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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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