Favourite Books of 2022

I’m all caught up, which means it’s time for this year’s look at my favourite reads from the last twelve months.

2022 felt like a reading year in two parts. I read voraciously for the first 7 or 8 months of the year, finishing my Goodreads challenge of 60 Books in record (for me) time. Then, some time around September, I lost focus and never managed to recover. I usually average around 6 books a month, but for the 4 months I’ve been pushing myself to even make it through 3 or 4 books. I don’t know if it’s stress, distractions, mental health, that I’m not choosing the right reading material, or e) some combination of all of the above, but I hope my ability to read returns swiftly.

I totaled 76 books this year, and some of the highlights of my bookish year included belonging, for a month, to three different book clubs at the same time (work, run by friends, and one run by me), beginning a 10th anniversary re-read of my favourite series (Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles) and having an absolute blast discussing the first three books in the series with my fandom friends over zoom, and going for a blackout in Roar Cat Reads’ Summer Book Bingo by reading 24 books on specific prompts, all featuring LGBTQ+ characters or authors!

Honourable Mentions

They didn’t quite make the cut, but a quick mention for some of the other books this year that I enjoyed:

The Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney – I saw a stunning production of “The Brothers Size” pre-pandemic and have been hoping the rest of the triptych would be mounted soon, but while I wait to see them live it was a pleasure to read all three plays. There’s a rhythm to the plays and I found them very visual and easy to picture.

Peter Darling by Austin Chant – I’m not normally one for fairy tale retellings, but I found this one, where Peter is trans and, as an adult, re-evaluating his feelings for Hook, inspired and profound.

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan – This queer reimagining of the life and ascension of Zhu Yuanzhuang, the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty, plays with gender in really interesting ways and I was intrigued by the politics and by Zhu’s rise.

The List

“Going through the mirrors requires confronting yourself. You need guts, you know, to look yourself straight in the eyes, to see yourself as you are, to dive into your own reflection. Those who hide their faces, those who lie to themselves, those who see themselves better than they are, they will never be able.”

10. A Winter’s Promise and The Missing of Clairdelune by Christelle Dabos (Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle)

A gift exchange with friends put A Winter’s Promise on my radar, and hilariously I was quickly spoiled for my secret book swap by two of the friends discussing A Winter’s Promise on Twitter and then panicking that I would buy it for myself before our exchange date. I may have known what book I was opening, but at least it was one that looked interesting! Sure enough, I really enjoyed the first book in Chistelle Dabos’ YA fantasy quartet about Ophelia, a quiet girl with the ability to ‘read’ inanimate objects and travel through mirrors, who must suddenly leave her family and her home to marry the aloof, cold Thorn and navigate the complicated politics of his world. I also enjoyed its sequel, The Missing of Clairedelune, which deepens the relationship between Ophelia and Thorn. Unfortunately I felt like the first two books almost felt like a separate duology, while the latter two felt entirely different and brought the quartet to a fairly disappointing ending. Still, I’ll always appreciate Ophelia and Thorn and the fascinating world building that Dabos does here. The first two books in the series were a gripping read!

“This is a love story to its blade-dented bone.”

9. The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

Last year Simon Jimenez narrowly missed out on being my favourite book of the year with his brilliant and affecting science-fiction novel The Vanished Birds. This year, I fell in love with his grim fantasy epic The Spear Cuts Through Water. If I could marry Jimenez’s prose, I would. The way he writes is lyrical, moving, epic in scale and world building, and yet intimate when it comes to his characters. The Spear Cuts Through Water is about as different from his previous book as it’s possible to be, and yet it’s also an incredible read. Though the world he creates here is violent and his protagonists both have traumatic pasts to reckon with, watching their arcs as the two warriors, Jun and Keema, grow from reluctantly depending on one another as travel companions, to yearning for one another hooked me and made my heart ache. At this point Simon Jimenez is an auto-buy author for me, and I cannot wait to see what he does next.

“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.”

8. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

I’ve been thinking a lot about Emily St. John Mandel over the past few years, as her “pandemic book”, the brilliant Station Eleven, has had a deserving resurgence and even a TV adaptation, that I have yet to watch. I spent this year catching up, reading first The Glass Hotel, which I also enjoyed, and then her latest, Sea of Tranquility. The thing about her work is that it’s so consistently excellent – how does she do it? I am wholeheartedly invested in the Emily St. John Mandel Literature Universe. I love the little threads that connect her books, the commonalities between three otherwise very different novels, and how compulsively readable, accessible, and yet lyrically written all of her works are. While Station Eleven is still my favourite of St. John Mandel’s works, Sea of Tranquility was a joy to read.

“Sometimes his very existence to me is the existence of love itself.”

7. Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

Told with warmth and honesty, Love in the Big City follows Young, a gay Korean man and aspiring author, who is searching for love in Seoul, South Korea. In all four of its interconnected parts, this slim novel moves between the past and present to explore people and relationships significant to Young throughout his twenties and thirties. The narrative voice is so candid and distinct that I felt like an old friend listening to Young discuss his relationships over drinks at a bar. I both laughed and nearly cried reading Love in the Big City, and found it a moving, raw, and often humorous look at young queer life in Seoul.

“Love can’t cure a mental illness. There are lots of ways to help him, you can just be there. To listen. To talk. To cheer him up if he’s having a bad day. And on the bad days you can ask what to could do to make things easier. Stand by his side, even when things are hard. But also knowing that sometimes people need more support than just one person can give. That’s love darling.”

6. Heartstopper volume 4 by Alice Oseman

I’m a big Alice Oseman fan and have been reading the Heartstopper digests as they’re published and loving the dose of endorphins they give me. While Heartstopper has never shied away from dealing with challenging topics, including bullying and homophobia, volume four shines a spotlight on Charlie’s anxiety and disordered eating problems as he seeks professional help. Just as poignant is Nick’s struggle, as he watches someone he loves in pain and isn’t sure how to help him. As someone who has been having my own mental health struggle, especially recently, this struck close to home for me and I was moved by Charlie’s bravery to face his problems and admit that he’s not okay and he can’t do it alone. Volume four definitely made me tear-up with its gentle, but honest storyline and I love that Charlie and Nick come out the other side stronger together.

“I think perhaps our kissing did do something strange to the way time flowed in the space occupied by our two bodies. Underneath me, she was perfectly open and sweet, content to be kissed and ravished. It couldn’t have lasted as long as I thought it did—long enough to build monuments that crumbled to marbled ruins, long enough that the entire city of Los Angeles fell into the fault line and was rebuilt on its own corpse—but when I looked up, I felt oddly sphinx-like, other and strange.”

5. Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

Writing lists of your favourite books from the last three years over a period of three days really lets you see which authors pop up again and again! Nghi Vo knocked me out with her debut novella, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, and this year I’ve been widely recommending her second novel, Siren Queen. The way Vo writes is so lush and atmospheric that it draws me in and I love her queer Asian women characters who take no shit. Set in a fantastical Hollywood, where both magic and monsters are real, Siren Queen is about Luli Wei, an ambitious, queer, Chinese-American girl who dreams of being a movie star. Gaining the leverage to propel herself into Hollywood, Luli puts some conditions on her contract: “No maids, no funny talking, no fainting flowers.” At first, the studio doesn’t know what to do with her, but then she’s cast as a monster and her star begins to rise. An atmospheric, enthralling story that asks how much of yourself are you willing to carve out for a shot at immortality?

