Author Archive

Book Review: “Low Town” by Daniel Polansky

Low Town by Daniel Polansky Low Town by Daniel Polansky wants to be an action-packed noir mystery novel set in a fantasy world. It succeeds at some of these things. While Low Town gets off to an awkward start with a summary of the grim and gritty world and our grim and gritty protagonist, it earned its first laugh on page ten — at the same time the first dead body turned up.

This is Daniel Polanksy’s first novel. He has a talent for writing fight scenes, and Low Town’s protagonist gives him plenty of opportunities to show off. The protagonist, Warden, likes to solve problems with his fists because he thinks he’s less likely to kill people that way. When he means to kill someone, he straps on his “trench blade” — the weapon he took from a fallen enemy during the Great War.

Warden was a soldier, and then Warden was a cop, but when we meet him he’s been stripped of his rank and makes his living as a mid-level drug dealer in Low Town — what they call the local slums. Unfortunately, he can’t bring himself to ignore the disappearance of a little girl, or her dead body when he finds it on the street. When a second child is abducted, he commits himself to finding the culprit and delivering him, if not to justice, then at least to his next incarnation.

The mystery aspect of Low Town is the book’s primary weakness. I had to watch Warden stand in a room with a metaphorical gun on the wall and then watch him spend the next three hundred pages ignoring that metaphorical gun. Near the end, the book winks halfheartedly at the audience as various characters tell Warden that he’s not a very good detective. An alert reader will already know that, because the alert reader will already know who killed the kids and have a decent guess as to why. If the reader is anything like me, they will spend most of the book shouting at Warden to figure it out already.

There are, by my count, approximately three female characters in the first half of Low Town. One of them is dead, one of them cooks breakfast, and one of them is a crazy lady. The lack of women is so exceptional that I began to wonder how the people of Low Town managed to breed. By the end of the book, the first three have been joined by whores of various classes, a few grieving mothers, and the Ice Bitch. The book doesn’t even have the excuse of being set in a medieval world, because it explicitly isn’t: There are references to large-scale shift work in factories and trench warfare, in addition to a tiered system of police departments.

Very little of the fantasy aspect of Low Town is laid out in clear prose. The reader must figure out the world through hints and suggestions (which will lead the reader to pick up on things that the protagonist misses; see above). The world hangs together well enough. The unexplained bits aren’t relevant to the narrative, and would slow down the action. It will be a disappointment to readers who enjoy a bit of expert world-building in their fantasy, but will help hold the interest of readers who are bored by exposition.

As in any good noir story, no one wins. If you like books where the hero comes out on top, avoid this one. Our protagonist isn’t a hero; Warden does some things that, in my opinion, take him from dark to actively hateful. The lack of a compelling protagonist combined with the failure of its twist ending made Low Town an unsatisfying read overall. Readers who are looking for grit and well-paced action might enjoy this book, but those who love mysteries should give it a pass.

“Deathless” by Catherynne M. Valente

Deathless cover
Deathless cover

“This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?”

The retold fairytale is an old and well-worn road in the fantasy genre. Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, still manages to arrive with something new. Valente hasn’t just taken “The Death of Koschei the Deathless” into modern Russia. She has also made a fairytale — a dark, and brutal, and frightening tale — out of the Russian revolution and the siege of Leningrad.

Marya Morevna is not the hero of “The Death of Koschei the Deathless.” Deathless is her story. She begins as a young girl in Saint Petersburg, watching as birds arrive, one by one, transform into men, and marry her sisters. By the time Koschei comes for her, she is a young woman in Leningrad.

Koschei is a perennial villain from Russian mythology. In Deathless he is cast as the Tsar of Life, fighting an endless war with the Tsar of Death that is always going badly. Marya steps into this mess and, right from the beginning, refuses to be what the fairytale demands that she be. She refuses to betray Koschei, her husband. She refuses to be helpless. And she swears that she will not go with Ivan when he arrives.

