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.

That is all to say that June was my most prolific reading month in almost two years, and I have talked about very few of those books in this space (sob). So here’s a quick recap of some of my June reading highlights. I’m starting at the end because the book I read over the weekend (yes, yes, that doesn’t count as reading it in June, but I can’t wait until the end of July to tell you about it!) was so good and so warm and so lovely that I want to bring it into your lives as quickly as possible.

Longtime followers of the blog will know of my affection for Anna-Marie McLemore, whose super-queer, super-magical YA novels have a firm place in my heart. I haven’t yet read anything by Tehlor Kay Mejia, but obviously I will need to after falling completely in love with Miss Meteor. Set in a small Arizona town called Meteor, Miss Meteor follows two former best friends, Lita and Chicky, who are trying to get Lita a win in the town’s biggest annual event, the Miss Meteor Pageant. Nobody who looks like Lita–round, dark-haired, Latina–ever wins the pageant; but Lita has a secret. She’s a star, and she’s turning back into stardust, and before she leaves the world entirely, she first wants to have this one thing.

Chicky and Lita were once inseparable, but their secrets drove them apart. Chicky was scared to tell Lita that she might be queer, and Lita was terrified of confessing to being a star, and their friendship couldn’t hold up under the weight of those secrets and the effort of keeping them. Now they’re brought back into each other’s spheres, and they’re trying to find a way back to each other. While both of them have (very! adorable!) love interests, the heart of the book is about their friendship, and I burst into tears at the end when Chicky’s finally able to be open with Lita.

Miss Meteor reminded me of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, a book I have not shut about since reading it for the first time ten thousand years ago, in 2019. Both of them deal with heavy topics — Chicky and Lita, and others in their sphere, face racist, sexist, and queerphobic bullying from their classmates — and both of them are ultimately such warm, dear, loving books about the power of friendship. Not only do Chicky and Lita come back to each other, a thing I was tearfully rooting for the whole time, but they also construct a web of support for themselves and each other, finding ways to trust and depend on jock hotshot (and trans boy) Cole and sensitive artist Junior, as well as Chicky’s three gorgeous and ferocious sisters. Y’ALL KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT SISTERS.

Read this book, friends, if you want to feel like the world is not trash. It brightened my day, my week, my month, my life.

What word are we using for books like Daisy Jones and the Six and The Final Revival of Opal and Nev? Where it’s not exactly epistolary (because there are no letters!) and it’s not exactly found documents (because it’s not really documents either, and they are also deliberately compiled by a fictional character within the world of the book), so what would we call it? The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is an oral history of a controversial rock pairing, the white British Nev and the Black American Opal, which produced an incredible album but fell apart in the aftermath of a major racist trauma at one of their events. The book is interviews compiled by journalist Sunny Curtis, the daughter of a drummer for Opal and Nev who had an affair with Opal and died before the narrator was born.

While I enjoyed Daisy Jones and the Six, The Final Revival of Opal and Nev worked even better for me. The books are superficially similar, in that each is an oral history of a fictional rock group, each compiled by a journalist with a personal connection to the story. But whereas I feel pretty distant from the World of Music (and therefore felt like I was missing a lot of what Taylor Jenkins Reid had to say about–I want to say Stevie Nicks?), Dawnie Walton manages to produce a book about music that’s about so much more than music. It’s about the industry, for sure, but mainly it’s about the way the music industry, like so many industries in America, chews up and spits out Black artists, eager for their talent but fully uninterested in their personhood.

I admit that I am–with this book and as always!–desperately allured by a book that refuses to answer one of its central questions. In this case, the question is about the level of Nev’s guilt. Is he culpable, or is he merely complicit — and does it matter? The Final Revival of Opal and Nev leaves the question open. Not only do we not know if Nev did the thing a single, untrustworthy person claims he did, we don’t even know if Opal, having been told of the claim, believes that he did it. Instead of giving us a pat answer to that question, Walton leaves it open, focusing instead on what the question means to that relationship. In the end, Nev’s specific actions matter so much less than his positionality within the industry and what he’s willing to do when push comes to shove.

Please accept major content warnings for racist violence! A key event of the book hinges on an evening in which white supremacist musicians and their fans do a horrific crime, inspired in part by the Altamont Free Concert in 1969.

I also really recommend this Shondaland interview with the author, because it’s a fascinating (and spoiler-free!) glimpse at how she got the idea for this book and how her career as a journalist influenced its structure.

