Julia and Victoria discuss book three in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and explore the complications of living life according to your principles.

This is the last podcast episode of Season 9! We’ll be back in late May with more books and more obsessions. In the meantime, you can watch our book-to-TV reviews of Pachinko on Buy Me a Coffee.

In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu is made up of intricate world-building, clever language development, and stories-within-stories-within-stories. There’s a lot packed into this little novella! Julia and Victoria do their best to parse through it and how it made them feel.

Julia and Victoria discuss when they figured out the twist in The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (at very different points in the book) and all the ways Jemisin expertly builds the world of the Stillness (through language, mythology, science, and culture). Also, Julia listened to this while she had a migraine, and now she’s obsessed with the audiobook reader.

Julia and Victoria (whose mic simply refused to cooperate this episode) dip their toes into the world of science fiction with “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, and its film adaptation Arrival. This inspires them to think some big, timey-wimey thoughts about language and brains and the way our experience of time affects our views on life.

While discussing the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Julia and Victoria ask the question on everyone’s mind: Are there too many World War II novels? Julia gets stuck on the fact that this story is sort of about a magical gemstone.

Julia and Victoria make a glorious return to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series with The Sea of Monsters, in which the heroes complete Odysseus’ ten-year journey in just four days. J & V revisit the “girl power” scenes with Circe as adults, and they have Feelings.