Because the hero of the story is Ivan — the hero of the story must always be an Ivan, who rescues the beautiful bride from Koschei’s withered hands. One of the central themes of Deathless is that everyone in the book knows how the story is supposed to end. They can choose to fight it, if they want. Marya does.

That sort of self-awareness will probably put some people off of Deathless. Like a lot of her writing, this book is aware that it is a book. Valente is not afraid to let her narrator turn and address the audience directly. I think this works in the context of a story whose roots lie in an oral tradition.

The fairytale style also helped give me some much-needed emotional distance from the worst of the brutality in Leningrad. Valente juxtaposes terrifying myths, such as the witch Baba Yaga who grinds the bones of disobedient girls in her flying mortar, with real tragedies — like people putting the bodies of their loved ones on sleds to take to the graveyard, only to die on the way, nameless and alone in the Russian winter.

The writing in Deathless is beautiful. I adore Valente’s writing style, and this book did not let me down. Readers who enjoyed her short story collection, Ventriloquism, will certainly find something to love in Deathless. They may recognize a character who first appeared in one of Valente’s short stories, and who has a minor role to play here.

Deathless is a subtle book. I was charmed by Naganya the rifle imp, and I’m sure there are many similar puns to be found elsewhere. The more the reader knows about Russia, its language, history, and mythology, the more they will get out of this book. Fans of Valente should definitely pick this one up, as should anyone who enjoys a dark fairytale well told.

Brave New Worlds, edited by John Joseph Adams

Brave New WorldsAnyone who is interested in the grim meathook side of the science fiction genre should pick up Brave New Worlds, the new anthology of dystopian fiction. Once again, John Joseph Adams has proved that he has a keen eye for a good story. These are not easy stories to read. Few of them have happy endings. However, I found them to be moving works of science fiction that will stay with me for a long time.

Dystopias have been part of science fiction since the beginning. Brave New Worlds opens with “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, which was first published in 1948 by The New Yorker. It is the kind of science fiction that provokes tempers on all sides. People within the genre criticize its lack of obvious scientificitional elements and its magazine of origin. Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker’s fiction editor, noted on her podcast that the magazine received angry letters from its readers after “The Lottery” was published. Treisman also pointed out that “The Lottery” is the only story by a woman of the period to be regularly anthologized.

Other classics that have been reprinted in Brave New Worlds include “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin. This story should already be familiar to most readers, who will know exactly what to expect when they see Le Guin’s name on a collection of dystopias. However, in this context, it provides a respite for the mind’s eye. The world that Le Guin has built is beautiful — except for that singular, terrible room.

The new stories in Brave New Worlds are also of the highest quality. Carrie Vaughn’s “Amaryllis,” reprinted here, has just been nominated for the 2011 Hugo Award for best short story. “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account” by Mary Rickert first appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award and the Stoker Award. I have an abiding affection for this story, in which all the brutality of a world where women are executed for having abortions is filtered through the eyes of a little girl who has never known anything else.

Longtime listeners of EscapePod will recognize “Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs” by Adam Troy-Castro. This is the only story in the collection that I did not completely reread, as I remember how much it affected me the first time. It is, however, not the most brutal story in this book — and the argument over whether or not it even qualifies as a dystopia should be an interesting one.

The stories are grouped loosely by theme. J. G. Ballard’s overpopulation classic, “Billenium,” is followed immediately by “Amaryllis” and Paolo Bacigalupi’s “Pop Squad,” in which children are vanishingly rare. Silverberg’s “Caught in the Organ Draft,” about a world where the young are required to donate their organs so that the terribly old can get even older, stands back-to-back with Orson Scott Card’s heartbreaking “Geriatric Ward,” in which people grow old and die while still terribly young.

Brave New Worlds strikes me as being comprehensive enough to serve as reference book. It even includes a list of suggested reading at the end, for anyone who wants to pursue longer works of dystopian fiction. I recommend this anthology wholeheartedly — on a sunny day, and followed by something cheerful.

