Reviews and Comments

Potentially fascinating Hindu-inspired (?) world building of magic vs technology and struggles of commitment, betrayal, and hierarchy. A slog, where the detailing of the world and revisions to our characters understanding of it stands in for plot.

Women-led jailbreak in space with swords in an unsettling but not deeply convincing AI-run prison ship. Ultimately I failed to like or believe enough of the dysfunction and misdirection in the character's relationships to enjoy what is mostly a fast-paced light fantasy.

Curious in-depth examination of childhood depicted in art and writing from the middle ages through early modern focused on France and England, a necessary but ultimately bizarre citation for any claim of change in family or schooling over shorter recent periods in its cataloging of moralistic and class-driven changes in views on protecting innocence and justifying corporal punishment etc.

Starts off in a stock fantasy of clerics and assassins, and clearly riffing on some familiar themes of space classics, but as this thriller's clever use of flashback and recall keeps weaving a strong set of character relationships and loyalties in unflinching intrigue, the wide-ranging story pulls off a lot of sharp turns without losing the individual threads. I'll likely read the next one, and thankful it's not just left as a part two.

A curious history through dramatizing a series of primary sources in paintings, dioramas, and travelogues depicting the banjo at a uniquely African-Caribbean intersection of slavery, music, worship and celebration, and adaptation. As some of the threads are light echoes, I wish there was a bit more sense of engaging with other supporting or supplanted accounts of the instrument's background.

While the complexity of trauma and self-doubt was a welcome thread here, this felt like a solid novella lost its way in variations.

Ultraviolent prison abolition set in an immediate future where our societal capacity to inflict pain is only limited by death. Our characters are flawed violent criminals given by the author a full capacity for love and loss and trauma without any easy redemption.

Personal aside, it's six years since Begley's "Concussion Protocol" short video ended my watching American Football. The only parts of this book that are a little faint or maybe subtle are the few views outside of the penal world, and implicate so much more of our lives, in how our jobs and our passions and corporate interests deaden us to pain of others.

I have delayed finishing this series as long as I could. I hope this one makes me want to start all over.

If you agree with her view of human relationships - the first section is 'principles', that parenting is relationship building and repairing, that we're good, that happiness depends on connection and regulating fear and distress first, that behavior reveals our struggles not defines us, that shame and lies and control are all self-defeating ways to relate - then the specific advice in the second section gets fairly repetitive. Solid overlap with Whole Brain Child and Montessori-esque self-will-development. Pretty narrowly focused on parent-child and mostly younger to school age kids.

More alien than familiar, some inconsequentially weird or brief, a few were moving but also didn't rise to much.

Trauma in childhood and a string of hard-to-watch young adult decisions connecting back to her family tree of abuse and colonially-broken social world. But for me it reads too strongly of a raw MFA draft stretched thin between catharsis and research.

This is local history, a post-dig analysis of the post-contact ("historic") record of a town and trading post superimposed in a site of pre-historic indigenous habitation - the Creek communities from the Chattahoochee moved here temporarily from 1690-1715 before returning. In addition to analysis of the artifacts and building sites, context is provided for the larger Creek community in this period, looking at historic accounts and maps with many partial variations in place and community names and interactions to ask who the larger network of villages and relationships were in this period, which helped me identify other local sites of interest that remain much less rigorously examined.

Collects modern archaeological evidence - which has zoomed out from 19C teleological (and "navel gazing") history of empires and temples to cover ecological, epidemiological, and regional analysis - to undermine any sense of inevitable city-state domination from the cultural adoption of agriculture or sedentism, highlighting the fragile downsides to domestication which civilization avoided fully succumbing to for millennia. Focuses on what domestication - of fire, grains, animals, and ourselves - creates, and on the ways in which forced labor and exploitation are the central inevitable basis for the state.

This opens ultraviolent, I'm quite curious how my local library bookclub discussion of it goes. Bold choice, librarian!