moonytoast's reviews
253 reviews

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Press for providing me with a digital ARC of this book! (Please ignore the quite embarrassing fact this is several months late.)

 

Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts is a slow, tense yet tender exploration of a family separated in the wake of a dystopian future eerily similar to our contemporary United States and the bond between a mother and the son she had to abandon. It is the definitive dystopian work of this burgeoning decade, pulling intensely from a number of current issues facing America, including the push for book bans in both school and public libraries in the name of protecting children, growing anti-Asian sentiment exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the history (and present) of removing children from their families as a means of political control. While it does suffer from rather heavy-handed exposition for a sizable chunk of the novel, Ng's most recent novel still shines when it focuses on the power of words and the tenuous dynamic between the protagonist, Bird Gardner, and his mother. 

 

The novel is told from two perspectives, Bird Gardner and his mother, Margaret Miu, as they go on a journey to reunite and understand who each other has become in their absence against the backdrop of a growing, odd little rebellion. Bird can barely remember life with his mother before she was taken by him due to her violations of PACT—Preserving American Culture and Traditions—which allow for children to be removed from their homes and separated from their parents in the name of preventing the spread of "dangerous" or "un-American" views. Suddenly, Bird receives a mysterious postcard from her, which sends him on a quest that has him traversing the hollow shells of public libraries and the streets of New York City to find his mother. When he finds her, Margaret shares why she had to leave him and, afterwards, all the testimonials she's gathered of other parents whose children were taken under PACT. The two slowly rebuild their bond as Margaret finalizes her act of defiance and an old promise to a mother: tell their stories. 

 

As always, Celeste Ng's prose is beautifully rendered. She has such a knack for creative, compelling metaphors that serve to conjure a distinct image and tone throughout all her books. It makes moments of tenderness, of violence, of hope all the more guttural to the reader. 

 

 

My one qualm, as stated earlier, is that the novel is particularly heavy-handed with the exposition towards the middle half of this book once Bird and Margaret are reunited. I think it is important to delve into the backstory of Margaret to understand her willing naivety and the way her perspective on PACT shifts once her own words became a calling card for anti-PACT sentiment and protests against the re-placement of children. However, it grinds the momentum to a halt with extended flashbacks which, at moments, feel more like a history textbook. Unfortunately, the narrative and Bird's perspective as a child who cannot remember the Crisis strains against the idea of "show, don't tell" and struggles to convey exposition in a seemingly organic manner. 

 

I think dystopian fiction lives or dies by its conclusion and Our Missing Hearts is no exception. I remember reading both 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 in my senior year of high school as part of a dystopian unit for my AP Literature class. I enjoyed both, but I always preferred the latter due to its more ambiguous, but still hopeful ending. I will not spoil the ending of this book for those who have not read it, but there is a solid balance of stakes and hope for the future of this United States. It recognizes that part of the success of discriminatory and fascist institutions is individualism and a willing ignorance to the harms being committed against others. Others whose full humanity you do not recognize because they are not within your immediate circle of community. The possibility of solidarity is not entirely lost, though, and the hope and perseverance that the novel closes on is poignant and actually made me tear up while reading. 

 

 reading this again after probably a decade is such an odd experience... i would 100% agree that it holds up after all these years and arguably has gotten more poignant with age


one note: i think katniss is genuinely in love with peeta by the end, but is too emotionally constipated from childhood trauma to be able to recognize that or admit it to herself. the moment peeta realizes and she tries to say it wasn't all pretend feels very heath ledger in "10 things i hate about you" and her inability to untangle that web or real-or-pretend she created in the arena feels so heartbreaking when you remember the fact that, at the end of everything, katniss is a child.

murderbot ur so right….. armor doesn’t have pockets 😢

it's interesting to see the minute or explicit divergences that the show made from this book (compared to the first book in the series)... i think i generally appreciate the changes they made to increase tension/enhance the internal conflict george is experiencing post-exposure to the bone glass

 Thank you to Netgalley and Tordotcom for providing me with a digital ARC of this book! 