“God’s War” by Kameron Hurley

God’s War by Kameron Hurley opens with our hero, Nyxnissa, who has just sold her uterus for petty cash and then blown it all on drugs and gambling. Then things get worse. This book picks up the reader and drops them onto an alien planet, thousands of years in the future. It is a world where technology is powered by genetically engineered bugs and the colonists are tearing their world apart to fight a holy war, the origins of which no one quite remembers.

All the men of Nyxnissa’s nation are drafted into the army. Women are allowed to volunteer. Nyxnissa served her time on the front, and came home a hero, with a body covered in burns. Once the magicians — this book’s practitioners of the Sufficiently Advanced Technology — finished putting her back together, she joined the bel dames, an order of sacred assassins who hunt down deserters in the name of God and the Queen. She isn’t particularly successful at it. When she’s offered a job that promises to shake all the vultures off her back, she has to take it, no matter how low her odds of surviving it seem to be.

The other protagonist in God’s War is a young man name Rhys. What terrible thing drove him over the border to Nyx’s country, which is not a safe place either for foreigners or beautiful men, is revealed slowly over the course of the book. He is as close to a pacifist as anyone can be in war-torn Nasheen, and as close to a romantic interest as Nyxnissa is capable of having.

While it is unmistakably science fiction, this book’s form reminds me of some of my favorite urban fantasy. The focus stays on Nyx and her band of hired misfit. None of them can afford to worry about interstellar politics or the power struggle between the Queen and her bel dames. They’re too busy trying to and take care of the people they love. Some romance has been waved in the direction of this book, but thankfully it is not allowed to dominate the narrative.

This book is brutal. Everyone and everything in Nyx’s world has scars from the war. The author is unflinching in her descriptions of violence. I’ll admit to skimming some of the more graphic passages. I’d hesitate to call it gratuitous, though. Hurley understands that the life of a woman who collects blood debts is not one awesome shoot-em-up adventure after another. In the course of the book, Nyxnissa is broken down to the last slivers of her character. Her choices would not make sense without the violence that surrounds her.

God’s War runs for quite a while before it tells the reader what it plans to be about. I did not mind that, because I was too wrapped up in watching Nyxnissa as she struggled to survive from one day to the next, as she tried (and inevitably failed) to stay ahead of the people who hated her. By the time the book gets around to mentioning the starships, the aliens, and the effects that three thousand years on an alien planet have had on its human population, they were just another set of interesting details added to the plot that had already sucked me in.

Islam permeates every part of God’s War. I don’t recall another work of science fiction that featured a planet that was not only colonized by Muslims, but by waves of different Muslims of different ethnicities and traditions. The religions in God’s War seem rich and detailed to me. I would be very interested to hear the reactions this book gets from its Muslim readers.

Now I am trying to find time to reread this book. I was not completely sold on the way it ended the first time around. As time has passed, though, I find myself growing more and more attached to God’s War. I’m glad I had a chance to read it, and I recommend it highly. God’s War is a fine piece of writing, and not one that its readers will easily forget.

Kameron Hurley and God’s War were featured on John Scalzi’s The Big Idea series.

Review: “I Am Not a Serial Killer” by Dan Wells

Cover of "I Am Not a Serial Killer"I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells is the story of a fifteen-year-old sociopath. It’s the sort of young adult book that gets shelved in with adult novels, because the experiences of a fifteen-year-old white boy are the sort of thing that everyone is supposed to be able to relate to. (Where this particular book ends up in the bookstore is governed by some arcane system that I do not fully understand. It took two Borders employees the better part of a quarter-hour to find my copy, and not for lack of trying – what I will miss most when my local Borders closes are the people who worked there.)

