Charlie Jane Anders

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

Four years late getting around to finally reading this first novel from Charlie Jane Anders, but better late than never. A lot of reviews discuss the confusion of genres trying to sort out whether it is fantasy or science fiction; there are certainly dystopian elements and messaging about our future, but those things were not what I was focused on reading this.

What struck me immediately were the wonderful Spielbergian themes and atmosphere in the crafting of Laurence (not Larry!) and show more Patricia's otherness and alienation as children. When you start out following them through their lives building a two-second time machine and encountering a strange tree offering up a riddle to a six-year-old girl lost in the woods, you know you should probably put aside your preconceptions.
The axis of this story is the relationship between Laurence and Patricia as they go through their difficult young lives. They try to navigate our messy world and their relationship to each other, often stumbling through confusion and miscommunication like we all do from time to time.

Everything else is window dressing to that relationship. Becoming a witch and world-class scientist are not at all easy to manage as we build our all-important connections to each other in a chaotic world. We have to find our own paths -- even if that means our misty recollections of childhood may just be figments of our imagination or the very things that help us and the world around us change forever.

And let's not forget the dear assassin Theodolphus Rose who only wants some ice cream. Someone please get him some. Ice cream makes everything better, at least for a little while. show less

I enjoyed [b:All the Birds in the Sky|25372801|All the Birds in the Sky|Charlie Jane Anders|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1429225322l/25372801._SY75_.jpg|45119441], so seized 'The City in the Middle of the Night' off the shelf during my ten frenzied minutes grabbing books from the library. The edition I borrowed has pretty blue page edges, which caught my eye. While [b:All the Birds in the Sky|25372801|All the Birds in the Sky|Charlie Jane show more Anders|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1429225322l/25372801._SY75_.jpg|45119441] was a quirky juxtaposition of sci-fi and fantasy in a contemporary setting, 'The City in the Middle of the Night' is set hundreds of years in the future on an alien planet that humans have colonised. The planet January is tidally locked, so part of it is permanently in freezing darkness and part in fiery constant sunlight. Neither of these extremes is habitable for humans and the two very different cities that have been established in between are struggling. I really liked the environmental world-building, which has considerable influence on the plot. The cultural world-building was likewise thoughtful and linked with the history of colonisation. Xiosphant's timefulness is an ingenious concept and its implications are cleverly shown.

The reader sees January through the eyes of two quite different protagonists, Sophie and Mouth. Probably because she's older than undergrad-aged Sophie, I found Mouth the more interesting of the two. Sophie being in doomed love with her best friend Bianca became rather overwrought by the end. After all they went through together I hoped they would work things out, but in the end class issues tear the two apart. Mouth's relationship with Alyssa is much healthier and happier, although Mouth herself has a lot of issues to deal with. Both Sophie and Mouth wrestle with self-destructiveness, guilt, and finding meaning in their lives, at some length.

Anders' writing style is very readable and the plot steadily paced, with quieter interludes between dramatic action sequences. There is a lot of violence and many brutal deaths, to the point that these lose some impact. The deadliness of January's environment and the cheapness of human life in the cities certainly come across powerfully. I found the twist that Mouth's Citizens were inadvertently destroying the Gelet very effective. This really underscored the theme of humans being hostile to January just as January was hostile to humans. At the end, Sophie represents hope for harmony via symbiosis, although it remains uncertain whether this would allow humans to survive the climate destabilisation they've caused. Overall, a thoughtful sci-fi novel that handles environmental themes notably well. show less

**.5

Gets off to a great start, with lots of action and a minimum of teenage nonsense. But then the plot slows down, and the focus turns back to petty squabbles, hormone-fueled feeeeeelings, and various assorted drama. A lot of the story itself doesn't make much sense either, relying on various plot devices, mcguffins, characters behaving wildly out of character to advance the plot, and ridiculous technology more appropriate to a Rick & Morty episode.

There's also still way too much teenage show more silliness, from cheesy catch phrases, slang that's already outdated, gratuitous pop culture references, random outbursts of tears and hugging, endless insecurities and relationship travails. It comes across as too calculated, pandering to the target demographic [insert Steve Buscemi "how do you do, fellow kids" meme here].