“The grief of the stones was grief for every man killed in the building of the wall, for every man who died defending or attacking, for every man executed by being thrown off the battlements. “But those are our worst criminals!” the king protests, and the young man says, “That doesn’t matter to the stones.”

4. The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison

My review of this on Goodreads was just “I love Thara Celehar so much you guys” and that remains true! If you too enjoy watching a lonely, haunted, depressed, gay man of faith solve murders in a steampunk fantasy setting populated by elves and goblins, then you’re going to love both The Witness for the Dead and its sequel, The Grief of Stones. Thara’s journey in The Grief of Stones as he reckons with a loss and how this loss changes his core identity is heartbreaking and profound. There’s also a side mystery featuring scones, so obviously I loved this book. I will read as many stories about Thara Celehar as Katherine Addison is willing to write.

“Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.”

3. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

King Lear is my favourite Shakespeare play and one of my favourite plays period, so I’ve had this acclaimed retelling, which casts Lear as an aging Iowa farmer dividing his thousand acre farm between his three daughters, on my list for ages. I’m so glad I finally picked it up, because A Thousand Acres is everything it promised to be. As a retelling it succeeds by finding the perfect balance between nods to Shakespeare’s play and doing something original and exciting rather than strictly updating the source material. The characters are layered, and I love that our viewpoint character is Ginny (Goneril in King Lear), which give us a fresh perspective on the story. Smiley’s writing and her character work drew me in and I think A Thousand Acres is that exceptional retelling that stands alone but can be enriched through some understanding of Lear.

“And if perhaps his friends had just learned his name, that the aloof small mage and artist was called Raphael, had a brother from another world called Kasian, well, he had to admit that he was rather relieved, in that distant marionette way, that he would not end the Game with no one to know his real name.”

2. Til Human Voices Wake Us by Victoria Goddard

Last year, Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor topped my list of Favourite Reads. Although considerably less polished, her debut novel Til Human Voices Wake Us was one of my favourite books of 2022. Perhaps not since Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell have I encountered a book that meshed together so many of my special interests that it felt written just for me. Til Human Voices Wake Us is about Raphael, the Lord of Ysthar (our Earth), who is coming to the end of a centuries-old contest with an opposing mage. If he loses “The Great Game”, Ysthar will be forfeit. At this worst of all possible times, his life is upended by the arrival of his long-lost twin brother. Combining complicated brother bonds, a protagonist who hides behind masks, music, a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and Shakespeare, Til Human Voices Wake Us very nearly brought me to tears and Raphael, this withdrawn man with the weight of the world literally and metaphorically on his shoulders, is one of my new favourite fictional characters.

“You’ll find that what you can bear increases a great deal when you are not offered any other choice.”

1. The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller

Judging from the 3.60 rating on Goodreads, this is a divisive choice for the number one spot, but it’s my list and I loved it. I do think The Bone Orchard is either a book you are going to absolutely adore or that it’s style just won’t be to your tastes. For me, it was clearly the former. Sara A. Mueller’s genre-defying debut novel is part political fantasy, part gothic revenge narrative, and part murder mystery. It revolves around Charm, the necromantic mistress of a brothel that services the wealthy of Borenguard, including its Emperor. When Charm is summoned to the Emperor’s deathbed, he charges her with choosing which of his awful sons will carry on the empire, and discovering which one is responsible for his own murder. I read The Bone Orchard compulsively in three or four days, drawn in by the rich world building, visual storytelling, the deft plotting, and the character work. I fell in love with its characters, especially Charm, who rebels through dying her hair in vibrant shades, and Justice, the most compassionate of Charm’s boneghosts. It’s densely written and there’s a lot to keep track of, but if you’re up for some intense courtly intrigue and themes of trauma, The Bone Orchard is a rewarding and wholly original read. It’s absolutely deserving of the title of my favourite book read in 2022 and although this is a standalone, I cannot wait to see what Sara Mueller comes up with next!


I’d love to know what books made your favourites lists, so let me know in the comments or drop a link to your blog posts so I can add to next year’s TBR!

Wishing you all a wonderful new year filled with new favourite reads and unexpected delights! See you in 2023.

Favourite Books of 2021

In which I continue my blast from the past with a list of my favourite books of 2021.

2021 was an unexpectedly fabulous year of reading for me! I read 86 books, a personal best in the years that I’ve been keeping track, and I found a lot of new favourites. Looking at general trends, I loved a large number of science-fiction books this year (4 of my top 10 books). Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a pandemic year, I was also drawn to books about lonely, isolated people finding companionship.

Honourable Mentions

So many great books means that a few of them just missed the cut. I absolutely love the ballet Nijinsky, which uses some of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 (The Year 1905) in its score, so I was fascinated by Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time, a spare, compact book about the composer and the compromises he must make to the integrity of his art to appease the Soviet Union. I raced through Juliet Marillier’s fantasy novel The Daughter of the Forest, which is loosely based on loosely based on the legend of the Children of Lir and “The Six Swans”, and rooted for its protagonist as she endures hardship for the chance to save her beloved brothers. Continuing my exploration of Jane Austen’s works, I enjoyed Emma, but admit that I needed a second read to truly understand and adore it. I thought E.J. Beaton’s political fantasy The Councillor was tremendous fun with a protagonist I adored. And of course Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series continues to deliver and I loved her take on a murder mystery in Fugitive Telemetry.

The List

“I can’t always speak my mind, not if I want to get the things I need or go places I need to go. Everything I do, every word I say, is calculated to make people comfortable. To make them respect me. None of it is a lie, but it is an act, and it’s one that gets very, very tiring.”

10. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

I wasn’t as taken with Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers’ third Wayfarers book and wondered if the series was losing its shine, but the final volume, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within moved me to tears. Chambers’ unique brand of hopepunk is virtually plotless – it features several aliens who face travel delays and are unexpectedly stranded together at an interstellar port – but as the characters’ stories are revealed to one another, they show each other the kindness and understanding so present in all of Chambers’ work. The book never feels preachy, and yet each of the characters’ predicaments have real world resonance. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within offers the same comfort as slipping into your pajamas and holding a cup of your hot beverage of choice in hand. There’s something powerful in that. While saying goodbye to the Wayfarers series is a bittersweet affair, I couldn’t have asked for a more satisfying end than The Galaxy, and the Ground Within.

“The twilight struck chilly as he went outside. He experienced for the first time that special dread brought by the first touch of winter to lovers who have nowhere to meet except out of doors.”

9. The Charioteer by Mary Renault

I’ve had Mary Renault’s books on my to-read list for years and I certainly didn’t expect her WWII novel to be the first book of hers I tried, but thank you to my friend Six, who recommended The Charioteer because they were right – it’s brilliant. Written in 1953, wasn’t accepted by U.S. publishers until 1959 because of its positive portrayal of homosexuality! The story follows Laurie, a soldier wounded at Dunkirk, who must choose whether his affections lie with Andrew, a young Quaker conscientious objector working at his hospital, or Ralph, a naval officer that he looked up to when they were both at an all-boys boarding school. I loved the intimacy and the relationships between the characters and I think this is a book that I will get even more out of when I inevitably re-read it.

