Review: The Library of the Dead, by T.L. Huchu

The Library of the Dead is the first book in a post-apocalyptic (sort of) urban fantasy series set in Edinburgh, written by Zimbabwean author (and current Scotland resident) T.L. Huchu.

Ropa is a ghosttalker. This means she can see people who have died but are still lingering because they have unfinished business. She can stabilize them and understand what they're saying with the help of her mbira. At the age of fourteen, she's the sole source of income for her small family. She lives with her grandmother and younger sister in a caravan (people in the US call it an RV), paying rent to an enterprising farmer turned landlord.

Ropa's Edinburgh is much worse off than ours. Everything is poorer, more run-down, and more tenuous, but other than a few hints about global warming, we never learn the history. It reminded me a bit of the world in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower in the feel of civilization crumbling without a specific cause. Unlike that series, The Library of the Dead is not about the collapse or responses to it. The partial ruin of the city is the mostly unremarked backdrop of Ropa's life.

Much of the book follows Ropa's daily life carrying messages for ghosts and taking care of her family. She does discover the titular library when a wealthier friend who got a job there shows it off to her, but it has no significant role in the plot. (That was disappointing.) The core plot, once Ropa is convinced by her grandmother to focus on it, is the missing son of a dead woman, who turns out to not be the only missing child.

This is urban fantasy with the standard first-person perspective, so Ropa is the narrator. This style of book needs a memorable protagonist, and Ropa is certainly that. She's a talker who takes obvious delight in narrating her own story alongside a constant patter of opinions, observations, and Scottish dialect. Ropa is also poor.

That last may not sound that notable; a lot of urban fantasy protagonists are not well-off. But most of them feel culturally middle-class in a way that Ropa does not. Money may be a story constraint in other books, but it rarely feels like a life constraint and experience the way it does here. It's hard to describe the difference in tone succinctly, since it's a lot of small things: the constant presence of money concerns, the frustration of possessions that are stolen or missing and can't be replaced, the tedious chores one has to do when there's no money, even the language and vulgarity Ropa uses. This is rare in fantasy and excellent characterization work.

Given that, I am still frustrated with myself over how much I struggled with Ropa as a narrator. She's happy to talk about what is happening to her and what she's learning about (she listens voraciously to non-fiction while running messages), but she deflects, minimizes, or rushes past any mention of what she's feeling. If you don't like the angst that's common from urban fantasy protagonists, this may be the book for you. I have complained about that angst before, and therefore feel like this should have been the book for me, but apparently I need a minimum level of emotional processing and introspection from the narrator. Ropa is utterly unwilling to do any of that. It's possible to piece together what she's feeling and worrying about, but the reader has to rely on hints and oblique comments that she passes over quickly.

It didn't help that Ropa is not interested in the same things in her world that I was interested in. She's not an unreliable narrator in the conventional sense; she doesn't lie to the reader or intentionally hide information. And yet, the experience of reading this book was, for me, similar to reading a book with an unreliable narrator. Ropa consistently refused to look at what I wanted her to look at or think about what I wanted her to think about.

For example, when she has an opportunity to learn magic through books from the titular library, her initial enthusiasm is infectious. Huchu does a great job showing the excitement of someone who likes new ideas and likes telling other people about the neat things she just learned. But when things don't work the way she expected from the books, she doesn't follow up, experiment, or try to understand why. When her grandmother tries to explain something to her from a different angle, she blows her off and refuses to pay attention. And when she does get magic to work, she never tries to connect that to her previous understanding. I kept waiting for Ropa to try to build her own mental model of magic, but she would only toy with an idea for a few pages and then put it down and never mention it again.

This is not a fault in the book, just a mismatch between the book and what I wanted to read. All of this is consistent with Ropa's defensive strategies, emotional resiliency, and approach to understanding the world. (I strongly suspect Huchu was giving Ropa some ADHD characteristics, and if so, I think he got it spot on.) Given that, I tried to pivot to appreciating the characterization and the world, but that ran into another mismatch I had with this book, and the reason why I passed on it when it initially came out.

I tend to avoid fantasy novels about ghosts. This is not because I mind ghosts themselves, but I've learned from experience that authors who write about ghosts usually also write about other things that I don't want to read about. That unfortunately was the case here; The Library of the Dead was too far into horror for me. There's child abuse, drugs, body horror, and similar nastiness here, more than I wanted in my head. Ropa's full-speed-ahead attitude and refusal to dwell on anything made it a bit easier to read, but it was still too much for me.

Ropa is a great character who is refreshingly different than the typical urban fantasy protagonist, and the few hints of the magical library and world background we get were intriguing. This book was not for me, but I can see why other people will love it.

Followed by Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Night and Silence, by Seanan McGuire

Night and Silence is the 12th book in Seanan McGuire's long-running October Daye Celtic-inspired urban fantasy series. This is a "read the books in order" sort of series; you definitely do not want to start here.

