The back-to-school vibes caught us in September, as a lot of WWAC Readers enjoyed books about teens this month! We’ve got horror, adventure, romance, nuanced fantasy world-building, and a philosophical look at bookselling and society. And as always, we’ve got magnificent taste.
Alenka Figa: Jade Nguyen should be looking forward to starting college, but she can’t. She got in but she can’t afford school, and she’s lied to her mother about how much the college is providing. Instead of a carefree summer, Jade has to stay with her estranged father in Vietnam for five weeks, where he is restoring a French colonial house—the house where their relatives once lived as servants. It should be an easy task: deal with her father, take care of her sister, and make a website for the B&B her father is working to open. The house, however, is strange in She is a Haunting, by Trang Thanh Tran. The windows in Jade’s room are painted shut, but the sills fill with dead bugs. For the first time in her life she’s experiencing sleep paralysis, and the flowers outside the house defy natural laws and grow and grow and grow, no matter how much they’re cut back. Something strange is happening in the house, and Jade and her family are part of it, whether they want to be or not.
This YA horror novel is VERY intense and comes with content warnings for body horror and parasite/insect related horror. However, there is so much here—about queerness, and how the fear of rejection can take root and cause someone to pull away from their loved ones, about France’s colonization of Vietnam and the ensuing generational trauma, about the pain of collapsing under the expectations of parenthood and family, and the pain of being given adult-sized responsibility as a child. It is a lot, but Tran weaves it all together brilliantly, and when you hit the final third of the novel you will NOT be able to set it down until you are done.
Kathryn Hemmann: Carsten Henn’s novel The Door-to-Door Bookstore, originally published in Germany in 2020, tells a feel-good story about an older man who delivers orders to the patrons of a small bookstore in a town with a walkable medieval city center. The 72-year-old Carl is socially awkward and set in his ways, but his routine is disrupted by a young girl named Schascha who starts following him on his rounds. Although Carl tries to brush off Schascha, her youthful energy is exactly what he needs to confront the crisis created by the misguided corporatization of his bookstore management.
The plot of The Door-to-Door Bookstore may seem somewhat formulaic, but what I appreciate about this novel is how it handles a set of serious and culturally relevant themes. Each of the main characters is socially isolated and dependent on Carl to keep them connected to the outside world. If someone like Carl were to be replaced by Amazon, what would happen to these people? And what would happen to Carl himself, a widower with no living relatives? The Door-to-Door Bookstore forces the reader to confront a troubling question: Do you really want to live in a profit-driven society where people are abandoned to die alone once they’re no longer deemed productive? [Emily interjecting here: No. No, I do not.] Thankfully, the novel offers a vision of an alternative model of friendship, connection, and community.
The 2023 translation of The Door-to-Door Bookstore was marketed alongside Eric Ozawa’s translation of Satoshi Yagisawa’s 2010 short novel Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, which has a similar premise. Unlike The Door-to-Door Bookstore, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is less driven by plot as it gently ambles from topic to topic, much like the bookstore cats that adorn the lovely cover art created by Ilya Milstein. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop makes a fine companion to The Door-to-Door Bookstore, and I very much enjoyed following these two localized approaches to the theme of “a community created by a love of stories.”
Emily Lauer: I’m a huge fan of Catfishing on CatNet and Chaos on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer so I was extremely excited to see that her next book is also a near future teen adventure: Liberty’s Daughter will be published by Fairwood Press in November.
I loved it. It has a lot of the elements I enjoyed in the CatNet books, including competent teens having an adventure in a plausible near future setting, with a whole new setting and cast. Liberty’s Daughter presents Rebecca Garrison, a teenager who lives with her bigwig dad on the Seastead: a collection of modified cruise ships and platforms in international waters where various rich folks go to evade taxes and various impoverished folks go to evade laws. Some of the rich folks are running from the law as well.
While initially presented as a kind of libertarian utopia, the Stead’s dystopian elements grow more and more pronounced when things go wrong. It turns out things like health regulations might be a good idea after all. Beck starts the story with an after school job as a “finder,” connecting people to what they’re looking for from the top of the hierarchy of rich shareholders, down to the recently arrived indentured bond workers on the Stead. She stumbles across some unsavory practices and decides to do the right thing … and then issues escalate.
As Beck learns more about her dad’s role in the problems of the Stead, her interactions with other people grow more mature and her connections to the mainland US increase. While Beck and her new friend might be too good to be true, their responsible, savvy navigation of their dystopian world is very satisfying. Liberty’s Daughter collects and connects stories previously published in issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 2012 to 2015.
Nola Pfau: I just wrapped up the final volume in S.A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad trilogy, The Empire of Gold. It’s a little outside what I’ve been reading of late, mainly because it’s very heterosexual compared to most of my choices—there’s a couple of queer side characters, but the primary love triangle of the series is straight. As a conclusion to a series though, it’s fantastic. Chakraborty’s world-building is excellent and I’m glad that she’s chosen to set her next book series in the same world, because I desperately want more of the mythology here. There’s also a concerted effort to build in anti-imperialist thinking, to demonstrate why and how that much power in a single person’s hands is such a corrupting influence.
It’s a very well-thought-out meditation on the dynamics of power wrapped in a fantasy story, and honestly I can’t recommend it enough. I’m eagerly looking forward to her next book.
Carrie McClain: Rebekah Weatherspoon, one of my fave romance novelists in the game, writes for the grown folks in the room, which I’ve always appreciated. I have loved playing in the sandboxes she’s created with everything from marriages of convenience to cowboys to male nannies. Her work always brings the heat and always brings characters I will be emotionally invested in with dialogue that never feels stiff. One striking feature of her work is that her books often feature heroines who are Black, plus-size, disabled, and/or LGBTQ.
So when I heard that she was releasing her YA debut, I knew I would read it and that she would knock it out of the park. Weatherspoon’s Her Good Side follows two awkward teens who end up using the tropey ‘fake dating’ situation to survive their latest season of high school. Bethany Greene, at sixteen years old, can NOT catch a break. On top of struggling to communicate to her parents that she yearns for a life outside of basketball, she needs a date for homecoming and has been turned down by her crush.
Bethany has known Jacob Yeun, photographer extraordinaire, most of her life and he’s had quite the glow-up recently but hasn’t figured out relationships as he’s been dumped twice in rapid succession. The two teens figure that fake dating is the key where the two can shed their awkward girl/boy status at school and get in some dating experience. The results are the amusing adventures of two late bloomers that I finished quickly in two sittings.
Rebekah Weatherspoon surely is our cool cousin who always makes sure we eat well at every outing.
In the same way that Black romance readers my age consider romance genre veteran Beverly Jenkins an honorary Auntie, Rebekah Weatherspoon surely is our cool cousin who always makes sure we eat well at every outing. Her Good Side is such a fun and swoon-worthy tale! I loved reading about these two young adults figuring out their feelings for each other, and also how to become more confident and go after what they want in life.
Weatherspoon nails all the conflicting tensions of teenagerhood and all the pressures that come from academics, parental expectations, navigating friends circles and being around that person who gives you all the butterflies. The book features a full cast of teenagers who do everything from score on the basketball court to film videos at the skatepark and both Jacob and Bethany have fleshed-out support systems. This was a sweet and entertaining rom-com worthy read to dip back into the YA genre. This author really proves that the genre has space for not just diverse couples (who are interesting individuals who gain well paced character development) but I am never not going to love the plus size girls Black girlies finding their happy endings!
