Audrey recommends: I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
Genre: Science fiction
Reading level: Adult
Summary: A futuristic folk tale about a man on a mythological quest across Lake Superior.
Audrey says: I loved reading Rainy’s enthusiastic first-person narration and its unique use of language, and meeting all the charming characters that inhabit this not-too-distant America. Enger’s writing fully inhabits a world that is familiar and yet unfamiliar, and maintains a folkloric quality that resembles an oral tradition tale like The Odyssey or Beowulf.
Summary: First-person story of one special woman and her journey into self-discovery while looking for her missing mother.
Cathy says: I was captivated by the details of the creation of this special woman, her discoveries, and the power of love. This book reminded me again that relatives are bound together by blood, but family is bound by the heart. I could not put this book down.
Kylie recommends:A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
Genre: Dystopian
Reading Level: YA
Summary: This is a prequel to The Hunger Games following President’s Snow origin story and the 10th Hunger Games.
Kylie says: This was a really interesting read. It was quite long and I was not really sure were it was going even though you know that Snow ends up as President Snow. I liked to see Snow’s backstory and how the war lead to the creation of the Hunger Games.
Snow throughout the book but especially at the end gave me psychopath, anti-hero, and vibes of Joe from You by Caroline Kepnes and June from Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. These stories are very deep to me and I like to see how their minds work even though they do terrible things, and you know as the reader that they are wrong but how they rationalize their perspective.
The ending was so good, I could not stop reading for the last like 20% of the book!
Audrey recommends:The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Science fiction
Reading Level: Adult
Summary: Shevek, a brilliant scientist in a utopian socialist society, visits the world where his people came from: a capitalist planet much like modern-day Earth.
Audrey says: Le Guin wrote The Dispossessed in 1974. As we approach the 50th anniversary if its publication, it’s startling how it seems to be more relevant now than ever. The first chapter alone, where Shevek innocently questions the wasteful consumption that we take for granted as a part of everyday American life, is such an incisive critique of capitalism without being didactic. Throughout the text, the reader slowly learns that the supposed “utopian” society Shevek comes from is not quite so perfect either. After all, who decides what is best for the collective, when the collective is comprised of individuals with their own needs and wants? Le Guin writes in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness: “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive […] I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, [what] we already are.” The Dispossessed is a mirror through which we can see our world through the eyes of someone who wasn’t born into it, allowing us to name the flaws we misidentify as necessities. This novel deserves all the praise it gets, and I expect a lot of fanfare in 2024.
