July Reviews

July was SUCH a good month for reading, oh man. I'm not even gonna say anything beyond happy birthday to me and then just get right to it.

Death's Country by R. M. Romero

I got this book at pride (signed by the author!) and carried it all the way to Tennessee with me, where I read just about the whole thing on the plane ride back home.

Andres drowned when he was fifteen, and when Death sent him back to life she kept his anger at his request, with the stipulation that she would one day take something he loved too. He doesn't think he'll love anything until he meets Renee and Liora and learns love can be a trio. When Liora is in a car accident, Renee and Andres are shattered-- until Renee reveals she knows a way down to the underworld, where they may have a chance to save Liora's soul if they don't lose their own in the process.

This book was sold to me as a polyamorous modern day Orpheus and Eurydice, and honestly that's spot in. What I didn't know is that it's written in prose, and it's more than that; it's a musician and a photographer going after their beloved dancer  it's three people learning to accept the darkness inside of them and to share it with the ones they love. It's poetic, obviously, but so very intentional and beautifully written. It's magical realism and Miami steeped in magic and shadows.

Some of it wad predictable in the most rewarding way, which is what a book should be because it means the author is laying the foundation for a good payoff. The characters were bright and dark in their own balanced way, and their relationship fell together lovingly. I especially appreciated the way they saw each other as being more than their perceived perfections and flaws, even as they struggled to let each other in.

Overall this was beautifully done and I really enjoyed it.

Shark Heart by Emily Habeck

I picked up this book at a used bookstore in Nashville, TN, at the recommendation of a dear friend, and she was absolutely right, it was such a masterpiece.

Wren and Lewis have been married for only a couple of weeks when Lewis receives a diagnosis; due to a genetic mutation he will be slowly turning into a great white shark. Throughout the transformation, Wren and Lewis have to reckon with loss and change knowing that the end of them is looming ever closer. Interspersed with stories from Wren's tumultuous childhood and a world of animalistic mutations, Shark Heart looks at what love means in the face of grief.

I cried so much while reading this book. I actually finished it on my lunch break and just cried on the couch, blabbering to my nearby coworker about how good and beautiful it was (she said it sounded good and that she wanted to read it, so I just handed her the book while still crying).

It's formatted in vignette moments and screenplays and poetic conversations and beautiful heartbreaking moments. Every new section is a different kind of gut punch, jumping between perspectives for a look at this strange and terrible magical realism world where people become animals. It's gorgeously written and enormously sad and also joyful. And it hits so hard on the progression of loss and grief while also doing something different and strange with it.

I honestly cannot say enough good things about this book, if you're willing to read about a guy turning into a shark and then cry about it, please give this book a shot.

Christa Comes Out Of Her Shell by Abbi Waxman

I didn't quite get the story that I was expecting when I picked this one up at a used bookstore, but it was still a decent enough read to be worth hauling it back from Tennessee.

Dr. Christa Barnet lives as far away from her family and her father's legacy as she possibly can, studying sea snails on an island. But her peaceful life is disrupted when news breaks: her famous naturalist father, believed to be deceased for over two decades, has reappeared, and now Christa has to reunite with her family and face the very media that drove her to the island in the first place. But not everything about Christa's father's return lines up, and a sudden attraction to an old family friend makes for even further complications.

I should have gone into this realizing it's primarily a straight love story,  when I really was surprised by the straight factor and how heavily the romance is involved in the plot. I read the back summary as more of a family drama than anything else, and then was kind of disappointed when it wasn't as much that (on top of the misconception that it was queer, idk where that thought came from). 

Christa is abrasive in a way that's mostly earned, though it sort of felt like she caved to what her family wanted far too easily for someone as fucked up by the media as she had been. But that probably just goes to show more the relationship she has with her family than her actual will. The love interest, Nate, felt kind of generic in a kind way, and it really felt like neither of them tried to deny the mutual attraction, so the marketing of trying to deny it doesn't really fit, but I'm just being nitpick.

The family drama and her father's whole deal was a lot more interesting to me, although I was kind of disappointed (again) in how that all ended. Again, I probably just went into this with the wrong expectations, because the writing was funny/entertaining enough and the characters were interesting. So it's really just me, but this was altogether an okay book.

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

You might recognize this name from when I read A Thousand Ships last year, and I was so impressed that when I saw this one I knew I had to read it too.

