Maria, Maria and Other Stories
Maria, Maria is a playful, witchy collection of short stories written in different experimental formats. While I didn’t fall head over heels, I had a lot of fun reading this one.
Author: Marytza K. Rubio
Publisher: Liveright
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
“The first witch of the waters was born in Destruction. The moon named her Maria.”
Set against the tropics and megacities of the Americas, Maria, Maria takes inspiration from wild creatures, tarot, and the porous borders between life and death. Motivated by love and its inverse, grief, the characters who inhabit these stories negotiate boldly with nature to cast their desired ends. As the enigmatic community college professor in “Brujería for Beginners” reminds us: “There’s always a price for conjuring in darkness. You won’t always know what it is until payment is due.” This commitment drives the disturbingly faithful widow in “Tijuca,” who promises to bury her husband’s head in the rich dirt of the jungle, and the sisters in “Moksha,” who are tempted by a sleek obsidian dagger once held by a vampiric idol.
But magic isn’t limited to the women who wield it. As Rubio so brilliantly elucidates, animals are powerful magicians too. Subversive pigeons and hungry jaguars are called upon in “Tunnels,” and a lonely little girl runs free with a resurrected saber-toothed tiger in “Burial.” A colorful catalog of gallery exhibits from animals in therapy is featured in “Art Show,” including the Almost Philandering Fox, who longs after the red pelt of another, and the recently rehabilitated Paranoid Peacocks.
Brimming with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition, these stories bubble over into the titular novella, “Maria, Maria”—a tropigoth family drama set in a reimagined California rainforest that explores the legacies of three Marias, and possibly all Marias. Writing in prose so lush it threatens to creep off the page, Rubio emerges as an ineffable new voice in contemporary short fiction.
TL;DR Review
Maria, Maria is a playful, witchy collection of short stories written in different experimental formats. While I didn’t fall head over heels, I had a lot of fun reading this one.
For you if: You like short (occasionally really short!) stories steeped in metaphor and magic.
Full Review
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, Maria, Maria and Other Stories is a playful, witchy collection that experiments with form and steeps itself in metaphor and Latine culture. As anyone who even loosely follows my reviews will know, this kind of thing is extremely my sh*t. And while I didn’t fall head over heels in love, I definitely had a lot of fun reading it.
These stories, set mostly in Latin-American cities, take all different shapes. We have a teacher conducting a class on witchcraft, an art exhibit showcasing art by animals, a woman who travels to Brazil to plant her deceased husband’s head in the earth, a dystopian future described in location-specific vignettes, and more. The last story is a novella and shares a title with the book.
In many ways, this is a collection of opposing forces: levity and darkness, life and death, love and grief, magic and the mundane. Rubio explores them all in ways that can be either enjoyed quickly or contemplated more deeply — which one depends on the reader. I found myself drawn to linger on the metaphors in some stories and happy to read and then move on from others. I thought the opening story was one of the strongest. I also really loved “Paint by Numbers,” which is practically microfiction and almost more like narrative poetry than a story.
If you’re open to experimental formats and love a witchy vibe, pick this one up.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Death of a spouse
Violence/murder
Kidnapping and sexual violence (off-screen, not described)
Gun violence
The Birdcatcher
The Birdcatcher is a slightly challenging but engaging novel that explores friendship, creative expression, and mental illness. Gayl Jones is a master, and it shows here.
Author: Gayl Jones
Publisher: Beacon Press
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Gayl Jones, the novelist Toni Morrison discovered decades ago and Tayari Jones recently called her favorite writer, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is publishing again. In the wake of her long-awaited fifth novel, Palmares, The Birdcatcher is another singular achievement, a return to the circles of her National Book Award finalist, The Healing.
Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor named Catherine Shuger, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island.
A study in Black women's creative expression, and the intensity of their relationships, this work from Jones shows off her range and insight into the vicissitudes of all human nature - rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers.
TL;DR Review
The Birdcatcher is a slightly challenging but engaging novel that explores friendship, creative expression, and mental illness. Gayl Jones is a master, and it shows here.
For you if: You like novels that feel a bit like literary puzzles.
Full Review
The Birdcatcher was written by Gayl Jones in the 80s, in English, but at the time it was curiously only published in German. Now it’s finally been published in English, and it’s a finalist for the National Book Award. What a unique experience, to have a book older than me up for this year’s prize, lol.
Anyway! The Birdcatcher is a raw, honest, disturbing, and somewhat absurd little novel about a romance author named Amanda who goes to stay with her married friends in Ibiza. The wife, Catherine, is routinely institutionalized for calmly and inexplicitly attempting to murder her husband. Catherine is also a sculptor, and she’s working on a long-term piece called the Birdcatcher. Throughout the book, we flash back and forth between Amanda’s time in Ibiza and how she spent the years immediately leading up to it, which is presented as a bit of a puzzle.
This is one of those books I think I appreciated and respected more than enjoyed, per se (although I would NOT to so far as to say that I didn’t enjoy it at all). It’s definitely a bit more challenging — more “literary,” perhaps — than other books on the NBA on the list. The ending in particular lost me a bit, and it left me feeling like I wasn’t *quite* smart enough for this book (which probably just means I need to reread it, tbh!).
Still, there’s no denying that Gayl Jones is a master. You can feel it in her sentences, in the way she plays with structure and point of view. Here she explores sanity and art and women and friendship and freedom in a way I’ve never seen before. Catherine is an enigma. Amanda surprises us. Jones shocks us. It’s a whole experience.
If you don’t mind a little bit of readerly elbow grease to puzzle through a novel, definitely give this a shot.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Mental illness, institutionalization
Violence
Body shaming
Death of a child
Best of Friends
Best of Friends is a quieter, lower-stakes novel than Home Fire, but it still crackles with scenic electricity. The character work here is also excellent. I liked it a lot.
Author: Kamila Shamsie
Publisher: Riverhead
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
From the acclaimed author of Home Fire, the moving and surprising story of a lifelong friendship and the forces that bring it to the breaking point
Zahra and Maryam have been best friends since childhood in Karachi, even though--or maybe because--they are unlike in nearly every way. Yet they never speak of the differences in their backgrounds or their values, not even after the fateful night when a moment of adolescent impulse upends their plans for the future.
Three decades later, Zahra and Maryam have grown into powerful women who have each cut a distinctive path through London. But when two troubling figures from their past resurface, they must finally confront their bedrock differences--and find out whether their friendship can survive.
