Mandate of Heaven--Preserving A Dynasty in Alternate China

 Mandate of Heaven by J.C. Kang is the fourth novel in the YA Daughter of the Dragon Throne alternate China fantasy series. I reviewed the previous three
 here , here and here though they all have new covers and titles now.

 In our world, when there was a transition between dynasties in China, the previous dynasty was said to have lost the Mandate of Heaven.  See Chinese Dynasties and the Mandate of Heaven for an explanation.   There is a great deal of turmoil in J.C. Kang's alternate China known as Hua or Cathay.   So the question arose as to whether the Wang family, who had been the rulers of this realm, had lost the Mandate of Heaven.

This sounded like a compelling storyline, so I purchased this book on Amazon and told J. C. Kang I would review it.

                             

A destructive dragon had played a role in the first two books. I am happy to say that the dragon in Mandate of Heaven is one who preserves, the Guardian Dragon of Hua.  If the Guardian Dragon comes to the defense of a ruler, that individual can be said to retain the Mandate of Heaven.

In the aftermath of the Emperor's death, Princess Kaiya turns out to be the only one of his children who is competent to rule in the midst of a major crisis for Cathay.  Kaiya  must deal with a revolting cousin who she once trusted, and a simultaneous Teleri invasion. She is also attempting to recover from the traumatic events of the previous novel.   Some readers might consider this too tall an order for a nineteen year old, but Kaiya has shouldered her responsibilities and met big challenges in the earlier novels in this series.  So I was rooting for her to succeed throughout the conflict.

                                   

                        

                                

Exiles--1920's Paris Literary Mystery

The literary mystery which focuses on the world of writers has always been a favorite sub-genre of mine.  When it's also set in Paris in the 1920's,  I am over the moon--or at least the Eiffel Tower.   This is why I purchased Exiles by Lawrence J. Epstein and reviewed it for Bookplex.

Author Lawrence J. Epstein’s has written extensively about Judaism and Jewish life.  This book is a departure since it’s his first mystery. Although the central character of Exiles has a Jewish background, he has come to Paris to escape his past.   In the 1920’s, which is when Exiles takes place, a number of American writers had made their home in Paris.  The most prominent among them who were included as characters in this book were Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Protagonist Daniel Levin arrives in France with high hopes of becoming a writer, but is soon confronted with the murder of the editor of a literary magazine in a bookstore.

                         

                              

A real strength of the novel is that Daniel Levin is complex and well-portrayed.  Yet some readers may become impatient because he hesitates to investigate the killing for the first third of Exiles despite receiving numerous requests to do so.   I understood the inner conflict that prevented him from joining the genre’s fellowship of amateur detectives.  My interest also never flagged because I loved Daniel’s encounters with prominent literary figures and the great dialogue that ensued.

I would never have guessed that Epstein had never written a mystery before this one because there were all the requisite plot twists.   I certainly didn’t guess the identity of the killer before the end.   So I give this author high marks for the first outing of his new series.

                                          

 

Ghost Talkers: Spiritualist Mediums in World War I

 This is the first time in 2017 that I am copying a review I wrote for Flying High Reviews and expanding on it a bit for this blog.  

My reviews dealing with Madame Presidentess  about Victoria Woodhull  and The Witch of Napoli  here , show my interest in spiritualist mediums.  This is why I wanted to read and review Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal.   The premise is that during WWI the British secretly utilized mediums to pass on information from recently dead soldiers to military authorities.  This is an extraordinary concept.  So I thought it would make for a highly unusual novel.

                                     

 Ghost Talkers reflects the world wide predominance of women among spirit mediums.  This doesn't mean that it's impossible for men to be mediums.   There actually are male mediums shown in this novel, but mediums are usually women.  The reasons are largely based on cultural traditions and gender stereotypes.   Mediums must be receptive to spirits. That ability to be receptive is a strength in the context of mediumship, not a weakness.  Gifted men must overcome the idea that receptivity is unmasculine in order to accept that they are mediums. 

Kowal presents mediumship as a way for women to play an important role in the war.   It was not the only role that women played in WWI. We know that women were nurses, ambulance drivers and espionage agents.  There were also woman pilots in WWI.   See  Inspirational Women of World War I.  Ghost Talkers does include nurses, and Kowal prominently mentions ambulance drivers in her historical note.

The women in the British medium corps are presented  as strong individuals.  It's mentioned that some were Afro-Caribbean immigrants.  One Afro-Caribbean medium was a named minor character. Yet the main protagonist was Ginger Stuyvesant, an American whose mother was English.  I ended up respecting Ginger for her courage.   Her romance with British Captain Ben Hadford is very central to the plot, and her last scene with him was very moving.