“But in grieving for a murderer, thou art not grieving for the monstrous. Thou grievest for the man who failed to reject the monstrous act.”

8. The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

The Goblin Emperor is one of my all-time favourite novels, so when I heard Katherine Addison was writing a novella set in the same world it quickly became one of my most anticipated books of the year. The Witness for the Dead lives up to the hype. Building on her brilliant world building, The Witness for the Dead is a gently paced mystery, and while there is darkness and murder, there is also kindness, compassion, and healing. The real draw though is protagonist Thara Celehar, who is called to help the common people by speaking on behalf of the recently deceased. He’s a layered, lonely character and I absolutely loved living his daily routine and watching him work. By the end he felt like a dear friend and I look forward to reading more of his adventures.

“The universe erases me, but it also remakes me again and again, so there must be something worthwhile in this image.”

7. The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Tightly plotted and perfectly-paced, The whip-smart sci-fi dystopia The Space Between Worlds is set on an Earth where multiverse travel is possible with one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, a poor, Black, queer girl plucked from the rural wastelands because her life has been cut short on 372 other worlds. Now she has an apartment in walled-off Wiley City, an aloof but beautiful handler to flirt with, and is on the road to citizenship and security, but when one of her few remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, Cara is drawn into a plot that threatens the entire multiverse. The Space Between Worlds is such an assured debut I can’t believe it’s a first novel! The plotting will make your head spin, but it’s grounded in a layered exploration of identity and privilege and characters and relationships that you root for. It’s absolutely one of the best books I read all year and I love that it features a bisexual woman as its protagonist!

“Our will and fates do so contrary run.”

6. The Sugared Game by K.J. Charles

I originally picked up the first book in K.J. Charles’ 1920s set historical romance trilogy assuming it would be a guilty pleasure read, but I adored both Slippery Creatures and The Sugared Game. The very things that seem to have put off some romance readers – the lack of a neat happily ever after ending for each book and the amount of plot – have elevated this romance into my favourite ten books of the year! The sizzling chemistry but complications between Will Darling, a bisexual WWI veteran-turned rare book dealer, and his enigmatic, aristocratic, sometimes lover and spy Kim Secretan left me torn between wanting to read it all in one sitting and drawing it out so the series would never end. The plot is engaging, the secondary female characters charming and worthy of their own novel, the sexual tension between Kim and Will simmers, and the sex scenes are enough to make you fan yourself or open a window. I’ve been putting off finishing this series because I can’t bear for it to be over, but I really do need more Will and Kim in my life.

“What was it about whiteness that seemed to elicit an infinite spring of faith and second chances?”

5. The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya

The Subtweet, a look at the transformative friendship and falling out between two brown women in the music business, is practically flawless. I love that Shraya, a Canadian trans woman of colour, is doing so well and while this is my first work of hers that I’ve read, it certainly won’t be my last! Shraya’s razor sharp commentary on the music industry, and especially the experience of being a brown, queer, woman in the industry is told through concise and exacting prose. I was floored by how clever and incisive this book is as Shraya lays bare the insecurities of both Neela and Rukmini and comments on the process of making art in the modern age.

“Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.”

4. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Years ago I read Lisa See’s The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane and really enjoyed it. I’ve been meaning to pick this book up ever since, but only putting it on my 35 to read before 35 blog post and its number coming up on my one of my friend Rick’s BookTube Spins gave me the push I needed. I knew nothing about nineteenth century China, so Snow Flower and the Secret Fan was an educational and engaging read for me. I loved reading about the laotong/”old same”, the idea of an emotional match between two women that will last a lifetime, and about nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women used to communicate in secret. The central relationship in the book is between two of these women, Lily and Snow Flower, who are “old sames”. I was deeply invested in their bond and desperately wanted everything to work out! Although the passages on foot-binding can be graphic and may not be for the squeamish, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is an affecting story of female friendship and survival that sucked me in.

“She’d said, When you know why I had to come with you, then we can talk. And she hadn’t meant When you figure out the political situation on Lsel Station, she’d meant – She’d meant, When you understand that when the Empire commands, I can’t say no. She’d meant When you understand that there’s no room for me to say yes, even if I want to. She’d meant You don’t understand that there’s no such thing as being free.”

3. A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

The more I sit with A Desolation Called Peace, the more I love it. The Hugo Award winning, whip-smart sequel to ambitious space opera A Memory Called Empire is practically perfect. It’s well-written, with a focus on language appropriate for an alien culture that values poetry and literature, the character arcs are well fleshed out, the world building continues to astonish, and the depiction of a first contact scenario is fascinating. It’s Mahit who is the beating heart of this series though, and her identity crisis and the muddle of her feelings as she questions where her loyalties lie and how she can reconcile her feelings for a woman from a colonizing empire who will always see her as a “barbarian” is exquisite. For me, this is the rare sequel that improves on its predecessor, but both books in this duology are a treat and will undoubtedly be viewed as science-fiction classics in decades to come.

“Perhaps he has the Kind One speak it for him first, before he tries it out on his own; smiling over the syllables, the sound like a sweet on his tongue, rhyming with the word of his soul; a discovery of not only his new name, but a guiding philosophy on life. That this is how everyone should be named: a hand, thrown into a bag of words, in search of that singular and fitting shape.”

2. The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Until September, I was certain The Vanished Birds would top my 2021 list of Favourite Books. Although I’ve ultimately ranked it 2nd, it was extremely close and this is one of those books that will live in my heart (and on my book shelf) forever. Told through Jimenez’s lyrical prose, The Vanished Birds is about the devastating impact of both colonialism and capitalism on people and worlds, but it’s also about the choices we make and the relationships we hold dear. I still can’t believe this is a debut novel, it’s so accomplished; far reaching with its ideas and scope, yet intimate and moving on a personal level, it’s one of only a few titles all year to actually make me cry. After I turned the final page, I practically thrust it at my mom, knowing she too would love it (she did). It feels like it’s flown under the radar and I have no idea why because it’s such a brilliant book and there’s just something about the way Simon Jimenez writes that works so well for me. I can’t wait to read everything he ever writes!

“I suppose we always hope that those closest to us can see into our hearts—but unless we invite them, or show them in words or deeds, how can they?”

1. The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard

As much as I adored The Vanished Birds, in the end my list really couldn’t have been topped by anything besides Victoria Goddard’s extraordinary novel. At just over 900 pages, The Hands of the Emperor is a cross between Disney’s Moana, beloved TV series The West Wing. the Broadway musical Hamilton, and Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor. While many fantasy novels are about the quest, the adventure, The Hands of the Emperor is about the quiet work of building a better world through competent, compassionate government. In this time, when governments around the world seem to be actively working to kill their citizens through deliberate mismanagement and greed, there’s something powerful about a fictional government that implements universal basic income so its citizens no longer live in poverty. The Hands of the Emperor is also about the profound relationship that develops between His Radiancy, The Sun-on-Earth, a literal god, and Cliopher “Kip’ Mdang, a supremely capable cinnamon roll of a man who happens to be His Radiancy’s personal secretary, after Kip dares to invite his lord to vacation with him in his distant homeland. This is a character-driven slow-burn of a novel about devoting your life to something and someone worthy of it, about the conflict between being pulled home, but knowing you have a duty to make the world a better place, and about two lonely, middle-aged men finding each other and being changed by one another. I have never read anything quite like it and I love it with all of my heart.



