magical realism – Krista Beucler

Books Reread

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien*
What a nice comfort book to read in these trying times. When Frodo’s uncle leaves him an enchanted ring, Frodo is pulled into a struggle to save middle earth. Peter Jackson’s movie is excellent and that is in part because he had great source material. A classic. It was nice to visit Tom Bombadil again too.
4/5 barrow-wights

New Books Read

The Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao***
Iron Widow book 2
CW: see content warning from the author at the beginning of the book
I won’t do a little summary of this book, because I don’t want to spoil the first book. This book was good, but I wouldn’t say I really enjoyed it. The first book was fun. I loved how Zetian, Shimin, and Yizhi interacted with one another and how they took on the establishment. In this book they almost don’t interact at all, which I found disappointing. I liked the examination of Laborism and the continued themes of feminism, especially how Zetian is learning her own shortcomings as a feminist. But the first half of the book dragged a bit. Still fascinated by the world. I’ll probably still read the next book.
3.5/5 suits of spirit armor

To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang***
Gods Beyond the Skies book 1
I love when authors thank each other in their acknowledgements. It was a coincidence that I happened to pick this book and Heavenly Tyrant up at the library at the same time, but I loved seeing both authors thank each other in the acknowledgements. Ruying has the power to pull the life force from someone’s body, but she is one of a conquered people. When a conquering prince discovers her power, Ruying is forced to become his personal assassin to save her family. But the prince is charismatic. He seems to want peace and unity between their people as much as she does. As Ruying is drawn in by his promise of peace, she must learn to trust herself to do the right thing for her people. I enjoyed this. I liked seeing Ruying’s character develop throughout the book.
3.5/5 blessings from Death

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle***
**Book Hangover Alert
This one was fun. Screenwriter Misha made it in Hollywood by writing queer horror movies, but then the studio tells him he has to kill off his gay leads right at the culmination of their relationship. Despite being closeted in his hometown in Montana, Misha is ready to stand for his principles until he starts being menaced by monsters from his own movies. Are these crazy stalker fans or something more sinister? I really enjoyed this. Great tension building. Important themes about technology and art and capitalism (spoiler: this book is anti-AI) that I was left thinking about long after the story ended. My one critique is that I hated the dialogue tags. This is probably just a personal quibble.
4/5 horror monsters

The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater***
**Book Hangover Alert
CW: ableism, Nazis, racism
Stiefvater’s adult debut is a sparkling historical fiction with elements of magical realism. After Pearl Harbor, the US government requisitions several luxury hotels to house Axis diplomats and foreign nationals in the hopes that if the diplomats are well treated, the American diplomats in Germany will be as well until a prisoner swap can be arranged. Hotel general manager June must figure out how to host the enemy, keep her staff under control, and balance the mineral water springs that flow beneath the hotel which return the same energy they are given. I can’t say enough good things about this book. I don’t feel like I explained it very well, but just trust me, you should read it. Gorgeous prose as always. Interesting and compelling characters. Magical and ethereal setting that fills you with longing. I adored it. I also loved seeing the themes of disability in this book, especially a consideration of the way Nazis were persecuting disabled people, which I think often isn’t talked about enough. My only caveat about this book is that you should not read about a luxury hotel while staying at a budget hotel. Lends itself to too much comparison.
5/5 dachshunds

Earth Before the Dinosaurs by Sébastien Steyer
A book I read for research. This book has gorgeous illustrations. It went a little more in depth on evolutionary history than I needed it to. I really just wanted to know what kind of animals were alive in the Carboniferous and Permian periods.
3/5 dimetrodons

Camp by L.C. Rosen
This was a very fun, easy read. Randy has been coming to queer camp as a theater kid for several years now, but this year he has a plan to catch the eye of butch gay boy Hudson who has never so much as looked at him. All he has to do is give up theater, his friends, his style, and everything he loves about camp. But when Hudson looks at him in his new masculine clothes, it’s all worth it. Or is it? I enjoyed this. I read it very fast. I did think maybe there was some trauma that didn’t really get fully addressed and it did seem like there was kind of a lot of sex for a YA book. I try not to be a prude (and I am and 100% against banning books), but I do think sexual content in YA books should be approached differently than in an adult book.
3.5/5 painted nails

Books I didn’t finish

Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi
This book was just a little more niche than I needed it to be. I read it as research for a novel I’m thinking about, but a few of the essays were more academic and focused than I wanted. I read the essays that interested me and skimmed the rest.

*This book only includes straight white cis people.

**Book Hangover Alert indicates the kind of book that will leave you full up on love. Satisfied, but wishing the book never had to end. You’ll be laying on the floor with no idea what to do with yourself (other friends have called this feeling Good Book Depression or say that certain books necessitate Floor Time). This is the kind of book that gets its teeth in you and won’t let go easily. After the last page you’ll be thinking about this book for a long time. You’ll bother all your friends trying to get them to read it so that you won’t be alone in your Hangover.

