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.

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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.

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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.

A WRETCHED FOLLY: A Regency Cozy, FOURTEENTH in Bea's series of stories

A WRETCHED FOLLY: A Regency Cozy (Beatrice Hyde-Clare #14)
LYNN MESSINA
Potatoworks Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Traveling to the ancestral Matlock estate with her husband, Beatrice, Duchess of Kesgrave, is finally able to confront her greatest the pinery. Forced to endure an endless parade of pineapple-inflected dishes early in her marriage, she has devised a scheme to sabotage the despised fruit, which she can now carry out at long last.

Good gracious, no. Bea does not really mean the plants any harm, and approaching the building on a summer morning, she is struck by how lovely it is, with its elegant portico and high arching windows. It is a shame, then, that she stumbles across a slain corpse almost immediately upon entering.

Devil it! A dead body is the last thing she wants to contend with! She’s in the country — nearly a hundred miles from London and her recent harrowing experience. Having proven to the beau monde that she is not guilty of multiple homicides, she is eager to put some distance between her and her reputation as the murder duchess. All she wants to do is enjoy some fresh air and ingratiate herself with her new staff, an effort that would not be aided by accusing the servants of lying — although they obviously are, which the constable will figure out quickly enough if he is not a dunderhead.

Oh, but maybe he is a dunderhead and maybe the drawing in the victim’s pocket actually is a treasure map to a lost viking horde and maybe the murder duchess is a little too set in her ways to allow a killer to go free — or strike again.

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My Review: Duke and soon-to-be father Damien has brought his duchess Beatrice to his ancestral estate for her confinement. Haverill Hall is also the source of Bea's culinary nemesis, the pineapple, a very very expensive and trendy comestible she loathes. There are, in her thoughts at least, opportunities to create that will end the beloathèd plants from existing while looking innocent of wrongdoing in her belovèd Duke's eyes.

Be real, Bea: he'd know anyway if something destroyed his pineapples in their pinery. Plus you've got bigger fish to fry. Like, why's there a dead guy in said pinery. Like, when's this baby coming. Like, what now when the pinery turns out to be cozy and charming. Not least, like who are all these people in Haverhill?

Damien, still furious about the ton's recent treatment of the woman he adores, is not blind to Bea's character. He doesn't love her anyway, he loves her as she is. It makes Duke Damien my hero. I really need to get stories about men who love and support their partners; his silly childish endearments would irk me were they not overmatched by his fondness and demonstrable care for her. It does, however, still cause him great anxiety that his Bea is suddenly wrapped up in another murder solving, only now while she is at the point of delivering her husband's much-desired heir. It's clear this is very much the motivation for how...helpful...everyone, from Kesgrave the slightly pedantic and overintellectual Duke to the staff are to Bea as she clearly has no smallest desire to be inactive and uninvolved in the world. The wretched, boring novel she's agreed to read instead of dashing about but that can't even make her fall asleep it's so pathetic, honestly sounds very like late-pregnancy frustration and severe tedium intolerance. She's not in London, she's got a murder of someone she is not interested in that she's mostly happy to let the constable deal with until she frankly gets involved mostly to keep herself from going mad.

When the corpse's identity becomes clear, it still feels like Bea is not really invested in solving his murder, but in working through some feelings she's got left over from events in Flora's A Highly Courageous Adventure (what a family her cousin is marrying into! unlike her husband, he's chock-a-block with terrible relatives) and Verity's A Lark's Regret (apologies matter, when harm's been done however careless instead of malicious it was). It was, if I'm honest, a matter of deepest indifference to me who killed the lazy, greedy git. Still and all Ma'at must be served or there is no point in promulgating a concept of justice. I'm not salty about the absence of same in the 21st century at all, nonsense whatever might you mean.

I don't at all recommend starting here because there are spoilers for multiple books in these series of intertwined Regencies. Begin at the beginning. Get these relationship-driven crime-solving stories in their proper order so you won't slap your forehead and/or purse your lips in annoyance like I did multiple times.

I'm giving four full stars, despite my deep conviction neither Bea nor I care in the least about this jerk's murder (and I suspect we're both eager to attend Mrs. Pomphrey's wake, sour old baggage she is) because Damien, Duke of Kesgrave, and his Duchess Beatrice, are so very obviously partners in what they both treasure as a friendship. That makes me feel hopeful and happy, so is worth four stars on the strength of that alone.

OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel, masculinity's vast void after destruction

OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel
SINAN ANTOON
Other Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebbok, preorder now for delivery on 17 March 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this achingly beautiful novel of trauma, memory, and identity, two Iraqi men struggle to start a new life in the US after the Gulf War.

