On Books

by Kelly Jennings

Mary Soon Lee, The Sign of the Dragon

Emily Yu-Xuan Quin, Aunt Tigress

Chuck Tingle, Lucky Day

Ray Nayler, Where the Axe Is Buried

Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster

Beth Revis, Last Chance to Save the World

 

I very nearly didn’t read The Sign of the Dragon (JABberwocky, 2025), by Mary Soon Lee. This is because it’s a 580-page story in verse—an epic, according to its cover. I had my doubts that anyone in the twenty-first century could successfully write an epic. (My doctorate focused on Greek and Roman literature, and I have opinions about epics.) But I read the first couple of pages and I was caught. This is indeed an epic, and it’s brilliant.

The Sign of the Dragon is the story of a king, Xau, from just before he becomes king at age sixteen until his death in his early thirties, told in a series of short poems, in various verse forms, from various points of view. Xau is the youngest of four brothers (there is also a sister), and when the king their father dies, each brother is sent up the mountain to be interviewed by a dragon, who decides whether or not each brother should be king. Xau’s three older brothers are rejected (and eaten by the dragon), and then Xau is sent up the mountain. “What will you pay for a crown?” the dragon asks him.

“Nothing,” Xau says. “I don’t want it.”

“Then why are you here?” the dragon asks.

“Because the kingdom needs a king,” he says, which is apparently the right answer.

The rest of the epic shows us Xau first learning to be a king, and then becoming a better (and better) king. Moreovery, it shows us why Xau is a good king. The narrative covers a couple of wars, his various heroic acts, and many, many mundane details of his life—his friendship with his guard detail, his marriages, his children, his fondness and respect for his cleaning lady. There is more than one poem from the point of view of his cat. The poems are beautiful, and occasionally heart-breaking.

There are three major events in the epic, all supernatural in origin. First there is a war with a neighboring kingdom, Innis, and its king, Donal. Donal’s queen, Fian, bears a generations old grudge. In service of that grudge, Fian bewitches Donal into starting the war. Xau, due to an earlier connection to the Horse Lords (one of the earliest acts of his rule, when he treated the Horse King as an equal), is able to control horses, including Donal’s horses, which allows him to win this war. The next war, also started by Fian’s witchery, is ended when Donal’s kingdom is attacked by a fire demon, and Xau offers his aid in defeating it. After Xau defeats that demon, Donal swears alliance to Xau—and Fian collects the demon’s blood in order to cast another spell, luring Xau to Innis, planning to have him killed there. This is the second big plot move.

When this plan fails, Fian kills herself, using her death—the third big plot move—to raise a monster in the desert, one dedicated in the short term to torturing innocents, and in the long term to killing Xau. Building toward Xau’s encounter with the monster occupies the second half of the epic.

But before that final encounter, Soon Lee gives us many quotidian details about Xau’s life that I won’t spoil here. These brief episodes—the cat, the kites, Xau’s children, and his daily life—are the real heart of the poem.

I’ve seen comments on the epic that say Xau is too good, too kind to be a believable hero, but I disagree. Epics always center around a hero who embodies the virtues a civilization needs. Achilles is a great warrior; Odysseus is tricksy; Aeneas is pious. Soon Lee gives us a hero whose strength is his determination to treat everyone, even his enemies, as his equals: as people who are as deserving of respect and kindness as he is. Their lives have equal value to his own, he insists, although his advisors keep trying to convince him otherwise, because if he dies before his son is old enough to take the throne, the entire kingdom will be at risk.

Xau agrees that these advisors are right—yes, he should smack down the Horse Lord; yes, he should flee and leave an enemy army to die in a forest fire; yes, he should let hostages die to save himself—but over and over we see him act according to his true nature, the one that treats everyone as valuable. We see this in his first act as a king, when he wakes b to find that Gan, one of his guards, has been watching over him all night, and fetches the man some water.

Gan stared at the boy, the king,

Standing there in his pajamas

Holding out a cup of water

To him, the guard.

A small thing,

but the boy’s father

Had never done it.

When he finally meets the monster in the desert to try to save the people who it’s using as bait, his advisors urge him to let them die. Kill the monster and save the kingdom. That’s the proper act when an enemy has hostages. Xau agrees this is true, but he cannot do it. He cannot treat people as objects.

Because of Xau’s essential nature, the world is made a better place, and people in it become better people. (Not all of them. But many of them.) I loved every page of this book. I can’t recommend it enough.

