There was no reason for me to do this. I just felt like attaining an arbitrary goal that made me feel clever. Do I still have more than 30 books checked out from the library? Yes. Do I have multiple ARCs that I’m supposed to be reading and reviewing and they’ve piled up and I’m starting to worry I’ll never catch up? Yes. But January Jenny read one book per day this entire month. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOALS. So here comes a lightning round of all the books I read in January.

There are thirty-one of them.

I’m a goals genius.

Week One

Noor, Nnedi Okorafor – A heavily augmented woman called AO is attacked in the marketplace, after which — she is extremely strong due to all the augmentations — she goes on the run across Nigeria with a Fulani herdsman she meets. A whole world of surveillance follows.

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, Tamsyn Muir – What a weirdo Tamsyn Muir is. I say it with love! Princess Floralinda is the story of a princess imprisoned in, yep, a forty-flight tower. On every flight there is a different monster, and at the bottom there is a dragon, and none of the princes make it very far. With the help of a horrible little fairy, Floralinda slowly begins to make her way downward. But as she’s changing the state of things in the tower, she changes the state of things in herself as well.

Where the Children Take Us, Zain Asher – This was a Booklist read! It’s Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sister’s memoir. Did you know poor Chiwetel Ejiofor was in a horrible accident with his father when he was a kid? He and his dad were on a road trip around Nigeria to help Ejiofor connect with his heritage, and there was a car accident, and the dad died and the son was very badly injured; and anyway, then Zain Asher’s mum raised them all by herself while running a pharmacy in London. The book’s a love letter to Asher’s mother, although I am not personally a huge fan of memoirs.

The Thief on a Winged Horse, Kate Mascarenhas – I got this for Christmas! The author of The Psychology of Time Travel, which I was so in love with, wrote another book that only (curses!) got published in the UK and not in the US. It’s about a dysfunctional family that makes magic dolls, a young dollmaker who comes to town and insists on joining them, and a daughter of the family who wants to learn her family’s dollmaking secrets too, despite family traditions that reserve those secrets only to the men. It’s a slightly chillier book than The Psychology of Time Travel, but fascinating and enjoyable anyway.

Silence Is a Sense, Layla Alammar – A sort of literary Rear Window, from the point of view of a Syrian refugee with post-traumatic mutism. From her window in a council flat, she watches her neighbors and writes essays, anonymously, about refugees and Muslim identity. When her local mosque is the victim of a vicious attack of vandalism, she’s drawn further into the community. The writing in this was gorgeous, although the ending was maybe just a little pat.

Just Last Night, Mhairi McFarlane – My first time out with Mhairi McFarlane! Recommended by my lovely pal Katie, McFarlane’s a Scottish author who writes lovely books about friendship and romance. Just Last Night follows Eve and her group of friends in the aftermath of one of their deaths. As Eve grapples with the loss of Susie, she’s also forced to reckon with her feelings about Ed — which everyone in the group has known about for years. The romance in this one is slightly back-burnered, and I’d more call it women’s fiction, much as I hate the term?, because it’s really more about Eve’s journey of self-acceptance.

The Dating Playbook, Farrah Rochon – I read this out of order! Which is a shame, because the inciting incident of the series sounds delightful: Three different women discover they’re dating the same man. They ditch the man and become the best of friends, and each of the books in the series focuses on the romance of one of them. The Dating Playbook follows Taylor Powell, a personal trainer who gets her big break when NFL player Jamar Dixon hires her to get him in shape to rejoin the league after a major injury. It’s funny and sweet and contains fake dating: everything you want in a romance novel! I can’t wait to read the others in the series!

The Perishing, Natashia Deon – This one’s a literary fantasy novel about a girl who shows up in 1930s Los Angeles with no memory of how she got there or who she was before. She heals with inhuman speed and — later on — realizes that she seems to possess memories from former lives. Lou’s story, which is vivid in its depiction of the time and place, is interspersed with glimpses of a woman called Sarah in the 2100s, who reflects on her past relationships and the generations-long struggle for equality. The novel’s light on speculative elements and is definitely more on the literary fiction side of things, which suits its plotting (uneven), characterization (wonderful), and writing (gorgeous).

