Daily Science Fiction recently published my first short story. In the style of a history textbook, it’s the story of a woman averting a diplomatic disaster through the power of picky eating and weird sandwiches:
The course of history and the fortunes of our country hinged not upon the whims of a single, ordinary woman but rather upon the extraordinary biology of her husband. Arnie Smith’s eldest child, Jonah, was born a mere six months after his first marriage. He went on to father another fourteen children before his first wife’s untimely death. There can be no doubt, then, that six weeks after her honeymoon, as she sat at that critical dinner, the second Mrs. Smith declined the Embiilid dishes for the sake of her child, which she nevertheless miscarried shortly thereafter.
The style is very different from most of my stories, but the themes are similar: epistemic injustice, gender, class, fatness, trauma.
At the time, I was thinking about how “picky eating” and “good taste” are socially constructed.
Many foods I grew up eating in a lower middle class* Midwestern town just absolutely would not fly on dining tables in the upper middle class West Coast town I live in now, and yet the diners here aren’t “picky.” They have good taste. They’re refined. They know more about food and nutrition than Midwestern diners–how else could the Midwest get so fat?–and so they do better.
Two people may have equally restrictive diets, but the worker/child/autistic/patient/POC/fatty is a picky eater, whereas the boss/adult/neurotypical/doctor/white/thin person has a refined palate.
Contrary to popular belief, your taste in food is morally neutral. Being open to a wider variety of tastes and textures doesn’t actually make you smarter, kinder, or more interesting. It’s mostly just a product of your environment.
*I really struggled with choosing class descriptors because no community is a monolith and everyone in America thinks they came from “nothing” and bootstrapped their way up to “comfortably middle class” (or will any minute now). The point is my community of origin is poorer, less educated, more rural, and fatter than the community I live in now.
I began sharing book reviews because I wanted to help authors I liked make a career in writing, and because I enjoyed writing reviews and thought I was good at it.
I no longer enjoy writing reviews.
Part of it is the nature of the author/reviewer relationship mediated through ARC distribution platforms like NetGalley: If I accept an ARC, I have to post a review, even if I don’t like the book. But what if I don’t like it because I’m just not smart enough to get it? What if I don’t like it because I’m not the right reader? What if my not liking it closes doors I don’t yet know will keep me out of my own career in writing?
If I do decide to start writing reviews again, I will likely stick to books I have purchased with my own money so that I have the ability to choose whether or not I want to say anything about them publicily.
However, part of what’s going on is also just that I’m not generally enjoying much right now.
I’m okay. I’m not in crisis, and I don’t want anyone to worry about me. Depression seems like an unpleasant but perfectly reasonable response to what I’m going through right now, especially given what we’re all going through right now.
For now, I’m going to focus on taking care of myself and my family; cutting back on commitments that don’t make me happy; and chasing the things that do still spark joy.
I’ve been able to finish a shocking number of short stories in the past few months, and I hope to be able to share some of those … realistically, with the rate at which publishing moves, within the next decade or two. I have the first draft of a cozy rural PNW sapphic romance novel about grief and ghosts and a three-legged gremlin dog to revise.
I think I might like to use this blog to talk about writing as a practice–routines, planners, resources, etc. I can’t say for sure yet because I don’t want to overcommit and cut into my fiction writing time, but that sounds fun and potentially useful. We’ll see.
I am also working on a post about the books that I’ve found most useful in dealing with both my feelings about and the material reality of preparing to lose a parent to pancreatic cancer. Should be a riot.
For fans of: Encanto, Primal Animals Julia Lynn Rubin, Veronica Schanoes’s short fiction, The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy, primary source research, etymology, found family (both literal and metaphorical), antiquing
I don’t remember exactly how I came to have a review copy of From Dust, a Flame. I mean, I know it came from Netgalley, but I don’t remember requesting it. It was just on my Kindle one day, with its dark and foreboding romantic cover, and I once again dove into a book with no memory of the blurb.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover Rebecca Podos’s fourth book isn’t the Hunger Games-adjacent drama-and-action-and-drama fest the cover implies. (I love a dystopian YA, but it’s been, you know, a time, and I’m very tired.)
From Dust, a Flame by Rebecca Podos is a young adult contemporary Jewish fantasy novel about how trauma gets passed through generations of parents imperfectly protecting their children. Most of the action revolves around primary source research, most of the drama is familial, and the romantic subplot is sapphic. It’s what I call a “nice story”–not free from conflict or trauma, but thoughtful about how it portrays them and full of characters who are trying their best to do right by each other, even when they make mistakes.
The main character, Hannah Williams, will resonate with readers who recognized themselves in Encanto’s super strong, hyper capable Luisa (me; I bawled my eyes out). Even though Hannah and her family have not spent more than a year in the same district since she started school, Hannah is a perfect student. She sacrifices sleep, free time, hobbies, and friendships in order to maintain her perfect grades.
Hannah has this sense of herself as someone who isn’t naturally gifted in any way, and therefore has to strive four times as hard as her peers in order to earn the love that flows naturally to the rest of her family:
Nobody can help loving my brother, but I don’t need anyone to love me like that. I just need to be good enough that they can’t help but sit up and notice me … sometimes, it feels like no student-of-the-mother award or A++ essay or glowing teacher’s recommendation could make Mom pay me her full attention.
Hannah’s mother and older brother, Gabe, are eccentric, extroverted artist types. It’s Hannah’s mother’s wanderlust that keeps the family in constant motion along “a trail of borrowed houses that had been winding its way across the country for years.” It’s Gabe’s grew-up-too-fast emotional maturity that keeps them relatively peaceful anyway.
When Hannah’s mother was seventeen, she ran away from “a black farmhouse besieged on all sides by wildflowers.”
