2016 books: the top five
I haven’t forgotten the drabble offer, fyi, and I’m going to do my best to get to all of them!
White Cat by Holly Black
Red Glove by Holly Black
Black Heart by Holly Black
Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing by Lauren Esker
The Big Con by David W. Maurer
Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn
Closed Hearts by Susan Kaye Quinn
Free Souls by Susan Kaye Quinn
The Lie Tree by Frances Hardringe
My Husband’s Sweethearts by Bridget Asher
Hysterical by Rebecca Coffey
Quinn Checks In by LH Thomson
Bone Swans by C. S. E. Cooney
Quinn Gets His Kicks by LH Thomson
Quinn Goes West by LH Thomson
Quinn and the Vanishing Bride by LH Thomson
Quinn Gets The Blues by LH Thomson
Quinn & The Dead Man’s Daughter by LH Thomson
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by JK Rowling
Quinn Slips The Noose by LJ Thomson
Quinn Goes To Jail by LH Thomson
Quinn Gets Hitched by LH Thomson
Hysterical by Rebecca Coffey. This is a novel - fictionalised biography almost - about Anna Freud, the Freud daughter who became a psychoanalyst, and her relationship with her father. (It elides her life after his death, so you just get a brief rundown.) The book is fantastically well-written with an incredible sense of place and time; you can taste and smell early-20th-century Vienna. It’s also fascinating.
So, Anna Freud was Freud’s youngest child, his intellectual heir, probably his favourite. She was also lesbian, and Freud’s theories argued that since women could only get their moral sense from men, lesbianism was inherently a downfall - and also something caused by selfish fathers damaging their daughters’ childhoods. She supported this view while living with another woman for decades and co-mothering children with her.
Freud had a strong rule that psychoanalysis is inherently an erotic relationship, and so you should never psychoanalyse a family member. But he spent hundreds of hours pyschoanalysing Anna as a young adult, and what they mostly discussed where her masturbation fantasies. The novel never suggests things went any, er, further - but it definitely digs into the weird wild stuff of that relationship and Anna’s confused sexuality and sense of self.
The Lie Tree by Frances Hardringe. This needs its own post, but in short I loved it. Victorian Gothic novels and British children’s fantasy are my two favourite genres, and this is a mash-up by one of my favourite authors who is also amazing at complicated family dynamics and raging against how women are denied credit for their discoveries. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Further details to come, hopefully.
White Cat by Holly Black. HEIST STORY WITH COMPLICATED SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS, so obviously I fell in love. It’s got several high-quality twists and some cringing horror and a BME/POC hero. Family relationships with weird difficult power dynamics that are clearly abusive but don’t feel that way from inside them.
There’s a cool world-building set-up, where the different forms of magic require touch; in the US everyone wears gloves and magic is outlawed. That’s less what I’m interested in but it does allow for some of the best body horror moments: magic in this set-up blows back on you, does a bit of what you did to you, so if you’re a death worker and you kill someone by magic, a finger or a tooth or your heart might die.
Red Glove by Holly Black. Ahhhh the ending. Now the third book is also great, and it gets into a bit of the political implications of the magic set-up - though not much because our protagonist isn’t all that interested. But the second book does stuff with the sibling relationships that made me FEEL THINGS. I won’t spoil it but. zomg.
Bone Swans by C. S. E. Cooney. This is an anthology of short stories by a new writer with serious chops - the intro is by (Cooney’s mentor) Gene Wolfe. The stories are sometimes incredibly creative fairy tale retellings (The Bone Swans is a creepy take on Pied Piper as told by a magic rat) and sometimes wholly original. I didn’t always enjoy the stories exactly, one in particular is terribly dark, but they’re all vividly told with imagery that has stayed with me: a self-playing orchestra made of swan bones, a woman sneezing desperately in a room of straw, child clowns jumping high and then falling to break bones.
Honourable mentions to Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing and My Husband’s Sweethearts. Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing has a couple of tropes I find annoying but is still the incredibly charming story of a wolf shifter and a sheep shifter from feuding families falling in love, and My Husband’s Sweethearts has a super annoying ending but a great premise: the protagonist’s husband has been cheating on her, she’s just found out, and now he’s dying. She invites his “sweethearts” to come and see him. The relationship with the husband was emotional but the relationships among the women were much more interesting to me.
And an honourable mention to the Cursed Child script. I deliberately didn’t read it before I saw it in the theatre, and seeing it was a wonderful experience and it was completely brilliant. So obviously I have zero objectivity about the script in itself, because it’s 25% of the production at MOST and I never read it without that context. I don’t feel like I can give it top 5 as a book because my relationship with it is so mediated through the performance. But seeing it at the theatre three times was a fantastic part of my year and reading the script made me cry at the exact point I cry every time I see it (“he could’ve been anything. And Amos is right - he was stolen”) so I have to give it credit.
