Tag: Science Fiction

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (7/1/25) – The Library of Broken Worlds

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Library of Broken Worlds – Alaya Dawn Johnson

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 itself is 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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (6/3/25) – The Death I Gave Him

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Here’s a continuation of my recent sci-fi mood…I’ve been looking to add more sci-fi to my TBR, because I seem to exhaust my supply faster than I can keep up. The premise of The Death I Gave Him being a queer, sci-fi/thriller retelling of Hamlet enticed me, but sadly, this novel didn’t deliver—not on the retelling front, and not entirely on the thriller part either.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Death I Gave Him – Em X. Liu

Hayden Lichfield is intent on carrying out the mission that his father is pioneering—the Sisyphus Formula, a substance that could one day reverse death itself. Enticed by immortality and down on his luck, Hayden throws himself into his work. But when his father is found murdered in Elsinore Labs, Hayden has no idea who to turn to—and who wanted to murder the man who wanted to beat death. Trapped in his room with only his AI, Horatio, to trust, Hayden scrambles for answers, and everyone around him is a suspect. But is it not just Hayden’s friends, but his father that have been lying to him all along?

TW/CW: murder, blood, descriptions of injury, suicidal ideation, grief, death of a parent

Trying to describe whether or not The Death I Gave Him qualifies as a retelling feels like the Ship of Theseus. If all of your characters’ names allude to Hamlet and you set your story in Denmark, but not much else relates to Hamlet, is it still a Hamlet retelling? How much Hamlet does one need to remove for it to still feel like a retelling? Sadly, Em X. Liu is proof that there is a limit to how much you can remove before it stops feeling like a retelling. It’s Hamlet in name only.

Having read Hamlet less than a year ago, I went into The Death I Gave Him with a fairly fresh memory. However, if not for the more obvious name changes (Hamlet becomes Hayden, Polonius becomes Paul, etc.) and the fact that it’s set in Denmark, I really wouldn’t have thought that this was a Hamlet retelling. I’m fine with loose retellings, but I don’t think it should’ve been billed as such. The whole Denmark setting definitely felt like very a “see? This is Hamlet, I promise!” move and wasn’t relevant to the plot whatsoever. I’m fine with loose retellings, but I feel like the similarities end with what I just described above. I’m not sure if this even qualifies as a retelling so much as people named after characters in Hamlet. Also, none of these people were nearly crazy enough to be in a Hamlet retelling. You’ve got to have someone go at least a little insane to have a proper Hamlet retelling. Hayden got a wee bit depressed and existential towards the end, but there wasn’t nearly enough “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” insanity to make it feel like a true tribute to Shakespeare. It just felt like a rather emotionally stunted novel even though it’s based off of something so dramatic. Some tonal liberties are inevitable for any given adaptation, but these ones just didn’t feel true to Hamlet, which made the more obvious Hamlet references feel more like preventative measures to make sure that people remembered that this was a Hamlet retelling.

Having mixed formats (interview excerpts, security camera footage, etc.) can be a great tool to add some additional context—and a unique flavor—to a novel, and I think it works especially well with thrillers, which The Death I Gave Him partially was. However, I don’t think Liu properly executed this format. Granted, it’s difficult to pull off, but when it’s executed well, it adds another layer of mystery to what is hopefully another layer of mystery. The problem Liu seemed to have is that, with the exception of the security camera footage, all of the other perspectives sounded exactly the same. All of the interviews, document excerpts, and “fictional” interludes by Horatio were in the same tense and the same POV, which basically rendered the format useless. Beyond that, these interviews and whatnot were from multiple people, but they all had virtually the same narrative voice. By the end of the novel, it didn’t even matter where the excerpts were coming from—they all sounded the same. If you’re going to pull off this kind of format, you have to make each component sound unique—if everything sounds the same, what’s the point in specifying which chapter is an interview and which one is a fictional account?

Also, none of the characters seemed to have much of a purpose outside of being props, aside from Hayden, Horatio, and maybe Felicia if I’ve being generous. Even though we get a significant portion of the novel through her interviews and written segments, I never even got a specific read on her voice since it was so similar to every other character’s. Paul, Rasmussen, and Charles were just there until they conveniently weren’t. The timeless fun of Hamlet comes from seeing everybody scheming against each other and different motives clashing against each other, but everybody was just rendered into very similar characters with too similar motives to each other for the mystery to really be worth it.

The same was true of the plot. I was committed to The Death I Gave Him because I was excited by the premise and wanted to see how the plot unfolded. I will say that Liu did a great job of setting the scene and cramming us in said locked room of this locked-room mystery. However, very little happened in said locked room—other than a handful of scattered moments, the place was quite slow, and the ratio of information that was revealed to the amount of pages it correlated to was way off—it felt like we only got significant revelations every 100 pages, and The Death I Gave Him is a little over 300 pages. There needed to be much more intrigue and complicating factors and clashing motives for this novel to work as a mystery; what we had was quite lackluster.

All in all, a sci-fi retelling of Hamlet that missed the mark on its source material and its new plot. 2 stars.

The Death I Gave Him is a standalone, but Em X. Liu is also the author of the novella If Found, Return to Hell and several short stories in various anthologies and magazines.

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!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (5/27/25) – Light Years from Home

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ve had several of Mike Chen’s novels floating around my TBR for quite some time. I’d forgotten that I’d read a short story of his in From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, and I figured I’d give his novel-length writing a try. Plus, I was just in a sci-fi mood (as I always am). Despite the flaws that dragged down the premise, Light Years from Home was an ambitious novel that blended genres and didn’t shy away from being messy. Whether it successfully cleaned up its messes, however, is up for debate.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Light Years from Home – Mike Chen

15 years ago, the Shao family was thrown into disarray. Jakob, the only son, and their father disappeared. Their father later returned, dazed, disoriented, and convinced that he and Jakob were abducted by aliens. He died soon after.

Jakob has been missing for over a decade now. Sisters Evie and Kass haven’t spoken since the incident, with Evie diving into alien conspiracy theories and Kass throws herself into her work and caring for their aging mother. But when Jakob returns, parroting their late father’s theories about alien abduction, the sisters have no choice to bury the hatchet and reunite. As Jakob’s story grows wilder and the rift between the sisters widens, they must contend with the possibility that all of this may be true—but can Jakob be trusted? And if his story is true, what does it mean for the fate of Earth?

TW/CW: death of a parent, grief, dementia themes, substance abuse (smoking, drinking)

In the acknowledgments, Mike Chen says that this story was initially inspired by “Red” by Belly, and I’m tempted to give it another half a star just because I’ve never heard anyone outside of my immediate family or Pitchfork talk about them. The title also makes me think of The Rolling Stones’ “2000 Light Years from Home,” but that’s a vague enough title that it could be a reference to a lot of things. Although Belly didn’t save every flaw, Light Years from Home is a solid meld of science fiction and realistic fiction.

