JOHN BERGER: From Life, and what a life it was!

JOHN BERGER: From Life
TOM OVERTON
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A magisterial biography of novelist and critic John Berger, whose work—including Ways of Seeing and the Booker-prize winning G.—revolutionized the critical tradition in the twentieth century

John Berger (1926–2017) served in Britain’s wartime army before attending art school. The young artist became a critic and broadcaster, cutting a swathe through the staid world of post-war Britain, demanding political engagement in all things. In 1972, he came to prominence with Ways of Seeing, a TV series and book that inspired generations to look more closely and think more deeply about art.

Committed to the passionate exploration of life in all its forms, unbounded by convention, he applied himself to a panoply of genres, media, and subjects. His career defies definition. His work reimagined the relationship between art and society; human and animal; living and dead. He charted the disappearance of peasants from the world; documented migrant labour; explored the AIDS crisis; and was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s, as he was to the War on Terror that followed. Berger was deeply and vocally committed to the Palestinian cause.

Through working on Berger’s archive at the British Library and fifteen years of getting to know his family, friends, lovers, and collaborators, Tom Overton has produced a portrait of an artist and storyteller who defined and transcended his times.

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

My Review: First, read this:

You lived through enough zeits for there to be many geists.Ways of Seeing is part of a moment of experiment with televisual equipment all around the world, from The Hour of the Furnaces in Argentina, Nam June Paik in America, to Harun Farocki and Cristina Perincioli in Germany. Not experiments your producer...remembered knowing anything about.

A friend writing his friend's biography either is wielding one of the Long Knives in anticipation of the famously horrible Night of them returning, or is barely stopping short of a public act of fellation. The staccato rhythm of the above sentence supports either interpretation in its sibylline recounting of Berger's wide field of cultural vision.

Considering how many, many, many coital acts are presented as factual in this extended celebration of the interesting and salacious life of a man who thought deeply and was very willing to detail the trails his thought had brought him down. An artist, a Booker-winning novelist, a public intellectual with a strong leftist bent...he created the riposte to Kenneth Clark's deeply conservative and Eurocentric Civilisation, Ways of Seeing, in the same year he won the Booker...a career highlight for anyone, even a wunderkind polymath who never left the cultural radar after exhibiting paintings in the post-War gallery scene of London until his death as a grand old man of Culture in France in 2017.

Author Overton has worked on and with Berger, his children, and his archives on multiple fronts. It's expertise one feels as the story of John Berger, polymath and bounder, unspools. His 1972 Booker acceptance speech...well...what a moment. It's a master class in how to make a statement as a principled person, while using the system's kindness against its failings and cruelties to others. As one would expect, there are illustrations, though goodness knows there could be an entire photo essay on John Berger's œuvre.

I hope a few of y'all, who have not heard of Berger before, will discover him; and the rest of us who remenber some bits and fragments of his art(s) career will gain insight and context on him, on how he came to think, and what he came to mean to a world that had then and has now a limited attention span for those who don't think outside the box.

They disassemble it, reuse the best bits, and chuck aside the dross with both hands.

THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT: A Memoir of Three Loves, more from Hepola post-Blackout

THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT: A Memoir of Three Loves
SARAH HEPOLA
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The New York Times bestselling author of Blackout excavates the romantic entanglements that defined her adulthood—an electrifying and unflinching account of the ways we choose love, it chooses us, and how those choices build a life.

“I’m scared I only want what I can’t have,” I said.

“Oh baby,” he said. “It’s the only thing there is to want.”

Sarah Hepola wanted so much: a big career; travel and adventure; deep relationships; passion. Having realized so many of those desires, she also grieved the ways her life was not what she’d always imagined it would be. Did I want too much, she wondered. Did I make the wrong choices? Love the wrong people?

In The Only Thing There Is To Want, Hepola revisits three complicated love affairs from her past, seeking to understand how they might have kept her from the life she’d envisioned, but also made her who she is. Examining her own decisions, Hepola probes the question: Is love ever really a choice?

This dazzling portrait of the mirages of modern romance captures the paradox of desire: wanting propels us forward and holds us back. Funny, achingly tender, and fearlessly intimate, The Only Thing There Is to Want is about discovering the beauty in the life you’ve built.

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My Review: "Is love ever really a choice?", the synopsis poses.

No.

That's it then, we're done here, no further questions your honor.

You're the same person sober as you are drunk only masking better. Author Hepola is candid about her love for these men being...ill-considered...but without insobriety to blame for them, she sits with the uncomfortable reality that she makes questionable choices. It's a major moment in an adult's life. Face up, take stock, look carefully at what you are actually doing not the story you tell yourself about what you're actually doing...it can never be simple when the subject is as primal as Love. The stories are simple, we need that to make sense of the wildness of Love.

But go into it, make that fearless and searching inventory of you life, the story crumbles and with it the wall between your Self and your illusions, the stories you tell to yourself about yourself. Like the ones about too-young guys who need you, married guys who want you, and remote guys you want.

It's all there, it's all totally relatable, it's not one bit more romanticized or disingenuously justified than anyone else's baggage; it's a good idea, do it in public so you can't hide from the consequences. Someone out there *needs* to read this book, to know they are not alone or even unusual.

Well-aimed at a market that will not shrink any time soon, presented in a very unflattering warts-and-all top light, it is indeed a book many will need. I don't think I'm one of them because I've been in therapy for, like, ever and these are the techniques of being in a theraputic collaboration.

I hope multitudes feel drawn to Author Hepola's story of how Love deceived her, and I don't mean the men she loved I mean the emotion Love...leading her into emotional traps, through strength-sapping swamps of self-pity, through the powerfully seductive pitfalls of main-character syndrome. (It might not be in the DSM yet but it will be.)

Love powers the world, we're told. but no one extends the analogy to how power is made: burning irreplaceable resources and polluting the planet in ever-more toxic ways, or using rare commodities that can fuel your power generation at the cost of massively dangerous leavings that can kill for generations. Only very rarely have people used renewable, ever-cheaper, and limitless ways of making power.

Time to switch to renewables, though at huge cost, for all our power needs. Love perhaps most urgently of all.

THE RADIANCE, involving autofiction from Ayad Akhtar

THE RADIANCE
AYAD AKHTAR
S&S/Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s most daring work yet—a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture.

When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.

Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it—asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.

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

My Review: Autofiction as I've experienced it has usually fallen just a bit flat. It's a close, close relative, a fraternal twin to the roman à clef, as even Wikipedia tells the enterprising reader in search of a reason for all these damned labels slapped onto stories:

In autofiction, an author may decide to recount their life in the third person, modify significant details and characters, or use invented subplots and imagined scenarios with real-life characters in service of an accurately portrayed self within the narrative. In this way, autofiction largely resembles roman à clef literature, though autofiction typically acknowledges its depiction of the author's real life. {It also shares similarities with faction, a genre devised by Truman Capote to describe his work of narrative nonfiction In Cold Blood I included this because I suspect almost 100% of my readers have read that book}.

I think this read is better categorized as a roman à clef because I, not in Author Akhtar's circle, get the idea of the story and the point of telling it, but feel an empty place where SOMEthing should go...likely a name or names to tell me what is not being said.

