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

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

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

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

Review of To Be Taught, if Fortunate

To Be Taught, if Fortunate

Author: Becky Chambers

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Publication Date: September 2019

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

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

Review of The Darkness Within (A Dragon's Spell, book 4)

The Darkness Within (A Dragon’s Spell, book 4)

Author: Abby Arthur

Publisher: Abby Arthur

Publication Date: December 2020

    In this fourth and final short story in a four-story series, the three royal siblings of Jasikx and the adopted son of the dragon who controls them are sent on a mission together. Twins Tarrek and Albree, their sister Sheva, and their accomplice Zi are a powerful four. But faced with two enemy dragons, a highly trained samurai, and the samurai’s family, they find themselves desperately struggling just to survive, let alone acquire the samurai target the dragon sent them after.

    Albree is the archetype perfect teenage boy - with bravery, looks, charm, and wit to spare. Fortunately, his potentially annoying perfection is leavened with comedic sarcasm. Quietly intelligent, cheeky in the way that comes with being the older twin, and thoughtfully solemn at points, Tarrek is Albree’s well-matched counterpart. Sheva, cheeky sister and eager fighter, brings humor to match Tarrek’s seriousness and power and prowess to battle. Zi  - a sassy, skilled, unlikely partner to the royal trio - is an entertainer out of battle and a fierce, levelheaded opponent when he needs to complete a mission. The convergence of all four characters in this, the fourth and final installment, brings the collection to a climactic end anticipatory of the next volume. I would recommend this short story to middle grade fantasy readers looking for a familiar type of kingdom - one with heroes bound to save people, but also needing to fight their own demons.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Dragon's Blood (A Dragon's Spell, book 3)

Dragon’s Blood (A Dragon’s Spell, book 3)

Author: Abby Arthur

Publisher: Abby Arthur

Publication Date: December 2020

    In this third short story in a four-story series, prince Tarrek Vaydmehn isn’t fighting with his twin, Albree, by his side. Instead, Zi, adopted son of the dragon controlling Tarrek and his brother, is the prince’s next mission partner. Tarrek, a master archer with the ability to bend light, is a force to be reckoned with on his own. But Zi is a master in another skill - magic. When the two of them face an elf who can block Tarrek’s light bending powers, Zi might be the only one who can save them.

    Quietly intelligent, cheeky in the way that comes with being the older twin, and thoughtfully solemn at points, Tarrek is Albree’s well-matched counterpart. Zi  - a sassy, skilled, unlikely partner to Tarrek - is an entertainer out of battle and a fierce, levelheaded opponent when he needs to complete a mission. Fragments of information about the rest of Tarrek and Zi’s personal lives help build them as characters and make readers emotionally invested in the next chapter of their journey. I would recommend this short story to middle grade fantasy readers looking for a familiar type of kingdom - one with heroes bound to save people, but also needing to fight their own demons.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Shattered Blades (A Dragon's Spell, book 2)

Shattered Blades (A Dragon’s Spell, book 2)

Author: Abby Arthur

Publisher: Abby Arthur

Publication Date: December 2020

    In this second short story in a four-story series, we meet crown prince Tarrek Vaydmehn of Jasikx, twin of prince Albree Vaydmehn. If their lives were entirely their own, the royal pair would be partying after a performance by Albree and his sister Sheva’s band. Instead, the brothers are under the control of a dragon’s spell. This time, Albree and Tarrek are chasing after a multiplier, whom the dragon wants alive. The mission would be hard enough on its own, but a mysterious opponent who attacks both the princes and the multiplier makes it even worse.

