Rereads 2023-2025
Feb. 2nd, 2026 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaDiscovered at the bottom of my book review file and proof that I really gotta notta let things accumulate with the intent of posting them in bulk, because the risk is that I never will. Anyway, these are rereads primarily from 2023 and 2024, with one from 2025
Enchantress from the Stars, Sylvia Engdahl
A decade later, I still think about this book. That speaks to the strength of the premise, which is an interrogation of the Prime Directive and "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I also remember not liking it, and I hoped that on reread—with adjusted expectations and more willingness to tolerate YA—I'd have better luck.
Nope! This is still intriguing but not very enjoyable. It's such a talky book, and the narrative tricks only exacerbate that while the YA antics fail to alleviate it. I like the bits I like very much (the premise; the fact that "less advanced" stubbornly does not mean "less human; less capable of autonomy" and how that informs the romance), but it feels stilted and strangely dry. Oh well.
Solaris, Stanisław Lem
Dropping this from 4 stars to 3. I remember liking this, but on reread discovered that I remembered very little, which is unusual for me—but having reread it, I'm not surprised. I didn't retain much of the reread, either! A phenomenal conceptualization of alien life which is truly alien, and what (attempts at) communication/Contact indicate about both parties. ...Delivered via hilariously clunky infodumping, with large chunks of worldbuilding relayed when the protagonist visits the ship's library and recaps volumes of Solarist theory/history. I found myself skim-reading some of the theoretically most interesting bits—such a waste. Beautiful when it's beautiful, often haunting, although the protagonist's visitor being a nubile young woman is perhaps the least interesting direction that could go; I want to like it, but it holds itself back. (FWIW this was the Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox translation.)
Mortal Fire, Elizabeth Knox
Yeah, there's issues with the autism-but-not and terminal illness which want examination. But the protagonist's characterization is so well-wrought that this really works for me. This bit:
gets me so good. So does a narrative that loops back on itself; so does a magic system which is numinous because it's comprehensible. What an engaging, comfy, satisfying reread.
The Fierce Yellow Pumpkin, Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Richard Egielski
I had basically no memory of reading this, so let that speak for the text. But on my second pass, my impressions were the same but intensified: Love the pumpkin's journey and how ridiculously indulgent the autumn atmosphere is; still, especially, hate the children, whose exaggerated "dancing" poses have a farcical, unsettling vibe. But would I reread it around Halloween anyway? Yeah, why not.
Axiom's End (Noumena Book 1), Lindsay Ellis
Wow, I thought, the beginning of this is slower than I remember. Then I reread my original review and realized, no, it's always been that slow, and I knew it, it's just so minor a part of my experience that I forgot—because the rest is entirely my catnip. I cried three times, each exactly when I knew I would, those scenes of bonding within shared-but-not-reciprocal trauma hitting just the right way. Ellis's aptitude for the tropes at play here is obvious; she's spoken of them brilliantly in her essays, and carries that forward, writing them deftly. Last time, I called it "indulgent but never frothy," and stand by that description. I'll keep rereading this, every few years I imagine; I'll keep being a little bored by the first quarter.
Truth of the Divine (Noumena Book 2), Lindsay Ellis
Trauma, my alien polycule, and me: the Cora Sabino story. I hate miscommunication tropes as much as if not more than the average hater; but narratives about bad communication, about the many illuminating reasons that people struggle to communicate within their most intimate, most communicative relationships—that's the good shit. I'm not sure that I like lots of this: I don't like Kaveh much as character or PoV; I don't like what it means to shunt a PoV character off page because they're effectively too traumatized to come to the plot right now; I don't like the dearth of tropey wish-fulfillment. But it's a productive not-liking that makes for a thorny, cruel, but so-compelling investigation of some gratifying relationship dynamics. It's rare that I have a book hangover while still reading the book in question, but there's a kind of investment which feels a lot like anger, a possessive, frustrated overwhelmedness, and this gives me that in droves.
The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1), N.K. Jemisin
I usually like books with a strong gimmick or mystery or what-have-you better on reread; I like watching the parts come together when I know what to look for. And I still like the worldbuilding, and still like how the revelations are paced against the PoV's relative disinterest in the larger world. (The PoV connections, less so; the gimmick feels like one.) But boy howdy is there a lot of suffering. It's intentional and confrontational and challenging, but it's also a grind when there aren't factors to offset it, and the mystery didn't quite manage to do so this time. I think I'll still reread the sequels, though.
