Reviews
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Review: Ash
4.5/5 stars. Buy at Amazon
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Ash by Malinda Lo is an nontraditional take on Cinderella that mixes fairy tales with tales of the fair folk.
When she is twelve, Ash’s mother passes away, and her father remarries; the step-mother brings with her her two children and a dismissal of the Old Ways. So when her father gets sick, nobody takes steps to ward off the fair folk, just bring in physicians who bleed him. He dies, and the step-mother takes Ash from her home and her mother’s grave to a house on the other side of the woods, where she is slowly forced to become a servant to pay her father’s debts. A familiar story?
Perhaps, but less familiar: she starts to see a strange man, with skin as white as snow and clothes and hair to match, who she recognizes as one of the fair folk. She longs to go with him and leave this wretched world behind, as the years pass, but he says she is not ready. He gives her a beautiful cloak, which she hides, and a medallion, and nothing more than hope that someday she might vanish entirely to go to their kingdom. Even though she knows in the stories of the fairy folk, humans who go lose time and humanity, become nothing more than servants—it is better than what she has here.
And that might stay that way until she meets the head of the royal hunt, a lovely huntress who helps teach her to ride whenever she can sneak away, who lures Ash in ways she’s unfamiliar with. As the Prince starts to hold events to choose a bride, Ash gets more chances to see the huntress—but has more to lose, as well, with her step-family right there as well, who could spot her and ruin her hopes. And the only way to really get what she wants is to take advantage of a fairy’s wishes, but those will come with a price…
I read a lot of fairy tales, and a lot of the ones about fairies kidnapping people, and this took one and melded it with the other quite seamlessly. The prose was beautiful and the way Ash was torn between her two interests was built up beautifully.
The only place that I didn’t quite feel was that we never got a good glimpse of what the huntress saw in Ash. We saw a lot of good traits in Ash ourselves, but the reason behind the huntress’s feelings were left somewhat mysterious. That’s not unusual in fairy tales, so it didn’t throw me, but I’d have liked to understand more about what was going on there. As well, the resolution of the central conflict worked for me, but I’d liked to have seen more of it; it felt, in some ways, like it worked up to the climax and then skipped to the denouement and I never quite got a glimpse of the peak.
But even so, I loved the book and how it came together, and I loved the composition of the narration. Really a beautiful read.
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Review: The Manny Files
5/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon
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The Manny Files by Christian Burch is a delightful middle-school adventure that brings the feels big time.
Nine-year-old Keats has two older sisters and one younger one. With that many kids in the family, their parents regularly hire nannies to take care of them. Keats hasn’t enjoyed this much. The always-female nannies dote on his sisters and ignore him. So when their newest nanny is a man—or Manny, as he insists they call him—he’s pretty excited. Even more so when the Manny brings adventure to them every day! The Manny’s personal motto is “be interesting” and he makes every day fun for Keats by playing loud 80s music, actually eating off the floor if it’s “so clean you can eat off it”, or wearing funny costumes. But Lulu, Keats’ preteen sister, is embarrassed by these hijinks and keeps a book of ‘evidence’ of why she thinks that the Manny isn’t a good babysitter. Keats has every reason to worry that she’ll take it to their parents to get the Manny fired!
The Manny Files is really a fun read. The author has a knack for writing from a child’s perspective; the digressions in the text feel very genuine to conversations with children that age, but never goes so far away that it makes the narrative confusing. Keats’ feelings are genuine and relatable, from being bullied to being afraid to go off the high jump and beyond. His reactions are shown instead of told, and Keats feels like a very genuine person.
This book is often laugh-out-loud funny even to the adult reader, and I frequently paused to read bits out loud to my fiancee. But that doesn’t make it irreverent. The serious moments are treated with gravity by both Keats and the narrator, and there was a part in the book—I won’t spoil you—where I had to put my kindle down and take a ten minute break because I’d started to cry.
You care about Keats, but you care about the adults in his life too, and his siblings, and of course the Manny. I had been a little worried before starting about reading a book with a gay character who’s most defined by his exuberance and flamboyance, but the book solved my doubts. The Manny is a real person, performing his job which involves being larger than life, but his relationship with Uncle Max (which is hardly a secret to the adult readers when you read them together) is genuine, and we see hints of old hurts and tired experiences in his own life that inform how he reacts to the kids’ experiences.
