• Secret identities.
• Opulent parties.
• Tangled secrets.
• Queernormative.
• Betrayal.
• Revenge.

If any of those criteria fit your reading checklist, you don’t want to miss out on Tara Sim’s Scavenge the Stars. This genderbent Count of Monte Cristo retelling is an absolute delight. Meet Amaya and Cayo, two protagonists that couldn’t have led more different lives. Amaya has spent the past seven years working off her parents’ debt on the Brackish and is only weeks away from earning her freedom. Cayo is the son of a wealthy merchant of Moray and spends his time gambling away his father’s wealth in the Vice Sector. But when Amaya rescues a drowning man, her fortunes change, and she’s given the opportunity to take down the man who destroyed her family and forced her into indebted-labor—Kamon Mercado, a dirty businessman and Cayo’s father. As a dangerous plague rips through the city, Amaya and Cayo have to decide where their hearts truly lie and if they are willing to accept the hefty price of revenge.

This book was one of my most anticipated reads coming into 2020 and it did not disappoint. Thirty-some pages into the book, I had already decided it was one of my all-time favorites and was scheduling a re-read. The Count of Monte Cristo is my favorite “classic.” I adore the intricate revenge that Edmond Dantès develops along with his single mindedness in seeing it through to the end, no matter the cost.

Sim does the classic Dumas story justice and manages to make it even better because now it’s genderbent and queer.

Both Amaya and Cayo are complex characters that will win you to their side despite the less than perfect decisions they continue to make. I adored Amaya. She takes no prisoners and is willing to see her revenge carried out no matter what, but she’s always worried about those around her and she wants a happy ending. Cayo has all the hallmarks of your typical millionaire playboy, but he’s so much more complex beneath the surface. And when they’re on the page together, these two make a fantastic duo—even if they’re totally scamming each other throughout.

The supporting cast is just as fabulous and diverse, and the main side characters are as fully realized as Amaya and Cayo. My personal favorites are Deadshot (I am such a sucker for a sharpshooter and she is positively DIVINE) and Romara (the deliciously dark daughter of the Slum King who will shank you as soon as smile at you). Sim’s worldbuilding shines in how inclusive it is to people of all skin tones, genders, and sexualities. And perhaps the best part of this is how it’s simply the norm for the world.

None of these topics are causes for animosity or hatred in the world or between characters, making it a safe space for marginalized identities to come and enjoy a swashbuckling story of revenge with just a hint of romance.

On the technical side of things, I can’t write this review without praising Sim’s writing. It’s magnificent. The Count of Monte Cristo is a BEAST of a book and if you’ve read it, give yourself a huge pat on the back. Scavenge the Stars is the pocket edition—it’s taken all the best parts and homed in on them. The pages flew by. I would sit down to read a chapter or two and suddenly I was a hundred pages further and my dog was wondering why I wasn’t getting his dinner ready. Sim trusts her readers to make the connections and unravel the mystery right along with Amaya and Cayo. Her word choice was excellent, and from the first line of “The first thing Silverfish had learned on board the Brackish was how to hold a knife,” (What a fabulous first line!) to the final line of the story, prepare to be swept away. Both Amaya and Cayo have agency, constantly making difficult choices that in the moment seem like the right thing to do but end up causing way more problems than they fix. I love when characters create their own problems, and Amaya and Cayo excel on that front.

Scavenge the Stars is book one in a planned duology and if you’re anything like me, you are going to be demanding book two when you get to the last page. I can’t wait to read the next book—I have theories and questions and I need answers! Scavenge the Stars has gained a place of honor in my heart and on my shelf and I can’t recommend it enough. Happy reading!

Katie Passerotti is a writer, teacher, and fangirl. She is obsessed with villains and will probably assist one in taking over the world. When she’s not making diabolical plans, she and her wolfhound are off exploring forests and parks or she’s reading stories about fierce, fantastical girls. Follow her on Twitter @KatjaBookDragon

The details were hazy but I remembered this book as one of the best I had read back in 2015. For that reason, and because it falls within the villain theme, I chose to reread it for review. As a suspenseful story, I was worried a second reading wouldn’t hold up, but it cut me deeper this time and I think I can pinpoint why.

Trying to describe this book without overdoing it is hard for me. I used to recommend it by stealing from a blurb I read somewhere calling it “Black Swan meets Orange Is the New Black.” Not entirely the gist, but it does paint a good starting picture.

The story is told from the split points of view of Violet and Amber. Violet, an eighteen-year-old rising star ballerina about to enter Juilliard, recounts long elapsed memories of herself and her best friend, Orianna or Ori for short. Violet dances all around the details of their relationship, and the horrific event three years prior that obsesses her, before she comes to the point.

