A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

• Genre: Fantasy
• Age group: ?
• Pub. date: July 21st 2020
• Format: Ebook
• Pages: 289
• Goodreads link

Fourteen-year-old Mona isn’t like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can’t control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery making gingerbread men dance.

But Mona’s life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona’s city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona’s worries…

The reason I put an ? under age group is that Goodreads doesn’t seem to agree between YA and MG. I think it’s middle-grade, since the acknowledgment mention’s children’s literature. But, I don’t think most MG books have such a high body count. The book opens with a dead body. And doesn’t stop there. I think it does an excellent job of being both light and fun, and not shying away from tough subjects like murder and systems of power letting people down. There are some points about heroism that are very well done.

I loved the book, the main character was a delight and my favorite thing was how creative the use of magic was. She can only influence dough, but the ways she manages to use those are interesting and quite powerful. There’s also a grumpy sourdough familiar which awwwww. The other characters we met were cool too, my favorite was a sort of bone witch and a street rat who was really rather skilled. I loved the MC’s aunt, a formidable woman that scares off trained military when she’s protecting her niece.

I thought the book was very well-paced, alternating fun creative stuff with dangerous adventure stuff.

Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley

• Genre: Fantasy
• Age group: Adult
• Pub. date: August 25th 2020
• Format: Audiobook
• Pages: 140
• Goodreads link

A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of The Mere Wife.

Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf — and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world — there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements never before translated into English.

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment — of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child — but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation; her Beowulf is one for the twenty-first century.

Bro.

This was so good.

I listened to this with no idea of the original lore and no previous experience with it, and I loved it. I got the audiobook because I thought it was the sort of text meant to be read out loud and I think it works very well like that. It was a little hard to follow at times, especially some bits about side characters that had new and interesting names that were completely lost on me, but I could keep up with the main story. I did have to listen more actively than I usually do.

I was really into the story, the relationship between Beowolf and the dude he went to help was great, and Beowolf’s boasting and takedowns always made me chuckle. It was all so much more fun than I had anticipated.

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

• Genre: Fantasy Sci Fi
• Age group: Adult
• Pub. date: February 12th 2019
• Format: Print
• Pages: 496
• Goodreads link

Would you give up everything to change the world?

Humanity clings to life on January–a colonized planet divided between permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other.

Two cities, built long ago in the meager temperate zone, serve as the last bastions of civilization–but life inside them is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.

Sophie, a young student from the wrong side of Xiosphant city, is exiled into the dark after being part of a failed revolution. But she survives–with the help of a mysterious savior from beneath the ice.

Burdened with a dangerous, painful secret, Sophie and her ragtag group of exiles face the ultimate challenge–and they are running out of time.

Welcome to the City in the Middle of the Night

This was weird. Super weird. I’m still not entirely sure if good weird or bad weird, though I think I lean good. The world itself is very creative, defined by extremes and truly alien. There’s a language trick where words don’t always mean what we think they mean that makes everything all the stranger. The worldbuilding was the main draw for me here. I found everything from the challenges of this strange planet to the way people and animals had adapted fascinating. There was one kind of creature that I loved, even though I could’ve done with fewer tentacles. The mystery of how we got here never got fully explained, we just learned about the past in small bits of information, but I liked how different the earth people had left seemed compared to today.

It was also bleak as hell. I think after the mess of last year I’m more comfortable reading bleaker stories because I have more faith in humanity’s ability to fuck shit up, it all seems more inevitable to me, I guess. All of that to say, if I had read this year a sooner I might have hated it for the tone, but it didn’t bother me now. The two cities are dystopian, one in more obvious ways than the other, nature is unhospitable, the main characters are dealing with losses and trauma, the relationships are kinda toxic, wasn’t exactly the sort of book where I was rooting for the characters. The plot was mostly about people figuring out their own shit and the actual events seemed more like a vehicle for that than anything else. The ending was strange, I liked where it went but it also felt more like I’d just read a prequel and the real story is still to come.