Review: Assassin of Reality

Title: Assassin of Reality

Series: Vita Nostra #2

Author: Marina & Sergey Dyachenko

Genre: Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Body horror, death, infidelity (mentions), sexual content (off-page), suicidal thoughts (severe), car crash (major), bullying (minor)

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of the first book, Vita Nostra. (But honestly if you haven’t read Vita Nostra yet go do that, it’s spectacular.)

Back Cover:

The eagerly anticipated sequel to the highly acclaimed Vita Nostra takes readers to the next stage in Sasha Samokhina’s journey in a richly imagined world of dark academia in which grammar is magic—and not all magic is good.

In Vita Nostra, Sasha Samokhina, a third-year student at the Institute of Special Technologies, was in the middle of taking the final exam that would transform her into a part of the Great Speech. After defying her teachers’ expectations, Sasha emerges from the exam as Password, a unique and powerful part of speech. Accomplished and ready to embrace her new role, she soon learns her powers threaten the old world, and despite her hard work, Sasha is set to fail.

However, Farit Kozhennikov, Sasha’s dark mentor, finds a way to bring her out of the oblivion and back to the Institute for his own selfish purposes. Subsequently, Sasha must correct her mistakes before she is allowed to graduate and is forced to do what few are asked and even less achieve: to succeed and reverberate—becoming a part of the Great Speech and being one of the special few who dictate reality. If she fails, she faces a fate far worse than death: the choice is hers.

Years have passed around the Institute—and the numerous realities that have spread from Sasha’s first failure—but it is only her fourth year of learning what role she will play in shaping the world. Her teachers despise and fear her, her classmates distrust her, and a growing love—for a young pilot with no affiliation to the school—is fraught because a relationship means leverage, and Farit won’t hesitate to use it against her.

Planes crash all the time. Which means Sasha needs to rewrite the world so that can’t happen…or fail for good.

Review:

I have made no secret of how much I loved Vita Nostra. I knew it was first in a series, but most likely due to the books originally being written in Russian, I could find no information online about any other books in the series existing, let alone when they came out. So I was absolutely delighted to stumble on book two, Assassin of Reality, completely by accident while browsing the library. However, I was a little nervous to start reading it, for a couple reasons:

1. Vita Nostra set a spectacularly high bar, and there was a solid chance book two just wouldn’t live up to it.
2. It has been almost two years since I read Vita Nostra, and reading a sequel so long after the original book usually results in the sequel being less enjoyable just because I’ve forgotten so much of the first book.
3. I got this copy as a physical book, and after going back to reading physical books after reading audiobooks almost exclusively for two years, physical books are just less immersive in general.

So I picked up this book full of hope that it would live up to its predecessor and concern that for a variety of reasons, it wouldn’t.

Let’s get the big question out of the way first: Did Assassin of Reality live up to the high expectations that Vita Nostra set? Not really. But that doesn’t make it bad – and it wasn’t for the reasons I expected.

Assassin of Reality has so many of the things that I loved about Vita Nostra. Impossible studies, a weird and vaguely incomprehensible magic system that seems to have definite yet undefinable rules, an intimate view of a character who may or may not be going mad (although we’re pretty sure she’s not going mad at this point), time as an inconvenience that can be changed and molded and is nowhere close to immutable, teachers by turn human and decidedly not human, a character so absurdly powerful that some faculty would rather see her dead than upend the balance. In many ways, there’s a lot to enjoy, and I did enjoy.

But it was also significantly less than Vita Nostra. It felt less bizarre and surreal, even though the events were objectively even more bizarre and surreal, because I’m not experiencing this wild and off-kilter world for the first time anymore. It’s also significantly shorter – which in some ways makes sense, since Vita Nostra covered three years at the Institute while Assassin of Reality only covers one. But it also did the story a major disservice. The main story here is Sasha grappling with her place in the universe and the strange cosmology of the Great Speech, to the detriment of everything else. The impossible studies got shoved to the side. Relationships with former classmates were almost nonexistent at the start and completely dissolved by the end. Even conflicts with teachers and the actual logistics of being in school were glossed over, to the point where I think she entirely skipped the spring semester? The story did, at least, even if Sasha didn’t. For a book that’s supposed to be about Sasha’s last year in an impossible school before she either becomes omnipotent or ceases to exist, it spends a whole lot of time watching her go through a magic version of a petulant teenager phase.

