I read Stephanie Foo's What My Bones Know, a rec from thistleingrey, about a... month? two months?... ago. Since then it has been staring at me from the bin where we keep the library books, daring me to talk about it. I finally have had to take it back to the library, and I'm now sitting in the library with it staring back at me, daring me to write about it before we leave and I really do have to return it. [I wrote most of this on Saturday, but didn't finish until tonight.]

It's a memoir of Stephanie Foo's traumatic childhood in San Jose, and her journey through being diagnosed with complex PTSD, and her journey through healing. Her childhood was very traumatic -- over-the-top physical and verbal and emotional abuse ( cut for a description of the kind of thing we're talking about -- warnings for threats of murder and suicide ) Both her parents also abandon her before she graduates high school. I don't know who had the worse childhood, J.M. Straczynski or Stephanie Foo (especially since my brain is doing the thing where it's trying hard to forget JMS's traumatic childhood so I forget the details), but the fact that I'm comparing the two should tell you something.

Foo's journey of recovery is interesting and inspiring, but honestly was not what I remembered most vividly a month after reading it. The section that really got me was when she went back to San Jose to see whether it was as she remembered, and see whether there were other kids in a similar position as she was (as she remembered being the case) -- not quite as over-the-top as she was, but dealing with trauma from their parenting. Most of the teachers are like, eh, everyone was maybe a little stressed about getting A's, but fine.

One of her former classmates says, "Yes. We were all getting our asses beat. Well, not all of us. But. I know a LOT of people who got their ass beat... Yes. Why do you think we were so stressed about getting all those As in the first place?"

This former classmate also says, "I think it's why I work so hard all the time. I'll take on other people's work, I'll do more than I should, because I have this need for acceptance. I need my boss to tell me that I did a good job or I'll have this anxiety -- this incompleteness, that no matter how hard I try, I can't hit." This is a succinct description of a lot of stuff Foo sees herself going through in the first section of the book as well (which leads her to her diagnosis of C-PTSD), so it's very validating for Foo to find her classmate also saying it.

My parents never beat us. I think they spanked us once or twice when we were younger, but that really doesn't register in my memory (or my sister's) as anything particularly bad. ...But I think I need to say that my sister could have written exactly what the classmate in the previous paragraph said. (Not me. I don't have the same scars from childhood that she does, for several reasons, although that's not the same as saying I wasn't affected.)

One of Foo's sections also looks at the way dysfunction and trauma propagate over generations, and... yeah.

Wow, writing this is hard, and I'm going to punt the rest of it. There's a tension -- which Foo does address in the book -- between a bunch of things, of recognizing that Foo's story is so much worse than the story of anyone I personally knew as a child, of recognizing that this doesn't invalidate what someone else went through if it wasn't "as bad" as that, of recognizing the feeling of relief when Foo's story was worse, of recognizing the sinking feeling that I could understand some parts of it, of recognizing that my sister and I had some experiences that were very different from each other and some of which were the same, of recognizing that there were a lot of things my parents did that were very very good, of recognizing that there were a lot of things my parents did that were not so good, of recognizing that there were things my parents did that might even have been more helpful than not in my case and the same things being extremely devastating in the long run to my sister, of recognizing that I don't want to display my family's baggage, of recognizing that it might be important to do so.

Anyway, it's a book that I'm glad I read, that's worth reading, and part of what's worth reading about it is that it's so very Asian-American. I'd love to know what other people thought of this book. But I certainly would warn that... it's a lot.

Saturn Run (Sanford, Ctein) - 3/5 - I forget why I read this one, though I think there was some RL reason. It reminded me a little of Project Hail Mary, if most of the science in PHM (except, I guess, the orbital mechanics and some of the engineering, which they say they worked out carefully and I'm too lazy to check) was replaced by Political Thriller Hijinks, and if all the touching and sweet parts of PHM were replaced by manly machismo. The idea is that aliens have been found at Saturn, and China and the US promptly get into a tense space race to get there. The aliens themselves are treated as almost an afterthought to Tense Country Relationships. I honestly greatly preferred PHM's idealistic "all countries would work together with no problem!" to this book's "The USA must win at all costs and that's a happy ending!"

