Review: A Master of Djinn (DNF)

Title: A Master of Djinn

Series: Dead Djinn Universe #1

Author: P. Djèlí Clark

Genre: Alternate History/Mystery

Trigger Warnings: Racism, misogyny, racial slurs, police brutality, violence, blood, body horror, stalking (minor)
Note: In DNF books, warnings listed only include the amount of book I read. There may be other triggers further on that I did not encounter.

Read To: 50%

Back Cover:

Cairo, 1912: Though Fatma el-Sha’arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, she’s certainly not a rookie, especially after preventing the destruction of the universe last summer.

So when someone murders a secret brotherhood dedicated to one of the most famous men in history, al-Jahiz, Agent Fatma is called onto the case. Al-Jahiz transformed the world forty years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. This murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions. His dangerous magical abilities instigate unrest in the streets of Cairo that threaten to spill over onto the global stage.

Alongside her Ministry colleagues and a familiar person from her past, Agent Fatma must unravel the mystery behind this imposter to restore peace to the city—or face the possibility he could be exactly who he seems…

Review:

I was really excited for this read. I read the two prequel short stories for this series (A Dead Djinn in Cairo and The Haunting of Tram Car 015) and enjoyed them immensely, and I hoped this book would be more of the same, but longer.

Turns out longer is not really what I wanted. This book just didn’t grab me like I’d hoped.

For starters, the main plot is the mystery, but the secondary plot is Fatma being assigned a partner and the whole “detective who works alone has to learn to work with their partner” trope. I’m not a huge fan of that trope anyway, and it brought out a mean and haughty streak in Fatma that I didn’t particularly like.

I also wasn’t enthused with the main plot as a whole. Fatma and her partner do some investigating into the person pretending to be al-Jahiz who murdered the brotherhood, and halfway through the book, they have discovered that someone is pretending to be al-Jahiz and did in fact murder the brotherhood. It felt like they’d made no progress and answered none of the questions they were trying to answer, and it felt like Fatma’s priorities were more “get my partner reassigned so I can work alone again” and “hang out with my girlfriend” than “solve the mystery.”

To be fair, I don’t read a lot of mysteries (a grand total of 5 in the nine years I’ve been blogging, and 3 of them were this year). I don’t know how they’re supposed to go. All of these complaints could just be my inexperience with mysteries and the fact that they’re not usually my favorite genre. If you’re a fan of mysteries and detective fiction, you might enjoy this a lot more than I did. It’s just not the book for me.

The Dead Djinn Universe:

Novellas:

1. A Dead Djinn in Cairo
2. The Haunting of Tram Car 015

Novels:

1. A Master of Djinn

Review: Dread Nation

Title: Dread Nation

Series: Dread Nation #1

Author: Justina Ireland

Genre: Alternate History/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Racism (severe), starvation, blood, gore, death, death of children (mentions), violence, guns, body horror

Back Cover:

Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville—derailing the War Between the States and changing America forever. In this new nation, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Reeducation Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead. But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It’s a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.

But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose. But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies. And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems.

Review:

I read this as an audiobook, and Bahni Turpin is fast becoming my favorite audiobook narrator. She did such a good job. A hint of a Southern accent (Jane grew up in Kentucky) that got stronger when Jane was emotional, and a very vibrant storytelling all around. I highly recommend the audiobook version of this.

The book itself is also very good. It’s an alternate history where the Civil War ended because the dead started coming back to life and the Union and Confederate soldiers had to stop fighting each other to fight zombies. It seemed a little unrealistic to me that they would train Black and Native people to do the zombie killing, since I doubted former slave owners would want to see those slaves given weapons and trained to use them, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief because I thoroughly enjoyed watching Jane kick ass. And Black people being trained in the art of killing somehow didn’t really change the extremely racist dynamic. Even though Jane – and most of the other Black characters – could have killed the white people treating them badly without breaking a sweat, she still feels the boot of racist oppression on her neck and limiting her entire life.

Whatever you think the main plot is, you’re wrong. The back cover barely even alludes to it. All Jane wants to do is finish up her mandatory zombie-killing education at Miss Preston’s and go back home to her mother on their plantation in Kentucky. But things do not go according to plan, and attempting to help a former friend find his sister, who went missing with one of the Baltimore families, lands her in more trouble than she is prepared for. Jane isn’t always great at making safe decisions, but she is good at thinking on her feet.

And, of course, there are zombies. A lot of zombies. They’re a growing threat throughout the book, giving the whole story a distinct horror edge that meshed very well with the horrors of the racist treatment of non-white folks.

