I guess it’s the summer of Kara reading sequels to books she read 3 or more years ago! I just barely remember Nyxia, but the good news is that most of that memory is of how excited I felt after reading the book. It was good young adult science fiction. Scott Reintgen balanced an anti-corporation message with adventure, teamwork, the bonds of friendship and family. There was a lot to recommend about it, and because it ends with a cliffhanger, I was eager to read Nyxia Unleashed. But you know how it goes….

This story picks up where Nyxia left off. Emmett Atwater’s drop pod has made it to the surface of Eden—although we soon learn from the indigenous inhabitants that it is more properly called Magnia. Similarly, even though the Babel corporation named the indigenous people Adamites, they prefer to go by the Imago. We learn a lot about them as Emmett and his fellow miners settle in on the tumultuous, dangerous continent of Grimgarden. Expected to mine nyxia and also make nice with the Imago, Emmett and the others have another goal: find a way home. Disgusted by how Babel treated them, they have no trust in Babel’s promises of bonuses. But before they can go home, first they need to survive.

I like how Reintgen wastes no time in introducing conflict, threats to their survival, and moves and countermoves. This is a book that does not stand still. More importantly, there is a lot of agency here. Emmett contributes, Morning contributes—most of the main characters have some kind of say, some kind of stake in the action and decisions that unfold. So even though Emmett is our viewpoint protagonist for most of the book, the group itself feels like it is run by consensus. This is very much the antithesis of a Lord of the Flies situation wherein one or two people emerge as the strongest voices. Instead, the group decides that it will stand “shoulder to shoulder.” But the hardest part of survival isn’t avoiding the big, scary alien monsters. It’s deciding whom to trust.

Babel is so clearly devious and untrustworthy that it’s almost cartoonish. Which is fine; I’m willing to give Reintgen that one because the methods that they use do feel realistic. I appreciate the little glimpses we get into how their propaganda machine operates at full tilt back on Earth. If Bezos actually takes Amazon into space, this is pretty much how it would operate.

The Imago were super mysterious in Nyxia. We only met the one who killed Kaya (still super mad about that btw), who is imprisoned on the Babel space station. Now we get to learn much more about these people and their culture. There are echoes (albeit not quite parallels) here of other “first contact” books like The Sparrow: two very different species getting to interact more deeply for the first time. I like that the Imago aren’t presented as all-knowing, wiser beings than humanity. They are flawed, perhaps just as flawed as humans. They have their own agenda as well, and Emmett smartly doesn’t want to trust them completely—at least not right away.

If Nyxia Unleashed stumbles anywhere, it’s in the last act of the book. As everything comes to a head, the pace shifts into ludicrous speed. We go from touring Sevenset to betraying Babel and Babel launching a full-scale assault. There are submarine chase sequences and fights, nyxia duels, etc. It’s a lot of violence, bloodshed, combat all at once—a little overwhelming compared to the fast-but-steady pace of the rest of the book.

Once again, we’re left with a cliffhanger ending (boo) that sets up the final book of the trilogy. I liked this one enough to read that one, but my 3-star rating is largely based on this fact that Reintgen is chaining his stories instead of delivering more complete works that, if they don’t standalone, at least have very discrete identities.

Oh, and as much as I think Emmett and his paramour are cute together, I am still incensed that Reintgen chose romance over friendship in this way! Nope, not going to let that one go.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Ordinarily, a book with this kind of ending angers me, but I think I was already angry with The Subtweet—in a good way. Ironically it took a Scot recommending me, a Canadian, this book by fellow Canadian author Vivek Shraya. So it goes. I was asking for recommendations for novels by trans authors that aren’t about “trans stuff.” As much as I love reading about trans experiences from trans authors, I believe it is deeply important that we allow trans authors to tell other stories in addition to trans ones. Until this happens more often and more widely, we have not truly achieved equity. So I was delighted to dive into The Subtweet.

The book follows multiple characters in a couple of perspectives. It’s mostly third person limited and mostly concerns 2 brown women: Neela Devaki and Rukmini. Both are musicians in Toronto. Rukmini acquires a small amount of Internet fame when she creates an electronic, pop cover of Neela’s “Every Song,” which leads to the two striking up an uneasy and unlikely friendship at Rukmini’s behest. Then someone leaks an experimental spoken word album that Rukmini created in college with a classmate, Malika. This catapults Rukmini even further ahead of Neela in terms of fame, and soon Rukmini is departing to open for a white woman artist’s world tour—with Neela’s own guitarist in tow. Neela finds herself missing Rukmini a great deal but also grapples with feelings of jealousy and insecurity, all of this ultimately culminating in the eponymous subtweet. Nothing is the same after that.

I commented to my Scottish friend, who of course has no context for what I said, that “I’m not sure Shraya would appreciate this description, but this book is very CanLit even as it tries to subvert that.” By this I mean that, in many ways, this book adheres to the tropes of characterization and storytelling that often glimmer on the CanLit landscape: the characters feel like sketches of people than actual people; the setting is effusively in-your-face Canadian (Toronto, in this case); the storytelling style has a whimsical quality to it that identifies it as “artistic” enough to justify this book’s presence before the Canada Council of the Arts. As the years have gone by, I have been less and less enamoured with most CanLit.

Indeed, The Subtweet had its work cut out for winning me over. Neela is not a very likable character, and this honestly doesn’t change throughout the book. Rukmini is also quite flawed, though I think I am more able to understand and forgive those flaws because we learn more about her past. I don’t mind any of this, and I think there can be advantages to having unlikable characters—but it’s just one of the several factors that contribute to the CanLitness of the book and made it work a little less for me overall. That being said, the one thing I will defend in its entirety is the way that Neela and Rukmini occasionally obsess over issues of social media.

