Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Summary from Goodreads: The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal–an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

I really liked Sea of Tranquility – but not quite as much as Station Eleven. I remember that one as feeling very rich in world building, but Sea of Tranquility feels like it’s a little too stretched in time. The Olive sections, though, were superb, clearly drawing little snippets from perhaps the author’s own experiences as a writer, who is also a mom with a small child on book tour. The structure of the book was also an interesting one. I thought it was nested in sections like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, based on the sections as listed in the Table of Contents. And it is…but it’s also a little different, so that was fun, too.

Sea of Tranquility also has time travel as a plot device and….ugggghhhh. I still don’t like it as a thing. It’s too unwieldy. But I did appreciate what Mandel was trying to do with it, because it did at least connect up the time loop (maybe not quite as well as it was done in This Is How You Lose the Time War, which was superb, but I think she did a great job). I also managed to pick up a couple of crossovers with her previous books – apparently, all Emily St. John Mandel books take place in the same universe, so little bits of prior books seep into the new one. But I don’t think they’re integral to the plot, so if you’ve never read any of Mandel’s books, you don’t lose anything in the reading. The cross-over bits are very much more like Easter Eggs.

Sentence level though – just fantastic. She could write a grocery list and it would be an intriguing read.

Dear FTC: I had to buy my copy at the store (it does have VERY pretty blue-sprayed edges) since we didn’t get physical galleys and anyway I needed the extras for Book Club since I lead it.

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow, #1)

Summary from Goodreads: The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.

When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​

To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

WHAT. OKOKOKOK, so. In Iron Widow:

There are Chrysalises (giant, Transformer-ish mecha) powered by a male-female pilot team, which is supposed to have a balanced qi, but more often than not, the male pilot drains the female pilot’s qi, killing her.

Zetian’s sister is picked for the pilot program and dies in this way. Zetian vows revenge and volunteers for the program, ostensibly to murder that pilot, but then somehow her qi takes control in their psychic link and she drains him. She’s an Iron Widow.

So now it turns out she’s a matched pair with Li Shimin, who is not only the best pilot but also a condemned murderer. The two of them eventually hatch a plot to break the system that is deliberately made to murder women. Also, they get some help from Zetian’s childhood friend/rich boy Gao Yizhi who becomes the brains and money behind their attempt to bring down the patriarchy…and part of their romantic triad. (As Ziran has said on Tiktok, a real “love triangle” meets on all sides, not just one because then that’s just a boring old less than/greater than sign.)

And then shit gets real wild on the last page. Gimme book 2, because Zetian is NOT done fucking up the patriarchy.

So, like 5 stars for the book but also 1 million bananas because holy cats is there so much in here. Come for the Pacific Rim-meets-Crouching Tiger vibes, stay for the feminism, anger, and polyamory (this is still a YA, not much steam on the page, but the committed triad is a real thing and all the main characters are bisexual).

Many CW for violence against women, rape (off page), misogyny, racism, coercion, physical abuse (foot binding is a REAL THING in this book), substance abuse, violence and gore in general.

Dear FTC: I started reading a digital galley from the publisher via Netgalley, but then I bought a hardcover copy and plowed through it. (I started this before Iron Widow came out in September – it doesn’t actually take that long to read, I just had pudding brain and startitis in 2021 and couldn’t focus on anything. But when I did focus? BOOM)

Crossings by Alex Landragin

Summary from Goodreads: A sparkling debut. Landragin’s seductive literary romp shines as a celebration of the act of storytelling. –Publishers Weekly

Romance, mystery, history, and magical invention dance across centuries in an impressive debut novel. —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

Deft writing seduces the reader in a complex tale of pursuit, denial, and retribution moving from past to future. Highly recommended. —Library Journal (Starred Review)

Alex Landragin’s Crossings is an unforgettable and explosive genre-bending debut–a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes.

On the brink of the Nazi occupation of Paris, a German-Jewish bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings. It has three narratives, each as unlikely as the next. And the narratives can be read one of two ways: either straight through or according to an alternate chapter sequence. The first story in Crossings is a never-before-seen ghost story by the poet Charles Baudelaire, penned for an illiterate girl. Next is a noir romance about an exiled man, modeled on Walter Benjamin, whose recurring nightmares are cured when he falls in love with a storyteller who draws him into a dangerous intrigue of rare manuscripts, police corruption, and literary societies. Finally, there are the fantastical memoirs of a woman-turned-monarch whose singular life has spanned seven generations. With each new chapter, the stunning connections between these seemingly disparate people grow clearer and more extraordinary. Crossings is an unforgettable adventure full of love, longing and empathy.

First off, the publisher’s blurb for Crossings is RIDICULOUSLY inaccurate and appears to be written by someone who didn’t actually read the book, only heard about it – maybe – in an elevator.