It's not being said quite richly, in a finely textured presentation giving we-the-reader subtle and elegant extra clues to Book-Akhtar's emotional and psychic well-being or loss of same. Book-Akhtar's libido is gone post-accident, allowing him the quieter inner life needed to experience "inner transports," less base than mere orgasms. When driving to the college campus where he teaches, his "body seemed to extend beyond itself...as if it were enlarged." Quite a reward for losing one's erections, no? Now, though, he's trying to convey the "wordless magic" of this new self—eventually formally diagnosed as "post-traumatic neuropsychiatric syndrome," utterly new to me as a real diagnosis and, honestly, one I think opens up real possibilities for contextualizing PTSD.

Author Akhtar is a fascinating Asian-American creative and educator, a blend of inheritances from training to family to generational standing, all altered with finality by the awful hate crime that he's subjected to and wrestles control over by means of this book. I'm intrigued by all the most American things about him being used as fuel for hatred of a stranger: a thriver and a striver, he is the object of intended to be murderous rage. It's deeply poignant that one result of the crime is to deprive him of his libido—that essential quality needed to survive, to thrive as a human. It wasn't a planned thing, it can't be, but it was a cruel blow indeed.

In his messy personal life Book-Akhtar subjects himself to consequences after the investigation into the crime begins that are...it's a bad time to be individualistic, let's say, in academia as well as in the wider world. Lots of vectors for judgment, few of them justifiable. I'm more outraged at the intrusiveness of the modern surveillance methods available than I am about someone's private peccadillos. In the assembling of any lynch mob, the distorted version of facts plays a key role...and the said facts are much easier to access than ever today.

I'm not sure where the facts are massaged, that's the point of autofiction after all, but these outrage merchants who are trained to expostulate at the drop of a hat get very wearying. It is a story we're living through the development of in this century; it has, in this novel, therefore to seek an ending in its end. It has neither, which is why I'm giving it four stars; the point of reading a story that is still developing is to trade the satisfaction of an ending for a slice through the layer cake that is a modern academic/creative's life...to get to know the emotional landscape of a developing character.

Young Werther, anyone?

HELEN OF NOWHERE, inexplicably longlisted for the Booker

HELEN OF NOWHERE
MAKENNA GOODMAN
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending October 13, 2026

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the “brilliantly complex” (Jenny Offill) author of The Shame comes an electrifying dive into one man’s fractured psyche as he searches for a new life.

Taking place over the course of one day, Helen of Nowhere introduces an intimate cast: an unnamed man at the end of both his career and marriage, a young realtor showing him an idyllic house in the countryside, and Helen, the mystifying former owner whose spectral presence seems to imbue the house’s every grain of wood. Through stories of the remarkable woman, the man is presented with an alternate way of life. But, as evening fades into black, the specifics of how to live it become more than what he bargained for.

Philosophically adventurous, strange, and fascinating, Helen of Nowhere examines the structures that form our identity, staring the reader down to ask the haunting question: What is the cost of true happiness?

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

My Review: Well...there hadda be one full-on flop among the Booker reads. I'm delighted to say I did not buy this inexplicably longlisted book; it was vouchsafed me. In a shock twist I *forgot* I got the DRC despite having opened the file, bookmarked a spot with no note as to why, and then checked it out of my branch because...I totally forgot I'd ever received it.

::cue ominous theremin music::

So here's the first bit:

Act I, Man

I think it’s okay to tell a woman she’s beautiful once a year. Any more than that and her life will be about being beautiful, entirely. Anything less and she’ll feel a lack of love and attention. My wife always said I never told her she was beautiful enough. But like I said, I don’t think it’s good for women.

Someone told me that life is a collection of details you choose to pay attention to. Most of my life has been taken up by my work, but since my work has always been about observing nature, I consider my life’s work all about paying attention. This is what I told my students: The world is to be observed, and observing for its own sake is a life worth living.

The house, for example, was warm, despite its being unfurnished, with simple wooden features and beams containing echo strokes of a handheld chisel. There was a built-in couch with a dark blue fabric cushion, its edges sewn by hand, somehow both right-angled and arched in a crescent shape. Beside it, an ornate cast iron wood stove. The windows were large, single-paned. There was a piece of upright wood in the corner, a gnarled tree or trunk that had been elevated into something sculptural. Besides that, nothing but gleaming, empty space.

I...was not involved, did not care, felt literally nothing.

Ellen, who is one of my longtime LibraryThing friends and with whom I share a lot of literary opinions, said it best: *shrug*

Man, the MC, gives off zero Main Character Energy, which I guess we all know is meant to de-emphasize the phallocentric "Big Dick Energy" it replaced in pop culture. This guy's a cuck, and boring with it which is unforgivable. The clue I was not going to resonate with the read came when I was searching other opinions to see why anyone on the Booker committee noticed this in the first place: It's A Christmas Carol made feminist, built around either archetypes or stereotypes depending on how positive you're feeling about the retelling but not realistic characters. I don't happen to think Dickens did his best work on the Cratchits so no shade cast.

Sound dreary? It was. I'm no fan of Dickens, I'm not hugely impressed by reimaginings as a class of literary endeavor, so the headwinds began to make sense. Maybe if I *loooved* A Christmas Carol...? But instead I have a true cuck Ebenezer, a Present in the too-chatty Realtor, Past in the eponymous Helen of Nowhere, whose stage presence is the most interesting, and Wife as Man's diminished Future. I found nothing compelling in them, I wanted the under-150pp to be over before it was, and most damningly,did not remember I'd read the story at all.

So, on the whole: Glad it wasn't on the shortlist.

MAY WE FEED THE KING, Booker-shortlisted poet's novel

MAY WE FEED THE KING
REBECCA PERRY
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending October 27, 2026

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Winner will be announced on 9 November.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur.

He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn't long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead.

May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.

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

My Review: A poet penning a literary novel about an unnamed museum curator grieving an unstated loss while she is engaged in a project that reimagines the physical world of an unnamed surprise king in his unnamed palace on its 750th anniversary of foundation and use.

I have been deciphering archives and curating semi-permanent scenes (domestic, culinary and otherwise) in medieval buildings for the past twenty-two years. When you see a replica feast scene in the great hall of an old building, I am the person who placed the pomegranates beside the pie, and for a very good reason. When you come upon a room, cordoned off with red rope, beyond which you see an open book on a desk, a chunk of bread picked hollow, and a quill in an ink pot that is empty of ink, I am telling you something about the person who lives in that room. The ink may be purple, and even though no one can see it in the straightforward sense, one in a thousand people will sense it. Ultimately, I want my work to communicate with everyone, but it is those people I really hold in my mind.

Sounds drearily precious, like a poem, like all the pit-sniffing Literary Novels we're subextually told us mouth-breathers are too dullwitted to Appreciate, no?

No. And no one is more surprised than me. I was interested in reading the story because, well, Booker snobbery is the honest way to say it. (I'm still salty that US Anglophone authors are now eligible for what was explicitly a Commonwealth storytelling prize...twelve years and not over it yet.) As the story unfolds in past and present, the real reason I kept going and going hit me...I'm a sucker for the hyperfixated, the deep-focusing narrow-vision-having wonks of History. It's endlessly interesting to me that someone could get this interested in creating an immersive experience for a modern audience of small size centering the medieval world of a minor, forgotten royal. Just to conceive of it is interesting abd then to sell the idea, to research the minutiae, to think through the problems inherent in the process...yep, I'm in!