This book is very, very good, especially if you like alternate history and growing existential dread. I think it ended well enough that I don’t feel a need to read a sequel, but I may pick up book two anyway, just to see what happens next.

The Dread Nation series:

1. Dread Nation
2. Deathless Divide

Review: Axiom’s End

Title: Axiom’s End

Series: Noumena #1

Author: Lindsay Ellis

Genre: Science Fiction/Alternate History

Trigger Warnings: Mind control, blood, death, gore, excrement, kidnapping

Back Cover:

It’s fall 2007. A well-timed leak has revealed that the US government might have engaged in first contact. Cora Sabino is doing everything she can to avoid the whole mess, since the force driving the controversy is her whistleblower father. Even though Cora hasn’t spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government–and with him in hiding, that attention is on her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father’s leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him–until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades.

Realizing the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to uncover the truth is not as a whistleblower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. Their otherworldly connection will change everything she thought she knew about being human–and could unleash a force more sinister than she ever imagined.

Review:

I had no idea what this was about going in. I just knew that it was scifi and written by a YouTuber I’ve watched for years and absolutely love. I had really no clue what the book was about besides the bits that Lindsay Ellis has posted and talked about (mainly that there’s aliens and it’s set in 2007), but I wanted to support her.

And it turned out to be really, really good. The back cover doesn’t do it justice.

The story centers around Cora, whose famous father left five years ago because the government started seeing his conspiracy theories (and his rabid conspiracy theory fans) as a threat to national security. She wants nothing to do with him. But when an inhuman something breaks into her family’s house, she barely escapes being taken into government custody, and she starts to discover that her father may be an asshole, but he’s not wrong. Aliens are here on Earth. Hoping to use her ability to communicate with them as a bargaining chip to free her family, Cora convinces the alien Ampersand to let her be his interpreter. And she soon finds herself in way over her head.

The only real thing I can say about Cora is that she’s incredibly human. A lot happens to her in this book, much of it terrifying, but she reacts very humanly and even in the midst of horrible things beyond her comprehension she seizes what agency she can, makes what she can of it, and is deeply likeable and relatable.

I adore how alien these aliens are. These aren’t little green men with big eyes, or any kind of understandable alien at all. They’re big, not fully biological, ancient, and entirely incomprehensible to humans. Lindsay does a fantastic job making them unknown and unknowable and making the gulf of what humans don’t know about them utterly terrifying.

I keep using words like “terrifying” because that’s what this book is about. It’s about the fear, the existential terror of learning that we are not alone in the universe and the other species out there is willing, able, and even likely to wipe out every living thing on our planet. There are a lot of big themes in this book, played out by a single girl and the alien she can talk to and the overwhelming threats of the US government and the alien superorganism.

And I knew that things were going truly, spectacularly badly for Cora when I realized the thing from the beginning that made me think, “That will come back to bite you,” never did and I didn’t even care because so many other things were busy going wrong. This is one of those books where nearly every page is a new variety of disaster and it kept me riveted.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read, but I’m not certain if I want to read the next book. Axiom’s End is really good, and I’m not sure what else there is to say in this series. I’m worried that the next book will be dragging a good thing out too long.

But I also really like Lindsay Ellis, so I may read it just to support her. It’s not coming out for a while yet, so I suppose I’ll just wait and see.

The Noumena series:

1. Axiom’s End
2. Truth of the Divine

Review: Everfair (DNF)

Title: Everfair

Author: Nisi Shawl

Genre: Alternate History

Trigger Warnings: Racism, racist violence, slavery, forced labor, torture, blood, gore, violence against children, implied sexual content

Read To: 38%

Back Cover:

Everfair is a wonderful Neo-Victorian alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britian join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated.

Shawl’s speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into a marvelous and exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history. Everfair is told from a multiplicity of voices: Africans, Europeans, East Asians, and African Americans in complex relationships with one another, in a compelling range of voices that have historically been silenced. Everfair is not only a beautiful book but an educational and inspiring one that will give the reader new insight into an often ignored period of history.

Review:

I wasn’t really vibing with this book even from the beginning, but when I paused it at the end of the workday I figured I was close to the end and I was legitimately going to finish it. Then I checked my progress and realized I wasn’t even close to halfway done.

Problem 1: Mismarketing

Every book starts with a “what if.” Usually it’s something like “what if there was a character with this particular trait or ability,” or “what if there was a world where such-and-such happened.” Everfair‘s marketing made it into a steampunk anti-colonialist adventure: “What if the people of the Congo developed steam power first and threw out the Belgians?” But the reality is more along the line of, “What if white saviors created a country in Africa that the poor Congolese could escape to, and also a white family lived there?”

