I want to teach high school because I want to stay young forever. Seriously. There is nothing like spending your day around teenagers, feeling their energy and their enthusiasm, being exposed to their perspectives in the world. At the moment my teaching career has shifted sideways, and I’m working with adults who need their high school diplomas (and that has its own rewards). Even then, I can still stay young by reading YA.

I started writing reviews on Goodreads when I was 18, when I could still comfortably call myself a young adult. Now, at 27, that stage of my life is, like my hairline, receding. Whereas 18-year-old Ben could review Unboxed and other YA from a YA reader’s perspective, I’m having to come to terms with the fact that I can only review it from an adult-who-is-reading YA perspective. Don’t get me wrong: I think these labels are largely marketing, that YA novels can be high quality literature, and that adults should read YA and can find it relevant. I just want to highlight that what I get from a YA novel isn’t necessarily what teenage readers might get from the same story, and that is an important distinction.

Still, in Unboxed Non Pratt deals with a subject that all adults will recognize. Sometimes I think the hardest thing about getting older is not the physical process of aging but the inevitability of leaving people, or rather one’s relationships with people, behind. Regardless of the details, we can all relate to Alix and her mixed feelings about reuniting with Ben, Zara, and Dean to unearth a time capsule five years on from its burial, with their now-deceased friend Millie an omnipresent ghost over the night’s proceedings.

There’s few things better than a writer who knows novellas. Unboxed is a surgical strike of storytelling. Like, I’m disappointed it’s not a full novel simply because I want me more Pratt—but I can see the wisdom of this particular length. This is a lean, mean, storytelling machine where every scene pays off, every conversation reveals more about these characters. And it is all towards this theme of what friendship actually means and whether it is OK for friends to drift apart as they change. I also think this is a book that will really appeal to more reluctant readers, both in terms of subject matter and length, and in my opinion any book that is a gateway drug to reading is a good thing.

One thing I find very fascinating is Pratt’s decision to tell the story entirely from Alix’s perspective. Why no split POV? Why Alix in particular? (Pratt has since answered this question on Twitter! Yay interwebs.)

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to talk about Alix being gay, since we learn it at the beginning of the book. I love the way Pratt weaves Alix’s sexuality, and her complex feelings about hiding her discovery of it from her friends five years ago, throughout the other developments in this book. Alix isn’t a gay character for the sake of having a gay character in some kind of tokenist move; neither, however, is her sexuality her sole defining trait. Rather, it’s a part of Alix’s wider identity, and the conflict she feels as the night goes on is an interesting foil to her otherwise forthright, take-charge attitude. Pratt clearly delineates a special connection from Millie to Alix to the rest of the group: they point out that Millie knew the others would come if Alix asked on her behalf. And throughout the evening, despite her anxiety about coming out to her friends, Alix is a driving force in this activity.

Millie’s role in the book is also fascinating just because she’s, you know, dead. She is a posthumous character in the most literal sense; aside from that last letter, everything we learn about her comes from how the others speak about her. As is often the case, they are reluctant to speak ill of the dead. To Alix, Ben, Zara, and Dean—at least on this night of nights—Millie is mythologized, larger than life, this wise and sympathetic creature who knew them better than they knew themselves. In some ways, this is true: Millie is quite literally the force that gets them together; she plays quite a big role in the time capsule. But it’s also a comment on how we project our hopes and fears on other people, and how we sometimes need other people to validate our choices.

Because I’m a wizened, old literary snob, I saw a lot of the plot points coming and so wasn’t moved by the twists per se—but I still teared up at the end, there. If you’ve read it, you know the part I’m talking about: page 128, after Alix has read her letter, that scene of unimpeachable and intense connection…. And that’s, to borrow a John Crichton turn of phrase, what I’m talking about. When you know it’s coming, you know exactly what’s going to happen, but the author still manages to sneak up and sucker punch you right in the feels—that is wonderful.

Pratt doesn’t just tell stories. She makes characters come alive, and she does it with such precision and timing. In less than 150 pages we meet four dynamic individuals with flaws and doubts and questionable choices of boyfriends. We only get to join them for a night, but what a night. Unboxed is about facing the past to confront the future, and it’s a story of uncertainty and friendship and bonding that adolescents and adults alike are going to recognize. It’s edifying without being patronizing; it’s sharp and clear but does not cut.

And it offers no false promises.

There is a tidiness to a lot of YA stories about friendship, particularly the kind that make it to the big screen, that makes me uneasy. There is a promise, explicit or implicit, that everything works out in the end. You spend your whole story worrying about going off to different colleges but, hey, it all works out for the best. We’re so afraid of loose ends in our narratives. But it’s those loose ends that make them real. Unboxed ends on what I would term a positive and uplifting note—but Pratt offers no reassurance, no promise that this Freaksome Four will remain reunited or intact. She can’t, because they can’t, because life is unpredictable. Life gives you stomach cancer and abusive parents and crap boyfriends and divorced parents who move away and you just have to deal.

But if you’re lucky, you don’t have to deal with it alone.

I like it. Maybe not as much as Remix or Trouble, but they were novels, and I’m really biased in favour of novels. Unboxed is about as good as novellas get for me, though, and it really is just delightful to meet more of Pratt’s characters and hear her uncompromising, empathetic words again.

It has been nearly a year since I read Am I Normal Yet?, the first book in Holly Bourne’s Spinster Club trilogy. That was Evie’s story of her struggle with OCD and related issues. With some nice summer weather (finally), I decided it was time to tackle the sequel, wherein Amber spends a summer in America, working at a summer camp run by her mother and stepfather. I’m not as big a fan of Amber as I am of Evie, so it was hard to let the latter’s voice go. Nevertheless, Bourne again demonstrates her pitch-perfect characterization of teenagers and their parents and her mastery of the ambiguous happy ending.

Trigger warnings for the book and this review: alcoholism and child abuse/neglect.

I charged Amber with the crime of not being Evie at the beginning of this review. She’s guilty of it—but that’s a good thing, right? Nothing is worse than an author who can’t write characters with unique voices. So it’s good that Bourne can write more than one UK teenager. Obviously, since Amber doesn’t share Evie’s anxiety and compulsiveness, she is more whimsical in how she behaves. She drinks and generally gets up into mischief … yet, paradoxically, there is steel beneath this carefree exterior. Amber is afraid of losing control as a result of her experiences with her mother.

My sympathies lie, for the most part, with Amber. After all, in addition to being the protagonist, she is also a teenager, while her mom is a parent. Nevertheless, despite the first-person narration, Bourne still manages to portray Amber and her mom’s fraught relationship with depth and complexity. We see her mom’s pain, the daily struggle of a recovering alcoholic—but we see it through the eyes of the child whom it has affected so dearly. And, yeah, Amber says some harsh things, does things that might not be advisable—but it all makes sense in the context of what she has gone through. How Hard Can Love Be? neither sugarcoats nor sensationalizes the life of a recovering alcoholic and her estranged teenage daughter: Bourne carefully distills the truth, for all its vinegar.

It’s amusing watching a UK author write about the States. Aided by her travels across the country, Bourne includes enough geography and some rich descriptions of Yosemite National Park. She also has a lot of fun in the vocabulary and cultural differences between the US and the UK (“poo-dank” hehe). I think she slips up at one point—she has Kyle talk about “year groups”, which should be grades in the US—but for the most part, the “British fish in American waters” trope is strong here. To her credit, Bourne doesn’t overuse it: Amber spends most of the novel at the camp run by her mother and stepfather, so we don’t see her interacting too much with the rest of American society.