Verity (Hoover) - 3-/5 - I read this because of rachelmanija's review saying This Is Bonkers, and I guess I'm a sucker for bonkers?

It is, indeed, bonkers. It starts out with a man falling into NYC traffic and his head getting crushed "like a grape" in front of our POV character, the writer Lowen. No one apparently thinks this is odd, except for Lowen, who is at least upset that her shirt has blood all over it because she has a job interview. A good-looking guy, Jeremy, trades shirts with her so she can get to the interview. (He is A-OK with the guy getting crushed like a grape because... his daughter drowned?? Because that's so similar??)

I had previously read all the spoilers in rachelmanija's post (which I don't regret at all, although someone else who wanted to revel in the BONKERS might) and had I not, I would have assumed that Lowen and Jeremy were about to team up to investigate the dead guy's murder. (I even had a suspect, her slimy literary agent and ex-lover.)

Spoiler: the book is not about that at all! In point of fact what happens is that when she goes to her job interview, it is in fact with Jeremy! Who is married to the best-selling author Verity, who is in a coma (which is a secret because ?? I don't know why??) and Jeremy wants Lowen to ghostwrite more of her work. She moves into their mansion (Verity was a very bestselling author) and spooky/tense things start happening, including Lowen finding Verity's journal, which is, uh, in large part erotica featuring Verity and Jeremy, but also starts getting more sinister.

A couple of my notes from this book that I passed on to rachelmanija while reading (if you do read this, I highly recommend lining up someone whom you can splutter to when bonkers things happen):

His eyes match the tie he just shoved in his pocket. Chartreuse.
His eyes... Are chartreuse?? Wtf??

stubble on his jaw. It was the perfect length to scratch my thighs.
The... What?

This was a deeply weird book! It was compelling, I give it props for that; I finished it very quickly. But also bonkers!

The Cartographers (Shepherd) - 2/5 - of all of these I regret reading this one the most, because I feel stupider now than I did before I read it. (I only finished it because my sister wanted to talk about it, and it turns out she wanted to know whether I would agree with her that it was Not All That. I did.) Plus which at least Verity and Saturn Run were compelling, but this one was so boring that I would just sort of skip over pages just to try to finish it, and it still took me forever. And also all the characters are somehow both cardboard and unlikeable.

Also, this book makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

What would you do?? (Spoilers, but you weren't going to read this, were you?)

The plot idea here is that the main character, Nell, a thirtysomething washed-up cartographer, finds out that her parents and her parents' friends (all cartography grad students) found out (when she was age 3 or so) that there are these maps that have a town drawn on them that does not exist "in real life" -- but then if you have the map with you, that town actually does exist!

Now listen. If you found out that there's this whole extra town that exists just because it was printed on a map, what would be your reaction?
A) Whoa! Does this work for all maps??
B) If it doesn't work for all maps, what are the conditions on the new town or room or whatever showing up?? Is this just for printed maps? Is it just for maps produced by a certain company?? If the latter, what's so special about that company??
C) Is this violating physical principles in creating something out of nothing, and how does that even work?? Is there magic involved? Are printing presses magic????
D) Hey, does this mean that if you had a map of the solar system and you put a big city on Mars, that then that city would exist?? <-- actual response by 7-year-old when his parent was ranting about this plot twist

If you answered any of these things, congratulations, you have more logical or at the very least more interesting thought processes than the characters in the book, whose response is to go hang out in the new town that was created by the map for a few months while they make a very detailed map of that town. Because something something show the world something? Even though I have no idea what making a detailed map of the town adds?? Even though I can tell you the world would care less about a map of the town than they would about the fact of existence of the town??

And no, we never find out what conditions are for new towns showing up, and we never find out if it's magic or what, and we never find out whether any random person could draw a new town on a map and magically have it show up! (It seems like this is true, in the sense that it happens several times with secret rooms, etc.)

