Walking on the Moon

I really enjoyed Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, but I feel like that says some bad things about me. I quite enjoyed hanging out with her antihero protagonist while watching her do things I despise. And this wasn’t the transgressive joy of watching a villain revel in getting back at the system or flaunting convention. She’s just going with the flow.

There’s a lot to chew on there. Nothing about the flow, or going with it, felt unreasonable. It doesn’t say much good about the world we live in and the people we are. I find myself with a lot of questions about the guilty pleasure of rooting for someone I should oppose in the abstract.

It would be easy to blame Kushner’s writing. It’s charming, witty, insightful, and completely believable. It would be hard not to be on her side. But I still think I shouldn’t be.

Recommended.

Steven Brust has a way of building a solid SF genre scenario, drawing readers into it, and then making the world real in ways that raise the stakes in way that should break it. It always works for me, but I see how it is a tightrope walk that won’t work for everyone.

Good Guys give the game away in its title. We’re in a modern Fantasy setting of shadowy magical societies with a group of folks working for the ends of their society. As we go on, they all start to question if they’re on the right side. And then they begin to consider if there is a right side. Or maybe if there are sides at all?

This is easy to do wrong. Too much realism breaks it as does too little. Or even the wrong elements of realism. This works for me. The structure of the adventure stays intact as the stakes evolve for the characters.

Recommended.

This was a fun SF novella with exactly the right amount of depth and character to be interesting without overwhelming me. Breezy, but with stakes that could be more later. I see that it’s becoming an Amazon series, and I can see how this makes a great setup for that. It also works as a novella. Very diverting.

Recommended.

I do like me some Carl Hiaasen. This is a sequel to Bad Monkey and I don’t have much different to say about Razon Girl. And that’s not bad.

Recommended.