Ordinarily I love meta stories and stories that play with unreliable narration. Stories about stories. Cloud Cuckoo Land sounds like it should be my cup of tea. It’s reminiscent in some ways of Sea of Tranquility. As gripping as some parts of this book were, other parts were a snooze fest. Anthony Doerr has clearly put a lot of work into this story, from research to setting and characters—and I want to be clear that I think there’s something here. I’m just not sure it becomes a unified story in a way that I consider satisfying.

This book is framed around a lost Diogenes story that tells of a foolish man named Aethon who, among other misadventures, visits a fantastical land—Cloud Cuckoo Land. The chapters take place across different time periods. There’s Constantinople in the years leading up to its invasion and sacking of 1453. There’s the decades leading up to Lakeport, Idaho in 2020, where an eighty-year-old man is putting on a play based on this Diogenes text, which he has been translating from recovered scraps of Greek. At the same time, a young man carries out a domestic terrorist plot that threatens the lives of the man, the children in his charge, and others. Finally, in the near future, a generation ship makes its way to a new home for humanity. One of its occupants becomes obsessed with the Diogenes story, for it is her only link to her father, from whom she has become irrevocably isolated.

As you can see, a lot of moving pieces and very difficult to summarize!

The chapters are largely short and grouped into short parts, each of which is preceded by a quotation from this lost manuscript. The problem, as is often the case with stories dispersed across such varied time periods, is that not every storyline is as interesting as the next. Oemir and Anna’s stories didn’t grab me as much as Seymour or Zeno’s; similarly, Konstance’s story could be interesting but is such a slow burn. Actually, no, I take that back—all of these stories, with the exception maybe of Oemir’s, feel like a slow burn, and I’m not here for it.

Seymour’s characterization and storyline are also problematic, perpetuating a stereotype that links autistic people with terrorism. Doerr portrays Seymour as autistic in a sympathetic way: the descriptions of sensory overload and how Seymour sees the world are consistent with what autistic friends have described to me. Unfortunately, Seymour is also a terrorist. His entire plot involves taking revenge on a company he thinks has wronged him, being radicalized and building a bomb in the process. This idea that autistic people or people with mental illness are more likely to commit terrorist acts—as opposed to, you know, actual fascists, militant white supremacists, etc.—is dangerous. For this alone, I would not recommend Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Beyond that, however, this is just a messy and boring book. I can see the value that some have derived from it, for Doerr’s writing has some spellbinding qualities to it. I wanted to immerse myself in each of the worlds here, yet I was constantly yanked away, pulled into the next one, before any real development had occurred. Each of these storylines by themselves might have made for a compelling novel. Merged and entwined as they are, the result is a muddy brown where there should be a riot of rainbow.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This was the December pick for the Rad Roopa Book Club, where we read books aligned with social justice and antiracist thought and praxis. Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics is an overview of the history and politics of the twentieth century and first two decades of the twenty-first century as they pertain to attitudes towards Palestine.

As a child of the 1990s, as a non-Jewish person growing up in Canada, this has always been a part of modern history that I only vaguely understood. I knew the modern nation-state of Israel as we now know it was created by European powers in 1948, and I had a vague notion about what Palestine was, who Palestinians were, and how they contested Israel’s claim to and presence on that land. But for most of my childhood and adolescence, that vague notion was all I understood. As I lay awake in the middle of the night at 14 years old, I would listen to the BBC World Service talk about Bush bombing Iraq, and these kinds of snippets of news informed my view on the Middle East. Truly, it was “somewhere over there.”

Thankfully, I have since broadened my perspective. More newcomers coming to Canada from countries in that region—some by choice, others unfortunately refugees displaced by war or other disasters—has afforded me the opportunity to meet more people and hear their stories, learn about their culture. And I’ve learned more about Israel and Palestine, though I have a lot more learning left to do. Indeed, parts of this book left me slightly confused, for I think Hill and Plitnick assume slightly more familiarity with certain names and events from twentieth-century United States politics than I have!

But the one thing that I didn’t really get was why it has been (and remains, in many ways) so taboo to talk about Palestine, even among so-called liberal or progressive groups. This is what Hill and Plitnick are getting at in this book. They do a fair job of representing different perspectives, referencing both Palestinian and Israeli sources, discussing the role of the United States and other world powers, and generally trying to inform. That being said, this is not a book that tries to “both sides” the issue—it is clearly, firmly pro-Palestinian, and its attempts to present other perspectives are there only to help us understand how we got to here, not to equivocate. The conclusion makes this clear if it wasn’t already: the authors view what is happening in Palestine right now as a human rights crisis, and this book is one way they are trying to get more people to pay attention to it as such.

My thoughts, of course, turned to Canada’s own domestic crisis of colonialism and genocide with the Indigenous peoples from whom Europeans stole this land several centuries ago. The trend right now when talking reconciliation here is to locate that harm as history. In reality, you just have to look at the actions of current governments and institutions to see that colonialism is still happening here. This helps to explain partly why Canada and other states support Israel and, by and large, don’t want to acknowledge what is happening in Palestine or to Palestinians: we are doing it here too.

