It feels like I have had this Massey Lectures book forever, always next on the to-read list, always another nonfiction book slipping in and taking its place but finally, finally I’ve sat down and given Esi Edugyan the time she deserves here. Out of the Sun is a great example of what the Massey Lectures can be: give someone the platform to talk about whatever they want, basically, but in a way that is interesting and gets you thinking, and that is exactly what Edugyan does here.

At first, this collection of five lectures is ostensibly about Blackness as it is represented in art. Edugyan begins by pondering representations of Angelo Soliman, an example of an African European in the eighteenth century. Her point is not surprising but no less important: so much of modern art has been Eurocentric and, when artists have deigned to depict Black people or Africans, the depictions inherently originate from a racist and colonialist perspective that positions them as inferior, enslaved, etc. These ideas have come up in other books I have read, perhaps most recently White Sight, and if that were all Out of the Sun was maybe I wouldn’t have found it so stimulating. Fortunately, Edugyan takes us beyond that.

Each chapter goes deeper into history as well as our present-day beliefs not just about how we depict the Other but how we construct stories of the Other. From Europe in Chapter 1, Edugyan takes us to Canada, America, Africa, and Asia in subsequent chapters. She engages not just with the literal representation of Blackness in art but with representing oneself as Black, discussing cases like Rachel Doležal as well as white journalists who, in the early twentieth century, posed as Black men to write newspaper articles and a book about what the experience was like. I really love how Edugyan handles such a noxious concept with empathy and nuance, acknowledging on one hand the obvious issues of ignorance and how problematic it is for fellow white people to fawn over such stunts, while on the other hand being able to understand why these writers did it in the first place. I didn’t know about Sprigle and Griffin until now, yet I am not surprised. Edugyan preserves the story without sensationalizing it, excusing it, or demonizing it, trusting her audience to understand how it is inappropriate while exploring what it contributes to the overall conversation.

This overall conversation, of course, is the idea of who gets to claim Blackness and who gets to tell Black stories or stories of being Black. What I, as a white woman, took away from these lectures is reinforcement of the idea that this is a highly contextual concept. “Blackness,” after all, is a construction of white supremacy. There is no one Black culture, though there may be a lot of overlap especially thanks to globalization and the internet. That’s why I really enjoyed the tour that Edugyan takes us on. People with highly melanated skin are racialized in different ways in different parts of the world, yet white supremacy means that Blackness and anti-Black racism exists even in places where Black people are demographically the majority, like many African countries. Her example of how outsiders and Zambians alike regarded Edward Nkoloso and his Zambian space program is a potent reminder of this.

In the end, Out of the Sun speaks to possibilities. It navigates around the edges of Black excellence and Afrofuturism, tantalizingly asks us to ponder what a world in which we truly dismantle white supremacy and break the chains on Blackness might look like. For anyone white who wants to confront the legacy of racism in our storytelling (rather than, as some would like to do, conveniently ignore it and wipe the record clean, barrelling forward into an assumed post-racial future), this book is a powerful read.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Bodies by themselves are weird, but what really takes the cake is how we police our bodies based on societal norms. It’s no secret that many societies, including Canadian society, are fatphobic and love to police women’s bodies. This is a difficult subject to write about and get right—and I’m probably not very qualified to talk about whether or not Diana Clarke gets it right in Thin Girls. All I know is that it got me thinking. Also, I have no memory of where/how I acquired this book—if you were the person who gave it to me, please remind me!

Rose Winters, like so many girls, developed an eating disorder as a teenager. Now in her twenties, she is an inpatient in a clinic where the hope is that shes will “get better.” Rose’s twin, Lily, visits her weekly—or she did, until she met a new boyfriend whom Rose believes is abusive and trying to isolate Lily. This motivates Rose to pretend to make enough progress to be released so that she can save her sister. Easier said than done when Rose can’t save herself.

As the present-day story progresses, there are flashbacks to Rose and Lily’s childhood. Each flashback lists their age and each sister’s weight before describing an episode in their lives that shaped the twins and started them on their divergent paths.

Huge trigger warning, obviously, for depictions of eating disorders/disordered eating, discussion of weights and methods for tricking a scale or hiding foot, etc. This book triggered me, even though I don’t have an eating disorder, in some ways, so if you have or had an eating disorder, please tread very carefully.

At the core of this book is the relationship between these two twins. Rose tells the book in the first person and is a textbook unreliable narrator: there is really no way to know how much of what’s happening is true and how much has been filtered or fabricated by Rose. At times, Lily is her saviour; at other times, Rose wants to save Lily. The narrative is one of remarkable codependency punctuated by jealousy.

The flashbacks are brutally accurate, in my opinion, in their depiction of how teenage girls internalize unhealthy and unrealistic body image standards and then pressure each other into striving to fit those standards. Rose’s accession into Jem’s mean girls squad only for her to develop an eating disorder after discovering the intoxicating sense of control she feels over denying her body food feels very real. Every step in Rose’s descent is predictable, perhaps even familiar to most readers, yet it is no less tragic as a result.

