Review of Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

This dark fantasy/alternate reality novella is a finalist for the 2020 Nebula Awards, published in October 2020 by Tor.com. P. Djèlí Clark is the pen name of Dexter Gabriel, a history professor at University of Connecticut who also writes non-fiction under his real name. Clark is a Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner who also appeared in the awards cycle last year with The Black God’s Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. This review contains spoilers.

The Ku Klux Klan is having a picnic in the park, and Maryse, Sadie and Chef have set a trap in an alley a little distance away. It’s the carcass of a dead dog rigged with a bomb, and it does attract three Ku Kluxes, but the bomb fails to take them out. There’s a heated battle, but Maryse calls her magical sword and Sadie has plenty of rifle shells, so the three women finally prevail. They take part of the carcasses back to the farm outside Macon, where they also work as bootleggers, and deliver them to Nana Jean who is researching the origin of the Ku Klux monsters. They go into town to the juke joint Frenchy’s to relax and Maryse spends the night with her beau from St. Lucia, Michael George. During the night she has an unsettling vision of Butcher Clyde, and she is warned by her guiding spirits afterward. Soon afterward, the club is attacked and set on fire by the Ku Kluxes. Maryse and Chef successfully evacuate some of the guests while Sadie stays behind to provide cover. She dies in the raid, plus they find several people, including Michael George, have been taken captive. Maryse has a crisis of faith over Sadie’s death and the loss of her lover. Her sword breaks, but after meeting with her guiding spirits, she manages to rebuild it. The community gets together a team to travel to Stone Mountain and rescue the captives. Maryse, as the Champion, plans to climb the mountain and confront Butcher Clyde alone, but Chef insists on going with her. As the Birth of a Nation is projected against the stone face of the mountain and the crowd eagerly awaits the Grand Cyclops, Butcher Clyde offers her a deal, not that Maryse should become his champion as she expects, but that he and his demonic minions will join her cause instead. 

First some definitions: Ring shout is an African American call and response musical form including song and percussion. The films Birth of a Nation (1915), Song of the South (1946) and the Uncle Remus books (1880s) have been long cancelled as racist, so many people may not understand the references. Birth of a Nation is about the origins of the Ku Klux Klan and Song of the South is a Disney film featuring African American folklore taken from the earlier Uncle Remus books. The books’ characters include the wily Br’er Rabbit, who always outsmarts his foes, Br’er Fox, Br’er Bear and the ever popular Tar Baby. In this story, Ku Kluxes are monsters transformed by their hate, while Klans are just ordinary, misguided people not yet infected by monsterism.

That said, this is an ambitious, complex work, a big jump from the slightly humorous djinn tales we’ve been seeing from Clark. Plus, he’s taken something of a radical stance here. A few notable points: The author has set up a powerful symbolism and subtext with the literary allusions—the opposition between Birth of a Nation and Uncle Remus is clear. This likely qualifies as Lovecraftian horror with a psychosocial bent, as it has the feel of elder gods and demons of a different reality impinging on our own. The action line peaks quickly and the plot includes a lot of tension because of the constant threats and battle scenes, plus use of horrific imagery that increases the effect. Maryse’s magical sword is forged from her anger over the death of her family, and part of her remains trapped in the cellar where she hid as a child while they died. Each chapter is preceded by an excerpt from a historical interview with a black Georgian, and the narrative includes ring shout songs and historical glimpses detailing a black community in the early 20^th century. Some of the characters here seem gender-queer, especially Chef, the munitions expert, who relates stories about service in the war. There’s a conversation about fine points in use of the N word; a discussion of whether communism or capitalism is a better avenue for African Americans, of truth versus lie, and then the central question of the book, whether Maryse is being offered hate or real power by Butcher Clyde. This is a classic deal with the devil.

