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The Mary Sue Book Club, August 2022: Personal Histories & Reverberating Revolutions

Another tough month to narrow down titles.

Three books mentioned in this months bookclub. Image: Viking Books for Young Readers, Harper Voyager, and Henry Holt & Company.

With the two Texan authors on this list, my yee-haw bias is very much shining through for the August edition of The Mary Sue Book Club. However, good luck trying to convince a person that played flute for over a decade that a YA book about band camp “drama” doesn’t sound like a fun time, or that a novel that explores a family’s cultural ties to the Karankawas (an Indigenous group very much still alive) as a hurricane approaches doesn’t pique your attention!

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Speaking of bias, SFF royalty R.F. Kuang’s sophomore series (a.k.a. her first novel not a part of the Poppy Wars) releases this month, too. Babel is one of the most highly anticipated books of the year for many readers interested in magic, linguistics, historical fiction, colonialism, and dark academia. Before getting into the weeds of any more of this month’s exciting picks, let’s start with Zoe Sivak’s debut and the perfect book to kick off Black August for fiction readers.

Mademoiselle Revolution by Zoe Sivak

Mademoiselle Revolution by Zoe Sivak. Image: Berkley Books.
(Berkley Books)

Sylvie de Rosiers, as the daughter of a rich planter and an enslaved woman, enjoys the comforts of a lady in 1791 Saint-Domingue society. But while she was born to privilege, she was never fully accepted by island elites. After a violent rebellion begins the Haitian Revolution, Sylvie and her brother leave their family and old lives behind to flee unwittingly into another uprising–in austere and radical Paris. Sylvie quickly becomes enamored with the aims of the Revolution, as well as with the revolutionaries themselves–most notably Maximilien Robespierre and his mistress, Cornélie Duplay.

As a rising leader and abolitionist, Robespierre sees an opportunity to exploit Sylvie’s race and abandonment of her aristocratic roots as an example of his ideals, while the strong-willed Cornélie offers Sylvie safe harbor and guidance in free thought. Sylvie battles with her past complicity in a slave society and her future within this new world order as she finds herself increasingly torn between Robespierre’s ideology and Cornélie’s love.

When the Reign of Terror descends, Sylvie must decide whether to become an accomplice while a new empire rises on the bones of innocents…or risk losing her head.

Mademoiselle Revolution releases on August 2nd.

It Sounds Like This by Anna Meriano

It Sounds Like This by Anna Meriano. Image: Viking Books for Young Readers.
(Viking Books for Young Readers)

Yasmín Treviño didn’t have much of a freshman year thanks to Hurricane Humphrey, but she’s ready to take sophomore year by storm. That means mastering the marching side of marching band–fast!–so she can outshine her BFF Sofia as top of the flute section, earn first chair, and impress both her future college admission boards and her comfortably unattainable drum major crush Gilberto Reyes.

But Yasmín steps off on the wrong foot when she reports an anonymous gossip Instagram account harassing new band members and accidentally gets the entire low brass section suspended from extracurriculars. With no low brass section, the band is doomed, so Yasmín decides to take things into her own hands, learn to play the tuba, and lead a gaggle of rowdy freshman boys who are just as green to marching and playing as she is. She’ll happily wrestle an ancient school tuba if it means fixing the mess she might have caused.

But when the secret gossip Instagram escalates their campaign of harassment and Yasmín’s friendship with Sofia deteriorates, things at school might be too hard to bear. Luckily, the support of Yasmín’s new section–especially introverted section leader Bloom, a sweet ace and aro-spectrum boy–might just turn things around.

It Sounds Like This releases on August 2nd.

Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Eversion by Alastair Reynolds. Image: Orbit Books.
(Orbit)

From the master of the space opera comes a dark, mind-bending adventure spread across time and space, where Doctor Silas Coade is tasked with keeping his crew safe as they adventure across the galaxy in search of a mysterious artifact.

In the 1800s, a sailing ship crashes off the coast of Norway. In the 1900s, a Zepellin explores an icy canyon in Antarctica. In the far future, a spaceship sets out for an alien artifact. Each excursion goes horribly wrong. And on every journey, Dr. Silas Coade is the physician, but only Silas seems to realize that these events keep repeating themselves. And it’s up to him to figure out why and how. And how to stop it all from happening again.

