The Space Between the Stars

I go back and forth about putting the book name in the name of the blog post, but you know, I think it's useful to know what you're getting into: today, I lean in that direction.

The Space Between the Stars, by Anne Corlett, is a book that I received for review from Netgalley, and the blurb couldn't be more up my alley. Post-viral civilization collapse! A ragtag band of survivors aboard a spaceship! A lone wolf developing grudging respect for her new compatriots!  What's not to love?

But I don't love it. There are a few things that come together, some of which fall into the "just not for me" category and some of which are, I think, real weaknesses.  "Just not for me" is that the characters are all very angry; "actual weaknesses" I would mostly categorize as clunky. Thinking about it more, I think this is an issue book--an after school special-level point-maker.

Jamie is a veterinarian working on a backward colony planet when the plague hits.  Thanks to a long incubation period, it's spread through all the inhabited worlds before anyone realizes the danger, and the fatality rate is 99.9999%--meaning across the known galaxy, there are only a few thousand survivors.  And thanks to the nature of the virus, people who stay close to other people pass the mutating virus back and forth--the denser the population, the higher the fatality.

This does not explain why there aren't more survivors on the cattle station.  However.

Jamie is a bit of a misanthropist and very much a loner.  A few things to know about Jamie: she is separated from her husband. She recently lost a near-full term pregnancy. Her mother died when she was a young teenager.  And she was born as a conjoined twin whose sister died in the surgery to separate them.  So in case you didn't notice, Jamie is a person who is very distant from other people.

We pick up other characters as we go along, and at first I thought the fact that they were all somewhat opaque was going to be a mystery--that everyone would be hiding a secret, or that we would learn that there's more to people than  meets the eye. But although there are some secrets, there's not a lot more nuance--Lena is an eccentric religious zealot; Lowry is a level-headed, spiritual man; Mira is every stereotype of a woman who has suffered sexual abuse (sometimes she reflects contradictory stereotypes at the same time); and so on.

The whole book takes place pretty immediately after the end of the world, but there's not a lot of complexity to the emotions of the characters. Sometimes they get upset, and that's the explanation, but there's no unexpected depth to anyone's reactions.  Eventually it's turned into a story about how society is evil and corrupt and the people who try to run things are out to stomp down on individual choice.  Honestly, I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale right now, too, and once we get into the totalitarian part of the book, the comparisons are too easy to draw, and this book is almost a caricature of that much better one.

There are several autistic characters, as well as others who fall somewhere between extreme introvert and apparently on the spectrum--including Jamie, who is very sensitive to touch and often uncomfortable in social situations.  Sometimes the book almost reads like a fantasy of how much easier it would be to live in the world if there weren't so many people in it, and that maybe it would even be easier to connect. And sometimes that came across in ways that really bothered me, like when Finn, who is explicitly autistic, doesn't want to be touched, but Jamie persists in trying to comfort him, and eventually he holds her hand gratefully.  That is not my understanding of how to handle that kind of touch sensitivity, and it feels kind of disrespectful of that kind of difference.

So sadly, this is not the book I had hoped it would be.  I think what I like in a good apocalypse/dystopia story is how people come together in adversity--to find hope, to find peace, to stand up.  I don't mind if it's a long road to that--whether it's Man vs. Nature or Man vs. Himself, it's about how the human spirit survives.  But these characters are so blank that I just can't find the human spirit in them; all the non-misfits are blank-faced fascists, and the misfits end up monologuing in detail about how there's nothing wrong with living the way they do.  I'm calling this one clunky, preachy, and not for me.

American Gods

Can you believe I never read American Gods before now?  I blame Neverwhere.  I didn't love that one, and that left me a little hesitant to read Neil Gaiman's other big novel.  But then they made it into a TV show and book club picked it for the month and here we are--I wrapped up the novel a couple of days before the show premiered.

Let's start with the novel, since that's how I did it. (Deliberately; I can't read the novel after the show or movie.  Once I've watched it, that's pretty much a commitment not to read the book; see Little Big Lies.)

Shadow is in jail for three years on a small time offense, but he'll be out in just a couple of weeks, and he can't wait to get back to his wife Laura.  When she dies days before his relief, his whole world is pretty much empty--until, on the way to her funeral, he meets Mr. Wednesday, an unorthodox con man who offers Shadow a job.

Mr. Wednesday is charming and insistent, and Shadow is at loose ends, so they begin to cross America together, enlisting other old-timers like Mr. Wednesday in the impending war.  Apparently, the old gods and the new can't get along. Shadow is his driver and assistant, sounding board and sidekick, and he begins to learn about the much, much weirder side of the world.

So, the thing that Neil Gaiman does so well is to place the fantastical and portentous beside the mundane and everyday.  It's what Stephen King does, only where King goes straight to grandiosity and horror, Gaiman lingers in the land of wonder--Gaiman's gods are as mundane, in their own ways, as the human world in which they coexist.  But the power of this book is in the long drives through small towns with their high school athletes' achievements on the welcome signs, the stops for roadside chili and pie (not bad, but not the best chili in the state, however it was advertised), and the neighbors you get to know when you realize that you are unprepared for a Colorado (I think?) winter and need some help finding the long underwear store.

Even Shadow is an everyman--the loss of his wife has him drifting across the top of life, not really digging into it (or maybe he's just like that?)--but he is not prepared for the supernatural that starts to go down.  He takes it in stride like someone on a mild tranquilizer would, in that he realizes that this is impossible nonsense, but also that it's happening and that rolling with it is really the only viable option.

I think that's what I loved best about the book--how it really captured the feel of a diner or an apartment full of old people or a public park in a way that allowed you to follow the story when it drifted into the "backstage" experiences that involve the moon and the world tree.

But (and here we're going to be switching over to episode 1 of the Starz series) this is just where the TV adaptation drops the ball, I think.  Or no, that implies that it tried something and failed; the TV adaptation is playing a totally different game--I was expecting some kind of ball game, but I got pro wrestling instead.

The show could not possibly be more glossy.  It uses slow motion and shifting frame capture rates to create hi-res visuals. There are multiple scenes in which a curtain of blood just washes across the screen, looking like cherry Kool-Aid. The best chili in the state is served at a bar shaped like the inside of an alligator's mouth.  It's a really cool visual--but it goes straight to surreal. The experience of a mundane world that touches a stranger one is missing, because the entire world is strange and hyperfocused.  Instead of seeing the banal in the gods, we are seeing the otherworldly everywhere we turn.

