CARLO F. SENTE'S PAGE: Sword Shatterers series—THE PLAGUE OF GOD & THE SUN KING'S MAN

THE PLAGUE OF GOD (Sword Shatterers #1)
CARLO F. SENTE
self-published (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Two intertwined tales, both driven by the irresistible allure of gold:

In the present day, Baron Tim de St. Clere faces ruin and desperation, his family legacy slipping away. Enticed by rumors of hidden treasure, he plunges into a perilous quest, only to find himself locked in a dangerous race against a relentless foe, a politician hungry for the same riches. Tim's journey brims with betrayal and sacrifice, yet ultimately unveils a newfound purpose amid the shadows of his past.

Meanwhile, amidst the tumult of ninth-century Europe, Bera Haraldsdatter grapples with the consequences of her allegiance to a ruthless warlord. As realization dawns upon her, she heeds the call of maternal instinct, embarking on a solitary mission to safeguard innocent lives. Against the backdrop of Viking conquest, Bera's defiance echoes through the ages, a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit.

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My Review: I'll be honest: Tim de St. Clere and his modern-day timeline did not grip me. I comprehend the author's point in making this a dual-timelines story was valid. A modern angle on the story of people making moral choices around wealth, power, and the uses they are put to (in opposition to the way they are, in the stories, used) allows him to present this as a thriller. The dreaded label "historical" or, even more limiting, "time-travel/fantasy novel" would seriously erode the commercial appeal of this tale. Or so he thinks, I assume....

Happen I disagree. Tim and the utterly pointless and barely characterized Julia, and the somewhat haphazardly included Frank and Tamara, are pressured by the expectations and the bedazzlements of twenty-first century life, to no satisfying end. The ninth-century timeline, with Bera fighting tooth and nail to preserve some sense of personal honor and family integrity, is more compelling (if just a bit more, um, leisurely of pace shall we say than is conducive to maintaining suspense) than Tim's efforts to recover material wealth contrast unflatteringly with Bera's powerfully moral quest to dissociate from the immorality seen in the misuse of power by a revolting suzerain.

Well, maybe an inconclusive result to the modern storyline is somehow resolved in book two. I was more than invested enough in Bera's efforts to make reading book two a certainty.

Anyone who enjoyed the National Treasure franchise ought to check out this debut novel.

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

THE SUN KING'S MAN (Sword Shatterers #2)
CARLO F. SENTE self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.99 paperback, preorder now for delivery on 22 April 2026

Rating: 3.75* of five

Two men separated by centuries. One legendary treasure. A ruthless enemy willing to kill to claim it. Baron Tim de St. Clere’s quest for his ancestor’s hidden treasure is no mere hunt for gold; it is a battle for redemption, family honor, and a fierce determination to right the wrongs of history. As he plunges into the depths of the past, Tim and his allies must confront not only the ghosts of yesteryear but also the ruthless ambition of Alain Lesczinsky, a man whose thirst for power threatens to consume them all.

Against the bloody backdrop of war-torn Europe lies the legacy of the courageous Quentin de St. Clere and his lifelong servant and confidant, Nicklaus Brenden. Their bond, forged in childhood and tempered in the fires of conflict, embodies an unwavering and relentless pursuit of justice. As Quentin fights to save their honor and their lives, Nicklaus stands firmly by his side, a testament to the power of loyalty in the face of overwhelming adversity.

In The Sun King’s Man (Part II of the Sword Shatterers Trilogy), the saga of the St. Cleres unfolds as a breathtaking epic woven through the centuries, resonating with the timeless echoes of honor and betrayal.

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My Review: The scoobygroup reunites! I still think the modern timeline's not the most compelling one, though. I got more interest from the political dimension added by including Alain Lesczinsky's quest to become president of France in addition to the treasure-hunting for its own sake. (It makes little sense when viewed practically, but it's a thriller so roll with it.)

Tim's ancestor, Quentin, in this story is in service to the Sun King (Louis XIV) a man of very questionable morals by modern standards but one of the most powerful people in recorded history...funny how often those things go hand-in-hand. Quentin and his man Nicklaus felt like they were more intimate than master and servant are usually, so of course I enjoyed them through my own headcanon. Quentin's desire to curry favor with the perpetually strapped-for-cash Sun King by sending him a vast fortune in gauds and baubles to help fund his forever wars is very much something I was glad to see *not* come to pass.

I'm surprised by the level of buy-in I have with these characters in their history-inflected treasure hunts that end as usual with enough wiggle room for there to be more storues. Please, Author Sente, develop Tim without his inexplicable desire to be with the bland Julia. Pretty please?

EMILIO PUCCI: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon, fascinating man's interesting life well told

EMILIO PUCCI: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon
TERENCE WARD and IDANNA PUCCI
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The Drama of War and Postwar Italy Through the Life of One of Its Most Celebrated Icons

When people think of fashion designer Emilio Pucci, it is of his bright, swirling colors and easy, freeing fabrics, and everyone from Sophia Loren to Jackie Kennedy donning the eye-catching dresses that personify La Dolce Vita. What few know about Pucci, however, is that before creating his world-famous fashions, he played a critical role in the war against the Nazis, risking his life to smuggle out to the Allies one of the most important documents of World War II.

The authors bring to life Italy’s darkest and brightest days, with the extraordinary Emilio Pucci at its center. Italy at the end of the war was broken, and Florence, which the Pucci family had called home for seven centuries, lay in ruins. Pucci returned home bruised in body and soul, having endured trials that would have broken many, but, like Italy itself, rose from the ashes, and went on to design some of the most exuberant fashion of all time. He helped usher in a new era of creativity in Italy, which again became a mecca of fashion, art, design, film, and more.

A host of supporting characters—including Mussolini’s daughter and Allen Dulles, and, most importantly, the timeless city of Florence and the mythic island of Capri—enrich this compelling narrative that will draw readers of all kinds, from war and history buffs, to fashionistas and fans of espionage thrillers along with the millions of readers who devour books about Italy and her many charms.

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My Review: Born in the Kingdom of Italy midway through World War I, Pucci was in the prime of his life during WWII becoming a flyer in the Royal Italian Air Force; he was an aristocrat, deeply in the circles familiar with Mussolini and was his daughter Edda Ciano's BFF. He was responsible for the Ciano Diaries reaching Allied hands and Edda Ciano escaping the Germans' tender ministrations as the daughter of a traitor to the German cause. (Husband Galeazzo not so much; murdered by the Gestapo.) Pucci was himself tortured by the Gestapo as a follow-on consequence of being involved with Edda and her family. No great revelations were given by him, apparently.

It interested me that Idanna Pucci, his niece, co-created the story told herein. Pucci's daughter Laudomia maintains the Pucci archives; her mother Cristina is still living; how is it neither of them chose to write this fascinating story? It's possible the Idanna Pucci, being their elder, simply had more perspective; and she is an author of four decades' standing and her husband Ward (ten years her junior) slightly less duration at twenty-plus years. The couple have also produced documentaries.

