Well, we’re coming to the end of this terrible fucking year, and 2021 is not looking promising. But if nothing else, we can imagine other futures and other possible worlds and contribute to good causes and support local organizations and keep devouring books at an unmanageable pace.

As usual, book title links go to Goodreads.

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First up should be Every Heart a Doorway, the first entry in Seanan McGuire’s (rightfully) lauded Wayward Children series. And then we should have The Rosewater Insurrection, Tade Thompson’s thrilling and delightfully weird sequel to Rosewater. But I have yet to get my greasy little paws on The Rosewater Redemption, the third book in Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy, so that’ll have to wait (but you should still read it), and there’s two other Wayward Children books in this entry, so I’ll hold off on discussing them until later. I appreciate your patience, dear reader.

That brings us up to Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome by Douglas Boin. Released earlier this year to pretty solid acclaim, Alaric the Goth — not to be confused with the French novel of the same name — uses the figure of Alaric to show how Rome “fell,” and the circumstances that led to and sprang from that “fall.” The sneer quotes are because, as Boin points out and literally anyone living through 2020 could tell you, the fall of Rome as we think of it would not have been popularly viewed as such at the time. Relying on some of our better-known chroniclers of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, but drawing from a robust variety of sources, Boin paints a vivid picture of a society torn by long-standing divisions, whipped up by nationalism and religious extremism to a breaking point that was only made visible in hindsight. (If it sounds frustratingly familiar, it’s because it is.)

The author and the book cover, from The Visualist.

But if Boin’s scholarship is good, his writing is even better. The energy and style of Boin’s writing are so good that they almost belie his academic credentials, which are considerable: currently a professor at Saint Louis University, Boin has also taught at Georgetown and published his first book with Cambridge University Press. Throughout Alaric the Goth, Boin manages an easy-to-read style with the harsh facts and harsher distortions of opinion and bias that have shaped our view of the events of 410 CE. Be warned, though: it’s the same shit! It’s the same shit every goddamn time! So if all this history we’re living through is getting to you, maybe wait on this one.

Alaric the Goth was yet another audiobook gift from the Libby app, which keeps on giving, as were my next two reads: The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (again, more later, when I discuss the rest of the His Dark Materials trilogy), which I also enjoyed in audiobook form; and Pet by Akwaeke Emezi.

Long-time readers may recall my affection for Emezi’s debut, Freshwater, which still lives in my brain rent-free. Pet is a different sort of novel: published by Make Me a World, a Penguin-Random House imprint dedicated to “exploring the vast possibilities of contemporary childhood,” the book has been marketed as young adult, and follows a much more straight-forward structure than Freshwater did. In a dreamy but closely-observed third-person, we go with Jam, a young trans girl, into Lucille, a nearish future utopian city where “there are no monsters anymore.” But Jam awakens a creature made to hunt monsters in one of her mother’s paintings — the “Pet” of the title — and she must follow it in its pursuit.

Pet seems to take as its central question how can we deal with wrongdoing in a world in which wrongdoing is no longer supposed to exist? and Emezi brilliantly paints both that world and its inherent conflicts. Jam is one of the first children to grow up free from monsters, and both her attitude towards monsters and the monstrous — a vague and passing curiosity turning to pained fixation as the novel progresses — and her parents’ horror at the reappearance of something they had hoped their daughter would never meet are handled with tenderness and delicacy. Emezi’s gift for brilliant turns of phrase is on full display here, and if anything, the weight of every line is intensified by the novel’s brevity. Consider:

What, you like being feared better?
It has its advantages when you are a thing that does not fit.

I really cannot recommend Pet highly enough. It does more interesting work on what the future could be than I’ve seen in a long time, and does it with an eye for beauty that is truly unparalleled. Take a day to read it, and then sit with it for a good long while.

The extremely striking cover, via Goodreads.

