One

 One

By Sarah Crossan

Grace and Tippi. Tippi and Grace. Two sisters. Two hearts. Two dreams. Two lives. But one body.

Grace and Tippi are conjoined twins, joined at the waist, defying the odds of survival for sixteen years. They share everything, and they are everything to each other. They would never imagine being apart. For them, that would be the real tragedy.

But something is happening to them. Something they hoped would never happen. And Grace doesn’t want to admit it. Not even to Tippi.

How long can they hide from the truth—how long before they must face the most impossible choice of their lives?

 

One is basically spoken word poetry about being a conjoined twin. Presumably Crossan has researched the topic so I'll trust in her characterization of Grace. While it seems unfathomable to me to want to remain physically attached to someone else, Crossan does a good job of explaining why, to Grace and Tippi, the question would be so offensive. The sisters aren't bad people, they're twins, and what's more natural than staying with your twin? And what kind of alternative is there? At one point, Grace overhears someone saying they can't imagine anything worse. Obviously hyperbole, but as Grace says, there are so many things worse than this, and brings it back to the idea that to be with a loved one forever is not the worst fate.  It reminds me that people are infinitely adaptable. What may be intolerable to someone used to living independently can be eminently reasonable to someone intertwined from birth.  

We're presented with the twins' growing pains over a period of a few short months: as they're unable to afford homeschooling and now have to attend (private) school for the first time.  They make friends, they watch their father wallow in alcohol, their sister slowly starve herself and their mother lose her job.  Grace develops a crush and a heart problem and the sisters have a choice to make. Several, in fact. 

It's a fast read, for all that it's 400 pages, since it is again, like poetry, half pages lost (another reviewer pointed out that the typeface changes alignment from left to center after the twins have surgery, which is a really cool detail) and trailing thoughts. Each "chapter" is basically a poem, and most are <2 pages. And that's fine, since the subject matter is pretty heavy. Prose would have taken ages to finish. 

 

Because of the style though, the book feels less rooted, more dreamlike. For all that Tippi is the person who is closest to Grace, I feel like we barely talk to her the entire book. We're at a crossroads in the twins' lives, which makes for more interesting dilemmas, but contrariwise, I'm not sure that the sisters' relationship feels as developed as it needs to be to support the climactic separation. And the sisters have to consider death and mortality when they consider the surgery options - but there's very little wrestling with that idea too. They make a couple of bucket lists and that's about it. Again, is that realistic? I don't know. As a sixteen year old, I was pretty confident I wouldn't die, but then again, I wasn't conjoined with anyone with a limited life expectancy. 

This feels like an incredibly interesting topic, nicely executed, but also lightly touched.  I don't know that it strikes as deeply as it ought to, considering.

50: A Book That Features A Character With Chronic Pain

The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King
By Carissa Broadbent

In the wake of the Kejari, everything Oraya once thought to be true has been destroyed. A prisoner in her own kingdom, grieving the only family she ever had, and reeling from a gutting betrayal, she no longer even knows the truth of her own blood. She’s left only with one certainty: she cannot trust anyone, least of all Raihn.

The House of Night, too, is surrounded by enemies. Raihn’s own nobles are none too eager to accept a Turned king, especially one who was once a slave. And the House of Blood digs their claws into the kingdom, threatening to tear it apart from the inside.

When Raihn offers Oraya a secret alliance, taking the deal is her only chance at reclaiming her kingdom–and gaining her vengeance against the lover who betrayed her. But to do so, she’ll need to harness a devastating ancient power, intertwined with her father’s greatest secrets.

But with enemies closing in on all sides, nothing is as it seems. As she unravels her past and faces her future, Oraya finds herself forced to choose between the bloody reality of seizing power – and the devastating love that could be her downfall.

Finally finished! This wasn't agonizingly slow, like Curious Tides, but nor was it zippy and short like Beneath the Star Cursed Skies. In retrospect I don't know that it was worth the effort, but the previous book ended on SUCH a hook, and it came so fast from the library, that I couldn't resist, and, since we're talking about PopSugar now, I feel like I can't just stop books halfway through when I'm bored, the way I've been doing more and more often lately.

It's fine. It's fine! I really shouldn't complain, I could have simply stopped at the first one, but, like I said, the revelation that they had to get married! To a former love who has betrayed them! was like trope catnip. Alas, while it makes the most sense for plot and characterization that the hatred only lasts about, oh, 15% of the way into the book, and then it turns to lusting and banging, I was really hoping for more angst.  Angst with a capital A!

This book is all about mood. Everything is dark and seductive, fire flashes in people's eyes, the glimpse of a city from far away is all ancient beauty, yada yada yada.  What ashes and star-cursed king are we talking about? Who knows, baby, it's all about the mood. The first book was all about rising to power and this second one is all about holding on to it through, gosh, at least two, if not three attempted coups. We gently gloss over torture and the hunting down of rebels. At the end, Oraya and Raihn unite the two vampire tribes who have been warring for thousands of years (because they have an unbreakable bond now! Everyone else gets to forget aeons of historically founded hatred and opposition. And I guess humans are living peacefully with the vamps now too, even though they are literally vampire food. Whatever! Oraya has wings now and that's super cool!), they bang a lot, and we leave the book having nicely set up the next duology, featuring Mishe and her trauma dump. 

I know it sounds like I didn't like the book, but I didn't hate it, I just... once again, am finding these romantastic stories of tyrants overthrown to be childish and sanitized in the wake of The Feast of the Goat, and that's obviously a me problem more than a book problem, but the stakes just never felt high. Admit it: was there ever a point at which you, dear reader, thought that either Oraya or Raihn might die? No matter how badly they are beaten (and they are crucified multiple times, not to mention both getting beaten by some sort of god-like avatar) they manage to heal themselves up just fine and come back to fight another day! Gosh! Vincent slaughtered thousands, if not millions of people, but in the end, he did love Oraya, so that's okay!

36: A Book With Silver On The Cover Or In The Title

Beneath These Cursed Stars

Beneath These Cursed Stars

By Lexi Ryan

Princess Jasalyn has a secret. Armed with an enchanted ring that gives her death’s kiss, Jas has been sneaking away from the palace at night to assassinate her enemies.

Shape-shifter Felicity needs a miracle. Fated to kill her magical father, she’s been using her unique ability to evade a fatal prophecy.

When rumors of evil king Mordeus’s resurrection spread through the shadow court, Jasalyn decides to end him once and for all. Felicity agrees to take the form of the princess, allowing Jas to covertly hunt Mordeus—and starting Felicity on the path that could finally take her home.

While Jasalyn teams up with the charming and handsome Kendrick, Felicity sets out to get closer to the Wild Fae king, Misha. Kendrick helps Jasalyn feel something other than anger for the first time in three years, and Misha makes Felicity wish for a world where she’s free to be her true self. Soon, the girls’ missions are at risk right alongside their hearts.

The future of the human and fae realms hangs in the balance as fates intertwine. Between perilous tasks, grim secrets, and forbidden romances, Jasalyn and Felicity find that perhaps their stars are the most cursed of all.

This was just what I needed as a palate cleanser after both The Feast of the Goat and Curious Tides. The first was way too heavy and the latter was way too slow, and this hit the sweet spot of being not too serious and a light, easy read.

Sidebar time: frankly any YA adjacent fantasy which involves despotic rulers feels so much more juvenile though, after reading The Feast of the Goat and all the real ways that people can be hurt and demoralized under a terrible regime. I happened to read two after The Feast of the Goat, and the feel so simplistic in how they treat tyranny. Tyrant=bad, resistance=good. Scars make you look tougher. PTSD is mostly nightmares that go away when you meet a hot guy. You've never given up on your humanity, and in the end all suffering is noble. I certainly don't think we need to get graphic in our fantasy, but it does add inauthenticity to the genre, which was already fantastical to start with.

Some reviews recommended reading this after the first duology in the world, These Hollow Vows and These Twisted Bonds.  Not only did I not realize this was set after a previous series and referencing the same characters, I also thought it was a standalone novel, and it very much is not.  So you could say I started with part 3 of 4. Nevertheless I was able to follow the storyline and setup decently well, although I did occasionally confuse the two female protagonists, which, since one is the princess and the other is pretending to be the princess, I don't take full responsibility for.

