ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island, new data and modern analysis change the game

ISLAND AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten History of Easter Island
MIKE PITTS
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vital and timely work of historical adventure and reclamation by British archaeological scholar Mike Pitts—a book that rewrites the popular yet flawed history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and uses newly unearthed findings and documents to challenge the long-standing historical assumptions about the manmade ecological disaster that caused the island’s collapse.

Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world.

For too long, people have imposed their own theories on this extraordinary place and its inhabitants. Thor Heyerdahl, after his famous Kon-Tiki expedition, claimed the island had been discovered by light-skinned people from South America, believing only they could have been capable of travelling there and building the statues. Erich von Däniken took it to greater extremes, saying the statues had been carved by aliens. More recently, Jared Diamond's theory of ecocide—that Islanders destroyed their world by cutting down all the trees—has become popular as a vital message about the need to conserve our planet's resources.

But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World, archaeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers.

A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: An archaeologist with access to twenty-first century morals and mores and technology is not going to write with kindness towards the previous generations' conclusions. They're rooted in outdated assumptions, using techniques that feel shockingly cursory to modern sensibilities; most shocking is the unquestioning racism of so very much of the analysis made by earlier generations.

A third, the first third, of the book relays those earlier analyses with what felt to me as condign levels of condemnation or disagreement, couched in evocative language. If you're offering a different light on past data with newer data and previously unavailable technology, casting shade is inevitable. Why not begin with tendentious tones? Many cavil at this. I do not.

After bringing attention to, in the second third, an underknown and too-little celebrated Katherine Routledge and her astute observations and contextualizations of the society and culture of the island, Pitts goes into the modern archaeology and emerging understanding of Rapa Nui. It's a paradigm shift, and we're seeing it in its earliest days.

I found the book as a whole fascinating, creating a gestalt of scholarly opinion's mechanisms of change as evidence...and society's changing mores...demand. It is not a simple bowing to the winds of fashion as the reactionaries and recidivists with political axes to grind insist. It is the scientific method at work, correcting its data to account for developments across all fronts of scholarship. No "Truth" is immutable, scary as many people find that fact. Fixing thoughts into cages of ideology is never permanent. Examining data, analyzing orthodoxy's tenets, is how Einstein blew open the ideas of physics...out came cell phones, computers, the entire internet.

I won't pretend I was completely fascinated during the whole read. It was a slog to read the archaeology jargon but it yielded a really fascinating new understanding of a place most of us are intrigued by. More than that, though, this is a perfect example of how science works: take a data set, examine it, add to it, and analyze both the before and after data sets. Present conclusions as "this new data refutes/supports previous data; the current, amended data set supports/refutes the following conclusions."

It's a message I like, I support, and I choose to amplify.

A DOMESTIC ANIMAL, an early gay-themed novel without a tragic ending

A DOMESTIC ANIMAL
FRANCIS KING (intro. Rumaan Alam)
McNally Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Francis King's 1970 novel A Domestic Animal is the story of Antonio Valli, a brilliant young Italian philosopher, who arrives to do a year's research at a well-to-do university. He lodges with Dick Thompson, a successful middle-aged novelist, and his good looks and impulsive yet immensely likeable character soon have Dick captivated.

Valli is someone who needs to be admired and loved and has an insatiable craving for attention from everyone he meets; he needs an audience to perform to and he finds this at the university, but especially in Dick's company. It is not long before Dick Thompson has fallen completely in love with his charming—but very heterosexual—lodger.

What follows is an ill-fated relationship that can only end in disaster, but in A Domestic Animal King has created a novel of bitter longing and painful complexities.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Is it easier to fall in love with someone who can't return your feelings, or someone who won't? Unlike the girl who doesn't love you back, Dick Thompson's love object Antonio Valli can't reciprocate his feelings...Antonio Valli is a straight man.

This is how the story frames its unhappy ending, or at the most charitable of my responses, its bittersweet ending: A straight man with a very intense psychological need to seduce and captivate those he's identified as powerful chooses a gay man whose lust is barely concealed to ensorcel. It was written in the 1960s, so this was pretty advanced stuff. Dick Thompson is not presented as sick,or weird, or as a pervert. He's simply made a bad bet on a man...everyone can relate to that.