While reading these, on the physical plane I was occupied by Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami by David Karashima. Released this year by Soft Skull Press (and kindly ordered for me by my beloved local), Karashima takes us on a very thorough trip through the foundations of the “Murakami industry,” and the various efforts by various parties to bring Murakami to, especially, US readership and current acclaim, culminating in the publication of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I touched on the book in an earlier piece, but I’ll reiterate: Karashima does a wonderful job of showing exactly how the sausage (and by “sausage” I mean “Murakami in English translation”) gets made, making copious use of personal correspondences and interviews to walk us through it. In doing so, he achieves a lovely kind of echo of Murakami’s own work. With this many people telling this many versions of the same story, events and meetings are misremembered or contradicted or “well, not quite”-ed, which serves to gently destabilize the reader. Is it inside baseball? Absolutely. But I don’t really care for any other kind, and if you, too, prefer it, I really enjoyed this book.

The cover, once again from Goodreads, though while I was looking for it, I saw that apparently there’s a Beeb miniseries of it?

I next finished Stonemouth by Iain Banks — not Iain M. Banks, who is the same guy but writing science fiction, but Iain Banks, his moniker for smart, gritty crime writing. And Stonemouth is that: Stewart Gilmour returns to his hometown after five years of exile to attend the funeral of an aged friend, and although he’s early assured that no one will start shit if he doesn’t, it becomes increasingly and dangerously clear that that is not actually true.

Look, I’ll be honest: it was fine. Good characters, cool setting, and Banks seemed to relish especially writing the beauty and rawboned severity of the Scottish landscape. And I’m willing to accept that my ambivalence is probably my own damn fault. I was, after all, primed for Banks’ no-M. writing by having a lot of people mention The Wasp Factory in the same breath as And the Ass Saw the Angel, Nick Cave’s brilliant first novel that I love with all my heart (or did when I last read it, which was some time ago). So I think my “meh” response to this one had more to do with my expectations being misaligned with the actual nature of the story. That said, if you’re down for the kind of story it, I do recommend it, and I do plan to read some of Banks’ Iain-M. material at some point.

Of course, I followed it up The House in the Cerulean Sea, T. J. Klune’s heartwarming tale of found family and fun magic stuff, which was definitely more the vibe I was looking for. (Why yes, I do love iyashikei; why do you ask?) We follow Linus Baker, a dedicated civil servant who has spent 17 years of his life inspecting “orphanages” for magical children, ensuring that the children are being treated well. But when Extremely Upper Management sends Linus to Marsyas Island to inspect a top-secret facility for children who may be dangerous, his world blossoms in understanding — and love.

The cover and some cute illustrations of the children, from the Tor/Forge Blog.

Fuck, man, it’s cute as hell, and I’ve been gushing about it a lot. Seeing Linus learn to look past the blinders of his society — unsurprisingly, the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, and the attendant push for registration of magical persons is Bad, Actually — and see how things could be was extremely moving. The child characters, who could have rapidly becoming annoying and/or saccharine, are instead well-observed and feel very real; the romantic angle is gentle and touching. As Em Nordling put it in their review at Tor:

At any other time, the constant outright statements of “can’t we all just be decent people?” might grate on my nerves, but it’s March 2020, so I just nodded along muttering “yeah, why can’t we?” It’s nice to read something kind and good-spirited and sappy right now, and it’s nice to be reminded that there are many people in the world working to make it gentler and more compassionate.

It really, really was.

The next one that I finished was Rin Chupeco’s The Ever Cruel Kingdom, the sequel to the phenomenal The Never Tilting World, discussed briefly elsewhere. Chupeco, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns (apologies for my earlier gaffe there), deftly follows on the promise of the first book with an tale of, essentially, how to clean up the mess you made when you thought you were fixing things. Once again following Haidee and Odessa, twin rainbow-haired goddesses of Aeon, and their respective paramours, Arjun and Lan, as they try to navigate what remains to be done now that their world turns on its axis again, and how to heal the rift between Haidee and Odessa’s mothers, which caused it to stop in the first place.

Is this a clear analogy for climate change? Very much so. Is it also a compelling and well-realized fantasy world, full of cleverly-built magic systems and cool fights against terrifying things? For sure. As I mentioned previously, it’s unfair that Chupeco is so often sidelined in to the YA genre: I’ve rarely encountered so engaging a setting, and even the occasional romantic squabbles are handled with care. (The fact that one of them is same-sex is really nice, too.)

