My Plus Ones

Having spent far too long slogging through Private Rites by Julia Armfield grouchily going 'this should have been a novella' I decided to start off June with a couple of actual novellas.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite - Olivia Waite is someone I had previously encountered through her series of f/f historical romances, so when I heard that her next book was going to be a cozy mystery set in space I was intrigued. A Miss Marple type detective is taking a well earned sabbatical in the ship's memory core before being decanted into a new body, when she wakes in a young body that isn't hers. It's cute, but it is very...slight. But I do increasingly think that it's an admirable skill to know and accept when a one hundred page idea is a one hundred page idea and not dragging it out to novel length.

Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard - This was a little bit longer at one sixty odd pages, and there was a lot going on - navigators are people who can navigate unreality with the help of some sort of magical/sci-fi power called shadows, a monster escapes from unreality, there's a murder mystery, four expandable junior navigators all with their own traumas and neurodivergences have to learn to work together, there's an odd couple romance - and it's very interesting and all, but none of it gets enough room to breathe, so it doesn't really land.

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older - I absolutely adore this series about awkward lesbians solving fairly low stakes myteries in a future where humanity has fled a dying earth to a system of interlinked platforms around the rings of Jupiter. They actually remind me a little bit of Murderbot, not so much content wise, but, like, vibes, and the way they go down so easy. If you haven't read them, there are three of them now, and you're in for a treat!

Cover Story by Celia Laskey - You know that feeling where you're reading something at a clip and having a great time, and then you get to the end and are like, I don't actually think that was that good? Yeah, it was one of those. So that the set-up is that it's 2005, the beginning of the smartphone and blogging era, and a neurotic publicist falls in love with the up and coming actress she's charged with keeping in the closet. It was pacey and frothy and I read it over a couple of days, and then I got to the end and the one (1) thing about it that had stuck with me was there's this line in one of the sex scenes "her vagina gulped for air", and, I'm sorry, but whoever let that line stay in the final draft hates you and wants your endeavours to fail.

The Heiress by Molly Greeley - Modern takes on Austen can be of, uh, variable quality, but this one, where Anne de Bourgh fights her way out of her laudanum induced haze to take control of Roslings, her destiny, her queerness, her desire not to be a mother is probably the best one I have ever read. Highly recommended!