Thanks for sitting through my look back at what I read and loved in 2021. I promise we’re onto this year’s reads next!


Next up: My 2022 Least Favourites

Favourite Books of 2020

No, you haven’t been overindulging in holiday punch and no, it’s not a typo. This truly is a list of my ten favourite reads of 2020. My always sporadic blogging suffered a hit in 2020 with the anxiety and fear of a global pandemic. The result? A carefully constructed list of the year’s reading highlights that… never made it out of my head. In 2021, Omicron struck and once again my list failed to make it to the page. In my defense, haven’t the last three years really felt like one long, awful year anyway?

I could just let it lie, focus on this year’s list and being more present as the new year begins, but in the interest of tracking my reading, embracing chaos, and, perhaps introducing someone to a new favourite read, I’ve decided to polish and publish my 2020 and 2021 favourites lists before presenting this year’s list.

Honourable Mentions

Before I count down my ten favourites, honourable mention goes to three sci-fi and fantasy titles that I loved. In the early days of the pandemic when I had trouble focusing enough to even pick up a book, N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became kept me interested. I also loved the characters and the Central and South America inspired world building of Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun, while the lyrical prose and enemies to lovers story in Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar’s This is How You Lose the Time War made me swoon.

The List

“Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves. I am not worried for her in the least.”

10. The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

I’m such a sucker for stories about storytelling and Nghi Vo accomplishes that so well in her novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune. A young royal from the far north is sent south for a political marriage. Initially alone, without friends or allies, the Empress In-yo is able to bend history to her will. After her death, traveling cleric Chih arrives at the isolated villa where she once lived and hears the Empress’ story from her loyal servant Rabbit. Vo’s writing is visual and atmospheric, and her tale unfolds in a way that is clever and empowering. Highly recommended!

“I think that after a certain number of evil choices, it’s reasonable shorthand to decide that someone’s an evil person who oughtn’t have the chance to make any more choices. And the more power someone has, the less slack they ought to be given.”

9. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

I had so much fun reading this book! Naomi Novik’s twist on the magic school idea popular in YA and crossover fantasy titles is the Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where only a fraction of the students survive graduation day. In A Deadly Education, unpopular dark magician Galadriel “El” Higgins tries to navigate the school’s dangers and its pesky heroic himbo. El is a snarky loner with mostly good intentions, which makes her an enjoyable narrator, and I absolutely loved the world building and magic system. A perfect spooky season read!

“It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.”

8. My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Compulsively readable, but deeply disturbing, My Dark Vanessa is about the relationship between intelligent, but naïve, Vanessa, who, at the age of fifteen, becomes involved in an affair with her magnetic forty-two-year-old English teacher. This is such an assured debut! It’s a brilliant character study and psychological profile of a woman who was abused in her teens. Even though we, the readers, can see Vanessa’s relationship with her teacher for the grooming and abuse that it was, Vanessa has convinced herself that she was not a victim. When another former student brings sexual assault allegations against their teacher, Vanessa must reckon with redefining her formative relationship. It’s a chilling, unsettling read and it won’t be for everyone, but I thought it was masterful.

“The Green Man walks the wood,” he tried explaining. “But the wood remembers.”

7. Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

I’ve rarely been so charmed by a book as I was by the lyrical fantasy novella Silver in the Wood. Drawing on the Green Man of myth, Emily Tesh constructs a tale of how the gruff, lonely, forest caretaker Tobias’ life is interrupted when he meets, and begins to fall for, neighbouring landowner Henry Silver. The prose is lush and atmospheric, the protagonists endearing, and the secondary cast, which includes a badass mother, an unusual dryad, and a furry friend, only add to the story’s appeal. How could I not be charmed?

“Give your friendships the magic you would give a romance. Because they’re just as important. Actually, for us, they’re way more important.”

6. Loveless by Alice Oseman

Millions have fallen in love with Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, a sweet, sincere love story between two British teenage boys. I adore both the graphic novels and the Netflix series, but it’s Oseman’s YA novel Loveless that holds a special place in my heart. A story of coming out and acceptance, it centers Georgia, a fanfiction loving aromantic asexual (aro-ace) woman, and I identified strongly with Georgia’s exploration of her queer identity. It’s such a powerful thing to be seen by a book, and even though my experiences don’t exactly match Georgia’s (I didn’t find a label that fit or accept myself as a queer woman until my late twenties), I was moved by Georgia’s journey, her passion, and the importance of her platonic relationships. In an uncanny twist, I wound up reading this book about an aro-ace nerd who starts a Shakespeare Society with her friends just when I, another aro-ace nerd, was performing in weekly Shakespeare plays with my friends over zoom, so it’s no surprise that reading Loveless was one of my favourite 2020 memories!

“In the resolved quiet of the heart it was possible to say “Give up; it’s done,” but in practice, hopelessness was too bitter wine for drinking day after day. One would steal a little sip of sweetness and wonder, “What if…?”

5. A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson

Kai Ashante Wilson’s queer fantasy romance novella is a book that won’t work for everyone – I know some had issues with the central relationship not being fleshed out enough – but A Taste of Honey sure worked for me. Noble Aqib falls for a handsome Daluçan soldier named Lucrio and is swept up in a whirlwind romance, but Aqib’s father and brother furiously disapprove and the world has more hardships to throw at their relationship. Is their love enough to survive? A Taste of Honey is a bittersweet book about the choices we make and the roads not travelled that stayed with me long after I turned the final page. Affecting storytelling, rich worldbuilding, and exquisite prose made this one of my favourite reads of the year.

“I love a little gall on gall.”

4. Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I have to admit that I’m not sure I would have loved Harrow the Ninth quite as wholeheartedly as I did if I had read it in any other year. Fortunately, I read it in 2020 and it was a bright spot in an otherwise pretty bleak time! Why is this book so closely associated with 2020 for me? Well, it features collective trauma, unhealthy coping mechanisms, gallows humour, confusion (especially about how time is passing), palpable repressed grief, bad sleeping habits, learning to cook, and having nothing to do but wait for imminent death. Harrow the Ninth is a whole 2020 mood and I’m here for it. Like my friend Hadeer, I would advise looking up some spoilers, especially if it’s been awhile since you read Gideon the Ninth, because this book is so (purposely) confusing that there are times when it felt incomprehensible, but it’s also completely unique and absolutely brilliant. Those with a keen awareness of fandom/fanfiction will undoubtedly get more out of Harrow, picking up on the fact that the book is essentially an homage to 5 Times/5 Things fanfiction and enjoying the Coffee Shop AU detour. Also, it has both a “Hi __, I’m Dad” and a “none pizza with left beef” joke – what more could you possibly want?! Muir’s prose is sharp, clever, and even those with a great vocabulary will find themselves picking up new words within the pages of Harrow the Ninth.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

3. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

2020 was truly the year of Shakespeare for me. As part of Project Shakespeare I have had the opportunity to revisit some of his plays, many of which I had not read since University, and to discover new gems. The rarely performed Henry VI plays, for example, are absolutely terrific, but it’s Julius Caesar that blew me away when I first read it in August. I knew within the first act that this would be a 5-star read for me and I was right! The lines are some of Shakespeare’s best imho and the relationships between characters are so compelling. My jaw quite literally dropped – that’s how incredible this play is! I still can’t believe I’d never studied or watched a performance of Julius Caesar before! I had the best time taking on my first larger role as Cassius in Project Shakespeare’s version of the play and even revisited the play, playing Brutus, on Project Shakespeare’s second time through the plays! If, like me, you haven’t encountered Julius Caesar before, or even haven’t encountered it since high school, I recommend giving it a read or watching the filmed 2018 National Theatre production with Ben Whishaw, Michelle Fairley, and David Morrissey – it’s terrific!

