sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: queer

This book started out SO strong, with a bunch of space nuns living in a living spaceship grown from a species of slug, each of the nuns with their own personalities and foibles and strengths and weaknesses that make living together in a small, isolated community a fun challenge. And it was so good at this!!! So good!!!!!! But then we went and had plot happen.

( cut for spoilers )

I read this book on the sales pitch that it's a Jane Eyre retelling featuring Jane/Bertha, which like, obviously I was all over that! In practice, although there are many things about this book that are delightful, there are aspects that make it not quiiiiiite all hang together as a coherent narrative to me, but it's still definitely worth the read..

( this will require spoilers to discuss )

A perfectly nice, sweet, fun m/m historical romance novella, featuring a sailor and his prize agent. Charming overall, and I love the family, especially Charlotte, and how Elie is so obviously gone on Augie, and I like how matter of fact the book is about Elie's Judaism and Augie's respectfulness about Elie and his family's religion. But although I enjoyed reading it, I wasn't as moved by it as I have been by some of Lerner's other books. And I was pretty frustrated by how "but what does the fiancee think" was the big Unanswered Mystery throughout that needed to be solved before the two of them could get together, and especially didn't like that they got together BEFORE Augie broke it off with the fiancee. Tbh I think the fiancee seems interesting! I wanted to have seen more of her!

Anyway reading this book reminded me that I need to get around to The Wife in the Attic at some point, since the heroine of that book is mentioned briefly in this one!

Remember how I was unmoved by the first two books in the Scholmance series? Well joke's on me, this is the third and final book and I was moved! I nearly gave up on it multiple times ("why am I reading this book when I didn't like the last two in the series?" I thought to myself, as I rolled my eyes over the opening section that was basically nothing but extended nothing-happens-but-mourning-Orion scenes) and only persevered because a friend of mine really wanted to talk about it with me, and I'm glad I did!

The first two books in the series were, ultimately, a) school stories, and b) monster-fighting stories, and I was bored. This one is about what you do with yourself when you survive past a point you never thought you'd survive, how you figure out who you are and what you want to do with yourself, and making it happen. I was into it!

Also now that we're out of the school, we got to explore some of the worldbuilding in more detail, and some of it was genuinely interesting. And I got more into the female friendships that were portrayed. And the main character, El, turns out to be bisexual and had a very interesting thing going on with another girl who she had complicated feelings about, which I loved. And we got to see more of El's complicated family dynamics!

HOWEVER. I loved all this.......which means that I'm even more frustrated about the things that I feel the book fell down on. I was invested! You had me, Novik! And I was let down!

( yeah, significant spoilers follow )

The third book in the Locked Tomb ~~trilogy~~ quartet! I had to reread the first two books because like, this series may be great but it is also MEGA confusing and I already struggle enough with remembering what happened in previous books when the new book in a series comes out! This time I went into Gideon the Ninth armed with an illustrated guide to all the cavaliers and necromancers, which house each belongs to, and what various names/titles they all go by. This helped ENORMOUSLY in being able to follow the dang thing, and I had a much better experience than my first go. And then, having been able to follow the first book made following Harrow the Ninth much easier too! I knew who Ianthe was, for example, and could understand her character better, and was capable of having opinions about her!

So then I felt as prepared as I could be to go into Nona the Ninth.

And it was GREAT. Was it also confusing? Yes, absolutely. Being confused is the Normal State Of Being when interacting with these books, in my humble opinion. But I understood enough! And oh gosh there are many amazing things about it!

Except that the first thing I did upon finishing reading it was go to my rss reader and read through all the tumblr posts, so now I kind of feel like all the important things have already been said by other people, which makes it much harder to write a review. Oops.

But I cared so much about so many characters, and I have so much admiration for Tamsyn Muir's writing (she uses words so deliciously, and also is great at creating imagery!), and I cannot WAIT to find out what happens in Alecto the Ninth!

Ohhhhh wow I was really captivated by this book! I loooooooved all the characters, and it did such an amazing job of being situated in a very specific place at a very specific time. San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1950's is so integral to the main character Lily's experiences, and it feels so lived-in to the reader - as does the Telegraph Club, the lesbian bar Lily sneaks away to.

And Lily's interest in and attraction to women (and especially to Kath!) feels so lived-in and grounded and alive too.

