BIG NOBODY, why is smoking back in positive framing?

BIG NOBODY
ALEX KADIS
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 10 March 2026

Rating: ? anywhere from 2, 2.5 to 5...

The Publisher Says: A wickedly funny coming-of-age novel about a misfit teenager in London determined to eliminate the one thing standing between her and a good life: her father

I think it’s safe to say that my father was probably always an abomination of nature.

It’s 1974 in London and Connie Costa’s already pitiful life has gone off the rails. She’s spiraling from the loss of her mother and younger brothers in a tragic accident. And the man responsible is her Dad—otherwise known as “The Fat Murderer.”

Kept at home under his increasingly tyrannical rule, Connie is an outcast who spends her nights conversing with the David Bowie poster on her wall and raiding her stash of whiskey and chocolate. Her only social outlet is the weekly gatherings with her father and their immigrant community of Greek “Freaks.” There she finds her life’s one bright sneaking off with her friend Vas to smoke cigarettes, debate literature, and joke about whether it is finally time to run away together. But when Connie sees an opportunity to get out from under her father’s thumb for good, she must make a perilous decision that will change her forever.

Devastatingly tender and riotously funny, Alex Kadis’ Big Nobody tells a warmhearted story about the rocky path to finding ourselves and the people who keep us afloat.

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My Review: Connie annoyed me from giddy-up to whoa. Being in her stream of consciousness required me to grab my mental reins and pull firmly back onto the path to...wherever it is we're going, Connie and her party of readers.

Greek immigrant culture in the 1970s was very patriarchal, making little room for female autonomy at any age let alone a teenager's urgently desired absence of supervision. After all, her controlling and abusive...we're told...father didn't bother to protect her from pedophilic abuse by her grandfather, so what good is it to her?

And here's where I get tired of the read. All of this emotional heat is Connie's stream of consciousness. I'm an incest survivor myself, so I can relate to the searing rage, hatred, and desire to escape in Connie's narration. I'm not sure the narrative choice to trap me in Connie's head serves the story well, because the casual slaps and the general oppressive misogyny start to feel like Connie being a bit overdramatic. It's not that the abuse did not occur, but that she could simply be so isolated, so without anyone to talk to, that her age-appropriate lack of perspective makes her point of view untrustworthy.

Since we're watching her evolve a plan to murder her father, that feeling is too powerful to ignore for this reader. I know why a teenager who's been victimized in body then re-victimized by being disbelieved about it is this enraged and this obsessed with revenge fantasies. But the voice, the sarcastic nasty voice, wore on me a lot. There's maybe 25% of the book set in 2007, where I'd've expected Connie to have developed a nuanced understanding of the events of the 1970s. Spoiler alert: Nope.

As a read, I'd rate it as pretty poor; as a story, not so much...it's a kind of strident klaxon blaring a message of "PAY ATTENTION! VICTIMS SHOULD BE BELIEVED!" that my own experience demands I support without any reference to my lack of enjoyment in reading this claustrophobic, overheated screech of rage.

So what the hell do I do now? Ask you to read a story whose storytelling was a bad miscalculation in my estimation, because the story being told is that urgently necessary to me?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

WHIDBEY, evoking a planet-scale beauty spot to soothe and smooth the pain of victimhood

WHIDBEY
T. KIRA MADDEN
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 10 March 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning literary achievement and portrait of three women connected through one man in the aftermath of his murder—the explosive and highly anticipated debut novel from beloved and award-winning memoirist, T Kira Madden.

Birdie Chang didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She’s a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend’s eyes—and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who’s now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution, a plan for revenge.

But Birdie isn’t the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There’s also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on Whidbey, she finally cracks the book’s spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin’s loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered.

Calvin’s death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate search for answers. A complex whodunnit told from alternating points of view, Whidbey is searingly perceptive and astonishingly original. Exploring the long reach of violence and our flawed systems of incarceration and rehabilitation, this is a tense and provocative debut that’s sure to incite crucial questions about the pursuit of justice and who has real power over a story: the one who lives it, or the one who tells it?

