Fantasy has never been my go-to genre. While I deeply respect the massive creativity that goes into building a strong fantasy world, my own brain doesn’t work that way and I often find fantastic novels hard to engage with—to surrender to. So when I say that I loved Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse with my whole heart, I mean this book leapt over all my fences, grabbed me by the hand, and dragged me (wonderfully) into a richly-imagined world I could not get enough of.
Fantastically American Mythology
In her end notes, Roanhorse describes her own love of fantasy and how there’s remarkably little of it written about the Americas. So she wrote the book she wanted to read. I wish I knew enough about the mythology and folklore of the pre-Columbian Americas to draw direct comparisons between the book and specific tribes, but also I know that Roanhorse took creative liberties in making her own world. The fragments I did recognize—the importance of the sun and crows—put me in mind of the shelves of kachina dolls my mom has in her home, gorgeous representations of immortal beings. So, for instance, when one character wears a cape fashioned from the feathers of a gigantic crow, I had a jumping off point. When Roanhorse describes the regalia and mask of the sun priest, I know enough to take my imagination farther than I normally would and try to soak up the details on the page so I can match the vision she has. An experience totally worth the effort. The various clans, religions, and locations in this book very much became real for me and I had so much trouble putting the book down (ask my kid).
Vivid Characters and a Compelling Plot
The opening scene of this book is visceral. Serapio’s mother is cutting her young son’s body and exposing his eyes to the sun to make him into a vessel for a god. As the mother of a young boy, it was a lot, but it was also richly described and layered enough to be fascinating. This was not gratuitous violence, this was the determined act of a woman trying to change the destiny of her people.
Other characters are equally interesting and nuanced. Naranpa, the sun priest, is a woman from “the wrong side of the tracks” grappling with some fascinating “palace intrigue” while trying to alter the relationship of the priesthood to the population entire. And Xiala, a drunk ship’s captain from a matriarchal culture that may or may not eat their lovers, is the hope on which Serapio’s plan hinges. There are also many side characters—including two nonbinary characters (it took me longer than it should have to get used to the “xe/xir” pronouns)—that complete and complicate this world, each with a story and a motivation interesting enough to earn them a place in the book.
Black Sun is a page turner in the best of ways as Roanhorse takes us from scene to scene in alternating locations from the point of view of alternating characters as the story weaves towards its conclusion. I had the pleasure of being stuck on a train with this book. It was thicker than I would usually carry downtown with me, but I couldn’t part with it. By the time I reached my destination I’d read more than 60 pages and I read another 40 on the way home. I also stayed up late reading because I wanted so badly to know what happens next.
Of course more happens than I can know at this minute because this is the first book of a trilogy. I’m holding off on buying the second book because the third won’t be out until next year and I want to pace myself. But you know if I’m planning my book buying for the next year around a series…it’s really fucking good.
For my friends and family who are fantasy readers and writers (hi Natasha, Roxana, and Nikki!) and interested in pre-Columbian history (hi Tosh and Dad!)—check out Black Sun, I really think you’ll love it as much as I did.
I’m slow to adopt new ideas so when I started reading about autofiction (telling a story that is close to your real life using fictionalized details) I mashed it together with metafiction in my head and moved on because it just didn’t feel like where my creative energy was at. But reading Hunger Heart definitely opened my eyes to what autofiction can do. Fastrup uses a “fictional” character to delve into a period of her life when she was in and out of mental institutions with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. The book is interesting (not just because the Danish health system is so much more humane than the American one) and well written and I can see how allowing herself to tell what is essentially a memoir in a fictional way really freed her as a storyteller. She always had the option, of course, of telling the true details about her life in her book, but autofiction lets her streamline events and change the surrounding characters enough so that the book flows well and so that she’s putting the (interesting and sometimes uncomfortable) spotlight on herself rather than her then boyfriend or kids.
All the blurbs on Vikram Paralkar’s The Afflictions reference Borges because, I think, the story takes place in a library where a librarian is introducing a visitor to a series of tomes on (imagined) afflictions. In truth, though, the book has a lot more in common with Calvino’s 
I’d actually been saving back I Have Some Questions for You because I love Makkai’s work and I wanted to give myself time to really enjoy the book. But we went away to Whidbey Island last week and it was the most compelling read I could take with me (and I ate it all up). This book is what prompted this blog post, honestly, because there was a lot I learned from this book. Set just before and during the pandemic, the action also includes significant portions of memory as the narrator, Bodie, reflects on the murder of her roommate while they were at boarding school in the 1990s. Bodie is revisiting that school as a teacher and reconsidering what may have actually happened. 
I randomly picked The Swimmers from my to-read pile after I Have Some Questions for You because I’ve loved Otsuka’s other books. What I did not know was that she was working directly with something I’ve been experimenting with for this book (despite great fear)—the choral voice. The Swimmers explores the collective experience of a group of swimmers at a public pool from a “we” point of view. 
I firmly believe that art and artists have the power to save us—the power to see the future and contextualize the now in ways that help us to survive and even to live our best lives. Nikki Kallio is definitely blessed with this insight and reading her new book Finding the Bones shook something loose for me in the very best of ways. This collection of stories and a novella is both wildly creative and also carefully attuned to the dangers of now. It’s also downright spooky at times, in the best of ways.
In Szilágyi’s engrossing novel, twenty-something Binnie is grinding through her workdays as an underpaid paralegal at a law firm while living a second life planning Joseph Cornell-inspired artworks in her mind. She gives up a rent-controlled apartment to spend less time commuting to have more for her artwork, but she often struggles to make the commitments to the work itself that would allow her to finish a piece (and thus potentially capitalize on some connections that could turn her fortunes). It was sometimes painful to watch Binnie’s choices, mostly because I’ve been there and the hours we spend on things besides art (hello, Twitter) are easiest to quantify and lament from the outside. 
In January 2020, my husband and I were starting a lot of big discussions about how to make the life we want. The theme was being intentional in our choices. Like everyone else, our choices were very quickly limited, but this discussion is once again rising to the surface in a practicable way. Sometimes this means picking the breakfast I want (rather than eating my oatmeal default) and chewing my toast slowly so I can experience and enjoy the last bite of special jam. Sometimes it means going to the beach, because one of the small (but huge) things that makes me feel whole is being near the ocean. This is why I was pretty sure I would love A Line in the World. What I didn’t know is my choice to curl up with this book during a week of sickness and recovery after Christmas would itself be healing.
Child of the 1980s, I grew up with a very particular view of love. If you were worthy (which as a woman meant being both beautiful and not too powerful), you would be placed upon a pedestal and cared for and worshiped as an object of great value. You would also, of course, be looking for someone to worship on a pedestal of your making. Sometimes those objects of worship needed to be reminded how lucky they were that you worship them, so you brought them down a peg (I now know to call this abuse), but as long as everyone followed these rules it was fine.
I had no idea what to expect when I opened The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. I’d bought it because our (wild) backyard bunnies are one of the things that have sustained me through the pandemic. I did not know the book was about love. I did not know this was the exact right book to read with All About Love. Edward is a ceramic rabbit who is loved and doted on by a little girl. He receives this as his due until her grandmother tells them a story about someone who could not love and Edward is very quickly thereafter lost. Edward sees many kinds of love in his journey and eventually learns how privileged he was to have been loved and have had the opportunity to love at all. He grows and he changes, he suffers and he is redeemed.