Week Two

Assembly, Natasha Brown – A short novel about refusal.

The Days of Afrekete, Asali Solomon – I read and enjoyed Solomon’s first novel, so I thought I’d pick this one up! It was fine though perhaps not quite my thing. It’s a novel that alternates chapters between a rather fraught dinner party (delicious) and the protagonist’s college career and tumultuous relationship with one of her exes. Both bits were interesting, but I’d actually have loved it to be just a dinner party book. Y’all know my feelings on bottle episodes!

Diary of a Provincial Lady, EM Delafield – A very long time ago, all the cool bloggers were reading this. It is perhaps not surprising that it took me like ten years to get to it. I found it tiresome when I started, but then I realized that the trick was to read it as it was written — in brief installments, like a newspaper column. Once I caught wise and started reading it like that, a few entries at a time, I quite enjoyed it. Not to reread, but it was an amusing entertainment of an evening.

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville, Akash Kapur – Only once ever have I been so intrigued by the book featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review that I’ve read that review in its entirety, the front page bit and the rest of it that you have to skip to, before reading the rest of the book review. This is because I am fascinated by cults. Auroville wasn’t a cult, but it was, at least, cult-adjacent. Kapur and his wife both grew up in Auroville, and his wife’s parents died there under troubling circumstances. Better to Have Gone tells the story of the founding of this intentional community outside of Pondicherry in India and the deaths of the two people who raised his wife. (Whiskey Jenny and I went to Pondicherry when we were in India, but not to Auroville. I did buy a comforter for my bed, though, that was made in Auroville!)

The Road Trip, Beth O’Leary – Remember how I said a minute ago that I love bottle episodes? Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip is one, and it was great. Addie and her sister and a stranger who’s hitching a ride with them are on their way to their friend’s wedding when she’s in a car crash with her ex-boyfriend Dylan and his horrible posh friend Marcus. They all pile into the car to go to the wedding (it’s a bank holiday weekend, so! no trains!), and everyone is mad at everyone, and I, obviously, loved it. Easily my favorite of Beth O’Leary’s books thus far. Par for the course with her, it deals with some heavy issues, including alcoholism and sexual assault. But also: ROAD TRIP.

Peter Cabot Gets Lost, Cat Sebastian – I mean! As I was already on the road trip theme! It just made good sense to read Cat Sebastian’s latest, Peter Cabot Gets Lost, in which a rich queer Cabot boy goes on a road trip with a (not rich) former classmate he doesn’t have a crush on. As they make their way across America, they’re forced to reassess their initial ideas about each other and also sometimes there is only one bed. Great stuff. Classic. It’s a very very soft book, as Cat Sebastian’s books always are these days, mainly comprising conversations and sex and occasional stops to check out weird Americana. Also, is it a journey to California or a journey to self-acceptance? YOU DECIDE.

Our Wild Farming Life, Lynn Cassells and Sandra Baer – Another memoir for Booklist! This one about farming. My God, farming sounds hard; equally, I bet James Herriot would have liked these two women and their animals. Food for thought.

A Lesson in Vengeance, Victoria Lee – omg so fun. This is the lesbian witch YA dark academia book you’ve been dreaming of. It’s got similar vibes to Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers, except for it’s more focused on academia — our protagonist, Felicity Darrow (they all have names like this), is studying but pretending she’s not studying a bunch of dead witches who once attended her school. She’s also grieving her girlfriend’s death the previous year, a death in which Felicity and witchcraft may or may not have been complicit. Ellis Haley, for her part, wants to write a book about the dead girls, for which she needs to research how to get away with murder. Setting aside the question of whether anything in this book makes sense, it was fucking fun as hell and I will certainly read more by this author.

The Eternal Audience of One, Rémy Ngamije – I loved this! It’s about a Rwandan Namibian guy and his family and his friends. Actually I have a pretty hard time describing what it’s about! But what I will say is that it made me laugh out loud several times, and I am n o t a person who typically laughs out loud at books. Also, love to see Namibia getting its flowers for welcoming refugees from other parts of Africa that were experiencing unrest in the late twentieth century. What a great country.