It’s tempting to read this as a cautionary tale about social media use. Don’t subtweet people; you’ll ruin a friendship! Don’t obsess over who is or isn’t liking or faving your posts! There is truth to this, of course, but I think The Subtweet is trying to get at a deeper message. This isn’t just about the perils of social media. It’s about the ways in which social media has shifted how we talk about each other and how we talk about art. For people with large followings, social media can be both performative and punitive. Neela retweets Rukmini’s cover, shares other positive news about her, because she feels a social pressure to do so—to be the gracious brown woman making space for another brown woman. To remain as aloof as Neela likes to be IRL would be seen as haughty and supercilious. Similarly, Rukmini’s social media is toxically positive even when she doesn’t feel that way—this is a sentiment I suspect most of us can identify with, but it’s one that fame and attention must amplify. In this way, The Subtweet comments on how all artists—visual, musical, written—are now performance artists. They must perfect not just the art they create in studio or on stage but also the persona their social media displays. Failure to do so results in a range of consequences, from accusations of inauthenticity to fractured friendships.

Perhaps the most honest character in this story is Bart Gold, the recording executive who is clearly only out to make a buck off you!

Let me explain now why the ending should have made me angry but didn’t, purely because I was already angry with the book as a whole.

After Neela’s subtweet, we never hear from Rukmini again. We get Neela’s first-person perspective. We hear from Kasi, and we even follow Sumi for a bit. However, the book ends without us or Neela hearing from Rukmini. Refusing to provide closure in this regard is a stroke of genius on Shraya’s part yet also incredibly frustrating from my point of view as the reader. I wasn’t hoping for a “happy ending” and tearful reunion between these two; but I was hoping for at least some kind of resolution, a final conversation or a hint that perhaps, one day, this wound would heal. The utter lack of communication from Rukmini, or even any hint as to where she is, what her status is, creates a breathtaking sense of silence in the final act of the story. It aligns, I expect, with the lack of closure we receive as the consequences of our actions on social media sometimes—the mutes we don’t learn of, the blocks that cut us off from contact with someone who was once our mutual.

In addition to the themes around art and social media, Shraya also explores the intersections of these topics with race. Race and skin colour come up a lot in The Subtweet. There is a particularly interesting article written by Sumi that is included in the story. In it, Sumi essentially contextualizes Rukmini’s success as an example of light-skinned brown women displacing or erasing dark-skinned brown women by being more appealing to our white supremacist society. So Shraya touches on colourism/shadeism and the way that critics love to “purity test” racialized people, especially women, to tear them down once they get too big. Indeed, one of the most important things to note about this book is how the majority of the characters are women of colour: Neela, Rukmini, Puna, Sumi, Kasi, etc. Bart Gold and Hayley are the only two white people with any significant role, and both exhibit unappealing facets of white supremacy—Bart in the form of unadorned capitalism; Hayley as a doubtless well-intentioned yet oblivious ally saturated in white guilt.

So Shraya centres women of colour and, in so doing, creates a space in which they can disagree with each other and argue (sometimes constructively, sometimes not), something we still seldom see. Shraya’s overall point? Representation is not enough. It’s not enough to have one brown woman in the room or on the page, because then she necessarily becomes the brown woman. Instead, we must create space for multiple, dynamic types of people who otherwise share a marginalization so that we reify them fully as humans, not as diversity hires or cast members.

Moving back into my own lane, let’s examine the trans characters! As I said at the beginning of the review, The Subtweet satisfied my criterion of a book by a trans author that isn’t overtly about trans issues. That doesn’t mean it lacks trans characters. However, Shraya pulls this off so subtly that I need to call it out because this is how it should be. Rukmini’s trans-ness is remarked upon twice: once, she comments to Neela, “But what if Hayley only invited me because I’m a ‘hip brown trans girl’?” A little later, once Rukmini is on tour, Neela observes a social media post celebrating Rukmini’s representation on the tour stage that has the hashtag #TransIsBeautiful. These subtle reinforcements of one aspect of Rukmini’s are all we get. There is no deadnaming, no unnecessary conversations about Rukmini’s past, nothing about her transition and journey, etc. No one misgenders her; they all treat her as a woman. This is how you do it!

More significantly, however, Shraya broke my brain by pointing out my own, obvious internalized cisnormativity. For those unfamiliar, cisnormativity is simply the assumption that being cisgender is normal, just like heteronormativity is the assumption that being straight is normal. Such normative thinking is harmful to people from marginalized identities, because it further marginalizes and others us. But it’s important for us to understand that normative thinking isn’t limited to members of the group being normalized. Because by definition it is pervasive to our society, most of us who don’t belong to that group also experience it!

Once I knew Rukmini was trans but that her trans identity had only been mentioned subtly, I realized that I had assumed every character in this book is cis without any proof. Indeed, who is to say that any of the main characters are cis? We just don’t know, and in the same way that we need to stop assuming all characters are white by default until their skin colour or race are mentioned, we need to stop assuming all characters are cisgender until we’re told they are trans. I include myself, a trans woman, in this exhortation.

So The Subtweet is a fascinating and dare I say worthwhile novel for the way it examines many interesting topics while also challenging my preconceptions. There are aspects of its style, its plot, its storytelling that I didn’t enjoy (the revelation around Hayley’s identity, for example, felt very trite and “close-the-loop” rather than truly meaningful). But I am glad I read it, and it definitely met my criteria. Please send more books by trans authors that aren’t mainly about trans issues my way! We need more of these.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Apparently 3 years was too long to wait between reading Witchmark and Stormsong because I have forgotten pretty much everything that happened in the first book, oops! As I started Stormsong, I was very confused: who are all these people? Who are the Amaranthines, and why do they care about Aeland or Laneer? What’s going on? Nevertheless, I did my best to forge on and trust that C.L. Polk would do her best to deliver a good story to me even if I had already let her down.

So no “previously, in Witchmark” this time … instead, we pick up with our narrator, Grace Hemsley, arriving at the capital city of Aeland. She is not alone: she comes with a cohort of Amaranthines, legendary beings of power beyond even the mages that secretly raised Aeland into greatness with their use of aether. Grace and her brother Miles, along with his Amaranthine lover Tristan, destroyed the aether network because it was evil; it trapped the souls of poor Aelanders (and Laneeri) instead of letting them pass on to the Solace, the afterlife. This act has plunged Aeland, its power and transportation systems utterly dependent on aether, into disarray just as the worst storms of the winter bear down upon the country. Although Grace is initially arrested when she arrives in the capital, political machinations quickly reverse this and restore her to being the Queen’s Chancellor. In this position, Grace must walk the knife’s edge between pleasing the queen, satisfying the Amaranthine demands for justice for Laneer, and finding a way to free the imprisoned, oppressed witches of Aeland and save her country from a disaster she is at least partially responsible for making worse….