Nowadays we'd call Dick Thompson "sapiosexual" and Antonio Valli a "queerbaiter". I suspect that, in a novel written on this model in 2026, Antonio would be heteroflexible if only to cement his conquest of Dick. It is a conquest, a thoroughly (though not consciously, I think) intentional act of subjugation for the purposes of the conqueror's ego gratification.

Antonio Valli is an unapologetic bounder...fucks Pam, a loud, vulgar woman despite pretending (in my opinion it's a pretense) not to know how much this hurts his inappropriately-but-consensually emotionally attached host Dick Thompson, despite being married and having a family with the wife left in Italy. He is fully in control of Dick Thompson's emotions. Only when Dick Thompson dares to display some liveliness of spirit in an indirect calling-out of his caddish behavior towards both women does Antonio Valli deign to treat Dick Thompson's feelings as real, as something not deliberately evoked as part of his power-play, his ownership of Dick Thompson's feelings.

Dick Thompson is utterly besotted by Antonio Valli in so many ways. He's queer, knows he's queer, but does nothing to approach sexual activity with Antonio Valli because, in that time, bottoms like women waited to be approached or risked serious consequences...physical, reputational, emotional. Dick Thompson revels in his emotional subjugation for the same reason submissives everywhere enter into Dom/sub relationships: I'll let you hurt me if you'll really choose me, own me, care for me. If this book was ever filmed it would have to be made like Pillion, an exploration of the consuming need some people have to be the full focus of another's attention. It is a deep, and from what I know about it, life-long need that finds a way to get met that can change over time...but is never satisfied. That fact is never clearer than in the ending of this novel.

Antonio Valli, in his lordly disdain for anything not immediately satisfying to his own clawing desperation to be central to the life of someone he actually admires, chooses Pam over Dick as his bedmate...but never lets Dick off his emotional hook, or allows Pam to be more than a sexual obsession. He is a man of his time, the kind we all hope is disappearing: the thoughtless user, convinced he should be able to do just as he likes and you should do just as he likes as well. It was the privilege of maleness at that time. I suspect that 1970 readers of this novel really didn't interrogate that Antonio Valli was perfectly ordinary, at least until they were confronted by Dick Thompson's emotional responses to his arrogance.

Has all that much changed? Heavens yes. Has it changed for the better? Mixed bag on that one. As a member of Dick Thompson's native minority, I'll say mostly yes on his behalf. One thing that's changed is the desuetude of the unrequited love/unhappy ending novel. I think the point of this story stands out in relief against that uglier truth of the ending: Men loving each other the way Ralph and Mervyn do can exist, men can and do fall in love with each other (even relentlessly heterosexual ones), and gay love is fraught, complicated, and very much as interesting as cishet love.

Lest y'all think Francis King was simply talking about the subject, know that he was my fellow AIDS widower. He, much like Dick Thompson, led a quietly queer life in a time where this could easily have led him onto nasty legal troubles à la Alan Turing. I suspect but cannot prove that Pam, Antonio Valli's object of sexual obsession, was modeled after King's friend Anne Cumming (albeit unflatteringly). King was not exoticizing or fetishizing his straight man in love with a man he had no desire to fuck. He was most likely discussing his own life in too-thinly veiled terms.

Brave of him. A major step towards accurate representation of gay life in the days before liberation began. Still not that great, it's centering desire for a cishet man, but definitely honest and in its day quite positive.

FEAR AND FURY: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage

FEAR AND FURY: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this masterful, groundbreaking work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson reveals how the infamous New York subway shooting of 1984 divided a nation, unveiling the potent cocktail of rage and resentment that ushered in a new era of white vigilante violence.

On December 22, 1984, white New Yorker Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers at point-blank in a New York City subway car. Goetz slipped into the subway tunnels undetected, fleeing the city to evade capture. From the moment Goetz turned himself in, the narrative surrounding the shooting became a matter of extraordinary debate, igniting public outcry and capturing the attention of the nation.

While Goetz's guilt was never in question, media outlets sensationalized the event, redirecting public ire toward the victims themselves. In the end, it would take two grand juries and a civil suit to achieve justice on behalf of the four Black teenagers. For some, Goetz would go on to become a national hero, inciting a disturbing new chapter in American history. This brutal act revealed a white rage and resentment much deeper, larger, and more insidious than the actions of Bernie Goetz himself. Intensified by politicians and tabloid media, it would lead a stunning number of white Americans to celebrate vigilantism as a fully legitimate means for addressing racial fear, fracturing American race relations.