Gillian, Toby's estranged daughter, has been kidnapped. Her ex-husband and his new wife turn to her in desperation (although Miranda suspects Toby is the one who kidnapped her). Toby of course drops everything to find her, which she would have done regardless, but the obvious fear is that Gillian may have been kidnapped specifically to get at Toby. Meanwhile, the consequences of The Brightest Fell have put a severe strain on one of Toby's most important relationships, at the worst possible time.

Once again, this is when I say that McGuire's writing has a lot of obvious flaws, and then say that this book kept me up way past my bedtime for two nights in a row because it was nearly impossible to put down.

The primary quality flaw in these books, at least for me, is that Toby's thought processes have some deeply-worn grooves that she falls into time and time again. Since she's the first-person narrator of the series, that produces some repetitive writing. She feels incredibly lucky for her chosen family, she worries about her friends, she prizes loyalty very highly, she throws herself headlong into danger, and she thinks about these things in a background hum through every book. By this point, the reader knows all of this, so there's a lot of "yes, yes, we know" muttering that tends to happen.

McGuire also understands the importance of plot and character recaps at the start of each book for those of us who have forgotten what was happening (thank you!) but awkwardly writes them into the beginning of each book. That doesn't help with the sense of repetitiveness. If only authors would write stand-alone synopses of previous books in a series, or hire someone to do that if they can't stand to, the world would be a much better place. But now I'm repeating myself.

Once I get into a book, though, this doesn't matter at all. When Toby starts down a familiar emotional rut, I just read faster until I get to the next bit. Something about these books is incredibly grabby to me; once I get started on one, I devour it, and usually want to read the next one as soon as possible. Some of this is the cast, which at this point in the series is varied, entertaining, and full of the sort of casual banter that only people who have known each other for a long time can do. A lot of it is that Toby constantly moves forward. She ruminates and angsts and worries, but she never sits around and mopes. She does her thinking on the move. No matter how preoccupied she is with some emotional thread, something's going to happen on the next page.

Some of it is intangible, or at least beyond my ability to put a finger on. Some authors are good at writing grabby books, and at least for me McGuire is one of those authors.

Describing the plot in any detail without spoilers is hopeless this far into the series, but this is one of the big revelation books, and I suspect it's also going to be a significant tipping point in Toby's life. We finally find out what broke faerie, which has rather more to do with Toby and her family than one might have expected, explains some things about Amandine, and also (although this hasn't been spelled out yet) seems likely to explain some things about the Luidaeg's involvement in Toby's adventures. And there is another significant realignment of one of Toby's relationships that isn't fully developed here, but that I hope will be explored in future books.

There's also a lot about Tybalt that to be honest I found tedious and kind of frustrating (although not half as frustrating as Toby found it). I appreciate what McGuire was doing; some problems are tedious, frustrating, and repetitive because that's how one gets through them. The problem that Toby and Tybalt are wrestling with is realistic and underdiscussed in fiction of this type, so I respect the effort, and I'm not sure there was way to write through this that would have been more engrossing (and a bit less cliched). But, still, not my favorite part of this book. Thankfully, it was a mostly-ignorable side thread.

This was a substantial improvement over The Brightest Fell, which was both infuriating and on rails. Toby has much more agency here, the investigation was more interesting, and the lore and character fallout has me eager to read the next book. It's fun to see McGuire's world-building come together over this long of a series, and so far it has not disappointed.

Followed by The Unkindest Tide.

As has become usual, the book ends with a novella telling a story from a different perspective.

"Suffer a Sea-Change": The main novel was good. This was great.

"Suffer a Sea-Change" retells a critical part of the novel from Gillian's perspective, and then follows that thread of story past the end of the novel. I loved absolutely everything about this. Gillian is a great protagonist, similar to Toby but different enough to be a fresh voice. There is a ton of the Luidaeg, and through different eyes than Toby's which is fun. There's some great world-building and a few very memorable scenes. And there's also the beginning, the very small beginning, of the healing of a great injustice that's been haunting this series since the very beginning, and I am very much here for that. Great stuff. (9)

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

The Truth is the 25th Discworld novel. Some reading order guides group it loosely into an "industrial revolution" sequence following Moving Pictures, but while there are thematic similarities I'll talk about in a moment, there's no real plot continuity. You could arguably start reading Discworld here, although you'd be spoiled for some character developments in the early Watch novels.

William de Worde is paid to write a newsletter. That's not precisely what he calls it, and it's not clear whether his patrons know that he publishes it that way. He's paid to report on news of Ankh-Morpork that may be of interest of various rich or influential people who are not in Ankh-Morpork, and he discovered the best way to optimize this was to write a template of the newsletter, bring it to an engraver to make a plate of it, and run off copies for each of his customers, with some minor hand-written customization. It's a comfortable living for the estranged younger son of a wealthy noble. As the story opens, William is dutifully recording the rumor that dwarfs have discovered how to turn lead into gold.