This review is a lot more scathing than I feel about the book, to be honest. While reading, I did enjoy it. It was absorbing and engrossing, and I genuinely wanted to keep reading through the whole thing. But looking back, I think there’s a lot of potential that was wasted. There’s nothing wrong with a story about Sasha grappling with her place in this cosmology and having a complicated romance with a guy who has no idea about any of the magical weirdness Sasha is involved in. But having those be the focus of the story to the exclusion of everything else left it not as strong as it could have been. Because of events at the end of Vita Nostra, Sasha has to start her education almost completely from scratch, and she takes on the nearly omnipotent Farit Kozhennikov head-on, and yet those are background elements. I can’t help but notice how it could have been so much more.

That said, it was still a solid read. I didn’t understand much of it, but I expected that and don’t really feel the need to understand. The world is still wonderfully bizarre, and getting weirder as Sasha gets more powerful. I hope she does finally manage to take Farit Kozhennikov down. And I do legitimately want to find out what happens next. So I will be reading the next book, whenever I can find it. But if you want to read Vita Nostra and then not bother with the rest of the series, that’s fine too. Let’s be real, this doesn’t feel like the kind of story that will have a tidy ending, anyway.

The Vita Nostra series:

1. Vita Nostra
2. Assassin of Reality

Review: Naamah

Title: Naamah

Author: Sarah Blake

Genre: Strong Magical Realism feel, but it’s also set way back in biblical times so potentially Historical Fantasy … it’s definitely weird and fantasy-adjacent, but it’s hard to nail down

Trigger Warnings: Death, child death, animal death (graphic), pregnancy, childbirth, excrement, gore, sexual content, infidelity, unreality, incest

Back Cover:

A wildly imaginative novel of the reluctant heroine who rescued life on earth.

With the coming of the Great Flood—the mother of all disasters—only one family was spared, drifting on an endless sea, waiting for the waters to subside. We know the story of Noah, moved by divine vision to launch their escape. Now, in a work of astounding invention, acclaimed writer Sarah Blake reclaims the story of his wife, Naamah, the matriarch who kept them alive. Here is the woman torn between faith and fury, lending her strength to her sons and their wives, caring for an unruly menagerie of restless creatures, silently mourning the lover she left behind. Here is the woman escaping into the unreceded waters, where a seductive angel tempts her to join a strange and haunted world. Here is the woman tormented by dreams and questions of her own—questions of service and self-determination, of history and memory, of the kindness or cruelty of fate.

In fresh and modern language, Blake revisits the story of the Ark that rescued life on earth, and rediscovers the agonizing burdens endured by the woman at the heart of the story. Naamah is a parable for our time: a provocative fable of body, spirit, and resilience.

Review:

This book is dark, graphic, occasionally gross, and above all extremely weird. “Wildly imaginative” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I picked it up mainly because I am all about mildly-to-severely blasphemous retellings of Bible stories. The story of Noah’s Ark, told from the perspective of Noah’s wife who doesn’t seem to be fully on board with their deity’s decision to genocide the world, seemed right up my alley. And there were indeed many things to like in this book.

Things I liked about Naamah:

• A raw and deeply human story about unnamed and unconsidered Biblical women (Naamah herself, but also her sons’ wives)
• The logistics of keeping eight people and probably thousands of animals alive and sane on a boat for nearly a year
• The emotions that come with being on a boat with a bunch of animals for nearly a year and basically being the only survivors of an intentional apocalypse
• Naamah herself, a woman who meets the living God face-to-face and still tells him to fuck off

As for what I didn’t like quite so much:

Now, I am no stranger to weird books. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I generally enjoy weird books. But this book is so weird in so many directions that I’m not at all sure what I’m supposed to make of it. It’s practically plotless, held together by sex scenes and extensive dream sequences, and for something that’s ostensibly some kind of Biblical reimagining contains a whole bunch of nonsense that doesn’t seem to fit anything.

We should probably talk about Abraham’s wife Sarai showing up as a time-traveling god-like figure. Or the sentient bird that can only talk when he’s sharing Naamah’s dreams. Or the angel living underwater with a bunch of dead children. Or that scene where Sarai takes Naamah to the present day and she watches Law & Order: SVU. We should probably talk about it, but I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to make of any of this.

