This is a book by a Black man about slavery in the United States, and I wanted to open this review by boosting the thoughts of Black reviewers—after all, their take on this book is going to be more salient than the opinion of a white woman like me. Unforunately, as I browsed reviews of The Water Dancer on Goodreads, I was dismayed to see that the majority of them are from white people (mostly judging by avatar), and particularly white women. Never has it been more starkly evident to me that we need to boost and promote the voices of book reviewers of colour. I finally found a review by Monica Reeds, and so I recommend you check that out (and like it on Goodreads!).

I do have an opinion, of course, and that is what this review is about. But I would be remiss if I didn’t knowledge my peculiar positionality, not only in terms of my race but also the fact that I am Canadian, and therefore I’m reading this book as an outsider to the history it inhabits.

The Water Dancer is a first-person narrative with a frisson of the fantastic. Hiram Walker is a slave on a plantation in Virginia. Traumatized at a young age by the sale of his mother, Hiram eventually discovers he has an eidetic memory linked to a mysterious power for translocation called Conduction. Coates doesn’t really explain the nature or functioning of this power for most of the book, and even when we get details, they remain vague. Hiram eventually becomes involved with elements of the Underground (Railroad), even meeting Harriet Tubman. However, his brush with freedom doesn’t last forever, for he discovers that the pursuit of abolition and the freeing of slaves are not always synonymous. In this way, Coates tries to illustrate for modern readers the complex, conflicting dynamics of abolitionist and Underground movements.

Monica’s review says that this book “demands that you take your time and sit with what Coates is exposing you to,” and I couldn’t agree more. Many will pan this book for the lyrical nature of Coates prose, and honestly, I agree with them. The style of The Water Dancer doesn’t appeal to me. Yet I suspect that this is at least partially Coates intention—not to be unappealing, of course, but to write the narrative in such a way as to challenge a reader to unpack its metaphors rather than interpret it as an historically-authentic, cinematic retelling of this period in time. I firmly believe The Water Dancer is an attempt to tell a story about slavery in a way that truly challenges readers to understand not just the intense physical and psychological trauma inflicted upon slaves but the complex social and spiritual relationship between slaves, free Black people, and white people of various classes.

This is evident from the start with the epithets Hiram uses to describe types of people. Slaves are the Tasked, and the work they do is tasking. Owners are the Quality, the rich and high-born Virginians; poor white people are the Low, and Hiram remarks how there is a peculiar, contextual hierarchy in the power dynamics among Quality, Tasked, and Low. Coates doesn’t use these terms to be cutesy or to disguise the nature of slavery. Rather, by using these epithets, he allows Hiram to tell this story from his point of view and averts some of the tropes and stereotypes that have seeped into narratives of slavery over the decades.

I don’t watch a lot of films about slavery—partly because they are depressing, yes, but also because they tend to be directed and written by white people. Hollywood has a hard-on for telling slave stories, but only a particularly type of slave story. As with most of American history, slavery has been romanticized—and even when attempts are made to restore some of the “grim truths” of this era, that restoration essentially amounts to trauma porn. That is to say, narratives of slavery in the States are extremely messed up because they have essentially been colonized by white people in positions of power to tell these stories. The Water Dancer is a decolonization of the slave narrative, and that’s what fascinates me about it.

Here’s another example: Corinne. Here’s Corinne described in Hiram’s words:

I don’t know about you, but as a white person I feel called out by this passage—and I should feel that way. Because Coates is critiquing the attitudes of white people towards the Black people they were claiming to help in a way that has striking parallels to what continues to happen here and now in the 21st century. White people (and particularly white women) love to champion trendy anti-racist causes, yet we often appropriate these causes and quash the very Black voices that we should be lifting up and listening to. The same goes for Indigenous movements, particularly here in Canada. And Coates nails it when he writes that “their opposition was a kind of vanity”—when we throw ourselves behind a cause out of a sense of white guilt, out of a hope that this absolves ourselves of our racialized privilege, we do so at the risk of failing to see and treat and help Black people as people and as individuals.

So it’s moments like that in The Water Dancer that moved me and gave me chills and made me realize Coates was speaking to me in that particular way. Did the book keep me captivated all the way through? No. As I mentioned, its style isn’t to my tastes, and Hiram as a character feels more like a conduit for Coates’ themes rather than a person. He is more memory and story rather than desire and flaw. Yet my personal hang-ups aside, I’m able to recognize that this book attempts something very interesting when it comes to narratives about slavery in the US. And I would like to praise that and point it out, so that if this seems intriguing to you, you can at least give this book a chance.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Ever wondered, “What would Jane Eyre have been like if Jane Eyre had been a serial killer?” That’s the basic premise of Jane Steele, although if I’m being honest, the serial killer aspect was not as intense as I had thought it would be. As a feminist retelling of Jane Eyre this book leaves much to be desired. However, as a kind of mystery/thriller/romance, Jane Steele is a lot of fun. I came to this book from the incredibly upset that was For Today I Am A Boy, and this was exactly the palate cleanser I needed. Don’t get me wrong: there are real, moving, and disturbing aspects to this book. But it ultimately all floats on an almost fairy-tale-like sensibility to it. Lyndsay Faye explicitly references Jane Eyre, both in epigraphs and in the text—Jane is aware of her literary namesake as a novel within this novel’s universe. While the parallels are overt, this is not a simple retelling, and Faye’s creativity is on full display.

Jane grows up poor living in an outbuilding on property that is ostensibly hers to inherit. After her mother dies, her wicked aunt sends her away to a girls’ boarding school to learn how to be a governess. Jane has other ideas: she kills her cousin after he attempts to rape her, and at the boarding school, she kills again. Eventually she ends up in London before eventually returning to the house of her childhood—now owned by the mysterious Charles Thornfield, a distant relative of hers and now potentially her next target. Yet Jane didn’t plan for two things: she didn’t plan to be drawn into the intrigue and shadow hanging over Thornfield and his family—nor did she plan to fall in love.

