June Reading Recap

Last month, along with my usual novel reading, I read two powerful nonfiction books. Both are about not looking away from the death and destruction in Gaza inflicted by Israel during the present war and in the past. Both hope for a future that denounces these acts on the way to peace.

→ ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS, writes Omar El Akkad, and "this" refers to the devastation of Gaza. He opens by describing an injured child found in the rubble of her home, and throughout the book, he returns to stories of Palestinian children bombed, shot, killed, orphaned by the Israeli barrage. El Akkad is challenging the reader not to look away from these horrors, not to place the victims in a category that excuses the slaughter, not to soften the language used in discussing the genocide. I struggled with these challenges, and my starting point wasn't as far removed as many who I hope this book will reach, though their challenge will be even greater.

The book is not all dead children, although those stories could easily fill many volumes. El Akkad weaves accounts from the current war with observations from his own life as a Middle Eastern, Muslim immigrant in Canada and the U.S. and a journalist in other war zones. He uses all these episodes to frame sections that lay out his well-conceived ideas in powerful writing: "Every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one's eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come."

→ In BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A RECKONING, Peter Beinart approaches the current moment, and the history of Palestine and Israel, from a Jewish perspective. He also brings his perspective of a childhood spent partially in apartheid-era South Africa to consider how one people justifies oppressing another and how a country can move past that oppression.

I appreciated the amount of historical and cultural context this book includes, giving me a greater understanding of the histories of Palestine, Israel, and Zionist movements over the centuries. Beinart also draws from Torah and Talmud passages that help make his case for opening eyes and hearts to Palestinian suffering.

Beinart's arguments seemed persuasive and well-developed to me (plus well-cited: there are extensive endnotes), but I didn't need convincing. I hope the book will provide some clarity to readers grappling with complicated feelings about Israel, and I'd love to also see it read by those who only feel a single way.

→ DOWN IN THE SEA OF ANGELS by Khan Wong: In 2106 San Francisco, Maida starts her new job with the Golden Gate Cultural Recovery Project. The organization finds and documents artifacts from before the Collapse that upended society and halved the population. Maida is a psion, one of the minority with psychic abilities, and her power lets her sense the history of objects she touches. A jade teacup produces stronger visions than she's ever experienced, revealing the lives of two San Franciscans from the past. In 2006, Nathan is a designer who feels unfulfilled by his work in the tech industry but loves the community and creativity he finds at Burning Man. And in 1906, Li Nuan is an indentured servant in Chinatown desperate to escape her brutal life in a brothel. The teacup brings them visions as well, in a connection that provides hope. But Maida's power also shows her that an anti-psion movement is growing, stoking fear and threatening to round up people with abilities.

I enjoyed this ambitious novel. Each of the three storylines is well-developed, with a strong set of characters and a clear arc. Wong portrays every version of San Francisco with care, and I was delighted by the historical details, the familiar-to-me recent past, and the imagined future shaped by drastic climate change. The way the three stories fit together is interesting—there are no huge surprises, and yet the overall story adds up to something a bit different than I expected. I didn't love everything about this (a recurring problem of shifting verb tenses was a big irritation), but there's a lot that will stay with me.

→ THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY by Mary Robinette Kowal: After gaining fame as the Lady Astronaut and participating in humanity's first voyage to Mars, Elma is now back on Mars with the second expedition. This time, the plan is to establish a permanent habitat, and Elma is thrilled to have her engineer husband as another member of the crew. At first, the habitat setup goes as planned, though Elma keeps encountering signs that there were problems on the previous mission she never learned about. But when one of the supply crates is found destroyed, it raises questions about the viability of the current mission, as well as more questions about what happened on the last one.

I was glad to return to the Lady Astronaut world and characters, but this fourth book felt slower to get going than the rest of the action-packed series. Since harrowing events didn't arrive at the usual fast pace, I had more time to grow frustrated by details and subplots that interested me less. But whenever the big problems did appear, they were as exciting as ever.

→ CURSED BREAD by Sophie Mackintosh: Elodie lives a small life in a small town, working every day at the bakery with her husband, who is driven by the desire to bake a perfect loaf but has no desire for Elodie. But when glamorous Violet and her ambassador husband move to town, Elodie's life is transformed. At first Elodie observes the couple from afar, catching glimpses of their passionate but disturbing relationship. Then Violet seeks out friendship, granting the attention that Elodie is starved for. Elodie's obsession with Violet, and by extension her husband, continues into a later narrative thread, when Elodie is writing letters to Violet in the aftermath of a strange tragedy that befell the town.

All I knew going into this book was that the marketing connects it to a real historical mystery involving tainted bread. That sets up the wrong expectation, because most of the story isn't concerned with that event, and while it does provide an explanation of the mystery, it raises far more unanswered questions. The novel primarily focuses on exploring obsession, creating unsettling vibes (sometimes both sexy and unsettling), and presenting a narrator who won't or can't commit to what really happened. I found it interesting to read, but not enough of the elements and questions resolved in a satisfying way.

May Reading Recap

Last month's books were completely different from each other, but all thought-provoking:

→ STAG DANCE by Torrey Peters is a collection of four stories, all nuanced, intense, and focused on characters in situations that require complicated thinking about gender (by both character and reader). All are first-person narratives, with fully developed settings and scenarios that made me feel completely immersed—an often uncomfortable experience, since none of these are particularly happy stories.

When I reached the end of the first story, the gender apocalyptic "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones", I forgot I was reading a collection and was sorry to have to move on. I could easily imagine a novel-length expansion of that story. "The Chaser" and "The Masker", both compelling stories based in the familiar world, left me satisfied by their self-contained plots.

About half of the book is the title story, billed as a novel itself, and I was glad to get so many pages to grow familiar with the logging camp setting, its denizens, and their distinctive jargon. Peters writes with such a distinctive and confident voice that every sentence is a marvel of language: "To timber trespass in the full of winter was to countenance ice slicks, frozen fingers, and sunlight hours so short the workday extended from dark to dark. The grade of the slopes made cutting sidewinders a common occasion, and if you weren't careful in how you stacked the cold deck, those massive logs would tumble like straw, snapping knees as they went." As a respite from this cold and challenging work, the boss of the operation (the "job shark") throws a stag dance, meaning that any logger who wishes may play the role of a lady by wearing a strategically placed triangle of fabric. The story's narrator wants this very much, which sets in motion a complex inner journey. I recommend this whole collection (as well as Peters' previous novel, DETRANSITION, BABY).

→ COLORED TELEVISION by Danzy Senna: When Jane's sabbatical lines up with the chance for her family to spend a year housesitting at the extravagant home of her rich and far more successful friend, she finally has the space and time to finish her second novel. For almost a decade, while teaching, raising two children, and moving between cramped apartments, Jane has been working on an increasingly epic book. She started out writing the story of a Black actress passing as white, then incorporated more characters and historical threads about mulattos in America to round out what her husband calls her "mulatto War and Peace." But at last she finishes the novel and sends it to her agent, dreaming of fame and prizes and a fancy house of her own. The response isn't what she expected, and soon Jane finds herself making some ethically dubious decisions and considering writing for television, a field she's always scorned.

Jane's character drew me into the story right away, and I was caught up in the unfolding drama of her situation. I loved the detailed and slightly satirical look inside both the literary and television industries. The writing is always sharply insightful about race, class, and human foibles. I frequently laughed at great lines, and I frequently cringed at Jane's choices. This is my first time picking up one of Senna's novels, but it won't be the last.

→ LUMINOUS by Silvia Park follows two main story threads, and how they connect is a mystery at first. (A mystery that's spoiled by other book descriptions, so beware.) In a reunified Korea, Ruijie is a human girl who uses robotic braces to walk, and she loves roaming the salvage yard after school in search of discarded robots to tinker with. She meets Yoyo, a robot boy who's exceptionally lifelike and advanced, yet has no owner and lives in the salvage yard, hiding from scrappers. Ruijie befriends him, introduces him to some classmates, and hopes to convince her parents to take him in. Elsewhere in Seoul, Jun works as a detective for Robot Crimes, and his latest case involves a missing robot girl who the owner considers her daughter. Jun is human, but following an IED strike during the Unification War, his reconstructed body is 80% bionic. It's also the male body he always wanted. Jun's investigation puts him back in touch with the sister he's been avoiding, a roboticist like their father, and the two of them start to grapple with difficult memories from childhood.

As you can tell, there's a lot going on in this novel. The characters are all well-drawn, and the portrayals delve into thoughtful explorations of disability, gender, and trauma. Park presents a complex vision of a society where robots are ubiquitous but there's no agreement on how much to treat them as people. The worldbuilding is also strong in depicting a Korea brought back together by another devastating war. I liked many parts of the story, but the pieces didn't all come together as well as I was hoping. This is Park's debut, and I'll definitely watch for more of their work.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel contemplates The Age of Genre Bending, Blending, and Juxtaposing: "Regardless, before 2006 it was rare to see writers engaged with science fiction, fantasy, or horror concepts competing for major literary awards. Since then, it has been rare to not have writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Karen Russell, or Emily St. John Mandel in the mix. We almost expect our big literary authors to embrace genre elements for some books."