***This book is part of my Books for a Social Conscience series! Read Heavenly Tyrant to learn about Laborism, overthrowing fascist regimes, and the subjugation of women in many different government systems. Read To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods for a fantasy inspired by the true events in Manchuria during WWII under Russian and Japanese subjugation. Read Bury Your Gays for queer rep in horror (with a happy ending!) and a critique of AI and the commodification of art. Read The Listeners to learn more about the Nazis and disability. I’m not marking Camp as a Book for a Social Conscience, not because it doesn’t have good representation, or because you shouldn’t read it, but just simply because I don’t think it will make you a better person if you read it. Which again doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

Reads marked as part of the Books for a Social Conscience series will regularly address topics like race and racism, colonialism and post-colonialism, LGBTQIA+ experience, feminism, BIPOC experience, social and political issues, history, identity, class, disability experience, immigration, gun violence, poverty, colorism, environmentalism, and more! The goal of these books is to diversify the stories we’re reading, grow our empathy for those who are different from us, and amplify voices who are often silenced.

Books Reread

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
CW: racism, slavery, cannibalism
See my post, the Überbook, for more on my Big Summer David Mitchell Reread.
5/5 moon-gray cats

New Books Read

Friday by Robert Heinlein
CW: gang rape, torture
This is one of my dad’s favorite books and he’s been trying to get me to read it forever. I finally did. I didn’t love it. Artificial person and courier Friday must hide her enhanced abilities as she navigates the social and political conflicts of a Balkanized 21st century North America. Overall it doesn’t really have a plot, so it was tricky to write that little blurb. I chose not to hide any of this review for spoilers, and this is because I don’t recommend reading it. Read my review and don’t bother. This book is unique among sci-fi from the 80s in that it has a female protagonist. I’m sure that were I reading this in the 1980s, this would impress me very much. As it is, I’m a 21st century girl, used to 21st century female representation. Friday was such a male-gaze female character. It was awful; I felt like Heinlein was trying to convince me the whole time that he knows what it’s like to be a woman (he doesn’t, and I also hated all the female characters in the other book I’ve read of his). Maybe because she’s an artificial person, she’s supposed to read as an approximation of a female designed by men? But then that undermines Heinlein’s thesis that artificial people (or people genetically engineered in a lab and not born) are just as human as “purebloods.” There was also too much sex for my taste in the book. I get that Heinlein was trying to show a society whose attitudes toward sex and family were very different from the mainstream in 1982, but I don’t personally want to read about that much casual sex. Then we also need to talk about the gang rape. Friday is gang raped in the second chapter as part of being tortured for information about something that she carried as a courier. In the scene, Friday is able to use her training to not really suffer and even enjoy herself during the rape, and she experiences no trauma from this. To me this is misogynist and also reads kinda victim-blamey. Like oh, if you just have enough mental fortitude, then you won’t be bothered if you get raped! Ew. And then at the end of the novel, Friday reencounters one of the men who raped her and he’s like, “Oh, sorry, I was ordered to rape you and I didn’t really want to, but also you’re so hot I basically couldn’t help myself.” And Friday forgives him! And let’s him join her open polysexual relationship with several other people! Excuse me while I go throw up. Heinlein has a couple interesting ideas in the book as far as infrastructure in the future, and it’s nice that in the future society families and relationships can take non-nuclear shapes. Heinlein also has a good quote about the marks of a sick society that rings eerily true with regard to our own current society in the United States, but I would recommend Googling the quote instead of reading the whole book.
1/5 artificial people

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
CW: plague, death of children, infidelity
I’m a big fan of the new (?) genre of the imagined history novel. Hamnet follows William Shakespeare’s wife and children in Stratford while he’s off in London writing plays. We know almost nothing about them, other than their names and rough birth and death dates. O’Farrell’s writing is so lyrical and the way she created these characters is so lovely. She gives agency and personality to these women whose stories are lost to history. I didn’t like it quite as much as The Marriage Portrait, but it might possibly be because it’s hard to read about plague after you lived through one, and I was really interested in the art history aspect of The Marriage Portrait.
4.5/5 second-best beds

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske
CW: child abuse, bullying
This was so delightful. I saw an ad for it on Facebook which said it was a cross between Red White and Royal Blue and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and since I love both those books, I immediately checked it out from the library. It did not disappoint. Discovering magic exists after a managerial error that led to his government job, Robin Blythe must team up with magician Edwin Courcey to unravel a plot that threatens all magicians in Britain. It’s gay and it slaps.
4/5 magic snowflakes

