bloodygranuaile

I’m at my annual writing retreat and, as has been the trend for the last couple of years, I’m treating it more like a reading retreat. Also, it being with the group it’s with, I determined that I would spend this time reading some actual spec fic for once, dammit. To that end I decided to kick off by reading the third and final installment of the last YA series I’ve gotten invested in, which was H.A. Clarke’s Scapegracers trilogy. To that end I spent most of Saturday reading The Feast Makers.

At this point in Sideways Pike’s life, she has her soul/specter back, and that’s about the only thing that’s going right. Sideways appears to be in acute mental and physical anguish in basically every single sentence of this book. She has a terribly unhealthy lifestyle, but she’s also like 17, which is an age where you can kind of get away with things like drinking too much coffee and sleeping at extremely weird hours and crashing on people’s floors. Sideways, for some reason, reacts to all these things like she’s thirty-five, or at least as badly as if she were thirty-five, though the specific complaints are slightly different. Her back and knees don’t seem to hurt but every third sentence is about how her mouth apparently tastes permanently bad and her eyeballs are about to explode and she is having a panic attack and can’t speak or listen or process information. But for all that she is apparently in a permanent state of something resembling advanced sleep deprivation and thus functionally incapacitated at all times, she is still a very active main character. She runs all over Sycamore Gorge hexing Chetts and going to parties and beating up witchfinders and making phone calls on her increasingly fucked-up phone, which, unlike Sideways’ head, cannot be magically healed after their run-ins with a particularly nasty witchfinder named Tatum Jenkins.

I had forgotten just enough of what had happened in the first two books to occasionally get a little disoriented but overall it was easy enough to slide back in to Sideway’s spiky teenage world and recommence cheering on our coven of feral mean girls. They are not nice but they do fight shitty conservative witchfinders and generally intend to use their magic to help people to the best of their shortsighted and often impulsive abilities, so it’s satisfying when they get a hit in. In classic YA fashion, most of the grown-ups ostensibly on their own side are also kind of shitty, thus forcing them into protagonisting even when they get involved in conflicts much bigger than themselves that ought to be handled by real grown-ups. In the matter of Madeline Kahn, we also get a plotline involving restorative justice in a way that manages to completely eschew the use of any nonprofit language, which I found beautifully aspirational, even if in real life we can’t actually solve things by hexing people’s ability to hurt others away from them.

Anyways, it was a fast-paced and gory ending to a fast-paced and gory YA series, and I enjoyed it very much. It may be the last new YA series I ever read and if so I will be OK with that.

I picked up A. R. Vishny’s Night Owls at a very bookish wedding because I thought it sounded like fun, even though it’s YA and I’m not finding myself to really enjoy a lot of YA anymore. (I think I am too old and stuff written for today’s teens does not resonate with me.) But this one promised queer Jewish owl-vampires and a lot of old New York lore and some shenanigans with dead people, so I figured it could be fun.

And it was! I am not super familiar with Jewish folklore, so for me as a reader, the estries were a fairly novel take on vampires, a subject upon which I am otherwise very familiar (possibly too familiar). I also learned a lot about late nineteenth and early twentieth century Yiddish theater, a subject upon which I am again not familiar. I don’t think I am the primary target audience for this book, in that the author is Jewish and seems to want to write about Jewish things for other Jewish people, but I enjoyed it very much all the same–it’s YA, so it’s an easy enough read and willing to explain all but the most obvious stuff to its adolescent characters, and I’ve read enough hundreds of variously warmed-over Christian-derived monster books over the past three decades that it was really great to get something else.

The setup is as such: Clara and Molly appear to be in their late teens but are in fact each well over 100 years old because they are estries. They are the curators and inhabitants of an old Yiddish theater called the Grand Dame, which has been revived as an indie cinema. They rent this building from the prince of demons in exchange for pictures of faces, because how else are you going to get affordable rent in Manhattan when you look like a permanent 18-year-old.

The shenanigans really kick off when Anat, Molly’s current human girlfriend, gets possessed by the ghost of what might be Molly’s first human girlfriend, Lena, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Other strange things are happening, too. Initially unbeknownst to Molly and Clara, their hot mess of a box office assistant, Boaz, is also dealing with supernatural stuff, because his family is cursed to be able to talk to ghosts, and the ghosts are getting bolder and pushier. In order to save Anat, and save the world from the demon prince’s machinations, all our main characters will have to come clean about their supernatural secrets and start being able to trust each other for long enough to piece together what is actually going on–which is difficult both because they’re all long used to keeping this stuff secret, and because in true paranormal romance fashion, they are all full of inconvenient feelings. This all builds up to a beautifully chaotic climax involving the space between worlds–the world of the living and that of the dead–manifesting as all sorts of stage and movie sets and places from the characters’ pasts, as various ghosts and demons try to kidnap our characters, steal the family heirloom that Boaz’ Aunt Hila uses to do medium-ing, and generally overrun the world of the living.

Trying to thwart ancient demons isn’t particularly easy–they are clever and have had a lot of time to practice being shady–so the tension remains pleasantly high as characters are crossed and double-crossed, especially in the second half of the book where saving Anat/the world gets quite time-sensitive and poor anxious Boaz is getting hassled by strong-willed secondary characters left and right. Overall I found this book to just be really cute and fun–it’s a pretty quick read, and I got through it over the course of one snowstorm. There’s teenage angst and demons with bird feet and a bunch of wish-fulfillment-y nerd shit about old movies; what else do you need from a YA fantasy?

About ten years ago, someone I knew through my writing group had a book published, and they had a book event in conjunction with a few other authors. In an abundance of social awkwardness/wanting to be supportive I bought the book being advertised of each of the four authors, the other three of whom I had not heard of. One of these books was The Wrath and the Dawn, a YA fantasy (they were all YA fantasies) from then-debut author Renee Ahdieh.

My honest to god opinion is that I should have read this book when I first bought it ten years ago, because I would have had a much higher tolerance for its general YA-ness at the time.

