BOOK REVIEW: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire, by Dan Hanks

BOOK REVIEW: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire, by Dan HanksTitle: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire by Dan Hanks
Published by Angry Robot
Published: September 8th 2020
Genres: Historical, Fantasy, Fiction
Pages: 380
Format: Mass Market
Source: Publisher
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

An ex-Spitfire pilot is dragged into a race against a shadowy government agency to unlock the secrets of the lost empire of Atlantis...

In post-war 1952, the good guys are supposed to have won. But not everything is as it seems when ex-Spitfire pilot Captain Samantha Moxley is dragged into a fight against the shadowy US government agency she used to work for. Now, with former Nazis and otherworldly monsters on her trail, Captain Moxley is forced into protecting her archaeologist sister in a race to retrieve two ancient keys that will unlock the secrets of a long-lost empire - to ensure a civilisation-destroying weapon doesn't fall into the wrong hands. But what will she have to sacrifice to save the world?

It felt like those in the west had a talent for skipping straight out of one war and into another, as though they had a lust for it, while the locals would be left to clean it up when they had gone. More and more, the glorious ideas of “Empire” were revealed to be nothing more than fancy dressing when you saw the realities of those who came to suffer beneath its polished boots, blinkered ambition, and secret agendas.

Dan Hanks’s Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire is a action-packed adventure that reminded me a lot of a cross between Marvel’s Captain America and the Indiana Jones universe with a dash of The Mummy and National Treasure. Captain Moxley is a take-no-shit heroine who races to protect her sister from a shady section of the United States government involving Nazis, genetically modified beings, and aliens? Yes, this novel is incredibly pulpy and uses a lot of familiar tropes to the genre, but it’s a page-turner with a lot of heart and a lot of insight that made me want to see where Captain Moxley was headed.

One of the things I liked the most about this was that Hanks does explore colonialism and the “empire” in archeological history and what that means for everyone involved. It’s an important conversation to have when we consider how many, if not all, of the artifacts of our museums come from colonialist “exploration.” I loved the dynamic between Samantha and her sister Jessica, and I thought the balance of being a protective sibling while also learning to let the other make choices because she’s her own person was well done. I also loved the genderbent characters and how those flips toyed with the genre’s tropes and expectations. Even though I took my time reading it (thirty minutes for lunch only leaves for bite-sized reading sprints), I found it easy to follow and compulsively readable with a lot of fun surprises throughout. It’s pulp fiction at its best and pulls in so much of what I like reading in genre fiction and making it new, too.

This book feels like an action-adventure film or even a video game, and once you’ve strapped yourself in, you’re in for a ride. There are a few anachronisms, mostly in the use of language, but in the scope of the novel, it’s not entirely noticeable at all in the midst of it all. Because it’s so cinematic, I think these anachronisms are to be expected. But if that sort of thing bothers you, then it’s something to be aware of!

I really hope to see more from Hanks and this world he’s created with Captain Moxley, and this ends with a set-up for a sequel, so I hope there’s one coming out in the future! I’d love to see how Captain Moxley continues to handle her relationship with her sister and the discovery/exploration of Atlantis and everything else that has come with finding those amulets and the Hall of Records.

Thank you to Angry Robot for sending me a complimentary copy of this book to review and feature! All opinions are my own.

BOOK REVIEW: Branwell, by Douglas A. Martin

BOOK REVIEW: Branwell, by Douglas A. MartinTitle: Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother by Douglas A. Martin, Darcey Steinke
Published by Soft Skull
Published: July 7th 2020
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 256
Format: Trade Paper
Source: Publisher
Goodreads

For readers of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, this genre-bending exploration of the tragic figure of Branwell Brontë and the dismal, dazzling landscape that inspired his sisters to greatness is now available in a new edition with an introduction by Darcey Steinke.
Branwell Brontë―brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne―has a childhood marked by tragedy and the weight of expectations. After the early deaths of his mother and a beloved older sister, he is kept away from school and tutored at home by his father, a curate, who rests all his ambitions for his children on his only son. Branwell grows up isolated in his family’s parsonage on the moors, learning Latin and Greek, being trained in painting, and collaborating on endless stories and poems with his sisters.
Yet while his sisters go on to write Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey, Branwell wanders from job to job, growing increasingly dependent on alcohol and opium and failing to become a great poet or artist.
With rich, suggestive sentences “perfectly fitted to this famously imaginative, headstrong family” (Publishers Weekly), Branwell is a portrait of childhood dreams, thwarted desire, the confinements of gender―and an homage to the landscape and milieu that inspired some of the most revolutionary works of English literature.

