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fandomsecrets⌈ Secret Post #7089 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 13 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1012.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
rachelmanija
In a country with Wild West vibes, young girls are often sold to brothels, to become sex slaves when they come of age. They are given magical tattoos of buds when they're bought. These tattoos slowly grow and blossom into flowers that the girls are nicknamed for. They cause excruciating pain when they're covered up, preventing the girls from fleeing and blending into the populace. But this isn't the only barrier to escape. The entire wilderness area is haunted by angry ghosts that can take physical form and rip you to shreds.
On Clementine's inaugural rape night, her would-be rapist nearly suffocates her, and she brains him with a lamp. As she would be executed for that, she, her older sister Aster who's been a sex slave for years already, and three other girls manage to escape the brothel and flee in search of a rumored woman who can remove the magic tattoos.
By far the most interesting character in the book is Violet, the brothel bully, spoiled brat, and magical opium addict who is the only one who knows where to find the woman who will be their salvation, if she actually exists. As they flee across the haunted wilderness, they're pursued by magical slavecatchers, are joined by a boy, and meet some rebels. Clementine has a romance with the boy, two of the girls have a romance together, and Violet and Aster have intense feelings which hopefully go somewhere in the sequel.
This novel has an extremely cool setting and unusual worldbuilding. I love ensemble casts and wilderness traveling. I expected to adore this, but while I did enjoy reading it, I didn't love it. I had been under the impression that the girls all had different magical powers, which is my own fault for misreading the blurb, but I was disappointed that they don't have any, except that Clementine can talk to ghosts a bit. More importantly, only Aster and Violet, plus Clementine to some degree, get any real characterization. I was interested in them enough that I'll read the sequel, but the book overall felt like it should have been fantastic but ended up merely good.
Content notes: There is a very violent, graphic rape attempt in chapter one. That's it for that but the repercussions of years of sexual abuse are felt throughout the novel.
james_davis_nicoll
This new Kobolds Ate My Baby! Bundle presents Kobolds Ate My Baby!, the cult-classic tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of anti-dungeon-crawl silliness, in its 2024 Orange Book edition from 9th Level Games.
Bundle of Holding: Kobolds Ate My Baby!
sholioThe answer is: very little. This is essentially a book-length manifesto about how the entire concept of a green city is rooted in early-20th-century racism and fascism. There are some interesting ideas in here, but for a book whose entire premise is that trying to change cities into something else is wrong, bad, and also fascist, there's a surprising lack of actual positivity about cities as they currently exist. He just doesn't like the concept of planned cities, and especially city planning with the intent of introducing more nature into cities, based on the idea that green spaces are a more natural human environment. But he rarely brings up existing cities except to talk about how much he hates them, specifically. Paris? Awful. Copenhagen? Worst city he's ever been in. New York? Soulless grid. There's one chapter that opens with several pages dissing on Melbourne, Australia, for wanting to preserve its self-image as "a genteel outpost of European colonialism" because the residents are upset about all their trees dying in a drought. He doesn't seem to hate London as a whole (I GUESS) but mostly talks about it in the context of "fuck these specific neighborhoods in particular."
In case you're thinking this is because he'd rather be in the country - definitely not! He also hates the country. The worst thing about making cities greener is that it makes them more like the country. He refers to the part of Ireland he grew up in as "a bog" which he was glad to escape. The country is also terrible and the last thing cities want to do is be more like the country.
The truly baffling thing about this book is that it contains exactly zero content about the main thing I picked it up for: to find out what alternative he's proposing. Trees and other green spaces have obvious benefits that even he makes a nod to every now and then (cooling things down, trapping water, supporting wildlife, beneficial effects on the mental health of their residents, etc), plus most people who live in cities like them, and I was wondering what he was going to propose as an alternative, and he just - doesn't! What I knew from reading the blurb on the back of the book - that he feels cities are meant to be chaotic, grimy, full of machines and people but lacking in plants - is exactly as much as I know after reading 2/3 of the book. I guess I was expecting a paean to how cities in their modern chaos are flawed but great, and instead I got a book about how cities are almost uniformly terrible, but planned, green cities and the country are even worse, and also planting trees is a fascist tool to pacify the working class.
I didn't really DNF on purpose, so much as I put it down because I was reading other things and just never picked it back up again because the more time that went by without dealing with this guy's relentless negativity, the less I wanted to go back to it. So I guess it's a DNF.
oursinWhat I read
Finished Persuasion - but felt a bit out of sync with the online reading.
