Insurrecto, Gina Apostol

I liked this book so much I went to a conference and hovered at the Soho Press booth and pestered everyone who stopped by into purchasing it. It worked on, like, two people. And me! I also bought it. Insurrecto is tricky to explain because it’s so complicated and strange — which, if that doesn’t sound good to you, Insurrercto may not be your book. It’s about a massacre of Filipino people that happened during the Philippine-American War, and the two women who are writing film scripts about that massacre. Their scripts are in competition/conversation with each other, although not necessarily in the ways you might expect. So the book follows the two script-writers, and also the stories that each of their scripts is telling, one about a white photographer and the other about a teacher in the village where the masssacre takes place.

Gina Apostol’s writing is gorgeous, but more than that, her book is fun, as strange as that is to say about a book with an atrocity at its center. She’s never glib about what American colonialism did to the Philippines, but she does find the absurdity and humanity around the edges of that. Insurrecto is a fundamentally humane book, and it’s also very, very clever without smacking you over the head with its cleverness. Gina Apostol has another book coming out in the US this year, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, which is done in footnotes and sounds incredible. I cannot wait to read it!

A Spark of White Fire, Sangu Mandanna

In part because of the nonstop bullshit (sorry to keep making excuses, but 4 real we are living in a bad timeline), I haven’t written as many reviews this year as usual. I regret this! Not least because when I don’t write about books I enjoyed, i don’t remember the details of why I enjoyed them. A Spark of White Fire was one that I read early in the year, and I remember thinking “this is just some good old-fashioned fun, and I couldn’t be more here for it,” but I also can’t…super remember what happened in it. Fucking fun adventures happened, my friends! A girl intends to win a competition, so that she can be brought back to the family she has lost, and ultimately help restore her brother to his rightful throne. In space! A Spark of White Fire is inspired by ancient Indian stories, including the Mahabharata, and it’s the first in a trilogy that promises to be awesome. I have the sequel out from the library now. Hopefully Sangu Mandanna has made provisions for assholes like me who didn’t write notes about the book after they read it and now can’t remember anything. YA novels are typically good about this.

(JRR Tolkien did something great and made a little “previously on” section for the second and third books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it was such a kindness to me, a forgetful dingbat.)

For a Muse of Fire, Heidi Heilig

Although in many ways this is an equally exciting YA adventure novel as A Spark of White Fire, For a Muse of Fire also gave me emotions about mental illness. It’s about a bipolar girl with magic who travels around animating shadow puppets for her family’s troupe — but she can never reveal that she’s controlling the puppets with magic, because her type of magic has been banned by the colonizers of her home country. It’s the postcolonialist musical theater story of your dreams. Like A Spark of White Fire, its sequel is newly out, but the gods have cursed me and it keeps being checked out at my library because I am cursed.

Also, if you want to read a book that has an accompanying soundtrack, For a Muse of Fire has one. It’s glorious. I love multimedia books. This is a theme that will come back later.

Punishment without Crime, Alexandra Natapoff

Remember when I read Delusions of Gender? And how I was like, oh my God, how does a book that I already agree with keep blowing my mind so cinematically? That was the experience of reading Punishment without Crime, a book about the legal system around misdemeanors and how people who have committed tiny civil offenses get penalized for poverty and caught up in the web of the criminal justice system. I knew all of this was true before I began. But Natapoff lays it out in the clearest terms, and it’s impossible not to be furious with a “justice” system that would do such irrevocable damage to people who haven’t done anything. It’s shocking, except for how not-shocking it is. If you only read one nonfiction book this year, I highly recommend that it be this one. Unless you haven’t read Delusions of Gender, in which case maybe do that first.

The Psychology of Time Travel, Kate Mascarenhas

Had I not been on a bus when I was reading The Psychology of Time Travel, I would have been screaming “HOW ARE YOU SO GREAT” at a very high volume whilst reading it. I legit couldn’t believe that a single book could be so fun and weird and delightful. I liked it so much I did something frightening and pitched a review to Strange Horizons about it, because I could not bear the possibility that people wouldn’t know about The Psychology of Time Travel and how fucking great it is.