Our hero, young John Wayne Cleaver, is trying very hard not to become a serial killer. He’s a lonely sociopath who has been obsessed with serial killers ever since he saw a picture of John Wayne Gacy in the newspaper when he was eight. He is smart and self-aware enough to be terrified by all the things in his life that seem to be pushing him down that road. He believes that the strict system of self-imposed rules which he lives under will keep his dark impulses in check. Like a lot of sociopaths, he’s capable of pretending to be an ordinary human being, until he is put under stress — in this case, by the appearance of what might be a real serial killer in his quiet town.

This is Dan Wells’s first novel, a fact that is in no way borne out by the quality of the writing. His prose is clear and direct, with an edge of sardonic humor that keeps the reader from getting too wrapped up in all the terrible things that are happening until the author decides to go for the big scare. Staying inside his young sociopath’s head lets him avoid some of the more obvious cliches. John Wayne Cleaver is not inclined to guilt. He is capable of operating with scary precision at times when an ordinary character would be curled up and gibbering on the floor. He likes dead bodies.

I Am Not A Serial Killer is a fast read. Dan Wells does a superb job of using suspense to keep the reader interested, without hording all the secrets for a dramatic reveal at the end. The beginning, which is devoted to the trials of a fifteen-year-old boy’s life, is saved by his humor and the mental-whiplash-inducing mentions of the supernatural element that drives the rest of the book. Watching that supernatural horror stalking the townsfolk is only slightly scarier than watching John Wayne Cleaver’s self-control crumble.

Whether or not this book lives up to the standards of the horror genre is not something I feel that I can fairly judge. I am not a horror reader. I will say that I Am Not A Serial Killer is a fun book and a nice change from my usual fare. It’s always nice to find a stand-alone novel with a satisfying ending that also has sequels. I will be interested to read those sequels – if Mr. Wells continues to improve his writing, they should be very strong books indeed. I recommending tracking down I Am Not A Serial Killer in your local bookstore — finding it may be an adventure, but the effort will be worth it.

Book Review: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald is the kind of science fiction novel that rewards the attentive reader. It begs its fans to create timelines and diagrams and carefully-plotted maps of the characters’ paths through the Queen of Cities. I felt I was missing layers of meaning, and if I just took the time to do the math, to make a map, I could discover the clever synchronicities and hidden stories that I missed on my first read. It may just be an illusion created by the quantity of detail crammed into this book, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Dervish House covers a week in the lives of a group of people in Istanbul as they move through a morass of religion, technology, terrorism, commodities trading, and deals made over ancient artifacts. The drama begins when a suicide bomber strikes on the tram line. Nobody except the bomber dies — that wasn’t the point of the attack. The effects of the explosion ripple outward. One character miss a job interview. Another send his Kid Detective spy robots out to see what happened. Still another makes a note of how high the stocks for a bombing had gotten on the Terror Market.

From there, events spin out of anyone’s control. One of the last Greeks in Istanbul must finally face the consequences of his misspent youth. A group of day traders conspire to divert crude oil from Iran’s radioactive oil fields to Baku, and thereby turn themselves into instant millionaires. A nine-year-old boy hunts for terrorists while the squatter in his basement sees visions of djinni. Across the street, a woman searches for the tomb of a mummy who was embalmed in honey — the legendary Mellified Man, whose flesh is said to have healing powers to rival a unicorn’s horn, and who may have never existed in the first place.

From a science fiction point of view, one of the more interesting aspects of The Dervish House is the way McDonald makes nanotech scary without resorting to a gray goo scenario. In fact, explicitly denies that scenario. He points out that we already live in a world filled with replicating micro-bots: We call them bacteria. The problem with nanotech is not that it might drown the world under a blanket of ooze, but that it could be used to reprogram the human mind on the scale of an epidemic. Simultaneously, he presents this as nanotech’s great promise — that we could turn every person’s body into a living computer of vast capacity.

