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ladybusinessElection years are always hard on my reading, and last year was no exception! I did some reading but never finishing writing about the books—until now.
Rewitched by Lucy Jane Wood | Ace | September 2024
In mid-2024, a pal shared a link to this on Netgalley. A few weeks later, I was offered an ARC and scooped it up. I said on Fangirl Happy Hour:
Weeks later, I stand by this summary! I was trying not to spoil too much since the book wasn't out yet at the time, but now that is—
I struggle a lot with the cozy SFF genre, because of how subjective it is across types of readers. Now that it's an official marketing category, it's even messier. Many essays have been written (in fact,forestofglory wrote one here on Lady Business!) about the complications of defining cozy SFF. Rewitched definitely fell into this trap for me.
When I read the blurb, what I thought was going to happen was a cozy story about a woman rediscovering her magic with the help of a supportive coven and trusted friends/family and gaining enough confidence through that process to take up space in her non-magical life. Some of this sort of happened.
At thirty years old, all witches must present themselves to their coven. It's determined whether they keep their magic or have it stripped from them by vote. Belle arrives at her 30th birthday uncertain of her place in world and the future of her magic. The opening itself is so miserable and cruel to Belle that it almost lost me. This book is not great for those of us with secondhand embarrassment triggers. A book where a character is faced with the permanent loss of an integral piece of herself (however she uses/doesn't that piece) isn't cozy, as least for me! It feels like voting on whether people should get to be considered a person. Stakes that felt too fraught, especially if you go in identifying with the frustrations of a character going through a huge life shift, tipped Rewitched out of the cozy category for me almost immediately.
I tried for weeks to put my feelings into words! The best I've been able to do: that feeling where you're reading a romance novel but there's not HEA? That's how reading the climax/denouement of Rewitched hit me, even though the ending was lovely and heartwarming and basically a HEA! I don't know what's wrong with me.
I compared Rewitched to The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches because the stakes feel similar. Rewitched, though, has less of a romance element and the consequences feel more dire. It focuses more on friendships and familial connections. As Belle struggles to master her magic and prove that she deserves to keep it, she's also trying to keep her head above water at her non-magical job (yes, there's a book shop, my personal "cozy" book nemesis). At the same time, she must also survive whoever believes she doesn't deserve her magic. The romance is the weakest element of this book, because there's too many other things going on. Once the plot pops off there's no space for the dude, whose name I can't even remember. This baby is trying to carry multiple genres, but the romance is not a selling point. This book may be a good choice for anyone who likes stories about women finding themselves and building stronger relationships, even if it wasn't really for me.
How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis | Simon Element | April 2022
I was confident that I had hoovered up all the self-care knowledge relevant to me from KC Davis via her TikTok account, which I have followed for years now. A trained therapist (although not currently practicing), Davis uses her social media to give people advice on how to navigate mental illness and a world hostile to those with disabilities. She uses her own experiences to anchor the advice. Her work shows people that even if a specific piece of advice doesn't work, you can adapt it so it will or discard it for a different solution without feeling bad. Not all advice is made for every person.
Even so, I still wanted to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Her book is very short and accessible to those without a lot of energy (it's all of us). It's easy to skip to the most relevant sections for each reader. I hadn't missed much, but it was nice to get a refresher on self-care and care tasks not having a moral measurement. It's easy to forget, in this age of rampant productivity, corporate greed, and social pressure to be "good" and "right", that so many of our decisions do not reflect our morality. After reading this, I immediately changed how I looked at laundry. It helped me let go of a lot of guilt and misery over it. (And let me forgive myself for buying a front load washer, which I now hate for how much cleaning it requires just to be functional and not a mold hotel.)
Grievers by adrienne marie brown | AK Press | September 2021
I picked this up on a recommendation based on a comp to The Last of Us from somewhere. Thank you, mystery person! Grievers follows Dune as a mystery illness spreads across Detroit, starting with her mother, Kama, a well-known and respected community organizer. The disease makes people catatonic and non-responsive to everyone.
