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Year in Review: 2018 Completed Reading List
I am quite late for a yearly review of the novels I read in 2018 but in my defense, I have had this planned since the last week of December. There are always memes about writing and reading and art that go around leading up to new year's and I couldn't find one that was quite what I wanted, so I made my own.
I'm the sort of person who always has a dozen different books in progress because I'll hop to something new every time my mood changes and am always reaching to read something that hits a specific tonal note. To that end, I present two lists: the list of books I completed in 2018, and the list of books I was reading in 2018 but which I have yet to finish. I'll be writing little mini-reviews of each; with the ongoing reads, some of them I'm still very excited about, some I got burnt out on for one reason or another and may or may not finish.
For a number of years I hadn't been reading much and since maybe 2016 I resolved to start reading more again. I use my library's digital lending system a ton for checking out ebooks and each year I've been reading more than the year before. I wish I did a roundup for 2016 and 2017 but I wasn't back in the swing of journaling yet; I hope that after 2018, I'll do one of these at the end of 2019 as well!
This post contains only the list of books I completed in 2018. In light of the fact that I am a walking TL;DR and cannot keep a post about literature brief to save my life, I am splitting the list of books in progress off onto a separate post, to be completed at a later date. I hope you, dear readers, enjoy this discussion of the books I finished.
As a bit of background before the mini-reviews: at the start of 2018, when I renewed my dedication to reading more in the new year, I made an additional pledge. No more white men. The shelves of book stores are full of the literary output of old white men and I am sick of reading what they have to write. I resolved to read more books by women and by people of color and I am quite satisfied with how well I've stuck to that resolution and with all the delightful novels I have read as a result.
I have genuinely loved every book I finished in 2018 and am pleased to say that I've continued this effort into 2019 with equally delightful results. I present my mini-reviews in the order that I finished the books, which is not in all cases the order in which I began them (The Margarets and City of A Thousand Dolls in particular I began early in 2017, so finishing them many months later was an interesting experience). I would recommend any of the books on this list to an interested party; YMMV with how much you enjoy them depending on your taste but they were all such good reads.
+ The Dark Forest :: This is the second book in a trilogy by Cixin Liu, which I picked up after hearing the translator of the first and third books, Ken Liu (no personal relation) speak at a literary convention. The first book is, in all technicality, a first contact story. But it is also so much more than that, being set during the Chinese cultural revolution. All three novels are incredibly dense hard science fiction, which can be a barrier to entry for a reader, but that said: the science and the nature of the aliens is SO FASCINATING, as is the virtual reality game which is a major part of the first novel.
If the first novel is a first contact story, I would say that The Dark Forest is an alien invasion story, but only by the loosest possible definition of the term. It is the case that the aliens are in the process of traveling to earth to annihilate the human race and take the planet's resources for their own, and it is the case that humanity, adequately forewarned, is doing everything in its power to prepare a defense. But the NATURE of that defense is what is so different and fascinating from other invasion plots I've read, as is the fact that the aliens don't just, show up on page one and begin to invade. The fact that both sides have centuries to plot and plan before they meet makes for a very, very interesting read.
+ The Margarets :: This was one of the first books I started reading from the digital lending library when I got back into reading more in 2017. What immediately struck me as fascinating about the novel was that it just FEELS like fanfiction to me. Not fanfiction as in, "this was fanfic for XYZ series and the author filed the serial numbers off and published it" but more, the nature of the writing itself has a tone and approach to its plot and its characters that resonates with me in the same way fanfic does. It made the book instantly accessible to me, and was a really gentle read at a time when that was helpful.
Regarding the story itself, the story begins with one character, Margaret, who somehow splits herself into six different versions of the same person, who all go off to different planets or places and live very, very different lives -- each in the fashion of one of the play-pretend characters she made up when she was a child. As someone who loves selfcest for the character study potential, this entire concept was FASCINATING to me. I really loved seeing the different ways this one character developed, and I especially loved the worldbuilding and finding out more about the societies and aliens on the planets that are populated in this universe. The ending, too, feels Very Fanfiction, in a way I at least did find quite satisfying.