I got serious “white woman feminist” vibes from Grace almost immediately, and I am here for it. Grace stands at the nexus of great hereditary wealth and privilege, along with political power granted by royal decree. She is also a skilled mage. As a result, she is very insulated from the struggles of common Aelanders and from the witches with whom she shares magical abilities but not magical privileges. Grace clearly wants to “do the right thing.” But like so many people of privilege in our society (myself included), “the right thing” can be hard to discern. Grace proposes to her foil and sapphic love interest, Avia Jessup, that change must be incremental. This is pretty much exactly what white people, especially white women activists, have said to people of colour forever—we hear you, we hear your issues, but you need to give us time to change the system. Avia, Robin, and the others who lack Grace’s privilege don’t see it that way.

This is a theme Polk returns to throughout the book. There is a wonderful argument between Grace and Robin while the latter is doing an autopsy, and a similarly chilling discussion between Grace and Avia over breakfast at the former’s ancestral home. Avia in particular is such an interesting character, because she represents an extreme form of Grace—born into privilege, albeit much less than Grace’s, Avia literally gave it all up because she perceived the injustice of her position. Now, Polk isn’t trying to say that the only ethical decision is to divest oneself completely of all power—after all, it is clear that Grace can achieve good in her office. But I appreciate that Stormsong tackles this issue of the “white moderate” in such a compelling and poignant way.

Time and again, I was impressed with Polk’s choices and what they meant as the story unfolds. A lot of the plot was predictable, but Grace’s reactions weren’t always predictable. For example, at one point a character proposes marriage to her. I was really expecting it to go one way, but it goes the other instead—and the results to that choice weren’t what I was expecting at all. So even though I saw a lot of the plot coming from far off, there were still plenty of surprises and twists that made me enjoy the mystery and intrigue parts of this novel.

That’s really what this is at the end, of course: it’s a novel of political intrigue, and politically-motivated mysteries, that masquerades as a fantasy story. It has magic and magical beings, yes, but other than that it’s really about the unrest that accompanies social and technological change. It turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.

Also, I’m not huge on romance, yet Polk managed to totally get me shipping Grace and Avia. It helps that Grace delivers her father an ultimatum regarding Avia being off-limits—that’s delightfully overprotective in a not-toxic sense. But really, it’s their scenes together. Polk invests in these characters such chemistry that even I was cheering for them to be together. (No spoilers.)

Finally, I love how Polk hints that there is so much more happening that we don’t yet know. The Amaranthines are shady AF. They are supposedly “good guys” yet one of them is very clearly a glowering villain, and Grand Duchess Aife is obviously hiding something about the Solace from Grace. What is it? I guess I need to read Soulstar to find out, preferably before I completely forget this installment!

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Do not let the slim form factor and thinness of this book fool you. Sara Farizan poses a thorny problem here and asks very real questions about the lengths to which one might go to be with one’s forbidden love. Ultimately a tragedy of sorts, If You Could Be Mine is nevertheless filled with promises of new beginnings. It is a reminder that, in the face of incredible oppression, people always find a way to strive to be together, to hope, to have enough. Finally, it is a story about the outsize importance we place upon gender.

Sahar and Nasrin are 17-year-old Iranian girls on the cusp of womanhood. They also might be gay—that is, they love each other and are attracted to one another, but in Iran this is illegal. Nasrin’s parents arrange her betrothal to a doctor doing his residency, starting a ticking clock for Sahar. She is determined to find a way that she can be with Nasrin. When she learns that Iran recognizes being transgender as a “medical condition” and will pay for the surgeries involved in medical transition, Sahar thinks she has hit upon the solution: she can’t be with Nasrin as a woman, but what if she were instead a man? As Sahar becomes more and more obsessed with enacting this plan, she gets involved both with trans Iranians as well as the seedy underworld her cousin, Ali, is wrapped up in.

There’s a lot to unpack here. This is a story about love, but it is also about selfishness. Farizan only gives us access to Sahar’s perspective as a narrator, so she is almost certainly unreliable in some ways. She is head-over-heels for Nasrin in a way that Nasrin might not be about her—Nasrin cares for her, but I got the impression it was in a more egoistical, “I like who I am when Sahar is around me” kind of way. Yet I don’t think it would be fair to write Nasrin off as shallow versus Sahar; we simply don’t get access to Nasrin’s thoughts or feelings beyond what Sahar reports to us.

There are so many other types of love present here as well. Sahar’s father clearly loves her, yet his love his attenuated by grief over Sahar’s mother. A significant portion of this book involves how Sahar expresses her dissatisfaction with her father while at the same time tries to understand her own role in her relationship with him. We see their relationship change as the novel progresses and as both make an effort, although in Sahar’s case she is distracted by her overall plot. Similarly, Reza loves Nasrin in an unrequited sense and perhaps more so in the way one loves the idea of a person instead of the actual person behind that idea. Finally, Ali loves Sahar as a cousin, even going so far as to offer to take her to Turkey.

The freedoms (or lack thereof) in Iran are of central importance to the novel. Sahar’s “solution” to being with Nasrin makes sense when you consider the cultural context—not just the Iranian government’s stances on being gay versus trans, but also just the very binary and gendered nature of Iranian society. We see this at every turn, from the expectations around how women dress (and how these are enforced, or the spectre of enforcement that looms over everyone) to the expectations about how men and women from different families interact. As not only a woman but a trans woman, I had a lot of complex thoughts as I read this book. Some were simply about the differences in the freedoms I have here in Canada versus in Iran. It might seem at first glance that the Iranian government’s funding of medical transition is a good thing, but it seems to me to be a poisoned chalice.

I won’t mince words: the portrayal of Sahar exploring transition and the nature of being transgender in Iran made me uncomfortable at times. I suspect it is supposed to make every reader uncomfortable, but as someone who is actually going through transition herself right now, the way Farizan bluntly discusses a lot of the medical aspects of transition was a lot. I don’t mean this as criticism but perhaps more as warning or caution for other trans people who read If You Could Be Mine.