It's a good little book, moving quickly along, doesn't waste much times drawing out the central mystery of the resurrection of the aforementioned tyrant. The one thing that didn't make much sense, and is a critical plot point, so perhaps it will be explained in the next book, is why/how Felicity was inserted as the pretend princess without any apparent means for her to communicate updates to the rebels. She just had to wait for her contact to show up? Seems kinda like a problem waiting to happen, especially when they keep alluding to their spies on the inside.

The romances, while admittedly, ridiculously sudden and convenient, were both written well enough to get you to suspend disbelief and I appreciated the plotting behind both couples' splits- Felicity's was almost guaranteed as a result of her impersonation, but the idea of Kendrick being in cahoots with the tyrant was something I was surprised by, yet also felt pretty organic from the prior plots, so kudos on that. None of the weird sword/portal thing made much sense though, but it didn't bother me excessively since it was pretty obviously just there as a Macguffin.

I enjoyed it enough to consider seeking out the first duology and am kicking myself for reading a book which ends on such a cliffhanger when the next one won't be out for at least six months. We leave both Felicity and Jasalyn in danger, Felicity in King Misha's dungeons, at his mercy for having betrayed him twice over - once for impersonating the princess and the second time for impersonating Felicity, i.e., the woman who he's seen in his dreams (of course), and Jasalyn setting out for the Macguffin on foot by herself, feeling betrayed by Kendrick in her turn, for his having lied to her about his reasons for being in the dungeon to begin with (not to mention his long-lost fiance, who (of course) will make another appearance in the next book, I'm sure. There's not much mystery about the plot beats, but Ryan does a decent job with it notwithstanding. I will say that now I've gone back and read the first book in the series (well, the excerpt, anyway) and it is startling how different Jasalyn comes across. Is it wrong to say I prefer the depressed, killer version instead of the stupidly optimistic one?

18: A Book Containing Magical Creatures That Aren't Dragons

Curious Tides

Curious Tides 

By Pascale Lacelle

Emory might be a student at the prestigious Aldryn College for Lunar Magics, but her healing abilities have always been mediocre at best—until a treacherous night in the Dovermere sea caves leaves a group of her classmates dead and her as the only survivor. Now Emory is plagued by strange, impossible powers that no healer should possess.

Powers that would ruin her life if the wrong person were to discover them.

To gain control of these new abilities, Emory enlists the help of the school’s most reclusive student, Baz—a boy already well-versed in the deadly nature of darker magic, whose sister happened to be one of the drowned students and Emory’s best friend. Determined to find the truth behind the drownings and the cult-like secret society she’s convinced her classmates were involved in, Emory is faced with even more questions when the supposedly drowned students start washing ashore— alive —only for them each immediately to die horrible, magical deaths.

And Emory is not the only one seeking answers. When her new magic captures the society’s attention, she finds herself drawn into their world of privilege and power, all while wondering if the truth she’s searching for might lead her right back to Dovermere…to face the fate she was never meant to escape.

Curious Tides can be summed up in one word: it's boring. It was boring when I read the first few chapters, it was boring when I was halfway through, it was mildly interesting at the end, and when I finished it and read the teaser for the next book in the series, I found myself completely uninterested in following up. In fact, not only do I keep forgetting that I've finished it, I've been forgetting that I've read it at all. In fact, when I was writing this review, I kept typing the title as "Cursed Tides" because I was getting it confused with another book.

If you look through other reviews there's two common complaints: one, even by those who ended up liking it, is that it's very slow to start. I agree. Somehow the author has taken a scenario in which our protagonist washes up on shore with four dead bodies and made it ... uncompelling. 

Second, people find Emory, our ostensible hero, annoying. I also agree with this, and with the person who says Emory comes across super young, and possibly was aged up to 19 just so a sex scene could be included (although I have no idea why, since that was also boring to read). Emory is the kind of person who somehow inherits a mysterious power that we're told is incredibly dangerous and could lead to her destruction and the death of other around her, like a bomb, and when her friend Baz, whom she's harassed into helping train her surreptitiously, tells her to call it a night, she tells him he's being too cautious and she just starts using it willy-nilly. And it's all okay! Absolutely nothing happens as a result of this idiotic decision. She won't tell Baz crucial information about that night, but shares everything with Kieran, because he...keeps looking at her meaningfully, I guess.

I don't know if Emory was meant to be as annoying as she was, but she consistently uses Baz (and his crush on her) to get him to do things for her, she beelines for this secret society despite secret societies always being bad news, falls hard for this Kieran kid who is clearly using her, assumes her 'friend' Penelope has ratted on her to the dean even though Penelope literally knows nothing, MOPES about every damn thing, even the fact that her best friend got invited to this secret society and didn't tell her, like she isn't doing the exact same damn thing, and at no point is she written like these are the actions of an asshole. Does she get an indefinite pass because her friend disappeared after doing a stupid ritual for a secret society? Because Romie was Baz's sister and he didn't come across as an asshole. It's like the author has to have Emory do all this for the book's plot, but then didn't want to have her be an antihero, so instead we all have to pretend her actions are forgiveable.

The third thing I didn't like about the book, which wasn't necessarily something others agreed with me on, was the magic system.  Lacelle sets it up with four moons (full, waxing, waning, and new) and each of these has like four "specialties", like soultending and wardcrafting and purifying and lightkeeping and dreaming and unraveling and memorists and reaping and amplifying and wordsmiths and sowing and glamouring and darkbearing and shadow guiding and healers and seers, and then there's also eclipses which also have separate powers and now we're at, like 20+ random powers (and which is which and who is what are RELEVANT to the plot, so you gotta try to remember all this shit) PLUS there's some fairy tale book about the powers being taken over by shadow which is also important except that it was introduced in the first chapter with all this other stuff and I promptly forgot. So the whole villain's motivation is like, making a path between worlds and undoing stuff about the four original moon gods, but none of it ever made much sense to me. There's tides and water magic and fake magic that comes from siphoned off stuff from people who have Collapsed, but also apparently after you collapse you're super strong but this is a complete secret. Anyway, there was a lot to keep straight and I had no interest in doing so.

What else can I say? It's already forgotten.

16: A Book Set In Or Around A Body Of Water

Whiteout

Whiteout

By: Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk, Nicola Yoon, Dhonielle Clayton, Nic Stone, and Tiffany D. Jackson

Atlanta is blanketed with snow just before Christmas, but the warmth of young love just might melt the ice in this novel of Black joy, and cozy, sparkling romance—by the same unbeatable team of authors who wrote the New York Times bestseller Blackout!

As the city grinds to a halt, twelve teens band together to help a friend pull off the most epic apology of her life. But will they be able to make it happen, in spite of the storm?

No one is prepared for this whiteout. But then, we can't always prepare for the magical moments that change everything.

I chose this mostly because I'd enjoyed Blackout (or vaguely remember enjoying it) and I figured this would be an easy, enjoyable read. 

No. 

I hated this book. I have no idea how the same authors, using the same concept, could write something so much worse that I had to force myself to finish it, but somehow they managed. The book is a series of interconnecting stories, loosely grouped around the primary couple (Stevie and Sola's) efforts to reconcile after a fight and everyone else helping out in some way. 

Problem #1 is the Stevie and Sola were the worst. And they behaved stupidly too!  After Stevie screws up, Sola insists on Stevie apologizing by midnight, but then refuses to look at any messages or phone calls from her. I assume it was necessary for dramatic reasons, but when you tell someone you're going to break up with them unless they apologize to you, ignoring their calls makes no fucking sense. On the other hand, Stevie is the one who showed up loopy from pain meds to her family's dinner, got kicked out for being so rude, and then hassled everyone she's ever met to do a bunch of favors for her last minute. And she responds to Sola's request that she apologize to her family members by... waiting at a baseball stadium after she has a friend shoot a bunch of drones in the sky? Is there a reason Stevie couldn't be waiting at Sola's house instead? It's not like Stevie's the one running the drones. She just happened to know someone willing to subvert their own work project for Stevie's demands.  And aside from the unlikelihood that all her friends are so incredibly desperate to help this young couple get back together that they literally trek through a blizzard to buy a bunch of junk like legos and stuffed animals and college rally wear, there's the whole "time Stevie used her mom's ID to get into the aquarium at night so she could have semi-public sex with her girlfriend" which is played like an incredibly sweet moment instead of the kinda gross and definitely inappropriate set-up it is. That's her mom's workplace, and I assume they've got cameras there. But young love, right? There's also allusions to Stevie not wanting to be called a girl but in Sola's chapter, she keeps referring to Stevie as "her" so that felt unexplained and confusing as well.

