February Mini-Reviews

So as not to lose momentum, here's the next six: all debut novels, most of which I found by googling "best debuts of 2023" and one from a podcast. My wonderful public library system had all of them.

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself Marisa/Mac Crane (2023, speculative)

Kris mourns the death of her wife in childbirth and the extra shadows that both she and her daughter have been granted for their "crimes" by the authorities in their oppressive surveillance state. The MC's grief and despair are palpable, but gradually transform into resistance. The speculative element (the "mechanics" of the shadows) is left unexplained, which works to keep the focus on the characters: this is their world, they're just trying to live in it, like we are in ours.

The Deep Sky

Yume Kitasei (2023, sci-fi)

A closed-circle mystery on a generation space ship: a few years into their mission, a bomb kills three people and throws the ship off course. Asuka is the prime suspect. A secondary timeline reveals how Asuka met the other crew in an elite training school. Red herrings abound with motives ranging from romantic jealousy and political ambition, to mission sabotage. The only thing we know for (pretty) sure is that Asuka, our 1st person MC didn't do it, and that she'll probably figure out who did.

Wandering Souls

Cecile Pin (2023, literary/historical)

After fleeing from Vietnam in her childhood and resettled in London, Anh works tirelessly to care for her two younger brothers, almost bypassing her own chance at happiness. Told through multiple timelines and POVs, not always identified, the story is ultimately framed as a novel written by Anh's second generation English daughter. An impressive debut in which grief, memory, family, and culture are all lovingly evoked but the story was occasionally sacrificed to form.

In Memoriam

Alice Winn (2023, literary/historical)

When the Great War breaks out, Gaunt and Ellwood are boarding school pupils who watch the class above them go for soldiers. Gaunt, secretly in love with Ellwood, joins at seventeen, the trenches and the volume of deaths quickly turning him bitter despite his official letters home. His despair is doubled when Ellwood shows up, having requested to be placed in his unit. Love ultimately blooms amidst the horrors of war, but when one of them goes MIA and assumed dead, the happy ever after is far from certain.

Here and Now and Then

Mike Chen (2019, sci-fi)

Kin has been stuck in "the past" so long that he's forgotten he's a time-traveler from 2142. When a retrieval team arrives, he's given no choice but to leave his wife and teenage daughter and return to his "real" family and job. Growing questions about the motives and ethics of his bosses and a threat on his daughter's life force him to make an impossible choice.

Chain Gang All-Stars

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (2023, speculative)

Thurwar and Staxx are two of the featured inmate-warriors in a world where the Roman Coliseum meets reality TV. Thurwar is on her way to becoming the first fighter to gain her freedom by killing all of her assigned competitors, but like the ancient myths, the reader knows her final match is fated to be against Staxx, her one true love. Many of the slain warriors are given POV chapters. Like Thurwar and Staxx, all of them are victims, in one way or another, of the unjust penal system that holds a mirror to our own.