Really nothing the characters do make any sense. One of the members of the grad student group, Wally, goes rogue and obsessed, and there's a fire which engulfs a lot of these maps, in which Nell's mom dies. Except she doesn't actually die. She stays behind in the town and lets everyone else (except Nell's dad, but INCLUDING NELL) think she is dead, because she thinks... Wally will come to his senses if he thinks she is dead? Only this doesn't actually work, so it's not clear why she stays there for, like, 30 years?? And then when it seems like 20-something Nell might find the Map of Doom, Nell's dad basically browbeats her into losing her job and blackballs her in the cartography industry because...???? something something this would protect her?? instead of actually telling her what was going on?? NO SENSE.

Dark Matter (Crouch) 3-/5 - One where my sister wanted me to read it to tell her whether the quantum mechanics stuff in it was correct. (I told her the answer before I read a single word of it. The answer is, unless it is a physics professor writing it, the quantum mechanics stuff is never correct, and sometimes not even then. To be fair, this one at least name-checked the Many-Worlds hypothesis (the book is an extended riff on alternate universes) and even had the word "decoherence" in it, which is much better than I'm used to!) Although I don't recommend it, it was certainly much more compelling than Cartographers, and some of the alternate-universe hijinks were sort of interesting although it never got particularly deep. (Also content warning for AU's with extremely deadly pandemic, AU where everyone died of starvation, etc.) And the writer likes to write in that thriller style which means there are lots of --
Single phrases.
One phrase per line.
Or even less than that.
Word.
Because this builds tension.
Or something.
Also, there's a question of "which AU self is the 'right' one?" and the book's answer is "the right one is the one who is narrating the book," which is hardly at all satisfying.

So people keep giving me books to read and I have been so way behind on posting about them, so uh I'm just going to post something quick about a few, even though they deserve much longer posts.

-The Girl from Rawblood (Catriona Ward) - 4/5 - this one part of the Catriona Ward kick which is all the fault of rachelmanija. I really liked this one! I felt that Sundial, while compelling, also didn't invest me overmuch in the characters, except for Callie, and that took a while -- but this book I felt both had compelling characters and a deep compassion for all of them. I read this in conjunction with rachelmanija over chat (we'd make sure we were synched for each chapter) which was super fun, although it did mean that occasionally we'd figure out plot twists ahead of time that I'd never have figured out on my own (since we were having twice the amount of epiphanies/making twice the number of connections that we would have by ourselves, as well as discussing after every chapter instead of my barrelling straight through). But also ALL THE WARNINGS (most flagrantly, content note for early-20th-century insane asylums and also there is a very graphic bit with rabbit dissection that both of us skipped -- lots of other terrible stuff too, but those were the ones that were so bad that I, who have basically no triggers or squicks, flinched). This was also a good book to read with someone else because we could stop ourselves from reading chapters late at night. (...There are definitely chapters you don't want to have read late at night and be trying to sleep after reading. It doesn't have a terrible awful no-good ending -- in fact, there's a lot of grace to the ending -- but the book itself is a Gothic horror book.) rachelmanija's much better review is here.

-Josephus, The Jew of Rome, Josephus and the Emperor (Lion Feuchtwanger) - 4/5 - selenak mentioned these as part of her never-ending quest to feed me books and history I am ignorant of, and I was like, wait, the Josephus of Antiquities of the Jews? Sign me up! (We read bits of Josephus in my college Bible class, and I'd always meant to read more of his work.) I found these quite interesting -- Josephus, the titular and main character of the saga, had a much more interesting life than I had realized (I knew basically nothing about him except that he'd written that one book), and Feuchtwanger makes him a complicated character who can sometimes be frankly unlikeable at times, but whom I found always fascinating. Feuchtwanger was Jewish, and these books were written in the 1930's and 1940's... much of the books is concerned with the Jews of that time and their relationship with the Roman Empire, both as a whole (e.g., the wars, as well as various Roman policy) and in individual cases (Josephus himself being the prime example of someone whose life, as Feuchtwanger portrayed it, was continually clashing between his Jewish identity and his Roman identity).

