AFTER THE FALL, latest Edward Ashton outing

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

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Would humans really make great pets?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PEDRO THE VAST, mycohorror/sporror at full throttle

PEDRO THE VAST
SIMÓN LÓPEZ TRUJILLO (tr. Robin Myers)
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Simón López Trujillo’s “mind-blowing” (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara) debut takes readers into a dry and degraded, fire-prone landscape where humanity has encroached a step too far into the natural world, and a deadly fungus mounts its own resistance . . .

In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of López Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro's kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn't ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro’s condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.

For readers of Jeff Vandermeer and Samanta Schweblin, López Trujillo is a next-generation Bolaño with a fresh, speculative edge and a mind that's always one step ahead of us.

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

My Review: Mycohorror, sometimes "sporror" (a play on "spore horror"), has a history that goes back a way. In our Anthropocene climate change-plagued times it's grown in prevalence and in popularity. The entire cultural interest in ecohorror is only growing. The Last of Us was quite a cultural moment; Jeff Vandermeer's Area X novels still fly off the shelves; in the QUILTBAG community T. Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier series makes a stir.

all of which makes my eyebrows rise a bit: y'all do realize this is the Earth herself rising in outraged fury against the disease process we represent to her body, like planetary chemotherapy, right? Considering the Anthropocene's awful effects on the Earth, we'll be lucky if all that happens is her fever goes up and she unleashes the ancient life-givers the fungi onto us because then a few will, by the immutable statistics of Life, will make it through.

Subtle weirdness abounds in the world-building, the eponymous Pedro being...affected...in ways that drive the plot but do not allow for him to be more than a name and a list of symptoms most of the time. The story reaches a climax I (experienced old weird-fiction reader that I am) saw coming, with a big reveal that was expected—albeit intense—and a niggling issue of "who exactly is telling me this story?" gets addressed.

I think the main draw of this read is the author's effective story design, and the excellent pitch of the prose...Translator Myers, take your well-earned bow...that makes it a pleasure to spend these 140ish pages with this team. I can see this being filmed and becoming a hit. Chile's natural beauty has been badly damaged, so it feels to me like the right cultural moment to do this story filmic justice.

It's short enough to make a solid weekend's reading but not so short you'll look up and think "...that's IT?" when you're done. The idea of horror is to give you a jolt, this does that (a bit late in the game, but definitely does it) and does a good job of reminding insular Anglophone readers that the world is much bigger than just our part.

I'd offer more stars if the twist was not so obvious. I've already said that this is a me thing; I expect you to know how much of my bugaboo stock you share by now, I've been at the reviewing game twenty years! Even if we share them all, this is a story I think is worth your time and treasure.

BIG NOBODY, why is smoking back in positive framing?

BIG NOBODY
ALEX KADIS
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 10 March 2026

Rating: ? anywhere from 2, 2.5 to 5...

The Publisher Says: A wickedly funny coming-of-age novel about a misfit teenager in London determined to eliminate the one thing standing between her and a good life: her father

I think it’s safe to say that my father was probably always an abomination of nature.

It’s 1974 in London and Connie Costa’s already pitiful life has gone off the rails. She’s spiraling from the loss of her mother and younger brothers in a tragic accident. And the man responsible is her Dad—otherwise known as “The Fat Murderer.”

Kept at home under his increasingly tyrannical rule, Connie is an outcast who spends her nights conversing with the David Bowie poster on her wall and raiding her stash of whiskey and chocolate. Her only social outlet is the weekly gatherings with her father and their immigrant community of Greek “Freaks.” There she finds her life’s one bright sneaking off with her friend Vas to smoke cigarettes, debate literature, and joke about whether it is finally time to run away together. But when Connie sees an opportunity to get out from under her father’s thumb for good, she must make a perilous decision that will change her forever.

Devastatingly tender and riotously funny, Alex Kadis’ Big Nobody tells a warmhearted story about the rocky path to finding ourselves and the people who keep us afloat.

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My Review: Connie annoyed me from giddy-up to whoa. Being in her stream of consciousness required me to grab my mental reins and pull firmly back onto the path to...wherever it is we're going, Connie and her party of readers.

Greek immigrant culture in the 1970s was very patriarchal, making little room for female autonomy at any age let alone a teenager's urgently desired absence of supervision. After all, her controlling and abusive...we're told...father didn't bother to protect her from pedophilic abuse by her grandfather, so what good is it to her?

And here's where I get tired of the read. All of this emotional heat is Connie's stream of consciousness. I'm an incest survivor myself, so I can relate to the searing rage, hatred, and desire to escape in Connie's narration. I'm not sure the narrative choice to trap me in Connie's head serves the story well, because the casual slaps and the general oppressive misogyny start to feel like Connie being a bit overdramatic. It's not that the abuse did not occur, but that she could simply be so isolated, so without anyone to talk to, that her age-appropriate lack of perspective makes her point of view untrustworthy.

Since we're watching her evolve a plan to murder her father, that feeling is too powerful to ignore for this reader. I know why a teenager who's been victimized in body then re-victimized by being disbelieved about it is this enraged and this obsessed with revenge fantasies. But the voice, the sarcastic nasty voice, wore on me a lot. There's maybe 25% of the book set in 2007, where I'd've expected Connie to have developed a nuanced understanding of the events of the 1970s. Spoiler alert: Nope.

As a read, I'd rate it as pretty poor; as a story, not so much...it's a kind of strident klaxon blaring a message of "PAY ATTENTION! VICTIMS SHOULD BE BELIEVED!" that my own experience demands I support without any reference to my lack of enjoyment in reading this claustrophobic, overheated screech of rage.

So what the hell do I do now? Ask you to read a story whose storytelling was a bad miscalculation in my estimation, because the story being told is that urgently necessary to me?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

WHIDBEY, evoking a planet-scale beauty spot to soothe and smooth the pain of victimhood

WHIDBEY
T. KIRA MADDEN
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 10 March 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning literary achievement and portrait of three women connected through one man in the aftermath of his murder—the explosive and highly anticipated debut novel from beloved and award-winning memoirist, T Kira Madden.

Birdie Chang didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when she chose it, only that it was about as far away as she could get from her own life. She’s a woman on the run, desperate for an escape from the headlines back home and the look of concern in her girlfriend’s eyes—and from Calvin Boyer, the man who abused her as a child and who’s now resurfaced. On her way, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger on the ferry who offers her a proposition, a sinister solution, a plan for revenge.

