The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison

 

I read The Angel of Crows by Katherine Addison to fulfill the Pop Sugar reading challenge prompt to read a book that was originally started as fan fiction. In this book, Addison does a Sherlock Holmes retelling where Sherlock is an angel named Crow and Watson is a hellhound named Doyle. In this world, there are vampires and werewolves, but someone still has to solve the Jack the Ripper case.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. It's funny. There are some unusual reveals that make it different from your regular old Holmes retelling. I like the world development, particularly the background on angels and how Crow grew to be who he is. But there's nothing really interesting about the cases that are covered here - they're pretty bog standard Sherlock Holmes stories, so the twists weren't really twisty, if you know what I mean.

It's admirable, I think. But it does read like fan fiction still.  3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Crow’s vanity was sometimes endearing and sometimes exasperating, but it seemed deeply ingrained in him. (page 44)

One thing I really liked about Addison's writing was the developing of characters with these funny one-liners.

“He could have suborned someone into acting as a proxy.” 
“Who?” Crow said. “Me? Mrs. Climpson? Jennie MacArthur? Dr. Doyle doesn’t see anyone else—certainly not on the sort of terms you’d have to be on to ask someone to commit murder on your behalf.” 
While I was grateful for Crow’s support, I wished he could have found a more tactful way to say I had no friends. (page 78)

Lots of humor here. 

...looking as miserable as a molting sparrow. (page 99)

I love a good animal analogy.

“Well, you’ll have all the oubliettes you could ever need,” I said. “The architect was clearly a megalomaniac.” (page 105) 

Oubliette! It came up again on page 152, too. 2023 is the Year of the Oubliette on my blog.

“I think you are making this complicated because you love complicated things,” said Lestrade—which was an accurate character assessment, if nothing else. (page 258)

Again, quick character reveals with a bit of humor. It's fun writing. 

“It’s … complicated,” Crow said. I said, “Most things involving families are.” (page 275)

Preach it. Sometimes I hear of functional families and I'm shocked. Like...how do you do that?

Things I looked up:

bouleversé (page 52) - upset in French

baize door (page 244) - I only knew the term baize as the felt used for pool tables. Apparently, at one time, a green baize door (a door to which cloth had been tacked to deaden noise) in a house separated the servants' quarters from the family's living quarters. It was a diving line between the two domains and trespassing beyond the baize door meant going into foreign/unfamiliar territory.

drugget (page 244) - a coarse fabric used for floor coverings

ferrule (page 283) - Any number of types of objects, generally used for fastening, joining, or sealing. They are often narrow circular rings made from metal, or less commonly, plastic. Sometimes called eyelets or grommets.

carte de visite (page 283) - Calling card. In retrospect, I should have been able to figure this out.

coombe (page 329) - deep narrow valley, often dry

jenny greenteeth (page 344) - figure in English folklore, similar to a grindylow

wodge (page 363)  - lump, chunk, or wad (informal British)

krait (page 412) - highly venomous snake

hamadryad (page 412) - another name for a king cobra

Hat mentions:

There were about a dozen mentions of the word hat in this book, but my favorite, by far, was the following:

“Quick, Doyle, your boots, your boots, oh my sainted hat, how are you still in your dressing gown?” (page 297)

I don't know if I've ever come across the word hat used in an oath like this before!

13.6 A Year of Reflection

I just finished a yearly project. Each day of the month I posted on a pre-determined theme. During the month of November, I'll post a collage of all my photos on the daily theme from the past year. The theme for the sixth day of the month was "Reflection."

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Ch-ch-ch-changes - Imagine how I thought my job situation would be fixed quickly. Fool, I was.
On My Mind - Wow. If I think my skincare stash was low back then, I had no idea what was coming.
Errands by Foot - It's nice to not have to get in the car to do things.
Thoughts on a Walk - One of the most cheerful posts I've written for this project.
Unexpected Boogie-Woogie - I will dance in the grocery store and you can't stop me. 
Daily Prompts in Month Six - In which I reflect on how this very blog project was going in the middle of it. 
Of the Way Life Used to Be - I did buy new running shoes.
Time Travel - I visited my friends in Michigan. It was lovely.
Fourth of July - I am anti-fireworks. 
A Saturday in August - A got a nap with the kitty.
Labor Day Weekend Recap - Our family reunion is a ton of fun.
One Moment - Our futures are not guaranteed.