Untethered Sky is a solid, engaging fantasy novella inspired by Persian and Arabian folklore which details the story of a young girl, Ester, whose mother and brother are lost to the brutality of a raging manticore. In this world Fonda Lee constructs, there is only one natural predator that can rival and potentially cull a manticore: the roc, a giant falcon featured in Persian myth. Ester then resolves herself to a life of hunting and killing manticores by training to become a ruhker, a highly skilled roc trainer. 

Told from the first person perspective of Ester, the story follows her as she slowly develops a trusting relationship with the adolescent roc she is tasked to train named Zahra and shifts from apprentice at the Royal Mews to a fully-fledged manticore hunter. The trusting—yet deeply tenuous—relationship between Ester and Zahra is the cornerstone and highlight of the novella. Lee plays heavily on this concept of the relationship between humankind and nature through the complex dynamic ruhkers have with their rocs. Ruhkers build an intensely personal attachment with their rocs while also maintaining the understanding that these are wild creatures who cannot be owned or reciprocate such attachments. 

Despite its length, Untethered Sky is full of complexity and a luscious, intricately carved world tattered by the existence and destruction of manticores. This is my first foray into Fonda Lee’s work and I’m impressed by her concise yet deeply evocative writing style here. The prose never feels understated and deftly conveys the complexity of Ester’s narrative journey which culminates with her killing the heterochromic-eyed manticore... at a cost. 

A sharply earnest coming-of-age fantasy story about finding one’s calling, the power of mythical beasts, and how our love for a wild animal cannot restrain them—yet we care for them anyway. 

 Thank you so much to Netgalley and William Morrow for providing me with a digital ARC of this book!

Chorine is a searing, deranged coming-of-age story and an apt depiction of the horrors at the intersection of girlhood and competitive athletics. It's wild and unapologetically, viscerally raw. The story follows Ren Yu, a young girl obsessed with water and the mythology of mermaids who–under the devastating weight of competitive swimming–devises to shed her human form and transform into her true self: a mermaid. Her ascension into her true self is a brilliant vision of body horror.

There’s such a depth and complexity to Ren Yu that the narrative style captures and lures the reader in like a siren… I started reading this book and it’s so easy to fall into the story and completely forget a world exists outside of the one Jade Song constructs. Ren's first person narration is interjected throughout with literal messages-in-a-bottle from Cathy, Ren's friend and fellow swim team member, further detailing the relationship between the two of them and providing more insight into the timeline leading up to Ren’s grand transformation. Song's prose is strikingly evocative and one of my favorite aspects of this book. (Don't ask me how many whole paragraphs I have highlighted on my e-ARC.)

There something twisted yet beautiful about the ending—Ren Yu achieves her escape into the water and finds the home she has always desired, but at a cost. In that sense, it’s almost reminiscent of traditional mermaid folklore where the ending is not always entirely happy.

In conclusion: GIVE! ME! MORE! DERANGED! COMING-OF-AGE! TEEN! GIRL! NARRATIVES! 

Natalie Haynes is slowly becoming one of my favorite authors and I'm glad to say I enjoyed Stone Blind as much, perhaps more, than I expected given my experience with her other works regarding Greek myths. She has a particular style that I really love where certain perspectives within the narrative will seem to engage in conversation with the reader of the story, both here and in A Thousand Ships.

As someone whose first encounter with much of Greek myths was in Percy Jackson & the Olympians, I think the way that Haynes conveys these stories is quite engaging and serves to reframe the narrative around Medusa and the Gorgons as supposed monsters as well as the standard perception of Perseus' quest to retrieve the head of one of the Gorgons. Here, Medusa is a living, breathing character whose immortal Gorgon sisters are also made human through their fears and anxieties about protecting Medusa from harm... and the raw devastation in their failure to do so. In a twist of our common understanding of the Greek myth, Haynes paints Perseus as a coward whose accompliments are solely due to excessive aid from multiple gods on behalf of Zeus. Here, he is a coward that uses the Gorgoneion at the mere inkling of conflict or obstacle to his goals and unabashedly revels in the mass death it causes, regardless of whether the victims are guilty or innocent of some slight against him. It is a far cry from the story told in Percy Jackson, but I think that it holds much more truth about the way men acquire and wield power. 

