Stormbreak is the third in a trilogy that began with Seafire, which was pitched as “Mad Max Fury Road but make it boats” (the latter half of which sounded great and the former half of which brought me out in hives because Mad Max Fury Road is the most stressful shit I have ever watched in my entire life). The series tells the story of a rogue ship of angry girls doing their level best to take down a warlord and his team of fighters. Over the course of the series, Caledonia Styx has become a true leader, with her best friend Pisces and her boyfriend Oran at her side. When Stormbreak opens, they have retreated to plan how best to complete their war against the Bullet fleet. When their stronghold is attacked unexpectedly, Caledonia must decide how to chase her dream of a better world, at the risk of losing herself in the process.

Is it me, or are we moving away from YA trilogies as a culture? I feel like I have been reading lots of standalones and duologies lately, but maybe that’s just me. Regardless, I was delighted to finally reach the conclusion of the Seafire series, which has been so consistently fun, thoughtful, and exciting. Because this is the final book in the series, Caledonia’s victory over Lir and his Bullets is something of a foregone conclusion, though Parker does terrific work in keeping the good guys on their toes.

Where the book excels is in creating moral suspense. Caledonia is navigating the ethical risks and demands of leadership in a time of war, while keeping in mind the eventual, hoped-for transition from war to peace. Much though she wants to stay true to her highest ideals, the world teaches her again and again the necessity of moral compromise. Stormbreak is as ripping an adventure tale as its predecessors, but it’s also an examination, not in a boring way, of how to choose among an array of bad options to attain your goals without losing your deepest self. It’s a marvelous conclusion to a superb YA series.

Having liked, not loved, Descendant of the Crane (it was sold to me as The Twistiest Book of Them All, and I didn’t find it to be that twisty but probably that’s just because the reviews led me to expect, like, Fingersmith), I wasn’t sure what to expect from Joan He’s sophomore YA novel. Taking place in two different timelines, The Ones We’re Meant to Find follows a science genius named Kasey trying to come to terms with her sister Celia’s disappearance; and a girl named Cee who lives alone on an island and wants nothing more than to build a boat and get back to her sister Kay.

I… wow. Really, really wow to The Ones We’re Meant to Find. It blew me away. It’s a little slow to start, especially if you think you already know what’s going on with Kacey and with Cee, and more broadly with the world. But Joan He is doing something a lot more interesting than first impressions might suggest. Kacey–socially awkward, brilliant, isolated, either persistent or in deep denial–wants nothing more than to make sense of the loss of her sister, as her search for the truth brings her closer to an understanding of the bitter, broken world she lives in. Cee has spent three years trying to get back to her sister when a new person washes ashore, a kind and handsome boy who periodically loses touch with reality and tries to kill her. Their shared yearning for a lost sister kept me reading even when I feared that the book would follow a slightly by-the-numbers plot.

Ha bloody ha ha, joke’s on me! This is one of those books where reading the end availed me nothing, because the end is predicated on a midway-through reveal that casts everything before and after in a brand new light. To say I loved it would be an understatement, and it’s hard to talk about the back half of the book without giving away what’s going on. What I will say is that while the book is very fundamentally about sisters, it’s about so much more than that too. Corporate corruption, disaster planning, climate change, the merits of survival and happiness, idealism vs cynicism, ethical science — I could go on! Heartbreaking though much of the story is, it ends so beautifully that I was near tears.

Be warned that if you don’t love an ambiguous ending (I looooooove an open ending), The Ones We’re Meant to Find might not be for you. But I hope you will read it. I loved it.

All Our Hidden Gifts is about a girl called Maeve who finds an abandoned deck of Tarot cards and starts telling fortunes for her classmates. It’s all fun and games until she does a reading for her ex-best friend Lily, and a card appears — the Housekeeper — that isn’t a part of the regular deck. The next thing anyone knows, Lily has disappeared. It’s up to Maeve, Lily’s brother Roe, and Maeve’s new friend Fiona to try and figure out what’s happened to Lily and whether they have any hope of getting her back.

The good: Are Irish feminists as prone to TERF-iness as British ones? I do not know, but I do know that it was a surprise and a joy to find an Irish book that’s so warm about gender. Though Roe doesn’t offer a label for himself, he’s at least exploring his options where gender is concerned, and neither the book nor Maeve treats this as a problem. (Which it isn’t! And shouldn’t be! But you know how TERFs do.) I also love that the central emotional conflict is a fractured friendship. Maeve’s romance with Roe is certainly a going concern, but it’s her friendships that take center stage. She has been a bad friend to Lily, long before the fateful Tarot reading, and the book neither excuses her cruelty nor treats her as irredeemable.

The bad: Honestly not enough searching for the missing person! The plot felt a little disorganized, jumping between Lily’s disappearance and the emergence of an anti-queer movement that threatens Maeve’s friends and town. Those conflicts turn out to be related, but it felt like neither of them was able to get the full airing they deserved. I also regret to report that I am a pedantic twat when it comes to books about Tarot cards. We’re meant to believe that Maeve has natural talent with the Tarot cards, but her readings felt very rote and basic to me. Tarot cards are not a real thing and fortune-telling is pretend, and it’s reductive and boring to interpret the Five of Cups as “sadness.” (said Jenny, like an absolute asshole)

That said, I’d read another book in this series! Maeve is kind of the weakest link, which is common in YA novels and sitcoms, but I’d be delighted to read more about Roe and Fiona, and I’d love to get to know Lily better and witness her (I hope!) eventual reconciliation with Maeve. Love a book that creates tension in relationships other than just romantic ones!

