What if the princess was actually a changeling, dark and cruel by nature?
What if her toad-like fairy godmother put her to sleep in order to protect the world?
What if the princes and the knights didn’t realize the hedge of brambles and thorns to keep them out was for their own good?
🦹♀️🏰🪄🐸🍄🧚♂️🫅🕌
This reimagining of Sleeping Beauty contains dark things, because fairy tale, but it’s also bursting with charm and heart. You’ll feel for Toadling and Halim, and root for them to defeat the princess in the tower.
“It should have mattered. All that love and all that trying should have changed…something.”
My mind wasn’t blown with how much I loved this like it usually is when I read T. Kingfisher novellas, but it was a pleasing tale nonetheless. Bonus points for Muslim representation.
A classic trait of girlhood—forever confusing your desires with that of an older man’s.
Jade Song’s debut novel, “Chlorine”, is a bit like if you crossed “The Vegetarian” by Han Kang with “The Art of Starving” by Sam J. Miller.
🌿 + 🩻 = 🧜♀️
This is YA contemporary fiction about Ren Yu, who has loved mermaids ever since she was a little girl. She took to the water right away herself and now swims competitively on her school’s cutthroat swim team. As one of the school’s top swimmers, she has a parasitic relationship with her touchy-feely, quick-to-anger coach, Jim. She and her teammates follow very specific dietary protocols that vacillate between pasta parties and restricting to snacking on small portions of protein throughout the day. Her father leaves to return to China, she suffers a concussion that threatens her athletic career, and her family expects her to get into an Ivy League school. 🏊♀️🥜🥦🤕📑🙇♀️👩🎓 No pressure, right?
Amidst all this stress from a human life catering to human sensibilities and values, Ren Yu experiences an epiphany: she’s not actually a human after all, but has always been a mermaid herself. She is not afraid to take matters into her own hands in order to complete the transformation for her to transcend to her true form. 🩸🩸🩸
Star athletes had to be delusional enough to think they could withstand physics and gravity enough to fly up onto the first-place podium and shine with the sheer force of athletic ability; there was nothing more bold than a star, after all, visible with the human naked eye despite its death eons ago.
I found this to be a smart novel about the mental gymnastics that can be induced by the pressures and traumas of human adolescence.
Nigerian American author Moses Ose Utomi brings readers a powerful novella about a boy setting out to save his people, making allies, honing new (supernatural) skills, and uncovering devastating truths.
They knew that all of history was a lie told to instill fear in those whose fearlessness could have rewritten it.
This is the first in The Forever Desert series. I can’t say it has a happy ending, but it does have a hopeful one.
It had been so long since he’d had the freedom to cry. That’s what crying was—freedom. You could only cry when there were no more urgent responsibilities. Only when there was no one watching you who depended on your strength. Only when the people around you wouldn’t take advantage of your tears.
The story has action, magic, and found family, and is delivered like a fable imparting wisdom (as well as a few gut punches). This is the author’s first novella, and his first novel (the YA Fantasy Daughters of Oduma) was also published earlier this year. I’d say he’s worth keeping an eye on, for sure!
“Homecoming” by Kate Morton is literary fiction featuring dual timelines, with a touch of mystery and a dash of family saga.
“Home is where the heart is, and the heart can be a dark and damaged place.”
In 1959, a family in Australia is found dead under suspicious circumstances, the youngest child missing. In 2018 a woman is just learning about this family history that her grandmother wanted to keep secret from her. Not everything was answered satisfactorily back then, but can she put all the pieces together now?
“There was no clear corollary between the two, and yet the first and firmest human addiction is to narrative. People seek always to identify cause and effect and then arrive at meaning…”
The overall story was pretty good (the mystery, the family tensions, the relationships), but honestly the choice to present much of the earlier timeline as a true crime book being read by characters within the story made for some boring reading. It wasn’t until around page 400 that things became more engaging.
“There was a truth observed by all good preachers, leaders, and salesmen: tell a good story, tell it in simple language, tell it often. That’s how beliefs and memories were formed. It was how people defined themselves, in a reliance upon the stories about themselves that they were told by others.”
