before i begin this section i should preface it by mentioning this is a young adult novel. i have not read any YA since early high school, when i tried to read throne of glass and found it awful. before i swore off the genre, though, i read another book by bardugo, shadow & bone. it was not very good. you shouldn’t bother. too many flaws just about synonymous with contemporary YA fantasy, not to mention a love triangle where between the asshole childhood friend and the controlling evil prince i’d sooner pick a bullet to the head. but what stood out to me, between the hand-wringing love triangle and the parade of lovely gowns the lead would summarily refuse, was the world the author placed her characters in. a sort of pseudo late-19th century europe, where magic existed only in the margins. in some countries bardugo’s sorcerors are canonized as saints; in others they are persecuted by witchhunters. regardless, these glimpses of the world beyond the lead were clearly where the author had poured the most effort and care into.

 

it’s a good thing, then, that bardugo spends so much of six of crows fleshing out this world. my friend of many years and current roommate made me cave and read it, and i was pleased to find bardugo’s improved her writing in general since then, too--for one, the characters are actually interesting. maybe not necessarily likeable--they’re cutpurses and habitual gamblers, guarded and prickly and often outright cruel to each other just as much as their many marks. but they were interesting, which is a much better indicator of quality than whether your characters are good people. bardugo knows the deck when it comes to YA tropes and takes pains to prevent the worst of them. above all it was a good time, which, frankly, is the most you can ask for out of a young adult novel from the mid 2010s. give it a shot and don’t be scared by the slightly longer page count--it flew by.

you should read it if: you enjoy sociocultural worldbuilding, you have a fascination with commedia dell’arte archetypes

 

 

the second book i read, an absurdist piece of litfic that starts with the narrator comparing the box a sex doll came in to the coffin of the newly-risen lazarus. i read nutting’s other novel, tampa, last year, and probably enjoyed it more than this one--check out the warnings if you do read that one, it’s narrated by a female sex pest--though i found nutting’s second novel just as evocative. 

 

there’s something very floridian about her style--helped by the fact that the author went to college here, but beyond that her novels read as if through a mirage, lazy and humid. her characters move languidly through her writing, spouting enigmatic little riddles and seemingly all too much like the people you’d find in aisles of an orlando walmart, or perhaps a denny’s outside disney world.

 

despite being over six years old made for love is almost a little prescient, the text overrun with overpowered manchildren with altogether too many fanboys and too much control over others’ lives. but nutting’s writing never loses its hazy, acid trip comedy of errors tone. a farce for the musk era, if you will. 

 

you should read it if: you have spent any amount of time in a "sleepy beach town", you are a recovering social media addict

 

 

the last book i read, and probably the one i have the least to say about. it’s hard to label annihilation as outright horror, but there are certainly horrific things about it--the thought of being infected and controlled by unknown forces, your very environment changing and warping you. much like vandermeer’s area x, implied to be slowly encroaching on its surroundings, the text carries on with a sort of grim acceptance. as if the events that unfold have unfolded before and will keep unfolding, ad infinitum.

 

you should read it if: you prefer setting to characters, you think cosmic horror should be a little less “cosmic”