    Albree is the archetype perfect teenage boy - with bravery, looks, charm, and wit to spare. Fortunately, his potentially annoying perfection is leavened with comedic sarcasm. Quietly intelligent, cheeky in the way that comes with being the older twin, and thoughtfully solemn at points, Tarrek is Albree’s well-matched counterpart. There’s some apparent substance to our young heroes as well. In a few short chapters, readers get to glimpse them vulnerable, persevering, frustrated, courageous, infatuated, and intelligent. Fragments of information about the rest of Albree and Tarrek’s personal lives help build them as characters and make readers emotionally invested in the next few chapters of their journey. I would recommend this short story to middle grade fantasy readers looking for a familiar type of kingdom - one with princes bound to save people, but also needing to fight their own demons.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Fire and Shadow (A Dragon's Spell, book 1)

NOTE: As you'll soon find out by reading this review, it is for a short story that is the first in a four-story series. I will be releasing reviews for each short story in individual posts. For readers who consistently look at this blog or are planning on reading the reviews for each short story, know that the summaries for each will be different, but the portion of the reviews that "analyze" the writing, plot, etc, will be more or less the same.

Fire and Shadow (A Dragon’s Spell, book 1)

Author: Abby Arthur

Publisher: Abby Arthur

Publication Date: December 2020

    In this first short story in a four-story series, we meet Albree Vaydmehn, prince of Jasikx. Albree’s having a terrible birthday week. The ability to travel through shadows, something that has always been his refuge, has been twisted into a curse; a dragon has him under a spell, forcing him to chase after a firebender. The spell doesn’t care that he’s in a band, that he has a twin brother and a little sister, and that his sweet sixteen has officially been ruined. It wants him to secure his target, no matter the toll.

    Albree is the archetype perfect teenage boy - with bravery, looks, charm, and wit to spare. Fortunately, his potentially annoying perfection is leavened with comedic sarcasm. And there’s some apparent substance to our young hero. In a few short chapters, readers get to glimpse Albree vulnerable, persevering, frustrated, courageous, infatuated, and intelligent. Fragments of information about the rest of Albree’s personal life help build him as a character and create a lead-in for the second short story. Unfortunately, the influx of information can sometimes be overwhelming and create confusing references. I would recommend this short story to middle grade fantasy readers looking for a familiar type of kingdom - one with a prince bound to save people, but also needing to fight his own demons.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of To Sleep In A Sea of Stars

To Sleep In A Sea of Stars

Author: Christopher Paolini

Publisher: Tor Books

Publication Date: September 2020

    First contact, romance, and warfare - what could possibly go wrong? 300 years in the future, humanity has ventured and colonized beyond the home solar system of Sol. Galactic exploration offers many jobs. Kira Navárez is a xenobiologist, which means that she gets to help colonize new planets while learning about their native flora and fauna. When she stumbles across a rock pile on a foreign planet that contains an alien relic, she is delighted… until the relic moves. Kira is thrown not just into a personal biological crisis, but an intergalactic war. First contact sends her to the limits of explored space in the fight to save her species. But it also leads her on a remarkable journey of discovery and self-transformation.

    To Sleep In A Sea of Stars is marvelous. The writing spares no detail, helping readers to inhabit both the story and Kira’s perspective. The dialogue, cursing included, is believable; it meshes with the descriptive writing, allowing characters and plot to develop together. Description and dialogue also support the rapid pace, keeping Paolini from overwhelming or confusing the reader. Kira is an arresting character who grows with - and because of - the events thrust upon her. For a xenobiologist like Kira, interacting with life forms usually means gathering samples and studying them in a lab. First contact with an extraterrestrial sentient species would ordinarily be a dream come true, but the sentient species she finds seems to want to kill her and the entirety of humanity. Being forced to comprehend a fundamentally alien perspective tests Kira’s character and intelligence. Because Kira is an empathetic person capable of both fierce love and easy kinship, her crisis evokes more than just horror and suspense. Her love and protectiveness for the people she considers her friends never leaves, helping to sustain her as the rest of her world falls apart.

    820 pages might seem excessive for a novel about one woman finding some friends and fighting some aliens. But it’s not. To Sleep In A Sea of Stars explores the curiosity and passion that drives us to explore the galaxy, and the intelligence and sensitivity that makes us capable of connecting with the aliens we wish to find. This is Paolini’s first science fiction novel, and he puts his experience as a fantasy author to good use in creating a truly “other” alien species. I would recommend To Sleep In A Sea of Stars to older YA science fiction and fantasy readers looking to deeply connect with a story that explores the boundaries of humanity. 

