THE DISAPPOINTMENT, debut novel of queer loving and grieving and connecting

THE DISAPPOINTMENT
SCOTT BROKER
Catapult (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set during a doom-fated vacation to the Oregon coast, The Disappointment follows a couple trying to hold close to one another while a bent reality—warped by personal losses and an ever-increasing drift toward the surreal—threatens to unravel them

It’s the night before a much-needed vacation, and Jack—a former playwright mourning his failed career—catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother’s urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren’t the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother’s remains everywhere since her death, and he isn’t ready to let go now.

Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly-dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbors, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy’s marriage—to say nothing of their hold on reality.

Told with sly, irreverent humor, and shot through with dark currents of envy and longing for something other than what one has, The Disappointment explores the mutual exhilaration and terror of being placed center stage in one’'s own life.

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My Review: Why do we accept the cultural pressure to seek only peak experiences? Why accept that added burden on mere humans who are not capable of providing The Pinnacle all the time? Even most of the time. Often any of the time. But they're what we got, they're flawed and imperfect and a lot of trouble.

And so, being human, are we.

Among the smartest things my stepmother ever said to me was "romance is sweet and fun, but relationships are about farts and morning breath." Yuh-huh. If somene's not farting or blowing morning breath at you, they're dying. And I don't mean metaphorically.

Longing for perfection is a curse that takes us out of the tangible and plentiful joys of the moments of our lives. I'm a little salty about the chatbot illusion of intelligence and emotional personhood because it's a complete and utter lie. It reinforces the same thing Jack and Randy are battling in this story. They plan a "getaway" from their lives, a chance to decompress and reconnect with themselves and each other...but that assumes they're not connected and not always compressed, a fallacy that modern culture just *loooves* to sell you.

Verb selected very much advisedly.

It's discovering that feat of misdirection and manipulation that I found in the core of this read. Jack and Randy have bought the cultural crap. They're drifting apart because they've fallen for the illusion and can't find each other in the haze of it. Their griefs...Randy's mother's death, Jack's sense of himself as a failure...aren't the kind you can choose not to process. What The Disappointment does is set the stage for a wacky road trip to nowhere, delivers just that, and has its men lead us into themselves...without miring us in Interiority, in Reflection, in Contemplation. All those are terrific when those emotional registers are the ones you're in the mood for. That was not me at the moment I read this story. As a result I battened on the absurdism of these two in their shared moment of crises (plural deliberate, as is the separateness it implies) being enacted before me. Author Broker invokes Samuel Beckett in the text, appropriate as Jack is mourning his failed life as a playwright and who else would he invoke without lèse-majesté; he's making you think in absurd, if not surreal, terms as love molds itself around their griefs.

Because they share a grief: "My skin hugs closer to my bones, then shivers like a sheet of aluminum when he speaks," can not be spoken of someone one does not have a powerful connection to. Even when the World is doing its usual indifferent thing, even when you're gripped by desire (for someone else), even when you're wild with jealousy over trifles, this kind of connection isn't escapable. You can choose to sever it in practice but it survives, it mutates into...I don't know the word, is there one for a state of interconnection deeper than friendship but tinged with the sadness of dead lust?

Randy and Jack are looking into that nameless abyss. It's led them to a flowering of sexual awareness of each other. Is that going to last? (Scruff might play a big role in this.) I don't think I've read a more surprising, more enlivening, more vigorously honestly grounded, story of the insanely complex world of long-term couplehood.

What I loved was tinged with a little sense of déja-vu, as a lot of the story is assembled from the stuff of life. It can't be avoided and remain an honest tale of how we navigate life. The very end of the book is an "incantation with no resolve"—a resolutionless invitation to go on when you can't go on.

I'll go on.

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS, good YA treatment of grief's realities

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS
SUSIE NADLER
Dutton Books for Young Readers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 3 March 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous debut about friendship, grief, and new beginnings set in near-future San Francisco in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake and on the cusp of the first human mission to Mars.

Celeste Muldoon is alone when the Big One finally hits, because, for the first time ever, her best friend stood her up after school. Nicky and Celeste share a birthday, matching tattoos, an obsession with the upcoming Mars mission, and pretty much everything else. So why did he ghost her on the day she needed him most?

As the quake’s death toll rises and days pass, Nicky and Celeste’s parents fear the worst. But Celeste doesn’t buy it. He couldn’t be dead. Nicky’d spent their senior year selling essays to rich kids and was about to get caught. He’d told Celeste about his plan to vanish, to reinvent himself and escape the disaster he’d created. The quake would be perfect cover.

But she can’t convince anyone that he could still be alive. Only Meo, a mysterious stranger who was somehow mixed up with Nicky, seems to believe, but Celeste has every reason to distrust him—even if her heart races whenever Meo shows up.

