I mentioned Off With Their Heads by Zoe Hana Mikuta yesterday. It’s something I read for a young adult reading committee, and I’m realizing it’s maybe the only one that stuck with me. I actually tracked down my reading tracker from that time and looked at my top ten, and I actually had to look up some of them to remember what they’re about (more on that on a later date, perhaps). But I think about Off With Their Heads a lot.

I originally read it as an advanced reader copy (ARC) through NetGalley. Because I’m a member of the American Library Association, I get approved for practically every book I ask for. The ARC for this book was honestly kind of a disaster–the formatting was all over the place, which made it really hard to keep track of chapters and dates. The dates themselves relied on an odd convention specific to this Alice in Wonderland-inspired world, and the prose had a purplish hue that would have felt more at home in an overwrought fanfiction than a young adult novel. And I don’t mean that as an insult, considering just how much time I spend reading overwrought fanfiction.

Off With Their Heads is a very strange story about identity and betrayal. It’s got a magic system I wish I’d thought of and characters whose obsessiveness with each other would feel obscene to me if I ever tried to write it myself. It’s the kind of book that makes me wonder if I should try my hand at young adult books, even though up until now, my writing has been strictly literary with a speculative bent. When I was a teenager myself, I spent a lot of time thinking about how fanfiction was able to get away with such intensity, an intensity that I felt all the time, meanwhile ‘real’ books often came off as subdued. I don’t feel as intensely now, thank goodness, but I do still wonder about that quandary.