Being a small-c catholic reader who came from fantasy means that I have a great appetite (appetite! a theme!) for weird literary fiction, where weird can mean anything from “xenophobic haunted house” (White Is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi) to “eating turtles to be immortal” (The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanigahara) to “inventing a fictional blues song whose made-up singer then haunts you because racism” (White Tears, Hari Kunzru). Though, uh, as I write this list, which I did while glancing at my litfic shelves, I am detecting a decided preference for haunted things and structural oppression.

Maybe that is why I did not get on so well with My Year Abroad! Nothing and nobody is haunted¹ and there is not much structural oppression although there is lots of Wealth. And I am not very interested in Wealth. No rich people are eaten in this book, by the way! Despite several alluring moments when you think they might be! Do not expect a “Soylent Green is [rich] people!” moment, for you will be disappointed in that expectation, as I was. Eat the rich. Or at least heavily tax them. Or at least enforce the existing tax laws on them.

Half of My Year Abroad is about Tiller’s odd, circumstantial encounter with Pong, a businessman who scoops Tiller up one summer to help with his business (why? we never know!), an experience that has left Tiller scarred and traumatized. The other half, interspersed, takes place in the aftermath. Tiller has attached himself to an older widow, Val, and her son, who are in witness protection and whose well-being Tiller has grown to care deeply about.

While the Pong sections of the books are the ones that verge most clearly into surrealism (which I tend to love), I struggled to feel connected to Tiller’s adventures with Pong. In part this is because they were so episodic, but in larger part because Tiller doesn’t feel connected to them. In both halves of the book he’s chasing a sense of connection and belonging that has been largely absent to his life before Pong. But with Val and her son, he’s able to carve out a role for himself, to make himself an active participant rather than a sightseer in his own life. My Year Abroad has drawn comparisons to The Great Gatsby, and perhaps to nobody’s surprise, I still do not love a Nick Carraway.

Lee’s writing tends towards the maximalist, with mouth-watering (and occasionally stomach-churning) descriptions of food and place. He’s as lavish describing a poorly-recalled college karaoke night as a gourmet four-course meal, and the book does succeed in conveying the too-much-ness of a wealthy (or in some cases simply an American) lifestyle. It is a long book. I am very old and tired.

I would add for readers a content warning for the latter fifth of the book, when things get particularly dark and weird. Val has persistent suicidal ideation and makes several suicide attempts; Tiller is coerced into unpaid labor; a terminally ill character attempts to save his own life through alchemical measures that are doomed to failure; and Tiller gets roofied and raped by his host’s daughter Constance. (He doesn’t say no, but also is unable to resist or give consent due to being high, and Constance has deliberately drugged him in order to get him in that state.) I wasn’t quite able to figure out how the book felt about the rape — Tiller clearly feels weird about it but also describes it as “the greatest ever itch for the greatest ever scratch.” Admittedly it’s hard to apply real-life morality to something as surreal as My Year Abroad’s final act, but overall I felt like this sequence, and Tiller’s subsequent relationship with Constance, played into the idea that men constantly want and enjoy sex and thus can’t be raped. I overall felt very icky about it.

So! Yeah! I love weird litfic but this specific one was not my cup of tea. Or jamu. Or mercury. (That’s a little My Year Abroad joke for you.)

Note: I received a review copy of My Year Abroad from the publisher; this has not impacted the contents of my review.

The post Review: My Year Abroad, Chang-Rae Lee appeared first on Reading the End.

Jeanne: There are lots of good things about Vinge’s classic science fiction novel The Snow Queen (published in 1980). There are also lots of less good things. There are just lots of things, as it’s 465 pages long.

Jenny: The thesis of my position paper is that this was too many pages to be. Has Joan Vinge thought about writing this same book but only two hundred and sixty-five pages long? How about that?

So the premise of this book is that this planet called Tiamat is ruled alternately by a queen from the Winters and the Summers, and every 150 years they swap out who rules. During the reign of the Winter Queen, the fancy-fancy technology planets have access to Tiamat via a wormhole, and during the reign of the Summers: No wormhole, no planet visitors, no trade in fancy tech. The current Winter Queen, Arienrhod, has come up with a scheme to prolong her reign: She impregnates a bunch of unconscious Summer women with cloned versions of herself, in the hopes that one of the clones will grow up and become the Summer Queen.

Fast forward the number of years it takes for a clone to grow up, and our hero is a girl called Moon. She and her cousin Sparks (yes) both plan to be sibyls when they grow up. It only works out for her. In despair, Sparks sets out to make his fortune in the city, and what with one thing and another, they are separated. I can’t describe to you how little I cared about them ever finding each other again. IS THAT CALLOUS?

Jeanne: No, it is not callous because we do not know them. I thought they were going to be the kind of background characters who show what a world is like before we meet the main characters on the big stage. But then they turn out to be the main characters? And the only thing we know about Moon is that she’s a sibyl and even though Sparks leaves her in their hometown because he can’t be a sibyl too, her driving motivation is to be with him again. And the only thing we know about Sparks is that his father was an “off-worlder” and that motivates him to make his way to the big city where “summers” like him are considered bigger rubes than rural Ohioans in downtown Manhattan–they are “superstitious fish-farmers reeking of seaweed and tradition.”

