A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

The Trail, by Meika Hashimoto



After a tragedy, 13-year-old Toby runs away to hike the Appalachian trail solo. This is a nice solid middle-grade novel with plenty of adventure and a satisfying conclusion. The revelation of exactly what happened to Toby's best friend made me giggle inappropriately because I visualized it with the sound effect "BONK." ( Read more... )

Content notes: Tragic death of friend, attempted suicide (Toby rescues the guy), dog abuse (Toby rescues the dog).


The Glamour, by Christopher Priest



Beautifully written literary novel, probably but not definitely fantasy, about people who can become invisible to the point where they cannot be perceived - ever - by anyone who can't also become invisible. Or maybe that's just a lie, or a shared delusion, or a metaphor; the ending is possibly the least resolved one ever written, very deliberately so. I enjoyed reading it while I was reading it, but the whole thing feels like a magician's trick. It may be relevant that Priest also wrote The Prestige.

Content notes: extremely graphic rape scene that seems to be written as a technical exercise in writing a rape scene where the man having consensual sex with the woman has no idea she's simultaneously being raped by a man he can't perceive. Kudos on the execution, ugh to the content.



Black River Orchard, by Chuck Wendig



Extremely enjoyable horror novel about evil apples. Likable good guys, awful villains, a good premise, excellent apple-related body horror, fun apple lore, and a whole lot of really good descriptions of what it feels like to bite into an apple, plus an unexpected amount of queer/ace rep.

Content notes: horror-typical violence, control-style relationship abuse.

Darby, a transmasc guy from a small town in Illinois, has been living in NYC for ten years, since he turned eighteen. He's acquired queer/trans friend group, but just got fired and is about to lose his apartment. He decides to temporarily move back in with his mom in Illinois. But things have changed in his town. Michael, his old bestie/crush, who he had a terrible breakup with ten years ago, has come out as gay. And the old bookstore Darby used to work at is still there... and his pre-transition teenage self is still working there.

Isn't that a great premise? The central conceit of meeting your own younger self when you return to the town you grew up in is such a perfect metaphor, made even more powerful by the split between pre- and post-transition.

Unfortunately, most of the book is not actually about that. It's mostly about Darby just kind of hanging around and feeling repetitively guilty about having been totally out of touch with his extremely supportive mom, and crushing on Michael while they both either fail to or refuse to actually communicate about either their present feelings or what went down between them as teenagers. (Darby literally can't even remember what their fight was about, but when he tells Michael this, Michael gets mad and stomps off without telling him.) When Darby finally does actually talk to his teenage self, he's mostly interested in trying to stop his teenage self from getting in that fight with teenage Michael.

This would be kind of okay if the book was a romance, where things are centered around the romantic relationship, but it isn't. It's a coming of age story, but it's only in the last two chapters that any actual character growth happens. Up until that point, Darby is kind of maddening. He's 28 but acts at least eight years younger. That's the point - he's a case of arrested development - but it was so annoying to read. It doesn't help that Michael acts way more mature than Darby except when it's necessary to keep them from communicating about anything important, and then he just refuses to talk like an adult.

I found this book frustrating. The author is obviously talented but the book needed at least another draft. Also, the bookstore itself isn't important, it's just the place where young Darby works.

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I feel like I'm saying this a lot recently, but this book would have been so much better if the entire book had been about the supposed premise which in fact only got about 10% of the total page time.

Charles Waters is a middle-aged accountant who's clearly autistic, though undiagnosed. He leads a solitary and uneventful life until he's given one month to live. He lives it and dies. Then he wakes up in the doctor's office, being given one month to live...

This is a fun and unusual riff on the Middle Falls formula, give Charles's very short time span in which to make changes. (The Universal Life Center, which annoys me as always, does eventually make some changes too, to give the poor guy a chance.) The story is about how Charles can live his life to the fullest and expand what he thinks are his limits without messing with his essential self. In this case, the key is friendship with a guy in his apartment building whose life is just as limited as Charles's was initially, but in a less obvious way. It's very sweet.

99% of the book treats Charles's unstated but obvious autism as just how he is, not something that needs to be fixed or makes him spiritually special or anything other than an important aspect of his character. There is one bit of dialogue that implies that maybe he's actually God (!!!), of course at the Universal Life Center, but that's never mentioned again and the Universal Life Center characters clearly have no idea what's really going on.

