Charlaine Harris’s alternative history/urban fantasy GUNNIE ROSE series shifts to a new setting in this third book in the series, The Russian Cage, onCharlaine Harris’s alternative history/urban fantasy GUNNIE ROSE series shifts to a new setting in this third book in the series, The Russian Cage, one that was foreshadowed by the ending of the prior book, A Longer Fall. Lizbeth Rose, who makes her living as a hired gun or “gunnie,” receives an intentionally cryptic letter from her younger half-sister, Felicia. For the past year, Felicia has been living in what once was California, Oregon and Washington but is now the Holy Russian Empire, ruled over by a young, married Tsar Alexei — certainly a better fate for him than his actual historical fate of being assassinated at age thirteen by Soviet revolutionaries. He’s surviving his hemophilia with the help of magical blood transfusions from Grigori Rasputin’s descendants, which include Felicia (in fact, Lizbeth is also a grandchild of Rasputin, though she hides that fact from the Russians, telling them that she and Felicia share a mother rather than their Russian father).
Reading between the lines of Felicia’s letter, Lisbeth realizes that her on-and-off-again lover Eli, a Russian noble as well as a gifted magician or “grigori,” has been tossed into prison for political reasons. Felicia thinks that Lizbeth can do something to bust Eli out of jail, and Lizbeth can’t wait to try. Apparently finding out that Eli’s in trouble makes Lizbeth realize that her feelings for Eli are stronger than she’s previously been willing to admit, even to herself.
A four-day train ride later, she’s in the HRE’s capital of San Diego, getting the lay of the land from Felicia, Eli’s mother Veronika, and his friend Felix (who we met in A Longer Fall). Felicia’s life is more complicated — and dangerous — than Lizbeth had imagined, giving her qualms of guilt for sending Felicia to the HRE. There’s a conspiracy to take Tsar Alexei down, and Eli and the tsar’s other supporters are in the crosshairs. Eli’s family isn’t a whole lot of help: his older stepbrothers are antagonistic to him, and his mother and sisters are mostly helpless (1940s-era Russian society isn’t particularly encouraging of noblewomen being tough and resourceful, unless you’re a grigori). And no one seems to have any idea what crime Eli has been charged with. But Eli’s friend Felix, though oddly antagonistic toward Lizbeth, seems anxious to help get Eli out of jail, and Felix has some particularly interesting magical powers, as well as the beginnings of a plan.
Eli’s family and friends are intriguing characters, more complex than I initially would have guessed, and Charlaine Harris does a competent job of creating a believable Russian society in exile in western America, beset by political conspiracies and plots to unseat a tsar who is viewed as weak. The tsar’s wife Caroline, a Scandinavian princess, proves surprisingly useful to Lizbeth and Felix in their efforts to bring the royals’ attention to Eli’s plight.
There are a couple of notable breakdowns in plot logic, one involving Eli’s prison guard, a woman named Hubble who is supposedly a “null,” impervious to magical spells … except it ends up that she’s not, for no particularly good reason, and that seems to be simply an oversight by Harris. The other relates to a direction given by the tsar to Eli at the end, which simply didn’t make much sense from a plot perspective. It felt more like the author simply needed an excuse to move Eli in a certain direction, and perhaps that was the best reason she could come up with.
The plot of The Russian Cage takes some time to really get rolling, but the details, as they unfold, are intricate and interesting enough to keep the reader engaged, and the bloodstained climax toward the end is gripping. The dénouement in the last few chapters is far tamer, but it does provide a reasonably satisfying wind-up to the story of Lizbeth and Eli … at least for now.
The Russian Cage is a fun adventure, less weighed down by the slavery and social issues that darkened A Longer Fall, not to mention the constant references to eating and sex that bogged down the pacing of that book. The GUNNIE ROSE series is worth reading if you have an interest in Old West-flavored urban fantasy, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but isn’t entirely. You do need to start with the first book, An Easy Death, and read the series in order.
