EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT, how I would know I was dead is just that

EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT
BEN REEVES
Avid Reader Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Travis is Death in the modern world. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and lives in a small, grey town. His job is to offer people comfort in their final hours of life. He’s stoic, gentle, and a little naive, despite everything he knows. He’s young and handsome, despite who he is. Each death he witnesses is meaningful to him; he listens, never judges, and most importantly, never tries to change anyone’s fate. He knows that every life must eventually end to maintain the balance of the universe and he respects the cycle.

Then he meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter Layla, who live across the hall. As Dalia and Layla come to embrace Travis, it becomes more difficult to maintain the detachment that’s allowed him to function for so long. Their time together teaches him what’s truly important in life—and what might be irrevocably lost in death.

Written with radiant warmth, wisdom, and compassion, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a timeless story about appreciating life, accepting its end, and finding our place in the universe—especially when it feels most impossible—that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost or worried at time’s passing.

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

My Review: Remember Meet Joe Black? Or, if you're a reader my age, Salley Vickers' novel Mr. Golightly's Holiday? We're all interested in divine personifications of absolute power...god and death being in Western cosmology the two supreme beings...and we need to tell stories as much as we need to breathe, so it's inevitable that there will always be new and interesting ways to personify them. (And funny ones, if you're irreverent like Sir Terry Pratchett. Author Ben Reeves is staking out a bit of that territory in this story.

Travis is an ordinary guy who also happens to be Death. Literal Death. The Grim Reaper wears jeans and t-shirts. Sure, why not. Travis comforts and guides people into death, so you already know it's not going to be a Pratchetty jollification of a story. Seeing the personification of death as more or less a death doula is, on its face, reductive because Death is permanent, absolute, fundamental, and utterly unknowable like Life is. Reducing a terrifying cosmic power to a guy in jeans and a t-shirt who helps you, guides you with kindness and sympathy, through the emotional landscape of The End, feels like lèse-majesté to me. Like euphemising "he died" into "he has passed away," if feels like emotional dishonesty to me, like a pointless attempt to pre-feel the horrible twisting agony that is grief. (It doesn't work, any more than not saying "Voldemort" did. Any time one uses the passive voice, dishonesty is stinking up the sentence.)
Enough abstraction. The action in this story is heavy, the emotions surrounding death are never otherwise though sadness is not necessarily always foregrounded. Author Reeves chose, rightly in my view, to give Travis a first-person narrative voice in stream of consciousness style. It is how we experience life, so why wouldn't Life's intimate partner use it? It's also effective in conveying the immediacy of Death's role in one's life by distancing our mere mortal PoVs into third-person limited narratives.

I think that won't sit well with some readers, but it very much worked for me. It made the stakes so clear: at the end of life, Death is the main character. He (in this case) looms large, his thoughts and his emotional investment in us are all mortals have in that transition. It was a very interesting take, one I don't recall seeing in a novel before. (A dim, distant tocsin sounds about a short story set during a pogrom in Ukraine—anyone else hear it?)

What made this creative and intelligent Death-centered story so interesting to me was the clear intent to elicit powerful responses in the reader was never shortchanged by pulled punches. I find the central conceit just a bit dimmed down for softening sharp edges; but within that mild criticism of intentional dimininshment of robustness, the action isn't kinetic to make the story external. It's a story of the interiority of death, as experienced and related to us by Death.

It's a superior read, told by a talented storyteller, in a creative way that enhances its message of coping with emotion at te end of life.

GRIEF EATER, female rage, childhood betrayal, homophobic idiocy revenged upon

GRIEF EATER
EMMA OSBORNE
Interstellar Flight Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Visceral, gritty, and unforgiving, GRIEF EATER is a zombie story like you’ve never read before.

When Kristina rises from her violent death, she’s not the same fragile woman her family once abandoned. She’s rageful, powerful, and hungry—for the blood of the ones who were supposed to love her. With a newfound craving to see vengeance and grief served, she launches into a once-in-an-undead-lifetime journey across blood-slicked highways to the scorched Australian bush and her hometown. As her body fails and her mind fractures, she’s left with one final question: Is she here to forgive, or to feed?

A transgressive, gory examination of queer identity and found family, GRIEF EATER sinks its teeth into trauma and what it means to be devoured by grief.