The present-day chapters were harder for me to wrap my head around. Clarke is not a very descriptive writer. Her prose has a detached and clinical quality to it. Her plotting has a similar kind of craft quality—beyond Lily and Rose, I would argue, all of the other characters exist only to fulfill certain needs of plot. I appreciate the diversity of female characters, especially how one in particular starts off being portrayed as evil/nefarious only for Clarke to fill her in with nuance and a bit of redemption. The idea that people can change, or that we can be mistaken about someone, is very powerful. And I think Clarke’s thesis, at the end of the day, is that patriarchy can cause women to harm one another but we still need to come together and ignore or take down the men, and I am here for it.

I mentioned above that I found this book triggering even though I don’t have an eating disorder. What I meant was that the book triggered my own body image feelings. As a trans woman, I experience gender dysphoria in ways that overlap with a sense of body dysmorphia. I am fortunate enough that my transition has allowed me to experience quite a bit more gender euphoria than dysphoria, especially nowdays (I will often exclaim to friends how much more I enjoy living in my body, how happy I am with how I see myself in a mirror). But I can’t lie: I think a lot more about my weight now that I am living as a woman than prior to my transition. I think a lot more about how people look at me, my appearance, etc.—and it is hard to parse out what proportion of that is womanhood versus being trans specifically versus general issues with aging, etc. It’s all wrapped up in a little ball of emotions that lives in my stomach.

All of this is to say that even though my personal experiences have been quite different from Rose and Lily’s and most white cis women, there is still a lot of emotional content in this book that resonates with me. In that sense, Clarke is very successful in her portrayal of a book about eating disorders.

I just with the writing and storytelling had felt more intimate in a more interesting way. Similarly, the ending feels a little bit contrived (or maybe unearned). I think in particular what I object to is how the book raises the spectre of the overall wellness industry but then kind of drops it before there is any satisfactory resolution? And just blames it on the man in the picture?

Feels like it could be a Louise O’Neill novel yet lacks the narrative and stylistic flair that makes Louise O’Neill novels shine most.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Was this a product placement for Malört? On Earth as It Is on Television is a quirky, borderline absurdist take on first contact with aliens from the perspective—at least so it seems at first—of ordinary, everyday people. Emily Jane asks us to consider what would happen if aliens show up one day and then leave as abruptly as they came. How would life go on, and how would we all be different? Unfortunately, I can’t say I am all that different having read this book.

The story starts thirty years prior, with a brother and his younger sister driving west to escape her abusive boyfriend and start a new life. Following an accident in a winter storm, we smash cut to the present. From there, Jane follows half a dozen different characters. Alien ships appear mysteriously over the skies of major cities around the world (not just Washington, D.C., thankfully), and then after a few days the ships vanish with no contact or explanation. Each of our viewpoint characters struggle to adjust to the new normal, with some of them discovering that there are actually aliens living among them—closer, even, than they initially thought.

This is a quixotic book, and for a while I didn’t know what to make of it. The beginning is like a suspense novel, with each character’s stories developing separately and an implicit promise that they will converge (which, to be fair, they ultimately do). The middle is more like a Vonnegut novel in both style and story. The final act reminds me most of an ’80s children’s movie about aliens, where the danger is undercut by the knowledge that everything will work out in ninety minutes or less.

There’s definitely something good to this novel. I like how Jane explores different yet equally valid reactions to alien arrival, the way that some people just shut down, others go into overdrive. While the humour wasn’t always my cup of tea (those kids were just annoying, OK?), I appreciate Jane’s attempt at establishing such a voice.

I guess what I’m trying to say, however, is that I don’t think the novel made me feel anything. The plot makes sense (in its own weird way). There are emotional notes for each character that Jane hits. But it’s all very perfunctory, very clinical. The narration is so detached, so much telling rather than showing, that it was hard for me to invest myself in any of the characters. I was curious to know the ending, if you will, but I didn’t care about the ending.

On Earth as It Is on Television has its moments, and for a different audience maybe it is in fact uproariously funny. I appreciate the eARC from NetGalley and Hyperion, but this one was not for me.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Bought last year but a victim of every bilbiophile’s nemesis, the ever-growing to-read shelf (or pile, or teetering tower), Her Majesty’s Royal Coven sounded like something I would really enjoy—and I did! It’s going to be a summer of witches on this site, for I have many witchy books to read and review, starting with this first adult novel from Juno Dawson.

Helena, Niamh, Leonie, and Elle grew up together in Yorkshire, bonded by age and the increasingly rare inherited gift of magic. As often happens, their lives have diverged in adulthood: Helena is posh and now the head of the eponymous royally sanctioned coven; Niamh is a veterinarian; Leonie has started an indie coven for racialized witches; Elle is a housewife who has largely given up on being a practising witch. The witches of England are still recovering from a brief but injurious civil war, in which a warlock wanted to expose witchcraft and subjugate mundane humans. Now, Helena believes an even worse fate is nigh: a child with inexplicable levels of power has appeared and might be the harbinger of a demonic apocalypse.

Though nearly 500 pages and involving four main viewpoint characters, this book feels very spry. I sense the work of a dedicated editor here helping Dawson hone her story into its best-told form. In particular, I like that while we spend time with each of these four witches, the book truly emphasizes Niamh and Helena. They are the two poles of the story, if you will, between which everyone else oscillates. In many ways they are opposite—Niamh the simple country witch; Helena the witch of power and privilege—but they have in common an obstinacy and deep desire to preserve the peace. Alas, Dawson is very good at showing us how two reasonable people can disagree, and how that disagreement can ultimately lead to division and disaster.

