Home (Binti #2) by Nnedi Okorafor

read by Robin Miles

A worthy successor to Binti, this is a short, intriguing novel that ends on a seriously wrenching cliff-hanger. It takes us to personal and sociological depths left unexplored in the first book, filling out the characters and the world-building in a super satisfying way.

We follow Binti back to Earth for her first visit home since starting at Oomza University. Out there, she’s a hero for ending the war between humanity and the Meduse (well, technically between the Khoush, but who’s counting?). But back where she came from, she’s unwomanly and disloyal for having left home at all, and gets no sympathy, much less admiration.

The fact that she’s coping with PTSD after all she’s been through is purely her fault for having left in the first place. The fact that she has tentacles like the Meduse now (technically okuoko, but again, who’s counting) is seen as somehow her fault, too; nobody cares that she never asked for them and nearly died in the process of receiving them. And nobody seems interested in being welcoming or even showing basic politeness toward her Meduse friend, Okwu—never mind that the war has been over for some time now.

Just as it’s really hitting Binti that you can’t go home again, the unbelievable occurs, and… nope, I won’t say more and spoil it for you. 

If you liked Binti, even (or especially) if you liked it but found it a little shallow, read this book! It’s great. But keep the third one in the series (The Night Masquerade) handy ahead of time, or you may want to toss this one across the room when you hit that super abrupt cliffhanger ending.

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

read by Michael Crouch

Oh my goodness, what a sweet story. I don’t mean sappy—I mean the protagonist has a fantastic personality (airily witty, a little insecure, loving, impulsive, just precocious enough to be adorable and just bad enough at stuff to be believable) and ends up in a ridiculously bad situation and muddles through it as best he can and ends up… well, I won’t spoil it for you.

The setup: Simon Spier is a closeted gay teenager who has somehow managed to make contact, anonymously, with another closeted gay boy at his high school. They deliberately don’t know who the other is; they call each other by code names (the other boy calls himself “Blue”) and they communicate without details that would out them to each other. Within that anonymity, they develop a super close bond that is just starting to feel romantic as the story begins.

And then, disaster strikes. Simon forgets to close out his email account on a school computer, and another kid, who has a crush on one of Simon’s female friends, finds it, takes some screen shots, and uses the information to blackmail Simon into playing wingman for him. It’s not entirely that Simon doesn’t want to be out as gay—he does, he’s just waiting for the right time. But he feels sure that if Blue gets outed, he’ll never speak to Simon again. And that’s just unacceptable.

Hijinks ensue, and this book is plot-based enough that I don’t dare say another word about them. So there you go.

What I loved about this book: well, Simon’s personality, which I already discussed. And the fact that any character you spend any time with at all is also a distinct personality, and all the interwoven and complex relationships including a few intense friendships (the kind most people don't have past high school), and the moral ambiguity and complexity of the situations and people’s reactions to them. Also the many cultural references—I’m the wrong age to get many of them, but I enjoyed the way they were tossed around in a way that made the characters and setting more grounded in reality and I ended up googling some music.

Oh, and I understand this has been made into a movie called Love, Simon. It's probably pretty good. But I've already got these characters in my head just the way I want them to be, in part because Michael Crouch did such a fantastic job with the reading for the audiobook. So I'm going to hold off on watching it, for now at least. I'm sure my curiosity will get the better of me eventually.

Basically this book is better than it needs to be, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 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.

A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab

read by steven crossley

As a gamer myself, it seems abundantly clear to me that the author of this book is also a gamer. As I was reading, I could almost see the rules for the magic system taking form around me (here is the list of magical elements; here is a description of the relationship of the planes on which the different Londons exist; here is the fumble chart for magic items—oh no, wait, you’re dealing with an Artifact, see Index D7).

Also, clearly, here are two player characters with elaborate back stories who have no reason whatsoever to hang out together (clashing alignments, anyone? Plus they come from different planes) and the GM had to go to great lengths to cause the world to not only shove them together without them killing each other, but on top of that to give them a common goal. If you’ve ever been the GM in that kind of situation, you know how annoying it can be. Herding highly territorial cheetahs.

I don’t mean this as a bad thing; quite the reverse. It's something that amused me somewhere in the back of my head as I read.

So: in the book there are four Londons (that we know of), each on a different but intersecting plane of reality. Delilah Bard is a rogue (excuse me, a resourceful and dextrous young woman with a fine appreciation for the moral gray areas of life) who comes from Grey London, where there is no such thing as magic. Kell is a magic user (excuse me, a powerful, acerbic, and somewhat arrogant man with the ability to use runes and words and blood to bend reality and travel between the planes) from Red London, where magic is abundant and the people live in harmony with it.