Final review, first posted on FantasyLiterature.com (along with my co-reviewer Bill's review):
In A History of What Comes Next, Sylvain Neuvel recasts history with a science fictional element, inserting a chain of mysterious mother-daughter teams who manipulate key events and powerful men through the ages to try to get the human race to reach toward the stars. Other than taking humans to space, “before Evil comes and kills them all,” the purpose of these women, the Kibsu, is pretty murky, even to themselves; most of their original knowledge, including about their own origins, has been lost. But they have an apparently inviolable rule that there can never be more than three Kibsu living at one time … and that many, not for long. And they know that they need to avoid drawing attention to themselves — difficult to do when they have some unusual physical and mental attributes, including that each daughter looks like a clone of her mother. They especially need to evade an equally shadowy group of men they call the Trackers, who are mercilessly hunting the Kibsu and killing them.
The main plotline follows two of the Kibsu women, Sarah and her daughter Mia. In 1945, Mia, who is then nineteen, is tasked by her mother with helping German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun to escape from Nazi Germany and get him into the hands of the Americans, to help them develop their rocketry science and bring humanity closer to space travel. Neuvel delves into the details of von Braun’s escapades during the waning days of World War II, helped along by Mia, who masquerades as his niece. This part of the plot takes almost a third of the book, too long for my taste, though it’s broken up by flashbacks that tell above lives of some of Mia’s Kibsu ancestors in ancient and medieval times.
After the war ends, Mia and Sarah make their way to the USSR and elsewhere, all in the service of their ultimate goal of fostering space travel. As Mia falls in love with Billie, a black girl living in Moscow, she has more difficulty accepting the Kibsu rules passed down to her and the way she’s expected to live her life.
Neuvel has an interesting gimmick here, following actual history, particularly the early days of the space race, quite closely, but weaving the Kibsu into it — which sheds new light on every historical event, and highlights the way women have been treated as secondary citizens through much of history. Personally, I also learned a lot about WWII and postwar rocketry history, and about monsters like Lavrentiy Beria, the influential Soviet politician who moonlighted as a sexual predator and (very likely) murderer. But WWII history isn’t my primary literary interest, so my interest flagged after a while, especially since the science fiction aspects relating to the Kibsu and the Tracker are disclosed only in small dribbles, and the flashes of humor that helped to make the THEMIS FILES books so appealing are absent here. The flashbacks were the most intriguing parts of A History of What Comes Next, but there are only a very limited number of those.
There are also a few chapters from the Tracker point of view, which tend to raise more questions than answers. Both groups, the Kibsu and the Tracker, are ruthless killers in pursuit of their goals, so it’s hard to really sympathize with anyone here. Complete answers about these people are never given, and the novel ends with the overall plot entirely unresolved. I was deeply disappointed at the time I finished the book (I really should have taken better notice of the “#1 in a new series” blurb). Neuvel also uses a quirky method of showing dialogue between characters, shades of the style he used in Sleeping Giants, but it fit better and made more sense there than it does here.
With the benefit of a little distance since I finished reading it, I’ve grown more forgiving of this book’s shortcomings, and more impressed with the amount of historic research Neuvel put into A History of What Comes Next. I don’t expect to ever love this series as much as I did the THEMIS FILES trilogy, but I’m quite curious about seeing where Neuvel goes with the next book in this new series.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. And thanks to Nataliya for the buddy read. We’ll have to try it again with a better book. :)
Initial post: I’ve got the ARC from NetGalley, cheers! This is the author of the Sleeping Giants trilogy, so my hopes are very high....more
Charlaine Harris’s GUNNIE ROSE series has already merged Old West, Russian magicA soft 3 stars here. Review first posted on www.FantasyLiterature.com:
Charlaine Harris’s GUNNIE ROSE series has already merged Old West, Russian magicians (called “grigori” in a nod to Rasputin), and alternative history; the setting is mid-twentieth century North America, in which the United States has fractured into multiple nations, including the “Holy Russian Empire,” with Tsar Alexei at its head, taking over what used to be California and Oregon. In A Longer Fall, the second book in the series, the pre-civil rights era deep South gets pulled into the mix.