Once again, Haynes manages to weave together a beautiful tapestry of myth and breathes new life into this story of a woman repeatedly violated by the whims of the gods. (Also: Haynes is an excellent narrator and I definitely recommend listening to the audiobooks of her work if you're an audiobook reader and love Greek myth retellings!) 

My current ranking of Hayne's work that I've read: 
1. A Thousand Ships
2. Stone Blind
3. Pandora's Jar 

Thank you to Netgalley and Atria Books for providing me with a digital ARC of this book!

Camp Zero is a promising work of literary dystopian fiction that interrogates the intersection of gender, socioeconomic class, and climate change in the remote setting of the Canadian Arctic, where the motivations and reasons behind the camp’s creation are more disreputable than they first seem. The story is told from three points of view: Rose, a young woman working as an escort with the hope of securing a future for herself and her mother; Grant, a young man trying to escape his wealthy family background; and White Alice, a group of women tasked with a scientific expedition in the far north of Canada.

Set in the near-future of 2049, the worldbuilding of Camp Zero feels well-grounded both conceptually and visually in how Sterling paints a picture of Earth in the wake of global warming. It integrates a vision of how the worsening climate crisis would impact different groups, particularly from a class standpoint. The Floating City and Meyer’s idea of creating a settlement for Americans in the Canadian Arctic to escape the ravages of the climate crisis feel evocative of the proposals we’ve seen in recent years coming from the uber-rich about space exploration and colonizing the moon. We repeatedly hear and witness the wealthy elite absolve themselves of the consequences of the climate crisis, while characters like Rose and her mother live on the meager scraps left behind and lose everything in the wake of extreme weather events.

I found the worldbuilding and characters extremely compelling—they all feel fully realized and each have their own beliefs and motivations connected to their unique experience within the climate-ravaged world Sterling created. White Alice reminded me in a way of the expedition in Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation with the emphasis on a group of exclusively women and their isolation from the outside world. Their shift over the course of the novel into a narrative of resilience and survival—and their unwavering willingness to kill in order to maintain their home—was fascinating. I also enjoyed Rose as a kind of central protagonist. The more I learned about her backstory and her motivations, I was increasingly rooting for her… not in the sense of rooting for her to successfully complete the task Damien set out for her, but for her to find her own path to freedom.

I think the only real flaw I have with Camp Zero is its somewhat muddled third act. The way these three narratives finally weave together made me so excited, but then I realized I was already about 90% of the way through the book.

Grant’s decision to leave camp, the revelation of White Alice, the destruction of the campsite, and Nari’s escape from Meyer

all felt a bit rushed. I don’t mind the open ending—given the enormity of their situation and the negligible chance that killing Damien would solve their world’s problems, it’s honestly a solid decision to leave the story there instead of trying to perfectly tie everything up with a bow. I just wish that the third act had more breathing room and was a bit more fleshed out to avoid the weird sense of pacing at the end. 

Overall, a great addition to the dystopian genre and I look forward to seeing more from Michelle Min Sterling!

atmospheric, full of yearning and magic…. definitely a top tier YA fantasy book ❤️ 


ALSO FUCK EVELYN WELTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

kinda wish i had read these books as a kid but also thank GOD i didn’t cause they would have consumed my entire being…… i would have been begging my parents for a badass rapier and fencing lessons and buying a giant black trench coat to cosplay anthony lockwood 💀

is there a high likelihood i might still do that now that i have adult money and am obsessed with the show????? yeah

if you want a YA series with solid found family vibes, spooky ghosts, and unique worldbuilding where the government actively exploits children and puts them in imminent danger but it actually reckons with that instead of pretending everything is fine…. [cough] theseriesthatshallnotbenamed [cough]… you should check this out! 

minus one star for a lack of george/lucy friendship bonding moments cause those were some of my favorite bits from the show