This is a tough one, because I’m feeling pretty conflicted about A Room with a View. On one hand, I’m pretty sure I didn’t like it—despite being only 220ish pages, it took me a long time to read, because I kept putting it down and looking for other, more interesting things to distract me. On the other hand, this is not a bad or poorly-written book. I can see what E.M. Forster is trying to do; I have seen other writers tell similar stories and knock my socks off. So what do George Eliot or Thomas Hardy have over Forster for me?

The plot is tedious and dull, and that’s likely my chief problem. Lucy Honeychurch is an eligible young lady on vacation in Italy with her chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett. She ends up associating with an ensemble cast of characters, one of whom makes a move on her and kisses her (scandalous!). When she returns to England, she accepts the third marriage proposal from a persistent suitor who is not suited to her at all. Then the cad from Italy intersects her life again, and of course, there is suspense as Lucy tries to figure out if he has feelings for her (or if she has feelings for him) and if anyone other than Charlotte knows of, and could reveal, that Italian indiscretion.

It’s pretty standard fare as far as these types of stories go. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be many stakes here (beyond, perhaps, Lucy’s reputation were her out-of-school kissing to become common knowledge). The supporting characters, like Charlotte and Mrs Honeychurch and Freddy, Lucy’s brother, tend to be fairly flat, stock types who don’t offer much in the way of conflict. There is no one, central figure who dominates the page and stands out as a strong antagonist. Not even Cecil, who is indeed trying to project his idea of what a woman should be on to Lucy, really deserves such a label.

I felt like I was trapped in the prequel to an Agatha Christie mystery. I kept waiting for someone to drop dead and Poirot to burst onto the scene with Hastings and Japp, so he could start using his little grey cells to figure out that, egads, Emerson is no murderer—it was Mr Beebe all along! A good murder would really have lightened the mood, I think, and made A Room with a View more bearable. That or maybe some kind of natural disaster plunging the family into penury.

But no, Forster instead offers up a very bland look at English country life circa 1900, the British Empire riding high into the twentieth century with the rumblings of the Great War still far off on the European horizon. Lucy can go for a jaunt around Italy all she wants in the first half of the book, then noodle about her neighbourhood, playing tennis and mulling over marriage … and it’s just. so. boring. Maybe it’s my misanthropic distaste for socializing, but I just can’t bring myself to care or be interested in the quotidian happenings of these various characters.

The book picks up a little towards the end, and it certainly has some moments. Lucy has a pretty badass moment in Chapter 17, “Lying to Cecil”, when she explains why she has gone off marrying him:

“… When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you’re always protecting me.” Her voice swelled. “I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman’s place! You despise my mother—I know you do—because she’s conventional and bothers over puddings; but, oh goodness!”—she rose to her feet—“conventional, Cecil, you’re that, for you may understand beautiful things, but you don’t know how to use them; and you wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and would try to wrap up me. I won’t be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious, and you hide them from me. That’s why I break off my engagement. You were all rigth as long as you kept to things, but when you came to people—” She stopped.

You go, girl! There, now you’ve read the best part; I’ve saved you the trouble of having to read the whole book.

I also like how this chapter and subsequent chapters are titled, “Lying to …”, giving us explicit acknowledgement that Lucy is deceiving herself and others about her feelings. There is a level of introspection here, which, combined with the above speech, definitely elevates A Room with a View above the frivolity of mere romance.

Yet Lucy is about all that is interesting about this book, as I mentioned above. George is no Mr. Darcy or Captain Wentworth. As far as I’m concerned, Lucy would be better off burning everything down and moving to Canada.

Hmm. Not a bad fanfic idea….

Anyway, Forster’s writing just doesn’t get to me. It’s an incompatibility of style and of plotting rather than ability, though. I can recognize that Forster is trying to do interesting things here, and I see why other people might find this book captivating. It does not speak to me, though. Some books, the right books, will transport you into their world and make you never want to let go. And when you’ve read enough of those, you know immediately when you’ve cracked open a book that won’t. A Room with a View is such a book for me. It might not be the same with you, but that’s not enough for me to recommend it.

So in the last book we were down an Animorph, sort of, and in this book we gain an Animorph, sort of. The Discovery is the start of the Third Age of Animorphs: the stakes are higher, the action is more intense, and the consequences are further reaching than we’ve ever seen.

(One day I hope to have a successful sideline as a writer of “next week” TV promos.)

If memory serves, this is all going to end in tears.

But before I talk about David, I need to have a little rant about Andalite arrogance.

David finds the Escafil device—the blue box that bestowed morphing capability on the Animorphs—and it’s a big deal, because the Animorphs need to get it from him before the Yeerks find out he has it. Because the last thing we need are Yeerks with morphing technology! Everyone is freaking out about recovering the blue box.

But, hey, Andalites—did you never think of password-protecting this thing?

I know that, theoretically, you need someone with morphing ability to trigger the device (although the Yeerks have that in the form of Visser Three). And maybe the Andalites were just so confident that one of the devices would never fall out of Andalite hands. Still. When humans are doing a better job of infosec than the Andalites, we got issues. Stick a hashed 20-character password on that baby and call it a day.

The blue box is really a secondary plot to The Discovery, however, because what really matters is David and his crash-course induction to the Animorphs.

The way Applegate deals with David is pretty dark. The Yeerks and Animorphs bust up his family’s house; the Yeerks hustle off his parents to become Controllers, leaving the Animorphs to vote on whether to let David into their club. That’s bleak. Poor David.

Too bad he’s possibly a psychopath, huh?

I love how Applegate lays down the clues in Marco’s narration. From David’s choice of pets and names for pets to more subtle behaviour, we start getting a picture of the kind of kid David is. And I’m not saying every kid who likes illegal snakes and metal bands is a killer. But I’m saying that kids who like illegal snakes and metal bands and who have violent tendencies might find a way to explore those tendencies if you give them the power to turn into any animal.

Let this be your PSA. You’re welcome.

The most telling thing about this book, however, is simply that it ends on a cliffhanger. It literally ends with Marco falling out of a helicopter in roach morph, with “To be continued…” promising us a conclusion in the next book. This is the first time Applegate has ever done this, and that makes it special.

Next time, David completes his heel turn. But even though Applegate hints here that he’s not going to work out as a member of the team, I don’t think it’s evident yet just how bad David will be.

I’m getting chills.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #19: The Departure | #21: The Threat →

Much of my young adult reading this year has been on the … intense … side. Lots of stories about what teenagers, and particularly young girls, go through. So it was with some relief that I discovered Flannery. I don’t want to give the impression that this is a fluffy book devoid of important themes. Our eponymous protagonist has to deal with an immature mother whose impulsive spending means they might not make rent. She has a crush on a childhood friend who has his own problems, and whose unreliability has left her working solo on their entrepreneurship class partnership. And her best friend is slipping away from her under the bad influence of the new boyfriend. Yet in the midst of these issues Lisa Moore brings us humour and compassion.

I received an ARC of Flannery from Groundwood Books, and I have been a bit remiss in reading it before its publication date (it came out at the beginning of May). I’d like to think, however, that what I lack in punctuality I shall make up for in enthusiasm for this book, because I really liked it. You too can send me free books that I may or may not like but will certainly review (maybe even on time for once).

