My ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review of WEARING THE LION by John Wiswell

WEARING THE LION is a triumph, an excellent addition to John Wiswell’s growing oeuvre. I loved SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN, so I went in with high expectations, and it did not disappoint. The tone evolves from a punchy comedy to something deeply affecting as the characters grow, and the choice to focus on Hera, a historically underdeveloped character, makes this an important entry in the tradition of retellings of myths. The diverse, queer ensemble feels simultaneously ancient and very modern, both accurate and respectful, and, in keeping with Wiswell’s style, the monsters come off the as the best people. The pivotal change to the traditional version is Heracles depicted as a non-traditional hero, not a gleaming mass of muscle and ego succeeding at every turn, but a person trying to do what’s right in impossible circumstances. In a world of often overwhelming injustice, it was a comfort to spend time with a humble person plodding through and trying to avoid doing more harm. He felt timely and eternal. I’ll be telling all my friends about this novel. It’s funny, delightful, and, ultimately, deeply moving.

(I was given an advance review copy. The book is available for pre-order now. https://bookshop.org/p/books/wearing-the-lion-john-wiswell/21819546 )

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review of Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth

Book 5 of Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive is a doorstop (1344 pages, but I listened to the audiobook, so it was 52+ hours at my preferred speed), but that's because it's such a complete and populated universe. If you want to escape to another plane of existence and still learn things that will make your life in ours better, this is an excellent, healing vacation. Sure, it’s got all the sword fights and magic powers you want, but at its heart, it’s a book about mental health, and I found it thoughtful and sensitive and wonderful. Now I’ll just wait not-so-patiently for books six through 10!

A Reflection on Disproportionate Ire

In the wake of an event that causes outrage, people often feel a temptation to lash out. I’m a person. I think there’s a really healthy impulse to desire that others reflect for the sake of making better decisions in the future, and then there’s an unhealthy desire to want to harm those who have caused pain so they will feel pain. The latter is recrimination, a word that derives from the Latin for “to charge/accuse back.” It’s an unhealthy impulse because, while I can try to justify it to myself, if I stop and take a deep breath, I have to admit it’s not focused on healing and making the world better in the long run (though I tell myself it is) but on causing harm in the short run under the false pretense that some lasting good will come of it.

Even the philosophical, abstract tone of that last paragraph is self-protection. I fucked up, and I should own that. I’m sure this is something opinion columnists deal with on a weekly basis: I wrote too fast, and I didn’t take the time to process every point I made, and, in my haste, I screwed up.

In Dear America: A Breakup Letter, my central thesis was that the majority of American voters and non-voters collaborated to empower the Trump administration, either in spite of all its hateful promises or because of them, and that this is not an outlier but a symptom of a deep rot in the American electorate that is rooted in racism, misogyny, and an enculturated epistemic flaw which dictates that beliefs trump knowledge. I still hold that opinion, and I still feel that America is not a place where I can live safely. I don’t regret leaving. Those of you who were hoping for that particular mea culpa: Sorry-not-sorry, or at least sorry-not-yet. Maybe you will engage in overwhelming activism and deep personal change, fundamentally change America’s politics on every level, and make me regret ever leaving. Please, please do that. I see you out on the streets in front of your state capitols, and it gives me hope that you will make me wrong to leave. I would love that.

But in the meantime, I do want to partly retract a point I made in my book (and I don’t mean the SIX typos readers have found, though I’ll be eternally embarrassed by those). A friend of mine pointed out that I was “punching sideways” at times, and she’s absolutely right. And maybe I’m not alone in this and you can benefit from me sharing my error.

Here’s the thing: I am very, very angry at a tiny sliver of the electorate. Before I get to which one, I should stop there and consider what I say next, but in the book, I didn’t. I let my anger supersede the main point I was trying to make, that the problem in America is that the majority actively want or passively tolerate fascism and have, in different incarnations of that oppressive instinct, tolerated or supported it throughout the history of the United States. So why did I fixate on a tiny portion of the population? Because they are the people who are closest to me. Their betrayal hurt the most. So I aimed my ire at them. And that was wrong.

