2019 JENNY IS FUN.

Now that literally everyone but me has done their best of 2018 post, I thought I’d enter the game. You have ceased to care but I CANNOT BE STOPPED. We’re breaking this business down by categories, so let’s get into it. First up: YA!

I read a ton this year, but somehow I don’t feel like I got in as much YA reading as I wanted! Luckily there were some standouts. The Summer of Jordi Perez is a doll of an f/f contemporary romcom, with a fat aspiring fashion designer MC, and plenty of emotional negotiation. It felt like reading an injection of sunshine. Seafire, by Natalie Parker, is the perfect ladies seafaring adventure that I needed to round out my year of reading. If you enjoyed Sarah Tolcser’s excellent Song of the Current series (I did!), Seafire is a good readalike. The girls in it are fierce, and their friendships are the book’s center. It’s also got marvelous worldbuilding. Hugely recommend. (Thanks to Charlotte for the rec!)

I have raved in this space a bunch already about Anna-Marie McLemore, but brace yourself for a bit more raving about her latest, Blanca and Roja. It’s about two sisters in a family that always has two girls; and when the younger one reaches a certain age that I cannot currently remember, one of the two girls is transformed into a swan. Blanca and Roja deconstructs the good-sister-evil-sister trope in ways that are consistently unexpected and lovely. The consistency with which McLemore produces these beautifully written queer Latina fairy tales blows me away. She’s one of those authors who makes me feel lucky to be a reader. (If you liked Sarah McCarry’s books, McLemore is similarly dreamy and gorgeous.)

(Hey, when is Sarah McCarry going to write another book?)

I’ve noticed that the less literary fiction I read, the fewer authors I read from other countries. I’m hoping to change this in 2019! I’d like to read more genre fiction by authors from other countries, even though I recognize that less of it gets published in America even than the heavily-American literary fiction genre. Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell, came to me via the Tournament of Books, which I was half-assedly trying to participate in by real-quick reading a short entrant before bed. I do not recommend this strategy. Fever Dream is incredibly scary — one of those horror books where you are deeply uneasy from the get-go, and the feeling of unease persists long after the book is over.

Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater reminds me of Helen Oyeyemi a little, in the dreaminess of the writing and the perpetual uncertainty about what’s real. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel about a Nigerian child who has more than one self inside her. I am not sure how else to describe this book. Trigger warning for rape. The writing is unbelievably gorgeous, the book is deeply strange, I loved it.

Occasionally someone will come to me asking for a book rec where the writing, the characters, and the plot are all superb. This is a very hard rec request to fulfill, and I pretty much just always shove Fingersmith at them. But now I have another book that meets these requirements, and it is Esi Edugyan’s wonderful historical novel, Washington Black. Though the first bit of the story is hard to read (it’s set on a plantation in Barbados in the early 1800s), it’s absolutely worth pushing through. Washington Black is a slave who gets taken on as a sort of apprentice and assistant to the plantation owner’s brother, a scientist and abolitionist who is working less on abolishing slavery than he is trying to build an airship. I was absolutely blown away by this book: It explores so many themes and ideas and histories without ever feeling overstuffed, and I wrote down approximately ten million quotes from it because of how insightful and interesting the writing is.

My most-recommended book of the year — although partly because I didn’t read Washington Black until December — is Tara Westover’s Educated. Recommended to me by the wonderful For Real podcast, it’s a memoir about a girl who grew up in a extreme survivalist Mormon family that didn’t get her a birth certificate or send her to school. I can’t overstate how bonkers this book is, and I 90% recommended it to people to ensure that I wouldn’t have to be alone with all the shit that went down in this woman’s life. It’s about the ways abuse can sit beside love in a family, and Westover does not downplay her ongoing trauma.

My other two best-of-nonfiction picks are about gender and race and how they function in our lives. Ijeoma Iluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race is a terrific primer on some of the most common questions and ideas that come up in conversations about race in America. She’s typically sharp and critical, exploring the many, many ways racism continues to shape American life in systemic ways. (If you haven’t yet read her interview with Rachel Dolezal, you should do so now.) Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an quite-academic book about sexism that’s worth plowing through if you can. I screamed YES so many times while reading it.

