In May the subscribers of If There's Anyone Left got to read my short story, The Things You Know, The Things You Trust. Now it's free to read online! Go, read, enjoy!
I have now finished reading the duology that began with Max in the House of Spies, in which a Kindertransport refugee with a dybbuk and a kobold on each shoulder wrangles his way into being sent back to Germany as a British spy.
The first book featured a lot of Ewen Montagu RPF, which was extremely fun and funny for me. The second book, Max in the Land of Lies, features a lot of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent RPF, which is obviously less fun and funny, though I still did have several moments where a character would appear on-page and I would exchange a sage nod with Adam Gidwitz: yes, I too have read all of Ben Macintyre's books about WWII espionage, and I do recognize Those Abwehr Guys Who Are Obsessed With British Culture, we both enjoy our little inside joke.
Our little inside jokes aside, I ended up feeling a sort of conflicted and contradictory way about both the book and the duology as a whole. It's very didactic -- it is shouting at you about its project at every turn -- but the project it's shouting about is 'the narrative is more nuanced and complex than you think!' On the one hand, people in Germany (many of them Based on Real People) who are involved in The Nazi Situation in various messy ways are constantly explaining the various messy ways that they are involved in The Nazi Situation to Max, a totally non-suspicious definitely not Jewish surprise twelve-year-old who's just appeared on the scene, at the absolute drop of a hat. It is somewhat hard to believe that Max is achieving these really spectacular espionage results when the only stat he ever rolls is 'knowledge: radio!' although his 'knowledge: radio!' number is really high.
ON the other hand, it is so easy and in vogue to come down in a place of 'Nazis: bad!' and so much more difficult and important to sit with the fact that believing in a monstrous ideology, participating in monstrous acts, does not prevent a person from being likeable, interesting or intelligent, and vice versa; that the line between Nazi Germany and, for example, colonial Great Britain is not so thick as one would like to believe; that people are never comfortably reducible to Monsters and Not Monsters. At root this is clearly Gidwitz's project and I have a lot of respect for it: this didactic book for children is more nuanced, complex and interesting than many books for adults I've read.
And then there's the dybbuk and the kobold. Throughout the second book they continue to function primarily as a stressed-out Statler and Waldorf, which I think is a bit of a waste of a dybbuk and a kobold. Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy and at this point I WAS about to come down on "Adam Gidwitz probably should just not have included these guys in his children's spy story." But Then ( he did something very spoilery that I actually found profoundly interesting )
The busy season has struck at work, so my reading has slowed down, but I’m still chugging along. I picked up Genzaburo Yoshino’s How Do You Live? (translated by Bruno Navasky) because I liked the cover, learned from the front cover flap that it’s one of Miyazaki’s favorite books, and therefore of course I had to read it. The novel was intended as a guidebook to ethics for Japanese schoolchildren, and I think would have blown my tiny mind if I read it at thirteen. I’ve missed the window for it to become a formative text for me, but I enjoyed it nonetheless, as a glimpse of a very different side of Japan in the 1930s. (Yoshino never mentions Japan’s wars of imperialist expansion, presumably because everything he would have liked to say would have gotten him thrown back in prison, where he had already languished for 18 months for his socialist beliefs.)
Mary Stolz’s Ferris Wheel, one of Stolz’s weaker books, as it ambles around without going anywhere. Our heroine Polly doesn’t get along with her little brother Rusty, is losing her best friend Kate because Kate is moving to California, meets a new girl who might be a friend but really seems like kind of a boring friend candidate… Good descriptions of life in Vermont, though.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve reached Part III of A Sand County Almanac. The first two parts are both close observations of places that Leopold knows well, and therefore perennially fascinating as well-considered firsthand observation always is. Part III is more about the Theory of Wilderness, which is less interesting to me, but I keep on keeping on.
What I Plan to Read Next
Despite my reservations about Ferris Wheel, I still plan to read the sequel Cider Days, just because the title sounds so perfectly autumnal.
As part of its current tour of military topics, the New Worlds Patreon is taking a look at all those other people involved: not the soldiers, but the secondary army of people who support and/or profit off them. Comment over there!
In the course of dealing with silly body stuff with which I will not bore you, my sleep cycle got turned upside down again, so I am busy with various attempts at precessing back to a more manageable situation.
