Reading

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The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso

The Last Hour Between Worlds

4/5. A single mother, just two months post-partum, gets out for one night to attend a ball in her fantasy city. Which gets complicated when the whole ballroom keeps falling through levels of reality each time the clock strikes, and when her former crush turned professional enemy, the hot lady thief, is also on the case.

This is a lot of fun, and very stylish. Visually, I mean – there’s a lot going on here with what people are wearing and carrying, and with the shifting esthetics of each layer of reality. And you know I’m in favor of adventure books about mothers, particularly very new mothers like this one.

If you’re paying even moderate amounts of attention, none of these plot twists will rock you. But they are all pleasing to unwind, as is the whole book.

Content notes: Violence, temporary character death.

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The Shots You Take by Rachel Reid

The Shots You Take

3/5. Another one of these M/M hockey romances. This one is even less about hockey than usual – old estranged teammates reconnect post retirement when one’s father dies. They have a lot of baggage having to do with how they used to sleep together, and one of them was in love and one of them had a lot of internalized homophobia.

I mean, I suppose someone did have to title a hockey romance that at some point.

Anyway, this one is nice, particularly for having actual adults in it. It also successfully walks that tough line where one half of the pairing treated the other half very poorly in the past, and there’s a lot of justifiable anger, but it is a romance after all so we have to retain some sympathy for both sides. So yeah, I liked this one fine. I’m not liking any romance more than fine at the moment, though, so who even knows what’s good anymore.

Content notes: Parental death and the raw aftermath.

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A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

A Drop of Corruption

4/5. Sequel in this fantasy biopunk Holmes & Watson universe.

One of the more successful sequels I’ve read in a long time, in the sense that this accomplishes the task of really blowing up and blowing out the world. I continue to be only middling interested in these characters (and also continue to be puzzled about why this series is first person, aside from the obvious stylistic nod). But the construction of this empire, whose people’s bodies and minds are modified in ways beyond our understanding by methods beyond their understanding, all while the leviathans come ever closer to breaking down the sea walls, is incredibly interesting to me.

I think this book is not as successful in its project of talking about kings and power structures by blood in general. It does that, but our protagonist is not really clocking the implications for his own life as an imperial subject, so it doesn’t quite come together the way intended. The first person gets in the way there, specifically, given our protagonist is not, shall we say, a political or philosophical thinker.

Still, I am way more interested in this now than I was after the first book.

Content notes: Body modification and body horror, threats of infection/contamination.

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A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

A more Beautiful and Terrible History

3/5. A fascinating look at the way civil rights history is used and abused and retold, most often to serve current racial status quo.

I liked this and found it helpful, but hesitate to casually recommend it to people. The problem is that the author occasionally drops a comment that is squarely in my expertise and that she is dead wrong about. Which, people are allowed to be wrong about things not in their wheelhouse, but it makes one wonder about the rest of their thinking.

An example: I don’t have the exact passage bookmarked, but she says something super casual early on about how the 2016 election was stolen and then moves on without addressing that at all. I suspect this is an artifact of that particular 2017 twitter brain rot that infected many people on the left. My problems with this are many. There has been extensive legal and factual investigation of this, and it simply isn’t true. Did we know that in 2017? No, but speaking for myself, I was pretty sure of it at the time and was validated by all the evidence subsequently gathered. Second, gosh, where have we heard this particular bit of red pill thinking before? Or since, I should say? “My guy lost so it had to be illegitimate?” Hmm. This is where all the Jan. 6 defendants started out, mentally. It’s

Look, she could have been saying something more fundamental about the nature of U.S. elections – how structural racism has permeated them to the point that they are not legitimate. I have heard these arguments and yeah, you can get me there. But if so, why is 2016 the one we point to? And why doesn’t she unpack that? Saying an election was “stolen” can mean approximately ten thousand different things, be precise, people! Here, it’s just leftie red pill stuff. And if her thinking is that messed up on that, boy, I don’t know. I don’t love marking a book down hard for throwaway comments, but then again, it’s the throwaways that really tell you how someone thinks, isn’t it?

Content notes: Racism, structural and personal. Historical accounts of civil rights history which, of course, include much racial violence.