Naamah has a unique problem where if you cut out the sex scenes, the dream sequences, and the weird stuff that feels discordant with the rest of the book, there isn’t a book. It’s part slice-of-life on the Ark and part magical mystical unreality I-don’t-even-know-what. I appreciate the sacrilege and the symbolism of Noah’s wife questioning the atrocity of the flood. But I’m unsure of the plot, point, purpose, moral, or any reason for this book to exist, and I’m unsure if there is one to find.

Is Naamah a good book? I’m not even sure how you judge a book like this. When I finished it, I found myself scrambling for meaning because there must surely be a point or idea or theme or something here, right? I was left with an overwhelming sense of what-in-the-world-did-I-just-read befuddlement. I legitimately have no idea what I’m supposed to take away from this story. Naamah has me well and truly stumped.

Review: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Title: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Author: Kim Fu

Genre: Short Stories/Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Vary by story; see end of review for list

Back Cover:

In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.

Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

Review:

Admittedly, I have not read a ton of short story collections. However, in my limited experience I’ve never encountered a short story collection where every single story is spectacular. But Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century contains twelve stories that are weird, vivid, occasionally disturbing, brilliant, and unforgettable.

Some of them were disturbing or just plain weird (“Sandman,” “Scissors,” “Bridezilla”). Some inspired a lot of emotions, sometimes very intense ones (“Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” “Time Cubes,” “June Bugs”). Some of them left me feeling like there was some meaning just beyond the written words that I wasn’t quite getting (“Liddy, First to Fly,” “Twenty Hours,” “In This Fantasy”). And some were just perfectly good short stories (“#ClimbingNation,” “The Doll,” “Do You Remember Candy”). But all of them were great in their own way.

Personally, I love the off-kilter feeling of the normalized weirdness in magical realism. And even though many of these stories don’t fit into strict magical realism territory (there are several that could be better categorized as science fiction, horror, or even contemporary), they all have that same vibe. They are infused with a feeling that everything is a little strange, a little off, a little not quite what you expected and that you’re the weird one for thinking it’s strange. If anything connects these stories, it’s that feeling, and I loved it.

If I had to pick a few favorites, I would go with “Sandman” (surprisingly emotionally compelling despite being very weird in concept), “Do You Remember Candy” (is there a word for the grief of losing something you haven’t actually lost yet? Because that’s what this story inspires), and “Time Cubes” (vividly sad with a dark but bittersweet ending). (June Bugs” does get an honorable mention for its heart-poundingly realistic depiction of the more subtle kind of abusive relationship.) But like I keep saying, there are no bad stories here. All of them are great in their own way. This short story collection is definitely worth reading.

Trigger Warnings:

• Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867: Parent death, unreality (minor)
• Liddy, First to Fly: Body horror
• Time Cubes: Mental illness, suicidal ideation, suicide
• #ClimbingNation: Death, sibling death, grief
• Sandman: Unreality, body horror (kinda)
• Twenty Hours: Death, romantic partner death, murder, gun violence, infidelity (mentioned as hypothetical), blood (mentions), body horror (mild)
• The Doll: Child death, death, suicide
• In This Fantasy: Domestic abuse, death, blood, murder, infidelity, unreality
• Scissors: Sexual content
• June Bugs: Domestic abuse, emotional abuse, toxic relationship, guns, insects
• Bridezilla: Animal death, ecological disaster (mentions)
• Do You Remember Candy: Loss of senses, strained parent-child relationship

Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Author: Gabriel García Márquez (translated by Gregory Rabassa)

Genre: Classic/Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parent, death of children, mental illness, murder, war, sexual content, adult/minor relationship, infidelity, incest, body horror, religious bigotry, rape

Back Cover:

Gabriel García Márquez’s finest and most famous work, the Nobel Prize-winning One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles, through the course of a century, life in Macondo and the lives of six Buendía generations-from José Arcadio and Úrsula, through their son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía (who commands numerous revolutions and fathers eighteen additional Aurelianos), through three additional José Arcadios, through Remedios the Beauty and Renata Remedios, to the final Aureliano, child of an incestuous union. As babies are born and the world’s “great inventions” are introduced into Macondo, the village grows and becomes more and more subject to the workings of the outside world, to its politics and progress, and to history itself. And the Buendías and their fellow Macondons advance in years, experience, and wealth . . . until madness, corruption, and death enter their homes.

Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel weaves a magical tapestry of the everyday and the fantastic, the humdrum and the miraculous, life and death, tragedy and comedy—a tapestry in which the noble, the ridiculous, the beautiful, and the tawdry all contribute to an astounding vision of human life and death, a full measure of humankind’s inescapable potential and reality.

Review:

I mainly picked this up because I put it on hold at the library during a (very brief) classics-reading kick earlier this year and promptly forgot about it. When it came available, I figured I might as well read it.

This story chronicles six-ish generations of the Buendía family and the small town of Macondo. Family heads José Arcadio and Úrsula, along with a group of unrelated other people, take a long trek into the jungle and build a town. Their family grows, their children have children of their own, and the Buendía family gets bigger – in number, in wealth, in stature in the town. Times change, war happens, the town becomes less isolated, new scientific inventions happen, the family begins to disperse away from the town. The town of Macondo rises, and then falls, with the Buendía family.

This is a weird book, but from my limited experience with magical realism, this is weird in ways consistent with the genre. It’s like the real world, but a little to the left. Alchemy is a thing that works, there’s a side character who may be immortal or may be already dead, one character gets medical treatment from psychic doctors who are thousands of miles away, a character gets taken up into heaven, and nobody views this as at all out of the ordinary. In fact, magnifying glasses and turning metal into gold are treated with equal seriousness and excitement, like the ability to put the right ingredients into a pot and turn them into gold is a neat scientific advancement like curving glass to make things bigger.

The thing that surprised me the most about this book is that for all its century-spanning scale and magical realism bizarreness, it’s remarkably human. None of these characters are great people, but they’re all doing their best in their circumstances. I found something relatable in every character – in Úrsula’s resourcefulness in keeping the family functional; in José Arcadio’s desire to learn all about cool new things; in Fernanda’s rigid adherence to rules; in Amaranta Úrsula’s desire to leave the small town where she grew up and grow in the wider world; in Remedios the Beauty’s … well, let’s be honest, Remedios the Beauty was who I wish I could be. There are six generations of Buendías, each of whom love and lose, grow and die, succeed, fail, make mistakes, and ultimately just are in all their messy glory. It sounds pretentious to say this book is about the human condition, but it kind of is.

My biggest struggle was keeping the characters straight. Normally I would blame this on the audiobook format, and it is what caused my difficulty remembering Arcadio and Aureliano were two different characters. But the book itself doesn’t make it easy on me, either. This family reuses names a lot – there are three José Arcadios (and one just Arcadio), three Remedioses, and twenty-two Aurelianos (although to be fair, only four of them actually have major roles). There are also 32 biological relatives and 8 spouses stretching across the century this book covers, not to mention characters who aren’t part of the Buendía family. At some point, I felt like I needed to give them numbers to tell them apart.

I didn’t think I was much for the “sweeping family saga” type of book, but if they’re anything like this, I may have to reconsider. I didn’t get particularly attached to any one character (unless you count Remedios the Beauty, who I mainly loved because she’s #goals), but I enjoyed seeing the high-level view of the rise and fall, fortunes and misfortunes of the Buendías. One Hundred Years of Solitude is, much to my surprise, an enjoyable and remarkably relatable book.

Review: A History of Wild Places

Title: A History of Wild Places

Author: Shea Ernshaw

Genre: Thriller with Magical Realism elements

Trigger Warnings: Gaslighting, murder, blood (mentions), death, childbirth, pregnancy, alcohol use, alcoholism, suicide (mentions), torture, emotional abuse, infidelity (mentions), injury, violence, domestic abuse, ableism, gun violence (brief), death of parent (mentions), drug abuse (mentions), grief, fire (one scene), confinement

Back Cover:

Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.

Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it…he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.

Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.

Review:

I picked this up for the cult-like commune, mainly. I’m a sucker for stories of cult members discovering that there’s something rotten behind the perfect facade of their cult, and I thought this book might have some of that.

