SISTERS IN YELLOW, exploring women's wrongs in Women's History Month

SISTERS IN YELLOW
MIEKO KAWAKAMI (tr. Laurel Taylor & Hitomi Yoshio)
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Rising star Mieko Kawakami reaches new heights in this pacy, thrilling novel, a Japanese Breaking Bad, in which a group of friends fight for freedom, independence, and survival in Tokyo of the 1990s, a world rapidly dividing into haves and have-nots.

All of them are fleeing something. Growing up without a father, Hana’s tired of the pity in her classmates’ eyes, and finds a flashier mother figure in Kimiko. Kimiko is older than Hana's mother but seems much younger, chatting easily about school and boys and wanting a better life. Fate throws them together with two more young women—bruised but not broken by life. Together the four set out to remake their lives, fighting predatory lenders, organized criminals, and plain bad luck as they open a bar called Lemon.

Keeping the business going, and trying to take care of each other, forms the core of this enrapturing novel. It is a story of startling reversals and vivid portraits of the matriarchy of Tokyo nightlife and its adjacent criminal underclasses. From the bar owners to the aging hostesses to the young street touts coaxing people off the street to places like Lemon, everyone wants a chance at renewal, but can everyone get it?

Narrated by Hana in Kawakami’s trademark evocatively poetic style and paced like a noir, Sisters in Yellow will be the literary blockbuster of the season. This epic of friendship and betrayal is the kind of book one longs to return to when away from a world until itself, and a book that makes you think while it produces immensities of feeling. It is a major novel that, like so many of the best recent phenomena—from Donna Tartt to Hanya Yanigahara—explores how we survive (or don't) together.

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

My Review: What if someone who liked noir novels thought, "let's make the women the active partners, and add overtly emotional tropes to a fear of abandonment-fueled story?"

Meet Mieko Kawakami.

The emotional stakes are huge. Hana, our PoV character, remembers the events of her teenaged life when she was seen, valued, and trained by Kimiko, an older woman with...situational...morals and a very large store of useful knowlegdge whose origins a sensible person would not pry into. As Hana is a completely neglected child of an emotionally absent mother and no visible father, Kimiko's louche lifestyle carries the allure of being chosen, paid attention to, seen as valuable for once...though her value makes older, more experienced readers shudder a little for what's likely to happen to her as she gains her experience points in the Dungeons and Dragons game of life.

Unlike man-centered noirs, this story is less about the crimes the gruesome twosome at the center of the story commit with their scoobygroup; more about how they, by working in tandem, learn things from each other and by making mistakes entirely new to each of them. We don't often get stories like this from Japanese writers, or at least not translated into English. These are hardscrabble folk, no expectation they'll be taken care of by the system. They're women, so of lesser value in their society no matter what they need from it; they are not likely to get much in any case. It sets the stakes of their efforts to make a living very high indeed. I'm impressed at Author Kawakami's willingness to have her women suffer for their mistakes, as well as fight to get what they need from an indifferent world.

But at least they're all in it together as the Japanese economy contracts post-1980s bubble. They're all grafting hard, grifting when they must, but they have each other's backs.

Oh dear.

No lesson without pain; every birth must have blood. Hana, now an adult, relives her hard growing up of schemes and crimes, when she sees Kimiko's name in the news as a blackmailer; it's no surprise, but it's a painful jolt of relived trauma nonetheless. Hana's insecurity has always led her into money traps. It's no surprise her insecurity is alive and well. of course it's not because her entire life is built on the reality of betrayal from neglectful mothering on to her time with chosen mother figure Kimiko.

It's not on the same craft level as the magisterial Breasts and Eggs. Pages spent explaining things now common knowledge are wasted space and/or padding. The noir/crime aspect of the story, so tonally important, assorts oddly with the flashback structure; is there tension meant to lead us on when it's obvious Hana survived her past reasonably intact?

