The Sea Child

The Sea Child by Linda Wilgus, 304 pages

When Isabel was a young girl, she washed ashore in a small Cornish town, apparently orphaned by a shipwreck. A naval officer and his wife soon adopted her and raised her to become the wife of another wealthy up-and-coming officer. But after the Napoleonic wars soon made her a widow, and her discovery of her husband's poor financial choices left her penniless, Isabel moved back to that Cornish town to make a home for herself and possibly learn a bit more about where she came from. What she didn't expect was to get involved in piracy and be the source of local superstition that she's the child of a sea god.

What a captivating historical adventure! Filled with smuggling, espionage, and piracy, this novel encapsulates the word "swashbuckling" to a T. I enjoyed seeing Isabel's transformation from coddled to scrappy, and the antics at sea kept the plot moving. A good summer read for someone who always wanted to be Keira Knightley's character in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

The City in the Middle of the Night

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders, 366 pages

Set hundreds of years in the future on a dying planet, this book follows student Sophie and smuggler Mouth as they try to find their own way in life. Sophie took the fall for a friend and was cast into the harsh dark and frozen side of their tidally locked planet, miraculously surviving, though not without both trauma from her ordeal and a fondness for the alien creatures that saved her. Meanwhile, Mouth has spent her life on the road, traveling the thin line between the sunny side and the dark side of the planet, first with a group of nomads, and now as part of a smuggling crew that illegally transports goods between the planet’s two major cities. 

This book is full of haunting histories, a confusing present, an uncertain future, and plenty of thought-provoking cultural clashes. It's the second time I've read it in as many years, and I loved it just as much this time as I did the first. I can't wait to see what the Orcs & Aliens book group thinks of this one next month, as there's plenty of fodder for discussion.

Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir  305 pp.

I really enjoyed Weir's novel The Martian so I was a bit hesitant about reading Artemis for fear it wouldn't live up to the same standard. As it turns out, I enjoyed it even more than The Martian. Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara is a porter in Artemis, the only city on Earth's moon. A porter is a low paying job transporting items delivered to Artemis to their intended recipients. Jazz augments her menial pay by smuggling, sometimes to well paying clients. When the possibility of huge score arises, she steps up her game into the big time but things go wrong and she finds herself the target of a killer, the law, and the corporations that control Artemis. The action is fast, the heroine has the right combination of smarts and snark and just enough ethics to commit an altruistic act of heroism. The audiobook is read by Rosario Dawson who does a masterful job. I was sorry to have it end.

Artemis

Artemis / Andy Weir, 304 pgs.

Jazz Bashara is a porter on the moon.  She also has a pretty robust smuggling business that supplements her meager income.  A resident of the moon city Artemis since age six, she has very little memory of her life on earth.  Her father is a respected welder and sometimes critic of Jazz's rebellious life and attitude. When Jazz gets mixed up in a plan to force the sale of a aluminum mining operation, things go south and her big payday ends with a murder.  Jazz is now on the run and trying to figure out how to make things right.  With a stable of interesting friends and a deep understanding of the things that make living on the moon a bit different, this modern day heroine is fun to get to know.  Laced with physics lessons and engineering details, fans of Weir's earlier book will find this similarly engaging.

More: a Novel / Hakan Gunday, 398 pp.

Gaza is in the family business.  In his case, that would be smuggling desperate humans, mostly from Afghanistan, through Turkey and onto to boats in the Aegean, destination Greece.  The novel begins in his young adolescence.  In an almost Holden Caulfield-like voice, he describes his abusive father and the pain of being a child forced to shackle, manipulate and control people in the direst of circumstances.  Initially I found the writing tremendously powerful.  And Gaza's odyssey, which involves being buried in a pile of corpses, commitment to a mental institution, and participating in lynch mobs, is certainly imaginative and strange.  But, as I have complained in the past, piling atrocity upon mayhem upon sadism seems to me a kind of writerly failure, like interspersing your writing with f-bombs.  After awhile it isn't shocking or moving; it's only dull.

Terrific, then disappointing.