Wiswell's Someone you can Build a Nest in is another Hugo award Nominee. (and OhGosh! It is also nominated for a Nebula Award and a Locus!!!) I saw this book ALL over Book tok when it came out and people were loving it. I may have formed some opinions, as many of the popular Booktok Books turn out to be popular mostly due to strong marketing. After delving into it, I think in part, it was being marketed by lots of creators that normally market romantasy books and they had a bit of a hard time seeing the nuance in this novel and talking about it, because it is nothing - nothing- like what they described in effusive tones.
Someone you can Build a Nest In, is a cut above all those romantasies, and romance disguised as fantasy.
I was - in equal parts- enchanted and repulsed by the narrative! Quite a feat for an author!
A No-spoiler "synopsis" for those who haven't read this yet. Our protagnoist is Shesheshen, a very terrifying blob of a monster. She is singular, but for an odd companion - a Blue Bear she has named Blueberry. Society loathes and fears her and spends quite some times looking for ways to repel and eliminate her. After a bad encounter with society, Shesheshen finds herself tended to by a human, and she must reexamine her beliefs about humans, relationships, family and belonging.
Obviously there's "So MUCH More" but we are keeping things spoiler free here.
For me, the horror was horror-ing but not in a jump scare kind of way, just more in a way that I found myself entirely ready to gag at some of the great descriptive, evocative writing in the book. Totally creeped me out! I felt like Wiswell did a great job keeping me engaged well through the novel and that the story was well paced. It left room for thought on issues of identity, relationship, community, and love.
The world he built was familiar but also somewhat unique in nature and I thought he struck a nice balance between the two, it was very easy to understand, and as a reader, I appreciated the lack of a very complex magic system that I would need to dissect carefully.
The conclusion was sort of a soft landing after a book filled with quite a bit of body horror, family trauma and violence, so it's worth sticking around for.
Wiswell is an interesting author who is living with a neuromuscular disability which he talks about candidly HERE.
So, overall I've now read 4 of the Hugo nominated novels. I enjoyed this one, but it was not my favorite. I can see it being the winner, however, because it hit all the right plot points, told a delightfully macabre story without jumping down any long winded rabbit holes. The world was original as was the plot, and it was so very relatable for anyone who's felt like an outsider.
So do I think this will end up winning? There's definitely a good chance of it. Have you read this? Would you nominate it for a Hugo?
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