I was amped for this book from the first I heard about it. Alas, that excitement didn’t long survive contact with the actual pages. Heroine Complex has a lot of interesting ideas, but I just didn’t enjoy Sarah Kuhn’s plotting, characterization, or writing style. In other words, this book didn’t just miss the mark; it didn’t even get on the board.

Content warning in this book, and discussion in my review, for acemisia.

Evie Tanaka is the personal assistant to Aveda Jupiter, San Francisco’s exclusive demon ass-kicker and superhero. Evie and Aveda have been friends since middle school (not that anyone is supposed to know that version of the story). Ever since a failed demonic invasion eight years ago, some San Franciscans have had extremely minor supernatural abilities. With smaller portals opening up periodically and expelling less impressive demons into our world, Aveda has honed herself into a fairly impressive martial machine—with the diva ego to match. Only Evie is patient enough to absorb the Aveda Jupiter Temper Tantrums. But when circumstances force Evie to step up and pose as Aveda, just as a new demonic threat seems to be emerging, Evie finds herself questioning pretty much everything in her life.

Heroine Complex borrows a lot of the cartoon tropes from the comic form that birthed its superhero genre. This is a world that doesn’t make much sense. And I’m not even talking about the cupcake-shaped demons, whatever. San Francisco has a demon-fighting superhero, yet the only media that seems to cover her is a minor blogger?? Maisie is everywhere Aveda Jupiter goes, and it seems like other media occasionally turn up, but Maisie’s channel is the only one we’re tuned to. (And what’s with those passive-aggressive inserts from Shasta, with faux-banter from Maisie, at the end of the articles we’re shown? Blah.) The City of San Francisco is apparently happy that a single vigilante deals with the demons (who, admittedly, don’t seem all that threatening on a grand scale but will fuck your shit up if you’re personally around a demon portal). There are a few mentions of insurance, and some excerpts from material by a Demon Tours company. By and large, though, Kuhn does little to explore the longer-term ramifications of a demon portal changing the nature of our existence. San Francisco is apparently just so unremarkable that a demon portal opening in it isn’t a big deal around the rest of the world.

The cartoony nature of the book continues with its characters. The secret when it comes to quirkiness is that only one or two characters can be “quirky.” Yet pretty much every character in Heroine Complex is quirky in some way. In an attempt to make her characters diverse and interesting, Kuhn instead imbues them with very generic, sometimes even inconsistent traits. Aveda is the high-strung powerhouse. Lucy is the badass fighter who never fails to remind us she’s a lesbian and constantly inquires about Evie’s sex life. Nate is the overly analytical man/hunk/love interest. Bea is the smart-talking teenager (“totes” and “frakballs” are about the extent of her teenager vocabulary though) who begins the book seeking alcohol and ends up being some kind of autodidactic social media genius. Evie eats only Lucky Charms (not kidding).

And then the villains, Shasta and Maisie, are an inept duo whose comedy makes me cringe. I mentioned the awkward interplay at the end of Maisie’s blog posts already. Shasta is an unremarkable, over-the-top, classically incompetent villain. It seems (and I’m always about giving the benefit of the doubt) that Kuhn is trying to lean into and lampshade these tropes. But … there just doesn’t feel like there’s any payoff there, because this isn’t a spoof.

I want to be clear: I think Kuhn does try to give her characters depth, particularly when it comes to Nate’s and Aveda/Evie’s backstories. I just don’t think these attempts work as well as they should.

Here’s a little praise, though, for Evie’s character. I think it’s probably tempting, especially if you’re not enjoying the book like I wasn’t, to label Evie’s dysfunctional relationship with Aveda as unrealistic. Who would stick around and let themselves be pushed around like Aveda does with Evie? Actually, this felt like the most real, most poignant part of the book for me. Especially when Kuhn caps it off with a confessional heart-to-heart where Aveda reveals her most vulnerable thoughts regarding Evie. That is the moment when they are both the most human, most real characters in this book. I wish I had seen more of that, or if it is actually there all the way through, that it weren’t buried under so many comic book tropes and clunky exposition.

So, yeah, Evie’s character growth I can get on board with, but there’s one red flag I want to raise: the way Kuhn describes Evie’s sexual behaviour. Evie is big about repressing her emotions to the point that she avoids sexual relationships. Early in the book she refers to her “Dead-Inside-o-Tron” keeping her sex drive in check, and how this appears to be malfunctioning in the case of Nate. Let’s set aside the incredible predictability of her and Nate’s romance for the moment. Let’s not dwell on how annoyingly frequently this book talks about Evie having sex (I’m not repulsed by sex scenes or discussions of sex by any means in my book, but these characters just don’t shut up about it). But comparisons of not experiencing sexual attraction to being “dead inside” are not comedic; they are offensive to asexual people. At best this is erasure; really, though, it’s saying that not experiencing sexual attraction means you’re “broken” or “abnormal.” To be clear: I’m not upset that Evie and Nate are in lust with each other and get it on every second chapter or whatever. That’s all to the good. But the idea that Evie being lustful over Nate and engaging in a sexual relationship with her somehow fixes her? That I can’t get behind. There is nothing wrong with people who don’t experience sexual attraction.

You might be wondering by now why I didn’t stop reading early on. That’s a legitimate question that I asked of myself at the time. Truthfully, I wanted to know how the story ended, and part of me still hoped for a little redemption from the writing. I don’t regret finishing the book, yet I don’t feel it redeemed itself either. The plot sputters and fizzles over a false climax then limps on to an unsatisfying, unspectacular actual climax. Kuhn haphazardly raises and then handwaves obstacles as the plot requires: first Bea not being in school is an issue, then when it doesn’t need to be an issue, suddenly Bea has homeschooled herself out of the predicament. How convenient. There’s a lack of any real tension here, despite the high stakes (their very lives) the nature of the conflict demands.

Heroine Complex is messy. It is wrapped in the fun, flashy exterior of cartoonish tropes that disguise this mess in some ways—cartoon logic is supposed to be messy. The more I mull it over, though, the more I consider the writing and plot and the characters, and the less I like this book. What began as a mediocre experience inexorably declined into dull, then dissatisfying, and ended somewhere in disgruntlement. Once again, I tend to love the idea of a superhero novel more than I like the actual novels themselves.

It has been somewhat more than a year since I read The Revolution Trade. Meanwhile, almost 20 years have passed between the events of that story and Empire Games. Miriam Beckstein, considerably older, is now a Commissioner in the revolutionary government in the timeline formerly hosting New Britain. Her adopted-out daughter, Rita Douglas, is about to be recruited by the U.S. government as a clandestine agent. Everything else is ready to go pear-shaped at a moment’s notice … because of course it is.

