Astrid Hawk
Added to listStrong Femalewith 24 books.
Added to listMagicwith 24 books.
Added to listFantasywith 76 books.
The rare 2nd book in a trilogy that is actually better than the 1st one! But ouch, that cliffhanger...
The rare 2nd book in a trilogy that is actually better than the 1st one! But ouch, that cliffhanger...
Added to listOwnedwith 52 books.
This was surprisingly good - not just for a debut, but in its own right. Lots of queer joy, equal or more queer angst, grief, and definitely a lot of love, learning, and growing.
Girls Girls Girls is semi-autobiographical, which is probably how Blanckensee is able to get inside her main character/narrator Hannah's head so well. The story follows Hannah and her girlfriend Sam, 2 18 year olds from Long Beach, NJ, who flee Long Beach just after their high school graduation for the lesbian promised land of San Francisco. When they get there, they discover a new freedom and their community - but also hardship in figuring out who they are, where they belong, and learning how to survive.
Unable to find jobs without having a place to live, and unable to afford a place to live without a steady well-paying job, they discover stripping. Sam takes to it like a moth to flame, but Hannah struggles with the taboo of it, with having to put on a mask and a different persona. Hannah is also struggling with her evolving sense of home - something we probably all experience the first time we leave our childhood homes, where you go through a phase of just not really belonging anywhere for awhile. At least, I certainly remember going through it when I made my own east-coast-to-west-coast move at the age of 22. Meanwhile, Sam wants to go out and meet other lesbians, make friends, grow in a different direction from Hannah.
Although I am not a lesbian woman, I'm not Jewish, and I'm a bit younger than Hannah (my first experience with San Franscisco was in 2000, and it was a typical tourist experience - definitely didn't involve the Tenderloin, stripping, sex, or drugs), there was a lot about her character that I deeply identified with. Her shyness. Her nameless fear of calling people she cares about, letting it get to the point of extreme awkwardness, making the situation worse when she doesn't call (I *still* struggle with this). At one point she says she wants so badly to fit in that she doesn't fit in - that's definitely me.
About 2/3rds of the way through the story, 6 months into her San Francisco life, Hannah gets abruptly pulled back to confront the life and people she left behind in Long Beach. It's certainly not a joyful time - but Blanckensee does a fantastic job of handling the grief and frustration and complex emotions in a way that makes the reader feel them through Hannah but doesn't get mired down in unnecessary angst and drama. Through the pain of it you can see and feel Hannah growing. Learning about herself, learning to reframe the world around her, and learning to accept and be brave. She's remarkably mature, and I wish my own introspection at age 18 had helped me figure things out like that. (Of course, I didn't have a Bubbe like Hannah's to guide me.)
The story ends after Hannah returns to San Francisco and commits to her life there. This isn't a love story - there's no heart-tugging reconciliation, girl-gets-girl-and-lives-happily-ever-after. But Hannah does find a semblance of acceptance and peace, and the story ends on a hopeful note, all the various character threads resolved, even though some are sad or frustrating resolutions. They feel like realistic resolutions. You get the sense that Hannah's life goes on after we stop looking in on her, and that she still has so much more to discover about herself, about being queer, about relationships.
What I love about the queer community is that they are (typically - no group is homogenous and the queer community is no exception) more open to alternative viewpoints and alternative ways of life. Less judging. I know, queer people can be just as exclusive and *phobic as non-queer people - but as a general rule I've found the queer community to be a safer place than any to experiment with who you are and then be who you are. Blanckensee's characters discover this, and I love that it comes through in the book.
This was surprisingly good - not just for a debut, but in its own right. Lots of queer joy, equal or more queer angst, grief, and definitely a lot of love, learning, and growing.
Girls Girls Girls is semi-autobiographical, which is probably how Blanckensee is able to get inside her main character/narrator Hannah's head so well. The story follows Hannah and her girlfriend Sam, 2 18 year olds from Long Beach, NJ, who flee Long Beach just after their high school graduation for the lesbian promised land of San Francisco. When they get there, they discover a new freedom and their community - but also hardship in figuring out who they are, where they belong, and learning how to survive.
Unable to find jobs without having a place to live, and unable to afford a place to live without a steady well-paying job, they discover stripping. Sam takes to it like a moth to flame, but Hannah struggles with the taboo of it, with having to put on a mask and a different persona. Hannah is also struggling with her evolving sense of home - something we probably all experience the first time we leave our childhood homes, where you go through a phase of just not really belonging anywhere for awhile. At least, I certainly remember going through it when I made my own east-coast-to-west-coast move at the age of 22. Meanwhile, Sam wants to go out and meet other lesbians, make friends, grow in a different direction from Hannah.
