YA I started before Christmas and had to make myself finish

There's a glowing recommendation. These books weren't actually that bad, they just didn't click with me.

I had heard good things about Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta, and I thought the premise was really strong (ten years ago, Bad Stuff went down in a fantasy kingdom, ending with it getting sealed off from the rest of the world with half the people outside it in exile; now some young folk think they might be able to get back in), but something about the voice and writing style and rhythm of the action just didn't work for me. I mean, they weren't wrong in any way I could point to, and I imagine it might work really well for some readers, just, not the ones who happen to be me.

Crap Kingdom by DC Pierson is from a YA subgenre of great interest to me (subversion of Chosen One tropes) and had some vivid world-building in spots, but it thought it was funnier than it was to me, and I found the main character more unsympathetic/unlikeable than I think I was supposed to, in a "too realistic to be interesting" sort of way. (Also, I suspect I may be more sympathetic to fifteen-year-old girl characters than fifteen-year-old boys?)

The Golem and the Jinni and the ticking Hugo clock

The end of March suddenly seems much closer, as I think about recommending more 2013 books as potential Hugo contenders... I was just reading an argument that the nominating season really should be a minimum of 4-5 months after the last eligible works come out, to give people more time to read. I'm curious whether my reading will look different this year, knowing from the very beginning of the year that I plan to play this game again, instead of deciding at the last possible minute like last year?

Anyways. Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni is a fantasy set in 1899 New York, and it is excellent. It's about a golem, and a jinni, and the immigrant experience, and I would recommend it highly to people who love New York City, people whose ancestors came through Ellis Island, people who love reading about robots and Vulcans and other such outsiders, and anyone who wants to request it for Yuletide next year, because I would love to offer it. (I don't feel the fannish impulse about everything I read - I have no desire to write Ancillary Justice fic, or Stranger in Olondria fic, for instance - but this just has so much potential.) Also recommended, as implied by the previous paragraph, to people who might still have open Hugo-nomination slots. (I think I personally would still vote for Ancillary Justice but I see no reason not to use all five of my slots if I have five worthy candidates.)

I loved the rich cast of secondary characters, and the little details about what various people's lives were like. (My intuition as a 21st century American is that in many (although not all) contexts people with Eastern European Jewish ancestors are "white" in a way that people with Syrian ancestors are not, so it was really interesting to see the immigrant communities as comparably insular and "foreign" in 1899.) I loved - I'm going to have to go to a spoiler cut here:

( more squee with MAJOR spoilers )