AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America

AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America
KERI LEIGH MERRITT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A revelatory and immersive biography of a white Southern woman who was a key figure in the early civil rights movement, devoting her life to ending segregation in America only to be forgotten by history.

Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and then a magazine, devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn’t support segregation—Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too. In 1944 she published a bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, which became a national sensation and was banned in Boston and Detroit. The FBI began a file on her, she received death threats, and her house caught fire three times, twice intentionally, resulting in the loss of all her works-in-progress and her correspondence.

Undaunted, she continued her ardent fight against segregation, maintaining correspondence with some of the great leaders of her day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Pauli Murray. She continued to fight for both civil and human rights throughout the 1960s, helping nurture many of the activists in SNCC and CORE, only to succumb to cancer in 1966.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith’s complex identity, An Inconvenient Woman is the definitive account of a woman who defied all expectations and dedicated her life to racial equality.

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My Review: We need another Lillian Smith after the upcoming midterms, regardless of the outcome. We need...have always needed...many Lillian Smiths, people willing to buck their systemic privilege to join the struggle for equity and equality.

She came by it honestly. Raised in a Methodist household that practiced (in theory) "love, acceptance, and understanding," Smith spent time doing missionary work in China where the actions of the white people often resembled their behaviors in her Georgia homeland. Awareness, once begun as a habit of mind, can not turn off or cease until death. Even a serious personal campaign to ignore awareness of injustice..."go along to get along"...is not turning awareness off, merely ignoring it. Lillian Smith remained fully aware of what she had seen, neither ignoring or avoiding her her perception guiding her actions in daily life. She was born into privilege, into a family whose wealth...in spite of their avowed christianity...was based on the exactions of slavery, and she was born with a voice.

Beginning at roughly the same moment as her forties, Lillian Smith began to pour out eloquent, cogent words against segregation and its legal and illegal rules, laws, customs. She and her lifelong partner, Paula Snelling, published a literary magazine called various things over its decade of issues. The women accepted submissions from Black writers, and submissions that quietly dealt with same-sex attraction. It became Lillian's conviction that she needed to write honestly about a miscegenous relationship. Thus was born her three-million-copy seller, Strange Fruit. (She insisted the title was unrelated to Billie Holiday's hit song {my favorite version from 1959 linked} but...)

Lillian Smith kept her romantic partnership with Paula Snelling masked until her death. It only made sense for them to do so in the Jim Crow South, riddled with hatred and violence as it was. They would've been in grave danger of death by mob. It was a worse time than any we've seen in the US until the invention of ICEstapo. It's been sixty years since Lillian Smith died of cancer. I like to think that her lesbian reincarnation was born on her centenary in 1997, and is preaparing to burst into outraged fury like Lillian Smith did, to goad decent but lazy or fearful people into action.

We need her. I think her biographer here has made a very good story out of Lillian Smith's life, filled with citations and with them, evidence of how important and inspiring Lillian Smith was to people across the spectrum of US society.

OBSOLETE: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us―and How to Stop It, BOO!!

OBSOLETE: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us―and How to Stop It
GARRISON LOVELY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The biggest companies in history are racing to build a machine that replaces human labor—all of it. And, as this provocative new book insists, the only thing that can stop them is us.

Many people today don’t get further than regarding AI as a boondoggle—a new shiny shareholding for techno-capitalists to sink their cash into. Obsolete sees something more sinister, not to say scream-out-loud alarming: A tiny group of people, backed by the richest companies in the world, is attempting to render humanity obsolete.

Their project is unimaginably vast in scope. What we previously thought of as big—the Gilded Age monopolies, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program—doesn’t even come close to capturing its size. Almost none of us want this vast transformation to succeed. Yet it is proceeding virtually unchallenged. Why? Because we don’t know it’s happening, we don’t believe it will work, or we don’t think we can stop it.

Obsolete investigates each of these reasons for inaction and brings together key information from top researchers, advocates, and industry insiders to show why we really can’t afford to sit this one out.