The other issue is that we start off with a bunch of the weaker storylines, so it puts you on the wrong footing right away. The second couple (Kaz and Porsha) we're introduced to are the aforementioned lego seekers, which includes a boy who has been bending over backwards for this girl, and the girl who apparently hasn't noticed this at all until a couple of mall-goers point it out to her. You want us to root for these guys? If they can't even communicate on an issue as commonplace as coming to dinner, how am I supposed to expect they'll ever be a functional couple? Plus this story had the most obnoxious use of slang, bruh. It's going to be dated within 12 months.

Then we've got another couple (ER and Van) who apparently are on a "break" but for reasons that seem hazy and irrelevant since, at the end of their chapter, the ex-/girlfriend says they didn't behave any differently when they were broken up anyway, so it was moot. Um, yay, I guess? The primary conflict in this chapter is because they run into another of the narrator's exes at the airport, which she acts like is the worst thing in the world apparently, but honestly I have very little sympathy for the narrator, since most of the conflict comes up because she picks up the phone to talk to her ex and then starts lying to her girlfriend about it. 

There's some cuter stories later, but my patience was already gone. Maybe I was just in a different mood when I read Blackout, but Whiteout got on all my nerves with how annoying these people were being in their relationships. So much anxiety, so little confidence! I know these are supposed to be teenagers and thus, idiots, but  it was really grating how many of the stories were some version of "this person I'm with isn't very considerate of me, but now that we've confessed our deep-seated love for each other, everything is great!"

I disliked Whiteout so much, I am now retroactively reconsidering my opinion of Blackout: maybe it's just as bad and I just didn't notice it when I read it last time. Aside from the varying levels of tolerance I had about the relationships, the logic of the stories was all over the place. There's the whole "why not just wait at Sola's house thing instead of making her dad drive her to the stadium" but also Sola digs an entire grave in her backyard to bury some lego flower set that Stevie made her...in the middle of a blizzard while wearing a dress because it reminded her of good times with Stevie. Sure, why not. And the idea that the gift shop at the aquarium just so happens to still be open at 10:30 pm (!!) so Ava and Mason's story can be slotted in there is ridiculous. {This is the same aquarium where Stevie told her mom she was picking up files from her mom's office for her, but instead planned a sexy picnic sex-surprise for her girlfriend. Do we think Ava and Mason know that's why Stevie is making them get a commemorative jellyfish gift?} And Jimi is busking outside a huge theater in the middle of a blizzard even though ostensibly, she's there to reunite with her bandmates and record a song? Outside? Because when Teo/Lil Kinsey shows up, it sounds like she wasn't even expecting to go inside at any point.

I was going to say something like, the best thing about this, is that I will not have to read it again, but that seems unnecessarily harsh. It wasn't terrible, but it definitely wasn't for me. 

47: A Book Of Interconnected Short Stories

We Are Okay

We Are Okay

By Nina LaCour

Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun. Now, months later, alone in an emptied dorm for winter break, Marin waits. Mabel is coming to visit and Marin will be forced to face everything that’s been left unsaid and finally confront the loneliness that has made a home in her heart.

I mostly picked this one because (a) reviews said it was short and (b) it was available at the library - and in fact had been on my TBR list for some time, even though I have no idea when or why I added it.  It's not something I would  normally go for, i.e., it has no plot, and concerns the emotional goings-on of a young teenager who mopes around after several of her family members die. 

It sounds kind of maudlin, but you know, in the way that teens really dig.  The author does a great job of not falling too deeply into that hole, despite the subject matter.  Yes, it does make you cry (even me, who hates sentimental teenagers and found families and other such wholesome activities, and even though I could feel myself starting to cry, and tried to will myself not to fall into the trap).  

It's a profoundly sad book.  The present storyline involves the narrator, Marin, planning for and receiving a visit from her old friend/ex-girlfriend Mabel, from California, during winter break. The past storyline, is pretty much what you think it will be from the outset, i.e., Marin graduates high school, starts getting involved with Mabel, and then her grandfather, with whom Marin has grown up after her mother died surfing, basically commits suicide by walking out to sea, leaving her to find out that he was hoarding all of her mother's memories.  This upsets her, leaving her to flee California like she's wanted for a felony, hence her current hermit-like cocoon at school in New York.  

Mabel's visit gets her to open up, grieve, talk, and begin planning how to exist again, rather than just remain in stasis.  It is, as I mentioned, very light on plot, very heavy on character drama.  The romance with Mabel is more wistful and in the past than an active relationship.  This is one of those books where you kind of read them for the catharsis jolt you get.  Does it feel weird and manipulative? Yes.  Does it prevent you from crying? No. I knew what was coming and I still cried.  

So, is it a good book? It's well written, and contains a decent enough story.  It's a sweet story, and no one is really the villain.  Mabel comes across as inhumanly patient, but aside from that, it's decently realistic, I guess.  For a YA novel.  There was a phase of my life that this would have hit all those synapses, but I'm a little more jaded and less wallow-y now.  I'd still recommend it to any teen girl.

05: A Sapphic Book

 

 

 

Cemetery Boys

Cemetery Boys

By Aiden Thomas

When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free.

However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He's determined to find out what happened and tie off some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian, so that they can both get what they want. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave.

 

This one was cute enough, although there isn't anything in it that isn't telegraphed from the first quarter of the book.  Yadriel finds a ghost the same night his cousin mysteriously dies, and neither body can be found; not to mention the jaguar claws of ultra-human sacrifice for ultimate power are missing? It doesn't take a genius to put it together. 

I was a little disappointed it takes place in East LA - for some reason I was thinking it took place in Mexico, and I don't know why that makes such a difference, but honestly LA is oddly flat for me as a setting (it's not specific to Cemetery Boys, I don't really get any entertainment that's set there).  

There's certainly enough Spanish in it (and untranslated too, so monolinguists just get to guess at some of the interplay) and the details about Dia de Muertos are thoroughly and lovingly described. And the romance is cute enough, and the main character isn't dumb for plot reasons, or obnoxious or anything like that.  I just... found myself skimming slightly, to get to the action at the end.  One of those things where, since you know so early how the big reveal and denouement will go, all the pit stops along the way start to feel superfluous.  I did appreciate (if not "enjoy") that the author switches to another POV when the main character is potentially dead.  Every little bit of suspense helps!

Yadriel, the main character, is trans, which I somehow managed to not know until after I started reading it, even though it's right in the description and I swear I read that multiple times before checking the book out.  It does impact the plot, since the whole thing hinges on the idea that Yadriel can use the male brujx powers instead of the female, although I still kind of wished that Yadriel didn't dwell so much on it.  I will give him a pass though, since teenagers the world over care way too much about other people's opinions.  I appreciated that Julian was like, no hangups here, dude.  Man, I think I'm just tired of YA right now.  I'm old, and I don't have time for melodramatic nonsense about accepting yourself and finding love.  Give me more no-nonsense heroines, like what's her name in The Alice Network (no, not the modern day one, the cranky old spy).  

28: A Book Set During a Holiday

Year of the Reaper

Year of the Reaper

By Makiia Lucier

The past never forgets . . .

Before an ambush by enemy soldiers, Lord Cassia was an engineer's apprentice on a mission entrusted by the king. But when plague sweeps over the land, leaving countless dead and devastating the kingdom, even Cas' title cannot save him from a rotting prison cell and a merciless sickness.

Three years later, Cas wants only to return to his home in the mountains and forget past horrors. But home is not what here members. His castle has become a refuge for the royal court. And they have brought their enemies with them.