The moralizing is as smothering as in the previous books, from the incessant consent requests every time a character manages to muster up the courage to interact with any other character ("we've lived together, killed together, mourned together, and had sex multiple times, but is it ok if I touch you in order to put this bandage on your sucking chest wound to prevent you from bleeding to death?") to the ever present pronouns ("blood" and "water" and a couple of others are added to the mix, as if "fire" wasn't bad enough). If anything, it feels more oppressive this time around. I'm all for representation and appreciate the diversity, but at a certain point they really detract from the story. For instance, there is one genderfluid character, and EVERY time they appear, are reintroduced with their current pronouns. It could be at a party, or a funeral, or literally in the middle of a gunfight! The action stops, and we are informed that they are now he/him, she/her, they/they, or a couple of other variants. Not only is it disruptive to what was otherwise an exciting action scene, it turns out that it has absolutely no impact on the character, the scene, or the story in any way whatsoever. In other words, it's well-intentioned but entirely gratuitous. And obnoxious in the same way that an evangelical vegan cross-fitter comes across.

This carries over into the YA-ness of the series, but especially this book. Is isn't enough for a character to exhibit traits such as Accountability or Pacifism. The action must come to a screeching halt in order to explain to the reader that the character is standing up for their principles, even though it would be easier for them to blame someone else or that by refusing to shoot their enemy they are putting themselves in grave danger. If the storytelling is so weak that these Cliff Note style sidebar interruptions are necessary, then the writing needs to be improved. But Anders is not a bad writer, and it ends up being disruptive and condescending.

And finally, the worst spaceship name ever has been made even worse, as it's now "The Undisputed Training Bra Disaster."

Merged review:

**.5

Gets off to a great start, with lots of action and a minimum of teenage nonsense. But then the plot slows down, and the focus turns back to petty squabbles, hormone-fueled feeeeeelings, and various assorted drama. A lot of the story itself doesn't make much sense either, relying on various plot devices, mcguffins, characters behaving wildly out of character to advance the plot, and ridiculous technology more appropriate to a Rick & Morty episode.

There's also still way too much teenage silliness, from cheesy catch phrases, slang that's already outdated, gratuitous pop culture references, random outbursts of tears and hugging, endless insecurities and relationship travails. It comes across as too calculated, pandering to the target demographic [insert Steve Buscemi "how do you do, fellow kids" meme here].

The moralizing is as smothering as in the previous books, from the incessant consent requests every time a character manages to muster up the courage to interact with any other character ("we've lived together, killed together, mourned together, and had sex multiple times, but is it ok if I touch you in order to put this bandage on your sucking chest wound to prevent you from bleeding to death?") to the ever present pronouns ("blood" and "water" and a couple of others are added to the mix, as if "fire" wasn't bad enough). If anything, it feels more oppressive this time around. I'm all for representation and appreciate the diversity, but at a certain point they really detract from the story. For instance, there is one genderfluid character, and EVERY time they appear, are reintroduced with their current pronouns. It could be at a party, or a funeral, or literally in the middle of a gunfight! The action stops, and we are informed that they are now he/him, she/her, they/they, or a couple of other variants. Not only is it disruptive to what was otherwise an exciting action scene, it turns out that it has absolutely no impact on the character, the scene, or the story in any way whatsoever. In other words, it's well-intentioned but entirely gratuitous. And obnoxious in the same way that an evangelical vegan cross-fitter comes across.

This carries over into the YA-ness of the series, but especially this book. Is isn't enough for a character to exhibit traits such as Accountability or Pacifism. The action must come to a screeching halt in order to explain to the reader that the character is standing up for their principles, even though it would be easier for them to blame someone else or that by refusing to shoot their enemy they are putting themselves in grave danger. If the storytelling is so weak that these Cliff Note style sidebar interruptions are necessary, then the writing needs to be improved. But Anders is not a bad writer, and it ends up being disruptive and condescending.

And finally, the worst spaceship name ever has been made even worse, as it's now "The Undisputed Training Bra Disaster." show less