Second, this is a really interesting debut novel that makes me feel a little bit like reading Choose Your Own Adventure novel, though with a specific path through the book. You can read straight through, starting with page 1, and read what is essentially three stand-alone novellas in a row. But I do love me a gimmick on occasion, and I was quite taken with the idea of “the Baroness sequence” which jumps back and forth between narratives in an almost random order (made easy by the hyperlinks in the digital file so I didn’t even have to page through the book). It’s very much like Hopscotch in this way and the multiple narratives as read in this sequence wound around like a David Mitchell novel.

The central idea of the book – the transmigration of souls between two living people – was really interesting, setting in motion a mystery involving three souls that kind of go rogue. One originates in a girl who was essentially trained in the art by her people’s shaman, one is the boy she loves who is involuntarily “crossed” with a white physician, and one is the soul of a white sailor who the girl crosses with to try and save the boy. And it’s this third soul that appears to really become a problem.

I will also note that Landragin, like Cortazar and Mitchell before him, does what Doerr only thinks he did in Cloud Cuckoo Land. There is tension in all the narratives and when finished, I really did have to sit for a second and wonder how that ending looped in with the Preface and information garnered from the other two narratives.

Crossings is out in paperback now!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley from the publisher via Edelweiss because this book was part of my store’s POTM program.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Summary from Goodreads: Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.

Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

Well, if you want lavish reviews of Cloud Cuckoo Land, there are a lot to choose from. In my opinion, it’s fine/good/OK. Doerr wrote a very readable multi-narrative meta-fiction – he doesn’t push the envelope much in his three timelines. They’re all very easy to follow and to figure out how they intersect via the lost Aristophanes play. Doerr even spoils part of the ending on one timeline early by talking about it in the futuristic timeline. This is the book you write after you’ve won a Pulitzer for All the Light We Cannot See and sold a gazillion copies of it – far more than other Pulitzer winners – and don’t quite want to alienate the book clubs by writing something that blows your hair back like David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks or Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. I read it in like 6 hours; not because I “couldn’t put it down” but because it was uncomplicated, had lots of white space, and I had to pass the galley to someone else at work *shrug*.

Content Warning for deaths of animals and ableism in the Constantinople timeline and homophobia in the 20th/21st century timeline. The teenage character Seymour in the 21st century timeline does appear to be written as a neurodivergent character – the representation seems good (and I haven’t seen reviews where the rep is called into question) but I am not a neurodivergent person, so don’t take my word on it.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is out today wherever books are sold.

Dear FTC: I read a paper galley of this book from the publisher provided to my store.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Summary from Goodreads: Klara and the Sun is a magnificent new novel from the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro–author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.

Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her.

Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

In its award citation in 2017, the Nobel committee described Ishiguro’s books as “novels of great emotional force” and said he has “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

Klara and the Sun opens as Klara describes the world she sees outside the store window. It seems like our world – the cars, the people, the clothes – but who or what is Klara? Ishiguro very slowly expands the view of this world through Klara’s narration. Klara, and her friends in the store, are not employees but merchandise. They are Artificial Friends, androids made to be Best Friends to privileged children. The role of the AF is intriguingly ambiguous – they are “friends”, but not a nanny-bot but also maybe they can be used as babysitters but also they seem to be needed to socialize these children so they don’t turn out to be sociopaths? One day Klara spies a girl and feels an immediate connection with her – maybe this child will choose her. After weeks of wishing and worrying that no one will choose her, the child returns with her mother and they buy Klara to be her Artificial Friend.

The novel then shifts to the family’s home – just a mother and daughter, with an estranged, anti-tech father in the periphery, and Klara’s limited world view expands, but in a skewed way. The way Ishiguro plotted the book is so delicate. It’s very lovely and quiet. The tone is very much more in the vein of The Remains of the Day than Never Let Me Go, although the plot is very firmly speculative fiction in genre. Klara’s narration brings a lot of questions to the fore – what is the nature of humanity and connection? What does it mean to love and to have love?

Klara and the Sun is out today!

Dear FTC: I read a paper galley sent to my store by the publisher.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Summary from Goodreads: An isolated mansion. A chillingly charismatic artistocrat. And a brave socialite drawn to expose their treacherous secrets…

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s not sure what she will find—her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness. And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.