Of course what's driving our curator to the bizarre lengths has to be very, very painful, very overwhelming to demand this depth of avoidance; it's a good decision for Author Perry to leave it imprecise, unfocused because specificity ruins relatability. I've been that deep in grief so I suppose there's more than a little fellow feeling driving my interest. I get in a visceral way the desire to lose one's hurting self in an all-absorbing, unrelated subject that can't trigger hurting memories or aching similarities that will fuel the downward spiral: "There’s something that can happen when I am embarking on a project on the scale of the work at the palace, and so heavily focused on food scenes: my appetite sours, and real food becomes some-thing of a threat. I can’t be sure if it is becoming more or less real, too much itself, too vivid, or something altogether different. Whatever, it makes me not want to eat."

Probably the short chapters Author Perry alternates between present and past are going to annoy some readers enough to cause comment from them. I'd like to offer an alternative to the annoyed noises by saying that mosaics are made of tesserae that look like nothing while the artist is assembling them to a pattern they alone see entire. But the pieces that look so unlikely, so unimportant, are integral to a whole we need patience to experience as intended: "One evening on the way home from the palace—after a full day in the shadow of the archives, where we had sat, the archivist and I, my left biceps pressed against their right, making a double-width human—I stopped in a local bar for a glass of wine.

These are things that I had forgotten how to do, that I had forgotten were possible."

It can enrich the experience of seeing the whole very much to recall the process of being present as it's made. This poetically rich story, a concentrated, allusive work of reckoning with a life's boundaries and endings is the reward a reader will remember and treasure long after the book itself retires to its shelf-bound afterlife.

HOW BRIGHT THE PATH GROWS: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington

HOW BRIGHT THE PATH GROWS: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington
MARCIA CHATELAIN
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Franchise comes the little-known story of the pioneering Black women artists and activists who were seen, but barely heard, at the 1963 March on Washington.

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day's headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”

In How Bright the Path Grows, Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.

How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.

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

My Review: Misogyny and sexism, the Dynamic Duo of millennia of Western (and Eastern...human, it seems) culture, were sadly never challenged in Civil Rights-era activism. Men were, as many of us remember and most of us can see on YouTube, front and center as speakers (thus implicitly leaders) of a march that took a mere twenty-two years from initial proposal by the Pullman Porters Union until it took place in 1963...after a gay guy, Bayard Rustin, and quite some several women (the author chose thirteen) got tired of hearing all the reasons the March couldn't be allowed and started getting it done.

On playing key roles leading and conceiving of the March, then discovering there were to be zero women speakers on the stage with the men, much outrage was unleashed...it's darn good reading, as Author Chatelain crafts voices for these silenced speakers. It was not out of some sense of fairness that the men who spoke were forced, after much recrimination, to allow a few women into the podium to take a speechless bow. It is still shameful, and a significant ding on the lasting legacy of the March, and really brings down my esteem for these men perpetuating the same irrational victimization they were protesting being subjected to.

It was an exciting read to me...felt like I was being let in on a well-kept secret...and I appreciated the Epilogue, with its extended tracking of the thirteen women restored to the spotlight after the the March took place. It's all too common to end an event-focused group biography like this thinking, "...and then what happened to them? what did they do then?" In this work, we get enough information to be certain these extraordinary women didn't go quietly into obscurity, though they are now obscure to the twenty-first century reading public.

I have to mention the author's extensive, broad-based Notes on her sources. There are enough leads for future scholars to pick up the gauntlet against silence Author Chatelain has thrown down in writing this book.

September 2026's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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Laws of Solomon (Martyr Maker #4) by Eriq La Salle

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Redemption isn't given. It's fought for.

After years of violence, Solomon leaves the brutal backdrop of New York and its underworld to find peace in California where he settles for the quiet life of a gardener defined by routine, restraint, and a fragile kind of peace that had alluded him. Having been a former child soldier, mercenary, and hit man, he is determined to put his past behind him. But as violence erupts on the grounds he tends, his hard-won tranquility shatters when he encounters a young boy named Gaby whose life is in danger.

Protecting the child pulls Solomon back into a world he swore he'd buried. As they set out on an unexpected journey, hunted by men who will stop at nothing to get what they want, Solomon must confront not only the threat closing in but the darkness he carries within.

Propulsive and deeply human, Laws of Solomon is a story of redemption, found family, and the cost of choosing compassion in a brutal world. In saving Gaby, Solomon may finally discover whether peace is something a man like him can earn—or something he must sacrifice everything to protect.

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

My Review: The fatherly love Solomon lavishes on the child Gaby is very welcome to see in a literary landscape where men are solely violent and hateful, or redeemed by some woman or another. Solomon's world has only ever been violent so he's redeemed, but by the need to protect and guide a child not his.

Not to say he's non-violent...many readers will love that, but I didn't, and I can't get all the way to a fourth star despite how well-written the story is.

Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $7.99 for an ebook. Tolerant of violence? Go ahead.

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She's a Killer by Kirsten McDougall

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Alice is struggling to find things to care about.

Branded 'smarter than most' at the age of seven, she now works in Enrolments at the local university and spends her time stalking the internet for shoes she can't afford.

Meanwhile, the climate is in crisis and wealthy immigrants are flocking to New Zealand for shelter, stealing land, driving up food prices and taking over.

When Alice meets teenage genius Erika, life suddenly gets a lot more interesting.

But Erika soon reveals a dangerous plan to set things 'right', forcing Alice out of indifference and into action of the most radical kind.

Just what is a slacker to do? Bold and brilliantly bizarre, She’s a Killer is the satirical dystopian cli-fi thriller you never knew you needed. Until now.

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

My Review: Buy it for the new (to me, anyway) coinage of "wealthugees." The rich are taking over beautiful New Zealand and screwing it both up and over, a too-smart-to-be-happy woman's caught up in a scheme to do something permanent about it, and hijinks ensue. Very slowly, but they do ensue.

I'm not over the moon because cli-fi and satire are odd bedfellows, the Māori in the story come across to me as more a white person's vision than real people, and I ran out of patience with Alice before I ran out of book.

Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) needs $14.99 for the openable ebook. In the proper mood....

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Children of wolves: a novel by Lawrence Osborne

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Never fall for your prey....

A thrilling tale of manipulation and deceit about an American private investigator who travels to Turkey to track down the daughter of a wealthy family, unwittingly setting off a sinister plot.

Four children from wealthy families are sent to a strict prestigious boarding school for troubled teenagers. Haunted by the horrors they experience, they vow to disrupt the status quo by all means necessary.

Years later, Tyler is a private investigator with a failing career who has been hired by petrochemical billionaire James Arthur Knight Jr. to find his run-away daughter, Chana. At a seaside hotel in Turkey, he finds Chana lounging with her three wealthy friends and living with a fake name.

Enthralled by Chana’s shyness and elegance, Tyler decides to keep his discovery to himself, accepting Mr. Knight’s payments while feeding him elusive information and partying with Chana and her friends over wine and raki. One night, when Tyler lets slip his relationship with the American consul, Chana lights up with interest and asks if he can orchestrate a meeting.

With a backdrop of of glitzy ex-pat parties, diplomatic galas, and the gritty underworld of Istanbul, Chana conjures a plot involving the consul that sets into motion a dark chain of events.

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

My Review: Glitzy surfaces that sound nice, have interesting shapes, and doesn't do much with them beyond note their surfaces' shine and elaborately describe to color and texture. Tyler's failings are self-inflicted; Chana's rebellion is pique at how her rich dad, a scumbag to be sure, failed to give her *enough* so now she and her buds want to take it away.

