Book 12: Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce

A book club book that I didn't manage to read in time to participate, but wanted to read anyway. This is a novella that felt like it didn't get to the meat of the story until about 2/3rds of the way through it, and then I wanted more at that point. It's a story set in Reconstruction, in a magical realism world, about a young Black woman who accepts the responsibility of planning her aunt's funeral service. She longs to have freedom from her mother and from who her mother would have her marry, and there's a secret at the heart of why her mother and her aunt were estranged, and there's so much of interest here, but the pace of the story just didn't quite work for me - too slow to begin with, and then much too fast, when I would have loved more time. The world was really compelling, though, and the concept of easing a person's passing within the magical systems of this place was beautiful. 

Grade: B

Book 11: The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang

A bookclub book! Specifically a novella, and it's the sort of space scifi mystery type story that I'm so glad is the length that it is. This is both because it involves lots of different species and translation and beings moving through space in ways that my brain simply will not picture while I'm reading, and so there was a lot of me just letting certain descriptive elements wash over me rather than stressing about it all. And I'm glad I did, because boy does it eventually pack a real emotional punch. 

The very short narrative logline for this story is that there's this alien Ro who's a linguist, and his species has the ability to jump into a different species and observe their language and report back. He's kind of an anthropologist, and they're trying to figure out how to help this other species, and so he jumps and learns much more than he was expecting to, in a variety of ways. I don't actually want to say much more because, well, that's the story, but in many way it's more of a morality play than a full story, which made it an ideal bookclub book to discuss and the read itself went by fast enough and gave me a lot to think about. Not my favorite kind of book but very compelling! 

Grade: B