Jul 21 2020

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

A searing, devastating indictment of both unquestioning loyalty and the corporate interests that use up workers in order to profit shareholders, extrapolated to their grimmest reality, Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade is both gripping and timely in this endless year of 2020. Our narrator, Dietz, grew up in the slums of Sao Paulo, eking a living with her family till her parents could earn residency with the ruling corporation of Teni-Silva. Resident living was slightly better, but the real perks were held by citizens, so once she’s eligible, Dietz signs up for the military, one of the few pathways open to citizenship. Granted, it still takes a long time that way and isn’t without its dangers, but she’s also motivated by the chance to strike back at the Martians who killed millions of people in attacks on both the moon and earth. She sees herself as a paladin, using force to protect the righteous, a belief that sustains her through brutal military training and then through the bizarre things that happen to her after Drops.

Drops are the name for the process that transports soldiers thousands of miles through space by busting them down to light and reconstituting them at the other end. It isn’t foolproof — people do wind up with limbs improperly reattached or in the middle of solid structures — but it’s fast and relatively cheap. Trouble is, Dietz doesn’t seem to move just through space but also through time, and what she sees isn’t pretty. Is she going mad or is she part of a Light Brigade that could very well save the world from itself?

I don’t know if, when the book came out in 2019, it seemed less prophetic than it does in 2020 but wow, does Ms Hurley know how to write meaningful social commentary in the form of military sci-fi! Which shouldn’t come as a surprise given her training as a historian specializing in the future of war and resistance movements, but it’s always weird actually watching a prophecy unspool in real time. The Light Brigade tackles so many important sociopolitical issues that it’s hard to pinpoint just one as being particularly relevant, but I must say that if you have any interest in seeing how a world ruled by unfettered corporate greed shakes out, you should absolutely read this novel. Unnecessary spoiler for anyone with half a brain: a future where corporations are given control of humanity is not a good future.

The sci-fi throughout was also pretty great, but I’m fairly easy to please when it comes to that sort of thing. I didn’t super love the ending but I didn’t hate it either. Writing-wise, I was very impressed by how Dietz’s gender was largely irrelevant and unknown throughout the book, tho I assumed she was female even before being told otherwise. Plus, the audiobook is narrated by Cara Gee (insert heart eyes emoji here,) which is the number one reason I would ever get an audiobook.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/21/the-light-brigade-by-kameron-hurley/

Jul 20 2020

Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb #1) by Tamsyn Muir

Several of my reactions upon completing this book, in no particular order:

“Do I really need to read the other Hugo finalists when this may be the best book I’ve ever read ever?”

“Oh gosh, I’d love to play in an RPG of this. I wonder what dice and stats system this would run best on…”

“You know, this would be really perfect for a TV series. Gory but perfect. Don’t let those GoT hacks anywhere near it tho.”

Reader, this may not be the perfect book for you, but it was the perfect book for me. I mean, what’s not to like about the standard description of Gideon The Ninth, calling it a tale of lesbian necromancers in outer space? Reading the first few chapters, where we’re introduced to Gideon and her fraught relationships with the other inhabitants of the Ninth House, was already divertingly unique, but then Gideon and her frenemy Harrow answer the Emperor’s call for necromancers and their cavaliers to attempt to become Lyctors, His hallowed right hands, and the book becomes a manor house murder mystery, my God, Tamsyn Muir, are you writing for me?! This novel is And There There Were None meets Warhammer 40k meets splatterpunk with a heroine who loves her puns and That’s What She Said jokes as much as I do, and a really clever indistinguishable-from-magic system, and this book is so smart and so laugh-out-loud funny and so heartbreakingly sad that I had several crying jags while reading it. Yes, there are parts where it’s obvious an editor* leaned over and reminded Ms Muir that readers don’t live inside her head and probably need a bit more explaining on the page than she’d set down already, but they only made me want to live in Ms Muir’s head which is both really creepy and really fucking apropos — read the book to find out why! I am worn out after reading this and am using far, far too many italics when reviewing it, but it is so much the best book I’ve ever read ever, thoroughly engaging my heart and my head and my funny bone. I’m probably going to pre-order the sequel, Harrow The Ninth, which is something I’ve only ever done for two other books before in my entire lifetime. Ooh, should I get a hard copy?

Tl;dr Absolutely mind-blowing amalgam of the best of different genres with a refreshingly contemporary heroine. I love.

