I first encountered Ibi Zoboi a couple years ago when I picked up American Street from my library on impulse. I loved it, and when I heard she would be coming out with a YA, all-black version of Pride and Prejudice, I was immediately excited.
I haven’t written about any of these books by Martha Wells because they’re all just really short novellas and I didn’t think they were worth talking about, but I recently finished reading the entire series (there are four of them) and figured it would be worthwhile to discuss them all in one go.
Murderbot is a cyborg SecUnit (short for Security Unit, as in its job is to protect humans who pay Murderbot’s owners for security). It doesn’t have a gender and is very specific about that fact because if it had a gender that would make it a ComUnit (short for Comfort Unit i.e. sexbot) and Murderbot is very clear that that is not what it is.
Murderbot doesn’t really have a name – it has a serial number, but it has named itself Murderbot, even though it keeps that name to itself (and the reader). It takes a while, but it eventually opens up to its current renters to reveal that it calls itself Murderbot, which becomes important later on in the series.
Murderbot calls itself that because it knows that, on its last mission, it killed a whole bunch of humans it was supposed to be protecting, but it doesn’t know why. The company that owns Murderbot wiped its memory after the incident and hired it out again … without mentioning to the new clients that Murderbot had a history of turning on its clients.
I requested this audiobook by Christina Dalcher from my library on a whim. I had seen it around, and although I hadn’t heard much about it, the concept seemed interesting enough for me to want to check it out.
This audiobook initially gave me a bit of whiplash because the narrator is Julia Whelan, who also narrated Catwoman: Soulstealer, which I listened to right before listening to this one, so that required some adjusting because I had come to think of her voice as belonging to Selina Kyle, but suddenly she was speaking for this other, very different character. Julia Whelan is a fantastic narrator and I highly recommend her, it’s just that it feels weird when you get two audiobooks in a row narrated by the same person.
The main character is Dr. Jean McClellan, a former scientist with a degree in neurolinguistic researcher who used to study Wernicke’s aphasia. According to Jean, Wernicke’s aphasia is when people lose the ability to communicate because it involves the destruction of the part of the brain that processes language.
In reality, Wernicke’s area is just one of two parts of the brain that deal with speech: Wernicke’s area is responsible only for the comprehension of speech, meaning people afflicted with Wernicke’s aphasia can’t comprehend what’s said to them, but they can communicate their own thoughts and feelings just fine.
Broca’s area is the part of the brain that deals with production of speech. Destruction of this part of the brain results in people losing the ability to communicate with language. They can speak, but it will be random words that don’t form coherent sentences – but they have no problem understanding what’s said to them.
Dalcher combined these two into one awful disease in which people can neither understand what’s said to them nor form coherent sentences. As someone with a degree in psychology, it always bugs me when authors get these things wrong because they didn’t bother to do a simple Google search.
Anyway, so in this dystopia where there’s only one part of the brain that regulates both comprehension and production of speech, Jean had been working on a cure for her version of Wernicke’s aphasia, and they were really close when a new administration was elected to the White House that promptly stripped women of all their rights – including their right to hold a job, to have a bank account, to live alone without a husband or male relative, to read or write, to access the internet, or even speak more than 100 words a day. They’re all required to wear counters on their wrists that count each word they speak and provide shocks for every word they speak after 100. The shocks get worse the more words they speak after 100.
If you’re thinking people can mouth words or use sign language, think again. One of the first things the administration did was install cameras everywhere and any women caught communicating nonverbally are quickly made to disappear.
I’ve been all over the new DC YA novels, so when this new installment by Sarah J. Maas came out, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. I promptly requested the audiobook from my library and enjoyed every minute of it.
I will say I was a little wary of this book, since there are some phrases Maas likes to overuse. She still overuses them in this book, but not as much. I think this one had a better editor than A Court of Wings and Ruin.
It starts when Selina Kyle is a teenager looking out for her sick younger sister in Gotham City. Their parents are both out of the picture (mom is an absent junkie and I can’t remember if they even know who their dad is). So Selina is making ends meet by fighting in an underground fight ring.
Before all this went down, she used to be a talented gymnast, so that’s where Catwoman gets her skills. She was also apparently really smart and won some science fairs.
So far they’ve managed to avoid social services, but when her mom turns up in a local hospital and gives her address, the cops quickly figure out that these two kids are living alone. Selina is desperate to keep her sister out of foster care, knowing how awful some of those homes can be, but she’s no match for the cops who show up at their door. She winds up unconscious and when she wakes up she’s tied to a chair. She doesn’t know where her sister is, but the person who is there offers her a job where her particular skill set will be useful. Selina accepts only on the condition that her sister goes to a good home where her medical needs will be taken care of. They reach an agreement and Selina is flown to Europe for training.
A friend of mine read this book by Kathleen Rooney a year or two ago and it sounded like the kind of thing that would be right up my alley. Of course, I never got around to reading it, but this year Book Riot challenged me to read a book with a female main character over the age of 60. I think this one counts because it’s about 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish looking back on her life as she wanders around New York City on New Year’s Eve, 1984.
I discovered Jason Reynolds about a year ago when I read Long Way Down, which I loved. I’m not sure how Ghost got on my radar (probably Goodreads), but because I love Reynolds, I decided to give it a try. It’s not very long, but I still knew I wouldn’t get around to reading it, so I listened to the audiobook, which is fantastic. Guy Lockard is the narrator and he did an excellent job of sounding like a teenager, especially the parts when Castle (the main character) is talking about things that genuinely confuse him (and they’re things that tend to be pretty confusing to teenagers, so Reynolds deserves at least as much credit as Lockard).
I had actually never read a novel by Ursula K. LeGuin before picking up this one. I had read one or two of her short stories in high school and absolutely loved it, so her books have been on my TBR list for more than a decade now and I just recently got around to reading one of her novels.
I’ve loved the entire Jackaby series by William Ritter and am so sad that this is the last book in the series because I’m really going to miss hanging out with these characters. Since my dad and I read the second book aloud to each other on a long car trip, and then we did the same thing with my mom and Book 3 a couple years ago, we decided to continue the tradition with the final book in the series, so I pulled it out for our long drive up to Wisconsin for vacation over the summer.