Bookwormish, 3rd quarter of 2017

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This quarter has felt like such a long span of time that I can barely remember back to the start of it! (With good reason: I got into grad school, packed up my entire life in the US in record time so I’d have time to travel a bit before moving to Scotland, spent marvelous weeks visiting friends in Iceland, then arrived here with two weeks to move in, settle in and start uni. No wonder July feels like a lifetime ago!)

 

So it’s hard to do a comparative and pick proper favorites of the quarter, since some of these books feel so long ago. So rather than trying to divide into categories, I’m just going to list a selection of books I enjoyed and recommend.

 

These are maybe VERY ROUGHLY sorted with favorites first, but it’s not any sort of exact ranking.

 

 

Ramona Blue by Julie Murphy – I love a book that is deeply about more than one thing. This is about being bi, but it’s just as much about growing up poor and how that does and doesn’t limit what you can do with your life. It’s also about family, and how to create a good life even when your family is imperfect. (And whose family is perfect?) It’s definitely also a coming of age story, and a tender love story. I’m a fan!

 

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman – I may be biased because I just finished this about an hour ago and am still deep within the emotional landscape of the book, but I loved this! I was there in the characters’ world and rooting for them desperately. Here’s another book that’s about so many things: friendship, identity, academic pressure (and breaking out of those expectations), mental health…and fannishness! I didn’t even know about that aspect until I started reading! The author is herself barely past teenage, so it makes sense that she writes teenagers this well. Also, a platonic story of the love between friends, a story written for teenagers that doesn’t present romantic love as the one thing that will cure all your problems? Sign me up. (Also: demisexual character! YA really is at the forefront of so many types of representation, and it makes me happy.)

 

More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera – “Eternal Sunshine” meets top-notch YA coming out story meets an author who actually knows how to write teenagers. I love that this didn’t go where I expected; that’s actually kind of rare in YA. The tropes I thought this was going to follow were not the case at all, and it made for a rich, thought-provoking story. (I’d love to read more by Silvera, who is excellent, but all his books sound so sad! Has anyone read “History Is All You Left Me” and can recommend? I can read sad as long as there’s a shred of hopefulness at the end.)

 

The Real Boy by Anne Ursu – A magician’s apprentice just wants a life out of the limelight…until he has to step forward and save the day. Ursu wrote this character as autistic (though it’s not stated in those words, given the fantasy world setting) and I’ve seen multiple reviews say she did a sensitive, realistic job of portraying the POV of an autistic character – still too rare in novels. Also, it’s a totally lovely story of friendship and finding the strength to do the things that scare you.

 

The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill – Won the 2017 Newbery, much recommended, so I had to check it out…and indeed a lovely, complex story about love and magic and people breaking out from oppression. All with, you know, witches and excitable tiny dragons. :-) 

 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead – I think what impressed me most was that Whitehead is writing speculative fiction here (which we usually only see in futuristic settings) even though the novel is set in the past. Set during the era of American slavery, it uses many types of SF-style speculative world-building (the hyper-modern dystopian city, the post-apocalyptic burned-out landscape), as a way of exposing and examining racism in its many forms.

 

Unbecoming by Jenny Downham – Yet another rec from that “best YA books” workshop I went to! A thoughtfully woven story about a daughter, mother, and grandmother. The grandmother reappears in their lives after decades of absence, the granddaughter bonds hungrily with this previously unknown person from her past, the mother seethes with her feelings of abandonment… That made it sound bleak, but it’s a lovely, thoughtful, affirming story.

 

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge – Finally got a chance to read this one; an exploration of the lives of women in Victorian times, wrapped up in a clever whodunit with hints of magic.

 

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin – A searing exploration of religion and its significance in Black American life. I love, admire and am-awed-to-death-by James Baldwin and his nonfiction, but struggle a bit more to know what to make of his fiction: like so many classic books created with painstaking craft, I think I would get a lot more out of this if I read it in the context of a literature class, with an expert teacher guiding me, and I’m kind of sad that I don’t get to do that. I still think everything by Baldwin is worth reading, though!