Douglas A. Martin’s Branwell is a queer interpretation of Branwell Bronte’s life, and an interpretation that I found both thought-provoking and stylistic. Martin imagines a Branwell struggling to live up to the expectations he felt as the ‘man of the house’ and ultimately failing on several levels. I think to get the full scope of the novel, the reader must be familiar with the Bronte history and lore, especially knowing that Charlotte destroyed so much of their family’s personal writings and letters after their deaths. It raises the question of what Charlotte was hiding or protecting, and Martin’s novel explores an answer to the question of Branwell. Based on my own research, this novel takes liberties with the life of Branwell, though I feel these liberties were tied in with Martin’s own experiences through revelations in the introduction to this book. I ultimately found the sexual content of this novel disturbing, and the barn scene at the end soured my reading experience because the implied bestiality ended up being all I could think about as it seemed out of place in the context and scope of things.

I do find it interesting to me to have received this almost alongside another title about Branwell’s life and I am looking forward to reading that one as well, and Martin’s seems to be in stark contrast thematically and stylistically to the other book about the affair of “unspeakable acts” Branwell had in his lifetime, as the affair has been referred to as a screen for homosexual activity. If you are interested in queer interpretations of literary figures and stylistic writing, based in fact or toying with it, this may pique your interest, but do be aware of the heavy subject matter.

Many thanks to Soft Skull Press for sending me a complimentary copy to review! All opinions are my own.

BOOK REVIEW: Beheld, by TaraShea Nesbit

BOOK REVIEW: Beheld, by TaraShea NesbitTitle: Beheld by TaraShea Nesbit
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: March 17th 2020
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Pages: 288
Format: ARC
Source: Netgalley
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
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From the bestselling author of The Wives of Los Alamos comes the riveting story of a stranger’s arrival in the fledgling colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts―and a crime that shakes the divided community to its core.
Ten years after the Mayflower pilgrims arrived on rocky, unfamiliar soil, Plymouth is not the land its residents had imagined. Seemingly established on a dream of religious freedom, in reality the town is led by fervent puritans who prohibit the residents from living, trading, and worshipping as they choose. By the time an unfamiliar ship, bearing new colonists, appears on the horizon one summer morning, Anglican outsiders have had enough.

With gripping, immersive details and exquisite prose, TaraShea Nesbit reframes the story of the pilgrims in the previously unheard voices of two women of very different status and means. She evokes a vivid, ominous Plymouth, populated by famous and unknown characters alike, each with conflicting desires and questionable behavior.

Suspenseful and beautifully wrought, Beheld is about a murder and a trial, and the motivations―personal and political―that cause people to act in unsavory ways. It is also an intimate portrait of love, motherhood, and friendship that asks: Whose stories get told over time, who gets believed―and subsequently, who gets punished?

Nesbit’s Beheld offers a glimpse into the lives of the Plymouth settlement ten years after their arrival told through the eyes of some of the women who lived there. I don’t really recall reading much historical fiction about the early Plymouth settlement, but I loved the imagery and the tension Nesbit explores in this novel. It’s a short novel, but it’s filled with the right amount of empathy for each of the women’s situations. The Plymouth settlement is fraught with disagreements, underlying and unresolved emotions, and flat out hatred that’s often glossed over in popular history’s retelling of a perfect new world for religious freedoms. At least for me, anyway. It wasn’t until I was an adult and in college that I began to really learn about the realities of Plymouth settlement.