I thought the pace picked up once Moon accidentally left the planet with some smugglers and Sparks started meeting people in the city. A policewoman, a “Blue,” named Jerusha gives readers the first clue about why the sibyls are important and why they are not allowed in the city, called Carbuncle: “Sibyls were the carriers of the Old Empire’s lost wisdom, meant to give the new civilizations that built on its ruins a key to unlock its buried secrets. And if there was anything the Hegemony’s wealthy and powerful didn’t want, it was to see this world stand on its own feet and grow strong enough to deny them the water of life.”

The “water of life” is produced by killing the mers who live in the seas of Tiamat. Predictably, for a book published in 1980, the colonists, “winters,” claim that the mers are non-sentient, only to find out later that they are sentient creatures. (Note: I did enjoy the “snowbird” theme in this novel, that the off-worlders are called “winters” because they are transients who have little interest in the struggles of the native people.)

Jerusha is fighting to keep her job in a patriarchal culture that doesn’t value her, and I identify with her so much it hurts. I’m assuming (hoping) that this is less true for Jenny, as I am older. When we first started to learn anything about Jerusha I was amazed at how much her struggles resemble mine at work. She says “I’m fed up with this! I’d do anything to be doing an honest job, somewhere where they want a real police force and not a laughingstock.” When her friend and colleague asks why she doesn’t transfer, she asks “do you have any idea how long it takes to get a transfer?” And then she sighs and says “Besides, I’ve tried. No luck. They ‘need me here.’” We are told that “the bitterness in her voice burned like acid.” And then she gets the question I’ve been asked so often: “why don’t you quit?” The answer, of course, is a line from Tony Hoagland’s poem “Reasons to Survive November,” that “my survival is their failure.”

Jenny: I hate that you’ve felt that way about your job! And yeah, I found Jerusha massively more compelling than our two main characters (or the damn queen). I’d have been a million times more interested in a book that focused on her, Ngenet, and the rest of the smugglers, not least because the author spent time showing us why those characters acted the way they did. This is particularly true for Jerusha: you really get to see what her moral code is and why she keeps pressing on with a job that seems so thankless.

Jeanne: Yes. There’s a moment when Jerusha is at work that kills me, another part where I really identify with her. She finds that “her eyes were hot and brimming suddenly; she did not blink until the reservoir of tears subsided, so that none escaped her control.” She cares, but she can’t let anyone she works with see that.

Jenny: I wish Joan Vinge had given Moon even a spark (no pun intended) of an interesting personality, because one thing I truly loved about the book was the way it blended fantasy and SF elements. What seems at first to be magic — the sibyls’ power to form a psychic connection and find information they don’t consciously know — turns out to be… well, still magic, I guess. But, like, science-y magic! There’s a sort of infinite Old Empire data source that the sibyls are drawing on, and Moon discovers late in the book that the data source is located on (in?) Tiamat. That’s genuinely really cool! Why wasn’t the whole book about that?

Perhaps to nobody’s surprise, I was immediately hung up on the situation with the mers. As with the sibyls’ power, the mers seem to be magical and turn out to be science, mutant creatures that were developed on purpose, with science, to have a kind of sentience that isn’t easily accessed through human means / human communication. Again, very cool! It’s the kind of xenobiology that appeals to me, where the species are so different in mindset and culture that it’s nearly impossible to find a point of connection between them.

But I couldn’t get over the mer slaughter. Regardless of their sentience (I guessed they were sentient too, and I guess we can’t blame an older book for using a trope that feels, forty years after the book’s publication, a bit passe), the brutality of the mer hunting seemed indefensible — and it seemed clear early on that the book thought so, too. It is unaccountable to me that we’re asked, in the final third of the book, to witness Sparks doing an absolutely brutal mer hunt, motivated by revenge on Ngenet (who’s trying to protect the mers in his area), and then to be asked to believe that Sparks is a good person really, underneath it all. Is he? Is he, Jeanne?

Jeanne: No, he isn’t. But who among us is good? Sparks is an object for Moon’s affection and a sign that she won’t turn out as bad as her clone-mother, Arianrhod, because she treats him–even him, having seen what she saw–as a person who is still capable of atoning for his mistakes.

Jenny: I think this is what bugged me! We see no sign that he’s interested in atoning for his mistakes, or that he’s working on any kind of plan to atone for his mistakes. The idea Moon is pushing is that he’s good at the core, and I think I’ve become (over the past four years especially) allergic to the idea that there’s some core of moral character that can be divorced from the actions a person takes. I wanted to see Sparks commit to repairing the harm he’s done, maybe even, I dunno, apologize to some of the people he’s hurt. But that doesn’t happen, and it really damaged the “happy” ending for me.

Jeanne: I agree that the way Vinge blends fantasy and SF elements is one of the best parts of this book. I am always enthusiastic about a world in which there’s old technology that the characters don’t know how to use because they’re the degenerate remnants of an earlier, more advanced society. I love the explanation Moon gets on another planet, Kharemough, about what it means to be a sibyl when she has asked “how could the Old Empire put sibyls everywhere, if no god did? Weren’t they only humans?” The answer is:

They were….But in some ways they had the power of gods. They could travel between worlds directly, in weeks or months, not years–they had hyperlight communicators and stardrives. And yet their Empire fell apart in the end…even they overextended themselves. Or so we think.