It also brings up nascent Christianity and Josephus' investigation into Christianity's roots (which selenak told me is the only reason why Josephus' work was saved in the first place, as opposed to his rival Justus, who is a minor but important character in the book (I hilariously was convinced that if there was a fandom for this book, Justus/Josephus would be the juggernaut ship -- there are a lot of very shippy tropes and language surrounding their relationship) whom we only know about because Josephus mentioned him in his books). And at one point it raises the question, what's the role of deceit in religion? In the sense of, is it okay if a religion (Christianity, in this case) is founded on a lie? Or on stories that may have some truth but other parts of it are not truthful? (Uh, doubly relevant for me, which is why it struck me so profoundly even though it's a quite small part of the book.) Anyway -- there's a lot going on in these books, more than the... margin of this post will contain. I haven't even gotten to the great plot thread with my fave Lucia in the third book! :P Anyway, very interestingly chewy books, I thought! Perhaps more interesting to someone who is already interested in the subject material (I was interested in both Josephus and the meta questions Feuchtwanger brings up).

(His book The Oppermanns is supposed to be re-released this week in English. (The link goes to a 2001 print version but I believe the print is being rereleased this week with the e-book.) This is a contemporary novel about a German Jewish family during Hitler's rise to power. I'm going to check it out, when I surface from Yuletide-related reading...)

-Luckenbooth (Jenni Fagan) - 3+/5. This was an odd and interesting book, courtesy of a rec by cenozoicsynapsid. I am not quite sure I liked it so much as I admired it -- it's a story of, well, various events that take place in a single building in Edinburgh during the 20th century, in a sort of dystopian-magic AU of our world, and it's doing some interesting things structurally, with each of three sections being the weaving together of stories of three different sets of people in slightly different but overlapping eras (each section is in a distinct time era and has its own arc): so, nine different sets of people. This sometimes worked well and sometimes not as well -- some sets were interesting stories, both for the way they intersected with the through-line and in their own right (the medium! the miner who is afraid of daylight!), though there was at least one set (perhaps not surprisingly, the one with William Burroughs -- if any of the others were people I should have heard of, I don't know it) where I just didn't care about the set of people in those chapters. This was definitely one of those books where I had no idea what was going on for a while (I'm still not sure I figured out everything), and I do enjoy that. I also feel like it was odd enough that I'm not sure I recommend it! But I'll probably put it on my Hugo ballot, because it needs more challenging material and less The Same Five Authors Over And Over Again, not that I am bitter. This one also has all the warnings! graphic murder, rape, etc.

So I read some YA for the Lodestar.

Victories Greater than Death (Anders) - 3/5 - Girl grows up on Earth knowing she's not actually a human, but the avatar of a great alien hero who will someday go to space and be great and heroic. The one recognizable as YA because the fight against terrible evil etc. is just about as important as whether your crush likes you back. It was readable, unlike the last Anders where I quit about a third of the way through, and I liked it -- just very YA.

Iron Widow (Zhao) - 3/5 - Retelling of the rise of Empress Wu Zetian only with a bunch more giant robots. This is the one recognizable as YA because you can tell the good guys by the fact that they are the only ones spouting enlightened twenty-first century viewpoints, while everyone else is really, really into subjugating the wimmenfolk in archaic Bad Guy ways that are definitely not sympathetic at all, and if you ever feel the faintest inclination to sympathize with anyone who isn't one of the heroes, that's the signal for the narrative to make sure that person does something even worse. Meanwhile, the heroes also do bad things, but hey, it's just because people were mean to them first, and at least they're not subjugating women! (I do think this part is going somewhere and is not necessarily considered good by the narrative, but we won't see until the next book. Relatedly, I should mention it ends on a cliffhanger.)

