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.

In honor of this exciting occasion, I have a massive installment of the column for the month of August. Many, many novellas came out this month, and I am here to bring you the best ones around.

First up, I want to start with two novellas from Book Smugglers Publishing, whose work is consistently weird, queer, and wonderful. This month they’re releasing a paired set of stories — one fire, one water — about young people whose worlds aren’t what they thought, and who have to decide how to cope.

I read Lena Wilson’s “Accelerants” first, the story of a queer girl who can raise fire. But people with powers like hers — Omnis — are discouraged from using their powers, and Mi-na’s father sends her to what essentially amounts to a conversion therapy program for Omnis.

If that sounds dark, it is: We get to see the good parts of Mi-na’s life before coming to Omni jail (official name, the Northern California Institute for Revitalization) — they mostly have to do with her best-friend-or-maybe-more-question-mark, Jessa — but a lot of the book takes place in Omni jail, where Mi-na and her closest friend Fatima (a trans girl!) undergo daily torture (“treatment”) intended to deprogram them from ever using their powers. Like many of the stories in the Book Smugglers line, Accelerants is about making one’s way in an inhospitable world — and reshaping the damn place if necessary.

“A Glimmer of Silver,” by Juliet Kemp, features a protagonist with some world-changing to do: Jennery has been training to be a Communicator for years without ever hearing a peep out of Ocean, but in xer very last week of training — right when xe thinks xe’ll be able to leave the Communicators behind and become a musician — Ocean whispers to xer that people have been fishing. Jennery is sent on the trip out to find the fishers who have breached the contract the settlers have with Ocean, never ever to eat anything that comes out of Ocean. Everything in Ocean is part of Ocean. You don’t eat sentient beings. Period.

Of course, things aren’t as simple as Jennery believed, and xe has to learn how to communicate effectively with Ocean, xer own people, and the rogue fishers, if xe wants to preserve the fragile floating colony.

Maybe I was just in a “burn it all down” mood when I was reading these books on the plane. As much as I loved this worldbuilding — Kemp has done an extraordinary job with both relationships and setting, in a short span of pages — I struggled to connect to the story emotionally. Kemp works hard to make her colonists as un-imperialist as possible (and succeeds!) but I felt resistant to even an inadvertent colonizing of a place with sentient life. I didn’t quite register the colonizing element going in, and I think it would have helped to know ahead of time. By that I mean: I’d absolutely read another book set in this world. Kemp’s created a world like nothing I’ve encountered before, and made it queer as hell while they were at it.

***

Y’all should have heard the noise I made when I discovered that JY Yang’s new novella was a story in documents. The Descent of Monsters (Tor.com) is the third Tensorate novella, and you should definitely read the first two. However, I do think you could — if you are willing to accept a few spoilers for the earlier two — go into The Descent of Monsters with no previous knowledge of the Tensorate world and still be okay.

How good is this cover? And the contents inside are even gooder. The Descent of Monsters is about an investigator for the Tensorate who has been sent to make a report about the disaster that befell the Rewar Teng Institute of Experimental Methods. When she arrives, the rebels Sanao Akeha and Rider are already in custody, and her dreams seem to be steering her in the direction of truths that the Tensorate are trying to cover up.

I’m not just saying this because I’m a sucker for a story in documents: JY Yang is getting better and better with each successive book, and there is nothing more thrilling than watching a talented author come fully into their talents. The Descent of Monsters is a strange, sad, satisfying story that promises more to come, and I dearly hope that I will get to learn more about Rider and their mysterious twin in future Tensorate stories. Meanwhile, the Book Smugglers have promised an all-new JY Yang story about illegal gods in love. I cannot wait, but I must.

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Guess what month it is, friends. Guess, guess.

MURDERBOT MONNNNNNTH. The third Murderbot book came out in August! And my mum accidentally bought two copies of it, so she gave one to me! So in Rogue Protocol, our dearest Murderbot is on a ship to Milu trying to acquire some evidence that will allow its old friend Dr. Mensah to stop saying frightening things on news channels so Murderbot can stop worrying about her. It makes friends with an annoying pet-bot named Miki, tries not to have feelings, and battles corporations bent on killing people it likes.

Spoiler-free review

It’s great, this series is great, you should read all the books in it, I love this series, and Murderbot, so much it causes me physical pain.

Spoilery review

Here’s — here’s the thing, y’all. One time when I was watching my favorite television program, Black Sails, for the very first time, I was engaged in sending a series of all-caps DMs to the person who recommended it to me to let her know how excited I was about one particular character of whom I had grown especially fond. And as I was watching the show and sending these messages, as I was doing those things, that character got, abruptly, killed.

Likewise, I took a short break from finishing Rogue Protocol to update Whiskey Jenny on how great the Murderbot series continued to be. I explained that Murderbot had made a new friend, this pet-bot called Miki, and I said that I wanted the fourth book to be like a Frank Capra movie where all the people Murderbot has helped over the years get together to save Murderbot from ruin and then talk amongst themselves about how terrific Murderbot is.

Then I finished Rogue Protocol. Guess the fuck what happens. Miki gets its humans to safety (I’m tearing up) and stays behind to help Murderbot battle a combat bot who Miki has no ability to fight against so the best Miki can possibly have been hoping for was to distract it long enough to give Murderbot time to kill it. And the combat bot kills Miki. And maybe not all of you read The Knife of Never Letting Go back in the day, but if you did read that book then perhaps you will have some idea of what my emotions were around Miki dying.

The good news is that at the end of Rogue Protocol, Murderbot decides — for practical reasons, not emotional ones, definitely not, no — to go and reunite with its old friends. We have a lot to look forward to, come October.

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And now, for some Southern girl sincerity. Bear with me, please. The 30 July issue of Strange Horizons was the Southeastern USA Special, guest edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Rasha Abdulhadi, and Erin Roberts, and focusing on SFF by people of color from my part of the South. I want to say right up front that I loved the issue, top to bottom, and you should read every word of it. I especially liked “Dying Lessons” by Troy Wiggins and “Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone” by Eden Royce, and I’m so glad to have found new writers in this issue whose work I can follow.

The rest of the country likes to talk about the South and have opinions about the South, and that’s fine, because we all have opinions about our own places and how they’re different than other places; but what makes me so tired is people saying the South and meaning the white South. Over half the black population of America lives down here, and the states with the biggest growth in black populations between 2000 and 2010 were all Southern states (source). I am tired not only of the South being treated like a monolith, but of the assumption that the monolith comprises the stories and cultures of white people only. The South is so vast, and so varied.

When I got to Jamey Hatley’s “Always Open, the Eureka Hotel,” it brought me very close to tears, which might have been a cumulative effect from all these stories and poems that talk about for once a version of the South that I’m able to recognize. Though it’s marked as nonfiction, it reads like fiction, the story of a young woman whose family tries to send her to Chicago, except the South stretches out its hand to keep her. It’s a story about southern black freedom and self-determination, and I loved it terribly.

Tell me about the short fiction you’ve been reading!

The post Shortly Ever After: August appeared first on Reading the End.