Review: The Deep

Title: The Deep

Author: Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, Jonathan Snipes, and William Hutson

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of children, murder, trans-Atlantic slave trade, gore, generational trauma, mild body horror, unreality

Back Cover:

Yetu holds the memories for her people—water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners—who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one—the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.

Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities—and discovers a world her people left behind long ago.

Yetu will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past—and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity—and own who they really are.

Review:

The first thing that jumped out to be about this book was the dispassionate, almost monotone narration. Possibly it’s because I listened to this directly after listening to one narrated by Bahni Turpin, who is fast becoming my favorite audiobook narrator (what level of nerd is it to have favorite audiobook narrators?), but even though it was read by one of the authors the narration was just flat.

Which was really incongrouous, because this story is all about feelings. Yetu’s people has the historian so they don’t have to remember the trauma of their ancestors. This book is about the horrible things done to pregnant African women during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the generational trauma of what happened to those “first mothers” of their people, and Yetu’s trauma of reliving that trauma over and over as she holds the memories for all her people.

I get what this book was going for. Really, I do. The message about the struggles of generational trauma and needing to cope with the trauma of your ancestors as part of understanding who you are was good. But it was so short, all there was in the book was trauma. There was no connecting with the characters or finding things out in the now, outside of the memories of trauma (or running from them). The book is about the importance of your ancestors providing context to your existence now, but it was so wrapped up in ancestors that it didn’t give the context of the characters. There was a lot of emotions but barely a silhouette of a character to put context to them.

This was not a bad book – not at all. The idea was interesting, I love the concept of a mermaid people being born from pregnant slaves thrown overboard, and generational trauma isn’t a common thing tackled in fantasy. I think the ideas and themes here have a lot of potential. I just wanted it to be so much more than it is.

Review: This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us

Title: This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us

Author: Edgar Cantero

Genre: Mostly Detective Noir, a tiny bit Thriller, a little Dark Comedy

Trigger Warnings: Transphobic terminology (mention), blood, death, guns, self-injury, pedophilia (mentions), intravenous drug use, car crashes

Back Cover:

In a dingy office in Fisherman’s Wharf, the glass panel in the door bears the names of A. Kimrean and Z. Kimrean. Private Eyes. Behind the door there is only one desk, one chair, one scrawny androgynous P.I. in a tank top and skimpy waistcoat. A.Z., as they are collectively known, are twin brother and sister. He’s pure misanthropic logic, she’s wild hedonistic creativity. A.Z. have been locked in mortal battle since they were in utero … which is tricky because they, very literally, share one single body. That’s right. One body, two pilots. The mystery and absurdity of how Kimrean functions, and how they subvert every plotline, twist, explosion, and gunshot–and confuse every cop, neckless thug, cartel boss, ninja, and femme fatale–in the book is pure Cantero magic.

Someone is murdering the sons of the ruthless drug cartel boss known as the Lyon in the biggest baddest town in California–San Carnal. The notorious A.Z. Kimrean must go to the sin-soaked, palm-tree-lined streets of San Carnal, infiltrate the Lyon’s inner circle, and find out who is targeting his heirs, and while they are at it, rescue an undercover cop in too deep, deal with a plucky young stowaway, and stop a major gang war from engulfing California. They’ll face every plot device and break every rule Elmore Leonard wrote before they can crack the case, if they don’t kill each other (themselves) first.

This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us is a mind-blowing, gender-bending, genre-smashing romp through the entire pantheon of action and noir. It is also a bold, tautly crafted novel about family, being weird, and claiming your place in your own crazy story, that can only come from the mind of Edgar Cantero.

Review:

Despite how dark and downright horrifying this book can be at times, This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us was, overall, astonishingly fun.

Adrian and Zooey are conjoined twins. Except instead of having two torsos, or two heads coming out of one torso, or an abnormal number of limbs, or something like that, they share a body with two arms, two legs, and one head – perfectly normal to look at. They’re two separate people sharing one body and one brain – Adrian has the left half, Zooey has the right. Adrian is pure calculation and logic, and Zooey is pure emotion and hedonism. And they hate each other.