But even as the Empire fell, some remarkable and selfless group had created a storehouse, a data bank, of the Empire’s learning in every area of human knowledge. They had hoped that with all of humanity’s discoveries recorded in one central, inviolable place, they would make the impending collapse of their civilization less complete, and the rebuilding that much swifter. And because they realized that technical collapse might be virtually total on many worlds, they had devised the simplest outlets for their data bank that they could conceive of–human beings. Sibyls, who could transmit their receptivity directly to their chosen successors, blood to blood.

And here’s the really interesting part–it’s not just technology, it’s also biology:

A sibyl’s ‘infection’ is a man-made disease, a bio-technical construct so sophisticated that we’ve barely begun to unravel its subtleties. It creates, or perhaps implants, certain restructurings in the brain tissue that make a sibyl receptive to a faster-than-light communication medium. You become a receiver, and a transmitter. You communicate directly with the original data source. That’s where you are when you drown in nothingness: within the computer’s circuits, not lost in space. Or sometimes you are in communion with other sibyls living on other worlds, who have answers to questions the Old Empire never thought to ask.

I’m less enthusiastic about any plot that involves Fate, especially when Fate is a blind old woman and turns out to have been another sibyl all along. But again, it seems to me that Jerusha is the true heart of the story, because at the end of it she provides context for what has happened on Tiamat. When it seems like Moon has triumphed and everything is going to be okay, one of Jerusha’s officers asks “what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?” and Jerusha replies “indifference….Indifference…is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don’t stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn’t act, it allows. And that’s what gives it so much power.”

Jenny: I loved this quote!! I agree that it felt like the heart of the book. Apart from the Moon/Sparks relationship, which as I say I did not care about at all, the book was at its strongest when it showed characters working for what they cared about. Like, Ngenet was a fairly minor character, but I felt so tender toward him knowing that he was trying to save and protect the mers in his area.

Jeanne: Although there are things about The Snow Queen that might seem dated, the warning against indifference does not. In the last four decades we’ve seen what happens when neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. –What do you think, Jenny? Why does the Queen put the “shards of ice” (the metaphor from the original fairy tale) into Sparks’ heart? Is she merely a warning against a heartless female in power?

Jenny: I would have loved to understand the Queen better! She’s completely indifferent to the suffering of her people, to the point of planning biological warfare against the Summers to prevent them from interfering in her plan for dominance, but she cares a lot about Sparks and about retaining her power, and I was never sure why either of those things was important to her. She did feel like a more generic woman-in-power villain, which was frustrating, especially in contrast to Jerusha, who is ambitious in her own way, but who tries to do the right thing, no matter the cost to herself.

Jenny: Final verdict: Incredible worldbuilding, shame about the protagonists.

Jeanne: We give our award for best supporting characters to Jerusha and Ngenet.

The post The Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge appeared first on Reading the End.

(Bear with me; I will get to Time War in a minute.)

–what a particular piece of art meant. My mother said, “You don’t have to worry about that. You just have to look at what the artist made, and see if it resonates anything in you. And if not, maybe you weren’t the audience for it.” This advice was not directed at me, a person too proud to admit it if I didn’t know what Jackson Pollock was on about (which I didn’t then and still don’t), but it has proved to be valuable advice all the same. There’s a particularity to artistic stylization — in modern art, in poetry, in your swooshier prose writing — that requires a resonance between creator and consumer, and if it doesn’t happen, you’re nowhere.

If you’re thinking I have used up a lot of words in a row as a preface to admitting that I didn’t love This Is How You Lose the Time War, you are perfectly correct. But I didn’t love it in a way I find interesting and want to think more about. All signs pointed to me and this book being a perfect match. It’s a semi-epistolary time travel romance about a woman called Red from a sciencey time army and a woman called Blue from a magicky time army, and they do time battles and thwart each other’s plans and fall in love. On paper this should have been great for me. I love it when a murderbird character finds herself in disconcerting possession of an emotion, and this book had two murderbirds.

On the other hand, this book isn’t so much a time travel story or a romance story (although it is both of those things) as it is a vehicle for swooshy prose. Here is what the prose is like:

She stops when she finds the letter.

Kneels.

The others gather round: What has disturbed her so? An omen? A curse? Some flaw in their lumberjackery?

The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft. Perhaps local legends tell of some fairy or frozen goddess in these woods, seen for an instant, then gone. Red wonders what expression she wore as she placed the needle.

She memorizes the message. She feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and performs a slow arithmetic of years.

I am on record as being generally more interested in story-forward books than prose-forward ones, and you may accept that as a statement of my own starting point. But regardless of your feelings about books that have “prose delivery vehicle” as a prominent goal (they are frequently not my cup of tea, Marilynne Robinson), they play a high-risk game in the same way that nonrepresentational art or poetry do. I can appreciate the hard work that went into Jackson Pollock’s paintings all day, but they will never stop me in my tracks the way Cy Twombly’s The Four Seasons did at the Tate Modern. I was rocked back on my heels by those paintings. Poetry functions the same way: Whether you understand the sense of it on a vocab-and-syntax level is often irrelevant to how emotionally impactful you find it.

