Continuing with Latine Heritage Month, here’s a new release that caught my eye! The cover and premise seemed stunning, and I was intrigued by the inclusion of Taíno mythology. On almost all of those fronts, Beasts of Carnaval delivered instantly—I was hooked from page one!
Sofía has heard legends of Isla Bestia since she was a child. They say that enchanting performances and mysterious people populate the mysterious island, and those who come there are too entranced to ever return to the real world. Sofía is sensible enough to not believe the rumors. But when her twin brother goes missing, her trail leads to Isla Bestia. There, she’s drawn into a bizarre, luscious world of magic and shifting alliances. Caught up in a tangled web of intrigue, Sofía must keep her wits about her if she wants to find out which of her new allies are men—and which of them are monsters.
TW/CW: colonialism/imperialism themes, loss of loved ones (past), panic attacks, religious bigotry, blood, murder, racism/slavery themes, misogyny
Before I get into gushing about everything I adored about Beasts of Carnaval, I’ll get my one major pet peeve out of the way: fantasy worlds that are named so closely to reality that they basically are reality. Rodrigo’s world is essentially the Caribbean, except that the countries are named slightly differently—their colonizers are Hisperian, for instance. Real-word terms such as mestiza are used, so at that point…I dunno, it’s so close to historical reality, so why not just set it in the Caribbean of the past and just establish that there’s magic and some minor changes? Alternate history, anyone? I guess there’s a ton of fantasy novels that do that for European countries, but honestly, I’ve never liked it no matter the country that inspired the setting.
I dunno, the commentary would come across no matter the setting. Beasts of Carnaval isn’t the first book to have this, but for me, even though it peeved me, it didn’t take away from how lush the worldbuilding was; beyond the real-world hierarchies that were present, I loved the magic in this world, and it was integrated into the real world almost effortlessly. It’s a very fleshed out world rooted in historical themes and cultures, enlivened by vibrant and vivid magic inspired by Indigenous Taíno mythologies.
After reading Beasts of Carnaval, I’m absolutely going to be looking out for anything else that Rosália Rodrigo writes, because the prose of this novel was truly captivating! A Carnaval-inspired setting is bound to have some fun imagery, but Rodrigo wrung every ounce of magic out of it. With her prose, Isla Bestia wasn’t just abstractly a place that nobody wants to leave—she really makes you feel the seductive enchantment of the entire island! From the first description of the hummingbird dancer at the beginning, I was nothing short of captivated—I was hooked from start to finish, and I loved every minute of exploring the world that Rodrigo had crafted!
Compelling prose needs a compelling protagonist, and Sofía was just that! I adored her character, and she just seemed to leap off the page for me. From the start, I loved the many facets of her personality; she was strong-willed, determined, sensible, and sometimes practical to a fault, but I loved watching her adventures. Especially in contrast to the other characters around her, she was so focused on her mission of finding her missing brother that I got sucked in immediately. Hidden beneath her practical exterior, her deep caring for Sol made me root for her instantly, and I loved the way she fought back against the micro (and very much macro)aggressions that she experienced in daily life for being mixed-race. It’s rare that I love a character from the get-go, but Sofía captured my heart immediately!
A part of Sofía’s character that I also appreciated was the discussion of her mixed-race/mestiza identity! As a mixed-race person myself (though I’m very white-passing), I loved the nuanced discussions surrounding her conflicting feelings about her identity and how it positioned her in the highly stratified world around her. Rodrigo also had some excellent discussions about passing privilege and the treatment that Sofía got as this universe’s version of an Afro-Latina woman, especially with her being a former slave; Rodrigo did an excellent job of balancing her pride with the hurt she carries from enduring decades of racism from her peers and having to justify being a part of either of the communities she’s descended from. It was also especially poignant to have her arc revolving around discovering the magic of her Indigenous ancestors, inspired by Taíno mythology! It’s always so fulfilling to connect with one’s culture (speaking from experience), and to have that be physically manifested as healing magic was nothing short of emotional. I couldn’t get enough of it!
Overall, an enchanting and emotional novel that hooked me instantly. 4 stars!
Beasts of Carnaval is Rosália Rodrigo’s debut novel.
Today’s song:
MICHELANGELO DYING MY BELOVED
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Guess who’s back/back again…with a negative review. Oopsies.
Yeah, sorry. I feel like this always happens, and I hate that it’s happening a) right when I come back to blogging in earnest and b) at the start of Latine Heritage Month. I swear this has happened so many times. (Don’t worry! I made a whole post about so many more books by Latine authors that are actually worth a read!) But a gal’s gotta review some bad books sometimes, and remember, kids: a book’s diversity doesn’t immediately mean that there aren’t any issues with the writing.
I’ve been hearing about Mistress of Bones around the blogosphere, and the premise seemed like some classic, YA fantasy fun. I regret to inform you that I’ve once again been duped into reading a very lackluster and generic fantasy book. There’s some slack I’m willing to give this novel because it’s Maria Z. Medina’s debut, but god, I haven’t read such a hot mess in quite some time.
Azul de Arroyo cares for little more in life than her beloved older sister, who had an early death at fourteen. But by channeling the bone magic of her people, she was able to resurrect her at a young age. But when her sister is killed again, she has no choice to journey to the capital city in order to steal back her sister’s bones and return her to life. Soon, Azul has run afoul of the Emissary of Lord Death; her escapades have not gone unnoticed, and he’s got his eye on her. The rules of Death cannot be reversed so easily, and he’ll do anything to stop her—however pulled he is to her. Dragged into a tangled web of dark magic and court intrigue, Azul must do everything in her power to bring her sister back—even at the cost of the world.
TW/CW: animal death, loss of loved ones, violence, gore, murder
DNF at about 60%. I just couldn’t take it. I really tried to make it through this one, but at a certain point, I realized just how fleeting life is, and wanted to spend that life with something other than this novel.
Listen. There’s a certain amount of slack I’m willing to give a novel like this based on a) the fact that it’s a debut novel, and b) how hard it is to get published as a marginalized author. Every novel is, to some extent, a labor of love, and I’m sure this was the truth for Mistress of Bones. I don’t mean to discount the work of Medina and anybody else involved. But god, this was a MESS. Labor of love as writing always is, this needed at least two more rounds of editing. At LEAST.
The problem with the setup of Mistress of Bones wasn’t that it had a nonlinear timeline. I don’t even know if I would call it nonlinear, but there aren’t adequate words to describe…quite what the situation with this novel is. It’s less nonlinear and more just thousands of flashbacks in a trenchcoat posing as a novel. I didn’t mind them in the prologue, and in fact, I did actually enjoy the way the prologue set up the narrative and the tone of the story. It was appropriately spooky and it set up Azul’s character nicely—it got the job done. However, this novel ended up being 50% flashbacks. Mind you, they weren’t just to the same period as the prologue, but jumping to entirely random years in the past. None of it made any logical sense, and not even in a convoluted way—it wasn’t complex, the plot points were just scattered every which way. At that point, if that much of your plot is propped up by taking random detours into the past, there’s something desperately wrong with the plot. Take the flashbacks away, and the plot was just the writing equivalent of a pile of crumpled-up tissues on the ground.
I’m usually one for bombastic dialogue; in fact, I’d like to think that I have a good tolerance, given the steady diet of classic sci-fi novels and ’80s X-Men comics I consumed when I was in high school. If done right, campy dialogue can enhance the atmosphere and the writing style in many ways. But Mistress of Bones missed the mark by miles. The key to its downfall was how self-serious it all was. Once again: I still read a good amount of YA, and there’s a certain amount of drama that you’ve got to accept from the get-go. But Medina constantly had teenagers exclaiming “Bah!” like Romantic English poets and then spouting off the corniest lines of dialogue known to man without an inch of self-awareness. (Thomas Thorne-core, and I don’t mean that in a good way. iykyk.) It was just so self-serious that it defeated the purpose of amping up the drama. What’s more is that all of the characters had the exact same voice. I expected it to be just reserved for the spooky edgelord male YA love interest, but no…they were ALL involved in this. If you’re aiming for drama, you at least have to do it right.
