Tuesday Top Five: My Year In Fiction
Dec. 30th, 2025 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nevannaThese were my favorite book releases of 2025.
1. Amelia, If Only by Becky Albertalli
Amelia has two goals for her road trip with her closest friends: to meet the teen YouTuber who’s the object of her parasocial affection, and to distract her friend Natalie from a recent breakup… which might give her the opportunity to see her own relationship with Natalie in a new light.
Albertalli’s latest offering includes character cameos from Imogen, Obviously, but is also a solidly self-contained coming-of-age story with hilarious narration and dialogue, a sweet romance, believable friend group dynamics, and spot-on observations on Internet-era fandom – including YouTube transcripts and social media posts interspersed with Amelia’s chapters – that that offer a critical perspective on RPF without becoming mean-spirited or moralizing. (I can’t decide whether I would have liked to see an excerpt of Hayden/Walter fanfic, or whether it would make me cringe and howl in secondhand embarrassment even more than I already was.)
2. The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey
In an alternate version of the 1970s in which nobody won World War II, Vincent and his brothers are the last boys remaining in a children’s home in the English countryside, where they live an idyllic life apart from bouts with a mysterious illness. Miles away, teenage Nancy lives with her adoring parents in a house that she’s never allowed to leave. Elsewhere still, a government employee faces the end of a years-long state experiment that has shaped the lives of Nancy and the boys, and the question of what will become of the children once it’s over.
The Book of Guilt invites comparison to another work of speculative fiction about young people growing up in institutional settings in rural England, only to face existentially shattering truths about their origins and their place in the world… but it would probably be a spoiler to identify the comparison, and the slow, horrifying revelations are part of what makes Chidgey’s novel engrossing, even if – like me – you figure out what’s going on before the characters do.
3. The Scammer by Tiffany D. Jackson
Lonely overachiever Jordyn has just started to feel at home at her historically Black university, when her suitemate’s charismatic older brother, recently released from prison, moves into the dorm and develops a dangerous level of influence over Jordyn’s new friends.
Jackson loosely based her YA novel on the Sarah Lawrence College sex cult scandal (I talked about a memoir by one of the survivors in a previous entry), but you don’t need to know about the real-life events to engage with her story. Devonte’s manipulation of his victims – in which he takes advantage of both the reality of societal oppression and Jordyn’s personal desire to belong – is believable and horrifying, and the message about choosing joy in an unjust world is one that I imagine will be helpful to a lot of teenage readers. I admit that an end-of-book reveal about the unreliability of the narrator and her secret motivation didn’t entirely work for me (though other twists very much did), but I found the story as a whole to be deeply compelling nonetheless.
4. A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff
A's parents have repeatedly dragged him to a "support" group for families who refuse to accept their children's trans and gender-nonconforming identities, but when one of his friends disappears during a meeting, A learns about the literally monstrous forces motivating the group, and his own role in stopping them.
A World Worth Saving is the third take on “what if conversion therapy was actually, not just metaphorically, demonic?” that I’ve read recently, the first middle-grade example that I’ve encountered, and probably my favorite. Trans author Lukoff combines Jewish mythology (including a golem made out of trash) with a well-paced fantasy adventure and a journey of self-understanding that explicitly rejects stereotypical “chosen one” narratives, instead emphasizing the importance of community bonds. I’ve ordered the paperback from my local Tiny Gay Bookstore, even though it won’t be available until the middle of next year.
5. Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang
Since they were orphaned as children, Chinese-American twins Chloe and Julie have lived very different lives. Chloe was adopted by a wealthy white couple and has built a career as an influencer. Julie has survived abuse from her relatives only to find herself in a lonely, financially precarious adulthood… until a spontaneous trip to New York leads her to discover Chloe’s body and impulsively decide to step into her sister’s privileged existence.
My primary engagement with influencer culture has been through fiction, and that is unlikely to change, but I find the topic to be a fascinating train wreck full of narrative potential. If you like stories that focus upon Rich People Behaving Badly, while also commenting on performativity, sexism, and racial bias in the world of “content creators,” you’ll probably like Zhang’s debut.
