Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

read by Bahni Turpin

Children of Blood and Bone takes place a richly-detailed mythical African country called Orïsha, in which magic is very real. That is, it’s real until a ruthless, despotic king decides that magic and the dominant social order can't coexist. So he finds a way to sever the people’s connection to the gods; after that, it’s effectively dead. He then proceeds to persecute and oppress the former magic-using caste, calling them “worms” but treating them worse than any animal.

Our protagonist, Zélie, has the distinctive white hair of a (potential) magic user, and still has flashbacks to the night her mother was hauled off and killed by the king’s soldiers. As a “worm,” Zélie lives in grinding poverty and constant fear of the random cruelty of the king’s brutal guards. Not only is she not safe, but nobody associated with her has any real expectation of safety or fair treatment. 

Very much against her own better judgment, Zélie finds herself helping a young woman escape from the king’s guard… and that young woman turns out to be a royal princess, and in possession of an item that just might let Zélie bring magic back. If she can learn how to use it, and whom to trust, and if she can stay ahead of the king’s guard and get to a mythical island on the one day of the year that it appears.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it takes what could be a fairly standard fantasy plot line and enriches it, transforms it, and fills it with surprises. Not simply by setting it in a mythical Africa instead of a mythical Europe, though Adeyemi does a wonderful job of that (Nnedi Okorafor calls it Africanjujuism); but also by taking individual elements of the plot (the romantic interest, the rules by which magic works, the hero’s journey) and subverting them.

In short, this is a very solid and compelling read, especially for anyone who loves fantasy or who used to love fantasy but has become bored with how derivative the genre has become. 

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton

read by Michael Crouch, Karissa Vacker, Brittany Pressley, Christopher Gebauer, Ari Fliakos, and Rebecca Lowman

This is a gorgeous, gorgeous book. (And I’m not talking about the inhumanly lovely face on the cover.) Westworld, HUM∀NS, Black Mirror—if you’re a fan of any of those, this universe will feel familiar to you. Then again, it will feel familiar to you if you live in the western world (and probably most other places) at all right now.

So then, what’s it about? Well, let’s try a little philosophical exercise. 

I don’t think that most people would argue too much with the proposition that if you lose, say, a foot, and it’s replaced with a prosthetic foot, you’re still you, and still human. Still true if you lose both feet, or both feet and both legs. And the recipient of a donor heart or liver is obviously still human and still themselves. Got a tattoo? Still you. Skin completely covered in tattoos, 27 piercings, and no appendix or tonsils? Possibly an unusual specimen, but definitely still human.

All right, but where does the line begin to blur? 

Let’s say a pair of twins were both born with numerous potentially fatal birth defects, and at a certain point in their lives, when they’re in their teens, one of them begins to suffer from cascading organ failure. There’s no question that this twin is going to die; only massively invasive medical technology is keeping her body even minimally functioning. Meanwhile, her twin continues to suffer from numerous major disabilities and it’s medically certain that he won’t live past his twenties. At best.

Unless. Unless his twin’s organs are harvested—the ones that are still functioning—and used to replace or repair his. This has to be done while they’re still in some kind of condition to do him some good, of course. And it has to be done using new technology that allows her organs to be grafted to his—stem cells, 3D-printed artificial tissue, CRISPR gene editing, what have you. And this is truly major surgery. A really significant percentage of this teenager’s body, going forward, will have once been part of his twin.

So… is he still himself? Unless his brain were being replaced, most people would still say yes. Likewise to his still being human… though some people might call him a monster. But they would probably mean that metaphorically. Mostly.

All right, then. What if, a couple of decades later, a teenager is in a terrible car accident, and half her body is completely destroyed, and she doesn’t have a dying twin to provide her with donor parts… but she has really top-notch health insurance and access to the world’s best medical technology. Which can replace literally everything that’s been damaged or destroyed with synthetic and/or mechanical parts. Is she still human? Is she a cyborg? What does that even mean? And how will that affect her social life when she goes back to high school?

