I was excited to read a YA novel with an Indigenous protagonist, because there aren’t enough of those. Killer of Enemies is an action-packed dystopian thriller from Joseph Bruchac. Yet what it gains from tense action sequences it loses in sloppy writing elsewhere.

Lozen is the eponymous Killer of Enemies, a post-apocalyptic job position that involves being sent on hazardous missions away from the haven of Haven to kill dangerous beasties that might otherwise threaten Haven. This dystopian community is ruled by the mad Ones, four individuals who had enough power pre-apocalypse to have shiny enhancements but not so much power that their shiny enhancements killed them during the Cloud that ruined all electronic technology. The Ones exist in an uneasy state of factional truce. They hold Lozen’s mother and two siblings hostage against her good behaviour, and when she isn’t killing monsters, she’s trying to figure out an escape plan.

The setting of Killer of Enemies is intriguing. The Cloud wrecks all the digital conveniences upon which our modern society relies. Not only does this knock us back into a Postman-like post-apocalyptic United States, but it creates a setting in which Lozen’s Apache heritage, the skills she learned from her relatives regarding self-sufficiency and survival, can shine. (It’s important to note at this point that Bruchac is not, himself, Apache; he’s Abenaki. Jean Mendoza has written over at American Indians in Children’s Literature a critique of another book by Bruchac involving a protagonist from another Indigenous nation—she is much more qualified than me to comment on this subject.) We also have the standard “might makes right” hard-scrabble mentality often featured in these types of dystopias, which is supposed to contrast Lozen’s unexpected strength and skill as a female monster hunter.

The Cloud thing is so handwavey, though, that it leaves me grumbling. It’s not entirely clear how the Cloud ruined electronics. Was it like an EMP? A massive solar storm could have been a more realistic vector for such an event. Yet, as devastating as that would be in the short term, nothing would stop us from rebuilding. Do the effects of the Cloud linger, preventing any new electronics from being built? If so, why hasn’t the world turned steampunky? Electronics are fastest, but there are other ways of building computers and complex machinery. If not … well, why hasn’t anyone brought us back into the digital age? Beyond that, Bruchac just doesn’t give us a good enough picture of society pre-Cloud for us to understand why it is the way it is now. I just don’t believe that a disaster like the one Lozen describes would result in this weird, isolated community somewhere in the southwestern United States. Would there be unrest? Definitely. Would it shatter countries? Sure, probably. But larger communities and cities would survive—where are all of those?

Normally I try not to spend too much time poking holes in people’s worldbuilding. But I am particularly apt to do it with dystopian YA novels, because this subgenre seems guilty of the most incredible laziness, as if its readers won’t care. You can’t just cook up a dystopia in 5 minutes in the microwave. You have to let it simmer gently on the stove, season it appropriately, but most importantly you need the right base, and you need to think through the consequences of each ingredient you add. Otherwise you end up with something that looks good on the surface, but as you start to get deeper, you realize it … does not work.

I liked Lozen as a protagonist. I like her determination, her utter willpower to survive in the face of all the various things trying to kill her. In Lozen, Bruchac gives us a protagonist who fights for something bigger than herself (her family), thinks on her feet (lots of improvisation happening), and of course fights against the status quo (gotta love an underdog).

I hated pretty much every other character in the book.

Partly this is because Bruchac doesn’t actually introduce us to too many other citizens of Haven. We meet the Ones and their heavies, and of course Lozen’s family and a couple of allies. Yet at no point do we really get a sense of how this microcosm functions. If it exists in a state of quasi–martial law, you’d think we would have more of a black market, more stuff happening underneath the Ones’ noses—especially considering the lack of surveillance equipment. Spies can’t be everywhere, and spies can be corrupted. If the pre-apocalypse exposition is unsatisfactory, this post-apocalyptic setup is just … lacking.

The Ones are all supposed to be mad in a comic book kind of way (one of them is literally called the Joker… uh … ok). It’s charming for about half a page and then it’s just like … why has no one else rebelled yet? Oh, and Bruchac introduces a character who turns into a love interest during Act Four, as if he suddenly remembered that every dystopian YA novel requires a romantic arc. (He apparently missed the new memo updating that requirement into a love triangle, though.)

Also there are vampires. Just because, apparently?

At the risk of ruining all the salt I’m flavouring this review with, let me change course and say that I enjoyed the action sequences. I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider Killer of Enemies a page-turner. But that’s about all the praise I feel like doling out to this book today.

Killer of Enemies features an Apache protagonist, which is great in the sense that Indigenous people are under-represented in literature, especially YA and kidlit. That, alone, is not enough to propel this book to any great heights. The rest of the book just drips with mediocrity, from the characters to the plot to the entire setting. Saying that I enjoyed it is an accurate description but not a complete one. I will pass on the sequels though, thanks. I’d rather look for some dystopian YA novels that are actually well designed.

Oh, you American YA novels and your obsession with Homecoming … sigh. At least in this case, I.W. Gregorio puts it right at the beginning of the novel and gets it over with. It is one of the many stock elements of None of the Above, a novel featuring an intersex protagonist coming to terms with her identity while navigating her final year of high school. I was very nervous to read this book, because Gregorio’s author bio mentions she was “inspired” to write this by an intersex patient she encountered while a resident. And that was … yikes. Nevertheless, I soldiered on. And my verdict? Well, it’s not my place to evaluate the intersex representation here—regardless, there are other problems with this book.