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Nucleation

Nucleation

Author: Kimberly Unger

Publisher: Tachyon Publications

Publication Date: November 2020

    As an operator for the company Far Reaches in an age of private space exploration, Helen Vectorovich’s job is to pilot vehicles, known as waldos, billions of miles away. She does so from her “coffin”, which allows her to merge her own senses with those of her distant waldo. Helen is an elite explorer who never directly faces danger - until she suddenly does. When a routine mission turns deadly, Helen must fight to save both her job and her life while searching for the saboteur. Junior pilots jockeying to replace her, rival companies trying to take control of the botched mission, and bad rumors about her sanity spreading give Helen more than enough challenges. Her situation gets worse when it begins to appear that the mission’s failure may not have been an accident.

    From the first page, Nucleation has no shortage of perils and surprises, but the fierce, ingenious character of Helen carries the story as much as the plot. As an operator, Helen has to exist in and understand two places - her own world and that of her waldo. This tension is the story’s mainspring. For readers who find the large number of scientific and technical terms confusing, the dialogue between Helen and her colleagues and the momentum of the plot keeps the story intriguing. Helen is part Hermione Granger and part Lara Croft blazing through a fast-paced story that is part science fiction, part space western. Nucleation can feel like too much action crammed between the covers, but this is a forgivable excess. I recommend this novel for middle grade and YA readers who enjoy speculative fiction adventure, fast-paced action, and resourceful female characters and don’t mind some colorful language.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of A Girl Is A Body of Water

 A Girl Is A Body of Water

Author: Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Publisher: Tin House Books

Publication Date: September 1, 2020

    “‘The minute we fall silent, someone will fill the silence for us.’” Kirabo, coming into her thirteenth year, is growing up in rural 1970s Uganda. Her culture has both saved and silenced her. Abandoned by her 13-year-old mother, Kirabo is being raised by a grandmother and aunts. Despite their efforts to “love the mother out of the child”, Kirabo yearns to find the woman who left her but all questions about her mother are unanswered. Coming of age, she also begins to recognize a second self, a rebellious and unreconciled identity that is at odds with her sweet and eager-to-please nature. She begins to look for answers to her past and a place for her selves away from home, sneaking to the village witch and bonding more with her distanced father. Growth for Kirabo is about more than age and physical maturity. Before she can find her place in the world, she must collect, understand, and make a whole person from the pieces of who she is.

    A Girl Is A Body of Water feels almost too rich – in language, personalities, cultural and physical setting, and transformative experience – to lend itself to mere summarization. More than most authors, Makumbi allows the reader to inhabit her main character’s perspective. And despite being a girl’s “coming of age” story, it is not full of trite assumptions. For example, powerful use of Ugandan folklore brings up questions of what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated world, but at the same time questions whether a man with social power is a man with an easy life. The expansive introduction to Ugandan culture is done deftly, primarily conveyed via Kirabo’s interactions with her large family. Evocative language and elaborate description strengthen the story without excessively burdening it.

    One of the most striking characteristics of Makumbi’s story is the unfiltered honesty of the incidents and themes that eventually define Kirabo - as if the author were a battlefield photographer doing her best not just to tell, but to show, not sparing any discomfort and closing the gap between observation and experience. Powerfully candid writing about relationships and struggles with body images may make some readers uncomfortable. And the proofreading at a few points was a little spotty. But these are trivialities. A Girl Is A Body of Water is a captivating, exquisitely told, and emotionally outspoken story. I would recommend it to older YA readers and adults looking for a thoughtful, vivid piece of realistic fiction best read and digested slowly.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library

Author: Matt Haig

Publisher: Viking Books

Publication Date: September 2020

    “At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing.” The game is chess, but this is said to Nora Seed as a metaphor for life. The problem is that at thirty-five years old, she already feels defeated and doesn’t see the possibilities. That’s why Nora decides to take her own life. But instead of dying, she becomes suspended between life and death in the Midnight Library, where each book offers Nora a different version of herself. Among that infinite supply of lives, Nora must choose the one that she will keep.

