As we ease into July, I wish everyone zero hurricanes and an adequate heat infrastructure. Because it’s been so consistently rainy here, we haven’t been getting the unbearably hot summer temperatures (though I’m sure they’re coming), but the downside to that is that the ground is going to be completely saturated so if there is a hurricane shit’s definitely going to flood. Ah, the climate crisis! So present! So little political will to protect people against the consequences wrought by a handful of rich assholes and their rich asshole companies! Is it any wonder that I retreat miserably into books and never wish to venture into the outside world?
That is all to say that June was my most prolific reading month in almost two years, and I have talked about very few of those books in this space (sob). So here’s a quick recap of some of my June reading highlights. I’m starting at the end because the book I read over the weekend (yes, yes, that doesn’t count as reading it in June, but I can’t wait until the end of July to tell you about it!) was so good and so warm and so lovely that I want to bring it into your lives as quickly as possible.
Longtime followers of the blog will know of my affection for Anna-Marie McLemore, whose super-queer, super-magical YA novels have a firm place in my heart. I haven’t yet read anything by Tehlor Kay Mejia, but obviously I will need to after falling completely in love with Miss Meteor. Set in a small Arizona town called Meteor, Miss Meteor follows two former best friends, Lita and Chicky, who are trying to get Lita a win in the town’s biggest annual event, the Miss Meteor Pageant. Nobody who looks like Lita–round, dark-haired, Latina–ever wins the pageant; but Lita has a secret. She’s a star, and she’s turning back into stardust, and before she leaves the world entirely, she first wants to have this one thing.
Chicky and Lita were once inseparable, but their secrets drove them apart. Chicky was scared to tell Lita that she might be queer, and Lita was terrified of confessing to being a star, and their friendship couldn’t hold up under the weight of those secrets and the effort of keeping them. Now they’re brought back into each other’s spheres, and they’re trying to find a way back to each other. While both of them have (very! adorable!) love interests, the heart of the book is about their friendship, and I burst into tears at the end when Chicky’s finally able to be open with Lita.
Miss Meteor reminded me of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, a book I have not shut about since reading it for the first time ten thousand years ago, in 2019. Both of them deal with heavy topics — Chicky and Lita, and others in their sphere, face racist, sexist, and queerphobic bullying from their classmates — and both of them are ultimately such warm, dear, loving books about the power of friendship. Not only do Chicky and Lita come back to each other, a thing I was tearfully rooting for the whole time, but they also construct a web of support for themselves and each other, finding ways to trust and depend on jock hotshot (and trans boy) Cole and sensitive artist Junior, as well as Chicky’s three gorgeous and ferocious sisters. Y’ALL KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT SISTERS.
Read this book, friends, if you want to feel like the world is not trash. It brightened my day, my week, my month, my life.
What word are we using for books like Daisy Jones and the Six and The Final Revival of Opal and Nev? Where it’s not exactly epistolary (because there are no letters!) and it’s not exactly found documents (because it’s not really documents either, and they are also deliberately compiled by a fictional character within the world of the book), so what would we call it? The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is an oral history of a controversial rock pairing, the white British Nev and the Black American Opal, which produced an incredible album but fell apart in the aftermath of a major racist trauma at one of their events. The book is interviews compiled by journalist Sunny Curtis, the daughter of a drummer for Opal and Nev who had an affair with Opal and died before the narrator was born.
While I enjoyed Daisy Jones and the Six, The Final Revival of Opal and Nev worked even better for me. The books are superficially similar, in that each is an oral history of a fictional rock group, each compiled by a journalist with a personal connection to the story. But whereas I feel pretty distant from the World of Music (and therefore felt like I was missing a lot of what Taylor Jenkins Reid had to say about–I want to say Stevie Nicks?), Dawnie Walton manages to produce a book about music that’s about so much more than music. It’s about the industry, for sure, but mainly it’s about the way the music industry, like so many industries in America, chews up and spits out Black artists, eager for their talent but fully uninterested in their personhood.
I admit that I am–with this book and as always!–desperately allured by a book that refuses to answer one of its central questions. In this case, the question is about the level of Nev’s guilt. Is he culpable, or is he merely complicit — and does it matter? The Final Revival of Opal and Nev leaves the question open. Not only do we not know if Nev did the thing a single, untrustworthy person claims he did, we don’t even know if Opal, having been told of the claim, believes that he did it. Instead of giving us a pat answer to that question, Walton leaves it open, focusing instead on what the question means to that relationship. In the end, Nev’s specific actions matter so much less than his positionality within the industry and what he’s willing to do when push comes to shove.
Please accept major content warnings for racist violence! A key event of the book hinges on an evening in which white supremacist musicians and their fans do a horrific crime, inspired in part by the Altamont Free Concert in 1969.
I also really recommend this Shondaland interview with the author, because it’s a fascinating (and spoiler-free!) glimpse at how she got the idea for this book and how her career as a journalist influenced its structure.
Though I’m not going to talk about Fugitive Telemetry here because my comments about it would just be a recurrence of all previous shriekings about Murderbot (Murderbottttt!), I do want to mention that I adore this subgenre where it’s SF or fantasy but mainly it’s a murder mystery. Books in this subgenre I’ve enjoyed this year include A Master of Djinn (podcast interview with the author coming soon!), Fugitive Telemetry, and The Conductors. More please!
The Conductors centers on married couple Hetty and Benjy (but it’s not romantic between them, they are good friends) (no, lol, it of course proves to be romantic between them), who spent the Civil War years helping enslaved people escape from slavery to the North, making use of folk magic to bolster their work. Now the war is over, and Hetty and Benjy have settled in Philadelphia, where they are making a life together in a community of free Black folks. Hetty doesn’t feel quite as connected to her community as she once did, but that doesn’t mean she’s unaffected when an old friend of hers, Charlie, turns up dead in an alley, with a death sigil carved into his skin.
The decision to set Hetty’s story after the war is one that I love. While Glover dips into flashback to share glimpses of the work Hetty and Benjy did as conductors on the Underground Railroad, and how they built the community in which they now reside, she’s mainly interested in what the world looks like now. The people in Hetty’s community were of course scarred by their time in slavery, but Glover is less interested in trauma and more in what community among survivors looks like. To unravel the mystery of Charlie’s death, Hetty has to involve herself deeply in the lives of her friends, from whom she’s become a little distant. So as she’s working to solve this murder, she’s also re-discovering the people she loves, why she loved them, and how much she can depend on them to be in her corner. It’s a lovely emotional arc, particularly in a book whose setting and premise is so closely entwined with America’s history of slavery and trauma.
More in this universe, please! I’d love to see Hetty and Benjy solve more crimes, using their skills in magic and blacksmithing and dressmaking!
What did y’all read in June? Anything that you can’t stop pushing on your friends and loved ones?