From the start I recognized that Jane is not nearly as bloodthirsty as I inferred from the cover copy—which might be my bad. I love the idea that she goes around killing men who have wronged her or other women. Yet Faye’s exploration of Jane’s psychology (psychopathy?) is inconsistent and incomplete. Although she examines it here and there—for example, with Jane’s relationship with Clarke—Faye doesn’t seem to want to let Jane’s psychology spoil the possibility of her romance with Thornfield. In my opinion, this is disappointing, because it wastes a truly unique and interesting part of this book and its protagonist’s characterization.

As far as the romance goes, it’s … fine, I guess? You know I’m not a great judge of these things! Thornfield is an interesting enough character, with a suitable number of skeletons in his closet. I appreciate that Faye does not dodge the colonialism of Britain during this time. However, I feel a little awkward at the careful way in which Faye has tried to position Thornfield as white, but it’s ok, he isn’t a dreadful imperialist because he grew up in Punjab and therefore he understands! I’m not sure there is a good or right way to manage this, though.

The plot is a somewhat messy knot of coincidences, villainous scoundrels and rogues, and a fair amount of gumption and moxie from our heroine. The pacing is off—I think this is a rare case in which it helped that I read this in a single day, with some breaks here and there, because I was able to cruise through the story without risk of forgetting details. I really did enjoy reading this—but it’s the kind of enjoyment that comes from a slightly chaotic book.

Finally, like many retellings and re-imaginings, Faye attempts to emulate the diction of Regency novels—yet the result is necessarily ersatz. I think this says something interesting about the evolution of the novel over the centuries. It’s not sufficient to emulate verbiage and use some more semi-colons. There is more to the style of the Brontës; there is a structure to their novels that comes from how they were constructed at the time. Jane Steele, on the other hand, is a modern novel taking a tour of an older world. If Faye attempted to fully embrace the Brontë style, the novel would still feel weird to us, though, because it would be very different from the novels we are used to reading today. So I think there’s some interesting conversation to be had here about how all art is irrevocably a product of its time, etc.

If you come to this hoping for a close retelling of Jane Eyre, you won’t get it. Likewise, as I’ve remarked a couple of times, the serial killer aspect is disappointing. Yet there is a good story here, at its core, and this was a fun book to read. As long as you tilt your head and read it with the right sense of fun and disbelief, I think there’s lots to enjoy here.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

The origins of our numbers, of our decimal place value system, of our numerals, is certainly an interesting topic! After all, we take for granted that we write numbers the way we do today—most of us learned Roman numerals as kids and quickly realize they are clunky and formidable as we try to write the year we were born (although anyone born after 2000 has a much easier time of it now!). But Amir Aczel was curious about the origins of our number system, and in particular its linchpin of zero. Finding Zero is his very personal story of searching for evidence that the earliest known use of what became our zero symbol was in what is now Cambodia.

Aczel opens the book by describing his childhood aboard the cruise ship his father captained across the Mediterranean. Here, his father’s steward fostered a love of mathematics. Now, as a professor of mathematics in the United States, Aczel still dreamed of the origins of our numbers. Eventually he took a trip to India, which was basically the birthplace of the Arabic numerals we use today, to visit some of the oldest known examples of zero. Finally, he discovered the work of Georges Cœdès, an anthropologist who had previously noted the presence of a 0-like symbol in a Khmer inscription on a stele. The actual artifact, however, went missing during the Khmer Rouge’s destruction of Cambodia’s cultural history. Aczel’s story climaxes with his trip to Cambodia to find this artifact—if it still exists.

Often when a writer includes personal anecdotes, it’s relatable and interesting. I can’t say the same for this book. I was so interested in hearing Aczel talk about the properties of zero and why it’s important, but I could have done without the discussion of his childhood, etc. While it’s ultimately his choice how he decides to tell this story, it isn’t satisfying to me, and it’s quite self-aggrandizing. Aczel seems to see himself as a mathematical Indiana Jones on an epic quest to find the first 0. This is less about his discovery and more about his discovery. I would be much more tolerant of that if the writing were better—to be clear, I don’t think Aczel is doing anything wrong by writing this in a memoir form. I applaud him for trying to make the history of mathematics into an intense, exciting quest. Similarly, this book sheds light on the bias of Western mathematicians, the way we have shunned or dismissed the contributions of Asian—particularly south Asian—mathematics. Aczel does his best to explain how the inscription fits into what was a vibrant, advanced culture; similarly, he asserts the importance of making sure that the inscription survives and remains in Cambodia. These are laudable attitudes.

But honestly, there are better books about zero. Although 20 years old now, Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea remains my favourite book about this number. Seife certainly doesn’t go into the same level of detail that Aczel devotes to tracking the origin of the 0 symbol, that’s true. He basically attributes it to India and leaves it at that. Nevertheless, Seife’s book is so rich in history and ideas—and very well-written.

Moreover, it’s worth noting that in the years since this book was published, the Bahkshali manuscript has been carbon dated. Aczel mentions this manuscript in his book—it contains some of the suspected earliest examples of a 0 symbol in India. At the time he wrote the book, no one had been allowed to extract samples from the manuscript to date it for fear of irreparably damaging the fragile artifact. I guess that changed, and the results are in: pars of the manuscript pre-date, by several centuries, the inscription Aczel rediscovered in Cambodia. So Finding Zero is also somewhat out of date in this respect.