But Birdie isn’t the only girl Calvin harmed back then. There’s also Linzie King, a former reality TV star who recently wrote all about it in her bestselling memoir. Though the two women have never met, their stories intertwine. Once Birdie arrives on Whidbey, she finally cracks the book’s spine, only to find too much she recognizes in its pages. Soon after, on the other side of the country, Calvin’s loving mother, Mary-Beth, receives a shocking phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered.

Calvin’s death sets into motion a series of events that sends each woman on a desperate search for answers. A complex whodunnit told from alternating points of view, Whidbey is searingly perceptive and astonishingly original. Exploring the long reach of violence and our flawed systems of incarceration and rehabilitation, this is a tense and provocative debut that’s sure to incite crucial questions about the pursuit of justice and who has real power over a story: the one who lives it, or the one who tells it?

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My Review: "Be careful what you wish for," taken to apotheosis. Now including "be careful what you say out loud" because you can never know who is listening...what they want from you...what they will do with, and to, the thoughts you leave unguarded in the air.

A paranoid thriller about sexual abuse of girls does not sound like something I, sexually abused by my mother, will find pleasant reading. It wasn't prurient...it stops short of recreating the abuse...and it very properly presents the topic in high relief instead of flattened into caricature.

Abuse is not foregrounded, at least the mechanics were not. Emotional devastation is this story's heart. I'm not exaggerating, unless you're made of stone, this is a deeply sad and often brutal tome. Linzie is my personal most awful victim of abuse because she parades it for attention, for the validating fame her honesty affords her and the materially comfortable living that brings. If that's not sad....

Birdie is mid-process in trauma terms. Her loose lips, her willingness to talk when silence would serve better, isn't like Linzie's garrulous yappin' for the cameras, the ghostwriter, the audience. Birdie doesn't have a plan, a purpose, a canny angle to show and sell. Birdie can't keep the chirps inside. It's a far worse place to be, because it's doing bad things to her belovèd girlfriend Trace.

But every abuser has a mother. How often do we, as a society, stop to think about what it means to a person to see their child in the harsh glow of a perp walk? How much rage and hate can this lone soul transmute into denial? Mary-Beth is the character I wanted to hug, to stand before her with my arms aroud her and just let her cry. Whatever she did, didn't, couldn't, wouldn't do, she is the one whose role in this was the most devastating to me. Then, while expecting her son to come home to her after incarceration and mandated psychotherapy, she hears the words your blood freezes even thinking about: "your child is dead."

Oh. My. GOD.

Parts one and two make the cases. The stakes get set. The pain is explained. No one's an angel but each one's a clear, passionate survivor. Part three's where we hit the top of the loop on the roller coaster and time speeds up as things happen, people talk but the Doppler effect renders them only partly comprehensible, events occur too fast for old-man me to see why they're causally connected to the first bits. The ending...well...it's a first novel, I grade on a curve for those, but...dude. Resolving plot threads should not feel as though you're doing a time-sucking chore you don't really want to do. Whatever the real ending was, and I'm morally certain there was one, it probably took the murky misty part-three energy around the bend.

If Author Madden reads this (ha! don't read reviews, your publicist does that) please take this sentence away, where you should go now, with you: You have an outstanding literary touch, a visual vocabulary most never acquire, and you need to read Mary Renault and Patricia Highsmith novels.

Everyone else: Support debut authors, or we'll never get more work from them. But maybe check this one out of the library.

THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS: A Novel, grief and grieving and loss drown a woman

THE VALLEY OF VENGEFUL GHOSTS: A Novel
KIM FU
Zando/Tin House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An eerie, spellbinding novel of grief, ghosts, apocalyptic rain, and slowly splintering reality, from an author who “writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet.” —PEN/Hemingway Award judges’ citation

In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—as Eleanor focused on her career as an online therapist. Left to navigate the world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house.

Desperate to obey her mother one last time, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the choices she’s made.

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My Review: When something is too good to be true, it is. Nothing is more guaranteed to blind you to that reality than desperation. Eleanor's mother, Lele, has controlled Eleanor's life to the point of a toxic...but comfortable...dependence on Lele for the mechanics of living. Tedious adulting offloaded onto a partner is seldom a good idea, and when the partner is a parent it is catastrophic. Parents die. it's part of the bargain. Eleanor finds Lele's death more than merely unpleasant, more than simply painful: it's her utter undoing. Lele cooked, laundered, managed Eleanor's world. Her inevitable death, far too early it's true, unmoors Eleanor in every way.

Parents expect their children will grieve on their death but continue to live and to manage themselves as one has taught them to do. Lele has not taught Eleanor anything of note, for complicated reasons no doubt but the effect is now all Eleanor has is last instructions: Buy a house.

Ever bought a house? It is complicated, it is intimidating, it is unnervingly legal and permanent and deepy scary. Eleanor is ludicrously ill-suited to the task on every level. It is no wonder she, deeply immersed in her business life of being a therapist, makes practical mistakes with emotional consequences. She can afford this really cool-sounding house in a stunning natural setting? How? That should be so far out of her reach...what's the catch, where's the trigger, what?? But you need to be savvy to the ways of the world to see that from the off, Author Fu writes this description of the realtor who sells her this place: "His thick hair was slicked back, coiffed high off his forehead. He smiled toothily as she approached. He held his hand out for a shake, and a large watch slid out of his jacket sleeve, the band and bezel the same chrome brightness as his car."

Run, Eleanor, run! But of course she doesn't. So she ends up with the whitest elephant of all white elephants. And the unraveling begins.

It's here where I leave Eleanor and her plight to you to discover. I took the trip to tell you if it was one worth taking, and why. It's a modern take on horror, this dread and unmooredness, this sense of waters so much deeper than you thought fro looking at them, this...unease. Eleanor stands in for us on the cusp of a revolution no one wants, on every front. No matter how much AI slop "They" feed us, people don't care about it; no matter how much doubt "They" fling over reality, summers are hotter and winters weirder and more violent; so there's a constant pressure to mistrust your own sense of Reality and leave everything to "Them" to manage.

It's not going well. For us, for Eleanor, for the planet.

The way the story unfolds is intended to build that...wrongness, unease, unhappiness...into the experience the reader and Eleanor exist inside, to make the boil expand so it will finally pop, them be cleaned out. But by whom? At what cost in pain and unpleasant side effects? Can we, in fact, clean up our own mess?

Not if we, like Eleanor, have no real connection to the way "They" are running reality on our behalf.