+ City of A Thousand Dolls :: This book, like The Margarets, also just gave me a vibe of spiritually resembling fanfiction. It's hard to pin down quite what it is but something about the way story ideas are presented to the reader felt accessible to me in the way fanfiction does, where even if it's an AU you already know a little of what to expect and can jump right into the story. And the prose was LOVELY, I instantly adored a lot of the author's turn of phrase and the way they paint a scene.
In terms of plot, the MC has been raised in this mini-city which is basically a cross between a fancy finishing school for orphan girls and an arranged marriage factory grinding out contracts. The world building is fascinating; there are different houses with different specialties which teach their girls a particular art, and while some girls are bought as brides, others are more indentured to work. It's all very shady and basically slavery but the way the author balances the unsavory feeling of the concept with the more fairytale tone of the story is very well-done. The conflict itself arises when someone starts killing off girls leading up to a major event in the city, forcing the MC to try and solve the mystery to protect everyone, including herself.
I loved all the characters and I loved learning more about the world they live in; there's a sequel and I'd like to read it but I haven't, because I learned there wasn't enough interest in terms of sales for the author to write a third book. Buy books which are parts of series if you can! Don't wait for the series to be complete! I know I'm terrible about this personally because I hate when I can't just read the entirety of a story in one go but it's so sad when such a fascinating story never receives its true ending due to sales.
+ Before We Visit the Goddess :: This novel jumps back and forth in time, following the lives of three generations of women as the family comes from India to America and as they grow over the years. I loved it because the depiction of their lives is so rich and detailed, it pulls you into their world and gives you this lovingly rendered window into a life different from your own. I also really appreciated that it's a story about cycles, about the idea that while the poor choices one woman makes can be passed on to her children and bind them to a similar fate, those cycles can also be broken and the hurts of the past can be healed and those who were hurt made stronger for experiencing that pain.
This was the first book I decided to read in 2018 where I consciously chose it because the author was a woman of color and it was just such a beautifully written, intricate tapestry of these female characters' experience. It gave me this feeling of "Yes, this is exactly what I've been wanting!" because all the important characters in the story are women. Even if there are plenty of men who play a role in their lives, the story itself is all about their agency and their choices and the lives they have made for themselves. I highly recommend it as such: a novel about female agency and empathy and living one's life in whatever way feels true.
+ Snow Flower and the Secret Fan :: I first read this novel in middle school, more than fifteen years ago. All I remembered about it from that time is that it included incredibly detailed and unflinching depiction of foot-binding. Rereading it as an adult, I loved it sooooo much, the basic concept of the story is that while girls of this time in China require a matchmaker to find them a husband, sometimes a matchmaker will find two girls who are compatible in all areas of their life and personality and spirituality, who are laotong, or "old sames" which is basically like being platonic soulmates. The concept speaks to me so deeply and emotionally that just trying to summarize it for this review, I'm tearing up at my desk.
Lisa See writes meticulously researched and beautifully detailed historical fiction, bringing to life the experiences of her protagonists with heartbreaking verisimilitude. This novel made me cry. It made me weepy toward the end of the book after everything both main characters have been through, but reading the author's notes and afterword material is what really made me gross messy sob about the story. This novel depicts such a unique and priceless form of love between two girls, intimate and unshakeable and unimaginably precious, something to be treasured for the entirety of their lives. I genuinely adored reading it and how emotional I'm getting trying to convey that feeling in review should be all the testament necessary to the beauty of this novel.
+ Every Heart A Doorway :: With this next section, I am going to do a bit of a shift. These next three books are all part of a series so I want to begin with my overall impressions before narrowing down to my opinion of each book individually. I absolutely ADORED the series, I started reading the first and basically didn't stop until I'd eaten through all three novels. (the fourth I believe came out in January 2019 so perhaps when I finish my current book I'll see about getting a copy of that.) These books are yet another iteration of "something about this prose, can't quite put my finger on it, jives with my brain really well and is an absolute joy to read." They really hit that ephemeral fairy-tale feel, but in a uniquely bittersweet way, due to the nature of the premise.