*Carl Engle-Laird, whose work I will be following hard from now on!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/20/gideon-the-ninth-the-locked-tomb-1-by-tamsyn-muir/

Jul 16 2020

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

I’ve read a bunch of Charlie Jane Anders’ short fiction and never understood why it was so popular. I figured reading something long form would help clarify this situation and it did, but not in the way I wanted. Here’s my problem with the writing of hers I’ve read so far: there are few interiors. She very rarely tells you how a character feels, in a lived-in way. There’s a scene where Sophie, one of the heroines, collapses from emotion, and it’s described in a weirdly clinical manner, all physical movement and acknowledgment of facts, but without any visceral reaction. It’s the reading equivalent of watching a puppet show instead of human or even animated actors: there are broad strokes meant to simulate feeling but everything feels dead behind the eyes. I don’t know if this is a deliberate choice not to describe how people feel via interior voice  — there are definitely bullshit writing advice websites out there promoting dispassionate storytelling with the claim that it somehow makes people feel character emotions more vividly — but it serves to make me feel at a complete arm’s length from anything going on in the narrative.

As to the narrative, woof. Okay, so there are some really great concepts here. A Mothership filled with humans fleeing a dying Earth landed on a tidally locked planet they called January. They built a series of cities in the twilight, temperate zone but as generations pass, the cities close off from one another and begin to decay, as entropy wins against adaptability. In Xiosphant, the biggest(?) city of a million people or so, citizens are ruled by a way of life called Circadianism, which strictly allocates when people are allowed to work, sleep or otherwise exist. Our first viewpoint character Sophie escaped the constraining expectations of her middle-class Xiosphanti lifestyle by winning a scholarship to the Gymnasium, an elite school for the best and brightest. She falls madly in love with her roommate Bianca, who is beautiful and rebellious in the way only privileged people can afford to be. When she takes the fall for a crime Bianca committed, Sophie is exiled to the night side, but is saved via an unexpected encounter with a member of the other sentient species on the planet, a species humanity refuses to see as anything but animals.

Our other viewpoint character is Mouth, the only survivor of a nomadic people who now works with a group of adventurers who are part courier but mostly smuggler. Her fighting skills are unparalleled, and when she hears that a copy of the last remaining book of her people is tucked away in the Xiosphant palace, she falls in with a group of student rebels planning to besiege it. One of these rebels is Bianca, who was radicalized by Sophie’s arrest and exile, and is now determined to liberate her fellow citizens from their dystopian government. Of course, little goes to plan, and Mouth, Bianca and Sophie eventually find themselves agents of planetary change.

There’s so much potential here but so little makes sense. The systems of Xiosphant sound interesting until you take into account how the place is geographically impossible given the distances Sophie allegedly covers on foot, even before her last return to the city. Argelo hangs together better as an anarchic city ruled by nine different gang families, until you ask how Sophie and Bianca manage to pay for their party hearty lifestyles before Dash takes an interest in Bianca. As with the lack of interior emotion, there are weird gaps in the logic of things that shouldn’t even be a concern. Like, I understand why the Gelet thought Sophie would make a terrific ambassador because they obviously don’t know enough about humans to know what a terrible idea that is — that makes sense. But just everyday questions of space and time and, again, human emotion are ignored in such a way as to make the mistakes feel glaringly obvious.

Possibly the worst of these is in Sophie’s obsession with Bianca. At 93% of the book, Mouth describes Sophie as an idiot, and it seems that the line was thrown in as an afterthought, Ms Anders acknowledging to the reader that yes, our heroine is hard to root for but hey, she realizes it too! To which: so maybe stop making her be an idiot?! Our knowing that you know she sucks doesn’t make her suck any less! But okay, fiction lives for people doing incredibly stupid things for love, even when the object of affection also objectively sucks.

What’s less forgivable is the way Ms Anders treats Mouth. Mouth is blamed for the failure of the Xiosphanti student rebels when it was likely Bianca’s fault they were discovered at all. Yes, she encouraged Bianca’s revolutionary interests but so did everyone else involved in their little plot, and instead of anyone acknowledging that they were as much to blame as she was, she’s cast as the villain for some bizarre reason.

I was also deeply uneasy with the way Mouth’s relationship to her dead peoples was treated. Sure, they turned out to be a cult but the ease with which the proudly Jewish Alyssa dismissed Mouth’s desire to protect her heritage before finding any of that out felt really wrong to me. I absolutely agree that the idea of heritage should be something that needs to be studied and considered critically, and that there are lots of things people shouldn’t throw away their lives over, but being the sole survivor of an extinct people seems like a perfectly good impetus for Mouth to want to recover anything that can teach her more about them. It was really bizarre to see Mouth vilified for any number of perfectly understandable motivations, considering that she was surrounded by people who sucked way harder.