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

My Review: Pause your reflexive eyerolling at the topic of AI's existential hsrms for a moment. Before acting on your "I am SO.SICK. of this scare-tactic crap!" and scrolling away, look at the author's bio as provided by the publisher:

Garrison Lovely is an AI expert and freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. In 2025, he was identified by the Pulitzer Center {on Crisis Reporting} as an AI journalist worth following. Lovely is known for his cover stories in The Nation ("Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower") and Jacobin ("Can Humanity Survive AI?"), as well as writing in The New York Times, BBC, Nature, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, TIME, The Guardian, The Verge, and elsewhere. He was previously a Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network.

This is a very serious person's resume. Author Lovely is, for my money, more credible on the subject at hand because of his "Road to Damascus" moment while working for McKinsey. His evident chops in journalistic thinking as applied to the social issues raised by new, fast-developing technologies mean that he puts topics into understandable combinations. He treats the reader as you would an intelligent non-expert, going to the trouble of explaining his parallelisms. It gives the anxious reader a chance to see unsensationally why the relationships of technology to humanity are developing the way they are.

When heading into a frontier area of science, technology, and culture, some degree of fuzziness is inevitable. Author Lovely distinguishes among who is being fuzzy of necessity (techologists,researchers on creating AI technology), who is using fuzziness to grift (banksters, CEOs), and who's using fuzziness to distract everyone else from a social-restructuring agenda (tech bros, Aynholes, fascists, et alii). It's a big part of this book just to explain who's got this technology in its sights to misuse it for appalling and unprecedented control over us, the ordinary people.

I was sobered, alarmed, and angered by the sheer scope of the latter group's ambitions for controlling us. It truly is unprecedented what AI by its mere existence as an attainable technology has elicited from the base of these people's very base personalities, and let's not shy away fro the calling it the darkness of their souls. It pays to remember, when contemplating this subject, that "They" are not all the way to true AI...yet. There are institutions and laws we can enact that will slow down application of AI in the real world, and that must be part of any concerned person's agenda when voting on Tuesday, 3 November 2026 in the US.

But the fight to save our literal freedom as human beings can't be thought of as complete until we come up with ways, enforceable, verifiable, visible ways to use this technology...we can't turn it off, as proved by the hugging-face incident, which Open AI itself (see article at link) thinks is a problem and admits to the validity of people's concerns, demonstrated. One of the most worrying yet most heartening sections of the book is "Too Big to Guardrail". It outlines the complexity of oversight on the frontiers of society and technology. Author Lovely proposes using US anti-trust laws to accomplish the purpose. I'll confess that I think y'all won't read the details, I had to force myself to because the amount of googling I had to do was breathtaking, so let me put it in a nutshell for you: I'm on his side, and following his note-links never took me to any weird, out-there places with fringe ideas. Everything Author Lovely proposes can be argued from serious establishment principles to be implemented in existing frameworks of law and precedent.

That means it could realistically be sold to the pooh-bahs of the world. No factor of this argument as he made it heartened me more. No hectoring, out-there (but correct IMO) newfangled thinking needed. The Economic Royalists will fight dirty, hard, and long to stop anything from getting in the way of their greed being primary to the world's societies running...but the way Author Lovely lays out to defeat them can work.

We need to gain power in US politics, yes; but we need to get people concerned about the actual survival of people, not only societal structures, to support this agenda. Author Lovely is sharp-tongued in his criticisms of both US political parties, with truth and justice on his side. I think, however, many readers on both sides of this divide will switch off because the tone he uses is strong. Advocating for change is never effective when done politely, far as I know. Please look past any hurt feelings to see what is presented, and decide if it is a solution you can support.

Then it's time to do the work of supporting it.

THE KOA KANE SERIES: 4 & 5 – Treachery Times Two & Retribution plus The Complete Koa Kane Hawaiʻian Mystery Series Books 1 - 5

TREACHERY TIMES TWO (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #4)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Secret military weapons, saboteurs, a volcanic eruption—and a probe of Chief Detective Koa Kane’s criminal past

On Hawaiʻi Island, a volcanic earthquake disrupts an abandoned cemetery—unearthing the body of a woman mutilated by her killer to conceal her identity.

The search for her identity leads Hilo, Hawaii’s Chief Detective Koa Kane to a mysterious defense contractor with a politically connected board of directors. Defying his chief of police, Koa pursues the killer, only to become entangled in an FBI espionage investigation of Deimos, a powerful secret military weapon. Is the FBI telling all it knows—or does it, too, have a duplicitous agenda?

