HOW TO SELL A GENOCIDE: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza

HOW TO SELL A GENOCIDE: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza
ADAM H. JOHNSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As bombs rained down on Gaza in October 2023, images of mass death and destruction gripped the world, and openly genocidal statements from Israeli leaders foretold the magnitude of horrors to come. But the US media was quick to downplay, obscure, and repackage an emerging campaign of extermination into a slick “war on terror” framework.

How to Sell a Genocide is a thorough indictment of US corporate media's role in enabling—and, at times, directly inciting—one of the most devastating campaigns of mass killing in modern memory. Johnson unpacks how major news outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC systematically sanitised Israel's war crimes, hid the US’s central role, and dehumanised the Palestinian people.

Drawing from deep, original data-driven analysis, Johnson dissects the mechanics of propaganda, from the selective empathy, strategic omissions, overt racism and repetition of state-sanctioned falsehoods, to the demonisation of humanitarian workers and dishonest coverage of campus protests. With clarity and moral force, Johnson argues that the genocide could not have been sustained without the active, sustained complicity of the US media.

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

My Review: When I read "deep, original data-driven analysis" in the book's synopsis, I realized the read was going to be tendentious, probably ill-sourced, and reflective of the need to marshal supporters of anti-war, pro-Palestine leanings into willingness to take action. That's exactly what I got.

Since I am all those things I find it hard to fault this read for being what it's supposed to be. If you are not all those things, or are anti-all those things, you'll be very unpset by this read. I myownself think you might should read it anyway.

War crimes are committed when there are wars. Both sides commit them. But do not lose sight of the fact that one side started this war. They're looking for you to believe they didn't start it, the other side did by doing something terrible. That terrible something did not suddenly occur in an otherwise peaceful and ordinary world, though. And that terrible something did not involve bombing runs by sophisticated jet aircraft, advanced anti-personnel drone attacks, destruction of thousands of homes, missile attacks on hospitals...in other words, we're being fed false equivalences to disguise a long-term and intentional act of ethnic cleansing, perhaps rising to the standard of genocide set after the Holocaust. I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak authoritatively on that. I'll say that my reading of the bloviations from each side of the conflict leads me to think there is a case to answer and a darn compelling body of evidence to compel the case to be brought in the court of public opinion.

That's why this book exists. It's a highly emotional read. It's a highly emotional subject. It's part of an effort to break through the saturation-bombing of the pro-Israel lobby's PR firms.

Are there angels in this conflict, the pure and unsullied victims of hateful demonic criminals?

No.

There are only ordinary human beings who need, but don't have, the basics you and I walk outside our intact homes to access: streets we can use easily, food stores with the planet's abundance piled up for us to choose from, water pipes to quench our thirst, sewer pipes to take our waste away to keep us healthy, hospitals to care for frail bodies' failure points, living parents and children and loved ones who, when they leave our sight, are statistically likely return to us alive and as well as they left.

War is wrong. Always and eternally wrong. It is war that created this oongoing crisis. War is a decision, a set of decisions, made by people who want *something* so much they're willing to trade your life for it. Never theirs, or the wars would be short.

I don't think for a single second that Humankind will ever be free of war. If reading words could stop war there wouldn't still be any of them.

Reading words is a slow process, thinking about them slower still. Changing minds, firing up action in people who don't like doing hard things, that kind of thing that words *can* do, all has to start somewhere.

I ask you, please, for the sake of people you have never met and will never meet: Start the process in yourself now. Pay it forward, to the best of your ability, and know from the beginning that you won't "win" or "succeed" or "finish the job" because the work is never, can never be, complete as long as there are human beings.

But let's make sure the greatest possible number of people live out their "one wild and precious life" as poet Mary Oliver taught us to think of it.

VILLAIN (Hench #2) is Author NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS long-awaited and worth the wait sequel

VILLAIN (Hench #2)
NATALIE ZINA WALSCHOTS
Watch the inimitable Nancy Pearl interview Author Walschots here!
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Boys meets Starter Villain and Assistant to the Villain in Natalie Zina Walschots’s electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench, in which the Auditor must confront the near-impossible in order to right the many wrongs in the superhuman industry…or cause more of them. She’s not picky.

Anna, better known to superheroes as the Auditor, has carved out a name for herself. Any hero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, success should taste she has an incredible job with lots of perks, and her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated and literally ground to a pulp.

But Anna still has her sights set on a greater destroying the Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good, and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has vanished without a trace, leaving Anna to examine all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty fill the air, and fear that this moment of triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

Anna soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her…someone much more the Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. This isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as the fight spirals deeper and deeper, with new foes popping up every day—she’ll need more than just her superpower—data research—to keep ascending through the supervillain ranks.

It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

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

My Review: It took five years, but the sequel I've quietly pined for has arrived. I downloaded the DRC in February, started reading it in late March, and finished a final pre-review skim last night. I treated this read as a reward, an experience to be savored, because Hench was such a completely fresh experience that it made me rethink the messaging of superhero crap, made me consider how subversion can in fact look like participation or even celebration. I liked The Boys because it's taken that idea to its logical end-point; but it came after Hench had prepared me psychologically for its storytelling mode.

The Department of Superheroic Affairs, aka "the Draft," is the organization that's responsible for everything involving superheroes. They do the recruiting, training, and funding...who ever stops to think about the accounting and expenditures that enable superheroes to blow apart entire city blocks? can you even imagine the insurance bills?!...and they create the most compelling backstories for them that they can. It means only certain tropes survive time-testing as superheroes wreak havoc in order to "save" people from supervillains.

Who also have an organizational structure centered around Leviathan, for whom our dear Anna...formerly Electric Eel's hench, now known as the supervillain "The Auditor" (if that yclepture doesn't provoke horripilation you've never filled out an accounting reimbursement justification)...serves as right-hand person. Leviathan, after the end of Hench sees the biggest rival he has (Supercollider) fall to richly deserved intimate betrayal orchestrated by Anna/The Auditor, is too depressed by the newly unchallenging world he lives in to be effective in supervillainy. Anna/The Auditor needs to snap him out of it but, in a truly tropey twist, The Draft hires a new marketing manager. One who is Anna/The Auditor's equal or possibly superior in data analytics and statistical modeling...the secret superpowers that brought Supercollider down. Now Supercollider is permanently damaged, and dies as the Draft's medics are trying to "untangle him from himself," and the Draft's new marketer finds enough dirt to plausibly, if inaccurately, pin responsibility for his death on Leviathan.

Hijinks ensue.

To look into this only-slightly-distorted mirror world is to see 2026 explained without didactic shouting, blaming, and finger-pointing. It's all here, all the guilty parties are lined up for our scorn and contumely to be unloaded on them, and exactly like real life they are everywhere not just on one side. False dichotomies like hero-v-villain aren't allowed to stand; the acts perpetrated are equally awful, are not discernably different in their results. They're not different in their motivations, either; each "side" is only out to do down the other side and then justify the carnage for everyone else later.

It is here that I come fully into my love of Author Natalie's storytelling. The battling sides are not contesting opposing ideas, arguing through competing society-wide organizational plans, they're solely and entirely focused on hurting each other in increasingly horrifying ways. What that means for non-combatants is (yet again) not part of the calculus except insofar as the optics can be used against the other side.

As Leviathan re-awakens to his supervillainous purpose, Anna/The Auditor and her scoobygroup are stretched on practical and emotional levels to achieve Leviathan's purpose and counteract the Draft's new, high-powered team that uses Anna/The Auditor's innovative techniques against them. As in Hench, the emotional costs of violence, loss, betrayal, and fanaticism are personalized while the impersonal systems grind on propelled by the suffering people behind the major players.

