Reading this book was a surreal experience in a few ways. I read a lot of contemporary YA, so I’m used to feeling a lot older than the characters. Speak was originally published in 1999, when I was ten years old. So I was younger than Melinda when this book first came out, and the high school setting actually predates my own high school experience. Yet I’m older than her now, when I read it. Time is weird, y’all.

Trigger warnings include discussion of rape and at least one scene with some racism.

Speak is Melinda’s first-person journey through depression and self-loathing after she was raped at a party the summer before Grade 9. We don’t learn this right away, of course, although anyone who is paying attention will connect the dots fairly soon. Melinda’s initial coping strategy after this trauma is to withdraw and stop talking any more than is absolutely necessary. Abandoned by her former friends because they think she called the cops to the party for no reason, Melinda walks the halls of Merryweather High alone. She pretends to like it that way, but secretly she feels broken. As the story goes on and the school year progresses, Melinda struggles to figure out what she should feel, how she should act, while her parents and other authority figures try to figure out why she has changed.

My edition is set in block format, an interesting departure from what is conventional. It matches the style of the book, though, which while not epistolary certainly feels confessional. Most of the adults in this story are not named. They’re given epithets: Mr. Neck, Hairwoman, Principal Principal, etc. Even her parents are stubbornly Mom and Dad. Melissa’s narrative voice is descriptive and eloquent yet also very succinct in how she relates events. We move swiftly from scene to scene, never wanting to linger too long. At first I wasn’t a huge fan of this style. By the end of the book, I’d adapted to it, and even if it isn’t my favourite, it kind of works for how Anderson tells the story.

I’ve read several YA books that deal with the consequences of rape or attempted rape now. Speak has the distinction of being one of the earliest, chronologically speaking, in terms of both writing and setting. There’s no texting here, no social media—the backchannel is the toilet stall door of the girls’ bathroom. In many ways, it’s these absences, these differences from what we’re used to now, that jumped out at me the most while reading. It felt very anachronistic, because other than these small cultural and technological differences, this story definitely feels like it could have been set now.

Melinda is also quite young. Not only is she unsure of how to express what happened to others, she struggles even to wrap her own head around it. Anderson has Melinda call her rapist “IT” and often uses imagery like “bunny rabbit” to describe Melinda’s dynamic with him as predator–prey. Unlike someone in Grade 11 or 12, at Grade 8 going into Grade 9, Melinda has so little experience with dating, flirting, drinking, and sex, and this adds another layer of complexity to processing her trauma. When Anderson finally has us describe the scene, it’s disjointed and occasionally difficult to follow, as one might expect from reliving a traumatic memory. Yet there’s also a nervousness to the passages. As if Melinda is worried we won’t believe her, because she doesn’t know how to explain what was happening to her.

I do wish there were more resolution here. I wish we got to see the aftermath of Melinda finding her voice and speaking up. Obviously Anderson chose to end the story where she did because she wants us to focus on Melinda’s journey to that point. I respect that even if I’m left wanting a lot more. Similarly, I find myself yearning for a little more than the somewhat stereotypical tropes deployed for the parents and authority figures. While there is an appealing kind of universality to the experience Anderson carves out in this story, it also left me feeling a bit bored. Okay, so Mom and Dad aren’t the most affectionate and attentive parents ever. Why? Could we go a bit more into that? I’m reminded a bit of Sana’s relationships with her parents in It’s Not Like It’s a Secret and how Sugiura helps us understand the full extent of those dynamics.

So really … Speak has elements of power to it, and I understand why so many people have enjoyed it and praised it. This is a book about the struggle to find one’s voice following an intense trauma. Despite being 20 years old now, it is as relevant, sadly, to our rape culture today as it was when it was written: none of this would have happened if we lived in a society that educated boys to treat women with respect and privileged consent over all else. In these regards, Speak feels like it belongs in that classics category. It has staying power. Yet like many classics, that doesn’t automatically make it perfect.

It seems like every time I review a short story anthology I always start with a disclaimer about how short stories, and by extension, their anthologies, are not really “for me.” In this case I need to say it because How Long ’Til Black Future Month? is one of those rare exceptions where I … I actually liked pretty much every story in here. Not equally, of course. But there were only one or two stories that left me scratching me head and shrugging and saying, “Eh, I didn’t get the one.” The rest were … wow.

I’m doubly surprised, because my foray into N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was less successful. It put me off reading her much-acclaimed Broken Earth books for a long time (I’m still on the fence). To be clear, it’s not a question of her writing skill but just my particular tastes.

What this short story collection does that her novel did not do for me is throw so many amazing ideas in my face. Some short story anthologies have the obvious superstars along with one or two duds and then a handful of mediocre material that’s all right but not really anything special. That’s not the case here. Every short story in this collection is a revelation of storytelling. The one thing in the back of my mind reading this was, “Damn, this is like Ursula K. Le Guin–level good.” Jemisin deserves a long and celebrated career in speculative fiction and grandmaster status, because she has got it.