It's short enough as a read to be a weekend's focused read. It's intense enough as a narrative to support that kind of sustained attention. It's a deeply satisfying immersion into the slow awakening of a grieving soul to the cost of extending childhood far, far too long. It's hard to be alive in a world beset by challenges too big to make a positive difference in by one's self.

Welcome to adulthood. Go out and do the work, no matter how scary or hard, because the alternative is drowning.

REPETITION, recursion...refashioning...recasting....

REPETITION
VIGDIS HJORTH (tr. Charlotte Barslund)
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Prize-winning novel by one of the foremost writers of her generation, explores the horror and beauty of being sixteen-years-old.

In a Norwegian November, when it is dark at waking and dark at sleeping, a novelist in her sixties sits next to a teenaged girl at the opera, and through their padded jackets feels a dreadfully familiar tension conducted from the parents seated on her far side. She thinks back to her sixteenth year. The year she first got drunk and the year she first had sex with a boy. A year of being circled by an anxious, hawkish mother and, at a notable distance, her silent father.

The year her family made an unspoken decision, and an unspeakable sacrifice.

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My Review: "Repetition" and "repetitive" have pretty negative connotations in literary discourse. We'll generally reach for "recursion" (the older term by nearly two centuries) and "recursive" to move the affect into a more positive light. Most of this very short read I was leaning towards grousing about repetitive prose making me feel kinda seasick, like Invisible Man always has; I've never managed to finish the read because of it. This being a novella there was no time for me to get really, really tired of it.

Hope is like a new garment—stiff, tight and glittering—but until you try it on, you won't know if it fits or suits you, while memory is like an old garment: no matter how pretty it is, it no longer suits you, you've outgrown it.

Repetition, however, is like a durable garment that hugs you tenderly, but never constricts or swamps you. I was glad that I hoped for nothing, but why then this feeling of dread?

Early on, we're told there will be repetition, and it's the bloody title of the story; I cannot whinge that I was blindsided or misled. As I said in my review of Is Mother Dead?, "'Do I confront my deepest self?' asks Johanna, our narrator, in a passage that honestly sums up the entire experience of reading Author Hjorth's writing," an assessment I equally happily apply to this read.

But that repetitive prose...it was not until the Big Reveal about three-quarters into the read that I realized we were in recursive territory, we were shading there all along, as every iteration of the memories our narrator, a woman of my age, recalls her sixteenth year's events and feelings, alive now to their emotional and practical freight in a way impossible to a sixteen-year-old.

She was suspicious and she had cause to be, but I didn’t know that at the time—though I had an inkling that not everything was as it should be with me—that something lived deep within me, was working away in me, and if it led to confirmation, then what? She was looking for signs of something she simultaneously suspected and feared, desperately hoping not to find anything in order to be reassured and so far she hadn’t found anything, but still she didn’t feel safe, because she didn’t know what she was looking for. She wanted to get rid of her unnerving, intrusive suspicion of what might have happened to me by finding evidence that would prove her suspicion was baseless, but seeing as that was impossible, she sought instead to prevent the potential consequences of what she suspected and feared but didn’t actually want to deal with, from a twisted belief that it was possible to do so by smothering me, by forcing me, by nudging me into acting and behaving like a healthy, normal teenager. Only she didn’t realise that her hysteria and fear ultimately suggested and homed in on the very thing she didn’t want to know.

Knowing what you don't want to know is corrosive. It destroys happiness, safety, even selfhood dissolves in its caustic bath. I should know, it's been my reality since 1982.

I was not primed to feel the shock of this story's revelation, then, but rather to bear witness with the narrator. The very best gift to give her is to be with her on her level, in her time, without drama that draws the focus away from her.

I rewrite and I reproduce like Munch painted several versions of The Scream, I repeat and I vary the repetition, shamelessly, with my heart on my sleeve and suffering inevitable heartburn in order to process and understand and put it behind me or to reinforce the bitterness and excitement inside me, in order to change myself through repeating and varying patterns . . .

Recursion, in other words. That's a word mostly used in math or computer science, occasionally someone trots out Chomsky's no-longest-sentence reasoning; but mostly this word is treated like it's wearing a starched white lab coat and a pocket protector (is my age showing or what?) in my opinion quite unfairly. This story is the most recursive thing I've read this year and proudly so. It's the zoomed-in fractal of trauma. It's the infinite capacity of language to iterate until the reader's eyes bleed. In under 150pp.

Truth is always hard to endure. This novel is truthtelling, degrading and repugnant truths told like it or not. The reason I think you should read it is simple: You can put it down. You can take some time to get your head around it. You can, in a pinch, apply the Pearl Rule.

Unlike life.

Facing truth as it's told is hard and it costs you many hard-to-lose things, like illusions and the warm loving comfort of being lied to. Practice in a novel; think about how the second person works as a narrative device; put your chest in the narrator's poking finger's path.

Imagine if there is no choice afforded you.

Welcome to the ugly side.

THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR, aaarrrgh earworm earworm!!

THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR
WADE ROUSE
MIRA Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this poignant and hilarious story inspired by TV’s beloved The Golden Girls, bestselling author Wade Rouse celebrates love, aging, finding your people, and the art of impeccably timed one-liners.

Theodore Copeland has created a fabulous life in the desert oasis of Palm Springs, where he shares a fabulous pink mid-century home with three fabulous friends: Barry, a former actor still clinging to his youth, his hair, and the memory of the dream role that killed his career; Ron, an uprooted Christian from the Midwest with a big heart but no one to give it to; Sid, who, after coming out late in life, has never found love. Teddy is the caustic, unspoken leader of “The Golden Gays”—the foursome’s monthly drag tribute to The Golden Girls. Despite their foibles and bickering, they have turned their golden years into a golden era.

But the harmony of their desert enclave becomes a carousel of emotional baggage when Teddy’s estranged sister, Trudy, shows up on their doorstep, her dramatic teenage granddaughter in tow. While Teddy keeps Trudy at arm’s length, she manages to wheedle her way into the lives of the Golden Gays, until the real reason for her visit is revealed and the secrets they’ve all been keeping from each other unravel faster than a hastily stitched hemline.

A novel that gives thanks to “old” friends, That's What Friends Are For proves that while family may be the tie that binds, it’s the chosen family that truly keeps us together.

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

My Review: Four older...old, "of a certain age" is such an absurd weasel-wording...gay guys live in Zsa Zsa Gabor's Palm Springs home, in the absence of other places to be as they live out their invisibility, bond to each other the way the Golden Girls did, and perform as a drag troup reenacting episodes of the show.

