User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I read this short story because it’s Hugo-nominated. And my verdict it - I did not care for it. I’m not quite sure how it got the Hugo nod, really. Which is too bad, as the only other work by Rivers Solomon that I read, The Deep, was quite decent.
A young slave girl Sully kills the slaveowner family that owns her. And then she proceeds to birth out revenant ghosts - one for each of the dead people, starting with a teenage girl and then adding others to this brood. Then the idea becomes to kill more to bring more of the revenants back. Then there’s a sort of a homemade do-it-yourself hysterectomy situation. Yeah.
I’ve read weirder plots, but the strangeness is not the only thing that makes this story not work well.
You see, it’s just not well-written, and that’s a failure you can’t recover from. It’s does not flow well and feels rough, like a first draft or very much a beginner work. The language is very uneven, wooden and with many words and phrases that felt incongruous for the time period described, destroying any feeling of immersion into the story. The pacing and the story structure - none of that felt finished or polished at all. Ideas are introduced, executed, poorly developed and the result is a strange partially baked mess with a jarring ending that does not fit in this story’s framework.
It needed another draft or perhaps an editor to avoid the underwhelming result. But for now I have no idea how it made it all the way to Hugo finalists.
1 star only since I two-starred (in retrospect) much better works already. Easily my least favorite of the Hugos bunch.
Very unsatisfying.
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Read it free here on Tor.com: https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...
Or better - just skip this one and read The Deep by the same author instead for a much better experience.
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My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Rating: really liked it
Another Hugo award-nominated short story, free online here at Tor.com. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
In the American Civil War era, as soon as she hears that the man of the house has died in the war, Sully, a 15-year-old slave, slits the throats of the five women who own her and have mistreated her. That’s not really so surprising, but what happens to Sully next is.
The murder of a family by a girl so tender and young ripped a devilishly wide tunnel between the fields of existence, for it was not the way of things, and the etherworld thrived on the impermissible.
Sully’s anger cuts a path between these two planes of existence, and the spirit of a teenage girl who died long ago rides that path into Sully’s womb and is immediately born in flesh (conveniently and temporarily shrinking down to baby-size for the birthing process). The new girl, Ziza, and Sully get along well, but there are four more lives Sully took that still require balancing, additional revenants who will need more food than their farm can produce, and a nearby town full of people who are bound to come checking on the farm sooner or later.
Sully’s seething anger toward her former owners is understandable. It’s not the initial murders that take me aback here, but the ongoing bloodthirstiness of the tale, which makes for an odd combination with the romance and the hopefulness of the ending. “Blood is Another Word for Hunger” offers some disturbing metaphors for our own day and time. It’s a disquieting tale: a cry of anger and wanting retribution and more from a world that’s never felt fair.
Rating: really liked it
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FOURTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2019 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
if you scroll to the end of the reviews linked here, you will find links to all the previous years’ stories, which means NINETY-THREE FREEBIES FOR YOU!
2016: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
2017: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
2018: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
reviews of these will vary in length/quality depending on my available time/brain power.
so, let’s begin
DECEMBER 26
In a wooden house on a modest farmstead by a dense wood near a roving river to the west of town, miles from the wide road and far away from the peculiar madness that is men at war, lived the Missus, the Missus’s grown daughters Adelaide and Catherine, the Missus’s sister Bitsy, the Missus’s poorly mother Anna, and the Missus’s fifteen-year-old slave girl Sully, who had a heart made of teeth—for as soon as she heard word that Albert, the Missus’s husband, had been slain in battle, she took up arms against the family who’d raised her, slipping a tincture of valerian root and skullcap into their cups of warmed milk before slitting their throats in the night.
the first part of this story is huge and wonderful and i loved it like crazy. it began with a dark and retributive violence that reminded me of The Book of Night Women or The Devil in America, and overall i loved the writing, but i lost some of my enthusiasm around the halfway mark, when it became more reconstruction than vengeance and the bloody bits were glossed and offstage. i guess that makes me a bad person, but oh well.
anyway, that's all i have for this one, because i am bitter at goodreads removing one of my reviews for this challenge by deleting the book altogether and i don't feel like risking another deletion so i guess no more short story advent calendar for me next year. this is not the first time it has happened, but it's the first time it has happened on the calendar-in-progress, which means my reading challenge has been affected and i'm already so far behind it's just one more thing to mope about.
so.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...
