[Fic Recs] Books: Fiction and Nonfiction!
Aug. 21st, 2022 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocochipbiscuitI haven't posted anything that wasn't fanfic-related since March, so...here are some books I've been reading in the interim!
Please note: I do include spoilers under the cut, but will try to separate them when possible.
Short Stories
The Night Dance by Leah Cypress - A retelling of the twelve dancing princesses story, with some gorgeous horror elements.
Ribbons by Natalia Theodoridou - A story about fairy tales and enchantments, following a trans man who's also a sex worker in a city full of magic and veterans of war and various curses. It's powerful and sensual and just packs so much in a short story, I really enjoyed this.
Books (Fiction)
On the Water by Jerica Taylor - Paranormal monster romance! Del is an investigator looking into the disappearance of local women, and Saira has entered the human world to retrieve a wayward guardsmen. They both end up searching a club on the river for their answers, and find each other. A bit short (I would have happily read a longer investigation that played up more of the mystery beats) but I love hot butches and river monsters!
Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto - Meddy Chan accidentally kills her blind date (who absolutely deserves it!) and her incredibly supportive (and meddling!) mother and aunties all swoop in to help dispose of the body…while also working the cake, make-up, flowers, and photography at a billionaire wedding! And then Meddy’s college sweetheart shows up?! It’s ridiculous, over-the-top rom-com goodness, and I just had a blast with this book! It’s fast-paced, silly, and absolutely steeped in immigrant Chino-Indonesian culture. Reading it as someone who’s also part of the Chinese diaspora feels like a big welcoming hug. :’)
The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monae - An anthology based on the world of Dirty Computer! Janelle Monae writes in collaboration with other storytellers, and it’s just. Gorgeous and delightfully weird in so many places, with people fighting for liberation (queerness, race, gender) in a totalitarian society, and it’s threaded through with the themes of memory as a means of control and time and it’s just! It’s gorgeous and weird and going to be one of my go-tos for recommending Afrofuturism to anyone!
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - A wealthy Mexican socialite goes to visit her newly-wed cousin, who’s sent a strange and frantic letter. Their home is a dilapidated house in the countryside, full of dark secrets, but she refuses to be cowed by her cousin’s menacing English husband or the repulsive family patriarch as she tries to uncover what’s happening.
It’s very true to the gothic horror elements (slow build! lingering chills!) and the dark history includes colonial exploitation and the racist eugenics of the house’s founder. Warnings for incest and attempted sexual assault.
Also it’s just!!! It’s so well done, the slow atmospheric build and the way all the pieces of mood and foreshadowing fit together until the reveal, I already want to reread it just so I can study the craft that went into it. It’s slow in the first half, but mostly because I wanted to savor each chapter like a square of very dark chocolate, but towards the end I stayed up past 1am because once the horrors were revealed, it was much faster-paced and I needed to know what happened next!!!
The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal - It’s 1963, ten years since the meteor strike that triggered climate disaster and the looming end of life on Earth, and Nicole Wargin, one of the original Lady Astronauts who pioneered the space colonization efforts, is balancing her image as a politician’s wife and the very real work she’s doing to prepare the international colony on the moon. Her husband is considering a run for President, but Nicole’s been assigned to investigate a possible saboteur on the moon. Politics, science, suspense, and mystery!!!
Longer and more spoilery comments from here!
.
.
.
(more spoilery comments) I’ve mentioned loving the thrill of scientific exploration with the Lady Astronaut series, and Nicole Wargin’s such a great character!!! She provides such a great contrast to Emma York (protagonist of the previous books), with her political savvy and more jaded outlook. There are a lot of things that made me grit my teeth with the younger Emma (like her well-meaning but clueless approach to racial tensions and complete failure to recognize queer issues) but Nicole provided much more insight and awareness of social cues. Which is part of her character! I was literally pumping my fist and going “YES!” at the reveal that she’d been a spy during WW2, because there had been just enough hints and context to help lead me to that conclusion before Nicole more overtly shared that information.