I should say that this was a quite compelling book -- Zhao is not a bad writer, and this was not at all a bad first book in terms of plotting and pacing. But in terms of characterization and worldbuilding, what I wanted it to be was either She Who Became the Sun with giant robots, where everyone had more consistently period-ish viewpoints, or something that leaned into the giant robots part and had everyone be super with-it futuristic internet cyber personalities. Either would have been fine!
But what I actually got was some sort of weird mishmash of the two, where everyone clomped around with giant robots and internet social media, but also literal bound feet, and it was hard for my head to reconcile all of it. Even when you don't count the part where I kept getting thrown out that the good guys all sounded like they had come from tumblr and everyone else sounded like generic One-Note Bad Guys.

Chaos on Catnet (Kritzer) - 3++/5 - Sequel to Catfishing on Catnet, but with a much better title. Hijinks with Catnet's AI and their friends which rapidly turn into a thriller. This is the one recognizable as YA because the YA character downloads a completely random social media app in the first few chapters just because a classmate tells her to. (I have definitely done my share of dumb things as a teenager, so I could have rolled with this -- except that with Steph's and her mom's history, I cannot believe her mom never told her not to download random social media apps?? Without even clearing them with her first?? Like, my kids know they're not supposed to do that and we have never had someone after us, much less for years.)

Anyway, I loved this book, which continues to have the comfort-read strengths of Catfishing in a very strong friend group and a very strong celebration of friendship, both internet and otherwise, as well as is an extremely compelling thriller -- and adds more strengths in the varied and awesome adult characters, and I was so glad when Steph finally told her mom about what was going on. The book ended really abruptly, though! Not in a cliffhangery way at all, just in a "OK, we won over the big bad, now we'll have a couple of pages of epilogue to wrap up, the end!" and she had managed to ratchet the tension high enough (she's really good at that!) that my heart was still racing and I was still all "so is anyone still after them?? Is something else going to happen?? Oh... it's the afterword? Oh, I guess it must be all OK then."

Definitely I would recommend reading Catfishing first, so as not to spoil it; if you don't like Catfishing, there's no reason to pick this one up, as it's more of the same, but if you do, this one is good too! (with the mild caveats above)

I have in fact been doing my Hugo homework in bits and pieces, even though Babylon 5 is way more compelling (btw, I am now at the beginning of S4, aaaaaaaaaaah)

Fireheart Tiger (de Bodard) - I found this piece on princesses and power struggles and a fire elemental more readable than her Fallen series, and all of those things are relevant to my interests! But it didn't really stick with me after I'd finished.

The Past Is Red (Valente) - Okay, um - this is actually pretty good! It's about the post-climate-apocalyptic society that forms on the Pacific Garbage Patch, which by this point has melded into a large island, and Tetley, a girl who grows up there. It's clearly fabulist/fantastical and not supposed to at all be in any way a realistic depiction of dystopia (say I to the part of me that kept going "but it wouldn't work that way!"). It's about optimism and hope and also about the dark sides of those things, especially when they intersect with the dark parts of the human psyche -- but Tetley herself is clearheaded as well as hopeful.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Chambers) - In this novella, Dex, a tea monk (a monk who serves tea while people talk to him about their problems) meets a wild robot, Mosscap. They go on a long hike. That's pretty much it. I think I was supposed to get more out of it than that, but I didn't really. Dex seems to angst a lot for reasons that just didn't resonate with me at all. I think something in me is just not temperamentally suited for Chambers?

Oh gosh, I have to rank these now, huh.
Elder Race > Past > Spindle > Fireheart > Grass > Psalm, I guess. IDK. I liked Elder Race the most, but besides that I feel like it's even more the vagaries of my personal opinion than usual. This category I found kind of workmanlike -- I liked a lot of these stories and felt like they weren't doing anything that I found super interesting or innovative, which is something I always like to see for the Hugo.

2/5. This is a rare ranking for me, as usually I don't finish books I dislike. And I would absolutely not have finished this book either had I not been reading it for a friend (who thinks her daughter may be on the spectrum). It's one of those irritating half-memoir-half-pop-nonfiction books. (I first wrote "pop science" but I don't think it rises to that level; O'Toole occasionally cites a paper but it's mostly her pontificating.) I think this book could be reasonably useful for a person with ASD who is exactly like O'Toole, or who has a child with ASD who is exactly like her, but wow am I not that person.

