THE AND THAT WAS, beautifully illustrated novella-length prose poem

THE AND THAT WAS
MIA TIJAM (illus. Rustom Pujado)
Rosarium Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The and That Was is an archipelago of words: lush and mountainous in parts, civilized veneer in others, almost all of it seemingly born from instances when the forces within could no longer be restrained. The thing about archipelagos is to not view them as chains of islands, but as the space that envelops them.

That is what this collection contains.

The land. The culture. The rustic and the urban, religious and heretical. The fractures. The spaces. The cities without dragons...

The Fairy Tale Reality of the Philippines...

Where the end began and begins again...The wishes that point to what we should have wished. These stories contain–and release. And so do you.

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My Review: "Stories" and "collection" are slightly misleading descriptors. There are under 150pp in this book; there are very cool illustrations on full pages, elucidating angles of seeing on the, the, uhm vignettes or prose poems they're surrounded by; the sum of these parts is less "collection" than stream-of-consciousness novella.

I don't know anything meaningful about the Filipino culture I was within though apart from as I read. I'm very clear that I'm in a world that's dreamlike, delineated in flashes, and in swirls of awareness.. It's bounded and bordered and depicted by the artwork that, malheureusement, I'm not able to show you (put up downloadable samples, Rosarium! you can watermark them!) for added edge-giving. Illustrator Rustom has either read these stories with great care and deep personal connection resulted or he is the male half of Author Tijam's bicameral mind. The prose is deft and rich:

The child gingerly stood up and warily folowed her out of the bodega, into the afternoon light, and through the dirty-kitchen—a hut beside the main house where the old women chopped ebverrything on a long wooden table and cooked in a kiln banked by dried wood.The old nursemaid led her to the deep-well pump beside it. The child wited silently as Nana Kuring lifted the tin basin that was shaped like a soft drink bottle crown and filled with laundry to hoist it on top of her head while bending to pick up the palo-palo used as the laundry paddle. The old woman began walking towards the gate that led to the road and after a dozen stepsm stopped when she realized that the child wasn't following her. The child was looking up at the windows of the old house, at those shuttered shell windowpanes, and then looked at her. Nana Kuring swung the palo-palo in a forward motion to the child, and the little girl hurried after the old woman.

An entire cultural milieu, images sounds and all, is in this brief not-unique passage.

I found the reading experience satisfying on several levels: curiosity about a culture I do not know, immersion in an unfamiliar sensory world, stimulation of visual language fresh to me. I'm sure it's hard to look stuff up, to see the places you don't have a ready-made image in your head to match, at first anyway. It' really worth making the effort and I recommend this work to you as a rewarding place to start your efforts.

SAVVY SUMMERS AND THE PO'BOY PERILS, second dangerously fattening entry in a delightful, atmospheric series

SAVVY SUMMERS AND THE PO'BOY PERILS (Savvy Summers #2)
SANDRA JACKSON-OPOKU
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The next delectable mystery featuring quick-witted, unforgettable Savvy Summers, owner of a soul food café in Chicago.

Savvy has her work cut out when an old friend hires her to cater a company luncheon at a nearby office building on Chicago's South Side. Stepping out of her traditional soul food comfort zone, Savvy whips together a menu of Creole classics, with her own spin, of course—mini po’boys with assorted fillings, sunburst salad, and bread pudding using Great Aunt Essie’s famous buttermilk biscuits.

But when someone is found dead in the company’s conference room, Savvy’s culinary creations are suddenly in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. While the focus should be on their delicious flavors and inventive techniques, Savvy’s beloved café instead becomes the center of a murder investigation once again.

Caught within a messy web of gossip, miscommunication, and fraught coworker relationships, Savvy will have to settle the confusion to clear her name. Somebody’s hiding something, and with the help of her trusty assistant manager, Penny Lopés, Savvy sets out uncover exactly who is to blame. With familiar faces turning up the heat on her investigation and her café still in hot water, will Savvy be able to save her reputation before it’s too late?