This is not a bad book, but it also isn’t one I would recommend. The mathematics are explored elsewhere in more detailed and interesting ways. And as much as I applaud Aczel’s adventurous spirit, I didn’t enjoy the way he told the story of his quest for the 0 symbol. I had hoped for a lot more here.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

This is an own-voices review for being a transgender woman, but I am white and do not share the protagonist’s ethnicity. For Today I Am A Boy left me unsettled in ways I didn’t expect, and not entirely in the good kind of unsettled you want from some literature. I’m going to be harsh here because it’s how I feel, having read the book, but I would like to disclaim up front that even though this review is own-voices, it is still only my voice. In particular, Audrey comes of age in the 1980s and 1990s, before the web was widely accessible—I have had the privilege of knowing about and being able to read about transgender issues for a long time. So perhaps an older trans woman who is Audrey’s contemporary will see herself in this book. But the more I sit here, stunned and disconcerted, the more I come to the conclusion that For Today I Am A Boy is a most elegant example of CanLit at its best, by which I mean its worst: the packaging and retelling of a marginalized character’s story for the entertainment and edification of an outside audience.

Trigger warnings for transphobia, homophobia, racism, rape, sexual assault of a minor. Seriously, this book is a cavalcade of violent (by which I mean disturbing physical and mental harm) incidents.

Audrey Huang is assigned male at birth and grows up with a Chinese immigrant father who has very rigid ideas of masculinity and sees Audrey as his only son. Audrey never quite gets the hang of masculinity, recognizing her gender incongruity from an early age and coveting signs of feminine expression that her sisters are allowed. Eventually she moves to Montréal as an adult, where she can explore her identity, albeit tentatively and with a fair amount of internalized shame. As Fu unravels Audrey’s journey towards accepting herself, Fu revisits some of Audrey’s most prominent and sometimes painful memories of childhood and adolescence. This includes times Audrey was forced to (or failed to) conform to boyhood notions of masculinity, as well as Audrey’s various sexual encounters as an adult.

The first few chapters of this book were interesting but ok for me, with a notable exception. I don’t share Audrey’s experience of dysphoria and exploring girlhood at a young age, yet I still found myself sympathizing with her experiences, her sense of not belonging. While my journey towards coming out to myself as trans looks very different from Audrey’s, I completely understand what she goes through in this book. And that notable exception? Yeah, um, very early on in the novel we get a scene where Audrey is a child and participates, as a result of peer pressure from the nasty ringleader of her friend group of boys, in the sexual assault of another girl. I almost put down the book and didn’t come back; the scene seemed so gratuitous, rape-as-plot-device. It’s meant to drive home the idea that Audrey is not just another boy (because all boys are homophobic sexual assault machines?), but it’s just such a disturbing choice of device to demonstrate that.

That is this book’s pattern: plot device. The violence that happens in this book serves to drive Audrey’s story forward; seldom do we get to pause and understand, reflect upon, or evaluate this violence in the context of society. Despite using a non-linear narrative structure, Fu never lets present-day Audrey interject or editorialize. Instead we receive a stream-of-consciousness perspective that dispassionately explains how Audrey feels as the events of her life unfold before us.

Fu portrays Audrey’s dysphoria in numerous, perhaps stereotypical ways: the desire to rid herself of body hair, the desire to wear dresses and heels, and a fascination with women’s bodies as a kind of envy. I won’t compare these experiences to my own—partly because I don’t want to share that here and now, and partly because its irrelevant to the idea of whether or not they are stereotypical. They’re stereotypical because they really only scratch the surface of transness. To be trans is to understand oneself to be apart from one’s gender assigned at birth. We get some hints of that in Audrey’s narration, but for someone who has three sisters, none of them ever sat down with Audrey and actually just, you know, had an honest conversation with her about her desire for girlhood?

[Paragraphs omitted because they contain spoilers.]

Updated July 2022: A commenter on my Goodreads review has pointed out that Kim Fu is agender (she/he/they), information which was not available to me when I wrote this review in 2020. Therefore, the paragraph below doesn’t necessarily accurately apply to Fu, although I stand by my assertion that we don’t need cis authors writing trans main characters right now.

For Today I Am A Boy is a cisgender person’s idea of all the worst things that a closeted trans person might endure on their way to self-acceptance. But you cannot just sit down and make a list of all the bad things a trans person might endure and then turn that into a story. The result is a book that looks deep at the surface yet is, if you dip your toe into it, shallow through and through. And it is so, so telling that this book won a bunch of awards and left CanLit critics salivating while books by trans authors go unremarked or even unpublished: cis authors build their careers on telling stories that aren’t theirs while trans authors languish in obscurity. I say that with all due respect to Fu and her skills—but we don’t need more cis authors writing what they think it’s like to be trans. We particularly don’t need cis authors writing these books for a cis audience under the mistaken impression it makes for poignant and moving Literature—you know, the struggle. Trans people, people of any marginalization, are not your porn.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

The concept of culinary extinction came to my attention late last year, and it was one of those very intriguing, “Oh, yeah, I want to know more abou that” moments. I listened to Lenore Newman on an interview with Quirks & Quarks, and I also added Rob Dunn’s Never Out of Season to my to-read list at the same time (my library just happened to have this book and not Dunn’s, so I’m reading this one first). Culinary extinction is one of those unintended and often overlooked consequences of globalization that I thought about as I reviewed The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong. Topics like GMOs are sensationalized in media, yet we forget that we humans have been reshaping this whole planet and its biosphere for tens of thousands of years now. More recently, globalization and capitalism mean those of us here in North America think of the kiwi fruit as a single type of fruit, for example, when in reality there are a vast number of wild cultivars—most of them just aren’t mass-grown and marketed here. Lost Feast is not just about what we have lost from our tables but also about what we have chosen to replace those lost foods—as well, of course, as which items might be in danger now.

Each chapter deals with a different aspect of food production, sometimes following a specific food item, such as cows or honey or pears, and sometimes tracing more complex agricultural chains. Newman bookends the chapters with anecdotes, mostly involving her friend Dan salivating over getting to cook a themed meal based on what she was researching for the chapter. This structural decision may have been my least favourite part of the book. Your mileage may vary, and to be fair, it did grow on me towards the end of the book.

