If you haven’t yet heard about Serial Box, my friends, you are missing a trick. They do serialized fiction — mostly SFF — with some of the most incredible writers working today. The Vela (out tomorrow!) brings together some of my truest new faves from the past few years: Yoon Ha Lee, who wrote Ninefox Gambit; Becky Chambers, who wrote The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; Rivers Solomon, who wrote An Unkindness of Ghosts; and SL Huang, who wrote Zero Sum Game. Of course, the problem with all of those authors is that they will break your heart. YES EVEN BECKY CHAMBERS. So I should have known what to expect with The Vela.

The sun in Asala Sikou’s solar system is dying, and there is an ever-worsening refugee crisis as people flee from outer planets to inner ones. Sikou takes a job from the Khayyami president to find a missing refugee ship, the Vela, the finding of which will garner political capital for the president. She is accompanied by the president’s child, Niko, an idealistic hacker eager to prove themself to their father. Asala herself is a refugee, sent away from her family (and her sister, Dayo) years ago to save her life, but she insists that this doesn’t affect her view of other refugees. Niko doesn’t really believe her. Also, Niko may be hiding secrets of their own.

tl;dr: I really, really liked The Vela. I expected to, and I did. The authors are doing a lot here, from conflicting character motives to science to political machinations, and the pieces fit together for me almost flawlessly. Serial Box is best enjoyed by accepting the company’s conceptualization of these stories as episodes and seasons of television. Thinking back on the story as a whole, I’m able to separate out the episodes in my mind — the one with all the evil spider robots, the one where they’re traversing the planet and getting help, the Very Climactic One, etc. A lot happens, and you will enjoy it most if you’re not expecting it to be the type of story a book would offer. This is a different kind of storytelling, and I remain delighted by the attempt.

The Vela is, as I mentioned, heartbreaking, and it’s heartbreaking for one of my favorite reasons that a story can be heartbreaking: because there are no good choices. We may love some of these characters more than others (bless Niko’s bunny heart), but they are all working to achieve some version of the least bad outcome. The resources of their world (the sun) are finite, and everyone has to make choices about how they want to see those resources allocated. As Asala and Niko delve deeper into their hunt for the Vela, it becomes more and more clear that the world isn’t what they thought. No matter how firmly committed Asala feels to remaining uncommitted, all the choices available to her put her squarely on the side of some power or other. Her struggles to navigate that are the best part of this story.

My most consistent problem with the Serial Box stories is how often I struggle to connect with the characters. Even when a character has an excellent hook (Asala is a refugee herself and hopes against hope to reconnect with her sister someday so, YOU KNOW, Jenny catnip), there’s something missing in the execution. I don’t know if it’s a question of plural authorship, or a case of the authors having to get through a certain amount of plot in the time allotted, or what. It’s not exactly that Asala or Niko or Soraya feel badly drawn — they don’t — or that I can’t understand their motivations — I absolutely can. Somehow, though, and this has been the case in other Serial Box stories I’ve read, they just don’t feel like fully fleshed out people to me. Make of that what you will.

Like a superb season of television, The Vela leaves us with some plotlines resolved and others wide open. The characters have been shuffled around on the board, and we stand ready to see how their conflicting loyalties and agendas will play out in season two. Of all the Serial Box stories I’ve read thus far, The Vela really does feel the most like a TV season. I’m living for it. I cannot wait for season two. Please subscribe ASAP to up my chances of getting a season two.

Note: I received an ARC of The Vela (by begging for it) for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review. My high level of love for the authors involved, however, probably has.

The post Review: The Vela, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, and SL Huang appeared first on Reading the End.

Dead Air is a YA novel that riffs on the craze for true crime podcasts: MacKenzie Walker receives an anonymous tip on her college radio show that a decades-old murder at a horse farm may not be quite as solved as everyone believed. As she begins to investigate, aided by the son of the Dead woman, she finds herself enmeshed in a world of horse-racing dynasties, secret societies, and dirty cops. Plus, there’s an accompanying podcast where MacKenzie shares (some of) her discoveries. (This was actually what lured me in on Dead Air. What can I say, I’m a sucker for multimedia storytelling.)