It’s really difficult to single out any stories for praise. Firstly, because there are a lot of them—you get your money’s worth for this collection, or in my case, my library certainly did. Secondly, because they do blur together, in the best way. Emergent AI consciousnesses downloading into meatspace from a futuristic descendant of the Internet. Singing to cities as they become sentient. Cooks challenged to create impossible meals. Dragons adapting to a new life. Epistolary evidence of a parasitical threat to humankind from contact with another alien species. The personification of Death wandering a post-apocalyptic Earth. The list goes on.

Jemisin’s imagination crystallizes here with breathtaking results. And yes, the stories are full of Black and brown characters and queer characters but regardless of the representation they are also just so good I didn’t want this collection to end and I also kind of did because it was hurting me that they were so good. The last story, “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters,” shouldn’t have worked for me. I didn’t like it at first. But the oddball friendship between Tookie and the lizard just … it’s just good, okay? This whole book is good.

How Long ’Til Black Future Month? has reignited hope that maybe I’ll enjoy some of Jemisin’s other novels. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll only ever enjoy her short stories, ironically, since we share in common a hesitation to embrace the form. That’s okay too.

It’s fashionable among a certain throwback segment of science fiction fans to claim that the entrance of so many new women writers to the field has somehow diminished the quality of stories being published. This, despite the fact that women have always been writing in science fiction from its inception. But whatever—all I have to say is I don’t know what SF they’re reading, because much of the best SF I have read in recent years has consistently come from women. This is particularly true of space opera, a subgenre I’d largely given up hope on, until I discovered established titans like Bujold and Moon and newcomers like Dunstall. Finder isn’t technically space opera, I don’t think, but it has many space operatic elements to it. Suzanne Palmer continues to prove that not only are women not diminishing this genre; they are actively bringing fresh stories that make it more of a pleasure to keep reading. So there!

The premise of Finder is incredibly simple, which is always a good sign: Fergus Ferguson (it’s a whole thing) is the eponymous finder. In this case, he has already found his object: a stolen spaceship. He’s going to have to steal it back on behalf of his clients, the rightful owners. But it’s in the hands of a particularly nasty piece of work, a warlord/gang leader who controls a part of a backwater solar system. Fergus inadvertently stumbles into the middle of cold war that he quickly ignites into a warm war—oops—and, oh, there are aliens involved too. Somehow.

The charm of Finder lies in how Palmer takes this simple premise and blows it up into a system-wide civil war without somehow losing the reader in all the chaos. Fergus is a likeable rogue type, and Palmer manages to balance perspicacity with errors in judgment. He comes up with a clever plan, executes the plan … and it goes horribly wrong, so he has to improvise, and come up with another clever plan. This formula repeats for about 300 pages, and it works quite well. We never spend too much time in one place or on one subplot before Palmer redirects us into another new adventure. I wouldn’t exactly call Finder “cinematic” in the sense we often mean when we use that word, but there are screenplay-like elements to this story that for some reason I find quite appealing here.

There’s also a good cast of minor characters who revolve around Fergus and offer alternatively comic relief, sidekick help, or sheer badassery. Fergus has a badass background, what with being a reluctant hero/rebel type on Mars, and a “particular set of skills,” but Palmer makes it clear he is more of a jack of all trades than a master of many. So he acquires various support characters throughout his quests, coalescing into a rag-tag crew for the final assault on the Big Bad.

This is where Finder kind of falls down for me. The Big Bad doesn’t seem all that imposing or, crucially, interesting. He’s an upstart warlord exiled from his home system for not being the right kind of religiously wacky. He’s supposedly this Xanatos gambit genius of a villain who is always one step ahead of all the other leaders, and indeed, he packs a serious punch throughout this book. Yet as a character he remains a frustrating, off-page cipher for almost the entire book. We only ever really hear about him through others. I’m not trying to say he’s misunderstood, just that as far as villains go, he’s boring. I want a villain who is convinced he’s not the bad guy and is doing this all for “good reasons,” or I want a villain who, while irredeemably cruel, nevertheless chews the scenery with the best of ’em. This guy … is neither of those things.

I’m also not on board with the alien subplot. It’s well-executed in terms of how Palmer integrates it with the rest of the story. It feels like a setup, though, for something that will run through the rest of the series. I guess I can see why that might be desirable, but as far as this one book goes, the reveal at the end regarding the aliens is frustratingly cryptic instead of charmingly cryptic. But that could just be me.

Overall, I’d say that I found Finder to be an entertaining, almost captivating work of science fiction. It kept me interested in reading from page 1 to the end, which is not something I can say for every book, and I really did enjoy both the characters and the situations in which they found themselves. None of the elements of the plot are, individually, all that novel or fascinating. Nevertheless, Palmer crafts them together into a coherent story that serves its purpose well. I would maybe read a sequel and would definitely check out other stories Palmer offers up in the future.