Content notes: Charles dies of cancer, but there's no real details.




Hart Tanner is an elderly con man, currently scamming and being the boy toy of even older ladies, until he dies a particularly miserable death. He wakes up a young man, before his life goes completely to shit, and quickly discovers that every time he dies, he wakes up at the same point. It's the perfect get out of jail free card! Except, of course, a life with no challenges or real relationships eventually gets boring...

The book doesn't go in the obvious direction of being about Hart growing a conscience, realizing how he hurt people, and turning over a new leaf; that does happen, more or less, but it's not what the story is about. Nor, when he meets up with his abusive mother, is it about forgiving and reconciling with her THANK GOD - how that does go down is very satisfying if you had bad parents. What's it mostly about is, as is usual with Middle Falls, creating and maintaining an important relationship. In this case, that relationship is mostly with a little rescue mutt named Mushu. There is dog death in the context of Mushu eventually dying of old age, but because of how time travel works, it's impermanent in a similar way to how Hart's deaths are impermanent. The whole story is really touching.

Both these books were very enjoyable and good examples of the series.

Content notes: Child abuse (mostly in the past), suicide (in the context of knowing you'll just immediately wake up in a new life), dog death (ditto, and peacefully of old age.)

By Jana Heidersdorf.



A gorgeous art-and-worldbuilding book - a small genre which I adore - purporting to be the sketch and notebook of a sirenologist studying mermaids. The mermaids are mostly not human-intelligent, or at least if they are, humans can't tell. Some are beautiful, some are eerie, some are strange, some are all three. The notes are fascinating, and the worldbuilding on mermaids is very original and interesting. Heidersorf put a lot of thought into how aquatic ecologies work, and there's a great balance of strange fantasy and inspiration from strange real creatures. The overall effect is like reading a guidebook to natural history from another world.

I loved this book and think it's absolutely worth the price.

This was based on her limited edition book "100 Mermaids", and you can see them here.

More mermaids, many of which didn't make the book but are just as cool as the ones that did.

https://www.boredpanda.com/weird-beautiful-mermaids-jana-heidersdorf/

Rose is a young autistic woman living with her parents in a small town largely inhabited by members of a giant church that combines elements of Prosperity Gospel with your basic right-wing evangelicalism. It's best-known for Camp Damascus, the world's only gay conversion camp with a 100% success rate.

Rose is a true believer. Until weird things start happening around her. Then to her. And she starts to investigate Camp Damascus...

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, because it has some nice surprises. In general, the plot was very nicely constructed and well-structured, with a lot of things that initially seemed like writing errors (like how Rose is 20 but everything would make more sense if she was 18) turn out to have reasons.

The main things that are notable about the book are Rose, who I loved more than possibly any other fictional character I met this year, the complex and thoughtful exploration of homophobia, community, religion, and love, and how much emotion the book evokes. In particular, I liked the depiction of what people actually get out of religion - not just beliefs but a community - and that people who abandon the religion they were raised in may swing around to atheism, or may join a different religion, or may create spiritual beliefs from scratch, and there's no judgment on any of that.

I was raised in a cult, and though mine was completely different, the cult dynamics are dead-on. Rose's journey to find her true self and figure out what she believes and who she loves are dead-on for the person she is, and while it goes to some dark places, it also has so much warmth and humor and joy. It's got enormous heart, and it's one of the most uplifting books I read all year.

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As for the buckaroo himself, all I can say is that I once wrote an enormous amount of bizarre porn to make money, but I'm capable of writing in a more literary manner too. There are some odd quirks to the book that did make me think, "Yep, this is indeed Chuck Tingle," such as habitually referring to anything anyone drinks as a "beverage." There's other overused phrases, largely due to his refusal to use the words "said" or "asked," plus some awkward transitions. But overall, this is a really accomplished book, and one that I've been pressing on people at the bookshop. It has a clear message but it's not simplistic, the horror elements are solid but it's also often quite funny, and it's just deeply enjoyable to read.

This is an adult novel but it's completely suitable for teenagers, and would make an excellent gift for teenagers in your life who would appreciate it.

Content notes: mild horror scariness, bug-related grossouts, depictions of homophobia and religious control.