Lizbeth Rose, a 19-year-old gunnie (gunslinger), is traveling by train with her new security crew from Texoma, the Texas region Lizbeth calls home, to Louisiana. Their crew of five is in charge of transporting and protecting a crate that contains … well, they don’t know, but it’s vastly important for some reason, and apparently everybody and their dog wants what’s in that crate. It’s all nice and boring — other than a gunfight that’s over as quickly as it began — until the train blows up. Their train car tumbles sideways, people with knives and guns and smoke bombs attack, and Lizbeth and her crew try desperately to save the precious crate from being stolen.
Now Lizbeth is stuck in the small town of Sally, Louisiana, trying to figure out how to complete her mission when all of the other members of the Lucky (or not) Crew are dead or injured. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, she immediately runs into Ilya (Eli) Savarov, the handsome grigori that she met and clicked with in the first book, An Easy Death … thus enabling Lizbeth and readers to enjoy a side of romance along with the grimmer task of tracking down the missing crate. But Eli’s own mission in Sally overlaps with Lizbeth’s in ways that Eli can’t or won’t explain.
Lizbeth’s task is made more difficult by the townspeople’s racism and sexism. While blacks are no longer slaves in Dixie, there’s segregation and widespread prejudice. Women are expected to fall within a certain mold; Lizbeth, to her deep disgust, finds that in order to be accepted in hotels and restaurants she has to wear a dress and nice shoes rather than her jeans and boots, and hide her guns in a purse or under her skirt.
I felt like A Longer Fall had a lot of potential that it didn’t quite reach. While the novel starts with, quite literally, a bang, the whole middle section of the story dragged badly, with Lizbeth and Eli just going from place to place, eating at restaurants (southern food impresses Lizbeth and she spends an undue amount of time describing her various meals), and having mostly-pointless meetings and lots of sex. What seems to be a friends-with-benefits relationship ends up much more fraught with feelings, but it’s never entirely clear why a deeper attachment has developed between Eli and Lizbeth.
Once I hit the three-quarter mark the plot started progressing more rapidly, but the ending carries its own set of problems. A “white Savior” theme that had been simmering since the mid-point of A Longer Fall reached full boil, complete with what’s arguably a resurrection scene. If that was intentional symbolism, it was oddly done, particularly since there’s such an incongruence between a public message of brotherly love and nasty private behavior. And after this brief pause for a rousing rendition of “All You Need is Love,” the plot jumps straight back to killing people. It’s cynical and muddled, and prior plot and character development wasn’t enough to fully justify the final twist. In fact, a lot of the key plot turns needed more foundation-building, fleshing out details and exploring motivations more deeply, to make them really work. As it is, the plot relies too much on coincidences and a critical bit of deus ex machina action to move it along.
While the main plot is wrapped up in the end (although I can’t help but wonder how permanent the magic-driven resolution will be), the romantic relationship is left hanging. It’s seemingly dead but since there’s at least one more book pending in this series, it’s safe to assume Eli will be back again. I’m still interested in seeing where the series goes next — the Holy Russian Empire is my guess — but my expectations are tempered.
One final comment: It’s never clear what the title of A Longer Fall has reference to, and when I contacted Harris on GR to ask, she demurred (“I’m having too much fun reading all the guesses”). Since I haven’t actually seen any guesses about this title online, even after searching, I’m hoping some other readers of this book will share their thoughts and ideas!
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC for review!