( I have Feelings about this book. I think if it had just been a straight memoir I would have liked it rather more. )

Project Hail Mary (Weir) 3+/5. D told me when I started this book that he'd heard it was Weir returning to form, and then I knew exactly what to expect!

And indeed this was a delightful book for a science nerd, full of delighted "Here's how the science would work for this!" infodumps and Solving Problems through Science!! Yeah!! It's basically as if a Randall Munroe book (or his blog) came to life and I am here for that. As you might expect from that description, there isn't any characterization or meaningful relationships or anything (with one exception, mentioned later on), but eh, that's for a different book.

One nice thing about the lack of characterization is that even though the Macguffin is that humanity is faced with eventual apocalypse that will just get worse and worse over time, it didn't really ping to me as a depressing book, but rather a joyful one, because what's the point of a Solving Problems Through Science book if you don't actually solve the problems, and everyone was definitely having a lot of fun with the science along the way.

Wow, though, I had to laugh at how simplified everything that wasn't ~Science!!~ was! If humanity were faced with mortal peril in ~30 years, by all means all countries would all work together without any fuss and they'd give one totally well-meaning person world-dictator-like powers to do whatever needed to be done to save humanity, and, yeah, it would totally work great like that, sure!

( Maybe mild spoilers? )

But yeah, this was definitely one of those books where if you were not warned ahead of time and if you weren't feeling like reading a book like the one this was, I can definitely see not liking it. Fortunately I was both warned and OK with reading this!

Light from Uncommon Stars (Aoki) - 3+/5. Katrina Ngyuen is a teen queer trans girl who runs away from her abusive family. She has a talent for the violin that attracts the attention of a great violin teacher, Shizuka Satomi, who's called "the Queen of Hell" for good reason, that good reason being that she has literally made a compact with hell that she will deliver them students who would trade their soul for being top-ranked violinists. Also, during the course of the book, they meet and befriend a starfaring family, the Tran family, who escape from interstellar war and buy a donut shop, from which they both make donuts and build an interstellar gate in the giant donut sign that is outside of the donut shop.

...As you can see, this is a book that goes a lot of places! And I enjoyed it! And there is a lot of good food in it, and a lot of music. I particularly liked this part:

Katrina: I have something super important to tell you, and you might not like me after I've said it.
Shizuka: OMG. You're going to tell me that you already have a violin teacher, don't you?? UGH. That's the WORST.
Katrina: What? No, I'm trans.
Shizuka: Okay. But seriously, do you already have a violin teacher?? Because that would suck, but we can work around that!
Katrina: Did you hear me?? I'm trans!
Shizuka: Well, yes, I heard you. But you were implying this was something negative...?

Because I just love that, and I know people who are like that -- even if they didn't understand exactly, it wouldn't occur to them to be negative, because what's important is the music. (And if they have to grab their student away from another teacher, haha.) Which is a lot of what the book is about, in fact.

I do think I feel like there is something about the book that feels shallow to me. I think there is so much going on that it doesn't seem to be delving into any of it very deeply, maybe. Personally, I would have loved more about the violin-competition world and the personalities and relationships and cross-currents involved, and I felt like I got just enough of it that I was like "...and that's it?? But you could have done so much more with it??"

And then there was Tamiko, who had the potential to be a really interesting character (she is in the running for Student to be Delivered to Hell, only for Shizuka to become interested in Katrina instead) and it looked like she was going to have an interesting arc but... then she didn't.

Anyway, I did like it! I think it's just that it wanted to be a poem and a fairy tale instead of a novel (it really is kind of a fairy tale in the way that Katrina and Shizuka find each other and help each other), and that wasn't what I thought I was going to read? That is, I think the majority of the difference between my reaction to Uncommon Stars and Project Hail Mary is simply that I knew exactly what I was getting into with PHM, heh.

