Let’s stop there.

I love this novel about a national park with dragons, which is also a meditation on parenting, communication, and memory. The premise alone was enough to sell me on this 2007 novel by the author of a dozen or so smart, humane, chatty fantasy novels, but I’ll give you a little more detail to explain why I love it so much.

Jake Mendoza is the teenage son of the director of the dragon studies institute at Smokehill, a chronically underfunded, understaffed dragon reserve. Almost no one sees the dragons on the millions of acres of parkland; Smokehill rangers track dragon population by counting the casualties among wild sheep, deer, and bison. Smokehill also has a very strange dragon-proof (and more importantly, poacher-proof) fence. Jake and his father are both devastated by the death of Jake’s mother three years before on a dragon study sabbatical in Kenya (the world’s only preserves for the endangered dragons are at Smokehill, in Kenya, and in Australia, to which dragons are native. The detail in Dragonhaven on the rediscovery and near-extinction of dragons and the politics of protecting enormous, flying, endangered species is right on.)

The following happens in the first 50 pages of the book, so don’t fear spoilers. Jake is belatedly allowed to do his first solo hike in the park and stumbles upon a dragon. It’s not just a dragon, which he has never seen up close before, but a dragon who has just given birth, which no one in the records has ever seen. And not only that, the dragon is dying, shot by a poacher. These are all unthinkably strange things, but Jake is focused only on the surviving baby dragon, who he saves and tries to raise, despite knowing — because of that complicated legislative picture — that it’s illegal to save the life of a dragon.

The relationship between Jake and Lois the baby dragon and the serious parenting crash course Jake has to undertake (what do you feed a baby dragon and how do you keep it from burning you? How can you do anything else when she needs feeding every half hour?) is compelling and all-consuming and feels true. The book is structured as a memoir Jake is writing to explain the events at Smokehill to a national audience, and he explains that he was so short of sleep while raising Lois that some of those years were a blur. Jake’s voice really does feel like a teenager’s voice and it sells you on the story and its required suspensions of disbelief because you trust that it happened the way Jake said it, even if he didn’t understand the larger political ramifications.

There are excellent small observations: because it seems absurd to Jake to say “Good dragon, Lois” like he was talking to a dog, he says “Hot stuff, Lois!” as a praise-phrase. And it’s exactly right that interspecies telepathy would cause terrible headaches.

If the book had a different cover I could see it being sold as a thrilling adventure novel, or as a touching book about parents and children. As it is, look for it in the young adult section of your bookstore or library.

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

Kage Baker’s Company books are some of the best time travel novels ever written, using the genre to talk about memory, time, history, change, and the limits of infinity. Baker, who died too young in 2010, wrote 8 novels and 2 short story collections about immortal time travelers and their shadowy employer, Dr. Zeus Inc. also known simply as “The Company.” It’s best to start at the beginning, with In the Garden of Iden (1997).

The backstory is that time travel and immortality were invented contemporaneously, in the 24^th Century. But there are caveats. Time travel is dangerous to normal humans, who can only go into the past and then return to the present, and cannot take anything back from the past with them. And the immortality process only works on children. The Company, then, for money as well as for unspecified nefarious purposes, goes back as far as possible in time and rescues children, starting with Neanderthal children, who would otherwise have died, using nanotechnology to turn them into immortal cyborg operatives. The operatives work through the millenia in real time, with retirement and rewards promised once they reach the 24^th century.

The heroine of most of the books, the Botanist Mendoza, was rescued from a Spanish Inquisition dungeon and drafted into the Company. Her first mission, in In the Garden of Iden, is to take genetic samples from plants in an 16^th century English nobleman’s garden. The teenage Mendoza dislikes the mission (indeed, all cyborgs are raised to hate the past from the perspective of their prudish 24^th century employers.) But as she learns to do her work she also learns that there is much she hasn’t been told about humans and human life in history. The book is a great Elizabethan historical novel whose main characters happen to be immortal cyborgs. Of course, Mendoza falls tragically in love. But why do people identical to her lover show up in the future in the other novels?

The work of the Company is to save cultural materials that would otherwise have been destroyed, such as the Library of Alexandria, or various extinct botanical species, to sell in the 24^th century. Operatives also save important papers in a long scene set during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. This is actually a common trope of time travel books. The idea that objects destroyed in their own time can be moved to the future without upsetting the continuum is a saving revelation in, for instance, Connie Willis’ time travel books. In Baker’s books, it’s a commercial proposition. Company operatives hide items in Company caches to last out the millenia till they can be found in the present and sold.

