A Fan's Playground

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.

I've started working on reading through the things on the Hugo nominations list, in preparation for voting this summer! I'm hampered right now in many categories by not all nominees being available either for free online or from my library as an e-resource, but I'm hoping that when the Hugo Voters Packet comes that'll help.

But I can do the short stories no problem.

I'd already read all but one of the short stories on the nominee list, because for the last number of years I have make it a regular practice to give a try to everything published by the major SFF magazines that provide their stories for free online. The one I hadn't read is is published by a horror magazine, and horror is really not my thing so I don't frequent horror venues.

I bookmark on my pinboard all the stories that I like well enough to want to be able to find again in the future. And none of this year's nominees are on my pinboard. Which means that none of them spoke to me when I first read them, which is disappointing when I think of how many stories I read in the last year which I loved and which are not a Hugo nominee. At least the nominees are all stories I found compelling enough that I actually read them all to the end when I first encountered them!

I've now given a reread to all the short stories I'd read before, and a first read to the one I hadn't. And looking at the stories together, I think that Hugo nominators as a group must be more interested in bleak or angry or violent stories than I am. Ah well.

Here's my (occasionally spoilery) thoughts about all the nominated stories, organized from my first choice vote to my last. None of these will go below No Award, because I do see admirable things in all of them, even if none are really to my taste.

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I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts if you've read any of these stories! (Except the cannibalism one. Please do not talk to me about cannibalism. Thank you.)