This is the kind of book that wins you over because of the main character’s voice. For example, Flannery confesses to us that, “I’ve had the school glockenspiel hidden under my bed since I quit band in grade five…. It took me so long to return the glockenspiel that after a while I was afraid to return it at all. It lives under my bed, silent in a glockenspiel coffin, a heavy, velvet-lined box of guilt….” Flannery takes the reader completely and utterly into her confidence, sharing with us her darkest secrets, deepest regrets, and most fervent dreams. Moore captures the earnestness of a sixteen-year-old girl with this voice while avoiding making Flannery come off too generic. In no time flat, we have a good sense of her personality. She is fiercely independent, because she has learned she can’t rely on her mom, but she can also be impulsive. She wants to do well, but issues of money and time and family weigh on her in ways they shouldn’t at her age.

Beyond the main character, the book offers so much more in the way of humour and compassion. As a teacher, I had to giggle (in a kind of “oh my god” kind of way) at Mr. Payne’s use of a laser pointer. Pretty sure shining a laser pointer at students’ foreheads is a good way to get in trouble, whether or not you actually manage to blind someone. Let’s not even start on Mr. Green’s headlocks. Newfoundland has quite the … interesting … educational system.

I say “compassion” in addition to humour because these two ideas form the emotional core of Flannery. As an example, consider one of the most serious events in the book, where several of Flannery’s peers attack her in the school parking lot and nearly make her swallow the contents of a used condom. Only the timely intervention of the school secretary, a character who might otherwise be considered chaotic neutral at best, saves Flannery from a fate both gross and, potentially, seriously harmful. I remember thinking at the time that this scene was so jarring compared to the overall tone of the book, which always acknowledged the presence of terrible moments but had, so far, declined to actually depict many.

Compassion is an important mediator for how Flannery relates to the other characters as well. Her brother Felix antagonizes her in typical six-year-old-boy ways. There were times when I was so angry with her mother Miranda, but Moore also puts Flannery in positions where she, and by extension we, must empathize with Miranda’s situation. And then there’s Tyrone. I am so pleased with the way that Flannery’s romantic life works out in this story! Some YA is just so obvious about the arc that two characters’ relationship will take, so I’m always happy when the author chooses the less conventional paths. Tyrone’s behaviour, fleshed out by the details we learn about his home life, provides another data point in our understanding of Flannery’s world.

And then we have Amber … oh, Amber.

This was the subplot that really got to me. The way that Amber and Flannery drift apart is tragic enough, especially because it feels so realistic. There is nothing melodramatic about this, and I imagine that many teenagers reading this book will feel some pangs as they see this rift occur. I love the ending; without spoilers, can I just say that I love the Moore does not want to give us easy outs? She commits to delivering us doses of reality even amidst all the weird and zany events this novel serves up, yet somehow it just all works. That climactic moment when Flannery discovers the depths to which Amber has been betrayed by her boyfriend … man, that’s a sucker punch right to the gut. And again, Moore draws on some very topical behaviour that is happening all too often among teenagers right now.

Flannery prompted me to finally create a new shelf on Goodreads: teachable texts. I’ve been talking a lot about books I am teaching, have taught, or would teach given the right circumstances. This book definitely falls into that last category. I’m not so sure I’d choose it for my current students (adults), but I’d love to teach it in a high school class, or put it on a list of novels for students to select for an independent study. While not a long or overly complicated book, there is just so much of note happening here, that it is a rich and thought-provoking story nonetheless.

Perhaps the only real downside is the way that Moore eschews quotation marks for dialogue. Longtime readers of my review know that this is a huge literary turn-off for me, to the point where I have discarded entire books for committing this sin. Granted, this book’s style is not otherwise opaque or hard to follow, so in this case the absence of quotation marks is more bearable. But I just want to emphasize that I still love Flannery despite its treachery in this instance, and I want you to understand how monumental that is for me.

This review is lengthy and also gets quite personal, since I can’t help but examine For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood …and the Rest of Y’all Too in the light of my own experiences as a teacher.

TL;DR: Christopher Emdin is awesome, and this book is too. It’s short and accessible, but it has such staying power. I wish this were mandatory in teacher training everywhere. Also, minor spoilers for Anne of Green Gables in the next paragraph. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

When I was a wee boy, I read the Anne of Green Gables series, as many Canadian children do. It’s fascinating what sticks with each person from the books they read in their youth. I don’t remember a lot of the series, but of course, I identified with Anne’s desire to become a teacher. And one part stays with me to this day: Anne’s resolve not to use corporal punishment, and the heartbreaking moment she breaks that promise to herself. The feeling of that moment is one that stuck with me as I went through high school and university and completed my own teacher training, and now it is one I understand more completely. While, of course, we teachers today do not use corporal punishment, like Anne most of us begin our careers with naivety and idealism, promising that we will not succumb to the rancour within the system that we want to change. And, inevitably, all of us fall.

After I graduated from my teacher education, I taught in the UK for two years. And boy, do I wish I had this book at the beginning of that journey (though I probably wouldn’t have been as equipped to recognize myself in it at that time). I chose to go to the UK, having decided I wouldn’t be getting a job back home, because it seemed relatively “safe” as far as exotic locales go. There were jobs up North too, but I don’t much enjoy outdoor activities, and I knew that if I didn’t want to participate in those, I wouldn’t fit into the community very well—something Emdin discusses in Chapter 7, Context and Content. I figured a country that produced Monty Python and shared my love of tea would be a good fit for me—and largely it was. But teaching there was still challenging, and while the school where I taught was not poor per se, the socioeconomic status of its students was definitely lower than in other parts of the UK. While the students were largely white, there was a diversity of ethnicities, from British students to Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, and other children of immigrant parents. Combine this with an education system that is literally the antecedent of the oppressive systems in place in Canada and the US, and you have a population of students who largely don’t see the value in what they are doing every day. And I can’t blame them.

I won’t be too hard on myself: I think, by and large, I was a good teacher while in the UK. I was new and inexperienced, of course, so I made a lot of the typical noob mistakes. I yelled (a lot). I got frustrated when I felt the students were not appreciative of my brilliance and my dedication and my oh-so-intricate lesson-planning. I made myself sick (like, shingles sick). Still, I enjoyed my time there. I loved living in the UK; I loved my colleagues; I even loved the students, as challenging as they might have been. I learned a great deal and grew, both as a teacher and as a person, and it will indubitably become one of the most significant and formative periods of my career and my life.

Nevertheless, I recognize myself in many of the mistakes or missteps that Emdin shares in For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood. Some of these come from teachers he has observed, but some of them come from his own experience, and I really admire someone who can own up to their mistakes. If there is a common thread throughout the chapters of this book, it pertains to one’s attitude as a teacher. Somewhere along the way, thanks to the droning of academia we inhabit during our training, and the pressures of the system we inhabit during our employment, we form a lot of assumptions about what “teaching” and effective teaching looks like. And Emdin is really keen on the idea that we need to have more of an open mind. We need to remember we can learn from our students, and that we can make mistakes—and that this is not the end of the world. Most importantly, the things we try and implement, whether they are suggestions from this book or any of the others out there, are not quick fixes. Real change and real improvements to teaching and learning take time.