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

My Review: I don't read many zombie stories, so I can't say "this is really different from all the others in the genre" with any confidence or authority. I can say I don't think anyone I've run across discusses the way the zombies are resonating with their readers on the level of emotional impact, of exploring how grief is a deadly contagion.

Katrina is one of the interesting-to-me abuse archetypes: someone who was offhandedly neglected, occasionally brutalized by unkindness from, it seems, earliest life; someone who is benumbed by her absence of caring for her as a person as well as damaged by the indifference to her actual fleshly person's caretaking. It is not uncommon for queer, odd, Othered kids to suffer this fate.

Ask me how I know. (Not a serious invitation...don't, please.)

So Kristina's brutalization by those with a duty of care towards her is resonant with me, and with many millions of us around the world. I don't...can't bear to...say "billions" though I suspect it's the literal truth. Katrina awakens to her afterlife as a zombie because her life as a human ended gorily and as a result of abandonment. It's weirdly liberating, this alteration. It's permission to drop her human life's expectations for the raw, vicious reality of revenge...of bringing into meatspace the consuming hatred of those who ignored and dismissed Katrina when she most needed their care: "I know now why we look so mindless, so insatiable to the living. There is beauty in letting your body glut itself with rich fat and small bones."

As a novella, this horror story is finely judged to the point where it felt to me, as I came to its end, there was not lingering sense that this or that was in need of more room to develop. The SFnal background was deftly handled in that it is left as a background. It isn't the point of the storytelling, so let it be the story's matrix. I often wish horror/near-future SF would choose this deliberate backgrounding in place of half-hearted worldbuilding that is more or less an infodump. Better in my mind, for my reading taste, to offer fewer details but place them with care and forethought in place of a wodge of stodge that's plopped before you and assumed to be part of your mental furniture henceforth. My example of this technique at its most irritating is how Asimov treated us in Foundation. My example of how my preferred method of establish and reinforce lightly but effectively is Orwell's clock striking thirteen in the very first line of 1984.

It's a rare feat to tell me a story about a subject I'm not interested in...zombies in this case...and come away with my admiring compliment: this is a close-to-perfect example of its format and its subject matter.

THE LOOM TREE, a title I enjoy more after the read than I did before the read

THE LOOM TREE
ANGELA MI YOUNG HUR
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$23.80 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Ninth House meets Babel for fans of myth and folklore in this contemporary fantasy about a Korean-American college student at a magical university where fairy tales intersect with family heritage to unleash powers beyond imagining.“

You always wanted magic to be real.”

Sharon and her daughter V’s points of origin hold common threads—both Korean American teenagers, raised by single mothers and searching for identity in the California suburbs. But during a Finals week celebration, high schooler V, compelled by strange impulses, crawls into a hollow tree trunk. That night in a fever haze, she sees gleaming strands of illegible text hovering over her body—flowing between her and her mother, leading to a long-forgotten diary.

With the aid of a luminous quill, a fountainhead of Sharon’s memories spill onto the faded pages. V witnesses her mother map out her past through drawings, diagrams, and reclaimed histories of her brief time at Alvsdahl, an exclusive East Coast college. Here, legacies and heiresses claimed descent from Bluebeard or Cinderella, grappling for control over family stories that could grant them terrifying abilities or burn them to ash. An Asian girl with an unknown inheritance was no one—until her discoveries cracked open Alvsdahl’s secrets.

Sharon’s rewritten narrative—of classroom rivalries, animal professors, debauchery in the woods, threatening Godmothers, and world-shattering powers—unfolds line by line as V desperately tries to help her mother, ultimately learning how to wield Sharon’s story to transform them both.

Lyrical and tender, Angela Mi Young Hur’s The Loom Tree is a magical campus novel centering two young women walking the thorny path toward adulthood, the fractures between parents and their children, and the global mythologies connecting us all.

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

My Review: Folklore, fairy tales, and fiction all contributed DNA to the central storytelling spine of Author Hur's tale told here. It was fascinating because the matter-of-fact presentation, and response within the story, to fantastical elements like erudite animal professors of magic thoroughly entertained me.