There were some literary references in Ghost Talkers.  A number of them were due to the use of books as keys for coded letters.  There were a couple of others that I enjoyed.

One was a reference to a martial arts form that was mentioned in a Sherlock Holmes story.   Arthur Conan Doyle mistakenly called it "baritsu" in "The Adventure of the Empty House".   Sherlock Holmes was supposed to have survived his encounter with Moriarity at Reichenbach Falls by using this martial art.  It was actually bartitsu .  What interested me most about the Wikipedia article on bartitsu that I linked is that Edith Garrud, who trained women to guard suffragettes, studied it.   I discovered Edith Garrud when I researched the movie Suffragette which I reviewed here.  Another literary connection with bartitsu, according to its Wikipedia article, is Will Thomas' Barker & Llewellyn mysteries.  Since I've read a couple of them, I was tickled that Will Thomas based protagonist Cyrus Barker on the founder of bartitsu, E. W. Barton-Wright.

I also enjoyed finding out in the acknowledgements that the Lieutenant Tolkien who was briefly mentioned in Ghost Talkers really was J.R.R. Tolkien who did fight in WWI, and based The Battle of  Helm's Deep on his war experiences. 

 I give this book an A for originality.  It may be a candidate for my favorite read of 2017, but it's much too early in the year to know that for certain.  It would be wonderful if Mary Robinette Kowal wrote further about the women of the medium corps.

                                     

The Bone Witch

The theme of necromancy fascinates me.  It got me to read the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton.  The necromancy concept was never really developed in those books, and Hamilton wandered away from it.   This resulted in my wandering away from the series.

I've seen some stories of necromancers as ceremonial magicians who draw a protective magical circle and summon the spirits of the dead into that circle.  A cautious attitude is wise when you don't know the spirit you're summoning.   Yet what about the beloved dead?

When I read in the description of  YA fantasy The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco that twelve year old protagonist Tea refused to accept the death of her brother and ended up resurrecting him, I was intrigued.  I also loved the cover.    So I requested an ARC from Net Galley,  and am now posting this honest review.

                             

Chupeco  doesn't spend nearly enough time on necromancy, but she does eventually show us how a deliberate act of necromancy works in her universe.   It's a dark approach, but it's  based on ancient beliefs about the nature of life and death.  I thought it was an excellent concept.

On the other hand, this is what is now called an epic fantasy.  This means that it takes place in a universe imagined by the author as opposed to urban fantasy whose setting is in a contemporary urban context, or historical fantasy which deals with a specific time and place in our past.  I always hope that an epic fantasy will be less derivative than they usually are, and I'm  always disappointed.  This is why I read so little epic fantasy.   

This book pulls background from a bestselling historical novel, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden.  I wondered if this was originally supposed to be historical fantasy.  I also  imagine that Chupeco considered the borrowed background a selling point.  She thought that the fans of Memoirs of a Geisha would buy the book.  I am not one of those fans.  I read Geisha: A Life by Mineko Iwasaki.  Iwasaki was the geisha that Arthur Golden interviewed when he was writing his book.  She considered the novel a misrepresentation.   I urge people who want to know the truth about geisha to read Iwasaki's memoir.

From a feminist viewpoint, the idea that women who have magical gifts that could potentially transform their world for the better should spend a great deal of their time entertaining wealthy and powerful men is repulsive.  It nevertheless makes sense in the patriarchal context that Chupeco is  portraying.   This practice provides these pseudo-geisha with important connections, but it also defuses the fear of strong women by making them seem harmless.   Since Tea turns out to be far too much of a powerhouse to be confined to the traditional geisha role, this strategy completely fails to render her unintimidating.

My favorite character in this novel is a boy whose nature and talents cause him to rebel against established gender roles.   His name is Likh.   He has magical abilities.  In this society, he would be required to join a special force of male magical adepts who are deployed militarily.  Yet Likh is a gentle soul who is unsuited to the military.   He is also a graceful dancer.  This would qualify him to be a pseudo-geisha, but males aren't permitted to assume this role.   I wanted this book to be about Likh's conflict with his society, but he was a minor character who didn't get enough space in the narrative to suit me.

Another important bone that I would like to pick with The Bone Witch is that I feel that it ended up reinforcing stereotypes about necromancers.  It seems to me that magic is a tool.  Whether it's good or evil depends on the ethical compass of the practitioner.   If someone's magical abilities are particularly potent, it is much more incumbent upon that individual to consider the consequences of every magical act.