When an assassin targets those closest to the queen, Cas is drawn into a search for a killer...one that leads him to form an unexpected bond with a brilliant young historian named Lena. Cas and Lena soon realize that who is behind the attacks is far less important than why. They must look to the past, following the trail of a terrible secret--one that could threaten the kingdom's newfound peace and plunge it back into war.

I really enjoyed this one! I think it's like a light YA, in the sense that it involves young adults, and isn't suuuuper heavy on complex plotting, but there's certainly some flexibility there, and definitely some dark moments, when we find out what happened to the sick woman (spoiler alert!).  

It reminded me in many ways of The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, which, aside from the protagonist sharing a similar nickname (Cas/Caz) along with the ability to see ghosts, recent release from an unjust imprisonment and a badly scarred back, also has a similar castle politicking/adjacent to royalty vibe with the same kind of medieval fantasy flavor. I mean, the plots are totally different, so it's weird that the protagonists have so many surface similarities, but I love Curse of Chalion, so the similar parts were welcome, and the differences were entertaining. 

There definitely could have been more world building.  We enter into a situation with two warring countries trying to make peace with a political alliance, and beset by a vicious plague.  Cas' backstory involves three years behind enemy lines, and the storyline involves a huge political marriage, but we never spend any time in the next country, or know what they think about, you know, the marriage, or the baby, or the plague, or the fragile detente.  Who IS ruling the country next door? It was never clear to me.  [And how on earth are they going to gloss over the ol' switcharoo when the next ambassador comes a'calling? A question alluded to, but never answered].  So although the story felt satisfying in many ways, it also felt weirdly like it was the second in a duology, or maybe that there was supposed to be another book after this one, perhaps exploring whatever Cas' brother is off to. 

The mystery of what is going on with the attacks is not that hard to figure out - the real question was always going to be be "why is the former queen so pissed off" but I guess when you abandon someone to die and then then marry their fiance and have a kid and then it turns out that the person you abandoned not only didn't die, but was spirited away to be tortured under the guise of medical experimentation, then that all makes sense. But seriously, there are at least three prominent people who survive the plague just in this book, you'd think people would want to see the person dead and buried, especially if one is the QUEEN.  Don't just drop her off at the nearest trauma ward and assume she's going to kick the bucket.  And what if someone recognizes her?  I mean, if nothing else, Cas' brother deserves to be banished for going along with such a stupid plan.  

I was reading a thing the other day about how boys/men don't have "toxic friendships" the way that female characters do.  They're limited in the way their relationships are expressed.  And initially I was going to applaud how fraternal and lovely the brothers' relationship was (and it is), but it's also interesting that the author of that article felt really right, that it seems like in books with male protagonists, you usually wind up with these ride-or-die friendships or no friends. It would be interesting to see a book about toxic male friends.  Not that I, necessarily want to read a book about toxic male friends, but I think it would be good to have one.  The one I can think of about toxic female friends was The Best Lies, and that one drove me crazy.  

 

15: A Book by a Pacific Islander Author

Vassa in the Night

Vassa in the Night

By Sarah Porter

 

When Vassa’s stepsister sends her out to buy lightbulbs in the middle of the night, she knows it could easily become a suicide mission. Babs Yagg, the owner of the local convenience store, has a policy of beheading shoplifters―and sometimes innocent shoppers as well.

But Vassa has a bit of luck hidden in her pocket, a gift from her dead mother. Erg is a tough-talking wooden doll with sticky fingers, a bottomless stomach, and ferocious cunning. With Erg’s help, Vassa just might be able to break the witch’s curse and free her Brooklyn neighborhood. But Babs won’t be playing fair….

I really wanted to like this one, but almost from the beginning I found myself disenchanted with it.  Part of my problem I think, is that the author assumes more familiarity with the original Russian folk tale than I had.  Even though we had flashbacks to Vassa's mother, father, Babs/Bea's relationship and Picnic and Pangolin, none of them really explained what was going on with the BY franchises, why Babs and Bea weren't friends (or how they'd become friends in the first place, and what kinds of powers each had), or how Vassa fit into the continuation of these events from the past.  Erg, the doll, tied Vassa to the magical world, but also, Erg was where Vassa put her own feelings in when her mother died? So, then, if the Erg feelings are absorbed back into Vassa, does that mean that Vassa is no longer drawn to the magical world? Because that's the reverse of how those things usually work: you have to become a complete person before your magic works correctly is a time-honored trope of the genre.  And for good reason!  It makes sense, unlike this book.

Characters just float in and out of the book, and frequently we'll be in the middle of a scene just to cut away and be abruptly transferred to a "night/dream" sequence and never really resolve or wrap up the first scene.  It was very disjointed, and didn't feel intentional.  If it was intentional, great, I hated it.

I also objected to the dialogue and characterization.  Is this chick fifteen? Why does she sound so stilted when talking to people? Why is she so casual about the decapitated people in the bodega parking lot (why is everyone so casual about the decapitated people in the parking lot)? Apparently magic is acknowledged and recognized in this world, but when obviously bad magic is extending night-time and a local franchise is murdering people, uh, the reaction is to watch more tv? Okay, fine, I guess.  But seriously, everyone's frankly ho-hum attitude is a really weird choice to make for the author.  It's like, how serious is this problem? Clearly no one else cares, so why should we?  Even to the point that teenagers are playing games with the store where the potential risk is getting their head (or other parts) cut off?  Everyone's decisions and thought processes in this book are just...confusing.  In a bad way.  

Dexter and Sinister, the disembodied hands for example.  Are they unwilling agents of Babs Yagg? Cooperative villains? Dexter has a change of heart and decides to help Vassa and get itself killed in the process for.. what reason, exactly? Because Babs is mean to him (again)? Or is it because the plot required it?

And there's a lot of people complaining that Vassa didn't actually do much (or anything) herself to solve the tasks given to her, which is also true.  Vassa's primary purpose was going into the store in the first place, and after that... unclear how she derives any character development since she blacks out a lot and the problem gets solved without her involvement.  And frequently, she creates these problems, by having no damn sense.  She see-saws between unbelievable naivety about her situation and the dangers, and some sort of "inner understanding" of all things.

I think there's the germ of a good book in there, but I was pretty disappointed by this one.

 

A Girl of the Limberlost

A Girl of the Limberlost

By Gene Stratton-Porter

Set amid Indiana's vast Limberlost Swamp around 1909, this treasured children's classic mixes astute observations on nature with the struggles of growing up in the early 20th century. A smart, ambitious girl, Elnora lives in the dwindling wetland with her mother and pays for school by collecting local moth specimens to sell to naturalists. Harassed by her mother and scorned by her peers, Elnora Comstock finds solace in natural beauty along with friendship, independence, and romance.

Well, if you're looking for the spiritual kin of L.M. Montgomery, you've found her.  This had a lot of the same hallmarks many of Montgomery's books do (not necessarily the Anne of Green Gables series, but a lot of her others): fiercely proud, independent women, some of them disappointed in love and taking it out on other people, friendly farm neighbors, rich benefactors, "mean" city people who actually love the country person's bold and simple way of life and speaking, etc., etc. I was reminded, reading this, about a recent article that reframed our country's political divide not as one between conservative and liberal, but between rural and urban, and called out all of this literature and media which gave rise to the myth of the rural pure and urban suspect.  This book would certainly add to that myth (although I doubt it's widely read enough to actually affect most voters).

We start out with Elnora walking the three miles to the high school in town, only to find out she needs books and tuition (and probably something other than calico and heavy boots if she doesn't want to stick out like a sore thumb).  Her mother, who is an ENORMOUS BITCH, by the way, knew all of this, but wanted Elnora to be defeated by the experience and give up.  Instead, Elnora sells some bugs and this farm couple help her out, since both their own daughters died in infancy.  We end up following Elnora as she (and her farm "family") charms the local girls and succeeds wildly in school, befriends a young, demanding boy whose alcoholic father dies conveniently timed so that the farm neighbors can adopt him, deals with her awful mother, who is a huge asshole until she finds out her husband died while cheating on her and suddenly about-turns into a caring woman and no one holds a grudge for the last twenty years of abuse, and then a recovering rich boy/Chicago lawyer comes to the swamp for health purposes and calls her "unspoiled" which we all know is code for "going to leave my fiance for you". 