When Celeste finds Nicky’s notebook, it sends her and Meo on a quest across the broken city, up the coast through towns sheltering quake refugees, and eventually all the way to Florida, where the mission to Mars is about to lift off.

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My Review: Celeste is a spoiled, solipsistic brat, the kind of kid my mother called a typical teenager...utterly sure she is the center, the reason, the ultimate source of others' feelings and actions. How dreary, right parents? Here we go again.

Only partially true. We do spend a bit more time with Celeste taking a widespread tragedy more personally than is ever justified. What drags Celeste into the larger world of adulthood is her determination to make the world give her a reason that she has to experience the horror that is loss and grief. There is, in other words, hope for her yet.

That's the adult reward for reading the story. I put on my YA hat for the rest of the review.

Structurally it's a quest novel that follows the hero's journey, so it taps into the pull this story always exerts. Celeste is shown as the hero to some advantage because she has strong self-confidence, and learns through adversity to trust that she is able and willing to make her own way. She learns, again through adversity, that acting out her negative feelings about others is a losing game. Her spirit-guide, Nicky, is not explored in depth; he is a ghost of some power, whose interactions with Celeste read to me as fantasy but could easily be interpreted as "from beyond" by less jaded readers. Meo, in the here and now, is uninteresting to me; he serves Celeste's desires and offers her companionship on terms that solidify her understanding of boundaries.

I'd like to shoutout the prose, in particular the resonance of the phrasemaking that permeates the story. There's a smart kid out there who will twig to how this style is chosen to do a specific emotional thing that isn't overbearingly, ham-handedly guiding you to Feel This Now. (Spoiler Stasi look away: Keep the first line in your head while reading the end.)

I would give this to an ordinary fifteen-year-old without hesitation. Not really so comfortable to hand to younger people than that, the independence and boundary-setting are just a bit more...mature...than their social development. But for that grand or nibling just getting to the "I want I yearn I long for" age, it can offer some guidance on that journey. It's always best to do this teaching by storytelling.

PICKY: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History, Dr. Spock has a LOT to answer for

PICKY: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History
HELEN ZOE VEIT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An eye-opening investigation into why American kids no longer eat broadly and with gusto

Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans saw children as joyful omnivores who were naturally curious and eager to eat. Of course, this doesn't make sense today. Don't kids have special taste buds? Aren't they highly sensitive to food's texture and color? Aren’t children incapable of liking “adult foods,” and don’t parents risk harming kids psychologically by urging them to eat?

But Americans in the past didn’t think any of those things. They assumed that children could enjoy the same foods as adults, and children almost always did. They loved spicy relishes, vinegary pickles, and bitter greens. They spent their allowances on raw oysters and looked forward to their daily coffee. So how did modern kids become such incredibly narrow eaters? The story is fascinating – and about much more than rising abundance. Picky shows how fussy eating came to define "children’s food" and reshape American diets at large. Maybe most importantly, it explains how we can still use the tools that parents used in the past to raise happy, healthy, wildly un-picky kids today.

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My Review: I wasn't a picky eater because I was raised by parents who loved food. I'm so grateful to them for the lesson they each taught: "try it, if you don't like it you don't have to finish it."

I'm also old. This message was more common among the Depression-era denizens who raised me than postwar-boom kids who raised the picky eaters we're discussing in this book.

As "experts" got hold of the conversation around food (author's scare quotes), the wheels came off. We know from decades of research findings being reported and then challenged, the "experts" (remember, not my scare quotes!) have been tarred by the backlash that keeps growing against expertise in general. It feels kind of justified to me, in this case, because there are no real reasons that the advice the "experts" gave should have been heeded as none of them made any sense at all. But, well, expertise needs to be respected. It's the world now that does NOT respect expertise that's in terrible trouble.

Author Veit has researched the question "is a generation of US-born kids pickier in their food choices than earlier generations?" and presented findings and posited reasons for the findings. It is a fascinating topic. The sources are broad-based and wide-ranging; cited in line which I appreciate; and to the extent I randomly sampled credible. What they aren't, and what the book itself isn't, is prescriptive. Nowhere in the text is there a solution to a problem identified. It was not promised, it was not suggested in the research sources to be intended; I bring it up because I don't want to give the impression there is anywhere anything about addressing the behavior being studied.

I get the impression that the title led previous readers down that garden path. Don't be one of them! I'm interested in the subject of picky eating because it seems so absurd to allow it. I was glad to read Author Veit's study because I feel much less...superior...about the realities of the issue. I think there's a lot of value in this lens on our present social moment's roots and results. I felt there was genuine curiosity, a real "I need to know" on the author's part, and I resonated with that feeling. It gave me a four-star reading experience. I was impressed with her research, her cogitations on the research, and convinced by her conclusions based on them. I was perhaps less drawn in than I might have been by the shifts I felt between the presentation of her digests of research and the chattier tone of her presentation of her conclusions drawn from it...this was more like feeling some charming cocktail-party acquaintance was suddenly taking me into the lecture hall.

