Trigger Warnings: Body horror (major), sexism, misogyny (mentions, from antagonist), sexual content, death, medical content, medical trauma, sexual assault, pregnancy (mentions), death of parent (mentions), vomit, cannibalism (mentions), bullying (mentions), drug use (dubious consent), unreality
Back Cover:
Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.
Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.
Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.
A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.
Review:
I’m always down for media skewering the beauty industry. The damage the pursuit of beauty does to to the body and the psyche, consumerism masquerading as self-care, a mantra of “wellness” that only adds more work and stress to your life while claiming if you just did it right you’d never have a negative emotion again … these are all ideas that I find fascinating and compelling and I love to explore.
Unfortunately, that’s not really what I got with Natural Beauty.
Don’t get me wrong, it tries! It absolutely tries really hard to say a lot of things. But I think the problem was that it was try to cover way too many things in a book that isn’t nearly long enough. In addition to the commentary on the beauty industry, it also tries to talk about the value of music, beauty as social capital, the nature of beauty itself (through both physical beauty and music), complex relationships with parents, the inherent power dynamics of money, possibly sustainability – and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.
One of the primary drivers of the book is a fascinating form of body horror serving as a counterpoint to Holistik’s beauty mandate, which was a wonderful idea and a form of body horror that I don’t see a lot, so I appreciated it both as a body horror fan and a beauty culture skeptic. But for it to have been done well, it needed to be a slow burn. And Natural Beauty is emphatically not that. In fact, in the first two-thirds or so, the bit that should have been the tense, gradual build-up to the true horror at the end, the changes happen rapidly – and our unnamed protagonist barely seems to notice them anyway, simply commenting on how her body has changed and going on about her business. What seems to be the message of the book has to struggle for page time among flashbacks to the protagonist’s past, her thoughts about piano and music in general, and interactions with her coworkers.
Then about halfway through, the focus slowly begins to shift. In case you couldn’t figure it out from the back cover or the first few pages of the book, there’s something very weird and very suspicious going on at Holistik. The story shifts away from the protagonist’s body and the idea of beauty and towards finding out exactly what is happening at Holistik. But even that is unsatisfying because the answers we eventually get don’t actually tie up all the questions that I had. (What about the deer? What about the hand cream?) The book gets weird, and not in the unsetting way I enjoy, but in a way that feels overdone and unbelievable. I was halfway through reading a particular scene before I realized it was supposed to be the climax and not just another outlandish even in the series of outlandish events that was the last third of the book.
The narration is straightforward and passionless, which is not always a bad thing, but in this case served to keep at a distance any emotions that would have made it impactful. It also made it really difficult to judge which scenes were actually happening and which were some kind of drug-induced unreality sequence. And as I mentioned previously, the body horror aspect could have been fantastic if it was paced better. But what really made it so disappointing was the fact that it couldn’t keep a focus. It started off with the beauty industry and the costs and dangers of being beautiful. But it seems afraid to go too deep into it or lean too hard into the horrifying, revolting underbelly. Whenever it approached anything particularly grim, it would back off to talk about music or the protagonist’s parents or her past. Then it shifted to “let’s find out how fucked up this company really is!” with the bonus that the protagonist wasn’t even particularly interested in this line of investigating, but got dragged along as her friends started to pry. Then at the end it abruptly switches back to body horror and beauty culture, skipping over the actual change that would have made me actually feel something about it and relying on the protagonist’s passionless commentary and opinions about how just entirely not participating in beauty is good, actually.
I wanted this to be something more than it was. I wanted a literary horror commentary on the beauty industry, beauty culture, and how the modern mandate of “wellness” just sells women more work and more reasons to appeal to the male gaze while convincing them it’s actually “self-care” and “empowerment.” What I got was an admittedly well-written but poorly paced and unfocused story about a young woman who got caught up with a really fucked up beauty brand. The ideas were strong and the concepts had a lot of potential. But the execution, at least in my opinion, didn’t do them justice.
Trigger Warnings: Death, injury, violence, police brutality, confinement (brief), unhealthy marriage, classism (a lot), alcohol use, body horror (mild), sexual content
Back Cover:
Since the city of Bezim was shaken half into the sea by a magical earthquake, the Inquisitors have policed alchemy with brutal efficiency. Nothing too powerful, too complicated, too much like real magic is allowed–and the careful science that’s left is kept too expensive for any but the rich and indolent to tinker with. Siyon Velo, a glorified errand boy scraping together lesson money from a little inter-planar fetch and carry, doesn’t qualify.
But when Siyon accidentally commits a public act of impossible magic, he’s catapulted into the limelight. Except the limelight is a bad place to be when the planes themselves start lurching out of alignment, threatening to send the rest of the city into the sea.
Now Siyon, a dockside brat who clawed his way up and proved himself on rooftops with saber in hand, might be Bezim’s only hope. Because if they don’t fix the cascading failures of magic in their plane, the Powers and their armies in the other three will do it for them.
Review:
This was one of my less-researched picks. It made it onto my reading list somehow, but by the time I grabbed it from the library I’d forgotten what it was really about or why. The only thing I knew about it was there was some kind of magic involved (obvious from the title) and the protagonist was queer in some capacity.
So I went in with very little context. But to be fair, I don’t think more context would have necessarily helped with my primary complaint – I had no idea what was going on with this world. The names were all long and hard to keep straight, especially since most characters had a first name, a last name, and a title, each of which could be used for the same character in different contexts. I got better at it as the story went on and I spent more time with the characters, but almost every name in the book at some point gave me a moment of “wait, do I know this person?” And the worldbuilding was clearly detailed and done with a lot of care and thought, but I also had a really hard time figuring things out. Part of the city fell into the sea, but I think it’s still around just a couple hundred feet lower than the rest of the city? I don’t really understand how the Bravi tribes work or what their role actually is in the city. There’s a huge class divide between the azatani and everyone else, but I’m not clear what defines an azatani or even whether it’s a racial category or a title. The magic system is fascinating and complicated but there’s a clear difference between alchemy, which is acceptable but regulated, and sorcery, which is very illegal (and I think “magic” is a separate third thing, maybe?).
So while the world was quite detailed and vibrant, I really didn’t have any idea of how it worked, or the rules of the magic system, or anything. (Although part of the plot of the book is figuring out that hte old rules of the magic system didn’t work anymore, so I’ll forgive that one.) But the weird part about the story, and I guess what best illustrates how enjoyable it really is, is that I didn’t mind all that. Sure, I wasn’t really sure how all the pieces of the world fit together, but even the confusing parts were just relentlessly cool. Daring street gangs getting up to hijinks, plucky underdogs who happen to be really good at what they do, and of course a whole lot of high-stakes magical shenanigans – it was a ton of fun. I enjoyed Siyon, I enjoyed the magical adventure, I enjoyed that it felt like a “protagonist has a big goal but accomplishing it is way more complicated than initially thought” plot and an “I only wanted to do this one small thing how did it get so out of hand” plot at the same time. I even in some ways enjoyed trying to fit new pieces of information into the story and the world.
