lightreads

Tom’s Midnight Garden

3/5. A middle grade fantasy time travel from 1958. Tom is sent to his aunt and uncle’s city flat while his brother recovers from Measles. He thinks it’s terrible until he discovers that, when the clock strikes thirteen, he can find a wondrous garden out the back door, and a special playmate there.

Why is it that whenever I pick up a book I remember from childhood, it turns out it’s sad and I had no idea?

This isn’t tragic sad, just concerned with the wistfulness of time slipped away, and the chasm of understanding that can grow between children and adults. It’s also framing growing up as a kind of loss, and doing a little bit of that thing where romance and sexuality are a kind of inevitable threat, but more complexly than, oh I don’t know, just as a random example, the Narnia books.

I remembered how much fun they had playing in the garden and that’s about it, and now as an adult I read a book rich with overtones and subtext (the aunt and uncle are infertile, and she at least is really sad about it, which I super did not clock), oh and also, the religious imagery is doing a lot of work here which, you will be shocked, I also missed when I was eight.

Overall, a neat little speculative kids story that I was not sorry to revisit.

Content notes: Some sad orphan taken in into an unloving home stuff, the sort of views on gender you’d expect of a pre-pubescent boy of that era.

Iron Widow

3/5. In far future fantasy/scifi inspired by Chinese history, a young woman enlists, knowing it will mean her death at the hands of her male co-pilot, for the purpose of killing the pilot who murdered her sister.

Like most YA these days, this one has a lot going on, including: mecha vs. alien fights, a love triangle turned poly triad, a deeply unjust and misogynist society that makes our heroine incoherently furious, family drama, celebrity culture, chronic pain, tormented boys and nice boys, and a whole lot of plot twists.

It has enjoyable elements – the heroine's fury is deep and genuine and unrelenting, which I appreciate, and while I have no investment in the triad emotionally, I like that it exists. But overall, the YA is too strong in this one for me. Am I the only one who thinks YA has been getting less and less interesting for the past decade? Which makes me sad, because there's a lot of cultural and sexual diversity in YA these days, and I'd like to enjoy it more. But it's all so *gestures* pitched at an emotional eleven at all times, with paper thin worldbuilding. Now I'm trying to remember if Hunger Games really was that much better, or if it's just that we've all read too much of this now.

Content notes: Violence of many sorts, misogyny, footbinding, forced addiction, torture.

Archer's Goon

3/5. The one about Howard, whose father is supposed to produce 2,000 words every quarter for a mysterious personage, or else, and the or else gets his family entangled in a set of seven mysterious alien siblings controlling the town.

This is a weird one. It's making a subtle but strange point about the difference between unpleasant people who are sympathetic and interesting, and unpleasant people who are not. The difference being self-awareness. Howard knows he has the potential to be a twit, and he definitely sees the dark road his sister* (named Awful, just in case you missed it) could go down. But his father is a raging twit and has no idea, and is rendered insufferable thereby. That's some complex stuff for a kid's book, which is typical DWJ. But it's not all that much fun to read about.

*I gloss her as genderqueer, btw. You can make a pretty good case for it in the text, though it's clearly not what DWJ actually intended.

Fly Trap

4/5. Sequel to Fly by Night, though I read that years ago and had no trouble picking this up. Further adventures of a furious (and furiously smart) little girl and her pet goose (also furious, because goose) and her conman sorta mentor (not so much furious as quietly bewildered that he gives a damn) in a fantasy city strictly regulated by what your time of birth says about you.

Wonderful. Do I even need to say that? I will anyway. This is a very serious story about chance and privilege and survival told with real lightness and humor. There are a few visual gags here that felt very Pixar to me, like the goose died temporarily green for reasons, and extended scenes of street chases of multiple sets of people in those animal costumes where someone is the head and someone is the butt, also for reasons. I like Hardinge best in this mode (it's not that I dislike her less comedic books, but she's too good at everything she does, and I don't always have the gumption for, say, Cuckoo Song).

Thank goodness she is still putting out books, because I am running out of her catalog and that makes me sad.

Return of the Thief

4/5. Conclusion to this long-running (in years, not pages) YA fantasy about the thief turned king.

I went on a journey with this one. I started out with oh come on, a completely new narrator again? and then very rapidly pivoted to oh, keep being amazing, sweetie, and from ugh, so she's keeping the main players off center stage for yet another book, come on to yeah . . . actually . . . Gen and Irene are exhausting, if we had to spend this whole book up close with them yelling at each other and having sex, I'd have to put it down every other page.