Kristin is your ordinary, average 18-year-old girl. She’s pretty popular (but not too popular). She’s great at track. She loves her dad, who is still grieving the death of her mother from cervical cancer. Oh, and she has a boyfriend! Then Kristin learns that she has a condition known as AIS, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. As a result, Kristin has male gonads (testes) and XY chromosomes, but she has developed in many other ways, physically, as a girl, and was assigned female at birth. She falls under the umbrella known as intersex (which includes people with a variety of different biological characteristics that mean they deviate from what we’ve decided is “normal” male or female biology). This upends her entire self and her worldview—worse, of course, is when news of her condition gets out at school, resulting in a predictable spate of bullying. As the people Kristin thought of as her friends desert her and she herself questions her own sex, gender, etc., Kristin has to come to terms with the fact that she exists outside of one of the many binaries our society imposes on us.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not qualified to comment on Gregorio’s representation of intersex here. As someone who is neither intersex nor a woman, Kristin’s experiences are way outside my remit. That being said, I was so dubious about this book once I learned it was not own-voices and what inspired Gregorio to write it. Reading her author’s note at the end didn’t help. I believe Gregorio’s heart is in the right place, and I don’t believe one must be own-voices in order to portray a marginalized identity. Nevertheless, just because one can write a story doesn’t mean one should—particularly when it’s not one’s story to tell. By this I mean: I think it would be great for perisex (non-intersex) authors to have intersex characters, even intersex protagonists, in their stories. But why does the story have to revolve around the character’s intersexuality, especially their discovery of that condition? Why not leave those stories for intersex authors to tell while simultaneously boosting representation of intersex people in other ways?

The idea that all stories featuring a protagonist with a marginalized identity must somehow be about that identity is another insidious way of Othering marginalized people. Speaking personally as an aromantic and asexual individual, I don’t just want more books about aro/ace teens coming to terms with their identity—I want those plus aro/ace characters who are involved in stories that have nothing to do with their sexuality.

Moreover, these stories are almost always written to be consumed by an audience of outsiders, and that is the case here. None of the Above’s focus on the medical aspects of intersex, its almost clinical portrayal of Kristin’s experience, the treatment she faces at the hands of her peers—all of this is points to the book being written for perisex readers, to inform them and educate them about being intersex (or at least, a particular variation thereof). Again, this is not a bad thing on the face of it. Certainly all of us (myself included) need a lot more education about and exposure to intersex people and their experiences. Yet it also means that, while an intersex person may very well still like this book, they are yet again not reading a book for them.

This is particularly evident in the way Gregorio portrays acceptance (or lack thereof) of Kristin being intersex. There’s bullying, name-calling, even to the point of using slurs. Gregorio defends this in her author’s note by saying that “intersex awareness isn’t widespread enough to have eradicated that term.” OK, sure, let’s say I buy that—what about all the homophobic and transphobic language and action in this book? On page 24, even before we find out Kristin is intersex, she describes another kid going around pretending he’s going to sodomize some dudes at Homecoming as a joke. And yes, I am well aware that—especially in small towns—toxic masculinity and homophobia are often visible and acceptable in high schools. But it’s interesting that Gregorio chooses to highlight such an environment throughout this book. It’s as if, having twigged to the idea that intersex people are marginalized and experience oppression, that’s all she can focus on.

That’s not to say Kristin lacks support. She finds her people, both literally in the sense of meeting other intersex people, and figuratively in new friendships or reaffirmation of existing friendships. Her dad is supportive, in his own way, which is good. She reluctantly consults a therapist, who makes some vague recommendations that are exactly the kind of thing you’d expect a generic therapist in a YA novel to say.

And that’s why I said at the beginning of this review that None of the Above has problems beyond the way it portrays intersex. As I considered what to say in this review, I wrestled with one question: why didn’t I like this, when I not only liked but loved Full Disclosure? Both books bear some superficial resemblance: they’re about a teenage girl with a marginalized identity that she tries and fails to keep secret, and in both cases, the author is not own-voices. Why do I rave about Full Disclosure yet pan None of the Above? It all comes back to the writing.

As I note in my review of Full Disclosure, I loved the whole novel, not just the parts about Simone’s experience with being HIV positive. I loved that minor characters, the support system Simone has in place, the way her friends all have their own issues going on. I also loved that the book is unapologetically, overtly queer in so many ways. Simone questioning her sexuality, her friends having their own queer identities, other queer characters—like, wow. It’s racially diverse, sexually diverse … it’s so much. Wait, when did this become a plug for Full Disclosure? Sorry not sorry, go read it.

In contrast, I don’t get that feeling from None of the Above. To be fair, Gregorio makes the attempt. There is, of course, the inevitable falling out with the best friends, the misunderstandings and miscommunications, the question of whether or not they can make up and move forward. But that’s precisely the problem: it feels inevitable, expected, stock. It’s as if Gregorio is following a checklist for how to write an American YA novel: ok, they care a lot about homecoming; add in some friendship drama; make sure the character gets bullied for her identity; have the character go through some therapy … and so on. It feels rote and perfunctory and entirely uninteresting. And on top of that, while there is some racial diversity here (though it’s hard to know, because Gregorio seldom actually points it out), this book seems very straight and cis. So not only is there overt homophobia and transphobia, but it’s also as if queer people barely exist. (There is one notable exception, which in some ways makes it almost worse, because she exists literally as a foil for Kristin. So I should say there are no casually queer people in this book—the only queer person is queer For a Reason. Ugh. Oh, and there’s a character whose Dad Turned Out to Be Gay, and so that’s a big deal.)

I know precisely two things about Kristin: she is intersex and she likes running. That’s it. I don’t remember what she wants to study in college (to be fair I think Gregorio told me, but I guess I’d checked out by then). I don’t know what kind of TV she likes. I kind of know her musical tastes (she hates Disney pop I guess?), but that’s about it. Intersex subplot or no, Kristin doesn’t feel like a very three-dimensional protagonist to me. This is a cardboard book full of cardboard characters.

None of the Above makes a valiant attempt. I’m not out to demonize or discourage the author. Yet as a debut novel it is lacking, and while I applaud people who try to shine more light on under-represented identities, I remain as skeptical coming out of this novel as I did going in that this book accomplishes that in a graceful, successful, and meaningful way. And that is part of a larger, ongoing conversation I hope we continue to have about representation in our literature, who should be telling which stories, and how our own assumptions and biases colour the ways in which we write (and read) even when our intentions are good.