I think Author Natalie took her time...I understand she re-wrote this book four times...to very good effect. I got invested again immediately despite the long interval between reads. I was deftly reminded of things necessary to remember instead of infodumped on; I was also shown how time has passed in the storyverse and the changes that has wrought on significant relationships. It's a fine achievement in storytelling craft. The ending is not A Conclusion. There is openness in its action to either another sequel (yes please!) or simply room for you-the-reader to headcanon something you'd like for the characters. It works for soap operas and comic book series, why not for a supervillain's difficult choices and incomplete emotional development?

I recommend the read; it's not utterly necessary to read Hench first, but why wouldn't you want to? It's a series with a lot to say about the world we live in, and what it says I agree with, so I'm recommending it to all y'all, even the superhero/comic book averse.

After all, that described me before this series came my way.

THE TRAITOR, last major novel of Kōbō Abe's to reach Anglophones

THE TRAITOR
KŌBŌ ABE (tr. Mark Gibeau)
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.40 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan's military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.

Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan's past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe's tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer's most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe's literary mastery from a new angle.

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

My Review: An historical novel from its inception, this read is now itself an historical artifact being sixtyish years old, but is also framed as an historical tale recounted in a period earlier than it was authored. Translator Gibeau is the first to render the historic-historical novel into English. I was initially surprised this was the case; the beginning of the story is that quick to capture one's attention with its immediate postwar framing device. It's a long story, though, with all the pacingissues that can lead to (sadly) being present.

It was an enjoyable read for me, to be sure. I say that despite needing to stop and re-read some of the middle third of the book, where lots of names and dates and cultural touchstones are presented but not explained as they would be in a work of non-fiction. There is an Afterword from Translator Gibeau that provides context and explains some cultural resonances. It's a bit difficult to read that after the confusion of the midsection of the read and relate the information to the proper spots. I found I was curious enough about the Kempetai, for example, to go looking for information on the internet while I was reading.

I'm not really doing a very persuasive job of selling you on the read am I. In truth I think this read is one for the Japanese-culture vultures. I'd love to tell all y'all to get and read it but there would be much throwing of bricks and dropping of gloves if I succeeded and too many of y'all did not want to do that much work. The techniques of surrealist literature aren't overused here, as I sometimes feel they are in his more famous work; but they're present, so the allergic are informed.

The most interesting thing about the read to most people is likely to be the cravenness of the WWII character's motivation for seeking out the truth of the Meiji-era story he discovers, that provides the direct reason for the title. It's a punchy title, isn't it? I was almost put off by its sinplicity because I thought it might be a sign of a reductive storyline. In truth, it's the only possible title for the tale unwound for our pleasure because it provides a powerful pleasure of slow-dawning realization and deepening of the reading experience.

Note to the Spoiler Stasi: you won't spot it until the author wants you to. No I won't say more.

I hope to have piqued the curiosity of enough of y'all to give this not-easy, not-simple, very rewarding effortful read a shot. Please do, it is good exercise for your little grey cells with less than the usual puzzle-like story's obfuscation.

History lessons can be entertaining, and this newly-translated novel from the renowned author of The Woman in the Dunes amply demonstrates. Please give it a try.

SANCTUARY, a talented writer's debut dystopian cli-fi tale of tomorrow's reality

SANCTUARY
JAMES CLEARY
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: “The meek shall inherit the Earth, unless the rich get there first.” That’s the reality of the post-apocalyptic world in this electrifying debut thriller.

The near future…

Climate disasters have crippled the United States. With half the country under water and the other half a dust bowl, civil unrest would soon escalate into something darker, something unstoppable. Billionaire John Brandt anticipated this and channeled his money, power, and influence into being prepared for the great unraveling.

Now Brandt, his family, and his security team must retreat to Sanctuary, their underground bunker—a vast luxury mansion beneath the parched earth of the Nebraskan Great Plains. But they are not alone. Above ground a group of raiders are desperate to survive and will use any means possible to accomplish that goal.

As tensions mount both inside and out, battle lines are drawn—between the haves and the have-nots, between decency and expediency, between life and death. In this game, everyone's a loser.

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

My Review: Eco-thriller beginnings as the planet's climate collapses into chaos, the US follows suit, and the civilization we take for granted vanishes. Dystopian survival story post-collapse nightmare comes for us all. The necessary, we-will-have-it conversation of how much is enough, how will you share your excess, if you won't do it voluntarily we will make you. Thhese three storytelling modes co-exist, with highly permeable boundaries, in debut Author Cleary's book.

It's a melange of ideas that turns at times into a melee. The combatants are all possessed of powerful motivation, survival, and thus give it their all. We-the-reader are given a straightforward narrative that propels the story from inception to ending (if just a bit abrupt in our arrival there) interleaved with journal entries that add emotional textures and act as masses that alter the flow of the story's movement. I did not feel this was quite deft enough in its execution for me to offer that fifth star, but it's a hard tick to pull off. So a quarter-star for the right idea not exactly well executed.

None of the above touches on the emotional punch of this story. The coinage of "grey swan" on analogy with "black-swan event" is particularly deft and effective. A grey-swan event is visible, clearly understood to be coming, and yet somehow still ignorable thus ignored. Very like the characterization of bureaucratic pettifoggers being said to "rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic" as the Depression of 1929-1939 unfolded.

I hope I do not need to belabor this point's relevance to 2026's audiences.

As hunger, true hunger, bites these people in this world, morality shifts. We in the US have not faced hunger of famine proportions in so long it is not even in living memory. Our insulation will be stripped away. It will bring dark, ugly revelations to individual members of the out group. It's a stark truth, attested for many millennia, that starving people will do anything at all to survive. It is built into us as animals. It changes the people in this story: "The dad. The husband. The carpenter…The murderer? Yes…It hadn’t even been that hard."

It's a lot to take in, but it is a distillation that rises from much documentary evidence.

Start preparing now. The Grey Swan is looming.

LIAR'S CREEK, Matt Goldman's Clay Hawkins mystery series book one

LIAR'S CREEK (Clay Hawkins #1)
MATT GOLDMAN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winner Matt Goldman comes Liar's Creek, which asks how far we'll go to protect the people we love.

The small town of Riverwood, Minnesota is true to its name, brimming with beautiful scenes of nature. Its rural landscape is threaded with scenic trout streams, which carve their way through limestone bluffs. But beneath its picturesque facade, danger runs rampant.

Clay Hawkins isn’t a stranger to the secrets of his hometown. After twenty years away, Clay has recently returned home from abroad with his twelve-year-old son Braedon, and his relationship with his father Judd, the recently replaced sheriff, is as strained as ever.

Trouble immediately brews for Clay when his beloved uncle, Teddy, disappears. Together, the three generations of Hawkinses must overturn every stone in Riverwood and confront deep familial wounds to find the one person who brings them together. As danger looms, Clay worries that it might be too late to save Teddy—and that the rest of the family might be next.

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

My Review: Author Goldman clearly invested a lot of mental energy in Clay Hawkins' life trajectory. It's all here: dead mother, grouchy prickly father, adolescent son with all that implies and entails, escapr from then return to Home after a fun, fascinating adulthood elsewhere...it's all here. Coming home has its rewards, these aren't skimped, and its risks. Uncle Teddy, who vanishes without explanation, is going to be found, by Clay, and damned if his family's ugly secrets they do NOT want splashed around will stop Clay from doing it.

Perch that determination on top of his...estranged, unliked...father making a friend of Clay's son, and the differing ways to be a father between the generations add a load of tension between them, among all three of them. The women in the story are all strong, competent people, with their own careers and concerns. They're not little ladies, nor are they ball-busting viragos, they're presented as flawed and imperfect like the stiff-necked men they choose to hang around with.