Empire Games is a soft reboot of the Merchant Princes series. That is to say, Charles Stross has found a way to have his cake and eat it too: he has continued the storyline of this series while at the same time given new readers an entry point into the series without having to read the earlier books. While you will certainly have a better appreciation for what’s happening in this world, and a firmer grasp on Miriam’s character, if you read the earlier books, you can also appreciate this novel as the start of a “new” series. Because it really is. The Clan, the eponymous princes of the previous series, is gone. The world-walker refugees of the Clan are an entirely different organization now. And the challenges that they and the U.S. government face are quite different, because Stross has opened up his universe into a multiverse with bigger, scarier foes.

If you have read Stross' works before then you know what to expect at this point. This is a book in love with its own jargon, a book religiously steeped within its own mythos. Stross loves exposition and infodumping almost as much as he loves figuring out how to disguise exposition and infodumping as necessary plot bulwarks—and sometimes it even works. That is, when he isn’t busy playing hypothetical game theory scenarios out over parallel timelines. Like you do.

Rita is a lousy protagonist when it comes to agency and character development. She just kind of shuttles around various supervisors. Even once she meets and interacts with Miriam, she herself doesn’t do much except gape and converse. About halfway through the novel Stross slings a love interest her way, and the two of them strike up a relationship in the blink of an eye.

Meanwhile, Miriam gets much less page time in this book. That, in and of itself, is fine. Unfortunately, the time she gets isn’t that interesting. It’s lots of meetings and Sorkinesque walk-and-talk sessions where she explains why X will happen if Y doesn’t happen and that would Be Bad for Everyone. Although Rita has replaced her as the heroine who lacks agency in this book, Miriam herself doesn’t seem to be doing much? At least, not in the part of the story we get to see—we skipped the boring twenty years of hard work she put in transforming the Commonwealth into the new society it has become.

Finally, the fact it takes an entire book to manoeuvre everyone into place to basically say, “Both sides have mature adults who agree that we should talk through backchannels” is somewhat underwhelming.

These are all ways of me saying that Empire Games, while satisfying a certain itch that I have, definitely doesn’t get off the hook just because it scratches. It is a good story but not a great. There is nothing wrong with that. I just can’t help but want more.

I want to learn more about the Forerunners and their adversary. I want to see this cross-timeline brinkmanship play out in the shadow of nuclear war between the Commonwealth and France. I want to see Rita, Miriam, et al actually make decisions instead of reacting to what everyone else is doing.

Maybe we’ll see those things in subsequent books! Maybe not. I will probably keep reading, though. I like this series in the way that most people, I suspect, like most thrillers: they enjoy the action and the … uh … thrill … even while acknowledging that the story and characters themselves are usually not the deepest. Empire Games is a thriller for snobs who don’t want to like thrillers. Me, basically.

So many mixed feelings about this one! The cover caught my eye while at Chapters shopping for books for my Dad. I read the first few pages and, honestly, was kind of hooked by Christina Dalcher’s writing. So I bought it and kept reading. Vox asks us to consider what it would be like if we used technology to literally silence women (at least in the United States).

Dr. Jean McClellan is our first person narrator. It’s about two years after the word counters were introduced and women were kicked out of the workforce—Jean is just “Mrs. McClellan” now. With only 100 words a day allowed to her and her young daughter, Jean must be judicious with her speech. This affects how she relates to everyone, particularly the men of her family—her husband, Patrick; her children, including an older boy, Stephen. And Jean worries how this will affect her daughter Sonia’s development, since Sonia is young enough that she may grow up never knowing a world without the word counters. When an injury to the President’s brother offers Jean an opportunity to revive her skills as a neural linguist working on a treatment for a particular kind of aphasia, Jean decides to spin the opportunity into something much more potent. The question, though, is if she has the gumption to take her actions as far as they need to go—and if there are enough allies around her to help her succeed.

My initial reaction while reading the first few chapters? “This book is hella white”—and I am not referring to the cover. Everything about the situation, Jean’s narration, and the characters themselves screamed “white feminist dystopia.” At the beginning of chapter 2, Jean explains how the U.S. has faced ridicule for its actions:

They laughed at us. They told us we needed to relax before we ended up wearing kerchiefs and long, shapeless skirts.

This is a not-so-subtle allusion to the fact that, in some countries, women wear headscarves of various types and longer items, for reasons sometimes religious and sometimes oppressive. And this is why Vox makes me, as a white person in the West, uncomfortable: this story of oppression is not Dalcher’s to tell.

Let’s unpack that for in a moment, because this is complicated. Before we do that, though, a few more general thoughts on the thriller plot of the book….

I don’t want to get into spoilers here, but the antagonists’ actual plot is both obvious and unwise in a comic-book sense of unwisdom. Their plan would almost certainly blow up in their faces and cause incredible, global chaos. Even if it didn’t, or even if that’s their intention, the way that Dalcher develops this plot is pretty basic. It takes a long time to set up, then everything rushes towards a conclusion. Jean isn’t even really involved in the denouement; she just summarizes stuff very rapidly for us. Very little about the actual plot interested me that much. I was here for the worldbuilding and the themes it represents.

And that, of course, is where we run into lots more problems than pedestrian plotting. I’m probably going to get a lot wrong, because I’m a white dude, but here are a few thoughts.

First, women are definitely oppressed the world over—but that oppression often takes different forms and is affected by intersections of other identities, such as class, racism, etc. So it’s true that American women experience types of oppression—for example, American women’s rights to bodily autonomy are under assault frequently in the United States. But not every American woman’s experience is identical. White American women don’t experience the same types of oppression that Black American women do, or Native American women, or Hispanic American women. A rich woman’s experiences with misogyny may not align with a poor woman’s experiences.

Yet in Vox, Dalcher flattens and simplifies the oppression of women. She really only focuses on the common denominator of monitored, repressed speech (along with a few side helpings of regression in rights like employment and suffrage). This overly reductive approach means it is difficult to comment on the complexity of oppression faced by women in the United States and other parts of the world. The Puritan-like Pure movement, the wholesale rounding up of queer people to be sent to concentration or re-education camps … yeah, it’s terrifying and awful, but it’s a white person’s view of terrifying and awful. It totally erases the fact that for many marginalized people, the United States is already and has always been an oppressive regime.