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My Review: "Be careful what you wish for," taken to apotheosis. Now including "be careful what you say out loud" because you can never know who is listening...what they want from you...what they will do with, and to, the thoughts you leave unguarded in the air.

A paranoid thriller about sexual abuse of girls does not sound like something I, sexually abused by my mother, will find pleasant reading. It wasn't prurient...it stops short of recreating the abuse...and it very properly presents the topic in high relief instead of flattened into caricature.

Abuse is not foregrounded, at least the mechanics were not. Emotional devastation is this story's heart. I'm not exaggerating, unless you're made of stone, this is a deeply sad and often brutal tome. Linzie is my personal most awful victim of abuse because she parades it for attention, for the validating fame her honesty affords her and the materially comfortable living that brings. If that's not sad....

Birdie is mid-process in trauma terms. Her loose lips, her willingness to talk when silence would serve better, isn't like Linzie's garrulous yappin' for the cameras, the ghostwriter, the audience. Birdie doesn't have a plan, a purpose, a canny angle to show and sell. Birdie can't keep the chirps inside. It's a far worse place to be, because it's doing bad things to her belovèd girlfriend Trace.

But every abuser has a mother. How often do we, as a society, stop to think about what it means to a person to see their child in the harsh glow of a perp walk? How much rage and hate can this lone soul transmute into denial? Mary-Beth is the character I wanted to hug, to stand before her with my arms aroud her and just let her cry. Whatever she did, didn't, couldn't, wouldn't do, she is the one whose role in this was the most devastating to me. Then, while expecting her son to come home to her after incarceration and mandated psychotherapy, she hears the words your blood freezes even thinking about: "your child is dead."

Oh. My. GOD.

Parts one and two make the cases. The stakes get set. The pain is explained. No one's an angel but each one's a clear, passionate survivor. Part three's where we hit the top of the loop on the roller coaster and time speeds up as things happen, people talk but the Doppler effect renders them only partly comprehensible, events occur too fast for old-man me to see why they're causally connected to the first bits. The ending...well...it's a first novel, I grade on a curve for those, but...dude. Resolving plot threads should not feel as though you're doing a time-sucking chore you don't really want to do. Whatever the real ending was, and I'm morally certain there was one, it probably took the murky misty part-three energy around the bend.

If Author Madden reads this (ha! don't read reviews, your publicist does that) please take this sentence away, where you should go now, with you: You have an outstanding literary touch, a visual vocabulary most never acquire, and you need to read Mary Renault and Patricia Highsmith novels.

Everyone else: Support debut authors, or we'll never get more work from them. But maybe check this one out of the library.

THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS: A Novel, grief and grieving and loss drown a woman

THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS: A Novel
KIM FU
Zando/Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An eerie, spellbinding novel of grief, ghosts, apocalyptic rain, and slowly splintering reality, from an author who “writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet.” —PEN/Hemingway Award judges’ citation

In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—as Eleanor focused on her career as an online therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house.

Desperate to obey her mother one last time, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the choices she’s made.

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

My Review: When something is too good to be true, it is. Nothing is more guaranteed to blind you to that reality than desperation. Eleanor's mother, Lele, has controlled Eleanor's life to the point of a toxic...but comfortable...dependence on Lele for the mechanics of living. Tedious adulting offloaded onto a partner is seldom a good idea, and when the partner is a parent it is catastrophic. Parents die. it's part of the bargain. Eleanor finds Lele's death more than merely unpleasant, more than simply painful: it's her utter undoing. Lele cooked, laundered, managed Eleanor's world. Her inevitable death, far too early it's true, unmoors Eleanor in every way.

Parents expect their children will grieve on their death but continue to live and to manage themselves as one has taught them to do. Lele has not taught Eleanor anything of note, for complicated reasons no doubt but the effect is now all Eleanor has is last instructions: Buy a house.