So, yes, maybe I sound dismissive, but I really loved (and love) my LM Montgomery books, and even if this feels like a version of one of her books with about 1000% more bugs and 75% more wooden characters, I found it very readable. It does skip around in time, improbably, and is sort of vignette-y (although we spend a good chunk of time on Elnora's first week at school and her romance with Phillip), and as I mentioned, the characters don't really "develop" with the sole exception of Edith, Phillip's erstwhile fiance, who (somewhat understandably) throws a fit at their engagement party when he abruptly leaves so he can catch a moth for Elnora, and then compounds her sins by going down to the Limberlost and implying Phillip is hers for the taking anytime, so you know she's going to get her comeuppance by the end of the book, and she does, not only giving up on Phillip, but actually being gracious to Elnora and giving her an elusive moth, which is how you know Elnora's innate good character and moral values have finally subdued every possible person she's ever met. 

Well, and NOW I find out that apparently this is a sequel of sorts to Freckles, which goes a long way to explaining who the hell HE is, and why we're never given any information about what his connection is to the moths, the swamp, or Eleanora, aside from leaving her all these valuable pieces. This becomes more pertinent at the end of the book, when Elnora goes to stay with Freckles and his family when she's waiting for Phillip to make up his mind about whether he's really interested in marrying her.  This also sort of explains the mentioned-but-never-really-resolved storyline of the band of criminals who use the swamp for their midnight expeditions (and spy on Elnora through the window, DAMN that creepy mess was just sort of glossed over!) and how the Bird Woman, Swamp Angel, and Freckles all know each other.

Overall, the plot feels a bit thin, and the characters are not much thicker, with the sole exception of Elnora's mother who does a complete 180, but if you're looking for books about moths, you've come to the right place.  Ironically, it was published just as the Limberlost was drained, although it has since been reclaimed for wetlands. 

The Near Witch

The Near Witch

By V. E. Schwab

The Near Witch is only an old story told to frighten children. 

If the wind calls at night, you must not listen. The wind is lonely, and always looking for company. 

There are no strangers in the town of Near. 

These are the truths that Lexi has heard all her life. 

But when an actual stranger, a boy who seems to fade like smoke, appears outside her home on the moor at night, she knows that at least one of these sayings is no longer true. 

The next night, the children of Near start disappearing from their beds, and the mysterious boy falls under suspicion. 

As the hunt for the children intensifies, so does Lexi's need to know about the witch that just might be more than a bedtime story, about the wind that seems to speak through the walls at night, and about the history of this nameless boy. 

I can't help comparing this to AWGTDB, which I read immediately beforehand, and honestly, the comparison was in Wizard's Guide's favor.

In my copy, the author notes that this is an early book of hers, which has been published after she's been successful otherwise, and maybe this is a self-fulfilling perspective, but it felt more derivative and less "established" than her other works. Of course, it also has that trope I hate, of the late teen/early twenties lady protagonist falling for some random "mystery" boy, and then making choices that range anywhere from silly/ill-advised to dangerous/dangerously stupid because she's just DRAWN to him, and no one else understands her and he's just misunderstood and therefore all choices must lead back to protecting this boy from outside forces (like older adults) who aren't as enamored of him.  I just wish there were more natural skepticism in these scenarios.  Romance is not even necessary in most of these cases! You can not want to make out with someone, but still object to the idea of them being summarily executed for a crime they probably didn't commit! Also, maybe it would be easier to convince people he's innocent if you weren't so clearly biased. 

So, a big part of the book was a non-starter for me, which made the rest of it feel very slight and maybe low-stakes?  It was very atmospheric, and the writing is good, but I guess I was never really surprised at any point - yes, her sister will disappear at a point when Lexi is supposed to be watching her (or was warned to watch her), yes, the town elders are all men who don't listen to her/believe her, no, her new boyfriend isn't actually responsible for the child abductions (although how awesome would it have been if he WAS?!), yes, the kids are found alive at the end (how??) and no one dies, except for maybe the bad actor (and sometimes one of the town elders who really deserves it).  It felt a little derivative, which I wouldn't use to describe her other work, so it surprised me - in a bad way. 

Other reviewers talk about it being fairy-tale like, and I guess I would agree with that - it works best if you just go with it and don't worry too much about nuanced characters.  Everyone here has a given role, and they will rigidly adhere to it!

There's an additional story - The Ash-born Boy - in my copy, which goes into Cole's background, and it was okay, although since I found him very uninteresting in Near Witch, I wasn't exactly waiting on bated breath for his backstory. Like I said at the outset, it compared unfavorably to Wizard's Guide, even though maybe the writing/story was more adult, but right now, I want something very different, more pep, less angst!  Even though I generally like heroines who get shit done, a lot of the choices Lexi made bugged me because they felt so antagonistic and needlessly invited pushback.  And I could have done without the romance, which dragged the story down.  I really am noticing that when I finish a book I'm not excited about, it takes forever for me to pick out my next one, which is counter productive, since what I really need after a less than excellent book, is a great book! Right now I'm in the mood for re-reads though, so we'll see what I manage to find.

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

By T. Kingfisher

Fourteen-year-old Mona isn't like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can't control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt's bakery making gingerbread men dance.

But Mona's life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona's city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona's worries...

 

I enjoyed this - it was a YA-ish/middle readers take on despotic fantasy and a heavy emphasis on baked goods.  I'm in the midst of my next read right now, which is (spoiler alert) crammed full of Atmosphere, but (so far) lacking in Personality, and it's helping me pin down why AWGtDB is so charming.  The story is both dark and light: yes, it does involve murders, and attempted coups and registration of wizard folk for eventual extermination (not to mention battle scenes, and death of friends/companions) but everything is squarely centered around 14 year old Mona, who knows very well that she's too young to have to deal with all this shit, but she hasn't yet become cynical and or angsty about it.  

It's also pretty creative in what you can actually do with bread, and how terrifying an enormous golem who doesn't care if it gets stabbed would be.  It also feels nicely original, or at least not overwhelmingly overdone (bread pun!) although maybe it's because I don't read as much middle-reader as I do YA, so I haven't gotten as much exposure to those tropes.  

It does have a little bit of an uneasy balancing act between younger and more adult themes though, and I'm not sure it's always successful in walking that line.  The book opens with a murder, and Mona is being stalked by the murderer, but it's relatively lighthearted, considering she has to flee her house, hole up in a church, flee guards who are also on the lookout for her after she's accused of treason, and then try and find a way to alert "the people in charge" that wizards are being systematically killed.  In an older book, the people in charge would have been behind the whole thing, but in this one, it's an attempted coup. Again, we get back to that lack of cynicism. It does seem a bit simplistic at times, that all the good people are good (although sometimes ineffectual), and the bad people are bad, with no redeeming qualities.   Is it "realistic"? Maybe, maybe not, but it's nice to visit a world where things get set right in the end. 

Good Girl, Bad Blood

Good Girl, Bad Blood

By Holly Jackson

Pip is not a detective anymore.

With the help of Ravi Singh, she released a true-crime podcast about the murder case they solved together last year. The podcast has gone viral, yet Pip insists her investigating days are behind her.

But she will have to break that promise when someone she knows goes missing. Jamie Reynolds has disappeared, on the very same night the town hosted a memorial for the sixth-year anniversary of the deaths of Andie Bell and Sal Singh.

The police won't do anything about it. And if they won't look for Jamie then Pip will, uncovering more of her town's dark secrets along the way... and this time everyone is listening. But will she find him before it's too late?

This is the second in the series, which I reserved almost as soon as I finished the first one... last year, though it took so long to be available now the third one's slated for publishing, and since I didn't write a review of the first, we'll just have to guess at how they compare to each other. I liked parts of this one, and didn't like parts, so it's a bit of a mixed bag, but overall a positive impression.

What I liked: obviously, the lengthy recap at the beginning, which was necessary for moi, since I never remember anything, and that it was done in such a way that it didn't seem forced or anything. It was good, I appreciated the recap, and helpful, since many of the people and events from A Good Girl's Guide to Murder carryover or have additional effects and storylines in Good Girl, Bad Blood.  