→ Charlie Jane Anders looks at How Cloud Atlas Is Shaping a Generation of Authors: "Lately, I feel as though I'm constantly seeing books that are described as 'Cloud Atlas meets ———————.' And I'm also coming across a steady flow of books that use that time-spanning structure, though not always with six whole storylines. I also feel like Cloud Atlas has become a shorthand for 'genre-hopping novel with literary aspirations.' As I've said before, this is how genres happen: a book comes along that everybody loves so much, they want more of the same."

April Reading Recap

Another month has passed, and I've read another big batch of books!

→ BACK AFTER THIS by Linda Holmes: Cecily is an experienced audio producer who's ready for a turn hosting her own podcast. She's pitched plenty of great ideas to her boss, but when he finally offers her a show, it's not an idea she ever would have chosen. The concept is that a dating coach will demonstrate her guaranteed methods by setting Cecily up on 20 blind dates. Cecily hates the whole plan, but the associated ad deals might keep the company safe from the layoffs always looming over the volatile audio industry, so she agrees. Just as the project gets underway, Cecily has a meet-cute with Will that involves chasing after a very good, very large dog. She can't think about serendipitous encounters while she's committed to following the dating coach's program, but somehow she just keeps running into Will everywhere she goes.

This book was so much fun! I was constantly chuckling over great lines, and I loved all the insider details about podcast recording, audio editing, and ad sales. I appreciated the strong pacing and the balance between different plotlines. The characters are wonderful, and it was easy to understand what Cecily and Will like about each other immediately, and as they get better acquainted. I recommend this for fans of romantic stories, especially those who are also fans of podcasting.

→ TILT by Emma Pattee: Annie is 37 weeks pregnant and shopping at the Portland, Oregon, IKEA for a crib she should have purchased months ago and can't really afford. Then the earthquake hits, the rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone expected to devastate the Pacific Northwest. Inside the IKEA, after the long minutes of shaking, Annie is briefly trapped, but she makes it out of the store. She's lost her phone and car keys, so all she can think to do is walk across the city in search of her husband. In the hours that follow, Annie's walk takes her through ruin and tragedy, while flashback chapters reflect on her marriage and the trajectory of her life.

This intense, introspective novel is an absorbing read. I enjoyed the combination of detailed disaster survival with a close look at a difficult but loving marriage. The story always feels painfully real, whether about the earthquake's impact or the strain that financial precarity puts on a relationship. Annie is a complicated character who doesn't make perfect choices but instead behaves in flawed and not always justifiable ways, just like a real person. I'll be excited to see where Pattee's fiction career goes next.

→ OPTIONAL PRACTICAL TRAINING by Shubha Sunder: Pavitra, a citizen of India, has just graduated from a Pennsylvania university and moved to Boston to teach math and physics at a private high school. She's in OPT status, allowed one year for optional practical training, and if the teaching job works out, she'll be sponsored for a work visa. Everything about her life feels uncertain: whether the school will consider her a successful teacher, if she even wants to teach, how much to put down roots, and what it means to be marked as an other in America. Over the course of the OPT year, Pavitra's encounters with colleagues and friends raise and explore these questions.

I enjoyed reading this novel at a slow pace, a chapter or scene at a time, because the sections are mostly separate vignettes. Each episode focuses on an interaction with another character, and while some people recur, there isn't a strong continuing throughline or chronology other than the background of Pavitra's teaching and housing issues. Often the conversations are more descriptive than realistic, with the goal not to convey how people actually speak but to evoke scenes and ideas. This isn't my favorite style of fiction, but Sunder does it very well.

→ ABSOLUTION by Jeff VanderMeer: Long before the Forgotten Coast was engulfed and the Southern Reach was established to explore the mysteries of Area X, the region was already under investigation by Central. A team of biologists encounters strange creatures and unsettling events, and their mission goes badly, as so many will later. Some years after, an agent at Central known as Old Jim studies the records of their mission and prepares for his own time on the Forgotten Coast.

VanderMeer recently published this fourth book in the Southern Reach series, a decade after the original trilogy. The novel is largely a prequel that continues to expand on the story, which means along with providing some bonus insights, it opens up many new questions. I found it to be a good but not essential addition to the series. The book has several parts, and I enjoyed some more than others. I particularly liked the character of Old Jim and the relationships that evolve between him and several other characters.

→ ZERO STARS, DO NOT RECOMMEND by M.J. Wassmer: Dan is enjoying a resort vacation with his girlfriend when the sun explodes. Or disappears, or something, but in any case, the world is plunged into sudden and permanent night. The resort is on a remote island, all communication is down, and the planes that delivered the guests aren't scheduled to return for two weeks. Everyone is desperate to speak to their loved ones and find a way to get back to them, but at least they have plenty of food and booze and are in a tropical paradise. Well, for the moment, because the temperature is rapidly dropping. And the wealthy guests soon commandeer all the supplies, claiming they'll distribute them fairly while actually imposing an authoritarian regime. Dan has never done anything impressive in his life, but he accidentally becomes a leader in the revolt that's brewing.

I was disappointed in this. Part of the problem was my expectations: I was anticipating the focus to be disaster survival rather than class warfare. But since the story did turn out to be largely about the rich people taking over, I wanted either more plausible details or a more insightful satire. The characters and situations were too often generic, and while the book occasionally made me laugh, much of the humor didn't land for me. I kept reading because I wanted to learn the resolution of some mysteries, but the answers were underwhelming. A lot of other readers found this much more fun, but I can't recommend it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Reactor, Jenny Hamilton makes the case for Why Romantasy Needs to Grow Beyond Trends: "Contributing to this relentless sameness is the way these tropes can calcify into prescription—not just the presence of the tropes on which the whole book hangs, but the way you get recurring trope clusters that are understood to all go together. I can't throw a rock in a bookstore these days without hitting five sprayed-edged romantasies where the girl has to reluctantly team up with a dangerous, sexy enemy in order to save her family / reclaim her throne / overthrow the oppressive ruling class. Fine, I don't have any objection to a girl getting it on with her dark and deadly enemy. (Au contraire!) But it becomes immensely tedious when every book starts hitting the same exact beats, with slightly different set dressing."

March Reading Recap

I've started reading from my list of anticipated new releases, and it made for an incredible book month!

→ WOODWORKING by Emily St. James: Erica has recently started understanding herself as a woman, but everyone else knows her as a man—an awkward, recently divorced man who teaches high school English and directs community theater. The consequences of revealing her true identity in her South Dakota town seem terrifying, so Erica can only come out to the one other trans woman she knows, a teenage student at her school. Abigail would love for everyone to forget that she's trans, and she's not at all thrilled about having to mentor her teacher, but in her own sarcastic way, she gives Erica the affirmation and guidance she needs. Though Abigail insists the two of them aren't friends, a friendship develops between them, which makes other people suspicious and threatens to expose Erica's secret.

This novel is so just so good, with fantastic characters, tight plotting, and a story that can switch from funny to gut-punch in a matter of paragraphs. St. James brings Erica and Abigail to life immediately by putting the reader deep into their concerns and mindsets, then continues to play around with that narrative perspective through impressive POV shifts. All the characters and their minutely changing dynamics are portrayed with insight, humor, and authentic emotion. The plot thickens with each chapter, introducing new obstacles and surprising developments. I highly recommend everyone read this marvelous debut.

→ THE STRANGE CASE OF JANE O. by Karen Thompson Walker is presented as a psychiatrist's account of his treatment of a patient with an unusual mind and confounding experiences. (An opening epigraph by Oliver Sacks helps establish the style that the novel is evoking.) At their first appointment, Jane is so reluctant to say why she's there that she leaves before explaining anything, but soon it becomes more urgent for her to seek care. Jane has blacked out for over a day, failing to pick up her young child at day care and apparently wandering Brooklyn before passing out in a park. She has no memory of that time, and Jane otherwise has a remarkably good memory. As she gradually tells the psychiatrist her story, the many strange pieces of her case raise more intriguing mysteries about what's happening to her.

I really enjoyed this book, and I can't even write about many of the reasons it appealed to me, since I don't want to give anything away. I will say that there is heavy material in the story, because it deals with the way experiences like grief challenge a person's sense of reality. Despite the sadness, I found this a joy to read. Both main characters and their pasts are initially almost as mysterious as Jane's case, and getting to know them is part of the story's pleasure. The clever unfolding of the plot puts readers in the fun position of knowing more than the characters, so it's possible to make guesses at what's going on before the story gets there. I read in short bursts to savor and ponder the unfolding mysteries, but I was also tempted to sit down and devour it all at once. This is joining Walker's previous novels on my list of favorites.

→ THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones is a series of stories inside stories, like the nested noun phrases of the title. In the frame narrative, an academic in 2012 comes into possession of a hundred-year-old journal written by her ancestor, a pastor on the Montana frontier. In the 1912 journal, Pastor Arthur Beaucarne writes about the disturbing discovery of a man's body left on the prairie, skinned like an animal and painted. Indians are immediately suspected, so it's curious when a Pikuni man shows up at his church and says he wishes to confess. Even more curious is that as Good Stab begins to unburden himself by recounting the events of his life, he claims to be decades older than seems possible. Good Stab's confession, told over multiple Sundays, appears inside Arthur's journal, though the pastor can't believe the fantastical tales he's hearing of inhuman powers, immortality, and an unquenchable thirst for blood.

While it's not clear at the outset that this is a vampire story, it becomes clear soon enough (and is revealed in the book's description). Jones draws on existing vampire lore and adds his own fascinating rules that Good Stab must figure out in order to go on surviving. This is definitely not a book for all readers, because it is crammed full of creatively horrific scenes of human and animal mutilation, narrated in loving and bloody detail. That's not usually what I'd seek out, but Jones is such a good storyteller that I was engrossed, while also grossed out.

The story at the core of all this blood and dismemberment is the shameful history of America. Good Stab chronicles an era of real life horror as he watches his people suffer and die at the hands of the US government and witnesses white hunters wipe out the buffalo. He can't stop any of this, but he can use his terrible powers to enact some revenge. "What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had."

→ THE HUMANS by Matt Haig: Professor Andrew Martin has solved the Riemann hypothesis, and a civilization of mathematically advanced aliens doesn't want humans to have that knowledge. So before this dangerous information can spread, Andrew is abducted and killed, and one of the aliens is assigned to take his form, and his place. Playing the role of Andrew, our alien narrator is instructed to find out who might have been told about the discovery, then kill them, too. After all, these are merely individual humans, primitive and ugly and of little value. But as soon as the alien meets actual humans and learns about their lives, he questions his mission. Soon he's disobeying his orders to protect the humans he's starting to value above anything else.

It took me a little time to get invested in this story, but then I found it entertaining and ultimately sweet. The opening section, when the alien narrator is first experiencing Earth and humanity, was too slapsticky for me, with what he understood or not overly based on what would be the silliest. Once he settled into Andrew's life and got to know the other major characters, I began to care about them, too, and became caught up in the events of the plot. This is a fairly fun novel, but it also deals with depression and suicide, a frequent topic in Haig's work.

→ A TASTE OF MIDNIGHT by Shannon Page is a fun story of later-in-life love, small town politics, friendship, and food, set in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. Julie has lived on Orcas Island long enough to establish the small business of her dreams and find a tight group of friends. They meet regularly to conduct their soup group (the solution to a failed book club) and stay updated on each other's lives. Julie's still enough of a newcomer to the island that she hasn't cared about local politics, until now. In the face of an outrageous attempt to introduce parking meters ("We're not Seattle!"), Julie and her friends organize to fight back. This unexpected new interest is followed by another, when Julie finds herself attracted to a guy she doesn't even like, when she never planned to get involved with anyone again.

This light-hearted, low stress novel was a pleasant break from my usual reading. I'm always happy to see middle-aged characters featured in stories, especially in romantic plots. I got caught up in the developing drama of Julie's life, and of her friends, who periodically have short POV sections. Page fills the story with local color and flavor, and many scenes made me hungry, whether set at a group meeting or in one of the (likely real) island restaurants. This is the first book in the Island of Second Chances, a series that will follow different members of the soup group.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Brittany K. Allen at Literary Hub talks to props master Michael Cory about the books that appear in The White Lotus: "We had to decide which books characters bought in Thailand, and how many books [they brought from home]. Like for Piper [Sarah Catherine Hook; arguably the show's most literary character], I was buying from the local bookstores in Durham and Chapel Hill. Like the university bookshops, the university press. And putting their bookmarks in her books."

February Reading Recap

There's rarely much connection between the books I read in a month, but my February reading happened to all play around with the borders between reality and something else:

→ THE REFORMATORY by Tananarive Due: After Robert is provoked into fighting the son of a prominent white family in his Florida town, he's in for a world of trouble. It's 1950, and Robert's father has already been chased out of town for trying to organize the other Black workers, so the law comes down hard (though the judge insists he's being lenient). Twelve-year-old Robert is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, where despite the educational trappings, Robert can expect to be put to work and receive beatings from both staff and other boys. As soon as he arrives at the Reformatory, Robert can sense the presence of ghosts who suffered horrific violence. Meanwhile, as his older sister Gloria tries to get him freed, her premonitions warn her that Robert is in terrible danger.

This is a harrowing story about the horrors of institutionalized violence and racism, and while occasionally the ghostly aspects add to the horror, they mostly allow the characters to fare a little better than their real-life counterparts. The reformatory where Robert is imprisoned is based on the infamously cruel Dozier School for Boys, also fictionalized in Colson Whitehead's THE NICKEL BOYS. The book is often difficult to read, as Robert suffers arbitrary punishments and Gloria struggles to seek justice, but both of them get moments of hope and kindness from people they join forces with. With the help of their allies, plus some supernatural assistance, they ultimately get to fight back against the system. At times the narrative didn't seem to trust readers enough, so events were overexplained or points repeated, extending an already lengthy novel. But for the most part, I was caught up in the emotion and suspense of the story.

→ DEATH OF THE AUTHOR by Nnedi Okorafor: When Zelu is fired from her teaching job and receives another manuscript rejection on the same day, she doesn't want to tell her family. Her parents and many siblings have always had low expectations for her because she's paraplegic, so they fixate on her failures and ignore her successes. Fueled by frustration and anger over all of this, Zelu begins writing something new. Rusted Robots is about a robot civilization in Nigeria after humanity has died out, and the story pours right out of her. Soon Zelu has sold the novel, and she's experiencing success beyond her wildest dreams, but her family still doesn't see her as capable. The more she achieves, the more they want to stop her from becoming everything she can be.

I really liked so many of the ideas and elements of this novel, though it didn't all work for me. The story is presented in three intertwined threads: chapters about Zelu's life, interviews with her family members conducted after her success, and chapters of Rusted Robots. I often find novels within novels lacking, but this one was excellent, and I was fully invested in the robot story. The chapters of Zelu's life and family, on the other hand, started to drag after a while with repetitive episodes, and I think the book would have benefited from being shorter.

→ AUTHORITY by Jeff VanderMeer continues the story of the expedition sent to explore Area X in ANNIHILATION, but this time, the focus is on the agency that sends the expeditions. The offices of the Southern Reach need a new leader, so an outside agent named Control is put in charge and tasked with restoring order. He comes with some strange baggage, but so does the agency, so they may be a good match. As Control deals with the aftermath of the most recent expedition, he's also trying to understand the methods and findings from years of past expeditions.

I ended ANNIHILATION feeling a bit disappointed by the lack of answers, but this second installment of the original trilogy left me more satisfied and excited by the series. It's not that this book provides many answers about the mysteries of Area X, which remains inexplicable. But the perspective from the world beyond fills out the picture, providing context and history that expands the story. Control is an entertaining character to spend time with, a bit odd, but not nearly as much as some of his new coworkers. This book was less creepy overall than the first, but includes plenty of unsettling moments.

→ ACCEPTANCE by Jeff VanderMeer brings the story of the Southern Reach to a conclusion by investigating Area X at multiple points, through multiple perspectives. VanderMeer revisits and follows up on characters and threads from the first two books, further expanding the story and addressing many questions. Not all questions, because the mysterious nature of Area X persists, but I felt satisfied by the ending, and impressed by how the three books work together. This trilogy was published in quick succession in 2014, and then a surprise prequel came out last year, which I'm planning to read as well.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Charlie Jane Anders offers tips on How to Fix a Character Who's Starting to Bore You: "If you look back at what you wrote earlier, you'll probably find that you left yourself lots of clues and hints about unexplored nooks and crevices in this character's personality and backstory. If you spent a decent amount of time building a character's internal monologue and developing their story, you're pretty much bound to find loose threads that you can pull on. I'm often amazed at the stuff I forgot I threw in when introducing a character, which can prove fruitful later on in the character's life."

January Reading Recap

My reading year has started off well, at least!

