2019 JENNY IS FUN.

Now that literally everyone but me has done their best of 2018 post, I thought I’d enter the game. You have ceased to care but I CANNOT BE STOPPED. We’re breaking this business down by categories, so let’s get into it. First up: YA!

I read a ton this year, but somehow I don’t feel like I got in as much YA reading as I wanted! Luckily there were some standouts. The Summer of Jordi Perez is a doll of an f/f contemporary romcom, with a fat aspiring fashion designer MC, and plenty of emotional negotiation. It felt like reading an injection of sunshine. Seafire, by Natalie Parker, is the perfect ladies seafaring adventure that I needed to round out my year of reading. If you enjoyed Sarah Tolcser’s excellent Song of the Current series (I did!), Seafire is a good readalike. The girls in it are fierce, and their friendships are the book’s center. It’s also got marvelous worldbuilding. Hugely recommend. (Thanks to Charlotte for the rec!)

I have raved in this space a bunch already about Anna-Marie McLemore, but brace yourself for a bit more raving about her latest, Blanca and Roja. It’s about two sisters in a family that always has two girls; and when the younger one reaches a certain age that I cannot currently remember, one of the two girls is transformed into a swan. Blanca and Roja deconstructs the good-sister-evil-sister trope in ways that are consistently unexpected and lovely. The consistency with which McLemore produces these beautifully written queer Latina fairy tales blows me away. She’s one of those authors who makes me feel lucky to be a reader. (If you liked Sarah McCarry’s books, McLemore is similarly dreamy and gorgeous.)

(Hey, when is Sarah McCarry going to write another book?)

I’ve noticed that the less literary fiction I read, the fewer authors I read from other countries. I’m hoping to change this in 2019! I’d like to read more genre fiction by authors from other countries, even though I recognize that less of it gets published in America even than the heavily-American literary fiction genre. Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell, came to me via the Tournament of Books, which I was half-assedly trying to participate in by real-quick reading a short entrant before bed. I do not recommend this strategy. Fever Dream is incredibly scary — one of those horror books where you are deeply uneasy from the get-go, and the feeling of unease persists long after the book is over.

Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater reminds me of Helen Oyeyemi a little, in the dreaminess of the writing and the perpetual uncertainty about what’s real. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel about a Nigerian child who has more than one self inside her. I am not sure how else to describe this book. Trigger warning for rape. The writing is unbelievably gorgeous, the book is deeply strange, I loved it.

Occasionally someone will come to me asking for a book rec where the writing, the characters, and the plot are all superb. This is a very hard rec request to fulfill, and I pretty much just always shove Fingersmith at them. But now I have another book that meets these requirements, and it is Esi Edugyan’s wonderful historical novel, Washington Black. Though the first bit of the story is hard to read (it’s set on a plantation in Barbados in the early 1800s), it’s absolutely worth pushing through. Washington Black is a slave who gets taken on as a sort of apprentice and assistant to the plantation owner’s brother, a scientist and abolitionist who is working less on abolishing slavery than he is trying to build an airship. I was absolutely blown away by this book: It explores so many themes and ideas and histories without ever feeling overstuffed, and I wrote down approximately ten million quotes from it because of how insightful and interesting the writing is.

My most-recommended book of the year — although partly because I didn’t read Washington Black until December — is Tara Westover’s Educated. Recommended to me by the wonderful For Real podcast, it’s a memoir about a girl who grew up in a extreme survivalist Mormon family that didn’t get her a birth certificate or send her to school. I can’t overstate how bonkers this book is, and I 90% recommended it to people to ensure that I wouldn’t have to be alone with all the shit that went down in this woman’s life. It’s about the ways abuse can sit beside love in a family, and Westover does not downplay her ongoing trauma.

My other two best-of-nonfiction picks are about gender and race and how they function in our lives. Ijeoma Iluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race is a terrific primer on some of the most common questions and ideas that come up in conversations about race in America. She’s typically sharp and critical, exploring the many, many ways racism continues to shape American life in systemic ways. (If you haven’t yet read her interview with Rachel Dolezal, you should do so now.) Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an quite-academic book about sexism that’s worth plowing through if you can. I screamed YES so many times while reading it.

The wonderful Bridget put me onto Jade City with her relentless advocacy of it, and I am not sorry she did. It’s kind of a mafia/martial arts/magic story set in an alternate universe where jade gives you magical strength and a group of powerful families controls the country in a delicate balance. Fonda Lee’s worldbuilding is superb, down to gestures and phrases that make her world feel textured and real. I loved it and I can’t wait for the sequel. The Descent of Monsters, by JY Yang, is actually the third in its novella series, but my favorite in the series so far. It’s written partly as a bureaucratic report, which is — of course — the way to my heart. I’ve loved watching Yang grow as a writer over the course of the Tensorate series, and I remain perpetually in delight to see what they do next.

SL Huang’s Zero Sum Game rivals Seafire for making me just feel happy while reading it. It’s just a damn good adventure that reminds you why you like reading. Cas Russell is a math genius and minor criminal who gets sucked into a corporate conspiracy that goes far beyond anything she could have imagined. Grudging respect is built. Math is used to do fights. It fucking rules. (Sequel to follow in 2019 – yay!)

And that’s it for 2018! Did you read any of these? What were some of your favorites for the year? Are you going to read Washington Black or do I need to pester you about it some more?

The post The Best of 2018 appeared first on Reading the End.

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

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

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

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

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

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