Walking on the Moon

Many people whose opinions I respect have said good things about Charles Portis’s True Grit. There are also those two very different movies, both of which I like for different reasons. So let’s see the original.

From the movies, I knew the general plot, but Portis’s novella is beautiful in its own right. He looks at the post-Civil War west through the eyes of a precocious teenager bent on revenge. The first trick he pulls is somehow making that point-of-view character believable. It’s a hard character to sell. A teenage kid driven enough to want simple bloody revenge on her father’s killer while simultaneously being competent enough to move the world to do it is a challenge for a writer.

He writes from the kid’s point of view so deftly that the reader can see what an unusual child she as well as how showing her inexperienced understanding of the world. I said “the kid” there, but she’s drawn so vividly I feel like I need to say her name – Mattie Ross – as if she were real.

Portis does a great job portraying her youth in that there are things she only understands in a shallow way, but that shallowness rings true. You can tell she knows people will try to take advantage of her, but she’s ready for it in ways that make more sense to a child. You can tell she understands she’s dealing with bounty hunters who are working outside the law, but she doesn’t understand entirely what that means.

Making your central character reveal their limitations in those ways without realizing she’s doing it is one thing, but showing the reader what she’s not seeing is more impressive.

Portis does allow himself the out that Mattie is telling the story as an adult, but that is just another source of unreliability in his narrator that he’s playing deftly.

It’s a story about desperadoes in the Old West. Truth and justice are slippery concepts. Portis plays with them in a way that lets the reader in on that. And he tells a rollicking yarn with outsized characters while he’s at it.

Strongly Recommended.

I picked this up because John Scalzi mentioned that Sherri Tepper does some great world-building in Grass. I like Scalzi’s writing, so I gave this a look. I agree with Scalzi that the world she creates and how she introduces readers work brilliantly. The characters in that world and how it drives them to grow make it a great book all around.

The world of Grass is an extrapolation of ours that heightens the aspects that Tepper wants to talk about and elides the ones she doesn’t. One of the ways that works is that she makes the parts she wants to talk about so intriguing that the reader forgets about what’s missing. Religion is there in a big way, and I found that picking at how much of it she is extrapolating it from Mormonism, Catholicism, or something caught my attention. And then sects within the church pop up with the inherent intrigue and I’m thinking about how all that meshes. None of which is really the aspect of the religion that she wants to focus on, bit its all engaging until she does get to her point.

Tepper brings us into the world through several characters’ views of it in ways that both show the reader the world and the characters. Good writers who are writing from the third person across their cast are usually aiming to do that, but I think Tepper is really doing it well. There’s a double shell game going on here where each the events each character is telling the reader what they know about the world and how they think and feel about those things. And she is author is deftly choosing the events that tell us about the characters and how they are changing. Or are not changing.

Tepper writes a book that makes this all happen for a reader. I think it’s built to be magical, even though it wasn’t magical for me. It’s not one of my favorite books, but I can tell it’s someone’s favorite. It’s worth a look to see if it’s one of yours.

Strongly recommended.

This turns out to be the kind of quirky sitcom someone of my age might have run into in a neglected time spot on an off channel. It’s the kind of show you wouldn’t quite believe was aired until you ran into someone else who had gotten into it and you wound up spending a couple hours talking about it at a party. It’s working inside the form but with the kind of stylish takes that seats it in its own world. It’s not where you live, but is fun to spend time in. Sonoko Machida does a great job creating that feeling in a novel.

The whole thing is set in a seaside Japanese town, specifically in a convenience store. But, it’s a quirky TV sitcom convenience store. There are larger than life employees, a weird ecosystem of neighbors, some customer or employee with a problem- one to a chapter – and strange product placement moments for the fictional products of the fictional store seamfully inserted. It’s all quirky and fun and I quite enjoyed spending time there.

Recommended.

Annalee Newitz’s latest is a simple book to sum up. Some robots open a noodle shop. There’s more to that to it, of course. To the pot Newitz adds politics, decency, a love of San Francisco, and a delightful sentient contract that wants to live and not ask too many questions.