You need to be charmed by the premise to enjoy the book. I was; I did.

It was more true to the spirit of the show than I expected. In novel form, that meant packing in a lot of trauma recall, a lot of wistful nostalgia, a lot of regrets for pasts "misspent" in all the ways people do that, in not a lot of space. The gestalt of these four charmers is just *chef's kiss* and the repartee flows like Veuve Cliquot from a marabou mule. (Zsa Zsa is, after all, the former owner of their house.)

If no one is currently in development talks for this book it will utterly stun me. Heartstopper for the teens, Heated Rivalry for the horny adults, That's What Friends Are For representing the generation that fought these stupid necessary battles for all y'all that seem to've been erased from the collective memory. *ahem* I meant to say "the seasoned citizens." Of course I did.

Celebrating found family, talking honestly about what life looks like as "The End" hoves into view without crowding you (yet), flexing the wicked-humor muscles developed from years of deflecting nastiness...it's a grown person's happy place, this. Drama arises because humans create drama the same way we breathe—automatically—but it never feels calculated, like Author Rouse said "let me rile these queens up now" while twirling his mustachios. I bought into the dynamics he built, accepted the moments when the men had trouble dealing with things as natural and inevitable. Author Rouse uses the conflicts the way a good therapist urges one to use them: get to know your friend better, get to know yourself better, apply kindness and acceptance like the balm it truly is, and move on.

A big issue in the story is staying stuck. It's a huge issue in almost everyone's life, from what I can tell. It's good to see it addressed openly, with candor, and in such a humorous setting. (I admit I want to bash Barry for chasing his long-past youth. Grow up!!) What Author Rouse has done is deliver a warm-hearted, clear-eyed, just sentimental enough look at the unforgiving terminal illness of Getting Old, in a relatable and enjoyable visible way denied to queer folk by our heteronormative culture.

Kudos! More soon? Please?

THE BEGINNING COMES AFTER THE END: Notes on a World of Change, essays about the one true constant

THE BEGINNING COMES AFTER THE END: Notes on a World of Change
REBECCA SOLNIT
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling survey of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. She argues that, despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, and the nature of that change is determined by who participates and how.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation has happened in so many disparate arenas, and within a longer arc of history, the scale of that change is seldom recognized.

While the backlash of white nationalist authoritarianism, Manosphere misogyny, and justifications for callousness, selfishness, economic inequality, and environmental destruction collectively drive individualism and isolation, the elements of this new world are related in their vision of more inclusion, equality, interconnection. This new vision embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, and indigenous and non-Western ideas, particularly Buddhism, as well as breakthroughs in the life sciences and neuroscience, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

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My Review: Collections often draw from existing bodies of work. Author Solnit began drawing acclaim for her robust, tendentious writing in the early Aughts, and has never fallen out of the cultural conversation. She won't stop telling the truth, though, so her honesty wins her detractors and even enemies across the political spectrum.

One knows a thinker is doing it right when everybody is mad at them for something.

This essay collection breaks no new ground in her public thinking. It is, if I'm honest, a highlight reel with a bit more sameness than I wanted to read. It is also a collection drawn from decades of work. I found myself thinking, "I remember this, move on," and finding it necessary to recall in the moment that it's collected not commissioned to be written anew or afresh. Not every essay chosen was necessarily up to the highest standards in the book. Again, it's a function of a collection...it's not possible to be perfect, but it's possible, like Author Solnit, to be trenchant and to add value to the consideration of organizing theme of this particular project.

Progress is relative. In any consideration of the societal norms prevailing now that has even a modest degree of perspective, things are hugely better for women, queers, trans folk, and people of color. We're always being bombarded with messaging to the contrary, for reasons y'all need to read Paul Linebarger's book to really connect with. A collection of work like this one is a good corrective to the easy-to-internalize message of the world sucks always has always will. It's true; it's also wrong; both these things can and do coexist because, faithless to your entire life's training, almost nothing in the observable universe is a binary. All physical systems are spectrums and there's mounting evidence literally everything is in fact spectrum...look into quantum physics and certainty vanishes to be replaced by probabilities (aka spectra). Author Solnit stressing that each ending is also a beginning is very much in line with this mode of thinking.

It's new enough to most of her audience that repetition is probably a good idea to deploy in examining the topic. Like any new-to-you theory, perspective, or fact, it's going to need some hammering home to become part of one's mental structural supports. I'm ahead of this curve so it wore on my nerve a bit more than it will for others. I hope you'll pick it up and give it a try if you're sinking under the wight of the world's idiocies and evils.

We need the perspective of one who has been decades in the trenches, struggling against the dying order's loud and lousy distractions, to remind us we've come far. We need to keep moving ahead. It's easier to find the will to do that if we've got a stedy hand and an encouraging voice like Author solnit's telling us to remember it can be done.

Because it has been done. It's not finished, this work; it never really is. Now, get back to it!

THE QUICKSAND THEATRE COMPANY, an entry in the loose Eidolonia series

THE QUICKSAND THEATRE COMPANY (Eidolonia series)
MOLLY RINGLE
Central Avenue Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A runaway witch, a cursed actor, and a magical theatre troupe full of sequins and secrets—this cozy, queer fantasy takes the stage with romance, rebellion, and fae-fueled drama.

When Vai Delvecchio leaves their home in the night, fleeing a family scandal, they knock on the door of the least likely but most alluring of sanctuaries: the traveling Quicksand Theatre Company. Actor Leo Takahashi—a.k.a. Leonidas the Obstreperous—grants Vai a bed in his caravan in exchange for Vai’s magical assistance in theatrical productions. Vai finds their respectable, dignified life transformed into a whimsical world of sequins, makeup, and irreverent comedy sketches.

In the caravan’s close quarters, it’s inevitable that Leo and Vai grow curious about each other, a feeling that blossoms into mutual desire. But trouble waits in the wings. Vai has to face the fallout of their family’s mistakes, and Leo guards a somber secret: soon, an unbreakable deal he made with a malevolent faery will take effect, destroying his freedom and potentially his life.

Yet it may be in the darkest lairs of the fae realm, and in the painful longing of separation, that Vai and Leo each find the truth that makes them whole again.

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

My Review: Nonbinary magic-practicing person in an ocean of really hot water falls for queer performer guy with a *major* secret that keeps him from showing how reciprocal their interest in him is. Set, as so many stories seem to be, in a theater company, a world of playacting, dissembling, and self-invention, it takes its time getting Vai the enby character and Leo our queer hero together.