I thought I would miss the rest of the Spinster Club dearly given that an ocean separates the other two from Amber. Fortunately, Bourne’s use of Skype chats and emails remedies this. Lottie and Evie’s distinct voices, as they war over the keyboard or eat cheesy snacks on webcam, are such a delight. Once again, it just feels so good to hear these three distinct and diverse female teenage voices in a novel that is not just feminist but about feminism. If Am I Normal Yet? is an intro to feminism, then How Hard Can Love Be? is the next-level course that introduces some more complicated topics, like the Female Chauvinist Pig.

Melody is such an interesting character, and I love how Bourne sets her up as a foil to explicitly deconstruct the “bimbo cheerleader villain” who so often appears in stories like this. You know, the one who robs the less-conventionally-attractive protagonist of her conventionally-attractive paramour, at least until the climax of the book? Bourne subverts this all here, and she does it in a very open way, pointing out to her presumably teenage audience the traps that women fall into as a result of the patriarchy.

Probably the most resonant note of the entire book, however, is when Lottie and Evie attempt to persuade Amber to go for it with Kyle, despite her fears over getting hurt. I so cannot wait to read the next book and just be inside Lottie’s head; here’s what she has to say:

Lottie’s face was read, and she punched the air. “It won’t make the world change for the better! It won’t make me change for the better. I won’t grow, if I just accept what’s what. The world won’t grow. The same unfair shit will just keep happening, and yes it’s easier to roll over and say, ‘That’s too hard and annoying, I just want to eat some pie’ but it’s not the right thing…”

Evie smiled slowly. “So you gotta fight for your right to be ruddy miserable?”

Lottie patted her shoulder. “Yes! Exactly. Because because because IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO.”

Although I don’t entirely agree with the sentiments expressed in this section of the book, I love that Bourne tries to tease out the distinctions between doing what makes one “happy” (for some value thereof) and doing “the right thing”. This are not always the same, but sometimes we are told that they are (usually when a company wants to sell us something). Amber’s fear of getting hurt in the future is stopping her from growing and changing and making herself (and potentially her world) a better place in the present. This is a powerful moment, a powerful scene, and it’s really well done—as is, let’s face it, the rest of the book.

How Hard Can Love Be? establishes in my mind a definite trend for Holly Bourne’s endings. She likes happy endings, but she also loves realism. I’ve seen that in both of the other novels of hers that I’ve read. Bourne likes to show her readers that the possibility always exists to be all right, but she also reminds us that life never promises you’ll stay that way. I like books that are optimistic while still reminding us that there are no promises, that nothing is ever a given.

So why not 5 stars like the first book of this series? Honestly, it’s just my preference for Evie as a narrator over Amber, and my preference for Evie’s adventures over Amber’s romance. It’s just not my thing, and watching Amber fall for Kyle isn’t my cup of tea. If it’s yours, and you like everything else I’ve said, then you’re going to love this book. Bourne’s writing is tight and smart and compassionate; her voice is so valuable to YA,and I hope books like this keep coming.

My reviews of the Spinster Club trilogy:
← Am I Normal Yet? | What’s a Girl Gotta Do? →

I love protagonists who screw up. Perfect protagonists are boring! In particular, I love protagonists who acknowledge their flaws and the fact they will make mistakes before they make them. I also love books that talk so explicitly about feminism and position their protagonists as feminists. Am I Normal Yet? is Holly Bourne’s sometimes sad, sometimes funny, always compassionate portrayal of a girl trying to live with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and Evie is a flawed protagonist and self-declared feminist (and spinster!). She tries hard to be good—tries hard to be normal—but she makes mistakes, just like the rest of us, and eventually some of those mistakes catch up to her.

People I follow on Twitter and watch on YouTube have been raving about Bourne for a while now, so I figured it was time to see what I have been missing. So I ordered all of her books from Book Depository (yay free transatlantic shipping!)—go big or go home, right? I rightly should have started with her earliest works, but I couldn’t resist this first book of the Spinster Club trilogy. It was the tail end of my week off, and I wanted something good to read, you know? I had an inkling that Am I Normal Yet? would hit the spot, and it totally does, in every respect.

Let’s get right into the best parts: Bourne’s portrayal of feminism here is so interesting and refreshing. Firstly, she does not patronize younger readers. Her three 16-year-old protagonists are fully capable of having intense philosophical and theoretical discussions on a high level of gender roles, just as real-life 16-year-old girls are—while simultaneously lapsing into debates about boys and friends, just as real-life 16-year-old girls are. The idea that you have to be one or the other, feminist or “slut”, brainy or bimbo, good girl or bad, is a total false dilemma. Bourne’s 16-year-olds are every bit as complicated and messy and imperfect as real 16-year-olds, and that is awesome.

Secondly, the feminism portrayed here is bottom-up, rather than top-down, and I love it. No adult shows up and says, “Hey, let’s form a school club for feminism and call it the Spinster Club!” It’s something that Evie, Amber, and Lottie come up with on their own, together, their own unique brand of feminism. This is an exciting and empowering idea to expose teenage girls to, and it speaks directly contrary to attempts by corporations to co-opt feminism as a kind of cool, commodified, consumerist movement. With the Spinster Club, Bourne shows us that feminism can—and arguably must—be a very personal movement. The Spinsters are engaging with issues related to feminism that affect their lives directly, such as whether one can date a stereotypically macho guy and still be feminist, or the extent to which one should change one’s behaviour and tastes to get with a guy. If you want a book that’s going to hook your kid on feminism, Am I Normal Yet? is a rather strong contender. It drops a ton of f-bombs (both feminism and fuck), but it’s not a textbook. This is feminism in action, and it’s beautiful to behold.

When they struck upon the idea of calling themselves spinsters, I had to photograph the page and send it to the friend—a self-declared spinster as well—who lent me Spinster. Evie, Amber, and Lottie’s attitude towards the word is precisely what Kate Bolick talks about in that book: they are reclaiming spinster as a term for a woman who does not define herself by her attachment, or non-attachment, to a man:

“Think about it,” I continued. “When boys get older, if they don’t find someone they get called bachelors. We get called spinsters. There isn’t a word that means male spinster. Just like there isn’t a word for a guy who sleeps around—whereas there are TONS for girls. The English language itself is sexist—it reinforces these overgeneralized, screwed-up notions about how boys and girls are allowed to be…”

So they reclaim spinster to mean “you value your female relationships as much as your male ones…. Being a spinster means not altering who you are, what you believe in, and what you want just because it makes a boy’s life easier.” In this way, these three young women very directly engage with the concept of patriarchy and the fact that society makes so much out of women being objects. It starts from birth, with women being given their father’s last name (which they are, traditionally, expected to retire in favour of the husband’s name upon marriage). By adolescence, girls learn to define themselves and their value based on their relationships with boys: do boys find them attractive (or “bangable” as Evie might put it)?

Despite these declarations of feminist independence, however, the message here is neither misandrist nor anti-relationship in any way. The spinsters still crush over cute guys, and they make some mistakes along the way, which leads to conflicts among themselves and with others people. And this is where the OCD part of the story really comes to the fore. Bourne could very well have gone and written just a feminist YA novel and it would be awesome—but no, Am I Normal Yet? has to be both a feminist and mental health novel and rock the world instead. Pfft. Overachiever much.