I might be the only person who was not impressed by this.  I'm somewhat less of a sucker for high art on TV than a lot of people--I like a good looking show, but not when the style gets in the way of the substance--characterization, emotion, story--which I think was happening here.

See? Glossy.

Maybe it's that I just finished the book and it was too fresh in my mind.  Maybe it was casting a hunky action hero as our everyman (I cannot picture the actor who plays Shadow smiling.  Cannot.)  Or maybe it's just that I don't like gloss as much as the rest of the world.  But I just couldn't feel at home in the show the way I did in the book. If anyone else runs across a non-glowing review of the show, I'd be interested to read it.  I'm feeling pretty alone in this assessment. 

But I will say, I did really love the book.

Chocolate Heart

The eternal temptation of Netgalley is a lifelong problem that I wrestle with, and one of the hardest things is not to scoop up middle grade books as fast as I can.  I want to read aaaaaallllllll of them with  my eight-year-old, but he is picky enough that I'm hesitant to commit to an ARC with him.

But I could not just walk by The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart, by Stephanie Burgis. It's about a dragon who gets turned into a human girl and decides to be a chocolatier.  I love that you can wrap it up with that unlikely one-liner, but that doesn't come anywhere near capturing the charm of this book.

Aventurine is a dragon who is tired of staying in the cave all day, but is too young to go out on her own.  She's not a scholar like her siblings, and her mother and grandfather are frustrated that she seems so directionless. But she is the stubborn kind of young dragon who will sneak out of the cave to prove her mettle--and run headlong into a mage with a sharp sense of self-preservation.

Trapped in a human body with no way to get home, Aventurine heads to Drachenburg, the nearest human city, to try to make her way. She does not understand humans, and her confusion and frustration with them had my son laughing. As a human, Aventurine discovers chocolate and realizes that she knows exactly what she wants to do with her (new human) life.

Enter the cast of secondary characters, who are, I have to say, the best.  There is her first friend, Silke, who is clever and unconventional and knows the city intimately.  Marina, the cranky, stubborn chocolatier who runs a second-rate chocolate house that should be the best one in the city; Horst, who runs it with her and is somewhat less cranky and stubborn.  We get glimpses of the king and the two princesses, who are different from each other and the most well-rounded tertiary characters I might have ever seen.  We even get to know Aventurine's family over the course of the book--proud, ambitious dragons who know exactly what they think of humans.

Every character here is individual, and they get to do clever things and surprise us. You could rewrite this story from anyone's point of view, even the people who hardly appear in it, and you'd have a fine tale.  I love that Aventurine is cranky and blunt and rather dismissive of humans, but learns to value them even as she learns her own true worth.  I love how her bluster at the beginning gives way to humility and then real competence.  I love that however human she is, she is still always ready to roar.

We got such a kick out of this book, Adam and I.  It was a great readaloud, and a real pleasure.  I have one of Stephanie Burgis's adult novels on my kindle, and you can bet that's coming up in the rotation very soon.

Dope Queen

Busy weeks turn into busier ones and the next month is going to be nuts.  Not sure if I'll be able to keep up with posting. Fair warning!

You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain, by Phoebe Robinson of Two Dope Queens podcast fame, was not my usual thing, but was pretty damned great.  (At first I wrote darmned, like darned and damned together, and I swear I almost left it in because that's a pretty great new word I invented.  But (as you may have noticed), I digress.) "Funny person writes book" is not always my thing; it's something I loved when I was a kid, but I think most of the ones I read now seem pretty shallow.  This book was anything but.

So take Bossypants, and Yes, Please--these are written by famous people who have relationships to maintain, but from whom you really want the gossip.  So it ends up like when you were a kid sneaking an R rated movie hoping for something salacious and you ended up getting My Left Foot and you're like, wha?

But Phoebe (if I may call her Phoebe, which I can, because we're besties now--hey, Pheebs!) is not boring. She gets personal and she gets real--about a lot of things, but especially race.  And I really appreciated that, because I've found that I have a huge appetite for stories about how this big ol' white world we live in can be super awkward for non-white people to put up with. I like being reminded that yes, being black in America is tough, all the time, if only because you never know where the next microaggression is coming.

This is not all the book is about--not by a long shot. My other favorite thing is her cultural references, because she will drill down to a moment in an episode of a show that you watched--yes you did, you know you did--or a movie that she watched over and over as a kid just as often as I did, and she understands just how I think in pop culture references.  There were a lot of great "Yes! That!" moments in here.

But what I appreciated was how real she kept it--not just about race, but about being a woman comic, and about being insecure and confident at the same time, and about being ambitious in a world that doesn't want to support you.  She shared the real experience of being a black woman in entertainment, and it was funny and sweet and real.

And now I have her podcast to listen to, which I'm super excited about and loving so far.  Yay, Phoebe!

I do have one criticism, though it's not about the book cover but the Amazon listing for the book.  You'll notice the colon in the title? Total misuse of a colon.  I understand that it's traditional to use a colon in a subtitle, but I strongly dislike the practice of a colon followed by an "and."  My only crit.  Sorry, Pheobes--love ya, sweetheart!

Gang of Liars

I'm in the middle of a bunch of really great modern classics of the fantasy and sci fi persuasion that I'm enjoying very thoroughly, but somehow I can't stop picking up lightweight YA stuff and whipping through it in the background.  This week's installment of Sharon Off Track is the upcoming One of Us Is Lying, by Karen M. McManus, and a hat tip to Netgalley for the advance copy for review.

It starts out all Breakfast Club, with five very different kids in detention, then takes a twist toward (according to the blurb) Pretty Little Liars, with one of them dead and the other four suspected of his murder. The police are pretty sure they conspired to do it.

But here's the thing: all four are first person POV characters.  We spend time in each of their heads--including during the incident--so the only way for one of them to have done it is for them to be actively lying in their narration of the story.

But...there's no framework for their accounts--these aren't diaries or confessions or anything.  They're straight narrative which would make that kind of lie really cheap, a cheating form of unreliable narrator.  Which leaves us with--who did it?

If I sound intrigued by this book, I completely was, maybe more than it deserved.  It is a straight-up high school story whose drama takes place mostly in the halls and classrooms (and teenagers' bedrooms and family rooms, plus the police station).  This is usually not my jam.  And it's a straight-up whodunit, so if I was expecting anything, it was really trashy pleasure.

But I ended up intrigued by the story.  There were a ton of secondary characters, all very easy to keep straight.  All four characters had friends and love interests and families at one level of involvement or another.  There were secrets--SO many secrets; the victim ran a gossip blog and had a lot of enemies. 