I won a copy of The Gauntlet in a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.

Farah Mirza is a gamer from a family of gamers. The Mirzas love all sorts of tabletop games, card games, and puzzles. On her twelfth birthday, she mistakenly receives the Gauntlet, a malevolent and self-aware board game. When her younger brother, Ahmad, gets trapped inside the game, Farah and her two friends have no choice but to enter the game themselves and beat it in order to retrieve Ahmad and exit. But the Gauntlet has not played in over twenty years, and its Architect is … hungry.

I tried hard to put myself into a middle grade mindset for this one. My reading for younger audiences skews almost exclusively towards the older end of YA, partly because that’s the age group I’d teach if I were in a regular high school and because those are the stories that most appeal to me. Middle grade novels, of course, can often have simpler or at least less subtle structures and subtexts because they’re appealing to a younger demographic. While that’s definitely the case here, I think Riazi does a fantastic job telling a tale that will hold the interest of older readers as well. I can easily see a teenager or adult enjoying this (I did), and it’s the kind of story I could see a parent reading out loud to or with a child who is on the younger end of this audience.

The plot is an intense and fast-paced one. Structured around the three challenges that Farah, Essie, and Alex must win in order to defeat the Architect, Riazi gives neither her characters nor readers much time to breath as they rush all over the city of Paheli. Yet the challenges themselves take up little enough of the book (if anything, they feel rushed). In the intervals Riazi creates a dazzling environment for the Gauntlet: a dream-like, shifting fantasy city that would be marvellous if it weren’t out to get the players. The talking lizards are cool, though.

Farah shines as The Gauntlet’s protagonist. She’s 12, that impossible age that straddles childhood and adolescence. Riazi explores this without making it too big of a deal, mentioning how Farah is feeling awkward around her friend Essie because she worries board games might be too childish, and of course, exploring Farah’s changing relationship with Ahmad. This is a tall order to accomplish in a book that takes place, essentially, over the space of 24 hours, but I like what Riazi does here. Farah is clever, cunning, and courageous; these qualities allow her to excel at games and hence at the Gauntlet.

I wish the other characters had more prominence. Although individual personality elements shine through—Essie is the impetuous one, Alex the more reluctant but analytical one—they lack defining moments that let them become heroic figures in their own right. Farah shoulders most of the story here, with Alex and Essie serving as her foils, as comic relief, or just plain sidekicks.

The Gauntlet is receiving lots of attention for its Muslim cast of characters. Farah is a hijaabi and comments early on in the novel how, her family having moved to Manhattan, she feels out of place in a way she didn’t in Queens. This is an interesting observation for someone like me, who is neither Muslim nor female nor a resident of a metropolis so big it gets boroughs. I’m sure Muslim children, or children of Bangladeshi descent, will enjoy having a character who looks like them and comes from their cultural background as the hero of a story.

What you might not pick up on from the publicity, though, is the way Riazi casually normalizes the names of games, food, etc., that will be unfamiliar to most Western readers. They don’t even show up in italics, and although Riazi does an excellent job describing the various desserts and confections these names often correspond to, you’re best off Googling them so your mouth can water at their appearance. This is refreshing, because while it seems like books are making strides in terms of character representation, the cultures of those characters are often sprinkled in like some kind of exotic language layered atop English. In The Gauntlet, they are simply part of the Mirza household, just like Monopoly or marbles.

The Gauntlet is equal parts exciting and enchanting. It has a lot of moving elements that come together to create a great story. Its characters are not as dynamic or interesting as I’d like—but I’m not a regular reader of middle grade, so I’m not sure how much that’s par for the course. I’m having a hard time figuring out who wouldn’t enjoy this book, though. Older readers might find it a little lighter, certainly a much quicker read, but at the end of the day it’s the kind of story that any person can kick back and immerse themselves in for a few hours.

Second review: October 2019

It has been many a year since I first read Bleak House! So much has happened. I moved, then came back, from the very country whence Dickens hails. I bought a house, which I still have. I did not get involved in protracted Chancery suits.

For the past year I've had The Pickwick Papers on my shelf, and I keep picking it up and then putting it down after a few pages. Eventually I realized the problem was more that I wanted to re-read Bleak House, yet I stubbornly refused to give myself permission to do that until I’d read The Pickwick Papers. Which is absurd. So I just re-read Bleak House and I’m all the happier for it.

I agree with most of my first review, so rather than repeat myself, I’ll just add a few more thoughts.

I can’t believe I only vaguely alluded to Esther’s marriage in the first review (I must have been trying to avoid spoilers). OMFG. What a strange, messed up situation—first being proposed to by your guardian, and then what he does at the end and the way Esther just kind of … goes with it? I realize matchmaking was different in Dickens’ day, but by my standards it’s weird and uncomfortable.

I did very much enjoy my re-read, although sometimes Dickens’ diversionary descriptions were a bit much for me. The core of the story, though, Esther’s narrative and the machinations surrounding Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, remains compelling. Dickens captures the essential unhappiness that can arise from focusing too much on potentialities and too little on what one currently has, as exemplified by Richard and foiled by Esther.

First review: May 2012
My physical pile of to-read books has a surfeit of non-fiction at the moment. So prior to setting off to a charity quiz night with my dad, I grabbed this book and Tess of the d'Urbervilles from the pile and told my dad to choose. (In fact, my massive market paperback version of Bleak House properly is my dad’s, but it’s mine now because I rescued it from almost-certain water damage in the dormer closet.)

