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juushikalol @ Wilder Girls/Summer Sons, a parallel I'm only seeing now
Title: Serafina and the Black Cloak (Serafina Book 1)
Author: Robert Beatty
Narrator: Cassandra Campbell
Published: Books on Tape, 2015
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 305
Total Page Count: 406,520
Text Number: 1528
Read Because: this was a runner-up in the October poll for in an alterhuman book club I'm in; audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: At her pa's behest, Serafina has spent her childhood hiding in the basement of the Biltmore Estate. But when she witness a girl disappear, she leaves hiding to track down the perpetrator. This is great fun: a relatable outsider protagonist (but she's also a little uncanny, a little unhuman) making her first forays into the wider world; a mysterious cloaked villian, missing children, a massive Southern estate filled with hidden passages and surrounded by a forbidden wood—spooky tone, unusual magic, and I'm fond of the protagonist. But the writing is just okay—MG doesn't have to be this on-the-nose or neat to speak to a young audience. I'm glad I read this in the Halloween season, but I won't read the sequels.
Title: Wilder Girls
Author: Rory Power
Published: Delacorte Press, 2019
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 360
Total Page Count: 408,500
Text Number: 1533
Read Because: on this list of queer dark academia novels (which FWIW it's not; there's no schooling left at this school!), ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A girls' school is quarantined after the students become infected with the Tox, which mutates their bodies in unusual, deadly ways. I love me some messy queer girls and love a delightful excess of body horror, especially the organic mutation variety—the body transforming and betraying, growing powerful and wild, maps beautifully to adolescence. But I don't like anything else about this. The action sequences and plot dumps are rocky, and the tone is all grimdark, all the time; I wish we saw more of the school-as-community or even more of the romance to provide some contrast. Honestly, my issue here is probably with genre. YA doesn't work for me, and it turns out this isn't an exception: there's so much room for characters to be messy, unforgiving, and selfish, which I like in theory, but which in a first person present tense teen tableau mostly bores me.
Title: Summer Sons
Author: Lee Mandelo
Published: Tor, 2021
Rating: N/A
Page Count: 380
Total Page Count: 409,610
Text Number: 1536
Read Because: more true crime while painting, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: DNF at 20% because reviews indicate that the parts that don't work for me will be sticking around. After his best friend's apparent suicide, the protagonist slips into his world to investigate his death, but that world is a lot of toxic masculinity and street racing (not my thing) which I find overwhelm the repressed queer longing, relationships-in-absentia, and Appalachian-flavored haunting (very much my thing, and I'm sorry to be leaving them behind) of the rest of the book.
Title: Serafina and the Black Cloak (Serafina Book 1)
Author: Robert Beatty
Narrator: Cassandra Campbell
Published: Books on Tape, 2015
Rating: 3.5 of 5
Page Count: 305
Total Page Count: 406,520
Text Number: 1528
Read Because: this was a runner-up in the October poll for in an alterhuman book club I'm in; audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: At her pa's behest, Serafina has spent her childhood hiding in the basement of the Biltmore Estate. But when she witness a girl disappear, she leaves hiding to track down the perpetrator. This is great fun: a relatable outsider protagonist (but she's also a little uncanny, a little unhuman) making her first forays into the wider world; a mysterious cloaked villian, missing children, a massive Southern estate filled with hidden passages and surrounded by a forbidden wood—spooky tone, unusual magic, and I'm fond of the protagonist. But the writing is just okay—MG doesn't have to be this on-the-nose or neat to speak to a young audience. I'm glad I read this in the Halloween season, but I won't read the sequels.
Title: Wilder Girls
Author: Rory Power
Published: Delacorte Press, 2019
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 360
Total Page Count: 408,500
Text Number: 1533
Read Because: on this list of queer dark academia novels (which FWIW it's not; there's no schooling left at this school!), ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A girls' school is quarantined after the students become infected with the Tox, which mutates their bodies in unusual, deadly ways. I love me some messy queer girls and love a delightful excess of body horror, especially the organic mutation variety—the body transforming and betraying, growing powerful and wild, maps beautifully to adolescence. But I don't like anything else about this. The action sequences and plot dumps are rocky, and the tone is all grimdark, all the time; I wish we saw more of the school-as-community or even more of the romance to provide some contrast. Honestly, my issue here is probably with genre. YA doesn't work for me, and it turns out this isn't an exception: there's so much room for characters to be messy, unforgiving, and selfish, which I like in theory, but which in a first person present tense teen tableau mostly bores me.
Title: Summer Sons
Author: Lee Mandelo
Published: Tor, 2021
Rating: N/A
Page Count: 380
Total Page Count: 409,610
Text Number: 1536
Read Because: more true crime while painting, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: DNF at 20% because reviews indicate that the parts that don't work for me will be sticking around. After his best friend's apparent suicide, the protagonist slips into his world to investigate his death, but that world is a lot of toxic masculinity and street racing (not my thing) which I find overwhelm the repressed queer longing, relationships-in-absentia, and Appalachian-flavored haunting (very much my thing, and I'm sorry to be leaving them behind) of the rest of the book.
