Nothing gets me on my crazy Catholic bullshit like a new Tamsyn Muir book. When I finally (FINALLY) got my hands on Nona the Ninth, after ten thousand (fact check: two) years of pining for it, I curled up on my sofa with it and my Bible and unfortunately no wine because I was on a clean living kick, and read it and thought of tweets like “New Revised Standard Version in the streets, King James Version in the sheets”, a tweet you were only spared because I couldn’t stop reading Nona the Ninth long enough to write it.

One fact about the Locked Tomb trilogy is that any man who falls behind is left behind; by which I mean that it is impossible to describe the events of this book to someone who has not read the prior two books. I know this to be true because I have read Harrow the Ninth eleventy-thousand times, and I have even written a blog post that tiresomely explicates its references to memes and Bible verses, yet when I picked up Nona the Ninth and flipped to the end to check how things were going for certain parties, the pages that I read were goddamn gibberish. I remember this from getting the ARC of Harrow the Ninth. Here was I, all determined to discover what was going to happen, and here was the end of Harrow the Ninth like “and then Mercymorn exploded, and some sunglasses, and we went under the River, and there was a Body GOOD LUCK BITCH.”

I love it here; I love everyone in this bar.

Thirty seconds after I had finished reading Nona the Ninth, I handed my copy to my mother. She said, “Were any of our theories right?” and I just stared at her with unseeing eyes like a necromancer whose blindness may or may not have protected her from the blue madness wrought by Varun the Eater (Number Seven). She said, patiently, “Who did Nona turn out to be?” and my facial expression did not alter because the fuck do I know. (I think I do know. But I am not confident.) It’s like when the first of my Twitter mutuals copped to having read Harrow the Ninth, way back in the innocent time before the plague, and I immediately DMed them to demand they tell me if Gideon was alive, and they were all like, “S…ort of? Yes? Or, maybe?”

If this makes it sound like Tamsyn Muir continues to be coy with the giving out of answers, that is an accurate takeaway. Or to put it another way, Tamsyn Muir has this uncanny knack for letting loose an avalanche of answers, at the end of which you have ten thousand more questions than you had in the first place. Of those, the one I have been shrieking most loudly at my friends-and-relations (who bear it very patiently, considering) is WHO THE ABSOLUTE ENTIRE LIVING FUCK IS E!!!! (I refuse to inquire if Gideon and Harrow are going to be reunited and okay. Of course they are going to be reunited and okay. They might both be dead; I am not sure; it does not affect my belief in their future happiness. I did a little Tarot spread for them, and the outcome card was the Six of Wands, so things are going to be fine.)

“Jenny please just tell us what the book is about.” Yes, okay. Sorry. So the book is about a girl called Nona, who only attained consciousness a short while ago, and who is living inside a body that doesn’t seem to be hers. She lives with Pyrrha (I love Pyrrha so much) and Camilla, who sometimes is Palamedes, and she goes to a school where she has a little gang of friends who are children. This is good for Nona because although she seems to be nineteenish, she is in many ways a child too. She can’t read, but she can speak every language. She loves everyone in her life, including and especially her teacher’s little dog Noodle. She and her little family are in constant danger from threats that include the armies of the Nine Houses, a Resurrection Beast in ?orbit?? or something? over their planet, and various Blood of Eden factions.

If I am absolutely honest, I have to confess that Nona is not quite my thing, as a character. Obviously she’s a good girl, and she cares about her people and she cares about Noodle, and that’s all well and good. But if I am anything, I am a second-book-in-the-trilogy bitch all the way up to my eyeballs, and if I am anything else, I am soft for a Shuos Jedao / Captain Flint type, and what I am saying is that Harrowhark Nonagesimus was always going to be the narrator of my heart. Good though Nona is, she was the least interesting character in her book, partly because everyone else has more information than she does, and I — frustratingly — had access to very little of it.

That said, Nona the Ninth is a banner book for fans of the Sixth House. If ever you have wished that fiction would give more space to best friendship (as opposed to, for instance, romance) between men and women, I believe that you will enjoy the whole arc that Palamedes and Camilla undergo, except uhhhhh possibly for one thing towards the end that I do not myself know quite how to feel about so I guess I’ll have to wait until Alecto the Ninth comes out to make a decision on that.

Major spoilers in this paragraph: When I was listing my hopes and dreams for the Locked Tomb trilogy, I said that I wanted a really really good Palamedes and Camilla reunion. Here is what I have learned, friends: Tamsyn Muir may give you what you said you wanted, but whatever the case, she will find a way to inflict the maximum amount of psychic damage on you as she goes. Before Nona came out, I spoke to a friend who was rereading Gideon, and they were like, “Can you imagine Crux’s face if he ever found out Gideon was God’s daughter? Like, I know that could never happen, but can you imagine?” and I was all “wow yeah that would be satisfying,” but secretly inside my own heart I was thinking, “It will not be satisfying and you will be devastated.” Anyway that was a very charming thing that happened to me, and I wanted to share it. Hopefully my friend was able to derive satisfaction from Gideon’s very spot-on burn of how badly Crux fucked up both her and Harrow. I certainly enjoyed it. I am very much in the tank for Gideon and Harrow’s devotion to each other, and it sends a zing of pleasure up my spine any time one of them heatedly defends the other. They’re so in love! They’re such good girls! I love them!

