I got about 20% of the way through this book before I decided to discontinue. I was getting frustrated by all of the questions entirely unanswered. Why are these teenagers responsible for all of this apparently incredibly serious and vital quest? Why are the main three going on the quest to get the corpse when it seems like Kajal is the only one who could resurrect him so they're risking her life in this incredibly dangerous place and thus would lose this key component for their plan. None of it makes sense.

The Reformatory is a masterful work of literature that weaves together family history, victim testimony, Black literary history, and recent archeological work to tell the story of the Dozier School in Mariana, Florida, through a scathing fictional lens. The book is about the entirely fictional school, the Gracetown Reformatory for Boys, and the equally fictional Gracetown, Florida. Due is clear in her author's note that this is the case. This differentiation allows for Due to construct a story that touches on so many elements of the systematic violence and oppression that allow institutions like the Reformatory/Dozier School to exist and for the people who run them to perpetuate such violence behind their walls.  

We are focused on a pair of siblings: Gloria and Robert Stephens. Their mother recently died, and their father fled town to avoid being lynched after being falsely accused of assaulting a white woman. He left his children behind in Gracetown, Florida, hoping to eventually send for them after establishing himself in Chicago. Before that can happen, Robert is sent to the Reformatory on trumped-up charges and false accusations before the family can be reunited. From that point on, the siblings are separated: Glorida tries to get Robert out of the Reformatory, and Robert tries to survive the cruelty of this place, which is orchestrated by Haddock, the warden/headmaster/pastor of this "school."  

My main critique of the book concerns Gloria's character. I felt that her character arc was just not as strong as Robert's, and her plotline was episodic compared with Robert's more linear progression toward his escape attempt. I was missing the connective tissue to make her storyline seem more cohesive. I also wish there had been more thematically to link the siblings' stories together.

This novel was expertly made and will stick with me for a long time to come.

The back of the book describes this as “A fabulous dystopian fable about fashion, family and the feckless billionaire class.” From this description, I think the word “fable” is the most important because this book has the energy of something like an Aesop’s fable, meaning light on the worldbuilding, heavy on the didacticism, but in the best possible way. If you’ve read or seen The Hunger Games, think of the part where they are at The Capital and are having to go on talk shows and wear outfits to convince people to sponsor them. This is one of the clearest critiques of the whole series about the massive disparity between the people in the districts and the people in The Capital. Now imagine that as a whole book from the point of view of someone from The Capital. While the average Capital citizen is complicit in the exploitation, they also don’t really have a choice in the matter if they want to keep their jobs, feed the family, etc. Much like anyone who lives in a “first world” country, the idea of giving up our lifestyle is pretty abhorrent. That’s who Simone and his wife, Georgie, are. They are insanely wealthy, so wealthy they don’t even know what money is, so wealthy that they don’t even realize or know how anything in their life gets done. Simone fully believes that his clothes get tailored just by magic; the furniture rearranges itself; the garden just grows perfectly because of how fashionable he is. They are something beyond removed from reality. 

That is until reality intrudes upon them in the form of a little girl. The glitterati class don’t know what children are as they don’t raise their own children, and when you come of age all of your memories of childhood are erased so you don’t have to carry around traumatic memories of being “unfashionable.” This little girl obviously is the child of one of the people who work for them, but Simone and Georgie have no idea people actually work for them so they just think this tiny human appears magically and terrifyingly. This storyline runs parallel to Simone’s feud with Justine, a fashionista who keeps stealing his innovative ideas. As the story continues, the two plots are increasingly at odds with each other in terms of gravity, showing Simone what the reader already knows about morality and values. 

So the takeaway at the end of the book feels very “teaching the billionaire to love,” but I there is more to it than that. The layers of satire are hard to capture in a short review. There are so many clever moments. For instance, after surgery, Simone wakes up famished. He goes to the kitchen and discovers a tower of burgers. He spends paragraphs agonizing over selecting the most aesthetically pleasing burger only to take a single bit that completely satisfies him (somehow). This is a hilarious scene with a sharp edge of commentary. And there are so many moments like that throughout the book. I would definitely recommend the book to anyone who is interested in a satirical and whimsical examination of class conflict and the effects of billionaires on society.

I Was a Teenager Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

One Sentence Review: This was a fascinating take on the slasher genre that proposes a way of looking at the slasher (the figure and the genre) that I have never encountered before. 