 

Aunt Tigress (DAW, 2025), by Emily Yu-Xuan Quin, is a glorious sprawling monster of a book. The main character is named Tam(ara) Lin, and she has a girlfriend named Janet Child, so you can see why I was expecting this to be a retelling of the Scottish folktale about Tam Lin, who was saved from the Queen of the Fairies by his true love Janet, which is famously one of the Child Ballads. And for those who love the story of Tam Lin, don’t worry, elements of it do show up. But the events of that tale are just one of the many stories from folklore (and modern lore) that inform this novel—which, while it is about those stories, is also about cultural appropriation and the reclamation of what has been lost. Fair warning: there is also a certain amount of body horror, a little too much for me at times.

Tam Lin is the child of immigrants, one of them a Chinese woman and one of them a Chinese tiger (or a shapeshifting tiger person). When she is very young, her tiger father is killed, before he can teach her what she needs to know about living as a tiger. Because Tam needs that knowledge, her mother reluctantly invites her father’s sister, Aunt Tigress, into their lives. Her mother knows this is a bad decision, because Aunt Tigress is violent, dangerous, and not at all safe company. She thinks her aunt’s presence is necessary for Tam, who is not thriving as a human child (a situation made worse by her mother’s remarriage to a Caucasian vegan, who tries to force Tam to live as a vegan as well). But she doesn’t know something essential about Aunt Tigress, which might have changed her mind—I’m not telling it here, since it’s a major spoiler.

Aunt Tigress teaches Tam how to live as a Tiger—or how Aunt Tigress claims Tigers live. This is by feeding on the weak, killing not just for sustenance, but for the sheer pleasure of the hunt, as well as harming others for fun and profit. When Tam hesitates, Aunt Tigress explains why harming others is okay. “She’ll suffer,” Tam protests about a woman Aunt Tigress has infected with a witch tree seed, a debilitating and horrific parasite. Aunt Tigress tells her:

“As all life should suffer, if it were fair. Witch seeds . . . redistribute karma. The woman is rich and successful and lucky, but the witch seed is stronger. The strong eat the weak. That’s the way it works, right, cub?”

“Yes,” I answered, and realized that it did feel right. . . . in the end, [that woman] was still prey. Unlike Aunt Tigress and me, humans were always prey.

Tam feels guilt about the suffering she and Aunt Tigress are inflicting on the world, but Aunt Tigress teaches her that it’s okay, because that is what tigers do, cause suffering. It’s how they live, Aunt Tigress says. Believing she is being taught the traditions of her people, Tam quashes her guilt and practices the violence and exploitation Aunt Tigress requires from her, only eventually understanding that Aunt Tigress is also exploiting her, using her as prey. Why would she not? Tam is weaker than Aunt Tigress, and the strong eat the weak.

After Aunt Tigress is murdered (as it appears), Tam and her new girlfriend Janet Child are summoned to the office of Delilah Little: Unconventional Wills and Litigations. Miss Little, as Tam calls her, is the lawyer for “ghosts and monsters older than law itself.” She sends Tam (and perforce Janet) on an investigation, a quest, to learn what has happened to Aunt Tigress. Whatever has happened with Aunt Tigress seems to be connected to the apocalyptic events (a rain of stone, a sky on fire) that are becoming more and more frequent in Calgary, where our story is set. Jack Little, Miss Little’s “son,” joins forces with Tam and Janet in this investigation.

I don’t want to give too many spoilers here, but both Tam and Jack are children who have been appropriated, in a fashion (Jack by Miss Little, Tam by Aunt Tigress); and through the complicated, sprawling, multilayered events that make up the plot of this novel we readers slowly come to understand that the central matter of the novel is this theft of children for the benefit of the more powerful—the strong, as opposed to the weak—and the theft of culture for the same reason. Both the children and the cultures are being exploited, as we learn, for the good of someone stronger, usually someone from a hegemonic culture.

So this book has important things to say, but those things do tend to get lost in the sprawling structure. The seemingly episodic nature of the novel can be daunting. It reminded me a bit of Journey to the West, no doubt deliberately. That sixteenth century Chinese novel about the monk Tripitaka and his trickster sidekick Monkey, who journey to India on a white dragon/horse to find enlightenment, has been made into a manga and an anime, among other things; and both manga and anime, as well as video games, are a clear influence on Qin’s novel. Once I figured that out, I found the novel less daunting, and indeed the structure comes together in the end—everything leads to the grand finale. Even with this caveat, the novel can be a bit overwhelming. For readers who can hang on and keep reading, the payoff is worth the journey.