Somewhere in some book or other, a character said something about the phrase for having a hangover in a certain language was "my eyes are not opposite the holes." It's not a hangover, but when my sleep schedule is deeply out of synch and I'm trying to do stuff connected to the outside world's schedule, I kind of feel like my life is not opposite the holes.
How's your life matching your hours of access lately?
So a little while back, for. my birthday I got various tasty things to nibble. One of them was salmon skin and salted egg crisps, with curry leaves in the mix, and some spice. Extremely tasty. When I got down to the bottom of the bag, there were a lot of little shards and crumbs that were particularly spicy. A mental note was. made for possible future uses.
Today was a future use. There wasn't a fresh vegetable in the house, but I wanted something with both softness and crunch, and wanted it to be in something that had umami plus. The last of the bread gave me toast. There was some braunsweiger (liver paste, Nueske's in particular) which went onto the toast, cut pretty thinly. (I am from people who like thick slices of braunsweiger on toast or bread, and normally I do too, but this was a special application, part flavor and part structural adhesive.) Then I spooned out some of the fragments from the bottom of the bag of salted egg and salmon skin crisps, laying them on top of the liver paste and pressing them in with the back of the spoon, and had it open-faced.
Big win. Big tasty win. Especially the way the curry leaves went with the braunsweiger.
Must remember this and make it again.
Part of the idea for this one was looking at the braunsweiger and wishing I could magically make a banh mi from the place in Global Market appear. So some of the taste combo came from that. Lettuce or bok choy or other green or variously colored thinly sliced vegetables, with vinegar or not, would have been great, but there was no such suppy in the house, alas. Although hey, there is a little new kraut in the back of the fridge which should get eaten up. Hmmm. Although we are out of bread now. Hmm. I wonder how it would be on top of ramen noodles. Pity that the boiled eggs are all et up.
Do you have any tasty kludged-together food that you are fond of? What gave you the idea?
(My term for kludged-together food is "cream of refrigerator soup," which explains the tag. No actual soup was generated in this particular instance.)
I was so charmed by The Fairy Circus that I decided to see if the university archives had any of Lathrop’s other books, and indeed, they have The Colt from Moon Mountain... and the colt is a unicorn colt!!!!!!! Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have spoiled that, I went into the archive not knowing and nearly squeaked with delight when I saw the cover, but as it IS on the cover it’s probably not a serious spoiler. Unicorn befriends farmgirl! Delightful.
The archive people know me, by the way. I was rooting through my purse for my ID and the desk clerk was like, “Don’t worry, I’ve seen you before.”
I also read Dick Francis’s Whip Hand, the sequel to Odds Against. In Odds Against, iron woobie Sid Halley had been forced out of his jockey career by a tragic accident that resulted in a horrifyingly deformed left hand, which led to him becoming a private investigator, which over the course of the book led to him losing said left hand entirely.
About three chapters into Whip Hand, the baddie trains a shotgun on Sid’s right hand at point-blank range and threatens to shoot it off. Sid endures in stoic (but deeply terrified) silence; I the reader screamed like a tea kettle. “IS HE GOING TO LOSE ONE APPENDAGE EACH BOOK?” I shrieked with horrified delight at this new horizon of whumpiness.
Another quote from A Sand County Almanac: “Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”
What I Plan to Read Next
Jostein Gaarder’s The Solitaire Mystery! Which comes with a side mystery: Gaarder has published a number of books since the 1990s, most of which have indeed been translated into English, and yet most of them are not available through any of the various libraries to which I have access. Why not? Where are they? A mystery worthy of Gaarder himself.
I liked the Korean movie Phantom (2023) enough that I decided to hunt down the novel on which it's based, Mai Jia's The Message -- in large part out of curiosity about whether it's also lesbians.
The answer: ... sort of! The lesbians are not technically textual but there's a bit of Lesbian Speculation and then a big pointed narrative hole where lesbians could potentially be. It is, however, without a doubt, Women Being Really Weird About Each Other, to the point where I'm considering it as a Yuletide fandom (perhaps even moreso than the movie, where the women are also weird about each other but in a more triumphant cinematic way and less of an ambiguous, psychologically complex and melancholic way. you know.)