This is a hard book to review because it absolutely has some pretty major flaws. Normally I wouldn’t even finish a book where I felt like I couldn’t get a handle on the world. But somehow this book managed to be so absolutely stellar in every single other aspect – plot, characters, romance, descriptions, the writing itself, coolness factor, being just plain fun and interesting to read – that it downgraded “I have no idea how this fantasy world works” from a dealbreaker to a minor annoyance. Which says a lot about the quality of the book itself, I think. This is also the author’s debut novel, so I have extremely high hopes for future books overcoming the worldbuildling issues. I fully intend to read book two.
Trigger Warnings: Sexual content (a lot), divorce (major), infidelity, abandonment, fatphobia/body shaming/disordered eating/moralizing about food (frequently mentioned), mental illness, terminal illness (mentions; not protagonist), medical content (mentions; because protagonist is a doctor)
Back Cover:
A finely observed, timely exploration of marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition from one of the most exciting writers working today.
Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this.
As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place.
A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope.
Review:
I still occasionally talk about the AP English Literature class I took my freshman year of high school. As I wrote in 2022, “Every single novel I had to read for the class was about divorce, marital infidelity, or divorcing over marital infidelity. All of these novels were the ‘literary’ kind. And I hated every. single. book.”
Fleishman is in Trouble is a literary, largely plotless novel about a middle-aged man going through a divorce and having a lot of sex to try to deal with it. So I bring up this literature class yet again to emphasize how astonishing even I find it that not only did I pick up this book, and not only did I finish it, I actually enjoyed it. (Up until the end, which I’ll get to in a second.)
These characters and this world feel like the embodiment of a “live your best life,” “#girlboss,” “you can have it all” aesthetically-pleasing rich-girl Instagram account. You know the type. The primary characters in this book (a New York City doctor divorcing his millionaire publicist wife) are aggressively unrelatable to me (a secretary living on 75% of the national average salary in the Midwest). It has very little in terms of a plot. But the thing that this book does so well, and that made me eager to keep reading despite all these factors that should have made it feel exactly like the books I hated in AP Lit, is that it so perfectly captures the tensions of living your “best life” in the modern world. You’re already stretched to your breaking point but the mandate of self-actualization demands you do more. You hate these people and everything they stand for and yet you must also fit in and earn their respect, if not admiration. You’ve been dealing with burnout for so long that you can’t even recognize that’s what it is. You simultaneously feel that you’re doing the bare minimum and that you’re doing too much. You just want those closest to you to recognize – not even necessarily appreciate, just recognize – how much time and effort you’re putting into keeping so many different things running – for them! – but all they ever seem to notice is the things you don’t do.
I have a lot of feelings about modern life, how doing it “perfectly” requires multiple conflicting things to be true at the same time, and how keeping on top of everything you’re “supposed” to do won’t result in a feeling of accomplishment or peace but in constantly feeling stressed and behind. And this book puts those feelings into words better than I ever could. In fact, I think making the story about rich people living dramatic lives in New York City is actually a better choice than something more easily relatable. Big lives enable the problems to become bigger, more obvious, almost caricatured to make the point. And it works.
Toby and Rachel are both not great people for different reasons. They’re both victims but they’re both victims of their own decisions. Their multiple penthouses and multi-million-dollar deals set them a world away from most things relatable to the average reader. But if the question is relatability, I will always choose Rachel. Toby has his own struggles and his story isn’t bad. Rachel throughout the book is portrayed as a monster. And though she’s definitely not as terrible as Toby thinks, she’s not a good person. But despite possessing wealth that I can only dream of, despite having the type of high-powered job that I neither want nor am likely to get, she was still relatable. She was relatable in being a person doing too much in a world that always demands more, and in being a woman and primary breadwinner in a heterosexual relationship that is unequal not due to any particular malice on the part of her male partner, but because the system of heterosexual relationships is inherently unequal and he has never bothered to consider how he might be passively benefitting at her expense.
The other thing that this book does wonderfully, but more subtly, was explore both sides of this kind of relational destruction. Even through the filter of Toby’s hurt and rage, I could still easily understand Rachel’s thought process and emotional state. But with Toby as the protagonist, I also saw his thought process. It was, above all, a failure to communicate on both sides. But it did do an interesting job of illustrating how even though it can feel like this person is just overtly refusing to meet your needs, chances are they also feel like you’re refusing to meet their needs. (Although the communication scholar in me wants to yell at them that if they were better about communicating what it actually was they needed they could avoid a lot of problems.)
The final thing I want to touch on as I start bringing what could be a really long review into some sort of ending is not so much something the book does or accomplishes, but a major theme that it touches on. And that is the theme of how relationships threaten female identity. A single woman, unattached, can be herself. A married woman must remove some of herself to make room for her new identity of wife. A mother must remove even more to take on the new identity of mother. Both of these other identities, taken on not because the woman chose to but because of her ties to someone else, have the potential to grow and push out even more of an individual identity – motherhood especially, until there is no more I, only Mother. I did not expect a book largely focusing on the man’s side to come out in such support of the woman, and women everywhere. It’s a deep, subtle exploration that may not even be recognized for people who don’t relate but will be blatant and resonant for anyone who is or has experienced similar feelings.
I went through most of this book ready and eager to write a glowing review (in case you can’t tell from the fact that my review so far has been so positive). There were a couple points where I actually had to stop myself from starting the review before I finished it because I was so eager to share how good this book was. And there’s a reason for that, and that reason played out especially true for this book. That reason is sometimes the ending doesn’t live up to the rest of the book. And when I say “ending” here, I’m mainly talking about the last few pages. The whole long, rambling story up to that point subtly and masterfully explored unique ideas and interesting themes – I hesitate to say “the human condition” because that’s very broad and also somewhat pretentious, but perhaps “the modern human condition” is fitting. And then in the last few pages, this previously rich and subtle book starts jumping up and down waving its arms in the air and shouting, “Hey! Here’s all the themes we’ve been talking about for the past 400 pages! Pretty neat, huh? Here’s an easy and quick answer to these big questions!” It felt jarring and discordant with the rest of the book, like the author didn’t quite know how to end it but wasn’t comfortable leaving the readers with no answers. It also felt cheap and almost dismissive, as if nothing it touches on actually matters because there’s a quick answer. Though it didn’t technically ruin my experience of reading the rest of the book, it thoroughly dampened my enthusiasm.