Overall, I think Farizan does a good job of portraying trans people’s struggles sympathetically. This isn’t really a book about being trans or trans issues. Sahar is clearly cis, and her plot to transition is just that—a scheme that’s supposed to get her the life she wants; at every turn, Farizan makes it clear to us that this is in fact a huge mistake, that transition is not right for Sahar. There is a long tradition in literature of cross-dressing as a form of deception to help a protagonist achieve their goals, and in some ways this has contributed to trans people not being taken seriously. So perhaps that is also a reason for my discomfort with the book’s plot. However, that’s not what is happening here. This isn’t a farce in which Sahar dresses as a man and attempts to court Nasrin on the sly. She is exploring literal transition to being a man, to do so openly so that she can marry Nasrin in front of everyone. That’s a very different idea. And it’s the disconnect between what Sahar wants versus what is best for her as a person (acknowledging she is indeed cisgender and gay) that powers the conflict of this story.

Where the book falters, it’s usually a result of its short length and its style. There were so many places I wished that the book had gone deeper. Sahar’s plot is wild on its surface, and I wish Farizan had given it more time to unfurl and more conversations between Sahar and others, particularly Nasrin. Nasrin features very little in the last part of the book until the end; there’s an emotional moment where Nasrin understands what Sahar is proposing to do, but there isn’t much payoff in terms of what comes from that conversation.

As for the ending … without going into spoilers, this is where the book balances on a knife’s edge between tragedy and hope. I think one can read it either way; I personally prefer the tragic aspect because I think it makes for a more rewarding overall perspective on the story. But Farizan also does her best to remind us that there is hope. It is, alas, unrealistic to think Sahar and Nasrin could alone topple the homophobia that is embedded in Iranian law. But Farizan acknowledges very explicitly that making something illegal does not stamp it out, that there are a great many queer Iranians who are doing their best to flourish despite the oppression they face. And that, I will admit, is a reason for hope.

Ultimately, If You Could Be Mine was a thought-provoking novel. I wish it had gone further, tried to do a little more, been willing to claim more of my time and energy. But it doesn’t, and I’ll conclude that what it does manage to accomplish is still pretty good.

Posted at Kara.Reviews.

This is a small thing, but I feel like it’s rare these days for a non-fiction book to lack a subtitle. The History of White People is minimalist in this sense: the title says it all. So too does the cover of my edition: pure white with a black circle in the centre containing the title and author in white block letters; nothing else on the front cover, blurbs pushed to the back and even to the spine. Between these covers, however, is a book that is far from minimalist. Historian Nell Irvin Painter has clearly Done the Research necessary to present a truly detailed, monumental look at the history of whiteness as a concept, an identity, a label. If you have questions about white people, this book probably has answers.

I can’t really summarize this book because it is so information dense. It’s more textbook than summer-read-on-the-deck, more reference read than cover-to-cover read. I learned a lot from it, but I’ll probably forget a lot too—and that’s fine. Just know going in that while this isn’t what I would term inaccessible, it is definitely quite academic.

Basically, Painter begins in ancient Greece and Rome and expands outwards from there as she takes along the timeline to the modern era. Along the way, she examines who counted as “white.” She explains the origins of the term Caucasian and its synonym with whiteness. She affirms that whiteness is a racial identity, yes, but also an economic one. That is to say that the scope of whiteness conveniently enlarges or contracts in order to further the economic gains of those in power. As Rome enlarged, so too did the definition of whiteness. Later, as Painter moves forward through the medieval period into the Renaissance and Enlightenment, we see how various thinkers in England and the Continent diverged in how they understood races and whiteness. Painter then moves focus to America, and the bulk of the final third of the book focuses on how American thinkers (including, notably, Ralph Waldo Emerson whom I wasn’t aware was so regarded a race scholar) enlarged whiteness.

This is a book that is exactly what it claims to be: it’s about race, but it’s about white people. I think we are—at least, I am—used to discussing race by focusing on non-white people. By placing the focus squarely on white people defining whiteness, Painter reminds us that our discussions of race invariably centre whiteness by assuming it is normative and non-white people are “racialized.” For this reason, Painter obviously discusses things like the American enslavement of Black people, yet she devotes less time to that than one might expect in a book about race. As she notes in her introduction, this is because there are literally libraries’ worth of books about African American history, inevitably a history that deals intimately with enslavement. In The History of White People, Painter is more interested in understanding how whiteness operates.

Painter is very careful here, and I am trying to be similarly careful in the language I use. Neither of us mean to suggest there is such a thing as a “white race” any more than the idea that all Black people belong to a “Black race” (or whatever label you want to use). Part of Painter’s overall thesis is that whiteness is a mutable, permeable label rather than a hard-and-fast biological, genetic, or even social construct. In this way, Painter seeks to undermine any hope of white supremacists to claim that there is a historical or scientific basis for whiteness-as-race, whiteness-as-national-identity, etc.

Sometimes the ways in which Painter addresses this ideas are surprising. Early in the book, Painter stresses that across the past two millennia of European history, the majority of enslaved people have been what we nowadays would consider white people. This is not meant to diminish the atrocities of later colonial enslavement. Rather, Painter seeks to establish the economic origin of slavery—that is to say, enslavement came first as a means of profit-making, and the racialized connotations of enslavement in the 17th century emerged later as justification for the institutionalization of enslavement in a society that otherwise prides itself on liberty. Racism and ideas of racial superiority, then, are ultimately a form of cognitive dissonance, a house of cards from which oppressive systems can be built.

Similarly, when Painter arrives to the American era, she focuses a lot on the oppression of the Irish. This is a common talking about that white people use when they want to diminish the history of Black enslavement in the States; people love to claim Irish ancestry and talk about how their ancestors were slaves too. Yes and no, Painter says, because of course it’s far more nuanced. By actually referring to primary sources (shocking, I know), Painter helps us ground this oppression in the context of British colonialism and the fluctuating American attitudes towards immigration. I know those white people who would say, “But what about the Irish?” aren’t the people who would read this book, but they should be.

I’ll stop short of recommending this book to everyone, because honestly it is a slog. It took me so long mostly because I was busy with work while reading it, but it is also a very dense book. I consider this only a plus, however, because this book is loaded with great research and sources. My overall takeaway actually emerged early in my reading: Painter reminds me of how complex, how dense our history really is. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you think you know about these concepts, there is always more to learn, deeper to go. When I first started The History of White People, I thought I had a good comprehension of how modern concepts of race emerged. Indeed, Painter affirms a lot of what I thought I understood—but she goes so much deeper, making connections I never would have heard of otherwise, such as between Emerson and transcendentalism.