The mystery's resolved. Copious trout-fishing is done. Football/soccer is discussed. The manly men (and one about to start being a man) all do man-stuff like pointedly not talk, like ignore feelings (their own of course, but each others' too), not talk, lust after women, and not talk. It takes extreme measures to goad them into speech not about sports. When they do talk, shit gets done and in a hurry.

I'm afraid I was not surprised by the big reveal. I really seldom am, and this was not one of those times. I don't fault Author Goldman for that. I fault him a little for apparently losing track of some red-herrings that will stink up the furniture in future installments of the series. There will be future installments because no publisher works this hard to drop a promising premise. I hope the team will make some serious effort to answer young Braedon's quite reasonable questions about his past that he's too young to remember on his own.

A promising debut series that needs a bit of finesse applied as it matures.

FIDELTY, a Belt Revivals series story by forgotten feminist Susan Glaspell

FIDELTY
SUSAN GLASPELL (intro. Sarah Blackwood)
Belt Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A classic feminist novel originally published in 1915, and set in Iowa in the early years of the 20th century, Susan Glaspell's Fidelity is a surprising, suspenseful work about the strictures that confine women, the risks those who want to flee them take, and the opportunities that await them if they do.

Ruth Holland, bored in her conventional small town, falls in love with a married man and runs off with him, shocking the community. A decade later she returns to cold shoulders and the disapproval of the town: she is seen as "a human being who selfishly—basely—took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it ... One who defies it ... must be shut out from it."

What Ruth decides to do next will upend most readers' expectations, as will the cryptic scenes that take place in the doctor's office after Ruth becomes involved with her married lover. Ruth Holland deserves to be placed alongside other heroines such as Emma Bovary and Lily Bart, women who wanted "an enlarged experience" and were "zestful for new things from life." Fidelity will shock and fascinate readers today as its heroine did in her day.

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

My Review: It will most certainly shock readers today, will this read; not for the same reasons and not to the same degree as the readers of 1915 were shocked. Nowadays we're watching, or y'all're watching because I sure as shootin' ain't, The Real Housewives of {Flyover Country} to get the equivalent shock value. (I sometimes long for the Hays Code when I read about the antics of these surgically altered weirdos that keep so many so entertained.) I too was shocked by Fidelity: How has Susan Glaspell disappeared from the awareness of 2026's readers?

Born on a rural Iowa homestead (this means something important, y'all follow the link) in 1876, by 1894 she was a paid journalist; she later became a college graduate (in philosophy!) at a time when the number of *men* who graduated college was a vanishingly small slice of the population; she was a staffer, full time and paid, at the Des Moines newspaper; then gave it all up...to become a bestselling novelist and short-story writer.

AFTER that, she fell in love with a married guy. He divorced whoever he was married to in order to put a ring on Susan's finger (and who can blame him?), and their union produced...more bestselling novels, as well as the Provincetown Players, Eugene O'Neill's career, several still-produced plays of her own...y'know, all the usual things a woman can expect to have happen to her when she's born into a nineteenth-century farming family. Her life as a radical socialist free-love advocate would shock and startle many in the US today, let alone then.

So Fidelity is probably more faction, or even a roman à clef if one knew the good folk of Davenport, Iowa, circa 1910 which I do not and, if this story is any guide, am delighted not to have done. I'm no small-town fancier in general, but the beady-eyed, small-minded and judgmental folk of the place evoked in this story made me panther-screechingly furious on the regular.

Equally irksome to my twenty-first century self is the lackluster critical reception of the time, doubtless symptomatic of the era's cultural unreadiness to examine its prudishness and misogyny. (I'm appalled to not these same objectively wrongheaded notions are being trumpeted as in the ascendant again. Well-timed, Belt Publishing!) I suspect some of the resistance then also stemmed from the multiple narrators whose ideas about "fidelity," that inherently coercive concept applied far more to women than men in marriage as we constitute it in the West, being rather transparently intended to counterpoint each other and reinforce the validity of protagonist Ruth's choice to elope with a married man.

Pace University Professor Sarah Blackwood's introduction alone might repay the cost of procuring the book. So much of Author Glaspell's life is footnoted in relation to the Provincetown Players' enduring legacy, despite her 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama meriting more than a simple "oh, by the way" footnote. Professor Blackwood makes a good case for why we should look for, and at, Susan Glaspell as a visionary life-liver and writer.

I don't really think this story of "infidelity" and sexual liberation despite its consequences will ever go out of relevance and ability to illuminate and elucidate how willful and calricious a thing the human heart is. It's more out of fashion in twenty-first century storytelling when its focus is not on the guilt and the transgression angles of attack. It might feel less minatory because there's no emphasis on punishment for the behavior, but to my mind this story is more honest about reality than modern salacious takes on the topic. There are consequences to the choices we make. They aren't always easy to endure. If you knowingly transgress your community's norms be ready to find a new community.

I think a lot of people, married or not, can relate to, resonate with, find fellowship in, that message.

NEWCOMERS: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York, or "Why I ❤NY"

NEWCOMERS: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York
ALAN MIKHAIL
Liveright / W.w. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.45 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The exceptional tale of an unorthodox, seventeenth–century married couple whose rags-to-riches story fundamentally rewrites our knowledge of American history at its very beginnings.

A man thought to be Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid are hardly the image we have of America’s founders. In Newcomers, Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of American beginnings through the tale of Anthony “the Turk” and Grietje Reyniers.

Married in Amsterdam, they arrived in 1630s Dutch New Amsterdam, hoping to forge a new life. Always outsiders in the young colony, they battled Dutch authorities, brawled with neighbors, and seized land from Native Americans. In this revisionist portrait of the early American family, we learn of anti-Muslim sentiment through Anthony and of female defiance through Grietje.

Eventually banished from Manhattan to Long Island, Anthony and Grietje farmed, prospered, and raised a family whose descendants included the Vanderbilts and President Harding. Promising “to change the way we understand Colonial Gotham’s formative first years” (Susanah Shaw Romney), Alan Mikhail’s Newcomers provides revelatory insights into the seventeenth-century origins of New York.

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

My Review: The New World was always a frontier where European countries saw the utility of sending its misfits, its non-conforming people, its "undesirables" to make their own way. It was better that way, really...these were the people who gave someone powerful some kind of uncomfortable trouble, and as we're all quite clear even unto today that is simply not to be borne. By them. By you? Troublesome peasant, it is your fault and you must pay the price of being obstreperous and too difficult for {whoever}'s comfort by leaving everything you've ever known or owned to begin again in an utterly alien place. Survive or not, it's up to you.

Anthony and Grietje Jansen van Salee were the survivor types. They stood up for themselves, mixed-race man of ambition and drive and mouthy broad with a gift for invective that they were. Quintessential New Yorkers, in fact; though there was no such identity in the late seventeenth century. They left a restrictive, stifling life of economic precarity and social exclusion for the possibilities of the edge of the map, as it was then. I'm glad Dr. Mikhail introduced me to Anthony and Grietje because I think they're my (spiritual) ancestors. They set the pattern for people like me who don't think or act the way our peers and neighbors do because we don't like their ways and see no reason to pretend otherwise, who find our home here in New York.

The legal records that Dr. Mikhail draws from, and they're extensive (as well as footnoted to a fare-thee-well), show that Anthony and Grietje totally never stopped being difficult. Their neighbors in Dutch colonial Manhattan didn't much like having a "Turk" (mixed-race Anthony, always suspected of being Muslim despite no evidence existing to support that idea) and a mouthy whore (grit-loaded survivor Grietje) in their midst. Off to the wilds of Brooklyn with you, aggressive and non-conformist folk that you are! Even non-conforming people don't like non-conformists.

Is this ringing any bells, Islamophobic sex-negative leftist political types who apply purity tests to each other? Who exile their leaders for not being "perfect" and thus lose elections but win at the Pure Ideology game?