In interstitial chapters, John is explaining to Harrow — but he doesn’t really really seem to be talking to Harrow — what he did and why things are like this. You do not discover answers to questions like “is Harrow alive” or “where did necromancy come from really” but you do discover answers to questions like “why does nobody ever talk about Ulysses and Titania” and “is it chill and fine to turn cows inside out, or will people get upset” and “how soon did people start correctly identifying that John is a fucking cult leader.” There is also the creepiest possible scene which I will share here for extensive discussion in the comments:

He was scooping indentations in the sand, making big, print-block child’s letters with the tip of his forefinger. As she watched, he made a pothook–J–then the finned spine of E. He wiped that E clean, and replaced it with A. He wiped that clean, and he drew the prison bars of H. This J and H he barred around with an uneven heart.

Just a few quick follow-up Qs:

1. What?
2. How is John so altogether fucking creepy?
3. J is John and H is Harrow and A is Alecto, so who the shit is E?
4. What?

Implied major spoilers in this paragraph: I had a dream in graphic novel form about some Catholic teenagers ruining one another’s lives, and in the dream one of the Catholic teenagers was reading Nona the Ninth and she looked up from the ?page? (idk she was a pen and ink drawing, I don’t think there even was a page, it was a weird dream) and said, “Is E the Earth?” and now I can’t stop thinking about that. E is the Earth, right? Alecto’s the Earth? And if I may, how many fucking times has John rebuilt all his fucking friends? Please discuss in the comments. I am troubled by the implication that a) they possibly may have had different names the first time around; and b) John resurrected them after killing them; and c) it is not outside the realm of possibility that John has done this more than once. Eeeeeeuuuuurrrrrrrgggghhhh.

Have you read Nona yet? Did you love it? Do you have theories you wish to share in the comments?

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https://www.tor.com/2022/07/26/how-to-not-fit-in-the-misfit-heroine-and-olivia-atwaters-half-a-soul/

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Tochi Onyebuchi is far too interesting and thoughtful a writer to have achieved his final form with his fifth novel, but I do get the sense that the success of his most recent novella, Riot Baby, and his continuing development as a writer bought him the leeway he needed to write his wonderful, genre-crossing new novel, Goliath. Inasmuch as it has a plot, it’s about the re-gentrification of New Haven. In this future, the wealthy and the white have mostly left earth for space colonies, while those without the means to leave were left to cope with pollution, automated policing, and steadily deteriorating government support. Now, white folks are coming back to New Haven (and Earth more broadly!), which means that governments are starting to care more about clean air and policing the lives of those who never left.

(Sidebar, I lived in New Haven for three months and it was the weirdest place I have ever been. It’s one of those things where like, the segregation and prejudice of the place you’re not from feels the weirdest? Like, I know that segregation happens all over the US, very much including my home state. But the divide between Yale and Not-Yale was so stark, and so mutually suspicious, and white people in New Haven would just say anything to you about non-white New Haven, like, right to my face after knowing me for thirty seconds, and everyone was deeply unfriendly, and tldr it was fucking weird as shit and I was not there long enough to get good at navigating it.)

ANYWAY. Goliath is the second of two 2022 SF novels that I read in January that were no plot, only vibes. Historically this has not been my thing! But I am trying to be more open to different kinds of books and different ways of telling stories, and certainly it’s impossible to read Goliath and wish for it to be anything other than what it is. It’s a dark story, dealing with police brutality, environmental racism, gentrification, housing inequality, and a host of other issues, so it feels a bit weird to talk about it in terms of play. But playing is exactly with Onyebuchi is doing: playing with his setting, with SF conventions, with the city of New Haven, most particularly with genre. Goliath is clearly a work of science fiction, but it ranges widely across genre, sometimes feeling nearly like a hangout sitcom, dabbling in romance, flirting with being a Western. You can sense the author flexing a lot of different muscles to produce a story that feels deeply situated in the time of its writing and simultaneously grimly predictive.

Though Goliath is packed full of people making variable levels of effort at being good, there’s an extent to which the project of goodness is doomed by the bigger systems in which the characters find themselves. The clearest–and most heartbreaking–example of this is the section of the book that tells the story of a successful inmate rebellion at a South Carolina prison in the near future. Because you’re not new here, you know from the first punch thrown that the rebels won’t gain their freedom. (This is obvious even before you read the acknowledgements and learn that Onyebuchi drew inspiration for this section from Heather Ann Thompson’s book on the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion.) But the exact mechanism by which they lose their shot at a better life is so pointless and futile, yet entirely predictable. It’s hard to feel that anything different could have happened, given the set of circumstances (slavery, environmental racism, the systematic devaluation of Black lives) we started with.

At its rosiest, Goliath is a book about community. One plotline follows a group of young Black adults in New Haven, many of whom are stackers (demolition workers sent to tear down old houses to get materials for new ones), all of whom are faced, again and again, with the stark reality that their lives matter less than those of the gentrifiers. They carve out space for their own joy by the simple act of being together. At times they’re even able to make that space physical, when they find some horses roaming free and ride them back into town and find a place for them to live and be cared for by the community.

But the limits of community are very stark. A white couple, biblically named David and Jonathan, have made a plan to move back to New Haven in the aftermath of their separate griefs. Onyebuchi gives us a glimpse of how the two of them forged their own we, meeting over cigarettes behind a hospital, and those scenes are lovely, compassionate, heartfelt. Except their we excludes Linc and his friends by the very fact of their presence in New Haven. The we of this white family is predicated on the they of Black families who have been in New Haven for generations, who have been left to breathe poisoned air (that’s now being cleaned up so David and Jonathan can breathe it), who are facing a renewed, strengthened police presence (so David and Jonathan can feel safe). We don’t get much sense of David and Jonathan recognizing the forces they’re a part of, or the fact that their relative privilege has enabled them to pursue a new community at the expense of already existing ones.

