There is a lot going on with the different characters' stories, but it's woven together quite well. Cw for homophobia/transphobia.

This final volume packs in SO MUCH. I'm going to miss these characters. Cw for homophobia.

Givhan is a Mexican American poet with family ties to the Laguna Pueblo in West-Central New Mexico and in this, her debut novel, she draws heavily on Indigenous storytelling, especially of the Zuni people. This dystopian sci-fi (questionably labeled as Magical Realism) features a pregnant Mexican American anthropologist named Calliope who wakes up following a car accident in a drastically altered world, absent most of its people. She struggles to reconcile her scientific understanding of the world with her unprecedented circumstances, the echoing words of her Acoma Pueblo great-grandmother, and the input of her eventual traveling companions - the strange prophecies of her neighbor girl Eunjoo, and the stories of the Zuni Physics PHD student, Chance, they meet along the way. ⁣
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Opening so ominously and flirting with the horror genre throughout, this book was an exciting and fascinating read. I feel like a lucky person because I’ve unintentionally read two books in a row that draw quantum mechanics into their plots

Haben is Haben Girma’s memoir, she’s a disability rights advocate and the first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School. Girma is such a funny, thoughtful person and this book was a treat to read. I love that she tells her story in present tense, and from her childhood in Oakland, California and Eritrea through college, Harvard, and beyond in disability advocacy, I could not put this book down!⁣
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I learned so much, especially about alternative techniques that Deafblind (and Deaf and blind) people use to navigate the world and complete tasks. I admit that as much as I aim to not be ableist, it’s easy to assume that things I rely on vision and/or hearing for wouldn’t be possible without those senses. But that’s absolutely not the case. It’s my worldview and imagination that are limited here, and I relished all the ways I was challenged in my assumptions throughout my reading. ⁣
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Writing about Hellen Keller, Girma says “Helen’s disability didn’t hold her back, nor did her gender; it was the community at Harvard that chose to create barriers for women.” Throughout this book she successfully deconstructs the common notion that disabilities hold people back, arguing that barriers are caused by society refusing to accommodate alternative techniques, and people being unwilling or unable to envision disabled people as competent. This was such a powerful moment in the book for me, as she eloquently connects that concept to marginalization more broadly.⁣

“I have never liked the phrase, ‘History is written by the victors.’ I understand the idea behind it - that those in power will tell and retell stories in whatever ways flatter them best, until those stories harden into something called ‘history.’ But just because stories are unwritten for a time, it doesn’t mean they’ll be unwritten forever. And just because stories don’t get written down, it doesn’t mean they’re ever lost. We carry them in our minds, our hearts, our very bones. We honour them by passing them on, letting them live on in others, too.” - Alicia Elliott in the foreword to This Place.⁣
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In 1867 the Constitution Act proclaimed Canadian Confederation. This Place is an anthology of nonfiction comics by a diverse group of Indigenous creators recounting 150 years of their history since. Each of these ten comics is introduced briefly by the author alongside a timeline of key dates related to the history, which heightened how much I learned through reading, especially as I’m not very familiar with Canadian history. Using comics to tell these stories makes this book very approachable and not at all dense, even as it’s packed with information from such a large span of time and place. Occasionally I found the comics hard to follow and wished for something a little more straightforward to help me grasp the story, but I think that’s often the case with using sequential art as a storytelling mechanism. ⁣
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The history this book covers is vast and varied, from anti-Indigenous sentiments in the 1860’s and a woman named Annie Bannatyne who fought them, to the 1885 Indian Act amendment that banned the potlatch, to the story of Francis Pegahmagabow, who fought in WWI and is recognized to this day as the most effective sniper in North American History.

One of the most moving stories recounts the history of Indigenous children stolen into foster care or adopted by non-Indigenous families. For example, by the end of the 1980’s a third of the children of Wabaseemoong had been taken into foster care, but in 1990 the Wabaseemoong Band Council passed a resolution forbidding the Children’s Aid Society from entering the reserve and stealing any more of their children.⁣⁣
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Informative and beautifully crafted, This Place is history that must be told. I highly recommend this book.⁣⁣

This novel follows two narratives: Tess is a time traveler working with a secret group of women and nonbinary people making strategic edits in history in an attempt to create a present and future where people of all genders and races are afforded equal rights. Though the cast of the novel is racially diverse and the group’s intentions encompass racial equity, the current mission is focused on recovering abortion rights, and my main criticism is how the story often felt lacking in intersectionality. The other narrative thread follows Beth, a teenage girl in the early nineties whose destiny is clearly tied to Tess’s, but why? Beth and her friends careen towards violence and she grapples with who she wants to become in a storyline that I was completely not expecting to be half of this novel, but that surprisingly charmed me. ⁣
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One of my favorite aspects of this book was the imagining of time travel and the functioning of edits of the timeline. Time travel isn’t a human invention (or if it is we’ve lost the memory of it being such) and might even be a geological phenomenon. The ability to travel through time has existed throughout human history, with varying degrees of understanding. When the past is edited, the only people with memories of the former reality they were living in are those who were present for the change, a scary and amazing framing of a timeline that enforces narrative consistency. It was totally elegant and sometimes made my brain scramble to follow the shifting timelines, all of which I found thoroughly satisfying. ⁣
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Cw for suicide, violence, murder, sexual assault, child abuse, transphobia, transphobic murder, abortion.

Positioned as dark fantasy with a tinge of horror, A Spectral Hue follows a grad student named Xavier who travels to Shimmer, Maryland to study the loose collective of Black artists who’ve made strange and stunning artwork there, in a tradition that began with an enslaved girl named Hazel Whitby who became a prolific quilter. His story twines together with those of two other Shimmer residents, the unfolding history of the artistic movement, and the haunting that has produced it. ⁣
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A ghost story that reckons with America’s brutal history of slavery, this book makes an excellent companion with fellow Lammy finalist The Deep by Rivers Solomon. It’s a magical, thoughtful, and unsettling read, and Gidney is a deft writer who packs so much into a few pages. I’m looking forward to checking out more of his work, but in the meantime I highly recommend this one. ⁣
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Cw for slavery, homophobia, drug use.

I found the collection to be uneven in my enjoyment, but it ended far stronger than it began, leaving me with a very positive overall impression. Characteristically, I was more intrigued by the stories that leaned more into science fiction, rather than those that felt built upon folklore. The stories that stuck out to me the most were The Ceremony by Elizabeth J. Jones, about a woman whose family has an insidious traditional ceremony involved in the passing down of their land, and Daddy by Damion Wilson, about a woman learning that her father, who has dementia, has begun to teleport out of his nursing home in search of his late wife. Also Quaka-Hadja by Brian Franklin, about a constructed woman taking care of her creator father in a post-apocalyptic bunker, and Cascadura by H. K. Williams, about an unhappy immortal woman. In spite of some of the stories underwhelming, I'd definitely recommend this collection to speculative fiction fans. Glad I picked it up!

All Boys Aren’t Blue is a “memoir/manifesto” written for a young adult audience. I don’t recall any other YA memoirs that I’ve read, at least not since I was a young adult myself, and I think that’s such a great concept, especially for a book like this that’s talking about queerness and Blackness and how those identities informed Johnson’s adolescence. The conversational tone and more manifesto moments didn’t always work for me, but personal taste aside I think that this book is vital. Books like this one need to exist in the fight to take down the cis white hetero-patriarchy. I’ll take one million more please.