It's a good read but not a perfect one. I'll recommend you check it out of the library, but do get your head around how young women do very seedy things without being forced by men into them. Celebrate Women's Wrongs this Women's History Month.

BLACK BAG, award-winning poet/novelist tantalizes with identity-exploring novel

BLACK BAG
LUKE KENNARD
Zando (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?

In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . .

A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

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

My Review: I...don't know about the impact, impression, image this one's left on and in my brain. It's kind of a lot as a read. Many will flinch at the punctuation and dialogue tags being unorthodox. Others (me among 'em) will get cold collywobbles from the fact this is based around a real experiment performed in an academic setting.

I'll never be fully easy around stories where people do bizarre, kind of abuse-enabling things for money. Please see Docile by K.M. Szpara for my perfect squeam-book. This story is worse...it basically happened, though this is not non-fiction about the real events.

The premise, as you've seen, is weird...the jacket illustration is about the best match for the subject one will ever find. So there is no ambiguity or misdirection in aesthetic or factual presentation. That's where unambiguous territory ends in this story. Our actor MC, hereinafter "Black Bag" because his name is never vouchsafed to us, is slightly desperate for a paying gig, but as we discover over time he is generally slightly desperate. Dr. Blend (!) chose him well, deliberately, and knowingly as we learn over the course of the story. His job is to be physically present in the back of this psychology class, featureless and silent, for some socially experimental purpose.

It doesn't take long for the students to attempt interactions with Black Bag. Could you resist a looming presence that's giving nothing of any human sort? No eyes? No face? No noises of normal body functioning...breathing, swallowing, sighing...all muffled by the bag? What sounds uncanny would naturally become deeply unsettling, irresistibly fascinating, unnervingly alluring, as it sat among, but not a part of, the entire class. There are characters attempting to get responses from Black Bag. There are characters thinking of Black Bag, not obviously gendered, as a sexual challenge. Others as a gender-wars provocation. Others still as a threat of undetermined severity and unknown nature. What those responses start as, and how they morph through Black Bag's unresponsive presence, is utterly unexpected to the participants in the experiment.

Is that an entire over-300-page novel's-worth of story? It's true I was always interested in the read. As it happened, the story flowed from sentence to sentence with pleasurable facility of expression as one would expect of award-winning Author Kennard. At the end of the chapters...and there are 89 of 'em...I'd lose steam in the reading experience and it would take a week or more for me to feel prompted to pick it up again. I'm not entirely sure this is not related to my own participation in the experiment through the read...was I ever not part of the experiment, as in did Author Kennard not envision that the act of reading this story was another facet of responding to Black Bag? Was he also responding to the experiment by getting fascinated by the story, writing it...always an act of externalization as writing requires, at its core, a version of narrative therapy?

As we travel through the course being taught, the effects of the experiment on Black Bag himself morph and grow more and more pervasive. It's not surprising, on the one hand, that he becomes really comfortable in the protective space of the black bag. He's a struggling actor. His career prospects, before the anonymity of the black bag, weren't great. But inside the black bag, his identity is mysterious, intriguing, alluring...all things an actor loves, relies on for securing and doing his job. He wasn't being seen as those things walking around in his normal condition and now he is.

So walking around the campus and the town as Black Bag makes perfect sense, then.

Not to my claustrophobic self. I battled a sense of desperate, breathless resistance every time he put the stupid thing on.

So that might explain why I found the ending...wanting. Justine, a true and complete freak, enters into Black Bag's orbit with the firm intent of making Black Bag a conquest. Claudio, more reserved but still excitable and into Black Bag (apparently platonically though there's ambiguity and vibey-ness enough to make my gaydar ping) is the other side character who interested me. Others are involved, but honestly, they're just not that fascinating to me. Squishy, blah Sophie most of all. All the way through the read he's Black Bag, he's there as a screen for these people to project fantasies, needs, fears onto all blank and visually heavy like black objects tend to be.

