THE LUCKY RED ENVELOPE: A lift-the-flap Lunar New Year Celebration, welcome to the Year of the Fire Horse

THE LUCKY RED ENVELOPE: A lift-the-flap Lunar New Year Celebration
VIKKI ZHANG
Wide Eyed Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: *Winner of the Society of Illustrators' 66th Annual Gold Medal*
Get ready for Lunar New Year, following a little girl and her family as they get ready for and celebrate the Lunar New Year festival.

With non-fiction information about the significance of certain rituals, but told through the excited eyes of a child, this is a book to return to year after year in the run up to the biggest festival in the Chinese calendar.

Each of the 12 spreads will feature 12 lift flaps, 144 in total.

Spreads include:
- See the little girl decorate the house with lucky red decorations
- Tidy the house to welcome in the new year
- Watch a special firework display
- Discover which animal year it will be
- Make festive dumplings with Nainai (grandma)
- Read a story about the zodiac with Yeye (grandpa)
- Watch a lion and dragon dance in the town square
- Make offerings to her ancestors
- And on the very last spread, have a traditional family reunion new year on the eve of Lunar new year and exchange lucky red envelopes.

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

My Review: Absolutely beautiful book! Stunning artwork making the cultural relevance of this ancient seasonal festival the US is finally learning deserves holiday attention.

Which is, of course, very upsetting to high-control people. I will not be surprised if there are opponents to this topic who are quietly working against its addition to library ourchases. Of course, interactive juvenile books don't last all that long...it's far better given as a gift to a lap-reader's lap-owner for an adult mediated experience.

Look at the way it's made:

The production values on this make me slack-jawed at the cover price. This is a complex printing and stamping job! It looks intuitive to me, which means someone designed it very carefully to work as a teaching tool.

What the story in these lovely pages does is illuminate this annual festival's cultural roots, its family-bond reinforcing uses, and its rituals in context.

Family focus is clear throughout the narrative. It's not didactic in its presentation, but sweetly organic as it unfolds the activities and actions the observances include. As a lap-reader's experience is likely to focus on acquiring this kind of information, I'd venture to guess the interactive bits will put it over the attention hump to becoming a favorite.

The Year of the Fire Horse started yesterday, 17 February 2026. It's the first one in sixty years; it has some very interesting connotations in East Asian cultures. I've linked an explainer in The Guardian for you to start learning the significance of the animal-year zodiac and its complementary elements that create each year's unique qualities. Even if you don't believe in zodiacs, the topic is a fascinating one to explore.

Aside from being culturally expanding, it is a beautiful and well-designed object to possess. I recommend it without reservation.

SKYLARK, Author Paula McLain's dual-timelines historical Paris novel

SKYLARK
PAULA McLAIN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife weaves a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below—where a woman’s quest for artistic freedom in 1664 intertwines with a doctor’s dangerous mission during the German occupation in the 1940s, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time.

1664: Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpêtrière asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined.

1939: Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized.

A spellbinding and transportive look at a side of Paris known to very few—the underground city that is a mirror reflection of the glories above—Paula McLain’s unforgettable new novel chronicles two parallel journeys of defiance and rescue that connect in ways both surprising and deeply moving.

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

My Review: Tunnels, underground/out of sight communication, hidden pathways...thematically this is the heart of Author McLain's story. The literal, factual tunnels under Paris start us out on the careful and hazardous reality of being a woman or, later, that other despised minority a Jew...yes, women were a social minority, rendered voiceless and affectless the way minorities always are...so we're going underground to follow them as they fight to survive without being Seen and still being effective actors in society. Spoiler alert: It doesn't go well.

There ya go. That's the story. It took almost five hundred pages of pretty sentences to get there.

They are pretty sentences but honestly, taken out of context they're pretty much meaningless. Describing a sculpture made by a side character, "... a lark with wings unfurled, fashioned from pale limestone with such delicate precision that it seems almost alive," is lovely...but its entire reason for being described is in fact its meaning and that's a gestalt. This is not a criticism of the writing, it's a statement of why I'm not quoting a lot more pretty sentences.

