My reading year has started off well, at least!
→ A HALF-BUILT GARDEN by Ruthanna Emrys: Judy is on call for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network and goes to investigate an alert about a water pollutant. Expecting a false alarm or minor issue, she brings along her wife and infant daughter in hopes that the excursion will settle the baby. But to her shock, the source of the pollution is an alien spaceship, and so Earth's first contact is made by members of one of the world's cooperative environmental networks rather than the archaic nation-states or a corporation. That Judy is carrying her baby also turns out to be significant for the diplomacy that follows, because the alien who emerges from the ship to greet them (having learned human language from studying broadcasts) is holding her own babies and considers motherhood a sign of the highest cultural status. The aliens have come in peace to bring a warning: Every technologically advanced species exhausts the resources of their planet and can only survive by abandoning it to live in space. The aliens want to help humanity escape in time, and they don't understand why Judy puts up any resistance to this offer. But as Judy explains, the watershed networks have been working for half a century to improve conditions on the planet, and most humans probably aren't ready to give up on Earth yet.
I loved this optimistic novel about people working together to solve big problems. It's a complex story with a good balance of plot, worldbuilding, and character development, well-constructed so that every introduced element is made use of later. The aliens are fairly alien, distinct from humans physically and culturally, and their expectations about motherhood, family, and gender drive the story in interesting ways. As the accidental ambassadors, Judy and the rest of her queer, poly, Jewish family are the central human characters, but more humans representing other backgrounds and family styles also play roles. All this variety is treated with nuance: For example, Judy starts the story believing corporations and capitalism are pure evil, but once she's forced to interact with corporate representatives and see their world, she realizes the situation is more complicated. This book is full of joy and hope, plus acknowledgment of how hard it can be to stay joyful and hopeful in difficult times. I'm glad I read it to start off 2025.
→ DOLL SEED by Michele Tracy Berger: In this collection of short fiction, most of the stories verge into some type of horror by the end, even if they start out with the trappings of another genre. The opening story sets this up well. In "Nussia", a Black family wins the honor of hosting the first alien child to visit Earth not long after first contact. The inventive developments lead to a much darker ending than I expected, preparing me for the rest of the collection.
A number of the stories involve the invoking of spirits, demons, and ghosts, but Berger imagines a range of situations within this repeated theme. "Etta, Zora, and the First Serpent", set during the Harlem Renaissance, is surprisingly about Zora Neale Hurston summoning a spirit so she can access lost stories. In "Family Line", which packs some real emotional power into a few pages, the demon is connected to a family legend going back to the days of slavery. Certain elements from both of these reappear in the tensely escalating "And They Will Rise From the Oceans". The ghosts of the "Cemetery Sisters" are friendly at first, but of course the truth is more complicated, with several creative elements that combine into a satisfying whole.
While the stories are largely speculative, some stay in the real world and focus on the horror of how people treat each other, as in "Miss Black Little Hill of 1965" and "The Invisible Son". Not all of the stories worked equally well for me, but even some I didn't enjoy overall tended to build to a strong conclusion, demonstrating Berger's gift at the difficult skill of writing endings.
→ ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer: On expeditions into the mysterious Area X, investigators are discouraged from sharing personal information or even using names, so they know each other only by their roles. The biologist of the twelfth expedition is more comfortable getting close with plants and animals than humans anyway, and she's reluctant to reveal the very personal reasons she volunteered for this dangerous mission. She knows that many members of previous expeditions did not survive, but most of her other prior knowledge about Area X is immediately suspect once her team crosses the border. The lush environment and its natural phenomena are unsettling in ways she never imagined, and the first discovery is a huge underground structure that doesn't appear on the provided maps. The biologist feels compelled to explore it, and what she finds defies any rational explanation.
This is a creepy horror story where everything is disturbing: the setting, the narrator's thoughts, what characters do to each other. VanderMeer's writing is highly evocative, and it generated both visuals in my mind and visceral reactions. I was absorbed in the novel's events, but as more and more questions continued to be raised by the expedition's discoveries, I realized this might not be the type of story to provide many answers. Indeed, far fewer mysteries are explained by the end than I would have preferred. But I've been told that the rest of the series builds out a more complete picture of the situation around Area X, and I'm planning to read on to learn more.
→ RENTAL HOUSE by Weike Wang: Keru and Nate have been married for five years when they take an extended vacation to Cape Cod (with their dog) and rent a house near the beach. The world is just emerging from the worst of the pandemic, so they haven't seen their parents for a while, and they invite both sets to visit, during separate weeks. They know the visits will be trying. Keru's parents, who grew up in China, always stress their daughter out with their stubbornness and criticism. Nate's parents, who live in the rural community where they grew up, infuriate their son with uninformed opinions about topics such as his career in New York City academia and Keru's background. And both parents want to know when the couple is going to have kids, yet won't accept the answer that they're not. But everyone survives the vacation. Another five years pass, and Keru and Nate plan another getaway for just the two of them (and the dog).
As the description suggests, this is a novel highly focused on characters and their relationships, and Wang depicts these with care, specificity, and humor. I found each scene engaging and realistic (sometimes painfully so). The interactions throughout the first vacation, between Keru and Nate and with each set of parents, set up so much tense potential for what might unfold in the second half of the book. But the events of the second vacation didn't follow up on as many threads from the first as I was expecting, and the story felt incomplete to me. I remain interested in Wang's character portrayals, but I've wanted a bit more from all her novels, and especially this one.
Good Stuff Out There:
→ Lincoln Michel shares thoughts on flipping from "TV brain" to "prose brain" when writing fiction: "The problem is that if you’re 'thinking in TV' while writing prose, you abandon the advantages of prose without getting the advantages of TV. Visual media and text simply work differently and have different possibilities and constraints. I don't believe in rules for art. But I believe in general principles. One is that it's typically best to lean into the unique advantages of the medium you are working in. A novel will never beat good TV at being TV, but similarly TV will never beat a good novel at being a novel."