The experiment, the last one Dr. Blend will conduct as he is retiring after this course, is ambiguous in design by design. That means it ends ambiguously. I was expecting that. I felt, however, this iteration of the story left the events unresolved in the dramatic sense...the final scene as an ending wasn't, the real ending as in the place the story resolved itself was earlier, with this musing inner speech from Black Bag:

Have you ever met a man who got exactly what he wanted? They always seem a little confused, even shell-shocked, They speak at one remove, as if delivering their own eulogy.
I wish to be alive, to continue to live, even should that mean a state of constant deferral. How much do you want to appear in other people's thoughts at all? As little as possible, I think. If I could, I would take everything I have ever thought about anyone else and delete it forever.

I think the story is fascinating but the not-main characters less so. I'd say this is an ideal library borrow, one that will reward you for reading it but not compel most of us to revisit it time and again.

DAUGHTER OF EGYPT from the reigning Rani of women in historical fiction

DAUGHTER OF EGYPT
MARIE BENEDICT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict, returns with a sweeping tale of a young woman who unearths the truth about a forgotten Pharaoh—rewriting both of their legacies forever.

In the 1920s, archeologist Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon of Highclere Castle made headlines around the world with the discovery of the treasure-filled tomb of the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamun. But behind it all stood Lady Evelyn Herbert—daughter of Lord Carnarvon—whose daring spirit and relentless curiosity made the momentous find possible.

Nearly 3,000 years earlier, another woman defied the expectations of her time: Hatshepsut, Egypt’s lost pharaoh. Her reign was bold, visionary—and nearly erased from history.

When Evelyn becomes obsessed with finding Hatshepsut’s secret tomb, she risks everything to uncover the truth about her reign and keep valued artifacts in Egypt, their rightful home. But as danger closes in and political tensions rise, she must make an impossible choice: protect her father’s legacy—or forge her own.

Propelled by high adventure and deadly intrigue, Daughter of Egypt is the story of two ambitious women who lived centuries apart. Both were forced to hide who they were during their lifetimes, yet ultimately changed history forever.

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

My Review: I like this sentence as a statement of purpose for this story:

I've been a student of Hatshepsut since the day Mr.Carter entered my world. The narrative of her existence is one I've been constructing as long as I can remember. The nature of her life and the manner in which her successors were positively determined to erase her from history is a puzzle I'm determined to solve myself.

Based on the few extant facts of two erased women's lives, intertwined in a way I found very compelling, this novel of erasure is so infuriating I want to chew nails to relieve my frustration. How many women, strong, intelligent, and capable, have suffered this fate without the unique concatenation of societal circumstances that preserved the barest bits and patches of their life like these two?

It doesn't do to dwell on it. I'm prone to rumination as it is.

I found the story of these two flinty women very involving. Their shared unwillingness to make themselves small enough to be unthreatening to the men around them truly inspired me to look more deeply into their factual lives. Historical fiction often does the opposite for me, leaving me more or less as informed as I ever want to be; these lives were sufficiently powerfully rendered that I wanted still more. There is not any evidence of Lady Evelyn doing any discovering, but she was clearly deeply intrigued and passionately invested in her father's and Howard Carter's discoveries in Egypt.

I was not entirely delighted by the, to my way of thinking, cursory nods at the deeply contentious subject of Empire and imperialism more generally. After all, Hatshepsut's own imperial project draws a distinct parallel to England's commercially motivated one. I know asking for more is asking for Author Benedict to choose to write *my* preferred story not her own, so I'm not holding that against the rating.

I felt this was a four-star read mostly because I found the ending a bit contrived for my taste. I do not think it is an ending that flows naturally from the two intertwined stories preceding it; more it was the set-piece everything on the way was going to support. It didn't ruin my pleasure in the read, but it did tarnish that pleasure just a bit to feel I was being pandered to when, until then, I was being lured along with strong storytelling.

Liking for ancient Egypt as a storytelling venue will go a long way towards wrapping you into the tale. It's not perfect but nothing is, and it's far more perfected than the lives these women were left with by the patriarchy of their times. Our times ain't great, but things have been worse.