The wonderful Bridget put me onto Jade City with her relentless advocacy of it, and I am not sorry she did. It’s kind of a mafia/martial arts/magic story set in an alternate universe where jade gives you magical strength and a group of powerful families controls the country in a delicate balance. Fonda Lee’s worldbuilding is superb, down to gestures and phrases that make her world feel textured and real. I loved it and I can’t wait for the sequel. The Descent of Monsters, by JY Yang, is actually the third in its novella series, but my favorite in the series so far. It’s written partly as a bureaucratic report, which is — of course — the way to my heart. I’ve loved watching Yang grow as a writer over the course of the Tensorate series, and I remain perpetually in delight to see what they do next.

SL Huang’s Zero Sum Game rivals Seafire for making me just feel happy while reading it. It’s just a damn good adventure that reminds you why you like reading. Cas Russell is a math genius and minor criminal who gets sucked into a corporate conspiracy that goes far beyond anything she could have imagined. Grudging respect is built. Math is used to do fights. It fucking rules. (Sequel to follow in 2019 – yay!)

And that’s it for 2018! Did you read any of these? What were some of your favorites for the year? Are you going to read Washington Black or do I need to pester you about it some more?

The post The Best of 2018 appeared first on Reading the End.

So Jade City is set in a fictional East Asian country called Kekon whose primary resource is a magical version of jade. Green Bones are warriors who are trained to use jade to make use of magical powers, and our protagonists are Green Bones and scions of the No Peak clan, one of the most powerful clans in Kekon. But as a new drug called shine — which lets untrained people wear jade without adverse consequences — hits the streets in ever greater quantities, the rival Mountain clan scents weakness in No Peak, and warfare between the clans threatens all of Kekon’s capital city.

I read Jade City due to the tireless advocacy of the marvelous Bridget at SF Bluestocking, and I admit that I found it slow going at first. One of the reasons I fight shy of secondary world fantasy is that I tend to struggle with the world-building up front, and that’s particularly true in Jade City, where Fonda Lee has fleshed out what feels like every corner of her world.

But the payoff for sticking with it is considerable. Once I had a grip on the power structures and conflicting political interests and magic system, I was able to give myself over to the story completely. Our central family is the Kauls, led by the Pillar, Kaul Len; his Weather Man, an old friend of his grandfather’s called Doru; and his Horn, the younger and more bellicose Kaul brother, Hilo. Their youngest sister Shae has returned from abroad, having given up her life as a Green Bone warrior to pursue a romantic relationship that didn’t work out and a degree in business.

That last thing? The degree in business? Is one of the big reasons I adore Jade City. Fonda Lee hasn’t confined herself to building out the sexy details, like the fact that when two Green Bone warriors fight, the victorious one gets to take all the jade off the defeated one’s body and keep it for themselves. She also gets into the economics of Kekon and the importance of maintaining a clean supply of trade to other countries: Jade is Kekon’s most important resource, and every clan has to take  this into account as they plan for the future. There are other bits like this, as when Hilo and Shae and Lan discuss the negative impact on tourism war with the Mountain would entail. It’s just so thought out, a modern(ish) secondary world that’s been built from the ground up with such meticulous care. God damn was I ever into it.

With all of this worldbuilding (y’all: SHUT UP ABOUT THE WORLDBUILDING), it would be more than easy for Fonda Lee to have taken a break on character development. But she totes does not! Her central characters are the three Kaul siblings, plus an adoptive younger one called Anden, whose mother went mad from jade addiction. Uneasy, complicated sibling relationships are my obvious fave, and Fonda Lee has a ton of great stuff to work with here. Family feelings run high in Kekon, and by the time Hilo [redacted] Anden for [redacted], you know enough about these two characters for it to hurt in every way Lee wants to make it hurt. And there are so many minor characters who seem more than ready to step into the limelight in subsequent books — I particularly want to see more of Hilo’s girlfriend Wen, who is much more than she seems.

Okay. That is probably enough blathering for the time being. Jade City is hella good. Get on it.

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