Too long. It's dragged out to explore the world, the fae's roles in human events, Vai's terrible choices vis-à-vis their family, Leo's errrmmm, uhhh, equally terrible decisions of a very different sort. It's a found-family narrative that one spends the entire read dreading the end of because every single one of the Quicksand Theatre Company's participants very, very badly needs the protection as well as the support of the whole company.

It's hard to relax, honestly, with the Sword of Damocles hanging by a fraying strand from a horse-hair wig. It was a good narrative choice, in other words; but it went on that small fraction too long and wore out my readerly patience. I was quite happy pnce the pace picked up in about the last third of the narrative. I was reading the last 10% at two in the morning; exhausted when I got up, was pretty pleased with the resolution presented.

I'm told this story shares a storyverse with other tales by the author. I never felt that level of mildly bewildered exclusion. I intend this as a compliment. Too often the shared background of a series obtrudes with major points feeling obscure if one is not already acquainted with the rest of the world that's already built. I didn't feel that reading this story...yes, I could tell some characters must've been from somewhere else by their introduction or the responses to them, but what they did in the moment was complete and logical in the context of *this* story. It's a tough feat, and Author Ringle pulls it off.

Normalizing all facets of queerdom earns the book its fractional fifth star. I was utterly gruntled as I ran into characters from everywhere on my peoples' spectrum; this is something I will always round up on the curve for. I couldn't offer a full fifth star because "fae" is a four-letter word in my vocabulary and rhymes in my mind with "feh."

I ain't helpin' y'all with that one, do your own research. My word was this fun. I'm so very happy I got to read it!

BRIDGET WALSH'S PAGE: The Variety Palace Mysteries series 1, 2 & 3

THE TUMBLING GIRL (Variety Palace Mysteries #1)
BRIDGET WALSH
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The first in a sharp, witty series of Victorian mystery novels, The Tumbling Girl sees an unlikely duo team up to solve a grisly spate of murders.

1876, Victorian London. Minnie Ward, the feisty scriptwriter for the Variety Palace Music Hall, is devastated when her best friend is found brutally murdered. She enlists the help of private detective Albert Easterbrook, who already has his hands full trying to catch the notorious Hairpin Killer. But Minnie can't help getting involved in the investigation, and as the bodies begin to pile up, Albert's burgeoning feelings for his amateur partner start to interfere...

A dazzling debut for fans of Sarah Waters and Elizabeth Macneal, and shows like Miss Scarlet and the Duke.

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

My Review: What delight it is to find a dynamic duo, opposite genders and complementary skill sets uniting to solve a case not worth the police's time...the victim was "just" a performer and a female one at that...without slobbering over each other's sex appeal! Albert comes to realize what a treasure Minnie is without her body being his focus.

Minnie's clearly an unusual person, one who does not accept Authority's word as law. It makes her very much in step with my tastes in a person to read about. Albert is built up as a detective of skill and reputation, which made me a little disgruntled at some missteps he made that were Very Convenient for the plot...I didn't want to leave off that fractional fifth star, but for a while it looked like I'd be rating this story just under four stars.

What put the rest of the fourth star back on my opinion of the story was Albert and Minnie's response, a shared one, to the Hairpin Killer as a person. The killer has a deeply twisted motive for doing the revolting things done to the victims, and it offends Albert as much as it does Minnie because he sees the victims as real people in the way she does. He, the experienced detective, wants to catch the killer because he is mortally offended that these crimes *occur* to the killer, that it seems *okay* to do these things in a person's mind. Minnie, OTOH, is outraged that there's so little official interest in the killings because the victims are lower class.

All of that is sort of elliptical because it would be very easy to ruin the puzzle if I say more explicitly what the duo are responding to. It's not a cozy, y'all, and the crimes are not sugar-coated. I don't think, for my read anyway, that it's prurient in purpose to be as direct about what the results of murder are. It felt to me that the detective duo's different tonal responses to the realities of the aftermath were intended to make their partnership more nuanced, more relatable for future events in this story and later ones.

Of course I already knew there were more books in the series before starting this read, but that honestly made the ending bearable. The twist, if I'd had to endure a long wait for book two to come out, would've been excruciating! It was not an artificial, tacked-on, manipulative one; it was organic and it was kind of dreadful, but it worked. I'll warn you, gentle readers, to have book two to hand when you read book one.

I encourage you to read it. There is a lot to enjoy in a female-led Victorian detective duo solving nasty crimes by bringing justice to the perpetrator in spite of official indifference. Victims, in any afterlife that might exist, can feel their wrongs have been redressed.

On to book two!

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

THE INNOCENTS (Variety Palace Mysteries #2)
BRIDGET WALSH
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The hotly anticipated follow-up to The Tumbling Girl, The Innocents follows Minnie and Albert on a new crime-solving quest in the world of a Victorian music hall.

Still reeling from the gruesome murders of the previous year, Minnie Ward is appointed manager of the Variety Palace. Times are hard, with performers shunning the 'cursed' music hall, and Minnie's relationship with Detective Albert Easterbrook is more complicated than ever. Despite the success of their last case, Minnie is terrified of the feelings that have started to grow between them. She has decided it’s definitely better for all involved if they stay as far away from each other as possible…

But when another killer begins to terrorise the city's streets, Minnie and Albert are thrown together once more. The crimes seem connected to a notorious tragedy that left nearly 200 children dead—and with so many lives affected by the incident, practically everyone is a suspect. As the investigation unfolds, dark truths begin to come to light, and Minnie is forced to confront her own past.

The Innocents is the 2nd book in the Variety Palace Mystery series, which can be read independently but continue the story of irresistible crime-solving duo Minnie and Albert. Taking place against the thrilling backdrop of the Variety Palace Music Hall in gritty Victorian London, it's perfect for fans of historical crime fiction, such as books by Sarah Waters, Stacey Halls and Elizabeth Macneal.

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

My Review: I'll start by noting that you really will enjoy this read a lot more if you read book one before picking this one up. (I'm soft-pedaling this because publishers are really anxious for y'all who resist series-reading unless the series is complete need you to buy the books.)

I'd say this was not *quite* up to the first one's standard of narrative refinement. The twist I mentioned that occurs in the last 15% of The Tumbling Girl is, to my surprise, allowed to keep affecting the action in this book. I felt that was surprising, not ordinary; I didn't mind it because the issue under investigation by Minnie and Albert is not an ordinary one, relating to and stemming from a decade-plus old cause. If we're seeing life unfolding as Life unfolds for us real people, let the recrudescence of complicating factors do the same. After all, ma'at is never done with us; why should plots be artificially tidy?