    For a book that starts with the main character’s suicide, The Midnight Library is a surprisingly thoughtful and witty search for balance. When Nora begins her journey through the Midnight Library, she offers readers an opportunity to step back and compare her lives and choices to theirs. The regrets that she chooses to redress offer the question of what regrets we, the reader, might fix in another life, or whether we might choose another life at all. The Midnight Library is certainly intriguing. The humor and everyday dialogue entertain, but the story also prods the reader on a psychological and philosophical level. When Nora enters the Library, she is given fresh starts. Kind of. Entering each new life at thirty-five gives her both the tools and experience of an adult and the necessity of growing into her world as a child would. That allows the story to grow with her, moving both slowly as she explores one version of herself and quickly as she jumps from life to life. This book could be read for simple pleasure and excitement, but also as a way to consider and vicariously consider how choices affect the arc of a life. I would recommend The Midnight Library to YA fans who enjoy Earth-based fiction, developing characters, engaging writing, and considering how the choices we make shape and define us.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orisha, book 1)

Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orïsha, book 1)

Author: Tomi Adeyemi

Publisher: Henry Holt Books for Young Readers

Publication Date: March 2018

    Eleven years ago, magic vanished from Orïsha. In what would be named as the Raid, the monarchy killed all divîners old enough to be maji, leaving shattered children and families and a caste-divided kingdom. Zélie lost her mother during the Raid. She scrapes by with her father and brother Tzain in Ilorin, a small town literally on the sea. When divîner taxes are raised yet again, she heads inland to make a sale that should provide for her family for the next year. Instead, she is found by none other than Amari, Orïsha’s princess. Amari has fled from her brother Inan, her mother, and King Saran, and has stolen the only thing that can bring magic back. The princess should be a natural enemy of the divîner and her brother, but they are forced together - because it turns out they only have one moon to bring magic back, and Inan is leading the chase for the three fugitives. In the midst of the chase, romances bloom among the four, further complicating an already improbable alliance.

    Children of Blood and Bone is fast-paced and beautifully written. Alternation between the perspectives of Zélie, Amari, and eventually Inan conveys the emotional intensities and complexities that define and bind the characters. Through the disparate perspectives the kingdom itself is also revealed to us, as we become privy to the very different ways that each character sees their homeland. Adeyemi hooks readers from the first sentence and doesn’t release them even once the story closes. The cliffhanger ending makes a sequel both certain and compelling, but does not cheat the reader by leaving the story feeling incomplete. Children of Blood and Bone isn’t a story for readers who want a quick and easy read where details of character and place are secondary to the plot. It is a story for readers who want to feel Orïsha’s soil underfoot, see gods reawakened, and share the desperate determination of an oppressed people. I highly recommend this book for YA fantasy readers who want to inhabit their stories and evolve with their characters.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Girl from Far Away

The Girl from Far Away

Author: Jennifer Austin

Publisher: Far Away Stories

Publication Date: July 2020

    Jessica “Jess” Durand, a seventeen year old on Earth, hates her life. Her preferred escape is her dreams. But her dreams are not normal. She dreams of Ella Day, a seventeen year old girl on the world of Biack. If Ella was real, Jess would know her better than anyone else. Sensibly, Jess assumes that her dreams are just that, until she blacks out at school and wakes up trapped on Biack. At first, neither she nor the people there can believe that the other exists. The place that has been Jess’ escape is suddenly the one place she wants to escape from. Then she finds Ella, and realizes that she can’t go back to Earth yet. Because Biack needs her.