I follow a fair number of educators and educationally-minded folks on Twitter, or through other venues. However, I largely stay out of the ed chats. I’m a bit disenchanted with the amount of buzzwords and lingo that fly around on social media; it feels a little like I haven’t escaped university still. Don’t get me wrong—there are so many awesome teachers out there sharing real experiences and actual ideas and lesson plans with each other, and I try to look for and pay attention to them. These pieces of gold are mixed up in less interesting conversations, at least to me—do I really care if the buzzword of the week is empowerment or engagement? Why should I compete to see who can shove more synonyms for “differentiated student-led student-centred inquiry-based rich open high-ceiling” lesson into 140 characters?

What I’m saying is that while social media offers a great deal of promise for its ability to connect educators, there is also a temptation to communicate very shallowly. Hyping up buzzwords might make us feel good and re-energize us with respect to the practice of teaching—and that might be fine in the short-term. But it’s also important to have discussions that reach past the most popular language and concepts of the day. One thing I find so compelling about For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood is how it kind of does both: Emdin certainly coins his share of buzzwords, from reality pedagogy to cogens and cosmo duos, but he also backs this flash up with substance. The result is a book that both reinvigorates my enthusiasm for teaching and leaves me with very practical ideas for experiments I can try in my classroom.

I’ve seen some criticism levelled at the dearth of research to back up this book. Firstly, I’m not seeing it—every chapter has references that Emdin draws on. Secondly, it means one has probably missed the point, because this entire book is predicated on the idea that pedagogy as it stands is biased towards academic (code for white) research that marginalizes and erases other ways of knowing. There is so much research in this book—but it’s research that Emdin has collected in ways not necessarily kosher among academics. It’s personal and experiential but no less valid for it. And you are free to disagree with that, but it’s disingenuous to expect this book to be anything else when Emdin signals it upfront at the end of the first chapter:

Reality pedagogy does not draw its cues from “classroom experts” who are far removed from real schools, or from researchers who make suggestions for the best ways to teach “urban,” “suburban,” and “rural” youth based on their perceptions of what makes sense for classrooms.

Fun story, since clearly I haven’t spent enough time being personal in this review already: during my teacher training year, multiple professors told me I should think about applying to the Masters in Education program. They meant that I should do it before I had even taught in a classroom. I was shocked by the idea that they thought I could try to tell other people how to teach without having taught myself! Now, they meant well, and it was flattering that they had such high regard for my academic abilities and my potential as an educator—but it was also clear to me, then and now, that they spoke from a position so completely divorced from the reality of the classroom. Theirs was the area of the professor, the academic, the researcher. But I knew that, while I could easily spend the rest of my days lounging around university soaking up more credits, if I wanted to be a good teacher, I needed to get out of that space and get into classrooms.

Emdin sticks to this idea for the rest of the book: reality pedagogy is about what we really have to work with in our classrooms, not what we might want to have, or dream of having, or what the curriculum, tests, or administrators tell us we should have. We teachers tend to forget that sometimes, if we ever knew it in the first place. I was certainly guilty of it in the UK: I got so caught up in doing what I felt I was “expected” to do, from enforcing stupid uniform codes to preparing students for their GCSEs, that I forgot I should, you know, actually be trying to help them become better people. Part of my journey post-UK has been towards becoming more “fearless” when it comes to what I actually do, day to day, to help my students learn.

Confronting the reality of the students one has also means, for me as a white person, confronting a very pernicious facet of my white privilege: entitlement. White people tend to get told that the universe owes them, and that their anger and disgruntlement when the universe reneges on that “promise” is totally justified (whereas the anger of Black and Indigenous and other groups is threatening). Growing up we’re told we will get careers handed to us out of school (that proved a huge lie). Teachers, so fresh and ready to “make a difference” and so secure in their knowledge of the content, feel like they deserve students who are likewise “ready to learn.” I know I did. Even now I still occasionally yearn for a mythical classroom of 14–18-year-olds who just want to learn calculus and read novels and have great intellectual discussions, as if those children or those moments will somehow exist in a vacuum.

Pop that bubble, and we see the world for the more complicated place it is. As Emdin articulates in this book, it’s not that students in urban environments are unready to learn: it that’s the systems in place do not recognize their expressions of readiness or validate their modes of learning. He coins the term neoindigenous so that he can liken these students’ experiences to those of Indigenous populations, which for the past several centuries have been subject to colonial policies designed to exterminate them through a combination of assimilation and outright genocide. Similarly, many of our educational practices extend this colonial mindset to the neoindigenous, rewarding students for “acting white” or for fulfilling our racist idea of what a “good” student behaves like.

This makes sense to me. Moreover, while I do not “teach in the hood”, I do work largely with Indigenous students these days in my capacity as an adult education teacher. So they have been through the traumas of the regular school system and, for whatever reason, didn’t succeed enough to get their diploma. Hence, much of what Emdin discusses resonates with me and reflects what I myself have been seeing in the year and a half I’ve been doing this.

That’s the …and the Rest of Y'all Too part of the title, of course, and it’s why this book is so good and should be mandatory everywhere teachers are trained. While Emdin’s own experience and practices are rooted in urban schools with predominantly Black populations, meaning he draws from hip hop culture, that doesn’t make his pedagogy or his suggestions any less relevant for other types of students. It just means that the specific cultural context will be different. The underlying ideas are the same: listen to the students, work with them, be open to criticism and changing your teaching style, and try to involve the wider community.

I’m looking forward to trying out Emdin’s ideas. Some of them are simple and won’t take too much effort to try; others require a little adaptation for my particular situation. Some will work out; others might not—such is the nature of experimentation. I’m not expecting it to be easy. But I’m convinced it’s worth that effort for me to be a better teacher, and for my students to get more out of their time with me.

My time in the UK was invaluable, and I learned a lot. That system tho! The system ground me down and nearly spat me back out, and I know I’m not alone—it’s no wonder so many teachers leave the profession that entire agencies make their money by recruiting overseas. It’s not education; it’s industrial warehousing of children until they can be press-ganged into the workforce. And I have so much empathy for my UK and US colleagues who are trapped in a hell of standardized tests, school inspections, and administrators who care more about appearances than actual learning.

It’s not all roses here in Ontario, but I think it’s a little better (and I certainly have a fair amount of freedom in adult education that I don’t have even in an Ontario high school classroom). Even so, one of the first and most daunting hurdles to reality pedagogy must be that fear of what happens if you screw up and something “doesn’t work” and suddenly you feel you’re behind on “curriculum” or haven’t prepared your students for that major test. And I really just want to say … so what? Curriculum is important, and it’s there for a reason—but it’s not the reason, if you get me. Tests can be useful, data can be useful, but it shouldn’t be an end unto itself. If you get caught up in that thinking, you’re not focusing on what teaching should be.

In my Philosophy of Education class, we once had a debate about whether education should/could be neutral or political. I maintained, and still maintain, even more fervently today, that education neither cannot nor should not be neutral. Education is inherently political; educating people is a political act. As a teacher, you are engaging in those politics every time you walk into that classroom, whether you work with the system or push back against it. Emdin summarizes it so well in the conclusion: “It essentially boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student.”