March 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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At Last: A Novel by Marisa Silver

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in midcentury America, At Last explores a rich family saga centered on two fierce and competitive matriarchs whose intertwined lives reflect the complexities of family, tradition, and personal ambition.

Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner are two formidable women whose paths cross when their children marry. Both women are sharp, cunning, and unwavering in their conflicting beliefs about marriage, responsibility, and family and, most pressingly, their efforts to vie for the love of their shared granddaughter.

At Last paints a vivid portrait of the American Midwest, capturing the essence of a time and place where societal norms and personal aspirations often clashed. Marisa Silver’s narrative weaves together the lives of Helene and Evelyn, from their vastly different childhoods through the pivotal events that define them. Both intimate and expansive, and capturing the complexities of ambition and love with humor and insight, At Last is a testament to what happens when an unintended, even unwanted relationship turns out to be a central one that defines a life.

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

My Review: I was in the mood for a family saga, but this one wasn't the one I was looking for. Helene and Evelyn were spoiled selfish brats; Ruth got one good thing, birthing Francie, and one dropped thread that annoyed me (what the hell ever happened to those bloody letters?!); and Francie did less for me than her invisible father did.

Maybe I'm grouchy because I was really hot for some family drama and got lots of unkind, whiny selfishness instead.

Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $14.99 for an ebook. Read a sample before committing.

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The Sun Dog: A Novel of Native America (The Native American Saga #3) by Robert Downes

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A tale of sorcery, witchcraft, and romance set in the heart of Native America—where myth and truth collide, and the line between savior and monster begins to blur.

When a Seneca Iroquois town on Lake Ontario is beset by an evil spirit, its female chieftain, Walking Turtle, calls upon seven shamans and seven warriors from neighboring tribes to free her people from the demon. Meanwhile, in an isolated village to the north, a young woman named Found by the River is accused of witchcraft. She and her protector, Willow, face certain death unless they can escape their tormentors.

Into this scenario comes Sun Dog, a charismatic magician leading a band of refugees fleeing the collapse of their civilization 800 miles to the south. Sun Dog and his people are survivors of mighty Coosa, a realm destroyed by the army of Spanish conquistador, Hernán de Soto. Sun Dog vows to rid the Senecas of their demon, while wrestling with a sinister force of his own. He alone can decide the fate of those condemned as witches.

Brimming with unforgettable characters and grounded in history, The Sun Dog is the follow-up to The Wolf and The Willow, reintroducing Willow and Wolf in an ongoing saga set in Native America during the tumultuous “Lost Century” of the 1500s. The Sun Dog is the final installment of the Native American Saga.

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

My Review: I was so confused during this read. It's apparently pretty enmeshed in the events of earlier books that reading it first was not at all a happy experience...in no way is this the book's fault.

The story and the prose were agreeable, interesting, and if I'd been fully in the picture I expect I'd've been warbling my fool lungs out to go get one.

Blank Slate Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $20.95 for a paperback. Start with #1, Windigo Moon: A Novel of Native America, if you want to read it.

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Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal by Gary S. Cross

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The history of leisure time, from the earliest societies to the work-from-home era

Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes?

Today, despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Free Time offers a broad historical explanation of why our affluent society does not afford more time away from work and why that time is often unsatisfying. Gary S. Cross explores the cultural, social, economic, and political history, especially of the past 250 years to understand the roots of our conceptions of free time and its use. By the end of the nineteenth century, a common expectation was that industrial innovations would lead to a progressive reduction of work time and a subsequent rise in free time devoted to self-development and social engagement. However, despite significant changes in the early twentieth century, both goals were frustrated, thus leading to the contemporary dilemma.

Cross touches on leisure of all kinds, from peasant festivals and aristocratic pleasure gardens to amusement parks, movie theaters and organized sports to internet surfing, and even the use of alcohol and drugs. This wide-ranging cultural and social history explores the industrial-era origins of our modern obsession with work and productivity, but also the historical efforts to liberate time from work and cultivate free time for culture. Insightful and informative, this book is sure to help you make sense of your own relationship to free time.