Sometimes books just come to you at the right time. I can guarantee that if I’d have picked this up even a few years ago, I probably would have found it dull and unlikeable. In fact, a few years ago I probably wouldn’t have picked it up at all. But I think I’m at the point in my life where I can appreciate the thematic resonance of a book about divorce featuring generally unlikeable characters. Despite my feelings about the ending, I still appreciate what the rest of the book had to say. It was definitely a different reading experience than my usual fare, but sometimes looking somewhere new leads to a surprise gem. And this is a book worth reading.
Trigger Warnings: Death, injury (major), blood (major), sexual assault (mentions), violence, war, child death, pregnancy, childbirth, parent death (mentions), animal death (mentions), religious bigotry, incest (mentions), sexual content
Back Cover:
Award-winning author Nicola Griffith’s brilliant, lush, sweeping historical novel about the rise of the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages: Hild.
In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king’s youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby.
But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world—of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing her surroundings closely and predicting what will happen next—that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her.
Her uncle, Edwin of Northumbria, plots to become overking of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief. Hild establishes a place for herself at his side as the king’s seer. And she is indispensable—unless she should ever lead the king astray. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, for her family, for her loved ones, and for the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future.
Hild is a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early Middle Ages—all of it brilliantly and accurately evoked by Nicola Griffith’s luminous prose. Working from what little historical record is extant, Griffith has brought a beautiful, brutal world to vivid, absorbing life.
Review:
This book has been in the back of my head for a while. I saw it somewhere, possibly a bookstore when it first came out, and the idea stuck in my head. I’m not sure if it was the idea of a fictionalized story of a saint’s childhood, or the idea that it was set in a place and historical period that I know nothing about but is far enough back to be interesting to me, or the concept of a young girl in a very man-centric society gaining power and influence through her own cunning. Or possibly it was the cover, which is not all that spectacular but for some reason grabbed me. Whatever it was, Hild has been lodged in my thoughts for a long time, and when it finally resurfaced again I decided to give it a shot.
It took me a long time to get through this book. Not because it was slow or boring or anything, but because it’s long and dense with detail, and also because I read it as an ebook which is not the best format for me to actually get through books quickly. I didn’t realize before picking it up that it was written by the same person who wrote Spear which I DNF’ed last year. But I think my issue with Spear might have been format-related, because Hild is told in an almost identical style – straightforward and unadorned, heavy on telling over showing – and I enjoyed this book so much.
I normally am not much for historical fiction because I usually find it boring. But a lot of that is because I just don’t find the time periods from the 1700s-ish on to be all that interesting – I much prefer ancient history. The British Isles in the 600s was far enough back to find interesting, and Nicola Griffith clearly did her research. I easily got wrapped up in the day-to-day of life in this world, which was richly detailed, fascinating, and not really what I would have expected. Though it wasn’t a central conflict of the book, there was always a simmering undercurrent of struggling against the land and weather for survival, which I suppose might have been an accurate feeling for the time period.
I know that this is a novel and therefore it’s hard to figure out the line between “accurate to research” and “made up for a better story” and therefore probably not accurate to say that I learned something. But in addition to being absorbed in a good story, I do feel like I learned something. Whether or not the wars and political machinations are true to history, and even if the details weren’t necessarily how things would have happened, I feel like I have a sense of what life, on the whole, might have been like in this time and place. And that was really cool.
I’ve been going on about the world for a while now, and that’s because everything that happens in this book is grounded in the reality of land and geography and the peoples who inhabit it. But what really made this book sing for me is Hild herself. She’s both an interesting, engaging character in her own right and a type of character that I really love to read about. It starts with her as a very small child, suddenly the only heir of a threat to the throne, being guided (or some might say manipulated) by her mother into a very specific role. But she is clever and observant and carves out a place for herself in the seer role. As the reader, I got to see inside her head and her thought processes and I know that everything she “sees” is just a prediction based on other patterns she’s observed. But even from her own point of view she comes across as a strange and uncanny child and young woman, and even though I know there’s no magic involved, I completely understand why others call her a witch. She inhabits the strange space of a child who had to grow up too fast, who is always in danger and must stay three steps ahead of everyone else to protect her life and the lives of those she loves, and who therefore acts and reacts in ways that someone on the outside might describe as strange and fey.
I think what I loved so much about this book, though, is that it covers so much. There’s not particularly a central plot. Hild’s driving goal is to keep herself and her loved ones safe from all the dangers the ever-shifting alliances and machinations of the power players of the day. She claws out as much agency as she can under the circumstances, but the context in which she acts is within the court of Edwin Overking, whose goal is to be king over all the kings of the land that will eventually be known as England. There are conflicts and challenges and small periods with defined goals, but overall it unfolds much as life does – piece by piece, event by event, with little in the way of a structured plot.
But the story opens with Hild as a young child, maybe five, and ends just as she blooms into an adult. And through it all, the world changes around her, and she grows and changes – from a child working hard to fit into the seer role and please the king to a young woman with her own agenda. I loved her grow into her role and then beyond it, pushing the boundaries. I loved her for her in-between-ness, a woman taller than most men, deft with healing herbs and spindle and equally deft with the war dagger she wears at her hip like the king’s fighting men. I loved her for the way she refused to take anything sitting down, determined to understand what had happened and what might happen, taking every opportunity she had to turn the situation her way.
This review is already absurdly long and I haven’t even touched on everything I could say about this book. It’s very long but it’s exactly as long as it needs to be. It is rich and atmospheric and so steeped in something undefinable and deeply engrossing that despite everything happening being completely earthly, there’s a mystic feeling that gives the whole story an air of being some kind of fantasy. I didn’t know going into this that there was a sequel, but there’s space for one and I want it. This book was so good and so much; I want to see where Hild directs the world next.
Trigger Warnings: Death, injury, blood, violence, war, parent death (mentions), terminal illness, alcohol use (mentions), child death (mentions), vomit (mentions), animal death (mentions)
Back Cover:
The Chinese classic Three Kingdoms reimagined with a lady Zhuge Liang.
The year is 414 of the Xin Dynasty, and chaos abounds. A puppet empress is on the throne, and three warlordesses each hope to claim the continent for themselves.
Only Zephyr knows it’s no contest.
Orphaned at a young age, Zephyr took control of her fate by becoming the best strategist of the land and serving under Xin Ren, a warlordess whose loyalty to the empress is double-edged—while Ren’s honor draws Zephyr to her cause, it also jeopardizes their survival in a war where one must betray or be betrayed. When Zephyr is forced to infiltrate an enemy camp to keep Ren’s followers from being slaughtered, she encounters the enigmatic Crow, an opposing strategist who is finally her match. But there are more enemies than one—and not all of them are human.
Review:
I didn’t realize when I picked this up that I’d already read one book by this author before – or at least attempted to read, as I DNF’ed Descendant of the Crane in 2021. But the back cover on this one sounded much more interesting, and I didn’t DNF the other book for being bad, just because I wasn’t able to get into it – which could very easily have been more about my mood than the book itself. So I gave this one a shot.
