Cinder House, Freya Marske

You know when you are an old and cranky lady, weary from nonsense, and you feel that you have read all the possible iterations of a specific fairy tale, let’s say Cinderella as an example? Well, just when you are feeling that way, here comes Freya Marske with Cinder House, a novella retelling of Cinderella where Ella is a house, but also kind of the ghost haunting the house. She has to obey her awful stepmother and her worse stepsisters, or they’ll punish her by harming the house that is her. Her one solace is writing letters to a faraway scholar — and then, also, getting a small dispensation from a witch to be a girl again for just the three days of the prince’s ball. Marske hits all the notes of the Cinderella story, yet somehow this novella still feels fresh and unexpected at every turn. I loved it.

Psychopomp and Circumstance, Eden Royce

I honestly can’t tell if there’s been an uptick in books dealing with death and traumatic loss, or if I just happen to be reading more of them, or if it’s feeling more salient because *gestures at everything*. Whatever the case, Eden Royce’s Psychopomp and Circumstance is among the loveliest books I’ve read about what we owe to our loved ones, living and dead. You can check out my full review of this one over at Reactor.

An Unlikely Coven, AM Kvita

I’ll be brief about this one too because I’ve got a review forthcoming at Reactor (hopefully soon!), but it was one of the unexpected treats of my reading year. It’s about the talentless younger daughter of a magical New York dynasty, who returns to New York just in time to become embroiled in the biggest magical and interspecies drama of her entire life. At its heart, it’s a story about finding the people who will hold you up when your family can’t or won’t. AM Kvita’s going to be an author to watch.

An Academic Affair, Jodi McAlister

It’s an unblessed time to work in academia, and rival scholars Sadie and Jonah are each hellbent on getting the one and only faculty opening that makes sense for their research. Then Sadie realizes that there’s a way for them both to get hired, via partner hire, if they just get married for a few years. This is frankly one of the only reasons for a contemporary marriage of convenience that I would actually buy. Like, that is a truly good idea. Sadie and Jonah each have complicated family dynamics to navigate, and I loved seeing them realize their admiration and attract for each other. I loved Jodi McAlister’s Marry Me, Juliet series, and I am dearly hoping to see more of her books published in the US going forward.

The Glowing Life of Leeann Wu, Mindy Hung

Last but very much not least is Mindy Hung’s debut novel, about a single mother whose hands start intermittently glowing. She can’t figure out what the hell’s going on, but it seems to be linked to the widespread insomnia that’s affecting everyone in town, and possibly to the great aunt Leeann briefly lived with as a young child. Hung is a careful, generous writer, and this story grapples with complex issues of generational trauma, the disconnections that come with being part of a diaspora, responsibility to family and community, and finding yourself anew at every stage of life. I particularly loved Leeann’s fraught relationship with her mom, where she feels that she’s settled into a certain version of that relationship, only to find, as she’s going through her supernatural powers, that she and her mother have more to discover about each other.

If you have gifts left to buy for this holiday season, perhaps consider one of these? Your gift recipient will not be disappointed.

The post The Very Best Books of Q4 in 2025 appeared first on Reading the End.

Herewith is the definitive, VERY VERY SPOILERY ranking of Ushers based on how much they deserved their nasty, nasty deaths. I have excluded from consideration three characters who I don’t think deserved their deaths at all and therefore can’t be placed on this scale. I will not be taking lip in the comments about whether my ranking was influenced by how hot and charming I think Rahul Kohli is. That is beyond the scope of this study.

Have I made it clear that this post is all spoilers?

It’s all spoilers.

Are we all clear on that?

People who don’t want spoilers have now departed from this post?

Great, okay, here we go.

8. Leo

Leo is by far the best Usher. There are a total of, like, two scenes where an Usher sibling is nice to another Usher sibling, and Leo is one of those siblings both times. He’s genuinely sweet and big-brothery to Perry, and with Camille he has a combative but ultimately fond dynamic.

I’m going to come right out and say it: Leo does not deserve to die. Yes, he has more money than he knows what to do with. Yes, he goes out and does endearing, sexy interviews to help out the Sacklers Ushers when they are getting bad press. Yes, he is cheating on his perfectly nice boyfriend. Leo is a shitty person. I simply do not believe that any of this rises to the level of deserving to be splatted on the concrete. I am shocked anyone thinks he deserves to be splatted on the concrete! Many that die deserve life; can you give it to them, Frodo? Ya know what I mean?

Crucially, for all you animal lovers, he did not kill a cat. No cats were harmed in the making of Leo Usher’s death! We know he did not kill Cat #1, because the last shot of the episode reveals that the original cat is still alive. He also did not gouge out the eyes of Cat #2, because Cat #2 — as far as we can tell — didn’t exist. (Nobody else sees the cat; nobody else sees the pile of dead animals the cat kills.) Leo Usher did not kill a cat and did not deserve to die, end of.

7. Tamerlane

In the cosmic scale of harm done to the universe, Tamerlane ranks low among her siblings. Is her GOOP knock-off subscription box lifestyle brand stupid? Sure. But it’s not in the same realm as any of the ones who work in the family business, and I was not unmoved by Tamerlane saying she wants to get away from her family’s poison legacy and make something. (Again, like, she gets a point for this, but not many points, because the thing she wants to make is really really stupid and she’s doing a very bad job with it.)

I’ve rated her below Leo because she is so mean to everyone all the time, and we see her making a point of being extra cruel to the people who show her any vulnerability. Juno is pitiful, but that’s no reason to treat her like garbage! BillT is an doofus but you have to admit he’s a pretty accommodating doofus. While I applaud Tamerlane for pursuing her specific sexual kink with purpose and intention, it is very unreasonable to make her husband do that one kink (which he obviously isn’t excited about) over and over again (exclusively??) for years and years. Meet a man halfway, Tamerlane! You get the sense that Tamerlane doesn’t think anyone’s real but her, which makes the manner of her demise feel especially fitting. It also looks really beautiful. That hasn’t affected my ranking; I just wanted to give some props to good cinematography.

6. Perry

I have really wrestled with who to put in 5th, 6th, and 7th place. Perry is the youngest Usher sibling, and he hasn’t perhaps altogether settled into his personality and his identity yet. That’s a thing! People screw up really badly in their twenties and then oftentimes they go on to be regular people in regular society. And I do think Perry suffers by being a type of awful that I, personally, find very difficult to take. If you say some shit like that your party’s theme is “anonymous debauchery,” I’m out. Anonymous debauchery. Shut the fuck up. I also found it really ominous and troubling that Perry immediately moves to physical threats when one of his two friends challenges him. I feel that he is on the path to doing intimate partner violence, which uh… does not seem unlikely given the way some of his other siblings behave. Moreover, it’s so irresponsible to not check the water system ahead of time! This was a completely solvable problem that Perry only declined to solve because he’d already said the party was going to be tomorrow. You really did not have to say the party was going to be tomorrow, Perry! It could have been any day! Any post-checking-out-the-water-before-making-it-the-centerpiece-of-your-dumb-orgy day would have been fine! Christ.

Still, though. He’s very young, like maybe 22?, and you can see that he’s intensely vulnerable to his father and his other siblings. (Props to the actor.) Maybe he would have found a less awful way to interface with the world if he’d had another few years. Maybe! Or maybe not.

5. Camille

Camille, for me, marks a step up in scale. Where the higher-ranked Ushers are personally awful, Camille is structurally awful. As the PR person for Fortunato, she’s made a career out of buying the company positive press when cool people like Auguste Dupin and Nan Goldin try to hold them to account. Gross! This is very bad. She is sexually exploiting her personal assistants, rude; she keeps creepy little blackmail files on everyone, I get it but yuck; and I have to suspect there’s a non-zero amount of racism hiding behind her vicious enmity for Victorine.

The thing about Camille is that she’s the only Usher who gets to be… I’m sorry, but… competent? As much as I have tried to resist the mid-aughts zeitgeist of horrible people doing horrible things with competence and style, I have not gotten away clean. All the other Ushers are dithering around playing video games or cheating their data or saying “anonymous debauchery” (shut up, Perry), but Camille gets shit done, and I was not immune to that, nor to Kate Siegel’s charisma and beauty. I am sorry! I’m only human!

4. Vic

Much like poor, doomed Ali, I really thought Victorine might be okay. Okay on the scale of Usher siblings! She doesn’t say or do as much rich-person bullshit as the others, and her life’s work is genuinely worthwhile. I think. I don’t understand heart mesh. Only, just as Perry lost me when he didn’t check the water tanks, Victorine lost me when I learned she was falsifying her results. First of all, morally that is not okay. Secondly, it’s a profound act of intellectual laziness, and Victorine is explicitly doing it for money. Thirdly, it sounds like she’s doing a very slapdash job of it. Of course Al was going to find out! Sweet, precious Al. She really ought not have dated an Usher.