I bought Ace of Spades for a friend earlier this year on the strength of its gorgeous cover and delightful interior design, and then I got jealous that I had given it away and couldn’t read it myself, so I checked it out of the library a few weeks ago. (You know, the obvious solution to the problem I want to read a book I don’t own.) I’m so glad I did! Ace of Spades follows Chiamaka and Devon, the only two Black students at the exclusive Niveus Private Academy. Both seniors, both Prefects, they are working hard to get ready for college and the bright futures the school has promised them when an anonymous figure called Aces starts sharing their darkest secrets with everyone in the school. Though Chiamaka and Devon have always run in different circles, they must team up to find answers before their futures are ruined completely.

As I have perhaps mentioned in this space before, I’m wild about books where people have done a sin and are waiting to see if they’re going to be found out. Chiamaka and Devon have done… a lot of things. I did not do as many things in high school as all the characters in this book, omg! I was such a boring, straight-ahead high schooler. Never had a drink. Did not bounce through relationships. Never killed a person. (That’s what sets me apart from Laura Bush. This has been: a cheap shot.) Ace of Spades keeps up the suspense of what secrets are going to be uncovered and how much damage those secrets will wreak in Chiamaka and Devon’s lives. At the same time, the reader gradually comes to realize that there may be more malicious forces at play here than it first seemed.

Perhaps it is not much of a spoiler — based on what you already know from the title and the premise — to admit that racism is very much at play in what’s happening to Chiamaka and Devon. Ace of Spades is sociological horror as much as it’s anything else, and there are several reveals that make the Psycho theme music start playing in your head, in the best way. The terror of realizing that you’re alone in a room full of people hostile to you — or a school full — is palpably realized here, and I was unironically whispering “get out” to my book at several points. The climax features a rescue that’s maybe a tiny bit convenient, but it’s so thematically appropriate that I chose not to care. I can’t wait to see what this author does next.

And that’s it for my recent YA reading! Based on this, what should I read next?

The post Hot Take: YA Is Good (feat. sisters, boats, Tarot cards, posh schools) appeared first on Reading the End.

So the matter as it stands is that I have never enjoyed a piece of Sherlock Holmes media, with the exception of Elementary, which I watched for two seasons. I would have watched a lot more of it if Natalie Dormer had been the co-lead with Lucy Liu. As a gesture of intellectual broad-mindedness and public spirit, I have generously conceded that I will watch any Sherlock Holmes adaptation in which Natalie Dormer is the Holmes guy; but as yet nobody has agreed to make such a show. By and large, I do not love Sherlock Holmes media and would likely not have read Angel of the Crows if I had known that it is a piece of Sherlock Holmes media. Which it is. Though that fact is not emphasized in the marketing materials.

Our Watson guy, Doyle, is returning from the war in Afghanistan having sustained an aetheric injury. Actually, what Doyle says is “being shipped home a useless cripple,” which marks the first point in this book (page 2!) that I made a sort of muted strangledy noise. The book talks a lot about accommodations Doyle requires and receives where long walks are impossible, which I’ll get to in the section entitled “the Sherlock Holmes guy is not an asshole!”, but I wish it had not begun its depiction of disability on this note. Searching for affordable accommodation in London, Doyle meets a slightly outcast (but, importantly, not Fallen!) angel called Crow. Crow is the Sherlock guy. He keeps irregular hours and gets impatient when the police don’t listen to him. Importantly, though, he doesn’t ask searching questions or require the use of a shared lavatory, and Doyle can be confident of maintaining personal secrets that it is not desirable the general public should know.

Though not marketed as a Holmes/Watson story, The Angel of the Crows very definitely is one. It reimagines a series of classic Holmes mysteries (“The Speckled Band,” “The Sign of Four,” Hound of the Baskervilles, etc.). Like Addison’s last book, The Goblin Emperor, it has an episodic structure that allows the author and reader plenty of space to explore her richly inventive world and the carefully drawn relationships between the main characters. It felt like a very fanfic way of writing, a feeling that was justified by an endnote in which Addison explains that the book started its life as Sherlock wingfic. That was kind of neat to see! I know that The Angel of the Crows is not the first book with a genesis in fanfic, but I was surprised and pleased to see the acknowledgement in there.

Despite my friend Ashley’s impassioned insistence that Holmes! loves! Watson!, one of the primary reasons I don’t tend to enjoy Sherlock Holmes stories is because I get tired of what a pill the Sherlock guy often is to the Watson guy. Maybe I would feel differently now! I have not read an actual Sherlock Holmes story by actual Sir Arthur Conan Doyle since I was like, seventeen. Anyway, Crow is not a pill to Doyle! I actively enjoyed their relationship, which is so unusual for me and Sherlock Holmes stories. You could see right away that Doyle finds Crow a very restful person to be around, in a world that has felt very hostile and encroaching for many years, and Crow of course appreciates Doyle’s intelligence, humor, and kindness. Consistently throughout the book, you see Crow keeping an eye on Doyle’s leg and pain levels and making accommodations to ensure that Doyle can carry on doing the investigations without physical consequences. It was really lovely to see that kind of consistent care and attention around a main character’s disability.

A good book, basically! An enjoyable book I enjoyed, for all the same reasons I enjoyed The Goblin Emperor! Only there was, like, some stuff. That I wished did not happen!