Week Three

Subtle Blood, KJ Charles – This is the third in a romance series I generally liked but also felt kind of weird about because it’s set in England between the wars, and the Big Bad is a giant international conspiracy of all-knowing people who are highly placed in government and they want to hoard all the wealth. JUST FELT WEIRD. Anyway, Subtle Blood was my favorite in the series because there is the least amount of the giant international conspiracy, and moreover, Kim’s really excellent former fiancee shows back up and I love her.

The Flatshare, Beth O’Leary – Delighted by my success with The Road Trip, I tried the final Beth O’Leary book I hadn’t read yet, so I read The Flatshare. I loved it more than The Switch but less than The Road Trip, and I was very touched by the friendship between Tiffy and Richie.

Mr. Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater – After my absolute adoration of the Raven Cycle, the first book in Maggie Stiefvater’s new Dreamers Trilogy kinda left me cold. Mr. Impossible is just a way way way better book (it contains the following sentence, which I loved: “She was dressed in a cocktail dress that said, Look at me, and also said, Now that you’re looking, did you notice I think you’re stupid? It was a good dress.“), but I still did not feel emotionally connected to it. Everyone is mad at everyone else! The only bits where I felt emotionally connected to the book were when two characters liked each other, so it was pretty much just when Matthew was helping out Jordan and they were bonding. I’ll read the third book though!

A Lot Like Adios, Alexis Daria – I maybe loved this a scootch less than Daria’s prior book, mainly because the previous one was about a telenovela and that’s my jam. This one was still really fun though. It’s also a solid entrant in the “people with jobs” genre, so there was a lot of stuff about the central couple achieving professional satisfaction. I love that shit.

The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales, Yoon Ha Lee – I am not 100% convinced that I’m smart enough for flash fiction. That’s all, that’s the review.

Lore Olympus, vol 1, Rachel Smythe – Maybe Lore Olympus was too hyped up for me to love it and/or maybe I needed to have read further into it. As I was reading it, I kinda had no idea why the characters were Greek gods at all? Readers please weigh in: Should I press on? Does it take a little while to form a true emotional connection to this book and these characters?

Once More Upon a Time, Rokshani Chokshi – I really should have paired this with Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower, as they are both novella-length twists on fairy tales. This is about a couple who were once in love, but because of magical shenanigans, they no longer are. In order to get the life they want, as non-married not-in-love people, they have to go on a road trip to do a favor for a witch. You’ll never guess what happens over the course of the road trip! Never ever once will you ever guess!

Week Four

School Days, Patrick Chamoiseau, trans. Linda Coverdale – Look at meeeee I picked up a book while browsingggggg at the libraryyyyyy! I do this all the time, but usually only from the new book shelves. Doing it from the old book shelves felt very smart of me. I have been meaning to read something by Patrick Chamoiseau for ages, and this story about a young boy attending an extremely colonial Martinique school that does all sorts of colonial things. It evoked a really vivid sense of place, despite being overall way too slow-paced for me.

Don’t You Forget about Me, Mhairi McFarlane – Another repeat author in January! I liked this one more than Just Last Night, because the romance was more central, plus there was a pub. It weirdly also had a lot of similarities to The Road Trip. Reading synergy? It’s about a woman leaving an emotionally abusive relationship, and she gets a job in a pub that turns out to be owned by her first love. Great stuff. Plus there is a dog.

Radha and Jai’s Recipe for Romance, Nisha Sharma – I love this type of YA romance, but this specific one didn’t work for me. The central characters were constantly blowing up at, lying to, or misunderstanding each other, so it didn’t feel like a satisfying or coherent relationship arc. I loved all the stuff about cooking and dance though!

Deaf Utopia: A Memoir — and a Love Letter to a Way of Life, Nyle DiMarco with Robert Siebert – Why am I suddenly reading so many memoirs for Booklist? I was not familiar with Nyle DiMarco, but reading the book caused me to get to watch a bunch of quite cool performances on Dancing with the Stars. Also I love that he represented ASL conversations with the structure and syntax of ASL. I haven’t seen that before!