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My Review: I gained fifteen pounds off the bread-pudding description alone. I would *kill* for some right now! I'd kill for some buttermilk biscuits, honestly, but these, and the perfect bread pudding...*drool*

As I said of Author Jackson-Opoku's work before, this series is going to fatten me right up into blimp-sized, belching satiety. Savvy's knack for landing in hot water is still credible to me, seasoned old reader that I am, because it doesn't come from some out-of-character contrivance but from accepting a job her business needs.

It seems clear that the series is going to do a lot of wandering around. It's not my first preference for the way a murder mystery unfolds, but it very much is my preference for a character-driven polyphonic novel of a community that feels real in its tight-knit gossipy love. Even though ugliness is inherent in murder mysteries, death is always a blow to a group, the deep interconnections are strong enough to heal the wound. With time, and as an aftermath to justice being served.

Savvy herself is a fun character to follow around as she talks to people, caring about them, listening to them. Penny is a scene-stealin' sass-dealin' delight as always. It's a hallmark of Author Jackson-Opoku's chops that I felt welcomed back into a charmed circle of lovely friends most of the time during this read. It takes skill to make that a reader's experience of a series story.

Savvy and Fanon (love that name, so resonant for someone born when and where he most likely was) have the kind of chemistry I myownself prefer: hot, but at a simmer that can turn into a boil quickly if there's just a *little* nudge of the thermostat. It's believable these two connected as hard as they did; it's believable they couldn't make it work full-time, but also are so finely attuned to each other that they have an unbreakable connection.

I really enjoyed being invited back into the community, welcomed with a so-enticing spread of delights, and told all the tea while everyone tried to be the one to spill it hardest. Not the greatest shakes on the mystery front...another deeply unlikeable crudbucket dead that not one soul should mourn the loss of...but as a novel, and a way to spend time rewardingly, it's up there for 2026.

THE MULAI, consider the comps given by the publisher as gospel

THE MULAI
MUNIR HACHEMI (tr. Julia Sanches)
Coach House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Interstellar via Invisible Cities: spec-fic translated from Spanish imagines a utopian way of life on another planet.

Years after the climate wars on Earth, the Mulai have settled into their new home on an unnamed planet. Supplies stopped arriving from Earth many years ago, and the Mulai have found a way to live. But now the people of Earth want to know what happened to the settlers, so they send The Archaeologist.

He finds that they have become a different people: uncannily similar to us but with something radically Other about them. Their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, reproduce, bury their dead, and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. The Archaeologist feels like his trip is one extended misunderstanding.

With fragments from The Archaeologist’s notes and the stories of Flukeh and Faida, who map both their world and their language, The Mulai offers a glimpse of a world adjacent to ours – one that just may be a model for how to better our own.

From one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and author of the celebrated Living Things, and translated by the award-winning Julia Sanches, comes a bold new Borgesian reimagining of what ‘civilization’ might look like.

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My Review: “Only when we encounter the other can we truly see ourselves.”

This is the crux of this story's argument. It is spoken by The Archaeologist, Dr. Cordovero, in an unironic way as he executes the duties of a scholar to interpret the Mulai, a culture not his own. So, a colonizer's PoV...a man whose cultural matrix he's so embedded within that he can't see how it forms...distorts...his picture of Reality. This being a story about how a human culture simply...vanished...without making a ripple in water left behind, it made perfect sense this should be the case. The Archaeologist’s notes are his rigid way of trying to fix an understanding of the Mulai's lifeways into a clear explanation of power structures, kinship patterns, and language architecture.

None of these concepts apply.