But there was something so much more human about this story than the description offers.  This book contained not one but TWO sets of fiercely loving sisters who support each other.  There was a cathartic breakup, and one that just seemed sad.  There were loyal friends and partly loyal friends and crappy friends and crappy friends who are maybe also evil, and there are adults who do not have it together (and, of course, bungling police--I mean, that's just a detective story inevitability, right?). There are loving parents and indifferent parents and absent parents and parents who are trying but going about it all wrong and those who have been wrong but will maybe make it right.  Guys, there was so much uplift of the human spirit in this book, right beside the salacious gossip!


When it comes to the end--no spoilers--I'm torn.  On one level, it was very satisfying--the information was all there but not pointing right at it.  As a mystery ending, it was very good.  On the level of humanity, on which the book was so surprisingly successful, it was a little weaker--more soap opera and less human condition.  I would love to discuss the ending with someone and its implications, but it's not necessary--it's the ending the story needed.

And that's what this comes down to; you've got a readable book that was so compelling that I was explaining the plot to my husband and he was trying to figure out whodunit with me.  That's a success story if I ever heard one.

War and Empire

The thing about reading KJ Parker books is that, after just a couple, you realize that the unreliable narrator and the twist are definitely coming.  So when I pick up another one (which I always will, because my god, these down-to-earth, irreverent geniuses he writes!), I know that a big surprise is coming. So, like, is that a spoiler?

Who cares?  Mightier than the Sword appeared  on Netgalley and I hopped right on it, as I will do with any KJ Parker novella that pops up in my line of sight.  I'm terrible at unreliable narrators, never do get over believing them, even when I'm sure I shouldn't.  And his narrators--even the scoundrels--are just so darned likeable.  I think it's because they're very, very competent.  Remember Blue and Gold, where the narrator solved about eight different life-or-death problems with one really basic plan?  Remember the bit about his wife?

Mightier than the Sword is another book about a favored son of an empire, winner of wars and highly regarded, given a seemingly impossible task and dealing with personal trouble on top of it.  Our narrator here has proposed to his lady (of the night) friend, of which proposal his aunt the Empress will not approve, and has been sent to investigate the raiders who have been attacking the northern monestaries.

Most of the book is a tour of the northern monestaries, and my Major Thing about monastic life might have fed my love of this part, but anyone who's into political fantasy will be into this.  These are people who are now far from the center of the empire for one reason or another, But who are at the center of their own worlds, and each house has its own way of things--illuminating manuscripts or working the field, rich or poor, strict or lenient.  All being attacked by barbarians we can't pin down.

There are, I'm sure, enough clues to figure it out, if you're willing to follow the twists and turns.  But it's so much more satisfying, in my opinion, to sit back and let everyone's cleverness wash over you.  I know there will be a twist; I suspect someone is going to betray our fellow, though it's possible he'll betray someone himself--you never can tell around these parts.  I don't care.  I am a sucker for competence. 

If you're waiting eagerly for the upcoming continuation of the adventures of Eugenides the Thief from Megan Whalen Turner, let K.J. Parker tide you over.

Monstress, At Last

I got an ARC of Monstress from Netgalley when the first volume, Awakening, came out, and I immediately sat down an read the first five issues straight through.  It's rich, dense, lush, and challenging, with incredible worldbuilding, powerful characters, gorgeous artwork, and incredible adventures.

But the tension was so much that I got overstimulated and put it down.  This happens to me a lot, especially with the best stuff--when I watch movies by myself and they get exciting, I almost always pause the video to get up and walk around. When I'm reading, I often switch from book to book when things get to exciting in the one I'm absorbed in.  I hit my stimulation threshold--especially for the good stuff--really fast.

This was a stupid thing to do, though, because Monstress is amazing. The art is by Sana Takeda, and it is lush and rich and intricate. The story is by Marjorie Liu, and it's harsh and beautiful. I've read that the two do not share a language, and that their collaboration involves interpreters.  I can't imagine what goes into producing even one issue of something so complex.

The worldbuilding is complicated enough that I was confused at times, but only in the way that you can just read past.  It took a while to get the hang of who is on what side in the war, partly because there are species that look the same and partly because of the factions and betrayals going on.  Basically, though, it's the humans vs. the part-animal Arcanics, and the Arcanics have been beaten, enslaved, and harvested for a magical substance that their bodies produce, in particular by a certain religious cult.

Maika, our main character, had been captive, but was living in freedom with her best friend, Tuya, before going back behind enemy lines for information that she couldn't get any other way.  She wants to know the details of what happened to her mother, and she finds some answers, more questions--and an artifact, a mask that connects her to a horrifying creature.  It fills her with power--and hunger.  Her enemies are in danger, but so are her friends.

This book. I'm not the first one to tell you this book is incredible, but this book is incredible.  Everyone is hungry for something--safety, power, memory--and everyone has their own agenda.  It's so easy to get caught up in the more notable amazing things--the world is populated by women! the art is absolutely incredible! the monster, the terrifying monster!--that it's easy to overlook the subtle wonderfulness of the storytelling--Maika's confusion about the right path; the unwavering goodness of Kippa the fox girl; all the people facing complicated moral choices and making the ones you might not have expected.

Best comic I've read in a year, I think--and it's been a pretty good year. 

Feminist Utopia

You know anything about beguines? In the 13th through 16th centuries, these were lay women who lived in monastic communities--basically nuns without the vows.  They would commit to living by the rules of the community, but were not bound to it for any period of time and were free to leave when they wanted.  At a time when the options for a woman's life were quite narrow, this seems like an incredible opportunity--the benefits of community living without the lifelong restrictions of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Maresi, by Maria Turtschaninoff, has had me thinking about beguines.  The Red Abbey is a community of women and girls, on an island where no man may set foot.  From all over the world, they come--sent by their families for the best education, or fleeing oppressive societies where women may not be educated, or just because it is a safer place for them than wherever home was.  They come as novices and they stay as sisters, or they return home, or go off into the world to use the things they've learned to make the world better.  They are protected by the Mother, the three-faced goddess.

Maresi is one of the oldest novices in the abbey, and she loves it there.  She loves the rituals and the food and her friends and the library. She loves studying with Sister O and looking after the youngest novices. When Jai arrives--frightened and on the run--Maresi shows her the ropes and they become friends.

There is danger and drama in the book, and that's all great and thrilling, but the thing that makes this book so incredibly wonderful is this lovely community, this ideal of people who work hard for common goals and give each other freedom to be themselves.  The sisters have different tasks and different lifestyles, and the novices work where they are needed and where their skills fit best.  Maresi has her opinions of everyone, but when the cards are down, every member of this community stands together.