And at first, I was really glad I did. I didn’t love the world-building – I’ve read too many fantasies set in actual ancient China, so this Chinese-inspired world felt like a discordant mishmash of ideas instead of a cohesive world, but I could live with that. What I did like was Zephyr, who was clever, calculating, always three steps ahead of everyone else (a trait I love in a character), and some intriguing combination of dedicated to her warlordess and desperate to prove herself useful. And even though the plot involved a lot of politics, it wasn’t slow and managed to involve a fair bit of action and intrigue along the way.
The back cover really doesn’t tell you much about what’s in the book. The infiltration happens almost immediately, and while Crow is definitely an antagonist, he’s not really a major player in the story. Just about every bit of the story you think you’re going to read wraps up in part one. Then in part two things go way off the rails, and that’s where I started to really struggle.
My big criticism of the story itself is that it sacrifices background for speed, and that blunts any potential emotional impact. I don’t disagree with the choice – a long setup would have done the story a disservice. But often the reader finds out about crucial pieces of information the moment they’re supposed to be connected to an emotional moment, so the emotions have to share my attention with the process of mentally putting this new information into the overarching picture of the book. This also makes the big revelation at the start of part two feel unexpected, but in a jarring, random way. I may have had a different experience if I’d read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Chinese classic that this series is based on, but I haven’t. So maybe this is true to the original, but it was still difficult for me.
The problem I had with part two, and the reason I won’t be continuing the series, is definitely a case of it’s not the book, it’s me. A major event at the end of part one and a character’s response to it at the beginning of part two resulted in one major character ending up in the body of another major character. I do not like body-swapping. I can’t even really explain why, it just makes me extremely uncomfortable. It’s worse if the body-swapped characters try to pretend that they are the person whose body they’re in, which also happens here. So I spent most of part two wanting to leave the situation but also hoping that the characters would get back to the right bodies, because I was sure I would start to like it again once the body-swapping thing was fixed. But based on the ending and reading the back cover for the sequel, I think the characters are likely to stay in the wrong bodies until near the end of book two. And I do not want to deal with that.
On the whole, this is not a bad book by any means. It had a lot of aspects that didn’t do it for me, personally, but that’s not a judgement on the book itself. I’m having a hard time expressing any sort of overall opinion about it because the biggest thing I didn’t like about it (and quite possibly the smaller thing I didn’t like as well) were all matters of personal opinion. I like the ideas, it’s well-written, and it kept my interest despite being fairly politics-heavy. It just has some elements that aren’t for me, personally – but might be for you.
Trigger Warnings: Death (severe), blood (severe), violence (severe), injury (major), murder, medical trauma (mentions, not protagonist), body horror (mild), grief (mild, not protagonist), homophobic slur (once, from bad guy), anxiety/panic attacks, transphobic language (mild, from ignorance not malice), fire (mentions), guns
Back Cover:
VAMPIRE FOR HIRE
Raylene Pendle (AKA Cheshire Red), a vampire and world-renowned thief, doesn’t usually hang with her own kind. She’s too busy stealing priceless art and rare jewels. But when the infuriatingly charming Ian Stott asks for help, Raylene finds him impossible to resist—even though Ian doesn’t want precious artifacts. He wants her to retrieve missing government files—documents that deal with the secret biological experiments that left Ian blind. What Raylene doesn’t bargain for is a case that takes her from the wilds of Minneapolis to the mean streets of Atlanta. And with a psychotic, power-hungry scientist on her trail, a kick-ass drag queen on her side, and Men in Black popping up at the most inconvenient moments, the case proves to be one hell of a ride.
Review:
My literary coming-of-age was in the mid-to-late aughts and early 2010s, beginning around the height of the vampire/paranormal romance era of YA literature and spanning its decline and the rise of dystopia as the hot new teen genre. But despite having a lot of available options for vampire books, I didn’t read many vampire books. Vampires just were not interesting to me.
This provides a little bit of context for part of why I didn’t expect to like this book. The other parts are that I generally don’t tend to enjoy books where solving a mystery/doing detective stuff is a major element, and urban fantasy is not my genre. I also picked up Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker many years ago, but never finished it as I found it lame and disappointing. But at a family gathering a few years ago, I somehow got to talking about books with one of my husband’s cousins, and she recommended this one. I had my doubts, but I do generally attempt to read books that are recommended to me. So while I fully expected to find it uninteresting, poorly written, and/or leaning towards the pulpy/trashy side, I gave it a shot. And, as you might expect from the fact that this isn’t a DNF review, I was pleasantly surprised.
While the standard urban fantasy elements are kept to a minimum (limited, in fact, to two characters being actually vampires and some references to the existence of vampire “Houses” and their politics), the thrust of the plot is a mystery. Raylene is trying to track down and steal some papers. However, it feels less like a detective story and more like an action movie because the government picks up pretty quick that someone is after information they’d rather not have anyone find. So yes, Raylene is trying to follow clues and find what she needs, but this also involves breaking into secure government bases, running across rooftops and rappelling down buildings to evade government agents, and generally feels more like Jason Bourne than Perry Mason. I may not be a fan of straight-up detective stories, but I can appreciate a good old-fashioned following the trail of clues when the antagonists are government agents who aren’t afraid to get into a firefight.
But what really carried the story was Raylene herself. I’ve read my fair share of snarky narrators with lots of commentary, and most of them quickly get annoying, frustrating, or boring. But Cherie Priest actually pulls it off. Raylene is snarky and sarcastic and intersperses the actual telling of the story with a ton of commentary, a “voicey” quality that puts her as a character, not the plot or action, at the heart of the story. And I think it works. “I’m a vampire, a famous thief, and you can hire me to steal things for you” leaves a lot of opportunity to create a more flat character, which can work in a plot-focused story. But Raylene is full of nuance and flaws. She may be really good at what she does, but she also has pretty bad anxiety which leads to overpreparedness, as well as a deep well of compassion that she tries to convince herself doesn’t exist and a reckless, almost self-destructive streak that she doesn’t yet recognize. Plus, her extreme confidence in her vampirism-enhanced physical abilities gives her a dash of that absurdly powerful protagonist trope that I love so much. I didn’t expect such a nuanced character with such an enjoyable voice, and I was surprised and delighed by how much I enjoyed following her through this story. There’s a lot of opportunity for growth in future books, and I think that could be really great to watch.
Speaking of future books, I didn’t know going into this that it had a sequel – although I probably could have suspected, because what urban fantasy book is a standalone these days? Regardless, this book stopped at a reasonable ending point, but the story itself is definitely not over. I’m not entirely sure if I so much care about how the story ends, but I do want to see what happens with Raylene personally. This is one of those books that nobody would call a masterpiece – it’s good and well-written, but it’s not deep or profound or thought-provoking. What it is, though, is enjoyable, engaging, and entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, and I will be reading book two, if for no other reason than I really like Raylene.