I have been deep in Stephen Graham Jones’s bibliography lately and his approach to the slasher. The Indian Lake trilogy plays with the concept of the final girl in interesting ways, and this book turns the lens on the slasher himself. Seventeen years after his killing spree, Tolly is telling the story of what he did and why. Telling a villain story can be executed so poorly, especially when that villain is a slasher, a breed of villain who is so mindlessly evil that any tragic backstory is irrelevant compared to his crimes. Tolly does not shy away from the fact he did many evil things, but the circumstances through which he becomes a slasher are unlike anything I’ve encountered before and, to me, paint the genre in an entirely new light.

This has Jones’s distinctive writing style that he has developed in the recent years of his career (as compared to books like Mongrels or Only Good Indian). The conceit of an adult man recounting what happened when he was a teenager can often fail, falling into traps of weird nostalgia, excuses for behavior, and the many other kinds of rose-colored glasses we put on when we look back at our youth. But Jones balances an adult’s perceptions (and fully developed brain) with the choices of a scared and hurt teenager. I sympathized with both the teenage and adult versions of Tolly and the things he went through. And yes, Tolly is a sympathetic character even though he is the slasher (as is obvious from the title). He is both the mindless force of evil and a complex human figure struggling with a series of complex choices, none of which are good options. 

If you are someone who is fascinated by the slasher genre not because of its goriness and violence but because of the complex ideas about culture that are presented through this genre, I would highly recommend this book. 

One Sentence Review: A vampire/urban fantasy novel that presents much-needed updates and twists on the genre, leaving me wanting more. 

Juniper “Gin” Cain works security for a vampire-owned casino in Reno, Nevada, after discovering that her blood is gross to vampires, implying she is not quite as human as she thought she was. That was two years ago, and since then, she’s only gotten pulled further into what she calls the darkness, the secret world of fae, vampires, werewolves, witches, and more. The longer Gin spends in the darkness, the more strange powers she discovers she has. She resists learning to control them, afraid of herself and everything else, even as she finds a new home and family with the other casino employees. Everything starts to fall apart when a zombie appears, not just because there is a zombie in the casino but because zombies are supposed to be extinct. 

Gin is supremely relatable and likable. She has undergone a series of traumatic events and responds to them in a way that I found believable and understandable. Her responses and actions came out of a place of confusion, trauma, fear, longing for normality, and loneliness countered by her stubbornness, cleverness, and generally being a good person. There was something so relatable about her struggle to deal with everything she’s learned about the world and herself but still have friends and community and do right by them. We are given enough about her backstory to understand where she came from and where she wants to go, but not so much that we are bogged down in the details of tragedy to create cheap sympathy. Wagner creates a realistic, lived-in young woman who has a past, present, and future without having to overwork her emotional and mental experiences. 

The secondary characters fleshed out Gin’s character and this paranormal version of Reno. The two main vampires, Colton and Clarisse, were delightfully twisted and ambivalent in their allegiances with the perfect dash of sexy hunter (or huntress). Leia, Gin’s former college roommate and a witch, was a complicated character mirroring Gin’s own complexity. Their relationship fell apart, and they have their own interpretations of why that happened and what the results are now. Winston, the changeling, is the world’s most supportive friend. I appreciated how all of Gin’s friends gave her the space to process what was going on in her world but didn’t let her wallow in a pity party. She was given a night to get drunk and forget everything, but the next day, she needed to get back to solving her problems. I want to know more about every single character. 

This isn’t a book with a staggeringly original plot, but like with most of my favorite books, I don’t care if the plot is predictable if the characters are interesting. After all, how many of us live truly original lives, but aren’t we still each individual?

One Sentence Review: This novella has a really strong promise, but too much of the plot relied on world building that was never done in the book, leaving the reader confused and unsatisified. 

At this point, I should be more suspicious of Tordotcom’s novellas, really. Tor and its imprints are consistently among my least favorite books (although they occasionally knock one out of the park, like The Locked Tomb trilogy), but for the most part, the books are playacting at being more radical than they actually are. The premises give you a promise of something revolutionary that is considering significant elements of our present moment, but in execution, they are watered down to the point of uselessness. I’m beginning to suspect Tordotcom particularly is doing this on purpose because there is so much in this book that I want to love. The world we’re thrust into is so interesting. The intense class structure, the mining economy, and the spacefaring culture. There are so many questions: what are the people in the hold even doing? Where did this fleet come from and why? What is beyond this fleet? Anything? I suspect Samatar has the answers to these things, but the editors at Tordotcom made her take these answers out to pull back on making any statements that could be considered offensive to some readers. The result is a bland book when it should’ve had teeth.