It goes on from there. What happens when we start deliberately modifying ourselves with parts of other people, or even animals? What is it that makes us human, what makes us other, and where does morality lie in all of this? Where does it end? Centuries, millennia from now, where will we be? Will we even be "we" anymore?

If any of this is even a little interesting to you, you should read this book. It’s written with such clarity and curiosity and understanding of what makes people tick that you will find yourself empathizing with points of view that are deeply inimical to yours.

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

read by Scott Brick

This book interested me because I heard that it featured a triad—a stable romantic partnership involving three individuals. It was one of a handful of examples of polyamorous relationships in science fiction that a group of friends on Facebook were able to come up with. Since I also enjoy dipping into the odd New Wave hard sci fi novel, and Asimov is of course one of the greats, I decided to give this one a go. 

It doesn’t start in a promising way. Basically a cadre of in-fighting, nerdishly vicious, and highly competitive white-guy scientists discover a source of infinite free energy, and they fight and fight and fight about it. Who really discovered it, who gets how much credit, whether it’s dangerous in any way and how shall we discredit and ruin the career of anyone who dares to ask that question, and so on. This, and the discovery that the energy source is actually a parallel universe with slightly different laws of physics than our own and that this may cause the sun to blow up, take up the first third of the book.

In the next third of the novel, we get to visit the alternate universe. This is where, for me, the book gets interesting. The species that has initiated the energy transfer (which goes two ways and thus benefits the civilization utilizing it in each universe) consists, in its immature form, of three genders: Rational, Emotional, and Parental. Every relationship consists of a triad including one individual of each gender, and they blend their essences to produce exactly three children, one of each gender. After that, they go on to the next phase of their existence.

All of this is interesting enough in theory. But what hooked me was Asimov’s gritty, unsentimental but not unsympathetic depiction of the everyday reality of these beings. He paints a vivid picture of the way their society is shaped by being comprised of three genders with very distinct roles and personality types, how that affects relationships and thought patterns, what this kind of relationship feels to someone who is in it and how that differs by gender. 

The day-to-day happinesses and compromises and failures to communicate and generosities of any romantic partnership, as transformed by the triune nature of relationships in this society, don’t have to be imagined by the reader. Asimov shows us both the differences and the similarities between that form of relationship and the two-person sort that most of us are more accustomed to and he does it with a very… I can’t say human touch here, can I? With a portrait painter’s eye for the homely, telling detail.

In the third part of the book we get on with the business of saving the universe, and for me it becomes somewhat less interesting. I mean, of course I’m all for the universe being saved, especially when saving it means flipping a highly humiliating bird at the forces of greed and egotism that got us in that mess in the first place. The pacing, once you figure out who’s who and what their agendas are, is good. The characters are interesting, the lunar society depicted is interesting, and there’s even a well-written central female character. It’s a good story and a fine final third. But for my taste, Part 2 is what this book is all about.

Verdict: read it! Just be prepared to do some eye rolling for the first hundred pages or so. Your patience will be rewarded.

All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella by Danielle Teller

read by Jane Copland

In the spirit of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, All the Ever Afters takes a familiar tale and turns it on its head by telling from the point of view of the villain. In this case the villain-turned-protagonist is Agnes, Cinderella’s purportedly evil stepmother. And oh boy, do we get a different picture of what kind of person Cinderella really is.

To begin with, this is very much Agnes’ tale, not Cinderella’s (she’s actually called Ella), though of course that fabled beauty plays a tremendous part in Agnes’s life—and not just by spreading those nasty rumors about the woman who eventually becomes her stepmother. Ella is an ethereally lovely child with an extremely tenuous grip on reality; she’s also the spoiled only daughter of a drunken lord, in whose household Agnes becomes a laundress when her family can no longer afford to keep her.