 

The short novel Lucky Day (Tor Nightfire, 2025), by Chuck Tingle, starts off with a perfect—not lucky—day in the life of Vera, a statistics and probability professor at the University of Chicago. Vera is engaged to Annie, a perfect woman, and has a first book about to come out. Her friends are throwing her a party in celebration. This book is a study of the mathematics behind the success of a huge corporation, Everett Vacation and Entertainment (EVE). More specifically, the book is a study of why the mathematics behind that success don’t work, in an attempt to demonstrate that EVE must be committing fraud in some way. That probable fraud will become important for plot reasons later.

It’s not a lucky day specifically because Vera doesn’t believe in luck. As a statistics and probability professor—the youngest one at the University of Chicago—Vera has spent her life understanding the world through probability and logic. Understanding the math behind events has convinced her that life can be understood and controlled by controlling the variables. If we look at the math, Vera says, we can understand why things happen, what life means. This philosophy has made her into a bit of a control freak, but a very successful one.

Vera plans to use the celebration party to announce her engagement to her mother. Since she’s not yet out to her mother, and fears her mother’s disapproval, this is a risky move. And indeed, the gamble does not pay off: her mother reacts badly, telling Vera first that her love for Annie is an “impulse,” an “experiment,” and then that she is wrong: Vera is not bisexual, her mother says, because bisexuals don’t exist.

“I’ve heard all about it on the news, this bisexual thing. More and more young people identifying as bisexual or transgender.” A literal shudder courses through her body. “These things aren’t real, Vera.”

It is precisely at this point that the perfect day explodes into bizarre horror. Fish fall from the sky. A truck slams into Vera’s mother, killing her instantly. Something explodes nearby. A giant parade balloon of a dinosaur in a spacesuit floats through the street, bodies of people caught and hanged by in its mooring lines dangling beneath it. An exploding manhole cover sheers away the face of a man near Vera. A chimpanzee in a Hamlet costume batters someone to death with a typewriter. Hundreds of other horrific events occur, all in the same twenty minutes. This is a nightmare, Vera thinks, but in fact it’s not. It’s a Low-Probability Event (LPE), which has killed almost eight million people worldwide, most of them Americans in America.

The LPE of May 23, as it comes to be called, wrecks Vera completely. She cannot accept a world in which the math does not work, a world that seems entirely random. When we next encounter her, four years later, she is living in the wreckage of her mother’s home, an absolute mental and physical wreck herself. She has lost track of Annie; she no longer works at the University of Chicago, living instead on checks from the LPE Commission. She has stopped exercising or bathing or changing her clothes, and she is living on instant noodles. She begins to feed a stray cat, which starts to bring her out of her near-catatonic depression; but then the cat dies. The death of the cat confirms the truth of the conclusion she has made, following the May 23 LPE. Nothing matters. Existence has no point. Life, she says, is “never going to make sense. There’s no master equation. There’s no hidden key. It’s just tragedy and bullshit and chaos.”

It’s at this point that Agent Jonah Layne, a federal agent from the LPE Commission, arrives. LPEC was created by Congress after the May 23 LPE, and it has unlimited power to investigate Low Probability Events—which have not stopped happening. Like Homeland Security and ICE, LPEC has enormous potential for creating abuses of power, something it takes Vera time to notice, both because of her depressed state and because Jonah Layne is a quirkily charming man. His entrance into Vera’s house, in retrospect, should have been a warning: he flings open the front door, shouting, “Heeere’s Johnny!” echoing the iconic moment from The Shining. Also, as he almost immediately informs her, LPEC operates without oversight.

Layne wants Vera’s help investigating Everett Vacation and Entertainment. He has noticed that all the victims of the May 23 LPE visited the flagship casino owned by EVE at some point, and suspects a connection. Though Vera is still sunk in nihilism and does not believe this investigation will lead to any answers, she agrees to accompany Layne and help him understand the data their investigation will reveal. That’s what Vera has always been good at—understanding data, seeing patterns, deducing what they mean and what they reveal.

The bulk of the novel concerns this investigation of EVE and its connection to the LPEs, as well as Vera’s quest to find meaning in a meaningless world—is it possible to create order in a chaotic universe? After the LPE of May 23, she is convinced it is not; but as the book continues, she starts to reevaluate this conviction.

This is a short, tight novel, which takes on big questions. Is there any meaning in a meaningless universe? Can we create order despite the chaos that surrounds us, and is there any point in trying? Is love real? There’s a lot of body horror in this one, too, but if you can tolerate that, or at least wince your way past it, Lucky Day is a great read.