The plot: well, as in the movie, there's a spy, and there's the Japanese Occupation, and there's a Big Haunted House where we're keeping all the possible spies to play mind games with until somebody fesses up. Because the book is set in 1941 China, there are actually three factions at play -- the Japanese and collaborators, the Communists and the Nationalists -- and for the whole first part of the book, fascinatingly enough, we are almost entirely in the head of the Japanese officer who's running the operation and choreographing all the mind games in an attempt to ferret out the Communist agent in his codebreaking division. The result is sort of a weird and almost darkly funny anti-heroic anti-Poirot situation, in which Hihara is constantly engineering increasingly complicated locked-room scenarios designed to get the spy to confess like the culprit in a Thin Man movie, and is constantly thwarted by his suspects inconveniently refusing to stick to the script, even when presented with apparently incontrovertible evidence, placed under torture, lied to about the deaths of other members of the party, etc. etc.
The suspects include several variously annoying men, plus two women whom we and everyone else are clearly intended to find the most interesting people there: quiet and competent Li Ningyu, cryptography division head, mother of two, whom everyone knows is semi-separated from an abusive husband, and who somehow manages to keep calmly slithering her way out of every accusation Hihara tries to stick on her; and her opposite, loud bratty chic Gu Xiaomeng, whom Hihara would very much like to rule out as a suspect as quickly as possible because she's the daughter of a very wealthy collaborator, and who seems moderately obsessed with her boss Li Ningyu For Some Reason.
Both book and movie spend, like, sixty percent of their length on this big house espionage mind games scenario and then abruptly take a left turn, with the next forty percent being Something Completely Different. In the film this left turn involves DRAMATIC ROMANTIC ACTION HEROICS!!!! so I was quite surprised to find that the book's left turn ( involves spoilers )
Guess what I’ve been up to? Yes! It’s a novella! It’s the story of an ex-harpy, her harpy ex-girlfriend, and some extremely opinionated weaponry. Pastries! Operettas! Complicated friendships! All in one conveniently sized volume (or file)!
Karen Babine, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo. Babine's take on both camping and more generally living as a single woman is particularly interesting because she is very much not solo most of the time in this book--this is a book that is grappling with her roots, her family, and engaging with her current family. It paints a picture of a life that can be satisfying without fitting prior molds--and our demographics are such that there are a lot of tiny details that really resonated with me.
Angeline Boulley, Sisters in the Wind. This is the third YA thriller about Native issues in the US, centering around the same families and clusters of characters. Boulley is writing them to try to be stand-alone but interwoven, and I'd like to see how someone who hadn't read the earlier volumes felt about how well this succeeded. I did read the earlier volumes, and I felt like there was quite a lot of "here's an update on someone you already know" going on here, and like the balance of that with the narrative at hand was a bit off. I also think she's set herself a very hard task, because when the real life issues you're writing about genuinely produce people who behave like cartoon villains, you don't want to sanitize them into something more understandable, and yet then you're stuck with the people who behave like cartoon villains. It's a tough problem. So I still found this worth reading, but I felt like the earlier volumes were stronger in some ways.
A'Lelia Bundles, Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance. I picked this up from the "new books" shelf in the library, and I fear it's one of those books where the author had a reasonably good bio of a famous ancestor in her, and she wrote that already (a bio of Madam C.J. Walker) and has gone on to what is clearly a labor of love writing about her famous ancestors but doesn't rise to be nearly as interesting to me as the events and subjects on the periphery of the book. Probably mostly recommended for people with a special interest in this era/location.
Martin Cahill, Audition for the Fox. My copy of this arrived early, but it's out now, I think? Interesting take on gods and their relationship with humanity, a fun fantasy novella.
Emilie A. Caspar, Just Following Orders: Atrocities and the Brain Science of Obedience. This is a fascinating book by a neuropsychologist who has not only done the more standard kind of campus studies into obedience and the variables that affect (or, apparently, in many cases do not affect) it but has also done a lot of interviews and various kinds of brain imaging (fMRI and EEG primarily) on groups of people who could reasonably be described as the foot soldiers of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. Caspar's willingness to admit which things she does not know is only one of the things I find refreshing about her work. She's also willing and able to engage with these interviewees on the subject of stopping either themselves or others from committing similar acts, what factors might be important there. This is not a book with all the answers but I'm really glad she's out there asking the questions.