And there's so many other people in Lily's life too, and I love the complexities of all the other characters and their relationships with her! Her contentious best-friendship with Shirley, how much of a staple it's been for her all her life, and how she can barely bring herself to admit the ways in which that friendship stifles her and holds her back. Her aunt Judy, who's so supportive of her career dreams and her interest in science and space, but does not react well to Lily being a homosexual. All the other lesbians she meets at the Telegraph Club - Tommy, who first represents to her what she's been longing for but is kind of alarming in person, and Lana, who doesn't know Lily hardly at all but is still so welcoming and supportive of her when she most needs it even though it's not a good time for Lana either, and Paula, who's friendly at the club but acts as if they're strangers when they meet in regular life, and so many more. The lesbians are so good!

And of course Lily's identity as a Chinese American is just as vital to her experience as being a lesbian. She's constantly being othered and exoticised by the white people she meets, and her family is in real danger of deportation due to trumped-up accusations of communism, and her deep connection to her community in Chinatown is both overbearing and life-giving to her, and Chinese food is clearly hugely important to her.

Everything is connected, and everything is a part of Lily discovering who she is and what's important to her and how she wants to live her life. And I loved her so much!

My one and only frustration with the book is the pacing of the ending. I think it's the right ending to the book! But the pacing was all off, and the end felt so abrupt that it kind of left me feeling like I'd stumbled over the curb at the edge of a sidewalk instead of guided smoothly to the emotional resolution. I get it, endings are VERY hard to write, and I don't know what I'd tell the author to do differently, but I do wish the ending had been smoother.

But honestly that's a pretty small complaint given how wonderful the rest of the book was. And also the book as a whole is so clearly written by a more skilled author than the only other book I've read by Malinda Lo, her debut Ash, and I'm always delighted to see that kind of real growth in an author.

All in all: I loved it!!!

Ohhhhhh boy. Where to start. Where to start with this. I suppose I'll start by saying that I think this is a very well-meaning book that is probably great for people who are looking for a specific kind of thing in their literature, but that person is emphatically not me and I am going to put a WHOLE lot of words of complaint after this.

( cut for a) significant spoilers, b) me being a grump, and c) discussion of rape )

I recognize that this is the third book in a trilogy and I have not read the first two, but this is what the hugo packet provided unto me for judgement for the best series nomination, and the first book had a lot of holds on it at my local library, so here we are!

I'd heard of this series on and off since the first book came out, but never bothered putting it on my to-read list, because it didn't seem like the kind of thing that I would vibe with.

But the hugos get me to read all kinds of things I wouldn't ordinarily prioritise so here we are! There are some great things about this book, and I love that it's a book about ordinary people doing community activist work to achieve a better world for the oppressed persons in their country, with a background queer romance. And a book that recognizes that a monarchy is bad because complete power is bad, EVEN IF the monarch seems willing to allow for some movement in the direction of reforms! But....I guess my main complaint is that Soulstar felt too simplistic. A lot of things were just brushed over, that should have been issues, I felt like!

There was not enough attention given to Robin and her spouse Zelind trying to rebuild a relationship after 20 years apart while Zelind was imprisoned and mistreated; they have, like, one fight but other than that things are basically fine and remarkably little attention is given to their relationship, or to Zelind's healing.

How did a group of activists manage to organise a country-wide analog election, in a country that's never had public elections and with a government that's against them, with only one month's lead time???? No attention is given to this either, or to any of the other difficult logistics problems that are inherent in the things the activists are doing. Robin is good at organising things, and that's the only thing we hear. What do she and the rest of the folks she works with on this actually DO? Who knows!

How did Zelind manage to come up with a non-witch-based source of aether SO quickly and easily, when this is clearly something so desirable but nobody's ever come up with it before? Is it really that easy? Or is Zelind unusually perceptive and bringing something to the table nobody else is able to in order to figure out the answer? It is not made clear.

And then the happy ending where they succeed at all their goals feels unearned, because I never really felt the truth of how hard it would have been to achieve the things they achieved! I felt more like "well, yes, obviously this is how things would end, because it's that kind of book" rather than feeling like "YEAH!!!! They did it!!"

It's fine! It's a fine book! But. Eh.

I don't know. A lot of things felt like they just kind of....happened, instead of feeling like they had the weight of reality. I wanted to feel like even if the reader doesn't actually know everything, the background context DOES exist and does make sense.