The more I look back at my teacher training, the more I think about how it didn’t prepare me for being a teacher. All due respect to my teachers, because they cared and knew their stuff, and I enjoyed my time there. The very structure and assumptions of the program, however, need reworking. The best moments were when we got to engage with teachers who were still connected to the classroom. One Grade 7/8 teacher came in and told us that if we didn’t look back at our first two years of teaching with horror, we shouldn’t keep teaching (and he was totally right). I also had the opportunity to go listen to Christopher Emdin speak when he came to Thunder Bay, which is how he first came on my radar. I still haven’t read his first book, but I will hopefully get to it sooner now. I’m really happy I pre-ordered For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, even though now I’m giving away this heavily annotated copy to a colleague and buying a few more as gifts … because I think every teacher needs to read this.

Teaching, for me, is all about critically examining what I do and the assumptions I have, and changing. Nothing stays still in this world, so why should my teaching? This book provides another opportunity to help me do that. While, at times, it reminded me of uncomfortable moments or made me cringe as I remembered less-proud actions, reading this is a largely positive, uplifting experience. It’s inspirational, but it is also not empty: Emdin presents eminently actionable ideas. The result is a balance between theory and practice. And that’s all I got, because it’s time to stop talking about this stuff and start doing it.

Last year I picked up my first Holly Bourne book with Am I Normal Yet?. I had been hearing so much about Bourne and her Spinster Club trilogy from people I follow on Twitter and YouTube that I ordered all of her books—yes, all of them—on faith. I deliberately deferred her debut, Soulmates. Not only did I want to see what all the fuss around the Spinster Club was about, but I know that debut novels are often not representative of an author’s full talents. Nevertheless, I still wanted to tackle Soulmates before getting too deep into the rest of Bourne’s back catalogue, so this was the first book I started in 2017. It proved a good choice.

If you can’t guess what this book is about from its title, you’re trying to be too clever. It’s exactly what the title promises. Poppy Lawson is seventeen years old, and she thinks boys her age are stupid. Then she meets Noah, a “fit guitarist” and troubled child, and their connection is electric and panic-inducing. As Poppy and Noah circle one another and start dating, we learn that their status as soulmates is literally an existential crisis—that there is an entire secret society devoted to stopping soulmates from getting together, because natural disasters are the result. If Poppy and Noah don’t want to cause untold death and destruction, they can never be together. What’s a girl gotta—wait, sorry, wrong book….

Soulmates is strange fare. It walks that line between being science fiction and not, never quite deciding how far it wants go towards the tropes of that genre. It takes a very long time for the soulmate police subplot to intersect with the main narrative. Until about the last 50 pages of the book, one could theoretically excise the italicized scenes between the members of the soulmate police, remove this entire subplot, and the book could just be about a particularly charged romance between two teenagers. The weird weather would just be a footnote. And to be honest, I kind of did this, mentally, because Dr. Beaumont was the least satisfactory character for me. Everything from the descriptions of her to her behaviour felt quite one-dimensional.

In contrast, the main characters of Soulmates have the three-dimensional and vibrant personalities I would expect, having enjoyed Am I Normal Yet?’s dynamic cast. Poppy endeared herself to me at the end of chapter 3:

“Anyway, on that note, I’m going to go home now. Ruth, in the future, can you please refrain from using my illness as a pulling method?”

I turned on my heels and made for the door, forcing myself not to break into a run. In one last moment of courage or madness—whatever you want to call it—I turned back and examined the stunned looks on their faces.

“Oh, and watch out,” I added. “She’s had chlamydia twice.”

And I flicked my head round and walked out into the night.

Low blow, perhaps, a bit reminiscent of Mean Girls but so too was Ruth’s behaviour. And whereas in Mean Girls Cady was only pretending to befriend the Plastics, these girls are genuinely Poppy’s friend.

Bourne is really good at depicting the complicated, often messy, nuanced interactions that happen among adolescent girls. One moment, Ruth is using Poppy’s anxiety as a way to make herself look better in front of a boy—the next, Ruth is helping Poppy’s other friends super-glam her in preparation for a date (with same said boy, ironically). This is the kind of behaviour that is played for laughs and used by male writers to patronize women/girls or downplay female friendships—“them bitches be crazy” is a common refrain. Instead, Bourne pulls back the curtain ever so slightly to show what influences these relationships. Poppy herself is a very introspective character, reflecting on her own changing self—how she couldn’t care less about any of the boys her age, and now she is hot for Noah—as well as the personalities of her friends, from Lizzie’s buoyant and intrepid journalistic ambitions to Amanda’s surprising journey from shyness to assertiveness to Ruth’s overcompensation for her own insecurity.

As much as I liked Poppy’s forthright attitude, though, I confess Lizzie is my breakaway favourite. It’s just that every time she shows up, you know you’re going to have a good time with this scene. You know you’re going to laugh, because Lizzie cannot keep a secret, because she is so nosy, because despite these flaws, Lizzie is Poppy’s true best friend. And it is great that, in a novel that is essentially a YA romance, we are also getting all these positive depictions of female friendship.

OK, Ben, that’s all well and good, but what about that romance?

I suppose one benefit of the science-fictional angle in this plot is that, whether or not I believe in soulmates (I don’t), this story takes place in a world where soulmates exist. So we can set that aside and take it as read that Poppy and Noah are, indeed, meant for each other. Bourne tries to balance their expressed desire to “take it slow” with the hormones that continue to push them together and prod them into more and more physical moments of intimacy. As a result, the romance feels both very intense and not at all rushed—there is an inexorable, powerful development of Poppy’s understanding of herself, and herself in relation to this boy, that is quite compelling. While I can’t relate to this myself, I can only imagine that there will be some teenagers out there who can identify with the way Poppy expresses her hesitation, her mixed feelings about how quickly everything is moving, as well as how much she wants things to move so much faster.

And then there’s the ending. Sometimes I’m a sucker for happy endings, but I have to admit, tragedies do tend to be more my style. I’m not going to spoil the details, but let’s just say that Soulmates is not about two people living happily ever after. Bourne does not promise her audience that you’ll find The One and everything will work out OK. Rather, the theme here is that love—any kind of love, as I read it, be it romantic or otherwise—is a powerful influence on one’s character. Love changes you, sometimes in surprising ways. So whether a relationship is destined to be for a day, a year, or maybe forever, that person leaves a mark on you—and you on them. It rather reminds me of the song “For Good” from Wicked.

Soulmates is an admirable debut novel. It already contains precursors of things that Bourne goes on to explore more fully in her later books, such as mental health issues. Despite wrapping itself around an intriguing science-fictional premise, the narrative never really embraces that part of the story except in the final, feverish rush towards a climax near the end of the book. However, it mostly makes up for this by containing so many well-drafted characters. For a book that is, literally, about fated love, Soulmates is more remarkable for being so much more than romance.

If you have read any Samuel R. Delany, you know he is a complex dude, and even his simplest stories are complex in some way. Tales of Nevèrÿon is no exception. Largely branded sword-and-sorcery, it’s actually an attempt to deconstruct this subgenre and provide commentary on the relationship between capitalism and slavery. And, for bonus points, if you read closely enough you start to see patterns and echoes from some of his other work, including Triton and Dhalgren.