Ever bought a house? It is complicated, it is intimidating, it is unnervingly legal and permanent and deepy scary. Eleanor is ludicrously ill-suited to the task on every level. It is no wonder she, deeply immersed in her business life of being a therapist, makes practical mistakes with emotional consequences. She can afford this really cool-sounding house in a stunning natural setting? How? That should be so far out of her reach...what's the catch, where's the trigger, what?? But you need to be savvy to the ways of the world to see that from the off, Author Fu writes this description of the realtor who sells her this place: "His thick hair was slicked back, coiffed high off his forehead. He smiled toothily as she approached. He held his hand out for a shake, and a large watch slid out of his jacket sleeve, the band and bezel the same chrome brightness as his car."

Run, Eleanor, run! But of course she doesn't. So she ends up with the whitest elephant of all white elephants. And the unraveling begins.

It's here where I leave Eleanor and her plight to you to discover. I took the trip to tell you if it was one worth taking, and why. It's a modern take on horror, this dread and unmooredness, this sense of waters so much deeper than you thought fro looking at them, this...unease. Eleanor stands in for us on the cusp of a revolution no one wants, on every front. No matter how much AI slop "They" feed us, people don't care about it; no matter how much doubt "They" fling over reality, summers are hotter and winters weirder and more violent; so there's a constant pressure to mistrust your own sense of Reality and leave everything to "Them" to manage.

It's not going well. For us, for Eleanor, for the planet.

The way the story unfolds is intended to build that...wrongness, unease, unhappiness...into the experience the reader and Eleanor exist inside, to make the boil expand so it will finally pop, them be cleaned out. But by whom? At what cost in pain and unpleasant side effects? Can we, in fact, clean up our own mess?

Not if we, like Eleanor, have no real connection to the way "They" are running reality on our behalf.

It's short enough as a read to be a weekend's focused read. It's intense enough as a narrative to support that kind of sustained attention. It's a deeply satisfying immersion into the slow awakening of a grieving soul to the cost of extending childhood far, far too long. It's hard to be alive in a world beset by challenges too big to make a positive difference in by one's self.

Welcome to adulthood. Go out and do the work, no matter how scary or hard, because the alternative is drowning.

REPETITION, recursion...refashioning...recasting....

REPETITION
VIGDIS HJORTH (tr. Charlotte Barslund)
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Prize-winning novel by one of the foremost writers of her generation, explores the horror and beauty of being sixteen-years-old.

In a Norwegian November, when it is dark at waking and dark at sleeping, a novelist in her sixties sits next to a teenaged girl at the opera, and through their padded jackets feels a dreadfully familiar tension conducted from the parents seated on her far side. She thinks back to her sixteenth year. The year she first got drunk and the year she first had sex with a boy. A year of being circled by an anxious, hawkish mother and, at a notable distance, her silent father.

The year her family made an unspoken decision, and an unspeakable sacrifice.

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

My Review: "Repetition" and "repetitive" have pretty negative connotations in literary discourse. We'll generally reach for "recursion" (the older term by nearly two centuries) and "recursive" to move the affect into a more positive light. Most of this very short read I was leaning towards grousing about repetitive prose making me feel kinda seasick, like Invisible Man always has; I've never managed to finish the read because of it. This being a novella there was no time for me to get really, really tired of it.

Hope is like a new garment—stiff, tight and glittering—but until you try it on, you won't know if it fits or suits you, while memory is like an old garment: no matter how pretty it is, it no longer suits you, you've outgrown it.

Repetition, however, is like a durable garment that hugs you tenderly, but never constricts or swamps you. I was glad that I hoped for nothing, but why then this feeling of dread?

Early on, we're told there will be repetition, and it's the bloody title of the story; I cannot whinge that I was blindsided or misled. As I said in my review of Is Mother Dead?, "'Do I confront my deepest self?' asks Johanna, our narrator, in a passage that honestly sums up the entire experience of reading Author Hjorth's writing," an assessment I equally happily apply to this read.

But that repetitive prose...it was not until the Big Reveal about three-quarters into the read that I realized we were in recursive territory, we were shading there all along, as every iteration of the memories our narrator, a woman of my age, recalls her sixteenth year's events and feelings, alive now to their emotional and practical freight in a way impossible to a sixteen-year-old.

