★★☆☆☆ A pandemic story

Conflation

Seanan McGuire

Conflation is one of those story in which Seanan McGuire extrapolates some current trend to a disastrous apocalyptic future. It is obviously a riff on the Covid pandemic. But it strays so far from reality as to be, to me, very unsatisfying.

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★★★★☆ More tragic than funny

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor Adam Kay ** spoiler alert ** I was told that This is Going to Hurt was a very funny book that would make me laugh out loud. It is that. However, when I reached the end I felt I had just finished reading a tragedy. In the United Kingdom, the government runs hospitals and directly employs doctors. This is different from the healthcare systems in the USA and Canada, with which I am most familiar. Here doctors and hospitals are small and big businesses -- the government's role is mostly to administer insurance programs that pay the healthcare businesses. (The USA does have one direct government-run healthcare systems that I know of -- the Veteran's Administration.) At the beginning of This is Going to Hurt Adam Kay is finishing medical school, and decides to become an obstetrician-gynecologist (OB/GYN), a field known among English medical students as "brats and twats". He is also newly married. He ...

★★★★☆ Hanging out with Death

Reaper Man Terry Pratchett Death (the character, not the phenomenon) is the only real hero of Terry Pratchett 's Discworld . Unlike every other Discworld character (with Granny Weatherwax and Lord Vetinari as sporadic but unreliable exceptions) Death is relentlessly competent and by his lights ethical. He's also a kind of cool guy to hang out with. Already he has developed a personality. Although Reaper Man is only the second book in the Death subseries , we readers have seen quite a lot of him. In a series in which violence plays as important a role as Discworld , and in which in addition there is a specific character who shows up every time someone dies, you can safely bet that Death is going to have at least a cameo in each Discworld novel. Not everyone loves Death. There is a body of people -- well, not people, best just call them entities -- called the Auditors of Reality who take it on themselves to make sure the universe runs as it ...

★★★★☆ The formidable Emily Wilde

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★★★★☆ What are these people?

Red Side Story Jasper Fforde When I reviewed Shades of Grey , the first novel in Jasper Fforde 's Shades of Grey series, I asked Although I referred to Eddie as a young man, it is not clear to me what the people of the Collective are. I think they are more-or-less human. ... However, in some ways they behave like automata. These are puzzles that I hope Jasper Fforde will clear up in subsequent novels in the Shades of Grey series. Now I'm patting myself on the back, because that is indeed what Red Side Story is about. Or so say I. You might think it is about other things -- a love story, a fight to survive, a battle for justice, a cycle race -- and you would not be wrong. Red Side Story contains multitudes. Shades of Grey ended in a flurry of revelations about the Collective. Eddie, Jane and Courtland Gamboge visited the abandoned town of High Saffron, where Jane revealed that all the people supposedly sent to Reboot were in fact sen...

★★★☆☆ Mostly interesting for the juggling lore

Lord Valentine's Castle Robert Silverberg I remember that I was a grad student in biochemistry when I read Robert Silverberg 's Lord Valentine's Castle . I was a grad student from 1976 - 1983, so I must have read it not long after it came out in 1979. I read it because I am and always have been a science fiction fan, and Silverberg has a BIG reputation -- I had read praise of him from many of my favorite authors. So I got this novel and read it. I never read another book by Silverberg , which probably tells you everything you need to know about my opinion. What's the book about? Well, the publisher's blurb begins thus Valentine, a wanderer who knows nothing except his name, finds himself on the fringes of a great city, and joins a troupe of jugglers and acrobats; gradually, he remembers that he is the Coronal Valentine, executive ruler of the vast world of Majipoor, and all its peoples, human and otherwise... This plot summary reminds me of the following qu...

★★★★☆ Emily Wilde is terrifying

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales Heather Fawcett Everyone seems to think that Heather Fawcett 's Emily Wilde novels are a Cozy Fantasy series. I don't see it. I'm not saying you're wrong, if you think that. No one but you can tell you how you feel, and if Emily gives you a cozy feeling, then she just does, and there is no more to be said about it. But I just don't see it. In Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries Emily tortures a child, then defeats a terrifying fairy king in part by chopping off her own finger with an axe. In Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands she infiltrates a fairy kingdom and gets rid of the ruler by poisoning her. She has a familiar called Shadow who is a monstrous Black Hound. I'm not going to tell you what she does in Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales , except to say that she doesn't dial it back. She terrifies even her romantic interest Wendell. He is not afraid she will harm him, but that she will, by...

★★★☆☆ Historical Fantasy of India and England

City of Stolen Magic Nazneen Ahmed Pathak Nazneen Ahmed Pathak 's City of Stolen Magic begins in a small village in what was then India and is now (I believe) Bangladesh. Chompa and her mother Amina live there. They are witches, and that, Amina knows, is a dangerous thing to be. Chompa, a rebellious kid, is difficult to convince, but learns the hard way when her Ammi is kidnapped. Her mother's old friend Mohsin shows up to take Chompa away to the city of Dacca (modern Dhaka). Chompa and Mohsin hear rumors that Ammi is being held in London, and make arrangements to travel there. London is the City of Stolen Magic named in the title. As explained in an extensive Author's Note, City of Stolen Magic , although a fantasy, is firmly rooted in the real history of India and Britain. The main villain is The Company, instantly recognizable as the East India Company , whose business was the economic exploitation of India by Britain. In City of Stolen Magic...

★★★★☆ Stevie is what I love about the Truly Devious books

Nine Liars Maureen Johnson I will begin with a confession: I don't really like murder mystery novels. What I mean by that is, I don't like them more than any other type of novel. When I read a mystery, I read it as I would any other novel -- that is, as a story, with characters and a plot. The mystery is only interesting to me as the plot of this particular novel. I don't care if the author follows the strangely arbitrary rules that mysteries are supposed to adhere to. (Some of them, indeed, I find tiresome, such as the scene in the end where the sleuth gathers all the possible suspects in a room together and reveals all. I will never forgive Agatha Christie for inflicting that monstrosity on us.) The mystery to me is no more than a plot. I want it to be a good plot -- I don't really care if it's a good mystery, in the way that mystery fanatics judge such things. I do, however, like certain mystery novels. That includes Maureen Johnson 's Truly Devious serie...

★★★★☆ Don't mind working without a net

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★★★☆☆ Not quite what I expected

Wings of War: The World War II Fighter Plane That Saved the Allies and the Believers Who Made It Fly David Fairbank White, Margaret Stanback White Wings of War was not quite what I expected. Based on the publisher's blurb, I thought it would be a chronicle of the science and engineering behind a crucial war-winning weapon, the P-51 Mustang fighter. Thus, I was expecting something like Richard Rhodes ' The Making of the Atomic Bomb , or Andrew Hodges ' Alan Turing: The Enigma , which tells the story of how England secretly broke Nazi codes, or Chance and Design by Alan Hodgkin , which in part describes his work developing radar targeting devices for use in aircraft. Authors David Fairbank White and Margaret Stanback White (whom I will henceforth refer to as "the Whites") completely succeeded in convincing me that the P-51 Mustang (why was an airplane named after a feral horse? -- OK, not important...) is on a par with Bletchley Park and radar as an innovation ...

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