Baker was a Californian and an enthusiast of California history, and it shows. Mendoza is sent to 16^th century and 19^th century California as well as to a 150,0000 BCE Catalina Island. In Mendoza in Hollywood (2000) the bored cyborgs watch Intolerance. (Luckily an operative who had been in Babylon is there to point out inaccuracies.)

Company operatives from the far past know all about the future — up to a particular date in 2355 known as the Silence, when all information stops. What happens then? You’ll have to read the books. (Hint: the last book is called The Sons of Heaven.)

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

The young man, the eponymous Brat (a derivation of “Bart”), looks almost exactly like Patrick Ashby, who had disappeared, believed a suicide, eight years before. Patrick was the older of twins, and would have been just about to turn 21 and inherit the family estate, Latchetts, a successful horse-breeding operation. An Ashby family friend conceives of the plan. He convinces Brat to learn the details and secrets of Patrick’s life at Latchetts, “become” Patrick, and split the inheritance with his backstage prompter. Brat, drawn by a love, not of money, exactly, but of horses, and a surprisingly deep desire to just see Latchetts, appears as the long-lost heir and “returns” with reasonable fanfare to the family home.

But that’s not exactly right. The opening pages of Brat Farrar don’t focus on Brat. They take place at Latchetts, with Patrick’s aunt Bea, who had taken care of Patrick’s twin, Simon, and two younger children, Ruth and Jane, since their parents’ death in an plane crash. It is the anniversary of that day eight years ago when Patrick had disappeared and they had found a letter from him on the cliff overlooking the ocean. Bea has never understood it, and she fears that Patrick, the serious little boy, is fading from everyone’s memories. That’s because this story is not just an intricately plotted mystery, but a family story, the story of the prodigal returned, and a meditation on what can be inherited.

For the characters at Latchetts, Brat’s resemblance to what Patrick would have become is so uncanny that they cannot doubt that he is Patrick. Brat is accepted by everyone — except for Patrick’s twin Simon, whose inheritance he is stealing. Why doesn’t Simon expose Brat? And how long can Brat keep up the masquerade? Under the calm rhythms of country life is a deep pit of hate and violence. Horses are a key metaphor. Brat is drawn to Latchetts because of their horses, and he wants nothing more than to spend his life working with them, but he knows the danger: he walks with a halt because he was thrown from a horse in the American West.

A novel set among horse breeders cannot help but have heredity as a motif. That’s one thing that puzzles Brat and Brat’s Svengali. Why does Brat look and act so much like an Ashby? His love of horses, is it from some unknown Ashby blood? Why is Brat so drawn to Latchetts? None of the characters or even Tey have any doubt that heredity doesn’t lie, that families no less than horses breed true. This is not something we tend to believe today, but it’s the logic of fairy tales. Brat Farrar is a fairy tale about an orphan finding his real family masquerading as a Golden Age British mystery.

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

I’ve been writing about books I love, that I reread because I love both the experience of reading them and the experience of having read them deeply and as part of the rhythms of my life. But I don’t reread the same way every time, and I reread each book differently. My first few readings of many books usually conform to the genre reader archetype: I read for plot, to find out what happens, and then I reread to find out what I missed, to dwell on beautiful sentences and clear up confusion engendered by reading so fast. But my subsequent rereads are idiosyncratic.

Since I discovered the books of the amazing sf writer Samuel R. Delany in my teens, I’ve read my favorites several dozen times. As a younger reader I liked the shorter, more tightly plotted novels he wrote in the 1960s, in preference to his shaggy, more theoretical later books, with their uneasy sexualities and ambiguous endings.

Since it was one of those early favorites, I’ve reread Nova, his 1968 Holy-Grail-in-Space story, more times than I can count. The book starts with a wonderful set piece in a port on Triton, where we are introduced to Mouse, who plays a synesthetic instrument, the “sensory syrynx;” Katin, the character who is writing a novel and annoys me because he is so relatable and I see the bright-eyed college kid part of myself in him; and the brilliant, damaged Captain Lorq Von Ray, who is recruiting a crew for his trip into the sun on the Roc. The worldbuilding is great: everyone has plugs in their wrists and neck, to plug into ships and machines so that everyone can do actual work with their bodies. A scene takes place at a galactic museum. It is a wonderful, rich space opera story about history and writing and bodies and blindness and empires rising and falling.