The book is, roughly, a retelling of the tale of Scheherazade, although in this one our heroine Shahrzad only has to tell about one and a half stories before other plot stuff intervenes to keep her alive. Shahrzad volunteers to become the bride of the murderous boy-king Khalid because he married and then killed her best friend, and Shahrzad intends to stay alive long enough to figure out how to kill the king. This gets derailed because Shahrzad also falls in love with the king, and figures out the secret reason he had been killing all those girls, in that order. There is much heterosexual angst when Shahrzad finds herself falling in love with her best friend’s killer, who doesn’t seem like a psychotic madman. This might have sat better with me if it didn’t take all of three days to happen, but whatever. If this were message fiction we would have to be very concerned about what message we are sending to young girls about handsome young men who do terrible things but don’t seem like total psychos, but this is not message fiction, this is a heterosexual power fantasy about the power of teenage love (and not really storytelling, which is odd for a Scheherezade adaptation) to overcome all obstacles, presumably including breaking curses in the sequel. Shahrzad is also a master archer, although this doesn’t end up being quite as relevant to the plot as I’d hoped.

The writing style is a bit overwritten in the way that YA so often is, where there are too many descriptive words but the result isn’t writing that’s dense, just sort of loose. I had more patience for this before spending years as a copy editor and now it’s hard to turn off the part of brain that wants to cut the extraneous words from every sentence, so at least for the first few chapters I had a constant running internal monologue that was just like “You don’t have to say ‘grains of sand,’ you can just say ‘sand,’ the default way sand comes is in grains” but once I got more engaged in the action-adventure stuff that voice moved more to the back of my head. The book is nearly 400 pages long and took me about half a day to read, so it’s fair to say the extra description didn’t slow me down too much.

Apart from our feisty but easily seduced heroine, the only other female character in the book who shows up for more than three pages is her Greek handmaiden, who appears to exist mostly to be more normal than Shahrzad but they’re still friends so we can show that this author doesn’t hate women, despite the otherwise all-male cast. We are not going to resolve the age-old question of “Is feminism when you chase boys” in this book review, so I will only say that this book was a bit too heterosexual for me personally, which is why I don’t read as much straight people romantasy stuff as I used to.

Overall this book isn’t bad for the type of book it is, but it doesn’t exactly transcend the genre, and this is no longer quite my genre the way it used to be. It is unlikely I will read the sequel unless it basically falls into my lap, but I wouldn’t particularly object to reading it if it does.

I read H. A. Clarke’s The Scratch Daughters and it was basically everything I wanted; i.e., it was super gay and had lots of Mr. Scratch in it. The story picks up several weeks after the end of the first book, and things are not going well for Sideways. Not having her soul is fucking her up. The rest of the Scapegracers are trying to balance helping Sideways get her specter back, not getting their own specters stolen, and Chett-hexing local assholes on behalf of the women they have hurt. This balancing act is not working for Sideways, who is in basically a constant dissociative state and keeps getting phantom thoughts and feelings of what Madeline is doing. The girls descend into some pretty bitter fighting and Sideways goes off half-cocked all on her own (or sort of on her own, she’s got her stolen bike and Mr. Scratch, after all) to hunt down Madeline Kline, and separately, Madeline Kline’s specter. Various things go entertainingly wrong but Sideways survives and eventually pulls it out of the bag because, while the world is full of awful people, it’s also full of good ones, and Sideways has some of the good ones on her side—in addition to her coven, she’s got her fantastic dads Boris and Julian, and a stray queer kid that she finds in the woods whose identity would be a massive spoiler. Much like the last book, the plot is eventful and witchy and fun enough, but the real fun of the book is in the characters and the general vibes. There is some very cool creepy magic and Sideways continues to lick her teeth a lot (they are her favorite bones). I had a great time and hope the third book happens in a timely fashion!

It was time to reread H. A. Clarke’s The Scapegracers so that I could remember what happened now that the sequel is out, and also for reasons relating to my particular book shelving system. The second time around, this book is still quite a vibe. Very character-driven, very gay. The plot is fun enough to hang the story on and I do want to know what happens next, although mostly I am reading the sequel because I want more Sideways and more Mr. Scratch. It’s definitely more YA than I’m used to reading these days but it’s still quite good. My one major criticism is that Sideways needs to do her laundry and soon; the cool disheveled thing stops being cool real fast when you become the smelly kid.

There is a new Wayward Children novella and, since I liked the other 7 and also because I was falling behind in my count for the year (already!), I checked it out from the library and read it in a day. I like novellas because they’re easy to square away fast and still give me that satisfying “I read a whole book in one day” feeling.

Lost in the Moment and Found deals with some pretty heavy stuff–it opens with five-year-old Antoinette (aka Antsy)’s father dropping dead in Target, and follows her as her mother marries a child abuser and Antsy, fortunately, runs away before anything too physically bad happens. Antsy winds up–via a Door, of course–in a shop for lost things, which allows her to reliably go through bunches of other Doors and always make her way back to the shop. Antsy spends a very fun and cool two years working in the shop for lost things and going on very cool shopping trips to various worlds via the Doors, until it inevitably turns out that the shop has a price, as well–or at least traveling the Doors does. The theme here is rather unmistakably about how once childhood is lost you can’t get it back, and the way this theme is literalized is no less effectively tragic for all that it’s not real subtle.

Antsy is a new character and at least over the course of this book doesn’t meet or interact with any of the characters from the other books, except Miss Eleanor at the very end, which I hope means she will be pulled into our network of existing friends in further sequels.

Overall a solid new entry into the Wayward Children universe.

In my bag o’ trashy summer reads I decided to pick what I think may have been the fluffiest book on my TBR shelf, or what at least looked like it: The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee, which I had picked up during a friend’s book cleanout last fall.