Anthony and Grietje prospered in their next exile as much as in their first. Their energy was tremendous so when it could be directed mostly at their real goals...prosperity for themselves...it was a great benefit for the colonials as well as themselves. The people it cost the most were not their colonist neighbors but the Native Americans the entire settler-colonial enterprise harmed the most. Anthony and Grietje left marks there as well, so truly set the pattern for all us New Yorkers to come by their darker, less benign actions as well as their courageous, trailblazing ones.

I felt very seen in reading this very well-presented story. It's true that Anthony, after Grietje's death, returned to Manhattan...the quintessential Manhattanite, move to Long Island to raise the kids and come home when they're grown! these two are perfect twenty-first century stereotypes!...it's also true that Anthony did things that look terrible to our eyes like have Native slaves-in-fact if not name to work lands he stole from them, but were part of the entire settler-colonial enterprise that white people like me are the beneficiaries of. There are few black-and-white actions in this our life.

Dr. Mikhail is very clear that people are not pure, that actions in context look different as the context changes over time, and that this partial and compromised record of two ordinary peoples' extraordinary choices and actions can never be considered complete or definitive. Defining people long-dead by the records they leave behind is always an act of interpretation. That does not mean it is not also an act of truth-telling, only that the truths so told must be viewed as contingent.

Maps and illustrations completed my happy journey through the lives of two remarkable spiritual ancestors I'm glad I got to know.

DEATH OF THE SOCCER GOD, fact-based fiction about race, love, and soccer

DEATH OF THE SOCCER GOD
DIMITRY ELIAS LÉGER
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A global soccer star’s epic ride to the 1950 World Cup places him in shooting distance of his dreams and his own death.

Gilbert Chevalier is a lover of life in a close and constant flirtation with death. His charms and big ambitions flood him with the sense that the world is, in fact, his. Despite his immense talents on the soccer field, his father makes him swear off the sport, a game he sees as unbecoming of a refined Haitian gentleman with a bright future ahead of him in the business sector. Gil promptly breaks this promise when he leaves the bourgeois comforts of Port-au-Prince high society and moves to the vibrant, jazz-soaked streets of Harlem to attend college. Scrimmaging in Central Park, he’s spotted by the US National Team’s coach and is recruited to play for the Americans in the 1950 World Cup in Minas Gerais, Brazil. What unravels next is the stuff of myth. Chance exchanges; secret messages smuggled across continents; lovers shuffled, scorned, and reclaimed; and a journey past the veil between our world and the afterlife. From the Caribbean, to the States, to South America and back, Gil’s journey is lush and lurid, and infused with a breathless, breakneck thrill synonymous with the world’s most popular game.

Death of the Soccer God by Dimitry Elias Legér is a roaring Pan American adventure about the unattainability of the dreams that govern our lives. Energized with the high-voltage fervor of a packed stadium, this is a story of fame and fate bursting with the vivid excitement and thrill of watching world-class athletes perform at their very best.

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

My Review: I'll give Author Léger many points for really *getting* the novel as a form's best use: novelty. Starting a story with the titular event and working back from there, we-the-readers aren't left without something novel occurring for very long at all. The factual 1950 1–0 US men's soccer victory over England, whose goal was scored by a Haitian player on the US team (a FIFA investigation determined there was no wrongdoing as all non-citizens on the US team had declared they sought citizenship though only one ever got it), has been immortalized on film and in a non-fiction book before. Author Léger's novel is the first to treat it in fiction, that a ten-minute internet search turns up anyway. I'd be interested to know if any not-Anglophone attention has ever been paid to this unusual occurrence, so please advise if you have any knowledge of the same.

But fictional Gil's life was not begun in 1950, nor did it end there. Along the way from his homeland and the privileged upbringing he had there, handsome athlete Gil falls for a firebrand who bears his child despite being his boring half-brother's fiancée, marries the daughter of a Nazi war criminal hiding in Haiti, goes to Columbia in New York City where his life-altering selection for US soccer team occurs, bums around Europe trading on his looks and his educated wit for food and lodging; rescues Miles Davis from an enraged lover's murderous intentions; and for some reason ends up in front of one of Papa Doc the dictator's firing squads. He reflects, in extremis, on this awful ending so very soom to come for him: "Given the misery and injustice around us, we cannot be indifferent. Believe me, I tried. But evil won’t let you be blissfully ignorant. Or be blissful, period. Evil means hating another person’s peace. Trust me on that one."

Gil is a great, entertaining guide through the world of 1950. He's privileged, but broke; he's mixed race but accepted into segregated high society; he's a reprobate with the self-knowledge to outrun its worst consequences. Until his luck runs out. We aren't vouchsafed the reason that happens. I suspect the cuckolded half-brother had some hand in it, but that's all my own headcanon.

We're addressed directly by Gil throughout the story. It's the reason we get gems like these: "You hate my arrogance, right? I’m among the most arrogant people you ever created. All professional athletes and artists are. Don’t you see how stubborn we have to be to make our dreams and talents come true?" and "All relationships come with asterisks. Life is an asterisk, I would soon learn." Learn he does; not much time alloted to applying his knowledge: "Even today, this dreaded day, Gil remembers with freshly boiled rage all those decisions that weren’t his, but were necessary for the family."

It's a fast-paced two hundred fortyish pages. It's never slack or slow. It's got a lot to say and it says it clearly. Well, mostly clearly, because this twenty-first century guy's eyes look at Gil's unremarked and unremarkable for the time dismissive misogyny and thinks, "well aren't *you* a caddish laddish cheater?" unlike the other people around him. Self-awareness fails us all at some point.

Knowing Joe Gaetjens, the model for Gil in this novel, met his exact end, made this fiction feel very immediate. I was fully in Gil's corner, rooting for him to get what he wanted throughout the story. I glossed over or justified his caddish treatment of the women in his life. It's a weird thing to watch one's self do, while feeling surprised displeasure at the very behavior I'd condemn in another character or real person. That's how I know Author Léger's made a fine work of art. I sought ways to excuse bad behavior and explain away what I could not excuse.

I will note with wistfulness the fact that this is among the very last books that will appear under the MCD x FSG imprint. I have had a good amount of happy reading time with the books from MCD x FSG that I've read. It was a great run, so farewell great kings of biblioholics' hearts.

JULIE JOHNSON'S PAGE: The Reign of Remnants romantasy series

THE SEA SPINNER (Reign of Remnants #2)
JULIE JOHNSON
Ace Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25*of five

The Publisher Says: Blazing with reawakened magic, a young woman challenges the tides of fate in this highly anticipated installment of Julie Johnson’s romantasy series.

Everything changed for Rhya Fleetwood in the battle of Fyremas. Her grief is heavy, her rage volatile. Caeldera lies in ruins. Her friends are dead or wounded. And Pendefyre, their newly crowned king, is shutting her out. The Remnant of Fire needs all his focus for his kingdom, his people, and—perhaps more than anything—his insatiable need for revenge.

When a twist of fate leads Rhya to the last place she expected—the Water Court—the novice wind weaver is forced to confront the limitations of her untrained power as well as her increasingly complicated relationships. For enigmatic King Soren of Llŷr is as different from Penn as sparks are from the sea. The more insight he offers into the maegic that binds them together, the more confused Rhya feels—about her future as a Remnant, about her deepest desires, and about her role in the coming war.

Enemies circle close, ready to strike. And if Rhya isn’t careful, she’ll lose more than just her heart.

She’ll lose her life.

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

My Review: The geopolitical forces that clashed so inevitably and so violently in The Wind Weaver (review below) are recovering from the ugliness of battles fought but a war as yet unwon. Rhya's got more than just her powers to unleash, though, as she's got her love life to resolve as well as, oh y'know just the fate of the world, so no bigs and no pressure.