But what I forget because of the way I reread is that this grail quest book is also a story of a bitter rivalry between the Von Ray and Prince and Ruby Red, owners of a huge company that makes spaceship machinery and controls mines of a Macguffin energy source, Illyrion. The story is told episodically with flashbacks to connections and clashes between the Reds and Von Ray — and Von Ray’s doomed romance with Ruby. But I always skip the flashbacks, because Prince Red is cruel and violent and Ruby is duplicitous, and I care more about Mouse and Katin than about the clash of empires. So the epic story, upon multiple rereads, has become for me a story about very different people brought together on a ship, and their picaresque, important travels across the galaxies talking about technology and writing and life and history.

But because I skip the Prince Red parts doesn’t mean I just reread a few pages or scenes I like. I reread probably two-thirds of the book. The parts I love don’t make sense without the experience of having (mostly) read up to that point in the book. The process of reading matters. And the parts I love have a different valance when they’re less inflected by the cruelties of Von Ray’s youth. Often the books I reread are different than on the first read for more subtle reasons, paragraphs that suddenly jump out, motivations that are suddenly revealed. But when I reread Nova, given the parts I skip, I literally read a different book.  And I love that book too.

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

It is my contention that some of the best recent high fantasy is about trauma and recovery from trauma. Novels of wars between low-tech nations and their rulers are an excellent place to think about personal and social trauma; a writer can enlarge the boundaries of traumatic events so widely that it becomes impossible to think that these events would not have repercussions in individual characters’ lives. In realistic fiction and in our own lives it’s a lot easier to bury a hugely traumatic event and assume that a character is over it, but when the entire kingdom suffers we cannot. In fact, in Finnikin the movement from silence to speaking together about horrible experiences is an important narrative trajectory. I’m not saying that Finnikin is very dark, but it is about recovery. (Another excellent example of this is Kristin Cashore’s Graceling novels.)

When Finnikin opens we find the eponymous main character, a young man, on his usual pursuits: going through the land looking for help for his exiled people and for information about both the dead and the possibly living — could the heir survive? Ten years before, Lumatere, a small, peaceful kingdom at the confluence of trade routes, had been invaded by troops from the north. Lumaterans blamed a magic-wielding minority for their troubles and began to persecute them. In response to their cruelties, at her death at the stake the priestess Seranonna cursed Lumatere, shutting it off entirely from the rest of the world. Those who were able to flee the country were shut out, unable to contact their “lost beloveds.” An impenetrable cloud lay over Lumatere.

Finnikin’s self-imposed work is the keeping of the Book of Lumatere, recording who was lost — at the closing of Lumatere, in massacres at refugee camps, of the plague — and who stayed alive. He also has been working with the kingdom’s former head courtier to convince other countries to offer a piece of land to the exiled Lumaterans. But when they meet a young woman who says she knows where the heir might be, their plans have to change.

I particularly like that in this book, after what might in a more conventional novel be the ending, Marchetta makes us stay with the characters and learn how they move together toward wholeness, understanding, and — dare I say — happiness. (This paragraph made intentionally vague to avoid spoilers.)

The sequel, Froi of the Exiles, was published a number of years ago in Australia but is now available in bookstores here. I haven’t read it yet, so that’s what I’m recommending for my own summer reading.

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

I reread constantly and without ceremony (see all my previous columns on books I’ve read over and over) but I too, have a book I read yearly. It’s Little, Big, by John Crowley, a sprawling fantasy family saga. Sometime during the summer, some hot and languorous week, I have a strong sense that it’s time. I drop the five other books I’m in the middle of, find a place to read and a bowl of apples, and return to the story. I haven’t memorized the first line like my dad did with his book, but Little, Big starts with Smoky Barnable walking from the City to the house called Edgewood to get married. Alice (called Daily Alice) Drinkwater is waiting. She takes a bath in Edgewood’s Gothic Bathroom, with stained glass and a stone tub (this is an indelible image for me). And the story goes inward and outward.

Little, Big is subtitled, in the style of Victorian novels, The Fairies’ Parliament, and it is indeed an exploration of the sympathetic magic between world and person, Word and utterance, wood and bird. The family story of the Drinkwaters is implicated in a magico-political rebuilding of America. A heartbroken young man builds a memory palace. Alice’s great-uncle photographs fairies in the bottom of the garden. Edgewood’s rusty orrery grinds back to orbit. The title reminds you to be attentive to the echoes of “as above, so below” throughout Smoky and Alice’s family story.