Also, Nicole’s just a type of character that I’ve never had much opportunity to see in fiction before. She’s a woman in her fifties, with arthritis and an eating disorder, and she’s such a badass! It’s handled with sensitivity and realism, including consequences (like the fact that her brittle bones fracture more easily), and the fact that, in her own words, she needs a little extra time to kill a man, compared to when she was fast and in her 20s.
Out of context favorite scene: where she interrogates the saboteur, and it’s just! Such a wonderfully written scene, both in terms of the control and the fury she feels, and the very real threat she represents. Again, even as a woman in her fifties with arthritis…she makes a very credible threat to kill a man, one which she absolutely could have followed through on, if she hadn’t made a promise to her friend and supervisor that she would stay within assigned parameters. It’s a scene I find myself wanting to read again, to pull apart and analyze, because it’s such a deliberate unmasking to expose the very real fury and ‘monstrousness’ that she feels. It's also interesting to me because even inside her head, she (and her supervisor) never consider torture a valid method of extracting information; her threat of violence is a way to destabilize the target, breaking him enough to extract the information they need, rather than physically laying her hands on him. (Even though she so badly wants to kill him. Not hurt him, but kill him.)
And on a more personal note…the way the author writes intimacy is so well done. I could truly believe in the relationship between Nicole and her husband, especially their long years of familiarity and the ways they reach out and care for one another, even at a distance. There’s love (and heat! Nothing explicit, but Nicole very frankly mentions what she finds arousing about her husband and the fact that she brought a vibrator to the moon for Reasons!) and it’s rare that I take notes outside of a romance novel for how to write relationships between characters.
While part of the Lady Astronaut series, I think this one stands on its own very well!
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata - This was given to me by a friend for my birthday! A bit outside what I usually read, but it was a quick read and I enjoyed it. :)
36 year-old Keiko Furukura has been working at the same convenience store for 18 years, and finds comfort in the familiar routines of the convenience store, anticipating the demands of the store’s customers and the established script of interactions. She has no identity beyond her work, but is content. The store’s equilibrium (and hers) is disrupted when a new employee, Shiraha is fired for not only failing to do his work, but stalking a female customer. Keiko has been facing pressure to start dating and find a husband, and decides that Shiraha will suffice.
I haven’t read a lot of translated Japanese literature, so I’m not sure how much is genre convention vs translation, but there’s a sort of heightened reality in even the most mundane experiences that I find compelling. The characters (Keiko included) feel more like archetypes than individuals, but I still found myself rooting for Keiko as she decides to go against societal pressure to pursue her own happiness, humble as it may be. Keiko reads to me as somewhere on the autistic spectrum, with a blunt efficacy that’s sometimes horrifying. (Like with her passing thought about the quickest way to quiet a baby!) Shiraha’s general horribleness simply slides off her because she simply doesn’t view him as anything more than a convenient camouflage.
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold - I’ve loved the Vorkosigan Saga since I was a teenager, and it was really refreshing to read a book that revisits Cordelia’s perspective!!! This is three years after her famous husband’s death, and Cordelia Vorkosigan, the Vicereine of Sergyar, is contemplating what to do after a long career entangled in Barrayar’s politics. Oliver Jole, Admiral of the Sergyar Fleet and Lord Vorkosigan’s other lover, is also contemplating a career change. There’s less explosions and intrigue (though still political intrigue!), and more contemplation of what it means to make a legacy. And, eventually, Jole and Cordelia coming together as a new dyad, after having been part of a triad.
There’s just such weight and emotional nuance, I always love this author’s prose. And it was startling for me to realize that I’ve almost literally aged along with Miles Vorkosigan; I happened to read the majority of the books when I was within a few years of Miles’ age, and it brings a different sort of emotional weight to realizing how my reactions and sympathies to particular characters have changed over time. Which meant I wanted to reread Barrayar.
Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold - Wow, this book was brutal. And I remembered it being brutal the first time I read it, but it punched me in new ways. Nutshell synopsis: Cordelia left her home colony to marry Aral Vorkosigan, and is once again embroiled in Barrayar’s bloody politics and a new civil war. Her unborn son, Miles, is one of the first casualties, and placed in a uterine replicator with severe teratogenic injuries. When the uterine replicator is taken hostage by enemy forces, Cordelia launches a commando raid to reclaim him.
It’s so gripping to me because it’s at once so deeply personal for Cordelia, but also gives all sorts of rippling aftershocks because Barrayar is so deeply culturally backwards, by her standards; no one expects her to save a ‘mutie’ son, the primitive eugenics and casual cruelty towards disability, the rampant misogyny and dismissal of Cordelia’s own military experience…it was fascinating for me to reread this immediately after reading Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, because that contrast with early-Cordelia missing social cues or catching insults only after the fact due to severe culture clash, vs the savvy and well-established Vicereine is phenomenal. Early Cordelia tried to be a ‘good Barrayaran wife’ by holding Miles in own womb, and by trying not to make too many ripples, but when everything the planet demanded of her was too much, she forged her own path.
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao - This book is extremely YA, by which I mean it’s about as subtle as a brick to the face but by gosh it was a fun ride!
I’ve read blurbs pitching it as something like ‘Pacific Rim meets Handmaid’s Tale,’ but the vibe is pure unhinged anime fury! The setting is based on Chinese history, but shot into a far-future setting as male/female pairs (pilot-princes and their ‘concubines’) pilot giant mechas to hold off hostile alien forces! Unfortunately, the women almost always die, and the army devours new concubines to continue the cycle.
Zetian joins the army to murder the pilot responsible for her sister’s death, and emerges as the Iron Widow: one of the few girls who not only survive, but kill the male pilot they’re paired with. The army, eager to get rid of her and to neutralize another ‘problem’ they’ve been having, pair her with the infamous Li Shimin, expecting one of them to kill the other. They not only survive, but join forces with Gao Yizhi, the son of the richest man in Huaxia. There is a love triangle! It resolves with polyamory! (After all, a triangle is the strongest shape!) Multiple fight scenes and action sequences, while Zetian plots how to destroy the misogynistic pilot system!
This is a book that’s not interested in subtlety, and you know what? I’ll ride with it! It’s fun! Zetian is angry, frequently lashes out, and disregards collateral damage. She and Shimin also literally torture a man to death to extract information, then goes home to dumplings with Yizhi.
My main criticism is that Zetian feels very much ‘not like the other girls,’ because she’s the only female character who actively rages against or is upset by the status quo. She has no female friends or allies, and while to a certain extent that’s because Zetian is, in general, much better at making enemies than friends…there’s also a certain amount of rationalization as Zetian reflects that many women (her mother included) have bought into the system because they don’t know how to fight it, and have invested their personal survival with upholding the system. There’s a scene where Zetian tries to make friends with one of the Iron Princesses (a woman married to her copilot, who survives every battle alongside her husband) and is knocked aside because the woman accuses her of trying to seduce her husband. It’s. Uh. Definitely a choice. From a meta level I understand the point as ‘not all women are naturally allies against the patriarchy’ but it’s still pretty sour.
Subject-wise, this is more mature than I’m used to expecting from YA; part of me wonders what this could have been if it had been pitched as Adult Science-Fiction instead, with certain characters and scenes expanded.
Either way, I’m reading the next book whenever it comes out. I want to see what happens next!
Double Exposure by Rien Gray — “Jillian is a world-class thief, but Sloane stole her heart and broke it in two. Now they’re in the way of a new heist. She could kiss them or kill them, but falling in love again? Should be completely out of the question.”
Or: NB/F heist romance!!! Friends to lovers to exes to rivals to partners to lovers!!!! (Though really, the book picks up on the rivals/enemies part!) This was such a fun romp, and the alternating POV gives such gems like “Stealing is like falling in love.”/”Stealing is like sex.” as we go between chapters and see the emotional parallels between characters!
Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan - I can’t possibly blurb this better than the author’s own summary, so here goes!
“Mrs. Bertrice Martin—a widow, some seventy-three years young—has kept her youthful-ish appearance with the most powerful of home remedies: daily doses of spite, regular baths in man-tears, and refusing to give so much as a single damn about her Terrible Nephew.
Then proper, correct Miss Violetta Beauchamps, a sprightly young thing of nine and sixty, crashes into her life. The Terrible Nephew is living in her rooming house, and Violetta wants him gone.
Mrs. Martin isn’t about to start giving damns, not even for someone as intriguing as Miss Violetta. But she hatches another plan—to make her nephew sorry, to make Miss Violetta smile, and to have the finest adventure of all time.
If she makes Terrible Men angry and wins the hand of a lovely lady in the process? Those are just added bonuses.
Author’s Note: Sometimes I write villains who are subtle and nuanced. This is not one of those times. The Terrible Nephew is terrible, and terrible things happen to him. Sometimes villains really are bad and wrong, and sometimes, we want them to suffer a lot of consequences.”
An incomplete list of consequences: siccing off-key carolers to sing after the Terrible Nephew, releasing a gaggle of geese in his living quarters, and loudly and cheerfully promising twice the going rate to any sex workers who choose not to fuck the Terrible Nephew! And, the spoiler-iffic finale….burning down his lodgings, his gentleman’s club, and making cheese toasties over the flames. It’s really quite delightful!
Donut Fall in Love by Jackie Lau - F/M Chinese-Canadian romcom!!! Ryan Kwok is an actor whose abs have their own hashtag, and whose father would rather roast him on Twitter than meet him for dim sum! Lindsay MacLeod is a baker who co-owns a cake and donut shop, and has been struggling with stagnation in her personal life! They meet when he accidentally knocks over two dozen specialty donuts! And after signing up for a celebrity episode of Baking Fail, he asks Lindsay to teach him how to bake!
This is sweet and delicious. Very little happens compared to the other romances I’ve been reading, but the emotional stakes as they bond over grief and bubble tea and Ryan tries to connect with his father made me just as invested.
Also, a vast and wonderful shout-out for Olivia Waite's Feminine Pursuits series: A Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics, The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows, and The Hellion's Waltz. I binged them all, loved them, and wish I had more F/F historical fiction to devour!
Books (Nonfiction)
Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis - A book about the history of the conservation and environmentalist movements, including historical figures I vaguely remembered from school and those entirely new to me! It includes the messy history of conservation (such as the fact that many original ‘conservation’ leaders were, in fact, more interested in conserving the type of animals they enjoyed hunting, and their racism and Eurocentrism) and the shift in perspective from seeing conservation as constantly in crisis, using heroic efforts to save on the brink species, to looking at the more interconnected and holistic ways of trying to preserve multiple species and their environment. I fully admit this is a topic that I know little about, but I found it interesting and educational.
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo - I’ve been meaning to read this for a while; mental health isn’t discussed as much among the Asian diaspora, and it was excellent. Heavy reading at times, due to the subject matter, but mostly healing. It begins with Stephanie talking about how she was abused as a child, the ways it affected her as an adult, and then discusses treatments and revisiting her hometown and putting it in greater context not just as something she went through, alone and isolated, but in terms of community and the way that racism and the model minority myth affects Asian-Americans.
The Sirens of Mars by Sarah Stewart Johnson - Part memoir, part retrospective, the author discusses the history of the search for life on Mars, including her own personal journey as a female scientist and researcher, then building a family and the parallels between seeking the intimacy of connection and knowledge both on distant planets and on our own world. This is one of the most poetic, almost lyrical books I’ve read about science, and I found it very accessible.
I want to make a fanfic rec list before the Black Emporium fics come out...if only so I can start 'fresh' by making a list of BE-specific recs. I also want to reread The Locked Tomb before Nona the Ninth comes out!