The night before Hannah’s seventeenth birthday, her mother gives her a silver pendant:
“A hamsa. It was from a friend of your grandmother’s … Someone who meant a lot to me growing up.”
… We’ve never met our grandmother on Mom’s side, never met any of her relatives. Mom rarely talks about the people or place she comes from, or anything that happened to her before [she met our deceased father]. I’ve never even seen a picture of her as a kid …
There are Stars of David engraved in the tip of each of the hamsa’s fingers. It’s the first time Hannah learns her mother’s family is Jewish–that she is Jewish.
What exactly that means is a recurring theme throughout From Dust, a Flame. As Hannah learns more about her family history, she meets Jewish people with a wide range of beliefs and practices, from atheists to mystics. Podos is clearly trying to balance Judaism for Goyim (“This is how we celebrate, this is how we mourn,” etc.) with more in-group-oriented discussions about Jewish identity.
Since I’m not Jewish, I can’t really say how well they pull it off, but I could tell how meaningful a project it was for her, and I am always won over by authorial earnestness.
The morning after Hannah opens the hamsa, she wakes up with “impossible golden eyes, and horizontal, knife-slit pupils.”
I was like “Hell yeah, werewolves,” but unfortunately this is not a werewolf book. When Hannah wakes up the next morning, the not-werewolf eyes are gone, and she has another animal feature. It’s a painless transformation that happens every night while she is asleep, and it’s only ever the one feature.
Gabe’s adamant about taking Hannah to a doctor. He’s a big fan of horror movies, so I don’t know why he would think that was a good idea, but his mother talks him out of it. She says she knows “a specialist” back home. She’ll go and find this person, Gabe and Hannah will stay alone in the apartment for two weeks at the most, and everything will be just fine.
Unsurprisingly, everything is not just fine. Their mother never returns, and Hannah ropes Gabe into going after her with only a mysterious piece of mail that arrived after her disappearance to guide them.
As I read about Hannah and Gabe digging through the layers of trauma and mistakes that formed them, I was really impressed by how Podos managed to craft such thorough and well-rounded arcs for so many characters in such a comparatively short book. Even when I disagreed with the choices characters made, I fully understood and empathized with the reasons they made them. It felt true to my experience of inherited trauma: Most people do the best they can to protect their children, but their scars get passed down anyway.
The only aspect of From Dust, a Flame that didn’t work for me was the way the final conflict was resolved. I liked the outcome, but I thought too much of the getting-there happened offscreen. It felt like it was geared toward a much younger audience than the seventeen-year-old protagonist would suggest.
Overall, though, I loved this quiet little book. At a time in my life where everything feels like it’s falling apart, I found the themes of grief and inherited trauma salient and comforting.
Plus, I cannot resist gay tryhards with mommy issues, and Podosgave me not one but four of them to love. I’m hoping she will also give me a sequel with Gabe as the protagonist because I love him and I want to see him thriving in college.
Disclosure
I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
For fans of: Stalking Jack the Ripper, Titanic, Tuck Everlasting, Mary Shelley, rich girl/poor boy romance, old anatomical drawings, plague stories
I requested a review copy of Anatomy: A Love Story after hearing Dana Schwartz’s guest appearance on the podcast You Are Good. Sarah Marshall, one of the podcast’s hosts, called it a “grave-robber YA book,” and I was in.
It helps that cover is absolutely gorgeous. It features a red-haired white young woman in a long red gown, viewed from above so that her skirts make an anatomical heart. The font is bold and gothic.
Unfortunately, though I liked the book, it didn’t quite live up to the expectations I had based on the podcast and cover.
The book is set in Edinburgh, 1817, and told through the alternating perspectives of lady Hazel Sinnett and resurrection man Jack Currer.
Here’s my first problem: At first, Schwartz sticks to the convention of maintaining one consistent perspective per chapter, but later, Jack will get a few paragraphs or even just a single sentence in the middle of a Hazel chapter, and vice versa. Either approach (alternating between or within chapters) would be fine, but I found the lack of consistency both confusing and frustrating.
On the other hand, I loved Hazel as a character. She’s a fiercely independent and powerfully lonely young woman trying to delay what she sees as an inevitable marriage to her cousin because she wants to be a surgeon.
This is doubly embarrassing for her cousin/future husband. Ladies aren’t supposed to have professions, and surgeons are regarded as the lowest kind of medical professional:
“If you wanted to pretend that you were going to become a physician–or a nurse–I suppose that would be one thing. But surgery–Hazel, surgery is the field for men with no money. No status. They’re butchers, really!”
Which, fair. Anesthesia hasn’t been invented yet, and surgeons won’t even start routinely washing their hands for another fifty years.
When we meet her, she’s gathering a dead frog and some makeshift lightning rods to see if she can harness the electricity of a gathering storm to reanimate the dead. She’s ruthless and a little cold in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen from a female protagonist. Definitely not a young female protagonist that the narrative regards as uncompromisingly good.
When the local surgeon refuses to teach Hazel because of her sex, she makes a wager with the famous Dr. Beecham:
“The conditions: You will sit the Physician’s Examination at the end of this term. If you pass, I shall open the course to any women who wish to attend, although I warn you there may not be quite so many with your peculiar predilection as you seem to believe. And, in the unlikely event that you do pass, I will also offer you an apprenticeship–with me–at the university hospital …
“Let’s say that if you do not pass the Physician’s Examination, you’ll be unable to sit it in the future. This larger experiment, of a female surgeon, will be considered concluded.”
But Beecham warns Hazel that it will not be possible for her to pass the practical examination with only theoretical knowledge. She needs hands-on experience.
Enter Jack Currer, a poor boy who lives in the rafters of a theater and steals corpses (but never their belongings, which is a more serious crime) to make ends meet. Medical schools require stolen corpses to teach anatomy and surgery because it’s illegal to practice on anyone but executed criminals, and there aren’t enough of those to go around.