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Reread. The curious thing about this reread is that it's so smoothly written, it's such a pleasant and easy read, that it was startling to notice how little momentum this book has. Each chapter is a lovely reading experience if you like that sort of thing! (You've seen the number of 19th century novels I read. Of course I like that sort of thing.) But also each chapter is a conscious decision to have more of it, because there's very little of either plot or character pushing forward in any way.
Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Joy Is My Middle Name. Only a handful of these poems really resonated with me, but the ones that did really resonated with me, which is an interesting experience to have of a poetry collection.
Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages: 987-1460. This is largely about the evolutions of the concepts and theoretical bases of power in French society in this era, and was really interesting for the things it bothered to examine in that way--where and when and how the Roman Catholic church got involved in various life milestones, for example, generally later than one might think while living in a world so shaped by those processes that they may seem obvious. Worth having. Did not hate Philip Augustus enough but is that even possible.
Xochitl Gonzalez, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. I found this harrowing in places, because I am auntie age, so the story of young women making themselves smaller and less interesting for men has my auntie heart wailing "OH BABY NO DON'T DO IT" without, of course, being able to do one darn thing about it. Do they come through the other side from that behavior: well, what is the title, really, it's not a spoiler to say yes. More concretely: this is about a murdered (fictional) Latina artist in the 1980s and an art history student in the late 1990s putting the pieces together. Most of it is not about the putting the pieces together in any kind of thriller/mystery sense. If you're used to that pacing, this pacing will strike you as very weird. Mostly it's about the shapes of their lives. I liked it even when I was reading it between the cracks between my fingers.
Guy Gavriel Kay, Written on the Dark. I feel like the smaller scale of this bit of fantasized history doesn't serve his type of writing well--there's not the grand sweep, and he's not going to turn into a painter of miniatures at this stage of his career. I also--look, I know he's writing these things as fantasy, so he's allowed to change stuff, I just feel like if a character is still obviously Joan of Arc I'm allowed to disagree with his take on Joan of Arc, which I do, on basically every level. Ah well. If you like Kay books, this sure is one all the same.
T. Kingfisher, Hemlock and Silver. I was mildly disappointed in this one. The mirror magic was creepy, but the romance plot felt pro forma to me, some of the plot beats more obvious than a reinterpreted fairy tale novel would strictly require. Of course she can still write sentences, and this was still an incredibly quick read, it just won't make my Favorite T. Kingfisher Books Top Three.
Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners. Reread. This title could also have matched up with The Book of Love but definitely not, not, not vice versa. This is not a book of love. It's a book of disorientation and weirdness. Which I knew going in, but having been here before doesn't make it less like that.
Alec Nevala-Lee, Collisions: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs. Look, I can't explain to you why Alec, who seems like a nice guy, has chosen a career path that could be described as "writing biographies of nerds Marissa would not want to have lunch with." But he does a good job of it, they're interesting books and manage to learn a lot about--even understand--their subjects without falling the least bit in love with their subjects. This one is Luis Alvarez. Did a lot of interesting things! Also I went into this book with the feeling that even an hour in his company would be more than I really wanted, and I did not come out of it with any particle of that opinion altered.
Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War. An account of a really interesting time, illuminating of things that came after, somewhat repetitive.
Vandana Singh, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories. Reread. Yes, the stories here were also satisfyingly where I left them, science fictiony and vivid.
Travis Tomchuk, Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the US, 1915-1940. This is actually a book about Italian anarchists in Canada that recognizes that there was a lot of cross-border traffic, so it also looked at those parts of the US that directly affect Canada--Detroit-Windsor, for example. Lots of analysis on Italian immigrants' immigration experiences either as caused by or as causing their radicalism. Interesting stuff but probably not a good choice My First History of Early Twentieth Century Radicalism.
Natalie Wee, Beast at Every Threshold. It is not Wee's fault that I wanted more beasts. Poets are allowed to be metaphorical like that. I did want more beasts, but what is here instead is good being itself anyway.
