stuff i read 12 July 2023

[tabacoychanel]

Ben H. Winters, Golden State (2019) It was a page turner but it was neither very good speculative fiction (not enough attention to worldbuilding) nor (by the time I got to the end and realized how many threads were left dangling) very good mystery!!! At least give me a good mystery, Mr. Winner of Many a Mystery Prize!!! I have had Underground Airlines on my tbr for ages but I’m taking it off now because I don’t trust Ben Winters.

Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State (2018) Never in my life have I seen a novelist attend so closely to how much shit costs. Not big ticket items like cars or houses or college tuition—I mean individually wrapped string cheese at the supermarket checkout, whose unit price is extortionate but whatcha gonna do when you forgot to pack your 18-month-old a snack. Maybe I encountered this book at the right time because my own kiddo is in that exact baby-to-toddler age range, but I was really moved by how it captures the unsustainable ennui of modern work + parenting. Daphne, our first-person narrator, will yo-yo between mindnumbingly mundane details (listing every time she snoozed her alarm between 6am and 7am) to “Now sometimes I have to remind myself that Engin is not actually dead, just in Turkey.” Engin is her Turkish husband, who due to an immigration snafu is stuck in Turkey for the time being. Daphne is in San Fransisco raising their 18-month-old alone, the financial and psychological strain of which causes her to have the mental breakdown which kicks off the book’s plot. She goes awol from her administrative job at the university. This is how she describes her job:

We at the Institute are nesting dolls: Karen the admin assistant who has no M.A.; then me who has an M.A. but dropped out of the Ph.D., then Meredith with her Ph.D., with Hugo encircling us all… The hierarchy is all we have. We are all publicly rather flirtatious with Hugo, privately disdainful, and occasionally afraid. I have spent so much time with these people that I can’t tell whether I hate them or whether I can’t live without them.

Daphne is both extremely competent at her job and beyond burnt out by it. She talks about “The more education you have the more removed you are from the ineluctable yawning of core work at the University” which, oof—big if true. Anyway Daphne takes her kid and drives upstate to her deceased parents’ mobile home, which has been sitting on the market for years without budging. Daphne tells us how much $$$ the house currently lists for, just as she tells us within 2 pages of the book’s opening how much her salary, her bills, her rent, and daycare are. She’s constantly tallying up the cost of everything and she can’t seem to stop. It’s exhausting. In her current state, even innocuous activities like checking her voicemail might trigger an anxiety attack, as she doesn’t have time to calm down before “she registers that it is Uncle Rodney, who is the least threatening person who could be leaving me a voicemail at this moment.” Hashtag relatable, I too frequently suffer anxiety attacks while checking my various inboxes. So the thing with this $80k mobile home is, it’s not worth a lot of money but it’s worth something, it’s not a trust fund but it’s what Daphne’s middle-class white parents left her ykwim? They left her assets, they gave her an upbringing where she could go to college without taking on debt, they didn’t leave her in the red. So she has resources. She’s just stretched very thin: “Honey called from her crib like a marooned sailor and I guiltily left her there to take a shower after calculating the days without (four).” Omg I feel exactly like this and I am co-parenting my kid; imagine solo parenting 24/7. So Daphne goes on a bender. Ill-advised, assuredly, and now she’s worried she won’t wake up in the morning and what’ll happen to the baby. She’s in a town where she knows absolutely nobody. She's got no one to call except a ninety-two-year old lady she met by chance at a diner. That’s how Alice enters the narrative. Alice and Daphne’s initial encounter is not particularly auspicious, but they have a shared connection to Turkey, and there is some kindred-soul spark there:

Normally when I am interacting with a stranger I want it to be over by a certain point so that I can avoid the inevitable moment of giving or taking offense or feeling bored or boring someone else.

