Writing book reviews is a tricky thing, because books are labors of love and time. As someone who writes I know what it feels like for someone to not care for your work. At the same time, across a few different areas of work and many years writing in different ways, my experience has been that honestly discussing work is the only way to grow. That’s not intended to suggest this page is some kind of charity for other authors: if anything, it’s purely for me. Writing is a way of thinking and thinking about what works in a book and what doesn’t is a way of becoming a better writer.
If these reviews are for anyone, they are for me, and perhaps anyone else who benefits from them. I don’t mean to pretend that more successful authors would learn anything from them – it’s enough for me if I learn something from them.
The Year of the Witching, Alexis Henderson -
Something I have done ever since college is go to the library and pluck random items off the shelves. Systematic searching, recommendations from friends, following reviews – all valuable methods of snowball sampling new reading, but all constrained. True randomness surprises you.
I consider this book proof of the method. It wasn’t on my radar until I grabbed it because I thought the cover illustration was striking while my wife was checking out Survivor DVDs (early seasons of Survivor hold up better than you think, by the way). I adored it.
The book is a feminist gothic fantasy set in a second world but with fairly clear parallels to Puritan America, and the story ends as a mediation on how to constructively move past an experience like that, perhaps imagining an alternate redemptive path for what America actually did. In the hands of a lot of authors I might say it was too on the nose, but Alexis Henderson is a beautiful writer. To me the book felt fluid and poetic in a way that made everything real and natural. It’s Kai Erickson’s Wayward Puritans as a fantasy, Immanuelle feeling perfectly believable both as a character from a classic sociological study and as a woman encountering the mythic unknown. The gothic is about collapse and Henderson plays deftly with those symbols, but she is very deft in turning them to regeneration.
Henderson’s reach for poetic stylings never once crosses over the line to purple or prosaic. She is a phenomenal stylist.
It’s fun, it’s imaginative, it’s deeply enjoyable to read. It certainly has something to say. It’s simply a great book!
The Library of the Unwritten, A.J. Hackwith -
Excellent build of the suspense and mystery surrounding the protagonist and a satisfying way of threading the character connections together, unravelling the plots into one. It’s well-executed. Absolutely a fun read and one I would recommend.
Leto is a very important character to the story, but I did not personally think it enriched the narrative to have him as a viewpoint character. Claire’s viewpoint is more interesting and the crux of the reveal is Claire’s realization of Leto’s connection to her so her interiority is really the heart of it. Leto’s mystery is that he did something unkind to a friend. Well, we’ve all been there, hopefully not with the same results, but I didn’t find Leto enriching. Beverly’s perspective, similarly, never goes anywhere. Claire is obviously a central viewpoint, and Ramiel is both interesting and necessary to the narrative (since someone has to narrate events Claire could never plausibly know about). Leto’s most interesting story actions happen either in front of Claire or off-page entirely and are filled in later, so I think she could have just told us about all of it.
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir -
It can be very fun in the accessible intricacy and presentation of the science mysteries that are continually resolved. I expect that’s why the book has resonated with so many people. I struggled with the social elements. There is a scene where Stratt, a woman who has been granted supreme power by every government on the planet, is briefly dragged into court due to an IP lawsuit. The lawsuit itself is nonsensical. It concerns Stratt putting a copy of every published work ever on the computers for the PHM ship. Most of the work would be in the public domain and there’s no reason she wouldn’t have just had someone purchase the rest (a miniscule cost compared to the project). Sending published work to another star system on a spaceship certainly doesn’t count as distributing it or violate any authorial rights. It’s not clear what the cause of action could possibly be.
Stratt shows up to court nonetheless so that she can provide the bailiff – a courtroom cop – with a copy of a treaty making her immune from lawsuits. It should be obvious that this is not how courts take notice of treaties. Stratt is incredibly busy with saving the world but apparently not so busy as to make this point by pretrial motion, and the court remarkably agrees to take judicial notice of a law based on someone showing their own printout of it to a cop. After the court agrees with her, Stratt announces that’s a good thing for all involved, because she won’t have to have the military… invade the court? It’s unclear but it seems like she is threatening to kill a judge (who just agreed with her in a case that makes no sense to begin with, despite her disdain for procedure). A bunch of soldiers with guns invade the court at this point to emphasize her threat.
The scene is a child’s fantasy of what it would be like to be powerful. It is completely disinterested in what power is, how it works, or how it interacts with courts. It has no reason to be in the book at all. This is a perfect example of the human social problem I encountered reading it. The suspension of disbelief crashes apart rapidly.
I don’t exactly want to say this is a bad book because I can see the many strong elements in it that made it work and it’s been a tremendous success, but it did not work for me.
The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon -
This book, like everything of Samantha Shannon’s, is the sort of book that makes me want to write. I mean that as the highest possible praise.