Because fiction isn't life, that's why.

Minnie is in a more complicated situation vis-à-vis the music hall in this entry, is still processing her complicated feelings for Albert, still juggling skatey-eight skabillion demands on her time...and still can not let an injustice, really a dereliction, with horrible real-world pain and anguish as its fruit go unaddressed once Albert makes her aware of it.

Albert's still the emotionally labile one of the pair. He loves Minnie and still doesn't demand anything of her just is there with her, supportive, while still giving her the impetus to use skills and talents she might be reticent to deploy as he guides her to do. She suffers the conflicted feelings that any PTSD sufferer would when confronted by a worthy, good partner: she isn't good enough, he deserves better, he is too good for her. Albert does not agree. Albert demonstrates this with patient kindness and sincere reassurance. It's like watching Ilya from Heated Rivalry tenderly reassuring Shane that everything's fine when stress causes a spin-out. Albert has earned Minnie's trust so he can focus her on protecting their friends from harm.

These stories are not sugar-coated. The terrible things that happen are not shied away from, minimized, in order to spare your 21st-century squeamishness. I'm okay with that, but in this story two things occur and get described that are...viscerally upsetting, child harm and cruelty to dogs. Both are condemned, both are presented as appalling to Albert, Minnie, and decent people everywhere. They're still in the story and not merely in passing.

I do not recommend this entry in the series to my sensitive pals. I had a hard time with the dog scene. I think y'all might as well skip this story who can't deal even with what I've told you.

Thicker-skinned folk will likely find the resolution to the multistranded miscreancy in this story worth powering past, or through, those dreadful byways. Minnie and Albert have annoying habits of not learning lessons from their pasts, but the author's set the books a couple years apart so that was enough of a fig-leaf for the issue in my reading experience.

It was a rather deus ex machina of an ending, though. Sort of late-career Agatha Christie vibes. It wasn't totally, utterly sprung on me but it was abrupt and not quite the very best work from Author Walsh. I'm still at four stars because Albert and the Variety Palace scoobygroup keep Minnie held together and moving forward in believable, investable ways.

Maybe you'll get as much from these two reads as I did by experiencing them back-to-back. I recommend it to the not-squeamish.

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

THE SPIRIT GUIDE (Variety Palace Mysteries #3)
BRIDGET WALSH
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 7 July 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A witty, propulsive historical murder mystery investigating a secretive spiritualist cult in Victorian London—and the 3rd installment in the beloved Variety Palace Mysteries series!

1879, Victorian London.

Tea room sting operations, seedy music hall secrets, elaborate disguises, and slow-burn romance…

Detective duo Minnie Ward and Albert Easterbrook return for another exciting case to uncover the dark secrets at the heart of Victorian London’s spiritualist scene.

This time, an investigation into two mysterious deaths leads this famed detective duo to the doors of the Spirit Sisterhood, a female-only spiritualist group that facilitates communion with the souls of the dead. And recently several of its visitors have been found dead themselves.

Minnie isn't buying it: there is more to the Sisterhood than there first seems. The more Minnie looks, the more covert operations come to light. She goes undercover at the organization’s secretive countryside home, where she quickly finds herself drawn into the dark but strangely alluring world of spirits and ghosts.

But, isolated from Albert and everyone she loves, Minnie's situation quickly gets out of hand. Can she find a way out of this remote cult before time runs out? And can she keep her own demons at bay long enough to withstand the Sisterhood?

A rip-roaring murder mystery brimming with theatrical detail, loveable characters, and an addictive plot, the 3rd book in the beloved Variety Fair Mysteries will keep you guessing until the very last page.

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

My Review: Albert's more assertive in this book, more worried about Minnie's immediate physical safety, and so more motivated to behave in a protective way. It's not unreasonable. Minnie is separated from him in the remote place that the target of their criminal investigation, the Spirit Sisterhood, has sequestered themselves away from prying eyes (like Minnie's since Albert can't come, or even visit).

Weird things begin to occur; Minnie, as a theatre person, can't *quite* dismiss them all as illusions. That is the most unsettling aspect of her stay with the Spirit Sisterhood. She is not taken in, of course, by the cruder illusions, but she is deeply troubled by the weird...immanence...of violence. There have been two murders already, and without the safety of her ever-attentive Albert, can Minnie navigate the eerie and threatening world of the Spirit Sisterhood?

Of course she can; of course the redoubtable Albert is there when he is really needed. It's the way the series works. And it's the series getting a shake-up with the spooky trappings of the Sisterhood that makes this entry a hit with me. Developments occur in a balloon. Speeches are made, laconic people wax eloquent, the rotten-souled abuser who's preying on young women is thwarted...though we're not privy to the inner workings of a louse's soul like we are with the Epstein Files, we're similarly positioned to watch the fall.

Less physically violent action marked a pleasant change to my mind. I like Albert, and really want him to end up with Minnie in all her prickly glory. I'm really pleased at how his character develops in this story. Minnie needs every second of the peril in this story to do hard, necessary emotional work; her relationship with Albert can't grow if she refuses to.

I very much approve of this outing. I hope the dynamic duo will be back to enliven the music-hall stage (foreshadowing, that) while making London safer for the ordinary working souls.

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER, debut procedural with heart and edge

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER
REBECCA PHILIPSON
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This fresh debut thriller finds a Scotland Yard detective trying to find the author of a self-help book that promises quite literally to teach readers how to get away with murder, which seems to have inspired London's newest murderer.

Detective Inspector Samantha Hansen has been on leave for six months, recovering from a breakdown she suffered at work, but when a fourteen-year-old girl is murdered in a local park, Sam jumps at the chance to return to the job and prove that she's still got what it takes to be the Yard's most successful homicide detective. One of the cases only leads is a copy of a self-help book found in the victim's backpack called How To Get Away With Murder by a man named Denver Brady.

Brady claims to be the most successful serial killer of our time, which is why no one's ever heard of him. Chapter by chapter, he details his methodology and his past victims, and as Sam's investigation progresses and the details of the book go viral, Sam begins to suspect that there’s more to the author than what he’s revealed. But in order to find a killer and get justice for young Charlotte, Sam must learn to trust her instincts once again, before Denver Brady—or someone else—really does get away with murder.