This was originally posted at http://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/351791.html. Comment wherever you like :)
White Cat by Holly Black
Red Glove by Holly Black
Black Heart by Holly Black
Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing by Lauren Esker
The Big Con by David W. Maurer
Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn
Closed Hearts by Susan Kaye Quinn
Free Souls by Susan Kaye Quinn
The Lie Tree by Frances Hardringe
My Husband’s Sweethearts by Bridget Asher
Hysterical by Rebecca Coffey
Quinn Checks In by LH Thomson
Bone Swans by C. S. E. Cooney
Quinn Gets His Kicks by LH Thomson
Quinn Goes West by LH Thomson
Quinn and the Vanishing Bride by LH Thomson
Quinn Gets The Blues by LH Thomson
Quinn & The Dead Man’s Daughter by LH Thomson
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by JK Rowling
Quinn Slips The Noose by LJ Thomson
Quinn Goes To Jail by LH Thomson
Quinn Gets Hitched by LH Thomson
Hysterical by Rebecca Coffey. This is a novel - fictionalised biography almost - about Anna Freud, the Freud daughter who became a psychoanalyst, and her relationship with her father. (It elides her life after his death, so you just get a brief rundown.) The book is fantastically well-written with an incredible sense of place and time; you can taste and smell early-20th-century Vienna. It’s also fascinating.
So, Anna Freud was Freud’s youngest child, his intellectual heir, probably his favourite. She was also lesbian, and Freud’s theories argued that since women could only get their moral sense from men, lesbianism was inherently a downfall - and also something caused by selfish fathers damaging their daughters’ childhoods. She supported this view while living with another woman for decades and co-mothering children with her.
Freud had a strong rule that psychoanalysis is inherently an erotic relationship, and so you should never psychoanalyse a family member. But he spent hundreds of hours pyschoanalysing Anna as a young adult, and what they mostly discussed where her masturbation fantasies. The novel never suggests things went any, er, further - but it definitely digs into the weird wild stuff of that relationship and Anna’s confused sexuality and sense of self.
The Lie Tree by Frances Hardringe. This needs its own post, but in short I loved it. Victorian Gothic novels and British children’s fantasy are my two favourite genres, and this is a mash-up by one of my favourite authors who is also amazing at complicated family dynamics and raging against how women are denied credit for their discoveries. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Further details to come, hopefully.
White Cat by Holly Black. HEIST STORY WITH COMPLICATED SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS, so obviously I fell in love. It’s got several high-quality twists and some cringing horror and a BME/POC hero. Family relationships with weird difficult power dynamics that are clearly abusive but don’t feel that way from inside them.
There’s a cool world-building set-up, where the different forms of magic require touch; in the US everyone wears gloves and magic is outlawed. That’s less what I’m interested in but it does allow for some of the best body horror moments: magic in this set-up blows back on you, does a bit of what you did to you, so if you’re a death worker and you kill someone by magic, a finger or a tooth or your heart might die.
Red Glove by Holly Black. Ahhhh the ending. Now the third book is also great, and it gets into a bit of the political implications of the magic set-up - though not much because our protagonist isn’t all that interested. But the second book does stuff with the sibling relationships that made me FEEL THINGS. I won’t spoil it but. zomg.
Bone Swans by C. S. E. Cooney. This is an anthology of short stories by a new writer with serious chops - the intro is by (Cooney’s mentor) Gene Wolfe. The stories are sometimes incredibly creative fairy tale retellings (The Bone Swans is a creepy take on Pied Piper as told by a magic rat) and sometimes wholly original. I didn’t always enjoy the stories exactly, one in particular is terribly dark, but they’re all vividly told with imagery that has stayed with me: a self-playing orchestra made of swan bones, a woman sneezing desperately in a room of straw, child clowns jumping high and then falling to break bones.
Honourable mentions to Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing and My Husband’s Sweethearts. Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing has a couple of tropes I find annoying but is still the incredibly charming story of a wolf shifter and a sheep shifter from feuding families falling in love, and My Husband’s Sweethearts has a super annoying ending but a great premise: the protagonist’s husband has been cheating on her, she’s just found out, and now he’s dying. She invites his “sweethearts” to come and see him. The relationship with the husband was emotional but the relationships among the women were much more interesting to me.
And an honourable mention to the Cursed Child script. I deliberately didn’t read it before I saw it in the theatre, and seeing it was a wonderful experience and it was completely brilliant. So obviously I have zero objectivity about the script in itself, because it’s 25% of the production at MOST and I never read it without that context. I don’t feel like I can give it top 5 as a book because my relationship with it is so mediated through the performance. But seeing it at the theatre three times was a fantastic part of my year and reading the script made me cry at the exact point I cry every time I see it (“he could’ve been anything. And Amos is right - he was stolen”) so I have to give it credit.
This was originally posted at http://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/351791.html. Comment wherever you like :)