I liked that Ravi was there but not really shoehorned in as a more active participant since this mystery wasn't directly concerning him.  A lot of times it feels like shows or books with popular characters have pressure to keep those characters a big focus of subsequent plots, even though it doesn't make much narrative sense.  I also liked that the "cast" of characters was manageable - even after reading the recap of the first book, it seemed like there was just a lot of different plots to keep track of in that one. 

I also liked Pip, and the development of her character - with a caveat.  The extended "scream" sequence, after she finds out Max Hastings is acquitted is... a bit much.  I appreciated that the trauma from the first book affected her in tangible ways in this one, but because the story is so compressed here (like a week from beginning to end), even spending one whole day on it feels like A LOT of the book.

And the storyline was also a bit suspect too - so in an effort to figure out which young man is the one "Leila" is looking for, both Stanley and Luke are drawn out to meet her - and Stanley's meeting place just happens to be where Luke's drug deals go down? Sure, Jan.  And I liked that Jackson at least attempted to address WHY ON EARTH Leila would use a local person's pictures for the scam, but I found the explanation to be very silly and unbelievable.  And I think, narratively, it was annoying that the reveal about Child Brunswick came so late in the game - yes, in real life, we discover things when we discover them, but when you have readers attempting to solve the puzzle along with the detective, it feels a little cheap to pull in a HUGE aspect of the mystery at like, 80% of the way through.

I also liked, again, the structure of the book.  I can't remember if the first one had all the diagrams and pictures, but those, along with the interview records and other notes, made the reading experience fun.  I liked getting those

Although, haha, where on earth does Pip live that can comfortably manage: two murders, two kidnappings, another miscellaneous missing child, a relocated person in witness protection, not to mention assorted other crimes, like drug dealing, underage relationships, uh, I know I'm forgetting some, but you get the idea.  I mean sure, okay, all that, but ALSO able to walk from one of town to the other in less than an hour?  Hmmm. 

I do see that there's going to be a third one, and I think I'll plan on reading that one too.  I like the style quite a bit,and although I didn't like this one quite as much as the first, it was still very readable.

The Iron Will of Genie Lo

The Iron Will of Genie Lo

By F. C. Yee

 

Genie Lo thought she was busy last year, juggling her academic career with protecting the Bay Area from demons. But now, as the Heaven-appointed Guardian of California, she’s responsible for the well-being of all yaoguai and spirits on Earth. Even the ones who interrupt her long-weekend visit to a prestigious college, bearing terrible news about a cosmos-threatening force of destruction in a nearby alternate dimension.
 
The goddess Guanyin and Genie’s boyfriend, Quentin Sun Wukong, do their best to help, but it’s really the Jade Emperor who’s supposed to handle crises of this magnitude. Unfortunately for Genie and the rest of existence, he’s gone AWOL. Fed up with the Jade Emperor’s negligence, Genie spots an opportunity to change the system for the better by undertaking a quest that spans multiple planes of reality along with an adventuring party of quarrelsome Chinese gods. But when faced with true danger, Genie and her friends realize that what will save the universe this time isn’t strength, but sacrifice.

Yes, the story is about a reincarnation of a metal rod from ancient chinese mythology in the body of a Californian teenager.  I know this, and I love it anyway.  Genie Lo is dry and funny and trying desperately to keep her head above water in her home life, college applications, boyfriend problems, and keeping her commune of demons from breaking out and wrecking havoc over the countryside.  

On a college visit, staying with her friend Yunie's cousin, Genie ends up getting enmeshed in several demonic and non-demonic army retreats (drawn to her aura), and joining forces with various gods, in the absence of the jade emperor, to stop the threat and potentially ascend to the throne of heaven.  Genie's got her money on Guanyin, while Quentin is backing his old buddy Guan Yu, with straight-A student type Nezha, and former defeated foe (and emperor's nephew) Erlang Shen rounding out the contenders, and Great White Planet tagging along to keep score.  

It's just a really charming book, and the characters are (mostly) trying their best. It manages to blend the mom's sudden and scary illness/college visit/mysterious absence of jade emperor and new demonic presence really well, although mom's illness got maybe the shortest shrift.  There's obviously themes going on in there about sacrifice and doing the right thing, and there's a scene which perfectly encapsulates the infuriating attitude of those born to invisible privilege. Surprisingly, I think Genie's mom nailed it at the end when she talks about how sometimes we have to accept that we can't control or guarantee the future, and all we can do is keep making the best decisions we can and supporting each other (and also the importance of letting your teenage daughter have a normal college experience, even if is she an ancient magical beating-stick).  I mean, that kind of anxiety is something I still struggle with, and I am much older and less prone to beating people up than Genie is. 

The old characters, particularly Erlang Shen, really got developed and fleshed out.  Erlang Shen become less of a three dimensional villain, what with his explanation for his earlier actions, and his relationships with some of the other characters adding a humane side to him.  As far as the new characters went,Yunie's hilariously deadpan older cousin blew everyone else away, but there wasn't a really sour note.  

The tone of the book wavers somewhere around Avatar: The Last Airbender (which makes sense, since the author's other book is an Avatar book) and Kung Fu Hustle, with the mix of martial arts, comedy, and sudden bursts of warmth and heartfelt interactions.  It's interesting how much happens "offscreen" - Yunie's adventures, and her parents' reconciliation could both have been much longer sections of the book, but we breeze past everything at a pretty good clip, and I didn't mind the recap-style overview, although others might.

The ending tag also really hit the spot for me.  I was honestly not sure if there would be a third in the series, so I was (a) glad to see how things got wrapped up and (b) COMPLETELY surprised by how things got wrapped up - the (SPOILER ALERT) time jump really tugged my heartstrings, the way that they kept working towards rescue and not giving up even years later.  I'm kind of mad though that we didn't get to see Genie in college, and all the stuff in between.  I also forgot about the three versions of the Ruyi Jingu Bang, and thought she already had the cloning power, so it's good that the rescue wasn't supposed to be more built up.  If there ever is a third one, I'm on board.   Especially since they make so many interesting allusions to what happened in the interim! A collection of short stories set in this timeframe would be perfect.

Just as a side note, um, do her mom and dad not notice that she's made of iron and has glowing eyes?  Let's make that one of the short stories!    Come on, do I have to do all the hard work here?

Strange the Dreamer & Muse of Nightmares

Strange the Dreamer

By Laini Taylor

 I keep wanting to call this Lazlo the Strange which makes more sense to me: "Strange" is just his last name, so the title sounds more foofaraw-y than it really is.  That's also a metaphor for the book itself. Strange the Dreamer is about a society trying to overcome its long nightmare while while the nightmares are still literally hanging over their heads.  If you didn't quite understand that, Sarai is called the Muse of Nightmares to really hammer the point home.  But long story short: this is a really interesting story, and the beginning was excellent, but the book is so long and in the middle part it's really just a lot of getting Lazlo and Sarai acquainted with what's going on in their respective spheres (and falling in love because of course) and the story drags until the very end, when there's a lot of action all at once and then we end in the middle of a scene.  Am I going to read the next one? Well, yeah, actually.  Was I planning on it up until like, the last five pages? NO.  It is what it is, but in point of fact, I do want to find out what happened to the two thousand god-babies, and see how Sarai and Lazlo will extricate themselves from Minya, Sarai's crazy sister. It's also a very picturesque book, what with the blue gods and big statue and salt flats and all, but - OH, I just remembered this: it is also very predictable.  I mean, who didn't know that Lazlo would be able to manipulate the mesarthrium, and be a god and that the kids were actually just tools of the gods themselves, and that the Godslayer and his wife would have some weird thing going on, and then Minya would control the ghost-Sarai?  It didn't really detract from the story, but again, when the readers know what's going to happen, making it not happen for hundreds of pages really makes things drag.

