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I finished reading Ruthanna Emrys's Deep Roots yesterday. It's very good, and very relevant to current events.
The author is working with Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, but with a very different viewpoint than Lovecraft's: the odd-seeming inhabitants of Innsmouth are people, with families and culture, not extra-dimensional monsters. Deep Roots is a sequel to Winter Tide, which I recommend reading first, because both character relationships and plot threads are continued from there.
If you're trying not to think too much about politics and the news, you might want to skip this: Aphra Marsh, the narrator, talks about the years she spent imprisoned in the concentration camps where the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. The book is set a few years after that; some of the characters are worried that Cold War paranoia will cause the government to react dangerously, to them as individuals as well as to the survival of humanity.
(I feel like I'm not doing a good job of saying why I liked the book, but I want to post something to say "hey, read this, I'd be recommending it even if Ruthanna wasn't a friend of mine.")
I'm also partway through Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead, but those are both a shape of good that made me not want to read them in parallel. I think I'm going to cleanse my palate by rereading one of Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest books next.
The author is working with Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, but with a very different viewpoint than Lovecraft's: the odd-seeming inhabitants of Innsmouth are people, with families and culture, not extra-dimensional monsters. Deep Roots is a sequel to Winter Tide, which I recommend reading first, because both character relationships and plot threads are continued from there.
If you're trying not to think too much about politics and the news, you might want to skip this: Aphra Marsh, the narrator, talks about the years she spent imprisoned in the concentration camps where the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. The book is set a few years after that; some of the characters are worried that Cold War paranoia will cause the government to react dangerously, to them as individuals as well as to the survival of humanity.
(I feel like I'm not doing a good job of saying why I liked the book, but I want to post something to say "hey, read this, I'd be recommending it even if Ruthanna wasn't a friend of mine.")
I'm also partway through Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead, but those are both a shape of good that made me not want to read them in parallel. I think I'm going to cleanse my palate by rereading one of Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest books next.
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