Except for Palestine highlights that, until now, few world leaders have been willing to appear “anti-Israel” because of how easily this is conflated with being antisemitic. They caution us not to view President Trump’s friendship and concessions towards Israel as an incredible outlier, showing that even past Democratic presidents were generally pro-Israel, albeit in a way that walked the line more finely. So much of politics in horse trading: you give me something, and I’ll give you this back, even if it’s not really something I want to do because at least I get something I want.

Although often verging on the academic and cerebral side, this book also makes itself accessible to us through oral history. Interviews or excerpts from news reports provide context for the Palestinian experience in Gaza, the West Bank, or abroad. This book is far from comprehensive and doesn’t go too deep; however, you’ll come away with at least a general understanding of the conditions Palestinians experience today, the human rights violations, and the violence.

I would have liked the authors to cover more about how Palestine is erased from leftist discourse in general. The book mostly focuses on formal, political speech. How is Palestine ignored or erased in our pop culture? In our memes? Online? How does this connect to intersectional marginalizations—queer Palestinian experiences, disabled Palestinian experiences, etc. That’s probably a wider scope than this book could cover, but these are the questions that are coming to mind now that I’ve read it.

I would recommend this for people with an interest in politics and history. As I said at the start of this review, the book assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge that maybe I fell short of; nevertheless, I muddled through (thanks, Google!). Clearly I have more learning to do on this subject. Still, Except for Palestine is informative and deep, helping me fill in gaps in my knowledge and helping me ask that all-important question: why? The world isn’t the way it is just because; there are so many whys, and now I know some more of them.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

As I’ve said in the past, I am very selective about the anthologies I read. Novels are my jam when it comes to fiction, short stories and novelettes and novellas much less so. Nevertheless, when Derek Künsken’s collection Flight from the Ages And Other Stories came up on NetGalley, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to request an eARC for review. Künsken might fast become one of my favourite living science-fiction authors. Ever since I read The Quantum Magician, I’ve enjoyed his ability to balance the novum of science fiction with the need to tell human stories. This collection is no exception—if anything, it showcases that ability even more prominently.

I know it’s customary to review the individual stories in a collection, especially one this small, but I don’t want to, and this is my book review, so you can’t make me! Instead, I want to talk about how all of these stories form a unified view of science fiction and why that works for me.

Each story takes place within the shared universe of Künsken’s imagination, the same one that his Quantum Evolution and Venus Ascendant series are set in (though most of these stories, it should be noted, were written and published prior to those novels being written). So if you have read Künsken’s novels, you will recognize many of the settings, species, and even a few of the characters. I do love when an author returns to the same universe over and over, and it’s clear Künsken has put a lot of thought into developing this one.

Künsken cites Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter as among his influences and even drops Galactic North by the former as an inspiration and recommendation in the preface to this collection. Now, I read a lot of Baxter when I was a teenager, just before I started reviewing every book, so I don’t have many reviews up for his works. But his writing always left me cold. Kind of like Greg Egan, his attitude towards humanity in his science fiction was so unbearably distant and utilitarian—he had zoomed the camera so far out (or so far in, to the quantum level) that as impressive as his ideas might have been, I couldn’t get behind his characters. Reynolds, on the other hand, is definitely up there on my list of great living SF authors—and I would happily compare Künsken to him.

There was a time when we might have said that these authors write what we call hard science fiction, though I think that term has blissfully outlived its usefulness in this day and age. Suffice it to say, Künsken and Reynolds both come from scientific backgrounds, and their SF is indeed quite embedded within a scientific framework, albeit one that relies on an artistic interpretation of quantum mechanical theory that is far more forgiving and flexible than our current understanding of the universe. Sometimes authors push that flexibility too far, verging into Clarkian “sufficiently advanced science” science-fantasy territory—and indeed, it can be really difficult to see where we draw the line.

I think what allows authors like Künsken and Reynolds to avoid that pitfall, however, is their need to focus on the humanity of their storytelling. This isn’t always obvious at first glance—“Schools of Clay” has no human beings in it, and “Beneath Sunlit Shallows” is about a protagonist who is literally condemning his ancestors for tinkering with his genome to the point where he is no longer recognizably human. Yet each of these stories is poignantly, perhaps even painfully, about very human traits: desiring, yearning, needing to belong and be a part of something bigger. The ensoulled skates, Homo eridanus, a Venusian Quebecoise engineer, a grieving military auditor, a traumatized artificial intelligence, a group of near-future Miao people in provincial China … through all of these characters, Künsken reflects on what it is that makes us human. And that is the ultimate goal of science fiction. If an author manages to do that, they usually have me hooked.

But there’s more to it still. See, a lot of our science fiction at the moment is quite dystopian. This doesn’t surprise me, given the state of our world. These trends tend to move in cycles, reflecting the optimism or pessimism of an era. And some dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction can be painfully good—but it’s still all so depressing, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we are going into like the third year of a pandemic that most of the governments of the world seem to have decided to pretend is over, and it’s … it’s all rather a lot right now, and I want to read happy things. Or, you know, if not happy, then at least not terminally sad.

Take artificial intelligence, for example. Present in most of these stories to one degree or another, it is in Tool Use By Humans of Danzhai County that we come to its most salient usage vis-à-vis contemporary AI. I was half-expecting, as I read the story, for the AIs being developed by the main characters to go rogue and, you know, take us over in a sinister and dystopian way. And they kind of do—go rogue, that is, and perhaps even take over, but in a much more utopian way. And I needed that.

