INSIDE THE MIRROR, a feminist tale in 1950s newly independent India

INSIDE THE MIRROR
PARUL KAPUR
University of Nebraska Press
NOW $16.17 trade paper until 30 April 2024

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel
Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2024

In 1950s Bombay, Jaya Malhotra studies medicine at the direction of her father, a champion of women’s education who assumes the right to choose his daughters’ vocations. A talented painter drawn to the city’s dynamic new modern art movement, Jaya is driven by her desire to express both the pain and extraordinary force of life of a nation rising from the devastation of British rule. Her twin sister, Kamlesh, a passionate student of Bharata Natyam dance, complies with her father’s decision that she become a schoolteacher while secretly pursuing forbidden dreams of dancing onstage and in the movies.

When Jaya moves out of her family home to live with a woman mentor, she suffers grievous consequences as a rare woman in the men’s domain of art. Not only does her departure from home threaten her family’s standing and crush her reputation; Jaya loses a vital connection to Kamlesh.

Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, Parul Kapur’s Inside the Mirror is set in the aftermath of colonialism, as an impoverished India struggles to remake itself into a modern state. Jaya’s story encompasses art, history, political revolt, love, and women’s ambition to seize their own power.

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

My Review: A debut novel that won the right to come out from a very distinguished press (see the link to the prize details above), this read is treading a well-worn path in its use of twin sisters on opposite sides of the eternal struggle for freedom of self-definition. Resisting patriarchy, Jaya refuses to knuckle under to her father's will for her future. It is of course the case that she suffers personal and social consequences for her self-willed rebellion.

Her obedient sister Kamlesh suffers, too...but the issues she faces down count for less in the storyverse because they are those faced down by multitudes of women around the world. The main take-away for me was that the father's quite surprising resistance to the women's desire for autonomy came from a genuine concern for them and their future happiness, not from mustachio-twirling meanness. He did, after all, make a radical (for the time) choice to educate his daughters. It isn't a development completely out of the blue, though...their grandmother was an active anti-colonial force, and the old saying about apples and trees is an evergreen for a reason...and still they face intrafamilial resistance to their using their educations for themselves.

Author Kapur is a former travel writer, UN press officer, and a current resident of the US. Her travels and her extended residence in Mumbai have all honed her observational skills to a great degree, resulting in a read that feels more immersive than I ever expected it to feel. Evoking so vividly a place as alien to my privileged white US upbringing as the India of the 1950s is a great feat of craft. To do this as deftly and effortlessly as Author Kapur does is to feel myself in talented hands indeed.

The feminist agenda in the story is the best bit for me. I am all in on the role of patriarchy being limned in completely unflattering shades. It does not like gay men, possibly even more than it does not like women. We have a common enemy. As the possibly well-intentioned old man tries to squash his already-unusually educated daughters' desires for control over their own futures, I nodded along and even felt a lot of empathy for Kamlesh...I too knuckled under for the sake of harmony and found only dissatisfaction and a deep sense of injury.

So why am I so mingy with my stars? I admire the story, the storytelling voice, the character-building...sounds like a solid five, right? Nope. I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brain at the fact that the women formed a love triangle with a man I can't even recall the name of. I was actively irked by the powerful, freedom-fighter grandmother's odd powerlessness in guiding the women to more, and better, uses of their minds with full family support.

It just didn't come across as well thought-out to me. So the inevitable first-novel longueurs are indeed present. The fact of them means I really can't give the last star. It is a read I recommend because it hits more sweet notes than clanging ones, and tells a very interesting, involving story well.

BLUE LARD, transgressive Russian SFF oddity

BLUE LARD
VLADIMIR SOROKIN (tr. Max Lawton)
NYRB Classics
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination.

Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author’s books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines.

The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese—peppered with ample neologisms—and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write.

This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers?

Blue Lard is a stylistically acrobatic book, translated by Max Lawton into an English idiom just as bizarre as the Russian original. Evoking both Pulp Fiction and the masterpieces of Marquis de Sade, Sorokin’s novel is a brutal, heady trip that annihilates all of its twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century competition in the Russian canon—and that annihilates Russia itself in a resounding act of heavy-metal dissidence.

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

My Review: Unquestionably the weirdest NYRB book I have yet read...and the second-weirdest alternate history book I have read this century.

It requires serious effort to engage with the first third or so of the book, as you are in medias res without even the usual linguistic snowpoles showing you where the obstacles are. You are, as is so often the case in Life, in a strange place with strange people you do not know or even understand as they have conversations around you.

After that point, there is a shift in the linguistic register that brings us closer to normal conversational tones. Not normal-normal, mind you, though closer. (There is a partial Glossary at the end for the desperately confused.) But, like Claude Simon’s nouveau roman novels, there is a difficult beginning that requires you to make an investment of concentration. We have left the normie-world of relatable plots, ordinary characters you could meet at the supermarket, sentences that start and finish in the same paragraph, and other such bourgeois fripperies. This is not a read that rewards being treated as a novel. This is writing that needs to be experienced and absorbed for itself not its meanings.

Sorokin, like so many truly inventive folk, is a natural iconoclast. At twenty-five, in 1980, he was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church, at that time still under Communist-Party suspicion. The nature of iconoclasm is always to resist, so in this era of Church/state rapprochement, he opposes Putin’s war against Ukraine. It is not as though his work work was ever popular with the regime, what with Hitler raping Stalin’s daughter, Stalin and Khruschev sexing it up (ewww!), and a variety of body-horror tropes, that Little Vladdy Pu-Pu just could not ever be on board with. This, among other not-socialist-realist flourishes, will mean no invite-to-dinner from the Kremlin. Now, being good little bourgeois decoders, we too like our novels to Mean Something, like socialist realist work...but that is not on offer here.

Sorokin does not Make Sense, he makes you think about how a story is more than just the beginning-middle-end structure we are ingrained to expect. He offers not one kind of Sense, but multiple ways to experience words and ideas forming into stories. This, and the transgressive nature of the words and ideas he does present us, makes a lot...A LOT...of people really, really angry. This being a feature of the Sorokin brand. I do not get the point of their outrage and negativity being performed. Giving the man the thing he tried to get from you? The point of that is...?

A read that demands effort, does it an awful lot of the time, and allows you to decide for yourself if it means anything at all.

Like Life itself, it makes you the Author’s apprentice. You can decide if that is your jam, but I am here to say that it is a read very much worth my time and effort and could be for you as well. Remember how mad it made the Russian overlord. Buy it to be ornery, to oppose the banning/forbidding/controlling ethos that increasingly envelops the information-delivery world.

