Review of Project Hail Mary

 Project Hail Mary

Author: Andy Weir

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Publication Date: May 2021

“What is your name?”

He’s Ryland Grace. But we don’t know that yet. And neither does he. He’s millions of miles from home on a “hail mary” mission to save Earth from certain and imminent death. But he doesn’t remember that. All he knows is that he just woke up in a room with dead people and his memory is returning far too slowly. With time running out for our species and himself, Ryland must figure out his mission and accomplish his impossible task - finding the solution to an extinction-level threat. Alone. This is a scenario made for - and of course crafted by - the author, Andy Weir.

Ryland is an entertainer as much as a wellspring of scientific ingenuity. His sharp, often self-deprecating humor keeps him sane and takes some of the edge off of what would otherwise be an overwhelming and seemingly endless series of crises. Ryland’s sense of curiosity is as relentless as his sense of comedy. It’s Ryland’s curiosity - even in the few times that there is not a sense of desperate urgency - that makes all the science and smarts entertaining. Think fun physics experiment instead of math homework. Weir’s small set of Earth-bound characters - who live only in Ryland’s fitfully returning memory - all share a few core personality elements, similar both to each other and to Ryland. They are quick to voice opinions, decisive in their actions, and prone to sarcasm. In other words, they don’t slow plot momentum and they don’t complicate readers’ interaction with Ryland. 

Weir’s literature is not finely nuanced, full of rich tangential descriptions, or weighted with deep insights. His specialty is a crisis-driven, warp-speed plot stuffed with problem-solving science and saturated with his protagonist’s relentless, laugh-out-loud sense of irony and gallows humor. But that’s more than good enough. It’s what Weir did so well in The Martian, perhaps missed a little in Artemis, and delivers again in Project Hail Mary. But this is not just a desperate-clever-guy-alone-in-space story. Without giving anything away, it is worth noting that the sociological, psychological, and xenobiological elements Weir added to Project Hail Mary make it much more than a rehash of The Martian. In the end, it’s a genuine page-turner that will leave readers a little breathless and disappointed only that the story’s over.

D. K. Nuray, age 15

Review of Born A Crime

 Born A Crime

Author: Trevor Noah

Publisher: One World

Publication Date: November 2016

It can be easy to forget that celebrities had childhoods. Beneath a public persona is, first and foremost, just another person with an accumulation of experiences that, if the icon is honest and we are attentive, we can know and understand. Noah’s stories curated from his South African childhood don’t just solidify him as more than pixels on a screen. They bring his firsthand experiences with issues such as post-apartheid racism, an unresolved feeling of estrangement, and the challenge of making your way in life from a single parent home to readers in a way that makes these elements of Noah’s origins both understandable and, in some cases, even relatable.

It may seem ironic that the writer engages in his own form of segregation, explicitly separating social and historical context from personal content rather than integrating both into a cohesive narrative. It is a gamble, but one that largely works. Noah is able to present each story simply as an account of experiences because he separately prefaces each story with a brief explanation of relevant socioeconomic circumstances. This gives him the freedom to speak relatively lightly about complex material, entertaining his readers with his presentation while providing them with the opportunity to think about the underlying content - if they choose to read and heed it. 

There are limitations to this approach.

Noah both invites readers extremely close to his personal memories with each story and creates a distancing, instructional effect at the same time. Each approach interrupts the other. A storyteller ultimately is not supposed to give you the ingredients of a story. They’re supposed to give you a mixture of words and perspective, of engagement and entertainment, and even education that together make a gestalt - something more than the sum of its parts. History is part of Noah’s story. Context is part of Noah’s story. One can easily understand why a TV personality whose life focus is entertainment chose to take this a la carte approach, but the cost is a separation of context and history from the personal narrative they shape and inform. For example, you can read the two meaty paragraphs about education in post-World War II Germany and post-apartheid South Africa, or you can skip straight to the - recognizably funny Trevor Noah - chapter title “GO HITLER!” In other words, you can just order dessert and skip the vegetables. Hard to be against that, but also hard to call it a full meal.

As a writer, Noah may be better suited to scripts than memoirs, but Born A Crime is still a thoughtful glimpse through a comedic yet informed narrative into South Africa’s complicated, disappointing, but still hopeful post-apartheid reality.