Sami, a retired doctor, lives with his son and grandchildren in Brooklyn. As he tries to navigate this new city, it becomes increasingly clear he is losing his memory due to dementia. Every day he sinks deeper into old memories of a life in Iraq before the war.

Omar arrived in the US with no family. He has run away from Iraq with a fake identity. As a deserter, he was punished by having an ear cut off. In Baghdad, this is an unmissable mark of shame. Omar works menial jobs, creates a new identity—comically passing as Puerto Rican—and dreams of reconstructive surgery to get his ear, and his dignity, back.

Their stories converge powerfully when it becomes clear they were connected in Iraq at a moment that was pivotal for them both. Deftly exploring the aftermath of war and relocation, Of Loss and Lavender creates a moving portrait of life in exile.

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My Review: A novel of displacement. A story of male identity that, in centering differing...often competing...cultural notions of masculinity, shines a klieg light into the endless void at men's cores left by their "failures," inabilities, unwillingness to live measured by that toxic measure.

What Author Antoon did by bringing these oddly assorted immigrants to the US was subtle, clever, and tendentious. Omar is a chancer. He's blagged his way into and out of trouble since...well, who knows, we're not vouchsafed his whole life's story but I'd bet my very own United States dollars that he's been behaving this way his whole life. Omar is running even when he stands still, never at rest because rest is the point when "They" can get you in their sights to pin you in your place, the one "They" have decided you belong.

Sami's never run in his life. Towards or away from a goal or a problem, he's been steady. His aging mind has fractured from the weight of his memories. He's not agile, he's strong. Strength, unlike agility, breaks when overextended. He tries to comprehend Brooklyn, not an easy task for the native from the US, and fails. In his failure to become a Brooklynite, Sami becomes the dependent he was always responsible for, the helpless and confused neophyte he always guided...the not-powerful responsibilty in place of a lifetime as the powerful protector. Wandering in his memories he needs to build his identity Sami has no traction thanks to dementia. We meet him before the dementia robs him of enough capacity to know he's losing his battle. It is the hardest to endure of all dementia's thieveries. Sami is still Sami. Cruel is our word for this moment of struggle, outsiders who observe it; internally, no one who knows it intimately has ever told us, because they can't.

When you use these men as each others' counterpoise you get the fulcrum of the system located at masculinity. Lost, found, rejected, but "Achilles absent was Achilles still," in Homer's distillation of verity into aperçu. In bringing these wounded-by-past-lives souls to a country that shares none of their lived experiences, Author Antoon removes all the props we use to build identity from them. They have no obvious place in the cultural map they must now use to navigate Life. Omar loves this because it means he controls his narrative, he has no further need to resist the boxes he's forced to occupy because they don't exist to threaten him. It's liberation, yes, but it comes as always at a price. Belonging, the sense of purpose that it grants, is also in those boxes that confine, shape, define Omar (including his name, fictional though it is). Freedom isn't free. Never has that truth been more stark than to Omar in Brooklyn.

Living your life in translation is never easy. It is a hidden cost of Othering those not deemed "mainstream" or those who are immigrants in similar degrees. Author Antoon is an iraqi immigrant to New York, a novelist and (it says in his biography) poet who translates from (and/or to) Arabic; It shows in this very good novel. It feels like he is translating the experience of masculinity from one culture to another, like the characters are finding ways to make sense of the world that use words no longer part of their fluency. Sami's losses are structural intrinsic; Omar's are voluntary, elective; both are costly and exact significant emotional tolls on each man's journey through the maze of Brooklyn.

As a professor at New York University, Author Antoon is no doubt drawing on his own immigrant experience in the vast, bewildering social system of New York. I hope the world here has treated him with greater kindness than either of these characters received. I offer the story an incomplete fifth star because I was immersed in the flume of the story's canal, the high-pressure constriction that roils and directs but does not deliver to an end point the narrative waters. What, in the end, did Omar and Sami do as a result of occupying the same canal? They changed; but in tandem not in response to each other.

I derived a lot of pleasure from the story. I hope y'all will give it your time and treasure. I think the way each character experienced their quest after identity was so poignantly masculine, so painfully rooted in their manhood, that many women would get significant value from this male interiority.

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES, New Adult coming-of-age novel

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES
BRIAN ZEPKA
Pennor Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
99¢ ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Eighteen-year-old Stetson Delancey never thought breaking up with his boyfriend would turn him invisible.

In Penango County, Pennsylvania, high school couples carve their names into the legendary Ardor Tree, a rite of passage said to grant love that lasts. Stetson and his boyfriend were no exception. But a bitter breakup just before college splinters their future, and in a moment of anger, Stetson does the unthinkable: he hacks their names from the tree.