Here I am, doomscrolling on a Musk-infested Twitter far more often than I care to admit, watching people discuss the pros and cons of GPT-fuelled text-generating AIs and Stable Diffusion image-generating AIs and thinking about whether we’re entering the post-truth era, an era of chaotic pornographic deepfakes and undetectably plagiarized student essays and everything in between. For all that the hawkers of modern AI services proclaim them to be revolutionary, they certainly seem underwhelming at best and dangerous at worst—and so much of our modern science fiction seems determined to emphasize the dangers.

Along comes Derek Künsken, who has the sheer, unmitigated gall not only to write stories where AIs are helpful and benevolent but to explore how humans can develop them to be that way.

Seriously, the nerve of this man.

See, that’s the kicker: we have to choose this future. Künsken has hit on the crux of the matter when it comes to AI—or really any technology—a truth that many science-fiction authors explore but few truly succeed at examining so cleanly. We build our future through the choices we make. AI is not the end of the world any more than fossil fuel use or nuclear weapons have to be. It isn’t our tools but our tool use (oh there’s that title of the novella now) that defines us.

This theme, so elegantly presented in the final story of this collection, reverberates backwards through the earlier stories much like Künsken’s protagonists so often seem to be involved in anachronistic, atemporal shenanigans. That is the value of reading these stories collected rather than in isolation across various magazines: once you finish this collection, you could easily go back to the start and read it again, and you’ll come away changed once more, iteratively so, because these stories form of a feedback loop of a kind. They pose tough questions about what it means to be human, about the choices we should make as individuals and as a species, asking us what we want our future to be. The stories also go further, reminding us that although there is indeed something quite special about humanity, ours is not the sole inheritor of this universe; the stories challenge the Eurocentric, colonial arrogance that we are the most superior form of life there could ever be. Maybe humans don’t make it to the end of the universe—and beyond—but life will go on.

And Künsken dares to dream of a future where, sure, there is still conflict and war and betrayal and sadness … but there is also a hell of a lot of compassion and empathy and love and hope, and that is a message I feel a lot of contemporary science fiction has buried. Again, I’m not yucking your yum if the dark, gritty stories are your cup of tea. But Künsken is steeping my tea the way I like it: big and bold, brash even, with some very Canadian humour and some difficult ideas and just a dash of quantum weirdness.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This is one of those questions that gets asked of you at a certain time in your life. Sherronda J. Brown introduced me to the term chrononormativity when I read Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, and that made a lot of things click for me. So When Are You Having Kids?: The Definitive Guide for Those Who Aren't Sure If, When, or How They Want to Become Parents is a practical guide for addressing a very specific aspect of chrononormativity (which is the expectation that your life will unfold in a predictable, progressive, mostly linear path). Jordan Davidson’s look at the important decisions and facts around having kids is incisive, inclusive, and extremely comprehensive. This is the kind of book I think a lot of young adults need access to!

I received an eARC from NetGalley and Sounds True Books in exchange for a review. I was drawn to So When Are You Having Kids? because of its promise to truly include gender and sexual diversity in its discussion of childbearing and childrearing. Davidson does her best to include as many different perspectives and experiences in the book. There are first-person testimonials from people of all shape, ability, and genders—yes, this is a book that boldly announces up front it will be gender-inclusive, and it follows through in its language and the people Davidson interviews. From cis men and women to non-binary folx, straight to gay to bi or pan or ace, from people who can get pregnant to those who can’t—this is a book that acknowledges that there is far more to a family than one man, one woman, and the hope that baby will make three.

This is valuable to me. When I was a kid, of course, thanks to chrononormativity I just kind of assumed I would be a parent, likely of biological children, one day. Yet as I grew up, I learned a lot about myself. I’m asexual and aromantic. Neither of these identities precludes me from having children, of course, but it is one way in which I diverged from the heteronormative narrative. Then, a few years ago, I realized I’m trans. As Davidson explores in this book, trans people often face steep challenges when having kids—not just as a result of the rising tide of discrimination and stigma, but also because of gender dysphoria and financial pressures that make it harder to access gender-affirming care.

So as I move through my thirties, my life looks a lot different from how teenage Kara imagined it. And I’m ok with that! I want to be the cool aunt who takes care of my friends’ kids so they can smash. I want to be the one who is available for a late-night phone chat because I’m not exhausted taking care of my own littles. I want to build a big, big chosen family around me full of people from all kinds of backgrounds—people with kids, people without kids—who take care of me and are taken care of by me in return. I don’t need biological children to do that.

But boy, was this book ever a fascinating education about having children!

See, I came for the inclusivity but I stayed for the science. Each chapter here was a revelation. Like, I think I have a reasonably good level of sexual education—certainly more than, alas, your average American, and probably more than most Canadian chicky boos too. But Davidson has done her research, oh my. First with the social science—stats upon studies of information about who’s doing it, at what age, or why we’re not doing it. A lot of this connects with things I’ve read in other books, like The Burnout Generation or treatises on climate change. Then with the biology: how ovulation, fertilization, and implantation actually happens. There’s also a lot of information on the expense of having a kid, a chapter that is very US-focused and reminds me of how important it is to stop Doug Ford from privatizing our Canadian healthcare system.