Eversion releases on August 2nd.

The Last Karankawas by Kimberly Garza

The Last Karankawas by Kimberly Garza. Image: Henry Holt & Company.
(Henry Holt & Company)

Welcome to Galveston, Texas. Population 50,241.

A popular tourist destination and major shipping port, Galveston attracts millions of visitors each year. Yet of those who come to drink by the beach, few stray from the boulevards to Fish Village, the neighborhood home to individuals who for generations have powered the island.

Carly Castillo has only ever known Fish Village. Her grandmother claims that they descend from the Karankawas, an extinct indigenous Texan tribe, thereby tethering them to Galveston. But as Carly ages, she begins to imagine a life elsewhere, undefined by her family’s history. Meanwhile, her boyfriend and all-star shortstop turned seaman, Jess, treasures the salty, familiar air. He’s gotten chances to leave Galveston for bigger cities with more possibilities. But he didn’t take them then, and he sure as hell won’t now. When word spreads of a storm gathering strength offshore, building into Hurricane Ike, each Galveston resident must make a difficult decision: board up the windows and hunker down or flee inland and abandon their hard-won homes.

Moving through these characters’ lives and those of the extraordinary individuals who circle them, Kimberly Garza’s The Last Karankawas weaves together a multitude of voices to present a lyrical, emotionally charged portrait of everyday survival. The result is an unforgettable exploration of familial inheritance, human resilience, and the histories we assign to ourselves, reminding us that the deepest bonds are forged not by blood, but by fire.

The Last Karankawas releases on August 9th.

Babel (Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution) by R.F. Kuang

Babel (Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution) by R.F. Kuang. Image: Harper Voyager.
(Harper Voyager)

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation–also known as Babel.

Babel is the world’s center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working–the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars–has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide…

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?

Babel releases on August 23rd.

Dead Flip by Sara Farizan

Dead Flip by Sara Farizan. Image: Algonquin Young Readers.
(Algonquin Young Readers)

Growing up, Cori, Maz, and Sam were inseparable best friends, sharing their love for Halloween, arcade games, and one another. Now it’s 1992, Sam has been missing for five years, and Cori and Maz aren’t speaking anymore. How could they be, when Cori is sure Sam is dead and Maz thinks he may have been kidnapped by a supernatural pinball machine?

These days, all Maz wants to do is party, buy CDs at Sam Goody, and run away from his past. Meanwhile, Cori is a homecoming queen, hiding her abiding love of horror movies and her queer self under the bubblegum veneer of a high school queen bee. But when Sam returns–still twelve years old while his best friends are now seventeen–Maz and Cori are thrown back together to solve the mystery of what really happened to Sam the night he went missing. Beneath the surface of that mystery lurk secrets the friends never told one another, then and now. And Sam’s is the darkest of all . . .

Dead Flip releases on August 30.

We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2021 edited by L.D. Lewis & Charles Payseur

We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2021 edited by L.D. Lewis & Charles Payseur. Image: Neon Hemlock Press.
(Neon Hemlock Press)

This yearly anthology released by Neon Hemlock Press features some of the best previously published stories (through magazines and digital publications) from queer speculative fiction writers last year. You’ll get stories from C.L. Clark, H. Pueyo, Aliette de Bodard, Watson Neith, Sam J. Miller, Laurel Berkley-Jackson, Alexandra Seidel, L.A. Knight, Bogi Takács, Fargo Tbakhi, Ann LeBlanc, Cheri Kamei, Sharang Biswas, Jen Brown, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, and more.

We’re Here releases sometime in August.

(featured image: Viking Books for Young Readers, Harper Voyager, and Henry Holt & Company)

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Author
Alyssa Shotwell
(she/her) Award-winning artist and writer with professional experience and education in graphic design, art history, and museum studies. She began her career in journalism in October 2017 when she joined her student newspaper as the Online Editor. This resident of the yeeHaw land spends most of her time drawing, reading and playing the same handful of video games—even as the playtime on Steam reaches the quadruple digits. Currently playing: Baldur's Gate 3 & Oxygen Not Included.

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