Agnes works in the drunken lord’s household for a number of years, under the supervision of a lazy, despotic sadist of a head laundress. She has a fair amount of contact with the lord of the manor, first because as the lowest-ranking servant in the house she can be made to deal with him when his drunkenness has made him unusually difficult, and then because she proves herself equal to the task of jollying him along. He develops a fondness for her; he is, nonetheless, a frightening individual to be around when he is in his cups, which he usually is.

Eventually her fortunes improve and she becomes a better sort of servant in a better sort of household. Much later, after numerous ups and downs as her hopes for a better life are repeatedly dashed because of a society and legal system that are stacked against the poor, Agnes returns to work for Ella’s father—as a senior servant. Now that she has more say in how things are run, her understandable bitterness comes out in petty ways. But overall she runs the household well, including handling its still-drunken lout of a lord and his spoiled, mentally unstable daughter, Ella.

The “wicked stepmother” rumors start here, as Agnes tries to find ways to get Ella to learn the responsibilities of running a household and to have some appreciation for the hard work that all of the servants do for her. And Agnes does, by something of a miracle and much to everyone’s disapproval, end up marrying Ella’s father. And no, that’s not the end of the story—but I’ve already given away a lot.

Basically, if you like a good, solid retelling of a fairy tale with richly detailed world-building, especially ones from non-traditional points of view, you’ll like this one a lot. It’s a really good example of the genre.

I’m Just a Person by Tig Notaro

read by the author

Full disclosure: I have a massive crush on Jett Reno, Tig Notaro’s character on Star Trek: Discovery. That may or may not have influenced my review.

Those of you who aren’t Star Trek folks (though honestly, what do you do with your time???) may have heard of her famous stand-up routine where she began with, “Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer.” If you haven’t heard of it, go google it now.

Basically what happened was, Ms. Notaro was hospitalized with a painful and life-threatening condition, and her mother died after a freak accident, and her girlfriend broke up with her, and she was diagnosed with bilateral invasive breast cancer, all within 4 months in 2012. Bringing it to her standup routine in that raw way was her way of trying to be as alive as possible.

This memoir is about that year—the four-month period just mentioned, and the 8 months or so that followed. It’s full of all the despair and hope and chaos and love and confusion and connection that you would expect. Ms. Notaro was of course knocked completely flat by all of this; she doesn’t claim any special strength or courage. Quite the opposite. She’s not self-deprecating in the least, but she’s honest and straightforward and utterly humble.

And she managed to face her world falling completely apart with a kind of grace. A very human grace, peppered with failures and lapses in kindness and common sense—but still, a grace. I think that, and her unflagging sense of humor, derive from her refusal to refuse to face the facts, tempting as it might have been. 

That’s what I find admirable about her. And what I admire and appreciate about the book is her willingness and ability to keep the raw parts raw and not try to gloss them over or tie a pretty bow around them. At the same time, while the reader does accompany Ms. Notaro to the depths of the worst days of her life, there are notes of humor and hope throughout.

I wish her a long and happy life. And I hope you will check her memoir out. It’s harrowing sometimes, but it’s also beautiful and satisfying and will give you all the feels.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

read by Cassandra Campbell

The power of this story is the compelling writing—and it’s a very powerful story. Despite the stupid cover, which makes it look like a YA fantasy romance (it’s not!!!), and despite the title, which someone ought to be fired for because it manages to be both deceptive and non-descriptive. This story is so much better than it needs to be, and so much better than I expected when I picked it up. I just wanted a good time-travel romp; what I got was much deeper, deeply satisfying, both emotionally and intellectually.

The story starts when Kate and Ben meet at a party at a rich girl’s uncle’s apartment in New York, attended by idealistic young political activists at the turn of the millennium. They hit it off right away, almost in spite of themselves. Ben isn’t quite looking to fall for someone, and Kate is super quirky, to the point of not quite seeming to live in the same reality as everyone else. But chemistry is chemistry.