I was less sure of myself than I'm accustomed to being when it came to untranslated passages...I can get most European languages wrapped in my head but Korean's completely outside my familiarity zone. I had to work harder, and was not always in the mood to do so. Cultural blind spot detected! I realize how much of this story was context. I wouldn't give it to an average high-school kid because I wouldn't expect them to have enough familiarity with the fairy tales and folklore referenced just yet.

Plenty of adults who don't batten on story mechanics and cultural transmission of ideas are going to need Professor Wikipedia and Doctor Google as consultants, too. Which brings to mind a point I might be reading too much into: I enjoyed the inclusion of science in Author Hur's storytelling milieus. It's a very true observation, science is all about making data tell a story only it gets called a proof not a tale, theory not lore, and so on.

A fascinating way to make a novel. It resonated with me on most every level. I did not ever feel an emotional closeness to or connection with the characters; I believe that is Author Hur's design, as they're enmeshed in storytelling systems not simply responding to events messily and randomly as most people do. It's effective and, as soon as I clocked this explanation for why I felt...apart from...the characters I appreciated the subtlety of the effect. (Now, of course, someone will bring up a quote from Author Hur saying the opposite is true because that's how V and Angela both operate in this story!)

I enjoy dark academia stories. I thoroughly love school-set magical tales; I never left Roke Island after 1969. I think the truth of human intelligence being a function of pattern detection and creation is never more clear than in this area of storytelling. Even though I identified (or invented) why I felt distanced from the characters, I still can't offer that fifth star because that coldness, that remove from their inner workings, left me unmoored at key moments. It's not a fatal flaw, and it doesn't feel like an authorial oversight or a judgment error. It is always the case that the author writes the book they want to write not specifically the one I-the-reader want to read; but potential other readers should know where this specific reader found wants unmet in case they have similar storytelling needs.

Immersion into the systems of Story is as much fun as immersive storytelling, when one knows that's what's offered and is what one is in the mood for. A tale to enjoy, an experience of pleasure and satisfaction is within, so come and get it.

COUNTRY PEOPLE, latest Daniel Mason book after North Woods

COUNTRY PEOPLE
DANIEL MASON
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 7 July 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A rollicking work of lyricism and humor, about one family’s tumble into the unknown, from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of North Woods

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he's become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, “a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in a “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

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

My Review: Absurd, overstuffed storytelling with the effect of making fun of tropey stories by being one.

California sophisticates uprooting themselves to follow the academic goldmine of research funding, tenure, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow...all of these ideas are really the same...and encountering wacky neighbors sound familiar? Put New York in for Cali, and it's Newhart; putthe 1960s in for today, it's Green Acres; it's not the structure that makes the tale fresh it's the characters. We're going to care about them, or the book falls flat.

I myownself wasn't terribly excited by the cast.

Kate the breadwinner, was longsuffering, Miles the dreamer was impractical, the kids (Olive and Wesley) were precocious, and will you look at the time? Suddenly it's 1980! I gave it the full four stars because there are loads of lines like: "But what was he to do, stay out of the woods? Then he met a man in camouflage in a tree who told him that if he didn’t get some blaze orange on him and his dog, their heads were going to end up together on someone’s wall," and set-pieces like the truffle-hunting dog in the weird national park no one's ever heard of that Miles the dreamer makes sure they visit.

It's a book version of a superior sitcom from pre-social media/reality TV days. I chuckled, even laughed out loud. Now that it's been a week since I finished the read, I remember literally nothing from it. If I had no notes I'd've sworn an oath I'd never opened the thing at all. It's not poor, it's not substandard on a craft level, it's just that it's doing something I do not care about.

I'd be glad to find this book in my summer rental's scanty bookshelf. I'd even be fine with checking it out of the library. If you want one for Yule I'll be happy to give it to you.

I won't ever re-read it, and if I recommend it to you it will be because you've asked for ideas for gentle, unchallenging reads.

WE WERE FORBIDDEN, feminist author at her tendentious best

WE WERE FORBIDDEN
JACQUELINE HARPMAN (tr. Roz Schwartz)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human defiance.

Wandering the forest in the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their march through its strange depths.

As part of her rigid schooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe—her punishment for doing so will be as disturbing as it is disproportionate.

Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.

In varying ways, and across varying worlds, each of these women are trapped. Do they have the will to escape?

