2026 read #4: Wildwood by Colin Meloy.

Wildwood by Colin Meloy

Illustrated by Carson Ellis

544 pages

Published 2011

Read from January 10 to January 24

Rating: 3 out of 5

In the early years of this blog, I must have checked this book out of the library half a dozen times. I never did read it, though, put off by its ever-so-slightly-too-precious opening. After a while it slipped out of my mental must-read pile.

An odd pop culture conjunction brought it back to mind. In the Dropout comedy special Demi Adejuyigbe: Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip, there’s a bit where Adejuyigbe gets a staged phone call from a character who introduces himself: “It’s me! Colin Meloy! Lead singer of the Decemberists!” This bit became a vocal stim for my partner and me, a harmless bright spot during this dismal dystopian winter. It led to me getting back into the Decemberists, and it led to R purchasing and reading a copy of Wildwood. I’m reading it now on their recommendation.

First of all, it is really hard to read a heroic children’s adventure novel at a time when fascists openly wage civil war upon the decent folk of one’s country. I would read for a page or two, hit a wall of who cares about any of this right now, and go back to doomscrolling. Not a great mindset for a fair book review.

Secondly, either because of the book’s pacing or my own admittedly distracted reading, I felt it took a while for Wildwood to hit its stride. Again, maybe that’s my fault. I wanted it to be a “magic hidden in the heart of the city” urban fantasy, something along the lines of War for the Oaks or Wizard of the Pigeons, but from the pen that produced “The Mariner’s Revenge Song.” Instead, it’s a talking animal fable for precocious readers, with a pinch of Portlandia.

For a book called Wildwood, it has an unexpected amount of towns, gas lamps, mail trucks, and paddywagons. It isn’t until the halfway point that the setting comes into its own and begins to feel like a distinct addition to the atlas of fantastika: a charming melding of urban and bucolic, highwaymen and talking coyotes, ghostly bridges and rain forests. It’s in these details that Meloy’s storytelling genius shows through. That, and the indomitable power of people resisting evil overlords and secret police. Turns out there was a reason to care about this after all.

2026 read #3: China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

312 pages

Published 1992

Read from January 4 to January 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (would be higher but it aged badly)

CW: fictional sexual assault, anti-queer violence

This Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novel dates from the heyday of white authors appropriating other cultures to make their writing seem more interesting. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time, only to bounce off casual anti-Chinese slurs on the first page. Because this was also the era of equating bigotry with gritty realism. Bad times!

Unfortunately, I already spent $9 on a paperback copy from eBay, so I felt obligated to finish it.

Zhang is one of the foundational queer sci-fi texts. Its queerness, like its Chinese background, was appropriated. McHugh handles it more respectfully than, say, Frederik Pohl did in Gateway, but it’s still broadly stereotyped: Zhang cruises Coney Island, and has a penchant for blond white guys. McHugh also tours queer trauma and state violence in ways that may have been adventurous in 1992’s mainstream, but verge on feeling exploitative from a straight author nowadays (and probably did at the time, too).

Structurally, Zhang is more like a loosely linked series of short stories and novelettes than a cohesive novel. Classic first novel stuff. We follow Zhang himself from Brooklyn to Baffin Island to China. But we also get chapters from other perspectives, filling out the world: an extreme sports kite racer; a goat farmer in a Martian dome; a sheltered young New York woman who alters her face to fit beauty standards and promptly gets raped. 

One unifying thread, the central character of the whole book, is the setting McHugh has created. Another unifying thread, the book’s emotional motif, is that you can never go far enough to escape yourself, that you have to find your own reason for continuing despite the seeming futility of it all.

McHugh is an excellent writer; her POVs pulse with interiority, and the universe is vividly realized, full of life and texture. However, her future New York, despite the intervention of centuries and Maoist revolution, isn’t far removed from the New York of the 1990s imagination. Homosexuality is still frowned upon outside gay clubs. Gay men are still described as “bent.” It’s a strange mix of future extrapolation and not being able to imagine certain things ever changing.

2026 read #2: A Horse Came Running by Meindert DeJong.*

A Horse Came Running by Meindert DeJong*

Illustrated by Paul Sagsoorian

147 pages

Published 1970

Read January 3

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

So far as I recall, this was the very first chapter book I ever read. It was in my older brother’s English textbook for 6th grade, the same textbook that introduced me to The War of the Worlds (via an account of the 1938 radio drama), and had chapters from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Sweetwater, as well. The full text of A Horse Came Running was included at the end of the textbook, presumably for a capstone unit or something along those lines.

I ate it up as an 8 year old. I assumed it was set in Kentucky (which, as the old family home we returned to for summers in my youth, had been a major scene in my life), and the plot revolved around a tornado (one of my earliest fears and fixations). I’d never particularly been into horses, but I was a big-hearted child, and immediately loved the horses in the story. I felt very smart and accomplished, reading a book for 6th graders all on my own.

It took some time (and way too much money) to track down a copy on eBay. But it was nice to revisit it. It’s a solidly done children’s book, capturing the magical thinking and mental bargains that make up childhood thought. It creaks with age, unfortunately, emphasizing obedience as a virtue, and dropping some casual misogyny in a boy’s-life sort of way. There’s also a lot more “the young horse is now the wife of the old horse” chatter than I remembered. I think the textbook version wasn’t as complete as I always assumed; I didn’t recall the inevitable death of one of the horses, at any rate.

2026 read #1: Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril.

Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril

277 pages

Published 1950

Read from December 31 to January 3

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

The most interesting aspect of this tale of nuclear war is its domestic perspective. After bombs drop on Manhattan, the danger isn’t a breakdown of civil society or roving bands of Westchester wastelanders. Rejecting the notion that America could be caught flatfooted by its enemies, Merril has a secret squad of all-American white men prepped and organized in every community for this very eventuality. Instead, the danger comes from radiation sickness, boozy socialite neighbors, and gas leaks, plus the occasional over-zealous members of the White Man Squad all too eager to replace our main character’s missing husband or flirt with her teenage daughter.

Hearth is, inevitably, tainted by its era’s assumptions of gender and divisions of labor. It also sags in the middle, abandoning anything like pacing in favor of moment to moment verisimilitude and repetitive conversations. It is not, in any modern day sense, a good or essential novel. (I only began reading it because I was on a plane and I had it on my phone.) Still, it was worth a read, if only to get a different contemporary perspective on nuclear anxieties.