That’s where I’ll start: Lost Feast feels unfocused. In attempting to discuss a vast swath of human-related or human-caused extinctions, Newman wanders through the garden of our culinary past in a way that left me with an appetite for more (but not in a good way). I’m sure that the author would agree that this book is very much a survey of our culinary past, that entire books could be (and have been) written about individual foods, like silphium or honey or passenger pigeons. So don’t take that as a criticism of the book so much as a description: Lost Feast is a grand, multi-course meal but the portions of each course are on the shallow side. Did you like the dessert? You’ll want to find a restaurant that serves it up as a main course.

So, stylistically, Lost Feast did not satisfy me. In terms of its content, there’s definitely interesting stuff happening here. I like that Newman explores potential futures of food, and while I was aware of some of the differences among “lab grown” meat versus Beyond or Impossible burgers, she really lays this out clearly for newcomers to the subject—it’s very easy to get all these different alternatives to industrially-farmed meat confused, but in reality, there are so many different, competing types of alternatives. Similarly, I like that Newman takes us into the infrastructures beyond contemporary food production, such as her explanation of how modern beekeeping works. As I mentioned at the beginning of the review, this is my jam: tell me all about these complex but overlooked systems that are just chugging along in the background of my life to get me that product that’s sitting in my cupboard.

I’m very intrigued to see how this one stacks up to Dunn’s book and a few others on related topics that I would love to read, should I be able to get my hands on them. With an A+ for information by C for writing style (from my perspective at least), Lost Feast is not a book I would race out to buy or borrow regardless of your interest level. Nevertheless, it is definitely a useful, informative read if you want to pick it up.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Every writer with each novel hones their craft. One of my joys in writing reviews of each of an author’s novels, in the order they’ve been written, is getting to see that development over time. (Meanwhile, my own review-writing skills have developed and changed over the years.) In Non Pratt’s case, Every Little Piece of My Heart showcases how her talents at characterization and particularly perspective have evolved over the years. With each novel, Pratt continues to tinker and imagine and play with how to tell stories from the point of view of diverse teenage characters. The result is invariably entertaining and poignant, and this latest book is no exception.

Every Little Piece of My Heart shares superficial similarities with Unboxed, an earlier novella of Pratt’s. Both books involve a group of teens coming together as a result of the absence of someone common to all their lives. Whereas Unboxed was about recovering a time capsule the main characters had intentionally buried, however, Every Little Piece of My Heart is about discovering secrets and relationships that were, until recently, buried. Sophie is grieving the decay of her best friendship with Freya, who moved to Manchester in the middle of Year 11. She’s hyped to receive a package from Freya, except it’s more of a quest: within her package is another package, addressed to someone else Freya knew, and so on. This game of “pass the parcel” brings these characters together in a way that should be sweet but isn’t, because of course, this is a Non Pratt novel.

Friendship has always been an important motif in Pratt’s work, which is perhaps one of the reasons her novels resonate with me. As an aromantic and asexual person, I am all about friendship being just as valuable and important as romance—and I think this is particularly true for teenagers, for that time in your life when (as I am given to understand) you are often making your first forays into sex/romance and prone to stumbling. Friends are the ones who are there to pick you up and help you figure out all the tough things happening while you are adrift on the sea of hormones and expected grades. Moreover, to me, books that talk about the end of a friendship—the heartbreak that comes with it—are so vital. So much is written about romantic break-ups, but friend break-ups—whether bombastic and sudden or quiet and gradual—deserve time in the spotlight too.

Freya reminds me of Margo from Paper Towns (I haven’t read the book but I enjoyed the movie). Both are subversions of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, and the theme of both stories entails the main characters understanding how they projected their expectations onto this person. Sophie realizes this later in the story, realizes that Freya was always performing—even with her; indeed, Sophie realizes she was performing right back. In this way, although we get flashbacks with and letters from Freya, she is more of an abstraction, an idea rather than a character. She is also the manipulator behind the event that drives this entire plot.

I admire the deftness with which Pratt portrays this manipulation. On the one hand, this is the kind of adventure that is made for a YA novel: lost friend re-enters your life only to send you on a madcap quest that ingeniously helps you find your people. If Pratt had wanted to play this straight, it would have been fun and quirky and probably too sugary for me. Instead, Freya’s ingenious plan backfires, as the main characters resent the way they’ve been manipulated, and the letters she leaves each of them like so many little nuggets of truth and wisdom inspire ire rather than awe and appreciation. I love this, because it just so effectively subverts the movie trope of grand gestures working out perfectly as planned. Freya left, and we don’t ever fully get to hear her story, but her attempt to reach out and touch the lives of these friends one last time does not go as planned. She could have just picked up her phone or computer, called or texted or otherwise messaged everyone. But no, she had to make it a big thing, and the result is much messier and more complicated than she probably ever imagined it would be.

So in this sense, I love the reactions that each character has to their encounter with the others. I love Sophie’s careful and deliberate way of setting out to prove to herself that her chronic illness will not define her. I love Winnie’s reaction to receiving a giant Pride flag as her present from Freya, the complicated relationship she has with her sexuality and her feelings about possibly coming out to others IRL. I love Lucas’ gradual realizations about how he has let others define his role in friendships. And I love Ryan’s slow and silent heartbreak. Finally, because not to mention her would be a crime, I love Sunny, Winnie’s sister and the only character not connected to Freya. Her presence as a foil for everyone else is so delightful, owing to her personality being about three times her stature, and she’s just a wonderful character for everyone else to play off of—at the same time, I like that Pratt gives her an arc as well.

Does Freya’s plan work after all? Do these characters come together? I’m not going to spoil the ending (I love the ending, and particularly Sophie’s ending)—but I will give you the heads up that there is a welcome ambiguity here. It invites the reader not only to draw their own conclusions but to recall what it feels like, that potential hanging in the air when you are about to embark on a new relationship (or rekindle an old one), that hair-tingling sensation of excitement mixed with butterflies in the stomach. At least, I imagine that’s what people feel about romance, because it’s totally what I feel about friendship! I love that Pratt leaves us with Sophie having the option to take one of two paths, because either path is totally valid when we’re talking friendship. Plus, this is a way better Sophie’s choice than that other one!