So this book reminds me to be humble. I love learning and love passing on my knowledge to others. But I also want to acknowledge that there is always more learning for me to do. I wish more people, especially people on the Internet, would recognize this instead of holding forth on everything as if they are the last word on that subject. I don’t debate with people on these types of topics on Twitter, for instance, because there is no way to squeeze this nuance into tweets. Instead, I’m going to spend my time reading more intense, interesting, edifying books like this.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

One of the library’s copies of Crooked Kingdom was available sooner than expected, although I did only start reading it 1 day before my loan was up (and it had another hold on it after me). Oops! Fortunately, despite its heft, this book is a pretty easy read. Leigh Bardugo’s style has that benefit of the words virtually leaping off the page as you glide through her narration.

Picking up where Six of Crows left off, Crooked Kingdom features the aftermath of Kaz and the gang’s doublecross at the hands of a wily yet dishonourable Ketterdam merchant. Now that merchant has Inej, Kaz’s wall-scaling Spider and also-perhaps-love-interest. So not only does Kaz need to rescue her, but he has every intention of recouping the money they lost by not being paid for their heist on the Ice Fortress. This calls for a convoluted plan … or perhaps several plans.

There are two things that really work for me about this book. First, as I just mentioned, Kaz’s initial plan doesn’t work. Nor, really, does the second. Or the third. I lost count at some point, but the fact remains that despite making Kaz out to be a genius mastermind, Bardugo makes sure he doesn’t succeed on the first try. He’s usually one step ahead, yes, but occasionally he’s one step ahead of someone else who is also one step ahead of him … or something. Anyway, a lot of the conflict in this book comes from the failure of Kaz’s plans, and I respect when an author lets their protagonists fail a bunch of times.

The second thing that really works for me is the way that Crooked Kingdom explores more of the backstories of its characters, particularly Jesper. This is a welcome addition to the novel’s length, for it helps us understand how Jesper came to run with Kaz—and why he sticks around, even after inadvertently betraying Kaz. Similarly, we see characters like Nina struggle with the fallout from the first book (in her case, craving for jurda parem). This is a book in which everyone is struggling, and Kaz has to push them to give him just a little bit more.

The story itself is more about cons than heists, and that’s ok by me. Again, each character gets a chance to participate in whatever ways they can contribute. The pleasure in Crooked Kingdom comes from the seamlessness of Bardugo’s worldbuilding meshed with the stakes of the plot: if Kaz and crew don’t pull this off, it isn’t just their necks and their finances on the line but also potentially a flashpoint for a massive war. The way that this sneaks up on you is excellent.

I’m guessing I’m probably not alone in my dissatisfaction with how Bardugo handles Kaz/Inej. I won’t get into spoilers, but let’s just say that the ship fics are probably in overabundance to compensate for what Crooked Kingdom dangles in front of us without truly delivering. And that’s ok—it’s understandable why Bardugo makes that choice, and I would be curious to know if she ever plans to revisit these particular characters.

As it is, I appreciate the tightness of this duology’s plotting. I respect Bardugo and her agent and publishers for not dragging this storyline into a duology. I am intrigued by the loose ends left here for future series—and perhaps this will motivate me to go back and read Shadow & Bone indeed. At the end of the day, that’s probably the best recommendation a novel can make of itself—that it left you wanting more, more from that author and from the universe they’ve created.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

As Lee McIntyre reflects in the book, this topic seems even more relevant now than it did prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have very effective vaccines that will help us mitigate the harms of COVID-19, yet a shocking proportion of people are hesitant to get vaccinated. A perhaps less-shocking proportion have decried public health measures, like mask mandates, designed to keep people safe. In How to Talk to a Science Denier, McIntyre tries to uncover why people deny science, how those beliefs are formed, and then what techniques will actually be effective in encouraging such people to change those beliefs. McIntyre is a philosophy of science professor, not a psychologist or a scientist himself. So he draws from a lot of references and experts in those fields, along with his anecdotal observations from talking to various flavours of science deniers.

I received an eARC of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a review.

McIntyre wants to deliver good news: contrary to some of the prevailing wisdom, the science suggests that science deniers can actually be convinced by facts. He refers to a couple of articles, including one that I’ve used in my English classroom: “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” and explains that more recent work hasn’t reproduced the results reported on in these articles. In fact, the research seems to indicate that content rebuttal is effective—at least in online settings. McIntyre goes on to reassure us that if you aren’t an expert in the field in question, then technique rebuttal is also effective: point out, gently and compassionately, the flaws in reasoning that have resulted in the science denier forming these incoherent beliefs. These flaws are 5 in number: “cherrypicking evidence, belief in conspiracy theories, reliance on fake experts (and the denigration of real experts), committing logical errors, and setting impossible expectations for what science can achieve.” As McIntyre chronicles his conversations and explorations of various flavours of science denial, he briefly summarizes how these 5 flaws in reasoning show up within each flavour.

More broadly, this is a book about epistemology and the limits of scientific knowing, as well as the role of healthy debate in our society. McIntyre is keen to point out that a great deal of science denial ultimately rests in a distrust of science, of government, or of some combination of those authorities. This is important, because McIntyre wants to emphasize that most science deniers are not stupid or even necessarily ignorant people (although ignorance/lack of education can be a good starting point for breeding science denial). Rather, these are people who embrace the denial of science as an identity because it provides them comfort in a world that at times seems very random and harsh.

In this way, McIntyre builds up a thesis that he truly only comes to understand through experience. His first attempts to talk to science deniers in situ, at the 2018 International Flat Earth Conference, fumble and fizzle out because, he concludes, he didn’t listen enough. Each subsequent mission to reach out to deniers, then, builds on this experience and results in McIntyre trying to find more common ground and truly understand the nature of the denial in question. At several points, McIntyre cites Peter Boghassian and James Lindsay’s book How to Have Impossible Conversations. I kind of wanted to go take a shower when he did that, because I’ve heard very few good things about Boghassian and Lindsay, and I’ve witnessed firsthand the latter not living up, on Twitter, to the exhortation to really sit down and listen compassionately to people you disagree with. McIntyre seems like a nice and liberal enough guy, but it made me super uncomfortable that he cited those two so favourably. (And more generally, I wasn’t a huge fan of how he kept praising various sources’ books as “terribly important,” and other such adjectives.)