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
**Book Hangover Alert
I love John Green. I love all his novels, but I was a little like, “eh not sure I want to read a nonfiction book.” But it was excellent! Green’s essay about seemingly disparate things (Kentucky blue grass, Canada geese, ginkgo trees, teddy bears, air conditioning) all speak to the wild, amazing, terrifying, beautiful, horrible experience of being a human. He does a wonderful job of blending personal stories, history, and science to examine what it means to be a human in this world. I loved it. I’ve also apparently watched enough of John Green’s videos that when I read the book, I heard the whole thing in his voice in my head.
4/5 teddy bears

Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo***
Acevedo’s adult debut, Family Lore, retains the the poetry-informed lyrical prose of her young adult work while delving into magical realism and examining more mature content and themes. After seeing a documentary, Flor decides to hold a living wake for herself, and, as someone with prophetic dreams that predict upcoming deaths, this troubles her family. Flor’s sisters, one with the ability to discern truth from lies, one with an affinity for plants and herbs, and one without an uncanny ability, only a passion for dancing, orbit Flor in the weeks leading up to the wake, though no one can make her reveal if she’s seen her own impending death. Flor’s sisters, daughter, and niece all play a part in helping to plan the wake, while balancing emotional upheavals in their own lives. The story skillfully skates between the family’s past in the Dominican Republic and present in New York City as Ona, Flor’s daughter and an anthropology professor, works to document her family through the lens of an ethnographer, afraid that this might be the last chance she has to understand her mother better. With heart, humor, and subtlety, Acevedo explores themes of family and legacy, immigration, and tradition and culture.
4/5 limes

Six Creepy Sheep by Judith Ross Enderle and Stephanie Gordon Tessler, illustrated by John O’Brien
I went on a writing retreat at the Highlights Foundation campus in the Poconos with my MFA program, and it was so lovely. This book was in my cabin, and one of the prompts of the StoryGraph genre challenge this year was to read a children’s book you’ve never read before. It’s spooky season so this seemed perfect. It’s super cute! I liked the art and the simple rhyming prose.
3/5 creepy sheep

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel
**Book Hangover Alert
CW: destruction of art and cultural heritage
This book was a wild ride from start to finish. It’s a true crime tale of Stéphane Breitwieser, the world’s most prolific art thief. Breitwieser and his girlfriend stole more than 300 art works and artifacts from museums in France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria in the 1990s and 2000s. It was fascinating to read about Breitwieser, the only known art thief who stole things just to have them in his room–not for any economic gain. Finkel attempts to unravel Breitwieser’s psyche and examine how two people could have gotten away with so many heists before Breitwieser was finally caught.
4/5 priceless Renaissance oil portraits

Masters of Death by Olivie Blake
I enjoyed this book; it was fun. Death’s godson, Fox D’Mora, must save his godfather and all of humanity in the gambling game played by the immortals. With the help of a demon, a vampire, a ghost, a demigod, an angel, and a reaper, chaos ensues. I enjoyed a lot of the characters and the premise of the book. There was a little too much arguing, which is rarely interesting to read. I also listened to it and sometimes there weren’t quite enough dialogue tags to follow who was talking when we had big group scenes. I also really wanted to root for the romance between Fox and Brandt but I felt like all they did was argue and lie to each other. I wanted to see a little more tenderness or just happiness or fun between them. There was also too much use of the f-word. It just get’s tiresome and loses its power if it’s used too often in novels. But overall I enjoyed it.
3.5/5 immortals

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn***
**Book Hangover Alert
CW: slavery, racism, death of a parent
This book was so great. After her mother’s tragic and suspicious death, Bree Matthews joins the mysterious Order of the Round Table, determined to find out if their magicians had anything to do with her mother’s death. Learning about the magic the Order practices, passed down by King Arthur and his knights, Bree begins to understand the magic that has lain dormant inside her and the legacy of her ancestors. This book was excellent. I love an Arthurian retelling, and this one was so fresh the way it also examined the legacy of slavery and generational trauma. I loved getting to know the characters, and I was right there with Bree as she unraveled the mystery. I’m excited to read the next one!
5/5 scions of Arthur

***This book is part of my Books for a Social Conscience series! First a caveat: I have decided that simply having queer people or people of color in a book is not enough to qualify it for the Books for a Social Conscience distinction. That sets the bar too low. So while in the past I would have marked A Marvellous Light and Masters of Death as Books for a Social Conscience, I have decided that the only way they are subverting dominant narratives is by having queer people and people of color in them. We love representation! Don’t get me wrong, but honestly at this point if you don’t have queer people and/or people of color in your book, like what are you doing? Maybe I should start marking books that I read that only have straight, white people in them.

Anyway, read Family Lore for a magical immigrant family. Read Legendborn for an interrogation of the legacy of slavery in the context of Arthurian legend.