In my opinion reading this really interesting story-idea could have been a lot more fun had the author been less pretty and more concise in her writing. It's a fine way to spend a weekend in the company of two people marginalized for being...unpopular because they're Other...but I don't know that I felt adequately entertained to justify the length of time it all took to come together.

BIANCA'S CURE, fictional reconsideration of a fascinating woman of Renaissance Florence

BIANCA'S CURE
GIGI BERARDI
She Writes Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For fans of Lessons in Chemistry, a based-in-fact novel imagining young Renaissance noblewoman Bianca Capello’s experiences as she pursues a cure for malaria in the Medicis’ Florence.

Florence, 1563. Forbidden from practicing her herbal cures in Venice, the young noblewoman Bianca Capello flees to Florence, where the ruling Medici family practices alchemy. There, she wins herself an invitation to their palace, and, as it turns out, a path to the duke regent Francesco’s bed.

The impassioned bond between Francesco de Medici and Bianca is at the core of this fact-driven dive into medicine, politics, love, and ultimately death in Renaissance Florence. Malaria killed many of the Medicis, but traces of the poison arsenic were recently found in Francesco’s remains. Even more sinister: Bianca’s remains have never been found. To this day, what happened to Bianca and Francesco remains one of the greatest mysteries surrounding Renaissance Italy’s legendary Medicis.

Bianca’s Cure probes what might have been as Bianca’s quest for a malaria cure—in palaces, gardens, sick rooms, and whorehouses—collides with Francesco’s intensifying illness. Her main tool is the herb artemisia—medicine still used today. A woman who dared to practice science well ahead of her time, Bianca fights off self-doubt until she believes herself invincible. But is she? When only she stands between Francesco and death, her skill may save him or doom them both.

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My Review: The impact of culture on a woman's choices about the course her life should take is hard to overstate. Author Berardi pushes that effort to its maximum degree by centering Bianca Cappello, facyually the Grand Duchess consort of Tuscany; and here shown as an early scientist pursuing a cure for malaria.

These things sit oddly together. I'm interested all the more because they're in such immediate, and irresolvable, tension: did Bianca Cappello correctlt identify artemisia as a substance that can bring the scourge of malaria, a killer of huge numbers of humans since the genus Anopheles began spreading it before History began, under control? The trajectory of Bianca's amazing story, from poverty to the arms, heart, and home of the Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany, would be astounding enough. Adding onto it the story of her quest for artemisinin as a malaria treatment adds poignacy to the manner of her, and her husband's, deaths. There is doubt as to the cause of death...malaria or poisoning? Either is likely. Both are possible. Very little poison is needed to send off someone dramatically weakened by the ravages of malaria.

It's a solid, involving set-up for an Italian Renaissance tale of love, of ambition, and of an extraordinarily gifted woman's determination to chart her own course. It is inspiring to read that story set in any time period. I'm glad that it crossed my path. I'm not going to tell you Biance succeeded...her death within a day of her Medici husband's exposes the forces that will array against a woman who tries to become more than her sex has predetermined her upper limit to be. That both she and her husband might have died of poisoning, though without a body to test for arsenic we can never know for sure about her, and her husband had both arsenic and malaria in his body upon modern testing.

The story told here is clearly the result of much learning about the manners, the mores, and the culture we're introduced to. I'm glad the author's note was there at the end to outline the liberties a novelist must take with the facts to build a story that works. I strongly support the message that Author Berardi sends about women needing to involve themselves in the pursuit of knowledge. I liked how clear-sighted Bianca was presented to be. Her goals were, like the men in Renaissance-set fiction, shown to be not only worthy but to be her main focus. I don't think that's at all anachronistic; rather I suspect it's underreported due to filters in place that say woman = mother/wife, not woman = ambitious, intelligent actor on the world stage.

Of course the act of taking any action means making enemies. Bianca's dead first husband's family loathe her and use her as spitefully as they're able; her second husband the Duke has a wife when they meet, who quite understandably hates Bianca for becoming his mistress and bearing him a (bastard) son before she manages a legitimate heir; then when the wife dies and the Grand Duke marries her, Bianca's most spiteful enemy comes to light. Her husband's brother, the Cardinal, despises this "adventuress" who has seduced his brother. He resists her son's legitimation, he tries to prove she's a witch for messing about with herbs, and as he survives her and her husband (most suspicious, that!) he refuses to countenance her burial in the Medici family crypt. This effectively denies us the opportunity to test her bodily remains for traces of poison and, later, for the malarial parasites found in her husband.

