This book made me mad.

First, the good.

Akwaeke Emezi’s prose is, as always, gorgeous and poetic and capable of hitting me in ways I’ve never even thought about before.

Feyi’s grief and pain and joy and messiness are written with so much heart and sensitivity and depth of feeling. She was a wonderful character to spend this time with. And I even related to her in some sweet and painful and messy ways.

Despite the age gap, etc, Alim is such a fantastic love interest, and, despite my qualms with certain things, one of the most well-written bisexual men I’ve encountered in fiction. I adore him.

This is very much a romance novel, but it’s a little bit less of one than Emezi would like to admit, I think. The main focus here is on grief and new growth, and the characters work through those things beautifully. It’s also single POV, and the love interest isn’t introduced til over a quarter of the way in, and that makes it read very unconventionally for a romance novel.

My big gripe here is that this novel’s approach to sex is SHOCKINGLY cisheteronormative for a book with bisexual leads written by a trans author. I’ve noticed a weird amount of bioessentialism and internalized transphobia in all of Emezi’s adult fiction, and this one is no exception. Also, what’s with the biphobia in Joy’s part of the story? Super weird.

Nasir and Lorraine are also super homophobic and the book kinda brushes that off a lot.

And I wish that we’d gotten one or two more real conversations between Feyi and Alim. I felt a bit lost in the sauce of the poetics at time at the expense of the characters.

I would still like to get Joy’s book, though, and I WOULD watch a movie of this. It made me uncomfortable at times, but it was oh so very fun and messy and delightful.

I’ve done it! I’ve read Heartstopper! Or I’m caught up with the webcomic and intending to read the rest as it comes out, at least.

I’m sure I’ll update this review when the whole story is finished, but here are some thoughts:

This is exactly what I expected it to be. Wholesome. Healthy. Diverse. Sweet. Generally adorable. Very very queer. It’s very in line with what I know of Alice Oseman’s other writing and general online presence.

I love Nick and Charlie. Charlie especially is written with so much care and sensitivity.

There are a lot of aspects of the story that resonate with me or that remind me of things and people that are familiar to me.

The side characters are sweet. Tara and Darcy are adorable wholesome lesbians. Tao and Elle are very adorable as well. And I enjoy the teachers a lot.

The whole thing is kind of sickeningly sweet, even the mental illness stuff. 

It’s just SO CLEAR that Alice Oseman is VERY online and VERY determined to be UnproblematicTM, and while I respect and appreciate that impulse, it leads to a lot of things being kind of surface-level. We’ll see if my thoughts on that change with further updates.

On to the show!

Aria is eighteen years old and just out of high school. A scandal in the former weeks of school leads to her spending her summer with her grandmother in California instead of with her high school friends at Martha’s Vineyard. And over the course of the summer, she learns a lot, about art, music, queerness, her family, and herself.

This is my favorite of the four books I’ve read by Malinda Lo. I think that Last Night at the Telegraph Club was more intricate and more impressive and more important in many ways, but A Scatter of Night was more enjoyable and more relatable for me personally.

Aria is a character dealing with coming out and coming to terms with her identity in ways that will likely feel familiar to a lot of readers. 

She finds herself surrounded by lesbians for, as far as she knows, the first time in her life. She is introduced to the concept of polyamory. She has to work on her relationships with her parents. It was sweet and tender and sensitive.

Personally, I related to and enjoyed Steph a lot. I also loved Analemma the dog of course.

And I’m so glad that things ended up the way they did. Refreshingly real for a YA book.

This novel is also written like historical fiction but set in 2013 (Prop 8 is a BIG background thing here), and that was such an interesting and useful approach. 

This book will definitely be more impactful if you’ve read Last Night at the Telegraph Club first, but I absolutely recommend it to anyone looking for a good sapphic coming-of-age YA novel.

Some stuff near the end was mildly triggering for me cause it hit so close to home, but it was ultimately a cathartic read in that regard.

Did the plot make sense? Meh. Was the art gorgeous? Yes very much so. Was the world fascinating? Also yes. Did I vibe with the themes of the story? Also also yes.

This book was SO MUCH FUN. So sexy. So fast-paced. The characters were great. I really enjoyed both of their dynamics with their families, as well as D'Vaughn and Cinta's friendship.

I would call this book high-heat, low-spice, I suppose? 

No part of me has any wish for a relationship like D'Vaughn and Kris's. The insta-love and possessiveness are a no from me in my own life and are generally not great in fiction either, but this book made it work cause it made sense for the characters.

I wish them the best. I'm rooting for them for sure.

This book is SO MUCH better than The Color of Magic, especially the middle portions of that one.

Rincewind has way more personality here. I actually enjoy him, and he and Twoflower are fun character foils in a way that they don't manage to be in the first book.

I will say, while The Color of Magic is not a great introduction to the Discworld in a lot of ways, and while Rincewind really is not my favorite Discworld protagonist, these first two books are a decent start and a pretty solid satirical fantasy duology. The whole thing just gets so much better later on.

Anyway, the whole Cohen and Bethan thing is slightly awful but mostly just amusing. The trolls are great. Some of the musings on magic and the multiverse and stuff start to get really interesting here. A fun time overall.

I love Janelle Monáe, and this collection still interests me, but I am not in the mood for longer short stories right now. Will return to this when I'm in a different headspace.

Talia Hibbert has done it again!!!

I didn't like this book as much as A Girl Like Her, but that's mostly because this one was too short for any real character development, but I liked it fine as is.

The depictions of abuse in this book are really intense. There are detailed content warnings by chapter in the opening, and I definitely recommend heeding them if you've ever experienced or been close to domestic abuse or intimate partner violence.

Laura and Samir are sweet and sexy, and I like them a lot. Daniel can eat shit and die.

This whole series is weirdly obsessed with having the characters form nuclear family units with children, and I really don't like the framing of that as THE happy ending, but it's working for these particular characters so far, so whatever.

I simply cannot get through this in ebook format. The plot holes are too glaring. Maybe once it’s out I’ll get it on audiobook and finish it that way cause I do care about at least some of the characters (the lesbians and Mephi, really).