Except I was immediately engaged by Travis and his hunt for the missing Maggie St. James. He’s a loner – no family, no home, nothing to live for, on the verge of driving into the wilderness and disappearing forever. But he can see visions of the past by touching associated objects, and that makes him damn good at finding missing people. Maggie has been missing for five years and a friend convinces Travis to take the case. He visits the place where Maggie’s abandoned car was found and discovers a hidden path deep into the woods. His investigation through the deep empty woods is peppered with his backstory and how he ended up here, five hours deep into a snowy forest.

But as the back cover tells us, he vanishes too. When the story switched to the alternating perspectives of Theo, Calla, and Bee, it very nearly lost me. None of those three characters – curious Theo, fearful Calla, and bold but blind Bee – engaged me nearly as much as Travis did. But I was at least curious enough about what happened to Travis and Maggie to keep reading.

I guess it was really strong curiosity, because after Travis is out of the picture, the story slows to a snail’s pace. It’s such a slow burn that you don’t even realize anything’s on fire until nearly halfway through. But I really did want to know what happened to Travis, especially since the few clues I was given added up to “this makes no sense at all.” And around the halfway point, it did pick up. Characters started realizing other characters were keeping secrets, clues started popping up that filled in a few answers but left more questions, and I started to get hints of just how sinister things were under the surface of Pastoral.

This was the kind of book that kept me coming up with theories for the true answer, and even though I did guess all the reveals, for most of them I formulated the correct guess only a few pages before the reveal. (One I did guess pretty far in advance, but it was more because my plot psychic tendencies immediately jumped to “this is the most shocking option so it’s obviously the answer” than any actual on-page evidence.)

This book was significantly slower than most books I enjoy, but it was well-plotted, I only saw one of the big twists coming, and it managed to keep me engaged and asking questions up until the end. I don’t think it will end up on any Bluejay’s Personal Favorite Books lists, but I’m glad I stuck it out and finished the story.

Review: The Master and Margarita

Title: The Master and Margarita

Author: Mikhail Bulgakov

Genre: Classic/Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, gore, forced institutionalization, nudity, infidelity, body horror, gun violence, fire, animal cruelty (kinda?), mental illness, cancer (mentions)

Back Cover:

One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of in exhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth.

Review:

Ever since I read Vita Nostra I’ve been chasing that high, looking for another book that’s a similar combination of incomprehensible and enthralling – or even a book that’s equally enthralling as that masterpiece. I picked up this book because I hoped that maybe another Russian novel about Satan’s hijinks in Moscow would be what I’ve been searching for.

It really wasn’t. It was well-written, to be sure, and interesting enough to finish, but it didn’t hold a candle to Vita Nostra. I’m not entirely sure anything will.

There isn’t a main cast in this story, unless you count Woland (the alias Satan took for his time in Moscow) and his entourage. The story follows many different characters showing all the different ways Woland and company mess with the people Moscow – usually by getting them arrested or sent to an insane asylum. It’s not entirely clear to me if Woland has a reason for being there or if he’s just there to cause chaos. I did enjoy his companions, especially the cat. They were all unique, well-drawn, and entertaining personalities.

This book wasn’t published in the author’s lifetime because the censors didn’t like its portrayal of life under the Stalinist regime. I don’t know enough about Russia, Russian culture and attitudes, and what Russia was like under Stalin to pick up on any of that. In fact, I felt like I didn’t really pick up on anything this book was trying to say. It’s one of those where I wish I had an English teacher telling me what I’m supposed to be seeing, like those magic eye pictures where it’s easier to find the hidden image if someone tells me what I’m looking for.

The plot itself is fairly comprehensible on a surface level. (The hardest part was keeping track of the names, because many of the characters had nicknames that did not at all relate to their names. There were several times where I was confused at the introduction of a new character only to realize later that I’d already met him under a different name.) I understood the what, but not the why. I can tell that there’s some other layer of meaning behind Woland tormenting Moscow, the story of the Master and his lover Margarita, and whatever Pontius Pilate had to do with anything, but I couldn’t figure out what. It was a good story, but I finished it feeling like I’d figured out what it was about but was completely missed what it means.