 

On Beauty by Zadie Smith – Ah, the brilliant Zadie Smith. I’ve read a bunch of her essays and admire all of her thinking, but only now finally managed to read a novel! This was, I suppose, a more “literary” book than I often read. More about big concepts, less about characters you can sympathize with. (NOT that characters have to be likable, ESPECIALLY since that complaint so often gets lobbed at female writers!) An almost Virginia-Woolf-ian omniscient POV style of hopping between characters’ heads, but never really settling into one long enough to allow deep identification. I saw someone on Goodreads said “Zadie Smith is at the same cruel and merciful towards her subjects” and that’s true! She’s merciless in revealing their foibles, and yet somehow also sympathetic to their human frailties. Another book I wish I could have read in a college class – there’s clearly so much here to plumb. (I didn’t even realize until after I finished that it’s an homage to “Howards End”!)

 

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi – Satrapi’s moving and important memoir about her childhood in Iran. I’d seen the movie ages ago but never read the book until now, and it was nice to see how much had stuck with me even all these years later!

 

The Porcupine of Truth by Bill Konigsberg – A sweet, fun and sometimes surprisingly deep story about a straight boy and his lesbian friend on a road trip to find his grandfather. The story starts out very “straight boy can’t get it through his head that his lesbian friend is really, truly not ever going to sleep with him,” and I wasn’t sure if it was going to irk me too much to finish, but it came around, and thoughtfully so. (I mean, Konigsberg is known for writing LGBT YA, so I assumed it would!)

 

The Secret Horses of Briar Hill by Megan Shepherd – A sweet and moving story about a girl recovering in a sanatorium during World War II. She copes through her love for the magical winged horses she sees in the building’s mirrors, though the horses aren’t real. Or are they?

 

All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island by Liza Jessie Peterson – A memoir about teaching imprisoned teenagers. Tough, fascinating, thoughtful; full of tough love but with the emphasis on the love, never failing to take into account the traumas behind how teenagers ended up in prison in the first place.

 

My Name Is Not Easy by Debby Dahl Edwardson – As a rule, I’m skeptical of white people writing novels from inside the perspective of oppressed and minority cultures (time for own voices works, y’all!) but this author writing about Iñupiaq boys sent to boarding school drew on the experiences her Iñupiaq husband had at boarding school, and it seems like a sensitive portrait.

 

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher – Carrie Fisher! I <3 <3 <3 her as a person and a personality and a mental health activist, so I had to read one of her books. It was fun and fast, though not quite as overwhelming in its hilarity as I’d expected. I think it suffers a bit from being an adaptation of her stage show, so even though I listened to the audiobook read by Fisher herself, I think it still lacked the pizazz of seeing Fisher onstage, making sly quips about her off-the-hook family. I bet that was fantastic.

 

On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks – Sympathetic memoir spanning his entire life from the endearingly quirky Oliver Sacks. Sheesh, he did a lot in his life!

 

The Door by the Staircase by Katherine Marsh – A charming Baba Yaga retelling transposed to 19th century upstate New York. The unfolding of the plot is fairly simple, given that it’s a middle-grade novel, but the characters really are heartwarming.

 

One Man Guy by Michael Barakiva – A touching coming out story. This is the author’s first novel and can be a little clunky (especially in the exposition and especially early on), which he readily admits to. (He has a sequel coming out, and I’m curious to see what his writing’s like now!) I almost didn’t stick with it, but I’m glad I did because by the end I was totally won over. It’s especially nice to get a coming out story from a different perspective: the protagonist here is Armenian-American, navigating how to be a “normal” American teen despite traditional, strict (but not homophobic!) immigrant parents. I’d love to see more books like this, a standard YA topic but from a unique perspective. (e.g., Karelia Stetz-Waters’ beautiful “Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before.”) 

 

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