Though the gentrification is an undeniable blow to the Black communities of New Haven, Onyebuchi is not sentimental about the limits of those communities. As was true for the prison riot and its near-success, and as is true for all of us, Linc and his friends are constrained by the structures they live within. Poverty is not ennobling or romantic, in Onyebuchi’s telling (or, of course, in real life). It is, by design, destructive. The book ends in tragedy, as it must, but Onyebuchi slips in a line to suggest that it’s not the tragedy you’ve been told, not the tragedy you expected.

In another sense, of course, it’s exactly the tragedy you expected, a tragedy that sits in exact alignment with every other tragedy in this book. It’s the triumph of oppressive structures over the people caught up in those structures. Goliath paints a dark picture of the future, by which I mean that it holds up a mirror to the present.

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If you’ve read Marjorie Liu’s wonderful adult comic with Sana Takeda, Monstress, you’ll already be familiar with her knack for lush worldbuilding, moral dilemmas, and road trip banter. Zuli is a gem of a heroine, and her newness to the “real” world makes her an ideal reader stand-in for this road trip. Some things Frowly knows and can explain to her, like the fact that birds and humans have bones (“I’d rather not think about it,” he says), or what hunger and thirst might feel like. But though Frowly once lived in the real world, he’s been absent from it for generations. His memory is patchy, and of course he’s missed out on years of history.

Of course, if you’ve read Monstress, you also know that two things she is very good at are found family and road trips. (If you know me, you may also be aware that I LOVE ROAD TRIPS. I would go on a road trip right fucking now. I would hop in a car this instant minute with just a backpack and a fully loaded e-reader. I don’t even care.) So naturally, Zuli acquires a second real-world explainer in the form of goblin scavenger Orien. He also has an animal sidekick, because that is what the people want. Honestly, nothing made me want to spend time in middle grade — a genre that forms an insignificant portion of my reading diet — as much as the presence of animal sidekicks. Please drop some recs of books with animal sidekicks in the comments. I always forget how much I like them.

When I was rereading Orien’s opening scene in preparation for writing this review, I was freshly delighted with Liu’s craft. Orien is an immediately recognizable character – the rogue guy who helps Our Heroes reluctantly — of a type that you’re never not going to be excited about. But Liu weaves in the worldbuilding seamlessly around Orien’s introduction. He mentions a winged people called the Siric, who lived high in the mountains. “If you have wings,” he says, “you live as high as you can.” When Zuli asks where Orien’s mountain is — he has wings, after all — he says, curtly, that he’s not allowed to live anywhere high, then changes the subject. In the next two-page spread, Frowly is anxiously warning Zuli about all the terrible things goblins do to other winged creatures. Has he ever seen goblins do any of those things, Zuli asks. “No,” says Frowly. “Not that I can remember.” It sets the scene wonderfully and tells us a lot about Orien’s past and present.

(As a small note here: The goblins of Wingbearer obviously do not eat children, and I’m sure the arc of the comic as a whole will be about how goblins have been wronged, and ultimately they will get to live in a lovely high place where they can use their wings to fly anywhere they want. Even so, I really would prefer that the stereotypes of fictional goblins should avoid alignment with antisemitic conspiracy theories, not only because antisemitism is on the rise globally, but also because the alignment of goblins with Jewish people is of long standing. We were, like, just having this conversation about the Gringotts goblins.)

Zuli and Orien are just the right pairing for a book like this. Orien is street-wise and a little cynical, while Zuli possesses the kindness, optimism, and confidence that come from having always been loved. In any given encounter, Orien and Frowly are the ones advocating for caution or schemes, while Zuli is the one who thinks that Just Telling the Truth will net them the best results. Each side is right about half the time. Sometimes Zuli’s sweetness is enough to carry the day, and other times it’s the exact quality that makes people think they can take advantage of her. She’s right often enough that she leaves in her wake a stable of variously dependable allies who can pop back up later on in the way of all good quest stories.

Though Zuli doesn’t begin her quest with a high level of interest in Where She Came From and Who She Is, those questions are at a constant low hum throughout the story. We get hints early on that she’s connected to the Siric — a winged people commemorated in ruined statuary — but Frowly isn’t eager to talk more about them, and Zuli of course doesn’t have wings. If you’ve read a book before, and I HAVE, MY FRIENDS, it’s obvious that Zuli’s identity will prove to be central to the mystery of what’s happening to the birds. From a starting point of complete trust in Frowly and the guardians of the tree, Zuli slowly begins to question what she’s been told (or rather, not told) about herself. It’s one of those tropes that’s kind of inexhaustibly good and pleasing, the beloved child being forced to reckon with her parents’ imperfections as she goes out into a world beyond them. This first volume leaves us on a cliffhanger that answers a big question while leaving the reader with about fifty more.

I can’t close out this review without a few words about Teny Aida Issakhanian’s art because whew is it gorgeous. Every panel is a swirl of colors and light, and Issakhanian has a knack for when to slam an emotional moment with a close-up on the characters’ faces and when to zoom way out and give the reader a sense of how massive this world is and how tiny Zuli and Orien are within it. If you’re in the market for a good fantasy road trip / coming of age story that’s also a visual pleasure, Wingbearer is absolutely your guy. I can’t wait for the next volume, or for my niece and nephew to get old enough that I can give them this book for their birthdays.