The Obelisk Gate(The Broken Earth Book 2), N.K. Jemisin
I was surprised to enjoy this reread more than my reread of the first book, but looking back on my original review ... no, it's just that this is a better book. The narrative gimmick is less gimmicky and more insightful; the worldbuilding is more involved and less dependent on a single reveal, and while I don't love parts of it (the Evil Earth, mostly), this is a reflective book: how does a world create a people create a person, reframing characters and events in the first book with the benefit of distance and hindsight, leading to character growth in the present. My parenthetical makes me think I won't like the third book as much, but this one was pleasantly engaging.
The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth Book 3), N.K. Jemisin
Concurring with past-me, here. I like the expanded Hoa sections more upon reread, but my interest in all the answers to all the worldbuilding questions is still touch and go. There's a lot of the Earth here, but still not enough to convince me of the character; the stone eaters get a lot of page time (okay) and guardians are all but left as a dangling plot thread (frustrating). Thematically, this bites of a lot and chews it to dust; I don't always care about the how that it goes about doing that, although the strong pacing carries me through when my interest flags. But the what, the picture of the larger society expressed within individual characters, that captivates me.
Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause
Having read The Vampire Diaries in the interim since my last reread reframes this for me, because I think the phenomenon of a female teen lead who is a wish-fulfillment/power fantasy à la Vivian or Elena was just A Thing in the 90s that has since been replaced (in my spotty understanding of YA, let's put that caveat over this whole thing) by the relatable everygirl lead à la Bella in Twilight in the 2000s. So Vivian is less special than I thought, although it's still a delightful template, these infuriating, arrogant teen girls, aspirational but still caught up in adolescent insecurities. But for all that boldness, there's something conservative in her arc: Vivian is punished for stepping out of her social role and experimenting sexually; her happy ending is to concede to social pressures and sexual advances. That push and pull is interesting but messy as hell in a book which is already weirdly paced and inconsistently written.
The Silver Kiss, Annette Curtis Klause
I have zero memory from my first reading, which says something less than flattering. So plot isn't the highlight, here: fair enough, and honestly I don't really remember the plot of Blood and Chocolate between rereads, either, yet I keep returning to that one. Klause is all about vibes and voice, and this is where I disagree with 2007-me. Is it good? Oh, rarely; on the other hand, where else a love interest whose eyes soften with the moon, who can crush his voice like velvet?—this is luscious bombast, peppered with ridiculous and lovable turns of phrase, and tragic vampire and a grieving teenage girl united by death is a premise that matters a lot more than the execution, especially in 1990, quietly preceding the phenomenon of YA paranormal romance. It's also fascinating in contrast to Blood and Chocolate; Zoe is the flipside to Vivian's coin, much more of an everygirl, a reader stand-in rather than power fantasy and appropriately bland.
The secret to enjoying a three star book, it turns out, is to let go of judgment. This doesn't mean I'm going to start reading YA in bulk, but these early examples that helped define the genre are a) fascinating, actually and b) frequently a lot of fun.
A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L'Engle
This was my favorite as a kid; I was less enamored a decade ago, and hold the same criticism, namely that L'Engle tries to insert a certain kind of tired fearmongering/morality ("the world these days" doomerism); luckily, it's fundamentally detached from the parts of the book that matter, as the Echthroi's ultimate motivation seems not to be destruction but nihilism, which makes for a much more sincere antagonist. And on this reread I find that the concepts of kything and Naming and Xing work for me—they're mythic, speculative, idealized, over-ordered but open-ended ways of recognizing versus refusing existence. There is a transcendence, here, which is larger than the moralizing L'Engle tries and fails to impose; it moved me as a young reader and I still like it, in the same way that
daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing is lodged in my heart; the number of sections I remember almost word for word is remarkable.
Millions of Cats, Wanda Gág
I'm amazed I ever thought this was anything but fantastic. Turns out that if you spend a lot of time translating a text into toki pona and then find a copy at a little free library and read it aloud to your partner then, by their powers combined, this will become one of your favorite picture books. To want to adopt every cat because each is perfect & beautiful is highkey relatable, and the whimsically WTF climax is hilarious. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats! I'm delighted that I own this now.
Wilder Girls, Rory Power
This is a totally different experience upon reread, approaching it through the lens of "fell down a transformative works rabbithole." It recasts my frustrations with this book, making it clear that my issue is less character choices, as I first diagnosed, and more the combination of big speculative/dystopic premise, a cast of flawed and prickly teen girls, and the urge to cram in every action & every explanation. It's an issue of balance and pacing: the protagonists uncover so many plot points and directly cause numerous disasters and get together/break up/get back together and have multiple discoveries/closures within just a few days' time, and far be it for me to criticize a speculative work for its cogent, complete worldbuilding, but I don't need to know every how and why when that space could instead give breathing room to character arcs or focus instead on the experience of bodily transformation.
