Butler's ability to write stories that are viscerally unsettling and yet almost painfully difficult to put down is unparalleled. We are discomfited from the beginning and it only gets more complex as the story evolves. Butler's commitment to the story means she eschews easy answers about, in particular, whether her aliens are either right or justified in how the treat the humans. I kept waiting for the narrative signal that would answer who was "right" and tell the reader how to feel. Butler categorically refuses that kind of easy closure, leaving us to find out way ourselves. Like in Parable of the Sower, Lilith's POV is precisely that: a way of seeing. We are, I think, meant to take her ability to see further to heart, but Butler is far more interested in opening her readers' eyes than directing their thoughts. Dawn wants its readers to think about what makes us human, what makes us stubborn, and what makes up screw up the way we do. Though the premise is far less plausible than the Parable books, the story itself rings with the same sense of truth.

Occasionally, you meet a book that just speaks to your soul. It knows the stories you love, the tales that move you and the narrative beats that hammer in your chest.
There are a few authors who can capture that for me. CSE Cooney is one of them.

Kuhn's Heroine series (will there be more? yes, please!) is really cute and I enjoyed both books very much. They do fall into the "hide your eyes and maybe the characters in the book will stop embarrassing themselves" category, at least when it comes to my reading. It's not always my favorite genre--I empathize far too much with characters trying really hard, getting it wrong, and getting humiliated--so I have a tendency to shut the book and try to peer at through ever so slightly opened pages. This is not the book's problem, more a caveat lector, but I enjoyed the book anyway and found the actual plot to be completely delightful.

The Underground Railroad situates itself in the province of memory, rather than history as such. Whitehead borrows from multiple eras and aspects of the African American "experience," drawing on the Tuskegee study and Jim Crow just as much as slavery. The railroad--both as link between and tree branches of--literalizes the slippage between atrocities and keeps them distinct from one another even as the episodic nature of the text piles them up. While not all of the events could have happened to Cora--any more than the train is real--Whitehead's book is more concerned with the book as a record of lived experiences. It is, for lack of a better term, a guidebook. But it's also a story of how historical events become personalized. It's a book that tries to tell a truth, rather than a history. I think, for all its discomfort and confusion, it succeeds.

Really good YA, and I mean really good, should not just be accessible to non-teenagers. It should make you feel like a teenager again and give you that heightened sense of drama and emotion that defines being a teenager and, most of all, it should make you fall in love with the characters the way you only could as a younger reader.
Basically, I got to the end of this book and flipped back to read the last fifty pages again because I could not bear to stop. I alternated between wanting to hug the main characters and bash their heads together. It was glorious. Brennan is still the queen of snarky main characters and everything in this book is no exception. If you like her other work, read this. If you've been enjoying the revival of thoughtful portal fantasy, read the hell out of this.
I have a lot to say about this book that is not entirely about this book, so, you know, why not write another Goodreads essay?
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This book—while being a hilarious and occasionally silly portal fantasy—functions also as a commentary on the genre. It reminds me of another web-published serial novel that flouts the convention of the portal fantasy hero: Ursula Vernon's [b: Summer in Orcus|32182098|Summer in Orcus|T. Kingfisher|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1482960864s/32182098.jpg|52819916]. Both authors write protagonists who are not merely non-stereotypical, but who are fundamentally real. They are not fantasies of children who keep their upper lips stiff and their hearts pure; they are afraid and they are weird and they are unsuited to the worlds of conflict into which they are thrown. And they win not by changing themselves to fit the world, but by becoming themselves and finding their places in it. To make the Narnia parallel, Summer is Susan Pevensie allowed to remain her caregiving self while Elliot is Eustace Clarence Scrubb done by a sympathetic author.
The thing about Eustace, and Ana Mardoll makes this point in her ongoing critique of the series, is that he's only wrong because the arbitrary word of the Lion declares him so. Aslan is out to get him. His reliance on and adherence to 20th century notions of law and honor is mocked and degraded until it is literally torn away from him along with his dragon skin. Elliot is Eustace when the narrator is willing to concede that maybe not murdering people and using knowledge to build common ground (rather than genocide) might have some merits. Elliot is allowed to use his morals and pacifism and sheer bloody minded annoyingness to win. And while his thick skin is rather more metaphorical than Eustace's, it's also a much more realistic portrayal of what it feels like to be a lonely kid to whom people are cruel.
Brennan's protagonist is not simply realistic, he's an bucketful of snarky rejoinders to both the tendency to romanticize the monarchy and nobility in fantasy AND the grimdark tendency to portray everything as not merely terrible, but irredeemable.
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On the one hand, I want to talk about this narrative as a work in the style of fanficiton, but on the other hand, I'm leery of doing that. Brennan got her start as an extraordinarily talented fanfiction writer—back when fandom was small enough for big name fans to be almost ubiquitously recognizable—and there are still those who mistreat her, denigrate her writing, or expect that her work be provided for free forever because of that. Screw them, they're awful. And to compare her work to fanfiction in style might be a misnomer; perhaps it is more accurate to say that a hell of a lot of fanfiction is written in the style of Sarah Rees Brennan (and others).
But whether the style is Brennan's and has trickled into transformative works or whether Brennan was at the forefront of defining the aesthetics of a new genre, In Other Lands bears the hallmarks of this new style.
There are a few components that I think define fanfiction as a style of writing (and not all fanfics will bear this style and not all that write in this style will be fanfic; it's a genre classification like Bildungsroman or, perhaps better, sonnet). One is the outsized role that dialogue plays not merely to advance the plot, but for its own sake and the delight in performance. Another is the space that romance takes up: the relationships are given closer to the amount of page-time you would expect from a romance novel, but the plot is not the romance nor does it hinge on the successful resolution of the romantic narrative (the way it does in a romance novel or a melodrama). And it is episodic; the plot has discrete chunks that resolve as the characters move through the narrative even as the larger storyline heads towards a grand conclusion. (Other good examples that come to mind immediately are Bujold's [b:Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen|25155958|Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen|Lois McMaster Bujold|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1439213337s/25155958.jpg|44858469], Rainbow Rowell's [b:Carry On|32768522|Carry On|Rainbow Rowell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1481729252s/32768522.jpg|43346673], Karen Lord's [b:Best of All Possible Worlds|15743440|The Best of All Possible Worlds|Karen Lord|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347419499s/15743440.jpg|21427733], and, naturally, Summer in Orcus).
There is a joy in reading books in the style of fanfiction. Some of it is because fanfiction bucks the trend of sad=serious and does not torture the reader by making them care about the characters and either screwing them over OR refusing to spend time on the emotional resolution of the relationship arcs. But for me, it's because fanfiction as a style hearkens back to the Victorian novel—which is one of my true loves—and rejects the close (and often stuffy) interiority prized by the modernist novel for the grand and sweeping sagas of Dickens and Collins and Thackeray and Gaskell and Eliot. (Most fanfiction is not as good as Eliot, but honestly, no one is as good as Eliot). Fanfiction, as a style, is the (possibly red-headed step)child of the Victorian novel and you can see the bones of Dickens' caustic critique, Collins' delight in twisted plots, Thackeray's commitment to the hilariously awful, Gaskell's understanding of how to build a relationship, and Eliot's compassion for taking people as they are in Brennan's writing.
Brennan has absolutely written a young adult novel with contemporary sensibilities and a plot that would make every single Victorian cringe (unless you count the 1890s...which no one does when they talk about Victorians). Yet you can see the roots of her style in theirs and the swing of the literary pendulum away from modernism. Man, I hope it spreads.
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Touching on the Dickensian side of Brennan's book, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Serene, the elves, and the deeply clever use of "reverse sexism" in this book. Brennan's elves are actually reverse sexist: their entire culture is based on the idea that men are the weaker sex and women are stronger and more powerful. It's played up and for laughs, but Brennan never says anything about male elves that hasn't been said about human women. That's why it works so well and is so discomfiting: we are invited to laugh at the absurdity both of the elves and of the humans who display sexism of the garden variety. Both are equally ridiculous and it works brilliantly as a sendup of sexism in fantasy. It delighted me, but then, so did the rest of the book.