I want to conclude by discussing the last act of this book and the way Pratt chose to write the scenes therein. Although earlier in the novel we are treated to your conventional “teenage party scene,” the last act is an impromptu day trip, and what I love about it is that Pratt expertly portrays teenagers doing nothing much at all, which is something I would like to see more of in YA. Time passes in this book, conversations happen, clothes are wrecked, but if you pay close attention you quickly notice that this is all happening at the same time that nothing is really happening, and that really reminded me of my adolescence and the way that a day could feel incredibly significant in some ways yet, if someone asked me to look back and recount what I did, I wouldn’t have much of an answer.

For fans of Non Pratt like my unabashed self, Every Little Piece of My Heart builds clearly and triumphantly on the themes and tropes that have percolated throughout her earlier works. From the messiness of real friendships to the fact that we seldom ever truly know someone, especially during the rocky years of adolescence, Every Little Piece of My Heart captures a small yet diverse slice of perspectives as it explores some of the most significant and important parts of adolescent life. I find myself so happy for these characters and what they’ve experienced yet also sad—particularly for Sophie—and my adult self layers atop that a kind of fatalistic awareness that … this is just how life is. For a reader closer to Sophie’s age, that feeling might instead just be one of deep sympathy and close identification. This is a book about realizing that sometimes the people you thought you were closest to will let you down in unimaginably mundane ways, and what you can do to pick up the pieces of yourself and move forward.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

Time travel. Like Captain Janeway, I hate it. I mean, I love stories about it (hello, I watch Doctor Who every Sunday with one of my besties). But the kinds of paradoxes in The Future Falls are not exactly my cup of tea. If you can look past that, this is another fun fantasy novel that benefits from being mostly set in Calgary, and you don’t see enough of those! If you liked the first two Gale novels, then this one is a nice conclusion to the trilogy.

Trigger warning here, as with the previous books, for incest.

Charlie features prominently in this book, as does her fellow Wild Power Jack. Kind of picking up where The Wild Ways left off, this book explores Charlie and Jack’s relationship and “forbidden love.” Meanwhile, an asteroid is on a collision course for Earth. When Aunt Catherine Sees the threat, she alerts Charlie in the hopes that she or the other Gales can avert this catastrophe. So this is very much an existential crisis, and at first there is no obvious solution. The Gales’ powers have always been good for smaller things: charms, influencing the weather or people’s decisions, etc. Moving or destroying an entire asteroid? Tall order.

There are a few distinct things that make The Future Falls compelling. First, as always, is the way Tanya Huff weaves her magic through this urban fantasy setting. Since Charlie is once again the protagonist, magic and music intertwine, with frequent allusions to songs I am not cool enough to recognize. For Charlie and the other Gale women, magic is something you do even if it isn’t something you are, as in the case of Jack. So there’s this easy effortlessness with which Charlie slides into the Wood and visits Ontario or Vermont, for example, that makes the narrative compelling.

Next we have the relationship between Charlie and Jack. It’s very much a star-crossed lovers situation: both Charlie and Jack feel a connection, but because their age difference is greater than seven years, the Gale family bylaws prohibit them from ever really being a thing. I guess we’re supposed to feel sorry for them, but it’s difficult for me to get behind a 30-year-old and a 17-year-old, especially when they are cousins. Huff seems determined to transgress certain boundaries in the romance/sexuality department, and I’m not always here for it. Nevertheless, it’s still the case that this is an interesting subplot and a thorny issue. In fact, I think what I’m trying to say is that I wasn’t pulled in so much by Charlie/Jack as I was by the family dynamics around them. Allie’s obsession with keeping Charlie at home, the interplay with Graham and the aunties, etc. … Huff writes family dynamics well, even if they can be too incestuous for my tastes.

Finally we have the actual plot. Huff establishes, fairly quickly, the stakes. I like that we don’t spend too much time away from the Gales in the back offices of JPL; this is not a book about JPL. Rather, most of the book comprises Charlie investigating the problem, trying to understand it, and then considering a solution. There’s also a question of jurisdiction—she debates who to involve, starting only with Jack because he is also Wild and then gradually widening the circle of trust within the family as they realize they can’t sort this by themselves.

The ending is … ok, I guess. As I said above, time travel can be annoying sometimes. I like what Charlie did, and I guess it puts a nice bow on the whole Gale family story. However, the way Huff presents it feels rushed and doesn’t come with as much exposition as I would have liked. We don’t get to sit with these revelations, don’t get to hear Allie’s reaction for example to the story that Charlie must have told. So in that respect I was disappointed.

Overall, The Future Falls is another great entry in this series. I would read more Gale books. I like that Huff writes fantasy set in Canada and featuring compelling female magic-users. Still not on board with the incest or the low-key gender essentialism going on here, as I’ve discussed in previous reviews.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

At first I admit to some scepticism about the idea that we could use mathematics to rethink our conversations around gender. I was apprehensive because science, and even to some extent mathematics (or at least more applied subsets of its, like statistics) have been misused and abused in service of gender stereotype fallacies. Indeed, Eugenia Cheng points this out herself, and this, along with her careful and patient exposition of her topic, eventually won me over. X + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender is a good example of how an interdisciplinary approach to gender issues can often yield interesting new ideas. Cheng has clearly taken a lot of time to consider how to model and talk about disparities in our society when viewed through the lens of gender. Her conclusion? Sometimes when we think we’re talking about gender, we aren’t, and that creates too much confusion for us to make effective change.