Entirely irrelevant to the value I received from the read. It was a factor that impacted me on a reading-pleasure level alone. You might feel entirely differently. I hope you will get the book to find out for yourself.

RISE AND RESIST: How to Reclaim Workplace Equity and Justice, resistance needs many fronts to be effective

RISE AND RESIST: How to Reclaim Workplace Equity and Justice
JANICE GASSAM ASARE, PhD
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 all editions, preorder now for delivery on 24 February 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This powerful guide draws on strategies from Black resistance movements and merges historical wisdom with modern technology to combat the DEI backlash and build sustainable workplace equity in today’s hostile climate.

As the unprecedented backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion intensifies—with corporations dismantling initiatives, lawmakers passing anti-DEI legislation, and post–George Floyd promises abandoned—this tactical handbook arms advocates with revolutionary resistance strategies drawn from Black historical movements.

Dr. Janice Gassam Asare transforms centuries of Black resistance wisdom—from Underground Railroad networks to civil rights organizing tactics—into modern resistance plans, wielding ethical AI as a force multiplier to create sustainable change that outlasts corporate whims and political cycles.

Each chapter grounds modern workplace tactics in revolutionary approaches of more than twenty prominent Black historical figures, including the following:

Ida B. Wells—Documentation techniques for workplace injustice inspired by her work
Ella Baker and Fred Hampton—Coalition-building methods from the American civil rights movement
Toni Morrison and Angela Davis—Narrative control strategies drawn from their celebrated writing

Whether you’re a DEI practitioner navigating corporate pushback, an employee experiencing equity rollbacks, or a leader committed to sustainable inclusion, this handbook provides battle-tested strategies for preserving workplace equity—even in hostile environments.

This isn’t just about surviving the backlash. It’s about reimagining workplaces where everyone thrives.

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

My Review: A hybrid how-to, why-to, and pep talk by an organzational psychology graduate with a track record:

Dr. Janice Gassam Asare is a journalist, speaker, trainer, consultant, and podcaster whose Forbes articles have garnered over 9 million views. Her writing appears in Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, and Fast Company, and she reaches over 170,000 followers across social platforms. A LinkedIn Top Voice in Racial Equity, Dr. Asare creates courses for LinkedIn Learning and Udemy Business. She holds a doctorate in applied organizational psychology and previously served as an assistant professor of management at Sacred Heart University before focusing on her consultancy. She delivers approximately fifty speaking and training engagements annually, helping organizations create more equitable workplaces.

This is her bio from the publisher.

By bringing together the tried-and-true techniques of past Black resistance and inclusion heroes in one book, Author Janice Gassam Asare taps into the most important asset in her field's arsenal: direct experience of success. As a field of psychological practice, organizational psychology has been evolving since its creation in the 1880s from industrial-worker adjustments...research that centered interest by management in reduction of expensive turnover hiring, problematic labor relations, etc., to the current efforts centering the needs of workers to experience their workplaces as safe, fair places where baseline survival is no longer the main focus of employment.

No wonder capitalists hate it.

Focusing on resistance to abusive practices involves learning what you need to know about behaviors, about what organizations will require in the way of proof of claimed harm, and why your voice should be raised in self-defense.

It's a solid, compact, effective read for anyone concerned about the way a workplace can...and should...function to better all within it.

I TOLD YOU SO!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right, organizations always protect orthodoxy

I TOLD YOU SO!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right
MATT KAPLAN
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An energetic and impassioned work of popular science about scientists who have had to fight for their revolutionary ideas to be accepted—from Darwin to Pasteur to modern day Nobel Prize winners.

For two decades, Matt Kaplan has covered science for the Economist. He’s seen breakthroughs often occur in spite of, rather than because of, the behavior of the research community, and how support can be withheld for those who don’t conform or have the right connections. In this passionately argued and entertaining book, Kaplan narrates the history of the 19th century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who realized that Childbed fever—a devastating infection that only struck women who had recently given birth—was spread by doctors not washing their hands. Semmelweis was met with overwhelming hostility by those offended at the notion that doctors were at fault, and is a prime example of how the scientific community often fights new ideas, even when the facts are staring them in the face.

In entertaining prose, Kaplan reveals scientific cases past and present to make his case. Some are familiar, like Galileo being threatened with torture and Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó being fired when on the brink of discovering how to wield mRNA–a finding that proved pivotal for the creation of the Covid-19 vaccine. Others less so, like researchers silenced for raising safety concerns about new drugs, and biologists ridiculed for revealing major flaws in the way rodent research is conducted. Kaplan shows how the scientific community can work faster and better by making reasonably small changes to the forces that shape it.