I followed that with Samantha Irby’s Wow, No Thank You. I first encountered Samantha Irby by means of her blog, Bitches Gotta Eat, and loved her style, which was funny and smirking and still warm and grounded. I think very frequently of her round-up of “All the Pages Worth Masturbating to in Fifty Shades of Grey,” and have long meant to read one of her books, but never quite got around to it until now. (Thanks again, Libby app!)

The cover, from this Vulture piece that’s paywalled.

But Wow, No Thank You. finds Irby a little past her wilder youth: she’s married to a lovely woman with kids who has a house in a small town; she’s writing for television; she’s going through the stages of grief before every social engagement, which end with:

5. Acceptance: “Fine then, I’ma just watch four episodes of SVU and eat saltines with my shoes on until it’s time to call a Lyft.”

This was one of many moments that caused me to laugh out loud — like ugly-laughing, where you’re just completely incapacitated by amusement. The very first essay contained an absolute tour-de-force passage showing the discrepancy between the “lifestyle” of lifestyle profiles and Irby’s actual lifestyle (featuring her wife opening a bottle of wine from Walgreen’s that she opens with her teeth before falling asleep on the couch immediately after dinner), which I read aloud to several people and made me die. But while Irby’s sense of humor is as wry and boisterous as ever, her writing becomes truly transcendent in its more reflective moments. Consider:

Loving yourself is a full-time job with shitty benefits. I’m calling in sick.

I really, truly, cannot speak highly enough of this collection. Please, do yourself a favor.

After that, I finished The Amber Spyglass, the third and final entry in the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. I think somewhere in here Cameron and I powered through the TV series, as well, which was, you know. Fine. It was good. The performances were solid, but I question the design; a few people of my acquaintance found Lin-Manuel Miranda’s performance annoying but I honestly kind of liked it. Ruth Wilson is terrifying, and I love that for her, and Amir Wilson’s performance as Will stands out for its subtlety and thoughtfulness, when it could easily have been wooden. NB: the next two paragraphs contain spoilers for the series as a whole, if that’s a concern to you.

The cover of the first collected edition, from Wikipedia.

The books themselves, of course, are basically Pullman taking arms against the Chronicles of Narnia and Paradise Lost; while I have a little more complex feelings about the former, I have read the latter out of pure spite several times because I want to dig up John Milton and fight him, so this was very satisfying for me. The books center on Lyra, an unsuspecting chosen one from an alternate universe, and Will, a young boy from our world, as they seek to prevent the Authority (read: the Christian God) and His agents on earth, the Magisterium, from ridding the world of dust, a kind of soul-stuff that manifests in our world as dark matter and is responsible for all that is good in humanity.

And what is dust, exactly? Arguably, original sin; for Pullman, it is responsible for imagination, creativity and love, and is interacted with by entering into a kind of trance state. Another character from our world, a nun who left the church to study theoretical physics, interacts with it by means of the I Ching; Lyra uses an aleitheometer, the golden compass alluded to in the title of the first book. I’ll admit, I found Pullman’s positioning of fucking, zoning out, and making shit up as fundamental qualities in humanity (broadly defined) delightful, and a strong part of me wishes that I had in fact read the books as a child, instead of bowing to the pressures of my conservative milieu and avoiding them. (I distinctly remember reading a dismissal of them in First Things, if that tells you anything.) While the books do occasionally slide into a somewhat didactic mode, I never found that it derailed the story, and more often than not, eloquently gave voice to the books’ ideological substrates. Here conclude the spoilers.

The man himself, from Heartland! — The man himself, from *Heartland!*

I burned through another entry in the Wayward Children series after this — Down Among the Sticks and Bones. Again, more later. But I also finished rereading Stanley Lombardo’s translation of The Odyssey. For full disclosure, I studied with Lombardo at the University of Kansas, and we have remained in touch (on and off) since. Needless to say, this leaves me ill-positioned to comment impartially on his translations.

But recently, I had the opportunity to work with him on a project, gaining some insight into his methods, and it certainly added a level to the experience of reading his work. Translated with an eye to performance, with poetry as an speech act very present to the linguistic choices made, Lombardo’s Odyssey is stylish without being overdone, and colloquial without sacrificing the epic quality of Homer’s verse. I’ll stop here, because honestly, I could go on and on. But I will add that I just turned up this lovely interview with the man, which is now 17 years old (Jesus H) and captures some of the spirit.

