Oct. 2nd, 2017

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Sangu Mandanna's debut YA novel The Lost Girl tells the story of a young woman who is an echo, a being deliberately created and trained to replace another person if they die. Her 'other' - the person she is living only to take the place of - is a girl called Amarra, whose parents commissioned an echo because they could not bear the thought if a life without their daughter. Genetically identical to her other, she receives daily information about events in Amarra's life, which she must memorise. She can read only the books Amarra reads, study only what Amarra studies, learn only the hobbies and skills Amarra learns.

But she is powerfully aware of herself as a separate individual - she has her own interests (one of which, art, she secretly pursues when her guardians and trainers are not around) and she has given herself a name of her own - Eva.

She lives on borrowed time - if her other's parents change their minds about having an echo of their daughter, then she will simply be terminated. If she is found breaking the regulations set for echoes by the Loom - the secretive organisation which creates echoes - she will be terminated. And there are 'hunters' - vigilantes who hate the idea of the echoes - who will kill her if they find out what she is.

Eva's life is quiet - except when she takes risks and breaks the rules, fortunate in having guardians who don't report her. Until the day Amarra dies, and she must travel halfway around the world, from England, where she was created and trained, to Bangalore, where Amarra's parents wait for their daughter brought back to life. But can she become Amarra? And if she cannot - can she ever find a way to be herself?

Reading the set-up for the novel's action, I kept thinking of the clones in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go - another novel about artificially created people who are defined solely by what their existence means to others, who are not granted the status of humanity on their own. And who nonetheless are real people, despite being created to serve.

The course of Eva's struggle to escape what she was made to be, to have her own life, is full of danger, betrayal and loss, and the author leaves us with an ambiguous ending. But whatever one imagines happens after the last page is turned - and none of the possibilities are without pain and sacrifice - Eva has at least won the opportunity to make her own decisions.

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Ellen Klages' novella, Passing Strange, is a rich science fantasy that explores many transitions - passings - across diverse borders. The narrative begins with an account of the final days of Helen Young, an American woman of Japanese heritage who has spent much of her life passing in one way or another. When we met her, she is very old, dying of some unspecified condition. One of her last acts before her self-administered final passing is to sell an original drawing - the last drawing - of the highly collectible pulp artist known as Haskel.

The narrative then moves back in time to the early days of the second world war, to San Francisco's hidden gay world. Here again Helen is passing, in multiple ways. As a straight woman - she is married, to a gay Asian man - and as Chinese - her married name in ambiguous and as she herself notes, most white people can't tell Asians if different nationalities apart. She is also a lawyer, but 'passes' as an exotic dancer to make ends meet. And she models Asian characters, male and female, for Haskell's covers.

Haskell is, like Helen, a lesbian, and passing professionally as a man to sell their art. As the story progresses, she meets and falls in love with Emily, a young butch and drag king performer who sings at the local lesbian bar.

Klages writes with great detail and empathy about the lives of lesbians in pre-war San Francisco, the different experiences of those, usually femmes like Helen and Haskell, who can pass, and the butches and dykes who cannot pass and thus draw the most reaction from the straight world of police and gawking voyeuristic tourists. The fears of discovery and subsequent loss, the courage to go on in spite of all this.

There's another dimension of passing in the story, besides that of the boundaries of gender. There are also passages across the borders of science and magic, reality and illusion. We meet Franny, a witch of sorts, with the gift of translocation, of passing magically between geographically separated points by folding the maps she creates, and her partner Babs, a mathematics professor who is trying to develop a branch of topological math that can describe what Franny does. And Polly, a young relative of Franny's from England whose passion is science, which she uses to help develop acts for her magician-father. And eventually, we learn the story of Haskell's grandmother, who used magic to pass through danger by turning life into art, and then back into life.

The story of Emily and Haskell's romance is both sweet, and fraught with danger because of their transgressive sexuality, and ultimately they must make use of Haskell's family magic to escape when there is no other way, a strange and magical passage into another life.

Klages fills her narrative with borders, boundaries, crossings, passages and transformations, from the great passings of life and death to the small changes in colour and appearance brought about by different lighting. What remains the same, despite transformations, is loyalty, friendship, and love.

If there is any weakness to this story, it's that there's not enough. The principal characters are drawn with such clarity and depth that one wants to know so much more about all of them, their lives after this moment in time. I had an overwhelming feeling that each woman mentioned has a marvellous story waiting to be told, about how they came to be in this place and time, and where they went from there. And I want those stories.

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Kathy Reich's novella First Bones is the story of Temperance Brennan's first case as a forensic anthropologist, told within the framing story of her vigil at the deathbed of a colleague she's known and worked with for her entire career.

It's a tight, fast-paced story. The narrative of the central section effectively captures her initial reluctance to get involved in something she has no direct training for, and her increasing interest in the process of solving the mysteries brought about by violent deaths. And the framing narrative is a strong and moving account of response to the sudden, random death of a close friend.

There's nothing here of the unnecessary 'protagonist goes senselessly into personal danger' trope or the massive infodumping habit that tends to detract from the pure investigative process and (in my opinion) weaken her later novels. One of her better works.

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