If you have a question about having kids, the answer is probably in this book.

There’s also a whole section dedicated to not having kids! I would have liked to see a little more time spent on reproductive rights and abortion rights—the book includes testimonials from some people who have had abortions, and Davidson does mention that women (we do not have much data for other genders who can become pregnant) who delay having children tend to be more successful and satisfied in other areas of their lives. However, given the political climate around abortion access in the US right now, I wish this book had been louder in pushing for a conversation around why protecting abortion access is important.

Our society puts a lot of pressure on us—especially women—to have kids. (My bestie and I did a whole podcast episode about this.) As Davidson remarks early in the book, we are expected to justify a decision not to have children, yet we seldom, if ever, ask people why they have children. And whatever your stance on our evolutionary duty to pass on our genes, the fact remains that many people for a variety of reasons cannot have kids, cannot even be parents to adopted kids, no matter how much they might want to. On the flip side, many people who think they will never have kids end up becoming parents through one turn of events or another.

This was what stuck with me the most from this book: the sheer unpredictability of life. The fact that we cannot have it all. As always, I come back to My Real Children, by Jo Walton, which follows one woman across two parallel lives. We can’t have kids and also not have kids, and as much as we try to steer our lives, nudge them along certain trajectories, external events will always shape those paths as well.

Oh yeah, this book gave me the philosophical feels, big time.

So When Are You Having Kids? is a fusion of fact and testimonial: each is powerful on its own, but the combination of the two makes this book extremely satisfying. As much as I learned a lot from the science, I also just enjoyed hearing all the varied stories from the voices that Davidson includes. This is a book I would recommend to anyone starting their journey into adulthood, anyone considering having kids—or not having them—and especially couples pondering if they want to become parents together. This is a book that will spark conversations, pose hard questions, offer advice on finding the answers to those questions, and help you become more prepared to navigate a world that insists it knows what you should want.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

It isn’t often that I read books in a series consecutively. However, I was able to borrow The World We Make and the first book, The City We Became, at the same time from my library. After I finished the first book, I decided that it made sense for me to dive into its sequel right away, before I forget anything about the series. I’m not mad about that decision!

Spoilers for the first book in the series but not for what happens in this one!

N.K. Jemisin picks up three months after the end of the first book. The five avatars of New York, along with the primary, who has taken the name Neek, are settling into their roles as embodiments of a living city. They are still missing among their number Aislyn/Staten Island, who has holed up in her borough and invited the Enemy—now known as R’lyeh—to establish a foothold in this reality. But the attacks on New York City are less extradimensional, more mundane—like a xenophobic senator running for mayor. Meanwhile, Manny tries to convince the other cities to convene a meeting. He’s convinced that they need to work together to defeat the Enemy, but very few of the elder cities are interested in listening to an upstart like New York.

In many ways this book is more explicitly political than the first book (which predated the pandemic). The City We Became is socially aware and pushes back against set-pieces of injustice in our society, like white supremacy. However, The World We Make takes that much further. In particular, Brooklyn’s decision to oppose Senator Panfilo’s run for mayor allows Jemisin to examine the tensions present in any battle for systemic change. Once again I find myself admiring how she allows the avatars to be so different. Bronca and Brooklyn both very much want the same thing, but their differences in age, sexuality, etc., mean that they don’t always agree (or even get along). Veneza is far more open to reconciling with Aislyn than the others (perhaps because, as Jersey City, she knows what it is like to be of New York but an outsider to New York at the same time).

Indeed, as I explored in my review of Sea of Tranquility recently, science fiction often does its best work in liminal spaces. This book is yet another great example. Jemisin’s palette is at once explosively colourful, expressive, celebratory of diversity of personhood and thought and at the same time easily described as shades of grey—that is, very little about what happens in this book is black-and-white. The ambiguous character of R’lyeh probably demonstrates that best, though I won’t go into more specifics!

The World We Make also delves more into the metaphysical aspects of the multiverse. This is my sweet spot (as I noted in my review of the first book, I have a particular affinity for Padmini), but other readers might find it less entertaining. I love the discussion of kugelblitzes and Schrödinger equations and observational collapse. Jemisin manages to strike a balance, in my opinion, between trying to make it sound too sensible versus turning it into so much quantum babble. The concept of cities as they relate to the multiverse, Rl’yeh’s role, the mysterious Ur, etc., is pretty cool, and it is one of the two elements of the story I’d love to have seen explored further.

(Also, while we’re shouting out my affinity for Padmini: I squeed when Jemisin reveals that Padmini is, it seems, asexual or at least ace-spec—the specific label isn’t used on page, but she says she isn’t attracted to men or women. Any time I run across a casually ace character in my fiction, I am excite!)

The other element is what’s up with Manny, his family, and what he apparently already knew before he came to New York City. There is so much more that Jemisin could do with this series. Alas, as she writes in the acknowledgements, her plan for this to be a trilogy was curtailed because of the pandemic’s effect on how she views the series—and I can’t blame her for that. I appreciate we got at least this much to close out this particular story, even if she has no plans for more at this point.

