….Here are some links.

Atul Gawande knows how to stop the spread of coronavirus when we reopen.

A VP at Amazon resigned in disgust due to the treatment of whistleblowers about the treatment of warehouse employees. Word.

God, Anne Carson rules.

Why we miss our weak ties so much in the age of COVID.

COVID has added a new clause to America’s racial contract.

Jaya Saxena signs up for oodles of online experiences, and reports back.

G….osh, I have learned some things about author Emily Giffin this month.

Antarctican isolation offers the perfect opportunity to observe a new accent as it forms. Antarctica also offers insight into why people are starting to go extra crazy in these exact days that we are now in.

SL Huang considers the vagaries of genre labels (as a writer whose books straddle the line between SF and thriller).

The hero our quarantine needs: The filmed staged version of Hamilton (with the original cast!) is coming to Disney+ on July 3rd.

The translation of women by women is a feminist project.

If you’re like me and have been mopity-moping around since 2013 about the lack of new Sarah McCarry books, your struggles are at an end!!

What are you up to these days, my lovely friends? Has anything from the internet particularly tickled your fancy? Drop me a line and tell me all about it!

The post Atul Gawande Saves the Day with Common Sense: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Should someone make a Cas Russell TV series, y/y? Critical Point is the third book in the series and all I can think, besides “this is so fucking fun,” is “this would make a great CW procedural.” (Relatedly, I have started watching a very stupid CW procedural, Lucifer, which is very stupid. I have chosen not to fact-check whether it actually airs on the CW because of how indisputably it is in spirit a CW show.) Cas Russell is a low-level career criminal turned…. still kind of a career criminal? but with a team and a conscience (sort of). In a former life, she was modified in a lab by a creepy company called Pithica to be a peerless math genius, which it turns out is kind of a superpower. She uses it to do crimes and, sometimes, help people.

Critical Point begins with a teenage girl arriving at Cas’s office to ask Cas to help find her father, who hasn’t answered his text messages in a few days. Cas is ready to dismiss her until the girl tells her who her father is: Arthur Tresting. Then, while Cas is freaking out about a, her close friend and colleague going missing and b, her close friend and colleague having a secret family he didn’t tell her about, someone blows up her office. That someone appears to be an Australian named Oscar who Cas forgets about every time he’s not directly in her line of sight. It’s a real one-two punch of an opener!

I love Cas’s team, so it should be no surprise to anyone that I was delighted with the way Critical Point delves into the lives and histories of her team. Not only does Arthur have a daughter, he has actually five kids (all of them sweet, devoted, smart, and angry) and an ex-husband who is Through with This Bullshit. Not only does Arthur have five kids and an ex-husband, but Checker and Pilar knew about them. Not only does Arthur have five kids and an ex-husband that Checker and Pilar knew about, but Checker is kind of part of the family — Arthur and Diego took him in when he was screwed up and wretched and helped to set him on the straight and narrow path. So pretty much everyone knew about the secret family except for Cas.

I loved this. I loved it. Throughout the book Cas is struggling to come to terms with the knowledge that the people she has come to trust the most do not trust her that same amount. Even harder to come to terms with is the fact that they’re right. Her life is chaos, and they have chosen to keep that chaos at a distance from the ones it’s their job to protect. Yet even while knowing that Arthur considers her mad (sometimes), bad (grey area really), and dangerous to know (FAIR PLAY THERE), she continues to put everything on the line to get him back. It’s heartbreaking in the best way. My one wish was that the book had ended on a slightly more hopeful note vis-a-vis Cas’s relationship with her team. I want them to get past this. Maybe in book 4 Tabitha can become Cas’s apprentice?

(“Jenny, are your desires in this matter influenced by how much you enjoy the munchkin in Lucifer being so high on Lucifer?” Yes.)

As always in a series where one of the characters has superpowers, SL Huang has to find a way to neutralize(-ish) Cas’s superpowers in a way that doesn’t feel forced. I love the solution she’s come up with in Critical Point. The villain they’re facing has the power to surgically alter humans such that they engender very specific emotions in those who encounter them. The Australian bomber is forgettable, which is troubling in its own right. But much scarier are the dogs and man designed to engender pure, debilitating fear in anyone who looks at them. It’s a brilliant way of getting around Cas’s superpowers in fight scenes, honestly, and it taps straight into my pleasure centers re: the whole face-swapping plotline on Jane the Virgin, another really superb CW show.