Amber is a resident of Aurora Hills Secure Juvenile Detention Center, convicted of a violent crime at thirteen, who starts her story with a strange day when the locks came open. Amber has been at Aurora Hills longer than any of the other girls and the years have eroded her. Her point of view is mostly passive, translating into words what is happening on the stage within the prison. Her situational awareness is shaky to the point of being difficult to follow in the beginning, but her perception of others, especially her fellow inmates, is sharp. Through Violet and Amber, Orianna’s full story is revealed.

I liked Suma’s writing style in general. There are nuances and allusions. The narrators’ voices each ring authentic and give away more than the characters intend. The supernatural elements seep in at a slow drip. A dramatic story emerges between the ballerinas that takes most of the reader’s focus. But while Violet and Ori are dancing out their white swan and black swan routine, Amber, whose life is remarkably gray, sneaks in and, in my opinion, upstages them.

She often speaks in first person plural. She wants you to look at all the inmates as a collection, a family, and Amber herself as an unimportant but very included member. She internalizes the neglect and hatred from everyone on the outside world who saw in her thirteen-year-old self a problem so big it had to be boxed up and forgotten. Every once in a while, though, Amber lets slip little heartbreaking pieces of joy and self-esteem that reveal the person she could have been. She also lets slip her anger.

Going back to the Orange Is the New Black comparison. It is a prison story, with people desperately attempting to cope with the rules of their new society on the inside. There’s plenty of racial and economic privilege at play. But the people in the story are children, and it is that unfortunately realistic element that hits me harder the second time around.

The Walls Around Us would be an intriguing story even if the characters were adults. Yet when so much fiction out there revolves around seventeen-year-old protagonists who save the world despite being surrounded by horrible adults, it is painful and necessary to hear stories about kids who are failed by adults and instead of ending up champions, end up broken.

Erynn Moss is an enthusiastic reader who likes refreshing her soul by spending time with the brilliant people she finds at Sirens. She’s into comics, sewing, knitting, costumes, and camping. She currently lives in Louisville with her BFF spouse and their toddler trainee-Siren.

Each year, Sirens chair Amy Tenbrink posts monthly reviews of new-to-her fantasy books by women and nonbinary authors. You can find all of her reviews at the Sirens Goodreads Group. We invite you to read along and discuss!

I was fully prepared to dislike Gideon the Ninth.

Because everyone loved Gideon the Ninth.

It’s not so much that I’m contrarian by nature—though I’m sure the patriarchy thinks I am—but that I have a list of speculative works as long as my arm that everyone loved and I really did not. Books that I quit at page 50. Books that I threw across the room at page 300. Books that I put down and forgot to ever pick up again. Books that I finished under duress. Books that I finished so that, in all seriousness, I could hate them properly. I will not name names.

But everyone loved these books.

I did not.

Everyone loved Gideon the Ninth.

I was fully prepared to not.

But will wonders never cease: I, too, loved Gideon the Ninth.

All the books I love have two things in common, regardless of genre or category or author or publication date: an unflinching defiance and a blazing ambition. These books that I love are rarely—but only rarely—perfect. Instead, these books often trip over the sheer force of their defiance or their ambition. And that is why I love them: I am far more interested in cataclysmic, rage-filled defiance and formidable, shoot-for-the-moon ambition than I am in perfection.

Which is to say that, if you’re trying to understand what I loved about Gideon the Ninth, you have to understand that I love White Is for Witching more than Gingerbread, and Who Fears Death more than Lagoon, and American Hippo more than Magic for Liars, and The Stars Are Legion even though I like neither space opera nor body horror, and Food of the Gods despite that it’s gore-strewn chaos, and Conservation of Shadows more than just about anything. My literary love is defiance and ambition, so much so that a messy book born of too much of either is far, far preferable to a perfect book born of less.

And while Gideon the Ninth is a number of things—including, yes, a story of lesbian necromancers in space—its heart is author Tamsyn Muir’s unrelenting defiance and ambition.

Somewhere in space, in some year, there are nine houses, eight beholden to the First, all adept at necromancy, all weird as fuck in a raw, all-id sort of way that reads as both endlessly fascinating and wholly authentic. People are weird, man, and consistent with basically everything ever, royalty-equivalent necromancers are weirder than most.

Gideon Nav is a foot-soldier in the Ninth House who really, really, really wants to leave the Ninth House’s planet and go far, far away and fight in a war she doesn’t really understand and maybe someday not be indentured to anyone, let alone to super-creepy Harrowhark the Ninth, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House. Gideon and Harrow loathe each other, for reasons that it takes a whole book to explain, and as the book opens, Gideon is attempting to escape and Harrow wants her to stay and do her a favor. A challenge is issued and accepted. Neither Gideon nor Harrow plays fair—Gideon is tremendous with a two-handed sword, Harrow is perhaps best in the galaxy at necromancy, neither has many qualms or morals—but Harrow offered the rules, and though she and Gideon are relatively evenly matched, she tricks Gideon into acting as her cavalier primary for some weird-ass competition that the Emperor is throwing for the other eight Houses.