I liked this book both more and less than the first book. More because it’s more multiversal, as I just discussed. More because the plot gives us more time to breathe and enjoy each of these intensely different, nuanced characters. Less because the wrap-up is a bit rushed. Less because, in some ways, parts of the storytelling feel less nuanced or more obvious than they did in the first book. I don’t know—I’m going to give it four stars to tie it with The City We Became because it is very good, and I do think that if you like the first book, you should close out the duology. Plus, I think this is consistent with my personal experience of reading Jemisin to this point: fantastic writer and storyteller whose style kind of works for me but also kind of doesn’t, which is totally fine. I’m just glad she keeps bringing this level of creativity to the fields of fantasy and science fiction.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

I love it when authors take concepts from a short story, novelette, or novella and turn them into entire novels! In this case, N.K. Jemisin’s story “The City Born Great”, which I read in How Long ’Til Black Future Month, has become The City We Became and a sequel. In a rare event, I read the sequel immediately after finishing this book, so I actually know how this series ends before sitting down to write this review. I’m going to do my best only to remark on this book in this review.

New York is … alive. Or at least, it is in the process of being born. Cities can erupt into a kind of multidimensional sapience and are, as a part of this processed, embodied through human avatars. While most cities only have a single avatar, some, like New York City, are so diverse and varied that there is a single, primary avatar and then others who represent each part of the city—the five boroughs: Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. The City We Became follows these five avatars as they struggle against an extradimensional Enemy trying to kill New York City and race to locate the primary, who lies somewhere in the city, comatose after his battle for the city’s birth.

Immediately evident here is Jemisin’s understanding of the differences between the boroughs. I’ve never been to New York City, so everything I know about it comes from our media. Jemisin, in the acknowledgements, describes herself as about 50 percent New Yorker at this point, an interesting way of situating herself in relation to the city. In any event, it’s clear she put a lot of thought into who would represent each borough and the way their personalities reflect and amplify the demographics of their borough. Similarly, the other cities we meet in the book have their own personalities that match Jemisin’s impression of those cities.

Much of the story involves fending off feints and direct attacks from the Enemy, personified as the Woman in White. Depending on which borough we’re following, the Woman in White’s attacks come in different forms. I love how Padmini/Queens is the Math Queen, visualizing her defences as equations. In contrast, Bronca/the Bronx’s arts background and deep connections to community liberation mean that her defences manifest more metaphorically. Brooklyn has music, Manny has money, and Aislyn’s is grounded in the spirit of decency she believes to be at the core of Staten Island. The plot’s structure can make it feel a bit on rails at times, with the protagonists lurching from one crisis to the next, barely getting a chance to breathe. But I think Jemisin does a good job of making sure there is enough substance to these events to make the story matter.

Take, for instance, Bronca’s struggle against the Better New York Foundation’s attempts to back an alt-right artist group’s attempts to get into the gallery where she is director. The attitudes of the white supremacists will be familiar to anyone following the rising tide of fascism in the US, and this book—having been written in 2019—reminds us just how long this movement has been building. The depiction of Bronca and her allies fighting back against the alt-right attempt to manipulate the narrative and paint themselves as victims feels just as relevant today as it does now.

The Enemy is similarly sinister in its attempts to befriend Aislyn and separate her from the other avatars. As the sole white person in the group, Aislyn, like the borough she embodies, already feels out of place in New York City. Jemisin doesn’t hold back in her portrayal of white fragility; at the same time, however, I like that Aislyn is just as nuanced and deep a character as any of the others—she is an exploration of why white women can be so fragile rather than a caricature of that fragility.

These are the reasons The City We Became has so much merit, in my view. Despite the conflict itself being quite simple, albeit cloaked in the language of science fiction, the characters and their struggles—both personally and on the city level—are easy for us to relate to. Jemisin has truly embraced the complex, messy, contradictory nature of New York City. It’s a truism to talk about a setting, often a city, is a character in a story—in this case, it is literally true.

Jemisin is also making an argument in favour of cities themselves as testaments to human achievements. (She explicitly acknowledges that Indigenous civilizations in the Americas had cities here pre-contact.) It’s trendy among some circles these days to look down at cities as a symptom of capitalism and colonization: cities are the antithesis of the “simpler times” that people want to call back to. They are polluted, crowded, menacing, lonely places—right? But Jemisin challenges this one-sided narrative. She doesn’t romanticize cities, mind you, which is why she has her characters wrestle with issues like New York’s historical connections to colonialism and genocide. But this book is, in many ways, a love letter to the human ability to come together and create. Not being a New Yorker, the ending of the book doesn’t have me cheering, “rah rah, New York!” but it did make me smile.

The City We Became is a very satisfying type of modern science fiction. Borrowing from the back catalogue of Lovecraft and the theories of many worlds and multiverses, this book delivers a healthy dose of what if alongside a hell of a lot of personality and pizazz, and I like that.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Let’s just get this out of the way: yes, that title is brilliant.

 Butts: A Backstory is a deep dive into our cultural fascination in the West with butts, and specifically women’s butts. Heather Radke—a curvy, queer white woman—wanted to know why we’re so hooked on butts, and because she’s a journalist, naturally she wants all of us to know why too. Frankly, I’m glad. Thanks to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for the eARC in exchange for a review.

Radke quickly rejects evolutionary psychological explanations for our obsession with butts. She thoroughly explains why evolutionary psychology, unlike evolutionary biology, is unreliable and pseudoscientific. While we have plenty of possible theories for the adaptive value of the butt, its role in sexual selection might forever be occluded by that pesky thing called culture.