My favorite deaths are the ones where Verna reeeeeeally gives them space to walk back from the ledge. Quite apart from my fondness for “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I love a tragedy whose central figure is given dozens of possible outs and takes none of them. When Verna appears to Vic as a vulnerable, open-faced potential first candidate for human trials, Vic has every opportunity to deal honestly and compassionately with her. She simply chooses not to. It’s absolutely cold-blooded, and Vic keeps on choosing it.

Still, the question of scale would probably have given Vic a better ranking on this list if not for what she does to Al. Even if you grant that throwing the bookend was a mistake, rather than an intentional act of murder, I have rarely had a more upsetting media experience than the objectively one-minute-long but subjectively interminable scene in which Vic waits for Al to die. It is so, so chilling.

3. Madeline

I can’t say much about Madeline because Mary McDonnell kind of looks like Catherine O’Hara in that wig so all I could see when she was on screen was Moira Rose. Did Mary McDonnell do a good job in the role? I don’t know, and I literally never will.

Madeline made Fortunato what it is, and she chose to doom her baby niece and nephew to premature deaths so she could get ahead. She sucks. One of my absolute favorite little realizations in this show — I like it more and more the more I think of it — is that, okay, Madeline is this brilliant woman, I think Roderick says “four or five in a generation” to give a sense of the scale of her brilliance, and she spends her whole life working to create immortality in an algorithm. That’s what she cares about, the thing she hopes to use to consolidate her power over the company after Roderick gets voted out, her legacy. And in the end, what does it all amount to? Her immortal AI version of sweet, good little Lenore? Nonsense words. It’s all for nothing. It’s a fucking failure.

2. Roderick

GOD Roderick Usher sucks. He suuuuuucks. By far the weakest element of the show were the flashbacks, which occupied way too much real estate for how much actual story they got us. And the most maddening thing about the flashbacks was how completely flopsy and incompetent Roderick Usher is. He has one good idea, and he rides that fucking train all the way to the end. Everything else is Madeline’s idea and Madeline’s plan. Roderick is just there.

I obviously don’t forgive him for agreeing to a bargain whereby his existing children would die young in exchange for him getting rich and never going to jail; but I extra don’t forgive him, after he made the bargain, for not using two forms of birth control every time he had sex thereafter. My guy! COME ON. Even if he didn’t fully believe that the deal was real, you would think a simple sense of financial self-interest would lead him to make better choices in his sex life. What an asshole. My only regret, really, is that the actual moment of death wasn’t worse and longer for Roderick. I guess he suffered from watching all his kids die, but it’s not the same kind of suffering as, for instance, watching a jagged piece of rock swing slowly closer and closer to ripping your shitty guts out.

1. Froderick

Speaking of which! Froderick is the worst Usher and he deserved it the most. What he does to his wife is viscerally horrifying on its own, but what makes it extra hideous is that he brings his daughter into it. Lenore tries her utmost best to stay on top of the problem, and of course she ultimately saves the day because she is a good girl and a hero, but of course she was going to find out what was going on, and of course it was going to traumatize her for life. Awful, shitty Froderick did not care about that as much as he cared about getting revenge on his wife for an offense she didn’t actually commit. I am glad he had to lie there feeling dread and terror as the jagged piece of rock swung closer and closer to ripping his guts out. If anything, it could have lasted longer; but I get that TV is finite, and Carla Gugino already ate.

No gif for Froderick. He doesn’t deserve a gif. Fuck that guy.

Thank you for coming. Please share your dissenting opinions in the comments section.

The post Usher Siblings Ranked by How Much They Deserved Their Nasty, Nasty Deaths appeared first on Reading the End.

Surprising nobody, this is my favorite Cassandra Khaw book. I love haunted house stories, and I love it when a bunch of people are stuck in an enclosed space together and all the tensions among them rise to the fore. It’s even better if they then maybe kill each other. Lol! Friendship!

The house is haunted by the ghost of a bride whose husband died on the way to the wedding. She asked the guests to bury her alive in the foundation of the house, and ever since then they buried a new girl in the walls every year. Not for an unclean spirit to eat, however! No flesh-rending in this ghost story! Does the protagonist again show an unsettling familiarity with what it might be like to eat a human, yes, but arguably “sweet as a knot of tendon after you’d gnawed on it for minutes, a faintly corrupt delight” refers to other, non-human kinds of tendon. I don’t think I have gnawed on that many tendons and found the experience to be a faintly corrupt delight, but perhaps I am deluding myself.

Anyway, Nothing but Blackened Teeth is, at last, letting its horrible monsters just kill people. Like, Jesus Christ. You don’t always have to eat them.

Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: n/a

The All-Consuming World

Now, The All-Consuming World is an interesting case where nobody eats human flesh, but one of the consistent fears/threats is cannibalization, a word that does not here refer to eating human flesh. Twist! In this use case, cannibalism refers to a machine schlurping into your AI mind and breaking it down into its constituent parts, which will then be used in other AI minds in the future. This makes perfect sense to me. It is not cannibalism in the classical sense (and indeed if taking out parts from one person and installing them in another person were cannibalism, then organ donation would be cannibalism too?, but I suppose it’s not perfectly analogous given that we don’t, by and large, grab people and saw out their organs to give to others), but it makes perfect sense to me.

Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh doing cannibalism, sort of: 10/10

Food of the Gods

Food of the Gods compiles two novellas about Rupert Wong, chef to the gods. This book kind of explains what’s going on, vis-a-vis eating human flesh. The gods are hungry for human flesh, but this is way down the list of inexplicable things the gods do in this book, and it’s not like I would know what gods wanted, you know? They’re gods, and they do unreasonable stuff, and that’s kind of that. Plus there are also ghouls that Rupert Wong is feeding, and I think ghouls canonically eat human flesh. Feels like bog-standard ghoul stuff. I’ll allow it. I’ll even allow it when Demeter says “Blood and meat is the oldest communion” and they chop up a bunch of dead unhoused people to make into delicious meals that the gods now eat. Like, fine. I assume the Eleusinian mysteries involved cannibalism more often than never.

Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: 7/10

Breakable Things

I did not wish to impinge upon your patience to the extent of breaking down all 23 entrants in this story collection. In lieu of that, I will just say that 9 of these stories featured someone eating human flesh; 4 implied that human flesh had been eaten or was just about to be; one was debatable and I honestly couldn’t decide (“But their faces were taken along with the names of our friends, eaten, nothing but grit in the teeth of those numinous bastards” — metaphor?); and 9 definitely had no eating whatsoever of human flesh. I’m putting it in the middle because in most of those 14 stories where someone had eaten, was eating, or was about to eat, human flesh, I was clutching my face and sobbing but why wouldn’t you just kill them.

Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: 5/10

A Song for Quiet

No flesh-eating in this book at all, and we’re going to start seeing a pattern emerge where I generally tend to like the cannibalism-forward Cassandra Khaw books less, and the not-so-cannibalism Cassandra Khaw books more. Does this speak to some slavish adherence to taboo within me? Who can say.

Although this book contains none flesh eating, I am ranking it higher than some of the others because the characters still seem uncomfortably prepared to equate human flesh with edible things. The phrase “spun the collagen and meat into spools of taffy” is said. When a character we like fades slightly, her presence is said to have been “masticated [ew] and redistributed through the noise and the hurt.” When our hero sings the song of the title, which is quite climactic of him, the song “tears out gobbets of his recollections, sucking them down, chewing.”

Why, though. Why are the gobbets. No to gobbets. Gobbets tomorrow and gobbets yesterday but never jam today. (I give all publishers blanket permission to use that sentence as a blurb for future Cassandra Khaw books. I feel it accurately captures their aesthetic.)

Degree to which I understood why the characters were [so graphically contemplating] eating human flesh: 3/10

Hammers on Bone

Our protagonist is not himself entirely human — just wearing a human body — and at one point when another character is pissing him off, he’s caught by the temptation to “eat chew eat tear / devour muscle, gobble up viscera.” It is not clear to me what this would accomplish. If someone is terrible, do you want to eat them? If a cow is an asshole, I don’t want to eat the cow. Au contraire! First of all, it would feel like a very weird flex to eat a cow that had been pissing me off. Like, it’s a cow. I am a person. I have opposable thumbs and can eat however many Oreos I want. I don’t need to eat the cow to make a point. Secondly, I don’t want to eat something I already don’t like and am mad at! Eating is a fun and nice experience, not an occasion to marinate in my grudges.

Later, he does, in fact, “bite, chew, swallow, devour” the wicked stepfather he’s been hired to stop. I get using claws and teeth to destroy the wicked stepfather when you do not have any other weapons to hand; that’s just good sense. I just… could not clearly see why one had to then swallow. Bite, yes. Chew, I don’t know, maybe? Like I guess I can see how you might get there in the heat of the moment with adrenaline. But swallow and devour? No, I do not know why this occurred.

However, it’s drawing on HP Lovecraft mythology, and maybe if I were familiar with the work of HP Lovecraft, I would also understand the necessity to eat human flesh. Let me know in the comments if the HP Lovecraft pantheon was prone to flesh-eating, please and thank you. For now I will say that I found the flesh-eating inexplicable.

Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: 2/10

The Salt Grows Heavy

The Salt Grows Heavy broke me. The novella turns out to be a sequel to “And in Our Daughters, We Find a Voice,” a creepy mermaid story Khaw published originally in The Dark, and which is one of nine (nine!) stories in the collection Breakable Things that features someone eating human flesh, nom nom nom. However! If you were not familiar with that initial short story, which I was not, The Salt Grows Heavy was… I mean, y’all, it was so unknowable. I finished the book, got to the acknowledgements section, and flipped back to the beginning to read it again in the hopes that I would understand it better. I did not. My best advice to you all is to be wiser than me, notice that “And in Our Daughters, We Find a Voice” is printed after the acknowledgements section of this book, and read that story first.

I do not know why our protagonist was eating human flesh. I do not know why she is made stronger by eating human flesh. I understand why she is mad at everyone (the land prince captured and imprisoned her against her will), but I do not understand why this has engendered in her a desire to chomp their flesh into gobbets. I have never wanted to chomp anyone’s flesh into gobbets, never, not even when they made me properly cross, like by disregarding the lane reservation system at the swimming pool or reading over my shoulder or being Mitch McConnell.

Nevertheless, the protagonist’s motivations were as crystal unto mine eyes when compared with the villains of the piece, who set a new record even among Cassandra Khaw books for guzzling human flesh without explaining themselves one tiny bit. I read the book twice! I think I put a crack on my brain trying so hard to understand what was going on with the bezoars and the flaying and the vivisecting and the flesh-chomping. I read it twice, and if you came up to me today and said, “Jenny, those bad guys didn’t eat human flesh, they did other very nasty stuff but not that,” I would have no choice but to believe you because my reading comprehension was at an all-time low. But, honestly, I think they did eat human flesh. Going purely on probability from having read Cassandra Khaw’s other books, I think they ate human flesh. I’ll just never know why.

Degree to which I understood why the characters were eating human flesh: 0/10

The post Cassandra Khaw Books, Ranked By How Clearly I Understood Why the Characters Were Eating Human Flesh; or, Gobbets Tomorrow and Gobbets Yesterday But Never Jam Today appeared first on Reading the End.

There was no reason for me to do this. I just felt like attaining an arbitrary goal that made me feel clever. Do I still have more than 30 books checked out from the library? Yes. Do I have multiple ARCs that I’m supposed to be reading and reviewing and they’ve piled up and I’m starting to worry I’ll never catch up? Yes. But January Jenny read one book per day this entire month. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALS. So here comes a lightning round of all the books I read in January.

There are thirty-one of them.

I’m a goals genius.

Week One

Noor, Nnedi Okorafor – A heavily augmented woman called AO is attacked in the marketplace, after which — she is extremely strong due to all the augmentations — she goes on the run across Nigeria with a Fulani herdsman she meets. A whole world of surveillance follows.

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, Tamsyn Muir – What a weirdo Tamsyn Muir is. I say it with love! Princess Floralinda is the story of a princess imprisoned in, yep, a forty-flight tower. On every flight there is a different monster, and at the bottom there is a dragon, and none of the princes make it very far. With the help of a horrible little fairy, Floralinda slowly begins to make her way downward. But as she’s changing the state of things in the tower, she changes the state of things in herself as well.

Where the Children Take Us, Zain Asher – This was a Booklist read! It’s Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sister’s memoir. Did you know poor Chiwetel Ejiofor was in a horrible accident with his father when he was a kid? He and his dad were on a road trip around Nigeria to help Ejiofor connect with his heritage, and there was a car accident, and the dad died and the son was very badly injured; and anyway, then Zain Asher’s mum raised them all by herself while running a pharmacy in London. The book’s a love letter to Asher’s mother, although I am not personally a huge fan of memoirs.

The Thief on a Winged Horse, Kate Mascarenhas – I got this for Christmas! The author of The Psychology of Time Travel, which I was so in love with, wrote another book that only (curses!) got published in the UK and not in the US. It’s about a dysfunctional family that makes magic dolls, a young dollmaker who comes to town and insists on joining them, and a daughter of the family who wants to learn her family’s dollmaking secrets too, despite family traditions that reserve those secrets only to the men. It’s a slightly chillier book than The Psychology of Time Travel, but fascinating and enjoyable anyway.

Silence Is a Sense, Layla Alammar – A sort of literary Rear Window, from the point of view of a Syrian refugee with post-traumatic mutism. From her window in a council flat, she watches her neighbors and writes essays, anonymously, about refugees and Muslim identity. When her local mosque is the victim of a vicious attack of vandalism, she’s drawn further into the community. The writing in this was gorgeous, although the ending was maybe just a little pat.

Just Last Night, Mhairi McFarlane – My first time out with Mhairi McFarlane! Recommended by my lovely pal Katie, McFarlane’s a Scottish author who writes lovely books about friendship and romance. Just Last Night follows Eve and her group of friends in the aftermath of one of their deaths. As Eve grapples with the loss of Susie, she’s also forced to reckon with her feelings about Ed — which everyone in the group has known about for years. The romance in this one is slightly back-burnered, and I’d more call it women’s fiction, much as I hate the term?, because it’s really more about Eve’s journey of self-acceptance.

The Dating Playbook, Farrah Rochon – I read this out of order! Which is a shame, because the inciting incident of the series sounds delightful: Three different women discover they’re dating the same man. They ditch the man and become the best of friends, and each of the books in the series focuses on the romance of one of them. The Dating Playbook follows Taylor Powell, a personal trainer who gets her big break when NFL player Jamar Dixon hires her to get him in shape to rejoin the league after a major injury. It’s funny and sweet and contains fake dating: everything you want in a romance novel! I can’t wait to read the others in the series!

The Perishing, Natashia Deon – This one’s a literary fantasy novel about a girl who shows up in 1930s Los Angeles with no memory of how she got there or who she was before. She heals with inhuman speed and — later on — realizes that she seems to possess memories from former lives. Lou’s story, which is vivid in its depiction of the time and place, is interspersed with glimpses of a woman called Sarah in the 2100s, who reflects on her past relationships and the generations-long struggle for equality. The novel’s light on speculative elements and is definitely more on the literary fiction side of things, which suits its plotting (uneven), characterization (wonderful), and writing (gorgeous).

Week Two

Assembly, Natasha Brown – A short novel about refusal.

The Days of Afrekete, Asali Solomon – I read and enjoyed Solomon’s first novel, so I thought I’d pick this one up! It was fine though perhaps not quite my thing. It’s a novel that alternates chapters between a rather fraught dinner party (delicious) and the protagonist’s college career and tumultuous relationship with one of her exes. Both bits were interesting, but I’d actually have loved it to be just a dinner party book. Y’all know my feelings on bottle episodes!

Diary of a Provincial Lady, EM Delafield – A very long time ago, all the cool bloggers were reading this. It is perhaps not surprising that it took me like ten years to get to it. I found it tiresome when I started, but then I realized that the trick was to read it as it was written — in brief installments, like a newspaper column. Once I caught wise and started reading it like that, a few entries at a time, I quite enjoyed it. Not to reread, but it was an amusing entertainment of an evening.

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville, Akash Kapur – Only once ever have I been so intrigued by the book featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review that I’ve read that review in its entirety, the front page bit and the rest of it that you have to skip to, before reading the rest of the book review. This is because I am fascinated by cults. Auroville wasn’t a cult, but it was, at least, cult-adjacent. Kapur and his wife both grew up in Auroville, and his wife’s parents died there under troubling circumstances. Better to Have Gone tells the story of the founding of this intentional community outside of Pondicherry in India and the deaths of the two people who raised his wife. (Whiskey Jenny and I went to Pondicherry when we were in India, but not to Auroville. I did buy a comforter for my bed, though, that was made in Auroville!)

The Road Trip, Beth O’Leary – Remember how I said a minute ago that I love bottle episodes? Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip is one, and it was great. Addie and her sister and a stranger who’s hitching a ride with them are on their way to their friend’s wedding when she’s in a car crash with her ex-boyfriend Dylan and his horrible posh friend Marcus. They all pile into the car to go to the wedding (it’s a bank holiday weekend, so! no trains!), and everyone is mad at everyone, and I, obviously, loved it. Easily my favorite of Beth O’Leary’s books thus far. Par for the course with her, it deals with some heavy issues, including alcoholism and sexual assault. But also: ROAD TRIP.

Peter Cabot Gets Lost, Cat Sebastian – I mean! As I was already on the road trip theme! It just made good sense to read Cat Sebastian’s latest, Peter Cabot Gets Lost, in which a rich queer Cabot boy goes on a road trip with a (not rich) former classmate he doesn’t have a crush on. As they make their way across America, they’re forced to reassess their initial ideas about each other and also sometimes there is only one bed. Great stuff. Classic. It’s a very very soft book, as Cat Sebastian’s books always are these days, mainly comprising conversations and sex and occasional stops to check out weird Americana. Also, is it a journey to California or a journey to self-acceptance? YOU DECIDE.