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

My Review: I'm not often surprised by the organization of non-fiction, at least not in a positive way. In the case of this book, I expected it to be split into chapters, perhaps chronologically presented, by the scientist under discussion. Instead I got a very effective, more fluidly narrative, organization by...umm...style of heresy, shall we say.

Because that's really what this book traces. Heresy, thank you Wikipedia, is "any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, particularly the accepted beliefs or religious law of a religious organization." Any organized field of study with a governing body, a code of ethics, and professional credentialing requirements from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) to the American Medical Association (AMA) has orthodoxies, has institutional biases, has entrenched powers in the field that do not welcome viewpoints or research findings or demonstrations that question or...horripilation!...disprove their beliefs. It's human nature.

Yet there will always be the mavericks who try to do exactly that. The professional trouble they face is in direct proportion to their success in the challenge. Often they're treated as whistleblowers. It is an ugly truth of human nature that the powerful protect themselves before all other considerations, and science is a human endeavor that attracts lots of money so it behaves this way in spades.

It's more notable in the sciences because they each and all depend for their existence, let alone progress, on the people who live out the Asimov-attributed quote: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny…” (though the attribution seems to be spurious)".

I myownself am most personally impacted by the work done by maverick genius Katalin Karikó (featured in this book), whose mRNA discoveries led to the creation of COVID vaccines of enormous effectiveness. I live among smokers, old people, and the enfeebled. I got COVID several times, and unlike over fifty of the people in my facility who died, was never even hospitalized. I was miserably sick once, mildly ill once, and would never have known it was more than a mild cold twice had I not taken a home test which would never have existed before her work made it conceivable). You better believe I get my flu and COVID vaccines annually, and they would not have existed had a heretical voice in medical research not refused to be silenced.

Read this fascinating work celebrating the contrarians, the heretics, the whistleblowers who disrupt the cozy, never-change, "shut up and calculate" hierarchies inherent in institutional science. (And all other fields, of course.) Read it because you benefit from their work; read it because they're interesting people; read it because your culture would not *exist* without them.

But read it mostly because it's really very good. It's a job of writing that, on its own merits, I'd give four and a half stars to; the extra half-star is my acknowledgement of how very, very urgently we need mavericks and contrarians when we are facing multiple existential challenges and crises that science has both created and is uniquely able to solve...only not with the orthodox thinking that got us here.

Preorders are being taken. Ask your library to get copies. But pay attention to message and delivery!

February 2026's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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The Storm by Rachel Hawkins

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: St. Medard's Bay, Alabama is famous for three things: the deadly hurricanes that regularly sweep into town, the Rosalie Inn, a century-old hotel that's survived every one of those storms, and Lo Bailey, the local girl infamously accused of the murder of her lover, political scion Landon Fitzroy, during Hurricane Marie in 1984.

When Geneva Corliss, the current owner of the Rosalie Inn, hears a writer is coming to town to research the crime that put St. Medard's Bay on the map, she's less interested in solving a whodunnit than in how a successful true crime book might help the struggling inn's bottom line. But to her surprise, August Fletcher doesn't come to St. Medard's Bay alone. With him is none other than Lo Bailey herself. Lo says she's returned to her hometown to clear her name once and for all, but the closer Geneva gets to both Lo and August, the more she wonders if Lo is actually back to settle old scores.

As the summer heats up and another monster storm begins twisting its way towards St. Medard's Bay, Geneva learns that some people can be just as destructive—and as deadly—as any hurricane, and that the truth of what happened to Landon Fitzroy may not be the only secret Lo is keeping...

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

My Review: Locked-room historical mystery being revisited by one of the participants in the events set in the present. The expected beats are all hit; the pace isn't consistently maintained, but the storm plot spine makes up for it by delivering excitement; the characters are pretty much who the genre demands they be.

You know Hawkins by now, so you'll make your decision based on her reputation, and this book is a solid, fun-to-read iteration of a Rachel Hawkins novel.

St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $14.99 for an ebook. Perfect if you're in the target audience.

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99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them by Ashely Alker

Rating: 3.5* of five, for absence of footnotes and endnotes and a bibliography

The Publisher Says: An illuminating, hilarious, and practical guide to 99 of the most terrifying ways to die and how to avoid them from an emergency medicine doctor.

Dr. Ashely Alker is a self-described death-escapologist—or, in more familiar terms, an emergency medicine doctor. She has seen it all, from flesh-eating bacteria to the work of a serial killer to the more mundane but no less deadly, and her work keeping people from dying (or being unable to) has uniquely prepared her to write this book.