I picked up what appear to be first editions, or near enough, of the first three Return to Nevèrÿon books from my used bookstore a year or so ago. This version of Tales of Nevèrÿon lacks the preface by Delany’s fictional K. Leslie Steiner, though I do get the afterword, “Appendix: Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three by S. L. Kermit” (love the play with the initials there). Apparently later editions/printings have corrected errors? So there’s that. But I love collecting old, used editions of classic SF&F like this, so I will suffer in satisfaction.

Longtime readers of my reviews will know I’m never quite satisfied by short story collections. That being said, Tales of Nevèrÿon fits into the loophole of one story deliberately structured as a series of related shorts. Indeed, the stories in this collection are even more related than most. Characters and settings overlap, with characters from one story reappearing, often older (but not necessarily wiser) and in different capacities than they once did. Each story tends to focus on a particular theme, which Delany might then rebut or reinforce in later stories. Overall, the stories form a kind of tapestry of tales that provide us with an understanding of Nevèrÿon, its cultures, and the changes underway in this empire.

This might be one of those rare situations where briefly looking at each story would genuinely be helpful!

“The Tale of Gorgik” is the first and pivotal story, since Gorgik goes on to play important roles in most of the subsequent stories (and, I am given to understand, later books in the series). Gorgik is a light-skinned man in a land ruled by darker-skinned people. He becomes a slave and works in the mines until a high-ranking government bureaucrat pulls him up out of that position to use as her sex buddy. He lives on her sufferance at the imperial residence for a while, then she gives him an army commission and sends him packing. Eventually, Gorgik strikes off on his own, becoming a kind of adventurer. Yet his experiences have left him with a taste for freedom and a distaste for slavery, and we’ll see that later. All in all, “The Tale of Gorgik” is mostly a reflection on how one’s fortunes are often out of one’s control and depend upon the will and power of other players.

“The Tale of Old Venn” takes us across the land to an archipelago off the coast of Nevèrÿon proper. The peoples of these islands trade with Nevèrÿon but otherwise exist outside its influence. That is changing, however, because money is making its way through the land. Although comprising several stories told by the eponymous Venn, the protagonist of the frame story is actually Norema, who will later emigrate to Nevèrÿon and one day meet Gorgik. Through Venn’s stories, Norema is exposed to the potential problems with the introduction of money, as well as different ideas about gender roles. This story might be one of the most confusing to follow, simply owing to its structure.

“The Tale of Small Sarg” concerns a young man, little more than a boy, who is kidnapped from his people and sold into slavery (are you sensing a theme yet?). Sarg was revered as a prince among his people, which seems to mean he wasn’t responsible for doing all that much, because in his society women had most of the responsibility. As a slave, Sarg gets sold to Gorgik. The relationship between these two forms the core of this story, as they navigate complicated matters of sexuality, kink, and the power dynamics of master/slave—which might not be what you would expect, not that I want to spoil it. Basically, if you are familiar with Delany you shouldn’t be surprised that so many of his characters are super queer, and this is book no exception. This story advances Gorgik’s character development, setting him on the path on which we encounter him in subsequent books.

“The Tale of Potters and Dragons” returns once more to this idea that money could be a saviour of society or the root of all evil. A potter educates his apprentice in the virtues of money before sending him to conclude a business deal. On the voyage, the apprentice meets Norema, also dispatched by her mistress to secure the same contract he is after. Unfortunately for both, they never reach their destination, falling victim instead to a much more massive and older deception. Norema meets Raven, a woman from the matriarchal society of the Western Crevasse, who tells her a very detailed myth about the creation of women (and then ’men). I really like this story for its plot, the craftiness of some of the characters we never meet, and because I get to see Norema again!

“The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers” brings together Norema and Raven with Gorgik and Sarg. The best way I can describe this is that Sarg basically yells, “RAMPAGE!” and runs into a castle and kills as many guards as possible, kind of like Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The scenes are literally kind of cinematic in that way. But anyway, this is the story that sees the culmination of the narratives on slavery, power, and economic revolutions. It’s a short but powerful tale amplified by the reader’s awareness of the previous narratives.

Lastly, we have “Appendix: Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three”. This is where I’ll state the controversial opinion that you could, indeed, just skip this entire part if you wanted. I think it’s possible to enjoy Tales of Nevèrÿon on the strength of the stories alone without worrying too much about what Delany is doing here. However, if you’re into considering the deeper implications of Delany’s work, then it is worthwhile reading and trying to parse this last entry. This is “part three” of these informal remarks; the first two are in Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (the main story is “part one” and an appendix to that story is “part two”).

So Delany is trying to link his works, trying to create a common thread throughout them. I don’t have the energy or memory to really compare Triton with these stories. But I can see some similarities between Dhalgren and these stories. In both cases, Delany makes much of the deconstruction and semiotic analysis as pioneered by Derrida. Language and symbols have huge significance in Tales of Nevèrÿon: in “The Tale of Gorgik”, Curly lectures Gorgik over the depth and significance of the few words the Child Empress utters to him; in “The Tale of Old Venn”, the rult that Venn describes from her time among the Rulvyn is a potent symbol, and this story also examines the utility of writing; in “The Tale of Small Sarg”, the slave collar that Sarg wears plays an important role in the relationship between Sarg and Gorgik beyond denotation of who is the slave … and so on.

And so, this is how Tales of Nevèrÿon transcends the sword and sorcery genre from which it takes its setting and inspiration. Delany transforms the setting into a meditation on the shape and scope of language, of writing, of money—the intersection of language and economics. It’s a slim volume that should not be underestimated; it reminds me a lot of the anthropological science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t know if this is a good entry point to Delany’s writing, but I’d also argue it isn’t a bad one.

When confronted by the uncertain future, we look to our past. We look to it for answers, for enlightenment, for inspiration. Mostly we look to it because we have nowhere else to look. This is natural, but it's also dangerous, for we have a tendency to romanticize the past: everything was better before we had electricity, urbanization, automation; life was simpler, slower, satisfying. Sometimes we get caught up in that idyllic illusion of a pastoral existence and forget about the disease, the injustice, and the poverty of the past. Yearning for certain elements of the past is quite all right, but let's not pretend the past is a paradise from which we have been expelled.

In Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America the past, present, and future collide against the landscape of an altered America. Brian Francis Slattery presents us with a meditation on the state of the American consciousnesses following a devastating economic collapse. The great machine of the American dream has sputtered and run down, and those who survived the tumultuous revolts in the first days now look back and wonder if it was ever a reality. Slattery captures this feeling perfectly in a passage early in the book:

The hippies knew it then…. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it.

The back cover of my edition describes Liberation as "a heist movie in the style of a hippie novel." I'm too young to have a solid grasp on what being a hippie truly means, but I think I understand what the summary is implying. With its stream-of-consciousness narrative style and a healthy dose of magical realism, Liberation is a very self-aware story that tries to live in the moment and ignore the linearity of its own plot. Scene transitions are nonexistent; past and present mix as flashbacks spill over into the contemporary narrative; death is merely another state of being, and not a very troublesome one at that. It's rather trippy, actually, in a hippie, "everything is connected," sort of way. And normally I don't like such books, because I find them too difficult to read for too little in return. In this case, however, I can make an exception, for this style is quite essential to Liberation's themes. While I was confused, especially at the beginning, I was entertained and moved enough to persevere until the end.