Light Years from Home has one of the most compelling beginnings of a book that I’ve read recently. You’re thrown right into the action aboard a Seven Bells spaceship in a classic space opera setting. Jakob cradles his alien comrade in his arms as they die, and thus begins his perilous quest back to Earth. But the reader and Jakob are the only people who know about this—the only other character who did (their dad) is notably dead. It would’ve been easy to just have the characters not believe him, but Jakob is already established as an unreliable person—his real life experience sounds suspiciously like an outrageous lie he would’ve told in his college days, which gives the characters both more obstacles to overcome, but more of their messy family dynamic to dissect. In terms of plot, Light Years from Home was a great study in not taking the easy way out—everything was messy and tangled, making for a book that had lots of drama and hurdles to pick apart.

Every single member of the Shao member was on the obnoxious, insufferable side (save for maybe Evie), but Chen did a great job of capturing the complicated family dynamic in the novel. Fifteen years after Jakob’s abduction, the wounds remain raw, and not a single member of the family has recovered from the fallout. Although I wasn’t satisfied at all with the character development of…well, any of the family (I’ll get to that later), Chen did an excellent job of weaving together all of the contrasting beliefs, motivations, and traumas that each family member had. All of them dealt with Jakob and their dad’s disappearance and death, respectively, in wildly different ways, and their coping mechanisms butted heads over the course of the novel. Even though this was ultimately handled poorly at the end, I did also appreciate the sensitive depiction of their mom’s dementia; Chen did a very respectful job of depicting the emotional impact of her memory loss and not being able to recognize her own children.

For all of the focus on the messy Shao family, the promised character development that their dynamic hinged on was not delivered on. There should’ve been plenty of conflict with Jakob reckoning with the man he was on Earth versus the man he was while serving in space with the Seven Bells, yet none of that happened. All of his character development happened off-page, resulting in a character that came off more flatly than I think was intended. Likewise, Kass and Evie were set up for significant development, but nothing happened with them either. Evie’s beliefs were reinforced and she and stayed static throughout the novel, not giving up her fantasies of aliens for the sake of the family. The closest Kass got, if you could call “okay, I guess aliens do exist” character development, was a brief revelation that even though she’s a therapist, that she doesn’t know everything about herself or her family, and that she shouldn’t pretend to know everything. That last half of my sentence amounted to about a paragraph around 50 pages before the novel ended, and it felt like entirely too little too soon. In the end, the character development was a jumble of unfulfilled promises—we got the shells of what could’ve been nuanced characters, but despite the bizarre journey they went on, they came out the exact same as they were before.

Also…I’m sorry, what the hell was that ending? Somehow, it was one of the most anticlimactic parts of the whole novel, and weird in ways that didn’t make sense. Jakob returns to the Seven Bells, but there’s hardly any fanfare or even extended moments of grief from the sisters, even though their brother has just decided to spend the rest of his life in space and never see them again. There wasn’t nearly enough emotion to it, and nor was there page time—this moment only gets around 4-6 pages tops. Instead of an emotional resolution with her daughters, the mom somehow un-dementias herself and remembers everything, and is also eerily content with her only son’s decision to spend the rest of his life in space. It all just felt so rushed and emotionally stunted compared to the rest of the novel, and not nearly as detailed as it needed to be. Weird is the only way to adequately describe it. I felt lost, but also robbed of what could’ve been something so bittersweet. I feel like it’s partially a side effect of none of the characters having any character development, but it felt like such a lack of a resolution. It was practically a non-ending.

All in all, a sci-fi/realistic fiction blend that embraced messiness in both plot and character, but had significant trouble with cleaning it up. 3.5 stars!

Light Years from Home is a standalone, but Mike Chen is the author of several novels. He has contributed short stories to From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and the full-length novel Brotherhood to the Star Wars universe. He is also the author of We Could Be Heroes, Vampire Weekend, Here and Now and Then, A Quantum Love Story, and many more novels for adults.

Today’s song:

NEW MARY IN THE JUNKYARD WOOOOOOOOOOO

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (4/8/25) – You Sexy Thing

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I’ll skip the prologue about how predictable it is that I picked up another queer space opera, and one with a ’70s music reference in the title at that. (SING IT WITH ME!! 🎶I BE-LIEVE IN MIRACLES—🎶) Nonetheless, I kept my expectations low, and I’m glad I did. Hilarious, heartbreaking, and heartwarming all at once, You Sexy Thing is the start of a true joy of a space opera trilogy!

Enjoy this week’s review!

You Sexy Thing – Cat Rambo

It’s been decades since Niko Larson and her fellow soldiers were able to break free of the Grand Military of the Hive Mind, where they were voiceless pawns in a never-ending war. Now, they run the Last Chance, a humble restaurant at the edge of TwiceFar Station, serving customers from all over the galaxy and from all walks of life. But when a mysterious, sentient ship destroys their livelihood before giving them a mysterious mission that they can’t refuse, Niko and her fellow chefs and restaurateurs must return to the fray they tried so desperately to escape—all with the heir to the Paxian Empire in tow.

TW/CW: sexual content, violence, blood, torture, kidnapping/imprisonment, war themes, abuse, genocide themes, death

The entire time I was reading this book, I’d click on the Kindle cover and I’d immediately start hearing “You Sexy Thing.” It just kept coming back, like I was trapped in a sitcom gag with a signature musical cue. Probably the intended effect. Not complaining, though. Absolute banger.

What an excellent space opera this was! You Sexy Thing scratched so many of my favorite sci-fi itches, and one of the biggest ones was the aliens and creatures! CREATURES! CREATURES! I’d place You Sexy Thing as bordering on space fantasy, though I won’t go into a whole digression on what counts/doesn’t count as sci-fi or SF; that was mainly because of the ghosts, some magic use, and were-creatures. However, Rambo did an excellent job with all of the alien denizens of this galaxy! There was a fantastic balance of humanoid and more unfamiliar creatures, all of whom were delightful. Skidoo was a personal favorite, as I’m particularly fond of any kind of cephalopod-inspired aliens, but Petalia, even if their name was rather on-the-nose (in line with a lot of the humor of the book), had some fascinating details about their culture and plant-based physiology. Also, there’s a chimp. Gotta have a chimp to round out the crew, amirite? Thankfully, this one doesn’t go the way of Nope, and Gio is a perfectly reasonable individual. There’s also lots of casual queerness abound, which is always a plus.

