I’ll Come Back to Haunt You If I Drown (original) (raw)

These are the books I’ve read most recently. Many of the reviews do have SPOILERS.

Along the Saltwise Sea, by A. Deborah Baker – The follow-up to Over the Woodward Wall has Avery and Zib continue their journey along the improbable road with the Crow Girl and the drowned girl Niamh, this time ending up on a surprisingly well-stocked pirate ship with a strange prisoner in a cabin that only sometimes appears. There’s more development on the Up-and-Under and its politics. Not all that much happens, but there are still two more books to go.

Last Canto of the Dead, by Daniel José Older – The second books in the Outlaw Saints duology alternates between Mateo, who’s dealing with divisions in the Brooklyn community and issues with his parents, and Chela, who’s on the just-restored San Madrigal fighting monsters with the hunter Odé Kan. We learn more about the history of the community, and of the gods who have incarnated as Mateo and Chela. The characters deal with the aftermath of the last story, and reconcile with each other. Really, the premise is rather complicated, perhaps a little too much at times, but I liked it. And it’s very distrustful of imperialism and the police.

Fire Sail, by Piers Anthony– Another Xanth adventure, this time focusing on an honest and naive young man named Lydell and a grandmother called Grania, whose honesty and integrity lead to the Good Magician Humfrey making them captains of a magical fire-powered boat, nicknamed Fibot. They sail it through a series of fanciful and pun-filled encounters, and a lot of women flirt with Lydell along the way. It also ties up some loose ends from earlier books, like Princess Rhythm and Cyrus Cyborg finally getting married after their dalliance with time travel magic, the fate of the destructive Ragna Roc, and finding a mate for Jenny Elf and Jerry Werewolf’s son. For some reason, even though nobody in Xanth seems to care too much about totally different species hooking up, having only four fingers on each hand is still a problem. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I guess prejudice rarely does. And the Pet Peeve makes a repeat appearance as part of the boat’s crew.

Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire – This book, the seventh in the Wayward Children series, is about an alternative school to Eleanor West’s, the Whitethorn Institute, which focuses on trying to make children who have visited alternate worlds deny and forget about their adventures, instead just becoming normal. The metaphors for gay conversion therapy were pretty blatant, including one particular quote from Stephanie, “They said it didn’t matter what we thought the truth was; when the truth isn’t something you can see, it’s malleable, and because we’re still legally children, our parents get to decide what’s true for us. They get to say they want their ‘real’ kids back, the ones they wanted, and not the ones they ended up with.” Anyway, Cora Miller, who thinks she can only stop the intrusive voices of the Drowned Gods if she totally forgets about her experiences, transfers to Whitethorn and finds it very unpleasant. She receives help from Sumi and Regan Lewis, the protagonist of Across the Green Grass Fields, in escaping. As I’ve been reading a few of McGuire’s series more or less at the same time, I’ve definitely noticed some themes that are common to more than one, in this case that of drowned girls itself.

Beneath the Moon: Fairy Tales, Myths, and Divine Stories from Around the World, by Yoshi Yoshitani – This is a quite attractive book. It contains seventy-eight stories from different cultures, including classical mythology, fairy tales, folklore, and legends, each given a one-page retelling and an illustration.

Some of them I was quite familiar with, and others not so much. While I’m well aware there are differences between these literary types, I do like the idea of emphasizing the similarities between them. Many feature female protagonists. Such familiar stories in American culture as Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Aladdin, Jack and the Beanstalk, and John Henry are here. So are a few I learned about later in life but might have been childhood favorites for other people, like the Crane Wife, Sun Wukong, Vasilisa the Beautiful, and La Llorona.

Some are individual stories, and others more overviews of specific characters or creatures from folklore, like King Arthur, the Phoenix, and the Griffin. Even Moses and the story of the Exodus get an entry.