Indeed, the lifeblood of this story is the conflict among these four women who grew up together, their shared history of loss—the witch now missing from among their number—their multifaceted identities as women, mothers, professionals, etc. I love how Dawson manages to establish each as a credible character in her own right. They explicitly name and discuss the role of patriarchy in their lives—fans of Holly Bourne’s adult novels are going to feel right at home here, albeit with an extra layer of magic on top. I know Dawson is also a big fan of Sex and the City, and while I am less familiar with that show I can also see some connections with that vibe among the main characters.

I don’t really know how to talk about the novel beyond this without diving into spoiler territory because I have to talk about Theo and the main conflict. In general, I don’t consider revealing a character’s gender identity or sexuality to be a spoiler, but the case can be made here that it is, and so I flagged my review as such.

I love that there’s no mention of a trans character in the cover copy for the book. I knew, of course, that Dawson is a trans woman, and I went into this book expecting to see a trans character, or a few trans characters, simply as a matter of good diversity. But I try to make it a habit not to expect that trans authors will write books whose plots revolve around transgender themes, because that is of course not all that we are. So I appreciate how it kind of sneaks up on you.

Not to brag, but I guessed that Theo is trans pretty quickly—Dawson explains early in the book that witches are just naturally stronger than warlocks when it comes to magic. The explanation proffered at the time is cissexist, speculation about X-linked genetic traits, and actually kind of stuck out coming from a trans author—but I was patient. Sure enough, the moment this boy-child shows up on the scene and all these people are all, “But why is he so much powerful than a girl his age, than all of us women even?” it was evident, at least from my perspective, what twist Dawson was working up to. I say all this because I want to emphasize that I really like how Dawson gets there in the end: the way that Theo confides first in Holly, short-circuiting a straight teenage romance and turning it into sisterhood; the delicacy and love that Niamh shows in handling the situation; the indelicacy and vulnerability of people like Leonie, who admits to grappling with questions of inclusion when she was starting up Diaspora, her coven.

After I finished the book, I peeped some reviews and saw a few people levelling the well-meaning criticism that Helena’s abrupt heel turn, somewhat cartoonish in magnitude, undermines her characterization as a transphobe. But I think that’s entirely Dawson’s intention here. Helena is the misguided cis white woman who thinks that feminism belongs to her, and her increasing caricaturization of herself is an intentional comment on how such white women tell on themselves. At each turn, as Helena encounters resistance to her transphobia from her friends, she doubles down on her rhetoric. She can’t possibly be wrong—everyone else is wrong. Helena feels like a clownish character by the end of the book because transphobic women like her are clownish; they are villains existing atop a house of rhetorical cards that threatens to topple over at the slightest wind of wisdom. The fact that each stage of Helena’s regression is logical and measured only adds to the effect. It is important for us to remember that Dawson wrote this novel in a moment where anti-trans sentiment in the UK, particularly among a certain brand of stalwart second-wave feminists (not to mention a certain author of children’s fiction about witches and wizards), was so legitimized in mainstream media and press that it was (and remains) easy to conceive of someone like Helena not only having power but wielding it in the way that she does. I found Helena’s characterization entirely believable, and any caricature therein to be a deliberate and effective strategy at lampooning transphobia.

Now, did I love everything about this part of the plot, the portrayal of Theo’s transition, or the transphobia that she and her allies encounter? Of course not. In particular, I wasn’t a fan of how Helena’s defeat and fall from grace radicalizes Snow into a TERF. Though it makes a small amount of sense, plot-wise, it feels a little bit lazy and melodramatic. I would have liked to see Snow break from her mum, or perhaps have Snow accept and affirm Theo’s identity but still oppose Theo, Niamh, and the others. (This is what I think many of the critics were getting at when they criticized Helena’s portrayal as a transphobic villain—although all transphobes are villainous, not all villains need be transphobes, and it would be nice to see some people who are trans-inclusive but still antagonistic for other reasons. Radley, I suppose, comes close to this.)

In the end, Her Majesty’s Royal Coven feels like a very timely work. I am so happy the sequel just came out so I can hopefully read that this summer as well! I enjoyed the world that Dawson created here, the way that she explores what magic is, its connection to the natural world and ourselves, and the institutions that have sprung up around it. I loved the characters, especially the tight-knit bonds between women—I hope in the next book we get to see more from Theo and Holly’s perspectives, even though I know this isn’t a young-adult series. Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes queer works, magic and witchcraft, and just really fun adventures.

Also, the hot pink cover? I love it so much.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

I hadn’t read Firebreak, the novel that this novella is a loose prequel to, before I requested Flight & Anchor from Tachyon on NetGalley. Normally I wouldn’t leap into an established world headfirst like this. However, I had a good feeling about this one. It is a standalone story that doesn’t require knowledge of Firebreak. Nicole Kornher-Stace’s writing is very intimate, very in-your-face, and the result is a slow-burn novella that has me wanting to read Firebreak for sure now.

Our protagonists are 06 and 22, cybernetically augmented child soldiers who have just escaped from a Stellaxis facility under control of the Director. She is keeping their escape secret at all costs, for it would be disastrous for her career and this program in general. As 06 and 22 try to survive in an unfamiliar, unkind city, the Director tracks them and observes from afar while trying to conceive of a plan to retrieve them that won’t embarrass her or result in heavy casualties.