The book follows three English young persons as they go on the traditional Grand Tour sometime in seventeen-whatever-the-fuck, which is promptly derailed by a series of avoidable and less-avoidable hijinks. Our narrator is Monty, a disaster bisexual (emphasis on the “disaster”) who is very close to getting disinherited if he doesn’t get his head on straight one of these days. Monty likes partying entirely too hard, his own appearance, and his best friend Percy. Monty dislikes his physically abusive father, taking anything remotely seriously, and babies. His traveling companions are his aforementioned lifelong best friend Percy, the biracial illegitimate nephew and ward of some respectable admiral and whomst Monty has been in love with for several years, and Felicity, Monty’s bluestocking younger sister whomst is being packed off to finishing school instead of the kind of school she’d like to go to (i.e. a real one, like medical school), most of which do not admit women.

The book–and the Tour–start off with a variety of Animal House-like embarrassing escapades that could probably have been avoided if Monty wasn’t quite so committed to drowning everything his father has done to him in every drop of liquor in Europe. Things get disastrous in a somewhat less predictable way when Monty steals an innocuous-looking puzzle box from the Duke of Bourbon during a sexcapade gone wrong with the duke’s mistress in the duke’s apartments in Versailles. This sets them on a series of extremely Boy’s Own adventures that include getting ambushed by highwaymen, getting kidnapped by pirates and eventually joining them (of course), a short stint in jail, seeking a magical McGuffin in an ancient tomb, all that sort of thing. The only thing missing was a Texan. (This book might have taken place a bit early for that, actually; I think that was more of a nineteenth-century thing.)

It was extremely entertaining and while I don’t think I’d bother to give it a reread, I could certainly see myself picking up the sequel next time I wanted something very fluffy and eighteenth-century-flavored. Especially since I’ve heard the sequel has more of Felicity.

Another book that I brought up to Maine was Alwyn Hamilton’s Rebel of the Sands, which I admit I did not really expect to like very much. I’ve sort of gone off YA a bit and basically picked up a few this weekend so that I could get them off my TBR shelves, and figured it was a good weekend to read them because my brain is soft and tired and made of cheese, and I was worried that once my head is good and rested I would simply never be able to read them. Also, I was slightly suspicious of a desert-flavored adventure written by a white author, because fantasy writing is full of white people writing exotic desert locales in very cringey ways, starting with Dune and going from there. So, in short, my expectations were not very high going in.

That said, said expectations were nicely surpassed. Clocking in at around 300 pages, it’s a fast-paced, frequently funny, very readable little gunslinging adventure about djinns and overthrowing tyrants and how much it sucks to live in a dying factory town in a militarized society under unaccountable armed occupation, and lots of terrible dudes get the shit beaten out of them. It is neither subtle nor thought-provoking, but it is fun. I liked it maybe slightly better than Vengeance Road but not as much as Gunslinger Girl, but overall I’d say if you liked one or both of those you may like this one too.

I’m trying to get through some of the books people have lent me before I move so, after reading the Pride book, I figured it was time to read the other book Talya lent me, a YA fantasy called The Black Veins. I’ve been a little off YA lately–I don’t know how much is that I’m aging out of it, how much is that I’ve read so much of it in my life that it’s gotten stale, and how much is that it’s become such a huge market that things are being rushed to print noticeably under-edited–but this one sounded fun so I figured I’d give it a shot.

And it was indeed fun! Our protagonist, Blythe, is a Guardian, which in theory means she is an extra-powerful magician, except that she’s never actually had her powers manifest or know what to do with them or anything. Her family is kidnapped as part of some political machinations between two magical countries, neither of which Blythe’s family is allied with; Blythe, who actually likes her family, then sets out to gather the other six Guardians and make them help her rescue them. Various high-octane shenanigans ensue on the course of this quest, the violence is very much action-movie violence, most of the Guardians start off hating each other but eventually develop into a found family, at least half the Guardians are queer but we are spared any Obligatory Romantic Subplots. Overall it’s a good time.

As for the under-editing: this one has an excuse in that it is self-published, but all the same, I did end up stopping to check (more than once) that I wasn’t reading an ARC/uncorrected proof and only realized it was self-pub when I couldn’t find a publishing house name upon scouring the front matter. I know it’s expensive to hire multiple rounds of good editors and it’s extremely hard to edit your own work, but this really needed to go through at least one more round of edits by someone familiar with the word “faze.”

Professional grumpiness aside, I did enjoy reading this one a lot more than I expected, given how tired I am with YA these days.

For some reason I had thought that Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series was complete after Across the Green Grass Fields, but there was no reason for me to actually think that, and I was pleased to discover that I was wrong, with the publication of Where the Drowned Girls Go. This one is about Cora, the mermaid, who is suffering something somewhere between PTSD and being haunted after her encounter with the Drowned Gods in the Moors, a very different set of underwater shenanigans than her first time through a door, her “own” door to the Trenches.

Cora decides that she can’t get better at Miss Eleanor’s and decides to transfer to the other school for children who have experienced portal fantasies: the Whitethorn Institute, a grimly regimented reform-school type of establishment designed to crush the desire to re-find their doors out of the students.

The grueling conformity of Whitethorn, which is basically a kind of psychological boot camp, actually does wind up helping Cora beat back the influence of the Drowned Gods, but the cost is high. The students are largely miserable and take it out on each other. Cora sticks out due to her size and her blue hair, and the sleep problems she’s been having ever since the Drowned Gods got their tentacles into her psyche don’t mesh well with the brutally rigid schedule and early-morning alarms. She doesn’t make friends.

At least, not until Sumi shows up and, being Sumi, causes chaos.

Like the other Wayward Children books, this volume focuses on a lot of heavy subjects but ultimately winds up being a heartwarming adventure. Fatphobia, bullying, trauma, and attempted suicide are major subjects; the series themes of identity, conformity, choice, and rejection are continued. Eventually the characters learn to work together to get themselves out of their predicament (in this case, the Institute) and be big damn heroes along the way (in this case, by figuring out some terrible secrets about how the Institute is run and staffed) and some of them even become friends. Regan, from Across the Green Grass Fields, makes an appearance and is folded into our main gang of heroes.