Penn continues to be bloody annoying, Soren continues to be my beau ideal of a boyfriend who could turn into a spouse of the most delectable rarity and scrummyness. Hey Rhya, if you want to continue to try that "but I can fix him" shtik with the yutz Penn, can I have Soren please and thank you?

Sadly for me, not only is Soren fictional but Rhya shows more than her usual (from last outing) romantic acuity while battening of Soren's Water Court vibe of collegiality, support, and genuine appreciation for her Wind magic. You go, girl! (Does he have a brother/uncle/cousin?)

The first third of the read was pretty pillar-to-post getting Rhya where she needed to be. I'm glad now that I have a sense that Author Julie Johnson is not going to give me anything all that fast-paced because it allows me to settle my expectations on the accepting it as it comes end of the spectrum.

I also understand now, having read these stories in close time-proximity that the ending of The Wind Weaver was very intentional. I'm ready to bump up my rating on this story despite its ending. That makes it sound like it's bad, but in point of fact it's merely evil-heated and cruel: It's a cliffhanger. Those really need to be outlawed. I should be able to start a class-action human-rights violation suit against Author Julie Johnson. I get it now...the endings are going to be like this in the whole series.

So where's book three, gorramit?! February 2027 is too long to wait!

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THE WIND WEAVER (Reign of Remnants #1)
JULIE JOHNSON
Ace Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Discover a world where magic isn’t learned. It’s survived. A gritty and intoxicating epic fantasy romance.

Rhya Fleetwood is a healer, an outcast, and like the realm itself—about to die. Or so she thought.

When the ruthless Commander Scythe plucks her from the vile clutches of her executioner there’s no time to feel relief. Her new captor wants Rhya for his own secret ends and they all lead back to the mysterious birthmark which brands her as a Remnant. One of four souls capable of calling forth inconceivable elemental power.

Rhya knows she must master the wind that whispers within her and make an escape. But as she is dragged across treacherous terrain with Scythe’s formidable band of soldiers, something keeps her at his side.

Inside her, a tempest roars—terror and desire. Soon, she knows she must choose.

Follow her magic, or her heart…

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

My Review: Strap in. This is a very long ride/read. I'm really not much of a romantasy reader because I want my romance between men and my maegickq absent or limited in its narrative use. Neither of those desiderata are delivered (or indeed promised) in this narrative. Still, it's a debut novel and a Sunday Times (UK) bestseller, so my curiosity was definitely piqued. Saying yes to the DRC didn't seem urgent so I did.

It's been a year since then, a second book (review above) has come out, and I'm quite surprised to report that I thoroughly enjoyed this read. Author Julie Johnson is not pushing any envelopes, nor was she touted by her publisher as doing so. I entered the reading experience hoping for a diverting low-steam, finding love and purpose at the same time, story trope-fest. I was expecting to need to skim past sex scenes disagreeable to my preferences.

Well...yeah...about that. Rhya has two possible love-matches. Penn's the main one, and goddesses below us is he tedious to read about. He's curiously unimaginitive for someone of his elevated station. Soren's more interesting because he's irreverent and funny with it, lightens Rhya's apparent bipolar-disorder moods, and generally feels like he's got main-character energy. In its most nuanced meaning. I'm happy enough to report there was pretty minimal scene skimming until we get to the topic of violence.

This story is violent.

Intentionally, carefully so; it still has a LOT of violent scenes that were almost...very, very nearly...gratuitously and salaciously, visceral pornographic gore. In a story intended as, marketed to appeal to, romantasy reading folk. These folk lean towards female identity. The violence is preponderently involving females. That felt like an odd choice, but it was not the only odd choice (see my opinion of Rhya's romantic options above): the pacing, or "how slow can you go" too.

I'm really, really drawn to the idea of being a Chosen One whose status is an ambivalent-leaning-bad one. I'm used to the social/societal trials and tribulations part of the Chosen Ones narrative but this world offers a story of the powers themselves being kind of awful and using them being a chore. (I'm a fan of KJ Charles's Simon Feximal for this reason.) A great deal more could've been done to explore this as opposed to the two skabillion words wasted on Rhya's experiences once she gets to the royal court.

In case my opinion on this authorial choice is not clear: I am not a fan of Rhya's tremendously long non-magical maladjustment to the court.

I hope you now understand my star rating above. It assorts oddly with my surprised pleasure with this debut romantasy that had few of my desiderata in that genre, has a very, very promising world to build out, and unusually powerful good fortune to find a paying audience in sizable numbers.

On to book two I now go with hope in my heart, and a (slightly strained) smile on my face!

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, a chilling title that blooms as you read its story

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS
ADA HOFFMANN
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A script supervisor for an AI media conglomerate is caught between her intense need for an orderly life and her deeper, darker queer desires. From the creator of the Outside trilogy, a heartfelt interplanetary epic of identity, longing, and a space pirate who smuggles inappropriate stories.

Kelli Reynolds loves creating stories more than anything in the world. But on Callisto, a generative AI company called Inspiration owns everything, including all the media, and only Inspiration determines which stories can be told.

Kelli has a rare and coveted job in which her autism is to her advantage: She precisely edits AI output into “appropriate” stories for Inspiration’s massive TV audience. Her proudest creation is the pirate Orlando—a dashing do-gooder based on stories she used to tell friends.

Reenter Kelli’s ex-boyfriend Rowan, the person Kelli based Orlando on. Back when they were teenagers, their relationship was a secret. Kelli had thought that Rowan, a trans man, was her schoolmate Em, a girl.

Rowan is tangled up in the black market after he needed to get money for gender reassignment surgery. He needs Kelli’s help with something . . . illegal. So, now Kelli has to decide: Will she risk the safe, tidy story of her life now for the world she once wished for? What would Orlando do?

Passionate, dangerous, and tender, Ignore All Previous Instructions is a sweeping, poignant novel about censorship, forbidden love, and growing up.

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

My Review: When one entity controls the entirety of a resource, controls all access to that resource, and the resource in question is valued highly by enough people, you have the makings of a great story. Food...oil...microchips...stories, doesn't much matter what it is, if there's a control of access you're looking at an inevitable reckoning for the controllers. They will do literally any- and every-thing to keep you, the dupe, hooked on whatever it is; they will cause hideous suffering and death just to keep their power and privilege.

Is this ringing any bells? Anything at all coming to mind?

That's the story Author Hoffmann is telling us. If that story is not to your liking, this is not the read for you.

The execution of the basic story is good. It offers the Resistance becoming an outright rebellion; it uses the characters' genuine, relatable emotional realities to deepen our readerly investment in the events. I was deeply invested in Rowan's multiple axes of rebellion, personal and moral; I found Kelli's deeply personal path through coming to awareness of the wrongs being done to her and to everyone else very convincingly limned by a very talented wordcraftworker.

Why I don't offer a perfect five is Rowan's direct PoV being limited to flashbacks. I found that jarring, when we have Kelli as the direct PoV in past and present. I looked for a structural reason that needed to be the way we were getting the story, but couldn't find one. Kelli's job as a script supervisor, with high-masking autism-spectrum disorder, is very very well used to set stakes believably. Her borning realization of the evil she participates in is *chef's kiss*.

Highly recommended for culture warriors most of all!

ELECTRIC SHAMANS AT THE FESTIVAL OF THE SUN, the most truth-telling title of 2026

ELECTRIC SHAMANS AT THE FESTIVAL OF THE SUN
MÓNICA OJEDA (tr. Sarah Booker)
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.00 paperback, preorder for delivery 12 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda returns with a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence, and the loss of innocence.

In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival’s so-called “celebration of life.” Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.

Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sunblends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.