It is clear Pucci deserves this attention because he was always somewhere interesting as world events unfolded. Never central, but frequently spotlighted, as he was after the frankly horrifying 1966 Florentine floods when he was instrumental in getting the US fashion industry as well as the general population to volunteer in the monumental cleanup as well as donate money and material aid. It is no exaggeration to say the assistance provided at his behest changed many Florentine lives.

Pucci's stamp on the pop culture of the 1960s was immense, as well. His color palette and choices of fabrics for his collections were widely emulated. He was well-enough known that my kid-self knew his name. I saw his work knowingly, because Braniff was my mother's preferred airline and their stewardesses (it's what they were called in those days) proudly discussed their suits as designed by Pucci. It accords well with the 1937 Reed College graduate's entire life spent in very classy social life...he designed the Reed College ski team's togs...and reinforces the perception of him as a member of a global elite.

It was a very interesting read that felt less like a biography (despite its chronological organization) than it did a family chat. If I'd been invited to an Easter feast in Palazzo Pucci, this is the kind of knowledge I'd've expected to come away with. Only here it's in depth and extensively footnoted.

Fashionistas, Italian and WWII as well as 1960s culture's history buffs are strongly encouraged to get themselves a copy. I suspect the most disappointment will be felt by the fashionistas, as that genre's devoted readers are not always terribly interested in name-dropping outside their area of fascination. Pucci being who he was, a staid local politician as well as a trendsetting designer, there are many diversions from purely the fashion world. It is, I promise, worth all y'all's time to venture a bit outside the boundaries of subject-matter interest. On all sides of Pucci's fascinating life's activities.

AMERICAN SPIRITS, sapphic suds with a side of sly social commentary

AMERICAN SPIRITS
ANNA DORN
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A love letter to pop music, American Spirits charts an icon’s fall—and an obsessive fangirl’s rise.

Thirty-eight-year-old Blue Velour has finally achieved the critical acclaim she’s long been chasing. Over the last decade, she’s released six studio albums to mixed reviews, landing her somewhere between performance artist and niche legend. But her latest album, Blue’s Beard—a cheeky reference to the subreddit fanatically dedicated to her suspected secret relationship with longtime producer Sasha Harlow—has rocket-launched her reputation. Blue hires nerdy superfan Rose Lutz as her assistant to handle the pressures of the upcoming tour.

When the pandemic shuts down the tour, however, Blue decides to hole up in the redwoods with Sasha to make another album. An aspiring singer herself, Rose is frothing at the mouth to be isolated in a cabin with these two legends, but what begins as a creative retreat spirals into a flurry of chaos and betrayal—culminating in a tragic act that changes their lives forever.

Smart, entertaining, and edgy, American Spirits is a compelling exploration of the dark side of fame.

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My Review: A Star is Born with Lana del Rey as Norman Maine. Let that sink in.

So I was pretty invested early on, I like the idea of a lesbian A Star is Born more than you can probably imagine, and from Author Dorn's very, very capable pen...! Home run ball, meet bat, amirite? Well, I was right. Just...not all the way to the fences for that ball.

I don't see much point in going over the plot, it's accurately summarized in the publisher's synopsis. The flavor of the book is more what I rate this author's work on. I enjoy the line-by-line reading of Author Dorn's work so much, f/ex Blue Velour's description of Ayn Rand as "the original girl boss", that I was carried along on a satisfied cloud of smiles as I absorbed her digs and jabs at the culture of Fame, its corrosive loss of perspective for the famous and the fans, the careful but there delineation of the societal systems that Fame depends on and reinforces as toxic and harmful. I was set to give this story a rave review.

Then came The Twist℠.

The observant among you will note the rating above. That is how much I disliked, and always dislike, this framing device as revealed near the end of the book. No I will not discuss details, no one dares do such a thing while the Spoiler Stasi lurk among us. It is a framing device that is completely ordinary, does not cause others the anger it evokes from me, and will bother very few, if any, of y'all. It's my quirk. I write reviews of books because sometimes someone discovers a new writer when I gush (or excoriate, I know of one case where someone read my line "...I, a charter member of the “Eradicate Ivy Compton-Burnett” Society" in a two-star review and found her newest reading passion), and to help people on the bubble about picking up a new book to gather information about it, and to vent my feelings about writers and writing. I've written a lot of reviews...there are over 2,000 posts on this blog alone...so the reader can get a bead on my personal taste. It's good to know your source's biases. So if you feel I'm being unfair to Author Dorn by not rating this particular book in line with the majority of the story's genuine excellence, understand that my opinion of her writing talent and expertise is as strong as ever...I simply do not like at all the particular twist she, in her authorial capacity, chose to use in this story.

It's not meant to discourage potential readers seeking sapphic melodrama, fame-culture takedowns, or the sheer pleasure of reading her prose, from getting the book. If you've been thinking about Perfume & Pain and wondering when the next dose is going to soothe your craving, don't drop it...just maybe borrow this one from the library first. You might adore what bothers me, and want a copy to keep on your shelves.

I can very much see this reaction. In fact, I hope you feel that way because I want Author Dorn's next book as soon as Simon & Schuster can get it out.

AN HONEST LIVING: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries, or "needs must when the devil drives"

AN HONEST LIVING: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries
STEVEN SALAITA
Fordham University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: An exiled professor’s journey from inside and beyond academe

In the summer of 2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois for his unwavering stance on Palestinian human rights and other political controversies. A year later, he landed a job in Lebanon, but that too, ended badly. With no other recourse, Salaita found himself trading his successful academic career to an hourly salaried job. Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus–a vantage point from which Salaita explores social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, professional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school–An Honest Living describes the author’s decade of turbulent post-professorial life and his recent return to the lectern.

Steven Salaita was practically born to a life in academia. His father taught physics at an HBCU in southern West Virginia and his earliest memories are of life on campus and the cinder walls of the classroom. It was no surprise that he ended up in the classroom straight after graduate school. Yet three of his university jobs–Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois, and the American University of Beirut {AUB}–ended in public controversy. Shaken by his sudden notoriety and false claims of antisemitism, Salaita found himself driving a school bus to make ends meet. While some considered this just punishment for his anti-Zionist beliefs, Steven found that driving a bus provided him with not just a means to pay the bills but a path toward freedom of thought.

Now ten years later, with a job at American University at Cairo, Salaita reconciles his past with his future. His restlessness has found a home, yet his return to academe is met with the same condition of fugitivity from whence he was an occasion for defiance, not conciliation. An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of the author’s decade of professional joys and travails.

