THE MULAI, consider the comps given by the publisher as gospel

THE MULAI
MUNIR HACHEMI (tr. Julia Sanches)
Coach House Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Interstellar via Invisible Cities: spec-fic translated from Spanish imagines a utopian way of life on another planet.

Years after the climate wars on Earth, the Mulai have settled into their new home on an unnamed planet. Supplies stopped arriving from Earth many years ago, and the Mulai have found a way to live. But now the people of Earth want to know what happened to the settlers, so they send The Archaeologist.

He finds that they have become a different people: uncannily similar to us but with something radically Other about them. Their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, reproduce, bury their dead, and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. The Archaeologist feels like his trip is one extended misunderstanding.

With fragments from The Archaeologist’s notes and the stories of Flukeh and Faida, who map both their world and their language, The Mulai offers a glimpse of a world adjacent to ours – one that just may be a model for how to better our own.

From one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and author of the celebrated Living Things, and translated by the award-winning Julia Sanches, comes a bold new Borgesian reimagining of what ‘civilization’ might look like.

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My Review: “Only when we encounter the other can we truly see ourselves.”

This is the crux of this story's argument. It is spoken by The Archaeologist, Dr. Cordovero, in an unironic way as he executes the duties of a scholar to interpret the Mulai, a culture not his own. So, a colonizer's PoV...a man whose cultural matrix he's so embedded within that he can't see how it forms...distorts...his picture of Reality. This being a story about how a human culture simply...vanished...without making a ripple in water left behind, it made perfect sense this should be the case. The Archaeologist’s notes are his rigid way of trying to fix an understanding of the Mulai's lifeways into a clear explanation of power structures, kinship patterns, and language architecture.

None of these concepts apply.

Seen from The Archaeologist’s PoV, a Mulai library f/ex is not anything like a library. A bit like Samuel Beckett's splices from late in his life, these places are collecting points for unbound unconnected sheets that do not necessarily tell any kind of cohesive story...just as random pages torn willy-nilly then taped together did not form a deliberate Beckett story, though it was what Beckett intended. The Archaeologist is sure, with typical colonizer arrogance, that these distant cousins of Earth's humans have let him in, have answered his questions as he intended them to not as they intended to. Life lived in translation is always tough. Life lived in denial, blindness, in a fog of culture-bits one does not know is obscuring clear vision...harder still.

That this story about a life lived in (mis)translation is itself a translation is either a step too twee or a layer of hot fudge atop the whipped cream of sociological SF from an earlier literary era wrapping up a rich, dense custard of story. It's a novel that requires you-the-reader to think past the obvious, to dig your spoon under the rich topping of the SFnal setting, through the soothing sweetness of the story's meaning, into the heavy, velvety lushness of Author Hachemi's ideas about how culture, language, and art emulsify into this marvel of delightful idea-sharing.

What actually happens on the page is far less important to this reading experience than what happens inside you as you read it. Did you just read the glossy surface...did you just give the story your attention without turning it over and over as you read, after you finished...or is this a "too hard, turn on the TV" kind of experience? They're all in here.

It's a lot, but it's rewarding no matter where you end up.

UNSAYABLE: A Life in Writing, speaks the unsayable into being

UNSAYABLE: A Life in Writing
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate memoir portraying a life spent trying to describe the indescribable—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Hours and Day

Go ahead. Try using language to slit the skin of mortality to see what’s on the other side.

At the age of three, Michael Cunningham began obsessively collecting the names of oak, Chevrolet, finch, tulip, Tupperware… Each word rendered the world ever so slightly more understandable, more describable, kicking off a lifelong love affair with language—one that would, eventually, maybe inevitably, lead him to become a writer.

In Unsayable, Cunningham’s memories spill forth, and with them, reflections on the craft of writing. He is fifteen, in a swimming pool at night, gazing at the first boy he ever fell in love with, who is lost in contemplative silence. He is a new college graduate, setting off for nowhere in a Dodge Dart, hoping to pull meaning (and a novel) from the expanse of America. He is on Cape Cod, regaling an elderly couple with invented tales of sexual escapades. He is in an art gallery, unwittingly having the first in a lifetime of conversations with the man he would marry. A thread ties each beautifully-wrought moment to the what is unspoken, what won’t yield to language, what is embellished beyond recognition, what is still left to say.

Luminous, perceptive, and powerful, Unsayable is an ode to literature, a meditation on craft, and an intimate account of a life spent trying to put into words that which resists depiction. This, it turns out, is the lifeblood of the fiction the impossibility of capturing the human experience, and the relentless desire to try.

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My Review: Do you like life?

Really unanswerable, that question. Does it mean your life or just Life, that vast agglomerating thing that doesn't even have a rigorous definition? See...pointless to ask, unable to be pinned down well enough to create an answer.

But asking the question made you think, made you name things to focus thoughts, organize feelings, contemplate so many things no one ordinarily just...turns over deliberately. And all of it was done in words, because you read words, and put your words into combinations they probably havent been in for a long time. Or ever.

This is what Michael Cunningham has done in Unsayable: he has turned over in his mind all the life he's had, looking for words to put around the very odd thing he's organized his life around, being a writer. He loves writing, he loves words, he loves stories, and each anecdote in this memoir reinforces the reader's sense of these facts as rooted in his life. It's a tacit admission of his likely audience, the aspiring writers of the Anglophone world. It's also a generous gift from a seventy-plus year old teacher of the arts of storytelling, because it will survive him as well as his professional career. There are moments of craft advice in the moments of life story, there are even more clues as to how a reader can view the stories they consume so as to get the most pleasure out of the reading. It's just never made sense to me that more readers who don't plan to write fail to see the benefit of reading writing advice. How better to comprehend a story's creator as a person practicing a craft?

It's as deft an exercise of prose-writing as you'd expect. It's a read filled with stories for you to know Michael Cunningham by. It's a powerful tool to create a narrative, whether for your own life, a story you want to write, or empower yourself to create change.