Anyone else have books or fics you're looking forward to reading? :D
Please note: I do include spoilers under the cut, but will try to separate them when possible.
Short Stories
The Night Dance by Leah Cypress - A retelling of the twelve dancing princesses story, with some gorgeous horror elements.
Ribbons by Natalia Theodoridou - A story about fairy tales and enchantments, following a trans man who's also a sex worker in a city full of magic and veterans of war and various curses. It's powerful and sensual and just packs so much in a short story, I really enjoyed this.
Books (Fiction)
On the Water by Jerica Taylor - Paranormal monster romance! Del is an investigator looking into the disappearance of local women, and Saira has entered the human world to retrieve a wayward guardsmen. They both end up searching a club on the river for their answers, and find each other. A bit short (I would have happily read a longer investigation that played up more of the mystery beats) but I love hot butches and river monsters!
Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto - Meddy Chan accidentally kills her blind date (who absolutely deserves it!) and her incredibly supportive (and meddling!) mother and aunties all swoop in to help dispose of the body…while also working the cake, make-up, flowers, and photography at a billionaire wedding! And then Meddy’s college sweetheart shows up?! It’s ridiculous, over-the-top rom-com goodness, and I just had a blast with this book! It’s fast-paced, silly, and absolutely steeped in immigrant Chino-Indonesian culture. Reading it as someone who’s also part of the Chinese diaspora feels like a big welcoming hug. :’)
The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monae - An anthology based on the world of Dirty Computer! Janelle Monae writes in collaboration with other storytellers, and it’s just. Gorgeous and delightfully weird in so many places, with people fighting for liberation (queerness, race, gender) in a totalitarian society, and it’s threaded through with the themes of memory as a means of control and time and it’s just! It’s gorgeous and weird and going to be one of my go-tos for recommending Afrofuturism to anyone!
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - A wealthy Mexican socialite goes to visit her newly-wed cousin, who’s sent a strange and frantic letter. Their home is a dilapidated house in the countryside, full of dark secrets, but she refuses to be cowed by her cousin’s menacing English husband or the repulsive family patriarch as she tries to uncover what’s happening.
It’s very true to the gothic horror elements (slow build! lingering chills!) and the dark history includes colonial exploitation and the racist eugenics of the house’s founder. Warnings for incest and attempted sexual assault.
Also it’s just!!! It’s so well done, the slow atmospheric build and the way all the pieces of mood and foreshadowing fit together until the reveal, I already want to reread it just so I can study the craft that went into it. It’s slow in the first half, but mostly because I wanted to savor each chapter like a square of very dark chocolate, but towards the end I stayed up past 1am because once the horrors were revealed, it was much faster-paced and I needed to know what happened next!!!
The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal - It’s 1963, ten years since the meteor strike that triggered climate disaster and the looming end of life on Earth, and Nicole Wargin, one of the original Lady Astronauts who pioneered the space colonization efforts, is balancing her image as a politician’s wife and the very real work she’s doing to prepare the international colony on the moon. Her husband is considering a run for President, but Nicole’s been assigned to investigate a possible saboteur on the moon. Politics, science, suspense, and mystery!!!
Longer and more spoilery comments from here!
.
.
.
(more spoilery comments) I’ve mentioned loving the thrill of scientific exploration with the Lady Astronaut series, and Nicole Wargin’s such a great character!!! She provides such a great contrast to Emma York (protagonist of the previous books), with her political savvy and more jaded outlook. There are a lot of things that made me grit my teeth with the younger Emma (like her well-meaning but clueless approach to racial tensions and complete failure to recognize queer issues) but Nicole provided much more insight and awareness of social cues. Which is part of her character! I was literally pumping my fist and going “YES!” at the reveal that she’d been a spy during WW2, because there had been just enough hints and context to help lead me to that conclusion before Nicole more overtly shared that information.