Thought-provoking, compassionate, and full of unexpected turns, Best of Friends offers a riveting take on an age-old question: Does principle or loyalty make for the better friend
TL;DR Review
Best of Friends is a quieter, lower-stakes novel than Home Fire, but it still crackles with scenic electricity. The character work here is also excellent. I liked it a lot.
For you if: You like books about friendship between women.
Full Review
Like pretty much everyone else, I was a big fan of Kamila Shamsie’s last novel, Homefire (which won the Women’s Prize in 2018). If you’re looking for a repeat experience, this isn’t it — Best of Friends is a quieter, lower-stakes novel — but it still crackles with in-scene electricity and explores similar ideas.
The story is told in two parts. In the first, Zahra and Maryam are unlikely life-long best friends living in Karachi, Pakastan. At 14, they’re each testing the limits of childhood and dipping a toe in rebellion in their own way. Then something happens that leaves them both affected and steers the direction of their lives. The second part picks up nearly 30 years later, with both women wildly successful in London. They’re still friends, but it’s a friendship that dances around the way their lives (and political views) have come to differ. And when a reminder of that long-ago incident comes to visit, those splinters become cracks.
There are a lot of signature Shamsie themes at play here — split loyalties, what it means to be a citizen, misogyny vs justice for women, xenophobia in the UK — but it’s mainly about the fight to keep a friendship strong despite being very different people from who you were as kids. Because they know you best, because they are all that’s left in your life of home, because their presence has always been a constant.
While it’s not a perfect book, I was still so impressed by Shamsie’s ability to create suspense in both everyday and climactic scenes. They make her books bingeable and give them life, even when the overall plot is lower stakes. She’s also given us two characters who are simultaneously sympathetic and not; flawed in different ways and the way they care for each other and their friendship. The tension and love between them (aka the whole point of the novel) was expertly done.
I’m eager to see what more readers come to think of this one!
Content and Trigger Warnings
Xenophobia and racism
Hate crime
Dictatorship
Gender-based violence/trauma
If I Survive You
If I Survive You is a strong, compelling collection of connected stories about a family of Jamaican men living in Miami. I enjoyed it quite a lot.
Author: Jonathan Escoffery
Publisher: MCD
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.
In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls "the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive."
Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery's If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper--himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica--Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn't want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.
Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery's debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.
TL;DR Review
If I Survive You is a strong, compelling collection of connected stories about a family of Jamaican men living in Miami. I enjoyed it quite a lot.
For you if: You like very connected short stories that could almost be called a novel.
Full Review
If I Survive You is a buzzy debut story collection that got longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. I’m writing this before the finalists are announced, but I gotta say, it feels like a strong contender.
This set of linked stories gives us a glimpse into the lives of the men of one Jamaican family living in Miami, particularly the younger son, Trelawny. He’s the protagonist of most of the stories, although we also get to hear from his father, his brother, and even a cousin. Trelawny is the only one who was born in the US and struggles with feeling like an outsider in every aspect of his life, including his family; the opening story, “In Flux,” sets this stage perfectly.
I do love linked stories, and these are very linked. In fact, seeing as they got away with calling How High We Go in the Dark and Disappearing Earth novels, I think this one could have snuck over that border, too. We get the stories near-linearly, following Trelawny and his family from his childhood, through Hurricane Andrew, into the Great Recession, and beyond. We come to know them, feel for them, understand their shortcomings, and hope for their futures. (In fact, the amount of time we spend with the same few characters could also give those who feel like they “always want more” from short stories the satisfaction they’re looking for.)
This is such a strong debut collection; it’s deeply heartfelt and compelling, looking at all the in-between places of race and heritage and belonging and family and survival. It’s a love letter to Jamaican families and immigrants living in Miami, and it speaks to our current moment and the last few decades alike.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Racism
Homelessness
Infidelity
Death and grief
Age of Vice
Age of Vice is a super-readable literary crime novel set in India. While I didn’t love it as much as some others (crime isn’t my genre), I definitely read it quickly and enjoyed it.
Author: Deepti Kapoor
Publisher: Riverhead
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
This is the age of vice, where money, pleasure, and power are everything, and the family ties that bind can also kill.
New Delhi, 3 a.m. A speeding Mercedes jumps the curb and in the blink of an eye, five people are dead. It’s a rich man’s car, but when the dust settles there is no rich man at all, just a shell-shocked servant who cannot explain the strange series of events that led to this crime. Nor can he foresee the dark drama that is about to unfold.
Deftly shifting through time and perspective in contemporary India, Age of Vice is an epic, action-packed story propelled by the seductive wealth, startling corruption, and bloodthirsty violence of the Wadia family — loved by some, loathed by others, feared by all.
In the shadow of lavish estates, extravagant parties, predatory business deals and calculated political influence, three lives become dangerously intertwined: Ajay is the watchful servant, born into poverty, who rises through the family’s ranks. Sunny is the playboy heir who dreams of outshining his father, whatever the cost. And Neda is the curious journalist caught between morality and desire. Against a sweeping plot fueled by loss, pleasure, greed, yearning, violence and revenge, will these characters’ connections become a path to escape, or a trigger of further destruction?
Equal parts crime thriller and family saga, transporting readers from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the urban energy of New Delhi, Age of Vice is an intoxicating novel of gangsters and lovers, false friendships, forbidden romance, and the consequences of corruption. It is binge-worthy entertainment at its literary best.
TL;DR Review
Age of Vice is a super-readable literary crime novel set in India. While I didn’t love it as much as some others (crime isn’t my genre), I definitely read it quickly and enjoyed it.
For you if: You like gangster movies like The Sopranos or The Godfather (but this time, make the story written by a woman!).
Full Review
First, big thanks to Riverhead for sending me an advanced copy of this book — it comes out in January, and the amount of early hype that’s being built around it tells you just how successful they think it’s going to be. I’m inclined to agree with them — Age of Vice is a super-bingeable, decadent, brutal read.
This book is set mostly in Delhi, India in the early 2000s. The story revolves around the Wadias, a powerful gangster family who run pretty much everything. We have three main characters: Ajay, who ends up working for them; Sunny, son of the patriarch; and Neda, a journalist who gets herself very personally involved. There’s a deadly car crash at the beginning, and we flash back and forth to not only learn what happened but also see how it shaped what will come next for these characters.