Speaking of the characters…they were also woefully mishandled. I’m wise enough in my older years (read: my early twenties) to know that hardly any YA fantasy book marketed with a Six of Crows comparison delivers. But this was a special kind of mismarketing. First off, only Azul, the Emissary, and Nereida really got any page time. There were a handful of other purportedly important characters skittering about somewhere, but they got so little page time that I lost interest in them and their minimal sway over the plot. Not only that, but even between the main characters, they all had virtually the same voice. They all had that pompous, overly self-serious tone that I spoke about earlier, but there was almost zero variation between any of them. You mean to say that a witch, the emissary of death himself, and a seventeen year old girl would have the exact same speaking voice? It’s almost like they were indistinguishable from each other on purpose—I can’t think of any other explanation for the breadth of how far this hot mess spreads.
Beneath it all, I can’t really say that there was much about Mistress of Bones that grabbed my attention. There were a few quirks in the worldbuilding that kept me reading for a good length, but they were barely sustained. I’m always excited to see Latine-inspired worlds and cultures in genre fiction, but it barely extended past the Spanish-inspired names. I was intrigued by the whole concept of the floating continents and the gods that mandated this seismic shift, but it barely seemed to have any bearing on the plot or the characters. The Emissary of Death should’ve had significant sway over the plot and over Azul’s actions, but the title only served to give him more edgelord love interest points. Looking back, I think this issue boils down most of my problems with Mistress of Bones as a whole: it was all setup with no payoff. We were promised a multilayered, multi-POV fantasy with romance and intrigue, and we only got the bones of those things (no pun intended). It was all skeleton, with no skin or muscle tissue to make the novel into something that could function on its own.
All in all, a novel full of messy, undelivered promises masquerading as a plot. 1.5 stars.
Mistress of Bones is Maria Z. Medina’s debut novel and the first novel in the Mistress of Bones duology; no information is currently available about the sequel.
Today’s song:
GORILLAZ AND SPARKS, THIS IS NOT A DRILL
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles! Apparently today marks ten whole years since I started with this blog…granted, it was a pretty far cry from what it is today, but it’s a marvel that I’ve kept it going for this long. Thanks for tagging along, everyone! 🫡
In my ongoing quest to read more translated books, I’ve stumbled upon a lot more Japanese books about cats than I anticipated. Granted, they’ve varied greatly, but it’s a pattern. Not that I’m complaining—I’ll read most anything involving cats! Which is partly why I decided to read The Full Moon Coffee Shop. It sounded downright whimsical, and to some degree it was, but ultimately, that quality was dulled by the formulaic nature of…well, pretty much everything else.
The Full Moon Coffee Shop is no ordinary café. It only appears during the night of the full moon. Its waitstaff are talking cats, and you can never order what you want—they only serve you what you need. And if you find yourself in the Full Moon Coffee Shop, you’re in need of direction in life. Weaving together the interconnected stories of five unlikely strangers, the Full Moon Coffee Shop may be the answer to their burning questions—and the healing they desperately need.
TW/CW: cheating/affairs, sexism, grief
One of the biggest letdowns in reading: finding a book that seems super cute and whimsical, and then said whimsy is there in name only. You can’t just give us an incorporeal coffee shop manned by talking astrologer cats and then be so unconvinced by your own whimsy! God.
The worst thing that a cozy book can be is preachy. Having a low-stakes novel centered around life lessons, healing, and character growth doesn’t mean that you have to have a Learning Moment™️ worded like a PSA every few chapters. It’s a pitfall that’s easy to fall into with cozy fiction, but it’s one that takes away the magic for me. For novels that are meant to be about taking quiet moments that are often taken for granted and giving them more weight and value to the narrative, having everything explained to you seems so contrary to what “cozy” means to me. I just resent books that try to show character development decently, and then ruin it all by assuming that the reader doesn’t have the capacity to figure out what just happened and regurgitating it word-for-word. This was the main problem with this novel—it assumed so little of the reader and spelled everything out in the least subtle way.Every chapter of The Full Moon Coffee Shop pulled a “And what did we learn today, kids?” moment at the end without fail, and it just got so tedious so quickly. It just felt so preachily worded and repetitive, dulling any emotional impact this story could’ve had.
I feel so conflicted when talking about the writing of The Full Moon Coffee Shop. I read it in translation, so I really don’t know who’s to blame for the quality of the writing. I don’t know if Mai Mochizuki’s original text was dryly written to begin with or if Jesse Kirkwood’s English translation somehow dulled some of Mochizuki’s writing style and rendered it blander than before! I have no clue! Gaaaaaaaah! In any case, The Full Moon Coffee Shop was written so stiffly for a book that billed itself as so whimsical. The characters’ inner monologues all feel very rote and one-note and there’s hardly any sensory descriptions to immerse the reader in the setting. The writing let me down the most when we were introduced to the coffee shop itself, the most unique part of the novel; while I enjoyed the concepts of everything, from the celestial-themed desserts to the talking cat waitstaff, it was all described with the sparsest possible detail, the bare minimum word count to get the reader to visualize a new image. The Full Moon Coffee Shop is a slim novel, so it’s not like more detailed descriptions would’ve made it overly long—I was barely immersed in both the real-world and magical settings. The same can be said for the characters, who were barely developed beyond a problem they needed solving. The writing just felt like the bare minimum of describing…well, everything.
For me, one of the main issues with The Full Moon Coffee Shop was just how formulaic everything was. I had the same issue with What You Are Looking For is In the Library, a similarly cozy book about finding direction in life, but in that case, the stories were so repetitive and short and seemed to be saying the exact same thing, so my patience ran thin much earlier than with this novel. Once again, cozy doesn’t necessarily mean predictable—it should mean something that’s low-stakes, not repetitive. The Full Moon Coffee Shop felt like hearing the same story three times over; character is dissatisfied with life, character discovers coffee shop, character gets their natal chart read, character has a revelation and magically figures out how to fix their life. Rinse and repeat for 200 pages. You can see how tired that got. I appreciated that Mochizuki at least attempted to switch things up for the last story, but it didn’t do much to my interest in the story. All that changes is that it’s framed through the characters thinking that the coffee shop experience is a dream. Sadly, that amounted to little more than a perspective change and a switch to a handwritten font. It just got so repetitive and boring after a while, and even though the stories focused on different problems, Mochizuki rarely had anything new to say.
I hadn’t read a ton of reviews of The Full Moon Coffee Shop going in, but it seems a lot of people had problems with the heavy emphasis on astrology. The presence of astrology in and of itself wasn’t an issue for me, but it was more how said astrology was woven into the novel that got on my nerves. “Woven” is a generous word—even as someone who’s at least sort of into astrology, I felt absolutely sledgehammered over the head with every minute detail of it. After a certain point, The Full Moon Coffee Shop just became Astrology for Dummies. You know that meme of the kid pretending to read the Bible, but there’s a Minecraft book peeking out of the Bible? That’s what it felt like. It’s less of a novel and more somebody talking at you about the natal charts of complete strangers for 200 pages. I guess it might be beneficial to assume that your reader doesn’t know much about astrology, but Mochizuki got so bogged down in explaining every minute detail of every character’s astrology that the real meat of the story got lost. For me, it took away from the heart of the story, which should’ve been getting insights into the characters and their healing journeys. I feel like astrology easily could’ve been a fascinating aspect of the novel if not for how unsubtly it was shoehorned in—there could’ve been a chance to give it some narrative significance rather than spending 50 pages explaining astrology to the reader like they’re 5 years old.