She was suspicious and she had cause to be, but I didn’t know that at the time—though I had an inkling that not everything was as it should be with me—that something lived deep within me, was working away in me, and if it led to confirmation, then what? She was looking for signs of something she simultaneously suspected and feared, desperately hoping not to find anything in order to be reassured and so far she hadn’t found anything, but still she didn’t feel safe, because she didn’t know what she was looking for. She wanted to get rid of her unnerving, intrusive suspicion of what might have happened to me by finding evidence that would prove her suspicion was baseless, but seeing as that was impossible, she sought instead to prevent the potential consequences of what she suspected and feared but didn’t actually want to deal with, from a twisted belief that it was possible to do so by smothering me, by forcing me, by nudging me into acting and behaving like a healthy, normal teenager. Only she didn’t realise that her hysteria and fear ultimately suggested and homed in on the very thing she didn’t want to know.

Knowing what you don't want to know is corrosive. It destroys happiness, safety, even selfhood dissolves in its caustic bath. I should know, it's been my reality since 1982.

I was not primed to feel the shock of this story's revelation, then, but rather to bear witness with the narrator. The very best gift to give her is to be with her on her level, in her time, without drama that draws the focus away from her.

I rewrite and I reproduce like Munch painted several versions of The Scream, I repeat and I vary the repetition, shamelessly, with my heart on my sleeve and suffering inevitable heartburn in order to process and understand and put it behind me or to reinforce the bitterness and excitement inside me, in order to change myself through repeating and varying patterns . . .

Recursion, in other words. That's a word mostly used in math or computer science, occasionally someone trots out Chomsky's no-longest-sentence reasoning; but mostly this word is treated like it's wearing a starched white lab coat and a pocket protector (is my age showing or what?) in my opinion quite unfairly. This story is the most recursive thing I've read this year and proudly so. It's the zoomed-in fractal of trauma. It's the infinite capacity of language to iterate until the reader's eyes bleed. In under 150pp.

Truth is always hard to endure. This novel is truthtelling, degrading and repugnant truths told like it or not. The reason I think you should read it is simple: You can put it down. You can take some time to get your head around it. You can, in a pinch, apply the Pearl Rule.

Unlike life.

Facing truth as it's told is hard and it costs you many hard-to-lose things, like illusions and the warm loving comfort of being lied to. Practice in a novel; think about how the second person works as a narrative device; put your chest in the narrator's poking finger's path.

Imagine if there is no choice afforded you.

Welcome to the ugly side.

THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR, aaarrrgh earworm earworm!!

THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR
WADE ROUSE
MIRA Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this poignant and hilarious story inspired by TV’s beloved The Golden Girls, bestselling author Wade Rouse celebrates love, aging, finding your people, and the art of impeccably timed one-liners.

Theodore Copeland has created a fabulous life in the desert oasis of Palm Springs, where he shares a fabulous pink mid-century home with three fabulous friends: Barry, a former actor still clinging to his youth, his hair, and the memory of the dream role that killed his career; Ron, an uprooted Christian from the Midwest with a big heart but no one to give it to; Sid, who, after coming out late in life, has never found love. Teddy is the caustic, unspoken leader of “The Golden Gays”—the foursome’s monthly drag tribute to The Golden Girls. Despite their foibles and bickering, they have turned their golden years into a golden era.

But the harmony of their desert enclave becomes a carousel of emotional baggage when Teddy’s estranged sister, Trudy, shows up on their doorstep, her dramatic teenage granddaughter in tow. While Teddy keeps Trudy at arm’s length, she manages to wheedle her way into the lives of the Golden Gays, until the real reason for her visit is revealed and the secrets they’ve all been keeping from each other unravel faster than a hastily stitched hemline.

A novel that gives thanks to “old” friends, That's What Friends Are For proves that while family may be the tie that binds, it’s the chosen family that truly keeps us together.

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

My Review: Four older...old, "of a certain age" is such an absurd weasel-wording...gay guys live in Zsa Zsa Gabor's Palm Springs home, in the absence of other places to be as they live out their invisibility, bond to each other the way the Golden Girls did, and perform as a drag troup reenacting episodes of the show.