Which brings me into the second point, the idea that Dalcher has to dial up the terrorizing nature of the U.S. government’s policy. I guess so white women will finally care? Vox is not quite an example of persecution flip (TVTropes) but that’s what I was thinking of—you know, the kinds of stories where white people are the ones who are slaves, as if that would better demonstrate how evil slavery is? I’m just struggling to understand what Dalcher adds to the conversation with these newer, more overt forms of oppression. Everything in this book is heavy-handed. Jean makes a big deal out of how Reverend Carl Corbin is a “true believer” of his ideology, not merely an opportunist. I agree that such distinctions are interesting, but Dalcher basically turns him into a stereotypical ideologically narrow-minded bigot. The same goes for Morgan LeBron. And the men who aren’t over-the-top dickheads turn out, conveniently, to be members of the resistance. There’s basically zero subtlety in how any of this is handled. It’s true that there are a few really nice moments between Jean and Sonia where we understand the subtle ways in which these new restrictions are affecting young girls. But Dalcher abandons that exploration in favour of a more traditional thriller narrative. (To be fair, that is a valid decision. I just don’t think it’s as interesting.)

Thirdly, Vox appropriates certain trappings of oppression experienced by women in other parts of the world. With the literal comparisons to the wearing of “kerchiefs” (ugh), it’s clear Dalcher is basically asking, What if things got so bad in the U.S. that we were like a [generic oppressive country in the Middle East]? On a certain level this is problematic to the point of being gross. Now, given Dalcher’s own background it seems clear she is trying to write what she knows, in terms of the protagonist’s occupation and status, and I’m not trying to invalidate Dalcher’s experiences of sexism and misogyny. It’s true that the patriarchal systems of America try to silence women, albeit not so literally in most cases. That doesn’t mean, however, that you get to take other women’s stories and co-opt them to build your own dystopia. For one thing, that distorts what is actually happening in those countries. The dynamics around the wearing of headscarves and other items, whether or not these things constitute oppression, are complex. And those of us who don’t grow up in these cultures don’t get a say in whether or not it’s oppression. We should listen instead.

You might be thinking at this point: wow, Ben, you really didn’t like this book, why are you giving it two stars instead of one? Valid question, hypothetical review reader! Vox is making an honest effort here to do some social commentary and, indeed, call the reader to action. This is mired in the problems I’ve outlined above, as well as the mediocre thriller everything is wrapped into … but at the end of the day, there are still compelling things about this story. There was enough in Dalcher’s writing to keep me reading, and that is worth something. I do think this is a worthwhile book. I just wish that we would stop celebrating OKish books from white women and pretty much ignore the so many far more creative, original, compelling narratives from queer authors, non-binary authors, authors of colour. (Moreover, there are also many original works from white women authors who dive deeply into experiences of oppression that they are equipped to discuss rather than appropriating other forms of oppression.) You might find Vox entertaining, stimulating, even eye-opening. It is, at times, all of those things. As you read, though, think not only about who has a voice in our society, but whose voices we amplify with ours—and the stories those people are choosing to tell.

I read #53: The Answer and #54: The Beginning back-to-back because this book ends on a cliffhanger. Like the rest of my reviews of Animorphs, I’m not really flagging this as having spoilers despite discussing the plot, because I figure that if you’re reading this review of the end of a 50-book series 20 years later, then you probably don’t care that much about spoilers.

ALSO, weirdly enough, very specific spoiler for Buffy season 5, FYI.

Indubitably it’s fitting that the last Animorphs book narrated from a single person’s perspective is narrated by Jake, the leader, the one who started it off. One might, if one had more emotional fortitude than myself, go back after reading this book and re-read #1: The Invasion right away, just to see the juxtaposition of the two Jakes. I bet it would be A Trip! The Jake of The Answer is tired, broken, angry, scared, and basically every type of messy emotion you would expect from a child soldier turned into a child general. This is a brutal book.

There’s a moment in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer at the end of season 5 that is hands-down one of my favourite lines of the series. Giles stands over a supine Ben/Glory, and calmly explains that Buffy could never have killed Ben, because “She’s a hero, you see. She’s not like us.” And then he smothers Ben to death. This act of chilling pragmatism, the way Giles implies he’s doing this to spare Buffy further pain, creates so many questions about what we consider to be heroic. Is it heroic to slaughter thousands, hundreds of thousands of creatures you consider your enemy? Is it heroic to send your people off to their deaths if you think it will save lives? Is it heroic to manipulate a pacifist android into inadvertently assisting your militant strategy? Jake does all of these things.

Jake’s key realization, what we are supposed to think is the eponymous answer of this book, is that he can take one for the team so no one else has to. Namely, Jake sacrifices himself as much as he sacrifices Rachel. He basically kills his humanity because he thinks that’s the best way to save the rest of humanity.

And I don’t like it.

I’m really, really tired of the idea that Sometimes In War We Must Do Terrible Things. Too often in fiction this seems like an excuse for the glorification of violence. That isn’t what Applegate is doing here, mind you. I know she’s attempting to explore, for a youth audience, the horrible nature of the choices people make in war. I know that this is ultimately a story about the horror of war, and Applegate is extremely clear that the Animorphs did A Good Thing by forcing the Andalites’ hand and averting the wholesale destruction of Earth, even if it cost a lot of Yeerk lives.

I’m just not really interested in science fiction perpetuating the inevitability of awful decisions in war when it could instead be exploring more interesting possibilities.

So that’s why I love this ending to the series. I love how Applegate finally concludes the arc that she started at the beginning of this series—and I’m not talking about the Yeerk invasion. I’m referring, obviously, to the incredible potential of morphing technology to end the war once and for all. This has been the elephant in the room for over 50 books now, and finally it gets a serious hearing, with potent results. The whole subplot with Arbron and the Taxxons reminds us that there are alternative ways to resolve conflicts that don’t involve mass slaughter and bloodshed. But the Andalites and the Yeerks have been fighting for too long to remember that.

So that’s why I think the real answer of this book refers to that solution, to the idea that there is a third path out of this war. If Jake and the Animorphs don’t completely pull it off, if more lives were lost along the way, that isn’t their fault—that is the messy reality of plans never working quite like you intend. What matters, I think, is that he and the Animorphs tried. There are so many other ways in which Applegate might have ended this series. She could have developed a bioweapon that starves the Yeerks out of every possible host. She could have had the Animorphs completely genocide the entire Yeerk species. But she didn’t. She leaves the door open to the possibility of peace, of reparation. Perhaps the Yeerks back on the homeworld will one day be able to morph into a form that suits them.