I love reading science fiction, and you might expect me to open this review with an encomium of how science fiction helps us imagine a way into a better future. But no. One of the reasons I love science fiction is for how it asks us to truly confront our assumptions about the way things are, and whether that’s inevitable.

So many science fiction stories involving artificial intelligence place that intelligence into humanoid or human-like android bodies. Yet other stories imagine AI as something truly posthuman, something so incredibly different from us in perception and ability as to be truly alien, no matter its origin. There’s a powerful moment in the last season of Battlestar Galactica when Number One, one of the human-form Cylons, rails against the unfairness that has saddled him with the biological limitations of human eyesight, human senses, human language: “I want to see gamma rays, hear X-rays, smell dark matter!” His passionate performance conveys a truly tragic sense that he feels trapped, that the embodiment that to the struggling remnants of humanity seemed like the ultimate upgrade for the formerly “toaster” Cylons is in fact a sick joke for him. It all comes down to perception, and to how we see the world.

In The Reality Bubble, science communicator extraordinaire Ziya Tong challenges our own understanding of how we see the world. She asks us to really dig deep into our perception of physical reality and how it affects our conception of reality, our mental map of the world. Understand that I’m not exaggerating here when I say that pretty much every chapter, if not every page, of this book is a revelation in some way. I mean, I consider myself a fairly well-educated human, and it’s true that I was familiar, in broad terms, with much of what Tong discusses herein. Yet every chapter goes deeper into these topics. As the subtitle of the book promises, this entire work focuses on the idea of the blind spots that we intentionally or unintentionally suffer throughout our lifetimes—and beyond. It is remarkably coherent and well-organized for something that is unequivocally polemical in its condemnation of capitalism’s overreach.

In Part One, Tong discusses what she calls “biological blind spots.” Basically, these are things we can’t see because of inherent limitations in our biology. These include the world of microorganisms, as well as the parts of the colour spectrum that are invisible to us. By establishing how what we don’t see shapes our world as much as what we do see, Tong lays the groundwork for the thesis that runs throughout the book here, namely that we should be mindful of how our perceptions of the physical world bias our internal, mental map of the world. It’s in this section that I learned 20 percent of our oxygen comes not from trees or even algae but from a humble cyanobacterium called Prochlorococcas.

In Part Two, Tong moves on to “societal blind spots.” As you might guess, these are constructs of human society that we nonetheless fail to see—often through a certain level of willful blindness on our part. She discusses the way meat industry, power generation, oil and other resource extraction, and the trash/recycling industry. She ties these together through an emphasis on the scale of these procedures. The culmination of a globalized economy post–World War II, combined with the technological fervour of the ebullient 1950s in the West, basically set the stage for the mass consumer culture that demanded these industries by built as they are.

In the final part, which is nearly half the entire book, Tong discusses “civilizational blind spots.” With chapters titled the likes of “Time Lords” and “Space Invaders,” you’d be forgiven for expecting flights of speculative fancy. Yet Tong remains grounded for the entire book. Those chapters are more about the arbitrary ways in which we have scientifically constructed and divided up divisions of time and space, respectively, and how colonialism and globalization have propagated these notions around the world. The final chapter, “Revolution,” summarizes Tong’s arguments and pleads for us to radically rethink how we approach the world.

I’m a huge fan of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything for the simple reason that it really captures the interconnectedness of our universe. As I sit here on my deck writing this review, I’m breathing oxygen produced by plants and indeed cyanobacteria, lounging in a chair mostly made from plastic and artificial fibres manufactured somewhere in … oh, likely China, and transported around the world through an intricate supply chain a century or more in the making. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Bryson’s style while reading The Reality Bubble, because Tong has done exactly the same thing.

This is a book designed to make you think. Hard. It’s designed to make you question. It doesn’t offer a lot in the way of answers; Tong isn’t trying to sell you on some miracle plan that’s going to fix the whole planet. Rather, she just wants us to cast off the complacency that often settles on us as a consequence of living in such a fast-paced, on-demand society wherein the wheels and gears of the machines that drive us are often hidden from view. Tong wants us to pull back the curtain and look at the wizard and ask some critical questions about his supply-chain infrastructure. And that’s probably a very good idea.

I often give my English students a project I call the Lifecycle of a Product. It’s pretty obvious what it entails: pick an everyday product you use, research its manufacturing lifecycle from raw materials to where/how it gets disposed, and then present your findings as a media text. Beforehand, we discuss globalization and what that means for our society. Because I feel like it’s my job as a teacher not just to teach my students how to use PowerPoint but to actually equip them to ask the hard questions in life. I want them to think, and I want them to wonder, and I want them to want to know where their cup of coffee comes from and what that actually costs us beyond the couple of dollars they might not even physically exchange for the drink. I want them to remember that our reality is a curious combination of physical stimulus and social construction, and sometimes it’s so hard to divine which is which, or to decide what to do about it.