There were some little bits of cool steampunk-esque technology (none of the technology created in Everfair, the country that got created, was actually powered by steam, but the asthetics were similar to steampunk), but it wasn’t an integral part of the setting. Or an integral part of anything, really. They just had some people in Everfair who were good at engineering stuff and that’s what they came up with. This is not a steampunk book, and it’s not about the Congolese discovering steam power and throwing out the Belgian colonizers. If anything, it’s an alternate history family epic that happens to be set in another European colony in Africa – even if this particular colony is more interested in being white saviors than exploiting the land and people.

Problem 2: Poorly Paced

The pacing in this book is … absent. There’s an event, and an event, and another event, and they’re all laid out for you one after the other even though there was two months between events one and two and four years between events two and three. There were dates interspersed periodically that I think were supposed to give a sense of temporality and time passing, but they didn’t work. I had no idea when anything was going on and no clue about the chronology of this story.

Problem 3: Ensemble Cast

An ensemble cast isn’t always bad, if you can do it well. This book did not do it well. The book opens with a fairly nonsensical scene of Lisette, a 15-year-old French girl, riding a bicycle, immediately followed by a three-year time jump with no mention or warning to her eloping with a married Englishman. It seemed to be setting her up as the main character. But, no. Besides her, other major characters include the Englishman’s wife Daisy and the fourth member of their poly quad whose name I forget, their four children, an African American preacher, an African American missionary lady and her two godsons (or maybe nephews), Jackie the English socialist, Tink the East Asian engineer in Everfair, King Mwendi (it was never really clear what he was the king of – I think a tribe of native Congolese?), and his favorite wife Queen Josina.

Count them – that’s 15 major characters. I’m not even mentioning the minor ones! With so many different people doing things, none of them got enough time on the page to even establish much about who they are, let alone make me feel any sort of connection to them or care about what happened to them.

Redeeming Qualities

This book was not 100% terrible. I don’t think any books are. So here are a few of the things I did like about it.

• The Belgian colonization and terrorization of the Congo isn’t a well-known event or a common setting for fiction, so props for uniqueness there.
• Very racially diverse cast of characters – not just African and white, but also East Asian, mixed race, and African American. Plus the majority of the book takes place in Africa.
• Polyamory rep. (It ends pretty badly, but it was pretty cool to start the book and find a seemingly happy poly relationship.)
• Plenty of romantic pining between two women.
• Totally awesome African queen who I wish had more page time because she was probably my favorite character.

Perhaps the white people making their own country to save (physically and spiritually, there was a strong Christian missionary angle that I did not like) the people suffering under Belgian rule is more realistic to actual history. But when I’m going into an alternate history, I expect a fantasy, especially if it promises me steampunk. I got none of that in this book. And combined with characters I didn’t see enough to connect with, it was just a disappointment.

Review: The Black God’s Drums

Title: The Black God’s Drums

Author: P. Djèlí Clark

Genre: Alternate History/Steampunk

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, guns, kidnapping, knives, mind control, slavery, sex work, sex (mention)

Back Cover:

Creeper, a scrappy young teen, is done living on the streets of New Orleans. Instead, she wants to soar, and her sights are set on securing passage aboard the smuggler airship Midnight Robber. Her ticket: earning Captain Ann-Marie’s trust using a secret about a kidnapped Haitian scientist and a mysterious weapon he calls The Black God’s Drums.

But Creeper keeps another secret close to heart–Oya, the African orisha of the wind and storms, who speaks inside her head and grants her divine powers. And Oya has her own priorities concerning Creeper and Ann-Marie…

Review:

This book is short, easy to read, and very, very good.

It’s also a hard book to write a review about because you start off knowing very little and the story unfolds as you go along. It starts off with Creeper overhearing some information about some scientist and a weapon that everybody seems to want, and deciding to trade that information to Captain Ann-Marie in exchange for a place on her airship.

Oh, and Oya has given Creeper a vision that probably means something bad is going to happen to New Orleans.

I really don’t want to say any more than that because what exactly is happening gets unfolded throughout the story. Creeper and Ann-Marie are both interesting and distinct characters, and so is Oya even though she’s kinda doing her own thing in Creeper’s head, and the side characters are surprisingly good too for as little page time as they get.

I also want to talk about the world for a second, because I love it. It’s an alternate history, slightly steampunk-y version of New Orleans where the American Civil War ended in a complicated peace treaty where the South kept their slaves and subdued them with a mind-altering gas to keep them from running away, but New Orleans became a neutral area where everyone was free because it’s a major port city for airships coming between the North, the South, and the Haitian Free Isles and other Caribbean nations. It’s an interesting idea and I really want more books in this world because I want to explore it more.