It makes for a wildly vacillating reread: so often flawed, too easy, unconvincing; phenomenal premise, great cast, beautiful setting*, and the different relationships different characters have with the tox, with their isolation, with their probable fate is captivating. So much to love, and, having written about/for this, I love those parts with an intensity I never would have expected after my first reading, and carry that adoration back the source material. Enough so that I'm moving this from 2 to 4 stars. I'm glad that I can appreciate this, now, because when it it's good it's very very good & exactly my kind of thing.
* Except that most things about how the school is run strain my suspension of disbelief. Boat shift doesn't do watches? Even though they're picked for their combat aptitude? Cliques run the school in a student body this small and diverse in age? Everyone sleeps in separate the dorm rooms despite the lack of heating? doubt.gif
The Death of Jane Lawrence, Caitlin Starling
Welcome to five stars. This was a fantastic reread, giving me exactly what I knew I wanted to revisit after reading Last to Leave the Room. I don't think the book is perfect (synchronicity becomes an excuse for any plot development; Chapter 0 & the ending are both too neat, although less frustrating than equivalent resolutions in Starling's other books), but I adore how Starling places character development(/relationship development) against speculative systems. This is why the romance doesn't bother me as much as it would: Jane's journey is driven as much by pride and curiosity as it is by her husband, and the way that the key tenants of magic transform that otherwise rushed romance is grounded & defined by flaws, by the limitations to the love. The interpersonal dynamics are more pointedly, delightedly fucked up in Starling's other books, but here, within Jane's narrow, evolving perspective, they feel the most fully realized.
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, Eric LaRocca
I think about this book all the time, but with a big eyeroll asterisk at the end, and rereading doesn't change my mind. Phenomenal premise, weak execution. I vibe with LaRocca thematically, and kudos to them for Going There—the whirlwind online relationship, the tapeworm pregnancy, Zoe's characterization. But it'd be nice if their writing were, like, good—believable voices, a little restraint (the edgy anecdotes only distract from the central dynamic), something!
Enchantress from the Stars, Sylvia Engdahl
A decade later, I still think about this book. That speaks to the strength of the premise, which is an interrogation of the Prime Directive and "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I also remember not liking it, and I hoped that on reread—with adjusted expectations and more willingness to tolerate YA—I'd have better luck.
Nope! This is still intriguing but not very enjoyable. It's such a talky book, and the narrative tricks only exacerbate that while the YA antics fail to alleviate it. I like the bits I like very much (the premise; the fact that "less advanced" stubbornly does not mean "less human; less capable of autonomy" and how that informs the romance), but it feels stilted and strangely dry. Oh well.
Solaris, Stanisław Lem
Dropping this from 4 stars to 3. I remember liking this, but on reread discovered that I remembered very little, which is unusual for me—but having reread it, I'm not surprised. I didn't retain much of the reread, either! A phenomenal conceptualization of alien life which is truly alien, and what (attempts at) communication/Contact indicate about both parties. ...Delivered via hilariously clunky infodumping, with large chunks of worldbuilding relayed when the protagonist visits the ship's library and recaps volumes of Solarist theory/history. I found myself skim-reading some of the theoretically most interesting bits—such a waste. Beautiful when it's beautiful, often haunting, although the protagonist's visitor being a nubile young woman is perhaps the least interesting direction that could go; I want to like it, but it holds itself back. (FWIW this was the Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox translation.)
Mortal Fire, Elizabeth Knox
Yeah, there's issues with the autism-but-not and terminal illness which want examination. But the protagonist's characterization is so well-wrought that this really works for me. This bit:
"You have more rat-cunning than anyone I've ever met. It's a kind of strength. And it makes me hopeful. It's warming somehow. And you keep making me laugh. Your brain is so surprising. I'm talking to you, and walking in step with you, then it's as if you vanish and reappear several steps ahead of me. It's exciting!"
Canny sniffed (unbecoming) and sat up. She said, "I thought you were being mean to me."
gets me so good. So does a narrative that loops back on itself; so does a magic system which is numinous because it's comprehensible. What an engaging, comfy, satisfying reread.
The Fierce Yellow Pumpkin, Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Richard Egielski
I had basically no memory of reading this, so let that speak for the text. But on my second pass, my impressions were the same but intensified: Love the pumpkin's journey and how ridiculously indulgent the autumn atmosphere is; still, especially, hate the children, whose exaggerated "dancing" poses have a farcical, unsettling vibe. But would I reread it around Halloween anyway? Yeah, why not.
