Review of The Last Cuentista, by Donna Barba Higuera

Award Winners, Children's Fiction Review, Science Fiction 1

The Last Cuentista

by Donna Barba Higuera

Levine Querido, 2021. 320 pages.
Review written April 6, 2022, from my own copy, purchased via amazon.com
2022 Newbery Medal Winner

The Last Cuentista won the Newbery Medal. Everyone should read it. The writing is lyrical, lush, and gorgeous. It talks about the power of Story, greater than anything.

As the story begins, Petra and her family are getting ready to leave earth. She misses her grandmother Lita, who told her a story about Halley’s Comet as a fire snake with bad eyesight that accidentally hit its mother, earth, and destroyed it.

It feels wrong to be sneaking off Earth while so many are left behind. They don’t even inform my parents of our destination until the day before. Dad says Pleiades had been storing their ships in a massive underground facility at the old Denver airport — they weren’t supposed to leave Earth on their first official trip for another two years. The maiden test flights into nearby space a few months earlier had been successful, but because we’re now leaving so suddenly, this will be the first interstellar journey.

If a solar flare hadn’t shifted the comet off course a week earlier, we’d be watching Fire Snake harmlessly pass Earth in a few days like it had since the beginning of time.

Petra and her brother Javier are prepared to go into a stasis pod. They will sleep for three hundred and eighty years and wake up ready to go to a new planet, named Sagan, where another ship has already gone to terraform. Scientists like Petra’s parents will help set up life on the new settlement — and Petra and Javier have custom programming that will go into their brains while in stasis, so they will wake up scientific experts as well.

As they go into stasis, Petra learns that her desired elective — storytelling — was overridden by her parents. She doesn’t want to be a scientist. She wants to be a Cuentista like her grandmother.

Not everyone on the spaceship will be in stasis. The Monitors will spend their lives in space making sure that those in the pods are safe.

But something goes wrong from the very start when Petra is supposed to go to sleep. And when she wakes up, near the planet, she discovers the Collective has taken over. They expect her to answer to the name Zeta-1 and serve the Collective.

The story is compelling and beautifully written. But I had problems with it that I’ve had with other dystopian fiction. I couldn’t get around my questions of why? Why would the Collective want to ban memories of earth and ban stories? The explanation given was that earth was a place of war and they were starting over, but I didn’t buy it. I didn’t think people leaving their home planet would want to forget everything.

I also couldn’t really bring myself to believe in the magic technology that could reprogram brains — and somehow didn’t work on Petra. And Petra could make people remember despite that. So although I see the amazing craft in the book, I could never quite suspend my disbelief and really believe it would happen that way.

But it won the Newbery. So there are many people who didn’t have any problem with those things. Try it yourself! Read this beautiful story and then tell me what you think: Were you pulled into this tale of the last survivors of humankind?

levinequerido.com

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Review of The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig, read by Carey Mulligan

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Science Fiction 0

The Midnight Library

by Matt Haig
read by Carey Mulligan

Penguin Audio, 2020. 8 hours, 50 minutes.
Review written May 17, 2022, from a library eaudiobook

This audiobook was a lot of fun and kept me entertained and absorbed to the end — which is saying something because I’m not in the target audience. I don’t believe in parallel universes.

The characters in this book say that it’s science, but I’m sorry, just because a physicist came up with a theory to explain some equations, that doesn’t mean it’s science. This isn’t a theory you can verify, after all. To me, the theory that a new universe is created every time you make a decision, besides seeming wildly unlikely, takes away a lot of human agency. What does it matter what choice you make if in another universe you made a different one?

In fiction, it also takes away from the story — why should I care about this particular character if another character just like them is doing something different in another universe? Why should I care about this particular set of choices? But if your choices do make a difference — you’ve got a story.