Bleak House is confusing at first, because neither the house nor the book is all that bleak. I kept waiting for something bad to happen to Esther, but it doesn’t get heavy until around page 400. Also it took me five days to read this behemoth, which is a lot for me. I was enjoying the book, but Dickens’ plot and prose are just so damn convoluted that every time I picked up the heavy, small-print-infested edition I read, I wanted to put it back down and read something more comprehensible, like War and Peace. (Yeah, I went there.) Dickens is probably a poet at heart and can’t describe anything so banal as a doorknob without going into detail about the life of the servant who polishes it every Saturday, and there are times when it’s beautiful and times when it turns the book into a laborious slog. I totally understand why some people can’t finish this book, and that’s OK. I’m going to say some very favourable things about Bleak House, and I certainly feel better for having read it. But if you feel like you’re putting yourself through a particularly English form of literary torture trying to consume this, then it’s not going to be worth your while.

Wikipedia has a robust plot summary available, but I will try my best to highlight the elements that were important to me. Bleak House is not just long but sprawling. The central character, and at times the narrator, is Esther Summerson. She’s an orphan of mysterious heritage who finds a benefactor in Mr. John Jarndyce of Bleak House. He brings her to live with him and his two wards, cousins Ada and Richard. They get along famously and everything goes well for them, except that Richard can’t decide on a profession and instead becomes obsessed with Jarndynce v. Jarndyce. This Chancery case, a dispute over wills, is a metaphor for all that is wrong with the English legal system. It is so tangled that none of the lawyers involved—and there are many—understand it in the smallest part; it has dragged on for years and seems bound to drag on for many more. So of course Richard decides he will put it aright and then live off the income. Yeah. Great plan, right?

Jarndyce v. Jarndyce grabs all the attention from critics, and I know it’s kind of the core of Bleak House, but it’s more of a background element (and its resolution is painfully obvious from the beginning to anyone remotely familiar with law and lawyers). What matters about this book are the many and sundry characters who make its pages come to life. There are the lawyers, like Mr. Tulkinghorn (whom I kind of liked despite his being a manipulative bastard) and Mr. Vholes (whom I didn’t like nearly so well). There are the nobility and the gentility: the Dedlocks, Sir Leicester and his wife, the mysterious Lady Dedlock; and the Jellybys and Turveydrops and Woodcourts, companions and foils for Esther, Ada, and Richard. There are the working men and women, the professionals, the soldiers, and the criminals: the Snagsbys, Sergeant George, the Bagnets, Mr. Bucket, the Smallweeds, etc. If I were to go back and read this differently, it would be with a notepad by my side so I could keep track of every character and his or her relationship with the other characters. They all seem extraneous at times, and then suddenly they become indispensable. Seriously, if Dickens hadn’t been busy churning out impressive novels, then I’m convinced he would have become a Moriarty-like criminal mastermind. The plot structure of Bleak House is a metafictional Xanataos Gambit (TVTropes).

The scary and wonderful thing is, all these characters feel very real. Dickens creates more lifelike personalities in Bleak House than some authors create in their entire careers. Not all of them are incredibly three-dimensional—some, like Mrs. Snagsby, are rather wretched excuses for plot devices, if that. But they all have their unique attributes and pasts and desires: Dickens is an expert and characterization through exposition. Aside from the chapters Esther narrates, however, Dickens hands the reins over to a third-person narrator, who chronicles the schemes and escapades of the Smallweeds and the Dedlocks, of George and Mr. Bucket. There’s such a diverse range of people in Bleak House. Mr. Smallweed is about as crafty and crooked as they come, aiming to cheat, swindle, and extort whenever possible. George is an honourable trooper who has fallen on hard times and finds himself in a bit of a bind. Poor Jo, a street-sweeper who “knows nothink”, finds himself shuffled from house to house, hand to hand, caught up as a bit player in a larger mystery. This mystery concerns, naturally, the identity of Esther’s parents.

Bleak House is as wonderful as it is long, and I have struggled with deciding whether to give it four or five stars. If there is one impediment to a perfect score, it is Esther Summerson, Mary Sue Extraordinaire (TVTropes). She is friendlly, stalwart, honest, loyal … I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. Worse still, everyone is constantly commenting on all of her virtues, either to her face or to other characters. Esther isn’t just some saint toiling in obscurity; she is practically worshipped by everyone she meets. Caddy Jellyby considers her a best friend after a single afternoon together. Esther seems to have no actual skills other than cleaning and being nice to people, but somehow that’s enough to get by.

Of course, as the protagonist in a novel as fiendishly complex as Bleak House, Esther is far from that simple. I confess I kind of liked her. I hate Dickens for doing this, because I don’t want to like a Mary Sue, but Esther is a good person. She stands up for Richard and Ada and wants what’s best for them. Like the reader, she anticipates that Richard’s obsession with Jarndyce v. Jarndyce can come to no good and tries, in vain, to divert his course. That she is ultimately unsuccessful subverts, in part, her Mary Suedom—but the rest of the plot more than makes up for that.

For you see, when the identity of Esther’s mother becomes clear to her (Dickens does not exactly conceal it from the reader for quite so long), there are no recriminations. Esther goes for what seems like an innocuous walk with her mom, and her mom is all, “By the way, I’m your mom. I had you out of wedlock, so my sister told me you died and then raised you secretly. Sorry.” And Esther is all, “Oh, what is this sudden blooming of joy upon my breast, that I should finally know my mother?” And then her mom says, “Oh, but never speak of this again. Or talk to me. Or come near me. Because if anyone finds out, it could ruin my family’s reputation.” And Esther’s cool with that.

I’m being slightly disingenuous here, of course. Dickens is trying to make a point about the absurdity of nineteenth-century English mores, particularly when it comes to marriage and childbirth. Esther’s mother is ashamed of Esther’s existence and what it implies about her morals and her conduct. This shame is powerful enough to compel her to flee rather than face her husband when she learns that Mr. Tulkinghorn knows her secret. On the level of social commentary, these plot points work fine. Unfortunately, they do very little for Esther’s characterization. I find it hard to believe that anyone could react as calmly or joyously to the news Esther receives. These types of reveals don’t go well no matter how you slice them, because it essentially involves tearing down someone’s worldview (TVTropes). It’s not something one takes in stride—unless one is Esther Summerson, who also nonchalantly acts this way when it comes to proposals of marriage, notifications of courtship, or the need to buy a dress.