On the less positive side, there’s a little disconnect in the setting. The tale is set in Macon, in the heart of Georgia south of Atlanta, but given all the celebration of Gullah-Geechie culture, I would expect a coastal city like Savannah or Brunswick might have figured more prominently. I expect the setting is because of the Klan activity around Atlanta and Stone Mountain, but that’s a long way from Macon in the early 1900s. Macon to Stone Mountain is maybe a two hour drive now on a nice, well maintained Interstate, but the story says it took them five hours to drive it, and then Chef and Maryse had to walk in and climb the mountain to locate the captives and confront Butcher Clyde. I thought the black Southern dialect used in the book was very readable, but the Gullah-Geechie dialect and Creole were harder going. It would have been helpful if the author had provided a few more clues to what people were saying.

Five stars.

Review of Downfall of the Gods by K.J. Parker

This is a fantasy novella published by Subterranean Press in March of 2016. It’s a fairly slim book, and runs 92 pages. This review contains spoilers.

As the story opens, Lord Archias is praying for forgiveness in the Goddess’ temple. It turns out he has found the Goddess’ favorite musician and composer Lysippus in bed with his wife and killed the man. Angry about the loss of her favorite, the Goddess refuses her forgiveness, but she is overruled by the Father of the Gods, who insists that she has to forgive. The result is that she offers Archias forgiveness if he will journey to the underworld and bring Lysippus back. Is there any way Archias can complete the task and win back his life?

This is a quick, easy read, written from the Goddess’ point of view. The scenario is fairly simple and the journey provides Parker with an opportunity to discuss some fairly weighty themes, including: class, privilege, power and entitlement, pretense and the effects of revenge. The Goddess drags her feet in dealing with things, and by the time it’s all over, Archias has found himself and pretty much given up all that stuff he thought he wanted, while Lysippus has taken over his place.

On the less positive side, there isn’t enough of the plot to make this interesting or entertaining beyond the philosophical discussion of themes. The events are very drawn out, with a lot of discussion, and the ending is pretty cynical. I would have preferred more drama and better development of the characters, with a lot more time spent with Archias, who’s the one trying to deal with the mess he’s made. The change he makes is pretty momentous, but we end up without any real understanding or perspective on it. I also thought the Goddess came off as shallow and petty, plus naïve about the dangers of trying to rework something that’s already history.

Three and a half stars.

Review of Mightier than the Sword by K.J. Parker

This is a historical fantasy novella, published June 30, 2017, by Subterranean Press and running 136 pages. K.J. Parker (a pseudonym for British novelist Tom Holt) won the World Fantasy Award in 2012 and 2013 and has been nominated a couple of times since. This review contains spoilers.

The Emperor has been indisposed for some time, sort of on his death bed, and the Empress rules. The Empire has been plagued by barbarian raids of late, so she summons her nephew and puts him in charge of stopping the raids. Nephew is an Imperial legate, and a possible heir to the throne. The raids seem to have targeted monasteries fairly often, so he takes an expedition out into the hinterlands to investigate the monasteries for possible clues about who the barbarians are and what they want. The monasteries are repositories of history and learning, and are in charge of maintaining libraries and copying books. The Abbots turn out to be mostly old friends/relatives of the ruling family who have been banished from the capital, and everyone seems to have their own agenda. As Nephew unearths corruption and closes in on who might be behind the raids, word comes that the Emperor is dead and that he should stay where he is until the succession question is settled. What should he do?

This is an entertaining read, written in first person and presented as a translation of an ancient text. Nephew (unnamed, but possibly Emperor Ultor III) has a certain wit and a cynical viewpoint that lightens the narrative. As the Emperor’s nephew, he is completely comfortable in wielding wealth and power. He’s not the brightest, the handsomest, or the bravest, but he is likable and is well informed by study about military strategy. As the story develops, it becomes clear that Nephew is also a total realist and completely ruthless. He trusts (almost) no one, and does what he has to do to survive.