(Please do not ask me any follow-up questions about how many gifts I have on tap for these kids when they get just slightly older. Those would be rude questions. Also, I don’t have to answer you. So there.)

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The mainstreaming of fandom has created some deeply weird ripple effects in terms of fan/creator interactions (my hot take is that we should never have wanted this, at least for the large franchises), but one of the best things about it has been that more and more authors are speaking openly about their fannish influences. All the Feels and A Marvellous Light each feel like books that couldn’t have existed without fanfiction, partly because of subject matter, but mostly because they draw so deeply from the well of joy that makes the fannish engine run.

All the Feels is a companion to Spoiler Alert, a romance novel I have recommended prolifically and at loud volume. Like its predecessor, All the Feels follows a lead actor in the television show Game of Thrones Gods of the Gates, which had some good years but is now kind of a mess because its showrunners lack vision and are mean, superficial jerks. In a mean, superficial jerk move, one of the showrunners has hired his very put-upon cousin, an ER therapist named Lauren Clegg, to follow star Alex Woodroe around and make sure he doesn’t get into trouble. This has become necessary after Alex got in a bar fight, but also because he is an agent of chaos. By contrast, Lauren is relentlessly sensible and self-effacing, though like Alex she’s trying to figure out her next moves as her life’s work implodes around her.

A Marvellous Light is a queer fantasy romance set in an alternate version of Edwardian England where everything’s the same except, unbeknownst to most, there is magic. The sunshiney, athletic, slightly laddish Robin Blyth takes a job for which he is numerously unqualified; the most pertinent of his unqualifications is that he has no idea magic exists and it’s kind of a magic-forward job. The job turns out to be its own hotbed of intrigue and murder—as Robin discovers when he meets the magical (but not nearly magical enough to suit his judgmental, Daisy-Fay-from-Gatsby-careless family) bureaucrat Edwin Courcey. Together they uncover a conspiracy that threatens the very foundations of English magic.

A Marvellous Light is notable for its inclusion of explicit sex scenes, which have always been common in romance novels (A Marvellous Light is a romance novel) but whose presence in mainstream commercial SFF is a pretty clear result of having editors, writers, and decision-makers who came out of fandom. As various genres (honestly including tradpub romance novels! and certainly including things like SFF movies; fuck you, Marvel) have become more squeamish about including sex and makeouts, it’s been refreshing to see SFF publishers shift in the opposite direction. A Marvellous Light is the latest of many recent books from Tor, Harper Voyager, and others that have included frank discussions and portrayals of sex. Yay! (Kit Rocha and Jessie Mihalik’s books are, like this one, romances, but recent books by authors like Rivers Solomon and Nghi Vo have also included sex scenes.)²

A Marvellous Light feels especially fannish in the unfussy queerness and careful building of the romance (despite being set in a historical era that was less than friendly to queer love). Marske dispenses quickly with the necessity for Robin and Edwin to conceal their sexual orientation from each other, which allows for her to explore the far more interesting question of what sort of relationship they each want from the other and–crucially–how much of themselves they’re willing to give away. The possibility of romantic and sexual attraction is flawlessly twined around the plot (plant imagery used advisedly): Robin has to spend time with Edwin if he wants his curse lifted (Robin’s under a viscerally nasty curse; I heart folk magic), giving them both plenty of time to gaze yearningly at each other’s hands and dislike each other’s unsatisfactory families.

Freya Marske is open about her background in fandom, and the DNA of fanfic and specifically fanfic sex is all over A Marvellous Light. Her sex scenes, and the scenes leading up to sex, are funny and frank (the two guys realize each other are queer because one of them finds the other one’s, like, porny pamphlet, which is extra funny if you’ve ever read any Victorian or Edwardian porn, all of which is goddamn absurd), and they do this thing that feels inestimably fanficcy to me: Marske’s sex scenes—and the book as a whole—are tender toward the realities of embodiment.

Outside of romance and fic, literature often treats bodies as pure grotesquery, a distraction from the loftier life of the mind. In the first place, I will have no truck with dualism, for it is nonsense. Secondly, this sort of thinking inevitably leads to heightened contempt for bodies perceived as unruly or transgressive, which somehow always belong to marginalized people. An amazing coincidence! And C, hating your body, and bodies generally, really sets a bitch up for failure. We do not actually possess the technology to convert you into a being of pure thought, so you’re kind of stuck with your meatsack, and you might as well be kind to it, even if you do insist on thinking of it as nothing more than the squishy, annoying vehicle that hauls your brain around.

All the Feels is similarly tender about its protagonists’ bodies, which would be par for the course in the romance genre, except that Olivia Dade’s work most wonderfully features protagonists who aren’t cast in one of the, like, three acceptable romance novel heroine physical types. Lauren is petite and round, with sharp features and a beaky nose that makes her look like a bird. As in Spoiler Alert, it’s never suggested that this makes her undesirable to Alex, nor is her body ignored or glossed over during sex scenes. It’s part and parcel of a bigger theme (in both books) of finding within yourself the ability to celebrate your own gifts and strengths, rather than constantly finding fault with your weaknesses.