Also, Nicole’s just a type of character that I’ve never had much opportunity to see in fiction before. She’s a woman in her fifties, with arthritis and an eating disorder, and she’s such a badass! It’s handled with sensitivity and realism, including consequences (like the fact that her brittle bones fracture more easily), and the fact that, in her own words, she needs a little extra time to kill a man, compared to when she was fast and in her 20s.
Out of context favorite scene: where she interrogates the saboteur, and it’s just! Such a wonderfully written scene, both in terms of the control and the fury she feels, and the very real threat she represents. Again, even as a woman in her fifties with arthritis…she makes a very credible threat to kill a man, one which she absolutely could have followed through on, if she hadn’t made a promise to her friend and supervisor that she would stay within assigned parameters. It’s a scene I find myself wanting to read again, to pull apart and analyze, because it’s such a deliberate unmasking to expose the very real fury and ‘monstrousness’ that she feels. It's also interesting to me because even inside her head, she (and her supervisor) never consider torture a valid method of extracting information; her threat of violence is a way to destabilize the target, breaking him enough to extract the information they need, rather than physically laying her hands on him. (Even though she so badly wants to kill him. Not hurt him, but kill him.)
And on a more personal note…the way the author writes intimacy is so well done. I could truly believe in the relationship between Nicole and her husband, especially their long years of familiarity and the ways they reach out and care for one another, even at a distance. There’s love (and heat! Nothing explicit, but Nicole very frankly mentions what she finds arousing about her husband and the fact that she brought a vibrator to the moon for Reasons!) and it’s rare that I take notes outside of a romance novel for how to write relationships between characters.
While part of the Lady Astronaut series, I think this one stands on its own very well!
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata - This was given to me by a friend for my birthday! A bit outside what I usually read, but it was a quick read and I enjoyed it. :)
36 year-old Keiko Furukura has been working at the same convenience store for 18 years, and finds comfort in the familiar routines of the convenience store, anticipating the demands of the store’s customers and the established script of interactions. She has no identity beyond her work, but is content. The store’s equilibrium (and hers) is disrupted when a new employee, Shiraha is fired for not only failing to do his work, but stalking a female customer. Keiko has been facing pressure to start dating and find a husband, and decides that Shiraha will suffice.
I haven’t read a lot of translated Japanese literature, so I’m not sure how much is genre convention vs translation, but there’s a sort of heightened reality in even the most mundane experiences that I find compelling. The characters (Keiko included) feel more like archetypes than individuals, but I still found myself rooting for Keiko as she decides to go against societal pressure to pursue her own happiness, humble as it may be. Keiko reads to me as somewhere on the autistic spectrum, with a blunt efficacy that’s sometimes horrifying. (Like with her passing thought about the quickest way to quiet a baby!) Shiraha’s general horribleness simply slides off her because she simply doesn’t view him as anything more than a convenient camouflage.
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold - I’ve loved the Vorkosigan Saga since I was a teenager, and it was really refreshing to read a book that revisits Cordelia’s perspective!!! This is three years after her famous husband’s death, and Cordelia Vorkosigan, the Vicereine of Sergyar, is contemplating what to do after a long career entangled in Barrayar’s politics. Oliver Jole, Admiral of the Sergyar Fleet and Lord Vorkosigan’s other lover, is also contemplating a career change. There’s less explosions and intrigue (though still political intrigue!), and more contemplation of what it means to make a legacy. And, eventually, Jole and Cordelia coming together as a new dyad, after having been part of a triad.
There’s just such weight and emotional nuance, I always love this author’s prose. And it was startling for me to realize that I’ve almost literally aged along with Miles Vorkosigan; I happened to read the majority of the books when I was within a few years of Miles’ age, and it brings a different sort of emotional weight to realizing how my reactions and sympathies to particular characters have changed over time. Which meant I wanted to reread Barrayar.
Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold - Wow, this book was brutal. And I remembered it being brutal the first time I read it, but it punched me in new ways. Nutshell synopsis: Cordelia left her home colony to marry Aral Vorkosigan, and is once again embroiled in Barrayar’s bloody politics and a new civil war. Her unborn son, Miles, is one of the first casualties, and placed in a uterine replicator with severe teratogenic injuries. When the uterine replicator is taken hostage by enemy forces, Cordelia launches a commando raid to reclaim him.
It’s so gripping to me because it’s at once so deeply personal for Cordelia, but also gives all sorts of rippling aftershocks because Barrayar is so deeply culturally backwards, by her standards; no one expects her to save a ‘mutie’ son, the primitive eugenics and casual cruelty towards disability, the rampant misogyny and dismissal of Cordelia’s own military experience…it was fascinating for me to reread this immediately after reading Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, because that contrast with early-Cordelia missing social cues or catching insults only after the fact due to severe culture clash, vs the savvy and well-established Vicereine is phenomenal. Early Cordelia tried to be a ‘good Barrayaran wife’ by holding Miles in own womb, and by trying not to make too many ripples, but when everything the planet demanded of her was too much, she forged her own path.
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao - This book is extremely YA, by which I mean it’s about as subtle as a brick to the face but by gosh it was a fun ride!
I’ve read blurbs pitching it as something like ‘Pacific Rim meets Handmaid’s Tale,’ but the vibe is pure unhinged anime fury! The setting is based on Chinese history, but shot into a far-future setting as male/female pairs (pilot-princes and their ‘concubines’) pilot giant mechas to hold off hostile alien forces! Unfortunately, the women almost always die, and the army devours new concubines to continue the cycle.
Zetian joins the army to murder the pilot responsible for her sister’s death, and emerges as the Iron Widow: one of the few girls who not only survive, but kill the male pilot they’re paired with. The army, eager to get rid of her and to neutralize another ‘problem’ they’ve been having, pair her with the infamous Li Shimin, expecting one of them to kill the other. They not only survive, but join forces with Gao Yizhi, the son of the richest man in Huaxia. There is a love triangle! It resolves with polyamory! (After all, a triangle is the strongest shape!) Multiple fight scenes and action sequences, while Zetian plots how to destroy the misogynistic pilot system!
This is a book that’s not interested in subtlety, and you know what? I’ll ride with it! It’s fun! Zetian is angry, frequently lashes out, and disregards collateral damage. She and Shimin also literally torture a man to death to extract information, then goes home to dumplings with Yizhi.
My main criticism is that Zetian feels very much ‘not like the other girls,’ because she’s the only female character who actively rages against or is upset by the status quo. She has no female friends or allies, and while to a certain extent that’s because Zetian is, in general, much better at making enemies than friends…there’s also a certain amount of rationalization as Zetian reflects that many women (her mother included) have bought into the system because they don’t know how to fight it, and have invested their personal survival with upholding the system. There’s a scene where Zetian tries to make friends with one of the Iron Princesses (a woman married to her copilot, who survives every battle alongside her husband) and is knocked aside because the woman accuses her of trying to seduce her husband. It’s. Uh. Definitely a choice. From a meta level I understand the point as ‘not all women are naturally allies against the patriarchy’ but it’s still pretty sour.
Subject-wise, this is more mature than I’m used to expecting from YA; part of me wonders what this could have been if it had been pitched as Adult Science-Fiction instead, with certain characters and scenes expanded.
Either way, I’m reading the next book whenever it comes out. I want to see what happens next!
Double Exposure by Rien Gray — “Jillian is a world-class thief, but Sloane stole her heart and broke it in two. Now they’re in the way of a new heist. She could kiss them or kill them, but falling in love again? Should be completely out of the question.”
Or: NB/F heist romance!!! Friends to lovers to exes to rivals to partners to lovers!!!! (Though really, the book picks up on the rivals/enemies part!) This was such a fun romp, and the alternating POV gives such gems like “Stealing is like falling in love.”/”Stealing is like sex.” as we go between chapters and see the emotional parallels between characters!
Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan - I can’t possibly blurb this better than the author’s own summary, so here goes!
“Mrs. Bertrice Martin—a widow, some seventy-three years young—has kept her youthful-ish appearance with the most powerful of home remedies: daily doses of spite, regular baths in man-tears, and refusing to give so much as a single damn about her Terrible Nephew.
Then proper, correct Miss Violetta Beauchamps, a sprightly young thing of nine and sixty, crashes into her life. The Terrible Nephew is living in her rooming house, and Violetta wants him gone.
Mrs. Martin isn’t about to start giving damns, not even for someone as intriguing as Miss Violetta. But she hatches another plan—to make her nephew sorry, to make Miss Violetta smile, and to have the finest adventure of all time.
If she makes Terrible Men angry and wins the hand of a lovely lady in the process? Those are just added bonuses.
Author’s Note: Sometimes I write villains who are subtle and nuanced. This is not one of those times. The Terrible Nephew is terrible, and terrible things happen to him. Sometimes villains really are bad and wrong, and sometimes, we want them to suffer a lot of consequences.”
An incomplete list of consequences: siccing off-key carolers to sing after the Terrible Nephew, releasing a gaggle of geese in his living quarters, and loudly and cheerfully promising twice the going rate to any sex workers who choose not to fuck the Terrible Nephew! And, the spoiler-iffic finale….burning down his lodgings, his gentleman’s club, and making cheese toasties over the flames. It’s really quite delightful!
Donut Fall in Love by Jackie Lau - F/M Chinese-Canadian romcom!!! Ryan Kwok is an actor whose abs have their own hashtag, and whose father would rather roast him on Twitter than meet him for dim sum! Lindsay MacLeod is a baker who co-owns a cake and donut shop, and has been struggling with stagnation in her personal life! They meet when he accidentally knocks over two dozen specialty donuts! And after signing up for a celebrity episode of Baking Fail, he asks Lindsay to teach him how to bake!
This is sweet and delicious. Very little happens compared to the other romances I’ve been reading, but the emotional stakes as they bond over grief and bubble tea and Ryan tries to connect with his father made me just as invested.
Also, a vast and wonderful shout-out for Olivia Waite's Feminine Pursuits series: A Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics, The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows, and The Hellion's Waltz. I binged them all, loved them, and wish I had more F/F historical fiction to devour!
Books (Nonfiction)
Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis - A book about the history of the conservation and environmentalist movements, including historical figures I vaguely remembered from school and those entirely new to me! It includes the messy history of conservation (such as the fact that many original ‘conservation’ leaders were, in fact, more interested in conserving the type of animals they enjoyed hunting, and their racism and Eurocentrism) and the shift in perspective from seeing conservation as constantly in crisis, using heroic efforts to save on the brink species, to looking at the more interconnected and holistic ways of trying to preserve multiple species and their environment. I fully admit this is a topic that I know little about, but I found it interesting and educational.
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo - I’ve been meaning to read this for a while; mental health isn’t discussed as much among the Asian diaspora, and it was excellent. Heavy reading at times, due to the subject matter, but mostly healing. It begins with Stephanie talking about how she was abused as a child, the ways it affected her as an adult, and then discusses treatments and revisiting her hometown and putting it in greater context not just as something she went through, alone and isolated, but in terms of community and the way that racism and the model minority myth affects Asian-Americans.
The Sirens of Mars by Sarah Stewart Johnson - Part memoir, part retrospective, the author discusses the history of the search for life on Mars, including her own personal journey as a female scientist and researcher, then building a family and the parallels between seeking the intimacy of connection and knowledge both on distant planets and on our own world. This is one of the most poetic, almost lyrical books I’ve read about science, and I found it very accessible.
I want to make a fanfic rec list before the Black Emporium fics come out...if only so I can start 'fresh' by making a list of BE-specific recs. I also want to reread The Locked Tomb before Nona the Ninth comes out!
Anyone else have books or fics you're looking forward to reading? :D