Shades of The Hunger Games abound, but Gideon the Ninth turns on distrust, cleverness, and gothic-style mystery more than desperation-fed, almost accidental revolution. Eight necromancers and their cavaliers primary—presumptively, each House’s intelligence and strength—are abandoned in an unknown building full of dangerous riddles and a single rule. Each necromancer is unfailingly ambitious, though each plays the game quite differently. Each cavalier primary is seemingly unfailingly loyal, except Gideon, who would frankly rather stab Harrow in the back with her teensy-weensy cavalier sword than help her solve riddles.

The heart of Gideon the Ninth is not lesbians nor necromancers nor space, but the fully realized relationship between necromancer and cavalier primary—a bond presumed closer than love, closer than blood—that Muir creates not once, but eight unique times. The generations of tradition that underlie these relationships, and the weight afforded to any breach of those protocols, are tangible. Much is made of the fact that Gideon was not trained as the Ninth House’s cavalier primary, but rather takes over from some wholly inept dude and learns a new fighting style. Much is made of the fact that Gideon rejects more traditional secondary weapons in favor of the close-range knuckle knife. More is made of the fact that, in Gideon’s first challenge as the Ninth House’s cavalier primary, her opponent disarms her and she retaliates by punching him. He goes down, gasping for breath, and a shocked spectator notes that he won the challenge, but Gideon won the battle, specifically by not following the rules.

And in that sort of exchange—which happens over and over and over again as Gideon or Harrow or both defy the rules, defy expectations, pursue their own desires, and ultimately reshape their own necromancer-cavalier primary relationship in a way that involves a leviathan sacrifice, but continues to subvert generations of history—demonstrates both Muir’s defiance and her ambition. Gideon the Ninth is not a revolution book (though the Locked Tomb series may well be), and yet it is: Because everything that Gideon or Harrow does, everything that Gideon or Harrow says, everything that Gideon or Harrow is—Harrow’s refusal to care about others, Gideon’s hilarious-yet-fully-felt insults, Gideon’s biceps, Harrow’s blood magic, Gideon’s sunglasses, Harrow’s face paint—is a defiant, ambitious revolution for the reader.

Rude, unlikeable, self-absorbed, brilliant, powerful women always are.

If you’re reading closely, you’ll be wondering right about now if Gideon the Ninth is a messy sort of book. It is. The world-building isn’t quite fully realized: I think it is in Muir’s head, but it didn’t quite make it on the page. The plot, particularly plot points surrounding the geography of the giant, gothic building they inhabit, is sometimes muddled. Going on twenty important characters, even if fully individual and fascinating, are too many people to keep track of, so you’ll breathe a sigh of relief when Muir starts killing them off. The necromancy magic is incomprehensible, though what matters for following the story is logic, not any real understanding of how the necromancers do what they do. It is, indeed, messy.

But if, like me, you’re less concerned with tidiness than you are with female characters who are defiantly unfettered by the rules that are meant to bind them, and Muir’s tremendous ambition in putting that on a page, you’ll love Gideon the Ninth, too.

Amy Tenbrink spends her days handling strategic and intellectual property transactions as an executive vice president for a major media company. Her nights and weekends over the last twenty-five years have involved managing a wide variety of events, including theatrical productions, marching band shows, sporting events, and interdisciplinary conferences. Most recently, she has organized three Harry Potter conferences (The Witching Hour, in Salem, Massachusetts; Phoenix Rising, in the French Quarter of New Orleans; and Terminus, in downtown Chicago) and ten years of Sirens. Her experience includes all aspects of event planning, from logistics and marketing to legal consulting and budget management, and she holds degrees with honors from both the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and the Georgetown University Law Center. She likes nothing so much as monster girls, Weasleys, and a well-planned revolution.

Many modern novels attempt to explore identity¹ in ways that are heavy-handed and moralistic. While I don’t take issue with these themes, I have often been disappointed with the execution of them in novels. However with Mona Awad’s new book Bunny, I found an author whose literary chops and subtle hand allowed me to enter into the gestalt of women’s relationships with each other, and discover how imagination can play a role in finding one’s agency in a world that capitalizes on Otherness, through isolating us from each other. It is the best novel I’ve read all year.