I’m not surprised, really, that I can’t recite the first line, because while the book’s language is beautiful, lyrical, and deliberate, I experience it after so many rereads as a sequence of dream images. When I reread Little, Big I fall back into them. I read for the images I can’t forget — and for unremembered images so vivid I’m amazed I could forget them. Every time I reread I’m struck by an incident involving a changeling that I find so terrifying that I block it out, just like the characters do. The structure is cyclical, too, so that I know that the story will turn back, like the paths in the private walled garden in the novel. I haven’t reread Little, Big yet this summer, but soon.

On a certain day in June, 19–, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked but did not ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

**COURANE, Sandor:

You are to be sent as a colonist to the agricultural world of Epsilon Eridani, Planet D. You will be part of an integrated farming community. Your future successes and failures will thus be of no consequence to the community at large here on Earth, yet you will be placed in an environment which will remand much of you and reward you with peace and satisfaction.**

Since TECT, the machine to which humans had conceded the government of their lives, ordered Sandor Courane into exile on Planet D (which the colonists inevitably called Home), he had no choice but to go. And on Home, Sandor found respite from his failures on Earth (TECT had mercifully given him 3 chances: as a basketball player, a science fiction writer, and a factory worker) and a community whose work filled him with pride. But Sandor also discovered that on Home, there were two types of colonists: patients infected with a terrible fatal neurological disorder, and prisoners to take care of them as they forget everyone and everything they once loved. What caused D syndrome? Why would TECT let this happen?

George Alec Effinger’s short novel The Wolves of Memory (1981) is a neglected small masterpiece by an under-read SF writer. Effinger is best known for his vivid, violent novels about a detective in an sfnal desert town based on New Orleans, starting with When Gravity Fails (1987). He died young, in 2002. The Wolves of Memory is a striking meditation on technology and empathy.

The key relationship in the book is between Courane and TECT. TECT (who is the slightest bit dated, since characters communicate with it only through typing or speaking to terminals) is characterized with biting wit, an all-controlling computer that is constantly exasperated and angered by human frailty. TECT is nosy and capricious in the guise of protecting humanity from its failings. And Sandor is a shlubby everyman that Effinger used in other stories; you can find Wolves in a recent collection of Courane stories called A Thousand Deaths. In Wolves Sandor becomes a stable, kind part of D’s farming community, but finds himself wholly incapable of finding a cure for D syndrome, saving any of his friends from death, and remembering the things he needs to remember: a failure just like he was on Earth. TECT is generally very sarcastic with Sandor, but maybe TECT doesn’t have everything under control like the humans think it does. And as Courane loses his memory, what really happened, and what TECT is really planning, becomes more and more unclear.

Read The Wolves of Memory for a book that, with humor, critiques human relationships with technology, and makes us care about TECT’s pawns and even, maybe, TECT itself.

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

Ibbotson (1925-2010), the beloved and bestselling author of chapter books for children such as Which Witch? and Journey to the River Sea, also wrote a number of charming historical romances during the 1980s and 1990s, all recently reissued as YA. (Ibbotson wrote them for adults and was surprised at their popularity among YA audiences.) In each book, a headstrong heroine finds herself in an unfamiliar situation (for instance, the Russian countess, exiled after the Great War, who works as a servant in an English country house in A Countess Below Stairs) where she eventually charms everyone and finds love. The characters are immediately relatable, and their emotions are deeply felt.

Ibbotson and her family fled Vienna for London on the eve of World War II, and that flight colors these novels, where love always comes after struggle, and the happily ever afters are always bittersweet. It is the two world wars that shatter the illusion that St Petersburg (A Countess Below Stairs) and Vienna (A Song for Summer, The Morning Gift) will ever be the friendly, carefree places where her heroines grew up surrounded by love.

The books have flaws, of course. The villians are entirely too villainous: Rupert’s fiancee in A Countess Below Stairs is entirely hateful, a eugenicist who insults and mistreats the mentally disabled kitchen maid and the kind Jewish neighbors; and Harriet’s closeminded father in A Company of Swans, who refuses to let her dance in the ballet company (or matriculate at Cambridge, where he is a famous professor) is a one-note caricature of the kind of family one would run away to South America with a ballet company from.

There is always an idyll in these books, a sense that joy is too good to last. This is pronounced in A Song For Summer, where Ellen, the practical daughter of suffragettes who is unaccountably gifted at housekeeping, becomes the matron at an alternative school in Austria and transforms all the rich, eccentric students and teachers with her kindness and levelheadedness. Ellen falls in love with the school’s caretaker, a Czech concert violinist who has resigned his position in protest against the Reich. Everything is about to end. Ellen and Marek will find each other again after the war, changed. We, the readers, know that the beautiful valley, the children, the storks, the still lake, and Ellen and Marek cannot stay there forever. But how we wish they could.

