This month I finally did something I should have done ages ago: I checked out every library ebook currently available from my wishlist there and put holds on as many others as they would let me hold at once, so I could browse -- the way I once would have done in a bookstore. The truth is that there are many books where I can tell within the first ten pages that they're unlikely to be for me, and by taking some time to give a quick look to a bunch of things, I was able to clear a good portion of that bunch off my list.

. . . meaning that instead of my TBR being seventeen miles long, it is now a mere sixteen miles long. But that's progress! And it in no way interfered with me being able to finish a goodly number of books last month.



How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, Django Wexler. This was selected by a book club I intermittently participate in, and I was startled by how quickly it drew me in. (This definitely contributed to the decision to ebook-browse: one of those periodic salutary reminders that there are plenty of books out there I don't have to "give a chance," because they click right out of the gate.)

The premise here is straightforward isekai: Davi, the protagonist, is someone from our world dropped into a fantasy realm, with no idea of how she got there or why she keeps resetting to the moment of her arrival every time she dies. She's supposedly the prophecied hero who will save the human kingdom from an army of monstrous wilders led by a Dark Lord, but after failing at that several hundred times, she decides to sort of take a vacation by joining the winning side. Why not be the Dark Lord for once?

I'm normally a poor audience for too much of a modern, pop-culture tone in fantasy, but here it worked for me. If you try this one and find the opening too bleak, consider sticking it out for another chapter or two; I think Wexler is setting you up for why Davi is so burned out that she takes her subsequent path, and/or front-loading the dark stuff so that anybody inclined to nope out at that won't get blindsided by anything later on. Much of what follows isn't surprising -- for starters, the inhuman wilders turn out to be just as much of a mixed bag as humans are -- but I found it highly engaging.

What Stalks the Deep, T. Kingfisher. Third of the Sworn Soldier novellas, which I've been greatly enjoying. I agree with Sonya Taaffe's comment on her own blog about wanting more from the central weirdness here; it feels like Kingfisher spends too long setting up the creepy atmosphere of the abandoned mine and not enough time on what the characters find there. Possibly this one should have been a short novel instead of a novella? You could start here if you wanted to, as the references to previous adventures aren't so load-bearing you can't pick them up from context; each installment is a different flavor of historical-dark-fantasy-tilting-toward-horror, leavened by Kingfisher's trademark dry narration ("I tried to back away from the floor. It went about as well as you'd expect").

The Owl Service, Alan Garner. A classic of children's fantasy I somehow managed to miss for four and a half decades. It is, as I had gathered, highly atmospheric in its restaging of the Blodeuwedd story in twentieth-century Wales, with characters being swept up in re-enacting mythic roles they never signed up for. "She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls." I greatly enjoyed everything except for the feeling that my copy somehow left out the final chapter, the one that would give me more than half a paragraph of off-ramp from the climactic moment.

Can anybody tell me if the TV adaptation is worth tracking down?

Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me, Django Wexler. Normally I try to space out my reading of a series, because I've learned the hard way that too concentrated of a dose tends to make me enjoy the later installments less. But since the Dark Lord Davi series is a duology, and the first book had such madcap energy, I decided to go ahead.

I don't think it's the concentration of the dose that made the conclusion somewhat disappointing. There are a number of enjoyable moments, but on the larger-scale level, I feel like the narrative ball got fumbled. Wexler set himself up with a significant central conflict -- the ongoing hatred and warfare between humans and wilders -- and then let it be handled far too easily, in a way I can't simply chalk up to the humorous tone of these novels; doing that cheapens both the story conflict and its real-world parallels. I was also underwhelmed by the eventual explanation of why Davi is in this fantasy world, why she's looping, and what the villain is up to. So, good start in the first book, but a swing and a miss in the second.

Where the Dark Stands Still, A.B. Poranek. Slavic-inspired and very folkloric fantasy about a young woman who goes into a haunted forest to pick a magical flower that blooms only once a year, all to get rid of her own magic -- only to instead wind up serving the master of that forest and uncovering the history of what's been going on there all this time. The mythic elements here were occasionally undermined just a touch by the story swerving toward conventional YA beats, but those never lasted for too long. This appears to be a standalone, though it ends with the kind of stinger that miiiiiight be setup for a future book? I sort of hope not, as it works well in its current form. And I enjoyed it enough that I promptly put another of Poranek's novels on my wishlist -- this being, of course, the curse of finding a book you like.

Paladin’s Grace, T. Kingfisher. This is a series I keep hearing mentioned in various corners of the internet, so I decided to finally try it out.

Somehow, in seeing all those references, I had missed the fact that this is straight-up fantasy romance: not a fantasy novel with a romance subplot, but a fantasy novel where the romance is the plot. Which, as I have mentioned before, winds up being less romantic to me than the alternative. I did enjoy this -- especially the worldbuilding around the Saint of Steel's paladins, the Temple of the White Rat, and so forth -- but I wanted that to be the focus of the story, not the "oh, this person couldn't possibly be interested in me" dance of the main characters' relationship. This particularly grated when it came to the serial killer plot, which landed in the worst possible middle zone of being resolved too conveniently while also not being fully resolved because (presumably) it will continue into the books centered on the love lives of the other paladins. (Also, I don't particularly like serial killer plots in the first place.) So the ending wound up being more frustrating to me than satisfying, even as I enjoyed individual elements of it.