According to Goodreads another book is expected next year, and it looks like there are actually supposed to be 10 books in the series. I’m pleased about this since I find this series to be really good comfort reads–they’re short and queer and genre-savvy and full of big feelings and the Power of Friendship and finding out who you really are, and they are a bit sentimental and full of absurd things and could easily be just flat-out cheesy but they’re just smart and dark enough not to be. I could reread the whole series in a weekend.

A very long time ago I had a copy of Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and I’m not sure if I ever actually read the whole thing or not? I was very young, and I don’t know what happened to the book. But anyway, when my friend Kyle was weeding his book collection and gave people the chance to claim some, I put my name down for his copy so I could give it another go, having become much more of an Ursula K. LeGuin appreciator in the intervening 20 years or so.

A Wizard of Earthsea can be a little difficult to fully appreciate because it was published in 1968 and so some of the things that were quite fresh and revolutionary at the time have since become quite commonplace, like “writing fantasy novels specifically for teens” and “wizards: they had to have been young and learned how to wizard at some point, right?” Anyway this book is the coming-of-age story of a young boy who will eventually grow up to be a mighty wizard, but isn’t one yet. He starts off instead as a young boy who saves his fishing village from barbarian totally-not-Vikings and keeps getting into trouble by being very ambitious and overextending himself no matter how many grave and portentious-sounding warnings about the Equilibrium he gets from the older wizards. The main form of trouble that his pride gets him into is that he summons a dead spirit due to a stupid schoolboy rivalry and this lets something crawl out from the tear in reality that summoning the dead causes, and then the something hunts him for years until he figures out what it is and how to face it.

The magic in this universe is largely based on ordering things around by use of their true names. All the people have both true names, which are closely guarded secrets, and use-names, which are what are used in everyday life. Our protagonist’s true name is Ged and he is called Ged throughout most of the narration, but everybody calls him Sparrowhawk, because he likes ordering birds around, and occasionally shape-shifts into one. Ged is kind of an ass and a good part of his story arc is learning to be less of an ass, which is the true and correct story arc of all teenage protagonists.

Overall, I do wish I had actually gotten around to reading this book in its entirety when I was actually in my teens, as I probably would have had more capacity to then read the entire rest of the series, which I am now intending on doing but let’s be read, it might take a while.

I’m not reading as much YA these days as I used to, but my ace book club (yes, more book clubs) is reading Rosiee Thor’s debut YA sci-fi Tarnished Are the Stars, the premise of which seemed like a fun adventure read: court intrigue, spies and rebels, dangerous (or at least illegal) technology, lesbians, steampunky clockwork stuff in space. And it did in fact have all that, plus an aroace character (hence why the book club was reading it), and it was reasonably fun and entertaining. But I had some trouble really getting too into it, and I can’t tell how much of this is a “me outgrowing YA” thing and how much is just a “debut novel is a bit amateurish” thing, but bits of it just seemed underdeveloped/under-edited to me. Some of the language was a bit overwritten--not just in terms of overexplaining the emotional stuff in an occasionally maudlin way, which is pretty standard for writing aimed at younger readers, but also I distinctly recall early in the book running across a sentence that started with “Her gaze snapped to…” and being like “F, I hate it when people’s gazes/eyes/ocular jellies do things instead of the people just looking at stuff, is this whole book gonna be like that” and it wasn’t entirely but it was enough to keep me from really sinking into it. There was also some plot stuff that seemed sort of slapped together; there was some figuring out of riddles and clues that seemed less like solving and more like jumping to conclusions that happened to be correct (although the worst of these did turn out to be incorrect, which was nice), and I have some questions about the practicalities of the sneaking-around and avoiding-security that probably stem from me having too much personal experience in that field (there is realistic poor/uneven security and there is Well That’s Extremely Convenient poor/uneven security, and I regret that I can tell the difference). The assorted moral questions about identity and power and leadership were addressed in ways I felt were a bit heavyhanded, but the morals themselves are unobjectionable (I really cannot agree harder with lessons like “loyalty isn’t really a virtue if you are being loyal to absolutely terrible people”). Overall it was an entertaining steampunk adventure, a decent way to spend 3 hours of a rainy long weekend, but I would probably not especially recommend it to anyone unless they had some pretty specific asks like “Do you know any space adventure stories that are about heart disease?”

I’d been kind of hoping to read the entire Wayward Children series last year but was thwarted by publishing schedules, meaning I only just got my hands on my library copy of Across the Green Grass Fields, which was published in January. At any rate, I’ve finished the series now! It’s nice to feel like I have completed a series; that doesn’t happen much anymore.

Though this is a Wayward Children book it does not interact with any of the other Wayward Children books; neither the school nor any previously known characters appear in it, which seems a bit odd for a series ender. But it is still very definitely of the same series, with similar vibes and themes, and of course the basic premise of a portal fantasy.

Our wayward child in this one is Regan, a certified Horse Girl and the daughter of a veterinarian, which works out quite well. Regan is also intersex--an XY girl with androgen insensitivity. When she reaches her preteen years and fails to hit puberty, Regan thinks this is a problem, even though the actual problem is that Regan’s best friend Laurel is a huge bitch and has surrounded herself and thus Regan with other catty conformist types. At any rate, Regan runs off to have a cry in the woods and accidentally falls into horse girl utopia, where she is adopted by a kindly family of centaurs, who are humble unicorn ranchers. When humans arrive in the Hooflands, it is always to save the world, Regan is told, usually from terrible monarchs, but Regan is only ten and doesn’t want to be a big damn hero yet, so she and her new friends spend a few years hiding from the terrible queen that everyone figures Regan is there to overthrow.

The actual saving the world part is packed in pretty tight at the end, because Seanan McGuire knows what Horse Girls want to read about, and that is daily life as the only human living in a herd of unicorn-rancher centaurs. In true YA fashion there is a certain amount of making the subtext text re: using fantastical creatures to explore what a person is, which has been a bit of an ongoing theme in this series so I was expecting it, and it’s fine.

Overall the story is deeply charming and a lovely bit of escapism for enormous fantasy nerds who have read too many portal stories, as it is intended to be, and I’m glad I read it, and I’m glad I read the whole series.