Then I went on to something Entirely Different: my interest was aroused by rydra_wong posting about Rachel Rosen's Cascade (2022) and Blight (2025) (The Sleep of Reason, #1 and #2), so I went and discovered that the ebooks could be obtained directly from the small Canadian press in question. Got stuck into Cascade and while I would not have thought I was up for grim eco/magical dystopia with festering political intrigue before everything goes to hell, I was absolutely gripped.
Pretty much the only reason I then read LM Chilton, I Think We Should Kill Other People (2026) was I had finished that and had not yet downloaded Blight. This was a not entirely happy mashup of rom-com (this part I thought worked least well), serial killer, and version of 'cut-off country-house' mystery (small airport shut down in middle of snowstorm trapping relevant characters), with added 'reality tv show that includes AI setting' and 'comic intentions'.
On the go
Have now gone on to Blight and may be some time (these are not your slender novellas).
Up next
Alexis Hall, Father Material arrived this week; also KJ Charles, How To Fake It In Society is currently a Kobo deal so have also got that on the ereader.
Still have not yet got to Slightly Foxed, and the latest Literary Review recently arrived.
james_davis_nicoll
Io the cat and Io's owner Ásta need a pragmatic friend. Happily for the pair, Unna could be that friend.
Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir (Translated by Mary Robinette Kowal)
case posting in fandomsecrets⌈ Secret Post #7088 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01.
( More! )
Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 19 secrets from Secret Submission Post #1012.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
oursinAnd surely that would include realising that things were not always the exact same way they are today?
This seems so weird to me. I grew up on reading books that had lingered for however long on the shelves of the children's dept of the local public library - which were all bound in that standard hard-wearing public library binding so one did not have any sense of shiny newness or otherwise - along with my mother's old books, some of which were works of a yet more previous generation which she had loved in her youth.
And that's before we get into the oddness of the Alice books and the talking animals and so forth.
Do they have no imaginations? Are they only supposed to identify with recognisable experiences?
Read somewhere about (in this case I think actually adult readers) who could not deal with subtext, foreshadowing, and other Litry Devices.
I was a bit beswozzled by this chap, too, though perhaps from a rather different direction. I devoured classic novels as a teenager. In a world of distractions, can I relearn how to read them?.
Sometimes books have their time and it is past. And sometimes they are just not the right thing at that moment.
And I also think of times in my past when I had fairly long commutes and other stretches of otherwise dead time that I could fill up with doing perhaps rather dutiful reading of those things One Ought To Read, and whether this is not only my experience. And then one's life shifts and these spaces go away.
james_davis_nicoll
Merchantship Loki is retired war criminal Bet Yeager's ticket off Thule Station and away from murder charges... but Loki offers hazards of its own.
Rimrunners (Rimrunners, volume 5) by C J Cherryh
sholio( Spider-Noir - just the first episode )
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dw_maintenanceEDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.
mrissaErin Hatton, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment. This book is thinking quite intensely about the points of commonality among kinds of coerced work in the US, particularly imprisoned labor, "workfare" programs, and the graduate student and student athlete labor associated with the American university. Hatton is being very careful about the ways in which these types of labor are dissimilar as well as similar, and there are lots of interesting thoughts on how this impacts the labor, the laborers, and the larger labor pool in which we exist.
Andrew Hiller, Hornytown Chutzpah. Discussed elsewhere.
Mark Hudson, Bronze Age Maritime and Warrior Dynamics in Island East Asia. Kindle. A brief monograph that, among other things, goes into some detail about considering what meaning the "Bronze Age" has beyond the geographic region where it originated. Revising thoughts about trade and tool use based on new information about this era is pretty cool, the idea that the future is not arriving linearly anywhere is usefully exemplified here.
Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea and Moominvalley in November. Kindle. Rereads. The latter is an ongoing favorite I've read many times and find delightful; the former is my least favorite Moomin book, and there's a reason I haven't reread it since I was about 8. Basically it's Moominpappa Explores Mildly Toxic Masculinity. He pouts whenever he doesn't feel other people are centering and deferring to him enough; he stomps around making other people clear up after his messes; he is just generally an extremely unpleasant version of his previous self, and I hope I remember not to go back to this one again soon. Especially when November is always there. And the others.