I did consider whether the things that were a problem for me in this book were due to me not having read the first two books in this trilogy, but from what I understand, each of the books has been from a different character's perspective, and each character had different priorities, and the first two were MUCH less about revolution than this one was. So I don't think it's that all the context and depth of world that I wanted was simply present in the previous books. But if I'm wrong about that, please do let me know!

(I also don't love that at one point in the story it's the "right" thing for our hero to pressure Zelind into seeing kher estranged-for-very-good-reasons mother on a weekly basis. Yes, there are good reason for it. Yes, Zelind agrees. Yes, this doesn't end up actually happening. But like. Yikes.)

When I read A Memory Called Empire I absolutely adored it and was blown away by it, and so when this sequel came out I a) bought it immediately, and then b) failed to read it for a year and a half because I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the first one.

And.....hm. A Desolation Called Peace is an excellent book, a five star book, doing many interesting things. The kind of book I want to pick into pieces because it has so many pieces TO pick; it's doing lots of things, and it's interesting and compelling and I care very much about all the characters and what's happening. But I don't love it to the degree I loved A Memory Called Empire.

I think I'm more confused about the ultimate themes that underlie everything this one is doing, is part of the problem. The first book was, among other things, about what it means to always be an outsider for whom belonging and fitting in isn't possible; about degrees of assimilation and whether they're inevitable or not, desirable or not. The sequel both continues some of that AND seems to be trying to say that there are always connections and similarities between people, no matter how different they seem, and that sometimes assimilation is the way forward. And the way they're implemented in this book makes it feel to me like those two themes were working against each other, instead of building together.

I love the thing where everything a book is doing all works together so perfectly that it creates something that's greater than the sum of its parts, and I feel like the first book did that beautifully, and this one not so much, as great as all its parts are. And it's disappointing! I think if I didn't have the first book to compare it to I would be writing a much more gushing review of this book.

I did really love many things! The complexity of the relationship between Mahit and Three Seagrass, everything about Eight Antidote and how he relates to the people around him and to the kind of world he is ensconced in, TWENTY CICADA omg he's so interesting I want to know everything about him, the subversive comic Mahit picks up in Lsel Station (I want to know more about the political teen artist stationers!), and so much more! And Martine is also just really good at writing prose that makes you want to keep reading.

I don't know. Talk to me about this book! If you've read it, what do you think? Did the management of the themes work better for you than it did for me? Am I missing something or misunderstanding something? It's possible that I just haven't cogitated over this one enough, but the hugo voting deadline is end of day TOMORROW so I wanted to get my thoughts up asap!

The last of the books I'm planning to read from the Hugo novella list for the year!! There were a lot of really good things about this one: the feeling of tension and unhappiness and like there are no good choices; fearing your lover's anger and your mother's anger and feeling like there's nobody with whom you can be at peace and uncomplicatedly yourself. The alternate-history Vietnam-like setting. All the important female characters.

But, like the last de Bodard I read, I struggled with the romance. I feel like I needed to see more between Thanh and Giang. And it feels awfully abrupt that Thanh is open to trying something with Giang so very very soon after everything went down with Eldris. I think the book just needed to be a bit longer than it actually is!

The third volume! It is here! And my main reaction is: aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! I actually had to take a break partway through reading because it was so much and I needed to calm down. But now I am finished and I am a mass of emotions.

Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe spend this whole volume trying genuinely to reach out to each other, to understand each other, and doing a lot of failing but eventually they get there and I AM OVERCOME. God. I can't believe that the first time I read svsss (in the online fan translation) I genuinely believed that there was no evidence that sqq was genuinely happy with how things ended up between him and lbh and that he was basically just like "this might as well happen." Sure he's not very outwardly expressive but it is So Obvious how much sqq loves lbh and ahhhhhh. And lbh! Trying so so so hard to be a good boy for his shizun!! Until xin mo warps his obsession and trauma and leads him to follow his worst impulses, and it's SO UPSETTING but sqq is THERE for him no matter what, now that he finally understands what's driving lbh!

Anyway, this volume also contained a whole bunch of absolutely wild plot stuff that I had 100% forgotten had happened from last time I read it and it was a time and a half to re-experience it. Also I now understand Tianlang-Jun and Zhuzhi-Lang far better too. (and airplane's explanation for why he cut tlj is SO FUNNY. Tlj is like binghe but MORE SO and the readers wouldn't stand for someone stealing lbh's spotlight!!)