Their star-crossed romance is painfully Romeo and Juliet. When he first meets Hazel, Jack believes he’s in love with the prima ballerina at his theater. Hazel is engaged to her cousin. Their families aren’t at war (Jack doesn’t have any family.), but there’s plenty of blood and death, anyway. They share their first kiss in a graveyard, sitting on top of a coffin. Hazel’s horse is named Rosalind.
It worked for me because Jack challenges Hazel, and I appreciate a narrative that recognizes what a relief it is to have someone take you seriously enough to argue with you. They have some cute banter early on:
The boy grinned and winked, although it might have just been him squinting against the setting sun … “I don’t find myself cavorting with high society ladies like yourself too often, so doesn’t strike me as an introduction one needs to make.”
“We’ve already met. Twice.” Hazel reasoned.
“Aye, but is it really meeting if I haven’t given ye a name?” he said, and this time he winked for real.
I also liked their interdependency. Neither Jack nor Hazel can achieve their goals without help from the other, and neither exists purely to help the other grow as a character. At first.
Then, it abruptly stopped working for me. Jack lost all agency. He became a prop in Hazel’s story in a way that felt a lot like a superhero’s girlfriend alternately nagging him and needing to be rescued. It wasn’t even like that loss of agency pushed Hazel to make any significant changes, it just made it hard to remember why Hazel supposedly cared so much about Jack in the first place.
Around this time, the book took a hard shift for the gothic. I don’t know if I can say it was surprising, given the cover, but the first three-quarters of the book are solidly historical fiction. There are no obvious speculative elements, and while there’s obviously suspense, it isn’t moonless night on the foggy moors with a wailing that might just be the wind suspense. The tone is pretty standard for a historical YA.
None of this felt like a twist. Instead, it felt like I was suddenly reading a different book, and I didn’t care what happened because the characters shared only surface details with the characters of the book I had been reading, and everything I had liked about them was gone. I really struggled to finish the book, and I found the ending profoundly unsatisfying.
It’s so frustrating. I enjoyed the majority of the book, and I think putting Jack into the role of the gothic damsel and making Hazel a gothic hero could be interesting, but it just didn’t come together for me.
Disclosure
I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Genre: Fantasy Audience: Adult Series?: Standalone
Rating: Loved it!
For fans of: Cold Magic, The Bone Witch, Shadow and Bone, fantasy maps, magic systems that would be really easy to incorporate into TTRPGs, PWP but instead of porn it’s worldbuilding
I’m a big Kate Elliott fan, so I was thrilled to get the opportunity to review one of her books. I devoured the whole thing in a single day and immediately logged onto Goodreads and gave it five out of five stars. While I was there, I noticed the average star rating was lower than expected, so I did something I promised myself I’d stop doing and took a peek at some of the other reviews.
Oh … those are good points … Well, I didn’t feel that way. I really enjoyed Servant Mage! Kate Elliott is such a good writer!
Friends, it has only been about week since I finished this book, and I had to go back to my Kindle highlights to remember anything about it. I didn’t retain the main character’s name. I didn’t retain any of the major plot beats. All I had was a mental image of a walled courtyard.
I’m not going to revise my rating because I have deliberately chosen a rating system that catalogues how I feel about a book when I finish it, rather than what I think about a book. What I think now is that Kate Elliott is such a strong writer that she can sell almost any story, even if the plot is wobbly and the ending is hanging on by a single rusted hinge. But I clearly felt like it was a good time, and that’s all the counts in these parts.
To the walled courtyard!
Since the revolution, Fellion’s country has regarded mages as a communal resource. The Liberationist Council government removes young magic users from their families, subjects them to horrific conditions in training camps, and then forces them to labor as “indentured servants” for various people and businesses. The justifying ideology is partially about using their powers for the common good, partially about controlling the symbiotic wraiths that give them their powers, but seems primarily to be a response to the high esteem they enjoyed under the Monarchist government.
Fellion is indentured to a hotel. In addition to using her fire magic to provide warmth and light for the wealthy patrons, Fellion scrubs the outhouses on her hands and knees. Because the latter task is gross, she can usually depend on the courtyard around the outhouses to be empty while she’s supposed to be cleaning them, and Fellion uses those daily moments of privacy to teach other servants to read.
I wanted more of these lessons. Narratively, their purpose is to establish Fellion as someone who is willing to risk her safety and freedom to do what is right, and also to introduce her backstory. Fellion’s mother and “older father” (Three-parent families seem to be the norm in this world.) were executed by the Liberationists for writing and distributing seditious materials.
However, after half a lesson at the beginning of the book, Fellion’s students exit the narrative entirely. I wanted more of a payoff for them. Thematically, I think it would make sense for Fellion’s relationships with other servants to play a role in the resolution, but they’re really just there as setup.
Her first on-page lesson is interrupted by an air “Adept, a mage whose gift was not commonplace as most were but superior and thus laudable and demanding of the highest respect.” He offers to pay her well for a job whose parameters he refuses to define. A job Fellion immediately realizes must be illicit:
“Because you made me an offer. If you were working on the orders of the Liberationist Council you’d have marched in and handed a transfer license to my boss to take control of my indenture. So I’m guessing this is something you’re doing for yourself. Or maybe on hire for someone you can’t refuse …”
However, Fellion’s desperate to escape indenture, and the Adept can not only pay her well but also provide her with a travel permit, so she accepts.
She and the Adept join up with three other mages: earth, water, and aether. Fellion’s a little scandalized. The Liberationist Council has banned “five arrow quivers” (groups of one of each kind of mage), though she doesn’t know why.