The way parallel universes come up in The Midnight Library is that Nora Seed has some sad things happen and decides to end her life. After she attempts to do so, she finds herself in the Midnight Library. It’s a library with infinite shelves where the time is always midnight. She sees her old school librarian there, who tells Nora this is her chance to undo her regrets. Each book in the Midnight Library represents another life that Nora could have lived. Choosing a book and reading it takes Nora into another life in an alternate universe where she made a different decision somewhere along the way. If she finds a life that she likes, she can stay.

So, in this context, the alternate universes do provide a fascinating way to explore Nora’s regrets. She quickly sees that if she had done what other people wanted her to — things didn’t always turn out so wonderful. So can she find the life she actually wants?

It does work as an interesting frame, but I still have trouble with the logistics. Nora dropped into lives without the memories of the alternate-Nora from that life. A lot of good it would do to be a polar researcher if you know absolutely nothing about the topic, after all. And I kept wondering, Where did the alternate Nora go? And wouldn’t it be a shame to have fallen in love and gotten married and had a child if you couldn’t remember doing any of those things? So it didn’t seem like a fair trial of the alternate lives. And without having actually made the choices that got her there, they talked about Nora’s “root life” — as if that Nora is the real person and her alternate selves are disposable.

But if you think of this book as a version of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — a vivid look at what would have happened if things had been different — and don’t get too bogged down in the details (as I tend to do), it is always fun to speculate how things might have turned out if you had made different choices.

This book also helped me realize that I’ve outgrown my regrets. There was a time when I wondered how life would have turned out if, for example, I hadn’t dropped out of a PhD program in mathematics. But after my divorce, that all seems like water under the bridge. My divorce was something that got me wondering if I could have done something differently to prevent it (even though it was my ex-husband’s idea). But now, twelve years after the divorce was final, my career as a librarian is blossoming — and if I hadn’t gotten divorced, I would have been content to continue to work part-time. But because I got my library degree and became a librarian, I got to serve on the Newbery committee, and just this week, I got word that I landed my dream job as Youth Materials Selector for my whole public library system. Life is good! So who needs regrets?

Still, this book, and this interesting story of Nora and many different things she might have done, is what got me thinking about how nice it is to live without regrets. So if you can keep yourself from thinking too much about the mechanics, I do recommend this book.

matthaig.com

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Review of The Lion of Mars, by Jennifer L. Holm

Children's Fiction Review, Science Fiction 0

The Lion of Mars

by Jennifer L. Holm

Random House, 2021. 259 pages.
Review written January 8, 2022, from a library book

This is a book about a kid who has grown up on Mars, who needs to draw on inner resources when he’s the only one who can save the colony.

Now, that description fits a few books I’ve read recently. This one features Bell, an 11-year-old boy who can’t remember ever going beyond the American compound, which is underground on Mars in an empty lava tube. Sure, he’s ridden on rovers and been to the communication station that pokes up above ground, but this is home to him.

There was a time when the Americans cooperated and communicated with the humans from other countries living on Mars. They even built an underground network of trains together — trains that now sit idle. Earth is at war, and Bell has been told he can’t trust people from other nations.

So when all the adults in their compound get sick, the kids are going to have to break some rules.

This is a fun story, though when the real reason for the Americans cutting off from the other nations was revealed, I didn’t buy it. (Won’t say more than that, because I don’t want to give anything away.)

Other books about living on Mars make a lot more of the fact that going outside can easily kill you and the technical details about staying alive. This one was more about a kid growing up not knowing anything different than the small compound where they eat food made from algae and are cared for by the entire compound. (The children growing up on Mars were brought there as orphaned babies, and their family is everyone together.)

This is a fun story about growing up in unusual circumstances, with a message that we all need each other.

jenniferholm.com
rhcbooks.com

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Review of The Ones We’re Meant to Find, by Joan He, narrated by Nancy Wu

Award Winners, Science Fiction, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Ones We’re Meant to Find

by Joan He
narrated by Nancy Wu

Tantor Audio, 2021. 11 hours.
Review written February 1, 2022, from a library eaudiobook
2021 Cybils Finalist, Young Adult Speculative Fiction

The Ones We’re Meant to Find tells two parallel stories in alternating chapters. One story is of Cee, who’s been living for three years on an abandoned island, trying to build a boat so she can go look for her sister, Kay.