Lauren is accustomed to people trying to make her feel small, and she no longer reacts to it and doesn’t want Alex to, either. All well and good, until you realize—as Alex does, almost immediately—that she’s fully internalized the idea that she deserves and should expect nothing better than the contempt and snottiness of people who will always, always put her last. On his side, Alex is perpetually terrified that he’ll disappoint the people around him, and perpetually certain that he already has. It’s easy for him to see his flaws and failure, particularly those that arise from his ADHD, but much harder for him to recognize how those same traits make him special, fun, helpful, kind.

A driving impulse of fanfic—though certainly not the only one—is the sense that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s the source of so much joy in fic, this simple idea to look at a piece of media or, you know, the world, and say, “Actually, I think we can do better than that.” Everybody can be gay! Everybody can have therapy! Everybody lives! For good and ill,³ there’s a critique baked in to what fic writers keep from canon and what they leave behind, a Marie Kondoing of the elements that don’t spark joy in favor of the ones that do.

The major characters arcs of All the Feels and A Marvellous Light are about finding ways to make use of your existing qualities and competencies in a world that’s not set up to find them, or you, valuable. The broader critique, of course, is that it’s all a trap anyway. There’s no middle ground you can find, no level of adherence to the desired standards that can exempt you from being made to feel small. Alex’s ADHD is met with contempt by—mostly jerks, sure, on page, but jerks who have power over him and are trying to persuade him to be less chaotic. Yet on the other side we have Lauren, a person defined by her ability to bring order out of chaos (that’s why she gets this job!), and it’s clear she’s been conditioned to think of herself as kind of a dumpy killjoy. The system has been set up for both of them to fail, and their emotional journeys are about carving out space for themselves and each other to thrive.

In particular, both books treat the gaze of the beloved as a kind of… I don’t know, splint? braces?, a small refuge within which the characters can begin to see themselves the way their love interests immediately saw them. As the least powerfully magical member of his family, Edwin has been subject to near-constant bullying from his siblings. He’s been convinced that his powers are inadequate, and that induced certainty prevents him from recognizing the areas in which he excels. Robin—new to the world of magic—brings a fresh perspective that Edwin allows himself, slowly, to share.

“You invented this system? You applied it?” Robin looked around them at the hundreds, thousands of books. “And you carry the whole thing around in your head?”

“I made a catalogue.” Edwin indicated a small hand-bound volume he hadn’t once touched. “And if you’re going to suggest that I was a very dull child, let me assure you that it would by no means be an original insult.” …

“Remind me not to make an enemy of you, Edwin Courcey,” he said, smiling to show he meant no sting. “I think yours is probably the kind of brain that could run a country.”

IT’S BEAUTIFUL TBH. I too would be very impressed with someone who had deduced the entire Dewey Decimal System from first principles.

I’ve been pretty critical this year of fannish spaces and racism in fandom, and I stand by those critiques. At the same time, it remains true that fandom contains a lot of beauty and tenderness and also thoughtful critique of inequitable social structures. It’s why I keep coming back to fanfic and why I probably always will. All the Feels and A Marvellous Light are both deeply engaged with the best of the fanfic ethos, and it was a pleasure to get to read them.

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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.

Light from Uncommon Stars has three protagonists: a teenage violinist, a grown adult violinist who can buy her soul back from Hell by giving it seven souls of younger violinists (her students), and a donut shop proprietor who is actually an alien on the run from galactic warfare. As that description indicates, this is a book that unapologetically blends genres, a fantasy novel that’s a sci-fi novel that’s actually really a novel about saving our lives through music, food, and human connection. Insofar as it reminds me of anything, it reminds me of Martin Millar: Aoki gives her world the same sharp edges that Millar’s worlds have, and like his books, Aoki’s is about wresting a happy ending out of chaos.

Shizuka Satomi has sent the souls of six of her students to hell, choosing them carefully, training them as violinists, and then letting them play with her special, cursed dogwood bow so that their souls are consigned to damnation. When she hears teenager Katrina Nguyen playing in the park, she recognizes something in the girl’s playing: she’s far from being a virtuoso right now, but she has an instinct that can’t be taught. Shizuka takes her on as a student with every intention of feeding her soul to the devil in exchange for Shizuka’s own.

As the two get to know each other, as they spend their days together, as Shizuka begins to understand the large and small traumas that have shaped Katrina’s life so far, they form a true bond. At times you worry that it’s an unhealthy bond, that Katrina is too willing to give herself away to the first person in — maybe ever? — who shows her kindness, who fully accepts her gender identity, who cares for her like you do for a child but respects her like a fellow adult. Even as you’re worried about Katrina, there’s still such a sense of respite. The book begins with her running away from home, her father having physically abused her for being trans, and she’s staying with a friend who turns out not to be one, while engaging in survival sex work to get by. It’s rough going, and you can see why Katrina’s ready to take any port in a storm.

Of course, I understood there was no chance that Shizuka was going to consign Katrina’s soul to hell. It is very much not that kind of book. I knew that the trajectory of the book was going to ensure that Shizuka and the other characters would take good care of Katrina. (Would love to get that kid into trauma-focused therapy btw.) And they do, of course. Better yet, they foster her career with affection and respect, and Shizuka follows Katrina’s lead in their teacher/student relationship, helping her play video game theme music when she’s feeling it and Bartók when she’s feeling that. The point in either case isn’t for Katrina to play this piece or that piece, but rather to be connected to her work.