Anyway, I’ve heard that All The Birds In The Sky is better so maaaaaybe I’ll give that a chance once I’ve dug myself out from under all the reading on my current slate, whenever that is.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/16/the-city-in-the-middle-of-the-night-by-charlie-jane-anders/

Jul 15 2020

Minor Mage by T Kingfisher

This book reads far differently for me as a mom now than if I’d read it before my kids were born, but I’d like to think that my younger self would still have appreciated how terrific, how finely crafted this tale of a young wizard on a quest to save his village is.

Oliver is our titular minor mage. He knows all of three spells, learned at the feet of an aging wizard, and one of them is to alleviate his allergy to his own armored familiar, Armadillo. Armadillo has a real name, of course, but one doesn’t go around calling a wizard’s familiar by his real name, so calling him by his species name will have to do. Oliver is also twelve years old, and when his mother, a former adventurer, heads to the next village over to help his older sister with the birth of her first child, he decides he’s going to take the opportunity to travel to the distant Rainblade Mountains in order to bring rain to his drought-stricken village. Unfortunately, a mob of his own villagers interrupt his packing to demand he set off immediately, turning his youthful folly into a much less savoury undertaking. On the plus side, Oliver acknowledges, once his mother gets back she’s going to be much less upset with him than with their fellow villagers.

So off Oliver goes, and over the course of nearly 200 pages, he has adventures that make him think about community and what people owe one another, though in far less abstract terms. His adventures are hair-raising and near fatal, but he learns so much about his capabilities and limitations. He also, unabashedly, misses his mother. Which got me to thinking, as I do every so often, of how few stories talk about good, heroic moms, at least in comparison with dads. For every Not Without My Daughter you have three Taken movies, after all. Not that Mom comes in to save the day here, tho: this is still very much a book about Oliver’s choices and agency. But it was nice to see the loving bond between living mother and child, especially in a fairy tale genre rife with dead or cruel maternal figures.

Tho as in real life, younger readers likely won’t even notice this. They will, however, appreciate not only Oliver’s adventures but also the wit and charm of the writing in general. T Kingfisher blends humor and suspense with just the right touch of gore, underpinning everything with a thoughtful look at how children deal with unreliable adults, as well as with how the idea of adventure rarely lives up to reality. Most importantly, she underscores a lot of things you don’t often find in fairy tales: how it’s okay to be scared sometimes, how it’s okay to miss your mom, how it’s okay to feel bad about making tough choices and, my personal favorite, how it’s okay to not want to be normal. Overall, an outstanding book from an author I’ve long wanted to read, and currently my favorite for the Lodestar Award at the 2020 Hugos.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/15/minor-mage-by-t-kingfisher/

Jul 14 2020

An Interview with Tiffani Angus, author of Threading The Labyrinth

Q. Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did Threading The Labyrinth evolve?

A. Way back in 2009, it started as a research proposal for a PhD in Creative Writing. I wanted to study the history of English gardens and write a novel that span 400 years in a garden with an analysis of space and time in gardens in fantasy fiction. I wrote that novel, passed my viva, and then set about trying to publish the book. It underwent some big changes, though, to get it from PhD to bookshelves!

I love multi-generational stories, so I wanted several time periods represented in the novel; there are even some time periods and stories I wanted that didn’t make it to the pages. The stories inside it each evolved individually, set to feature certain gardening styles and some ideas springing from specific things I discovered on my research. For example, Joan the weeding woman was named for two weeding women I found in a record of Hampton Court’s garden laborers from the reign of Henry VIII, and Mary Hill’s aunt Madeline was inspired by the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. It was only when I finished the novel that I realized Toni, the American who comes to England to find her heritage, was—in a very small way—me, an American returning to the land of her ancestors. It was about halfway through writing it that I also realized that it was an adult version of the trope found in a lot of fantasy books for children in which the garden is a time travel device, though in Threading’s case it isn’t as overt. Once I realized that, a lot became clear, so I took it and ran with it!

Q. Do you write with any particular audience in mind? Are there any particular audiences you hope will connect with this story?