99 Ways to Die And How to Avoid Them is an illuminating, darkly funny, and practical guide to 99 of the most terrifying ways to die and how to avoid them. Dr. Alker manages to scare readers while making them laugh, preparing them for a wide range of deadly situations and conditions. Each chapter includes stories of her patients pertaining to the chapter’s subject, as well as her related experiences in life and medicine. Sections include categories on sex, poison, drugs, biological warfare, disease, animals, crime, the elements and much more.

An Anthony Bourdain-style greatest hits tour of death, 99 Ways is entertaining while it informs. Quirky yet commercial, it will appeal to fans of everything from The Vagina Bible to Stiff to What If?, as well as the large audience of readers of bestselling medical books like How Not to Die.

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My Review: A book of disasters that befall us in our millions, with predictable risks of being involved in each; yet we continue to behave as though they're rare, freakish happenings. Dr. Alker disabuses the reader of this fallacy with facts and humor, gallows/dark of tone a lot of the time, fun and wry all the time.

If you're not inspired to take some commonsensical risk mitigation steps after reading Dr. Alker's book, it's on you when your family gathers at your dirtnap resting place before you're 80.

St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks for $15.99 to get the ebook onto your reading device.

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Moonlight Can Be Deadly (A Discount Detective Mystery #4) by Charlotte Stuart

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In Moonlight Can Be Deadly, Cameron’s family has a fascination with the gruesome details of the death which occurred at a midnight sacrificial ritual, but are torn about the tactics by the ecofeminist group, despite their support of the group's mission.

When Cameron attends a climate change rally with her colleague, Yuri, they bring along her children. Unfortunately, when Cameron leaves Yuri and her kids to try to get her client’s niece out of harm’s way, she gets caught up in a mass arrest after an explosion occurs. Cameron and Yuri interview a number of suspects, including a handsome professor who Cameron decides is “dateworthy,” but she is alone when she confronts the person responsible for not one but two deaths.

Instinct and training kick in at the last minute to prevent her from becoming the murderer’s third victim.

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

My Review: Not the place to start this series. I realize publishers hate it when you don't spread the lie that any series can work as a series of standalones, but there's just too much I could not immediately grasp in this story for me to agree you could start here without issues. Issues abounded.

I really enjoyed the humor. I might like Yuri if I'd met him properly. I'd like to be in on the joke, however, that authors establish in the first series stories they write.

Walrus Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks you to fork out $16.95 for a paperback. I wouldn't start here but I think series-mystery fans might not regret starting the series with #1, Survival Can Be Deadly.

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Good Intentions by Marisa Walz

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A deft and immersive psychological suspense debut about a luxury party planner who becomes obsessed with a woman she encounters in a hospital waiting room.

Cady has worked hard to have a good life. She has a thriving luxury event-planning business, the man she’s loved since she was seventeen, and a social calendar she can barely keep up with. She also has Dana, her identical twin, her beyond best friend, her most trusted confidante. When Cady gets a call that Dana has been in a serious accident and arrives moments too late to say goodbye, her world falls apart.

But to Cady’s family’s growing concern and confusion, it’s not Dana’s death that consumes her. It’s Morgan, a grieving mother Cady encountered in the hospital waiting room, the day her sister died. It can’t be a coincidence, that they both experienced tragedy at the same moment, in the same place—Cady doesn't believe in coincidences. Instead, she is convinced that she must help this stranger overcome her tragedy, in order to come to terms with her own.

Or...is there more to it? Is it possible that Cady wants something else from Morgan? Something she can’t even admit to herself?

Slyly twisted and deeply provocative, Good Intentions captures the moral ambiguity that can arise in the face of impossible choices. Like the aftermath of a car accident—and against your better judgment—you won't be able to look away.

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

My Review: I didn't look away. I thought seriously about it; there's a lot of really mid-level prose telling an unsurprising story with predictable twists. As a psychological thriller it falls short of top-tier execution.

It's perfectly fine as an afternoon's distraction.

St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requests $14.99 for an ebook, available now.

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Black River by Nilanjana S. Roy

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the village of Teetarpur, a few hours from the capital city of Delhi, Chand’s peaceful life is shattered as he is forced into a dangerous quest for justice.

At the station house, the jurisdiction of which extends to Teetarpur and the neighbouring villages, Sub-inspector Ombir Singh, who has known Chand’s daughter Munia since she was born, wrestles with his conscience and the vagaries of his personal life as the increasingly murky case unfolds under the watchful eyes of the ‘Delhi boy’, SSP Pilania.

Meanwhile, in the rough bylanes of Bright Dairy Colony, Chand’s old companions Rabia and Badshah Miyan fight for their right to home and country as the politics of religion threaten to overwhelm their lives. Framed as a police procedural, Black River is fast-paced and relentless, yet tender and reflective, in its exploration of friendship, love and grief.