For me, that group was very-online, hyper-politically engaged Leftists. Yeah, people just like me. Many of my friends in that sliver of the electorate chose to speak out against Harris for various reasons. Because these people were so close to me, and because I told them a Trump victory was personally terrifying due to my death-threat-sending stalkers, I took every one of their statements calling for people to refuse to vote for Harris as a personal attack. I admit, I still do. I’m still angry. There’s no two ways about it: When they said, “I don’t care who wins because they’re both equally bad,” they were absolutely saying, “I don’t care about the impacts on you, Ben, or on anyone else, because I see those effects as being equivalent.” And since I know those effects to be shockingly different, both for me and so many others, I’m hurt by that statement. But my friend is right; out of a place of anger and pain, I’m punching sideways. That sliver of the electorate is so small, they are not the problem. They are just the ones who hurt me most because I was closest to them.

This election was so ridiculously close, it’s possible to slice and dice the vote in a million ways and find groups who could have swung it one way or the other. Like the 2016 election, we could rightly say, “If not for group tiny X, she would have won” and plug a myriad of labels into that variable. If you are like me, that distorts your view of the election. The more important point is this: It never should have been close enough for tiny group X to make a difference!

I’ll bet there are lots of people in other communities who feel similarly betrayed and are turning their ire on their betrayers. Maybe there are five Black trans men who voted for Trump in the entire 333,000,000 people in the US, and I’ll bet their friends are livid with them. Or one Buddhist Latina. I’m sure there are some Pro-Palestinian activists who were so disgusted with the Biden administration enabling Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza that they actively pulled the lever for Trump out of spite. And was the election so close these few votes could have made a difference, depending on their geographic distribution and the individuals’ sway with their networks? It’s possible. We’ll never know if a few more people telling their friends and family to vote for Harris, even if they said they were doing so reluctantly, would have made a difference. But that’s not the point. It should never have been necessary. A healthy electorate would have had space for people on the far left to make protest votes and for people across the spectrum to just make simple human errors and fill in the wrong bubble. The closeness of the election highlights those few votes and obscures the bigger problem: It never should have been close.

I’m still glad Dear America is out there in the world, and I stand by most of what I wrote, but I regret those angry swipes at my fellow Leftists who decided they couldn’t hold their noses this time, and I regret the angry posts I’ve made at their expense since. While I still disagree with them and irrationally feel most hurt by them because of our ideological proximity, they are not the problem I should be focused on any more than any other community’s Leopards-ate-my-face members are their real problem. I should have taken more deep breaths, done more editing, and focused more on encouraging healthy, forward-focused reflection, and I failed to do so.

If you feel inclined to take a swipe at someone close to you who may be regretting their vote or non-vote, or, worse, like me, get in a pre-emptive jab on the assumption they will be particularly stung by some horrific bit of news, I encourage you to learn from my mistake. Yes, everyone’s votes matter, and everyone should get to vote and should feel ownership of the outcome, win or lose. But don’t make my mistake. To strain a metaphor beyond its breaking point, let’s not aim our punches at the margins when a problem is systemic and cultural. I addressed the book to America because America has a problem worth addressing, and I apologize for the times I lost sight of America and aimed for a few individual Americans with whom I’m irrationally angry.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review of SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN by John Wiswell

Cover art by J.M. Fenner

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This novel is... I only hesitate to say "masterpiece" because the term is overused. But I use it here selectively. It's such an ingenious premise, and the execution is impecable. This book is a masterpiece, like a piece of music concieved because of a clever melody and then elaborated upon until it becomes something so much grander. I'll be recommending it to anyone who will listen. The ending is thoroughly satisfying and even gives a little wink at the author’s reluctance to add an epilogue. You’ll see what I mean.

