The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. I have always had mixed feelings about Kowal’s work. She’s a decent writer and her contributions to the Writing Excuses podcast are usually quite insightful. But I find her books and stories middle-of-the-road, and she has a Middle America sensibility that rivals Bujold’s (many of whose books I am very fond of, as they have spark). But she always feels like a writer whose work I should enjoy; it’s light, clever and feminist, and written by someone who is literate and sensitive. I picked up this novel hoping it would be a light, engaging read. Well, it was light all right – the 800+ pages passed in a blur. One problem was that the central conceit of the book – that a meteorite strike in the 1950s sends the Earth into a runaway greenhouse effect and it becomes clear that space colonisation is the only way forward – I found unconvincing. It was never clear to me why space colonisation was a necessity or why Mars or the Moon might be more inhabitable than a hothouse Earth. The characters were uniformly bland Middle Americans, it felt like the women kept grouphugging each other, and the protagonist, Dr Elma York’s self-conscious Southernisms (‘bless your heart’) were grating. I found it worthy and, well, uninteresting; while Dr York’s near constant sex with her near-but-not-quite-perfect husband made me cringe. At the same time, I did zip through it at record speed so there is that.
The second was Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman. This is set in the same world as Hartman’s Seraphina and Shadow Scale of which the first was very enjoyable and the second was extremely poor. Tess is Seraphina’s disgraced half-sister who embarks upon a sort of roadtrip, or escape from herself, to come to a deeper understanding of herself and the world around her. There are brilliant, compassionate bits in it; I was particularly touched by her relationship with a senile old man, and several tortured parent-child relationships in which eventually it was possible to acknowledge both hurt and understanding. Really good stuff.
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik was a different beast altogether. Also very light reading, it’s by the author of Uprooted from a few years ago. That earlier novel I really loved until the last fifth or so, when I thought it fell flat with the thuddiest thud imaginable. Spinning Silver doesn’t have that flaw. It’s a fantastic fairy story about three young women in a country like early modern Lithuania – a Jewish moneylender, a Christian peasant, and a duke’s daughter, who get caught up in magic and terror, in pogroms and fairy folk, a winter that never ends, and a fire demon that threatens existence. Each character was fantastic, the love story ws superb, the sense of danger was profound, and even the extended action sequence in the third act worked. I really enjoyed it and I loved the Jewish angle to it, so much less ineptly handled (to my admittedly untutored eyes) than in The Calculating Stars. This was by some margin the best of the three.