I also love this bit about sj!sqq:

"When written within the bounds of the original genre, this kind of character was extremely difficult to handle. You could say he was scum, but he was also pitiful. But if you tried to acknowledge his pathos, his ruthlessness was real too. Characters that were both scummy and tragic always drew aggro, and they were a hotbed for wank, leading comment sections to devolve into massive flame wars."

Hot damn. This is so accurate, to how parts of fandom treat characters who are both scummy and tragic at the same time; it seems like many people struggle to acknowledge that both aspects exist simultaneously, or are only interested in exploring one side. And there are characters like this in so many fandoms! I mean, I spent my youth in the depths of HGSS fandom, and like. Severus Snape. Oh boy.

And the statement at the end that the way svsss goes is what airplane's original outline had INTENDED for pidw, like, ALL of it?? Including the lbh/sqq ship?!?? INCREDIBLE. Real curious how that would have gone with sj!sqq instead of sy!sqq! How would a happy ending have still been reached? AIRPLANE TELL ME MORE about the lost non-harem version of pidw!!!!

Also every single illustration in this volume is an artistic masterpiece, I don't even know which one is my favourite because there are SO MANY perfect illustrations of important scenes.

This volume takes us to the end of the main story of svsss, which means that volume 4 will be entirely the extras, and I am PUMPED. I don't think I successfully managed to find translations of all the extras when I read svsss the first time, given how I've definitely heard references to things that happen that I haven't read, so I cannot wait for NEW BINGQIU CONTENT for me, and also to get to wallow in the airplane extras some more because MOSHANG.

As far as I've seen the publishing date for volume 4 hasn't been announced yet, and I want them to take the time they need to finish making it, and also I am on tenterhooks for more. I am made of nothing but svsss feels!!

Sequel to A Spindle Splintered! Featuring the protagonist of a version of the Sleeping Beauty tale who has taken to wandering the multiverse to save other Sleeping Beauties, but ends up in a Snow White variation by accident and meets with the Evil Queen.

When I started the book I was like, sigh, this is leaning real hard on simplistic versions of tropes and I'm bored. But then somehow I got invested and then I was THERE. Look, fractured fairy tale retellings were basically my first fandom, and this is a great representation of the genre, a lot better than much of the dreck I was reading and enjoying as a young kid!

Anyway: the importance of having agency over your own life and story, the value in connections with the people you care about and who care about you, getting to see a version of Snow White as a revolutionary leader overthrowing the monarchy, many great themes in this book. Also, obviously, Sleeping Beauty and the Evil Queen from Snow White kiss.

If you liked the first one, you will like this one! A very fun series, imo.

HECK YEAH!!! Nghi Vo's novella duology was everything I could have ever wanted they were so perfect, and then her more recent retelling of The Great Gatsby I just felt disappointed by. But Siren Queen has Vo back on her A game!

This book is set in pre-code hollywood, following a young queer Chinese-American woman who falls in love with the movies and will do anything to be a successful actor -- except play the stereotypical Asian roles. The world is full of dangerous magic, on top of the more mundane dangers of being a vulnerable outsider under the control of the power-hungry men who run the studios, but she's determined to find her way.

I love the role of magic in this story, that it feels real and threatening and ever present but also always slippery and a little out of reach of understanding. The reader never really grasps all the rules of magic in this world, but not in the irritating way where it just feels like the author is being sloppy, but instead in a way where it feels numinous and believable, always just around the corner.

I also love the various intertwining lives of the other women in the novel, because of course our protagonist is not the only one around. They each have their own ways of making a way to live in the world, and sometimes those ways are in conflict with our protagonist's, but none of them are necessarily wrong for it. They each just have different priorities. But the protagonist loves women so much, and the book loves women so much, and there are so many great characters! (there are also some great male characters too, for the record; I love the part of the storyline involving Harry particularly!)

The protagonist's relationship with her sister, her sexual and romantic partners, her roommate, the older woman who helps her get access to a studio head for her chance as an actor, on and on. They're all great. But of the women in the protagonist's life, I particularly love Greta; she fascinates me, and I love the strength of the bond between Greta and the protagonist, even though Greta is straight. I love when books depict those kinds of complicated relationships that are beyond the bounds of what's normally considered friendship, but also doesn't follow the expected patterns of a partner-level relationship.

(In case you're wondering why I'm writing around the protagonist's name: yes, names are complicated in this book. Love that for a narrative, hate that for me trying to write a review :P)

But overall what I love most about the book is the Vibes. Idk sometimes authors are just good at creating a Vibe with their words and Vo does this!