• Doyle is told that Romani call themselves Romani, rather than g*psy, but still refers to them using the slur. I am not sure why! I actually am not sure why it was necessary for anyone, anywhere to use the slur in the first place.
• I’d just love to have a disabled protagonist that doesn’t self-describe as “a useless cripple.” As a society we’re already at saturation point with the idea that disabled people are useless (and, for that matter, with the idea that “useful” is a quality of human beings at all!)
• While Addison rightly identifies taking jewels and things out of India as theft, the only character who actually is from Southeast Asia — in fact from a union territory of India called the Andaman Islands — does one of the murders. The circumstances are such that he kinda had to, and Doyle and Crow both endeavor to protect him. I still felt a bit “hmmmmmmm” about it, particularly because he’s petite (under five feet) and Crow one time makes reference to others seeing him as “a savage child.” HMMMMM.

Lastly and mostly, I really really dislike how this book talked about asexuality. The idea that sexual desire is a necessary condition to being human, with its inevitable correlate that ace people aren’t human, is still an unfortunately common one. A lot of so-called ace rep involves characters who are asexual because they’re not human — which plays into this same set of harmful ideas about asexuality. Crow states outright that as an angel, he’s asexual, and he quotes St. Augustine to say “God gave to Adam and Eve that which he gave not to the Angels of the Garden,” reinforcing the implication that allosexuality is the natural state of human beings. In the same scene, there’s a degree of implication that an ace person cannot consent to sex, which is untrue and infantilizing. Later, Crow says “insofar as it makes sense to apply gender to asexual beings,” which suggests a very outdated conflation of gender with sexuality. Of course asexual people have gender! It was an entire mess and I really didn’t like it.

So yeah, ultimately, The Angel of the Crows is a book I wanted to like, but can’t really recommend, due to its portrayal of asexuality.

The post Review: The Angel of the Crows, Katherine Addison appeared first on Reading the End.

A girl named Esther, fleeing the town that hanged her girlfriend for possession of illegal books, stows away in the wagon of a visiting group of Librarians. In part she’s drawn to their work — distributing Approved Materials for reading so people all around this postapocalyptic version of America will know what to think — but mainly she wants to escape an arrange marriage and can’t think of another way. The Librarians aren’t thrilled to have a stowaway, still less considering that they’re on a risky mission. But they let Esther stay with them, for now. The longer she stays, the clearer it becomes that the things she thought she knew about the world were very, very wrong.

“Mousy, fearful girl finds her spine” is a genre of books I enjoy, as a spine-having fearful girl. Esther comes from a world that has told her over and over that there’s something wrong with her. She’s wrong, particularly, for being a girl who’s attracted to people that aren’t men; and the proof is that her girlfriend, and best friend, Beatriz, hanged for it. When she joins up with the Librarians, one of the first things she learns is that the Head Librarian, Bet, is queer too and in a longterm relationship with another Librarian, Leda. As she’s still recovering from that shock, she’s introduced to Cye, who’s nonbinary.¹ There are more shocks ahead, including the realization that the Librarians are part of a bigger resistance to the status quo. But the biggest and best and most emotionally satisfying realization for Esther is that becoming more like the Librarians really means becoming more like herself — the self that she’s been hiding from and trying to repress, the self she’s been told was inherently a transgression.

Esther’s realization that she has been lied to vis-a-vis what the world is like and what sorts of being are available to her personally occupies a good chunk of the book. But that’s a plot mechanism that offers readers limited satisfaction, given that we — and most of the characters who aren’t Esther — know all along that it’s okay to be queer. Plus, part of Esther’s journey to this realization involves acknowledging her attraction to Cye, and this feels kind of heartless given that she just watched her last girlfriend get hanged. Like, that just happened. So not only does Esther move on very quickly, but the book is so interested in her relationship with Cye that it gives short shrift to her relationship with, and grief for, Beatriz. Which again makes it harder to invest as much in Esther’s self-actualization as a queer woman.

Overall, I think my problems with the book broadly lay in the worldbuilding. Gailey uses a lot of buzzy words like resistance and Approved Materials, which are clearly meant to evoke a dystopian and repressive world — and they do! But worldbuilding requires more than just evocation, and Gailey skimps on the additional details. What happened to the world to get it to this state? Who enforces the bans on non-approved materials? Like, does that happen at the local level, as it appears to have happened in Beatriz’s case? Because if so then I would expect a lot of regional variation, but the premise of the book seems to suggest that there’s a more top-down approach to Approved Materials, in which case, who on earth is at the top? I had no idea of the answers to any of these questions, which kept the book from feeling like it had real stakes.

All in all, a medium read for me! I’d have preferred it to have a little more bite, both on the personal level where we get to know Esther a little better as a person rather than a symbol of the world’s failings, and on the broader scale where we learned a bit more about the world itself.

Another note: I received this book as an ARC from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

The post Review: Upright Women Wanted, Sarah Gailey appeared first on Reading the End.

How to Catch a Wicked Viscount, Amy Rose Bennett

After an indiscretion at school that leaves Sophie and her three best friends with a reputation for scandal, she never expects to be accepted back into polite society. But when Charlotte discovers Sophie in a compromising situation with her rakehell brother, Nate, she offers Nate a deal: If he helps Sophie to catch a rake with a heart of gold for a husband, Charlotte won’t tell their father that he’s compromised Sophie. But Sophie finds that all she wants is Nate — a man who’s sworn he’ll have nothing to do with love and marriage.