Axiom's End (Noumena Book 1), Lindsay Ellis
Wow, I thought, the beginning of this is slower than I remember. Then I reread my original review and realized, no, it's always been that slow, and I knew it, it's just so minor a part of my experience that I forgot—because the rest is entirely my catnip. I cried three times, each exactly when I knew I would, those scenes of bonding within shared-but-not-reciprocal trauma hitting just the right way. Ellis's aptitude for the tropes at play here is obvious; she's spoken of them brilliantly in her essays, and carries that forward, writing them deftly. Last time, I called it "indulgent but never frothy," and stand by that description. I'll keep rereading this, every few years I imagine; I'll keep being a little bored by the first quarter.
Truth of the Divine (Noumena Book 2), Lindsay Ellis
Trauma, my alien polycule, and me: the Cora Sabino story. I hate miscommunication tropes as much as if not more than the average hater; but narratives about bad communication, about the many illuminating reasons that people struggle to communicate within their most intimate, most communicative relationships—that's the good shit. I'm not sure that I like lots of this: I don't like Kaveh much as character or PoV; I don't like what it means to shunt a PoV character off page because they're effectively too traumatized to come to the plot right now; I don't like the dearth of tropey wish-fulfillment. But it's a productive not-liking that makes for a thorny, cruel, but so-compelling investigation of some gratifying relationship dynamics. It's rare that I have a book hangover while still reading the book in question, but there's a kind of investment which feels a lot like anger, a possessive, frustrated overwhelmedness, and this gives me that in droves.
The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth Book 1), N.K. Jemisin
There passes a time of happiness in your life, which I will not describe to you. It is unimportant. Perhaps you think it wrong that I dwell so much on the horrors, the pain, but pain is what shapes us, after all. We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be… not alive.
I usually like books with a strong gimmick or mystery or what-have-you better on reread; I like watching the parts come together when I know what to look for. And I still like the worldbuilding, and still like how the revelations are paced against the PoV's relative disinterest in the larger world. (The PoV connections, less so; the gimmick feels like one.) But boy howdy is there a lot of suffering. It's intentional and confrontational and challenging, but it's also a grind when there aren't factors to offset it, and the mystery didn't quite manage to do so this time. I think I'll still reread the sequels, though.
The Obelisk Gate(The Broken Earth Book 2), N.K. Jemisin
I was surprised to enjoy this reread more than my reread of the first book, but looking back on my original review ... no, it's just that this is a better book. The narrative gimmick is less gimmicky and more insightful; the worldbuilding is more involved and less dependent on a single reveal, and while I don't love parts of it (the Evil Earth, mostly), this is a reflective book: how does a world create a people create a person, reframing characters and events in the first book with the benefit of distance and hindsight, leading to character growth in the present. My parenthetical makes me think I won't like the third book as much, but this one was pleasantly engaging.
The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth Book 3), N.K. Jemisin
Concurring with past-me, here. I like the expanded Hoa sections more upon reread, but my interest in all the answers to all the worldbuilding questions is still touch and go. There's a lot of the Earth here, but still not enough to convince me of the character; the stone eaters get a lot of page time (okay) and guardians are all but left as a dangling plot thread (frustrating). Thematically, this bites of a lot and chews it to dust; I don't always care about the how that it goes about doing that, although the strong pacing carries me through when my interest flags. But the what, the picture of the larger society expressed within individual characters, that captivates me.
Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause
Having read The Vampire Diaries in the interim since my last reread reframes this for me, because I think the phenomenon of a female teen lead who is a wish-fulfillment/power fantasy à la Vivian or Elena was just A Thing in the 90s that has since been replaced (in my spotty understanding of YA, let's put that caveat over this whole thing) by the relatable everygirl lead à la Bella in Twilight in the 2000s. So Vivian is less special than I thought, although it's still a delightful template, these infuriating, arrogant teen girls, aspirational but still caught up in adolescent insecurities. But for all that boldness, there's something conservative in her arc: Vivian is punished for stepping out of her social role and experimenting sexually; her happy ending is to concede to social pressures and sexual advances. That push and pull is interesting but messy as hell in a book which is already weirdly paced and inconsistently written.
