The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

read by Kyle McCarley

Maia is the exiled, motherless, abused, and neglected youngest son of the emperor of the Elflands. He’s also a half-goblin in a society where stone-cold racism is the norm. When his father and all of his older brothers are killed in an airship crash, suddenly *he’s* the emperor—a job he has no training or desire for. 

But he does have the desire to make a good job of it. And he gradually learns he’s got the disposition for it; his childhood, miserable and deliberately neglectful as it was, prepared him for the imperial throne in some unexpected ways. Still, learning whom to trust and how best to navigate the bewildering and seemingly constant intrigues of a hostile court is far from easy. 

And then it turns out that the disaster that killed his father was no accident—and whoever is responsible for it is still out there somewhere. Or maybe somewhere in his own palace. Maia knows in his head, and soon learns in his gut, that an emperor can’t truly have friends; and his relations are either distant, dead, or have so many agendas, secret or otherwise, that it would take someone as idiotic as his former guardian always told him he was to trust them.

He can’t act alone, though. There’s only one of him, and he doesn’t know enough to be effective. And the potential consequences of failure to unearth the perpetrators of this plot won’t just affect him; thousands of his subjects could suffer if he makes a wrong move. He needs reliable advice and confederates, not honeyed words from sycophants. He’ll have to trust someone. But who?

This is a truly charming coming-of-age tale/political thriller/murder mystery set in a delightfully detailed and creditably believable world somewhere between elfpunk and steampunk (elfsteam? Punkpunk?). The cultures, political system, and details like court fashions are all three-dimensional and fascinating. We follow Maia's point of view closely throughout, to a degree that’s almost old school by today’s standards. 

Mostly this works beautifully, because Maia is such a good sort and a sympathetic character on multiple levels. His ignorance of court life is nearly as deep as our own ignorance of the world it’s set in, which makes him a good stand-in for the reader, and his awkwardness and occasional spitefulness are believable and save him from seeming too good to be true (or too good to be palatable, anyhow). 

The only drawback to this following-super-closely-over-Maia’s-shoulder business, and it’s the only real flaw I see in the writing, is that the scope of the story is much broader than our narrow view of it. Lots of things that one might like and expect to see happening, one only hears about afterward, which can feel a little anticlimactic at times.

But that’s a quibble. This is a really engrossing story that I couldn’t make myself stay away from for any length of time. Highly recommend.

The Dark Between by Sonia Gensler: #tbt review

Plucky, street-wise Kate is an orphan who has just lost her last hope of making an even vaguely respectable living. Frail, dreamy Elsie suffers from fits and can’t admit to anybody what she sees while she has them. Handsome, brooding Asher is just trying to get away from an American father he hates. 

The members of this ragtag group of Victorian teens find their various ways to London’s Summerfield College, where all is not as it seems. There have been mysterious deaths, and the three very different young people are going to have to start trusting each other before they can learn the disturbing truth--and how to deal with their own dark secrets.

This is an entertaining paranormal mystery in the gothic vein with fairly judicious touches of steampunk. It does suffer from a very common fault, that of putting characters with distinctly modern attitudes into a setting that is supposed to be more or less historical. Also, the vast majority of the story's tension revolves around the fact that these characters repeatedly fail to just come out and tell each other what they obviously need to know. 

Nonetheless, the story carries the reader along an amusing roller-coaster of a plot with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. Refreshingly, the obvious pair-off fails to materialize, and the way the lines between the spirit world and the world of hard-nosed scientific discovery are blurred is interesting in itself. A fun, light read for younger and middle teens.

The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson: #tbt review

Can a book change, and maybe save, a girl’s life? What does the life of one little girl matter in a world of abundance and extreme social stratification?

Four-year-old Nell, a member of a dispossessed underclass in a world where abundance should be everybody’s birthright and education has become the scarce commodity that sets the classes apart, is dangerously ignorant. She's growing up with all the dangers and disadvantages of poverty in a world where there’s no reason for poverty to exist.  

Then she comes into possession of a wondrous stolen item. It's a technological marvel: a book that talks to her, changes itself to teach and entertain her, shapes her view of the world, and even cares about her, until she can not only survive her harsh reality, but, as she becomes a young woman, break out of it.

You've heard of smart phones? This is a smart book, and it’s meant to teach critical thinking to educated young ladies of the upper classes. But there's a person behind it; humans are hired as voice actors, and to fill in the gaps where an AI can't figure out how to respond to something. Miranda has a gig being the human voice behind these primers, and she's worried about Nell. Pretty soon her humanity starts to color the responses of Nell's primer, and that changes everything.

There’s a strong ideological statement here; the story aims to show the extent to which poverty, ignorance, and misery create the inability to rise above one’s parents’ station, rather than the other way around.

This book was my first exposure to steampunk, and my second Neal Stephenson, and I was in awe. There are so many ideas zooming around, and the world-building is so impeccable and complex, and yet Stephenson never loses sight of the human beings who make all of it matter.