Drawing from never-before-seen and archival interviews, newspaper accounts, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on the social and political conditions which set the stage for these events, delving into the lives of Goetz and his four victims—Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The most powerful, privileged, cosseted, spoiled class of people in the entire history of the planet feel aggrieved and put-upon by those hugely less fortunate than themselves. It is the single biggest victory ever won by a lie over the truth. This is the story of one of the most important moments in the long campaign to weaponize class struggle...downwards.

A similar, racialized effort has been just as stunningly successful, much of it supercharged by the crime committed by Goetz. There are now "stand your ground laws" in many states, one of which got George Zimmerman off a murder conviction in the case of Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman is now 42; Martin died at seventeen. Goetz is 79. Darrell Cabey is a paraplegic with the functional capacity of an eight-year-old. But Goetz is a hero to a lot of (mostly) white people because he shot a bunch of aggressive, stupid teenagers because he "felt threatened."

In reading this careful, unimpeachably sourced story of how this came to pass and the world that's followed the crime it details, I got angrier and angrier. It was my New York, the one I moved to, that was being described; yet I felt unfamiliar with it, unable to imagine myself in this city. I was admittedly young; I had little more than the rudiments of a social conscience, or an honest awareness of racial injustice; but to learn so very much I absolutely had no idea about or access to? Humbling. Infuriating, because of what I was learning.

If you're willing to go on a long, well-footnoted trip into the ugliest part of US white mens' psyches, if you'd like to know why I cheered and clapped when Hinckley made his attempt to rid us of Reagan, if you weren't even born when these events transpired and just wonder how shit got so fucked up in this country, read this book.

It's not light reading. It's serviceable writing, it never ignited my excitement; but it's not poorly done, not boring, not awkward. It does what this kind of non-fiction is meant to do. That's a good thing, if not a toe-tingling one. I hope you'll keep it in mind, get it from the library, see if you find a sale on it in one format or another. It's well worth your time.

FIXING FAIRNESS: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for All, well worth the short read

FIXING FAIRNESS: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for All
LILY ZHENG
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: DEI needs a reset. Discover how to achieve real social change in the workplace that puts everyone ahead through the groundbreaking FAIR framework.

The demand for inclusive workplaces is stronger than ever, with most employees seeking a sense of belonging and fairness at work. Yet traditional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies have faced backlash and stagnation, leaving organizations at a crossroads.

Where common DEI initiatives have failed, this book instead offers a results-based, systems-focused, all-inclusive, and universally beneficial framework to help bring about real social change in the workplace. This can be achieved through the FAIR framework:

Fairness—Promote equitable treatment by addressing systemic barriers and ensuring transparent, just practices for all.

Access—Expand opportunities by removing obstacles and creating pathways for underserved and underrepresented groups.

Inclusion—Foster a sense of belonging where diverse voices are valued, heard, and integrated into decision-making.

Representation—Reflect the diversity of society at all levels, ensuring visibility and participation across demographics.

This book isn’t about the next acronym or rebranding; it’s a call to action for a more effective and resilient approach to social progress. The DEI industrial complex failed to make real change through unchecked growth and performative practices, and far-right antagonists only offer regressive “solutions.” With clarity, urgency, and practicality, Fixing Fairness offers a third option and charts a path forward for those committed to creating better outcomes for all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Tight, compact, and rooted in the author's entire career's-worth of research and—more importantly—practice.

What I appreciated most was Author Zheng's ability to restate points without making me feel I was being given cold leftover oatmel, lumps and all; it is down to the approachable style of their writing. (Author Zheng uses they/them pronouns.) It's clear, from high-powered venues supporting their work with publications and endorsements...this was on Forbes's Best New 2026 Books On Workplace Inclusion And The Future Of DEI list and Author Zheng's work has appeared there, in the New York Times, and Harvard Business Review. Links are all on their website here.

A key realization in this read came from the not-subtle calling-out of the fabrication of noise and chaos surrounding the efforts, flawed and half-hearted as they were, to set up DEI initiatives, by hostile sources supporting an antiquated and no longer prevalent societal paradigm. It's a lot to pack into barely over 160pp. Author Zheng manages! There are notes, and all of them I tested, around half, link to vaild and apparently reputable venues. None were, for example, to weird little fringe outlets...except maybe directorsandboards.com, because what tinier fringe group is there than that...and perhaps tellingly, the author cited on that site was Ted Kennedy, Jr.