We spoke on podcast recently about how utterly subjective hope is, in books — how the same book can make one person feel exhausted and miserable, and another person rejuvenated and hopeful. I believe that any piece of art that has as a main goal the evocation of emotion and mood narrows its audience, purely because it is functioning on a different level of engagement that slightly bypasses the “interpret the words and their meanings” level and gets into something far harder to articulate.

When a book or a poem or a piece of art works like this for you, it really really works. It feels like something beyond the intellectual experience of reading, or even the typical emotional experience of reading. It’s more visceral, like the book has gone fishing for exactly you and lodged its hooks in your soft tender heart and now you are just being dragged along, willy-nilly, wherever it wants to take you. It’s intense. Maybe you think about it for years and years afterward, like I do about this passage from White Is for Witching:

In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?

The very-very-personal-ness of this kind of writing and how it hits you and how it’s meant to hit you does truly mean that it’s Not for Everyone in a way that can be quite hard to predict. You can appreciate the above passage on a sentence level and a meaning level, you can get it without that passage slamming into you like a freight train, the way it does to me. As I’ve said, This Is How You Lose the Time War described in bullet points is such a me book that it’s almost comical; but you can’t bullet point how noticeable prose will make you feel. I’m not even convinced you can bullet point how it’s meant to make you feel. Leah Bobet¹ said something so sensible about this recently:

Relatedly, I’ve realized after years what it is I *like* about poetry.

There’s a lot of good in a form where our interior lives exist without pressure for explanation or translation.

— I came in like a breaking ball (@leahbobet) July 15, 2019

How can cover copy tell you whether a prose-forward story will speak to your interior life, or a collection of poetry? It’s impossible, even impossibler than marketing materials typically are in predicting what you’re going to like. Self-serving as it may seem to say this in a post about a book I didn’t like that litrally everybody else in the world seems to adore, it also isn’t a case of anybody having messed up. The authors didn’t make a misstep. I didn’t not get it. It’s just that the match between them and me didn’t occur. Their elegant, complicated, weird swooshy writing didn’t resonate anything in me.

Sometimes that’s just how the fuck it goes.

Note: I received an ARC of this ebook from the publisher for review consideration. This hasn’t impacted the contents of my review.

The post This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone appeared first on Reading the End.

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?

The post YA Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

What I’m saying is that I read a lot of books in January. Some were YA.² Here’s a round-up of those.

Beasts Made of Night, Tochi Onyebuchi

An excellent cover for an excellent book! Beasts Made of Night takes us to the city of Kos, where mages can call forth the spirits of sins from the sinners. Aki like Taj come forward to eat the sin-beasts that result, though eating sins marks their skin with tattoos and eventually drives them mad. I loved this fictional Nigerian city and the scrappy street kids that occupied it, and Onyebuchi drops plenty of hints about the magic the wider world contains. I’ll very much look forward to the sequel.

Burn Baby Burn, Meg Medina

I’ve been meaning to read a book by Meg Medina for untold ages, and at last I have done so! Burn Baby Burn takes place in Brooklyn in 1977, when the city is terrorized by the Son of Sam and our protagonist, Nora, is terrorized by the increasing violence and unpredictability of her older brother. Medina evokes the heat and danger of this time in New York, and I was glad to see a depiction of a type of family violence that rarely comes up in fiction.

Everless, Sara Holland

I loved the premise of Everless but thought it lost something in the execution. In Jules Ember’s world, time is literally money: Days and months and years are extracted from the poor and, by and large, given to the rich. When she goes to work at the Everless estate, Jules expects to gain some time to put away and maybe to solve the secrets her father has always kept from her. Holland maybe has a few too many balls in the air in her debut novel, such that the plot twist towards the end feels more confusing than shocking.

Wild Beauty, Anna-Marie McLemore

And Anna-Marie McLemore continues to make me revisit my dislike of magic realism. Wild Beauty is the story of the Nomeolvides women, five in each generation, who tend the grounds at La Pradera and whose love is a curse. When the Nomeolvides girls admit to each other that they have all fallen in love with the wealthy Bay Briar, they make sacrifices to La Pradera to keep it from taking her from them. The next day, a boy called Fel appears in their garden, with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

McLemore’s writing is as lush and dreamy as it was in When the Moon Was Ours, and she continues to write queer romance stories (and straight ones) that make my heart sing with their respectfulness and loveliness. She’s quickly become a must-read author for me.

Here We Are Now, Jasmine Warga

This was recommended by one of the authors in my December YA Agenda column, and I was delighted to check it out and discover this new author. Tal has long suspected that famous musician Julian Oliver is her father (the father her mother won’t talk about), but that doesn’t mean she’s prepared for him to show up at her door. She goes with him to see her grandfather in hospital before he dies, and in the process she and Julian learn about each other and themselves.

As always with secret-baby stories, Here We Are Now doesn’t quite manage to get me to buy Tal’s mother’s reasons for concealing her existence from Julian. She still just seemed like an immoral jerk. Apart from that, though, Warga gets at a lot of real truths about emotions, family, friendship, and the human experience. It was also terrific to see a protagonist who’s culturally Muslim but (mostly) doesn’t practice.