Future Feeling, Joss Lake – For such an allegorical story (I don’t like allegories) with at least two daddy-kink-heavy sex scenes (I am from the South, where adults call their fathers Daddy, so therefore I cannot with it as a sexual thing), Future Feeling was unexpectedly enjoyable for me. It was funny and heartfelt, and also I loved the escapist fantasy of a global network of trans minders looking out for all trans people.

L.A. Weather, Maria Amparo Escandon – I am actually not sure why this has been getting such a huge marketing push! It’s enjoyable, but I expected there to be more there there, somehow. One thing I did love was the representation of Jewish/Catholic syncretism within this Mexican American family. Apart from that, it’s a perfectly fine family novel! It’s everywhere because publicity decisions were made that it should be everywhere!

The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed – OH how skin-crawly this book made me, in a good way! It’s set in a post-everything-disaster world, and its protagonist, Reid, gets an acceptance letter from a university, her ticket out of the life that keeps her and her family and everyone she knows working flat out to just barely get by. Her mother doesn’t believe the university is even real, but Reid is determined to take her chance at a better life. The truly special thing about this book, though, is Mohamed’s depiction of the Cad, an infection that lives under the skin of Reid and her mother and numerous others, and it might be semi-sentient. The Annual Migration of Clouds is about hope and choice in the most fascinating ways, a very very strong book to end the month on.

WHEW that was a lot of books. I feel like that song “88 Lines about 44 Women.” How was your January?

The post The Thirty-One Books of January appeared first on Reading the End.

Jebi is a specific type of protagonist that I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but is definitely my cup of tea. In many ways they’re very naive, despite having a sister who’s a freedom fighter. They don’t want to become involved in politics; they don’t feel qualified to be involved in politics; they aren’t any good at doing politics. What they want is to be left alone to do their art. Or as a next-best outcome, they don’t want to be actively contributing to the imprisonment of a sentient being and the destruction of their own culture. But as it turns out, there come times when you have to make a choice — and once Jebi has made theirs, they have to keep making it, or lose everything.

What’s particularly neat about this choice of protagonist is that all the other characters clearly have their own shit going on, and nobody’s clearly in the right. For instance, Jebi doesn’t want to kill people. A perfectly cromulent position! I too do not want to kill people. By contrast, their sister Bongsunga deeply wants the colonizers out, which is also a very cromulent position. Better yet, Yoon Ha Lee has a real gift for imbuing numerous different characters with protagonist energy. Vei, the shatteringly hot swordswoman who Jebi has a crush on, very clearly has her own shit going on, to the point that you could easily see a future book shifting into her POV. Same for Bongsunga. Same even for minor characters, like Vei’s parents — despite their relatively small amount of screen time, you’re so aware that these are not just satellites for the characters we actually care about. They’re all people who have their own stories and their own lives.

Speaking of characters with real protagonist energy, I absolutely loved the dragon automaton. Its name is Arazi and it acquires a telepathic connection with Jebi and I am here for it. I know that I have spent the years since the Heralds of Valdemar books trying to play like I’m too cool for telepathic connections with supernatural creatures, but the fact is that I am not now and never have been too cool for it. (See also: The Bone Shard’s Daughter.) And like, how refreshing that Yoon Ha Lee is not too cool for it either, despite being a very deeply cool writer. (See also: Nicefox Gambit et seq.) Arazi is a tremendously sweet and great character. It’s very very very smart (and in different ways than a human is smart!), but also in many ways a little innocent. I adored it.

If I had to register a complaint about the book, I guess it’s reasonable to say that Jebi’s crush on Vei progressed a little fast once things got going. The transition from “chill boning” to “I would bathe in the blood of your enemies for you” happened kind of fast, but you know what? I don’t care! These are hard times, and I love an artist one / murder one romance, and Vei is very hot and Jebi has a dragon ally, so it is no surprise they were so into each other. So there! I loved it! I would read a whole other book that was just Jebi and Vei and Arazi flying around the world doing stuff. Maybe petty crimes / acts of sabotage against the Razanei regime? Petty crimes, but for justice? I’d read it.