I am all for listening to people who disagree with me on science and seeking to understand their point of view. I have had conversations with vaccine-hesitant people in my life, and this is exactly what I tried to do—I asked them what their concerns were, and I tried to treat them with respect and acknowledge that it’s ok to be concerned and apprehensive about these things. In this sense, I am entirely in agreement with McIntyre (and perhaps, at least in the way he filters it through this book, Boghassian and Lindsay, ugh).

That being said, I do feel uncomfortable when this idea gets extended to conversations about society in general. McIntyre submits that some of the most recent research suggests not showing up to a debate is an unproductive way to combat denial. That made me think of Bill Nye agreeing to debate creationist Ken Ham, and how at the time I scoffed at the idea. Maybe I was wrong. But I also think we need to think carefully about where we draw the line at accepting such debates as valid events. Debating science is one thing, but I don’t want to debate the rights of any particular group of people. Don’t try to debate with me that Black people are human, and don’t try to tell me that, as a trans woman, I don’t or shouldn’t exist. In that sense, even as McIntyre lays the responsibility of communicating with science deniers on the shoulders of scientists, I feel uncomfortable with the possible analogy to be had here—that members of marginalized communities have the responsibility to reach out and communicate better with racists, transphobes, homophobes, etc.

To be clear, McIntyre isn’t saying that. He wisely side-steps that issue by explicitly focusing on science denial and only science denial. At one point, he brings up white supremacy but then rejects any firm comparison between white supremacy and science denial. To me, this signals that he understands there is a qualitative difference between two people disagreeing on a matter of science versus two people disagreeing about the humanity of others. Nevertheless, I do think that discussions about science denial must acknowledge their embedded context of a society that is increasingly suspicious of any form of intellectual discussion around social justice. Just see the backlash against critical race theory (a backlash which Lindsay, incidentally, champions, ugh) and how schools in the United States are “banning” the teaching of critical race theory despite the fact that it isn’t taught in high schools, because it’s a complex field of study usually reserved for grad school. I think it’s a mistake to ignore the fact that the people likely to engage in science denial are also likely to be in favour of “banning” critical race theory, because their flawed reasoning resonates with the 5 flaws McIntyre highlights here.

One element I did find lacking in How to Talk to a Science Denier was a deeper look at science denial within science itself. McIntyre brushes up against this topic in a few areas, such as when he has a conversation with a biologist friend who is, if not anti-GMO food then at least not pro-GMO. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about—the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us nurses and scientists coming out against vaccination, even though these people should be the ones who have the best understanding of vaccine science. But science is a very broad discipline; the general public seems to place an overabundance of trust that if you are a scientist then you know what you’re talking about when you opine on any science. I would have liked to see McIntyre interrogate this idea more thoroughly and examine, for example, scientists who deny climate change. Do they genuinely disbelieve, or are they sowing doubt because it funds their bottom line? This is, after all, one of the ideas McIntyre wants us to understand after reading the book: much science denial these days is political and corporate in its origins, the result of decades of doubt sown by tobacco and then oil companies. Scientists themselves are not immune from such corruption.

In the end, this book is far from a comprehensive guide to the world of science denial (how could it be?). But it’s definitely interesting, and I think for the most part, McIntyre meets the expectations he sets out at the beginning and in the very title of this book. If you are someone like me who is interested in having more fruitful conversations with people who deny or are wary of otherwise accepted scientific views, then this book might hold some answers for you. Yet I think McIntyre would agree that not even this book can be the magic bullet that fixes all our science denial problems. That will take concerted efforts in our institutions, from education (hello) to politics and beyond.

Earlier this year I panned Ruins & Revenge, a Raine Benares spin-off novel featuring Tam as the main character. In my review, I expressed my disappointment over Lisa Shearin’s plotting, but I reassured myself that I would continue reading her novels (specifically her SPI Files series).

I might need to revise that prediction. I might need to take a long hiatus from Shearin’s novels for a while.

The Phoenix Illusion begins with a building appearing out of nowhere in an empty block of New York City. Not-so-coincidentally, that building belongs to Rake, our protagonist Makenna’s goblin boyfriend, and it’s not from our world but rather from the world we know from the Raine Benares series. That’s not all—buildings from around the United States have been disappearing, most of them in isolated locations where people wouldn’t notice a building vanishing right away. Someone is up to no good, and Rake, Mac, and the rest of the SPI team need to find out who, what, and why. Oh, and Tam shows up. Yay.

I’ll cut right to my criticism: Mac doesn’t do much in this book until the climax. She is, for the majority of the story, merely our first person narrator, mostly there to provide us with interminable exposition and occasionally making sly innuendo about other characters who are in relationships. I have written about Shearin’s penchant for exposition before, and maybe it used to work better for me, but in this book I was getting annoyed. I wanted something to happen, yet after the initial excitement of Rake’s otherworldly headquarters showing up in New York, it’s a while before anything does.

When it does occur, Mac isn’t integral at all. This hasn’t always been the case—she has played far bigger roles as a seer in other books—but for some reason in this book, she feels extraneous. Her role as a seer is underutilized for most of the book, and everything happens to her or around her instead of at her own instigation. This lack of agency makes for a boring story and also does little to get me excited about Mac or her relationship with Rake, which is the focal point of the characterization. In contrast, Mac’s partner Ian is there, but it feels like he barely gets any lines. There is almost no exploration of their friendship and professional relationship like there was in previous SPI Files books.

To be fair to the book, Mac eventually gets to do something near the end. With entirely predictable comedy, she ends up in the thick of the villain’s evil plot. But it’s wrapped up very neatly, with little enough trouble for any of the good guys and only a moment of tension for Mac.