At the end of the day, the Animorphs always revelled in how morphing was this incredible gift. The most joyous moments of this series occur when one or more of them goofs off in morph. When they describe the incredible sensations of flight, of swimming in a pod of dolphins, of burrowing into the soft earth. There is a cruel irony in this series, that the Andalites, who are literally in physical contact with their planet every time they feed, perceive a technology that lets them become closer to nature only as a weapon of war, while some humans, who are every bit as quick—if not more quick—to violence as Andalites, view it as this incredible experience.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #52: The Absolute | #54: The Beginning →

Well, here we are. Almost four years ago I started re-reading Animorphs. I had been wanting to do this for a while, and then my Goodreads friend and occasional Twitter DM enthusiast Julie started her own, finally galvanizing me to just do it, as Shia Le Nike says. (You should also read Julie’s review of #54: The Beginning as well!) It has taken me considerably longer than Julie to finish re-reading this series, but I’ve still enjoyed it very much. Animorphs is a very memorable part of my childhood. I remember obsessively collecting most of the books from #21 or so on, and when I eventually donated them away it was definitely an emotional moment in my life. This series has stuck with me.

Like the rest of my reviews of Animorphs, I’m not really flagging this as having spoilers despite discussing the plot, because I figure that if you’re reading this review of the end of a 50-book series 20 years later, then you probably don’t care that much about spoilers.

And if the only answer you’re looking for in this review is the answer to the question, “Does it hold up?” That answer is yes, unreservedly, and more so than I ever expected.

Certainly this series has its flaws, its problems, and as a book written for middle grade and young adults, there are definitely times I feel like, as an adult, Applegate is not writing for me. I read these books now with a more critical eye than I would when I was younger—and there is nothing wrong with that. Nevertheless, for younger readers—dated ’90s references aside—I think these books would still be just as formative and valuable today. And for those of us reading for nostalgia reasons, these books are no less powerful or remarkable for the story Applegate tells.

The Beginning wraps up the cliffhanger battle from The Answer pretty quickly. Then it jumps forward one year and then another two years so we can see what this hath wrought. And while this series as a whole holds up, this particular book is dissatisfying. It was dissatisfying to me when I was a kid, and it is dissatisfying now.

Note that this is just me being particularly harsh. Endings are hard. Endings for a series are even harder, and truth be told, there are very few series whose endings I have loved. Want to know my most perfect series finale? Orphan Black.

Alas, The Beginning is more Battlestar Galactica—although, to give Applegate credit, I think she managed to tie everything up much more credibly than Moore et al did. (It’s probably closer to Star Trek: Voyager “Endgame” on the finale scale.)

Also, when I say I’m dissatisfied, I’m not talking about that last chapter. I get why Applegate wants Jake to go out with a bang, and why she wanted to leave the fans with something. As a kid, I literally just shrugged and moved on to the next book (such an old man pragmatist even back then). As an adult me, I also kind of shrugged—perhaps more ruefully—and hit up the Internet to read fanfic speculation.

No, what I don’t like about The Beginning is its broad-strokes approach to the character development of our main cast. Everything feels a bit like a stereotype of these characters, from dedicated Cassie to easygoing Marco to depressed Jake. (Marco in particular, with his “all the ladies want me” vibe, really creeped me out). We can wring our hands and talk about how Applegate could only do so much in the space she had (really, I think Scholastic should have sprung for a “Megamorphs” sized finale book). But the truth is that this ending really only offers a shallow snapshot of the Animorphs a couple of years after the war. I’m really disappointed we don’t get more of Tobias’ perspective. We’re supposed to infer that he is just so heartbroken from losing Rachel he wants to go off and live that hawk life. I would have liked to hear that from him, though.

I don’t mind Rachel dying. I think it’s fitting that at least one Animorph lost their life, and Applegate gives Rachel a hero’s death. She would make a great Klingon. She is bold and tough as nails and she wants to make a difference. The first chapter of this book might actually be one of the best chapters in the entire series, because it’s really where it pays off. (That being said, the fact we don’t really get revenge on the Blade ship Yeerks disappoints me too.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that The Beginning is very uneven. That is probably fitting, considering that this series as a whole is very uneven. I’ve been ruminating lately on how TV seasons have been shrinking in episode number over the past decade, and how sometimes this has resulted in a net increase in average episode quality. When you have a 22 or 26 episode season, it can be tough for every episode to be amazing. The same is true for a long-running series. Animorphs reminds me of a comic book series more than a novel series, in some ways. There have been many instalments that just fall flat and don’t work, not even really as a kid reader. There have been equally as many, if not more, amazing stories that stand well as part of the series or even on their own. (Remember the time Rachel totally definitely killed David? Because she did. Fight me.)

Applegate could have written the ending as literally a single page that reads, “They all die. The Yeerks lose. The end.” And that would not have detracted from the rest of this series.

Animorphs is a titanic achievement, for a writer, and an amazing experience for a young reader. Yes, I read Harry Potter as a kid (or rather, the first six books) and enjoyed that series. But Animorphs was the children’s series that raised me. I read that shit long after I had outpaced that reading level as a precocious child because these characters and these stories spoke to me. I watched every single deliciously flawed episode of the ill-conceived Nickelodeon TV series. I downloaded and played that impossibly frustrating computer game where you have to navigate your Animorph through a maze to collect keys and you can morph but only for like five seconds and whoops now you got spotted by a controller and uggggh it was awful. But I played it, because it was Animorphs. I’m pretty sure if they had launched an Animorphs pay-to-play website or something I would have stolen my parents’ credit card and committed identity theft just to get access. I might never have the ability to morph, but I am certain Animorphs itself is in my DNA at this point.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #53: The Answer | #1: The Invasion →

Over Sea, Under Stone reminds me of that endless string of ’80s and ’90s movies featuring plucky groups of child protagonists outwitting bumbling adult villains. You know the ones I mean—The Goonies is probably the most famous example, but there are others. Children get into real danger and use a combination of courage and clever planning to defeat the bad guys and save the day. In this case, Simon, Jane, and Barney work together to decipher a medieval treasure map that could lead to the Grail of Arthurian legend. They run up against a contained cast of characters all bent on acquiring the Grail for unspecified, but no doubt nefarious reasons—and they don’t think twice about stooping to the level of threatening children.