Though I’m not going to talk about Fugitive Telemetry here because my comments about it would just be a recurrence of all previous shriekings about Murderbot (Murderbottttt!), I do want to mention that I adore this subgenre where it’s SF or fantasy but mainly it’s a murder mystery. Books in this subgenre I’ve enjoyed this year include A Master of Djinn (podcast interview with the author coming soon!), Fugitive Telemetry, and The Conductors. More please!

The Conductors centers on married couple Hetty and Benjy (but it’s not romantic between them, they are good friends) (no, lol, it of course proves to be romantic between them), who spent the Civil War years helping enslaved people escape from slavery to the North, making use of folk magic to bolster their work. Now the war is over, and Hetty and Benjy have settled in Philadelphia, where they are making a life together in a community of free Black folks. Hetty doesn’t feel quite as connected to her community as she once did, but that doesn’t mean she’s unaffected when an old friend of hers, Charlie, turns up dead in an alley, with a death sigil carved into his skin.

The decision to set Hetty’s story after the war is one that I love. While Glover dips into flashback to share glimpses of the work Hetty and Benjy did as conductors on the Underground Railroad, and how they built the community in which they now reside, she’s mainly interested in what the world looks like now. The people in Hetty’s community were of course scarred by their time in slavery, but Glover is less interested in trauma and more in what community among survivors looks like. To unravel the mystery of Charlie’s death, Hetty has to involve herself deeply in the lives of her friends, from whom she’s become a little distant. So as she’s working to solve this murder, she’s also re-discovering the people she loves, why she loved them, and how much she can depend on them to be in her corner. It’s a lovely emotional arc, particularly in a book whose setting and premise is so closely entwined with America’s history of slavery and trauma.

More in this universe, please! I’d love to see Hetty and Benjy solve more crimes, using their skills in magic and blacksmithing and dressmaking!

What did y’all read in June? Anything that you can’t stop pushing on your friends and loved ones?

The post June Recap! appeared first on Reading the End.

If you are not aware of the Queen’s Thief series, I do recommend popping out and purchasing The Thief for yourself. Though you will not be getting the full experience. I, myself, have not had the full experience, because I am a Jenny-come-lately who, despite the best recommending efforts of Legal Sister, didn’t read these books until 2010, which is when A Conspiracy of Kings came out. I did not wait; I did not suffer. Others among us (like Legal Sister) read The Thief when it came out in 1996 and commenced a waiting game for the subsequent five books that only bore full fruit in this, the year of our Lord 2020.

“Stop being weird, Jenny! Tell us what the books are about!” Yes, okay, so, these books are set in a society that’s inspired by classical antiquity, drawing specific inspiration from the Persian Wars and the small Greek states that held out against the Persian Empire despite odds that were, shall we say, daunting. At the center of the series is a boy named Eugenides, who is a thief. That is basically all I can say about the series without spoiling the entire thing. These books are a complicated machine, powered by intrigue and feelings. So many feelings. They also contain the angriest women and the softest men, including perhaps the purest cinnamon roll character in all of literature. Here is a further recap of the series, just so you know what to expect. (Book one: Road trip! Shenanigans! Book two: High-octane emotional devastation!)

Anyway, my non-spoilery review of Return of the Thief is that it was tremendous, there were elephants, it was everything I wanted it to be, and I feel joyful but also bereft to know this amazing series is at an end. What follows below the line is some disconnected and spoiler-filled fangirl screaming.

(I am not doing this to tease you! These books are so extremely serialized that even mentioning certain characters in affectionate terms is a spoiler. I’m so serious. It’s a spoiler to say with affection the full names of, I’m going to say, three? of the seven major characters.)

My opinions are as follows, and I have put them into bullet points:

• I would die for Pheris
• Megan Whalen Turner very clearly has spent the last twenty-four years thinking “What if Thermopylae, but haunted” and now we must all think about that too so thanks a lot, Megan Whalen Turner
• I can’t believe that after twenty-four years of dishing out the most devastating scraps of emotional availability, Megan Whalen Turner has produced a veritable feelings orgy
  • Irene buying Gen a horse like the troll she fundamentally is
  • Sophos picking out the horse for Gen like the cinnamon troll he fundamentally is
  • every single monarch of the Little Peninsula lowkey conspiring to protect Gen from going into battle
  • HIERO EARRINGS HELP ME WHYYYYY
  • Costis going absolutely feral over the prospect of Kamet being danger
  • Eugenides going somehow even more feral over the prospect of Kamet being in danger
  • “They do not smile at first, Your Majesty.”
  • “Why that orange tree? What that tamarisk bush?”
• It turns out we have been grievously underestimating the amount of murder of which Gen is capable
• Years and years and years and years and YEARS ago Megan Whalen Turner told us that Gen would see an elephant and be like “I want that elephant”
  • It happened.
  • Also, he fed them melons
  • Irene was like “where would you even keep an elephant anyway”
  • then, in the truest expression of love, she GETS HIM THE ELEPHANTS
  • I thought he was going to steal an elephant
  • This was better.
  • (because of my feelings)
• Of all the characters I would die for, I would die for Irene the most. Evidence:
  • Elephants; op cit.
  • “I did not become inappropriate all by myself!”
  • “I am not here to cut Sophos’s food him”
• THERMOPYLAE, BUT HAUNTED
• Disaster bisexual Relius (!) and disaster virgin Teleus (!!!!)
• the play to catch the conscience of the king
  • I was SO ANGRY at first
  • I was UNIMAGINABLY angry, like, I was ready to burn some shit down
  • not least because “swayed by a pretty face” like how actually dare you insult Irene Attolia in this manner
  • and then? Megan Whalen Turner?
  • just?
  • changed everything???
  • and Cenna said, “But it was funny, Gen, wasn’t it?”
  • and actually, it’s not Hamlet’s stupid fucking play plan; it’s someone who knows Gen well enough to call him by his nickname being an absolute dick to Gen
• I know I already did a whole bullet point about emotions but:
  • Pheris’s whole strategy of being underestimated
  • The King of the Strategy of Being Underestimated, Attolis Eugenides Eugenideides, doesn’t not fall for it
  • “To hell with Lader if he thinks I will not trust you”  H E L P  M E.
  • PHERIS
  • P H E R I S.
• the moment when Irene is like “you think Kamet is dead?” and Gen is like “yep” and Irene is like “without Costis burning down the entire Mede Empire about it?” and Gen is like “Ah.”
• The whole thing ends with a dance party! Just what you want!

This is the end of my screaming thoughts. But maybe I will add more later. Who knows? I love this fucking series.

The post Return! of! the! Thief!, by Megan Whalen Turner appeared first on Reading the End.

Are you salty as fuck about how Game of Thrones ended? Have you spent time surfing the “Pegging” tag on AO3? (sorry Mom that I am talking about pegging on the internet again) Do you yearn for more fat romance heroines? Cease your peregrinations, your search is at an end! Olivia Dade is here for her you with her latest novel Spoiler Alert, which is all about a fat fanfiction-writing geologist who goes on a date with the star of the biggest fantasy show of our time (who secretly also writes fanfiction). It’s not Game of Thrones! But it’s definitely Game of Thrones! Please someone page the burn ward, as I will be delivering Benioff and Weiss to them posthaste!

I am very excited about this book but will endeavor to calmly ennumerate the reasons for my joy. A of all, I loved the representation of fanfic writers. Olivia Dade is obviously a woman with a healthy Marked for Later list on AO3 if you know what I mean,¹ and it was wonderful to see not one but two protagonists for whom fandom is a joyful escape. Is it realistic? TO HELL WITH REALISTIC. I have not lived through half a year of pandemic to answer your quibbling questions about whether Oscar Isaac writes Finnpoe fanfic in his spare time (he does). April and Marcus Caster-Rupp write Aeneas/Lavinia fic for fun and I loved both that general premise and also the specific thing of the fandom believing that one specific character on the show enjoys pegging. This is the kind of fandom specificity I am here for in fiction.

Secondly, the romance was extremely lovely. Marcus and April are two people who, for vastly different reasons, have a hard time letting their guard down around new people. April has recently moved from a job that makes her miserable to one she believes will make her happy, and she’s resolved to be open about her interests, including fanfiction, but that doesn’t mean she’s not nervous about it. Marcus will, of course, risk losing all his future jobs if it comes out that he’s a fic writer, let alone one who’s been openly critical about the direction the last few seasons of his show have taken. So it’s extra great to see the characters being open and vulnerable with each other, even though you do know there is going to be a Reckoning when April eventually finds out that Marcus has an alternate identity as a close fandom friend of hers.

I also loved Dade’s depiction of one protagonist who’s fat and another who’s dyslexic. Both of them are adults who have officially figured out where they stand on weight and disability, and April in particular refuses to allow fatphobia into her life. It was great to see such a clear depiction of the fact that fatphobia and ableism are often/?always? rooted in the other person’s own issues. When April and Marcus talk about their parents’ disappointment in them, it’s clear that the parents aren’t responding to the children they have, but rather to some idea of what they wanted their own lives to be. It’s not about whether April and Marcus are happy or healthy or professionally satisfied — it’s about how they differ from what someone else, for reasons of their own, thinks they should be like.