The other story is about Kasey, a socially awkward scientific genius who lives in the next-to-the-top level of an eco-city built above the clouds, designed to be safe from all the disasters that have overtaken planet earth. Kasey’s sister Celia went missing three months ago, and everybody thinks she’s dead.

The two stories do come together, but not at all as we expect they will at the beginning.

Before they come together, Cee tries to set out to find Kay, but her boat is swamped by a storm. She washes up back on the island. Not long after that, a boy washes up on the beach, and life on the island changes.

Meanwhile, with the help of a hacker, Kasey finds Celia’s brain interface, which she had removed before she disappeared. Kasey can access Celia’s memories and find out why she left. Oh, and the world faces more disasters for everyone outside the eco-cities.

The set-up is intriguing, and we want to learn about how they connect. For me, several details toward the end stretched credibility, but I can’t list those things because it would give away the big reveal. However, it’s a nice speculative fiction book about how people might respond to manmade disasters threatening to make earth uninhabitable and the kind of dilemmas people might face. A book that makes you think, while providing engaging characters facing difficult decisions and trying circumstances.

joanhewrites.com
fiercereads.com

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Review of Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao

Science Fiction, Teen Fiction Review 0

Iron Widow

by Xiran Jay Zhao

Penguin Teen, 2021. 394 pages.
Review written January 27, 2022, from my own copy sent by the publishers for the 2022 Cybils
2022 Cybils Finalist, Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Iron Widow is about an angry young woman who starts out seeking vengeance and moves on to destroy the patriarchy. It’s set in a completely different world, but with a culture reminiscent of elements of Chinese history.

Huaxia is besieged by aliens called Hunduns, made of spirit metal. But pilots can fight them, using their qi to control giant Chrysalises to battle and destroy the Hunduns. But pilots can’t channel all that qi alone. They need a pilot-concubine in the cockpit next to them, contributing qi and helping to channel it. There’s one major problem: More often than not, the concubine can’t handle that much qi and dies.

Zetian’s older sister was sold off by her family to be a pilot-concubine, but she didn’t even live long enough to die in battle before the pilot, one of the biggest celebrities in the country, killed her. So now Zetian is determined to enlist as a concubine — and kill him. But before she has the chance to carry out her vengeance, the alarm goes off and they’re pulled into battle. And it turns out that Zetian’s qi is so strong, the one who is overwhelmed and ends up dead is the pilot.

But that’s not the end for Zetian. Next, the army matches her up with the Iron Demon, a man who murdered his family before he became the most powerful pilot of them all. And he is not what Zetian expects. But the more involved she gets, the more she finds out about the pilot system and how it treats girls as disposable.

Zetian herself has bound and broken feet, so it’s always painful to walk. Her feet were broken by her grandmother when she was five years old, so that she would be refined and acceptable to men.

This book has a love triangle with a rich boy Zetian has known for years, but the love triangle has bonds of love (and off-page sex), rather than jealousy, between all three. I tried not to think about whether it would be likely that all three would feel that way about each other. We do see Zetian learn to see and understand more deeply than externals.

Much more disturbing for me, there’s a scene where the main characters torture and kill someone. This person has tortured many others and deserves whatever he gets, but I’m from the Don’t-Sink-To-Their-Level school of thought. I think an atrocity is still an atrocity, even if the victim has committed multiple atrocities himself.

That scene does highlight how horribly the people currently in power are using their power — and that Zetian will do absolutely anything to fight back. She goes from wanting vengeance for her sister to wanting to topple the entire system and save more girls from being sacrificed to the system. And she’d like to win back the province of Zhou from the Hunduns as well. She does an amazing job of defeating the bad guys, and you can’t help but root for her.