Speaking of the premise, the overall series is about a home for "Wayward Children," kids who at some point found a doorway to a magical world uniquely suited to them but who, for one reason or another, were ejected back into our reality. And something about that concept of finding a place you belong, which might be dangerous and terrible and the last place someone else would want to be but for you, for you, no place feels more like home, only to lose it... Is uniquely heartbreaking for me and just resonates very deeply with my aesthetic tastes for storytelling. Honestly, the concept of a place of belonging which you and you alone will be able to appreciate to its truest potential, is what makes me teary and emotional. I'm a mess before I even think about what it would be like to lose that.
This book, specifically, is likely my favorite of the three. It includes an asexual protagonist and a trans guy main character and the depiction of each of them really rang true to me. I enjoyed the mystery plot of figuring out who was killing children at their little boarding school but more than that, I really loved hearing about the different worlds different characters had come back from, and the way those different worlds fit together into a tapestry the characters have elected to keep track of. I also just... Really adored the protagonist, in part because I don't think I've ever read a novel from the point of view of someone like her. These books made me feel warm and fond and seen because that specific longing all the characters are experiencing, that sense of being displaced and struggling in light of that, really rings true for me.
+ Down Among the Sticks and Bones :: The second of the Wayward Children books! While I didn't love this one quite as much as the first that is more a commentary on how much I ADORED the first book, and not a reflection of any lacking with this novel. In Every Heart a Doorway, we meet these two twins and find out a little bit about the world they come from and learning more about them is genuinely important to the mystery plot of that book. This book is almost a prequel; it follows Jack and Jill into their other world and back again, so it was really delightful reading their story outright, instead of piecing it together in bits and pieces. If anything, the only reason I love it slightly less than Every Heart a Doorway is because I knew a lot of what to expect, and because I loved the first book's protagonist SO MUCH.
+ Beneath the Sugar Sky :: The third book in the Wayward Children series! This book was a lot of fun because it let us learn more about a character from the first book who we didn't really get to know, brought back other familiar faces from that book, and introduced new characters I was excited to learn more about and which I immediately found to be endearing. To me it did feel a little bit less cohesive than the first two books but part of it may be that it focused on a character from a nonsense world, so that sense of nonsensical levity seeped into the writing itself. Moreso than the other two, Beneath the Sugar Sky is a great adventure with an ensemble cast and I ADORED the character of the baker. I just... Really love this series so, so much, it resonates beautifully with my heart.
+ Practical Magic :: This novel is one I first read when I was about nine or ten years old, borrowed from the lending library at the snack bar of the pool where I did swim team. I was ABSOLUTELY too young to be reading this book at that time. It's a story about family and sisters but it's also about love and lust and desire, and there's a truly upsetting, fraught scene where a character narrowly avoids being sexually assaulted. That said: I adore the way this book captures the subtle magic of superstition and belief, I love all the details behind the charms the aunts perform and I love the sense the book gives you of these characters being people who are putting a kind of energy out into the world and having it returned to them.
This book is so good at conveying sensory experience and combining that sort of experience with its emotional tapestry. The characters frequently are swept up by the force of their emotions and I love the way the author captures that and reveals it to the reader. And I love that it's a story about sisters; I've been trying to read more stories by women and more stories which are fundamentally ABOUT women and while this is also a story about heterosexual love it's just... Very deeply a female story and I appreciate that a lot.
+ Peony in Love :: This novel is also by Lisa See, the author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Naturally, I found it to be equally emotionally devastating and would highly recommend it to anyone who would like to have their heart ripped out and slowly squeezed to pulp. As with Snow Flower, this is a meticulously researched and richly detailed historical fiction novel, inspired by the circumstances surrounding the publication of a real book, of three wives' commentary on the play "The Peony Pavillion." Part of what is fascinating to me is that the story is so fantastical that it feels like it should be invention, so when I read the afterward and discovered quite how much of it is based on historical fact I was blown away. Lisa See does a beautiful job bringing to life the story of these three wives and their experience with a play about consuming, devastating love.
That said, I especially love this novel for invoking in me such a visceral, overwhelming emotional response. The only other story in recent memory that had a scene quite so excruciatingly heart-rending to read was actually a work of fanfiction, The City. With Peony in Love, everything leading up to the scene in question heavily foreshadowed what was about to happen to the character but something about how the information was portrayed meant I kept ignoring and kept ignoring the signs until finally, I hit the point of no return and realized what was happening and just... Felt myself mentally bargaining with the author to stop what was happening while simultaneously knowing it was too late and I would have to watch the event unfold. Reading that chapter was like dragging my emotions across broken glass, IT HURT, IT HURT SO MUCH, but it was so beautifully done.
