Plastic Lions & Fantastic Phantoms

The other book I finished during my voyage through the southwest was How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum, translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. This was book [checks notes] #17 from the “Women in Translation” rec list. It’s about an estranged mother and daughter; as the mother peers through the windows of her adult daughter’s house from across the street, she ponders what went wrong in their formerly loving relationship.

How to Love Your Daughter is a cerebral kind of novel that swims back and forth between Yoella’s present, desperately reaching after the daughter who’s walked out of her life, and Yoella’s recollections of raising Leah.

The twists and turns of their relationship are subtle, almost too subtle. Both characters come off slightly neurotic, fussing about every minor interaction and seeming, to me, to invent problems where none really existed. In the end, it’s not so much a long-deteriorating relationship, which is what I expected, as it is Yoella making one decision that forever alters Leah’s perception of her.

“No one warned me my love could destroy her,” Yoella says about Leah at one point and that’s the core of it. Yoella adores her daughter, almost beyond reason. And it’s that very willingness to put Leah above everyone and everything else that eventually pushes Leah away from her, which is such a perfect tragedy.

I saw another review that said this book was both too long and too short, and I think there’s some truth to that. There are drawn out middle sections which don’t necessarily add much, but the ultimate break and subsequent efforts at reconciliation by Yoella don’t get as much room to breathe as might have benefitted them.

However, the ending is an exquisite microcosm of the tension of the whole novel, leaving you wondering about unreliable narrators and perceptions. Some people felt that Yoella gets off too easy—I would recommend rereading the section where Leah talks to Yoella about her reality/fantasy of Dennis writing her a letter.

I don’t know that either Yoella or Leah comes off as really sympathetic here, but they do come off very human, full of flaws and self-justifications and irrational reactions. And maybe sometimes it’s just human nature to create a tragedy where there didn’t have to be one.

I went out of town for my little sister’s graduation this weekend and finished two books on the trip! The first was Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, a fantasy-in-space story about a young infantry captain who has the soul of a famous traitor embedded into her mind to assist with a tricky military campaign.

I nearly had to eat crow on this book because I’ve said so many times I prefer when SFF books just dump you into their world rather than giving you an expositional primer, but Ninefox Gambit really tested my commitment to that. The first third of this book is a whirlwind of terms, practices, and concepts that not only are never explained, but for which the context is nearly nonexistent. I think you simply have to accept being confused to enjoy this one, which is why many reviews did not.

Semi-related, this may dress itself up as sci-fi, but it is fantasy. This is a magic system. A magic system that makes use of mathematics, but a magic system nonetheless. Accepting that going in will make dealing with the practical jargon much easier.

All that said, I ended up really enjoying this one, and I do plan to read the next two in the series. There’s just oodles of machinations and scheming and recontextualizations that I think are great fun and the end payoff was worth sticking with it.

As is the case with any story of this nature, our resident omnicidal traitor, Jedao, eclipses the book’s actual protagonist, Cheris. It’s just hard for our young, inexperienced infantryman to be as engaging as someone with as much history and baggage as Jedao. But I do think Cheris holds her own and doesn’t become just Jedao’s shadow. Additionally, Jedao, who is the most tactically brilliant mind the empire ever produced, gets plenty of opportunity to shine without making Cheris look like an idiot in comparison, which is a difficult needle to thread as the author. Furthermore, Cheris comes into her own more over the course of the book, which makes sense for her rapidly expanding level of experience.

Jedao is great fun to poke at and learn about, though I won’t say too much here to avoid spoilers. I hope we get to hear more from him in the next books.

Lee tees up the next book perfectly here without ending on a total cliffhanger. Nevertheless, I’ll be getting my hands on book 2: Raven Stratagem as soon as I can.

Yesterday on a lovely walk through then neighborhood I reached the end of The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso. This is fantasy/action novel, set in a world in “prime” reality, beneath which sits ever-descending “echo” layers of reality. The further down you go, the stranger and more dangerous things get. At a New Year’s party, things get unexpectedly tricky when the entire party is pulled down through the echoes.

Our protagonist is Kembral Thorne, a “hound” whose job is to retrieve people, animals, and other things that are pulled or “fall” into the echoes. This party is Kem’s first step back into society after having her first baby two months earlier.

Of course, when things start going wrong, Kem can’t help but get involved. It’s her job.

I’ll say again, I do love queer lit with adults. YA is great and I’m so happy that teens today have access to so much queer lit, but online queer book recs can skew very YA. Here, Kem is very much someone at least in her thirties—she’s got a baby, she’s reached a senior role in her career, and her concerns reflect this position in her life. While she and her quasi-rival Rika have the sort of skittish interactions you might expect from people who are into each other and unwilling to admit they are into each other, they don’t reach the level of comic avoidance or overwrought drama of teens or young adults.

I liked the ebb and flow of Kem and Rika’s relationship. These are two people who already have history and have kind of already had their big, relationship-ending squabble before we even get to this party, which is fun to unravel over the course of the evening. They have some cute moments, some artificially-amplified angst, but are generally enjoyable.

The worldbuilding here is fine. It’s serviceable for what the novel is doing, but we don’t really get a look at much else outside of the party except when Kem ventures out into the echoes, which becomes increasingly less frequent as they descend. There’s some fun stuff, some spooky stuff, some aesthetic stuff.

The book pushes a little hard on maintaining the status quo when the status quo isn’t that great (I think it could have made this more believable with more discussion, but the book is really more about the action than the political debate) and I did think one character’s fate was a cop-out, especially given the former. Violent change to the system is wrong but we’ll all shrug and smile when this criminal we couldn’t nail down conveniently dies without a trial.

On the whole, I enjoyed this one, but it’s nothing earth-shattering. I put the next book on my TBR though because I do want to see what Rika and Kem get up to next.