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Review of The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Alternate History, Fiction Review, Science Fiction, Starred Review 0

The Calculating Stars

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Tom Doherty Associates, 2018. 431 pages.
Review written September 3, 2021, from my own copy purchased via amazon.com
Starred Review

I tend to love novels where the main character is a mathematician, and when that main character is a woman, that love goes over the top.

The Calculating Stars is set in 1952, featuring Elma, a woman who was a WASP pilot and now works as a computer for NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Her husband is a lead engineer for NACA.

Yes, this is a different timeline from the one we’re living in – and as the book begins, a meteorite strikes the earth, landing in the Chesapeake Bay outside Washington, DC – which is completely wiped out.

Elma and Nathaniel are in the Poconos when the meteorite strikes. I love the way they both know enough about explosions to know it is not an atomic bomb because the radio continues to play, so they know there wasn’t an electromagnetic pulse. Since an earthquake hits four minutes later, they figure out it was a meteorite and know to get to shelter before an air blast hits. This tells the reader these are highly intelligent scientists – but in an extremely tense scenario.

When they do get to safety, after much difficulty, much of the East Coast has been obliterated. As Elma is doing calculations to figure out what the meteorite was made of – she realizes that earth is in trouble. After some years of extreme cold, things are going to heat up until earth is uninhabitable.

So the rest of the book happens in 1956 and is about the push to go into space – much more quickly than happened in our timeline. Because if those calculations are correct, humans are going to need to build colonies off our home planet.

Elma is an experienced pilot and a genius mathematician – but it’s 1956, and she’s a woman. Many believe that a woman’s place is in the home. Can she prove she has what it takes to become an astronaut? And doesn’t anybody understand they’re going to need women in space to establish colonies, anyway?

This book had me following the gripping storyline all the way through. Elma’s voice telling the story is practical but engaging. I love the way she built in actual things about the space program in our timeline – for example that engineers were male but human computers were female – and that women were allowed to train to be astronauts but were not accepted – and the discrimination that was prevalent at that time. All of this is built into what feels like a very realistic story.

It was disconcerting to read about a disaster that would render earth uninhabitable at the same time fires are raging and huge hurricanes are striking and a pandemic is killing people all over the world. I thought it was just as well she set the disaster in the past so it didn’t feel like something that might soon happen. I could reassure myself this was just fiction!

One thing puzzled me a little after I finished the book. Elma and her husband are young and healthy, and they have lots of sex throughout the book. The book covers five years, but Elma never gets pregnant. Perhaps she’s on birth control pills (maybe developed earlier in that alternate reality?), but she sees a doctor and doesn’t talk about that. And medication for anxiety becomes a big issue for her career. Plus at one point she vomits from anxiety and her husband thinks she’s pregnant, but she tells him she just had her period a week ago. If they’re taking steps not to be pregnant, why would he think that, but if they’re not taking steps, why aren’t they concerned? The book covers five years, so I’d expect a young married couple having lots of sex to be thinking about this issue, one way or another. And especially if they’re living in the 1950s. And even more so if they’re making the case that women need to go into space to help build a colony. Perhaps this will be an issue, one way or the other, in later books.

But that’s a minor quibble. The only time it occurred to me when I was reading the book was when I was puzzled the husband thought she was pregnant. By then, I’d assumed there were strong reasons she wasn’t.

One thing I do know: I want to read the next two books in the series. I’m hoping the lady astronauts will help save mankind.

maryrobinettekowal.com
us.macmillan.com/tomdohertyassociates

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Review of In the Red, by Christopher Swiedler

Children's Fiction Review, Science Fiction, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

In the Red

by Christopher Swiedler

HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2020. 277 pages.
Review written October 22, 2021, from a library book
Starred Review

In the Red takes place on a Mars colony with a kid who grew up there. His parents took him out on the surface many times – but when he was ten and tried to pass his Basic Certification, he had a panic attack and failed. Ever since then, he can’t even get to the airlock.

