Catfishing on CatNet

3/5. YA near future thriller about a girl on the run for reasons her mother won't explain who happens to belong to a chat room of variously queer teens moderated by a secret AI.

Fun and charming, with just enough near future shenanigans to really work (sex-ed robot hacking, anyone?). On the most basic level, this is about young people (humans and an AI) learning to take action responsibly, and not always getting it right. The title is not great, though, and there are a few elements that seem pasted on, like the actual cat that wanders into the book and then literally disappears under a piece of furniture for a hundred pages.

Content notes: References to domestic violence, stalking.

My Sister Rosa

3/5. Seventeen-year-old boy moves to NYC with his entrepreneur parents and his little sister, the budding psychopath. He wants to protect her, or protect everyone else from her – one of those.

I said "yikes, this is a car crash" in the first ten percent of this book, and I don't think it's a spoiler to confirm that yeah, it is. This book shares some DNA with her Liar -- interested in competing narratives and in how we conceive of the origins of evilness in people. Not so much where the evil comes from, but in why we ask that question and what our answers – genes, environment, bad luck – say about us.

So this is interesting, but at a certain point with an author you have to acknowledge that they like writing car crashes, and that you only like reading car crashes under very limited, specific circumstances.

Content notes: Child harm.

Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Good book, wrong time. This is a haunting and strange tale of a girl who is the designated ghost-catcher in a possibly post-apocalypse world. The writing is strong, but. The protagonist is the subject of such unrelenting awfulness. I counted, and I was at the 22% mark before anyone said something to her that wasn't actively cruel, and even that was complicated more than kind. I imagine that improves, but. Not right now.

We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia

Oh man, this could have been so great. Secondary world where powerful men enter into triad marriages with two women, one to have the babies, one to be his political partner. You know, the pretty one and the smart one. But in this book, the two women – enemies from finishing school – fall in love with each other. Also there is a revolution and blackmail and spying and immigration politics and stuff. And yet I am abandoning it. The whole thing is subliminally annoying like a constant high-pitched noise. Which, come to think of it, also describes the pitch of tension and emotion, which is perpetually at, like, 13/10. Exhausting, and not very effective.

Dark Lord of Derkholm

3/5. A fantasy kingdom collectively decides it has had enough of the tours groups that come through from our world seeking adventure.

I mistakenly thought this would be zany, as it had all the hallmarks – jokes about geese! Animals of all sorts that can talk! Nonsensical prophecies! But actually it's a rather grim tale of exploitation and the costs of it. This fantasy land is forced to conform itself to tourist ideas, and in so doing it teaches many of its people, including those who hate the tours, to think of life and other people as their playthings. It's a hard lesson for a lot of them, including the putative good guys.

And I'm not sure this stuck the landing? It stuck a landing, I'll give it that. But I have a sinking suspicion that DWJ was not actually entirely aware of all the kind of exploitation she put in here. Like, the main guy has two human kids and five talking griffin kids, and it's all charming blended family, right? Except he's also bread a talking winged horse that, for absolutely no reason, is chattel and not a child even though I'm damned if I can see the difference.

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

2/5. Sloppy eighteenth-century fuckboy is a privileged asshole, goes on tour, is tragically in love with his mixed race male best friend, improves minorly as a human being.

On the one hand, I acknowledge that it is important for people to write about assholes when they know they are writing about assholes. And to write about assholes who only improve in the most marginal sense, because that's usually how human beings work in the real world. No grand revelations, no big turnaround. Just a long series of fuckups with slowly improving reasons for the fuckups.

On the other hand, that's not very satisfying or enjoyable.

On the other other hand, I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the people who don't like this book don't like it because the protagonist – gasp – sleeps around while being in love with someone, the horror.

On the other etc. hand, I realized I kind of don't like it not because he's an eighteenth-century fuckboy but because he's really, uh. Not bright. Not just uneducated but, um. A very dull spoon. Which probably makes me no better than the above people.

On the other etc. hand, there is something really offputting about how this book frames the child abuse, almost like a character trait. Like his only good character trait, somehow. It's hard to articulate this, but it feels like the points at which we are supposed to decide we like him after all are when he's acting the way a lot of abused kids act.

Basically, I have a lot of problems with the fantasy of wokeness that this book is diverging from. You know, the version where he magically learns self-reflection and consideration for others and an understanding of the race and class and gender and wealth pyramid that he stands on top of. But it turns out I also have problems with this version of the counternarrative, where he continues to be an asshole who gets everything he wants, up to and including the boy, but he's such an asshole that you're like "but why do you like him? For real? Why is this story even about him?"

Mask of Shadows

3/5. Genderfluid street thief joins a hunger games-ish competition to the death to be the queen's next assassin; also, revenge plotting.