With Alice, the ubiquitous hammer of disappointment simply evaporates. Alice sees that Daphne’s a mess, and calls her out on it but like, nonjudgmentally. When I say Daphne’s a mess I don’t mean her surreptitious smoking that she tries to hide from her kid, or her lukewarm efforts to Skype her husband. One time she asks her husband if he’s mad at her and he says no and her next impulse is to ask “well what about your mom what about your sister what about everyone else you know” like this woman is walking around assuming that everyone she’s glancingly acquainted with is mad at her, and has ample reason to be. Nonsensical? Yes. Relatable? Also yes. I haven’t talked much about Turkish—either Daphne’s insecurity re: her fluent but far from native Turkish, or her guilt re: not speaking Turkish with her half-Turkish daughter—but the institute Daphne works at is the Institute for Islamic Studies. Her unfinished Ph.D. was in Turkish. Given her husband’s immigration situation, Daphne is carrying a HUGE chip on her shoulder re: white America’s Islamophobia, and while she is staying in this rural country she tries to “educate” some of the locals—with hilarious results. Daphne is a well-meaning liberal but she can’t see her own blindspots; watch her eyes narrow in “equal parts suspicion and guilt at the word ‘homeschooled.’” Her political frictions with the locals come to a head in the climax, where she is trying to drive up this mountain in the rain and the baby’s crying in the backseat and these local nutjobs have closed the road because they’re bound & determined to secede from the state of California. On the other side of the roadblock is Alice. Alice is the catalyst. It’s Alice that jolts Daphne out of her rut. When she’s with Alice her inner monologue is “All I want to ask is How did you do this how did you do this. I want to know how she cared for three sick infants, how it was physically possible” which, well, yeah, don’t all of us who are stuck in the trenches of parenting small humans want to know that there is life on the other side? And Alice says, “You’re never safe from bad things happening,” and for Daphne “This thought is so profoundly depressing I hope the earth opens and gently swallows everyone on it, right now.” What an emotionally turbulent book, but not in a way that yields to despair. It says to you: The work of living is difficult but not joyless.

R.F. Kuang, Babel: An arcane history of the Oxford translators’ revolution (2022) Very cathartic burn-it-all-down energy!! If I was God I would decree Rachel Kuang could only write novels set in academic settings (the 60% of Poppy War that took place after they left school was almost unreadable). The subtitle is accurate—this book culminates in a bona fide revolution—but it’s rooted in academia and the concerns of privileged academics, and without that academic ballast I don’t know that she could have carried off the revolutionary climax. Not sure she did carry it off, frankly—the ending is ??? chaotic.Babel asks the question: Where is the line between being complicit in an unjust system forsurvival vs for security? And Kuang’s unusually compassionate answer is: Who cares, does it even matter, the system will grind you to dust regardless of how impeccably you serve it so stop wringing your hands over your precise degree of moral culpability. “The system” in this case being British imperialism and “you” being four brilliant young translators of various marginalized identities. Our POV character, Robin, is half-Chinese and while he’s not ambivalent about his white father (this is the man who raised him from the age of 11 to be a translation machine), Robin is conflicted about his position as a cosseted scholar at Babel: “He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be part of it.” Rachel Kuang is very attached to Oxford, as an institution and as a place, and it shows in Robin’s narrative. I think this would have been a stronger novel if Robin’s relationship with his father, Professor Lovell, could have been more nuanced? Look, Lovell is a monster. But given the pyrotechnics with which Robin and Lovell’s relationship ends, wouldn’t it have had greater impact if Lovell was a monster whom Robin actually cared about? Then again, nuance and ambivalence are not Kuang’s strong suits. I found myself invested in Robin’s story, but mightily ticked off at the author of said story for hitting me with an anvil anytime any character did a racism or exploited another’s labor onstage. Which was all the time. Because this is 19th century England, come on. I mean, her observations about how the system operates are spot-on: “And the grand accomplishment of the imperial project was to take only a little from so many places; to fragment and distribute the suffering so that at no point did it ever become too much to bear.” It’s all true! Even the way the lone white girl member of their little quartet behaves is heartbreaking yet has the ring of truth (the other three are an Indian boy, a Haitian girl, and Robin the half-Chinese boy). Because Letty is not just a white girl she’s an admiral’s daughter; presumably if she was a bricklayer’s daughter she’d have behaved differently. “’Well anyhow,’ said Letty, annoyed and defensive now and therefore vicious, ‘what would you know about voodoo? Didn’t you grow up in France?’” Ouch!!! This is literally the worst thing you can say to someone whose assimilation into the dominant culture will always be incomplete due to outward markers of otherness, but whose connection to their native culture is tenuous due to their youthful removal from it. I felt that in my bones.

Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (2018) “Professional facilitator dispenses invaluable party-planning advice” is a glib but not inaccurate summary. She talks as much about work conferences, trade shows, and retreats as social gatherings; she has nothing but disdain for Martha Stewart re: spending more time preparing her crudités than her guests. It’s probably the most straightforwardly useful book I’ve read in awhile.