The story starts slow. The first few chapters are from the point of view of a barista, Cassie, who otherwise doesn’t return. She is our first introduction to 06 and 22, whom she views as children—odd children, yes, creepy children, perhaps, but children. From there the story alternates between chapters that present 06 or 22’s limited third person viewpoints and chapters that follow the Director or even her ally, a semi-sentient nanoparticle probe she tasks with spying on and sabotaging the children. After 06 and 22 settle into a shipping container they use as a makeshift shelter, they plot their next move. With limited funds, and concerned about being identified and apprehended, they aren’t sure where to go next. They’re only twelve, after all.

So for the first half of the novella, I honestly was unsure what to make of the story and whether or not I was enjoying it. I got it. I understood what Kornher-Stace was trying to do. But I just didn’t see feel it. This changed in the second half, and by the end I was heavily invested in these characters.

The introduction of the probe was the first step towards this change of heart for me. I do love myself a sassy AI, which is essentially what this is. It’s basically the Kronk to the Director’s Yzma, if you know what I mean—an antagonist, technically, but only in the most technical sense. Its shenanigans (for lack of a better term) help propel the plot forward in interesting ways.

The codependency of 06 and 22, referenced in the title, is also so crucial to the story and one’s enjoyment of it. In her afterword, Kornher-Stace connects this to Firebreak, saying that this story gave her the chance to provide a tragic backstory to where we find 22 in that novel. Obviously I don’t have all the context for that statement, but I like it. I really liked the climax and resolution of Flight & Anchor. Kornher-Stace wraps everything up neatly, but the little references throughout the story to “years later” are tantalizing hints at how various characters (particularly our amoral Director) will regret their present decisions.

All in all, by the time I had finished with Flight & Anchor, I was hooked. An obvious comparison would be to Murderbot Diaries—for the length but also the sympathetic killer protagonists—but there are echoes here of numerous other dystopian and cyberpunk worlds I’ve visited in recent years. At the same time, nothing in this setting felt recycled or clichéd to me. Kornher-Stace’s worldbuilding is careful, simple, sufficient. As I said in my introduction, I’m left wanting to read her novel, which is pretty much mission accomplished.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

First off, shout-out to this book for no subtitle! That’s rare for a work of nonfiction—not that I have any great hatred of subtitles, but the absence of one here is notable. Anyway. Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet caught my eye because the history of computing, intertwined as it is with the history of mathematics and the history of feminism, interests me a lot. Ted Striphas discusses how we conceptualized both the word algorithm and the word culture prior to “algorithmic culture” emerging as a more recent phenomenon from the past few decades. This book is really not what I expected from the description, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad time. Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for the eARC!

Striphas takes a very intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to answering the question of, What was algorithmic culture like before we had the internet? These chapters span centuries, languages, and draw on everything from philosophy to computer science to linguistics and semiotics. It’s truly impressive how Striphas synthesizes writings and ideas from these various fields into his presentation. He references entire areas of study and scholars I had no idea existed (and I have degrees in math and education as well as minors in English and philosophy!).

In particular, Striphas grounds his approach through his own expansion of Raymond Williams’s Keywords publication/theory. Look, I’m not going to pretend I have enough background to evaluate this approach. Readers more familiar with this angle of attack and Williams might be better poised to critique Striphas’ strategy. As it is, I liked the emphasis on looking at language as something constructed by and responsive to changes in our society—along with the potent reminder that even a concept like culture, whose meaning we might assume is to be taken for granted, shifts over time. So Striphas definitely exposed me to a lot of new (old) ideas, got me thinking, and that alone is something I appreciate in a nonfiction book like this!

On the other hand, this means that Striphas often gets bogged down in the weeds of theory. So much so that I’m not sure each chapter actually accomplishes its mission of supporting his overall thesis. Striphas attempts to trace the history of the word algorithm, then culture, and finally algorithmic culture, but along the way he gets lost in discussing, say, the historical context of the Cold War, suspicion and oppression of gay people in civil service and academia, etc. I’m not dismissing that these could be relevant threads to his argument, but the amount of digression feels, if not boring, then distracting enough to divert me from the overall point he’s trying to make.

As a mathematician, I really liked the chapter about the origins of algorithm, algebra, and al-Khwarizmi. I learned a lot I didn’t know. Striphas carefully questions the “official,” simplified narrative we often learn (if we are lucky) in our math classes. He makes it clear that he isn’t trying to downplay al-Khwarizmi’s role, or the wider role of Islamic mathematicians, when it comes to their influence on European mathematics. At the same time, he points out that a reductive approach—tracing algorithm back to al-Kwharizmi’s name, algebra back to a book he wrote (on a method that he probably did not originate)—actually does an injustice, flattening and erasing the complexities of that time period and al-Khwarizmi’s life.

I really appreciate how Striphas clearly acknowledges the power dynamics at play, both in contemporary writings of each period along with modern views, the roles of racism and sexism, etc., influencing our perception of algorithmic culture. He references many luminary scholars whose names I’ve heard of (Ruha Benjamin) or work I’ve read (Safiya Umoja Noble). In this sense, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet continues the intertextual conversation, not just engaging with it but building it and then throwing the ball forward, into the future, hoping that someone will pick it up and engage with Striphas later down the line.

