2015 read #33: The Bullet Catcher's Daughter by Rod Duncan.

The Bullet Catcher's Daughter by Rod Duncan
374 pages
Published 2014
Read from July 8 to July 13
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

The outline of this novel sounds more like a gumbo of cliches and fads somewhat past their expiration date: A steampunk alternate history in which technology is regulated by a sinister Patent Office, and traveling "gypsy" circuses cobble together arcane devices to relieve "jossers" of their money. A daughter of one of these performers, on the run from a lascivious nobleman, earns a living as a private detective, disguising herself as a man when the lights are dim, following the clues of an aristocrat's disappearance into the very world of traveling performers she had had to flee. Soon she discovers that the aristocrat absconded with contraband technology, and soon the Patent Office -- as well as the lascivious nobleman and a traveling circus jealous of its secrets -- are after her. It's like you asked someone to come up with the most contrived and steampunk-y of steampunk plotlines and turned it into an actual book. The only thing is missing is some half-baked appearance from Ancient Horrors.

And yet, for its first two-thirds or so, The Bullet Catcher's Daughter elevates itself above the triteness of its outline, thanks largely to Duncan's zippy prose and his appealing narrator. Only in the last third of the book does the momentum break down, impeded by a change of scenery less interesting than Duncan perhaps supposed, weighed down by the appearance of new central characters that have little life except as plot contrivances. The twists at the end carry no emotional weight because of how little effort went into these characters. We're told the missing aristocrat was motivated by love and a desire to smash the class hierarchy, motivations the glossary implies are carried forward in ensuing volumes by our narrator, but we aren't shown this -- the mere telling of it feels like the last gasp of a storyline that ran out of steam (har har) a hundred pages before.

Perhaps the ensuing volumes will better serve the promise of Elizabeth Barnabus as a character, though I'm not sure what surprises the setting itself might be able to offer, given how generic its setup has been thus far.

2015 read #32: Spindle's End by Robin McKinley.

Spindle's End by Robin McKinley
422 pages
Published 2000
Read from June 30 to July 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

A fun and thoroughly enjoyable restructuring of the tale of Sleeping Beauty, charming and folksy and populated by a progressive cast of strong, competent women. The prose gets a little breathless and busy at times, hurrying forward and backward to develop the story, jumping ahead and then backfilling events in between, a common enough storytelling technique that nonetheless got to be too much at times for my currently addled attention span. That's not a mark against the book itself, merely against my ability to stay invested these days in anything for longer than about a hundred pages. The ending especially was hectic with everything going on, a messy gathering of threads dropped throughout the foregoing four hundred pages that I couldn't help but feel could have been handled more elegantly. That doesn't detract from the essential humor and sweetness of the book as a whole.

2015 read #31: Legend of Lost Earth by G. McDonald Wallis.

Legend of Lost Earth by G. McDonald Wallis
133 pages
Published 1963
Read from June 28 to June 30
Rating: ★★ out of 5

The sci-fi "double" novel of yore is thoroughly charming. I bought this original Ace Double edition in order to obtain Alpha Centauri—Or Die! by Leigh Brackett, but was almost equally excited to discover this unknown book by an unknown (to me) author, potentially a lost pulp classic for all I knew. Buying a book because it's by an author you like, and getting a second book by a "new" author you might be glad to discover, feels close to the very spirit of sci-fi readership. It's a shame that, despite some attempts at revival, the double never caught back on with more modern readership.

Legend of Lost Earth, despite an atmospheric setting and some Celtic flavor setting it apart from more formulaic fare of the time, was disappointingly mediocre. It begins as a dollar store knockoff of 1984 set, ostensibly, in space, which is entertaining enough while it lasts. But the big "Everything is not what you thought!" twist is a mash of half-baked ideas, mingling vague words about a sentient Earth choosing who will live on it, something about multiple Earths overlapping each other, and the power of good vibes to escape a totalitarian hellhole and find a green and grassy Eden that's been there all along. A soupçon of biblical doctrine is in there somewhere as well. Frankly, it becomes a bit of a mess.

2015 read #30: Alpha Centauri—Or Die! by Leigh Brackett.

Alpha Centauri—Or Die! by Leigh Brackett
121 pages
Published 1963 (a fixup of two stories published in 1953 and 1954, respectively)
Read from June 26 to June 28
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Kind of a midcentury standard pulp space adventure, in which a libertarian man's man rebels against the computerized nanny state in order to be manly and play with his rocket. The exquisitely felt humanity of Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is absent here. Our hero's noble Martian wife gets him out of one scrape by play-acting shrewish and hysterical, but that merely bolsters his status as a superior grade of man; the wives of his co-conspirators nag and complain because that's all they're permitted to do in this type of story. A moderately entertaining but ultimately disposable piece -- the best part of it is the title.

2015 read #29: The Mount by Carol Emshwiller.

The Mount by Carol Emshwiller
233 pages
Published 2002
Read from June 24 to June 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

High-concept soft science fiction in fine form. Emshwiller brings a gentle but sure hand to her prose, finding unexpected conviction and sensitivity, and ambiguity of feeling, in her tale of alien invaders using human beings as, and breeding them for, riding stock, and employing the conceit as a lens to examine concepts of freedom, self-determination, civilization, and mutualism as a survival strategy. The novel benefits from the breadth of these questions, but I wasn't left convinced that I'd gained any new insight into these topics after reading it. There's an awkward absence of representation in the Hoot-dominated breeding stock, with black-haired white people and red-haired white people forming the bulk of extant humanity, which even in Emshwiller's preferred setting of the Sierra Nevada seems to be omitting some folks.

Just as in her The Secret City, Emshwiller treats the Sierra as a central character in the novel, lingering on views and the palpable exertion of climbing up and down rocky passes, pausing to huddle under and then admire a high-altitude hailstorm.

2015 read #28: On the Beach by Nevil Shute.

On the Beach by Nevil Shute
279 pages
Published 1957
Read from June 19 to June 24
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

Expertly mixing tragedy with tangents of utter boredom, this classic of nuclear fallout makes human extinction a banal, inexorable process of fly fishing, auto racing, brandy drinking, and garden improvements. The quotidian details make for an insidious apocalypse, but also tend to pad out an otherwise affecting novel.

2015 read #27: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
438 pages
Published 2013
Read from June 5 to June 19
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

At what point this year will I learn to quit when I'm just not feelin' a particular book? At this rate I doubt I'll be able to finish even sixty books by the end of the year. A sad state of affairs.

Fangirl was all right, really. The problem was my inability to get invested in anything lately that doesn't immediately grab my interest. The first fifty or so pages were off-putting because, frankly, the central character reminded me too much of me when I was 18. Representation in fiction is vital, but Cath represented 18 year old Rick a little too well. That paralyzing social avoidance and panic is not something I wish to revisit. Even when the viewpoint character had begun to adjust, I found my interest in her growing love affair outstripped by my concern about her grades and her writing assignment. Hardly the stuff of a swooning romance, not at all as well-observed and deeply-felt as the central relationship in Rowell's Eleanor & Park.

I did enjoy the snippets from Rowell's fictional Harry Potter pastiche, as well as Cath's fanfic of the same -- I especially liked the fact that both were written in subtly but noticeably different voices.