My heartbreak aside, I also really loved the mythology of the story, the way it depicts the cycle of the main character kind of... Experiencing the full breadth of love's experience, in all its forms, both for herself and more vicariously, through her husband's second and third wives. It was such a unique way to depict the progression of the story's events and I genuinely really enjoyed its themes and the sense of things coming full circle. I adore this book and highly recommend it.
+ Ninefox Gambit :: The first book in the Machineries of Empire trilogy, no mini-review will do justice to my feelings about Ninefox Gambit and its sequels. While only Ninefox makes my list of the three (as I read Raven Stratagem and Revanent Gun at the beginning of January 2019), the entire series absolutely wrecked me in the best possible way. No book or book series that I have read in the past DECADE has been so uniquely, perfectly tailored to my tastes as these. As early as the climax of the first book, I found myself trying not to read them too quickly so I could enjoy them for longer, and wondering how long I'd have to wait to forget enough of the story to enjoy reading them a second time. I can say right now, this is a series I will enjoy for the rest of my life and I fully anticipate returning to them frequently for multiple re-readings.
The basic premise is this: Cheris, an infantry captain, is tasked with winning a military seige where the odds against her are impossibly high. The one notable weapon she is given is an undead, mass-murdering, traitor general, who is scientifically anchored to her like a ghost and who only she can hear. Both characters are complex and immensely likeable; in fact, there wasn't a single character introduced in the trilogy who I did not like, though some I liked more than others. The greatest strengths of these novels are absolutely the characterization and the world building. Interestingly, the pacing of the plot itself felt somehow "off," it never dragged or bored me, every scene I read felt engaging and the sequence of events was logical and compelling. Rather, the story structure seemed to go against what I've been taught is the "right" way to plot a novel. Which to me is a plus: the author rejected conventional structure and wrote a beautiful, fascinating story in spite of that.
As far as why this story is so overwhelmingly for me... The entire society of the world hinges on mind games, horrific rituals, and math. I loved all the politics between the six factions of society and loved learning about each faction's unique traits and place in the world. I loved the sense of all the characters knowing that their world is a hellscape but it's what they have so they have to make the best of it. I loved that the story is the sort of science fiction where "any suitably advanced technology will appear nigh-indistinguishable from magic" but where all of the fantastical tech is grounded in real, concrete mathematics. I loved that Cheris' unique strength that makes her qualified to achieve her goals in a way no one else can is that she is good at math.
And more than those broad strokes, I love that all forms of gender expression, sexuality, and relationship dynamics are normalized in this world. It's hellish in so many ways and that creates this fascinating circumstance where no one in-world will blink at what we would call inhuman torture, but they also won't blink at someone being gay, or trans, or having three dads. I loved that basically no character in the book was provably cishet; any character who had either their gender or sexuality hinted at was either not straight or not cis or both. It made me... So incredibly happy to see a book absolutely filled with gay and trans characters achieve commercial success. And it made me extra happy to read about a world where polyamory is the norm; monogamy still exists but no one thinks anything of a family being a dad and two moms, or three dads, or several agender parents.
There's so much more I could say about these books but I don't want my Ninefox commentary to completely balloon above the length of my other reviews. I love this book, I love this series, everything about them makes my heart sing with delight and I recommend them with my highest regards to absolutely anyone who might even begin to consider reading them. Please read Ninefox Gambit. Please appreciate these novels I loved so much.
And with that, we conclude my review of my 2018 reading! To anyone who has read the entirety of this, thank you. Fiction has always brought me such joy with its ability to transport the reader to fascinating alternative realities or into other lives, to places we could scarcely imagine but which meticulous prose has made real on the page. Everything I read in 2018 has delighted me, and if any of these messy, crying summaries-slash-reviews speak to you, I hope you buy the novel in question or check it out from your local library, and I hope these books will delight you, too.