What’s wrong with inviting Bob? Every gathering has its Bobs. Bob in marketing. Bob your friend’s girlfriend’s brother. Bob your visiting aunt. Bob is perfectly pleasant and doesn’t actively sabotage your gathering. Most Bobs are grateful to be included … shift your perception so that you understand that people who aren’t fulfilling the purpose of your gathering are detracting from it, even if they do nothing to detract from it. This is because once they are actually in your presence, you (and other considerate guests) will want to welcome and include them, which takes time and attention away from what (and who) you’re actually there for.

Like, what a paradigm shift!!!! Utterly game-changing to think about invitations this way. More paradigm-shifting content relating to 1) your role as the host and 2) rigid rules paradoxically affording participants more freedom:

The chill approach to hosting is all too often about hosts attempting to wriggle out of the burden of hosting. In gatherings, once your guests have chosen to come into your kingdom, they want to be governed—gently, respectfully and well. When you fail to govern, you may be elevating how you want them to perceive you over how you want the gathering to go for them. Often, chill is you caring about you masquerading as you caring about them.

In the explicitness and oftentimes the whimsy of these rules was a hint of what they were really about: replacing the passive-aggressive, exclusionary, glacially conservative commandments of etiquette with something more experimental and democratic.

These positive features of etiquette work particularly well in stable, closed, homogenous groups…This is the bargain that the rules-based gatherer offers: if you accept a greater rigidity in the setup of the event, the gatherer will offer you a different and much richer freedom—to gather with people of all kinds, in spite of your own gathering traditions.

Keith Gessen, Raising Raffi: The First Five Years (2022) It’s a memoir! Gessen is probably more talented as a memoirist than as a novelist. He is after all a journalist by trade. He recounts all this day-to-day minutiae of parenting and makes it mean something and refrains from boring me. Still, final verdict is that his novel resonated more with me than this memoir did—he had one story to tell and he told it with his whole heart (yes Anna I know you haven’t finished A Terrible Country).

Marisha Pessl, Night Film (2013) I’m not entirely sure what happened here. I mean that in the sense of I watched a horror film and I did not ‘get’ the ending. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad ending just means I don’t consume a ton of horror. As someone who does read a ton of fiction, I’ll say Marisha Pessl has the trick of choosing/constructing the most outrageously unself-aware protagonist-narrators (Special Topics in Calamity Physics did this as well). You the reader spend half the book exhorting them to get their act together, to no avail. The second half of the book proves they were the exact right narrator to tell this story, because their blind spots coincide neatly with the story’s themes.

hp | Theft of Assets, Destruction of Property by helenish (23k, Draco/Neville) I could give less of a hoot about this pairing but I keep seeing this fic on every reclist ever and I am here to tell you it is PHENOMENAL. There are fics you read because they tickle your id in some way (90% of the fic I read falls in this category) but there are other fics that you just have to sit back and admire the craftsmanship. There’s no super involved plot or anything it’s just a postwar arranged marriage AU. The author is a talented home cook/baker who would not be out of place on Great British Bake-Off.

Colleen Hoover, It Ends With Us (2016) Technically there’s two rival love interests—one the abusive husband and the other her lost&found first love—but I see very little daylight between them when it comes to the relevant criteria which is: how obsessed these men are they with Lily. The answer is: TO THE POINT OF PSYCHOSIS. Every time Husband beats her up it’s because jealousy has driven him out of his mind. When her perfect angel of a first love who’s always Treated Her Right is discovered to have lied to her, it’s a lie meant to spare her feelings. I’m not saying a little white lie is the same thing as nine stitches in the forehead (Hoover isn’t saying that either). I’m saying that the romance genre’s main deliverable is making the heroine (and by extension the reader) feel wanted, feel like there’s someone in the world for whom her needs come before everything else. And both these love interests do that! Look, abuse is a hard cycle to escape, I could feel how difficult this book was for Colleen Hoover to write—she dug real deep for it—but for me the main selling point was I got to bask in the adoration of not one but two handsome accomplished men.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Making of a Marchioness (Emily Fox-Seton Parts I and II) (1901) The author of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, who has never been to India, continues to be bizarrely obsessed (at a distance! the actual story is set firmly in England) with British colonial India. I confess to mouth-open agapeness when the social-commentary first half takes a hairpin turn for the murder-mystery second half, but that’s the danger of serialized stories. Little Princess and Secret Garden were quite formative for me as a preteen, and revisiting the author reminds me of why: She has seamless control of the narrative voice, just enough distance to establish when the protagonist’s opinion is Wrong but not so much distance that the reader’s investment is lost. The protagonist’s problem is she undervalues her own worth—that she overvalues cleverness, interestingness, frothy conversation etc above kindness and decency. Emily is dull but there is no one more dependable in a crisis; she’s metaphorically thicker than a brick wall but she is a workhouse when it comes to the behind-the-scenes emotional labor that women are saddled with—the labor which keeps everyone’s lives running smoothly. I suspect Emily may have been created in the way of a thought-experiment. Maybe Burnett wanted to know: can I create a compelling protagonist if I strip away all her flashy attributes, strip her down to the decency at her core? And the answer is: possibly, but not if you abruptly lose interest and switch genres halfway through, Ms. Burnett!

Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers (2022) A high-concept heist-adjacent plot with the caloric content of a communion wafer. Yawwwwn.

Harry Turtledove, Gunpowder Empire (2003) (Crosstime Traffic #1) Harry Turtledove can write when he feels like it—Guns of the South is his marquee work of alternate history and I really enjoyed it—but he’s painting by numbers here. It’s not even that locating the point of divergence at “the Western Roman Empire never fell” is 101 level laziness; it’s that Turtledove doesn’t seem much interested in using alternate timelines to interrogate our own world, which is kind of the whole point of SFF. Hard pass.

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (2021) I lost my mom when I was thirteen, which is long enough ago I don’t think about it much except when her birthday comes around. Two pages into this memoir I was straight bawling. You can tell it’s her first book, there are rough patches, but it basically ripped my insides out and fed them back to me in a tube. I’ll also say that I have, as the mother of two mixed-race kids, more than a passing interest in the plight of half-Asian kids growing up in America and oof it is rough out there, even in the coastal metropolises.

Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace (2021) (Teixcalaan #2) Martine’s main beef with Empire seems to be that it’s so ubiquitous it’s got it’s tentacles in everything & it doesn’t give you a choice, and is love even love if it’s not chosen freely (looking at you Mahit/Three Seagrass). I—don’t think that’s a premise I agree with. Also none of the characters are as clever as Martine thinks they are. I don’t mean they aren’t as clever as they think they are—you can milk the gap between the reader’s perception of the character and the character’s perception of themselves for a lot of mileage—I mean that Martine as a writer is not in the appropriate weight class to convey a story of truly byzantine (heh heh) intrigue. It wasn’t a slog or anything, the disappointment was more in the whole amounting to less than the sum of the parts. I wish poor little Lsel station felt like less of an afterthought but all her worldbuilding energy seems to have been poured into Teixcalaan.

Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio (2003) This is it, I’m breaking up with Iain Pears. Not because he’s bad per se, but he keeps doing the same thing over and over, and that thing is neither entertaining enough nor does it have enough intellectual heft to hold me.

Fonda Lee, Jade City (2017)(Green Bone Saga #1)
Fonda Lee, Jade War (2019) (Green Bone Saga #2)
Fonda Lee, Jade Legacy (2021) (Green Bone Saga #3) A tour de force. I sound like I'm doing a generic cover blurb or something but it's the best thing I read this year--both in the sense of "most impressive work of art" and "most enjoyable for me personally," which are not two criteria that always overlap. Didn't take any notes because I was in the hospital having a baby at the time. Can't believe it lost the Hugo to (I'm cackling) the Wayward Children series looool thanks for looking that up Anna but wtf ever, this is the problem with popularity-contest awards (juried awards have different problems obviously).