This reveal happens towards the middle of the book, and the remainder of Bleak House follows the consequences of various characters learning the secret and trying to use it for their own gain. This gets one of the characters murdered, and then the novel metamorphoses into a detective story, with Mr. Bucket taking centre stage and explaining his various methods of deducing the identity of the murderer. My interest was starting to wane prior to this twist, because I was wondering where Dickens was going with all of this. I should have known someone would end up dead!

This is probably Bleak House’s most redeeming quality: it is changeable. Despite its length, it changes its mood so many times that it doesn’t feel like one story so much as a package of many inseparable stories. I quite enjoyed the chapters that followed Mr. Bucket on the case and went all the way up to his dramatic trap laid for the killer—and unlike the other “mysteries” in this book, Dickens successfully diverted me from the true identity of the killer, much to my delight. This change of gears reinvigorated my interest in the book for the last two hundred pages. After this mystery is solved, Dickens quickly wraps everything up, marrying Esther off and resolving Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, and telling us what happened to the rest of the characters in a matter of twenty or thirty pages. This denouement is very rushed and practically brief compared to the rest of the book!

I am not quite willing to call Bleak House “the finest literary work of the nineteenth century produced in England”, the bold assertion with which George Tillotson opens his afterword to this edition. He reveals himself as a Dickens fangirl by continuing, “If that claim can be questioned, it can only be on behalf of one of the other big novels of Dickens…. For Dickens was the supreme literary genius of his time….” I’m all for the Dickens praise, but I could do without the hyperbole of, “OMG. BEST. 19th CENTURY. BOOK. EVER.” There are plenty of reasons people aren’t going to like this book, not the least of which is because it is so very long. And that’s fine.

That being said, Bleak House is an excellent book. I didn’t think so when I started reading it, but along the way Dickens managed to captivate me with his characters and the lives they lead. Much like Middlemarch, another nineteenth-century novel I adore, Bleak House provides a microcosm of nineteenth-century England, complete with the social stratification, scheming, and family drama that we expect and love. Tillotson is correct in one respect: Dickens is, if not the supreme literary genius of his time, a literary genius of his time. And if Bleak House belabours his poetic style, it also demonstrates his mastery of plot and subtext that make the novel rise above the idiosyncrasies of style. Best nineteenth-century English novel? Up to you. Awesome nineteenth-century English novel? Most definitely.

As I’ve said before and will say again, one reason I love the library is for book discovery. I had zero idea what I was in for with Worldshaper. In this case, I saw book 2 on the New Books shelf, and fortuitously book 1 was also present in that very same library branch. So I borrowed both on a wing and a prayer, and here we are. Perfectly serviceable portal fantasy for some holiday reading from Edward Willett!

Heads up that I put a spoiler flag on here for the allergic, but I’m not really going to spoil much of the plot. The whole next paragraph is paraphrased from the back cover. Later in the review I’m going to talk about the resolution of the book in very general terms. But you have been warned.

Shawna Keys is having a perfectly fine life in the world she didn’t know she created until one day everything comes crashing down. This guy named the Adversary shows up and tries to kill her, and this other guy named Karl, who doesn’t seem particularly trustworthy beyond not trying to kill her, pulls the whole “come with me if you want to live” routine on Shawna. As a result, she spends an entire novel running from the Adversary while getting a crash course in her ability—Shaping. Shawna and Karl need to escape her world and find their way to the heart of the Labyrinth of Worlds so that she can help her patron, Ygrair, stand against the Adversary. If she doesn’t, all of the Shaped worlds are in jeopardy. So, you know, no pressure.

So many things to like about this book. First, Shawna is a great protagonist. She’s smart and sarcastic, but not in the “I’m trying really hard to be sarcastic because sarcasm is cool” kind of way that seems to be a trend these days. A lot of her sarcasm is actually channelled anger and fear; she lashes out at Karl because she is tired, hungry, and, oh yeah, people are trying to kill her. Willett ensures that her reactions are always justifiable given the circumstances, and if at times she behaves somewhat irrationally, I think that makes a lot of sense given the pressure she’s under. I love how Shawna questions Karl constantly and doesn’t fully trust him. When someone shows up claiming to want to help you avoid getting killed, you don’t instantly become best friends. Similarly, I appreciate that Willett doesn’t develop any obvious sexual/romantic tension between the two of them.

Second thing I like about the book is how Willett handles exposition. Karl provides minor infodumps here and there when the breaks in the running permit it, and the perspective jumps to him or the Adversary help us fill in some of the blanks. There’s still a lot we don’t know about worldshaping, and I’m fine with that. (Oh, I should probably mention right now that this is one of those fantasy books that is actually science fiction in disguise. If that is a pet peeve of yours, just take it off the list. Otherwise, carry on!) Also, the off-brand references to things like HiPhone and a lunar colony stick out at first and seem strange until you make the connection that this is evidence Shawna is in a different world that merely shadows the First World (which is supposed to be Earth, I think, though you never know). So that was a retrospective “nicely done” from me.

Finally, Willett doesn’t shy away from the moral questions raised by Shawna creating sentient beings ex nihilo and having the power to Shape them to her will. Although Karl repeatedly warns her that she is not a god, that doesn’t obviate her ability to rewrite people’s personalities, memories, and desires—to remove their volition and replace it with her own. Shawna is rightly freaked out when she discovers she has this power, and throughout Worldshaper she ponders the implications. What does that mean for her relationships with her parents, her too-perfect boyfriend?

Despite all the good, Worldshaper never get made me love it. Mostly this has to do with the plot. I appreciate that Willett goes into so much detail regarding Shawna and Karl’s flight west. He certainly succeeds in creating an atmosphere of tension and raising the stakes as they work first to destroy one Portal and then try to find the location where they can open another. He avoids the temptation to make Shawna too powerful yet allows her to exercise her power just enough to keep things interesting. Nevertheless, none of this really changes the underlying truth: this is a fugitive story, a chase story, and so the overall story arc of fighting the Adversary is never resolved. So, Worldshaper is definitely not a standalone novel. It ends on a mighty cliffhanger, and I’m glad I have book 2 waiting for me on the shelf.