This book is very specifically targeted towards an audience with more knowledge of this field than me. I think some people might pick it up (as I did) because of its title and description, expecting a more straightforward history (as I did) of computer science prior to the computer and the intersections with culture. But this is an academic book, not a pop history book, and it shows. If you’re willing to wade into deeper intellectual waters, then you will find parts of this book rewarding—challenging but rewarding. If you’re not wanting that workout right now, then you should skip this one.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Did I apply for this book on NetGalley solely because of the title and story’s surface similarities to Oona Out of Order? You bet I did. Cassandra in Reverse even has a blurb from Margaret Montimore. But don’t let this association colour your ideas about Holly Smale’s take on time-hopping through one’s own life, for this novel is very much its own story—and it’s a good one. Thank you to publisher MIRA for the eARC!

Cassandra Dankworth is dumped by her boyfriend and fired from her job on the same day. Also, her flatmate situation has become untenable. After this no good, very bad day, Cassandra is at her wit’s end. Overwhelmed and defeated, that’s when she discovers for the first time that she can, through sheer mental effort, travel back along her own timeline and relive her life from any point. She can’t go back all that far—certainly not far enough to save her parents from a fatal traffic collision when she was younger. But four months is enough time to save her relationship, her living situation, and her career. Right?

As I said in my introduction and is worth reiterating here: when you look at Cassandra in Reverse more closely, it’s actually quite distinct from Oona Out of Order. Notably, Cassandra has agency over her time-travel ability, whereas Oona is a passenger on her nonlinear life. Cassandra’s ability is a kind of gigantic do-over button—and who hasn’t wished for this power, let’s be honest? Any time I say something that proves mildly embarrassing or uncomfortable, any time the perfectionist in me thinks “I could have handled that better,” I wish for exactly this ability to blink my way back to that moment and do it ever so slightly better.

Of course, this leads to some self-imposed Groundhog Days, if you will, as Cassandra starts to obsess over getting certain days right. The iterations start to blur together (both to her and the reader), a deliberate decision on Smale’s part, I believe, that helps us to see how confusing this experience must be for Cassandra. Living a single day over and over is one thing—redoing weeks at a time, while trying to hold memories of all the different timelines in one’s head? That must be an incredible feat!

The book left me with several unanswered questions about Cassandra’s ability. First, there’s no explanation for why she can time travel (fair enough) nor why she can, seemingly arbitrarily, only go back to about four months prior to the start of the book. Perhaps most intriguing to me is the possibility that this ability makes Cassandra effectively immortal, albeit with some caveats. In theory, she could live out her life and then, in her old age, travel back in time to a younger age and keep looping her life, even trying different variations of it. Of course, this assumes that her ability remains viable for the rest of her life (and that she could go back further than four months prior by then). But it’s an interesting idea!

To be clear, the fact that none of these questions are answered doesn’t bother me in the slightest, I just wanted to ruminate on them in my review.

Indeed, I rather like that Cassandra raises some questions about the ethics of time travel at all. As I mentioned in my review of Some Desperate Glory, my experience watching The Flash TV series has thoroughly convinced me that time travel is largely unethical. Cassandra ponders what happens to each timeline she abandons when she travels back to reset hers: what happens to all the other people, all their lives that get reset? At some points, Smale demonstrates how tiny changes in Cassandra’s actions inadvertently ripple out in a butterfly effect to alter the courses of lives of people she didn’t even intend to affect. That’s an awesome responsibility. Moreover, what if there were two people with this ability wielding it at the same time? A kind of time travellers’ duel, if you will? Frightening.

Oh, I’m supposed to be reviewing the book, you say? Oops. I guess you could say this is my praise for Cassandra in Reverse: it does what any good time-travel story should do, which is get me thinking about the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey nature of time travel!

I also have conditional praise for the portrayal of an autistic protagonist in Cassandra. I say conditional because I’m allistic, so it’s not really my lane to evaluate Cassandra as autistic representation. The dearth of autistic representation in mainstream fiction means that, inevitably, we put too much pressure on individual instances of own-voices rep to capture every nuance of identities that are necessarily not monolithic. Cassandra is one particular portrayal of one particular experience of being an autistic woman in English society—and it’s a portrayal that I suspect won’t satisfy some autistic people. At the same time, I hope others feel very seen by what Cassandra undergoes in this book.

Speaking only from my perspective as an allistic yet neurodivergent woman: I really liked how Smale captures how much our society is not designed for autistic people. Cassandra is very sensitive to smells, very much likes having all of her things in the right place, has trouble reading people’s emotional states, etc.—traits that we often dismiss or outright mock, usually in ableist ways. Told from her first-person perspective, however, her experiences are less about stereotypes and more about an accounting of the struggle to exist in a society that’s constantly gaslighting you simply for who you are.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Cassandra’s interactions with her coworkers. I am so happy that Cassandra ends up finding a friend in one of them—watching that relationship grow, albeit iteratively as Cassandra resets the timeline, was one of the most delightful parts of this book. The rest of her coworkers are incredibly ableist in the most dull ways. There were moments when I groaned because it felt like they were caricatures, almost, or at least not sketched in great detail. That being said, towards the end of the book we see moments of greater depth from some of them (like Barry), and I do appreciate that.

