Aurora's Sundry Notes

As I'm slowly crawling my way back towards health (damn this bug has been persistent! but I have a little bit more energy each day), LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT A BOOK I READ RECENTLY. Because it's wonderful.

When I first heard about Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's novella This is How You Lose the Time War, I knew I had to read it once it came out. Time travel! Two (female) time agents on opposing sides, exchanging letters! And f/f love! I was sold on those points alone.

Yet I wasn't prepared for how good it would be, and how unusual.

Here's the cover blurb: Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

And thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more.

Except discovery of their bond would be death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That’s how war works. Right?

I'll try to avoid spoilers as I describe my experience, though if you don't want to know anything about a book you probably should skip the rest of the post. But oh, I loved it. I loved the exquisite poetry of the letters Red and Blue leave for each other across time streams. I loved the poetry of the increasingly impossible ways in which those letters were delivered. I loved the development of their relationship, and gradually learning to know their strange worlds through their letters, and how the book left much unexplained, for the reader to guess, or dream. I loved all the myriad time streams and the careful ways in which each side wove their own patterns in time and just, I don't know, everything. Including the multitudes of names Red and Blue call each other.

The book stole my heart and did exquisite things to it. I can't get Red and Blue and their world and their times out of my mind. And that's a good thing.

I hesitate to say more. Except, perhaps, that if you only want straightforward books which don't leave anything unexplained and do not enjoy poetic language at all, then this book may not be for you. But then again, it would be worth it to try, anyway. Maybe you'll discover that it is for you after all. But if you have any level of tolerance for the poetic and the unsaid and the inexplicable, I recommend this. Especially if you want awesome female characters and time travel and beautiful (f/f) romance, or at least some of those items. This a novella, so it won't take long to read. And it's so, so worth trying.

It came out in July 2019, so very very recent! I was lucky enough to get it from our library's e-books this soon, but I know I'll have to own it.

If you need to know more spoilery things before reading, or if you've read this and want to discuss it, drop me a comment or something! I can DM you or set up a spoilers-allowed post, whatever seems the most convenient.

As many of you (but maybe not all) probably know, rachelmanija recently started the idea of FF Friday, with the idea of reviewing/recommending any book/story/etc. featuring women loving women. It doesn't have to be a positive review, if you've had a negative reading experience you'd rather tell about, and the reviews can be as long as or as short as you like. There's a community for it, fffriday, and I'm going to try to do this as often as I manage, posting a longer review/rec here in my journal, and linking to it in the community. Do check out the community if you're interested in the topic; there are already plenty of interesting works you can find reviewed there.

I've wanted to do this since it started, but I seem to kind of fail at actually doing this on a Friday - often I'm too tired on Fridays after a week of work, but yesterday was Midsummer's Eve which is a big holiday in Finland and hence a day off and I didn't have any program planned, and I still didn't get around to writing it. But I figure early Saturday is okay, too. Hopefully I'll get around to doing this as often as possible now that I've started. I've no pretensions of being a professional reviewer, but I do my best to give an overview of the books and how I felt about them, and not ramble on endlessly as I tend to.

So, I wanted to start by writing brief reviews of Heather Rose Jones's Daughter of Mystery and The Mystic Marriage, the first two books of her Alpennia series. Because I've been meaning to write about these books ever since I read the first one last year, and they're awesome. The books are historical fantasy with a strong element of lesbian romance, but they're not romance genre; the adventure/historical fantasy portion is a stronger part of the plot, though the romance is significant. There is a third book out, Mother of Souls, and it recently won The Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Novel of 2017. I haven't read it yet (I'm saving it a bit!) so I won't review that yet.

I absolutely adore these books. They take place in an alternative 19th century Europe, in a fictional Central European country called Alpennia (I'm assuming from the context it's located somewhere between France, Switzerland, and Austria). The fantasy element draws heavily on actual historical mystical material from European history - the first book involves magic based on mysteries for invoking various saints and their protection, the second deals with alchemy. They centre on a group of intelligent, studious, strong-willed women who don't conform to the expectations of women or the typical roles of female characters in historical romance, and whose lives and roles draw from the rich history of what women have actually been able to do throughout different centuries, even if we're not usually told about it. Basically these women just want to study and learn with their other female friends and do magic / alchemy / be excellent swordswomen and lawyers / etc. Oh, and they fall in love with other women. And it's beautiful and grand.

( More detailed review, cut for your browsing comfort )

Finally, if you're interested in history of lesbians / women loving women, you should check out the author's website and blog for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, where she has assembled an amazing wealth of historical research involving queer women in the past, with careful attention to sources and how to read them critically, understanding what we can deduce from the available material and what we can't. She also does The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast that's a part of this project over at The Lesbian Talkshow podcast. Every Saturday has a new podcast about historical lesbian/queer women, research into them and gender and sexuality, and historical fiction about queer women, including historical fantasy / alternative history (such as steampunk). Every now and then there's also a podcast where a new original piece historical f/f short story is narrated. It's a very good quality podcast, and even if you don't normally listen to a lot of podcasts, it's worth checking out if you're interested in the topic. It's one of the two podcasts that got me hooked into podcasts in general (the other one being the Doctor Who themed podcast Verity!). She also is on Dreamwidth as hrj.

The Lesbian Talkshow podcast is great in general, featuring several different podcasts in one, many of them discussing lesbian fiction in one way or another. Totally worth checking out! I don't like all of the different podcasts, but enough that it's worth subscribing to - I just delete the episodes that aren't to my taste.