Hello and welcome to the November 2024 edition of the QLR! This month we have a teenage boy on a trip to Joshua Tree with rough memories of his first love, a non-binary rancher, and a mail-order bride in 1880, and a newly-formed poly family dealing with aliens having come to save humans from a potentially dying world.
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Happy Reading!
Title/Author: Desert Echoes by Abdi Nazemian
Reviewer: Laura B.
Summary: When his high school GSA schedules a trip to Joshua Tree, Kam is conflicted. The GSA outing is usually his favorite part of the year, but Joshua Tree is where his boyfriend and first love went missing. He hopes that returning to the desert might help him remember what happened, but he also worries that it might exacerbate his already debilitating grief.
Series/Standalone: Standalone
Genre/Sub-Genre: Teen Fiction
Book Format: Physical book
Length: 320 pages
LGBTQ+ Orientation: Gay
Content Warnings: Addiction (drugs, alcohol), homophobia, death
Well-Written/Editor Needed: Well-written
Would I Recommend?: Yes, but be cautious if stories about addiction are tough for you.
Personal thoughts: I think Nazemian is still a great writer even though this wasn’t my favorite of his books, I did really enjoy it. I thought he did a good job of portraying Kam’s grief about both the loss of his boyfriend, Ash, and about his parents’ divorce. I also liked that we got to see Ash’s parents and sister and how they, as people who knew Ash differently (and in many ways better) than Kam did, had different grieving processes. And I always love how Nazemian weaves Iranian-American culture into his books.
I do think that the reaction from readers who have lost people to addiction will vary. This story is really about Kam and how Ash’s struggle with addiction affects him – both in the past when Kam doesn’t know about Ash’s struggles, and in the present day as he discovers the truth.
Because it is Kam’s story, Ash does sometimes feel more like an object to help Kam on his own journey than a full character in his own right. This wasn’t helped by the fact that Ash is a very pretentious character who Kam’s family and best friend actively dislike, which in turn makes him a difficult character for the reader to like. You can write a troubled character without making them a totally toxic character, so this rubbed me the wrong way. The present-day romance plotline also served to minimalize Ash and Kam’s relationship in a way I won’t spoil, but that added to my feeling that Ash, as an addict, wasn’t given the same respect as other characters. Based on the afterword, Nazemian has much more realistic and nuanced feelings about his real-life ex who inspired this story, and I wish he had infused more of those characteristics into Ash.
My other big complaint about this book is a less serious one but is one of my biggest YA pet peeves. There are so many pop culture references to a degree that I don’t really remember in Nazemian’s other contemporary YA novels. Characters are constantly mentioning singers, movies, popular drag queens, etc. in a way that dates the book, and I think will make it less relatable to teen readers in just a couple of years.
Despite my reservations about this book, I still think it is worth reading. It is a quick read; Nazemian’s writing style is compelling, and while some readers will have critiques of how addicts are presented in the story, other readers will feel seen by the characters’ experiences with the addicts in their lives.
Title/Author: They Ain't Proper by M. B. Guel
Reviewer: Ana
Summary: In the late-1800s American West, non-binary rancher Lou orders house plans but receives Clementine, a mail-order wife instead. Lou rather Clementine leave them alone, but Clementine is determined to get them to open up.
Series/Standalone: Standalone
Genre/Sub-Genre: Western Romance
Book Format: eBook
LGBTQ+ Orientation: Non-binary, lesbian, pansexual
Content Warnings: Child abuse (past), guns, slut-shaming, and period-typical homo/transphobia, racism, and misogyny
Well-Written/Editor Needed: Well-written
Would I Recommend?: Yes!
Personal thoughts: If you've ever wanted to try reading a Western but are put off by the cis-heteronormativity and/or whiteness, this is the book for you. The cast is almost entirely Latine, and it stars a pansexual woman and non-binary lesbian! Laugh-out-loud funny, suspenseful, and heartwarmingly tender all at once, this book is one of my comfort reads.
Title/Author: A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
Reviewer: Puck M.