I enjoyed the story for itself. Once I figured out that the guy the story started with was not the actual protagonist, it was a lot of fun. But I wish I had read this in an English class or with a friend who was really into Russian literature or something, because there’s a lot more underneath the surface here that I just can’t grasp.

Review: The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Title: The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

Author: Shaun David Hutchinson

Genre: Magical Realism (my best guess, this one’s hard to categorize)

Trigger Warnings: Bullying, blood, gun violence, suicide, suicidal ideation, death of parent, child abuse (mention), toxic relationship

Back Cover:

Sixteen-year-old Elena Mendoza is the product of a virgin birth.

This can be scientifically explained (it’s called parthenogenesis), but what can’t be explained is how Elena is able to heal Freddie, the girl she’s had a crush on for years, from a gunshot wound in a Starbucks parking lot. Or why the boy who shot Freddie, David Combs, disappeared from the same parking lot minutes later after getting sucked up into the clouds. What also can’t be explained are the talking girl on the front of a tampon box, or the reasons that David Combs shot Freddie in the first place.

As more unbelievable things occur, and Elena continues to perform miracles, the only remaining explanation is the least logical of all—that the world is actually coming to an end, and Elena is possibly the only one who can do something about it.

Review:

I picked this up because it was immediately available at the library and a long time ago (I don’t know how long, but I haven’t been on Goodreads in a year and a half) someone I followed on Goodreads had loved it. So I grabbed it, more because it was available than from any strong desire to read it.

Looking at it from the outside I probably shouldn’t have liked it much. It’s very slow, with hardly anything in the way of plot, but I didn’t find the characters strong enough to call it character-driven either. A good seven hours of the nine-hour audiobook is Elena trapped in decision paralysis about whether she should do what the voices want or not. The plot is determined not to give her any information that would assist in that decision to force her to make it herself, which she was expending all her effort to avoid. If there weren’t so many interpersonal things happening between characters, it would have dragged a lot.

The characters do all have good character arcs though, so maybe you could call it character-driven for that. Elena’s love interest Freddie had the strongest arc in my opinion. Elena herself and her best friend also felt like they had some kind of good arc, but I’m not entirely sure I could put into words what it was. Even Elena’s mother and ex-boyfriend got arcs, albeit smaller, simpler ones.

Looking at it from this review, you might think this is a boring book. But weirdly, it’s not. By all rights it should have been – it’s very slow, all Elena’s attempts to learn more about plot-related things are foiled, she spends the vast majority of the book avoiding the one decision she has to make. But somehow, I liked it. Elena was relatable in her fear of making the wrong decision, the complexity of the relationships between characters was good, there was enough magic to satisfy my fantasy love while still having a very contemporary vibe. I can’t really tell you why, but I did enjoy this book.

Review: Vita Nostra

Title: Vita Nostra

Authors: Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

Genre: Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (major), vomit (major), threats of death, stalking, manipulation, blood (mentions), alcohol use, sexual content (mostly off-page), forced sex work (mentions), death, suicide attempt, suicidal ideation, abelism (mentions)

Back Cover:

While vacationing at the beach with her mother, Sasha Samokhina meets the mysterious Farit Kozhennikov under the most peculiar circumstances. The teenage girl is powerless to refuse when this strange and unusal man with an air of the sinister directs her to perform a task with potentially scandalous consequences. He rewards her effort with a strange golden coin.

As the days progress, Sasha carries out other acts for which she receives more coins for Kozhennikov. As summer ends, her domineering mentor directs her to move to a remote village and use her gold to enter the Institute of Special Technologies. Though she does not want to go to this unknown town or school, she also feels it’s the only place she should be. Against her mother’s wishes, Sasha leaves behind all that is familiar and begins her education.

As she quickly discovers, the institue’s “special technologies” are unlike anything she has ever encountered. The books are impossible to read, the lessons obscure to the point of maddening, and the work refuses memorization. Using terror and coercion to keep the students in line, the school does not punish them for their transgressions and failures; instead, their families pay a terrible price. Yet despite her fear, Sasha undergoes changes that defy the dictates of matter and time; experiences which are nothing she has ever dreamed of … and suddenly all she could ever want.