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My Review: I have experienced being in the crosshairs of the True Believers. It was not as awful for me, old retiree and disabled, as it was for able-bodied new dad and advanced-degree having Steve. My career is an avocation, not a livelihood; I read books and write about them whether or not anyone pats attention to me. I do not do this for money so I am more insulated from that harm, which made me feel the nervousness of Author Steve's situation more sharply. If I'm this tense when piled on, dismissed in demeaning terms, then blocked by people I'd assumed were not judgmental, how must someone with a job he likes and wants to keep doing as well as a family to support feel?!

One thing is for sure, he felt the need to get a paycheck very quickly. Leaving a professorship for a seat at the front of a schoolbus was not the comedown I think his enemies within academia thought it would be. It certainly makes me understand Mao's cultural revolution more clearly...tell an academic he's now a "menial worker" and watch him wither like a salted slug. Not Author Steve. He did the "menial" job, thought about what principles and ethics are for, and came out of the situation with very cute anecdotes about his kid passengers, and a damn good job in Cairo working for the American University in Cairo. (I read a lot of their press's books.) I'm very glad for that because I think Author Steve belongs in the driver's seat of young peoples' education, always has but even moreso after his recent experiences. He can now speak with authority about the hypocrisy and the shabbiness of the Establishment's vaunted belief in the free exchange of ideas and the protection of the right to free speech within their institutions.

It's worthwhile to read a memoir by someone who's been victimized for standing up for his principles. It's fun to read the wry reflections of a man who's never lost his principles under pressure. It's deeply instructive to take the tour of modern cancel culture with one of the canceled. A book doing all of these things is a must-read in my never-remotely-humble opinion.

THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES, cute while being trenchant

THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES
GLENN DIXON
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: In a near future, where even the smallest of appliances are sentient, a young Roomba vacuum sets out to save the humans of her house from a rising technological power in this compelling, original novel.

In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.

But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he’s lived in for fifty years.

With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie’s formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.

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My Review: I was pretty sure this read would be very twee and deeply, annoyingly cute. I might've sat through a few too many playings of The Brave Little Toaster in the late 1980s, resulting in my willingness to read about Kirby the vacuum cleaner's great-grandappliance Scout the Roomba.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

I was charmed by Scout as she becomes self-aware, chooses her name based on what she overhears abour Scout in Harold's reading aloud, then decides to become Atticus and fight the Grid (aka AI-dominated society) to keep Harold in his home.

Why Harold and Adrian become aware of the self-awareness of the machines around them and do not immediately light out for the hills, I could not tell you. I went with it because I also watched WALL-E raptly and accepted its lapses of logic because I was enchanted by the pluck li'l guy's selfhood. Same situation here. I did not think the worldbuilding was very well-handled but I was willing to skip it because this is a feel-good story with elements of social commentary that I agree with. As a card-carrying old man I thought Harold was very well-drawn compared to anyone else. Except Scout. She's the star of the show. A Roomba on a mission is clearly not to be messed with. Kate, the daughter he and Edie lost to her own foolish stiff-necked pride, was not much more than a place-holder, and that was just fine by me. I saw plenty of her in the flesh over the decades so no further text needed please and thank you.

So my verdict? Check it out of the library on the day you're a bit bored of the world's evils yet not steaming mad at the idiots who keep shoving their unwanted greed-increasing systems into our homes. You'll be rewarded by a gentle, sweet individual in Roomba form who wants to do the right thing by those she has learned to care for.

I wish Sam Altman and that fuck Zuck were more like Scout and less the bastards behind the Grid.

SELF-HELP FROM THE MIDDLE AGES: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living, never forget people are ALWAYS people not labels

SELF-HELP FROM THE MIDDLE AGES: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living
PETER JONES
Doubleday (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From medieval historian Peter Jones comes a groundbreaking guide to navigating contemporary life through the wisdom of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Peter Jones was teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia when his third icy winter there plunged him into a dark place. Luckily, he knew something few of us know—that for all its reputation for darkness and superstition, the Middle Ages were the golden age of self-help. So he set out on a journey to explore the wisdom of medieval scholars, saints, and mystics, looking for an alternative path through the challenges of modern life.

Never in history, Jones marvels in Self-Help from the Middle Ages, has so much energy and talent gone into studying how the mind works as in the medieval centuries. Although today we think of the Seven Deadly Sins as a catalog of forbidden behavior, in the Middle Ages, at the height of their currency, they were a path to self-knowledge and self-forgiveness. Together, pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust were a psychological map that laid out seven basic patterns of thought, showing how our thinking can go astray and how we can find our way home.

In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, Jones explores each sin, searching the hellscapes of Hieronymous Bosch and Giotto, the intimate confessions of Dante and Margery Kempe, and the personal struggles of Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena. Along the way he discovers a treasure trove of lost truths about temptation, frustration, addiction, compulsion, burnout, rage, fear, anxiety, and grief that still pulse with life. With beautiful illustrations drawn from medieval art and literature, his book is a gift to all who love history and anyone who has ever sought wisdom from the past.

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My Review: What happens when a scholarly British man with an advanced medieval-history degree from an American school gets a seriously good job in Russophone academia? He moves to Siberia! (Before the Ukraine war begins. He lives in Madrid now.)

Siberia. The place Russia sends people to die in misery. A byword, in US English anyway, for grim, awful exile, for the place you're sent to pay for your sins. I'm afraid this is where I start revealing my prejudices: I envied this polyglot scholar for his seriously good luck. I envied him for living a life I'm still feeling angry at being denied a chance to pursue (though Siberia was never in my mind as an option). So already two of the deadly sins ticked off—again—my life's list of the damned things committed. Oh okay, I'm getting the point now, thought I.

Siberia, the severeness of it, wore on the spirit of Author Jones. He experienced the dark night of the soul, the terrible trackless waste of depression. Being a scholar by nature the solution was obvious: you are not the first person to have this problem. How did those others handle it? The seven deadly sins offer up a schema for understanding the workings of the human mind as well as a perspective check on what your emotional weather really means.

These "sins" are, of course, deeply enmeshed with christian concepts of a religiously ordered universe. Sin more broadly is a religious concept of transgressing a divinely ordained code and appears in multiple religious traditions. It's only natural that a medievalist from England would gravitate towards concepts familiar from his scholarly activities.

In the memoir portions of this narrative, the author evokes very movingly the experience of researching, identifying, and handling medieval manuscripts that contain the seven deadly sins and their explications of how these can be used to improve one's soul. The goal in these readings iss to give the reader a map towards salvation, union with the god of the christians; but as Author Jones elucidates, how different is that goal from modern self-help books' stated goal of helping one become better, happier, more adept at navigating your life. People have sought ways to understand their inner workings, how to cultivate their minds/souls into "better" or "happier" behaviors since the oracle at Delphi...much earlier than that, I am certain, because a pithy aperçu like "know thyself" isn't a first draft, and it is carved in literal stone so it's been workshopped to a fare-thee-well, though it wasn't done in writing so the records are implicit only.

