awesome book

[psocoptera]

Stranger, by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith. This is *so good*, YA the way you want it to be and so often isn't. (Brown is "one of us" in a fandom sense so that might help.) The setting is great - postapocalyptic southern California, with all kinds of weird mutant animals and plants and powered people. The structure is great - five different POV characters, plus significant revelations and twists about non-POV characters, so it really feels like a world where everyone is real and interesting, not one of these stories where everything is always about one main character. Also, structure-wise, a bunch of random wacky adventure shit happens very fast in the beginning, building the world... and then over the course of the book, bits of it come back again, some of it in unexpected ways. I get annoyed when I feel like I'm just reading through a bunch of disconnected episodes, a mishmash of elements where the author seemed to take an "every nifty idea that ever occurred to me plus the kitchen sink" approach to their world, which seems to plague fantasy particularly. Stranger does not have this problem, it really felt well-built and coherent and like someone was paying close attention to hanging guns up on a series of walls and then taking them down again and firing them. (And they hit a good balance between a satisfying ending and still having some guns left on the walls that I'm eager to see go off in the next books - this is book one of a trilogy.) Did I mention some very intense action (and emotional realism about it) and a canonical OT3? And the world actually seems to make sense in terms of, like, population size and where people get their food and stuff, which I really appreciate *not* having to suspend disbelief about? I'm not sure what to compare this to but I highly recommend it.