Goodness knows the world needs people of vision to create better, more humane stories to follow in the world itself. Best to learn how from a master practicioner of the storytelling art.

THE WINTER FOLK, a new way to magic up Appalachia

THE WINTER FOLK
JEN JULIAN
Run For It (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman returns to the mysterious lodge in the woods where she once worked, and to the inscrutable creature that bound her there, in this haunting Appalachian gothic horror from singular voice Jen Julian. Perfect for fans of Alix E. Harrow and T. Kingfisher.

This is the story of Moth, who earned her name working for the Winter Folk.

Every year, the Winter Folk gather at a secret lodge in the Appalachians, a place known as Deerhaven, refuge for the time-worn and weary. As a child, Moth heard warnings from her mother: They are heartless, wild creatures—and they got no concern of us. At twenty-one, Moth is a college dropout, indebted, impoverished, and desperate for better things. She falls instantly for Deerhaven’s beautiful antlered host, the mild-mannered Mr. Oslin. When he offers her a housekeeper’s contract—one wish granted for a winter of service—she signs without question.

But Deerhaven is a dangerous place. Staff must follow strict rules or else face dire consequences, and the guests can be unpredictable and savage. And yet, Moth endures, enticed by a rumor that Mr. Oslin is looking for a protégé. A singular worker who would stay with him forever and be transformed.

Decades later, Moth returns to Appalachia with her husband and teenage daughter. She can't shake the feeling that she needs to return to Deerhaven, which banished her twenty years ago. As she hunts for a way in, her haunting memories and harrowing experiences come roaring back—her friends and rivals, her growing obsession with Mr. Oslin, and her mysterious exile.

A door exists in the dark of the woods. After so long away, what has Deerhaven become?

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My Review: In fiction, one must always have a fine balace between questions answered, questions unanswered, and unanswerable problems. Without something in the story that feels...unfinished, there's no place for the reader to put their own experiences onto the read. If there are unanswered questions, things the author sets up as needing reolution that aren't resolved, they'd best be finely calculated to invite a sequel. My ur-text for doing this balancing act well is Lord of the Rings. Yes, *I* said something noce about a story I really disliked reading. It left the Problem of Evil unresolved, as indeed is reality's unresolved Big Question; but the plot-driving questions? All resolved to varying degrees of finality. It is genius storytelling. (I still hate it, but credit where it's due.)

On the other end is A Song of Ice and Fire. I don't feel the need to elaborate. Trillions of pixels arranged in uncountable patterns are out there reflecting fans' emotional responses to an incomplete story. Fans are still spouting off about the various issues, the creator is not doing much to calm them down, so on the noise goes.

Here's a story, with a fundamentally unresolvable conflict underpinning it, resolvable conflicts skinned over it, and some left-unfinished business that invites a sequel or two, that doesn't quite scale heights of genius but does plant the author's story-flag atop a hill.

The setting is Appalachia, which is US-cultural shorthand for "the Shire," that pre- or de-industrial landscape of natural beauty, peopled by rustics, rife with quaint folk who *indulgent smile* accept magic is real. I find that more than mildly insulting acceped as a storytelling given, but it's there, it works, and it's not factually incorrect just because it's insulting. It is not used condescendingly in Author Jen Julian's hands, so I'm not bristling at her, but at the stereotyping that allows this perception to go unchallenged.

Author Julian's story of Moth's life lived in two mutually exclusive worlds, magical and mundane, is one she could not have told as well absent this stereotype. Moth will always be Moth despite being born Vera. Think a moment about the root of the name "Vera," and her destiny is unlocked. (Go read, I'm going to assume you got the point and move on.) Moth is, and isn't, Vera. Like all those who are transformed by contact with magic, the life Moth leads after her time in Deerhaven is much like the lives lead by post-Garden Adam and Eve. She knows now what it costs to See Beyond (caps very intentional for context) when Vision is...removed, denied, forbidden...after being granted. How she will always, always have Heimweh for a state of being that can only exist in a place that is inaccessible now you've left it.

Don't put too much weight on Vera's last name being "Stoker." It can best be seen as a marker of her otherness and not as an invitation to horror and bloody violence. Moth, being returned to "Vera" and mundanity, can't stop being aware of her lack, loss, denied state. It's achieved by very unshowy means, in word choices for Moth and later for Vera that convey different emotional registers. It's not something that will hit you in the face but a dawning awareness, a thing that stays just outside your field of vision until you see it then you don't unsee it as it organizes the read anew.

Vera and Moth belong to different worlds. They have some memories in common; they know a few of the same people and carry some of the same baggage from bruising, painful shifts in their life; but in the end Vera can only be Vera or Moth in those lives, in those mutually exclusive worlds.

Do you need a better explanation for the experience of growth as a person?

It's a read I can see taking on a life bigger than its basis if and when the zeitgeist aligns with it. I hope for Author Julian's sake that happens now, propelling her into prominence she has the talent to support. I seriously hope she has or acquires the skills to survive it.

FORTRESS OF THE FORGOTTEN ONES, don't delay learning about them

FORTRESS OF THE FORGOTTEN ONES
FAHMIDA RIAZ (tr. Sana R. Chaudhry)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation

In Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, Fahmida Riaz transports readers to fifth-century Ctesiphon, the zenith of the Sassanian Empire, in a brilliant historical novel that blends rich cultural memory with striking political relevance. Set against the backdrop of fire worshippers, Parsi kings, and the ancient Avesta, this ambitious tale follows Mazdak, the first socialist revolutionary in history, as he challenges the power structures of his time.

With vivid depictions of the Great Palace of King Qobad, the lands of the White Huns, and the impoverished masses, Riaz delves deep into the forces of history that shaped Mazdak’s quest for social justice. A masterpiece of historical fiction, Fortress of the Forgotten Ones is a powerful meditation on erasure, cultural identity, and the fight for justice that resonates with our contemporary world.