Then we have Cassandra’s relationships with her boyfriend and sister. It’s doubly hard for me to comment on the former, because not only am I not autistic but I’m also aromantic (although maybe in this case that means I can at least better approximate Cassandra’s confusion about what Will expects from her, because I would feel much the same, I suspect). Suffice it to say, Cassandra’s attempts to “fix” things with Will are, as far as I understand, a very real if painful portrayal of how our society makes autistic people feel broken for not fitting into the moulds and roles we expect in these areas of life. In the same way, the rift between Cassandra and her sister exists for several reasons—notably the trauma following their parents’ untimely deaths—yet Cassanda’s undiagnosed autism lurks at the heart of those reasons.

Again, Smale’s point is not that Cassandra is the broken one but rather that our society is broken. I fear that some allistic readers will pick up this book, read a couple of chapters, and put it down, deriding Cassandra as an annoying or anal character, calling her unlikable—precisely the reaction, essentially, of the coworkers and clients in this book. If you stick around, you’ll see what Smale is doing, I hope. You’ll see how Cassandra is using time travel as the ultimate masking tool.

Which is why I don’t know how I feel about the ending.

No, actually, I think I really don’t like the ending.

I’m not going to spoil it. I don’t want to discuss it here in that much detail. But I can describe how it made me feel: ambivalent, and now as I write this review slightly betrayed. Maybe I am misunderstanding Smale’s theme, or maybe I just don’t see how this ending ultimately caps that theme. From where I sit, unfortunately, the ending seems to undermine it—establishing that Cassandra is as doomed as her counterpart from Greek mythology, essentially. I don’t know—if you liked the ending or want to share your interpretation of it, hit me up on Twitter and let’s chat.

Cassandra in Reverse has its rough patches, to be sure. Many of the deliberate artistic choices on Smale’s part (the repetitive structure, the portrayal of Cassandra’s autism) will make this book less enjoyable for some readers. Yet it is those same choices that make this book memorable, unique, valuable, in my opinion. Smale sets out to say something interesting, and her take on a time-travel story involving romance and family drama and dealing with trauma deserves definitely got me thinking about all of these things.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Every so often I take stock of what I haven’t read in a while and try to remedy that. In this case, it was translated fiction. My amazing new next-door neighbour, with whom I have so much in common (tea! knitting! cribbage!), offered to lend me a bevy of books including Signs Preceding the End of the World. She highly recommended Yuri Herrera, and I was eager to experience a book that she loved. Yes—my enjoyment of this book was likely going to make or break our friendship. Just kidding. Or am I?

Set during an unspecified present, this is a novel about borders, transgressions, and transformation. Makina leaves her border town in Mexico and crosses over to the United States in search of her brother, who himself was convinced there was land in their family’s name waiting for them on the American side. The crossing is unsanctioned and full of danger, but so too is existing on the other side. Makina will be changed by what she experiences as she uproots herself from all that she has known in order to find family.

Herrera, through translator Lisa Dillman, writes in stream of consciousness. The book doesn’t use quotation marks for dialogue, my one unforgivable sin when it comes to typesetting fiction—if my friend hadn’t recommended this book to me, I would have DNFed it. This flouted convention aside, I enjoyed Herrera’s style and the way that most of the other characters don’t need names. Makina interacts with crime bosses only assigned a letter: Mr. Double-U, Mr. Aitch, Mr. Q. Her mother gets a name (Cora) but her brother, with whom she arguably has a more significant interaction, doesn’t. Herrera is very sparing with how he doles out such personal details.

This paucity of details extends to the setting—at least at the broader level—lending the story a timelessness that belies the title’s harbinger tone. This book could have been set yesterday, or two years ago, or next week. Makina’s town is small and has no direct phone service—she prides herself at being a skilled and neutral switchboard operator. Border crossings of the kind Makina undertakes have been common for a long time. Similarly, America is always sending people overseas to fight in one place or another. As a result, the themes Herrera explores feel like they are suspended in time if not in place. The end of the world, it seems, is always ever just over the horizon.

Makina’s journey is simultaneously physical and spiritual. As her body traverses borders and nations, her spirit undergoes its own transformation. Her journey opens up her world and helps her to understand that, even in isolation, far-flung events and powers shape her and her family’s possibilities and experiences. Her brother was pulled away by the lure of land, false though that promise proved to be, yet stayed because the dangerous identity he acquired seemed to fit him better than whatever he could have hoped to be back home. In a similar way, Makina is permanently changed after finding and speaking to him.

I’m not sure how I feel about the ending. It’s abrupt and almost truncated. Herrera’s narration thins out until it is a tight metaphor suspended in amber, the light shining through his words but distorted, unclear. My interpretation, best as I can make it, is that Makina realizes she must let go.

Like many books written by foreign authors, the full brilliance of Signs Preceding the End of the World eludes me because I lack cultural context. A quick Google helped me understand that the chapters of the book are meant to mirror the journey through Mictān, the Mexica underworld—but that knowledge by itself is a mere surface detail; I lack the context of fully appreciating what that means. This is not a flaw of the book (or even of myself) but merely my attempt to remind myself that it’s OK that I’m struggling to articulate my thoughts entirely.