Now Michael is twelve, and determined to prove himself. He’s sure his parents are disgusted by his “condition” and way too protective, so he schedules a test without telling them. When he gets put with the Advanced Test, he impressively calculates directions in his head without using the nav computer, but still has a panic attack when he’s almost gotten back to the dome. Will he never succeed?

Soon after, at night, his best friend Lilith shows him a secret way to get out of the dome. They steal a slightly damaged rover and go on a joyride. When everything is going well, Michael rashly decides to pay his father a visit, six hours away at the magnetic field station at the polar ice cap.

It would have worked, if the station didn’t suffer a major disaster that took down the magnetic field. Now all the humans on Mars need to take cover before the sun comes up with its deadly radiation and no protection from the magnetic field. Trouble is, where will Michael and Lilith find protection out on the surface?

That’s just the beginning of their troubles. Communication is also down, and no one knows they’re out on the surface. In the tradition of a good thriller, solving one problem is only a temporary respite before the next life-threatening situation comes up. The author has them working with reasonably imagined future technology that does have major constraints as they try to survive on a planet that could easily kill them.

This book reminded me of The Martian, but for kids. The dangerous situations and solutions all sounded plausible as well as terrifying. Michael’s practical genius with math had a counterweight in the devastating panic attacks that always put him at further risk.

A science fiction story that feels like it could be telling the future. Kid vs. Nature in a setting that is more hostile than anything on earth.

christopherswiedler.com
harpercollinschildrens.com

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Review of Dare to Know, by James Kennedy

Fiction Review, Science Fiction 0

Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

Quirk Books, September 14, 2021. 294 pages.
Review written September 28, 2021, from an advance reader copy sent to the library.

If you like exceedingly clever and also bizarre books – think Douglas Adams as an example – then you should try James Kennedy’s novels.

His first book, written for young adults, The Order of Odd-fish, inspired my entire Sonderling Sunday blog series, because if ever there was a book with interesting language, that was it.

In this new book, written for adults, our story opens with a washed-up but once prosperous salesman desperate to make a sale, trying to close that sale in a Starbucks. His product is unusual: Dare to Know tells people the day and time of their death.

Our narrator, whose name we never learn, was in at the beginning of Dare to Know and had studied thanatons in college – a newly discovered particle intimately wrapped up in human death.

At that time, the company was called Sapere Aude – the Latin translation of “Dare to Know” and (as I just discovered via Google) a famous quotation from Kant. Our narrator was a physics and philosophy major – as was the author, according to his bio. There’s lots of philosophy in this book, with a glaze of plausible physics theory of thanatons and a new field of “subjective mathematics” which is required to work with this theory.

The math and physics in this book doesn’t actually make any sense, but we’re told the information with such confidence and plausibility that even my strong implausibility detector didn’t pull me out of the story. But as I said, you should enjoy bizarre stories to best appreciate this book.

At the end of his bad day that opens this book, our narrator calculates his own death time and learns that it happened twenty-three minutes in the past. And yet he seems to be alive. But if the calculations were incorrect, this is the very first time Dare to Know has been wrong. Their accuracy is 100%.

This begins our hero’s journey to figure out if he’s dead or not. He goes on a quest to visit Julia, his girlfriend back when they started together in the company, who calculated his death date long ago and kept it in a blue envelope. If she still has the envelope, will it match his calculations? Is he, in fact, dead?

Along the way, many surprising memories come forward which at first seem unimportant, but if his death date is wrong, then is something wrong with Dare to Know?

I’m afraid that while I did enjoy the book, it went a little too far toward the bizarre for my taste. It did remind me of the author’s other book, The Order of Odd-fish, which also heads toward the outlandish and also doesn’t shy away from a main character who seems to be in danger of causing the end of the universe.