Turtles All the Way Down, John Green

Actually I finished this in February, but close enough. In the five years since John Green has published a book, I had a lot of time to get annoyed with the narrative of John Green, Savior of Young Adult Fiction, but no new John Green books to read. Turns out, he’s a pretty good writer. I sort of forgot! Turtles All the Way Down features a treasure of a best friend character, plenty of snappy dialogue, a heartbreaking depiction of OCD, and an actually genuinely good and effective therapist. Good stuff!

So that’s my January in YA! Did you read any good YA this past month? Anything I shouldn’t miss?

The post January YA Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

First of all, Tarttelin lets her protagonist, Max, feel generally okay about being intersex. He worries about sex and children and loneliness in the context of his intersexuality, but mostly, he knows who he is and feels fine about it. The uncertainty he faces about his identity generally comes from outside him — his parents, his cousin Hunter, his classmates and girlfriend Sylvie.

More broadly, Golden Boy acknowledges the insufficiency of a gender binary. Max talks with his doctor (a nice doctor, oh God it was such a relief for him to have a kind, smart, sympathetic doctor) about the science on intersexuality, what we do and don’t know, and what areas are under-researched because intersex folks often get lumped in with trans folks, to the probable benefit of neither. Tarttelin isn’t voyeuristic about Max’s condition or the various health issues he faces in the book, but she’s also not coy about them: Dr. Verma tells Max (and us) in very plain language what’s happening with his body and what it means.

SO. That was the good stuff. For more, here’s a review of Golden Boy by intersex writer and OII-USA¹ executive director Hida Viloria.

Now for my gripes. The first, and biggest, is a marketing gripe. When I read about Golden Boy online, the implication of the descriptive copy was that the book was primarily about a family coping with their social circle discovering that Max is intersex. It is actually not about that at all. In fact what it’s about is Max’s rape by a family friend and the fallout and recovery from that. He gets raped in the first few chapters, and it is a several-pages-long rape scene for which I was emotionally unprepared after this several-decades-long year we’ve been having. THUS. If you are someone who does not choose to read graphic rape scenes, you may wish to give Golden Boy a miss.

(Rape culture is so weird, y’all. I started reading Golden Boy to take a break from another book I was reading in which a sexual assault had just occurred. When the rape scene in Golden Boy started, I felt really shitty and miserable about it but I kept reading because it felt like it would be rude to stop reading this Socially Important Book. Rude to whom? Rude how? I don’t even know.)

Anyway. I kept reading because I figured the worst was already behind me, which was true. Tarttelin is respectful of Max’s feelings and his recovery process,² if a trifle didactic, and even though the resolution of this storyline is awfully tidy and suggests a level of closure that I found improbable, I didn’t have any complaints with the author’s treatment of the emotional fallout.

A few other things: Max uses the word retarded at one point. (His younger brother, Daniel, is clearly on the autism spectrum, though nobody explicitly says so, which made it even more depressing to see the word go unchallenged.) His girlfriend, Sylvie, who is portrayed in a very positive light, refers to some female athletes at her school as “like, steroid aggressive…crazy, butch try-hards.” And in a book where Max is perpetually pushing back against the idea that being intersex means he must be gay or bi, it’s uncomfortable that the only character in the book who is gay is also a rapist.

So I mean, a mixed bag. I wish we were not at a place where very few books have to carry the burden of representation for a group as widely diverse in biology and experience as the intersex community. By saying Golden Boy was not the book for me, I worry that I’m pushing readers away from one of very, very few books with a respectful depiction of an intersex protagonist. I don’t have a good solution for this, except that I hope we can continue to support a diverse book world that can lighten each book’s individual burden of representation.

The post Review: Golden Boy, Abigail Tarttelin appeared first on Reading the End.

In case you aren’t familiar with Amy Biehl’s story (I wasn’t), she was an activist and Fulbright scholar who was attacked and murdered in the South African township of Gugulethu in 1993, on the eve of apartheid’s demise. Four men were convicted of her murder, then later pardoned under the terms of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which offered amnesty for political crimes in exchange for full public disclosure. Biehl’s parents publicly offered forgiveness to her killers and even employed two of them at the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust, which they established in South Africa to empower township youths.

Van der Leun’s efforts to uncover the story of what happened on the day of Amy Biehl’s murder are tireless. She’s able to track down and speak with an impressive number of the people involved — police, suspects, witnesses — although twenty years on, they rarely have much of substance to add to official accounts. The thrust of Van der Leun’s argument seems to be that neither the South African criminal justice system in 1993 nor the political and social systems in of the present day are perfect. Which, I mean — yeah? Systems are flawed? I don’t know that I needed to spend 500 pages navigating class divisions in South Africa in order to be convinced of that.

As a travel writer, Justine van der Leun evokes the people and places of poverty-stricken South Africa incredibly well. Well, but at incredible length. We spend page after page on the family drama of one of the convicted killers, Easy Nofemela, and don’t get me wrong: He’s a wonderful character in van der Leun’s telling. It’s just not clear why, in a book ostensibly dedicated to unpicking the many threads of Amy Biehl’s 1993 murder, so many chapters are dedicated to Easy and Justine driving around shooting the shit.