Evie’s fear of relapse and her burning desire to be “normal” drives the whole plot, of course, and what’s interesting is what Bourne does with that. I’m going to skip over Ethan (who’s a dick) and go straight to Oli, because the scene between Evie and Oli at the end of their date is when I knew that Bourne had me hooked. As I put it in a tweet, she next-levelled me:

Just as I was about to leave, I looked at myself one more time in the mirror. Really looked. My hair was up, my top clung in all the right bits, a bag hung off my shoulder. I looked like any other sixteen-year-old on her way to a party. From the outside, nobody could tell what had happened to me, and I’d worked so hard to make it that way. Then I understood why I’d done what I did.

I enjoyed being the healthy one. That was it.

For the first time ever, I was the normal one.

And it had felt intoxicatingly good…

That’s what I’m talking about! When I say I like protagonists who make mistakes, I’m not really talking about Evie’s fear of revealing her condition to her new friends, or the fool she makes of herself in the way she behaves with Guy—I’m talking about her betrayal of Oli. Instead of seizing a perfect moment to sympathize with someone, to find someone who would understand her struggle, Evie twists it around and uses it as a moment to validate her attempt at normality. This is such a clever, heart-wrenching twist; it keeps the novel from becoming too preachy or clichéd, and at the same time it forces us to see how desperate Evie is to be seen as a functional adolescent.

It should come as no surprise or spoiler, though, that Evie’s OCD plays a significant role in the climax. After fighting so long to pretend to be normal, the stress of that pretense is too much. Watching Evie finally break down is probably the most difficult part of this book. It reminds me of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls, which also pulls no punches, and also features the protagonist’s younger sister finally seeing the true injuries of a mental illness. It’s the reason “Content is not suitable for younger readers” is plastered across the back of this book—but the inclusion of this scene and its consequences for Evie is so important that to leave it out would be a travesty. By writing this, Bourne acknowledges that mental illness is not something one simply experiences and then walks away from. The denouement of Am I Normal Yet? is basically a PSA for supporting people with mental health issues—but Bourne also returns to the feminist theme and points out the ways in which we gender mental health and the harmful consequences for both men and women.

Am I Normal Yet? is not as bleak as Wintergirls by any measure. However, the two books also share unique narrative conceits to capture the protagonist’s voice and mental state. I like the offset “bad” and “good” thoughts, though I confess I wasn’t a huge fan of Evie’s bubbliness at the beginning of the book, and I’m a little curmudgeonly about this trend of SHOUTING AT THE READER when we have perfectly good italics to get the job done. Nevertheless, these stylistic quibbles on my part do nothing to diminish the substance of the book, which is nothing short of brilliant.

We place so much social capital on this idea of normal when it is always an illusion and this obsession with it just exacerbates the mental health issues we want to treat and avoid. Am I Normal Yet? smashes the myth of normality while simultaneously smashing the patriarchy. There is so much joy and laughter for the reader in here—Bourne and her characters are so full of life and such fun to be around—but it comes with several intense moments. When Lottie asked, “Why are you here?” at the very end of the book, I broke down and cried a little bit. Because friendship can never be unconditional but we always hope they’ll be there in the end. Because feminism is hard enough when you’re a privileged white dude like me, let alone a 16-year-old girl with OCD constantly being told to be normal and pretty (but not too pretty) and smart (but not too smart) and slutty (but just the right amount of slutty). Because people are complicated, and Am I Normal Yet? gets that, and it shows you all their myriad complexities while telling a damn fine story in the process.

My reviews of the Spinster Club trilogy:
How Hard Can Love Be? →

With Radio Silence, Alice Oseman accomplishes the literary equivalent of knocking me over with a feather. I’d heard some good things about this book from people whose opinions I trust, yet still … I wasn’t expecting it to be this good. This captivating. Most importantly, this book has such strong portrayals of friendships, both platonic and romantic, and I love it so much.

Our protagonist is Frances Janvier. Head Girl at her school, on paper she is a star student: she has her UCAS statement all done, is on track to go to Cambridge, and just needs to ace these AS-level exams. In real life, of course, things are more complicated. She isn’t feeling all that connected to her school friends—they see her as a “study machine” more than the art-loving nerd she is. So Frances finds solace in an anonymous YouTube podcast called Universe City. And then she finds Aled.

This is a love story, but it’s not a love story. And Oseman would have won me over if that were the only thing I liked about this book.

This is still a love story, though, because Frances does love Aled, platonically, and he loves her back. It’s a love story because of Aled and Daniel’s complicated relationship. It’s a love story because of Frances and her mom, and in spite of Aled and Carys’ mom.

Indeed, there are so many great relationships in this book, I just want to break them down one by one.

Let’s start with the most obvious: Frances and Aled. Frances and Aled do not fall “in love”, and I love it. I’m tired of narratives where girl-meets-boy and they become friends and then they become “more than friends”. I want more narratives where friendship is enough. Because friendship is enough:

Everything with Aled was fun or good. Usually both. We started to realise that it didn’t matter what we did together, because we knew that if we were both there, we would have a good time.

Uggggh, this passage perfectly describes the way I feel about me and one of my friends. With some friends, you enjoy very specific things together; with others, you enjoy a variety of activities. And then there are some where the very act of being together is itself sufficient, and the activities are really just a bonus.

And I love that Oseman very clearly rules out romance. When Frances’ mother asks Frances if she likes Aled, Frances replies, “That’s a random question,” like it’s weird that her mother is even asking. I love this, because not only does it avert the romance trope, but it actively subverts the normalization of teenage hetero couplings. But if that isn’t enough, on the very next page, Frances reassures us in no uncertain terms that she and Aled don’t end up together. The book basically spoils itself!

Frances and Aled’s relationship isn’t always smooth, of course, and I like that too. This isn’t a fairy tale. Aled goes through some very rough experiences, including his mom’s outright abusive behaviour. I appreciate how Oseman approaches the complicated nature of these issues, the way she shows both Frances and Aled reacting and behaving just like the young, flawed human beings they are.

On a related note, the use of texting is stellar in this book. We see conversations between Frances and Aled, as well as between Frances and Raine. In both cases, I think Oseman nails the tone and diction and voice of certain types of texters. These conversations sound similar to how I converse with some of my friends via text (with some variation given my older age and penchant for grammatical sentences, even in text messages…). They sound quite genuine. This is difficult to do with texting in books sometimes.

Speaking of Raine, can we stop and appreciate her for a moment? Let’s do it.

Raine is my favourite character. She comes out of left field, just another minor background character at first, someone you can easily dismiss. Yet her presence just grows, slowly, until the sheer force of her will cannot be denied. She embodies the friend who is just there for you, no questions asked, no complaints. And then that climax, where she sees what Aled’s mom is trying to pull and she just takes charge and orders everyone else into the car so they can speed off to the station. Time and again, Raine proves herself both badass and awesome. I’d read more of her story.

A close second for favourite character is Frances’ mother. Oseman does something very interesting here. Frances’ mother acts as a kind of foil to Carol’s obviously horrible abuse. As terrible and messed up as Aled’s relationship with Carol is, Frances’ relationship with her mother is just all sorts of positive. Firstly, her mother is permissive and often complicit in some of Frances’ adolescent boundary-pushing—but never in the “I’m a cool mom” way, only in the “better that I know what/where/when than that you go around behind my back” kind of way. Frances’ mom is there for her, is supportive of her, is always ready to offer advice or ask questions. If anything, one might critique her character for being a little too one-dimensional in this regard. But that circles back to how she is a counterpart to Carol, I think, who is also somewhat one-note. Through Frances’ mom, Oseman includes a valuable example of a healthy mother-child relationship as contrast to the very unhealthy one that serves as some of the conflict for the last part of the book.

