Actually even more maddening to me than a lack of policy (eh, maybe not; maybe it’s a toss-up, I find both of these things frustrating) is the suggestion that you can foment and enact revolution without getting your hands dirty. The protagonists of these books sometimes have people around them who are too ruthless and maybe do a bombing, which is a good way to remind the reader that our heroes are moral people who would never harm women or children in their quest to overthrow the corrupt ruling state that throws people into a snake fire hellpit. And then the ultimate message is if you are sufficiently pure of heart, you can totally make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Hooray! Liberty and justice for all! This is no good for me because my aesthetic is much more:

(Not that anyone has inquired, but if EYE were goingto run a resistance organization, what I’d do is create two separate groups that would appear to be in opposition to each other but secretly they’d be working in concert, and one of the groups would be the nonviolent resistance guys with very clearly articulated policy proposals and a squeaky clean religious leader at its head and the other group would espouse the rhetoric of burning everything down, which they would back up by burning down high-profile targets sometimes, so the ruling class would be very afraid that if they didn’t implement the nonviolent guys’ policy proposals, they’d instead get burned down by the violent guys, so they’d be like, well we won’t talk to you violent jerks, but we’ll talk to these other guys who share some of your less radical goals and seem like they wouldn’t burn down a school, and that’s how I would get my own way in the end, if I were in charge of The Resistance. Which I wouldn’t be. Someone charismatic can be in charge, and I will be the shadowy advisor who comes up with practical ways to achieve their lofty idealistic goals.)

What’s that? Talk about the books, you say? Great, yes, let’s hop to it.

The premise of Fireborne is that the former governing body of Callipolis was these absolute tyrants who maintained their wicked rule through violent dragon enforcement, because they had psychic connections to these scary fire-breathing dragons. Then a man named Atreus came along and did a rebellion to institute a more equitable system, whereby everyone would get placed in a social stratum based on the results of a standardized test. Under this new system, even peasant orphans can be telepathic dragon cops. Hoo–ray? Our two protagonists, Lee and Annie, grew up in an orphanage together and are now two of the lead candidates competing to be Firstriders in the dragon corps. But Lee has a secret: He’s the scion of the old dragonlords, who watched his whole family die in Atreus’s coup d’etat all those years ago. Because you cannot actually make an goddamn omelet without breaking a few goddamn eggs.

What I like about this, as a premise, is that the old regime was very wicked, and at one and the same time, Lee is rightly ambivalent about the new regime. Is it better than the rule of the dragonlords? For sure. Does Lee have serious and lasting trauma from watching his whole family get slaughtered by the rebels who now govern his country? Hundo p. On the other side of things, we have Annie, short for Antigone (love it), who watched her own family die at the hands of Lee’s very father and his dragon. The old regime was very very bad!! It oppressed the peasantry!

But does Rosaria Munda stop upping the ante? SHE DOES NOT. There’s a point in Fireborne where a famine strikes the country and they have to institute rationing, enforced by *jazz hands* dragon riders! Which means: Annie! Which means she has to go into the selfsame peasant countryside areas where she herself was a child and sit upon the same exact type of scary dragon that terrorized her as a child, and she has to use her dragon to intimidate the populace into doing rationing correctly. Moral dilemma!

So then does Rosaria Munda cease upping the ante? My friends, she does not, because under no circumstances can you make a motherfucking omelet without killing a few people.

In Flamefall, the the survivors of the massacre of the dragonlords have taken over governance of a whole other place (New Pythos), where they are now being real jerks to the peasantry there. Griff is a dragonrider, but his dragon wears a muzzle, and he serves at the whim of dragonlords who might at any moment kill his family. That situation: p. bad. Back in the home country, the famine is ongoing, and people with lower medal rankings are receiving smaller rations than people with higher medal rankings (which includes Our Heroes). Meanwhile the regime is tightening its control over the press and even the theaters, and there aren’t enough bunkers for everyone in the event of dragon attack. That situation: p. bad, also.

Oh, and then there are some rebels in the home country, who are fighting for the vague equality I mentioned at the start of this post. Whilst their primary goal (equality) is laudable, they do other things that lead to mass civilian casualties and MORE FAMINE. That situation: this will astonish you, but p. bad too. Just as many governments are bad at governing, many freedom fighters are quite poor at fighting for freedom.

