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From the Wreck by Jane Rawson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book was insane. Fabulism meets historical fiction meets generational drama/trauma meets cultural commentary meets well-meaning alien life forms who just kind of accidentally muck things up big time. Fascinating!
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Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
BLOB: A LOVE STORY is a gelatinous and generous debut from Maggie Su. The fantastical premise–what if you could mold a sentient blob into the ideal partner?–is grounded by the nightmare of being in one’s moorless early twenties. The protagonist’s life is a study of despair. Humor pervades the unraveling in a way that cuts through to confront the reader, daring us to ask if hitting rock bottom can or should be laughed away, asking us to consider if our vices and hurts can ever be evicted from the childhoods where they were formed. Within a fever-dream of a plot, Su raises interesting questions about cruelty, autonomy, bodies, and goodness.
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The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
THE STARLESS SEA by Erin Morgenstern is a party that I am very late to, but after reading it, I feel certain that the story itself was expecting me to arrive, just now, just as I am. This book is an indulgent, comforting, and surreal homage to the power of a literary life. The way Morgenstern builds a spiral of recursive symbols goes up, down, and especially forward. The book is built from specific old rules that govern the magic of reading itself: the same elements can be endlessly remade into new stories, and even the same stories, when they are read at different times in our lives, can meet us anew. The particulars change throughout the epochs, but many stories emerge from the place in imagination where they were born to become important pieces of what we call reality–and this book is surely one of them.
Need to spend some time in another place, entirely away from whatever this timeline is? These 500 pages are a wonderful prescription.
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12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Thoughtful writing that approaches the rise of AI from a take-no-prisoners feminist angle. Winterson deftly weaves a history of artificial intelligence that intertwines religious belief, scientific breakthroughs, and the stories that have been told and refashioned about both across the centuries. At the very core of the human imagination are the questions ‘What am I? What is a mind? What is power? What is a person? What is a god?’ This book approaches all of that with clear eyes, and reads like a bell tolling for us simple, embodied human beings.
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Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. Isabel Cañas’ novel VAMPIRES OF EL NORTE is a stunning, searing book. Speculative fiction can reveal truth in ways that realism simply can’t, and Cañas uses that to her full advantage in a book balancing sweeping romance with seething horror in the Rio Grande Valley of the 1840s, as the shifting border between Mexico and America was being redrawn in blood.
While the historical basis of the book is nearly two centuries in the past, it is markedly relevant, vampires and all. As Cañas mentions in her final note, “…I wrote this book for my family. For every one of us has been asked variations of the question ‘when did your family come to this country?’ […]
I have realized that the answer is, in fact, a question itself. A question that became the heart of this book.
‘When did this country come to us?’ “
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The Stars Did Wander Darkling by Colin Meloy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Colin Meloy’s superbly eerie middle adult fiction doesn’t shy away from unanswered questions or grotesque imagery. THE STARS DID WANDER DARKLING is a wonderfully creepy tale inspired by 1980s American small town life and what I can only assume are some of the weirder wells of Meloy’s expansive imagination. Really appreciate how he trusts his readers to spin part of the web. Favorite character: Randy, the horror-movie obsessed video store owner.
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The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Super fun and jaunty little time-travel mystery that doesn’t take anything seriously. A fun treat for those who will catch the many British literary references and especially who have a love for Jane Eyre–it was very fun for me to read shortly after reading that classic for the first time earlier this year. While a very insignificant part of the book, I absolutely loved the ubiquitous but never explained genetically engineered pet dodos. Caution: the humor is very British. Proceed accordingly.
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Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Complex feelings on Ava Reid’s LADY MACBETH. I don’t think I can rate it fairly, nor do I think anyone with a longstanding relationship to the original play and titular character could. Best to know the story is Macbeth-inspired rather than a true retelling. The departures from the original story and Lady are many. There were lots of things I hoped this book would be, and instead it was something entirely of its own, which interestingly enough is one of the major themes of the novel–the difference between truth and expectation of identity. It really leaves me wondering if this was the same exact book but with different character names if I would have had a different experience.
Many beautiful and evocative moments in the story. I have a deep respect for anyone who attempts to make something new out of Shakespeare–it’s bold and it’s risky. The atmosphere created had gorgeous intensity. I just couldn’t snap out of my own desire to keep looking for Lady Macbeth. The more time I spent with Roscille, the more I just kept thinking, “that’s not her.” But I do think Roscille’s story has merits of its own.
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All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Why have an existential crisis when you can read one instead?! ALL MEN ARE MORTAL is an Existentialist manifesto in the form of a centuries-spanning epic, narrated primarily by Fosca, an immortal man born in the 1200s who is now trying to begin yet another new life in 1900s Paris. The story is at turns chilling, gorgeous, infuriating, passionate, problematic, and profound. Existentialist philosophy argues that every human individual forges their own life’s meaning and value through their freely-chosen actions in the face of certain death and despite the incomprehensible nature of the universe. But without the threat of death, could life have meaning at all? Fosca struggles to answer this question through countless regimes, lovers, bloodlines, landscapes, wars, and ambitions, all the while increasingly mourning the inevitable loss of his humanity. Incredibly thought-provoking.
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Black Tide Son by H.M. Long
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
BLACK TIDE SON is the second installment in H.M. Long’s pirate fantasy trilogy. This book expands the rich universe of the Winter Sea with more cultures, more monsters, and an unraveling knot of forces at the core of a swiftly intensifying war. It’s a constant chase, careening through alleys, waterways, and levels of reality as the core characters all seek their own forms of redemption amid the swelling supernatural power of the Black Tide. A very fun read!
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