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?

The post Hot Take: YA Is Good (feat. sisters, boats, Tarot cards, posh schools) appeared first on Reading the End.

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.

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.