Seen from The Archaeologist’s PoV, a Mulai library f/ex is not anything like a library. A bit like Samuel Beckett's splices from late in his life, these places are collecting points for unbound unconnected sheets that do not necessarily tell any kind of cohesive story...just as random pages torn willy-nilly then taped together did not form a deliberate Beckett story, though it was what Beckett intended. The Archaeologist is sure, with typical colonizer arrogance, that these distant cousins of Earth's humans have let him in, have answered his questions as he intended them to not as they intended to. Life lived in translation is always tough. Life lived in denial, blindness, in a fog of culture-bits one does not know is obscuring clear vision...harder still.

That this story about a life lived in (mis)translation is itself a translation is either a step too twee or a layer of hot fudge atop the whipped cream of sociological SF from an earlier literary era wrapping up a rich, dense custard of story. It's a novel that requires you-the-reader to think past the obvious, to dig your spoon under the rich topping of the SFnal setting, through the soothing sweetness of the story's meaning, into the heavy, velvety lushness of Author Hachemi's ideas about how culture, language, and art emulsify into this marvel of delightful idea-sharing.

What actually happens on the page is far less important to this reading experience than what happens inside you as you read it. Did you just read the glossy surface...did you just give the story your attention without turning it over and over as you read, after you finished...or is this a "too hard, turn on the TV" kind of experience? They're all in here.

It's a lot, but it's rewarding no matter where you end up.

UNSAYABLE: A Life in Writing, speaks the unsayable into being

UNSAYABLE: A Life in Writing
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Hours and Day

Go ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side.

At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of oak, Chevrolet, finch, tulip, Tupperware… Each word rendered the world ever so slightly more understandable, more describable, kicking off a lifelong love affair with language—one that would, eventually, maybe inevitably, lead him to become a writer.

In Unsayable, Cunningham’s memories spill forth, and with them, reflections on the craft of writing. He is fifteen, in a swimming pool at night, gazing at the first boy he ever fell in love with, who is lost in contemplative silence. He is a new college graduate, setting off for nowhere in a Dodge Dart, hoping to pull meaning (and a novel) from the expanse of America. He is on Cape Cod, regaling an elderly couple with invented tales of sexual escapades. He is in an art gallery, unwittingly having the first in a lifetime of conversations with the man he would marry. A thread ties each beautifully-wrought moment to the what is unspoken, what won’t yield to language, what is embellished beyond recognition, what is still left to say.

Luminous, perceptive, and powerful, Unsayable is an ode to literature, a meditation on craft, and an intimate account of a life spent trying to put into words that which resists depiction. This, it turns out, is the lifeblood of the fiction the impossibility of capturing the human experience, and the relentless desire to try.

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My Review: Do you like life?

Really unanswerable, that question. Does it mean your life or just Life, that vast agglomerating thing that doesn't even have a rigorous definition? See...pointless to ask, unable to be pinned down well enough to create an answer.

But asking the question made you think, made you name things to focus thoughts, organize feelings, contemplate so many things no one ordinarily just...turns over deliberately. And all of it was done in words, because you read words, and put your words into combinations they probably havent been in for a long time. Or ever.

This is what Michael Cunningham has done in Unsayable: he has turned over in his mind all the life he's had, looking for words to put around the very odd thing he's organized his life around, being a writer. He loves writing, he loves words, he loves stories, and each anecdote in this memoir reinforces the reader's sense of these facts as rooted in his life. It's a tacit admission of his likely audience, the aspiring writers of the Anglophone world. It's also a generous gift from a seventy-plus year old teacher of the arts of storytelling, because it will survive him as well as his professional career. There are moments of craft advice in the moments of life story, there are even more clues as to how a reader can view the stories they consume so as to get the most pleasure out of the reading. It's just never made sense to me that more readers who don't plan to write fail to see the benefit of reading writing advice. How better to comprehend a story's creator as a person practicing a craft?

It's as deft an exercise of prose-writing as you'd expect. It's a read filled with stories for you to know Michael Cunningham by. It's a powerful tool to create a narrative, whether for your own life, a story you want to write, or empower yourself to create change.