We're highly intelligent, us humans, curious about ourselves because we're so different from other creatures. We have access to the thoughts and the musings and the conclusions of millennia of our forebears. A scholar would know where and how to look for insight into issues common to us all. Descriptions of depression, of psychological maladjustments, maladaptive behaviors, and solutions to the problems arising therefrom, might vary but the impetus to look for ways to be, feel, act "better" is constant. Author Jones seeks the commonality between the seven deadly sins and modern self-help schemata because he needs help, knows our ancestors...sons, daughters, lovers, spouses just like us...needed help figuring out the best ways to be fulfilled. He accomplishes this in the way that best uses his personal strengths. He tells us about his quest in plainly personal terms, clearly stating his stakes in starting the quest. (I frame it as a quest because he's a medievalist and "happiness" is a grail quest.) It is more this strand of his narrative that I found involving, engaging. I was less invested in the rubber-meets-the-road formulations of how the personally offensive to me religious concept of the sins themselves represent paths to self-knowledge. This is a very useful and, to me, persuasive argument. It's offensive to me because the religion it's embedded within is evil and vile, used to create division and enact horrors of cruelty; if there is a "God" as they name her, and she tolerates these terrible acts committed in her nsme, she is not the kind of god who deserves worship.

None of that is addressed in this book; I can't offer an otherwise fully merited fifth star because to do so is to accept a fundamental agreement with an argument for "God" and her christian system's validity.

This is purely a personal inability to tolerate any support of the christian worldview,however tacit it may be, as in any way moral or positively constructive.

THE VIOLENCE: My Family's Colombian War, debut memoir/political history

THE VIOLENCE: My Family's Colombian War
ADRIANA E. RAMÍREZ
Scribner (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five (no perfect fives for the descendant of vandals!)

The Publisher Says: A powerful chronicle of Colombia’s descent into decades of civil war through the lens of an intimate, multi-generational tale of upheaval and betrayal.

When presumed president-elect Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, champion of the working class and harbinger of a new era of progressive social change, is assassinated on the eve of Colombia’s 1948 presidential election, the capital is plunged into bloodshed. So begins a singularly brutal period of Colombia’s history known simply as la violencia—a bloody civil war that spawned decades of turmoil and splintered the country into ever-shifting factions.

The Violence is an intimate history of this conflict—told not from the political center of the war but from the mountainous finca that Adriana E. Ramírez’s family tended to for generations, and through the eyes of her formidable grandmother, Esther. With startling lyricism, Ramírez illuminates the specter of violence—from guerilla warfare to the brutalities found so often in romantic relationships to the spontaneous and senseless violence steeped into everyday Colombian life during this period—and the threat that it poses to a country, and a family, that is trying to stay whole. Gracefully braiding together macrohistory, family history, and personal narrative, Adriana E. Ramírez traces these parallel stories of upheaval in a sweeping portrait of a country and family in flux.

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My Review: First, read this:

A Colombian aphorism says that to understand tomorrow, you need to make sense of yesterday. Like a long line of dominoes, one moment in time topples another, which topples another, until soon nothing stands.

Nothing stands when nothing is anchored, tied down, held in place. Change feels like chaos to those who like the status quo, and no one human likes chaos. Even the ones who cause it do so to achieve a goal, then they try to impose an order they like better than the one they destroyed.

Author Ramírez, whose father-in-law I proudly claim friendship with, tells the violent, chaotic story of the Colombian civil war of (more or less) 1948 to 1954 using the lens of her own family's participation (avoidance is also participation) in the events of the time. It is a dark, terrible one, this story; no one comes out of civil war without a smudge on their personal or familial reputation. I refer to an act of heinous vandalism on the corpus of History that Author Ramírez's family perpetrated...my inner historian was so wounded by it I was forced to lie down for an hour with a cool compress over my eyes. Murder, rape, torture...well, that's war isn't it...but burning records?!? *shudder* Unforgivable.

Fortunately my forgiveness is neither requested nor required. The family survived, the deeds done made the existence of this book possible. Its publication today, the fourteenth of April 2026, launches a writing career into a new literary orbit. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has, until now, been Author Ramírez's writing home so this memoir of history and family is her mark on the book-reading world. It is a story only she could tell, told with clarity and a great deal of honesty. If I'd discovered my family had burned records I would not admit it out loud, still less commit it to the permanent record of publishing it! Kudos for bravery, and may the Terminators of the history department that clearly must exist in some weird corner of spacetime choose not to expunge the bloodline.

I think I fell asleep watching a movie....

What made this a good read for me was the voice Author Ramírez chose to convey this blend of history and family memoir in. It is a book-length chat with a good raconteuse, a lovely, long chat after dinnner with an interesting friend. It is, as mentioned, dark of subject but not grim or gross of recounting. I do not think anyone's expectations of an involving, emotionally resonant read will be disappointed. I'm very glad I was introduced to the political complexities surrounding La Violencia in such a personal way. Reading about politicians and diplomats and US imperialism is definitely something I enjoy doing; I prefer to approach history with a flexible set of expectations, however, so seek out what more intimate and reflective storytelling I can find to enliven the public facts.

Author Ramírez has received warm reviews in multiple venues, most excitingly to me Time Magazine with its many millions of readers. The praise early readers like Idra Novey and Angie Cruz is praise she earned by careful and attentive wordsmithing. I've known since I began reading her journalism several years ago that Author Ramírez was both talented and skilled at the craft of writing. I am excited for us, the commmunity of readers, that she is also able and confident enough to listen to the muses' whispered inspiration and then to give us deep life-giving drafts of storytelling water.

YESTERYEAR, debut novel perfect for book clubs...and Anne Hathaway as Natalie comin' soon!

YESTERYEAR
CARO CLAIRE BURKE
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

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

My Review: What a rotten human being Natalie is, phony, all about surfaces and appearances. And then one day, she's required to put in the effort she's faked for life as a momfluencer/farmfluencer. Remember Overboard, the 1987 film? Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell as truly terrible people, lying, cheating, using people around them as objects. This story reminded me of that, with Outlander as the backdrop.

There is a thing called a "tradwife" on the internet. It's as brummagem as the "manosphere" the right-wing owners of major media outlets likes to insist is worthy of attention so their employees yap on about it. Natalie and Caleb, her husband, are mouthpieces for this made-up cultural phenomenon. As will surprise no one over forty, the couple are complete fakes: the lifestyle they present as aspirational, as somehow attainable, is a profit-driven collective endeavor of many minions and two public faces, supported by a cast of their minor children exploited as accessories, as decorative objects.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. It's got elements of the whole Ruby Franke debacle, the various terrible men in the right-wing talk circles, the young kids trying to be famous on YouTube because that's what they see as fame...none of this is different than it's ever been. Classes, courses, camps, schools teching acting, writing, cooking...mor acccurately chefing...all have done this since who-knows-when but certainly since Carême parlayed his successes serving super-fancy vittles to the power elite of the Napoleonic era into a publishing empire. Others came before, I'm sure. Humans like looking up to people who do things flamboyantly and publicly because the spectacle is fun, because we like novelty, because we enjoy the inevitable fall from the heights. I myownself have never felt more intense schadenfreude than I did at the fall of Beau Brummell. The word "comeuppance" was only coined in 1859, but might as well have been invented for him...and for Natalie.