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My Review: What a fascinating read! I was constantly intrigued by the strangeness of the settings, and eager to get the next interesting tidbit of knowledge.

And that's where my problem lies. I genuinely could not wait for my lessons in history to commence but I was never empathetically crushed when the history was dark. I am still not sure who the characters are, but I am very clear on what happened to them. Ctesiphon is no longer a name on a map of archaeological sites, it's a place. It vibrates with events so huge their echoing claps of collapse, of rupture, their crackling roars of inflammation, reverberate (I now see) in 2026's tragedies.

That's heady stuff. It's why there are four stars up top. There'd be six if I could remember anyone's name. Events occur...curiously impersonally. Power vanishes...but no one lost it. It's a narrative choice that other authors have made over time, and more particularly when telling sweeping historical stories. If one isn't willing to create a doorstopper like War & Peace, Jean-Cristophe, or their ilk, a narrower focus on facts and events will keep pages turning.

It worked on me. It would most likely have worked on me with many more pages, too. As things stand I'm a happy reader, sated in my desire to be presented with a very interesting story about places and events completely new to me in a landscape foreign to my eyes.

I missed the portraits that could've showed me the people is all.

THE SIXTH NIK, we need a new literary adjective..."Krausian"

THE SIXTH NIK
DANIEL KRAUS
Saga Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Perfectly aligned for readers of Iain M. Banks’s The Culture series and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, The Sixth Nik is a galaxy spanning adventure from the New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Angel Down and Whalefall.

Deep into space, far past the triworld outposts, beyond range of the lethal trollbot internet, soars The Sickness: a ship woven from biomatter and capable of reacting to every need of its human crew. Sisilla, a nine-year-old cultist with a brain enhanced by arcane tech known as “niks,” has boarded to investigate the enigma of Fém—a plague-riddled planet that has abruptly gone rogue.

The mysterious crew includes a faceless assassin, a beautiful engineer jigsawed by plastic surgery, a peyote-addicted medic, and—most lethal of all—a rugged, NonModded captain with a score to settle with Sisilla. Other dangers abound. A hacked robot begins to believe Sisilla is its daughter. The Sickness itself is mutating, possibly even pregnant. And the secret of Fém is more horrific than anyone could have imagined. To survive, Sisilla will need to forsake her predetermined fate and embrace the unknown.

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My Review: Sisilla is a weird protagonist. She knows when she will die: after she completes her "Chore," the issue/problem/situation her birth family gave her life to resolving with the aid of major surgical brain modification and enhancement by alien tech. It's...distancing, for we-the-reader and most certainly for the Inuit people her birth family sent her to live among (it's the custom, it's required). She is the fifty-fifth child to have this life wished on her before she's got anything like the ability to offer consent, and then there's the fact that she will be killed when her "Chore" is complete. The alien-tech brain mods, the "niks," will be removed from her dead brain, the next sacrificial child will be found and modified, and giant social/technical/existential problems will be solved.

I was appalled and repulsed by this system of abusive exploitation. I was revolted by the most bizarrely powered transport that took Sisilla from her place of education and preparation into distant reaches of space, that "plasmagraphic" ship's name...The Sickness...apt for the ship and the "Chore" Sisilla is to accomplish at the cost of her life. This being Author Kraus, I was expecting seriously effective descriptive language everywhere. I got it in spades. I've seldom liked a character I sympathized with *less* than Sisilla, mostly because the Omelas-ness of her world is a truly effective backdrop for creating kind feelings by way of contrast. I was actually nauseated by The Sickness, thus felt a reluctant protective urge towards the child it was created to transport. A misplaced emotion...Sisilla is not a person in need of protection, but one to be protected against as normalizing a brutal, utilitarian corruption of innocence in a very questionable enterprise. I won't call it a cause.

I finished this read in May. I wrote three reviews, discarded them for being inaccurate and overly emotive. This review goes up no matter what. Author Kraus does a tremendous job of creating fascinating, flawed, awful human being protagonists in the two books of his I have now read. I know a lot of people read Angel Down (review linked on first reference) very differently than I did...it is my favorite WWI novel, despite the war being only the setting of a far, far more damning commentary on capitalism, anomie, and sociopathy writ large. Its commentary would not be as effective as it is were it set in another time and place. That is why I call it my favorite WWI novel. I won't call The Sixth Nik my favorite SF novel, or my favorite alien-contact novel; it is my favorite body horror novel. This is a finely gauged story that evokes sympathy and disgust simultaneously. There is a direct presentation of revolting meaty awfulness. Then there is, as one thinks about it, an awful emotionally excavating familiarity to its meaty awfulness. It is a story wherein People...that giant amorphous guilt-ameliorating construct...have chosen to sacrifice the humanity and the life of a little girl to solve a problem more quickly, more expeditiously, more seamlessly, at that cost.

Is the bell ringing yet?

So this read is not for everyone, not likely to be one you'll undertake unless you are willing to spelunk some dark caves of the soul with only a little light to carry with you. It will reward you with an undistorted assessment of the world, the humans in it, and (from Shakespeare in Love, remember that film?) a bit with a dog aptly named "Positive Roy." I suspect the fairly heavy-handed symbolism of the ship's mode of propulsion...one of my few true objections to the not-subtle nature of the story's worldbuilding...will cause eye-rolling. I offer to the rolled eye a reminder of "the Snarl," an equally unsubtle but much more palatable metaphor for tech-mediated human communication, and quite possibly an equally useful organizing principle to use along with Cory Doctorow's "enshittification."

Would I recommend you read this story? Yes. Do I expect you will? Not many of you. Do I hope you will try to overcome your reluctance to engage with something this complicated emotionally?

Very much. I did. I got a lot out of reflecting, revisiting, rethinking my ideas in this story's mirrors.

