Travel reading

[ellarien]

Perfect Circle, Sean Stewart

I wouldn't call this fantasy, exactly; it's a ghost story, but not really horror. The protagonist is a loser who sees dead people, with an extended family where prison and violent death -- by murder and industrial accident -- are very much part of life. The gritty, smoggy, humid atmosphere of Houston is vividly evoked. This was an odd thing to read while mildly sleep-deprived in transit from Tucson to Phoenix on a 110-degree day. The musical references -- the title is from a CD -- unfortunately were completely lost on me.

Storyteller, Amy Thomson

Sweet and moving soft SF set on a mainly-water planet where the intelligent, telepathic harsels have formed a symbiotic relationship with the human colonists, acting as sailing vessels for their telepathically-bonded captains. An old itinerant storyteller, who is also a harsel captain, befriends an orphan boy, and as their relationship grows he learns that she is more than she seems. I enjoyed this, but I have a couple of gripes. The main one is that the people just seem too nice; I don't entirely buy the idea that one woman could have so much influence for good, even on a world with a population of a mere two million. The other problem is that the thread about the young protagonist's sexuality feels rather tacked-on, with little to do with the rest of the story.