A book that manages to maintain both a very broad and a very tight focus. In the grand scheme it’s about migration and refugees, how people try to make a life when they’ve lost everything in the world that they know. The sole aspect of magical realism is the existence of doors, which mysteriously connect one part of the world to another. Someone can step through a doorway in the Philippines and exit in a closet in Germany; or, as our protagonists do, leave a war-torn, crumbling Middle Eastern city and emerge on the Mediterranean seaside. The couple at the tight focus, Saeed and Nadia, do indeed manage this escape, but not without pain and loss; the book doesn’t give them an easy journey, realistically anticipating the kind of treatment that awaits unwanted refugee arrivals. Saeed and Nadia go through a lot; running away together is hard, staying together is harder, and staying true to yourself under such pressure is hardest of all. The way Hamid writes reminds me of Salman Rushdie; he favors long, flowing, beautiful run-on paragraphs that end, abruptly, on hard and piercing truths.
Author: librarykat
Rosewater, by Tade Thompson
I am sorry to say that nothing about this book really grabbed me. The concept was cool – in an alternate future Nigeria, a dome is built by aliens for mysterious reasons, which keep themselves in and humans out. The dome opens every now and then and makes changes in humans who happen to be nearby, seemingly at random. Some are healed of lifelong ailments, while others are changed into mindless beasts. Meanwhile some other humans, like narrator Kaaro, have developed various extrasensory abilities; some work on behalf of the government, some against, and some are just out for themselves. This book was dense with ideas but the telling was a little too wordy, losing me among the rambling paragraphs, and the occasional interludes of grimdark or body horror were extra jarring in contrast. The timeline is also confusing, jumping back and forth between Kaaro’s past and his present. The big reveal, when it came at the end, would have been far more effective had I managed to care even slightly about the characters, or if there had been any kind of logic underpinning their actions.
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
I’ve reread this multiple times. I still love it. It is the most rollicking crazy amazing book you’ll ever read about lesbian necromancer/warriors trapped in a deadly scavenger hunt through a haunted gothic mansion on a mysterious planet. (It’s also the first book of an ongoing series and it does end on an argh note, but it’s totally worth the ride to read standalone.) The narrative voice of Gideon, which manages to be simultaneously irreverent, oblivious, and incredibly evocative, is everything I ever wanted.
Black Water Sister, by Zen Cho
This phrase is overused, but: I felt seen. Narrator Jess, getting ready to move back to Malaysia with her parents, begins to hear a voice in her head. She chalks it up to the multiple stresses in her life: moving back to a country she barely remembers; feeling like a failure for being unemployed after graduating from Harvard; being afraid to come out to her parents, and having to constantly hide the existence of her long-distance girlfriend. But when the voice keeps feeding her facts that actually turn out to be true, Jess eventually finds to her dismay that she is a medium, and that the ghost of her grandmother Ah Ma has her own reasons for wanting to drag her Americanized granddaughter into the world of spirits and gangsters that she’d left behind. I loved Jess’s relationship to her parents and extended family, which reflected my experience of being mostly familiar with your birth culture, but occasionally encountering unexpected pitfalls that remind you that you didn’t really grow up immersed in the culture the way the previous generation did… though of course my pitfalls didn’t involve demons or a powerful crime boss. The book manages to cover a ton of ground, touching on various conflicts from homophobia and sexism to the tension between capitalist development and the respect due tradition and nature, while never losing track of the personal and familial relationships that drive the story. Jess is a strong character who tries her best to take control of her own story, even as the plot events yank her around (often literally). I actually loved most of the characters, and their conversations and interactions were delightful. If I had a criticism of this book, it would be that I felt it moved a bit too fast, without giving Jess (and therefore me) time to process what was happening. Still, I really liked it and will definitely be reading anything else the I can find from the author.
Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo
It finally came off the hold list and… I waited sixteen weeks for this? It was perfectly okay, but oh so tropey: a combination of country bumpkin magic user goes to school (cue the usual leveling-up montage of exposition-filled classes, professor stereotypes – I think one of them is even Kung Fu Man!, fish-out-of-water insecurity, and petty student feuding), Sailormoon heroine (with great power comes great naivete), and inevitable teen drama love triangle (I continue to be uncomfortable with books that posit that jealousy and possessiveness are hallmarks of epic romance, instead of being creepy and borderline abusive). Oh and the obsession with beauty = power comes across as super shallow and unfortunate. There is some legitimately cool worldbuilding potential (a literal void filled with monsters, blocking trade and travel? Think of the possibilities!) and a plot twist midway through the book that honestly took me by surprise… but mostly, meh. I have heard though that the duology is better, so maybe once Bardugo worked all of the tropes out of her system, she did a better job with this honestly cool world concept? I put Six of Crows on hold, we’ll see what I think of it in [checks library prediction] four months.
Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu
This book was written in screenplay format, which was a daring and brilliant approach that worked most of the time. In Hollywood, Asian men can aspire to a very limited number of roles: never the lead, of course, but certainly the Generic Asian Man, and for the select few, the only possible pinnacle: the Kung Fu Man. Protagonist Willis Wu spends his days as Generic Asian Man, flitting around the edges of a long-running police procedural, hoping for his lucky break. I get why the book was structured as a screenplay; there are a limited number of ways to be acceptably Asian in American society, and it’s reflected in (maybe even because of) how rigidly those roles are defined in Hollywood. Therefore, naturally Willis’s whole life is pretty much a screenplay and the reader is purposefully blinded to whether, at any given moment, Willis is playing his role in the show, or his role in society at large (which is always a bit part anyway, amirite?). The book is full of pointed critique, both at Western society for pigeonholing Asians through institutional and individual racism, and for the Asians who twist themselves into knots fitting into those pigeonholes. A lot of it rang super true to me, striking to the heart of my experience as a 2nd gen ABC, but the screenplay presentation felt like it blunted some of the impact.
Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Take all the artfulness and creeping wrongness of DuMaurier’s Rebecca, but make the heroine an actual fierce and feisty 1950s debutante who can dress fabulously while also holding forth on philosophy and the chemical properties of paint… throw in references to racism, sexism, colonial plunder, and a great nod to The Yellow Wallpaper… and you have this amazing book. In response to a desperate appeal from her newlywed cousin, Noemí ventures into the in-laws’ mold-infested Gothic mansion, and meets a creepy old British patriarch and his weirdly subservient family. Reading this was extra creepy for me because I’d just read about the possibilities of fungal networks, which this book uses to good effect.
Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake
This book probably wins this month’s award for “book that I immediately needed to share a fact from;” the family got many earfuls of fascinating mycological trivia. Fungi are not only ubiquitous, an invisible network reaching throughout our world, they are also constantly affecting things, feeding nutrients to plants, changing the brain chemistry of insects and animals (including humans), bubbling and fermenting in our food, digesting things that we’d never think possible, and surviving in incredibly challenging environments. Biologist Sheldrake throws himself entirely into learning more about fungi, not just through research and experimentation, but also by literally inserting himself into his subject (or consuming it). Despite their ubiquity fungi are not entirely understood; clearly some internal communication is at work within the fungus to allow it to reach in the direction of resources, while pruning back spread branches that did not find food; however, as Sheldrake acknowledges, any effort to understand it is limited by our human modes of understanding (Can fungi hunting for resources be said to be “reaching” out? Is it “deciding” which direction to move? Is it “playing favorites” by supplying some plants with nutrients while neglecting others? Have we just stumbled upon fungal properties (yeast!) beneficial to us, or did we evolve into mutual benefit?) Also I had no idea that plants were so bound up with fungi to exist; entire mycelial networks of resource-harvesting and -sharing underlay the ecological landscape that we see outside. My house plants, struggling in their little pots, look so lonely now.
Everfair, by Nisi Shawl
The book opened with the author announcing that she wanted to rewrite the genocide that happened when Belgium ran roughshod over the people of the Congo Free State in pursuit of rubber, which was an entirely new and terrible eye-opener for me. In this revisionist steampunk history, horrified missionaries band together with secular British technocrats to purchase vast tracts of Congolese land, providing a haven for Congolese fleeing the brutal rubber farms, building prostheses for the many who had hands cut off by the corporate mercenaries (a thing that actually happened! The mass amputations, not the prosthetics), and banding together with local leaders to defend themselves with airships and other technologies. It would have been a fine enough ride to leave it there, but then the book fearlessly dives into the consequences: at what point would the king and his people begin to chafe under the well-intentioned rule of their white saviors? What would the consequences be around the world, for their allies as well as those seeking to take advantage of their resources? And at what point would the alliance between the missionaries and the technocrats break down, as they begin to pursue their differing priorities? It’s a phenomenally ambitious book with a wonderfully diverse cast in all aspects. It does drag a bit in places, but nothing feels forced about any of the character interactions, and the whole is very detailed and very well thought out.
The Dawn Chorus, by Samantha Shannon
A little novella that deals patiently and unsparingly with the main character’s PTSD from being held and tortured; it makes a realistic bridge between the books where she engineers her release and when she plunges into action again. Does not stand alone well, relying as it does so heavily on preceding events, but I can see why it would have been cut from the main series – it’s much more slow and contemplative than the tense pacing of the main books.