Long Hidden

The first thing I noticed about Long Hidden was of course the gorgeous Julie Dillon cover.

The second thing was that it was typeset with almost no margins - was that a deliberate thing, a sort of riff on it being "Speculative Fiction From The Margins of History", that here there are no margins?

I was on page five when I came to the first line halftoned to grey. I spent a while puzzling over why that line - to emphasize? To undermine? It took me until the next grey bit to realize that occasional words, lines, or even pages were just randomly printed halftoned. In some cases they were actually unpleasant to read.

I worry that even mentioning that is the equivalent of making a tone argument - ha, I guess it's literally a tone argument. Obviously it has nothing to do with the quality of the stories. It's just something that jumped out at me; I guess I don't handle very many books that don't have that major-publisher slickness.

Okay, actual review of contents. As a whole, I have to admit I did not end up super enthralled by this anthology. I didn't really know much about the project when I requested the book, except that it was something people were talking about in SFF fandom. It turns out that it's all historical fantasy set between 1500 and the early 1900s that (as far as I could tell without doing research) did not include significant alternate-historical elements, like, did not actually change the outcomes of recorded conflicts. And I think this for me is not so much my favorite genre. I might dig the occasional historical fantasy story that vividly brings to life a time and place, or that's set in a place or period that I've personally visited or studied for some reason, but for the most part what really engages me about historical fantasy is alternate history. How dragons change the Napoleonic Wars. How vaccines change the conflict of the Incas and the Spanish. How time travel saves Europe from conquest by the Aztecs. That kind of thing has a zing for me that nothing in Long Hidden did.

That said, there are a few stories in here that I liked, that I would like to recommend to anyone picking up the anthology and curious about it as a place they might want to start their reading:

"Ogres of East Africa", Sofia Samatar. I thought I wasn't impressed by this at first, but, man, she's got a way with words.
"Free Jim's Mine", Tananarive Due. Man, I don't have quite enough critical vocabulary to talk about the things I want to talk about. This felt very "classic" to me, like, straightforward, simple, powerful, and I enjoyed it, being in many ways a very simple sort of reader.
"The Witch of Tarup", Claire Humphrey. This one made me smile the most (although I was disappointed they didn't end up in a threesome with Mads).
"Diyu", Robert William Iveniuk. Buddhist monk turned railroad laborer vs alien, oh yeah.
"The Colts", Benjamin Parzybok. Okay, this didn't entirely work for me, but I loved the POV and it's the most historically-grounded zombie explanation ever.
"Lone Women", Victor LaValle. I do enjoy a good Enemy Mine.

three kid things recs

Two books and a game.

A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat by Emily Jenkins and Sophie Blackall is a brilliant picture book that, like it says in the subtitle there, shows how four different families, from 1710, 1810, 1910, and 2010, make blackberry fool. Junie and I read through this several times (on different occasions) comparing different things between the time periods - the technology (twigs! a wire whisk! an electric mixer!) but also the clothes, the details of the house, sociological things like how in 1810 the people are slaves and what does that mean and in 2010 is the first time a dad and son are making it instead of a mom and daughter. We also made blackberry fool ourselves, a fine project with much smashing of blackberries and shrieking about the mixer noise. (It would really help to own a wire sieve, though, the colander holes were too big to strain out the blackberry seeds and trying to push it through the fine mesh of my woven plastic sieve took forever. Or maybe actual cheesecloth.) Highly recommended. (I also had a good conversation with Junie about what blackberry fool in 2110 might be like - we think maybe robots will make it. And we talked about how she'll turn 101 in 2110 and she might live to be that old and see that year, dang (and she was able to figure out that Quentin would be 98 which I think is the first time I've seen her do math across 100).)

Little Melba and Her Big Trombone, Katheryn Russell-Brown, ill. Frank Morrison. Junie was less enthralled with this but I felt like we got a fine multimedia lesson out of it reading it and then watching YouTube videos of Melba Liston playing.

Chutes and Ladders. No, wait, listen. I finally did what I've been claiming I was going to do for ages and made up a set of "powers cards" vaguely along the lines of options in RoboRally and now this game is much faster and actually fun. Everyone starts with a power, spins, has the option to use their power instead of the spin, and gets a new power if they do. Some sample powers: "go to the next odd number", "go up vertically one space", "if you're at the bottom of a chute go up it", "go to the next multiple of three/four/five" which might actually be familiarizing Junie with the word "multiple" although she still needs my help to find them. It has pretty much solved the "endless cycling at the top" problem and made me willing to actually play.