Fran Wilde, A Catalog of Storms. This was my first reading of this collection but not my first reading of the vast majority of stories within it. This is the relief of a collection by someone whose work I enjoy, knowing that each of the stories will be reliably good and now I have them in one spot, hurrah, glad this is here.
Here's a video of me reading my own poetry for the first time, with SFWA's Speculative Poetry Open Mic. I have not listened to it because I cannot bear listening to myself, but I have hopes that other people feel differently about it....
cyphomandra asked about Newbery novels in verse, and friends, I have THOUGHTS. I have OPINIONS. Or actually I have neither of those things, I just have FEELINGS, feelings first engendered decades ago when I first read Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, which despite the lapse of time have yet to subside.
Out of the Dust won the Newbery Medal in 1998. It is about a girl named Billie Jo, so named because her dad really wanted a boy and apparently wanted his daughter to be reminded twenty times a day that she was a disappointment. It’s the Great Depression, and they live on a miserable Dust Bowl farm where Billie Jo’s only source of solace is playing her piano.
But then ONE DAY, someone leaves a can of kerosene on the stove. This kerosene catches fire, so Billie Jo grabs it with her bare hands to throw out the door! But she reaches the door just as her pregnant mother is about to enter, and thus accidentally hurls flaming kerosene all over her!
The mother dies a slow and agonizing death of her wounds. The baby IIRC is stillborn, but I can’t recall the details of this point because I was too busy obsessing over all the neighbors coming to Billie Jo’s dying mother’s bedside murmuring “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.”
Billie Jo’s mother is dead. Billie Jo can no longer play the piano because her hands are horribly scarred from the kerosene. Billie Jo jumps a train to get out of Oklahoma, presumably to escape to a place where no one knows “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.” But in the end she comes home, and there is I believe an attempt at a vaguely hopeful ending (Billie Jo is perhaps attempting to play the piano again?) but it is TOO LITTLE TOO LATE.
This was my first novel in verse. It was, I believe, also the Newbery’s first foray into novels in verse. (There are earlier collections of poetry, like A Visit to William Blake’s Inn and Joyful Noise, but a poetry collection is a different beast.) It has given me an abiding aversion to novels in verse, a prejudice that has proven ineradicable even though I loved Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again (Newbery Honor 2012) so much that I’ve read all of Lai’s other work, AND ALSO loved Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (Newbery Honor 2015) so much that I’ve been making a game stab at reading all her work as well, although as she has published approximately 500 books I haven’t managed it yet.
As I contemplated this fact, I wondered woefully if I would never learn to let go of this prejudice. But then I started totting up the other Newbery novels in verse.
Once Out of the Dust opened the sluice gates, an inundation of Newbery verse novels followed. Well, okay, more of a trickle, but if you are averse to verse novels it feels like quite a lot.
2002: Marilyn Nelson, Carver: A Life in Poems, actually a biography and not a novel, but includes a particularly scarring poem about lynching.
2009: Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom. You know how a lot of the earlier Newbery books were exciting adventure stories about the battle for freedom? This is not an exciting adventure story. This is a long, slow, bloody trek of misery to freedom.
2015. Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover. Dead father.
2018. Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down. Dead brother.
2020. Jasmine Warga’s Other Words for Home. Refugees. Actually not super depressing, though.
2022. Rajani LaRocca’s Red, White and Whole. Dead mother.
2025. Lesa Cline-Ransom One Big Open Sky. Dead father.
So actually I think the numbers are on my side here. Newbery novels in verse have a 70% chance of being miserable! It is right and proper that I approach them with crushing dread.
We watched Scavengers Reign because it was enthusiastically recommended to genarti as fun animated science fiction about being stranded on an alien planet with interesting alien biology. Which is true! This is not incorrect! Not Mentioned was the extent to which it is also very definitely lovingly animated body-and-survival horror ..... every time we watched we checked in with each other like 'still good to proceed? not too much eugughghhhhhh?' '[grimly] let's watch at least one more episode and see what happens,' and in this way we eventually crawled through all twelve episodes.
