All Men of Genius, by Lev A.C. Rosen

Review copy provided by Tor.

All Men of Genius seems to have been written entirely by Lev Rosen's id. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for you depends on how nearly yours coincides with his. This is a book that has a girl-disguised-as-boy plot*, a special school for geniuses, steampunk automata and animal experimentation at every turn--with highly modern bows to animal rights/well-being, Shakespearean references some of which connect up and some just for the hell of it. It has a train in the basement, a snotty noble, and women of various degrees and types of virtue. It even has a clockwork--well, I won't spoil that part. If you're reading all that and going, "Ooh!", I will tell you that it also has varying expressions of sexuality, and also platonic friendships in different combinations of gender and sexuality.

This is very much the book for a great many of you.

What it does not have is a very good sense of pacing, and there is a Dischism smack in the middle where a character proclaims everything that has gone before all too complicated, and it is, and not the controlled clockwork kind of complicated where it's all going to work out in detail, but rather the kind of complicated where this skin has been thrown on the bones of this plot without as much care for the combination of colors and textures as one might have otherwise hoped (yes, this is a reference to an event in the book). Rosen never makes the error of being too careful, so I have hopes that he will get a bit better at pacing and at managing all the balls he has in the air with his next projects, since there is "there" there to actually get better at.

*Oh how I want a fantasy novel where a boy has to disguise himself as a girl to get into the special wondrous school of awesome.

Also, my lawn: please to be getting off it.

1. Another brick in the road to official crankdom: I have written the newspaper to complain, and not even about their lack of copy editing. (Add to to-do list: write to newspaper to complain about lack of copy editing.) The Vikings lose another game. The Lynx win the first game of the national championships. The former of these is not news, and yet it takes up the entire front page of the sports section. The subject line of my letter was, "Your Sexism." Jerks. They should write the Whalen family an apology letter. I mean, the other women, too, but the Whalens are Minnesotans, for the love of Pete.

I don't even like basketball. Actually I hate basketball. (Note to Seimone Augustus: not you, you're awesome.) But this is just wrong.

2. I bought some cutting boards at Ikea. I put them in the dishwasher, as one does with a dirty plastic cutting board. The plastic melted. There was, it turns out, a cheerful little Ikea icon of a scrub brush in a hand on the corner of the board. We suspect that this is their notification that these boards are hand-wash only. (Or alternately that clean things are nice. Ikea icons, who knows.) Because everyone buys a plastic cutting board at Ikea because they want to put the time and energy into lovingly handwashing the thing. I realize that not everyone has a dishwasher, but a high enough proportion of people have dishwashers that it seems relevant, and also if I wanted to handwash a cutting board I would get a wooden one. I mean really.

3. I fell on the stairs this morning. Only two of them, did not break the glass I was carrying, did not appear to break the mrissa either. Still and all: I cannot like it.