I’ve focused mostly on character in this review and not so much on plot, because honestly, the plot receded so much in my mind after I finished the book. What matters to this story is the way the characters interact with each other. There is a plot—several, in fact, and they are good. I love that Frances doesn’t get into Cambridge, that she has to deal with this set-back only to decide that maybe it’s actually for the best. I love that Frances gets some closure with Carys, discovering that Carys is, in fact, just a person and not this symbol that Frances might have turned her into in Frances’ mind. I love that the story ends on a hopeful note: it’s a happily ever after (at least for now).

There are queer characters here too, but their queerness is not in and of itself the story. Frances’ bisexuality is a part of her, something that informs her memory of Carys, but this is not a story of her coming out or coming to “accept” herself. Similarly, Aled’s demisexuality runs throughout the book. Oseman shows us how ace-spec people can be in relationships, and how Aled and Daniel’s relationship isn’t complicated so much because one of them is demi and the other is gay but because they’ve known each other for so long that they never really had proper conversations about it. Yet, as with Frances’ sexuality, Aled’s is not a main part of the book. This is not something that is easily resolved, tied up neatly, because that wouldn’t be fair. Sex and sexuality are complicated, and orientation and identity are not the same as behaviour, and Oseman acknowledges that by just showing the characters trying to figure things out, one step at a time.

Radio Silence is masterful. It goes to some dark places, but even in those dark moments, there is a core of hope and an unrelenting steel to Oseman’s writing. She creates characters and breathes life into their actions, makes them feel like real people, and shows time and again the value of friendships of all shades. This was a valuable read for me, and I hope, too, for many others.

I read young adult, or YA, for a lot of reasons. As I’ve said before, I read it to keep me young, or at least to keep me connected to the ideas and feelings of younger adults. It’s natural, as we grow older, to lose touch with those perspectives, especially as the world around us changes. Reading YA inoculates me, to some extent, against that. Moreover, YA novels often display so much courage. By this I don’t necessarily mean the writing itself is courageous (though that could certainly be the case). This is what I felt when reading Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and I will explain why in a bit.

Becky Albertalli delivers a story that might be described as “sweet”, as a romance or rom-com or whatever you might call it. The eponymous Simon is a gay teenager who isn’t out to anyone, not even his friends or family, except for a fellow gay teen at the same high school—but they only communicate through anonymous email exchanges. When a peer accidentally stumbles upon this exchange—good op-sec means not leaving yourself logged into your anonymous accounts on a school library computer, you know—he blackmails Simon, threatening to reveal Simon’s sexuality unless Simon arranges for him to have a shot at one of Simon’s close friends, Abby. Yet while this blackmail plot runs throughout the book and forms a significant part of the story, Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda is much more than that. It’s much more than a coming out story, or even a coming-of-age story. It’s about the strengths and tribulations of friendship, the angst of understandings, and ultimately, the courage to seize happiness in the face of the unknown.

I mean, it’s right there in the title: “vs the Homo sapiens agenda”. This is a play on the idea of the so-called “gay agenda” often floated as a straw man by conservative groups, which itself is a specific case of a more general tactic whereby marginalized people are accused of wielding out-sized amounts of power in some kind of shadowy conspiracy to silence privileged people. Albertalli turns this idea around on itself, pointing out in the process that the very people who rail against the “gay agenda” claim seldom acknowledge their own agenda—because, for a long time in our history, their agenda was (and to some extent still is) the mainstream agenda of our society. The Homo sapiens agenda, or to get more technical, the allocisheteronormative white supremacist patriarchal agenda (yeah, that’s a mouthful, glad that wasn’t the title) burdens us with assumptions about identity and behaviour: cis, straight, white, male are the defaults in society. You are assumed to be these things until otherwise—and if it turns out you aren’t one of those things, we reserve the right to judge you, even to the point of harming you, for having the audacity to be other.

Albertalli explores the Homo sapiens agenda on several levels, from the most mundane or simplest parts to the deepest and most poignant areas of our lives. Sometimes it’s the little things that are the best. For example, even Simon, who is gay, has to check himself a couple of times when he assumes that someone is straight or white just because these are the defaults that even he has internalized about his society. This is a good reminder of how experiencing a type of oppression doesn’t free you from assumptions and how these assumptions are themselves baked into our lives and our language.

On a deeper level, I love how Albertalli uses Simon’s ambivalence about coming out to help drive the story without problematizing being gay. That is, Simon still experiences a lot of trepidation about coming out—sadly, this is still realistic and the norm in our society, so it’s a natural thing to depict on the page. Yet at no point in Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda does anyone close to Simon ever actually shame him, judge him, or remotely make a negative comment about his sexuality. Even Martin, the blackmailer, makes it clear to Simon he doesn’t actually care about Simon’s sexuality; he’s exploiting the fact that other people might care, or at least that Simon might care that other people might care. (To be clear, I’m not here to excuse Martin’s actions at all—rather, I want to point out that Martin isn’t motivated by hatred for Simon’s sexuality, just by pure assholery.) And when some people bully or mock Simon after he is forcibly outed, Albertalli has other characters—students and teachers—rally to his defence.

In other words, Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda takes the approach of depicting some of the serious issues that—in this particular case—a gay teenager might struggle with, but presents us with a possible world that is recognizable yet also better. There are problems and conflicts and struggles but there is also support and acceptance and hope.

Still, as much as a gay reader might identify with Simon, this is not just a book for gay teens. People who aren’t gay should still read this book—because reading about characters whose identities are not like your own is one way to work against different types of normativity that skew our perspectives.

TIME decided to run an article about the movie based on this book asking if today’s teens “need” a groundbreaking gay movie. Well, if a major media site feels the need to run a garbage headline like that, then the answer must still be yes. The author essentially takes aim at what I identified above, claiming that so many gay teens in our world are already getting the love and support Simon receives in this book, so why do we need this movie? I guess that’s why we stopped making movies about straight couples receiving love and support from their families, right? (Seriously, that whole article is a trashfire.)

Like, seriously, we’ll know we don’t “need” a groundbreaking gay movie anymore when we stop talking about “gay movies” as if they are “groundbreaking”. When gay people in relationships, out of relationships, whatever are just present across all media and all genres and have stories about being gay and stories about coming out and stories that have nothing to do whatsoever with sexuality or romance. Until that happens, until non-straight sexual orientations are no longer “the other”, we have so much work to do.

To that end, let’s move on from discussing Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda as a “gay book” and examine all the other ways in which I loved it!

There is so much friendship in this book. Obviously the love story between Simon/Blue is important, but as an aromantic and asexual person, this is my jam. Watching Simon interact with his friends, navigate coming out to them, deal with how the blackmail affects his relationship with Abby, dealing with Leah’s jealousy … it’s just beautiful.

And this is what I mean about YA books having such courage sometimes. Here we are: Simon has got his guy; Albertalli could have ended things there with a happily-ever-after. Instead, she deals with this loose thread, this tension between Simon and Leah that has boiled over into outright avoidance on the latter’s part. Simon basically forces a confrontation, and it’s messy and uncomfortable. So here we are, a YA book portraying how, sometimes, you and your best friend are going to reach an impasse. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Sometimes friendship has moments of pain and anguish every bit as poignant as romance.

I think about this a lot lately. Not so much pain and anguish—we aren’t there yet—but obviously, by the ripe old age of 28, I’ve had my share of close friendships change, attenuate, strengthen or weaken as the months and years elapse. In the past 8 months, I’ve become inexplicably, abruptly close to one brand new friend in particular, so rather like Abby she has assumed a role of closeness and confidence in my circle that neither of us could have predicted. And as someone whose social circle has always been circumscribed and who counts his “close” friends on a single hand, this has been disruptive—wonderful, head-over-heels delirious happiness wonderful, but also a big change.