Since I’m not a true crime buff and have never listened to a single episode of Serial (YEAH YOU HEARD ME), I can’t speak to Dead Air‘s success as a fictional piece of true crime. But the podcast is slick and fun and very good at imitating the genre of podcast it’s selling itself as. True crime people, please let me know your views.

Where Dead Air really shone for me was as a mystery. I love mysteries that explore weird subcultures, so I was really into all the stuff about Peg (the dead lady) trying to clean all the doping out of the horse-racing business. The authors also have fun with the metafiction of MacKenzie’s podcast: Because she’s trying to solve this murder in a podcast format, there are repercussions for her, the people around her, and the crime she’s investigating. Which is fun! As a reader and listener, I felt delightfully (because it’s fictional) complicit in the consequences that came from the podcast. I also love that there are some intense last-minute revelations. From the word go, MacKenzie has a good guess at the murderer’s identity: The husband always did it. The more she investigates, the more she finds ways that this crime touched her own life and the lives of her family members. It’s personal. Those reveals are parceled out nicely, leading up to a terrific climax.

For me, the romance worked less well. I don’t mind the frequency of romance plotlines in YA novels, but I was never terribly committed to MacKenzie’s romance with Ryan. When she begins to suspect him of being involved in Terrible Events (I won’t specify what those are), I couldn’t understand why she was still romantically interested in him. He never seemed interesting to begin with!

A bigger failing for me — and this should also serve as a trigger warning — was the depiction of suicide in Dead Air. A character appears to die by suicide over the course of this book, and MacKenzie thinks it was actually a murder. I know the apparent-suicide-actually-murder is a staple of murder mysteries, but a few recent irresponsible portrayals of suicide in popular media (looking at you, A Star Is Born and A Million Little Pieces) have me feeling twitchy about using it as a plot device/plot twist.

MacKenzie learns the method the person used, and she describes that on the podcast in specific, explicit detail. There is a lot of research indicating that explicit depictions or descriptions of the method someone used to kill themselves correlates with an increased risk of suicide contagion; multiple organizations that deal with suicide have therefore recommended that media outlets not do this. I really, really wish Dead Air had also not done it, even though — spoiler! — the character ends up not really having died by suicide.

Another trigger warning: This story deals with drug addiction, albeit in a more engaged and thoughtful way than how it deals with suicide. MacKenzie’s cousin died from a drug overdose, and that motivates MacKenzie’s behavior and choices in various parts of this story.

Note: I got Dead Air comped to me by the folks at Serial Box for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

The post Serial Box’s Dead Air, by Gwenda Bond, Rachel Caine, and Carrie Ryan appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 79

Here’s the time signatures for each segment, if you want to skip around!

1:05 – What We’re Reading
4:01 – Sea or Space Update
5:42 – Serial Box Book Club
14:32 – Book Awards!
31:58 – The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso
44:41 – What We’re Reading Next Time

And here are the books we discussed this ep!

What We’re Reading

Mama Day, Gloria Naylor
The Abyss Surrounds Us, Emily Skrutskie
The Fortunes, Peter Ho Davies

Sea or Space

Here’s an article about the supergroups of humpback whales.

Serial Box Book Club

We’re reading episodes one and two of The Witch Who Came in from the Cold. Thanks again to Serial Box for letting us have these episodes to review!

Book Prizes

National Book Critics Circle Awards

LaRose, Louise Erdrich
Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram Kendi
Lab Girl, Hope Jahren

Los Angeles Times Book Awards

Darktown, Thomas Mullen
A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS, Robert F. Worth
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, Heather Ann Thompson
They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, Wesley Lowery
Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson

Suki Kim on journalism and memoir

His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life, Ed Yong
Patient H. M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets, Luke Dittrich
Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, Masha Gessen

Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso
Barkskins, Annie Proulx
The Lesser Bohemians, Eimear McBride
Stay with Me, Ayobami Adebayo
The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry

Tournament of Books

We did not love this match-up.

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
The Mothers, Brit Bennett
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
We Love You Charlie Freeman, Kaitlyn Greenidge
Version Control, Dexter Palmer
The Vegetarian, Han Kang
Sudden Death, Álvaro Enrigue
High Dive, Jonathan Lee
The Nix, Nathan Hill
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter

For This Time

The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso

For Next Time

Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour

The post Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.79: 2017 Book Awards and The Woman Next Door appeared first on Reading the End.