The premise is that time travel is invented after World War II by a group of British women. Then, as they’re presenting their findings to the press, one of the women has a breakdown. Their leader immediately pushes her out of the group and tailors the entire time travel system to ensure that nobody will ever have an emotion again. That’s one description of the book. Another is: A woman receives a newspaper clipping about the horrifying death of an elderly lady. The weird thing is, the clipping is from the future.

GOD IT’S SO GOOD. As I was reading, I was perpetually re-delighted by what a marvelous puzzle box this book is. I implore you to read it. Read it, and then come talk to me about it. I just got it for Christmas, and I want to reread it immediately and then talk about it with sixteen different people.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

I cannot scream enough about Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, although I am doing my level best to scream enough about it. It’s the story of a girl named Freddie who can’t quit her shitty sort-of girlfriend, Laura Dean, even though all her friends are clear that she ought to. This YA comic is the dearest, sweetest, goodest book that ever I have read in this entire year. If any part of this year filled me with sorrow about the future of the nation, at least I had Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me to solace me in my dark night of the soul.

We are honestly blessed to have a writer like Mariko Tamaki working these days. In my old age, I have grown extremely protective of The Youth and also deeply resentful of adults who seem to have completely forgotten what it was like to be a youth. So I cherish Mariko Tamaki for clearly remembering what it was like to be a kid. Being a kid is dumb. Zero stars. Would not do again. And Laura Dean absolutely captures the shittiness of being a kid and not knowing anything, while also being extremely tender and gentle and good. Rosemary Valero-O’Connell’s art is similarly flawless, with oodles of moments that are such spot-on reminders of teenagerhood.

When the Ground Is Hard, Malla Nunn

Why can’t I have more African YA? ANSWER ME THAT. Malla Nunn is a Swazi author, and When the Ground Is Hard is a treasure of a boarding school book. I say that as a connoisseur (connoisseuse?) of boarding school books. When the Ground Is Hard is about a girl in a Swazi boarding school who faces an abrupt loss of status when her best friend, supposedly, ditches her for a fancier girl. She’s immediately forced to room with the school’s weirdo outcast, Lottie, only to find that Lottie is more loyal and good than any friend she’s ever had. I had reservations about the depiction of the disabled character, which was disappointing, but overall I thought the book was great and I desire more African YA.

To Tell the Truth Freely, Mia Bay

You know how sometimes you start to read a biography of someone you admire based on the child’s biography you read of that person in second grade? And you’re concerned that when you read a grown-up biography, you’ll discover all the bad things about the person and you won’t feel the same about them? Well, I read a grown-up biography of Ida B. Wells, and I discovered that she’s exactly as amazing as I always assumed she was. In fact, she was more amazing. Even better, she had a good marriage. I am just so happy for her. She deserved a partner who admired the shit out of her and supported all her endeavors, and that’s what she got. She also kept working in this astonishing tireless way, even though it was frustrating and she was constantly being foiled by the forces of sexism and white supremacy.

tl;dr Ida B. Wells is even cooler than you thought.

The Ventriloquists, E. R. Ramzipoor

My favorite thing about historical fiction is that every time I decide to do a gavel bang and declare that historical fiction is not for me, I am seduced into reading some historical fiction book that reminds me why historical fiction is good, actually. In 2019 that was E. R. Ramzipoor’s The Ventriloquists, a World War II novel in which the lesbians survive and everyone works together to make fun of the Nazis on a grand scale.

(Don’t let that summary fool you. I’ve made it sound tremendously chipper, but it’s really genuinely quite sad. Because: Nazis. But still, it’s a really moving and lovely book, and there are parts that are quite funny.)