The only real criticism I have of the book is the ending, which built up some really dramatic tension and then skipped over the actual culmination by jumping to the next morning with an “I don’t remember much of what happened last night” and you’re just expected to accept that the day was saved without actually knowing how it happened. I guess you’re just supposed to accept that Oya’s goddess magic did it? Personally, I wanted to know how Creeper fixed that entire disaster.

But despite that, it was an enjoyable read. I hesitate to call it “fun” because it is fairly dark (lots of death, discussions of slavery), but it’s a quick read and I’m very glad I picked it up.

And as a completely unrelated side note, every time I read Oya’s name the song “Oya” by Ghanan artist Azizaa Mystic popped into my head, because it’s catchy and worth listening to. (TW for strong language in the song.)

Review: That Inevitable Victorian Thing

Image from E.K. Johnston

Title: That Inevitable Victorian Thing

Author: E.K. Johnston

Genre: Alternate History

Trigger Warnings: Amputation, privacy invasion, f/f sex (implied)

Back Cover:

Victoria-Margaret is the crown princess of the empire, a direct descendant of Victoria I, the queen who changed the course of history two centuries earlier. The imperial practice of genetically arranged matchmaking will soon guide Margaret into a politically advantageous marriage like her mother before her, but before she does her duty, she’ll have one summer incognito in a far corner of empire. In Toronto, she meets Helena Marcus, daughter of one of the empire’s greatest placement geneticists, and August Callaghan, the heir apparent to a powerful shipping firm currently besieged by American pirates. In a summer of high-society debutante balls, politically charged tea parties, and romantic country dances, Margaret, Helena, and August discover they share an unusual bond and maybe a one in a million chance to have what they want and to change the world in the process.

Review:

I have mixed feelings about this book, but they’re good mixed feelings. Sort of. So this review is a little bit out of order because the setting is hugely important in my thoughts on the book and the characters, not so much.

First off, this book is set in near future Canada, but I categorized it as alternate history because it’s a near future where Britain didn’t lose its power and influence and also made a lot better choices regarding human rights, less colonialism, etc. It was almost utopian. There were things I liked about it (like racism not being a thing and healthcare being free), and there were things I didn’t like about it (like the way it felt a bit like an erasure of all the wrongs Britain has done, and the computer-based “genetic matches” to promote marrying someone who you would produce better children with smacked a bit of eugenics). I definitely enjoyed reading about it, but I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Uh, plot. Princess Victoria-Margaret takes an undercover vacation to Canada, makes some friends, and falls in love. The author’s note at the end of the book called the book “a very small story in a very big world,” and I like that description. It’s a small story of a girl meeting new friends and falling in love with one of them, but it has enough turns and surprises that it doesn’t feel plotless. The worldbuilding overshadows it, but the plot is definitely there and definitely strong if you like character-oriented stories. Plus, there’s a happy ending for everybody!

On that note, let’s talk about characters. The characters were all enjoyable to read about – I loved them all and wanted all of them to get a happy ending – but thinking about it, they weren’t really developed in the traditional sense. This is very much a slice-of-life story, and there isn’t really much of a need to learn much about these characters’ pasts or delve into their deepest fears or anything like that. I loved all of the people on the pages (literally all of them, there’s no “bad guy” or even a rival to hate) and I was happy to spend 300 pages with them, but I couldn’t really tell you much about them.

Really, the only thing I didn’t really like was the romance. And not because I didn’t like the romance itself – the concept was great, the characters were great together, and I’m super happy it happened. But it was just poorly done. The characters who fall in love feel little flutters when they look at each other (starting halfway through the book), they’re confused why their hearts beat faster when they accidentally touch … and then they’re making out on the couch. It came out of nowhere with hardly any buildup. And I just think it could have been done so much better.

And, because the diversity is so good, I have to mention it: Victoria-Margaret is a mixed-race person of color with African-textured hair, one of the characters is intersex, and there’s also polyamory.

That Inevitable Victorian Thing takes a small, slice-of-life story and mixes it with rich world-building to form a complex, multi-layered story that feels a lot bigger than it actually is. It’s not precisely lighthearted but definitely very wholesome. Despite my mixed feelings about some elements, it was an enjoyable book and I’m glad I read it.