Basically, I’m thrilled to have this new standalone fantasy novel from Yoon Ha Lee. The magic system is very cool but not nearly as difficult to grab onto as the one in Machineries of Empire series, so if you’ve been wanting to try this author but nervous that his books will be too hard to follow, give Phoenix Extravagant a try.

Note: I received a review copy of Phoenix Extravagant from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

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Dear Yoon Ha Lee,

Thank you for the matchless gift of Kel Cheris and Shuos Jedao. They are the quintessential match-up of stern stoicism and absolute ferality, and I fucking live for their uneasy alliance/?friend?ship? (Would we call them friends? I cannot decide. Uneasy allies, anyway!)

I often find it a challenge to read books with a lot of worldbuilding, but I’m so glad that my pal Renay evangelized enough that I picked up Nicefox Gambit a few years back,¹ because it has brought me so much joy. This month, I finally picked up Hexarchate Stories, and while everything in it was terrific, I felt the most exquisite happiness reading “Glass Cannon.” Evidently my heart had been longing for more content in which Cheris finds Jedao maddening and they do murdery adventures together. When my family goes fake-camping (like, in cabins and shit) later this year, I am planning to bring the whole Machineries of Empire series on that trip and do a big reread. I am indescribably excited about that prospect.

Thank you once again for writing these books and creating these characters. I love them so much.

Kind regards,
Jenny

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How did you get into fanfic? Do you remember the first fandoms you read/wrote in?

Technically, the first fanfic that I wrote was a Star Trek parody co-written with a friend when I was in middle school. We’d never really heard of the term fanfic and we weren’t connected to any community of fans. Another friend attended a Star Trek convention that year, but my mom was busy and couldn’t take me.

Anyway, the parody was a (bad) play featuring a Mary Sue character who grew exasperated with the men of the Original Trek crew. There was a terrible running gag in which she would exclaim, “You…you…you men!” over and over, and Very Literal Poorly Written Spock interpreted this as a spaceship name “UUU Men.” As I said, it wasn’t any good, but it was fun to write.

It wouldn’t be until years later that I rediscovered fanfic in college, this time in the context of anime. I came across some Rurouni Kenshin fic on some Geocities shrine, and also a Lovecraft/Neon Genesis Evangelion crossover called “Children of an Elder God,” which I should finish reading since it apparently is still up on the web!

You’ve had the fairly unusual experience of writing fanfic for a thing and then /actually writing the thing,/ with Legend of the Five Rings. What was that transition like? Did your background in writing fic for it help or hinder?

It was a lot of fun but a lot of work! The “ascended fanfic writer” thing was not too unusual in L5R; longtime story writer Rich Wulf was originally an L5R ficwriter with his well-loved “Rokugan 2000” stories, which cast the samurai fantasy setting of L5R in a modern-day cyberpunkish variant, and my friend Nancy Sauer, who also joined the Story Team, started out in fanfic.

The main difference in the transition was, of course, the external constraints. Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), which then owned the L5R property, preferred 2,000-word stories, so I had to confine myself to that length. But my long familiarity with the setting was generally helpful. In fact, before I tried out for the Story Team position, I reread over 1,000 (that is not a typo) L5R official stories from a period of some fifteen years to prepare. Most of those stories were quite short, but some were longer. It was a lot of research!

More broadly, how has fanfic (reading or writing it, or just being in fandom!) influenced your professional work? One thing I’ve noticed about fandom is its focus on bodies and embodiment — did that influence the way you thought and wrote about Jedao, who moves among bodies?

I’m afraid that particular concern predates my exposure to others’ fanfic and comes from the sf/f author Jack L. Chalker. I would not recommend Chalker generally to reader today, but his fiction showed a general preoccupation with bodies and gender and shape-changing/body-swapping. His Spirits of Flux & Anchor series, which I read to pieces as a kid, is in some ways a direct ancestor of my Machineries of Empire series.

On the other hand, the use of crackalicious tropes like amnesia and curtainfic interludes definitely comes from fanfic. I’ve written some short flash pieces in a “seven things” format inspired by fanfic’s “five things,” swapping out the number for worldbuilding numerological reasons. So it’s true that I owe a very large debt to fanfic for broadening my idea of what a narrative can look like.

