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.

Stormbreak is the third in a trilogy that began with Seafire, which was pitched as “Mad Max Fury Road but make it boats” (the latter half of which sounded great and the former half of which brought me out in hives because Mad Max Fury Road is the most stressful shit I have ever watched in my entire life). The series tells the story of a rogue ship of angry girls doing their level best to take down a warlord and his team of fighters. Over the course of the series, Caledonia Styx has become a true leader, with her best friend Pisces and her boyfriend Oran at her side. When Stormbreak opens, they have retreated to plan how best to complete their war against the Bullet fleet. When their stronghold is attacked unexpectedly, Caledonia must decide how to chase her dream of a better world, at the risk of losing herself in the process.

Is it me, or are we moving away from YA trilogies as a culture? I feel like I have been reading lots of standalones and duologies lately, but maybe that’s just me. Regardless, I was delighted to finally reach the conclusion of the Seafire series, which has been so consistently fun, thoughtful, and exciting. Because this is the final book in the series, Caledonia’s victory over Lir and his Bullets is something of a foregone conclusion, though Parker does terrific work in keeping the good guys on their toes.

Where the book excels is in creating moral suspense. Caledonia is navigating the ethical risks and demands of leadership in a time of war, while keeping in mind the eventual, hoped-for transition from war to peace. Much though she wants to stay true to her highest ideals, the world teaches her again and again the necessity of moral compromise. Stormbreak is as ripping an adventure tale as its predecessors, but it’s also an examination, not in a boring way, of how to choose among an array of bad options to attain your goals without losing your deepest self. It’s a marvelous conclusion to a superb YA series.

Having liked, not loved, Descendant of the Crane (it was sold to me as The Twistiest Book of Them All, and I didn’t find it to be that twisty but probably that’s just because the reviews led me to expect, like, Fingersmith), I wasn’t sure what to expect from Joan He’s sophomore YA novel. Taking place in two different timelines, The Ones We’re Meant to Find follows a science genius named Kasey trying to come to terms with her sister Celia’s disappearance; and a girl named Cee who lives alone on an island and wants nothing more than to build a boat and get back to her sister Kay.

I… wow. Really, really wow to The Ones We’re Meant to Find. It blew me away. It’s a little slow to start, especially if you think you already know what’s going on with Kacey and with Cee, and more broadly with the world. But Joan He is doing something a lot more interesting than first impressions might suggest. Kacey–socially awkward, brilliant, isolated, either persistent or in deep denial–wants nothing more than to make sense of the loss of her sister, as her search for the truth brings her closer to an understanding of the bitter, broken world she lives in. Cee has spent three years trying to get back to her sister when a new person washes ashore, a kind and handsome boy who periodically loses touch with reality and tries to kill her. Their shared yearning for a lost sister kept me reading even when I feared that the book would follow a slightly by-the-numbers plot.

Ha bloody ha ha, joke’s on me! This is one of those books where reading the end availed me nothing, because the end is predicated on a midway-through reveal that casts everything before and after in a brand new light. To say I loved it would be an understatement, and it’s hard to talk about the back half of the book without giving away what’s going on. What I will say is that while the book is very fundamentally about sisters, it’s about so much more than that too. Corporate corruption, disaster planning, climate change, the merits of survival and happiness, idealism vs cynicism, ethical science — I could go on! Heartbreaking though much of the story is, it ends so beautifully that I was near tears.

Be warned that if you don’t love an ambiguous ending (I looooooove an open ending), The Ones We’re Meant to Find might not be for you. But I hope you will read it. I loved it.

All Our Hidden Gifts is about a girl called Maeve who finds an abandoned deck of Tarot cards and starts telling fortunes for her classmates. It’s all fun and games until she does a reading for her ex-best friend Lily, and a card appears — the Housekeeper — that isn’t a part of the regular deck. The next thing anyone knows, Lily has disappeared. It’s up to Maeve, Lily’s brother Roe, and Maeve’s new friend Fiona to try and figure out what’s happened to Lily and whether they have any hope of getting her back.

The good: Are Irish feminists as prone to TERF-iness as British ones? I do not know, but I do know that it was a surprise and a joy to find an Irish book that’s so warm about gender. Though Roe doesn’t offer a label for himself, he’s at least exploring his options where gender is concerned, and neither the book nor Maeve treats this as a problem. (Which it isn’t! And shouldn’t be! But you know how TERFs do.) I also love that the central emotional conflict is a fractured friendship. Maeve’s romance with Roe is certainly a going concern, but it’s her friendships that take center stage. She has been a bad friend to Lily, long before the fateful Tarot reading, and the book neither excuses her cruelty nor treats her as irredeemable.

The bad: Honestly not enough searching for the missing person! The plot felt a little disorganized, jumping between Lily’s disappearance and the emergence of an anti-queer movement that threatens Maeve’s friends and town. Those conflicts turn out to be related, but it felt like neither of them was able to get the full airing they deserved. I also regret to report that I am a pedantic twat when it comes to books about Tarot cards. We’re meant to believe that Maeve has natural talent with the Tarot cards, but her readings felt very rote and basic to me. Tarot cards are not a real thing and fortune-telling is pretend, and it’s reductive and boring to interpret the Five of Cups as “sadness.” (said Jenny, like an absolute asshole)

That said, I’d read another book in this series! Maeve is kind of the weakest link, which is common in YA novels and sitcoms, but I’d be delighted to read more about Roe and Fiona, and I’d love to get to know Lily better and witness her (I hope!) eventual reconciliation with Maeve. Love a book that creates tension in relationships other than just romantic ones!

I bought Ace of Spades for a friend earlier this year on the strength of its gorgeous cover and delightful interior design, and then I got jealous that I had given it away and couldn’t read it myself, so I checked it out of the library a few weeks ago. (You know, the obvious solution to the problem I want to read a book I don’t own.) I’m so glad I did! Ace of Spades follows Chiamaka and Devon, the only two Black students at the exclusive Niveus Private Academy. Both seniors, both Prefects, they are working hard to get ready for college and the bright futures the school has promised them when an anonymous figure called Aces starts sharing their darkest secrets with everyone in the school. Though Chiamaka and Devon have always run in different circles, they must team up to find answers before their futures are ruined completely.

As I have perhaps mentioned in this space before, I’m wild about books where people have done a sin and are waiting to see if they’re going to be found out. Chiamaka and Devon have done… a lot of things. I did not do as many things in high school as all the characters in this book, omg! I was such a boring, straight-ahead high schooler. Never had a drink. Did not bounce through relationships. Never killed a person. (That’s what sets me apart from Laura Bush. This has been: a cheap shot.) Ace of Spades keeps up the suspense of what secrets are going to be uncovered and how much damage those secrets will wreak in Chiamaka and Devon’s lives. At the same time, the reader gradually comes to realize that there may be more malicious forces at play here than it first seemed.

Perhaps it is not much of a spoiler — based on what you already know from the title and the premise — to admit that racism is very much at play in what’s happening to Chiamaka and Devon. Ace of Spades is sociological horror as much as it’s anything else, and there are several reveals that make the Psycho theme music start playing in your head, in the best way. The terror of realizing that you’re alone in a room full of people hostile to you — or a school full — is palpably realized here, and I was unironically whispering “get out” to my book at several points. The climax features a rescue that’s maybe a tiny bit convenient, but it’s so thematically appropriate that I chose not to care. I can’t wait to see what this author does next.

And that’s it for my recent YA reading! Based on this, what should I read next?

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