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DECEMBER 14 GOODREADS ERASED THIS STORY AND MY REVIEW FROM THE SITE, SO IF YOU REALLY WANT TO READ IT, IT IS HERE. THANKS.
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come to my blog!
Rating: really liked it
Lately I'm having trouble to understand some award nominations. Is it just me? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
For me this was somewhat underwhelming.
A fifteen-year-old slave girl kills the women that raised, but also owned her. It's a very bloody beginning. But not as rewarding as it could be, as we never really get to know the five women, and barely learn anything about how life was like for Sully growing up.
But soon another element enters the fray, as Sully gives birth to a revenant. Several in fact. As for every person she kills she gives birth to one person who had died already. And the killing and birthing continues throughout the story. However, both mostly happens in the off.
Sully and the revenants spend their days together on the farmstead of her former (and now dead) slavers. But it seems like Sully only really has a relationship with one of the revenants. A girl her age who is the polar opposite of Sully. We don't learn much about anyone else. Though I suppose the other revenants are pretty busy bringing Sully more people she can kill. Which, again, happens in the off. But we don't know much, if anything about those people anyway.
The author really made some odd choices here. I would even go so far and say this is a poorly laid out story. The prose is fine, sure. But it feels like there are just some ideas thrown into the mix and none of them are elaborated on in a satisfying way.
I don't see what makes this worthy of an award nomination. But here you go, Hugo 2020 finalist for Best Short Story.
2.5 stars, rounded up, just. Because of some bad-ass moments in the beginning and also because of the hopeful ending.
This story can be read for free here: https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...
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2020 Hugo Award Finalists
Best Novel• The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
• The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
•
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine• Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
Best Novella• Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang ( Exhalation)
• The Deep by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes
• The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark
• In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire
•
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone• To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
Best Novelette• The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2019)
• Away With the Wolves by Sarah Gailey ( Uncanny Magazine Issue 30: Disabled People Destroy Fanatsy! Special Issue)
• The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye by Sarah Pinsker ( Uncanny Magazine Issue 29: July/August 2019)
•
Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin• For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll
• Omphalos by Ted Chiang
Best Short Story• And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons 9 September 2019)
•
As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang• Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon
• A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 26, January-February 2019)
• Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #270)
• Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, Issue 80)
Best Series•
The Expanse by James S. A. Corey• InCryptid by Seanan McGuire
• Luna by Ian McDonald
• Planetfall series by Emma Newman
• Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden
• The Wormwood Trilogy by Tade Thompson
Best Related Work• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
• Joanna Russ by Gwyneth Jones
• The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara
• The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn
•
2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech by Jeannette Ng• Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, produced and directed by Arwen Curry
Best Graphic Story or Comic• Die, Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, letters by Clayton Cowles
•
LaGuardia, written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford, colours by James Devlin• Monstress, Volume 4: The Chosen, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
• Mooncakes by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker, letters by Joamette Gil
• Paper Girls, Volume 6, written by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Cliff Chiang, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Jared K. Fletcher
• The Wicked + The Divine, Volume 9: "Okay" by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles
Rating: really liked it
Interesting...This is the second work that I have read by Rivers Solomon and I found it to be interesting. There are trigger warnings for gore, traumatic childbirth, death, violence, suicide. This short story focuses on the experiences of Sully a young girl who makes the decision to kill her slave owners thereby opening the doors to another world where she can resurrect the dead. I like that the narrative focused on necromancy. I think I got lost in the middle of the book when it began to focus more on rebuilding and reconstruction and that mystical element was lost a little bit. There was great conversation around the fact that sometimes revenge doesn't give us the feeling of fulfillment that we're looking for. And I think that this happens because when people do things that are bad they still leave their mark. Basically this means that when someone harms us the damage is already done whether we are able to harm them in return or not. I think that the main character struggled greatly with this when she expected to feel better after killing her Slave masters. But instead of feeling better she ends up more engulfed in her unhappiness. I would be interested in seeing where the story could go if Rivers Solomon was able to turn the short story into a full length novel. Overall I thought this was a good short story but The Deep is definitely still my favorite.