At the same time, Koa—a cop who thirty years earlier killed his father’s nemesis and covered up the murder—faces exposure by the dead man’s grandson. Koa is forced to investigate his own homicide, and step by step, his cover-up unravels until another man is falsely accused.

Can Koa stand by and let an innocent man pay for his crime?

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

My Review: Chickens always come home to roost, the damned things. We've spent three stories getting to know Koa, getting to see his complete willingness to follow a trail to terrible destinations, awful and condign punishments meted out to guilty people who thought they'd got aqay with it, whatever "it" was in that case.

And now the decision to find the guilty is the easiest it will ever be.

Look in the mirror.

His murder of his father's enemy, covered up for decades and the guilt used to power his investigations that prevent others from escaping justice is now a bill come due, a debt to be settled. While investigating his regular job's latest murder...a woman who wanted to disappear, not die horribly, still less have her body clumsily disposed of, but you lie down with tech scum that serve the military death machine you don't always get back up. Her mad coding skills were ultimately a defense contractor's problem as her Hawaiian-sovereignty ties were most exceptionally sus. An ever-expanding, ever-intensifying ring of ripples has his Chief of Police getting pressure from above, from the sides, and now from Koa humself: he'll finish this investigation, he'll see justice served, and he won't take any steps to hide from his decades-old crime and its consequences any longer.

This would be disastrous, because it would pave the way to potentially letting Muskolini-in-all-but-name to oil his way out of taking the blame for the dead woman's demise. This would be disastrous because Koa is not a criminal despite having committed that murder.

At no time does the tension let up. At no time do we feel sure things will be all right...which means Koa gets away with literal murder. We're suspended with the Sword of Damocles on a thread growing far too thin and way too stressed under all the weight on it.

I'll just remind y'all there's a book five and slide on outta here.

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

RETRIBUTION (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #5)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As people around him come under attack, Chief Detective Koa Kāne wonders if he might be the real target

In the back alley of a bar on Hawaiʻi's Big Island, a young man is found stabbed to death. When Hilo Chief Detective Koa Kane begins investigating the crime, the murder weapon is recovered only a few feet away from the body. Crime scene technicians find fingerprints on the knife—they are a perfect match for Koa's younger brother, Ikaika.

As the brothers scramble to prove Ikaika's innocence, another crime sends shockwaves through the Hilo police force. A sniper tries to take out Makanui, Koa's closest colleague. As Koa tries to figure out whether these crimes are linked, the sinister force continues their killing spree, threatening Koa and his loved ones at every turn.

Could Koa be the real target? If so, who is behind this trail of retribution? With his own secret criminal past, Koa confronts an all-out offensive against those closest to him and his police force to which he has devoted his life. As the bodies pile up, Koa finds himself the ultimate target of a ruthless adversary and must risk it all to survive.

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

My Review: A more reflective tone animates this story, last in the series...to date. Koa's day job hands him some fairly sobering food for thought. First his reformed ex-con brother is implicated in a murder; then a close friend on the police force is targeted by a sniper. In very close succession.

It is, after recent events and a long and successful police detective career ("As was his habit at a crime scene, Koa let his eyes scan the corpse absorbing every detail, no matter how gruesome. He called it listening to the dead, trying to envision their last moments. It sometimes yielded important clues and always empowered Koa's empathy for the victims"), feeling as though more chickens might be on the way to the roost.

This is where I get off the bus, Driver McCaw. I won't let anyone have their ticket punched too soon at my hands. I very much hope y'all will get the Koa fever this #Deathtober.

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

THE COMPLETE KOA KĀNE HAWAIʻIAN MYSTERY SERIES: Books 1 – 5 ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing
$2.99 ebook, available now

All five in one epub file for $2.99 is the best deal of them all.

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

THE KOA KANE SERIES: 1 – 3...Death of a Messenger; Off the Grid; & Fire and Vengeance

DEATH OF A MESSENGER (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #1)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Someone’s found a body at Pohakuloa, the army’s live-fire training area. Bearing all the marks of ancient ritual sacrifice—the murder is the grisliest of Detective Koa Kane's career.