→ A HALF-BUILT GARDEN by Ruthanna Emrys: Judy is on call for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network and goes to investigate an alert about a water pollutant. Expecting a false alarm or minor issue, she brings along her wife and infant daughter in hopes that the excursion will settle the baby. But to her shock, the source of the pollution is an alien spaceship, and so Earth's first contact is made by members of one of the world's cooperative environmental networks rather than the archaic nation-states or a corporation. That Judy is carrying her baby also turns out to be significant for the diplomacy that follows, because the alien who emerges from the ship to greet them (having learned human language from studying broadcasts) is holding her own babies and considers motherhood a sign of the highest cultural status. The aliens have come in peace to bring a warning: Every technologically advanced species exhausts the resources of their planet and can only survive by abandoning it to live in space. The aliens want to help humanity escape in time, and they don't understand why Judy puts up any resistance to this offer. But as Judy explains, the watershed networks have been working for half a century to improve conditions on the planet, and most humans probably aren't ready to give up on Earth yet.

I loved this optimistic novel about people working together to solve big problems. It's a complex story with a good balance of plot, worldbuilding, and character development, well-constructed so that every introduced element is made use of later. The aliens are fairly alien, distinct from humans physically and culturally, and their expectations about motherhood, family, and gender drive the story in interesting ways. As the accidental ambassadors, Judy and the rest of her queer, poly, Jewish family are the central human characters, but more humans representing other backgrounds and family styles also play roles. All this variety is treated with nuance: For example, Judy starts the story believing corporations and capitalism are pure evil, but once she's forced to interact with corporate representatives and see their world, she realizes the situation is more complicated. This book is full of joy and hope, plus acknowledgment of how hard it can be to stay joyful and hopeful in difficult times. I'm glad I read it to start off 2025.

→ DOLL SEED by Michele Tracy Berger: In this collection of short fiction, most of the stories verge into some type of horror by the end, even if they start out with the trappings of another genre. The opening story sets this up well. In "Nussia", a Black family wins the honor of hosting the first alien child to visit Earth not long after first contact. The inventive developments lead to a much darker ending than I expected, preparing me for the rest of the collection.

A number of the stories involve the invoking of spirits, demons, and ghosts, but Berger imagines a range of situations within this repeated theme. "Etta, Zora, and the First Serpent", set during the Harlem Renaissance, is surprisingly about Zora Neale Hurston summoning a spirit so she can access lost stories. In "Family Line", which packs some real emotional power into a few pages, the demon is connected to a family legend going back to the days of slavery. Certain elements from both of these reappear in the tensely escalating "And They Will Rise From the Oceans". The ghosts of the "Cemetery Sisters" are friendly at first, but of course the truth is more complicated, with several creative elements that combine into a satisfying whole.

While the stories are largely speculative, some stay in the real world and focus on the horror of how people treat each other, as in "Miss Black Little Hill of 1965" and "The Invisible Son". Not all of the stories worked equally well for me, but even some I didn't enjoy overall tended to build to a strong conclusion, demonstrating Berger's gift at the difficult skill of writing endings.

→ ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer: On expeditions into the mysterious Area X, investigators are discouraged from sharing personal information or even using names, so they know each other only by their roles. The biologist of the twelfth expedition is more comfortable getting close with plants and animals than humans anyway, and she's reluctant to reveal the very personal reasons she volunteered for this dangerous mission. She knows that many members of previous expeditions did not survive, but most of her other prior knowledge about Area X is immediately suspect once her team crosses the border. The lush environment and its natural phenomena are unsettling in ways she never imagined, and the first discovery is a huge underground structure that doesn't appear on the provided maps. The biologist feels compelled to explore it, and what she finds defies any rational explanation.

This is a creepy horror story where everything is disturbing: the setting, the narrator's thoughts, what characters do to each other. VanderMeer's writing is highly evocative, and it generated both visuals in my mind and visceral reactions. I was absorbed in the novel's events, but as more and more questions continued to be raised by the expedition's discoveries, I realized this might not be the type of story to provide many answers. Indeed, far fewer mysteries are explained by the end than I would have preferred. But I've been told that the rest of the series builds out a more complete picture of the situation around Area X, and I'm planning to read on to learn more.

→ RENTAL HOUSE by Weike Wang: Keru and Nate have been married for five years when they take an extended vacation to Cape Cod (with their dog) and rent a house near the beach. The world is just emerging from the worst of the pandemic, so they haven't seen their parents for a while, and they invite both sets to visit, during separate weeks. They know the visits will be trying. Keru's parents, who grew up in China, always stress their daughter out with their stubbornness and criticism. Nate's parents, who live in the rural community where they grew up, infuriate their son with uninformed opinions about topics such as his career in New York City academia and Keru's background. And both parents want to know when the couple is going to have kids, yet won't accept the answer that they're not. But everyone survives the vacation. Another five years pass, and Keru and Nate plan another getaway for just the two of them (and the dog).

As the description suggests, this is a novel highly focused on characters and their relationships, and Wang depicts these with care, specificity, and humor. I found each scene engaging and realistic (sometimes painfully so). The interactions throughout the first vacation, between Keru and Nate and with each set of parents, set up so much tense potential for what might unfold in the second half of the book. But the events of the second vacation didn't follow up on as many threads from the first as I was expecting, and the story felt incomplete to me. I remain interested in Wang's character portrayals, but I've wanted a bit more from all her novels, and especially this one.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel shares thoughts on flipping from "TV brain" to "prose brain" when writing fiction: "The problem is that if you're 'thinking in TV' while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV. Visual media and text simply work differently and have different possibilities and constraints. I don't believe in rules for art. But I believe in general principles. One is that it's typically best to lean into the unique advantages of the medium you are working in. A novel will never beat good TV at being TV, but similarly TV will never beat a good novel at being a novel."

December Reading Recap

I closed out 2024 with a final great reading month. Next week, I'll round up the highlights of my reading year.

→ THE ANOMALY by Hervé Le Tellier, translated from French by Adriana Hunter: The story opens with a hitman in the middle of a job that required traveling to New York from Paris. The transatlantic flight encountered terrifying levels of turbulence that left him fearing for his own life. We meet a number of other characters, mostly in France and the US, and learn about their lives and problems. All were on the harrowing flight in March, and some made big changes as a result of feeling so close to death. Still, the experience is far from their minds by June, when federal agents arrive to take each of them into custody. Something very strange has happened, and that flight is at the center of it.

I knew the premise before I started reading, but nonetheless, much about this excellent novel came as a surprise. I wasn't expecting to meet so many characters, and I enjoyed encountering each of them and learning their widely ranging stories. I didn't anticipate how deep we'd get into the book before the initial reveal, and though it would have been fun to go in unspoiled, I also liked being able to recognize the hints and foreshadowing. And I was happy to discover there's another whole level of premise I knew nothing about. This is a delightful read that's full of surprises!

→ THE LOLA QUARTET by Emily St. John Mandel: Gavin is a newspaper reporter in New York City, the life he dreamed of while growing up in Florida, but that life hasn't turned out the way he imagined. Things are already going badly when he's sent to Florida for an assignment and his sister drops some shocking news: She encountered a ten-year-old girl who might be Gavin's daughter by Anna, his high school girlfriend who disappeared. Soon Gavin's New York life is over, and he's back in Florida, on the hunt for Anna and the girl. As he searches, it becomes clear that the other members of Gavin's high school jazz quartet are all involved in the story of Anna's disappearance and return, and there's far more to their histories than he ever knew.

I'm so glad I went back to read Mandel's pre-breakout work, because I love her writing style and characters (plus the subtle ways her books are tied together). This third novel is immediately Mandelian, with time shifts, secrets, and a gradual unfolding of the plot as both reader and characters come to understand what's going on. Part of the fun of this story is figuring out how the different storylines connect and staying several steps ahead of Gavin. Everyone in this novel makes terrible decisions, and I really felt for them anyway.

→ THE DAZZLE OF DAY by Molly Gloss: The Dusty Miller left Earth 175 years ago, holding a community of humans and an ecosystem of other species prepared for generations of travel. Now the ship is approaching a new planet that could support human life, but the conditions are harsh, dominated by cold weather and rocky soil, and there's uncertainty about whether to settle there or journey for generations more. Juko is one of the sailmenders who does the risky work of performing maintenance on the outside of the aging ship. Her husband Bjoro is in the midst of an even more dangerous job as part of the advance crew landing on the planet to gather more information than can be gained from probes. Their experiences and those of other family members show the complexity and constraints of life on the Miller in the months before that life may change unimaginably.

The generation ship that Gloss imagines is a fascinating one where much of daily living appears low-tech, with most people focused on farming and crafts. The ship was launched by Quakers and is governed by those principles, so decisions are made in meetings involving long stretches of silence and a goal of consensus. These meetings, and neighborhood life in general, are a major focus of the novel, and I generally enjoyed the intricacies and logistics. The planetary details are also well-imagined, and Gloss does a great job depicting the disorienting experience of being on a world after a lifetime inside a ship.