Taffy Brodesser-Aker, Fleishman Is In Trouble (2019) I thought it was about divorce and/or male entitlement, but the bones of this book are about mourning lost youth. You don’t miss the dumb dipshit you used to be; you do miss the opportunities foreclosed by age. And you miss it particularly acutely when you’re in your early forties and that door has just slammed shut: “How could I find my way back to a moment where my life wasn’t a flood of obligations but an endless series of choices” wonders the narrator. The way this impinges on divorce is very often, “the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault.” Don’t get me wrong—it’s true women “age out” of a lot more opportunities than men do. But this novel’s takeaway is hardly that Toby Fleishman was a uniquely bad husband, or that Claire Fleishman did nothing wrong. Toby’s besetting sin is his blinkered worldview: he thinks his problems are the only problems (fyi the way he treats the nanny is ghastly). Libby, our narrator, wonders why Toby never asks her a single question about her marriage or her kids. Libby says, “That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman—to tell her story through a man.” Which is why, of course, Libby is narrating a story about the dissolution of Toby’s marriage. It’s such a tightly-focused third-person pov that for the first 20 pages I didn’t even realize Libby was the first-person narrator, or what her relationship to Toby was (they’re old friends from college). Libby and Claire are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is “heads I win tails you lose.” Motherhood is a double-bind. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS Either you choose to quit your job to raise kids in the suburbs (like Libby) and you feel like less than a person; or you choose to stay in the city and work your tail off to ensure your kids have the best opportunities (like Claire) and you’re unnatural. There’s no big reveal at the end when we switch to Claire’s POV. The reader does not gasp “so this is why she left Toby!” It’s the accumulation of grievous indignities, and the way Toby responds to those indignities (protip: try to be in your wife’s corner when she’s passed over for a promotion or has a traumatic labor/delivery!). Here is Claire, working herself to the bone and wondering “what the hell was she doing this all for if Jack Rothberg was going to love Miriam as much as Solly loved her.” I haven’t talked yet about the discourse in this book about upper-middle-class precarity which is REAL in the sense that they’re anxious their children (or they themselves) might fall a few rungs down the increasingly hierarchical ladder of the American economy so they’re scrambling to give their kids every leg up that they can. Finally, I learned more than I ever bargained for about dating apps and sexting and nudes; the way Brodesser-Aker describes Toby’s sex life is so bloodless that we ought to find him pathetic—certainly Toby finds Toby pathetic—but she gives him enough grace that the reader doesn’t in fact come away believing Toby a sad sack of an early-forties divorcée for whom there is no hope. Neat trick, that.

China Miéville, The City and the City (2009) A genuine banger of a police procedural that’s also, unironically, a literary masterpiece. Ever since I read Babel and was moved by its themes but bothered by their hamfisted delivery, I’ve wondered how an author’s leftist credentials can make it into their fiction without crushing the reader like an anvil. Well, China Miéville is a flaming communist. This man has published a nonfiction books on the Russian Revolution and the Communist Manifesto. He goes and writes a fucking mystery, which is an inherently conservative genre insofar as structurally, you’ve got to restore the status quo—you’ve got to bring the murderer to justice. Which presumes that justice is a thing that exists in society. If your protagonist is a career detective, with the apparatus of the state behind him, he’s also got to contend with the bureaucratic jostling that occurs in any large unwieldy organization—there are Higher Powers who would prefer the case not get solved, and those powers are well-connected enough to lean on the detective’s superiors. Inspector Tyador Borlú is tasked with the corpse of a Jane Doe. What makes this particular case a sensitive one is that it straddles two jurisdictions: the two titular cities, Besź and Ul Qoma, which are at the moment both roiled by political instability. The two cities occupy the same geographical space (in an unnamed backwater of Eastern Europe). They lie on top of each other. Besź and Ul Qoma are a patchwork of spaces such that some places exist wholly in one city or another, and some exist in both, and when citizens encounter each other in these buffer zones they are just supposed to ignore or “unsee” each other (even if the encounter is a literal car crash!!!). Exaggerated cultural differences in architecture and fashion are designed to aid people in the daily work of sorting out who they can and can’t legally interact with—because make no mistake, if they trip up and “see” people or stuff they’re not supposed to, Breach will swoop in to disappear them faster than you can say "Stasi secret police." Breach is the semi-mystical enforcement agency that maintains the de jure separation of the two cities (de facto it's not really possible to separate them, which is why this whole story is a parable about the power of cultural norms). Nobody knows who Breach is or how they do their job; my working assumption for 3/4 of the book was they were literal faeries. Our narrator Borlú is at first baffled and then furious that his Jane Doe case—she was murdered in one city and the body dumped in another—is not taken over by Breach. The murderer meticulously avoided invoking Breach and now, due to this technicality, Borlú is saddled with an investigation that he simply does not have the resources to conduct. He conducts it regardless, because he's determined to bring justice to the victim. Yep, and the book never treats Borlú's abiding faith in the system with cynicism. 