The bizarre case draws Koa deep into his own Hawaiian roots. As Koa probes the victim’s past, he must sort through a rich roster of suspects—grave robbers, native activists, thieves, and star gazers. Koa surmounts a host of obstacles as he pursues the murderer—an incompetent local medical examiner, hostility from haoles (Westerners) and sovereignty advocates, and myriad lies.

Did the victim stumble upon a gang of high-tech archaeological thieves? Or did he learn a secret so shocking it cost him his life and put others, too, in mortal danger? Will Hilo’s most respected native detective catch this fiend in time, or will the killer strike again—with even deadlier consequences?

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

My Review: Pohakuloa Live Firing Range near Hilo, Hawaiʻi, is a place men go to practice their killing techniques, but not a place where dead men are usually found. This day is the exception.

The dead man is not military, so the nearest civilian authority is called to the scene. Hilo detective Koa Kane gets the job, seniority demands it; after, of course, the Army certifies the crime scene is free of live munitions. Koa starts with the victim's identity...no mean feat, with the grotesque and detailed damage done to him. From there a truly vast web of interconnected lines of relationships, a cast of what feels like dozens but isn't quite, and a lot of the stuff of Koa's ordinary life get chucked at the reader's head. Every step of the way Hilo is a palpable presence ("Far off to the west, trails of vaporous mist played eerily over the deeply shadowed valley where night had already fallen bewtween the Hawaiian mountains. Across the channel, Haleakala on Maui seemed to rise from the mists of some unseen netherworld. Hues of red, orange, yellow and pink glorified the darkening sky"), enough description given to bring the reder to the place the action's happening but never enough to make us feel we could get off a plane, into a car, and drive there without a map app. (Thank goodness, as I was not in the mood for that!)

As book one in a series I expect as author's hobbyhorses to show up. I'd say they did: Hawaiʻian culture, history, and archaeology, astronomy, a strong focus on Native Hawaiʻian rights and political grievances, and to my disappointment a condescending attitude towards fragile, pretty "girls."

Exercise tolerance for that, and escape to a truly fascinating place is on tap. A decent mystery with a lot to say; more will be sought by me!

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

OFF THE GRID (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #2)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing(non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Perfect for fans of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux

A scrap of cloth fluttering in the wind leads Hilo police Chief Detective Koa Kāne to the tortured remains of an unfortunate soul, left to burn in the path of an advancing lava flow. For Koa, it’s the second gruesome homicide of the day, and he soon discovers the murders are linked. These grisly crimes on Hawaiʻi’s Big Island could rewrite history—or cost Chief Detective Koa Kāne his career.

The dead, a reclusive couple living off the grid, turn out to be mysterious fugitives. The CIA, the Chinese government, and the Defense Intelligence Agency attempt to thwart Koa’s investigation and obscure the victims’ true identities. Undeterred by mounting political pressure, Koa pursues the truth only to find himself drawn into a web of international intrigue.

While Koa investigates, the Big Island scrambles to prepare for the biggest and most explosive political rally in its history. Despite police resources stretched to the breaking point, Koa uncovers a government conspiracy so shocking its exposure topples senior officials far beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores.

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

My Review: Koa Kāne is a grouchy mensch. He looks at the obstructive efforts of people enmeshed in concerns that a detective with compassion and justice as his moral poles and can't be bothered to respect their shibboleths. Two people are dead. Their deaths were not natural or kind. He feels it incumbent on himself to make the guilty parties in this dreadful death-fest accountable. What could the dead guy possibly have done to merit someone immersing him in Kilauea's ever-flowing lava?!

No one will make it easy, as he learns when visiting the scene of a woman's death for the first time and damn near dying as the truck that hit the victim's car seems to cause a nearby vehicle to explode out of nowhere. He survives but that will sure as hell get a man's undivided attention after the murder by lava.

Establishing the link between them accomplished it becomes clearer that these victims were in some giant, far-reaching trouble involving international espionage, political skulduggery, and a side helping of maybe terrorism? The sheer amount of overt discouragement applied to Koa by local poerbrokers and the various security conccerns surrounding a governor's race rally being held in Koa's patch means his signature stubborn refusal to stop when told to is high-risk behavior.