For the NEA book club (how many book clubs am I in now?), we read Darcy Little Badger’s Elatsoe, a fantasy murder mystery with an ace main character and no unnecessary romantic subplots. It takes place in an oh so slightly different version of this world, which features fairies, fae, and a lot of ghosts.

Our protagonist is Ellie, a seventeen-year-old Lipan Apache girl who lives in a working-class suburb in North Texas with her mom, her dad, and the ghost of her dog Kirby. She has to travel down to South Texas when her older cousin Trevor is mysteriously murdered, leaving behind a wife and six-month-old baby. Ellie is visited by the Trevor’s spirit on his way out of the world of the living, for just long enough to give her two bits of information: the name of the man who killed him, and the town the man lives in. As Trevor’s death is ruled a homicide by the police--he appears to have died in an uncharacteristic car accident, slightly off the route of his commute--Ellie has to go about solving the murder herself, with help from just her family, her best friend Jay, Jay’s sister Ronnie, Ronnie’s vampire boyfriend Al, Ronnie’s lineup of basketball-playing bridesmaids, Kirby the ghost dog, and Ellie’s ability to raise ghosts--a family secret that is only allowed to be used on animals. What they find in town of Willowbee, Texas, and the secrets of its suspiciously wealthy Doctor Abe Allerbee, unsurprisingly puts them all in massive danger.

I found the worldbuilding here to be a ton of fun, the murder mystery quite thrilling and enjoyable, and the characters entertaining. Sometimes I feel like it read a little bit young, although this may be because a lot of YA writes its characters a little bit too old. I loved all the other stories within the story, mainly the kickass legacy of Ellie’s sixth-great grandmother. IT dealt pretty matter-of-factly with issues of colonization, police corruption, and rich people being terrible, but it was definitely still primarily a fun fantasy murder mystery rather than an “issues book.” Overall it was an excellent way to spend a couple hours after the week that was this week.

In September there was a day that, probably coincidentally but maybe not, was a big publishing day for YA by trans and non-binary authors, and my social media feeds were flooded with them, in one memorable case all arranged by cover color theme in a rainbow. I remember that particular display because I remember, skulking gothically all the way at the purple end, a matte black book with lavender-silver foiled lettering and some vaguely occultish-looking drawing on the front, titled THE SCAPEGRACERS. I had not been in a very YA mood lately but I also have been around publishing for long enough to know that people work very hard on book covers and you absolutely should judge them, so I clicked through, surmised that it was supposed to be sort of like The Craft but gayer, and decided that I had to read it ASAP, given this year’s rules for fiction reads. I admit I had some apprehensions because the author is like 22 and I am not ready for the zoomers to be publishing—they are too powerful already—but there are a limited number of books about socially inept queer goth girls with magic powers, and I had already read the other two earlier this year. So I borrowed THE SCAPEGRACERS as soon as I could.

THE SCAPEGRACERS takes place over one intensely action-packed week in the life of one Sideways Pike, a pile of insecurities and trauma in a leather jacket, who until this week had mostly skulked around the school being friendless in the tradition of YA protagonists--although in Sideways’ case it is because she is deliberately scary and weird and an actual witch, not because she is a quiet mousy Book Girl who the narration is convinced is sweet despite being a condescending ass to everyone (Sideways’ narration dunks on this trope pretty hard, in fact, because Sideways has a modicum of self-awareness). (As someone who moved from mousy to goth basically because it was easier than learning real social skills, I loved this.) Sideways is also extremely gay; she is known as the school’s resident lesbian while the town’s other queer girls are quietly figuring themselves out, and her narration contains a sustained intensity of Feelings About Girls that is very endearing but also definitely trips my “how do allo people live, this sounds exhausting” cranky ace wiring. Sideways lives with her two dads (actually her uncle and his partner) who run an antique shop in a house full of gothy nonsense, which is insanely adorable.

Our plot kicks off when Sideways is invited to do magic at a Halloween party hosted by the three most popular girls in school. The magic works surprisingly well, until it is rudely interrupted for mysterious reasons, and then things start getting weird, even by the standards of Sideways Pike’s life. The ensuing plot involves such rollicking shenanigans as getting kidnapped by terrible religious zealots, daringly escaping from said terrible religious zealots, breaking and entering into a magical book dealer’s to look for magical books, reluctantly befriending a disembodied demon type thing that talks like a 1950’s news anchor, another outrageous party with magic that goes uncontrollably awry, and Sideways making an absolute fool of herself over a mysterious hot girl that goes to the other high school. Since it all takes place in early October, it’s got extra Halloween vibes on top of everything else, which is extremely rad.

But the main plot point, the thing that carries the book, is that SIDEWAYS FINALLY MAKES FRIENDS, a thing she is singularly bad at. Sideways’ attempts to Not Fuck Up friend-having are very funny and should be relatable to any undersocialized disaster queer. Despite the extremely short timeframe, this book doesn’t take the tack that teenage girl friendships are fake or shallow just because they are highly volatile; rather, they are extremely intense, and that intensity gets across very well. The popular girls here--Daisy, Jing, and Yates--are also all really entertaining characters. Daisy is the mean one, not in the catty way that “most popular cheerleader” characters are often portrayed, but just openly, over-the-top casually bloodthirsty in a way that probably would have had people concerned that she’d be the next school shooter if she were a guy. I found her hilarious. Jing is slightly more normal and Yates is actually nice, which sometimes makes her the odd one out.

One thing that sort of jumped out at me and made me feel very old is that there’s a lot of casual physical affection among the friends, not just hugs but also things like impromptu piggyback rides and piling on people because it is amusing to squish them until they can’t breathe. I had to stop and think a minute and be like “Were we that touchy-feely as younguns?” and the answer is absolutely yes, I had just completely forgotten when I grew out of it. (I’m not really sure how, given that I had a number of friends over the years who were dudes between 1.5x and twice my body weight, and in the social circles where I was one of the smaller people, I was therefore the most hilarious to sit on.) Anyway, I’m old, and several months of the “stay six feet away from everybody at all times” thing appears to have sunk into my limbic system and made me even more uncomfortable getting anywhere near other humans (except, oddly enough, in big crowds, which feel nice and normal), so all this entirely normal behavior--which, objectively speaking, is probably the least weird stuff in the book--struck me as strange and confusing.