Muse of Nightmares

By Laini Taylor


I'm now in the unfortunate position of trying to write this review like, a year after I read the book, so it's going to be pretty vague!  That being said, I liked the second much more than I thought I would.  I wasn't even that sure I was going to read the second book after I finished the first, but I'm glad I did, even though it's not a series that I'll be buying for my shelves anytime soon.  The good news is that it did stick the landing, and things are basically resolved such that both the townies and the godkids are permanently separated, which is great, because their various traumas and PTSD made it almost a requirement.  No one can really heal while the giant alien ship of your oppressors is literally casting a permanent shadow over your town.  Did I think it made sense for the godkids to go haring off into the universe basically under the wisdom and guidance of a couple of teenagers? No, not really, but they seem like they're having a good time, so let's not dwell too much on how little any of them know about the worlds out there.  I'll just be happy that they're happy. 

Ten Second Reviews

Note that Seven Days of Us and Monstrous Beauty were read in 2019, while Gilded Web was in 2021.

Seven Days of Us

By Francesca Hornak

 

Family gathers together to quarantine for the holidays, with unexpected secrets coming to light.

This was a different kind of predictable - in fact the least predictable thing about it is how much I was won over by the end.  In the beginning, everyone is kind of awful: lies abound, just plain unhappiness, and Jesse planning to just crash into his biological father's life like a bomb was driving me crazy. How could everyone be encouraging this? It's not hard! If your purported father does not respond to your email, HE DOESN'T WANT TO SEE YOU.  I mean, that's pretty much true of everybody, don't just invite yourself places.   But somehow all the contrived craziness cancels itself out and the end is a sweet family holiday story: Jesse's accepted, Emma's cancer is less scary, Andrew's leaving his soul-sucking job, Olivia has a baby (and a dead boyfriend, man, THAT I didn't expect (except I kinda did, because I kept checking to see how long it would go for and saw spoilers, whoops)) and the youngest girl's engagement is over, conveniently bothering her for approximately one and one-half days, just long enough to stir up drama between the family, but not long enough that we start to feel like the relationship was anything but a plot digression.

Monstrous Beauty
By Elizabeth Fama

Mermaid falls in love with land dweller, setting off a chain of events and ghostly curses down the generations. 

This one was....fine.  A young woman in New England finds a ghost (without realizing it) and is drawn to him, only to have to figure out her family's connection with a three/four person murder a couple hundred years ago and - wait, let me try to work this out (with spoilers!).  So the mermaid likes this guy and accidentally drowns him, so the next guy she likes she realizes she needs like human lungs for, so after she's caught and raped by Olaf (the mermaid gets a really shitty deal in this whole thing) she takes his lungs, but then she's pregnant so she gives the baby up and it's adopted by Olaf's terrible wife? Who also accuses her of killing Olaf? (somehow Olaf and his awful wife are the only people smart enough to realize she's a mermaid) and then lures her to the church for murder, except that the mermaid kills Olaf's wife (and also the minister and the little girl who was watching the mermaid's adopted baby also die, because why not) and then somehow the mermaid's husband gives up his life for hers, but she doesn't want him to die so the mermaid takes the baby's soul and gives it to... him?  This part is the most confusing: did her husband die? Did she die? Apparently the husband sticks around as a ghost, and she just...melts? Unclear. And then everytime the baby (or her daughters) has a baby, the mother dies because there is too much soul for the world? Also unclear.  

 

Gilded Web

By Mary Balogh 

Woman in regency England is mistakenly kidnapped and has to marry or face scandal.

This was fine, I guess, ugh.  Mary Balogh is generally alright, but I realized partly through this one that I'd read the third book of this series earlier in 2020 and hated it (mostly because of how awful the hero was - he is literally super mean to his wife for the entire book except at the very end, when he finds out she's pregnant.  Yeah, that's a keeper).  This started out VERY over the top (fake kidnapping! mistaken identity! shenanigans!) but the hero and heroine turned out to be fairly buttoned up and quiet people, so it wasn't too crazy.  I didn't really feel the need for the different viewpoints - I think we get through three or four of the side characters, in addition to the mains, and none of them were that compelling - and it started dragging after the halfway mark.  Plus, the struggle is resolved by the heroine deciding that as long as the hero was willing to call off the engagement, then that means she has enough autonomy to stay in the marriage.  But all of her points are still valid! They're just impossible to solve in regency England under the conditions she was in. Well, not a blazing start to the new year, but we gotta start somewhere!

Ten Second Reviews

Anya's Ghost, by Vera Brosgol

Anya could use a friend, but she wasn't expecting to find one at the bottom of the old well she fell into.  Emily has been there for 90 years - she's ready to get back out into the world, and her gratitude towards Anya knows no bounds.  Until Anya begins to realize that Emily may have been in the well for a reason - and Emily doesn't want to go back.  This one, like Be Prepared, takes inspiration from the author's life (although I assume all of the ghost stuff is made up).  Anya is a scholarship teenager at an expensive prep school, trying to navigate relationships, and Emily seems like the answer to a prayer, helping Anya with tests, tracking down the cute boy's class schedule - at first.  But when Anya doesn't like Emily's methods and tries to distance herself from her, Emily threatens even more destruction  - this time on Anya's family.  I don't know if it's the inclusion of ghosts, but this one felt slimmer than Be Prepared, more like a short story than a novel.  It also seemed like it ended really abruptly.  It seemed like the last scene (when Anya and her class are outdoors) was supposed to be connected somehow to Emily, but I couldn't figure out why (are they just out beautifying things? Did Anya tell people where to find Emily's bones? What is it?) and it seems like everything just wraps up really tidily.  While still entertaining, definitely not my pick for Brosgol's finest.

Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon

Kylara Vatta, daughter of one of the great trade and shipping families, has been sent home from the military academy in disgrace.  Her father arranges a new job for her - taking an old ship off for scrap - which should give her some time and space from her embarrassment, and set her up in the family business.  But it's not long before Ky starts to take matters into her own hands, and accidentally winds up in the middle of a planetary war, where she'll have to use all her military training to survive mercenaries, mutinies, and pirates.

One of the Publisher's Weekly reviews for a book in this series says that Moon is great at action and space battles, but it's "too bad she so frequently drowns them in mundane details that provide realism at the expense of entertainment." I could not have said it better.  I like slow sci-fi books that talk about commerce and boring things (how else could I have made it through the Ancillary  series?) but already in Trading in Danger, it feels like we spent a hundred and fifty pages ramping up to action, and then forty pages on the aftermath - planning funerals, reading mail, arranging a new name record for the ship (I am not making any of that up).  I didn't mind it at the beginning, but it definitely feels like the end is unbearably slow paced, like when people (mostly my family, although I'm sure other people felt the same way) complained that The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King movie had like, ten endings that went on for an hour.  It's a weird pacing problem.  The other problem that Publisher's Weekly had, which I definitely agree with, was that things are set up, and then there's no payoff: like this polo match which is alluded to multiple times like it has meaning, and then is just skipped, or the whole ship model kit that Ky receives from one of her old military instructors which has a secret code in it that she just ignores, but then also happens to have the one part she needs later to re-assemble the ship's beacon. That pissed me off.  Come on!  You can't just be like, here's a mysterious package which has a mysterious part, which turns out to be the one part you need, but we're never going to even talk to the sender or mention him again, or even have consequences of using what is clearly a military beacon on this junk ship.

I'm just not quite convinced enough to keep going.  Based on the reviews, although the rest of the series has more action, they're all plagued with similar issues. 

Be Prepared

Be Prepared

By Vera Brosgol

All Vera wants to do is fit in―but that’s not easy for a Russian girl in the suburbs. Her friends live in fancy houses and their parents can afford to send them to the best summer camps. Vera’s single mother can’t afford that sort of luxury, but there's one summer camp in her price range―Russian summer camp.

Vera is sure she's found the one place she can fit in, but camp is far from what she imagined. And nothing could prepare her for all the "cool girl" drama, endless Russian history lessons, and outhouses straight out of nightmares!

This is a middle-school readers semi-autobiographical graphic novel about nine year old Vera, who, finding herself not fitting in amongst her (non-Russian) schoolmates after a disastrous sleepover, begs her mom to send her and her brother to Russian scout camp - where she unhappily discovers that there's just never a guaranteed way of fitting in and making friends.

This was going to be a Ten Second Review but - as you'll notice - I got a little expressive and the review got a little lengthy.

I really loved this book. It's beautifully illustrated, with muted colors and expressive faces, but more than that, it really gets to the heart of a common pre-teen girl (and boy) experience: beginning to compare yourself and your family to others and feeling awkward or embarrassed or just plain uncool.