I first heard of Ian McDonald in discussions of The Windup Girl. The Dervish House has the same sort of complex plotting and frenetic pace as The Windup Girl, but with far more complexity and optimism and both in the setting and in the characters. Yes, there is global warming to deal with, and nasty geopolitics, and the threat of technology used for evil, but there is also beauty and hope in McDonald’s Istanbul. In a way, The Dervish House calls to mind my favorite parts of my beloved cyberpunk — flying through filthy, glorious cities, watching brilliant people struggling in the space between corrupt governments and ruthless corporations.

The Dervish House is supremely clever. I have a feeling that I’ve missed many of the jokes (although there are some good ones about a science fiction writer who plays a minor role in the story). A reader who is knowledgeable in Turkish politics and history would probably get much more out of this book than I did. However, The Dervish House contains enough detail to get its readers through the various intrigues without resorting to tedious infodumps. This is probably not a book that will change your life, but it is a lot of fun.

Review: “Monster Hunter International” by Larry Correia

Monster Hunter InternationalI had a warm spot in my heart for Larry Correia after reading his HK rant. (“Because you suck. And we hate you.”) Unfortunately, I decided to read his novel, Monster Hunter International. This book was originally self-published, and owes its success to Mr. Correia’s marketing instincts. I don’t have space to cover all the flaws in this book, so I’ll just hit the highlights. Because it was self-published and only later picked up by Baen, Monster Hunter International shows no sign of an editor’s pen. The characters are flat. The prose is stale and repetitive. The plot reads like something intended for a weekend of tabletop gaming, complete with prophetic visions from the storyteller to keep the protagonists on track.

The company called Monster Hunter International was founded when a group of good Southern boys got a lynch mob together in order to drive some unsavory elements (read: vampires) out of their town. I wish I was kidding. In the years since, Monster Hunter has made its founder’s family rich by collecting government-sponsored bounties on supernatural creatures like werewolves, zombies, and vampires. These days, the only thing they fear is the EPA (and Fish and Wildlife, and OSHA, and…).

Our hero, Owen Pitt (brother of the heavy metal artist Mosh Pitt — not kidding about that one, either), gets involved in the monster hunting business when he defeats his evil-boss-turned-werewolf in single combat. Afterwards, he is visited at his home by Monster Hunter International’s recruitment team, including one Julie Shackleford, who tells him that not only is he the first man in history to kill a werewolf with his bare hands, but that his scores in various firearm competitions are even better than hers! Also, his college degree proves that he is a genius. Owen decides that he is in love (though whether with her or her handguns is sometimes an open question). He expresses his love by staring at her a lot, and when that doesn’t work, by pretending to be her friend.

I decided to read this book based on the strength of its action scenes, but to my dismay I found that the narrative is dominated by lectures. The hundred pages or so that pass between the werewolf fight and the first vampire fight are filled with Owen’s monster hunter training. We are introduced to some more monster hunters, whom the reader might be tempted to worry about if Mr. Correia had the fortitude to kill his characters. In training, Owen proves that he is the best at every possible thing (except running), earning the admiration of all the instructors. Multi-page monologues leave the reader with only one questions: Who will be beating our hero with the exposition bat this time?

When the book finally gets back to the action, it’s a mess of vampires on a cargo ship. Owen saves everyone from the cowardly French vampire, and is left for dead by Julie’s asshole boyfriend (and who didn’t see that one coming?). We learn the first rule of monster hunting: Any problem can be solved by getting a bigger gun. In Owen’s case, it’s a fully automatic cut-down combat shotgun with a spring-loaded bayonet and optional grenade launcher. (“How many gun laws does this break?” “All of them.”) The action scenes are precise and well-scripted, but I was willing to put this book down at any time up to the last fifty pages. The final battle is the most interesting one in the book, but suffers from overuse of the passive voice (see: the perils of self-publishing). Finally, it turns out that women are the source of all evil.

Owen is not the kind of character who thinks his way out of problems. Despite being introduced as a genius, he isn’t particularly bright. He has a magical dead Jew in his head who does his thinking for him (still not kidding). Instead of figuring out the bad guy’s plans, the magical Jew dumps Owen directly into the bad guy’s head and lets him see through his eyes, removing all suspense from their later encounters. People who learn things tend to go insane, like Julie’s father.