 I also think that a character who isn't introspective or ambivalent about his or her decisions, isn't very interesting.   Perhaps  the YA genre doesn't really accommodate the maturity that I wanted to see in Tea, but I was a reflective teenager myself.  This is probably why I believe that she fell short, and that The Bone Witch became less worthwhile as a result.

                                     

                                    

My 2016 Retrospective

                                       

                                             Image courtesy of  arcadante at
                                                         FreeDigitalPhotos.net


 As I predicted in the beginning of 2016, I didn't post as frequently, but at least I can say that my post total was higher than this blog's first year.   My views total was a bit short of 8800, but I believe that I can claim that my views nearly doubled.

Book Babe, where I have been co-blogging with Tara , now has a new title.   This means that my most viewed post in 2016 appeared on Flying High Reviews.  It was my review of  The Last Painting of  Sara de Vos  by Dominic Smith.  My most viewed 2016 post on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer was my review of Rebel Queen by Michelle Moran.  This is not surprising since both books are popular historical fiction from major publishers.  

Now I will present the best books I read in 2016 which are recipients of 

                                 The Golden Mask Awards 

Best Book of the Year

Everfair  by Nisi Shawl

This first novel receives the award for originality and compelling themes.   It portrays an alternate history of the Congo.  It was also the best book published in 2016, the best science fiction book and the best ARC that I received from Net Galley in 2016.  You can read my review here. 

Best Fantasy Novel

The Book of Esther by Emily Barton 

This one was also a first novel and an alternate history.   In our world, the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria was destroyed in the  medieval period, but in Barton's magical novel it survived to fight the Nazis in WWII!   See my review here.

Best Contemporary Fiction

The Eagle Tree by Ned Hayes 

This was a book that I nominated on Kindle Scout which ended up being accepted for publication on Kindle Press.   I've been impressed with all my previous Kindle Scout nominees that have been published by Amazon.   This affecting novel deals with an autistic teen who loves trees and becomes an activist to preserve his favorite tree. It's also the best YA novel I read in 2016 and the best indie published book of 2016.  My review can be read here.

Since Amazon is rather dominant in the book business, I gave some thought about whether I should consider Kindle Press an indie publisher.  I decided that my criterion was whether you can obtain titles from the publisher at libraries.  Overdrive only offers e-books from major publishers that have also been published in print formats.   This means that Kindle Press books aren't able to attain the same level of distribution, and should be considered at a similar disadvantage to indie publishers.

Best Historical Fiction

Night in Shanghai by Nicole Mones

I discovered this book on the Goodreads group African American Historical Fiction.   It deals with a 1930's African American musician who finds that he can leave racial discrimination behind by going to China.   My review can be found here.

Best Romance

Miss Jacobson's Journey by Carola Dunn


Jewish protagonists are rare in romance.  I certainly wouldn't expect to find them in the Regency sub-genre which tends to focus on the world of British aristocrats.  I was also impressed by the independence of the heroine.   See my review here .

Best Graphic Novel

Wonder Woman: Hiketeia by Greg Rucka


I read other wonderful graphic novels in 2016, but this Wonder Woman book with classical Greek content and structure was a masterpiece.   I read this close to the end of the year and didn't have time to do this title justice in a full length blog review, but it shows why Greg Rucka is eminently qualified to write Wonder Woman.

Best Non-Fiction

Honorary White by E. R. Braithwaite

This memoir of a stay in apartheid South Africa was written by the author of To Sir With Love.  I thought that it was the most thorough depiction of South Africa during this period.  Braithwaite spoke to a cross-section of the population in a number of cities plus Soweto and Transkei.   

I wish you all good reads in 2017!

                          

 


 
        

 

  

Speakers of the Dead: The Costs of Medical Progress

Back in the 1970's I read a historical novel about Dr. John Hunter, an 18th century Scottish physician who is regarded as a medical pioneer.   I can't recall the title or author and couldn't find it on the internet, but that book was the one in which I discovered that doctors once  stole corpses from cemeteries in order to learn about human anatomy.   More recently,  I read The Anatomy of Deception by Lawrence Goldstone, a historical mystery which took place in late 19th century Philadelphia only a few years after autopsies became legal.

The subject of this review, Speakers of the Dead by J. Aaron Sanders, is a 2016 historical mystery that takes place in New York in 1843 when resistance to medical dissection of human corpses was still extremely high in the United States.  So medical schools continued to break the law in order to teach students anatomy.