Our Wild Farming Life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer – Another memoir for Booklist! This one about farming. My God, farming sounds hard; equally, I bet James Herriot would have liked these two women and their animals. Food for thought.

A Lesson in Vengeance, Victoria Lee – omg so fun. This is the lesbian witch YA dark academia book you’ve been dreaming of. It’s got similar vibes to Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers, except for it’s more focused on academia — our protagonist, Felicity Darrow (they all have names like this), is studying but pretending she’s not studying a bunch of dead witches who once attended her school. She’s also grieving her girlfriend’s death the previous year, a death in which Felicity and witchcraft may or may not have been complicit. Ellis Haley, for her part, wants to write a book about the dead girls, for which she needs to research how to get away with murder. Setting aside the question of whether anything in this book makes sense, it was fucking fun as hell and I will certainly read more by this author.

The Eternal Audience of One, Rémy Ngamije – I loved this! It’s about a Rwandan Namibian guy and his family and his friends. Actually I have a pretty hard time describing what it’s about! But what I will say is that it made me laugh out loud several times, and I am n o t a person who typically laughs out loud at books. Also, love to see Namibia getting its flowers for welcoming refugees from other parts of Africa that were experiencing unrest in the late twentieth century. What a great country.

Week Three

Subtle Blood, KJ Charles – This is the third in a romance series I generally liked but also felt kind of weird about because it’s set in England between the wars, and the Big Bad is a giant international conspiracy of all-knowing people who are highly placed in government and they want to hoard all the wealth. JUST FELT WEIRD. Anyway, Subtle Blood was my favorite in the series because there is the least amount of the giant international conspiracy, and moreover, Kim’s really excellent former fiancee shows back up and I love her.

The Flatshare, Beth O’Leary – Delighted by my success with The Road Trip, I tried the final Beth O’Leary book I hadn’t read yet, so I read The Flatshare. I loved it more than The Switch but less than The Road Trip, and I was very touched by the friendship between Tiffy and Richie.

Mr. Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater – After my absolute adoration of the Raven Cycle, the first book in Maggie Stiefvater’s new Dreamers Trilogy kinda left me cold. Mr. Impossible is just a way way way better book (it contains the following sentence, which I loved: “She was dressed in a cocktail dress that said, Look at me, and also said, Now that you’re looking, did you notice I think you’re stupid? It was a good dress.“), but I still did not feel emotionally connected to it. Everyone is mad at everyone else! The only bits where I felt emotionally connected to the book were when two characters liked each other, so it was pretty much just when Matthew was helping out Jordan and they were bonding. I’ll read the third book though!

A Lot Like Adios, Alexis Daria – I maybe loved this a scootch less than Daria’s prior book, mainly because the previous one was about a telenovela and that’s my jam. This one was still really fun though. It’s also a solid entrant in the “people with jobs” genre, so there was a lot of stuff about the central couple achieving professional satisfaction. I love that shit.

The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales, Yoon Ha Lee – I am not 100% convinced that I’m smart enough for flash fiction. That’s all, that’s the review.

Lore Olympus, vol 1, Rachel Smythe – Maybe Lore Olympus was too hyped up for me to love it and/or maybe I needed to have read further into it. As I was reading it, I kinda had no idea why the characters were Greek gods at all? Readers please weigh in: Should I press on? Does it take a little while to form a true emotional connection to this book and these characters?

Once More Upon a Time, Rokshani Chokshi – I really should have paired this with Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, as they are both novella-length twists on fairy tales. This is about a couple who were once in love, but because of magical shenanigans, they no longer are. In order to get the life they want, as non-married not-in-love people, they have to go on a road trip to do a favor for a witch. You’ll never guess what happens over the course of the road trip! Never ever once will you ever guess!

Week Four

School Days, Patrick Chamoiseau, trans. Linda Coverdale – Look at meeeee I picked up a book while browsingggggg at the libraryyyyyy! I do this all the time, but usually only from the new book shelves. Doing it from the old book shelves felt very smart of me. I have been meaning to read something by Patrick Chamoiseau for ages, and this story about a young boy attending an extremely colonial Martinique school that does all sorts of colonial things. It evoked a really vivid sense of place, despite being overall way too slow-paced for me.

Don’t You Forget about Me, Mhairi McFarlane – Another repeat author in January! I liked this one more than Just Last Night, because the romance was more central, plus there was a pub. It weirdly also had a lot of similarities to The Road Trip. Reading synergy? It’s about a woman leaving an emotionally abusive relationship, and she gets a job in a pub that turns out to be owned by her first love. Great stuff. Plus there is a dog.

Radha and Jai’s Recipe for Romance, Nisha Sharma – I love this type of YA romance, but this specific one didn’t work for me. The central characters were constantly blowing up at, lying to, or misunderstanding each other, so it didn’t feel like a satisfying or coherent relationship arc. I loved all the stuff about cooking and dance though!

Deaf Utopia: A Memoir — and a Love Letter to a Way of Life, Nyle DiMarco with Robert Siebert – Why am I suddenly reading so many memoirs for Booklist? I was not familiar with Nyle DiMarco, but reading the book caused me to get to watch a bunch of quite cool performances on Dancing with the Stars. Also I love that he represented ASL conversations with the structure and syntax of ASL. I haven’t seen that before!

Future Feeling, Joss Lake – For such an allegorical story (I don’t like allegories) with at least two daddy-kink-heavy sex scenes (I am from the South, where adults call their fathers Daddy, so therefore I cannot with it as a sexual thing), Future Feeling was unexpectedly enjoyable for me. It was funny and heartfelt, and also I loved the escapist fantasy of a global network of trans minders looking out for all trans people.

L.A. Weather, Maria Amparo Escandon – I am actually not sure why this has been getting such a huge marketing push! It’s enjoyable, but I expected there to be more there there, somehow. One thing I did love was the representation of Jewish/Catholic syncretism within this Mexican American family. Apart from that, it’s a perfectly fine family novel! It’s everywhere because publicity decisions were made that it should be everywhere!

The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed – OH how skin-crawly this book made me, in a good way! It’s set in a post-everything-disaster world, and its protagonist, Reid, gets an acceptance letter from a university, her ticket out of the life that keeps her and her family and everyone she knows working flat out to just barely get by. Her mother doesn’t believe the university is even real, but Reid is determined to take her chance at a better life. The truly special thing about this book, though, is Mohamed’s depiction of the Cad, an infection that lives under the skin of Reid and her mother and numerous others, and it might be semi-sentient. The Annual Migration of Clouds is about hope and choice in the most fascinating ways, a very very strong book to end the month on.

WHEW that was a lot of books. I feel like that song “88 Lines about 44 Women.” How was your January?

The post The Thirty-One Books of January appeared first on Reading the End.

Act Your Age, Eve Brown, Talia Hibbert

I was lucky enough to get to interview Talia Hibbert in 2021, which was lovely! She was a delight, as you’d expect, and her most recent romance novel is a confection and a treat. Act Your Age, Eve Brown is the last in a trilogy about the Brown sisters (Chloe, Dani, and Eve), and if I hadn’t already staked out a claim on Take a Hint, Dani Brown as my favorite in the series (which it is still), Eve Brown would have given it a run for its money. It’s a romance novel about the youngest Brown sister, who’s always felt like the fuck-up of the family, unable to settle down to one thing, always running out on her commitments. She takes a job managing a B&B after hitting its owner, Jacob, an extreme Order Muppet, with her car. Guess what happens to them then. Guess. Guess.

Guess.

THEY FALL IN LOVE.

It’s laugh-out-loud funny; it’s a touching exploration of how families support and hurt each other; it’s a sexy, romantic love story; I adored it.

The Space Between Worlds, Micaiah Johnson

Maybe because I’ve recommended this book to absolutely everyone this year, it feels like I read it much longer ago than January. But as I thought about it, I sort of remembered saying things in the genre of “it’s halfway through January and I’ve already found my favorite book of the year,” so I guess the story checks out. Anyway, I was right! The Space Between Worlds is my favorite book of 2021, and I am absolutely giddy with the knowledge that the author will be writing another book set in this world.

Cara has died in most of the worlds in the multiverse. This means that she is tremendously well suited to be a multiverse traveler, given that nobody can visit a world in which their counterpart in that world is still alive. Cara works for the Eldridge Institute, which plucked her out of the slums and promises her a life of ease and plenty (and citizenship) if she does her job like a good little cog in the machinery of her world’s inequality. Except that one of her counterparts dies under mysterious circumstances, and…

Well, actually, that’s all I can really say about it! The Space Between Worlds is one of those books that constantly makes its characters — and you, the reader! — question their assumptions as they learn more about the world they live in. If you’re in it for hard science fiction and lots of technical details about what makes the multiverse run, this book won’t be for you — but that isn’t Micaiah Johnson’s project. Her project is sociological SF, exploring questions of inequality and colorism, borders and criminals and family dynamics. It’s a book that takes on a lot of issues and handles them deftly, all while dancing the reader through so much plot it’s dizzying.

