It’s no accident my reading centers around tyranny lately. Reading is how I understand the world, and there’s a lot to try and understand. This is no accident, either, as artists of all kinds process through the creation of their work: see this interview with Tony Gilroy about making Andor. Three books have stood out in my reading so far this year. Each has something different to teach about tyranny, and each uses a different type of narrative timeline to do so, so I had to share them with you.
Narrowing Options in Heir by Sabaa Tahir
I just realized I’ve never written here about An Ember in the Ashes or All My Rage, two projects that cemented Sabaa Tahir as one of my favorite living authors. Heir sits beside the Ember tetralogy, continuing the rich world in which deeply imagined characters fight across kingdoms that could easily be modern countries. The political strife is exacting and yet the fierceness with which Tahir imagines the humanity that cuts across it all makes these books both deeply engaging and must-reads for right now. I haven’t done a good job of explaining any of them because I don’t want to spoil the unfolding, but one person who read these books described them to me as “The first thing I’ve read in a very long time that made me care about the characters.” They are fast-paced and you can read them for pleasure, but they are also exquisitely crafted…
What flipped my writer brain on while reading Heir was a timeline shift about halfway through. The book is told in alternating points of view between Aiz, Sirsha, and Quil—characters from different backgrounds and different lands whose narratives intersect in explosive ways. I assumed as I was reading that the timelines were concurrent. I think we are meant to assume this, because the narrative is driving so hard forward and we are pulled into that momentum.
So it’s a shock when it’s revealed that one of these narrators (I won’t tell you who) is actually speaking from a past timeline. What this did for me as a reader was immediately start to explore the limits for that character’s storyline. They became backstory for the other two characters and I mourned for the futures I’d imagined for that character. What had once been an infinite sea of options now felt truncated, hemmed in. Like the walls of fate had closed in.
What this did for me as a writer is remind me that we all come to books with assumptions about what is normal. Things we expect and hope for unless we are told otherwise. Many of these are pretty human assumptions and can be assigned to most readers: the action moves forward, we want good things for the characters we are told are good, etc. By carefully playing with these expectations, we can build friction and power in our stories. We can create the unexpected.
Don’t worry, Tahir is an artful writer, and the way she works out of the limitations I then assumed for her character are magic and also feel inherently like part of the world she has created.
There are lessons to be learned here for life, too, where we are can subvert expectations. Step outside of the roles we are being assigned. Stand up when it is assumed we’ll be cowed.
Revealing Our Roles in Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
Speaking of roles and expectations, Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River feels like a documentary of a small town in Germany starting near the end of World War I through the end of World War II. It’s filled with an entire town of characters who play against each other in the way that we do with our neighbors. Everyday things happen as the country’s descent into fascism plays out in the background. In fact, the first time I tried to read this book I found it so quotidian I had to put it down. This time I realized quotidian is the point.
The quote that circulates during every cultural moment where we have the chance to move forward or backward is something like “What you are doing now is what you would have done in Nazi Germany.” This book allows the reader to see what actions a myriad of people take and why. It demonstrates the aftermath.
The timeline plods forward mercilessly forward as people report their neighbors. They cuddle up to power to get a little for themselves. They leave the country. They stay. They help their neighbors openly. They help their neighbors clandestinely. They are arrested. They are released. They are disappeared. They lose their minds. They move forward as though nothing has changed.
I had the chance to talk with someone I love this week about this book and our now. It can feel so difficult to know how to make a difference, but I urge you, if you feel like what is happening is wrong, to do something to change it. Even if you simply start by saying, “This is not okay.” Then keep doing more until you’ve realized how strong you can be.
Stones from the River feels like a personal excavation for an author who was born in Germany after the war, but you have the chance to make a different narrative now. It can feel dangerous, but if you are doing nothing, then what exactly are you preserving?
Documenting the Atrocities in Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
On the subject of atrocities that go on too long, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is the most effective history of slavery I’ve ever read. This novel begins with the story of two half sisters born in Ghana in the eighteenth century. Through the parallel tracks for their descendants, Gyasi shares vignettes from each generation that highlight moments of cultural import. We experience the trajectories of colonialism in Ghana and slavery and racism in the U.S. Ghanaians wrestle with colonizers and tribal strife, people are enslaved, escape, get kidnapped, and work in indentured servitude. Families endure and are severed.