On the subject of this being "a heist movie," I will have to disagree. If you go into this expecting a gang-reunion one-last-job style of story, you're going to be disappointed—I was. I can understand why the back cover is going for this comparison, because Liberation does feature the reunion of the Slick Six, a band of awesome criminals, and their one last job against their most potent enemy, the Aardvark. Frankly though, it's not much of a heist, and its heist elements are incidental to the rest of the story.

The core of Liberation is the dual perspective that Slattery gives us on the collapse of the United States. The proximal cause of the collapse is the economy, or rather, a loss of faith in the economy. The dollar became worthless, people could no longer buy anything, and the United States government crumbled. The ultimate cause, however, is the full weight of America's history finally catching up to it, "history curling up on itself," as Maggot Boy Johnson puts it. In his final confrontation with Marco, the Aardvark says:

We're history's agents and its slaves. It has made us do its bidding, made us go around the wheel again and take the whole country with us. But now it has no more use for us. Kill me. Then kill yourself. Then it's done, we go into a book somewhere, and everyone else can go on living their lives.

Liberation is predicated upon this cyclical view of history. From the resurrection of the slave trade to the marauding of the New Sioux, everything seems to have its origins in the late 19th-century crucible from which sprang the modern United States. The ghosts of American cowboys and Indians and civil war veterans, spectres of a guilt-ridden past that seems chained to the collective American consciousness, constantly interrupt the events of the present day. There are some people who think they are better off after the collapse, people who have built a new society, started over, feel happy. Others, like Jeanette Winderhoek, miss the stability and civilized veneer of pre-collapse America. Both types of people, however, share a profound sense of loss, the idea that something about the United States has definitively ended. It's this vacuum that Marco and the rest of the Slick Six seek to fill with their plan to incite revolution; it's this vacuum to which the Aardvark refers in his fatalistic condemnation of Marco's victory.

And it is a victory, but it's not a very satisfying one for those personally involved. The Slick Six are not a ragtag bunch of criminals with hearts of gold, struggling against a great evil that has overtaken the United States. They are morally dubious at best, confidence tricksters and an assassin. Most of them don't even sign on to Marco's plot out of a sense of civic or patriotic duty; no, they sign up to take down the Aardvark so they can live the rest of their lives free from the threat of his vengeance. Marco himself is haunted by his past, by his own unlikely abilities that have allowed him to survive so long. Marco is more than a man; he's a myth, a legend whispered on the tongues of those who grabbed onto the pulley of America's collapse and rode its descent to the top. The Aardvark, once a client of Marco's, respects his deadliness enough to dispatch after him a nameless assassin who, upon confronting Marco, confesses to a healthy amount of awe for Marco's prowess.

These living, postmodern, post-collapse myths carry over to the rest of the narrative as well. The New Sioux, the Americoids, the Circus of Industrial Destruction, are all kinds of legends set against the backdrop of a failed United States. It is a smörgåsbord of post-apocalyptic enclaves, a choice of presentation that feels very realistic, which is in stark contrast to the more unrealistic aspects of the book.

Indeed, Slattery lathers on the lyrical prose that often accompanies magical realism. It is somewhat reminiscent of [a:Salman Rushdie|3299|Salman Rushdie|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1217934207p2/3299.jpg] or [a:Haruki Murakami|3354|Haruki Murakami|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1285812707p2/3354.jpg]: in the sense of the former, Liberation is almost a post-colonial ballad for America, the catharsis that the American Revolution never quite brought; of the latter, Slattery captures the tone of a book that has comfortably broken down the barriers between genres. If one wants to get pedantic, Liberation is certainly fantasy, in the sense that the living converse with the dead and some people have preternatural aptitude for killing. But it's fantasy in the sense that the entire story itself is a fable, beginning and ending with Marco and surveying the state of American society in between. When I said Liberation is a meditation by Slattery, I am not exaggerating; that lyrical prose is often too dense, too thoughtful, too much. It contributes to the confounding state sustained by his stream-of-consciousness style, and that is going to turn a lot of people away from this book. Which is a shame, really, because if one gets past this initial resistance, Liberation is completely worthwhile.

The first time Liberation seized me and wouldn't let go is when Slattery began describing the new slave trade. It is depressing even to entertain the notion that we could so quickly slide back into such a violation of human rights and dignity. Not only has slavery been reestablished, but thanks in part to help from the Aardvark, it is flourishing:

Our peculiar institution is everywhere now. The slave markets are social events, with electricity, strings of Christmas lights, girls dressed in a hundred and five colors; bands made of junting guitars, spitting horns, skittering drums; carts with yellow umbrellas selling curried mutton and green beans, tamales with chiles; horses clapping their hooves against the ground, sweating in the heat while clowns on stilts with pump accordions let a flock of balloons escape into the sky. Jeannette Winderhoek is appalled. They should have gone through the proper procedures. They should have had the debates, covered the contingencies, resettled the uninhabited territory between individual and property rights. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of legal questions scream to be answered, and they'll keep screaming for Jeannette Winderhoek until she strangles the law inside her and burns the corpse.

The above quotation is a good example of how Slattery can get carried away with his description, but it also demonstrates why this new slave trade is so sinister. This is not a foreign power that has occupied the United States and enslaved its citizens. Two members of the Slick Six sell themselves into slavery because they are starving. And the slaves are used as disposable labourers meant to be used up and tossed away. It is a harsh, depressing melody that Slattery has composed.

I keep on emphasizing how much I agree with this book's depiction of America's collapse, how much I like the use of history as the ultimate cause. But I do not want to be the haughty Canadian condemning the United States for its mistakes (Canada has made plenty of its own mistakes, believe you me). No big surprise: this book is not all lollipops and rainbows. It is in some ways an indictment of America's past, but because of the way in which Slattery manipulates past, present, and future, that is not all Liberation is. Rather, it is a look at life after the collapse that takes into account the effects of history on our consciousness, our culture, our way of thinking about how we live. The communities and lifestyles that Slattery depicts find their origin somewhere in America's past, whether it is the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the turn of the twentieth century. Because when the future fails you, where else can you turn but the past?

I find this very fascinating, because history and nostalgia are only now beginning to have any meaning for me. I am finally of an age where I can begin to appreciate the significance of events contemporary to my life. I cannot predict—no one can predict—how such events, like the September 11th attacks, will be judged by future generations. But I am old enough now to start glimpsing how these events influence the present day. As individuals, we are very much products of our generation, of the society that raises us and educates us. Slattery extends this to American society in general, proposing that it is a product of its own history.

As a novel Liberation is far from perfect. The structure is sloppy, almost non-existent; the villain is lacklustre; the plot is mostly a framework for Slattery's descriptions and ruminations, which make up most of the book. Yet it still managed to grab me and move me. This is what all fiction should aspire to do, and this is my golden standard of success. I cannot laud Liberation by calling it a masterpiece, or a tour-de-force, or any other of those terms often associated with technical brilliance. However, as I hope this review communicates to you, Liberation made me think and wonder about where we are today, as a society, and where we might be going in the future. That, to me, is an invaluable experience.

