Book round-up: November 2019

Spent most of this month trying various Ilona Andrews novels and critique-reading most of them; probably my punishment for trying to climb out of my happy queer-and-or-female-fiction-author bubble. The House of Sundering Flames (Aliette de Bodard) totally made up for it, though. 

Non-fiction

Lead Wars (Gerald Markowitz)
We talked about reading this for book club and then didn’t, but I’d bought it in the meantime and decided I might as well read it. A little long-winded, but a thorough breakdown of exactly how chemical industries had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, towards removing lead from their products. Puts the Flint water crisis into an unrelenting and horrific light: we know exactly what lead does, we know how bad it is, and yet nothing is done because we do not value the lives it destroys.

Fiction

American Hippo (Sarah Gailey)
Linked novellas + short stories about con-artists and criminals in an alternate universe where hippopotamuses were farmed and then became endemic feral animals in the American South. Fun, cleverly plotted, imaginative.

Hidden Legacy trilogy + sequels (Ilona Andrews)
I am on a mission to find romance novels I enjoy outside of two or three reliable favourite authors; the mission continues. I enjoyed the worldbuilding in this urban fantasy series, although it wasn’t taken to its fullest conclusions, but…look…I have enjoyed many an asshole hero and an unwise relationship. I still enjoy Spike/Buffy. And THIS asshole hero was a step too far; stalking is not attractive at the best of times, and especially unattractive when your stalker-hero is also extremely rich and politically connected and magically powerful and has ‘does not take no for an answer’ as his main character trait. Also, extremely heteronormative in the view of power dynamics, which is just dull.

Clean Sweep + Iron and Magic (Ilona Andrews)
I enjoyed the previous series enough to keep trying first books in the author’s other series, but the Asshole Hero problem only continued. If I had had a physical copy of Iron and Magic to throw at the wall, I would have (you are ALL terrible and I hope you are ALL eaten by vampires or whatever). Again: enemies to lovers, fine! But people have to RESPECT each other.

The Queen of Rhodia (Effie Calvin)
Third in a series of loosely-connected secondary-world fantasy wlw romances; it’s basically D&D-lite fantasy, but you know what, I am entirely cool with that. The couples of the first two books in the series team up to make friends with dragons and deal with an abusive parent coming to visit. Happy endings for everybody, kittens, baby dragons, I’m sold.

The House of Sundering Flames (Aliette de Bodard)
Final book in her Dominion of the Fallen trilogy, in post-apocalyptic Paris ruled by fallen angels. No kittens, no unmitigatedly happy endings, but DOES have a dragon toddler? I go back and forth on this trilogy because it is so relentlessly Gothic and everything is awful all the time, BUT it is also so great on community and slowly resisting colonialism and rejecting clinging to the ruins of empire in favour of making things better than they were before, even if ‘better’ is slow and small and uncertain. And unapologetically queer in an everyday way. The main romance in this is Gay Fallen Angel (hobbies: sarcasm, torture)/Bisexual Vietnamese Dragon Prince (hobbies: childcare, idealism) Arranged Marriage, and I could read an entire extra trilogy of it. Plus the author keeps posting bird GIFs on Twitter of their OTP and what more could you ask for?