Reviewing the 2022 Hugo Nominees: The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult SciFi/Fantasy Novel

 

Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the August 11, 2022.  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last five (wow, 5!) years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

This is the first part of this series.  You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE. 

To start this series, we're looking at the Lodestar Award, which is "technically" not a Hugo Award, but is awarded with them anyway, so it counts for this series.  The Lodestar Award is for the best Young Adult SciFi and Fantasy novels of the previous year - the Hugo equivalent of the Norton Award (which is the Nebula version of the same award).  As a huge fan of YA works, I love going through the nominees of this award every year, and unsurprisingly I had read all of the nominees of this one prior to the shortlist being announced.  None of the nominees were on y nomination ballot....and yet there's a number of works here on this list that I really liked, and a few very deserving winners.

So without any more preamble, let's go through the ballot and reveal my rankings:

As I have in past two years or so, I'm separating the nominees into Tiers, since it's sometimes difficult to rank certain works as better than the other, and I'd be equally happy to see some books win as others.  The order here is my actual nomination ballot order at this time, although it's possible I'll flip a couple of works that are in the same tier as I think about it more.  

In the case of these works, the works fall into four tiers:

Tier Four: 

The two works in Tier Four are going to fall below No Award for me, as both had major flaws that prevented me from enjoying them as much as I wanted to, and as a result neither managed to be up to the level of being award worthy.  Both are by super popular authors, so my opinions here are probably in the minority.

6.  The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey Books) (My Review Here)

The sequel to last year's nominee A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate continues the story of El, magic student with the power to cause mass devastation in a magic school that's trying to kill all its students.  I liked A Deadly Education (it was a lot of fun) but The Last Graduate took that book's biggest flaws - some national stereotyping and frequent info-dumping - and exacerbating them.  I'm not fully against infodumping, and the series' style of having El narrate things makes it make sense to some extent, but here it gets to ridiculous levels, with the narrative info-dumping on things that just do not matter way late in the book, completely bogging the story down...and the stereotyping of various nations gets too blatant to be ignored.  

There's a fun book here in between it all, but those flaws definitely prevent it from being award worthy.  

5.  Victories Greater Than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Teen / Titan) (My Review Here)

Victories Greater Than Death is the type of novel that 10 years ago would've felt super innovative and award worthy - a Queer space opera featuring a group of oddball human teens drafted into a war between aliens on the side of a force trying to defend against a genocidal monstrous enemy, one who possesses a horrifying weapon capable of making one think of one's lost allies with disgust.  It's done well enough generally, and features solid themes about how we remember people and how we live up to their memories, to go along with a set of decent characters.  

Yet well, it's also very very derivative and feels done before, features good guys vs bad guys who are entirely black and white, and is heavy-handed in a clumsy way...only to also feature silliness like a world called "Best Planet Ever" that's just kind of jarring.  This is a book YA readers certainly can enjoy, but it doesn't really do anything special, which makes it hard to consider worthy of an award.    

Tier Three:

Consisting of one book, this is where I start to rank books above No Award, meaning each book from here on out is award worthy, even if I rank some of them well above others.

4.  Chaos on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer (Tor Teen) (My Review Here)

Chaos on CatNet is the sequel to Catfishing on CatNet, the book which won the 2020 Lodestar Award....and deservedly so.  The story featured a group of queer teens, most notably one girl whose mother had her on the run from her dangerous father, coming together in a chatroom run secretly by a friendly AI who gets in trouble of its own.  Chaos on CatNet tries to expand that plotline - first by successfully adding in a new teen girl Nell who is struggling to deal with her being rescued from an abusive cult and second by adding in a second AI to cause conflict with its own darker social media tools, which isn't quite as successful.  

There's some really good stuff here, but the extra AI just makes this feel like a copy of Person of Interest from TV at times, and so the book feels kind of messy - enjoyable, but not nearly the revelation its predecessor was.  So it sits here in Tier Three.  

Tier Two:

With Tier Two we come to the Books that I not only think are Award Worthy, but I actually would be happy to win the award.  There's also not a crazy gap between Tier Two and Tier One this year, so these are damn good books.  

3.  Redemptor, by Jordan Ifueko (Amulet Books / Hot Key Books) (My Review Here)

Redemptor is the second half of an incredibly hyped up duology (after Raybearer, which got a Lodestar nomination last year).  That book set up an African culture inspired fantasy world dealing with themes of injustice, aristocracy/class, empire, misogyny and more...even if it didn't quite have the page length to handle those themes.  

And Redemptor, to its credit, is a lot better about that, with it dealing with issues of trying to right past injustices and oppressions, of sharing power, of loneliness and accepting people for who they are (among other things).  The book still has an issue with having too many characters and not enough room to provide each with characterization, but it works really well and is an impressive conclusion to this duology.  Well worthy of two Lodestar Nominations this series is, and Ifueko has shown she's clearly a name to watch.  

2.  A Snake Falls to Earth, by Darcie Little Badger (Levine Querido) (My Review Here)

Last year, Darcie Little Badger's Elatsoe earned a Lodestar nomination of its own, and was truly an incredible book with its indigenous teen girl protagonist in a modern fantasy world.  This book is a little closer to the Middle-Grade age of the scale, featuring an indigenous girl Nina who grows up trying to figure out the strange multi-language story told by her great great grandmother and also a cottonmouth (snake) spirit named Oli who has to find his own way in the Reflecting (spirit) world only to undertake a dangerous mission to our world when one of his friends grows sick.

It's a very fun story filled with characters who are very enjoyable, as they deal with stories from the past and how they get lost in modern translation technology, and how extinction and modern losses can affect the natural world, plus about friendship, building a home and family, and well the difficulties that all can be with parents who aren't always there, if they are at all.  The only reason this is in Tier Two is that well, I don't think the two plotlines gel as evenly as they could, with the ending being a bit rushed, and it not coming together as well as say Elatsoe did.  This won the Norton Award this year and might win the Lodestar as well, but it just isn't quite as good as my number 1.....

Tier 1:

Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao (Penguin Teen / Rock the Boat) (My Review Here)

Iron Widow is a novel advertised as being essentially a cross between Pacific Rim (co-piloted giant mecha) and The Handmaid's Tale (crapsack misogynist world)....all combined to also tell the story of the first/only female Chinese Emperor in history.  And it delivers all that in a vengeful angry story, as its protagonist uses her strength and righteous rage to take control of the giant mecha that is supposed to kill her in favor of its male pilot....and then becomes determined to tear down the system that keeps women like her down.  

It's a dark and angry book (I can't say that enough), but it's incredibly powerful even as its highly entertaining, and its use of Chinese history for its inspiration instead of a Western one gives in a freshness which isn't there in some other works, even if some of that inspiration is skin deep.  The main protagonist is utterly compelling, the setting is very believable, and well again it has all this in a book featuring giant mecha battles, without it feeling jarring or anything but....right.  

This isn't my favorite YA book of the past few years, but it's a really really good one and well deserving of being on top of my ballot for this year.