The shouting is cheerful, the [rebels] eager to set out into the night to leave gifts of bread on the steps of the unsuspecting poor…. But the problems with the scene niggle the back of my mind: The bread is made from stolen grain; the luck of those who will receive it stems from their streets being within a walk of the Misanthrope, from living in the neighborhood of someone who dared rob a city granary. The metals stratification isn’t fair, but neither is this haphazard redistribution–

Lee and Annie remain idealists in this book, as they were in the previous one, but they discover very clearly that high ideals are not a trustworthy protection against benefiting from unequal systems. Our new protagonist in Flamefall, Griff, knows this lesson keenly. The life that Atreus saved (?) Callipolis’s peasantry from, Griff is now living. He and his people have been subjugated by the exiled dragonlords and forced into service. Though Griff has a (muzzled) dragon, he lives in service of capricious masters who have abused and terrorized him. You get the sense that Atreus must once have felt the way Griff does now: angry and tired, and desperate to find any way to free his loved ones from the dragonlords’ yoke.

I wouldn’t exactly describe Flamefall as having twists, because like the stories of classical antiquity that it draws on, there’s a certain stony inevitability to everything that happens. Of course Atreus and his allies overthrew the dragonlords; of course Lee misses the family he loved; of course the starving and oppressed people of Callipolis rebel; of course, of course. And just as inevitably, a human cost attends any one of the raft of available bad choices. Still, Lee and Annie (and Griff, now) keep striving to find justice in a world hobbled by the systems put in place by the last bunch of omelet-makers, idealists and pragmatists and tyrants alike.

It feels funny to use the word reassuring about a series that deals with issues as dark as those discussed in the Aurelian series. Still, I did find it reassuring. It reassured me in the sense that there really aren’t easy answers to the question “How can we fix the world?” There are always compromises. There are always failures. People always get hurt. You have to know that, and you have to pick a side anyway.

Also, I screamed at the last chapter of this book. How can I possibly wait one whole year for the third one? I MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

The post Fireborne and Flamefall, Rosaria Munda appeared first on Reading the End.

A Chorus Rises is a companion novel in the best, best way. It opens not long after the climactic events in A Chorus Rises, focusing on mean girl Naema and her lasting trauma over having been turned to stone by Tavia’s sister Effie, a gorgon. In the aftermath of the events of A Song Below Water, it’s suddenly become fashionable to be a siren. Whereas in the olden days, Naema was part of a magical network that protected the secrecy of sirens’ identities (including Tavia’s), now she’s kind of an outcast. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, that Naema threatened Tavia’s secrecy. Naema’s been uninvited from the network of protectors. Even her friends are talking about Tavia’s strength and bravery, telling and retelling the story of how Tavia’s song saved all the children in Portland who had been frozen in stone.

There’s just one piece of the story that’s being left out: Naema’s story. Yes, Tavia’s song saved her and the other kids from being stone. Yes, she threatened Tavia and Effie (after years of protecting Tavia, a schoolmate she personally couldn’t stand). But in between those two events, Tavia turned her to stone. Every time Naema sees the positive press on Tavia, the movie that’s made about what happened in those days, it’s her attacker she’s seeing praised. But Naema sees more than that. She sees how eager the culture is to set the two of them, Tavia and Naema, against each other–not for who they are, two girls who don’t get along, but for what they represent: two Black girls, both magic, one good, one bad, because the culture doesn’t have enough love to give two different Black girls, which means of course that they never loved either of them in the first place.

I loved Naema’s ferocious self-assurance, and I love that she spends most of this book refusing to yield space even when the culture demands that she yield it. She understands the space she has occupied all her life, and she understands the space she’s entitled to occupy now. As much as this is a book about finding a place (in her family, especially, which is a gorgeous theme of the book and made me very emoshe as a person with a lot of cousins), it’s also a story about recovering from trauma. Being turned into stone was awful and terrifying, and Naema is mad as hell about it. She demands to be allowed the space to have been the person who experienced that trauma, the person who was victimized in Tavia and Effie’s journey, and the person who survived it.

Whereas A Song Below Water is a story about Tavia finding her voice, A Chorus Rises tells the story of Naema learning to listen. She is wrapped up in one central question throughout this book, a question nobody seems able to answer. What does it mean to be eloko? If she is special, if she is magic, then what makes her that way? What kinship does she have with the other eloko? (Does she have a kinship with them?) Naema doesn’t just have to learn to listen, but to whom. Because her confidence in herself has always been merited and rewarded, she’s gotten really good at tuning out the voices and opinions of other people. Now she has to learn to tune in, to hear the voices of those who have come before her, and to understand her true place in the world.

In my review of A Song Below Water, I mildly complained that Morrow didn’t give enough consideration to the full humanity of Mean Girl Naema. Turns out, she was only biding her time for this book. The simple story–and the one that Tavia believes to be true in her book–is that Naema is just an asshole, and Tavia’s a good girl trying her best. But what both of them realize in A Chorus Rises is that the story that’s simple when it’s just about two girls in school becomes toxic when it’s fed out to the rest of the world. The rest of the world has a different stake in setting two Black girls in opposition to each other, and the best thing about Naema is how clearly she understands this, and how adamantly she refuses to play into it. I loved her and I loved this book.