"A riveting murder mystery. A psychological thriller. A magnificent work of literary fiction. Roy brings her formidable experience as a journalist to this story of crime in modern India. Black River addresses a society unravelling in the midst of change, a brutal class divide, the terror of religious strife, relentless violence against women—but it is also suffused with tenderness for the ordinary, heroic decency of those who persist in abiding by different rules.— Kiran Desai"

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

My Review: Morally grey story of serious consequences for women in an unquestioningly patriarchal system. It's not a thriller but a literary procedural, with heavy noir overtones in its violence. Be prepared for the action to stop like a local train for you to pick up backstory on the character just introduced.

While I felt the pacing really could've used tightening, I understand why we got the backstory we did. I was always glad to pick the book back up, and finished it with the feeling I'd been to this village.

Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks you for $12.99 to add the ebook to your library, which I certainly hope you will.

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Murder Will Out: a mystery by Jennifer K. Breedlove

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award winner Jennifer K. Breedlove brings coastal Maine to life in Murder Will Out, a lighter, modern gothic mystery that's as atmospheric as it is heart-warming.

Come for the memories. Stay for the murder...

Little North Island, off the coast of Maine, is so beautiful it could be a postcard. Organist Willow Stone cherishes her memories of childhood summers spent on the island with her godmother Sue... even though her visits ended abruptly, and she hasn't seen or heard from her godmother in over fifteen years. Until a letter from Sue—and word of Sue’s death—brings Willow back to the picturesque island.

The islanders rarely mention Sue without also bringing up Cameron House, and the controversy around Sue’s unexpected inheritance of the sprawling mansion. When Willow overhears someone threatening the next heir to the property, she starts to question whether Sue’s death was really an accident, and can’t help but wonder whether someone on this sleepy island is willing to stop at nothing—even murder—to claim Cameron House for their own.

Through Willow’s eyes, as well as those of others on the island, a mystery unfolds that keeps drawing Willow back to Cameron House and the very real ghosts that walk its corridors.

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

My Review: Ghosts plus forced-feeling familial relationships times genealogical puzzles that don't add up equals the debut novel of a very promising writer. Just not quite there yet because the elements don't fit together as seamlessly as I'd need them to do to whole-heartedly recommend buying one.

Debut authors need support. I hope those who love genealogy stories, who aren't unhappy with paranormal tinges to them, and who like found/made family fiction will take note.

Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) needs a transfer of $14.99 before you're legally allowed to read the story. Check it out of the library, it still supports the debut author.

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The Bird Hotel: A Novel by Joyce Maynard

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Enter the magical world of La Llorona with New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard.

After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, finds herself in a small Central American village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano.

The Bird Hotel tells the story of this young American who, after suffering tragedy, restores and runs La Llorona. Along the way we meet a rich assortment of characters who live in the village or come to stay at the hotel. With a mystery at its center and filled with warmth, drama, romance, humor, pop culture, and a little magical realism, The Bird Hotel has all the hallmarks of a Joyce Maynard novel that have made her a leading voice of her generation.

The Bird Hotel is a big, sweeping story spanning four decades, offering lyricism as well as whimsy. While the world New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard brings to life on the page is rendered from her imagination, it’s one informed by the more than twenty years of which she has spent a significant amount of her time in a small Mayan indigenous village in Guatemala.

As the New York Times said, "[Maynard] has an unswerving eye, a sharply perked ear, and the ability to keep her readers hanging on her words." People Magazine said of her: "Maynard’s spare prose packs a rich emotional punch.”

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

My Review: It's not magical realism when there's no logic to the logical lacunae in these linked microstories. Irene's not quite innocent of white-saviorism vis-à-vis the Maya people she deals with. Lovely sentences, though.

I'd check it out of the library as opposed to buying one.

Arcade Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requests and requires you to stand and deliver $19.99 for paperback or ebook editions.

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Murder at the Black Cat Cafe (Detective Kosuke Kindaichi #2.5) by Seishi Yokomizo (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending February 1, 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tokyo, 1947. In order to solve this sensational stand-alone murder mystery, scruffy detective Kosuke Kindaichi will have to untangle a complex web of love, jealousy, and betrayal

The Pink Labyrinth is one of the bomb-scarred city's most shady neighbourhoods. There, in the dead of night a patrolling policeman catches a young Buddhist monk digging in the back yard of The Black Cat Cafe, a notorious brothel. In the shallow grave at his feet lie the dead body of a woman, her face disfigured beyond recognition, and the corpse of a black cat.

Who is the murdered woman, and how was she connected to the infamous establishment? And where did the dead cat come from, given that the cafe's feline mascot seems to be alive and well? The brilliant sleuth Kosuke Kindaichi investigates, but as he draws closer to the truth, he finds himself in grave danger...