Another thing I love in space opera is a good motley crew, and You Sexy Thing had a stellar one! Rambo’s choice (apparently a challenge from fellow sci-fi author Ann Leckie, if the epigraph is anything to go by) to have You Sexy Thing in an omniscient, third-person POV was a great solution for covering the thoughts of all of the characters, discarding the need for separate chapters for everyone. All of them had distinct and lovable (mostly) personalities that made them butt heads with some characters and mesh with others, while still retaining a sense of familial bonding. Even outside of the restaurant setting, they retained a hilarious rapport that was a joy to read. Dabry’s musings on cooking were a delight, Atlanta’s trouble fitting in with the crew made for some lovely interactions, and Niko’s continuous struggles to face her past made for some of the novel’s most emotional points. You Sexy Thing balanced levity with emotional weight to great effect, and had a fantastic cast of characters to split the difference.

Amidst all of the humor, You Sexy Thing explores some quite complex, nuanced emotion, which I appreciated. I don’t think Rambo fully explored the implications of everything that had been done to Petalia, and how returning to Niko’s company affected them, but what we got was appropriately complicated, messy, and painful to read—exactly how it should have been, given the circumstances. This story never strays away from the cross-cultural complications of relationships, grief, and more, which added to how fleshed-out and unique all of the characters felt. By the end, all of the betrayals were appropriately punches to the gut, but ones that were cushioned by the found family dynamic that had been built up by the end.

Like the characters, the worldbuilding was an absolute treat! I will say, some of it was rather scattershot—we frequently get references to alien species and places that don’t even show up after they’re mentioned, but since this is a trilogy, I might be able to get past that, assuming that they come up later. I’m mostly accepting it, knowing that a) this is a huge galaxy, and b) that the world will presumably be expanded upon. It only really peeved me when they failed to explain much about what said alien races looked like. Other than that, Rambo’s worldbuilding was fascinating to pick apart! Sometimes, individual concepts are more interesting than the whole, and that aspect was made manifest by many of Rambo’s concepts, from married couples (or friends) being able to meld into a single being to the biotechnology that made You Sexy Thing (the sentient ship) possible. Through it all, I got the sense that Rambo’s galaxy was a distinctly lived-in one, which made my reading experience all the better.

My only real complaint, if any, was Tubal Last. You Sexy Thing had moments of being purposely cheesy, from the in-your-face ’70s music references to the on-the-nose character names; the latter felt like a nice, tongue-in-cheek reference to some of the characteristics of older sci-fi. That quality extended to the villain, who was cartoonishly evil. I don’t necessarily mind a comically evil villain every now and then, but in contrast to the complexity and nuance of many of the characters, Tubal Last felt out of place, just another obstacle (a formidable one, but a very one-note one) for the crew to overcome. He was over-the-top, but not in a way that necessarily served the story, other than some slightly unique motivations.

Overall, You Sexy Thing was a blast from start to finish, with a lively, energetic galaxy and a cast of lovable characters and daring hijinks to fill it with. 4.5 stars!

You Sexy Thing is the first book in Cat Rambo’s Disco Space Opera series, followed by Devil’s Gun and Rumor Has It. They are also the author of Neither Here Nor There, the Tabat Quartet (Beasts of Tabat, Hearts of Tabat, and Exiles of Tabat), And the Last Trump Shall Sound (with Harry Turtledove and James Morrow), and many other full-length works and short stories. Rambo is also the former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

Today’s song:

it’s taken me this long to finally listen to Jimmy’s Show all the way through…preparing for Jimmy’s Show 2? either way, it’s an absolute delight.

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (1/7/25) – The Infinity Particle

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

First book review of 2025, and so far, the best book I’ve read this month! Granted, we’re only a week into the month, but it still counts for something, right? loved Mooncakes, which Wendy Xu illustrated, but I had no idea until recently that she had published a solo graphic novel—and a sci-fi one! What resulted was an incredibly emotional read to start the year off with: robot romance and explorations of how relationships make the universe work.

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Infinity Particle – Wendy Xu

Clementine Chang is headed for Mars. In the distant future, it’s a place of peace and industry, and it’s precisely the place that Clem wants to start her new life. A clever inventor, Clem has a knack for working with AI. She hopes to continue her education under Dr. Marcella Lin, a legendary AI engineer who inspired her work. But Dr. Lin is not what she seems—and she’s hiding a secret from the scientific world: a lifelike, humanoid AI that she refers to as her son. His name is Kye, and he yearns for a life outside of the one that Dr. Lin programmed for him. As Clem gets acquainted with him, she discovers that Dr. Lin’s intentions in making him were not as noble as she once thought—and that she may be falling in love with her former hero’s creation.

art by Wendy Xu (p. 150)

TW/CW: emotional abuse (past/present)

You know me. I’m a sucker for a good Frankenstein story. Oh, so you brought a conscious being into existence, expected it to be completely obedient to you and your whims, and didn’t expect anything to go wrong? Surely this will not have a domino effect of consequences…

That being said, The Infinity Particle isn’t just a Frankenstein story. We’ve been inundated with stories about AI and the ethics of giving robots human-like consciousnesses since day one of sci-fi’s conception (back to Frankenstein), but The Infinity Particle does what many of those stories try and fail to do: make the story human. It weaves both engineering and the complicated legacies of familial trauma into a story that is ultimately about relationships: that of parents and children, but also of young lovers. It’s a story of breaking cycles and of forging something newer and better out of their ashes. All of it is worth your time.

Wendy Xu’s vision of Mars in the distant future is one that I want to live in, which isn’t something I often say about sci-fi novels. The world of The Infinity Particle is a cozy, comforting one. In spite of the more emotional moments of the story, Xu’s setting is one you can get lost in. Rendered in a pastel color palette that’s easy on the eyes, it’s a world full of greenhouses, cafés, and cobblestone paths. Here, Mars is the perfect place for a museum date—except here, the museum features all manner of robots from bygone centuries. Although there are ethical conflicts with some of the AIs (this forms the central conflict of the novel), none of Xu’s AIs are malicious creatures—they’re all in the form of cuddly cats or owls, and in the case of Clem’s custom companion, a cat-moth hybrid. (SENA!! WE LOVE SENA!!) It’s a world I was eager to escape to, and one that I could dwell in forever.

Clem’s motivations were part of what made this story stand out. As she begins to dig deeper into Dr. Lin’s true motives for creating Kye, the way her former hero treats her AI creation begins to mirror how she was treated as a child; the emotional abuse from her mother is very similar to the emotional abuse by Dr. Lin to Kye. The Infinity Particle is a fantastic example of how very far-fetched, sci-fi concept can be used as incredibly emotional metaphors. We have Clem, who is a clone of her mother and was raised to live out the dreams that her mother could not, and Kye, an AI made to replace Dr. Lin’s son and live out her fantasies. Admittedly, the clone part was very on the nose, but the way that Xu delivered with care, giving The Infinity Particle an undeniable heart. In part, The Infinity Particle is a story of how trauma always echoes into the present, and how it can create ripples that both tear apart and rebuild relationships with others.