That sense of connection is particularly important for Shizuka to foster in her student, because she herself has faced such an intense alienation from her own music. Her deal with hell meant that all trace of her career as a performer has been wiped. No record remains of her talent. Among the many things Aoki does well is to truly make the reader feel the ways in which music intertwines itself with the characters’ lives and emotions. This is very helpful to me, a non-musician, and it made me want to ask Aoki a ton of questions about her own musical background.

With Katrina, Shizuka used what had always worked: let her listen, let her follow…. Just play and trust her to follow.

Initially Shizuka had assumed this process was to compensate for a lack of training. Yet Shizuka quickly realized that, although it differed from her previous students, Katrina was far from untrained.

Her tonality had been honed by a lifetime of being concerned with her voice. Her fingerings were liquid, born of years of not wanting her hands to make ugly motions. And her ability to play to a crowd, project emotion, follow physical cues?

Katrina had trained in that most of all.

So, of course, I wanted the book to end with Katrina being safe and cared for with the tenderness and interest that every kid deserves. What I didn’t expect was how emotional I would feel about Shizuka getting saved and taken care of. Because Light from Uncommon Stars understands something about generosity that I rarely see reflected in fiction, perhaps because it’s hard to articulate (I am struggling to articulate it right now). Receiving generosity is great, and it’s important to Katrina to be given new clothes, and money, and a safe place to sleep, and the repair of her violin. Katrina has not had the experience of receiving generosity from people. But she also hasn’t been in a position to dispense generosity, and Aoki understands that this, too, has been a lack. As she shifts out of survival mode for the first time maybe ever, Katrina possesses the resources to give help, and because she is a good girl, that’s exactly what she does. Your correspondent got pretty emoshe about it.

(I still don’t feel like I’ve articulated the thing I want to say about generosity, dammit. It’s that being able to help others is its own kind of need? And when that need goes unfulfilled, it sucks? And that is why kids with trauma backgrounds often say they want to grow up to work in a job where they can help other kids like them.)

If I haven’t said as much about the third protagonist, Lan Tran (the galactic traveler who now owns a donut shop on earth but can’t get good donuts out of her replicator because the ingredient that’s missing is love), or the violin shop owner Lucy Matia whose arc is about changing her own understanding of how violins are made and maintained and what her place in that world is, it’s not because I didn’t care about those guys. It’s just because I melted all the way into Katrina and Shizuka’s relationship, how these two people enter into it with the matter-of-fact assumption that Shizuka will do harm to Katrina and it’s just a question of how much harm and when, and then the way it shifts not just into Shizuka loving Katrina like a daughter, but into Katrina stepping up to protect and care for Shizuka as well.

Ryka Aoki’s previous books came out from small publishers, which, yay for small publishers!, but it’s also awesome to see her at the start of what I hope is a long and prominent SFF career with Tor. I would like please for her to send me a list of The Best Violin Performances for a Lady Who Doesn’t Know Anything about Music (full disclosure, it’s me) to Listen to on YouTube; because she really made me feel things about violins.

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Like Peas and Carrots, Partly Cloudy is about what makes a family and how to be a good citizen of the world. Madalyn has been accustomed to a very traditional family, where she and her mom and dad all live in the same place all the time. But now change is afoot. First her dad gets a job that takes him out of town most of the time, and then her mom decides to send her to live with her great-uncle so she can attend a better school. That leaves her without either parent for much of the week, and she has to make all new friends at a school where she’s the only Black kid in her class. She immediately vibes with one of her classmates, but quickly finds that Natalie harbors ugly ideas about Black boys and adults.

Partly Cloudy has a real slice-of-life vibe, in ways that I tend to find frustrating in books for older readers and adults, but really enjoyed here. Papa Lobo, Madalyn’s great-uncle, is a gem of a human being, and though Madalyn doesn’t quite get the hang of him at first, she’s quickly able to settle into life with him (even though he doesn’t have wifi). At the same time, she has two parents who are very involved in her life and to whom she’s very close, but Davis doesn’t shy away from the fact that financial problems are dictating a lot of the choices the family has to make. It was great to see representation of how many, many parents struggle to balance issues of finance with parenting, without any suggestion that they’ve fucked up fiscally or parentally. Madalyn doesn’t love her new situation, but she’s able to find the good in it, forming a close bond with Papa Lobo and making new friends at her school.

As a separate thing, I was delighted with the presence of Black Louisiana Catholics in this book! Papa Lobo goes to Mass every week — on Saturday, so he can hang out with his friends on Sunday — and throws out Creole phrases as well. Yay Louisiana!! And yay for representations of religious people not being close-minded jerks. (Contrary to what white evangelicals are constantly striving to make us believe, it is actually possible to be a person of faith without trying to take away rights from your fellow humans.)

The climactic event of the book is a fire that comes near enough to Madalyn’s life that her family’s affected by it. A of all, I feel so sorry for the kids today. What a crap life for them to live on this burning planet! Secondly, though, I was very heartwarmed to see the community pulling together to take care of each other in a time of disaster. Papa Lobo rightly insists that children deserve to be and feel safe, even if their parents raised them racist, while Madalyn insists on taking care of one of Papa Lobo’s nemeses — so they each have something to teach each other about the right way to act in times of crisis. Despite the miserable, ongoing counterexample of COVID-19, we do still do this for each other. We pull together in disasters. That’s a value worth cultivating, and Partly Cloudy knows it.