Notably, this also means that Spoiler Alert is on the pro side when it comes to familial estrangement. I reviewed another romance novel recently that was more equivocal about the Regrets You Might Have around cutting off contact with shit family members, but Spoiler Alert comes down hard on the side of not hurting yourself by spending time with people who are supposed to love you but instead perpetually undermine you. That is my position as well! Feel free to set boundaries, beloved friends, and if your familial relationships are consistently more harmful than healing, it is a-okay to stop expending effort on them. April and Marcus know this on behalf of each other, but struggle to know it for themselves.

Furthermore, if like me you derive at least 20% of your enjoyment of romance novels from the hints that the author drops about other books in the series, you will not be disappointed in Spoiler Alert. Marcus’s co-star Alex is a loose cannon who has been assigned a minder called Lauren whom he finds very annoying OR DOES HE??? Alex also writes secret fic about his character, Cupid, getting pegged. Can’t say enough about the majesty of this character choice by Olivia Dade. I say again, TEN THOUSAND STARS, can’t wait for the sequel.

Run, do not walk, to your local book purveyor to purchase Spoiler Alert. I truly truly loved it.

Note: I received an e-ARC of Spoiler Alert from the publisher for review consideration. This has not affected the contents of my review.

The post Review: Spoiler Alert, Olivia Dade appeared first on Reading the End.

However, had I not given up magical thinking in 2019, I would have had to admit that it is not real when it was announced that Susanna Clarke had a new book coming out, because I admit that I have not kept the faith. In the last few years, I had said out loud to more than one person, “Susanna Clarke will only ever write one novel.” I had said, “But that’s okay! She has already given us perfection. I could not ask for more.” And that’s not the kind of attitude which (if magical thinking were real) gets you Piranesi in September 2020. What gets you Piranesi in September 2020 (if magical thinking were real) would be keeping the faith in spite of all the odds. Which I did not do. Which proves magical thinking doesn’t work.

Anyway, as you remember, Susanna Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell way back in 2004, dayenu. And this year she wrote Piranesi, a pithy novel of a mere 272 pages about a man who lives alone (?) in an endless House comprising statues and floods and rotting things, and I really loved it.

The writing style of Piranesi isn’t tremendously similar to the writing style of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, because Susanna Clarke is a beautiful genius and I’ll fight you. What is similar is the fact that if you’re not enjoying the writing by about 10% of the way through the book, the book is probably not for you and you can move on to other pursuits. Piranesi (his name isn’t Piranesi) is extremely intelligent yet very innocent, and all you can think from very early on is “ack I want to protect this sweet marshmallow from his machinations, whatever they may be.”

This is fortunate, because Piranesi is a little slow to start, with a lot of descriptions of the House and the various floods, statuary, and bird life inside the House. I do not have a strong visual imagination, so this was very challenging for me — though not as challenging as it is for Piranesi, who is constantly mapping out the many rooms of the House and harvesting seaweed for food and taking tender care of the House’s dead. Also, I am frightened of floods. Also, his name isn’t Piranesi.

In all of this moody scene setting — which is by turns charming, sad, and funny — Clarke includes just enough discordant notes to make it clear that Piranesi, though recording with earnest accuracy his memories and impressions, is an unreliable narrator. For instance:

The Other believes that there is a Great and Secret Knowledge hidden somewhere in the World that will grant us enormous powers once we have discovered it. What this Knowledge consists of he is not entirely sure, but at various times he has suggested that it might include the following:

1. vanquishing Death and becoming immortal

2. learning by a process of telepathy what other people are thinking

3. transforming ourselves into eagles and flying through the Air

4. transforming ourselves into fish and swimming through the Tides

5. moving objects using only our thoughts

6. snuffing out and reigniting the Sun and Stars

7. dominating lesser intellects and bending them to our will

The Other and I are searching diligently for this Knowledge. We meet twice a week (on Tuesdays and Fridays)to discuss our work. The Other organises his time meticulously and never permits our meetings to last longer than one hour.

Piranesi is a sweet, good cinnamon roll who trusts his friend (slash, the only person in the House besides Piranesi who is currently alive), but I do not require his input to know that I don’t trust this The Other character. I am touching my collarbone thinking about a later scene where Piranesi acquires some doubts about the value of this Secret Knowledge and tries to very sweetly bow out of acquiring it because he doesn’t want to dominate lesser intellects, actually.