Cooper obviously understands the ingredients needed to capture a child’s imagination. It’s evident in the way her characters speak and the way she describes their environment. From the beginning, the story has a fantastic, Narnia-like quality to it: an old house not their own, with a hidden world (in this case, a room) behind a forgotten wardrobe. The children find an ancient manuscript and decide it has to be a treasure map, a deduction later confirmed by their ephemeral Great-Uncle Merry, who keeps disappearing at the most inopportune times. The children begin working to decipher the clues on the manuscript and follow the trail they put down in order to find the Grail; meanwhile, they have to work hard to dodge the antagonists who dog their every step. Each chapter feels packed with adventure and a hint of danger.

The mythology of a Celtic King Arthur pervades the story, which is set in 1970s 1950s Cornwall. It would be a mistake to pick up this book solely for this reason, however. Cooper uses the mythology as a backdrop and a reason for the quest, but she doesn’t explicate so much as signpost. Familiarity with Arthurian legend is neither helpful nor required, and aside from the romanticism such allusions allow, any historical connection might have done just as well. I was disappointed that Cooper couldn’t come up with a richer way of integrating the legends than she does.

What impressed me more was Cooper’s dedication to deductive reasoning and methodical planning on the part of the children. Too many books pitched at young adults have shallow, even insipid plots that require little originality or problem solving on the part of the protagonist. The adventure usually consists of a series of physical feats, and the mental obstacles, if any, are tired and repetitive. Here, the children face a number of obstacles that they overcome through rigorous reasoning and ingenious innovation. For example, at one point they use a ball of cotton thread Jane has to hand to try to measure the depth of a hole they find. Another scene has them reasoning out how the relative placement of three standing stones on a slope affects their apparent heights, and thus the heights of the shadows they cast. By including these details and showing the children’s thinking process, Cooper exposes her younger audience to deductive reasoning. I devoured juvenile mystery series as a boy—Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Encyclopedia Brown were among the best—and I could see myself enjoying this dimension of Over Sea, Under Stone.

Alas, much like the movies this book resembles, the relentless, positive portrayal of the children and their adventure is far from satisfying. Every setback is quickly turned into a triumph; every apparent defeat is actually a victory in disguise upon further reflection. Though there is the hint of danger, it never really emerges. I can understand the appeal of this type of storytelling when pitched at younger readers, but I’m not overly fond of it. And I firmly believe it’s essential to scare kids once in a while. Though I can’t accuse Cooper of leaving out the conflict in this book, I wish it had been more fully developed. I wish the children hadn’t succeeded so easily. There is certainly plot here, in the form of adventure, but the story itself leaves much to be desired.

I’m reading this as part of The Dark is Rising Sequence omnibus. As I write this, I’ve read both this and The Dark is Rising. I’m not quite rushing to add this to my nephew’s future reading list. Which is not to say the books are bad, or dull, or even particularly unimpressive. I enjoyed them. But they don’t achieve the intense highs or agonizing depths that I want from my books, young adult or otherwise. I can’t speak for whether younger me would have had a less critical opinion of them, sorry. And perhaps, at the time when they were published, this was innovative and inspirational. As it is, I think the market and genre have widened to the point where there are certainly more worthwhile stories in which children can immerse themselves. But if there aren’t, then I suppose this would do in a pinch.

My reviews of The Dark is Rising sequence:
The Dark is Rising →

Second Review: January 27, 2019

I’ve just finished another TNG rewatch, and I’ve noticed a lot of things, or been looking at the show, in a different way this time around. That’s what I love about revisiting media I enjoy: you always notice new things. Although I don’t typically re-read a book so close in time to my first reading, the hardcover of Sadie has been calling to me ever since it showed up in September and decorated the shelf in my living room where to-be-read books live. Having read it once, knowing the general twists and turns of the plot now, allows me to spend more time focusing on discovering other elements.

For example, although I mention the timbre of Summers’ writing in my first review, it dominated my experience on this second reading. I have long enjoyed Summers’ novels, but wow, my conviction that Sadie is another level has only been reaffirmed by a re-read. Because when I examine the characters, the way that Summers tells the story, it’s so clear how much work must have gone into figuring out the whole vision for this narrative—not just the parts we see on the page. That is true for most novels, of course. Yet Summers manages to leave the hints of it there without showing the seams of the writing and undermining the whole enterprise.

There’s … there’s just so much happening with these characters. I love the various reactions to people upon learning about Darren’s proclivities, the realistic incredulity of, “He was a God-fearing man,” “he saved my life,” etc. I love the way that Summers gives each of the characters their own little scars and wounds and hurts, to make them like living, breathing people, without making those flaws feel stock or cookie-cutter. May Beth is not a generic grandma/guardian figure. Claire is not a generic druggie single mom. West is not a generic podcast/radio producer. Summers endows each with a clear, strong voice that cuts across Sadie and makes the entire novel cohere into something far more compelling than simply “a story about a lost girl.”

Sadie is lost. Whatever you think of the resolution of this book, Sadie has slipped out of the frame of the picture we put around girls in our society. She knows it too—one of the more subtle elements of heartbreak to this story is the way that Summers weaves these moments throughout Sadie’s narrative where she mulls over what it might be like to be a “normal” girl. To go to high school, be on Instagram, kiss people she wants to kiss, make mistakes that don’t seem like the end of the world. But Sadie can’t have these things, not just because of the circumstances of her childhood and adolescence but because Mattie will never get those things now, and to somehow embrace that life with Mattie gone would be an even grosser betrayal than anything else Sadie feels guilty for (cough, no spoilers). Sadie surrenders herself to her mission, burns herself up in this all-consuming fire of revenge.

And that ending tho.

Again, no spoilers. But the way Summers pulls the rug out from under us is … just so appropriate. I’m sure some people are frustrated. Maybe I’m a little frustrated, but in a good way. I like it—I love it. It’s perfect for what Sadie is doing, which is not just telling the story of Sadie but playing with how we tell stories of girls like Sadie, commenting on it through the almost meta-fictional vehicle of the podcast.

Every so often I come across a book I want to come back to again and again. I want to leach it into my bones, make it a part of me. A Wizard of Earthsea, The Mill on the Floss, and Sophie’s World are a few examples. I didn’t think I would say this on the first reading of it, but Sadie belongs on this list too. No matter how you slice it, this book is achingly beautiful in its heartbreak, yet Summers makes me want to come back and have my heart broken again and again and again.

First Review: April 21, 2018

So I pre-ordered Sadie the moment Courtney Summers announced when it would be out. Over the moon when NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press/Wednesday Books gave me access to the eARC five months ahead of publication! Just so we’re clear, serious fanboying happening, both initially and now as I write this review.

