Victoria Janssen's Blog

Much Ado About Margaret by Madeleine Roux was very sweet and satisfying, by which I mean there’s a happy ending (of course! it’s a Romance!) and even the villains of the piece become sympathetic in the end, at least to some extent. Margaret Arden, Maggie, is a writer, and her latest work is based heavily on the naval stories of her beloved and recently-deceased father. Bridger Darrow, a second son to an abusive father, left a military career with PTSD to instead do work he loves, as a publisher...

Fiction:
Copper Script by K.J. Charles was a delightful historical romance, set in 1920s London, in which a closeted policeman, Aaron, encounters Joel, a graphologist who lost his dominant hand in World War One. Despite attraction, neither trusts the other until they’ve slowly tested each other out. In the course of a semi-scientific test of Joel’s (somewhat fantastical) abilities at determining character from handwriting, they uncover a conspiracy and must work together to save each other. It w...

Fiction:
Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree will be out in November. It takes a different path from Legends and Lattes and Bookshops and Bonedust; rattkin bookseller Fern is reunited with the orc coffeeshop proprietor Viv in her new life, fits into Viv’s new found family, and then learns that what ought to be her heart’s desire…isn’t. I loved this story; it’s a middle-aged woman’s quest to find what makes her happy, exploring discomfort and new ideas. And of course she finds weird and da...

Here There Be Monsters: Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo [2004] is speculative fiction, but also has a feel of literary fiction. I would probably call it dark fantasy because of tone, themes, a killing, and some domestic abuse. It’s the first novel by this Finnish author who also writes comics and scripts. The U.S. edition I read was edited from the British edition, Not Before Sundown [2003]; the original title was Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi.

I found that the short sections make it a quick...

Earls Trip by Jenny Holiday is a light historical romance with a mournful beginning. (By “light” I mean light on the historical details and with modern-sounding dialogue, which can be a feature or a bug, depending on your tastes.) Archie is the Earl of Harcourt. His mother no longer remembers who he is, and though he feels guilty about leaving her with her competent, kind companion, he truly needs the break of his annual vacation with his two best friends, one an earl and the other an heir to an...

Fiction:
I re-read Lois McMaster Bujold’s initial three books set in the “world of the Five Gods,” The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt. I’d loved them when they first came out, but it’s been well over a decade since I revisited them. Reading one after the other, instead of as they came out, meant I could see themes and ideas developing much more easily, and was also able to think about them in conjunction with the newer Penric and Desdemona stories, which are set in the...

Content warning: this book has past harm to a dog (but it did not die).

The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson would today be considered Middle Grade, I think. It’s set in 1908 Austria. Infant Annika is found abandoned in a church and taken in by a Viennese cook and a housemaid, as well as the three sibling professors for whom they work. Annika is a sunny, happy child who learns everything about taking care of a house and cooking, as well as random lectures on geology and art history and music from t...

My reading in the first half of the month was re-reading of large quantities of work by Cecilia Tan and P. Djèlí Clark, in preparation for Readercon panels. I didn’t make substantial notes on either panel, so I don’t have much to report here.

Fiction:
The Chicken Salad War by copperbadge is latest in the Shivadh series of romance novels; it doesn’t appear to be available in ebook yet. Simon LeFevre is chef to the royal family of Askazer-Shivadlakia and has been very lucky in romance if not in a...

Fiction:
Miss Morton and the Spirits of the Underworld by Catherine Lloyd turned out to be second in a historical mystery series set in 1830s England. The author managed the excellent trick of giving me enough hints of book one’s events to both let me follow the character arcs and make me want to go back and read book one. Miss Morton, Lady Caroline who has taken work as a companion/secretary, accompanies her delightful wealthy industrialist employer, Mrs. Frogerton, to a seance; when the spirit...

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo is fantasy set in 1930s Hollywood. The nameless first person narrator, whose Chinese immigrant father owns a laundry, first sees silent films by selling an inch of her hair; later, she plays the roles of assorted children in talkie movies that are filming nearby. To join a studio as an actor, ruled by an inhumanly powerful otherworldly being, she has to make sacrifices, blackmailing a contact and bargaining away some of her life in the hope of becoming a star, which in thi...