I've been thinking a lot about community lately--about the groups we belong to that consist of many loose ties, small tugs of obligation and connection to people you would probably not have chosen individually, but who together make your team.  Community is hard, because not every relationship is comfortable, and because it is almost inevitably going to include people you'd rather omit if you could.  But you can't; you're stuck with them, and they're stuck with you, and if you're not better off because of each person included, you are better off because it's hard to get left behind.

The Red Abbey is an idea of community in a dangerous world; it's a place where people protect each other and know the value of themselves and their sisters.  I could read my way through the cycle of days over and over again, even without the storms and pirates and demanding goddesses.

This book makes my heart swell with gladness to read.  Maresi and Heo and Jai and Enneike and the Rose and Sister O and Mother--I would very much like to meet and live and belong with these wonderful women.

(I received an advance copy of this book from Netgalley, but that was ages ago and I didn't read it till now.  So thank you, Netgalley, and I'm sorry that I waited so long!)

Scheherazade

I have to look up Scheherazade every time I type it, so I just put it in the title to refer back to.  This post is actually about One Hundred Nights of Hero, by Isabel Greenberg, which is a wonderful graphic novel and you should read it.

Two men are discussing the modesty and beauty and purity that is attractive in a woman, and one claims that his wife fits all their requirements, and the other doesn't believe him.  So they make a bet--that Old Guy One can seduce Old Guy Two's wife if given one hundred nights to do it in.  This is incredibly gross, which is the point.

The wife, Cherry, was married off Old Guy Two by her father, and Old Guy Two is right--she's so pure she's never even slept with her own husband.  But he's also wrong, because she's actually got a beautiful and loving relationship with her handmaiden, Hero.  The two women overhear about the bet and hatch a plan to keep Old Guy One from winning the bet.

And so follow night after night of stories--beautiful, human stories.  I usually don't love books that are structured around mythology or folk tales, but there is an enormous humanity (as well as a modern sense of humor) that just made me love these.  The people are not the two-dimensional shadows from  most fairy tales--they all have depths of feeling that made me believe in them and want to hear more of Hero's stories.

I also loved the ideas of storytelling here. I'm usually surprisingly immune to stories that are about stories, but here, the agenda is so explicit and so empowering that I couldn't help but love it--this is a book about how even when you lose, the story you create can win far beyond you.  It's about how the world is made up of individual people, and enough of them together make a society, a zeitgeist, a nation, an era.  It's about the League of Secret Storytellers and the moon who came to earth and about sisters--sisters of all kinds.

The art made me a bit nervous at first--it's got a rough edginess that I associate with horror comics like Em Carroll's work.  But when it needed to be, it could be lovely, and I think that the humanity in the stories balanced out the abstractness of the art.

I want to thank Aarti for turning me on to this one. I tried Isabel Greenberg's previous book, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, at her suggestion, but I was put off by the mythology at the beginning--mythology is not my jam.  There are a few pages of mythology at the beginning of Hero, but the story sounded so intriguing that I pushed through it, and it was completely worth it.  Now I have to go back to Early Earth and see if I love it as much.

This is the perfect graphic novel for right now, because it's about how people can make their own power, and about how small stories matter, and how small stories can accumulate into larger stories in unexpected ways.  Kelly and Cora, you need to read this one!

Horrible People Week Continues

There was no reason to expect anything from Stephanie Kuehn besides a continuation of the string of unlikable characters.  She writes dark and twisted stories about dark souls in twisted situations, and Delicate Monsters fits squarely in that genre.

I previously read her book Complicit, and she deals with a lot of the same themes here.  She's definitely an author who you can see the issues she keeps coming back to--memory, defining oneself and lying to oneself, and how someone who seems like an objectively bad person can believe he is a good one, or see himself as the hero of his own story.

Delicate Monsters follows three characters--Sadie Su has come back to her hometown of Sonoma, California, after being kicked out of her third boarding school for trying to kill someone. Emerson Tate is not thrilled that she's back; they had been friends for a while before she left, but that was a dark time in Emerson's life, and the person he was around her wasn't someone he wants to think about a lot. And Emerson's brother, Miles, suffers from mysterious illnesses and visions of dark futures.

The book is less about a chain of events than about the unfolding of the past. I consider this to be a risky strategy, because the Thing All The Characters Know But The Reader Doesn't is really hard to pull off.  Either I'm teased with this mysterious knowledge until I'm frustrated, or I don't know it's there and it ends up feeling like a deus ex machina. This book pulled it off, primarily because a) it takes a while for you to figure out that there are gaps in your understanding of events, and b) it's a fairly short book, so the time between recognizing the gaps and realizing the truth is not long.

At 230 pages, with three POV characters, you'd think the book would be too short, but I think it works very well this way.  The point is to see into the experiences of these three characters, and I don't know that spending more time with them would have been easy.

Sadie is basically your textbook sociopath. She has no fear and no inhibition, does what she wants when she wants it, primarily wants her life to be easy but is bored easily and frequently does damage to other people when that happens.  When she comes back to town and sees that Emerson is a basketball star with a budding romance and popular friends, she sees her knowledge of what he used to be like as leverage to make life interesting.

Emerson, on the other hand, is mostly thinking about the beautiful May, and trying very hard not to think about the period he spent with Sadie soon after his father killed himself when Emerson was 10.  That was a very hard time and he's still angry about how a lot of things played out--including his brother's increasing health problems. He knows what Sadie is capable of, and from the time she comes back to town, everything starts to feel precarious and wrong.

Miles, on the other hand, tries to stay as meek and quiet as possible. His life is plagued by problems--bullies at school, constant and unexplained health problems, visions that come over him suddenly.  It's all he can do to get through the day drawing as little attention to himself as possible, and he still winds up in the hospital.

These three stories come together in ways that I definitely wasn't expecting from the beginning, but that unfold naturally and with perfect inevitability.  The things that you forget or filter out of your understanding of yourself, the things you count and don't count when you're adding up your assets and liabilities--this is where the truth lies, and this is how the story unfolds.

It's a grim and dreamy book; I read it in an afternoon and I suspect I'll be thinking about it for a few days.

Goldie Delight

Oh, guys, Goldie Vance!  It looks delightful from the front cover, which is why I requested it from Netgalley. Then you open it and it gets sweeter and more adorable and DELIGHTFUL than I can describe to you.