What Ben is slow to realize is the degree to which Kate’s reality differs from his. She has dreams of another life—a life in which she’s the mistress of an Elizabethan nobleman. And she takes these dreams very seriously. How could she not, when sometimes, when she wakes up from them, reality has changed? It might be a small change, like suddenly there are blinds instead of curtains on her bedroom windows. But nobody else ever remembers things the way she does, or seems to realize that anything was ever different. 

Gradually the changes get bigger and bigger, and always, Kate is the only one who remembers how things were before. She comes to the realization that she actually is traveling to the past in her dreams, and that small things she does there are changing the future.

As the changes become bigger and bigger, and the world keeps changing—always for the worse—it becomes harder and harder for Kate to keep her grip on the current state of things. And when she can’t remember who the president is, or why people allow so many billboards and cars all over the place, Ben and her friends and family increasingly see her as mentally ill and out of touch with reality.

And maybe that’s actually the case…? Is this actually a time travel story, or just a story about someone with a remarkably detailed structure of delusions? Could 2001 have been entirely different if Kate hadn’t decided to advise an acquaintance to leave London during a plague year, and then put a good word for him in her lover’s ear? Or is that as ridiculous as it would sound to you or me in the real world?

All of this would be fascinating in any case. It’s just such a good story premise. But what makes it truly compelling for me is the way Sandra Newman writes. 

She’s just so good at depicting what happens between couples when they argue, what goes on in their heads and how they try to express it and what happens when that goes wrong. She paints such a clear and realistic picture of how people who think they are very sensible and attuned to what matters can actually completely miss seeing the elephant trampling all over the room. She’s a master of the telling emotional detail, and writes it in brilliant, insightful, and unsentimental strokes.

I walked away from it in a daze. Verdict: read this book. 

Life by Keith Richards and James Fox

read by Joe Hurley, Keith Richards, and Johnny Depp

If you’re above a certain age, it may surprise you to learn that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger aren’t baby boomers. They’re members of the Silent Generation, by two or three years. But the band they formed, along with Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Ian Stewart is such an intrinsic part of the baby boom generation that I think we’ve got to give them honorary membership. To this day, if you want a lively debate among Boomers (not to mention a significant portion of Genexers), all you’ve got to say is three words: “Beatles or Stones?”

And Keith Richards’ autobiography is necessarily a biography of the Rolling Stones—from his point of view, of course. And it turns out that he is disarmingly charming. James Fox captured his voice, first over hundreds of hours of interviews, then in writing—and he did a fantastic job. If you listen to the audiobook, Johnny Depp does some of the narration (mostly in the first few chapters and then again for a bit near the end) but Keith does quite a lot of it himself, and it’s wonderful to hear his stories.

For me the most fascinating part was how the band got together, and then their early days—both before they became famous and then after they really caught on. There was a certain early-to-mid-career part, where the sex and drugs were very present but not yet all-consuming, where Keith was fascinated with learning and perfecting his five-string open tuning, and when the relationship with Anita Pallenberg was first occurring and then was at its best, that feels to me like a golden age—if not in Keith’s life, then in the course of the book. 

But his recounting of how heroin took over his life, and heroin and paranoia took over Anita’s, and all the difficulties with parenting and with the deterioration of the friendship between Keith and Mick, is also deeply interesting. All of that went into making Keith the person he is at the end of the book, too—that, and the various deaths in his circle of family and friends and co-famous-people, and new relationships we don’t get to hear so much about anymore.

It’s not possible for me to listen to the Rolling Stones with new ears. I’m too familiar with their canon up to about Tattoo You, and I don’t care enough about anything they produced after that. But after listening to this book, and stopping frequently to listen to the song being discussed, I can say I have listened to their work with, at least, new appreciation. For the history of each track, of course, but also for the artistry that went into so much deceptive simplicity. And there was definitely artistry—technique and concept both. Keith geeks out about all this in several places, and I found it oddly charming.

In the end I can say that Keith Richards is a man of depth and complexity who follows all of his passions well beyond the dictates of common sense—which is the reason for his genius as well as numerous brushes with the law and with death. In short, he lives up to his reputation. 