Fireborne and Flamefall, Rosaria Munda

I wrote about these ones! It’s hard to say a lot about a trilogy of which only two books are out, and I can’t exactly imagine how Rosaria Munda’s going to land this plane, given that the premise of the series to date is “everyone is a monster to someone, and good intentions will never be enough to protect you from that basic reality.” But I am interested to watch her try!

Fireborne is set a decade on from a revolution against the oppressive and hierarchical Dragon Lords were overthrown by a juster, merit-based system. Lee and Annie are two orphans (Annie orphaned by the old regime, Lee a son of the old regime) competing for the lead position among the dragonriders, at a time when the old regime is putting together its plans for a comeback. In this book, you generally have a sort of notion about which regime is the lesser of two evils — the Fireborne post-rebellion regime isn’t good, but they’re not like, actively setting whole towns on fire. (Usually.)

By the time Flamefall rolls around, though, Annie and Lee have become more completely folded into their governing system. The onset of war means that the cracks in the equality facade have begun to show, and Annie and Lee and their friends are, all too often, the people whose job it is to enforce their unjust systems. Where they’re able to push for change, they do it — but is that enough? It pretty clearly isn’t, yet they’re also keenly aware that the alternatives on the table are just as bad, and possibly worse.

I guess the reason I haven’t seen much buzz about this series is that not everyone gets super excited about the policy proposals of rebel groups, and I guess Winning is easy, young man; governing’s harder is a message that displeases more people than just a fiery young Alexander Hamilton. But if any of those things sound appealing to you, I really recommend this series. While it shares DNA in common with many of the stop-a-bad-regime YA novels out there, it’s miles more thoughtful than most of them, and I absolutely can’t wait to see how Rosaria Munda brings it to a close.

The Theft of Sunlight, Intisar Khanani

I ran out of time to do this, but for a while I had the idea of writing a holiday-themed post that was just a book recs list of books where family estrangement is Good and Fine, Actually. My sister got very enthusiastic about the idea and kept yelling book titles at me, and they were all good ones, but then I ran out of time. If I do ever write it (maybe for Easter! or, like, Fourth of July?), Intisar Khanani’s books will certainly feature.

The Theft of Sunlight is a companion novel to Thorn, centering on a young disabled woman called Rae who’s hired as lady’s maid to the young princess (Thorn from Thorn! I missed her!). Her secret mission is to find out all she can about the human traffickers who have been snatching children off the streets for years, while the crown denies that it’s happening at all. While this isn’t a sequel to Thorn, it does feature some of the characters we remember and love from that book, and it emphasizes again the absolute validity of Thorn’s decision to cut off contact with her family to the fullest extent she’s able to do so. Sometimes family estrangement is Good, Actually!

For her own part, Rae is a tenacious and — in true Intisar Khanani style — deeply moral heroine who’s determined to find out what’s going on in her city. On a more personal level, she’s also desperate to find her own missing sister. Along the way, she has to learn how to navigate the treacherous upper class of Menaiya, not to mention the dangers she faces as she begins to ask questions about the human traffickers that have plagued her country for years. The Theft of Sunlight is also notable for the fact that someone on the trail of a mystery actually thinks to comb through financial records — more bookkeeper allies for fantasy protagonists, please! Nothing pleases me more than a fantasy-world bookkeeper being like “hmm this is weird” while the protagonist is like WHAT WHAT.

The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo

Gosh, okay, yeah, actually, I am suddenly unsure if The Space Between Worlds was my favorite book of this year, or if it was The Chosen and the Beautiful. It is, to be honest, a very fucking difficult call. I think I will simply decline to choose. The Chosen and the Beautiful is the queer, magical, Vietnamese American, Jordan Baker-POV retelling of The Great Gatsby that I did know I wanted but then also felt sure was going to fail to live up to my expectations for it.

LOL.

Not to overstate the case, but I suspect that any year Nghi Vo writes a book, my best-of-that-year post is going to contain a book by Nghi Vo. She has now written two novellas and one novel, this one, and her work has been so consistently, blazingly superb that it’s hard to believe The Chosen and the Beautiful is only her first novel. In some respects, it follows The Great Gatsby quite closely, except that there are lightly magical elements scattered throughout and, of course, it’s from Jordan Baker’s point of view rather than Nick Carraway’s. While I wouldn’t wish a pandemic publication year on any author, it feels particularly suitable for this book to have come out this year, at a time when so many of us are desperately wishing to have the space and freedom for some high-quality decadence; but also at the same time there is this looming, terrifying xenophobia and deep hostility towards people who are different. (Like, in this book, Jordan.)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Upon finishing this book, I discovered within myself that it would never again be necessary for me to read The Great Gatsby. The Chosen and the Beautiful contains all of what I loved about The Great Gatsby — vibes; accidental homicide; terrific writing — while adding further layers of magic and social critique. Whew, I made myself want to reread it. I did that just now.

The Ones We’re Meant to Find, Joan He

I swear that at some point in 2021, I thought the thought “perhaps I have gone off YA” and then when I could not discover that to be true in my reading habits, I thought “perhaps I have gone off SFF YA and only love contemporary YA,” and that has been my working theory for a few months. In going back over my reading list for the year, though, I discover that a lot of my best reads this year have been YA. I cannot pinpoint any reason I might possibly have thought i was going off YA! YA is great, still! I am a silly bunny!

The Ones We’re Meant to Find is Joan He’s second YA novel, and it’s an absolute corker. It follows two girls in two different timelines. One of them, Cee, has been living alone on an island for three years, with no memories of her life before the island. All she knows is that she has a sister called Kay and she absolutely must find her. Worlds away, an isolated teenager called Kasey struggles with the disappearance of her sister Celia. Celia chafed against the restrictions placed on the residents of their eco-city, and then she took a boat out into the dangerous ocean waters and never came back. Missing her terribly and unwilling to accept that Celia is gone forever, Kasey sets herself on a path to find out the things about her sister she never knew.

As with The Space between Worlds, this is a book that doesn’t lend itself to plot summary, just because it’s constantly tossing in new wrinkles that radically alter the reader’s perception of what’s going on and what might come next. This type of book wears on its sleeve the fact that it has secrets to tell, but I was still unprepared for what the secrets would turn out to be. The Ones We’re Meant to Find is about sisters, as promised, but it also turns out to be telling a story about moral responsibility, corporate greed, and collective action. All this plus an ambiguous ending too! The dream!

The Startup Wife, Tahmina Anam

I am not 100% sure that The Startup Wife belongs on this list, in the sense that I don’t know if I’ll ever need to reread it (one of my main yardsticks when I’m determining what books to include in this sort of round-up). But I liked it so much more, and got so much more from it, than I expected, that I think it’s worth a shout-out. I am not the lady who goes around reading books about shitty rich people treating each other shittily! Just. You know. Sometimes there’s a good’un.

The protagonist of The Startup Wife, Asha, isn’t rich to start with. Instead she’s in a PhD program, part of a program that’s slated to alter the way we think about artificial intelligence. When she reconnects with her high school crush, Cyrus, her life takes a whole other turn. She teams up with Cyrus’s best friend Jules to create an app that will custom-design rituals (weddings, funerals, celebrations of new births) according to the specific interests and passions of the user. The idea is that humans have moved away from organized religion, but we still desperately need communal rituals. It’s a lovely idea. And at first, it’s an ideal partnership: Asha codes the algorithm, Cyrus is the idea man, and Jules handles the business side.

Asha starts to be sidelined a little bit, but of course that doesn’t have anything to do with malice. On the contrary! Cyrus doesn’t want to be the face of the organization. It’s just that because he has this unique, and uniquely weird, perspective on ritual, it’s his vision they’re selling with the app. Increasingly, Asha is pushed to the fringes of her own business, while Cyrus becomes more and more visible. Press coverage focuses on Cyrus and his ideas, while Asha — the power behind the algorithm that makes the app possible — is treated as a footnote.

Also, though, the app is starting to become kind of a cult. So. There’s that.

The Startup Wife reminded me why I keep trying to read books of this type. They always promise to be Saying Something about our culture and its prejudices and its hangups, but most often they just feel like a combination of praise ode and half-assed elegy to conspicuous consumption in late-stage capitalism. The Startup Wife, by contrast, truly is saying something about the need for human connection and the gifts that connection can give us and the dangers it can pose. I really really liked it, and I’m eager to see what this author does next.

And those are my top books for the year! Whether because of pandemic, because there was no new Locked Tomb book this year, or because I’m too pandemic-listless to really devote myself to books and reading, it was a slightly quiet year in books for me. But the standouts were so superb, so instantly guaranteed a permanent place on my bookshelf, that I can’t say I have anything to complain of.

What were your best reads this year? What should I make sure not to miss in 2022?

The post 2021 in Books appeared first on Reading the End.

All to say, I wanted to mark the occasion (instead of forgetting to post about it like I usually do) with a rundown of a couple of my favorites among the translated books by women that I’ve read in the last year.

Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi, trans. Chris Andrews

French Algerian author Kaouther Adimi tells the story of the famous Algerian bookshop and publisher, Les Vraies Richesses, and its owner, Edmond Charlot. Half the book is set in Algeria’s colonial and independence eras, in diary entries and third-person narration of Charlot’s experiences in the 1930s and 1940s. The other half is set in the present day, a time when Les Vraies Richesses has been sold to be a beignet restaurant, and a young man has come to the village to clear the old bookstore out. While my knowledge of Algerian history is patchy, and my tolerance for books about books has gone way down over the last decade, I genuinely loved Our Riches. The author’s love and admiration for Charlot, for literary culture, and for Algeria in all its incarnations shines through every page.

Earthlings, Sayaka Murata, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori

If you came out of Convenience Store Woman (Murata’s previous novel) whispering “what the fuck” quietly to yourself, you are fully not prepared for the what-the-fuck-ness that awaits you in Earthlings. It’s about a young woman who — along with her beloved cousin — believes that she is an alien, a fact that would explain her deep disconnection from those around her. When she and her cousin sleep together, it causes a family scandal, and they’re separated. Years later, Natsuki is in a marriage of convenience. She and her husband flee to the family home in Akashina, where they’re reunited with Natsuki’s cousin Yuu. It’s…. shit gets weird. Is what I’ll say. Sayaka Murata is not afraid to write the absolute weirdest, darkest shit, and I respect her for that.

cw for child sexual abuse and a whole bunch of violent murder

Eartheater, Dolores Reyes, trans. Julia Sanchez

Speaking of violent murder, Eartheater follows a young woman in the slums of Argentina who discovers, after her mother dies, that she can eat earth and gain visions of the lost and disappeared. Her newfound talent unnerves many of the people around her, and she’s left with just her beloved brother, Walter, for company and guardianship. Gradually she gains a better understanding of what she can do, and her neighbors begin to come to her with dirt for her to eat to find their missing loved ones. The narrator even teams up with a gentle local cop to solve crimes! But there’s an emotional cost to constantly witnessing the violence that befell the people around her.

This is another one I really loved. A thing that I’ve grown to love in translated literature is how often it denies the necessity of explaining what the fuck is happening. It just is what it is! This woman can eat dirt and get visions of what happened to the dead! No follow-up questions!

What translated literature have y’all been enjoying lately? What are you planning to read this August?

The post It’s Women in Translation Month! 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.

(“But you read fanfic, Jenny, and that’s not physical books either” I KNOW AND I LAMENT THIS EVERY DAY.)

The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, Cat Sebastian

The arrival of a new Cat Sebastian book is always cause for rejoicing! The Queer Principles of Kit Webb is another queer historical romance, this one set in the 1700s, about a nobleman’s son called Percy who is plotting with his mother-in-law (she’s his mother-in-law but she’s his same age and they are The Best Bros) to ruin his father’s life before a blackmailer can ruin it for them. To do this, Percy must do a highway robbery! But he does not know how to do a highway robbery, which means he has to find *presto hands* A HIGHWAYMAN.

(Did anyone besides me read that poem “The Highwayman“? It’s about the highwayman who comes riding, riding, riding up to the old inn door to flirt with Bess, the landlord’s daughter, and then in order to capture the highwayman, the long arm of the law ties up Bess and puts a gun to her breast and the idea is that when the highwayman shows up, they’re going to use Bess to capture him. I won’t spoil what happens but things do not end well for Bess. She is really beset on all sides by Male Nonsense. Justice for Bess.)

The only highwayman that Percy and Marian are able to track down is out of the game. Kit Webb retired from the life of a highwayman after his partner Rob was killed and he himself was significantly injured. Now he runs a coffeehouse, where he grumps around very handsomely and runs a lending library very grumpily. He has long luscious brown hair. You will never convince me that he’s not English Eliot Spencer. He even runs a brewpub basically.

English Eliot Spencer Kit Webb is out of the game, but he is allured by the prospect of one last job, even though he knows that it, and Percy, are a bad idea.

As noted, this is a new time period for Cat Sebastian (I think? unless I am forgetting something?), and she really leans all the way into it. The 1700s were a horrible (read: amazing) time for fashion, complete with beauty spots for people of all genders, decorative swords, and so many wigs. Percy wears all of those things. It is great. I am so glad that Cat Sebastian did not try to pretend that the fashions in 1751 were anything other than what they were. Sometimes Percy wears very quiet clothes in order to skulk around and blend in, but other times he goes all in on 1750s nonsense, and it never failed to make me laugh.

A nice trend that I’ve noticed in m/m romance lately is a greater emphasis on the women in people’s lives (and community more broadly). I loved Kit and Percy’s romance, of course, but I also adored Percy and Marian’s friendship. Their relationship is totally unromantic, but that doesn’t make it less important. It’s of vital importance to them both, the life raft that keeps them afloat in the ocean of 1750s society. Marian is ferociously intelligent and determined to see their plan through to the end. If I had one small complaint about this book, it’s that I’d have liked to see either more or less of what was going on with Marian: Clearly she’s got her own drama, which we catch glimpses of in the background of this book, and which I presume is setting up a sequel? But there’s just enough of it that it felt like it should have been more central to this book, rather than a tease for the next one, and the lack of resolution made the book as a whole feel not quite resolved.

But also, I mean, who cares? We’ll get Marian’s book (right? right?), and then I will be happy. And in the meantime, Cat Sebastian’s romances continue to be an absolute treat, every single time.

Note: I got this from Netgalley for review and am also mutuals with the author on Twitter, where I am trying to convince her to share with me her archives of Harry Potter fanfic from the olden days.

The Spare, Miranda Dubner

You know how sometimes you have a book on the docket to read, and you know you’re going to like it, but somehow you don’t get to it right away, and then you get distracted by other shiny things? And then when you go back to that one book, you’re like WHY DID I NOT READ THIS SOONER? That was my journey with The Spare. I have no explanation! I knew I was going to enjoy it!

At baseline, The Spare is a romance between a prince (of alterna-England) and his bodyguard. Already great stuff, no? But instead of being a completely straightforward, two-point-of-view romance, it’s more of an ensemble piece. Eddie and Isaac have their chapters, but so do Eddie’s sister Alex, his mother Victoria, even his older brother (the heir-apparent). As I feel that I’ve said ad nauseam in recent romance round-up posts (and am going to say again about the next book because I am Predictable), I love reading a romance where the central couple feels really situated in their community. Admittedly Eddie and Isaac have very specific, rarefied, some might say deeply weird communities, but it’s wonderful to have the opportunity to care about some of those people too.

Reading stories about fictional royals is always slightly weird for me because I do not like the monarchy! I want to topple the monarchy! But I also have a soft spot a mile wide for indulgent royal silliness, and The Spare came through for me in all the ways I wanted it to. There’s all the made-up (that’s not a jab) royal protocol that everyone has to adhere to with stone-faced seriousness because of their Duty to their Country. There’s lots of public relations people and their opinions about what information about the royal siblings and their lives can be shared with the public (in Eddie’s case, photos of him with a guy have been leaked to the press, and now everyone wants to do damage control about the Absolute Scandal of having a bisexual prince). There are public charity efforts and private charity efforts; there are excruciating public events of the type that make me glad to be in quarantine.¹

Underneath and alongside that silliness, though, is a core of true warmth and care. I was describing this book to a friend as “50% [royal] nonsense, 50% the most incredible weapons-grade softness.” (They were like, isn’t softness inherently not weapons-grade? and I was like DEPENDS WHAT YOU WANT THE WEAPON TO DO.) Everyone in this book messes up and makes careless decisions, sometimes to the very serious detriment of other characters, but what’s fundamental to them all is that they want to do the right thing, not just by each other, but by the world. It’s soft and lovely –and occasionally searingly insightful — in all the ways I need my books to be soft and lovely right now.

Note: The author sent me this for review!

Accidentally Engaged, Farah Heron

Sourdough starters really freak me out, and Accidentally Engaged, despite having many strengths as a book, did not ease my mind vis-a-vis sourdough starters. Did you know that sourdough starters double in size all the time? So you have to keep trimming them or whatever, to prevent them from running rampant? (Don’t fact-check this; I was too frightened and grossed out to go back and reread the part of the book that talked about this, because I didn’t want to give myself nightmares.)

When Reena runs into a hot new neighbor, Nadim, she thinks nothing of it — until she learns that Nadim is her father’s newest employee, and that her parents are hoping she’ll marry Nadim. She does, um, not want to. What she does want, after she’s laid off from her job, is to enter a home cooking competition, but to do it, she needs to have a pretend fiance. It’s a win-win! Maybe. Sort of. And anyway she is definitely not going to fall in love with her fake TV fiance.

Y’all I lied. She is going to fall in love with her fake (web) TV fiance. Also I never remember how many Es go in the word fiance. Thank you for being a safe space for me to be open about these vulnerable truths.

