People have been telling me the early aughts are back in style with this gleeful look in their eyes that tells me they must remember the era very differently than I do. Sure, there’s something to be said for the slower, gentler relationship we had with tech in the pre-algorithm, dial-up internet days, when we weren’t constantly being surveilled or sold to. At the same time, I can’t be alone in thinking the Y2K years were pretty messed up. If you were a kid then, you spent half of 1999 being warned that the world would end at the stroke of midnight on January 1. Then midnight came and went, and the life you hadn’t planned for just . . . kept going?
For those of us who survived this imagined doomsday only to go barreling towards the personal apocalypse that is puberty, the aughts live in our memory as a time of dark, unsupervised chaos and the creeping, elated sense that we’d gotten away with something. My debut story collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, captures this feeling through the bizarre rituals of a Y2K sleepover. Children have a folklore all their own that exists outside the realm of adults: games, riddles, superstitions, and rhymes that’ll chill you to the bone if you think about them long enough. In my book, these look like coded jump-rope songs, cootie catchers that tell you who you’re destined to marry, and summer camp pranks every bit as terrifying as the monsters rumored to roam the grounds.
All these secretive games we played under the cover of night, trying to understand our lives better, or to challenge the forces that threatened to take them from us—the forces that dared try to control us at all. Some of the books below explore this post-lights-out world through speculative fiction, like mine does; others in the form of a realist novel, an essay collection, or a book that isn’t even book-shaped. All of them are shot through with the spirit of the Y2K sleepover: caught between centuries, between dusk and dawn, between childhood and adulthood, between the magical and the mortifying everyday.
Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap
This is one of the mixed-genre story collections I read to convince myself that I was allowed to write a mixed-genre story collection, everything I knew about publishing trends be damned. These thirteen stories weave horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and folklore together with exactly the kind of urban legends you might hear at a slumber party. A number of the stories are set in schools where girls behave badly, weather betrayals and betray one another, and try desperately to make up for it. “Good Girls” tells of a manananggal, a mythical creature in Filipino folklore who detaches her upper torso from the rest of her body to fly at night, battling a taboo hunger. Another favorite, “Hurricane Heels (We Go Down Dancing),” features five friends trying to have a regular bachelorette party until the celebration takes a turn. Some stories, like “How to Swallow the Moon,” are so gorgeous and atmospheric, they read more like a magic spell.
Log Off by Kristen Felicetti
A voice-y, big-hearted novel told in LiveJournal posts, Log Off opens on an entry dated Tuesday, September 5, 2000, with the words: “Hello, people of the Internet. Let it be known that today, 9/5/Y2K, my legal guardian Brian finally joined the modern world and connected our computer to the great World Wide Web.” The book follows sixteen-year-old Ellora Gao, who lives in a Western New York suburb with her emotionally distant former stepfather and memories of her estranged mother, and goes online in search of the close relationships she feels are missing from her life. I love the intimacy of Ellora’s friendships, and the humor and tenderness with which they’re drawn. One memorable entry contains a choose-your-own-adventure flowchart of an interaction that members of certain diasporas will recognize as the “But where are you from from?” question.
An American Girl Anthology edited by Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler and KC Hysmith
This collection of thoughtful, accessible essays assembles seventeen viewpoints on the social and cultural impact and lasting nostalgia of the American Girl universe. First released in 1986, the American Girl dolls evolved into a full-on craze by the mid-nineties to early aughts. By tapping into multiple disciplines and research areas, this collection manages to cover a lot of ground—from the historical recipes associated with each of the girls, to the dolls’ role in “tag yourself” memes (I’m Samantha), to the struggle to find Asian American representation in the Pleasant Company catalog. Contributors look toward the past, by turns fondly and critically, all while keeping an eye to the future, as the first generation of American Girl devotees become parents themselves.
Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott
Imagine getting to hear the freakiest fairy tales from your childhood for the very first time. That’s what reading Nethercott feels like. One of this collection’s fourteen stories follows a pair of teenage girls working a summer job at a mysterious roadside attraction. Another throws us into the midst of conspiratorial middle schoolers as they harness various divination methods, from alomancy (divination by salt) to zoomancy (divination by animal behavior), to get rid of a new classmate. Formally playful, the book also includes a story in the shape of an illustrated bestiary; I feel closest to the Yune, a bog creature who joins a game of spin-the-bottle with disastrous results. Through lush prose, fearlessly out-there premises, and a romantic sensibility, Nethercott explores the venomous, feral nature of girlhood, and why we might refer to a group of girls not as a clique but a pack.