As Natalie awakens to the reality of her comeuppance, she becomes...authentic, at least briefly, in her intense desire to get back to being artificial, groomed, and pampered. She'll take the misogyny, the fakery of her persona's religious trappings, wrap herself in the cocoon of decepetions if it will bring her back to luxury behind the cameras. The hollow and unsatisfying Caleb of the modern day? Fine, compared to the sterner and more effortful relationship with her nineteenth-century Caleb; and how the hell does anyone get raised in a world without nannies? Natalie doesn't want to know.

I'm painting a portrait of a woman as obsessed with surfaces and self-absorbed as any Dorian Gray. She is just as awful as he was. We know this because we hear her inner monologue. We are left in no doubt that her responses are genuine because there is no camera to play to, no audience except us, the invisible readers she is speaking to.

I am definitely the audience for this story: anti-religion, revolted by the fameseeking culture depicted herein, accepting of a premise that promises weirdness in the form of time travel. But there are limits. Yes, Natalie and Caleb exist in the world...Ballerina Farm...but this story's got to do more than regurgitate the headlines to succeed. Does Author Burke have anything to add to the conversation? Or are we here for the fun of Natalie's comeuppance? The ending is designed to offer that perspective, I think, but it did not land with me. That's why I only offer four stars.

Not being perfect, not sticking the landing is not in any way meant to vitiate the real pleasures of the read. It's the kind of story that book clubs will engage with eagerly, much to chew on, much to consuder. I think you're wise to pick it up in that context; this is a story best experienced as a catalyst of discussion.

Debuts that attract Anne Hathaway to adapt and then star in their film are rare. I see why this one won that lottery. Find a group to read it with!

METROPOLITANS: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team, lefties like sports too!

METROPOLITANS: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team
A.M. GITTLITZ
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending April 12, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending April 5, 2026

The Publisher Says: A wide-reaching, revolutionary narrative history of the Team of Destiny (da Mets, for anyone not keeping score), that takes us from their 19th century inception to their 1962 resurrection to the present day.

A love letter to a franchise and a thrilling study of New York City history, Metropolitans brilliantly shows us that sports have long been a site of political struggle, rousing class consciousness, and animating fights for racial equality. From purportedly calming riots in ’69 through the quality of their play to producing some of the greatest chokes in sporting history, from integration to desperate labor struggle against millionaire and billionaire franchise owners, Metropolitans makes a deeply humane and convincing argument for the fascinating singularity of the New York Mets—and why it should be not just the team of the counterculture, the freaks, and the losers, but anyone with a beating heart.

Gittlitz leads us through baseball’s amateur beginnings to the Mets’ first heady World Series on the heels of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements that many Mets players participated in to the bad boy years, the exploitative development of farm academies in developing nations, and their inglorious purchase by a new breed of capitalist—even after which they remained lovable losers.

But this is a book not only for Mets fans, or New York partisans, but anyone interested in the Mobius strip dynamic of sports and politics, the history of the national game, or the beautiful contradiction of baseball a middle-class game owned by billionaires, in which the players—like the spectators—look to traverse the diamond and ultimately safely escape its many dangers.

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

My Review: I'm giving this book five stars because the Miracle Mets defeating the Orioles in 1969 was the first time I understood why my grandmother wanted to live to see the Cubs win the Series again (she didn't), and why my dad took me to freezyfrosty cold Candlestick Park to see the Giants play, and lose.

I can't not love anything about baseball, even as I get more and more uneasy with the concept of these gladiatorial games organized to give people some outlet for their desire to hate that is not threatening to "Them"—the capitalist class that very, very badly does not want you to expend that energy in political action.

Carefully entwined into the history of the US, the story of the Metropolitans and of team sports in general is told here with acuity and concision. It's a purpose and a point expressed best in this quote:

From this communal vantage, the abstractions of statistics and standings are confronted by the reality of what we are really seeing—not a game between two opposing teams, but a common human struggle, within and against the economic, legalistic, and mechanical structure of the game itself, and its role as opiate for the physical and existential pain of wage labor.

I can't really add anything to that statement except to say "+1" to it.

I'm old, so I remember when baseball mattered to lots and lots of Americans, held a real place in our cultural conversation. Football and basketball have that centrality now. But for those of us still loving the sound of a snapped bat connecting on a fastball, this book is catnip. Leftist social critique and economic analysis are seldom more appealingly presented than when entwined with a cultural mainstay of generations-long standing.

I hope I live long enough to see my Mets win the Series again.

MY DREADFUL BODY, five-star novella debunking misogyny's lies

MY DREADFUL BODY
EGANA DJABBAROVA (tr. Lisa C. Hayden)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition.

The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods.

With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation.

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

My Review: Poetically laconic, elegantly simple, maximally affecting prose telling a woman's life of contradictions in identity. For a woman in Azeri culture, her body defines her. It is female therefore these are her options, this set of rules apply to her. Then along comes Egana, like the author's name...probably like the author. She yearns not to be defined by her body, and paradoxically freed by having a woman's body defined by a painful, disabling illness called dystonia blends both those realities.

Eleven body parts define the course of this narrative, under 150pp in length, and still eternal. It's Egana coming to terms with patriarchy and its religious, its community, its intimate controls over women. This is a fierce and outraged shout in the face of a god and a culture that insists femaleness has no agency, can only exist in relation, in submission, to masculine needs and wants. Egana doesn't shout her rage, she trumpets her horrible escape from the unkind fate of a life spent in drudgery and servitude...a decidedly mixed blessing, but a blessing she catalogs in careful, intimate detail. This is what makes this read so different from US feminist fiction: It prescribes no path to follow, defines no road not taken or taken by stricture. Egana has no say in her desirable opting-out from Womanhood's duties as prescribed by her culture. It was wished on her by a bodily dysfunction, a painful affliction; but it serves as a space separate from her culture's expectations so is a vantage point from which to observe the power of normative expectation. It is a meditation and an examination, not a prescription for others to follow.

Possibly the most powerful strand in the tight, compact story for my disabled-by-pain self was not related to that shared experience but the equally defining quality of being in a cultural diaspora. A Muslim and an Azeri in Russia, the colonial power that defined her family's country's course in the modern world telling the story of her intimate estrangement from that community was perhaps the least expected source of empathy and pathos in my read of the story. I felt as though I was fully in Egana's life when I realized how alienated from her Othered cultural reality...doubly, triply Othered by religion, sex, and culture.