BALSAM KARAM'S PAGE: using pieces of the SFF toolkit to great effect without writing SF or F

EVENT HORIZON
BALSAM KARAM (tr. Saskia Vogel)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of The Singularity, a saga of one girl's resistance and exile in the stars and soil of empire.

Seventeen-year-old Milde is from the Outskirts, a place beyond the mountains where the dirt is corpse-rich and mothers and daughters make their living banished from society—without rights, access to care, or legal status. Simmering under the surface of their day-to-day survival is a desire for change—and one day, Milde and her friends act on it, setting fire to government buildings in the city that has rejected them.

When Milde is framed as the instigator of the uprising, she is arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually presented with a final choice: to be executed publicly or to be launched into space, into a black hole called the Mass, for an experiment. Milde chooses the Mass.

Event Horizon is an exquisite existential novel, dark as deep space, woven with reflection on oppression, solidarity, trauma, and loss. With a completely unique voice, Balsam Karam writes about the swirl of hope and despair in the lives of the marginalized and a young woman’s unwavering belief in a better world.

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My Review: First, read this:

They're talking about deportation, we told them, Do you understand what that means? They're talking about taking us across the border and leaving us there, they're saying we have to go home, but what home do we have other than this one, I told them. I was born here and my child was born here, I told them—It's true that we've been living without papers for all these years, but now were being deported—is that acceptable? These are our lives I told them, but no one wanted to listen and so we ended up here. Milde listens to her mother and sits down beside her, watching the buildings rise one by one, wishing she already knew how to build a home.

Maybe I resonate with this despairing cry because I experienced a similar feeling, if not legal process, with my own homeplace rejecting my very being as a gay man. Displacement is a violent painful amputation without mercy or understanding or empathy...and it goes on every single day all over the world, in homes in cities in countries in (especially) religions.

Every time it occurs it is an evil, a wound to the spirit of all who perpetrate and/or experience it. It is a wound on the masses of people who, like those who stay in Omelas, ignore it. Milde chooses a course of action in recation to this wrong that commits the most terrible crime imaginable: It is meant to, in the metaphorical structure of Omelas, show the complacent, the docile and unquestioning, the cost of their dreamworld. Terrorism! the shout rises, led by those terrorizing Others to please and entertain the unthinking and disengaged. Milde must be punished, must be seen to be punished, not to deter future "terrorists" but to satiate the appetite for cruelty of the dociles, passive entertainment to slake the human thirst for blood.

Milde makes an ugly bargain with the evil system:

Sure, I can go to space and die, why not? I'd rather die in the depths of a black hole than wait around to be executed here, if you see what I mean. I'm doing this so that I can sit back and rest for once, no knife or metal lid hidden under my pillow, and so that, if only for a day, I won't have to look at those same white faces that wish me harm.

Her consent to be sent into the uttermost unknown to die while providing data (her suffering and death) is about as meaningful to the "white faces that wish {her} harm" as clicking "accept and close" is. There is no meaningful other option, but make it look good for those who can't be arsed to see how wrong, how painful it really is.

Swedish Kurdish author Balsam is the child of a man who experienced the horrors of a "terrorist" who chose his course of action to resist colonization. That crime resulted in his daughter being a Swede not a Kurd by nationality, a displacement that will reverberate through her entire life short or long. Everyone makes these decisions for their children, it's inherent in having them; but as all parents know it's never what you say but what they hear that counts. Author Balsam's feelin' some kinda way about these choices, and seeing the world in a unique cast of light as a result.

All of us Anglophones can see it because she let us in on experiences we don't precisely share, but still can find ways to be with. We can all feel echoes pressing on our emotional eardrums that come from a similar place of "injustice happened to me, to my life, that I had no pwer to resist"...maybe enabling us as a result to make the effort to help the world resist, reject the bloody hunger for revenge or simply the vicious desire to hurt Others to slake Humanity's thirst for it.

Eminent Translator Vogel has been at work for a good long time so it's no surprise her skills make this feel like a native English speaker wrote it. In fact I bring it up here because I was suddenly struck about the halfway point that I was not having my usual internal debate about "what word was that in {language}?" I checked the copyright twice during this read...yep, translation. This is very unusual for me. It's even more surprising because this is Author Balsam's first book.

The outrage that simmers under this lovely surface is definitely part of the reading experience. There is not sweetness in the story, or in the language; there is precision, but not distance, or chill. It's going to make emotional demands of you-the-reader. Milde experiences the constant reminder of difference that is used by polite people to maintain their superiority in the hierarchy. Her mother Essa is not even as far into the acculturation process as she is; it's a process defined by exclusion, rejection, after all. Milde's course as a resister is set thereby and this her fate sealed.

Her violent terrorism is what is left to a powerless woman in the face of an entire power structure built for the purpose of excluding her forever. Her resistance is all she has; it can only be what it compelled her to enact; so her phases of punishment *must* result in her body being launched into a black hole to die in as-yet-unknown suffering that must be public. It must be shared, this last and most intimate violation of her humanity. Otherwise she will not have paid for her "crime."

It is the best of all possible validations for the power structure. It is the best of all possible tricks to play on the power structure for Milde. It was chilling how much courage Milde possessed accepting this final, long act of her life. Even Christ only suffered for hours.

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


THE SINGULARITY
BALSAM KARAM (tr. Saskia Vogel)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Lyrical and devastating, The Singularity is a breathtaking study of grief, migration, and motherhood from one of Sweden’s most exciting new novelists.

In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter’s name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman—on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses—of a language, a country, an identity—when once, her family fled a distant war.

Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze. Her English-language debut, The Singularity is a powerful exploration of loss, history, and memory—an experience akin to “drinking directly from a flood of tears” (Aftonbladet).

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My Review: Published first but written second in Author Balsam's career.

The grandmother picked them up and held them close in sleep almost no sleep at all and then muttered that no one beyond the ruined wall wished them well and that she couldn’t bear another loss – again and again she said she couldn’t bear any more loss and even though the children didn’t understand how or why, they knew that the loss was now a part of them and that at any moment it could strike again.