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

My Review: One of the most enduring stories in Western Anglophone culture is the princess in the tower, locked away and in the absolute control of A Man/A System/An Enemy, and how she must connive to survive with whatever degree of success the cruel, cruel storyteller allows her. Now firmly grounded in the reality of being female over the millennia, along comes Author Harpman with Translator Schwartz as amanuensis, extrapolating this cultural juggernaut to include all those trapped in subservience and obedience to high-control systems.

In "The Outcast" Author Harpman uses the most familiar iteration of the story. A teenaged girl is in the intertwining coils of adolescence and sexual maturation and cultural demands for conformity. It's harrowing to see Author Harpman's keen observations of fascism turned loose on one so hugely vulnerable and malleable...it is a shorter and refocused version of the juggernaut I Who Have Never Known Men and should appeal to those seeking more of that story only dressed in a shorter, more contemporaneous skirt.

Moving into times and ties more concrete, "The Broom Closet" is a woman's struggle to find her footing in 1920s Belgium. The demands of domesticity on women are different from those made on men even now; in the deeply conservative culture of postwar Belgium, where the battles that killed millions were barely over let alone their damage repaired, they were starkly different. As one adds the inexorable advance of marriage's compromises conflicting with the absolute tyranny of the need to create stories, the trap of cultural expectations springs shut. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own's observations made specific and played out with the intensity of "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Expanding the story logic to those enmeshed in the military of an apocalyptic future, "The Ardennes Forest" is the most immediately reminiscent in its setting to I Who Have Never Known Men while expanding scope beyond one woman's life. A group of conscripts are mapping and scouting the terrain for what they imagine, not unreasonably, to be a future battlefield. That future never comes. They continue the work they've been assigned.

Endlessly.

As the story goes into nothing deeply, it became obvious to me this is Author Harpman meditating on the tedious tasks of daily life performed under nebulous, ominous duress. There's a weirdly onanistic edge to the submission of these soldiers to their assigned task even as they begin to question what it is they're doing as nothing ever changes as a result of its self-similar patterns.

Three stories of people in a system of depersonalizing cruelty, and how that strips an individual of any sense of agency; numbing the essential "You"ness of you into submissive obedience. I'm not a bit sure it will make new Harpman fans. For one thing, there are limits to the efficacy of compactness in the involving process of storytelling. I think these three stories are on the shortest end of that effort, possibly too short for anyone not already familiar with Author Harpman's thematic hobbyhorses to fully invest in them.

Existing fans are in for a treat.

KILLING BABY HITLER, time-travel/alt-hist fantasy of Changing History...derailed by the Butterfly Effect

KILLING BABY HITLER
MICHAEL TOMASKY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the year 2141, the planet is ruled by billionaires, democracy is a relic, the environment is collapsing, and Illinois is home to thirty-foot alligators.

When a ragtag team of scientists discovers the secret to time travel, they set their sights on history’s most infamous villain: baby Adolf Hitler. The mission doesn’t go quite as planned.

Because rewriting history is never simple. Instead of preventing the rise of fascism, they trigger a bizarre new timeline in which Hitler grows up in America, editing one of the country’s most hateful newspapers, and history warps in strange and unsettling ways. What begins as a darkly funny scheme to fix the past spirals into a mind-bending journey across centuries, as the time travelers confront unintended consequences, shifting timelines, and a future that may be even worse than the one they left behind.

Part sci-fi thriller, part biting satire, Killing Baby Hitler is Michael Tomasky’s first work of fiction—a wildly original novel that skewers power, questions the logic of hindsight, and reminds us that the present may be the hardest time of all to change. Bold, provocative, and disturbingly plausible, it’s a time-travel tale like no other.

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

My Review: I like my silly sci-fi delivered with humor, so I'm your boy for this story's topic and style. I'm also a fan of time-travel (purest of fantasies) and alternate history (I dunno if we'll ever science our way into certainty that other timelines are real, but I think they can't NOT be), so bring your killing Hitler story unto mine eyes.

O/R is a leftist purveyor of tendentious reads mostly non-fiction; I approve of this, so seeing this novel become available I downloaded it immediately. I'm a fan of the wish-fulfillment inherent in stories of changing history, though the pop-culture "butterfly effect" is pretty inaccurate to the real subset of chaos theory. Doesn't mean I don't love to read about it. I was really hoping to love this read, too.