You need to be charmed by the premise to enjoy the book. I was; I did.

It was more true to the spirit of the show than I expected. In novel form, that meant packing in a lot of trauma recall, a lot of wistful nostalgia, a lot of regrets for pasts "misspent" in all the ways people do that, in not a lot of space. The gestalt of these four charmers is just *chef's kiss* and the repartee flows like Veuve Cliquot from a marabou mule. (Zsa Zsa is, after all, the former owner of their house.)

If no one is currently in development talks for this book it will utterly stun me. Heartstopper for the teens, Heated Rivalry for the horny adults, That's What Friends Are For representing the generation that fought these stupid necessary battles for all y'all that seem to've been erased from the collective memory. *ahem* I meant to say "the seasoned citizens." Of course I did.

Celebrating found family, talking honestly about what life looks like as "The End" hoves into view without crowding you (yet), flexing the wicked-humor muscles developed from years of deflecting nastiness...it's a grown person's happy place, this. Drama arises because humans create drama the same way we breathe—automatically—but it never feels calculated, like Author Rouse said "let me rile these queens up now" while twirling his mustachios. I bought into the dynamics he built, accepted the moments when the men had trouble dealing with things as natural and inevitable. Author Rouse uses the conflicts the way a good therapist urges one to use them: get to know your friend better, get to know yourself better, apply kindness and acceptance like the balm it truly is, and move on.

A big issue in the story is staying stuck. It's a huge issue in almost everyone's life, from what I can tell. It's good to see it addressed openly, with candor, and in such a humorous setting. (I admit I want to bash Barry for chasing his long-past youth. Grow up!!) What Author Rouse has done is deliver a warm-hearted, clear-eyed, just sentimental enough look at the unforgiving terminal illness of Getting Old, in a relatable and enjoyable visible way denied to queer folk by our heteronormative culture.

Kudos! More soon? Please?

THE BEGINNING COMES AFTER THE END: Notes on a World of Change, essays about the one true constant

THE BEGINNING COMES AFTER THE END: Notes on a World of Change
REBECCA SOLNIT
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling survey of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. She argues that, despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, and the nature of that change is determined by who participates and how.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation has happened in so many disparate arenas, and within a longer arc of history, the scale of that change is seldom recognized.

While the backlash of white nationalist authoritarianism, Manosphere misogyny, and justifications for callousness, selfishness, economic inequality, and environmental destruction collectively drive individualism and isolation, the elements of this new world are related in their vision of more inclusion, equality, interconnection. This new vision embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, and indigenous and non-Western ideas, particularly Buddhism, as well as breakthroughs in the life sciences and neuroscience, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

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

My Review: Collections often draw from existing bodies of work. Author Solnit began drawing acclaim for her robust, tendentious writing in the early Aughts, and has never fallen out of the cultural conversation. She won't stop telling the truth, though, so her honesty wins her detractors and even enemies across the political spectrum.

One knows a thinker is doing it right when everybody is mad at them for something.

This essay collection breaks no new ground in her public thinking. It is, if I'm honest, a highlight reel with a bit more sameness than I wanted to read. It is also a collection drawn from decades of work. I found myself thinking, "I remember this, move on," and finding it necessary to recall in the moment that it's collected not commissioned to be written anew or afresh. Not every essay chosen was necessarily up to the highest standards in the book. Again, it's a function of a collection...it's not possible to be perfect, but it's possible, like Author Solnit, to be trenchant and to add value to the consideration of organizing theme of this particular project.

Progress is relative. In any consideration of the societal norms prevailing now that has even a modest degree of perspective, things are hugely better for women, queers, trans folk, and people of color. We're always being bombarded with messaging to the contrary, for reasons y'all need to read Paul Linebarger's book to really connect with. A collection of work like this one is a good corrective to the easy-to-internalize message of the world sucks always has always will. It's true; it's also wrong; both these things can and do coexist because, faithless to your entire life's training, almost nothing in the observable universe is a binary. All physical systems are spectrums and there's mounting evidence literally everything is in fact spectrum...look into quantum physics and certainty vanishes to be replaced by probabilities (aka spectra). Author Solnit stressing that each ending is also a beginning is very much in line with this mode of thinking.