That shared trauma is part of what made the romance between Clem and Kye one that I was rooting for from page 1. Not only were they the most adorable couple (museum dates! Philosophical conversations in greenhouses!), their shared connection allowed them to help each other in ways that made the relationship blossom. Clem had experience with having to escape from the same kind of emotional abuse that Kye was undergoing, and as they realized that connection, their relationship deepened. However, it wasn’t just that aspect that made their relationship so lovable. Their chemistry was some of the best I’ve read in a YA novel in a long time—they were both such curious and sensitive people, and that combined curiosity not only drove the plot, but the course of their romance. Every shared moment was sweet, but never saccharine—The Infinity Particle was just a warm hug (and a kiss on the cheek) in so many ways, this being one of the most prominent.

However, even though Dr. Lin was objectively in the wrong, I appreciated the way that The Infinity Particle humanized her; never once were her actions condoned, but in the end, she wasn’t a purely evil person—she was a person who slipped so far into grief that she failed to realize how she was treating those around her. She did horrible things that could not be undone, but she was also capable of healing. It’s an incredibly difficult line to toe between acknowledging a character’s humanity and acknowledging that their actions were inexcusable; most media gets it wrong (I am looking directly at Encanto), but in the short time that was given to this plot, Xu did a graceful job of hitting that balance. Dr. Lin did some unspeakably terrible things, but deep down, she is still human. My one (minor) complaint is that this was squeezed into the end and didn’t have as much time to develop as some other parts of the novel, but it was executed thoughtfully nonetheless.

And the epilogue…hnnnnnnnngh do I love a good “the fabric of the universe is made up of love” story AUUUUUUUUGH

All in all, a heartwarming, sensitive, and thoughtful story of love, robots, and what it means to have—and to want—a mind and a life of your own. 4.5 stars!

The Infinity Particle is a standalone, but Wendy Xu is also the co-creator of Mooncakes and the creator of Tidesong.

Today’s song:

I feel like I remember this song about every 5 years and realize how much I’ve missed it…

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (11/26/24) – Countess

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I try not to let my lizard brain take over when it comes to my TBR these days (that’s how it got to almost 1,100 books back to high school…that took some serious pruning). That being said, at this point, I’ve accepted that the phrases “space opera,” “queer,” and “anti-colonial” strung together activate me like some kind of sleeper agent. Thus, Countess found its way onto my TBR and swiftly onto my Kindle. It excited me even more that Countess was Caribbean-inspired and that the author is Trinidadian-Canadian (!!!!), so my expectations were high. Though it wasn’t perfect, Countess was a raw and brutal novella—hardly a page was wasted.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Countess – Suzan Palumbo

Centuries after the British colonized islands in the Caribbean, an evolution of their iron fist remains in space. Under the harsh rule of the Æcerbot Empire, planets and moons are stripped of their resources and their inhabitants left with the paltry choice to enter an immigration lottery to find work or make a meager on their exploited homeworlds.

Virika Sameroo has sworn her life to the empire, loyal to their army for years. But just as she attempts to ascend to a higher position, her captain mysteriously dies—and the imperial authorities frame him for his death. Imprisoned and alienated from the empire that brainwashed her, Virika becomes an unlikely figure for a galaxy-wide revolution—but will she survive long enough to see the Æcerbot empire fall to its knees?

TW/CW: colonization/imperialism themes, torture, murder, descriptions of corpses, blood, self-harm, attempted suicide, sexual assault

how it feels to enjoy a retelling when a bunch of the reviews say that it doesn’t follow the source material (I’ve never read The Count of Monte Cristo):

Of course, regardless of whether or not I’ve actually read The Count of Monte Cristo, I think it’s worth saying that a retelling doesn’t have to stick to every plot line to a T. I get going into a retelling and being disappointed on that front, but even if the setting is wildly different (as Countess is), I don’t think it’s a crime to tweak many of the plot points. In this case, having a vastly different setting kind of necessitates the plot being different, but from what I can gather, Countess is more inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo than it is a direct retelling. That’s fine, in my book. No pun intended.

As a whole, Countess was a fantastic read, but its one weak point was the writing. In a way, the writing style, even if I disliked some of it, worked for the story—and the character—that Palumbo was telling. It picks up at the halfway point, once the plot rockets into a breakneck pace in terms of both action and stakes, but for the first half, the prose felt very bare-bones. Even in this new, expansive empire in the stars full of political intrigue, there wasn’t much to embellish the prose—it was all very quick and to the point, with language that took the quickest routes to explain how we got from point A to point B. This is my first experience with Palumbo’s writing, so I’m not sure if it’s just her style, but either way, it works in connection to Virika; she’s been groomed to be a perfect, obedient soldier, so I doubt she’d be one to mince words or get into excessively flowery prose. For some of the scenes where Virika is in prison and a decade blurs by in only a handful of pages, it makes complete sense. Yet I needed some more descriptive prose to get me immersed in the setting—and in the other characters outside of Virika.

I’m all for having gentler books about resistance, but that doesn’t mean that narratives centered around brutal realities have no place. In fact, in stories like that of Countess, I’d argue that they’re necessary. This is a novella about the horrors of imperialism, down to the most minute aspects. For me, it didn’t go full grimdark, but it was because there was realism to it; grimdark is, for the most part nothing but suffering and pain with no real basis, but the events of Countess, horrendous as they are, were logical byproducts of the crushing weight of a colonialist empire with the galaxy under its colossal thumb. Palumbo pulled no punches with the depictions of what Virika goes through (especially the sequences in prison…please pay attention to the trigger warnings); some of it bordered on gratuitous, but this is a slim novella, and all of it was in service of the theme that the crimes under imperialism are many, varied, and real.

As I’ve said so many times, I see the phrases “queer,” “space opera,” and “anti-colonial” and I’ll run towards the book like I’m a bull that’s just seen the tiniest sliver of red in my peripheral vision. What grabbed me about Countess in particular was that it was Caribbean-inspired—particularly Trinidadian. My grandparents on my mom’s side are from Trinidad, and I’ve seen hardly any literature—much less speculative fiction—that incorporates these cultures. Admittedly, I’m more than a little distanced from that part of my heritage, but I’ve been learning thanks to the tireless research of my amazing artist mom, who is in the process of making a Caribbean oracle deck of her own! It’s thanks to her that I caught a lot of the Trini and generally Caribbean references (the fact that there’s a rebel ship called the Pomerac was gold), and there are plenty scattered throughout the novella—I’m sure I didn’t catch all of them, but what I recognized, I loved. I’ve loved witnessing the shift towards marginalized voices in speculative fiction, but one of the reasons it feels particularly beautiful to me is because for so long, our communities have been denied a place in the collective imagination, a place in a distant future among the stars. So thank you to Suzan Palumbo for this novella, and thank you to my wonderful mom for being the reason that I got these references.