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Hannah count: 6

Park by our house count: 5

Hat count: 1

Shadows: 2

Sign count: 2

Community center count: 2

Snow count: 1

Blaze orange count: 1

Water count: 6

I've mentioned before that I thought there would be more themes within these themes. Despite the fact that I wrote all these posts with "reflection" on my mind, what I chose to reflect on was so wide and varied. Very strange. But lots of water, eh?

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I just finished reading a library book and I found this little slip of paper with what I can only imagine is a password on it. However, there were no capital letters or special characters in it and I found myself reflecting that it is not a very strong password, if it was someone's password. 

I love the communal nature of library books - the little slips of paper used as bookmarks, the checkout slips that show what other books someone checked out at the same time, the words underlined, the corners dogeared, the question marks in the margins. I rarely write in my books, since I mostly write my own notes on a sheet of paper and because I mostly read library books, but I wonder what will be missing when I am no longer here on this earth. How will people know that I found That Line so perfect? How will they know that I yet again had to look up the word oubliette? Surely my marginalia is important? But surely it is not. 

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What do you use as a bookmark? Do you write marginalia in your books? 

A Deadly Education (The Scholomance #1) by Naomi Novik

In general, I am a Naomi Novik fan. Her writing tends to be hit or miss for me, but more on the hit side. I have fond memories of the Temeraire series (DRAGONS!), although it does seem like every other book was a bit of a slog. I even thought the first part of Spinning Silver was pretty great. And, just as I had taken A Deadly Education out of the library, a friend told me all about how much she loved it, so I took it as a good sign. A Deadly Education is the first in a trilogy and I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you that I've already requested the other two books from the library.

So what we have here is a magical school. But this is not Hogwarts, with its cushy common rooms and Pomona Sprout to heal our broken bones. This is the Scholomance where death lurks behind every corner and to survive, you have to be lucky, smart, and allied with the right people. El, our heroine, is lucky and smart, but she's an "independent," which is to say that she's not allied with people from an enclave. Because of this, she's really struggling with keeping her magical skills sharp. But then Orion Lake comes along, saving her life, and suddenly she has friends, but the school is getting more and more dangerous.

There's a lot to like here. I am a big fan of the Scholomance and its history. I really dug how there are malaficaria, monsters and evil beasties, everywhere. El was frequently looking under her bed and around corners and even in the mashed potatoes and I really liked how Novik never dropped this, so as a reader, you were always on edge. I liked that we got to see El doing work - building a magic mirror, learning languages, and even doing exercise to build up her magical energy force, mana.  I like how El's friends seemed to come from a variety of backgrounds, racial and class. I liked a lot about this.

But there's also a huge whiff of a romance here. I would definitely liked to see this trilogy go by without a romance. I want a young adult series about bad ass young women in an evil magic school in which the plot ends up being about kissing. I want to see it about them improving their skills, working with other people, and having success that doesn't wrap around a romantic relationship. I do understand that this is a young adult book, and young adults are exploring their sexuality, but, geez. I just don't want it. 

I'll be back for more, though. I can't quit the Scholomance without knowing what becomes of El.

4.5/5 stars

Okay, apparently there's been some controversy about a couple of passages in the book potentially being racially problematic. I think this controversy is overstated, Novik has apologized and intends to change some language in future printings, and I don't think it should dissuade anyone from reading the book. This blog post covers it better than I ever could, so I leave it for you to read at your leisure.