A. I teach creative writing, and I honestly don’t believe in “writing for yourself” in the sense of writing but never intending to share it; I think writing for yourself is writing for those people out there like you who are on the lookout for stories about witches or ghosts or interstellar orchids or whatever. So I wrote this because I’ve always loved multi-generational books and historical fiction that is about real people but messes with the history a bit and inserts fantastic elements. I hope this appeals to fantasy readers and historical fiction readers—I think it has enough for both audiences without necessarily alienating either one. Gardeners might like it, too, but hopefully they approach it as fiction and not as written by a professional horticulturist!

Q. It isn’t often that we read a novel like Threading The Labyrinth where gardening is shown to be a form of art, ever evolving and often needing the commitment of generations to perpetuate and expand upon the work of the original creators. How has your own connection to gardening and art influenced your writing of this book?

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/14/an-interview-with-tiffani-angus-author-of-threading-the-labyrinth/

Jul 13 2020

Riverland by Fran Wilde

Oh how my heart hurt for the Prine sisters, 7th grader Eleanor and her younger sister Mike! Growing up with an abusive father, Simon, and a mother, Moira, who would prefer to blame them rather than defend them, the girls resort to telling each other stories about magic in order to explain the horrifying circumstances in which they live. On one particularly bad evening, when their developer father breaks a witch ball heirloom they’d inherited from their mother’s Scandinavian forebears, a portal opens up beneath Eleanor’s bed that whisks the girls to Riverland, an odd place that shares a name with the coastal Baltimore development they live in (and, it’s implied, that Simon helped build from land Moira inherited.)

Portal Riverland is a scary place inhabited by birds who tend to the budding dreams and nightmares that grow in the reeds along the banks of the river that dominates the landscape. Things aren’t going so well in Portal Riverland tho, as the nightmares, under the guidance of the monstrous Anassa, are trying to break through the cracks in the tunnels that form the border between Portal Riverland and reality. Eleanor and Mike just want to go home, especially after they’re told that staying past daybreak will trap them there forever. But the girls keep coming back for one reason or another, even as the reality of their abusive family life threatens to escape the confines of their home.

This depiction of abused children feels so achingly honest and personal, as if Fran Wilde is exposing her own wounds (which, it is implied, she is.) Eleanor and Mike are easy to root for, even as their upbringing makes them occasionally awful. Is anyone surprised when they’re casually violent with one another, given what they’ve been shown is acceptable behavior through what their father does to them and their mother? Ms Wilde’s exploration of complicity and blame is haunting, so much so that I wanted to reach out to the two Prine girls and assure them that none of this is their fault. It made my heart hurt as a mom to see parents fail their children as completely as the Prine parents do here.

That said, this book is unfortunately less successful as a fantasy novel. Portal Riverland is meant to be an extended metaphor for what the girls are going through but often feels sloppy and disconnected, which is fine for a personal fable but not so great for mass publication. Also, almost everyone outside of the Prine family is barely more than a stick figure — Aja and Kalliope get particularly short shrift, at odds with the author’s note at the beginning that hopes we will love them — and Pendra, who is probably given the most depth otherwise, is eye-gougingly annoying. Maybe it’s because I was a pretty empathetic, private kid myself whose circle of friends was generally sensitive to each other’s feelings, but her oblivious insistence on having things her way even when it obviously hurt her friend’s feelings made me pretty mad.

I also wish that there had been more of an emphasis on Eleanor learning how to manage her feelings in a healthy way beyond the two sentences James said to her about her anger. Given that Ms Wilde wants this book to be available to any kids going through a similar situation in hopes that it will spur them to get help by telling the truth, I felt that it might have been even more helpful in overtly assuring them that they’re not bad kids simply by virtue of being abused, and that their conditioning is not irreversible. I guess that’s a lot to ask for from any one book, but I would honestly rather have read about that than the half-baked fantasy world the girls find themselves in.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/13/riverland-by-fran-wilde/

Jul 10 2020

Deeplight by Frances Hardinge

This may be the most original fantasy novel I’ve read so far this year! I genuinely can’t believe this is billed as a children’s book when it’s so rich and layered and honestly deeply interrogative of personal and political relationships and choices. It’s so much more thoughtful and nuanced than at least 75% of the adult and YA fantasy I’ve ever read in my lifetime, with terrific deaf representation, too. I’m genuinely shocked not to have heard of it before the Lodestar slate for the Hugos came out!

Our protagonist Hark is an orphan on Lady’s Crave, one of the islands that make up the Myriad Archipelago. The Myriad used to worship terrifying monsters from the deep who guarded each island or cluster of same, until several decades ago when the gods began to tear each other apart. Nowadays, there’s a thriving trade in godware, the relics of the dead sea monsters that possess unusual and often coveted properties. Hark is a scavenger and his best friend in the world is Jelt, who’s looked out for him since they were little. As Jelt grows older and harder, however, their relationship begins to sour.