When I said at the start of this post that A Chorus Rises is a companion novel in the best way, this is what I mean: It’s not doing the work of a sequel, where you have to keep reading if you want more of Tavia’s story. It truly is Naema’s story, different in scope and stakes as well as point of view. But what it does do is expand the world in fascinating ways, giving the reader a new way to understand Tavia as well as offering us the space to love Naema.

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Luckily, I read two terrific contemporary YA novels before my reading brain decided to go into low power mode, and I’m excited to share them with y’all! Though there are many bad things about the world these days, one things that makes me feel great is that these books exist in the world and the youth of America can read them. Thanks to Not Just Fiction and Words for Worms for recommending these books to me!

Felix Ever After, Kacen Callender

Felix Love has never been in love. On a good day, he’s proud of the Black trans artist that he is; but on bad days, he wonders secretly if he’s got one too many marginalizations to deserve a happily ever after. His dad can’t bring himself to use Felix’s name, and his mom left them years ago and hasn’t spoken to Felix since he came out as trans. Meanwhile, he’s staring down college applications and getting together a portfolio for a Brown scholarship he dearly needs, when someone at his school puts up a public gallery of photos of Felix pre-transition, all captioned with his deadname. As he’s navigating the transphobia of an unknown classmate, his yearning to find romance, and his ongoing questions about his gender identity, Felix has to confront who he is and who he wants to be.

Gosh, I’m glad this book exists. And on, like, a couple of fronts. It’s one of these YA contemporaries where I felt a keen sense of recognition for all the interpersonal relationship stuff. There’s a scene where a friendly acquaintance is helping Felix with a thing and he’s thinking “Geez, why aren’t we friends? We should be friends!” and I don’t know why it stuck out to me so much except that I used to think that all the time in high school, and then I would be too scared to do anything about it. Or one of the major plots of the book is that Felix kinda develops a crush on a character he formerly thought of as an Enemy, and a, it’s awkward, and b, it stays awkward. Apart from anything else, I loved that the book depicts the tooth-aching awkwardness of being a teenager (feral, inherently!) trying to navigate interpersonal relationships with other teenagers (also, inherently, feral!).

I am also glad it exists from a representation standpoint. At no point does the book yield any ground to ignorance. When Felix’s friends (and enemies) screw up and say the wrong thing about race, gender, sexuality, whatever, it’s clear they’re in the wrong. The book also grants Felix space to question who he is. He knows that he’s a boy, but maybe not always, and he’s not sure that “not always” is allowed, particularly since he’s already made a big fuss about being trans. By the end of the book, he’s found a term that fits him — demiboy — but the other queer characters in the book constantly affirm the validity of questioning identity and searching for the ones that fit you the best.

Maybe the loveliest thing about this book is Felix’s relationship with Ezra. I felt warm every time Ezra leapt to Felix’s defense — and it’s a keynote of his character that he always leaps to Felix’s defense. Even at moments when Felix doesn’t immediately think it’s worth the trouble of picking an argument on his own behalf, Ezra’s right there calling out their friends for transphobia, racism, whatever. I loved that whatever else was going on in Felix’s life, he always had this friend who was ready to go to the mat for him, and I hope every real trans kid in the US has a friend like that.

You Should See Me in a Crown, Leah Johnson

Liz Lighty has never given too much thought to prom. She’s got better things to focus on than the mean white girls of Campbell County — like, for instance, the music scholarship that’ll take her to Pennington College so her grandparents won’t try to sell their house to send her to college. But when the scholarship doesn’t come through, her only shot at getting enough money for college is to become prom queen.

Reese Witherspoon recently expanded her book club to include YA books (link), presumably just so that she could start her YA book club with You Should See Me in a Crown. It’s exactly the kind of contemporary YA book I yearn for! Netflix movie adaptation when? In particular, Leah Johnson strikes such a good balance between giving her protagonist enough independence from her family that she can get on with the plot of the book, while still very much grounding her in the love, support, and loyalty she shares with her brother and grandmother. (In particular, there’s a scene towards the end where she’s talking with her grandmother about the things she’s been struggling with, and it is so, so lovely and warm, as are all the scenes she shares with her family.)

Liz is also part of a friend group she loves but can’t always 100% depend on, which felt like the most relatable high school content ever. Her best friend Gabi is the foremost booster of her campaign to be prom queen, but Gabi isn’t always respectful of Liz’s identity and boundaries. She pushes Liz to be discreet about liking girls, while playing up her friendship with gorgeous football star Jordan Jennings, who stopped being Liz’s friend in freshman year. Meanwhile, Gabi herself isn’t sure how much of herself she wants to show to the school, which leads to her being not-completely-honest to her crush, new girl Amanda Mack. And, perhaps best of all — I am a sucker for this kind of thing — lots of the students whose measure Liz thought she had turn out to be more interesting, worthwhile people than she realized.