The characters in the story's central family experience a number of difficult changes during the novel, not always as connected as I would have expected to the massive change facing the whole community. I was occasionally frustrated when the story turned away from the questions that interested me most, and some threads felt unfinished to me. What the characters experience is sometimes hard to read about, because there's quite a bit of tragedy and trauma. Not everything about this book worked for me, but it was an engrossing and thought-provoking read.

→ DISPOSSESSED by Desiree Zamorano: Manuel is a small child when, one day in 1939, his parents are gone. He's too young to comprehend why he and his older sister are suddenly being moved between the homes of strangers. He isn't even old enough to grasp that he can only understand his sister because she speaks Spanish, while the strangers they encounter all speak English. And then his beloved sister says goodbye, and he's alone in the incomprehensible world. At last Manuel is placed in the home of a kind, Spanish-speaking older woman, and he has a chance at growing up with some happiness. But nobody explains what happened to his family until he's much older and learns that his parents, Mexican nationals, were caught up in a mass deportation. Manuel would like to search for his parents and sister, but he has so little information that the quest seems impossible. The anger and pain of their loss is always on his mind as he makes his difficult way into adulthood and imagines making a new family of his own.

This novel about the consequences of mass deportations is tragically timely, and the story is often a tragic one, though there is joy at the end of it. Manuel's story covers decades and intersects with many heartbreaking events in the history of Mexican-Americans in Southern California. The way the opening chapters capture young Manuel's disoriented perspective is especially effective, and the book continues to be at its best when the narrative goes deep into Manuel's feelings.

→ LOST ARK DREAMING by Suyi Davies Okungbowa: Following an apocalyptic ocean rise, hundreds of thousands of people spend their entire lives inside a massive skyscraper off the coast of now-flooded Lagos. The wealthy enjoy luxury in the upper floors, while in the lowest third of the tower, submerged beneath the water, residents are crowded into dark, poorly maintained spaces. Yekini is a midder, grateful that her grandparents managed to ascend and that she holds a decent job, a junior position in the tower's bureaucracy. But it's unclear whether she's being punished or rewarded when she's sent to an undersea floor to investigate reports of a leak. To Yekini's horror, she realizes the breach might be the work of the mysterious Children, rumored to be part human, part aquatic creatures. What she discovers changes everything.

This is a short book that moves along fast, unfolding in the span of a day. The major characters are portrayed well, and the ideas are fascinating, but I wished both had more room to develop. Like many novellas, the story left me with a frustrating number of questions about the world and the concepts. I also wasn't as interested in the mystical aspects of the story that ended up getting much of the focus by the end. So the book wasn't a great match for me, but it has a lot to offer different readers.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Reactor, Molly Templeton has advice on finding small press science fiction and fantasy: "Anyone who reads small press work will cite their own favorites. And because the world is so wide, and publishing so specific, and distribution so complicated, you may or may not have heard of them. It'll take more work to find their books, maybe. But it's also kind of fun. If you have a certain kind of temperament—the kind that liked hunting down obscure albums in the pre-internet age, say—it may be a familiar sort of work. It is the work of trying to find art outside the larger corporate sphere."

November Reading Recap

I was so busy reading books last month, I got behind on reviewing them until now!

→ CAHOKIA JAZZ by Francis Spufford: Detectives Barrow and Drummond of the Cahokia PD are called to the scene of a grisly murder. It's 1922, so most of their cases involve the illegal liquor trade, but this is something else. An eviscerated body has been left atop one of the city's highest buildings, with a message scrawled in Anopa, the local language that most Indigenous citizens speak along with English. Barrow isn't an Indigenous local, though he's often mistaken for one; he's a newcomer of uncertain heritage to this ancient kingdom on the Mississippi that's now part of the United States. Since Barrow is still learning Cahokia's customs and culture, he tends to let Drummond take the lead, even when his friend's policing strategies are corrupt. But this time, Barrow is compelled to look past the convenient suspects and figure out what's really happening with this case and its complicated repercussions.

I loved everything about this compelling detective story set in a brilliantly rendered alternate history. Cahokia was a real city that prospered centuries before European colonization, and Spufford has established a timeline in which it continued thriving. He puts enough of the worldbuilding details on the page that my curiosity was satisfied, but not so much that Barrow ever gets much chance to rest from the grueling pace of his investigations. Barrow is an excellent character, burdened by all the usual trappings of a noir detective and also grappling with who he wants to be in the world. This is a smart, complex, dark novel, and I highly recommend it.

→ THE TELLING by Ursula K. Le Guin: When Sutty was growing up, Earth was dominated by an oppressive religious regime. She couldn't wait to complete her training as an Ekumen Observer and leave for an assignment on another planet, where things would be different. But when she arrives on Aka, she finds it's another rigidly controlled society, this one stridently anti-religious. The Akan government, in pursuit of technological progress like that of Earth, has outlawed everything associated with the planet's once-widespread spiritual practices. Sutty wishes she could learn more about this situation, but she's granted little access to anything worth studying while she's confined to the city. Once permitted to leave, Sutty travels to a remote village and realizes the old ways are still a part of daily life, though kept hidden from government monitors. As she gains the trust of the villagers, she learns the traditions of the Telling and the history that brought Aka to this point.

As I continue to wander through Le Guin's extensive body of work, I'm particularly enjoying the stories that place characters in cultures they're unfamiliar with and delve into the anthropological details. I didn't know anything about THE TELLING when I started it, so I was pleased to discover it's firmly in this category. I was immediately drawn in to Sutty's story and happy to get to know her better as we learned together about Akan culture and history. This novel is so heavy on the anthropological details that I grew a bit impatient in the middle, but soon more plot developed, and I was enthralled again. It's interesting to read a story contrasting a society that demands religion with one that bans it, and Le Guin explores this with her usual nuance.

→ OREO by Fran Ross: Oreo begins before the birth of the title character, when her eventual parents, a Black woman and a Jewish man, announce their marriage. The news of the union is so upsetting to their own parents that one drops dead and another is rendered catatonic. The marriage doesn't last long, and soon Oreo's father is gone from her life, but he leaves behind a set of clues Oreo can find him with when she's older. Though Oreo and her younger brother are raised by the Black side of their family, they are exposed to a certain amount of Yiddish as a consequence of their (now immobilized) grandfather's extensive but spite-based knowledge of Judaism. After a childhood immersed in the various language eccentricities of her family members and tutors, the precocious Oreo sets off to New York City on a quest to find her father.

This novel was published in 1974 and largely ignored until decades later. I went in knowing only that it was a satire with a biracial protagonist, and the book was quite different from what I expected, and from anything else. While there is social commentary on race as well as gender, the most prominent feature is Ross's extensive, inventive use of wordplay. The puns and jokes and rhetorical devices draw on numerous languages and fields of reference. I was constantly amused, impressed, and looking things up. The broader humor of Oreo's adventures is, well, broad, and often too slapsticky or surreal for my taste, but the language jokes are magnificent. The quest's structure turns out to be based on a legend from Greek mythology, adding another unexpected, fascinating layer. I didn't always enjoy this as a story, but I appreciated its idiosyncrasies, and I'm glad I read it.

→ THE SEQUEL by Jean Hanff Korelitz is a sequel to THE PLOT. The plot of THE PLOT involves a writer who publishes a wildly successful novel based on a plot that originated with another writer, and consequently ends up in the middle of his own sinister plot. The plot of THE SEQUEL results from the events of THE PLOT, making it difficult to describe without revealing the plot turns of THE PLOT. Once again, THE SEQUEL involves a writer publishing a wildly successful novel, but the plot of that novel is less important to the plot than the plot of the novel from THE PLOT, which continues to have sinister consequences in the life of the new writer. You got all that?

This is a reasonably clever followup, but I found it far less fun than the original. What THE SEQUEL adds to the story is the new protagonist's perspective, which Korelitz brings to life with some complexity. However, the premise requires going back over much of the material from THE PLOT, so this novel lacks the freshness and surprise of the first one. The rehashing made my disbelief lose suspension, and some of the publishing insider stuff felt like unnecessary filler this time. I was also sorry that one of the plot twists hinges on sexual assault, a trope I'm very tired of. Read THE PLOT if you're looking for an entertaining, over-the-top thriller set in the literary world, but you may want to stop there.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ For Literary Hub, Jadie Stillwell and Nicole Blackwood attend a Nancy Drew convention and consider the mystery of the girl detective: "Even if Nancy can't be defined by her image, surely we can nail down a character logline. Sherlock Holmes is abrasive, Hercule Poirot is vain, Veronica Mars is prickly, and Nancy Drew is... the quintessential teen girl of her time, at all times. Yes, she was lovingly sculpted into being by Carolyn Keenes (Carolyns Keene?) and scores of illustrators, but she's also one publishing executive's idea of how an independent young woman might look and act, packaged for the masses and routed straight to a bookshelf near you—and your mom, and your mom's mom. It's true that most of Nancy's iterations share a few traits: cute blue roadster, loyal boyfriend, indulgent dad. But these are things she possesses, privileges she has; there's still frustratingly little to cement her as more than a concept."