 

I really liked Tusks of Extinction (Tor, 2024) by Ray Nayler, so I opened Where the Axe Is Buried (MCD, 2025) with high hopes. These hopes were not dashed. This is an excellent, though complex, book.

Set in the near future, Where the Axe Is Buried takes place in a world in which almost every nation in the West has been “rationalized.” This means the governments of those countries have surrendered control to an AI, known as the Prime Minister, or PM. There is a different PM for each country; these are “bespoke” artificial intelligence programs that are “attuned to the ‘lifeways’ of the country,” but from what we see, each rationalized nation is pretty much like every other rationalized nation—the working class and poor have jobs, but they’re miserable jobs. Corporations continue to suck up wealth. Everyone is confined within their narrow lives, without much chance of change. A parliament or some human government still exists, but they don’t have real power.

Meanwhile, in the East, or at least in an unnamed country in Eastern Europe (which is the other place we get a close look at), the president rules with an electronic fist, using surveillance technology to control the population. Cameras are not just on the street, but within homes and churches and retail outlets. Everyone has a Social Credit score, based on their surveilled behavior. If someone’s score drops, restrictions are imposed—they’re limited in how far from their home they can go, for instance, or which stores they can shop in. If the score drops too low, they are arrested and sent to work camps. Scores can be docked for hundreds of reasons, including saying the wrong things, or asking a neighbor for help, or failing to attend church, or having the wrong expression on your face. There is a quotation that is repeated several times in the text, from the book The Forever Argument, which is a philosophical treatise about the need for resistance:

[T]he state was everywhere. The state did not need to anticipate us: it shaped the mistakes we would make, and it was th  ere to take us into its prisons when we made them.

Reading The Forever Argument, or even owning a copy of it (and certain other books), is a death sentence, as is any form of resistance to the president or his regime. But any such resistance has long since been quashed, by means of slaughtering and imprisoning those who resist in even the smallest ways. Yet one dissident at least remains: Zoya Alekseyevna Velikanova, author of The Forever Argument. We meet Zoya in the opening pages of the novel; she and a computer scientist/physicist named Lilia Vitalyevna Rybakova are two of the main characters. There is also a clerk, Nurlan, in the parliament of an unnamed post-Soviet state called the Republic; and a doctor, Nikolai, who is keeping the president alive.

This last is a trickier proposition than it seems. A method has been developed for making copies of a person’s neural patterns—copies of their mind—that can then be translated into a new body (a “blank”). This has been done repeatedly with the president, making him functionally immortal and, due to the intelligence and security apparatus around him, very nearly all powerful.

The book is about oppression in this Eastern European country under the president; but it is also about oppression under capitalism in the West. One population is oppressed by a powerful and punitive state; the other by the powerful and punitive economic order. Neither system seems, to those living within them, able to be changed or resisted. There is no escape from the systems, they believe; the most anyone can hope for is survival, a good meal, something entertaining to stream. More than one character compares these systems (and the people who keep them running) to a fungus: interconnected, spreading under the surface of things, nearly impossible to kill. Nayler’s book is about how such systems can, despite all, be resisted. On one level, the book is about the act of resistance itself. But the plot concerns a specific resistance movement, and a specific act of resistance, which does not come from the direction we as readers expect.

The novel is also about the use of stories and books as a form of resistance. Throughout the novel, characters remember stories they have been told by their grandparents or parents, and Zoya’s book informs the acts of all the main characters, who all have or acquire copies of The Forever Argument and read them diligently. We see, as well, the appropriation of fiction by the oppressive systems—which use fiction written by the state or the corporations or AI as propaganda.

This is a rich and complicated novel that requires attention from its readers. Parts of it are difficult to read, due to the grimness of the events. But there are also moments of optimism and beauty, and the book itself is very well written. This is Nayler’s best yet. Don’t miss it.

 

Lessons in Magic and Disaster (Tor, 2025), a new novel by Charlie Jane Anders, concerns an English literature graduate student, Jamie Sandthorn, who is also a witch. Jamie is working on her Ph.D. with a focus on British novels written by women in the early eighteenth century. As the novel opens, Jamie has decided to teach her mother, Serena, how to do magic, hoping to lift her mother out of the depression and stagnation that has followed the death of her wife (Jamie’s other mother, Mae).

So this is a novel about magic, but it is also a novel about doing academic research, and about the subject of Jamie’s research, which is two specific women novelists from the first half of the eighteenth century: Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding. Jamie starts out searching for evidence that one of the women wrote a novel, Emily, that was published anonymously in 1749. As her research advances, she begins to find evidence that Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding were in a relationship; and that they were both witches, using magic to protect themselves against the slander and attacks of their contemporaries.