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

My Review: Sarah Booker, the translator whose job it was to make this...tale...accessible to Anglophone audiences, has The Best Job Ever. She and the Coffee House Press acquisitions team get to read good stuff all the time, most of which will never see US publication for a variety of reasons, and we on the outside will never know even exist. Translator Booker has the hard, intense job of creating in English (a very slippery tool, English, full of landmines and tiger-traps for translators) a story told in Spanish that's already sui generis. (Read the Spanish-language reviews on Goodreads, most mention how poetic/beautiful the language is.)

Starting a story at a music festival (I recommend googling the names of the musicians throughout the book, it's most instructive) is quite a flex. It's a loud, raucous thing by design, so having your characters start our acquaintance in such an intense and auditorily overwhelming way is going to sort the audience into pro and con very quickly. I suspect most people who liked Jawbone and/or Nefando will be averse to this intense introduction to our PoV women. I don't know if enough people are already on the Ojeda/Booker train to make that a sizable market but I sure as hell hope so...I want more.

After the characters are charged with the passionate energy that a music festival imparts to those willing to receive it, they begin the Hero's Journey to that gorgeous and mystical place, the Andes Mountains, for shamanic enlightenment. If you have never been to Cuzco or Machu Picchu, please make at least those places destination priorities. I found the evocation of place in this part of the tale we're investing in to be stellar, even better than the more divisive music festival with its more chaotic and uncontrolled atmosphere.

The common element of both segments of the tale, musical and mystical, are overcoming the breakage that a brutal and uncaring world inflicts on us all, and submerging into an overwhelming Otherness to find the path through the noise and pain of Life. It's done in the musical mode of counterpoint, so it unites seemingly disparate modes by their very difference.

I'm really not sure how better to explain the affect of the read than to say it helps to think of the gestalt as an opera libretto, structured to an underlying music that never stops and always leads you forward. The effect of this use of a constant, if quiet, through line is to make the crescendos hit harder, feel louder, than you expect them to be. Invest in Noa and her dad, accept the antiphonal others, and this read will propel you into the shamanic journey's end-point you didn't necessarily see coming.

LYNDA DREWS' PAGE: Disposable Wives: Murder and Menace in Green Bay's Rural Belgian Settlement; The Maid and the Socialite: The Brave Women Behind Green Bay's Scandalous Minahan Trials

DISPOSABLE WIVES: Murder and Menace in Green Bay’s Rural Belgian Settlement
LYNDA DREWS
Little Creek Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, preorder for delivery on 12 May 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the quiet Belgian farming settlements near Green Bay, Wisconsin, whispers traveled faster than truth.

At the center of it all stood Jean Philippe Soquet—a man known by many names: the Bay Settlement Bruiser, the Belgian Archfiend… and, to some, a murderer. Over four decades, suspicion followed him, especially in the wake of multiple disturbing deaths and disappearances—including those of three of his wives.

What began as gossip soon hardened into something far more troubling.

Determined to uncover the truth, Pauline Villiesse—sister to Soquet’s third wife—refuses to let the past be buried. With the help of Xavier Martin, a respected translator navigating both language and loyalty within the Belgian immigrant community, she begins a relentless pursuit of justice.

Set in the decades following the Civil War, this riveting true story reveals a world shaped by faith, survival, and tightly bound traditions—where secrets are protected, reputations are everything, and justice is far from guaranteed.

Through courage, persistence, and an unyielding search for truth, Pauline and Xavier confront a chilling question:

How many lives can be lost before a community is willing to see what’s been there all along?

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

My Review: Male privilege is still unassailable, though that is steadily eroding. Hence the hysterical white-male rear guard action being waged by the reactionaries in this century. This is, they know, their final opportunity to avoid the reckoning for their multitudinous crimes against everyone not them.

As one who has benefitted from the privilege they've abused for millennia, i say bring the reckoning. Make it impossible for this hideous pattern of abuse to recur this generation. #ReleaseEpsteinFiles

The facts of Jean-Philippe Soquet's life are hard to stomach even at over 150 years' remove. The crimes he committed, and many we no doubt still don't know of, will call forth the horrified revolted rage that, in the twenty-first century, we're feeling as the Epstein Files slowly, inexorably, come to light. Apologists for Soquet's crimes pointed to his undeniable good works. That merely proves the ancient truism "bad people can do good things just like good people can do bad things" is never not accurate. It also follows that the actions don't change the essence of the person. Soquet's evil murdering heart did good too? Take that up with your god on Judgment Day.

I read this précis of a *mountain* of research done by the author. I came to the conclusion that Jean-Philippe Soquet was a sadistic, murdering scumbag, and no amount of good he did as well changes his status as an evil murdering bastard.

It's a tough read because it's so well sourced. It's stunning that male privilege has operated, and still operates, so well that even murder is...swept away, forgotten, ignored...because the remorse-free murderer does some objectively good things. How many women must die, lose their "one wild and precious life" in Mary Oliver's deathless formulation, before it matters more than someone's pallid do-gooding?

I've decided for myself: one.

Let justice be done at long last. It won't raise the dead. It might help heal the affected. That alone makes reading the case against a long-dead man for his crimes worth your time.

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THE MAID AND THE SOCIALITE: The Brave Women Behind Green Bay's Scandalous Minahan Trials
LYNDA DREWS
Little Creek Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the shadows of progress, two women's stories were erased. Until now.

What if a respected surgeon could destroy your life with just one diagnosis?

In early 20th century Green Bay, Wisconsin, this terrifying reality was all too true for two women. Mary, an illiterate maid, and Mollie, a college-educated socialite, fell victim to the physical violence and mental abuse of celebrated surgeon Dr. John R. Minahan. To silence them, he claimed they had the shameful and dreaded disease of syphilis. This is the first full account ever written about Dr. Minahan, whose wealth built a college stadium, science hall, and six-story office building—all named for him—while history lost, or perhaps erased, Mary’s and Mollie’s heroic stories.

Until now.

Eerily mirroring contemporary debates around gender equality, misinformation, and wealth disparity, this tale remains alarmingly relevant. It is a story of power, abuse, and the tireless pursuit of justice. Delve into this haunting yet inspiring historical tale to uncover the forgotten stories of Mary and Mollie, two courageous women who dared to stand up against a powerful adversary.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. CW: repeated violations of bodily autonomy

My Review: I have never been interested in Green Bay, Wisconsin; never thought much about it; never considered the idea that it, all hundred-ish thousand people in and around it, would have "socialites" because that suggests to my mind big-stage dramatics. Football, whether US or FIFA interpretations of it, bores me. So, no...not the instantly obvious reader of the book, me.

The publicist offered it to me, and because I've come to trust their take on the kind of stories I enjoy reading, I said yes. Thanks, Shaun! I owe you one.

John Minahan was a bounder, a cad, and a creep. I'd say he'd be diagnosable as a malignant narcissist in the twenty-first century (aren't all rapists, though? serious question). In his lifetime I suspect people thought of him, quietly and privately, as a thin-skinned bully. Feminists are likely to see in him a flattened caricature of "Manliness." The author, clearly a subject-matter expert more well-informed than the man himself on his pathologies, presents a vast body of details that support all these views of him. The gestalt of the (possibly too many) facts s wisely left to you to decide. She has an opinion but presents it as such, not as incontroverible fact.

The sheer volume of awfulness detailed by Mary and Mollie makes difficult reading. Obviously that is a vanishingly small concern compared to the living hell the perpetrator inflicted on his victims, and got away with doing so because they are women. When these two women stood up to him, and brough the receipts to show him up, he pulled out the V-card used against women since time immemorial: he accused them of having VD...syphilis...to show them as being un-Virtuous therefore deserving everything they said he did, but of course he didnt because un-Virtuous women lie to get back at men but even if he did they deserved it.