Of course, the next one I finished was Harrow the Ninth, the absolutely electric sequel to Gideon the Ninth, discussed in my previous round-up and very very beloved by me. I was very excited to get my hands on Harrow, especially after skimming this Autostraddle review. The prospect of a very different sequel was thrilling to me: trying to repeat the ghastly exuberance and swashbuckling horror of Gideon would have been enjoyable, but also a fool’s errand (especially given the ending of the novel).

The cover, from Goodreads. Also the author specifically references Draco in leather pants but I couldn’t get that in the roundup.

And Harrow the Ninth is very different, not only in tone — we’re following Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, now a nascent necrogod with semi-dysfunctional powers, and it would be weird if the tone were the same — but also in structure. Gideon was in many ways very straigthfoward: sure, there was a lot of intrigue and stuff, but it fundamentally followed a linear structure. Harrow does not. In an attempt to avoid spoiling it (this one did just come out in August, after all), I won’t say too much more, though there is a twist to a particular form of narration that is only revealed half-way through the novel that made every hair on my body stand on end and made me actually cackle. And fear not: the late-period-Zdzislaw-Beksinski-takes-up-van-art vibe is absolutely still present.

I’ll admit, I hit a bit of a lull here: I think I had a couple things on hold that I was waiting for, and I needed a new audiobook to listen to, so I followed the path of the desperate and went for something I knew. That “something” was Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker, the follow-up to Borderline and the second novel in the Arcadia Project trilogy/series.

Why did I do this? I had very conflicted feelings about Borderline, and while Phantom Pains was kind of better, it did a lot to absolutely not clarify the situation, and didn’t even do much to make me like Millie more. Sure, it deepened the lore, and the stuff with magic and the fae is by leagues — leagues — the best thing about the series. And it was nice to see Millie kind of getting her shit together a little better, and learning more about the broader structure of the Arcadia Project, the in-universe Fairy immigration control that Millie kind of works for sometimes was interesting. A lot of people seem to like the series, and many of the reviews on Goodreads (where the book has a 3.99 star rating out of 5) focus on how much people enjoy Millie as a main character.

But while Millie was the least-interesting part of Borderline (please, do me a favor and imagine Kristen Bell in The Good Place saying, “Ya basic,” and my assessment of the character is complete), Phantom Pains was plagued more by frankly weird underlying assumptions. Like, to have a character with Borderline Personality Disorder, written by an author who also has Borderline Personality Disorder, claim that said character couldn’t be in a relationship with someone because she wouldn’t be able to avoid being manipulative and abusive is… It’s bad! It’s fucking bad! And the Arcadia Project’s reliance on people with various psychological disorders for their staff (yes, that’s part of it) is still not explained, and for many characters, that’s pretty much all the characterization they get. I definitely finished it, and if I’m being honest, I will probably read the third one at some point. But I will still be cranky about it, and, barring some major leap, I will still be frankly baffled by the warm reception of the series.

Which brings us up to the much better Beneath the Sugar Sky, the third Wayward Children novel in this roundup. I follow Seanan McGuire on Tumblr, and I already liked what little I’ve read of her October Daye series, and further, I’d seen the acclaim heaped on the Wayward Children books, which loosely center around teens who were at some point taken to one of many fairy lands and, on returning to their families, were so altered by the experience that their parents could no longer deal with them. They then arrive at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, where they find others with similar experiences and a validating environment to process what they have experienced and, hopefully, will one day find the door back to their true homes in fairy land.

The covers of the first three books, courtesy this lovely review from the Johnson City Public Library (TN).

