2019 Hugo Awards: Best Novel
Jun. 9th, 2019 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonelvisIt's Hugo reading season! I'd already read one of these in 2018, but I polished off the rest (well, all but one) within the past several weeks. All reviews here are also on Goodreads, so if you follow me there, you'll have seen them already. (I did add some excerpts from Space Opera, though, so that people will understand why I gave it the review I did.)
Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers
A gentle, meditative set of intertwined character studies that hangs together perfectly despite a near-complete absence of plot – not a criticism, because the characters are so sharply drawn that I always wanted to find out what they were doing next. It isn't necessary to have read the previous books in the series (I still haven't read the first one!); Chambers' worldbuilding is thorough and natural enough that it's easy to immerse yourself in Fleet life immediately.
The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal
This is a perfectly fine book, but maybe not for me, or maybe simply not for me in my current mental/emotional state. I think I'm just not in the mood for books in which women have to heroically overcome (period-appropriate) sexism; if I want to read about men getting in women's way all the damned time, all I have to do is read virtually any headline right now.
Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee
This was slow going for me – the pacing felt all over the place, and the parts that really grabbed me didn't even get started until about halfway through the book. But at least I was satisfied with where Cheris and Jedao ended up at the end.
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik
This is probably a 4.5-star book and not 5, but 4 alone doesn't feel quite strong enough to me; I really loved this book, and fairy-tale retellings aren't always my thing.
One of the elements I loved most about this book is that Judaism is an integral part of it. Maryam, and her villagers' reactions to her and her family, would not be the same were she not Jewish, and I was glad that Novik didn't shy away from the implied and overt threats the Mandelstams faced. Those threats felt as worrisome to me as the main conflicts of the book – the threat of eternal winter, as well as an equally dangerous demonic possession – though I assume non-Jewish readers might not have the same reaction I did.
Anyway, so far this is my lead contender for the Best Novel category for this year's Hugos – frankly a huge surprise to me given how I felt about Uprooted. But I'd be very happy to see this one win instead.
Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse
I wanted to like this book. I enjoy Native American folk tales and mythology, I saw that this book featured a badass female protagonist, and nowadays, I try to read books written by anyone other than white cis dudes. Trail of Lightning also includes some fascinating worldbuilding in which the United States has largely been destroyed by "the Big Water," and the Diné fully own the traditional Navajo lands, now surrounded by massive magical walls – and also slowly becoming infested with dangerous magical creatures.
But this book was not for me. It's a violent book, which in and of itself isn't always an issue for me, but there was a level of graphic immediacy I found hard to take. I'm also currently not interested in stories in which men repeatedly tell women who they are or should be in love with – which is not the book's problem so much as mine, but was still a nagging issue that bugged me every time it came up.
I don't think this is a bad book. Someone else will likely enjoy it very much, and clearly did, or it wouldn't have been nominated for a Hugo. But I don't see myself reading more in this series unless they're nominated in the future.
Space Opera, Cat Valente
I tried to read this. It wants to be the great lost successor to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
It is very much not. Actual excerpts from this execrable thing:
and
I gave up only 14 pages in. It was unreadable.
My likely vote rankings
1. Spinning Silver
2. Record of a Spaceborn Few
3. Revenant Gun
4. The Calculating Stars
5. Trail of Lightning
6. NO AWARD, YES, I HATED SPACE OPERA THAT MUCH
Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers
A gentle, meditative set of intertwined character studies that hangs together perfectly despite a near-complete absence of plot – not a criticism, because the characters are so sharply drawn that I always wanted to find out what they were doing next. It isn't necessary to have read the previous books in the series (I still haven't read the first one!); Chambers' worldbuilding is thorough and natural enough that it's easy to immerse yourself in Fleet life immediately.
The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal
This is a perfectly fine book, but maybe not for me, or maybe simply not for me in my current mental/emotional state. I think I'm just not in the mood for books in which women have to heroically overcome (period-appropriate) sexism; if I want to read about men getting in women's way all the damned time, all I have to do is read virtually any headline right now.
Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee
This was slow going for me – the pacing felt all over the place, and the parts that really grabbed me didn't even get started until about halfway through the book. But at least I was satisfied with where Cheris and Jedao ended up at the end.
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik
This is probably a 4.5-star book and not 5, but 4 alone doesn't feel quite strong enough to me; I really loved this book, and fairy-tale retellings aren't always my thing.
One of the elements I loved most about this book is that Judaism is an integral part of it. Maryam, and her villagers' reactions to her and her family, would not be the same were she not Jewish, and I was glad that Novik didn't shy away from the implied and overt threats the Mandelstams faced. Those threats felt as worrisome to me as the main conflicts of the book – the threat of eternal winter, as well as an equally dangerous demonic possession – though I assume non-Jewish readers might not have the same reaction I did.
Anyway, so far this is my lead contender for the Best Novel category for this year's Hugos – frankly a huge surprise to me given how I felt about Uprooted. But I'd be very happy to see this one win instead.
Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse
I wanted to like this book. I enjoy Native American folk tales and mythology, I saw that this book featured a badass female protagonist, and nowadays, I try to read books written by anyone other than white cis dudes. Trail of Lightning also includes some fascinating worldbuilding in which the United States has largely been destroyed by "the Big Water," and the Diné fully own the traditional Navajo lands, now surrounded by massive magical walls – and also slowly becoming infested with dangerous magical creatures.
But this book was not for me. It's a violent book, which in and of itself isn't always an issue for me, but there was a level of graphic immediacy I found hard to take. I'm also currently not interested in stories in which men repeatedly tell women who they are or should be in love with – which is not the book's problem so much as mine, but was still a nagging issue that bugged me every time it came up.
I don't think this is a bad book. Someone else will likely enjoy it very much, and clearly did, or it wouldn't have been nominated for a Hugo. But I don't see myself reading more in this series unless they're nominated in the future.
Space Opera, Cat Valente
I tried to read this. It wants to be the great lost successor to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
It is very much not. Actual excerpts from this execrable thing:
As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of all-annihilating flames to help you follow along.
This book is that disco ball.
Cue the music. Cue the lights.
and
Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery country called England (which was bound and determined never to get too excited about anything), a leggy psychedelic ambidextrous omnisexual gendersplat glitterpunk financially punch-drunk ethnically ambitious glamrock messiah by the name of Danesh Jalo was born to a family so large and benignly neglectful that they only noticed he’d stopped
coming home on weekends when his grandmother was nearly run over with all her groceries in front of the Piccadilly Square tube station, stunned into slack-jawed immobility by the sight of her Danesh, twenty feet high, in a frock the color of her customary afternoon sip of Pernod, filling up every centimeter of a gargantuan billboard.
I gave up only 14 pages in. It was unreadable.
My likely vote rankings
1. Spinning Silver
2. Record of a Spaceborn Few
3. Revenant Gun
4. The Calculating Stars
5. Trail of Lightning
6. NO AWARD, YES, I HATED SPACE OPERA THAT MUCH