I enjoyed and liked it. I'd've loved it if it'd kept on with the initial tone. It's honest, abrasive, truthful about human nature; it's holding up our faults as people to us in this low-real life stakes fictional tale. It's always safe to look at existential crisis in the mirror of practical impossibility. To be able say humanity does not come off unscathed is pretty much my minimum standard for this kind of srory. Happy to say scathing is done. Pulling the punch at the end...well...I get it, I really do, and I can't tell you I thought the ending was incongruous, or tacked on to the story it was finishing off. It fit fine.

I wasn't expecting the tonal shift, so it popped me in the mouth for a minute. I don't think others who're less pessimistic, or permaybehaps don't see things through my Darkling eye. Without reservation a recommended read for summer in particular among the "if only" fantasists seeking to refashion the world. A well-paced story that makes its points without sacrificing the exuberant fun of reinvention, no matter how implausible.

Truths are told, honest self-appraisal encouraged, and a vote of confidence I don't entirely agree with is offered to send the entertainment reader away happy.

HOW QUEER BOOKSHOPS CHANGED THE WORLD, worthy thesis defended with passion

HOW QUEER BOOKSHOPS CHANGED THE WORLD
A.J. WEST
Oneworld Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending June 30, 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For over a century, LGBTQ+ bookshops have been the unsung heroes of queer liberation

Home not only to books but chaotic community noticeboards, vicious rescue cats and countless meet cutes, queer bookshops have always been more than just bookshops, offering friendship, solidarity and sanctuary.

Traveling the world—Shakespeare and Company in Paris, Gay’s the Word in London, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York—A. J. West explores the remarkable history of these bookstores. Tracing their evolution from under-the-counter operations to beloved out-and-proud institutions, West reveals how the queer bookshop stood at the vanguard of LGBTQ+ rights, offering support and vital information through the AIDS crisis and bringing the fight to Section 28 and book bans.

A powerful testament not only to bookshops but to the courage of queer booksellers, from Sylvia Beach hiding books from the Nazis in laundry baskets to Craig Rodwell facing off against the police at the Stonewall riots, A. J. West celebrates the shops and booksellers that brought queer literature and lives into the mainstream.

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

My Review: I'd give it a perfect rating if I hadn't felt so put-upon with the opening chapters speed-lining queer history.

It was my emotional reaction. I'm not wrong; I literally cannot be wrong about my feelings.

It's necessary to put not-queer, or new to their history queer, readers in the picture of what these trailblazing heroically brave people did and what they risked for us all to have access to queer stories. It is breathtaking, and eye-opening, and quite honestly shaming for those of us not willing or able to stand up against Authority for the good of all.

It is more clear to me than ever before that the urgent project of the authoritarians trying to ban queer books, the tech scum trying to make all knowledge available only on their say-so and the seeker's ability to pay any vig "They" choose to demand, and the ruling class's desire to keep you as stupid as possible intertwine like snakes on Medusa's head. The underknown prophet of this future we now live in, Sinclair Lewis, wrote: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross."

Look around you...that was prophecy, not fiction.

Author AJ writes about the past in this book. It could, one day soon, feel like an elegy for les jadis if you and I are not very careful and very intentional in our actions in November 2026. It's fragile, this thing called Liberty, and it's always been very, very unpopular with with the ruling class. We-the-people have already seen how much control "They" want after women's bodily autonomy was stripped away from them in the US. Revoltingly it was enabled by a quisling woman. All of these struggles, legal battles, and societal shifts are under long-term and well-funded attack. How I wish more people had listened when Hilary Clinton spoke that truth.

Author AJ details the harms this determined regressive minority causes with seeming impunity in his chapters on the role of AIDS amelioration and drag-queen story hour bannings. Restraining the flow of often life-saving information to those in desperate need of it, and excluding people "They" don't like such as gender-nonconforming people, are terrible actions on their face. The true evil doesn't announce itself. It unfolds as Author AJ shows us consequences.


The best kind of non-fiction writing tells you a story that evokes emotional responses from the reader. I've seldom been more emotional in my response to a true story that does not involve a murder. Author AJ deserves all the kudos there are for bringing a storyteller's constructive attention to this crisis in our body politic.