October Reading Recap

I've been keeping my mind occupied this past month with plenty of reading!

→ THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore: In 1975, at a summer camp in the Adirondacks, a camper goes missing. And Barbara isn't just any camper—she's the daughter of the wealthy family who has owned the camp for generations. Even worse, Barbara's parents lost their first child 14 years earlier, when he disappeared into the forest and was never found. As the search for Barbara begins, the narrative shifts between characters and times to connect earlier events of the summer with clues that surface. Soon the investigation reopens questions about the previous disappearance, the family, and the camp staff, introducing more time periods and perspectives.

This is a well-written and suspenseful mystery that kept me up late reading for many nights. I was as interested in getting to know the characters as I was in finding out the answers to the many questions raised. The story unfolds at an exciting pace, with information parceled out in a way that lets the reader form and test theories along with the investigators. If you like complex thrillers and can handle stories where children are in peril, I definitely recommend this.

→ THE SINGER'S GUN by Emily St. John Mandel opens in New York City with a federal agent investigating a mysterious phone call connected to women smuggled into the country in a shipping container. Her inquiries lead her to the parents of Anton Waker, a man who's gone missing and may be dead after last being seen on a Greek island. Earlier, Anton arrives on that island during his honeymoon, and he decides to stay there, alone. The wedding was postponed twice, so perhaps the marriage was doomed before it began, but Anton won't give his new wife a clear explanation for why he isn't returning to New York with her. There's a lot Anton hasn't explained, including that his job has recently unraveled, his background isn't what he claimed, and his whole family's history is shady and criminal.

I really liked this story and the way it unfolds. There's a mystery established at the start, but much of the mystery is what's even going on, and while certain pieces soon become clearer, others take longer to expose. Anton is hiding a great deal, and so are all the other characters, giving them each a different sense of the big picture. As in every Mandel novel (this is her second), frequent shifts in time and perspective are used to good effect in assembling the pieces. The characters are rendered in full and specific detail (also what I expect from Mandel), and the plot becomes more tense with each new development. I was captivated all the way through.

→ GENDER QUEER is a graphic memoir by Maia Kobabe about the process of figuring out eir gender and sexuality. Kobabe starts with episodes from eir childhood that first introduced em to society's different expectations for girls and boys. Growing up as a girl, e often felt ignorant of these rules and wished to opt out. Adolescence brought more confusion as e developed crushes that weren't limited by gender, but was always most turned on by gay male fantasies and fanfiction. As a young adult, Kobabe tried out different relationships and identities before settling into understanding emself as nonbinary and asexual.

I found this an effective and affecting story that makes great use of the comics form. Kobabe's panels are a pleasure to look at, easy to follow, and often visually witty. I was especially impressed by eir ability to draw nuanced facial expressions with so few lines. Through the combination of art and text, Kobabe reveals deeply intimate thoughts that are sometimes painful, sometimes joyous. It's a beautiful portrait of one personal journey that may also help readers better see themselves or their loved ones.

→ SHANGHAILANDERS by Juli Min: In 2040, the Yang family is coming apart, literally and figuratively, as some members stay at home in Shanghai and others fly off to distant countries. After a quarter century of marriage, Leo and Eko are both wondering if they still have a future together. Their three daughters are growing into young women, all with big problems their parents are unaware of. After an introduction to the family, each chapter takes a step back in time, offering glimpses of earlier and earlier events and expanding the set of secrets.

This is one of those books where I enjoyed the individual pieces more than the whole. I was intrigued by the stories presented by each new chapter and point of view, and I wished they were more tightly connected beyond revolving around the same family. Though the backward structure seems designed to answer questions about the past raised by later events, most referenced situations never appeared again, and that left me unsatisfied. For example, two of the strongest chapters focus on staff members employed by the Yangs, and it felt like a missed opportunity to not see them through the family's eyes at a different time. Min is a talented writer of characters and scenes, but this didn't come together for me.

→ THE FAR REACHES: STORIES TO TAKE YOU OUT OF THIS WORLD is a collection of six original stories (published by Amazon and exclusive to their platforms) by well-known science fiction authors. I was already a fan of some of these writers, and others were familiar names who I'd never read and wanted to try. I enjoyed the collection overall and each story individually, though I wanted more from some of them.

All the stories involve space travel, usually beyond the solar system, so many deal with broad sweeps of time. In "How It Unfolds" by James S. A. Corey, characters from Earth are scanned and beamed as information to distant planets where they might reestablish human civilization. The details set up a fascinating premise at a vast scale, while the story focuses on individual character relationships. "Slow Time Between the Stars" by John Scalzi also involves a long-range search for habitable planets, but the narrator is a solitary intelligent spaceship who spends its slow time musing about its mission.

In "Void" by Veronica Roth, the crew of an interstellar ship has to live outside of normal human time, barely aging on their journeys while decades pass at their destinations. That story is a murder mystery that makes satisfying use of the time dilation. The characters in "Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach" by Nnedi Okorafor are selected for solo space travel, each tasked with roaming the solar system alone for ten years, but they get to meet up for one week of intense human connection.

"The Long Game" by Ann Leckie is narrated by an alien life form interacting with humans. Leckie is always great at imagining alien minds, and this intriguing story is no exception. Aliens also feature in "Falling Bodies" by Rebecca Roanhorse, a bleak story about a human who was adopted by a colonizing species and grew up uncertain about where his allegiance should lie.

September Reading Recap

Once again, my reading adventures led me through a fascinating variety of novels:

→ CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: In the near future, the United States prison system takes inmate exploitation to a whole new level by introducing gladiatorial combat. Prisoners convicted of violent crimes can enroll in the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program and fight one another to the death before live and televised audiences. For as long as they remain alive, fighters become celebrities, with their lives recorded and broadcast to fans who dissect the between-match dramas among the different Chain-Gangs. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are two of the biggest stars, and both the romance between the two women and the way they run their Chain is legendary. Thurwar has survived almost three years, and if she wins just a few more matches, she'll be granted freedom from this gruesome life where killing is better than the alternative.

The novel starts out intense and disturbing by detailing several matches, and I wasn't sure how to feel about what I was reading. But as I read a little farther, I got a better grasp on the concept, and the characters drew me in. The premise of this dystopian future prison system is horrific. So is much about the current prison system. Adjei-Brenyah explores these real and invented horrors with nuance by shifting among characters with different relationships to the system and throwing in occasional pointed footnotes.

Because the characters have been led to glorify violence, the writing often does as well, making the readers part of the audience invested in every moment of these lethal matches. Enough time is spent outside of the arena that the story isn't nonstop brutality, and I was also invested in and moved by the characters and their bonds. This novel successfully pulls off a number of difficult moves. It will make you uncomfortable, and I recommend it.

→ FIGHT NIGHT by Miriam Toews: Swiv was expelled from school, so she spends her days at home with her grandmother. Grandma conducts a form of homeschooling that involves talking about death, occasional math problems, and the letter-writing assignments suggested by the family's therapist. When Swiv's mom comes home every evening, she's always tired and ranting about something. Mom is pregnant with a fetus the family calls Gord, who Swiv often worries about. She doesn't know where her dad has disappeared to, and she isn't sure whether the adults know or are just as in the dark about why their family has fallen apart.

This novel is all about Swiv's unique and hilarious narrative voice. Not a lot happens for much of the story besides Swiv coping with the daily realities of her family. As a young child surrounded by adults, she's the focus of their love and attention, but they also have other concerns she doesn't always understand. The characters' lives have been shaped by mental health problems and loss, and some of that history is eventually revealed to the reader, but more is left unexplained than I anticipated. I laughed and laughed through this unusual, darkly funny story, and then I cried a little. I loved the whole experience.

→ LOKA by S.B. Divya: Akshaya doesn't want the life her parents have planned for her, and genetically designed her for, on the planet Meru. After a childhood spent in space travel, Aks will be making her first visit to Earth, and though she's never set foot there, she's convinced it's where she wants to spend the rest of her life. (She's sixteen, and full of convictions.) In order to really experience the home of humanity, Aks and her best friend set out on an ambitious journey to circumnavigate Earth, under a specific set of constraints. They're undertaking the Anthro Challenge, a commitment to only using human-era technology and accepting no help from alloys, the genetically advanced descendants of humans. Since most humans are content to let alloys manage everything and are suspicious of any form of ambition, this endeavor will be not just a grueling physical trial but a challenge to win understanding and acceptance.

