Two Prequels to Lodestar Award Finalists

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

Published: 2020
Read: September 2024

Whenever I finish voting in the Hugo Awards, I circle around to see what finalists from this or previous years have had follow-ups that I would like to read. So far this year, I've read two of them, both of them finalists for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book; in each case I picked the book up from my local library.

The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix was a finalist this year, but it was second in a series, though it stood alone pretty reasonably. I looped back to pick up the first book, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. I am glad I did, because it explained some aspects of the setting I hadn't picked up in Sinister Booksellers (I hadn't realized the books took place in an alternate timeline, for example. Nor did I realize that Merlin's body magically transformed; I just thought he was gender nonconforming. Honestly, that was kind of a disappointment.) I did end up feeling like my take on the first was pretty much confirmed, though. That the main characters are booksellers is kind of irrelevant, unfortunately; the book occasionally invokes other fantasy novels but it's all a bit tacked on, and the characters are all a bit thin because they're ultimately there in service to an action plot. I think a better book could have been written with this premise. A third installment is forthcoming; I probably won't bother to get it from the library.

Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe
by Darcie Little Badger

Published: 2024
Read: October 2024

Elatsoe was a finalist in 2021, when I ranked it second; this was a fantasy set in an alternate magical United States about a mystery-solving girl with a ghost dog. 2024 saw the publication of the prequel Sheine Lende, about her grandmother when she was a mystery-solving girl with a ghost dog. Like the original, it's a solid, well-crafted book, with intriguing worldbuilding. What really stuck out to me about this one was the structure. Storytelling is central to the book, and the book contains a number of embedded stories, and sometimes even stories within stories, and will sometimes shift between events happening, and events being recounted later, and the recounting being recounted! Some things don't quite add up—as is, of course, true of all stories, fictional or not. Though I think probably Elatsoe has got my heart more, Sheine Lende feels like the more accomplished, skilled book on the whole, and I look forward to seeing what Little Badger comes up with next.