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

Cheng’s central argument goes like this. We spend a lot of time observing differences between men and women in various aspects of society (professional life comes up a lot as an example). Some people hold that these differences are innate. Otherwise believe the differences are caused by environment—that is, structural inequities. And the truth, probably, is somewhere in between. But as Cheng points out, researching innate gender or sex-linked differences is very hard and every time someone purports to have sorted it, people come along and very easily poke holes in the findings. Similarly, we have this tendency to refer to certain behaviours as masculine or feminine, yet that association is not as useful as we think: there are plenty of women who behave in so-called masculine ways, and likewise there are many men who exhibit so-called feminine attributes.

As a side note, I have struggled with these terms myself lately as I transition. Technically anything I do, as a woman, is feminine by definition. Yet in everyday language, when I discuss how I dress, wearing makeup, etc., I talk about “expressing my femininity” and “being feminine.” I do this because I have an idea in my mind about how to express myself as a woman, but that idea is wrapped up in what we have been socialized to believe is feminine as a result of our society. For me, as a woman, wearing makeup is a feminizing act—but if a man wears makeup, is that feminine or feminizing? I would argue that context matters greatly here: some men put on makeup to feminize themselves (e.g., drag); others do it merely to hide a blemish or look better, just as many women do, and in that context I would argue that wearing makeup is in fact a masculine behaviour, if we are defining masculine as something done by men.

Hopefully you can see how this quickly becomes confusing! Cheng points this out and then tries to help us make sense of it by falling back on her experience as a mathematician. If you were hoping to escape any mathematics in this book, you’ll be disappointed, but you also don’t need to understand the mathematics Cheng references to understand her point. Basically, math is good at definitions. Math is also very good at contextual definitions: infinity means something different depending on which mathematical world you’ve chosen to play in. Finally, Cheng argues that her particular field, category theory, is of supreme usefulness in this discussion because it tries to discuss different items in terms of relationships rather than membership/attributes.

Now, in this particular case I don’t think Cheng is on to anything new. Plenty of people before and after Foucault have written about social justice from the point of view of power dynamics. If all she brought to x + y was some category theory, I don’t think this book would be very useful or successful. However, the discussion of category theory merely lays the ground work for Cheng’s main thesis. This goes back to what I discussed above about the equivocating around the terms masculine and feminine. Cheng proposes two new terms: ingressive and congressive. I’m not going to explain it as well as she does, but the gist goes like this: ingressive actions look inwards, centreing the individual; congressive actions work to bring the community together.

When I first heard these terms, I immediately thought, “is this just a rehashing of individualism versus collectivism? In some ways, perhaps, but I will credit Cheng with building atop such concepts. My next thought was, “this is a nice attempt, but won’t people just use ‘ingressive’ as a synonym for ‘masculine’ and ‘congressive’ as a synonym for ‘feminine’?” I didn’t think Cheng was intending it, but I can see how someone who isn’t being careful might view this as a one-to-one mapping. Cheng makes it clear that this isn’t the case, going so far as to outline her journey from acting ingressively to keep up as a research mathematician to realizing that she truly preferred to foster a congressive environment while teaching mathematics. Lest you think that this is merely semantic sophistry to chronicle her journey from trying to act like one of the guys to reclaiming her femininity, Cheng tries to help us understand that this is not, in her opinion, a matter of gender.

What these terms allow us to do, she argues, is discuss our ways of relating to one another without making stereotypical statements about gender. When someone jumps to ask a question that highlights their own expertise, that’s not “typical masculine behaviour”; it’s ingressive. People of all genders can do this. Likewise, if someone is trying to build consensus and help everyone get on to the same page, that’s not the empathetic behaviour of a woman—it’s congressive, and again, people of all genders can do this. So we can challenge the dominance of ingressivity in areas like academia in a way that removes the complication of talking about gender.

Great, right? I’m not sure.

I do like the new terminology, and I see the value in what Cheng proposes. I agree that sometimes our focus on gender can obscure the true power dynamics at work. Cheng demonstrates this aptly by referring to critiques of “lean in” feminism as trumpeted by Sheryl Sandberg. Cheng understands, and I agree with her, that merely putting women in positions of power within the current system is insufficient. It ignores intersectionality and the idea that there may be other marginalizations at work (race, class, etc.) that contribute to oppression or unequal power dynamics. Her solution is to restructure parts of our society to encourage congressivity, presumably because a congressive social order would allow people to participate more equitably regardless of their identities.

It’s a nice vision. I want to acknowledge that it’s not entirely pie in the sky, that Cheng takes her time to lay out how we can build a congressive future from the ground up. That’s more than some dreamers do in their books where they try to explain why their one neat trick for saving society is the one we should enact.

I hesitate to endorse this fully, however. Cheng tries hard to be congressive here, to encourage us to rethink our discussions around gender because she doesn’t want us to be “divisive.” She offers up competing definitions of feminism and slogans like “smash the patriarchy” as examples of how current thinking on gender polarizes the conversation and prevents true progress. I am sympathetic to this view. Yet I think there is an appropriate time and place for polarizing or divisive messages.

Let’s take transgender people, for example. (And I note that Cheng makes every effort to be inclusive here, using cis and trans appropriately and acknowledging that, for example, some trans men are capable of becoming pregnant.) We trans people are, just by existing in current society, polarizing. TERFs or gender-critical feminists or whatever you want to call them (I prefer the simple transphobe label) would really rather prefer we don’t exist at all. No amount of re-labeling or rethinking the gender conversation will change this fact, because at the end of the day, this is not about how trans people behave or even about how transphobes behave: it is, ultimately, an ideological divide. It is not one that can be argued away. For trans people to be safe and able to participate fully in society, we and our allies must fight, passionately and aggressively, against discrimination. I, personally, hope that some transphobic people, if they are exposed to more trans people and come to know us and understand that we are not a threat, will change their tune. In that respect I do not think this is an “us vs. them” situation. Nevertheless, this is an example of how some aspects of gender-linked discrimination cannot be rectified through new labels.