    The Girl from Far Away is a coming of age story with elements of fantasy, mystery, romance, and a little science fiction. The twisting, exciting plot is paired well with characters that grow into themselves through the story. The dialogue is witty and engaging, with a realistic mix of seriousness and teenage flippancy. Occasionally added to the mix is some comedic differentiation between British and English vocabulary. Some of the content is a little adult, but neither explicitly nor a distraction from the story. The dramatic ending sets the book up nicely for a sequel. I would recommend The Girl from Far Away for YA and adult readers who enjoy fast-paced novels with arresting plots and characters and a striking patchwork of genres.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Publication Date: October 1953

    Guy Montag is a fireman. In this case, that means a man who makes fire. A man who breaks into houses in the middle of the night, armed with a hose filled with kerosene instead of water, and burns books. This is a future in which books are illegal and society has traded technology and entertainment for vitality and liberty. Montag thrills in destruction, in the smell of kerosene and the crackle of flames. He is drawn to to secretly save an occasional book, but the action is more of an impulse than a deliberate one. Then he encounters a woman who refuses to leave her house when he comes to burn her books, and a girl whose passion and curiosity kindles Montag’s own. That is when his doubt begins - doubt about himself and his society. His impulsive thefts become purposeful, and he comes ever closer to being hunted by the same society he has brutally defended.

    Despite being written almost 70 years ago, Fahrenheit 451 feels hauntingly current and even disturbingly familiar. The characters’ behavior may seem strange - Montag and his wife cannot remember where they met, “friends” only gather around screens, and the government has systematically attempted to erase the true past. People are fed a diet of pills and propaganda, of entertainment instead of education. Many listen to “ear-thimbles” instead of one another and confuse “family” and “friends” with entertainers. The reflection of ourselves in this narrative is perhaps far clearer now than when Bradbury wrote this book. Bradbury’s future looks entirely too much like our present.

    From the opening pages, there is a steady, building, almost relentless tension to the story that is maintained even during lengthy philosophical dialogue. The multiple supporting static characters emphasize the importance and singularity of the dynamic main character. The technology in the story is disturbingly recognizable. Writing nearly three quarters of a century ago, Bradbury crafted a story that today presents a plausible future - and a relevant warning. Fahrenheit 451 was and remains a book that can make us think, feel, and fear. It is a terrific choice for YA and adult science fiction readers, but the passage of time and a single genre do not confine or define this story.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of To Kill A Mockingbird

To Kill A Mockingbird

Author: Harper Lee

Publisher: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

Publication Date: July 1960

    There is arguably no better time to read this book than now. Then again, that might be true of every year since this book was published more than half a century ago. While To Kill A Mockingbird is set in a town far removed from our place and time, the themes it addresses and the choices made by its characters seem all too familiar. The setting is sleepy Maycomb, Alabama, in the Depression era 1930s. The fact that many of Maycomb’s inhabitants are segregated, racist, and hypocritical is neither unusual nor unexpected. Nor is the central horror of the book - the brutal persecution of a black man, Tom Robinson. Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, who is five years old when the story begins, is the narrator. She grows up with her father, a white widowed lawyer named Atticus, her brother Jem, four years her senior, and her friend, Dill who visits during summers. Everything changes for Scout’s family when Atticus agrees to defend Tom, who is accused of raping a white woman.

    Lee’s choice of Scout as narrator allows us to discover Maycomb through the keyhole perspective of a precocious child. Scout awakens to the harsh realities of Maycomb - to racism and class conflict, to insensible hatred and to the cruelest falsehoods in the name of virtue. Our perception of Scout’s world grows with hers. There is no shortage of good stories about the complexities and terrible consequences of prejudice and hate. Why does a 60-year-old story remain not only relevant, but compelling? Maybe because it makes you not just furious, but sad. Deeply, profoundly sad. Fury is powerful, but often without constructive direction. Sadness makes us care and empathize, makes us not just want to destroy what’s wrong, but make things right.

    To Kill A Mockingbird is also just a well-told story. The dialogue of the main characters fits and evokes the time period. Their vivid, unorthodox personalities help us feel a deeper connection with them as well as the whole of Maycomb. The experiences of Scout and Atticus certainly don’t promise us a better future, but they do show us why we must hope and try. I recommend this book to mature middle grade readers and up. 

- D. K. Nuray