In conclusion I loved every minute of reading this book and I can't wait for whatever Vo puts out next. (which appears to be another Singing Hills novella due out later this year and I CANNOT WAIT)

This is the third book in a trilogy of historical f/f romances by Waite, and although I loved the first two books in the series, this one just didn't work for me nearly so well.

This is a book about working-class women getting revenge on a man who has been taking advantage of the workers he relies on, which you know, I should be into!

But ultimately it's supposed to be a romance novel, so I want to be sold on the relationship between the two leads, Sophie and Maddie. But I'm really not. It's one of those romances where most of the focus is on how hot they find each other, and although they DO share mutual values as well as finding each other hot, it doesn't feel like I'm ever really shown that they develop any kind of relationship of mutual liking and understanding. Their relationship becomes very serious very fast without ever showing how that happens!

As well, although I thought Sophie's character arc was well done, and I really enjoyed her story, Maddie's arc did not get sufficient attention. I'm pretty sure Maddie's arc is supposed to be one of her learning to leave behind her efforts to live for her dead mother, and learn instead to live for herself, but it feels like an abrupt transition from one state to the other, rather than a process that the reader is at all given a glimpse into. The conclusion of her arc felt very abrupt because it wasn't led into.

Plus.....I don't actually particularly enjoy the plot. The specific way they get revenge on the unscrupulous man just feels over-convoluted and silly to me, and the balance between the acknowledgement from the characters that the real problem is the system vs wanting to take down this one cog in the system didn't feel well managed to me.

I loved the various friendships and working relationships and familial relationships the two lead characters have, as well as their relationships with their crafts. And I had fun reading the book, as long as I kept myself to only trying to engage with it on a superficial level. But overall I just really did not like this book the way I wanted to. Really disappointing! :(

Wow this book is incredible. It's a middle grade novel about a kid in the summer before starting middle school, with a newly-dead uncle who was an important parent-figure, trying to navigate shifting friendships and figuring out identity and what it means to be yourself, and also figure out what the ghost haunting the family home is trying to say. The book does an amazing job of capturing a pervasive sense of unease as Bug tries to navigate all these uncertainties and changes. But despite that unease it's such a good-hearted book, deeply moving and beautifully queer, and with a wonderful ending. I loved Bug, and Uncle Roderick, and Bug's mom, and Bug's best friend Moira. It's a book with no antagonist, but it's gripping the whole way through!

....huh, I did not expect to be as compelled by this book as I ended up being! I had seen a bunch of hype for it and deliberately decided not to read it because it didn't sound like my kind of thing, but then it ended up on the Hugos list for this year so I read it after all, and. It isn't exactly my thing? But I really liked it regardless!

It's a YA fantasy historical-futuristic reimagining of the story of the chinese empress Wu Zetian, with giant mecha battles.

( Read more... )

The second volume of the official version of scum villain is finally out!! obviously I read the whole thing the very day I got my hands on it.

This volume starts at the point where Luo Binghe returns from the endless abyss, though, and wowwww had I ever forgotten the degree to which Shen Qingqiu acts against his own interests in this part of the story. He's SO convinced he understands lbh due to having read the original PIDW that he makes no efforts to actually communicate, and his silences and dismissive statements are guaranteed to make sure lbh can't see the truth of what's in sqq's heart!

I spent a lot of time slamming this volume shut because I couldn't bear to read about sqq's latest bad choices, lol. My heart panged to see how much lbh was clearly hurt by sqq's treatment of him! And sqq couldn't even see how much he was hurting lbh, despite how much sqq cares about him!!

I mean, don't get me wrong, lbh makes some bad choices too (....the implications of necrophilia are definitely stronger than I remembered, among other things!!), but sqq is the worst (affectionate).

This book was a lot easier to read back when I didn't actually care about sqq or lbh :P

Anyway, a lot of the actual events of this part of the story had kind of flowed by me without registering when I first read the fan translation, so I found myself generally surprised by a number of plot developments, oops. Also I was much worse at keeping track of secondary characters, and now I'm charmed by a lot of them. (yang yixuan, for example!)

Many things in this volume to delight and infuriate and now we all have to wait for MONTHS before the next volume is released and I am already dying!

This book is very good at being the kind of book it is, and I'm very happy for it, but unfortunately it's not my kind of book. Yes, another book read for the hugos! Yes, I somehow find it rewarding to read books I don't like in service of a greater cause!