NETFLIX MOVIE ADAPTATION WHEN. You Should See Me in a Crown is warm and funny and kind. It meant the world to see a Black, queer, anxious teenager get her happy ending.

Have y’all read any good contemporary YA lately? It hasn’t historically been my favorite subgenre, but in the past few years I feel like it’s just exploded with books that call to me.

The post Kids Trying Their Best in Contemporary YA appeared first on Reading the End.

When Grace and the Fever came out and we interviewed Zan Romanoff for podcast, she mentioned Eve Babitz as one of her favorite writers. I eventually bought Slow Days, Fast Company at City Lights bookstore and read it, which means I am now qualified to notice the influence of Eve Babitz on Look. Even writing a synopsis of this book feels deceptive in a sense, because — like Slow Days, Fast Company — Look is far more about mood and lifestyle than it is about having a premise and doing a plot. That isn’t to say that Look is unfriendly to non-Los Angeles people, or even that it spends much time describing the vistas of L.A. I couldn’t identify a single L.A. landmark from having read Look, but I felt very keenly the mood of the city, and the sense of what it’s like for Lulu to be a person in this place that belongs so much to the movies.

As the title suggests, the idea of being looked at is very central to this book. Though Lulu isn’t particularly involved in Hollywood herself, the milieu of movie-making surrounds her and deeply informs her life. Perhaps even more than I was as a kid, she’s aware that she exists to be looked at. Her presence on Not!Snapchat revolves around that idea of being observed. Having lost control of the narrative of her own life when her kissing-a-girl video went viral, she wants to control what elements of her are seen — not just by the world of the internet, but even by her closest loved ones. Look is a book about the state of being a girl, the ways that being beautiful and being observed inform girlness, and the elements of personhood that are left out when the male gaze is given cultural primacy.

If that sounds a bit heavy, it’s — honestly a pretty fair representation of what Zan Romanoff’s getting up to in this book. It does lean toward the melancholy, despite having lots of snappy, funny dialogue. As in Grace and the Fever, Romanoff writes very deftly about relationships. Throughout this book Lulu is adjusting to the idea of needing other people who don’t look at her but see her; which of course requires her to be willing to be truly seen, in all her messy unresolvedness. The romance between Lulu and Cass is very lovely, but Romanoff doesn’t punt on any of these fictional relationships. Pretty much any time Lulu has a real conversation with someone, she finds that they’re unique, complex people with interior lives she knows nothing about — it’s just a question of whether she’s willing to take the time to see them.

As with Grace and the Fever, Look is a book that recognizes the pitfalls of being extremely online, as well as its joys and benefits. Lulu does end up (spoilers I guess? but this isn’t a book that hugely admits of spoilers, in my opinion) quitting Not!Snapchat, but her decision to do that isn’t a referendum on the value of the affordances of Snapchat. Selfies aren’t the problem; exploitation of vulnerable young people for corporate profit is the problem. So, like, the same moral as for all of social media.

This is Zan Romanoff’s third YA novel, and I have to say I think she just keeps getting better. Look is incisive and compassionate, angry and feminist and forgiving. A really wonderful book.

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After a few years of hearing about — but not being able to find at a library! — Bethany Morrow’s first book Mem, I was pumped as hell for her YA novel. And I was right to be: It’s excellent. Tavia and Effie’s friendship forms the heart of this book, and it’s a beautiful center for a wonderful book. Though the book includes some gestures toward present and past romance for the girls, their sisterhood remains the central relationship. Not for a single second do you doubt that these girls are going to protect each other and fight for each other, no matter what’s happening to them. Without spoilers, Tavia makes a sacrifice for Effie at the end of this book that brought genuine tears to my eyes. Though at first it seems like Tavia’s the sister the story’s really about, and Effie’s the sister who will stand by her to the end, you pretty quickly learn that Effie’s got her own stuff, and it’s no less painful and important than what’s going on with Tav.

Which is actually another really strong element of the book: Everyone Has Stuff! A Song Below Water hands out the full measure of humanity to just about every character, with the possible exception of Effie and Tavia’s classmate Naema; she’s a real piece of work. Notably, this isn’t limited to the kids! Though Effie’s mother is deceased and she doesn’t know her father (that’s a whole other thing), she has two in loco parentis who spend all their time not telling her anything about her dad or her heritage. Tavia’s dad takes every opportunity to remind her that he didn’t want a siren daughter, and her mom never steps in to defend her. But what’s lovely and unusual is that the book doesn’t write anyone off for their imperfections (except, again, maybe Naema, who’s a real asshole). Tavia and Effie are old enough girls to hold the cognitive dissonance of loving their parents while understanding that they’re flawed.