It was nicely paced, had a fascinating geopolitical setting that's mostly squandered in travel-magazine puffery, and ultimately ends in sequel bait. It was not a huge success for me.

Summit Books/S & S (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) thinks $12.99 is fair for the book. Library's free....

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Thoughts Be Bloody by Auden Patrick

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A struggling student, a resident golden boy, and the curse that will bring them together: this queer, trans retelling is Hamlet as you’ve never read it before

Exploring classism, identity, and the true meaning of revolution, this dark academia novel is perfect for fans of R. F. Kuang’s Babel

The summer before his sophomore year, Horatio Bithersea walks into the university library to find Carson Hamlett, resident golden boy and master magician, cradling his father’s dead body. Life at Elsinore, one of the most prestigious universities in the secretive magical world, simply goes on when the professor’s death is ruled an accident—despite the mysterious circumstances and the bloody scene.

A year later, Horatio is keeping his head down, attempting to graduate without his out-of-control magic harming his classmates. That changes when the ghost of Hamlett’s father appears and places a curse on Horatio and Hamlett: avenge his death by destroying Elsinore and its heart, lest the ghost robs them of their minds, memories, and their very souls.

Elsinore has given Horatio everything—knowledge of his magical ability, an escape from his abusive family, and freedom to pursue his life as a transgender man—and now he’s to be its doom. As the two uncover more of Elsinore’s secrets, Horatio finds himself becoming more and more ensnared in Hamlett’s dark but charismatic web.

The question is not if Horatio will manage to destroy Elsinore. The question is if Hamlett will destroy him first. This twisty, queer, dark academia is a brand-new take on the questions that haunt Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

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

My Review: To read, or not to read: that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous youthful solipsism, or to take leave from Horatio's roiling inner-sea of troubles, and by opposing the demand to re-tread deepworn paths leading to that ever-stormy inner-sea, end them at bloody last; to die to this endlessly refought battle, finally to sleep through more youthful Sturm und Drang; and by a sleep, to say we end...at least my unwilling awareness of...the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that solipsistic young transmasc Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I read the whole bleedin' thing and I want those hours back.

DAW (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
thinks $15.99 works as a price for the ebook...I disagree.

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Three Hitmen and a Baby (Assassins Anonymous #3) by Rob Hart

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Welcome back to Assassins Anonymous, where family is everything and danger lurks around every corner.

Assassins Anonymous isn't just a weekly recovery meeting for reformed killers—it's also a family.

When Valencia receives troubling news that her brother has gone missing, she wants rush off to LA to find him. But she can’t bring her baby girl, Lucia. Enter the other members of Assassins Anonymous—Mark, Astrid, and Booker, who offer to watch the toddler while she's gone. After all, they're three of the deadliest, most highly skilled people on the planet; what could go wrong?

Turns out, a lot. Shortly after Valencia leaves, Mark is summoned to the lair of Zmeya, a Russian mob boss calling in a deadly favor—she wants him to kill Astrid, his protege and friend. Mark refuses, but Zmeya reveals that she knows the identity of Mark’s ex-girlfriend . . . and his son. Either Astrid goes, or they do.

Meanwhile, Lucia spikes a dangerously high fever, and when Booker and Astrid take her to urgent care, they realize too late, that their fabricated identities are a real liability. Also, they don't know Valencia’s last name, let alone Lucia's. They can hardly blame the staff for calling the NYPD.

Suddenly the splintered group is on the run from both the Russian mob and the police, dodging bad guys and do-gooders while trying to find refuge in a city full of surveillance cameras—all without killing anyone. That is, until Zmeya captures Sara and Bennett, and Mark is ready to throw his sobriety out the window.

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

My Review: I lost steam, lost the thread, lost my sense of humor...SOMEthing happened to reduce my enjoyment of the silliness of this series to a new low. Maybe it's the baby's fever...?

Whatever it was I chuckled a couple times early on then sat stonefaced in front of my Kindle flipping pages with no trace of a smile, no moment of rib-tickling daffy fun I could see on my mental TV screen.

G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requires $14.99 to completely transfer you a reading license that they can revoke at any time, for any reason. At least the library isn't capricious. (see? humorless)

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Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir (tr. Mary Robinette Kowal)

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An Icelandic night may hide secrets and affairs—or even bodies—in this gruesomely cathartic horror thriller from the author of The Night Guest.

Unnur was living a normal, if lonely, life until a black cat showed up at her door.

Trying to do the right thing, Unnur reunites the lost pet with its owner—a young woman named Ásta who is in desperate need of some help. Unnur reluctantly agrees to take in the cat until Ásta is able to care for it again herself.

Soon, Ásta becomes a fixture in Unnur's life and the two form an unlikely friendship. But like a black cat, trouble is tailing Ásta, and Unnur is the only one there when things take a violent turn.

Nothing tests a friendship like blood on your hands.

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

My Review: Dark, horrifying story of how vicious the world is to women, how victimization of women is met by apathy, and how few women step up to help each other in hours of need. Nothing else in this story made me afraid and angry...I was pretty eye-rolly about the "horror" in this story.

At a hair over 150pp, this is a novella which is exactly long enough to spend with dreary, depressing Unnur and ridiculously unintrospective Ásta...about three and a half hours and I was gnawing on my Kindle's case to escape the dreary sadness I was feeling with some microplastic consumption.

Tor Nightfire (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $12.99 for an ebook, but the library's free.

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To Rob a Bank Is an Honor by Lucio Urtubia (tr. Paul Sharkey)

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: For the first time in English, the life story of the revolutionary outlaw who brought Citibank to its knees.

In 1981, Lucio Urtubia received a suitcase full of cash from Citibank executives, handed over the plates he’d used to forge 20 million dollars in traveler’s checks, and walked away a free man. This is the true story of the most famous Robin Hood of the twentieth century, a lifelong anarchist who robbed from the rich to give to liberation struggles the world round.

Born to a poor family in the Basque Country, Urtubia was conscripted into Franco’s army at seventeen, where he began smuggling rations from military stores. In 1954, he fled to exile in Paris, where he learned to work as a mason, laying bricks by day and collaborating with Catalonian anarchists by night. Soon, he was planning bank heists to fund the Spanish struggle, stealing weapons, and masterminding the escape of resistance fighters. Following the uprisings of May 1968, Urtubia opened a printshop, producing political pamphlets while amassing a crew of operatives to counterfeit passports, ID cards, and workers’ paychecks.

By the late 70s, Urtubia hit on the plan that would make him infamous: changing the serial numbers on traveler’s checks and depositing them simultaneously. Citibank’s early global banking system offered the prime target, and checks spread to revolutionary movements in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. “He who robs a thief is a thousand times forgiven,” Urtubia argued. Over decades, Urtubia funneled material support to groups including the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, the Black Panthers in the US, and the ETA Basque separatists.

Told with Urtubia's characteristic warmth and humor, To Rob a Bank Is an Honor collects the adventures and political convictions of this larger-than-life figure of an incendiary era.

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

My Review: Gets into inspiration porn pretty quickly, is 75pp too long, and deals with rebellion in a world that simply does not exist in today's societal panopticon.

OTOH he's got good stories to tell, makes an excellent example of "who robs a thief is a thousand times forgiven," and very clearly does not succumb to the right-wing-encouraged "moral purity" bullshit afflicting leftists for centuries.

AK Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $21.99 for an ebook...I'd make the obvious joke but....