Though the book is certainly overlong and could have done with being shortened by about a third, I think expectations were also a factor in my unenjoyment. Many South Africans have grown critical (or always were) of the TRC’s work, and I hoped that van der Leun would bring to light some of these criticisms and how the TRC’s failings continue to affect South African lives. That isn’t this book, and it’s not clear that van der Leun even wanted it to be.

My love for scholarship on restorative justice remains undimmed, however! While I was reading this, I also dipped in and out of Priscilla Hayner’s classic text on truth commissions, Unspeakable Truths, and it is just as excellent as I remembered. What a fascinating subject.

POLL TIME! Who here knew who Amy Biehl was when I first mentioned her name? And secondary question, this one for millennials only: Were you aware of apartheid as a kid? I totally was not, and it’s really weird to think that that was still going on when I was in grade school.

The post Review: We Are Not Such Things, Justine van der Leun appeared first on Reading the End.

Further investigation on the Marvel website has revealed that Phil Noto draws like he’s running out of time and that therefore you can find his work both in the ongoing Black Widow comic (though I don’t advise it) and in what I am sure is the greatest comic of all time throughout all of history, POE DAMERON COMIC.

I feel like those capital letters did not adequately convey my enthusiasm to read a whole entire comic about Poe Dameron, so I will let John Boyega’s beautiful sunshine face say it for me.

The only way I could be more excited for POE DAMERON COMIC would be if it were the story of his space adventures with Rey and Finn. I have been given to understand that is not the premise and I should shut up about that anyway because there will be no further space adventures of Poe and Rey and Finn until practically 2018 and what’s the use of dreaming of things you can’t have.

Sigh.

Anyway.

Black Widow follows a very expectable comic story arc, in that Natasha has mini-missions to complete every issue in service of a greater mission, which is to Atone for her Wrongs (these are not specified in the first two volumes, which is what I read). This is fine. It’s monster of the week in comics form, and the adventures are reasonably engaging — nothing to write home about, but not every comic has to be.

Regrettably, we don’t get to see Natasha being very good at her job, nor particularly proactive about how she gets shit done. Mission after mission goes south because of bad intel or poor planning on her part, and it’s framed as bad luck a la the “This looks bad” recurring joke in Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye. But whereas in Hawkeye it fits into a broader character arc for Clint, it’s hard to know in Black Widow what we’re supposed to make of it. Is Natasha The Most Competent (which is how I conceive of the character) and just having a lengthy run of bad fortune? Is she Medium Competent and this is what life is like for Medium Competent Spies? It would help so much to see one mission that goes exactly as planned — cf. how Captain America: The Winter Solder opens with a successful mission that lets us see how this unit is supposed to operate, before everything goes to hell.

We also get scenes of both Daredevil (a former romantic partner) and the Punisher (er, not) explaining to Natasha why she’s doing things Wrong and how a person on the side of Righteousness would behave. In Issue 8, she runs into the Winter Soldier, who kills someone for hurting her because he looooooooves her. None of it’s egregious, but cumulatively, and in a comic with a female lead and a male creative team, it rubbed me the wrong way.

Then on top of that we have this small subsidiary plotline in which Natasha’s neighbor is being beaten by her husband, and Natasha’s always all “oh Ana you should leave him,” and then in Issue 3 she’s fed up with it and she threatens the husband with bodily harm if he continues his wicked ways. I get it, right, like there’s been some question in this comic (from dudes, it literally is all dudes who have been expressing this concern) about whether Natasha’s in the right place morally. Since we don’t yet have enough information to adequately evaluate that question as it relates to all her Missions, this incident with the neighbor exists to show a straightforwardly disinterested Good Deed by Natasha. A classic deployment of the Pet the Dog trope.

Except that “you should leave” with no further follow-up is a hella simplistic and unhelpful response to intimate partner abuse, and by assaulting this dude and then peacing out for two months or whatever, Natasha’s creating some A+ conditions for him to retaliate against his wife. I guess the scene works if you don’t know anything about domestic violence, but it’d be super swell if people who don’t know anything about domestic violence could take a break from writing about domestic violence. Because, breaking news alert, if you do not do your due diligence prior to writing about a complex issue, you most likely will end up reproducing harmful stereotypes.

In sum: A three-star comic docked a star for sexism. Maybe let a lady write Black Widow next time? (There already is a next time, and the creative team is all male still. #comics)

Who here has read POE DAMERON COMIC? I need reports! Is it as good as I am imagining?

The post Black Widow, Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto appeared first on Reading the End.

The Nurses has a similar structure to Pledged, in which chapters following four individual nurses through their work days alternate with chapters that offer contextual information based in research and interviews. For instance, one chapter may address a specific nurse’s concern that her coworker is stealing narcotics from patients, and the next will discuss narcotics addictions in the nursing profession.

I love reading about jobs that are not my job, and I found Pledged horrifying and interesting when I read it a few years back, so believe me when I say that I was primed to enjoy The Nurses. It is just that all the racism made it difficult.

Let’s compare and contrast two (of the very few) racial interactions in this book, so you can be horrified along with me. That’ll be fun, right? This one’s between Juliette, a white lady here serving as the charge nurse for her unit, and her Dominican tech, Lucy.