I'm the sort of person who always has a dozen different books in progress because I'll hop to something new every time my mood changes and am always reaching to read something that hits a specific tonal note. To that end, I present two lists: the list of books I completed in 2018, and the list of books I was reading in 2018 but which I have yet to finish. I'll be writing little mini-reviews of each; with the ongoing reads, some of them I'm still very excited about, some I got burnt out on for one reason or another and may or may not finish.
For a number of years I hadn't been reading much and since maybe 2016 I resolved to start reading more again. I use my library's digital lending system a ton for checking out ebooks and each year I've been reading more than the year before. I wish I did a roundup for 2016 and 2017 but I wasn't back in the swing of journaling yet; I hope that after 2018, I'll do one of these at the end of 2019 as well!
This post contains only the list of books I completed in 2018. In light of the fact that I am a walking TL;DR and cannot keep a post about literature brief to save my life, I am splitting the list of books in progress off onto a separate post, to be completed at a later date. I hope you, dear readers, enjoy this discussion of the books I finished.
Books Completed in 2018
 The Dark Forest |
 The Margarets |
 City of A Thousand Dolls |
 Before We Visit the Goddess |
 Snow Flower and the Secret Fan |
 Every Heart A Doorway |
 Down Among the Sticks and Bones |
 Beneath the Sugar Sky |
 Practical Magic |
 Peony in Love |
 Ninefox Gambit |
 |
As a bit of background before the mini-reviews: at the start of 2018, when I renewed my dedication to reading more in the new year, I made an additional pledge. No more white men. The shelves of book stores are full of the literary output of old white men and I am sick of reading what they have to write. I resolved to read more books by women and by people of color and I am quite satisfied with how well I've stuck to that resolution and with all the delightful novels I have read as a result.
I have genuinely loved every book I finished in 2018 and am pleased to say that I've continued this effort into 2019 with equally delightful results. I present my mini-reviews in the order that I finished the books, which is not in all cases the order in which I began them (The Margarets and City of A Thousand Dolls in particular I began early in 2017, so finishing them many months later was an interesting experience). I would recommend any of the books on this list to an interested party; YMMV with how much you enjoy them depending on your taste but they were all such good reads.
+ The Dark Forest :: This is the second book in a trilogy by Cixin Liu, which I picked up after hearing the translator of the first and third books, Ken Liu (no personal relation) speak at a literary convention. The first book is, in all technicality, a first contact story. But it is also so much more than that, being set during the Chinese cultural revolution. All three novels are incredibly dense hard science fiction, which can be a barrier to entry for a reader, but that said: the science and the nature of the aliens is SO FASCINATING, as is the virtual reality game which is a major part of the first novel.
If the first novel is a first contact story, I would say that The Dark Forest is an alien invasion story, but only by the loosest possible definition of the term. It is the case that the aliens are in the process of traveling to earth to annihilate the human race and take the planet's resources for their own, and it is the case that humanity, adequately forewarned, is doing everything in its power to prepare a defense. But the NATURE of that defense is what is so different and fascinating from other invasion plots I've read, as is the fact that the aliens don't just, show up on page one and begin to invade. The fact that both sides have centuries to plot and plan before they meet makes for a very, very interesting read.
+ The Margarets :: This was one of the first books I started reading from the digital lending library when I got back into reading more in 2017. What immediately struck me as fascinating about the novel was that it just FEELS like fanfiction to me. Not fanfiction as in, "this was fanfic for XYZ series and the author filed the serial numbers off and published it" but more, the nature of the writing itself has a tone and approach to its plot and its characters that resonates with me in the same way fanfic does. It made the book instantly accessible to me, and was a really gentle read at a time when that was helpful.
Regarding the story itself, the story begins with one character, Margaret, who somehow splits herself into six different versions of the same person, who all go off to different planets or places and live very, very different lives -- each in the fashion of one of the play-pretend characters she made up when she was a child. As someone who loves selfcest for the character study potential, this entire concept was FASCINATING to me. I really loved seeing the different ways this one character developed, and I especially loved the worldbuilding and finding out more about the societies and aliens on the planets that are populated in this universe. The ending, too, feels Very Fanfiction, in a way I at least did find quite satisfying.