It’s 2024, if you can believe it. I don’t think I’ve had such an absolute year since the disaster that was 2020 – although in this case for much better reasons. But on the whole, though 2023 felt crazy and ridiculous, almost everything turned out better this year than 2022 (which was a rough year personally).
For the past two years, I’ve been working in a job that let me have earbuds in while I work. That meant audiobooks – 40 to 50 (sometimes up to 60) hours a week of audiobooks at 1.75x speed. I got through a lot of books that way. But in March 2023, after almost exactly two years, I left that job for one that is significantly better but involves significantly fewer earbuds. (I am actually allowed to read books on my computer at the new job if we’re not busy, but the amount of “not busy” time varies.) Naturally, going from reading as a full-time job to reading in my spare time had a dramatic affect on the quantity of books I read. But it also had some other, less-expected and less-intended effects.
I switched back to physical books. Since I no longer have large chunks of time to read audiobooks, I’m back to reading print books regularly. I was actually excited about this change, because I had always been a print book lover and audiobooks were a matter of conveninece and opportunity, not preference. But after reading my first print novel in at least two years (A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe), it was quite upsetting to discover that I find print less engaging and immersive than audio. Though I’m over the rough part of adjusting to the format switch, I still prefer audio.
Going to the library in person. I used to love going to the library, any library. But I haven’t set foot in one for many years – partially due to covid, partially because audiobooks go through my library’s app, no physical library visits required. When I switched jobs, I wanted to keep reading, which meant regular library visits. But I’ve discovered that I don’t really enjoy browsing very much. My local library is MASSIVE. The sheer volume of choices is overwhelming, and the physical building is so big I generally need my cane, which makes it difficult to carry books and browse at the same time. I’ve also discovered that I really would rather browse books in an environment where I can easily filter results, check reviews, browse curated lists, and open a new tab to look up the author or other books in the series. (The StoryGraph‘s recommendation algorithm has spoiled me.)
Sticking to my TBR list. Partly because of the lack of library browsing and partly because of the overall reduction in reading volume, my reading choices haven’t been super adventurous this year. The last two years involved a lot of trying and liking new things. But almost all of those unexpected gems came from the librarian-curated lists on my library’s audiobook app. These days, most of my library trips involve me looking books up in advance to see if they’re available and where they’re located, then going to those locations and getting those books. Even when I browse, I tend to get overwhelmed by options and not check out even books that look interesting. So I’ve overall stuck almost exclusively to my TBR list and tried fewer un-researched options in 2023.
My Reading in 2023
As always, I have a lot to say about my reading in the past year (although hopefully less than last year – after all, I read significantly fewer books). I also have my StoryGraph Reading Wrap-Up for 2023. Most of the stats there are accurate. But a few aren’t – the number of books I read that I owned, for example, doesn’t include books that I owned and read, then got rid of and marked as no longer owned.
As always, none of these lists are in any particular order.
Overall Reading
My annual reading goal is always 48 books. This year I actually tracked when I hit that goal: June 6th.
In total, I read 80 books this year, which is 167% of my total goal. That’s 132 books less than last year – but considering I only had two-and-a-half months of the year where I could read the entire work day (I left the audiobook-reading job mid-March), I think that’s a perfectly reasonable number.
I also track how many books I DNF (Did Not Finish), and this year I DNF’d 48 books. So in total I picked up 128 books and finished 62.5% of them.
In reviewing, I reviewed 72 books in total, 11 of which were DNF books. I also continued the Review Shorts this year (and will continue to do them because I like the concept). I wrote 38 review shorts this year, so only 47% of my reviews in 2023 were full reviews.
Reading Charts!
I’m surprised that print was such a small proportion of my reading – but I did have three months of audiobooks and apparently more digital books than I thought.
That small bump in audiobooks in November and December was because we do a lot of driving for the holidays (both his family and my family live in different states than us) and I could listen to audiobooks while we drove.
My Goals for 2023
I set goals for my reading every year. Most of them are the same year to year. But it’s always good to check in on them. So let’s see how I did on my goals in 2023.
Finish 48 books between January 1 and December 31. Check! Because I still had the audiobook-reading job for three months, I reached it faster than I probably would have otherwise, but I definitely hit that goal.
Read at least 50% fiction. Also check! Almost three-quarters (71%) of my reading in 2023 was fiction.
Read only good books (by only reading books I’m interested in, not reading books just because I feel like I “should,” and not finishing books I’m not enjoying). I usually use the star ratings to help me analyze this one. And I read a lot of 3-star books this year, and not a lot of 5-star books. But 35 of the books I read this year (43.75%) were ones I rated 4 stars or higher. But less than half of the books I read were 4 stars or more. This tracks with my general feelings, too. I read a lot of books that were fine, finishable, even enjoyable, but not a ton that were fantastic and outstanding. So overall I’d say I did okay on this (I did, after all, only finish 4 books that I rated less than 3 stars), but I wouldn’t call it a resounding success.
Unread Shelf 2023: Read 12 books I own but haven’t read yet. I didn’t hit that one this year. I only picked up 7 Unread Shelf books this year, and ended up not finishing one of them.
Bonus: Completing series. I didn’t actually set a goal for this one, but since I’m notorious (at least to myself) for starting but never finishing series, I had a section last year on all the series I finished. This year I finished far fewer series, but I did complete a few:
Contagion (technically – I picked up all the books but DNF’d the last one)
Top Fictional Reads of the Year
I don’t pick favorite books. Never have. I read so much and so broadly that it’s really difficult to compare books I really enjoy to determine which I like more. Plus, with such a variety, I often deeply love books for very different reasons.
So, as every year, instead of ranking or picking “a” favorite, this is a list of the top fiction books I read in 2023. As with every list in this post, it’s in no particular order.
It’s a vampire story, sorta. There are definitely vampires in it, at least. But it’s also a blend of Castlevania and dawn of science era a la Frankenstein, with a fascinating setting and a strong plot and, most of all, absolutely fantastic characters. There’s a generous helping of angst, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and even though I’m not usually much for romance this one was sweet, full of mutual pining, and polyamorous, which is always a bonus. The plot is surprisingly twisty and there’s plenty of action. It’s just so good – and it’s first in a series, so there’s more to come!
This was one of my more unresearched selections this year – I’d read the back cover and decided that it sounded like something I’d enjoy (I’m always down for unique takes on gods), but I didn’t know much about it. So it was a delight to find that not only is it a really cool take on gods with an interesting world and a solid plot, the characters were the standout hits of the story and I loved them. Especially our protagonist, who is strong and broken and furious and violent and loyal and traumatized and all-around spectacular – and, of course, stupidly good at murdering deities. I didn’t know going in that this was first in a series but I’m so glad there’s more to come.