I grabbed this book off my library’s new books shelf, and I’m glad I did. I’m happy to live in an era where we can have a blurb on the cover of a book that says, “#MeToo and #Resistance through the lens of epic fantasy.” Count me in! The Women’s War posits a world where men control the direction of women’s lives and a woman’s worth is largely determined by the children she has or could bear—wait, sorry, that’s our world. In this fantasy world it’s … oh, is it the same? Oh snap.

Except in this case, there’s magic, and at the start of the book a conspiracy of three women aim to smash the patriarchy by working a reproductive rights spell: that’s right, women (well, people with uteruses, I’m guessing, but this book doesn’t seem to acknowledge that trans or even queer people in general are a thing) will only conceive if they truly want to conceive—and that doesn’t mean under duress. Also, there’s a bunch of ancillary effects that change how some women can do magic, etc.

Glass teases the actual spell for the first few chapters and keeps us guessing, which definitely helps you get into the book. I will confess to being underwhelmed by the actual “Curse” as it becomes so named. My first reaction was, “I feel like this could really easily backfire,” i.e., women could now be punished for failing to conceive. I worried that this was a surface solution to a much deeper issue. Fortunately, Glass anticipates this objection, and indeed, the Curse doesn’t magically improve life for women—it turns out it will take a lot more to smash the patriarchy than that. If anything, The Women’s War is all about how small, ongoing acts of resistance matter just as much, if not more, than grand, dramatic gestures. The three women who kick off the Curse give their lives, which is huge—but they don’t have to live in the world they create. Alys, Shelvon, Ellin, etc., are the ones who have to live with the consequences and continue fighting, day in and day out. That takes more strength.

There’s also an interesting magic system in this book. It’s an interesting mixture of alchemy and a kind of third-eye that lets the caster locate and manipulate “elements” to combine them into different spells and potions. I really like that Glass doesn’t infodump too much about this system; we get a good understanding of its basics and its limitations without a lot of unnecessary exposition.

I wish the same could be said for the political intrigue … sigh. This is the part of the book that really didn’t interest me, and it’s such a significant part! The political structures of the countries in this book are extremely simplistic and undifferentiated. There are “kingdoms” and “principalities,” and every country apparently has the exact same cabinet/council structure—lord chamberlain, lord commander, lord high treasurer, etc. Glass attempts to introduce some cultural diversity in terms of the dress, manners, and expectations of the various kingdoms. But it’s all a little too cookie-cutter for a book that spends so much time talking about dynastic matchmaking, trade agreements, and land disputes. Moreover, the religious dynamic is almost entirely absent. There is some generic mention of holy text known as a Devotional, but beyond that, it’s extremely unclear how many religions there are, what their power structures are like, and how much influence they wield over various governments.

Glass’ storytelling style also isn’t the most appealing to me. There was a time when I would have drooled to see a 560-page fantasy novel and yearned for more and more of them. Yet the more of them I read, the more I realize that they seldom need to be that long. We don’t need pages and pages of scenery-chewing by the bad guys lamenting that these nasty women are making them do terrible things. We don’t need pages and pages of scenery-chewing by the good guys lamenting that these bad guys are making them become revolutionaries. Paradoxically, however, I’d say that this means The Women’s War would be extremely familiar to those of us who grew up, as I did, on classic fantasy along the lines of Eddings and Modesitt. Every so often I have a nostalgia-fuelled craving for such fantasy, and you know what? This book would scratch that itch for sure. It’s just the right amount of over-the-top-taking-itself-too-seriously fantasy that would fit right in with what 14-year-old me would have loved.

I’m sure some people are going to pan The Women’s War for being too progressive and attempting to cash in on what they might call the “SJW hype,” although I suspect most of those people wouldn’t even bother reading this book. On the other hand, it’s possible to criticize The Women’s War for not going far enough. I don’t really know if it’s that revolutionary in terms of the story it’s telling, to be honest, and maybe that’s part of the reason I liked but did not love this book. No queer people, unclear whether there are really any people of colour involved, no women outside of the nobility as far as I can tell … and, once again, we have a fantasy novel that replicates the patriarchal structure of our world. Granted, Glass only does this to challenge it extremely explicitly. Yet I appreciate that so many people are trying to shift the conversation within fantasy towards imagining worlds that aren’t oppressive in the way ours is, and playing with the types of conflicts that might exist in those worlds.

Now, I’m not going to criticize The Women’s War for not being something it isn’t trying to be. For that very reason, however, I also can’t sing its praises at the top of my lungs. This book is trying to be a feminist fantasy novel full of resistance and rebellion. It only kind of succeeds. I always appreciate it when stories swing big, of course, and that gives this book a lot of credibility with me. I just wish either the themes had gone further or the storytelling had been more to my personal tastes—I think if either of those elements were a bit different, I’d be all over this.

