1 - North Wind, by Gwyneth Jones

First book of the new year. I’m going to post them all, just so I can keep track of how much I’m reading and what’s actually getting read.

This is the second book in the Aleutian trilogy, and I read it because I read Spirit: the Princess of Lengthy Subtitle in PDF over the christmas break. Spirit has great worldbuilding and a wonderful sense of place, at least until you get back to Speranza and are in full enigmatic superwoman Count of Monte Christo mode. Losing Bibi as a central character is a near-fatal blow to the novel.

North Wind is a much earlier book. Interestingly many of its failures in the other direction, as she somehow makes the weird, fated, fizzle-ending plot work, mostly on the strength of the characters, but you never get a good sense of where you are, or what is happening there. A very personal novel for its setting, which is in the middle of a world-wide low-intensity conflict.