Permanent Objects

A collection of miscellany

Young Adult

52 IN 52, Book #36: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

I ended up listening to this audiobook during a road trip, having chosen it almost wholly on vibes, but I’m pleased to say that I really enjoyed it! In my review of The Darkness Outside Us I mentioned that I like books with premises that make me wonder how the hell the author managed to come up with such an idea, and this is definitely one of those.

The core premise of the book is more or less a boarding school for wayward children who slipped away from their parents and found doorways that led them to other worlds. Our protagonist is Nancy, who went through a doorway that took her to the land of the dead; having recently returned to the human world, she’s struggling to adapt to human life and no longer feels connected to a human identity. Her parents have sent her to a boarding school run by a woman who herself was once such a wayward child and therefore knows best how to handle them, although she doesn’t present herself as such to the children’s concerned parents.

Soon after Nancy’s arrival at the school, other students begin to be murdered in various gruesome ways, and it’s up to Nancy and her ragtag band of friends to figure out what’s happening and why.

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52 IN 52, Book #16: Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

I am glad I read the author’s notes on this one because I was thinking “damn, this is like Gossip Girl was even more racist and the stakes were way higher,” and then at the end I read how the author was inspired to write it by watching Gossip Girl and observing how few people there were on that show who looked like her. So in that respect I think the idea definitely got across! The tension-building in this story is so excellent to the point that by the end you really don’t know who the characters can trust, and there were a couple of scenes that made me feel like, for-real genuinely palpable fear for the characters. Beautifully executed.

Rating: ★★★★☆ – The book was great and I would recommend it to anyone who likes this subject or genre, and I am likely to re-read it at least once.

52 IN 52, Book #15: The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer

I love reading a book that makes me think “how the hell did anybody come up with this idea?” And I really enjoyed the idea’s execution here.

At the outset this book really just seems like pretty straightforward YA sci-fi fare. An astronaut wakes up on a spaceship midway through its mission and has to figure out what the mission is and what he’s meant to be doing, with the aid of an onboard computer… Only, as it turns out, things aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem. Honestly, having read Project Hail Mary not too long before I read this one, I was sort of thinking that it was giving Andy Weir — only to be promptly proven wrong by the events of the latter half of the book.

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52 IN 52, Book #4: The Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Daunis is a child of two very different worlds, descended from both the historically French settlers of her Michigan town and the native Ojibwe people who live on a reservation nearby–and yet, she doesn’t quite fit into either place. After putting her dreams of university on hold to care for her mother following a family tragedy, Daunis doesn’t have too much going for her, except for Jamie–a new recruit on her brother’s hockey team, who’s kind and charming and very similar to Daunis in his relationship to his own Native family.

Soon thereafter, though, tragedy strikes Daunis’ community yet again, thrusting her into the heart of a criminal investigation that takes her undercover to investigate the very tribe that she grew up with. But the more death, betrayal, and deception she witnesses, the more it calls into question how far Daunis is willing to go to protect her community, and in fact who her community needs protection from.

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52 IN 52, Book #1: Kiss & Tell by Adib Khorram

Following a messy and way-too-public breakup with his ex-boyfriend, pop star Hunter and his group Kiss & Tell are making their way around the US and Canada, playing arenas and meeting fans. All Hunter wants is to focus on the band and start working on their next album, but unfortunately he can’t escape the press that’s dogging his heels–and as the only gay member of the group, he finds himself held to way higher standards than the other, straighter members of the group.

This leaves Hunter basically on his own as he tries to navigate what it means to be the perfect queer idol, whether that’s blindly following the expectations of his label (even down to what he eats and how he dresses) or getting involved with the drummer for Kiss & Tell’s tour opener. Wait a second, that last one might turn out not to be the best idea Hunter’s ever had…

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