I bet lots of y’all end up liking it.

THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST, Premee Mohamed's body horror/dark fantasy novella

THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST
PREMEE MOHAMED
Tordotcom Publishing
$18.99 trade paper, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A world-weary woman races against the clock to rescue the children of a wrathful tyrant from a dangerous, otherworldly forest.

At the northern edge of a land ruled by a monstrous, foreign tyrant lies the wild forest known as the Elmever. The villagers know better than to let their children go near—once someone goes in, they never come back out.

No one knows the strange and terrifying traps of the Elmever better than Veris Thorn, the only person to ever rescue a child from the forest many years ago. When the Tyrant’s two young children go missing, Veris is commanded to enter the forest once more and bring them home safe. If Veris fails, the Tyrant will kill her; if she remains in the forest for longer than a day, she will be trapped forevermore.

So Veris will travel deep into the Elmever to face traps, riddles, and monsters at the behest of another monster. One misstep will cost everything.

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

My Review: Being one who really internalized the truism "No good deed goes unpunished" and its corollary "Never reveal how competent you are because then you will always get the job," I was all set to like this iteration of these aperçus. I am happy to say, nothing in the read convinced me otherwise.

Veris, whose shocking, likely unique ability to survive a trip into Elmever forest has landed her the unenviable and possibly lethal job of rescuing kids lost in there, is a good person. Her exploit in Elmever was not last year, or even last decade...she is solidly in her middle years now. She would also like to enter cronehood, thank you very much, and that might not happen unless she gets the stupid kids out of this haunted, evil forest. The stupid kids that belong to the local wicked overlord. The foreign, wicked overlord.

Of course this woman of middle years and possessed of close loving ties to her community of friends and family will drop everything and rush off to rescue this awful man's kids at risk of disappearing into the horrors she overcame before. You just need to ask!

And threaten everyone she loves with horrible deaths.

Thus are the stakes established. This is going to be a Quest with a difference in dramatis personae. Since Quests are about inner discovery through outer-world problem-solving, we are accustomed to seeing them feature young people. This time Verity, who has already solved the puzzle of surviving a day in accursed Elmever forest, must return to figure out the mystery of the place. The difference? A puzzle has one correct answer, a mystery has many possible solutions, varying shades of Rightness.

Part fairy tale with its lessons quietly taught, part adventure horror story with its body horror lightly sprinkled in, part cosmic horror with its universal stakes salted on...this novella packs a lot into its one-sitting length. Enough that it might repay breaking the read into two sessions.

While the ending fits with the story, and concludes the stakes satisfyingly, I do not think the usual audience for Quests will be all that pleased with this iteration of the storyverse because its stakes are...mutable. Veris faces down lots in this tight package. She makes her peace with the past, as all of us around her age must; she does the right thing by her lights, as we all hope to do in life; she learns that her life of answering puzzles and solving mysteries can not prepare her for anything to come except in habits of mind. The answers are, maddeningly, never the same.

Sound like my forties. Yours too, I wager.

SEARCHING FOR VAN GOGH, coming-of-age novel set in 1960s Michigan

SEARCHING FOR VAN GOGH
DONALD LYSTRA
Omena Hills Press
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in Michigan during the tumultuous closing weeks of 1963, "Searching for Van Gogh" is a heart-wrenching story of two young souls bravely navigating life's challenges.

A young woman is inspired by a cinematic heroine to find meaning in a world that has cast her aside.

A teenage math and science prodigy turns to art as he struggles with the pain of losing his beloved elder brother.

Their unlikely friendship is a beacon of hope, reminding us that in tough times the best defense is the help we can give to one another.

Reminiscent of timeless classics like Ordinary People and To Kill a Mockingbird, this story celebrates the power of friendship and understanding in an often unforgiving world.

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

My Review: Do you need a break from the nastiness and unapologetic hatemongering of the world outside your door? Do you want to take a trip back to a world still slowly moving into full awareness of how cruel it has become?

Here's you a read.

Two people carrying a lot of sadness find each other at very vulnerable moments in each one's life. Their entire worlds have narrowed into coping with loss and loneliness. Then...they meet, they connect, and they tentatively learn to communicate.

What on Earth is happening to this old man, I can hear you wondering. This kind of story never appeals to him! Quite true, it is not my native land, well-trodden paths to and fro everywhere one looks in my catalog of reads. I was pleased to read something with the personal stakes of this story...grief, loss, coming to terms with the way the world works, how families fail each other at crucial times. The prose is direct and unpretentious, the voices of the characters distinct, and that plus the storyline and setting gave me what I craved most: Investment and involvement with neither anger nor outrage, just the pleasant sense that this time the world handed these two hurting souls the balm instead of the liniment.

I needed an emotionally real story, uncomplicatedly told, with people in believable emotional pain that was not going to cause Disaster. I needed that story to end believably well without absurd, over-the-top machinations, like it does in the happier passages of Real Life. And I got what I needed. I am glad I read this direct, involving, kind story.

So, kindness seekers, come to Donald Lystra's doorstep and be fed.

February 2024'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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When Grumpy Met Sunshine by Charlotte Stein

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A steamy, opposites-attract romance with undeniable chemistry between a grumpy retired footballer and his fabulous and very sunshine-y ghostwriter.

When grumpy ex-footballer Alfie Harding gets badgered into selling his memoirs, he knows he’s never going to be able to write them. He hates revealing a single thing about himself, is allergic to most emotions, and can’t imagine doing a good job of putting pen to paper.

And so in walks curvy, cheery, cute as heck ghostwriter Mabel Willicker, who knows just how to sunshine and sass her way into getting every little detail out of Alfie. They banter and bicker their way to writing his life story, both of them sure they’ll never be anything other than at odds.

But after their business arrangement is mistaken for a budding romance, the pair have to pretend to be an item for a public who’s ravenous for more of this Cinderella story. Or at least, it feels like it’s pretend―until each slow burn step in their fake relationship sparks a heat neither can control. Now they just have to is this sizzling chemistry just for show? Or something so real it might just give them their fairytale ending?

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

My Review: Mabel and Alfie, whose names sound like an English music-hall duo, also sound like an English music-hall duo while they bicker and banter. This is an uncomplicated, pleasant iteration of the evergreen romance trope, executed without unnecessary fuss and with the panache one expects from an experienced practitioner of the Art of Romance. The only minor whinge I have is that the pace of this story is not as snappy as the copious dialogue...really more like exchanged monologues, if I am in full-disclosure mode.