Rae is 20 and dying of cancer. For the last several years, her main consolation has been her younger sister Alice and Alice's favorite fantasy trilogy, Time of Iron. Due to brain fog and fatigue, Rae has read the second two novels but not the first, which she knows only via what she remembers from Alice reading it to her and recounting events to her - but that's not all that much, again due to brain fog and fatigue. However, she does have a massive crush on the antihero protagonist, the mortal king in book one who becomes a semi-undead, all-powerful emperor in Book Two.

This is all relevant because a weird woman walks into her hospital room and offers to transport Rae into the body of a character from the novel, with the deal that if she can pick a highly guarded flower that blossoms once a year, she'll be cured and returned to her own world. Rae takes the deal, only to discover that 1) she's in the body of the villainess, 2) the villainess is slated to be executed the next day by the very angry currently-king, emperor-to-be.

Rae quickly realizes that she needs to assemble Team Evil from the people she has, consisting of one angry maid destined to become an axe murderer and one cheerfully sociopathic guard who she doesn't remember from the books at all. Lucky for her, she does know what's going to happen. Sort of.

"Person gets transported into their favorite fantasy novel" is a big genre in Asia, but this is the first one I've read (and the first western one I've encountered.) So this is a review from total ignorance. I'd be very interested to hear how it's similar to and different from other isekai novels, from people more familiar with the genre. For instance, I enjoyed how Rae was actually not all that familiar with the novel, but for all I know that's a totally normal trope of the genre.

I had mixed feelings about this book. There were parts that I loved. There were parts that I thought were extremely well-done. There were parts that left me cold. And there were parts where I wished the story had gone in a different direction that would have appealed more to me personally.

All the parts involving Rae's cancer were extremely good. Sarah Rees Brennan had cancer herself (she discusses this in the afterword) and it's one of the more realistic depictions of severe illness - including the social repercussions - that I've come across. Unfortunately, that was all so realistic and heartfelt that it made me want the rest of the book to have at least a little more realism and emotional heft.

This is an extremely quippy book. Rae is a quip machine, and so are several other major characters. Unfortunately, I didn't find most of the quips actually funny, so I spent a lot of the book wishing she would just stop. But most readers loved the banter and jokes, so your mileage will probably vary.

Quips aside, there were a couple areas where I really wished for more emotional weight. The whole book is about Rae being in a villainess's body and celebrating being evil. But she's not actually evil. She's just hot. The villainess is very curvy and it's a puritanical world, so Rae just wears low-cut dresses and lives in goth quarters, and that's "evil." It's like goatees being evil in the Star Trek Mirrorverse - it's a fashion statement. Plus commentary on how we view sexual women as evil, which is certainly true in real life, but not so much a thing in fantasy books nowadays.

Rae never, not once, does anything even slightly evil to anyone. Some of her decisions have bad consequences for others, but that's always because she made a mistake, not because she intended to harm anyone. I found this frustrating, because I wanted Rae to be tempted at least a little by actual evil. When I had a life-threatening illness, I sometimes wondered what I'd be willing to do in exchange for getting a healthy body back. That's Rae's entire motivation, so I wanted her to actually wrestle with "What would I be willing to do to be healthy again?" But she doesn't get put in a position where she would have to do something actually bad in order to save her life until the last few pages, so there's only like 30 seconds of dilemma.

For a lot of the book Rae thinks the characters aren't real, but she still never does anything bad to them. So when she finally realizes that they are real, it doesn't feel meaningful because she's been treating them like real people all along.

But! There was also a lot that I did like. I loved Key, the cheerful sociopath bodyguard. He was by far the most fun character in the entire book, and the only one I got emotionally invested in. This was also the most clever part of the book - it explains exactly how writers get people to fall in love with a villain, and then goes step by step through the process and makes us fall in love with Key. Brilliantly done.

I loved Key and Rae's relationship, which was very iddy for me. It was "sociopath attack dog on a leash who loves only you," plus femdom overtones. And their banter was often actually funny - I'm thinking especially of when Key is trying to tell her he wants to go down on her, and she doesn't know any of his euphemisms. I was totally invested in them as a couple.

I also enjoyed Emer and Lia, a pair of supporting characters. They had sympathetic motivations, and they didn't constantly wisecrack.

Also, the ending was KILLER. (A killer cliffhanger, just so you know.) ( Read more... )

I also appreciated that the fantasy book excerpts are extremely plausible as an actual popular book series.

So, will you like this? I think that depends on how funny you find it. If I'd been more charmed by the banter and musical numbers and the comedy in general, then the goatee evil would have been perfect. I'm definitely going to read the sequel, though.

