Category: Fiction

Jenny over at Reading the End started her post about this book by noting that someone on Twitter described it as a “postcolonial Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” which was enough to pique my interest. I like books that are set in England at the time of the Napoleonic wars, but with magic (Jonathan Strange…

In the foreword to the edition of Oreo that I read, Danzy Senna calls the book a “hilarious badass novel,” and yeah, that sums it up pretty nicely (xi). Oreo is a satirical picaresque quest-narrative, with the protagonist (a half-black/half-Jewish precocious teenage girl called Oreo) playing the part of Theseus. It’s a very smart book…

Speak starts with a prologue narrated by a doll that’s been “banned and marked for disposal” for being “excessively lifelike” (2). “I review stored information,” the doll says (3). It tells us it’s been “programmed to select which of [its] voices responds to the situation at hand: moving west in the desert, waiting for the…

I read about Disgruntled earlier this summer, when both Jenny at Reading the End and Jenna at Lower East Side Librarian posted about it, and I’m glad I read their posts and then checked this out of the library. It’s got a back cover blurb by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the start of which I think…

Last First Snow is the fourth book in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence in publication order, but the first chronologically: it’s set in Dresediel Lex, the desert city of fourteen million where Two Serpents Rise (which was the second book, both in publication order and chronologically) also takes place. I wouldn’t recommend starting the series here,…

Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star is often an uncomfortable read, but it should be: its narrator is an astronomy grad student with an eating disorder, and she’s in a long-distance relationship with a guy dealing (or rather not dealing) with alcoholism. The binary star of the title is the book’s metaphor for their relationship—two stars orbiting…

Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island reminded me a bit of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, in that they both feature writer-narrators engaged in a project of writing/observation whose result, basically, is the book you’re reading. I liked 10:04 a bit more, because it’s got more New York in it and is more lyrical and optimistic, but I liked…

I mostly read Exodus because I’m a completist—it was bugging me that I’d read the first two books of this trilogy about, as the back cover puts it, “the two preposterous philosophical anti-heroes,” Lars and W., but hadn’t read the third. This third book is more of the same, which is mostly a good thing,…

“Where does trouble come from? How do you get into it?” (9). For fourteen-year-old Gwen Needle, the trouble, and also the adventure, starts on Memorial Day, when she’s caught shoplifting at a drugstore. She also has a falling out with her mean-girl best friend, quits the synchronized swimming team she’s been on (partly because of…

I was worried, at first, that The First Bad Man was going to be weird for the sake of weirdness, and awkward/uncomfortable without any sort of payoff for it. But while the book is plenty weird and awkward and uncomfortable, it’s also funny and readable and sometimes surprisingly sweet. The narrator is Cheryl Glickman, who…