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

My Review: The subtitle needed to add: "...in the US" to be representative of the contents. It's interesting, trenchant, a bit tendentious; not unusually so in any of those cases. It's explicitly acknowledged in the up front text; it needs to be more forcefully stated still.

Strongly recommended to the Robert Reich and Thomas Piketty crowd, urged on the Thom Hartmann readers too.

NYU Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $25.00 for an ebook.

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Set for Life: A Novel by Andrew Ewell

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A wryly funny and moving novel that captures the complexities of marriage, art, friendship, and the fictions we create in order to become the people we wish to be.

A creative writing professor at a third-tier college in upstate New York is on his way home from a summer fellowship in France, where he’s spent the last three months loafing around Bordeaux, tasting the many varieties of French wine at his disposal, and doing just about anything but actually working on his long overdue novel. A stopover in Brooklyn to see his and his wife’s closest friends—John, a jaded poet-turned-lawyer with a dubious moral compass, and Sophie, a once-promising fiction writer with a complicated past and a mysterious allure—causes further trouble when he and Sophie wind up sleeping together while John is out serenading Brooklyn coeds with poems instead of preparing legal briefs.

But instead of succumbing to his failures as a teacher, writer, and husband, an odd freedom begins to bubble up. Could a love affair be the answer he’s been searching for? Could it offer the escape he needs from the department chair, Chet Bland, who’s been breathing down his neck? Relief from the gossip of colleagues and generational tension with students? Respite from embarrassment over his wife, Debra Crawford, and her meteoric rise as a novelist? His escapades might even make the perfect raw material for an absolutely devastating novel, which would earn him tenure, wealth, and celebrity—everything he needs to be set for life. If only he could be the one to write it.

A brilliant case of art imitating life, Andrew Ewell’s gem of a debut is a hilarious and poignant tour de force that asks who owns whose story, skewers the fictions created from our lives and others’, and brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “publish or perish.”

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

My Review: Competently executed riposte to a very nasty break-up between the author and his ex, writer Hannah Pittard. I was mildly amused, chuckled a time or two, received the w-i-n-k and nudge from him as he detailed how absurd break-up spats are; nothing new, in short.

It's fine, but not my favorite read of 2024.

Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $13.99 for an ebook. Read a sample first.

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Bad Foundations by Brian Allen Carr

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Bad Foundations is a comedic absurdist novel about a home foundation inspector whose own home life is falling apart.

Cook does not have an ordinary job. He spends his days inspecting people's crawl spaces, cataloging their filth and photographing the decay. At his other job, as a father, he has to learn how to bond with his teenage daughter, but that's hard to do when covered in spider webs.

High on legal weed and searching for answers to life's mysteries, Cook works alongside similar colorful characters trying to make money and save for the future. That is until a bad sales month spirals out into a quantum stay at a surreal Ohio hotel.

New friendships are made, old curses are dealt with, and the local police force is put to the test. Told in a stylized working-class voice, Brian Allen Carr is a true raconteur of the American Midwest.

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

My Review: Double entendres and in-jokes for the literarily informed; not much of a plot to keep you reading, though. It's a book I browsed through for a couple years but never lost interest enough to Pearl-Rule it forever.

I don't know if y'all're gonna resonate to the odd combo of working-class setting and slightly recherché philosophical and literary-theory concepts.

CLASH Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)requests and requires delivery of $17.95 for a paperback.

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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 Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse (85%) by Ed Simon

Rating: 1.5* of five

The Publisher Says: No Western religious concept has been as socially, culturally, economically, and politically significant as that of the apocalypse. Neither heaven and hell, nor sin and salvation, nor even God and the devil have merited the attention of billions of people in the manner that belief in the end of the world has. Apocalyptic thinking is riven by a fruitful--and at times dangerous--binary between the hopes for a coming millennium when all shall be perfected or of a fiery deluge when the earth shall be destroyed.

