88 books like Black Water Sister

To build a better future, you must find other world builders. N.K. Jemisin is just that—someone who can craft a convincing imaginary world. I love that the characters are complex personifications—avatars—of cities, including the boroughs of NYC.

The book is in conversation with one of my favorite lyrics from artist Lucy Dacus: “You say nobody loves a city | Nobody loves what can't love 'em back.” Place is so important to the human experience in part because it shapes who we are, and we exist in relation to it. At the same time, I believe cities (towns and other spaces) *do* live, breathe, change, grow, die, and are reborn.

Jemisin’s world-building is a lovely way to explore these concepts alongside themes like justice, care, creation, and power. 

By inserting the book into a time when the very essence of the story is dangerous, the people are made to be in a situation where I was turning one page after the next to find out what would happen to them.

Each question that arose in my mind made me urgently attempt to find answers and the smile that came to my face at each happy moment felt amazing. The emotions that echoed through the book found their way into me and made me feel as if I was along for the ride as well right beside the characters.

I loved Iron Widow because reading it is like a train wreck you can’t possibly look away from.

The main character, Zetian, is angry, unhinged, and bent on vengeance, and not once does the narrative punish her for it, which I loved. Zetian is willing to kill, torture, girl boss, and reverse-harem her way to ruling an empire whether anyone cooperates with her or not.

And I was merrily along for the ride from the moment she psychically murdered her chrysalis copilot as vengeance for the death of her sister.

As a writer of feminist myths, Kartika Nair’s exquisite poetic retelling of the Mahabharata from the women’s perspective felt like it was written for me. The title is from the African writer Chinua Achebe’s words, "Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." Using formal poetry, free verse, and prose, Nair has created a palimpsest of the great Indian epic of kingship and warring dynasties which is several times the length of The Iliad and The Odyssey combined. Here the mothers, wives, sisters, and lovers of the protagonists tell their stories, providing a counterpoint to the much-quoted verse from the epic: "All that is found here can be found elsewhere, but what is not here can be found nowhere."

The Mermaid of Black Conch takes a mythological creature and gives her extraordinary life, as a very real, young woman, called Aycayia.

She is caught – hooked like a prize fish - by greedy anglers, and hauled from the sea, bringing with her an already fascinating and tragic history of injustice and misunderstanding. But, she is also an object of love.

Not all fishermen are commercial opportunists… Not all men are eager to exploit beautiful and unusual women, and so begins an extraordinary rescue, and a life-affirming relationship, with many unpredictable, literally magical, and truly remarkable twists.

This enchanting book, written with breath-taking originality, is likely to spell-bind you – permanently. You’ll never again think of mermaids in the same way.

I’ve heard people say this book is “magical,” and that description is spot on.

I cannot get over how cute this book was! A sprinkle of magic, found family, finding yourself, and amazing descriptions of the city. This book gave me so many sparkly feels. I begged for the two characters to get together and rooted for the MC from page one. The plot was phenomenally creative, genuinely like nothing I had ever read within contemporary romance.

I finished this book faster than any other book of the year. 

I was instantly pulled into this first book in the Rivers of London series because of the main character. I found Constable Peter Grant to be delightfully awkward. His very much unwanted ability to see and speak to lingering spirits results in his assignment to a secret police unit that investigates crimes involving magic.

He’s stunned to meet gods, goddesses, and more fantastic beings who exist in a hidden world alongside mortals. I loved meeting all of the engaging characters, normal and supernatural. I was totally engaged in the believable world created by the author, where the ordinary ticks beside the extraordinary. Even better, the humorous situations Peter stumbles into as he chases down whodunit made me laugh out loud.

This pick made me fall in love with a Mulan-style gender swap all over again. From the moment Zhu steals the fate of greatness promised to her dead brother and takes his place, prepared to use any amount of trickery and the occasionally necessary murder to claim the mandate of heaven for herself, I was ride or die.

I loved the way Zhu molded herself into the perfect person to inhabit whatever role the situation required of her. She was prepared to trick monks, generals, lords, and even the gods themselves into granting her greatness.

Bangalore, or Bengaluru, is a city I’m very familiar with in real life, and Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual, to be published in the West next year by Rebellion as The Ten-Percent Thief, does a splendid job of moving it to the future, using an intricately interconnected mosaic structure to take a wide-ranging look across the social and technological divides that present-day India will carry into the future, giving her readers bleakness, clarity, wonder, humour, and hope as she tells the multifaceted story of a revolution. Analog/Virtual was published in India the same year as Chosen Spirits (the Indian edition of The City Inside), and it was personally fascinating to me to see how similarly and differently we approached present-day social and political concerns in our future-real cities. Definitely a book (along with SB Divya’s Machinehood) that would have deeply influenced mine if I’d read it before writing.

It’s hard to describe Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, except to say that it is a fascinating study of various humans and non-humans residing—some permanently, some temporarily—in a hot, dusty spaceport/city that has sprung up between Tel Aviv and Jaffa sometime in our future. They confront questions and answers about family, memory, reality, and what is human—and occasionally come up with answers. A wonderfully written, almost hypnotic book.