It's astonishing how deep this experience of identification was as I considered my own alienation from US culture with its youth-worship, its heteronormativity, its serious lack of interest in including the disabled or the chronically ill. It lifted the read into five-star territory because it managed this feat without once telling me how terrible Egana's fate was. I got to experience her life with her, in her words, grounded in her own body...each discussed part of which I also possess. Nothing in Egana's "dreadful" body is unique to femaleness. It is female because she is a woman. It is discussed as a woman's body in relation to every other cultural reality only because she is a woman.

If you can think of a better way to point up the sheer idiocy of misogyny, its illogic and its sadism, I encourage you strongly to write about it. You'll be a bestseller in no time at all.

As My Dreadful Body should be.

WORK TO DO: A Novel, like "The Office" only meaner

WORK TO DO: A Novel
JULES WERNERSBACH
University of Iowa Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, preorder now for delivery on 7 April 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When Eleanor founded Guadalupe Street Co-op in the early 1980s, she was in her mid-twenties and madly in love with her girlfriend, Meg. Together, they envisioned an idyllic grocery store owned by its workers and customers.

Forty years later, Guadalupe Street Co-op is an iconic Austin business with a loyal customer base, an antiquated business model, and a disgruntled staff. Roz, one of the store’s senior managers, is too caught up stalking her ex-wife online to notice that her girlfriend, Molly, is plotting with her coworkers to unionize. Roz also doesn’t see that Molly is not-so-secretly in a situationship with Randy, the dairy manager leading their collective.

Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the co-op’s first year and present day, as the unionization bid reaches fever pitch. The wind howls, the power goes out, and water creeps through the front door, as questions of who owns the grocery store and who has a right to its future are posed. And will the workers ever be paid enough to buy the organic groceries they shelve?

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

My Review: Hierarchies change people, at the top and at the bottom. They're good for, and at, that...yet we're told that being "a family" is not to be in a hierarchy by the kind of lefty person who sets up a co-op. (I was transported to Wheatsville as I read this.) If that's the case, what kind of family did you grow up in? Parents are our first bosses, our first gods. The idea of hierarchy is instilled in us by "bedtime" and "naptime" and, most hated of all, "bathtime." These activities are policed by Authority, ie parents. Thus from a young age we are in a hierarchy called "family"; soon enough, we begin to rebel. We desire to make our own choices, our own lessons learned our own way.

A unionization drive at a co-op is the business equivalent of adolescent rebellion. It felt to me as though all the characters were coping with adolescent emotional states throughout the story. The nature of any group is to experience friction in different strengths and around different topics of disagreement. This story pits idealism...no co-op anywhere ever is founded to make a profit...and pragmatism...how the hell can I pay rent and buy food this month? It's all tangled up with personality conflicts, old grudges, and the inevitable recrudescence of Being Right in any group attempting to make decisions.

Eleanor, the founder of the co-op, is parent to the idea and has powerful, forty-year-old ideas about the concept of the workers as family. Of course no one's paid enough, no one ever is because capitalism runs on scarcity. No matter that you're structuring a business on a cooperative model, you're still in a capitalist system, its pressures still apply. As the founder (owner is not applicable, they all own the co-op) Eleanor's investment is truly, intimately personal. It explains but does not excuse how thoroughly unpleasant Eleanor is during the whole book.

In point of fact, everyone from Randy the unionizer to Roz the manager, through to Eleanor the founder, is thoroughly unpleasant. Not one of them behaves empathetically, with kindness, or in any way not narcissistically. This is not the read for someone who needs to like the characters they're reading about. It's well-observed, with lots of clever lines; it's got the hurricane and its aftermath to give the reader a serious jolt of adrenaline; it's been part of everyone's experience to be a member of a hierarchy that's experiencing change. I was kept in the flow of the story by these structural realities while not invested in any one character's success. It was an interesting experience of being on the outside of a story, looking on as events unfolded, feeling myself caring in an abstract way about these folks.

Anyone who wonders if queer people running things, leftist running things, or multigenerational structure including all ages, are happier workplaces should read this story. Anyone who thinks life is better when x thing is the center of your work, your relationship, your mind should read this story. People are people. They do and say stupid, ill-advised things. Sometimes hurtful words are fixable, sometimes they aren't...don't think you're being Right will carry you through to inevitable victory...or even to happiness. It's all laid bare in Author Wernersbach's smoothly polished prose.

Read Work to Do when you're after a cautionary tale about hubris, a reminder that empathy is always a better choice, that cooperation trumps selfishness but does not necessarily mean getting what you want. It's a very grown-up person's book, and looks at queer people in all their messy, human glory...and snickers behind its hand.

HONEY IN THE WOUND, Korean magical realist family saga

HONEY IN THE WOUND
JIYOUNG HAN
Avid Reader Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 7 April 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lyrical and suspenseful debut novel about a mysteriously gifted Korean family confronting the brutality of the Japanese empire, Honey in the Wound is an epic tale of survival and the reclamation of power.

A sister disappears and returns as a tiger. A mother’s voice compels the truth from any tongue. A granddaughter divines secrets in others’ dreams. These women are all of one lineage—a Korean family split across decades and borders by Japanese imperialism.

At this saga’s heart is Young-Ja, a girl who infuses food with her emotions. She revels in her gift for cooking, nourishing the people she loves with her cheerfulness. But her sunny childhood comes to an end in 1931 when Japanese soldiers crush her family’s defiance against the Empire. Young-Ja is cast adrift, her food turning increasingly bitter with grief. When a Korean rebel fighter notices her talents, however, she is whisked off to Manchuria to join a secretive sisterhood of beautiful teahouse spies. There, Young-Ja finds a new sense of belonging and starts using her abilities for the resistance. But the Imperial Army is not yet finished with her…

Decades later, Young-Ja lives alone in Seoul, withdrawn from the world until her Tokyo-born granddaughter Rinako bursts into her life with the ability to see into dreams. In cultivating a tentative bond, they confront the long-buried past in a stunning emotional climax.

As an unforgettable family perseveres in the long shadow of colonialism, Honey in the Wound transports readers to mountain forests where tiger-girls stalk, to Manchurian teahouses and opium dens where charming smiles veil secrets, and to the modern metropolises of Tokyo and Seoul where restless ghosts stir. This debut novel is a tender yet powerful multi-generational drama that shines light onto the twentieth century’s darkest corners and gives voice to those who bore witness.

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

My Review: Brutality is colonialism's sole common legacy across all colonial regimes. Korea's half-century as part of Japan's empire was certainly no exception. Many are the stories of families ravaged by slavery, by economic disadvantages imposed to benefit the colonizers, by the horrors of the comfort women's suffering. It's not unique to Japan's imperial project...go look at Briseis' life after the fall of Troy, and I promise you she was nowhere near the first to suffer this fate...but its systematic, intentional social sanction somehow makes it a vile twentieth-century model of efficiency in evildoing.

