Nanoreviews: Unraveller, The Mimicking of Known Successes, Tread of Angels

Unraveller by Frances Hardinge [Macmillan Children's (UK)/Amulet (US)]

Clara's review of Unraveller already covers most of what makes this book so great: Frances Hardinge always brings intriguing magic and thoughtful moral complexity to her particular brand of YA, and her latest is no exception. Set in a world where humans live alongside the otherworldy denizens of the Wilds, Unraveller focuses on Kellan, a boy from a community of weavers who has been cast out after gaining the uncontrollable ability to unravel both fabric and curses, and Nettle, a formerly cursed girl, as they travel the country of Raddith unravelling the various curses that its inhabitants have placed on each other - ranging from mildly inconvenient to the truly horrible. The curses themselves are gifted by the Little Brothers, spider-like fae inhabitants of Raddith who also take a keen interest in ensuring its technology doesn't develop too extensively. When someone is given a "curse egg", they have the ability to lay a curse on someone they feel has wronged them, but the punishment for even having a curse egg - let alone using it - is extremely steep, even before the emotional cost and stigmatisation for the curser is taken into account.

We follow Kellan and Nettle as they try to discover the source of a curse on Kellan, which appears to be making his abilities stronger and more unpredictable. Along the way, Hardinge sketches out the various impacts that living with this particular brand of otherworldly justice has had on Raddith's society, and what, if anything, can be repaired after a curse has come to pass. As tales of fae morality being imposed on humans go, this is a seriously good one, and Kellan and Nettle's mildly prickly friendship forms a wonderful core around which the rest of the narrative unfolds. If you haven't read any Hardinge before, this is a great place to start.

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older [Tor dot com Publishing, 2023]

It feels appropriate to be talking about this book (again, following one of my Nerds of a Feather colleagues, this time Arturo) at a point when many of the genre fans I know are grappling with the definitions and purpose of "cosy" fiction. Perhaps this will become an essay for another time, if this fan ever gets her proverbial shit together. The Mimicking of Known Successes, billed as cosy Holmesian fiction, divides much of its time between university campuses and windswept train platforms and comfy carriages, but perhaps not in the location you'd expect: this is the human settlement on Jupiter, to which the survivors of humanity fled after Earth became uninhabitable, with habitats floating in the, uh, clouds of our biggest planetary neighbour and connected by a planet-spanning train network. We follow Mossa, an investigator looking for a missing academic, and her ex-girlfriend and classical geographer Pleiti, who Mossa approaches to help with the investigation into her colleague. Together, the two uncover a deeper conspiracy surrounding this disappearance, with implications for Earth's future and the people who get to decide on it.

Part of the cosiness here is aesthetic: Older does a fantastic job of creating a colony that seems comfortable and interesting and dynamic, even as we see characters grapple with the historic loss of Earth and the limitations of their current home. The novella opens in a remote settlement at the end of the railway line which Mossa refers to as a "piece of grit", but it's a piece of grit with a surprisingly nice pub and pleasant residents, not some desperate, impoverished outpost. People are doing OK for themselves, and for each other, on Jupiter, even if some are more OK than others, and it makes for a very different atmosphere than the gritty "everyone is one step away from a cold, unpleasant death" aesthetic that pervades most colonisation stories.

Beyond that, though, The Mimicking of Known Successes provides a perfect mix of personal stakes with wider implications for humanity's future, with Pleiti and Mossa rekindling their relationship and grappling with what this case means for their respective careers while also piecing together the answer to the mystery, and its full stakes. At the heart of those stakes is the academic debate for Earth's future, which is introduced to us as an interdepartmental war between different geography disciplines (finally, geography gets the respect and centrality it deserves!), and effectively revolves whether recolonisation of Earth should take place with full understanding of Earth's former ecosystem and its recreation, or whether humanity should be trying to build something new and adjust as they go along. I would read an entire Mars Trilogy-style doorstopper featuring characters arguing about the ins and outs of terraforming along these lines, but here it's just one strand in a much shorter narrative. Moreover, it's inextricably tied to Pleiti's position as a classicist (the "understand everything first" position) working in an academic institution alongside colleagues who, for various reasons (such as "being men") do not give her views the respect she feels they deserve.

Mimicking of Known Successes has a great ending to its mystery and its romance, but it also leaves the door open for more stories in this world - which we are getting! I, for one, am very excited.

Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse [Saga (US)/Solaris (UK) 2022]

I haven't seen as much about this Weird Western as I'd expect given that it's Rebecca frickin' Roanhorse, but if you're looking for a diverting adventure into a frontier town of angels and demons (hey, "angels and demons" is a bingo square for Reddit's r/fantasy bingo this year!) you could do much worse than this novella. The setting here is a mining town where the ostracised "Fallen", descendants of rebel angels are put to work mining Divinity (created from the body of Abaddon, because what else would it be) under the watch of the virtuous "Elect". Celeste is a Fallen, but she has been raised by her Elect father and only recently reunited with her sister Mariel, who spent her childhood with the pair's mother. Now Celeste is trying to keep her head down, but when Mariel is accused of murdering one of the settlement's leaders, her sister is given just 24 hours to prove her innocent, aided only by her demon ex-lover Abraxas.

Standing between Celeste and her sister's freedom are an entire town's worth of deep secrets, not least those of her own sister, and most of the action here is about one woman coming up against an entire system which is stacked against her, not least because of the baked-in presumption of moral goodness in the angelic Elect (their leaders are literally called Virtues!) and the stigma against the Fallen. The adventure here is firmly in "satisfyingly tropey" territory, and while the end result is a story that didn't make a huge lasting impression on me, it's certainly an enjoyable read, with depths of worldbuilding that would lend themselves to further stories in this setting. 

POSTED BY: Adri Joy, Nerds of a Feather senior editor, dog owner, aspiring mermaid, having an increasingly weird time about her own biography

Review: Unraveller, by Frances Hardinge

Undoing the curse is only the start.

If you have ever stood by, quietly seething, swallowing down a boiling fury that cannot find an outlet because you are too powerless to express it, then this book will strike you with a deep resonance. It is, fundamentally, a ‘what-if’ for those people who have writhed in the grip of impotent anger: What if you had the power to express it, to defy social strictures, to channel your rage into an outlet that would make them pay? 

In the country of Raddith, which lives in an uneasy equilibrium with the creatures of the Wilds next door, the furious, wronged, indignant, or malevolent among us are granted that outlet. The gift comes from spiderlike creatures from the Wilds, known as Little Brothers because an affectionate, friendly name blunts—however ineffectively—people's fear of their terrible power. Little Brothers find people nursing a deep sense of wrong, and grant them a curse egg, which grows and matures inside the wronged, nurtured by their hurt and indignation, until they let fly, turning the target of their anger to stone, mist, a fishhook, a bat, a sentient harp, a murderous monster who must be cast out and ostracized from all she ever knew and loved. The shape each curse takes is dictated by the nature of the wrong that was committed, because a punishment is all the more satisfying when it fits.

Naturally, a nation plagued by cursers and cursed must develop an infrastructure to handle this. Institutions are constructed to lock up cursers—or indeed, potential cursers, because the best way to prevent a curse is to find the carrier of a curse egg and lock them up before they’ve hurt anyone. After all,

There were telltale signs of a potential curser, if you knew what to look for, so they could be identified. Some showed flashes of uncontainable rage or saw things other people couldn’t. No, it wasn’t fair to lock up an innocent person, but what else could you do? It would be like saying you couldn’t take an arrow from a drawn bow because it hadn’t hurt anyone yet.

Because, you see, everyone knows that if you have a curse egg, you will use it. And if you’ve had one, you will probably get another, because everyone knows that a curser will always curse again. Always. Everyone knows this.

Kellen, a teenage boy cast out from his family of weavers due to his uncanny ability to unravel any woven thing merely by getting too close, also possesses the ability to unravel curses. Together with Nettle, a girl who’d been cursed into a heron until he’d intervened, he travels Raddith, taking commissions from people who want their loved ones released from their curses. 

Unravelling curses is not a simple matter. The first stage of every investigation requires Kellen and Nettle to learn everything about the nature of the curse—who cast it, to be sure, but also why. Which means every investigation must begin with the question, ‘what did you do to deserve this?’ In this world, victims must be blamed, not because they are necessarily culpable (although, to be sure, many are a right piece of work), but because the nature of how curses work requires that the curser feel wronged and hard done by. The work is as much psychology as it is magic.

These psychological causes and consequences of cursing form the real strength of this book. The writing is equally sympathetic to both curser and cursed. Yes, if you’ve spent thirty years as a terrifying monster in the wilderness, luring people with your siren voice to a swamp where you drown them and eat them, you are not okay when the curse is unravelled and you must face what you’ve done as a human. But, similarly, if you’ve been wronged so deeply (or feel that you’ve been wronged so deeply) that you are willing to turn someone into a terrifying swamp monster, you’re equally not okay. Hardinge allows the cursers to speak their bit with their own voices, never losing sight of the harm that they’ve done, but also not glossing over the harm that was done to them that spawned their curse egg in the first place.