In these kinds of stories (and in life in general), I always try to look for a glimmer of hope, even if it’s foolish of me. Make no mistake: Countess is a tragedy, one of the many (forthcoming) ones that Palumbo has written, according to her Goodreads bio. This novella is a very realistic depiction of how revolutions often make martyrs of their figureheads, and that was Virika’s fate from the start. Palumbo does make you feel the wasted potential of her life as she falls, but I couldn’t help but see the swell of revolution that she ushered in as the ultimate form of revenge—and an assurance of a better tomorrow, at least for a short time.

All in all, a brutal and bold—if not rote in periods—novel of revolutionary change and one woman’s struggle to break free of imperialism. 4 stars!

Countess is a standalone novella, but Suzan Palumbo is also the author of the anthology Skin Thief: Stories and several short stories in various magazines.

Today’s song:

finally got around to listening to Songs Of A Lost World!! this was my favorite—the whole album tended to be repetitive, but it was great nonetheless.

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (11/19/24) – Loka (The Alloy Era, #2)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

…so. Elephant in the room here, quite literally. I’ll venture to say that last Tuesday was one of the worst Tuesdays in American history. Hence, no activity. (Also, I had a whole cocktail of midterms to study for and papers and annotated bibliographies to write.) I needed the time to grieve. Let me tell you the truth: I’m so scared. I’m betrayed. Being in my formative years under a president who systematically mocked the identities of everyone who isn’t him—not just the ones that comprise my family—forced me to confront the fact that America had no regard for me. If there was change to be made, I had to do it myself, and with the help of the communities around me. So I started writing. I started educating myself. The process is never over, and will continue until my dying day; even with the sort of beef that I have with Sara Ahmed (yeah, killjoy etc. etc. etc., I’m on board with 50% of it, but can’t feminism be gleeful sometimes?), I look back to her words: “To become a feminist is to stay a student.” I am always learning. I am far from perfect, but I am trying. The key here is motion: we can’t afford to stay static, not in our ideas or in our actions. Resistance comes in many forms (and don’t let anybody tell you that there’s one right way to fight), but the key is that we must always keep moving. Donate. Protest. Pay someone a compliment. Make art. Write with hope in your heart. Trump and his ilk win when we’re too far into the quicksand of hopelessness.

Never lose hope and never lose love, because that is what the Trump administration lacks. Grieve, and grieve on your terms. I certainly did. The last thing I wanted was a repeat of that November morning when, at the age of 13, I woke up to my dad hanging his head over the kitchen counter as he made lunches for my brother and I. I remember clinging to him tighter than I ever had, frightened of every horrid possibility. Some of them came true. Some of them didn’t. I called both of my parents. I cried the same tears to them that I cried when I was young. Cry the same tears, but remember that they are the same tears. I’m frightened. But if we can resist Trump once, we can do it again. We can fight the same good fight. I love you.

…

All this is to say that, even though my output has been lessened lately (college!), this won’t change a thing. I’ll still be reviewing queer books aplenty, and no election will change that. Gather ’round.

After a solid two weeks of reading nothing but fluff to keep my mind off of everything, I remembered that Meru, one of the more innovative new sci-fi novels I read last year, had a sequel that was finally out! I was eager to re-immerse myself into S.B. Divya’s endlessly creative futuristic landscape, and Loka found itself on my Kindle in no time. Loka turned out to be contrary to my expectations and a very different book to Meru—it was a mixed bag at first, but by the final third, I’m happy to say that it stuck the landing in a deeply moving way.

Now, TREAD LIGHTLY! This review contains spoilers for Meru, book one in The Alloy Era series. If you haven’t read Meru and intend to do so, read at your own risk!

For my review of book one, Meru, click here!

Enjoy this week’s review!

Loka (The Alloy Era, #2) – S.B. Divya

Akshana is a child that defies all existence. Her mother is human, and her maker is an Alloy—a post-human being with godlike powers. The ruling Alloy government condemns her very existence. For years, she has lived a sheltered existence on the planet Meru, raised by her human mother. But once Akshana turns 16, she heeds the call of Earth, the ancient homeworld of humankind. With the help of her friends, she takes up the rigorous Anthro Challenge: a trek to circumnavigate the habitable zone of Earth. As she navigates foreign terrain, Akshana comes to terms with how she was born and created—and where her destiny lies.

TW/CW: near-death situations, medical emergencies (related to sickle-cell anemia), xenophobia/discrimination (fictional), life-threatening storms

I thought that Meru had scared off all of the people who thought that S.B. Divya invented neopronouns, but apparently people are still complaining about it in the reviews for Loka? Did you just…miss book one in its entirety, or what?

I’ll get my main gripe about Loka out of the way first. The more I think about it, the more that I realize that my issue with Loka is that to some extent, it has the exact same stakes as Meru: a young girl/woman has to take a daring trek onto a foreign landscape, all the while facing prejudice from the outside world and alien, terrestrial dangers from the ground beneath her feet. S.B. Divya remains an excellent writer and crafter of worlds, but in terms of plot, in this case, lightning couldn’t strike twice. Aside from Akshana’s differing personality and the novelty of Earth 1,000 years in the future, there wasn’t as much to distinguish the two plots once I broke them down.

I wasn’t crazy about the main plot of the Anthro Challenge. In the future landscape of Loka, this challenge is designed for humans and Alloys to circumnavigate the landscape of Earth as humans did millennia ago. Only a few strips of Earth remain habitable (forming ringed borders around the world), but the brave adventurer must cross swaths of the Southern hemisphere and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in order to complete the challenge. In concept, it’s a great bit of worldbuilding, but it didn’t make for a very compelling of a plot. For the first half of the novel, it felt like the same regurgitation of 1) reach new landscape, 2) inter or intra-personal conflict within the friend group, and 3) make a harrowing trek to the next stop on the Challenge. This was rinsed and repeated with less change than I wanted; even with the new landscapes, none of the side characters had much time to develop, and they seemed to encounter almost the exact same problems for a solid 100 pages. It bordered on feeling cheap, given how innovative Meru was.

That being said, even though the plot faltered, Divya’s writing never did. You’ve just got to trust in her abilities at this point, because she can write some fantastic sci-fi, even if the foundation of the plot is flimsy. Her voice for Akshana perfectly captured that teenage urge to explore beyond your parents’ backyard and prove everyone wrong. Divya’s descriptions of future Earth, from the raging seas to the lush greenery to the plains of a futuristic America, immersed me instantly in a vibrantly crafted vision of the future. I’ll get to the specifics of the emotional core of Loka later, but that was perhaps the best part of the novel—S.B. Divya’s brand of space opera borders on hard sci-fi for me, but it keeps the emotional center that so many other hard sci-fi novels forget to consider.

