lightreads

Plain Kate

3/5. Kate is a carver's daughter who, in hard times, trades her shadow away. Then she and her talking cat companion must discover what the magician who bought it plans to do.

I was reading this back in September, but had to put it down when the universe decided to kick me for a while. This book is raw and sad and saturated in loss, and it took me a while to want to finish it. It's good – it isn't The Scorpion Rules brilliant, but you can draw a line from here to there. This book is about the loss of self that follows the loss of community and family, so yeah, good writing about that will be hard. I nodded to myself, sad but not surprised, at Bow's endnote which talks about her sister's death. A book like this would come from a place like that, yeah.

Content notes: Animal harm, violence, grief, loss.

The Scorpion Rules

4/5. In a future dys/utopia, the AI that rules the world holds the children of national leaders as hostages to peace. If a nation goes to war, the child is sacrificed. It works pretty well. Gretta is a classicist, a scholar, a leader, a princess, and a hostage. And her country is creeping towards war.

This book went a lot of places with me. I started it on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto in the week after Thanksgiving, picked at it while I swallowed nauseously on a bus switch backing up the side of Koyasan, gulped down a solid 20% of it on a flight from Toronto to Baltimore, snuck a chapter on the tram in the Minneapolis airport, and finished it in my sister’s living room the day after Christmas, a week after our father’s death. And every time I picked it up, even when it had been days or many miles or a lot of life since I’d last read it, it always had me within a page.

It’s funny, the things your brain does to you. This book has been on my TBR for over a year, but I didn’t pick it up, didn’t pick it up, until suddenly I did, and it wasn’t until I was mostly done that I was like no shit, brain, thanks for throwing me a book utterly saturated in the dread and terror of impending death while I spend a month waiting for someone to die.

This is so good. And so hard. It’s about the torture of waiting for it, and also about being two selves at the same time: one who thinks and calculates and analyzes; and one who cries. #relatable, as the kids say. Also, it’s about a beautiful, unexpected, wonderful queer romance. Also also, and you’re just going to have to trust me on this one, but it has a wonderful sense of humor.

Highly recommended.

Content notes: Um. See above? Also, there’s a literal torture sequence which is 80% psychological and so awful and so effective that I shook for half an hour, but I’m having a rough month, so YMMV.