More stuff to read, yay!

As you may have guessed, I completely failed to live up to my goal of reviewing everything I read, even in brief. Rather than attempting to catch up to my backlog, I am re-starting from where I am.

Yesterday I did a quick book cull by pulling books off my shelves that have been sitting there for ages, reading the first couple chapters, and deciding if I was likely to continue. I focused on books I'd started before and not gotten very far into. Here are the books that landed in the "move to Paper & Clay's used section" bag.

Trouble and Her Friends, by Melissa Scott



See the new cover? If you've been wanting to read this, it's now available as an ebook!

This is a classic lesbian cyberpunk novel that I have tried to read at least three times, and never managed to get very far into. I kept putting it back on the shelf because it's a classic and probably objectively good, but I'm just not that into cyberpunk. If a lot of the action is taking place online, I tend to lose interest. Also, some books just don't grab me, due to a mismatch between me and the book, rather than being objectively or even subjectively bad. This is clearly one of them. Someone else can be thrilled to find it at Paper & Clay, take it home, and enjoy it.

The Splinter in the Sky, by Kemi Ashling-Garcia



A tea specialist becomes a spy in a far-future colonized world! Unfortunately, this starts with a prologue which reads much like the infamous "trade war" crawl at the top of The Phantom Menace. Yes, I know that turned out to be prescient, but the problem was that it was written in a stultifying manner. The next couple chapters were much more lively, but also had a tendency to clunky exposition - some of which was pretty cool, to be fair. This was the second time I attempted this book, and had essentially the same reaction I did to Trouble and Her Friends - not bad, but not for me.

Furies of Calderon, by Jim Butcher



This has been described to me as "Pokemon in alternate ancient Rome," which sounds amazing. For at least the third time, it failed to grab me. I got about four chapters in and there's still no Pokemon. Someone else will like it more than me.

The Hum and the Shiver, by Alex Bledsoe



A race of people called the Tufa have lived amongst normal humans in Appalachia since the beginning of time. They can see ghosts, have music-based magic, etc. This opens with a Tufa woman very very clearly based on Jessica Lynch, who was a real-life American soldier who was wounded and captured in the US/Iraq war, returning from Iraq. I found this in poor taste. The general style also got on my nerves.

While doing this, I got sufficiently grabbed by the openings to keep reading and finish Maureen McHugh's Nekropolis, which hopefully I will actually review. I also returned Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies and Tanya Huff's Sing the Four Quarters to the shelf.

Natalie is a wildly successful trad wife influencer. She and her husband Caleb have a farm and six adorable children, and Natalie has parlayed carefully edited clips of her perfect life into a lucrative career. (She leaves out the two nannies, 30 farm hands, and the fact that Sassafras the cow is actually four sequential cows, replaced every time one dies, like goldfish.)

Then Natalie suffers a mysterious fall from grace. And then she finds herself in what appears to be an alternate version of her own life in the 1800s, with a husband very similar but not quite identical to her original husband, and children who claim to be her own. Has she time traveled? Is she delusional? Has she gotten kidnapped into a non-consensual reality show?

This is an extremely interesting novel that makes a good companion to Saratoga Schrader's Trad Wife. The beginning of the book is extremely similar, though Natalie is much more successful than Camille. Burke's version of a trad wife influencer deluding herself and lying to her followers about her supposedly perfect life is much better-written than Schrader's. But that's a double-edged sword, because it makes Natalie much more unlikable. She's an incredibly hatable character and the book is from her POV, and that makes a lot of the book not really enjoyable to read.

But the book turns out to be much more ambitious and clever than it seems at the beginning. When I finished it, I was glad I'd read it and appreciated it a lot. That being said, I enjoyed Trad Wife more on an emotional level.

I highly recommend not clicking on the cut unless you're 100% positive you'll never read the book. I really enjoyed the non-spoiled experience.

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Content notes: Domestic violence, rape (on-page, graphic), child abuse and neglect, farm animal neglect/poor caretaking (just mentioned), gaslighting, non-consensual drugging, current American right-wing stuff.

While attempting to buy Saratoga Schaefer's Trad Wife, I accidentally bought a different novel called Trad Wife by Michelle Brandon. And Sarah Langan is coming out with yet another book called Trad Wife in September. I am now on a mission to read all four trad wife books, to compare and contrast.