I don't think most general readers will care too much about the subject discussed here. It's too bad. After reading this book I understand the opponents of DEI much better, and disapprove of them and their actions even more...plus I've picked up some techniques for opposing their rhetoric effectively. I encourage y'all to go to Author Zheng's website, linked above, to see what their work is all about. Even if your budget is tight, you can always request your library get a copy. These ideas deserve room in your head, your awareness, and your actions.

THE GREAT SHADOW: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, serious subject...serious treatment

THE GREAT SHADOW: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy
SUSAN WISE BAUER
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From alchemy to wellness culture, from antisemitism to disposable plastic, a gripping account of how getting sick has shaped humanity.

Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? The Great Shadow brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle—the experience of actually being ill. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions?

The Great Shadow uses extensive historical research and first-person accounts to tell a vivid story about sickness and our responses to it, from very ancient times until the last decade. In the process of writing, historian Susan Wise Bauer reveals just how many of our current fads and causes are rooted in the moment-by-moment experience of sickness—from the search for a balanced lifestyle to plug-in air fresheners and bare hardwood floors. We can’t simply shout facts at people who refuse vaccinations, believe that immigrants carry diseases, or insist that God will look out for them during a pandemic. We have to enter with imagination, historical perspective, and empathy into their world. The Great Shadow does just that with page-turning flair.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is unbelievably apt that this book was contracted for in 2019. I don't think I need to discuss what happened in 2020. What COVID did was to point up the absolutely amazing progress in medical treatment of disease that we've made...vaccines that have saved tens of millions of lives in the past six years developed in months not years...and how ingrained fallacies are in our species...the social distancing farrago is just miasma theory written in Times New Roman. COVID also caused the author to forego doing in-person research in favor of extensive online research. (If, like me, your eyebrows went up at the mere notion of suchlike in a serious work of nonfiction, cool your jets until you've looked through the over 400 notes and citations that make up a literal quarter of the text.)

As a narrative technique, reconstructions of past actions and attitudes work only as well as the author's ability to convey evidence from the records in appropriate prose. It's a technique I think adds some immediacy to history that otherwise is often dry and tedious. I'm happy to say Author Bauer convinced me to follow her as different events were interpreted as divine wrath, moral turpitude, and individual punishment when most twenty-first century people would see the disease process for the impersonal force it is.

It does lend itself, however, to a discontinuity of time. I followed Author Bauer's conceptual links between topics and strands of evidence without much conscious effort, often thinking "...but what about...?" mere words before she addressed the very question I was still formulating. Others might not find that to be their experience. I mention it as information only. You'll resonate with a less linear presentation in your own way. I can't offer a perfect five because even I was occasionally thrown off the scent of the idea being pursued.

I'm here to tell you I want you to read this book, no matter your beliefs about medicine or science. It is not chiding or minatory to people not in the tent with the believers on either side. It is tendentious; it is not disrespectful. Of course I can say that without hesitation because I agree with Author Bauer. I will offer my main evidence in favor of reading it by saying I was highly resistant to her take on social distancing being modern miasma theory until I read her points about the science for and against it. My mind, in the face of cogently presented and logically mustered evidence, changed.

An author who can get in under my well-entrenched, heavily undergirded arrogant illusion of knowledge deserves your treasure and your eyeblinks.

THE MIDNIGHT CAROUSEL, debut magical novel of loss, grief, and redemption

THE MIDNIGHT CAROUSEL
FIZA SAEED McLYNN
Park Row / Harlequin (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Night Circus meets Water for Elephants in this enchanting, darkly glittering story of grief, obsession, revenge, and enduring love.

Come children, come children from far and near. Come choose your steed, you galloping knights, to enjoy the fun of the carousel . . .

1920, Chicago
Maisie Marlowe has come to America for a fresh start. After discovering an antique fairground carousel, she is seized by the idea of running a glittering amusement park. But little does she know that the wondrous object has a sinister past of its own.

Paris
A decade ago, fairgoers inexplicably vanished riding an extraordinary carousel, and Detective Laurent Bisset closed the case with a suspect behind bars. So when rumors of fresh disappearances in Chicago also linked to a carousel make their way across the Atlantic, Laurent sets out for new answers to an old mystery.

