The Scorpion Rules was one of my favorite books of 2015, so I obviously snapped up the sequel, The Swan Riders, as soon as it showed up on Netgalley. I cannot talk about this book without giving major spoilers for The Scorpion Rules, so if you haven’t read Scorpion Rules yet, dash off and do that real quick, and meet me back here afterwards. IT IS REALLY GOOD, a take on YA dystopia that zigs when you think it will zag and values a wide range of skills and values (i.e., there’s a character who perpetually rages against the machine, and there’s characters who recognize that this isn’t always the best strategy to get what you want).

Okay. Did you non-Scorpion Rules readers leave?

Good. Onward. The Swan Riders begins where The Scorpion Rules left off, with Greta trying to adjust to being an AI, and Talis — occupying the body of a Swan Rider named Rachel — intent on getting her to safety and making sure that she makes the transition safely. The whole project is hideously derailed when a faction of Canadians attack Talis, Greta, and their Swan Rider escort, Francis Xavier, and to say more would be to deprive you of the many wonderful twists and turns this book takes.

Though The Swan Riders didn’t perpetually upend my expectations the way Scorpion Rules did — largely because now I know a little better what to expect from Erin Bow — it was an absolutely wonderful follow-up. So many sequels fall victim to the idea that they have to make the foes of the second book huger and more terrifying, stacking the odds ever more heavily against the protagonist. Erin Bow dodges that bullet.

In The Swan Riders, Greta is allied with a being who is functionally all-powerful, so to give them a foe worthy of their steel would have been quite some trick. Sure, they can be attacked while they’re out in the wilds of Canada (excuse me, the Pan Polar Alliance), but you know that Talis has the power to just start blowing up everything whenever he feels like it, so it would be difficult to find an antagonist who could stand up to that. Instead, Erin Bow locates the book’s major conflict within her little group of three: Talis, Greta, and Francis Xavier. The world hands them a set of bad choices, and it’s up to them — mainly up to Greta, since Talis is all pragmatism and no heart, and Francis Xavier has sworn an oath to obey them no matter what — to figure out the best of a bad lot.

All of that’s a little vague for avoidance-of-spoilers purposes, but I will say that Erin Bow does a plot thing that’s one of my favorite types of plot things, when done well: What seems to arise from complex political motivations ends up being very simple and very personal, and it packs a hell of a punch as you head into the final third of the book, and the characters really and truly have to decide what they, and their world, are going to look like.

Or to put it another way: I cried on the bus reading this. Twice.

We don’t see much of Talis in The Scorpion Rules, and what we do see is not much to his credit. The Swan Riders gives us much much more Talis, and since he is a type of character I absolutely cherish — smart-mouthed, brilliant, and viciously pragmatic — this was a good time for me. If you are a fan of a particular type of character that is Tony Stark, I promise much enjoyment out of Talis.

“We’re equals.”

“Oh,” I said. “In that case, I would like to propose that peace achieved through terror can never truly be peace. We should release all the Precepture hostages and shut down the orbital weapons platforms.”

“Okay,” said Talis. “We’re equals, but you’re a dewy-eyed moron.”

“We would not have come this far if that were even remotely true.”

“Fair point. Let me put it this way instead: no.”

Y’all, this series. I love it. Please read, then come back and scream at me about your feelings.

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My best thing of 2015 (brace yourself for a shock) was the musical Hamilton. Not a full week after I whined to my friends that I feared there would never be another musical that made me feel the way Wicked and Rent made me feel, and maybe my feelings about those musicals (and the others I love) were just a function of youthful emoness, lo there came Hamilton into my life. If you haven’t listened to the cast recording yet, find a way to do it. Then come back and tell me how much you loved it. Please and thank you.

In books, I’ve picked out a few faves for the year. Some of these I’ve talked about ad nauseam already, so bear with me.

Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson, was the first webcomic I read for my “Read More Webcomics” resolution of 2015 (which went brilliantly for me, if you are wondering). Also probably my most-recommended book of 2015.

How It Went Down, by Kekla Magoon, has been inexplicably overlooked, and I cannot understand why. In addition to being painfully topical, it’s also a beautifully written, thoughtful look at some of the issues that arise when a black child is suddenly dead and nobody can understand why. I can’t say enough about this book and this author. Check it out.

And now for a total change of pace, I loved Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, when I didn’t remotely expect to. It’s witty and tender, and full of characters you just want to see succeed.

Congo, by David van Reybrouck, laid out the history of a huge, messy country in a way that was perpetually readable and relied as much as possible on the testimony and memories of the Congolese people themselves. If historians like David van Reybrouck could write histories of all the African nations, I’d be done with my Africa reading project in just a few years.

Touch, by Claire North, kept me up late trying to guess what was going to happen next. At least one book a year reminds me why I love reading so much, and Touch was that book for me this year.

Predictably, Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, has arrived on my best-of this year. I didn’t review it in this space because it was hard to feel that I had anything to add about this book, after so many glowing reviews have emerged of it. I’ve admired Coates’s writing for years for its measured insights and unwillingness to rely on easy answers. Between the World and Me is a tragic, beautiful, necessary book.