If you come to x + y expecting a totally revolutionary blueprint for how to think about gender, you might be disappointed. I came to this book with sceptical expectations, however, and I was pleasantly surprised. This book reminds me of Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?, in which trans man Heath Fogg Davis argues that there are many areas of society where gender doesn’t matter even though, at the moment, we insist it does. Cheng and Davis would probably agree on a lot of points, I think, as do I with both of them. I see value in critiquing the epistemology of gender, and I like that Cheng tries to apply the rigor and flexibility of mathematics. However, her arguments and ideas here can only take us so far. This is a great contribution to the ongoing meta-discussion.

Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.

As someone who is herself aromantic and asexual, I was very much anticipating Loveless, to the point where I pre-ordered it. My experience with Alice Oseman has been varied: I adored Radio Silence but didn’t much care for Solitaire. Here I find myself very ambivalent: on one hand, I really enjoyed the aro/ace representation here. On the other hand, I’m not sure that, overall, Loveless is a very good book.

Georgia Warr is going off to uni, fortunate to be accompanied by her two best friends Pip and Jason. While there she befriends her roommate, Rooney, who is the extroverted, sexually-active foil to Georgia’s introverted, sexually-inexperienced self. Indeed, as the title and most of the first part of this book emphasize, Georgia is obsessed with the fact that she has never had sex, never had a boyfriend (or girlfriend), never even been kissed. She is low-key worried something is “wrong” with herself. So much of Loveless entails Georgia’s fumbling attempts to force herself to feel sexual attraction, to finally have that kiss, and to figure herself out. But it turns out—and this is not a spoiler, because it is literally the whole premise of the book—Georgia is not broken; she’s aromantic and asexual. She just didn’t know those terms! Unfortunately, along her journey of self-discovery, she makes some mistakes that hurt herself and her friends.

Overall, I really liked the portrayal of Georgia’s experiences and her journey of discovering that she is aro/ace. Now, I don’t entirely identify/sympathize with that journey myself. You can hear all about my personal aro/ace journey by listening to this episode from my podcast with my bestie, We Just Like to Talk. (Please note that we recorded it before I came out as trans, so we use my dead name, of course—you can just ignore that.) To summarize, though: I had it “easy” in the sense that my dearth of romantic or sexual relationships never bothered me the way it clearly bothers Georgia. I took a few half-hearted stabs at asking out girls in high school because I figured that’s how it works; when that didn’t work out, I shrugged and just … didn’t do it any more. I went on with my life of books and tea, finished university, found the labels of aro and ace somewhere along the way and said, “Oh, huh, it me, ok,” and that was that. I didn’t wrestle with my identity like Georgia did, didn’t blame myself or wish I felt differently, didn’t encounter much in the way of acemisic behaviour. Moreover, I didn’t move away for university, and I never sought the “typical uni experience” that Georgia seeks here—I was largely asocial for the first three years of university and only found my people towards the end of my time there.

That being said, I recognize there are a lot of aro/aces out there whose experience must be closer to Georgia’s, so if you see yourself in her, awesome. Also, there were definitely moments where I nodded my head and said, “Yes, definitely, you’ve nailed it for me.” Georgia and Rooney have a frank conversation about masturbation, and Georgia talks about how she doesn’t imagine herself having sex when she’s fantasizing—this is very much my experience too. I’m happy that Oseman shows an asexual character who is sex-repulsed personally (although, as other reviewers have noted, Oseman doesn’t actually use that term and I agree this is a mistake) yet still masturbates. Similarly, there’s a moment in that same scene when Georgia says, “You have got to be joking” and reacts to Rooney’s statements with incredulity. Again, it me: I genuinely have these moments where I wonder, just for a second, if anyone really likes sex or feels sexual attraction, or if the rest of y’all are just pretending. Because it truly boggles my mind, this thing that you are experiencing that I just don’t experience.

I wish Oseman had handled the explanations of terminology with more deftness and grace. At one point, Georgia is researching this stuff online, and she eventually shuts down because “it’s a lot, like a lot a lot.” I can understand this reaction, but it feels unsatisfying to see it in a novel that is purportedly trying to raise awareness of asexual experiences. Like, it’s kind of your job to parse this into a format that is digestible to the reader. I acknowledge that, as Georgia learns about these terms and even tries to educate others, like her cousin, there are attempts to acknowledge the diversity of the aromantic- and asexual-spectra, including the fact that some asexual people do like or seek out sex.

Similarly, I really, really like that Loveless ultimately champions the validity and worthiness of platonic love and friendship. More of that in books, please! However, as she does this, Oseman puts her thumb heavily on the scale that reads “aromantic and asexual people never get married or have romantic/sexual relationships,” so that’s disappointing. Throughout the novel, Georgia wrestles with the fact that she wishes she felt attraction to people, because she wishes for the kind of lives she has seen in romantic media. She is unsatisfied, even after discovering the labels that match her experiences, because she doesn’t want to be aro/ace. She thinks this limits her options, and that is a very uncomfortable conclusion to draw about aro/ace identities. It would have been nice even just to introduce an ace person who is happily married—how simple and easy that would have been, to show us that there are situations where, if that’s the life you want, you can have it? 

Anyway, although I have some critiques as discussed above, by and large, I liked the aromantic and asexual representation in Loveless. It isn’t going to be every aro/ace’s experience, and if you don’t see yourself reflected in Georgia, you are still valid. But I think Oseman thoroughly captured many of the struggles that young aro/ace adults experience when they haven’t been as lucky to learn about those identities already or, like me, didn’t just stumble through adolescence in a charmed fashion.

Ok, so if I liked that part of Loveless, why the long face at the beginning of this review? I’ve given it some thought, and my ultimate conclusion for now is that Oseman is just trying to do too much here. I have some other, more specific critiques, but that’s the main one: as a narrative, Loveless is a mess.