So it was really nice and comforting for, kind of out of nowhere, Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda to remind me that this is what happens. Life is messy. As we grow and change, so to will our friendships. Being best friends doesn’t always mean your relationship will be easy or free of drama. Sometimes, having that tough Real Talk™ is what you need, even if it’s uncomfortable. So, major kudos to Albertalli for including this subplot.

There’s also the antithesis of friendship in this book. Albertalli allows Martin to get one last word in, in the form of an apology email to Simon. I like this. I like that Albertalli humanizes Martin rather than turning him into some kind of stock villain. Earlier, when Martin tries to apologize in person, Simon rejects the apology and tells Martin he just doesn’t want to see Martin around—which is a totally valid reaction. And I love how the book portrays the way that Martin’s callous, treacherous actions have created this rift, and how no amount of words can heal that. It sounds, from the way Martin writes, that he is genuinely contrite, and maybe this will make him grow into a better human being. But Albertalli manages to do that without excusing his actions or providing him with an iota of redemption in Simon’s eyes.

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda is a lot of things. It is laugh-out-loud funny. It is compassionate and heartwarming. It features romance, friendship, family. It has moments of angst and moments of deepest satisfaction. It’s a feel-good book because of all the feels. Read it because it’s a gay book. Read it because it’s a romance. Read it because it’s about high school. Read it because it’s YA. There’s so many reasons to read it, because in the end, this is a complex novel that constantly invites you to challenge yourself and your assumptions.

I have been a diehard fan of Louise O’Neill since I read Asking for It, and I pre-ordered Almost Love when I learned of its existence. O’Neill combines an unflinching feminist philosophy with an unfettered talent for storytelling, and her latest novel is no exception. Equal parts amusing, scathing, and surprising, Almost Love presents us with the paradoxes of making and breaking relationships and the ways in which we make and break ourselves in the process.

Honestly, this book was not what I was expecting. The back cover copy makes no mention of Sarah’s age, and given O’Neill’s previous fare, for some reason I went into this thinking it was another YA novel. Sarah is much closer to my age (28), though. Set across two parallel times—a “present” wherein Sarah is turning 28 and flashback sections to the past where she is 25—Almost Love chronicles Sarah’s quixotic relationship with Matthew, a much older man. With this relationship O’Neill explores the liminal spaces of emotional abuse.

I’m surprised by how well the parallel narrative structure worked for me. Sometimes, especially when I am not expecting it, I really take against such decisions. In this case, I think it works really well. It helps that O’Neill writes the past sections in first person and the present in third person. This makes Sarah’s past the work of an unreliable narrator, of course, and also contributes to a more stream-of-consciousness feel. Even though we know certain things going in, like the fact that she and Matthew do eventually stop seeing each other, the minutiae feel all the more immediate and real.

It’s hard for me to comment on the way in which Sarah falls for Matthew and starts wanting to spend more time with him. But I really liked how O’Neill includes text exchanges between them and shows the escalation of the flirting, followed by Sarah’s intense need to be conciliatory juxtaposed with Matthew’s almost bored curtness. To outsiders like ourselves, his disinterest is palpable. How can she not see it? But O’Neill makes it clear that this is almost-love, an infatuation shading into obsession fuelled not even by any intrinsic, interesting qualities of Matthew himself (we learn almost nothing about him as a person) but by Sarah’s own need to feel some kind of connection.

While I can’t quite identify with Sarah’s desires in the relationship sense, being of a similar age to her and also being a teacher, I do feel like we have a little in common. I can identify with some of the stress in her life, the way that you have to put on this extreme mask of professionalism every single day in front of the children and your colleagues and your boss, even though you have all this normal human life stuff happening outside of work. I had it easy—I taught math and English, while Sarah is an art teacher who has lost, it seems, her personal passion for creating art. That in and of itself is not so bad, were it not for all the people in her life trying to be “encouraging” and “supportive” by telling her to pick up her paintbrush and get back into it. Anyone who has a creative passion, be it a hobby or a profession, and who has hit dry spots in that passion, can identify with the frustration that accompanies such well-meaning attentions.

So in some small ways I can identify with parts of Sarah’s struggle. Still, I admit that in a lot of ways, what she is going through here feels quite alien to me. I’m going to try to press this book on a few of my friends to get their reactions to it. I want to see what others have to say, particularly people who have been in unsatisfying relationships (even if they aren’t quite as dramatically one-sided as Sarah and Michael’s).

Then we come down to Sarah’s characterization and the fact that she’s rather unlikeable.

I love that O’Neill does this, because it would have been so easy for her to just create a protagonist who does and says all the right things yet is still suffering and thus, because she is pure and good, she deserves redemption and forgiveness from both reader and her friends. Instead, O’Neill challenges us to still follow Sarah on this arc, despite the fact that she says and does terrible things to her friends and acts like an entitled, selfish asshole at times—because, you know, real people are like that on occasion. Sarah’s friends and family repeatedly reach out to her, demonstrate that they care, make allowances, offer olive branches—and time and again she rebukes them, pushes them away, even burns some bridges. Although Sarah never quite enters physical self-harm territory, her behaviour is still self-destructive.

I think this characterization makes both Sarah and the story much deeper and more entertaining. While I understand how some readers are going to be turned off by this characterization and decide it’s a reason to pan the whole book, I think that’s an unfortunate and dismissive reading. To me, an unsympathetic protagonist is only a problem when the author isn’t in on the joke. Sarah being an unsympathetic character is the point, and it is part and parcel of her experience.

If a protagonist is unlikeable because they are a jerk to everyone and the author doesn’t demonstrate why this is a problem, then yeah, I’m not going to enjoy the book, because I’m not going to see the point in following that protagonist’s journey. Almost Love is not like that, however. It’s messy and gripping because Sarah is so flawed, and even in the end, there is no promise that she is magically going to become a better person. Maybe she’s going to carry on being an asshole the rest of her life. But hopefully she has learned a little bit more about herself and about love.

Moreover, I read Sarah’s characterization as pushback against the idea that women need to be nice or sympathetic in order to be worthy of love or redemption. This parallels the patriarchal bullshit O’Neill excavates with Asking For It, which of course is rife with people who blame the protagonist victim. While it’s fine to say one doesn’t like Sarah because she’s unsympathetic, the fact remains that she still deserves love, redemption, or what have you. She shouldn’t have to be a nice person, shouldn’t have to work to “earn” it. If Almost Love were a story of an “innocent”, sympathetic woman, then it would be very different—and, I would argue, much less potent.

Almost Love is one of those so-fascinating-it’s-difficult-to-put-down books. It recapitulates a lot of common motifs about destructive or unhealthy relationships, but rather than offering trite or easy solutions—like a Prince Charming rebound to the rescue, or some big, climactic life crisis that forces Sarah to “wake up” to everything good around her—the book reminds us that love, and relationships in general, is hard work. I see this everyday, in my own platonic relationships, and in the romantic and sexual relationships my friends pursue, the work they put into flirting (or trying hard not to be flirtatious, in some cases) and whatnot. One of the hardest things is figuring out if you and the other person or people in the relationship want the same things. And if you don’t … how do you find a way towards some kind of equilibrium, instead of spiralling out of control like Sarah does here?