Anyway, I'm not actually sure this is terribly good as the end of a series. There are a lot of things solved by divine power (an actual lightning bolt!) that seemed to me to transgress some of the narrative rules of this universe, which was previously focused more satisfyingly on divine power operating painfully through human effort. I liked it better when all the gods did was tell Gen to stop whining. Still funny. But oh, this universe. Of course its final tale should be told by a young man with multiple severe disabilities. Of course. Absolutely no one else would do. I will miss them all, and what good friends they made (or, in several cases, more, even the offscreen queers arrrrrgh).

Content notes: References to the murder of disabled children, war, torture with few details, miscarriage and fears of maternal mortality.

Enchanted Glass

4/5. Thoroughly charming standalone about a kid who flees to the country home of what his grandmother said would be a great wizard, only to find the great wizard's grandson, a somewhat magical professor instead. Lots of dog and country fair hijinx and the fae and suchlike. Charming, that is, if you ignore the thing where the book tells you something cheerfully and you're like whoa wait what the fuck. You're talking about sexual exploitation of a young and vulnerable woman by an older powerful man, right? and the book is like la dah dah. So there's that.

The Lives of Christopher Chant

3/5. Chrestomanci. Christopher Chant has nine lives, and carries on wasting them doing stupid things with his rare power to travel between worlds. This was okay, but Christopher's privilege is so overwhelming from start to finish that his conflicts over whether he is going to bother to be a decent person or not didn't land for me. I mean, for real, he spends half the book sulking about how he is being trained to be the most powerful enchanter in the world when he'd rather be back at his posh boarding school playing cricket with all his rich friends. Okay dude, whatever, tiny violin.

Conrad's Fate

3/5. Better. Young man becomes a servant in a wealthy household to uncover who is making reality skip and reset itself. It turns out a running theme in these books is the terribleness of being a child in the power of manipulative adults. The ultimate resolution here has had all the sense surgically removed from it, but the journey is enjoyable, as Conrad learns to define himself instead of letting adults do it for their own ends. Also, Christopher appears, and the book is quite aware of how he is like 20% charming and 80% terrible from an outsider's perspective.

The Magicians of Caprona

2/5. Meh. Not in the mood for a book about rival magical Italian city-state magician families. I.e. a book about people being irrationally prejudiced against each other (they literally both think the other family smells bad), sprinkled with DWJ's cultural stereotypes about Italy. Good cats though.

Mixed Magics

3/5. Four Chrestomanci shorts, ranging from the cute (criminal leaps dimensions, ends up being bullied by a dog and a small child), to the . . . weird? (boy brings down a world of rules by asking questions of gods). But by this point I was starting to ask some uncomfortable questions about the Chrestomanci series in general, like so basically the rule here is that the most powerful man becomes the multiverse head cop and judge and jury? That's sure a system you've got going.

Planesrunner and Be My Enemy

3/5. YA about a math savant teenager who goes adventuring across the multiverses in pursuit of the kidnappers of his father, also airships.

Fun and stylish, with a very definite feel of those Doctor Who two-parters about alt Londons and Cybermen, with a strong dash of Stargate in there too. I didn't finish the trilogy because it's a smidge young for me, and the last book apparently goes down a path I'm not interested in, but I would give these to the right early teen.

and The Whispering Skull

3/5. YA about a ghost-hunting agency staffed entirely by teenagers in a world where you grow out of the ability to perceive the supernatural, but not out of the ability to be killed by it.

Fun. I almost said cute, but there's too much horror and the literary equivalent of jump scares for that. These hit every single beat I expected, exactly when I expected, which is not a criticism. I was only in the mood for the first two (of many) but if you like supernatural horror more than I do, and have a higher tolerance for teenaged emotional nonsense (not of the romantic sort, at least not yet) here you go.

Also, I don't actually care enough to google, but I have a theory these started as early trunk novels. Might explain the weird timelines – they're vaguely present day, yet no cell phones? No internet? It's an alternate timeline where ghosts are known but I'm not sure how adding ghosts subtracts connectivity.

Incarceron

3/5. YA about a boy trapped inside a vast sentient scifi prison, and the daughter of the warden living on the outside, and what happens when they find a way to communicate.

Diverting but clumsy. There's some nice atmosphere here, but the twists are signaled with such thudding obviousness that it verges on the insulting. I don't know if this is just how Fisher writes, or if she thinks that's what you need to do in YA. Either way, I figured out the three largest reveals in the first 15%.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

3/5. Cleaning up the last of the Pratchetts that I never got to. This is a mostly inconsequential little book about a talking cat and some talking rats who have been pulling a con in various towns, only to discover someone else is pulling a far worse con in their new target. It includes the themes he did better elsewhere, like making stories out of life vs. making life out of stories. But the cat is pretty great. Though let's be real, how often do I read a talking cat that I'm not into.