In this version of Cold War Florida, Goldie's father manages a hotel. Goldie works as a valet and solves mysteries as the hotel detective's unofficial sidekick. Her best friend works at the front desk and dreams of being an astronaut.

This is a 1950-something that should have been, where people of different races live and work together, where Goldie has a crush on a girl and it's all in stride, where a brown girl aspires to be an astronaut and is working hard toward that goal.  It's what the good old days should have looked like.

But it's not good just because it makes you feel good. It's good because it's the best kind of detective story, with complicated heists, evil Russians, first dates, stolen jewels, car chases...everything you could want.  It's got a simplicity that's kid-friendly, but it's a breath of fresh air and a glorious romp. 

Next volume's out soon; I can't wait.  You guys really need to read this one!

Lovecraft Without the Horror

I started this post a couple of days ago with a bit about how I really don't like to review books I don't finish, especially review copies from Netgalley, because it feels unfair.  I mean, yeah, I'm not finishing because I don't like the book that much, but it seems wrong to judge based on less than the whole thing.

But then I finished the book.  So...I liked it more than I thought? Or at least, I found its weaknesses more interesting?  Anyway, I did finish, so no apologies; just a review.

Winter Tide, by Ruthanna Emrys, comes to me at a time when I'm just discovering Lovecraft.  I've read some stories, which I liked, and some books that are influenced by him, which I've mostly also enjoyed.  There's some great horror to be had, both in his writing and in his imagery and ideas. I literally CANNOT with the racism, but I've had good luck mostly avoiding it in what I've read so far. But the eeriness, the sense of cosmic unease that he puts in the most innocuous parts of his stories--the feeling of damp that permeates everything he writes is gloriously creepy.

So I can't really figure out why this story exists. Winter Tide is what happens when you take Lovecraft's cosmology and folklore and imagine it as innocuous.  This is a world in which humanity is more frightening than the Old Ones, who are just like any other gods--distant and cosmic and pretty much not there.  Only humanity isn't actually that frightening here.  I guess government is?

 It's the story of the people of Innsmouth, the weird village near Arkham where the people worship Cthulu and the gods of the sea. I haven't read the Cthulu books, but I saw a TV movie about this once and it was amazingly creepy and freaky, a trashy delight.  The joy and terror are missing here, because it turns out that those people were misunderstood, not evil, no blood sacrifice (well, maybe they nick their own fingers when doing magic, but that's all!), no unspeakable evil.  Just good folks who turn into fish creatures when they finish with their landwalker stage and go to live in the ocean, misunderstood by us airbreathers and interned and murdered for it.


So really, the emotional heft of this story belongs to Aphra and her brother Caleb being the only survivors of their race after being interned in camps between the world wars.  Eventually, they are joined by Japanese citizens, and when the war ends and they're released, these last two survivors leave with their new adopted family.  This is about loss of legacy and trying to heal, about being out of place and trying to find your heritage. Which is a great idea, and there's so much to do with that.

But there just wasn't enough story to back it up.  Too many characters swirling around--with some great, really lovely representation, but so many that you don't get to know them.  Dawson should have her own book, but she barely gets a line here. Neko exists to show that Aphra has ties. Why is Charlie even there?  (I think because this is a sequel to a story in which Charlie features.) Audrey ends up being a main character, but darn if she didn't just feel like another pile of clothes to get in the way for the first half of the story.

Having gotten to the end, I feel confident that this would have been much better as a novella.  There was a lot of time spent telling characters things that other characters already knew, and deciding whether to tell them things that we'd just told other people.  In theory there are secrets, but everyone shares them with each other promptly (and generally in separate conversations), so they don't feel that tense.

I think this just might not be the book for me.  It could have been an exciting story about....something happening at Miskatonic University (I keep forgetting what the plot of the book is--they want to do research for what feels like a MacGuffin reason) or it could have been an intriguing character study of a person trying to figure out what it means to be connected to a world that tried to cut all your ties.  But there was just too much distance for a character story, and too much stillness for a mystery.

And...really, if you're going to make the Old Ones NOT want to destroy the world and devour humanity and set men mad on sight--why bother writing Lovecraft?  It's like making a Mission Impossible movie about those quiet moments of friendship you share with your team, not talking but just being together without any agenda.  I just didn't get it.

Unlovable

It's Unlikable Ladies Make Compelling Books week here at LibraryHungry Headquarters, and I'm kind of proud of it. I've always thought that the ability to appreciate an unlikable narrator was a sign of more sophisticated taste than mine. The ability to appreciate a book for something besides pleasure seems like a sign of rarefied sensibilities.

I don't know if "rarefied sensibilities" really describes the audience for Roanoke Girls, by Amy Engel--52 Book Minimum, where I first saw the book reviewed, would probably say newp to that one--but I liked the book. It's a psychological drama (I guess?) told in the past and the present.

In the past, Lane is brought after her mother's suicide to live with family she's never met at Roanoke, the house where her mother grew up. After  a painful, contentious relationship with her mother, she finds friendship with her cousin Allegra and love and belonging with her grandfather. It's a beautiful place, and Lane feels like she belongs for the first time.

In the present, Lane has reluctantly returned to Roanoke for the first time in a decade after learning that Allegra is missing.  There are ghosts in every corner as she comes to terms with the past and tries to find her cousin and best friend.

So much for the blurb.  Roanoke is creepy in the stagnant, stultifying way that Southern towns are creepy in literature (though it's in Kansas, so it has the added benefit of being flat and featureless).  I was most impressed that the author didn't try to keep Roanoke's dark secrets for a big reveal--close to the beginning you find out what sent Lane packing, and it doesn't take anything away from the drama.  You still watch young Lane learn slowly what she's walked into and adult Lane try to come to terms with it and find her cousin.

Lane is...not likeable.  She's a different kind of prickly than Lois in Experimental Film; Lois was awkward to the point of struggling to move through the world; Lane is pushing back hard against anything that comes close.  After a childhood with a miserable and possibly mentally ill mother and the events that unfold in the past timeline, adult Lane has a bunch of classic maladaptive interpersonal behaviors.  Cruelty feels more comfortable to her than kindness, and she finds herself accidentally-on-purpose creating situations where things can't get too raw or honest.

The mystery and/or thriller part of this wasn't that thrilling--I saw all the twists coming a long way off--but the characters were very human and fragile and real, and it kept me turning pages as fast as I could all the way through.  If the central ugliness of Roanoke itself is a bit outside my ability to comprehend, well, I guess that's a good thing, as far as my moral character goes, right?