Intensely different from Asking for It, Almost Love nevertheless reaffirms my opinion of O’Neill as a writer who tackles tough topics with no small amounts of compassion or courage. There are so many ways in which she could have cut corners here, could have taken an easier tack, even though it would have made the book feel more conventional. I’m really glad she didn’t. Even when this book makes me uncomfortable, it is still a pleasure to read, because it is so compelling and interesting. It is open to the reader engaging with it on so many levels, personal and literary, and that makes it worth reading and even re-reading in the hopes of discovering something new.

Lauren Beukes writes haunting pieces of speculative fiction, and The Shining Girls is no exception. If you like serial killers, time travel, or investigative journalism, then this book is for you. I don’t normally read thrillers, serial killer stories, etc. That just isn’t my cup of tea. But I like Beukes; Broken Monsters is a fantastic work, and I was hoping for more of the same here. By and large I was satisfied, although certain circumstances (feeling drained from travel) and the pacing of the book made me like it less than I wish I had.

In 1931, Harper Curtis stumbles across a mysterious House. Seemingly abandoned, it contains a room with the names of several “shining girls”. Harper alone understands what this means: he can step out of the front door of the House into any time between 1929 and 1993, just with a thought, and he can find these shining girls and kill them. Because that’s what he does, apparently. But he messes up. Kirby Mazrachi survives his attack, and a few years later she interns at the Chicago Sun-Times and makes it her mission to track down her killer.

The narrative jumps around through time periods, so each chapter helpfully indicates which character it is following and the month/year. This is particularly valuable for Harper, who does the most time-travelling, whereas Kirby, for example, gets a relatively linear story (with some exceptions). What’s nice about The Shining Girls is that Beukes has put an effort into creating a twisty, loopy time travel story here, with the way that Harper interacts with people at various points in their timelines … yet if you don’t care for time travel or science fiction at all, you can pretty much ignore this plot and just focus on the serial killer thing.

Beukes depicts Harper with just the right level of zeal and creepiness to him. He moves through life with that grim caul of determination pulled tight to his skin: survive, survive, kill. He is a predator, yet not a particularly clever one. While it’s not entirely clear why Harper finds the House, or how it works, the relationship is heavily implied to be some kind of closed time-like curve and heavily symbiotic. In any event, Harper’s possession of the House does not provoke or even enable his killing tendencies; they merely direct his energies in a horrific and new way. Harper’s relationship with Etta is perhaps one of my favourite parts of this story.

Our protagonist, Kirby, is equally interesting. I love the look we get at her childhood and teenage years, the way Beukes depicts her relationship with her mother, Rachel. We receive a good understanding of Kirby’s character, which in turn helps us understand why she is the shining girl who gets away, if you will. Kirby’s determination is actually an interesting mirror to Harper’s, and part of me wonders what might have happened if Kirby had somehow been introduced to the House “before” Harper was. (I’m not saying I think she would have become a serial killer, but she seems to have the same intensity that Harper channels into his murder-times.)

As much as I loved the first part of the novel, The Shining Girls lost steam for me as we neared the climax. I can’t be too harsh here, because for various reasons unrelated to the book itself I was dragging my heels with reading this, so maybe I didn’t give it a fair shake. Nevertheless, Beukes doesn’t connect the time travel mystery with the killer mystery very smoothly. The dramatic irony of Dan and Kirby knowing nothing about Harper’s time-travelling origin overstays its welcome, only to be resolved entirely too quickly and haphazardly for my tastes. Kirby makes one tenuous connection and suddenly everything falls into place (albeit not instantaneously, to be fair). Then it’s off to the chase and fight scenes that close out the story.

So this is a very entertaining, sometimes intense, really creepy book. Basically, what I expect from Beukes. It didn’t wow me like Broken Monsters did, unfortunately, but it was a good enough way to spend a few (more than I would like, grr) days. Your mileage will vary depending on how intensely you appreciate the various things that bind this plot together. What I most enjoy is Beukes’ audacity and skill at making such esoteric bindings in the first place.

Oh my this book made me angry. I started Some Girls Are during lunch on Friday, got about 24 pages in (I know this because the bookmark is still at that spot), then read the rest in one big gulp on Saturday night. Want to talk about page-turners? I kept telling myself I should stop, go to bed, finish the rest with a clear head in the morning—but I literally could not turn those pages fast enough to find out what happened next. And there was no way I was sleeping without learning what happens to Regina. Even after I’d finished the book, part of me was crazy enough to want to boot up my computer again and start the review, at 12:30 am, because I was just so raw and ready to talk about this book. I didn’t—it’s Sunday morning as I write this—and we’ll see how my thoughts have set now that I’ve slept on it.

Trigger warnings (in this review and in the book) for discussions of rape, bullying, suicide ideation/attempts. Trigger warnings in the book, additionally, for eating disorders.

Up until now, Regina Afton has been a member of the Fearsome Five and the right-hand girl of clique-leader Anna Morrison. But when Anna’s boytoy Donnie attempts to rape Regina at a party and fellow Fearsome Five member Kara spreads the rumour that Regina slept with Donnie, the Fearsome Five becomes a Fearsome Four, freezing out Regina and turning her into a social pariah. Through bullying both overt and subtle, Anna and her minions make Regina’s school life a living hell. As Regina vacillates between wanting revenge and simply wanting the bullying to stop, she must confront the fact that, until recently, she wasn’t only a bully herself—but she liked it.

This is the cornerstone of Some Girls Are. Courtney Summers is so good at writing deep, intensely interesting protagonists, whether it’s “perfect Parker Fadley” from Cracked Up to Be or ostracized Romy Grey from All the Rage. Now we have Regina, who is by any metric not a good person. This book is not a case of “oh no, this poor, innocent girl is being bullied by mean people”. Without going into too much detail, Regina is complicit along with the other Fearsome Five girls in driving another girl towards suicide. So when she falls, she falls hard, and the people she once tortured have a chance to relish her disgrace.

Summers puts us in an interesting position as the reader, then. On the one hand, I want to be the moralizing person who, like Michael says in the book, tells Regina that “nobody deserves” what has happened to her. And that is true, in the abstract sense. No one deserves to be raped or to be the victim of unwanted sexual advances. No one deserves to be bullied. Yet by the same token, I cannot blame the characters around Regina, like Liz, who refuse to forgive her now that she herself is the victim:

I feel hollow, just like I felt in the days after it became devastatingly clear to her we weren’t going to be friends again and I was going to have to make her life miserable. Enough for her …

… to want to die.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and my voice cracks, splitting the word sorry in two.

She lowers her hand and turns to me slowly, setting the brush on the counter. “What did you say?”

I try to find the word again—sorry—but it’s gone. I want to tell her she’s brave, she’s stupid brave for coming into school day after day knowing what is waiting for her, and I want to to tell her she was the best thing in my life for one brief moment in time, and I want to tell her that I’m sorry I stood by while she was ruined, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I am so sorry.

She turns back to the mirror, silent.

It’s one thing to write a novel from the point of view of an innocent person getting bullied and another thing entirely to humanize the bully by writing from their point of view. The former is incredibly important for helping teenagers recognize their struggles and get through them—but Some Girls Are is not such a book. This is a book about a bully whose own squad turns against her, and as a result she starts to understand why the poison is not so sweet from the other end. I find this very intriguing, because while we should never excuse bullies’ actions, when we are talking about teenagers, we should remember they are still vulnerable. Regina is not evil; she is not beyond redemption; she is a product of the social system that has rewarded her for being a bully and a terrible person towards other girls.