Fellion knows there are Monarchist rebels trapped beneath the Iron Hills. At first, the quiver seems to be headed in that direction. She surmises:
“… Maybe you’re out of oil and need Lamps to help guide people out. Folk are calling it the last stand of the Monarchists. But that fight was already lost … My grandmother used to say Monarchist rebels are a twitching corpse that hasn’t realized it’s dead. Even if they were to win, which they can’t, it’s over for them … No royal child of the dragon lineage has been born in the years since.”
The words are barely out of her mouth before the group gets word that a dragon-born child has “fallen into the world.” The group rushes off to try to save the child before the Liberationist Council can find and kill her.
Traveling with the Monarchist rebels, Fellion gradually learns everything she knows about magic and the history of the revolution is a deliberate lie crafted to support Liberationist rule. As a reader, I found myself reluctantly beginning to side with the Monarchists. They feed, bathe, and clothe Fellion more generously than she has been since she was stolen from her family as a child. They seem genuinely grieved by her trauma. They’re gentle with her, and when they realize they’re in immediate danger, they give her the option to set out on her own rather than face it with her.
Only it’s a false choice. Fellion is unlikely to survive extended travel on her own.
Worse, the Monarchists don’t seem to realize it’s a false choice. They think very highly of themselves for treating Fellion better than the Liberationists, but they still maintain a rigid class-based hierarchy. They treat Fellion almost as an equal on the road, but as soon as they get to a Monarchist settlement, she’s forced to eat and sleep apart from the noble members of her group. They expect her to be grateful for it.
This is reassuring, right? It’s 2021. We don’t need books that justify rule by birthright.
Unfortunately, even though it’s ethically the right decision, it made the ending less satisfying than it could have been. Fellion spends most of her journey with people who are somewhat kinder to her than the people she escaped from but still aren’t her friend, which means she isn’t able to develop any significant relationships. Not with her fellow servants, not with the rebels, and not with the family she might hopefully find again someday.
Which is not to say the ending is unsatisfying. Fellion’s arc is lovely. She really comes into her own and chooses a path that’s in harmony with her family’s values and her own lived experiences. In the final pages, I was filled with a sense of hope and excitement for what comes next. I did immediately rate it five stars, after all.
Unfortunately, right now it seems like what comes next is nothing. This feels like a really good prequel to a really great epic fantasy trilogy, but it’s a standalone. I can understand why that information might make someone choose to mark it down, but instead I’m going to choose to hope that enough positive reviews will inspire Tor to give Kate Elliott a three-book contract to continue the series.
Please?
Disclosure
I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Genre: Contemporary romance Audience: YA Series?: Standalone
Rating: Loved it!
For fans of: One Direction fanfiction (Larry?), The Charm Offensive, Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun, An Unexpected Kind of Love, VH1’s Behind the Music, found family, friends to lovers
I hate when people call gay romance novels cute. It feels infantilizing. It reminds me of the way straight people will stare and point at (especially male) gay couples on the street, and when they’re caught say, “Oh, you’re just so cute.” Like gay people (especially men) are fluffy handbags, statement pieces, not entirely real people.
Also, this book is cute as hell, and it’s only partially due to the romance. I can’t remember the last time I saw a media portrayal of male friendships this open and loving. Usually, when fictional friends say they love each other, it’s a pair of girls who are about to stab each other in the back. There’s no backstabbing in this book. There’s not even a single “no homo.”
The friends are four boys who met and performed together at music camp one summer when they were fifteen: “sensitive, sweet Zach … type A, cautious Jon … wild, hilarious Angel … perfectionist, darkly sarcastic [Ruben].” Though none of the other boys knew it at the time, Jon’s father is the famous pop talent manager Geoff Braxton:
… if he decides you’re worth it he can make you a global superstar, richer and more famous than you can ever imagine. If you want to be famous, he’s a god.
Geoff watched the boys’ finale performance (complete with “terrible choreography that we crudely put together … by watching YouTube … and altering the moves to fit our ability”) “through calculating eyes” and decided they were worth it.
Three years later, Geoff has carefully shaped the boys into Saturday, a world-famous pop band preparing to leave for their first international tour. He’s given them professional choreography and more money than they know how to spend, but also entirely new personals that they have to maintain both on and offstage.
Angel, who has a model waiting in every country, is the innocent virgin, while Jon, a devout Catholic, struggles against instructions to wear less and less clothing for every show.
I’m not going to say much about Jon in this review because when things happen, he’s usually standing on the sidelines yelling for his friends to put on their helmets, but I want to get it on the record that Jon is 10/10 the best boy. Jon would bring you soup when you’re sick and never forget your birthday. If I ever come into a possession of a human son, I want him to be like Jon.
Zach, the pop punk-loving cinnamon roll, is the bad boy of the group, but his vocals have been polished free of any edge. He longs to write a song for Saturday, but Geoff continually rebuffs his efforts, telling him to think more along the lines of “something that would play … in a mall.” Fuck managers, but I actually can’t hold this against Geoff. All the lyrics Zach shares in the book are comedically bad:
I bring my pen to the page and write: You’re like a hangover … I put my notebook down, and write down mysterious ways.
Is there a song in that … you’re hot like water?
Though his musical theater background makes him the strongest vocalist of the group, Ruben is bland, a blank slate for the projected fantasies of any girl who doesn’t want a virgin, a player, or a bad boy. Which seems like a good marketing strategy, at first. However, Geoff goes beyond just dressing Ruben in neutral-colored sweaters, preventing him from showing off his true singing abilities, and forbidding him from drawing any attention to himself. Geoff is terrified someone will find out Ruben is gay, even though it’s an open secret in the industry and Ruben has been asking to make it public since he was sixteen.