This is the crux of my dissatisfaction with this story: none of it feels like it matters. Ok, so the bad guys are moving buildings around (and even between dimensions). I agree that’s villainous, and at one point the good guys remark on how it could be deadly for people inside those buildings. So I see the potential for the plot of this book to matter. Nevertheless, when you get right down to it, very little bad happens in this book, and what does happen is resolved without too much fuss. There are no hard choices, and therefore no room for character growth. The Mac at the beginning of The Phoenix Illusion is the Mac at the end, albeit perhaps hornier for Rake than ever before….

Hence the need to perhaps take a hiatus from Shearin for a while. I don’t want to dislike these books as much as I am, because I really did enjoy the first few Raine Benares books and also the beginning of the SPI Files. Shearin is a good writer, but lately her plots have fallen flat, in favour perhaps of her fondness for the characters she has created and the worlds she wants to showcase. This exuberance doesn’t lead to excitement for the reader, alas, and that is where I am at with The Phoenix Illusion.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Over a decade ago, I read Lilith’s Brood. I immediately recognized the power of Octavia E. Butler’s writing, her utter willingness to exploit science fiction to the fullest extent that it can comment on our society. Since then, I have always nodded along and agreed every time someone calls Butler a grandmaster of science fiction and fantasy. She is an icon. But I didn’t read anything else by her.

Until now.

Kindred is the first of many Butler stories I hope to pick up and finally read over the next few years. It’s time to address this fundamental gap in my science fiction experience!

Moving between 1976 and the early nineteenth century, Kindred is more fantasy than science fiction for reasons I’ll discuss shortly. Dana is Black, recently married to a white man named Kevin, and they are moving in together. She begins to be “pulled” through time to the side of a white man named Rufus—first when he was a small boy, and then progressively as he ages, every time apparently when he is in mortal peril. Dana saves Rufus yet inevitably finds herself trapped in Maryland, at the mercy of Rufus’ abusive, slave-owning father, until time pulls her back to 1976 and a distraught husband. As this process repeats, it takes a toll both physical and emotional on Dana.

It’s a commonplace for people to insist that, were they around in the past during times of great upheaval or injustice, they would definitely be on the right side of history. The trouble with this assertion is that in most cases you wouldn’t be, statistically. You would have been brought up into a society in which an injustice like enslavement would be accepted or at least tolerated, and though many people bristled at it and opposed it, the continuation of that institution for so long points to the social inertia it had. Time travel adds another layer to this mix, for Dana is not a woman of the nineteenth century. As the characters from that time point out, she speaks like a white woman sometimes—too educated, too assertive by the standards of the Black women, free and enslaved, around the Weylin plantation. It marks Dana out as different even from her own people, gets her into trouble. But it also reminds us that she is not someone who grew up with slavery.

On Dana’s first two trips to the past, she positions herself as best she can as free. When Kevin inadvertently accompanies her, she poses as his property. Subsequent trips find her power and autonomy further eroded, as first Rufus’ father and then Rufus himself exploit Dana’s fondness for some of their contemporaries to manipulate her. Dana finds herself compromising or at the very least stretching many of her principles, first as a matter of immediate survival in the past and then as a matter of existential survival—for she realizes that if certain events don’t come to pass, she won’t exist.

I mentioned that Kindred isn’t science fiction, and this is why: there is no explanation for Dana’s time-hopping. There is no how or why, no novum that propels her into the past and flings her into the future. It just happens. There’s no obvious magic here either, though, so perhaps the most accurate label is speculative fiction (I just don’t want to create another tag). In any event, I think this choice on Butler’s part is deliberate and important: Butler doesn’t want us to focus on the time travel itself. That is not the plot; stopping it is a desire of Dana’s but not, ultimately, what this story is about.

This is a story about being pushed to one’s limits, and then being pushed past those limits, and deciding how you respond to that.

I would love to see Kindred turned into a movie or television series, but I doubt this will happen any time soon (we’re just going to keep adapting dead white guys like Isaac Asimov, I guess). American media has an obsession with narratives about enslavement but only through the narrow lens of the white viewer. It’s no coincidence that the most successful movies about America’s enslavement of Black people tend to feature intense violence, white saviourism, etc. The movies offer up the idea of redemption in the form of white people who help the Black characters survive and even escape their wretchedness while at the same time attempting to scourge any lingering guilt through the spectacle of violence: oh, look how bad it was back then, it certainly isn’t that bad now! American history, when it even acknowledges enslavement as an institution, firmly insists it is an artifact of the past, with no connections now to racial inequity or slavery in other forms (such as that of prisoners).

Kindred is not that type of narrative about enslavement. It was very uncomfortable to read this. I don’t want to dwell on my discomfort, because I don’t want to centre myself as a white person—but I do think my position as a white person is important to note when I discuss this book. Butler reminds us that our power as individuals is circumscribed by the state, by culture, by society. When Kevin travels to the past with Dana, he has privilege as an educated white man, yet even he can only do so much. Neither he nor Dana really manages to make any real change on the Weylin plantation. The ending of the novel is grim not just for the physical consequences for Dana as she returns to her present for the last time but also because, afterwards, we learn that the worst had come to pass for the enslaved people on the Weylin plantation. Dana is the protagonist of this novel, but she isn’t a hero. In her desire to survive and perhaps to punish Rufus, she makes life worse for the myriad Black people who live on the plantation (I suppose one might argue Dana is caught in a predestination paradox and lacks free will, but as I said above, that’s not what Butler is trying to explore here).

So this isn’t a feel good story about escaping enslavement. Rather, Butler seeks to challenge the reader (especially, I think, us white readers) to truly think about the daily abuse experienced by enslaved Black people (and even free Black people) in that era and such places as Maryland. She reifies slavery in a way that more glorified portrayals cannot, turning it from a hypothetical idea that we know existed as a part of history into something far more … familiar. For you see, Rufus and his father are abusive AF—and that isn’t any different from people in our time. Ownership of others is no longer sanctioned in the same way that it was in theirs, but abusers like the Weylins can still operate and still inflict harm on vulnerable and marginalized people. Maybe, having experienced Dana’s difficulties and the way she comes to understand the plight of her ancestors, we might also turn our empathy towards those who suffer now rather than blame them for their own suffering.