Review of STARTER VILLAIN by John Scalzi

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Cover of Strater Villain by John Scalzi, cover art by Tristan Elwell

I started reading a different novel that was too depressing, and I decided I needed something lighter before I could plow through that one. Scalzi to the rescue! Starter Villain starts off with a protagonist in such a bad place, it could have read like that other depressing book, but Scalzi zips us through to wild events fast enough, and then things really get fun. Scalzi doesn't hesitate to take potshots at our economic/political system and some of its more nefarious participants, and I'll bet there are those who will find it heavy-handed, but they are probably the ones who need to read it most. Our protagonist enters the world of corporate villainy only far enough to give us a glimpse of how it works, but his arc resolves without him becoming so morally compromised that we demand a tragic ending. The book's resolution, while a bit predictable, is satisfying. In a way, this novel should be more depressing than some intimate portrait of family trauma. It's a portrait of family trauma laid on top of destructive and pointless late stage-capitalism no one can fully escape! But it has talking animals. And it's very funny.

Review of Tamsyn Muir’s NONA THE NINTH

Cover of Tamsyn Muir’s None the Ninth, art by Tommy Arnold

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I'm going to be careful here so I don't spoil anything about this novel or its predecessors. Consequently, this review will be cryptic and largely unusable. In short, Nona the Nith introduces us to a maybe-new character who is absolutely delightful. The novel also alternates back and forth with a narrative told in a different point of view like Harrow the Ninth, but this other narrative seems to be set so far away from the universe we've previously explored that we initially question if we're even reading the same book or in the same universe. (We are. It all comes together.) The ending is very to-be-continued, and if I hadn't been able to quickly find an interview confirming that Tamsyn Muir is writing the fourth and, she says, last in the series, I probably would have left this one with a more bitter taste in my mouth. But the titular protagonist is so wonderful, I can't give this less than 5 stars, and once it's bookended, its ending will be justified.  

Review of Tamsyn Muir’s HARROW THE NINTH

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Cover of Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, art by Tommy Arnold

I was telling a friend, author Erik Grove, about how much I enjoyed Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth and was looking forward to the sequel. He warned me about the structure. It's not a spoiler to reveal that the novel is told in a pattern of alternating accounts, one in 3rd person about Harrow, and the other in what some people call 2nd person (which is really 1st or 3rd but about a 2nd person protagonist). Erik also warned me that he found the first half of the book slow and sometimes so confusing that he was tempted to put it down, but that the ending redeemed it. I'm grateful for the warning; I doubt I would have put it down, but I was grateful to know it would resolve in this book and not in some future volume. And resolve it did! Muir does a wonderful job of balancing a mystery between "When will we find out?" and "When will the characters find out?" This relies on making the reader care so much about the characters that their discovery is just as important to us as our own, and in this one Muir manages to make characters who were less important, absent, or off putting in the first book into characters we care about so much that we desperately want them to figure out what we have been suspecting as much as we want our own submissions confirmed or refuted. The novel does resolve it's main question but leaves a huge mystery about a character's motive to be addressed in a future installment. I'm not sure if I can conclusively say if I liked this novel more or less than it's predecessor. Gideon The Ninth is slightly less demanding fun (though there are still two competing puzzles at the heart of that book), but this one felt more rewarding when it all came together. And, of course, I went immediately on to Nona the Ninth the second I finished this one.

Review of GIDEON THE NINTH by Tamsyn Miur

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Cover of Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Art by Tommy Arnold

This was recommended to me by the author Karen Eisenbrey, and I’m so grateful. Tamsyn Muir’s novel is a challenge to describe. It’s a sci-fi fantasy in that it’s set in a distant future of what may be our universe, but there are supernatural elements. Specifically, some of the characters can perform necromancy, and the whole structure of their society is organized around that. The nature of that political organization becomes clear over the course of the novel, but it’s dribbled out slowly, so the reader only learns the way life works on the first planet where our characters live, then learns the way that planet fits in with the larger civilization over time. I appreciated the careful way Muir balanced the need to give the reader a lot if information about this universe without any boring data-dumps. 