And so as this book hurtled headlong towards its final act, I could not stop reading. I was so emotionally charged, so full of anger and doubt and conflict about how I felt about Regina, about Regina/Michael, about what was happening with Kara. I loved when Regina essentially seizes the opportunity to get revenge via the only way she knows how—discrediting Anna in much the same way Kara and Anna discredited her—because it just goes to show how slowly we learn our lessons. Even after all that she has been through, and the growth she has undergone, Regina is still so used to playing this game that she reaches for her arsenal almost automatically. Kill or be killed in the teenage jungle.

Then Anna’s final master stroke is so perfect I had to pause, for a moment, and reflect on the deliciousness of what she would achieve. Now, Anna—there’s a character much closer to evil than Regina; Anna seems to lack any shred of conscience about what she is doing, as her threat that she holds over Regina to get her to obey makes abundantly clear. The moment she confronts Regina with this bargain is so poignant, because I can’t fault Regina for going through with it, not one bit. Regina has finally found someone she cares about, and of course what happens? It gets used against her. High school.

If I were a different person I might choose to share at this point, talk about my own experiences with bullying in high school. Unlike a lot of people, though, I was lucky and was spared that. I can’t pretend to understand what it’s like to be torn down, repeatedly and relentlessly, particularly by people you once thought were your friends. And all this is happening under the noses of parents and teachers and authorities. This is where Summers’ writing resonates for me, as a teacher. I discussed this in my review of Cracked Up to Be, and those same feelings resurfaced reading Some Girls Are. The adults in this book are so clueless, so completely blind (wilfully or not) to what’s happening at this school. I see some reviewers commenting how the situations here are unrealistic, asking why Regina never once went to her mom or a teacher or her guidance counsellor. If you have ever been bullied you know why—and even if you haven’t, you should. Most of us have come up through that toxic environment, been exposed to it to one degree or another—yet somewhere around our twenties or thirties we develop a kind of amnesia for how awful high school is. Perhaps we even stoop so low as to trot out clichés like “it can’t be as bad as you think it is” or “it will get better if you just ignore it”. Like, when do we become so stupid as adults? So part of the reason I read YA books like this is to remind myself, to prevent myself from succumbing to that kind of amnesia.

When it comes right down to it, individual adults are going to have a tough time being effective at stopping bullying. Even those of us who are aware and vigilant for the hallmarks will miss things, whether because it’s happening online in an app we don’t use, or because it’s so subtle and we’re stressed and overworked by our own deadlines that we don’t notice in time. To be an effective anti-bullying activist, then, one needs to step back and look at the bigger picture. Bullying is a systemic problem embedded within the structure of (in this case) our high school system and bolstered by attitudes and role models in wider society (teenage bullies see older people get away with bullying everywhere in media, so why shouldn’t they?). There’s a reason Anna says, “It doesn’t matter … but it’s good practice.”

But I digress.

When I finished Some Girls Are, I was put off by the abruptness of the ending. “That’s it?” I thought. “It’s just … done?” It struck me as unrealistic, but I quashed that initial reaction and thought about it more carefully. And on second thought, the ending actually seems perfect. Sometimes these storms do end abruptly. More to the point, Summers gives us no assurances about what happens for the rest of the school year or after graduation. We don’t get to see if Anna gets her comeuppance. We don’t get to see if Regina continues her journey of redemption or if she falters again. So many books and movies like this climax at the senior prom, ending with a big message, where everyone has either been defeated or learned a valuable lesson. Here we kind of end in a detente of mutually assured destruction, where it’s not clear if lessons have been learned, and there are no winners or losers—just survivors, bullies, and victims, and some people who are a mixture of the three.

Some Girls Are slots into an interesting niche when it comes to YA books about bullying. I love its tone, its ambiguity. I love that it made me angry and feel so many conflicting emotions with regards to Regina’s redemption arc, her treatment of Michael, and her former squad’s treatment of her. I love that it highlights the systemic problems with bullying, the way the little things in high school (like picking teams for gym class) can exacerbate and support bullying. I can see the comparisons to Mean Girls that inevitably make it into the marketing and reviews, but these are very different stories. Some Girls Are is not a comedy; it resolves differently, and it goes further than you can in a PG film. It’s a harrowing read but a powerful one.

Yes, hello, hi, someone asked nicely on Twitter and got an eARC of City of Betrayal and that someone was me, but then I went and didn’t read it until near the publication date anyway because … busy … and not wanting to sit on my review, but also wanting to hype it up closer to publication. So, although this is an honest review, it most certainly is biased, because I liked City of Strife and I liked this one even more. Claudie Arseneault successfully dodges the dreaded “middle book syndrome” of trilogies, raising the stakes but also reaching a kind of turning point for the series.

Spoilers here for the first book but not for this one.

City of Betrayal picks up pretty much where City of Strife left off. This is good, considering the cliffhanger of the last book with the Dathirii launching a war against the Myrian Enclave and Nevian convalescing in the Shelter. Isandor isn’t exactly in chaos, but you can feel the tension ratcheting up: Lord Allastam is furious that he’s had his chance for “justice” snatched from his grasp and demands Hasryan’s head on a platter. Sora is trying to deliver, even if she doesn’t really want to, but a certain wise-old-elf-lady isn’t going to make it easy. Meanwhile, members of the Myrian Enclave are torturing (Avenazar, obvs), being tortured (Varden), trying to be Switzerland (Jilssan), or having minor empathetic epiphanies (Isra). And Arathiel, though he seems to get a little less page time than he did in the first book, Arathiel just seems to be glad to be … alive … if that’s what you call it. He actually seems a little excited to be back in the thick of things, even if it means helping elves on a crazy rescue mission that is probably going to get everyone killed.

Arseneault’s characters, while sometimes larger-than-life, still seem true to life. They’re just so layered and complex; I appreciate that, with a few exceptions (Avenazar, obvs) few of them are outright caricatures of good or evil. Indeed, I found myself rather identifying with many of the characters in this book, at various points, for various reasons—even characters I didn’t like all that much! But thanks to the omniscient narrator’s glimpse into each character’s inner life, I caught myself nodding along, agreeing with what one character or another was thinking or going through. Larryn is still impulsive and judgmental, but I can understand the source of his anxiety and insecurities. Isra is still delusionally self-serving, but I understand her fears and her desire to be seen as belonging when she knows how different she really is. (Side note: I found the revelation about Isra’s identity somewhat awkwardly dropped into the first act without any real lead-up. I went back and scanned through City of Strife to see if I had missed any clues or foreshadowing but couldn’t quite notice anything.) And don’t even get me started on Hasryan’s moments of self-doubt, on Yultes’ application of Skelegro to his spine, etc. This book has character development in spades.

Still, it feels kind of weird to praise a book overly for character development. That should just be a given in literature; if yours is not a book with character development, maybe it’s just not very good. What makes City of Betrayal so compelling and interesting to me is the strength of its theme and the way Arseneault emphasizes it across so many storylines and characters without making it feel heavy-handed.

At times this book is bleak. The odds are against our heroes, and they don’t emerge unscathed from many of their scrapes. Political or physical, the conflict is savage and unrelenting: just when I thought they might turn the tide, Arseneault slapped me down with another twist that left me shaking my head in admiration and sympathy for them. This book’s title is apt, because in this story, Isandor plays host to numerous turnings of the coat and changes of the guard.

For the majority of the cast, everything boils down to one, simple question: will you make a stand? What will it take for you to make a stand? How much can you endure, how much can you let pass, before you feel that you must stand? Everyone is different in this regard, but everyone discovers this point. Diel sums it up extremely well towards the end of the book:

“It’s not so simple,” he said. “You can’t always choose your fights. Some battles need to be fought, whether you want to or not—whether they can be won or not.”