Content notes: gritty and violent, with torture and murder; sex scenes are non-explicit; a couple of F-bombs....more
Upping my rating from 4.5 to 5 stars on further thought. This really is an excellent Tor novella, and my favorite of the novellas nominated for the NeUpping my rating from 4.5 to 5 stars on further thought. This really is an excellent Tor novella, and my favorite of the novellas nominated for the Nebula this year. Final review, first posted (in a slightly different form) on Fantasy Literature:
In an alternative history, magical steampunk version of New Orleans, in 1884 the city is still influenced by the aftermath of the Civil War, which ended in a division of the Union and Confederate states. New Orleans is a pocket of neutrality, one of the few territories not aligned with either the North or South. The city is run by a council made up of ex-slaves, mulattoes and white businesspeople; British, French and Haitian airships patrol the skies to keep the peace.
Thirteen-year old-Jacqueline is a bright, quick street girl and pickpocket who goes by the name of Creeper (for her skill at climbing walls). Within Creeper lives part of the spirit of Oya, the orisha or goddess of storms, life and death, lending Creeper power over wind and sharing premonitions and visions with her. And her latest vision is a doozy: an immense, horrific skull moon hanging over New Orleans, snuffing out the lights below. Not long after, Creeper accidentally overhears a plot that may endanger the entire city: a group of southern men is angling to get possession of “the Black God’s Drums” from a Haitian scientist visiting the city.
Creeper tries to barter the information to Ann-Marie St. Augustine, the tough-minded Trinidadian captain of the airship Midnight Robber, for a spot on her crew. The captain demurs ― she thinks Creeper is too young and needs some schooling ― but soon both are pulled into the chase to foil the plot that menaces all of New Orleans.
The Black God’s Drums is richly imagined and uses every one of its 112 pages to good effect. P. Djèlí Clark put some serious thought into the alternative history of this world, with enticing tidbits about that post-Civil War history and the unique culture of New Orleans gradually shared with the reader. The magical system, with the orisha (gods of the Nigerian Yoruba people), is equally appealing and an intrinsic part of the plot. I completely bought into the idea of a portion of the goddess Oya living within Creeper, whispering to her, and manifesting her powers through her.
I loved the unusual, colorful characters. The dialects used by many of the characters ― which include a number of French words spelled phonetically ― is sometimes a bit tough to sink into, but isn’t too hard to follow, and adds color to the story. Creeper, who narrates the story, is a precocious, stubborn 13-year-old orphan; she’s a type I’ve met before in literature, but she’s unusually well-drawn, although it’s difficult to buy the novella’s narration as really being that of an uneducated street child. Ann-Marie St. Augustine is more unique, a lesbian airship captain with one leg (she wears a complex prosthesis) who is strong both mentally and physically … and whose stubbornness is a match for Creeper’s. Two nuns with a taste for gossip and weapons almost steal the show in their brief appearance.
The captain looks between the two women, her eyes narrowing. “Allyuh sure allyuh is nuns and not obeah women?” she asks.
Sister Agnès only smiles: a plump knowing angel. I say nothing. Like I said before about these sisters: They’re odd.
There's an offhand reference to Harriet Tubman and her life in this alternative history world that was absolutely delightful. I really hope I meet these characters again!
This issue includes the story that just won the Nebula award in 2019: “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington.” Highly recommenThis issue includes the story that just won the Nebula award in 2019: “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington.” Highly recommended! 4.5 stars for this Nebula award-nominated short story, free online here at Fireside magazine. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
P. Djeli Clark’s quasi-historical tale of nine slave teeth purchased by George Washington begins with an excerpt from a Mt. Vernon ledger (“By Cash pd Negroes for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoire”) which, I was astonished to find after a little online research, is entirely historical, though it’s not clear whether the nine teeth ended up in the dentures of Washington or someone else in his household. (In any case, none of Washington’s false teeth were the wooden teeth of legend; mostly they were ivory or animal teeth but some were, in fact, human.)
From here Clark spins a magical, imaginative tale of the distinct origins of these nine teeth: the people they originally belonged to, their histories, and the effect of each of the teeth on George Washington. I gave an appreciative shudder at the end of the tale of the fifth tooth, and cheered the grim justice in the tale of the seventh tooth. Clark deftly mixes together the actual facts and circumstances of the slavery trade with mystic mermen, conjure men, magic-wielding cooks and other fantastical elements.
