Charlie Jane Anders

The world's only two clairvoyants begin dating, even though both of them can see how it's going to end. But where Doug can see one future, Judy can see many possible futures, and this disparity comes to color their own relationship - as they both know it will. This one raised a lot of interesting questions: If you know that a relationship is going to end (which they all do, until one doesn't), are the good times worth the bad? Do their various ways of seeing the future mean different things show more for whether or not they have free will? If you know the future, and try to change it, but know that trying to change it won't work, and so don't bother trying to change it, is the future changeable or not? Very cool story. show less

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tina never worries about being ‘ordinary’—she doesn’t have to, since she’s known practically forever that she’s not just Tina Mains, average teenager and beloved daughter. She’s also the keeper of an interplanetary rescue beacon, and one day soon, it’s going to activate, and then her dreams of saving all the worlds and adventuring among the stars will finally be possible. Tina’s legacy, after all, is intergalactic—she is the hidden show more clone of a famed alien hero, left on Earth disguised as a human to give the universe another chance to defeat a terrible evil.

But when the beacon activates, it turns out that Tina’s destiny isn’t quite what she expected. Things are far more dangerous than she ever assumed. Luckily, Tina is surrounded by a crew she can trust, and her best friend Rachael, and she is still determined to save all the worlds. But first she’ll have to save herself.

Buckle up your seatbelt for this thrilling sci-fi adventure set against an intergalactic war from international bestselling author Charlie Jane Anders.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is, hands down, the queerest YA book I've read.

I really could stop writing now with the injunction for you to go get a copy and read it before setting it loose into the library, the Little Free Library, the bus subway breakroom etc etc. Tina and her found families are urgently needed in a world where the ugliest, most hateful and judgmental people are launching their latest attack on progress, inclusion, and a better world.

Same as it ever was.

What the younger readers will learn from reading Aunt Charlie Jane's book is that there is a future, and it can look the way you'd like it to look...but you have to be willing to move outside your boundaries, you have to embrace your ability to make, find, and accept the world's wildness and surprises. Your efforts will pay off in proportion to your commitment to them.

How Author Charlie Jane accomplishes that is to take one teen girl, one best friend of teen girl, and hurl them into a cosmic battle of good against evil. Do you know a teenager...have you EVER known a teenager...who did not resonate like a struck bell to this plot? And then Author Charlie Jane shakes the soda bottle to fizz up the stakes by making everyone in the girls' expanded universe into some form of different, but without Othering them for the differences...after all, if the way you just are is somehow different from how I am, who says *I* get to decide that YOU are the Other?

This is a truth that permeates all Author Charlie Jane's work. It makes the banners and haters and deniers completely mental. Since I think making those sorts of people wildly uncomfortable is a very worthy cause, I want to support it wherever I can.

While I love a dense, richly textured world, I'm an old man and have been reading since before Author Charlie Jane was born, so I found the expository bits too frequent and a smidge too detailed for my reading pleasure to morph into joy. They seem a touch overdone for today's SF-savvy youth, if I'm honest; but that is a thing I'm happy to see because it means this book can be an onramp into SF for even the most innocent and unworldly young person.

Matching my expectations, then, was not her project...that was what she did with Even Greater Mistakes, her other work from the annus mirabilis that was her 2022...but speaking to her audience, to the future leaders and readers. This is a wonderful thing, an excellent project, and a top-quality execution of it.

Gift it. Read it yourself, then give it to all the young readers you know. show less

The City in the Middle of the Night feels highly reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin with its analysis of alien culture, colonialism, and even the meaning of language, though with a grittier, modern edge. It's not simply a book on social issues, though--the characterizations are deep and realistic. This is a book that makes you think and feel.

The book follows two viewpoints: Sophie, a quiet student with a hopeless crush on her manic, popular university roommate, and Mouth, the hard-edged only show more survivor of a roaming culture that was obliterated by the harsh environment of the planet January. Humans have been on the world for centuries struggle to survive in massive cities that exist largely in isolation.

The worldbuilding truly blew me away here. This is hard scifi across disciplines, but the cultural aspect is what I loved most. I didn't find this to be a fast read-the tension has a slow build, but it was interesting all the way through. show less

Jamie is worried about her mother, Serena. It's been seven years since her other mother, Mae, died, and Serena still hasn't been able to move forward. Serena lives in an isolated one-room shack, which she rarely leaves. Perhaps, Jamie thinks, learning a new skill will help Serena get back to living, so she plans to give Serena lessons.

That story alternates with flashbacks to the 1990s, when Serena and Mae are a young couple caught up in lesbian activism, love, and motherhood.

Our third major show more narrative strand is Jamie's dissertation research. She's attempting to figure out who wrote the 18th-century novel Emily, published only as "by A Lady," and her discoveries will have unexpected relevance to her current relationships. (The literary figures Jamie comes across in her research are real people, but I believe that Emily is a fictional novel. As is so often true when authors use historical figures in their fiction, a "here's what real, here's what I made up" note would have been appreciated.)

So far, this sounds like a mainstream literary novel -- explorations of relationships between mother and daughter, between spouses; how to move on from grief, and the consequences of not doing so; balancing the demands made on you by the people in your life so that none of them feel neglected, while also finding time for the things that matter to you. But the skill that Jamie is attempting to teach her mother is magic, and that sends us into fantasy/magical realism territory.

It's a fairly gentle version of magic, basically wishing with a bit of cosmic oomph behind it, but any power is subject to abuse, especially by novice practitioners. Serena, who is by nature both more ambitious and more impatient than Jamie, dives eagerly into exploring her new skills, and her explorations are not always well thought out, causing problems for both women.

If there's a throughline in Anders's work, I think it's that secrets will fuck us up faster than anything else. She does not advocate for the sort of cruelty that some emotional sadists like to dress up in the guise of "radical honesty" -- kindness is also an important value in her work -- but her characters are repeatedly stalled in life by their refusal (or inability) to tell the truth, and honesty to one's self is just as important as honesty to others.

A fine novel. The emotional progressions of the characters are credible and convincing; the story is involving; and the prose is a pleasure to read. Highly recommended. show less