Are there particular fics or authors that influenced you or that you often go back to?

Yahtzee’s “Phoenix Burning” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for its worldbuilding and clever plotting; Rheanna’s “Vivere” (Angel) for its quiet beauty and psychological depth; Helen Keeble’s “1000 Nights of Darkness” (Legend of the Five Rings/Angel) for its flawless fusion of two disparate settings, humor, and grace notes of hope. Of course, I could list many more, but that’s a start.

What do you love best about fanfic as a medium? And are there things about the fic world that you wish would change/improve?

I love the sheer creativity and joy of the medium, and the fact that it has so many different faces depending on who you are and what you’re looking for. I guess I would change the anti/shipwar culture if I could. These are (generally) fictional characters and I’m a ship-and-let-ship (or not-ship, if you’re writing gen/worldbuilding/etc.) kind of person.

Tell me some of your favorite tropes! And/or: Are there any tropes you really hate except for That One Fic that wore it best?

Oh, gosh, where would I even start? Things I love: Amnesia, bodyswap, curtainfic and fluff, AUs (canon-divergence, coffee shop, high school, IN SPAAAAACE, vampires, anything), crossovers…that being said, I also love weird meta and deconstruction. Honestly, I’m easy.

I wouldn’t say I hate the trope, but I’m usually a hard sell on hurt/comfort because I don’t really get the dynamic. That being said, I have certainly read a lot of excellent hurt/comfort because this is a trope where one is spoilt for choice!

If you’re a shippy fic person, what are some canon things that make you ship people? Or if not, what elements in a canon make you eager to read or write fic of the thing?

Ha, I often go for dark, messed-up pairings between people who are absolutely terrible for each other, and who may also be terrible people. I was an Angel(us)/Buffy shipper precisely because that was in no way a healthy relationship! But I sometimes also enjoy happy ships–pretty much any two of the main characters in The Good Place, for instance.

Could you share some fic recs for fandom newbies?

I’ll have a go at a few that require minimal canon familiarity, in no particular order:

• Sholio’s “Cute But Prickly” (Iron Fist), in Ward gets turned into a potted cactus and Danny and Colleen have to figure out how to turn him back. It’s hilarious.
• For something darker, kangeiko’s “The Harvest of Orhoch” (The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin) stands alone, and is a tragic history/fable.
• For something funny/sexy/heartwarming, friskaz’s “Grande Soy Triple Dirty Chai” (Suits) is a barista AU where you don’t need to know the canon at all. It’s pure enjoyment.
• For any Hamilton fans, Fahye’s brilliant fic in verse “Rise Up” shouldn’t be missed. [blogger’s note: I ardently co-sign this, I adore this fic.]
• And for female friendship and culture clashes, Rheanna’s “Lunch and Other Obscenities” (Star Trek [2009]) is really great.

Thanks so much to the wondrous Yoon Ha Lee for doing this interview with me, and please do check out his Machineries of Empire series. You won’t regret it! He can be found on Twitter and his website!

The post Authors in Fandom: An Interview with Yoon Ha Lee 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.

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Revenant Gun picks up nine years after the end of Raven Stratagem, as the new government Cheris-and-Jedao founded tries to fight off efforts by the old hexarchate to regain their former power. Most notably, the ruthless and inventive Hexarch Kujen has resurfaced, and he has woken up a younger (less rebellious — he hopes) version of Jedao’s ghost to help him. Cheris-and-Jedao has disappeared. As it turns out, she/he/they are on a mission to assassinate Kujen (who we can all agree deserves it).

Phew. That was a lot of words to say. If you’re able, I would advise reading all three of these books one after another. They contain a lot of names and concepts and weirdness, and it took me a little while to get back in the swing of things. (Big surprise, I know.)

The verdict? Revenant Gun is an exciting, suspenseful conclusion to the series. Yoon Ha Lee introduces a potentially serious complication in the form of a second Jedao awakened and embodied by Kujen to win wars to sustain the existing calendar. (There’s a very funny — to me — running gag about a third Jedao, a kitten owned by a minor character.) This means, of course, two Jedao-ish characters working against each other, which could have been too much of a muchness but in fact works out to heighten the pitch of both the emotions and the suspense.