As the book wears on, it gets creepier. (You will remember this technique from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and all those stories the gentleman with the thistledown hair tells to Stephen re: his own history. Really, anything relating to the gentleman with thistledown hair.) It’s partly creepy because Piranesi is so good and sweet and you don’t want this poor guy to have to keep eating seaweed; and it’s partly creepy because the House is full of water so everything’s wet all the time and wet things are creepier, as we all know; and it’s partly creepy because whilst there are fifteen people in the history of the world that Piranesi knows of, evidence begins to mount that the House might contain a sixteenth person too. You, an enemy to the Other because he’s an obvious butthead, will not be able to stop thinking about the question IS THE SIXTEENTH PERSON GOING TO SAVE PIRANESI OR WHAT?

So yeah! I loved it! Predictably, I loved it! More than anything, it reminded me of Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall, in which everything is damp and there are a lot of dead birds. While it wasn’t exactly the haunted house story I was envisioning (so much wetter! so much more otherworldly!), it was nevertheless fucking creepy, yet tremendously sweet and charming. I cannot believe that we received this gift from Susanna Clarke after so many years.

Also, Piranesi discovers documentary evidence of things, and y’all know how I feel about documentary evidence.

Note: I received an e-ARC of Piranesi from the publisher, for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

The post Review: Piranesi, Susanna Clarke appeared first on Reading the End.

Luckily, I read two terrific contemporary YA novels before my reading brain decided to go into low power mode, and I’m excited to share them with y’all! Though there are many bad things about the world these days, one things that makes me feel great is that these books exist in the world and the youth of America can read them. Thanks to Not Just Fiction and Words for Worms for recommending these books to me!

Felix Ever After, Kacen Callender

Felix Love has never been in love. On a good day, he’s proud of the Black trans artist that he is; but on bad days, he wonders secretly if he’s got one too many marginalizations to deserve a happily ever after. His dad can’t bring himself to use Felix’s name, and his mom left them years ago and hasn’t spoken to Felix since he came out as trans. Meanwhile, he’s staring down college applications and getting together a portfolio for a Brown scholarship he dearly needs, when someone at his school puts up a public gallery of photos of Felix pre-transition, all captioned with his deadname. As he’s navigating the transphobia of an unknown classmate, his yearning to find romance, and his ongoing questions about his gender identity, Felix has to confront who he is and who he wants to be.

Gosh, I’m glad this book exists. And on, like, a couple of fronts. It’s one of these YA contemporaries where I felt a keen sense of recognition for all the interpersonal relationship stuff. There’s a scene where a friendly acquaintance is helping Felix with a thing and he’s thinking “Geez, why aren’t we friends? We should be friends!” and I don’t know why it stuck out to me so much except that I used to think that all the time in high school, and then I would be too scared to do anything about it. Or one of the major plots of the book is that Felix kinda develops a crush on a character he formerly thought of as an Enemy, and a, it’s awkward, and b, it stays awkward. Apart from anything else, I loved that the book depicts the tooth-aching awkwardness of being a teenager (feral, inherently!) trying to navigate interpersonal relationships with other teenagers (also, inherently, feral!).

I am also glad it exists from a representation standpoint. At no point does the book yield any ground to ignorance. When Felix’s friends (and enemies) screw up and say the wrong thing about race, gender, sexuality, whatever, it’s clear they’re in the wrong. The book also grants Felix space to question who he is. He knows that he’s a boy, but maybe not always, and he’s not sure that “not always” is allowed, particularly since he’s already made a big fuss about being trans. By the end of the book, he’s found a term that fits him — demiboy — but the other queer characters in the book constantly affirm the validity of questioning identity and searching for the ones that fit you the best.

Maybe the loveliest thing about this book is Felix’s relationship with Ezra. I felt warm every time Ezra leapt to Felix’s defense — and it’s a keynote of his character that he always leaps to Felix’s defense. Even at moments when Felix doesn’t immediately think it’s worth the trouble of picking an argument on his own behalf, Ezra’s right there calling out their friends for transphobia, racism, whatever. I loved that whatever else was going on in Felix’s life, he always had this friend who was ready to go to the mat for him, and I hope every real trans kid in the US has a friend like that.

You Should See Me in a Crown, Leah Johnson

Liz Lighty has never given too much thought to prom. She’s got better things to focus on than the mean white girls of Campbell County — like, for instance, the music scholarship that’ll take her to Pennington College so her grandparents won’t try to sell their house to send her to college. But when the scholarship doesn’t come through, her only shot at getting enough money for college is to become prom queen.

