YA contemporary with a sprinkling of the fantastical. Follows a teenage girl – Mexican-American, queer, a high school student, works in her family’s pastry shop and has a knack for knowing the perfect baked good to meet the needs or fulfill the desires of anyone who comes in. At a party at the home of …
Sci fi. Centuries ago, humanity fled Earth on generation ships. The ship at the centre of this book has survived because it came upon a herd of massive, vacuum-living space beasts. Originally, the beasts were just a source of resources, killed and harvested, but for many generations now the humans on this ship invade a …
Science fiction, I suppose, or maybe fantasy – anyway, kind of comic book-y in feel, and a world different from our own in that a small number of people have super powers, though this seems to be relatively new and not yet commonly known. Follows a not-very-good small-time super villain who robs banks, and a …
Scholarly. About habit – what it is, the role it plays in lives and worlds, and how it relates to struggles for social transformation. (Not, btw, the philosophy book I alluded to feeling resistant to reading in a post last week…I had already finished this by that point!) Draws on US pragmatist philosophers, more recent …
An unfortunate photo that seems to show more than it actually does starts rumours about a Hollywood powerhouse and her assistant, leading to gossip, paparazzi…and maybe something more. Sweet, fluffy, heart-warming, and fun. Felt reasonably plausible in terms of the character journeys, which is not always true of this sort of book. One smaller plot …
Short stories, most with some element of the science fictional or fantastical or speculative. A very quick read. Protagonists are mostly Black women, in fact mostly queer Black women. A worker employed to do the nightly retrieval of scooters for a bike share-style company encounters scooters that have achieved sentience. A pregnant woman in the …
Science fiction. Humanity has found a gate near the earth that leads to another solar system with a world inhabited by sentient life. Which they have conquered, or at least they think they have. The story is set in the English west country, which has declared itself independent and adopted a kind of isolationist and …
Science fiction. Future earth, a couple of generations post apocalypse. There are the walled cities where the privileged live in carefully controlled environments of plenty and ease, their security ensured by jealously guarded gates and the invisible violence of citizenship, and there are the settlements beyond the cities where everything has a Mad Max-like vibe. …
Listed by some as young adult…but it doesn’t really read like it, for all that it’s about teens coming of age. Listed by others as historical fiction…but I refuse the idea that a book set when I would’ve been in Grade 10 belongs in such a category. Fantastical, certainly, and of a witchy bent, but …
Novella. Noir detective story mixed with eldritch horror. The book opens with a young boy trying to hire a PI who is more than he seems to kill his (the boy’s) stepdad. A very quick read. The kind of punchy, compelling writing you would want from both of its source genres and that you would …