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Book Review: Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

cover art for Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

 

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

Tor.com, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250788832

Available: Hardcover, paperback, library binding, KIndle edition, audiobook

Buy:    Bookshop.org  | Amazon.com

 

 

This is not so much a horror novel as it is an homage to classic monster movies and a critique of golden-age Hollywood. Readers looking for blood and gore will not find it here. What they will find is a dark, beautifully written warning about the dangers of ambition. Told in first person by the protagonist, the story reads like a memoir.

 

CK is a Chinese-American girl obsessed with acting in the movies, at the beginnings of the talkies. She is working bit parts for children off the books for a director at Wolfe Studios, who wants to present her as his new discovery once she turns 18. CK is impatient and tracks down a retired actress who gives her information that will get her an audience, and a contract, with Oberlin Wolfe, using blackmail photos. Due to this leverage she is able to demand that she not be cast in stereotypical roles for Asian women (an issue faced by real-life Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong in this time period).. She takes the stage name Luli Wei, a name that happens to also be her sister’s.

 

Getting a studio contract is similar to making a bargain with faeries. In exchange for fame and fortune, the studio owner controls your life (this is a fairly accurate description of the Hollywood studio system at the time, even without faeries’ involvement). There’s even a version of Tam Lin that takes place within the story.

 

Directors don’t know how to cast CK since she can’t be cast in stereotypical roles, but finally she is cast as a monster, the Siren Queen, and the movie and its sequels are blockbuster hits. Despite her ability to cause scandal and her defiance, the studio can’t get rid of her. CK has a lesbian romance with rising star Emmaline Sauvignon which the studio ends because it interferes with their narrative of the kind of person Emmaline is supposed to be. Later, she gets involved with a scriptwriter hired to do edits on the script of the last Siren Queen movie.

 

Despite knowing her contract would eventually have negative consequences for her, I couldn’t help loving CK for her ambition and refusal to let studio officials and directors walk on her, and for her own love of playing the role of a vengeful monster and loving it. The classic monster movies are clearly an inspiration to the author, and the critique of racist stereotypes and queer erasure in casting at that time is something I am glad to see brought to the attention of modern readers. Highly recommended.

 

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on March 7, 2024 by , Reply

Book Review: The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

Inkyard Press, 2021

ISBN-13: ‎978-1335402509

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Buy;   Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com

 

Wow. Polydoros set out to write a work of historical fantasy about Jews and Judaism not set during the Holocaust, and was inspired by an article about H.H. Holmes to set his story among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

 

Alter, the main character, was ill as a baby and named to avoid the notice of the Angel of Death, but people around him frequently die. Alter is also gay, but in denial and ashamed. He is in love with his roommate Yakov, who leaves to meet someone and is found drowned the next day, the most recent of several Jewish boys who are dead or missing.

 

Alter, a member of the burial society, is helping immerse Yakov in the mikveh when he thinks he sees Yakov move, and jumps in the mikveh to pull the body out. Instead, he is possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk (a dybbuk is a malicious spirit, usually the dislocated soul of a dead person with unfinished business). Alter’s only choices to save his own soul are either0 to exorcise the dybbuk or to find Yakov’s killer and exact revenge. Luckily, he has the help of Raizel, a unionist working for an anarchist newspaper (the local matchmaker keeps trying to hook them up), and Frankie, an ambitious Russian Jewish teenage criminal and boxer who heads a gang of thieves.

 

This is such a layered, detailed story, both in the integration of the various aspects of Jewish culture and the Eastern European immigrant experience, and the vividness of the Chicago and World’s Fair setting. In addition, it really reveals the viciousness of antisemitism in this country and how it also traveled from overseas. I think people don’t really think about how insidious and common it was. It’s truly a Jewish horror story, and there aren’t too many of those around. I’m so impressed with the research and writing on some very difficult-to-address topics.

 

The City Beautiful won the 2022 Sydney Taylor Award and was a finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the 2021 National Jewish Book Award, and the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Toung Adult Novels. The attention is well-deserved.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on August 29, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney

Cover art fo Saint Death's Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney

Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E Cooney.

Solaris, 2022

ISBN-13: 978-1786184702

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook. ( Bookshop.org  |   Amazon.com )

 

 

Miscellaneous Stones, born into a family known for its violence in service to the crown of Liriat, is a teenage necromancer with an allergy to violence that opens “echo wounds” when violence is done or described. When her parents die, her family is left indebted to a banker’s family with connections to Liriat’s enemy, the Blackbird Bride.

 

Lanie’s sister Nita returns to renegotiate the debt, and does so by agreeing to work for the Queen of Liriat to kill all 24 of the Bride’s consorts. Nita has returned with an unwilling fiance, a gyrgard, who can shapeshift into a falcon and usually has a soul-bonded partner. The gyrgard, renamed Mak, attempts to poison himself rather than stay with Nita, but Lanie, unwilling to experience the echo wound that would be caused by his suicide, brings him back by calling on Saint Death, one of the 12 Lirian gods.

 

In order to prevent having his memories wiped, Mak swears loyalty to Nita, and they have a child, Datu, who is raised primarily by Lanie and Mak, while Nita assassinates the members of the Bride’s parliament. Finally, the Bride kills Nita, pronounces a death sentence on Datu, and tries to seduce Lanie into joining her court. Lanie, Mak, and Datu, along with the family revenant and the entrapped ghost of Lanie’s necromancer grandfather, flee to hide in the city of Liriat Proper to protect Datu.

 

In the city, Lanie, Mak, and Datu make truly good friends willing to help with their problems. Lanie also has a romance with Canon Lir, second son of the queen, and a priest to the many-gendered god of fire. Then Lanie has a serious echo wound in public that reveals their location to the Blackbird Bride, and Mak and Datu flee. Lanie has made a promise to her family’s revenant she must follow through, protect Datu, and bring down the Bride.

 

I know Harrow the Ninth is the big name in literary necromancers right now, and she’s a much more horror-tinged character, but Lanie is my favorite necromancer character ever. Compassionate and loving to the living, dead, and undead, sometimes unwise, she honors her goddess.The allergy to violence and refusal to enthrall others, and her relationship with Lir, make her unusual.

 

This is a long book, but with surprising twists, fascinating world building, great character development, and beautiful prose. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Posted on February 25, 2023 by , Reply
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