Oh, one other thing: if you're two teenagers naked in the back of a pickup truck in the middle of an empty field, how is he chewing on a toothpick?  Did he have it in his mouth the whole time? Did he set it aside till you were...done?  Or does he carry a box of toothpicks in the pocket of his discarded jeans?  Inquiring minds want to know.

(Thanks to Netgalley for a review copy of this book.)

Horror Movies

This doesn't count as Brenda's Forcening (TM-Thefted Material) pick, since it was just a straight-up recommendation. She discovered Gemma Files and fell in love, and I couldn't resist, so I picked up Experimental Film.

There's a darkness to this book that really belies almost anything you can say about it.  The story is about a woman, Lois Cairns, whose cobbled-together career as a teacher of film history and a critic of art films has pretty much stagnated.  She has an autistic son, a truly great husband, and a loving but critical mother. Lois is an abrasive person, and in a lot of ways she struggles to get along in the world.

At a screening of an experimental film, she recognizes the imagery in some of the old footage the filmmaker has used. As she starts to research the source material and the filmmaker, she realizes she might be on the trail an undiscovered artist, the first female Canadian filmmaker. But she also learns that the woman's life was plagued with troubles that hit close to home with Lois herself, and get stranger the more she learns.

I don't always like books with unlikeable narrators, and Lois is someone I particularly wouldn't like in real life--she has no patience for fools or for sensible people who contradict her; she is endlessly frustrated with everything around her; she experiences chronic health problems but does not attempt to address them or take care of herself.  I would never expect to like this character. 

But she carried the story so well for me.  I can't quite figure out why--maybe it's because she actually did run into so many fools and it was cathartic to watch her strip them down to the bone.  Maybe it's from watching Simon--who is endlessly patient, but also smart and perceptive and somehow in love with Lois. Or maybe it's her awareness of her own fallibility. Whatever the reason, I felt so much more sympathy for her than I would expect to for a narrator who's this much of a crank.

As with many good horror novels, the first third is mostly about a real, normal world, but I will say, that may be the darkest part.  I picture the entire first half of the book taking place at night, in a cold rain.  The fact that the glaring noonday sun is the pervasive imagery here doesn't take away from the sense of darkness gathering at the corners of everything.

One thing that I found both rough and appealing was all the information about art and film and Canadian experimental film in particular.  There are a lot of references, whole passages that explain how this character's work reminds her of the aesthetic of Artist X and the sensibilities of Filmmaker Y, none of whom you've heard of.  The claustrophobia of the tiny, intimate world in which she operates--partly elite and partly irrelevant--adds to the sense of creepiness, but you're not going to get the references, and you just have to coast over them and let them form a rich background for you to not look at too closely.

As the horror gets deeper, it gets stranger, and honestly, I feel like Lois comes to terms with the unreal situation she's in faster than I would have.  But she also has such an authentic voice, she's such a real person, that I felt like I was right there with her in the story--even when that was a creepy as hell place to be.

Gonna Regret This

As you may know or have gathered, my to-read list is out of control.  And based on the way I acquire books, it's pretty outrageous.  There are literally hundreds of unread books on my kindle.  I currently  have a dozen novels out from the library in print, not counting the comics or the "chapter books" to read to my son.  My Goodreads to-read is over 1300 books long--and I have a B-list consisting of another 1500 books.  If writers stopped writing tomorrow, I'd still be set for life.

But the length of this list means that things I am incredibly excited to read and have been pushed at me for ages never percolate to the top.  And it kind of kills me, especially when my friends are all reading books that I recommended and I haven't read their recommendations yet.

So I'm going to try something.  I'm usually reading a bunch of books at a time, and sometimes I manage the load by assigning a slot to a specific category.  I'm usually reading at least one ARC and one library book at a time, even while I'm reading other things.

New category: recommendations!  One at a time, of course; I will take more suggestions as I go, but one from each person should make a short list that I can use while still balancing the types of books with other things I'm reading.

My plan to start off:

Welcome to the God Damn Ice Cube, by Blair Braverman. After seeing the excellent play Franklin this weekend (doomed Arctic expeditions for the win!), I'm about to enter a spell of novels about freezing to death or nearly so, and this memoir is where I'll start. It's about a woman who unexpectedly finds herself living in and falling in love with the Arctic and becoming an accomplished sled dog racer.  Recommender: Lily.

A Darker Shade of Magic, by V.E. Schwab. There are actually a ton of Schwab books that I want to read, but this is the beginning of a trilogy that just ended, and two separate people have called it a Must Read.  When the person who pushed me to read Fifth Season says a book is amazing, I take her word for it.  Recommenders: Sarah and Elizabeth. (Two for one!)

That's actually all I've queued up so far--not really much of a list.  BUT: I would like to solicit choices from the other book recommenders in my life, especially the ones that I've been ignoring for so long.  Brenda, Curse of the Chalion, do you think? Or do you have another vote? You moved a bunch of stuff to the front page of my kindle a few weeks ago. Lianna, which of your favorites have I forgotten? Linden, do you want to put a pick on the table?

Now that I think about it, this reminds me of the Forcening, an event on the Reading the End podcast where each Jenny picks a book that she's wanted to the other to read and they read it together.  (Damn I love that podcast.)  So, help me, friends! Bring on the Forcening!

Prequelization

I was drawn to Brother's Ruin, by Emma Newman, when I saw it on Netgalley, partially because of the premise, but mostly, I'll admit, because her book Planetfall got such great reviews, but I never got a chance to read it. So hey, I thought, I'll get out ahead of this new one!  But I have to say, I think this was the wrong place to start.

I'm on this novella kick lately, partially because I like the size--you know it's going to be a quick, tight story, but not in the spare fashion of a short story.  I just don't think I'm a short story person--I always want all the details laid out for me. No, when I want short, I want a novella, but sometimes that falls short of what I'm looking for.

The premise here is promising--Charlotte is a young woman who is happily engaged and becoming quite successful in her work as an illustrator (under a pseudonym, of course, because it would not be respectable for a young woman to have a career).  Her brother, with whom she's very close, suffers from ill health, so her income, in addition to those of her parents, helps keep the family afloat.

When her brother begins to suspect he has magical abilities, it looks like it might be the family's financial salvation; though magical training is compulsory for anyone with talent, their families are generously compensated.  But bringing the testers around endangers Charlotte in a way her family doesn't know--she's been hiding her own magical abilities to avoid having to give up her fiance and career. 

Now she has to make sure her brother passes his tests while keeping herself hidden--and uncovering complicating secrets about the politics of the city's maguses.