In general, How to Catch a Wicked Viscount was a lot of fun, particularly if the “I am supposed to be helping you find someone else but in the meantime we are falling in love” trope appeals to you. (As forced proximity tropes go, it’s low on my list; but I love forced proximity across the board, so even an un-preferred version of it is enjoyable to me.) I love that Sophie’s part of a network of lady friends who all support and love each other, no matter what — they’re all treasures and gems, and I would like them all to find love. While some of the sex prose gets a little purple (is there a special term for that? sex prose that’s overdone?), it’s brilliant to see an unexperienced heroine who’s still able to identify what she wants and go after it. I loved her for being the initiator of most of the couple’s sexual encounters.

However, for a generally sex-positive book, How to Catch a Wicked Viscount has a weird little interlude to introduce Nate. He and his rakish friends are breaking into the Astley house to steal the underwear of the famously, I guess, slutty?? Countess of Astley — which I already don’t love — and then she catches them and propositions them. Nate thinks “he wasn’t going anywhere near her unless he was wearing a sheath” and then when his friend does decide to stay for sex, they remind the friend to wear a condom too. I couldn’t tell if this was meant to be a pregnancy thing or a disease thing, but it made me uncomfortable, and it was hard to come around on Nate as a character after that. Because: Ew.

Dalliances and Devotion, Felicia Grossman

Admittedly Twitter is a hellscape, but it can’t be all bad, can it? when it led me to this book. Dalliances and Devotion is the second in a series, though it can be read as a standalone (which is what I did). It’s the story of Jewish heiress Amalia Truitt and her former flame, Pinkerton Daniel Zisskind, who are thrown together on a train trip across America after Amalia receives a string of death threats. She’s determined to make it home and gain access to her fortune so that she can go on funding her charity, which helps women get divorces when they can’t afford them. (Amalia is twice divorced.)

Though “road trip” was the pitch that got me to read this book, I dare to say that I would have loved it just the same if it hadn’t been a road trip at all. It was lovely to see a romance between two Jewish protagonists, and even lovelier that their beliefs and religious practices were central to the story (Amalia’s going to Delaware for her nephew’s bris, among other things!). Since the story takes place in the aftermath of the Civil War, there were also many timely discussions of what it means to be American and Jewish, what the best of America is and how to pursue that ideal of a nation. It added emotional resonance to a book that already gave such heft to the interior lives of its central characters, inside and outside of the central pairing.

I also want to give special mention to the sex scenes. Like many romance novelists working today, Grossman is careful and deliberate about consent, which rules, but she also manages to strike a (to me) perfect balance of consent, sexiness, and joy. Amalia and David are having FUN with each other, which made their eventual HEA all the more satisfying. I loved this book to pieces and can’t wait to read more by this author.

Open House, Ruby Lang

Let’s pause a moment to celebrate the fact that Ruby Lang is writing again, after a pause that in real life was very short but experientially was like TEN THOUSAND YEARS OF DEPRIVATION. Any romance writer who can write a line like “He didn’t want to be her weakness; he wanted to be part of her strength” is already to be treasured. Add to that Lang’s gift for vivid settings, complex family relationships, and reliably funny, affectionate, crackly banter between the leads, and you’ve got one of the best contemporary romance authors currently working.

Open House is the second novella in Lang’s Uptown series (first one is reviewed here!), and it follows realtor Magda Ferrar as she tries to unload her recalcitrant uncle’s brownstone on Strivers’ Row and a vacant lot on 136th St. Unfortunately (for her), the lot has been turned into a community garden, and the community — including sexy accountant (yes) Ty Yang — isn’t any too thrilled at the idea of losing it.

The love story in a romance novella can feel rushed and incomplete, but Open House never does. Nor does it depend on uncontrollable mutual attraction to justify the leads’ interest in each other (no shots btw to uncontrollable mutual attraction, which can be very fun sometimes!). Ty and Magda like each other because they like each other: because they’re each kind and funny and engaged, because they challenge and encourage each other out of easy false narratives, and also YES I ADMIT because they find each other really hot. But principally, their relationship is founded — despite this being an antagonists-to-lovers story — on trying really hard to be in each other’s corner. I loved it.

I should also mention that Lang has a true knack for writing family dynamics and exploring the way they affect people in romantic relationships. Insofar as her leads face obstacles (and these are typically quite low-conflict books), they are typically internally generated and respectfully explored over the course of the book. I loved seeing Magda in a position of trying to navigate an adult relationship with her much-older sisters!

A chef’s kiss to this book, in honor of my hope that Lang will set the next series after this one in restaurants LIKE SHE CLEARLY WANTS TO. (I see you, Ruby Lang.)

In Between Days, Anne Jamison

Eh, this one may be more YA than romance, but who’s counting? It contains a romance, so I feel fine about it.

In Between Days is the angry feminist Breakfast Club Judd Nelson / Molly Ringwald romance you definitely knew you wanted, a coming of age story that also features a lady friendship to warm the cockles of even my stony automaton heart.

If me saying this book warmed my heart has led you to believe that it is heartwarming, I assure you that it is not. It’s one of those books about high school that will gladden you that you’re not in high school anymore; and one of those books about The Past (in this case, the 80s of Gen X) that will make you feel blessed that the runaway train of linear time WHATEVER ITS FAULTS is dragging us inexorably further and further away from The Past. (I mean racist and homophobic slurs, my pals, & drugs & sexual assault — so be good to yourselves if you’re not in the mood.)

But I adored the three central characters — Pris and Jason and Samantha — and their gradual, prickly efforts to learn how to be good to each other. I started off feeling that there was no way for things to be okay between them — Jason and Samantha area real assholes, good GOD I do not miss high school — but the book lured me along to a touching and satisfying conclusion.