So Hugo nominees have come out! And I have read all the short stories and started on the novelettes, but got pulled away by a bunch of holds coming in from the library for the novels -- watch this space :)

Short stories:

“Mr. Death”, by Alix E. Harrow (Apex Magazine, Feb 2021) - Feel-good story about Death's minions. Sometimes one just wants the feel-good story, okay? :) I liked this one, though I will say that it's not one that I see myself rereading.

“Proof by Induction”, by José Pablo Iriarte (Uncanny Magazine, May/Jun 2021) - The conceit here of a person talking to a recording of his dead relative and working out (or not) issues with relative is not super new (Compassionate Simulation is a powerful recent take on it), but gosh I really liked the academic/mathematician twist on it, and how it interplayed with the themes of the story.

“The Sin of America”, by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny Magazine, Mar/Apr 2021) - Having been burned by Space Opera, I forgot that Valente could write powerfully, but yes, she can. Valente made me have a lot of feelings and thoughts about the process of redemption and what we mean by it. Now, I will say that the central conceit was maybe... done better and more subtly by Shirley Jackson? But I still thought it was an interesting story.

“Tangles”, by Seanan McGuire (Magicthegathering.com: Magic Story, Sep 2021) - I think that McGuire's stuff works better for me when it doesn't try so hard to be ~profound~ or ~numinous~. I really liked Middlegame! But this story... didn't do it for me. I popped right out of my suspension of disbelief when, in the middle of a story that seems like it's supposed to be reminiscient of high fantasy, there was a parenthetical clause about the pronouns and gender of a tree's dryad. (I mean, it's great that McGuire is cognizant of gender questions and so on! But wow that was a weird tone shift, and didn't seem to be at all relevant for the rest of the story.)

“Unknown Number”, by Blue Neustifter (Twitter, Jul 2021) - This story, told all in text bubbles, is great and has interesting things to say about identity -- just, I feel a little like the author got to elide most of the hard parts of telling a story due to the creative format, so I'm not rating it quite as highly as the other ones I liked.

“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”, by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Mar/Apr 2021) - I feel like this one was tailor-made for my id?? Pinsker is super hit and miss for me. I've read a couple by Pinsker where I think they were reasonably good stories but she didn't tell the story I wanted, and at least one where she actually wrote a story I wanted to read. But this one is the story I never knew I wanted but I really did, told entirely through a wikipedia-like message board where a few really committed internet fans are commenting on a ballad. It's everything I love about the internet, how sometimes you find a few people who really like something you also really like and form a tiny virtual community in a corner of the internet (hello all of my DW friends! you guys are the best!! so glad you talk to me about SF and Hugos and opera and crochet and 18th-century history and all the other completely random stuff around here), and also it's about people geeking out about a ballad, I mean, this was made for me :)
If you liked e.g. Wylding Hall, I think you'll like this story. (why yes, rachelmanija, you should read this)

1. Oaken
2. Proof
3. Unknown NUmber
4. Sin
5. Death
6. Tangles

So like everyone else I've been spending a lot of time reading about horrific current events, but also I read three novels published in the last year. All of which are going to go on my Hugo ballot, whee! Some brief thoughts:

1. So I read She Who Became the Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan) (which I think has an amazing title) and I have a lot of inarticulate thoughts about how when you take the genre of "secondary-world fantasy books about unconventional characters going up against the political system" and rate them for soul-crushing-ness, the spectrum ranges from The Goblin Emperor (happy shiny) to, on the other end, the Baru Cormorant books (so utterly and crushingly depressing that I still haven't tackled the series past the first book -- well, I might have if I hadn't heard that the second book was even more depressing than the first). This book is, hm, solidly on the latter end of that scale; you can see everyone kind of careening towards disasters of their own making, even if not all the disasters happen in this book (there is going to be a sequel). But there's something incandescent about the kid who takes her dead lout of a brother's name and glorious destiny, and grows up to fool not only almost everyone around her, but also Heaven and Its Mandate, which saves it from the utter depressingness of Baru Cormorant. (It's still not at all clear to me how seriously we are supposed to take Heaven -- Zhu obviously takes it seriously, with her internal understanding of Heaven as a major character arc, and Heaven's Mandate is a Thing. But I don't know what is going on with Heaven objectively, and I wonder if it will be a plot point in the next book.) I also really appreciated about Zhu (and the other characters and Parker-Chan), how she approaches gender in such a utilitarian fashion; it's woven in to everything else, especially Zhu's incandescent ambition.