Maisie and Laurent both hold clues to this dark puzzle.

But can they piece it together before the carousel claims someone else?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Carnivals are intentional, designed liminal spaces. Carousels, maybe more than most attractions at a carnival, are meeting-places for mundanity...powered separate spaces that go in endless circles like the ritual dances of so many cultures accompanied by endlessly repeating music...and magic.

Magic always demands a price, a sacrifice of treasure. It works like all the other balancing systems in nature. Benefit given, cost exacted...it is the universal law, it functions across time and (on terrestrial scales for sure) space, many cultures have a divinity whose purpose is maintaining or restoring balance: in my case I refer often to Ma'at, the Egyptian goddess of balance and rightness. In this story a terrible painful tragedy rips the balance utterly and without redress...so a perspectiveless human seeks out a powerful way to exact a price for it.

Tragedies ensue, all linked to that loss...though not obviously or directly.

What works best for me in this read is the atmosphere of unreality, made stark by the very quotidian writing. This enhances the surreal events being evoked in the direct prose. It's a debut novel, so I can't say from experience with the author if this is a stylistic trope of hers or not. As a novel, it's got some flaws. There is a great reliance on coincidence, which might or might not have been intended to heighten the sense of mysterious forces in action to redress that balance discussed above; there are dangling threads that could be intended to evoke the certainty that no pattern is ever truly complete.

Debut novels get the charitable interpretation from me. Especially debut novels that evoke similar reading experiences to The Night Circus, a read I adored in the Aughties. I hope some more work of Author McLynn's will come out soon for my delectation.

MISSING SAM, urgently tale urgent told

MISSING SAM
THRITY UMRIGAR
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From bestselling author Thrity Umrigar, a thrilling and haunting story of an Indian-American woman who becomes the prime suspect when her wife goes missing.

When Aliya and Samantha have a fight one night, Samantha goes for a run early the next morning—and doesn’t come back.

Aliya reports her wife Samantha as missing, but as a gay and Muslim daughter of immigrants, she’s immediately suspected by her neighbors in Samantha's disappearance. Scared and furious and feeling isolated as everyone around her doubts her innocence, Aliya makes one wrong choice after another. All the while, Samantha is being held captive, strategizing how to escape before things escalate even more. Meanwhile, Aliya must fight to prove her innocence in the public eye and save her wife. But is safety ever truly possible for these women even after Samantha is rescued?

A provocative examination of suburban mores, Missing Sam captures the terror manifested in today’s political climate, and the real dangers, both physical and psychological, of being Brown and queer in America.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was leery of reading this expansion on the "be careful of your words, you do not which will be your last" aphorism. I took the DRC because I like stories by and about my lesbian siblings in Otherhood, and because I'm pretty damned sure we're going to see this kind of horror again in the future so I wanted to get it out there.

Sam and Ali are well-drawn, fully realized people. We see each one's PoV, so we know what Ali doesn't, that Sam is alive. It should diminish the stakes, yet Author Umgar uses the technique well enough that it did not.

I was, for the most part, glad to keep reading the story though as parents and social media and investigators kept becoming more toxic by the page I wanted to say, "Thrity! enough already!" When piling on the trouble the story begins to feel like the artificial construct it is. Never mind that reality does this ad more to people...fiction is different, plays by different rules. When COVID hit, I hit the wall. It took some time for me to come back.

After Sam is rescued, the true horror (for me) began: How do you put yourself...your wife...you entire life...back together after the sheer awfulness of what each of you has been through? What alchemy do you need to work in order to remake bonds that have been, without either one's volition, shattered? This horror was very well, very believably, explored. The ending was the culmination of multiple strands of un/making and remodeling.

What kept me from making a bigger fuss about the book was the dropped and abandoned threads, eg Kabir's development. I loved the challenged queer marriage that had to sustain or fail the spouses...it's the way reality is when you're in a committed relationship. The resolution Author Umrigar presents is pitch-perfect. I think the story of an immigrant, a Muslim, a queer woman, interacting with the power structures that see her as enemy Other, is one we should all reckon with.

It's not like the world is waiting for us to wake up to injustice on our own. It is ringing alarm bells and sounding klaxons and stories like this one are the easy way to see why waking up to it is so important.