When Jelt guilts Hark into a reckless undertaking that gets Hark arrested, Hark is at first upset, then grateful for the fact that his sentence requires him to stay away from his former associates or face an even worse punishment. But Jelt shows up again with the promise of one last score, and Hark is unable to resist his friend’s bullying tactics. Things go dreadfully awry, setting Hark on a terrible path: either choose to save his friend or to save Myriad.

The blurb calls Deeplight a cross between 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Frankenstein, and while those influences are obvious in this novel, it’s so much more. The toxic friendship between Hark and Jelt opens Hark up for some real soul-searching, even before he begins to understand as more than instinct the power of and need for storytelling as witness. The truth about the sea monsters, birth to demise, was also really well done, as was the dissection of the usage of fear and the hard choices that had to be taken in order to protect Myriad. Frances Hardinge doesn’t paint in broad, heroic brushstrokes, but carefully takes into account the ramifications — the cold equations, if you will — our characters must accept as being an inescapable part of their work and good intentions. It is both deeply moral and deeply nuanced, and just about one of the smartest, most original things I’ve read all year.

Also, it’s only the second book I’ve read that uses the word “goddery” which is a term/concept I very much love (the first was Roger Levy’s The Rig.) I definitely need to read more of Ms Hardinge. If there’s one thing I’m grateful to the Hugos this year for more than any other, it’s for introducing me to her exceptional work.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/10/deeplight-by-frances-hardinge/

Jul 09 2020

From Page To Screen: The Babysitter’s Club by Ann M Martin

Back in the early 90s when these came out, I tried one or two books from The Babysitter’s Club, but figured I was too old for them. My sights were set on solving mysteries with Nancy Drew in college, if I was reading YA/Middle Grade at all. So when the Netflix series came out, I did not at all consider myself the target demographic. Still, one adoring Insta post after another from Cover Critiques had me turning the show on while making dinner one night. And oh, dear reader. I may have been too old to read these books back in the 90s, but I’m definitely the right age to watch this series now.

So the two books that I did read were Keep Out, Claudia! (Book 56 in the series) and, um, something about Kristy training for something athletic and needing to carb load? Anyway, I came in when there were dozens of characters and I felt confused most of the time and, let’s be honest, the Very Special Racism issue read weirdly to me as a teenager. I don’t remember much else about my reactions then but I’ve read enough incisive reviews since to know that this is the kind of book that would make me go “yikes” now. Even at the time, I didn’t think these books were as well or engagingly written as the Sweet Valley High books or the Nancy Drew Case Files that I’d been obsessed with (which yo, I know is a super low bar.)

Thus my reaction to the absolutely charming and really terrific Netflix show has very little to do with childhood nostalgia and everything to do with how great this new production is. They have talented age-appropriate actors for the main characters, with outstanding supporting performances by Alicia Silverstone and Marc Evan Jackson (or grown-up Cher and Captain Holt’s husband, as I automatically think of them.) Each of the first eight episodes is based on the first eight books of the series, with the two-part ender being an amalgam of different books and scenes revolving around summer at Camp Moosehead. It’s both surprisingly faithful to the source material as well as delightfully and sensitively updated for the 21st century. Mary Anne is now biracial and Dawn is Latina, but neither change feels inorganic. There is really great trans and neuroatypical representation, as well. Perhaps the only thing that feels a little less than realistic is how the girls are so consistently loving, supportive and forgiving of one another, but that is aspirational behavior I can get behind! In particular, I love how Dawn weaponizes kindness. She’s such a great character, even if I’m definitely a Mary Anne-Stacey hybrid myself.

This is a great series that anyone who’s ever been a pre-teen girl should watch. Honestly, anyone who enjoys wholesome, lovely G-rated entertainment should check this out (especially if you enjoy the occasional good cry.) Side note: way back in the day I read an article stating that Ann M Martin was married to Michael Crichton, which was an idea I always enjoyed, but apparently the journalist had confused this author with Anne-Marie Martin, whoops!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/09/from-page-to-screen-the-babysitters-club-by-ann-m-martin/

Jul 08 2020

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

I’m rating this book quite highly even as I found myself oddly detached from it, so I’m chalking this down to a me-problem and not to any fault of the book itself. Okay, maybe there’s a pacing issue once we discover who the seeker is: I get that the authors didn’t want to retread stuff, but you’d think at least the scene where she felt obliged to comfort Red would’ve dwelt a little more on how she was feeling in the moment. Ha, so I guess maybe it is partly the fault of the book.

