lightreads

Leia, Princess of Alderaan

3/5. A Star Wards new canon book about Leia at sixteen, tripping and forcing her way into the rebellion her parents are trying to build.

I've realized that I appreciate that Claudia Gray keeps writing Leia books, but that I don't actually want to read them? Mostly because new canon is not my canon, and I only care about it so much. And this book is indubitably new canon, even though it is set before the original trilogy. You can tell because the metric fuckton of dramatic irony is largely suspended from new canon stuff. (Though points for making Holdo so weird, she gives Luna Lovegood a run for her money). So much dramatic irony. So so much. Leia's family is complete with no siblings, you know, oh and also her home will always be there for her, and and and. So much dramatic irony that it loses all impact, whereas maybe 10% of it could have been sad and whistful, and you know, dramatically ironic.

The Pearl Thief

4/5. Prequel to Code Name Verity. Before the war, before France, before Nazi interrogations, there’s just Julie. She’s turning sixteen, helping dispose of the few remaining assets after her grandfather’s death, and embroiled in a local mystery. But mostly, she’s coming into her (queer) sexuality.

Lovely. This is one of those coming of age stories where you really can see a person becoming themselves. Julie is just beginning to flex her powers of intelligence and interpersonal manipulation. She’s not always good at it yet. And she’s playing with gender, too; she cross-dresses for plot reasons, and plays with her presentation and the various freedoms and constraints it imposes upon her.

Also, and I really just am listing things I like now, but also, this is a book about Julie’s privilege, and how she learns to see it. But how the learning doesn’t just come to her, it has to be called out over and over and over again. That’s how it is.

What breaks my heart is the fact that we’re never going to get the long series of Julie books I want. Julie solving mysteries. Julie politicking for her brother. Julie, after the war, teaching spy craft to women. Julie in the sixties. Just imagine the books.

Content notes: Attempted sexual assault; attempted sexual coercion.

Games Wizards Play

3/5. Most recent Young Wizards book. Kit and Nita are working on this dating thing, and also mentoring a personally unpleasant competitor in a wizarding competition.

I feel kind of grumpy about this book and I’m not sure why? Like, I can manufacture reasons, but none are quite right. E.g., the wizard technology with the not!Apple logo on it was cute in the 80’s, but now seems desperate and grasping after relevance. Or e.g., for a book about how some people are just difficult sometimes, and how wizards are also people who need to grow and learn and change, this book sure did excuse a lot of sexist shit in an extremely convenient way that had nothing to do with anyone actually rethinking their beliefs.

IDK. Ultimately, this book is about the lacuna. The empty space at the center. And I’m starting to feel that the series has a lacuna where it used to have something warm and delightful. I can see where that was, but now everything moves around that space.

Three stars for nostalgia and for little bits, here and there, that almost made me feel it again.

The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

4/5. Middle grade. Every year the townspeople leave a baby to die in the forest to appease the evil witch. The evil witch, who has no idea why they keep doing this terrible thing, finds the babies new and happy homes in other lands. Until the one baby that she accidentally enmagics…and keeps.

A lovely, sad, charming book. It's all miniature dragon who thinks he's absolutely enormous! Sweet-tempered swamp monster named Glerk! Found family! Oh also women imprisoned for their madness grief and predators who consume sorrow and centuries of oppression coming to a head.

A little bit Patricia Mckillip and a little bit Kat Valente, and a lot about being . . . oppressed is not quite the right word. Crystallized in time. Held back by parents who think they know best, or by actual oppressors. And the sometimes explosive escape.

Kinda Like Brothers

3/5. It's all well and good for our protagonist's mom to take in foster babies. But the most recent baby comes with the baggage of an older brother, and that just doesn't work for our protag thank you very much.

I think this was a disabilityinkidlit rec? It had to be a rec from somewhere because I don't pick non-specfic YA lit without a prompt these days. But this is great. Well, okay, it's cringily great. Our protagonist is terribly eleven – he's convinced everything is criminally unfair and he's a little shit roughly 90% of the time, with the other 10% being overwhelming sweetness. And he's eleven, and this book is super honest, so there's enough social embarrassment going on here to make me use my one-minute audio skip button more than once.

But really, it's great, particularly if you have a thicker skin than I do. Non-traditional families of all sorts, relationships that don't fit a tidy box, complicated adults doing their best. And there's a lot in here about being a community of color, from the overt – a totally wrenching scene in which an older man teaches a roomful of pubescent black boys how to act when they are stopped by the cops because it might save their lives one day – to the more subtle work embedded in the unfolding of everyone's backstories. I'd definitely buy this for a kid.

P.s. The commercial audio is A+++. John Clarence Stewart is hilarious and pissy and sad and just perfect.

Signal to Noise

2/5. In 2009, Meche goes home to Mexico City upon her father's death. In 1988, Meche and her friends discovered that she could do magic with her father's record collection.