The antagonist, the Adversary, is also as generic and bland as his moniker implies. Yes, we get a little bit of a backstory for him. Yes, it makes sense. But that’s all—and it’s all very impersonal. The best villains have a very personal stake in this, and we have yet to really see that from him. It’s often said a story is only as good as its villain, and while that’s reductive and not always true, I think it’s true for this story. Worldshaper’s mediocre villain is a good synecdoche for its mediocre story in general (in contrast to its interesting worldbuilding and protagonists, as noted above).

I read Worldshaper in an evening and morning/afternoon (I kept having to take breaks to shovel snow). So it’s an enjoyable, fast-paced read—it just never quite creates that “wow” factor I want in my fantasy novels. But you never know … the series might Shape me to believe differently after I read the sequel.

I'm not sure if it's a positive or negative that I read Too Like the Lightning so soon after reading Ilium. That is, Ada Palmer’s writing here reminds me a lot of Dan Simmons’ writing: science fiction heavily saturated with literary and philosophical references. In this case, Palmer grounds her story in the duelling philosophies of the Enlightenment—humanists vs rationalists, individualists vs collectivists—while simultaneously springboarding us into a vision of a future for humanity that is probably utopic, if you’re willing to be flexible about how you define “freedom.” Honestly, I don’t know how much I liked this book, but I know for certain I’ve never read anything like it.

The narrator is Mycroft Canner, an infamous convicted murderer. Most of the world thinks him executed; actually, he lives out his days as a Servicer—a kind of lifetime sentence of community service. He’s on call by pretty much all the Powers That Be. Mycroft is also helping a child named Bridger, who has the mysterious ability to reify any image or give life to inanimate objects. For example, he’s breathed life into some toy soldiers. In this future world, by the way, religion is outlawed. Nation-states are a thing of the past, mostly—instead, people join “hives,” what we might call a collective or club or association, and form bash’es, which are like extended families. And it’s rude to gender someone in polite conversation—everyone is referred to with gender neutral pronouns. Against the backdrop of this human society that’s alien to us, Mycroft explains how he and a few allies are trying to prevent Bridger’s premature discovery. Meanwhile, an inexplicable theft and perhaps a murder mystery threaten to destabilize the world order.

A good deal of this book is exposition and philosophical discussion between Mycroft and the reader. Now, Palmer never quite gets us into the realm of infodump—one of the best yet, for some people, most annoying attributes of Too Like the Lightning will be the fact that it doesn’t show all its cards. Want to know what’s really up with the mysterious J.E.D.D. Mason? Too bad. You get hints and proclamations, but not all is revealed—at least not in this book. Want to know why Bridger can do the things he can do, and whether to shelves this as science fiction or fantasy? Again, you’re going to be out of luck.

What you will receive is an ambitious thought experiment that tries to take Enlightenment ideals and apply them, along with some social engineering, to the 25th century. Basically, Palmer posits a nearly-utopian federal society that has settled on the bare minimum of universal laws. Humans can choose to apply more laws and mores to themselves based on their hive membership. Hives also help you declare your overall goals and values. If you want to LARP as a bad mofo, you can declare yourself a Blacklaw, a Hiveless person who claims no protection from any law—i.e., anyone can dish it out and you better be able to take it.

If you have the energy and inclination to immerse yourself in this world, then you’ll be rewarded with one of the treats of a good, self-consistent science-fiction story: the richness of human ingenuity. Palmer has mined philosophy for sets of ideologies and then adapted to them to create a possible future that is, for all intents and purposes, utopic. At the same time, because of course we need some conflict, she examines that edge cases that could precipitate a failure mode of the system—and the extraordinary lengths to which some plutocrats might go to preclude that possibility.

So we have this theft of what is essentially a really popular ranking. But the investigators pull on one too many threads, and it leads us to learn that there is more going on here than someone stealing a list. Or tweaking a list. Or making lists in the first place. There is murder happening, people. Murder! Egads! And not your nice, tidy, face-to-face murder. We’re talking conspiracy, hiding-it-in-the-sea-of-data murder. For the greater good, of course. Because the way this all hooks into the wider utopian vision is the old truism that you need to break a few eggs. Too Like the Lightning’s thesis is essentially that humans are smart enough and good enough to create utopia, but that we are also always going to be the snake in our own Garden. Utopia is achievable but perhaps not a sustainable vision for the future.

Or is it? I don’t know—the story definitely doesn’t end here. I don’t have the energy to pick up the sequel just yet. Maybe one day, when I’ve completely forgotten this story (so, next month), I’ll come back to it. For now, I’ll just reiterate: Too Like the Lightning is effusively original and interesting, but it’s exhausting as well. Think carefully before taking it on, lest you be disappointed by how taxing it is. But don’t write it off just because it’s heavy, because the experience is quite rewarding indeed.

Sometimes the perfect storm occurs. No one decision, no one action or inaction, leads to the outcome—it’s the combination that brings us to disaster. Sometimes, though, that perfect storm happens because of structural racism, as Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry seek to demonstrate in Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City. This is the story of Brian Sinclair: his life, his death in a Winnipeg emergency room, and the context in which these events are situated. This is less of a history and more a systems-theory approach to how racism, colonialism, and prejudice create a climate in which Indigenous people’s bodies are overwhelmingly policed, incarcerated, and otherwise deprived of agency.

McCallum and Perry tell the story over five acts: introduction and conclusion, and then three parts in between: the city, the hospital, and Brian Sinclair. In each chapter, they seek to link Sinclair’s ordeal—34 hours left unattended in a Winnipeg ER waiting room until he was discovered dead from preventable complications—to the colonialism and racism that underpin Canadian society. In so doing, this book is similar to, for example, Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers. This is not just a book about Brian Sinclair’s unnecessary death: it’s a book that seeks to explain, to Canadians, just why Brian Sinclair died.