That’s the value of Signs Preceding the End of the World, of course. The translation of this book into English provides a portal into the psyche of a certain experience. In this book, America makes its presence felt, always and unflinchingly. Its presence is at times gregarious, callous, dangerous, devious, treacherous. While aspects of this portrayal are recognizable to me, as someone who lives on the other border of the United States, my positionality is very different from Makina’s.

In the end, the same sparse descriptive style that I praised (along with Dillman’s assiduous translation) is also my least favourite thing about this book. This novel (novella?—it’s short) is very much like oysters. I don’t mind eating oysters, but I wouldn’t eat them every day, and I probably wouldn’t even eat them that often throughout the year. It is a literary experience in and of itself rather than a literary escape.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Time and again, I keep saying it: give me the stories about stories, the metafiction, all of it. Kill Your Darlings by L.E. Harper is another spin on this idea. Along with a heavy (in many senses of the word) focus on mental health, this is a story about figuring out who you want to be when everyone is telling you who they think you are. This is a debut novel, and the rough edges that often come with that show. Aside from that, I enjoyed the story and the attempts that Harper makes to go deep on sensitive issues. I received an eARC from NetGalley in exchange for my review.

An author living in New York City wakes up to find herself inhabiting the body of Kyla Starblade, the protagonist of her fantasy series set in another world. “Kyla” quickly explains to the other characters in this book what’s up, but it’s immaterial—the Shadow War that they have been fighting for the past four books will stop for no one, and it’s up to her to vanquish the dark lord and save the day. There’s just one problem: in the original ending to this story, as written by this author, all of these principal characters die. Can she change what she has written, and in so doing, find her way back home?

An author finding themselves transported into their world isn’t the most original premise, but it has been a while since I’ve seen precisely this sort of twist on it. Additionally, Harper leaves the nature of this transposition ultimately unresolved: it could be a “quantum magical” entanglement, or it could be the narrator simply hallucinating everything. Did she create this world, or did she merely perceive its events from Earth, an interdimensional clairvoyant? The ultimate answer is irrelevant because it’s the journey that is important.

This is a story that is clearly, unapologetically about mental health and in particular about depression and suicide ideation—there are trigger warnings up front, and I have to say, they are justified. The book contains graphic descriptions of a mechanism of suicide, so practise self-care when deciding whether to read this book.

This layer to the story is both thematically and narratively important. The narrator is unreliable—there are a few twists near the end that, when revealed, subtly shift the reader’s interpretation of the situation. She lies to us but also to herself. Indeed, in her role as the hero of this world, the narrator feels the pressure to win against the dark lord, who is constantly telling her that she isn’t good enough. This is all too similar to what the narrator’s own brain has told her repeatedly over the years, resulting in her withdrawing from community with the people who care about her.

We don’t get to know the narrator’s world nearly as well as we do the fantasy one. There are a few stolen glimpses, but beyond that it is entirely what the narrator divulges through exposition—mainly how some of her book’s characters are modelled after her close friends, people she has since pushed away or ignored. At first, when the book opened with the narrator already in Kyla’s body in her fantasy world, I wished that we had flashbacks to the narrator’s life in NYC. Then again, I think I understand what Harper was going for here: depression is of the mind. Although circumstances can exacerbate it, the narrator isn’t depressed because of what she has experienced in her life—she’s depressed because her brain chemistry is out of whack. So it does make sense, thematically, for Kill Your Darlings to take place entirely in the narrator’s head (whether or not it is also taking place in another reality), separate from her own external world. There’s an appealing subjectivity to this storytelling.

Similarly, I appreciate that Harper doesn’t spend chapters upon chapters of the narrator trying to dupe everyone into thinking she is Kyla. She basically comes right out and says it right away, and the book’s pacing is much better for it. As it is, I think there were moments of uneven pacing—in particular, the middle was a bit of a slog. The story is very much about the narrator overcoming her self-doubt and other inner demons. As a result, the cornucopia of external threats often took a back seat in terms of the actual threat they seemed to pose to the characters. This is the trouble when you posit that a group of people might or might not be “real” in fiction—you have to be really careful to somehow maintain the stakes and our desire to sympathize with those characters. Do I care about the Kyla as much as the narrator? Is Kyla’s survival as important as the narrator’s here? These kinds of metaphysical considerations are fun but can also distract a reader from the mental-health themes at the core of the book.

Finally, I of course have to comment positively on the portrayal of a queernorm world (which is pretty subtle) and the narrator as an asexual character. The latter part is important given that Kyla is not asexual—Kyla has a very lusty love interest indeed, and some of the conflict comes from the narrator feeling romantically drawn to this character despite feeling no sexual attraction. I really liked how Harper is careful to establish that the narrator’s asexuality is not part of her being “broken,” despite what her brain might tell her. Her asexuality is wrapped up in her loneliness and isolation, which I think is an appropriate commentary on how the discrimination and erasure that ace people face in our society can converge with mental illness. This is just one more way, in other words, that the narrator feels isolated, even though her asexuality is in and of itself a valid experience.

