America Fantastica by Tim O'Brien

 

Reading this novel reminded me a good deal of reading Processed Cheese. America Fantastica is more subtle, and the points it's making are ... more varied, I think--not just privilege and wealth and inequality (though that) but also identity and the lies people tell each other and themselves. It's either kaleidoscopic or disjointed, I'm not sure I know which, and I'm not sure the going is particularly worth the ride, though there are some passages that made me laugh out loud.

Windigo Island by William Kent Kreuger

 

I spent like the first two-thirds of this novel not sure whether I really wanted to finish it. I'm kinda a sucker for mysteries set in various and sundry Native American countries (yeah, like Hillerman ..) but I really wasn't sure how I felt about all the Anishinaabeg beliefs being portrayed as though they were objectively real--I don't believe in nothing, and having mystic stuff in a mystery novel seemed like a bit of a violation, or a category error. Last third grabbed me and held tight: The characters are well-drawn, and the budding romance is handled ably, and whatever gawds there may be know the various Native American peoples got many fuzzy ends of many lollipops, and the evolution of one crime method to another as society changes was deeply believable. The couple of instances of "Hello, crime novel from 2014" not withstanding, I feel pretty good about this book, and the chances I'll look into other novels in the series are high.

Where They Wait by Scott Carson

This is an actual Horror novel. Not a big shock, reading the blurbs, but the jacket text makes it seem vaguely Mystery/Technothriller-ish, and the Mystery is a feint and the Technothriller is a disguise. This is supernatural Horror, with all sorts of other concerns--family and identity topmost--along with the typical Horror moral themes. It's pretty well-executed, though I spotted some of the moves at the end coming; whether someone spotting those things means the author's playing fair, or playing with tropes is a fair question--and I've read *a lot* of Horror over the years. I mostly don't mind, since if you're going to pull the trigger on that gun late in the story you need to show it to me earlier--and you probably want to make sure I see it, so you might show it to me more than once.

SignWave by Andrew Vachss

 Andrew Vachss wrote novels about seriously violent people doing seriously violent things. Usually the people who die are at least marginally worse than the people doing the violence. I wouldn't say the main character of *SignWave* exactly good, but he has his rules and he lives by them--and by the end he seems very much as though he's who he feels he should be, maybe taking some last step out of darkness. There's a strong whiff of noir here. I should probably read more Vachss.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

 

For whatever reason, the blurbs--even the couple-three that *explicitly* compared it to *The Stand*--weren't enough for me to twig that this was a novel of apocalyptic fiction. There's nothing wrong with apocalyptic fiction, though it's not really my fave, and I figure my failure to grok the messages I was receiving is at least partly my fault. It's a good novel, though there's some misdirection going on at places in it, and it's not as grim as apocalyptic fiction can be, which is nice--the end is ... mostly hopeful-ish. I saw at least one part of where the book was going about 100 pages before it got there, but that just means Wendig was playing fair. Apocalyptic fiction does have a tendency to have an air of "...and good riddance!" to it, and this novel does go there, but it's not persistent about it. Lots to like about this book, more if it's more your thing.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

 

Hrrrrm. This is a short-ish novel that wants to say big things. It's from 2016 and its future is already dated. The characters in it mostly aren't people I'm interested in spending time with, even the time it takes me to read a ~300 page novel. The conflict between magic and super-science is overblown and poorly resolved. The novel vacillates between twee and almost technophilic. Things are resolved by an action taken in the first half of the novel. And it still kinda sticks the landing. I've read novels I've resented reading, and I've started novels I couldn't finish or didn't want to, and this isn't either of those, but I can't really recommend it, either.

In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune

 

So, this was a book that I almost stopped reading a couple-three times. It's not *bad*, exactly, but it's a weird dissonant tonal mix of whimsical and grim, romantic and hopeless (and not hopelessly romantic) that basically makes for a bit of a jarring read. Also, it feels slightly over-elongated in the denouement: Your story's done, wrap it up, will you.