As of this review, I’ve read six books by Larry Niven (some coauthored by his frequent collaborator, Jerry Pournelle). That’s a hefty number for any single author on my bookshelf. I’ve another three books by him on my to-read shelf, but part of me wonders why: my average rating is just over 2 stars, and I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I’ve found most of his books too flimsy and poorly written to be great. But Niven, despite all his flaws as a writer, remains a singularly remarkable source of interesting ideas (Ringworld is just one of them).

Flash Crowd is another example of a good idea. It’s Niven’s attempt to methodically examine how long-distance teleportation would change society. He uses the conceit of a journalist, Barry “Jerryberry” Jansen, working to uncover how the transit booths work as part of a larger piece on the effects of transit booths on rioting. Niven’s premise is that the ability to cross the country in a matter of minutes allows for near-instantaneous riots, or even a semi-permanent, itinerant riot. It’s a chilling vision of something that seems highly unlikely yet plausible, given the right technology at the right time.

Jerryberry is working under a time limit. He literally has hours until an interview that will either absolve him for his role in starting a riot or pinion him as the man who let it happen. This is good for dramatic tension, but it’s also a commentary on the fast-paced nature of life with teleportation. We don’t have teleportation yet, but I think the metaphor holds given our near-instantaneous access to information. Niven touches on the double-edged sword of instant media here, and while the technology references and the ideas are somewhat stale, the overall commentary remains incisive.

This is the type of story that really only works as a short piece of fiction. As far as stories go it shouldn’t work but does: it has very little in the way of plot and an embarrassing amount of exposition. This is quite literally Niven rapping a thought experiment in the form of a novella … but that’s OK. Because, again, the ideas are just so interesting and thought-provoking that one can ignore the impoverished, hastily-erected structure surrounding them.

Of all the Niven works I’ve read so far, this is probably one of my favourites. It’s short, accessible, and fascinating. So if you have the time to read about how teleportation might disrupt and innovate, Flash Crowd is worth a look. Just don’t expect a symphony of words to wash over you in the process.

Read as part of The Mammoth Book of Short Science Fiction Novels.

Okay, so instead of five years passing between re-read books, I’ve only let a year elapse. That’s not too bad on the Ben Scale of Book Series Completion! My reception of Second Foundation is much more positive than my review of Foundation and Empire, in which I skewered Isaac Asimov’s writing style. Honestly, I found this book to be far more readable and even enjoyable at points!

As with the previous book, this one is essentially two novellas. The first takes place five years after “The Mule” from Foundation and Empire. The Mule has consolidated his hold on the volume of space he wrested from the Foundation’s control, but he has delayed any further expansion. Instead he’s searching for the mysterious, shadowy Second Foundation. When the story starts, he is about to dispatch his two Top Men™ on one more expedition to locate the Second Foundation, who the Mule believes to be mentally manipulating his own manipulated men (try saying that 5 times fast) but weak in physical defences.

What follows is a bit of a romp in which Asimov is extremely parsimonious with characters. Seriously, you could be forgiven for thinking he has some kind of novelist character budget going on here, because it’s almost as if Pritcher and Channis are alone on that big ol’ ship of theirs. The novel is basically a three-hander play acted out between Pritcher, Channis, and the Mule, with a few supporting characters in the form of subordinates and the Speaker characters from the Second Foundation (which, shockingly, does exist).

Both novellas share in common the theme that the Second Foundation survives through subterfuge regarding its location. They don’t just exist in a secret location; they actively obfuscate and misdirect anyone searching for them. Asimov quite enjoys playing around with what “at the other end of the galaxy” could mean in various literal and metaphorical senses. But there is a bigger issue here, one which is addressed more explicitly and satisfactorily in the second novella.

Basically, the Second Foundation’s leaders have clued into the fact that as long as people are aware of a Second Foundation, Seldon’s grand Plan is in serious jeopardy, Mule or no Mule. The Second Foundation is both bogeyman and guardian angel: “oh, no worries, the Second Foundation will step in and save us!” This faith distorts the actions of people on a grand enough scale to make the Plan’s probabilities and calculations useless. So the events of Second Foundation are part of an attempt by the eponymous organization to remove itself from the equation, so to speak.

Of course, this all feeds into the overall series theme in which Asimov questions whether or not we could ever really control the fate of our species to such an extensive degree. I think it’s interesting that science fiction has examined this from so many angles. Foundation imagines a true beneficent conspiracy to manipulate humanity on the species level. Others take a more anarchic approach, imagining it virtually impossible that humanity won’t fragment off into clades and groups and sub-species. It seems like this latter perspective has gained in popularity since Asimov was writing in the middle of the twentieth century. Certainly, the future our species—regardless of whether it involves a galaxy-spanning stagnant empire—seems far less clear-cut than Foundation proposes.