So….are you looking for a chilly, creepy book? Maybe a bit of psychological horror in the vein of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House or perhaps some Gothic horror a la Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca? Have I got a book for you! Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new novel Mexican Gothic follows a young woman from Mexico City, Noemí, who is sent by her father to visit her cousin Catalina. Catalina is newly married to an Englishman and living on his estate near a former silver mine deep in the countryside but she has sent every more disturbing, erratic letters. So Noemí takes herself and her city-girl sophistication off to the very remote estate of High Place. And it is a dreary, chilling, crumbling estate perpetually shrouded in dense fog. The Doyle family built the English mansion – and basically imported as much of Britain as they could – over the silver mine they took over in the 19th century. The mine is no longer operating and the family and house have decayed over the decades since the Revolution. And that’s just the beginning. Catalina’s husband Virgil is handsome yet strangely menacing. Florence, the sister-in-law, is distant, cold, and lays out the rules: no smoking, no hot water for bathing, no electric light, and no disturbing Catalina (who has been diagnosed with tuberculosis, which doesn’t track with her symptoms). Her son Francis is a mild-mannered young man who might be Noemí’s friend, but he’s under his mother’s thumb. And the family patriarch, Howard….well, Howard is the source of almost all content warnings for this book. (CW for discussion of suicide, body horror, eugenics, sexual assault, and those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head.) After a few days of making herself a nuisance – and having ever-more disturbing dreams – Noemí has enough information to determine that she has to get herself and Catalina away from High Place and this dangerous family. But will the house let them go? (Yeah, you read that right!) There are so many excellent, weird, creepy parts to Mexican Gothic. The isolated, creepy house, the chilling housekeeper, the magnetic yet menacing husband (all the best parts of Rebecca) mixed up with Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak in the vividly decaying house and the uniquely British obsession with family history but set in 1950s Mexico. Noemí’s interactions with the Doyle family get stranger and scarier and more complex. Then a little “weird nature” like in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation gets into the mix and the story goes WILD (I don’t eat mushrooms and thank God for that). Mexican Gothic is solid Gothic horror. I LOVED IT (it also gave me major book hangover). Another contender for best book of the year. Mexican Gothic is out now! Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess

Summary from Goodreads:
Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States—an alternate timeline—she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram’s copy of The Pyronauts—a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback—and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture.

But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel’s efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost.

I came across Famous Men Who Never Lived through the Tin House Book Club (you put your name in the hate for advances every once in a while). I didn’t get lucky this time, though, but I liked the premise of the book enough that I requested the galley on Edelweiss.

And it’s a really, really good premise – using the idea of two divergent Earths and their histories to explore the idea of forced migration and Otherness, “belonging” to a group, grief, and mourning. It has some interesting parallels to the plight of migrants from the Middle East and Central America. Where I struggled with the book was when the sections of the fictional book “The Pyronauts” from Hel and Vikram’s world were included in the narrative – the technique was distracting here and didn’t work as well as it did in a book like Station Eleven.

Famous Men Who Never Lived was published last month.

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Girl Town by Carolyn Nowak

Summary from Goodreads:
Multi-award-winning cartoonist Carolyn Nowak (Lumberjanes) finds powerful truths in fantasy worlds. Her stunning solo debut collection celebrates the ascent of a rising star in comics.

Diana got hurt—a lot—and she’s decided to deal with this fact by purchasing a life-sized robot boyfriend. Mary and La-La host a podcast about a movie no one’s ever seen. Kelly has dragged her friend Beth out of her comfort zone—and into a day at the fantasy market that neither of them will forget.

Carolyn Nowak’s Girl Town collects the Ignatz Award-winning stories “Radishes” and “Diana’s Electric Tongue” together with several other tales of young adulthood and the search for connection. Here are her most acclaimed mini-comics and anthology contributions, enhanced with new colors and joined by brand-new work.

Bold, infatuated, wounded, or lost, Nowak’s girls shine with life and longing. Their stories—depicted with remarkable charm and insight—capture the spirit of our time.

Girl Town came across my radar as part of my second round of TBR (aka Pigeon) recommendations. (Thanks, Mya!) So I was reeeeeealy smart and got the Graphic Novel Book Group at my store to pick Girl Town for our December selection.

Ultimately, I liked this collection. I think Carolyn Nowak does great work with Lumberjanes, so I’m glad I read her own work in Girl Town. I really liked the two center stories, “Radishes” (about two young women at a fantasy-ish boardwalk market) and “Diana’s Electric Tongue” (about a woman who is fed up with dating and purchases a robot boyfriend). The other stories felt a bit unfinished in places, not necessarily because they all end abruptly, and one is a transfictional piece that incorporated multimedia-like panels surrounded by a lot of dialogue ballons and it was very hard to read. This is definitely a collection that fits in with Kelly Link, Sofia Samatar, Carmen Maria Machado, and Anjali Sachdeva, only sequential art instead of prose. If you’re a fan of those authors, I think you’ll like Nowak’s work.

Dear FTC: I bought a copy of this book after receiving the recommendation in my Pigeon.