Monster Hunter International did not have to be seven hundred pages long. Its sequel, which I am told did benefit from the attentions of an editor, is much shorter. Not that it really matters, since I’m not going to spend any more time struggling through yet another lecture set to the sound of an entire Viking army’s worth of political axes grinding. Monster Hunter International is not a book for people who enjoy well-crafted prose or fast-paced action. It is not for people who don’t care about the difference between a Government .45 and a Glock. Larry Correia is writing for a specific audience, and it is clear that I am not one of them.

Sauropod Dinosaurs Had Weird Feet

As a science fiction writer, one of my hobbies is comparative anatomy. It is important for me to know how various organisms on Earth have solved the problems of moving, eating, seeing, and so on in order to build plausible aliens (or modifications for human beings). Evolution is constantly throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and that churn produces some really interesting solutions to mundane-seeming problems.

Take walking, for example. Most of our familiar walking creatures (except bugs) are based on the tetrapod body plan. Four limbs, two on a pelvis and two up near a head. As evolutionary pressures drive a species to be bigger and bigger, their limbs become more robust to support the extra weight. Evolution is not an intelligent process, and so every solution is quick and dirty, thrown together from preexisting parts and driven as much by chance as by natural selection. Thus, animals with superficially similar body plans may, on closer examination, have wildly different anatomies.

Everyone’s favorite cuddly megafauna, the elephant, walks on its toes. Its weight is carried on an enormous shock absorber made of fat and connective tissue that sits behind its toes. This system works so well for the elephant that they can move almost silently. From a human point of view, elephant feet look right. They bend in the right places, and the idea of walking along on one’s splayed fingertips isn’t too alien.

It’s easy to assume that elephantine dinosaurs had feet like elephants, especially when they are so often illustrated that way. The first clue that this isn’t the case is in the tracks: some sauropods leave crescent-shaped tracks. Next, there’s the skeleton. Except for the thumb, the toes of Eusauropoda are blunt, clawless nubs. These multi-ton dinosaurs walked on the ends of their metacarpal bones — the bones which, in humans, form the back of the hand.

How strange this must have looked! As a writer, imagining the motion of such an animal and then translating that movement onto the page is a glorious challenge. I can look at reconstructions, or I can press my hands into odd shapes and imagine what it would be like to walk on a column of hand-bones. Where the animal’s wrist would be, and how it would bend… All the things I must keep in mind if I write such a creature into a story.

For more detailed information and pictures, see the Tetrapod Zoologist. I highly recommend that blog as a resource for cool animal facts and analysis.

For further examples of strange creatures that have lived on our planet at one time or another, see Mark Witton’s Flickr gallery.

Review: The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne Valente

The Habitation of the Blessed, being the first volume of A Dirge for Prester John, is the newest addition to the long and honorable tradition of fan fiction dedicated to a 12th-century forgery. The original letter described a kingdom in the generically exotic and conveniently distant “east,” where a Christian priest ruled a nation of improbable creatures, and oh-by-the-way also the Fountain of Youth. The letter went viral, spawning argument, analysis, fan fiction, and ill-fated military expeditions whose commanders though Prester John would show up with his griffins and his lions to help with the Crusades. It stayed popular for the next five hundred years, until Europeans got far enough east to realize that Prester John had never existed.

More information about the historical Letter of Prester John can be found at the handy Prester John website.

Catherynne Valente’s book takes on the myth from a science fiction point of view, asking the practical questions of — How did a random Christian guy end up king of all these incredible people? How does a society made of so many radically different people, from the talking griffons to the headless Blemmyes, actually work? And what is life like for people who drink from the Fountain of Youth?