Decent story, good prose, presentation was a swing and a miss (for this reader, at least)
We’re going backlist today, readers, but I was enamored with this wonderful and unique 2012 standalone YA Fantasy!
I swam across the torrent of my madness, and pulled myself upon the shore of a new and better sanity.
I think the YA categorization must be due to the protagonist’s age, not the sort of themes and issues it deals with. The overarching story is about a rebellion against an oppressive society. The dark aspects are navigated in a relatively gentle way–people die, but not in ways that are gruesomely depicted.
“Pull on a thread, and you pull the whole web. And then out come the spiders…”
Caverna is a city beneath a mountain. Its inhabitants do business with the outside world, but do not go there themselves. Children born there do not learn to mimic their caretaker’s faces, so they must be taught a repetoire of Faces to use at appropriate times (eg. Face No. 41, The Badger in Hibernation, a look of gruff interest).
Neverfell turned up in the Cheesemaster Grandible’s tunnels at the age of five with no memory of her life before, but it is clear she must have come from the outside because her face is constantly and effortlessly expressing the things she is thinking and feeling. This makes her an object of great interest and curiosity for many of Caverna’s denizens, but also puts her in a uniquely vulnerable position. Everyone else has only poker faces, after all, and you can imagine the court intrigue that ensues.
Neverfell wishes to learn where she came from, but whoever erased her memories the first time is willing to prevent that from happening by whatever means necessary.
This book is like what would happen if someone placed effervescent and earnest ingenue Anne of Green Gables in a world just as fantastical and mad, as whimsical and dangerous as the Tower in the Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft. I loved the crazy cast of characters, from the Kleptomancer to the Cartographers. My favorite was the Grand Steward, though, who brought to mind Sheogorath of the Shivering Isles in the Elder Scrolls games. The leader of Caverna, the Grand Steward has learned to keep himself alive for centuries, but his body has been preserved at the price of his soul, and time has stolen from him the ability to feel any joy, pain, desire, or sorrow. Always alert for assassination attempts, he only allows one side of his brain to sleep at a time. When the right side of his brain sleeps, his right eye is open (being associated as it is with the left side of his brain), and the courtiers know to expect that Right-Eye will be cold but fair, logical to a fault. Left-Eye is the one responsible for any of their ranks falling into or out of favor on a whim.
Right-Eye was not amused. He had known for centuries that he could trust nobody but himself. Now he was seriously starting to wonder about himself.
The Grand Steward finds Neverfell of particular interest because by watching her face as she reacts to things, it’s almost as if he can feel those emotions for himself once again. She also presents him with a rare opportunity for some self-reflection.
Nobody in four hundred years had dared to look at him with such disappointment and saddened anger.
I found these things about the Grand Steward to be such a fun and spectacular part of the story!
A rollicking adventure that addresses some serious themes, the narration of this story was also very funny at times.
For the first time it occurred to Neverfell that perhaps he did not know what to do with stolen goods that did not stay where he put them but instead screamed, ran around, and threatened to eat his correspondence. Perhaps he did not really know what to do with people at all.
All around I found this to be an original, fun, and touching story.
For a while I thought this would be an average 3 star read for me, since some truly insufferable characters were being pretty evenly balanced with how well this book made me feel absolutely transported to Italy 🇮🇹🍝🌊☀️
But then, lo! The story includes the protagonist recognizing what about her life is problematic, and then her decision to address it, making it a more satisfying read.
Katy is 30 years old when her mother, Carol, dies. She is lost without “the love of her life”, the woman who had all the answers, the person she defined herself in relation to. She decides to go by herself to Italy on the trip she and her mother were supposed to take together. While there she meets, among other people…her mother, 30 years ago!
Katy is emotionally stunted, has dysfunctional family relationships, and makes some poor choices while grieving. But by whatever magic her trip to Positano has created to allow her to see a past version of her mother, Katy begins to see that Carol was also only human. She learns that she’ll need to work on herself and learn who she is now that her mother is gone before moving forward.
“She made me in her image, but she forgot the most important part. She forgot that one day she’d leave, that she already had, and then I’d be left with nothing. When you’re just a reflection, what happens when the image vanishes?”