Despite the formula of The Full Moon Coffee Shop getting on my nerves, I at least appreciated some of the messaging that the cats gave to the characters on how to fix their lives, particularly in the second chapter. However, the advice that the cats gave Mizuki seemed downright weird. I get that she’s not having success in her career, but the cats telling her to get with the times and not write what she loves just seemed so odd to me. There could’ve been something so poignant about success not being everything and her failures only being a small part of her career, but the cats were just talking to her like they were corporate executives telling her to be hip with the kids! Not only did that rub me the wrong way, the story itself seemed to refute the cats’ advice as well. Mizuki ends up finding success when she injects her signature style into a project that she was only doing for the money, thereby finding success in being herself and putting her own personal spin on things! Crazy concept! So why even have the cats tell her that in the first place, if that’s not even the lesson that the novel leads us to believe that Mizuki takes away from it?
All in all, a cozy novel that billed itself as tender and sweet, but ended up being unsubtle, preachy, and unconvinced of its own lessons. 2 stars.
The Full Moon Coffee Shop is the first in the Full Moon Coffee Shop series, followed by Best Wishes from The Full Moon Coffee Shop. Mai Mochizuki is also the author of the Holmes of Kyoto series.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
On Earth As It Is on Television has been on my TBR for at least a few years, and I’ve nearly bought it at least twice at my local Barnes & Noble before settling on it last week. It seemed quirky and interesting, but this novel ended up blowing me away with how inventive, heartfelt, and downright funny it was. The best 5-star reads come out of nowhere, and On Earth As It Is on Television is one of them.
Aliens have finally come to Earth. Without warning, dozens of spaceships appear over Earth, causing a worldwide panic. Days later, they leave without a word. As the world falls into chaos, the lives of three people intersect as the world struggles to reckon with this occurrence. Blaine struggles to wrangle his TV-addicted children, now convinced that they need to skin people to find the aliens within, and go along with the mercurial plans of his wife, Anne. Catatonic for 30 years, Oliver suddenly regains consciousness, only to be whisked away on a strange journey by a stray cat. Heather, always the outsider among her stepfamily, ponders if the aliens could finally mark the start in the next chapter of her mundane life. All of their journeys converge as the world reckons with their place in the universe—and what could be next for the human race.
TW/CW: car accident, death, imprisonment, suicidal ideation, substance abuse
I did not expect a book with such a massive volume of millennial cat meme-isms to nearly make me cry multiple times. One minute they’re going on about Mr. Meow-Mitts and “himb peets” or something, and 20 pages later I’m a puddle on the floor. What a book.
There’s not a ton I can compare to in terms of On Earth As It Is on Television, but if anything, it’s quite like No One Is Talking About This, a book that also deals with the chaos of 21st century life; there’s a lot of meme-speak, there’s a lot of mindless media consumption, and there’s a whole lot of absurdity. A lot of the humor takes cues from the oversaturation of memes in the 2010’s (cats, bacon, etc.), but it’s a lot funnier than that entails—it’s more about the ridiculousness of that microcosm than it is about the actual humor; for me, it fed into the whole side of the story that was about the ridiculousness of modern life, as we are oversaturated with…well, everything. Plastic, fatty foods, cat memes. (If you have minimal tolerance for phrases like “heckin chonker” and “floofy boi,” this might not be the book for you. It’s a lot, but stay with it, trust me.) Surprisingly, this ends up being very poignant by the end of the novel, but it was both an astute observation on our 21st century state of being in a perpetual deluge of mindless information and content. Jane cranks the absurdity up to its absolute maximum without it feeling overwhelming—it’s totally goofy at times, but it’s great satire as well.
Both of the sci-fi books that I’ve rated in the 4.75-5 star range this year have involved cats in some way. Coincidence? I think not. (Shoutout to The Last Gifts of the Universeand Pumpkin the cat.) The way that On Earth As It Is on Television uses cats was one of the funnier parts of the novel, setting aside the pervasion of cat meme-speak. As well as causing worldwide panic, the alien ships have an unexplained effect on the world’s cat population—they all come back telepathic, and the results are hilarious. It’s clear that Jane is a cat lover, and it came through in every page. It added another wonderful layer of silliness to an already absurd novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And honestly, it seemed completely plausible for cats to be the ones to pick up on alien frequencies, out of all the creatures on Earth.
Usually for a 5-star novel, I get super attached to at least a few characters. On Earth As It Is on Television might honestly be an exception, but that’s not a slight against it in the least. I didn’t like all of the characters—in fact, I doubt it was the point for them to be likable—but they all felt real. Blaine didn’t have a distinct personality for the beginnings of the novel, but you come to realize that he’s been so swallowed up by trying to juggle everyone else that it’s become his personality. Avril and Jas are the most insufferable children you could ever dream up, but they feel like the terrible kids you’re stuck sitting next to at the DMV or on the plane. Heather came off dramatic and whiny more often than not, but I could easily see how much her life felt out of her control. All of this is to say that though they were not all likable in the traditional sense, they felt real, and that was what felt refreshing. For a novel that tracked the trajectories of ordinary people, they felt especially authentic. It’s a mass reckoning with the absurdity of life, and Jane makes every detour worth it.
If anything, it was the characters’ journeys that were the most compelling part of the novel. All of the interconnected characters throughout On Earth As It Is on Television were thrown into circumstances outside of their control, both physical and mental, and nowhere that any of them went ended up being predictable. The concrete trajectories ranged from the ordinary (Heather feeling forgotten amongst her stepfamily) to the outright bizarre (a catatonic man regaining consciousness after 20 years and going on the world’s weirdest road trip with a telepathic cat), but all of them presented such rich character development. They crisscrossed all over the country, at times laugh-out-loud funny and other times more grounded and solemn. Wacky as it was, Jane used them all to wring out so much emotional development from a worldwide crisis that affects everyone differently; grappling with the fallout of feeling important in the universe, but then being forgotten just as quickly.
I’m a sucker for fun alien designs, and I didn’t expect On Earth As It Is on Television to deliver as much as it did. The Malorts aren’t peak creature design, but with their three-handed meerkat-like appearances and affinities for plastic crap, they hammered home the themes of the novel excellently. I wasn’t looking for any kind of realism in this novel, which is why I’m so glad that Jane went so bonkers with the design and culture of the Malorts, from their dietary preferences to their fascination with cats. They were a perfect vehicle for the absurdity that this novel emphasizes, and they provided as many laughs as the humans. There was a moment where there was so much plastic involved in the novel that I thought that the wry commentary on consumerism was going to fall flat, but the Malorts ended up turning it into a solution for climate change in-universe: why not give the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to a bunch of aliens who really like plastic for some reason? It was totally wonderful and goofy, but it segued nicely into the novel’s themes of finding joy in unlikely and mundane places and things.
More on that…any book that makes observations of shiny, plastic souvenirs and children repeating meme-isms into something genuinely poignant and moving deserves some kind of praise. But by the end, I loved what it had to say about the nature of life, however absurd it may be: everything is messy and out of your control, but that’s okay. Life is worth living for all of the strange detours and tiny miracles that you can find in every day life—cats, children singing, good food, silly television, and unexpected forks in the road. No matter our place in the universe or what the government does, we can always look to the ordinary to find solace. And beyond that, we can look to each other—our family, our friends, and strangers—to anchor us in the face of upheaval. On Earth As It Is on Television is a novel about many things (cats, TV, road trips, aliens), but above all, it’s about the small miracles that make life worth living—and what better way to end such a strange, beautiful novel? When we are inundated with mindless consumption, what better resistance is there than to notice life’s small, organic miracles? Finding and reading this novel felt exactly how it was intended to be read—on a whim, and being unexpectedly moved by it in so many places.
