I read this for the Fear Street square.
The thing about this book is while it is very much stock urban fantasy and sometimes a bit too heavy on dialogue, the world building and characters are great. We also do not have the heroine as the only girl who can do anything.
The librarian usually sends out links for each months topic. This month, her links include an article titled something like "what is urban fantasy" that only says it's a marketing category and a list of "where to start" that has more male authors than female authors. I, just, I don't know, ya'll. If I were introducing someone to UF, I'd probably talk about the use of noir tropes in contemporary fantasy settings, broken vs unbroken masquerades, and Carrie Vaughn's theory, "these books are symptomatic of an anxiety about women and power." But, sure, here's a dude saying it's meaningless marketing and a list of mostly dudes to read.
The other big UF reader in the group is going to be out of town for this one, so I'm trying to psych myself up to deal with a room full of guys all talking about Harry Fucking Dresden.
I'm also bounding myself by recommending in-progress series or stand alone books. A few months back, one of the members asked for recommendations for completed UF series that weren't PNR, and I want to avoid repeats. Okay, he didn't say PNR, he asked for books that weren't all about vampire sex. So at least one person may have some non-Dresden. . . take a deep breathe, Saturdays, you don't want to start another fight in book club.
Whatever. I love this genre.
Shadowshaper - Daniel José Older. So far this series has 2 novels and 3 novellas and is dynamite. The protagonist is an artist who discovers her legacy includes channeling spirits into physical forms. She makes her graffiti come alive. Yeah, that's right, I talk all that shit and then start off with a book by a man.
Owl and the Japanese Circus - Kristi Charish. Action packed with an unlikable heroine, this series follows an antiquities thief and her vampire hunting cat through endless poor decisions and explosions. I adore that she isn't good with weapons and doesn't have powerful magic abilities. I just recently finished the 4th installment, and the heroine is consistently a train wreck.
Zero Sum Game (Russell's Attic) (Volume 1) - SL Huang. Fast paced, plenty of violence, and her magic power is being really good at math. Do I need to go on?
Drink, Slay, Love - Sarah Beth Durst. A teenage vampire gets stabbed by a unicorn and finds herself able to go out in daylight. Her family decides to enroll her in high school so she can lure teens back to the rest of the bloodsuckers. This is a lighthearted, almost rom-com book that is exactly as much fun as my first sentence indicates.
Broken Monsters - Lauren Beukes. The protagonists are all human in this not-quite police procedural where strange murders point toward incomprehensible motives.
And I think I'll stop there. I really want to add about 10 more books. We'll see where the night leads.
Let's start off with the good. This had a very unique premise. A unique premise usually leads to a high rating in-and-of itself BUT unfortunately, the execution was subpar at best. I have come to terms with the fact that I will be the villain here and speak ill of the dead. I'm harsh mainly due to an overabundance of slang as well as one dimensional, highly trope-y, boring characters... a crime most foul in my eyes. Now, I must preface this by letting you know that I was born and raised in Brooklyn N.Y. I have been to each and every place the book names and while I was living there I encountered every slang you could imagine (except for southern country slang) and by far, this was the most egregious, overused, off-putting abuse of the English language that I have seen in a while. It was so bad, I lost interest almost immediately. I kept going by sheer will power alone, plagued with desperation to make it to the end. I pushed on...through dry, broken, painful dialogue mostly because so many of my GR friends loved this one. In fact, I was about 70% in and found my will to go on depleted. I had to psych myself up repeatedly with false bravado just to make it, limping along bruised and battered mentally... unemotional and reluctant until the very end and you know what?!? It turned out to be... MEH. I am normally on the same page (more or less) with my GR friends and their literary assessments... I say this with the utmost respect BUT here I am, SO underwhelmed that I question if we even read the same book. Harsh? Yes and deservedly so. Not only was the writing barely passable but the characters were completely flat... and the MC?? She was so boring that I didn't care one whit whether the antagonist killed her off or even if she did the merciful thing and commit Harikari. Again, harsh? You bet! When I don't care for ANY of the characters and the writing is hard to digest, I am brutal. I am utterly amazed that I made it all the way through to the last page. My honest opinion is to skip this one because right now I am wishing for a time machine- not to right the wrongs of History but to recapture my lost time wasted on this endeavour and apply it to some other precious more deserving.
~end vicious rant
This novella is the least stand alone piece of Older's work I've read so far. It's written from the perspective of a character introduced in the previous Shadowshaper novella, and important in the next novel, and introduces some aspects of magic that would be hard to get at from the perspectives present in that novel. However, it feels like 3 info dumps standing on each other's shoulders, dressed up in a plot coat, trying to pass for a story.
I was going to plunge right into Shadowhouse Fall, the sequel to the excellent YA UF novel Shadowshaper, but noticed there were 2 novellas set between the novels. This is the first, and follows a secondary character, Tee from the first novel.
A satisfying read that leaves open a potential new threat for the novels in the series while still reaching a conclusion for the mystery of the ghost girl.
This story also has the cluelessest of white ladies who wants to make sure everything has a happy, optimistic twist to it. I definitely have worked with that lady. 100% guaranteed to be colorblind. I kind of wish we'd gotten a little more resolution there. Tee's journalism project is left off at a point where the white lady wants to talk about potential misuse of funds, and having finished both novellas and half the next novel, this hasn't come back up.
The printing press hasn't been mentioned at all in the other stories. Like this short was meant to introduce some stuff to the series for later, but the rest of the stuff it is built from doesn't exist in the novels. At least not yet. Having read Older's Bone Street Rumba trilogy, it may just be further out in the series that this comes back into play.
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