January Reading Recap

My reading year started off well!

→ THE OFFICE OF HISTORICAL CORRECTIONS by Danielle Evans is an impressively, consistently strong collection of stories. They're just so good! Each one puts well-drawn characters into nuanced conflicts, often with themselves.

Evans is particularly skilled at combining a bunch of seemingly unrelated elements so the story feels organic and lifelike, yet delivers a satisfying narrative arc. In "Happily Ever After," a woman works in the gift shop at a landlocked replica of the Titanic, she has a difficult health decision to make, and these threads and more weave together into a compelling whole. (An earlier, shorter version of the story appears online.) "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain" juxtaposes a potentially doomed wedding weekend with the disastrous circumstances in which a guest and the groom first met.

The situations in these stories are complicated. In "Boys Go To Jupiter," a college student goes viral for casual racism, and the story unfolds her tangled past. "Anything Could Disappear" presents a traveler with a series of choices that lead to an emotional journey through ethical gray areas.

The title novella has space for even more complexity in the plot and character relationships. The protagonist works at the Institute for Public History, a federal agency that combats misinformation by issuing corrections to plaques, public records, and so on. She's tasked with making a particularly knotty correction that puts her back into contact with an old frenemy and their longstanding rivalry. It's a fascinating end to an incredible collection!

→ WE RIDE UPON STICKS by Quan Barry: Danvers, Massachusetts, borders the more famous Salem, but it was part of Salem Village in 1692, when a group of teen girls discovered the power they could wield by accusing neighbors of witchcraft. The Danvers Falcons Women's Varsity Field Hockey Team have never come anywhere close to a successful season, but in the fall of 1989, their goalie turns to local lore for help. She makes a dark pledge that the rest of the team join by solemnly signing their names—to a notebook with Emilio Estevez on the cover. With the magic of Emilio fueling them, the eleven team members discover their own power. They start scoring (both on and off the field), they grow into their truest selves, and they delight in wreaking havoc on their own terms.

I loved this quirky novel and found it wicked funny and at times quite moving. It didn't hurt that I was also a Massachusetts high school student in 1989, so every cultural reference charmed me. Barry does a great job managing an ensemble of eleven main characters, plus assorted classmates and adults, and I developed deep affection for everyone in the story. In the middle, I felt some sections dragged a bit, but in retrospect, I'm not sure I'd give up any part of the book. It's a lot of fun, it has a lot of heart, and all its weirdnesses lined up well with my own.

→ RING SHOUT by P. Djèlí Clark: Maryse fights monsters that wear Ku Klux Klan robes. And they really are monsters: hideous creatures from who-knows-where that feed on racist hatred and take over the bodies of weak, despicable fools. Most people can't see the signs of the monsters lurking beneath the skin of the humans they've turned. Maryse and her friends have the sight, and they're part of a group using both magic and firepower to fight back against evil in 1922 Georgia.

This short book is packed with exciting action scenes and effectively disturbing body horror. I'm not the best audience for either of those, but I appreciated many parts of the story, including the opportunity to read about Black women wielding power in the Jim Crow South. I was intrigued by the premise and the connections made to historical events, and I would have enjoyed more worldbuilding about the origins and spread of the monsters. You can judge this book by the cover: The KKK robe and the mouths where they don't belong encapsulate the story's horrors, so use that to decide whether it's for you.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Ruth Madievsky looks at the differences in reviews of women-centric and male-centric literary fiction on Goodreads: "In our publishing climate—where women authors (especially queer women and women of color) are often assumed to be writing autobiographically, are dismissed for writing work that is 'domestic' and characters who are 'unlikable,' and are reviewed significantly less than men in major media outlets—this ratings discrepancy doesn't feel benign."

→ Melissa Baron introduces Book Riot to the genre of ergodic fiction, a new term for me: "What that really amounts to is whether or not the text follows the conventional format of paragraphs, dialogue tags, standard margins, and all the things that make reading it easy."