+ City of A Thousand Dolls :: This book, like The Margarets, also just gave me a vibe of spiritually resembling fanfiction. It's hard to pin down quite what it is but something about the way story ideas are presented to the reader felt accessible to me in the way fanfiction does, where even if it's an AU you already know a little of what to expect and can jump right into the story. And the prose was LOVELY, I instantly adored a lot of the author's turn of phrase and the way they paint a scene.
In terms of plot, the MC has been raised in this mini-city which is basically a cross between a fancy finishing school for orphan girls and an arranged marriage factory grinding out contracts. The world building is fascinating; there are different houses with different specialties which teach their girls a particular art, and while some girls are bought as brides, others are more indentured to work. It's all very shady and basically slavery but the way the author balances the unsavory feeling of the concept with the more fairytale tone of the story is very well-done. The conflict itself arises when someone starts killing off girls leading up to a major event in the city, forcing the MC to try and solve the mystery to protect everyone, including herself.
I loved all the characters and I loved learning more about the world they live in; there's a sequel and I'd like to read it but I haven't, because I learned there wasn't enough interest in terms of sales for the author to write a third book. Buy books which are parts of series if you can! Don't wait for the series to be complete! I know I'm terrible about this personally because I hate when I can't just read the entirety of a story in one go but it's so sad when such a fascinating story never receives its true ending due to sales.
+ Before We Visit the Goddess :: This novel jumps back and forth in time, following the lives of three generations of women as the family comes from India to America and as they grow over the years. I loved it because the depiction of their lives is so rich and detailed, it pulls you into their world and gives you this lovingly rendered window into a life different from your own. I also really appreciated that it's a story about cycles, about the idea that while the poor choices one woman makes can be passed on to her children and bind them to a similar fate, those cycles can also be broken and the hurts of the past can be healed and those who were hurt made stronger for experiencing that pain.
This was the first book I decided to read in 2018 where I consciously chose it because the author was a woman of color and it was just such a beautifully written, intricate tapestry of these female characters' experience. It gave me this feeling of "Yes, this is exactly what I've been wanting!" because all the important characters in the story are women. Even if there are plenty of men who play a role in their lives, the story itself is all about their agency and their choices and the lives they have made for themselves. I highly recommend it as such: a novel about female agency and empathy and living one's life in whatever way feels true.
+ Snow Flower and the Secret Fan :: I first read this novel in middle school, more than fifteen years ago. All I remembered about it from that time is that it included incredibly detailed and unflinching depiction of foot-binding. Rereading it as an adult, I loved it sooooo much, the basic concept of the story is that while girls of this time in China require a matchmaker to find them a husband, sometimes a matchmaker will find two girls who are compatible in all areas of their life and personality and spirituality, who are laotong, or "old sames" which is basically like being platonic soulmates. The concept speaks to me so deeply and emotionally that just trying to summarize it for this review, I'm tearing up at my desk.
Lisa See writes meticulously researched and beautifully detailed historical fiction, bringing to life the experiences of her protagonists with heartbreaking verisimilitude. This novel made me cry. It made me weepy toward the end of the book after everything both main characters have been through, but reading the author's notes and afterword material is what really made me gross messy sob about the story. This novel depicts such a unique and priceless form of love between two girls, intimate and unshakeable and unimaginably precious, something to be treasured for the entirety of their lives. I genuinely adored reading it and how emotional I'm getting trying to convey that feeling in review should be all the testament necessary to the beauty of this novel.
+ Every Heart A Doorway :: With this next section, I am going to do a bit of a shift. These next three books are all part of a series so I want to begin with my overall impressions before narrowing down to my opinion of each book individually. I absolutely ADORED the series, I started reading the first and basically didn't stop until I'd eaten through all three novels. (the fourth I believe came out in January 2019 so perhaps when I finish my current book I'll see about getting a copy of that.) These books are yet another iteration of "something about this prose, can't quite put my finger on it, jives with my brain really well and is an absolute joy to read." They really hit that ephemeral fairy-tale feel, but in a uniquely bittersweet way, due to the nature of the premise.