The Dove and the Dragon is the first comprehensive history of Western apocalypticism. Ed Simon introduces a new system for classifying movements concerned with the end of history, between hopeful, millennial "doves" and violent, apocalyptic "dragons." This framing connects a seemingly disparate phenomenon, from medieval millennialism (sic) to modern Marxism, Reformation apocalypticism to contemporary techno-utopianism. Expected groups are considered, but unexpected phenomena are interpreted through the lens of apocalypticism as well to argue that those that have often been classified as "secular" still take part in this ancient theological category.

This new way of interpreting history gives sense to the full scope of apocalypticism as a series of movements and as a genre, including not just religion and theology, but politics, philosophy, and pop culture as well. The Dove and the Dragon promises to be the standard introduction for years to come.

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

My Review: Per the publisher, "Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and a staff writer for LitHub, as well as the editor of Belt Magazine." Mistaking the date relationship between the Plague of Justinian (540s) and the Black Death (1340s)...cited as "a century" instead of "eight centuries"...which should not happen even as a draft typo. Multiple infelicities occurred in the realms of definitions, f/ex: when writing a book about apocalypses it's wise to state your definition early, buttress it with cited external sources, and stick to it; never happened that I noticed, we went from millenarian (the "ism" intended above, where I wrote "sic") ideas to technological ones (all cited, but to what purpose if even I can find introduced errors?). And this is a magazine editor writing a book for a religious publisher.

I read the whole book because I was so deeply stunned this made it out of the editing process in this condition. He says of the book, "If a reading of this book demonstrates anything, it’s that that every century has a contingent of people, both smaller and larger depending on circumstance, who are convinced that they’re living in the last days." I am now.

Fortress Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $39.00. They do not deserve it.

YOU DID NOTHING WRONG, psychological horror

YOU DID NOTHING WRONG
C.G. DREWS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Dark domestic suspense meets haunted house horror in this unnerving adult debut guaranteed to keep you awake for days afterward, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Don’t Let the Forest In and Hazelthorn

The walls are closing in on her perfect new life.

Single mother Elodie’s life has become a fairy tale. She’s met Bren, equal parts Golden-retriever-devoted and sinfully handsome. He’s whisked her and her autistic son, Jude, to the crumbling family house he’s renovating. She has a new husband, a new house, and a new baby on the way. Everything is perfect.

Until Jude claims he can hear voices in the walls. He says their renovations are “hurting” the house. Even Elodie can’t ignore it―something strange is going on.

The question is, Is it with the house, or with her son?

And what is Elodie hiding?

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

My Review: I'm not going to do content warnings because the Spoiler Stasi will come for me in a dark alley of the internet and I do not want to find out what those hatchet-wielding weirdos are capable of. I will simply say that the rule often known as "Chekhov's gun" is in force in this story.

You do the rest.

A domestic psychological thriller about a single mom who does some really sus stuff in pursuit of a good life for herself and her son. Not wrong, or evil, or even particularly stupid stuff. She just wants things to work out so fine-grained examination of her decisions goes out the window...and, my impression of her is, this is not the first time she's just done stuff without making a careful decision. Her deeply, terribly wounded self does not do calm or logical. Of course, like all people who are wounded as horribly as Elodie has been (who don't put in tons of work in therapy, which she decidedly has and will not), she can be a wrecking ball with three-foot red-hot spikes sticking out of a thousand-pound iron ball crashing, into bystanders innocent or not.

So why'd I read a book that sounds like I really hated it? Because Author Drews shows me how much of Elodie's life is really not in her control. Inner life, real life, life of the mind...none of it is under her full control. Her husband, her autistic child, no one does not have scars she has left somewhere in their psyche. It's all coming to a bitter head as this story progresses.