The rumor is true, although not in the way that one might initially assume.

The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong. There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise.

For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.

The dwarfs used the lead to make a movable type printing press, which is about to turn William de Worde's small-scale, hand-crafted newsletter into a newspaper.

The movable type printing press is not unknown technology. It's banned technology, because the powers that be in Ankh-Morpork know enough to be deeply suspicious of it. The religious establishment doesn't like it because words are too important and powerful to automate. The nobles and the Watch don't like it because cheap words cause problems. And the engraver's guild doesn't like it for obvious reasons. However, Lord Vetinari knows that one cannot apply brakes to a volcano, and commerce with the dwarfs is very important to the city. The dwarfs can continue. At least for now.

As in Moving Pictures, most of The Truth is an idiosyncratic speedrun of the social effects of a new technology, this time newspapers. William has no grand plan; he's just an observant man who likes to write, cares a lot about the truth, and accidentally stumbles into editing a newspaper. (This, plus being an estranged son of a rich family, feels very on-point for journalism.) His naive belief is that people want to read true things, since that's what his original patrons wanted. Truth, however, may not be in the top five things people want from a newspaper.

This setup requires some narrative force to push it along, which is provided by a plot to depose Vetinari by framing him for murder. The most interesting part of that story is Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, the people hired to do the framing and then dispose of the evidence. They're a classic villain type: the brains and the brawn, dangerous, terrifying, and willing to do horrible things to people. But one thing Pratchett excels at is taking a standard character type, turning it a bit sideways, and stuffing in things that one wouldn't think would belong. In this case, that's Mr. Tulip's deep appreciation for, and genius grasp of, fine art. It should not work to have the looming, awful person with anger issues be able to identify the exact heritage of every sculpture and fine piece of goldsmithing, and yet somehow it does.

Also as in Moving Pictures (and, in a different way, Soul Music), Pratchett tends to anthropomorphize technology, giving it a life and motivations of its own. In this case, that's William's growing perception of the press as an insatiable maw into which one has to feed words. I'm usually dubious of shifting agency from humans to things when doing social analysis (and there's a lot of social analysis here), but I have to concede that Pratchett captures something deeply true about the experience of feedback loops with an audience. A lot of what Pratchett puts into this book about the problematic relationship between a popular press and the truth is obvious and familiar, but he also makes some subtle points about the way the medium shapes what people expect from it and how people produce content for it that are worthy of Marshall McLuhan.

The interactions between William and the Watch were less satisfying. In our world, the US press is, with only rare exceptions, a thoughtless PR organ for police propaganda and the exonerative tense. Pratchett tackles that here... sort of. William vaguely grasps that his job as a reporter may be contrary to the job of the Watch to maintain order, and Vimes's ambivalent feelings towards "solving crimes" push the story in that direction. But this is also Vimes, who is clearly established as one of the good sort and therefore is a bad vehicle for talking about how the police corrupt the press. Pratchett has Vimes and Vetinari tacitly encourage William, which works within the story but takes the pressure off the conflict and leaves William well short of understanding the underlying politics. There's a lot more that could be said about the tension between the press and the authorities, but I think the Discworld setup isn't suitable for it.

This is the sort of book that benefits from twenty-four volumes of backstory and practice. Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork cast ticks along like a well-oiled machine, which frees up space that would otherwise have to be spent on establishing secondary characters. The result is a lot of plot and social analysis shoved into a standard-length Discworld novel, and a story that's hard to put down. The balance between humor and plot is just about perfect, the references and allusions aren't overwhelming, and the supporting characters, both new and old, are excellent. We even get a good Death sequence. This is solid, consistent stuff: Discworld as a mature, well-developed setting with plenty of stories left to tell.

Followed by Thief of Time in publication order, and later by Monstrous Regiment in the vaguely-connected industrial revolution sequence.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Black Stars, edited by Nisi Shawl & Latoya Peterson

This is a bit of an odd duck from a metadata standpoint. Black Stars is a series of short stories (maybe one creeps into novelette range) published by Amazon for Kindle and audiobook. Each one can be purchased separately (or "borrowed" with Amazon Prime), and they have separate ISBNs, so my normal practice would be to give each its own review. They're much too short for that, though, so I'm reviewing the whole group as an anthology.

The cover in the sidebar is for the first story of the series. The other covers have similar designs. I think the one for "We Travel the Spaceways" was my favorite.

Each story is by a Black author and most of them are science fiction. ("The Black Pages" is fantasy.) I would classify them as afrofuturism, although I don't have a firm grasp on its definition.

This anthology included several authors I've been meaning to read and was conveniently available, so I gave it a try, even though I'm not much of a short fiction reader. That will be apparent in the forthcoming grumbling.