So Radke investigates how, in Western society at least, we started to care so much about what was behind us. She begins the story in South Africa and London, tracing the life as best she can of Sarah Baartman, a Khoe woman who became better known as the “Venus Hottentot.” Is it any surprise that our obsession with butts is wrapped up in Europe’s history of white supremacy? Of course not. For centuries now, white Europeans have sought to hypersexualize and dehumanize people of African descent. Therefore it is no coincidence that big butts became associated with Black people while the ideal—embodied, of course, by white people—was a flat, more demure behind.

From this inauspicious beginning, Radke moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of our journey centres upon fashion: the bustle, changing hemlines, the flappers, etc. Some of it, too, is rooted in celebrity and media, from the starlets of the early twentieth century to the models and music videos of the nineties. Exercise fads and diets come and go. The one constant? Change. Sometimes big butts are in, sometimes out. The message, however, is the same: for women, your butt is a synecdoche. A sign of how well you meet your generation’s ideal of femininity.

Radke echoes this in some of her personal anecdotes throughout the book. She would tag along, as a young girl, on her mother’s shopping mall trips. Changing room try-ons and the betrayals of clothes—or bodies. For, you see, that’s how Radke reports her mother framing the situation, language that she then inherited: my butt is too big. Never that the clothes are wrong, but rather her body is wrong. Whoa.

So of course I thought about my body. All my life I have had thin privilege, have never had to contend with being called or understood to be fat. Most of my problems with clothes not fitting are a result of my height rather than waist, hips, or weight. As an asexual person, I didn’t really pay much attention to others’ bodies, and I never thought of myself as a sexual being—and because, for the first thirty years of my life, we all thought I was a man, most of the world seemed content to let that be the case.

I thought my issues with my body came largely from how it was changing as my metabolism slowed. Then I realized no, it was because deep down I knew my body didn’t match with my idea of who I am, especially my gender.

Transition, then, has done wonders for my confidence in my body. But the euphoria I feel from how my body changes—hair growing, skin softening, curves emerging—is also accompanied by the unease that many women feel in our society. I want curves because I want to feel more feminine, yes, but surely some of my desire for a curvy booty comes from internalized ideas of beauty from my coming-of-age in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

So here I am in this liminal space of wanting to accept my body as it is yet also wanting to change it. Therefore, despite the butt holding very little fascination for me as a symbol of sexual attraction, I definitely understand the hold it has over us as a symbol of femininity, of my femininity. Reading Butts has helped me think about my body against the backdrop of our wider cultural and historical zeitgeist.

This is a thoughtful, thorough treatment of a topic that many might dismiss as childish or prurient. Their loss. I might not be enamoured with butts, but I was enamoured with Butts.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Time travel always opens up such interesting storytelling possibilities, loops and predestination paradoxes among them. We humans are so immured in the linearity of time that these possibilities can be tantalizing, frightening, and even bewildering. Add on top of that metafiction, the idea of a story escaping itself into the real world, and you get some truly fascinating plot ideas. Sea of Tranquility tries to create such an atmosphere of possibility. Though I wouldn’t say that Emily St. John Mandel entirely succeeds in this endeavour, I still respect the big swing and enjoyed the experience.

We start in 1912 with Edwin St. John St. Andrew, eighteen years old and newly exiled by his English family to Canada. He ends up on Vancouver Island, where he witnesses something strange in the forest—he hears violin music, and for a moment appears to be in a strange place, before the forest returns. This event unites him with a woman in an airship terminal in the 2090s, and an investigator on a colony on the Moon centuries later still. Is reality slipping? What’s going on?

Like so much about time travel, this book feels at times very sad. Knowing the future can be a burden—but so too can knowing the past. Gaspery knows how Edwin and Olive each died, for example. And eventually he puts together his own fate thanks to working out the paradox at which he is the centre. He seems resigned rather than resentful of this turn of events. If our future is fixed, are we better off not knowing it? If we learn it, like Gaspery does, what can we do about it? I think it’s so fascinating that Gaspery desperately wants to change the fates of others yet ultimately embraces his own.

Yet, as Vonnegut reflected in Slaughterhouse-Five, experiencing time out of order means that your loved ones are never really dead either. That’s the case of Gaspery and Zoey, for example. Having the privilege of stepping out of time only to step back in a moment later from one person’s perspective but days, months, years from yours—with no more effort, apparently, than leaving and reentering the room—that’s intriguing.

Although the title is partially a reference to one of the book’s settings, I also see it as a thematic nod. Each of these characters have something in common (beyond witnessing the anomaly)—they’re just living their lives. They aren’t engaged in any venture more significant than simply going about their everyday life, and there is value in that. I think this is Mandel’s jam, if I recall correctly from Station Eleven, a book I enjoyed but don’t really care to revisit (or watch as a TV series) having gone through a pandemic of my own.