Goodness knows the world needs people of vision to create better, more humane stories to follow in the world itself. Best to learn how from a master practicioner of the storytelling art.

THE WINTER FOLK, a new way to magic up Appalachia

THE WINTER FOLK
JEN JULIAN
Run For It (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman returns to the mysterious lodge in the woods where she once worked, and to the inscrutable creature that bound her there, in this haunting Appalachian gothic horror from singular voice Jen Julian. Perfect for fans of Alix E. Harrow and T. Kingfisher.

This is the story of Moth, who earned her name working for the Winter Folk.

Every year, the Winter Folk gather at a secret lodge in the Appalachians, a place known as Deerhaven, refuge for the time-worn and weary. As a child, Moth heard warnings from her mother: They are heartless, wild creatures—and they got no concern of us. At twenty-one, Moth is a college dropout, indebted, impoverished, and desperate for better things. She falls instantly for Deerhaven’s beautiful antlered host, the mild-mannered Mr. Oslin. When he offers her a housekeeper’s contract—one wish granted for a winter of service—she signs without question.

But Deerhaven is a dangerous place. Staff must follow strict rules or else face dire consequences, and the guests can be unpredictable and savage. And yet, Moth endures, enticed by a rumor that Mr. Oslin is looking for a protégé. A singular worker who would stay with him forever and be transformed.

Decades later, Moth returns to Appalachia with her husband and teenage daughter. She can't shake the feeling that she needs to return to Deerhaven, which banished her twenty years ago. As she hunts for a way in, her haunting memories and harrowing experiences come roaring back—her friends and rivals, her growing obsession with Mr. Oslin, and her mysterious exile.

A door exists in the dark of the woods. After so long away, what has Deerhaven become?

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My Review: In fiction, one must always have a fine balace between questions answered, questions unanswered, and unanswerable problems. Without something in the story that feels...unfinished, there's no place for the reader to put their own experiences onto the read. If there are unanswered questions, things the author sets up as needing reolution that aren't resolved, they'd best be finely calculated to invite a sequel. My ur-text for doing this balancing act well is Lord of the Rings. Yes, *I* said something noce about a story I really disliked reading. It left the Problem of Evil unresolved, as indeed is reality's unresolved Big Question; but the plot-driving questions? All resolved to varying degrees of finality. It is genius storytelling. (I still hate it, but credit where it's due.)

On the other end is A Song of Ice and Fire. I don't feel the need to elaborate. Trillions of pixels arranged in uncountable patterns are out there reflecting fans' emotional responses to an incomplete story. Fans are still spouting off about the various issues, the creator is not doing much to calm them down, so on the noise goes.

Here's a story, with a fundamentally unresolvable conflict underpinning it, resolvable conflicts skinned over it, and some left-unfinished business that invites a sequel or two, that doesn't quite scale heights of genius but does plant the author's story-flag atop a hill.

The setting is Appalachia, which is US-cultural shorthand for "the Shire," that pre- or de-industrial landscape of natural beauty, peopled by rustics, rife with quaint folk who *indulgent smile* accept magic is real. I find that more than mildly insulting acceped as a storytelling given, but it's there, it works, and it's not factually incorrect just because it's insulting. It is not used condescendingly in Author Jen Julian's hands, so I'm not bristling at her, but at the stereotyping that allows this perception to go unchallenged.

Author Julian's story of Moth's life lived in two mutually exclusive worlds, magical and mundane, is one she could not have told as well absent this stereotype. Moth will always be Moth despite being born Vera. Think a moment about the root of the name "Vera," and her destiny is unlocked. (Go read, I'm going to assume you got the point and move on.) Moth is, and isn't, Vera. Like all those who are transformed by contact with magic, the life Moth leads after her time in Deerhaven is much like the lives lead by post-Garden Adam and Eve. She knows now what it costs to See Beyond (caps very intentional for context) when Vision is...removed, denied, forbidden...after being granted. How she will always, always have Heimweh for a state of being that can only exist in a place that is inaccessible now you've left it.