Though this is a series of vignettes (reminiscent of Ken Liu’s 2012 Nebula-nominated short story “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species”), the overarching themes, particularly of slavery and its evils, but also of the indomitable human spirit, unify these nine brief tales into a coherent, compelling whole....more
It’s the 22nd century, and North America is divided into several different countries in the afte2.5 stars. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
It’s the 22nd century, and North America is divided into several different countries in the aftermath of a worldwide disaster. A plague that first hit back in the early part of the 21st century killed ― and continues to kill ― almost every person who get infected with the virus. Those few who survive become “witchings,” developing a variety of magical powers as a result of the virus’s presence in their body.
Noam Álvaro is a bisexual teenage refugee from Atlantia, now living in the West Durham slums of the more well-developed country of Carolinia. He’s the son of a Jewish mother and a Hispanic father (thus ticking as many boxes as I’ve ever seen for diversity representation in a single character). When Noam survives a plague outbreak that kills his father and most of the people he knows, he emerges with unusually potent magical powers over technology that make him highly valuable to the people in charge of the Carolinian government. Noam outwardly accepts his new life as a student in Level IV, the Carolinia government’s elite witching training program, and as the defense minister’s protégé. Secretly, though, he plans to use his new position and power to bring down the government, which has been extremely hostile to refugees.
But then things get complicated, particularly when Noam meets Dara, a handsome brown-skinned fellow student who looks like a magazine model. Noam is torn between his deep attraction for Dara and his fears about Dara’s allegiance to another politician who’s taken anti-refugee positions. Noam is also confused about how much he can trust Calix Lehrer, the minister of defense who has taken such a keen interest in Noam’s development.
The Fever King is an LGBTQIA urban fantasy novel that feels more like science fiction/alternative history. Even the magic has a quasi-scientific explanation, which was appealing and helped to ground the novel. On the other hand, it didn’t seem realistic that not just the main characters, but every single character in the novel, is queer (per Victoria Lee’s blog). It made The Fever King feel like an interesting if unlikely exercise in diversity representation. The politics in the novel and its concerns with refugee rights and the gulf between the haves and have-nots also bear a clear message for our current society.
Lee’s storytelling is a little disjointed and unclear, most noticeably in the first half. She creates an imaginative future society, but it could have used more worldbuilding. For that first half I wasn’t particularly enjoying the story, just plowing through it. But then it gets much clearer, and the final third is exciting and tension-filled, with some solid twists and turns. The Fever King is the first book in Lee’s FEVERWAKE duology, and though the ending doesn’t leave you with a terrible cliffhanger, the overall story is clearly unfinished at this point.
Although the main character and his love interest are teenagers, this is a hard-hitting, R-rated book, with countless F-bombs, a semi-explicit gay sex scene (it cuts from the initial foreplay to the aftermath), discussion of sexual abuse, underage drinking, drug use, violence and murder. That’s quite a list, and I thought it was excessive for what is considered to be a YA book. There’s an audience for this type of novel, but I wouldn’t recommend it for younger teens. I’ll admit to some curiosity about how the plot will be resolved in The Electric Heir, to be published in 2020, but I’m on the fence as to whether I’ll actually read it.
I received a free copy of this book for review from the publisher, Skyscape, and the publicist. Thank you!...more
This is an alternative history short story, set in the late 1500s/early 1600s in colonial America, with a really great premise. A group of Cherokee meThis is an alternative history short story, set in the late 1500s/early 1600s in colonial America, with a really great premise. A group of Cherokee men goes on a raid and comes back with a fascinating prisoner: a white man, who many of the tribe thought were just a wild tale. I won’t spoil the surprise. :) But I will say that my college English major studies added a whole extra level of enjoyment to reading this.
I thought this story was funny, poignant and thoughtful—a great combination.