If you like your romance reading without male knuckle-dragging, female high-horsing, or mutual sexist disrespect...as I do...you will very likely enjoy this read.

Our friends at St. Martin's Griffin want $18.00 for a trade paper edition, and it is worth it.

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The Bastard Prince Of Versailles: A Novel Inspired by True Events by Will Bashor

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A historical novel inspired by real events, The Bastard Prince of Versailles narrates the escapades of a misborn "prince" during the reign of Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France.

Louis de Bourbon wasn't a real prince—even though his father was King Louis XIV. The illegitimate son of the King and his mistress, Louise de La Vallière, young Louis has been kept far from the court's eyes until summoned to bid adieu to his mother. To atone for her adultery, she joins a convent, abandoning Louis to an uncertain future.

When Louis is humiliated by his father for his role in a secret gay society, he struggles to redeem himself through heroism and self-sacrifice in the king's army on the battlefield.

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

My Review: What surprised me most about this read was that it is based on fact. I was unaware of the existence of the bastard son of the Sun King. I was more surprised still that there was a gay demimonde at this intolerant, aggressively cishet jerk's court. The last jaw-dropper for me was the way the author treated the subject of "gayness" in a time when that identity had not been invented. While being honest and true to the historical record, Author Bashor allows us twenty-first century snowflakes to feel connected to, and hopeful for, the sodomitical young bastard prince.

History buffs, as much as historical-fiction fans, will find much to enjoy in this evocation of a brutal, glamourous past. The gay themes should be a draw, not a bar, as the light the author sheds on the subject is welcome indeed...even if the life it illuminates is very, very saddening to modern eyes.

A Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link) is a mere $4.95 and worth every dime.

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Sea Fever by Elsie Sze

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Mystery and Suspense in Kazakhstan!

Sea Fever is a mystery thriller surrounding clandestine activities on Voz Island in the desiccating Aral Sea of Kazakhstan, when Ayan Kazbekov was growing up in a fishing village by the Aral in Soviet time. When two locals are murdered while taking a couple of strangers to the now-abandoned Voz Island in the post-Soviet era, Ayan and his friend Grace, the wife of an American expatriate, are incited to decipher a coded note secretly passed to Ayan before the fall of the Soviet Union by Victor, his Russian scientist friend from their university days in Moscow.

Victor is not heard from again, but his note may hold clues not only to solving the locals’ murders but also thwarting life-threatening dangers to humankind.

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

My Review: I strongly doubt most of us have heard of the Aral Sea, or its impending disappearance. I will bet my life that not more than one or two of my readers have heard of Voz Island...at the most. Kazakhstan, very likely to be likewise. So there are the exotic locale, effectively limned, boxes ticked...the stakes have to be high to get the uninformed interested in the subject of such a setting.

How does environmental catastrophe causing multiple disease outbreaks ring your bell? Unfolding over decades, including huge world-changing events like the fall of the USSR, the discovery and possible exposure of its ugliest secrets puts lives at risk decades later.

I won't say this is the fastest-paced thriller I have read, but I will encourage anyone who likes Robert Ludlum's geopolitical plots to give this one a whirl. It is more than engrossing enough on its merits to deserve our attention just for its factual basis.

The trade paper edition is $17.95, available from the publishers website.

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Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A bold and brilliant revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century, illuminating how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.

"It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents." Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated.

American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life’s mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age.

As we follow Mead and Bateson’s fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.

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

My Review: What a complete clusterfuck the right wingnuts made of the 20th century. There were glimmers of a better, more open world that could have been...then the generals and religious nuts got hold of it, and choked it into the pale, selfish idiocy of the New Age.

What did not work for me was the sense that Mead and Bateson were ciphers...what about them made them worth setting at the center of a book, I do not know, because it felt like they were not there. The research, and its aims, are very interesting. The opponents to the use of this research are more carefully, and luckily damningly, limned than the people whose names are on the jacket.

Interesting story with a weird hollow at its core, yet still worth reading for the facts you are very likely not to have known before regarding the US attitudes towards psychedelic drugs and their theraputic uses. A story steeped in tragedy for cures and benefits lost.


A hardcover is $30 and a Kindle edition is half that.


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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 Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

PEARL RULED @ p38

The Publisher Says: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy steals a time machine that’s low on batteries and attempts to save girl from impending annihilation. ...You know how this goes.

Tak O’Leary is a Japanese-American television host who vanished off the grid after a failed suicide attempt. Samira Moheb is an Iranian-American military translator suffering from PTSD as a result of her time in the Iraq War. They have been in love from the moment they met, and because they never told each other, they are destined to be apart forever. But thanks to a mysterious invention buried deep in the Australian Outback, they now have one more chance to get it right.

Of course, it won’t be easy. Love never is. First they have to avoid being captured by a powerful and mysterious corporation. Then they must take down a deranged scientist who is trying to unleash a monstrous creature upon the world. Finally, there’s the matter of the invention—an impossible machine with the ability to destroy time itself. If Tak and Samira hope to reunite and save the world, they must use this machine to find a theoretical reality constructed by the thoughts of whoever is inside it. They must find the Beautiful Land.

Skillfully blending non-stop action with compassionate characters and a sharp sense of humor, The Beautiful Land is a novel unique in style and scope. It’s a love story with time machines. A science-fiction novel for people who don’t read science fiction. And an elegantly timeless tale about the nature of memory, heartache, and redemption.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ten years ago, I’d’ve lapped this up...strange timeline shenanigans, portentous foreshadowing, and so on...but now, this manic pixie girl as love object of depressed dudebro makes me want to scream. I would probably not *love* the same basics with two men in the leads, but in the intervening time, that has become something I can actually find.

Off to the Little Free Library with you, tedious cishet stereotypes-from-the-1990s. Bring me the SFF with men in love, lust, or even just a defining partnership with each other. Maybe I only need queer SF now, and for sure I need SF for people who DO read SF.

AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE, a flawed Dutch gem via Archipelago Books

AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE
WILLEM FREDERIK HERMANS (tr. David Colmer), introduction by Cees Nooteboom
Archipelago Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this dark, unnerving work of wartime fiction, W. F. Hermans exposes humanity’s essential savagery, barely concealed by its mores and morals. The year is 1944, and a Dutch partisan chances on an abandoned estate, where he decides to take refuge during a lull in the hostilities. The house seems untouched by the war, a kind of haven, its ornament and grandeur intact (not to mention its walls), clothes and sheets to spare, a kitchen stocked with food and drink. He settles in, and begins to consider himself the owner. When the Nazis recapture the village and come knocking, they similarly assume the house to be his; they assume, also, its spare rooms, which they outfit as barracks.