It's hard not to see this as more than just a slight on an intimate enemy.

As a novel, the story has wonderful bones. As a story told, it focuses its reader's attention on actions as opposed to emotions. I think that choice keeps us reading away but in the end lets us gloss over a bit the really unplumbed depths of a mother's feelings for her son, and concern for his fate; a loving wife's deeper worries for her husband's fate not only her own struggle to cure him of malaria; in short, the underpinnings of why she does what she does. It's what prevents me from offering the fifth star this story, on its base merits, could easily have earned.

As it is, an enthusiastic four stars for feminist readers an those historical-fiction gobblers who like seeing a new angle on a familiar setting.

SADEQA JOHNSON'S PAGE: KEEPER OF LOST CHILDREN; THE HOUSE OF EVE

KEEPER OF LOST CHILDREN
SADEQA JOHNSON
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The House of Eve, one American woman’s vision in post WWII Germany will tie together three people in an unexpected way.

Lost in the streets and smoldering rubble of Occupied Germany, Ethel Gathers, the proud wife of an American soldier spots a gaggle of mixed-race children following a nun. Desperate to conceive her own family, she feels compelled to follow them to learn their story.

Ozzie Philips volunteers for the army in 1948, eager to break barriers for Black soldiers. Despite his best efforts, he finds the racism he encountered at home in Philadelphia has followed him overseas. He finds solace in the arms of Jelka, a German woman struggling with the lack of resources and even joy in her destroyed country.

In 1965, Sophia Clark discovers she’s been given an opportunity to integrate a prestigious boarding school in Maryland and leave behind her spiteful parents and the grueling demands. In a chance meeting with a fellow classmate, she discovers a secret that upends her world.

Toggling between the lives of these three individuals, Keeper of Lost Children explores how one woman’s vision will change the course of countless lives, and demonstrates that love in its myriad of forms—familial, parental, and forbidden, even love of self—can be transcendent.

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

My Review: On a kernel of fact, Author Sadeqa coaxes a mighty oak of a story about the power of determination and the motivation of compassion. Three characters are entwined in a narrative of prejudice endured, triumphally defeated by love, and made into the beautiful thing that is selfhood.

Ethel Gathers has the most nominitively determinative name ever. I understand why Author Sadeqa chose it in place of the rather blander name of the woman who started the Brown Baby Plan, Mabel Grammer. Of course I, a white child of privilege, did not ever hear of this marvelous plan or its tutelary spirit. Being both about Black folks and established by a woman, that information is not startling. I have never been so heartened by the factual roots of a story! It entwines Ozzie, a "colored" man in the post-WWII US Army who merits and desires a promotion into the Intelligence service only to be stymied because, what else, racism shuts doors nominally opened by executive order; Ethel, as her time in 1951 Germany as an Army wife introduces her to the issue central to the story; and Sophia, a biracial teen in 1965 when we meet her.

No points for sussing out the interconnections among them all.

It's not an advanced storytelling technique that draws on into this read, it's the human connection, the fellowship of people who know anger, feel frustration and loss and sadness, and revel in goodness and rightness triumphing. Our older PoV characters proceed into the future while Sophia is mostly looking into her own past as she works to escape her truly awful upbringing. All three threads come together at a powerfully symbolic and racially charged moment in the 1960s.

It's not coyness that leaves me with lamentably vague language there. As you read along you'll see the interconnections forming. I'm not going to reveal them because they're a very big part of the finale of the story, giving it a lot of its oomph. I hate when reviewers do that but...trust me, you want to take this ride innocent of these facts.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE HOUSE OF EVE
SADEQA JOHNSON
37 Ink/Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: 1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright.

Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC’s elite wealthy Black families, and his parents don’t let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William’s family and grant her the life she’s been searching for. But having a baby—and fitting in—is easier said than done.

With their stories colliding in the most unexpected of ways, Ruby and Eleanor will both make decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives.