Oh man, I so wish I could recommend this, because parts of it are really good – the portrayal of several different and contrasting kinds of poverty, for one. But the structure here so completely did not work, I feel like it should be an example in someone's class. The 1988 story is tense and mean; Meche's parents' marriage is imploding, and her friend group is splintering around teenage hormones and bad decisions, and the magic takes Meche to some pretty dark places. She does things – everyone does things – that are scary and awful (I actually kind of hoped at one point that the twist of this book would be that it was Meche's villain origin story). And the 2009 story moves in the opposite direction, to a slow kind of grace and forgiveness. Except that turn to hope at the end is structurally placed right along side the destruction at the end of the 1988 strand and it just . . . nope. It does not work. The two strands slide off each other, and the gulf of years in between is a blank. Could it have worked? Oh yeah. It could have been good, too. But it doesn't, and I was so frustrated by the structure that it dulled the enjoyment of so many of the small vignettes in this book, and the love of music.

Handbook for Dragon Slayers by Merrie Haskell

3/5. Sweet young adult about the princess born with a clubfoot who goes on the run with her handmaiden and an apprentice dragonslayer after her cousin tries to take control of her tiny holdings.

Perfectly middle grade, which means pitched just right for the age range and a little too simple for my complete enjoyment. And I object a little bit to the heroine's journey in this. She is ready to give up her kingdom because so many of her subjects dislike her disability and treat her badly because of it, and the book takes her on a journey to discover that she was wrong and some of them really do love her anyway. And I just . . . I'm not really interested in these (extremely popular) narratives. I mean, if a person with disabilities perceives ableism in her community and is harmed by it, I don't think she's the one who needs to go on a journey of self-discovery, you know?

But this book surprised me in the last third. Dragons lurk throughout its pages, alternately frightening and pathetic, but I wasn't sure what the dragons were really for. Then they were for something, and that something was a metaphor about feminism and power and anger and restraint. Nice landing, is what I mean.

Shadowed Summer

3/5. Fourteen-year-old girl in a tiny Louisiana town accidentally calls up the spirit of a young man who went missing years ago, and she and her friends set out to find out what happened to him.

Slim and quick young adult, notable for a beautiful sense of place. Not just tiny town, not just Louisiana, but also summer as a place. And fourteen as a place; on the brink of sexuality and not particularly thrilled about it. There's a not really love triangle that's zero fun for anybody – our uninterested narrator and her boy crazy best friend and the boy who may like the wrong one of them – and the book is about how hard all of that is, and how to stay friends through it.

Also notable for actually startling/frightening me. The blurb made it sound like a gentle ghost story, but this ghost is not gentle. This ghost is angry.

Crooked Kingdom: A Sequel to Six of Crows

4/5. Sequel to Six of Crows. More of that – crew of misfits and thieves takes several runs at getting what they're owed.

This is prickly, difficult, very grown up for YA. On the surface it's about these hardened teenagers who have reluctantly come to care about each other, compounding and healing their respective damage as they work through a series of complicated cons. Beneath that, this is a book about consequences. The action and the echo. What grows up in the shadow you cast. How what you put out in the world is what you get back, but twisted. How the wealthy and powerful in that city are no different than the gutter rats trying to swindle them; how the two are an inevitable consequence of each other.

The heart of the book, for me, is a quiet scene, the sort of thing that movie producers like to ruin with music but that ought to be played to silence. Two people – one a girl turned to crime after she escapes the brothel she was sold to at fourteen, one a boy driven by revenge and his screaming touch phobia after he survived a plague in a pile of corpses. The two of them talking quietly and edgily about how they feel about each other and, exquisitely painfully, touching each other just a little bit. This book turns on that holding point.

Audio note: This is a multi-voice production with excellent casting, particularly for the women. And is tragically ruined by the fact that no one thought to coordinate the voice actors so that they pronounce proper names of major characters in remotely the same way aaaaaaargh. Painful.

Wizard's Holiday (Young Wizards Series Book 7), Wizards at War (Young Wizards Series Book 8), A Wizard of Mars: The Ninth Book in the Young Wizards Series

3/5. More Young Wizards, with a definite science fictional turn in these three (well, more interplanetary travel and cosmic whatsits, anyway – the esthetics of the series remain solidly fantasy).

I liked these, but in a measured way. The series matures with our heroes, whose power is settling down into its adult channels after the exuberance of earlier, and they have to learn to live with that and develop the talents they have. I should find this excellent, and I do, but it was around this point in the series that I started really thinking about the philosophical underpinnings.

The enemy – The Lone Power – is supposedly the champion of entropy, of things running down. And the work of wizardry is to fight entropy wherever found. There's a lovely interview with Duane at the end of one of the early audios -- High Wizardry, I think -- in which it becomes clear that this is a reflection of her view of the world. And it's not mine. Entropy in this series wears the face of the Lone Power, who is alternately frightening and pathetic. And who, we know from book one, is ultimately losing. But he is specifically not the face of evil, even if the things he does are appalling. And there is something uncomfortably slippery in this notion of entropy, something very whoops, guess that just happens, which I think ducks the problem of the active evil that so many people choose to put out into the world. Like in one of these books, for example, the world teeters on the brink of war and mass violence, but it all stops when the kids deal with the magic mcguffin evil cloud. Which implies all sorts of things about world history, according to this universe, that I don't like.

I don't know, I can't get this out right. But essentially I think the philosophy of this series is a bit confused about personal responsibility, and for all its time with the Lone Power, it isn't really equipped to grapple with active malice.

It can grapple with other things, though. The philosophy of these books gets more difficult and adult when Nita's mother gets cancer; Nita's reaction to that and to the Lone Power bring a richness to this idea of bad things just happen. But it still doesn't really satisfy me.