Shay Kauwe, The Killing Spell. This is an own-voices post-climate-apocalypse fantasy whose use of languages is, I think, much closer to what many of my friends wanted in Rebecca Kuang's Babel. Its character is part of a complex family and community whose relationships with each other did not ever get oversimplified. I really enjoyed it and hope it gets attention, because frankly I don't think the title and cover are doing it any favors.
Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. I sure hope that Keefe has a good therapist and personal life, because he so consistently writes about such awful people. And one of the things that makes him very good at what he does is that he doesn't get drawn into the "glamor" of horrible rich people. But oof. Criminals and Russian oligarchs in contemporary London, terrifying but interesting and well done.
Ada Limon, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry. This is a single essay in a beautifully published edition. It was published as a book because this is a former poet laureate, not because it in any way counts as an entire book. It's a reasonable enough essay but I'm glad the library had it because it would have disappointed me to spend money on it only to find the number of blank/ornamental pages.
E.C.R. Lorac, Death of an Author, Fell Murder, Post After Post-Mortem, and These Names Make Clues. Kindle. Lorac continues to write quite good Golden Age puzzle mysteries. The one I thought succeeded least here was the last of them. When your pen name is openly known to be an acronym (this is an author who is secretly a lady named Carol!!!), and then you title the book These Names Make Clues...having the names literally as clues is not a good mysterious mystery premise.
Sujata Massey, The Star from Calcutta. The latest in this series, and I think it's flagging a little but still worth having. This time it's gone into early filmmaking in India for its setting, which is fun and interesting.
Jo Miles, The Final Chronicle of Yeneh. Discussed elsewhere.
Andrew Moore, Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit. A really cool exploration of this fruit throughout its range in the US, which does not include where I am, so it's interesting but from one step over. Definitely worth reading if you have an interest in how produce gets bred and marketed and/or local fruits, definitely of interest.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. Frankly much more useful in terms of interesting and provocative/inspiring essay writing about creative work. Lots of writers should read this and think about it.
D.T. Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Kindle. I continue my slow-motion comparison of epics from different parts of the world. This one was somewhat defensive about its tradition--but a lot of writing down of oral epics does come out that way.
Emmet A. O'Brien, Both Your Houses and Ever Vexed With Storms. Discussed (both books, separately) elsewhere.
Nnedi Okorafor, The Daughter Who Remains. Kindle. Coming full circle in this series, and for heaven's sake don't start here; you'll know if you've read the rest of the series and want this conclusion, and if you do I think it'll be satisfying.
Linda Proud, Pallas and the Centaur. Kindle. No actual centaurs were harmed in this Renaissance Italy fantasy novel. It's the second in its series and worth reading the first if you think you might be interested; artists and powerful families and religious figures abound. It's non-fantastical except for a divine possession that might be literal or might be a really intense metaphor. I like this kind of big historical novel and would like to find more.
Rebecca Roanhorse, River of Bones and Other Stories. Oh gosh am I glad this exists. Several favorite things and also some new-to-me things, hurrah for having them collected, hurrah.
Rebecca Solnit, No Straight Road Takes You There. This is a reasonable collection but not one of her absolute barnstormers. If you like her essays previously, you'll probably like this; if not, probably try another thing first to find out.
Kory Stamper, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color--From Azure to Zinc Pink. I thought this was going to be about colors, pigments, and dyes, and it is not, it is about the Merriam-Webster 3rd edition dictionary and the people who figured out how to define colors in words to their particular standards. Stamper is a vivid prose stylist, and this was interesting and not terribly long.
D.E. Stevenson, The Two Mrs. Abbotts and The Four Graces. Kindle. These two are marked third and fourth in a series, but I would call them third and vaguely-related. They're both light middlebrow midcentury novels, and I enjoyed both, but only one is really stand-alone.
Molly Tanzer, And Side By Side They Wander. Molly's deep knowledge and love of art history really shines through in this novella, and she sets up her characters to ring changes on her theme very skillfully. It's one of the many novella cases where I wanted more room for them to do so, but I don't read the ending as very open to a sequel? I could be wrong. It's marketed as a heist and then the focus is very much elsewhere, which was fine with me, but if what you're looking for today is center-of-genre heist fiction, maybe read something else and come back to this a different day.
Jessie L. Weston, trans., Guingamor, Lanval, Tyolet, Bisclaveret: Four lais rendered into English Prose. Kindle. Weston did a bunch of translations of Arthuriana and similar eras of heroic poetry, and this volume is four Breton examples. If you're interested in more examples of that, here are some. If you're not, I wouldn't recommend them as the place to start or as particularly good exemplars.