Ruben is the group cynic, which sometimes makes him hard to sympathize with. There’s more than a bit of condescension in the way he thinks about his friends’ hopes that their management company will give them more freedom in the future. None of his friends know Geoff has been keeping him in the closet for years because he hasn’t told them. I often wanted to shake him, but I also found him painfully real and relatable. In addition to a gay teenager who’s way over his head, Ruben was raised by parents who are cruel and controlling, and he’s learned to keep his vulnerabilities hidden.
Though all four boys are privately struggling, they manage to keep it more-or-less together until they leave for the international leg of their big tour.
Then, it quickly becomes clear that Angel’s partying is out of control, and there’s something more than friendship growing between Zach and Ruben. (Poor Jon has very little time to worry about his own problems because he’s somehow gotten stuck with the responsibility for keeping his friends alive and out of trouble.)
Even though I have only ever read one (horrifying) piece of bandfic, I loved this setup for a YA romance novel. It’s full of opportunities for angst and drama beyond the usual miscommunication. And it delivers! This is a book that’s practically dripping in teenage angst, but the authors usually manage to keep it from veering into melodrama by making sure there are actual, clear stakes and plenty of fluff to balance it all out.
Then they kiss, and it’s suddenly very gay. (Did you know you’re allowed to describe an erection in YA? Because I did not.)
There are several chapters of angst while Zach tries to figure out if he actually wanted to kiss Ruben (and that would mean about him) or if he just wants to have wanted to kiss Ruben because he doesn’t want to hurt his best friend. Ruben has a tendency to attract guys, both straight and not, looking to date their way into stardom. Zach’s almost more afraid of having used Ruben like all the others than he is of admitting he’s bi. Meanwhile, Ruben is panicking that he somehow forced or manipulated Zach into kissing him, and the media is picking up on the tension between them.
If I sound dismissive, it’s not because I have no sympathy for Zach’s experience. The way the authors describe his dawning realization that he’s always been attracted to people of all genders was similar to my own internal coming out process:
Is the truth that I don’t get strong crushes on guys the way I get on girls? Or is the truth that whenever those crushes start to poke their heads up I squash them, and ignore them?
I think of Lee. I think of Eirik. I think of Ruben, and his photo.
… There’s an explanation here, and maybe … no, it can’t be that. You’d know. You’d know.
However, I do think these chapters are the weakest part of the book. While Zach’s coming out feels honest and meaningful, the conflict between him and Ruben feels unnecessarily cruel and drawn out. It’s like the book comes to an abrupt stop so they can bicker in circles for a while.
I get that they’re teenagers. I do get that, but I don’t get why they have to have the same argument over and over again, or why Ruben apparently has no sympathy for what it’s like to realize you’re not as straight as you’ve always told yourself you were. Does he not know any other queer people?
The plot picks up again when Zach decides he does want to be with Ruben. He comes out to the other members of Saturday, who are so excited and supportive I wanted to cry. He comes out to their management team, who promise they can start “thinking about” announcing the relationship publicly after their Russian tour stop. Angel’s mental health continues to decline.
I have mixed feelings about Angel’s plot. On the one hand, I think it’s important to honestly portray what that kind of fame combined with a complete lack of autonomy does to people. Having it hit a supporting character the hardest makes space for more fluff and tenderness in Ruben’s relationship, which I adored.
On the other hand, I’m uncomfortable with Angel’s addiction and mental illness being used as a plot device to create drama in his friends’ love story, especially when Angel is Asian American and Zach and Ruben are white. I’ve yet to make up my mind about how his arc is resolved mostly offscreen with a single stint in rehab. I guess I’m glad to see YA finally portraying therapy positively, but ehhh …
I did really appreciate the way Angel’s struggles motivated his friends to stand up to their management team, and I liked seeing Angel finally being able to open up about what he was going through once he’d gotten help. Again, this book has so much more emotional vulnerability than stories about boys are usually allowed to have. It’s truly lovely.
Something else you don’t see in many YA books: When things get really bad, most of the boys’ parents step up and fight for them. They form a moms’ club to lead the fight against Saturday’s management. It’s a nice change to the feelings of isolation and helplessness the boys have been dealing with for most of the book, and I appreciated the fact that the boys still maintained their autonomy to drive the conclusion.
Overall, this was a sweet read that nicely balanced tenderness with teenage angst and emotional intimacy with international pop star drama. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to people struggling with addiction, but I think anyone who likes their fanfiction with a lot of fighting and a lot of kissing will enjoy If This Gets Out.
Disclosure
I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I got to read VIP when it was still a Word document by virtue of being actual, real life friends with the author. I’m also an actual, real life big fan of these books, so I’m going to try to split the difference between friend and fan by abandoning my usual review format and using the rest of this post to explain why you should preorder this very good book.
Gif of a man in a suit and tie saying, “SHE’S BACK!”
1. You should preorder this very good book because it’s a return to form.
If you read and enjoyed the first Run with the Hunted novella, you’ll enjoy the return to Bristol’s narration. She has a much clearer, more action-focused voice than either Bits or Dolly. That means the book as a whole moves more quickly because we get less monologuing, more plotting.
We also get the return of Will, the well-meaning super secret government agent from book one. It’s fun to see how he’s grown as a person in the intervening months, and how he hasn’t. He only gets a few scenes, but they’re impactful. I’m hoping he gets a bigger role in an upcoming book.
Gif of Rebel Wilson saying, “MY LIFE HAS BECOME A ROMANTIC COMEDY/AND IT’S PG-13!”
2. You should preorder this very good book because it’s like nothing Jen’s ever written before.
Inspired by a Twitter meme where people share their favorite romance tropes, VIP revolves around a fake engagement that slowly but inevitably builds toward real feelings. I can’t say more without spoilers, but there’s an unusual sweetness to this story. It reminds me somewhat of the resolution of Standard Operating Procedure, except Standard Operating Procedure was 1000% more stressful than VIP is.