Lucy ignored her, as if she didn’t understand; she seemed to have selective comprehension of the English language. She did this frequently to Juliette, even though techs were supposed to follow charge nurses’ instructions.

Juliette exploded, upset about Lucy’s treatment of the patient. “Oh, will someone just say it to her in a language she understands?” She regretted the words as she said them. . .

For the rest of the day, Lucy ignored Juliette even more blatantly than usual. “Where’d the patient go?” Juliette asked. “What room is that patient in?” Lucy wouldn’t look at her. If Lucy had a question, she asked another nurse, even though Juliette was charge.

The next day, when Juliette goes to tell her superior what happened, and her superior mentions that Lucy was upset by it, Juliette says “Oh, give me a break. Lucy was insubordinate before this escalated.”

Juliette bought an apology card and a box of chocolates from the gift shop. When she tried to apologize, Lucy refused to accept them.

“I don’t need a card,” Lucy said.

“I’m trying to say I’m sorry,” Juliette said, genuinely trying to make amends.

“What you did was wrong.”

“Yes, it was. I’m trying to apologize,” Juliette repeated, still conciliatory.

Lucy stood up and walked away. Juliette left the card and the chocolates on her computer.

Let’s sum up this interaction so far, shall we? A white charge nurse made a xenophobic remark to a Latina coworker under her direct supervision. She did not apologize the day of the incident, nor did she emphasize to Lucy or the staff that the remark was made in a moment of stressy anger and was not representative of her real opinion. When speaking about it to her supervisor, she downplayed her own behavior while tattling on Lucy for misbehaving. The author’s framing of the incident and its follow-up is heavily sympathetic to Juliette.

BUT WAIT. A few weeks later, Juliette’s at a continuing ed workshop and brings up this incident and its aftermath. “Lucy hasn’t spoken to me since,” she said.

“What Lucy was doing, before the incident and after you apologized, is a form of bullying that is common in nursing today,” the facilitator said. “Ignoring is a form of bullying because you’re blocking that person out. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like somebody. That’s fine. You don’t have to. But you need to be cordial to and communicate with that person at work.”

Juliette felt helpless, but Priscilla[, her supervisor,] wouldn’t do anything about it. Priscilla was too afraid of confrontation to act like a manager and diffuse the situation. In Priscilla’s realm, bullies and slackers went unpunished, and staffers who did go beyond the call of duty weren’t recognized. Priscilla didn’t reprimand Juliette; in fact, she told Juliette she had been right about the patient and encouraged Juliette to be charge nurse more often.

Really. Because to me it seems like in Priscilla’s realm, open racism in a white superior not only goes unpunished, but garners an offer of career advancement. How did the editors at Workman let this get by them? That Robbins uses this story as a jumping-off point to talk about nurse-on-nurse bullying (casting Juliette as the victim) would be stunning if it weren’t so exhaustingly predictable.

And now for a counterpart to that story. If you’re interested. It’s about another nurse, Lara. Here’s some context about the racial makeup of Lara’s job at her hospital, and the position she occupies there.

Despite racial tensions, Lara, one of the few white nurses at the hospital, hadn’t landed in anyone’s crosshairs. Evidently someone had noticed that Lara seemed to get along with everyone, because in November, the ER director selected her as one of fifteen people to join a new hospital-wide committee.

Really. REALLY with this. The only possible explanation for the presence on a hospital-wide committee of one of the only white nurses at this institution is that she was just so exceptionally agreeable? Fucking really?

And then, a sample of some racial tensions:

Nurses knew when they were in Makayla’s assigned zone because they were knocked sideways by the overpowering smell of bleach. Apparently, someone had complained, because Makayla told the four other nurses, “And one of our latte nurses felt the need to write me up that I had wiped down the area to make sure it was clean.” The other nurses clucked sympathetically.

For the moment, Lara didn’t say anything because she was outnumbered. There were only three white nurses left in the ER. When the black nurses left, Lara called Makayla back. “Makayla, I have to talk to you,” Lara said, speaking slowly to think through how to avoid putting Makayla on the defensive. “I respect you as a nurse and I know that you work hard. But I have to tell you, your comment about latte coworkers is racist. It wasn’t cool and I was sitting right here. I’m surprised to hear a comment like that coming from you.”

Makayla balked. “Oh no no, oh my gosh, no. I call people my mocha sisters and my latte sisters, but it has nothing to do with color!”

Nevertheless, for the next month, Makayla went out of her way to be nice to Lara. Normally, she was the type of nurse who shopped online while other nurses ran around taking care of patients. Now she leaped up to help Lara, greeting her enthusiastically. Lara wasn’t going to waste energy resenting Makayla, so she let the incident slide.

Please note that again a woman of color is cast as lazy and unresponsive in her work, as compared to the conscientious white woman from whose point of view the story is being told. Where Juliette’s remark and its impact on the work environment, and on Lucy, were repeatedly downplayed, this second passage specifically identifies Makayla’s remark as “racist” and emphasizes Lara’s discomfort at being a racial minority among her coworkers.