I am officially whelmed by this book. Exoveterinary studies sounds like a cool field, and all the strange animal descriptions reminded me of Animorphs, which I guess is always a good thing. Zenn Scarlett is a very whelming book, however: it is competent in every technical respect, but it does not inspire me or grab me. Christian Schoon’s imagination is rich, but his rendering of it on the page leaves something to be desired.

Our eponymous heroine is taking the tests needed to become an exovet novice. For some reason, exoveterinarianism is a monastic kind of thing. She lives on Mars, at the cloister run by her uncle, and is pretty good with the animals. Too good, in fact—she has some kind of psychic rapport with them, except that should be impossible, because psychic stuff is fake. Oh, and mysterious sabotage keeps occurring, and Zenn keeps getting the blame. So we have all the ingredients for a good mystery, for something that would keep me engaged. I was ready for Zenn to get mixed up in some high-stakes, pulse-pounding action.

What we get instead is … hmm. I’m not sure if it’s just that this book aims at a younger target audience than I was expecting, or if it just doesn’t pitch its tone quite right, but Zenn Scarlett reads like an after-school TV show. The villains are all a little over the top. The conflicts are all very mundane. Most of this story is just small town shenanigans transplanted to Mars. Replace “aliens” with “outsiders” and the townies become your standard closed-minded rural folk who don’t want to see the city slickers around. The plot progression is eminently predictable—like, I had most of the plot figured out after the first few chapters, and even with the few twists that Schoon threw in here or there, none of it was very surprising. Zenn is the Encyclopedia Brown of exovet stories.

Unfortunately, the novelty that might be acquired from having a setting on Mars is belied by the utter waste of such an amazing planet. For the longest time, I was trying to figure out how everyone was living there—were they in domes, had the planet been terraformed? I was worried Schoon had just overlooked that one small niggling detail. To his credit, he eventually tosses in an explanation that some kind of force-field is keeping the atmosphere “pressurized” up to a certain altitude. (No mention of where the nitrogen/oxygen ratio required for human life is coming from.) Still, Mars is a special place. I kind of feel like you don’t use it in your science fiction unless you’re willing to deal with it in the right way, willing to accord it that gravitas it demands as our closest planet and most likely candidate for colonization. The way Schoon describes living on Mars, however, it might as well be any extraterrestrial planet. This is a waste of the Red Planet!

If these aspects of the story underwhelm, there are some redeeming moments that bump the book back up into whelming territory. There is some cool technology at work here to work with these large animals. The “in soma” pods and the regeneration tool (I can’t be bothered to find its name) are neat ideas. Similarly, Zenn herself is not a terrible protagonist, though I do find her a rather flat character. The cliffhanger at the end of the novel (yes, this is merely a set up for a larger story, surprise surprise) is genuinely interesting—though, again, I think I’ve kind of got it mostly figured out already.

If you are trapped in an airport, or at an insufferable relative’s house, or you’re waiting for the rain to stop before you dig up that body, this is a perfectly pleasant book to pick up and pass the time. The story is OK, the characters are OK, and the writing is … yeah, OK. And that is OK, I guess. But that’s about all I can say.

I’m very glad that no one asked me what I was reading when I was reading Carry On, because at first I was not sure I could describe it succinctly. How do you quickly sum up a book that is a fictional story based on fanfiction written by a character in another fictional story, with the series inspiring the fanfiction itself fictional. That is, in Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, Carry On is Cath’s epic Simon Snow fanfic, her “parallel telling” and Simon/Baz ship that she then finishes differently from Gemma T. Leslie’s version of the story! In Cath’s universe, Simon Snow is the equivalent of Harry Potter. As Rowell herself has said, however, this version of Carry On is not Cath’s. It’s Rowell writing Simon Snow, rather than Rowell writing Cath writing Simon Snow, because Simon Snow would not leave her alone. I find that very interesting.

About two thirds of the way through the book, however, I figured out how to describe this book: it’s what The Magicians should have been, in my opinion. And clearly someone on the marketing team was on this wavelength, because they got Lev Grossman to blurb it!

Like The Magicians, Carry On is a postmodern look at children’s and young adult fantasy stories. Rowell takes the familiar tropes of Chosen Ones, prophecies, magical schools hidden within the mundane world, etc., and plays with them. Simon Snow is the “worst Chosen One” there could ever be; his friend Penelope is like an even-smarter, even more competent Hermione; Baz is Draco Malfoy if Draco were a dragon and gay and rooming with Harry. The Mage, who is not just Dumbledore but also Gandalf and all sorts of “wise mentor” figures. Like Quentin, Simon Snow discovers that being let into the secret of the magical community does not mean being accepted by that community, nor does magic prove particularly … well, magical.

I feel like The Magicians gets sidetracked, however, is seduced by its own fascination with deconstructing these fantasy tropes. In contrast, Carry On stays the course. It’s as if Rowell asked, “What if Harry Potter acknowledged that Harry is generally incompetent and that he is, in some way, responsible for Voldemort?” (I’m not saying Harry is responsible for Voldemort; I am saying he’s generally incompetent.) This book is clever, and it is aware of its cleverness, but that cleverness never gets in the way of telling a good story. And so we wind up in this situation where, on the one hand, Rowell is playing with the tropes of young adult fantasy, but on the other hand, she is also using them straight in many cases—much like Delany in my recent read of Tales of Nevèrÿon, albeit with less semiotic subtext.

There are two ways any author can endear a story to me: characters and writing style. Rowell nails both.

Simon is a dolt, but Penelope, Agatha, and Baz are all really fascinating. In particular, I loathed Agatha—and I felt a little bad for this. Because of the way Rowell tells the story from multiple perspectives, we get inside Agatha’s head, so we learn why she is so distant from Simon, why she breaks up with him, what her worries are. Towards the end of the book, I admit, too, that I started rooting for Agatha and her desire to escape this crazy World of Mages. Nevertheless, I still can’t like her. And I like that I can’t like her; I love it when authors give me unlikable characters whom I nevertheless find interesting and sympathetic.

Similarly, Baz is a delightful antihero. It’s not just his sarcastic voice, the way he is so clearly pissed off with himself for falling in love with someone he has declared his sworn enemy. Again, Rowell is using some very stock, very tired tropes here, but she breathes fresh life into them with the way she writes these characters. Baz is a dynamic character; his arc is long and broad, from accepting that there is an alternative to fighting Simon all the way to becoming accustomed to the idea that they might get a happy ending—or at least something that doesn’t end in death.

All the while, Rowell’s writing just makes this story so much fun to read. Her humour and style creates exactly the kind of wordplay that I enjoy:

“But …” Agatha is staring at the two of them. “Baz is dark. He’s evil.”

“I thought you never believed that,” I say.

“I absolutely believed it,” she says. “You told us he was a vampire, Simon. Wait—” She turns to him, then back to me. “—did he just now admit that he is a vampire?”

I pull at the hair on my neck. I can tell I’m making an idiotic face. “I’m not sure it’s that simple….”

“That Baz is a vampire?”

“No, he’s definitely a vampire,” I say. “I guess it is that simple. But you can’t tell anyone, Agatha.”

“Simon, you’ve already told everyone. You’ve been telling everyone since we were third years.”

“Yeah, but nobody believed me.”

“I believed you.”