A couple things to know about this book: First, it’s book one of a planned trilogy, which I didn't know until later, but was very glad to hear after I finished it. Second, this kind of crime novel set in India and written a woman is a rare thing, and the kind of attention this book is getting is an excellent, boundary-pushing thing. We love to see it, and it’s well-deserved.
While I don’t think I fell quite as head over heels for this one as much as some other early reviewers — simply because this kind of antihero crime fiction is not my genre; I don’t really like things like The Sopranos or The Godfather — I did really like it, and I did read it very quickly. To me, the three main characters make the book especially notable; they are beautifully, exceptionally morally gray. Some of them are better people than others, and their degree of goodness changes wonderfully over the course of the novel, but Kapoor has made sure that we always at least nugget of sympathy for all three of them.
I’m eager for more readers to get their hands on this book and to see what they think, and I’m definitely looking forward to book two!
Content and Trigger Warnings
Rape (off screen)
Hard drug use
Alcohol use
Murder
Violence and death
Abortion
Suicidal thoughts
Stories From the Tenants Downstairs
Stories From the Tenants Downstairs is a seriously impressive debut story collection. I’m particularly partial to linked story collections, but still. No skips.
Author: Sidik Fofana
Publisher: Scribner
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Set in a Harlem high rise, a stunning debut about a tight-knit cast of characters grappling with their own personal challenges while the forces of gentrification threaten to upend life as they know it.
Like Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, Sidik Fofana’s electrifying collection of eight interconnected stories showcases the strengths, struggles, and hopes of one residential community in a powerful storytelling experience.
Each short story follows a tenant in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone’s mind. There is Swan in apartment 6B, whose excitement about his friend’s release from prison jeopardizes the life he’s been trying to lead. Mimi, in apartment 14D, who hustles to raise the child she had with Swan, waitressing at Roscoe’s and doing hair on the side. And Quanneisha B. Miles, a former gymnast with a good education who wishes she could leave Banneker for good, but can’t seem to escape the building’s gravitational pull. We root for these characters and more as they weave in and out of each other’s lives, endeavoring to escape from their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love.
Stories from the Tenants Downstairs brilliantly captures the joy and pain of the human experience and heralds the arrival of a uniquely talented writer.
TL;DR Review
Stories From the Tenants Downstairs is a seriously impressive debut story collection. I’m particularly partial to linked story collections, but still. No skips.
For you if: You like linked short stories with super strong characters.
Full Review
Stories From the Tenants Downstairs is a buzzy recent release with a premise that caught my eye: eight loosely connected short stories, each told from the perspective of a different person living in a single Harlem highrise. Many of them are facing eviction as rapid gentrification prices them out of homes they’ve lived in for years, sometimes decades.
I’m so glad I pulled this to the top of my TBR pile; this is character-driven short story writing at its best. Every character was just so deeply human, with such distinctive, strong voices. This paired really well with the full cast of audiobook narrators, who quite literally bring the collection to life. “Little Feet,” which takes the form of a letter penned by a 12-year-old boy to his friend’s mother, was possibly my favorite. (Oof, that one hurt.)
This is a collection that goes deeper than the primary themes of class, race, gentrification, and the cyclical trap of financial struggle. It’s about people, and choices, and survival, and humanity, and community.
What an impressive debut. No skips.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Child death
Children taken by CPS
Drug use
The Undocumented Americans
The Undocumented Americans is a moving, well-written memoir-in-essays that does exactly what I want from nonfiction: it helps open my understanding of the world and other people.
Author: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Publisher: One World
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.
Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants--and to find the hidden key to her own.
Looking beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the DREAMers, Cornejo Villavicencio explores the lives of the undocumented--and the mysteries of her own life. She finds the nation of singular, effervescent characters often reduced in the media to political pawns or nameless laborers. The stories she tells are not deferential or naively inspirational but show the love, magic, heartbreak, insanity, and vulgarity that infuse the day-to-day lives of her subjects.
In New York, we meet the undocumented workers who were recruited into the federally funded Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11. In Miami, we enter the ubiquitous botanicas, which offer medicinal herbs and potions to those whose status blocks them from any other healthcare options. In Flint, Michigan, we learn of demands for state ID in order to receive life-saving clean water. In Connecticut, Cornejo Villavicencio, childless by choice, finds family in two teenage girls whose father is in sanctuary. And through it all we see the author grappling with the biggest questions of love, duty, family, and survival.
In her incandescent, relentlessly probing voice, Cornejo Villavicencio combines sensitive reporting and powerful personal narratives to bring to light remarkable stories of resilience, madness, and death. Through these stories we come to understand what it truly means to be a stray. An expendable. A hero. An American.
TL;DR Review
The Undocumented Americans is a moving, well-written memoir-in-essays that does exactly what I want from nonfiction: it helps open my understanding of the world and other people.
For you if: Like memoir and/or seek to learn more about the undocumented immigrant experience
Full Review
I’m late to the party when it comes to The Undocumented Americans; it’s 2.5 years old and was nominated for the 2020 National Book Award for nonfiction (among others). I’ve watched many friends read and love it in that time, and I always knew I’d get there eventually. And now I have: This month we’re reading it for the book club I run at my office.
The Undocumented Americans is a journalistic memoir-in-essays by a young woman who was one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard. The book not only gives us a look at her life and experiences, but also introduces us to communities of undocumented folks all over the country, from Staten Island to Miami to Flint, Michigan.
This book isn’t that long; I listened to the entire audiobook (read by the author) during a single long car ride. But it’s moving, well-written, and often sharp as a knife. Karla Cornejo Villavicencio isn’t afraid to surprise us with her choice of language to make a point, and she wields it with precision. She’s smart and unapologetic. Her care for the people she writes about seeps through every page.
I read nonfiction to broaden my understanding of humanity, to foster a stronger connection to the global community, and to become a more empathetic citizen of this world. This book most certainly helped me do it, and I’m so glad I finally picked it up.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Racism
Suicidal thoughts
Mental illness
Death
Alcoholism
The Spear Cuts Through Water
The Spear Cuts Through Water is a sweeping, imaginative, gorgeously and uniquely told story that completely knocked my socks off. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook as you read along in print.
Author: Simon Jimenez
Publisher: Del Rey
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
The people suffer under the centuries-long rule of the Moon Throne. The royal family—the despotic emperor and his monstrous sons, the Three Terrors—hold the countryside in their choking grip. They bleed the land and oppress the citizens with the frightful powers they inherited from the god locked under their palace.
But that god cannot be contained forever.