Hawaiʻian indigenous culture, language, and history are present in this story though, as expected, there are only tenuous links to the highly populated story for much of it. I can't give perfect scoring to the story because some characters came and went before I could even figure out what the heck they had to do with anything (not much) and most of those were among the Hawaiʻian characters...well...at least I felt less annoyed by the misogyny. Because there were fewer women.

Well worth considering in #Deathtober reading days.

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

FIRE AND VENGEANCE (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #3)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A heinous conspiracy—a volcano exacting revenge—an island paradise in anguish Having killed his father's nemesis and gotten away with it, Hilo, Hawaiʻi Chief Detective Koa Kane, is not your ordinary cop. Estranged from his younger brother, who has been convicted of multiple crimes, he is not from a typical law enforcement family. Yet, Koa's secret demons fuel his unwavering drive to pursue justice.

Never has Koa's motivation been greater than when he learns that an elementary school was placed atop a volcanic vent, which has now exploded. The subsequent murders of the school's contractor and architect only add urgency to his search for the truth.

As Koa's investigation heats up, his brother collapses in jail from a previously undiagnosed brain tumor. Using his connections, Koa devises a risky plan to win his brother's freedom. As Koa gradually unravels the obscure connections between multiple suspects, he uncovers a forty-year-old conspiracy. When he is about to apprehend the perpetrators, his investigation suddenly becomes entwined with his brother's future, forcing Koa to choose between justice for the victims and his brother's freedom.

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

My Review: I really did not find this plot remotely credible...a school built over a fumarole? in HAWAIʻI, world capital of active volcanoes amid populated areas? not buyin' it...but I decided to move ahead with my read accepting the premise with a snort.

Then, after the hideous tragedy occurs, Koa is going to have to make the perpetrators of the negligence publicly accountable for their crime's hideous loss of life. The fact that there is not, at present, Chief of Police in Hilo means the buck stops with Koa. All the Chief of Detectives has to do is follow back the trail of documents forty years and figure out where the lying and covering up started while there's major politicking and finger-pointing going on, and everyone who ever touched this land and construction faud is pretty shifty, pretty slimy, and looks really really guilty.

Another moment where Koa will fail to do the politic thing because it is decidedly not the right thing. Of course by book three we're not the least surprised by this. I know I wasn't anyway. But what surprised me a lot was Koa going to the finest knife edge of the law to help his obnoxious criminally guilty brother. I can understand it, given that it's literally life and death. But it was so extreme, so complete a shift from the troubled relationship of their shared past, that it caused me to pause and look over the story...something niggled at me. I'm not seeing something important, I said inside my head.

Then the boom got lowered, it was ugly, and set up one of the most fun endings in the series to date. Unbelievable like the rest of the story, but entirely self-consistent, and as mentioned fun. Just not credible.

And I do not care. Fun to be had, y'all, and whatever the publisher tells you, you need to read the books in order.

THE PORCELAIN SISTERS, sibling rivalry hurts the very fabric of one's being

THE PORCELAIN SISTERS
DARYL GREGORY
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A shy young woman and her deeply unpleasant—and literally porcelain—sister fight for their inheritance, taking on an impossible array of enemies: a chain-smoking demon crow, an unkillable assassin, and a secret clan of French sorceresses. In his newest adventure, Daryl Gregory (Spoonbenders) takes us on a dizzying romp through the horrors of sisterhood.

Ruth Winslow is trying to save up enough money to finish college while looking after her sister, Isabel—who happens to be a haunted doll. When an accident severely damages Isabel’s porcelain body, the sisters have to find the only woman who can fix her, the fearsome witch known as La Fabricante: the Dollmaker.

The sisters head to Marseille, where they take on Le Clan: Chiffon, a red-headed, unkillable assassin; a collection of angry, haunted dolls; plus a pair of demons—one a cigarette-smoking crow, the other a black cat—and their human familiars.

Along the way, the sisters learn that they’ve been lied to their entire lives. Their mother wasn’t just a homemaker who died in a car accident, she was a legendary enforcer in the Le Clan des Sorcières.

While Ruth has to come out of her shell and deal with her own latent powers, Isabel has to grow up in a body that can’t grow. Together they’ll have to outwit and outfight everyone to claim their birthright.

