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landofnowhereAn Academic Affair, Jodi McAllister. Recommended by cahn as an academia romance that gets the details right and also doesn't have a concerning power imbalance. It delivered on that: admittedly, since it's set in Australia, I'm not capable of nitpicking to the same extent that I would a book set in the US, but it generally rings true. There is a lot of wish-fulfillment in this book, but it doesn't sugarcoat the experience of being an academic without career security. There is also some very fun meta here, drawing on the author's background: she studies popular fiction and is a romance reader, while he studies Jacobean drama. That said, I didn't feel that the eucatastrophe in this book lived up to the expectations set by the meta -- but I have high standards for eucatastrophe. But on the other hand the male lead is a cinnamon roll who has some excellent pining, and over all it sucked me in.
Obstetrix, Naomi Kritzer. Novella about an ob-gyn who is kidnapped by a cult, written with Kritzer's usual empathy and attention to detail. A good book to keep me distracted during travel.
Everybody's Perfect, Jo Walton. Not yet officially published, but I acquired an advance copy at Scintillation. This is cozy fantasy, but the type that Jo has been writing and reading for a long while, not the type that's gotten trendy recently. It is set at a nexus between nine worlds populated by different species that are all humanoid enough to pass for a human wearing some sort of Venetian mask, and you get one chapter with a point of view from a member of each species. The magic is evocative but not fully explained; the way that people's will shapes the world is reminiscient of a collaborative storytelling exercise or a mechanics-light RPG. Reading it, I knew that at eventually we were going to get the POV of the character from our world, and when I got there I was not disappointed.
cahn as an academia romance that gets the details right and also doesn't have a concerning power imbalance. It delivered on that: admittedly, since it's set in Australia, I'm not capable of nitpicking to the same extent that I would a book set in the US, but it generally rings true. There is a lot of wish-fulfillment in this book, but it doesn't sugarcoat the experience of being an academic without career security. There is also some very fun meta here, drawing on the author's background: she studies popular fiction and is a romance reader, while he studies Jacobean drama. That said, I didn't feel that the eucatastrophe in this book lived up to the expectations set by the meta -- but I have high standards for eucatastrophe. But on the other hand the male lead is a cinnamon roll who has some excellent pining, and over all it sucked me in.Obstetrix, Naomi Kritzer. Novella about an ob-gyn who is kidnapped by a cult, written with Kritzer's usual empathy and attention to detail. A good book to keep me distracted during travel.
Everybody's Perfect, Jo Walton. Not yet officially published, but I acquired an advance copy at Scintillation. This is cozy fantasy, but the type that Jo has been writing and reading for a long while, not the type that's gotten trendy recently. It is set at a nexus between nine worlds populated by different species that are all humanoid enough to pass for a human wearing some sort of Venetian mask, and you get one chapter with a point of view from a member of each species. The magic is evocative but not fully explained; the way that people's will shapes the world is reminiscient of a collaborative storytelling exercise or a mechanics-light RPG. Reading it, I knew that at eventually we were going to get the POV of the character from our world, and when I got there I was not disappointed.