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When the Tamarind Tree Blooms by Elaine Russell

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Geneviève Dubois, half-Lao, half-French, turns eighteen and leaves the French orphanage where she has been trapped for fourteen unhappy years. She is determined to uncover the story of her parents and locate her missing twin brother.

Stepping into the deeply divided world of 1931 French colonial Laos, she finds neither French colonists nor native Lao readily accept her mixed heritage. Even falling in love is fraught with the cultural restrictions of two dissonant societies. Where does she fit in?

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

My Review: Interesting setting, interesting mixed-race woman's PoV in colonial patriarchal cultures (plural), and somehow it never comes together. From the outset I was not clear as to why I was so involved in the story as I read it; when I'd put it down, I'd forget about it. It's a two-year-plus odyssey, my finishing the story.

Yet finish it I did, and without much flipping back to refresh my memory; unusual experience, honestly I just don't get it at all.

Belles Histoires (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $4.99 for an ebook. If the premise interests you, it's not a bad read.

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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

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Warning to the Crocodiles (41%) by António Lobo Antunes (tr. Karen Sotelino)

Rating: 3* of five because there was no reason it should've been this obfuscatory

The Publisher Says: Set in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974, Antonio Lobo Antunes's Warning to the Crocodiles is a fragmented narrative of the violent tensions resulting from major political changes in Portugal.

Told through the memories of four women who spend their days fashioning homemade explosives and participating in the kidnap and torture of communists, the novel details the clandestine activities of an extreme right-wing Salazarist faction resisting the country s new embrace of democracy."

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

My Review: I don't know what's going on here, I'm told there are four narrators and okay that's nice but who are they and why are they helping the men doing these horrible things to decent, upstanding communists anyway? Like, they're men who're bruised by losing but you're going to be better off so what the what is the cheapness of the family treasures causing such gold-plated anxiety about?

It's never been harder to say "No thanks" to a read because I liked the strange, not-ordinary descriptions (that church shadow *shudder*), the way the prose wrapped around itself; but when you don't like these women and you can't tell who's who and there's not one shred of help...ya gotta bail eventually.

Dalkey Archive Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) has a yen for getting $9.95 per ebook.

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Swallows (46%) by Natsuo Kirino (tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda)

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The highly anticipated new novel. When a young single woman in Tokyo decides she’s ready to sell anything—even her womb—to escape the precarity of her life, an agency pairs her with a wealthy couple desperate to have a child. The match seems made in heaven. She even looks a little like the wife. But is anything ever that simple?

Nothing has ever gone right for Riki. She left her boring hometown in Hokkaido, where she worked at a nursing home, for a better life in Tokyo. But as a temp in the big city she has no job security, and barely scrapes by. She eats the same old discount boiled egg for lunch every day, sometimes for dinner, too. Many of her peers have to take on a side hustle just to make ends meet. So when her friend discovers an agency offering a hefty sum for egg donation, both leap at the chance for an interview.

Meanwhile, former ballet star Motoi Kusaoke and his wife, Yuko, have been trying to conceive for years. After trying what feels like every available option, it seems futile—until Motoi dives deep into his research and learns that, while surrogacy is technically illegal in Japan, there is a company that’s found a loophole.

Before long, everyone has an opinion on the from Yuko’s sex-obsessed, asexual best friend, to Motoi’s controlling prima ballerina mother, and even the affable sex-worker-slash-therapist that Riki has been to a couple of times, after she accepted a down-payment to be a surrogate.

Acutely funny and addictively page-turning, Swallows pulls at the seams of society, reassessing our understanding of motherhood, self-worth, bodily autonomy, and class. What does it mean to be “in control”? And can money really buy happiness?

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

My Review: My discomfort reached the breaking point at the end of chapter two, when the ironic distance between Ririko and those around her crystallized into the overarching phoniness of the entire story's relationships being so in-my-face I couldn't unsee it. It could simply be a mood-based dislike of that, it could be there's humor in how it was being done that I simply didn't cotton on to, or it could just be a sea-change in me, away from interest in stories about fa¸ades, is real.

Whatever the source, I'm not continuing reads that lose me, no matter where they do so.

Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $12.99 for the ebook. Read a sample first.

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Fallow (61%) by Sarah Anderson

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Slyly funny and disarmingly tender, Fallow is the story of a young woman who signs up to be the world’s first in-house corporate surrogate, then finds herself caught up in a social experiment of another kind.

Natalie knows one truth: There is no such thing as a good job.

As the clock ticks away at the workplace harassment call center, she tries to ignore the increasing pain in her jaw. She has no dental insurance. She has no skills or ambitions. She has student loans. And, minute by minute, she hears the many ways workers are not just not getting by, but actually getting hustled.

Then, at the blood bank where she sells her plasma, a mysterious flyer leads her to The Company. Natalie turns out to be the perfect candidate for their pilot in-house surrogate. The Company pitches it as an opportunity to help women access greater gender equity, motherhood without maternity leave. Finally, she will be adequately—generously—compensated.

For years, her every need is stacks of healthy meals in the refrigerator of a luxury condo, fitness coaches and nutritionists, around-the-clock healthcare. Between deliveries, she takes time off—no obligations or expectations. For the first time in her life, she is good at her job; for the first time, she feels free.

But just as she’s about to fulfill the terms of her contract, a staffing decision upends everything and drags her deep into another social experiment. There she meets new questions about her future, her freedom, her purpose, and what she can expect from the world.

Woundingly funny and deeply moving, Sarah Anderson’s Fallow is a tender, hilarious, alarmingly real vision of a woman balancing on the knife-edge of capitalism as she comes to realize who she wants to be.

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

My Review: K.M. Szpara's Docile made my skin crawl, with its pharmacologically induced submissiveness as an enforcement of sexual servitude to repay debt. This is, somehow, worse. I was all the way into part three of three when a twist occurred that caused me to mark a character's speech given to Natalie...very amusing name to give her, Author Sarah...and decisevely type "Uncle" and nope out. I can't say why because I hope you will be deeply intrigued by this not-unrealistic end-stage-capitalist cautionary tale of why we need tumbrils, guillotines, and Mme Defarge to recrudesce, and to give it a fair shake.

My breaking point is entirely, idiosyncratically personal so irrelevant to the quality of the book.

FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $14.99 for your ebook passport to capitalist dystopia. Only if it gets me *out*....

MURDER ON THE SACRED RIVER, the TWENTIETH Lady Emily Ashton series mystery

MURDER ON THE SACRED RIVER (Lady Emily Ashton #20)
TASHA ALEXANDER
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this next enthralling mystery in Tasha Alexander’s bestselling series, Lady Emily chases down a killer in India along the misty banks of the sacred river Narmada.

1908: Lady Emily and her husband Colin Hargreaves, along with an eccentric group of English tourists, are vacationing in India at Ahilya Fort, the old home to the Maharaja’s family, when a man is found shot along the Narmada River. Emily and Colin jump into action, but their suspect list is large, including a wonderful spinster and her not-so-wonderful companion; a local doctor; a widow who lives nearby; an English explorer; and an Englishman who now runs a tea plantation near Darjeeling.

1740: Fifteen-year-old Ahilyabai has been married to the son of Malharrao Holkar, the Lord of the Malwa territory, for seven years. Now the time has finally come to produce an heir. But though Ahilya’s in-laws have shown her nothing but kindness, her notoriously-drunken husband remains a mystery to her, having rarely spoken to Ahilya since their wedding as children. Faced with this tortured and distant man, Ahilya’s sense of loyalty is tested as she attempts to balance fulfilling her duty with forging her own destiny. Her decisions will have ripple effects across time—including Lady Emily’s investigation almost two hundred years later.