"The Visit" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: This is a me problem rather than a story problem, and I suspect it's partly because the story is not for me, but I am very done with gender-swapped sexism. I get the point of telling stories of our own society with enough alienation to force the reader to approach them from a fresh angle, but the problem with a story where women are sexist and condescending to men is that you're still reading a story of condescending sexism. That's particularly true when the analogies to our world are more obvious than the internal logic of the story world, as they are here.

"The Visit" tells the story of a reunion between two college friends, one of whom is now a stay-at-home husband and the other of whom has stayed single. There's not much story beyond that, just obvious political metaphor (the Male Masturbatory Act to ensure no potential child is wasted, blatant harrassment of the two men by female cops) and depressing character studies. Everyone in this story is an ass except maybe Obinna's single friend Eze, which means there's nothing to focus on except the sexism. The writing is competent and effective, but I didn't care in the slightest about any of these people or anything that was happening in their awful, dreary world. (4)

"The Black Pages" by Nnedi Okorafor: Issaka has been living in Chicago, but the story opens with him returning to Timbouctou where he grew up. His parents know he's coming for a visit, but he's a week early as a surprise. Unfortunately, he's arriving at the same time as an al-Qaeda attack on the library. They set it on fire, but most of the books they were trying to destroy were already saved by his father and are now in Issaka's childhood bedroom.

Unbeknownst to al-Qaeda, one of the books they did burn was imprisoning a djinn. A djinn who is now free and resident in Issaka's iPad.

This was a great first chapter of a novel. The combination of a modern setting and a djinn trapped in books with an instant affinity with technology was great. Issaka is an interesting character who is well-placed to introduce the reader to the setting, and I was fully invested in Issaka and Faro negotiating their relationship. Then the story just stopped. I didn't understand the ending, which was probably me being dim, but the real problem was that I was not at all ready for an ending. I would read the novel this was setting up, though. (6)

"2043... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)" by Nisi Shawl: This is another story that felt like the setup for a novel, although not as good of a novel. The premise is that the United States has developed biological engineering that allows humans to live underwater for extended periods (although they still have to surface occasionally for air, like whales). The use to which that technology is being put is a rerun of Liberia with less colonialism: Blacks are given the option to be modified into merpeople and live under the sea off the US coast as a solution. White supremacists are not happy, of course, and try to stop them from claiming their patch of ocean floor.

This was fine, as far as it went, but I wasn't fond of the lead character and there wasn't much plot. There was some sort of semi-secret plan that the protagonist stumbles across and that never made much sense to me. The best parts of the story were the underwater setting and the semi-realistic details about the merman transformation. (6)

"These Alien Skies" by C.T. Rwizi: In the far future, humans are expanding across the galaxy via automatically-constructed wormhole gates. Msizi's job is to be the first ship through a new wormhole to survey the system previously reached only by the AI construction ship. The wormhole is not supposed to explode shortly after he goes through, leaving him stranded in an alien system with only his companion Tariro, who is not who she seems to be.

This was a classic SF plot, but I still hadn't guessed where it was going, or the relevance of some undiscussed bits of Tariro's past. Once the plot happens, it's a bit predictable, but I enjoyed it despite the depressed protagonist. (6)

"Clap Back" by Nalo Hopkinson: Apart from "The Visit," this was the most directly political of the stories. It opens with Wenda, a protest artist, whose final class project uses nanotech to put racist tchotchkes to an unexpected use. This is intercut with news clippings about a (white and much richer) designer who has found a way to embed memories into clothing and is using this to spread quotes of rather pointed "forgiveness" from a Malawi quilt.

This was one of the few entries in this anthology that fit the short story shape for me. Wenda's project and Burri's clothing interact fifty years later in a surprising way. This was the second-best story of the group. (7)

"We Travel the Spaceways" by Victor LaValle: Grimace (so named because he wears a huge purple coat) is a homeless man in New York who talks to cans. Most of his life is about finding food, but the cans occasionally give him missions and provide minor assistance. Apart from his cans, he's very much alone, but when he comforts a woman in McDonalds (after getting caught thinking about stealing her cheeseburger), he hopes he may have found a partner. If, that is, she still likes him when she discovers the nature of the cans' missions.

This was the best-written story of the six. Grimace is the first-person narrator, and LaValle's handling of characterization and voice is excellent. Grimace makes perfect sense from inside his head, but the reader can also see how unsettling he is to those around him. This could have been a disturbing, realistic story about a schitzophrenic man. As one may have guessed from the theme of the anthology, that's not what it is.

I admired the craft of this story, but I found Grimace's missions too horrific to truly like it. There is an in-story justification for them; suffice it to say that I didn't find it believable. An expansion with considerably more detail and history might have bridged that gap, but alas, short fiction. (6)

Rating: 6 out of 10