So much of modern US culture is Korean inflected. I've reviewed a fair few Korean translations, Korean-themed stories written by members of its diaspora, stories set in Korea, all sorts really, because the culture of the place is ancient, rich, and deeply rooted as it smoothly takes on the modernity of this century as an economic, therefore cultural, powerhouse. As I gain more and more experience with the stories Koreans send into the Anglophone readership, I see one very, very frequent strand appearing: the Japanese occupation, usually framed in apocalyptic, folkloric ways to distance the reader from the brutal reality and to restore some agency, some meaning, to the country's suffering.

No exception this time. Starting in 1902 when Korea was an independent monarchy, the family we come to know and invest caring into is gradually Japanesed in personal names (pay careful attention, context will tell you if someone is being addressed or referred to as a Korean or as a Japanese imperial subject) and place names. It's like the British stealing India and naming "Mumbai" as "Bombay." (There are so many examples from all over the colonized world, that example is just the one I felt Anglophones would relate to most easily.)

The first 40% of the story is the slowest, with the highest concentration of double names. It's a debut novel. The fact is this is exactly reflective of the reality Author Han relates to us as we start our journey in 1902. Put in some effort and it will all begin to feel second nature to you quite quickly. The delight of a writer whose planning makes your reading more fluent with her intentional shifts in register is one who gets my highest regard. Time changes within few pages of each other are all quietly indicated with characters giving us clues, not with bold chapter or section headings that bring your readerly attention to the shifts themselves not the flow of the story.

This might not sound like it will suit you. I recommend reading a sample after publication day on the 7th. It feels more fluid than I'm making it sound. For example, you'll notice as you read through the book that there is a lot of use of, and description using, the color yellow. It would behoove you to go look into musok, the people's religion of Korea, and its use of colors. Like the shifts of names this is an enriching detail that clues the reader in to the larger thematic purpose of a passage, or a name, or an evocative word.

It made this read one I really looked forward to getting into, immersing myself into again and again. And a good thing indeed these moments were there because the horrific cost to the people of the colonial occupation, then the war, demanded much fortitude of me-the-reader to stay invested in people enduring so much. I had reservoirs of interested, sympathetic caring to draw down as horrors mounted up.

I will say I wish there had been a map in the book. I'm not sure where some place names were, whether they were really elsewhere or were Korean places I had read about renamed. Its lack was not fatal to my pleasure; but I felt it nonetheless.

A story I urge on readers and enjoyers of Pachinko and Whale. A story with depths deeper than its modest 320pp page count implies. An author who is a fine discovery in her debut novel.

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES, Emily Jane's ruminations on end-stage capitalism and toxic masculinity

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES
EMILY JANE
Hyperion Avenue (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: America’s venture capitalist werewolves meet their match in USA Today bestseller Emily Jane’s third rollicking, genre-defying novel.

“It takes aliens (or an Emily Jane) to help us see our society for the bizarre, sugary, microplastic-poisoned dream it is.” —Edgar Cantero

From the author of On Earth as It Is on Television and Here Beside the Rising Tide…

Many full moons ago, a young American boy with ambition in his belly and the moon in his veins followed his destiny west, determined to carve a path to success no matter the carnage.

Two centuries later, a city is captivated by the strange and savage murder of a young woman. Her roommate, Natasha, no longer able to afford their apartment alone—and hounded by both rumors of wolves and a pop-star’s angry fan-swarm—has resorted to living in her car. There’s nothing left for her…except vengeance.

Across town, Shane LaSalle is about to see his wildest dreams come true. He already has a gorgeous apartment and a high paying job in venture capital. Now the partners of Barrington Equity have invited him to board the company’s private jet for an exclusive retreat. But with partnership finally in his reach, Shane realizes he’s losing his taste for just how ruthless and all-consuming the firm is.

Epic and electric, American Werewolves brings readers from the wilds of the New World to the opulent board rooms and golf courses of the twenty-first century, where devouring the weak is an American birthright as old as the country itself.

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

My Review: I was really amused by On Earth as It Is on Television last year. It made me smile and chuckle in a year when those were not my first choices of response to the world and its shenanigans. I'd hoped for the same experience here.

Mostly got it, though entirely without humor. Toxic masculinity and predatory capitalism are worthy targets for Author Emily Jane's sharply observed snark. Told in two narrative strands, this story of modern-day Shane, an ordinary young man who's just found out he's now a partner in an equity-capital firm; modern-day Natasha, a downwardly mobile woman who is determined to find out how her bizarrely murdered roommate, Marie, died and why no one else seems to care; and, in the nineteenth century, a boy called Bit who wends his way West to make his fortune. There's a horrible animal attack on Shane, to bookend Marie's murder by an unknown creature; it's the first of many such events that Author Emily Jane presents in a dry, unsensationalized framework for us to, ermmm, chew over. Why this character? Why now? What really happened here, who's noticed, and why are we seeing the responses that Emily Jane shows us?

It's just incredible that these people are somehow existing in relation to each other. It does feel stretch-y, like the need of the storytelling trumped the need of the characters; none of them are ever going to be easy in each others' headspace. Which is the point. It just left me with a sad, uneasy emotional aftertaste. I'm clear that the rape-culture and misogyny elements are presented in a highly negative and critical light. I don't know for sure that they're necessary to foreground so much...put it down to my dislike of these themes, not the author's overuse of them in making your decision to read the story or not.

I suspect that, my quibbles above notwithstanding, it will be Author Emily Jane's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell-esque urban fantasy elements regarding lycanthropy and its invented factual history that will cause most of y'all to give the read a pass. I get it...the technique can feel off-putting if over- or awkwardly done. I found these elements very well-chosen and did not find them out of place or obtrusive in the author's hands. Werewolves or aliens, from her previous book—makes no odds, each is as unlikely as the other to be objectively verifiably present among us.

Your taste in humor will matter a lot in your experience of the read, so get that sample under your belt. If you run across this: "Veronica tried to convince him that werewolves weren't supposed to cry, until her dad explained that werewolves could cry when they needed to and it didn't make them any less werewolvesy," and do not at least chuckle, this read will flop for you likely quite resoundingly.

Most of the rest of us will, however, get our grin on. I think it's worth the time and treasure it will take to get it read.

CITIZENSHIP: NOTES ON AN AMERICAN MYTH, Daisy Hernández reflects on a cultural sea-change

CITIZENSHIP: NOTES ON AN AMERICAN MYTH
DAISY HERNÁNDEZ
The Hogarth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A provocative, personal, blazingly intelligent examination of one of the most vexing questions facing the United States today—who is, and should be, a citizen?