But together, they make a really good private eye. So when the police department calls them in to help an undercover cop prevent a gang war, they get in a little bit over their heads, especially since Adrian is actually trying to get things done and Zooey gets them in trouble by acting on impulses and feelings and never thinking things through. Zooey worked really well as as foil for Adrian, but I really liked him the best. Neither of them were exactly good people, but I related much more to Adrian’s logic than Zooey’s free-spiritedness.

This book does get really dark. There’s car crashes, guns, gory murders and injuries, questions of what exactly a minor child should do when she knows her father’s a mobster and how to cope when the polar opposite sibling you hate shares your body, the trauma of growing up abandoned and medicalized because people think you’re insane and having people see you as a medical curiosity or a dangerous maniac but never as a human being, Adrian’s trauma of being asexual while Zooey is a nymphomaniac, and the question of whether the siblings trying to hurt each other counts as siblings fighting or self-harm. But despite all that, the writing style and Zooey’s inability to be anything approaching serious, it manages to be mostly lighthearted and sometimes even laugh-out-loud funny.

This book breaks the fourth wall a lot. In some ways it doesn’t seem intentional, since Zooey is a little nuts anyway and seems to fully believe that she’s the protagonist in a book. So like, sort-of fourth wall breaks. It fully leans into the wacky weirdness of two siblings who hate each other in one body, and was highly entertaining. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Review: Across the Green Grass Fields

Title: Across the Green Grass Fields

Series: Wayward Children #6

Author: Seanan McGuire

Genre: Portal Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Bullying, toxic friendships, death of animals, mild gore, blood, kidnapping, racism but in an allegorical way

Spoiler Warning: Even though this book is sixth in a series, it contains no spoilers of the previous books, and this review contains no spoilers either.

Back Cover:

“Welcome to the Hooflands. We’re happy to have you, even if you being here means something’s coming.”

Regan loves, and is loved, though her school-friend situation has become complicated, of late.

When she suddenly finds herself thrust through a doorway that asks her to “Be Sure” before swallowing her whole, Regan must learn to live in a world filled with centaurs, kelpies, and other magical equines―a world that expects its human visitors to step up and be heroes.

But after embracing her time with the herd, Regan discovers that not all forms of heroism are equal, and not all quests are as they seem…

Review:

I want to know what witch, demon, deity, or other supernatural being Seanan McGuire sold her soul to in order to make her writing this relatable, but I swear each Wayward Children book is more relatable than the last. This one is a standalone, with the same concept of children falling through doors to other worlds but none of the reoccurring characters from the previous books, but I enjoyed it just as it was.

If you’re familiar with the idea behind Wayward Children, every kid has some reason that they “need” to go through a door. Regan is having trouble with feeling like she doesn’t fit in and a friend group that’s not exactly healthy. When she reveals to the girl she thought was her best friend that the reason she hasn’t been going through puberty is that she’s intersex, the resulting fallout brings her to a door in the woods. She ends up in the Hooflands, magical world of centaurs and unicorns and kelpies and fauns and all manner of hooved fantasy creatures, a wonderful place for a horse-obsessed ten-year-old girl to be. There, she finds what she needs – people who love her not in spite of her differences, but because of them, a place where she doesn’t have to worry about being a certain way in order to fit in and be loved.

I say this about every Wayward Children protagonist, but Regan was incredibly relatable. I didn’t go to a school, but I went to homeschool group where I had a friend who, like Regan’s “best friend,” I let isolate me from other people I could have been friends with so I could stay friends with her. I always felt like I wasn’t normal, like I didn’t fit, like people needed me to be something else or someone else in order to like me. I completely related to Regan’s feeling of being alone and lonely despite having peple around her who ostensibly loved her. And I loved horses as a kid, too – perhaps if I’d gone through a magical door, I would also have ended up in the Hooflands.

Also, this book has some great insights. It wrestles with the question of “how do we determine who are people and who aren’t?” throughout the story, and the representation of the way adults and children relate to each other was spot-on and incredibly insightful. Seanan McGuire captures the child’s perspective on things so well, it’s stunning.