This was a touching story featuring personal growth, set against the flavors of the Amalfi Coast. A great summer read!
But it turned out people didn’t want things to be nice, they wanted them to be familiar.
“The Half Moon” by Mary Beth Keane is contemporary fiction about a married couple in crisis.
Malcolm and Jess are in their forties. They’ve spent years, and a small fortune, on trying to get pregnant. Malcolm owns a bar, The Half Moon, but thanks to some unsound financial decisions and the struggle to compete with the newer bars and microbreweries, things are not going well in that department, either. Dreams are crumbling, mistakes are made, and these two find themselves facing some really tough decisions. 👰♀️🤵♂️👶🏼🍻📉
He stopped himself from saying it aloud, but they knew each other so well that the air between them became legible, and she could read it anyway.
My minor gripes: 1) I believe Malcolm’s attraction to Jess was explained on three separate occasions (if not more) as because “she was different from other girls”, and 2) the fact that people who assume that everyone thinks New York City is the Best Thing Ever just because they do is a big pet peeve of mine (and the assumption here that no newly single person might actually want to live in the suburbs).
Lastly, I have no idea what half the words in this quote mean: “[he] shaped for per diem work with the sandhogs. He was a little on the old side, but he had a hook…” Shaped for work? Sandhogs? A hook? Huh?
But overall the writing was very good, and the characters felt quite real, as did their experiences. I didn’t necessarily enjoy how the feelings the story engendered were mostly depression and claustrophobia, but there is certainly hope here, as well, and a theme throughout of starting anew and choosing to redirect the story of your life.
The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song.
From Justin Cronin, author of The Passage trilogy, comes a science fiction standalone, The Ferryman.
The end had been ordained in the beginning, the way the final chord was built into the first measure of a symphony
The people of Prospera aren’t sure what lays beyond the Veil that surrounds their archipelago state, but they know they’re lucky to be where they are. Prosperans live out idyllic lives, retire to the Nursery when their bodies begin to fail them, are overhauled both physically and mentally, then get reiterated into society as blank slates. This isn’t the case for support staff from the Annex, however, who perform menial labor for the Prosperans, while everyone is controlled by a police state. This world is dystopian for just as many as it is a seeming utopia for others. But how were these lines drawn?
I got The Truman Show vibes from the early parts of this book, not in tone, but in knowing that the world is not what it seems. But in this case, the reader is as clueless as to the truth as are all the characters. Most Prosperans are content in their ignorance, living happy life after happy life, though they may lack real love or anything to make it at all meaningful. On the other hand, the people of the Annex have built a religion around the idea of a day of Arrival (who will be arriving where?), and some people, like protagonist Proctor Bennett, want to learn the truth after being plagued by troubling dreams that are echoes of past iterations.
It was what the world taught us to do, but it was no way to live, and now, for the first time, I felt like I was waking up.
Proctor finds himself in league with others who are not satisfied with the status quo. Can they find their way out of what, for all intents and purposes, is the world itself? If so, what will they find outside its limits?
This book features some beautiful writing. I really loved it in the beginning, it fizzled out a bit for me in the middle, but then the final revelations were pretty good. I definitely had some questions, but to list them here would be spoilery. Overall it’s very well done.
I’m trying my hand at book annotation! Pictured is Sea Change by Gina Chung (with a sleeping German shepherd for scale)
Sea Change is literary fiction about Ro, the thirty year old daughter of Korean immigrants. A history of loss has shaped her into a rather dysfunctional adult. Her marine biologist father disappeared on a research trip while she was a teen, she and her BFF are at odds, and her boyfriend left her (and the planet) on a mission to colonize Mars. Now Dolores, the giant Pacific octopus at the aquarium where she is employed, and one of her last remaining links to her father, is being sold. Ro deals with all of her loneliness and fears that anything good is only going to be taken from her by neglecting everything in her life except for her quest to stop feeling anything at all (with the help of a drink or two, or ten).
This is the story of Ro discovering that if she wants to escape the rut she is stuck in, she’ll need to learn to appreciate the things she does have without constantly tiptoeing around the possibility of losing them. I may have teared up during a scene about saying goodbye to the octopus…
Jessica Crawford 