Like with any good YA book I could probably spend a lot of time discussing what it says, both implicitly and explicitly, about identity and finding your place in the world and the way you present yourself to the world, but instead I’m going to keep it brief and just say: I have never read a YA book that is so unapologetically long-winded about the joys of feeling goth as fuck, like there is an entire page about the magical potential of surrounding yourself with gigantic-ass Hammer Horror movie type candles, and Sideways’ relationship to her leather jacket is practically talismanic, which I find very relatable.

This is certainly one of my favorite reads of the year, up there with the Locked Tomb series, and for very similar reasons--extremely funny and dramatic; lots of excellent female characters; representation of self-conscious goth girls with poor social sense makes me feel Seen--and I will for sure be grabbing a copy of The Scratch Daughters as soon as it is published next year.

My library hold for Rory Power’s Burn Our Bodies Down came in just in time for me to use it as a way to avoid watching any news on Election Night, and I knew that if it was nearly as good as Wilder Girls it would keep me sufficiently distracted for the night.

Short version: It was. I read over half the book on Tuesday night, lamentably had stuff to do Wednesday and Thursday, and polished it off Friday.

This book is about a 17-year-old girl named Margot who lives with her objectively insane mother in a dilapidated apartment in a dilapidated town somewhere out West, judging by the amount of corn (I think it might be in Nebraska somewhere). Margot and her mom’s life is neither materially abundant nor emotionally healthy, and Margot is itching to get out and find something else about the rest of her family--who they are, why they’re estranged, if they really exist--but her mom has given her literally nothing to go on, and expressly forbidden her from ever asking. This all changes when Margot finds a photo of her mother with a phone number on it, allowing her to contact her grandmother in a town called Phalene. Following another fight with her mother, Margot runs off to Phalene, which, it turns out, is also fairly dilapidated and surrounded by corn, although bits of it clearly used to be quaint. It is here that Margot meets her grandmother, who, it turns out, also seems pretty insane and won’t tell her anything; Tess, the beautiful daughter of what is currently the richest family in town, now that Margot’s family isn’t it anymore; and a handful of other people, most of whom aren’t very important.

Pretty much the first thing that happens when Margot arrives is that there’s a fire on her grandmother’s land. It turns out there was also a fire when Margot’s mother ran away seventeen years ago, and, perhaps unsurprisingly but no less satisfyingly, there will be another fire before the end of the book.

The bulk of the book is mostly Margot and Tess trying to solve the mystery of the fire and of why Margot and her mother and her grandmother look so eerily alike, more like clones of each other than regular descendants. There was also another girl who looked just like them who Margot found dead in the fire when she arrived, so that’s the mystery Margot and Tess start out trying to solve, but solving it necessarily means figuring out everything that’s going on. I don’t want to spoiler what’s going on but let’s just say I was sort of correct when I guessed “clones” but not quite in the way I was expecting. Much like Wilder Girls, it’s very atmospheric and creepy, although the atmosphere is much different--it’s got a very hot, suffocating, post-industrial Southern Gothic sort of vibe (or Midwestern Gothic? Is that a thing? Idunno, it feels Southern Gothic to me but dryer and with more corn), with its decaying small towns and multigenerational family secrets.

Anyway, if you like creepy atmospherics and dark family secrets and socially maladjusted queer protagonists and lots of fire, you will probably like Burn Our Bodies Down! I did, at least.

I can tell I’m getting late into the series because there aren’t any queues for the holds anymore. I was surprised to be able to check out Come Tumbling Down, Seanan McGuire’s fifth Wayward Children novella, without any wait, and even more surprised to find that this story again brought us to see Jack and Jill and the horror-movie world of the Moors, which I had assumed we’d left behind after Down Among the Sticks and Bones.

This one puts us back in our “main” timeline, taking place shortly after the events of Beneath the Sugar Sky and featuring our old gang of Kade, Christopher, Cora, and a reanimated Suki. In it, Jack, body-swapped with her once-resurrected insane sister Jill, and her girlfriend Alexis, now twice-resurrected (which isn’t very healthy), turn up in the school’s basement after fleeing the windmill that Jack mad-scientists in. The gang heads back into the Moors to try to settle the power struggle there in Jack’s favor, which mostly means getting her own never-died and never-resurrected body back so that Jill can’t turn it into a vampire. This puts us on a semi-traditional epic quest of the sort that featured in Beneath the Sugar Sky and that In An Absent Dream wrote around; in this case, we have all kinds of fun stuff like making an alliance with the acolytes of the Drowned Gods, a final battle in a big castle, multiple dramatic instances of people falling off cliffs and turrets and rickety rope bridges, and other swashbuckling nonsense.

It was, in short, the absolutely perfect thing to read in the bath on Halloween night. I have no further commentary at this time.

I was supposed to do all kinds of admin stuff on Sunday but didn’t, because I was still existentially exhausted from Saturday, so instead I read the entirety of Rory Power’s YA sapphic body horror novel Wilder Girls in one sitting.

With the caveat that at the time we were drinking some extremely extra craft stouts brewed in the tradition of “breakfast foods for bersekers about to sack Rome” so I don’t remember the conversation with perfect clarity, but we were talking about the Locked Tomb series and Vengeance Road and other stuff we’d read, and I mentioned that 2020 has sucked enough without slogging my way through any more heterosexual romantic subplots; I have read untold thousands of them since I first learned to read and I simply do not give a shit; for the rest of the year I am only reading fiction about goths, lesbians, and goth lesbians. (I do not know if books in which a girl falls in love with a tall dark and handsome house count as queer fiction, they probably don’t, but I’m allowing them anyway.) Anyway, somewhere between stouts I ended up with Lyndsay’s copy of Wilder Girls.