With the aid of Jun, a guard broken by his guilt-stricken past, and Keema, an outcast fighting for his future, the god escapes from her royal captivity and flees from her own children, the triplet Terrors who would drag her back to her unholy prison. And so it is that she embarks with her young companions on a five-day pilgrimage in search of freedom—and a way to end the Moon Throne forever. The journey ahead will be more dangerous than any of them could have imagined.
Both a sweeping adventure story and an intimate exploration of identity, legacy, and belonging, The Spear Cuts Through Water is an ambitious and profound saga that will transport and transform you—and is like nothing you’ve ever read before.
TL;DR Review
The Spear Cuts Through Water is a sweeping, imaginative, gorgeously and uniquely told story that completely knocked my socks off. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook as you read along in print.
For you if: You like books with experimental storytelling styles and epic prose.
Full Review
“Once, the Moon and the Water were in love. … And though they occupied different spheres, they were able to visit one another through less direct means, for there is no barrier in this life that love cannot overcome. The Water would send up to the skies plump storm clouds, swollen with its essence, its cool mist and salty breath kissing the Moon’s dry and cracked surface. And the Moon, when it wished to visit the Water, would cast its reflection into the Water’s surface, and in the Inverted World that lies suspended below our own, in glass and still water, they would meet, and dance, and make love. … It was in that world of reflection where they built the theater that is the locus of our tale.”
You know that feeling when you read the first few pages of a new book and you’re just like…wow? The Spear Cuts Through Water did that for me, and then some. I started the audiobook in the car and was so hypnotized by the opening chapter I felt like I was driving through a dream. And it just kept getting better from there.
This book’s cover blurb says it’s like nothing you’ve ever read before, but that’s not just a gimmicky marketing line. On one level, we have the book’s narrator, who speaks to us in the second person and remembers the old stories about the Old Country (unnamed, but Jimenez is Filipino-American) that his lola used to tell him as a boy — she’s the one speaking in the quote above. But he is also sitting in a magical theater, watching a play that tells an epic tale of ancestry, battle, a god, a throne, and yes — love. And even as the narration melts into the recounting of that story, we get (sometimes single-sentence) interjections from the characters, adding their voices to what becomes a chorus.
It’s this experimentation with form and narration — combined with breathtaking but slower-moving prose — that makes me say that this book will be perfect for those who like to read both literary fiction and fantasy; the book requires a bit of a close read, a bit more engagement. But it’s very much worth the effort.
I listened to the audiobook as I read along in print, which I do often. But with this book, I can’t imagine NOT experiencing it in both formats. The way the text is laid out on the page adds so much to the storytelling style (and could be a bit confusing if you’re listening only), and Joel de la Fuente’s audio performance is just so rich and beautiful. (You may recognize his voice from Interior Chinatown or How Much of These Hills Is Gold.) Please take my advice and do this one both ways.
I loved this reading experience. I loved the story. I loved the characters. I loved the queer elements. I loved its homage to ancestry and myth. I loved how hypnotized I felt. I just loved it. You bet your bottom I’m going to go back and read Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds now. And literally anything he writes in the future.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Violence and death
Cannibalism
Animal death
Alcoholism (minor)
Sexual content (minor)
Never Let Me Go
Never Let Me Go is a quietly eerie, thought-provoking book with a strong first-person narrator. It’s engaging and will stick with you long after you finish it.
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Publisher: Vintage
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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
From Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro comes a devastating novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss.
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules—and teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life, and for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them so special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day.
TL;DR Review
Never Let Me Go is a quietly eerie, thought-provoking book with a strong first-person narrator. It’s engaging and will stick with you long after you finish it.
For you if: You like books that ask ethical questions.
Full Review
I’m late to the Ishiguro party (my first book of his was Klara and the Sun), but several people recommended Never Let Me Go as a beloved backlist title of his. I went in with few expectations and little knowledge about the plot, which I think was a good way to do it. I definitely enjoyed it, but it’s also proven to be one of those books you appreciate even more as time goes by and you think back about it later.
I won’t give too much away, but the book is written in the first person by a character named Kathy H. She’s speaking directly to us, her readers, telling us a mostly linear account of her time at school with her friends, and then what happened to them as they aged. That makes it sound boring and straightforward, but the society that Kathy lives in is not quite like our own, and she and her friends are not like you and me (except they also are, which is kind of the point).
Once again, Ishiguro has blown me away by his ability to write for an entire book in a very distinct character voice; Kath and Klara sound nothing like one another, and wholly like themselves. Going by prose alone, you might not even know it was the same author. But of course, it’s all Ishiguro, and the two books have similar thematic threads, both being a sort of subversion of the dystopian genre in which there are troubling technological advancements and humanitarian issues at play, but no attempts to "overthrow” them. Only a sort of melancholy acceptance that makes the books even more disquieting. This one, in particular, makes you think more about how you may be a cog in a machine, what you may be complacent in, and how much agency you actually have. That, and ethics in modern (and future) medicine.
The one thing that bothered me about this book was how Kathy H. constantly told us she was about to tell us something. It seemed like every few pages she was like, “or at least that’s what I thought … until what happened next” (implied DUN DUN DUUUUN). But ultimately that’s a small complaint.
While I’m not sure this became an all-time favorite like it was for some of my friends, I’m really glad I read it and definitely recommend it. It’s one that will stick with you for a long time.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Infertility
Terminal illness (in a way?)
Death and grief
Sexual content (non-explicit)
Book Lovers
Book Lovers is a compulsively readable, super smart book that takes a common trope (small-town romance) and and subverts every single element. Reading it was very fun.
Author: Emily Henry
Publisher: Berkley
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming....
Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.
Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.
If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.
TL;DR Review
Book Lovers is a compulsively readable, super smart book that takes a common trope (small-town romance) and and subverts every single element. Reading it was very fun.
For you if: You prefer romance novels that have a little extra something to give them more substance.
Full Review
I don’t read very many genre romance novels; I typically prefer my romance plots to live inside fantasy novels. That said, I do keep an eye out for the kinds of romance novels that have a little extra oomph; more literary characters or interesting experimentation or uncommon representation, something like that. Luckily, a friend who knows my reading tastes well flagged Book Lovers as a good one for me, and when my library hold came in during vacation, I knew it was the perfect time.