Anyhoo, it’s a charming idea: two elite soldiers on either side of a war to control the past such that it will lead to their preferred present end up being covert pen pals who fall in love. Red is an Agent for a technophilic cyberfuture, sorta like the Matrix but utopian. Blue works for the Garden, an organic hivemind a la Swamp Thing which can also send its proxies back through time and across the strands and braids of reality, just as Red and her fellow agents can. Don’t feel bad if you read the book and don’t exactly understand what the difference is between the two sides, as I only really figured it out after reading the explanatory note at the end. Oh, jeez, maybe my muted enjoyment really was the book’s fault.

What starts as a battlefield boast turns into a meaningful correspondence between two lonely people who eventually fall in love and decide they’ll go to any lengths to be together. It’s a bit Romeo & Juliet, only better, with more mature protagonists who make smarter choices. I enjoyed reading the desire that burned through the pages of the letters they sent each other, even as I spent way too much time feeling that the authors were being deliberately vague about way too much of the background stuff (see: having to read the extra material for clarity above.) I love it when authors trust their readers to be intelligent enough to catch on without needing lengthy info dumps, but this book felt like I was struggling to catch on to a series of in-jokes and personal references, not helped by the many pop culture references that I did get, which just wound up feeling weirdly gratuitous as a result. It was like being at a party where the cool kids were talking to each other rapid fire about their personal interests, which is fine if you’re part of their inner circle but not very entertaining to anyone else. I’d rather go strike up a conversation with someone who’s actually interested in talking rather than showing off.

Leaving my extended metaphor to return to this novella, however, I’m thinking it needed to be longer, to be explored more, to be less breathlessly romantic and more descriptive of the myriad settings it found itself in. This Is How You Lose The Time War has plenty of charm and tons of brilliant ideas, but it’s also weirdly underwritten for having two acclaimed authors.

This was the last of my reads for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella, and I’ll definitely be voting for the novella at this link.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/08/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-by-amal-el-mohtar-max-gladstone/

Jul 07 2020

The Voting Booth by Brandy Colbert

A fast, funny, incredibly relevant look at teenagers and voting in today’s America. Marva Sheridan is the kind of responsible straight-A student whose entire life revolves around how she can make a difference. She’s super-focused and organized, to the point where her parents wish she would let loose and just be an irresponsible teenager every once in a while. Her boyfriend Alec is the cutest guy at the private school they attend, and though he’s white, he totally understands and supports her political activism. Or so she thought. Because today is voting day and he’s decided he’s going to sit out the election because he no longer believes in America’s two-party system.

Duke Crenshaw just wants to do his civic duty and get on with his day. His band has their first paying gig tonight, plus he’s got a big test at school, but voting is important to his family, so much so that he’s been pre-registered to vote since he was sixteen. He is thus utterly gobsmacked to discover that he isn’t on the precinct rolls at all. Overachieving Marva steps in to help, launching the two on a day-long journey of conversation, self-discovery and romance.

This was such a terrific book, covering so many aspects of being Black and biracial in America, as well as the many complex issues surrounding voting today. Marva and Duke are adorable both singly and together as they race around their county to ensure that Duke gets to vote. It’s the perfect book to spur the apathetic person in your life to go line up at the polls — tho having myself recently discovered the joys of the mail-in ballot, I cannot help but think it the superior way to have your voice heard and opinion count. Being able to sit at my kitchen table and have a cup of coffee while looking up each candidate and measure, and then only needing to mark my ballot once and mail it in at my leisure was pretty freaking sweet. Trying to eliminate this option instead of spreading it is a particularly evil form of voter suppression.

My only issue with the book itself was the fairly short shrift both Alec and Kendall got in the narrative. I know that part of the appeal of The Voting Booth is that it takes place on a single, defining day, but I felt that Alec’s change from awesome boyfriend to jerkface was way too abrupt. Also, having been in Kendall’s position, I feel that she deserved way more from Duke than whatever the hell he managed to say before the gig. Heroes of romance novels shouldn’t fuck around with people’s feelings like that, ijs.

Clunky romantic speed bumps aside, this was a really great book about young Americans voting. It deserves to be read widely, and will hopefully encourage more civic participation from its readers (psst, fellow Americans here at home, also visit Vote.org to check on your own registration and other voting info ahead of November.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/07/07/the-voting-booth-by-brandy-colbert/