Remember that period of YA where all the books with Muslim American protagonists were about those protagonists breaking free from the strictures of their old-fashioned first-generation immigrant parents? And then YA moved on, and now we get to have lots of different kinds of first-generation immigrant parents? Accidentally Engaged feels like the sequel to that era of YA novels. Reena works hard to be independent of her parents, who are overbearing and they do keep secrets and they can’t be trusted with the truth about what’s going on with her. But over the course of the story (and this was far and away my favorite thing about the book), she starts to realize that she doesn’t want to separate herself from her family. Rather, she wants to find ways to be true to herself within her family and her culture.

As a person with a warm and loving family, and a person who has had to renegotiate her relationships with most of her nuclear family members in adulthood, I truly loved Reena’s journey to being more truthful with her family and giving them space to be more truthful with her. She starts the book with a lot of anger towards her sister Saira, and the shift in how she views Saira was a particularly lovely element of a broader plot arc around her family that I already loved.

Her romance with Nadim is also a lot of fun, especially if you’re a fan of fake relationships. Reena and Nadim cycle through just about every possible permutation of real and fake relationships, in ways that poke fun at the genre conventions while also partaking in them — catnip to me! Nadim is also a little kinky, in ways I rarely see in romance novels, and the book overall feels really sex-positive despite being a closed-door romance. The big misunderstanding in the final third was a good one, although Heron might have gone the teeniest bit overboard on accumulating evidence of Nadim’s wickedness, which she then had to painstakingly refute later on.

There is also a recipe for a Zanzibar egg curry at the back of the book that I am for sure going to try to make. It looks delicious.

That’s it for me and recent romances, friends! What romances have y’all been reading lately?

The post Bodyguards! Highwaymen! Sourdough Starters!: A Romance Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi

Riot Baby felt terrifyingly topical when I read it in January of this year, and then it just got more and more and more topical somehow. It’s about two Black siblings, Ella and Kev, who each have special powers. Jumping around in time, Riot Baby shows us a dystopian America that’s functionally just… America, and Kev ends up incarcerated for living in the world while Black. Using their powers, Ella and Kev pay telepathic (?) visits to each other, as well as to a number of scenes in America’s racist history, and search for ways to bring the whole racist system down.

Tor’s novella line continues to publish absolute bangers, and Riot Baby felt like a gift in a year when America has felt even more like a dystopia than usual. Its leaps through time are deliberately disorienting, so that the reader is never quite allowed to settle into any certainty about what the book is going to be. Instead you’re carried through time and space in a sort of grand tour of American oppression. Riot Baby is imaginative, strange, dizzying, exhilarating.

Butterfly Yellow, Thanha Lai

I can’t remember who recommended Butterfly Yellow to me, but it was this wonderfully quiet and careful YA novel about a Vietnamese girl who comes to America in search of her little brother, from whom she was separated during the Vietnam War. She’s certain that he’ll be delighted to be reunited with her, but instead she finds that he’s comfortable in his new life with his adoptive parents. Hằng befriends a cowboy named LeeRoy and sticks around, patiently trying to rebuilt her relationship with her brother.

Because we see Hằng so much through LeeRoy’s eyes, I kept thinking that she was younger than she was, so it threw me off a bit when she develops a romance with LeeRoy. And overall I think Butterfly Yellow feels slightly more middle grade than YA. Aside from that small area of disorientation, though, it was a book with a great deal of emotional depth. No matter how much we want easy answers, such answers aren’t forthcoming. Instead, it’s a story about perseverance in love and finding joy in an imperfect world.

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

On a grim day in January, I opened my mail to find an ARC of Harrow the Ninth, upon which I shrieked like a banshee and dived into it with an enthusiasm. Gideon the Ninth, you’ll recall, was the lesbian necromancers in space book, and this is the middle book in the series. We follow Harrow as she struggles with her imperfect Lyctorhood and her fractured memories of what happened at Canaan House.

This book is bonkers. It is bonkers. Every choice that Tamsyn Muir makes in this book is bonkers. It is a symphony of what-the-fuck, with every instrument playing a perfect, terrifying what the fuck variation, and all I could do was let myself be swept along by it. I know that some folks have said they found this one a harder read than Gideon — in Gideon the Ninth you’re in Gideon’s head enjoying her irreverent take on all the horrifying blood and murder events, whereas in Harrow the Ninth you’re living with Harrow’s rage, grief, and self-loathing. So I hope it won’t make me sound like a callous monster when I say I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book. I was grinning from ear to ear every time I opened it. I cannot wait for the third one.

Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo

WHEW did somebody say “mastery of the novella form”? I got Empress of Salt and Fortune as an ARC and was not immediately sucked in after reading the first few pages. Then on a Saturday I was like “I’m going to dedicate some actual time to reading this bastard” and sat down and read it all in one sitting. It’s the story of cleric Chih, who is collecting stories on their travels through a country that has been shaped by a powerful empress. They encounter an old woman who used to serve in the royal palace, and settle in to hear her version of the empress’s rise.

Just, wow. I absolutely loved this book. I am not one for secondary world fantasy, usually, but Vo builds her world around material culture: the tooth that was part of the gown the empress wore when she came as a bride to the palace; the dice that she used to play games and cast lots; a map of pilgrimage shrines throughout the empire. The things are the hook into the story of this empress, and the story is about women’s rage. It’s about the refusal to accept the oppression and denial your life has given you, and the overlooked ways women use to communicate among themselves, using tools that powerful men can’t be bothered glancing at twice.

I still don’t quite know how Vo managed to pack so much worldbuilding, emotion, and plot into 118 pages, but I do know that I’m excited for her future career and inevitable superstardom in the world of SFF.

The Good Luck Girls, Charlotte Nicole Davis

ROAD TRIP ADVENTURE YA!!!

Every year for the last few years, there’s been at least one YA novel where I was like “this is just a good fucking adventure story, what a pleasure, what a dream,” and as I look back on them, they are all, one hundred percent of them, road trip adventures. So in case there was any lack of clarity about what I like and whether I am predictable, the answers are road trips and yes, I am very predictable.

The Good Luck Girls tells the story of a group of girls fleeing from the brothel to which they were sold as children, trying to escape the consequences of a patron’s death. They are seeking asylum in a place they’ve only heard about, a place that for all they know doesn’t even exist — but they have to try and get there, or else resign themselves to spending their lives being hunted by the raveners who have been tasked with finding them and punishing them.

As dark as this premise is, Davis does a terrific job of writing a book that doesn’t feel doomed, yet also doesn’t gloss over the genuine trauma these girls have been through in their lives. Aster is determined to get all her friends to safety, whatever the cost to her; she’s smart and resourceful and angry and driven, and I cherished her. There’s a slow build-up of grudging respect between her and the house favorite at their brothel, Violet, which of course I adored, and the stakes of their road trip escape remain high, high, high, so there’s this lovely release of tension any time they have the chance to stop and rest and be happy for even a short time. And the set-up for book two just really thrilled me. Can’t wait for more!

The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Whoever decided to get Paul Lewin to do the cover for this book deserves a trophy. Also, I love Paul Lewin’s art. One of my goals for this year is to read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, not just because I need to read more of Octavia Butler’s work, but also because if I like it then I can maybe buy the editions that feature Paul Lewin’s fancy, gorgeous covers.

Anyway, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games digs deep into major fantasy properties to explore the ways Black characters in those franchises have been used and abused by both the stories themselves and the audiences who received them. Thomas is a terrific, insightful cultural critic, and her work is particularly notable for how clearly she loves these properties and wants better for them. Her readings of the texts and their audiences enriched my understanding of these books, movies, and TV shows, and I’m so excited for whatever this author plans to do next.

Norma Jean Baker of Troy, Anne Carson

Before *waves hands* all this, I attended a conference at which New Directions had a booth, and you just wouldn’t believe the shriek of joy I emitted when I realized that Anne Carson had a new book. Anne Carson is the translator, poet, and genius behind If Not, Winter (an amazing translation of Sappho) and Nox, a book-in-a-box I incepted myself into being able to afford the first year I lived in New York.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy combines the story of Helen of Troy with the life of Marilyn Monroe, whose name before fame was Norma Jeane Baker. It’s expectedly strange and funny and devastating.

In ancient Greece you use the verb [I am too lazy to recreate this in WordPress], which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum, and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.

Anne Carson is a queen on etymology. If you liked the above quotation, I refer you to Nox, which does a lot of this kind of thing.

Realm of Ash, Tasha Suri

Remember when I was lowkey obsessed with Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri’s debut? Well, in an exciting twist, I loved Realm of Ash even more. It maintains the same Angry Girl / Soft Boy romance dynamic, but dials the anger and the softness up by several notches.

Even saying that feels like a disservice to Realm of Ash, because it ignores the absolutely wonderful worldbuilding and plot work that Tasha Suri is doing. It’s the kind of sequel that Diana Wynne Jones would write, where the book is set in the same world under (some of) the same set of assumptions, but it’s far more of a companion novel than the type of sequel where you’re like, aw, yeah, gonna get some answers now. Realm of Ash is about the crumbling Ambhan Empire, and the efforts of a widow and a prince to understand the limits of their forbidden magic.