3.75 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature (along with my co-reviewer Jana's review):
The author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels jump3.75 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature (along with my co-reviewer Jana's review):
The author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels jumps into the Weird West with her latest series, GUNNIE ROSE: It’s a combination of Old West + magic + alternative history. An Easy Death appears to be set in the 1930s or 40s, but not in an era we’d recognize. When Franklin Roosevelt was assassinated before taking office, the U.S. fractured and chunks of it were claimed by other countries, including the Russian royal family taking over California and Oregon, Mexico taking back Texas, and Native Americans reclaiming much of their territory. Nineteen-year-old Lizbeth Rose is a gunslinger or “gunnie,” part of a crew that gives travelers an armed escort to protect them on their journey.
The very first thing we see Lizbeth Rose doing at the beginning of this book is cutting her hair into a pixie cut, mostly because her much older boyfriend Tarken liked it long and cutting it is her way of pushing back against his too often telling her what to do. It’s a signal of Lizbeth’s obstinacy and independence — qualities she’s going to need in the conflicts and difficulties coming her way. It's grimly amusing that "an easy death" is the accepted way to say goodbye to a gunnie and the kind of luck they wish for.
After the Tarken Crew’s job escorting two farming families from Texas to New America takes a disastrous turn, Lizbeth — somewhat at loose ends, and financially strapped — overcomes her detest for wizards and accepts a job protecting a couple of Russian wizards or “grigori.” These wizards, Eli and Paulina, are searching for a particular Russian, Oleg Karkarov (or if not him, his descendants), whose blood is needed for transfusions to preserve the life of Tsar Alexei. Apparently the blood of Grigori Rasputin and his relatives has a salutary effect on hemophilia (it’s nice to know that in this world Rasputin was good for something). What the wizards don’t know, although Lizbeth mentions it in her narration to the reader fairly early on, is that (view spoiler)[Lizbeth is actually Oleg’s daughter … and that she killed him herself, for excellent reasons (hide spoiler)].
In this gritty Wild West territory, life is precarious and the lives of most people, other than the wealthy, are hardscrabble. Cars and homes with electricity exist, but they’re too expensive for most folk, including Lizbeth. Bandits and magicians are equally feared. It’s not easy for a young woman to stake out her position in this world, but Lizbeth is determined both to make her own way and to protect those who she’s responsible for.
There’s lots of action in An Easy Death, with guns blazing and magic slaying, but the book isn’t a whole lot deeper than that, and the logic of the plot got a little murky. But Lizbeth Rose is an honest, tough and appealing heroine, and her continuous adventures and struggles against opposition make for captivating if not profound reading. I’ll definitely follow Gunnie Rose into Dixie in the sequel, A Longer Fall, where the antebellum South has risen again ... in fact, I'm reading it now!
Content notes: Rape of a minor character (on-page, but brief), sex, violence and murder, a handful of F-bombs.
I received a free copy of the hardback book for review from the publisher and publicists. Thank you!!
Original post (Oct. 2018): Look what just landed on my doorstep! Looks very interesting - the only question is how and when to fit it into my already overstuffed reading schedule. ETA: Well, it took me 11 months to read this. But better late than never?...more
This Tor fantasy novella (free online here at Tor.com) is memorable mostly for its setting: A magical steampunk version of Cairo, Egypt, in 1912. FortThis Tor fantasy novella (free online here at Tor.com) is memorable mostly for its setting: A magical steampunk version of Cairo, Egypt, in 1912. Forty years earlier a man managed to open a portal to the other magical side, and djinni, "angels" and other magical creatures streamed through to our world. The good news is, they helped the humans quickly kick the British government out of Egypt. But can you trust them?
Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi, an unusually liberated woman for her day, investigates the inexplicable death of a large, naked djinn. Her investigation leads her from one problem (carnivorous ghuls!) to another, and gradually an overarching Lovecraftian-type plot becomes clear to her and those helping her.
Full review to come. I have the second and third books on my Kindle, so more magical alternative-history Cairo also to come!...more
Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽
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