The subject of disability was one of the more compelling aspects of Meru; in a genre rife with eugenic practices that get dismissed as signs of a “progressive” society, Divya changed the game by creating Jayanthi, who, in a future when most disabilities were edited out of the gene pool, was specifically engineered to have sickle-cell anemia. More than that, her sickle-cell anemia was advantageous for surviving the landscape of Meru. Fast-forward 16 years, and Akshana is experiencing, as I said before, the same plot, but her sickle-cell anemia presents unique challenges on Earth, leading to many a close scrape when she exhausts herself to near-fatal levels. She has thoughts of resentment towards her mother, who made a conscious decision to pass this gene down to her. S.B. Divya said that Loka was inspired by their experience being a disabled parent, and that shone through in Loka; eugenicists would have you believe that this would constitute cruelty on the highest level, but Akshana comes to reconcile with—and understand—her mother’s logic. By erasing this gene and others from the gene pool, the Alloys past erased entire cultures, as well as the ways in which they moved about in the world. Being disabled is challenging, to say the least, and in my experience, bothersome and at times taxing to deal with on a daily basis. Yet it has shaped my life in ways that I will never regret. Akshana comes to realize that her mother, even though the road to this decision was rocky, merely wanted her to know that individuality, adversity, and culture cannot be erased by a purging of the gene pool.

Which brings me to the ending. The buildup of Loka concerns the mounting pressure and prejudice surrounding daring Akshana and her friends as they complete the challenge and return to a world that wants to erase their bravery and ban the Anthro Challenge altogether. Not only has she come to terms with her disability, she has come to reckon with her status as a half-human, half-Alloy being in a galaxy where neither party wants her to exist. Yes, there was the physical challenge, but the real Anthro Challenge is the identity crisis you have along the way, amirite? All jokes aside, that was the real hurdle to overcome. I know how corny I sound, but the real journey was Akshana’s journey to self-acceptance in all of the facets of her identity. At the end of the treacherous paved with prejudice and hatred, Akshana learns that the only way to survive is to be yourself, unapologetically so. As she says, in Loka’s stunning final lines:

“Our bodies don’t have a true end. Subatomic particles bounced between skin and air continually. So what did that make me, or any person? If I coexisted with everything and everyone, then part of me was also part of them, and vice versa. To some people, I would never be human enough. To others, I would always be too human. In the end, I had no choice by to be myself.”

And if anything could save Loka from being a letdown, it would be this, and the character arc it coincides with. Excuse me for a moment…no, I’m not crying, it’s just raining on my face.

All in all, a sequel with a plot that nearly dragged the novel down, but just like Akshana completing the Anthro Challenge, beautifully stuck the landing after a rocky journey. 4 stars!

Loka is the second book in The Alloy Era series, preceded by Meru. S.B. Divya is also the author of Machinehood, Runtime, and several other science fiction short stories.

Today’s song:

NEW HORSEGIRL IN FEBRUARY? ON VALENTINE’S DAY? PRODUCED BY CATE LE BON? today is a GOOD day

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (10/22/24) – The Brightness Between Us (The Darkness Outside Us, #2)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

We’re keeping up my sequel streak for the time being, so it seems. The difference between this and The Heart of the World is that I had no idea that The Darkness Outside Us, one of my favorite books of 2021, was even getting a sequel in the first place. That novel rocked my world—it really enraptured me in a way that not a whole lot of books ever have. But it was beautiful as a standalone—it had about as satisfying of an ending as you could ask for. So I was teetering towards hesitantly optimistic when I heard about The Brightness Outside Us, but in the end, I’m so glad I took the gamble; this novel is a different kind of twisty than its predecessor, but it’s worth taking the leap.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Now, tread lightly! This review contains spoilers for book one, The Darkness Outside Us. If you haven’t read it and intend on doing so, read at your own risk!

For my review of book one, The Darkness Outside Us, click here!

The Brightness Between Us (The Darkness Outside Us, #2)

In the 24th century, Ambrose Cusk is on the cusp of the greatest space mission mankind has ever embarked on. After losing his sister Minerva in a troubled gambit outside of the solar system, Ambrose is set to cross the universe itself in order to save her. But when he discovers that he won’t be on the ship—only clones of himself—he is determined to get to the bottom of what his true mission is—and what really happened to Minerva.

30,000 years in the future, the final clones of Ambrose and Kodiak have grown from the teenage clones they once were into fathers of two children. Owl and Yarrow live a peaceful but sheltered existence on the surface of Minerva. Owl yearns to learn what the rest of the planet holds, but her parents are keen on keeping her safe. But when her brother Yarrow begins acting strangely, the family suspects that a stranger thousands of years in the past may have sabotaged their mission.

TW/CW: violence, war, past mentions of child death, animal death, terrorism, intrusive thoughts

It didn’t even cross my mind that The Darkness Outside Us would have a sequel. I went into this novel with trepidation—how do you follow up a novel as twisty, complex, and heartwrenchingly beautiful as The Darkness Outside Us? By splitting the novel in two, as it turns out. I didn’t think that The Darkness Outside Us needed a sequel, but nonetheless, I’m glad I stuck around to see the result—of course Eliot Schrefer would have something fascinating up his sleeve.

The Brightness Between Us reminds me of how much I love a good “space colony gone wrong” story. As I said, I didn’t even think about The Darkness Outside Us getting a sequel, but this novel has the perfect setup for precisely this kind of plot. I should have trusted Schrefer from the start, given how masterful book one was, but wow, the Minerva plot amazed me! There was so much solid, hard sci-fi put into the terrain, climate, and wildlife of Minerva, and Schrefer did an excellent job of keeping the reader in the dark just enough to make everything suspenseful, even when the mysterious bones that Owl digs up in her exoplanet yard only turn out to be from a duck. From the research behind the wildlife, the weather, and the atmosphere, no stone was left unturned, each one its own Chekhov’s gun waiting to fire.

Although Owl wasn’t my favorite protagonist, she fits perfectly for the environment she’s in. Every “space colony gone wrong” needs a character who questions everything; there is always some part of the planet that has been unexplored, and someone needs to be curious and daring enough to want to discover what’s on the other side of the world. It can be even more effective when that character is a child; children are naturally curious, making it more than simply questioning authority—the authority is often their parental figures, and the excuses of them hiding things “for their safety” feel more tangible. Fifteen-year-old Owl was naturally curious, but also paired with her more obedient (at first) brother, Yarrow, giving her more resentment towards her parents. She wasn’t as likeable as Ambrose or Kodiak (I loved seeing them become parents), but they had the home field advantage of book one. But I can recognize when a character is perfect for the plot they’re in, and Owl was the perfect match for the plot of The Brightness Between Us.

