It’s safe to say that Apricot Brandy by Lynn Cesar is one of the more unusual urban fantasy novels I’ve ever read, and I’m a little sorry I missed it when it first came out. It’s got its flaws, but I give it quite a bit of credit for what it tried to do. Being an unusual urban fantasy novel these days is very hard to pull off.

First of all, we’ve got the title, which is pretty much the thing that drew me to the novel. The drink for which the title’s named has good plot relevance, and it stands out very nicely against the glut of urban fantasy titles that involve “night” or “blood” or “darkness” or whatever. And thank you, Cover Art, for actually showing us a heroine’s face rather than making her a headless torso! Both of these got my interested enough to look at the actual blurb about a small town being overrun by a rising Mayan god.

Huge, huge points as well for the heroine being a lesbian. Gay men are getting more inroads in fantasy novels to be sure, but lesbian heroines are still pretty thin on the ground and it’s nice to see one have the lead role in an urban fantasy for once. On the other hand, I was really disappointed that her beloved–and I’ll say this only because this happens fairly early on in the story–is killed off, after her one on camera scene shows her acting pretty heavily out of character due to supernatural influence. I was similarly disappointed that the only other person in the cast who has sexual interest in their own gender is one of the bad guys, because this could leave a less discerning reader with the impression that queer people are screwed up.

And, was it really necessary to make the lesbian heroine a victim of sexual child abuse? You could make an argument that it’s plot-relevant, but I wouldn’t necessarily buy it; there’s a lot in the plot about how Karen’s beloved father turns into a monster and how this eventually makes Karen an alcholic in her adulthood. But I’m thinking you could have pulled this off without involving rape.

Similarly, I was disappointed at how the heroine’s interactions with the main male character came perilously close to being romantic. They didn’t actually cross that line; at no point does our heroine show any actual sexual interest to the guy. But he’s definitely got sexual interest in her, and there are moments between them that are definitely intimate even if they’re not romantic. The circumstances that force this closeness on them are pretty brutal, and it’s reasonable for them to form a bond. Yet, again, I could see a less discerning reader leaping to the conclusion that our heroine is romantically interested in the guy.

This sort of unfocused treatment of the main characters has similar echoes out in the plot at large. There’s a lot of POV jumping, and in fact, the heroine actually vanishes out of the action for a big section of the last third of the novel. I must give Cesar credit for her heroine not actually being the main driving force behind fighting the Big Bad of the story, but on the other hand, it was quite disconcerting to have her vanish entirely for a big swath of the narrative. Likewise, Cesar’s prose has moments where it’s surprisingly lyrical and others where it swings right into purple floridity.

All in all though a decent read, even if it never did quite come together fully for me, and even despite its disappointments. There are bits in particular where Cesar describes the townsfolk being subsumed by the plant god that are genuinely creepy and worth reading. Three stars.

My gut reaction to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, the first Samuel R. Delaney I’ve ever read, was pretty much this: it feels like something I might have read for a college course on influential SF authors, rather than something I’d ordinarily have read for fun. I have a very definite respect for the language, but there are a lot of aspects of the plot that just didn’t work for me.

The core of this story is essentially a romance between Rat Korga, a man who’d submitted to voluntary slavery on his homeworld, and Marq Dyeth, an interstellar diplomat. Korga is the only survivor of a cataclysm that has destroyed his world, and he’s been brought to Marq under mysterious circumstances; Marq’s not really told much more than “this man has been found to be your ideal erotic object, so we thought you might find him interesting, show him around your planet, will you?”

And that’s part of my first problem with the book. A big part of me was put off by the whole concept of these men coming together only because a third party had calculated that they are each other’s “ideal erotic objects”. That’s very cold and very clinical and not at all romantic. On the other hand, there are certain scenes where Marq waxes eloquent on why exactly he finds Korga so very, very attractive–and those are some of the passages that work the very best for me. (On a related note, there’s a huge amount of casual sex all throughout this book, way more than I was expecting; from what I’ve read about Delaney, though, I think that may be typical for his work?)

Secondly, there’s frustratingly little plot here, truth be told. The initial stretch with Korga, setting up his background, was a lot more interesting to me just because of the relative sparsity of Korga’s point of view; by comparison, Marq, who has a propensity to infodump huge reams of text at the reader, was a hard slog to read through. And he’s got the main point of view for the majority of the book. He spends the vast majority of his time hanging out at parties and chatting with other people, and more than once I kept groaning and waiting to see when the plot would kick back in. I can’t say anything about the ending due to spoilers, but I will say that ultimately, I was unsatisfied with it.

On the other hand, all of this is balanced out for me by the sheer mastery of Delaney’s language, infodumps aside. I don’t go up to five stars here because he pulls a couple of language tricks in places that I thought were kind of a cheat. But I found his whole treatment of gender-based language fascinating. This is a future where humanity in general refers to itself collectively as “women” regardless of physical gender, and in which female pronouns are used as well. At first I found this horribly distracting, but then I thought, “well, WHY CAN’T ‘women’ be used as a generic identifier for humans?” Once I had that realization, it was suddenly much easier to accept.

More confusing though were the parts where Delaney suddenly switches back to male pronouns in certain scenes. Only after reading about the book after I’d finished did I realize that apparently this was a marker for when the point of view character, Marq, was finding a male sexually attractive; now that I know that was going on, I appreciate the distinction. I liked as well how he used subscripts on work-related nouns like job, profession, and such, to give a distinction between a person’s primary employment and other jobs they might take on the side.

Overall I’m definitely not sorry I read it, and I appreciated how it made me think about what I’d read in ways a lot of SF/F hasn’t made me do lately. I’m sticking by my initial gut reaction, though, and am not sure I’d ever want to read Delaney for general fun as opposed to “broadening my SF horizons”. Still, though, four stars.