Does any of this, any part of this playbook, sound at all familiar?

Reading about the trial, the havoc that any legal proceeding wreaks on the lives and the mental health of the innocent and the guilty alike, makes me feel so hugely grateful to Virginia Giuffre for her astounding act of tenacious courage.

#OnlyRedactVictims

In this time of reckoning, it behooves all of us to learn the history of abuse suffered by our ancestors. Painful it is, necessary it must become.

THE YOUNG WILL REMEMBER, the Korean War should never, ever be "forgotten"

THE YOUNG WILL REMEMBER
EVE J. CHUNG
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping novel about a correspondent trapped behind enemy lines during the Korean War, and the women who help her find her way home, from the national bestselling author of Daughters of Shandong.

“When I found the courage to lift my head, I expected to stare down the barrel of a gun, but instead there was a woman in front of me, the back of her white skirt embroidered with columns of yellow chrysanthemums.”

1950. It’s the coldest winter in decades, and twenty-eight-year-old Chinese American journalist Ellie Chang is on a military flight to cover a battle in the mountains of North Korea when her plane is shot down.

As she emerges from the fallen aircraft onto an icy field surrounded by the enemy, Ellie is sure it’s the end, certain she’ll never make it home to her parents…until a woman pushes her way through the crowd and claims Ellie as the lost daughter that she’s been searching for since the last war ended. Never mind that Ellie doesn’t speak a word of Korean.

Ellie is taken in by her rescuer—a woman who calls herself “Emma”—and the Paks, a pastor’s family. She knows she can’t stay and yet there’s no way she’ll survive on her own.

As the war intensifies, the sky alighting with bombs overhead, Ellie convinces Emma and the Paks to travel south towards an elusive promise of safety, and where Ellie insists they are more likely to find Emma’s real daughter, stuck on the other side of the frontlines.

Emma’s decision to claim Ellie, and Ellie’s choice to take her hand will connect their lives forever.

Moving and triumphant, The Young Will Remember sheds light on a “Forgotten War,” the resilience of love within our darkest histories, and the indefatigable determination of mothers to protect their children.

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

My Review: Stories with this kind of stakes, "everything changes because one moment to the next a decision is made," always appeal to me. So do stories about Korea, probably because it was my father's wartime experience. This story, then, started out with literally every advantage granted to it.

Why then is my rating so mingy?

Because the author is very, very clear on the story she wants to tell, but rather less so on the craft of storytelling. The dialogue, the scene-setting, the stakes she clearly thought through carefully, all work together. They don't cohere emotionally to punch me in the gut as I weep for the fate awaiting Emma and the Paks if they are not able to use Eleanor's Americanness to leverage an escape.

Here is my opportunity to say that Eleanor's CHINESE-Americanness rubbed a serious saddle-sore on me. Emma claiming this CHINESE-American woman as her long-lost daughter...well, no one in Korea would fall for that for a single second. Han people, assuming that's who Ellie's ancestors were which is by no means guaranteed, are visually quite distinct from the Korean people; it's very "Western" to assume there's no difference, or such a small difference as to be indistinguishable to natives of the region.

So...the story's foundation was my problem, not the story itself. The awful intersection of colonialism and its bastard child warmongering was the source of the story's impetus. As Ellie and Emma navigate their intersecting desires to leave the place they are, escaping the suite of violent terrors that war orchestrates for those who are not allowed control of their world (read: old men), they illuminate the compromises and suffering the old men in charge inflict so indifferently on the world's mass of humanity. In service of what? Does any ideology, any philosophy, justify the titanic life-altering suffering of vast numbers of people? Ellie, a war correspondent, is well placed to use the scalpel of reporting to cut away the rottenness of propaganda to expose the real wounds caused to real people. Emma's loss of her daughter to the Japanese colonialists, probably as a "comfort woman" or, more accurately, a sex slave has wounded her entire family. The author, a lawyer by trade, has clearly read Frantz Fanon ("The formula 'this all happened long ago' is substituted by that of 'we are going to speak of what happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today and it might happen tomorrow') or encountered his ideas of the artist as moral actor because this story is very much the argument for despair, and its fellow traveler inactivity, as a moral wrong.

Ellie spends part of the story in survival mode, not doing anything to actively improve her chances for escape. In this time of joining the woman who "claimed" her as a daughter, she is gathering her circle of women who share a goal of ending the harms being done; it's assembling a posse, not only sinking into a morass of misery. Going back to my foundational problem, would Emma's actual daughter need the kind of help and instruction Ellie receives all uncommented on?

It all ends up making this a three-and-a-half star read. I found the prose adequate, if unexciting; quite mannered at times thus unlikely to move me to empathetic tears. The story being told moved me to outrage and its hotter, briefer tears. Ellie...and Emma...are supremely tough women. Reading about their struggles was angering, educational, and instructive. I did not come away converted to Eve Chung fandom though I'll read another story by her. I respect her eye for what makes a good story and hope she will enter into the next one all guns blazing.

LOST IN YELLOWSTONE, Nicole Maggi's second National Park Mystery with ISB agent Emme Helliwell

LOST IN YELLOWSTONE: National Park Mystery #2
NICOLE MAGGI
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$23.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A foot in a geyser. A school in the wild. A truth no one saw coming.

When a human foot is ejected from a geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Special Agent Emme Helliwell of the National Park Service is assigned the chilling case.

Tasked with identifying the victim and uncovering what led to such a grisly end, Emme is drawn into the park's vast, unforgiving wilderness—and into the orbit of a private school for at-risk teens where extreme backcountry excursions are part of the curriculum. As disturbing truths begin to surface, Emme must also confront personal fault lines, including the unresolved tension with an ex-boyfriend who's suddenly back in her life and assigned to the same case.

In a place where danger hides behind natural beauty and good intentions can mask darker motives, Emme must navigate both treacherous terrain and emotional landmines to solve a mystery that could cost her everything.

Perfect for readers of C. J. Box, Paul Doiron, and Lisa Gardner

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

My Review: In the course of doing my due diligence, I looked for published book reviews of this second Emme Helliwell mystery (after A Murder in Zion) and ran across a depressing reality of our time: They were mostly book reports. I think that's a shame because opinions are helpful in deciding on the suitability of a read for one's own TBR shelf. If you read my reviews, I'll give you an opinion about a book's merits. Of course you might end up disagreeing, or might not like my way of expressing my opinion; but you will know more than a restatement of the blurb can tell you.

So, here I go:

Another really weird case death under unusual circumstances brings Emme to Yellowstone in order to poke her nose into the situation. Her still-smarting ex, whom I called "Thrush" throughout because it's the best name for him...smarting because Emme just ghosted him with not so much as fuck-you in explanation...and the dude she met last book who's really perfect for her, Finn, are involved in this weird case. Thrush and Emme *have* to be, they work for the National Parks Service's Investigative Services Bureau, but Finn chooses to be. The unattached foot and its mysterious companion object, a red pocket knife spotted by the informant of the probable crime's commission, cost both Emme and Thrush actual skin in the form of burns suffered while retrieving them as the "game" takes shape.

Emme is, as in the last book which ended mere days before this one starts, still processing her mother's death, her uneasy relationship with her younger sister, and now her awfulness to Thrush needs mending too. It's not only about the restoration of Ma'at in this story. It's about Emme becoming aware of how true the truism "hurt people hurt people" really is. It's all internal in this story, as her trail of devastation through genuinely good guy Thrush's heart is never shown to lead to her making any sort of adult apology to him, never acknowledging the hurt and harm she's caused, seeking forgiveness, promising to change her ways towards him. It's like Author Maggi decided her inner awareness of her unkindness was enough.

It ain't.