Oh, look! A new Penric! Apparently I don't notice new books by authors not on Twitter.

The Penric series remains a delightful television-esque narrative that asks deeply fascinating questions about theology. I keep wanting to write a drash about it, but it would be for like an audience of one.

I think I may have read too much YA recently so I'm a bit sick of some of the familiar tropes which, given that this is a YA book, it had some of. And it does a thing that, as I get older, I find less and less compelling just because I find it a harder sell.

I really have issues with ancient being in love with teenage girl...I'm not sure if including reincarnation helps, although I also think Lanie Taylor did it very well and so that's kinda my bar. I realize this does not work well with my utter beauty and the beast obsession, but "very well, I contradict myself".

I really liked how unpredictable much of this book felt; I definitely expected the story to go in one direction and it didn't. But I also wanted more time spent discussing the world and portraying it because I am always the "how does this world work?!" person and I just want more about it. (I'm really glad to see the way Khorana is using the mythology, but in the same way that I always want people to work out their understanding of the Fae, I want something similar with the vetala.)

This was a fascinating story whose stylistic conceit took me a while to get into. I eventually realized that, yep, the entire book was going to be in this archival style and it worked pretty well overall. I found the story compelling, although the characters were...possibly done a disservice by the novel's style and felt a bit flat. I get Neuvel's choices and, in particular, I think some of the twists would not have worked nearly as well had we had any access to the character's interiority, but that did come at the expense of fully realized people.
Still planning to read the next one; the premise is certainly creative enough to stick with it.

Another entry in the genre that should probably be called glorious madcap mashup. A mix of magical realism and future-tech, Drayden is clearly having a blast with her novel. It is a book that is hard to describe, but easy to read. And it's fun, even as it explores some of the darker sides of powerful divinity. Drayden handles the more depressing elements of the narrative with a pretty light touch, refusing to dwell, but also refusing to gloss over. It reminds me of Anders [b:All the Birds in the Sky|25372801|All the Birds in the Sky|Charlie Jane Anders|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1429225322s/25372801.jpg|45119441] only without the ambitious message. Drayden is, overall, more successful than Anders precisely because she is interested in a more intimate scale and story. And because she is more interested in telling fast-paced story of shifting allegiances than she is in trying to say something about her story. Drayden's novel has a lot to say, but it says most of it in the novel and does so through the language of myth and choice. I like it better for that.
Also, any book with a surprise dik-dik joke is a good book.

How do you end your revolution?
This is the hard question for all YA novels - if you stage the revolt, you have to follow through with the possibility of real change. But you have to make your overthrow believable. Elliott has something of an advantage as she has not written some weird futuristic police state and many of her characters actually have records of the previous rule, but she still has the basic problem, which is pulling off a plausible rebellion.
Overall, she sticks the landing and her rationale rests not on lucky breaks or volte faces, but on reasonable machinations behind the scenes and characters we already know to be sympathetic in positions where they can effect change. So that was better than average and very fun.
The book did take a while to get back into--this is a series problem that I don't think I will ever get over--but it was pretty interesting once it was there and I enjoyed watching the plot weave its way to its conclusion. I do sometimes find that Elliott gets a little too caught up in world building and it leaves her characters feel a bit underdrawn, which happened in a few places here, but not in a way that hurt the book. There was more than enough adventure to hold my attention.