A complex blend of adventure, magic, science, and philosophy that probes the mysteries of existence, filtered through a distinct Russian sensibility, this astonishing work of speculative fiction – brilliantly translated by Julia Meitov Hersey – is reminiscent of modern classics such as Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Max Barry’s Lexicon, and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, but will transport you to a place far beyond those fantastical worlds.

Review:

I legitimately expected to DNF this pretty early in. The back cover didn’t sound super great (the “school where the lessons can’t be memorized” was the only intriguing bit), and I was very concerned about the adult man making a 16-year-old girl do “potentially scandalous” things. (If you’re concerned, it’s uncomfortable for Sasha but not inappropriate). The only reason I picked it up at all was because I’m trying to read new ideas from voices I don’t often hear and this book was a bestseller in Russia. I was kinda curious what a Russian bestseller would be about, but I didn’t have high hopes.

This is going to be more of a list of the things I don’t understand. Starting with the genre – I think magical realism is the closest, but strong arguments could be made for low fantasy, psychological horror, or even contemporary. The back cover is pretty lame, but like the mentioned lessons defy memorization, this book defies categorization. I described it to my husband as “a magical school narrative, but if Hogwarts was a brainwashing cult,” and that’s close but still fails to capture the full essence of this novel.

It’s impossible to adequately describe this book, the experience of reading this book, in words. It’s a first-person narrative of a girl falling into madness such that you don’t notice how mad she is until other characters point it out. It’s a first-person narrative of a girl whose eyes are opened to the true power within her and transcends her mortal form. It’s bizarre, surreal, uncomfortable and unsettling, and somehow made my reality outside of the book seem just a little bit off-kilter every time I put it down. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to stare at all wall for a while until you process what you just read. For a while I didn’t understand, and then I sort of understood, and by the time I finished I still didn’t really understand but I loved it.

I still don’t know whose “side” the Institute is on, if they’re good or bad, or if those terms even apply. I still am not entirely sure if the deadly consequences that seem to happen whenever Sasha and her schoolmates fail are truly orchestrated by these people or if they’re all just terrible coincidences, though by the end I, like Sasha, tended towards belief. I still don’t know if I entirely “liked” this novel, but I do know that I was completely and utterly enthralled. Baffled, disturbed, and unnerved, yes, but also engrossed, captivated, and desperately curious to continue, to be in this book and this story and this … whatever exactly it is. The Dyachenkos have created an experience in reading that is akin to Sasha’s experience at the institute. It defies understanding, it defies explanation, it defies review, but all I wanted while reading was to continue to be immersed in this surreal and fantastic story.

The Vita Nostra series:

1. Vita Nostra
2. Assassin of Reality

Review: The Chosen and the Beautiful

Title: The Chosen and the Beautiful

Author: Nghi Vo

Genre: Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Alcohol use, drunk driving, death (mentions), ghosts, blood (mentions), blood consumption (mentions), smoking, heterosexual sexual content (explicit), homosexual sexual content (mentions), gun violence (mentions), infidelity, racism/xenophobia, car accidents, domestic abuse

Back Cover:

Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.

Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society–she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer, Asian, adopted, and treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.

But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.

Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.

Review:

This is a retelling of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of Jordan Baker – but a Jordan Baker who is a Vietnamese adoptee and unapologetically bisexual, set in a just slightly off-kilter version of Jazz Age New York where the elite drink demon blood whiskey, electricity is more strange than magical lights, and good friends can spend an afternoon floating around the ceilings of the house.

I do not like The Great Gatsby. I read it at age 14 in the worst English class I’ve ever taken, found it boring and didn’t understand any of what the analysis in class said it was about, and decided that it wasn’t necessarily a bad book but had no business being as popular as it was. However, my husband adores it, and the fact that he’s been pestering me to give it another chance and this book’s premise of a queer Vietnamese Jordan Baker convinced me to give this book a shot.

And overall, I’m glad I did. From what I remember of the original Great Gatsby, The Chosen and the Beautiful holds pretty closely to the major plot points – excepting differences in perspective, since this one is told by Jordan Baker. I liked the background of Jordan growing up as a Vietnamese adoptee in turn-of-the-century Kentucky, the subtle and not-so-subtle racism and exclusion she experienced for being Vietnamese despite also being a daughter of a rich and prestigous family, and how she coped – weaponizing her “exotic” beauty, unapologetically embracing her sexual desires for both men and women, and donning emotional armor so as not to care what anyone else may say or think about her.