I just… I loved this? Again I say that I tend to struggle with secondary world fantasy, but authors like Tasha Suri and Nghi Vo seem determined to undermine my carefully established opinions. Tasha Suri comes out of fanfic, and you can really tell by the way she makes relationships so central to her plotting. I loved this book, and I cannot wait for Suri’s 2021 book The Jasmine Throne. I love her.

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

This round-up includes three nonfiction books (unless you count the book of poetry; in which case, four), and I stand by all of them. Because Internet is a linguistics book about the language of the internet, and it’s 24-karat gold in my opinion. Gretchen McCulloch talks about all the things you’d expect, like the development of emojis and the reason why memes work or don’t, as well as a whole slew of things you wouldn’t, like how Arabic-speakers convey the Arabic alphabet on Twitter and why old people use so many ellipses in their emails.

If you’ve ever been like “I am extremely online, but why?”, I highly recommend that you read Because Internet. It won’t explain why you are so online (who could?), but it will describe your life in terrifyingly accurate terms.

The True Queen, Zen Cho

I could just as well have put The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water on this list, because Zen Cho blessed us with two new releases in the last two years, but The True Queen was the one that I really loved. This may reflect my general preference for the novel-length format. The True Queen is a follow-up to the 2015 Sorcerer to the Crown, and I loved it so so so so so much. It’s set in an alternate version of the nineteenth century, as Sorcerer to the Crown was, but it focuses much more on people who aren’t English. Yay!

I love Zen Cho for so consistently writing books that could have been dark and grim but are, in fact, funny and light-hearted. In these quarantimes, it feels like a particularly revolutionary writing choice. The True Queen deals with a lot of heavy themes (imperialism, family conflict, etc.) in a way that isn’t too grim but also doesn’t feel like a cop-out by the author. I just truly loved this book, as I have all her books to date. I had so much fucking fun reading it, and in a year where fun was few and far between, I value that so so so much. ZEN CHO.

The City We Became, NK Jemisin

Yes, I was furious at the offhand way in which NK Jemisin dismissed New Orleans in this book, and yes, it made me cry on podcast. But apart from that gripe, which while not minor to me was minor in terms of the space it occupied in the book, I really loved NK Jemisin’s latest novel. It’s about the city of New York becoming sentient, manifesting itself in the avatars for each borough, who must come together to fight against an evil white Lovecraftian tentacle creature.

In perhaps the clearest measure of success, The City We Became made me feel agonizingly homesick for New York City. I was supposed to visit it in 2020! Reading this reminded me so keenly of what the city is like, in all its boroughs, in every iteration, and I just got really fucking emoshe about it. NK Jemisin’s writing is typically beautiful, her plotting typically tense, and I was left with a mighty yearning for more of this series.

A Song Below Water, Bethany Morrow

It’s the misogynoir fantasy novel of your dreams! Tavia has known for years that she’s a siren, and she knows that she must be careful never to reveal what she is. Living in the city of Portland, she has plenty of opportunity to see the kind of oppression faced by other Black people, especially Black women, especially sirens. In the aftermath of a siren murder trial, Tavia learns that an idol of hers is also a siren, and she begins to understand that she has no alternative but to use her voice to pursue her values.

I loved the worldbuilding in A Song Below Water, and I dearly hope that Bethany Morrow has plans for more books in this universe. Though Tavia struggles mightily with understanding what it means to be a siren, sirens are not the only magical being in this world. I would love to see books that deal with other kinds of magic and their implications — not least because Tavia’s beloved sister Effie has secrets of her own that are uncovered in the course of the novel. I love sister stuff! I love it! And this book is about sisters who are absolutely ride-or-die for each other, which was great to see — I love a complicated sibling relationship, but I also love the kind of relationship that’s all about love and loyalty.

Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall

Mirabile, Janet Kagan

Okay, I confess that this one’s on me. My aunt has been trying to get me to read Mirabile for, like, six years, and every time I was like “oh yeah yeah I’ll get to it for sure” and then because I couldn’t easily access the book, I did not for sure get to it. Last year, my aunt totally got me by just lending me the mf book, so it was either I read it promptly or I became one of those people who borrows a book and never remembers to return it. And y’all know I refuse to be that person.

Mirabile, which was published in 1991, is about xenobiologist (?) / xenoecologist (??) Mama Jason, who is responsible for researching and keeping under control the many mutant life forms that inevitably arise on the planet colony of Mirabile. This is a novel in stories (not usually my favorite thing), most of which were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction before being collected in novel form, and each chapter deals with a specific life form, from the Kangaroo Rex to the Loch Moose Monster. It’s the kind of low-stakes SFF novel that I’m constantly searching for: Though Mama Jason is tasked in some ways with the survival of the colony, there’s never any real question that she’ll succeed in her endeavors. She has a funny, wry narrative voice, and it’s overall just great to see an older woman protagonist in SF. My aunt was right. I should have read this sooner.

Part two is coming your way soon! Probably!

The post All the Books that Blew My Mind in 2020, Part 1 appeared first on Reading the End.

The true headline of November has been my discovery of the sweetest and dearest sitcom since The Good Place got me through the 2016 election. It is — and I do not say this lightly — woth subscribing to Apple TV for. The promos make Ted Lasso look like a very broad fish-out-of-water comedy, about a college football coach who leaves Kansas to coach football (the other kind) in England, where they find his good cheer and optimism annoying and charming. The owner of the team is an ice queen who wants revenge on her ex; the players you need to care about are a cinnamon roll Nigerian kid doing his best; a Mancunian fuckboy with a girlfriend who deserves better; and a very cross veteran footballer reaching the end of his career. On a macro level, it’s about friendship, grudging respect, and non-toxic masculinity. I can’t describe how much I loved it.

I did, against all odds, read some books this month! The best one was Yoon Ha Lee’s Phoenix Extravagant, which I reviewed here. Dit dit dit, this just in, I adore Yoon Ha Lee’s writing! Now begins the long wait for whatever he’s going to write next.

A plurality of my November reading was YA. Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko, is one of those YA novels that I enjoyed a lot but didn’t necessarily understand why it was YA. It felt like an adult SFF book, not least because it’s a little slower-paced to allow for more diligent and thorough worldbuilding. That’s not a complaint! I liked the book a lot. It’s about a girl whose mother sends her to become a magical attendant to the crown prince, but secretly her mission is to kill the crown prince. By the time the spell comes due, Tarisai has formed a strong bond with Dayo (an ace! cinnamon roll! whom everyone must love!), and she is determined to find a way to protect him and break her mother’s power over her. I truly can’t say enough about the worldbuilding in Raybearer, and I say this as a person who is not easily won over by worldbuilding. Can’t wait to read the sequel!

Girl, Serpent, Thorn, by Melissa Bardashoust, is inspired by Persian mythology and features a girl whose skin is poison. Soraya has never had what one would call a thriving social life! Instead, she’s been shut away from all companionship while her brother is groomed to become the shah — until her brother’s team captures a demon. Certain that she can get answers out of the demon, Soraya enlists the aid of one of her brother’s guardsmen to sneak into the dungeon and find out what the demon knows about the curse that makes it impossible for anyone ever to touch Soraya. Mayhem ensues! The best thing about this book is that at one point I was like “ooooooh I hope she [spoiler] and gets with [spoiler],” and the reason I have redacted that wish is that it came truuuuue! It’s the fairy tale subversion of my dreeeeeeams!

Candace Montgomery’s By Any Means Necessary is a book about saving an apiary that’s not really about saving the apiary. I tell you this because my enjoyment of the book would have been substantially abridged had I not read the end and learned that it’s not really about saving the apiary. Because, spoiler alert, they don’t save the apiary. Saving the apiary isn’t the point! By Any Means Necessary is a character-driven story about a first-generation college student grappling with the effects of gentrification in his L.A. neighborhood (which threaten to destroy his late uncle’s beloved apiary), his budding relationship with a hot guy named Gabe, and his complicated relationship with his shitty grandfather. Torrey has a wonderful, funny, vulnerable narrative voice and a baller group of friends. I’d read one book dedicated to each of his STEM friends.

(Oh, I also read Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, which is not YA, but we’re going to do a podcast on it later. So you will hear about that in the fullness of time!)

My favorite read overall this month was an Untamed fic, perhaps to nobody’s surprise. I read a fair bit of fic this month, much of it excellent, but by far my favorite was this Saturday Night Live AU called “live from new york,” by varnes. It’s a contemporary AU in Lan Wangji’s POV, with brief interludes in other POVs, most notably Yanli’s. To date it’s my most favorite fic for Yanli. While Untamed fic correctly adores and treasures the women of The Untamed, who are angels, “live from new york” gives her a whole-ass emotional arc and actually somehow gets me on board with her romance with Jin Zixuan. My friends promoted it to me on the basis that it contains very good pining. A, that’s correct! But B, it also contains a bunch of really fun jokes! And C, it describes emotions really really well. I loved it and I want to immediately reread it.

How was your reading in November? And do you have any reservations about Ted Lasso? If so, please share them in the comments so I can dissuade you!

The post November Reading, Plus an Advert for Ted Lasso appeared first on Reading the End.