It's new enough to most of her audience that repetition is probably a good idea to deploy in examining the topic. Like any new-to-you theory, perspective, or fact, it's going to need some hammering home to become part of one's mental structural supports. I'm ahead of this curve so it wore on my nerve a bit more than it will for others. I hope you'll pick it up and give it a try if you're sinking under the wight of the world's idiocies and evils.

We need the perspective of one who has been decades in the trenches, struggling against the dying order's loud and lousy distractions, to remind us we've come far. We need to keep moving ahead. It's easier to find the will to do that if we've got a stedy hand and an encouraging voice like Author solnit's telling us to remember it can be done.

Because it has been done. It's not finished, this work; it never really is. Now, get back to it!

THE QUICKSAND THEATRE COMPANY, an entry in the loose Eidolonia series

THE QUICKSAND THEATRE COMPANY (Eidolonia series)
MOLLY RINGLE
Central Avenue Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A runaway witch, a cursed actor, and a magical theatre troupe full of sequins and secrets—this cozy, queer fantasy takes the stage with romance, rebellion, and fae-fueled drama.

When Vai Delvecchio leaves their home in the night, fleeing a family scandal, they knock on the door of the least likely but most alluring of sanctuaries: the traveling Quicksand Theatre Company. Actor Leo Takahashi—a.k.a. Leonidas the Obstreperous—grants Vai a bed in his caravan in exchange for Vai’s magical assistance in theatrical productions. Vai finds their respectable, dignified life transformed into a whimsical world of sequins, makeup, and irreverent comedy sketches.

In the caravan’s close quarters, it’s inevitable that Leo and Vai grow curious about each other, a feeling that blossoms into mutual desire. But trouble waits in the wings. Vai has to face the fallout of their family’s mistakes, and Leo guards a somber secret: soon, an unbreakable deal he made with a malevolent faery will take effect, destroying his freedom and potentially his life.

Yet it may be in the darkest lairs of the fae realm, and in the painful longing of separation, that Vai and Leo each find the truth that makes them whole again.

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

My Review: Nonbinary magic-practicing person in an ocean of really hot water falls for queer performer guy with a *major* secret that keeps him from showing how reciprocal their interest in him is. Set, as so many stories seem to be, in a theater company, a world of playacting, dissembling, and self-invention, it takes its time getting Vai the enby character and Leo our queer hero together.

Too long. It's dragged out to explore the world, the fae's roles in human events, Vai's terrible choices vis-à-vis their family, Leo's errrmmm, uhhh, equally terrible decisions of a very different sort. It's a found-family narrative that one spends the entire read dreading the end of because every single one of the Quicksand Theatre Company's participants very, very badly needs the protection as well as the support of the whole company.

It's hard to relax, honestly, with the Sword of Damocles hanging by a fraying strand from a horse-hair wig. It was a good narrative choice, in other words; but it went on that small fraction too long and wore out my readerly patience. I was quite happy pnce the pace picked up in about the last third of the narrative. I was reading the last 10% at two in the morning; exhausted when I got up, was pretty pleased with the resolution presented.

I'm told this story shares a storyverse with other tales by the author. I never felt that level of mildly bewildered exclusion. I intend this as a compliment. Too often the shared background of a series obtrudes with major points feeling obscure if one is not already acquainted with the rest of the world that's already built. I didn't feel that reading this story...yes, I could tell some characters must've been from somewhere else by their introduction or the responses to them, but what they did in the moment was complete and logical in the context of *this* story. It's a tough feat, and Author Ringle pulls it off.

Normalizing all facets of queerdom earns the book its fractional fifth star. I was utterly gruntled as I ran into characters from everywhere on my peoples' spectrum; this is something I will always round up on the curve for. I couldn't offer a full fifth star because "fae" is a four-letter word in my vocabulary and rhymes in my mind with "feh."

I ain't helpin' y'all with that one, do your own research. My word was this fun. I'm so very happy I got to read it!