I was very interested in Keats’ changing relationship with his bully, and how we got to see Keats develop empathy. I’m often also wary of the “the bully has a hard life and you just need to be nice to them” stories (as someone who was bullied as a kid myself), but this particular bully’s moods and neediness did come through loud and clear.
I know there’s a sequel and I’m looking forward to reading it soon. I hope too that there will be more books in this series even before I get to read Hit the Road, Manny; that’s how charmed I was by this story!
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Review: The Second Mango
4.5/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon
| Barnes & Noble | Prizm Books
The Second Mango (Mangoverse #1) by Shira Glassman is a delightful lesbian young adult fantasy with a charming sense of adventure.
Shulamit is the young queen of Perach, and is not exactly happy with her situation. She likes ladies and can’t digest wheat or fowl, both things the servants around her can’t or won’t accept as something normal to work around (taking them instead as signs that she’s desperate for attention). After her lover runs away with no explanation and her loving father has tragically died, she’s left frustrated—in multiple senses of the word. Which results in her sneaking out to a bawdy house, which results in her getting kidnapped, which results in her getting rescued by the travelling mercenary Riv—secretly Rivka, a woman hiding her identity to avoid prejudices against women as warriors. Impulsively, Shulamit hires Rivka to be her bodyguard on a quest to go find another woman-loving-woman in return for being offered position as guard captain, so they’re off on an adventure that will bring them face-to-face with thieves, evil wizards, and surprises from both their pasts.
Shulamit is one of my favorite types of characters—High Int, Low Wis, which is to say, perfectly smart but with the common sense of a spoon. She attaches to people quickly, and when she opens her mouth, words fall out. I find her a very charming example of this type, quirky and energetic but not stupid in the slightest. Her companion, Rivka, is slightly older and calmer by nature. She talks less, acts more, though we get to see she was quite a bit reckless when she was younger as well. They balance each other well, and I was willing to buy that the opportunity to settle down in a job that’d still let her see lots of action while guarding someone important would be a compelling argument to go along with Shulamit’s poorly-thought-through plans.
I agree with some of the other reviewers that this reads toward the younger end of the YA scale. I think probably I’d recommend this most for the 12-16 age range, young teen girls looking for heroes like themselves in fiction and wanting to read a cute fluffy adventure at the same time. That was definitely the age that I started reading adult novels to try to find queer characters, while also juggling fluffier younger reads! This would be a perfect antidote to those things I didn’t have when I was young, and I’m excited to think that it exists now.
And there’s a lot to like in this book for adults too, and a lot to recommend. Not only is it a Jewish fantasy world (as opposed to the copious number of Christian-centric fantasy worlds), and has a main character who’s a queen rather than a princess, it also introduces a hero with food sensitivities which, as someone with them myself, I realize I have literally never read. Maybe I’d have a lot less trouble in restaurants if people grew up reading it as a standard! And then on top of that, the adventure is fun and the het pairing is also cute and something I could root for. And there are dragons!
The only thing I looked for and didn’t find in it was a sense of tension; problems were usually solved with the first solution the characters came up with, and there was never any guilt or resentment (justified or not) to deal with when people made mistakes. There are scenes we see the characters’ insecurities, but they aren’t really talked out with the others involved. That said, as much as I would have liked more of a sense of risk, it didn’t bother me; I was in it for a fun read and that’s what I got.I’m very much looking forward to reading the rest of the Mangoverse. More to the point, I’m glad this book exists and I hope teens out there, particularly, snatch it up. Read it like I couldn’t, back then!
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Review: Glitterland
5/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon
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Glitterland by Alexis Hall was recommended to me by my friend and fellow author Luna Harlow (whose review of it can be found here), and I am so, so glad I took her up on the rec. Spoilers: I loved it.
Glitterland is the story of stuck-up novelist Ash Winters, post-breakdown and suffering from anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. When he runs into aspiring model and Essex boy, Darian Taylor, who he can only describe with the words glitter pirate, Ash absolutely intends to have no more than a casual hookup with him. But despite himself, Ash finds himself drawn to Darian’s honest good nature, even while he’s ashamed by his awareness of what the people around him, who already think less of him due to his breakdown, will think of him for being with someone so lower-class. And mental illness is no fun ride, either, making him want to ruin his own happiness. But is it possible that being around someone who doesn’t want to fix him—someone who just wants to be there with him through the hard times as well as the good—can help him move forward?