It’s hard to come up with any negatives in this. The only niggle I have is that Nephew seems to have a lot of trust in his staff, and no apparent suspicion of his sweetheart’s motives about suddenly agreeing to get married. Presumably he’s sure of these people because of his own personal charisma—plus, I guess you have to trust somebody. It’s a short book, but the length is about right. Once we’ve seen all the candidates for trouble, it moves right into the succession issue and finishes up without dragging its feet.

This goes back three years, but it very much addresses a couple of the recent popular themes in literary SFF. The first is the issue of erasing history. Nephew is totally on the side of preserving books, and in leaning on history for the path forward. “In the end,” he says, “books are all that matter…[they are] the past speaking to the future.” The second popular theme covered here is the assumption of wealth and power. Not only does this story provide a grand tour of the Empire’s corruption, but it also outlines the career path for the successful emperor candidate. Trained at ruthlessness from an early age, Nephew doesn’t waver. If they’re a challenge, they’re dead.

Recommended. Five stars.

More on Wealth and Power

Most people who gain wealth and power have followed some kind of career path that gives them the skills to be successful in holding onto it. However, there’s an alternate path to wealth and power that involves behaviors we generally consider morally corrupt. It’s a scenario where the end always justifies the means, and favors are more important than qualifications and skill.

Looking again at the currently popular theme of killing people and taking over their wealth and power, it can be tricky to transfer these without documents, so what the authors are having the protagonists do is resort to fraud to carry it off. There’s a long tradition in fiction of romantic thieves who make their living through trickery and clever heists, but somehow this feels different. It’s as if the authors are advising readers to cut corners to get what they want. This signals a shift in moral standards.

Examples: In The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow, the protagonist January kills her benefactor William Cornelius Locke and forges documents to take over his estate so she can live in comfort and have what she wants. In Network Effect by Martha Wells, ART’s crew is forging documents to dispute ownership of worlds and displace the corporate owners. Both these instances are presented as matter-of-fact and justified because of systemic bias, therefore the right thing to do. So, is moral corruption now the approved method to achieve our various causes?

Of course, corruption has always been there in human interactions. Moral corruption is the whole basis of organized crime, which uses violence, assault, murder, extortion, and fraud to build wealth and power. These tactics also have a bad tendency to creep into politics, where the stakes for wealth and power are similarly high. The US has laws against corruption, but various investigations and charges signal that it is fairly common and ongoing in politics. Somehow it is just there, strongly associated with people who achieve positions where they see the opportunities to capture or launder money and make deals to benefit their own personal interests.

So, is this one of the opportunities that women (or minorities) have been missing in their quest for wealth and power? Is that why authors are now pointing it out as a morally justified activity? It’s true that women have a complex association with corruption. Historically they have often attached to corrupt and powerful men to share in their spoils. Research shows that (at least in democracies) more women in business and politics tends to be associated with lower levels of corruption. Plus, women see the opportunities differently. For example, women tend to evaluate the risk of corrupt behaviors more carefully than men, and may take a bribe and not follow through on the deal. This makes them less trustworthy for anyone who is offering corruption, and turns out to mean that men are approached with more and better deals. However, when there are no penalties, everybody seems equally corrupt.

On the one hand, we’ve got a human tendency to corruption, and on the other an unspoken assumption that our society has rules against corruption, and that this is the moral high ground. The question is which we’re going to choose, and where we’re going to draw the line. Another consideration is how we justify morally corrupt behaviors to ourselves and whether this is actually exculpatory. Is it okay for someone to (allegedly) lie about sexual assault for monetary or political gain as Tara Reade and Christine Blasey Ford have been accused of doing? Is it okay for somebody to manufacture a racial hate crime like Jussie Smollett or racial profiling like Rev. Jerrod Moultrie? Is it okay for Sherita Dixon-Cole to lie that Officer Daniel Hubbard sexually assaulted her during a traffic stop because of the need for police reform? These charges are consonant with political causes, so does that justify lying to manufacture incidents? Is this now the best way to get the power for the changes we want? Or not?

