Things I read in 2014: Smoketown and Pen Pal

Tenea D. Johnson -- Smoketown

June 7, 2014

This book was odd as hell! Not least on the genre front:

• It takes place in a futuristic city in the eastern US, post major climate change, where sensory/emotional simulations are the entertainment of choice, which is arguably mundane SF.
• But there's an intense enough sense of place and preoccupation with place to push it into urban SF (by parallel with the late-80s/early-90s iteration of “urban fantasy”).
• Also, the city is traumatized in the wake of a plague and lives in fear of birds, with importation banned and a killing forcefield walling in the sky, which maybe qualifies it as a soft eco-dystopia with a strong strain of post-9/11 American soul-searching. (I realize those aren’t consensus genres, but shut up, stay with me here.)
• Except that the main character has godlike magical powers of no knowable origin and can create animals from drawings, so that's DEFINITELY urban fantasy in probably a post-’00s-urban-fantasy mode.
• And at one point years ago (INCOMING SPOILER, but it doesn't ruin the book), in a trance of grief, she created a real live human woman in straight-up YHWH flesh-from-clay style, and you can't call THAT genre anything other than “Actual O.G. Frankenstein.”
• And for completeness we should mention that it's also lesbian SF and African American SF.

I loved it. This book is fuckin’ wild and maybe a bit of a mess, the sort of thing you'd write if you were worried no one would let you write another book and you figured you had to get it all out in one go. But it has awesome energy and a delicious sense of atmosphere, and I think I can honestly say I haven't seen anything like it. I will definitely keep an eye out for Tenea Johnson’s other stuff.

Francesca Forrest -- Pen Pal

Jul 5, 2014

I enjoyed this intensely. It's an epistolary novel about a girl who lives in a marginalized and fragile shore community on the Gulf Coast (think Beasts of the Southern Wild, kinda, sorta) and a woman held political prisoner above the fuming crater of an active volcano. In the first of several almost (but not quite) plausibly deniable magical events, they become pen pals, and then a lot of stuff happens.

This wasn't like anything else I've read this year, and it's extremely good. “Might have cried a bit” good, we're talking. Excellent prose, haunting voice. (And also it's only like $5 on Kindle.)