Following the birth and subsequent life (and death) of three people who's fate are intertwined, Stone Blind is about Medusa, the goddess who cursed her, Athene, and the man who murdered her, Perseus. Medusa was not born a monster, and whether she became or died as one depends on your definition of the word. 

I adore Haynes' writing, I think it's as fierce and unapologetic as the characters she writes about. Her familiarity with Greek myth is very apparent, and she seems to handle them in a way that makes you stare directly into the heart of them, good, bad, and horrific. The lines she draws through all the narrators, connecting every person in the story to one another, is both clear and sometimes surprising in a very heart wrenching kind of way. Myths are full of violence and assault and Haynes tackles it in a way that's hard to describe, because she's not showing the graphic horror of it, but she tells you frankly that it's happened and works through the emotional turmoil of the aftermath with grace.

It's such a strange world with strange rules and characters that she has made seem like her own, a new telling with a tragedy that many people are already familiar with. There's also quite a bit of humor that bites like a snake, not deadly but still sharp.

Overall I don't know if I likes this or A Thousand Ships better, but both are definitely worth checking out if you're into Greek mythology.

A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock

I was enthralled by this book from the moment I read the blurb that it was Jeff Vandermeer meets Mary Shelley, and oh my god did it hold up.

Gregor and Simon are two strange Victorian gentleman, a botanist and a taxidermist respectively, hiding their relationship in the greenhouse manor they call home, intruded upon only by their housekeeper, Jennifer. When Gregor receives a mycelium wonder in the mail, he embarks on an endeavor to create new life, dragging Simon along with him. As their creation, Chloe gains new sentient awareness and physical skill, they have to grapple with the morality of what they've created-- and what lengths they will go to protect her.

Was I absolutely captivated by this book the entire time I was reading it? Yes. Did I have messed up plant monster dreams about it when I finished? Also yes.

Medlock's writing is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde, full of clever wordplay and amusing observation. The perspective moves between Gregor, Simon, and Jennifer, all of whom have very different and very complicated relationships with Chloe. They all grow and change almost as much as Chloe does, locked away in Grimfern greenhouse trying to keep one another safe from the outside world and each other. They're also all queer-- Gregor and Simon with their balanced if strange relationship, and Jennifer grieving the girl she loved, who becomes the messy and complicated base for Chloe.

The botany terms weren't overwhelming by any means, and the science of it was that perfect balance of just vague enough and just specific enough to seem both plausible and outlandish. The created world lent to this fantastical creation, where all of it felt believably horrific and fantastically magical all at once. 

This was a fantastic read that I will be thinking about for the rest of my life.

Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

It took me a while to get to this book because I knew I had to be in the right mindset for it, and after reading A Botanical Daughter I figured it'd just sort a slide right into the weird.

Picking up after the events of Annihilation, Authority follows John Rodriguez-- or as he prefers to be addressed, Control, as the new director of Southern Reach, the facility responsible for monitoring Area X. The biologist has returned, but as Control tries to figure out what happened to her in Area X he soon realizes the strangeness of it all lingers in the very office itself. Plagued by distrust and unsettled by everything about the plan, Authority it about recognizing that everything runs deeper than you think, and nothing can be trusted.

Confession time: I'm still about 3/4 of the way through this book, so I'm writing this review way too early. But I wanted it included in this batch for the month, so at the very least I'll finish it in the next few days and come back to edit this after if I need to. But it's as unsettling and strange as Annihilation was, but from a more militaristic and banal office setting. Which somehow makes it worse, because nature can be strange and dangerous and fucked up, but civilization I supposed to be controlled.

Control is a strange narrator, waffling between events at the facility as he tries to sort out the former director's office and thought process and his own weird history and  dynasty of his mother and grandfather, who both work in higher sects of military intelligence. 

Vandermeer is so good at writing weird science fiction that crawls slowly from "that's a little weird but alright" to "fully what the actual fuck" terror. The world he's created with this series is vast and fully incomprehensible, haunted by both the previous story and how little we and the characters actually seem to know. The littlest things echo deep, the approaching end calling back to seemingly meaningless moments with such force that your surprise grips you by the throat.

I already know there's gonna be some fucked up twist I won't see coming, and am honestly very excited and also terrified to reach the end.

And now I'm off to Europe! Wish me lots of galivanting and reading on trains!

Literary recommendation: I was just talking to someone about Howl's Moving Castle by Dianna Wynn Jones

Media recommendation: I've been listening to Kacey Musgrave's Deeper Well album a lot lately