It is all and well until the true owner and his wife return to their estate. Horrified at the thought of being caught in his subterfuge, our protagonist finds himself drawn into further deceit—and swept up in the violence that ensues.

Civilization comes face-to-face with brutality, truth meets the duplicity that has upended and challenged its certainty—Hermans’ prose searches for an order to the chaos and nihilism of war and life. What he cannot find is as telling as what he uncovers.

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

My Review: Novellas are, by definition, brief and gestural as opposed to the novel in its deeper dives, its wider emotional landscape. These general observations are, of course, not true of every novel or novella. They serve to define nothing but an expectation of the reasonably experienced reader when picking up one or the other.

I went into this read, then, expecting to get a glancing blow to my interest in the topic of what the Second World War was like for those who lived it, who were involved in the conflict and not observing events from afar. That was an expectation met...but exceeded, at least as the read settled into my brain. The prose, as translated, was not showy or terribly Writerly; the story itself was simple enough, really more suited to a short story than a novella; but as I sat stunned after finishing the read, I realized why the author chose this length of telling for a story this uncomplicated.

Without the novella’s-worth of buildup, the ending would feel artificial and out of proportion to the story itself. As it is, the ending is a shocker. It arrives without fanfare and smacks the complacent, even slightly bored, reader in their readerly chops. At the end of a trip through one devious survivor’s opportunistic manipulations of everyone around him, all in service of maximizing his immediate personal comfort, the situation he has created from his selfish, self-serving and utterly believable actions comes to a loud, permanent conclusion.

The issue I had been nursing against this overgrown short story exploded in the events of the ending. There is a reason for the length the author chose to tell his simple tale. I was not ready for the impact of the ending, which to be clear would always have been powerful. The novella before it, however, was exactly right to create its seismic shifting of my emotional response. An entire novel with this ending would, honestly, have vitiated its power to stun; a short story, even a long one, would make the ending feel artificial and tacked on.

This read is an excellent example of what a novella can do best, when used to best advantage: satisfy the reader’s hunger for a powerful emotional experience in a one-sitting package. So why only four stars? In the end, the manner of telling the story, the simple unfussy writing, works against the needed investment in the story being told. It gets to the stage of thinking, "Really? is this IT?" before the truly impactful payoff occurs. That I soldiered on, finishing the read, was not assured by the manner of storytelling the author used. At times I was ready to jump ship just to be done with this really dislikable man, this solipsistic selfish creep. I am glad that I persevered, but also a little surprised that I did with the truly staggering number of reads I already have lined up.

So, to all who start this read, I say: Do stick it out for the whole distance. It *is* worth your time. But because I feel the need to say that, I can only in honesty rate it four of five stars.

MONKEY GRIP: A Novel, a loud BANG! of brightly-colored paint in a very pale cultural landscape

MONKEY GRIP: A Novel
HELEN GARNER
Pantheon Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The novel that launched the career of one of Australia’s greatest writers, following the doomed infatuations of a young, single mother, enthralled by the excesses of Melbourne's late-70s counterculture

The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of Australian life, often drawn from the pages of her own journals and diaries. Now, in a newly available US edition, comes the disruptive debut that established Garner's masterful and quietly radical literary voice.

Set in Australia in the late 1970s, Monkey Grip follows single mother and writer Nora as she navigates the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne’s bohemian underground, often with her young daughter Gracie in tow. When Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she becomes snared in the web of his addiction. And as their tenuous relationship disintegrates, Nora struggles to wean herself off a love that feels impossible to live without.

When it first published in 1977, Monkey Grip was both a sensation and a lightning rod. While some critics praised the upstart Garner for her craft, many scorned her gritty depictions of the human body and all its muck, her frankness about sex and drugs and the mess of motherhood, and her unabashed use of her own life as inspiration. Today, such criticism feels old-fashioned and glaringly gendered, and Monkey Grip is considered a modern masterpiece.

A seminal novel of Australia’s turbulent 1970s and all it entailed—communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex— Monkey Grip now makes its long-overdue American debut.

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My Review: Novels belong to times and places. This novel is absolutely a product of its time...the 1970s...and place, settler-colonial Australia. Now we are fifty years (close enough) on from that time, we see it very differently. The term "settler colonial" as an example had not been articulated in any but the most ardently leftist circles and is now much more a part of the cultural conversation. What Garner has to say about a liberated woman of the 1970s hits very differently now than it did then. Nora’s descent into sexual obsession and drug abuse was transgressive in a different way. Now, in a conservative social landscape developed in reaction to that bright bohemian moment, Nora seems appallingly neglectful, pretty much criminally culpable for her treatment of Gracie as an expendable accessory to her own life. We think that differently about children and their needs. Thank goodness.

A point that was clear then that we of the 2020s often seem to ignore is that Gracie...of necessity...has a dad. Nora is living her own life without so much as a thought for Gracie. And so, I remind is all in our desire to tut over this, is Gracie’s dad. In the 1970s that was so ordinary an outcome that nothing whatever is made of it, nor is Javo’s hostile indifference to anyone’s needs except his own. He is, after all, A Man. Nora, by the end of the tale, is the only sufferer for her actions. Her resentful neglect of Gracie, product of an unhappy stab at marriage, really stood out for me as she simultaneously pined after the job of riding herd on Javo of the wild blue eyes and the clearly terminal smack (heroin, for the youths who might read this) addiction. As always, the inconvenient thing about children is that they need meals, clothes, baths, every day. Junkies like the adult-but-younger Javo, in contrast, can be left in their own mess, and no one does a double-take.

The reason this book sprang out at people back in the day was that it was still very much Not Done for a woman to write about women’s desires for sex, and about the bright shining fact that the reason drug culture took hold was that taking drugs feels really good. It gets a user out of their doubtless boring and routine life. That it also takes them over and ruins that boring tedious necessary engagement with living one’s life slowly emerges as Nora stays focused on herself and her addictions to sex and drugs. The shock value of this, then, was that it was a woman writing about it without stuffy moralizing and overt message-making. Yes, she has been in this out-of-control relaationship but she does come to know it must, and is at the, end. Nora does not ever think about the impact of any of this on Gracie.