The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado

When Carmen Maria Machado was in an emotionally abusive relationship, she went to the archive to find information about abusive lesbian relationships, and discovered very little. The Dream House is a corrective to that lacuna, with each brief chapter exploring one element of the relationship and Machado’s thinking about it. As always, Machado’s writing is beautiful and strange, and she makes liberal use of fairy tale motifs as a frame for understanding her own behavior and that of her ex-girlfriend.

Dream House as Famous Last Words

“We can fuck,” she says, “but we can’t fall in love.” [2]

2. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fablieaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955-1958), Type T3, Omens in love affairs.

(It’s also quite short. Not that length is a benchmark of quality, but in these troubled times I am having a hard time getting it up for TOMES. The Dream House is a tight 242 pages, and many of the chapters are quite short, a few pages or even a single page. Given the difficult subject matter, this sort of length makes the book very approachable. God, I hope Carmen Maria Machado never sees this blog post. “Her book was short! Five stars!” I hate myself.)

Steel Tide, Natalie Parker

I read the first book in this series, Seafire, towards the end of last year and absolutely loved it: It’s an adventure at sea about a shipful of angry girls fighting back against a warlord who controls everything. Steel Tide is the second in the series, and it more than lives up to the promise of the first one. I don’t have the most to say about it, because you need to have read the first one for this one to make sense, but I can tell you that it’s so exciting and suspenseful I had to walk away from the book a couple of times in order to cope with. I am a sucker for a YA adventure novel, and Natalie Parker’s Seafire series delivers that in spades.

Rules for Vanishing, Kate Alice Marshall

This book. Was so. Scary. I don’t have much else to add. Rules for Vanishing was a terrifying nightmare of a YA novel. I loved it, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

So that’s it! My best of 2019! Did you read any of these? Did you love them? What were some of your faves of the year, and what are you anticipating the most for 2020?

The post The Best Books of 2019 appeared first on Reading the End.

Here is what For a Muse of Fire does that could have lost me: It takes Jetta to so many different places, and I, as a reader, do not like places. I am bad at envisioning them. Authors have to spend time setting the scene that I tend to prefer they had spent building character. But Heilig makes her places memorable even to me, and she does it by packing them full of emotion. Every new place is desperately, vitally important to the characters, and that makes it matter to even a reader as places-hostile as me.

Another element that I loved is Heilig’s portrayal of mental illness. This is slightly harder for me to pin down, but I’m going to do my best. Jetta and her family are in search of a cure for her malheur, and we get several opportunities to see how it affects Jetta’s life and her decision-making. She’s haunted by her mistakes, and constantly worried about what the next one will be. But what I like is that Jetta and her malheur are not separate creatures. At one point, Leo (owner of a burlesque theater, maybe collaborator with the rebels, estranged brother of royalty) tells her, “Madness doesn’t make you good or evil. Actions do.” And it’s Jetta’s actions that matter in this book. Though we see how her malheur turns the volume up or down on various of her traits in situations, her actions and her mind belong to her. She is not lost to them.

WELL I don’t know if that makes any sense. I have depression, and when it’s not being medicated, it requires more effort from me to act in line with some traits of mine, and less effort from me to act in line with some other traits. But the traits aren’t different; just differently amplified. For a Muse of Fire does a stupendous job of portraying that. (I still do not feel I have described this well, but onward.)

For a Muse of Fire is also postcolonial as hell, which brings me to my last point, i.e., that this is a wonderful adventure and really exhilarating start to a series. In addition to all the places (really! more than one place! that I liked!), it effortlessly juggles political machinations, ever-shifting loyalties, complicated family ties, critiques of governments past and present, and magical secrets that won’t stay secret for long. Nor should I forget to mention how cool Jetta’s power is: She can use her blood to harness spirits and make them do her bidding. It’s the kind of power that could go to anyone’s head (whether they have a malheur or not), and Jetta has only just begun to grapple with that. I can’t wait to see what she does with it in Book 2.

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