(God, like, I know the world is in many ways garbage, but how fucking blessed are we to share a world with the CW? It had Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, somehow both at the same time??? Like. Gah.)

I will now do a small spoiler. It will be confined to the next paragraph only. Do not read the next paragraph if spoilers are not your thing.

My one small note on the book’s plot is that because it’s quite complicated, I think it throws a wrench in the works that nobody’s ever sure whether Pithica is doing all these wickednesses (despite their deal with Cas to leave her alone). In fact Pithica is not doing all these wickednesses, so it just gums up the works to have their involvement in question. And the works are already quite complex! There are many moving parts (allies, adversaries, people in need of protection) and red herrings! If it were me, I’d have found a way, early on, for Cas to reassure herself that this wasn’t Pithica. Then the plot would be clearer throughout, and the reveal at the end — that Pithica needed this situation dealt with and mildly manipulated Cas into dealing with it — would have had more bite.

Apart from that, Critical Point was as fun as its predecessors. Part of me hopes that SL Huang will go on writing this series for years, though another part of me knows that she has some queer fairy tale-ish sorts of stories in the hopper, and I want those too. In conclusion, I guess, please read this series so the publisher will want more of them, and then SL Huang can do whatever she wants.

Note: I received an e-ARC of Critical Point from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

The post Review: Critical Point, S. L. Huang appeared first on Reading the End.

Cas and her friends are dealing with the fallout from their takedown of Pithica in Zero Sum Game, and trying to cope with the uptick in crime that Los Angeles is seeing as a result. Rio is God knows where; Arthur and Checker and Cas are chasing down child trafficking rings, while Cas grows more and more frustrated with the small scale of the good work they’re able to do. They also have a new staff member called Pilar, who does admin and has demanded that Cas teach her how to shoot a gun. (Pilar is a treasure.)

In other bad news, Cas’s mind is starting to break down. Whatever Dawna did to her at the end of Zero Sum Game, it’s eating away at her memory, letting through flashes of the life she used to know. She’s become prone to hallucinations that she struggles more and more to ignore, control, or work around — even, at times, to the detriment of the jobs she’s working. Arthur and Checker, who love her, are worried. I am heartwarmed that she now has people to love her apart from just Rio, whose faithfulness to her is very sweet but it’s not like you can lean on the guy for emotional support. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure from her past, a psychic called Simon, is following her around and asking uncomfortable questions.

(PS I can’t see why nobody has asked Rio or Simon if Cas has been psychically told to trust Rio. But like — she has, right? I know he’s been unflinchingly loyal to her, etc., etc., but at some point she had to *start* trusting him in order to find *out* that he was going to be unflinchingly loyal, so — she’s been psychic-influenced, no?)

Two main questions occupy Our Heroes over the course of Null Set. One is whether Cas will allow another psychic to mess around with her brain, if their doing so means that she’ll survive the things that brain is currently doing to her. The second is how to stop the crime wave in Los Angeles, and our Cas unfortunately comes up with — okay, not the worst idea in the world, but an idea that is p R e T t Y bad, if you have ever read a book before, are Rio, or prefer not to mess around with the fragile and unpredictable human brain. Drawing on technology developed by the collapsed tech firm Arkacite, she creates a method of doing what she calls “brain entrainment” — basically, disrupting/shutting off the thing in the human brain that makes us form mobs and commit inhuman acts of violence. This is already pretty bad because don’t play God, brains are fragile, you never know what’ll happen, etc. etc., but then the actual worst idea in the world follows close on its heels, that being to implement the brain entrainment at scale and without testing.

Maybe superheroes should be required to undergo peer ethics supervision, like social workers. Wouldn’t that be good? Or like, bring their superplans before an Institutional Review Board and get some feedback. My instinct is that I would love to be on a superhero IRB. My thought-out response is that members of superhero IRBs would probably have really short life spans on account of all the superheroes who would turn evil and have a grudge against them. But what if it were like jury duty and everyone took a turn? But then you couldn’t have like a board full of experts on superheroics.

(This is the kind of internal conversation that ideally would take place in the tags of this post, but WordPress doesn’t let me post tags in the order EYE want to post them. They insist my tags be alphabetized. WordPress would probably try to brain entrain me given half a chance.)

I’m fascinated by the conflict Huang ends up creating about Cas’s brain. Spoilers begin here, so I’ll put a gif to give you a chance to get away before the spoilers. And I’ll put another gif after the spoilers are over, so you’ll know where to start reading again.