The world she builds on this foundation is like nothing I have seen before. If I had to, I suppose I could compare it to the way I remember Narnia, before someone pointed out all the Christian symbolism and I grew old enough to wonder where the tea and sugar came from. Catherynne Valente does a remarkable thing in a book with one foot in a medieval bestiary: Not one of her characters is a symbol. Each of them, even the ones we only meet briefly, feels as real as any of the people I see every day. At one point our heroes meet a man who is digging endless tunnels through the mixture of air and sea that has smothered his city. He has the head of a goat, and his circumstances are strange even by local standards, but in a crisis he puts his head down and gets to work, trusting everyone else to do the same.

The superbly-drawn characters make the framing narrative and structure easy to follow. The Habitation of the Blessed has at least four major narrative tracks — the story of Hagia, fierce and beautiful, who forces Prester John to see her as a person and not just as an upsetting body, the story of Imtithal and the queen’s children, Prester John’s own story, and the story of the monks who followed him.

Prester John himself has the potential to be just another Christian man who arrives in a foreign country, fails to understand or even acknowledge the beliefs of the locals, and decides that God wants him to be in charge (why they never seem to use the premises that 1-their God is supposed to be omnipotent and 2-the locals are getting along fine to deduce that 3-God is ok with the status quo… is a topic for another time.) Like the rest of the characters, though, he isn’t a just symbol or a message, and it’s hard not to feel for him as he tries to make sense of the bizarre world in which he finds himself, as the people he meets challenge and overturn his most deeply held beliefs, just by existing.

I didn’t want to put The Habitation of the Blessed down and read something else, but I ran out of pages. It comes to a conclusion of sorts, though there is clearly more story left to tell. My only consolation is the promise of a sequel.

Review: Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

While I do not read romances, and I have not read a book by Jane Austen since high school, I nevertheless decided to pick up Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal. She is a brilliant writer, and I trusted her to write something I could endure. As it turned out, enduring the book wasn’t a problem — the hard part was putting it down.

The choice of detail in Shades of Milk and Honey is exquisite. Everything is described in spare, precise language. I can still see the glass cherries, the nymph’s face hidden in the tree, the dark and stormy bedroom of a heartsick girl. There is not a single wasted word or padded scene. That makes Shades of Milk and Honey a quick read. There is very little action until the dramatic ending, but that does not slow the narrative down. The majority of the book is concerned with interactions between people — with word and gesture, thought and response. I found it enthralling.

I believe the plot will be familiar to readers of romance. Two sisters named Jane and Melody try to walk the narrow path that society has marked for them, with the threat of scandal and ruin pressing in on both sides. Mary Robinette Kowal does not pull her punches in her portrayal of traditional marriage as an economic arrangement between families. As the sisters cannot inherit, they must either marry well or fall into poverty when their father dies. Romance in this setting is a matter of survival. Melody, who is beautiful, has no shortage of suitors. Jane, on the other hand, is cursed with a big nose and brown hair, and believes that she will never find a husband.

The aspect of the book that has gotten the most attention is its magic. Mary Robinette Kowal has made her book’s magic small and subtle, to avoid breaking history. This was not an easy task, and she has spoken at length about it elsewhere. The magic is called Glamour. It is the art of folding the ether to produce small illusions — a dress on a mannequin, a piece of ambient music to liven a party, or an elaborate “glamural” that turns a room into a forest glade. Jane has a particular talent for glamour, which gets her into trouble before it gets her out of it.

Just as the magic has been carefully constructed so as to allow the Regency period to proceed more or less as it did in the real world, the language in Shades of Milk and Honey has been chosen to fit the period. Modern readers will notice obvious examples of archaic English, such as “shew,” but the overall effect is wonderfully subtle, making the book feel right without distracting the reader. Shades of Milk and Honey is a deceptively simple book resting on a foundation of solid research.

I am told that there are plans for another book, which will involve swashbuckling. I can’t wait. I had my doubts about this book at first, but I’m glad I gave it a chance, and I am looking forward to the sequel.

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