Reese Witherspoon recently expanded her book club to include YA books (link), presumably just so that she could start her YA book club with You Should See Me in a Crown. It’s exactly the kind of contemporary YA book I yearn for! Netflix movie adaptation when? In particular, Leah Johnson strikes such a good balance between giving her protagonist enough independence from her family that she can get on with the plot of the book, while still very much grounding her in the love, support, and loyalty she shares with her brother and grandmother. (In particular, there’s a scene towards the end where she’s talking with her grandmother about the things she’s been struggling with, and it is so, so lovely and warm, as are all the scenes she shares with her family.)

Liz is also part of a friend group she loves but can’t always 100% depend on, which felt like the most relatable high school content ever. Her best friend Gabi is the foremost booster of her campaign to be prom queen, but Gabi isn’t always respectful of Liz’s identity and boundaries. She pushes Liz to be discreet about liking girls, while playing up her friendship with gorgeous football star Jordan Jennings, who stopped being Liz’s friend in freshman year. Meanwhile, Gabi herself isn’t sure how much of herself she wants to show to the school, which leads to her being not-completely-honest to her crush, new girl Amanda Mack. And, perhaps best of all — I am a sucker for this kind of thing — lots of the students whose measure Liz thought she had turn out to be more interesting, worthwhile people than she realized.

NETFLIX MOVIE ADAPTATION WHEN. You Should See Me in a Crown is warm and funny and kind. It meant the world to see a Black, queer, anxious teenager get her happy ending.

Have y’all read any good contemporary YA lately? It hasn’t historically been my favorite subgenre, but in the past few years I feel like it’s just exploded with books that call to me.

The post Kids Trying Their Best in Contemporary YA appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 135

Here are the time signatures if you want to skip around!

1:20 – What we’re reading
4:05 – What we’re cooking
9:40 – Books we acquired in quarantine
32:33 – Talia Hibbert’s Take a Hint, Dani Brown

And here’s a list of everything we talked about!

The Hidden Scrolls, Neil Silberman
Making Oscar Wilde, Michele Mendolssohn
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty
Cal Cunningham (candidate for NC Senator)

recipe for Trinbagonion doubles (with video!)

Binti, Nnedi Okorafor
The Changeling, Victor Lavalle
Milkman, Anna Burns
Girl Gone Viral, Alisha Rai
A Gentleman Undone, Cecilia Grant
A Woman Untangled, Cecilia Grant
A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong, Cecilia Grant
The Kraken King, Meljean Brook
Pansies, Alexis Hall
Glitterland, Alexis Hall
Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Talia Hibbert
Tubby and Coo’s
The City We Became, NK Jemisin
The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo
Thorn, Intisar Khanani
In West Mills, De’Shawn Charles Winslow
Network Effect, Martha Wells
The House on the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune
Giant Days, John Allison
The Heir Affair, Heather Cocks
The Rock and the River, Kekla Magoon
The War that Saved My Life, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Good Night Mr Tom, Michelle Magorian
The War I Finally Won, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
Pretty as a Picture, Elizabeth Little
Night Film, Marisha Pessl
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
VERSO BOOK CLUB
War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran, Patrick Cockburn
Feminist City, Leslie Kern
Sensoria, ed. McKenzie Wark
The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
The Mothers, Brit Bennett
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

two Les Mis fics:
this one goes out to, by knight_tracer and novembersmith
World Ain’t Ready, by idiopathicsmile

Take a Hint, Dani Brown, Talia Hibbert
Girl Gone Viral, Alisha Rai

You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript is coming soon!

The post PODCAST – Episode 135 – Books We Bought in the Quarantine and Talia Hibbert’s Take a Hint, Dani Brown appeared first on Reading the End.

I may become a slight broken record over the course of this review, but let me say up front: This is a damn good example of a Gothic novel, and I know from Gothic novels. The first real proper grown-up book I ever read was Jane Eyre, and I periodically do a buddy-reread of it and Rebecca and feel the most exquisite pleasure about it. Though Mexican Gothic is very much its own creature, it pays beautiful homages to the Gothic novel tradition, from the long winding roads to the manor house to the Mrs Danvers-like figure of Florence Doyle (Catalina’s aunt-in-law), who insists that Noemí adhere to her many rules: No smoking; no going into town without permission; no talking during dinner; the list goes on and on, and Noemí breaks all of them. Virgil, who’s by turns friendly and menacing, has an anxious cousin named Francis and a deeply unpleasant father called Howard, who wants to talk to Noemí about eugenics and the relative merits of European nations (pure, good, smart) and indigenous people (maybe hardier question mark).

