I don't read a lot of fiction about Shakespeare, mostly because I'm tired of the trope where they add all kinds of inspiration for his plays (maybe even exact dialogue) into his life. Dark Aemila has a ton of that, but I found that I didn't care.

Dark Aemilia is the story of Aemilia Bassano, later Lanyer, a possible inspiration for the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets and one of the first female poets to be published in England. As told here, she has a brief, ill-fated affair with Shakespeare while the mistress of Lord Hunsdon. When she falls pregnant, she allows Hunsdon to believe he's the father so he will marry her off with a dowry big enough to make her new husband look the other way. Years later, when her son is dying of the plague, she makes a deal with Lilith; in exchange for her son's life, she will write a play for her, The Tragedy of Lady MacBeth. You can probably see where this is going.

Although the plot is mostly fiction aside from the basic outline of Aemilia's life (there's no evidence she had an affair with Shakespeare, no reason to think her son was his rather than Hunsdon's), she did in fact write poetry in defense of Eve, and it's not difficult to believe that she could have been the brilliant and somewhat embittered woman we see here. This is her story; Shakespeare is almost a footnote, a hook to bring the reader in and give the story a closing with his death. The plot is about Aemilia's shifting place in the world, her love for her son, and her struggle to find a way to do what she wants with her poetry.

I would have liked to have heard more about her Lady MacBeth. It's clear that for the most part, Shakespeare is to have stolen her script word for word and scene by scene. But she wrote The Tragedy of Lady MacBeth, and the final play was of MacBeth. So no matter how wonderful a role Lady MacBeth is, presumably Aemilia's version was not the final version. For one thing, Lady MacBeth dies with several long scenes left to go, and it seems unlikely that would have been the case if she were the title character (Julius Caesar aside). Did Shakespeare add more to MacBeth's role to make the two leads at least equal? Did he edit and alter the tone in order to make it a play about a king, not a queen? Since this was the plot point that made me pick up the book I would have liked to have known more about what was meant to have been changed aside from the name of the playwright.

Overall Grade: A-

Many books have been written about Abigail Adams's correspondence with her husband John. Dear Abigail is an account of her life and correspondence alongside her sisters', as well as their children. The spotlight remains largely on Abigail, naturally enough, but while the events are often familiar, the emphasis on the relationship with her sisters renders them with more domestic detail. As somebody who reads every book on the Adamses that she can get her hands on, I found that this book was still enlightening.

Overall: A

This review is based on an e-galley, which I will miss very much when it expires.

Fool's Assassin is Robin Hobb's fourteenth novel in the Realm of the Elderlings books, and although so far I'd say you could probably get away with just reading the other Fitz trilogies before reading this one (The Farseer Trilogy, The Tawny Man Trilogy), you definitely wouldn't want to leap straight into this.

The most important thing for fans to know about this book is that, although the Fool gets equal billing in the title of the series, he's not on the page much in this book. Don't think that this is his story more than the Tawny Man trilogy is. In fact, there is in general a lot of building in this book and it mostly focuses on Fitz's family relationships and daily life.

That is not to say that I don't like this book. I do. Robin Hobb regularly rips my heart out every hundred pages or so. The Realm of the Elderlings is, as always, fascinating, and her characters are a pleasure to spend time with, even when one wants to shake them. I remember a LiveJournal community called fitz_is_stupid. Fitz remains, in some respects, rather stupid. I don't want to include spoilers for a book well into a series in a review published months before the release date, so I'll just say that something happens less than halfway through the book that seems rather obvious to me, and which Fitz has seen all the evidence for, that he still hasn't gotten at its end. But he is Fitz, and even though he's been well trained in observational skills of the kind that he uses when he reports to Chade, he's still amazingly oblivious in some areas.

This is very much a latter book in a series and the first book in a trilogy. Starting here wouldn't give you a good entry point, and stopping here without the intent to continue wouldn't be satisfying. If you're the sort of person who sometimes can't handle waiting for sequels, this might be a good series to wait to be completed before you start. As for me I'll be on the second book as soon as I possibly can.

Overall Grade: A


Fool's Assassin will be available August 12

This review is based on an advance reading copy received from the publisher.

