Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen

A sci-fi time travel story featuring a father and memory problems. This is a really well-paced and loving ode to familial love complete with fully thought out world-building and complex sci-fi jargon. Kin Stewart is from the future and the world of the book holds that humans aren’t really built for time travel, so when he gets stuck in the past his brain has trouble holding onto the reality of two eras. He loses his personal memories of his present and chooses instead to live his life in the past, falling in love, starting a family.

His retrieval partner comes back for him eighteen years later and he’s only lost two weeks of his own future time. But Kin’s a different person now and when he’s brought back to the future, he has to contend with leaving his family behind and going back to a life he feels like he’s outgrown.

I favor this as a book and hope it doesn’t become a movie (although I may have already seen moves to do that). Kin’s struggles between worlds are easier to convey and believe in text, in my opinion, and the book is a little soft on him (his past-life wife dies from unrelated circumstances a few months after he’s plucked away, while he has a present/future-life fiance, which is all very convenient). But I really enjoyed this. Mike Chen has a way with sci-fi storytelling that’s interesting and dynamic and doesn’t get too bogged down in details, allowing it to breathe in the context of familiar, contemporary lives. I found the way time travel works in this intriguing as well — the idea of the human body having actual, physical issues with the physics is interesting.

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

I really adored this. There was recognizable immigrant, 1st gen family feelings about embracing changes in tradition in order to keep the magic alive. I found the trans aspect so organic to the story. Thomas clearly knew what to do to illustrate the inner struggle well in fantasy. In Yadriel’s family, everyone is brujx — the men are brujo whose abilities include helping spirits cross over and the women are bruja who have the ability to heal. How does Yadriel fit in when he’s trans and his family won’t let him go through with the ritual to receive his gift from their goddess? It was smart in this case to gender the magic because it allows the story to showcase how stifled that thinking is, and it’s very rooted in Latin tradition.

It is exhausting always apologizing for self and explaining self and assuaging the confusion and guilt of other people. I felt that queerness hard.

Yadriel goes through with the ritual on his own and ends up summoning Julian, a rebel boy from his high school who has apparently died this night. Julian sees what Yadriel doesn’t at first. He interrogates Yadriel about why he feels like he has to prove to his family that he is a brujo when Julian can see plainly he HAS the magic of brujo already, Lady Death sees it/has blessed him, so why does he feel like he has to prove anything? And he also brings up that Yadriel can’t be the first trans person — which prompts Yadriel to realize that there might be a whole lost history of people like him.

I found the pacing of the story fantastic and the breadth of relationships so interesting. Julian’s friend group has a rebel reputation, but when we meet them they’re all misfits and queer people whose home lives suck significantly. They’re a found family who look out for each other, forcing Yadriel to confront the idea that maybe his closest connections will need to be outside his family too.

The Cost of Knowing by Brittney Morris

Morris wrote one of my favorite books I read in 2020, which was Slay. This one maintains her strengths in grounding one slightly sci-fi/fantasy thing in very solid reality — in this case, two brothers who gain unwanted visions after the accident that killed their parents where one sees the past and the other, Alex our protagonist, sees the future of anything he touches.

Alex has severe anxiety after that accident and alongside this ability to know that. It makes him nervous and cautious. What the book does extraordinarily well is showcase how childhood trauma can affect siblings strongly and not necessarily in a bonding way. In the book, four years have passed since the accident, but Alex and his little brother Isaiah are distant and barely know each other, both of them suffering in adjacent silence. This is incredibly realistic and very striking.

Eventually, Alex sees a vision where his brother will die which motivates him enough to try to connect. The book takes the audience through that process and opens Alex up to what he’s been missing in the world around him, including in his fears surrounding his job, his girlfriend, his neighborhood, his school, and his family. This book hurts with how real it gets.