Which is not to say that all of the rumors are true; according to him, at least, some are and some aren’t. And the truth behind at least one major one will remain forever a mystery if he has his say. No, I won’t tell you which is which. Read the book! Go on, I dare you.

Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma

read by Stephanie Racine

I’m not sure how to categorize this book. It's not a psychological thriller, though we do spend a lot of time on the edge of our seats wondering, claustrophobically, what's really going on. It's not contemporary realistic fiction, because people travel to and live on another planet. It’s not exactly science fiction, either—though a lot of it takes place on that other planet, in a near-future that’s scarily like ours.

That planet, Nyx, is a lot of things—on a surface level it’s what the narrator describes it as, a barren planet sufficiently Earth-like as to make colonization and eventual terraforming a possibility. Scratch just a little below that surface, though, and Nyx is a sort of anti-Earth, a symbolic and literal refuge for social media refuseniks who romanticise grandiose and permanent acts of rebellion, or for those who just can’t cope with life under the modern social panopticon. Its presence in the book, at the beginning at least, is clearly more about our current social ills than about actual and literal heavenly bodies.

So: in addition to being straight-up entertaining and a quick, fun read, this book is definitely literary, working on several levels and raising more questions than it answers. In fact, if I were teaching a freshman lit class in college, I'd want to assign this book, for those very reasons.

And so we come to the fourth paragraph on this review and I’m not sure I’ve even begun to tell you what you want or need to know. I may, in fact, have already scared you off from reading this novel. But in case you're still considering reading it (and I do recommend that you do), you’ll want some basic information. So:

It’s set in the near future, as I’ve said. A near future that’s maybe halfway between Life As We Know It here and now, and that Black Mirror episode where people constantly rate each other and their ratings affect what jobs they can have, what housing they can live in, and so on. What’s really different about this near future is that a wormhole has opened up on Earth. A one-way wormhole that leads to the planet Nyx, which humans are colonizing.

Nyx is beautiful and pink and Instagram-perfect, populated by like-minded folks who have no interest in being connected to the World Wide Web—which is a good thing, seeing as how the wormhole is one-way only. Once they go to Nyx, they can’t send home so much as an email. (And yet, strangely, social media posts complete with luscious images are sent to Earth on a daily basis, and they arrive just fine.)

Our protagonist, who does social media for a living, isn’t exactly a wiz at critical thinking. What she is is exhausted with her life and with having to pretend that it’s better and prettier than it is. She’s also suicidal—not that she wants anyone to know. After spending her entire (young) adult life putting a good and socially acceptable face on everything, she’s ready to pitch it all and head to where things are real, even if there’s no return from there. Especially since there’s no return from there.

And naturally, once she’s there and it’s too late, things aren’t quite what they seemed from Earth. A slow, intensely creepy unraveling of the minds and lives of the Nyxians ensues. And that's where I need to stop in order to avoid spoilers.

Read this book. Just don’t expect to know quite what to make of it, even after you’re done with it.

Note: Sharlene Teo summarizes this book brilliantly as "both ultra contemporary and timeless in its examination of mental health and existential and social purpose, it's the most hilarious and razor-sharp depiction of office politics I've ever read. The protagonist, Iris, hates earht so much she volunteers to participate in a reality show set on another planet."

See the entire article here.

Earth Abides by George Stewart

read by Jonathan Davis (introduction written & read by Connie Willis)

Earth Abides was my first post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. Way back in the 8th grade, my English teacher, Mr. Felker, assigned it to the class. (We also read Flowers for Algernon that year, and the room was decorated with black-and-white photos of Marilyn Monroe. Go figure.) The book made such an impression that that post-apocalyptic became one of my handful of favorite sub-genres of science fiction, which I'd already developed a taste for, and I’ve never stopped reading it. To this day, if I leave my house at some ungodly hour and the streets are deserted, I think to myself, “It’s like Earth Abides out here.”