For me, what made this book so fun to read (aside from it having a strong plot and great characters and excellent steamy scenes) is the way it takes a common trope — small-town romance — and subverts it so completely. It 100% flips all the elements on their head in a way that is just smart and creative and enagaging. For that reason, I don’t want to tell you much about the plot, but suffice to say that the main character is the spiky-heeled, ambitious NYC woman that gets dumped and left behind when all the romance novel dudes take a trip to some small town and fall in love with the innkeeper’s daughter or whatever. So that’s the first subversion, and it only grows from there.
Another fun thing about this book: It’s a bit of inside baseball on the publishing industry, since the main character is a literary agent and the love interest, Charlie, is a sought-after editor at a big publishing house. (Hence the title.) Last thing I’ll say is that Julia Whelan reads the audiobook (I switched between ebook and audiobook), and I can’t imagine experiencing this story without her sultry rendition of Charlie’s voice. Just incredible stuff.
If you’re looking for a fast, fun, super readable book that plays with genre in a smart way, give this one a go. And yes, I count myself a proud new member of the Emily Henry fan club.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Sexual content
Panic attacks
Death of a parent and grief
Pregnancy
The Overstory
The Overstory is a sprawling, beautiful novel about trees, activism, and interconnectedness — both between us and the planet, and with one another.
Author: Richard Powers
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of — and paean to — the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours — vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
TL;DR Review
The Overstory is a sprawling, beautiful novel about trees, activism, and interconnectedness — both between us and the planet, and with one another.
For you if: You like climate fiction and / or books with lots of main characters and plotlines.
Full Review
The Overstory has been on my TBR for a long time. It won the Pulitzer, it was shortlisted for the Booker, and everyone and their brother kept recommending it to me. So when I planned a trip to Northern California to visit the redwoods, I knew it was finally time to pick this book up.
As you’ve probably heard, The Overstory is about trees. But it’s also about people — quite a lot of people, in fact. A big chunk of the book is dedicated to introducing us to a huge cast of characters, one full chapter per person. It’s unclear what these people have to do with one another until we move into the other sections of the book, at which point we bounce between them and see how their stories start to merge. In some cases, they meet; in others, they hear of one another. But the throughline is that all of them find themselves protesting deforestation and protecting trees in one form or another.
If you read Bewilderment first, like I did, you know Powers can write one heck of a nature book. Please allow me to confirm that this is a book that will make you think more, and more fondly, of every tree you see. It’s just exquisite stuff. I especially loved when two of our characters spent an entire year living up inside a giant old-growth redwood to stop it from being cut down. What made this even more interesting is that I read it after I read Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, whose research inspired this book.
I will say that I did find all the characters and storylines a bit tricky to keep track of, although to Powers’ credit, my confusion never lasted very long. It’s also a bit longer than I think it needed to be. But overall, the prose is breathtaking, the characters will make you ache, and the impression it leaves won’t fade anytime soon.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Police brutality
Suicide
Fire and fire injury
Death and grief
Infidelity
Permanent full-body paralysis
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4)
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within ends the Wayfarers books on a strong note, although it also feels the most like Chambers’ Monk & Robot books. I liked it and recommend it!
Author: Becky Chambers
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
With no water, no air, and no native life, the planet Gora is unremarkable. The only thing it has going for it is a chance proximity to more popular worlds, making it a decent stopover for ships traveling between the wormholes that keep the Galactic Commons connected. If deep space is a highway, Gora is just your average truck stop.
At the Five-Hop One-Stop, long-haul spacers can stretch their legs (if they have legs, that is), and get fuel, transit permits, and assorted supplies. The Five-Hop is run by an enterprising alien and her sometimes helpful child, who work hard to provide a little piece of home to everyone passing through.
When a freak technological failure halts all traffic to and from Gora, three strangers—all different species with different aims—are thrown together at the Five-Hop. Grounded, with nothing to do but wait, the trio—an exiled artist with an appointment to keep, a cargo runner at a personal crossroads, and a mysterious individual doing her best to help those on the fringes—are compelled to confront where they’ve been, where they might go, and what they are, or could be, to each other.
TL;DR Review
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within ends the Wayfarers books on a strong note, although it also feels the most like Chambers’ Monk & Robot books. I liked it and recommend it!
For you if: You have loved the other Wayfarers books!
Full Review
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is the fourth and final book in Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, and it was nominated for this year’s Hugo Award.
The story is about a group of people, all of different species, who find themselves temporarily trapped on a small planet that basically just has the equivalent of a rest stop on it. The recognizable character is Pei, Ashby’s secret girlfriend who is also a badass bad-guy fighter.
I loved that with this book, we get more of one of the best parts of Small, Angry Planet: having all these species in one place together, learning and confronting biases and xenophobia, forcing us as readers to think about how this applies to our own biases and xenophobia. Of the four Wayfarers books, this one feels the most like her Monk & Robot books: just enough plot to give the book a bit of a shape, and lots of philosophical conversations between characters about morality, purpose, and acceptance. Personally, I love that stuff, and Chambers of course does it so so well.
If you’re on the fence about the Wayfarers books, or about continuing past Small, Angry Planet even though the characters change, I say go for it. Becky hasn’t led us astray yet.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Xenophobia
Pregnancy (sort of)
Diaspora
A Taste of Gold and Iron
A Taste of Gold and Iron is a standalone fantasy with a queer central romance, and it hooked me HARD. The characters and their arcs are so exquisitely crafted that I didn’t even mind the slow burn. LOVED.
Author: Alexandra Rowland
Publisher: Tordotcom
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
The Goblin Emperor meets "Magnificent Century" in Alexandra Rowland's A Taste of Gold and Iron, where a queer central romance unfolds in a fantasy world reminiscent of the Ottoman Empire.
Kadou, the shy prince of Arasht, finds himself at odds with one of the most powerful ambassadors at court—the body-father of the queen's new child—in an altercation which results in his humiliation.
To prove his loyalty to the queen, his sister, Kadou takes responsibility for the investigation of a break-in at one of their guilds, with the help of his newly appointed bodyguard, the coldly handsome Evemer, who seems to tolerate him at best. In Arasht, where princes can touch-taste precious metals with their fingers and myth runs side by side with history, counterfeiting is heresy, and the conspiracy they discover could cripple the kingdom’s financial standing and bring about its ruin.
TL;DR Review
A Taste of Gold and Iron is a standalone fantasy with a queer central romance, and it hooked me HARD. The characters and their arcs are so exquisitely crafted that I didn’t even mind the slow burn. LOVED.