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

Diana Wynne Jones

One of Jones’ books always eluded me. I found it once at a library but never saw a copy again. As I grew older I was haunted by images from the book — a skeletal ship, a man chained to a rock, a girl with a withered arm — and, having forgot the title, began think that I’d dreamed it rather than read it. It was The Homeward Bounders.

The Homeward Bounders is a book about not finding home. Jamie narrates the story; he is twelve and is speaking into a machine left behind by Them. (They are always in italics.) Jamie grows up in late 19^th century London, the son of a grocer, exploring the city and getting into trouble. He stumbles upon Them playing a wargame, and, after consulting the rules, they decide, rather than killing him, to throw him onto the bounds.

This is the heart of the book, even though it’s only about 50 pages. Jamie ends up first in a world with nomadic herders, and many others that blur together for him as they do for us. He stays until the bounds call him, which they do sooner or later, and send him somewhere else. He is a Homeward Bounder — the rules are that if he ends up back at Home, he can stay. Other rules — he can’t die. It’s lonely. It doesn’t end.

Luckily, Jamie comes to a boundary that drops him into the sea. He is picked up the Flying Dutchman — his ship has got rid of anchors, to show that they have no hope — and dropped on an island where he meets a man in chains (who we know must be Prometheus, but Jamie doesn’t). Jamie finally meets other Homeward Bounders (a young woman exiled from her own world and a demonhunter), finally makes plans to defeat Them, and finally loses hope.

Diana Wynne Jones’ books are often madcap and hilarious, but not this one. There is humor, but the real triumph of the book is a flawless evocation of some of the bleaker moods: loneliness, hopelessness, dark irony, the feeling of being home everywhere and nowhere. I trust Jones, and I trust that any story she tells me will be important. Until I picked up The Homeward Bounders, I didn’t know I needed to read a story about how a boy can become an anchor.

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian

The novels revolve around Hilary and hir friends, three young barristers at 63 New Square, and a fourth character in a tax practice next door. Hilary is always just dropping in at Chambers to find someone to buy wine and dinner — always just in time to hear about a complicated tax or inheritance case that inevitably ends in mysterious deaths. “I am a historian,” says Hilary, “my profession largely consists in speaking ill of the dead.” The friends — Cantrip, Ragweed, Selena and Julia — all have personalities and backstories, but they’re vaguely sketched and tend to contribute to the stories mostly clever, allusive dialogue and bottles of wine. Hilary is also an enigma as to age, gender, and any interests besides being well-fed, insulting Cantabrigians, and ditching as often as possible an ongoing research project on the concept of causa in medieval common law. Hilary is a don, full stop.

The four novels, all named after classical references and with cover art by Edward Gorey, each take place in a different locale, evocatively sketched by Caudwell. In Thus Was Adonis Murdered (1981), Julia takes a vacation in Venice but a young man from her tour group is found dead — with Julia’s copy of the Finance Act beside the corpse. The Shortest Way to Hades (1984) involves a complicated Probate case and takes place on Corfu.

The Sirens Sang of Murder (1989) is my favorite. In the other novels, the characters are forver writing each other letters (theoretically to supplement their short phone conversations) but in this one Chambers has been equipped with a telex. Cantrip is attending a meeting of a trust in the Channel Islands when mysterious happenings ensue — I suspect this is the only epistolary novel ever told through telexes.

The last novel, The Sibyl in her Grave, published after Caudwell’s death in 2000, is an English village mystery. But the characters seem rather uncomfortable to be so far in the future, and one wishes she had just set the novel back in the 80s.

Caudwell, the pen name for Sarah Cockburn, seems to have been a character herself, a pipe smoking crossword puzzle enthusiast who worked as a tax lawyer before quitting to be a full-time novelist. The novels demonstrate a fond exasperation for English law as well as for the usual tropes of mystery novels. In The Sirens Sang of Murder, an engraved pen is found in a suspicious place, and Julia objects to its obviousness as a clue. “I do not doubt,” Hilary replies, “that in a crime novel having any pretensions to modernity, the pen would be quite inadmissible. As a mere historian, however, there is nothing I can do about it. Nature, as we know, does imitate Art, but I fear that she too often falls short of the highest standards.” I admit that I never thought that novels about tax law could be so entertaining.

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Suzanne Fischer is a historian and writer who lives in Detroit. She cares about people, places, and things. Find her on Twitter as @publichistorian