I was laughing out loud by the end of that page—it just reads like something from a comedy sketch. Rowell balances these moments of humour with moments of madness and darkness, too, whether it’s the Mage’s descent into murderous insanity or Simon’s melancholy over this being his last year at Watford, over each day being the last of those days that he will have here. In this way, Carry On taps into a very real, raw type of teenage emotion without going over the top.

That’s about all I have to say about Carry On. If you need more thoughts, head over to my friend Aubrey’s review. I’ve had this book ever since last Christmas; my dad bought it for me because I liked Fangirl so much. And, as with most books, it sat around my TBR pile until Aubrey’s review—and the need for something really, unsurprisingly fun to clean my palate after the disaster that was Trans Voices—galvanized me into picking it up. If you are a Harry Potter fan, or even like me, just someone who read the series once when you were younger, do yourself a favour and read this.

I might need to stop requesting non-fiction books from NetGalley, because it seems like I haven’t been very successful with them. In this case I don’t know if I just didn’t read the description properly or didn’t understand it, but I thought Trans Voices: Becoming Who You Are was by a trans author and comprised longer-form interviews with transgender people. Instead, this inaccurately titled book is by a cisgender gay man who intersperses his medicalized, somewhat discomforting commentary with cherry-picked excerpts from interviews he conducted with trans people. (Also, the description itself is terrible and even worse than the book is.)

Trigger warning for possibly transphobic, medicalized language quoted in this review.

The structure of this book is great; Declan Henry doesn’t just address binary transgender people but specifically devotes a chapter to nonbinary people as well. He highlights issues of discrimination against transgender people, both overt—anything from slurs to physical and emotional violence—and more subtle—such as the way many countries do not fund/subsidize hormone treatments and gender reassignment surgery. And throughout the book, Henry makes it clear that the trans community is not monolithic:

There is no single authentic expression of trans identity. Trans people have a wide diversity of appearances, personal characteristics, interests, experiences and viewpoints…. There are many degrees of transition and options available to trans people…. Surgical status is not a reliable indicator as to how a person identifies…. Trans people have many different opinions about terminology, with some preferring medicalised terms and others preferring community terms.

So, basically Henry is saying that different people prefer different labels; different people have differing opinions on how they want to perform their gender and how or whether they want to make a physical transition. This is all well and good, and it is a promising beginning to the book. I don’t have much doubt that Henry’s intentions are good here, that he just wants to share trans perspectives with others. But I don’t review a book on intentions. I review a book based on what I read and how it makes me feel, and Trans Voices made me (a cisgender man, for what it’s worth) very uncomfortable with Henry’s appropriation of trans voices.

I call it appropriation because instead of letting transgender people tell their story, he embeds quotations from interviews within a framework of his making. Some of these are mere paragraphs, a little bit of “authentic trans flavour” to whatever he has chosen to say at that point. Admittedly, others are longer (my electronic Kindle copy doesn’t do a great job of differentiating between quoted material and Henry’s words, with multi-paragraph quotes not having a quotation mark at the beginning of each subsequent paragraph like they should, and no other visual indicator) and hint at more developed narratives. Again, however, these “voices” are only used in service to Henry’s thesis, rather than the other way around. Hence, rather than a strong euphony of diverse trans experiences, we get a watered-down, overly academic and medically-fixated look at transgender-related phenomena through the eyes of Declan Henry.

As I mentioned earlier, Henry points out that surgery is not the be-all-end-all goal or metre-stick for understanding transition. Yet he certainly spends a lot of time talking about the details:

For trans women, the most commonly undergone genital surgery is vaginoplasty…. However there are also other vaginoplasty techniques, using different tissues, and also some trans women may decide to undergo orchidectomy without any vaginoplasty. As previously mentioned, some trans women do not undergo any genital surgery as they feel either it’s not appropriate or necessary for them to express their identity, or they are fearful of surgical experiences, or there are health reasons.

or:

Trans people assigned female at birth may wear chest binders whilst awaiting chest surgery. The binders are sometimes tight and often result in tissue damage, as well as chest infections because they make breathing shallower.

These types of sentences are the rule rather than exception. This is what made me so uncomfortable with this book. This language is so clinical; it feels invasive, and it makes me feel like a voyeur. I know we aren’t talking about any one specific person here, and certainly, as a cisgender person, I could benefit to understand the surgeries that trans people might have or the other techniques they use to express their identity. But if I’m going to learn about these things, I’m better off hearing it from an actual trans person who isn’t going to reduce it to a matter of meat.

It’s just so dehumanizing. And in a book proposing to give a voice to trans people, of all things. Remember, Henry is writing this as a gay man who feels that it’s his responsibility to educate people about the misrepresented, unknown trans community. How would he feel if a straight person decided to write a book called Gay Voices like this one, and started talking in clinical detail about how gay men have sexual intercourse? That would be just as inappropriate as this book. (It probably exists, come to think of it.)

Also, what’s up with that cover?! I normally don’t care much about covers, but I don’t know what the artist/marketing people were thinking here. That the person appears androgynous I understand, but monochromatic with that splash of colour? Is that supposed to be symbolic for this book “shedding light” on the hidden stories of trans people? Then that positioning of the title so it covers the person’s mouth, figuratively saying, “Don’t worry, poor trans person! I, Declan Henry, will speak for you and give you a voice!”



I am reminded of the way settlers co-opt and colonize Indigenous issues all the while claiming to give Indigenous people a voice. At the time of writing this review, CanLit is embroiled in something of a controversy over Joseph Boyden. For a while, many Indigenous people have been questioning his claims of Indigenous heritage and pointing out inconsistencies in how he represents himself, and this news is finally bubbling to the surface of the mainstream press and wider Canadian consciousness (including my own). One of the reasons this is so upsetting, as far as I understand it, is because Boyden has been profiting off assuming a role that is not his; at the same time, he provides sanitized picture of Indigenous cultures and issues that cleaves to what settlers would like to see.

Henry would have you believe that transgender people do not have much of a voice, and so it is necessary for outsiders to step into their community, interview them, and talk over them. Henry, unlike Boyden, is at least clear about his identity. But by speaking over trans people, he is erasing them, exactly counter to his stated objective. Trans Voices ignores the fact that trans people already have a voice, have multiple voices, and they have been talking and shouting and making media about their experiences long before this book was a gleam in Henry’s eye.

I think the most dangerous thing about Trans Voices is that, on the surface, it seems so good. Like I said at the top of this review, I didn’t pay enough attention and thought this would be a very different book. I can only imagine that many cis people are going to pick this up, read it, and think they somehow “understand” trans people better now—or worse, they’ll start transplaining to trans people using the medical terminology they’ve gleaned from this. Reading a book about a marginalized community of which you are not a member does not suddenly give you the ability to speak for them, or of them, or about them. By this token, I can’t stand up and yell about how this book should anger trans people—that’s not my call to make. (At least two trans people, judging from the foreword and afterword, liked this book. That is their prerogative.) I’m yelling about how this book angers me and, as a cisgender person, I’m telling my fellow cis people not to read it.

Go read an #ownvoices book instead. By the time you’re reading this I’m going to have read If I Was Your Girl, so check back for my review of that. Also, Here We Are, which is out January 24, features some trans writers as well; I can’t recommend it enough.