Sadie revolves around two sisters, Mattie Southern and Sadie Hunter. Shortly after thirteen-year-old Mattie is murdered, nineteen-year-old Sadie disappears on a quest for revenge. The narration alternates between Sadie in the first person and transcripts of a podcast hosted by West McCray, who has come out to this small town from the big city in the hopes of learning more about Sadie’s story and maybe even finding her in the process. Some natural questions emerge quickly. Will Sadie find who she’s looking for, and did he actually kill Mattie? Will West find Sadie—and will she still be alive? Will May Beth, Claire, the other residents of Cold Creek get any closure? Yet more important questions blossom in the background. To what lengths will people go to conceal the monsters within, or in their family? Just how far can you run away from, or towards, something before you fall apart? And what, exactly, can you do when the only thing in your life that gives you meaning is brutally ripped away?

On the one hand, Sadie feels a little out of time; like many books set predominantly in that “small town America” milieu, it is filled with set pieces that freeze everything in place: a diner made up like the fifties, suburbs full of the affluent upper-middle class spilling out and blurring the edges of the bigger cities, sketchy bars looking the other way and serving the under age. On the other hand, this is a book very much of the zeitgeist of the 2010s. Sadie does some recon by stalking a fellow teenager on Instagram in a telling scene that reminds us of how much information you can find on someone online.

Similarly, the podcast half of the dual narrative feels very now. Everything about West McCray, from his name to his voice, screams NPR-like radio host, and The Girls podcast is reminiscent of investigative pieces like Serial. I never can visualize characters, but I can totally hear West’s voice in my head, the even-handed way he carefully describes the people he interviews, the places they live, the ways in which they react to the news he tells them. Summers manages to capture the cadence of a podcast perfectly yet in a way that never makes the transcript format imposing or uninteresting.

West himself acknowledges that girls like Sadie disappear almost everyday, that this is a very common story in our society. And it seems like, by adding this podcast layer to the narrative, Summers is making a statement on how these girls’ stories get told. How, once they disappear, if they are not ignored entirely then they are pieced together, rebuilt out of the stories that those they leave behind can tell the media. The picture of Sadie that West provides us is different from the Sadie we get to know from her own voice. Neither is necessarily the authoritative version (more on that below); neither really tells us “the whole story”. But you can sense the ambivalence in West’s voice, the way he is aware that even as he tries to bring attention to Sadie’s story and, by extension, the stories of other girls who have disappeared like this, he also knows he is perpetuating the appropriation of these stories as media spectacle.

There’s a lot happening in Sadie, and I’m still not sure I have unpacked it all in my head, let alone figured out how to articulate it in a review. (I guess I’m just going to have to revisit this when I get the physical copy in September….) There is so much more here than just the story of Sadie, alone on the road, looking for the man who killed Mattie. This is about what people remember about Sadie, the way they think about her. As always, Summers eschews stereotypes and stock characters in favour of rich and deep personalities who don’t always conform to our expectations. Sadie’s mother, Claire, is perhaps the best example of this: it’s easy and perhaps natural for us to want to vilify her for her absenteeism and negligence—yet Summers confronts us with Claire’s humanity, with that brutal reminder that Claire was even younger than Sadie was when she had Sadie.

And so this is book not just about Sadie, or about girls who disappear, but also about how we judge those girls—and indeed, girls and women in general. We judge them for how they act, or don’t act, how they speak, or don’t speak—basically, we find them wanting whenever we want something from them. In this way, Sadie is a tragedy, yes, but it’s a tragedy that cuts to the heart of our society’s hangups about how to talk about girls and women. Sadie’s story has been overlooked until The Girls podcast precisely because she doesn’t conform to the stories we want to tell, like the heartwarming tales of small town girls overcoming adversity and making it big. Sadie is not a stereotype, nor is she a statistic: she’s a young adult driven by a dangerous cocktail of determination and desperation.

Let’s talk about unreliable narrators for a moment, because holy shit is Sadie unreliable, and it’s fantastic. I love the unreliable narrator conceit in general, because when the author nails it, they can do incredible things to the narrative. That’s exactly what happens here. Thanks to the dual narrative structure, Summers can use West’s podcast to reveal details that Sadie doesn’t witness or chooses to omit. There’s a moment close to the end of the book where West interviews a character with whom Sadie crossed paths, and we learn that there was an entire scene between this character and Sadie, in which she reveals something very important, but she completely leaves it out of the story she tells us. I literally did a doubletake while reading and very carefully paged back through this book to the point earlier in the narrative where Sadie interacts with this character, just to make sure I hadn’t somehow missed this scene. Nope. Sadie left it out. And then she goes and lies to us.

Brilliant.

As usual, I also just love the quality and timbre of Summers’ writing too. Her descriptions, in particular, just jumped out at me in Sadie as lush and evocative:

Cold Creek arteries out into worn and chipped Monopoly houses that no longer have a place upon the board. From there lies a rural sort of wilderness. The highway out is interrupted by veins of dirt roads leading to nowhere as often as they lead to pockets of dilapidated houses or trailer parks in even worse shape.

This passage would be sublime with just that first sentence. I know exactly what she’s communicating here. OMG, that juxtaposition of “arteries” and “veins” tho—it elevates this to perfection.

Sadie is a such a smooth yet intense read. It builds, quickly and violently, towards an explosive series of confrontations before settling down into a resolution that probably won’t surprise anyone, although certainly some might not be satisfied with it. I, for one, didn’t mind it at all. Once again Summers manages to capture all the awkward in-between moments, the dirt and grit and apposite exhaustion of a single-minded quest. This is Kill Bill stripped away of its grindhouse trappings. This is realism meshed with revenge fantasy, and there are moments where it seems like it’s about to lurch dangerously to one side and spill over, yet Summers manages to keep it all together into a coherent tale.

At one point in the novel, Sadie describes herself:

My body is sharp enough to cut glass and in desperate need of rounding out, but sometimes I don’t mind. A body might not always be beautiful, but a body can be a beautiful deception. I’m stronger than I look.

I’m in love with that phrase, “a beautiful deception”. Paired with “sharp enough to cut glass” and, again, although I don’t actually visualize what Sadie looks like, I feel like I understand what she looks like now.

More importantly, “sharp enough to cut glass” is a perfect way to describe Summers’ own writing, and thanks to the clever narrative structure, Sadie is definitely a beautiful deception. Summers has always written about lost girls, about girls who are also survivors. And I’ve always been here for it. I have loved every one of Summers’ novels that I’ve read, and this one might be the best yet.