Speaking of the premise, the overall series is about a home for "Wayward Children," kids who at some point found a doorway to a magical world uniquely suited to them but who, for one reason or another, were ejected back into our reality. And something about that concept of finding a place you belong, which might be dangerous and terrible and the last place someone else would want to be but for you, for you, no place feels more like home, only to lose it... Is uniquely heartbreaking for me and just resonates very deeply with my aesthetic tastes for storytelling. Honestly, the concept of a place of belonging which you and you alone will be able to appreciate to its truest potential, is what makes me teary and emotional. I'm a mess before I even think about what it would be like to lose that.
This book, specifically, is likely my favorite of the three. It includes an asexual protagonist and a trans guy main character and the depiction of each of them really rang true to me. I enjoyed the mystery plot of figuring out who was killing children at their little boarding school but more than that, I really loved hearing about the different worlds different characters had come back from, and the way those different worlds fit together into a tapestry the characters have elected to keep track of. I also just... Really adored the protagonist, in part because I don't think I've ever read a novel from the point of view of someone like her. These books made me feel warm and fond and seen because that specific longing all the characters are experiencing, that sense of being displaced and struggling in light of that, really rings true for me.
+ Down Among the Sticks and Bones :: The second of the Wayward Children books! While I didn't love this one quite as much as the first that is more a commentary on how much I ADORED the first book, and not a reflection of any lacking with this novel. In Every Heart a Doorway, we meet these two twins and find out a little bit about the world they come from and learning more about them is genuinely important to the mystery plot of that book. This book is almost a prequel; it follows Jack and Jill into their other world and back again, so it was really delightful reading their story outright, instead of piecing it together in bits and pieces. If anything, the only reason I love it slightly less than Every Heart a Doorway is because I knew a lot of what to expect, and because I loved the first book's protagonist SO MUCH.
+ Beneath the Sugar Sky :: The third book in the Wayward Children series! This book was a lot of fun because it let us learn more about a character from the first book who we didn't really get to know, brought back other familiar faces from that book, and introduced new characters I was excited to learn more about and which I immediately found to be endearing. To me it did feel a little bit less cohesive than the first two books but part of it may be that it focused on a character from a nonsense world, so that sense of nonsensical levity seeped into the writing itself. Moreso than the other two, Beneath the Sugar Sky is a great adventure with an ensemble cast and I ADORED the character of the baker. I just... Really love this series so, so much, it resonates beautifully with my heart.
+ Practical Magic :: This novel is one I first read when I was about nine or ten years old, borrowed from the lending library at the snack bar of the pool where I did swim team. I was ABSOLUTELY too young to be reading this book at that time. It's a story about family and sisters but it's also about love and lust and desire, and there's a truly upsetting, fraught scene where a character narrowly avoids being sexually assaulted. That said: I adore the way this book captures the subtle magic of superstition and belief, I love all the details behind the charms the aunts perform and I love the sense the book gives you of these characters being people who are putting a kind of energy out into the world and having it returned to them.
This book is so good at conveying sensory experience and combining that sort of experience with its emotional tapestry. The characters frequently are swept up by the force of their emotions and I love the way the author captures that and reveals it to the reader. And I love that it's a story about sisters; I've been trying to read more stories by women and more stories which are fundamentally ABOUT women and while this is also a story about heterosexual love it's just... Very deeply a female story and I appreciate that a lot.
+ Peony in Love :: This novel is also by Lisa See, the author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Naturally, I found it to be equally emotionally devastating and would highly recommend it to anyone who would like to have their heart ripped out and slowly squeezed to pulp. As with Snow Flower, this is a meticulously researched and richly detailed historical fiction novel, inspired by the circumstances surrounding the publication of a real book, of three wives' commentary on the play "The Peony Pavillion." Part of what is fascinating to me is that the story is so fantastical that it feels like it should be invention, so when I read the afterward and discovered quite how much of it is based on historical fact I was blown away. Lisa See does a beautiful job bringing to life the story of these three wives and their experience with a play about consuming, devastating love.
