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Yesterday, with hours to go until my library hold expired, with another hold not on the horizon before 3 weeks, I finished A Drop of Corruption, the second book in the In the Shadow of the Leviathan series by Robert Jackson Bennett.

Ana and Din are back with another grody and baffling murder. I think the consistency between the first book and the second is very good; if you liked one, you’ll like the other. Bennett maintains the same quality mystery narrative here, dropping believable misleads while feeding out enough information that when Ana makes her breakthrough realizations you can look back and see the path she took.

Bennett’s fantasy world is coming into its own as well. We pick up many months after the end of the last book, so Ana and Din have developed a stronger rapport and working relationship. We are fed more information about the world itself—with some outside perspective, as this book takes place entirely in the nation of Yarrow, which is essentially a satellite state of Khanum, pending full annexation once negotiations with Yarrow’s king complete.

I enjoy how the women are written in these books. Ana and our new, local connection, Malo, are wholly unmoored from concerns about what others think of them. Ana is brash, loud, demanding, and arrogant—except that she’s almost always right. She has a masterful understanding of her own capabilities and weaknesses and she’s not afraid to openly discuss either. She’s also crass, gluttonous, and does not have great personal hygiene habits. And yet, everyone simple handles it, because she’s so good at what she does. I feel it’s rare to see a female character like this.

When it comes to the other women in service to the empire, like Thelenai and the female members of Uhad’s crew from the last book, there is little distinction between them and their male colleagues. A number of fantasy stories have posited that their worlds are gender-equal, but many fall utterly short of showing that beyond having women around. In Bennett’s world, in Khanum, I believe it, in part because the women lack the self-consciousness that comes of being raised in a sexist society.

However, this book is politically confused. It is obvious, even before the author’s note, that Bennett thinks very little of monarchy, and its destructive power is hammered over and over throughout the book. In that closing author’s note, Bennett is highly critical both of real-world leaders behaving like kings, and the glorification of monarchy in fantasy literature. However, the glaring hole in this, to me, is that no commentary is made on the empire. Ana and Din hail from what is nothing more than an elevated monarchy—one where their centuries-old emperor has chosen to extend his power well beyond his initial borders. Now, it makes perfect sense that Ana and Din believe in the good of Khanum. They serve it, they are members of its government. However, Khanum’s pending annexation of Yarrow is posited as almost universally a good thing for Yarrow—indeed, the only character we see strongly opposed to it is easily the most loathsome character in the book. There is criticism also of Yarrow’s practice of slavery, but when Din protests that a potential Khanum retreat from the annexation would leave the slaves of Yarrow to their fate, Ana warns him it is not Khanum’s place to legislate the morality of other places. And yet, over and over and over again for all of human history, empires have believed it was their place to do just that—and violently (Hello, White Man’s Burden).

Perhaps these inconsistencies would be less sharp if we understood more about Khanum and its role in the world. In A Drop of Corruption, we are told the empire no longer conquers with strength of arms—ergo the protracted negotiations with Yarrow. However, that means it did, and even in the last book we saw how the empire treats its cantons, with the utter destruction of Oypat accepted as a reasonable price to maintain the wealth of various noble families. Even if the emperor is only a figurehead, we know that Khanum is tightly bound by the whims and desires of its nobility. It was baffling to me why this is never raised in the political discussions of Yarrow and the annexation.

Moving on, we get new backstory on both Ana and Din here, which bulks their characters out (although Din’s apparent lifelong yearning to join the Legion feels a bit out of left field) and leaves us in a very interesting place for the third book. Ana continues to be a vicious delight and without spoilers, we are finally learning what makes her so unique.

I also had to appreciate the importance the narrative places on civil servants. One of Din’s gripes about life in the Iudex is, essentially, that it is unglamorous and frequently bureaucratic. Yet the narrative champions those who do the day-to-day drudgery of running a country, frequently for no thanks. It takes the garbage men and the post office workers and the teachers and the Social Security Administration clerks to run things, and A Drop of Corruption says these people are important, and the work they do is important, even if it is rarely recognized.

Bennett has hit his stride with this series and I’m curious to see where it goes next.

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The other book I finished during my voyage through the southwest was How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum, translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. This was book [checks notes] #17 from the “Women in Translation” rec list. It’s about an estranged mother and daughter; as the mother peers through the windows of her adult daughter’s house from across the street, she ponders what went wrong in their formerly loving relationship.

How to Love Your Daughter is a cerebral kind of novel that swims back and forth between Yoella’s present, desperately reaching after the daughter who’s walked out of her life, and Yoella’s recollections of raising Leah.

The twists and turns of their relationship are subtle, almost too subtle. Both characters come off slightly neurotic, fussing about every minor interaction and seeming, to me, to invent problems where none really existed. In the end, it’s not so much a long-deteriorating relationship, which is what I expected, as it is Yoella making one decision that forever alters Leah’s perception of her.

“No one warned me my love could destroy her,” Yoella says about Leah at one point and that’s the core of it. Yoella adores her daughter, almost beyond reason. And it’s that very willingness to put Leah above everyone and everything else that eventually pushes Leah away from her, which is such a perfect tragedy.