VIP is by no means a romantic comedy, but it is the closest to a romantic comedy I think we’re ever going to get out of this series. Let’s cherish it.
Gif of Fred from Scooby-Doo taking off the bad guy’s mask
3. You should preorder this very good book because it finally reveals Bristol’s real name.
Actually, it reveals quite a lot about Bristol’s past. We still don’t have any details about her family of origin, but a character from her past gets tangled up in her present and shares an origin story of sorts with Bits and Dolly.
There are just enough tantalizing details to seed a really good fanfiction if, say, you wanted to write a story in which Bristol and Dolly kiss and also other things happen.
Gif of Michelle Tanner from Full House in sunglasses and a black leather jacket
4. Youshould preorder this very good book because of theexcellent Dollycontent.
Listen, word of God from Jen, Bristol’s straight. She and Dolly are never going to kiss outside of my fanfiction, in which other unimportant things also happen, probably.
This is, I think, all the more reason to enjoy Dolly leaning and smoking and smirking at Bristol during Bristol’s wedding festivities. Also, the cute bickering! And the [very romantic moment redacted for spoilers]!!!
Enjoy them loudly, and tag Jen (@AuthorizedMusings) when you do, which is not at all bullying. Authors like it when you enjoy their work!
(Is this a book review? I don’t think this is a book review, but I’m going to put it in that category anyway because it’s close enough.)
Genre: Fantasy Audience: Middle grade/young YA Series?: Standalone (?)
Rating: Loved it!
For fans of: Matilda, Harry Potter, Willodeen by Katherine Applegate, magical schools, feminist children’s books, found family, lonely children making friends for the first time, stories about stories, tapestries, secret languages
With its thoughtful messaging about gender equality, the importance of education, and critically evaluating how history gets written and thus remembered, The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy is exactly the kind of book I want to give to my niece and nephews when they’re old enough. Despite some dark themes, it’s also so sweet, funny, and charming that I’ve recommended it to adult friends as well for comfort reading.
Don’t get me wrong: This is definitely a book for middle grade or young YA readers. However, as someone who regularly rereads A Wrinkle in Time, I recognize that children’s stories are often worthwhile reading for adults as well, both because it’s nice to be able to talk about books with the young people in our lives and because they’re enjoyable.
The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy opens with an explanation of the role of women in Illyria. While men might have great destinies as kings or sorcerers, women raise men, make their clothing, clean their homes, provide their food, and record their great deeds in beautiful tapestries. Written by another author, this opening might be heavy handed and cringey. It’s definitely didactic, but Ursu’s clever writing style makes it fun, too.
Then, we meet Marya Lupu, who’s cleaning the chicken coop. Everyone is sure her older brother, Luka, is going to be apprenticed to a sorcerer tomorrow:
The Lupus had been waiting for this day since Luka had come into the world thirteen years earlier bright-eyed and somehow already sage-looking, as if he had absorbed enough wisdom in utero to declaim on some of the weightier issues facing a baby, if only he could speak.
Even though Marya knows the council that evaluates potential sorcerers only care about whether or not their candidates possess magic, Marya’s mother believes their house and family must be clean and proper for Luka’s big day.
Due to a combination of bad luck and an ongoing feud between the Lupu children, this turns out not to be possible. Mrs. Lupu orders Marya to stay in her room and pretend not to exist while the council examines Luka (big Chamber of Secrets vibes), but that isn’t possible either. A hungry goat finds his way into the house. When Marya tries to catch him, she only makes things worse. She not only creates greater chaos; she loses her temper and snaps at a sorcerer.
Luka and Marya both had their roles in the family: his was to make them proud; hers was to disappoint them. Someone had to do it.
It’s no surprise, then, when the family receives a letter saying Luka will not be a sorcerer. It doesn’t matter that the council explicitly stated all that mattered was Luka’s magical potential. Marya is banished to her room and forbidden from visiting her friends.
A second letter arrives a few days later stating that Marya, by order of the king, will be attending “Dragomir Academy near Sarabet, a school dedicated to the reform of troubled girls.” No one in Marya’s village has ever heard of Dragomir Academy. No one knows what will be expected of her or even what she should pack. Still, no one tries to intervene when the deputy headmistress shows up the following morning to take Marya away.
I love Marya as a protagonist. Headstrong and brave, she spends most of her time frustrating the powerful people who would like to shape her into a soft spoken, elegant lady. She sees through adults’ “pretty words” to the hard truth of what they really mean, and she continues to demand honesty and fairness long after other “troubled girls” have given up.
Despite her strength, Marya is often self conscious, quick to take the blame for injustices beyond her control and anxious to fit in with her peers:
I found her fear that the other girls in her class would not want to talk to her about the mysteries of their school’s founding and purpose both endearing and painfully relatable. Marya’s the kind of kid who’s had to take care of herself because the adults in her life won’t, and that makes me want to take care of her.
At Dragomir Academy, girls are given a wide-ranging education in everything from history to magical theory, but the emphasis is on etiquette and “character.” The school’s goal is to turn them from “troubled girls” into proper young ladies who can fill administrative and supporting roles in sorcerer’s estates. There are strict rules governing everything from the proper use of “free” time to how to use cutlery. When a student commits even the smallest infraction, her entire class is punished.
This makes finding friends difficult for Marya at first. Most of her class’s punishments come from her. However, she quickly finds a kindred spirit in Elana, the daughter of a sorcerer who wanders the halls after curfew, seeking secrets and some sense of self-determination.
Elana uncovers the first mystery of Dragomir Academy: The school is housed in an estate donated to the crown by the Dragomir family, whose family portraits still hang throughout the school. A daughter appears in three of the portraits, from young childhood to around Marya’s age. Then she disappears, and there is no further mention of her in the Dragomirs’ letters or journals.