For you if: You like fantasy novels with mystery and romance.
Full Review
If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I LOVED this book. First of all, standalone fantasy? Yes please. Queer central romance? Double yes. Political mystery? YES x3. By about 40% in, I was not only completely hooked, but also genuinely angry that I had to stop reading to sleep and work. When it was over, I was despondent. I can’t remember the last book that made me feel like that.
The story takes place in a fantasy world reminiscent of the Ottoman Empire where some people can touch-taste metals, identifying materials by the different tastes and sensations they conjure. Kadou, a prince whose life is ruled by anxiety and panic disorder, has committed an unfortunate political blunder with tragic results. His sister, the sultan, assigns him a new lead bodyguard, the proud and disciplined Evemer. Those tragic results color Evemer’s opinion of Kadou, but as he helps Kadou investigate a counterfeiting conspiracy in order to redeem himself in the court’s eyes, Evemer begins to realize that his initial judgment may have been too hasty.
So much to say, so little space. I loved the way diverse genders and sexualities are so commonplace in this world. I loved the way I felt when the meaning of the book’s title finally snapped into place. I loved Kadou’s commitment to reciprocity and goodness. I loved the way it explored anxiety and mental illness. I loved the way it felt like my chest was imploding and also exploding as I read it.
But mostly, I loved the way Kadou and Evemer’s character arcs and romance developed so fully — technically, I guess, it’s a “slow burn,” but not one that ever made me feel impatient. These characters have to grow in order for the way they see each other to change, and Rowland pulls it off exquisitely.
I just loved it, okay???
Content and Trigger Warnings
Panic attacks / anxiety
Violence
Sexual content
Alcohol use as a coping mechanism
Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3)
Record of a Spaceborn Few is yet another emotional little space story from our liege, Becky Chambers. I loved how this one explored cultural grief.
Author: Becky Chambers
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Return to the sprawling universe of the Galactic Commons, as humans, artificial intelligence, aliens, and some beings yet undiscovered explore what it means to be a community in this exciting third adventure in the acclaimed and multi-award-nominated science fiction Wayfarers series, brimming with heartwarming characters and dazzling space adventure.
Hundreds of years ago, the last humans on Earth boarded the Exodus Fleet in search of a new home among the stars. After centuries spent wandering empty space, their descendants were eventually accepted by the well-established species that govern the Milky Way.
But that was long ago. Today, the Exodus Fleet is a living relic, the birthplace of many, yet a place few outsiders have ever visited. While the Exodans take great pride in their original community and traditions, their culture has been influenced by others beyond their bulkheads. As many Exodans leave for alien cities or terrestrial colonies, those who remain are left to ponder their own lives and futures: What is the purpose of a ship that has reached its destination? Why remain in space when there are habitable worlds available to live? What is the price of sustaining their carefully balanced way of life—and is it worth saving at all?
A young apprentice, a lifelong spacer with young children, a planet-raised traveler, an alien academic, a caretaker for the dead, and an Archivist whose mission is to ensure no one’s story is forgotten, wrestle with these profound universal questions. The answers may seem small on the galactic scale, but to these individuals, it could mean everything.
TL;DR Review
Record of a Spaceborn Few is yet another emotional little space story from our liege, Becky Chambers. I loved how this one explored cultural grief.
For you if: You like multi-POV sci-fi novels that are also deeply emotional.
Full Review
While Record of a Spaceborn Few wasn’t my favorite Wayfarers novel (that award still goes to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet), I enjoyed this book quite a bit. Becky Chambers never fails to deliver beautiful characters grappling with relatable challenges in a way that makes us feeeeel feel feel.
This Wayfarers book is about a cast of characters who live on the Exodus Fleet (sort of like a nation of big space stations filled with humans who had to flee Earth when it became uninhabitable), one of whom is Tessa, the sister of Ashby from Small, Angry Planet. Without giving too much away, it tells a small slice of the story of a community that’s still healing from a big, years-ago tragedy and reckoning with the momentum of cultural change. Amid all that, another, smaller-level tragedy strikes that forces them to look inward.
While the plot here isn’t the strongest (having now read all the Wayfarers and Monk & Robot books, I can see that this is where she started to shift toward interiority over plot), her characters are as beautiful as ever. I really loved the way this book examined personal and cultural grief and guilt. And of course, very few people writing today treat representation as well as she does.
A worthy continuation of the Wayfarers books for anyone who read and enjoyed the first two!
Content and Trigger Warnings
Death
Grief
Xenophobia
How High We Go in the Dark
How High We Go in the Dark is a heartfelt, unsettling book set in a near future riddled with plague and climate change. I enjoyed some chapters more than others, but liked the book overall.
Author: Sequoia Nagamatsu
Publisher: William Morrow
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
For fans of Cloud Atlas and Station Eleven, a spellbinding and profoundly prescient debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague—a daring and deeply heartfelt work of mind-bending imagination from a singular new voice.
Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.
Once unleashed, the Arctic Plague will reshape life on earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.
From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resiliency of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.
TL;DR Review
How High We Go in the Dark is a heartfelt, unsettling book set in a near future riddled with plague and climate change. I enjoyed some chapters more than others, but liked the book overall.
For you if: You like novels made of connected short stories, like Olive Kitteridge.
Full Review
How High We Go in the Dark has gotten a lot of buzz since it was released, and I was excited to read it. And while I enjoyed some of its chapters more than others, I definitely liked it overall.
Each chapter of this book focuses on different characters and jumps forward in time, so it spans a few generations. In the first chapter, climate change releases a plague that had been frozen in the arctic ice. The rest of the book examines how the world reacts, and it’s heavy — from funerals becoming highly commercialized to euthanasia theme parks to give terminally ill children one final happy day and a pain-free ending. But there are also happy moments, hopeful moments, and moments of beauty.
So as I’ve alluded to, this book is actually told in a format that’s much more like linked short stories — think Olive Kitteridge or Disappearing Earth. (I thought that was interesting, given that this author is typically a short story writer, and they’ve positioned this as his “debut novel” and entered it for a bunch of prizes … but I digress.) But while I really loved those two books, I liked — but just didn’t quite love — this one. Those books felt like albums with no skips, but this one didn’t. It had more chapters on the fringes of the “central plot,” less connected to everything else, and I was impatient with them.