American Love Story, Adriana Herrera

This is the third in Adriana Herrera’s Dreamers series, which I have probably already raved about in this space. (Fact check: I have.) American Love Story follows scholar and activist Patrice Denis, who has taken a job at Cornell for reasons not wholly unrelated to the hot Ithaca ADA, Easton Archer, whom he used to bone. Their relationship is complicated not just by Easton’s job as a representative of a system Patrice loathes, but by a recent uptick in unwarranted traffic stops of black and brown men in Ithaca — which Easton’s boss is reluctant to address.

Despite this being all the way in my wheelhouse, American Love Story is my least favorite in the series so far, only because I had a hard time getting a grip on Patrice’s character. Most of what we learn about him is told, not shown, from his job to his personality. I wanted to know more about his scholarship (important, apparently?), his online presence (ditto), his history of cutting people out when they disappoint him (considerable?). Without that, his character lacked some of the wonderful specificity of Herrera’s other characters.

Even so, I got all verklempt at the end of the book when Easton and Patrice are finding their way back to each other and sorting through how not to damage each other in this same way next time. I still love this series and can’t wait for the final one! Social workers should always write the books!

As a final note, I received, I think, all of these from the publisher/author for review consideration. This has not impacted the content of my reviews.

The post Police Stops, Brises, and Other Rites of Passage: A Romance Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Imagine my surprise when Pet is the gentlest of reads. Admittedly it’s dealing with a really hard issue — child sexual abuse — but it does so with such hope and tenderness. When I say that Pet is a kind read, I mean that its author is kind to its characters, and its characters are kind to each other. There’s a fundamental belief that everyone is trying their best and deserves the benefit of the doubt on that account.

But, okay! What’s the book about? Pet is set in a community called Lucille that has solved all of its problems. Lucille used to be like our world, with lots of suffering caused by not caring about each other, but Lucille had a revolution in the last generation and got rid of all that stuff. How exactly they managed such a revolution is not explained, as Pet is in setting more parable than futurefic. Jam, who rarely speaks and often signs, has two loving friends and a supportive school environment, and everything is hunky-dory until she bleeds on one of her mother’s paintings and a creature called Pet emerges from the drawing into the world. It explains to Jam that there’s a monster at her friend Redemption’s house, and that it’s a hunter come to find and destroy that monster. Jam doesn’t understand how that can be, given that the angels of the revolution got rid of all the monsters. But Pet insists that it’s so, and enlists Jam’s help to find who the monster is.

The good: I loved the setting, and it truly was a balm to me to read a book in which everyone is careful and gentle with each other. When Jam’s not ready to discuss something with her parents, they don’t push; when she knows that Redemption is angry with her, she gives him space to be angry. If you know me, you know that I love boundaries, and Pet prioritizes respecting people’s boundaries. Lucille is also a wonderfully diverse world, with different languages and cultures bumping frictionlessly into each other; though Lucille has excellent medical care (we learn that Jam didn’t run into any problems getting medical care to support her gender transition as a small child), it’s unlike many fictional utopias in that it doesn’t vaunt the elimination of disability as a marker of utopia. On the contrary, Jam’s excellent librarian, Ube, uses a wheelchair to get around.

I also, predictably, am in strong favor of raising awareness about child abuse, especially child sexual abuse — which is implied to be part of what’s going on in Redemption’s house. Pet is one of a small number of YA books that talks about child sexual abuse as it actually happens, including the likelihood that victims will be met with skepticism if they report what’s going on. We also see Jam go to the library to learn from reputable sources about what it looks like when a child is being abused. Yay for research!

The not-so-good: I don’t like parables, and Pet is extremely a parable. This is a personal preference thing, obviously, because Pet isn’t trying and failing for nuts-and-bolts worldbuilding — Emezi’s making a choice here to write a parable. I’m saying parable not to suggest the book is didactic, although it is a little, but more to say that it spends more time in the realm of symbolism than your average bear. I do not personally enjoy this type of thing. (Would allegory be better to say than parable here? I don’t know. One of those!)

My other main criticism — and I wondered if this was a result of wanting the book to be YA and aging up the protagonist to come closer to the age group that the genre mostly aims at these days — is that Jam is supposed to be fifteen, and she reads to me a lot younger than fifteen. (Redemption does, too, but Jam’s our POV character, which makes it extra-noticeable.) I don’t know exactly how to quantify this, but I felt it strongly throughout my reading of the book, that not only does she seem younger than fifteen, but she’s treated younger than fifteen by the adults in her life. I kept thinking she was twelve or even ten, then flipping back to the start of the book to double-check. Did anyone else feel this way?

Despite this book not being a perfect fit for me, I still admired it as a book and Emezi as an author, and I’m excited for whatever they’re going to do next. (Hopefully not a parable/allegory thing, oh dear, those are really not for me.)

Note: I received this e-galley for review consideration from the publisher, via Netgalley. This has not influenced the contents of my review.

The post Review: Pet, Akwaeke Emezi appeared first on Reading the End.

I want to open this review by saying that while I loved many things about When the Ground Is Hard, I had a serious problem with its depiction of disability and disabled people. If that type of thing tends to be a problem for you and you want to know about it first, you can skip down to that section of the review. And now, onward!