Nesbit’s strength in this is making you care for and understand each of the women’s perspectives, even when they clash with someone else’s views. I understand why each of the women made the choices that they did and didn’t, and each of the characters felt so real to me. For me, sometimes characters in historical fiction almost feel like standees or caricatures, but characterization and character development is where Nesbit excels.

Beheld is a short historical crime novel that packs a punch and will leave you thinking about it and the early American settlements long after you’ve finished reading.

Thank you to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for an advance reader copy! All opinions are my own.

BOOK REVIEW: The Glass Magician, by Caroline Stevermer

BOOK REVIEW: The Glass Magician, by Caroline StevermerTitle: The Glass Magician by Caroline Stevermer
Published by Tor Books
Published: April 7th 2020
Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 288
Format: ARC
Source: Netgalley
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

A gilded menagerie rules a Gilded Age: Bears and Bulls are not only real, but dominate humanity in The Glass Magician, an amazing historical fantasy by Caroline Stevermer

What if you could turn into the animal of your heart anytime you want?
With such power, you’d enter the cream of New York society, guaranteed a rich life among the Vanderbilts and Astors, movers and shakers who all have the magical talent and own the nation on the cusp of a new century.

You could. If you were a Trader.

Pity you’re not.

Thalia is a Solitaire, one of the masses who don’t have the animalistic magic. But that is not to say that she doesn’t have talent of another kind—she is a rising stage magician who uses her very human skills to dazzle audiences with amazing feats of prestidigitation. Until one night when a trick goes horribly awry…and Thalia makes a discovery that changes her entire world. And sets her on a path that could bring her riches.

Or kill her.

The Glass Magician is set in an alternative Gilded Age New York City in which magic exists beyond the stage performance. Thalia is a stage magician who realizes after watching a trick go horribly wrong for her and again on stage for someone else that there is more to her world than she knew before. It is a world of shape shifters tied by bloodline, and she is one of them after thinking she was a Solitaire (a human who doesn’t shape shift) for her entire life.

I ended up feeling rather so-so about the last third of the book because it felt both melodramatic and rushed at the same time. The magic trick at the end to reveal the true killer and motive didn’t seem to flow as well with the story as I would have liked, but I think that’s also to do with the world building. However, it did leave me hopeful that there would be more books set in this universe because the foundation has been laid for a lot more exploration and examination.

I enjoy “quiet” novels, stories that are a bit slower and softer than the usual fantasy fare of high-octane action. I loved the setting of an alternate New York City in the Gilded Age, and I imagined magic and magic tricks revealed and performed in gas-lit rooms and lush dresses of mint and lilac and rose contrasting with the darker elements of this society and the magic therein. Most of these thoughts were more of my own projections of my enthusiasm of the era, but I enjoyed this book for what it was. I think I was left wanting because I knew there could be more – from world building to character development to character interactions. So much of it felt like a superficial magic trick. Pretty to read and to look at, but I felt like I could see right through the tricks.

Thank you to Tor Books and Netgalley for the advance reader copy; all opinions are my own.

LITTLE LIST OF REVIEWS #10: Recent Netgalley Reads

Today’s Little List of Reviews features three reads from Netgalley that I’ve had on my Kindle for a long time and have needed to review for a while. Thank you to Netgalley

LITTLE LIST OF REVIEWS #10: Recent Netgalley ReadsTitle: The Girl in White Gloves by Kerri Maher
Published by Berkley
Published: February 25th 2020
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Pages: 384
Format: ARC
Source: Netgalley
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

A life in snapshots…
Grace knows what people see. She’s the Cinderella story. An icon of glamor and elegance frozen in dazzling Technicolor. The picture of perfection. The girl in white gloves.
A woman in living color…
But behind the lens, beyond the panoramic views of glistening Mediterranean azure, she knows the truth. The sacrifices it takes for an unappreciated girl from Philadelphia to defy her family and become the reigning queen of the screen. The heartbreaking reasons she trades Hollywood for a crown. The loneliness of being a princess in a fairy tale kingdom that is all too real. Hardest of all for her adoring fans and loyal subjects to comprehend, is the harsh reality that to be the most envied woman in the world does not mean she is the happiest. Starved for affection and purpose, facing a labyrinth of romantic and social expectations with more twists and turns than Monaco’s infamous winding roads, Grace must find her own way to fulfillment. But what she risks--her art, her family, her marriage—she may never get back.