Unlike Talaga, however, the authors are historians, not journalists. So even though their methodology overlaps in some cases—both books make use of extensive interviews with relatives and authorities, for example—their writing is quite different. Talaga’s book is meant for wide public consumption. Structure of Indifference, while accessible and worthy of a read, is a much drier and far more conventional academic text. The introduction is 27 pages of McCallum and Perry “situating” everything in the drawn-out, convoluted jargon that is academic language these days. I say this not to mock them but merely to make it clear to prospective readers what you’re in for. I don’t dispute that this book is well-written or well-researched, but I have definitely read more engaging stories.

If you’re creating a syllabus for a university course, then yeah, this is a good book for you. Ditto if you live in Winnipeg and want some more context on your city’s history. As someone from Thunder Bay I found it interesting and relatable, and certainly similar attitudes of prejudice and inaction occur at our hospital and other social services (I mean … just look at our police service).

At the end of the day, this book is not going to change someone’s mind about whether or not racism “exists” in Canada at a systemic level. For those who have accepted systemic racism is a thing, however, and are looking for concrete, actionable examples of how systemic racism functions, this book is a valuable resource. In particular, the three-act structure of city, hospital, and Brian Sinclair help McCallum and Perry to establish the intersectional and complicated nature of the discrimination that ultimately cost Sinclair his life. It isn’t that any person or people were looking at Sinclair and thinking, “Man, I hate Indigenous people, I’m not going to help that guy.” It isn’t even as simple as people stereotyping Sinclair as a homeless drunk/junkie (although that was a component). No, there’s something bigger afoot.

There is a whole society in existence right now that deals with Indigenous people only as it is convenient for them to do so. This society is called Canada.

Code Name Verity was some of the best WWII fiction I’ve ever read. So I’ve had this prequel on my to-read list for a while. Elizabeth Wein in general seems like an author I should watch, and I finally tackled The Pearl Thief with no small amount of trepidation: how could this possibly measure up to Code Name Verity? Indeed, if that’s your metric, you will necessarily be disappointed. Obviously this book is smaller in scope. Yet there are still so many good stories happening here!

Julia Beaufort-Stuart arrives at her family's ancestral home. It’s been retrofitted into a school following the death of her grandfather, so this will be Julia’s last summer there. The summer festivities are immediately overshadowed by the disappearance and death of a professor who had been cataloguing some of the Stuart artifacts in the house. Suspicions fall on the Traveller encampment whom Julia has befriended. It’s difficult for her to clear the air, however, because at about the same time, Julia herself had been attacked and knocked unconscious near the river! What’s happening, who’s responsible, and can Julia overcome generations of prejudice to make sure innocent people don’t take the blame?

On the surface, The Pearl Thief is a YA mystery with Julia as the detective. She displays the characteristic force of will that made her so formidable in Code Name Verity but applies it this time to unravelling the mystery. Along the way, she experiments with the power her femininity brings her, flirting half-seriously, half-usefully with Frank, the project manager of all this construction. What’s so interesting about this story is how it allows us to glimpse the genesis of the Julia we meet in the other book. She demonstrates her flare for adventure here, and she also questions and explores her sexuality with Ellen.

Going deeper, The Pearl Thief is also about discrimination. Wein is telling a story about the mistreatment of Scottish Travellers. I’m aware of the Travellers because of the time I spent teaching in England, but of course that doesn’t mean I’m very familiar with their history. I appreciate that Wein is careful about how she tells this story. Not being a Traveller herself, she avoids trying to speak for them or have a Traveller as the protagonist. Julia is her avatar, an outsider who messes up and needs to earn the trust of people like Ellen. The result is a book that helps young readers see Travellers in a different light than they are perhaps stereotypically portrayed while not claiming to speak for them or represent their culture.

This is what I meant when I said that you shouldn’t dismiss The Pearl Thief just because it isn’t Code Name Verity and doesn’t involve spies and interrogations and planes. Yes, it’s a more intimate story. Yet it is important for its own reasons. I won’t pretend it captivated me as much or that I will revisit it again and again like I might with Code Name Verity. That’s ok. It’s still a really good read!

In a very rare move for me, I picked up The Obelisk Gate on my visit to the library after reading The Fifth Season. N.K. Jemisin’s sequel picks up where it leaves off, with a little backtracking to fill in Nassun’s story. Short review? If you liked the first book, you’ll like this one. The mysteries of this world deepen, the characters grow and both gain and lose. Longer review? Well, keep reading.

Spoilers for book one but not for this book.

Essun, aka Syenite and Damaya, recently arrived at the concealed comm of Castrima. There she finds her former lover/protégé, Alabaster, who is slowly turning to stone as a side effect of harnessing orogeny in strange and unsanctioned ways. Alabaster is desperate to teach Essun enough for her to finish what he tried to start. Unfortunately, a combination of the dysfunction in their relationship and Essun’s other involvement in Castrima’s society makes progress difficult. Meanwhile, far to the south, Essun’s daughter Nassun has been recruited by the former Guardian Schaffa, who is not at all right in the head.

The central question of The Obelisk Gate is this: whose side are you on? The problem, as Essun soon discovers, is that it’s really hard to see what the sides are, let alone what side you’re standing on.

Mad props to Jemisin for not giving us easy answers. Some burning questions one might have after The Fifth Season include whether this is a future version of Earth. Certainly it’s possible. But does it matter? Absolutely not. It doesn’t matter if orogeny and its related phenomena are magic or sufficiently-advanced science or whatever. Jemisin sweeps aside this curiosity in favour of a far more pressing issue: power.

