Bookish and Speculative

Photo: Left Part, Cover Text: This is How it Always Us by Laurie Frankel.  Camera pointed up a tree at a blue/pink sky.  A child in rainbow leggings is climbing the tree.  Right Part: Head shot of Laurie Frankel: white, middle aged woman in a v cut black top with red/brown hair turned perpendicular to camera but looking at it over her shoulder.  Forest trail out of focus in background. *** #ThisisHowitAlwaysIs by @Laurie_Frankel is a beautifully written novel covering #parenting, #trans-children, #family, and #myth.  The beats of the story were tight and the tension kept me hanging on every moment.  As a parent, I have wondered about how I would parent a trans-kid and Frankel's novel feels like a parental speculative fiction that lets the reader experience some of the inevitable obstacles that a family of a trans-child must overcome.  I don't want to give a moment of it away. This is How it Always Is by Frankel is beautiful and worth your t...

Book Cover Description: A craigy peak topped by orange sunset clouds in the North American High Sierra Mountains is mirrored by a mountain lake. Text reads: The High Sierra - A Love Story - Kim Stanley Robinson - New York Times bestselling author of The Ministry for the Future *** Since reading Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), I have become obsessed with his books.  I have read the Mars Trilogy several times and found new and interesting details each time.  I am also a Midwest-based outdoors-person and lover of mountains. KSR's Sierra book is beautiful.  His discussions on Muir and the conservation of the range are interspersed with gear philosophy, life advice for outdoors people, and the stories that are swapped when outdoors-people start talking. I was just thrilled to learn that my obsession with KSR's work and mountains are intertwined in a way that seems obvious in hindsight.  So many physical descriptions in his books are inspired by the Sierr...

I started Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie because it was on a list of books that were said to be similar to Star Wars: Andor.  The resemblance is interesting. In a space fairing collection of civilizations, the Radch rules as an empire over others.  Power is gained by the "illbred" by colonizing land not already controlled by the Radch. At some point, the technology to create ancillaries develops.  An ancillary is a human that is under AI control.  In this future, slave drivers directly control slaves without freewill creating conflict: an absolutely unrelatable concept that does not strike fear into my heart. The protagonist, Breq, was once an AI that controlled a ship and many ancillaries.  Something caused the destruction of her ship and the deaths of all of her ancillaries but the one they inhabit now.  Breq is on a quest to kill the person who destroyed her ship, the Lord of the Radch, which doesn't sound at all like Lord of the...