adult

Pumpkin – Ines Johnson

by

Pumpkin CoverSeries: Cindermama, #1
First Published: 10th March, 2015
Genre: Romance
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK

Pumpkin is a single mother, who has given up on fairytale happy endings. Manny is from a rich family and running for mayor. When they meet, Manny knows Pumpkin isn’t the one, because all his family have a gift where they see a golden aura around their true love. But whatever the magic may be saying about it, both of them have other ideas.

This is a contemporary romance retelling of Cinderella, with light magical elements. Basically the ability to see auras taken to a more magical level. I liked the idea of subverting destined magical soulmates, and that is the general direction of the book. Love is something that takes work and there are no guarantees because the golden aura said (or didn’t say) so.

The writing was generally conversational and easy to breeze through. There are some things that worked well, like Pumpkin having to realise she couldn’t force people to be like a movie script. Some of her people predictions are very wrong, because she’s more caught up in stories than reality. The mayoral campaign worked well enough as a plot to tie things together.

My main issue is it wasn’t quite the book I expected it to be. As it starred a single mother, I wasn’t expecting so much hate to be piled on single mothers. Pumpkin is only okay because she’s the idealised single mother, who has a day job, and hasn’t dated since her husband walked out. Her cousins (the ugly step-sisters of the tale) are horrible welfare queens who take food stamps when they don’t need them, and purposefully try to have children by lots of men to get child support. It’s frequently laid on how terrible they are. Empathy is for Pumpkin, not single mothers as a whole.

In Pumpkin’s own words about welfare: “I think the flaw with social programs is that the poor start to believe they can’t do for themselves without it and the rich believe the poor can’t act without their help.” This doesn’t match my experiences at all, where it’s more that poor people wish they didn’t have to rely on it, and rich people wish they could stop paying out because they’d have more money if they let people starve. But the narrative proves Pumpkin right. After all, people collecting food stamps are like her horrible cousins.

It turns out the golden aura is because Manny and his family are gypsies. There are certainly times when Roma people might reclaim that word, but a book where it’s the source of fairytale magic, because Roma are like magical fairytale people, is not one of those times. There wasn’t any other cultural connection, outside of golden auras and fortune telling.

I can see this romance might appeal to some readers, given its fairytale themes. For me, I couldn’t really get past the policing of what makes someone a respectable poor person.

[A copy of this book was received from the publisher for review purposes]

Dust on the Wing – Parker Foye

by

Dust on the Wing CoverCollection: Solitary Travelers
First Published: 14th March, 2016
Genre: Science Fiction Romance / Novella
Available: Out of Print

This book is part of a collection of novellas called “Solitary Travelers”. I was interested because they’re asexual romances and/or aromantic relationships. This particular title does have some sexual content.

I found this book difficult to read. Tam is asexual and is being pressured by his partner to do more than he’s comfortable doing. It paints an unhealthy relationship, as Tam feels pressured, and his partner feels like he’s being denied something. It also doesn’t feel like there’s much emotional connection between the characters. It’s about power, with Tam having to constantly be on his guard to avoid being forced into situations he doesn’t want. This wasn’t just my feeling about it, as the book later confirms that the partner is basically interested in Tam being physically attractive, and Tam has to move quickly to “escape the promises his body made”.

It was a relief that the opening is the last time they see each other. Most of it is about transporting a young woman to another planet. There wasn’t a whole lot of character interaction, as Tam doesn’t want to speak to anyone. I’d hoped for a bit more of a friendship between them, but they never really break through Tam’s dislike of being around people.

My expectation for the book was a feel-good story with a happy ending. If the book had only been the transportation part, it would have succeeded at that. Not in a perfect way, as it was a little prone to infodumps at the start, and could do with more development of the character relationships. But it would have passed the time. Unfortunately, the romance was not a happily-ever-after situation. It reinforced some of the negative things asexuals face in relationships with sexual people (you’re tempting people if you’re pretty and you’re denying things to people that are rightfully theirs). I wanted them to break up, and it left me feeling uncomfortable with the book as a whole.

[A copy of this book was received from the publisher for review purposes]

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories – Ken Liu

by

Paper Menagerie CoverFirst Published: 8th March, 2016
Genre: Speculative Fiction / Short Story Collection
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK | IndieBound

Ken Liu has been nominated for, and won, many genre awards for his short fiction. He’s also a translator, which is discussed briefly in the preface.

The collection starts with short stories, with the novelettes and novellas towards the end. This was a good choice, as it gives the reader a chance to read through several stories to get a feel for the range. The opening story, “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species”, was particularly imaginative. It’s written like an article and covers a range of alien species and their books. I liked how they all tied together at the end, with the books of the final species.

“Good Hunting” was one I didn’t expect to enjoy at first, as it looked like a classic science versus magic story. The construction of a new railroad starts to cause magic to disappear, leaving a trainee demon hunter out of a job, and a hulijing unable to transform. But as the technology veers off into steampunk territory, the story takes another turn. It ended up being one of my favourites.

I enjoyed most of the stories, though a few didn’t really work for me. “The Perfect Match”, where an automated assistant called Tilly controls people’s lives, was rather predictable and about as exciting as Tilly’s personality. The funny side is Microsoft chose that moment to suggest I downloaded Windows 10 and they’d give me a new personal assistant. It’s one of those things where the idea is certainly based on reality, but the execution didn’t take it anywhere new.