With The Last of Us, the story centers on Joel and Ellie how their pasts put them on the journey they're on to find a cure and we travel through a entire country that's in ruins. In Grievers, the main place that's falling apart is Detroit, which is a majority Black city. The state and federal governments respond exactly as you would expect to a disease striking a primarily Black city and its people. As we watch the fall of the Detroit through Dune's eyes, we see the collective grief mirrored in Dune's own more immediate, personal grief. She watches her community either escape, struggle with being left behind, or content with their choice to stay. The only other option is to be captured by an illness there doesn't seem to be any political will to solve because of how Black bodies are devalued. There's an exploration of self, of what it means to belong to a community, and trying to understand who your parents were when they're no longer present to tell their own stories.
The best part of Grievers for me was the skill the author has in showing Dune move through the loss of her family. Dune's story captures the messiness of grief: anger and aimlessness and the loss of every gossamer thread of briefly captured hope. It's not linear. Dune's journey examines the grinding repetitiveness of it perfectly. Her survivor's guilt weaves through the narrative as she tries to make sense of what's happened to her, her family, and her wider community, all while learning as much about the illness as possible.
This is the start of a trilogy, followed by Maroons, and will wrap up in Ancestors, which looks to be coming out in June 2025.
A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith | Penguin Press | November 2023
This book won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work last year. In a surprising twist, I read it via audio before it won. It was good! The thesis: do we really want/need to colonize Mars/space? Here are all the problems we'd have to overcome before colonization is feasible.
I wanted this book to be meaner to the billionaires who are wasting our time with the "let's colonize space!" nonsense. I also found it a little too easygoing on company towns, which was weird. Dear nonfiction authors: you can be rude to the people who propagate these systems we know are abusive! It's fine!
The one thing I appreciated was that they didn't shy away from the population problems re: reproduction. Politics, sociology, the law, and technology are going to have to respect people who can reproduce 900% more than they currently do. Until we figure out how we sustain populations on this planet, literally all the money these rich white dudes are pouring into space could be better used to make sure Earth and all its people survive? I want to go back and reread the sections on law and authority in space. Those were the parts of the book that I didn't retain well because of the audiobook. It's a pretty dense book and if you struggle with sensory overload re: information coming at you verbally, this may be one to get in print.
Anyway, 7/10, should have been ruder to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for being wasteful, tax-evading, anti-labor weirdos and making the space/Mars question a thing in the first place.
Rewitched by Lucy Jane Wood | Ace | September 2024
In mid-2024, a pal shared a link to this on Netgalley. A few weeks later, I was offered an ARC and scooped it up. I said on Fangirl Happy Hour:
When I first saw it, it was kind of marketed as a romance, but the romance is kind of secondary and reminds me more of the romance from The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, where it’s there but not really so much until the end. Actually, this book has a lot in common with that book, now that I think about it? Although, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches feels a little softer than this one did. But this one is very much about friendship, and finding yourself, and having confidence. It was very cute!
Weeks later, I stand by this summary! I was trying not to spoil too much since the book wasn't out yet at the time, but now that is—
I struggle a lot with the cozy SFF genre, because of how subjective it is across types of readers. Now that it's an official marketing category, it's even messier. Many essays have been written (in fact,
forestofglory wrote one here on Lady Business!) about the complications of defining cozy SFF. Rewitched definitely fell into this trap for me. When I read the blurb, what I thought was going to happen was a cozy story about a woman rediscovering her magic with the help of a supportive coven and trusted friends/family and gaining enough confidence through that process to take up space in her non-magical life. Some of this sort of happened.
At thirty years old, all witches must present themselves to their coven. It's determined whether they keep their magic or have it stripped from them by vote. Belle arrives at her 30th birthday uncertain of her place in world and the future of her magic. The opening itself is so miserable and cruel to Belle that it almost lost me. This book is not great for those of us with secondhand embarrassment triggers. A book where a character is faced with the permanent loss of an integral piece of herself (however she uses/doesn't that piece) isn't cozy, as least for me! It feels like voting on whether people should get to be considered a person. Stakes that felt too fraught, especially if you go in identifying with the frustrations of a character going through a huge life shift, tipped Rewitched out of the cozy category for me almost immediately.
I tried for weeks to put my feelings into words! The best I've been able to do: that feeling where you're reading a romance novel but there's not HEA? That's how reading the climax/denouement of Rewitched hit me, even though the ending was lovely and heartwarming and basically a HEA! I don't know what's wrong with me.