Lady Emily’s case takes a dramatic turn when a shocking new person arrives at the fort—and when the killer strikes again shortly afterwards, she and Colin must race to uncover the villain’s identity before it’s too late.

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

My Review: So, dual timelines...I did not know when I picked up this series how that was going to remain a feature of the reading experience. At least I've never, not once, felt unsure of which timeline I'm reading.

I confess the whole "sacred river" trope felt bookhorned into the plot. It's more set-dressing than it is integral to the action from my observation, a kind of local color add-on that doesn't sit very well with me when it's so emphasized in the synopsis.

Colin and Lady Emily are exactly as you'd expect them to be, and that's a good thing. Like Peabody and Emerson, they're as British as Bovril and just as unmistakable. The murder victim is the sort of person who they'd cut dead. And, may I say, dead's the exact right way for the creep to be. The interrelationship of the murder to the 1740s timeline bordered on psychometry, and wasn't a bit surprising; but it was absolutely fascinating as a piece of historical knowledge I now treasure possessing.

There was a slight air of didacticism surrounding the proceedings as we-the-reader are quite brusquely led to the conclusions Author Tasha wishes us to reach. It's not as elegantly done as I could wish, but since I agree with her, I'll look past it.

Already a fan? Here's another one to enjoy. Not yet a fan? This is a good place to start. Don't like historical mysteries? Please see a therapist at your earliest opportunity.

FURY IN DEATH, the SIXTY-THIRD In Death series novel featuring Eve Dallas

FURY IN DEATH
J.D. ROBB
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the new crime thriller from the #1 New York Times-bestselling author, Lt. Eve Dallas journeys into the darkness where murder is born…

NYSPD homicide detective Eve Dallas never knows what to expect when she gets word of a body. It could be an elderly man who made the mistake of climbing a ladder in slippery footwear. And the next call could be a wealthy biotech executive beaten to death in his home office—but what was Larry Chu’s mistake?

The victim’s corpse is so mangled and damaged it’s hard to believe a lone, unarmed assailant could have managed it. The killer was clearly unnaturally strong—and smart enough to find a way into Chu’s highly secure building. Most of all, whoever did this was very, very angry.

The excessive violence leads Dallas to conclude that this was a deeply personal act, born of a rage that she can’t excuse but can understand thanks to her own traumatic past. And though the motive seems rooted in heated emotion rather than cold hard cash, she can’t ignore the suspicious bank account in the Cayman Islands, or the shadowy, profit-hungry company Chu worked for. The mystery only grows when it turns out Chu isn’t the only victim—and Dallas will need to tear through one layer of secrecy after another to reveal what lies behind this explosion of fury...

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

My Review: The story starts with a huge spoiler and it's not the perp's identity. It's a weird place to put one of those, Author Robb, and I think rafts of people have been hollerin' at you online.

A very interesting slantwise take on the Luigi Mangione case, with a deeply aggrieved victim deciding on exacting revenge against the corporate scum he once worked for after they cause him irreparable harm. It's terrible to contemplate the events that drove him to take the actions he took.

It's Eve and Delia solving the how part of the crimes, uncovering deeply buried secrets and unearthing the bodies literally everyone in the story would prefer to remain buried if only for decorum's sake...there were *awful* crimes committed in connection to this case.

I'm routinely gruntled by the explicitly anti-capitalist messaging in these stories. It gives me a happy dose of fellow-feeling for the undoubtedly well-off Author Robb to expressly go out of her way to chastise greed that blinds the greedy to morality and common sense, while loving and enjoying a billionaire with that lifestyle because no one's ever said Roarke is an evil rotten-souled bastard.

I'm sure it's just me, but it feels like this is the first time I've heard MacNab's name? Delia and Summerset and that repugnant felid all recrudesce as expected, but MacNab? No bells in my brain so much as clinked still less rang. I got an unnerved frisson, though, about the seemingly eternal housewarming party FINALLY coming home (!) to roost...is Author Robb planning to retire now, after I finally found my way into the series by starting at #40? No fair, if so, and I'll kick off big style if there's no #64 in 2027.

I myownself think you'd do best to start where I did rather than here. It's okay to get this plot early but most of the best fun is dynamics that develop best over time. Start with Obsession in Death, #40, for maximal character and series-story enjoyment.

A COMPLEMENT OF SCOUNDRELS, debut (on several levels) revenge thriller with magical trimmings

A COMPLEMENT OF SCOUNDRELS
S.V. LOCKWOOD
Bindery Books | Kist Reads (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: There are many ways to bring down the man who betrayed you—and Myria Cadessa has thought of them all.

Cracking the Elysius Vault should’ve made Myria the richest thief in all Carintheum. Instead, it shattered her crew and left her rotting in jail while her double-crossing master walked away with everything that should’ve been hers.

But now she’s out, and it’s time to settle the score. Reunite her crew? A pleasure. Steal back everything her erstwhile leader took? And then some. She’ll just need to trick the king of all tricksters, with the law on her heels, and a troublesome new ally whose loyalties seem as conflicted as his feelings for Myria. It’s the most audacious heist she’s ever attempted, but she failed her crew once. This time, she’ll make it right—at any cost.

A Complement of Scoundrels is a bold, raucous journey through the underbelly of an empire where the devil’s rules reign, and morality, loyalty, and friendship are values few can afford. But where there’s a wit, there’s a way—and Myria has plenty of that.

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

My Review: Woman-led cast in The Count of Monte Cristo, among thieves in *London/Oxford, with less romantic pining. I absolutely co-sign each of these changes as an improvement.

Well? What're you waiting for? Go buy one.

Look, I'm annoyed enough that I can't in good conscience deliver the scathing insult-ridden takedown I threatened that guy Kist with, and there's still eyes looking at me like I should say something else only nice. Get him to restart weekly reading updates on YouTube instead of paywalled and we'll talk.

Yeah, yeah, not the author's fault blahblahblah. You want nice? Go find somebody nice, get them to tell you about Author Lockwood's way with banter that takes in-jokes between strangers and gives us chuckles as well as a sharper picture of the speaker's inner workings.

The world of Carintheum is given inner workings as well, and as deftly and eloquently. I'm pretty fussy about magic systems; I'm not naturally drawn to reading about magic because it doesn't exist, like gawd or vampires or mpreg. It's got to be presented, as it is here, in a way that lets me suspend disbelief; Myria's experience of the magic she and her partners in crime encounter a the very beginning of the book totally convinced me this was well thought out, so I relaxed right away. It was trust well placed because I never had any reason to revisit my decision to believe this was in-universe plausible stuff happening. It's a real pleasure to encounter an author whose assured and enjoyable presentation of prose could disarm my long-ago-acquired suspiciousness so fast.

The initial conditions of Myria's life as we join her set the other facet of worldbuilding, the society in which the magic is used, as a sort of pre-Victorian time starting industrialization...just not quite as we did in our rather fallen world. Magic as a harvestable, refineable resource capable of being extracted led to some very interesting consequences indeed...Myria's unique relationship to the resource is a very enjoyably used take on an old fantasy trope, the magically deprived in a magical society. It also explains the source of her betrayal that would otherwise have made me feel a bit cheated, so very well done indeed Author Lockwood for seeing a problem and turning it into an advantage.

