A Jungle of Tales

  I first tried to read this book when I was about 14 or 15 because I loved the Earthsea books and all of the Le Guin sci-fi that I’d tried. And my reaction was basically: “WTF kind of portal fantasy was THAT? How was this possibly written by the same person?” Trying it again, more than 20 years later, I can appreciate its virtues more, and the experimentation evident in the writing, even if I still don’t enjoy it on anything like the same level as her other books. As mentioned, in structure this is a portal fantasy vaguely reminiscent of the Narnia books, in which two young people find a passageway from our world to a mysterious fantasy world where time moves differently. However, whereas in C.S. Lewis’s series the travelers are schoolchildren, here both protagonists are 20 years old. And, whereas the Pevensie kids and their successors spend most of each book in Narnia, interacting with and getting to know people from that world, a much larger chunk of this b...

  This story proves that it is possible for a book to explore complex and rather dark themes such as the impacts of imperialism while also being delightfully funny. A lot of this is down to the main character, Jebi, who in their talent for falling ass-backward into heroism rather resembles the Discworld series’ Rincewind. Jebi just wants to make a living as a painter, but that is rather difficult in Razanei-occupied Hwaguk. Then the Ministry of Armor makes Jebi an offer they can’t refuse – basically: “paint the control symbols for automaton soldiers, or your rebel sister gets it” – resulting in Jebi finding out a horrifying secret about how those paints are made, and meeting both an automaton dragon named Arazi and a Razanei swordswoman named Vei. Neither are quite what they initially appear to be! The setting is basically a fantasy version of Korea under Japanese occupation. The book depicts the complexities of that quite well. On the one hand, a lot of people...

2021 list Best book of 2022 so far:   I’m going to go with the whole ‘Broken Earth Trilogy’ by N.K. Jemisin, followed by a tie between two books by Adrian Tchaikovsky: ‘Children of Ruin’ and ‘The Doors of Eden’ . The former has incredibly creative world-building, some great character-writing, themes of motherhood and dealing with trauma, and ties up the twisty plot in a satisfying if bittersweet way. ‘Children of Ruin’ I describe below; ‘The Doors of Eden’ is a stand-alone book that has similarly good evolutionary world-building but with parallel earths and a fast-paced X-files-ish plot.   Best sequel: I loved ‘Children of Time’ and its spider civilization, so I was delighted to discover that there is a sequel!  In ‘Children of Ruin’ , the humans and spiders are joined by sentient octopuses, an AI, and a genuinely alien mind, all of which have distinct ways of thinking that make sense given their history. Plus the story is quite exciting, and y...

              I read ‘Wild Beauty’ last year and loved it, so I’ve been interested to check out McLemore’s other books. This one has a lot of similarities, being kind of a cross between a fairytale and a Latin American magical realism book, with queer characters and gorgeous nature descriptions. However, ‘Blanca & Roja’ feels a lot more “cluttered” to me. I like most of the things it is trying to do, it just feels like the book is too short to do them all justice.             There are four POV characters, compared to the two in ‘Wild Beauty’. The titular Blanca and Roja are sisters from the del Cisne family. As the name (“of the swans”) suggests, the family is under a curse: In every generation there will be two daughters, but one of them will turn into a swan. Blanca is blonde and sweet, while Roja has black-red hair 1 and a prickly temper, but t...

              After reading this and the ‘Children of Time’ / ‘Children of Ruin’ books, I’ve concluded my favorite thing about Adrian Tchaikovsky’s writing are A) the fantastic use of biology, particularly evolutionary ideas, and B) his ability to create characters, human or otherwise, that are immediately endearing, in part because of their flaws. However, while the other two books had a somewhat more leisurely pace, this one’s action-packed mystery/spy-thriller structure combined with parallel worlds shenanigans kept me on the edge of my seat throughout. That, and the fact that main characters in this one are all human, make me think this one could make a very engaging movie adaptation without losing too much 1 .     1. The depiction of the internal lives of spiders and octopuses and how they are similar to and different from ours were something I loved about the other two books…but that woul...