The best way to appreciate these books, I think, is to bring some New Historicism into the mix and look at the context in which they were written. The first couple of books make a big deal of atomic weapons, which were so new on the scene at the time Asimov was writing. Now we turn to an emphasis on the human mind, then (and only slightly less so now) a great mystery. Asimov really tries to capture the wonder involved in being able to record brain waves and use them to get a glimpse literally into how people might be thinking. In this respect, Second Foundation is definitely a great work of science fiction for the sheer level of imagination and questioning it introduces.

Characters? Plot? Story? Eh. As with my previous reviews, these rereads are definitely not endearing me any more to Asimov as a writer. Though he includes a precocious 14-year-old girl as a protagonist this time out. So … yay?

Anyway, Second Foundation allayed the minor dread I felt when I went into it, having re-read my review of Foundation and Empire. It’s a good pair of novellas and was a delightful way to spend an afternoon on my deck.

Arrrgh, I hate writing reviews like this because I never know what tone to take. It would be so much simpler if I just hated or just loved Fat Girl on a Plane, but the complicated truth is that I really liked this book and I think it’s really problematic. I loved it for the fashion but not so much the fat rep, which is never a phrase I thought I would utter. In Cookie Vonn, Kelly deVos gives us a very endearing protagonist in the sense that I appreciate the passion evident in her voice. She actually made me, a guy who just wears T-shirts and shorts, care a bit about the elegance and intricacy of designer clothes. For that reason, I really enjoyed the story.

The author’s note at the beginning of the book definitely had me hesitating. It is very defensive: “This is not a Cinderella weight loss story.” Except that the book is being told across two timelines, one labelled “FAT” and the other labelled “Skinny,” and major plot points revolve around Cookie embracing a Weight Watcher clone called NutriNation and her blog being sponsored by the spin-off NutriMin Water. And even if the end of the book involves a small epiphany wherein Cookie realizes she can quit NutriNation and “become a giver of zero fucks” and eat whatever the hell she wants … the whole book is still about Cookie’s weight loss journey. So I went into the book with trepidation, because even if Cookie ends up in a good place, the framing of her story seems problematic nevertheless. It is, at the very least, reductive and overly simplistic in how it conceptualizes fatness and its relationship with weight loss.

I can only imagine that this book would be hella triggering, but I don’t really think I’m qualified to say what those triggers would be.

Cookie’s characterization really captured me, and I’ll talk more about that towards the end of the review. But the rest of the characterization fell flat. Most of the characters seem to pop up when and as they are needed, and it isn’t so much that they are stereotypes as they are remarkably one-note. Gareth never shows any glimmer of self-awareness in terms of the creepy, predatory nature of his relationship with Cookie. Same with Mom, who literally only exists to be a terrible parent to Cookie. Grandma seems to exist to tell Cookie that she should just “take the high road,” which is weird, because in my mind grandmas are always the ones who are going to help you plot revenge when you’re wronged. And Keenes is a walking cliché to whom deVos attempts to give depth in the same way Wiley Coyote sticks a black oval on the side of a cliff like a fake tunnel.

Tommy … now Tommy is an interesting character. He is supposedly Cookie’s best friend, although to be honest we don’t see much of that in this book. Aside from the emergency $600 loan (which—she did she ever pay him back?), Tommy and Cookie seem to be rocky almost from page one. And while I in no way condone Tommy’s actions—he’s pretty much a terrible person—it’s not like Cookie treated him very well at any point either, and she never really seems to own up to this. Not for a single moment does she stop and think about asking him why he feels like he should be dating Keenes.

Here’s the thing: I really did like Cookie’s conflict with Tommy and Keenes because, buried within a bunch of the problematic fat-shaming and acemisic/aromisic stuff, there is a nice kernel here. I do like it when a story sets us up for a romance between two characters and then averts the typical reconciliation. I’m not a fan of Grandma’s one-note “take the high road” moralizing, but I did like her advice to Cookie that sometimes you shouldn’t get involved in another person’s romantic decisions. Sometimes you need to accept that someone is making choices you wouldn’t make. Likewise, Father Tim’s line about how you can love people and still realize you shouldn’t have them around you is pretty poignant.

See, this is what gets me about Fat Girl on a Plane: there’s a lot here I could unpack and criticize, yet there are a few parts that are a sublime, and overall, I liked the book. A lot of this has to do with Cookie herself, and the rest of it has to do with deVos’ portrayal of fashion.

I am somewhat stereotypical in the sense that as a fairly nerdy male, I’ve largely eschewed much awareness or understanding of fashion. This is something I’m open to changing, albeit in a somewhat passive way, which is why every so often I’m happy to dive into a book about fashion and try to take it seriously. Now, this book doesn’t actually show us much of the fashion “world” per se; I’m sure there are much better books that accomplish that. What deVos does show me, however, is the perspective of how someone would get so involved in this aspect of the fashion world—designing the clothes. Cookie basically lives and breathes clothes design, and it’s really fascinating to me. As someone who knits yet who has no love for sewing or really anything that involves measuring too carefully, I’m far too lazy to do anything truly productive craft-wise. So I have a lot of admiration for people—even fictional ones—who can sit at a sewing machine and table for hours at a time and produce perfectly tailored garments.

