Literary fiction. Draws, I think, on Nishnaabeg storytelling traditions, which I know little about. The building blocks of the book are units of text ranging from a sentence to a couple of pages, each focused on one of the book’s characters. These characters are human and not, and introduced in a way to unsettle the …
Literary fiction. A family novel focused on a mother and her twin daughters. The mother, for her entire life, is seen by most as not-quite-right or worse, though her own narrative of things is rather different. And the twins, one straight and one queer, are sent on very different trajectories after a “bad thing” happens …
Literary fiction with fantastical elements. The author is from Argentina and the book was translated from Spanish. A girl in a poor neighbourhood of Buenos Aires responds to her mother’s death by compulsively eating dirt. As she gets older, it becomes clear that when she eats earth associated with someone who has been murdered or …
YA fantasy. Towards the “high fantasy” end of the genre. Set in Orisha, a nation based loosely on Nigeria. It is a kingdom in which magic had suddenly ceased to work and all adults who had been able to use it were killed by the king’s soldiers about a decade before the start of the …
Literary fiction. Short stories. I don’t generally orient my reading via prizes, but the fact that this collection won the latest Giller Prize is probably why it was prominent enough in my awareness that, after my partner borrowed it from a colleague, I spontaneously picked it up and read it as well. Stories of everyday …
Science fantasy. In a post-apocalyptic Sudan, a child of a rape that happened as part of war-slash-genocide develops powerful magic as she grows up, and seeks to confront both the threat to her and the threat to her people. I’ve read a bunch of books by Okorafor – her Binti series and her Akata series …
Contemporary fiction. A young widow in the city of Suryam in India witnesses a beautiful woman having a seizure in a park, and ends up drawn into a relationship with the woman and her husband. I picked up the book because of the unconventional relationship at its core, but it also has some things to …
Middle-grade fantasy. Book three of the Nevermoor series. Features Morrigan Crow, a serious and sensible girl growing up in an absurd and fantastical realm, along with lots of strange creatures and magic and terrible villains and hijinks. As I’ve observed before, it is enough like that famous series by She Who Must Not Be Named …
YA contemporary. Queer Black girl in a mostly white, mostly well-off town in the midwestern US doesn’t get the big scholarship she’ll need to attend the university program of her dreams, so she decides to go after an alternative source of scholarship dollars by entering the superintense prom king/queen competition for which her school is …
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 …