Charlie Jane Anders checked in with her opinion earlier this year. In City in the Middle of the Night, all the grand causes fail because corruption degrades the new order the same as the old. Would choosing a different path to wealth and power make a difference in the results?

Gaining and Using Personal Power

Since I’ve reviewed a number of works in the last couple of years that seem to deal with the question of how to gain and use personal power, I’m going to devote a couple of blog post to it. Specifically, the most popular theme seems to be about killing someone and taking over their power, but other writers, like Holly Black for example, have taken a deeper look at why women, in particular, seem to have problems in gaining and using real authority. Power isn’t a dark mystery. It’s an important subject to anybody interested in leadership, and social scientists have studied how it’s done. Again, this is just the high points, and anyone interested in the topic should do more reading.

In 1959, French and Raven identified five bases of power: legitimate, reward, expert, referent and coercive. Later, they added informational as a sixth. Legitimate power is generally gained from a formal position of some kind, like a boss or a president, that everyone agrees has a right to give orders and expect compliance. Reward power has to do with what kind of rewards a person can provide for his or her followers. Bosses can hand out bonuses, for example; politicians provide a job in the administration and crime lords share their wealth and influence with followers. Expert power is based on high levels of skill or knowledge. A mentor has this kind of power, as does a medical expert or a military strategist. Referent power comes from a person’s particular personality or charisma. This kind of leader is highly respected and perceived as worthy by his or her followers. Coercive power comes from the ability of a particular person to hand out punishment for anyone who steps out of line. Police, the military and some businesses enforce this kind of power, as someone who fails to follow the rules can be subject to fines, imprisonment, or in the case of work, get demoted or fired. Informational power has to do with the ability to control the information someone receives. This includes influencing beliefs through fake news and web brigades to rig foreign elections.

It’s easy to see that highly effective leaders often employ several of these power bases. King Arthur, for example, was apparently a highly charismatic leader, seen as legitimate because of Excalibur. He also had the power to punish and reward his followers, and presumably he developed into an expert peacemaker and strategist in dealing with his enemies. Some leaders may have problems in combining power bases like this. For example, a boss may have positional authority, but lose the respect of employees because of negative and demeaning policies, overuse of punishment, corruption, unreasonable demands, failure in planning, etc. Some positional power is also undermined because this kind of leader doesn’t have the control of events followers expect. For example, company management sets policy that supervisors have to follow. Personal charisma is always the wild card.

So, why do women have problems with this? I can’t define this problem in just a few words, but I’ll review some literature. Again, studies have suggested causes. There is a huge snarl of traditional expectations at work that undermine women in power positions. Traditionally women have taken their positions of power and authority from their male relatives, husbands or boyfriends. You can still see this at work from the prominence of Ivanka Trump, for example, or the push to draft Michelle Obama as a presidential candidate. Women are often less interested in positions of power, possibly because of family responsibilities and other interests. Another big difference is that men traditionally mentor younger men, sharing methods for successfully wielding power, while women fail to establish appropriate support networks. Because of this women can miss the existence of unwritten rules in an organization that all the men know about. Once in positions of power, women also tend to behave differently, as studies show women are less inclined to use rewards like bribery, suggesting that they may employ fewer tools in building and maintaining a power base. Studies of alpha females found that their positions of power correlated with masculine traits, but women may have problems in presenting these without being identified as shrewish and strident. Consider the campaign to convince Oprah Winfrey to run for president, for example. Winfrey is highly charismatic and known for empathy and social consciousness. She has considerable influence in media, but why was she unwilling to move up to a run for president in 2020? How would she have had to alter her image to stand on a debate stage next to Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, for example, and attack the other candidates?

For further reading on female power, check the article here.

