Kentucky Folktales: Revealing Stories, Truths, and Outright Lies by Mary Hamilton

A number of tales, from legends to fairy tales, including several variants of most and explaining how she, as a story-teller, retells them, and how others retell them.

I had originally wanted to listen to this one on audio, but there’s a length at which it just seems more practical to read the paper version, and 23 hours is about there. This chunker of a book clocks in at around 670 pages and it’s an entry in the Arthurian Legends. It’s The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman.

Any book that long has to justify itself as far as I’m concerned. I might read a mediocre 300-page novel, but I’m not going through almost 700 pages unless it’s good. Happy to report this one is!

I have some familiarity with the Arthurian Legends—in that I’ve read The Once and Future King—but I haven’t gotten around to Le Mort d’Arthur or other more original elements yet, so just some perspective to keep in mind if you are someone more read in this area.

Grossman’s take involves a young wannabe knight, Collum of the Out Isles, who steals armor from his liege lord and runs away to mainland Britain in hopes of the chance to try out for the Knights of the Round Table. He hasn’t even set his goal as becoming one of them really, just the chance to try. Unfortunately, by the time he arrives at Camelot, King Arthur is 2 weeks dead and most of the Round Table is gone too, leaving behind only the less illustrious knights.

I thought it was very bold to center the story on Grossman’s original character, but I think it works. Collum is likeable and interesting and watching him interact with characters we know from the legends is fun.

The Bright Sword obviously comes from a place of love for Arthuriana. This is not a “genre-busting” book, but one that comes from deep attachment to the stories that spawned it. It balances the weight of epic legend well with humor—I laughed out loud a couple of times. It also does a very good job I thought of making the story appeal to a modern audience without copy/pasting 21^st century morals onto a book set well in the past. For instance, there are queer knights at the Table (And really, how could there not be? If you were a gay man of moderate athletic ability in Arthur’s Britan, and you heard about the Table, would you not be trying to get in there?), but they don’t use modern terminology to describe themselves, and their attitudes towards themselves and others feel appropriate for the setting.

 

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The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age by Simon Schama

17th century Netherlands. All sorts of things.

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Escape from the Island of the Rat Queen by Phil Folgio and Kaja Folgio

Book 23 of Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius!

Spoilers ahead for earlier books.

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Stealing an idea from susieboo to share some spooky/horror-themed reads for Halloween season! ( ⓛ ω ⓛ *)

Affinity by Sarah Waters
An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women’s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London’s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by on apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Selina was imprisoned after a séance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina’s freedom, and her own.

Key notes: Romance, atmospheric, gothic, ghosts, questioning reality

Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Something evil is buried deep in the desert. It wants your body. It wears your skin.

In the summer of 1995, seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp came face to face with it. They survived—but at Camp Resolution, everybody leaves a different person.

Sixteen years later, only the scarred and broken survivors of that terrible summer can put an end to the horror before it's too late.

Key notes: Psychological torture, there's an actual monster, the lasting impact of trauma, the monster is an allegory

A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson
Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things. Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband's dark secrets.

Key notes: Vampires, romance, abusive relationships

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning research. She’s patient and gentle and obedient. She’s everything Evelyn swore she’d never be.

And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband.

Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up.

Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.

Key notes: Murder, conspiracy, human experimentation, people are the real monsters

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
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 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.

Key notes: Gothic, family drama, a vague and creeping sense of horror, there is a curse but there's also plain racism

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Key notes: Family drama, generational curse, slow build, cult/cult abuse

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica
In the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, the unworthy live in fear of the Superior Sister's whip. Seething with resentment, they plot against each other and await who will ascend to the level of the Enlightened - and who will suffer the next exemplary punishment. Risking her life, one of the unworthy keeps a diary in secret. Slowly, memories surface from a time before the world collapsed, before the Sacred Sisterhood became the only refuge. Then Lucía arrives. She, too, is unworthy - but she is different. And her arrival brings a single spark of hope to a world of darkness.

Key notes: Cult/cult abuse, post-apocalyptic, body horror, people are the real monsters

Earlier this week, with 22 minutes left on my Libby check-out, I finished The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson. This is an SFF book about Caramenta, a young woman who travels to different parallel universes to gather information on their development for her employer, the tech company Eldridge.

In Cara’s world, and many like it, environmental disasters have wreaked havoc on Earth. The population is divided among people who live in domed, climate-controlled cities, and those left to the wasteland. The trick about world-hopping is that you can’t go to a parallel universe where “you” are still alive—so suddenly wastelanders like Cara, who have died over and over again by virtue of their terrible living circumstances, become valuable to Eldridge. Cara is particularly special, because in 325 parallel Earths which Eldridge has reached, she is dead in all but eight of them.

There is a lot of playing with what becomes of people if their circumstances are changed—Cara is especially interested in tracking one parallel version of herself who was adopted into a city family at a young age and how radically different her life is from the other Caras as a result.

The Space Between Worlds is pretty light on the SFF, actually. The world-hopping is really secondary to the issues of race and class that the book focuses on. I enjoyed Cara as a protagonist; she’s self-serving in a way that makes perfect sense given how hard she’s had to fight just to survive, but not cold-hearted. There are moments when you can see how much she wants to be different, softer, kinder, but she doesn’t trust the world not to punch her in the solar plexus if she tries.

She has a struggling romance with Dell, a female coworker born and raised in the city, and it’s tragic watching how the aforementioned race and class issues throw up roadblocks between them. I thought Johnson was occasionally a bit heavy-handed on the subject of Cara’s yearning for Dell, but on the whole this aspect was fun to watch play out.

The book was engaging all the way through and I always wanted to see how things turned out, but I’m not totally sold on the later third or so of the plot. I can’t decide if the ending was anticlimactic or just realistic. I did like the book, but something about the final big plot point just didn’t fully land for me.

Overall, a fun read.

The Chronometric Lantern Expedition by Phil Folgio and Kaja Folgio

Book 22 of Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius!

Spoilers ahead for earlier books.

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