As for the racism, Madalyn’s immediate friend at school is a white girl named Natalie, and Madalyn quickly gets a sinking feeling that Natalie is kinda racist. She’s scared of Papa Lobo’s godson, Jean, and their mutual friends are quick to explain it away as the result of a bullying incident Natalie endured the previous year at the hands of a Black boy. But Madalyn’s not sure she should give Natalie a pass. When she finally talks to her mother, her mom wisely tells her that you get to choose when it’s worth it to you to try to educate, versus when you want to walk away. Because there’s such an onus placed on Black folks in real life to forgive and educate, I might have liked to see a little more pushback in the text to the idea that Madalyn should continue her relationship with Natalie. But in the end, the girls reconcile, and you can see that Natalie has been struck by the conversation Madalyn bravely had with her about the impact her words and ideas have had on Madalyn.

Partly Cloudy reminds us of the value of care, and of taking the time to really see those around us. Madalyn doesn’t love being apart from her parents, but she’s ultimately able to see the joy, fun, and value of making herself part of Papa Lobo’s life. Natalie has allowed the weeds of white supremacy to take root in her mind, but her friendship with Madalyn and the care that Madalyn’s family shows her during the fire help her to learn better and act better. Tanita Davis is relentlessly uncynical, and Partly Cloudy felt like a tonic in these wretched and angry times.

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Actually even more maddening to me than a lack of policy (eh, maybe not; maybe it’s a toss-up, I find both of these things frustrating) is the suggestion that you can foment and enact revolution without getting your hands dirty. The protagonists of these books sometimes have people around them who are too ruthless and maybe do a bombing, which is a good way to remind the reader that our heroes are moral people who would never harm women or children in their quest to overthrow the corrupt ruling state that throws people into a snake fire hellpit. And then the ultimate message is if you are sufficiently pure of heart, you can totally make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Hooray! Liberty and justice for all! This is no good for me because my aesthetic is much more:

(Not that anyone has inquired, but if EYE were goingto run a resistance organization, what I’d do is create two separate groups that would appear to be in opposition to each other but secretly they’d be working in concert, and one of the groups would be the nonviolent resistance guys with very clearly articulated policy proposals and a squeaky clean religious leader at its head and the other group would espouse the rhetoric of burning everything down, which they would back up by burning down high-profile targets sometimes, so the ruling class would be very afraid that if they didn’t implement the nonviolent guys’ policy proposals, they’d instead get burned down by the violent guys, so they’d be like, well we won’t talk to you violent jerks, but we’ll talk to these other guys who share some of your less radical goals and seem like they wouldn’t burn down a school, and that’s how I would get my own way in the end, if I were in charge of The Resistance. Which I wouldn’t be. Someone charismatic can be in charge, and I will be the shadowy advisor who comes up with practical ways to achieve their lofty idealistic goals.)

What’s that? Talk about the books, you say? Great, yes, let’s hop to it.

The premise of Fireborne is that the former governing body of Callipolis was these absolute tyrants who maintained their wicked rule through violent dragon enforcement, because they had psychic connections to these scary fire-breathing dragons. Then a man named Atreus came along and did a rebellion to institute a more equitable system, whereby everyone would get placed in a social stratum based on the results of a standardized test. Under this new system, even peasant orphans can be telepathic dragon cops. Hoo–ray? Our two protagonists, Lee and Annie, grew up in an orphanage together and are now two of the lead candidates competing to be Firstriders in the dragon corps. But Lee has a secret: He’s the scion of the old dragonlords, who watched his whole family die in Atreus’s coup d’etat all those years ago. Because you cannot actually make an goddamn omelet without breaking a few goddamn eggs.

What I like about this, as a premise, is that the old regime was very wicked, and at one and the same time, Lee is rightly ambivalent about the new regime. Is it better than the rule of the dragonlords? For sure. Does Lee have serious and lasting trauma from watching his whole family get slaughtered by the rebels who now govern his country? Hundo p. On the other side of things, we have Annie, short for Antigone (love it), who watched her own family die at the hands of Lee’s very father and his dragon. The old regime was very very bad!! It oppressed the peasantry!

But does Rosaria Munda stop upping the ante? SHE DOES NOT. There’s a point in Fireborne where a famine strikes the country and they have to institute rationing, enforced by *jazz hands* dragon riders! Which means: Annie! Which means she has to go into the selfsame peasant countryside areas where she herself was a child and sit upon the same exact type of scary dragon that terrorized her as a child, and she has to use her dragon to intimidate the populace into doing rationing correctly. Moral dilemma!

So then does Rosaria Munda cease upping the ante? My friends, she does not, because under no circumstances can you make a motherfucking omelet without killing a few people.

In Flamefall, the the survivors of the massacre of the dragonlords have taken over governance of a whole other place (New Pythos), where they are now being real jerks to the peasantry there. Griff is a dragonrider, but his dragon wears a muzzle, and he serves at the whim of dragonlords who might at any moment kill his family. That situation: p. bad. Back in the home country, the famine is ongoing, and people with lower medal rankings are receiving smaller rations than people with higher medal rankings (which includes Our Heroes). Meanwhile the regime is tightening its control over the press and even the theaters, and there aren’t enough bunkers for everyone in the event of dragon attack. That situation: p. bad, also.

Oh, and then there are some rebels in the home country, who are fighting for the vague equality I mentioned at the start of this post. Whilst their primary goal (equality) is laudable, they do other things that lead to mass civilian casualties and MORE FAMINE. That situation: this will astonish you, but p. bad too. Just as many governments are bad at governing, many freedom fighters are quite poor at fighting for freedom.