After Eli Burke dies, his granddaughter, Marjorie, discovers that in his private notebooks, the "White Magician" from the stories he told in her childhood is called the "White Rebbe," a figure out of the Wandering Jew legends on which she's writing her dissertation. The stories contained in the notebooks, involving also the Angel of Losses and a lost letter of the alphabet, not only reveal a lost history of the family but a legacy that must be taken up by the current generation and a possible miracle for Marjorie's sister Holly, from whom she has been estranged since Holly married an Orthodox Jew and converted.

The Angel of Losses is a wonderful mix of magic, history, and folklore (some of it invented). It's also a powerful story of family, of the ties that bind and the ones that people break, or try to, to survive. In a way, it struck me also as the story before a fantasy story- which is not to say that I expect a sequel. It's clearly self contained, but Marjorie ends the story at the brink of something new, and perhaps this isn't the "quest" itself, but the explanation for why Marjorie undertakes it.

Overall Grade: A

The Angel of Losses will be available July 29.

This review is based on an ARC received from the publisher.

Prototype is the second part of Archetype, which I reviewed here:

http://unreachableshelf.weebly.com/on-the-shelf/archetype-by-md-waters

Because I can't talk about it without talking about things from the first book, I will not hold back spoilers. Although spoiler is perhaps the wrong word. There are very few things that could make this book worse.

When I reviewed Archetype, I was having trouble deciding what I should think of it because I wasn't sure if I was unfairly comparing it to The Handmaid's Tale. Now, I'm even more concerned that I'm hating this book unfairly because it's the book it is and not the book I wanted to read. I am a librarian, and I believe in every book to its reader. But I'm not sure there's such a thing as a case in which a book can take place in a future in which women are property while completely avoiding the seriousness of that issue to focus solely on the romance and in which that book is OK.

I couldn't figure out if Archetype was aiming for The Handmaid's Tale or The Stepford Wives. Now I know. It's neither. It's a romance that uses the oppression of women as a plot device. Slavery was only a red herring. Or a MacGuffin, maybe, but I'd rather be thinking about Clue than thinking about this book. In these books, men own women as a justification for how Emma wound up in Declan's control at the beginning of Archetype. That having been accomplished, Waters completely fails to consider the possible impact on society. There's the occasional reference to corporal punishment in the Wife Training Centers, but she doesn't seem to have put any thought into how a woman's life is different after being bought. For example, there's this statement, of one of Declan's assets:

"'Who's name is it under? Travista's?'

'Mine,' I say. 'I never gave it any thought, but Declan once had me sign a bunch of paperwork. Financial in nature. He said he wanted to protect me if anything happened to him. He was making sure I was set up and would not have to remarry or work.'" [Emphasis mine.]

Think about that last bit there. Women are property in these books. Fertile women, at least. The legal status of infertile women is explored even less, aside from the fact that they aren't allowed to marry and have to work in specific women's-work type jobs. Having her own money or not isn't supposed to have any impact on whether or not Emma would have to remarry if Declan died. So long as she's fertile she's supposed to be forced to marry and reproduce, and not be allowed to work. Granted, Declan lied some in the first book. In retrospect, the more I think about it, the more he lied about really stupid things. He lied about how he met Emma and that she was bought for him. Not that it doesn't make sense that he might not want her to know that, except that that's how their society works, and since he doesn't plan to keep her isolated forever eventually she'll find out that's how their society works. Obviously he put this asset in her name to hide it, and maybe he's lying about the fact that there's a possibility she could have the option to avoid remarrying, or have the choice to work if she wanted to, in the event of his death. Apparently the property is legally in her name, which makes no sense because if women are an asset that can be bought and sold, how are they allowed to own things?

There's generally a really strange sense in spite of the fact that girls are forced into Wife Training Centers and then forced to marry and reproduce, or to not marry if they're infertile, that women still have just as much agency as they do now in every matter except whom/if they marry and reproduce. The fact that Dr. Travista is making women fertile through a process that involves cloning them has apparently gone public in between the books. This is being handled really strangely, too. It sounds like women are voluntarily signing up to be cloned. If this world has such a shortage of fertile women and if women are nothing more than a commodity, then why are the women the ones deciding to be cloned? Why isn't the government or whoever forces the young girls into the Wife Training Centers rounding up all the infertile women and forcing the procedure on them? (Apparently girls in some of the WTCs are being cloned, and this is apparently the only scandalous thing, but you'd think that a system based on forcing all fertile women into slavery because of a shortage of fertile women would go gather up ALL of the women given this opportunity.) There's also a reference to how a woman gave her daughter to a WTC and "stayed home to raise her son" in language that sounds like she had a choice in the matter. As if fertile women are allowed to do anything besides stay home and raise children in the world of this book.