There are a lot of other things I like more about the book. The choice to have necromancers accompanied by sword fighters makes for great action scenes. Even better, the book becomes a puzzle itself as the characters try to figure out how to achieve a goal without being killed by a mysterious monster who is picking them off. 

But these aren’t the best things in the book, either. The best thing about this book, hands down, is the protagonist, Gideon. Her voice is so funny that scenes which would have been dry become hilarious, and scenes that could have been saccharine become heart-wrenching. I want Gideon to sit with me at every staff meeting I have to attend for the rest of my life and make snide comments to me, shout insults when necessary, and occasionally threaten someone with her sword. Not the rapier. The two-hander.

I had a slight frustration with one of the elements of the ending that I think is sometimes done to death (hee-hee), but some friends assured me it would be complicated by events in the sequels, and I’ve already read far enough to know they’re right. So, you should expect to enjoy Gideon the Ninth, but be prepared to jump to the next novels in the trilogy right away.

Review of WE’LL FLY AWAY by Bryan Bliss

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Hey, it’s February, and I’m still keeping my New Year’s resolution to review all the novels I read this year. I’m as surprised as you are!

Cover art by Matt Roeser

One of my most promising students, Shawn Stewart (keep an eye out for this talented aspiring writer!) recommended We’ll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss as a possible text for my creative writing classes. He correctly pointed to the use of a mixture of letters from one character and toggling back and forth between 3rd person limited points of view, something Bliss employs deftly, as a feature authors can learn from this book. But our larger conversation was about the quantity of hope we like in our books. We’ll Fly Away is a tragedy in the best way; it provides us with endearing but flawed characters who we know will not succeed, and it makes us desperately want them to succeed throughout. I felt too tense as I devoured this book in mere hours. I am very open with my students about the fact that I am not a fast reader, but this book made me one, not because it was written in that pulse-pounding, low-lexical-level prose appropriate for thrillers, but because, despite its rich, beautiful prose, I needed to know when and how the impending doom would befall the characters.  A bit of writing advice commonly misattributed to Vladimir Nabokov is, “The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then, once they are up there, to throw rocks at them.” (It seems the first framing of this advice came in a review of a play in the Bridgeport Herald of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1897, two years before Nabakov was born:  “The best advice ever given writers of farce is in these words: ‘In the first act get your principal character up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him; in the third, get him down gracefully.’” Thanks, quoteinvestigator.com!) Bliss follows the most brutal version of this advice, giving us Luke and Toby as protagonists who are trapped in multiple ways: by poverty, by abusive or neglectful parents, by a system that has failed them over and over, and shares their dreams of escape as children who find a broken down airplane in the woods, teenagers looking for escape through sports, violence, romance, sex, alcohol, first loves, and often the pure and desperate desire to simply jump in a car and get as far away from their lives as possible. All the right things bring them back: love of family, girlfriends, responsibility, honor, and bravery, and we’re left screaming internally, “None of those things are worth your lives! Go! Go!”

Ultimately, I think I need a little more hope in my literature than We’ll Fly Away provides, but I’m very glad I read it to help me find that line previously held by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Not to spoil the ending, but I think We’ll Fly Away provides a quantity of hope just between McCarthy’s The Road and Blood Meridian (despite being unlike both those books in almost every way), and I’m not sure I have the constitution for anything more hopeless than The Road. But maybe I can find the same hope in We’ll Fly Away that I grasp for when reading Orwell’s 1984: This is a world we must not make! Unfortunately, We’ll Fly Away is a world that’s all too real for so many people, so many of the students I see come into my classroom each day, imprisoned in more ways than I can imagine. But I can hope for them, and We’ll Fly Away demands the reader close the back cover and get to work making a world that’s better than Luke and Toby’s.