book: Lizard Radio
Jul. 3rd, 2016 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraLizard Radio, Pat Schmatz, co-won the 2015 Tiptree. So I'm a giant hypocrite: this book is totally a YA dystopia with Authorities with Secrets, a genre I usually claim to be quite sick of, and yet I loved it. Maybe it's not that I'm a hypocrite, maybe this one is really that unusually good? It's more character-driven, smaller in scope, more of the important drama is internal instead of societal. Also I'm a huge sucker for a nonbinary protagonist, and while the book's world is sfnal in how it deals with gender, the nbness felt like real-world nbness in that sfnal setting, which I liked. It was just really good teen-coming-of-age-in-conflict-with-their-society, plus some neatly-handled worldbuilding of being very concrete and specific in its details (a lot of fun invented slang) and entirely blank on anything it doesn't actually *need* to mention, so, we get this very narrow intriguing glimpse of this world, without anything like a backstory dump.
You-might-like-it-if: The Giver, the Stranger/Hostage series? Uglies? I almost want to say Clockwork Orange, although it's been a million years since I reread that, and Lizard Radio has a super likeable protagonist so it's not a great parallel? Oh, that brilliant Samatar story, "How to Get Back to the Forest", I thought about that a lot.
You-might-like-it-if: The Giver, the Stranger/Hostage series? Uglies? I almost want to say Clockwork Orange, although it's been a million years since I reread that, and Lizard Radio has a super likeable protagonist so it's not a great parallel? Oh, that brilliant Samatar story, "How to Get Back to the Forest", I thought about that a lot.