Finally, a cozy fantasy with actual stakes!

Emily Wilde is a Cambridge professor of dryadology (the study of faeries) who travels to the remote village of Hrafansvik to finish her great work, an encyclopedia of faeries, with a study of a type of Scandinavian faeries. There are just a few problems: the locals are deeply suspicious of her, and she has absolutely terrible social skills; the local faeries are in the habit of kidnapping and mindwiping people; and another Cambridge professor, the charming/annoying Wendell Bambleby, descends upon her welcome solitude with a pair of grad students in tow.

The novel is in the form of Emily's journal, with plenty of footnotes and scholarly details on faeries. It is, very delightfully, exactly what one might hope for from the premise: an account of an academic's fieldwork on faeries, and a fantasy centrally dealing with human-faerie interactions. As a bonus, it also contains a very enjoyable romance between a pair of giant weirdos. Emily is extremely not good with people, and Bambleby, who initially appears to be the normal one, is also extremely, extremely not normal.

It's very funny, it has some nice plot twists, and I loved its portrayal of faeries. They're much more like old folklore faeries than like most modern twists on them, obeying their own strange and often incomprehensible logic which, in Emily's theory, is because they are story-based beings and will/must do whatever makes the best story. But also, they're just generally extremely weird and inhuman and hard for humans to understand.

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There are sequels which I haven't read yet, but this stands perfectly well on its own.

I first heard of this extremely odd book in a passing mention online that gave me the impression that it was a post-apocalyptic novel about a patriarchal cult and was along the lines of The Handmaid's Tale. This is both kind of hilariously wrong, and yet not totally wrong; it does involve a cult in a sense, and the cult is run by a man called Father, so it is technically a patriarchy. However, it's not post-apocalyptic except in the sense that there's some deep time history in which civilizations we never knew existed met their ends, and it's not like The Handmaid's Tale except in the sense that it involves deliberate brainwashing into a way of thinking, enforced by awful punishments, and in which rebellion is almost unthinkable because they're watched so closely (telepathically, in this case).

I next heard of it on the horror reddit, where it's a controversial favorite. I would not classify it as horror, but as dark fantasy; if I had to pick the work it reminds me of the most in tone and content, it would be Sandman. Did I mention that most of the main characters are effectively gods?

The general outline of the story, which will not really give you a sense of what the reading experience is like, is that Father is an ancient immortal with godlike powers that he learned in a magical library. He adopted twelve children and taught them god-level powers as well, mostly by abusing them in absolutely horrific ways, including killing them and then resurrecting them. While they're somewhat in touch with a larger magical world, they've been so isolated and brainwashed that most of them know absolutely nothing about anything but their personal course of study (raising and communicating with the dead, time travel, animals communication and transformation, etc), and do not interact at all with anyone but each other. A few of them have very limited contact with humans, who they call "Americans" because their magical cult is located in America.

When the book opens, Father is missing and his magical library is magically locked. Carolyn, the one who studied languages and has had the most contact with Americans, reluctantly agrees to help her siblings try to open the library. A couple humans get sucked into the situation. An absolutely batshit novel ensues.

You can see this is an extremely hard book to describe. It did sort of remind me of Sandman, but mostly it reminded me of nothing else I've ever read. It's extremely funny, sometimes, and extremely dark and brutal, sometimes, and extremely technically accomplished, mostly. There's a chapter called "The Luckiest Chicken in the World," which seemed completely random until I suddenly realized what it meant and literally burst out laughing. Some of it is very beautiful. Some of it is very moving. Some of it feels like actual myth, which is extremely hard to pull off. There's some fantastic characters, several of whom are animals. It has a lot to say about abuse and family dynamics and what can happen to people who've never known anything but abuse.

I loved the book, but I can see how others absolutely hated it. It's a first novel, it's been nine years since it came out, and the author has yet to write anything else.

I think there should either have been fewer siblings, or they should have all gotten more characterization. There's twelve and we only ever get to know five of them. Also, I could have done with less animal death. And the last section went on a bit too long. But overall, this was weird, unique, memorable book, and I'm so glad I finally figured out that it wasn't The Handmaid's Tale Redux.

Content notes: OMFG what isn't in this book? Horrific child abuse (detailed and central to the plot), rape (not graphic), torture (graphic), fates worse than death, violence, talking animal death (heartbreaking, multiple instances), suicide, death of about 30-50 feral dogs (which might all be zombies - this is not stated, but it's logically implied.)