I know what you’re thinking. “But Jenny, doesn’t the book elsewhere address the racial demographics of nursing and what it’s like to be a nurse of color in a heavily white-dominated field? That would help to alleviate my feeling that this author is letting racial bias color her depiction of these two incidents.” You will be shocked to hear that, no, it never does that, not even a little bit. Robbins mentions the social segregation between white and black nurses in this inner city hospital only in terms of its impact on the (white) point-of-view characters (Molly, Lara); we never hear from a single POC nurse about what it’s like to work at this hospital or how race and racism plays into the work life of a non-white nurse.

Oh, and can I interest you in a soupçon¹ of rape denialism? (Skip down if that sort of thing upsets you.)

Then the [drunk teenage] girl changed her story. “Dad, I think when I was passed out, someone raped me,” the girl sniffled. . . . Everyone in the room except her parents knew the girl was lying.

Teen patients commonly said anything they could think of to avoid dealing with their parents’ reactions. Molly had treated dozens of teenage girls who made up the same story, and not one of them had been sexually assaulted. . . . Most patients didn’t realize that if police officers seriously considered somebody to be a sexual assault victim, they brought the patient to a hospital with a sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) on staff, which [Molly’s hospital] did not have at present. . . . Therefore, ER nurses knew that if EMS or the police brought a patient through triage, they did not believe the individual had been sexually assaulted.

When the father went into the hallway to call the police himself, Molly turned to the girl. “If you really were raped, we will do everything we can to help you,” she said. “If it’s not true, we have a big problem. Someone will get arrested, go to jail, and possibly serve time just so you can get out of trouble for drinking. Now tell me, what’s worse: being grounded for something you did or someone going to jail for something he didn’t do?”

The girl retracts her story, and Robbins goes on to tell a hilarious story about a teenager who gets herself out of trouble by having a pretend religious awakening. Again, I cannot imagine how anyone who read this passage — particularly any women! — okayed it to go forward. It reads like something out of an exposé about the many ways our police, medical, and legal systems fail rape victims.

If I sound pissed off in this review, it’s because I’m so disappointed. At some point, a lady grows tired of discovering that books she intended to enjoy insist upon reproducing the same tired old rhetorical strategies to prop up the kyriarchy that she has seen a kajillion times before. A lady in those circumstances may be forgiven for shriek-reading passages of her book to her podcast partner whom she fortuitously happens to be visiting,² then having a glass of wine and writing a furious post about it.

The post The Nurses, Alexandra Robbins appeared first on Reading the End.

Genius, Marc Bernardin, Adam Freeman, and Afua Richardson

Shitdamn, this book was good. I’ve had a medium reading year thus far — nothing that I’ve hated (although see below re: puppy), but also nothing that I’ve wanted to shove in the hands of every single person I see. Genius is a book I want to shove at everyone.

Seventeen-year-old Destiny was born with the military and strategic mind of an Alexander the Great, a Napoleon — but she lives in an area of Los Angeles that is torn apart by unchecked drug violence and police brutality. So (as you would) she unites the gangs and secedes from the country.

If you are thinking “How did they ever get a comic book published that’s about black kids blowing up large swathes of the LAPD?”, you and I are thinking along the same lines, friends. At first I felt uncomfortable with it, but then — revolution against an oppressive power is a staple of our story-telling, and it’s hard to argue that Destiny and her compatriots don’t have a legitimate, revolution-worthy grievance, when LAPD officers (and cops all over the country) can shoot unarmed black folks with no repercussions at all for their employment status, and we’re just all supposed to write it off as the cost of doing (crime-prevention) business.

Afua Richardson’s art is beautiful, the story is ballsy as fuck, and I dearly hope that we can expect another volume of this audacious and brilliant comic (not least because I want to know what comes next for Destiny).

Honor Girl, Maggie Thrash

A graphic memoir of a summer spent at camp in which Maggie Thrash developed a crush on an older camp counselor. The art was lovely, the writing and characterization were achingly true to what it’s like to be fifteen, but — have we talked about my thing about imbalance of power? I cannot deal with stories about older authority figures developing crushes on their charges. The nineteen-year-old camp counselor, Erin, doesn’t do anything technically not-okay with Maggie, but I just am not comfortable when those boundaries are being nudged. You know what I like in mentor-mentee relationships? NICE CLEAR BOUNDARIES.

(Yes, I did know some girls in high school who were sleeping with our algebra teacher. Why do you ask?)

The Arab of the Future, Riad Sattouf

A comics memoir of growing up in Syria and Libya, with a father who fell under the spell of various dictators’ cults of personality. I warn you now that a puppy gets spiked with a pitchfork and has its head cut off in this comic. I noped on out of there as soon as that happened, but it was late in the book, so. There you go.

The Gigantic Beard that Was Evil, Stephen Collins

Dave lives in a place called Here, where everything is orderly. Across the sea is a place of chaos, called There. One day, the chaos of There starts to assert itself on Dave’s very own very face.

No, I get it. It’s because you shouldn’t have too many rules. If you have too many rules your life will be boring and hemmed in, and that’s why ladies who like spreadsheets have to learn a Valuable Lesson about Lightening Up and Enjoying Spontaneity in romcoms. I UNDERSTAND THIS PARABLE.

Like, Stephen Collins’s art is beautiful, and his panel structuring is a masterclass, but I read comics for the story too. Did we really need another book in this world with the message “Lighten up, office drones!”?

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