The first half of this was so good, nuanced and detailed with a lot of sparking humor. I love fiction about Hollywood and the behind the scenes glimpses it gives, but this book fell apart halfway through for me. The characterization of Grace Kelly did a complete turnaround and felt unrecognizable from the character introduced to us in the beginning. Tonally, the book felt like a completely separate title halfway through, and it left me a little disappointed.

LITTLE LIST OF REVIEWS #10: Recent Netgalley ReadsTitle: Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays by Peter Watts
Published by Tachyon Publications
Published: November 12 2019
Genres: Non-Fiction
Pages: 320
Format: ARC
Source: Netgalley
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
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“A brilliant bastard.” —Cory Doctorow“Comfort, of course, is the last thing that Watts wants to give.” —New York Review of Science Fiction
Which of the following is true?
-Peter Watts is banned from the U.S.-Watts almost died from flesh-eating bacteria.-A schizophrenic man living in Watts's backyard almost set his house on fire. -Watts was raised by Baptists who really sucked at giving presents.-Peter Watts said to read this book. Or else.
“Watts, undoubtedly, is a genius.” ―Medium
In more than fifty unpredictable essays and revenge fantasies, Peter Watts — Hugo Award-winning author, former marine biologist, and angry sentient tumor — is the savage dystopian optimist whom you can’t look away from. Even when you probably should.

I didn’t really know anything about Peter Watts before reading this collection of his writing/blog posts, and the resulting collection in an acerbic, entertaining look into a myriad of subjects. It was a lot to take in all at once, so I picked at this over the course of several months. I loved his perspective on a lot of things, so if you like essays about literally anything, definitely take a look at this.

LITTLE LIST OF REVIEWS #10: Recent Netgalley ReadsTitle: Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: January 28th 2020
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 256
Format: ARC
Source: Netgalley
Buy: Bookshop(afflilate link)
Goodreads

A blisteringly original and wickedly funny collection of stories about the strange worlds that women inhabit and the parts that they must play.
A sense of otherworldly menace is at work in the fiction of Nicole Flattery, but the threats are all too familiar. SHOW THEM A GOOD TIME tells the stories of women slotted away into restrictive roles: the celebrity's girlfriend, the widower's second wife, the lecherous professor's student, the corporate employee. And yet, the genius of Flattery's characters is to blithely demolish the boundaries of these limited and limiting social types with immense complexity and caustic intelligence. Nicole Flattery's women are too ferociously mordant, too painfully funny to remain in their places.
In this fiercely original and blazingly brilliant debut, Flattery likewise deconstructs the conventions of genre to serve up strange realities: In Not the End Yet, Flattery probes the hilarious and wrenching ambivalence of Internet dating as the apocalypse nears; in Sweet Talk, the mysterious disappearance of a number of local women sets the scene for a young girl to confront the dangerous uncertainties of her own sexuality; in this collection's center piece, Abortion, A Love Story, two college students in a dystopian campus reconfigure the perilous stories of their bodies in a fraught academic culture to offer a subversive, alarming, and wickedly funny play that takes over their own offstage lives. And yet, however surreal or richly imagined the setting, Flattery always shows us these strange worlds from startlingly unexpected angles, through an unforgettable cast of brutally honest, darkly hilarious women and girls.
Like the stories of Mary Gaitskill, Miranda July, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, and Ottessa Moshfegh, SHOW THEM A GOOD TIME is the work of a profoundly resonant and revelatory literary voice – at once spiky, humane, achingly hilarious-- that is sure to echo through the literary culture for decades to come.

I like reading collections of short stories to break up longer books or when my attention span is fried, so I was happy to read a collection of a new-to-me author. This collection played with the subversion of gender roles and explored the contrasts of women in society. My favorite story of the collection is ‘Show Them a Good Time,’ but the rest began feeling samey and repetitive after a while. This is probably best read one story at a time rather than a few here and there.