The two of them come into contact because of a plot originating in White London, which is a cold, miserable place where magic is all about dominance and is gradually bleeding away, along with everybody’s life force. The plot involves an artifact from Black London, which we don’t talk about, because its fate is too horrible.

Kell ends up with the artifact, Delilah swipes it from him, both come to grief in different ways, and horrific hijinks ensue. 

This is a fine fantasy novel with very high-caliber world-building. Recommend.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

read by Martin Jarvis

With the new series set to premier this month, I had to read Good Omens. I’d avoided it for all these years because, honestly, I’m not a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s. (Yes, go ahead and pelt me with raw carrots or something.) I just didn’t love Neil Gaiman enough to read this collaboration—and I love Neil Gaiman a lot. But the on-screen version of American Gods was so good, I decided I had to have the necessary background to properly appreciate this adaptation.

And it turns out to have been an excellent idea. Good Omens is terrifically funny, in a style reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ best work: somehow ludicrous and dry at the same time. Basically two angels, one fallen (Crowley) and one not so fallen (Aziraphale), are friends who have “gone native” here on Earth and are living happily among us. But then it turns out that the End Times are about to happen—and neither of them wants that.

Also in the mix: the Antichrist, age 11; Anathema Device, a witch and a descendant of the eponymous Agnes Nutter; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; and a couple of misguided but very devoted witch hunters. Hijinks ensue.

There are tons of scenes that stick in my head in a very visual way—but if I told you about them, I'd be like that preview of that really hilarious movie that shows all the funniest pratfalls and sight gags and one-liners to get you all excited, and then when you go to see the actual movie, you realize you've already seen all the best bits. So I'm not gonna do that.

I will tell you that it's about free will, more or less. Free will, and the absurdity of the human condition, and yes, it's also a buddy comedy, sort of. It's got elements of the Hitchhiker's Guide and of American Gods, which you would expect. But it's also got elements of The Screwtape Letters (but less preachy), Lucifer (the TV show) (but smarter), The Good Place, and The Preacher.

Verdict: definitely read it. Especially if you plan to watch the show. If you like this sort of thing, this is definitely a great example of it. If you have no idea what sort of thing this is, this is a good place to start. If you don't like this sort of thing... I still think you should give it a try, because this might very well change your mind. If it doesn't, I'll still shake your hand and wish you well.

The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

read by Paul Boehmer

So humanity has found a way to time travel, and to edit history (and therefore the future) for the good of humanity. But it’s run by a cadre of chest-thumping nerd boys who live together with next to no female companionship (and no female colleagues at all) outside of time, in a no-place called Eternity. 

Eternity is meant to be a safe bubble of idealism and intellectual stimulation, free from distractions and the sorts of personal prejudices that would lead to bad decisions… but which, in reality, is a seething cauldron of bitter competition, thwarted desire, unexamined privilege, and unchecked neurosis. 

Basically, if you put a bunch of Silicon Valley bros in charge of all of time, it would look something like this.

I spent a lot of time gnashing my teeth at the obvious error of putting a bunch of putatively meritocratous hormone-soaked monks in charge of humanity’s destiny, and trying to tell myself that Asimov grew up when and where he grew up and so had some serious but understandable blind spots when writing this. And then, when the main character (duh) becomes willing to mess up all of history and therefore the entire future of everyone purely because he wants to get laid, I gnashed my teeth even harder.

But I kept reading… because it was a classic that I’d never gotten around to, and it’s not that long, and I figured what the heck.

And then it turns out that Asimov was taking all of this into account… but if I tell you how, I’ll spoil the book for you.

Verdict: read it. But only if you can stand to grit your teeth for the first 90% of the book. In my opinion, it was worth it.

Eternal Life by Dara Horn

read by Elisabeth Rodgers

Rachel Azaria can’t die. Two thousand years ago, she and Elazar sacrificed their own deaths so that their son might survive a terrible illness—and for two thousand years, Rachel has lived life after life and raised family after family, loving them all, changing very little.

She moves from place to place as her apparent immortality became a danger to her loved ones because of the beliefs of the society around them, or as she is killed in a fire and finds herself renewed, a physically young woman again, somewhere in the world far from where she has “died.” The first time this happened was when she was burned to death at the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, and it’s happened enough times since for her to have lost any fear of it.

What she does fear is that her life will never end. After this many centuries and this many lives, living has lost its meaning. It has also, in this age of social media and biometrics, become much harder to properly disappear and start a new life. And Elazar—who sacrificed his death alongside her, who has followed her and who has become a mysterious presence in the lives of her offspring—Elazar is stalking her, convinced that they are meant to be lovers throughout eternity.