Review of The Lost Sisters by Holly Black

This e-novella is a companion piece for the Folk of the Air trilogy, a look at The Cruel Prince’s story from Taryn’s viewpoint. The e-file also contains a one-chapter intro to The Wicked King. This was published by Little Brown in October of 2018, and runs 50 pages. This review contains spoilers.

This is basically a short recap of the first book, written in second person (you), and addressing Taryn’s twin sister Jude. It features Black’s lyrical style and flow, and investigates the cruel interpersonal relations that go on between the Folk of Faerie and the mortal Taryn and her sister. There is also some introductory commentary about traditional fairy tales and how they discriminate against women in the realms of power.

Clearly this was meant as a marketing tool for the next installment of the main series, but it may have also been meant to give life to Taryn’s character—the first person structure of the Folk of the Air trilogy means we always see others from Jude’s perspective, and the other characters remain a little flat. However, if this was the purpose, it didn’t work very well. This ends up sounding mostly like an apology from Taryn for bowing to circumstances and not being there for her sister when Jude tries to fight back. In this narrative, Taryn comes off like a whiny victim who never manages to take control of her own life, falls for a clearly duplicitous guy, makes a poor marriage, and then constantly apologizes for being what she is. Part of Black’s intent may be to set up Taryn as Jude’s foil just to illustrate the contrast between the fighter and the victim mentality. Neither of the two is particularly likable, and neither is completely successful in trying to deal with the system. However, the idea that the characters (twins) might be laying out two paths for the same person is interesting.

Besides this, I have to hand it to Black for taking on the issue of submission. A big chunk of media these days is pushing girls to take charge, but nobody is presenting the real-world challenges. We’re seeing some of it here. Jude fights her way to the top, but struggles because she hasn’t the skills to make alliances and wield power. Meanwhile, Taryn tries to blend and take a traditional role, but then turns out to be boring to a dismissive, two-faced husband.

Three and a half stars.

Review of The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black

The Queen of Nothing is the third novel in the Folk of the Air series, preceded by The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King to complete a three-novel set. The Queen of Nothing was published by Little Brown in November of 2019, and runs 320 pages. This review contains spoilers.

Jude had been banished by the High King to the mortal world for her murder of Prince Balekin. She is living with her sister Vivi, Vivi’s girlfriend Heather and her brother Oak in Heather’s apartment, and makes money to help with the rent by hiring out as an errand-girl for a local faery. She accepts a job and ends up fighting a duel with Grima Mog, Redcap general of the Court of Teeth, who then reveals a plot to dethrone the King of Elfhame. Soon after, Jude’s twin sister Taryn arrives. She reveals she has killed her husband Locke, and she wants Jude to stand in for her at the inquest so she can use her resistance to glamour in order to lie. Jude agrees, and disguised as Taryn, she re-enters Elfhame. The inquest seems to go well until Nicasea insists Taryn be searched for a charm, and King Carden offers to examine Taryn himself. Once they are alone, he reveals he knows who she is. Madoc attacks the palace, attempting to rescue Taryn, and captures Jude. She wakes in Madoc’s war camp, where she continues to pretend she is Taryn and learns about the plot to remove the High King. When Madoc’s forces arrive at the palace to capture the crown, Carden destroys it and then turns into a monstrous serpent that defiles anything it touches. Is there anything Jude can do to save the kingdom and claim her rights as Queen of Elfhame?

My first impulse that this is an allegory for high school turns out to be correct. Jude and Taryn are Average Kids trying to enter a clique of the Right People. Nicisea is the Mean Girl, Locke is the Gamer, and Carden is the abused child who grows up to be a monster that Jude tries to salvage. Jude continues to fight her way through everything, while her twin Taryn tries to blend. At the end, everybody ends up getting pizza together at the local shop. On top of this, author Black spins the surface story of Faerie and the scheming around succession to the throne. In general this works well, and the story manages to be entertaining on both levels. It continues the theme of fighting for power versus submission to the system, and Jude continues to fail in her struggle to deal with a powerful position. Black’s trademark style is fairly lyrical and this is strongly plotted, if a little abrupt sometimes and short on transitions.

