Riverland, by Fran Wilde

Ohhhhhhhh ouch. This children's book is a hard one to read. It's about two sisters' experience of living in an abusive household, their frantic struggle to follow all the rules perfectly so that nothing will go wrong, and their journey into a portal world they find underneath their bed where everything's breaking and they're expected to fix it. This is a masterfully written book, where the themes all tie into each other beautifully, and each part of the story fits. And it's heartbreaking.

I'm sure there's kids out there who are living through things like this who will find it a comfort to read a book that validates their experiences. It's so awful that this kind of thing can be a reality for too many families. I cared so much about Mike and Eleanor, and all the ways they're so clearly hurting because of the abuse. ( brief spoiler )

2020 Hugo Award: Lodestar (YA)

Alrighty, next up on the Hugos ranking docket for me is the YA category. Technically speaking not a Hugo (it's the Lodestar Award) but voted for on the same ballot, so hey.

This was a strong category! A good proportion of the books in this one are worthy and admirable, even if not all of them are perfectly to my taste.

Here's my final ranking, with links in the titles to full reviews for the books I finished:

1. Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge
Amazingly inventive and captivating and just great all around and I love it.

2. Riverland, by Fran Wilde
Superbly written and effectively emotional.

3. Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer
A fun, quick, easy read.

4. Minor Mage, by T. Kingfisher
Good and grounded and kind of upsetting (in an appropriate way).

5. Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee
Doesn't take the dangers faced by its preteen protagonist seriously enough, but an interesting setting/worldbuilding.

6. The Wicked King, by Holly Black
I read the first couple chapters and the last couple chapters and it's just not up my alley. It's about a mortal girl in Faerie and being involved in the various complicated backstabbing politics of that realm; so far so promising. But: a) as I feared there don't seem to be any characters I actually like, AND b) the mortal girl doesn't actually appear to be....very good....at the kinds of necessary machinations and manipulations. Which means that I don't have any reason to want to hang out in her head, if I don't like her and can't even get pleasure from watching her be really good at being bad. So I didn't bother reading the rest.