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

My Review: An internal-chronology follow-on to The Inagumi Curse, this is a fix-up of a novella, of the title, and a short story, "Why did the well wheel creak?" It's outside the novel canon established for Kindaichi, so it's an optional read in his timeline; it's not really a thrillfest and I found it pretty mid-.

Completists will want it, but I can't say I think it's worth the investment.

Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $13.99 for you to read the ebook.

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She Walks at Night (Detective Kosuke Kindaichi #3) by Seishi Yokomizo (tr. Jesse Kirkwood)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: FROM JAPAN’S GREATEST CRIME WRITER: Yokomizo’s iconic detective Kosuke Kindaichi returns in this stand-alone murder mystery featuring a luxurious family estate beset by madness, scandal, and a terrifying curse

"Plenty of golden age ingredients... with a truly ingenious solution." — The Guardian, Best New Crime Fiction

In this mind-bending new addition to Seishi Yokomizo’s bestselling Kosuke Kindaichi Mysteries—translated into English for the first time—scruffy sleuth Kindaichi is called to the home of the aristocratic Furugami family, where in the midst of the Musashino countryside and enclosed on all sides by a long earthen wall, a gruesome scandal is brewing.

At the centre of the estate is the family patriarch: the drunken, sword-wielding father Tetsunoshin. His mistress, the icy, alluring Lady Oryu, is also housed in the estate along with their illegitimate daughter Yachiyo —beautiful and unstable—and the drink-ravaged Furugami heir, Naoki Sengoku. With each family member holding onto their own dark secrets, tensions between them ride high.

But this family feud turns bloody when the mutilated, headless body of Yachiyo’s fiancé is discovered in the Furugami estate. To solve the case, Kindaichi will need to pick apart the threads of the family’s carefully-woven story. But can he find the killer before the family is torn apart by its own secrets?

Perfect for fans of Knives Out and Lucy Foley, this thrilling mystery from Japan’s greatest and best-loved crime writer is rife with family drama and shocking twists that will captivate readers old and new.

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

My Review: Third, in internal chronology, in the Kindaichi series; the publisher says, now, these are able to be read as stand-alones. I know y'all need to sell books but do stop lying to us.

Don't read this entry in the series first. I can't give you an eager recommendation to read the interestingly-constructed puzzle because I'm completely skeeved out by the not very hidden incestuous lust of the men in the story.

Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) publishes this book on 2 June 2026. Preorder for $14.99 for an ebook.

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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

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The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution by Gregory E. O'Malley (28%)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: By a prize-winning historian: The dramatic story of a Black man's relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America

When most Americans think of slavery, they do not picture the colonial or revolutionary eras. Yet, in fact, one of six inhabitants of the thirteen original colonies was enslaved. The Escapes of David George: an Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution reveals a remarkable, untold experience of the American revolutionary period—a Black man's quest for the freedom espoused by our Founders, but denied him and other enslaved people.

In 1762, at the age of 19, David George escaped from a plantation in Virginia. Running southwest by night, fording rivers and crossing borders, he embarked on a decades-long journey in and out of captivity that spanned multiple colonies and thousands of miles. George lived among White, Black, Creek, and Natchez settlements, fled to the British Army for the promise of liberty, founded what might have been the first Black Baptist church, helped to hack a settlement for refugees out of the Nova Scotia wilderness, and died as a leader of an experimental anti-slavery community in Sierra Leone.

Piecing together archival records and David George's own brief account of his life—the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America—Gregory O'Malley presents a thrilling narrative and a unique perspective on our nation's origins, principles, and contradictions.

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

My Review: There's a good book in here; or maybe it's a good book, and just did not mesh with my reading mood. Hundreds of notes, a lot of intimate and social detail, seemingly the sort of thing I batten on, yet I bailed out at this: "Indeed, the trade route on the Savannah River would play a major role in David's next attempt to tun from slavery, but that attempt would not come for many years."

Well, he'll be making it without my presence. I don't know why but it's just not the read for me.

St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) will let you read it for $15.99 in ebook. Maybe read a sample, then decide? Or the library, which is likely to have one?

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The Christian Past That Wasn't: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History (17%) by Warren Throckmorton

Rating: ??

The Publisher Says: Known for his work debunking bad history, author and professor Warren Throckmorton addresses the seven myths Christian nationalists use to falsely claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, in order to equip readers to counter these claims.

America was not founded as a Christian nation.

Who gains what from myths about the past? Why are many of us susceptible to their power? And how can the truth about a nation's past prevail? In this lively book, Warren Throckmorton, coauthor of Getting Jefferson Right, investigates the gloss that Christian nationalist storytellers put on history and equips readers to debunk seven myths that they propagate.

