It’s June and I have been reading some YA and I will be so honest with you: A lot of it has let me down a little bit. I’m going to start with the one that I thought unequivocally was terrific, and then I’ll work forward and we will get through this together.
Genesis Begins Again was an impulse grab at the library, and I’m so glad I picked it up. It’s a YA book that feels written for young teenagers, and specifically for black girls. Debut author Alicia D. Williams is dealing with difficult topics, and she never talks down to her readers, but it’s very clear that her intended readers are kids. (It’s still a wonderful read for me, an adult, though!)
Thirteen-year-old Genesis has a list of things to hate about herself, but the main one is almost always her skin color. She wants to have lighter skin, and she wants to be pretty like her mother, instead of dark and ugly like her (unreliable) father. When her dad brings them to a beautiful new house in a new school district, Genesis is nervous to begin again in a new school district. But she’s tough and brave, and she finds herself making new friends at her school (and navigating which people are true friends, and which ones want to use her).
Williams is a teacher herself, and her grasp on school dynamics is perfect. I loved watching Genesis grow into herself, with the help of a math tutor who’s proud of his black heritage and a choir teacher who believes in Genesis and her potential. At the same time, she’s navigating complicated relationships with her father, who keeps promising to change and never seems to; her grandmother, who doesn’t conceal her wish for a lighter-skinned grandchild; and her mother, who loves her fiercely but can’t always protect her. The book is clear-eyed about these adults, and when the book ends, you have a sense of what their place will be in Genesis’s life after the book is over.
I haven’t even mentioned the talent show or Genesis’s friend’s OCD, so just rest assured that there’s plenty to discover in this book! It’s gentle, kind, and brave, and I hope to read many more books by this author.
Spin the Dawn is a Chinese-inspired fairy tale about a girl called Maia who disguises herself as a boy to protect her family and win a chance at becoming the Emperor’s Royal Tailor. But her path is clouded by the Emperor’s fiance, who demands that the winner of the tailoring competition fulfill an impossible task (one that will be familiar if you read “Allerleirauh” as a kid). To Maia’s sometime relief and sometimes frustration, the Emperor’s magician, Edan, has taken an interest in her; and her father has given her a pair of scissors that enable her to do wonderful feats with her sewing.
The good: I looooved Elizabeth Lim’s world. The way to my heart is always through a road trip, so I was delighted when Maia’s tailor-trials-at-court days were over and her kicky-road-trip-with-Edan days began. They travel through many different parts of the world, and Lim describes each one in fascinating, vivid detail. Kicky road trips 5ever. Though the magic in this book has many, many, many varieties, features, and rules, it was all still fun to discover, and its limitations fun to watch Maia and Edan circumvent.
The bad: I still don’t like stories where the love interest in hundreds of years old, yet has Never Felt Love until he met this one teenage girl. The power dynamics are squicky, and Maia and Edan were no exception. I appreciated that Lim didn’t topple them into insta-love — they have a fair amount of banter and trust-building before anyone kisses anyone — but I still wasn’t able to suspend disbelief. Since the back half of the book is heavily predicated on buy-in for Maia and Edan’s romance, it made for ultimately a slightly unsatisfying read.
Note: I received an e-galley of Spin the Dawn for review from the publisher.
I saw Castle of Lies described as a CW-esque backstabbing machinations fest with a poly relationship, which is about as strong a pitch for a book as I can imagine. It’s about a girl named Thelia who is ace-spectrum and an ice-cold bitch; her cousin Parsifal, who is a promiscuous bisexual and whom Thelia eventually bangs; and a soldier in the invading elf army, Sapphire, who is nonbinary and also not-human.
If that summary sounds a little salty, it’s because I regretted the lost potential in this book. I actually really loved Thelia and wanted good things to happen for her, but it was frustrating to see an ace-spectrum character whose main trait as perceived by others is icy. (Again, I love icy bitch women characters! It’s just.) And like, Sapphire, I in fact think we should have way more non-human characters who don’t adhere to human gender binaries, but at the same time — there’s no other non-binary characters in the book! For the only one to be literally not human, it just felt pointed.
All of this meant that I had a hard time connecting with the book. I do truly love poly relationships and would be delighted to see more of them in litrature, but so far the one in Rachel Hartman’s books is the only one I have truly loved. Castle of Lies and That Inevitable Victorian Thing really let me down ideologically.
Note: I received an e-galley of Castle of Lies for review from the publisher.
I received such a glowing review of Meagan Spooner’s Sherwood that I decided to break my rule of no Robin Hood stories. My only two exceptions are the Disney movie with the hot fox and the Monica Furlong book Robin’s Country, and those got grandfathered in because I encountered them so young. In real life, I just do not care for Robin Hood or King Arthur stories. I would like to like them! But I do not. Here we are.
Turns out that even when a Robin Hood story is feminist and subversive and complicated, I still don’t like Robin Hood. I don’t know what to say! It’s not my thing! The premise is that Robin of Locksley dies in the Crusades, and Marian is trying to save her maid’s friend Will Scarlet from being hanged by the wicked Guy of Gisborne (who also wants to bang marry her).
In trying to save Will, Marian accidentally creates the illusion that Robin is alive again — alive, and fighting for the people of Nottingham. At first she doesn’t intend to encourage the story, but then she sees the ways she might be able to help. And as time goes on, and “Robin Hood” pursues bigger, wealthier targets, she finds herself losing control of the story, and of the person she wants herself to be.
The feminist twist on Robin Hood was really cool and really interesting, and if you’re a Robin Hood person, I bet you’d love this. I got frustrated with some of the moral complexity that got introduced later on, because I thought the book was making really disingenuous arguments? Like, at some point it’s raised to Marian that if she steals money from the government, they won’t be able to feed the troops in the Holy Land and then it’ll just be a different group of people who will starve. Those? Are not? Equivalent?
“But did you ever think that if you rob the rich to give to the poor, it’ll make it harder for the government to fund their unjust war?” YES SANDRA, THAT HAD ALREADY OCCURRED TO ME AND I CONSIDERED IT A PRO.
Anyway, Sherwood is a mostly really terrific book that I’d probably have loved if I liked Robin Hood. But I don’t. Down with Robin Hood. It’s weird that the whole thing is just waiting for Richard the Lionheart to come back from the Crusades! Don’t the Robin Hood people recognize that monarchy is fundamentally corrupt and they’re just going to be taxed by a different set of assholes? Dang.
As you can see, I need some YA recs that will genuinely blow me away. What have you been reading lately?