Some people sleep on their sides, other prefer to sleep on their backs, but a lot of y'all are sleeping on THIS BOOK and that simply cannot go on…Some people sleep on their sides, other prefer to sleep on their backs, but a lot of y'all are sleeping on THIS BOOK and that simply cannot go on…...more
Imagine someone asking you, "what are you reading?" and you have to sigh and mumble: "... Mister Impossible." Imagine someone asking you, "what are you reading?" and you have to sigh and mumble: "... Mister Impossible." ...more
Counting Down with You was such a warm joy to read, and it left me with something luminous bubbling bright within my chest. It’s a charming and achingCounting Down with You was such a warm joy to read, and it left me with something luminous bubbling bright within my chest. It’s a charming and aching story with a quietly furious heart, a story that would have given me a mirror as a teenager, and now at twenty-two, pried something open in me that had been shut for a very long time.
Counting Down with You pulled me tenderly towards my younger self, and reading it, I could so easily put myself back into the picture of it: that tremulous age when what there is of you feels too heavy to bear but too weightless to have its own gravity, the familiar keenness of helplessness and words crawling back inside your throat even as you thought them—a child’s desperate urge to be seen, to be adored, as who they are, as who they want to be, not as some rarefied version that they ought to be—and the terrible, slowly-dawning realization that perhaps there is no such thing as unconditional love, or unconditional belonging, only love and belonging that seize and weigh and measure before they find you worthy. And something else too, that sharp, glittering edge of defiance, always like flint, a spark away from fire.
I can speak autobiographically to the conflict that resides at the heart of the story which is, perhaps, why the novel landed very heavily within me. Like Karina Ahmed, I wanted to pursue a career in literature instead of one that is empty of passion in medicine, and like Karina, my parents were quick to snuff out that dream like a flame pinched between two fingers. My parents did not understand why I would “waste” my high school diplomat in mathematics and chase after such an unpractical dream, and I struggled for language to explain that a career in books fit into the contours of my heart like nothing else did, that I could not conceive of doing anything else. It was the first time I put my feet down in front of my parents, and it laid me open to a world where I might decide to stand and find the ground beneath me visible and solid.
It was, by no means, an easy decision: my parents’ murmurings of skepticism—their silent disapproval—had a way of cutting me open, and it almost bled me out of what scraps of resolve I’d defiantly managed. Like Karina, I was seventeen, and I felt like a gulf lay between me and my parents. I remember that whole year as an open wound; I felt raw and tender all the time, like if you touched me, my whole body would start throbbing. I longed for my parents’ approval, I longed to find whatever combination of words that might bridge that gulf, that might make my parents understand the hugeness of my passion. Even now, as unspeakably grown up as I feel, I still do.
Counting Down with You channels all those feelings with startling acuteness. I loved the author’s warm, energetic, almost fevered attitude toward her characters. She sees her characters, and wants them to see themselves, and to be seen by those they hold the dearest. She gives Karina a net of support to break her fall: her sweet, kind grandmother and her two enthusiastically supportive best friends. The fake-dating-to-lovers romance between Karina and Ace—which, hilariously, begins when Karina, an unrepentant bookworm, reluctantly agrees to be Ace’s girlfriend only after he offers to take her to a bookstore and let her go wild with his rich-boy credit card—is chokingly sweet, and Ace’s disarmingly silly romantic gestures simply set too high a bar to vault for romance. Ace's fragile vulnerability and fundamental decency, which he is used to hiding behind the thin veneer of an irritating smirk, a black leather jacket, and a carefully crafted "high school bad-boy" persona, was also touching.
All in all, this is a cracking debut—a story lit up like a beacon, a stirring invitation to fearlessly release your dreams into the world, to let them grow, and stretch wings, and soar.
Oh, this was stunning. A beautiful, sweeping tale of revenge, betrayal, warring powers, unbreakable bonds, and the stinging weight of destiny that ticOh, this was stunning. A beautiful, sweeping tale of revenge, betrayal, warring powers, unbreakable bonds, and the stinging weight of destiny that ticked every single box on the list of things I love most dearly about the genre: a deep, layered world-building, tenderly realized characters, a plot that never lags, and an emotionally and thematically vivid narrative.
At the heart of the novel is a sharp and thoughtful examination of empire, cultural imperialism, and how history can both immortalize stories and disappear them. Raybearer is a novel that understands the insidious power of empire, how it’s like a kind of poison that seeps into the groundwater, eating holes into the bulwarks of many cultures, and how it can be very, very convincing while it destroys them. The novel also speaks to many themes that we know all too well in the real world: about leadership and the tendency of the powerful to rationalize their own worst ideas without truly understanding the possibility of disaster; about patriarchy and its seamless continuity with imperialism; and about towering women with towering destinies who get written out of history.
These thematic and emotional sketches are made even more compelling with a rich cast of characters. I loved these characters. There's a vulnerability to them: they're so young and so stubborn and so wracked with troubled pasts and a bruised, wistful yearning for belonging, fighting not only to save themselves and each other but to save themselves and each other to a world “worth surviving in.” In that sense, Raybearer feels like a love letter to all the young people out there marching in the streets, speaking up against injustices, and holding themselves tall because they too refuse “to see the world as a small place, where nothing matters but [their] happiness.” The antagonists are gripping creations as well, and their slow unmasking throughout the story is both touching and terrifying. We see them yanked from their shells, all exposed flesh and raw nerves, shrunk down to something accessible and understandable in its undeniable humanity. Ifueko invites us to glimpse the world as they see it, made simple by fear and righteousness and fury, and we shake our heads in pity at some of them, roll our eyes at others, and wonder if we could ever forgive them.
All in all, Raybearer heralds a welcome new voice in fantasy. I'm so excited to read what Ifueko writes next!...more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
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Books:
young-adult
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