All in all, a clever, quirky, and unexpectedly moving novel about the biggest and smallest things in our human—and alien—experiences. 4.75 stars, rounded up to 5!
On Earth As It Is on Television is a standalone, but Emily Jane is also the author of Here Beside the Rising Tide and the forthcoming American Werewolves.
Today’s song:
BIOPHILIA ‼️
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
As Disability Pride Month comes to a close, here’s one last book to finish off the month. This one has been on my TBR for at least a year, and it’s evaded me in the library thus far—thankfully, Barnes & Noble finally brought my chase to an end. Even though I’m growing a little weary of every new sci-fi that hinges on the promise of “incomprehensible space religion, woooooo,” Redsight provided a fascinating twist in the subgenre.
Korinna knows that she is doomed to a life of obscurity. Even though her being a Redseer gives her the power to manipulate space-time itself, she is the weakest of her order, and little mercy is shown to the weak. Resigning herself to a position navigating a warship for the treacherous Imperium, Korinna is at war with herself. But when the warship is boarded by strange pirates, Korinna learns that she has power beyond comprehension—all deliberately hidden. With her newfound abilities and a desire to uncover the secrets of the Goddesses that once ruled the galaxy, Korinna searches for answers, but what she finds may be more dangerous than she could have ever bargained for.
TW/CW: violence, gore, blood, death of children (off-page)
In the last six or seven years, I’ve seen a major trend in science fiction where the plot centers around an ancient, ominous Space Religion™️ (see: Gideon the Ninth, The First Sister, The Genesis of Misery). It’s a Thing. The usual suspects include an AI/vague cosmic entity deity, some form of cult, vague to overt references to Catholicism, and repression. I’m honestly fine with all of these things—in fact, having a cultish religion on an intergalactic scale is often a fascinating way to set up a story, and can be used to many ends, whether it’s deepening worldbuilding or critiquing organized religion in the real world, as it often does. My problem was that it’s everywhere. I feel like every other space opera I find is some kind of retelling of Joan of Arc or “what if God was real and it was a robot and the robot wanted to kill you?” Again, interesting once or twice, but after a point, they all start to blend together. On a personal level, I guess it’s partly because I don’t often connect as deeply to stories about religion/religious trauma, but I swear every other adult sci-fi book out there is like this.
Redsight is one of those books. However, it had enough different aspects that it was separated from the rest for me. It honestly veers into space fantasy at times, toeing the line between that and space opera expertly. Even though the redseers and all of the other witches in the universe had a slightly similar structure to some other books I’d read (spooky magic, incomprehensible goddesses trapped in tombs for thousands of years, etc.), it was Mooring’s exploration of how this insular cult of witches affected the outside world that stood out to me. The space-time manipulation is awesome, first off, but there’s also a host of space pirates, sprawling libraries, and transformative magic that goes…wrong. Snakes are involved. Also, Korinna and the others don’t exist in a vacuum—they’re a small part of a massive galaxy and are entangled in all manner of messy, manipulative politics throughout the universe. (There’s a strong Bene Gesserit vibe going on…I guess Dune might be to blame for the big spooky space religion trend?) They are outwardly very strange to others, and they don’t feel self-contained, as some other similar books are—they felt like a small part of a much more expansive world, which is what set it apart. Plus, I loved how it served as a critique of both that can come from organized religion AND the corruption that spreads into imperial politics—it’s all a great examination of systemic corruption, which I enjoyed thoroughly.
One of the more unique aspects of Redsight was how disability was handled. Up until we leave the Navitas, where all of the redseers are trained, pretty much all of the characters you meet are blind. All of the priests and priestesses of Vermicula are blind, and the way that Mooring shows us how it’s accommodated in the universe is fascinating. Through the power of redsight, they can sense most everything they need to sense through…well, manipulating the fabric of time and space, which is pretty badass in and of itself. But beyond that, I love how many intricacies to Korinna’s life are detailed. We see how she senses space around her with her blindness, how the Order of Vermicula produces special tactile books so that everyone can read the holy texts, and how she navigates the universe without being accommodated like she was within the Order. Knowing that Mooring herself is blind, I’m sure that she thought of everything when it came to how Korinna would navigate the universe, accommodations or not, and it showed through in her writing.
If you’re looking for a twisty book, then Redsight is the book for you! Even though I feel like I’m iffy when it comes to predicting twists, the ones in this novel had me constantly guessing. Mooring nails a critical combination of a very slow-burn first third of the novel, gradually building tension, while also throwing out a red herring where you think you know what the big mid-book reveal is, but…oh boy, I did not. (Red herrings, Redsight, red witches…lots of red in this book! Say, what’s that pooling on the floor?) In all seriousness, Mooring did an excellent job of creating tension and putting up all manner of red flags and misleading clues, and they came up organically: they were both the result of Korinna not knowing any better and the propaganda and narrative control that both the Order of Vermicula and the Imperium had over the knowledge that was passed onto her. It deepened the worldbuilding and the pacing of Redsight…for the most part.
All that being said, the ending was quite rushed. With as much buildup as this novel had, it was kind of bound to happen. All things considered, Redsight is Mooring’s debut novel, so I can let some of it go, because I enjoyed the majority of it. But there was just far too much crammed into the last 100 or so pages of the novel. Even with the theme of undoing systemic corruption, the speed at which it happened was truly just bonkers. For the truly mind-boggling, cosmic scale that everything in Redsight happened in, it seemed illogical that everything that happened in the novel would’ve been able to happen so quickly. After all of that, it was wrapped up strangely tightly—the loose ends were tied up basically because…the Goddesses can just do whatever, and it’s fine. I guess if you’re dealing with universe-creating Goddesses, by that logic, they can also clean up messy endings? It felt cheap. For the amount of time spent just on the buildup in the first third of the novel, everything was resolved far too quickly than seemed plausible, even with my suspension of disbelief.
All in all, a gripping and captivating—if a little messy—story of corruption and history, all set within the bounds of a boundless, magic-filled universe. 4 stars!
Redsight is a standalone, and Meredith Mooring’s debut novel.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Continuing with Disability Pride Month, here’s a fascinating 2025 debut! I love books about libraries and archives, both for personal reasons and because of the possibilities that they hold. Add in the queer, science fiction aspect of it, and I was instantly hooked. The Ephemera Collector turned out to be one of the more unique books I’ve read recently, both in its mixed-media approach and the sprawling nature of its vision.
2035. In a divided, polluted Los Angeles, Xandria Brown pours her passion into her work as an archivist. Collecting ephemera from prominent Black authors, artists, and activists, she fights to preserve her work as the threat of corporate encroachment in her library looms. After the death of her wife, only her health bots, which monitor her symptoms of long COVID, keep her company. But when the library goes into lockdown for undisclosed reasons, Xandria and her health bots must get to the bottom of the mystery—and make sure that her collections are unscathed.
TW/CW: ableism, eugenics, racism, violence, medical content
Though not without its flaws, this is one of those novels where you can really feel how much of a labor of love it was for the author. The Ephemera Collector is Stacy Nathaniel Jackson’s debut novel, which he published in his 60’s (!!!). It’s a mix of prose, poetry, and visual media, and I honestly wish I’d read a physical copy instead of an ebook in this case, because I feel like my Kindle couldn’t grasp the formatting fully. Nevertheless, The Ephemera Collector is a unique novel in all senses: a unique dystopia, a unique Afrofuturist novel, and a startlingly original piece of sci-fi.