After the pummeling of gut-wrenching twists that we call The Darkness Outside Us, the sequel was going to have to pull off a miracle to follow it up in terms of plot. The main twist was so earth-shattering that I thought it would be impossible to come up with anything better. I remain correct—I don’t think anyone, much less Schrefer, could come up with a twist that could top book one. But the main twist that we do have was excellent enough to propel me to finish the book in one sitting—just like The Darkness Outside Us! (The difference is that it was at a reasonable hour this time. I’ve matured since 2021, I promise.) Not only is this duology a love story 30,000 years in the making—it’s a conspiracy 30,000 years in the making! I loved the twist that Devon manipulated the frozen fetuses to develop violently aggressive traits as they grew—it gave even more stakes to an already gripping plot, and it made the days of present future half of the novel gripping as well. It gave the “space colony gone wrong” side of The Brightness Outside Us a truly unique twist—sabotage from 30,000 years in the past, and two versions of the main characters communicating across time to thwart it.

All this talk about the Minerva plot, and I haven’t even touched on the “present-day” Ambrose and Kodiak…oops. I don’t have a favorite child, I swear. The worldbuilding in this half of The Brightness Outside Us was my favorite part; getting a glimpse into the forgotten world that we only knew about in whispers in book one was fascinating. Schrefer’s vision of a world divided into a corporate hellscape of excess and a corporate hellscape of rigidity was one that was mapped out just as vividly as the alien world of Minerva. You really do see how it is that Ambrose and Kodiak got to be how they were at the start of book one. In terms of character development, it did tend to feel like listening to a broken record after book one, but that’s my only minor nitpick—Schrefer made sure that they had startlingly different—and almost as emotional—arcs as their clone counterparts in The Darkness Outside Us. Devon was a fascinating, slippery antagonist, and his sabotage was one of my favorite parts of the novel to witness unfolding.

All in all, a sequel that had a Herculean task to live up to its predecessor, but delivered a miracle in spite of the odds—just like Ambrose and Kodiak. 5 stars!

The Brightness Between Us is the second book in The Darkness Outside Us series, preceded by The Darkness Outside Us. Eliot Schrefer has also written several other books for children and young adults, including the Ape Quartet (Endangered, Threatened, Rescued, and Orphaned), The Lost Rainforest series (Mez’s Magic, Gogi’s Gambit, and Rumi’s Riddle), Queer Ducks (And Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality, and many others.

Today’s song:

EVERGREEN COMES OUT THIS FRIDAY, ARE WE READY?

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (8/13/24) – Beautyland

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

As far as science fiction goes, I’m not usually for the literary side of it—that goes for most literary novels of any genre, to be honest. I’ve often found that the sci-fi part is dulled in favor of mass appeal. But the premise of Beautyland fascinated me, not just as a science fiction reader, but as someone who’s grown up feeling like an alien. Surprise, surprise—I cried.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Beautyland – Marie-Helene Bertino

Philadelphia, 1977. Humanity has given the gift of Voyager 1, along with its landmark Golden Record, to space. Unbeknownst to us, a power hidden deep in the cosmos has given humanity a gift in exchange. At the same time as the launch of Voyager 1, a baby is born to an unknowing mother, not human but alien. Her mother names her Adina, and as Adina grows older, she learns how to communicate with her kinfolk in space, reporting the oddities of human life and culture through an old fax machine. As Adina pretends to be human, she experiences the joy and terror of human existence, but longs for closure—will she ever be able to return to her homeworld?

TW/CW: cancer, sexual harassment, loss of loved ones, pet death, bullying, grief, 9/11 themes (brief)

One of the best feelings is when you pick up a book that you’re interested in, but not expecting anything marvelous from, and then getting absolutely pied in the face out of nowhere with the feeling that this book gets me. Setting aside my reservations for literary sci-fi, Beautyland digs into the heart of my experience growing up—of feeling alien, but of cataloguing all of the nonsensical facets of American culture and the feeling of not belonging. I cried. I laughed. I had an echoing pang in my chest for a while. Like life, all of it was worth reading and living.

Observations about the human condition formed the heart of Beautyland. Through Adina’s messages on a fax machine, she reports to her alien superiors on everything from the oddities of American culture (“When it was time to decide the official food of movie-watching, human beings did not go for Fig Newtons or caramel, foods that are silent, but popcorn, the loudest sound on earth”) to the painful and uneasy truths of human existence (“The ego of the human male is by far the most dangerous aspect of human society”). Bertino’s writing shone the most when chronicling Adina’s observations. She adopted a blunt, matter-of-fact tone of a distanced journalist, someone watching our species from the sidelines, yet always managed to wring the emotion from it, be it humor or sorrow. The wonder of Adina when she visited her superiors at night, in a vast room inside of her mind, was just as palpable, capturing her childlike curiosity. You felt every joy of Adina reporting back on the eccentricities of humanity, and every sorrow once Adina matures and realizes the dark side of our nature. The eventual abandonment of her superiors as she grew older drove the point home even more—at a certain point, nobody can answer these questions for you, and you realize that you don’t have the answers, and neither does anyone else. All that’s left to do is live your life, and observe.

Though it wasn’t outright said or diagnosed, the neurodivergent themes of Beautyland were what stuck with me the most. (I have sensory processing disorder, and, among other things, I felt Adina’s growing discomfort with sensations as simple as hearing people breathe and chew.) Whether or not you believe that Adina is actually an alien, the experience of being on the fringes and unable to understand not just other people but their actions deeply resonated with me. As Adina moves through middle and high school and is ostracized by her more popular peers and tries to scientifically observe them, she’s confronted with a frequent feeling of questioning why it has to be this way: why are these girls looking at me like I’m gum on the bottom of their shoes? Why is not wanting sex such an affront to men? Why don’t they like me? That feeling of knowing something’s missing, but being unable to find it, put into words a feeling I struggled with through my adolescence, a sense that everybody else knew something I didn’t, and that was what made me so strange to them.

I read Beautyland as both science fiction and historical fiction; some people have put it up in the air as to whether or not Adina actually is an alien, but I think the answer is…yes. Both can be true. I’ve grown up in a similar way to Adina, feeling so on the outside of everything that I’ve attached myself to science fiction and alienness in general. Like Adina, it’s informed by some neurodivergence and general outsiderness, but there’s something to be said for all of the questions presented being true. Yes, she may be an alien sent from an advanced race beyond the solar system, and yes, she has some neurodivergent tendencies as well. The two can coexist. And Beautyland’s embrace of how these qualities can intersect was what made it so impactful; this experience fundamentally makes us human, even if it makes us feel alien. I often see criticism of alien or robot characters who are characterized as “inhuman,” but what makes them inhuman boils down to them just having the traits of neurodivergent people (“lack” of emotion, misunderstanding of how humans work) and those on the asexual/aromantic spectrum (no desire for romance or sex, that which “makes us human”), and I think it’s a valid criticism to apply to characters who are written thoughtlessly. But who’s to say that an alien character like this can’t also be neurodivergent and asexual? Again: the two can coexist. Bertino wrote Adina as a character with a deep understanding of human culture, and that, to me, does not skew the reading of her as asexual and neurodivergent.