Summary: On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. She heads out to check what she expects to be a false alarm but stumbles upon the first alien visitors to Earth. These aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn't agree, they may need to be saved by force. But the watershed networks that rose up to save the planet from corporate devastation aren't ready to give up on Earth. Decades ago, they reorganized humanity around the hope of keeping the world livable. By sharing the burden of decision-making, they've started to heal our wounded planet. Now corporations, nation-states, and networks all vie to represent humanity to these powerful new beings, and if anyone accepts the aliens' offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone's eyes turned skyward, the future hinges on Judy's effort to create understanding, both within and beyond her own species.
Series/Standalone: Standalone
Genre/Sub-Genre: Science Fiction/Climate Fiction
Book Format: Physical book
Length: 340 pages
LGBTQ+ Orientation: Main character is a queer woman; there are characters of diverse genders and sexualities throughout
Content Warnings: Climate disasters, discussion of past religious child abuse, some transantagonism and gender-essentialism (called out as such on the page), attempted kidnapping
Well-Written/Editor Needed: Well-written
Would I Recommend?: Yes!
Personal thoughts: Happy upcoming Polyamory Day! As has become my tradition (twice is not enough for a tradition, but I do intend to continue :D), I am reviewing a book that centers queer polyamory and chosen families for the month of November. This is also apparently my year of reading/reviewing Jewishly because for the second month in a row, not only are the central characters wonderfully queer, they are also wonderfully Jewish. And in the best traditions of Judaism, the whole book wrestles with the extremely thorny issues of identity, ethics, consent, whether it is possible (or even desirable) to save a world, and whether it is possible (or even desirable) to build connection and understanding across profound differences.
The worldbuilding in the book is fantastic. First, there are the watershed networks who draw their political authority not from a monopoly on force but from the nature they are working to heal, embodied by the rivers at the center of each watershed; they provide a hopeful look not only at how humans can self-organize, but also at how acknowledging that biases will always be baked into any algorithms we build can lead us to consciously choose how we’d like to bias our algorithms. Then, there are the aliens. The Rings are composed of two species: the plains-folk, whom Judy likens to giant pillbugs and who can play human language on their limbs like a bow on a string, and the tree-folk, who appear to be giant furry spider-like creatures with eyes and mouths on all their limbs, and who use translation boxes to communicate with the humans. In addition to human politics and alien biology, Emrys has crafted a convincing picture of what the world in 2083 might look like. If anybody can be considered an antagonist, it would be the remnant corporations, clinging to the “growth at all costs” style of economy that has nearly brought the world to ruin, but even the individual characters from that faction are interesting, three-dimensional characters, with a fascinating take on gender expression. I don’t want to spoil it for a reader, so I’ll just say that they’ve taken the concept of “work-life balance” to an extreme.
And that brings us to the characters. They are all so real — with virtues and flaws that everyone can understand if not relate to (and boy, do I relate to some of them). Judy, of course, is our primary POV character, and her passions and anxieties ring very true. Her family consists of herself, her wife Carol, their unweaned child Dori (all she/her), and the co-parents they were matched with by a shadchan--Dinar (she/her), Athëo (he/him), and their toddler Raven (they/them). Athëo and Carol are both trans and with very different histories of parental acceptance, which become critical to the plot at various points. The two families have only recently merged, and their process of becoming closer and learning to trust each other better mirrors the growing relationship between the human representatives and the Ringers — in both the fraught and the rewarding aspects.
Finally, while the concepts the book wrestles with are high-level and abstract, the book itself stays firmly grounded. In the acknowledgments, Emrys mentions that Malka Older refers to the book’s genre as “diaperpunk”, which is not wrong. Parenthood is front-and-center throughout the book, not just as a way of organizing society, but with all the earthy logistics it entails — sleep schedules, diaper changes, lactation issues. A Half-Built Garden plants itself in the earth and reaches for the stars, not neglecting everything in between.
And, as a post-script, I appreciate how delightfully nerdy the various characters are about their favorite hobbies and media. It’s another way the world and the people in it feel real.
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