I compared Rewitched to The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches because the stakes feel similar. Rewitched, though, has less of a romance element and the consequences feel more dire. It focuses more on friendships and familial connections. As Belle struggles to master her magic and prove that she deserves to keep it, she's also trying to keep her head above water at her non-magical job (yes, there's a book shop, my personal "cozy" book nemesis). At the same time, she must also survive whoever believes she doesn't deserve her magic. The romance is the weakest element of this book, because there's too many other things going on. Once the plot pops off there's no space for the dude, whose name I can't even remember. This baby is trying to carry multiple genres, but the romance is not a selling point. This book may be a good choice for anyone who likes stories about women finding themselves and building stronger relationships, even if it wasn't really for me.
How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis | Simon Element | April 2022
I was confident that I had hoovered up all the self-care knowledge relevant to me from KC Davis via her TikTok account, which I have followed for years now. A trained therapist (although not currently practicing), Davis uses her social media to give people advice on how to navigate mental illness and a world hostile to those with disabilities. She uses her own experiences to anchor the advice. Her work shows people that even if a specific piece of advice doesn't work, you can adapt it so it will or discard it for a different solution without feeling bad. Not all advice is made for every person.
Even so, I still wanted to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Her book is very short and accessible to those without a lot of energy (it's all of us). It's easy to skip to the most relevant sections for each reader. I hadn't missed much, but it was nice to get a refresher on self-care and care tasks not having a moral measurement. It's easy to forget, in this age of rampant productivity, corporate greed, and social pressure to be "good" and "right", that so many of our decisions do not reflect our morality. After reading this, I immediately changed how I looked at laundry. It helped me let go of a lot of guilt and misery over it. (And let me forgive myself for buying a front load washer, which I now hate for how much cleaning it requires just to be functional and not a mold hotel.)
Grievers by adrienne marie brown | AK Press | September 2021
I picked this up on a recommendation based on a comp to The Last of Us from somewhere. Thank you, mystery person! Grievers follows Dune as a mystery illness spreads across Detroit, starting with her mother, Kama, a well-known and respected community organizer. The disease makes people catatonic and non-responsive to everyone.
With The Last of Us, the story centers on Joel and Ellie how their pasts put them on the journey they're on to find a cure and we travel through a entire country that's in ruins. In Grievers, the main place that's falling apart is Detroit, which is a majority Black city. The state and federal governments respond exactly as you would expect to a disease striking a primarily Black city and its people. As we watch the fall of the Detroit through Dune's eyes, we see the collective grief mirrored in Dune's own more immediate, personal grief. She watches her community either escape, struggle with being left behind, or content with their choice to stay. The only other option is to be captured by an illness there doesn't seem to be any political will to solve because of how Black bodies are devalued. There's an exploration of self, of what it means to belong to a community, and trying to understand who your parents were when they're no longer present to tell their own stories.
The best part of Grievers for me was the skill the author has in showing Dune move through the loss of her family. Dune's story captures the messiness of grief: anger and aimlessness and the loss of every gossamer thread of briefly captured hope. It's not linear. Dune's journey examines the grinding repetitiveness of it perfectly. Her survivor's guilt weaves through the narrative as she tries to make sense of what's happened to her, her family, and her wider community, all while learning as much about the illness as possible.
This is the start of a trilogy, followed by Maroons, and will wrap up in Ancestors, which looks to be coming out in June 2025.
A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith | Penguin Press | November 2023
This book won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work last year. In a surprising twist, I read it via audio before it won. It was good! The thesis: do we really want/need to colonize Mars/space? Here are all the problems we'd have to overcome before colonization is feasible.
I wanted this book to be meaner to the billionaires who are wasting our time with the "let's colonize space!" nonsense. I also found it a little too easygoing on company towns, which was weird. Dear nonfiction authors: you can be rude to the people who propagate these systems we know are abusive! It's fine!
The one thing I appreciated was that they didn't shy away from the population problems re: reproduction. Politics, sociology, the law, and technology are going to have to respect people who can reproduce 900% more than they currently do. Until we figure out how we sustain populations on this planet, literally all the money these rich white dudes are pouring into space could be better used to make sure Earth and all its people survive? I want to go back and reread the sections on law and authority in space. Those were the parts of the book that I didn't retain well because of the audiobook. It's a pretty dense book and if you struggle with sensory overload re: information coming at you verbally, this may be one to get in print.
Anyway, 7/10, should have been ruder to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for being wasteful, tax-evading, anti-labor weirdos and making the space/Mars question a thing in the first place.
