YA fantasy, nominally, but it overflows both parts of that label. A teenage girl who grows roses from her wrist and who spilled mysteriously out of a water tower when she was five, a teenage boy who paints moons and hangs them from every tree, the bond between them, the family of four red-headed sisters …
Sci-fi. A bind-up of the first three novels in Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, a series of very loosely interrelated novels and stories set in humanity’s space-faring future. She came back to this universe a number of times later as well, but the three novels in this book were written quite early in her career, …
Literary fiction. Race, class, gender, and nonmonogamy. Follows a 23 year-old Black woman who begins the book as a low-level employee at a publisher in New York and who leads what you might describe as a sexually abundant but relationally poor life. The book begins as she starts dating a relatively well-off older white man …
YA. Another book set in our world except that things supernatural are common and widely known. The two viewpoint characters are young Black women in their junior year of high school. One of those two is a siren. In this world, though only a tiny proportion of Black women are sirens, all sirens are Black …
Literary fiction. Ranges from China to Salt Lake City to the back woods roads of the northern US, but mostly it orbits a pre-apocalyptic and apocalyptic New York City. Though this book was published a couple of years ago, the apocalypse in question is 2020-appropriate – a pandemic, in this case a fungal infection that …
A short nonfiction collection by Rebecca Solnit. Most of the contents originally appeared online between 2017 and 2019. The pieces fell roughly into three categories. Some focused relatively directly on the theme described by the book’s title, the relationship between power and stories. The second category, which overlapped with the first, included a range of …
A book about struggles for social change in the Muslim Middle East, mostly focused on Iran and Egypt but with scattered references to other countries as well. The first edition was written not long before the Arab Spring and laid out an analysis that didn’t quite predict the uprising but that described dynamic circumstances allowing …
Another collection of weird, fantastical short stories. (I certainly seem to have a type when it comes to short fiction, don’t I?) I first encountered this author a couple of years ago when she was the only person with two stories in a “best of” collection that I read, and they were also two of …
Good ol’ fashioned space opera. Told from the point of view of a former ship commander of a space exploration force now residing on the to-her alien planet where her new husband is a retired military officer and high-ranking nobleman’s son – she is pregnant and said husband has just been appointed regent for the …
YA. Set in a city in a world very much like our own. Except the city – no mention is made of broader polities of any sort – is a couple of decades past a revolution. And that revolution seems to have been based on prison abolitionist and transformative justice principles, though such terms are …