2. I read The Unraveling (Rosenbaum) based mostly on seekingferret's rec -- warning, his rec has spoilers for, among other things, the most charming bit of the book, which fortunately I missed because I only read the first half of his review before reading the book. And, well, this is the kind of book where I want it to get a Hugo because it's so thought-provoking and playing with so many kinds of different things -- it's a world, probably descended (eta: by which I mean colonized) from our own, where each inhabitant has several different bodies (so the POV can change from one body to another very separated in space without it changing the character POV), where babies are assigned at birth to be a Staid (more cuddly and intellectual) or a Vail (more violent and emotional, into fighting and sex), where everyone's connected in a sort of super-social-media network, where families are made up of a number of adults whose neighbors vote on whether they're good enough parents to have another kid. It's a lot and Rosenbaum keeps all those balls in the air. (The Staid and Vail stuff was kind of hilarious to me because I'd just finished the Parker-Chan and admired how it thought about gender as an organic outgrowth of everything else, whereas Rosenbaum flatly was all "yeah, gender? Let's put those thoughts out there front and center," and Rosenbaum made me like that too :P ) And I kept thinking that with all of this, and with all of the strangeness that Rosenbaum delineates, it's still such a human book -- the conflict of Fift with zir family, how they both think they're doing the best thing while escalating their conflict, was very familiar.

(seekingferret talks about its debt to Le Guin and Delany, which yes! and to Joyce which I've not read so can't comment on, but to me it also reminded me a lot of John Brunner, especially his Stand on Zanzibar and its collections of different reactions and different conversations, but much more joyful than that book, of course!)

I totally would vote for this to win the Hugos over everything else I've read this year except maybe The Last Graduate (which is an incredibly different kind of book), and yet I'm... not totally sure I'd recommend it to some of you? Maybe even most of you? It's just dense and thinky in a kind of way that I think is really appealing to some people and not to others.

3. Black Water Sister (Zen Cho) - I felt about this book sort of how I would have felt about Crazy Rich Asians if it were well written, not about crazy rich people, and a fantasy. By which I mean that there was a lot of it that really resonated with me. Which was good and bad -- Jess reminded me a lot of younger!me, which mostly made me feel seen (great!), but also was a problem insomuch as there was a large slow stretch in the middle of the book where she was angsting about her parents and living up to their expectations and keeping her girlfriend a secret and so on, and I just... really didn't want to hear about it because I'd lived it already, I felt there was no need for me to redo the whole thing. (Details different, of course, but the general principles the same.) And I loved all the family relationships, although thinking about it now the book was honestly rather light on in-depth relationships (the love interest is long-distance and never on-screen, the other same-age characters never have enough interaction to become friends, the family relationships are basically characterized by all family members trying to hide secrets from other family members, which again, yeah, relatable, but ugh). But after that slow middle stretch it was great and very compelling, with at least one development that was set up well and that I totally missed until it happened. If all three of these were on a Hugo ballot, I'd probably vote for this under the other two, but only because it wasn't quite as mind-bendy; I still liked it a lot and thought it did good things.

4. I didn't read this for the first time recently (although I did reread it recently!) but just gonna rec again the STET fic Rephrase? again, and unless cenozoicsynapsid objects I'm gonna put it on my Hugo ballot under short story. (It's worth reading STET and then reading Rephrase? -- both are pretty short.) Content note of child death strongly alluded to (but not on screen, not graphic) for both, and additional content note for Rephrase? that it is heartbreaking, chilling, and also funny.