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ladybusinessHugo reading season has begun.
The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He | Roaring Brook Press | May 2021
This is my second He novel, after Descendent of the Crane. That book was bananas, and we were robbed of a sequel by publishing shenanigans. I hope the executives responsible always get slightly dirty utensils when they go out to eat. This book doesn't quite reach bananas level, but it didn't go in a direction I expected. I ended up being pleasantly surprised after the first quarter of the book left me a little cold.
The main story is about two young women: Cee, who has been trapped on a remote island for three years. Her only goal is to escape and find her sister, Kay. The other character is Kasey, struggling to cope after the disappearance and assumed death of her older sister, Celia. Kasey lives in an eco-city that operates on a numerical caste structure. The structure, and whether people can get into certain eco-cities, is based on how much someone's family/ancestors contributed to the destruction of the planet in the past. Good luck if your ancestors were oil barons. Kasey is also suffering from trauma from losing access to science after she committed a crime; this is on top of losing her sister. Before her disappearance, Celia hated the eco-city and used whatever excuse she could to get Kasey to buck the rules about going outside. Kasey's goal: find out why Celia left (unspoken on Kasey's part but obvious to the reader: left her).
The connections between Cee's story on the island and Kasey's are not obvious until the nature of Kasey's crime is revealed. As far as climate apocalypse novels go, this one was light on the apocalypse parts except toward the end when hard decisions about how humanity will survive become more pressing. To me it felt more like window dressing for the study of a relationship between family and the nature of personhood. Who, exactly, gets to decide who gets to be a person? Who do we get to hold accountable for the harms done to our bodies and hearts? At what point does it stop being holding people accountable and become just another tool powerful people use to abuse others?
I loved Cee's journey of self-discovery as she learned why she was on the island, her struggles about how to move forward when she found love and care in someone else, and felt gutted at her devastation at the choice she had to make. I found Kasey more complicated. She felt more like the main antagonist, although we meet another character early in in the novel that could fill the same role. I'm still mulling over the end of this novel. It's open-ended, but also like it could have a prescriptive resolution, depending on how you read the choices that both Kasey and Cee make. I am happy to report there is a wonderful robot pal in this book. A+ for robot pals.
I'm excited to try Strike the Zither, the first book in a new duology, and see where it falls on the Banana Scale. At this point I will read whatever Joan He writes.
Rose/House by Arkady Martine | Subterranean Press/Tantor Audio | April 2023 / March 2024
I talked about this on Fangirl Happy Hour. I said:
The blurb of Rose/House talks a lot about Basit Deniau and Selene Gisil, but nothing about their relationship is truly explained. It's all feelings, vague references, and inferences readers can make based on the dead body that's in the house. The true main characters are Rose House itself and Maritza, the detective who picks up the case. It's short, so choices had to be made. It was funny that I read this after The Ones We're Meant to Find, especially given that Rose/House is about personhood once again! Not a bad pairing, honestly.
I would fight a bear for Maritza, my investigative queen.
Rose/House is nominated for the Hugo and Locus Awards (so far) in the novella category.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi | Tor Books | September 2023
This is another book I talked about on Fangirl Happy Hour. Alas, as I have drifted away from the book I have become more and more bemused about why it is an award nominee beyond "this is a beloved author who we, the voters, are familiar with, and reading is hard in late stage capitalism". The thing that stuck with me the most was the friendship between Charlie, Hera, and Persephone, very much a love letter to cat companions everywhere. It was my favorite thing, but I'm a cat person!
Scalzi is very good at light commercial fiction, and Starter Villain is no exception. It's meant for you to slide through it like butter, have a fun time, and doesn't need to be particularly memorable. In this time of rising fascism, aggressively hostile capitalism, and the struggle to survive, fiction like this is important. It's important that art be accessible and fun for whoever needs it. Even though it's a popular award, I want my Hugo finalists to have more density instead of feeling, as I said on the pod, like a novel aching to be a screenplay so the actors can give the world weight, emotion, and meaning.
Starter Villain simply wasn't saying much about the privilege that was on display other than going "let's wreck it!!" It felt as if the book tossed out all kinds of hot button topics from broken family connections to the gutting of local journalism to economic privilege to labor organizing, but never engaged with them beyond a surface level in service of shenanigans. I was also very put off by the end of the book. It felt like it was trying to critique power and generational wealth, but in the end most people are pawns to our wealthy oligarchs, the wealthy families will keep on keeping on re: generational wealth and avoiding taxes, and there's nothing to be done about it. Big shrug! At least our cats are cute.
In all honesty, if this hadn't been nominated for a Hugo, I wouldn't have read it. I'm very happy for Scalzi to write whatever he wants, have a good time doing it, and get that bag. I can wait patiently for him to write more space books, or non-space books like Lock In and Head On, which I found chewy and interesting to discuss (although neither of those were nominated for a Hugo, go figure). But reading Starter Villain made me sad, in the way when you realize your preferences as a reader are growing away from a favorite author. It happens! It doesn't mean you won't be able to reconnect with their future work. It's still bittersweet.