Stacy Nathaniel Jackson’s vision of the United States 10 years from now was certainly bleak, but his worldbuilding was what made The Ephemera Collector stand out so much to me. No stone was left unturned in terms of what happens to America in the next 10 years, from the threat of corporate oversight on Xandria’s archives of Black history to the COVID-34 pandemic that occurs a year before the novel is set. It was bleak to me, but not necessarily cynical to me; yeah, us going into a second global pandemic only 14 years after “getting through” the first one seems a bit cynical, but given how this country absolutely bungled how we handled COVID-19, it feels somewhat realistic. Yet the weirder and further you get from the center of what makes Jackson’s dystopia a dystopia, the more imaginative the worldbuilding gets. Xandria is followed around by health bots that all have distinct personalities. There’s a whole Atlantis 2: Electric Boogaloo situation with a group of POC separatists who settle underwater off the coast of California. The weirder Jackson gets with it, the better the worldbuilding becomes; those unique touches are what stuck with me the most.
Yet even though Jackson’s vision of the future is full of polluted air and government corruption (not too far off…oof), it never fully felt like completely gloom and doom. In the end, I feel like this novel was about the importance of preserving history, and the main character’s fight is to keep corporations out of her exhibition of Black history, namely a collection of ephemera about Octavia Butler. Our protagonist is a queer, disabled Black woman who comes from a line of disabled Black ancestors, and she is standing her ground when it comes to preserving their history as a fundamental thread in the fabric of our country. Xandria putting up this fight, for me, was what kept The Ephemera Collector from being fully cynical. To imagine a darker vision of the future is one thing, but to have a character fight it, win, and outlast said corruption and hatred (somehow, she lives to be 300 years old? I assumed it was the gene editing, but it’s never fully explained) was what gave me hope in the end. Xandria, a battered woman who faced threats to her archives, non-consensual gene editing and eugenicist practices, and the death of her wife, comes out the victor in the end, triumphant over everything she fought to defeat. She is alive to preserve the history of her ancestors, but she is also proof that even the groups that America is most determined to erase will survive no matter what this country throws at them—and outlive them by centuries.
Going into The Ephemera Collector, I knew it wouldn’t be the easiest book to digest. The reviews warned me of a novel that frequently went on tangents that didn’t relate to the main storyline, and a novel that was disorganized in general. Having that in mind, I went in with low expectations. While I do think this novel was a bit disorganized at worst, I think it was partially the point. This is a book about an archivist poring through artifacts in a massive library. Jackson’s style is very stream-of-consciousness, and I feel like it uniquely reflects what Xandria’s mindset would accurately be if she spent most of her waking hours as an archivist. It reminded me vaguely of The Library of Broken Worlds, a very different book from this one, but still a sprawling, magnificent at best, deeply convoluted at worst novel set in a vast library. Maybe that’s just what you’re in for if you write imaginative books about sci-fi/fantasy libraries. There were some sections that strayed too far from the main plot for my taste (more on that later), but overall, I enjoyed the breaks in form, whether it was the switches from prose to poetry to the anecdotes about Xandria’s ancestry. It really put me in mind of an archivist, and that seems exactly what Jackson set out to do. For me, it also tied back into the theme of preserving history—all of what we see is the history that Xandria fought so hard to keep alive and non-sanitized by corporations.
Here’s the thing, though. I was fine with the earlier tangents because I could see the thread that connected them to the rest of the novel. But around 60% of the way through, The Ephemera Collector quite literally loses the plot. Without warning, it switches to an entirely new story that’s barely connected to the main story—and that’s being generous. The only possible connection I could find was that one of the characters was a relative of Xandria, but that’s it. There’s no connection to her or the library. My dilemma is that although it was very distant from the rest of the novel, it was still a compellingly written storyline. It dealt with one of the more fascinating parts of the worldbuilding: the separatist community who created an underwater settlement, and later became pseudo-climate refugees when it became untenable to live underwater for any longer. It was so strange and lovely to pick apart, but it didn’t connect to the main narrative until the very last minute. Even in the context of Xandria looking through the archives, there wasn’t a clear thread. I’m tempted to give this less than 4 stars, because although this frustrated me, the writing was just that good. In my more arbitrary system, I guess it would be more in the 3.8-3.9 range, if we’re getting really specific, but I like it more than a 3.75. It’s a weird dilemma, but so is the whole novel, really.
All in all, a deeply imaginative Afrofuturist novel that pushed the boundaries of what a dystopia can be. 4 stars!
The Ephemera Collector is a standalone and Stacy Nathaniel Jackson’s debut.
Today’s song:
NEW GUERILLA TOSS, WOOOO
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
This week: I get more heated than I ever expected to be about Edvard Grieg, my middle school sad bastard music comes out of its cave, and, uh…what’s that? LOVE SHACK, BABY! More at 6.
This one came late because of, once again, my insistence on sticking to these (loose) color palettes. But god, I was having a blast listening to this on repeat during Pride Month. I couldn’t go to any pride parades or anything because of a) preexisting plans and b) it was, quite literally, as hot as an oven. But the amount of times I listened to “Love Shack” honestly made up for it.
Sure, this isn’t nearly as weird as some of The B-52s’ other songs—in fact, it’s probably their most accessible song—but it really is fitting as one of their signature songs. The pop joy isn’t just a product of them being upbeat for airplay—it really was a triumphant moment for them, their comeback after tragedy struck the band in 1985 after the death of Ricky Wilson from AIDS-related complications. It was them coming back from the brink and declaring that in spite of tragedy, they would stick to their mission of bringing gleefully weird pop music to the world. It’s a catchy pop song, sure, but it was also a commitment to celebrate togetherness in spite of the greatest hardship a band could possibly endure. And for a song that’s mainly just remembered as the product of a particularly weird party band, that’s such a beautiful legacy to leave. But beyond that…oh my god, it’s just so camp. It’s just so fun! How can you not grin constantly when you hear this song? Fred Schneider’s just being Fred Schneider, Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson are producing some of the best harmonies in pop music, and the whole “bang, bang, bang, on the door, baby” bridge? Who ISN’T shivering with antici……..pation at that? (And yes, that is RuPaul right there at 2:03 in the music video, as if this song couldn’t get any queerer.) I’m tempted to dismiss my instincts to get all women and gender studies with it about “Love Shack,” but if this isn’t queer joy—coming together in the face of a widespread tragedy that affected the LGBTQ+ community so fundamentally—then what is? LOVE SHACK, BABY!
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Like a Love Story – Abdi Nazemian – The B-52’s aren’t the focus of this book (Madonna is, though), but this novel is set in 1989—the same year “Love Shack” was released—and centers around similar themes of queer identity and togetherness in the face of tragedy.
While we all wait for Jimmy’s Show 2 to come out, Jim Noir has released an EP of covers, available on his Patreon! (It also includes a mashup of Pink Floyd’s “Breathe” and Super Furry Animals’ “Northern Lites,” which is pretty amazing.) He posted this cover of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid” several months before hand, and I lamented that he hadn’t made it available for release, because unexpectedly, it was perfectly suited for him. Jim Noir’s music is full of ’60s influences, but until now, I mostly thought it was reserved for bands like The Beatles or the Beach Boys, which more readily come through in his sunnier, twinklier melodies. I should’ve known how easily that would translate to another part of the ’60s—Sam Cooke’s classic love song. It’s hard to touch any of his songs for me, not necessarily because they hold a particularly special place in my heart, but because they’re so ubiquitously him—Cooke’s songs have a quality about them that make them feel fully-formed, able to be made by nobody but him. The key to Jim Noir’s success with the cover is that he doesn’t overdo it—he’s just Jim Noir, not Sam Cooke. It’s an understated cover, but that quality makes it more intimate and calming to me—there’s a soothing quality about it, from his harmonies to the soft background strings. That’s what makes it such a genius cover—Jim’s not being anyone but him, but staying true to the spirit of the original.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Last Night at the Telegraph Club– Malinda Lo – I’m a few years off as far as the dates go, but give it a few years, and this would fit right in with the more tender, quiet moments of this novel.