I mention the introduction of a second Jedao as a kind of synecdoche for Yoon Ha Lee’s relentless talent for inventive complication. It would have been easy (for me) for Revenant Gun to operate with the players already on the board, building to a climactic battle and a success for Cheris’s new calendar. Instead Lee continues to throw new ideas and complexities at the reader and the characters right up to the very end, requiring a constant re-sifting-through of loyalties and ideology. The result is a distinct lack of clear villainy or clear heroism. Everyone here is trying to correct wrongs they’ve perceived in the past, with the inevitable result of introducing shiny new wrongs that new people will have to launch assaults against.

Obviously, I love this series. It continues not to be for the faint of heart, and readers will probably benefit (I did) by not worrying too too much about sorting through and perfectly understanding each and every detail. But it’s superb and weird and strange and absolutely worth the effort you’ll invest.

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With that said, I had a pretty terrific reading year in 2017. I encountered some new instant favorites, books I loved so much I shoved them at everyone I knew and immediately requested them for birthday or Christmas. I love books and I love reading and I love y’all, so thanks all the way around for being great.

Monstress, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Never shall I give up my fondness for monster girls. Monstress is a weird and wonderful comic about a girl with special powers who finds herself at war with the whole world. The art is unfathomably lovely.

Iron Cast, Destiny Soria

Two best friends create magical illusions at an illegal night club in Boston, just before Prohibition begins. Iron Cast features found family to the max, including a best-friendship that’s more central to the characters than their romances (which is rare as hell), and some genuinely cool magic. If you’re a reader on the hunt for more one-and-dones in YA, Iron Cast is for you.

Borderline and Phantom Pains, Mishell Baker

I haven’t read much urban fantasy, but Borderline made me want to change that. Mishell Baker’s borderline protagonist is a double amputee and survivor of a suicide attempt, recruited to work for a mysterious organization called the Arcadia Project. Creepy fairies abound (my fave), plus lots of details about the nitty-gritty of cognitive therapy for BPD.

The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso

Contrary to popular belief, I do not like books solely based on their having French flaps. But French flaps help. The Woman Next Door is a lovely, quiet exploration of the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa: the story of two women whose enmity softens into something that is not quite friendship but no longer exactly hostility. It’s also a story about complicity in oppression that doesn’t insist upon redemption. I loved it.

Testosterone Rex, Cordelia Fine

I mean, obviously. Cordelia Fine remains brilliant, and she is so good at making complicated science accessible to a layperson. My big complaint with Testosterone Rex is that it doesn’t talk about non-cis people hardly at all. However, it makes many brilliant arguments about the role hormones like testosterone play in gender and gendered behavior. Read it, and read Delusions of Gender.

White Tears, Hari Kunzru

I said it when I read it, and I’ll say it again now: What the entire fuck. White Tears is a story about white appropriation of black culture, but it’s also a terrifying ghost story and a wild wild ride. It has one of the scariest endings I’ve ever encountered in a book. It’s brilliant and bananas. Get on it.

Amberlough, Lara Elena Donnolly

Amberlough is a secondary world fantasy (without any magic) about the performers in a cabaret confronting the rise of fascism in their country. If you can’t face that sort of a thing during the Trump presidency, it’s absolutely fair play. But if you are up to it, Amberlough is a strange and lovely book, a fantasy novel for lovers of the darkest bits of Cabaret.

Thorn, Intisar Khanani

One of the truly lovely things that happened this year was Intisar Khanani’s book deal with HarperTeen. Soon you’ll be able to get Thorn in a shiny new edition, and you should. It’s a retelling of the fairy tale “The Goose Girl,” a story that’s sad but hopeful, a story about good people trying their best. Intisar Khanani remains one of my favorite fantasy writers currently working.

Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee

I admit that I was fearful of reading Ninefox Gambit, which I’d heard was a particularly dense bit of science fiction. But I’m so glad I pressed onward with it. Ninefox Gambit might be my actual favorite book of the year; I liked it so much that I ran straight out to the library to get Raven Stratagem. It’s about an imperfectly loyal soldier who has to share a brain with a famously brilliant, famously murderous general from the past. I loved it so much. I want you to love it, too.

Song of the Current, Sarah Tolcser

Such an excellent YA adventure novel. Caro takes to the river with a crateful of mystery cargo in the hopes that she can save her father from prison. But when the cargo turns out to be a boy — a snooty-as-hell boy, but good in a fight — she finds herself enmeshed in more plotting and violence than she’d bargained for. And look at that cover!

Starfish, Akemi Dawn Bowman

In YA as in adult fiction, I tend to gravitate more towards SFF stories. But Starfish won me over. It deals with sexual and emotional abuse in families in a way that I’ve encountered virtually never, and it’s exceptionally honest about the impact of growing up with an abusive parent. I loved Starfish, even more so because the author was able to take critique of some of the language in her book, and make a change for future editions.

Jane, Unlimited, Kristin Cashore

If you’d asked me what I expected as a follow-up to Kristin Cashore’s Graceling series, the last thing I’d have said would have been “Rebecca as a choose-your-own adventure, by way of Diana Wynne Jones.” But that’s what I got: Five separate stories in five separate genres, each most wonderfully stranger than the last.

I wish you strength in the New Year, and all the glorious books you can gobble up. What were some of your 2017 faves?

The post 2017 Reading in Review appeared first on Reading the End.

WHAT A GREAT BOOK. I confess that I delayed reading Ninefox Gambit, recent well-deserved winner of the Locus Award for First Novel, given that all the reviews I read of it said that it was SF as hell and explained absolutely nothing. And look: That was correct information. Several people explained to me in advance the whole deal with calendrical rot and what it all meant, and even so, I was at sea for the first AT LEAST forty pages, like to the point that I did not feel confident I had grasped the meaning of any of the events that had unfolded up to that point.

“Wow you are doing a great job selling this book Jenny” I KNOW I KNOW but let me get to the point.

Well, no, okay, I’ll summarize it first. I’m not going to worry too much about the technical aspects, since you won’t understand them anyway until you’re halfway through the sequel. Bear with me. A very orderly Order Muppet indeed, Cheris, has been tapped to deal with a group of rebels (heretics) who are adhering to a different belief system (calendar) that threatens the stability of the government (hexarchate). But she can’t do it alone. Too Orderly. To help her out, they are depositing the world’s most ever chaotic Chaos Muppet, Jedao, into her brain. Once upon a time he was the Ender Wiggin of the hexarchate, winning vicious battles against impossible odds, right up until the day he slaughtered millions of people — enemies and allies alike — and then turned his gun on his own staff. Does he have a hidden agenda? Read it and find out!

Okay, now I will get to the point. If you have interest at all in watching brilliant people be mercilessly competent while simultaneously battling their inner demons, Ninefox Gambit is your book. (Black Sails may also be your show but that’s going to be a longer, separate conversation.) The trick for Jedao is attaining a victory without any use of the hexarchate’s best magic tricks, against an enemy with unbreachable defenses. The trick for Cheris is not to be (ideologically) seduced by Jedao, who has nothing but his words and his brains for weapons but who tends to triumph against insane odds every time he gets the chance. And the trick for the hexarchate, of course, is to avoid another mass slaughter by a general they chose to put in the field.

I loved this book, y’all. I do not tend to enjoy SF (or fantasy, actually) where there is lots of new terminology to remember, but I fell into Ninefox Gambit like a ton of bricks. I had a severe and annoying case of mentionitis. I drove the far, far drive to a separate, far-away library branch because I couldn’t wait for the library holds system to acquire the sequel, The Raven Stratagem. This is going to be one of my best books of 2017, and I want you to love it as much as I do.

Here is what I can do for you. If you wish to read Ninefox Gambit but aren’t 100% sure you can roll with the very ess-eff-y SF-ness of it, I give you permission to tweet at me (@readingtheend) or email me (readingtheend AT gmail DOT com) with any questions you may have at any stage, and I promise I will answer them, to the level of detail that you require.

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