More mean, nasty-sounding stuff, but I'm recommending it to you? Not like me, is it, any more than horror stories are normal fare for me. As we started this journey with psychological suspense my guard was let down. As a suspenseful novel, the highest barrier to entry into this storyverse is that everyone in it is shitty to everyone else. Elodie tells us all the worst and least sympathetic things about each person most certainly including herself. It is all done in a very sincere tone, Elodie being brutally honest with herself and us.

Remember Chekhov's gun.

I will say I got to only a hair under four stars based on one thing. The epilogue. I was cruising along, too invested and interested to bail out but not more than a solid three stars, until I read the epilogue. My entire idea of the story shifted under my readerly feet. In a good way? I'm not a bit sure.

A book that does a dark and stormy life, leave aside night, and seriously commits to its reality and its truth, is deserving of praise and support. I think a reader with a taste for gothic stories and for messy women as heroes of their own stories, ought to join me in reading the book. That fractional slice under four stars is all down to my personal taste, not craft-judgment, against Bren the husband. I can't be explicit...see Spoiler Stasi fear outlined above...but I don't think my cavil will be shared by most others. (Except you, Horrible.)

I do reiterate: Chekhov's gun. Read a sample before committing, nervous folk.

SINGING BONES: An Epic Saga of Loss and Survival in an Ancient Neolithic World, Téuta's World series #2

SINGING BONES: An Epic Saga of Loss and Survival in an Ancient Neolithic World
S.G. ULLMAN
Stuart Ullman (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Nearly 8,300 years ago, a sudden climate collapse reshaped the earth. Winters grew longer and colder, harvests failed, coastlines flooded, and the ground itself became unstable. For the Téuta, a settled Neolithic village that had endured for generations, survival became uncertain.

Eini is born with troubling visions of disaster—warnings her people dismiss as superstition. As the climate worsens and violence spreads among desperate neighbors, Eini spends her lifetime trying to protect her family and preserve the fragile traditions that hold her community together. When catastrophe finally strikes, the Téuta must face the unthinkable: abandoning their ancestral home and redefining who they are in a transformed world.

Told across generations, Singing Bones follows the lives of women whose strength, memory, and resilience shape the fate of their people—from prophecy, to survival, to leadership forged in loss. Song, story, and shared history become tools of endurance in a world where nothing can be taken for granted.

Grounded in real archaeological and climate research, Singing Bones is ancient historical fiction set during the Neolithic era. Its spiritual elements arise from a prehistoric worldview in which nature, belief, and survival are inseparable. Sweeping yet intimate, it explores how early civilizations responded to climate catastrophe, displacement, and change.

Perfect for readers of immersive historical fiction, ancient civilizations, prehistoric survival stories, and epic sagas rooted in humanity’s deep past.

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

My Review: Three years ago, I gave Author Ullman's The Téuta's Child four stars. It's a deeply human story of dealing with the hand that's dealt to you, one that patiently invites you to be in a human world long vanished and still, because humans are truly never going to change in basic needs, familiar within its fascinating surface differences.

One basic reality of human life is loss, losing love, losing comfortable certainty; the other angle of view on this is change, that difficult-to-endure condition of uncertainty and adjustment and learning. The world our characters inhabit is changing with relentless momentum. It was a time in human history wherein the very earth beneath people's feet was vanishing, prey animals were simply vanishing, the whole basis of life was unsettled, no longer trustworthy and familiar. The last days of vanished Doggerland brought to vivid life through the story of a woman and her descendants is poignant and very emotionally involving.

I was a little confused about how Eini's visions could be dismissed in a time of supernatural reality being the only way to understand the world. It's necessary, of course, for there to be a story...the hero faces the obstacle of disbelief in order to make the reader invest in their rightness...but rwally, simply being required to question how that could happen made me reflect on how, eg, climate scientists must experience their world. I bear down hard on the concept of "vanishing" because its connotation of helplessness, of cruel inevitability and enforced absence. It is inherent in the idea of seeing the world around you change into something you've never seen before, have no idea how to deal with, can't even imagine what to change in yourself to cause positive adjustment.