“How did ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ turn upside down to where we are today? Everyone needs to read this book, citizens and non-citizens alike. Brilliant!”—Sandra Cisneros

"The most comprehensive book on citizenship/immigration I've ever read. A must-read!"—Javier Zamora

In this one-of-a-kind book, Daisy Hernández fiercely interrogates one of the most complicated subjects of contemporary life and citizenship. Braiding memoir, history, and cultural criticism, she exposes the truths and lies of how we define ourselves as a country and a people. Turning to her own family's stories—her mother arrived from Colombia, her father a political refugee from Castro's Cuba—Hernández shows how the very idea of citizenship is a myth and part of the stories we tell ourselves about the American soul and psyche.

Reframing our understanding of what it means to be an American, Notes on Citizenship is an urgent and necessary account of the laws, customs, and language we use to include and exclude, especially those who come from Latin America. With her scholar's mind and memoirist's gift for narrative, Hernández weaves a story both personal and national, while reckoning with our country's ongoing debate about who belongs and providing fresh ways of thinking about citizenship. At once bracing, fearless, and tender, Notes on Citizenship is a powerful portrait of one family's experiences in the borderlands of citizenship and an honest illumination of the country in which we live.

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

My Review: The Supreme Court has heard oral arguments on the deeply contentious topic of ending the age-old concept of "birthright citizenship," very much in the current regime's sights for elimination. Based on the Justice's tenor of questioning the Justice Department's counsel, I don't feel the regime can count on the ruling being in their favor.
This collection of essays has as its core a desire to think through how citizenship has changed in practice. The US Constitution defines citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment, and it's pretty unambiguous about it. (That same amendment gifted us with the legal horror of corporate personhood.) It's been a longstanding desire of racist, fascist scum to make the idea of citizenship into a conditional grant...which, if anyone though about it for a single minute, would mean there's no citizenship for anyone at all.

Author Daisy thinks through the various ramifications of this terrible idea. Once a right is "granted" it can be taken away. That is why every time a law is passed that limits a right, like birthright citizenship, you...you personally...are at risk of losing whatever right it is. If this kakistocracy has not taught you the lesson that believing "they wouldn't/can't do that" is a dangerous illusion, read Author Daisy's essays. They can, and they will, and even court orders will not force the scum to cease and desist from illegal, immoral behavior. Look how many losses in court have been dealt the regime; yet no sign of meaningful compliance, compliance with the *intent* of the orders and laws, exists. This is, in other words, a coup against the form of government we take for granted.

Read these essays, even though the collection feels thematically scattered, because each essay is very clearly argued, and makes excellent points. It is a slowly unfolding disaster but it is unfolding...it's time to pull your socks up and do the work of citizenship.

Follow Author Daisy's example.

STAKEOUTS AND STROLLERS, award-winning debut cozy amateur-sleuth mystery

STAKEOUTS AND STROLLERS
ROB PHILLIPS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Amateur private investigator and new dad Charlie Shaw gets more than he bargained for when he agrees to track down a young girl’s missing father in Rob Phillips’ award-winning debut.

Charlie Shaw is low on sleep. And cash. Otherwise, life is going pretty well for the ex-crime reporter: He’s happily married to his college sweetheart, he’s a first-time dad to the most adorable baby girl in existence, and he’s making ends meet as a rookie PI. But when Charlie meets Friday Finley, a frightened sixteen-year-old runaway on a stakeout-gone-wrong, his world gets a little more complicated.

Friday is looking for her estranged father Shawn, an unreliable alcoholic who left when she was young—and who also happens to be her only shot at avoiding the foster care system since her mother’s death a few weeks earlier. At first, Charlie believes the man is simply hiding out somewhere, avoiding his responsibilities as usual, but the more he investigates, the more unsettling—and dangerous—Shawn’s disappearance becomes. When his own family is threatened, Charlie realizes he’s in over his head, but can he back out now that he’s begun to care for Friday as his own?

A perfect blend of humor and high stakes, Stakeouts and Strollers is a heartwarming story of fatherhood, family, and what it really means to be a “Girl Dad.”

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My Review: This story won the 2024 Minotaur Books/Malice Domestic Best First Mystery Novel...an "award-winning debut" just sounds odd, at least to me it does.

There's little doubt in my mind that it deserved the award, though. Charlie Shaw was a newspaper crime reporter who, when laid off as it seems all must be in pursuit of more for the ownership class, pivots to using his detecting skills as an actual detective. This is not quite as easy as it might sound, since in addition to losing his reporting job, he's just become a dad for the first time. It's important to the plot: he's so besotted with his baby girl, he has her crib monitor up on his phone at all times thus using up his battery; when he needs to use the camera to document the identity of cheating spouse's side piece, he's got no juice to make the shot. This leads to closer involvement in the perpetrator's life than is healthy...for lots of reasons, Charlie should not get deep into this divorce.

Yet here we are.

Red herrings abound. Ryan, Charlie's wife and co-parent, is in a high position in her company so Charlie's flexible PI schedule makes this job perfect for new parenting, but also means he's sleep-deprived at weird moments so Ryan's making adjustments too. It's a story that brings the stuff of real life into its fictional plot in well-judged ways. All the players in the story are embroiled in family dynamics that give them depth greater than surface level. They all move through life making themselves crazy over trifles, worrying about how to connect better with their families, thinking about what to do to face problems and fix mistakes. It's a very good enhancement to a pretty standard PI plot.

What really sold me on the read was Charlie himself. He's narrating the events with a constant self-deprecating edge of humor. When violent things occur, it's not minimized by his sardonic edge. It's a different register from most PI mysteries, so it comes across as...surprising? fresh?...not as expected, anyway, which is greatly to the story's benefit and Author Phillips' credit.

I can't offer a fifth star, however, due to some squicky stuff around sexism. It's always down to male-gazery isn't it? Noticing and complimenting other women on their appearance, barely avoiding openly comparing his new-mother/full-time executive wife's body and style changes to pretty young things. The "night nurse" Ryan and Charlie employ is more a housekeeper than a nurse, uncomplainingly cleaning, caring for Baby Callie, then taking on a new caretaking job for a teen thanks to Charlie's impulsiveness. It's a stylistic choice to make the story very talky by having dialogue function as exposition at times...why would a man's wife say out loud that his sister died when he was a kid?...which is a trap as often as a bonus chance for emotional resonance.

I'll skip past some stuff that's all on the editor, because the author needs to be able to trust the guidance he's given. Our villain ain't a mystery for long; there are enough red herrings to make it plausible the villain might just be a shitty human being but I pegged the identity early on. *tsk* on you, Editor! Not factored into my rating.

I'd recommend the read, flaws and all, because Charlie's a particular kind of Guy, not a dudebro, not a Cinnamon Roll, but a regular ol' Guy you'll meet on a barstool, at a barbecue, in a post-office line. He means well, he's got a good attitude, he isn't interested in ragey stupid testosterone-y 'tude. I like him, and I think you might too. Get it from the library, by all means, but it's worth getting.

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

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

Rating: 3.8* of five

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

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

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

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

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

Meet Mieko Kawakami.

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

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

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

Oh dear.

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

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

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