Jamie uses magic to find the original documents she needs for her research: letters and notes written by these women, and pamphlets written about them. Jamie’s wife, Ro, ponders the moral implications of using magic in scholarship at one point, since this gives Jamie an unfair advantage over other scholars. However, as she adds to Jamie, you “might be the only researcher in your field who can use magic to find primary sources, but some of your peers might have other advantages, like a bigger travel budget or access to private libraries.”

And this is the other thing Anders’ novel is about: the various levels of privilege and marginalization suffered by and inflicted upon different groups in our contemporary world. Both Jamie and Ro are trans, a somewhat terrifying thing to be in our current political climate. And when Mae is dying of cancer—a death that might have been prevented, except for the fatphobia of her doctor—Serena is attacked by a right-wing outrage journalists, who set up a sting to entrap Serena into making unwise comments, comments that are later edited into a misleading video. This results in Serena losing her job. It is also one reason that she has fallen into depression at the start of the book. Jamie, attacked by the same group halfway through the novel, sees her own life collapsing in the same way. She thinks it is a conservative student in her class who set the outrage journalists on her; but in fact, as Gavin, the student, tells her, there’s no need to entrap people anymore, or investigate their lives to find gotcha details. “We don’t, like, need to gather a ton of evidence to show that someone is a problem,” he explains tolerantly to Jamie. “We just say they’re a problem loud enough over and over, and it becomes true.”

Anders has written a novel about academic research and how it’s done, which as an English professor I very much enjoyed; and she’s written a novel about magic and how it works, with some fascinating worldbuilding and philosophy; but her main thesis here, if we can speak of a novel as having a thesis, is about attacks on marginalized minorities and on marginalized cultures as a way of controlling and erasing those groups. Just as the seventeenth century culture used gossip and gossip columns in an attempt to control and silence women, and specifically Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding, so today some use social media and Fox News to control and silence women, trans people, and anyone else they decide to disapprove of.

Charlie Jane Anders always writes interesting books, but due to our current political climate in the United States, this one should be on everyone’s reading list.

 

I reviewed two books by Beth Revis for the May 2025 On Books—the first and second installments in her in Chaotic Orbits trilogy. Last Chance to Save the World (Daw, 2025) is the conclusion to that trilogy. As I noted in the previous review, the main character of the trilogy, Ada Lamar, is a big part of why these books are so readable. She’s witty, sweary, and delightful, a person of strong appetites who will pause in the middle of a heist to gobble treats from the chocolate fountain at a reception, and who falls in love with the agent (Rian White) who is pursuing her (he’s hot). In this book also, Ada continues to be relentless—one goal, her motto, is full speed until we get it.

But this is not exactly true: Ada has, here as always, multiple goals, and she will do what it takes to achieve them. As she notes to Rian at one point, “I lied to you. Honestly, Rian, you should expect that of me by now.”

Her overarching goal through all three installments is to prevent a trillionaire from monetizing the repair of Earth’s environment. The trillionaire, Strom Fetor, has taken a lucrative government contract to create nanobots that will strip pollutants from Earth’s oceans. (He doesn’t create them himself, obviously. That’s what programmers are for.) Fetor plans to release a version of these nanobots that has been designed to fail periodically, so that he can require more money—a ransom—from everyone on the planet in order to fix them. In other words, Fetor is turning the repair of Earth’s climate into a cash cow for his corporation. An activist group on Earth, headed by an agent code-named Jane Irwin, has hired Ada to subvert this plan. Ada, herself a stellar programmer, has written a fix for the nanobots, which she just needs to substitute for Fetor’s nanobots before they are released.

At the start of this third novel, Ada and Rian are landing on Malta, where the gala celebrating the nanobot release is scheduled to take place at Fetor Towers the next morning. Ada needs Rian to get her access to the towers. So she has kidnapped him and then charmed him into helping her accomplish not just her main goal—the nanobots—but also a couple of side goals. Meanwhile, both she and Rian are swooning for one another, though each knows the other will betray them in the end.

Besides tying up all the plot lines, advancing the romance, and giving us another chance to hang out with Ada, this third installment gives us more of Ada’s backstory, showing us how she ended up the “looter” she describes herself as in the first book. These reveals about Ada’s past give some needed depth to her character, and honestly left me wanting more.

You’ll want to read the first two books before you start this one—it’s definitely not a stand-alone work. But it’s a satisfying conclusion to the Chaotic Orbits trilogy.