Tootfinder

Just finished "Hammajang Luck" by Makana Yamamoto. It's lovely in a lot of ways and was quite fun to read, even if there were some aspects I disliked. It's an #OwnVoices queer romance heist set in a dystopian future space station with megacorporations and brain implants and all that jazz. I actually liked the tech aspects of it (despite a few physics warts) and the romance was both sweet and dramatic; even though it failed the consent test I was just talking about, it had some reasons to do so (not that that makes a perfect excuse). The heist plot was good to my mind (but I haven't read a lot of the genre). The biggest thing I didn't like was the treatment of prison as a redemptive force, and the police as a semi-neutral entity with real principles, rather than what we know them to be in real life.
More and more these days in science fiction I'm especially looking at whether and how appeals to law or governments (especially the nice "league of worlds" that steps in to save characters from a corrupt local government) function, and to the degree they are mechanisms of real justice, In disappointed. To be fair, even Le Guin does this to some extent... In any case, this isn't a totally fair criticism because that's not really what this story is about, just something that bothers me whenever I see it.
Overall, the book was great.
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Just finished the manga "My Brain is Different" by Monzusu. It's a series of true stories of people with learning disabilities, talking about their childhoods and adult lives, plus some parents talking about their kids & parenting strategies (including parents who themselves have learning disabilities, of which the author is one). It's got some dark stuff in there, of course (indirect CW depression, suicide, bullying) but it was so nice to read the stories that were all #OwnVoices and which all showed his childhood difficulties (sometimes extreme) weren't defining of an entire life trajectory. Plenty of positive parenting examples too, mixed in with negative ones.
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Just finished "Healer of the Water Monster" by Brian Young. I'm reading a bunch of juvenile fiction right now in a quest to have some good recommendations for my kids to read in a few years when they're old enough, and this one definitely makes the cut, with deeply-integrated #OwnVoices Diné cultural elements, good (to my reading) handling of complex topics like divorce and depression, and cool magical elements. This is exactly the kind of new generation of kids' fiction I'm looking for that drops the regressive themes present in so much of what I read at that age. For example, I just before this I read Howl's Moving Castle and then The House of Many Ways by Dianna Wynne Jones, and while the first was pretty much great, the sequel has a whole benevolent monarchy thing that's central to the book in a way that weighs down the politics of the book a lot. Unsurprisingly, the indigenous perspective is a refreshing one.
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