The Silver Kiss, Annette Curtis Klause
I have zero memory from my first reading, which says something less than flattering. So plot isn't the highlight, here: fair enough, and honestly I don't really remember the plot of Blood and Chocolate between rereads, either, yet I keep returning to that one. Klause is all about vibes and voice, and this is where I disagree with 2007-me. Is it good? Oh, rarely; on the other hand, where else a love interest whose eyes soften with the moon, who can crush his voice like velvet?—this is luscious bombast, peppered with ridiculous and lovable turns of phrase, and tragic vampire and a grieving teenage girl united by death is a premise that matters a lot more than the execution, especially in 1990, quietly preceding the phenomenon of YA paranormal romance. It's also fascinating in contrast to Blood and Chocolate; Zoe is the flipside to Vivian's coin, much more of an everygirl, a reader stand-in rather than power fantasy and appropriately bland.
The secret to enjoying a three star book, it turns out, is to let go of judgment. This doesn't mean I'm going to start reading YA in bulk, but these early examples that helped define the genre are a) fascinating, actually and b) frequently a lot of fun.
A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L'Engle
This was my favorite as a kid; I was less enamored a decade ago, and hold the same criticism, namely that L'Engle tries to insert a certain kind of tired fearmongering/morality ("the world these days" doomerism); luckily, it's fundamentally detached from the parts of the book that matter, as the Echthroi's ultimate motivation seems not to be destruction but nihilism, which makes for a much more sincere antagonist. And on this reread I find that the concepts of kything and Naming and Xing work for me—they're mythic, speculative, idealized, over-ordered but open-ended ways of recognizing versus refusing existence. There is a transcendence, here, which is larger than the moralizing L'Engle tries and fails to impose; it moved me as a young reader and I still like it, in the same way that
And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other.
daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing is lodged in my heart; the number of sections I remember almost word for word is remarkable.
Millions of Cats, Wanda Gág
I'm amazed I ever thought this was anything but fantastic. Turns out that if you spend a lot of time translating a text into toki pona and then find a copy at a little free library and read it aloud to your partner then, by their powers combined, this will become one of your favorite picture books. To want to adopt every cat because each is perfect & beautiful is highkey relatable, and the whimsically WTF climax is hilarious. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats! I'm delighted that I own this now.
Wilder Girls, Rory Power
This is a totally different experience upon reread, approaching it through the lens of "fell down a transformative works rabbithole." It recasts my frustrations with this book, making it clear that my issue is less character choices, as I first diagnosed, and more the combination of big speculative/dystopic premise, a cast of flawed and prickly teen girls, and the urge to cram in every action & every explanation. It's an issue of balance and pacing: the protagonists uncover so many plot points and directly cause numerous disasters and get together/break up/get back together and have multiple discoveries/closures within just a few days' time, and far be it for me to criticize a speculative work for its cogent, complete worldbuilding, but I don't need to know every how and why when that space could instead give breathing room to character arcs or focus instead on the experience of bodily transformation.
It makes for a wildly vacillating reread: so often flawed, too easy, unconvincing; phenomenal premise, great cast, beautiful setting*, and the different relationships different characters have with the tox, with their isolation, with their probable fate is captivating. So much to love, and, having written about/for this, I love those parts with an intensity I never would have expected after my first reading, and carry that adoration back the source material. Enough so that I'm moving this from 2 to 4 stars. I'm glad that I can appreciate this, now, because when it it's good it's very very good & exactly my kind of thing.
* Except that most things about how the school is run strain my suspension of disbelief. Boat shift doesn't do watches? Even though they're picked for their combat aptitude? Cliques run the school in a student body this small and diverse in age? Everyone sleeps in separate the dorm rooms despite the lack of heating? doubt.gif
The Death of Jane Lawrence, Caitlin Starling
Welcome to five stars. This was a fantastic reread, giving me exactly what I knew I wanted to revisit after reading Last to Leave the Room. I don't think the book is perfect (synchronicity becomes an excuse for any plot development; Chapter 0 & the ending are both too neat, although less frustrating than equivalent resolutions in Starling's other books), but I adore how Starling places character development(/relationship development) against speculative systems. This is why the romance doesn't bother me as much as it would: Jane's journey is driven as much by pride and curiosity as it is by her husband, and the way that the key tenants of magic transform that otherwise rushed romance is grounded & defined by flaws, by the limitations to the love. The interpersonal dynamics are more pointedly, delightedly fucked up in Starling's other books, but here, within Jane's narrow, evolving perspective, they feel the most fully realized.
Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, Eric LaRocca
I think about this book all the time, but with a big eyeroll asterisk at the end, and rereading doesn't change my mind. Phenomenal premise, weak execution. I vibe with LaRocca thematically, and kudos to them for Going There—the whirlwind online relationship, the tapeworm pregnancy, Zoe's characterization. But it'd be nice if their writing were, like, good—believable voices, a little restraint (the edgy anecdotes only distract from the central dynamic), something!
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Date: 2026-02-02 11:28 pm (UTC)