The longer Noemí stays at High Place, the less she understands the place. She begins having deeply unsettling dreams, and minor hallucinations that the wallpaper in the house is moving, writhing. She starts sleepwalking again, though she hasn’t sleepwalked since she was a little girl. She even starts to experience sporadic, unwanted lust for Virgil, who acts flirty and inappropriate with her at times. Meanwhile Catalina, the reason for Noemí’s visit, seems to fluctuate wildly between moods. One moment she’s calm and acquiescent, insisting that there’s nothing for Noemí to worry about, and the next moment she’s panicked and begging to be taken away from High Place.

This book is soooooo creepy. I read a fair few creepy-house stories in search of the exact high that Mexican Gothic gave me. As I was reading it, I was simultaneously saying a tiny prayer to God to send us the blessing of a Gothic novel renaissance led by authors of color. Though Mexican Gothic is absolutely classic in many of its tropes, and feels deeply satisfying for that reason if you’re a fan of the genre, the ghosts that haunt it aren’t just those of the family dead, but of extractive imperialism as a whole. The Doyle family’s history of using and abusing cheap Mexican labor in their silver mines — now defunct — proves to be inextricably linked with their whole fucking spooky situation; as does, unsurprisingly, Howard and Virgil Doyle’s unseemly interest in Noemí qua native of Mexico.

Here follow two paragraphs of spoilers, followed by an unspoilery final paragraph:

The book’s climax is also near flawless in execution.¹ *Stefan voice* It has everything: Eye-stabbings, secret passageways, a confrontation with the Final Horror at the Heart of this House, and, of course, setting the whole fucking house on fire on your way out. Again, like, truly all the best tropes of the Gothic novel genre, wound together in a way that felt new, unexpected, and terrifying.

I will add in particular that Silvia Moreno-Garcia has a line on the exact creepiest thing for me. At first I thought she was just doing the “things are creepier if they’re moist” which I have been saying for years and continue to vigorously endorse — but no! It’s much scarier than that! THINGS ARE CREEPIER IF THEY’RE FUNGUS. A couple of authors in recent years have kicked up the horror of their premise by adding mushroom body horror, and with some experience under my belt I can now report that mushroom creepiness gets me every time. I do a real, proper, full-body shudder every time I think about it. Who gave horror writers permission to add mushroom invasion to their bag of tricks? It is deeply inimical to me, a coward. I shall never sleep again probably.

As with all of Moreno-Garcia’s books, Mexican Gothic is a fast, immersive read — I got through it in a single sitting, partly because it was due back at the library because there are like 96 holds on it, but mostly because it sucked me in as soon as Mrs Danvers Florence Doyle showed up, and I had to find out what was going to happen. This is easily my favorite Moreno-Garcia book to date, and I can already tell you it’s going to be one of my best reads of 2020.

The post Review: Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia appeared first on Reading the End.

In the aftermath of enormous solar flares and governmental collapse, Nina and her team of mercenary librarians have carved out a home for themselves. They share knowledge and stories with their community and try to make people’s lives better. Meanwhile, Knox and his team of supersoldiers have defected from their handlers because it’s the Right Thing to Do, but bad guys have seized their biochem hacker, the only person capable of keeping their brain implants from degrading and killing them all by inches. The bad guys will give them back the hacker — in exchange for Nina. So Knox and his guys propose a team-up to do a theft, knowing all the while that they plan to give up Nina’s team to the forces of evil. BUT A GRUDGING RESPECT FORMS AND OH NO WHAT WILL THEY DO NOW. Also, Nina and Knox most definitely want to bone.

Kit Rocha have been writing dystopian SF romance for many many years, and they are reliable as fuck when it comes to setting up found families you adore and ratcheting up the stakes of their dystopian world until you can’t see a way that anyone gets out of this alive. But then they get out of there alive! Because it’s a romance novel!

God, can I just say that I love romance novels a lot? I was fraught with suspense throughout Deal with the Devil, and yet! Because I knew it was a romance novel, I knew everything was going to work out for a best. The time arrived when Nina et al. discovers that Knox et al. were playing them all along, and of course it happens at the worst possible time, i.e., when they are at the mercy of the bad guys, and in a regular SFF book I would have gotten nervous and read the end, but because it’s a romance novel, I already knew the end, and the end would inevitably be that Knox and Nina were happily in a relationship. Which is what happened. And I do not have to mark that as a spoiler, because Deal with the Devil is a romance novel and is therefore defined by its genre as a book in which, at the end, Knox and Nina are happily in a relationship.

In the meantime, there’s so? much? friendship??

“I’m not about to arm wrestle someone if I can just shoot them in the head instead.”