We find out Cas’s original identity in the best way, when a friend of Arthur’s mentions it to her in the full assumption that Cas has already figured it out. I love this fucking shit. The idea that the answer to a central mystery can be an absolute nothing can be hard to pull off without the reader feeling cheated, but I thought Huang managed it. Anyway, her original self was a Bahraini girl named Valamarthi, a child prodigy in math, and that person’s brain was completely broken by what Pithica did to it. In an effort to save her, Vala’s then-boyfriend knocked out all her memories, creating essentially an entire new person: Cas.

I love this problem. I love it. Cas is clearly not Vala; wiping Vala’s memories eliminated that person. But she questions her own right to live, palimpsested on top of the forcibly blank slate of Vala’s memory and Vala’s life. The memories are still inside her, though, struggling their way to the surface — so what does that make her? A person or an occupying force? Or both?

(If you were anywhere near me in early to mid-2018, you’ll have heard me raving about a fic called A Change in Energy, by kvikindi. It shares many of these very concerns! I still rave about it! If what I’ve just said about Null Set sounds interesting to you, perhaps I can interest you in a 450,000-word fic, based on a by-all-reports-terrible SF show, but which nevertheless explores interesting questions about what it means to be a human and a body and a person.)

Though I wasn’t quite as enthralled by the mystery of Null Set as by Zero Sum Game, the counterbalance is that Cas has found a real community in this one. If you are a lover of found family vibes, as who would not be?, Null Set has them for you in spades. It’s lovely to see Cas in the bosom of people who care about her, particularly in contrast to the little we learn about her past life and self. Null Set finishes on — not a cliffhanger, but a resetting of the board (my favorite way for a middle book to end), where we know the immediate next thing that will happen to Cas, but just have no fucking idea about what might come after that. It’s a great entry in a great series, and I recommend it entirely.

The post Null Set, S. L. Huang appeared first on Reading the End.

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.

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.

Cas Russell is a math genius such that she can calculate the bolt depth and wall strength of bars on windows in an instant, and apply leverage in exactly the right spot to pry them off. She’s a math genius such that she can dodge bullets by predicting their speed and vector and uh, other? math? words? But the job she’s taken on, rescuing a young woman called Courtney from a drug cartel she’s working for, is turning into something much bigger than she’d bargained for. Along with her only friend, who is a psychopath and not her friend, and a PI she has just met and barely trusts, Cas finds herself taking on a vast and shadowy organization with fingers in more pies than any of them can imagine.

If you are a fan of the thing where all the other characters constantly say “Cas no” and Cas thinks it over very seriously and then screams “Cas yes” and dedicates her life to overthrowing an all-powerful all-knowing international conglomerate that can litrally control your mind, Zero Sum Game has you covered. It’s the best kind of destroying-an-international-conglomerate story, where unimportant characters whiz past you at breakneck speed, and only later does Cas realize those people had all the answers. Had she but known. Had everyone but known!

Cas’s math genius giving her superpowers might have felt gimmicky if not for Huang’s obvious knowledge of both math and superpowers. (I realize that I am tacitly taking the position that stuntpeople have superpowers; this is what I truly believe.) Cas’s powers mean that she’s nearly immune to physical threats, which is so restful and pleasant, but the book still finds ways to put her in danger — and not always just by numerically overwhelming her. Despite her very very accurate risk calculation, she doesn’t always have the information she needs. Some situations turn out badly.

More than any of that, I just couldn’t stop reading this book. Though SL Huang, a superpowered individual herself, will not understand this lazy-person metric, I will tell you that I did stair-running for the first time in weeks because I had Zero Sum Game to get me through it; and it’s the first time in months I did stair-running while reading anything other than an old favorite.¹ It’s that engaging. I am chomping at the bit for the sequel.

I have only two caveats about this book, and neither of them applies to me, which is probably why I loved it so much. First of all, Cas is not a woman who feels a great deal of remorse. Halfway through the book she gets accused of killing people as a first line of defense for all her problems. If you can’t live with a protagonist of whom this is true, Zero Sum Game may not be your book. Also, Zero Sum Game is the first in a series, which means that a lot of broader-strokes questions remain unanswered at the end of it. Caveat lector. As for me, I’m just excited I get to spend more time in this world.

The post Review: Zero Sum Game, S. L. Huang appeared first on Reading the End.