I do not pretend to like Nora, or to think I would voluntarily pick up a book about her. I’m glad that I read Monkey Grip because the prose is terrific...elliptical, imprecise, and poetic...and the fact that this is based off Garner’s own life is much better known now. This adds a depth of field to my reading of the nearly plotless events that occur. The fact that Garner spent her energy in this difficult-to-sell way, then transmuted that sort-of wasted life into a work of very loud art in a very beige cultural landscape, made me admire her for her honesty, and for her clarity of purpose in writing it as a novel. She could have written a mea-culpa memoir, and been forgotten in a year.
What we get instead is a book that, for its story and its storyteller, was a loud BANG! of brightly-colored paint in that very beige cultural landscape. It would take over a decade for Australian writers to follow Helen Garner into the Fitzroy Baths and soak some of the settler-colonial stiffness out of their storytelling muscles.

TOLKIEN: Lighting Up The Darkness, or me recommending a comic book to you. No, really!

TOLKIEN: Lighting Up The Darkness
WILLY DURAFFOURG (illus. Giancarlo Caracuzzo)
Ablaze Publishing
$16.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: JRR Tolkien was not always the old Oxford professor, pipe in the mouth, refining his extraordinary work.

In 1915, at age 23, he left for the front with his high school friends, whom he loved like brothers. They take part in the Battle of the Somme which will kill 450,000 people. The horror of war will brand his relationship to friendship, love and creation.

This graphic novel explores the youth of the author of The Lord of the Rings, and his traumatic experience of the battlefields of the First World War, which will forge the imagination of his literary work.

For fans of The Hobbit & Lord of The Rings looking to learn more about the genius behind their favorite epics.

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My Review: Okay. This is how you know for certain that we are in the End Times.

I am recommending to you, dear blog reader, a comic book. A format I avoid because I do not "get" it. One that is, to boot, about the author of The Lord of the Rings. A book series that I famously dislike with the utmost vigor.

Have the GQP released some personality-altering chemical into the atmosphere? It feels like that is not out of the realm of possibility, given how many of my shibboleths I am smashing by recommending this read to you. The issues I have with graphic works always comes down to, what am I supposed to do, read its words or look at its art? I am not wired to do both...I read fast, so am the right audience for subtitled film and TV, and less so for sequential story-telling which is, of necessity, light on words.

Then we come to Tolkien. Not my jam, as the middle-aged whippersnappers say. I never caught the Middle-Earth bug, despite my love for The Hobbit in childhood. I seem to have acquired sterile immunity to Tolkien from that story-inoculation. No idea why, really. It should have been so totally my thing, only it wasn't.

What led me to get this DRC was the fact that, despite my dislike of his stories and his conservative, anti-progressive politics, I think I need to know about the man that changed the entire publishing industry, and the popular culture I grew up in, with the stories that were inspired by his experiences in the Great War. The fact that this is a translation from the French, and is illustrated by an Italian master of sequential storytelling art, made the prospect of reading the story much more attractive to me.

The artwork speaks for itself in the samples from the publisher posted below. It is, to my art-savvy eye, lovely stuff. It is well-chosen to make its storytelling points succinctly, and very aesthetically pleasing.

I think the light shined on the origin of the world-beating work done by Tolkien makes this graphic treatment of his life all the more interesting. The plight of a WWI soldier is, as always, interesting to me. That it is the story a soldier who went on to use the horrors of his time at war to write effectively of the cost of battles on the unprepared and unsuited people who always have and always will predominate among the combatants...priceless.

Kudos to the writers and to the publisher for seeing that this take on the life of JRR Tolkien is important, illuminating, and quite beautiful.

THE MARS HOUSE, latest from the ever-delightful Natasha Pulley

THE MARS HOUSE
NATASHA PULLEY
Bloomsbury USA
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, a queer sci-fi novel about an Earth refugee and a Mars politician who fake marry to save their reputations—and their planet.

In the wake of environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London’s Royal Ballet, has become a refugee on Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. In Tharsis, January’s life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger—a person whose body is not adjusted to Mars’s lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. January’s job choices, housing, and even transportation options are dictated by this second-class status, and now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse: Gale wants all Earthstrongers to be surgically naturalized, a process that can be anything from disabling to deadly.

When Gale chooses January for an on-the-spot press junket interview that goes horribly awry, January’s life is thrown into chaos, but Gale’s political fortunes are damaged, too. Gale proposes a solution to both their problems: a five-year made-for-the-press marriage that would secure January’s financial future without naturalization and ensure Gale’s political future. But when January accepts the offer, he discovers that Gale is not at all like they appear in the press. And worse, soon, January finds himself entangled in political and personal events well beyond his imagining. Gale has an enemy, someone willing to destroy all of Tharsis to make them pay—and January may be the only person standing in the way.

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My Review: This has a very "ripped-from-the-headlines" feel, like a big issues-driven Movie of the Week in the 1980s. The playfulness that the author, comme d'habitude, uses to frame her presentation of the Issues made me smile. I am particularly fond of the way she plays with the MM romance trope of a fake marriage that leads to a real relationship, in the context of a serious contemplation of the refugee crisis and the ever-increasing backlash againt gender minorities.

No one ever accused Author Pulley of lacking ambition.

Even inclusivity excludes, when it is a mandate...I am not a they, I am a he, and will resist being "they"d because of the same reasons I ask people what their not-always-obvious pronoun preference is. Like any overarching solution, it will not work for everyone...like absurd wealth disparities don't, like hypercompetition won't. And, as I expect from the author of The Kingdoms and The Secret Life of Valery K., that is the point. She invites us in to have a good, solid storytelling, then the real purpose sort of creeps up behind your chair and slaps some ropes around your wrists so you *need* to know what happens while also getting yor mind wedged open a bit.

Like the surgical "naturalization" of the Earthstrong immigrants that will artificially weaken them to make the like "real" Martians instead of merely imprisoning them in tightly binding suits...oh my goodness, the unpleasant parallels to our culture war over transness and the nature of being a "real" something. "We must PROTECT our weakest from these interlopers!" The eternal cry of the high-control fascist-leaning cultural bully. The Earthstrong immigrants have a terrible social ostracism as threats to the adapted Martians, confined to menial labor that renders their actual physical power differential a big advantage.

January, our main character, is the only character referred to by a masculine pronoun. As a former dancer, he is strong and lithe even by Earth standards. This makes him a scary monster of a beast to the adapted Martians, much less gravity having attenuated their strength and stamina. This is quite a come-down for him since he was once a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. It does make his masculine pronoun feel simultaneously othering and fetshizing...like all perceived-stronger minorities his gender is hyperemphasized. This makes his union with Martian nativist Senator Gale, whose impromptu soundbite caused January tremendous social trouble, all the more trenchant in its commentary on the social construction of gender and the fetishization of, especially the visible, Others in a society.