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

2. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

Despite watching numerous adaptations of Pride & Prejudice and Emma, I’d never actually read one of Jane Austen’s books until 2020. I began a group read with two friends, only one of whom had read Austen before, during the pandemic and both of us newcomers were surprised by just how acerbic and sharp Austen’s commentary and wit could be! Of course Pride & Prejudice is a classic for a reason – it’s deeply romantic, it’s wish fulfillment of a sort, it’s funny, and it’s well-written. I’m so glad that I finally took the plunge, first with Pride & Prejudice, and then by reading the rest of Austen’s canon with a Book Club in 2021. Even though I didn’t find Pride & Prejudice quite as enchanting on a re-read, the sheer delight and laughter it brought me in 2020 makes it worthy of its high place on this list.

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”

1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Read in April 2020, right in the heart of the lockdown, my favourite book of the year was John Steinbeck’s classic, East of Eden. A sprawling family epic, it follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Despite it’s doorstopper size, East of Eden never feels long and I practically devoured this book! This book pulled me out of a reading slump and while it didn’t cure my depression, it made it easier to live with for awhile. Dying for some fresh air yet terrified of leaving my apartment, the hours I spent on my balcony absorbed in its pages meant the world to me and I devoured this novel. The scope is truly epic, spanning generations of families. Steinbeck’s storytelling is masterful and his characters are complicated imperfect beings whose stories are compelling. I can’t recommend this highly enough. In fact, it might be time for a re-read in 2023…

Although I went through periods of being unable to focus or pick up a book at all, I’m so grateful that I found some new all-time favourites in 2020 and that my reading was so varied, with all of my top three showing that classics can still be powerful and meaningful in the present.

Thanks for sticking with me on this strange throwback to the beginning of the decade!

Next up: My 2021 Favourites

Mini Book Reviews: PRIDE edition

While Pride is traditionally celebrated in June, LGBTQ+ books are never out of season. Here are my thoughts on some recent LGBTQ+ reads.

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

Remember the days when the only mainstream asexual representation was a handful of YA romances? I do, and it’s why, as an asexual bookworm, I am so glad that a thought-provoking book like this exists. Ace not only represents a wide range of asexual experiences, including disabled aces, aces of colour, male aces, non-binary aces, and aromantic asexuals, it also challenges all readers, ace and allosexual (meaning people who experience sexual attraction to others), to re-examine how we think about and relate to sex and relationships.

Chen writes in a style that is clear and accessible, drawing on personal anecdotes as well as analysis of sexuality and interviews conducted with asexual people. She also has an uncanny ability to look at an issue or topic from all sides and anticipate counter-arguments, which makes for a persuasive and eye-opening book. A bibliography and extensive notes section speak to the research that has gone into this book and may point those looking for more resources in the right direction. As someone who reads very little non-fiction, and who generally prefers narrative non-fiction, I did find Ace a little more theoretical and academic than I’m used to, but it’s still a worthwhile and insightful read.

I not only recommend this book to fellow asexuals who may still be figuring things out or who want to read books about asexuality, but also to pretty much everyone. The points Chen makes about compulsory sexuality are enlightening and I think there is genuinely something that any reader, be they ace or allo, can take away from this book.

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The City Beautiful by Aden Polydoros

Just when I thought that I’d outgrown Young Adult as a genre entirely, I pick up a pair of outstanding queer young adult historical novels! Featuring a Jewish protagonist, The City Beautiful is set in Chicago during the 1890s, a time when thousands of Jewish refugees were fleeing rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Alter Rosen, a Jewish immigrant from Romania, shares a room with three others and often goes hungry as he tries to save enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America. But when his closest friend Yakov becomes the latest victim in a line of murdered Jewish boys, Alter is possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk, a malevolent possessing spirit that seeks to take over Alter’s body. Alter must join forces with a dangerous boy from his past to find Yakov’s killer.

I’ve never read anything quite like The City Beautiful! I absolutely loved the way Aden Polydoros depicts 1893 Chicago, as both a city of promise and glittering delights, but also a place of poverty, prejudice, and danger. His writing is so evocative that I had a clear picture in my head of the setting as events unfolded. Alter Rosen is deeply empathetic as a boy just trying to make the right choice, but who is tempted by desires he believes to be wrong, and I felt invested in the romance that develops between Alter and another boy. Almost as wonderful as good mensch Alter, are the secondary characters, who are well-developed with their own voices, quirks, and pasts. There’s definitely anger, grief, and pain here, but Polydoros confronts them with maturity and an authenticity that I found moving. Be warned that there is darkness here though and potentially triggering content. The combination of Jewish mythology, murder mystery, characters to root for, and an atmospheric setting make this an irresistible read.

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The Reckless Kind by Carly Heath

Set in early twentieth-century Norway, The Restless Kind is about the friendship between three outcast teens who find refuge in community theatre. Asta is a hard-of-hearing girl who looks different from anyone else in her village due to her mismatched eyes and white forelock. Alongside her friend Gunnar and his secret boyfriend Erlend, she hopes to perform in the local theatre and make a life together as a unit rather than enter into marriage with anyone. However, any future they hope to have together will require money. They have one shot at gaining enough money to secure their future: win the village’s annual horse race.

I loved so much about this novel, but let’s start with the wonderful rep. Disability is still too infrequently represented or at least represented well in fiction. Although Carly Heath is limited by the language of 1904 and therefore discusses the conditions her characters have in an author’s note rather than in the text, she writes from experience about being hard-of-hearing, having post-concussion syndrome, and her experiences with lumbar spine trauma inform her portrayal of Gunnar’s Brown-Sequard syndrome. There is also sexual diversity as Gunnar and Erlend are gay men and Asta is asexual. Accordingly, The Restless Kind is a book about authenticity and resisting the pressure to conform to societal norms, even when it’s difficult.

It’s the characters who are the beating heart of this found family story. I loved reading about Asta, who is courageous and hardworking, maintaining hope as she tries to keep her found family together when circumstances and despair threaten to tear them apart. Told in a dual narrative format, wealthy, big-hearted, but anxious Erlend is the other perspective character. Gravely injured Gunnar is the only one of the central trio not to get a point-of-view chapter. Independent and straightforward, he has a tendency towards melancholy and copes through dark humour that makes his boyfriend nervous. Gunnar’s serious younger brother Fred completes the family.

I would recommend The Restless Kind to anyone who has ever dreamed of running away to a cottage with their friends, anyone who loved Frozen but wished it had lived up to its queer potential, and those looking for a hopeful read about queer found family with authentic disability representation.