There are some themes of racism and xenophobia in this book, but up until the end they’re mostly undercurrents. For most of the book, i’ts mostly about wealth and decadence and love and magic and how Jay Gatsby’s inability to let go of a past love causes the deaths of three people and deeply wounds the woman he loved. Which, if my memory serves, is pretty spot-on to the original book, except for the magic.

Even though this is a new book (released less than two months ago), it reads like an older book, very similar in style to the original Great Gatsby. And I think that’s why I didn’t like it as much as I should have considering how many things this book has I do like (like magic as a metaphor for cultural identity, queer girls, and love interests who may or may not have sold their souls to demons). The Chosen and the Beautiful was far too faithful to The Great Gatsby for what it was trying to be. It didn’t reimagine anything besides Jordan Baker herself, instead taking the entirety of The Great Gatsby and painting a varnish of magic and queerness on it that is very careful to not obscure too much of the original.

This book wasn’t bad, but it could have been so much more. It isn’t so much a reimagining as it is a boringly faithful retelling with just enough imagination to appeal to people who like fantasy but not The Great Gatsby (like me). I liked it enough to finish it, but I’m mostly disappointed because I think this could have been so much more. Or maybe you just have to like the original book to fully appreciate this one.

Review: The Hearts We Sold

Title: The Hearts We Sold

Author: Emily Lloyd-Jones

Genre: Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Death, abusive parents, alcohol addiction, mild body horror

Back Cover:

When Dee Moreno makes a deal with a demon—her heart in exchange for an escape from a disastrous home life—she finds the trade may have been more than she bargained for. And becoming “heartless” is only the beginning. What lies ahead is a nightmare far bigger, far more monstrous than anything she could have ever imagined.

With reality turned on its head, Dee has only a group of other deal-making teens to keep her grounded, including the charming but secretive James Lancer. And as something grows between them amid an otherworldy ordeal, Dee begins to wonder: Can she give someone her heart when it’s no longer hers to give?

Review:

This book is intense. It doesn’t sound like it from that back cover description – that makes it sound kinda like a love story – but the emotions and the tension are strong. As in, got my heart pounding and pulse racing just from reading. If you’re looking for a heavy emotional ride, you’ll find it here.

Let’s start with Dee. I don’t want to say she’s full of desperation, because that makes her sound unpleasant, but she’s desperate enough to get away from her alcoholic and abusive parents that she sells her heart to a demon. She’s a very sympathetic character – an innocent kid trying to survive her terrible parents any way she can as a minor with no legal power. And as someone who grew up in a similar situation, her story reminded me a lot of mine – painfully so, at times. At one point I had to put the book down for two weeks because a particular scene just got too intense.

The love interest is James, who is the perfect stereotype of the eccentric artist – paint all over everything, mismatched un-stylish clothes, carefree attitude with an undercurrent of actually caring a lot about Dee. In a lot of ways he’s perfect, but since he’s more of a player in Dee’s story than having a story of his own, I didn’t mind.

There’s a fair amount of minor characters, like the other “heartless” people who’ve made deals with the same demon, as well as Dee’s boarding school roommate. They’re all unique people and well-written without overwhelming our main character, and I liked them all.

There’s a supernatural save-the-world plot going on – the demon has his “heartless” doing some dangerous tasks as part of their deal with him and it involves some big supernatural elements. There is some romance, but really most of it is Dee building a relationship with James and the romance part doesn’t come in until the end. But all of that is mainly a backdrop to Dee’s emotional arc. Her desperation to escape her parents, her struggle to get free of them, and her emotional healing just enough so she can have a romantic relationship with James is the main story. If you go into this story hoping for action-packed urban fantasy, you’re going to be disappointed. If you go in looking for an intensely emotional story about abuse and dealing with it, you’ll get what you wanted and more.

Fair warning: This book does not have a completely happy ending. Dee takes a pretty big step forward, which is really good, but there’s also a major setback that ends the story on a pretty sad note. It fits with the story, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as positive an ending as I would have liked.

This book is very dark. The story is great, the characters are well-done, and the emotions are intense. It’s a lot all at once. It left me emotionally wiped out at the end – but personally, I like that in a book.