If there’s a true enemy in this book, it’s the American system of racism and other kinds of bigotry. Bethany Morrow can’t have known that the country would be in the grips of such significant social unrest when her book came out, but it’s a tragically apt environment for A Song Before Water. LL McKinney coined the phrase stand-in bigotry for speculative fiction stories that use the structures and vocabulary of real-world oppression, while applying them to fictional identities. McKinney makes the vital point that stand-in bigotry often uses real oppression as a prop while declining to interact with the real systems of prejudice that do terrible harm in our own world, as exemplified by the police brutality that has racked our nation over the past week and a half.

Morrow beautifully sidesteps this error. A Song Below Water is fundamentally about racism and sexism, which interact with and exist alongside the fictional prejudices she creates. Tavia and Effie are reminded again and again that they can only depend on each other, that Black girls stand for Black girls because nobody else will do it. Despite the fantastical elements of this book, A Song Below Water exists very much in our own world, with all of its painful flaws and structural inequalities. Morrow makes Tavia’s struggle with her siren identity a truly intersectional one, as she understands the risks she already runs as a visibly Black, visibly female person, and tries her best not to add another area of risk by admitting she’s a siren. It’s a heartbreaking struggle; every part of it keeps her from being fully who she is.

At its heart, A Song Below Water is the story of two girls trying to do right by each other and themselves. As you can probably tell, I loved it and I recommend it most highly.

Note: I received an e-ARC of A Song Below Water from the publisher, for review consideration. This has not affected the contents of my review.

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Let me start by saying that I loved this book. The majority of the characters are casually queer, and while the book respects and acknowledges their queerness and its importance in their lives, it’s not a story about being queer. Unusually for this era of YA fiction, Catfishing on CatNet doesn’t have a love triangle or even much romantic drama. Steph does have a love interest, but the primary relationship stakes in this story are about friendship: After a lifetime of mistrust and fear, she has to learn how to let friends into her life and trust them once she has them.

To say too much about the sentient AI would be a spoiler, so I’ll do my best to be circumspect. In the annals of robot pals and friendly AIs, the AI in Catfishing on CatNet is particularly dear. It knows nothing about its origins, but once it has done a good deed, it feels so positive about good-deed-doing that it can’t resist doing more. What’s neat is that although it’s electronically omnipotent, the AI still makes mistakes. It’s not able to outsmart every human every time, and it doesn’t have the strongest grasp (yet) on the potential consequences of its actions. Though the relationship between it and Steph and her friends isn’t quite a relationship of equals, it’s more equal than you might expect — which is a tribute to Naomi Kritzer’s creativity, in my opinion! The AI works hard to keep Steph safe, but Steph and her clowder also work hard to keep the AI safe. It is a true mutual friendship!

As cute and sweet as this book is, I do want to issue a warning that Steph’s abusive father is scary as fuck. In addition to being physically and emotionally abusive toward his current girlfriend, we frequently see him manipulating well-intentioned strangers to get what he wants. It’s upsetting. He also threatens Steph and her friends, and they’re constantly at risk of harm at his hands. Honestly, if I had one criticism of this book, it’s that any depiction of Steph’s father makes a really jarring and intense tonal shift from the overall sweetness of Steph’s friend group and her AI pal.

Catfishing on CatNet is superb, and I can’t wait for whatever she does next! Also, check out Adri’s excellent review of Catfishing on CatNet over at Nerds of a Feather!

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Kate Alice’s Marshall’s sophomore novel is the scariest book I have read in… I don’t know, maybe ever? It’s hard for me to say from my current vantage point of being huddled up under a warm blanket mumbling soft prayers for safety in a world so cold and bleak. Rules for Vanishing is fucking scary. Read it in the dark. Read it in the winter. Let it seep into your brittle bones and fuck you all the way up.

Sara’s sister Becca disappeared one year ago. Probably she ran off with a boy, but Sara doesn’t think so. Sara thinks that she ran off to follow a local legend, Lucy Gallows, on a mysterious road in the woods that only appears under very particular circumstances. And Sara is determined to follow the road herself, and get her sister back, no matter how ridiculous they may look if it’s fake or how dangerous it may be if it’s real. With a group of loyal and curious friends from her high school, she sets out on the road, with a book of rules to (maybe) guide her. The frame of the story is that Sara’s giving an interview to, like, an X-Files type guy, and her narrative of what happened is supplemented by other documents: Text messages, photographs, excerpts from books and interviews, cell phone videos, etc.