The Scorpion Rules, by Erin Bow, did absolutely none of the things I expected it to do. It was a perpetual surprise, and it’s made me excited to see what Erin Bow will do next with this world.

As with the Coates book, I don’t feel I have anything super valuable to add about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which has basked in plenty of accolades already and doesn’t need my additional input. However, I will say that I had no expectation of liking this book and only read it so I could get to Bring Up the Bodies, which I also didn’t especially expect to like. But there you go. Life is full of surprises.

Finally, a shout-out to 1796 Broadway, a monster of an epistolary fanfic which, like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in its time, kept me up late on several occasions where I kept saying “oh I’ll just do one more and then I’ll go to bed.” Ha, ha, Jenny. You know that’s not what’s really going to happen.

In statistics, female authors were far more heavily represented in my reading than male, and I continue to be fine with that.

I read 18% of my books because I was familiar with the authors from previous books I’d read of theirs, while another 45% of my book recommendations came from you lovely people! If that number seems low, please note that many of the books in the “author fondness” category became favorites of mine due to your unfailing advocacy. So actually I got closer to 53% of my books from bloggers. Another 15% I picked up based on professional reviews; 6% were books I spotted in publishers’ catalogs or that publishers pitched to me; and a small sliver, 3%, were books I picked up randomly at the library.

84% of everything I read came from the library. Lovely, lovely library, please never change. I cherish you so much. I borrowed two books from friends, owned eight, read seven online (from apps like Marvel Now and Comixology), and read fifteen in ARC format (either ebooks or physical). About a fourth (27%) of my reads were ebooks, and the rest were physical books. That is how I roll when subways and purse heavinesses are not a consideration.

I read less SFF this year than I think is typical for me, only 26%, whereas fiction-not-otherwise-classified accounted for 30% of my reading. Actually, that seems okay. Maybe I’d like to read slightly more SFF than ungenre fiction, but those percentages seem fine. 10% of my reading was comics, which I’d like to see go up a bit in the new year, and 14% was nonfiction, which rocks. I read more books in translation this year, seventeen, than I’ve probably ever read in a year before.

My goal for 2015 was to read no more than 65% white authors, and no more than 60% American authors. These stats are probably a little off, because I couldn’t always find interviews where the author self-identifies as one ethnicity or nationality over another, but anyway, employing US census categories, I ended up with 44% authors of color, and 50% authors hailing from countries other than America. I read books by authors from 38 different countries, and it was glorious.

How was your reading year? Did you meet your goals? Did you read anything of exceptional wonderfulness?

The post It’s the End of 2015 (as we know it) appeared first on Reading the End.

Does the world need yet another story about a plucky white heroine in a dystopic future world and a love triangle? I might have said no before reading The Scorpion Rules, but I’d have missed out on a genuinely excellent book. Greta is a Child of the Peace: a hostage for the good behavior of her parents, the king and queen of (basically) Canada. At the behest of an all-powerful AI being called Talis, Greta and the other children of ruling monarchs/presidents reside in the Precepture, where they are monitored at all times. If any ruling nation decides to go to war with another, the two nations’ rulers’ children are killed. Talis permits no exceptions.

I knew from the book’s description that Greta’s world is disrupted by the arrival of an unwilling and rebellious hostage called Elian. So when the book opens on Greta chatting with her longtime friend/classmate — a white straight boy called Sidney — I thought I knew roughly where the book was going. I have read dystopian fiction before.

Wow did I not know where the book was going. I didn’t know where any part of this book was going. Erin Bow starts with a brutal premise, and she commits to it a thousand percent, never shying away from the terror these kids face every day. Nor does she elide the benefits of the hostage system, even as she acknowledges that Talis is kind of a psychopath. No matter what these characters do, no matter how pure their intentions or how good their hearts, the most likely outcome for them all is a sudden, terrifying death.

But the way to my heart is really through plot, not premise, and The Scorpion Rules burns through plot like it’s going out of style. Every time I’d glance at my status bar to see how much more book was left, I couldn’t believe there was any, because it had felt like everything that could possibly happen had already happened. Instead the characters kept on resetting the board for what was possible, and the hits just kept on coming.

Although the book focuses tightly on Elian and Greta and Greta’s best friend Xie, Bow wins points from me for her portrayal of the other four hostages in their age group. It’s a group of kids from all over the world, and although they are not as central to the plot, Bow also does not make them satellites to the main characters. They are not foregrounded, but you can see — even when Greta doesn’t have the bandwidth to pay attention — that they are the protagonists of their own lives. Their world and their concerns are not limited to the way they affect Greta (although they do affect Greta, and vice versa). And that is excellent from a writing standpoint (yay for vivid side characters!) and excellent from the standpoint of populating a diverse world.

Seriously, though, guys: Should we maybe just let an AI be in charge of our weapons systems? They might be better at handling it. (To find out whether Talis is better at handling it, you will have to read the book.)

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