The hot-off-the-presses-at-fanfiction.net title gave me concerns, and the start of this book is a bit, well, that. But it gains confidence and momentum, and by the end I was quite enjoying this.

Also, I haven't read that much published fiction about genderfluid people, so maybe this is standard, but I appreciated how this book never bothers to collapse the waveform and tell us what the protag's biological sex is (well, it implies lightly, but you can take that or leave it). This reminded me of a well-meaning but often, uh, interesting friend of mine who read the Ann Leckie books and got obsessed with figuring out what everyone's "real" gender was. Which, yiiiiiikes. Why? And also no. So I think this book would really get under her skin, and that amuses me. Also, it occurs to me that fanfiction about genderfluid people, which I have read a middling amount of, is actually limited in a way, as you generally come to it with a pre-conceived notion of someone's sex.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: 2 Fuzzy, 2 Furious

3/5. Second Squirrel Girl novelization, not nearly as delightful as the first one. See, this book is about a new mall opening, and how the backers start a contest to vote on the mascot, and there's team dog, and team cat, and the two fight like cats and dogs because there's an election, and a villain whose superpower is making everyone fight with each other, and I just. Look, I am not in the mood to read a haha funny book about election tampering. And this one in particular strikes me as poorly-judged. I mean, it's a Squirrel Girl book, so it's not really intended to be deep, but if you think about it for more than a few seconds it seems to be saying that . . . partisanship is stupid and there's no real difference between the camps and we should all just get along? Or possibly that elections are stupid? Ugh. It is simultaneously so on the nose that my nose hurts, and also without any clear meaning.

Points for the title, though.

The Hero and the Crown

3/5. Fantasy about Aeron, the very special king's daughter whose people don't understand her but really she's so magical and special you guys.

I deeply disappointed my wife by finding this not to my taste. Except for a section in the middle where Aerin literally spends several days lying in a river in terrible pain deciding whether to die. By pure chance, I read that segment while huddled in my living room at 2 in the morning in horrific pain and kind of wishing for sweet death. This was just five days ago, but it's already a distant, hallucinatory memory. Maybe I got flamed by a dragon. Maybe Aerin had a kidney stone and couldn't keep narcotics down.

Anyway, this book crystalized for me that I don't actually like McKinley's tell-tell-tell style, no matter how much everyone tells me I'm supposed to. Though I do give bonus points for having her bang whatshisface then run off and marry other whatshisface without a blink. Minus points for not really engaging with Aerin's sense of alienation and how it is rooted in actual alienation, in actual not-entirely-humanness. A lot of that got sublimated into the mean girl bullying, which, yawn.

In Other Lands

4/5. Expansion of an online novel about Elliot who goes away to school in another dimension when he's thirteen.

Elliot is a delightfully horrible little shit, and the story of him becoming incrementally more capable of forming meaningful connections with other people is wonderful. It's also a story of colonialism around the edges, and cross-cultural communication, and queer teenaged awakenings. It's great, basically.

Also, this book is a great litmus test. If a person calls it Harry Potter fanfic, you can immediately dismiss all their opinions since they clearly have no critical faculties. Brennan has a great note on the page above about all the shitty ways people have called this work fanfic. You know, where people use a perfectly fine and acceptable description as an insult. But anyway, this is specifically not Harry Potter fanfic. It is not in conversation with those books really at all. It does contain a boy-boy-girl friend trio, which to the tiny-minded is apparently enough? Idk. Anyway, my point is that what this does have is a fanfic sensibility, if you know what I mean. I.e. it cares about the things I care about in proportion to how I care about them. Specifically, all the complicated relationship stuff and also there's a plot which illuminates all the complicated relationship stuff. A+.

Knocking one star off for that weird phenomenon where the end of this book did exactly what I wanted it to, relationship wise, without particularly satisfying me. I think Brennan may have hamstrung herself a bit since she wrote this incredible long developed novel after a short story set in the same universe, and the short story kind of boxed a lot of things in.

Dread Nation

3+/5 (don't @ me, I do what I want). Jane is a mixed race girl born to the mistress of a Kentucky plantation right about the time the Civil War was ended by the rise of the zombies. She is sent away to zombie combat school, and makes her way in an America torn by racism and the undead.

This is great, Jane is terrifying great, and her main female friendship is delightful. She is allowed to be sexual and violent and practical and also kind, which is a lot, but people are a lot. I do think the book does not quite hang together thematically. The zombies serve the function of linchpinning a different stripe of Jim crow, where freed blacks are forced to defend white safety with their lives, often being literally eaten alive for it. But all of that doesn't quite hook up with the strands of this book which are about passing – there are multiple characters who pass for white when they are not, and the book is really good at digging into the precariousness and terror of that. But the pieces of it don't quite come together. But I suspect later books in this series – of course it's a series – will be tighter and stronger.

Content notes: So much racism. Including racist violence, and a flashback to parent on child violence.