It's the world of Event Horizon (review above) on Swedish soil in the camp the women live in as they have no recourse or options:

It’s your first winter in the house with the little garden, the darkness outside. Something hard hits the windows and your brother stands up, puts on his coat. After a while he comes back in, says he needs something to wipe off the dog shit from the window and the postbox. In his hand is a blue and yellow sticker that he’s torn off, like the ones you’ve seen high up on lampposts around town.

–and–
Later, your mum tells you that the first thing she was told after talking about how she had been tortured in prison was that no one would hire a person like her. One eye missing, older and not entirely fluent – it’ll be tough, the caseworker had said.

Nice people do not shout racist slogans in your face. It does not mean they are not going to behave in racist ways. The story's narrative risk-taking is more evident in its middle third:

/ do you think of her often, Marcus or Magnus asks softly / we ate bean stew with rice and yoghurt and I drank a whole pot of tea afterwards / you nod, of course you do / Gran was the happiest of us all I think / I think of her and of my grandmother you say and put the cup down / she took you in her arms and then I made sure to sleep while I had the chance / do you know anything about black holes? you later ask the counsellor / and I only got out of bed the next morning can you imagine? / inside a black hole is a place that is also a state — do you know about this? you ask, facing Patrick or Henry in his chair / a few days later Rozia's mother visited with little Rozia in her arms and a basket full of fruit /no, I'm afraid I don't know much about space, says Eric or Martin and continues to take no notes / then the two of you would meet up practically every day / you say it's called the singularity - that's what the place is called and lean over the bed / you and Rozia were like twins, we thought - the same round face and your hair as big and black / inside the singularity, the force of gravity is so strong it can't be calculated, can you imagine? you tell the counsellor / the pair of you often played in Rozia's yard and sometimes you stood by the big road even though you weren't allowed to and the soldiers could show up at any moment / that force pushes bodies together and renders the distance between them nil / because you both liked Gran's fried potatoes and her bean stew, you mostly ate at ours Mum says / you use your hands to show how no space remains between bodies in the singularity

It doesn't scan easily, but I promise you it is not flummery, a brummagem gaud of "Style" that distracts with difference without adding into meaning. In the more conventional first and last parts, the harrowing tales told do the work of impacting you in dark corners of your Safe Place, you are not safe, ever, as long as you are Other. While you are reading Author Balsam's story you are Other along with her.

It's a passionate document about grieving. It is a horrible chronicle of losing a child, losing an infant, losing losing losing without a moment of respite and never once ever giving up.

Until the final act of control is yours.

If you need a—any—content warning, do not pick this read for yourself.

THE BREAK-UP RETREAT, latest from Sweden's bright star doesn't twinkle as bright

THE BREAK-UP RETREAT
CAMILLA STEN (translator not credited)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An undercover journalist goes to expose an exclusive psychological wellness clinic where women go to recover from heartbreak, with dire consequences, in this creepy thriller from The Bachelorette Party author Camilla Sten.

Welcome to Himlafall Clinic, where we use revolutionary therapy techniques to heal you from heartbreak. Whether you are going through a devastating breakup, or can’t seem to stop picking the wrong partners, we are here to help you change your life, once and for all…

Isobel Anderssen has heard rumors. Nestled deep in the Swedish woods, there is a retreat. Primarily aimed at helping women who have gone through devastating break-ups, the Himlafall Clinic is meant to heal your mind and help you move on.

Sometimes people are never heard from again.

Armed with a fake story and a contraband phone to record interviews, Isobel is ready to expose Himlafall’s founder and get closure for the families of missing loved ones. But when she gets there, nothing goes to plan. Her contact is missing. The founder, Dr. Martina Hastings, knows how to get under Isobel’s skin in ways she didn’t anticipate. And all the while, the ghosts of the missing haunt her at every turn. It is clear something is going wrong and Himlafall, and Isobel must uncover the truth, before she disappears once and for all.

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

My Review: This reads uncomfortably like the transcripts of some brainwashing sessions, brutal and demeaning and very destructive. It's written in Camilla Sten's voice, but in this uncredited translation, reads more like it's not-quite-Sten enough to be all her own work. The Bachelorette Party I reviewed in June 2025 had a similar effect on me. It's not *bad* but it's not like her earlier books in that it never sparkles, its cast feels...cast from a mold, but never painted, lacquered and polished, buffed up.

It struck me as odd that Author Sten would choose to have Isobel make herself so incredibly obvious as an interloper. In 2026, you need to expend a great deal of thought on how someone even *could* assume a fake identity. Surveillance capitalism demands to know who you are, even (especially) the very wealthy who could afford this emotional Abu Ghraib for brokenhearted rich ladies (and at no time did any of the men...all men 0.o...feel worthy of more than a sneak-eaten grocery-store pastry as mourning). If Author Sten did that here, I did not see it. I was quite surprised that someone who could make me really feel how prosopagnosia affects one's life in The Resting Place that wasn't up to her earlier storytelling standard. Isobel's daft actions would've been glaringly obvious to anyone with a reasonably observant eye and a modicum of common sense, and her vaunted Plan was basically "wing it based on vibes."

Disappointing...this is a premise that the earlier Sten would've embroidered a Bayeux Tapestry of story over, yet what I got was a sampler.

Come home, Alexandra Fleming and Camilla Sten! Y'all were the dynamic duo. Whatever's gone wrong fix it and make more magic.

Please.

KILLER VIBES, the authorial and series debut novel set in "Keep Austin Weird" Austin...not Alex Jones Austin

KILLER VIBES (Peter Key Mystery Series #1)
JACK FRIDAY
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Meet Peter Key: self-proclaimed “laziest private investigator in Texas” (it’s harder than it looks), full-time bisexual, dedicated stoner, and the surprised recipient of a windfall inheritance from an uncle he barely knew. Peter’s life was a mess before he became the owner of a dilapidated house in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Austin, but now he has a mountain of debt to deal with—and pushy realtors popping up on every corner to convince him to sell the land while the market is hot.