Wilder Girls is about a plague, which off the bat may seem overly timely and not quite the sort of thing one wants to turn to for escapism at the moment. The plague is, thus far, limited to a small island in Maine called Raxter Island, which features a bunch of woods, a small visitor’s center, and the Raxter School for Girls, which has been put under quarantine and now subsists off of supply drops from the U.S. Navy, which has cut off all communications except periodic notices to sit tight and wait for a cure, which the Navy is definitely working on and will surely have one of these days. The girls call the disease the Tox, and it hits everybody differently, but one of the common threads is that it causes all sorts of interesting mutations if it doesn’t kill you. Our narrator, Hetty, has had one eye fused shut by the Tox, and is pretty sure she can feel something growing underneath it. Her best friend and bunkmate, Byatt, has grown a second spine on the outside of her back. The third girl in their clique, Reese, has had one hand turned into a scaled claw, and her hair has gone luminescent or phosphorescent or something else radioactive-looking (but very pretty). The Tox doesn’t just affect humans; it has also done all sorts of interesting things to the flora and fauna on the rest of the island, rendering Raxter extremely dependent on the fences and gates separating it from the woods.

The book opens about eighteen months after the Tox hits, and Raxter has settled into some sort of routine, in a militarized, scarcity-driven sort of way. One of Hetty’s roles in quarantine is that she’s on Gun Crew, essentially armed guards that cover Boat Crew. One of the inciting incidents of the plot involves some personnel changes in Boat Crew, the only group that is allowed to leave the school to go pick up the supply drops from the Navy. With the Boat Crew switchup, Hetty comes into some information suggesting that the Navy’s relationship with Raxter might not be quite what they say it is.

The other big inciting incident of the plot is that Byatt has a flare-up, and then goes missing. Hetty knows she didn’t just die, because all the girls who die are burned and buried publicly (or what passes for “publicly” when your entire community is quarantined), and she’s not in the infirmary, so Hetty decides to figure out where she is. Reese gets in on this objectively bad idea of an adventure as well, which is a little awkward because Hetty is doing it for Byatt but Reese is doing it for Hetty.

As readers we get to know somewhat more about where Byatt is because there are also several chapters from Byatt’s viewpoint, although there’s still things we don’t know, because the Navy research center that Byatt is being held in also refuses to tell Byatt key information like “what research center is this and where is it located.” Byatt spends her days being doped up on diazepam and answering a lot of questions from a Dr. Paretta and a very nice young Navy medical assistant named Teddy, whom I suspected was a goner the moment he showed up being nice. Teddy is not very genre-savvy and does not understand that he is in a body horror story and not a romance; Byatt, somewhat unconscionably, does.

Back over at Raxter School, Hetty and Reese are trying to unpick several mysteries at once, including figuring out what happened to Reese’s father--formerly the groundskeeper, and the only man on the island when the Tox hit--and what their one remaining adult teacher, Ms. Welch, is up to, given all her secret talking on the phone with the Navy and sneaking around with the one girl who quit Boat Crew. Similar questions surround Headmistress, the only person over 30 left alive on the island. The particular plot threads are less important than the general suffocating atmosphere of secrets and lies they help build, a creepy addition to an already wonderfully creepy atmosphere of abandonment, unnatural nature, and mutated teenagers. Something about the Tox doesn’t seem to take well to adults or males--something with how it interacts with hormones--leaving the youngest girls unscathed until about 13, the teachers dead, and the teenage girls increasingly changed in painful and terrifying ways.

I just… love it? A lot? The contained post-apocalyptic mini-universe of Raxter Island, the tiny threads leading outwards from it that Hetty and her friends pull on like a ratty sweater until the whole thing unravels, the cold hard bonds of friendships forged in trauma that are almost completely lacking in warmth but nonetheless earth-shakingly powerful, the underexplored hints at bigger stories, the political underpinnings about climate change and elite faithlessness. It’s absolutely riveting.

When Lyndsay Ely’s Gunslinger Girl debuted, the launch party was in the upstairs bar at Trident Booksellers, and the authorial interview portion was conducted by Erin Bowman on the basis that she had also written a YA western with a female lead. While the two books are very different, “YA western with female lead” has enough points of interest in common with Gunslinger Girl that I made sure to pick up a trade paperback of Vengeance Road at the party. (It helps that it has a beautiful cover.)

While those unfamiliar with the genre might assume that YA has a limit on how gory it’s allowed to be, those persons are wrong, and Vengeance Road is a nonstop grand guignol of shoot-outs, fires, natural disasters, and… well, more shoot-outs, mostly. It’s great. The story starts when a gang of outlaws burns down protagonist Kate’s house and murders her dad, stealing his treasure map to an abandoned gold mine in the Arizona desert. Kate very sensibly decides to hunt down this entire gang of outlaws and personally murder each one of them, despite the protestations of various other people she comes across who think she should let it go and do something less likely to get herself killed. Sidekicks she picks up over the course of this quest include her pony, her dad’s horse, the two oldest sons of her dad’s (also dead now) friend Abe, a genre-savvy Apache girl who makes fun of her constantly, and a crazy old German guy who lives in the desert. The oldest of the two sons of Abe, Jesse, is telegraphed from his first appearance as the love interest; he follows a fairly standard love interest arc of being tortured and insufferable and eventually sort of getting over it, but also helping Kate get slightly less tortured and insufferable. But mostly he just helps Kate shoot her way across the Arizona Territory in search of the gang in search of the gold mine. It is a lot of old-fashioned straight-up cowboy bullshit, updated for the 21st century where girls can do stuff now and in hindsight maybe the Apaches had good reason to keep raiding the white settlers who kept building shitty mining towns on their land.

I feel like I ought to have more to say about this given how much I liked it, but really I just picked it up, sat my ass in a chair with a can of watermelon beer, zipped through the whole thing in a few hours, put it down, and went “Dang, that was a really good Western.” So… yeah. It’s a really good Western. Got all that really good Western shit. I hear the companion novel has more trains; I might check that one out sometime too.