Although I am not a lesbian woman, I'm not Jewish, and I'm a bit younger than Hannah (my first experience with San Franscisco was in 2000, and it was a typical tourist experience - definitely didn't involve the Tenderloin, stripping, sex, or drugs), there was a lot about her character that I deeply identified with. Her shyness. Her nameless fear of calling people she cares about, letting it get to the point of extreme awkwardness, making the situation worse when she doesn't call (I *still* struggle with this). At one point she says she wants so badly to fit in that she doesn't fit in - that's definitely me.
About 2/3rds of the way through the story, 6 months into her San Francisco life, Hannah gets abruptly pulled back to confront the life and people she left behind in Long Beach. It's certainly not a joyful time - but Blanckensee does a fantastic job of handling the grief and frustration and complex emotions in a way that makes the reader feel them through Hannah but doesn't get mired down in unnecessary angst and drama. Through the pain of it you can see and feel Hannah growing. Learning about herself, learning to reframe the world around her, and learning to accept and be brave. She's remarkably mature, and I wish my own introspection at age 18 had helped me figure things out like that. (Of course, I didn't have a Bubbe like Hannah's to guide me.)
The story ends after Hannah returns to San Francisco and commits to her life there. This isn't a love story - there's no heart-tugging reconciliation, girl-gets-girl-and-lives-happily-ever-after. But Hannah does find a semblance of acceptance and peace, and the story ends on a hopeful note, all the various character threads resolved, even though some are sad or frustrating resolutions. They feel like realistic resolutions. You get the sense that Hannah's life goes on after we stop looking in on her, and that she still has so much more to discover about herself, about being queer, about relationships.
What I love about the queer community is that they are (typically - no group is homogenous and the queer community is no exception) more open to alternative viewpoints and alternative ways of life. Less judging. I know, queer people can be just as exclusive and *phobic as non-queer people - but as a general rule I've found the queer community to be a safer place than any to experiment with who you are and then be who you are. Blanckensee's characters discover this, and I love that it comes through in the book.
Added to listReviewedwith 46 books.
This was my 2nd read - 1st one was way back when, in 2016 or so. I thought it was a 5-star read then, and now I think it's even better.
Set a couple centuries in the future, humans have not just colonized but built civilization on the moon (Luna) and Mars. Mars has developed its own national identity, separate from Earth (which, in this book, is represented as a single faction behind the UN, rather than the separate nations it is today). With the help of feats of engineering, people have also built city-colonies on asteroids and moons beyond the inner 4 planets - known collectively as Belters, they have now lived for generations on small planetary bodies - asteroids that have been artificially spun to create weak gravity, and space stations. They have developed different physical traits from spending their lives in low gravity, and have their own culture and patois. Unsurprisingly, Earth and Mars don't like each other - competing for political control and sovereignty of the solar system - and Belters, having grown out of the working classes and having a greater struggle to survive than those with a real planet to call home, feel at best overlooked and more often abused for their labor and resources.
All this is established before the story of Leviathan Wakes actually begins. It's a great setup, and, no matter what you think of the technology advancements that enabled this, completely realistic from a human behavior perspective. Most (all?) of this book takes place either on ships or on a handful of the Belt stations, and I loved all the details in here about how people and civilization have adjusted to life in inhospitable vacuum - the descriptions of the "holes" they live in on the stations, the foods they eat, what becomes luxury and what is commonplace, the coriolis effect in everyday life, the "juice" they use to keep them alive in high-g situations, the magnetic boots for walking around in null gravity, the rough culture and class striations on the Belt stations that's just a part of everyday life.
And through it all, the common recognizable themes of the haves vs the have-nots, the racial/ethnic tensions that have transcended skin color and landed on bone structure instead. It's so rich and well-thought-out. The first time I read it, I remember that a lot of the nuance went over my head. I remember being confused as to why Belters, who themselves were technically colonizers, originally from the Inner Planets they despise, dependent on the Inner Planets still for resources, hated them so much. I didn't really understand why Holden's announcement started riots. I guess younger me was just ignorant, not making the (really obvious) connection between racism and generational trauma in real life today and the racism and generational trauma extrapolated to a solar-system-wide landscape. Some of the tensions are quick, casual, short conversations (usually between Miller, the character who serves as the reader's view into life and social structure on Belt stations). On re-read, I like that the authors don't spoon-feed all of this, but rather trust the reader to interpret what's going on, why Miller behaves and reacts the way he does, why the riots are happening, why Havelock has such trouble getting along.