Things I Looked Up:

Burj Khalifa (page 150) - Tallest building in the world, a skyscraper in Dubai.

oubliette (page 275) - A secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling. This seems like a particularly specialized word and now I'm trying to figure out ways to bring it up in my everyday conversations.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow starts by introducing us to January Scaller, a young girl whose father frequently travels and leaves her in the custody of his employer, Mr. Locke, a collector of interesting artifacts. But she finds a strange book and soon she finds out that her own identity is as much of a mystery as to where all of Mr. Locke's trinkets come from.

In general, I liked this book. I liked the strong female characters - January, Ade, and Jane are my new favorites. I liked the love stories in this book - they felt real and magical in the real sense of how it goes when you meet someone and something clicks. I liked Bad, the dog who comes to the rescue over and over again, as any good canine companion would. l liked the historical fiction aspect of this fantasy novel, in which a black girl is faced with discrimination as she tries to maneuver through this world. I liked so much. 

But it's not a perfect book. The motivations of the very evil villains are still not entirely clear to me. There's a villain who happens to be a vampire and that storyline is out of place and strange. There's also a part in which January is committed to a mental health asylum when she's sane and it's a trope that I don't care for because it's so real and how do you prove you're sane when people say you're not and I legit freak out when this happens in books. Ahem. Maybe you don't need to know that much about my fears.

It's a good book. I'm counting on it to turn around my bad book streak. 4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Samuel Zappia was my only nonfictional friend...(page 9)

When I was young, I really felt like the characters in books were my best friends, so this really resonated with me.

...what is written is true. Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy...all stories, even the meanest folktales, matter. (page 53)

This sort of made me chuckle. Move over Black Lives Matter, All Words Matter.

None of this marked the Larsons apart from any of their neighbors. It seems unlikely that any biographer or chronicler or even a local newspaperman has ever written their names in print before now. The interviews conducted for this study were stilted, suspicious affairs, akin to interrogating starlings or white-tailed deer. (page 56) 

As always, I feel like I need to identify fun animal-related similes.

The townspeople - who weren't really townspeople at all, but more a collection of feral persons who lived on farms just as isolated and distant as the Larson family's, who congregated for auctions, funerals, and God - shuffled into the pews with the same dulled expression they wore every week. (page 63-64)

I like this as a way to describe rural life. It seems appropriate.

"No, thank you," I said. He blinked with the stunned expression of a man who knew the word no existed by had never actually met in the flesh. (page 82)

Ha. Harrow's observations about men are hilarious to me.

...words in that world can sometimes rise from their ink-and-cotton cradles and reshape the nature of reality. Sentences may alter the weather, and poems might tear down walls. Stories may change the world. (page 134)

This book is about the love of words, the love of books, the love of reading. I think this passage demonstrates the themes more than any other.

Yule was stuffed with the kind of unblemished confidence that belongs only to the very young, who have never truly known the bitterness of failure, or felt the years of their lives trickling away from them like water from cupped palms. It seemed to him that his success was inevitable. (page 146)

This reminded me of one of the lines I noted in Writers & Lovers about how all the men the narrator knew felt that greatness was their destiny. It seems crazy that these ideas came up in books I read two weeks apart.

"They always end up alone in the stories - witches, I mean - living in the woods or mountains or locked in towers. I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and men are mostly cowards." (page 250)

More of Harrow's feelings toward men coming off the page.

Things I looked up:

Grammalogie (page 51) - the study of signs or symbols representing words

Glottologie (page 51) - linguistics

Great Algiers Fire of 1895 (page 101) - In October 1895, a fire broke out in New Orleans on Morgan Street. This blaze destroyed hundreds of homes.

Toussain Louverture's rebellion (page 104) - Louverture was born into slavery, but became a Haitian revolutionary leader. Some argue he led the most successful slave revolt in world history and was a crucial figure in the downfall of European colonialism. 

Line that made me laugh:

"Guests, Sol?" She said the word guests the way you might say fleas or influenza. (page 267)

Introverts unite, right?

This word again!

oubliette (page 132) - How does this come up again within a month? It is that crazy phenomenon when you learn a word and then just see it everywhere, isn't it?