What were some of your favorite reads of the year?
1. Amelia, If Only by Becky Albertalli
Amelia has two goals for her road trip with her closest friends: to meet the teen YouTuber who’s the object of her parasocial affection, and to distract her friend Natalie from a recent breakup… which might give her the opportunity to see her own relationship with Natalie in a new light.
Albertalli’s latest offering includes character cameos from Imogen, Obviously, but is also a solidly self-contained coming-of-age story with hilarious narration and dialogue, a sweet romance, believable friend group dynamics, and spot-on observations on Internet-era fandom – including YouTube transcripts and social media posts interspersed with Amelia’s chapters – that that offer a critical perspective on RPF without becoming mean-spirited or moralizing. (I can’t decide whether I would have liked to see an excerpt of Hayden/Walter fanfic, or whether it would make me cringe and howl in secondhand embarrassment even more than I already was.)
2. The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey
In an alternate version of the 1970s in which nobody won World War II, Vincent and his brothers are the last boys remaining in a children’s home in the English countryside, where they live an idyllic life apart from bouts with a mysterious illness. Miles away, teenage Nancy lives with her adoring parents in a house that she’s never allowed to leave. Elsewhere still, a government employee faces the end of a years-long state experiment that has shaped the lives of Nancy and the boys, and the question of what will become of the children once it’s over.
The Book of Guilt invites comparison to another work of speculative fiction about young people growing up in institutional settings in rural England, only to face existentially shattering truths about their origins and their place in the world… but it would probably be a spoiler to identify the comparison, and the slow, horrifying revelations are part of what makes Chidgey’s novel engrossing, even if – like me – you figure out what’s going on before the characters do.
3. The Scammer by Tiffany D. Jackson
Lonely overachiever Jordyn has just started to feel at home at her historically Black university, when her suitemate’s charismatic older brother, recently released from prison, moves into the dorm and develops a dangerous level of influence over Jordyn’s new friends.
Jackson loosely based her YA novel on the Sarah Lawrence College sex cult scandal (I talked about a memoir by one of the survivors in a previous entry), but you don’t need to know about the real-life events to engage with her story. Devonte’s manipulation of his victims – in which he takes advantage of both the reality of societal oppression and Jordyn’s personal desire to belong – is believable and horrifying, and the message about choosing joy in an unjust world is one that I imagine will be helpful to a lot of teenage readers. I admit that an end-of-book reveal about the unreliability of the narrator and her secret motivation didn’t entirely work for me (though other twists very much did), but I found the story as a whole to be deeply compelling nonetheless.
4. A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff
A's parents have repeatedly dragged him to a "support" group for families who refuse to accept their children's trans and gender-nonconforming identities, but when one of his friends disappears during a meeting, A learns about the literally monstrous forces motivating the group, and his own role in stopping them.
A World Worth Saving is the third take on “what if conversion therapy was actually, not just metaphorically, demonic?” that I’ve read recently, the first middle-grade example that I’ve encountered, and probably my favorite. Trans author Lukoff combines Jewish mythology (including a golem made out of trash) with a well-paced fantasy adventure and a journey of self-understanding that explicitly rejects stereotypical “chosen one” narratives, instead emphasizing the importance of community bonds. I’ve ordered the paperback from my local Tiny Gay Bookstore, even though it won’t be available until the middle of next year.
5. Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang
Since they were orphaned as children, Chinese-American twins Chloe and Julie have lived very different lives. Chloe was adopted by a wealthy white couple and has built a career as an influencer. Julie has survived abuse from her relatives only to find herself in a lonely, financially precarious adulthood… until a spontaneous trip to New York leads her to discover Chloe’s body and impulsively decide to step into her sister’s privileged existence.
My primary engagement with influencer culture has been through fiction, and that is unlikely to change, but I find the topic to be a fascinating train wreck full of narrative potential. If you like stories that focus upon Rich People Behaving Badly, while also commenting on performativity, sexism, and racial bias in the world of “content creators,” you’ll probably like Zhang’s debut.
What were some of your favorite reads of the year?
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Date: 2025-12-31 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-31 02:36 pm (UTC)