I don’t tend to read a lot of novellas, which is unfortunate, because novellas are a perfectly good story length and many of them are quite good. But I tend to just reach for bigger books, most of the time (I should really reconsider this for the time being), and so I have had a copy of Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway sitting around on my shelf since some long-past Readercon; I’m not even sure which year it was. Probably the publication year, which was 2016.

Anyway, part of the reason this book sat ignored on my shelf for so long (besides having too many things on the shelf) is that, in my typical Readercon fugue state, I seem to have picked up this book and gotten it signed without having any idea what it was about, and therefore it didn’t ring any bells in my brain when I saw it on the shelf later. But I read the back cover copy when I was rearranging my fiction shelves the other week and saw that it appeared to be one of those genre-savvy meta-story type things, and I do love a good shorter story about stories, so I made a mental note to pack it for Maine. You see, it turns out that Every Heart a Doorway is about kids who come back from portal fantasies and don’t fit into the real world anymore, and I love portal fantasies (and misfits, obviously).

Our protagonist is a teenage goth named Nancy (a possible The Craft reference? Who knows), who has come back from the Halls of the Dead, a sepulchral underworld whose standards of decorum revolve heavily around being extremely still for long periods of time. This is a thing that Nancy became rather good at in her time there, and that she is still good at, which creeps people out.

Nancy’s parents are not dealing so well with the whole sudden statue-y goth thing, and have sent her to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, but not before sneakily repacking her suitcase with brightly colored clothing instead of the carefully chosen black and white wardrobe she’d packed and a note lamenting that she wasn’t as cheerful and rainbow-y as she used to be. Honestly, you’d think these people had never heard of the concept of a seventeen-year-old before having children; even without the falling into a portal to the Halls of the Dead and becoming a potential bride for the Lord of Death, the whole un-bubbly teenage Goth phase thing is perfectly normal. A lot of them grow out of it; those of us that don’t still often manage to survive and become functional and productive members of society, or at least to become technical editors, which is close enough.

Nancy arrives at the school, which is overwhelmingly populated by other girls, and overwhelmingly populated by ones that went to happy colorful fairyland type worlds. Nancy does end up making sort-of friends with her assigned roommate, Suki, who does fit this description; the other folks she winds up hanging out with are Jack and Jill, twin girls who went into a sort of Hammer Horror universe (where Jack was a mad-scientist-in-training and Jill was a vampire’s bride); Kade, a trans boy who got kicked out of a disappointingly transphobic fairyland for becoming the Goblin Prince because apparently that was supposed to be someone else’s job; and Christopher, who went to a sort of Dios de los Muertos themed underworld/fairyland and learned to make skeletons dance (his parents think his obligatory love interest, the Skeleton Girl, is a regular girl he liked who died of anorexia, because that’s the sort of thing that makes sense to parents).

Nancy’s obligatory love interest is Kade, which on the Kade side of things is fine--he’s a good character, especially for a Male Romantic Lead. On the Nancy side of things I had some issues with it, some of which may constitute critiques and others of which are purely personal spleen. Nancy is ace, and, as I Was A Teenage Asexual Goth myself, one would think I’d be happy about teenage ace goth rep in YA literature, except that the aspec community is extremely diverse and it’s always sort of personally disappointing when someone tries to rep People Like You in literature and comes up with the absolute opposite of your experiences. Nancy is a romantic ace, and the fact that aces in YA literature, on the occasions they do pop up as viewpoint characters, seem to frequently (to the degree that there is a “frequently”) be romantic aces, so that they can have obligatory romantic subplots and their aceness can present A Challenge (and, it being YA, A Teaching Moment) within their romantic subplots gets up my nose far more than it should--it always makes me sort of mentally stamp my feet and go you are missing the point! which I am intellectually aware makes no sense as an actual argument. Romo aces exist and don’t deserve representation any less than aroaces just because I find it personally obnoxious how much it underscores how absolutely obligatory all those obligatory romantic subplots are. Also, there is no “point” to having a sexual orientation in real life, so there doesn’t need to be one in fiction, either. Except that I always felt like there was a point--including in real life--and the point was to avoid irritating romantic subplots, because my feelings about amatonormativity are stronger than my feelings about any actual person have ever been. (I’m reasonably sure the shift in the discourse toward “inclusion” of romo aces as the more visible kind of ace, especially in the kinds of books that I read a lot of, has at least as much to do with my ditching that label in favor of just “aromantic” as a standalone at least as much as anything that’s happened out in reality.) Also, and possibly I am only having this thought because I was already annoyed, but writing a cis/trans romance where the cis person is asexual feels a little like chickening out? Like, we’re going to do three pages of “don’t worry, just because this person is asexual doesn’t mean they get to skip having a romantic subplot like a normal person” internal monologuing but we’re going to combine it with “this person is attracted to a trans person, but not like that.” This is a combination of things that can easily happen in real life, but as a sequence of deliberate authorial choices in fiction it could not but make me go “hm.”

Other than that bit it is very much my kind of book and I did enjoy the murder mystery bit quite a lot; it has strong callbacks to many of my favorite stories but not so obviously as to kill the suspense. It is full of weird creepy shit like people getting dissolved in acid and body parts going missing, and several very good jokes. Overall I’d be interested in reading the rest of the series sometimes, especially since I believe they are all of similar length and I am very, very behind on my Goodreads challenge this year.

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bloodygranuaile

November 2025

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Entries tagged with ya

Chett-hexing and chaos

Duo ain't got nothing on these scary owls

A handful of Arabian nights

Sideways, Scratch, and the Scapegracers take on Chetts and Chantrys

Reign of Scapegrace

Portal fantasy, Mysterious Traveling Junk Shop subtype

The grandest and touriest of Grand Tours

I like to read about teenage girls overthrowing the government

If it weren't for those meddling kids

Not that kind of killer

Dragons and shadows and birbs

Clockwork hearts in space

I'm here to save the world

Let loose the ghost dogs of war

In which there is good goth representation in YA literature

In which the corn is blighted

Pushing, pulling me down again

A new meaning to the idea of a toxic environment

A girl, her guns, and a quest for revenge

High Nonsense, High Logic, and other directions