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Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko

Early on in Too Much Lip I began to realize exactly how few Australian novels I’d read before and that this was the first Indigenous Australian novel I’d ever picked up. It took a bit for me to get used to the vernacular and the distinct sense of dark humour here, but I’m glad I read Too Much Lip! The book revolves around Kerry Salter, a tough, wise-cracking bisexual woman on a stolen Harley who plans who spend twenty-four hours, tops, in her hometown – just enough time to say goodbye to her dying father. But Bundjalung country has a way of latching onto people and soon she’s once again dealing with her chaotic family, a proposal to build a prison on Granny Ava’s Island, the family’s spiritual home, and her attraction to a good-looking white fella.

Kerry is such a great character to spend time with. She’s outwardly tough, unapologetic, and her smart mouth gets her into trouble, but she also cares. The rest of the Salter Family are similarly well-developed, survivors of trauma who feel fucked up and flawed but who are still standing and interact in all the ways that a family can (both loving and dysfunctional). Author Melissa Lucashenko has a voice that’s distinctly her own and she writes about intergenerational trauma and Australian Indigenous identity in a way that’s intelligent, raw and unflinching, but characterized throughout by biting humour. It’s worth noting that this book deals with a lot of very heavy stuff so please heed the content warnings and know what you’re getting into, but Too Much Lip is a well-written and original novel that I would recommend to the right reader.
Content warnings for child abuse, incest, domestic abuse, alcoholism, and animal cruelty that includes the dog dying

5 Bookish Things I Changed My Mind About + 1 I’m Hoping to Reconsider

One of the greatest gifts as a reader is to have a reading experience that changes your mind for the better about something. Whether it’s revisiting a classic novel and gaining a new understanding of it or finding joy in a genre or form that you’d never appreciated before, I love the way that reading a certain book can alter your outlook and shift your future reading trajectory.

As I sat down to review some recent reads, it occurred to me that some of them had been expectedly delightful; so much so that they’ve had an impact on my to-read list! Inspired by the desire to explore these shifts and the irresistible 5 Books articles Tor.com publishes, and armed with a fanfiction inspired title, Here’s my list of 5 shifts for the better that my reading has taken, and 1 I’m hoping it will take in the future:

1. Novellas

Many of my all-time favourite novels are chonky 500+ page doorstoppers or, as I like to affectionately call them, murder books.  Les Misérables is a 1,469 page paperback, The Hands of the Emperor is a massive 900 page hardcover, A Little Life rings in at 720 hardcover pages, and let’s not even get into George R.R. Martin’s catalogue. I could have carried one of those I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie tote bags.

Then I decided to commit publicly to reading the 2019 Hugo Award nominees for Best Novel and Best Novella. I started with The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark, a brilliant steampunk alternate New Orleans that includes Yoruba mythology, continued onto Kelly Robson’s thoughtful and innovative Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, about a future where time travel is used for profit, enjoyed Kate Heartfield’s whimsical queer timey wimey Alice Payne Arrives, and discovered the glory that is Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. It was like a switch in my brain had flipped. Why did I think that a compact novella couldn’t have the same impact as a novel-length work? Why did I think that it’s worldbuilding would be incomplete or that it’s characters would have less satisfying arcs? I don’t know, but I was entirely wrong!

There are some absolutely brilliant novellas out there, spanning literary and genre fiction. If, like past me, you’re wary of shorter books, here are a few I’d recommend besides the above:

• Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard (translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell)
• The Empress of Salt & Fortune by Nghi Vo
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
• Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh
  

2. Shakespeare

I have never disliked Shakespeare. As an English major who took an entire course on his works in university, I retained a vague fondness for The Bard but besides a select few plays, including King Lear (a banging play and anyone who says otherwise is lying or wrong), the Tom Hiddleston versions of Henry IV part I and Henry V, and Much Ado About Nothing, I hadn’t revisited most of the plays I studied. I was especially ambivalent about some of the more commonly known ones like Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Still others I had never read or seen performed at all.

When Covid-19 arrived in North America I felt adrift. I was fortunate enough to still be on the payroll, but there was little work I could do from home for my public service job, I wasn’t seeing friends or family, and the theatres had closed. My friend Rachel invited me to be a part of Project Shakespeare, a mixed group of hobbyists and actors performing a different Shakespeare play each week over zoom, and I jumped at the chance! While part of the fun was creating props and costumes, practicing our roles, and the friendships we made or renewed along the way, another joy was discovering, and rediscovering, the genius of Shakespeare.

There are certainly plays that didn’t appeal to me, but there were many that did. Among them, Romeo and Juliet, with lines so beautiful I’m sorry they were wasted on my teenage self who couldn’t appreciate their beauty, and Hamlet, which I connected with more as a disaffected thirty-something millennial than as an emo university student. I even found new plays to love, like the brilliant Julius Caesar (one of my favourite works read in 2020)!

Having the chance to both read and perform Shakespeare in a welcoming environment has increased my appreciation for these plays immensely and I can’t wait to take back what I’ve learned to becoming an audience member once more.

3. Romance

I don’t remember when I wrote off romance as a genre. Did I assume most romance was cheesy, like the Sandra Hill Viking novels a friend liked to text me snippets of? Was I embarrassed by the covers and, as an asexual person, lacking understanding of why these shirtless highlanders, lords, or cowboys appealed? Was it the heteronormative relationships they seemed to depict? I’m not sure but I wrote off romancelandia.

Like so many other people, the book that put me on the path to changing my mind about romance was Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. Frothy, sweet, and idealistic, I enjoyed the dynamic between Alex and Henry. Over the last few years I’ve read more romances (mostly mlm ones) as well as fantasy romances and I’ve come to appreciate a good romance as an escape from the darker realities of the word we live in.

4. CanLit

Full disclosure I’m still working on this one, but I’ve made progress! As a Canadian English major, I took a year-long course dedicated to Canadian Literature (CanLit for short). At best it was on the dull side, at worse, painful. So what is CanLit? Early works include James De Mille’s satiric travel fantasy A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder and Susanna Strickland Moodie’s instructions to potential settlers Roughing It in the Bush. More well-known are authors like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Alice Munro. When I think of CanLit my mind still goes, however unfairly, to landscape/nature as a metaphor for the characters’ isolation.

While I can’t say that all Canadian Literature suddenly appeals to me, I have discovered shining examples in the genre that have reduced my fear of picking up CanLit titles.  Books like Emma Hooper’s Our Homesick Songs, a magic realist look at the disappearing fishing industry in Newfoundland, Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, about a northern Anishinaabe community coping with a plague, and Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread, about the African diaspora, have stuck with me and I’m making an effort to choose more novels by Canadian authors.

5. Indie/Self-Published Authors

Surprisingly I’ve been buying some fiction by small-press and independently published authors for about 10 years, but they were very much in the minority of my reading habits. Yes, I bought C.S. Pacat’s Captive Prince back in 2012, having followed the serialized livejournal posting of it as original fiction, and yes, I bought Elegy by Vale Aida only a few years after that, but it’s only about a year ago that I started increasingly picked up self-published and small press books. I think I’d fallen into believing the stigma that self-published books wouldn’t be as well-written or engaging as those with major publishing houses.

The truth, of course, is that there are many fantastic books being written by authors who aren’t traditionally published. There are books with asexual representation, like His Quiet Agent by Ada Maria Soto and City of Spires by Arseneault. There are queer romances like K.J. Charles’ Slippery Creatures and Austin Chant’s Peter Pan retelling Peter Darling. There’s also my favourite book read in 2021, The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard.