(Is maguses a word? Let's roll with it.)

So there's my back cover copy.  I have to say, a lot of this book is like a breath of fresh air.  Charlotte frequently considers keeping secrets the way people in books do to keep the plot moving forward, then blurts out what she was thinking anyway.  First, I find this relatable; second, it prevents Plot By Unnecessary Withholding, which I'm pretty much done with.

I loved how close Charlotte was with her family, and I thought this book did the best job I've read in a long time setting up why someone with special powers might not want to seize hold of the opportunities that come with them.  I've always been kind of skeptical of "I just want to be ordinary" as a beginning and end to a person's motivation. But the things Charlotte has to lose are laid out quite well here, and the mystery and possible discomfort that would come with the opportunity are made pretty obvious.  The premise felt grounded in a way that a lot of similar stories don't.

The drawback here is the pacing, I think.  There's too much setup, and then it ends all in a rush.  This actually felt like the first third of a book, and it should have continued into Part 2, rather than ending itself.  From the broader pacing (I was shocked to realize that I was closing in on the end, and that they were going to wrap everything up in what felt like just a few pages) to the scene-by-scene details (the domestic descriptions were important to evoke what Charlotte's life is really like, but there was just SO MUCH time spent on the family getting the house ready for fancy guests), the pacing felt off. 

As the first third of a novel, this worked swimmingly, and I will definitely read what comes next (because oh yes, this is just the setup for a bigger story).  But I was pretty disappointed to get to the end--not in an eager to move on way, but in a "that's all there is?" kind of way.  A sad feeling to be left with, even if it's a good problem to have.

(Thanks to Netgalley for the free copy for review.)

On the Rails

We had book club today, talking about The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead.  It's the first book I've ever read by Whitehead, and it was really an incredible book--painful and exhilarating and pretty explicitly a work of genius.

Unfortunately, I don't even feel remotely qualified to do a reader's guide for this one. It's just too...big? raw? intimate? It's a lot of these things, but most of all I'd say it's brilliantly structured.

Cora is a slave on a plantation in the South, which is pretty horrifying, as you might imagine.  Her mother escaped when Cora was young, leaving her on her own in a horrible situation and now, many  years later, Cora takes thee opportunity to run. She travels with another escaped slave, Caesar, on the Underground Railroad. In her travels, she sees different parts of the country and the different situations of black people.

It's kind of a Pilgrim's Progress of horrors. Magical realism isn't quite the right term, but there is the feel of a fairy tale or a parable about this. The first clue is the actual railroad that runs underground, on which Cora makes her escape.  It's not really dreamlike, not the way I expect magical realism to be.  It's actually much more realistic--different stations in different states of repair, and the characters wonder over who built it and how it works.

But it's also both ends of a metaphor--the railroad and the mysterious connection going to no one knows where. And at every point in the journey, each stop takes you on a tour through a lot of the horrifying things that have been done to black Americans through history. It's not literally an antebellum landscape--we get a glimpse of the Tuskegee experiments, of Jim Crow sundown laws (only worse, so much worse), of all kinds of horrors in all kinds of guises. 

Cora is an interesting protagonist--she's prickly and not terribly personable, and she's not an adventurous person.  Although she does several heroic things, she's not a hero.  I'm reminded of Sansa Stark--when you read a story about great injustice, you expect your protagonist to rise up and vanquish it.  But really, if the world was full of heroes there'd be a lot less injustice, and the most a person can often hope for is to survive and not be to horribly damaged by the journey.

Okay, I do have a couple of talking points, in case you have a book group of your own.  Here are my questions.

1. What did you think of the interstitial chapters, where you get glimpses of other characters' back stories?  Did you feel like they fit together with each other?  They seemed to serve many different purposes; did they have anything in common?

2. What did you think of Ridgeway? Did he feel like a real person, or like an archetype of a slave hunter?  He stood for the institution--indifferent and implacable.  How did he work as a human being.  And, corollary, how did the character of Homer work for you, as an archetype/stereotype and as a person?

3. This is the worst question, but which state was the most horrifying to you?  Which atrocity struck you hardest.  I was surprised at the different answers in our group.

4. What did you think of the ending, both as a symbolic ending to the journey and as a place to stop the narrative?  What do you think would come next--or maybe I mean what would be the logical next place for this story to go?

Discussing in book club, we kept saying "so depressing, horrifying."  But the fact is that it was a beautiful book to read.  It was horrifying, but it also gave you enough space among the horrors to catch your breath and appreciate the storytelling that was going on here, and the craftsmanship that takes on the enormity of an historic experience and shapes it for a modern audience in a most accessible way.

Binti

Nnedi Okorafor is an author I've been meaning to read for a long time.  I used the excuse of my Black History month reading goals to pick up a few of her books, so I ended up reading the novella Binti and its sequel, Binti: Home very close together.

Binti got a lot of glowing reviews when it first came out, and I can absolutely understand why. Binti herself is such a lovable character--brave, smart, headstrong, and loyal. She's been accepted to the best university in the known galaxy, Oomza Uni. She's not the first human to go, but most people who travel are Khoush, while Binti is Himba. She's the first member of her community to travel off planet, and she pretty much has to sneak away.

On the ship to the university, though, the ship is attacked by the Meduse, a race with a feud against the Khoush. Binti survives, but she has to use every resource she has to stay alive and prevent a war.

The great parts of this book were the details about Binti and the people she meets.  Her connection to her people, the clay she wears on her skin, the mathematical skills she has--these details are lovely.  I got confused, though, when the ship was attacked and the plot started hinging on a random object she had in her pocket--a trinket she found in the desert years ago and carried for good luck, but that also turned out to have magic? technological? properties that saved her life.  I don't know if it counts as deus ex machina if it happens in the beginning of the story instead of the end, but it threw me off my stride, and it left me stumbling for the rest of the story.

In the second book, Home, Binti has been studying at Oomza University for almost a year and decides she wants to visit home, along with a new friend.  This is a fraught decision, because her family does not approve of her leaving, and her friend is from a race that has been at war with humans (Khoush, not Himba, but isn't a human a human?) for ages.

Again, I started off confused, because Binti was being hit by waves of anger that seem to come from nowhere, and also maybe an empathic connection that lets her know what her friend is feeling when it's far away. This part seemed very disjointed and unconnected from the narrative; I wasn't quite sure what it meant, either what it was describing or what that implied. 