The first book, Every Heart…, sets up this basic premise: Nancy, newly returned from the Halls of the Dead and longing to return, arrives at Eleanor West’s and becomes embroiled in solving the case of whoever’s been murdering students, along with Kade, West’s would-be right hand and my favorite character for a variety of reasons, and Jack and Jill, twins lately returned from The Moors. We learn more about Jack and Jill’s experiences there in Down Among the Sticks and Bones, along with a look at their early life, which was simultaneously stifling and emotionally absent. Beneath the Sugar Sky introduces us to Cora, who spent some time as a mermaid and is not thrilled to be back on dry land, as she and a few others — Kade, again, and Christopher, introduced in Every Heart… and bearing with him a bone flute from Mariposa, the Country of Bones — as they try to bring an old friend back to life before reality catches up to her daughter.

Honestly, I’ve really enjoyed every entry thus far, and I am very excited to begin the fourth one, In an Absent Dream. Kade definitely stands out as my favorite character throughout, however: he can never return to his fairy land, because they require princesses and Kade is trans; he is dedicated to the mission of Eleanor West’s school and charting the different varieties of fairy lands, and acts as the school’s resident tailor. These characteristics resonate for me — but at risk of derailing this already-unwieldy roundup into my feelings about gender and also fiber arts, I’ll move along.

And what I moved along to was Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, her adult debut — though to call it that feels a little weird, given that most of the main characters are “traditional” undergrads (at Yale, no less), and her previous works focused largely on characters in the 16-18-years-old corridor. It’s also set in something closer to our world, but also at Yale, so definitely not the really-real world. (I’m sorry, but I am contractually obligated to periodically dunk on Ivies.) Alex Sterne arrives there at the invitation of the dean of the Lethe, the “ninth house” which helps to mitigate potential damage from the actually-magic shenanigans of Yale’s ancient eight secret societies. But, unlike other members of Lethe, Alex — short for Galaxy — can see the spirits of the dead without assistance, and when a local girl is murdered on the same night that a ritual almost went badly south, she feels compelled to investigate further, potentially upsetting the social order that feels like her sole chance at a better life.

As usual, Bardugo’s plotting is delightful: probably by virtue of its setting, Ninth House felt closer to a World of Darkness plot than a Blades in the Dark one, and she manages some truly awful shit (in one horribly memorable instance, literal shit) pretty well, now freed from the relative constraints of the YA genre. The setting, too, was well-realized, especially as the novel progressed and this world’s divergence from our own became more clear. But the setting and, indeed, the genre in which Ninth House is itself situated, presented new frustrations for me. It seemed, tantalizingly, as if Bardugo were going to meaningfully engage classism in the academic setting she envisions, and to an extent, she does — but it seems to lack weight until right at the very end, and the novel fundamentally positions class distinctions as a source of personal motivation rather than as a structural problem. Maybe that will be rectified: it seems that at least one sequel is projected, and Ninth House leaves us on a pleasant cliffhanger. And honestly, that was my biggest issue with the novel, which was otherwise quite good.

I close out this roundup with a nice call-back to sometime three years ago — sorry, like, April. Having thoroughly enjoyed Zoraida Cordova’s first two entries in the Brooklyn Brujas trilogy, I finally managed to get ahold of the third novel, released earlier this year: Wayward Witch. This third book follows Rose, the youngest of the three Mortiz sisters, as she wrestles with newfound powers and her feelings about her newly-returned father. But in a moment of celebration, the two of them are pulled back to Adas, the Caribbean fairy land where her father was held hostage for seven years — and it looks like Rose is the only one who can save Adas and, by extension, the rest of the world.

Rose is a really lovely character: having believed her powers had one nature for many years, in Bruja Born, it was revealed that she was capable of much more, and her mixed feelings about what could be an incredible gift were very believable. Adas, too, was a well-realized setting with a clear internal logic: the antagonist Rose must face is legitimately frightening, and the other characters she meets along the way were deep and well-rounded. While very much in the YA mode — which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I personally get a little tired of hearing about the first flutterings of romantic feelings — the novel never derailed into relationship squabbles, and though the action was sometimes unclear, the plot was solid enough to keep it chugging along. It was fun, and cool, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

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So there we have it. I’m on track to finish another book this year — Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit, which is amazing — but this is plenty. However, if you’re inclined to get a jump on your own reading for next year, I humbly offer my novella, The Horn, the Pencil, and the Ace of Diamonds, available by several means here, or check out what a dear friend has been reading this year for some inspiration.

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Edgar's Book Round-Up, November-December