On the less positive side, the surface story seems to be wearing a little thin toward the finale as the allegory starts pulling the strings. Jude constantly overestimates her abilities, takes on more than she can handle and then despairs—after a while, she ought to know better. Maybe the constant murders are an allegory for “cutting people dead,” but the high attrition rate continues to be worrisome. Also, it would be nice if Jude and Carden would just talk. A little bit of communication would go a long way in resolving the issues between them. Instead, Jude remains defensive and suspicious, refusing to recognize that it’s about anything but Jude. As far as I can tell, she never grows much as a person, always grandstanding solo rather than taking the reins of power and working within the structure that should be in place to defend the king and the kingdom. I’m wondering why so much space is used up by descriptions of women’s gowns, and also why everyone uses just swords and knives. Maybe there’s some magic in Faerie that prevents the use of firearms, but in the mortal world, why does Jude still show up for a fight with just a knife? There are other ways, dear.

This is a good story, regardless of the niggles. Highly recommended for young adult.

Four stars.

Review of The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

I reviewed The Wicked King, second in this Folk of the Air series, which won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Young Adult Novel in 2019, but thought it would probably help if I’d read the first book in the series, too. The Queen of Nothing completes the three-novel set. This novel was published by Little Brown in 2018, and runs 385 pages. Apparently it was optioned for a film in 2017. This review contains spoilers.

Jude’s mother was a mortal married to Madoc, a general of the High King of Faerie. She had one daughter Vivienne with him, and then ran away with a human artisan to the human world, where they had two more daughters. Madoc followed them, killed Jude’s mortal parents and spirited the girls away to raise with his new wife and son Oak. At seventeen, Jude wants desperately to fit in, but she is tortured by the young fay of her social circle, especially the cruel Prince Cardan, youngest son of the High King. Although her twin sister Taryn yields to the abuse and finds a place, Jude remains defiant, determined to win some kind of power to make her tormentors sorry. She schemes and intrigues, allying with Prince Dain, who is expected to succeed the High King, but then the coronation goes wrong, leaving the kingdom on the verge of civil war. Can she come up with a plan to save her family and make peace in the kingdom?

This is a pretty awesome intrigue, strongly suggesting the author had a tough time in high school. The story starts off with a bullying episode and gets successively more gripping as it goes along. Nothing and no one is what they seem, and all the characters are gray, rather than black and white. The Faerie are all cruel and hungry, but they love each other, too, and they fear loss. The characters take on dimension slowly as the tale progresses, as Jude fights her way through the love, hate and ambition, trying at first to achieve something for herself, and then once things go wrong, to save the people she loves. The Faerie kingdom and its rules are well-laid out, and now and then Jude slips back into the mortal world with her fay sister Vivi to shop at Target.

It’s hard to find anything really wrong with this. Considering the setting, I did start to suspect the characters were two-sided early on, so it wasn’t really a surprise when they showed a different face. One questionable issue here is what Jude is turning into—maybe becoming just as cruel, evil and calculating as the fay? She’s been cursed, so we’ll have to see how it turns out.

Five stars.

I’m going on to review the Queen of Nothing. If you’d like to read my review of The Wicked King, here’s a link to it.

Review of The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

This fantasy novel is a finalist for the 2019 Nebula Award. It’s listed as the author’s debut novel, published 10 September 2019 by Redhook/Orbit and runs 385 pages. This review contains spoilers.