City of Betrayal is about the importance of fighting for your beliefs, even when the odds are so much against you that defeat might be inevitable. The probability of losing doesn’t mean you should step down, step away, bury your head in the sand. That’s how some of these characters react—at least initially—and it doesn’t get them anywhere. And rather than delivering a single, crowning moment in which everyone stands up in unison to resist, Arseneault opts instead to show us each character making that decision for themselves. Some of them are loud and proud, some of them so quiet we might not even notice. But the time to make a stand has come. And it’s electrifying.

The ending of this book feels right. It isn’t necessarily making me salivate for book three the way City of Strife did for this one. But I feel like we’re perfectly poised for this last act, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what Arseneault throws at them, and us, next. Avenazar isn’t dead—though to be honest, I was fine with how little he figures in this book, except as a sideshow, because I can only handle so much over-the-top megalomania before I need to go back to more subtle villains. I have no idea what madness he’ll deliver next, or what Diel and his allies will do to try to safeguard Isandor.

I love books like this. I love books that have such strong moral stances, books that have such unrelenting themes, yet manage to avoid bludgeoning the reader with that morality. Despite its depth, City of Betrayal remains very much an urban fantasy adventure at its core. This is a diverse book, and I don’t just mean in terms of its characters sexual, romantic, or gender identities. We’ve got elves and humans and halflings and whatsits, a city poised on the brink of war or hostile takeover, mercenaries running their own deadly and sorcerous games at the margins. Arseneault’s world comes alive, and my second visit to Isandor was even more exciting and delightful than my first.

My reviews of City of Spires:
← City of Strife

Magical cities are one of my favourite tropes in fantasy novels. I think I could read nothing but magical city fiction for a while and take a long time to feel sated or bored; there is so much room for variation. Camorr from The Lies of Locke Lamora is an example that readily springs to mind, but this is a very old trope. As its title implies, City of Strife is very much a story about such a city, Isandor, essentially in the path of the ambitious and violent Myrian Empire. Claudie Arseneault skilfully weaves the lives of various characters into this political drama.

This is an ensemble cast situation, so it’s difficult to know where to begin. The novel opens with a human, Arathiel, returning to Isandor after 130 years away. Normally he would have, you know, died in that time, but he went looking for a cure for his sister’s illness, and he ended up at some kind of “Well” that didn’t let him age but robbed him of his tactile senses. Arathiel was a member of one of Isandor’s noble Houses, but he is ambivalent about reclaiming his title and identity. He falls in with a group of philanthropic nobodies trying to run a Shelter in the lower city for Isandor’s least privileged. He spends much of the novel vacillating over how much he should get involved in his nascent friendships with these people—and this decision has a huge impact on the course of the story.

Meanwhile, it what feels like an entirely different city sometimes, Lord Diel Dathirii has insulted the head of the Myrian Enclave, a nasty magician by the name of Master Avenazar. This would normally only be a minor political incident, but Avenazar is the type of person who doesn’t just hold grudges—he nurtures and irrigates them like a hothouse flower. Diel may just have set Isandor teetering on the brink of war, but the other Houses don’t see it that way and refuse to present the Myrians with a united, resistant front.

So there’s a lot happening in this book, but at no point did I feel overwhelmed or pitched into a situation where I had no idea what was happening. At the same time, Arseneault avoids the temptation to bludgeon me to sleep or death with the cudgel of heavy-handed exposition (+1 melee, -2 charisma). She drops in enough occasional references to other geography, etc., that I get the sense there is a wider world out there, one that she has figured out at least to the extent that its politics affect Isandor. But the eponymous City of Strife is the story here, and Arseneault keeps the plot tightly focused on its problems.

I’ve been watching a lot of The Expanse lately, and also replaying Mass Effect 3 in preparation for Mass Effect: Andromeda, so a lot of my thinking has been filtered through these two stories. Particularly in the case of The Expanse, the writers have done such a great job alleviating the feeling like this epic political drama is a narrative on rails: seemingly small actions by characters can have major repercussions that perhaps throw the entire story onto a new, unanticipated course. I really respect it when writers can create this kind of atmosphere in their stories, and it’s something that Arseneault succeeds at here. Every character’s actions flow from their own, deeply personal motivations: Larryn is hell-bent on rescuing Hasryan, damn the consequences; Diel is hell-bent on rescuing Branwen, damn the consequences; Avenazar is hell-bent on vengeance, damn the … huh, I think I see a pattern emerging here.

In any case, it’s nice to see a fantasy novel with an ensemble cast where you actually get to know the various members of the ensemble instead of seeing them reduced to usable, plot-ready archetypes. As the title might imply, too, Arseneault is not afraid to sow as much conflict as she can among the characters. Even so-called friends and allies rub each other the wrong way half the time. For example, Larryn and Cal come to loggerheads over what the former sees as a betrayal of their friendship with Hasryan when Cal gets distracted saving a stranger in need. In this case, I actually found Larryn’s behaviour a little over-the-top—believable, yes, but somewhat melodramatic in its execution—but I enjoyed watching these characters screw things up. The same goes for Varden’s attempts to gain Nevian’s trust and the latter’s bleak cynicism. There was something inside me that was just pushing back against the book and going, “This would all be so much simpler if people trusted each other! It’s so obvious what they should do!” But they don’t, because they are human (or elvish) and therefore flawed and, let’s face it, sometimes rather daft. And as easy as it would be to write a story where everything is a straightforward and linear narrative, that isn’t much fun at all.

That’s the bottom line, basically: City of Strife is a lot of fun. For the first half of the book I was just enjoying the atmosphere; once I hit Chapter 26 or so, and everything went to hell, I literally didn’t want to put the book down. I’m glad I had March Break off and didn’t have to stop to, you know, work.

A final note about the portrayal of sexuality and romance in this book. Arseneault identifies as asexual and aromantic-spectrum and promotes City of Strife in part as boasting a diversely LGBTQIAP+ cast. If you’re going into this book looking for heavy LGBTQIAP+ plotlines you might be disappointed, because they aren’t a thing. Rather, Arseneault just telegraphs various characters’ sexual and romantic orientations as and when that information comes up. There are no explicitly romantic or sexual situations in the book (which is good for any arospec people who don’t like that stuff), although some of the characters meditate on the possibility of using sexual liaisons for political gain. While books that focus on characters’ gender, sexual, and romantic identities are truly important, I also appreciate books like City of Strife that seek to normalize LGBTQIAP+ identities by not foregrounding those struggles. Rather, these identities are simply part of the characters, and various characters are totally fine with that (yay!) or, if they are raging bigoted monsters like Master Avenazar, predictably not so much. In which case, you know, Fireball! (That’s how that works, right?)

Finally a final final note on Isandor’s origin story. The use of humans, halflings, elves, and the generic medieval European-esque fantasy city setting reminded me a great deal of Dungeons & Dragons, and indeed, Arsenault explains in her acknowledgements that this world is based on an RPG she DMed. So … yay me for being perceptive? This origin isn’t really surprising and is, I suspect, a lot more common than authors might admit. Once upon a time I read a truly awful attempt by someone to turn their D&D campaign into a story, so it’s good to see that it is possible to weave a great story out of what was probably a fun campaign.

A word of warning, though: City of Strife ends on a damn delectable cliffhanger, and if I had access to the second book, I would have started it immediately after I finished the last page of this one. This is a book I highly recommend, but if you’re the type of reader who needs closure and certainty, maybe hold off on reading it until the next book is out.

My reviews of City of Spires:
City of Betrayal →