This could feel like a history tome where important moments are thrown at a narrative. But because Gyasi so beautifully inhabits each of the characters and moments, we feel the deepest pain and highest joy along with the characters. She is able to document some of the worst of our history while also keeping the book focused at a human level, which makes it all the more effective.
From a craft standpoint, the fractured timelines of the vignettes allows the reader to feel the disjointedness of the family histories. We see how these stories relate and we have (some of) the cultural context to see where it started and how it’s going, but there are characters here who will never know their family histories and, fresh back from a family reunion where every story has three wonderfully different angles, I ached at the gaps that creates in a person’s understanding of themselves and their culture.
This book is very much in the zeitgeist around me, and I feel like I am late to read it. If you haven’t yet, it’s time.
If any of these books piqued your interest, order Heir, Stones from the River, or Homegoing from Bookshop.org. If you use that link to purchase anything, you’re keeping indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.
I’ve been sitting on a review copy of Steph Catudal’s Radicle, or When the World Lived Inside Us for ages. I think I was afraid of reading the book, which explores motherhood and losing a parent, because of what it would open for me. I was right about the feelings. I was wrong to wait to read it, because the sensory detail and her gentle attention to the experience of being human make this book worth returning to again and again.
What drew me to the series (beyond my husband’s recommendation) was how beautiful it is (and not just because they cast Lee Pace). The on-screen world is painterly (in one season expressly so as “Dusk” Cleon is actually painting the murals in his palace). What kept me there is the fascinating characters (especially Gaal Dornick and Salvor Hardin) and political machinations that made the world feel real and urgent. I kept thinking, “There must be so much more of this in the books! I must read the books!” I found the second two in a local Little Free Library, but it took me ages to actually order the first. What a surprise it was to finally read about this world I thought I knew.
The book is different. Not only is Gaal not a woman (almost no characters of consequence are), the character is incidental to the plot. In fact, most of the characters are incidental. As I was reading Foundation, I realized that part of what I’d loved about the series was the way the characters provided a touchstone for me as we hopped across planets and leapt forward in time over and over again. We lost a few of my favorites along the way, but there were always others I could lean on, knowing how their sympathies did and did not square with mine.
I have no interest in dogging on books that make lots of people happy but just aren’t my bag. But am interested in learning from these books, as something can be learned from anything. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher was one of those books for me. Loaned to me by a beloved relative, I read the book even after I figured out I was the wrong reader, because I was interested in why the book didn’t work for me. 
Speaking of political violence, which is on a lot of our minds lately, I found a copy of A Burning by Megha Majumdar at the Little Free Library and dove right in. I’m not quite done with this one but it was interesting to feel how differently I related to the characters in this story of a young woman (Jivan) in India who is imprisoned for a terrorist act she did not commit. 
Some dystopias are fictional and I got the chance to revisit this classic by Ray Bradbury recently as my 10-year-old son picked it out as one of his birthday books. I can tell he’s exploring someone’s canon of great books because he checked Frankenstein out from the school library more than ten times last year (and it’s in our home again already this year—though I have offered to buy him a copy). He struggled in the beginning as he couldn’t tell what was metaphor and what was a mapping of an unfamiliar world (someday he’ll be the book reviewer, I tell ya), but I think we were both enriched by reading this book (and by watching the Simpson’s Treehouse of Terror takeoff, though picturing Montag as Homer did shift things a bit for me).
The book that rounds out the puzzle in my brain today is The Bat-Poet by Randall Jerrell, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. This simple story of a bat who is finding ways to himself through writing came to me by 
I can’t recall where I read about Barkskins, but as the daughter of a forester, the idea of reading about how timber has shaped our nation appealed to me. The book follows two (entwined, at times) families, one Mi’kmaw and one French from 1693 until almost the present day (though I haven’t reached actual nationhood for either the U.S. or Canada) as settlers clear the newly “discovered” land, first for the value of the timber, then for the sake of clearing.