And on multiple occasions, during love scenes, Emma tells Noah that she is "his." We're following characters in the resistance, and she calls herself "his" in the same way that people might in our contemporary U.S., in which legally two people enter into a partnership of equals. Calling herself "his" would mean something entirely different in a setting in which a man could buy a wife. By contrast I'm thinking of The Handmaid's Tale, how when the first laws keeping women from having their own bank accounts came into effect and the woman we know as Offred knows that her husband doesn't understand that it doesn't matter that he will take care of her, what matters is that she's not allowed to take care of herself. Meanwhile Emma lives in a world in which she literally belongs to her husband, not in an "I am my beloved's and he is mine" kind of way, but in a men can literally buy her kind of way, and yet she seems to be perfectly happy to belong to a man as long as it's the right man.

There are all other kinds of things that don't seem to be thought out. The plot thread about Emma wanting to find her parents seems underdeveloped, just an excuse to get her away from the resistance at the beginning of the book long enough for Noah and Sonya to start a relationship. It's mentioned in passing that Noah's father has been married five times because he sells each wife after he impregnates her a time or two. With such a shortage of fertile women, why would a man sell a wife who'd proven herself? Wouldn't he be afraid he couldn't purchase another one, or that the new one would turn out to be infertile after all? Does he wait until he knows he'll be able to buy a new wife before he sells the old one? Does he actually make a profit because the women he's had children with have been proven to be fertile? Is this encouraged for reasons of diversifying the gene pool, since there aren't enough women to go around for all the men, or is it just an old fashioned case of a rich guy who wants variety? And is he really rich and powerful that he can apparently always buy a new wife in spite of them being a rare commodity?

And at the end, the wife training centers are sold but still intact, as if that's supposed to make us happy. Because it's fine that women are being sold as long as they aren't cloning them and then killing the originals any more.

Look, I know that dystopias aren't really supposed to have happy endings. More often than not, they don't. The happiest ending of one of the classics I can think of off the top of my head is Fahrenheit 451, in which case it's clear that people are preserving lost literature waiting for the current regime to fall to its own wars. If this were a "He loved big brother" ending, that would be one thing. But this is supposed to be a living happily ever after ending.

This is obviously supposed to be a romance novel more than it's supposed to be social SF. I don't dislike it because it's a romance novel. I like romance novels but, like every other book, I expect them to commit to their characters and their setting, whether we're talking about historical, SF or fantasy, or a slightly quirkier version of the real contemporary world. If you don't want your romance hero and heroine to have to deal realistically with horrific dystopian things, then don't write a book with a horrific dystopian premise.

Overall: F

Prototype will be available July 24

This sprawling book is why I haven't posted in over a week, and it was so worth it.

It starts with Theo Decker sick and alone in Amsterdam at Christmas, but quickly flashes back to when he was thirteen and his mother was killed when a bomb exploded in an art museum. In the confusion that follows, and possibly suffering a concussion, Theo accepts a ring from a dying man who gives him an address and takes a small painting that his mother loved from the wall. The ring and the painting set Theo on a course that will unfold over the next fourteen years, even as he drifts from home to home.

The approach of starting near the end of the story and then working back to it did a lot to maintain narrative tension during stretches of the story that otherwise might not have appeared to have a lot going on. Sooner or later, we know that Theo is going to wind up in the middle of something serious in Amsterdam, most likely involving the painting, and the suspense builds as we wonder how he gets there. As we go, we watch how a wide cast of characters deal with the volatility of life. The most interesting is Boris, whom we first meet as a teenager when Theo lives for a time in Las Vegas, a sort of a modern Artful Dodger. Theo's PTSD and the general instability of his life after the bombing seems to have left him with a self destructive streak; Boris's similarly chaotic childhood appears to have taught him to grab everything he can from life and not to worry too much about tomorrow. Others search for stability even if it means giving up what one might call their heart's desire. And through it all, there's the mystery of the painting and what will become of it.

This is the last of the ALA Carnegie fiction shortlist books that I was able to get my hands on, and I'll be rooting for it on June 28, sitting in front of Twitter late at night because I won't be at Annual.

Overall: A+