Bad Feminist has been on my radar for years, but as with many such books, it took someone physically putting it in my hands for me to get around to it. In this case, my best friend Rebecca (with whom I have started a podcast!) gave this to me as a going-away present when she moved to Montreal (I’m not sure she understands how going-away presents work?). She inscribed it, “To our first book, for our Feminist Book Club.” So I guess I’m in a feminist book club now! It’s interesting, because Rebecca and I both call ourselves feminists, but we have very different experiences, of course. Her lived experience as a woman is very different from mine as a man. And while we both share a voracious appetite to learn more (about everything, not just feminism), we sometimes have different ways of going about this. So I love discussing our experiences and ideas with each other, and I enjoyed reading Bad Feminist if only to get her take on it.

I’ve only actually read one other book by Roxane Gay: Difficult Women, a collection of short stories. I loved it. I’ve also read a non-fiction article here or there by her. I don’t follow her on Twitter but occasionally see some of her stuff retweeted into my timeline. That sort of thing; I’m aware of who she is and how she approaches these subjects, but Bad Feminist is the first time I’ve sat down for an extended visit in her mind. And this time I even sipped this book rather than chugged it, like I do with most essay books, which I’m aware isn’t the ideal way to consume these things.

I appreciate Gay’s honesty, the way she is upfront when she explains that she has not set out to create a manifesto, or the next Visionary Feminist Book. Too often writers (either earnestly or because they think confidence is the key to marketing) pitch their writing in a way that makes it seem like they and only they have the revelation that’s going to make feminism (or whatever subject) make sense for the reader. Gay is having none of it. These are personal essays, she says. They are published, public, but they are political in the sense that being a person (and especially a Black woman) is political within the context of American society. In this sense Gay is continuing a long tradition of essays written for the sake of a writer expressing her opinion, as opposed to essays written for the sake of a movement.

I really like the first section, “Me,” in which Gay ruminates upon some facets of her life, such as professorship and Scrabble. Some of her comments about teaching resonate with me, a high school teacher of adults. As she confesses her feelings of inadequacy trying to make class “fun,” or her reservations about the way so many of her students appear to be there only because they’ve been told (by parents, by society, by companies) that college is the only route to success, I think about my own experiences in the classroom. The specifics of our experiences overlap very little, but the overall feelings are familiar.

As the collection goes on into broader topics, most of the essays are OK but not outstanding, in my opinion. More specifically, they are fine pieces of writing, but they fail to unify into any particular set of ideas or perspectives that really get me thinking differently. There are a few exceptions to this, of course. I appreciate a lot of the content around race, including the essay on Chris Brown’s abusiveness and how women sometimes still gravitate towards such abusive celebrity, or her critiques of acclaimed movies like Django Unchained and The Help. Basically, these make me feel like I’m reading someone’s blog. Their thoughts are fresh, somewhat unfiltered, and coming from someone whose ideas and experiences are quite distinct from mine.

Sometimes I disagree with her. Gay mulls over whether or not trigger warnings are useful. Now, I like the essay, because she explains quite well why she doesn’t want to use them. In so doing, she makes me think about trigger warnings, and I understand what she’s seeing. I also think she makes a salient point that a lot of people who eschew trigger warnings don’t grasp or refuse to grasp: just because she doesn’t believe in them doesn’t mean she wants others to stop using them, in the same way (her analogy) an atheist doesn’t necessarily think a Christian should stop believing in the Bible. So while she didn’t convince me (and I’m not sure that’s what she set out to do anyway), it was interesting hearing her perspective on that issue.

Some of the pop culture stuff, the essays about Orange is the New Black or Girls, feels less relevant now. If you watch these shows then I suspect you would find these pieces more interesting. For me, though, I have to rifle through my brain of five years ago to dredge up my incomplete understanding of those shows.

Overall, I appreciate the way Gay labels herself a “bad feminist” and, at the end of the book, dissects what she means by that. I, too, am a bad feminist of course. In particular, I am a white, cis man, which means I have a lot of privilege in this patriarchal society, so sometimes I don’t even realize when I’m flexing that privilege or stepping over a line. If I’m lucky, one of my friends notices and warns me—but it shouldn’t be someone else’s job to educate me. That’s my job, and it’s why I read books like this one. It’s why I identify as a feminist, even though I know I’m going to mess up—because I believe feminism is for everyone.* If we restrict it only to people who are doing it “right” then no one could be a feminist at all.

(*Except TERFs. Fuck right off with that bullshit.)

Bad Feminist is a solid three stars from me. I liked it, didn’t love it. Might leaf through it again in the future, or if someone asks me about a particular essay, or maybe I’ll lend my copy to an interested friend at some point. I have read much worse books that purport to be about feminism, and I have read some far more interesting ones as well (interesting at least to me). I enjoyed getting to know Gay’s non-fiction writing a bit better. I don’t think you can go wrong reading this, but I also don’t want to hype it up and make it more than what it is.

Some books don’t work for me even as they leave me stunned, impressed, or moved. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is one such book. Benjamin Alire Sáenz makes me cry at points with his writing, which is definitely beautiful. Yet neither the story itself nor the characters end up doing much for me.

Aristotle (Ari, he calls himself) is a Mexican–American teenager growing up in the 1980s. One summer he meets Dante, also of Mexican descent but with parents who are college professors. The two strike up an unlikely friendship that verges into shades of the romantic. Dante in particular seems quite smitten with Ari and willing to explore the romantic side of their friendship, but Ari is reluctant. Things are complicated by the way Ari bottles up his emotions and has difficulty forming authentic connections with other people. Ari thinks he just wants to be left alone. I’m not here to psychoanalyze Ari, though.

I liked the beginning and middle of this book. I liked the development of Ari and Dante’s friendship, the way that they befriend one another, defend one another, and acknowledge each other’s strangeness. Sáenz attempts to portray the zaniness that often accompanies the timeless treasure of a teenager’s summer. After Ari and Dante are separated and Ari returns to school, then gets a job and a vehicle, and begins to think about what it means to grow up, I found myself really invested in his narration. I understand why other people are so captivated by these characters, and in particular by how Ari fixates on some aspects of his personality while diminishing others.

I don’t like the ending. At all.

