Books of 2020- Installment #18

86. The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Wow! This book was dark! I mean good but wow! It went a million places I did not anticipate! So the basic premise of the story is that someone has developed the ability to travel between Earths. And of course there are a million different ways a story with that premise could go. Then there's a level of this story that is really interesting which is for a very important reason, the people who can travel between worlds tend to be the very poor which means this work while important gets marginalized and viewed as somewhat inferior. This was deeply interesting to me and helped me through some of the darker elements because it seems really important to think about but it is 2020 and this is a dystopian novel which wow 2020 doesn't need more dystopian elements!!

87. Ayesha at Last by Uzuma Jalaluddin and read by Roshni Shukla

This book is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice which is not for me. There is a lovely little romance between Ayesha and another character. But the racist white woman got on my nervous.

88. Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse and read by Kinsale Hueston

Okay, so I love Rebecca Roanhorse and expected to enjoy this children's book. But I was not expecting to looooove this book!! I don't particularly read children's books so I just didn't think it would hit me so hard! It's an awesome adventure story. A trio of kids have to save some people and it's delightful! I don't go in for hero's journey stories particularly but what I would say I don't like about them is mostly absent from this one. Not completely (I don't think you can write a hero's journey and not have the hero be special in some way...) but this is a team effort and thinking about things and understanding people is really important in this story, so I loved it!

89. Braised Pork by An Yu and read by Vera Chock 

This was a book that seems like it'll be one thing but turns out to be another, which is pretty interesting. At the beginning it seems like it'll be the story of a woman grappling with the death of her husband and possibly a journey of self-discovery. It certainly has elements of that but then it evolves into something else. I say all that because it didn't engage me initially and it wasn't until it evolved that I was interested in. Food for thought if it doesn't initially grab you.

90. The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

Okay, so I love T. Kingfisher's writing and loved The Twisted Ones. I was so excited to read this one, and actually was really surprised to learn that these are her only horror books. I have a quibble with the book, but overall it was fantastic. It creeped me out and I can't get it out of my head. 

I've read 90 books and 71 were by woman, 15 were by men, 3 were anthologies by both women and men, 1 was by a nonbinary author, and 9 1/2 were translations. My year of reading lots of women and at least 12 translations is going well in that I've read mostly female authors, but the world is going through a pandemic and state sanctioned murders in the form of police brutality with a horrible man still at the helm and supported by horrible men in the Congress. In short this year has been really rough. What will this global health crisis leave us with? What changes will we make, not only in terms of the huge inequities of our health system where people of color and the poor (which let's face it- the system works really hard to ensure that people of color, especially black people, are poor) are more than extremely disadvantaged, but also all the other ways in which our society, our systems, actively damage people of color? Only time will tell. But I hope it is a greater sense of community, a need to care for one and another and support each other, not just people with the same colored skin as ourselves, not just people with the same sized wallet as ours. My naive? hope is all of this isolation leaves us wanting to lift each other up and not hold others down.