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

My Review: Playing the mother card does not earn a story my esteem. The Cult of Mother is, oddly, not the focus of Author Sadeqa's stories...it's about how women, in relation to motherhood, are required to make hard decisions and come to terms with how fathers create mothers but mothers do not create fathers. Many factors haunt Author Sadeqa's mothers in this story of how becoming pregnant is not always, or in all ways, a happy moment for a woman. Leaving aside the permanence of motherhood, the social milieu a child is brought into is almost more important than the love, or lack of it, a mother feels for that child.

In exploring these complexities in a 1950s racist US Author Sadeqa brings struggles and battles to light that can not help but move the reader. It is a sentimental story, it will cause you to well up with tears (or you're a sociopath), it does its romantic-fiction job with verve and gusto. It is not a prose megalith to be held up in future literary seminars, and is not meant to be, but it is effective at its chosen task. It entertains, it informs about the deep emotional ties humans form...willingly or not...to those they might or might not admire.

It's a good read for a dull weekend that will give you a solid satisfying ending for its story.

LAND OF MY FATHERS, West African historical fiction

LAND OF MY FATHERS
VAMBA SHERIF
HopeRoad Publishing
$22.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The proud Republic of Liberia was founded in the 19th century with the triumphant return of the freed slaves from America to Africa.

Once back 'home', however, these Americo-Liberians had to integrate with the resident tribes—who did not want or welcome them. Against a background of French and British colonialists busily carving up Mother Africa, while local tribes were still unashamedly trading in slaves . . . the vulnerable newcomers felt trapped and out of place.

Land of My Fathers plunges us into this world. But in the midst of turmoil, there is friendship. Edward Richard, a man born into slavery and a preacher by profession, is convinced that the future of Liberia lies in bringing peace amongst the tribes. His mission takes him to the far north, where he meets an extraordinary man, Halay. Edward's new and dearest friend is ready to sacrifice his own life to protect his country; for the Liberians believe that with Halay's death, no war will ever threaten their land. A century later, this belief is crushed when war engulfs the land, bearing away with it the descendants of both Edward and Halay. The story of Halay is the untold story of Liberia. What he did would come to stand as symbol of man's ability to defy the odds, to face the inevitable head on.

Where men should have stood shoulder to shoulder, they turned on each other instead.

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My Review: Human beings are vile. They are irredeemable. Sweeping statements, condemnatory and accusatory, all-inclusive, and deeply heartfelt. Want to know why? Read this novel about Liberia's history.

I'd wager big money against most people in the US being able to find Liberia on a map, or identify its flag correctly. This one:

...clearly modeled after the US flag, meant to align the new nation with the US principles of equality and freedom. Well...in a curious way it did. The native inhabitants of the country now called Liberia weren't in any great hurry to welcome these dark-skinned colonizers.

To tell his story as a story, not a sermon, Author Vamba Sherif uses a multigenerational structure tracking the developments of Liberian history. It's pretty much all new to me. I was interested in all the details salted through the story. I was always glad to return to the read. I'm deaccessioning my lovely hardcover but I can't say enough about the beautiful design and quality execution of the hardcover.

The story being told is of the same level of craft. It was deeply involving, it presented the disasters of human history in humane terms, giving the reader people to invest in and then giving those people the fates suffered by many millions like them.

I can't say I feel uplifted by this tale of venality, of carefully fanned hatreds overtaking the weakest of human emotions: Kindness.

I recommend the read to all who need a primer on the West African historical disaster that is Liberia.

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel, look into some meanings of "genius" before leaping to conclusions

EVIL GENIUS: A Novel
CLAIRE OSHETSKY
Ecco
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 17 February 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant novel about a young woman’s quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way

It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be married to Drew, a man who says he loves her. But Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered when a woman she knows is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die—or kill—for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full knowledge that each breath is bringing her closer to her final breath?

Before Celia knows it her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. She’s practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range. She's searching for a love tryst of her very own. She's thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband’s ear. It’s all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.

Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir about obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life for herself.