                                   

By choosing to center his story on a fictional medical school for women which didn't exist in New York at the time,  Sanders has epitomized the anxieties of an era.  Respectable women were regarded as The Angel of the House  during this period.  The Wikipedia article to which I've linked refers to a popular poem that was published more than a decade later, but it crystallized the attitudes that had been part of the Anglo-American zeitgeist for some time.  Women were expected to swoon if anyone so much as mentioned the darker aspects of life. According to Victorian ideology, women were supposed to be too delicate to be exposed to such things.  Men existed to shield women from reality.   This means that women who cut up corpses were total iconoclasts.  I had no difficulty in believing  that they in particular would be subjected to mass outrage as they were in this novel.   They hadn't merely stepped outside women's sphere, they had shattered it and left the wreckage behind them.  There was a women's medical school in neighboring Pennsylvania a few years later, so Sanders was tweaking the chronology a bit.  He confesses to altering chronology in his author's note. This didn't bother me because he set up such an interesting social conflict.

The real first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, was one of the medical students in Speakers of the Dead.  Her name was Elizabeth Blackwell, and she had an unusual background.  Sanders has Blackwell speak about her father as an abolitionist, but my research revealed a man who was generally at odds with society, and he raised a set of children who were dissidents.   Elizabeth Blackwell's sister followed her into medicine, and her brother Henry Browne Blackwell became a women's suffrage supporter who married the women's suffrage activist Lucy Stone.  The Wikipedia article dealing with him includes the protest against the marriage laws that they read aloud during their wedding ceremony.

I haven't yet mentioned the amazing protagonist of this book.  It's Walt Whitman.  Other reviewers say that this isn't the Walt Whitman that they knew.  I guess they didn't actually read all his poems.  I did, and I consider him one of the most brilliant and unconventional poets in the English language.  So it didn't surprise me that he was taking on the establishment of his day as a young journalist.

Some mystery readers dislike historical personages as detectives because they don't think it likely that they'd be investigating crimes.  Newspapers that report crimes are also expected to uncover facts about them.  So I would think they'd have no problem with Walt Whitman solving cases during the journalistic phase in his life.

Actually, Speakers of the Dead wasn't so much of a whodunit.  Walt's challenge was to convince the authorities to arrest the man he knew to be the perpetrator.  This turned out to be a very risky undertaking.   Even though I knew that Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Blackwell  would survive the events of this novel, I still found it quite suspenseful.

I definitely wouldn't mind reading more Walt Whitman mysteries.  This may be J. Aaron Sanders' first novel, but it already shows evidence that his future work may be astonishing.

                                     

                           

True Colors of Betrayal: Characters Don't Always Evolve In A Straight Line

I promised J.C. Kang that I would read True Colors of Betrayal in January when he sent me a review copy.  Well, I got to it a bit early thanks to my new one book at a time reading policy.  Reading print books at home and e-books on mass transit has not been a good idea for books in either category.   The digital review copies were being completed more slowly, and there were so many print books that weren't getting completed at all.  I'm already seeing a small improvement in the number of books that I'm getting read.

True Colors of Betrayal is the third book in J. C. Kang's Daughter of the Dragon Throne series.   The main protagonist of this YA fantasy series is Princess Kaiya, a member of the Imperial family in an alternate version of China known as Cathay and Hua.  I reviewed book one, The Dragon Scale Lute, here and book two, The Dragon Charmer, here.  As usual, this review is an honest one.

                                   

Based on the foregrounding of the male character on the cover, you might think that he was the protagonist.   I imagine that he is Tian.  Tian is Kaiya's childhood friend who was exiled from the Imperial court for reasons that you will discover in this novel.   His narrative role is mainly action hero, but he's protecting Kaiya.  Characters are seen in relationship to Kaiya who is still the protagonist.

If Kaiya had continued to progress in the direction that she was headed at the end of  The Dragon Charmer she would have been an even more formidable leader at the close of True Colors of Betrayal.  Unfortunately, her momentum was disrupted by trauma.  This is the fate of far too many women, but it isn't a natural stage of development.   Kaiya was hijacked on her life journey. She was transformed into a survivor who would never see the world in the same way again.

The antagonists in this novel are the Teleri Empire. I originally thought they might be an alternate Mongol horde.  Yet on reflection, after reading this book, the closest parallel to the Teleri seemed to be the Castor clones of the BBC science fiction series Orphan Black  for a number of reasons which would be serious spoilers.

There was a long chase sequence in this novel that I found rather uninteresting.  It has always seemed to me that all chase sequences are the same.  The only way they can diverge is by mode of transportation which doesn't really provide enough variety.  The plot picked up for me after Kaiya stopped fleeing though the resolution was rather bleak. 

I sincerely hope that Kaiya can fully recover from her victimization. Judging from the description of the fourth novel in the series, she has a rough row to hoe.