I’ve fallen in love with Victoria Goddard’s Nine Realms in all its soft, idealistic, intelligent fantasy glory and am working my way through the spin-off novellas and novels set in the same universe as The Hands of the Emperor. It’s my love of this book that has changed my mind about self-published authors.

+ 1 I’m Hoping to Reconsider: Poetry

Poetry terrifies me. Every time the category comes up on a reading challenge I shudder. Sure, I could take the easy way out and pick up a Dr. Seuss book or Shel Silverstein, but I want to get into poetry, to try it properly outside of academic contexts… I just don’t know where to start!

If you’re a poetry fan, or someone who came to poetry recently I’d love to hear which poets or collections you’d recommend. Please, help me give poetry a proper chance!

If there are genres, forms, authors, or other bookish things that you’ve opened your mind to, I’d also love to hear from you. Please drop me a comment and let me know what’s changed your reading over the years.

Mini Book Reviews: Novellas

Proving that size doesn’t always matter, here are my thoughts on four excellent novellas I read recently.

All the Horses of Iceland by Sarah Tolmie

As both a former Horse Girl™ and a lover of historical fantasy, it will shock no one to learn that I really enjoyed this imagined origin story of Iceland’s unusual horses. Eyvind, a pagan trader in ninth-century Iceland, refuses to convert to Christianity as his captain commands. Instead, he chooses to join Jewish merchant David and his crew on a journey to Mongolia, where they will trade and barter for horses. Along the way he meets an otherworldly white mare with no name, who ensures that Eyvind’s hard-won herd arrive safely in Iceland.

Tolmie writes with a lyrical and dreamlike style, grounded by historical detail and keen sense of place. One of my pet peeves in historical fiction/fantasy is dialogue and writing that feels too modern, but Sarah Tolmie avoids that trap nicely. In fact this might be the first novella I’ve read that had me wishing for a map! Besides my minor gripes about not being able to track Eyvind’s travels visually and my initial confusion about how ninth-century place names corresponded with geography today, I loved this book. The magical elements (including ghosts and the gift of prophecy) are woven in seamlessly, while the mare with no name deserves to be spoken of alongside Katherine Arden’s Solovey, and Tolkein’s Shadowfax as one of the great fictional horses of fantasy.

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Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Set in a small Irish town in 1985 in the days leading up to Christmas, Small Things Like These will bring to mind other holiday classics like A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life in the way that it shows how one man’s choices make a difference. Bill Furlong has risen from humble beginnings to become a busy coal merchant, husband, and father. While delivering an order to the local convent he stumbles across a scene that forces him to confront his past and decide whether to speak out against the powerful Catholic Church or be complicit in their wrongs.

Keegan displays great sensitivity in the way she writes about the difficult subject matter that is the Magdalene Laundries. Her descriptions are never unnecessarily graphic, but she deftly conveys the abuses suffered there. I especially loved the subtlety with which Keegan develops her setting. Though her prose is spare, she builds a real sense of time and place through her dialogue and imagery. The characters are clearly developed and empathetic and there is resilience and kindness to be found here. Especially for such a slim novella, it’s remarkably affecting and I can certainly see myself rereading in holiday seasons to come.

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Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters by Aimee Ogden

Aimee Ogden’s Nebula Award nominated novella is a gorgeously told, queer, sci-fi reimagining of what happens after the little mermaid has settled down with her Prince. Set in the distant future, where scattered human clans have edited their genes to adapt to harsh environments like the desert and the sea, it focuses on Atuale, the daughter of a seaclan lord. Falling in love with a land-dwelling man, Atuale fled her tyrannical father, who viewed her only as a means to seal alliances through marriage and procreation, and edited her genes to survive on land. Now, with her husband and her adopted people dying of a plague, she seeks out her former lover, the World-Witch, for aid.

Odgen’s worldbuilding is impressive. In just over 100 pages she gives us multiple completely different settings that range from the World-Witch’s lair to the desert-dwelling lands of Atuale’s husband, to off-world, and the variety of technology showcased indicates civilizations with differing priorities. At the center of the book though is the relationship between the little mermaid and her childhood friend and first love Yanja, who is now the resourceful World-Witch. There’s a wonderful nod to Disney’s queer-coded villains in Yanja, who was in a relationship with Atuale before he transitioned, and his voice has a deliciously embittered snark to it. I loved the race against time aspect, I was invested in the relationship between Yanja and Atuale, and I adored Ogden’s lyrical prose. The ending isn’t going to work for everyone, and I understand why some readers took issue with it, but it did work for me. I look forward to seeing what Aimee Ogden does next!

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When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

While this novella isn’t quite the homerun that was The Empress of Salt and Fortune (one of my favourite books of 2020), I loved this continuation of The Singing Hills Cycle. Cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of three fearsome tigers. In order to stay alive until help arrives, Chih tells the tale of the infamous tiger Ho Thi Thao and her scholar lover.

Like The Empress of Salt and Fortune, this is a book about storytelling and how the tale changes depending on the audience, the teller, and the cultural context around actions and words. There are few things I love more than storytelling as a theme (as witnessed by the fact that I won’t shut up about Black Sails!), so of course I loved this. The tigers’ corrections to the tale as Chih tells it unfold in a fascinating way that challenges us to rethink our preconceptions. I may have missed Chih’s avian scribe, Almost Brilliant (busy sitting on a clutch), in this installment, but the woolly mammoths made up for it! I will pretty much read anything Nghi Vo writes at this point.

Mini Book Reviews #3

I’m slaying my goodreads challenge, but not managing to write about many of the books I’ve read, so here are some mini reviews as I catch up!

Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse
(rounded down on goodreads)

With Black Sun, the first book in her fantasy trilogy set in a Pre-Columbian Americas inspired world, Roanhorse won me over with her complicated characters and strong worldbuilding. Fevered Star is the second book in the series but it suffers from a bad case of middle book syndrome. So much of this book feels like set up for the concluding volume; there’s a lot of moving characters from point A to point B, both physically and metaphorically and the result is a book with intricate, arguably overly, complicated political moves but stagnant character development.

In a book with multiple POVs there will often be perspectives that grab you more than others and that’s at work here. Serapio, the blind avatar of the crow god, is one of the more compelling perspectives, but Xiala, who I absolutely loved in Black Sun, is reduced to pining over Serapio for most of the book. I continue to love the casual queerness of this series (expressed through characters like Xiala, who has relationships with both men and women, and Iktan, a non-binary Priest of Knives who uses xe/xir pronouns) though, and I did enjoy the dynamic between Xiala and Iktan.

Fevered Star appears to be building to big things so fingers crossed Roanhorse can nail the conclusion next year!

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Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki 

More melancholic than its quirky premise might indicate, Light From Uncommon Stars is about self-discovery, human nature, and queer found family.

I absolutely loved the originality of concept here. As anyone who’s been following this blog for a while knows, I give points (or stars maybe?) for uniqueness and this one is up there! It features an alien who runs a donut shop with her family/crew and who falls in love with Shizuka Satomi, a shark of a teacher who sells her students’ souls to the devil in order to earn her own back. Meanwhile, Satomi is developing a bond with her seventh and final student sacrifice, transgender runaway Katrina.

