These two books jointly won the 2022 (and so far last) Otherwise Award, formerly the Tiptree. I had read Light of Uncommon Stars previously, but it was from one of my Hugo years so I didn’t write it up at the time and have returned to it now.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Sorrowland:

At least summer brought an end to the dreary dead fawn show, and Vern was able to get some work done. She tied one babe to her hip and the other to her back in a way that made it possible to walk ten or even fifteen miles to forage without tiring.

I rather bounced off Solomon’s first two books, An Unkindness of Ghosts and her novelisation of the .clipping song The Deep. But I found this worked much better for me – like the other two, it furiously addresses race and gender and historical oppression, but somehow seemed more under control. The protagonist is a very young black woman, escaping a cult by fleeing into the nearby wooded wilderness where she gives birth, and her allies and enemies as she undergoes strange physical changes as well. It still got a bit off the rails towards the end, but most of it made sense in a very angry way. You can get it here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Light from Uncommon Stars is:

Once common in LA’s Eisenhower years, just a few of these giant donuts remained in greater Los Angeles. There were Kindle’s Donuts, Dale’s Donuts, and Randy’s Donuts, of course. Donut King II was in Gardena. In La Puente, there was the drive-through Donut Hole.

This worked less well for me, both when I first read it in 2022 and again three years later. There are a couple of elements that work really well – the very sympathetic portrayal of the trans protagonist, and the life of Asians in contemporary California, and there’s some good stuff about violin playing. But the two main plot lines are about a music teacher who sells her pupils’ souls to the Devil, and a doughnut restaurant which is really a front for a stranded alien starship, and both seemed to me rather silly; my disbelief rapidly became unsuspended and didn’t pick up again. Obviously my tastes are in the minority here, because it was the runner-up for the Hugo after A Desolation Called Peace, which I enjoyed much more. You can get Light from Uncommon Stars here.

There was an unusually strong overlap between the 2022 Otherwise Award and that year’s Hugos. As mentioned up top, co-winner Light From Uncommon Stars was a Hugo finalist; the honor list included Lodestar finalist Cemetery Boys and Hugo finalist She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan, and seven other books that I have not read. The Clarke Award that year went to Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles, the BSFA Award to Shards of Earth, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and the Nebula to A Master of Djinn, by P. Djèlí Clark.

I’ll do a write-up of the Tiptree / Otherwise Awards as a whole soon, but just to note that this takes me to the end of a reading project that I started in 2017 with A Woman of the Iron People, back when the world was a very different place.