Apr. 2nd, 2019

mrissa: (Default)
Full disclosure: we are friends who are represented by the same agent, and I got this review copy from passing it around among our agentsibs.

However.

I am entirely sure that I would love this book anyway, even if I'd never heard of Claire Eliza Bartlett before, because it is so full of things I love. The setting is a fantasy world version of WWII-era Russia, which is something I don't see nearly enough of--and then to make things even better, Claire draws on the real history of the Night Witches to create a group of girl witches--pilots, navigators, and engineers using this setting's magic to fly missions against the enemy.

Revna is the daughter of a supposed traitor to the Union, a man whose main crime is stealing waste scraps of "living metal" to fashion prosthetic legs for Revna herself. Linné is the general's daughter, spending years hiding in a regular regiment as a boy until she gets caught, dedicated to the Union. They find themselves in very different precarious situations within their very different worldviews, that lead to the same flight training, the same missions, the same perils.

It's as good as it sounds. It's better. It's full of varied and complicated relationships with a morally compromised homeland under siege. Friendships form in all permutations in a war zone: the shallow ones, the easy ones that find their own depth, the treacherous ones, the difficult ones that almost don't happen at all. Trust, friendship, and making your way through a situation with no clear answers are the heart of this book, and I love it.
mrissa: (Default)
Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is an online friend.

This is a debut novel of a kind of science fiction loads of my friends are constantly (no, CONSTANTLY) telling me they do not see enough. It's planets-and-aliens science fiction! It's got space stations and settlements and lots of divergence/diversity of human culture and a very big universe and spaceships that think and people disagreeing about who counts as people! Adventure! Excitement! We may know that a Jedi craves not these things, but that doesn't seem to stop the majority of my social circle.

Well, here you go, friends, here's a one of these, and it is fun and satisfying and has an ending that leaves a lot of room without being maddeningly open. This is a book, not a chunk of story approximately book-shaped. Fergus Ferguson (under various aliases) and his allies (maybe friends? They're working on that?) unravel mysteries, fight bad guys, and come up with plans so zany they just might work.

Or not, but then something else needs to, and that's okay too.

I don't want to spoil too many elements of Finder, because turning a corner and finding I was not quite where I expected to be was part of the fun of this book. I will say that there are a lot of elements that I'm used to having set up for two, three, five books later, and while there is plenty of room in this universe for interesting stories, Palmer is not hoarding her ideas. She's giving us a fireworks-filled book. Or sometimes a tennis-ball-filled book. Um. Just go read it, okay? You'll find out.
mrissa: (Default)

Today I have a new essay published in Uncanny magazine! That Never Happened: Misplaced Skepticism and the Mechanisms of Suspension of Disbelief talks about Serena Williams, AOC, Galen, and teaching quantum mechanics.





Go, read, enjoy!


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