It’s the early 1900s, and the wealthy William Cornelius Locke is the founder of an amateur archaeological society that collects ancient artifacts. When he runs across Julian Scaller, a needy black man with a baby girl, he employs Scaller to find artifacts for him and takes in the girl as his ward. January Scaller grows up with wealth and privilege, but also carefully protected, as her nursemaid works to turn her into a fine young lady acceptable for polite society. Scaller sends Jane, an African companion for January, and Locke takes her in, too, plus a big, protective dog named Bad. January finds a magical chest in Locke’s study that presents her with messages and gifts from her father, including a book about another girl and Doors to other worlds. After her father disappears and is presumed dead, January gets drunk at one of Locke’s parties and rejects his birthday gift, embarrassing him. Her wealthy, sheltered life comes crashing down then, as he fires Jane and has January sent to the local asylum. Is he really a monster, and has she been a hostage to ensure her father’s cooperation all this time?

This has the feel of young adult. On the positive side, Harrow’s style has been described as “lyrical” and the sweet love story between January’s parents evokes childhood’s wonder at the wide possibilities in the world. The timeline catches the end of the imperialist Victorian period when polite young ladies were carefully controlled and expected to be seen and not heard, and the resulting themes are about what you’d expect from this period, including repression, personal freedom, racism, cultural appropriation, wealth, and power. At one point, Locke comes right out and equates whiteness with power and influence, and later an epiphany dawns on January that it’s dangerous to be quiet for too long. The Doors represent diversity and opportunities for change.

On the less positive side, the plot doesn’t really get moving until the second half of the book, and then it seems to get seriously confused. The fact that almost all the principal characters turn out to come from other worlds undermines the racist statements Locke has made. We’re expected to automatically condemn the man and his strange friends because they’re wealthy, powerful and racist, but when you look at the situation critically, Locke is offering the talented January a chance at high station, privilege and power herself. At this point she has a choice: 1) go with it, become wealthy and powerful and try to destroy his organization from within, or 2) get drunk, publicly rebel, get her dog hurt, herself tortured in the asylum and her friends Samuel and Jane injured and nearly killed. January takes choice #2 and suffers the consequences. Meanwhile, she has no idea how to survive in the world without Locke’s protection. Jane even has to warn her that she has no skills and needs to be smarter. In the end, January commits fraud, forging documents in order to take over Locke’s wealth and position herself. Are we supposed to applaud? What are young readers expected to take from this story?

Two and a half stars.

Wrap Up of the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award Reviews

For anyone who doesn’t know, Amazon bought Goodreads in 2013, in a move to integrate the review and discussion site for direct promotion of its literary offerings. Goodreads analyzes the data from what they say includes hundreds of millions of books rated, reviewed, and added to their Want to Read Shelves in a given year to determine which books make the cut for the Opening Round. This is followed by Semifinal Round and a Final Round where site users are invited to vote for the winners. In 2019 there were 300 initial nominees with an average rating of 4 stars. Because the site is so powerful, it’s clearly important for authors to pay attention to how their books are received and reviewed there. That makes this pretty much a popularity award, though I expect it will be affected by factors like levels of promotion and influencers within the various Goodreads groups.

So, this went better than I expected. I don’t always like bestseller novels because I do like solid world building, strong characters and literary elements like theme and meaning. Although Crouch’s book was a little weak, I did like the novels the women authors wrote. One of the big advantages in reading for this award was that there seemed to be a minimum of political messages in the books. There were messages and themes, of course, but in general they were more social commentary than political screeds. These included the dangers of technology (Crouch) and the effects of power, abuse and bullying (Black). Bardugo’s book is a little harder to summarize, but also seems to be about abusing others for the purposes of achieving power.

These books seem to have won the awards pretty much on their entertainment value and for how they speak to the reader, rather than for their “diversity” or other characteristics. All three winners involve mainly white characters, except for Bardugo’s black Centurion, and all the authors are also white. Bardugo appears to be Jewish, and Crouch writes about gay characters fairly often, but hasn’t come out as gay that I can find with a quick search. Of the three, only Black seems to have been recognized by the SFF community; she won the Andre Norton Award in 2005 for Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faery.

Since this went well, I’ll do it again next year. Stay tuned for the 2019 Nebula reviews.