Somehow, one of the most emotional parts of Beautyland for me was how Bertino wrote about Carl Sagan. As I mentioned before, the novel is written in fragments, not always linearly, but taking frequent detours outside of Adina’s immediate life and into moments of relevant pop culture at the time—the popularity of Carl Sagan being one of them. With her connection to the Golden Record and the absence of her own father, Adina looks up to Sagan as a surrogate father, someone who can teach her more about the cosmos from which she was born from. Even having never met him in person, the way that Adina processed Sagan’s death was where I lost it; this is one of her first experiences of loss, and it’s the loss of someone who has unknowingly guided her through her alien life, teaching her about the universe, and by proxy, given her a roadmap of the human condition. Fleeting as it was, Bertino wrote this instance—and the connection to Sagan in general—with the kind of love of someone you feel like you’ve known all your life, but have never even met.

All in all, a deeply human exploration of what it means to be alien. 5 stars!

Beautyland is a standalone, but Marie-Helene Bertino is also the author of Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the short story collection Safe as Houses.

Today’s song:

new Smile!! not my favorite, and I can see why they left it off the album, but a solid track nonetheless.

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (8/6/24) – The Stardust Grail

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Here I was thinking that I hadn’t had a 5-star read in so long, and bam…two in a row! I was expecting to enjoy The Stardust Grail because I loved The Deep Sky, Yume Kitasei’s debut. To my delight, it turned in a much more space opera direction, but not only that—it had one of the most heartwarming sci-fi universes that I’ve had the privilege of experiencing!

Enjoy this week’s review!

The Stardust Grail – Yume Kitasei

Maya Hoshimoto is a grad student, pouring her life into her studies on an Earth university far from her colony home. But what her university doesn’t know is that her extensive background in alien cultures comes from a history of art theft, stealing alien artifacts and returning them to their rightful owners. When a friend from her past offers her one last job, Maya is ready to refuse—until she learns that the artifact in question could mean that her friend’s species could be brought back from the brink of extinction. Plunged back into her old life, Maya now faces her hardest job yet—putting an entire alien species on the line.

TW/CW (from Yume Kitasei): themes of colonialism/imperialism, genocide, chronic illness (migraines), torture, suicidal ideation (brief), violence/gore, torture/confinement, war themes, pandemic

I loved The Deep Sky, but it was more literary than my usual tastes in sci-fi. I went into The Stardust Grail expecting more of the same, knowing I’d enjoy it, but I did not anticipate it being the perfect book for my constant space opera hankering! Heartwarming friendships, intergalactic hijinks, and excellent creature design—I’m ecstatic to report that The Stardust Grail has it all!

You all knew I was going to go after the creature design first. THE CREATURE DESIGN!! THIS IS THE ABSOLUTE CREAM OF THE CROP HERE!! My only issue is that we didn’t get to see all of the alien species that Kitasei set up, but to be fair, with a story jam-packed with rival parties and factions, it would’ve been a chore to have to incorporate every single one of them. (Maybe what we need is a companion novel in this universe? WE NEED TO MAKE IT HAPPEN!) Back to my point—even in sci-fi, it’s a difficult task to make aliens feel truly alien, not just in looks, but in culture, lifespans, and general quirks. The Frenro, and Auncle in particular, felt bizarre in the best possible way. I love a good cephalopod-like creature, but Kitasei did an excellent job of portraying not just xer mannerisms and what made xem unique as a species, but having those in contact with Maya’s more human sensibilities—there’s a ton of cultural confusion, even though they’ve been friends for at least a decade, but both Kitasei and the characters themselves handle it with a humorous grace. I also loved the design of the Belzoar—again, arachnid-like aliens are also tons of fun, but like the Frenro, they had enough distinguishing qualities to separate them from just being giant spiders.

I could go on and on about how much I adored these characters! Even if I didn’t have a soft spot for alien characters in the first place (being marginalized and generally an outcast will do that), Auncle would be my favorite by far—xe was just so delightful in their joyous dialogue and relentless optimism, but xer deep history of tragedy, both personal and in the context of xer species, was handled with all of the respect that it deserved—xe was joyous in spite of it all, because joy is all you’ve got in some cases. (AMEN!!) Maya was a fantastic protagonist—like Auncle, Kitasei did an excellent job of giving the reader the full breadth of her motivations and past that led her to the place where she is now. Her devotion to a fair galaxy and to help the Frenro made for a beautiful quest, and her feeling of outsiderness amongst both humans and aliens resonated deeply with me. (Given the themes of mixed-race identity in The Deep Sky, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was another analog. YES!!!) Wil and Medix were charming and lovable as side characters, and all of the colorful denizens of the galaxy were equally so—not a single character felt flat or out of place.

In her personal review of the novel on Goodreads, Yume Kitasei cites Star Wars—A New Hope in particular—as her primary inspiration for writing The Stardust Grail and much of her other science fiction. The Deep Sky was much more on the literary side of sci-fi, and while I loved it, I’m hoping that Kitasei keeps in this direction for her next few books. (I’ll read anything she writes at this point, but my statement still stands.) As a fellow space opera girlie and an avid Star Wars fan, the passion of both Kitasei’s personal life and her love for those movies shines through in The Stardust Grail. Kitasei took all of the right lessons from George Lucas and company. Not only do we have a vibrant galaxy full of characters who are just as vibrant, this novel hits the right balance of emotional weight and campy, truly fun action. Speaking of George Lucas…another obvious inspiration in the latter third of the novel was the Indiana Jones franchise, and those action scenes were the best kind of fun amidst an otherwise deeply grounded and emotional novel. Never at any point do the emotion and serious themes contradict the aforementioned action, nor the other way around—all of it is earned, and all of it feels like a worthy tribute both Star Wars and other such space opera works.

Speaking of said serious and emotional themes…as I said earlier, The Stardust Grail has such grace in the way that it handles the myriad of themes that it explores. From Maya’s lasting effects of an alien illness that linger into her life to her experience as an outsider, being raised on a colony isolated from Earth, every topic is treated with the weight it deserves. Imperialism and the ownership of art is the primary theme of the novel, and it’s unabashedly anti-colonial, which I adored. However, it didn’t just say “colonialism bad” and leave it at that—just as in the real world, nothing in The Stardust Grail is without nuance. With dozens of alien species and factions amongst said species, everything is gray, even in the case of their main mission. Would it have been fine if all there was to The Stardust Grail is “colonialism bad?” Sure, I agree. But the fact that Kitasei chose to explore all of the layers to the various conflicts and perspectives made it so much more worthwhile.

All in all, a deeply emotional and heartwarming tale of resistance, friendship across cultural barriers, and retaining joy in spite of it all. 5 stars!

The Stardust Grail is a standalone, but Yume Kitasei is also the author of The Deep Sky.

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!