It’s generally a strong collection, with reoccurring themes of Chinese history, the experience of being an immigrant in America, and control/surveillance. However, there is a tendency for the work to be rather heteronormative. Not in the kind of way that is openly anti anyone who doesn’t fit that, but in the kind of way where anyone else is unlikely to appear in the stories. Men and women date, men and women marry and have one or two children, people broadly follow binary gender roles, and so on. It’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t be so obvious reading any one of the stories in isolation, but does stand out when they’re collected together.

Readers should note some stories have detailed torture descriptions and violence against women is a common theme. There’s a lot of text in italics in some stories, which can be difficult to read.

[A copy of this book was received from the publisher for review purposes]

Sugar Scars – Travis Norwood

by

Sugar Scars CoverFirst Published: 28th July, 2015
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic / Novel
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK

Sugar is a type 1 diabetic. When a virus kills most of the world’s population, she hoards all the insulin she can find. But insulin can’t be stored forever. To survive, she’s going to have to make her own.

There will be some discussion of sexual assault in this review, though no graphic descriptions.

The basic premise is something that appealed to me. It’s a different kind of post-apocalyptic survival, as it deals with how to get something that requires a society to produce. This part is handled well enough. Sugar’s diabetes is something she constantly has to remember, by monitoring her blood sugar and food intake. Producing insulin also isn’t something she can do alone. It requires a community. Though there are people who use society’s collapse to do bad things, most of the survivors are simply trying to live their lives and help each other out. This is realistic, as most people don’t actually turn into serial killers the moment a disaster happens.

The issues I had weren’t with the main plotline of trying to set up insulin production. Communities that band together and help their sick and disabled members is something I’m down with, and I wish happened more in post-apocalyptic work. The problem was everything else.

Sugar does not act like an older teenager. She acts like a child. Though her voice does mature somewhat over time, the start was a mismatch between what the text says she is (a nineteen-year-old who has been in and out of various foster homes, and living on her own since she was eighteen) and her behaviour (maybe nine or ten years old at most). At first, I thought this might be purposeful. She might be non-neurotypical. But as it went on, I changed my mind, because of the gender binary stuff.

And there’s a lot of gender binary stuff going on. Women all want babies, even the ones who say they don’t. Men are all lust machines. Sugar thinks her first relationship was as an equal and she never relied on her boyfriend, yet what is shown is her struggling with basic tasks when he isn’t there to do them. He did manly man stuff, because he was the provider. She cooked and looked after the house. There’s a constant repeating of how small and tiny Sugar is (she’s a woman of average size) that I’ve come to associate with this sort of attitude. It’s a way to portray women as being like children. Which with Sugar’s immaturity, combined together in a package that says women really need menfolk around to look after them.

Non-white people are mostly there as background decoration, or for Sugar to sweep in and rescue. It’d be nice to say no gay people appeared, but one of the characters has a backstory of being raped by his father as a child, and by other boys of a similar age. Gay people are rapists and paedophiles. There are no counterexamples to this.

That’s touching on just a few of the bigger issues. There’s basically a layer of bigotry over every aspect of the book. The author’s worldview shines through clearly, and it’s a worldview that hates people like me. I was not particularly surprised that the author’s note says he aspires to be like Orson Scott Card. For anyone who loves Card and his politics, this might be a great book. For anyone else, it’s one to avoid.

[A copy of this book was received from the publisher for review purposes]

You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories – Andrew Kozma

by

Book CoverFirst Published: 8th February, 2016
Genre: Speculative Fiction / Short Story Collection
Available: Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Smashwords

This is a mini-collection of four short stories. They’re generally dark stories, with some violence, though the focus is more on the atmosphere. The theme that really ties them together is helplessness. The protagonists can do very little about what’s happening around them. They can observe and they can speak, but they can’t change what’s happening.

The stories were reasonable, though I think they’d have worked better in a collection with a few longer pieces mixed in for contrast.

 

You Have Been Murdered

Told in second person, you’re a woman who has just been murdered. But as you’re still aware and able to move, you’re not going to let that stop you from holding a dinner party. I’d have liked to see the mystery angle of this one developed. It’s very likely the murderer was one of the dinner guests. It would have been interesting to know a little more about the guests, in order to make a guess about which one it might have been. As it is, the end wasn’t as strong as the beginning.

 

Teller of Tales

In a post-apocalyptic future, water is scarce. Susan is a child at the Annex, which grows its own food and is generally prosperous. Some strangers arrive seeking sanctuary, and Susan discovers the tales she’s been told are not all as they seem. This isn’t a story where a child can miraculously save the day. Which is realistic, if somewhat tragic.

 

Breach of Contract

A man represents an oil company, who’ve been renting land on a reservation. When the oil stops being delivered, he’s sent in to find out why. I liked some of the imagery in this, such as the giant reed. I wasn’t so hot on the Native American representation, as it consists of a man called Chokfi (who I’m assuming is Rabbit). That makes a change from yet another Coyote, but it doesn’t change that he was more mystical mouthpiece than character. Native Americans represent a mystical force bringing justice, rather than people, which doesn’t sit well with me.

 

The Trouble-Men

The world is ending, via many freak occurrences. One of these is the Trouble-Men, who visit a man trying to survive. I liked this one the best. It has a creepy atmosphere and the reveal of why the Trouble-Men are there is paced well for the story length.

[A copy of this book was received from the author for review purposes]