Roseanna discussed the choices of the nominating body more eloquently in her review, which I agree with and recommend.
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera | Tordotcom | July 2023
Another Fangirl Happy Hour discussion:
I would now revise my genre categorization to add magical realism to the mix.
Fantasy novels like The Saint of Bright Doors are very challenging for me, a person who considers herself Bad at Fantasy (unless it's Final Fantasy). What's kept turning over in my head since reading this book is Fetter and the relationship he has with his mother. The novel is jammed full of stories within stories, and Fetter's mother is no different. Her backstory—her mythology—really changed how I looked at Fetter's story, the city he lived in, and the mission his mother gave him to assassinate his father and why.
I also said:
I've thought a lot about these parts of the book given everything going on in the world right now, both in the U.S. and in the Middle East. Even in the U.S. it's hard for those of us who live in privilege to imagine what it's like to not have that privilege unless we have experienced it before. It's almost as if our experiences of the world create multiple, overlapping realities, and we can never truly see and understand what others are experiencing. Our stories are offset from everyone else's.
The Saint of Bright Doors was nominated for the Crawford, Hugo, Lambda, Locus, Nebula, and Subjective Chaos Awards. It's won the Crawford and Nebula Awards. If it picks up the Locus Award for First Novel, I have a feeling the Hugo Award is in the bag.
Anyway: I don’t really know how to describe it. You’ve just gotta read it.
St. Martin's Press Title
I would love to talk about this book because I want to complain about it. It was the fastest 3.5 to 1 star I have experienced in a long time. Alas, I cannot, because I am standing in solidarity with Readers for Accountability's #SpeakUpSMP boycott.
The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He | Roaring Brook Press | May 2021
This is my second He novel, after Descendent of the Crane. That book was bananas, and we were robbed of a sequel by publishing shenanigans. I hope the executives responsible always get slightly dirty utensils when they go out to eat. This book doesn't quite reach bananas level, but it didn't go in a direction I expected. I ended up being pleasantly surprised after the first quarter of the book left me a little cold.
The main story is about two young women: Cee, who has been trapped on a remote island for three years. Her only goal is to escape and find her sister, Kay. The other character is Kasey, struggling to cope after the disappearance and assumed death of her older sister, Celia. Kasey lives in an eco-city that operates on a numerical caste structure. The structure, and whether people can get into certain eco-cities, is based on how much someone's family/ancestors contributed to the destruction of the planet in the past. Good luck if your ancestors were oil barons. Kasey is also suffering from trauma from losing access to science after she committed a crime; this is on top of losing her sister. Before her disappearance, Celia hated the eco-city and used whatever excuse she could to get Kasey to buck the rules about going outside. Kasey's goal: find out why Celia left (unspoken on Kasey's part but obvious to the reader: left her).
The connections between Cee's story on the island and Kasey's are not obvious until the nature of Kasey's crime is revealed. As far as climate apocalypse novels go, this one was light on the apocalypse parts except toward the end when hard decisions about how humanity will survive become more pressing. To me it felt more like window dressing for the study of a relationship between family and the nature of personhood. Who, exactly, gets to decide who gets to be a person? Who do we get to hold accountable for the harms done to our bodies and hearts? At what point does it stop being holding people accountable and become just another tool powerful people use to abuse others?
I loved Cee's journey of self-discovery as she learned why she was on the island, her struggles about how to move forward when she found love and care in someone else, and felt gutted at her devastation at the choice she had to make. I found Kasey more complicated. She felt more like the main antagonist, although we meet another character early in in the novel that could fill the same role. I'm still mulling over the end of this novel. It's open-ended, but also like it could have a prescriptive resolution, depending on how you read the choices that both Kasey and Cee make. I am happy to report there is a wonderful robot pal in this book. A+ for robot pals.
I'm excited to try Strike the Zither, the first book in a new duology, and see where it falls on the Banana Scale. At this point I will read whatever Joan He writes.
Rose/House by Arkady Martine | Subterranean Press/Tantor Audio | April 2023 / March 2024
I talked about this on Fangirl Happy Hour. I said:
The first thing that I read was Rose/House by Arkady Martine. This is a book about a sentient house out in the desert built by an architect who died and then in his will said, "Only this one student of mine can have access to Rose House and its archives once a year for seven days." The student he gives access to is estranged from him. The guy is dead and he is still in the house. He interred himself in the house in a very creepy way that I’m not going to spoil.
But then one day the house calls the local police precinct and goes, "There’s a dead body." And the police are like, "Yeah. We know. He’s there." And the house is like, "It’s an additional dead body." Nobody else is supposed to be able to get into this house, but there’s another dead body in the house.
It spools out from there with the detective getting determined to figure out what’s happened, the estranged student being called back, and a mystery to figure out: who the dead person is and why they are 1) dead and 2), made it into the house to begin with.