As I opined in my review of the first book, power and who has it is the primary axis around which this story revolves. Essun’s power dwarfs that of the orogenes in Castrima, even the feral Ykka who has just barely held things together to this point. Her power is such that Alabaster thinks she is his only viable successor. Her power is such that a stone eater, Hoa, has chosen to protect and elevate her as his champion. Her power is such that, as Essun comes to realize over the course of this book, although she will always be a pawn in some ways, she can also make a lot of choices for herself.

A similar, slightly more scoped version of this narrative happens with Essun’s daughter. While it seems like Schaffa has the power, as a Guardian (or something of that ilk), Nassun is special. She has inherited Essun’s innate talents (and perhaps, with enough experience, might even exceed her mother’s abilities). So, like Essun, other powers want to co-opt, coerce, or otherwise influence her. But Nassun (who is only 10!) has some ideas of her own. I find it very interesting, the way Jemisin uses this nested mother-daughter arc, with both women being manipulated while they simultaneously explore their abilities and redefine their goals.

The Obelisk Gate cements this series as a type of fantasy that I only sometimes enjoy, but when I do, I love it. I’m talking about fantasy series that are largely character-driven and less concerned with the war between good and evil than they are with how much a single person can fuck it up. There is this backdrop of a grand war between the “evil” Earth and … others. But that’s not really the story here. The story here is about a small number of people struggling against literally epochal forces, and the realization that while it is impossible for a single human or group of humans to survive such forces, even the biggest rocks can be moved by the application of a smaller force at the right fulcrum.

My reviews of The Broken Earth:
← The Fifth Season

I did not enjoy The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but N.K. Jemisin’s brilliant short story collection gave me hope that The Fifth Season might be her novel for me. Indeed it was! I can conclude that it wasn’t Jemisin’s style that bothered me about the previous series, just the world and the premise and the plot, etc.—it just wasn’t a story I was into. In contrast, The Fifth Season tells a very focused story about a few characters in the middle of an apocalypse in a world that might very well be our own, far into the future, although I’m going to avoid saying too much for risk of spoilers.

Definitely spoilers, later on in this review, so seriously, stop reading now if you don’t want an essential plot point ruined.

The book spreads itself over multiple timelines. It tells the stories of Essun, Damaya, and Syenite, all women who are also orogenes—people with the ability to manipulate the kinetic and thermal energy in earth and living things in order to reshape rock. Orogenes are ostracized and forcibly recruited, when possible, as children into the Fulcrum—kind of like mages in Dragon Age, if you will, being taken into the Chantry. Essun is an orogene living under the radar until the continent-shaking quake that signals the beginning of this eponymous fifth season. Damaya and Syenite are orogenes at different points of their training with the Fulcrum (it’s implied that their stories are taking place prior to the onset of the fifth season, although the complete timeline isn’t clarified until near the end of the book). All three women must navigate their dangerous lives as they learn more about how their gender and their abilities define them, and constrain them. All three women must make choices about what they value, and whether or not they can use their powers to protect whom they value.

Jemisin’s tectonically quixotic world is automatically a fascinating setting. Paired with the orogenes, Stone Eaters, and Guardians (our trio of “magic”-like beings in this world), and you have a really cool fantasy setting. Seriously, this is unlike anything that fell off the European knock-off fantasy tree, and that’s cool. As I alluded to above, it’s more like a very original fantasy created for a video game. As I discovered in her short story collection, Jemisin’s creativity is so fecund and diverse that this world is bursting at the seams with so many fascinating ideas. All I can do is soak up as many as possible while I read.

Although the women’s powers are obviously key to the plot, it’s important to understand that The Fifth Season is more about power than powers. As with many a good speculative fiction story, Jemisin makes it her mission to explore how different social structures influence the social constructs we inhabit. Essun is an orogene, but she’s also a woman and a mother. Her story begins with the death of her son at the hands of her husband, launching her on a kind of revenge-fuelled quest to leave behind a community that has forsaken her and hopefully rescue her daughter. Syenite, likewise, begins her story essentially being directed to breed with another powerful orogene in the hopes of producing a powerful orogene offspring.

It’s notable that large-scale power structures are all but invisible in this book. The characters are technically members of an empire, yet the emperor, we’re meant to infer, has precious little real political power. Instead there is a Leadership caste who seem to make the decisions, although their influence over he far-flung “comms” of the Stillness seems perfunctory at best. The Fulcrum has many powerful orogenes, yet it is also somewhat shunned—it is respected but not necessarily welcomed or appreciated. Both Damaya and Syenite ask: who is in charge of the Fulcrum? Is it the Guardians? What’s their deal anyway?

I love how Jemisin answers enough questions to keep us going yet resists the urge to infodump and answer every question all the time. There are just enough interruptions to keep us guessing, too. This is a fine line to walk in this kind of story—don’t hide so much I lose track of what’s happening, because then I’m going to bail. But don’t tell me so much I get bored. There’s two pretty cool twists towards the end of the book. The first one I didn’t actually figure out; the second one I did see coming.

First: Essun, Damaya, Syenite are the same person. Totally missed that, although the clues are kind of there and it’s obvious in hindsight. This is a great storytelling technique that Jemisin exploits fully, and it’s executed with aplomb.

Second: the tectonic instability of this world (which may or may not be a future Earth, but that’s kind of irrelevant for now) is because the moon is no longer a thing. Which I kind of guessed before they mentioned it, because no character had mentioned the moon at any point in the book, and lack of a moon is one way a planet like this would have issues with its plate tectonics. I love when a fantasy novel proves to be backdoor science fiction in some ways!

The Fifth Season is about survival, and power, and doing what it takes to survive even when it means not exercising your power to save people you’d rather save. It has a focused, careful plot that keeps the reader going, yet it’s obviously set in a much larger, captivating world. I adored every moment I spent reading this, and I’m really looking forward to diving into the sequel sometime. (I want to say soon, but let’s be real. Best of intentions and all that. It could be next week, it could be two years from now. I make no promises!)

My reviews of The Broken Earth:
The Obelisk Gate →