Like we do with highly intentionally muscular men, heavy-breasted women whose endowments are clearly artificially augmented, and those whose skin and/or eye colors are not like the resident majority's are.

This, then, is Author Pulley at her tendentious best. The invitation to think through the role of fetishization, or simply enjoyed as the slow, rocky coming-together of two people from opposite sides of an ideological divide, is there. It is up to you which one you wish to foreground as you read the book. The interpersonal stakes are not shorted, or allowed to dominate; they are, as always in this author's œuvre, balanced carefully thus enriching each strand.

What makes the read just less than five stars for me is my rather less than enjoyment experienced by the inclusion of resurrected wooly mammoths. The entire ecological commentary is, for my money, twee and forgettable, though of course well-crafted...I just do not buy the animals' PoV bits, which thankfully are confined to footnotes. This is a facet that will delight some but did not me.

A worldbuilding tour de force, a meet-cute/fake marriage queer love story, a takedown of high-control ideology, and most of all a chance to fall in love alongside two wounded souls who had to travel from literal different planets to find their happiness.

THE WISDOM OF PLAGUES: Lessons from 25 Years of Covering Pandemics, best to learn from someone who knows because he was there

THE WISDOM OF PLAGUES: Lessons from 25 Years of Covering Pandemics
DONALD G. McNEIL, Jr.
Simon & Schuster
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. reflects on twenty-five years of covering pandemics—how governments react to them, how the media covers them, how they are exploited, and what we can do to prepare for the next one.

For millions of Americans, Donald McNeil was a comforting voice when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. He was a regular reporter on The New York Times’s popular podcast The Daily and told listeners early on to prepare for the worst. He’d covered public health for twenty-five years and quickly realized that an obscure virus in Wuhan, China, was destined to grow into a global pandemic rivaling the 1918 Spanish flu. Because of his clear advice, a generation of Times readers knew the risk was real but that they might be spared by taking the right precautions. Because of his prescient work, The New York Times won the 2021 Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.

The Wisdom of Plagues is his account of what he learned over a quarter-century of reporting in over sixty countries. Many science reporters understand the basics of diseases—how a virus works, for example, or what goes into making a vaccine. But very few understand the psychology of how small outbreaks turn into pandemics, why people refuse to believe they’re at risk, or why they reject protective measures like quarantine or vaccines. The COVID-19 pandemic was the story McNeil had trained his whole life to cover. His expertise and breadth of sources let him make many accurate predictions in 2020 about the course that a deadly new virus would take and how different countries would respond.

By the time McNeil wrote his last New York Times stories, he had not lost his compassion—but he had grown far more stone-hearted about how governments should react. He had witnessed enough disasters and read enough history to realize that while every epidemic is different, failure was the one constant. Small case-clusters ballooned into catastrophe because weak leaders became mired in denial. Citizens refused to make even minor sacrifices for the common good. They were encouraged in that by money-hungry entrepreneurs and power-hungry populists. Science was ignored, obvious truths were denied, and the innocent too often died. In The Wisdom of Plagues , McNeil offers tough, prescriptive advice on what we can do to improve global health and be better prepared for the inevitable next pandemic.

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My Review: "The innocent too often died" in plagues...that is one of those evocative sentences that sound good until you start unpacking them. Does this excuse the public-health indifference around the fate of the incarcerated, as we presume them to be guilty? (Of what, and why, let’s leave for another book review.) Of course not...at least I hope those reading my reviews agree that this is not acceptable...but it illustrates a fact of the author’s writing such a book reveals.

How we talk about plagues, and public health in general, is deeply fraught and will, no matter how carefully phrased, offend and insult someone.

What Author McNeil chose to do with that realization was write the facts of plagues...origins, spreads, containments...in the context of a long career’s take-aways about what works, what doesnt, and how to effectively stop the inevitable rise of some highly infectious and contagious disease from becoming another pandemic. I tell you upfront, you will hate the answer. It involves infringing, to an astonishing degree, your liberties.

The author has covered the topic for an adult human lifetime. He has seen what effective responses look like. The US did not mount an effective response to COVID, and many died who need not have done. I live in an assisted-living facility with many, many smokers. Over thirty of the residents...out of two hundred-ish...died. Many, including me, got sick. Many of those, though not me, went to the hospital to treat their infections. We were lucky it was not a lot worse because the leaders locked us down, passed out masks like candy, made social-distancing rules that they enforced, and still people got infected.

But we live in a state where those measures were put in place quickly and enforced. Fewer died, and got seriously ill, because the patchwork of regulations and responses worked in our favor. That was good luck, which was in short global supply. But we live in a state where those measures were put in place quickly and enforced. Fewer died, and got seriously ill, because the patchwork of regulations and responses worked in our favor. That was good luck, which was in short global supply. There were even then other challenges concurrent with COVID, eg monkeypox, that never became pandemics despite having the makings of such. One big reason is the public-health response was faster, more openly communicated, and more united. This limited the pathogens’ natural ability to spread.

What the author says to us is that solipsistic selfish behavior in defense of your little "liberties" is fatal in the context of a pandemic. Sometimes Life is not fair, but to save the lives of others you must be ready and willing to accept the loss of unlimited, unrestricted personal "liberty." Sarcastic tone implied by quotes very much intended.

Author McNeil is a bona fide expert on this subject. He knows from being there what is needed to stop a pandemic from arising. I sometimes found his explications, deeply grounded and reported with clarity, to be repetitive, so can not offer a perfect five-star rating. I devoutly hope that some who did not read The Daily during 2022 will still find this book and respond to his "I was there, I saw it happen," account of pandemics past, and re-evaluate their stances on responding to the absolutely inevitable and guaranteed recurrence of a pandemic.

A boy can dream.

SALEM'S CIPHER, or "What the Patriarch Will Stoop to"

SALEM'S CIPHER
JESS LOUREY
Thomas & Mercer (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A troubled codebreaker faces an epic plot reaching back through centuries of America's secret history


Salem Wiley is a genius cryptanalyst, courted by the world's top security agencies ever since making a breakthrough discovery in her field of quantum computing. She's also an agoraphobe, shackled to a narrow routine by her fear of public places. When her mother's disappearance is linked to a plot to assassinate the country's first viable female presidential candidate, Salem finds herself both target and detective in a modern-day witch hunt.