The blurb of Rose/House talks a lot about Basit Deniau and Selene Gisil, but nothing about their relationship is truly explained. It's all feelings, vague references, and inferences readers can make based on the dead body that's in the house. The true main characters are Rose House itself and Maritza, the detective who picks up the case. It's short, so choices had to be made. It was funny that I read this after The Ones We're Meant to Find, especially given that Rose/House is about personhood once again! Not a bad pairing, honestly.
I would fight a bear for Maritza, my investigative queen.
Rose/House is nominated for the Hugo and Locus Awards (so far) in the novella category.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi | Tor Books | September 2023
This is another book I talked about on Fangirl Happy Hour. Alas, as I have drifted away from the book I have become more and more bemused about why it is an award nominee beyond "this is a beloved author who we, the voters, are familiar with, and reading is hard in late stage capitalism". The thing that stuck with me the most was the friendship between Charlie, Hera, and Persephone, very much a love letter to cat companions everywhere. It was my favorite thing, but I'm a cat person!
Scalzi is very good at light commercial fiction, and Starter Villain is no exception. It's meant for you to slide through it like butter, have a fun time, and doesn't need to be particularly memorable. In this time of rising fascism, aggressively hostile capitalism, and the struggle to survive, fiction like this is important. It's important that art be accessible and fun for whoever needs it. Even though it's a popular award, I want my Hugo finalists to have more density instead of feeling, as I said on the pod, like a novel aching to be a screenplay so the actors can give the world weight, emotion, and meaning.
Starter Villain simply wasn't saying much about the privilege that was on display other than going "let's wreck it!!" It felt as if the book tossed out all kinds of hot button topics from broken family connections to the gutting of local journalism to economic privilege to labor organizing, but never engaged with them beyond a surface level in service of shenanigans. I was also very put off by the end of the book. It felt like it was trying to critique power and generational wealth, but in the end most people are pawns to our wealthy oligarchs, the wealthy families will keep on keeping on re: generational wealth and avoiding taxes, and there's nothing to be done about it. Big shrug! At least our cats are cute.
In all honesty, if this hadn't been nominated for a Hugo, I wouldn't have read it. I'm very happy for Scalzi to write whatever he wants, have a good time doing it, and get that bag. I can wait patiently for him to write more space books, or non-space books like Lock In and Head On, which I found chewy and interesting to discuss (although neither of those were nominated for a Hugo, go figure). But reading Starter Villain made me sad, in the way when you realize your preferences as a reader are growing away from a favorite author. It happens! It doesn't mean you won't be able to reconnect with their future work. It's still bittersweet.
Roseanna discussed the choices of the nominating body more eloquently in her review, which I agree with and recommend.
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera | Tordotcom | July 2023
Another Fangirl Happy Hour discussion:
The last book I read, which was another Hugo Awards read, was The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. And this book…when I’ve asked people to describe this book to me they’re like, "I don’t really know how to describe it. You’ve just gotta read it." They are correct. I don’t know how to describe this book.
It’s fantasy! It’s a fantasy dystopia and it’s examining what makes you your own person and maybe the impossibility—or the possibility—of overturning abusive, hegemonic systems. Can small groups of people overturn fascist states? Is it possible?
I would now revise my genre categorization to add magical realism to the mix.
Fantasy novels like The Saint of Bright Doors are very challenging for me, a person who considers herself Bad at Fantasy (unless it's Final Fantasy). What's kept turning over in my head since reading this book is Fetter and the relationship he has with his mother. The novel is jammed full of stories within stories, and Fetter's mother is no different. Her backstory—her mythology—really changed how I looked at Fetter's story, the city he lived in, and the mission his mother gave him to assassinate his father and why.
I also said:
Basically, he gives up an identity and takes on another identity and we see how easy it is for different classes of people to live and work next to a lower class of people and have no fucking clue what’s happening to that other group of people. You can’t imagine it. You can see it, but you can’t imagine it. There’s a lot about class happening in this book, too.
I've thought a lot about these parts of the book given everything going on in the world right now, both in the U.S. and in the Middle East. Even in the U.S. it's hard for those of us who live in privilege to imagine what it's like to not have that privilege unless we have experienced it before. It's almost as if our experiences of the world create multiple, overlapping realities, and we can never truly see and understand what others are experiencing. Our stories are offset from everyone else's.
The Saint of Bright Doors was nominated for the Crawford, Hugo, Lambda, Locus, Nebula, and Subjective Chaos Awards. It's won the Crawford and Nebula Awards. If it picks up the Locus Award for First Novel, I have a feeling the Hugo Award is in the bag.
Anyway: I don’t really know how to describe it. You’ve just gotta read it.
St. Martin's Press Title
I would love to talk about this book because I want to complain about it. It was the fastest 3.5 to 1 star I have experienced in a long time. Alas, I cannot, because I am standing in solidarity with Readers for Accountability's #SpeakUpSMP boycott.
