What Have I Been Reading? (2020 batch #3)
May. 16th, 2020 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroMr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan - A charming book about a mysterious bookstore and the secrets it holds. I think “cozy mystery” is the genre I’d put it in. At no point is there really any danger, and nothing actually supernatural is involved, but it features and interesting slow reveal with a whimsical flair. (This may include some fantastical imaginings of how Google works, the history of typefaces, what you can build in NYC, and the nature of museum exhibits. Accept that it’s an alternate world and enjoy the ride.)
We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory - It is easy to guess from the title that they are, in fact, Not. Five people scarred by terrible tragedy are brought together by the only psychologist who believes their claims that the supernatural figured into their trauma. They might be crazy…or they might actually be right. (They’re right. It’s got some torture-porn elements, but plays out decently from the set-up.)
The Midwinter Witch by Molly Knox Ostertag - The third in this series of YA fantasy books, in which magical powers are a thinly-veiled metaphor for queerness and the teenage protagonists need to wrestle with identity and familial acceptance. This one is very much a sequel and relies on knowledge of the first two books, but isn’t bad for that. (My only complaint is that I want Ostertag to focus on finishing her Strong Female Protagonist comic.)
Ivory Apples by Lisa Goldstein - Ivy’s reclusive aunt is actually the mysterious author of a legendary book called “Ivory Apples,” and this story actually covers a coming-of-age decade of Ivy’s life as she tries to protect that secret from an unhinged fan who’ll stop at nothing to take the author’s magic for herself. This is dark but not graphic; the flowing prose and first-person-retrospective perspective keeping your attention away from exactly how dark it gets. (It ends happily, but there’s a lot of turmoil getting there.) I enjoyed the ideas but probably won’t seek out Goldstein’s other books.
Please Don't Tell My Parents You Believe Her by Richard Roberts - This is the fifth and final book in a series; and I read the previous one two years ago because a publisher dispute meant this was unavailable for most of the interim. It’s…meh. Maybe I just lost the rhythm of the series, but this loses some of the middle-school glee the first few books had but doesn’t address the pathos of the situation particularly well. Bad Penny spends most of the book cut off from her entire social support network and her home; she’s functionally bouncing between foster homes for weeks (but inexplicably ignores several avenues for support that are still open). That’s dark, and it gets shrugged off in favor of madcap superhero battles and introducing an expanded cast the author clearly just wanted to throw in. In general, I felt the reveals about the nature of her superpower were insufficient for various setups--there was any early theory she had two powers that turned out to be correct, but there wasn’t enough explaining how her power was a) apparently sapient and b) re-creating other people’s super-science. (Overall, the first couple books were good, but this series got long in the tooth.)
We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory - It is easy to guess from the title that they are, in fact, Not. Five people scarred by terrible tragedy are brought together by the only psychologist who believes their claims that the supernatural figured into their trauma. They might be crazy…or they might actually be right. (They’re right. It’s got some torture-porn elements, but plays out decently from the set-up.)
The Midwinter Witch by Molly Knox Ostertag - The third in this series of YA fantasy books, in which magical powers are a thinly-veiled metaphor for queerness and the teenage protagonists need to wrestle with identity and familial acceptance. This one is very much a sequel and relies on knowledge of the first two books, but isn’t bad for that. (My only complaint is that I want Ostertag to focus on finishing her Strong Female Protagonist comic.)
Ivory Apples by Lisa Goldstein - Ivy’s reclusive aunt is actually the mysterious author of a legendary book called “Ivory Apples,” and this story actually covers a coming-of-age decade of Ivy’s life as she tries to protect that secret from an unhinged fan who’ll stop at nothing to take the author’s magic for herself. This is dark but not graphic; the flowing prose and first-person-retrospective perspective keeping your attention away from exactly how dark it gets. (It ends happily, but there’s a lot of turmoil getting there.) I enjoyed the ideas but probably won’t seek out Goldstein’s other books.
Please Don't Tell My Parents You Believe Her by Richard Roberts - This is the fifth and final book in a series; and I read the previous one two years ago because a publisher dispute meant this was unavailable for most of the interim. It’s…meh. Maybe I just lost the rhythm of the series, but this loses some of the middle-school glee the first few books had but doesn’t address the pathos of the situation particularly well. Bad Penny spends most of the book cut off from her entire social support network and her home; she’s functionally bouncing between foster homes for weeks (but inexplicably ignores several avenues for support that are still open). That’s dark, and it gets shrugged off in favor of madcap superhero battles and introducing an expanded cast the author clearly just wanted to throw in. In general, I felt the reveals about the nature of her superpower were insufficient for various setups--there was any early theory she had two powers that turned out to be correct, but there wasn’t enough explaining how her power was a) apparently sapient and b) re-creating other people’s super-science. (Overall, the first couple books were good, but this series got long in the tooth.)