I had no idea that this existed until a few days ago, and y’know what? It’s an absolutely wild pairing as far as covers go, but trust me, it sounds exactly how you’d picture it sounding. It’s just “In The Hall of the Mountain King” done entirely with synths. I do enjoy it, but I feel like it betrays the original song in a key way. The thing that most people remember about “In The Hall of the Mountain King” is that point (you know the one) where it goes absolutely, truly, off-the-wall bonkers, like they crammed chaos incarnate into whatever concert hall it was performed in. It’s about the gradual buildup!! The payoff!! It feels like a whole pack of firecrackers going off and ricocheting off the walls!! And Erasure…barely sped up the tempo? Which is a crazy move to pull when covering this…like, how does one cover “In The Hall of the Mountain King” and not go fucking nuts with it? You do you, Erasure, I guess, but…man, you already pulled the move of putting an Edvard Grieg cover as a bonus track, might as well go crazy with it!!
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Stars Undying – Emery Robin – …kinda hard to recommend a book to pair with a synth cover of classical music, but, uh…how about a sci-fi retelling based on the stories of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar? Will that suffice? Help me out here…
So here’s what Graham Coxon was doing all that time when Blur was making Think Tank, which was…doing exactly what was barely on Think Tank: guitar freakouts (no pun intended). While his former bandmates were reveling in some of the more experimental sides of their musical taste and abilities, Coxon was sticking to what he loved and did best. Part of why I got so attached to Blur was his propulsive guitar playing, whether it was his bright, chugging melodies on Parklife or the darker, grungier sounds of their self-titled album or 13. “Freakin’ Out” isn’t his lyrically strongest song, but it’s got this driving, punk-inspired beat that never lets you go. Of course, in true Graham Coxon, he’s in a suit and glasses while playing all this—Weezer who? If there’s anything that Graham Coxon has committed to in the last few decades, after spending time with Blur during the height of Britpop and being pressured to conform to pop music standards, it’s being nothing but himself. We’re all better for him being a quiet, introspective person playing loud, upfront music.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Light Years from Home – Mike Chen – “Nothing to be, nothing to fear/Nothing to prove, nothing to say/Nothing to lose, nothing to gain/Nothing to feel, nothing to hate/Nothing is real, it’s all too late…”
The Car Seat Headrest I saw when I was 14 was a very different Car Seat Headrest than the one I saw last week. At one point in the show, Will Toledo opened up about how he didn’t like playing some of his older material, particularly that from Teens of Denial, because he was, as he said, “an angry young man of 23.” It struck me as so humble that he’s willing to admit that he’d moved on from that anger and strife and that he was committed to being in a stabler, happier place in his life. Teens of Denial remains one of my favorite albums of all time, an album that was at my side at my most lost and confused moments when I was a young teenager. Sure, I would’ve loved to hear “Cosmic Hero” (if not just to replace my video from 2018 where my off-key screeching drowned out the actual song) or something, but I’m happy that Will Toledo’s happy. And all of this was the preface for “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales,” which he played to a crowd that knew all the words. Myself included. It was one of those nights where I could feel my younger self peering out from my chest, wiping the smudge away from her glasses, and dancing. I felt her dancing with me. I danced as hard as I could that night. It’s one of those times where a concert has felt, more than anything, like a warm hug, a reassurance across time to that little girl that she would be okay.
Car Seat Headrest has a notoriously rabid fanbase, small but mighty, the kind of people who’d unironically go up to you and say something like “Oh, you haven’t listened to the absolutely crusty-sounding old recordings he put out on Bandcamp and labeled ‘just awful shit?’ Fuckin’ poser!” And…yeah, with the kind of discography that Will Toledo has, it does lend itself to the kind of Charlie Kelly conspiracy theory board types. But the other side of that coin is that you get people who will ardently do the wave to a song that’s only available on Patreon. And that’s what made the show so riotously fun—the fervor of the fans for songs old and new, whether it was the stirring intro of “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)” or the extended medley of older songs. (I’ll admit to being awakened like a sleeper agent when they started playing “Something Soon.”)
“Happy News for Sadness” was one of the excerpts from medley of older songs that they did for the encore, one that somehow escaped my unending curiosity when I was in middle school. I’d already found “No Passion” and “Sunburned Shirts,” so who knows how this slipped through my fingers. I feel like it might’ve been for the best, because I have a feeling that earsplitting, lower-than-lo-fi “BWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEARGH” at 1:52 would’ve killed my headphones. “Happy News For Sadness” is as clear a glimpse into the sadder, angrier young man that defined much of Will Toledo’s career—the central chorus of “You can never tell the truth/But you can tell something that sounds like it” speaks to a lingering depression that’s been ever-present throughout his catalogue. Meandering through malaise and expired food doesn’t seem like something Toledo would revisit, given the speech he gave about Teens of Denial, but the fact that he’s able to reconcile with different eras of his own art in different ways feels like a mode of communication with the past. His songwriting was his way of telling the truth, and that truth resonated with so many people. To bridge that connection, to be able to look back and sing altered versions of the same song, is likely his way of making peace with it. Healing that younger part of yourself is different with each angle you tackle it from, but committing to that seems to be Toledo’s ongoing mission. I’m just lucky to be able to heal along with him and alongside hundreds of people.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Bad Ones – Melissa Albert – “Nobody cares about/(But I’m still ugly on the inside)/Your life and the people in it/(But I’m still ugly on the inside)/So you can stop telling me it gets better…”
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
I’ve been looking around for books to read for Disability Pride Month, and in general, trying to find some books by Palestinian/Palestinian diaspora authors. Something More fit both of those, so I figured I would give it a go! Though it wasn’t a perfect novel, it had all of the qualities of a classic YA romance novel—angsty, romantic, and heartfelt writing.
Jessie is determined to turn over a new leaf. On the precipice of starting high school, she wants to show the world that she isn’t the girl who she was in middle school—lonely, awkward, and more importantly, autistic. Keeping her diagnosis a secret, Jessie quickly makes new friends—and new crushes—at Holy Trinity High. But when her friendships begin to unravel and her relationships start to crumble, Jessie questions whether it’s worth it to keep her authentic truth a secret after all.
Dude. Jessie and I would’ve been best friends in high school. I would’ve gladly welcomed another neurodivergent Radiohead girlie to go sneak off to the library with during my lunch period.
Though I can’t speak to the accuracy of the representation, I loved how Something More explored Jessie’s identity! It’s something that I assume has a lot of personal importance to the author, and Khalilieh’s explored all of the facets of Jessie’s identity with such sensitivity and love. I’m not autistic, but I am neurodivergent (I have SPD), and I deeply resonated with a lot of her struggles with fitting in and adjusting to high school while being neurodivergent. I loved the arc of Jessie realizing that there’s no reason to hide her autism from her friends, and I also appreciated that a lot of her friends, despite their flaws, were respectful and accepting of her identity. The same goes with her Palestinian-Canadian identity—again, I can’t speak to the representation, but Something More had such a lovely exploration of Jessie’s experience growing up in an immigrant household and feeling like an outsider because of her Palestinian roots. It’s a deeply refreshing intersection of representation in YA literature that I adored!
I normally don’t advocate for things becoming Netflix movies, but I swear that Something More has the perfect recipe for becoming that kind of YA classic that gets a cute streaming movie. I can already see the Clueless-esque ’90s soundtrack from here, tailored towards Jessie’s special interest and the music integrated in the novel. From Jessie’s diary full of friend and boy-related (and getting her parents to get her a phone-related) goals to Jessie’s unique spark as a protagonist, it’s got the classic tropes down to a science, yet never makes them feel tired. She injects the right amounts of both the sass and the vulnerability that comes with a lovable YA rom-com protagonist. Khalilieh perfectly captures the awkwardness of entering high school and the rocky path to fitting in and finding your place. Jessie has so much great development, from realizing her self-worth in the face of her crush being dismissive of her, to realizing that she needs to stand up to her toxic “friends.” Jackie Khalilieh has clearly done her homework on YA, and with a little refinement, is well on her way to making a classic.