Where Mieville's leftist creds are most in evidence in The City and the City is in his depiction of the separatists and the unificationists and the nineteen other fringe political factions that Borlú encounters in connection with his investigation. You begin to see why, in normie parlance, "radical” and “insurgent” are more often than not a synonym for “nutjobs.” These are straight-up unpleasant people, puffed up with moral certitude--certain that they know the best way forward for their respective cities. You can tell that Mieville has mingled with fanatics like this irl. The problem with fanatics isn't that their Cause isn't just, but that they let the Cause take precedence over the welfare of actual human beings. Humans, it turns out, are rooted in a dense web of tradition and community. That is to say, the specificity of place is worth preserving. And if there is one thing China Mieville is outstanding at doing, it's evoking a sense of place. I thought Perdido Street Station was unparalleled in this respect (I thought it was a slog for other reasons). I'm so pleased I picked up The City & the City because it plays to Mieville's strengths as a writer, it's impeccably structured into three acts (1. Besź 2. Ul Qoma 3. Breach), and it has the tensest apprehending-the-murderer/soliciting-the-confession scene I've seen in awhile. At the same time, Mieville never loses sight of the fact that the structural antagonist is not the murderer--he's evil but he's small fry--but the unchecked greed of multinational corporations. That in the end it's capitalism that poses the greatest threat to the continued survival of a backwater like Besź/Ul Qoma.

Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (2022) Some people complain this was slow to start but i thought Edwin’s section was the most immersive (which was borne out by the Acknowledgements, where the only “research” book she shouted out was a book about second sons of the British aristocracy emigrating to Canada). Sea of Tranquility is a “multiple POVs scattered through time braided into one narrative” story. The far-future strand felt the least lived-in, and it made me suspicious of the novel’s sci-fi bona fides, because if she’s not interested in our Martian future the way she is in the minutiae of Edwin’s 19th century milieu, is it even sci-fi? Even if there’s time travel. HOWEVER upon reflection I do think it’s solidly SFF in the sense that the worldbuilding is a character—the reader is asking themself throughout the first four sections “Is it time travel? How does time travel work?” Thoroughly enjoyable book; the scope was a bit narrower than I expected but just right for what it is.

Ilona Andrews, Iron and Magic (Iron Covenant #1)(2019) Crikey, the most fun I have had in ages. Don’t let the bodice-ripper coverart and the no-frills prose fool you; those are merely surface attributes. This book is propulsively plotted and phenomenally characterized. I wouldn’t recommend jumping into the larger Kate Daniels world via this spinoff, but I’m glad I did because it was so completely the right book for me. I lapped it up in a matter of hours (not that it’s exactly a tome) and first things first, it’s not Fake Married if all their friends and enemies know it’s fake, right? I would call it a marriage of convenience: Elara married Hugh for the mercenary army he commands, and Hugh married Elara for her castle, where she undertakes to feed & house his army (he has lately been disowned by his surrogate father, who was also the employer of said army). To say Hugh is rudderless and drowning in suicidal ideation would be a quaint understatement. He latches onto Elara because sniping at her is fun, I think. Not a lot in his life to bring him joy right now. Elara, in turn, is drawn to Hugh less for his six-pack than for his competency—and he is scarily competent at what he does. Don’t get me wrong, Hugh’s charistma stats are off the charts, but Elara has met charismatic men before. What she’s never had before is a working relationship. And as a team these two are unbeatable. Yes, their shared enemies include an army of undead vampires and an alien invasion (maybe it ain’t aliens but somebody is opening portals in space-time to attack Our Heroes) but the real meat of the romance is in the domestic spats. See, Hugh’s main objective in this book is to build a moat around the castle—a moat that Elara thinks is a waste of their shared resources. “You’re building a money pit,” she says, “except it’s not a pit, it’s a moat. Why not just line it with money and set that on fire when the vampires come?” Lol. I love the stupid satisfaction they take in publicly referring to their spouse as “my husband” and “my wife.” The satisfaction is equally real whether they’re putting on a show for those not in-the-know (the local sheriff’s deputies are under the impression they actually are besotted newlyweds) and those who are. It starts, I think, as a game of chicken— I double-dog-dare you to admit you regret getting hitched to me—and it evolves (after they catch Feelings) into an inside joke.

