Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

fiction

“Very Far Away From Anywhere Else” by Ursula K Le Guin

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I ran across this reference to a book by Ursula K Le Guin which was not science fiction or fantasy, and I was curious, so I got it out of the library. I had seen the title around over the years, and I imagined it was something like “Bridge to Terabithia” with people going to imaginary worlds, or maybe a travelogue about very remote wilderness places.

It had a little bit about an imaginary world, but no one goes there. It’s about two socially isolated high school seniors who find each other and become friends. It’s explicitly about being out of step with what’s expected. More indirectly, it’s about being neurodivergent. It’s about taking music seriously, and taking friendship seriously, and the ways relationships can be complicated and ruined by expectations, and maybe repaired again. It’s about despair and dissociation and disconnection and the double bind of loving expectations that don’t apply.

All that in 89 pages! Its location is never named, and while it has geographical elements of Portland OR (Le Guin’s home town), it seems like a smaller city than the Portland I knew.

Recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“Seaward” by Susan Cooper

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Recommended to me by: Noticing it on my bookshelf

I have one remaining shelf of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, winnowed down over the years from my avid teen collection. Most of them are deeply familiar, authors like Le Guin, Lindholm, MacAvoy, McKillip. I was idly looking at the beginning of the alphabet and noticed this one, which I didn’t really remember. I must have picked it up at a book sale and kept it out of fondness for Susan Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” series.

This is a portal fantasy with fairy tale themes. Two young people in great distress over the loss of their parents find themselves in a different world. Westerly and Cally soon meet up with each other and travel together. They also meet two powerful and mercurial figures that are in conflict with them and each other.

I liked the world-building, the movement of the plot, and the ambiguous villains and helpers. No simplistic good and evil here. The young people are around 16 and are referred to as children even while traveling and surviving a difficult world, competent but not falsely assumed to be adults.

They explicitly call out gender dynamics when the boy assumes he can take the lead and try to protect the girl. Of the two powerful figures, the man is more caring toward the children and the woman is more dangerous.

The children undertake a long and arduous journey to reach the sea (thus the title). In the end, the travel seems to have been for their education, which feels patronizing to me as a middle-aged reader, but makes more sense for teens. The journeying reminded me of George Macdonald’s The Golden Key, although not as heavy-handed with the moralizing.

The ending left me curious about what happened later for Cally and Westerly.

People have written fanfiction about it, such as The Unending Swell of the Sea by silveronthetree.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Book of Love” by Kelly Link

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Recommended to me by: troisoiseaux

This book is a cross between fantasy, romance, and horror. The four main characters are complex, well-drawn teens, which means they are all irritating in one way or another as they try to decide what they want to be when they grow up. The book is in conversation with The Lord of the Rings, but declines to make the struggle about good vs. evil. It is about death, magic, transfer of power, and (given the title), many different ways to express love. And many different ways to love music.

On the positive side, this book has more than one Black character, and they talk to each other about something besides race. Some of them live in the biggest house in the most chic neighborhood, and some of them live in a house in a middle-class neighborhood. They are not “issue” characters, and at the same time they are impacted by racism as they go about their lives, and they name it when that happens.

At times the book reminded me of Pamela Dean’s The Dubious Hills and at times it reminded me of Patricia McKillip’s Riddle-Master trilogy, but without inspiring the same kind of affection I hold for those. I can tell it’s well done, and it wasn’t my kind of thing. Too much body horror, too much casual violence, too much physical and emotional harm done to and by characters we’re supposed to care about.

Everyone else seems to recommend it highly though!

Available at bookshop.org.

“Alexandra’s Riddle” by Elisa Keyston

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Series Northwest Magic, book 1

This is a romance set in a small town in rural Oregon, with connections to the fae realm. The plot tension gets turned up to 11 in a couple of places where I would have preferred a calmer narrative, but maybe that’s part of the genre.

There are some consent issues in the book, not with physical touch, but with a lifetime commitment to a role, along with an anti-selfishness author’s message.

Those grumbles aside, I did read and enjoy the whole thing. The scenery and friendships in the book are well-described, and two women do talk about something other than a man. The scenes where Cass is at her library job sound similar to what I hear from my friend who works at a public library.

Recommended as an entertaining diversion.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Weaving Hope” by Celia Lake

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book coverThis is a gentle romance between two capable, kind people in their 40s. The careful background research about weaving, tapestries, and estates gives the book a solid foundation. It was good to see neurodiverse characters portrayed with respect and treated with kindness.

The characters are skilled at communication and consent. We hear their thoughts as they notice the details of each other’s behavior, but there is a refreshing lack of silence or miscommunication driving the plot.

There are a lot of small details of daily behavior – making tea, using the water closet, navigating a large complex house. The characters are emotionally well-regulated, so the book feels calming to read, even while they work on solving a mystery.

Recommended for a refreshing and peaceful read.

Available from Celia Lake.

“The Fortunate Fall” by Cameron Reed

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This book is a meditation on evil, and embodiment, and what it means to be human, and what it means to love. How can activists succeed against a totalitarian government when everything is networked and everyone is under surveillance.

It was published in 1996, and since then we have only stumbled (or been shoved and dragged) closer to the dystopian future it portrays.

It’s well written, swinging from immediate danger to philosophical conversations, from discussions of genocide to ordering takeout. The new technologies are well named and smoothly layered into the story with deft clues for the reader to follow along.

Recommended if you don’t mind horror mixed into your cyberpunk. I prefer to avoid dystopias for my fiction reading – I can read the news for that.

Coincidentally, Kate Nepveu post her notes on a ReaderCon 2025 panel  about this book.

Available at bookshop.org.