Walking on the Moon

Havoc is a thriller with an interesting set-up. It is told in the first person from the point of view of an octogenarian agent of chaos. She’s on the leisurely lam from some earlier incident gone wrong after starting to travel after the death of her husband. It is set in the pandemic, but that’s basically not a real factor in the story. Christopher Bollen occasionally invokes it as a difficulty in managing travel or contact but in another time plenty of other causes could fill those plot holes.

Overall, Havoc is well crafted and diverting. Our narrator is interesting, but obviously untrustworthy. If nothing else her justifications of her casually sowing strife in others relationships smacks of self-deception. A lot of the fun is figuring out what is really driving her and why.

And on paper the answers are interesting and satisfying. The plot gears all mesh. There are dropped hints that slipped under the RADAR. All the things that make a psychological thriller work are there.

But for me, the big twist just rubbed me the wrong way. I know it is just me, but the reveal just took me out of the story in a way I could not recover from. Probably worth a try if you are not me.

This is a kind of high concept history book. Take the signers of the Declaration of Independence and do a capsule biography of each of them. It provides a way to take a slice of pro-revolution (well, mostly) Americans and dig into their lives. They are going to be relatively well documented and give some kind of a slice of life in the Colonies around 1776.

Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese do a good job running these folks down and telling their lives in pretty interesting capsules. There is a lot of variation in outlook and experience of these people. It’s a good reminder that America has never been monolithic. But the bios are necessarily short and if someone interests you, their chapter is over pretty quickly. As an invitation to reading more history, that can be effective, but I have already swallowed that pill.

More Martha Wells Murderbot. I do not have a ton to say about it beyond that earlier review. This continues to be fun and interesting. I see that there’s an overarching plot line going on, but I’m only barely paying attention to it. I am enjoying watching the Murderbot’s character develop and being engaged by the plots.

It’s fun. Recommended.

I was impressed by Mallory O’Meara’s earlier history on Milicent Patrick who designed the Creature From the Black Lagoon effects. This is a more straightforward history of women’s role in American drinking history and culture. It’s still very good.

O’Meara does an excellent job addressing what could be a pretty light topic. She tracks the history of people drinking alcohol from prehistory to modern America. That history, as most sources relate it, leaves women out of it, which she sets out to correct. It also reflects women’s role in society – because drinking is important to society – and O’Maera makes sure you know it.

Tone and style really matters here. The book has the citations one hopes for in a history, even though the documents for events in bars and distilleries can be dicey to find. Having the goods, O’Maera adopts a conversational tone in delivery. When she writes about the drama between the players at the center of the emerging Tiki Bar movement, it sounds like a story you might hear at a party. But when you get to that moment when you wonder “how does she know that?” or “is that really true,” well, there are citations.

Overall this is a well researched book about an interesting and fun topic that may just tell you about some bigger things, too.

Strongly Recommended.

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.

This is an early Vonnegut novel which brought him a Hugo nomination and more attention from the community. It is full of ideas that Vonnegut would return to in later works. I liked it, because Vonnegut will always be enjoyable to me, but Sirens felt a little too jam-packed with ideas that are better explored in later work.

I’m a big fan of Gail Simone in general and of her Red Sonja comics run in particular, so of course I wanted to check this out.

Lots of what I love about Simone’s writing is in here. Strong characters from across the spectrum. Horror twined into adventure. Fun plot twists. Great stuff.

But, honestly, it took a while to get moving. The first half or so of the book is more disconnected than I was expecting. There’s a lot happening, but not all of the stakes are connecting for me. A couple times characters are saying “I know this is a mistake, but I…” I know people do that, but it felt a little more like a flag that we were doing this for strict plot reasons.

Eventually, the gears all mesh and the plot becomes propulsive with character-driven beats that make sense and have impact. By the end I was cheering for the good guys and hissing the villains enthusiastically.

Recommended. If it feels slow, stick with it.