“Uh-huh.” Dani propped her chin on one hand. “So what do you do when you can’t?”

Maya made a face at her. “Rest easy in heaven knowing you’re gonna avenge me?”

“Not if you give up without a fucking fight.” Dani snorted. “Haunt me forever, see if I care. I’m not embarking on a dark path of vengeance and death because you skipped cardio.”

FRIENDSHIP. Which honestly is another great thing about romance novels: Very often, they come in a series! Then if you were like “wow I loved how Nina held the team together but Dani does so many murders, I want her to find love but I also want to see more of their close and enduring friendship,” all you have to do is wait for a while and the authors of the romance novel, who are geniuses, will assuredly write a story in which Dani finds love but is still part of a close and enduring friendship with all the characters from the first book. (I don’t know how this post became a commercial for romance novels, but I’m comfortable with it.)

Now for some spoilers about the bad guys. Do not read this paragraph if you don’t want to know these spoilers. I have very politely not put the spoilers in caps, even though caps were the way I truly felt about them. When it gets down to time to find out who the bad guys are, [here is where I would start doing all caps in normal life] the person who hired Knox to lure in Nina is her alive-after-all evil twin. [Here is where I would do all caps in a bigger font.] Evil twin!!!!! But then her evil twin is not evil after all, and when it’s time for the evil twin to find love, there will certainly be a very great deal of complicated sister emotions. If there is one thing I love nearly as much as an actually evil twin, it’s a complicated sister relationship!

All in all, I encourage you all to read this book so that Tor will cause Kit Rocha to write the rest of the series. So many murdergirls!!

Note: I received an e-ARC of Deal with the Devil from the publisher for review consideration.

The post Review: Deal with the Devil, Kit Rocha appeared first on Reading the End.

This book is clearly a labor of love, as are all the books in this series. The task of summarizing all of American history down to fewer than 300 pages is, in itself, a phenomenal accomplishment. Berry and Gross manage it by pinning each chapter to a specific Black woman’s life and experiences. Those experiences then serve as a jumping-off point for a more detailed examination of a given period in American history. Notably, the women who give their names to each chapter aren’t famous. Though some of them achieved fame in their lifetimes, they aren’t household names, and it’s clear this is a deliberate choice by the authors. These women typified, in some way, the lives that Black American women lived in the era under consideration, and the authors are lifting up their names as a reminder of the central role that Black women have always played in our country’s history, culture, and imagination.

Nor do the authors limit themselves to straight, cis, able-bodied women. Part of the project of this book is exploring the multiplicity of intersecting identities fall under the umbrella of Black womanhood. One chapter begins with the story of Millie and Christine McKoy, conjoined Black twins born to enslaved parents in 1851. Though the McKoy twins were duly emancipated in 1865, they spent years of their lives under the control and influence of various showmen, or were offered up for examination by pruriently inquisitive doctors. (The authors use the term “differently abled” in this section, a term which many disabled activists dislike.) Another chapter details the story of Frances Thompson, a trans or intersex Black woman who fought for her personhood in the aftermath of the Memphis Riots.

I in fact got quite emotional about the fact that every chapter bears the name of an unfamous Black woman. The central philosophy of this book is to say the names of the Black women whose lives typified America’s development as a nation. I was particularly struck by the story of the enslaved woman, Maria, who was captured by Francis Drake’s crew. She was raped or gang-raped and abandoned on an island, pregnant, along with two other Black men. After that, she disappears from history. A Black Women’s History is at heart a reclamation project, a reminder that while history chose not to value these women, their names are remembered.

All of this has sounded quite sad, so let me say that another thing that inspired and amazed me about this genuinely excellent book is the way the authors keep focus not just on Black women’s struggles but on their successes. Black joy matters as much, in their telling, as Black suffering. Like, I loved this anecdote:

In addition to self-liberation, Black women found ways to express themselves and experience pleasure. In Northern communities like upstate New York, they participated in Pinkster Festivals, where they mocked their enslavers, dressed like Europeans, gave political speeches, told stories, and participated in festivities involving dance, music, and food.

The focus on Black women’s achievements is a central theme of the book. They tell the story of Mary Bowser, an enslaved woman with an eidetic memory who worked in Jefferson Davis’s home and passed on his secrets to Ulysses S. Grant; of Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor who received international acclaim; of Alice Coachman, the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Black women have faced so many challenges throughout American history that this book might have felt like a slog, but it felt instead like a celebration. I loved it.

The post Review: A Black Women’s History of the United States, Daina Ramey Berry and Kali N. Gross appeared first on Reading the End.