A truly unique take on a lot of generic fantasy tropes. The sheltered youngest princess raised in a convent is perfectly happy with that; the impossible magical tasks are not the actual quest and aren’t actually all that hard for the protagonist to pull off; ideas that could have very easily become a somewhat formulaic YA gets a refreshing update with a protagonist who is thirty years old, a princess who would rather not be a princess not because she’s rebellious or wants her “freedom” but because it’s too much pressure and she’d rather knit, and who isn’t whip-smart and in fact recognizes she’s on the lower end of average. Plus she and a variety of companions are on a quest to solve some problems with murder (and honestly, I agree that’s the best solution here). All around an enjoyable story.
This is the sequel to She Who Became the Sun, which made my Top 5 Novels last year. But that doesn’t feel like cheating to me becuase while they’re both astonishingly good, it’s in very different ways. This one leans hard into the morally gray aspects of the protagonist as she passes the point where her relentless clawing upward feels essential to her safety, forcing her to confront the damage she’s doing and making both her and the reader consider if it’s worth it. It’s very dark and full of big, deep emotions. And, being the last book in the series, full of endings – bittersweet for many characters, as I wanted better for them but knew they wouldn’t get it. Dark, intense, and very, very good.
I did enjoy this book, don’t get me wrong. It’s got a compelling protagonist (and self-aware unreliable narrator) who disregards rules purely becuase she has other priorities, an engaging cast of secondary characters, some really fantastic worldbuilding creating a monotheistic multi-planet scifi society, a compeling plot with some genuinely surprising twists, and a general fantasy vibe woven among the scifi. But that’s not why it made this list. It made this list for an interesting take on unreliable narrators (although admittedly, I haven’t read many) and strong engagement with the concepts of belief, fanaticism, religious power, heresy, and ethics vs. religiosity. Those are all concepts that I find generally interesting, and watching the protagonist engage with it was like watching my own deconversion process, but in reverse. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.
The Hall of Honorable Mentions and the Otherwise Noteworthy
I Did Not Ask for a Therapy Session But That’s a Risk You Take With Some Books I Guess
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Stekeete. I am not a hoarder. So I didn’t expect an impromptu therapy session from a book about the psychology of hoarding. However, I do have a somewhat complicated relationship with stuff and owning it, and I actually gained some really good insights into the psychology behind relationships with stuff in general and why my own relationship with things I own is so complicated. And even besides that, it’s an interesting read on its own.
I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was by Barbara Sher. If you’ve spent some time in therapy, you’re familiar with the feeling where the therapist suggests something that is an amazing solution to your problem but also blindingly obvious now that they’ve said it. For me, reading this book was the literary equivalent. Nothing Barbara says is all that revolutionary or even something you couldn’t have come up with on your own. But it left me with the same feeling of vaguely sheepish enlightenment. (Plus it’s just straight-up good advice.)
If You Like Weird Books Then Do I Have a Book For You
Sister, Maiden, Monster by Lucy A. Snyder. There’s a pandemic-driven societal collapse and old gods from outer space, and both of those are background elements in this body horror fever nightmare of a book. Unbelievably gory, extraordinarly disturbing, and contains the only book scene to ever make me physically gag. Repulsively readable. I can’t stop thinking about it.
Naamah by Sarah Blake. Now, I am an enjoyer of weird books. But this one is so weird in so many different directions that the primary feeling I experienced was a general “what the fuck is going on?” There’s a ton of weird, uncomfortable, sometimes vaguely incestuous sex scenes. There’s insanely bizarre stuff like the angel who lives underwater with a bunch of dead children, or the time the protagonist time travels to watch an episode of Law and Order: SVU. I couldn’t even tell you if I liked it because I have no idea what is even happening here.
Annihiliation by Jeff Van Der Meer. This is a very weird book with a definite SCP vibe. It does have some semblance of a plot, at least at the beginning, but it goes off the rails quite quickly. It goes hard on a twisted and distorted natural world and a good helping of body horror. It’s also much more towards the scifi edge of weird books than the fantasy edge where I usually read, so I don’t have as much to say about it. It’s pretty good, it’s creepy, it’s very weird. What else do you need to know?
The Gallery of Gorgeous Books
Whether or not you believe in not judging books by their covers, you have to admit that some covers are just prettier than others. This gallery is my favorite covers from books I’ve read this year. (Whether or not I enjoyed or even finished the book is irrelevant – here I judge books by their covers and by their covers alone.)
Reading Goals for 2024
Like every year, I’m aiming for my three annual reading goals: Finish 48 books, read at least 50% fiction, and only read good books.
The Unread Shelf goal (reading 12 books that I own but haven’t read yet) has become a repeating goal over the last few years, too. But I have consistently failed at that one – probably because the majority of the books I own are reference books. So I’m keeping the goal of reading books that I own but haven’t read, but I’m reducing the target to 6.
And finally, I still have a lot of series that I’m allegedly in the middle of – by which I mean I read at least one book in it, said it was really good and I intend to finish it, and then never actually kept reading. Some of these have had the next or final book on my readlist for years. (The exception is the Discworld series. I am actively reading Discworld books, but since there’s a total of 41 books, not counting the novellas/short stories between them, I’m going to cut myself some slack there.) So I am setting one additional goal to finish 3 series that I have started and intend to finish. (I have five different series on my reading list that I only need to read one more book to complete, so theoretically this one should be very doable.)
So my final list of reading goals for 2024 looks like this:
Finish 48 books between January 1 and December 31
Read at least 50% fiction
Read good books, which involves…
Only reading books I’m truly interested in
Not attempting to read books because I feel like I “should”
Not finishing books I’m not legitimately excited to finish reading
Unread Shelf 2024: Read 6 books that I own but haven’t yet read
Finish reading three series that are “in progress” (meaning I have read at least one book in the series and enjoyed it enough to want to read more)
Is this a bit ambitious? Potentially. I have been known to bite off more than I can chew every now and again. But considering this is all just for fun anyway and even if I read zero books in 2024 there would be no real consequences, let’s just see how it goes. If I do it, great! If not, oh well.
Final Thoughts
I spent the last two years reading both widely and deeply and trying a lot of new concepts and genres. I did not do that so much this year. A large portion of my reading in 2023 was from by TBR list, or at least pre-researched in some fashion.
I have yet to determine if I want to change this. Perhaps 2024 will be the year I learn to enjoy browsing the library again. Perhaps it will be the year I intentionally choose books outside my comfort zone. Or perhaps it will be another year of working through my TBR list (and let’s be honest, even if I only read books on my TBR list, that would still keep me busy for a year or two).
I don’t think either option is necessarily bad. But sticking to my TBR list definitely has a more narrow scope of genres and concepts than my audiobook reading did the past few years. As much as I enjoyed finding some of the unexpected gems from my more adventurous reading choices, I’m not sure I feel particularly adventurous right now. But really, in a lot of ways life feels like it’s in a state of flux for me at the moment. I have no idea what 2024 will hold in any aspect. So I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes.