That said, I especially love this novel for invoking in me such a visceral, overwhelming emotional response. The only other story in recent memory that had a scene quite so excruciatingly heart-rending to read was actually a work of fanfiction, The City. With Peony in Love, everything leading up to the scene in question heavily foreshadowed what was about to happen to the character but something about how the information was portrayed meant I kept ignoring and kept ignoring the signs until finally, I hit the point of no return and realized what was happening and just... Felt myself mentally bargaining with the author to stop what was happening while simultaneously knowing it was too late and I would have to watch the event unfold. Reading that chapter was like dragging my emotions across broken glass, IT HURT, IT HURT SO MUCH, but it was so beautifully done.
My heartbreak aside, I also really loved the mythology of the story, the way it depicts the cycle of the main character kind of... Experiencing the full breadth of love's experience, in all its forms, both for herself and more vicariously, through her husband's second and third wives. It was such a unique way to depict the progression of the story's events and I genuinely really enjoyed its themes and the sense of things coming full circle. I adore this book and highly recommend it.
+ Ninefox Gambit :: The first book in the Machineries of Empire trilogy, no mini-review will do justice to my feelings about Ninefox Gambit and its sequels. While only Ninefox makes my list of the three (as I read Raven Stratagem and Revanent Gun at the beginning of January 2019), the entire series absolutely wrecked me in the best possible way. No book or book series that I have read in the past DECADE has been so uniquely, perfectly tailored to my tastes as these. As early as the climax of the first book, I found myself trying not to read them too quickly so I could enjoy them for longer, and wondering how long I'd have to wait to forget enough of the story to enjoy reading them a second time. I can say right now, this is a series I will enjoy for the rest of my life and I fully anticipate returning to them frequently for multiple re-readings.
The basic premise is this: Cheris, an infantry captain, is tasked with winning a military seige where the odds against her are impossibly high. The one notable weapon she is given is an undead, mass-murdering, traitor general, who is scientifically anchored to her like a ghost and who only she can hear. Both characters are complex and immensely likeable; in fact, there wasn't a single character introduced in the trilogy who I did not like, though some I liked more than others. The greatest strengths of these novels are absolutely the characterization and the world building. Interestingly, the pacing of the plot itself felt somehow "off," it never dragged or bored me, every scene I read felt engaging and the sequence of events was logical and compelling. Rather, the story structure seemed to go against what I've been taught is the "right" way to plot a novel. Which to me is a plus: the author rejected conventional structure and wrote a beautiful, fascinating story in spite of that.
As far as why this story is so overwhelmingly for me... The entire society of the world hinges on mind games, horrific rituals, and math. I loved all the politics between the six factions of society and loved learning about each faction's unique traits and place in the world. I loved the sense of all the characters knowing that their world is a hellscape but it's what they have so they have to make the best of it. I loved that the story is the sort of science fiction where "any suitably advanced technology will appear nigh-indistinguishable from magic" but where all of the fantastical tech is grounded in real, concrete mathematics. I loved that Cheris' unique strength that makes her qualified to achieve her goals in a way no one else can is that she is good at math.
And more than those broad strokes, I love that all forms of gender expression, sexuality, and relationship dynamics are normalized in this world. It's hellish in so many ways and that creates this fascinating circumstance where no one in-world will blink at what we would call inhuman torture, but they also won't blink at someone being gay, or trans, or having three dads. I loved that basically no character in the book was provably cishet; any character who had either their gender or sexuality hinted at was either not straight or not cis or both. It made me... So incredibly happy to see a book absolutely filled with gay and trans characters achieve commercial success. And it made me extra happy to read about a world where polyamory is the norm; monogamy still exists but no one thinks anything of a family being a dad and two moms, or three dads, or several agender parents.
There's so much more I could say about these books but I don't want my Ninefox commentary to completely balloon above the length of my other reviews. I love this book, I love this series, everything about them makes my heart sing with delight and I recommend them with my highest regards to absolutely anyone who might even begin to consider reading them. Please read Ninefox Gambit. Please appreciate these novels I loved so much.
And with that, we conclude my review of my 2018 reading! To anyone who has read the entirety of this, thank you. Fiction has always brought me such joy with its ability to transport the reader to fascinating alternative realities or into other lives, to places we could scarcely imagine but which meticulous prose has made real on the page. Everything I read in 2018 has delighted me, and if any of these messy, crying summaries-slash-reviews speak to you, I hope you buy the novel in question or check it out from your local library, and I hope these books will delight you, too.