Don't put too much weight on Vera's last name being "Stoker." It can best be seen as a marker of her otherness and not as an invitation to horror and bloody violence. Moth, being returned to "Vera" and mundanity, can't stop being aware of her lack, loss, denied state. It's achieved by very unshowy means, in word choices for Moth and later for Vera that convey different emotional registers. It's not something that will hit you in the face but a dawning awareness, a thing that stays just outside your field of vision until you see it then you don't unsee it as it organizes the read anew.

Vera and Moth belong to different worlds. They have some memories in common; they know a few of the same people and carry some of the same baggage from bruising, painful shifts in their life; but in the end Vera can only be Vera or Moth in those lives, in those mutually exclusive worlds.

Do you need a better explanation for the experience of growth as a person?

It's a read I can see taking on a life bigger than its basis if and when the zeitgeist aligns with it. I hope for Author Julian's sake that happens now, propelling her into prominence she has the talent to support. I seriously hope she has or acquires the skills to survive it.

FORTRESS OF THE FORGOTTEN ONES, don't delay learning about them

FORTRESS OF THE FORGOTTEN ONES
FAHMIDA RIAZ (tr. Sana R. Chaudhry)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation

In Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, Fahmida Riaz transports readers to fifth-century Ctesiphon, the zenith of the Sassanian Empire, in a brilliant historical novel that blends rich cultural memory with striking political relevance. Set against the backdrop of fire worshippers, Parsi kings, and the ancient Avesta, this ambitious tale follows Mazdak, the first socialist revolutionary in history, as he challenges the power structures of his time.

With vivid depictions of the Great Palace of King Qobad, the lands of the White Huns, and the impoverished masses, Riaz delves deep into the forces of history that shaped Mazdak’s quest for social justice. A masterpiece of historical fiction, Fortress of the Forgotten Ones is a powerful meditation on erasure, cultural identity, and the fight for justice that resonates with our contemporary world.

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My Review: What a fascinating read! I was constantly intrigued by the strangeness of the settings, and eager to get the next interesting tidbit of knowledge.

And that's where my problem lies. I genuinely could not wait for my lessons in history to commence but I was never empathetically crushed when the history was dark. I am still not sure who the characters are, but I am very clear on what happened to them. Ctesiphon is no longer a name on a map of archaeological sites, it's a place. It vibrates with events so huge their echoing claps of collapse, of rupture, their crackling roars of inflammation, reverberate (I now see) in 2026's tragedies.

That's heady stuff. It's why there are four stars up top. There'd be six if I could remember anyone's name. Events occur...curiously impersonally. Power vanishes...but no one lost it. It's a narrative choice that other authors have made over time, and more particularly when telling sweeping historical stories. If one isn't willing to create a doorstopper like War & Peace, Jean-Cristophe, or their ilk, a narrower focus on facts and events will keep pages turning.

It worked on me. It would most likely have worked on me with many more pages, too. As things stand I'm a happy reader, sated in my desire to be presented with a very interesting story about places and events completely new to me in a landscape foreign to my eyes.

I missed the portraits that could've showed me the people is all.

THE SIXTH NIK, we need a new literary adjective..."Krausian"

THE SIXTH NIK
DANIEL KRAUS
Saga Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Perfectly aligned for readers of Iain M. Banks’s The Culture series and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, The Sixth Nik is a galaxy spanning adventure from the New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Angel Down and Whalefall.

Deep into space, far past the triworld outposts, beyond range of the lethal trollbot internet, soars The Sickness: a ship woven from biomatter and capable of reacting to every need of its human crew. Sisilla, a nine-year-old cultist with a brain enhanced by arcane tech known as “niks,” has boarded to investigate the enigma of Fém—a plague-riddled planet that has abruptly gone rogue.

