The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

read by Kyle McCarley

Maia is the exiled, motherless, abused, and neglected youngest son of the emperor of the Elflands. He’s also a half-goblin in a society where stone-cold racism is the norm. When his father and all of his older brothers are killed in an airship crash, suddenly *he’s* the emperor—a job he has no training or desire for. 

But he does have the desire to make a good job of it. And he gradually learns he’s got the disposition for it; his childhood, miserable and deliberately neglectful as it was, prepared him for the imperial throne in some unexpected ways. Still, learning whom to trust and how best to navigate the bewildering and seemingly constant intrigues of a hostile court is far from easy. 

And then it turns out that the disaster that killed his father was no accident—and whoever is responsible for it is still out there somewhere. Or maybe somewhere in his own palace. Maia knows in his head, and soon learns in his gut, that an emperor can’t truly have friends; and his relations are either distant, dead, or have so many agendas, secret or otherwise, that it would take someone as idiotic as his former guardian always told him he was to trust them.

He can’t act alone, though. There’s only one of him, and he doesn’t know enough to be effective. And the potential consequences of failure to unearth the perpetrators of this plot won’t just affect him; thousands of his subjects could suffer if he makes a wrong move. He needs reliable advice and confederates, not honeyed words from sycophants. He’ll have to trust someone. But who?

This is a truly charming coming-of-age tale/political thriller/murder mystery set in a delightfully detailed and creditably believable world somewhere between elfpunk and steampunk (elfsteam? Punkpunk?). The cultures, political system, and details like court fashions are all three-dimensional and fascinating. We follow Maia's point of view closely throughout, to a degree that’s almost old school by today’s standards. 

Mostly this works beautifully, because Maia is such a good sort and a sympathetic character on multiple levels. His ignorance of court life is nearly as deep as our own ignorance of the world it’s set in, which makes him a good stand-in for the reader, and his awkwardness and occasional spitefulness are believable and save him from seeming too good to be true (or too good to be palatable, anyhow). 

The only drawback to this following-super-closely-over-Maia’s-shoulder business, and it’s the only real flaw I see in the writing, is that the scope of the story is much broader than our narrow view of it. Lots of things that one might like and expect to see happening, one only hears about afterward, which can feel a little anticlimactic at times.

But that’s a quibble. This is a really engrossing story that I couldn’t make myself stay away from for any length of time. Highly recommend.

Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

read by Michael Levi Harris

So what we have here is a kid who calls himself a “fractional Persian”—raised “American” in the U.S. by his Persian mom and blond “Übermensch” dad. (He loves Persian cooking, for example, but only speaks enough Farsi to be polite and talk about food.) He nerds out about Star Trek, Tolkien, Harry Potter, and, of all things, tea. He’s a little overweight and get teased at school and doesn’t have many friends, which makes him a constant disappointment to his dad. In fact, Star Trek is just about all he has in common with his dad. That, and depression, and a chronic inability to express himself.

He’s also smart and thoughtful and, it turns out, pretty decent at soccer, a.k.a. non-American football—and a really good friend. But we don’t know about any of this at the beginning of the story, and neiher does he. Well, maybe the smart part, but not the rest.

Things start to move when the family takes a trip to Yazd, Iran, to visit with the grandparents he’s never met in person before. His grandfather is formidable and his grandmother is sweet and he’s expected to make friends with the neighbor kid, Sohrab. Which actually turns out to be the greatest thing ever. Because Sohrab is super interested in Darius, and draws him out, and helps him feel like it’s okay to be himself, fractional or not.

What I loved about this book: it made me fall in love with Iran and with Persian culture (and made me super hungry for Persian food). The relationships were varied, three-dimensional, believable, relatable, and central to the story. The drama was dramatic indeed… but also understated (way more Benjamin Alire Sáenz than, say, Francesca Lia Block). There was tons of representation, most of it very off-hand, all of it spot-on, especially regarding depression. And Darius himself was such a sweet, dysfunctional nerd. I feel like I went out with him, or maybe I was him, in high school.

Highly recommend for all fractional Americans and most anybody else.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

read by Lin-Manuel Miranda

It’s 1987 and 15-year-old Aristotle Mendoza has a whole summer ahead of him, with all the freedom and potential for adventure and boredom that that implies. He needs to get away from the house one fateful, stifling day, so he heads for the public swimming pool. He doesn’t know how to swim, but he can still splash around and cool off. As it turns out, there’s another bored 15-year-old there—his name is Dante, and he offers to teach Ari to swim. Ari’s not sure why he takes Dante up on this odd offer, but he does.

