then there are blackbirds

Auuugh, still have at least ten more books to do, so I'm putting these up first-

1. The Mystery of Grace- Charles deLint:
According to Amazon, this is a supernatural love story, but I think that the "love story" part is a misrepresentation- it's not the romantic relationship that the book is centered on. The protagonist, Grace Quintero, is newly dead and trying to adjust to her ghostly existence, while balancing her desire to return to the world of the living (to which she can cross over twice a year)... This one's kind of difficult for me to blurb, so I will simply note my impressions: an interesting read, but not edge-of-my-seat compelling, and I found deLint's POC characters (there are many of them, not just Grace) in this story to be somewhat sketchy, incomplete. They didn't feel fully fleshed out or- I want to say integrated, but am not sure this is the right word- and I thought that deLint was teetering on (if not over) the edge of certain NDN stereotypes. I enjoyed Grace very much, though, sketchy as she was- particularly her love for her job as a mechanic, and for cars in general! You don't see much of that in fiction, and it was refreshing.

2/3. The Sorceress and the Cygnet; The Cygnet and the Firebird- Patricia McKillip (reread):
It's been a long time since I've read these books! Both of them are genre fantasy of the flavor that I used to eat up with a spoon; I fell in love with these for the folktale-feel and the awesome female characters. The entire story arc is written from what I feel is a distinctly female perspective; while there are plenty of male characters, it is the women- two of them protagonists- who are the center of the story. None of them are helpless or warrior princess archetypes, but hold power and are stubborn and feminine and individual and mutually-supportive and self-actualized and their lives revolve around themselves, not men. Win! (Er, for those of you who might have developed similar peeves to mine: none of them resemble Mercedes Lackey or Tamora Pierce-type women, either. I have enjoyed their books in the past and loved the vast majority of their female characters; it's just that lately they rub me the wrong way, on multiple levels.)

Caveats: One of my favorite things about McKillip is her complexly layered writing, which never fails to make me think and come out with something new every time, but her style is by no means everyone's cup of tea. Also, if you are tired of Euro-type settings, you may want to give these a pass.

4. The Left Hand of Darkness- Ursula K. LeGuin:
As I've said before: STUNNING. This is a brilliant commentary/thought exercise on gender and, to a lesser degree, sexuality, and how integral they are to human identity/society/institutions. The gender-neutral world of Gethen is one I find endlessly fascinating, and the contrast in the perspectives of (Gethenian) Estraven and (human, male) Genly Ai provides a really interesting interrogation of gendered hierarchies.

5. Fool's Run- Patricia McKillip (reread):
The one and only scifi book McKillip has written, I think? (Or at any rate, the only one I've discovered!) This is a big departure from the rest of her work, and also her usual writing style. The story: Terra Viridian kills 1500 people while in the grips of a vision and is sentenced to life in the Underworld, a high-security prison. Seven years later, a group of scientists try to rehabilitate her using the Experimental Dream Machine, starting a dramatic chain of events.

As generically-futuristic/spacer as I found the setting, I wouldn't precisely call this genre SF, either; I don't think it provides much in the way of social commentary or scientific extrapolation. (Space opera, perhaps? A futuristic love letter to rockers??) At any rate, I originally fell in love with it for the musicians, the connections and disconnects between the characters, and the vivid sense of the alien that it gave me, even though all of those elements were slightly less compelling on the reread.

6. Trader- Charles deLint:
Max Trader and Johnny Devlin wake up one morning in each other's bodies. Max (a protagonist, though perhaps not the protagonist) is a quiet, upstanding guy- a luthier- who wants to get his life back; but Johnny is a loser who's planning to milk the unexpected opportunity for all it's worth.

I really enjoyed the writing and I thought the story was interesting, but I found it hard to suspend my disbelief for this one. While Max's sudden feeling of displacement when he wakes up in Johnny's body is finely done, deLint never touches on the biggest point of identity crisis: namely, that Max, a white guy, wakes up in the body of a POC (Johnny is a black man, iirc). Despite having multiple POC characters- including, once again, an NDN character that troubled me a bit- there is magically no racism! And also no acknowledgment of the paradigm shift that it would take- that it ought to take- on both men's parts, for one of them suddenly to wake up with skin privilege and the other to suddenly wake up without it (and never mind the fact that Johnny, the POC, is the no-good delinquent).

Had this book made any attempt to address these things in addition to- or perhaps even instead of- the mystical urban fantasy bit, I would have absolutely loved it. Instead, half of my mind was always on what Max should have been feeling aside from outraged that somebody stole his life, his livelihood, and his reputation; wondering what Johnny felt, waking up to a brand new life and a world of opportunity, but at the price of his own skin.

... Off to rewatch Loveless now, yays! :)