Throughout the book, we repeatedly run into the message that you must treat the harm—whether the original wrong that was done, or the aftermath of the unravelled curse—with as much care as you treat the technical unravelling of the magic itself. Kellen’s real skill lies in unravelling the curses, not ministering to the mental health of the uncursed and curser alike, but just because you’re not good at something doesn’t mean you get a free pass to neglect it. 

It’s a dark and difficult message. Indeed, many of Hardinge’s books have quite a grim undertone to them. Although her books are nominally YA, she does not give her young main characters the naivety or impetuousness that so frequently characterizes teenage protagonists of YA books. Kellen and Nettle are persistently distrusting of adults, and their distrust is usually well-founded. It makes for cynical story, but satisfying reading: A too-trusting character who gets duped is just frustrating, and that never happens in Hardinge’s books. Characters must earn Kellen and Nettle’s trust. At the same time, though, their perpetual caution and second-guessing of every decision regarding whom to trust becomes exhausting. Yet that exhaustion, that dilemma, is the very heart of the difficulty of their task, because trust is a key component in treating mental health. And as they learn at the end, the path forward is going to require a substantial amount of that. 

The world-building of this tale supports the story beautifully, starting with one of the finest prologues I’ve ever encountered. The Wilds, which constitute the source of everything dark and magical about the world, are shrouded in a veil of uninterestingness. People’s minds slide right past them; views of them from the sea make them look like a pathetic scrubby bit of nothing, hardly worth the trouble to think about, let alone explore. Yet within them are all sorts of magical beings: the spidery Little Brothers who grant curse eggs; the carnivorous marsh-horses who form bonds with humans at the cost of an eye and—effectively—a life; the Dancing Star, who detaches its hands to form a cage that traps and eat souls; the Bookbearers, who oversee and enforce all agreements, whether or not the speaker realizes that they’re entering into it at the time. (Magically enforced bargains that operate by rigid adherence to the wording, rather than good faith respect for the intention, are my favorite kind of bargain.)

It is a wonderful instantiation of the wild and weird kind of magical realm, filled not with the twee twinkling Tinkerbell fairies, but the magical Other, akin to Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies, to Clarke’s Raven King and Faerie kingdom. It is a realm whose blue and orange morality is so far askew from human dimensions that people who live on the borders of the Wilds shut their doors at night and don’t let anyone in; while people who live within the Wilds themselves welcome everyone to their homes without question, because they vulnerable to terrifying punishment if they give the slightest offense to any of the inhabitants. Indeed, so satisfying is this kind of magic that it is rather disappointing when some of the Wilds creatures turn out to operate according to human standards of kindness. It is, to be sure, a relief to Kellen and Nettle, who have received precious little of it in their wanderings, but it felt unearned here, where kindness, and trust, and goodness, are granted grudgingly, if at all. 

But then, that trust in kindness must be granted if the curses are not just to be unravelled, but fully healed.

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention

• An understanding of mental health, without getting bogged down in a Trauma Plot
• Weird and wild magical creatures
• Appropriately suspicious youngsters

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative

Reference: Unraveller. Frances Hardinge. [Macmillan Children's Books, 2022].

Reading the Hugos: Lodestar

Welcome to what is likely the final entry in Reading the Hugos this year. As I noted last year, from the perspective of a reader who is not plugged in the YA scene and isn't a YA reader, the Hugo nominators did a good job again this year.

I do always wonder about visibility and this award. How widely are Hugo voters reading in YA? I tend not to nominate much for the Lodestar for that reason (this year I nominated Catfishing on Catnet and Anne Ursu's excellent The Lost Girl), but that is also an argument that can be made for Graphic Story or, if we're feeling nitpicky, the entire ballot. The Hugo Award (and the technically not a Hugo Lodestar Award) is representative of the tastes and opinions of those Worldcon members who take the time to nominate and vote. That's part and parcel of the process, which I suppose makes this paragraph somewhat excessive.

This year I was only able to read five of the six finalists. I missed out on Deeplight, which is the second time I've missed reading Frances Hardinge for the Lodestar. This year I have a good excuse - I was reading all of Seanan McGuire's Incryptid stories included in the Voter Packet (oh, my heart after reading the last of the Johnny and Fran stories).

Let's look at the finalists, shall we?

• Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer (Tor Teen)
• Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge (Macmillan)
• Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee (Disney/Hyperion)
• Minor Mage, by T. Kingfisher (Argyll)
• Riverland, by Fran Wilde (Amulet)
• The Wicked King, by Holly Black (Little, Brown; Hot Key)

Riverland: I haven't read much of Fran Wilde's fiction, far less than I would have expected given how well regarded her Bone Universe novels are (start with Updraft), but I have fairly consistently bounced off each story of hers that I have read. Whether it is The Jewel and Her Lapidary, "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" or The Fire Opal Mechanism, I have a growing suspicion that I'm just not a Fran Wilde reader. That, no matter how good or how well regarded, these aren't the stories for me. It also means that I am unlikely to give Updraft a go, but that is a different point.

I had hoped that Riverland would be the book to buck that trend. It is completely unrelated to her Gem novellas, it's YA rather than strictly written for adults, it's a portal fantasy novel dealing with domestic violence. Riverland is beautifully written for those readers able to dive in and work their way through Wilde's storytelling. I know Adri gave Riverland 5 Stars on Goodreads, so there's at least one editor here who strongly disagrees with me on Riverland (this is not likely to be our only disagreement in this category) - but Riverland really locked down the idea that unless Fran Wilde is on an awards ballot I am actively reading for, I probably won't be reading more of her work. It is worth noting that this is written before I read any of the Short Story finalists, which does include a selection from Fran Wilde, so there's one more chance for me to connect with Wilde's fiction this year.

Dragon Pearl: Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire trilogy of novels are simply excellent. Each book was a finalist for the Hugo Award (as was the series as a whole), and justifiably so. I thought the series got better as it progressed, and it was pretty darn good from the start. I could not wait to see what Yoon Ha Lee would write next and what was next was Dragon Pearl, a YA novel from Rick Riordan's publishing line. A bit of space opera and adventure.

I absolutely love the idea of Dragon Pearl, of the novel's set up of a girl with hidden magic desperate to find and clear the name of her brother who is accused of desertion from the Space Forces. I loved how Min used her magic, how she cons her way into getting to the heart of what happened to her brother. So much of Dragon Pearl was absolutely delightful and weeks after finishing the novel I'm still thinking about the relationships Min made. Dragon Pearl is a wonderful novel of friendship.

That's what makes it so difficult to put my finger on why I didn't love Dragon Pearl as much as I expected. The individual parts are so excellent, but they somehow don't coalesce (for me) into a novel that reached the heights it should have. All the ingredients were there, the meal just didn't quite come together.

Minor Mage: I have much less to say about T. Kingfisher's Minor Mage, but it was an absolutely charming story of a boy who was training to be a magician but has far too much responsibility for his village compared to his age and training. Minor Mage is a quest story and I would have loved to have another hundred pages of it (Minor Mage is more a novella than full length novel). I look forward to reading it to my kids when they are older.

The Wicked King: When I wrote about The Cruel Prince as part of last year's Lodestar ballot it was my runner up, behind only the superb Dread Nation (The Cruel Prince placed fourth, Dread Nation was the runner up). Where The Cruel Prince was the first book in a series related to other books it did not require any familiarity with Tithe and the other Modern Tales of Faerie. The Wicked King, on the other hand, is the direct sequel to The Cruel Prince and if readers who don't remember the relationships in that first book will be at least half lost in this book, though Holly Black is a skillful enough writer that new readers will be able to keep up, just without some of the nuance.

I wrote last year that Holly Black is a master storyteller and that remains the case. The Wicked King is exactly the continuation of The Cruel Prince one might hope for, though this is not a series for the faint of heart or those who don't want bad things to happen to good people. Black does not pull punches.

Catfishing on Catnet: When Naomi Kritzer won a Hugo Award in 2016 for her story "Cat Pictures Please" (also a Nebula Award finalist) I assumed it was a one-off. "Cat Pictures Please" was a delightful story of an A.I. (artificial intelligence) who wants to help people and look at pictures of cats. Catfishing on Catnet is more than an expansion of that story, it's a complete reworking using that same central premise. Most impressively, it's seamless. Kritzer is not expanding a smaller idea into a shape it doesn't fit, she has a big idea that is bigger than just the one novel (good thing there's a sequel coming next year).

Catfishing on Catnet is a smart and warm hearted thriller that deals with internet privacy, personal identity and rights, friendship, stalking, and social networks - it is an absolute delight. In a category where some of the finalists don't quite work for me - Catfishing on Catnet is a favorite. This is as good as it gets.


My Vote 
1. Catfishing on Catnet
2. The Wicked King
3. Minor Mage
4. Dragon Pearl
5. Riverland



POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.