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

My Review: Ruth and Isabel are (unwillingly) close. Their sisterly bond has survived trying, testing circumstances like loss of their mother, growing up isolated, and Isabel being a haunted porcelain doll. Who is broken badly twice, once in a car accident, once in a fall. Now Ruth has to use her college savings to get them to France in order to find and then convince the original maker of Isabel's doll body to mend her. You can read the blurb, you see it as well as I do.

We're going on The Hero's Journey. Only with women at the center, distinctly different from the stereotypical boy/chosen one, since it's about fixing their loved one instead of leading The People, like Arthur. (Men keep doing that. Wonder why.)

It's a fun trip, full of great villains, exciting traps, and the unfolding weirdness of Isabel's...genesis. There's a reason Ruth has a porcelain doll as a sister. It's not a fantasy or a dream or a comforting lie told to a grieving child. Their father finally had had enough of Isabel's cruel words, snarky ways, and abusive personality, which separation is what set the sisters on course to a *real* bust-up. Both behave abominally...siblings often do...so each needs absolution and atonement.

Among the little they know about their vanished mother is that she was French and from Marseilles. It's enough to piece together an answer to what the initials "CdS" on Isabel's back mean...Clan des Sorcières, Witch Clan...mean and thus lead them to a source, an original maker: La Fabricante, the (Doll) Maker. None of this is easy, nor does it take a linear form like I'm telling it to you in. I am, as regular readers will know, a fan of corvids. I liked Shit Turd from The Hollow Kingdom a couple years back, partly for being a crow, mostly for having a "foul" (see the wordplay? hahaha) mouth. But S.T. was a fling compared to my true love, Monsieur Griezzel the chainsmoking music-hall-joking antagonist. Of a sort. He's a delight with a wicked (literally) line of patter.

I confess now to a surprising weakness: Dolls are second only to clowns in my Pantheon of Nightmares. I hate 'em. Why'd I request the story, then...look at the date, being scared's de rigueur. In reading this story of sororital rage and parental neglect, of love looking weird from some angles, of guilt moving mountains that love quails before, I was unable to do more than remember why dolls creep me out. It was not the story, it was me; I became so immersed in the story I absorbed uts frame of reference over my own. I even *got* their mother's actions as genuinely kindly motivated in the moment.

No perfect score for you, Daryl Gregory. Brevity may be the soul of wit and of lingerie, but it's the downfall of a satisfying connection between reader and main character. Ruth and Isavel's trajectories are show very much from the outside, which is part of the point of making one a literal doll, ojay I get it...but move more slowly, please, to tell me more about the titanic impact of this on the women. Bickering, fighting, being jealous are all symptoms...tell me of what in more than labels, please.

It's not a quibble but it's also not what I was promised in a book this short. I wasn't told I'd read Anna Karenina and suddenly got Valley of the Dolls. So a minor ding and only because I liked what I got so much I wanted more.

So: I want some more, please sir. Soon would be good.

WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project, hard disagree with author

WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project
ANN HARTLE
University of Notre Dame Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 1* of five

What is civility, and why has it disappeared? Ann Hartle analyzes the origins of the modern project and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne to discuss why civility is failing in our own time.

In this bold book, Ann Hartle, one of the most important interpreters of sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, explores the modern notion of civility—the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the Western world—and asks, why has it disappeared? Concerned with the deepening cultural divisions in our postmodern, post-Christian world, she traces their roots back to the Reformation and Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne’s philosophical project of drawing on ancient philosophy and Christianity to create a new social bond to reform the mores of his culture is perhaps the first act of self-conscious civility. After tracing Montaigne’s thought, Hartle returns to our modern society and argues that this framing of civility is a human, philosophical invention and that civility fails precisely because it is a human, philosophical invention. She concludes with a defense of the central importance of sacred tradition for civility and the need to protect and maintain that social bond by supporting nonpoliticized, nonideological, free institutions, including and especially universities and churches.

What Happened to Civility is written for readers concerned about the deterioration of civility in our public life and the defense of freedom of religion. The book will also interest philosophers who seek a deeper understanding of modernity and its meaning, political scientists interested in the meaning of liberalism and the causes of its failure, and scholars working on Montaigne’s Essays.