I don’t like how Ari’s parents sit him down, basically hold and intervention, and parentsplain his feelings to him. This seems like a weird way to end something that should be a romance (is it a romance?). Does anyone’s parents act this way? And it feels infantilizing, like it’s stripping Ari of his agency to make his own choices not just about what he feels but how he expresses his feelings. This might sounds harsh of me, but I think it’s Ari’s prerogative if he wants to be bottle up his emotions and be unhappy. While I understand that his parents might want to intervene to help him, I don’t think you can tell someone what is in their heart. They have to come to these realizations on their own—sometimes with your guidance, sometimes with your questioning, but ultimately from within, not without. So that entire denouement felt rushed, clumsy, and unsatisfying—particularly given the care exhibited in the rest of the book.

This book is endearing because it embraces the messiness of adolescence. Sáenz’s writing style is particularly suited to admitting the complexities of teenage friendship and romance that are sometimes elided in other young adult novels. Ari’s complicated relationships with other friends, or with his parents, are just as real and interesting and important as whatever is happening between him and Dante.

And this is definitely Ari’s story. Sáenz could easily have split the perspective of this narration. He doesn’t, which means we never really get to know Dante beyond what Ari reveals to us through the letters and his recounting of his time with Dante. Part of me wonders how much of the Dante we know is a result of an unreliable narrator. Because Dante never really feels like a fully-realized human character. He isn’t quite a manic pixie dream boy (I don’t think Ari wants one of those?)—and to be fair, Sáenz endows him with desires and issues of his own. Yet Dante remains always somewhat distant from us, even as we continue to go deeper into Ari’s psyche.

I guess I’m in the situation where I can see why people love this book, but it’s like I’m admiring it from the next mountain over instead of joining you on that particular peak. If I’m far enough away, I can dig the atmosphere, the setting, and some of Ari’s journey. As I zoom in, though, there’s more and more that doesn’t work for me. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe didn’t live up to the expectations that others’ joy for it gave me—but that happens sometimes. Paradoxically, I still enjoyed reading it. I like that it moved me to tears a couple of times. I’m just not going to rave about it.

Funny status update concerning this book and my friend hoping to give it to me as a present. But ever since I kicked off my year with Alice Oseman’s sublime Radio Silence, I was ready to pre-order I Was Born for This. I was slightly more hesitant to dive in after being disappointed by Solitaire, so let me start by saying that Oseman has won me back over. This is a great book.

Told in alternating chapters by Fereshteh “Angel” Rahimi and Jimmy Kaga-Ricci, I Was Born for This is about the “love” fans have for their heroes, and what that actually entails. Jimmy is a transgender member of a boy band trio (The Ark). Angel, just turning 18, is a diehard Ark fan—at least, online. In person she makes do with talking about whatever her other friends talk about. So she’s excited to go to London and meet her online friend Juliet IRL for the first time, then accompany her to The Ark’s O2 show. Jimmy, meanwhile, is having cold feet about signing a new contract that promises more success and fame for The Ark—but longer, more arduous tours and performances too. Oseman gradually brings these two characters together while examining what it means to have your beliefs and desires challenged.

Angel is a really interesting character because she’s quite flawed. She goes into her week with Juliet with all these pre-conceived expectations. Then, when the universe doesn’t bend itself to her whims, she’s slow to adjust those expectations. I like how Oseman captures the way in which a lot of people (myself included) have this kind of latent social anxiety: we don’t always get uncomfortable around various sized groups of people, but sometimes we build up expectations in our mind that, when unmet, make it difficult for us to enjoy ourselves socially. In this respect, although I’m older than Angel and don’t share her gender, religion, or other background, I can definitely identify with the experiences she has here. Yes, it’s rude the way Juliet invites Mac without telling Angel. No one is an angel (pun intended in this book)—but Angel doesn’t handle it well, and she acknowledges this and learns from it, and I love that.

I also like the nuance of Jimmy’s character. In general, Oseman does her best, I think, at creating three-dimensional band members—although Rowan and Lister are slightly less well-rounded than Jimmy, I’d say. Jimmy’s anxiety is far more pronounced than Angel’s (and ironically he is much more in the public eye), and I really like how Oseman portrays the way his anxiety mounts. In the particularly memorable bathroom scene, the way the perspective jumps from Jimmy to Angel and then back and we can see them reacting to the way the other is acting … ugh, it’s good. Oseman’s writing, the way she narrates and develops each scene, is on point here.

Both Jimmy and Angel are flawed characters, then. They also have identities that the author doesn’t share. I like how Jimmy being trans and Angel being Muslim is each a part of their character but not a significant plot point. Firstly, that other type of story isn’t really Oseman’s to tell. And we need more stories with this kind of rep, where characters have diverse and often marginalized identities, but those identities are not themselves the focus of the story. I can’t speak to Oseman’s portrayal of these identities, but I can say that I like the way she tried to be inclusive without being tokenizing.

As far as the actual story goes … it’s just very human. It takes longer for Jimmy and Angel to meet up, versus what I expected from the way it’s described in the back of the book. Angel accompanying Jimmy on that little trip is … a little weird, I guess? But it leads to perhaps the best line of the book, where Jimmy’s grandfather observes:

I know he asked you for help … but the trouble is, while asking for help is always good, it’s impossible to keep relying on others to solve your problems for you. There comes a point where you have to help yourself. Believe in yourself.

This resonates with me not so much as someone who needs help (I do sometimes, of course) but as someone who is very eager to help his friends. “Being helpful” is a core part of my personality—yet, of course, sometimes I overreach or overextend myself. Sometimes I try too hard to help people, when really, there isn’t anything I can do (beyond being supportive). In this way, Jimmy’s grandfather reminds Angel and me, as kindly as possible, that we can’t solve other people’s problems.

Although I love this line, and I like Jimmy’s grandfather, I notice that Oseman casts two elderly people—Jimmy’s grandfather and Juliet’s nan—in the role of kindly, wise old person. These two characters are among the least well-developed of the cast, and it’s interesting that they are so similar in their roles.

Similarly, I’m not a huge fan of the climax of the story and Lister’s disappearance. Everything happens in a way that is a little too sickly-sweet-cinematic or after-school-special for my tastes. I understand what Oseman is going for, I think, and I’m happy with the overall resolution of the plot, but that particular set of events was less interesting to me because it felt so contrived compared to the rest.

I Was Born for This didn’t grab me quite as much in the feels as Radio Silence (then again, what book could?!). Nevertheless, it’s a solid story with two dynamic and interesting main characters. Once again, Oseman tackles issues of anxiety in young adults and the unrealistic expectations we put on ourselves as well as the world around us. She does it with empathy and some humour, and there is a lot more to like here than what I managed to express in this review, which I’m unfortunately writing over a week after finishing the book (so it goes).