Then her favorite granddaughter starts studying longevity, and Rachel begins to hope, for the first time in many, many lifetimes, that she can die after all. Maybe she can strike a bargain with this granddaughter.

This book is beautifully written—you really get the sense of what somebody born two millennia ago would feel and think if they were still alive today. You understand both the joy and the despair of unending life, the mystery of a terrible oath resulting in a miracle so huge that there’s no knowing whether it’s a blessing or a curse. Highly recommend.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

read by Davina Porter

It’s 1686. Nella has traveled from her home in the countryside to Amsterdam to join her new husband’s household. But when she arrives, being the wife of a wealthy merchant isn’t at all what she imagined. Somehow Nella has to learn how to be a proper wife and citizen, but she has no idea how and nobody to help her.

She rarely sees her husband, who seems kind enough in his way but takes almost no interest in her; his proud, cold sister is the one who is really in charge of the household; and one of the servants is an insolent keyhole-listener and the other is a foreigner. Nella is lonely, bored, and cooped up in the imposing house almost every day, with no company but her little bird, Peebo. Her few interactions with the burghers who should be her peers leave her perplexed at best.

Then one day her husband brings her a wedding gift: a model of their house the size of a cabinet. Nella commissions a miniaturist to create tiny residents and furniture for the house—but soon finds that the miniaturist seems to know a lot more about the goings-on in her household than she herself does. In fact, everyone she meets seems to know more about her household than she does. All these secrets lead inevitably to disaster, and then Nella really needs to find sources of strength.

This is a gorgeously claustrophobic, twisty-turny book—Diana Gabaldon meets Margaret Atwood. Highly recommend, especially if you like a beautifully-researched period piece that doesn’t succumb to stereotypes. And speaking of Diana Gabaldon, the narrator of the audiobook version is Davina Porter, who also narrated all the Outlander books, and she is nothing short of amazing.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, Book 2) by Seanan McGuire

Note: though this book *could* stand alone, it’s not really meant to; it’s a prequel to Every Heart a Doorway, which is fantastic and should be read first. It’s the story of a very special school: Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. It’s for children who, like Alice Liddell and Coraline Jones and the Pevensies kids and so on, went through some kind of magical doorway to an improbable realm whose rules (of manners, logic, and even physics) were not our own—and then returned to the real world.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones is the backstory of two of those students, Jack and Jill (or as their extremely rigid parents insist that they be called at all times, Jacqueline and Jillian) Wolcott. They’re twins, born to an emotionally-stunted couple with extremely firm and inflexible views about how children in general and each of their daughters specifically should behave.

Roles are assigned—Jacqueline is the “girly” one, always dressed in frilly dresses and terrorized into keeping them perfectly clean (and into a shyness and timidity that isn’t really natural to her). Jillian, who seems the more physically active of the two, is designated the "tomboy," encouraged to go outside and get muddy and given appropriate clothes for that, whether she likes it or not. Each resents her own role and her twin’s occupation of the role she thinks she’d prefer, and over the years they grow to dislike one another.

They do have a loving grandmother who cares for them and encourages them to love each other and to be exactly who they are, rather than who their parents want them to be. But she’s banished from their lives on their 5th birthday, never to be seen again. The girls are encouraged to think their beloved grandmother didn't love them enough to stay, and they grow up living with that terrible "knowledge."

Once the story gets properly going, the girls find a magic staircase in what should have been an old trunk full of dress-up clothes. Of course they go down it—hundreds, or maybe thousands, of steps down into the earth. At the bottom they find a door labeled “Be sure.” One twin is definitely more sure than the other—but nevertheless they open it and step through, and find themselves on a dark, rolling moor. They pick a direction and start walking--and anything more than that would be a spoiler.

Let’s just say the world they find themselves in is deeply creepy.

I loved lots of things about this book. The world building is definitely its strength, the language is drily quirky, and you can’t help but empathize with these poor kids. However, it’s too slender a book. And it gets that way by skimping on what would, to me, have been the most interesting part: the process by which each girl learns and grows into her new role in their new reality.

If it had been up to me, the book would have been twice as long and included a chapter apiece, for each twin, on each of the five years spent in The Moors that are covered in this book. The twins are such interesting characters, and the Moors are such a fascinating place, that it’s a real disappointment not being able to spend sufficient time with either.

Lacking that, though, it’s still a beautifully-written little story, with numerous archly humorous lines that had me laughing out loud. If you’re a fan of Every Heart a Doorway, you’ll definitely want to read this.

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.