D. K. Nuray, age 15

Review of The Dictionary of Lost Words

 The Dictionary of Lost Words

Author: Pip Williams

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Publication Date: April 2021

Pip Williams has not only given us an entire book full of words, but provoked us into thinking about them too. Words allow us to create common understanding of ideas and perspectives. Yet the choice, application, and even meaning of words can be an intensely personal experience. This rather lovely paradox underpins the setting, plot, and individual character arcs of The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Born in the late 19th century, Esme Nicoll grows up under the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary - literally. Dr. James Murray and several lexicographers, Esme’s “Da” among them, spend their days around a table in their Scriptorium sorting, defining, and approving words brought to them on slips of paper, while Esme entertains herself underneath the table. One day, a slip falls down into her lap and seemed to be missed by no one. She claims it as her own. Forgotten slips become her secret treasures, defining her as the dictionary defines the world around her. As she grows and her role in the Scriptorium is allowed to become one of consequence, it becomes clear that the men of the Dictionary exclude words of women and common folk, thereby invalidating their thoughts and experiences. In the time of suffragette protests and The First World War, Esme’s quiet, self-appointed purpose of protecting disregarded words and memories guides her journey as a woman and a person. Along with the lost words she rescues, Esme must lose, find, and define herself.

Esme’s guarded behavior and suppressed opinions suit the time she is written into. However, her emotions are still understandable and empathetically accessible to her modern audience. Like the women of her time and the words with which she spends her days, Esme is defined by others but also struggling to validate her own sense of meaning. Our relationship with language is a symbiotic one; words are our creation, and we are continually defining them, but they also have the power to influence and shape our perceptions. Esme’s effort to define herself becomes the emotional gravity of the story - which is why the epilogue is ultimately unable to engage and fully satisfy. There is a recurring sense in the story of characters and ideas oddly truncated even as they are developing. Nonetheless, the story and the author’s protagonist are fully engaging conceptions.

Historical fiction writers walk a fine line between conveying enough historical context to accurately enrich a story but not so much that the narrative is overburdened. Williams capably inhabits this historical fiction “Goldilocks zone”, making sure the historical context is all deeply pertinent and personal to her characters. She also navigates the difficult task of increasing the social and political context of her story as the time it takes place in and its characters evolve. This story impresses upon us that the act of defining is itself a paradox - both essential and perpetually subject to change and imperfection. The story itself has that same feeling of both worthiness and imperfection. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a beautifully conceived journey about the reciprocal nature of words - how meaning is something we both define and discover.

D. K. Nuray, age 14

Review of Exhalation

 Exhalation

Author: Ted Chiang

Publisher: Vintage Books

Publication Date: May 2019

    A parrot admonishes us about the Fermi Paradox. A time machine in a Baghdad bazaar teaches us about acceptance. A mechanical universe comprehends life by the breath. Virtual pets learn - and teach - humanity. Free will is undone by a button. A robot nanny is a failure of conception. Recorded memory reveals the inhumanities of truth. Even parallel universes cannot separate character from choice.

It might seem difficult to draw connected lines through stories that range from an Arabian folktale to hard science fiction. But consistent themes are readily apparent and deftly unify Exhalation. Each of the nine stories revolve around the power and constraints of perspective, and the limitations and possibilities of choice. Volition and perspective are the common and complementary themes that make Exhalation a collection rather than just an entertaining bunch of stories.

In fact, Chiang’s ability to cohere seemingly disparate lines of plot and thought and imagination is what makes Exhalation such a worthy read. The diversity of the settings, timelines, characters, and story length showcases the remarkable breadth of Chiang’s imagination. He is a perfectly fine writer, but it is really in the complexity of his imagination and the breadth of his philosophical provocation that he excels. There is an ouroboros quality that pulls us into Chiang’s writing; the journey of a story arc often ends up limning the questions that created the story in the first place. The result is a deepening sense of curiosity. Sometimes it feels like we’re being told a really good story by a really good professor. We don’t even mind that he’s teaching us something.

It is not incidental that Chiang is a technical writer for the software industry. His job is to explain, in great detail, complicated things. If he errs in Exhalation, it is by occasionally over-explaining the implications of a story, assuming his audience needs conclusions drawn for them in the same way that an audience reading a technical explanation might. But this is a small critique for an expansive collection. If you like science fiction filled with things that go boom in space, Exhalation might not be for you. This is for people who are willing to be prodded as much as they are entertained.