If nothing else, this book has helped me better understand why some people obsess so much over the fit of a garment, over seams and darts and all that jazz. Why some people spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on clothing. Cookie’s descriptions, both of the clothes themselves and also the process and passion that goes into designing and manufacturing them, have enriched my perspective on fashion. So that’s something.

There’s also some commentary on fast fashion and the portrayal of the fashion design world as driven by reaction/sales that I found interesting. We often get caught up in the “diva” side of fashion, with popular media telling stories of fashion designers like they are gods. But Gareth isn’t a god so much as a victim of his own success (and a bit of a predator).

There’s probably a lot we could unpack about the toxic relationship between Gareth and Cookie. On one hand, I really liked that deVos downplays how Cookie starts having sex with him—not because I condone it, but because I think too many YA/NA novels treat their protagonist’s start of sexual activity like it’s The Biggest Deal Ever. I mean, it can be. But it doesn’t have to be, so it’s nice to have that variety. Furthermore, from my limited perspective, I like that Cookie is fairly self-aware of what’s happening, even if she doesn’t push back initially. Cookie isn’t naive enough to believe all the hype, yet deVos does a good job showing how easy it is for Cookie to get caught up in the hype hurricane around her.

Before I wrap up, a few other critiques I couldn’t fit elsewhere into the review. First, no queer people?? In a book about fashion?? (I know, I know, now who’s stereotyping—but still.) Second, there’s something about the way technology is/isn’t used in this story that doesn’t quite work for me. For a contemporary story about a 19-year-old, there’s this … absence of tech. Cookie is so technophobic she needs to bribe a computer nerd to set up a WordPress blog for her. This isn’t the 1990s when computer class and dial-up modems were a thing; I would expect even the least nerdy teenager to be able to create a blog, even if they have to Google it first. Finally, I wish we’d seen some pushback (or at least addressed) about the fact that while Cookie was once “plus size” she is now a thinner person running a blog aimed at a plus-sized audience, and that seems disingenuous.

Fat Girl on a Plane is fierce and frustrating because I want it to be only fabulous so I can just praise it unstintingly, but it’s not. It’s a laser-focused book about fashion and fatness, yet it is also oh-so-flawed.

So why do I like it? Probably for the same reason we like Marvel movies despite them not always being the most socially responsible fare: the formula hits the right buttons in our brains. Problematic elements aside, this is a well-constructed story with a fascinating protagonist and a satisfying pay-off at the end of the narrative. DeVos knows how to write a good novel, and I enjoyed lying on my deck over two afternoons reading this.

I’m uncomfortable because I don’t know how much of my enjoyment of this book is me still needing to unlearn and challenge my privileged understanding of this world versus how much is just me … liking the book. I kind of feel similar to how I felt about Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, only in reverse—in that case, I didn’t like the book as much as I thought I should given its reception. I’ve read many other reviews—positive and negative—of this book trying to see if these would help me unpack my discomfort. If anything, Fat Girl on a Plane really demonstrates that checking privilege isn’t the same as negating it. My experience informs my views of all stories, and sometimes that makes those views unreliable.

Welcome one and all to another instalment of Fanboying About Holly Bourne. I read Are We All Lemmings and Snowflakes? mostly on a flight to Montreal to visit my friend Rebecca, on whom I foist all the Holly Bourne books after I read them, finishing the book at her place while I waited for her to come home from work. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the spartan description on the back—but having read quite a lot of Bourne’s books by now, I knew I could expect something good. I knew I could expect some smiles and tears and maybe a little laughter, and Bourne delivers all of these things.

Trigger warnings for this book include discussions of suicide/suicide ideation, sexual abuse, OCD related to smells, and anxiety, as well as depictions of bipolar disorder and hypomania, and scenes of psychiatric treatment and therapy in and out of hospital settings.

Olive has just finished Year 11, and she’s going through rather a lot, mental-health-wise. She can’t stand the noise around her, and sometimes it seems like everything is just too much. We quickly learn, though, that Olive also doesn’t want to know what mental health professionals have diagnosed her with—she doesn’t want to be labelled. So she agrees to go to a pilot program for a new youth treatment camp. There, she will participate in completely optional classes and therapy sessions. Will a summer away help Olive feel more normal? What even is normal, and is that even what we should want? These are big questions for anyone to wrestle with.