That’s when everything in his rural hometown goes from boring to bizarre. Shadows flicker where they shouldn’t. Strangers pass by like he’s not even there. And some people stop seeing him altogether.

With just two months left in Penango and his college dream slipping away, Stetson races to uncover the tree’s secrets before he vanishes for good. But when he meets a boy only he can see—a boy who may have secrets of his own—Stetson begins to wonder if breaking free from his hometown means letting go of everything or learning to hold on to what matters.

WITHIN THESE COUNTY LINES is a queer coming-of-age novel about the unraveling of first love, hometown magic, and how sometimes we can’t uncover the truth about others without confronting the truth about ourselves.

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My Review: Stetson's a queer kid at the inflection point between ending the perspectiveless wasteland of adolescence and taking on the habituation to and of emotional regulation that we call "young adulthood." At eighteen, he knows when he fucks up there'll be consequences; sometimes he just doesn't much care. This is where we meet him.

What happens to start Stetson on his path to maturity is not revealed until about two-thirds of the way into the story...bye now, fifth star...while he very thoroughly trashes his now-ex boyfriend (of two years, at eighteen) in the vaguest most undefendable terms. It's clear Precious is a Major Drama Queen. He's got his BFF Whitley (I mentally called her the most patient girl in the world because she never snapped on this inconsiderate chud despite how often he simply ghosted her, used her as ears to whine into, etc.) as his captive audience for obsessively overthinking all the weird stuff that's happening to him. It's not 100% clear to me the supernatural implications of Stetson becoming invisible to Murray, the ex, and his sudden ability to "see" the long-missing Xander were real or simply the intense fantastical overdescriptions of Stetson's wounded spirit.

What I want to praise is the evocation of how domestic violence becomes normalized within a relationship. If you screw up, like Stetson did with his big dramatic announcement to Murray, and your partner's response is what Murray's was, you're going to need to consider an exit strategy. Props to Author Zepka for making this a point, though why wait so long to bring it up?

I'm generally positive about the read, though more for teens than readers in my age bracket. As the author's already in the YA market, I'm supposing this is more aimed at "New Adults" (a kind of reader I characterize as "YA with pubic hair"). It's still not on my top-ten list but I'm not the marketed-to reader. I'd prefer a story with much better female representation, the sweet, patient BFF is in short supply in the real world; but that's me being an old guy with multiple axes that need grinding. I'd buy it for my grandkid who's navigating a new relationship territory. If they asked for it.

THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA, The Cosmic Wheel series book one

THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA (The Cosmic Wheel #1)
A.D. SUI
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding.

Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy and guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI construct for companionship.

The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years. A relic of Earth’s dying past, humanity took the ship to the stars on a multi-generation journey to find another habitable planet yet never reached its destination. Its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Vessel Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.

Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship.

But the ship's plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Vessel Iris with his AI construct may be their only hope for survival. . .

IN OUTER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOUR PRAYERS

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My Review: What if Murderbot was a Buddhist monk, and arrives on a derelict generation ship to guide its long-dead colonists through samsara to the Light, but a bunch of irreligious bumbling academics need saving from...beings...while he's trying to do his work? Yes, this time he's male, and has a...situationship...with his AI. That's a major friction point with the normal humans he needs to save, because all life is sacred even when it's stupid and nasty.

It's a good story, it's got levels to think about that open like hatches hidden under green stuff then turn into wormholes, gates, passageways through reality into your busy monkey-brain. Whirling in my monkey-brain was a sneaky little thought: why do monks, who famously renounce the world, decide to help us worldly denizens of samsara (apparently Sanskrit for the same concept as "gefilte" or "mashed up and stuffed") only when we die?

But that's trespassing into religion, its uses and motivating ideas, its sacred territory....

What to enjoy about the monk with an AI sharing his brain, albeit in a subservient role, is the fertile territory for human nastiness to get directed at a "holy" person by the deeply secular people around him. I'm envious of Vessel Iris because he lives in a world of only a few tiny remnant religious nuts. Sounds like heaven to me. (See what I did there?) My missing parts of the fifth star came from my deep dislike of the Harry-Dresdenish self-recriminating litany of personal abuse Vessel Iris feeds himself. Since the book is all inside Vessel Iris' head, and since I want to shove him out an airlock about once every twenty pages, it made for a choppy, months-long reading experience. I made the deal with myself that I couldn't Pearl-Rule a book set on a failed generation ship with serious botanical Nostromo vibes and a monk who's treated like we'd treat a sex-trafficking politician for having an AI in his brain.