Perhaps this is why Mandel, like many other Canadian science-fiction authors like Margaret Atwood, has successfully broken into the mainstream and received the coveted “speculative fiction” label. This is a book about straight-up time travel, but if you read the description or see where it gets shelved (though my library, rightly, put it under science fiction) you’ll see the attempt to litwash it. I’m not complaining, mind you—I am all for sneaking more science fiction into the mainstream, and the success of properties from Westworld to Marvel movies suggests that people have never been more receptive to it. But I think it’s important to point out, whenever I see it, the double standard, the way that some novels are treated as literature and others as pulp even to do this day based mostly on vibes and marketing.

As for the plot? Eh. Mandel warns us fairly early in the book, foreshadows it even, by having a character talk about reading a novel which was really a series of stories where the characters don’t quite meet up. I thought a lot of Cloud Atlas when I was reading this. To be fair to Sea of Tranquility, there is a larger plot chugging along in the background, a tantalizing philosophical question hanging over our characters like a Sword of Damocles. But the resolution to that question belies its importance, in fact, to any of the characters. It’s not really about the question or even about the journey. There are whispers of a cabal, implications of shadowy figures manipulating events from afar. None of this is ever reified, however, in any truly fulfilling way. That might be for the best—this would be a very different book if such things had been more prominent—but it also leaves the novel feeling more shallow than I expected. It feels almost like it could have been a novella for the amount of ideas happening on the page.

Fortunately, I still enjoyed the experience of reading the book. Mandel’s writing is as meditative as it was six years ago. I’m glad I went on this little science-fictional adventure!

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

My bestie Rebecca lent this to me, and I am glad she did—I don’t think I would have picked it up otherwise, and that would have been my loss. Lessons in Chemistry stands out. It is quite a literary novel, full of narrative tricks and idiosyncrasies and enough contrived character circumstances to make John Irving or Heather O’Neill jealous. But Bonnie Garmus is on a mission in this book. She’s laser-focused on the unfairness of life—not just in terms of institutional sexism but also the way in which life robs us of the ones we love the most. This is a sad yet hopeful story that made me laugh and cry, and sometimes those are the best.

Elizabeth Zott is a chemist. She would be a PhD., except for—well, you know, she’s a woman in science in the 1960s. So she ends up as a researcher at a small institute in California, where she unexpectedly falls in love with Calvin Evans, the institute’s brightest and most eccentric researcher. But when Calvin dies, Elizabeth is left as a single (unwed!) mom, and sexism continue to impede her ability to earn money or move forward in the world. Opportunity arrives in the form of an afternoon cooking show—for Elizabeth to host—but neither the television producer who discovers her nor Elizabeth herself know what to make of the success of Supper at Six. Meanwhile, Elizabeth tries to raise her precocious daughter, Mad, the only way she knows how: scientifically.

There’s probably many ways for this book to lose the reader. Garmus’s narration is, by and large, flat albeit extensive in description, prone to tangents and meandering towards its point. The dialogue sputters onto the page in fits and spurts before drying up again. Each chapter flits between times and memories, occasionally with an attention span so frenetic it’s hard to read. The characters are caricatures—some of them so sexist and boorish it borders on the incredible, others so buffoonish or farcical as to nearly undermine the seriousness of the story. But I think that’s rather the point, and that’s kind of what Garmus is getting at here—sexism is silly.

This is a story about a woman who refuses to settle. Throughout Lessons in Chemistry, so many people—including other women—tell Elizabeth that she just has to accept the way the world is. Maybe you can make a little headway, but eventually you have to give in and play by the patriarchy’s rules. You have to be a Miss Frask instead of an Elizabeth Zott.

Garmus perfectly portrays so many of the tropes I see in social justice spaces—women weighed down by so much internalized misogyny it’s painful to see; men who profess to be allies but only if it means you’ll sit down now, please, you’re being disruptive; people of all genders who stand with you and mean well but really don’t understand just how far the fight for liberation must go. From Frask to Walter to Harriet, the characters jump off the page because they are caricatures.

Indeed, Lessons in Chemistry rather feels like Garmus is screaming into the void. Because the world has not changed much since the 1960s.

Last year I watched Picture a Scientist, a Netflix documentary about historical and present-day sexual harassment in science. While the language we use and some laws have changed, what Elizabeth experiences here remains very much part of women and non-binary people’s experiences in science. Moreover, if there is a flaw in this book, it is the whiteness of it—racialized women continue to face even more hurdles than women like me and Elizabeth.

So Garmus wrote a book to scream, and scream, and scream, at the unjustness of it all.

There is a love story here too. It’s couched in the language of beakers and rowing and leash laws, but it’s here, on paper, a slow-burn romance that ends too soon and turns into a meditation on grief. Elizabeth and Calvin never had a chance. Calvin and his mother never had a chance. Calvin and Mad never had a chance.

Sometimes life just happens, and you never get a chance.

I loved all of Elizabeth’s relationships in the book. She’s so careful with her daughter yet so oblivious. Mad is a delightful child, slightly creepy but never in an overwhelming way—I don’t think I would have liked to see her try to carry the whole book, but as a protagonist who joins us midway through, she is great. Harriet too—her development from housewife with little ambition to Elizabeth’s close friend … it’s just so neat, and in the hands of another writer perhaps could have been trite, but Garmus somehow pulls it off.