That said, there were some chapters that made my jaw drop too (especially the one from which the novel gets its name), and while the ending felt like somewhat of a swerve, I also really liked it. There’s no doubt that Sequoia Nagamatsu has created something deeply resonant and human here, and I’ll happily read his next work.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Death of a child (many children)
Euthanasia
Pandemic / plague / lots of death
Suicide
Terminal illness
Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution
Babel is the standalone, low fantasy, dark academia, alternative history of our dreams. R.F. Kuang has written a great story that looks unflinchingly and creatively at the devastation of colonization.
Author: R.F. Kuang
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he'll enroll in Oxford University's prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel.
Babel is the world's center of translation and, more importantly, of silver-working: the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars, to magical effect. Silver-working has made the British Empire unparalleled in power, and Babel's research in foreign languages serves the Empire's quest to colonize everything it encounters.
Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, is a fairytale for Robin; a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge serves power, and for Robin, a Chinese boy raised in Britain, serving Babel inevitably means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to sabotaging the silver-working that supports imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide: Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? What is he willing to sacrifice to bring Babel down?
Babel — a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of translation as a tool of empire.
TL;DR Review
Babel is the standalone, low fantasy, dark academia, alternative history of our dreams. R.F. Kuang has written a great story that looks unflinchingly and creatively at the devastation of colonization.
For you if: You like low fantasy (takes place in our world) and books that take place in a university setting.
Full Review
Say hello to one of my (and many people’s) most anticipated books of the year! As you might guess from this novel’s full title, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang is a dark academia novel. It’s also a low fantasy (meaning it takes place in our recognizable world, with a magic system introduced on top) alternative historical fiction. And…WOW.
Babel is about a character named Robin who was born in China in 1828 but spirited away from a cholera-infested household to England as a young boy. There, he was raised to study translation (and thus a magic called silverworking) at Babel, the preeminent institution on Oxford’s campus. He and three his fellow incoming classmates — two of whom are also people of color, and two of whom are women — arrive and begin the daunting work of proving themselves, as students and as outsiders. But soon it becomes obvious that sinking into the privileges afforded to them, built on the colonization of their own homes, would mean turning their backs on their consciences.
The absolute GENIUS of this novel is the way translation and silverworking stand as the most perfect metaphor for the parasitic relationship of Britain (or any colonizer today) and its colonies. A fluent speaker of two languages translates one word into another and carves them into a silver bar. But there’s no such thing as a perfect translation; some nuance is always lost. That nuance fuels the bar’s magic. In this version of the world, everything is powered by silver — carts run faster, old buildings stay up, illnesses are healed. The economy is built on it, and international “trade” is fueled by it. But as European languages merge more and more, silver powered by translation between romantic languages is becoming less potent. So fluent speakers of other languages — ex. Chinese, Hindi, etc — are becoming more valuable. But to what purpose does Britain put the knowledge and power they gain from the students they “rescue” from these countries? As R.F. Kuang writes this story, she stares you in the eyes unflinchingly, unblinkingly, and dares you to look away.
OK this is getting very long but the last things I’ll say: the characters are amazing (each member of our foursome is compelling and together they form the perfect group to probe one another’s prejudices and blind spots). This book has some of the best footnotes (mix between informative, funny, sarcastic, etc) I’ve read in a novel. If you love language you’ll love this. And while it was long and I expect some will call it slower paced (it covers a span of years, from Robin’s childhood to the end of his time at Oxford), it never bothered me for a second.
This is my first R.F. Kuang — I haven’t read The Poppy War (yet!), but from what I’ve heard, her writing has gotten better and better with each book. And while this one is super different from her debut trilogy, it sounds like her fans are loving this too. I hope you decide to read this book!!
Content and Trigger Warnings
Colonization
Racism and racial slurs
Sexism, misogyny
Suicidal thoughts, suicide
Gun violence, general violence
Tomb of Sand
Tomb of Sand, translated to English from the Hindi, is a masterpiece of both storytelling and translation. I’ve simply never read anything like it.
Author: Geetanjali Shree, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
Publisher: Tilted Axis Press
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Note: This book is not yet published in the US. Click above to buy this book from my Blackwells, a bookstore in the UK that ships to the US for free (and isn’t affiliated with Amazon, unlike Book Depository and others).
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a hijra (trans) woman – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more 'modern' of the two.
At the older woman's insistence they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.
Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree's playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.
TL;DR Review
Tomb of Sand, translated to English from the Hindi, is a masterpiece of both storytelling and translation. I’ve simply never read anything like it.
For you if: You love language, are OK with feeling unmoored while reading, and aren’t afraid of a challenge that’s very much worth it.
Full Review
“Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself. Even women on their own are enough. Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass.”
Whew, where to start with this one? While Tomb of Sand isn’t going to be quite right for every reader, there’s simply no denying that it’s a masterpiece of both storytelling and — as for Daisy Rockwell’s English from the Hindi — translation. It’s also unlike anything I’ve ever read before, which was both exciting and challenging. I’m so glad it won the International Booker Prize, prompting so many of my friends to read it and recommend it to me over and over.
Told in three parts, the book is about the matriarch of a family in India and her daughter. In part 1, Ma grieves the death of her husband and won’t get out of bed. In part 2, she moves in with Beti and deepens her friendship with a hijra (trans) woman named Rosie. In part 3, Ma and Beti travel abroad and we come to realize just how much about her we did not know.
As I said, this book challenges the reader — at least, it will challenge Western readers (which I think is a very good thing, tbh). It asks us for patience and trust, looping and playing and experimenting and waxing and taking every shape but a linear one. The narrator’s voice reminds me of a capering jester, and reading it feels like you’re flying on the wind that moves around, above, and between everyone and everything. The wordplay is joyful and begs you to admire the care Rockwell took with this translation. There were, admittedly, parts where I zoned out a bit, allowing myself to just be carried along — but honestly, I think that also felt like kind of the point.
This book is for those who love language for language’s sake, and for those who are interested in exploring themes like borders (physical, imagined, cultural, of the self), family structure, nature, and joy itself. (It won’t be for those who prefer things to be relatively straightforward, or feel uncomfortable when unmoored, or prefer a book carried by plot.)
I was moved, provoked, impressed. And so very glad I read this one.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Death and grief
Transphobia
Murder (off screen)
War violence
Nightcrawling
Nightcrawling is a brutal, heartbreaking, beautifully written book that just as often feels like poetry from an astounding young talent. I, like everyone else, can’t believe Leila Mottley published this at 19.
Author: Leila Mottley
Publisher: Knopf
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed.
