1. This Shattered World by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner was a good continuation of the trilogy. I can’t discuss much of the plot since the first book is a prerequisite, but I liked the two main characters: Captain Jubilee “Lee” Chase, a career soldier who thought she was hardened to sympathy, and Flynn Cormac, a rebel and a pacifist who wants to end the three generations of conflict on Avon. The sworn enemies will have to cooperate, learn to trust each other, and fall in love (of course). Watch out for that mysterious military base that seems to appear and disappear out on the swamps. And for the Fury, which is a violent madness that can affect anyone on Avon. I’ll be reading the finale in the hopes of getting to the bottom of…the whispers. Yeah, so that isn’t very scary, but it works in context.
2. I finally finished reading this book. I usually read a short story between novels but skipped a few because The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2016, edited by John Joseph Adams and Karen Joy Fowler just was not speaking to me. I bought it because I’ve liked the Best American Short Stories series and saw that Ted Chiang and many other authors I recognized had stories in this anthology. But other than the truly fantastic “Things You Can Buy for a Penny” by Will Kaufman, most were weird, some boring, others not to my taste, and a couple just plain awful. I mean, I’ll read the next one because it’s got an N. K. Jemisin story in it, and because the volume is a veritable Who’s Who of SFF writers and publications, and because I find the author’s notes about their stories extremely interesting (some more so than the stories themselves, on occasion). But I can’t say I’m happy with this collection. For a list of great SFF books and authors, I should finally delve into Jo Walton‘s What Makes This Book So Great.
3. I stayed up late to finish reading Their Fractured Light by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner, which is a huge compliment because I like my sleep. It ended well–each volume saw the complexity of the problem develop, and while the final message of Love Conquers All made the solution to the problem not much of a surprise, it was still a strong finish and a great overall trilogy. I’ll be tracking down more reads by these authors and watching to see whether they write anything else together. I hope they do, because I’ll read it for sure.
4. I like Anne Tyler. I like William Shakespeare. Which is why I gave Tyler’s Vinegar Girl a try: it’s her rendition of The Taming of the Shrew. All of a sudden Kate is 29, working in a preschool and taking care of her father and teenage sister. She is not at all interested in indulging her father’s scheme to wed her to his lab assistant, Pyotr, who has only two months before his three-year visa expires. As always, Tyler’s characterizations are impeccable–you feel you know irascible, solitary Kate utterly by the end of the first chapter. The fact that Vinegar Girl is more homage than novelization works greatly in its favor. And though this is a short book, it feels as complete as it is comical and charming.