Drawn into a labyrinth of messages encrypted by Emily Dickinson and centuries-old codes tucked inside the Beale Cipher, Salem begins to uncover the truth: an ancient and ruthless group is hell-bent on ruling the world, and only a select group of women stands in its way.

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My Review: Secret history novels are always fun for me...they put a spin on the facts that usually makes very little sense, but has the lovely quality of being off-the-wall...and this outing into that garden of fantasy is no disappointment.

If James Rollins had written a woman-centered story, this is what it would feel like. Since I like James Rollins, I think of that as a compliment. Salem and Bel, with their matrilineal cultish secret society, The Underground, are in opposition to the male-dominated world-spanning cult, The Order...don't you love the harkening back to the antique world's division of authority into women/Earth::men/land?...each side ready to lie, cheat, and kill to accomplish their goals. The two (so far) stories in Salems world make it clear that the nightmare of christian nationalism and fascistic order/totalitarianism are only going to be effectively opposed by women organizing and taking their power back into their own hands.

This being a message I am totally on board with, I say go get you a copy and learn what one intelligent, observant woman thinks is worth fighting for, and how to do it. I won't say it's a roadmap since we live in mundane reality not Conspiracytopia, but I will say I agree that the stakes are existential.

When the next woman is nominated to run for president I will not be surprised if she faces some sort of threat very similar to this story's plot. There is no reason to think that the incels and MAGAts will change in the next four years. I hope that somewhere there is an actual real-life cabal of powerful women ready to blast the patriarchy that will come gunning for her. If they had the quasi-mystical powers that the Underground...do you not just love the echoes of Persephone in that name?...and if they could just use Emily Dickinsons poetry a a cipher, too....

The idea of power in the hands of women scares some men so badly that they will stoop to anything to stop it from occurring. This being amply demonstrated by the events of 2016, when the first version of this book came out, the anxiety that propeled this story reads as relevant today as it ever has. Absent some Great Dismantling of the patriarchy, the plot of this story will remain evergreen.

An excellent investment of a minimal amount of money, for very solid return of pleasure in the read.

THE PERFUME THIEF, WWII espionage in a beautifully evoked Paris setting

THE PERFUME THIEF
TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT
Doubleday
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A Gentleman in Moscow meets Moulin Rouge in this stylish, sexy page-turner about Clementine, a queer American expat and notorious thief of rare scents, who has retired to Paris, only to return to her old tricks in hopes of protecting the city she loves when the Nazis invade in 1941.

Clementine is a seventy-two year-old reformed con artist with a penchant for impeccably tailored suits. Her life of crime has led her from the uber-wealthy perfume junkies of belle epoque Manhattan, to the scented butterflies of Costa Rica, to the spice markets of Marrakech, and finally the bordellos of Paris, where she settles down and opens a legitimate shop bottling her favorite extracts for the ladies of the cabarets.

In 1941, as the German's stranglehold on the city tightens, Clem's perfume-making attracts the notice of Oskar Voss, a Francophile Nazi bureaucrat, who comes to demand Clem's expertise and loyalty in his mysterious play for Hitler's favor. Clem has no choice but to surrender fully to the con, but while she knew playing the part of collaborator would be dangerous, she never imagined it would be so painfully intimate. At Oskar's behest, and in an effort to win his trust, Clem recounts the full story of her life and loves, this time without the cover of the lies she came to Paris to escape.

Complete with romance, espionage, champagne towers, and haute couture, this full-tilt sensory experience is a dazzling portrait of the underground resistance of twentieth-century Paris and a passionate love letter to the power of beauty and community in the face of insidious hate.

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My Review: Lush, lovely prose telling a story that made me squirm so hard I wore a hole in my upholstery.

Stories about coercion of trans folks using their identity as trans are not comfortable reads. I do not think this was intended to be a comfy-cozy kind of a read but it was clear in its empathy for its trans main character. So, blessedly, I was not left with the rather unclean film of exploitive appropriative use of trans identity as a negative signifier on my lens into the story.

Still, this story causes me horripilation. As things that have Nazis as the antagonist should.

The felt-like-he-was-factual Oskar Voss, nasty boss Nazi spymaster, based like the rest of the story—as per the author—on real people who were in Paris to escape the judgments of Society in the safety of the big city. Then, the worst-possible worst result happens to them all when the vileness of the Nazis come barging in with their giant, outsized hatreds, and their very overblown sense of purpose. Oskar is typical of the cynical bandwagon-hoppers that puritanical movements attract like horse apples attract dung beetles. He is very much not interested in the ideology of his paymasters. He wants power over others. His means of getting more of his drug is to use whoever and whatever he can to buy himself a seat at a higher-placed table.

Enter Clem(entine). And a lot of Clem's fellow misfits. They need to survive, and their Otherness has equipped them to do this any and every way they possibly can including stealing and blackmailing any and everyone they need to. Oskar wants to ensorcel Hitler with some super-special scent, which TBH just fell flat for me as a motivation...but it led to butch lesbian/transman Clem recounting, for honestly flimsy reasons, her lifetime's-worth of stories to the rapt Oskar. Whatever excuse made that happen is good enough for me.

Clem, a very old person for that era at seventy-two, has Lived A Life, maybe three or even four, in those years. A born tale-teller, as anyone making a living as a con artist and thief operating among the very rich must be, Clem completely wraps Oskar up in the memory palace of the past. How much of it would pass the fact-checking of the internet age, well...who cares. I do not really buy into the motivations of Oskar for any of his actions, but that left me no less delighted to spend time with Clem.

The horrors of Nazi-occupied Paris, the horrors that were to come, all seemed to Clem to be clear because these puritanical control freaks are just like the others from the past. None of it is downplayed, and there are terrible passages in this story, but the way it is presented feels...convenient. Oskar is easily led by his greed for power, Clem is easily swayed by a murky sense of responsibility that all just jelled a bit too patly for this reader.

I will not, though, say anything to discourage anyone who longs for ancestral representation for their own kind to get stuck in right away. I think the transmasculine Clem, while imperfect, is perfectly delightful to spend page time with. The hurts and betrayals of lives long over make for great stories, even knowing they were painful and hard to live. You will come away edified for knowing the honorable, sensible, deeply relatable hero that is Clem.

THE FIELD GUIDE TO THE DUMB BIRDS OF THE WHOLE STUPID WORLD, great Valentine gift for your birder love

THE FIELD GUIDE TO THE DUMB BIRDS OF THE WHOLE STUPID WORLD
MATT KRACHT
Chronicle Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This must-have sequel to the bestselling parody book The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America proves that all birds are fascinating, wonderful, idiotic jerks—no matter where in the world they reside.