One thing that you have to remember about Wayward Children books is that, fundamentally, these are not happy stories. These magic worlds give the children what they need, but then they spit the children back out into our world and expect them live in normalcy after experiencing magic. These are books about what happens after you have your adventure and return home to find you no longer fit into the place you left and there’s not a spot for you now. This book ripped my heart out. It was so, so good. I adore this series.

The Wayward Children series:

Wayward Children short stores

1. Every Heart a Doorway
2. Down Among the Sticks and Bones
3. Beneath the Sugar Sky
4. In an Absent Dream
5. Come Tumbling Down
6. Across the Green Grass Fields
7. Where the Drowned Girls Go
8. Lost in the Moment and Found

Review: That Inevitable Victorian Thing

Image from E.K. Johnston

Title: That Inevitable Victorian Thing

Author: E.K. Johnston

Genre: Alternate History

Trigger Warnings: Amputation, privacy invasion, f/f sex (implied)

Back Cover:

Victoria-Margaret is the crown princess of the empire, a direct descendant of Victoria I, the queen who changed the course of history two centuries earlier. The imperial practice of genetically arranged matchmaking will soon guide Margaret into a politically advantageous marriage like her mother before her, but before she does her duty, she’ll have one summer incognito in a far corner of empire. In Toronto, she meets Helena Marcus, daughter of one of the empire’s greatest placement geneticists, and August Callaghan, the heir apparent to a powerful shipping firm currently besieged by American pirates. In a summer of high-society debutante balls, politically charged tea parties, and romantic country dances, Margaret, Helena, and August discover they share an unusual bond and maybe a one in a million chance to have what they want and to change the world in the process.

Review:

I have mixed feelings about this book, but they’re good mixed feelings. Sort of. So this review is a little bit out of order because the setting is hugely important in my thoughts on the book and the characters, not so much.

First off, this book is set in near future Canada, but I categorized it as alternate history because it’s a near future where Britain didn’t lose its power and influence and also made a lot better choices regarding human rights, less colonialism, etc. It was almost utopian. There were things I liked about it (like racism not being a thing and healthcare being free), and there were things I didn’t like about it (like the way it felt a bit like an erasure of all the wrongs Britain has done, and the computer-based “genetic matches” to promote marrying someone who you would produce better children with smacked a bit of eugenics). I definitely enjoyed reading about it, but I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Uh, plot. Princess Victoria-Margaret takes an undercover vacation to Canada, makes some friends, and falls in love. The author’s note at the end of the book called the book “a very small story in a very big world,” and I like that description. It’s a small story of a girl meeting new friends and falling in love with one of them, but it has enough turns and surprises that it doesn’t feel plotless. The worldbuilding overshadows it, but the plot is definitely there and definitely strong if you like character-oriented stories. Plus, there’s a happy ending for everybody!

On that note, let’s talk about characters. The characters were all enjoyable to read about – I loved them all and wanted all of them to get a happy ending – but thinking about it, they weren’t really developed in the traditional sense. This is very much a slice-of-life story, and there isn’t really much of a need to learn much about these characters’ pasts or delve into their deepest fears or anything like that. I loved all of the people on the pages (literally all of them, there’s no “bad guy” or even a rival to hate) and I was happy to spend 300 pages with them, but I couldn’t really tell you much about them.

Really, the only thing I didn’t really like was the romance. And not because I didn’t like the romance itself – the concept was great, the characters were great together, and I’m super happy it happened. But it was just poorly done. The characters who fall in love feel little flutters when they look at each other (starting halfway through the book), they’re confused why their hearts beat faster when they accidentally touch … and then they’re making out on the couch. It came out of nowhere with hardly any buildup. And I just think it could have been done so much better.

And, because the diversity is so good, I have to mention it: Victoria-Margaret is a mixed-race person of color with African-textured hair, one of the characters is intersex, and there’s also polyamory.

That Inevitable Victorian Thing takes a small, slice-of-life story and mixes it with rich world-building to form a complex, multi-layered story that feels a lot bigger than it actually is. It’s not precisely lighthearted but definitely very wholesome. Despite my mixed feelings about some elements, it was an enjoyable book and I’m glad I read it.