Is Loveless a harmful travesty? Absolutely not. Is it a perfect representation of anything, be it aro/aceness or other queer identities? Also no—but I don’t think any novel could claim that label. If Loveless steps wrong, it’s a well-meaning step caused by overly-ambitious plotting and characterization. This is a hot mess and certainly very problematic in parts, but it also has a great deal going for it. Your challenge, if you choose to read it, is to separate those two things and decide if, on balance, the latter outweighs the former. In my case, as ever my indecisive brain comes down on the “definitely, maybe” middle ground!

Please note that my review on Kara.Reviews is significantly longer but contains spoilers for the plot of the book.

I simultaneously enjoyed and loathed reading Foundation and Earth. This might be the best Foundation novel yet also the worst. I know I called Foundation’s Edge the best, but this one surpasses it in terms of plot. Asimov does as amazing a job of ratcheting up the tension surrounding the search for Earth as he does a terrible job of avoiding the objectification of women. Moreover, when we look at this novel in the context of the Foundation series and Asimov’s other works, it’s possible to read this as Asimov giving up on Foundation.

Yeah, this review is going to be … interesting. Trigger warnings for this book, by the way: in addition to the massive amounts of Asimovian sexism/womanizing you would expect, add a hefty dose of highly inappropriate, medicalized portrayal of an intersex person, including the use of the h-slur.

Foundation and Earth picks up exactly where Foundation’s Edge ended. It follows a classic quest structure: Golan Trevize has decided, somehow, that the planetary networked consciousness that is Gaia will one day be allowed to expand and form a galactic consciousness called Galaxia. But he isn’t happy with this decision; he doesn’t understand it. So he decides to take up, earnestly, the bogus quest for Earth that was his initial smokescreen in Foundation’s Edge. Janov Pelorat and his newfound Gaian lover, Bliss, accompany Trevize on what proves to be a dangerous expedition across the galaxy. This time, the search for Earth seems to have lesser stakes—no one really cares this time, except Trevize and maybe Pelorat in an academic way—yet it is all the more intense.

It’s worth noting that both of these novels were written in the 1980s, thirty years after the original Foundation stories were written and published. Asimov’s writing has markedly improved over that time. I spent most of my review of Foundation and Empire criticizing Asimov’s writing style, criticism I think was fair and justified but which I can’t level against these books. Moreover, whereas the earlier stories were shorter and compiled into novel-sized books for retail purposes, these two stories were definitely conceived of and designed to be unified novels. As someone who has repeatedly stated her highly subjective and personal preference for that literary form, there’s no wonder I prefer these two books to the previous ones.

So, there I was, enjoying this book thoroughly until I ran into a scene fairly early in the novel where Trevize seduces his way out of a situation. Ok, maybe it would be more accurate to say he allows himself to be seduced. However, you interpret it, the fact remains that Asimov’s writing skills have improved in every category except his portrayal of women:

If that didn’t make you throw up in your mouth a little bit like it did me: the next chapter begins with Trevize congratulating himself on being such a stud. Not only did he correctly surmised that the poor, sexually-repressed woman in a position of power “would want to be dominated,” but she goes on to call him “a king of sexuality.” This is the kind of stuff I expect to read in bad erotica. Moreover, aside from being bad writing, it’s just so incredibly exclusionary—there is little doubt for whom Asimov is writing here (straight, cis men)—while the rest of us just have to deal.

That’s not the only example, of course—Asimov doesn’t seem capable of not objectifying women—just the most egregious that jumped out at me. I could go deeper into the gender dynamics aboard the Far Star, the way Bliss is portrayed as the nurturing and soft personality who naturally has to go out of her way to rescue a child (while Trevize casually advocates not just leaving the child behind to be killed but, later in the novel, genociding all Solarians because he “fears” them), the constant jokes or questions about the nature of Bliss’ relationship with the two other men on the ship.

And then we have the intersex characters, Bander and Fallom. After the promising beginning of Bander interrupting Trevize to request that Trevize stop misgendering them, Asimov quickly dehumanizes these characters by using the pronoun “it” and dwelling most inappropriately, as he does with his female characters, on their various physical attributes. We’re supposed to excuse this as the curiosity and flawed biases of our main characters, but it’s still a gross portrayal of a marginalized identity. (I should acknowledge at this point as well that there’s additional conflation happening here of sex/gender: intersex is not the same as non-binary, agender, or bigender, which are all gender identities. Many intersex people use he/him or she/her pronouns. It’s complicated!)

Indeed, this is perhaps the most striking thing for me, as a trans woman reading this book in 2020: Asimov, like so many other straight white dudes writing science fiction in the 20th century, has this brilliant imagination when it comes to a future humanity sprawled across the galaxy. He dreams up hyperspace, positronic robots, and mental telepathy; his books touch on the complexities of empire-building, linguistic drift, history versus mythology, and the Gaia theory of consciousness. Yet this same man is unable to wrap his imagination, in an empathetic way, around alternative presentations of sex and gender. And this is something that will never not boggle my mind about the so-called “great” and classic science fiction of the previous century. It seems to me that all science fiction must be queer simply because science fiction is about embracing and exploring the most amazing variety of possibilities for our future, and queerness is necessarily present among the varieties—unless it is deliberately excluded, as Asimov and others do by dint of a very limited worldview.

Finally, there’s also a sense of fatigue in this book. This comes across most stridently in Trevize’s fixation with finding Earth, but it is also evident in the rushed denouement and a Wizard of Oz reveal. Trevize lampshades this when he questions the legitimacy of psychohistory as a science. I’m not sure if this represents Asimov trying to revise his views after over three decades of contemplating it—certainly an author should be allowed to change and evolve in their attitudes towards their earlier works and the ideas therein—or if Asimov is just kind of … done … with Foundation and wants, at this juncture, to move on from it once again. In any case, the ending to Foundation and Earth is rushed, perfunctory, and disappointing compared to the quest that led up to it.

Two more books now to read, both prequels, one published posthumously! Will they be improvements? We will find out soon.

Originally posted on Kara.Reviews.