Read this book if you dare!

jameskennedy.com
quirkbooks.com

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Review of Dreadnought, by April Daniels

Paranormal, Science Fiction, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Dreadnought

Nemesis, Book One

by April Daniels

Diversion Books, 2017. 279 pages.
Review written April 8, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review

I picked up Dreadnought because of a recommendation by a transgender woman I follow on Twitter, and was so glad I did.

The set-up for this book is maybe a little typical: A fifteen-year-old is present when a superhero dies, so the mantle is passed to her and she gains all the powers of the superhero, to be the next one with that persona.

But in this case, there’s an extra twist. Danny, the person who received the mantle and the superpowers, is a transgender girl, who wasn’t out to anyone but herself. But part of the superpowers includes Danny receiving her ideal body – and in Danny’s case, that’s the body of a woman. She now looks like the girl she’s long known she is.

So besides figuring out what to do with her new superpowers and whether to let the world even know she has them, Danny also has to navigate suddenly looking female.

Danny’s abusive father does not take it well. He insists on bringing Danny to doctors and trying to set up testosterone therapy. Danny’s former best friend thinks he’s doing Danny a favor when he says he’s willing to date her. And the local Legion of superheroes doesn’t allow underage “white capes,” and not everyone currently in the Legion is okay with being joined by someone who’s transgender.

Meanwhile, Utopia, the supervillain who killed the last Dreadnought, is still out there. Danny does make a friend in Sarah, who has her own super abilities and acts as a “gray cape,” not affiliated with the Legion. Sarah convinces Danny that they need to deal with Utopia, and Danny thinks she owes it to Dreadnought for the wonderful gift of a female body.

The story that follows is intense. First, Danny’s father greatly increases his abuse, and then Utopia threatens the Legion itself as well as the world. And she hints that there’s something even more dangerous coming, something called Nemesis. Since right on the cover, we see Nemesis – Book One, I’m looking forward to reading more.

This book is beautiful with all the things any superhero book might have about grappling with new powers and whether great power really does bring great responsibility. But layered on top of that, Danny grapples with what it means to finally have a body that reflects the person she’s always been, and how people react to her. Danny has a very hard time with her father’s abusive words, and I appreciate that no simplistic answers are given to that. Even with superpowers, it’s hard to stand up to abuse.

This is a wonderful book, and I’m looking forward to reading the follow-up. (As soon as I can get to the library.)

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Dry, by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman

Science Fiction, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Dry

by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman

Simon & Schuster, 2018. 390 pages.
Starred Review
Review written October 8, 2018, from a library book
2018 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#6 Teen Speculative Fiction

Dry is frighteningly easy to imagine happening. The book tells the story of what happens when all the taps in Southern California are suddenly out of water in the middle of a drought.

It starts when Arizona and Nevada back out of a reservoir relief deal and shut the floodgates on all the dams, keeping the water for themselves.

For a long time, people haven’t been allowed to fill swimming pools, so there aren’t any of those sitting around full of water. The government brings desalinization machines to the beach, but there isn’t enough for all the people who come, and a riot develops and the machines get destroyed.

Fortunately, Alyssa, the main character in our story lives next door to a Survivalist family with their own water tank – and a teenage son who has a crush on her. But Alyssa also has a younger brother to care for who is autistic. When their parents go missing after trying to get water at the beach, she turns to the neighbor boy. But the neighborhood knows they have water….

One thing leads to another, and we end up having a story of a bunch of teens trying to flee to safety when society has descended into chaos.

Since I lived in Southern California many years, it was easy to picture the story all the way along, including when they drove in the dry aqueducts. Unfortunately, it was all too easy to imagine this happening — from the water drying up to the completely inadequate response to the water zombies who cared about nothing but getting water.

Riveting and frightening, here’s a near-future thriller for teens. Don’t be surprised if they start hoarding water after they read it, though.

simonandschuster.com/teen

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