There’s so much more I could say about this book, so many ideas of race and gender politics that Butler explores. I don’t fully have the words (and I must disclose that I’m writing this review about two weeks after finishing the book, so my memory has already begun to fade). All I can really do is hope that what I have said helps you understand that Kindred is a truly special work. Discomforting in its intensity yet energizing in its brilliance, I admire it especially for being a discrete, standalone work. I know this book already has so much praise, but I want it read more. I want it talked about more. Starting with you.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

I think I finally have the answer if someone ever asks me who my favourite poet is. Longtime readers of my reviews will know of my ambivalence towards poetry. I don’t want to malign an entire form, yet at the same time poetry has never transported me the same way a novel does. Until, that is, I started reading Amanda Lovelace’s poems. My reviews of The Mermaid’s Voice Returns in This One and her earlier works in the Women Are Some Kind of Magic series attest to the power their poetry holds for me. Lovelace fell off my radar for a bit until my bestie Rebecca reminded me that there are more books of their poetry that I have yet to read! Rebecca even lent me her copy of Break Your Glass Slippers, but here’s how you know I was really hooked: before I had even finished it, I ordered the rest of Lovelace’s books that I didn’t already own. I will enjoy spending the next few months catching up on that catalogue.

As with the rest of their books, this one comes with a brilliant, detailed list of trigger warnings at the front. My review will mostly discuss the topics related to abusive/toxic romantic relationships and friendships.

It’s so interesting to re-read my reviews of Lovelace’s previous trilogy and note how I have or haven’t changed from the Kara who read those books. Maybe I need to revisit them. I read The Princess Saves Herself in This One 4 years ago, and my life has changed so much in those 4 years—I had just bought a house, was just starting to make the adult friends that are the bedrock of myself today, and of course I realized I am trans and came out. When I read those previous books, I was coming to them as someone who thought she was a feminist but cisgender man, an ally who hadn’t experienced directly the misogyny often laid bare in those poems. This is my first time reading Lovelace’s work from the conscious position of being a trans woman.

Thankfully, I have not experienced many of the traumas within these pages. I have the privilege of being thin in our society, and I have never been in any romantic relationship, let alone an abusive one. Yet many of the themes in these poems resonate with me still. As the series title suggests, you are your own fairy tale. Many of these poems are about finding the strength to help yourself while also recognizing who in your life is a positive influence, a source of strength and succour rather than a drain. They speak of change, the ability to change and transform oneself.

One of the poems near the end the book begins with “maybe i was never given a fairy godmother…” and ends with “i handle things that i never, ever could have handled before. / —if that’s not a true transformation, what is?” (emphasis original). I think many trans people, perhaps in particular trans women like myself who come out to themselves and others later in life, have moments of wishing for a fairy godmother who could change their bodies like magic. As Lovelace gently yet soberly reminds us, the fairy godmother isn’t here. You have to make your own magic, but you can make your own magic.

I love how this book is structured. In the first part, the poems come in pairs: the left page is a poem from the point of view of someone else, or from the narrator’s less charitable internal psyche. It is a poem of doubts, half-truths or untruths whispered into the narrator’s ear about her body, her self-worth. The right page has the heading “fairy godmother says” and then a poem from the point of view of the fairy godmother, someone or some part of the narrator whispering truths of strength in her ear. The dualistic structure remains throughout the book, but after the first part the fairy godmother heading disappears, perhaps symbolizing the narrator’s growth in becoming more comfortable articulating her own truths. This structure reminds me of the power of a book of poetry; although individual poems did jump out at me throughout the collection, the pairing of poems together like this enhanced how much I liked each one.

Plus, if I am being entirely honest, almost every single poem in this book is fire. I kept turning the page being like, “Goddamn”—that is, if I wasn’t sniffling with tears triggered by the words of the poem previous. It was this intensity that motivated me to go out and buy this book even before I had finished it. I knew I needed this—I needed it for myself but even more so to share with others when I could.

Without going too much into particulars, I have a very close friend who has been in an abusive romantic relationship. I knew her prior to the start of this relationship, was with her every step of the way through its beginning, and I am currently witnessing what is hopefully its end. So many of Lovelace’s poems hit me like a ton of bricks here because they describe what my friend is experiencing, at least as best as I can tell as an observer. I let her borrow my new copy of this book, and she agreed that it resonated. The way that an abuser manipulates and gaslights one, and the need to recognize how “people have a habit / of telling on themselves.”

Lovelace builds on top of this commentary of rejecting abusive behaviour with a plea for us to remember the power of friendship (and in this particular context, female friendship). It’s really difficult for me to pick a favourite poem in this collection, but if I had to, I might say it’s this one:

As an asexual and aromantic person, this encomium of friendship is a welcome contrast to the insistence much of our society makes that romance is at the pinnacle of a relationship hierarchy that relegates friendship to a lower tier. The whole extended metaphor of this book is meant to push back against the Prince Charming narrative that we feed women from birth: you will find the One; he will be a man; he will sweep you off your feet and take care of you—and if that doesn’t happen, it’s because you did something wrong, because you are broken, because it’s your fault. When I thought I was a man, this narrative smothered me because there was no one of any gender I cared to sweep off their feet—I was content being “just friends” (even though there should be no just about it). Then I met this close friend I mentioned, and she became this amazing, platonic presence in my life that made me feel even more whole than I was without her. She knew me before I realized I was trans; she accepted me the moment I came out to her.

As I gradually found myself, our friendship revealed itself as the female friendship it has always been. The poem I quoted above works for me because in many ways I am the one who fiercely wants to protect her, from her relationship woes as well as other knocks in life—but ours is a reciprocal relationship, and equally one might say she desires to fiercely protect me, both in terms of my vulnerability as a trans woman but also in general simply as my friend. I feel that word “unearthly” so hard. I often struggle with language to describe our friendship, for I feel that it transcends what most friendships (even best friendships) have, having qualities that a romantic relationship might without the actual, you know, romance. So I appreciate Lovelace attempting to convey those types of feelings of connection.

In the end, this is a poetry collection that is beautiful on every level. Structurally, stylistically, and content-wise, I appreciate all of it. Take it from me as a reluctant reader of poetry, as someone who does not much enjoy grappling with metre and metaphor, symbols and scansion—these poems spoke to me in a way poetry doesn’t often achieve. I’m glad that such powerful messages found their way into my life, that they help articulate and remind me of the powerful friendships I have, and of the power I have within myself.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.