Aside from bonding over their similarly odd names, the two couldn’t be more different. Ari is a working-class kid, the youngest of four, though his oldest brother went to prison when Ari was only 4 years old and both of his sisters grew up and left the house years ago. His Vietnam-veteran dad is withdrawn and uncommunicative, and his mom pushes him to succeed. In response to all this, Ari has developed an uncaring, tough-guy exterior and is completely out of touch with his own tremendous store of pent-up anger and sadness.

Dante, on the other hand, wears his enthusiasms and admittedly odd thoughts and points of view on his sleeve. The only child of affectionate, well-to-do parents, he’s somewhere between happy-go-lucky and neurotic. He’s also as close to openly gay as a teenager can be in El Paso, Texas in 1987.

The two accept and even enjoy each other’s differences, and they make each other laugh. Soon they develop a friendship that can survive anything… even Ari saving Dante’s life. But sooner or later Ari is going to have to figure out who he is and who he wants to be, and what that means for him and Dante.

If you can possibly get your hands on a copy of the audiobook version of this, do (pro tip: you can probably download it from your library for free). Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lively and nuanced reading makes an already-fantastic story spring to life.

How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran

read by Louise Brealey

Such a good book. I couldn’t get over how good this book was the whole time I was reading it—and that was after thoroughly enjoying How to Build a Girl. I laughed out loud so many times, I had to think twice about reading it in public. There was one, comparing a man’s parts to a turnstile, that was so good that I had to call my partner and repeat it to him and laugh all over again.

First off: no, you don’t have to have read How to Build a Girl to enjoy this book… but it would probably help. If you haven’t already, I recommend it. It’s a terrific book in itself and I’ve already reviewed it on this blog.

Second: if swearing, casual drug use, excessive drinking, and frank discussions of sex that don’t mince words aren’t your bag, this is not the book for you.

Now that’s out of the way, let me tell you a bit more about this fabulous book. It’s about Johanna Morrigan (AKA Dolly Wilde) again, but now it’s 1994. She’s 19, living in London, and a successful writer. She’s still desperately in love with John Kite, and he still doesn’t return her affections, but never mind: she has a plan. She’s going to write him into being in love with her.

Along the way, she’ll have to somehow get her marijuana-addled dad to move out of her flat, teach John to value his teen girl fans, and—and this is the whopper—decide what to do about being very publicly slut-shamed by the entire London music scene after a disastrous encounter with a Famous.

This is How to Build a Girl for the #metoo era. Tremendous fun. Read it!

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley

narrated by Charlotte Parry

Ah yes, Beauty and the Beast: the classic fairy tale about Stockholm Syndrome. I have to admit that I am enough of a fan of this story (and of modern retellings of fairy tales generally) to have sought out the live action version last year. And to have thoroughly enjoyed it—because, duh, Emma Watson, but also, Josh Gad as LeFou: what a performance! Totally stole the show.

But also, like any right-thinking person, I’m always a bit queasy about the premise, no matter how good the execution is. Basically this is the story of a young woman trapped in an enchanted castle by a man who has literally become a monster due to a (well-deserved) curse, and whose only hope of becoming human again is to have someone agree, of their own free will, to marry him.

But apparently in this universe the idea of “free will” isn’t negated by coercing someone to live with him by threatening grave harm to said person’s father, who innocently stumbled across an enchanted castle and plucked a single rose to bring her as a souvenir—so that’s exactly what the Beast does. It’s not technically kidnapping, but morally speaking, it might as well be.

Of course if we take all of this stuff literally, and not as a metaphor for bad things that happen in real life, we can decide to just focus, as this retelling does, on Beauty’s specific experience, her bravery and loyalty and ability to see the good in just about any person or situation. And on the magic and the tragedy of the castle and its various inhabitants.

If your only experience of this tale is the two Disney adaptations, you’ll notice some changes in this version. For one thing, “Beauty” is just a nickname—one that its bearer has come to dislike, over the years, even more than she originally disliked her given name, Honor. That’s because she’s not as beautiful as her two sisters.