There's a lot to be said for that kind of rattling uncertainty to make a story work. This story made me sit still and absorb the fear, the panic, the resolve summoned from one's depths, as these brave human beings took their lives in their hands and...angrily, fearfully...made the changes they needed to in order to survive.

I hope very much we will get more stories in this dynamic world.

ALMOST LIFE, the ghostly sound of unrung bells in unlived lives

ALMOST LIFE
KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Two young women meet in Paris in this decades-spanning tour de force about the enduring power of young love and the poignant heartbreak of missed chances—perfect for fans of One Day and Normal People.

Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, 1978. Erica is a student, relishing her first summer abroad before beginning university at home in England. Laure is studying for her PhD at the Sorbonne, drinking and smoking far too much, and sleeping with a married woman. The moment the two women meet, the spark is undeniable, but their encounter turns into far more than a summer of love. It is the beginning of a relationship that will define their lives and every decision they have yet to make…

Erica and Laure’s love story spans decades, marriage, children, secret trysts, and the agonizing changes—both personal and political—that might mean they can be together, after all. But when life brings them within touching distance again, will they be brave enough to seize a future together?

Beautifully capturing young love and all its complexities, Almost Life is a story of longing for the paths not taken, and the almost lives we live.

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

My Review: Messy lives are so much more interesting than tidy, orderly ones. Messy for the right reasons...like being in love with two people for the usual complex, complicated reasons we humans fall in love...make for even better, more involving reading. Then there's the ultimate messiness of not being able to decide what to do about any of it. That is the most relatable thing of them all.

Of course, the emotional cost of being in two equally important relationships...well, grief and guilt and anger are spread around pretty thickly, pretty widely, and really heavily. Erica and Laure are connected but in ways that are demanding, requiring choices to be made. Erica is the one with A Plan (children, career as a novelist), so she chooses her Plan over the loose, freeing love of Laure (that will never get her one step closer to fulfilling her Plan).

Laure. Her plan for life is to love, to make love, to build around her loving chosen family of outsider misfit gay folk a nexus of happiness and support. As this story begins in 1978, I needn't tell older readers what was about to ram into the walls of the world...suffice, for those who were not there, to say that COVID was not the first deadly plague that came out of nowhere your elders faced. Laure being in the gay world of Paris feels it, bears it, as it scythes through her circle of loved ones. Erica, insulated in marriage and children, feels it less, but she feels love for Laure and the deeply conflicted happy delights and miserable lows of being a human in a family.

Author Hargrave is not going to trudge through the lives of Laure and Erica, taking us into bedrooms and kitchens and school meetings; we hop and bounce and move through their worlds, seldom seeing them together, but always connecting, and always dreaming of what might have been if....

It's a technique whose use means that a reader wanting a saga, a densely woven tapestry of emotional connections explored and explained, is not going to be satisfied. This story explores how the truly, intensely important loves in our lives crystallize us. Shaping the futire is not all that often a deliberate act, despite the mountains of books and stories that tell us we can take charge, we can direct our own life-movie. Erica meeting Laure awoke to her bisexuality, and I am here on this Earth to tell you that sexual awakening is not under the awakened's conscious control and is seldom a force for good until lots of painful lessons about emotions and plans gone awry are learned. Erica and Laure set in motion changes and processes of healing and cycles of misery and destruction in their lives. Lives lived, of course, but more interestingly roads not taken. These are the strands of Author Hargrave's story that sang and shimmered in my mind's eye.

I must say that this technique militates against deeper explorations of the women's relationship to each other. There is an inevitable sense of unsettledness, of being in motion without being headed in any particular direction, as a price exacted for seeing into the "almost lives" that pepper every person's experience—without most of us being aware of them, aware of their ghosts anyway.

I'm sure this story would ignite terrific book club discussions. It's tailor-made for the present moment of multiple inflection points converging on unknowable futures that preclude each other. Well worth your time and treasure.