What I love about Are We All Lemmings and Snowflakes?, as I love about all of Bourne’s writing, is its deep and abiding honesty. This book neither sugarcoats nor exaggerates mental illness, its effects, its consequences. Near the beginning of the book, as Olive navigates another episode of a fragile mental state and finally emerges from it, she contemplates how horrible she feels she was to her parents. Some of that is, of course, blaming herself for something that isn’t her fault—but I like that Bourne takes the time to explore the nuances, the edges and vertices of the facets of the mental health journey. It can be simultaneously true that it’s not your fault, and that you don’t need to apologize, yet also that you were being somewhat horrible to the people who care for you. And that can be awkward and uncomfortable.

I also really enjoyed Olive’s parents here. I love that Bourne portrays them as very supportive, well-meaning people who do almost everything they can for their daughter. In doing so, she demonstrates that sometimes even being loved very much by the people around us doesn’t preclude mental health issues. I do think Olive’s dad sending her that tell-all email was a bit of a dick move on his part, and I wish the book had dealt with that more thoroughly—we never really see the results of that, never really get to hear Olive and her dad talk about it in detail. Nevertheless, overall I like the dynamic she has with her parents. They are clearly trying to help her, even if they don’t always get it right, and sometimes it’s enough and sometimes it isn’t.

Similarly, with Olive’s peers at the therapy camp, Bourne reminds us that everyone experiences mental illness—and reacts to it—in different ways, and that those reactions can spill over and be negative towards others who share mental health issues. The initial conflict between Olive and Hannah, for example, captures how people can be very sensitive about how you bring up or discuss their mental health. Bourne artfully demonstrates that mental illness isn’t an excuse for acting like an asshole, yet at the same time, it’s also important for us to try to understand why others might lash out or be extra-sensitive about a topic.

The fact that Olive isn’t 100% in the right all the time is very clearly on display throughout this book. Other characters, both her peers and the adults around her, constantly question her in healthy ways. Sometimes it’s difficult to parse, because everything is from Olive’s point of view, but I read her treatment by mental health professionals not so much as overbearing as well-meaning but perhaps not as helpful as they could be. That is to say, I didn’t interpret this as Bourne trying to depict a “bad” experience with psychiatry and therapy so much as showing that psychiatrists and therapists are only human, and they won’t always say or do the right things for every patient.

The last half of this book is like a slow tumble downhill for Olive. Even as she hatches her brilliant and fun “Kindness is Contagious” campaign, thanks to Bourne’s writing, you almost feel your stomach twisting into knots as you watch Olive become more and more frantic, euphoric, and less focused on her own journey. This idea, this mission, becomes everything to her, to the point of ignoring everyone else’s expressions of concern. It must not be easy to pull this off, to show a character’s gradual decline from their point of view in a way that is both realistic and also still coherent enough for a reader to follow. Bourne manages it, though, right until the classic Holly Bourne climax when the character hits rock bottom and needs a hard reset.

Are We All Lemmings and Snowflakes? reminds me a lot of Am I Normal Yet?. Bourne is a master at talking about mental health for sure. I love how compassionate, how tender this book is in so many ways. I do wish that we had learned more about Olive’s life before coming to this camp—we only barely meet her best friend, Ally, and only hear superficially about stresses she experienced in the past school year. I understand the focus is on her experience at camp, yet I don’t really feel like I got to know Olive as well as I could.

Still, as far as mental health in YA goes, it’s hard to beat Bourne, and this book just further demonstrates why.

Labyrinth is a short Miles Vorkosigan adventure that starts as a simple covert pick-up and ends with a new recruit for Miles’ Dendarii mercenaries, not to mention some romance for one of the side characters. There’s a lot to like about this novella: it’s paced quite well for its length, and although very science-fictional, it’s definitely more special-ops thriller than anything else.

Labyrinth shows why Miles is the hero of this series. He’s capable of seeing the potential in others, and of questioning his prejudices and pre-conceptions, in a way that some others aren’t—particularly those more traditional nobles on Barrayar. When Miles meets Taura, he’s taken aback by the revelation that there is more intelligence to her than meets the eye. He was set up to expect a ravening beast of a soldier and instead meets a sensitive young woman. It’s these kinds of twists that make Bujold a force to be reckoned with in this genre. She uses science fiction so effectively to help us explore the liminal spaces of humanity, whether it’s one’s genital configuration and gender identity; one’s limbs, bone structure, etc.; or one’s overall genetic profile and destiny as a short-lived soldier science experiment. There’s very little, beyond the obvious technology, to this story that would be out of place in a contemporary thriller.

The plot is simple and straightforward despite the twists and turns that Bujold loves to serve up. Pick-up and leave turns into smash-and-grab turns into ransom-and-escape, and it’s fun watching plans fall apart, backup plans fall apart, etc. Miles is one of those protagonists always poised on the brink of being a Mary Sue, given how everything seems to go his way, but there’s always those little setbacks—usually as a result of his own hubris—that keep the game interesting. That is, we know Miles will emerge victorious eventually, but he’s probably going to be in mortal peril quite a few times before it’s all over.

Another fun, brief journey back into the Vorkosigan universe.