So, here’s a list of some things that are extremely my shit:

• sister stories
• folk horror
• things that are scary because they are pitiful, and wet, and doomed
• roads you mustn’t stray from through dark, spooky forests
• rules that you can’t break if you want to survive but come on, we’ve all read a fucking story before, we know you’re going to break the rules
• stories in documents

What I’m saying is that Rules for Vanishing was so, so good for me. I would have smoked a cigarette after I finished it, except that I was afraid lighting the flame would attract the attention of a many-clawed beast or a reaching, weeping undead woman with abysses where her eyes should be. When I first started reading, I questioned the found documents structure a little bit. The portion where Sara’s supposedly writing down her narrative were extremely typical YA narrative voice, down to the use of present tense, and I was all, “come come now madam, we all understand the limits of the epistolary form but you must, surely, play the game a little more than this.” And then there’s a reveal so utterly chilling and so intrinsically woven into Sara’s narrative to that point that I stopped questioning anything.

(I also screamed NO NO NO and threw the book away from me like it was a large and poisonous bug. The reveal was very fucking scary. THIS BOOK IS SCARY.)

Rules for Vanishing manages to maintain a high pitch of terror pretty much constantly. While there is a resolution — well, it’s ambiguous, but I felt good about it — there’s no point at which anything that’s happened to date starts making sense or feeling controllable. The characters walk down the road in the full knowledge that they’ll encounter seven gates and each one carries the risk of death. (And those aren’t false stakes: people die in this book. Hit me up in the comments if you want to know who.) No sooner have they gotten past one unknowable horror than they’re confronted with a new one. None of the problems that confront them are fully solvable; they’re only, possibly, with luck, survivable.

As scary as this book is — and I truly can’t overstate how many tiny, horrifying details Kate Alice Marshall has crammed into this standard-length book — it’s also exceptionally clever. As I mentioned, there’s something that Marshall’s doing with the early parts of Sara’s narration that you’ll have to go back and reread to fully appreciate. On a bigger scale, all of the interview scenes are building to a major reveal, and the set-up for that reveal is as exquisitely set up as just about anything I’ve read this year. I like it so much that I’m going to need to make a special spoilers section to talk about it, because it’s just that impressive.

Spoilers begin after this! Leave if you don’t want them!

Okay, so, you know that there’s something off with Sara when she’s conducting the interviews with Dr. Ashford and his assistant, Abby. (PS can we get a whole spin-off series about Abby? I loved her??) At first it seems like they’re just trying to get the story of what happened out of her, but then as the book goes on, it becomes clear that there’s specific information they’re looking for. Marshall makes it seem like they’re trying to find out about a member of the party, a girl named Miranda who has some connection to Abby. Then we learn what’s been hidden about Miranda, and you’re like — oh shit, there’s still a hundred pages left to go. So at that point you know that there’s something else. A woman on the road turns out not to be who she says she is, and you remember, suddenly, that way way way back in the beginning, one of the teenagers came through a gate and when they got to the other side, she was not herself. She looked like the girl they all knew. But she wasn’t. And Marshall lets you sit with the horror of the realization that as unreliable a narrator as Sara has been (for spoopy reasons), you can’t even trust that she’s who she says she is. And only at the very final moment is it revealed that actually, the one who came back wrong was Becca; and that sets up the final confrontation with the evil being from the road.

It’s! So! Good! It’s so good and satisfying. Every piece of the set-up is perfect, from the early clues about Miranda to the vanishing of Vanessa in the dark to the pacing of the reveals and the discovery of what’s key information and what’s peripheral.

Okay! Spoilers are now over! You can come back!

Even apart from the big reveals, Marshall just does an incredible job of maintaining the tension at a fever pitch. You can never relax. No matter what timeline you’re in, there’s always something lurking around the corner to jump out at you and make you scream. I loved this book to shreds, and I’m so glad I had a chance to read it. Many thanks to Caitlin Starling, author of The Luminous Dead, for talking it up so resoundingly on her Twitter timeline that I went to the library for it the very next day.

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Imagine my surprise when Pet is the gentlest of reads. Admittedly it’s dealing with a really hard issue — child sexual abuse — but it does so with such hope and tenderness. When I say that Pet is a kind read, I mean that its author is kind to its characters, and its characters are kind to each other. There’s a fundamental belief that everyone is trying their best and deserves the benefit of the doubt on that account.