It’s a lot of fun, compassionate, well written, and has interesting ideas. It does seem a little shallow and maybe YA. That’s not a criticism. This is a good book to hand to younger readers or to take to the beach or on a flight.

Recommended.

John Scalzi is very good at finding a good hook for a story. Redshirts and Starter Villain can both be described in a sentence and are fleshed out into interesting fun reads. When the Moon Hits your Eye is the same. The hook is that one day Earth’s moon inexplicably turns into cheese. He spends the rest of the book looking at how that affects people.

Scalzi does a really nice job picking the people he’s going to talk about and also the topics he’s going to use them to touch. There are little stories about how headlines drive entertainment, and deep moments of grappling with the ineffable. There are lots of funny moments and the prose crackles.

At the end, though, the word I’d use to describe this book is “sweet.”

Strongly recommended.

I really admire the folks who have taken a swing at summarizing Tricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You, because it’s such a thankless task. I mean most of the ones I’ve looked at seem accurate – or at least defensible – but none of them really captures the experience of reading it.

A summary is never the totality of a book, but there is so much going on in here in so many ways, that you’re going to leave the path pretty quickly. And I say that with delight. Whatever is going on in Another You, I liked it.

Lockwood is a poet – it says so right here in this novel – and perhaps that’s why so many lines of this book are whole worlds unto themselves. Any single sentence can send you down the rabbit hole. And they just keep coming, those sentences. It is fascinating and amazing that she can also make those sentences cohere into a story that can be incompletely summarized as well.

This all worked for me, but it is definitely a big swing. You’ll know pretty quick if it’s for you.

Strongly recommended.

The last book in Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series is in a lot of ways more of the same. It’s a small character-driven story set in a well imagined SF universe. No galactic overlords will be out of a job at the end, but I find myself cheering anyway.

Galaxy is beautifully written, and I find that the universe Chambers has built is just right for looking at ideas from enough of a new angle to spark insight. Nothing’s opaque, but it is often fresh.

Chambers work often signals its themes by what’s missing in the story. In this story, human characters are not on stage much, but humanity abounds. If you find yourself looking at our world and believing that people who believe things that you can’t are space aliens, consider spending some time with these space aliens. I found it refreshing and enlightening.

Strongly Recommended.

This is another Murderbot novel, and I’ve not had much to say about the preceding chapters beyond “good fun.” in Network Effect, I found that Martha Wells brought together a lot of the character threads that she placed in earlier novellas into a powerful emotional climax in the middle of a rollicking space adventure.

She has spent those early novellas putting the sets in place and establishing character details that feel like tropes – and in some ways are – that are combined here to have more depth and power than I had been expecting. She snuck up on me, she did and in the best way. I’m not going to say much more so she can sneak up on you.

Strongly Recommended.

Record of a Spaceborn Few is Becky Chambers again creating a character drive SF story in a richly textured world. It’s more a coming-of-age story than an adventure story, but those are adventures in their own way.

I re-read my gushing review of A Closed and Common Orbit and a lot of what I said there applies to Record as well. It’s set in a different part of her galaxy, but the same intricacy and depth is there. As many SF authors do, she creates a society based on familiar social principles pushed far enough to make things unfamiliar and uses that to talk about those principles. I find the way those ideas are explored is more thoughtful and reasonable than many more polemic versions of that setup.

Her writing remains impeccable, though I did find one chapter a little more on the nose than I was expecting. It didn’t take me out of the story, but it did jar a bit.

Strongly Recommended.

I do like me some Carl Hiaasen. Fever Beach is his usual chaotic and comedic send up of politics and people who annoy him. This time he’s set his sights on right wing militia types and politicians who take advantage of them. I’m no fan of fools with guns or folks who use them for their own ends, so I enjoyed Fever Beach a good deal.

I think this was written before the uptick in ICE enforcement. I understand that these are different, but if you are looking to escape from images of folks in camo toting guns around American cities, I’d escape elsewhere.

Recommended.