Reviews and Comments

Finished creating a list for all the works cited in Reactor Magazine's article "Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2024". There's a lot of really interesting looking books mentioned there. This is the last book from that.

The list can be found on SFBA.club. If you follow me, your bookwyrm instance should have the list as well. I made sure all the books on the SFBA.club version have high-res covers and descriptions, but other instances will only pick that up if they didn't already have a copy of the book listed. (There's two short stories without covers.)

John Ferguson is a minister in the Free Church of Scotland as it is trying to establish itself. With no parish to support him, he takes a job for an estate landlord to "clear" or remove the last remaining tenant on a remote island owned by the estate. Although conflicted, he really needs the money. Shortly after arriving, he falls off a cliff and is rescued by Ivar, the tenant he is supposed to evict.

A really well-written story of a relationship between John and Ivar. You get a bit of the history of the Scottish Free Church, a bit of the history of the Highland Clearances, a few moral dilemmas deftly handled, some feminism appropriate for the time, and North Sea adventures. I suspect this is quite good as a read, but it's amazing narrated by Russ Bain with a Scottish accent, a bit over 3 hours in length.

Clare Fergusson gets embroiled in a series of gay-bashing crimes in Miller's Kill. Spencer-Fleming captures how liberal uncomfortableness with homosexuality contributes homophobia even when they think they are supportive. But the gay-bashing is too obviously calculated and the ultimate motivation is economic. It's a too-fantastic of a scheme. As a police procedural, the story doesn't hold together well either due to how involved Russ Van Alstyne (the Miller's Kill police chief) allows Clare Fergusson to be. He can bring in professionals, but allows a hard-charging Fergusson to drive the investigation, even when he says it's a bad idea.

Humanity invents a way of traveling at near light speed by encoding people as energy and reconstituting them at the destination. So one traveler sneaks an engagement ring onto his body when he is scanned, because his ex-wife will also be one of the people sent to the stars. I didn't understand why, but the original encoded group is then sent on to further destinations, giving the main character even more chances at a do-over.

The story does understand just how wrong-headed the attempt at a do-over is.

Like this review which I just boosted, I found some really good stuff. In addition to the articles mentioned in the linked review, I thought chapter 27 (EXCERPT FROM “MOVING BEYOND CRITIQUE”) was good because it looked at how one TJ project worked from the inside, and highlighted how messy that project was structurally. A lot of the items got hand-wavery in their discussion of what the issues could be; that one was very specific.

Reach decides to hitchhike to the Canadian border, where he befriends a pair of hikers who've decided to trek across the border via a wilderness path. Reacher is about to head on when the military arrives and seals off the trail, but our hikers have already snuck in. Will the government track down the hikers? Will Reacher help them? Do the hikers have an ulterior motive and has the governent laid a clever trap for them?

Maaaaayyyybe.

Main character goes to a big city in the neighboring empire because he believes he was the lover of a famous poet of that city in a previous life. The famous poet is old now, and hasn't really published poetry like she had when she was younger. Can our MC's dreams awaken the poet she once was? Am I going to care? No.

In early 2021, (IIRC) Nikkita Oliver helped develop and lead a class on restorative justice. I bought this book, part of the curriculum, at the time because of that but work started taking over much of my time, so I didn't read any of it. Gonna see how it sits with me now though.

Finished on the flight to Hawaii for vacation

I couldn't resist buying this! It arrived today.

Benine has the power to see an object's past when he touches it. The government of Mortova sends him to the site of a mass grave so he can identify the remains buried there, while rebels get closer and closer.

Brings the reader right to a war without going all the way in.