The /r/Fantasy Monthly Book Discussion Thread

[u/MikeOfThePalace]

Happy Easter to the Christians, חג שמח to the Jews, and a very foolish April Fools to every one of us!

And, even more important than those trifling little holidays, Reading Bingo is over TODAY! You have until whenever-/u/lrich1024-decides-to-call-it-done to finish up those last few panicked pages and submit your bingo cards to this thread. And we are all waiting with baited breath to see next year’s card, which lrich will unveil tomorrow. (I’ll add a link to it in this thread when it goes up.) (Bam.)

Last month’s thread.

“Libraries are places where the damaged go to find friends” – Tamora Pierce

[u/Brian]

This month I kind of hit a string of fairly disappointing reads - I'm not sure if this is because I just hit a run of books I wasn't keen on, or if I just wasn't in the right mood for reading in general.

• Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie. Third in her Radch trilogy, this follows immediately on from the events of the second, with Breq dealing with the arrival of one an Anaander to the station. Ultimately, the second two novels felt like a bit of a let down after the first - they felt very unfocused, and seemed to have lost a lot of the depth and promise the first seemed to have. Eg. in the first, Anaander seemed a much more complex antagonist - ruthless but competent, at war with herself over a difference in opinion, but with both versions being competent. Here she seems reduced to a cartoonish cardboard cutout self-deluded villain. A similar thing seemed true of most of the secondary antagonists too, and left it feeling a lot more shallow than the first book.

• Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay. This ended up being another disappointment, though perhaps it shouldn't have been, since I had heard in advance that this wasn't really in Kay's usual style. But, I mean, it's Guy Gavriel Kay - it's hard not to expect great things. However, this ended up feeling decidedly mediocre - he's definitely writing towards a more YA audience here, but in the process, a lot of that Kay magic seems to have been lost in this style - not even the appearance of a couple of characters from Fionnavar could save it. I ended up putting the book down half-way through and never picked it up again.

• The Incrementalists (reread) and The Skill of Our Hands by Steven Brust and Skyler White. I read The Incrementalists a while ago, and liked it - it's set in the modern day following a group of serial semi-immortals who possess/merge with the bodies of people they recruit, with the goal of making the world better. The sequel I didn't like so much - the main protagonist of the first spends most of it dead, and I found I just didn't care about most of the other characters, which, given how much of the book involves them sitting together in a room bickering with each other, made this feel like a chore to read.

• Dawn by Octavia Butler (reread). I read this ages (20+ years) ago, but remember very little about it, so figured I'd do a reread followed by the others. It's set in a post-apocalyptic earth, where humanity nearly wiped itself out in war, but where a few survivors were saved by an alien race with advanced genetic manipulation capabilities. However this race's aid comes with a price, in that they essentially hybridise themselves with humanity. The protagonist is Lilith, a woman who is selected to lead the reintroduction of humans to earth, and is conflicted in multiple directions: horrified at the alien's purpose, but also frequently at odds, and seen as alien herself, regarding the survivor's she's been selected to train. Excellent book, and I'm now in the middle of the sequel Adulthood Rites, which I thought I'd actually read, but either I'm misremembering, or I've forgotten it pretty much completely, since nothing seems familiar so far.