Claire Oshetsky is also the author of the novels Poor Deer and Chouette, which was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm an Oshetsky fan. Chouette and Poor Deer (review links above) were excellent reads for a lover of storytelling that blends noir and surreal and pieces of stream-of-consciousness. I'm here for the women who, for varying reasons not least including men being obliviously privileged and uniformly clueless, don't get their feet under themselves. Identities are always under construction, never more so than when the identity is most rigidly brandished at the world. Those like "my Drew" as our PoV character, Celia, thinks of her controlling husband, are fragile masks that must constantly be reinforced...at Celia's expense in this case. It's not an uncommon trait, this...I was the raw material from which my mother's controlling abuse drew her rigidity, masked her awfulness from outsiders.

In this tale of obsession, cruelty, and how we create ourselves in response to outside pressures meeting a core of resistance, and how very much pressure that can require. Celia does not seem aware of how deep her well of rage is. Celia, under "my Drew" as lord and master, touches that rage at last...she has the example of her quite spectacularly murdered co-worker to create urgency in her feelings about "my Drew." It is a spiral up, from touching the rage and the hatred in her to dreamimg of murdering him with a nail file to the ear to taking a ride home from an attractive stranger on her commuter train to buying a weapon to taking the initiative to set up a meeting with a man she's never met but deals with on the phone a lot. It's clear the cork's popped on a lifetime of swallowed emotional abuse and neglect and victimization.

And she's only nineteen.

What keeps me Oshetskying every time I can is Celia and her half-siblings who are all Author Claire's brain children. I find new ways to enjoy off-the-beam points of view with each story she writes. Here's Celia in progress: "What Drew didn’t know is that I couldn’t be shamed that way. Not any longer...I would never again let myself be shamed by my body, or its functions, or its urges." Brava, kid! You're only nineteen and light-years ahead of most people's final destinations. It's of a piece with Celia's object of fetishization, the Barbie doll. It requires no huge leap to see how a bizarre doll...collection...stands in for the need to discover safety, and how little actual use it is. How little it takes, a few ounces of plastic molded into a distorted human shape, to buy a sham safety from the very real storms around her, these golems of industrial feminization in their legions pacifying the susceptible intentional victims with their infinite manipulability (plasticity in its original sense.).

Author Claire doesn't say this. That would be rude. Author Claire might be rowdy but she is not rude. Her ability to slit the character envelope with a rapier of witty, unsentimental observation while releasing the evil genius inside Celia to perform the real function of protection is *chef's kiss*. I've seen a few reviews that interpret the title in a more comic-book way, resembling a supervillain; I suppose that's inevitable as this is what most people are familiar with. It is, however, not at all what the story delivers, whereas I see the genius loci in every shred of this story's fabric. Follow the link above after reading Evil Genius to see if you find similar echoes.

It's a rare thing for me to say: I wish I could forget this story entirely so I could read it for the first time all over again. I want to re-meet Doggo. And Celia. (Not Sock Man, though.)

DETOUR: A Novel, first in a proposed series, ends on a cliffhanger

DETOUR: A Novel (Detour #1)
JEFF RAKE and ROB HART
Random House Worlds (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in the first book of this emotional, mind-bending thriller series from the creator of the hit Netflix show Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.

Ryan Crane wasn’t looking for trouble—just a cup of coffee. But when this cop spots a gunman emerging from an unmarked van, he leaps into action and unknowingly saves John Ward, a billionaire with presidential aspirations, from an assassination attempt.

As thanks for Ryan’s quick thinking, Ward offers him the chance of a lifetime: to join a group of lucky civilians chosen to accompany three veteran astronauts on the first manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

A devoted family man, Ryan is reluctant to leave on this two-year expedition, yet with the encouragement of his loving wife—and an exorbitant paycheck guaranteeing lifetime care for their disabled son—he crews up and ventures into a new frontier.

But as the ship is circling Titan, it is rocked by an unexplained series of explosions. The crew works together to get back on course, and they return to Earth as heroes.

When the fanfare dies down, Ryan and his fellow astronauts notice that things are different. Some changes are good, such as lavish upgrades to their homes, but others are more disconcerting. Before the group can connect, mysterious figures start tailing them, and their communications are scrambled.

Separated and suspicious, the crew must uncover the truth and decide how far they’re willing to go to return to their normal lives. Just when their space adventure seemingly ends, it shockingly begins.