All in all, Kill Your Darlings has its engrossing and interesting moments. Harper definitely made me want to keep reading and find out what happens next, both to the narrator and this fantasy world that she has created. I also like its very overt commentary on mental illness. While the writing itself—particularly the pacing and the challenges of pathos given the story—could be improved, it’s still a thoughtful and worthy story.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

As an aromantic asexual person, all three things in this book’s title have confused me at one point or another! Attraction, Love, Sex: The Inside Story examines our scientific understanding of makes humans interested in one another, romantic stylez (yes, with a Z). Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist, brings together research from psychology, biology, chemistry, and more in order to help the reader understand the physiological, psychological, and even evolutionary underpinnings of sexuality and romance. There’s a lot of good science in this book, along with some really bad science that left a bad taste in my mouth. An eARC was provided by Columbia University Press via NetGalley.

This book is organized into discrete chapters that are easy to pick up and put back down. LeVay takes us on a tour, if you will, through different aspects of sex and sexuality. Each chapter has a simple title, like “Love” or “Attraction,” yet that simplicity conceals the beguiling complexity of each topic. I really liked the structure and especially the way LeVay consistently includes a conclusions section at the end of every chapter to give us the bottom line.

What I liked: this is a book that doesn’t oversimplify and clearly acknowledges that science can be a flawed, human endeavour. As LeVay mentions various studies and the theories they support, he is ever diligent in noting if a study couldn’t be replicated or was contradicted by a more recent study. This is a practice I respect, for I find that sometimes science communicators, in their desire to distill science into a more streamlined narrative, pick one theory (or a couple of most likely theories) and present that version of the science as more settled than it actually is. Given that science is an ever-evolving discipline, LeVay’s approach to discussing these topics is a lot more transparent. In particular, I appreciated how he presented evolutionary psychology theories in a more skeptical light.

I also think this book has a great deal of useful information in its pages. For anyone just setting out to get a comprehensive overview of all things love, you could do worse than to read Attraction, Love, Sex. Even a single chapter in isolation, for example as an excerpt in a high school class, could be really useful. LeVay’s writing is skilled, and I learned all sorts of useful tidbits.

On the other hand, there were times when this book frustrated me as a queer person. Now, LeVay is gay and also, from what I can infer here, attempts to be trans inclusive. At one point he discusses sex-linked differences in the brain and includes the intriguing result that brain scans of binary trans people are often more similar to the sex they identify as rather than their sex assigned at birth (something also discussed in Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender. So I want to give LeVay some credit here. Nevertheless, I have some reservations.

First, LeVay seems to put a lot of stock in defining sexual orientation in terms of physical arousal and being able to quantify this by hooking people up to machines that measure that arousal through, say, blood flow. I understand the desire from a scientific standpoint to be able to talk about sexual orientation in a more objective, measurable way. Yet plethysmography has a troubling history (undiscussed here) linked to authorities wanting to out gay people and even then subject them to conversion therapy. More broadly, I think LeVay misses the point. While there is undoubtedly a physiological component to orientation—whether that is neurological, hormonal, genetic, etc.—like so many other emergent aspects of our identity, I don’t think we will ever be able to reduce orientation down purely to a single test or to concrete and tidy definitions like the ones he mentions here.

Second, LeVay’s treatment of asexuality is woefully inadequate. Again, credit where credit is due: he at least mentions asexuality and explicitly declares that “asexuality is not a problematic lack of sexual desire” and also states that “most asexual people are satisfied with their orientation.” So why am I dissatisfied with this mention? Simply put, even though LeVay charitably says that “asexuality should probably be thought of as a sexual orientation,” this single mention of asexuality (all of these quotations come from a single paragraph) occurs in the chapter on “Having Sex” rather than the “Orientation” or “Attraction” chapters. We are once again an afterthought, little more than a footnote—a positive, inclusive one, yes, but not much more than that.

Third, I take major issue with how LeVay characterizes trans people. LeVay uncritically draws on the work of Ray Blanchard and his theory of autogynephelia. (Julia Serano has a very cogent explanation of why Blanchard’s work is harmful, so I’ll leave that part to her.) LeVay draws a very artificial distinction between what he sees as “classical” transsexuality and autogynephilic trans women (you’ll notice that this discussion and Blanchard’s original research both focus solely on trans women, with nary a consideration for trans men or non-binary people, insert audible eye-rolling here). Just the label of “classic” sounds icky to me. As with his conversations on orientation, LeVay’s conceptions of gender identity miss the mark in a profound way.

I don’t know anything about LeVay outside of reading his Wikipedia article. It sounds like he has been a longstanding expert in the study of sexuality as it relates to neuroscience, along with an advocate for gay rights. With that in mind, I don’t want to be the uppity youngster who criticizes her elders with undue harshness.

Even so, as I sat down to write a much softer version of this review … well, I got to the part about trans people, and I found myself unable to be conciliatory. LeVay might be a towering giant in his field and have a long career behind him, but it’s irresponsible to publish remarks like this in 2023 in the current political climate around trans people. I cannot in good conscience recommend this book, because well-meaning and curious allies who read this might inadvertently think that LeVay (and by extension, Blanchard) are accurately discussing transgender people. As much as there are valuable nuggets of information elsewhere in the book, this one section alone is too problematic. Additionally, it represents the challenge of talking so broadly about a topic like this. Rather than specializing, LeVay decided to take on all of human sexuality—and even with his decades of experience in the field, that task proved to be too elusive for him to complete with reasonable fidelity.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.