NONETHELESS I do think it was very good, once we acclimated to the eugughghhhhhh factor. (I ended up higher on it than genarti did, in some part because I liked the ending for my favorite character better than she liked the ending for hers.) The first episode introduces you in media res to the several sets of people stranded on this planet that the show will be following:
- Sam and Ursula, an older man and younger woman traveling together, who've developed a plan to bring down their heavily damaged ship, the Demeter,, still in orbit around the planet with most of the crew in cryosleep; Ursula is fascinated by the planet and interested in learning more about it, while Sam is laser-focused on Getting Out Of There - Azi, a motorcycle butch who's been in crop-growing survival mode supported by (a) Levi (unit), a pleasant manual labor robot whose behavior is becoming increasingly altered by some kind of planetary growth thriving in its innards - Kamen, alone and still trapped in his escape pod, on the verge of death until he encounters a telepathic creature that brainwashes him into symbiotic/parasitic collaboration, and yet somehow his biggest concern is still His Divorce
Over the course of the story, we learn through flashbacks more about who these people were on the Demeter and what happened to strand them on the planet, while they cope (or don't) with the various challenges of the planet and the hope of escape provided by the Demeter. The real fears that the show evokes, IMO, are isolation and transformation -- being, yourself, transformed without your knowledge or consent, or, perhaps even worse, seeing your only companion changing into something unrecognizable and untrustworthy. These are things that scare me personally very much and so I often found this a very scary show! But -- like Annihilation or Alien Clay, the two other stories that Scavengers Reign reminded me of the most -- it also evokes the flip side of this fear, the beauty and wonder of the transformative and strange. The animators loved animating these weird alien ecosystems.
(The trailer is very clear and accurate to the amount of body horror in the show. From this you will be able to tell that we did not in fact watch the trailer before we began the show itself.)
A second season was planned, but has not been ordered and may never be made; IMO the first season does stand as complete but I would very much like to see the second season and I hope it happens.
Broadly speaking, I liked Star Wars: The Mask of Fear, the first book in a planned trilogy of Star Wars Political Thrillers pitched as Andor Prequels, For Fans Of Andor.
This one is set right after the declaration of the Empire and is mostly about the separate plans that Bail Organa and Mon Mothma pursue in order to try and limit their government's whole-scale slide into fascism, with -- as we-the-readers of course know -- an inevitable lack of success. It is of course impossible not to feel the weight of Current Events on every page; the book came out in February '25 and so must have been complete in every respect before the 2024 elections, but boy, it doesn't feel like it. On the other hand, it's also impossible not to feel 2016 and Hillary Clinton looming large over the portrayal of Mon Mothma as the consummate politician who is very good at wrangling the process of government but whom nobody actually likes.
That said, as a character in her own right, I am very fond of Mon Mothma, the consummate politician who is very good at wrangling the process of government but whom nobody actually likes. With her genuine belief in the ideals of democracy and her practiced acceptance of the various ethical compromises that working within the system requires, she makes for a great sympathetic-grayscale political-thriller protagonist. I also like the portrayal of her marriage in this period as something that is, like, broadly functional! sometimes a source of support! always number three or four on her priority list which she never quite gets around to calling him to tell him she's back on planet after a secret mission before the plot sweeps her off in a new direction, oops, well, I guess he'll find out when she's been released from prison again!
Anyway, her main plot is about trying to get a bill passed in the Senate that will limit Palpatine's power as Emperor, which involves making various shady deals with various powerful factions; meanwhile, Bail Organa has a separate plot in which he's running around trying to EXPOSE the LIES about the JEDI because he thinks that once everyone knows the Jedi were massacred without cause, Palpatine will be toppled by public outrage immediately. Both of them think the other's plan is kind of stupid and also find the other kind of annoying at this time, which tbh I really enjoy. I love when people don't like each other for normal reasons and have to work together anyway. I also like the other main wedge between them, which is that both of them were briefly Politically Arrested right before the book begins, and by chance and charisma Bail Organa joked his way out of it and came out fine while Mon Mothma went through a harrowing and physically traumatic experience that has left her with lingering PTSD, and Mon Mothma knows this and Bail Organa doesn't and this colors all their choices throughout the book.
Bail Organa's plot is also sort of hitched onto a plot about an elderly Republic-turned-Imperial spymaster who's trying to find the agents she lost at the end of the war, and her spy protege who accidentally ends up infiltrating the Star Wars pro-Palpatine alt-right movement, both of which work pretty well as stories about people who find themselves sort of within a system as the system is changing underneath them.