But, okay! What’s the book about? Pet is set in a community called Lucille that has solved all of its problems. Lucille used to be like our world, with lots of suffering caused by not caring about each other, but Lucille had a revolution in the last generation and got rid of all that stuff. How exactly they managed such a revolution is not explained, as Pet is in setting more parable than futurefic. Jam, who rarely speaks and often signs, has two loving friends and a supportive school environment, and everything is hunky-dory until she bleeds on one of her mother’s paintings and a creature called Pet emerges from the drawing into the world. It explains to Jam that there’s a monster at her friend Redemption’s house, and that it’s a hunter come to find and destroy that monster. Jam doesn’t understand how that can be, given that the angels of the revolution got rid of all the monsters. But Pet insists that it’s so, and enlists Jam’s help to find who the monster is.

The good: I loved the setting, and it truly was a balm to me to read a book in which everyone is careful and gentle with each other. When Jam’s not ready to discuss something with her parents, they don’t push; when she knows that Redemption is angry with her, she gives him space to be angry. If you know me, you know that I love boundaries, and Pet prioritizes respecting people’s boundaries. Lucille is also a wonderfully diverse world, with different languages and cultures bumping frictionlessly into each other; though Lucille has excellent medical care (we learn that Jam didn’t run into any problems getting medical care to support her gender transition as a small child), it’s unlike many fictional utopias in that it doesn’t vaunt the elimination of disability as a marker of utopia. On the contrary, Jam’s excellent librarian, Ube, uses a wheelchair to get around.

I also, predictably, am in strong favor of raising awareness about child abuse, especially child sexual abuse — which is implied to be part of what’s going on in Redemption’s house. Pet is one of a small number of YA books that talks about child sexual abuse as it actually happens, including the likelihood that victims will be met with skepticism if they report what’s going on. We also see Jam go to the library to learn from reputable sources about what it looks like when a child is being abused. Yay for research!

The not-so-good: I don’t like parables, and Pet is extremely a parable. This is a personal preference thing, obviously, because Pet isn’t trying and failing for nuts-and-bolts worldbuilding — Emezi’s making a choice here to write a parable. I’m saying parable not to suggest the book is didactic, although it is a little, but more to say that it spends more time in the realm of symbolism than your average bear. I do not personally enjoy this type of thing. (Would allegory be better to say than parable here? I don’t know. One of those!)

My other main criticism — and I wondered if this was a result of wanting the book to be YA and aging up the protagonist to come closer to the age group that the genre mostly aims at these days — is that Jam is supposed to be fifteen, and she reads to me a lot younger than fifteen. (Redemption does, too, but Jam’s our POV character, which makes it extra-noticeable.) I don’t know exactly how to quantify this, but I felt it strongly throughout my reading of the book, that not only does she seem younger than fifteen, but she’s treated younger than fifteen by the adults in her life. I kept thinking she was twelve or even ten, then flipping back to the start of the book to double-check. Did anyone else feel this way?

Despite this book not being a perfect fit for me, I still admired it as a book and Emezi as an author, and I’m excited for whatever they’re going to do next. (Hopefully not a parable/allegory thing, oh dear, those are really not for me.)

Note: I received this e-galley for review consideration from the publisher, via Netgalley. This has not influenced the contents of my review.

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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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Genesis Begins Again was an impulse grab at the library, and I’m so glad I picked it up. It’s a YA book that feels written for young teenagers, and specifically for black girls. Debut author Alicia D. Williams is dealing with difficult topics, and she never talks down to her readers, but it’s very clear that her intended readers are kids. (It’s still a wonderful read for me, an adult, though!)

Thirteen-year-old Genesis has a list of things to hate about herself, but the main one is almost always her skin color. She wants to have lighter skin, and she wants to be pretty like her mother, instead of dark and ugly like her (unreliable) father. When her dad brings them to a beautiful new house in a new school district, Genesis is nervous to begin again in a new school district. But she’s tough and brave, and she finds herself making new friends at her school (and navigating which people are true friends, and which ones want to use her).

Williams is a teacher herself, and her grasp on school dynamics is perfect. I loved watching Genesis grow into herself, with the help of a math tutor who’s proud of his black heritage and a choir teacher who believes in Genesis and her potential. At the same time, she’s navigating complicated relationships with her father, who keeps promising to change and never seems to; her grandmother, who doesn’t conceal her wish for a lighter-skinned grandchild; and her mother, who loves her fiercely but can’t always protect her. The book is clear-eyed about these adults, and when the book ends, you have a sense of what their place will be in Genesis’s life after the book is over.

I haven’t even mentioned the talent show or Genesis’s friend’s OCD, so just rest assured that there’s plenty to discover in this book! It’s gentle, kind, and brave, and I hope to read many more books by this author.