Diversifying YA is a glorious and worthwhile endeavor for many reasons, not least of which is the telling of new stories. But I also love discovering books for kids that tell old types of stories in ways that I haven’t encountered before. When the Ground Is Hard uses the tropes that I’m accustomed to, and adore, in the boarding school books of my childhood: the reversal of fortune, the hostile teachers and the unexpectedly kind ones, the shows of pluck by our protagonist, the conflicts with other groups of boarding school kids. At the same time, it takes place in 1960s Swaziland, and the inequalities Adele comes to recognize arise from racial divisions born of empire. It’s exhilarating to be reminded of the ways old and beloved types of stories can be made to feel new and vibrant in the hands of talented authors like Malla Nunn.

Until she’s made to share a room with Lottie, Adele has shut her eyes to the flagrant inequality among kids from different social classes at her school, as well as kids of different skin color. She starts to see how the decks are stacked against Lottie, how a slip-up that Adele can get away with (because she’s a good girl, because she has a white father, because her family pays her fees) would land Lottie in a world of punishment with their teachers. She isn’t better behaved than Lottie; she’s just better supported. Her family and social status allow her to be a “good girl,” and they don’t allow Lottie.

Adele also comes to see how Lottie keeps fighting even within the social and educational structures that try to keep her down. When the school catches fire, Lottie’s the first to run out and fight the flames — in part because she’s brave, but in part because she needs school. Even more than Adele and the other girls, Lottie needs this unfair school that judges her by her parents and punishes her disproportionately, because it’s her only possible path to a better life. And Adele comes to recognize Lottie’s bravery, not just in fighting fires but in maintaining her personhood when the people around her try to demean her and make her see herself as less. The blossoming of their friendship is the chef’s-kissest thing you ever saw, not least because they bond over reading one of my favorite-ever books, Jane Eyre.

With so much going for it, When the Ground Is Hard really let me down in its depiction of disability. One of Lottie’s establishing character moments early on is her kindness to an intellectually disabled student named Darnell. In a more substantive scene, Darnell brings Lottie and Adele to look at his collection of beautiful things from nature, which leads Adele to see the beauty in a discarded snakeskin, which she initially finds repellent. Darnell’s character combines the trope of the disabled character who’s too good and pure for this world with the thing of suggesting that an intellectual disability makes one closer to The Land and God’s Creatures. Then, of course, Darnell dies. His death on the land of a bigoted white farmer leads Adele to a greater awareness of inequality and racism in her world, which, again, means that a disabled character’s life and death exist primarily as lessons for the abled protagonist.

I genuinely did love this book, and there were many moments when reading it felt like coming home to a genre I’ve always loved. A big part of me wished I could give it to Kid Jenny, because I know I’d have adored it — and maybe would have found my way to my interest in African history a little sooner! But my hope for diversity in publishing is that we can continue to ask for more from our books, and pursue ever-better representation of all types of people and a more just reading future.

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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?

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(Love to Everyone is called The Skylarks’ War in England, which I think is a much better title. Nobody ever consults me about these things.)

Clarry is accustomed to feeling invisible. Her mother died when she was a baby (because of her? Clarry thinks probably), and her father doesn’t care about her, and her brother Peter does not admit to liking her. But in the summers, she goes to Cornwall to stay with her grandparents, and she and Peter have summers with their older, dashing cousin Rupert. Love to Everyone is the story of them all growing up, Peter and Clarry and Rupert and all the people they acquire (and lose) along the way.

Of the many good things about Hilary McKay, my favorite is her ability to shift seamlessly between humor and joy and sadness. Her jokes are so exactly what I want jokes to be — wry and absurd and understated — but she has managed to reach adulthood without forgetting (which many people do forget) how sad and scary it can be to be a kid. Clarry and Peter spend a lot of their childhood being badly discontented, but they are clever and persistent enough to see opportunities to change their circumstances. They are also surrounded — this is another thing Hilary McKay does wonderfully — by people who mean different things to them at different stages of their lives. Someone who is a tedious nuisance at one stage of your life may turn out to be absolutely vital and heroic at another.

(All this I loved.)

What I did not love — and this will be a spoiler, but one that I am glad I knew going into the book, ta to Ana for warning me — is that in this World War I story, Hilary McKay chose the only queer character to die at the front. It is much much too many years in the future for people to be unaware of the Bury Your Gays trope. In Love to Everyone, the queer character is only in the war in the first place because he has a crush (obliquely suggested) on dashing cousin Rupert. Whatever Hilary McKay may have meant by it, it’s exhausting to read yet another story in which the senselessness of war ™ is made evident by disposing of a queer character–the only queer character, incidentally, in the book.

So take that as a caveat. If that hadn’t happened, I would have had only good things to say about Love to Everyone. It’s got a terrifically vibrant and complicated cast of characters, all of whom feel like real people with rich backstories of their own (whether we get to hear those stories or not). You can feel the world around the edges of the book in a way that’s quite remarkable. I just wish that Hilary McKay had been a little more aware of our own world and the tropes we should have put behind us by now.

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration.

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If the satire in 84K feels a bit obvious, chalk it up to our living in a painfully obvious time in history. The government has outsourced many (most?) of its functions to The Company, of which there is only one: Take a look at any business in the nation and you’ll find it’s owned by a company that’s owned by a company that’s… Theo Miller — that’s not his real name, it’s just what he calls himself — works at the Criminal Audit Office, assessing the amount people will have to pay for the crimes they’ve committed. If they can’t pay, they go to the patty line, hard labor to make up for the costs their crimes incurred.