That’s what this is: a magic trick. This book is so raw yet so carefully and precisely crafted, a chemical—nay, alchemical—chain reaction of storytelling culminating in a coda that left me crying. When Elizabeth signs off, when she finally reads the cue cards … well, not to spoil it, but there were tears in my eyes—though so much of the finale is predictable, it is predictable in such a way that Garmus has earned it through foreshadowing. The payoff is so well executed, so satisfying, that I just feel like I’ve come full circle.

I want this to be a movie.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This book was the November selection for the Rad Roopa Book Club in which I participate, but it was also one I just really wanted to read soonish (and I’ve purchased a copy as a birthday gift for a friend!). Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives was an important book for me a few years ago. I haven’t read anything from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, but her words here proved just as significant. Rehearsals for Living is a moving and meditative journey through the minds and hearts of two powerful, political women. It gets you thinking—but it should hopefully do more than that; it should get you acting.

The book is a collection of letters the two authors wrote to each other over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The letters are long and intended to be turned into a book, yet they still feel very intimate. Maynard talks about her struggles with parenting during lockdown and raising a Black child in an anti-Black society. Simpson recalls how land defence actions, like the Oka Crisis at Kanehsatà:ke in 1990, shaped her as a young activist, and connects this with ongoing Indigenous stewardship, sovereignty, and protection of the land. This is not a history book, yet you will learn history from it. It is not a manifesto, yet it left me feeling energized and invigorated.

Canada is an unjust society. A lot of people have trouble acknowledging this fact, owing perhaps to propaganda we get fed in school or a reluctance to feel like we are more like our neighbour to the south than we care to admit. Nevertheless, it’s true. We have serious issues with anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, and structural social problems that prop up a carceral, capitalist state built on colonialism and resource extraction.

Now, if you’re looking for a soft introduction to these ideas, then Rehearsals for Living is not the place. This book assumes you are at least somewhat aware of the problems Maynard and Simpson discuss. That’s what I liked so much about it: I really want to move from ally to accomplice, move beyond “antiracism 101: don’t do a racism” lectures that tend to proliferate throughout EDI training. This book is a great step in that journey, both for how it challenges the reader’s assumptions and ideas and for how it demonstrates concrete action.

I read this the week after Treaties Recognition Week here in Ontario. The first full week of November has been designated for teaching and learning about the Treaties between Canada (or its predecessor colonial governments) and First Nations. I live on territory that’s part of the Robinson–Superior Treaty of 1850. Usually in my English course, I discuss Treaties in general and then show the NFB documentary Trick or Treaty?, by Alanis Obomsawin, which is about Treaty No. 9, to the north of Thunder Bay. Treaties are an immensely important part of understanding the historical, legal, and cultural relationships between settlers and First Nations. We are all Treaty people.

So land was on my mind as I read these letters. I had tried, as best I could as a white woman, to impress upon my students (some Indigenous, some not) how much colonization comes back to land. How different the worldviews of First Nations are from those of settler-colonial institutions when it comes to even the idea of “ownership” of land. Of course, Simpson expresses it so much more eloquently than I ever could! I read some passages from one of her letters out loud to my class.

Simpson and Maynard together help to demonstrate how so many seemingly separate injustices are connected and how they have their root in the land. Black and Indigenous activisms are connected because Black and Indigenous people are both overrepresented in Canada’s prison system. Incarceration is another way of controlling who has access to, who is restricted from, certain land. Whether it’s reserves dictated by the Indian Act and Department of Indian Affairs or sentences handed down by judges empowered by jurisdictions more interested in developing land than serving the people who live upon it, the state has always had intense mechanisms available to it to exercise this kind of control.

Rehearsals for Living is also inescapably about the pandemic and how it affected life, including activism. On one hand, there was some early release of prisoners to try to stop the spread of COVID-19 in prisons and jails. On the other hand, lockdown increased the isolation of vulnerable people, made group demonstrations and protests riskier and more difficult to coordinate, and increased risks for frontline workers, who tend to be racialized people. The ground shifted between us in the past two years, and Maynard and Simpson take note of this. Their letters capture their frustration with the moment, their exhaustion, but also their irrepressible hope. Because their people are still here. Indigenous people are still here, five hundred years in to colonization. Black people are still here. The centuries-long project of genocide, the attempt to erase people in favour of persons, of labour, has not been successful.

However, as these two authors note with sincerity and admonishment, we cannot think our way out of these problems. We cannot write our way out of these problems. Simpson and Maynard both share details of their actions, how they organize, participate in, support, or otherwise enable demonstrations, protests, sit-ins, mutual aid. The state is not going to save us; we have to save ourselves. This is something I think about a lot lately, both as a white woman with a lot of privilege in our society, as well as a trans woman who experiences structural and individual discrimination. It all comes back to community-building, to finding your people, and rallying around the cause.

From prison and police abolition to mental health to climate change, Rehearsals for Living tackles the important issues of our day with grace and optimism and unapologetic honesty. Part of me worries that white women like myself will elevate this book as another kind of feather to put into our reading cap—oh, did you read Rehearsals for Living? Touching, isn’t it? Yes, I learned a lot from it—well, onto the shelf it goes! Look at how educated I am! But as tired as I can tell Maynard and Simpson are from dealing with white people, even so-called allies, I can also see a lot of hope in their writing. All of us who live here can play a role. But we need to step out onto that stage, need to take responsibility, need to start living the relationship between ourselves and the land and other people on it. At least, that’s what I took away from this.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.