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

My Review: If I ever needed an inoculation against conservatism, this under-200pp book was the full and complete spectrum version of it.

In looking for reviews of the book to see if I was crazy, reading it wrong, or simply bilious when I was reading it, I found my proof I was not here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/ann-hartle-what-happened-to-civility-the-promise-and-failure-of-montaignes-modern-project-notre-dame-in-university-of-notre-dame-press-2022-pp-ix-178/CE68BDF228EB95F3533F945414C7E785 The Review of Politics is paywalled, as one expects from conservative-leaning publications, but an excerpt is available at the link. It contains the words that "civility is inadequate to replace traditional moral virtues" and "{c}ivility is not self-sustaining: as a merely human invention, it lacks the kind of transcendent support possessed by the traditional moral virtues, which found their grounding and stability in their orientation towards the divine."

Of course the reviewer says a lot more about the book, but for my purposes (trying to see what it is I found appalling about the read) this was a showstopper. The divine is a human invention. My bedrock reality will not accommodate the assertion that y'all's god is real; one of us is wrong, and I'm quite sure it's you.

We're so far apart, Author Hartle, that all I can say is your writing on a sentence level is clear and your arguments to my non-expert mind is completely self-consistent.

And you're wrong.

IN THE WOODS THEY WAIT, #Deathtober goes Gothic

IN THE WOODS THEY WAIT: A Novel
CARRIE LEE SOUTH
Little, Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A park ranger in Devil’s Den becomes obsessed with the case of a missing child—a case that mirrors the disappearance of her own brother, whom she lost in the woods many years ago—and the possibility that both were taken by something vicious and unnatural that lives deep in the Ozarks.

From a powerful new voice, a story that's at once a haunting southern gothic and a satisfying page-turner, perfect for fans of Stephen King and Liz Moore alike.

Fifteen years ago, Audrey Figg's little brother, Benny, vanished on a family vacation to Devil's Den state park, a day that split her life in two. Now, Audrey is a park ranger in the very same woods with expertise in wilderness search and rescue. Audrey has found a rhythm to her days: training new rangers, tending to injured hikers, protecting the backcountry, and still, searching.

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

My Review: Moving between past and present timelines usually feels forced, like the author wants to create psychological tension but erroneously believes the straightforward linear approach can't do that well enough. Debut author Carrie Lee South thought the trauma Audrey, our PoV close-third-person character, is introduced in 2004 as she wander the woods of Devil's Den State Park...a real place, quite beautiful...with some lovely, meditative prose setting a mood that's soon enough shattered along with an essential part of Audrey that can't be fixed: She saw her little brother Benny walking too far away and did nothing, didn't follow him, made no attempt to care for his safety.

He's never been seen since. No body, nothing but absence.

Fifteen years later, Park Ranger Audrey's receiving a trainee, so clearly done the job well for some time now; no lovely meditative prose, though always with Author South's surprisingly assured touch with telling details observed. Audrey is all business because she can't let herself be anything resembling happy. I was here my interest in the story picked up. This is a grief response I've become familiar with. It betrays your loved one for you to feel normal human warmth or closeness or, perish forbid, love.

No wonder religion's tortures and misery disguised as "love" remain in the populace. We're wired for it. How grim a prospect is that.

The 2019 Audrey faces an existential crisis when young Ivy goes missing in an eerie echo of Benny's disappearance. Audrey's faced trouble in her time as a park ranger but this...so intimately familiar a situation, so closely similar people, feelings, circumstances...it's all perfectly designed to hook into Audrey's unfixable breakage as a human being.

And here I come back to my initial alternating-timelines argument from above: In a deft, assured way I associate with authors of considerable age and experience, Carrie Lee South uses the back-and-forth not solely to ratchet up tension (it does, though), but to introduce previously unrevealed details, a steady accumulation of new information surfacing in Audrey's mind that reveals important clues. They lead to major, perhaps incredibly in the original sense, helpful avenues of exploration in 2019 as well as resolutions to 2004's trauma.

So effective. So very convenient. I could've whacked stars off for it, feeling cheated; instead I sat back, impressed at the care and affection Author South lavished on Audrey, her survivor guilt, and the resolutions never available to Audrey before going through the forest fire.

Because it's true, the only way out...ever...is through.