The story itself is told from the perspective of James Holden, a disgraced UN naval officer who has renounced planetary allegiance and is content to live a civilian life on an ice hauler (sort of the equivalent of an officer on a container ship today), and Miller, a cop/detective working for the Earth-run security force that serves as the local law enforcement on the Belt station Ceres. Holden and his crew of an Earther, a Martian, and a Belter (plus some other characters who don't last very long) are sucked unwillingly to center stage when they answer a distress call that turns out to be a trap, and their ice hauler and all their shipmates are blown to smithereens. Miller, an alcoholic just going through the motions of his colorless existence on Ceres, is caught up in the action when he's asked to find a missing person - the daughter of a rich Earther who just happens to have been on the ship that Holden's crew was trying to help. Eventually, Miller's and Holden's paths join, where they discover an even more horrifying/sinister mystery and destructive plot unfolding.
Both Miller and Holden are great characters. Holden is still figuring himself out, not entirely sure where he stands on big questions like who decides whether people deserve to die, but fully committed to the principle that no one should get to have secrets. His common identifying trait is that whatever is happening to him, he's going to blab it to the solar system, consequences to others be damned. He is "righteous" to a fault - but also fiercely loyal to those he considers his friends, and his crew becomes found family to him and to each other. Miller, on the other hand, is hardened by his life experiences - he no longer treasures life, not even his own. At first, his assignment to find the missing Julie is just another mystery to be solved, but when his alcoholism plus the rising violence and tensions on Ceres cause his livelihood to disappear, he finds himself obsessed with his own construction of Julie as a person, and he is compelled as if by a greater force to find her and save her.
Although there is a point in the book where Miller's and Holden's voices start sounding similar, it's very intentional, and for the most part they act as foils to each other. They are reluctant allies - Holden viscerally rejects Miller's shoot-first-think-later-or-not-at-all approach, and Miller is judgmentally dismissive of Holden's naïveté in trusting that if the public "just knows the truth" everything can be solved. It's a great dynamic, an ever-present tension - although at times it does feel like it's repeated a little too often. Unlike the racial tension stuff, that can be more subtle, the Holden/Miller tension is spelled out a lot more plainly via repeated mental flagellation in each character's respective chapters. This is probably my one negative observation in the whole 500+ pages, and it's pretty minor all things considered.
Amidst all of this, there is plenty of action to be found in the story as well - space battles, station riots, close escapes from both ships and stations. Everything from verbal banter, to gunfights in corridors and maintenance shafts, to rail-gun battles across hundreds of kms in space. There are a few "gee-whiz" moments - like the coffee maker that can brew coffee no matter what the gravity is (the TV show gets this wrong btw, showing the coffee falling into the mug like a standard keurig drip), and the ship auto-doc that can apparently fix everything from compound fractures to radiation sickness to cancer, and the "juice" that's made up of an unspecified mix of stimulants and blood-viscosity-maintainers which probably wouldn't actually keep a human's bones and organs from collapsing at 10gs. I love it all though. To me, this is what good sci fi should be. Just enough of a stretch to take the reader outside of our current situation, and provide a revelatory mirror into our world with a great story and characters you care about.
This was my 2nd read - 1st one was way back when, in 2016 or so. I thought it was a 5-star read then, and now I think it's even better.
Set a couple centuries in the future, humans have not just colonized but built civilization on the moon (Luna) and Mars. Mars has developed its own national identity, separate from Earth (which, in this book, is represented as a single faction behind the UN, rather than the separate nations it is today). With the help of feats of engineering, people have also built city-colonies on asteroids and moons beyond the inner 4 planets - known collectively as Belters, they have now lived for generations on small planetary bodies - asteroids that have been artificially spun to create weak gravity, and space stations. They have developed different physical traits from spending their lives in low gravity, and have their own culture and patois. Unsurprisingly, Earth and Mars don't like each other - competing for political control and sovereignty of the solar system - and Belters, having grown out of the working classes and having a greater struggle to survive than those with a real planet to call home, feel at best overlooked and more often abused for their labor and resources.