Well, now I know. My wishlist can shrink a little instead of growing again.

Shanghai Immortal, A.Y. Chao. It's apparently my month for enjoying types of thing I normally bounce off, because this novel -- set in Jazz Age Shanghai and its underworldly (in the magical sense) counterpart -- has a protagonist who routinely exhibits a total lack of self-control, and I'm a bad audience for characters so angry at the world around them they just can't hold back. But the setting was vivid enough, and Jing's reasons for lashing out clear enough, that I happily stayed on the roller-coaster. The ending dragged out a little too much for me, with too many characters suddenly appearing to stick their oars in, but that was more a matter of craft than concept. Turns out there's a sequel forthcoming, which sends the characters to Paris; despite my reflexive "bleh" reaction these days to the word "vampire," I will check it out!

Botanical Curses and Poisons: The Shadow-Lives of Plants, Fen Inkwright. This is a lovely hardcover book with copious black and white line illustrations, organized like an encyclopedia, alphabetically. Inkwright is interested in not just poisonous plants but anything with a dark reputation, whether that's from association with witches or death, a starring role in a tragic legend, or anything else. My main caveat here is that I'd check any factual information you want to get from it, as the cited sources are often rather old ones, and I caught at least one outright error. (The Japanese word for wisteria does not mean "immortality." It's a homophone for the name of Mt. Fuji, and one of the proposed etymologies for Fuji is "immortality": not the same thing.) If you just want it for general inspiration, though, it's good for that, and very pretty!

The Alchemy of Stars II: Award Winners Showcase 2005-2018, ed. Sandra J. Lindow. Having learned this exists, of course I had to get it! I was pleased to see it includes the Dwarf Star winners, after the SFPA added a separate award for poems 10 lines and shorter. Like the first volume, it's an interesting longitudinal section of what's been going on in speculative poetry over the decades.

Little Thieves, Margaret Owen, narr. Saskia Maarleveld. As I've mentioned before, I've kind of gone off YA, because it's often out to do something other than what I really want from a novel these days. I gave this one a shot anyway because the premise sounded like it was going to land right on top of the Rook & Rose gear in my mind, and I was not wrong. What I didn't expect was that it was also going to bring a delightful folkloric strand to the party, and the kind of textured worldbuilding I so rarely get from YA. Combine that with a lively prose style whose occasional modernisms bothered me much less than usual, and, well, as soon as I finished the audiobook I went and ordered it in paper, along with the sequel. If "loose retelling of 'The Goose Girl' meets politics and a con artist/thief in a flavorful Germanic world" sounds like it's up your alley, absolutely try this one out.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats, Ursula K. Le Guin. A little collection of her various works (poems, prose, drawings) about cats, mostly her own. I'd encountered a couple of the poems previously and decided to get the book. It's cute, but ultimately I found I'd already read the best bits of it.

This is as good a place as any to mention that I read a lot of poetry this month. In addition to this and the collection above, I was participating in a poetry challenge for all of March wherein I had to read and comment on other participants' work, and I'm on the Rhysling jury for the long poem category. Which leads us to . . .

The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach. Recommended by a fellow poet during the challenge I just mentioned. When the book showed up, I realized I'd read another from this series -- Mark Doty's The Art of Description -- which I did not find terribly useful. But this is the kind of nonfiction series where one not liking one book has absolutely no bearing on whether you'll like another by a different author, so.

Did I like this one? Kind of. I have a long-standing puzzlement with the craft of deciding where to break a line in free verse, and the idea here was to unpuzzle myself a bit. Longenbach does make a useful-to-me distinction between the end-stopped line, the parsing line, and the annotating line, and he gives a few examples about how to switch between those for effect. However, he also has a tendency to quote a bit of poetry and then describe how the lineation creates thus-and-such effect that . . . I just don't get from the quotation? Poetry is subjective; news at eleven, I guess. I learned some useful things here, which is all I could really hope for.

The Servant’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Second of the Dame Frevisse mysteries about a fifteenth-century Benedictine nun. This one had much less of my main quibble with the first book ("why have you not asked questions yet about Obviously Weird Thing?"), and meanwhile it had as much if not more of what I liked, which is interest in how people lived back then. Here that alternates between Frevisse's life as a nun -- complete with some back-and-forth about what the religious life gives her, and what it takes away -- and the life of the titular servant, with all the stresses of being a poor peasant worrying about how she'll pay the taxes and fees that will come due if her alcoholic husband dies. This is an ideal series for me to dip in and out of when I want something short and comfortable; the third is already on my shelf.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/7VMVVP)