But Peter doesn’t like to be pushed around. And when he discovers a bag full of cash and a suggestion that his uncle's death might not have been an accident, he starts asking questions. When they said “Keep Austin Weird,” they weren’t joking. Just about everyone Peter meets seems to have a hidden agenda, and he soon finds himself pulled into a lethal game where not everybody plays by the rules. Fortunately for Peter, he’s never been a rule follower anyway.

Sexy, suspenseful, and packed with Austin’s quirks, Killer Vibes is the start of an iconic new series with a singular, unforgettable cast of characters.

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

My Review: I lived in late 1960s, 1970s, and very early 1980s Austin. I've got a lot of nostalgia for that world. "Keep Austin Weird" is a resonant slogan to me. So I'm primed to be this story's booster by happy association.

There is always an ugly side to any place humans congregate. Austin produced vile scum Alex Jones the Sandy Hook liar, who is my direct peer, being only two years younger than me and a product of the same public schools I went to. Every sunny meadow has shadows, great and small, or you wouldn't see any depth at all.

Peter Key, connoisseur of life's finer things (sex, drugs, skiving off anything that looks like work), has pushed his boundaries with those who toil that he may chillax. He's a slacker in the mothership of slacker culture; but he is, when we meet him, a slacker with a housing and eating problem.

His deus coming ex machina is Uncle Forrest, a barely-remembered relative with a house (mortgaged) that Peter can go live in; and whose death is...hinky. How did a retired daredevil racer lose control of his car badly enough to go over a cliff and die from the injuries he sustained? Why, in his seriously past due mortgaged house, is there a bag of cash? Where's the money from? What was his gambler/adrenaline junkie uncle up to? Did it get him murdered? Peter's aunt's hired a PI to investigate, but with a serious stake in the solution (who doesn't want a home?), Peter takes the PI's offer to keep going only if he'll help help with the investgation seriously.

Practical people who care about Peter are all encouraging him to cash in on his real-estate windfall, as housing in Austin is insanely expensive. Peter decides he wants a home, rolls up his joint sleeves, and begins looking around at the people badgering him for stuff Uncle Forrest "owed" them. It's a classic origin story. It's billed as #1 in a series. It's got modern energy, in that our man-bunned hero is both slacker and hedonist enough to be bi in that casual way younger men often are in my own experience. The pacing is good, the thriller elements are well deployed, the most important element of a series...the hero's ability to command our emotional investment in him...is finely crafted.

I stopped at four stars not for any prose flaw or characterization lack, but for a structural quibble: WHY ARE YOU BREAKING THE SCENES SO OFTEN?! There's no reason, and certainly no excuse, for this choppy execution when there is literally no change of time, of PoV, of subject, between them! I'd lop off another star if I hadn't enjoyed Peter's disastrously bad judgment all coming out okay for...Reasons. I really hope, Author Friday, you won't succumb to the temptation to prevent Peter from growing, from making *new* mistakes in a field he's still learning how to work but which he clearly has a solid aptitude for.

That said, I'm sat for book two.

HAPPY LIFE, not a buck-up-bucko book despite the title

HAPPY LIFE
DAVID FOENKINOS (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A tender and wistfully satirical novel about the desire to change your life by bestselling French author David Foenkinos

"Foenkinos's surreal yet relatable novel…considers life in our age of anxiety, when other people's picture-perfect lives make our own seem drab in comparison." —Washington Post

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wants to be someone else.

Eric Kherson—40, divorced, distracted—is spiraling. He has devoted his life to a successful career as the marketing director of a leading sports brand. But when family disaster rocks him to his core, he finds himself adrift from his family and questioning all his choices.

That is, until an acquaintance from his schooldays offers him a high-powered government position. Desperate for escape, he throws himself into her enigmatic world of high-risk deals and endless networking, doing anything it takes to get a contract signed.

But on a business trip to Seoul, Eric starts feeling worse than ever. Wandering the city's streets, he comes across Happy Life, a store that offers its customers something that could change their lives: a fake funeral. Happy Life will write your eulogy, arrange the flowers, and allow you to lie inside your own coffin. Why? They believe the experience will help you reinvent yourself.

But above all for Eric, Happy Life sparks a business venture of his own that might do just that…

A celebrated French bestseller, Happy Life is a life-affirming story of hope and recovery, perfect for fans of Matt Haig and Nathan Hill.

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

My Review: I am on record as a David Foenkinos fanboy. I have not (yet, anyway) rated any of his books I've read under four stars. I'm pickin' up what he's puttin' down because he's willing to take a classically realist setting and stitch some strangeness onto it. It's never a huge dissonance, it doesn't feel as though some clumsy editor from a different decade bookhorned a bad idea into the story...it's happened to other authors. I'm always *sure* this story of his I'm reading right then will be Foenkinos' breakout hit, and all y'all will see how Right I am about his humor, delicate honesty, and how very deftly Sam Taylor captures it in English!

To date, not so much. I persevere. I'm shocked that y'all read Solvej Balle's riff on Groundhog Day in your tens of thousands and shun a more fun version of the "things fall apart, emotions have entropy, no one gets outta here alive" story. There are over a thousand reviews of this book on Goodreads, average high three stars. Given the quotidian subject matter...there must be more than this...that strikes me as decent.

Happy Life, the business, is a very interesting conceit. Pretend you're dead. Read your obituary. Lie in your future coffin. Now, when you get up, think "is this good enough?" I'll bet most people look at life without depth until confronted with Death, the Reaper, the dirt nap, whatever euphemism tickles your fancy, whose cold grasp is very strongly focusing to everyone who feels it. Eric, our PoV character, is middle-aged, mid-career, peaking in power. He's miserable in the depressed person's way, shrouded in grey fog and honestly unable to see why that's even a problem anymore.