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

My Review: I'm going to get the mean bit over: thriller it ain't. Procedural plus PTSD it is. But that's on the publisher, not the author. The author, whose debut it is, did a decent job with the story, but needs some time to sand smoother edges onto her storytelling...quit hinting, either say or or skip it. And certainly cut it out after maybe twice, really that's where it stops being hinting and becomes annoying nudging.

So that's why it's a four-star read. I think as a debut, the ending crafted by Author Philipson is complex enough to show this is a very, very promising debut indeed. The story of a book within a book, a book by a mysterious author purporting to be a confession to his murders, and a clue in the murder of an obscenely young woman, can feel, well, artificial but Author Philipson dodged that trap deftly by interweaving Sam's...that's DI Samantha Hansen on introduction, Sam thereafter...recent issues around mental health into the investigation. It was quite well done. A detective who's a reader, who's been famed for her command of detail and pattern-matching, is suddenly fuzzy and afraid of the details she battened on becoming too triggering. It slows her down and speed is of the essence, does this portend her new future? Can she be successful in this new, possibly permanent, slow mode?

Questions that I suspect anyone who has had an external event alter their affect in the world can relate to.

On we go through a constructed maze, fair-play clues concealed well enough to make them niggle at the edges of awareness, and that ending I've already praised cause experienced mystery readers like me to pause and doff our invisible caps to Author Philipson. Her editor had a very good touch, I can't see obvious editorial alterations. I suspect the trainees Sam's lumbered with were once a lot more like props because they're not as well-rounded as they will be in future. (Do posh English people really join the police as often as they do in fiction?) I think a loot of the humor in the book is going to be a barrier for US readers. Or maybe not, now that I've typed the sentence...lots more of us are tuned in to UK slang and humor. It was fun to get chuckles in surprising places.

In my never-humble opinion, this is an auspicious debut. It portends an interesting writer's arrival onto a scene that's always stuffed with talent that goes nowhere fast for lack of that little spark, that addictive personal edge, that hooks the ma'at seeking series mystery addict coming back for more.

I think Author Philipson has that. Come find out if you agree.

THE DIRECTOR, living life through extraordinary times demands a lot from an artist

THE DIRECTOR
DANIEL KEHLMANN (tr. Ross Benjamin)
Summit Books/S&S (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

2026 International Booker Prize longlistee! Shortlist announced Tuesday, 31 March 2026.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.

When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.

Daniel Kehlmann's novel about art and power, beauty and barbarism is a triumph. The Director shows what literature is capable of.

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My Review: Georg Wilhelm Pabst (25 August 1885 – 29 May 1967) lived an unlucky life. He was trapped in his native Europe for each of the World Wars fought there. His work...impressive stuff...is almost totally forgotten outside the small world of cinéastes. (Do you know anyone, apart from me, who's seen The Threepenny Opera and/or L'Atlantide?) We're treated here to a deep fictional dive into his inner workings. Given that he already knew Nazism was wrong, bad, and evil, and was trying to escape its miasma, his decision to collaborate with Goebbels in the propaganda machine seems inexcusable. In fact it was never forgiven. Not even his German-language film The Last Act (The Last Ten Days in English) bought him back his prior-to-collaboration esteem in spite of its honest treatment of Hitler's insanity at the end of the war.

What price security. It cost this security-seeker very dear. His only son was swallowed by the Hitler Youth because his father returned to see if he could care for his ailing mother. He is examined in this novel as only fiction is capable of examining an inner life. It's not the justifications and self-delusion that a memoir could bring to the table. It's the decisions he made writ plain and unadorned with the inevitable dishonesty of making excuses.

Director was, all in all, a strange profession. One was an artist, but created nothing, instead directing those who created something, arranging the work of others who, viewed in the cold light of day, were more capable than oneself. That was why so much was required before one could even start to work: writers, artists, composers needed only paper, at most paint, sculptors needed marble and a few tools, but a director needed a hundred people and a studio and machines and a great deal of electricity. All this had to be paid for, so he always also needed someone to entrust him with a lot of money. And that was why one only rarely made films, the rest of the time one talked to people and went out to lunch and wrote letters and gave lectures and tried to convince someone. And again and again one secretly wondered when all the people working on a film together would realize that they could do it without a director too, if only they agreed. Because the actors could certainly act on their own, the camera operator could easily film them, the architect could build a stage for them, and the editor could select and assemble the best footage afterward. But because everyone simply believed that a director was necessary, the whole thing was not undertaken without a director.

I don't think a man who could meet with and work for Nazis could've brought himself to conjure those honest, self-deprecating words.

I'm new to Kehlmann's work. This kind of spotlight is not flattering to its object. It can easily become a hatchet-job or hagiography; each is distorted and ultimately dishonest. In Author Kehlmann's choice of fictionalizing events and people very close to precisely aligned with the historical record, he puts the dishonesty and ambiguity on whom it belongs: Pabst. It's just...disturbing, and in a way a biography, a memoir would not be because Author Kehlmann clearly knows the facts and has an opinion yet makes us, the audience, take in our responses without the comfort of distancing our responses.

Would any one of the readers of this book behaved differently than Pabst? The fictional framing strips away the fig-leaf of "objectivity" so we must sit in the decisive moments with Pabst. Are you sure your illusion of yourself as a resister is accurate? Are you sure your judgment of what you'll need to give up is accurate? Are you sure you can be in, but not of, the system you scorn and abhor?

Translator Ross Benjamin did a good enough job rendering the read into English that I was a bit surprised to realize it was a translation. That is, to me, a very high compliment, or intended as one at least. It is a feat of writing to fictionalize someone who's famous (if you know who he is) in the light that emphasizes who he was; an equal feat to take that unusual choice to a very high level of craft in a different language. Kudos to both artists for a job well done.

Why, if I'm praising this work so highly and with such fervor, am I not offering all five stars? Because at no time was I transported into a different awareness, a space of timeless immanence such as I was by Evil Genius or The Remembered Soldier. It's all too rare, that removal from mundanity, so this is not a knock on the quality of the read. I'm impressed and I'm edified and I'm involved by this novel. It's at the top of the literary heap. It deserves its International Booker nomination. I'm not going to put in my pantheon but I'm going to urge it on you as a fascinating, timely, well-crafted story.

THE DISAPPOINTMENT, debut novel of queer loving and grieving and connecting

THE DISAPPOINTMENT
SCOTT BROKER
Catapult (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set during a doom-fated vacation to the Oregon coast, The Disappointment follows a couple trying to hold close to one another while a bent reality—warped by personal losses and an ever-increasing drift toward the surreal—threatens to unravel them

It’s the night before a much-needed vacation, and Jack—a former playwright mourning his failed career—catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother’s urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren’t the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother’s remains everywhere since her death, and he isn’t ready to let go now.

Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly-dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbors, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy’s marriage—to say nothing of their hold on reality.

Told with sly, irreverent humor, and shot through with dark currents of envy and longing for something other than what one has, The Disappointment explores the mutual exhilaration and terror of being placed center stage in one’'s own life.

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

My Review: Why do we accept the cultural pressure to seek only peak experiences? Why accept that added burden on mere humans who are not capable of providing The Pinnacle all the time? Even most of the time. Often any of the time. But they're what we got, they're flawed and imperfect and a lot of trouble.

And so, being human, are we.

Among the smartest things my stepmother ever said to me was "romance is sweet and fun, but relationships are about farts and morning breath." Yuh-huh. If somene's not farting or blowing morning breath at you, they're dying. And I don't mean metaphorically.

Longing for perfection is a curse that takes us out of the tangible and plentiful joys of the moments of our lives. I'm a little salty about the chatbot illusion of intelligence and emotional personhood because it's a complete and utter lie. It reinforces the same thing Jack and Randy are battling in this story. They plan a "getaway" from their lives, a chance to decompress and reconnect with themselves and each other...but that assumes they're not connected and not always compressed, a fallacy that modern culture just *loooves* to sell you.

Verb selected very much advisedly.

It's discovering that feat of misdirection and manipulation that I found in the core of this read. Jack and Randy have bought the cultural crap. They're drifting apart because they've fallen for the illusion and can't find each other in the haze of it. Their griefs...Randy's mother's death, Jack's sense of himself as a failure...aren't the kind you can choose not to process. What The Disappointment does is set the stage for a wacky road trip to nowhere, delivers just that, and has its men lead us into themselves...without miring us in Interiority, in Reflection, in Contemplation. All those are terrific when those emotional registers are the ones you're in the mood for. That was not me at the moment I read this story. As a result I battened on the absurdism of these two in their shared moment of crises (plural deliberate, as is the separateness it implies) being enacted before me. Author Broker invokes Samuel Beckett in the text, appropriate as Jack is mourning his failed life as a playwright and who else would he invoke without lèse-majesté; he's making you think in absurd, if not surreal, terms as love molds itself around their griefs.

Because they share a grief: "My skin hugs closer to my bones, then shivers like a sheet of aluminum when he speaks," can not be spoken of someone one does not have a powerful connection to. Even when the World is doing its usual indifferent thing, even when you're gripped by desire (for someone else), even when you're wild with jealousy over trifles, this kind of connection isn't escapable. You can choose to sever it in practice but it survives, it mutates into...I don't know the word, is there one for a state of interconnection deeper than friendship but tinged with the sadness of dead lust?

Randy and Jack are looking into that nameless abyss. It's led them to a flowering of sexual awareness of each other. Is that going to last? (Scruff might play a big role in this.) I don't think I've read a more surprising, more enlivening, more vigorously honestly grounded, story of the insanely complex world of long-term couplehood.

What I loved was tinged with a little sense of déja-vu, as a lot of the story is assembled from the stuff of life. It can't be avoided and remain an honest tale of how we navigate life. The very end of the book is an "incantation with no resolve"—a resolutionless invitation to go on when you can't go on.

I'll go on.

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS, good YA treatment of grief's realities

LIES WE TELL ABOUT THE STARS
SUSIE NADLER
Dutton Books for Young Readers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gorgeous debut about friendship, grief, and new beginnings set in near-future San Francisco in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake and on the cusp of the first human mission to Mars.

Celeste Muldoon is alone when the Big One finally hits, because, for the first time ever, her best friend stood her up after school. Nicky and Celeste share a birthday, matching tattoos, an obsession with the upcoming Mars mission, and pretty much everything else. So why did he ghost her on the day she needed him most?

As the quake’s death toll rises and days pass, Nicky and Celeste’s parents fear the worst. But Celeste doesn’t buy it. He couldn’t be dead. Nicky’d spent their senior year selling essays to rich kids and was about to get caught. He’d told Celeste about his plan to vanish, to reinvent himself and escape the disaster he’d created. The quake would be perfect cover.

But she can’t convince anyone that he could still be alive. Only Meo, a mysterious stranger who was somehow mixed up with Nicky, seems to believe, but Celeste has every reason to distrust him—even if her heart races whenever Meo shows up.

When Celeste finds Nicky’s notebook, it sends her and Meo on a quest across the broken city, up the coast through towns sheltering quake refugees, and eventually all the way to Florida, where the mission to Mars is about to lift off.

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

My Review: Celeste is a spoiled, solipsistic brat, the kind of kid my mother called a typical teenager...utterly sure she is the center, the reason, the ultimate source of others' feelings and actions. How dreary, right parents? Here we go again.

Only partially true. We do spend a bit more time with Celeste taking a widespread tragedy more personally than is ever justified. What drags Celeste into the larger world of adulthood is her determination to make the world give her a reason that she has to experience the horror that is loss and grief. There is, in other words, hope for her yet.

That's the adult reward for reading the story. I put on my YA hat for the rest of the review.

Structurally it's a quest novel that follows the hero's journey, so it taps into the pull this story always exerts. Celeste is shown as the hero to some advantage because she has strong self-confidence, and learns through adversity to trust that she is able and willing to make her own way. She learns, again through adversity, that acting out her negative feelings about others is a losing game. Her spirit-guide, Nicky, is not explored in depth; he is a ghost of some power, whose interactions with Celeste read to me as fantasy but could easily be interpreted as "from beyond" by less jaded readers. Meo, in the here and now, is uninteresting to me; he serves Celeste's desires and offers her companionship on terms that solidify her understanding of boundaries.

I'd like to shoutout the prose, in particular the resonance of the phrasemaking that permeates the story. There's a smart kid out there who will twig to how this style is chosen to do a specific emotional thing that isn't overbearingly, ham-handedly guiding you to Feel This Now. (Spoiler Stasi look away: Keep the first line in your head while reading the end.)

I would give this to an ordinary fifteen-year-old without hesitation. Not really so comfortable to hand to younger people than that, the independence and boundary-setting are just a bit more...mature...than their social development. But for that grand or nibling just getting to the "I want I yearn I long for" age, it can offer some guidance on that journey. It's always best to do this teaching by storytelling.