Well, that was another real long month. Please consider, if you have the cash, sending some of it to an abortion fund, or an organization supporting trans people. If you don’t, consider calling your local representatives, or publically affirming your support for trans people. Or something. Just… something. Anyway, here’s some books. Links go to Bookshop.

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I led off the month with Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism, edited by Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl. This entry in Routledge’s series on translation is, the blurb says, “the first book-length publication to critically engage in the emerging field of research on the queer aspects of translation and interpreting studies,” and does more or less what it says on the tin. Ranging from examining the publication of translated works of queer literature under two dictatorships, to the queerness of a Russian aristocrat’s hobby translations, to translating a notable speech on queerness into the language of visual arts, the book provides an able survey of contemporary translations of queer source texts, and the many joys and problemata they present. While any edited volume will have some unevenness, most of the essays collected here are very readable, and many are even fun. A bit niche, but goddamnit, it’s my niche, and finding works that fit it is always a joy.

I followed that up with one of the hot new releases from May of this year — and you know I preordered this one back in like, February from my local fave — Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, the author’s first foray into the romance genre. Long-time readers are doubtless aware of my love for Emezi’s writing, and this latest does nothing to unconvince me of their brilliance. The novel follows Feyi, a young widow grieving the years-past death of her husband, as she falls in love with a series of men, anchored by her deep and somewhat romantic friendship with her best friend, Joy. But honestly, Emezi could rewrite the phone book and I’d go wild: while their plots are generally solid, it’s their prose that truly transcends. A few lines of dialog here and there struck me as a little awkward, but did absolutely nothing to prevent me from devouring this novel at great speed. I am once again thrilled to be here to watch Emezi’s career unfold, and experience their sensuous yet finely-wrought writing whenever possible. A true delight.

Next up was H. E. Edgmon’s The Fae Keeper, the sequel to The Witch King, which I wrote about here. The Fae Keeper picks up shortly after the conclusion of the first novel, as Wyatt and his beloved Emyr try to both stabilize Asalin, the fae foothold of which Emyr is king, and seek to reverse the damage that fae magic is doing to the human world — to say nothing of the now-open door back to faerie, which presents its own problems. Overall, The Fae Keeper was a lot tighter and just generally better than The Witch King, examining some of the wicked problems of its world in interesting and, often, inventive ways. Part of this is because Wyatt as a character has grown since the first book: he’s much more ready to take up the various mantles with which he’s presented, and his ability to do so is tested by his own character and the exigencies of the world itself. While the style is still intermittently teeth-gratingly slangy, The Fae Keeper was, overall, a lot of fun, and a solid conclusion to the story.

Like many other transmasculine people of my acquaintance, I am uniquely susceptible to an interview with Elliot Page, and for other reasons, I had been meaning to read Amateur: a True Story About What Makes a Man by Thomas Page McBee. In this brief and pellucid memoir of masculinity and violence, McBee details his experience training and subsequently boxing in Madison Square Garden, the first trans man to do so. While that feat is impressive enough by itself, it’s McBee’s reflections — on how affection is displayed in the relatively hypermasculine space of the boxing club and ring, how men do and do not show up for and support each other, how to be a good man when your early models for manhood were very bad — that truly activate the memoir, and make it a brief, punchy read. (Sorry.)

That book, along with this next one, came from my local library, and it was only because the library had it that I read this next book: Overdressed: the Shocking High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth Cline. As mentioned elsewhere, I’m interested in clothing and fashion, and I’d been aware of Cline’s work — especially some of the writing around and accompanying this book — for some time. Unfortunately, that “some time” was enough to make Overdressed feel a little passe, as it were: the book came out in 2012, and you can tell, from the discussion of the industry itself down to its ultimate conclusion, which is highly individualistic, and does little to address the increasingly obvious problems with cheap clothes and the trash they rapidly become. That said, Cline’s style is solid, the kind of personal journalism that flourished around the time of publication, and it holds up reasonably well. I would love an updated edition, but as it is, it was better skimmed than read deeply.

I love the covers of the Edinburgh Nights books so much.

Fortunately, I had finally gotten my hands on an audiobook I had been anticipating for some time: Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments by T. L. Huchu, the second (but hopefully not the last) in Huchu’s delightful Edinburgh Nights series, the first book of which I reviewed here. Our Lady… picks up shortly after The Library of the Dead left off, with Ropa on the outs from her ghostalking work, but replacing it with a prestigious apprenticeship to learn the scientific magic prized by the world’s elite. Unfortunately, the paid apprenticeship turns into an unpaid internship, and in the mean time, Ropa must determine what fell magic is leaving the boys of Edinburgh’s classiest magic school mysteriously dying. Believe me when I say: I am underselling this, and it’s not on purpose. These books are delightful. Ropa is an incredible heroine, the worldbuilding is simultaneously tight, terrifying, and funny, and I am profoundly excited for Ropa’s further adventures.

Next up was The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley, a fixup of this short story (to which I link, but have not read). Fundamentally a take on the kind of military science fiction of which Starship Troopers is a prime example, Hurley takes the subgenre in some very interesting directions — not least because their politics are quite different from, say, Heinlein’s or many of his imitators. We follow Dietz, a recruit into one of the corporate infantries, as she learns the truth of the war(s) in which she fights nonchronologically: the technology that enables extraordinarily fast travel (there’s really something in the phrase “they bust you down to light” that just sticks in your brain) also causes her to become unmoored in time, and ultimately, she must confront the injustices inherent in her society and put a stop to the endless meatgrinding and corporate consolidation. It’s a great premise, and generally well-executed, though I did find the central portions of the novel a little difficult to follow — arguably, a structural support for the novel’s content — and the characters difficult to recall — which, again, may be an authorial choice for which I simply was not in the right frame of mind. That said, it was a lot of fun, and I’m definitely excited to check out more of Hurley’s work.

I next finished T. Kingfisher’s recently-published Nettle and Bone. Unlike the other novels of hers that I’ve read, this one operates in much more of a romantic fantasy register, with a few characteristic horror flourishes: Marra, the youngest daughter of the royal house of a kingdom in near-constant political peril, vows revenge against the prince of a neighboring kingdom, who contributed to the death of one of her sisters and torments the other ceaselessly, and is joined in her quest by a motley crew of magic-users, a disgraced knight, and a chicken with a demon in it. Very much in the style of Patricia C. Wrede or Vivian Vande Velde, Kingfisher’s characters move through a fairytale-like setting with a level of genre awareness that strikes a perfect balance among all the ways it might have gone wrong — but with the added bonus that Kingfisher’s characters are all adults. Marra is in her thirties, and she’s the youngest of her little band (except, perhaps, the chicken), and for my money, that makes Kingfisher’s works all the more compelling: these are people who are old enough to know better, but do the thing anyway, and I really appreciate that.

On the other end of things, and rounding this round-up, we have Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed With Us. White’s debut novel gives us Benji, a young trans man on the run from the Christian dominionist eco-fascist cult in which he was raised to serve a special purpose, and which unleashed the body-horror plague on a near-future world. He’s taken in by a group of queer teens, fending for themselves in a fractured Pennsylvania — but his creeping transformation goes beyond gender. Quite frankly, this was a keyboard smash of stuff I was going to like, and like it I did. As much as it sometimes felt a little close to home, the cathartic quality of Benji and his friends’ fight against the cult was unbeatable, and White does a stand-out job of capturing how much the religious rhetoric of evangelicalism can rapidly permeate thought. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

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Anyway, that’s it. Stay cool in the northern hemisphere, warm in the south, and follow me and Cameron on Twitter if you want.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, June 2022