That's the true danger point, when a new challenge (his new job as a trade representative for France in this case) only points up the essential sameness of Life and futility of hope. On a mission to Seoul, Eric discovers Happy Life and its weird conceit of fake-deathing yourself to shed the fog, pull off the shroud of sameness, rise from the coffin renewed and revitalized. It works. And if it worked for Eric, unhappy and unable to think *why* he should be when he's got money, power, and purpose, then it probably will for other wealthy French people.

Can money buy happiness after all?

A mean little stereotype says literary fiction needs to be depressing. A cultural insult says French fiction's full ashtrays and empty lives must end stories in ennui. Both might've been true in the 1970s or 1980s but even then it was books written for the haute bourgeoisie, the people who had too much of everything so did not need anything; that's a soul-killer, that is, any era or country. Look at the billionaires today, they're purposeless and useless so they frivol away their substance on useless stuff while real problems need solving.

Eric brings Happy Life to France in order to jolt people into the same sense of purpose, of wanting something more important and rewarding than "more." Spoiler: Eric is a helluva salesman, as his entire career has shown.

Author Foenkinos is not writing for Literati. He's writing to tell people who like stories a story about a man who faces endings by casting about until he finds a new beginning. I like that story; it's not one we see in upper-echelon-aimed books but it's honestly all the better for it. It doesn't do that American thing of chirping five easy steps at you, just do *this* and you're all set MLM happy-clappy horseshit. It's a story that starts from "sad man doesn't want to be sad" and moves on from there through the steps of doing whatever comes his way to setting out with intention and purpose when one shows up worth his while.

It's not experimental literary or boundary-pushing shenanigans. It's a French guy writing a story he figures will resonate with French people of the 2020s. Is it also critiquing the PTB and their greed? Yeah, that's in there, but it's not what thee and me will see first. It's not yelling at you. It's on the next barstool over talking on the phone to someone who needs the same commonsensical splash of water you need.

I liked it, didn't fall madly in love with it, and think we need more like it from countries all over the world to show us how common this malaise really is. Better than floundering in the dark foggy corners wondering if we're alone in our befuddlement.

ASTRONAUT!: A Novel, a metaphor for escape from here-and-now that makes it sound so...frictionless

ASTRONAUT!: A Novel
OANA ARISTIDE
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A tense, darkly funny, and politically resonant novel of life under authoritarian rule.

Romania, 1989, the twilight of Ceausescu’s dictatorship: A time when every neighbor, every friend, every family member may be an informant for the regime. When news emerges of a man-eating bear terrorizing the country, two bright lives collide. Constantin, an idealistic police detective—prone to daydreaming and scribbling fairytales in his notebook for his four-year-old son—is tasked with solving the string of mysterious deaths. Lia, a rebellious, inquisitive schoolgirl pining for more color in her life, is unwittingly drawn into an elderly neighbor’s secret plot against the regime. The decisions they make amid the constant gray skies and fear of speaking out will have sweeping consequences—for themselves, for their families, and for their country. Astronaut! is a chilling, suspenseful, and resonant tale by a dynamic new novelist.

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

My Review: What a claustrophobic read. At eery turn there's a wall, at every corner there's an uneasy dread of what you'll find when you turn it. Even the fun of a kid wanting to give Mama a special birthday gift...disastrous, unmitigatable harm follows.

I was uneasy, I was unnerved, and I was totally hooked. I stopped feeling like I was reading a novel pretty quickly. I winced, chuckled hollowly, got staring prickles, I felt as much a part of the cold greyness of 1989 Romania as a guy in the sunshiney summer of 2026 New York City is likely ever to feel. Lia is in the midst of things she does not realize are seismic shifts. Her sense of self-preservation hasn't taught her what safety is yet. She barrels into danger as she searches for the vibrancy and color of her home country. Honestly I wondered where she might've seen that, the eternal dankness and foggy grey of 1989 Romania was so pervasive.

Then we shift our story attention to detective Constantin, tasked with solving a brutal death, one that lends itself in its mindless ferocity of commission to the spurious explanation of a bear attack.

One that just happens to take place near the hunting party at Dictator Ceaușescu's hunting lodge.

These narratives don't appear to be connected at first. Constantin escapes from the Orwellian "investigation" he's performing to instructions from...well...Securitate (the secret police)? who can be sure, they're very secretive these secret police never doing anything directly that Constantin's seen just by innuendo and "they said"-style rumors. He writes fairy tales for his much-loved son Sandu. The fairy tales are so completely adorable and so trenchant that I want illustrated books of them!

Sandu's story-lessons in how things really are in the world are all so trenchant and targeted that they become our primary means to follow the backgrounded collapse of the Ceaușescu regime. It's a clever and enjoyable way to tell me a larger story behind the story I'm paying attention to. More violent vicious deaths occur that Constantin feels he needs to escape from absorbing, as he turns to creating stories about an astronaut (not the Party-approved term "cosmonaut" please note) to make up in his mind for the nonsensical stories titillating the people about bear attacks with escape from Earth's surly bonds entirely.

Lia's absolute unwillingness to dim down her search for color, for life, in her country and her school leads her into a dangerous association with a real honest to goodness rebel. It's something she puts her whole heart into, this small role in a small eddy of the current of rebellion in 1989 Romania, leading her into a dangerous conflict with a Party official's daughter in her school. She is clearly, obviously the winner of a contest that girl was supposed to win..."he's at the top of the page, the bravest explorer of all. She gives him a light blue helmet and matching spacesuit, and he's smiling through the visor. Why the smile? Because he has just realized that the view from the outer space is like being deep inside a Christmas tree, and he is never afraid. Lia smiles back at him. She names the drawing, flattening the black letters across the surface of the sun, 'Astronaut!'"...whose prize was a face-to-face with Ceaușescu himself. Special classes, intensive training, the usual efforts to make sure no tinge of reality can intrude on the leader's dreamworld.