At first I couldn’t understand how the protagonist—a poor graduate student named Samantha Heather Mackay (nod to the 1988 musical Heathers)—could fall for the shallow enticement of belonging to the mean-girl clique in her creative writing program at a fictional Ivy League university. I persevered because of the gorgeous descriptive language and biting wit, and the fact that I began to suspect that the phantasmagorical Alice-in-Wonderland-like weird and disturbing events playing out weren’t real, but actually metaphorical—imagination run amok, as it were. No spoilers, but I will say that Awad presents us with characters who will stop at nothing to gain entrance to—or maintain—their membership in the upper echelons of writerly elitism. Everybody gets blood on their hands.

The treatment of Awad’s twee female foursome (all having named themselves a homogeneous Bunny) are given little individual character development or depth. They are instead the “blob of peach-colored flesh wearing a pastel rainbow dress.” This group of antagonists (perhaps significantly a group of white women) is a symbol of a well-established competitive femininity that moves in packs and takes no prisoners. As Awad develops them throughout the novel we discover why and how this kind of femininity is systemically sustained in our society, making us our own worst enemies sometimes. Says Samantha,

I look up at the blob. It laughs softly with all its mouths.
“Bunny, this isn’t high school.”
“This isn’t even undergrad, Bunny.”
“Or an eighties movie.”
“Or even a nineties movie.”
“We’re all educated adults here.”
“…That’s the beauty of being friends with us, Bunny.”
“There don’t have to be words sometimes.”
“You could text us a whale tomorrow afternoon and we’d be like, We know. We’d know exactly what it is you were feeling.”
The blob nods its four heads vigorously. Then it rises from its many thrones.

Awad reveals for us the quagmire of academic creative writing programs that require students to “dig deep” and “process” and open themselves up to “wounds” that “bleed” in order to do the “work,” but how teachers in such programs do nothing to support students in the vulnerabilities they inevitably uncover in these reaches. Perhaps worse, academia is oblivious to the Othering dynamics it creates through coercing students to critique each other’s work and “kill your darlings” (advice to writers by William Faulkner to avoid the overuse of favoured elements).

But what if your “darlings” are actually pieces of your identity? This is where Awad shines. She shows us what it means to belong to “tribes” without sacrificing the very elements that make us us. Throughout the novel Awad gives many witty, subtle references to privilege, exceptionalism and whiteness, bringing humour and depth to her character’s choices. For example, if one replaces the word “cohort” with “tribe” in the following passage where Fosco, a self-important instructor, attempts to constrain Samantha’s identity, one gains a visceral understanding of ingroup/outgroup dynamics (otherwise known as bullying):

“I always say your cohort is your life-support system while you’re here….You need them as much as you need solitude. Too much solitude, Samantha, can just lead to the worst kind of paranoia and navel- gazing….Learning from each other, growing with each other, on the other hand”…

But I can’t even answer her for the laughter bubbling out of my own throat. Laughter is a rabbit hole and I’m falling, falling like Alice. There is no way up or out. The only way is down, down, down. The only way out is to keep falling. Succumb.

With Bunny, Awad has written a Gothic horror novel in the style of Mary Shelley, and it is rich and delectable in its descriptive use of language and setting. Like Shelley, the author uses allegory to explore how the power invested in established institutions eats the most marginalized in its midst alive. To provide a concrete example of how the novel plays with the literary versus the literal, Awad notes early on that creative writing programs discourage dependence on “the time-space continuum aka plot.” So Awad gives us the rare novel that is not completely plot driven, instead focusing on characters (or a group of characters!) and on seeing how the system itself reinforces the intersectional outsider’s wasteland that binds us. One that is infused with loneliness. But one which we can free ourselves from, when we use our imagination.

In the end Awad gets the last laugh, because she takes every last crumb of creative writing instruction and packaged literary device, and through great storytelling recycles them all to create a novel that exposes the academy’s (the system’s) shallow underbelly. In this way she doesn’t just use Samantha to take down the blob with her indisputably superior imagination, she fashions a literary jujitsu of the power structures among the intelligentsia and its “soft-serve” foundations by producing this well-received and important book. This is what ultimately makes Bunny such a tremendous and satisfying read: success is the ultimate revenge.

¹identity: who a person is, or the qualities of a person or group that make them different from others; what the reputation, characteristics, etc. of a person or organization is that makes them viewed by the public in a particular way; usually referred to in terms of race, gender, class and/or sexual orientation.

Tere Mahoney is a communitarian and a former policy analyst living in Vancouver, Canada, having worked in both grassroots and policy development capacities with marginalized social groups. She now coaches, facilitates, and mediates, currently working as a conflict resolution specialist—because conflict often gets in the way of diverse and collaborative possibilities in communities. Tere also happens to have an undergraduate degree in English Literature, and is a long-time reader and lover of fiction.