I don't think everyone will love this read. I'm not sure *I* loved this read. But I was completely unable to abandon ship. I lurked through the overgrown halls celebrating with nasty schadenfreude every time whatever it was picked off another creepy academic. I did not, in other words, root *for* anyone in the story, not even the dead colonists whose reasons for seeking a new world...well. I didn't like anyone. It wasn't an easy investment to make.

But it was one I absolutely did make.

This is a very philosophical horror-of-sorts story of how fear and safety are too deeply intertwined to be separable, no matter how much one tries to treat them as opposites or even antipodes on a spectrum. What happens when you're only safe when you're afraid is a subtle and fascinating frame to hang a space-locked-room mystery on.

It felt to me like the story smashed into a brick wall when Vessel Iris started in on his self-flagellation, but I stipulate that as a me problem. Leaving aside my annoyance I think the pace of the action is rising at a good storytelling clip; the ideas never got too top-heavy, causing weird bends in the plot (a major flaw in Becky Chambers' stories from my PoV); and the resolution was very nicely capping off the plot while not too obviously blaring the sequel-is-coming horn.

It might not be for you, but you will know within the first 10% if it isn't. Read a sample; there are genuine pleasures to be had in the story for people who don't have my oversensitivity to self-flagellation.

AFTER THE FALL, latest Edward Ashton outing

AFTER THE FALL
EDWARD ASHTON
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Would humans really make great pets?

Humans must be silent.
Humans must be obedient.
Humans must be good.

All his life, John has tried to live by those rules. Most days, it’s not too difficult. A hundred and twenty years after The Fall, and a hundred years after the grays swept in to pick the last dregs of humanity out of the wreckage of a ruined world, John has found himself bonded to Martok Barden nee Black Hand, one of the "good" grays. Sure, Martok is broke, homeless, and borderline manic, but he’s always treated John like an actual person, and sometimes like a friend. It’s a better deal than most humans get.

But when Martok puts John’s bond up as collateral against an abandoned house in the woods that he hopes to turn into a wilderness retreat for wealthy grays, John learns that there are limits to Martok’s friendship. Soon he finds himself caught between an underworld boss who thinks Martok is something that he very much is not, a girl who was raised by feral humans and has nothing but contempt for pets like John, and Martok himself, whose delusions of grandeur seem to be finally catching up with him.

Also, not for nothing, something in the woods has been killing people.

John has sixty days before Martok’s loan comes due to unravel the mystery of how humans wound up holding the wrong end of the domestication stick and find a way to turn Martok’s half-baked plans into profit enough to buy back his life, all while avoiding getting butchered by feral humans or having his head crushed by an angry gray. Easy peasy, right?

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My Review: I really hope y'all're catching on to Author Ashton. I confess I don't *get* why people weren't excited by Mickey17, because I thought it was a decent adaptation of Mickey7 as well as a good movie on its own; but mostly I'm a bit bumfuzzled as to how all Author Ashton's books aren't on the bestseller list. Every one I've read has been good-plus. I enjoy them, I spend time after reading them pondering about this bit that's really made me think, or that character who's so awful it must've been a big hoot to write them (specifically thinking of the one in The Fourth Consort of whom I said "'kindness and acceptance' sounds better than 'craven lickspittle sycophancy' doesn't it.") In a lot of ways this novel feels like Author Ashton taking a crack at some of the ideas not fully explored in that story.

I'm really thinking mostly of the ownership angle we delve into in this story, the ethics of cannibalism are unambiguous in The Fourth Consort whereas the Grays in this book are arguably the more vicious in their treatment of humans because they see us, say "aww how cute" and then go right on looking at us like there is nothing else to say or think. Someone who slaughters and eats you regards you as valuable; someone who views you as fungible, as a pet, does not. In a lot of ways it feels like the plays from the Roman Republic and early empire where the clever slave runs master's business better than master, saving the day and earning master's gratitude but never respect.

Like all Author Ashton's work, you're going to get some funny lines, and you'll never have any trouble remembering who said what to whom...I think that's why I like the Mickey series and why I think Director Bong did too, there's such a clear sense of the main characters' identity. What there isn't is a clear path towards resolving the conundrum the story orbits around: Is the condition of the humans going to change for the better? John and Martok are coming out of these events in a different state than they entered them but...well...is there a larger point to this larger story? If not, why bear down on it?

I enjoyed this stand-alone read, I thought it raised interesting points and gave me some good pondering to do. I was not convinced this was the best place to end the story, but it wasn't like it was poor on a craft level. It just could've leveled the read up, but chose not to.

Not the worst, or least forgivable, authorial peccadillo. I'll definitely await the next Ashton book with attentive eagerness.