The scoobygroup Myria forms also suffer deprivation on account of her betrayal on top of losing trust in her. It's the reason this revenge plot, very much a thriller wearing lace cuffs and expensive shoes, is so firmly rooted in the complex social and societal webbing Author Lockwood presents. The depth of field means the machinations and the interrelationships don't ever flatten out into that dreadful second-rate diagrammed-sentence feeling padding so very common when an author isn't given time, or space on the page, or guidance in choices, to fully realize the basis of their world and its social network. Author Lockwood was very well served in this regard.

So what happened to that vanished quarter star? I'll tell you, old girl: the catchphrasiness, the very real and human tendency of people to settle into mannerisms, wears thin in a book. It's great when the characters themselves bicker and banter about it, as Leo and Myria do from the very start. But reading a novel is being married, deeply in the hip pocket of the characters without the IRL ability to pat the partner's pate just a touch too hard while saying "oh, very amusing, dear," thus earning a respite from the actually cute and endearing behavior that's annoying you right then. I also felt a case of quibbles coming on with Myria's found-family dynamics resolving neatly...having the crew's emotional hurts coming up in different ways at different times would be more like establishing the firm intent to return to Carintheum as I feel positive is the intent in this author's (and more than likely publisher's) mind.

I can't offer a perfect score but I can most certainly see Author Lockwood's ability to wring one out of me is definitely there.

CITY OF SOULS AND SINNERS, second in the House of Devils dark romantasy series

CITY OF SOULS AND SINNERS (House of Devils #2)
KAYLA EDWARDS
Scarlett Press/Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$23.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the sequel to City of Gods and Monsters, Loren Calla and Darien Cassel have settled back into their old routines, grateful that the whirlwind of dangers they’d faced on Kalendae and the weeks leading up to it are now behind them—or so they think.

But Loren soon finds herself caught in a new storm of trouble when the Terran Imperator blackmails her into working for him. There’s only one problem: he expects her to use her magic, and she doesn’t seem to have any of it left. To keep Darien and the other Devils safe, she agrees to everything the imperator asks of her. But the secrets she is forced to keep from Darien, and her involvement with the imperator’s son, threaten to drive her away from Darien in ways she might never recover from…

As Randal Slade’s successor, Darien wants nothing to do with the throne his father once sat in, but the city of Angelthene has other plans. The Magical Protections Unit asks for his help in taking down the illegal arms trade his father once dabbled in, and to do that Darien must claim his place at the top of the tiers of Darkslayers—a crown the other circles are willing to kill to possess. As he spirals deeper into the secrets his father kept, he makes enemies of friends and friends of enemies—and finds himself buried so deep in Angelthene’s underbelly that he is uncertain he’ll ever get out of it. And if that wasn’t enough, Darien fears he is going crazy when he starts to see creatures that only he can see…

Return to Angelthene in City of Souls and Sinners, a gripping, action-packed tale that tackles themes of love and loss, light and darkness, and the battle between good and evil—and what happens when you can’t tell which is which.

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

My Review: I somehow did not notice, or possibly retain, the information that this is #2 in a series...and that it's got child abuse as one of its themes. It's a serious no-go area for me. It is presented to us in flashback, so supposed to be cushioned that way...we know it came out okay since it's been survived.

Nope. I'm seeing the damage, the awful burden the adult carries and not happy to see it in the flashbacks. It's also a cishet romance, moderate steam, so not going to appeal to me there either. (At. All.) So how'd that fourth star appear?

Clocking in at 750ish pages, it should've been a serious effort to connect the worldbuilding dots for someone stating here, yet it wasn't. It's possible I'd be more annoyed at the slower pace if I'd read the first one. As it was it felt as though I was being given a shot at really getting in there, getting the lay of the land. I felt the magic system was a bit fuzzy, but then checked my response because it's book two so shuddupppp. I flipped past the steamy bits, but it's not like that's anyone's *fault* I'm just not the audience. Darien does some world-class yearning for Loren. I'm always happy to see a man presented as unashamedly being in his feelings for someone, and dude's down bad for this (dull to me) woman and not a bit hesitant to say so: "Do you want me on my knees? Do you want me to beg, is that it? Because I will, I’ll crawl for you."

The size of the cast wasn't as much of an issue as I'd thought it would be. I took in the nicely detailed map in the front matter, then hit the dramatis personae that kept going and going...and turns out I kept up fine because there was enough real estate to do a decent amount of character building for most everyone.

It's on the downside, though, that there are as many opportunities as there are for the romantasy reader with a taste for the yearn to get their fix. Five fewer would not make a negative impact on the story itself. I'm also not convinced we needed the urpsome flashbacks about horrific child abuse. Like, at all. I'm admittedly totally outraged by the topic, but even someone who does not have my sensitivity could see the ease with which we-the-reader could get along fine with only dealing with the aftermath would give the same result.

I mean:

"You belong with me." His words were a declaration. A shout out into the universe, a claim that could not be challenged. "No one else. This—" He lifted her left hand to his chest, flattening it right above his heart, his strong pulse thumping under her palm. When he spoke, his eyes burned with passion and intent. "This is yours. From now until the day I die, and every day after, I am yours. Got it?"

Who needs the cruelty?

AMERICAN ELEGY: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America, short hits about touchstones of US culture

AMERICAN ELEGY: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America
ED SIMON
Ig Publishing(non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.75- of five

The Publisher Says: Before there was the United States, there was America. The former is a country, a nation, a geographic reality, but the latter is an idea. Invented more than discovered, “America” signified a revolutionary ideal of freedom, liberty, equality, and justice, what Tom Paine in Common Sense meant when he wrote that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Among the greatest expressions of that faith was the Declaration of Independence with its promise to forge a nation dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American society and culture have always existed within the gulf of our stated aspirations and the actual reality, which has necessitated the forging of prophetic voices from Walt Whitman to Toni Morrison, Herman Melville to James Baldwin. Now, just as we prepare for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the United States is succumbing to authoritarianism and the noxious blood-and-soil nationalism which curses the faith in the universal and indispensable America.

In response to this moment, noted cultural critic Ed Simon offers a rejoinder in American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America. Compiling an assemblage that’s less a canon than a cultural mixtape, Simon presents fifty short chapters that are asynchronously organized works of flash criticism, meant to draw connections across time periods, which each celebrate an aspect of the “America” that’s larger, deeper, and broader than the mere United States. Here the Great American Novel meets the Great American Songbook; sign language converses with the blues; method acting shares the stage with Afrofuturism, and Superman plays baseball. Defining “literature” as broadly as possible, each of the works profiled critiques the status quo and imagines a better world.

As cynical politicians deny the diversity, complexity, and actual beauty of American culture in favor of myths about the nation being made great again, Simon provides not just an elegy, but a challenge and celebration, as well as a repository, an archive, and a call to start over. In the tradition of Gary Wills and Greil Marcus, American Elegy charts a course to a land still undiscovered.

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My Review: The most valuable concept I came out of this read in possession of is how deeply rooted the fallacy of conflating the term "America" with the United States is. This is a project of lessening urgency as Little Vladdy Pu-Pu's stooge squatting in government housing has wrought havoc on the country's international standing. Most places in the world do not respect the US as much as they did between 1940 and 1990.

Viewing the development of the US cultural identity in the short bursts that he does makes this effort at self-justification for "Americanness" a great browser's book. The brevity of the chapters militates against depths of argument or thoroughness of contextualization. It relies instead on the cumulative effect of tendentious, surface-level prose about the Usual Suspects of US culture...Twain, Walt Whitman, Saul Bellow...to achieve it aim of challenging the monomyth of US manifest destiny in matters societal. Kind of an odd choice, its effectiveness relies on we-the-reader agreeing that the touchstones *are* touchstones....