I saw another review that said this book was both too long and too short, and I think there’s some truth to that. There are drawn out middle sections which don’t necessarily add much, but the ultimate break and subsequent efforts at reconciliation by Yoella don’t get as much room to breathe as might have benefitted them.

However, the ending is an exquisite microcosm of the tension of the whole novel, leaving you wondering about unreliable narrators and perceptions. Some people felt that Yoella gets off too easy—I would recommend rereading the section where Leah talks to Yoella about her reality/fantasy of Dennis writing her a letter.

I don’t know that either Yoella or Leah comes off as really sympathetic here, but they do come off very human, full of flaws and self-justifications and irrational reactions. And maybe sometimes it’s just human nature to create a tragedy where there didn’t have to be one.

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Wednesday night I plowed through most of The Unworthy by Augustina Baztericca, translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses. This is a horror novel about a woman living in an isolated cult after climate change has ravaged most of the planet.

This was one of those books that had me going “okay just one more section and I’ll put it down” and then it was five sections later and I was still there. It just hooked me. I wanted to know more about the cult, I wanted to know more about the narrator’s past, I was so eager to see what was going to come next.

This book goes heavy on gore, mutilation, and cult abuse, so if those are not for you, you may want to give this one a pass. I found it fascinating; the world of the narrator is so grim and tightly controlled, but it’s all that’s left (as far as they know). The book also leans hard on things unspoken: things the narrator knows are so taboo she crosses them out of her own (secret) writings (such as when she wonders if maybe the earth has begun to heal); things she has forcefully blocked from her memory because they hurt so much to think of; the deep current of attraction she feels towards various other women in the cult which is easier to express through violence than sexuality.

In the claustrophobic world of the cult, it becomes so easy for the leadership to pit the women against each other, and they have grown shockingly cruel and violent towards one another in their quest for dominance (each of the “unworthy” dreams of ascending to the holier status of a “Chosen” or “Enlightened”). With virtually no control over their day-to-day, they fantasize about opportunities to punish each other, their only ability to enact their will on the world.

The hints from the beginning that the narrator questions her role in the cult create a delicious tension in the work. Her mere act of writing her experiences down is a violation of cult rules and she frequently keeps her journal pages bound to her chest under her clothes so no one will find them.

The translation was excellent, the writing flows well and Moses captures the descriptions and the narrator’s backtracking on her wording without anything becoming awkward.

The book isn’t long, but I was riveted, and I would like to read more of Baztericca’s work in the future. This was also the second Argentinian horror novel that surprised me with queerness, so another win for Argentinian horror.

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On Sunday I finished The Tainted Cup, the first book in the Shadow of the Leviathan series by Robert Jackson Bennett. This is a fantasy murder mystery with an element of political thriller.

The main character is Ana Dolabra, an eccentric but brilliant investigator, and I believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen a woman fill this role. The wacky but effective investigator is of course a very well-known stock character, but has always been, in my experience, a man. I found Ana delightful; strange but not off-putting, and without coming off like the author was working to hard to make her quirky.

However, our point-of-view protagonist is Din Kol, Ana’s put-upon assistant, on whose shoulders falls the managing of her many idiosyncrasies. They’re a fun team to watch work, and in this first book we get to see their working relationship unfold, as they’ve only recently teamed up at the start. Din is fine, but mostly I appreciated him as a lens for Ana.

Bennett’s fantasy world is characterized by fantastical use and manipulation of plants and the human body. Din, for instance, has been modified to be an “engraver”—someone with an eidetic memory. For obvious reasons, this serves him well as aid to an investigator.

I think Bennett does a good job of throwing you into the world and letting you use context to figure most of it out. I get bored with SFF novels that feel the need to hold your hand, as if you might be a first-time SFF reader who never encountered a magic system before, so I was relieved when Bennett just started telling the story and letting me figure the world out as it went along. I’d rather be a bit lost at times than be toddled along, but I never felt lost here.

The novel touches on some things that I feel are pretty keenly relevant, like the ability of the wealthy to avoid justice and their willingness to inflict suffering on the rest of society to better their own position (and then justify it to themselves).

I don’t read a ton of murder mysteries, so I may not be the best judge of this, but I also felt that Ana worked well. It’s a tough trick writing a character who’s meant to be much smarter than the rest of the cast (perhaps even than the author!), and it can fail a couple of ways: the supposed “brilliant” deductions are obvious to the average reader, making the rest of the cast look painfully dull for not seeing them; or the machinations are so obtuse with so little evidence the reader simply won’t believe the detective could have figured that out without an ass-pull from the author. I didn’t think Bennett fell into either of these traps and every detail Ana referred to in one of her deductions was something that had been mentioned before.

I only have one real criticism and that is about how unrealistic the sword fight scene was. I simply don't think it was necessary to showcase what the Bennett was trying to show us about Din, and <spoiler>having an untried swordsman defeat three--almost four--trained imperial soldiers on his own (partially because they do him the courtesy of attacking one at a time)</spoiler> was so unrealistic it jarred me right out of the scene. As Milgen points out later in the book--fighting is not just about memorizing the right moves.

I enjoyed this book and I plan to read the next one. Very interested to see where Ana’s adventures take her next!