First published in 1949 (and the winner of the first International Fantasy Award in 1951), this novel is very much a product of its time. There’s all the breathtakingly casual racism, sexism, and jingoism that you’d expect (though to give him credit, I think Stewart, a UC Berkeley professor, really was trying quite earnestly to be open-minded and open-hearted). What’s wonderful about it to me, though, is that it’s also very much a product of its place. And its place is the San Francisco Bay Area—specifically, Berkeley. More specifically, the Berkeley hills.

This, more than anything, helped me put myself in the shoes of the protagonist, Ish. When he comes home from a solitary camping trip (where he’d been working on his graduate thesis in geography), he’s coming home to his parents’ house on a fictional street within walking distance of Indian Rock Park. He uses both the university library on the UC Berkeley campus and the main public library downtown. As time passes, he makes his way through numerous familiar landscapes and neighborhoods, going so far as to describe billboards that were still recognizable to a local reader more than 30 years after the book was written. 

Ish goes on to mark the passage of days and years by watching where, along the horizon dominated by San Francisco to the south and Mount Tamalpais to the north, the sun sets—much as I used to do when I lived in a house with a western view in the Berkeley hills. (Though, unlike Ish, I had the help of up-to-date calendars and society generally.) He chisels the number of each passing year onto the face of one of the enormous rocks at Indian Rock Park, describing recognizable things there like the bowl-shaped depressions where the area's original inhabitants used to grind acorns and a cave-like area formed by two rocks leaning together. 

Ish—short for Isherwood Williams, though also, without doubt, meant to call to mind Ishi, the last of the Yahi people who himself walked down out of the hills into what we think of as modern civilization and lived out his in Berkeley, where he worked as a janitor when he wasn’t being studied by anthropologists—Ish is a familiar type in a university town. Like many academics, he lives very much inside his own head. He thinks of himself more as an observer of than a participant in life. He credits this tendency of his as the major factor that helps him, having survived a pandemic that has killed off all but a handful of humans on Earth, to keep himself together.

He does go into a sort of shock, of course, after his civilization dies. It’s not possible to survive something that has killed off 99% or more of your species without enduring major emotional trauma. But he doesn’t descend into drink or any of the other excesses now freely available to him; he doesn’t commit suicide, either quickly or slowly; and he doesn’t build a false life for himself, pretending nothing has changed. He observes; he accepts; and slowly, over decades, he becomes the nucleus of a group of more or less stable folks who start a new society in the rubble of the old.

Of course he’s not perfect. Far from it, even in his own terms. For one thing—and I couldn’t get over this as I was reading—he’s strangely passive about certain things. For example, he’s very aware, as an educated person, of the importance of literacy—and yet he doesn’t read stories to his own children or encourage his neighbors to do it when the time comes; he just grouses about the fact that none of the kids are learning to read. He does eventually start a school of sorts, but by the time the community’s children arrive there they are big kids with no background or interest in literacy. Those who aren’t already too old for school and don’t already have kids of their own, that is. 

And instead of thinking this through and encouraging parents and grandparents to start reading to the littlest ones at home, he throws his hands up and decides the new society he’s creating is just going to have to be too illiterate to use the treasure troves of knowledge that are available to them.

There are other examples—that’s just the main one that stands out in my librarian's mind. And yet. As Stewart points out himself, via Ish’s internal maunderings, those who are left after the great disaster and its secondary kill aren’t necessarily going to be the brightest or best of humanity. They’re a random sampling, in the universe of this book, of those whose immune systems were able to fight off the virus, and whose mental habits were conducive to getting on with life afterward. They were all hardy in their various ways, yes, but really had no other traits in common, good or bad. They were just regular people, doing their best in a world gone horribly wrong.

And that is another great thing about this book. It’s not about scientists, or tough guys, or utopians. It’s about a cross-section of folks, and about the world they live in. It’s about the ants and the rats and the housecats and the dogs. It’s about the pavement and the grocery stores and the electric and water grids. It’s about our world, as it might have been if things had gone wrong in just that way. And it’s fascinating, even now.