This one was particularly on the nose: Hugh: “Do you not understand me? I won’t work with Lennart. Elara, are you stupid or hard of hearing?” Elara: “I must be stupid, because I married an idiot who stomps around and throws tantrums like a spoiled child! What the hell did this Curran do to you? Killed your master, stole your girl, burned down your castle? What?” The ensuing uncomfortable silence tells Elara that she hit the bulls-eye on ALL THREE COUNTS looool.

By the end of the book they’re working together like a well-oiled machine: “How did it go?” Hugh asked. “He’s frothing at the mouth.” “That’s my girl.”

When Elara reveals she met privately with his personal nemesis Hugh’s reaction is not “did you betray me to the enemy” but “how much time did you buy us to dig fortifications.” He doesn’t doubt her; he takes it for granted that she only pretended to entertain Nez’s offer.

The story delves much deeper into Hugh’s psychology than Elara’s, understandably so since we know Hugh from the Kate Daniels books but Elara is an unknown quantity. We’ll get to her backstory in future installments. What I like about their dynamic is they’re both overpowered magic users, both leaders who feel responsible for the welfare of their people, and yet it’s abundantly clear who’s in the driver’s seat. “Why did you heal the dog?” Elara asks. Hugh says, “Because he did his job. Loyalty must be rewarded.” EXACTLY!!! Hugh’s entire trauma hinges on his lifelong dogged unswerving loyalty to Roland being met with betrayal. Not only does he feel worthless, his worldview is shattered. Nothing makes sense anymore. But this dog has finally found a new master. Ffs he left orders that were he to fall in battle his spouse would assume command of the Iron Dogs. He trusted her with his men.

Elara has been bearing the weight of leadership alone for a long time, and to have someone come along to share that burden with must be the most unlooked-for relief. Hugh doesn’t wait to be instructed, he just does what needs to be done. (Look for “How To Repel Vampire Assaults With Targeted Home Improvement Projects” by Hugh d’Ambray at your local bookseller.) The climactic battle scene decisively proves Hugh’s competence because the moat plays a pivotal role, and he was RIGHT to insist on building it, and I am reminded that the root of the word husband is “husbandry.” Elara and Hugh are basically running a medium-sized farm together, and they are good business partners. They’re also really hot for each other:

He rested his forehead against he back of her head. “Elara…”

“Please,” she whispered. “please don’t say anything you’ll regret in the morning.”

His voice was a low snarl. “Sometimes when I lay awake in the middle of the night, I think of you.”

“Don't…”

“Sometimes there is nothing left and all that’s anchoring me here is knowing you’ll pick a fight with me in the morning.”

“Hugh…”

“What do you want more than anything? Tell me what it is, and I’ll rip the world apart to bring it to you.”

Forget the sex scene, THAT Is what I call a moment of intimacy. Unfortunately this book came out in 2019 and it is (checks calendar) 2023 and no sequel in sight, booooo.

Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites (2007)(Kate Daniels #1) Yippee here we go! There's been an apocalypse and now there's magic. Post-Shift Atlanta’s jurisdiction is split between the Pack and the People—that is, the werewolves and the vampires—and while there are several smaller factions these two are the heavy hitters. You can see why our lone-wolf mercenary Kate is more inclined to form alliances—and eventually, down the road, a romantic attachment—with one group over the other:

Nataraja and his college of death-devotees, with their clinical indifference to tragedy and murder. For them, a dispatched vampire and a comatose Journeyman equaled a loss of investment, costly and inconvenient, but ultimately not emotionally painful. The man in front of me, on the other hand, had lost friends. They were people he knew well and they had placed themselves in his charge.

What Kate is saying is, people aren’t disposable. Caring isn’t optional, it’s what makes us human. Pretty tidily sums up the thesis of the series. Kate was raised by her dad, who tried to make her into a lean mean killing machine, and it didn’t work. Moreover Kate’s dead dad is probably glad it didn’t work; he after all chose to quit his job as a professional killing machine working for the most powerful man on earth in order to raise Kate.

So, this first book is not as cohesive as later ones. I think Nick Feldman’s inclusion is particularly clunky. Jim is at best one-dimensional and Derek is maaaaybe two-dimensional. Ghastek and Saiman's cameos don't do justice to the layers of their backstory. It's addictive af though! At no point was I tempted to stop turning the page.