Lia and her family figure in Constantin's investigation...the part without the bear story in it...and as Lia's meeting with Ceaușescu draws closer, more and more strands of story logic bind them together. We discover Constantin's dark, painful secret; we watch Lia as she draws closer to murderous scum without feeling the appropriate level of fear; we are *frantic* to save whomever we can from the explosion looming.

It's a novel with a satisfying resolution. I will say nothing of the ending.

"We've grown numb. It's like this, kid: in wars, you have to face guns and cannons and soldiers, and the situation is somehow so obviously serious that we mobilise our courage, and our will, and so on. But here, we are supposed to be heroic at our kitchen table, at the factory, on the bus. We are supposed to risk terrible consequences just for saying some perfectly commonsense thing. It never seems worth it."

{Lia}'s pretending to listen, but really she's thinking how lucky she is Comrade Mantea is her friend. He talks complete gibberish but it never feels like he's lying to her. He's nice to her, and he has ideas, not only about grown-up problems but about everyone's problems.

Don't kid yourself: Oana Aristide will show you a mirror, she will shine a harsh raking light on you while she does it.

But she sees everyone's problems in the unflattering shadows.

ADA, latest fascinating idea made into a story by the eminent funny intellectual Mark Haber

ADA
MARK HABER
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 5 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: From “one of the most rigorous and serious—and anachronistic—novelists working today” (The Washington Post) comes a raucous new tale plumbing the depths of ego and ardor.

In a remote country in Europe, Gerard Desacroux IX, petty tyrant and French nationalist, wants nothing more than to be reunited with Ada, the object of his desire ever since their brief fling in Paris years before. Though Ada is on her way to visit, there are the unfortunate matters of civil unrest, assassination attempts, and Ada’s affluent (and highly inconvenient) husband to contend with before bliss is attained. Despite it all, Desacroux IX is determined that nothing—neither war, nor ominous weather, nor the rising swell of indignant peasants—shall stand between him and Ada.

Told with Mark Haber’s trademark exuberant absurdity, Ada is a comedy about the mania of power, unrequited love, and the solitude of authority.

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

My Review: Berchtesgaden. Are you even serious right now. Berchtesgaden! And Desacroux being shoved out of Paris because of THE Revolution, being scion of a lineage of disgusting fascist scum! Readerly nose, meet authorial fist.

And it *barely* takes him a hundred pages to whomp up this recipe for tart-tongued satire of entitlement. It's a fast-moving read, it doesn't have digressions or discursions to slow Desacroux's millrace of thoughts as he settles into Berchtesgaden (seriously, follow the link above...it makes this read exquisitely funny!) with the intent to claim what is not his for purposes malign and bland at the same time. It goes...not well, really for anyone but most definitely hastens Desacroux's comeuppance.

At every turn, he's hemmed in, he lives in a tine, muddy place of no significance after being thrown off the world stage for utter incompetence and uselessness. Desacroux paces in circles around his "Great" Room, abusing and being abused by Hans the sole servant; when the people rise against him, he retreats into the Sword Closet, an even smaller space than the "Great" Room, one with the trappings of power all around him...and he never grasps a single one, relying on isolation to "protect" him from consequences from his real-world abuses of power. Trapped with the trappings of power, weapons he does not have the skill or the wit to wield, fearful and waspish with it, utterly determined to possess *some*thing so he chooses a woman.

Reliably a safe choice for controlling men throughout history. It's here I got to thinking about Ada, or Ardor, Nabokov's longest work of fiction with its alternative world that so deftly, so lovingly, dissects the loss of the illusion of power by dwelling on its exterior trappings; both puissance, and intimate power are lost, misused, made into glue-traps of self-delusion and narcissism. The title, obviously, is a source of my mental leap from a short satire to a long and complicated exploration of similar themes. The sound of the word "Ada" is important in both works, but I don't think it's ever obvious they're related. Maybe they aren't, in Author Haber's purposeful use of brevity, more than coincidentally resonant and then only in my fevered head. Though I'll counsel anyone who starts this read and feels like abandoning it to read it aloud to youself for a page or two: This is performative language, meant to be performed, to be inhabited like its not-quite-our reality. Make the sounds, speak the vision into your world. It will change your experience for the better. (I do this with Nabokov's prose, too.)

It did make my propulsive experience of this single paragraph of a read more piquant, so I hope it was really in Author Haber's mind nit solely mine. The fate of each Ada, and her illicit suitor, is oddly enough not the real point of the story. It ends not with a bang but a whimper, like most people's lives do without regard to their egocentric self-aggrandizement. It's here that I dock my tenth of a star from a perfect five. Desacroux clearly believes he is fated for the ending of a Great Man, and nothing short of that is an ending. *I* think he deserves to be beaten almost to death, then thrown into a muddy ditch to drown while dying of thirst: "...the importance of literature and books, not the books themselves, I’ve said, quite frankly books bore me, but the presence of books is vital, because the absence of books is quite disastrous, the proximity of books, the symbolic importance of owning books, cannot be overstated, and having books around, read or not, speaks to the intellectual vigor and peerless ambitions of their owner," and "...my grandfather stupidly, ridiculously, decided not only to purchase books and collect books and surround himself with books, which, as I’ve already said, is fine and good, but also to read them, the fool!"

Off with his authorial head, I say in my Red Queen voice, for even crafting these sentences! For sinful wicked shame on you, Haber!

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

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

Rating: 4.5* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 4.9* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 4.25* of five

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

You always wanted magic to be real.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COUNTRY PEOPLE, latest Daniel Mason book after North Woods

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

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I myownself wasn't terribly excited by the cast.

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

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

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

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

WE WERE FORBIDDEN, feminist author at her tendentious best

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

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending July 14, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endlessly.

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

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

Existing fans are in for a treat.

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

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

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 4.75* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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