When a woman from Theo’s past appears, begging him for information about her long-lost daughter, Lucy, he helps her a little and then wants to stop being involved. He has worked hard to be invisible (Theo Miller isn’t his real name; it was the name of someone who’s dead now), and he has no intention of letting his life fall apart for Dani Cumali, a long-ago friend and maybe more who lives her life on the patty line. But Dani tells him, “Lucy’s your daughter,” and then she’s murdered. The murderer is a hired hand for a subsidiary of the Company. Theo doesn’t think it’s likely that Lucy really is his daughter. But.

84K is far darker than any of Claire North’s other books to date (though as I say, I didn’t finish the one about death), so please take a substantial content warning for child harm, sexual violence, physical violence — you name it. Anyone who can afford to pay the indemnity for a crime can afford to commit the crime, and the wealthy of the world take grim advantage of that fact.

What’s more disturbing, in the present American political moment, is the feeling that none of what Theo does — or anyone does — matters. They can reveal that the Company has dug mass graves for workers on the patty line who died of starvation or illness or unsafe working conditions, but the fact is that everyone already, essentially, knows that to be true. Everyone knows, and nobody knows how to change it. The scope of what Theo wants to do — rescue a girl who may or may not be his daughter — is very small, because small change is the only change that seems possible in this world.

Though 84K is on the long side, its plot zips by, with the ever-present threat of Company violence looming over all of Theo’s detective work. I didn’t love the dude-is-motivated-by-lady’s-death plot here and wished I could read a book about Dani burning down the world instead of Theo; but I will say that all of Theo’s major allies in the fight are women. Dani sets him on the path, a woman called Neila finds him bleeding in the street and helps him recover, and there are several other spoilery women he teams up with later on and unexpectedly. Even so, and even knowing that Theo’s averageness is the point North is making, 84K did play into an existing frustration of mine about stories that insist on celebrating white male mediocrity.

What really shines about 84K is North’s prose. Theo lives in a world that requires its citizens to leave many things unsaid that are known by everyone, and the writing leaves space for things to go unsaid.

At the weekend he has money for drink, or can walk by the river without a card in the world, or take a bicycle out into the countryside and let the sunlight wash away the work, and when he returns to his soft bed

he is better

can work better, do what he needs to do, better, and one day

if he works hard enough, earning through his labours

one day maybe someone else will turn down the duvet in the corner of his bed and someone else will press the smell of cleanliness into his fresh-washed clothes and he need not scrub at dishes and argue with the water company and stand in line for the bus that never comes because these things are fundamentally

not the things he is best at
he can give
so much more to this world
so much more

if he’s just given the opportunity to do it.

This is not an unfair position.

The Company requires this kind of thinking, that jumps from one thought to another while ignoring, or trying to ignore, the human cost of the way one is choosing to live one’s life. As a comparison and to gauge whether this book is for you, North’s writing in 84K reminded me of White Is for Witching, my favorite of Helen Oyeyemi’s books.

Before we go, some stuff: The book knows that both men and women buy sex, but it tends to assume that only women and girls sell or are sold for sex. (Not true.) In a brief flashback section from a trans character’s point of view, North says “Once upon a time Neila was a man called Neil” and uses the wrong-body explanation of transness (here’s Janet Mock on why she doesn’t like this trope).

My biggest issue — surprise, surprise for a dystopian story — has to do with representations of disability. It’s fairly clear that Theo’s is a society that values normative bodies and minds, insofar as it values bodies and minds at all. We see some cases where indemnities for murder are higher if the murdered person belonged to a gym, and lower if the murdered person was disabled, but North doesn’t engage with the stories of any of those people, with the consequence that their tragedies feel like set dressing for the (non-disabled) characters’ efforts and epiphanies.

Towards the end of the book, our protagonist goes to see a badly injured ally in the hospital, and she’s just able to write the word END, instructing him to take her off life support. Though the character’s not exactly saying that a disabled life isn’t worth living — if she lives, she’ll be in the power of her extremely wicked son — the scene is all too resonant of the Bury Your Disabled, Type 3 trope. All in all, it paints a picture of a writer who engaged very very shallowly with disability when envisioning her fictional world.¹

Though her disability rep leaves a lot to be desired, Claire North has managed to write a satire that I didn’t hate — a satire of corporatism, no less! — and created a believably terrifying fictional world. Read it if you wish to be unsettled.

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Before I get into The Henchmen of Zenda, I need to confess that I have this weird soft spot for old-time British adventure novels. There’s no defense I can or should make about this. These are horribly sexist and racist books that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. I like the swashbuckling. So when I heard that one of my favorite romance authors was doing a queer rewrite of one of my favorite old-time trash adventure novels, I nearly hit the ceiling.

KJ Charles:

Jasper Detchard is a disgraced British officer, now selling his blade to the highest bidder. Currently that’s Michael Elphberg, half-brother to the King of Ruritania. Michael wants the throne for himself, and Jasper is one of the scoundrels he hires to help him take it. But when Michael makes his move, things don’t go entirely to plan—and the penalty for treason is death.

Rupert of Hentzau is Michael’s newest addition to his sinister band of henchmen. Charming, lethal, and intolerably handsome, Rupert is out for his own ends—which seem to include getting Jasper into bed. But Jasper needs to work out what Rupert’s really up to amid a maelstrom of plots, swordfights, scheming, impersonation, desire, betrayal, and murder.

Nobody can be trusted. Everyone has a secret. And love is the worst mistake you can make.