Before picking this up I expected it to be one of my favourites of the year, and while I did enjoy this book, something was missing for me. Maybe it’s the too frequent shifts in perspective (often from paragraph to paragraph), maybe it’s that everything seemed to be wrapped up a little too conveniently at the end, or maybe it’s the tonal dissonance of telling a dark story in a whimsical way (a personal pet peeve of mine), but this book didn’t quite click for me.

I’ve seen Light From Uncommon Stars being recommended to fans of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, so I want to caution that this is a much darker book. Chambers’ books are often set in worlds of casual queerness, where differences are often accepted and celebrated. While there are also aliens and there is, eventually, acceptance, Light From Uncommon Stars is set firmly in a world like our own with all of the prejudices that entails. Katrina is a transgender runaway who has experienced domestic violence both at home and in her relationships, who engages in sex work to get by, and who experiences transphobic language and misgendering. As someone who went in expecting more of a feel good, cozy sci-fi vibe, this did take some getting used to. Still, it’s wonderful to see an Asian-American trans voice in science-fiction and I’m interested in seeing what Aoki will do next!

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The Magician by Colm Tóibín

It’s telling that not a single member of my book club could figure out why The Magician was written. Spanning more than 400 hardcover pages, The Magician is a fictionalized biography of acclaimed German author Thomas Mann and the contradictions of his public and personal lives. I’ll admit that having read this after reading one of Mann’s own books (Death in Venice), which I found underwhelming, and, unfortunately, the Wikipedia article that mentions Mann’s diary entries where he writes about being attracted to his adolescent son, my mind may have been clouded, but I at least expected Mann to be an intriguing figure, if not a particularly likeable one. I can’t find fault with Toibin’s solid prose, but Thomas Mann is the least interesting character in this book. He’s passive, reactive, and interior, none of which make for a person or character who you want to spend time with. Members of the book club I read this for agreed that we’d rather have read about multiple other Manns, including pragmatic spouse Katia, strong-willed daughter Erika, screw-up of a son Klaus, or daughter Monika (who survives a German submarine sinking the ship she’s travelling on!) before Thomas. Yet it’s Thomas’ story that Toibin inexplicably chooses to tell. Of more interest is the early-mid-twentieth century Germany setting, which is deftly described.

The Magician is only my second Toibin novel, after Brooklyn, which I also remember as an emotionally hollow read. I like Toibin’s writing style enough that I’m willing to try once more and see if three times really is the charm, but I’m starting to wonder if character development is not his strong suit.

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Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker
(rounded down on goodreads)

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City was recommended to me by a bookseller at my local SFF indie as part of a long and enthusiastic conversation about our shared love of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, Katherine Addison’s exquisite worldbuilding, and the joys of Martha Wells’ Murderbot, so perhaps my expectations were just too high going into this one.

I think I expected a narrative that focused more on character and the daily lives of the ordinary people impacted by the siege, but K.J. Parker’s novel is more about engineering wizardry and the ingenuity of one man who tries to save his adopted home. I did, however, enjoy it. Sixteen Ways is an entertaining read and I was compelled to keep going and see how Orhan, a colonel of engineers more experienced in bridge-building than battles, would get himself out of each new scrape. Orhan’s unreliable first-person narration effectively guides us through the intricacies and politics of a Rome-like city and though I am emphatically not an engineer, I found the Roman-era technology interesting.

Ultimately I wish Parker had focused more on the characters, most of whom (besides Orhan) are shallowly developed. The women in particular exist almost entirely as love interests or relations to the male characters, which felt like lazy and regressive writing for a book that’s only a few years old.

Book Review: Return of the Trickster

Return of the Trickster by Eden Robinson
Published March 2, 2021


The final book in Eden Robinson’s bestselling Trickster Trilogy is largely a dark and compelling read about family, love, addiction, and vengeance, but it never quite fulfills its potential and is let down by the single most abrupt ending I’ve ever encountered in any medium.

We’ll get to the ending, but first let’s talk about what I loved about this book… which is a lot!

Picking up where Trickster Drift left off, Return of the Trickster begins with Jared waking up in a hospital bed. Some of his loved ones believe he fell off the wagon after a year of sobriety, but Jared knows that the truth is much worse. He can no longer deny that he is the son of Wee’git, a shapeshifting Trickster God, and worse, that he is a Trickster himself and has no hope of ever living a normal life again. Oh yes, and he trapped his power-hungry ogress Aunt in another dimension, but now she’s swearing revenge on his entire family. It’s a horrible position for anyone to be in, but especially for the sweetest cinnamon roll of a baby Trickster who just wants to make the world a better place.

I love a good anti-hero protagonist, but as anyone who has heard me shout to the rafters about The Goblin Emperor knows, I also adore a protagonist who genuinely just wants to do good, and that’s Jared. Like my darling Maia, Jared has suffered abuse and contends with family members who are sometimes overtly hostile towards him, but he consciously tries to do the right thing. Throughout the series Jared may get into trouble with his snarky mouth, but he watches over vulnerable friends and family members, he cooks meals, he assembles furniture. How could I not be invested in a character who is dealt blow after (metaphorical and physical) blow and who keeps getting back up again? It’s devastating to watch Jared, traumatized and acting in self-defense, make choices that place others in harm’s way, then have to grapple with feeling like he’s a monster as a result.

I have such affection for the secondary characters in this series. Much of this trilogy is about relatives, both those related by blood and those who are bound to one another in other ways. Robinson has a gift for writing complex family relationships in such a dynamic, fully-realized way that I wouldn’t even blink if any pair of her characters appeared in my kitchen (okay, yes, maybe the floating head or the ogress). Jared’s abrasive, badass, nail-gun-wielding mother Maggie, who also happens to be a mighty witch, is a highlight, but I also loved Kota, the gay cousin, Mave, the artsy activist aunt, and the other assorted members of Jared’s extended family.

I’m so attached to the characters that I wish Return of the Trickster had built in more downtime for the characters to interact without being constrained by the breakneck pacing. While the first two books in the series are slow burns that spend time exploring Jared’s day-to-day life before introducing the fantastical, Return of the Trickster is a plot-driven book and I think it suffers a little for that. Don’t get me wrong, I raced through this book and was on the edge of my seat for most of it, but there’s a lot of trauma for characters to process and, much like a Marvel movie, no time allowed in which to work through it.

As you’ll have gathered, my biggest issue with Return of the Trickster is whatever those two pages masquerading as an epilogue are supposed to be. As a reader, as someone who was invested in these characters and in the overarching story, I was left feeling jilted and confused. I honestly wonder if Robinson, writing during the pandemic, was overwhelmed by ennui and listlessness. Was she fatigued by her own series and just wanted it to be over as quickly as possible? I can only imagine the pressure of trying to wrap-up a much-loved series in a satisfying way; perhaps it got to her. I don’t know. What I do know is that I found the epilogue so abrupt and dissatisfying that it cast a damper over my feelings about this book as a whole, and that’s a shame.

I hope that one day Eden Robinson will return to this world. The one thing her epilogue offers is a wonderful jumping off point for a series of novellas or a short story collection expanding on the succinct information about each character’s future she provides. As the ending of a trilogy though, it’s lacking.

TL;DR: A darkly compelling wrap-up to the Trickster Trilogy, Return of the Trickster moves at a breakneck pace, but its characters aren’t given time to breathe and reflect, while the ending left me thinking “that’s it?”