The shouting is cheerful, the [rebels] eager to set out into the night to leave gifts of bread on the steps of the unsuspecting poor…. But the problems with the scene niggle the back of my mind: The bread is made from stolen grain; the luck of those who will receive it stems from their streets being within a walk of the Misanthrope, from living in the neighborhood of someone who dared rob a city granary. The metals stratification isn’t fair, but neither is this haphazard redistribution–

Lee and Annie remain idealists in this book, as they were in the previous one, but they discover very clearly that high ideals are not a trustworthy protection against benefiting from unequal systems. Our new protagonist in Flamefall, Griff, knows this lesson keenly. The life that Atreus saved (?) Callipolis’s peasantry from, Griff is now living. He and his people have been subjugated by the exiled dragonlords and forced into service. Though Griff has a (muzzled) dragon, he lives in service of capricious masters who have abused and terrorized him. You get the sense that Atreus must once have felt the way Griff does now: angry and tired, and desperate to find any way to free his loved ones from the dragonlords’ yoke.

I wouldn’t exactly describe Flamefall as having twists, because like the stories of classical antiquity that it draws on, there’s a certain stony inevitability to everything that happens. Of course Atreus and his allies overthrew the dragonlords; of course Lee misses the family he loved; of course the starving and oppressed people of Callipolis rebel; of course, of course. And just as inevitably, a human cost attends any one of the raft of available bad choices. Still, Lee and Annie (and Griff, now) keep striving to find justice in a world hobbled by the systems put in place by the last bunch of omelet-makers, idealists and pragmatists and tyrants alike.

It feels funny to use the word reassuring about a series that deals with issues as dark as those discussed in the Aurelian series. Still, I did find it reassuring. It reassured me in the sense that there really aren’t easy answers to the question “How can we fix the world?” There are always compromises. There are always failures. People always get hurt. You have to know that, and you have to pick a side anyway.

Also, I screamed at the last chapter of this book. How can I possibly wait one whole year for the third one? I MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

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A Chorus Rises is a companion novel in the best, best way. It opens not long after the climactic events in A Chorus Rises, focusing on mean girl Naema and her lasting trauma over having been turned to stone by Tavia’s sister Effie, a gorgon. In the aftermath of the events of A Song Below Water, it’s suddenly become fashionable to be a siren. Whereas in the olden days, Naema was part of a magical network that protected the secrecy of sirens’ identities (including Tavia’s), now she’s kind of an outcast. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, that Naema threatened Tavia’s secrecy. Naema’s been uninvited from the network of protectors. Even her friends are talking about Tavia’s strength and bravery, telling and retelling the story of how Tavia’s song saved all the children in Portland who had been frozen in stone.

There’s just one piece of the story that’s being left out: Naema’s story. Yes, Tavia’s song saved her and the other kids from being stone. Yes, she threatened Tavia and Effie (after years of protecting Tavia, a schoolmate she personally couldn’t stand). But in between those two events, Tavia turned her to stone. Every time Naema sees the positive press on Tavia, the movie that’s made about what happened in those days, it’s her attacker she’s seeing praised. But Naema sees more than that. She sees how eager the culture is to set the two of them, Tavia and Naema, against each other–not for who they are, two girls who don’t get along, but for what they represent: two Black girls, both magic, one good, one bad, because the culture doesn’t have enough love to give two different Black girls, which means of course that they never loved either of them in the first place.

I loved Naema’s ferocious self-assurance, and I love that she spends most of this book refusing to yield space even when the culture demands that she yield it. She understands the space she has occupied all her life, and she understands the space she’s entitled to occupy now. As much as this is a book about finding a place (in her family, especially, which is a gorgeous theme of the book and made me very emoshe as a person with a lot of cousins), it’s also a story about recovering from trauma. Being turned into stone was awful and terrifying, and Naema is mad as hell about it. She demands to be allowed the space to have been the person who experienced that trauma, the person who was victimized in Tavia and Effie’s journey, and the person who survived it.

Whereas A Song Below Water is a story about Tavia finding her voice, A Chorus Rises tells the story of Naema learning to listen. She is wrapped up in one central question throughout this book, a question nobody seems able to answer. What does it mean to be eloko? If she is special, if she is magic, then what makes her that way? What kinship does she have with the other eloko? (Does she have a kinship with them?) Naema doesn’t just have to learn to listen, but to whom. Because her confidence in herself has always been merited and rewarded, she’s gotten really good at tuning out the voices and opinions of other people. Now she has to learn to tune in, to hear the voices of those who have come before her, and to understand her true place in the world.

In my review of A Song Below Water, I mildly complained that Morrow didn’t give enough consideration to the full humanity of Mean Girl Naema. Turns out, she was only biding her time for this book. The simple story–and the one that Tavia believes to be true in her book–is that Naema is just an asshole, and Tavia’s a good girl trying her best. But what both of them realize in A Chorus Rises is that the story that’s simple when it’s just about two girls in school becomes toxic when it’s fed out to the rest of the world. The rest of the world has a different stake in setting two Black girls in opposition to each other, and the best thing about Naema is how clearly she understands this, and how adamantly she refuses to play into it. I loved her and I loved this book.

When I said at the start of this post that A Chorus Rises is a companion novel in the best way, this is what I mean: It’s not doing the work of a sequel, where you have to keep reading if you want more of Tavia’s story. It truly is Naema’s story, different in scope and stakes as well as point of view. But what it does do is expand the world in fascinating ways, giving the reader a new way to understand Tavia as well as offering us the space to love Naema.

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