LOKA continues The Alloy Era series by moving into the next generation, but it's a very different sort of story than MERU, and either book could be read alone. I preferred the first novel, which had a wider scope and took the characters around the galaxy. By contrast, this one that focused on Earth felt more limited, and I didn't find the premise or characters as compelling. I still enjoyed following Aks on her adventure and was caught up in the exciting and emotional journey. I'm eager to see what's next for this series and will check out whatever Divya writes!

→ ENTITLEMENT by Rumaan Alam: Brooke is excited about her new job at the foundation of billionaire Asher Jaffee, who has pledged to give away his fortune. She spent some years as a teacher but didn't have the necessary passion, so she's enjoying the relative ease and comfort of the office work while still doing good in the world. Asher, at 83, is uninterested in retirement and likes to stay involved in his charity. He's intrigued by the new Black hire and the connection she might provide to the souls who most need saving. Asher takes Brooke on as his protégé, removing her from the project she's been assigned and giving her free rein to find the causes that interest her most. Brooke slips easily into her expanded role, happily filing expense reports and using the car service for whatever she needs. Before long, she starts to wonder whether her own life might be be as worthy as any other cause.

There is so much that's great about this premise, and so much potential in Brooke's developing sense of entitlement. But I was disappointed by the story's slow pace, and unsatisfied by the plot. The characters are fascinating, and as always, Alam writes with insight and nuance about people trying to connect across the borders of class and race. I remain a fan of his writing, but I hoped for something more from this novel.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Leigh Stein considers the claim that there are only 20,000 readers of literary fiction: "All I can offer in my defense is that I read that number (20,000) in a review in July and it stuck in my memory because it sounds true. It might not be accurate, and I would love to see real data on this, but I've worked in the publishing industry since 2008. I've sold six books. I know first-hand how hard it is to sell literary fiction—and by sell I mean both to a publisher and to readers." (Thanks, Book Riot!)

August Reading Recap

I had another great month of reading all sorts of books!

→ THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley: After the British government discovers time travel, a newly formed Ministry decides to test for safety by pulling a few individuals out of the past when they're on the brink of certain death, so their removal won't alter any timelines. Each "expat," as the unwilling time travelers are called, is assigned to live with a ministry agent called a "bridge" who will help them adjust to modern London while watching for any signs of physical or psychological deterioration. The novel's unnamed narrator is the bridge for a (real) Royal Navy explorer, Commander Graham Gore, taken in 1847 from a doomed Arctic expedition. The bridge finds her new housemate charming and quicker to acclimate to the twenty-first century than some of the other expats, and their cohabitation goes well, despite his reservations about living with an unmarried woman. But as she delivers her reports to the Ministry and carries out her duties, she starts to suspect there is more to the time travel project than the bridges have been told.

This novel starts off fun and mostly light-hearted, focusing on the amusing antics of Gore learning about the modern world and the bridge's increasing attraction to him. But the plot soon becomes more complicated, darker, and unpredictable. I really liked the story in both modes, and the way all the pieces worked together. Bradley fully imagines every character and writes Gore and the other expats with reactions and manners of speech that match their eras. The writing is funny and clever, the story unfolds in a satisfying way, and the book was a pleasure to read.

→ SPECIAL TOPICS IN BEING A PARENT by S. Bear Bergman, illustrated by Saul Freedman-Lawson: The subtitle to this book of advice promises "A Queer and Tender Guide to Things I've Learned About Parenting, Mostly the Hard Way," and from the first page, Bergman is humble and honest about those difficult lessons. "I was a perfect parent before I had actual children," he writes, in an opening chapter that goes on to describe the contrast between his tidy imaginary children and the chaotic real ones. Freedman-Lawson's delightful and detailed illustrations bring both versions to life and establish the visual language of the guide. From then on, it's always clear Bergman is drawing on his real life experiences and has put great thought into deriving lessons that might be useful for other parents.

The guide covers a range of topics, from everyday matters like getting everyone out of the house on time to weighty issues such as bullying. There's advice on introducing kids to new foods, and on introducing them to the concepts of diversity and differences between people. One lovely chapter offers the idea of replacing family trees with family gardens, presenting many possible ways to make use of this metaphor. For anyone who's part of a child's garden, I heartily recommend this book.

Check out photos of a few sample pages here. And to every flavor of human, I also recommend Bergman and Freedman-Lawson's first collaboration, SPECIAL TOPICS IN BEING A HUMAN.

→ DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver: Damon is born to an addict mother in a trailer home in the southwestern Virginia mountains. Though he soon acquires the nickname Demon, he's actually a good kid who helps his mother keep her act together after she gets clean. His best friend is part of the kind family next door who provide a second home for Demon, and despite a rocky start, his early life is pretty good. But when Demon's mom marries a hateful, abusive man, there's only so much the neighbors can do, and soon Demon is shunted into a terrible foster situation where he's used as free labor on a tobacco farm. From there, Demon's childhood is a string of miseries, until he finds his way back to some happiness—for a while. More tragedies lie ahead, but Demon remains a good kid with people who care about him, and he'll make it through.

Demon narrates his story with a voice that's vibrant, funny, and insightful about both his childhood thoughts and the adult perspective he's writing from. Kingsolver's masterful handling of the narration kept me absorbed in the novel for many hundreds of pages, and while I do think some episodes could have been trimmed, my attention rarely flagged. I was always caught up in caring about what would happen to Demon, and I appreciated getting his view of his world.

Kingsolver reimagined Charles Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD to create this novel, and while I knew nothing specific about that story before reading, I could recognize the Dickensian nature of Demon's hardships, the colorful characters, and the occasional commentaries on social problems. It was interesting to read a summary of COPPERFIELD afterward to see how Kingsolver transposed the plot and people into modern Appalachia and used them to examine the region's poverty and the opioid crisis.

→ SLOW DANCE by Rainbow Rowell: When Shiloh attends the second wedding of one of her oldest friends, she's anxious about whether their other oldest friend will be there. Shiloh has been out of touch with Cary almost since they graduated from high school fifteen years ago, so on the one hand she's eager to see him. On the other hand, Shiloh has been married, had two kids, and divorced since then, and she isn't sure about being seen. Cary is at the wedding, and it's wonderful to reconnect, but also strange, because they have a lot of history together. A lot, and it's complicated. Everyone always thought the two of them were dating, though that wasn't what they were to each other, despite being inseparable. Now romantic possibilities are surfacing, but Shiloh has the kids and ex-husband, and Cary has a career in the Navy and is only back in Omaha briefly. So it's even more complicated, and it's definitely a lot.

This is a compelling novel about characters trying to bridge the gaps between each other, between imagined versions and reality, and between their teenage and adult selves. As I expect from a Rainbow Rowell book, the story is sweet and romantic at the same time it deals with emotional turmoil and difficult family situations. Also on brand: the characters have long, deep conversations as well as witty banter. At times, some of the angsting felt like too much to me, but I was happy to spend time with Shiloh and Cary and to watch their relationship develop.

→ THE BERRY PICKERS by Amanda Peters: Joe's whole life has been shaped by his sister Ruthie's disappearance when the two of them were young. She vanished in 1962 from the side of a road in Maine, where their family went every summer along with other Mi'kmaq Indians from Nova Scotia to work as blueberry pickers. Fifty years later, Joe is dying, surrounded by what's left of his family, his memories of the past, and the consequences of his life choices. Elsewhere, Norma is starting to make sense of a lifetime of confusing experiences, including childhood dreams of a different mother than the anxious, overbearing one she grew up with. Norma has always been aware that she's browner than her parents and that something doesn't add up in their story of a fire that destroyed all her baby pictures. But it takes fifty years for her to find the explanations she's long sought.

The end of the novel is clearly established at the beginning: Norma is Ruthie, and before Joe dies, she will find her way back to the family she was taken from. It makes sense not to withhold this information that would be easy to guess, but I was disappointed that by the middle of the book, almost every other piece of the story was already revealed, and I was losing interest. Though I felt for the characters, they never really came to life for me. Many other readers loved the story and the writing, but I wanted more from it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Ed Yong offers a writing case study from his own work: "The start of any piece is known in journalism jargon as the lede. It should be a lure that entices readers and makes them want to read the rest of the story. It should be a trailer, which gives an accurate reflection of the content and tone to come. And it should be a flex, which demonstrates that the writer knows what they're doing. It's perhaps the single most important part of any piece of writing, and the part I spend the most time on. This paragraph took three fucking hours."

July Reading Recap

Now that I'm actually writing again, will my reading spree taper off? Time will tell!