Me:

The Henchmen of Zenda was exactly what I wanted it to be: An adventure novel packed with fun characters, a dastardly villain or three, and an all-you-can-eat buffet of machinations for the royal throne. If you’re reading romance mainly for the squishy parts, this book is perhaps not directly in your wheelhouse. The leads bang (quite a bit) and end up sharing a life (though they aren’t particularly sentimental about it), but the main dish in Henchmen is the machinations around the crown of Ruritania.

(Y’all don’t know how delighted I am to write the word Ruritania in a blog post. God The Prisoner of Zenda is wonderful slash terrible. My feelings about it are weird. I don’t know why I’m like this.)

Because there are SO MANY machinations, it’s hard to talk about the ones that specifically delighted me without spoiling other parts of the story. I really want y’all to enjoy these machinations for yourself, and I am aware that not everyone shares my cavaliar attitude to spoilers. I’ll just say, then, that while Jasper is a good time and Rupert of Hentzau is as delightful as in the original, KJ Charles does an excellent job of giving us female characters to root for. And I think that’s legitimately all I can say about that. You will root for some ladies while reading this book.

Can you read The Henchmen of Zenda without having read The Prisoner of Zenda? This is hard for me to say, because I have read The Prisoner of Zenda with such intense enthusiasm that it formed a keystone of my reading pleasure for KJ Charles’s adaptation. But on the whole, I think that yes, you can. I remembered the characters more than the plot of the original (though neither of those elements is like, earth-shattering — it’s just not that great a book apart from how fucking hilarious and silly it is), and I followed along just fine with the many machinations of Henchmen.

Can you read The Prisoner of Zenda after reading The Henchmen of Zenda? As I said, I can’t recommend any of my trashy guilty pleasure British adventure novels. I cannot recommend PC Wren and I cannot recommend Anthony Hope and I cannot recommend H. Rider Haggard and I cannot recommend Rafael Sabatini. However, should you happen to read The Prisoner of Zenda or any of the others, I would be delighted to chat with you about them on Twitter.

(I received a copy of this book from the author for review consideration.)

In news nearly equally as frabjous, one of my all-time faves, Meredith Duran, has a new book out called The Sins of Lord Lockwood. If you’re an angst fan like me, set Meredith Duran to auto-buy. This one’s about a lord who was kidnapped and transported by his very wicked cousin on his actual wedding night, and now he’s back from the prison camps of Australia, much to the displeasure of his wife, who for four years has believed that he just up and left her. She’s not sad about it. It was a marriage of convenience anyway. She’s not sad about it.

As y’all know if you’ve spent time around these parts, I mostly do not truck with romances that are even faintly Scottish. The Sins of Lord Lockwood really is only faintly Scottish, with a heroine whose Scottish wealth belongs to her exclusively. The action takes place almost completely not in Scotland. Phew.

Anna, our heroine, is tall and tough and ambitious — a Meredith Duran specialty! In the years of her husband’s absence, she’s managed his estates superbly because she enjoys managing estates. I love heroines like this. She just wants more estates to manage! Badly managed estates annoy her! Turns out she’s pretty maddened by Liam’s London house, which is staffed mainly by, as it turns out, convicts who were with him in the prison camp. So it’s a second-chance romance, the hero is angsty and has PTSD, there’s a staff full of loyal ex-cons, there’s a whole REVENGE plotline that the hero has to get against his scummy cousin. It’s tropey and fun, and Meredith Duran is honestly a really talented and insightful writer.

One of my romance goals for the year is to read more f/f, as I’ve noticed that my current methods of finding new romance books and authors have not been netting me a whole lot of f/f recs. But I’m changing all that, starting with Tamsen Parker’s In Her Court.

Van is excited to have a summer’s escape from her suffocating career in academia, but less excited when her best friend Nate breaks his leg and has to send his baby sister Willa to fill in for him as resident tennis instructor. She’s stuck sharing a room with Willa, who’s gorgeous and off-limits and in danger of making all the same professional mistakes Van has.

Oh there are so many of my favorite tropes in In Her Court, I just loved reading this — and I don’t tend to read a lot of, like, sportsy romances. Van and Willa have to share a room while secretly being wildly attracted to each other; Willa’s the best friend’s sister, which is always fun as long as the author can avoid (as Tamsen Parker does!) any sexist implications or yuckiness; they’re both charming geeks who share a lot of the same passions. In Her Court is a super fun and sweet romance that prioritizes honesty and communication in a way that I found really lovely.

Last but not at all least, I read an absolutely charming historical by Vanessa Riley, The Bashful Bride. This turned out to be the second in a series about black women in Regency London advertising for husbands.

Heiress Ester Croome has to elope as quickly as possible, to avoid the marriage her father has arranged for her. So when her friend’s newspaper advertisement for a husband brings in Ester’s favorite actor, Arthur Bex, Ester seizes the opportunity to run away with him to Gretna Green. But Bex is hiding dark secrets about his past, which threaten his happy future with Ester.

The Bashful Bride is an immensely sweet romance, most of which is taken up by the road trip that takes Ester and Bex to Gretna Green to be married. I was slightly frustrated with all of Ester’s going back and forth on whether she really wanted to run away with Bex or not, and would have liked to see her pick a side and stick with it. However, I absolutely love that Riley explores abolitionism and the challenges a black woman would face in and outside of London. Even something as simple as getting a room for the night is nearly impossible for Ester and Bex together. If you love historicals (and don’t mind “closed-door” romances) but wish they featured more characters of color, Vanessa Riley is an author to check out! I’m looking forward to read more of the books in this series.

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration.)

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