The book spends quite a bit of time telling the story of the three sisters and their father and their various suitors, and how they became impoverished, and how they settled in their new life. A lot of time. About two-thirds of the book. Fortunately for Beauty, there is no Gaston in this retelling (which, alas, means no LeFou). Her troubles are a quieter sort—until her father falls afoul of the Beast, who threatens to kill him for taking one of his many flowers as a gift for Beauty. But Beauty offers herself in her father’s place, and somehow convinces her father to accept this, under a lot of protest.

At the enchanted castle at last, Beauty encounters the invisible servants of the original tale (not the talking animated objects of the Disney versions) and sets about making the best of her new circumstances. The best part is, of course, the library—this Beauty being just as bookish as Disney’s Belle—but I won’t spoil it for you, there being few enough surprises in this version. The rest of the story goes on more or less as one would expect, if somewhat condensed.

The end of the tale is extremely condensed—that, apparently, not being the part McKinley was most interested in. That was a bit disappointing. But overall, this is beautifully written, and, in spite of a certain vagueness about when it’s supposed to have taken place, it does a lovely job of bringing these characters and this story to life. Recommended for adult and teen fans of the genre or of fantasy in general.

Against the Fall of Night (or The City and the Stars) by Arthur C. Clarke: #tbt review

This is the book that turned me into a science fiction reader when I was 10 or 11 years old. I was at my godparents' house when I noticed this book cover on the stack of books kept in the half-bathroom off the kitchen. Of course I was completely intrigued and started reading it—and ended up taking it home with me. The rest is, well, history. So many scenes from this book are utterly vivid to me even now. I lived this book.

Against the Fall of Night (also called, in a different and longer edition that I don't actually recommend, The City and the Stars) is the far-future story of a teenager named Alvin. It's humanity's twilight; Alvin is the only child of his generation. He lives in Diaspar, a beautiful, fully self-contained city on an Earth that has become a vast, inhospitable desert. He has everything he could possibly need or want—at least, that's the idea.

But Alvin is a throwback, blessed (or cursed) with a trait that has been nearly bred out of what remains of humanity: curiosity. His curiosity leads him to discover that there’s a lot more out there than he’s been taught, and he becomes caught between forces that have been holding his world in a rigid balance as a defense against a power that threaten’s humanity’s very existence.

This story takes place in a very far future where humanity is long past its bloom and has hunkered down in one city on one planet to slowly, slowly die. What’s left of our species lives in parasitic luxury off the past, while denying itself or its children any knowledge of that past or why things are the way they are now. Basically we are a moribund species and have retreated so far back into our shell that we don't remember anything else when Alvin is born.

Or so it would seem.

Alvin represents both the past and the future of humanity: he’s a type that hasn’t existed in Diaspar for so many millennia that nobody quite knows what to do with him. He’s also the key to any possible future humanity might have. This is an allegory about old age and adolescence, and also a story of an existential threat to our species that’s very much born of the cold war. It's also an adventure. It's quite wonderful.

Do check out the link to The City and the Stars if you're at all interested. It will take you to a nice, long Tor Books review of both books that discusses the differences and interplay between the two versions. But maybe check it out after you've read Against the Fall of Night—because spoilers!

Dune by Frank Herbert

This was not my first time at this rodeo. I first read Dune somewhere around age 15, and I re-read it (and its sequel, Dune Messiah, and sometimes the third book, Children of Dune, and always the then-last book in the series, Chapterhouse: Dune) many times. In fact it was something of a yearly ritual of mine, to pick up Dune and whichever sequels I chose during the holidays every year for a very satisfying re-read. I estimate that I’ve read books 1, 2, and 6 at least a dozen times each, and book 3 perhaps half a dozen times. (I only bothered with books 4 and 5 once each; they didn’t do it for me.)

However, life is short and there are so many great books out there that I will never have time to read, and over the years I became a busier person. When you only finish about a book a week, you become much more selective about what you spend your precious reading time on, and you think hard before going back to something you are already thoroughly familiar with. So, I gradually lost my annual Dune habit. In fact, when my stepson became interested in Dune earlier this year, I realized that it had been at least 15 years since I’d read it—maybe more; I think the last time was around the time the TV miniseries came out in 2000.

It was time to revisit Arrakis.

For anyone who has not read Dune (and also, I hope, not seen any of the screen adaptations—all of them so far are hugely problematic in my opinion and I would be sad to think that they were your first experience of this universe, though if you’re already a fan they’re worth watching)—for anyone not already familiar with this work, the incredible thing, the thing that impressed the hell out of everyone back in 1965 when it was originally published and still impresses new readers today, is the world-building. Nobody had attempted anything like it before, and damn few have succeeded since.