This is a thin little book with no credited author and is obviously a gift book more than anything else. But it is full of gorgeous photos of tablescapes. And even though I doubt I will ever be hosting a meal fancy enough to require multiple clearings of the table, I feel slightly more cultured knowing what a charger is and the proper order for wineglasses. (And considering the wide variety of places my work tends to take me, it’s concievable that someday I might attend a dinner where I need to know the right order to use my forks.) There were definitely some good ideas in here – although largely leaning towards the formal and fancy, there’s no reason most of it can’t be toned down to fit a more casual modern lifestyle. Although perhaps adding a little more fanciness and polish to regular meals can be a good thing, too. And there are some interesting ideas about nontraditional meal settings, like how to set the table for a buffet or pack for a picnic. If nothing else, the photos are gorgeous and it inspired me to update my table linens. I’m going to keep it around and go through it again once I have a house and more space to collect linens and nice dishes.
Title; A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease
Author: Sara Elise
Genre: Self-Help
Trigger Warnings: Drug use, alcohol use, self-harm (mentions), religious trauma (mentions), discussions of sexual practices (no actual sex), mental illness, child abuse (mentions)
Back Cover:
In this expansive book of compassionate wisdom and self-reflection, entrepreneur and “pleasure doula” Sara Elise uncovers the powerful – and often unexamined – forces that keep us in a state of survival and limitation, and asks us to consider a new way to live.
A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease is an invitation to reimagine the ingredients of our lives, those essential components that make up our days. Have we chosen rest, breath, movement, agency, visibility, play, and pleasure? Or are we trapped in the numbing and violent pattern of self-inflicted suffering? Do we celebrate the unique and precious wiring of our brains? Are our relationships a garden of ever-growing and evolving roots? Do we nourish our bodies with what they require to sense and receive? Are we liberated, awakened, and alive? As a Black & Indigenous, autistic, queer woman, Sara Elise makes a radial argument for dismantling the systems that oppress us. But it begins with the individual, and the simple recipe of our every day.
Groundbreaking, persuasive, inclusive, and warm – and written in the tradition of authors like adrienne maree brown and Sonya Renee Taylor – A Recipe for More brings the ingredients of an abundant life to all readers so that we might honor ourselves, deepen our communities, and finally be present in each miraculous and life-giving moment.
Review:
I had really high hopes for this book. The title and back cover sound exactly like something I’m looking for, and I was excited for the perspective that a queer, autistic, polyamorous, and Black & Indigenous author primarily doing creative-type work could bring to the ideas. And as much as I have some reservations about the entire self-help genre, I am still vulnerable to the appeal of the modern iteration of self-help – the kind where instead of teaching you how to do it all, succeed at work, “win” capitalism, etc., they’re teaching you how to enjoy life, experience inner peace, free yourself from the pressures and hurry of capitalism, etc. I know it’s basically the same ideas repackaged for a generation that cares more about personal fulfillment than career success, but there’s still a part of me that wants a book to tell me how to feel pleasure again.
Anyway. That’s what led me to pick up this book and expect to enjoy it immensely. But reading it is such a strange experience. Sara Elise clearly has some deep, interesting ideas and thoughts on how best to live life. But I couldn’t really identify what exactly she was trying to say in this book.
Sara Elise is very deeply into things my skeptic husband describes as “woo” – energy healing, astrology, higher powers/Universe Energies, manifestation, Earth wisdom, drugs as a method of spiritual healing, that kind of thing. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but I get strong “Tumblr witch” vibes. (Admittedly, I myself spent a few years as a Tumblr witch, so I at least didn’t have any trouble parsing some of the unusual phrases and ideas here.) Though I’m still open to some woo, she is way beyond what most people would consider a reasonable amount of it. It’s obviously working really well for her, which is great. But if you’re not as far as she is on the skeptic-woo spectrum, you’ll probably be weirded out by some of this.
Although honestly, there’s a lot in here to be weirded out by that’s not woo. Sara talks about her commitment to being open and vulnerable. And that includes being extremely, uncomfortably open in this book. If feels like the book form of that person who you just met five minutes ago but is already telling you about their childhood trauma, the years when they did as many drugs as they could get their hands on, and how much they’re into BDSM. (All things Sara talks about in this book.) There is a place to be open about your personal struggles and/or sexual proclivities in your book, and that can be done really effectively. But since very little of it seemed to connect to an actual point, I ended up with the same very-uncomfortable-but-don’t-want-to-be-rude feeling that you get when someone starts talking about how their parent abused them on a first date. I barely know you and I’m trying to find out if this connection is worth pursuing – why are you telling me about your BDSM parties and how your father used to beat you?
I think my biggest criticism of the book is that I am really not sure what it’s trying to say. The chapter titles and subheadings have some standard self-help concepts (“Give Yourself Permission to Change,” “The Myth of Productivity”) and some slightly more interesting concepts (“Invest in Your Pleasure,” “Allowing Good Feelings”). I think if you took the headings and used them as an outline to write a longform article, you’d get something with more clarity and a more direct point. There’s so many different types of content packed into 220 pages that it’s hard to combine the variety into something cohesive.
And when I say “types” of content, I do mean types. This isn’t just Sara Elise writing a book about a topic. That part is definitely there, but it’s also interspersed with a lot of other things.
There are short essays written by other people, several of whom I think are her romantic partners, which range from actually quite interesting (“A Journey in Black Minimalism”) to vaguely incomprehensible (“Natural State”).
There’s a black-and-white reproduction of an oil painting self-portrait of someone else.
There’s a literal recipe (for a Roasted Squash and Garlic Ricotta Buckwheat Galette).
There’s instructions for how to eat something delicious. I actually read this one to my husband, and he described it as “woo meets vore.”
The second-to-last chapter is almost entirely a “minimally edited” transcription of a conversation between Sara and some of her friends, but it feels more like a literary device than an actual conversation. (One example, starting on page 190: “Our queered model and practice of friendship defies the way that freedom gets defined by whiteness and by capitalism, so the dominant culture that we’re living in defines freedom as an island and that being free means unaccountable and being able to do whatever you want.” Interesting philosophy? Yes. A sentince I can imagine a real human being saying while talking with friends? No.)
There’s a ton of other people quoted in this book. These include bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah, books like Wintering and Do Nothing, various Instagram accounts, and assorted podcast episodes. It gave the whole book a strange sense of trying to be academic by including a bunch of citations, but also failing because half the time the citation is just something somebody said on social media.
There’s also a variety of reflection questions scattered throughout the book, and they’re the only actually actionable thing in it.