D. K. Nuray, age 14

Review of The Space Between Worlds

 The Space Between Worlds

Author: Micaiah Johnson

Publisher: Del Rey

Publication Date: August 2020

Cara is valuable because she’s good at dying - albeit on other worlds. The secrets to multiverse traveling have been unlocked by a genius scientist, and Cara has a job as a traverser, one of precious few people who walk on alternate Earths. Precious few because no one can visit an alternate world where their counterpart is still alive. And it turns out that Cara is dead almost everywhere else in the multiverse. Plucked from the dirt of the wastelands, Cara’s job gives her a conditional home in the filthy rich Wiley City, a place so apart from the wastelands that it is literally walled-off.  She collects off-world data for Eldridge Institute and flirts shamelessly (and fruitlessly) with her coworker Dell. When one of Cara’s eight remaining alternate world doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, she is plunged into a web of old secrets on a new world. What she finds will link her past and present, putting her in the center of a plot threatening the entire multiverse. 

Firstly, I need to encourage you to stick with this book. It starts with introductions to an overwhelming number of undeveloped characters. Cara is rapidly established as the center of the plot, but the events and places connected to her are revealed similarly to the characters - too many at once. The plot develops and coalesces into a coherent story as tension rises between Cara’s wasteland home and new Wiley City residence. Cara is the Katniss Everdeen of a different dystopian future. She is fiercely determined to survive, but still bound by an ultimate sense of right and wrong. Walking in the space between worlds has made her a part of every place she goes, yet unable to ever completely belong in any of them. 

Johnson writes in a manner that fits the personality of her main character, convincingly building her settings through a lens colored by Cara’s sense of herself and her situation. As such, she is able to subtly convey social and personal observations in a way that does not feel heavy handed. The Space Between Worlds uses a unique and highly compelling main character to expose and build on conflict, and therefore plot. This plot is revealed piecemeal, but is ultimately worth the wait. YA dystopian science fiction and fantasy readers should enjoy Johnson’s complex, engaging protagonist and the worldview gradually constructed from Cara’s perspective.

D. K. Nuray, age 14

Review of The Strength of Weeds

 The Strength of Weeds

Author: M. M. Blyth

Publisher: M. M. Blyth

Publication Date: November 2020

Ivy and Rose Green are inseparable. Ivy, the narrator of the story, is almost ten and Rose is almost seventeen. Sisters of four boys and daughters of a widowed father, their lives in the backwaters of 1930s Louisiana are far from easy. When the local mine is shut down and their family is left in desperate need of money, Rose is faced with a daunting adventure: finding a husband. Unwilling to let her sister approach marriage without her help, Ivy agrees to accompany her out of the bayou and into the next chapter of her life. Leaving home for the first time and heading to the bustling city of New Orleans, the Green sisters find themselves farther from their simple lives than they ever dreamed. Balancing the excitement and joy of exploring a new world with the gravity of their situation, Ivy and Rose grow closer than ever as their time together draws to a close.

Ivy is an apt and engaging narrator. Able to convey both sisters’ awe and emotional turmoil, Ivy chronicles their steps away from childhood as she narrates the experiences they choose and the circumstances forced upon them. Blyth conveys Ivy’s growing independence through conversations with her family, but also her lingering naivete through her enamored perception of her limited world. Rose is both a best friend and a revered guide to her little sister. At sixteen, she has a broader perception of life’s disappointments than Ivy. However, she is still eager to experience everything she can before marriage constrains her. 

Ivy and Rose describe a Louisiana that is both sultry and struggling, conveying a sense of beautiful ruin. The division between rural and urban Louisiana is stark; the culture and glamour of New Orleans enraptures the girls, awakening them to their impoverished upbringing. Ivy’s abject wonderment at everything more than an hour’s walk from home leads her to describe each detail, immersing readers in her perspective. She provides more than sensory immersion; each vignette is expressed with eloquent fervor, charged with Ivy’s sadness, joy, curiosity, or silliness. Her exuberance is conveyed in a manner that enriches her story rather than burdening it. The one problem that arises with heavy description is Ivy’s extensive vocabulary, which seems to belie both her age and upbringing. In the first couple chapters of The Strength of Weeds, Blyth struggles to create a narrator that can both fit her backwater setting and describe it well. However, as she settles into Ivy’s voice, the notional disparity dissipates; Ivy becomes both credible and compelling. Over the course of the story, Ivy illustrates her home with detail, precision, elegance, and youthful energy. I recommend The Strength of Weeds to YA historical fiction readers. In Ivy and Rose, Blyth gives us characters we can understand and appreciate, bringing their own lives closer to our own and inviting us into their perspective, place, and time.   