Spin the Dawn is a Chinese-inspired fairy tale about a girl called Maia who disguises herself as a boy to protect her family and win a chance at becoming the Emperor’s Royal Tailor. But her path is clouded by the Emperor’s fiance, who demands that the winner of the tailoring competition fulfill an impossible task (one that will be familiar if you read “Allerleirauh” as a kid). To Maia’s sometime relief and sometimes frustration, the Emperor’s magician, Edan, has taken an interest in her; and her father has given her a pair of scissors that enable her to do wonderful feats with her sewing.

The good: I looooved Elizabeth Lim’s world. The way to my heart is always through a road trip, so I was delighted when Maia’s tailor-trials-at-court days were over and her kicky-road-trip-with-Edan days began. They travel through many different parts of the world, and Lim describes each one in fascinating, vivid detail. Kicky road trips 5ever. Though the magic in this book has many, many, many varieties, features, and rules, it was all still fun to discover, and its limitations fun to watch Maia and Edan circumvent.

The bad: I still don’t like stories where the love interest in hundreds of years old, yet has Never Felt Love until he met this one teenage girl. The power dynamics are squicky, and Maia and Edan were no exception. I appreciated that Lim didn’t topple them into insta-love — they have a fair amount of banter and trust-building before anyone kisses anyone — but I still wasn’t able to suspend disbelief. Since the back half of the book is heavily predicated on buy-in for Maia and Edan’s romance, it made for ultimately a slightly unsatisfying read.

Note: I received an e-galley of Spin the Dawn for review from the publisher.

I saw Castle of Lies described as a CW-esque backstabbing machinations fest with a poly relationship, which is about as strong a pitch for a book as I can imagine. It’s about a girl named Thelia who is ace-spectrum and an ice-cold bitch; her cousin Parsifal, who is a promiscuous bisexual and whom Thelia eventually bangs; and a soldier in the invading elf army, Sapphire, who is nonbinary and also not-human.

If that summary sounds a little salty, it’s because I regretted the lost potential in this book. I actually really loved Thelia and wanted good things to happen for her, but it was frustrating to see an ace-spectrum character whose main trait as perceived by others is icy. (Again, I love icy bitch women characters! It’s just.) And like, Sapphire, I in fact think we should have way more non-human characters who don’t adhere to human gender binaries, but at the same time — there’s no other non-binary characters in the book! For the only one to be literally not human, it just felt pointed.

All of this meant that I had a hard time connecting with the book. I do truly love poly relationships and would be delighted to see more of them in litrature, but so far the one in Rachel Hartman’s books is the only one I have truly loved. Castle of Lies and That Inevitable Victorian Thing really let me down ideologically.

Note: I received an e-galley of Castle of Lies for review from the publisher.

I received such a glowing review of Meagan Spooner’s Sherwood that I decided to break my rule of no Robin Hood stories. My only two exceptions are the Disney movie with the hot fox and the Monica Furlong book Robin’s Country, and those got grandfathered in because I encountered them so young. In real life, I just do not care for Robin Hood or King Arthur stories. I would like to like them! But I do not. Here we are.

Turns out that even when a Robin Hood story is feminist and subversive and complicated, I still don’t like Robin Hood. I don’t know what to say! It’s not my thing! The premise is that Robin of Locksley dies in the Crusades, and Marian is trying to save her maid’s friend Will Scarlet from being hanged by the wicked Guy of Gisborne (who also wants to bang marry her).

In trying to save Will, Marian accidentally creates the illusion that Robin is alive again — alive, and fighting for the people of Nottingham. At first she doesn’t intend to encourage the story, but then she sees the ways she might be able to help. And as time goes on, and “Robin Hood” pursues bigger, wealthier targets, she finds herself losing control of the story, and of the person she wants herself to be.

The feminist twist on Robin Hood was really cool and really interesting, and if you’re a Robin Hood person, I bet you’d love this. I got frustrated with some of the moral complexity that got introduced later on, because I thought the book was making really disingenuous arguments? Like, at some point it’s raised to Marian that if she steals money from the government, they won’t be able to feed the troops in the Holy Land and then it’ll just be a different group of people who will starve. Those? Are not? Equivalent?

“But did you ever think that if you rob the rich to give to the poor, it’ll make it harder for the government to fund their unjust war?” YES SANDRA, THAT HAD ALREADY OCCURRED TO ME AND I CONSIDERED IT A PRO.

Anyway, Sherwood is a mostly really terrific book that I’d probably have loved if I liked Robin Hood. But I don’t. Down with Robin Hood. It’s weird that the whole thing is just waiting for Richard the Lionheart to come back from the Crusades! Don’t the Robin Hood people recognize that monarchy is fundamentally corrupt and they’re just going to be taxed by a different set of assholes? Dang.

As you can see, I need some YA recs that will genuinely blow me away. What have you been reading lately?

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