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Joan, the daughter of an English mother (deceased) and a Malaysian father, learns as a child that her mother's family is unusual. They call themselves monsters, and can do what appears to be genuine magic, if of a minor variety: they can make small objects appear and disappear. Joan can also do this as a child, but the ability fades away as she grows up. By the time she's sixteen, it's gone and she's relegated the whole monster-and-magic thing to the realm of "my eccentric family has weird beliefs."

Needless to say, there's a lot more to it than that.

Only a Monster is a YA fantasy that partakes in some current YA tropes (the love triangle) and does its own thing in other ways. Unusually for a modern YA, the worldbuilding is excellent and original. The monsters have their own society, with families who have different abilities, mostly of a pleasingly eccentric and small-scale variety. Because the powers aren't world-shattering, there's a good amount of figuring out how to use them in clever ways. I LOVE this kind of thing, and it's very well-done.

There's another power that all the monsters have. It's time travel, of a very unique variety and with a real and disturbing cost. I've never come across this exact variant on time travel before, and the worldbuilding around it and the society than grew around people who can do it is also extremely well-done. The plot is mostly very good, with some excellent twists and surprises.

The flaw in the book is that two of the three main characters are not very interesting. This didn't at all ruin the book for me - I enjoyed it a lot - but it's definitely the sort of book where the supporting cast is enormously more interesting than the leads.

Joan is kind of an everygirl figure and she feels more there as a vehicle to tell the story than a three-dimensional character. She often refuses to listen to people trying to tell her information she really needs to know when that serves the plot, but is very clever and quick-witted when that serves the plot.

The other issue is the love triangle. One of the boys accompanies Joan for almost the whole book, and we see their relationship grow from strangers to enemies to friends to could-be-lovers. This really worked for me. The other one is someone she had a crush on before the book starts, we get a tiny bit of very dramatic interaction at the beginning, and then he's off-page for most of the book, but we're told that their love could move worlds, etc. This didn't work for me.

Bizarrely, there is another love story, between supporting characters, in which the characters are almost never in the same place at the same time, and I was REALLY invested in that one. Maybe it worked better because it was pushed less hard? But it was a very difficult technical feat to pull off, and it was executed beautifully.

This book has a satisfying "settled for now" ending, but the story clearly continues. I'll be following it, because I LOVE the world and the supporting cast is great.

In which Dove, Edgar, Zora, Chloris, and a mystery guest continue their studies, leading up to their magical thesis project, a personal examination of worthiness by the Shape of Peace, and a metaphysical transformation which they must make or die. Also, there is a unicorn.

This is the sequel to A Succession of Bad Days. strikeslip described the series as "Imagine the Shire, but it's populated by six-foot-something very strong green people who drink poison, and also the rest of the world is Mordor. The shire-orcs spend their time trading pickles, designing short-range missiles, and having strong opinions about propriety re: who cooks and eats the latest giant monster. The author really *really* likes canals."

I'm re-reading this before I move on to the next book, and will put up discussion posts for the chunk I've read so far. Since I can't predict in advance when I'm putting up posts or how big the chunks will be, spoilers are likely to be incomprehensible without context, and events often only make sense in retrospect, it's fine to discuss the entire book in comments. No need for rot13 or anything like that.

They're really good about trying not to fill the link up with inarticulate expressions of joy.

The book opens with Zora taking a walk in the snow to escape the intense togetherness of the rest of the students, who have formed a polycule and are madly in love. This is probably the single most personally relatable moment for me in the series so far.

Most of this book is narrated by Zora, the youngest and least powerful of the students, the only one not in the polycule, and the only non-militant. (In this context, non-militant means psychologically incapable of using magic to kill... an intelligent being? Anything but a weed? Something like that.) Her magic involves doing things with objects and living things, and if that seems a bit vague, that's concerning to her too. The others seem to have largely figured out what their magical talents are, and she still hasn't. She's 21, everyone is in love but her, she's staring down the barrel of an immortality that means she'll outlive her family, and she has to grow up or die.

In the previous book, I liked Zora a lot but found her the least interesting of the group (well, after Kynefrid), as she had no trauma and didn't seem to have significant inner conflicts. My level of interest in her skyrocketed in the very first chapter.

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