Despite what I loved about it, Something More suffered from a few key flaws. The most glaring of them was that…oh my god, there were so many wild, random subplots and side tangents that didn’t contribute much to the plot. Jessie’s grandma, who was almost never mentioned, randomly dies towards the end of the book, one of her friends gets involved with a creepy older man and gets dumped in a parking lot, and the rest of the friend group continuously gets tossed between several skeevy guys, seemingly with no resolution. Yeah, high school is weird, but by the end of the novel, the relationship/ex statuses between Jessie and her friend group looked like that one panel in Diary of a Wimpy Kidwith the massive relationship diagram. And that’s just her friend group of FOUR PEOPLE. It was wild. Other than the gross Mel subplot, which…at the very least, I guess it gave some depth to Jessie and Levi’s relationship, none of them added to the plot, and nor did they have any ripple effects throughout the novel. I guess there was only so much time for Jessie to reflect on her grandmother dying, but if they were as close as we were blatantly told in a handful of sentences, why did it barely have an effect on Jessie? Wouldn’t she be…y’know, experiencing some form of grief? It all just felt rushed and took away page time that could’ve been used to develop the more central relationships in the novel.
Speaking of relationships…thankfully, as the cover might lead you to believe, there really isn’t much of a love triangle. (Cue a sigh of relief.) I guess you could technically make an argument for it, but honestly, up until the 80% mark, I fully thought that things between Jessie and Griffin were going to stay completely platonic. Yet even then, Levi would’ve been the worse choice…LEVI. What a piece of work! I know that Jessie had to learn, BUT GIRL! YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN HIM! Just because he’s vaguely nice and looks like Kurt Cobain doesn’t mean that he’s not a flaky, disrespectful asshole! I get that Jessie had to learn both her lesson and her self-worth when it comes to falling head-over-heels for guys, but I feel like the writing of their relationship needed some work. I feel like the time between them meeting and having their first kiss was way too fast, even if Jessie was infatuated; their dynamic over the rest of the novel felt repetitive, and it didn’t serve much to the novel save for building the case for Levi being insufferable. As for Griffin, I did like their relationship, but I honestly think it could’ve worked romantically or platonically—I did like them getting together at the end, but I also would’ve appreciated him being part of Jessie’s (abandoned) goal of getting a guy friend and having a healthy depiction of friendships of the opposite gender.
Overall, a diverse YA romance that nails all of the factors for a classic formula, but faltered in its overabundance of subplots and awkwardly-paced relationships. 3.5 stars!
Something More is a standalone and Jackie Khalilieh’s debut novel. Khalilieh is also the author of You Started It and the forthcoming Everything Comes Back to You, which is set for release in 2026.
Today’s song:
I love this song, it sounds like being in a goldfish bowl…
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourself!
Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles, and happy Disability Pride Month! I’ll have something up for the occasion later this week, but for now, here’s the first book review of the month.
I’ve had this novel on my TBR for a few years. I read Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Trouble the Saints several years ago and remembered it being on the denser side, so I was hesitant going into this novel, especially with the low ratings on both Goodreads and Storygraph. I understand those ratings now—this book is not for the faint of heart, but it was also victim to some serious mismarketing, in my opinion. It’s a sprawling novel that hops between worlds and genres, and despite its flaws, it’s one of the most ambitious novels I’ve read in a while.
Centuries ago, tesseract technology made travel and connection across the stars. Now, in the Library, where all of the tesseracts are held and all of the political machinations go on, Freida spends her childhood wandering amongst all kinds of strange magic and technology. She was artificially created by the Library, and has access to all of its texts. But as she grows older, she begins to understand the corruption deep within the Library. Her friends face persecution from all sides, both from mortal people and the gods beyond their reach. To save them, she must dig deeper than she’s ever ventured into the Library—and what she finds there could change her life.
TW/CW: genocide, loss of loved ones, sexual assault, colonialism/imperialism, violence
Right off the bat, let me just say: this is truly a weird book. For the most part, I mean that affectionately. It’s weirder than most YA I’ve read, and even weirder than some adult books. It’s also one of the more ambitious books I’ve read in quite some time. Straddling the line between hard sci-fi and full-blown fantasy, The Library of Broken Worlds is an ambitious—if not incredibly messy—novel.
I’ll start off by saying this: The Library of Broken Worlds really shouldn’t have been YA. Even though Freida is about 17 here, all of the concepts jammed in here really don’t feel like they should be for the 12-18 crowd. That might just be another consequence of 12-18 being a ridiculous jump in maturity for a single age range, but I digress. There are a lot of aspects that feel more well-suited for the more adult crowd. You sit in on a lot of court hearings, the politics get both deeply philosophical and intricate, and you’re dunked into the worldbuilding like one might be dunked face-first into a bucket of ice water. I think you can still work with a teenage character in an adult story (see: The Fifth Season), so I feel like it wouldn’t be much of an adjustment. As voracious of a reader as I was when I was in the peak market for YA books, I feel like I would’ve DNF’d this book in my teens. But that’s not to say that I didn’t love The Library of Broken Worlds. Had it been adjusted for an older audience, I think it might have been more successful—if not in marketing than anything else.
The case of the worldbuilding in The Library of Broken Worlds is a complicated one. It’s both the biggest strength and the biggest weakness of the novel. The worldbuilding itselfis marvelous—what I could get of it. This novel is such a unique blend of sci-fi and fantasy. You have a Library as the central hub to travel to other parts of the galaxy, and the main characters is an artificially-created being created by the will of the Library itself. There’s lots of intergalactic folktales, extinct alien civilizations, a triad of nature gods that preside over the universe and form the basic divisions between its people, and a ton of worms and grubs. Gotta love the grubs. There’s a lot of ’em. The world is also refreshingly queernormative, with a variety of characters with different neopronouns and a young sapphic couple at the forefront of the story. In the acknowledgements, Johnson said that Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki were the biggest inspirations for the book. The comparison didn’t fully make sense to me, but in a way, I can see that the blend of sci-fi and fantasy, along with some of the more imagery, could feel like a darker, more convoluted version of Miyazaki. It’s such a lovingly created and multilayered world—I just wish we could’ve explored more of it.
Now, let’s go back to that word, convoluted, because it applies to…well, everything. I often talk about how writers often have the issue of vomiting all of their worldbuilding in chunks that distract from the story. This book has the exact opposite problem. From the start, you’re thrown headfirst into an exceedingly complex and convoluted world, expecting to know all of the terms and political divisions as they’re thrown about every which way. It felt like the scene from The Big Lebowski where The Dude is repeatedly getting his head dunked into the toilet (“WHERE’S THE MONEY, LEBOWSKI?”), but each time, you get a face full of completely wild fantasy terms that only get the most barebones explanations. By the time you’re sort of acclimated to the world and you think you’re getting a break, somebody’s pissing on your rug that really pulled the room together (more unexplained worldbuilding out of nowhere that overcomplicates things further). I still don’t fully know what a “broonie” is, and at this point I’m too afraid to ask. This book was in desperate need of a glossary, Jesus Christ. And a lot more exposition, as well as less convoluted and all-over-the-place explanations for what little was explained beyond the basics.
The characters in The Library of Broken Worlds were also a treat to explore! I wish we got more of some of the side characters, since there were so many, but it was Frieda’s story first and foremost. Though some parts of her were underdeveloped, Frieda was a solid protagonist; although she almost falls into a very typical mold of the YA protagonist whose life is out of her control and is different from the others (and is understandably angsty about it), these things are for reasons that are fully fleshed-out—the weight on her shoulder never feels manufactured, and the way that Johnson writes her trauma, from various sources, was very sensitive. I don’t think we got enough of Joshua (he’s almost forgotten about halfway through and only comes back in the last few bits of the climax), but I did like Nergüi’s coldness and eventual insightfulness as a counter to Frieda’s passion and hunger for knowledge.