Other mysteries soon follow: What is mountain madness, an illness that usually strikes girls in their third or fourth year at the academy and causes them to see things that aren’t there? What happens to girls afflicted by mountain madness, who return looking thin and haunted several months after they fall sick? Is the academy cursed?
Why are the magical creatures that menace Illyria getting stronger? Why won’t Dragomir’s teachers or headmaster admit there’s a problem? And why has a sorcerer, one of the country’s most precious resources, been assigned to protect a school of troubled girls?
Marya and Elana are determined to find out. As things get worse, though, they’re gradually joined in their quest by the rest of their classmates and even people outside the student body. It’s really lovely to see such a disparate group of girls, who the school’s group-punishment policy have set at odds with each other, coming together to take on the people in power.
This isn’t a Chosen One narrative. Marya doesn’t save the day through prophecy or special powers. She isn’t the smartest or the strongest or the best at anything, aside from getting into trouble. Instead, Marya takes on the bad guys with a combination of bravery, determination, rule breaking and help from her friends:
It would be nice, Marya thought, if once in a while she went into a situation with some kind of plan, as opposed to simply opening her mouth and seeing whatever came out.
I love the way she sort of stumbles headlong into trouble and then grits her teeth and hopes for the best–no strategy, just conviction. Ironically, though the adults of Dragomir Academy don’t see it, Marya’s strength of character is her greatest gift.
I can’t recommend this book strongly enough. Buy it for your kids and your friends’ kids and your kids’ friends. Read it aloud to them or save a copy for yourself.
Disclosure
I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Genre: Science fiction Audience: MG/YA Series?: Wardenclyffe series
Rating: Liked it
For fans of: Star Trek’s Data, adventure games, the “It was earth the whole time!” trope
Achievement unlocked: I received my very first physical review copy of a book earlier this summer.
eARCs (eBooks for review) seem to be the standard for blogs like mine, and I get why. They’re much cheaper for publishers to manufacture and distribute, and reviewers can’t resell them (a controversial practice I’m not going to weigh in on right now). People with larger platforms get to require physical books for review. For the most part, I’m just happy to be invited to the party, but I was very excited to get this offer.
I was even more excited to receive the book! I can’t say for certain, but I’m guessing most physical review copies don’t come packaged so beautifully, with coordinated tissue paper and thank-you notes:
How I received Wardenclyffe: Wrapped in purple tissue paper with a gold sticker and a hand-written thank you note.
The author and publisher of Wardenclyffe, Lloyd Hall, has a fashion and costume design background, and it shows. Even discounting the gorgeous packaging, which I assume retailers like Target won’t include, the book itself is a work of art. The satiny, dark purple hardback and matching dust cover were illustrated by Abigail Spence. You can’t tell from the little digital image, but when you hold it in your hand, the drawing almost looks like a linocut. It’s stunning.
Additional illustrations throughout the book by Minna Ollikainen help bring the world of Wardenclyffe to life.
Despite its beauty, I had a tough time getting into this book at first.
We got off to a bad start. Though it remains popular, I’m always put off by the sci-fi trope where characters in futuristic settings talk about weird old artifacts they found that we, the readers, recognize as commonplace in our time:
Mary is behind the counter distributing large containers to the crowd. I look inside the container and see it filled with hundreds of tiny pieces of white material. I approach Mary …
“What is the material you are distributing?” I ask her.
Mary laughs. “It’s food, Bit!”
ANALYSIS — UNKNOWN
“I am unfamiliar with this food,” I tell her.
“Well you’re not completely unfamiliar. You know the corn we grow up in the fields behind the cafe?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Well that’s what this is!”
DATABASE SEARCH — MATCH INCOMPATIBLE
“It does not appear to be the same,” I say. She laughs again.
“No it is, I promise! We just found a new way to cook it,” she explains.
“What method of preparation causes the physical appearance to change?” I ask.
“Well, Bruce found us this old book of recipes. If you take the corn kernels and heat them they do this.”
This happens several times in the first few chapters, and I seriously considered DNF’ing the book because of it.
Another problem I had is the book is written in a style that feels overly simplistic for the intended audience (thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds).
This could be a deliberate stylistic choice.The narrator, Bit, is an android. Though she’s physically stronger than ordinary humans, doesn’t age, and has perfect recall, Bit lacks several basic human traits, including emotions and the capacity to recognize beauty. She’s overly literal and lacks a sense of humor.
It makes sense that her sentences would be short and direct with limited sensory details, but I still struggled with them at first. I barely made it through the disaster that cuts off all power to Valentine and the surrounding towns and Bit’s decision to journey north (for years, if she has to) in search of a scientist she believes may have a solution.
Things changed for me almost as soon as she got out of town. While I struggled to invest in any of Wardenclyffe’s characters, I found the world fascinating and mysterious.
Bit travels through a town called Paradise, where most people spend their days turning power switches on and off to make sure they use the exact same amount of power in the exact same way as they have for generations, and an island called St. Helens, where technology is reviled and melted down for scrap. The people of Paradise believe disasters are the result of breaking tradition. The people of St. Helens believe they’re caused by technology.
I started to think of Wardenclyffeless as a novella and more as an adaptation of an adventure game or a Twilight Zone episode. It gave me serious Myst vibes. That way, the odd, clunky dialogue seems less like a flaw and more like an essential element of the genre.
As Bit travels, we learn more about the history of her world. A catastrophic event referred to as “the flooding” resulted in the loss of most of the human population as well as most human knowledge, so that surviving people can use old technology but they cannot repair it or create new technology. I like that the book doesn’t try to explain what caused the flood or fill in every detail of the world before and after. That kind of granular worldbuilding has to be immaculate, and leaving it vague makes it easier to suspend disbelief.
