Bookish Thoughts

JY Yang is an absolute master at spinning out an epic tale in a very short space. This book is barely 100 pages long, yet it covers so much ground. It was surprisingly sad and incredibly complicated and continued the series' pattern of refusing to conform to a pattern. The emperor has finally died and the one who has spent half her life working to bring it about finds herself alone in a bar, contemplating her life. Well, not quite alone. She has an audience of one, the reader, to whom she tells her tale over drinks. This story was deft and incredible and I wish Yang were planning to write anything more in this world. I'm eagerly awaiting their next book, which won't be out until 2022.

The coolest and most unexpected thing about the Tensorate series is the way JY Yang plays with form and structure. The first book was a compressed bildungsroman, following Akeha across forty years as he came to terms with his relationship with his mother. The second was a very focused piece on grief and new beginnings, taking place over only a few days. And the third book is a mystery told in epistolary form. When an accident wipes everyone at a government research facility, a mid-level investigator is assigned her very first lead case. It quickly becomes apparent that she's been given this case in an attempt to make it go away: the government knows what happened and they don't want the truth to get out. The narrative alternates between the investigator's official reports and private diary, with letter and interview transcripts included to round it all out. And it's really amazing what Yang is able to accomplish in such a short story. At this point, I'm official...

This one so obviously comes after The Black Tides of Heaven  I'm not sure why they were initially marketed as "read in any order". Though it could be because they are very different books. While the first charts the twin's journey from childhood to adulthood (from the point of view of Akeha), this is a much more contained story that takes place over just a few days when Mokoya is about 40 years old. As the story opens, Mokoya is still deep in grief due to the death of her daughter four years prior. She has fled from her old life as a Prophet and the wife of the Head Abbot, unable to deal with the pain of her old life. Now she's out in the desert with a small team hunting a naga that seems to be heading for the city where Akeha lives. There's a bunch of action in this book, along with some fun political intrigue. But at it's heart, this is a story about grief and letting go and moving on. It's about taking back control of your life and finding new w...

A couple of years ago, JY Yang burst on to the SFF scene, releasing two books in the same day. Though everyone initially said that the two could be read in any order, fans quickly reached the consensus that this one came first. Which makes sense to me. It starts on the day the twins are born and outlines the major events in their lives as they grow. This book actually focuses on Akeha, which took me a bit to figure out. In this world, all children are considered gender neutral, and they choose to become male or female (or neither) as part of their coming of age. Thus, all children are referred to as "they". And in a book told from a third-person limited perspective about twins who are close enough to share a telepathic connection...well I had to do some mental gymnastics to figure out whether any given pronoun referred to Akeha, Mokoya, or the two of them together. But after a few chapters I settled in and the rest of the story was easy to follow. (It became even easier onc...

This year tor.com has started releasing bundles of short fiction, free to download if you sign up for their newsletter. All the stories in the collection were eventually published on their website, but it was nice to get them bundled together and have access a few days before everyone else. Even if I didn't actually finish the collection until after they were all released. It's nice to be able to download these to my work computer and read a story over the course of a day (my work is such that I often have 15-20 minute chunks of time waiting for data to load or simulations to run, and it's a good time to get some reading in). Some of the stories were better than others, and most were excellent. They all used fantasy elements to tackle common relationships in new ways. A chef is trying to recreate his mother's signature recipe after her death, and it takes an encounter with his abusive sister to help him let go of the past. A man is dealing with the imminent death of h...