Working in the tradition of muckraking journalists, Throckmorton, whose fact-checking of David Barton's book The Jefferson Lies convinced the publisher to pull it from the shelves, picks a fight with fables told about the past by those who are trying to erase the separation of church and state. Did the Puritans actually establish a covenant with God, and were all the founders evangelical Christians? Are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution based on the Bible, and did delegates at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia actually kneel for daily prayers? With keen attention to primary sources, Throckmorton dismantles the myths, piece by historical piece. And he asks: How are the genocide of Indigenous people and enslavement of millions of Africans not definitive repudiations of some righteous Christian past?

It's never been more important to understand why myths about the past wield so much force--and whom those myths empower. White Christian nationalism thrives on origin stories, and Throckmorton equips readers to debunk the false ones. The real heritage of America is neither as a Christian state nor pure secularism; it is a more nuanced story, he says, one of religious tolerance and pluralism. To understand Christian nationalism, we must know the power of myth. To counter it, we must know the facts.

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

My Review: It's very important to wrench the US, more generally Western, religious conversation back from the control of the christofascists currently blaring their hate...and the behavior-controlling it requires...from behind the armor of the cross. It pays all of us to attend to their spreading of fallacies, lies, and evil-souled misdirections from their purported holy book to the people who look to it for guidance.

I am so very far from being the target audience that I felt seasick, repulsed, and enraged that anyone could actually buy this guff at all that I had to stop reading or risk more strokes. I had the last, sickest lurch during the discussion of David Barton's The Jefferson Lies. (If you don't know about it, maybe look it up in incognito mode.)

Broadleaf Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) brings this book out on 19 May 2026. Don't let my readerly failings dissuade you from reading it then.

BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON: The Rise of the People's Politician, not great not bad

BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON: The Rise of the People's Politician
DAN CHIASSON
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: a scant 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of Bernie Sanders's quixotic but inexorable rise is told by a son of Burlington on a broad and vivid canvas, depicting the shaping of a people's politics, as he tracks a political signal that traveled from the hard-luck neighborhoods, general stores, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the Town Meetings and the ballot boxes of the last century, predicting much of what has happened to our nation writ large since then.

This utterly captivating symphonic story of city, a visionary, and the way our politics changed forever is told through the very specific people of Burlington, beginning with Dan Chiasson's own mall-punk friends of the 1980 in a video that would go viral decades later in 2020, they engaged with the itinerant carpenter turned socialist mayoral candidate, and there in that food court, the seeds of everything that was Bernie were sown. Dan, uniquely placed to bring a deep insider's perspective, knew all the the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose great grandparents had worked in the mills (his own); the puppeteers and hippies and NYC transplants looking for land and "authenticity" in Vermont; the developers involved in the era's Robert Moses urban-renewal schemes; the corrupt old-school Dems at their table in the local dive; and even Ben and Jerry who became Ben and Jerry's right there in town. They all made up the mosh pit of the Burlington that Bernie captivated, running on the slogan "Burlington is not for sale," to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, intimate with his constituents across workers, cops, lefties, and the little old ladies who organized their streets; he also boasted a foreign policy, a sudden national profile, and a bullhorn to speak to Ronald Reagan.

In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, this epic of American city life delves into the gossip—and the exhilaration—around Bernie's unlikely rise, as we watch an American place transformed one diner coffee, one neighborhood door-knock at a time.

Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, forging alliances with all comers, this is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.

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

My Review: Poet and academic Chiasson came of age under Mayor Bernie Sanders' Socialist administration in Burlington, Vermont. It's no surprise that he decided to write Senator Sanders' political biography.

The Bernie Bros were never a thing. The likeliest explanation for the chimera was state-sponsored misinformation campaigns led by an authoritarian polity that supports the current administration taking socially divisive cyberaction to help the 2016 campaign waged by the current president succeed. As is the norm in the US, the main supporters of progressivism are young women and people of color. It's a relief in one way...those trolls were obnoxious...and very sad in another, because so much hate and rage has been sown in young white men so successfully for so long it's hard to see a path back from the ugliness for them.

This story is about one of the few remaining Sixties radicals who stayed true to his vision and who made it a point to live out those principles loudly and publicly. A terrific opposition leader, in other words...but not a person of Presidential timber any more than the current occupant of the White House is. (Albeit I'd take Bernie in that office every damn day over felonious yam.)

I wasn't raised in Burlington, saw none of Bernie's achievements, and was not engaged by the nostalgic-bordering-on-elegiac tone of the read. I'm glad to have a blunt, mouthy, principled person in the Senate, and wish Bernie a long, useful life. I don't think anything in this book altered my overall positive opinion of him, I don't find the book a must-read, but am very glad it's out there. Someday we'll need a reminder there *were* idealists in US politics. As it is now, this feels more like a finger wagged in my face for not getting on board with Bernie. Offered the choice between voting for Harris or Sanders, I'd still vote for Harris.