In Herbert’s universe, humanity has spread to the stars and their interstellar civilization is still recovering from a cataclysmic war, the Butlerian Jihad, which resulted in a universal ban on “thinking machines” (basically any computer at all). Humanity, partly as a result of the jihad, has attained amount and degree of diversity that is unimaginable by today’s standards. Some people, even some entire peoples, have been genetically modified and/or deeply, intensively trained to take the place of the thinking machines that previously made an interplanetary civilization possible.

All of these people are knit together in a neo-feudal empire ruled by a theoretically absolute ruler, Emperor Shaddam IV. He holds the Landsraad (a political entity composed of all the noble houses under Shaddam’s rule) and CHOAM (the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles, an organization that controls all above-board trade in the known universe) in his imperial pockets. However, his power is balanced by that of the Spacing Guild, who hold an absolute monopoly on all interstellar travel, and a shadowy sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, whose motivations are hard to discern and whose members are everywhere.

All of these organizations are completely dependent on a highly addictive substance called melange, or more often, simply “spice.” Spice confers health and longevity in small doses and a variety of utterly necessary mental powers (no computers, remember? But interstellar civilization) in large doses.

And this spice, it turns out, can’t be synthesized. It can only be mined, and only on one planet: Arrakis, nicknamed “Dune” because the entire planet is a deep-desert ecosystem, aside from small habitable areas near the poles. Mining spice is incredibly dangerous; special mobile factories must be flown into the deep desert, where they face constant danger from the planet’s “wild” inhabitants, the Fremen; immense, unpredictable, and astonishingly destructive coriolis storms; and, most of all, the planet’s signature lifeform, the sandworms.

Sandworms vary in size from merely half a dozen meters to large enough to swallow an entire spice factory in one gulp. And swallow them they do, given the opportunity; the sandworms protect the spice sands. Always, without exception, a sandworm will appear at any excavation site. The question is when, and whether a given worm is sighted early enough for the mining machinery and personnel to be safely evacuated.

Arrakis, then, is existentially important to the Empire, and also extremely difficult to govern. As the story begins, Duke Leto Atreides has just won Dune as a fiefdom from his enemy, the morally and physically disgusting Baron Harkonnen. Leto, his Bene Gesserit concubine, Jessica, and their 15-year-old son, Paul, all must leave their beautiful homeworld to take possession of this incredibly tough nut. Of course it’s a trap; Leto and his family are slated for betrayal and assassination. The noble duke nevertheless does his best to successfully govern Arrakis in spite of his powerful enemy’s plots.

He fails, of course. (It would only be a mildly interesting story if he succeeded.) But his son and concubine survive, spirited away to the deep desert, which turns out to be more inhabited than anyone but the inhabitants realized—and it turns out they have plans of their own for their planet. The destiny of the entire human universe will hinge on one fifteen-year-old boy and the fallout from an evil baron’s petty machinations.

This is a book that contains a vast civilization, a carefully-thought-out planetary ecosystem, and a fascinating array of characters. For me, though, it’s a book of moments. I can thumb through these moments in my mind as easily, and almost as meaningfully, as my own memories. There’s the moment when Jessica is overseeing the unpacking in their new home and trying to decide whether she can get away with not displaying the portrait of her duke’s father and the taxidermed head of the bull that killed him in the dining room. The moment when Paul uses a compass, a few precious drops of water, and some real Boy Scout ingenuity to save his and his mother’s life when they are buried in sand. The moment when Paul and Chani meet and he recognizes her from his dreams.

There are a thousand such moments in this book. Reading it is like dipping my hand into a chest full of pearls and coming up holding a strand where one perfect orb follows another, and another, and another, each one deeply lustrous, and each following the next because how could it be otherwise? I honestly can’t tell to what degree the vividness, clarity, and (once you’ve read them) inevitability-in-retrospect of all the moments is a function of how well-written the book is, and to what degree I feel that way because I read it repeatedly at an impressionable age. I do know that inevitability is a large part of what the book is about, and that Herbert won both the Hugo and the Nebula for it in large part because he had created such a believable universe. It’s considered a classic for a reason.

If you’ve never read this book, read it. If you haven’t read it in a while, revisit it. It stands up to the test of time.