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

My Review: I'd never heard of the Netflix show Manifest before I picked up this DRC. I'd never heard of the imprint that publishes it, either, and I'm old enough that imprints matter to me. I track them and their subject-matter focuses so I can ask for DRCs I'm happy to read and review. Surprise! There's an entire LitRPG-inspired publishing world, that now subsumes to old movie novelizations and TV-show expansions. This had escaped my attention until now because I've never played these games. I got hooked on Dark Shadows novels and Doctor Who novels back in the day, but found most Star Trek novels pretty hit-or-miss, and gave up on them. So this rediscovery was pleasant because now I've watched Manifest and really like it. I hasten to add that this novel is reminiscent of the TV show's premise but is not directly related to the show you can see on Netflix.

This story started out with a cool-to-me hook: six random people are lightly trained after being plucked from richly deserved obscurity to travel to Saturn's moon Titan. Terrible, tragic explosions on their craft occur; they're brought safely back to Earth but them isolated from each other very stringently, instructed not to attempt to contact each other or to discuss their experiences.

From here we're in the PoV of the six people separately as they experience...oddness, off-kilter alterations in what their memories of Earth tell them should be present in the world around them. It is unsettling to them. The...can't call them changes, that implies violated continuity, can't call them alterations because that implies known agency...discontinuities in their realty versus their memories of reality are strange, undirected by a moral compass, some make things better some worse yet the people are left with a sense that they're suffering from Capgras Syndrome. I suppose you're already assuming the characters ignore, and circumvent, the orders to stay out of contact with their fellow survivors of the trip. Of course this is the case.

The *real* story here is in the returnees' efforts to provide each other with support, you aren't crazy the world is-level support. It's not a space-sci fi story at all; it's a Sliders-meets-Sliding Doors narrative of roads not taken. This ties in to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the Hindu, and later Buddhist, concept of Indra's net. This is more fun for me as a reader but might very well cause some disappointment for others. Understanding going in that space travel and hard sci-fi are honored more in their absence as igniting events than bases for the continuing action will help you decide if this is the read for you.

As each character has unique struggles to adapt to their individual changed circumstances they're all, as a unit, required to look at the common underlying altered reality of the world they collectively remember. It's this facet of their experience that most recalls the earlier media franchises I reference in tge paragraph above. It creates among these six people, so randomly assorted and so very different in personality, training, and character, a found family with the most powerful ties imaginable. Their shared bedrock assumptions have been whisked out from under them.

It's in this that the authors choose to emphasize the shared nature of their trauma, and its developing coping mechanisms. The six PoVs are not dealt with chapter-by-chapter, which could easily lead to dilution and confusion among the characters, but with chapters that entertain similar attempts to cope by varying constellations of people. There are chat threads, emails, news articles, and other such media insertions into various parts of the narrative. This is a narrative technique as old as Tristram Shandy yet we still act as though this is somehow new and fresh and surprising. It worked beautifully in Stand on Zanzibar nearly sixty years ago. It still works now. Its worldbuilding is useful; the technique of said worldbuilding functions as commentary on both message and medium.

I was happy enough with the characters' varying arcs in this series-starting volume as they reached obviously temporary resolution points in some way. The story overall, of the gestalt formed by our six folks, ends on a cliffhanger. I'm now going to explain why, despite enjoying the read, I'm only giving it three and a half stars. Nowhere is it said that this is the first in a series of stories because publishers know how much many readers hate starting series that are not completed. Ask George RR Martin and Patrick Rothfuss why that might be the case; consult with Adam Christopher's novel publisher as to why amputating series before they conclude might result in blowback. (I want more Ray Electromatic stories!) So instead of learning the right lesson from this and publicly committing to the entire series in advance, greed rules and there's a tiny little detail omitted from the sales bunf in the hopes you will get hooked and buy them all as they come out. This is scummy.

I also detest cliffhangers because there is never a narrative reason for them. Ever. It's purely marketing. So, three and a half stars for those dickhead marketing-driven moves draining a lot of my pleasure in reading this iteration of a story whose bones I very much enjoy seeing fleshed out.