young adult

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

October 6, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

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

September 20, 2025 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

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.

“Wizards at War” by Diane Duane

September 5, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Young Wizards series #8

Recommended to me by: a friend

I saw a recommendation for this book right before a trip, and found an ebook at the library to download and take with me for airplane reading. It was enjoyable in that context. I had read the first few books in the series a long time ago.

The more I thought about it after finishing it, the more dubious I got. It is a Christian allegory that ends up being (perhaps unintentionally?) anti-Semitic in the parallels it draws. Over the years, I have lost my taste for personified powers and angsty teens, but I am far older than the target audience.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Kingfisher” by Patricia A. McKillip

June 28, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

I am a longtime McKillip fan. I remember finding “Riddle-Master of Hed” on a used book rack as a young teen. When I finished reading it, I held the closed book in my hands, turned it over, and started reading it again to see all the connections I had missed the first time. Her “Forgotten Beasts of Eld” was my favorite book for many years.

Over the years I wandered away from automatically reading everything she published. The same themes and characters seemed remixed in each book, and the stories floated along vaguely without making sense.

I picked up Kingfisher when it popped up in a library search for “T.Kingfisher”. It’s a more recent book, from 2016. The King Arthur underpinnings give the book a strong structure, and the way she fixes the fore-doomed parts of the story is very satisfying.

Like with “Riddle-Master of Hed,” I turned the book over and started again when I finished it. It rewarded re-reading with more connections with the King Arthur story, and more details that I skimmed over the first time.

There is a strong theme of missing parents, and repairing broken connections. Some of the familiar themes were missing – no musicians! Some were there – cauldrons and castle kitchens cooking feasts. Shape changing. Learning magical skills quickly and easily. I liked that perceptiveness was a valued magical skill.

On the positive side, there are strong, competent women knights. On the negative side, all the important women characters are tall, willowy, and have light hair and eyes. A couple of incidental characters without speaking parts are described as plump. All the relationships are heterosexual. Everyone seems to be white. Even the man described as having “lamb’s wool” hair is also described as having pale colored hair. I would have hoped for better from a book written in 2016.

Recommended with those caveats.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The English Understand Wool” by Helen DeWitt

May 3, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Andy

A story in brief chapters of a child raised by very wealthy very upperclass very international parents, and how she copes with a sudden change in her circumstances.

The story seems light, superficial, until it comes to its sudden, satisfying end and it becomes clearer how the apparently superficial details fit together.

It is written in a distancing style. Recommended if you like that, and/or if you like reading about how people behave when they have really a lot of money and are trying to meet their own standard for good behavior.

Available at bookshop.org.

“When the Angels Left the Old Country” by sacha lamb

March 12, 2023 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Soph and Becca.

This is a book about an angel and a demon (and some humans). A Jewish angel, a Jewish demon, and Jewish queer humans, emigrating by ship from a tiny shtetl in Poland to New York.

The angel is obviously, essentially Good, and at the same time it can be oblivious, and its actions can have evil effects. The demon is selfish and encourages wickedness, and its actions can have ultimately good effects. They are conflicted within themselves, argue endlessly with each other, and love and need each other deeply. This complexity and debate around questions of good and evil, intent and action, are quintessentially Jewish, in contrast to a single clear polarizing answer.

Of course some immigrants were queer, and of course some of them would fall in love with each other. As a Jewish queer human myself, it was surprising and delightful to feel recognized in the world of this book, permeated with Yiddish phrases and Jewish mysticism.

The prose is a pleasure to read, tumbling from one scene to the next and only occasionally allowing the uncertainty and danger to ratchet too high. The outcome is satisfying neat, even if full repentance is a little unexpected.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.