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?

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I want to open this review by saying that while I loved many things about When the Ground Is Hard, I had a serious problem with its depiction of disability and disabled people. If that type of thing tends to be a problem for you and you want to know about it first, you can skip down to that section of the review. And now, onward!

Diversifying YA is a glorious and worthwhile endeavor for many reasons, not least of which is the telling of new stories. But I also love discovering books for kids that tell old types of stories in ways that I haven’t encountered before. When the Ground Is Hard uses the tropes that I’m accustomed to, and adore, in the boarding school books of my childhood: the reversal of fortune, the hostile teachers and the unexpectedly kind ones, the shows of pluck by our protagonist, the conflicts with other groups of boarding school kids. At the same time, it takes place in 1960s Swaziland, and the inequalities Adele comes to recognize arise from racial divisions born of empire. It’s exhilarating to be reminded of the ways old and beloved types of stories can be made to feel new and vibrant in the hands of talented authors like Malla Nunn.

Until she’s made to share a room with Lottie, Adele has shut her eyes to the flagrant inequality among kids from different social classes at her school, as well as kids of different skin color. She starts to see how the decks are stacked against Lottie, how a slip-up that Adele can get away with (because she’s a good girl, because she has a white father, because her family pays her fees) would land Lottie in a world of punishment with their teachers. She isn’t better behaved than Lottie; she’s just better supported. Her family and social status allow her to be a “good girl,” and they don’t allow Lottie.

Adele also comes to see how Lottie keeps fighting even within the social and educational structures that try to keep her down. When the school catches fire, Lottie’s the first to run out and fight the flames — in part because she’s brave, but in part because she needs school. Even more than Adele and the other girls, Lottie needs this unfair school that judges her by her parents and punishes her disproportionately, because it’s her only possible path to a better life. And Adele comes to recognize Lottie’s bravery, not just in fighting fires but in maintaining her personhood when the people around her try to demean her and make her see herself as less. The blossoming of their friendship is the chef’s-kissest thing you ever saw, not least because they bond over reading one of my favorite-ever books, Jane Eyre.

With so much going for it, When the Ground Is Hard really let me down in its depiction of disability. One of Lottie’s establishing character moments early on is her kindness to an intellectually disabled student named Darnell. In a more substantive scene, Darnell brings Lottie and Adele to look at his collection of beautiful things from nature, which leads Adele to see the beauty in a discarded snakeskin, which she initially finds repellent. Darnell’s character combines the trope of the disabled character who’s too good and pure for this world with the thing of suggesting that an intellectual disability makes one closer to The Land and God’s Creatures. Then, of course, Darnell dies. His death on the land of a bigoted white farmer leads Adele to a greater awareness of inequality and racism in her world, which, again, means that a disabled character’s life and death exist primarily as lessons for the abled protagonist.

I genuinely did love this book, and there were many moments when reading it felt like coming home to a genre I’ve always loved. A big part of me wished I could give it to Kid Jenny, because I know I’d have adored it — and maybe would have found my way to my interest in African history a little sooner! But my hope for diversity in publishing is that we can continue to ask for more from our books, and pursue ever-better representation of all types of people and a more just reading future.

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The beginning: British police detective Emmanuel Cooper comes to investigate the murder of an Afrikaner police captain in the small town of Jacob’s Rest. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s a murder mystery where the victim is male. This probably happens more often than it seems to me to happen. I don’t read that many murder mysteries, partly because it always seems to be women getting killed, and I get tired of reading about beautiful lady corpses. I can read about alive ladies doing things that alive people do.

When Aarti reviewed A Beautiful Place to Die recently, I was excited to read a murder mystery by a non-American-or-British author and set in a non-American-or-British place, and as I’ve said, a murder mystery featuring a male corpse. From the get-go, it was clear that the book was going to be a nuanced exploration of racial and gender prejudice, and I was excited for it.

The end (spoilers here, but not spoilers about who did the murder because that is actually the least interesting part of this book and that’s not a criticism): If I had to choose, I’d always go with the I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here today style of ending. I got anxious reading the ending of A Beautiful Place to Die, which gets pretty violent. Since the book is really about prejudice, the violence that simmers throughout the book rarely has to do with the murderer’s identity, and nearly always has to do with preserving one idea of what people and society are like and how they are supposed to behave.

The whole: My favorite thing about A Beautiful Place to Die is also my least favorite thing about it. Malla Nunn is absolutely wonderful at depicting life in a society that not only condones but (openly) institutionalizes racism. The down side of this is that racial violence is very, very hard for me to read about in fiction. The final third of the book features a healthy dose of race-based violence, as well as (threats of) sexual violence, and if I am going to read about that, I would prefer to read about it in nonfiction.

The up side is that it’s amazing to watch Malla Nunn pick apart the assumptions, large and small, that go into creating a racist society. That she does this while writing from the perspective of a white British man is even more impressive–wonderfully, you can see Emmanuel Cooper being forced to confront his own privilege as he struggles to solve the murder of Captain Willem Pretorius:

She made a sound of disbelief low in her throat. “Only a white man would ask a question like that and expect an answer.”

Emmanuel felt like he was seeing her for the first time. The meek coloured girl he could deal with, even ignore, but this furious sharp-eyed woman was something else altogether.

“What’s the question got to do with my being white?”

“Only white people talk about choice like it’s a box of chocolates that everyone gets to pick from. [A white man] walks into this room and I say what to him? ‘No, thank you, sir, but I do not wish to spoil my chances for a good marriage with a good man from my community, so please ma’ baas take yourself back to your wife and family. I promise not to blackmail you if you promise not to punish my family for turning you away. Thank you for asking me. I am honored.’ Tell me, is that how it works for nonwhite women in Jo’burg, Detective?”

What’s particularly good is that discussions like these come up regardless of Cooper’s good intentions. Although he opposes apartheid and even has some personal experience of racial prejudice (his whiteness, the book suggests early on, may be more fragile than it seems), he’s still able to benefit by it, both in the issues he has to worry about day to day, and in the power he has over any black resident of Jacob’s Rest.

When I said, above, that the identity of the murderer was the least interesting aspect of the book, I didn’t mean to imply that the mystery is a bad one. It isn’t. But the book isn’t exactly about trying to solve a murder. It’s about how it would be to try to solve the murder of an upstanding white citizen in a small racist town where certain paths of investigation are acceptable and others are unacceptable, and you can tell which path is which by the skin color of the people being investigated. Malla Nunn does this spectacularly well, and despite bits of her book being quite upsetting to read, I’m looking forward to reading the next two books in this series.

Cover report: American cover wins. I didn’t choose this one. Both covers were boring to me, so I had Randon choose. He says neither draws him, but he thinks the American cover is better than the British cover.

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