It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living by Dan Savage and Terry Miller: #tbt reviews

In response to a series of teen suicides in 2010, famed sex and relationship advice columnist Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, put together this collection of open letters to LGBTQ+ teens to let them know that life really does get better after high school and to inspire them and give them courage to stick around, even in the face of bullying, and discover that for themselves.

After years of bullying, 15-year-old Justin Aalberg hanged himself in his bedroom in the summer of 2010. His suicide was followed by that of Billy Lucas, and others followed them. Dan Savage, a longtime advocate for queer rights, was painfully aware of these deaths and wished he could speak directly to young people being bullied everywhere, to let them know that it gets better if they can just manage to stick around long enough. 

Then it occurred to him that in the age of the Internet, he could speak directly to teens. He and his husband, Terry Miller, put together a video talking about that and posted it on YouTube, hoping to inspire perhaps 100 other queer adults to do the same. 

Their video went way beyond viral.

As of December 2011, over 10,000 people had made videos for the project: teens and adults in towns and cities across the world; celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres; and even President Obama. The book is a compilation of hundreds of these open letters: some transcriptions of the videos, some essays that have grown out of the videos, and some original material. The book also includes resources for queer youth and their parents, educators, and anybody who cares about them.

These are amazing stories, as individual as the people who wrote them. Each one is a celebration of life and a heartfelt plea to kids who are being bullied today to stick around long enough to learn for themselves that it does, in fact, get better.

Exception: some of the pieces, such as the one by President Obama, though they may be sincere, come across as overly polished and somewhat self-serving. The letters written by actual members of the LGBTQ+ community ring much more true and will mean more to LGBTQ+ kids. Nonetheless, it’s important for kids who are being bullied for their sexuality to read the other letters too. Because if the President of the United States thinks what these kids are going through is important enough for him to be talking about, well… maybe it does get better.

[Note from the present: Um, yeah. Let's just put a pin in that one. -MN, July 2018]

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki: #tbt review

(Finished April 22, 2015)

I don't often sit down and take in a whole book, even a short one, in one sitting anymore, but this was so absorbing I did just that. The characters and situations are very imperfect and very real. There's so much tension between things everlastingly staying always the same whether you want them to or not, and things inexorably changing whether you want them to or not—and the girls are right at that cusp of becoming teenagers, and developing (internally, externally) unevenly, as kids do—and it's just a chapter in their lives, just this one summer—

We see coming-of-age books about boys all the time. And sexy ones about girls. This book is just real. In some ways it's more of a window than a mirror--I didn't have the kind of childhood where staying at a summer cottage was a thing--but I saw myself, too, in the push and pull between wanting to stay a child and being impatient with the whole thing and wanting to just grow up already. 

And there's the whole thing where your parents become suddenly human and the way their human imperfections impact your life becomes—not exactly a thing you question, but at least you begin to see it. It's still the water you swim in every day, but you're getting close to the point in your life where you will be breaching the surface tension. 

And there's the other thing where your childhood friendships, based on nothing more than proximity and age and yet seeming as permanent as the landscape around you, become something that may or may not last through the next argument or your family's next living situation. Just because someone's proximity has made them almost part of who you are doesn't mean that the person they're growing up to be won't be a stranger to you. And that feels so, so strange when you realize it.

I guess what I mean is, read this.

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

read by Louise Brealey

I ended up keeping this book on my wish list for a really long time—close to a year, I think—because while initially it appealed to me, I started to have reservations about it and it got lower and lower on my list. Finally, though, I was in the mood for something a little nostalgic, even if it was British working-class crumbling-industrial-town nostalgia, after having gone through the end of the world with the Amish; so I went for it.

And actually it was really great. I’d say that Dolly totally reminded me of me at that age if it weren’t too embarrassing—oops, did I say that out loud? Of course, Dolly’s humiliations and triumphs are exaggerated in order to make them better reading. But it is, indeed, wonderfully amusing reading, especially her gleefully lusty enjoyment of life in general and of lust in particular. And her cultural touchstones—Blackadder, Blade Runner, and her blundering entry into the local Goth and indie music scenes—made my heart go pitter-pat.

Oh, and the reader was spot-on perfect. I can’t imagine this in anybody else’s voice.

In short: I am so glad I decided to read this book after all. I haven’t had so much fun cheering a character on in a long time.