A Fan's Playground

I sure have a wide range of opinions on the nominees for the Astounding award this year!

1. Shelley Parker-Chan

Parker-Chan's debut novel, She Who Became The Sun, is one of the most brilliant books I've read in years, and there is no doubt in my mind that I think both book and author deserve ALL the awards. And I can't wait to see where Parker-Chan goes from here as an author, if this is the level they're starting at!!

2. Everina Maxwell

I thoroughly enjoyed Maxwell's debut novel, Winter's Orbit. It's a delightful queer romance space opera and fully lives into the things it's doing and I'm here for it.

3. Micaiah Johnson

Johnson's only book so far is The Space Between Worlds, which, though it didn't land perfectly for me, was still a thought-provoking and powerful read.

4. Xiran Jay Zhao

I found Zhao's novel, Iron Widow, too dark for me to love it unreservedly, but I found the story and the characters very compelling!

5. Tracy Deonn

Deonn's only book so far is Legendborn, and it's good at being the kind of book it is, and it explores some important themes, but I found all the monster-fighting to be kinda boring, personally.

6. A.K. Larkwood

Larkwood now has two books out, but when I tried reading her debut, The Unspoken Name, I was just so unutterably bored that I couldn't make myself finish reading it. I know many people loved this book and I'm very happy for them but WOW I could not read it.

Oh boy. Hmm. Where to start? A brilliant book, but I have some complicated feelings about it, so let's see if I can work through those by writing about it!

In this book, Cara is a traverser, someone who travels between different versions of the world for her job. The reason she can do this: she's dead in most other versions of reality, and you can only go to worlds where you don't already exist. So most traversers come from difficult backgrounds, the kind of lives where you have a lot of near misses with death. Between her history and her job, she has something of a complicated relationship with her own identity, and with the concept of death! She also has a complicated relationship with her handler, Dell, involving flirtation from Cara and a certain degree of mutual attraction, and Dell keeping firm boundaries that make it clear she'll never be willing to respond or act on this attraction.

It's a book with a lot to say about what makes a person who they are, about class dynamics and the huge effects they have on everyone's lives, about what it means to love someone (both platonic and romantic), and about evil capitalist tech bro billionaires.

All of this is GREAT. But I found the book very slow to start; it took quite a while before I was into it. And even after I got interested, it took even longer for me to be really invested. I think this might be because the book is doing enough unexpected things that it took a long time for me to be able to settle into an understanding of what sort of book I was actually reading! Not to say that unexpectedness is bad; just that when I don't know what to expect, I can't emotionally prepare, and so I hold myself at a further emotional reserve from the story.

Anyway eventually I was invested indeed, and cared a lot about everything, and also found it all really interesting! But then I was once again thrown by the ending.

( a bunch of spoilery discussion of the ending )

At any rate, despite the issues I had, I do really think it's an amazing book and I'm so glad I read it. I will be thinking about it for a while, I think!

Content note: Cara is a survivor of an abusive intimate partner relationship, and although that relationship is in her past, it's relevant to her present and so you hear a lot about it.