I think my fundamental problem here is that I went in thinking this was something it’s not. I was expecting and hoping for a how-to – for Sara to give me the ingredients for me to cook up my own life of abundance and ease. But that’s not really what this book is about. I think it’s more a combination of life philosophy and memoir. Despite what the title seems to imply, Sara isn’t here to tell you how you can do this for yourself. Instead, she’s here to share her philosophy on living, experiencing life and its sensory pleasures, working within and embracing the unique constraints of an autistic and ADHD brain, feeling abundance, and adding more ease into existence, and also share a radically open story of how she built this philosophy and uses it in her own life.
Despite how critical this review has been, I don’t want to be overly hard on this book. Most of my complaints came from my own expectations and desires for a how-to manual. I think if I had known in advance that it was more a work of personal philosophy, I would have looked at it with different eyes and maybe been better able to see what’s actually there. Because I do feel like there’s something worthwhile here. I just wasn’t able to grasp it.
Trigger Warnings: War, death, violence, unreality (severe), injury, sexual content (consensual, minimal descriptions), terminal illness, parent death, religious trauma, religious bigotry (mild), mental illness (delusions/hallucinations), confinement, involuntary sedation with drugs, medical content (mentions)
Back Cover:
An immersive, electrifying space-fantasy, Neon Yang’s debut novel The Genesis of Misery is full of high-tech space battles and political machinations, starring a queer and diverse array of pilots, princesses, and prophetic heirs.
It’s a story you think you know: a young person hears the voice of an angel saying they have been chosen as a warrior to lead their people to victory in a holy war.
But Misery Nomaki (she/they) knows they are a fraud.
Raised on a remote moon colony, they don’t believe in any kind of god. Their angel is a delusion, brought on by hereditary space exposure. Yet their survival banks on mastering the holy mech they are supposedly destined for, and convincing the Emperor of the Faithful that they are the real deal.
The deeper they get into their charade, however, the more they start to doubt their convictions. What if this, all of it, is real?
A reimagining of Joan of Arc’s story given a space opera, giant robot twist, the Nullvoid Chronicles is a story about the nature of truth, the power of belief, and the interplay of both in the stories we tell ourselves.
Review:
I picked this up for two reasons: a nonbinary protagonist and the idea of Joan of Arc but in space. And you know, this book definitely has both of those things. Misery is most definitely nonbinary. And there definitely are Joan of Arc-type elements to the overarching plot (although you probably have to know that’s what it’s supposed to be to spot them – it’s definitely more “Joan of Arc-inspired” than “space opera retelling of Joan of Arc”).
But if you go in expecting just that, you are not at all going to be prepared for what The Genesis of Misery is going to throw at you. Because like I said, those elements are there, but they are definitely not the main thrust of the story.
Before I go too far, I do want to talk about Misery for a moment. (I’m going to be using she/her pronouns here, because while Misery uses both they/them and she/her, the narrative primarily uses she/her.) She’s an interesting character by herself. She’s a bit of a troublemaker – not for the sake of making trouble or being rebellious, but because she just has other priorities that rank higher than “obey the rules.” One of those priorities is self-preservation. Born with the disease that killed her mother, and experiencing the delusions and hallucinations that the disease causes, her driving motivation at the beginning of the book is survival. And the best way to do that seems to be to convince everyone that the symptoms of her terminal illness are actually symptoms of being god’s chosen messiah. All of that makes for a very interesting character. Her tenacity, resourcefulness, and general focus on prioritizing what matters to her over what people around her want her to do made her compelling and enjoyable to read about.
I haven’t read many unreliable narrator stories – not intentionally, that just hasn’t been a big aspect of my reading in general. Misery definitely qualifies as one, though, and in a really interesting way. She’s unreliable because she experiences hallucinations and delusions as a symptom of her illness, and she is very aware of that fact. So I may not be able to tell if the narrative is telling me the truth, but neither can she. In fact, she was so unreliable that I ended up believing the exact opposite of whatever she believed. At the beginning, she was 100% sure it was just hallucinations and she was faking the messiah thing as a survival strategy. At that point, I figured the twist would be that she was really divinely chosen after all. But as the story goes on, she began to slowly begin to think that maybe she was god’s chosen after all – and I began to doubt that she really was the messiah, or even that this deity existed in the first place. It wasn’t really an unpleasant experience, but it was weird to basically switch opinions with the protagonist throughout the course of the book.
This review is already pretty long, and I haven’t even gotten into the plot. But honestly, the plot is not really all that important here. In fact, you could argue that there really isn’t much of one. Misery’s people are at war with the Heretics, who have rejected their god and are trying to invade. Misery is playing messiah (or growing into the role of messiah, depending on who you believe) to cover for the fact that she has a fatal disease. A lot of people are doing politics and such around Misery and have big plans for this and that, but for the most part Misery is doing her best to 1. Stay alive, 2. Stay not imprisoned, and 3. Convince people that the weird stuff about her is from messiah-ness instead of mind-altering space disease, in that order. Sure, there’s some Pacific Rim-style mech battles in space, but those don’t come in until quite a ways through the book and they’re not what it’s about anyway.
What really makes this story work is the religious aspect. This society has one god, the one true god, who agreed to help the humans who dispersed among the stars. This deity chooses saints, identifiable by their iridescent hair, who have powers to activate and control special types of stone that are used for all kinds of things through this society. This religion is integrated so deeply with the society that they never actually talk about a religion or name the faith – knowledge of this deity, following religious observances, the way the saints’ ability to control special stones make society function, it’s just part of how things are. At the beginning, despite being raised in the church, Misery doesn’t even believe in this deity. But ideas of heresy, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, paying lip service to religious rules while doing what you want anyway, the difference between ethics and religiosity, power structures, belief, and fanaticism are wound throughout the whole story. I don’t really know how to describe it. As someone raised in a religion that was big into fanaticism, private hypocrisy, and ignoring the spirit of the rules where possible, I found it both strange and sci-fi while simultaneously intimately and painfully familiar. Watching Misery start to believe that maybe she was the messiah had a similar ring – it was nearly the same process as my journey out of religion, but the opposite direction. It left me feeling a bit disoriented – which is, honestly, an appropriate feeling for this book.
I don’t think I have adequately expressed yet my overall opinion of this book. It’s good. It’s very, very good. But it’s an uncommon type of good. Some really good books hype you up. They get your adrenaline pumping, leave you emotionally exhausted at the end, and make you want to yell from the rooftops that everyone should read this book. (Honestly, as much as I liked it, if you’re not up for a book that’s heavily about weird space religions, you probably won’t enjoy it very much.) Instead, it’s a much quieter kind of good. It makes me want to slow down, savor the story, and appreciate the richness of the world and the journey. It makes me want to think and linger over all the religious elements, both thematic and emotional. There’s some bittersweet tones as I understand exactly why Misery is doing what she’s doing but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be painful for her. I can already tell I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.
Bluejay Reads 