This book had me from page one. I’ve had anxiety attacks before, and the description of how he felt was so horrifically familiar. All kudos to Alexis for being able to describe it so aptly—and everything else besides. The prose in this book is lovely, and the writing feels like what I’d expect from a first-person narrator who is also a literary author.
Beyond that, the character writing is wonderful. Everybody is complicated. Characters frequently say terrible things because they’re hurting; that doesn’t make them terrible, and the narrative doesn’t give them a pass for the terrible things they say even while it understands and empathizes with them. The writing is careful about these things most of the time; for example, one character early on says something unpleasant about bi people, but the narrative itself shows the bi character happy, genuine, and loving, and also shows that the rudeness of the speaker there is rooted in his own current pain.
In a lot of ways, this story is about words. What people say that they don’t mean, what people don’t say that they do, and when it’s time to try to balance that back out again. It’s also about taking responsibility versus acting out of guilt, and admitting culpability versus self-hatred. It’s a book that is very kind to itself and the characters in it while not going easy on the terrible things people can do to each other when upset, guilty, afraid. As I said earlier, it’s also about mental illness, and how hard it can be both on the person with it and those around them… while not blaming them for it, not acting like behavior is immutable, and accepting, too, that sometimes executive dysfunction is part of it. Sometimes sadness happens. Sometimes worse. It treats it as something Ash is living with (and sometimes doesn’t know how to live with), and doesn’t either victimize him for it or hate him for it. It feels very, very genuine.
It’s also really darn cute, which is incredibly impressive when dealing with material as heavy as this book does. I found myself smiling throughout the whole thing, and sometimes sending my fiancee quotes. The characters are charming and the dialogue is witty and it was fun.
Ultimately, it was a book I had faith in to do its best by its characters, and it lived up to that.
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Review: The Unintentional Time Traveler
4/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon
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The Unintentional Time Traveler by Everett Maroon is the story of teenage Jack Bishop, whose epilepsy ends up with him put into an experimental program to try to cure him. Unexpectedly (to say the least), this causes him to travel back in time and find himself in the body of 1920s teenage girl, Jaqueline. But as Jack repeatedly jumps between time periods, losing stretches of time along the way, things get complicated in both the past, with a prohibition-era self-proclaimed prophet ruling the town by violence, and in the present (or is it?), as his actions cause rippling repercussions…
Overall, I found this a delightful read with a great narrator and a strong theme of identity. Moving between time periods (both in the “past”, and by the way losing time caused him to have to resettle in his life without knowing what’s gone on in it) and bodies brings up a strong theme about how identity itself is experiential. The situations you live through in both different time periods and different bodies: both affect your identity. Jack’s narrative voice grows and evolves throughout as a result of this variety of experiences.
There’s a lot of disconnect and skipping in the book. Both as Jack and as Jac, the protagonist finds that he ‘returns’ to whichever time to find that life has literally gone on without him. The changes in the world and technology aside, he comes back to Jack (for example) to find that he’s gone through puberty, or got a girlfriend, or got a job. All of which he didn’t remember, because the Jack who did it wasn’t him—or was, but was living life as a Jack who was separate in time. The story starts out fairly straightforward and linear and gets more disconnected and jagged the longer Jack spends in a different time and body, or the more Jack goes back to reset things. I liked this quite a bit because the disconnect is deliberate and plays well into the sense of being about an experience, learning things by living them, not by understanding how they’ve developed.
The only way I was drawn out of the story is that at several key decision points (both in the romance and in the plot), we don’t see Jack’s POV on why he’s making a decision to act. We just see the dialogue around it, or a skip to it happening. We’re in Jack’s POV throughout the story and hear a constant entertaining self-deprecating dialogue, so these moments really stood out to me. We’re experiencing so many discoveries along with Jack that not seeing the mental decisions to take those steps makes it feel very blank in comparison to what we’re reading the rest of the time. I feel it may be deliberate, to play around with the concept of disconnect/skipping/experience, but since we’re solidly in a time/setting/body and are seeing thoughts leading up to that and right after the relevant story-driving decisions are made, the lack of seeing Jack make those steps felt odd to me.
Overall, a fun adventure with great characters and a solid theme. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next Time Guardians book will have to offer.
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