Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

New books read in May:

Daniel Abraham, A Shadow in Summer. I picked this one up on papersky's recommendation. It has good worldbuilding, characters I cared about, and all sorts of intrigue. The main characters include poets and someone who walked away from the school of poetry because its methods and worldview were too deliberately cruel. It becomes clear fairly early on the poets of the Khaiem are closer to magicians, in our terms; they create, or bind, and hold a spirit called an andat, something similar to a djinn. Each andat has a specific power, but the details of that can be fuzzy. One spirit to a poet. The successful poet we see is thoroughly unhappy, as is his andat, Seedless. Seedless is called on once a year, to remove all the seeds from the cotton crop; in a world that has not invented the steam engine or the cotton gin, that andat is enough to give the city he lives in dominance of the cotton trade.

Many of the characters seem, or feel, trapped, by circumstance or other people's plotting; their attempts to escape entangle others.

Volume 1 of 4, and having finished it, I will be asking the library for the next.

Daniel Pinkwater, The Neddiad. A light-hearted adventure story, set a few decades ago (the era of Pullman porters, and when a ten-inch television was a rare thing). The story starts when Ned reads an article about a hat-shaped restaurant, and tells his father he wants to eat there. His father responds by telling him that he also wants to eat in the hat, so they're moving to Los Angeles. Everyone packs up and goes, and takes it more or less in stride (though Ned does observe that his father being like that, the move might have been planned for months and they forgot to tell them). Partway across the country, a shaman called Melvin gives Ned a little stone turtle. It's more than a maguffin, but does drive a fair amount of the plot, which also has an "and then, and then, and then" feeling about it. We get ghosts and mammoths and a girl named Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil Birmbaum. Bits of this are familiar from other Pinkwater, but they're minor bits, like a lizard reference on a game show; it's like noticing that two unconnected characters in different Dorothy Sayers stories have the same odd surname. I think this would be filed as YA, from reading level and the age of the hero, and it's definitely fantasy. Very good, and I don't think you need to be a Pinkwater fan, or fond of turtles, to like this, though I am both of those.

Ursula Le Guin, Lavinia. Le Guin started with Vergil's Aeneid, and a minor character in it, and tells a story of life in Latium almost three thousand years ago: Bronze Age towns and countryside, and the relations among some of the people there. The Lavinia of this book knows herself to be fictional (though she doesn't use that word), called into being by the poet who spoke to her near the end of his life; she knows this, but she doesn't feel it most of the time, any more than any other fictional character would, not least because she is surrounded by people, including Aeneas, and places that seem solid and real to her. Her poet claims to have invented her, and not written enough about her, but he makes no claim to have invented Aeneas, much less Latium or the Tiber or the patterns of her days. Le Guin notes in the afterword that the life and patterns she gave her characters isn't Vergil's, it has more to do with what we know (such as it is) of eighth-century-BCE Italy, where the Aeneid paints a past more like the poet's own time. It's long enough since I read the Aeneid that I don't know how consistent this Aeneas and Anchises are with his, but they're plausible characters, and their interactions with each others, with Lavinia, and with the other women and men around them are believable and interesting.

Rosemary Harris, Pushing Up Daisies. A mystery novel with an amateur detective, in this case an ex-newswoman and now professional landscaper who stumbles on a body. A pleasant enough couple of hours in suburbia, and I think it may be as much the few days I put it aside as anything the author did that had me confused about a couple of the characters. Inevitably part of a series; I may read more, because I did enjoy this, although the denouement wasn't entirely satisfying: the crime isn't exactly solved, and having the police officer tell the amateur afterwards that they had been close to arresting the guy, well, the way they've been back and forth at each other it's hard to know how much to believe.

Pat Murphy, The Wild Girls. The first book read from my Wiscon purchases, I picked it up based on a page or so and having liked The City, Not Long After. The two books have almost nothing in common, and the Bay Area landscape is far more memetic here than in that novel. It's mostly a book about friendship and getting to know people, including relatives one is stuck with. YA, a quick read, and I could easily make it sound like either a Message book or like froth, depending on which aspects I talked about. The characters are good, and I like the ways Joan, Fox, and Joan's mother explore a bit more of their world, and some of the people they meet.

This is some of what I read in March and didn't already post about:

( cut for length: Kushner, Beagle, Wrede and Stevermer, Scoppetone )

This book was a slight disappointment; I'd read some of Smith's earlier works, though not recently, and picked this up semi-randomly at the library yesterday. The narrative voice, or maybe focus, seemed disjointed. It's certainly possible to do third-person and move the authorial/descriptive eye among several characters, and I'm not entirely sure why it doesn't work here; that the character called "Talba" when she's the focus becomes "Ms. Wallis" when the focus is on her employer seems relevant.

Louisiana Lament is a mystery set in New Orleans around 2003 (the copyright date is 2004), which feels a bit odd to be reading now, especially as the book takes place during and immediately after a near-miss by a hurricane, and one of the characters is yelled at, reasonably, for going out on a boat while the hurricane warnings were still up. Skip Langdon, the protagonist of some of Smith's earlier mysteries set in New Orleans, turns up very briefly in this one, entirely by telephone.

I had trouble keeping track of some of the characters, including some who are central to the mystery. The ones at the emotional center, including Talba, her mother, her sister Janessa, Janessa's friend Rashad, and Talba's employer Eddie Valentino (the other character whose actions and sometimes thoughts the narrative follows) are clear and well-drawn. Eddie is a white man in his sixties, a lot older than Talba, and not entirely comfortable with having an assistant who is young, black, female, and well-educated; he was persuaded to hire her by his daughter and wife, and realizes they were right, but knowing that she's competent doesn't entirely relax him.

When she's not doing detective work, Talba Wallis is a poet, one of several writers in the book, who performs at open mike nights and such as well as having published one book of poetry. The book includes a bit of Talba's poetry, which isn't my style, and a bit of Rashad's (it's easier to write poetry that isn't supposed to be good, as we're told (correctly, I think) Rashad's isn't, though Talba reads it in search of clues.

I also suspect I'd have had an easier time following the story, and maybe appreciated the book more, if I'd either liked The Great Gatsby or read it more recently (it was on the very long list of stuff we did in high school), since various characters refer to it—the woman found dead in the first few pages is known, none too affectionately, as "the Girl Gatsby"—and draw parallels between the book and their own relationships. (The characters in Gatsby are identified, but in loose terms like "the mistress," so I missed the emotional resonances I think Smith was trying to set up.)