There are some fascinating themes, political and otherwise, at play in The Library of Broken Worlds. In an attempt to be more utopian, the main government has built its government and legal system on the basis of freedom from and freedom to, and the discussion surrounding that, especially where those definitions get dangerously misused (justifying planetwide colonialism and genocide). Johnson didn’t shy away from getting into a ton of moral dilemmas. However, aside from that theme, I loved how The Library of Broken Worlds handles cycles. Simply by existing counter to her original purpose, Freida is breaking a cycle of her sisters being created for a specific purpose, and embracing empathy and love. But by doing that, she is also breaking a multitude of other cycles—the personal cycles of being traumatized and taking it out on others, and the vast, historical cycles of injustice and mass cruelty. The tesseracts also felt a bit like the interconnectedness of actions as well as events throughout history, and Freida exists at the confluence of it, making her able to fully see how she is able to reshape both her destiny and the unjust system that she lives under. As rocky and convoluted of a road Johnson takes us to get there, I appreciate that it was taken in the first place, because the payoff was mostly worth it in the end.
For most of what I just detailed, I nearly gave The Library of Broken Worlds the full 4 stars. But given the state of the book, I just…couldn’t. For all of its boundless creativity, timely themes, and observant insights, this novel was just a mess. I think this could’ve been the second-to-last draft before sending it off to the publisher, because as good as it was, the writing was all over the place. You’re unceremoniously thrust into the worldbuilding, and the only reason that I ended up acclimating (and even that’s a stretch) to everything was that this novel is nearly 450 pages long. It desperately needed more exposition, as well as clearer explanations of the key terms that come into play throughout the novel. The pacing was off—though I enjoyed the explorations of politics that Johnson employed throughout, I think we could’ve spent more time getting to know the world and less time sitting in space congressional hearings. There were a multitude of loose ends that didn’t fully get tied up. I guess that’s a consequence of such an expansive world, but The Library of Broken Worlds needed some serious refinement. I don’t normally find myself saying this, but give this book 50 more pages and a glossary, and I think some of these issues could be fixed.
All in all, an expansive piece of sci-fi/fantasy with highly commendable worldbuilding and themes, but which needed more page time and another round of edits to fully achieve its purpose. 3.75 stars!
The Library of Broken Worlds is a standalone novel, but Alaya Dawn Johnson is also the author of several novels for teens and adults, including Trouble the Saints, Love is the Drug, Moonshine, Racing the Dark, and The Summer Prince.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles! I’m back from my road trip with a fantastic book for you.
I try to stick to mostly queer books for June, but I read extra queerly all year…think of this as pregaming for Disability Pride Month. (Both apply to me, I get a pass, right? Hell, it’s my blog and I’ll do what I like.) Nevertheless, I bought Life Hacks for a Little Alien while on vacation (shoutout to Townie Books in Crested Butte). I’d heard great reviews of it, particularly that it encapsulated neurodivergent childhood beautifully, so of course I had to read it. What I found was a heartstring-pulling and tender depiction of neurodivergent childhood.
In England, a young girl grows up not knowing that she’s neurodivergent, but certain that she’s different from the other children. She doesn’t talk or think the way they do, and her parents are having trouble keeping up with her. She never shows any interest in much anything, but when insomnia prompts her to watch TV at night, she discovers a documentary on the Voynich Manuscript. Soon, the mysterious manuscript heightens her curiosity and invigorates her life. The only thing that would make it better is to find the Manuscript itself—and she’s determined to get it in her hands and decipher its impossible code.
I have once again been ensnared by a book with metaphors about aliens relating to neurodivergent. It will happen again.
I’ll absolutely be reading more by Alice Franklin after this, because her writing style captivated me from the start! The first comparison that sprang to mind, strangely, was of Wes Anderson. It feels odd to jump from literature to film, but stay with me. The narrator’s voice is very matter-of-fact and particular, which are qualities than can be ascribed to both very self-assured children and comically self-assured Wes Anderson characters. The linguistic footnotes and reading lists at the end of each chapter were also reminiscent of the wry judgements of Anderson’s omniscient narrators. All of this is to say that Life Hacks for a Little Alien boasted such a charming voice. Second person POV is a notoriously difficult POV to write from; Franklin chose it for the book because she found it personally easier to write and thought that it would help the reader have empathy for the protagonist. I think it would’ve been easy to have empathy for the narrator no matter what, but the use of the second person gave Life Hacks for a Little Alien such a unique flavor. As the narrator tried to pick apart the structures of how a young English girl is supposed to act, she was methodical, but in a way that was always witty, snarky, or charming. Yet that voice, when faced with the harsher realities of neurodivergent life, never faltered in its emotional connection. I was invested in the narrator’s story from the start, and from then on, Franklin kept me hooked!
Although I’m not autistic, I am neurodivergent (I have sensory processing disorder, which has some similarities to autism), and there are so many aspects of Life Hacks for a Little Alien that resonated with me. Even if I weren’t so interested in sci-fi, the latent, never-ending feeling that you’re from another planet never fades, and the latent alienation that exists in everyday life was depicted with such authenticity and heart. Beyond that, what was depicted most accurately to me was the lingering sense of “I’m doing what the other kids are doing, so why am I wrong/why are they laughing at me/what about what I did makes it wrong?” Neurotypical society is so full of idiosyncrasies, and being neurodivergent makes you realize that from an uncomfortably young age. The narrator’s struggles with picking it apart were delivered with such sensitivity and accuracy, and I loved that her special interest in linguistics and the Voynich Manuscript was not just something that made her fall in love with learning again, but also became a survival mechanism for her to navigate a complicated world.
Beyond that, the use of the Voynich Manuscript and linguistics as a metaphor for the narrator’s experience was easily the most poignant part of a very poignant novel. Many neurodivergent people of various diagnoses often express the feeling that they were never given the same “script” as neurotypical people, a feeling I’ve often shared; if anything, we were basically given a kind of indecipherable Voynich Manuscript that the author understands perfectly, but nobody else does. The narrator’s theory by the end of the novel is that it functions as a way to help aliens navigate Earth, but what is unspoken is that she sees it as such too—she feels like the alien that has been given an indecipherable code with strange pictures in order to understand a completely foreign world. You can see how that hit me in the gut instantly…and it goes even further. English linguistics are full of similar idiosyncrasies as the neurotypical world, and you’re expected to go along with them all the same, even though they frequent contradict all manner of rules. The narrator’s interest in linguistics becomes her way of understanding—or failing to understand—the world. It’s such a beautiful, multilayered metaphor, and it struck such a resonant chord within me.
I have almost no criticisms of Life Hacks for a Little Alien, and I might’ve given it 4.75 or 5 stars if not for this one aspect. My only real problem with Life Hacks for a Little Alien is that it just…ended. Although the epilogue wrapped things up in a more satisfactory and clean manner, the real ending just…ended. For such a meticulous book, it was jarring to end in such an abrupt place. Even though we got some sort of resolution, Life Hacks for a Little Alien seemed to just plunk itself down and end unceremoniously. I’m fine with some books having neatly wrapped-up endings, but this novel seemed to need some semblance of one. I fully expected another chapter afterwards. However, I can sort of see how it might function—this isn’t necessarily the end of the narrator’s story, and her life was far from over by this point. Yet it felt like the end of this arc and the beginning of a new chapter in her life, which seems to necessitate some more closure.
All in all, a deeply poignant and beautiful meditation on neurodivergent girlhood and navigating alien worlds. 4.5 stars!
Life Hacks for a Little Alien is a standalone and Alice Franklin’s debut novel.
Today’s song:
there we go, here’s something for pride!
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 