I remember myself the pain of having to leave a slumber party early (god, ALL the slumber party shit.  Why do I still love the idea of slumber parties when all of my memories are of like, extreme embarrassment? WHAT PYJAMAS YOU WEAR DETERMINES YOUR SOCIAL STATUS FOR LIFE AND LET'S NOT EVEN TALK ABOUT THE DELICATE ART OF GIFT-GIVING), and the like, social minefield that is your pre-teens and early teens. Why no, I haven't been scarred at all by events that happened decades ago and I definitely don't still remember the excruciating details of another twelve year old making fun of me (with what is, in retrospect, not even good sarcasm).

And I - OH MY GOD I just remembered how much I hated bringing my sleeping bag  - which was flannel and super bulky and had to be wrapped up with elastics tied together because they had worn out and snapped - when my friend had, like, the speedo of sleeping bags - shiny, tiny, with its own cover bag to stuff it into. It was teal and hi-tech and shaped like a coffin, not a rectangle (remember that I don't make the rules about what is cool, I just know that coffin shaped sleeping bags are cooler than rectangles, or at least they were back in the mid-90s) and so fucking cool and everything my sleeping bag wasn't and I bet you my friend had not one clue that I was dying inside about her sleeping bag. She's happily married now with a really cute baby girl who slept on me for like an hour during dinner once, which was amazing and I highly recommend, and I really hope I have enough willpower not to message her and be like, "REMEMBER YOUR SLEEPING BAG FROM TWENTY YEARS AGO? I think I'm finally working out my feelings about it!"

I'm going to move on from my own traumas for like, one hot second, to reiterate that Be Prepared makes me want to, like, go back and relive my youth except now, I would be able to unclench and actually enjoy it more, having learned the hard lesson that is growing up and becoming (and loving) your own self.  Be Prepared achieves the hard balance of getting to the heart of these seemingly insurmountable embarrassments and cruelties (which are in hindsight pretty minor) without actually wallowing in it or becoming too schadenfreude-y.  This is not cringe-kink (ew, gross, I hate this word I just made up and will never use it again). 


I will definitely be reading more from Brosgol (I already have Anya's Ghost waiting for me at the library), and if you want to relive your youth, without actually, you know, reliving it, please pick this book up.  

Ironically, the girl whose slumber party I left early now leads hiking expeditions into the wilderness for young women. What a wonderful world.

Treasure Island

Treasure  Island

By Robert Louis Stevenson

The classic adventure tale of buried treasure and pirates, young Jim Hawkins becomes involved in a search for the lost treasure of legendary pirate Captain Flint.  He sails to Treasure Island only to discover the ship's crew is planning to mutiny and kill their passengers after the treasure is found, and his life will depend not only on his own quick wits, but on the uncertain benevolence of Long John Silver, leader of the mutineers.

Despite this book being a classic in just about every sense of the word, I realized very early on that the only thing I knew about it was that the main character was a young child, and there was a bad pirate called Long John Silver who kinda, like, took the kid on an adventure??? In hindsight, I'm pretty sure most of my impressions were generated by Muppet Treasure Island (and like, Swiss Family Robinson, which also involves children and pirates) - which was somewhat problematic, since I've never even seen Muppet Treasure Island.   But I definitely got the idea this was a kids book.  I mean, it was a Disney movie! Uh, sure, like a pirate kids version of And Then There Were None.  As Jim says at end, of their fully staffed ship, only five people made it out alive.   Jim is almost murdered multiple times (although he fears the torture worse) and ends up shooting and killing another pirate.  I'm just saying, at no point did I have any idea of what to expect.

In fact, despite the popular idea that this is a kids book, perhaps because the narrator is a child, and it's short, honestly, it didn't feel very child-like.  I also struggled with the whole intro, in which we meet a variety of pirates whose relationship to each other was less important for Stevenson to describe, than the ominous signs and portents and chills which accompany their actions.  So, I guess I'm pretty sure that the pirate at the beginning was Flint's first mate (we never meet Flint, but everybody talks about him all the time) and had the treasure map, but just wanted... to retire in poverty?  It's unclear to me why he's just camped out at the hotel basically waiting for the other pirates to track him down, but you do you, as the kids say.

Then there's like, Blind Pew and his gang, who are somehow affiliated with Long John and his gang, although they never appear together in the book.  Or maybe they're competing pirate gangs?  All I know is, we meet a whole bunch of pirates in the first fifty pages that never appear again and aren't, actually, relevant to the main story.  Well, I guess they add spice.  And for some reason, Jim and his mom just give the map to the local squire? And then the squire decides Jim will be going on this trip and we never hear about his mother again (except that before they depart, Jim can spend one more night with her - like, was this childcare in the 1800s? Good lord).

And THEN! I was delighted to find out Long John Silver was hired as the cook! Amazing!  It makes the chain restaurant so much more apt!  Other things I was surprised by: the fact that Long John is both a mutineer and like, a triple agent! He actually is the only "good" pirate, even though he's the one that lead the mutiny. And they're more concerned about getting off the island alive than they are in looking for treasure (which does make sense).

Treasure Island has a lot of dialect, and also some like, 1880s sea-faring slang, which makes whole pages at times incomprehensible. In fact, I found the story better when there was less dialogue.  Its beginnings as an action serial are clear.

I will add just as a final note, that having just sailed on a masted schooner, I have no further insights on Treasure Island except to say that the experience is the opposite of restful, such that I had like, waking night terrors for four days following my sail, thinking that I was still rocking gently on the boat and also had no idea where I was.  Maybe that's just me. However, I can certainly understand the desire to mutiny, if only to claim better sleeping quarters.

I had a tough time with this prompt, since "celebrity" and "admire" don't really go hand in hand.  But in addition to the recommendation, I happened to have a very handsome set of adventure stories which I bought two years ago and never opened, so this was the perfect opportunity.

28: A Book Recommended By A Celebrity You Admire 
(Barack Obama)

Blackfish City

Blackfish City

By Sam J. Miller

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges—crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population.

When a strange new visitor arrives—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people—each living on the periphery—to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves.



Blackfish City is a remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying power of human connection.

There's something I just really enjoyed about this book - the vibe, the feel of it, the concept, the execution, whatever it was, I was just rapt from page 1. There are four narrators (for a little while, sorry, Fill!) but it maintains relatively confusion free, everything eventually coming together to solve the mystery of the woman with the orca, and the Breaks disease. It feels fresh and new in a way a lot of dystopian fiction doesn't (at least, YA fiction).  Some of that may be because of the setting, which allows Miller to completely invent the city and its social structures and strictures.  It's also a pretty fun revenge story, and those are generally a good time.  I like a good revenge story in fiction.  It gives you all the feels from punishing wrongdoers without actually having a mental breakdown and like, going after every person who has ever cut you off in traffic.  Revenge in real life is not nearly as awesome. 

The other thing I appreciated about this was how dark it was without actually being depressing.  Fill is murdered, the polar bear dies and it's presumed that Kaev will descend into madness again, the city is a mess, and we kind of leave our characters in a boat, on uncertain waters, but you do feel like it's possible for things to be okay.  I would be interested in spending more time in Qaanaaq (or the rest of the world) but it seems like it would be hard to duplicate the tension and sense of impending collision that marks Blackfish City.  Part of the book's strength is each character's internal narration and the sense of loss and loneliness that each has, which is both explained and solved by the end of the book. 

There's a lot about current social issues - otherism, disease, economic injustice, climate change, gender/sexuality - that does feel timely (and pointed).  It's not really a very subtle book, but honestly, how far have we gotten with subtle? There's a lot going on, and the tone of the book does change from the beginning (more of that internal struggle and place-setting) and the end (action action action), but that really didn't bother me the way it did other reviewers. 

Maybe I'm letting the novelty of it count for too much, but it weirdly reminded me of another dystopic masterpiece, the ineffable 17776.  Particularly with the Memory Map of Qaanaaq, and the feeling that of a very lived-in world, even if we only focus on a few people in it.  We're all bound together, let's try not to sink this ship.


37: A Book With A Two-Word Title