And then there is the Saw plotline. This is my biggest disappointment in the book, is that the Saw plotline is not actually a Saw plotline; it's about a Separatist assassin who ends up temporarily teaming up with Saw for a bit as he tries to figure out who he should be assassinating now that the war is over, and we see Saw through his eyes, mostly pretty judgmentally. I do not object to other characters seeing Saw Gerrera pretty judgmentally, but it feels to me like a bit of a cop-out in a book that's pitched as 'how Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Saw Gerrera face growing fascism and start down the paths that will eventually lead to the Rebel Alliance' to once again almost entirely avoid giving Saw a point of view to see his ideology from within. But Star Wars as franchise is consistently determined not to do that. Ah, well; maybe one of the later two books in this trilogy will have a meaty interiority-heavy Saw plotline and I'll eat my words.
(NB: I have not yet seen S2 of Andor and I do plan to do so at some point, please don't tell me anything about it!)
littlerhymes asked which Newberies were hardest to find. As it happens, I kept a list of how I found all the Newberies, so I can answer this in some detail!
When I started this project, I was living in Indianapolis, and the Indianapolis Public Library had all the Newbery Honor books back to 1970. Since I looked this up in 2020, it’s possible they have some sort of cutoff where they keep at least one copy in the system for fifty years? Or maybe it was just a coincidence.
At any rate, the cutoff was sharp at 1970 itself, when there were three books the Indianapolis library didn't have. Through my mother, I had access to the Evergreen Library Consortium which connects libraries through Indiana. Through my father, I had access to the Purdue University libraries. Using these resources, I found two of the Honor books of 1970, except The Many Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to the Pleasures of Art, which my mother bought me as a present, which is CHEATING.
Um. I mean, thank you for the kind present, Mom!
(But it’s still not in the proper treasure hunt spirit!)
These two libraries also filled the gaps in the Indianapolis collection of the 1960s Newberys.
In the 1950s, the treasure hunt got real. I got four books through interlibrary loan. One I read on a trip to the Indiana State Library, and another I read on in the Lilly Library Reading Room in Bloomington, which conveniently has a collection of first editions of many Newbery Honor books.
I also read one through openlibrary.org, and I will note that many of the books I found through other means are available on this website. I only used it a few times for two reasons: one, the scanned books tend to give me a headache, and it’s impossible to be fair to a book while you have a splitting headache. And two, this also cut into the whole treasure hunt aspect. Does openlibrary.org bring you a book on a little pillow like the Lilly Library? Absolutely they do not.
(I also almost certainly could have gotten all the books I found in various archives and reading rooms through interlibrary loan, but again, would they have been brought to me on a little pillow? No! Sometimes one must simply embrace the thrill of the chase.)
For the 1940s, I had one Indiana State Library book, three interlibrary loans, and three Lilly Library Reading Room books. (I also read two more books on openlibrary.org, and it was the poor scanning of Eva Roe Gaggin’s Down Ryton Water that broke me.)
The 1930s were the hardest decade by far. I had twenty-three interlibrary loans, three Lilly Library books, two Indiana State Library books (I should note that the Indiana State Library doesn’t check out the older materials in its collection, so all these books I read in the library), four Lilly Library Reading Room books, and near the end of the project I discovered that the Purdue Archive had one of the books I needed, so I got to read that one in the Purdue Archive Reading Room.
The 1920s were actually easier, mostly because the Newbery Committee chose far fewer runners-up in the 1920s than the 1930s, but also because the 1920s books were beginning to come off copyright. (As of 2025, they’re all out of copyright.) So I could read many of them through gutenberg.org or Google Books, but since 1928 and 1929 were still under copyright at the time, there was still an interlibrary loan, a Lilly Reading Room book, and an Indiana State Library book.
And that is the tale of my Newbery treasure hunt! Now that I’ve finished the list, I feel a trifle bereft: what books can I have the archivists bring me on little pillows now? However, you’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve already started a small list of books that I look forward to reserving at the archives at my leisure.
The counterpart to the New Worlds Patreon's discussion of supply lines last week is "living off the land" -- usually meaning off the backs of the civilian population. Comment over there!
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mrissa
