The Lodestar Award is the redheaded stepchild of the Hugos: like a Hugo, but not of them. What did I think of the best of YA sf&f? (I did not nominate anything in this category.)
I acknowledge that a high school romance novel is very much Not For Me, but even allowing for that, I didn't enjoy that much. The central idea—about the secret brujx who can communicate with the dead, and the main character, a trans boy whose family won't let him be a brujo—is a good one, but this book just rambles with no purpose for a long time. Basically, the main character rescues a hot ghost who also goes (went, I guess) to his high school, and they are supposedly working together to figure out how he died, but they learn literally nothing of use after chapters and chapters of investigations. And then after that slow build-up, the murderer just reveals himself, and the action is over in a single chapter. Most of the focus is on the developing relationship, which is eminently predictable.
This started okay but didn't work for me. There are just a lot of elements jockeying for attention, and they ultimately don't cohere. The main character is a sixteen-year-old in an Early College program at UNC-Chapel Hill shortly after the death of her mother; she stumbles into a hidden world of Arthurian mythos. Only, it never felt very Arthurian, it just had Arthurian names grafted onto it. That she's sixteen feels like something the writer forgets about at times, and I'm not sure why it's there, except to make this squarely YA. Supposedly she's trying to undergo trials to join this secret order to figure out how they were involved in the death of her mother, but the trials feel like an afterthought, as does the fact that this all takes place at a college. Oh, and there's one of those generic YA romances: there's a hot dude she's into, but this other dude who's dark and seems to hate her but she gets this electric thrill whenever they touch... On top of all that, there's a ton of exposition; I felt like the second quarter of the novel was entirely people explaining things to Bree, much of which washed right over me; I never grokked the magic system, or what the difference between a Page and Vassal and a Scion and a Merlin and a Onceborn was. When another character tells Bree that no, there's an entirely different magic system out there, I sighed a bit, and wished she was learning some of this instead of being told it all. I think this novel is trying to do interesting things, but I did not find them interesting much of the time (things do pick up a bit here and there in the second half), and the thematic elements don't come off in the execution. So I can see why other people might like this, but it did not work for me. Marginally less interesting than Raybearer, really; I could have gone the other way, too.
This secondary-world fantasy (one of only two this year, alas) was interesting, but never fully engaged me. I am not quite sure why. The main character is part of the council of the heir to the throne, who gains invincibility by bonding mentally with his councilors (one form of invulnerability per councilor); there's also some complicated stuff about a curse that the emperor can push off with his councilors' bloodlines. Only she's been raised by her mother to kill the heir apparent, and that command is buried deep within here. It felt to me like there was a lot going on, much of interesting, but in a way that didn't entirely cohere. There's a good story about memory (the main characters has the power to access and erase others' memories) and a good story about parenting here, but I think they struggle against the not terribly convincing geopolitical strand. I do like that the book takes place in an African-derived fantasy world, and unlike Children of Blood and Bone, that actually feels meaningful to the worldbuilding; it's not just Avatar: The Last Airbender with different names. I feel like the book, despite being told in the first person, is not quite reflective enough for the character stuff to land. So, definitely more interesting to me than Cemetery Boys, but not as successful as A Deadly Education.
This didn't seem to entirely delver on its potential; it felt like it ended when it was just getting underway. I think there's a 500-page version of this story that is better than Elatsoe; it's more ambitious and well put together. But I felt Elatsoe better accomplished what it set out to do than did A Deadly Education.
Like Cemetery Boys, this is about a high schooler who can talk to the dead investigating a murder with the aid of the murdered. Beyond that, though, it's very different, and much better. Though I am not entirely certain the worldbuilding hangs together in every detail, I really enjoyed all the ideas Little Badger worked in here, and some of them intersect in interesting ways, such as the use of vampires. I found the ghost dog pretty great, and the main character was a delight. The main thing that held me up was it felt like the writer's idea of her relationship with her best friend had changed during revisions and not been implemented consistently; there were things they didn't know about each other that didn't really make sense! But this is fun, and exactly the kind of thing I am glad the Lodestar Award exists to introduce me to.
Full write-up at the link, of course, but this was a blast. Neat concepts and lots of heart; everything I want out of a YA fantasy novel in general, and T. Kingfisher novel in particular. Even though I liked a lot of what I read for the Lodestar, this is the one I loved.
Final Thoughts
The thing about the YA category is it's a really mixed bag. When I like something in it, I tend to really like it... but when I don't like something, it becomes tedious in a way that's not true of a piece of adult fiction not to my taste. I think I just don't find the current generic conventions very interesting as a 36-year-old male adult. The thing is, if the point of reading for these awards is to expose me to stuff I don't know already but might like, a lot of the time, my favorite stuff in the YA category is something I already know: I already like Urusula Vernon (a.k.a. T. Kingfisher). Usually, there is one totally-new-to-me book and author that really does it for me, and justifies the whole endeavour: Riverland in 2020, Tess of the Road in 2019, In Other Lands in 2018. This year, alas, Elatsoe was pretty good but not great, and then there were three books I found vaguely sloggish. So then I wonder if I should stop voting in this category, but I'd scarcely like to live in a world where I never discovered Riverland or In Other Lands.
Kingfisher/Vernon has been a finalist in this category before, but I think it's her year to win it. If she doesn't, it'll be Novik. The other books, I think, skew toward the tastes of YA Twitter, I think, not the stereotypical Hugo voter.
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