Anyway, though, the next part of the story is really lovely and powerful as Binti undertakes the second space journey of her life.  Since the first one ended in terrible violence that has haunted her, the middle part of this story is a powerful recounting of facing trauma. I especially loved that it didn't have any easy answers; sometimes things are hard and sometimes they're easier, and she takes care of herself and feels a little better and maybe will continue to get better.  It's a very realistic sense of fallout from the previous story and I admire that a great deal.

Then at home, there are some really lovely family relationships to explore.  Again, the strength here is that nothing is black and white--her family loves her and is angry that she left.  Binti wants to belong and doesn't quite anymore. By leaving, she has become something different, something that their society doesn't have a place for, and it's not a simple thing to deal with that.  The nuances of how the different characters handle this and react to the changes in Binti--everything from her new friend to the different clothes she wears--are well-observed and generous, even to those who behave the worst.

There are further plot developments that seem to come out of nowhere--people and legends who come up in the middle of the book and turn out to have been a part of her history all along--that I found a bit confusing from a narrative perspective.  But I think that this is a different style of storytelling, with less of a through arc and more of an emotional arc.  I'm still wrestling with how to read it right.

There is so much to love here--the representation, the cultures, and the diversity that Okorafor brings to her universe.  And the depictions of complicated family bonds, and how it's not always possible for everyone to get what they want, is something I've always wished someone would depict in this way. I'm not sure I've found my footing on these books, but I can tell you that when the next one comes out (because warning: cliffhanger!), I will be picking it up instantly.

Death By Therapy; Therapy By Death

I'm so behind on my ARC reviews, guys.  Another by-product of the cold that won't quit.  But I want to tell you about all this stuff, even if it's no longer in advance!

Seanan McGuire produces novellas at a thrilling rate, and I've been digging novellas lately.  I got Final Girls by Mira Grant (McGuire's more horror-ish pen name) from Netgalley for review recently after reading and loving Every Heart a Doorway.

The premise is the real draw here, and I think it kind of stands in for my feelings about the whole book. Esther is a skeptical reporter who's doing an investigation of a new type of therapy. This therapy, invented by Dr. Jennifer Webb, involves a complete virtual reality simulation of a novel trauma experience--basically, you get into a VR tank and have a completely convincing experience of living through a horror movie.  It seems like mostly the therapy is being used to heal very damaged personal relationships--by surviving a carefully controlled horrible experience, two sisters, or a father and son,  or whoever, can get over long-term feelings of antipathy to have a positive relationship going forward.

This brings up a LOT of questions, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Esther is skeptical because the therapy is a little too reminiscent of repressed memory therapy, which of course has been thoroughly debunked, but not before it ruined her father's life.

More questions, but give me a second.

During a demonstration, there are complications, and there you have most of the plot.

So there are three central stories being told here. The two that comprise most of the book are the story of the illusion--Esther and Jennifer, growing up together and encountering evil--and the violent story playing out at the clinic that sends the inside story spiraling out of control.  The framing story--Esther investigating this new therapy--might not even be worth counting as its own, but I actually found it one of the most interesting ones, especially from a worldbuilding perspective.

Because the new therapy was just meant to set up the story, but it raises SOOOOO many questions.  I'm not even worried about the scientific issues, like the fact that they can control dreams with drugs or see what's going on in the dreams with monitors (though that at least gets a nod in the story).  I'm talking about the viability of this business.  Like, you have a fully immersive VR system--one in which the subject has no idea the experience is not real--and your go-to application is...this?

Actually, I guess I think therapy is a good first application here, but therapy specifically based around healing relationships by inducing a shared trauma experience just seems...unlikely.  How many people have relationships in their lives that involve deep antipathy and a desire on both sides to get rid of that antipathy?  And are those the people who are trying expensive, cutting edge therapeutic technologies?  Are they really the ones who are being failed by talk therapy?

It just seems like a campy level of setup for an otherwise kind of serious story.  Like, I would expect this to be the premise of a very cheap, B-grade horror story, the kind that winks at you with its own silliness. The kind that is a movie on Spike TV. (Though now that I think about it, they actually made this movie and it was anything but cheap.)

I also found Esther's conflation of this with recovered memory therapy to be kind of spurious.  I mean, this is kind of the opposite--it's creating new, purposefully false memories. I could see a whole host of problems with it, but none of them are the ones Esther's looking for.

As horror novels go, it was engrossing and kept you wondering what would happen.  I really did enjoy reading it.  But what I walked away with were questions--so many questions, and not ones the story gave me a lead on. 

Also, would you ever go into an immersive virtual reality experience? Would it make a difference if you would know inside the story that it wasn't real?  I think my answer might be no, but I'd like to know yours.

Black History Month, Retrospectively

Two things about February: Black History Month, and the cold that wouldn't die.  This means that I have been reading a bunch of great books by black authors, and that I haven't been blogging about them. And now I'm in that place where the backlog of amazing books is intimidating.

So, in the interest of taking the job in bite sized pieces, let's do a run down of my February reading list.  My policy was to only start books by black authors in February, and I got some great ones in.

I read Nnedi Okorafor's novellas Binti and Binti: Home, which have gotten great reviews.  I didn't love the first one as much as everyone else did, but I thought the sequel was exciting and much stronger.

I also started the audio book Okorafor's The Book of Phoenix, which I'm still in the middle of. I liked the first part very much, but I'm not clear on where the story's going, and I'm wondering if Nnedi Okorafor just might not be a writer for me. Her manner of storytelling is very fairy tail-like, and I'm not actually that big a fan of fairy tales and mythology.

In February I also finished N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, which we read for book club at work.  Not a lot of people managed to finish it--it's dense and DEEPLY world-buildy--but it was incredible.  Seriously, an unbelievable masterwork of storytelling. I am now creeping my way up the library's infinitely long waiting list for the sequel, The Obelisk Gate.

Just yesterday I finished Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, which has been getting a ton of buzz, and for good reason.  This is an incredible book and will win many prizes, I think. We'll meet for book club next week and I hope I can do a list of question after that.

Also a lovely book: Brit Bennett's The Mothers.  This is exactly the kind of book I say I don't like--it's pure literary fiction, a story of the closely observed lives of a young woman and the people around her in the wake of her mother's suicide.  The story centers around a church, and how the pain of many people can interact in so many ways.  It's sad and sweet and so, so lovely.

I also started and am still reading both Tiny, Pretty Things (Jenny: murder bunheads!), by Dhonielle Clayton and Sona Charaipotra, and You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain, by Phoebe Robinson.

February has been a really terrible month for my body but an incredible month for my mind.  Hopefully now that we're deep in March, I can get back to telling you all about the latter!