Following in the tracks of the first uproarious and beloved bird book in the series, this hilarious sequel ventures beyond to identify the stupidest birds around the world. Featuring birds from North and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, author Matt Kracht identifies the dumb birds that manage to live all over the freaking place with snarky yet accurate names and humorous, anger-filled drawings. Offering a balance of fact and wit, this uproarious profanity-laden handbook will appeal to hardcore birders and casual bird lovers (and haters) alike.

ENTERTAINING AND EDUCATIONAL: This laugh-out-loud funny spoof guide to all things wings includes a matching game, a bird descriptor checklist, and tips on how to identify a bird (you can tell a lot by looking into a bird's eyes, for example). Plus, each entry is accompanied by facts about a bird's (annoying) call, its (dumb) migratory pattern, its (downright tacky) markings, and more.

POPULAR AUTHOR: Matt Kracht is an amateur birder, writer, and illustrator who enjoys creating books that celebrate the humor inherent in life's absurdities. Based in Seattle, he enjoys gazing out the window at the beautiful waters of Puget Sound and making fun of birds. Other amusing titles from Matt include The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America and OMFG, BEES!

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

My Review: Do you love a birder? You do?! Why? Couldn't you find a normal person, one that doesn't glue (super expensive, need upgrading all the time) binoculars to their face at the smallest rustle of a leaf?

Well, it's your life, you do you. Or them, I suppose....

As Valentines Day is coming up very, very quickly, you might need a last-minute gift idea since you have the terrible taste to hang out with a bird nut. No doubt forgetting it's the romantic holiday is completely within such a goofball's capabilities. If the hinted-after super-de-dooper binocs are outside your budget, but something bird-y is still required, believe me when I tell you a reference book ain't a lot cheaper than the binoculars. Go for this book, it's more fun than you usually have with the bloody birds, and it's about $20.

Enjoy the artwork.

Even *I*, no bird-fancier bones in me anywhere, got a ton of good laughs at the expense of all these dumb birds from all over the entire stupid world.

THE STORMLESS SERIES: Stormless #1 & The Fire King #2

STORMLESS (Stormless #1)
NICK STITLE
Blazecrest Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition,available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The world you are about to enter is very different from the one you know.

Auris is a place of storms and chaos where seven violent Tempests rule the land, wreaking havoc across the continent. Only the Summoners, bearers of powers not unlike those of the divine Tempests themselves, have the strength to stand against the tyranny of the storms. Society depends upon the enigmatic Summoner-empowering Crystals for survival... Yet when a Summoner bearing powers that should not exist appears on Arvendon’s doorstep, the world begins spiraling into chaos.

Castien Varic, a common soldier, finds himself in the throes of a coming war. He embarks on a mission with the most legendary of Auris’s Summoners, hoping to discover the truth behind the resurfacing of the Ancient Summoner.

Faelyn Titansworn, heir to the largest of Auris’s empires and one of the most powerful Summoners in the world, finds himself lost in his father’s shadow. When a conspiracy threatens to destroy all that he knows and loves, Faelyn takes it upon himself to save not just his kingdom, but all of Auris.

Asteros Silverglade bears the powers of a god. Two years in the past, he, along with five others of his Sect, uncover the hidden secrets that the world has tried to erase. Yet they soon learn that the mysteries of the baffling event known as the Vanishing—the war that somehow caused over half of Auris’s Summoners to disappear without a trace—run far deeper than they could’ve ever imagined.

These three heroes walk the threads of fate, together weaving an epic tale of magic, war, love, and loss. Together these individuals will forever change Auris’s future. Empires will shatter, Tempests will be Unbound, but destiny will prevail as these heroes face their fated ends.

This is Stormless.

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My Review: First novels usually have issues...this one has mostly fantasy-novel ones. Male characters predominate, and they are the ones we get to know. The female characters, therefore, are there to dress the stage up for the males...sadly all too typical in most genres, especially Chosen One fantasy narratives like this. The author, as a counterweight to this, understands pacing quite well. He uses the templates of fantasy that are well known and well developed. This is not a knock, since there really is little reason to mess with a generations-old template unless you have to. Many others do not bother to do so, and they have far less command of their material than Author Stitle does.

And now a word about our author: He is all of seventeen. For someone that age to have the fluency and the grasp of the mechanics of storytelling that he does is *remarkable*. If you need a good reason to read this particular fantasy novel, there it is. Will you come away from the read enlightened and changed by the power of the storytelling? No. Will you be entertained for the trip you take with these dudebros through Auris?

Fantasy fans surely will. I came to this read expecting to be annoyed and frustrated, but willing to try because someone seventeen does not lightly just write a novel. I was ready to applaud him for doing this difficult task, but criticize his output. Here I am, not his natural reader, saying you should give this book your time.

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

THE FIRE KING (Stormless #2)
NICK STITLE
Blazecrest Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Immediately following the shocking events of the Solstice, Castien Varic finds himself forced to leave his home city for good. With an unlikely team, Castien sets off for the city of Celes, hoping to find an explanation for Ilyana’s betrayal.

Arvendon’s crown falls to a grieving Faelyn Titansworn as the young king grapples with his father’s death. At the guidance of the treacherous Illusomancer Eithor, Faelyn travels to Cyfalion in a misguided attempt at revenge.

Finally, the Emissary shows Asteros Silverglade the secret histories of Auris, revealing that there is far more to the continent’s past than Asteros had believed.

The Fire King brings the Stormless Series to new heights, elevating the stakes and bringing Auris to life like never before. Surprising twists and riveting action sequences build toward two spectacular battles involving all of Auris’s greatest forces. The world of Stormless will evolve in unimaginable ways, forever changing the rest of the series.

This is The Fire King

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My Review: Literally picks up where the previous book leaves off. Feels more like one long book simply cut in half, in which case I say good decision! This afforded me the chance to rest between battles. This is a thing that the characters get little chance to do.

We are still within the male-dominated narrative of Western European high fantasys Chosen One plot. Betrayal, sadness, and loss are the dominant modes for most of the book. I think it bears repeating that Author Stitle is a seventeen-year-old writing sensitively and well about heavy, hard topics that many much older can do less with than he does. This is very impressive inner-directed writing, given the general trope of fantasy for tormented heroes. These men grieve realistically.

Still fully within genre conventions, though. Nothing breaks the mold...but it does not need to when it is molded so well.

A new fantasy author is born. Try him out.