I enjoyed reading the book, though I wonder if it will succeed in its stated aim of acting as a "call to start over." I was not so called, but I'm a curmudgeonly old man who really needs a nap.

THE STRANGERS, autofiction? metafiction? thought-provoking grief-study no matter how you look at it

THE STRANGERS
NAOMI ALDERMAN
Little Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: They came from nowhere, and now they are everywhere.

A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long, trunk-like nose. Suddenly these “mimmoths” are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they’ve come from.

As Alderman negotiates the territory of grief—a place with its own logic and rhythms – the mimmoths spread. From the UK east and west, to the United States, to Russia, to India. They seem harmless, but oddly intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes.

Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to ‘mimmoth psychosis’? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably?

From the award-winning author of the international bestseller, The Power, The Strangers is a thrillingly original and devastatingly moving novel that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human. It’s like nothing you’ll have read before.

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My Review: Grief does very weird things to a person. I'll hold up my hand and admit I've hallucinated (officially) the sound of my thirty-five ears gone belovèd's voice more than once over the years. That one, however, is nothing compared to the mimmoths.

Shared, collective grief powers the mimmoths, of course; no way are fun-sized mammoth-y entities that just...appear...as Naomi Alderman's mother dies, her father's decline speeds up, the planet's climate and civilization's bad-crazy frag-grenade era heat up, just totally unrelated. There is plenty of evidence that Naomi Alderman is not the only one seeing them!

Mass psychosis? Permaybehaps...the mimmoths being widely seen hasn't meant they're easily, or even at all, interacted with, no feedings by humans, no captures (just killings) by humans, nothing tangible except ubiquity. Oh, and lots of (potentially) related effects stemming from being in the vicinity of the mimmoths, healing or spontaneous abortion or death, but SOMEthing momentous occurs to some people (Naomi Alderman included), so of course the conspiracy-theory areas of society have new fodder for old conspiracies and material to make new ones.

Book-Naomi Alderman and Author Naomi Alderman are entwined narratively and intertwined emotionally, as the genesis of the story in mother-loss is real world; the mimmoths and their effects, well...the effects are real, and while I haven't seen a mimmoth I'd love to. What led to Author Naomi Alderman creating this lovely, odd, off-kilter sci-fi memoir is the awfulness of needing a way to work through the random events in a world where the god you thought was yours turns out not to exist and nothing you've thought was real is, in fact, enduringly persistently real, the stuff that god should prevent/ameliorate isn't getting better, and love does not conquer all...but Love persists, endures."Everyone knows the saying: Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

But it's not true. Some things don't kill you but just leave you permanently weaker," as Naomi Alderman muses.

A better way to present the fragmented sensation of living on after the death of a love object but not the love is hard for me to conjure. A mimmoth is real, if not tangible; it affects the world but has no effect on it, like a past, like a dead love; and comes from a silent nowhere without explanation like the Orthodox Jewish god that Naomi Alderman has lost.

It is in blurring the lines separating Author Naomi Alderman's terrible emotional, psychic blows, and the consensus-reality immiseration of end-stage capitalism, that this story's impact is most powerful. Creating, summoning the mimmoths, endowing them with potency of emotional and practical sorts...affect and effect...Author Naomi Alderman makes this a story to be reckoned with. As Author Naomi Alderman processes the profundity of her loss (mostly the loss of possibility, a different, better future) after her mother's death, Naomi Alderman reckons with the world's losses and the loss of the world through her semidivine, partly malign living-but-not mimmoths.

Like every other grief considered I've ever read, this is not a story for its own sake or an entertainment to be enjoyed for a while then largely forgotten. It's not tidy enough for that. Manicured Versailles gardens are not the analogues here, but the designed and controlled wildernesses of Capability Brown. Visibly as different as it's possible to be, yet each is a planned, designed, shaped, undergirded and attention-directing space to be within. Moving through The Strangers will give you the feels a great piece of writing is so good at delivering. Don't expect Versailles, enjoy the wilder, less trammeled world of Capability Brown, and I expect you'll feel amply rewarded.

EDEN AT DAWN, queer love between Palestinian men...nominated for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

EDEN AT DAWN
KARIM KATTAN (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Finalist for the 2026 Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation.

On the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-wrenching love story between two young Palestinian men in a land swept by sandstorms, burdened by occupation, and haunted by spirits.

In the labyrinthine city of Jerusalem, where poets woo their lovers with tales of jinns, lions, and warriors, Isaac and Gabriel pass in the streets, unaware of one another until a fifty-day wind brings enough sand to blot out the heavens. From their first meeting, desire blooms, hesitates, withdraws, and returns in a heady romance recounted by the sky itself, who cranes past rooftops and through windows to glimpse the pair. Defying checkpoints, desert squalls, and blazing heat, Gabriel and Isaac embark on a road trip through Jericho and past the Dead Sea to a storied village in the West Bank—a daring act in a divided country.

Lyrical and languorous, shattering and profound, Eden at Dawn is a feast of love in the midst of war. With this North American debut, lauded author Karim Kattan proves that storytelling is the ultimate act of devotion.

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My Review: As omniscient narrators go, it'd be quite a feat to go bigger than the actual sky itself. I'm impressed at the bold claim Author Kattan stakes with that choice. "I'm telling you about 'forbidden love' from the one PoV that literally everyone on Earth cannot escape from, that sees literally ALL from one or another angle."

I love that the sky sees all, but doesn't always catch little details, like who someone is based on what they look like. Perfect...omniscient, inattentive, fallible, so we-the-reader are never spoonfed too much of the story.

Grace notes like this abound but the entire story centers love between men who live on a patch of Earth where their essential selves are rejected by some people all of the time and all people some of the time...Palestinian, male, queer...SOMEone is mad at you 100% of the time. Love for a man is BAD in this motherland of two religions that shriek their LOVE for ALL MANKIND out of mouths stained red with the blood of the men they've ripped the throats out of for daring to speak their love for each other.

Isaac and Gabriel (you can look up the cultural relevance of choosing those two names yourselves) speak to each other in...heightened...language. They're hella eloquent and very willing to put it on display at the drop of their briefs. A lot of the discussion of their love and their plight taking place in this supernatural, seemingly eternal khamsin felt on-the-nose. A sad truth is, the more eloquent about love, being in love (the genitive case of the verb), the characters wax, the more...artificial...this external obscuration feels. It started out with this being the sky's omniscience failing, but became a labored device as its qualities were belabored.

I was charmed and entertained by the read, I genuinely wanted Gabriel and Isaac to strengthen their loving bond. It was very much about the feels, the emotional frisson, the men's illusions of Love, but that's how the first fifty days of every love affair I've ever had felt, too. I'm sure the read will come across as passionate, fervent, to Anglophones, which is certainly how it ought to be received. I suspect, based on long acquaintance, that there was a great musicality in the original French; I do not know how to explain it better than to say that I heard ringing church bells in the background as I read.

It is a beautiful way to feel, being in love; Love feels marvelous...full of and creating simultaneously marvels, its a drug so potent that it convinces you others will feel its power and accede to Love's demands, willingly.

I think my readers will all be old and scarred enough to know what Life does to love.

But we go back, but we go on, but we love and Love by this means conquer (us) All.