Tender by Sofia Samatar
The first Samatar story I ever read was “How to Get Back to the Forest,” and when I heard it was being included in this collection, I knew I had a new title at the top of my TBR. These twenty stories are organized into two sections—Tender Bodies and Tender Landscapes—and range in setting from past to near future, more distant future, and alternate present. “How to Get Back to the Forest” is a dystopian tale in which kids are separated from their families at a young age and sent to a strange summer camp. Dread mounts as the details of the camp are gradually teased out: mood-tracking metal bugs, inanimate objects meant to serve as parental figures . . . It’s a reminder of what any reformed camp kid already knows: Sleepaway camp is like a sleepover with no morning. You don’t get to go home so easily, and the night feels like it might never, ever end.
A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton
Set across two timelines, one in 1998 and the other in 2016, this novel follows three queer friends from the time they met online as teenagers and created the video game Saga of Sorceress. Eighteen years later, their lives look very different. Once scattered across the country, Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa now all live in and around New York City—though they still haven’t met in person and fell out of touch long ago. None of them knows the others are nearby, but they haven’t forgotten the game, which remains unfinished in the confines of their respective drives. I appreciate how insistently this book challenges the false dichotomy between “real” friends in the “real” world and “online” friends online.
The Family Arcana by Jedediah Berry, illustrated by Eben Kling
What says slumber party more than sitting in a circle, sharing scary stories with your friends? The Family Arcana is the story of a doomed family trapped in their decaying farmhouse, told across fifty-two playing cards and designed to be read an infinite number of ways. Which characters you meet—and which of their obsessions, problems, and idiosyncrasies you’re privy to—depends on how the cards fall. The deck is packed with sharp, striking images that linger, like ghosts, long after you’ve read them. There’s the sister “born with dirt under her nails,” the aunt “who cuts pictures of horses from the newspaper,” and the grandfather who says, about the importance of mustaches, “You must have something to tug on when you are wrong, to make it look like you will not be swayed.” The cards are suitable for use in all standard card games and definitely scratch the analog itch. There’s also an audio edition featuring fifty-two different readers.
These Worn Bodies by Avitus B. Carle
I’m clearly a sucker for unconventional story structures, and this collection of sixty-one delightful, nervy pieces of flash fiction delivers. It reimagines what a story can look like, just as it interrogates how society teaches us what we, based on ideas about gender, should be. One story, “Vagabond Mannequin,” appears on the page as a crossword puzzle, while another, “So Many Clowns,” takes the form of a letter to a nail-polish manufacturer. Other stories are set in diners and among the cardboard cutouts of the last Blockbuster on Earth, and imbued with the language of girlhood, as is the case with “I Double-Dog Dare You.” They’re filled with dolls, piggy banks, hair ribbons, Sunkist, and secrets, and together feel like sixty-one sparkling gems in a treasure chest.
Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games edited by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon
This essay collection focuses on the past, present, and future of video games, as considered by writers who are also gamers. The list of contributors includes heavy hitters Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Charlie Jane Anders, Alexander Chee, Elissa Washuta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Larissa Pham, and comic MariNaomi tackling topics of grief, power, language, race, illness, bodies, and technology through the lens of video games. However, this book isn’t only for gamers (I’m not really one—not of the digital variety, anyway), and should appeal to anyone interested in thinking more deeply about the way interactive virtual realms inform how we see and navigate our physical world. I was particularly moved by Jamil Jan Kochai’s reflection on being an Afghan American teenager targeting Afghan insurgents in Call of Duty.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
Made up of nine stories linked through the appearance of locked doors and keys, this collection feels a bit like sneaking out past curfew: that sense of mischief, bordering on danger, that comes with being somewhere you shouldn’t be. Many of these stories exist at the threshold between spaces—a library, a garden, the front cover of a diary—and dare you to proceed. If spooky puppets were the subject of your nightmares growing up, you’ll be drawn to (and/or terrified by) “Is Your Blood as Red as This?”, a tale that’s set in a puppeteering school and deals with questions of agency, autonomy, and control. I love surprising, audacious titles that hint at the personality of the story that follows, so “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don’t You Think” is a standout for me.
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