The case brings these two together, and if I'm honest, I sorta hoped Thrush would brush off Emme's halfassed request to be friends. With great unkindness. I'm all about FMCs being as complicated in their emotional lives as males have always been allowed to be. Look at Harry Hole: Popular novels, popular TV show, miserable nasty guy, so bring it Author Maggi!

The investigation leads to an outdoor program developed to rehabilitate teen offenders. To no one's surprise it's not run in such a way as to make the families sending their kids there feel good about it. Emme is a representative of law enforcement, so automatically suspect to the young offenders; winning their trust to get information she needs taxes Emme to the utmost. Her character is developed as the story delves into some dark and violent territory (in retrospect, not immediate and present until the ending). The manner she comes into possession of information to resolve this case harkens back to her Zion National Park case, unsolved in the legal sense....

I like the storytelling as well as the story told here. It's a series with developing promise. I'm glad Oceanview brings these stories from debut and early-career authors out. Conglomerates only want hits, not to make careers for authors who might, or might not, throw a hit out one day. I predict Author Maggi will be one who does.

PRESTIGE DRAMA, debut novel from a stellar storyteller

PRESTIGE DRAMA
SÉMAS O'REILLY
Grand Central Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Derry is already abuzz with news that famous American actor, Monica Logue, has flown to the city and will be starring in a new series set during the Troubles. And then she goes missing...

All eyes are on Diarmuid, the flaky scriptwriter who was the last to see Monica alive. From budding young actors hoping for a role to grieving parent whose story forms the backbone of the narrative; newspaper editors covering the mystery to taxi drivers hearing all the news from their clients, The Dogs in the Street follows the city's cast as they all try to locate themselves in Monica's disappearance.

Séamas O'Reilly's debut novel is a comedy about dramatising tragedy, and the responsibilities of a teller to a tale. It brings to life the voices of a city, the people, families and communities who find themselves obsessed with, and terrified of, interrogating their past.

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

My Review: Author of the poignant, hilarious memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? delivers a novel of The Troubles™...this seems to be a rite of passage for Irish writers born after 1950...via a lens I found mostly successful. A TV production hub in factual reality, Northern Ireland was a violent and terrifying place not that long ago. A multi-part limited series being made there is a welcome boost to the economy, and to the good image the country badly needs to project into the world.

But a film being made about The Troubles™ is a different proposition altogether. That topic is quite sensitive. So when Monica Logue starts researching her starring role in this prestige drama, the mere act of talking to people about the past..."How do you talk about the past as a person still living it, in a place that barely survived it?" the author has a character muse...sets off explosions of the same emotions that threatened to destroy the societal fabric of the place. Is it any wonder she just vanishes? The real question is "how." Did she run away from threats and intimidation, was she kidnapped by people she frightened with her research, was this another ugly political assassination to silence a voice digging in dirt some powerful people buried bodies in?

A very short read of under 200pp ought not to offer satisfying conclusions to these questions, that's just too little space. "Hold my beer" says Author Séamas, and delivers a series of tight storytelling-heavy chapters from multiple points of view. The only one you see more than once is, unsurprisingly, Diarmuid the writer of the television series. Each of them flows into the next, not always seamlessly, but that did not jar me out of the narrative flow. All the chapters are, as mentioned, storytelling-heavy...focused on making your idea of what's happening in that moment illuminate the journey to the resolution of the plot.

As a debut novel, this is the cream of the crop. Author Séamas is an experienced storyteller, his writing-craft chops are well-exercised from prior work done. In the places I was less that ecstatic, it was down to my feelings about the choice he made to have the novel mirror a screenplay in its tightness, its use of the delightful discursiveness of his characters mainly in dialogue. I'd've enjoyed more "Irishness" throughout. I found his memoir so very delighful because it had observations expressed in the same voice as the dialogue. That, of course, works better in personal and factual contexts. It adds distance in that setting, allowing truly horrendously painful memories to be seen as past, not immediate and awful...which is why I found their relative absence odd here.

I'm in no way trying to put you off the read, please understand that. It was a delight, well mostly a delight to learn why Monica was treated as she was. I want the pleasures of this read to be the main take-away you have for this story. I have a minor few cavils, none of which made me think I should move on to the next DRC on the Kindle.

A debut novel from a stellar storyteller that's a treasure of time to read.

SMOKING KILLS, deeply French story made accessible to Anglophone readers

SMOKING KILLS
ANTOINE LAURAIN (tr. Louise Rogers Lalaurie)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, preorder for delivery on 5 May 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this cozy crime novel with a witty, Parisian black-comedy twist, anti-hero Fabrice can only make smoking pleasurable by committing the ultimate crime

How far would you go to enjoy a cigarette?

When headhunter Fabrice Valantine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to undertake a course of hypnotherapy to rid himself of the habit. At first the treatment works, but his stress levels begin to rise when he is passed over for an important promotion and he finds himself lighting up again—but with none of his previous enjoyment.

Then he discovers something terrible: he accidentally causes a man’s death, and, needing a cigarette to calm his nerves, he enjoys it more than any other previous smoke. What if he now needs to kill someone every time he wants to properly appreciate his next Benson and Hedges?

Unwilling to return to the numbness of a life without pleasurable smoking, Fabrice launches into a life of crime, finding ever more original murder methods—including the use of a poisonous Ecuadorean frog.

A blackly comic story of addiction and transgression, this is also an exploration of the human need for fulfillment, and the lengths we will go to in order to find it. In the end the book provokes us to question the limits we place on ourselves, and the true definition of joy.

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

My Review: Fabrice Valantine is in prison. He is so an unrepentant smoker, as the title implies, that he sees the joy of smoking as superseding others' right to life. Not quite the spin on the title you expected, eh what?

How a professional headhunter (noun Wiktionary serves three senses of the word:
A savage who cuts off the heads of his enemies, and preserves them as trophies.
One who recruits senior personnel for a company.
A pitcher who throws at the batter's head.)
Of these three I think the fairest to apply here is the third; the author intends the second; and implicit in all three is the first) with a genuine love affair with/oral fixation on the dick-shaped tubes of chemicals that, when ignited, provide particulate delivery directly into one's mucous membranes...and those of hundreds of others who happen to be passing by. When absolutely, as a condition of employment, required to stop smoking, Fabrice resorts to hypnotism. It works.

Sort of.

Fabrice loses the pleasure of smoking ("I faced these painful hours with no solace whatsoever, just the dusty taste of my cigarettes and the utter ineffectiveness of the nicotine"), not the need to smoke. Until after an awful, awful accident where someone loses their future to death due to his carelessness, the frisson of smoking returns. So it wasn't permanently removed by hypnosis, only recalibrated to require extreme stimulation to experience it. Being a smoker therefore selfish and self-obsessed, this shows a path forward into pleasure that Fabrice, narrating his story from prison, chooses to follow. But he's careful! He only kills those whose loss won't matter! Isn't he due a reward for, as I often say, cleanin' the gene pool?

A fantastical noir-tinged laugh-out-loud satire of capitalism is one way to see this story. So is a comedy of manners, replete with stock characters (Fabrice as Gordon Gekko leaps to mind). Most of all, though, I want you to read this pinnacle of the translator's art. Louise Rogers Lalaurie has rendered into high-level, delightfully readable English one of the most vibe-dependent reads from the very French pen of Author Laurain. It's not this team's first collaboration...I do not know if the author and the translator worked together to create their magic, but I'm inclined to view the evidence as supporting that interpretation...as the current rush of Pushkin Press's republications attests. I'm a fan because I think Author Laurain chooses his targets well. I'm a fan because the translator understands on a deep level the targets, their cultural position in France, and the sense of the language the author chooses to use and renders it into a different culture recognizably. Her skill is to make this extremely French book humorous in the extremely different cultural valences of English. That is a tremendous skill.

A book to savor like one's last cigarette.