Anyway this is a YA sci-fi adventure novel, with spaceships and daring rescues and attempts to save the universe and all that, and a group of ragtag misfits working together to fight evil against all odds. Also it's interrogating the idea of being a Special Chosen One. It does all these things well! But it's just not my thing.

I found it tedious, and the characters a bit one note, and I don't enjoy action scenes, and I just don't care about Chosen One narratives even when the point being made is that it's your actions and choices that define you, rather than what you were intended to be. Also it ends with a Big New Bad Thing being discovered to make you want to read the sequel. I hate when a Big New Bad Thing is introduced in the last pages of a book!

But you know what, I'm pretty sure that if this kind of book is your thing, you'll find it a fun read. It is very earnest about the things it's doing, which is charming, and Anders is a generally good writer! (I mean, I have yet to actively like a single novel she's written, but they're always good even if not my thing.)

I was introduced to Harrow's writing in a previous Hugo year with her debut novel, Ten Thousand Doors of January, which was making a stylistic statement that REALLY didn't land for me. So I was a bit trepidatious heading into this book, which is on the hugo novella nominee list this year. But, although I don't love everything this book is doing, I actually really liked it, I'm glad to say!

A Spindle Splintered is a fractured fairy tale, and exactly the kind of thing I would have devoured as a kid. Characters from multiple versions of the Sleeping Beauty tale end up interacting and able to affect each other's stories! It's very fun, and I loved how clear it was that the author ALSO loves fairy tales and loves the inherent nature of mutability within them. And I loved the main character Zinnia and her various coping mechanisms for dealing with knowing she's a dying girl with a time limit on her life

However, I did not love the way that the book leaned so hard into the cliches for various of these stories, most especially the story of Primrose, the second-most-important Sleeping Beauty of the book. It felt like it was simultaneously trying to poke fun at the ridiculousness of the story and the setting AND ALSO take the difficulties of Primrose's life seriously, and the clash between those two modes made it feel really off-balance to me. It was basically fine for the various other Sleeping Beauties who show up at the very end to help save the day, because they're ultimately minor characters so it feels more okay for them to be avatars of cliche. But for Primrose....her story was central to the whole thing, as it's the story the main character Zinnia escapes into, and it just didn't work for me.

Also the author has fun putting in little easter eggs for the reader, like a "Harold, they're lesbians" joke, and you know what, memes like that stuck into books continue to be jarring imo.

BUT there are some things the book gets really right, and my favourite thing it does is the best friendship between Zinnia and Charm, where it's like, straddling the line between platonic and romantic, and the exact nature of it might be complicated, but the depth of love between them is NOT complicated and they just love and care for each other SO MUCH. Anyway, love that for canon, but for fanfic: post-canon (post Zinnia's finding-herself adventures) Primrose/Zinnia/Charm, am I right?

Thank you to

chestnut_pod for having drawn this book to my attention, because it is GREAT.

A graphic novel about a Chinese teenager in the late 19th century working at a logging camp in the USA with her dad, the head cook. The chinese workers have an uneasy relationship with the white leadership with rising racial tensions in the area, and the ways in which those tensions exist alongside the fact that these are people with long-standing relationships with each other that they need. Mei and the other Chinese people in the logging camp are outsiders and experience plenty of racism, but at the same time Mei's best friend is the white daughter of the logging camp's big boss. And also, the white working-class people in the logging camp also don't necessarily have easy lives, in this dangerous and potentially deadly career, and that's ALSO not okay.

Mei processes a lot of the complexities she experiences through the stories she tells -- inspired by the Paul Bunyan stories, but interpreted through a Chinese lens, replacing Bunyan with Auntie Po. Auntie Po turns out to be a great source of comfort and strength for Mei as she deals with stressful and unpleasant life events. Stories you can relate to are so important!

The relationship between Mei and her dad is strong and positive and wonderful, and....pretty much every other relationship in the story has layers of complexity to it even if they're important relationships in the characters lives, which is ALSO wonderful. For example, I like how clear it is that Mei is queer and super into her friend, but also how that's tbh one of the least difficult parts of her life and not one of the things she spends a lot of time having to process. It's much MORE challenging that her best friend is the daughter of the guy who fires Mei's dad for being chinese!

I loved this book and all the different things it manages to do without losing control of its scope. What a good.