The mysterious crew includes a faceless assassin, a beautiful engineer jigsawed by plastic surgery, a peyote-addicted medic, and—most lethal of all—a rugged, NonModded captain with a score to settle with Sisilla. Other dangers abound. A hacked robot begins to believe Sisilla is its daughter. The Sickness itself is mutating, possibly even pregnant. And the secret of Fém is more horrific than anyone could have imagined. To survive, Sisilla will need to forsake her predetermined fate and embrace the unknown.

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My Review: Sisilla is a weird protagonist. She knows when she will die: after she completes her "Chore," the issue/problem/situation her birth family gave her life to resolving with the aid of major surgical brain modification and enhancement by alien tech. It's...distancing, for we-the-reader and most certainly for the Inuit people her birth family sent her to live among (it's the custom, it's required). She is the fifty-fifth child to have this life wished on her before she's got anything like the ability to offer consent, and then there's the fact that she will be killed when her "Chore" is complete. The alien-tech brain mods, the "niks," will be removed from her dead brain, the next sacrificial child will be found and modified, and giant social/technical/existential problems will be solved.

I was appalled and repulsed by this system of abusive exploitation. I was revolted by the most bizarrely powered transport that took Sisilla from her place of education and preparation into distant reaches of space, that "plasmagraphic" ship's name...The Sickness...apt for the ship and the "Chore" Sisilla is to accomplish at the cost of her life. This being Author Kraus, I was expecting seriously effective descriptive language everywhere. I got it in spades. I've seldom liked a character I sympathized with *less* than Sisilla, mostly because the Omelas-ness of her world is a truly effective backdrop for creating kind feelings by way of contrast. I was actually nauseated by The Sickness, thus felt a reluctant protective urge towards the child it was created to transport. A misplaced emotion...Sisilla is not a person in need of protection, but one to be protected against as normalizing a brutal, utilitarian corruption of innocence in a very questionable enterprise. I won't call it a cause.

I finished this read in May. I wrote three reviews, discarded them for being inaccurate and overly emotive. This review goes up no matter what. Author Kraus does a tremendous job of creating fascinating, flawed, awful human being protagonists in the two books of his I have now read. I know a lot of people read Angel Down (review linked on first reference) very differently than I did...it is my favorite WWI novel, despite the war being only the setting of a far, far more damning commentary on capitalism, anomie, and sociopathy writ large. Its commentary would not be as effective as it is were it set in another time and place. That is why I call it my favorite WWI novel. I won't call The Sixth Nik my favorite SF novel, or my favorite alien-contact novel; it is my favorite body horror novel. This is a finely gauged story that evokes sympathy and disgust simultaneously. There is a direct presentation of revolting meaty awfulness. Then there is, as one thinks about it, an awful emotionally excavating familiarity to its meaty awfulness. It is a story wherein People...that giant amorphous guilt-ameliorating construct...have chosen to sacrifice the humanity and the life of a little girl to solve a problem more quickly, more expeditiously, more seamlessly, at that cost.

Is the bell ringing yet?

So this read is not for everyone, not likely to be one you'll undertake unless you are willing to spelunk some dark caves of the soul with only a little light to carry with you. It will reward you with an undistorted assessment of the world, the humans in it, and (from Shakespeare in Love, remember that film?) a bit with a dog aptly named "Positive Roy." I suspect the fairly heavy-handed symbolism of the ship's mode of propulsion...one of my few true objections to the not-subtle nature of the story's worldbuilding...will cause eye-rolling. I offer to the rolled eye a reminder of "the Snarl," an equally unsubtle but much more palatable metaphor for tech-mediated human communication, and quite possibly an equally useful organizing principle to use along with Cory Doctorow's "enshittification."

Would I recommend you read this story? Yes. Do I expect you will? Not many of you. Do I hope you will try to overcome your reluctance to engage with something this complicated emotionally?

Very much. I did. I got a lot out of reflecting, revisiting, rethinking my ideas in this story's mirrors.