Review: Portal

Title: Portal

Series: Portal Chronicles #1

Author: Imogen Rose

Genre: Alternate Reality

Back Cover:

On the way home from the SAT with her dad one afternoon, ice-hockey-playing tomboy Arizona falls asleep…and wakes up at night in a different car with her mother. She suddenly finds herself  living the life of a glamorous cheerleader, transported from her happy life with her dad to living with the mother she hates. Everyone knows her as Arizona Darley, but she isn’t. She is Arizona Stevens. As she struggles to find answers she is certain of two things — that her mother is somehow responsible, and that she wants to go back home to her real life. At least until she meets Kellan …

Review:

I picked up Portal on a whim. The cover wasn’t the greatest, and the synopsis sounded only okay, but I read the first chapter on Amazon and thought it sounded interesting. So I decided to give it a try.

And am I ever glad I did.

I loved Arizona. Kick-butt hockey player Arizona Stevens is suddenly popular cheerleader Arizona Darley, and I loved watching her adjust. I also loved watching her try to hide how lost she was, because she was afraid of going back to the psych ward (just another layer of interesting to an already fascinating character).

Kellan was awesome, too. He was sweet and considerate, but he wasn’t perfect. He got mad sometimes, and butted heads with Arizona every once in a while. He wasn’t s pushover, but he was supportive, and willing to give Arizona the benefit of the doubt. He was great.

In fact, I loved almost all the characters. Arizona’s sweet little sister Ella, her big brother Harry, her best friend Ariele…even the more minor ones, like Arizona Darley’s cheerleading friends, were fun. The only ones I didn’t love were Arizona’s parents, because I knew they were hiding something.

The plot was awesome. There was the main, how-the-heck-did-Arizona-Stevens-become-Arizona-Darley plot, which could be considered one and the same as the getting-back-to-Arizona-Stevens’s-world plot, plus romance, trying to adjust to her new school and friends, and issues with an angry wanna-be-friend. It was all brilliantly fascinating and delightfully complicated.

If I hadn’t known Portal was an Indie book, I wouldn’t have guessed it. The plot was brilliant, the writing was excellent, the characterization was awesome, the emotion was real. The whole book was strong and professional. I was highly impressed.

When I picked it up, I thought Portal was a standalone. I was wrong. It’s actually first in a series, and I am thrilled. After the awesomeness of Portal, I can’t wait to read book two, Equilibrium.

I received a free review copy of Portal from the author. Her generosity in no way influenced, or sought to influence, this review.

The Portal Chronicles:

1. Portal
2. Equilibrium
3. Quantum
4. Momentum
5. Fusion

Review: Game Changer

Title:  Game Changer

Author:  Margaret Peterson Haddix

Genre:  Alternate Reality

Back Cover:

Eighth-grader KT Sutton is the star pitcher for a highly selective club team, and she’s going to play for even more impressive teams in high school, win a college scholarship, and become an international star.  But in the middle of a championship game, she blacks out.  When she wakes up, the whole world is different.  There’s no more school classes, just hour after hour of athletic drills – always practice, never a game.  To top it all off, there’s no after-school sports – instead, everyone’s obsessed with academic competitions.  And her parents are more interested in her brother’s mathletics career than her softball hopes.  KT wants nothing more than to find her way back to the real world.  But her crazy dreams maker her wonder … what if something truly awful happened to send her here?  And what if she lost something more important than a softball game?

Review:

I have a love-hate relationship with Margaret Peterson Haddix’s books – some of them I love, and some of them I hate.  But I can never tell from the synopsis if I’m going to love it or hate it, and I thought Game Changer‘s premise sounded at least interesting.  So I picked it up.

I loved KT.  Her enthusiasm and obsessive love for softball came through immediately in a way that, even though I don’t like sports, I could understand.  I could empathize with her big dreams, and I wanted her to succeed.  And while she could be a jerk to her little brother, I could empathize with that, too.

I also loved the plot.  Honestly, I had no idea how KT ended up in the alternate world, and I enjoyed following her as she tried to make sense of it.  And since I had absolutely no clue how she would get back to the real world, I was perfectly content to enjoy her attempts to find some semblance of normalcy.

I only had one problem with the whole book, and that was really nobody’s fault.  KT’s first day at school in the alternate world, she was entirely disoriented and had no idea what was going on.  But because I’d read the synopsis, I knew what was going on, and I was ready for her to hurry up and get it, already!  But once she figured it out, I had no problem with it.

My copy of Game Changer was 250 pages, but it was an extremely quick read.  I think half of that was me frantically turning pages, wanting to know if KT ever got back to the real world.

One thing I have to say is how much I loved the ending.  It’s not a traditional happily-ever-after – honestly, I think it’s happier, more fitting, and all around better than any sort of traditional happily-ever-after.  In fact, I think the ending was the absolute best part of the book – and I loved the whole thing.

Game Changer falls on the “love” side of my love-hate relationship with Margaret Peterson Haddix’s books.  Which just cements my policy to not judge her books before I read them.