D. K. Nuray, age 14

Review of To Be Taught, if Fortunate

 To Be Taught, if Fortunate

Author: Becky Chambers

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Publication Date: September 2019

Date of Review: January 2020

Faced with the possibility that her home planet may have forgotten her and her crewmates, Ariadne O’Neill begins to chronicle her extraordinary journey to the planets of a distant sun, in the hopes that someone may still be listening. We all should.

Spaceflight has always been theoretically restricted by our bodies as much as by our technology. We’re designed for one type of atmosphere, one gravity, and one distance from one particular sun. At the beginning of the twenty-second century, these limitations no longer apply. A technique known as somaforming allows astronauts to survive in non-Earth environments using biological supplementations, and extended hibernation allows humans to dramatically slow their aging process during the long journeys to distant stars. Ariadne and her three crewmates aboard the spaceship the Merian are part of a mission to survey exoplanets suspected of harboring life. For them, potentially habitable worlds aren’t just lights in the night sky but the next waypoints on the expanding frontier of human experience. But their journey separates the crew irreparably from home.

It is improbable that To Be Taught, if Fortunate works as a novella. The title is far from catchy, and the basic plot of astronauts visiting distant planets is hardly groundbreaking. And that plot is tremendously freighted with emotional density that might seem better suited to a full-length novel. There are four characters and four planets - each in turn yielding lessons about the limits and exultation of understanding, about the futility of isolation and the vitality of purpose, and about how purpose is born of understanding your existence in greater context. This novella uses the fundamentally alien to root a fundamentally human sense of place and purpose.

Yes, there is a lot in this novella, but it works. And that’s partly because of what Chambers leaves out. Years of exploration and experience spanning four planets transpire over the course of the story, but the narrative device announced in the opening paragraph - the voice of Ariadne distilling the experiences to their most important elements - makes it work. This provides the author with freedom to give readers enough impression of the worlds to understand them, and enough of a glimpse into the characters’ interactions with each world to understand how each of them thinks and feels. We are immersed only in Ariadne’s summarizing perspective - not in the myriad details of each character and world. We get high and low moments, and an understanding of what creates those moments, which is more than enough to grasp the core of each place and personality. 

As the engineer on board the Merian, Ariadne’s job is to keep everything working and to be an extra set of hands. That gives her more opportunity to observe and reflect than her crewmates. Venturing far from the place you call home doesn’t mean you leave the people and ideas you call home. The Merian’s astronauts are each imperfect, but are united - and sustained - by sharing their grief at leaving behind friends and relatives, the joy of discovery, and their driving sense of wonder. The four are a reminder that even when we are far from familiar settings, it is possible to find home with ideas and people that fulfill us.

       The fact that this reviewer feels compelled to write so much about a novella might be her biggest endorsement. In short, read it. There are plenty of elements to notice and absorb in Chambers’ novella, but most important it is a well-told, enthralling, and thoughtful story. At its best, science fiction broadens our perspective, taking us outward so that we can better see inward - which is exactly what To Be Taught, if Fortunate does. I would recommend it to YA and adult readers who enjoy reflective science fiction.

D. K. Nuray, age 14

Review of Bubble (USA & Canada)/The Bubble Boy (UK)

 Bubble/The Bubble Boy

Author: Stewart Foster

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Publication Date: May 2017

    Orphaned 11-year old Joe has never known a life outside his hospital room. Joe is reconciled to staying inside, where his unusually weak immune system can’t be attacked. His sole companions are his older sister, Beth, doctors and nurses, and his distant friend Henry who shares his condition. Then one day, a new person enters Joe’s world. Amir is Joe’s new nurse. He talks fast, believes in aliens, and sometimes prefers staring out the window to social interaction. Amir enlarges Joe’s world and becomes his closest friend.

    Joe clearly has an unusual life, but what makes his story special is the ordinary - his interactions with the people who come in and out of his room, his love of Spider-Man, and pleasures as simple as seeing the face of a friend. For a kid who thrives on superhero movies and limited social interaction, Joe is surprisingly thoughtful. While his disease is physically confining, he still has mental freedom. His conversations with nurses, his sister, and Henry show Joe’s curiosity about the world and the people in it and his eagerness to interact with both as much as possible. He has learned to observe, understand, and interpret his small world, and to dream beyond it, to let the imaginative space in his head be an escape.

    Bubble is a chronicle of Joe’s life - the surprises, sorrows, and dreams that can be born and borne in one small room and one young mind. I recommend Bubble to middle grade readers who enjoy realistic fiction that relies on the small intimacies of characters rather than grand adventures to tell a story. 

D. K. Nuray, age 14