All this is established before the story of Leviathan Wakes actually begins. It's a great setup, and, no matter what you think of the technology advancements that enabled this, completely realistic from a human behavior perspective. Most (all?) of this book takes place either on ships or on a handful of the Belt stations, and I loved all the details in here about how people and civilization have adjusted to life in inhospitable vacuum - the descriptions of the "holes" they live in on the stations, the foods they eat, what becomes luxury and what is commonplace, the coriolis effect in everyday life, the "juice" they use to keep them alive in high-g situations, the magnetic boots for walking around in null gravity, the rough culture and class striations on the Belt stations that's just a part of everyday life.
And through it all, the common recognizable themes of the haves vs the have-nots, the racial/ethnic tensions that have transcended skin color and landed on bone structure instead. It's so rich and well-thought-out. The first time I read it, I remember that a lot of the nuance went over my head. I remember being confused as to why Belters, who themselves were technically colonizers, originally from the Inner Planets they despise, dependent on the Inner Planets still for resources, hated them so much. I didn't really understand why Holden's announcement started riots. I guess younger me was just ignorant, not making the (really obvious) connection between racism and generational trauma in real life today and the racism and generational trauma extrapolated to a solar-system-wide landscape. Some of the tensions are quick, casual, short conversations (usually between Miller, the character who serves as the reader's view into life and social structure on Belt stations). On re-read, I like that the authors don't spoon-feed all of this, but rather trust the reader to interpret what's going on, why Miller behaves and reacts the way he does, why the riots are happening, why Havelock has such trouble getting along.
The story itself is told from the perspective of James Holden, a disgraced UN naval officer who has renounced planetary allegiance and is content to live a civilian life on an ice hauler (sort of the equivalent of an officer on a container ship today), and Miller, a cop/detective working for the Earth-run security force that serves as the local law enforcement on the Belt station Ceres. Holden and his crew of an Earther, a Martian, and a Belter (plus some other characters who don't last very long) are sucked unwillingly to center stage when they answer a distress call that turns out to be a trap, and their ice hauler and all their shipmates are blown to smithereens. Miller, an alcoholic just going through the motions of his colorless existence on Ceres, is caught up in the action when he's asked to find a missing person - the daughter of a rich Earther who just happens to have been on the ship that Holden's crew was trying to help. Eventually, Miller's and Holden's paths join, where they discover an even more horrifying/sinister mystery and destructive plot unfolding.
Both Miller and Holden are great characters. Holden is still figuring himself out, not entirely sure where he stands on big questions like who decides whether people deserve to die, but fully committed to the principle that no one should get to have secrets. His common identifying trait is that whatever is happening to him, he's going to blab it to the solar system, consequences to others be damned. He is "righteous" to a fault - but also fiercely loyal to those he considers his friends, and his crew becomes found family to him and to each other. Miller, on the other hand, is hardened by his life experiences - he no longer treasures life, not even his own. At first, his assignment to find the missing Julie is just another mystery to be solved, but when his alcoholism plus the rising violence and tensions on Ceres cause his livelihood to disappear, he finds himself obsessed with his own construction of Julie as a person, and he is compelled as if by a greater force to find her and save her.
Although there is a point in the book where Miller's and Holden's voices start sounding similar, it's very intentional, and for the most part they act as foils to each other. They are reluctant allies - Holden viscerally rejects Miller's shoot-first-think-later-or-not-at-all approach, and Miller is judgmentally dismissive of Holden's naïveté in trusting that if the public "just knows the truth" everything can be solved. It's a great dynamic, an ever-present tension - although at times it does feel like it's repeated a little too often. Unlike the racial tension stuff, that can be more subtle, the Holden/Miller tension is spelled out a lot more plainly via repeated mental flagellation in each character's respective chapters. This is probably my one negative observation in the whole 500+ pages, and it's pretty minor all things considered.
Amidst all of this, there is plenty of action to be found in the story as well - space battles, station riots, close escapes from both ships and stations. Everything from verbal banter, to gunfights in corridors and maintenance shafts, to rail-gun battles across hundreds of kms in space. There are a few "gee-whiz" moments - like the coffee maker that can brew coffee no matter what the gravity is (the TV show gets this wrong btw, showing the coffee falling into the mug like a standard keurig drip), and the ship auto-doc that can apparently fix everything from compound fractures to radiation sickness to cancer, and the "juice" that's made up of an unspecified mix of stimulants and blood-viscosity-maintainers which probably wouldn't actually keep a human's bones and organs from collapsing at 10gs. I love it all though. To me, this is what good sci fi should be. Just enough of a stretch to take the reader outside of our current situation, and provide a revelatory mirror into our world with a great story and characters you care about.