Rating: really liked it
Death came to stay with the girl, a secret smile on her lips.
"Your life is a living death as is, I feel quite at home here.
You have given me such a comfy place in your heart.
All the world hates your people - I can see why you hunger for slaughter."And then Death sat back, to see what would be wrought.
And so the girl took a blade, and plunged it into her body.
The girl would give birth to more deaths, and so unleash them upon the world.
A new country will be born!
read all about this new country, for free:
https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...
Rating: really liked it
Well that... was not what I expected, damn. There sure is blood.
Rating: really liked it
“A young girl, a slave in the South, is presented with a moment where she can grasp for freedom, for change, for life. She grabs it with both hands, fiercely and intensely, and the spirit world is shaken.“Odd. Very wordy, very bloody, with a faint touch of romance and hope at the end. The tale was unsettling and had no rewarding features for me.
Can be read for free here:
https://www.tor.com/2019/07/24/blood-...
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2020 Hugo Award Finalist
Best Short Story
* “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing”, by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019) ★★★☆☆
* “As the Last I May Know”, by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019), ★★★★½
* “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger”, by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019), ★★☆☆☆
* “A Catalog of Storms”, by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019), ★★☆☆☆
* “Do Not Look Back, My Lion”, by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
* “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island”, by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)
Rating: really liked it
A tor original novella about a young woman revolting against the five people who owned her in the Deep South and the balancing of life thereafter.
This short story relies heavily on magical realism and it did send my head spinning a little, but I enjoyed the overall storyline.
Rating: really liked it
This was dark and violent and cruel and yet... also lovely and sort of beautiful, while being both melancholic but hopeful. So... A real mess of emotions that somehow makes me feel like the world might be a bit more okay.
Rating: really liked it
It’s probably more of a 3.5 but I’m rounding up.
Another short story I read because it’s nominated for the Hugo.
This is pretty out of my comfort zone coz it’s so bloody and gory, with quite a bit of violence. I loved the vengeance part of the story because there’s just something satisfying about a slave girl extracting it from her masters. But what happens later with the balance between life and death, and the main character’s hunger for a place where she and her loved ones can feel safe was both disturbing as well as hopeful; and I’m amazed at the author’s ability to evoke so many contrasting emotions in me.
I’m not sure this will be for everyone, so I don’t want to outright recommend it. But if you’ve read the author’s other Hugo nominated novella The Deep and enjoyed it, you should give this a try as well. It just might surprise you.
Rating: really liked it
Visceral, full of pain, but with a small measure of hope at the end. Rivers Solomon’s continues to impress me.
Rating: really liked it
This is one of my Must Read stories for July 2019: https://1000yearplan.com/2019/08/01/t...
Rating: really liked it
This was dark, unique, beautiful, strange, and poignant.
I loved it
Rating: really liked it
This story starts out as it means to continue, violent and bleak, with the main character's internal landscape perhaps scarred beyond saving. But what is saving?
At first, the spare, emotionally
broken austere reality is tempered with poetic language, and as the story progresses the language gets more and more beautiful, achingly so, until the portions I thought I would absolutely
have to quote in a review to convey said beauty turned out to be almost all of the last portion of the story. So I won't, I'll leave them here for you to read. CW: This is a very violent story, and the scoured-out soul of the MC is arguably even harder to read, but I thought it was absolutely worth it by the end. This is my first Rivers Solomon encounter, and I'm stunned and gratified.