→ MOONBOUND by Robin Sloan: After the Anth have solved all Earth's problems, humanity engineers a crew of beings, known as dragons, and sends them to explore the galaxy. The dragons return determined to prevent any further exploration by isolating Earth in a veil of moondust. The Anth fight back, but the dragons are invincible from their citadel on the moon, and the war is disastrous for humanity. (This is all explained in a four-page prologue.) Eleven thousand years later, a microscopic chronicler wakes up again. A young boy, Ariel, has just stumbled upon the preserved corpse that was the chronicler's previous host, and so this sentient "sourdough starter with a mech suit" leaps into Ariel's body and once again experiences the world. Earth has changed immeasurably, and mysteriously. Ariel lives in a small village dominated by a castle, as well as by a wizard who flies an airplane. Ariel has a handheld video game device and a dog that can talk. (All animals can talk.) The sky remains dust-shrouded, and soon Ariel and the chronicler will set out on an epic quest to revive the war against the dragons.

This novel is a weird and wonderful adventure that plays around with the conventions of genre, quests, chosen ones, and other classic tropes. While the story's patterns are familiar, little about it can be anticipated, and each new stage in the characters' journey brings fascinating surprises and extends the imaginative worldbuilding. MOONBOUND is quite different from Sloan's previous novels, but it has the same gentle humor and lovingly developed characters. (There are also some small references to his earlier books.) Sloan has planned this as the first book in a series, and I look forward to spending more time with these great characters and seeing other elements of the far-future Earth.

→ DIXON, DESCENDING by Karen Outen: Dixon has climbed serious mountains, but he never dreamed of attempting Everest until his brother Nate suggested it. The brothers have come into some money after their mother's death, and Nate's proposal is that they train together and then take a few months out of their lives to travel to Nepal and climb with a tour group. For Dixon, that means a semester off from the boys' middle school where he works as a psychologist, leaving his favorite kids, including one who is the target of relentless bullying. Still, Nate's dream of Everest becomes Dixon's as well, until he can't imagine not making the trip, and not reaching the summit, whatever the cost.

The novel begins on the mountain and sets up ominous foreshadowing before jumping back to establish what led the brothers there and what they've left behind. Careful shifts between time periods build up the tension as the story circles around the question of what happened. Outen did extensive research to portray the experience of climbing Everest, and her evocative writing captures both the majesty and the agony to be found on the mountain.

Dixon and Nate are Black, a rarity on the mountain that attracts some attention. Dixon's students are also young Black men, but they lack the privileges he grew up with, and his desire to help them doesn't always work out. In the portion of the book focused on the aftermath of the Everest expedition, there's an emotional story about Dixon and two of his students. While that plotline can't live up to the adventure and suspense of the Everest plot, it's well-crafted with high stakes of its own, and Outen ties the threads together in a satisfying ending. I recommend this, especially to others who share my horrified fascination with the idea of anyone climbing Everest.

→ PEOPLE COLLIDE by Isle McElroy: Eli and Elizabeth are an American couple living in Bulgaria, where she's earned a coveted fellowship. Eli is aware of being the less ambitious one, and he's hanging around with little to do while Elizabeth teaches and writes. Until one day, when Eli discovers that he's taken over Elizabeth's body. Once he reconciles himself to this strange situation, he assumes Elizabeth is in his own body, but she's nowhere to be found and isn't responding to calls. Because Eli can't explain the situation to anyone else, he has to pretend to be Elizabeth and act like Eli is the one who's disappeared. Soon a clue emerges to her possible whereabouts, and Eli is off on a search for his missing wife and his own missing body.

While the body swap is a familiar premise, McElroy bypasses most of the usual components, for good and bad. I had mixed feelings about this novel due mostly to imagining it would be a different sort of story. I was always eager to find out what would happen next, but I wasn't always as interested in where the author chose to take the story as in where I thought it might go. However, McElroy writes well, with excellent insight into the characters and relationships, and they use the premise to explore a range of ideas.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Charlie Jane Anders offers Another Way To Think About "Conflict" and "Stakes" In Your Fiction: "A lot of conflict is really about people dealing with all the weird programming that was crammed into their brains when they were younger, because most people have been indoctrinated with a ton of bad ideas about how the world works. I'm really interested in writing about the conflicts that take place within people. (In fact, one of the most interesting conflicts a character can have is the struggle to see past the toxic notion that life is about being aggressive, fighting, taking what you want, and so on.)"

June Reading Recap

I read some great, inventive, and varied novels last month!

→ THE OTHER VALLEY by Scott Alexander Howard: Odile is sixteen and friendless, and she rarely speaks to anyone at school. She doesn't seem a good candidate to vie for a competitive apprenticeship on the Conseil, but at her mother's insistence, she applies. The Conseil governs Odile's valley and makes decisions about the very small number of visits permitted to the neighboring valleys. In the valley to the west is a town identical to Odile's, exactly as every person and place existed twenty years earlier. To the east, life proceeds twenty years in the future. Visitations are only allowed in cases of extreme grief, so that loved ones may be viewed at a distance. These visits are carefully controlled because any interference could have consequences on the circumstances of future valleys. When Odile accidentally catches sight of a visiting group, the dangerous knowledge changes her prospects, leading to new friends and a chance at a spot on the Conseil.

I'm always excited to read a new twist on time travel, and I'm thrilled when the resulting story is as good as this one. From the start, I felt immersed in Odile's world and invested in her friendships and career prospects. The tension of the novel comes as much from the subtle shifts in character dynamics as the looming speculative stakes. A plot that plays around with time needs an ending that's clever, logically consistent, and satisfying, and Howard delivers. Highly recommended for my fellow fans of time-bending stories.

→ THE HAZELBOURNE LADIES MOTORCYCLE AND FLYING CLUB by Helen Simonson: In 1919, as Britain recovers from the war and the influenza, new and old ways of life collide in the seaside town of Hazelbourne. Constance, who managed a grand estate during the war, has the qualifications for a career in bookkeeping, but employers want to hire returning soldiers and encourage her to become a governess or get married. Her new friend Poppy is wonderfully modern, riding a motorcycle and running a small business staffed by other lady riders, but Poppy's wealthy upbringing makes her outlook more traditional than she realizes, and she's cavalier about money in a way Constance can never be. Poppy's brother Harris lost a leg in the war and is haunted by all the other loss he witnessed, and since everyone is determined to view him as an invalid, he has little hope in ever finding work or love.

These characters and many more populate this novel that delightfully picks apart the class and social customs of the era while also addressing the numerous ways people suffered during and after World War I. As always, Simonson writes with a clever humor as well as thoughtful compassion. I loved getting to know the wonderful characters, and I was only sorry there were so many that some dropped out in the middle of the book before resurfacing when the many subplots came together at the end. The setting is well-developed, and I learned some pieces of history I hadn't known about. I remain an enthusiastic fan of Simonson's work, and I recommend all her novels.

→ THE EXTINCTION OF IRENA REY by Jennifer Croft: A group of eight devoted translators gather for a summit with "Our Author", the celebrated Polish novelist Irena Rey. They are meeting at her home on the edge of the Białowieża Forest to translate her latest masterpiece before it's revealed to the world, as they always do. But this summit is immediately unlike every previous one. Irena's dependable husband is absent without any explanation, so there's nobody providing meals or structuring the schedule. After a couple days of chaos, Irena disappears as well, and her only message is the completed manuscript. The translators are left searching for clues in the text, the house, and the village as their usual solidarity and their sense of purpose fracture.

This novel is funny, strange, and wonderfully meta. Translations don't happen at an author's house this way in reality, but Croft is well aware as an accomplished translator herself, and she has great fun with the premise she's created. The characters refer to each other by their languages rather than their names, and a note at the beginning establishes that the book we're reading was written by the character Spanish and translated by English, who provides disapproving footnotes throughout. The story becomes increasingly unhinged, and toward the end, I wished for things to come together a bit more clearly, but I was always entertained.

→ THE DEFAULT WORLD by Naomi Kanakia: Jhanvi has a stable job and a community of other trans women in Sacramento, where she'll eventually be able to save up the money she needs for expensive gender-affirming surgeries. But she's tired of waiting, and she's bored by Sacramento. Her old college friends in San Francisco are rich tech workers who spend their leisure time organizing sex parties, and though Jhanvi finds them shallow, she also envies their life. She goes to stay at their communal house with a bold scheme: to marry one of them and become eligible for the generous trans benefits their companies provide.

This is a great premise, and Jhanvi is a great character who is motivated by so many competing desires and constantly reckoning with those contradictions. As always, Kanakia demonstrates skill at teasing apart the complicated nuances of characters and their interactions. However, I thought this novel fell short of what it might have been with a clearer throughline and different pacing. The story often felt disjointed, without enough sense of the progression between events. There's a lot that's compelling in the book, but more that frustrated me.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Molly Templeton at Reactor wonders, Can a Book Really Be For Everyone?: "Listening to [Gabrielle] Zevin, I thought about what makes a book for everyone.... I mean the kind of book that can draw packs of teens, writers, parents, readers, and everyone else in a community into a theater on one rainy Thursday afternoon. Is it the presence of universal themes? Approachable prose? Intergenerational narratives? A certain sense of transparency, like you can see what the author is doing even as you appreciate it?"