It wasn’t until Bit reached St. Helens that I realized her world is actually our world. St. Helens is an island in a thermal lake either near or in the crater of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. June, the location of the titular Wardenclyffe lighthouse, is Juneau, Alaska. Paradise is a town in California, and I think Valentine might refer to Valentine Camp, also in California. This is maybe hypocritical, given what I said earlier, but I was delighted by these breadcrumbs and felt very smart for getting them.
The mysteries of the scientist and what happened to Valentine’s power are tied to the mystery of Bit’s creation and why she has outlasted all the other androids. She finds all the answers she’s looking for near Wardenclyffe, which should make for a satisfying ending. I’m still torn on whether or not it does, though. I think it’s thematically appropriate, but perhaps because I never connected with the characters, I didn’t find it particularly emotionally resonant.
Still, I really enjoyed exploring the world of Wardenclyffe, and I’m intrigued by the possibility of future books. I’d definitely pick up book two if it had a different narrator with a more descriptive voice.
For fans of: Darling in the Franxx, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Pacific Rim, The Hunger Games, Strange Grace by Tessa Gratton, Chinese harem dramas, angry bisexuals who don’t flinch when they kill their enemies
Spoiler alert: I’m not going to spoil this book any more than the author has on social media, but if you’d prefer not to know what happens at all, please come back when you’ve finished Iron Widow!
Here is everything I knew about Iron Widow when I requested it from NetGalley: It’s a reimagining of the rise of the only female Chinese emperor written by the person who made those Mulan videos. I expected historical fiction, political intrigue, and maybe some family drama.
Iron Widow is nothing like I expected. If I had to write an elevator pitch, I’d say it’s a dark mecha anime with an MFM throuple that makes only minor concessions to YA conventions. There’s a makeover, a love triangle, and a homecoming, but there’s also so much violence The Hunger Games looks like a game of touch football.
It also isn’t a retelling in the sense I imagined. It isn’t set in ancient China, but rather a non-earth sci-fi world inspired by the culture and geography of ancient China. In this world, all girls are raised as sacrifices. They’re sold to wealthy husbands or to the army. Either way, their lives are cruel and rigidly confined by both their patriarchal society and their own internalized misogyny.
Wu Zetian’s older sister was sold to the army, where male pilots use girls as fuel sources to power their giant mechs in battle against the mechanical aliens beyond the Great Wall. Girls often die in battle, but Zetian’s sister didn’t even make it that far. Her pilot strangled her to death.
To her parents’ relief, Zetian finally agrees to join the army, but she doesn’t intend to die in battle either. She plans to kill her sister’s murderer. She knows she and her entire family will be executed as a result, and she believes she’s prepared to die for her vengeance.
However, before she can act, the pilot takes Zetian into battle with him, and two unexpected things happen. First, the pilot dies in her place. Second, Zetian discovers she wants to live.
Iron Widow continues my streak of LGBT books that are so delightfully fanfic-y (Queerleaders, The Calyx Charm) they make up for the fact that they’re also continuing my streak of books that are thematically heavy.
It reads like a wildly creative AU for some mecha anime I’ve never seen. (Confession: I have never seen any mecha anime.) Partially because of, you know, all the mechs, but mostly because there is so much here that I’ve only really seen in places where writers don’t have to contend with publishing gatekeepers. In a YA novel!
The MFM throuple is a fun subversion of the love triangle trope. While I’m more invested in the enemies-to-lovers pairing than the others, I was impressed by how clearly Zhao handled them all. They felt inevitable. All four of the relationships (each character with each of the others, and then all three characters together) had ample on-screen development time, including the relationship between the non-POV characters.
I had no choice but to love Zetian, who is angry, bisexual, and traumatized. That’s everything I want in a protagonist. She even gets some shit from other characters about her weight, though the cover model is thin and it’s hard to tell if Zetian is intended to be read as fat or if this is just another example of the patriarchal scrutiny she lives under.
I also loved the plot structure, which reminded me a bit of Six of Crows. Pop writing advice says that protagonists have to fail and fail and fail again until they succeed. Each challenge they fail raises the stakes, until they’re in an impossible position with the entire universe depending on them, and only then can they succeed.
Only, it’s actually much more fun to read about protagonists succeeding occasionally. In both Iron Widow and Six of Crows, we have characters who are smart and clever and good at what they do. They encounter obstacles, strategize, and then overcome those obstacles in ways that both raise the stakes and move the plot forward. Often, Zetian succeeds in ways that only end up getting her into more trouble, but at least we get to see that she truly is remarkable, instead of just being told how Special she is.
This is also my only real complaint: Zetian is Special in a way that I feel somewhat undermines Iron Widow’s feminist themes. I have no problem with Zetian spontaneously deciding to resist her patriarchal upbringing, which seems like a matter of self-preservation more than anything. I also don’t mind how much internalized misogyny influences Zetian’s perception of other women. My problem is how the narrative reinforces Zetian’s perception.
Without venturing too far into spoiler territory, other women in Iron Widow essentially fall into 3 categories: tragic victims, catty bitches, and the tragic-victim-catty-bitch Venn diagram overlap of victims who eagerly sacrifice other women.
Zetian does occasionally think about how there have to be other girls who are as remarkable as she is, and sometimes she’ll mentally challenge her internalized misogyny. I interpret that to mean later books in will contain more nuanced female characters. I’m still disappointed by their absence in Iron Widow, but I think Zhao has done enough to merit optimism for the rest of the series.
Content Warnings
From the author: “Please be aware that this book contains scenes of violence and abuse, suicide ideation, discussion and references to sexual assault (though no on-page depictions), alcohol addiction, and torture.”
Disclosure
I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