One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
TL;DR Review
Nightcrawling is a brutal, heartbreaking, beautifully written book that just as often feels like poetry from an astounding young talent. I, like everyone else, can’t believe Leila Mottley published this at 19.
For you if: You like poetic prose and are OK with very heavy subject matter.
Full Review
“Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we're all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up.”
Wow. Wowowow. Leila Mottley, a former Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, was just 17 when she started writing Nightcrawling, and 19 when it was published. Then it was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club pick. THEN it was longlisted for the Booker Prize, making her the youngest-ever nominee. It’s hard not to want to pick this one up out of sheer curiosity.
I’m happy to report that it absolutely lives up to the hype — raw, heartbreaking, her poetic skills on full display — but be warned: this book is extremely heavy and can be hard to read in certain parts. (Biggest TWs: sexual violence, police violence).
Inspired by a real case that happened in Oakland in 2016, Nightcrawling is about a 17-year-old girl named Kiara who’s desperately trying to keep a roof over her and her brother’s heads, not to mention the 9-year-old boy who lives next door, mostly alone. After months of trying to find a steady job, she turns to the only option she feels is left: nightcrawling. Soon she finds herself at the center of a scandal in the Oakland Police Department — and of media attention.
The first thing that stands out with this book is the prose. If you don’t like writing stuffed with poetic phrases and metaphors, this won’t be for you, but personally I love that kind of thing. Then there’s the characters. It’s impossible not to have your heart broken for them again and again, not to love them all (except Marcus, her brother, who I honestly just wanted to punch — but that’s also a sign of effective writing, lol). The end is also very emotional.
Mottley has succeeded in making this Oakland case feel real and personal, and in forcing us to look closer at the kind of cyclical entrapments and impossible choices that too many poor Black women are forced into.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Sexual violence/rape (graphic)
Police brutality
Death of a child
Suicide attempt (non-narrator)
Addiction (non-narrator)
Racism
An Island
An Island is a tense, layered story about trauma, agency, and loneliness during political upheaval. I appreciated it more than enjoyed it, but it’s a quick and impactful read.
Author: Karen Jennings
Publisher: Hogarth
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - A "powerful" (The Guardian) novel about a lighthouse keeper with a mysterious past, and the stranger who washes up on his shores--the American debut of a major voice in world literature.
Samuel has lived alone on a small island off the coast of an unnamed African country for more than two decades. He tends to his garden, his lighthouse, and his chickens, content with a solitary life. Routinely, the nameless bodies of refugees wash ashore, but Samuel--who understands that the government only values certain lives, certain deaths—always buries them himself.
One day, though, he finds that one of these bodies is still breathing. As he nurses the stranger back to life, Samuel—feeling strangely threatened—is soon swept up in memories of his former life as a political prisoner on the mainland. This was a life that saw his country exploited under colonial rule, followed by a period of revolution and a brief, hard-won independence--only for the cycle of suffering to continue under a cruel dictator. And he can't help but recall his own shameful role in that history. In this stranger's presence, he begins to consider, as he did in his youth: What does it mean to own land, or to belong to it? And what does it cost to have, and lose, a home?
A timeless and gripping portrait of regret, terror, and the extraordinary stakes of companionship, An Island is a story as page-turning as it is profound.
TL;DR Review
An Island is a tense, layered story about trauma, agency, and loneliness during political upheaval. I appreciated it more than enjoyed it, but it’s a quick and impactful read.
For you if: You like stories that flash backward and forward in time to paint a more complete picture.
Full Review
An Island was the darkhorse of the 2021 Booker Prize longlist, publishing in the US almost a whole year after the prize put it on people’s radar. I appreciated it more than enjoyed it, but it’s a quick, impactful read that will probably stay with me longer than I think.
The story is about an old man named Samuel who lives alone on an island off the coast of an unnamed African country, caring for the lighthouse and subsisting off the land. He spent 25 years in jail for his role in a violent protest to overthrow the (corrupt) government before moving to the Island. Sometimes, bodies of drowned refugees wash ashore, but this time the man is alive. As Samuel brings him back to health, flashbacks to his past mix and mingle with his present circumstance to blur the line between fact and fantasy, companionship and violence.
Some parts were slower than others, but the thing I liked best about this book was the form: how it alternated so smoothly between past and present to really show how Samuel’s current reality was informed by the trauma and circumstances of his past. Also, I sympathized with Samuel even though he’s not really a good person; it does a good job of exploring the fact that there are no winners in colonization or coups. And the ending shocked me, but also felt true and earned, which was impressive.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Violence
Murder
Animal death
Prostitution, economic necessity
Second Place
Second Place is one I respected more than enjoyed, but I definitely didn’t hate it. It has a strong, resonant, effective narrator voice that impressed me.
Author: Rachel Cusk
Publisher: FSG
Goodreads | The StoryGraph
Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
From the author of the Outline trilogy, a fable of human destiny and decline, enacted in a closed system of intimate, fractured relationships.
A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. His provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally in the intersecting spaces of our internal and external worlds.
With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Rachel Cusk's Second Place is deeply affirming of the human soul, while grappling with its darkest demons.
TL;DR Review
Second Place is one I respected more than enjoyed, but I definitely didn’t hate it. It has a strong, resonant, effective narrator voice that impressed me.
For you if: You like novels narrated by unlikeable women.
Full Review
“To take on the work of fate is to incur full responsibility for its consequences.”
I read Second Place because it was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was also my first Rachel Cusk!
The book is narrated by a woman referred to as M, writing to a man named Jeffers (whom we never actually meet). She recounts the period of time when a famous painter called L stayed in the cottage on their land, aka the “second place.” She was hoping L would be able to see and illuminate the landscape and herself in a way that would help her feel more whole and free — but things rarely go the way we hope.
The strongest part of this book, IMO, is M’s voice. (It was also very well done on audio.) This is one of the most quotable books I’ve read — nearly every page has a passage that could be isolated and presented as profound. But the cumulative effect of this, plus M’s constant use of Jeffers’ name twice a page, is one of near-pretentiousness, which I think is sort of the point. Both M and L are terrible people treating people terribly, but she is somehow the perfect character to show us the dichotomy between the way we imagine something going and how things actually go, and the desperation that many women feel to exert power wherever one can.
I liked this book okay, but I respected it more. It won’t be for everyone, but it is impressive in that it does what it sets out to do very well.
Content and Trigger Warnings
Toxic relationship
Misogyny