CHOSEN FAMILY: A Novel, Aussie lesbian-led found-family with all its loving flaws

CHOSEN FAMILY: A Novel
MADELEINE GRAY
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An exuberant and irreverently funny novel about one gorgeously messy friendship-feud-unrequited-love-affair set in Sydney across eighteen years.

Nell Argall and Eve Bowman are both brilliant, odd, and friendless. When they meet on the brutal battlefield that is their posh all girls’ high school during their first year there, both their lives are changed forever. From school, to university, to careers, Nell and Eve’s relationship is a life raft that is also a poison apple that is also a Medusan stare, frozen in time.

When the passion, guilt, shame, and joy that perpetually twists and turns between them finally implodes, Nell abruptly walks away, leaving Eve alone at the helm of the gloriously unorthodox family they’ve built with their seven-year-old daughter, Lake. Eve finds herself left wondering: Can the wounds of adolescent betrayal ever really heal? Can we ever really understand what’s going on in someone else’s head? And what’s love got to do, got to do with it?

Written with Gray’s characteristic big-heartedness and dark wit, Chosen Family is a queer modern classic that reminds us again and again that sometimes the most fulfilling and life-saving relationships are the ones that are the hardest to define.

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My Review: Who among us did not think "I'll do it right" when imagining parenthood?

No one does it right.

Kids hate their parents because they lack the perspective to understand what comes with the job of parenting, partnering, sustaining all of this all the time under all conditions in all moods with no meaningful support. This is true of all classes—genders—wealth levels.

You as a parent have one thing under your control: What your kids hate you for. Choose wisely.

Sound impossible? Of course it does, because it is, always was, and insofar as I know anything about humanity, always will be. So we read about how badly others fuck it up, or about how they say they didn't. It's all about getting a hit of fellow feeling that SOMEone is getting wronger than you. A book like this one is an excellent source of that schadenfreude. I might be screwing my kids up but it's got to be better than raising a kid with someone you're in love with but can't tell her or make a move on her to show your love's more than of the mind but only if she's willing but she can't do that so neither can you.

Talk about modeling dysfunction!

It's a story that's very much rooted in urban life, no one in small-town Anglophonia is going to do this; it's a very Australian story because the cultural references root it there...which facet of the story I quite enjoyed, though I'll bet Aussies reading it are wondering how dated/anachronistic (set fifteen or so years ago from when it was published and when I'm reading it) references made into the book. It's thus an advantage to read it in the US, a bit like reading Zazie dans le métro in English is appreciating a classic and in French is "they thought this was funny in 1959?"

Eve, one of our PoV moms, is a student making a good go of intellectualizing the queer experience in endless study and reading. "Look over there!" I kept wanting to shout, pointing at Nell. "A queer person to experimentally test your theories on who's DYING for a chance!!" But the thing about theorizing is that it keeps the messy, smelly reality of bodies at bay. The incredibly messy emotional realities of being human aren't susceptible to the keeping-at-bay delusion for long. Our framing device is Eve writing to Nell after a long estrangement, a letter unsent, atonement unsought; Eve's not a great one for introspection so her missed opportunities are legion whether past or present. Moving among the times of the family's life works well enough as a means of getting us to the story's heart; it's not a technique I love for itself, but Author Gray has the skill to use it well enough that I didn't make scoffing noises and slam the Kindle shut.

If you like Sally Rooney's messy stories about messy people whose love problems are lack of honesty with their communication and a *serious* need to see a therapist, only want it queer and Australian, your story awaits. I think most readers of "contemporary/women's fiction" in the Industry's reductive and condescending marketing terminology will enjoy the experience enough to make it worth their time and treasure. I was glad to see the back of Eve, and that seemed to me to be both the problem with and the explanation of my compulsion to finish the story.

People who are hard to love are no less..possibly more...interesting because of it; but interacting with them IRL is more exhausting than reading about them in doses we-the-reader get to set. Let Author Gray do the heavy lifting of living with the family, and enjoy the way it feels to leave without hurt feelings.

CONFLUENCE, our queer elders show us how they did it in times more dangerous than today

CONFLUENCE
ALEX TURNER with Lucian Childs
Arsenal Pulp Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate, deeply moving queer coming-of-age novel that evokes '50s small-town life and the surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall '60s

In 1956, lonely teenager Teddy is drawn to the water and woods surrounding his small town, where he meets bad boy Wade and becomes overwhelmed by his attraction to him. During the rapturous early period of their friendship, the two range over the area’s mountains and waterways before falling out after high school over Teddy’s sexuality. In the years following their separation, Teddy—now going by Ted—struggles to live openly as a gay man, finding and losing lovers at parties, dance clubs, and cruising spots in a surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall gay Vancouver. He is befriended by a lively crew of eccentrics—a new chosen family—who aid him in finding fulfillment both as a gay man and as an artist. Returning to his hometown nearly a decade later, Ted must decide whether or not to reunite with the one who once meant so much to him: the sexy and mercurial Wade.

Confluence is a collaboration between late author Alex Turner and his husband, Lucian Childs. Drawing on his sixty-year history with his beloved West Coast home, Turner wrote much of this beautifully rendered novel before he passed away in 2019. Childs, an award-winning author himself, completed the work, a novel that is simultaneously poetic, humorous, and exuberantly down to earth.

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My Review: "Exuberant" is a very good word to use with this novel's affect in mind. It's inherent, in a funny way, in the idea of coming of age; it feels a lot harder and more like a chore as you're doing it than the reality from the outside, and later the memory of it, report.

Teddy and Wade, misfits in their small town of origin, do what misfits most often do. They find common cause, they make a mutual defense pact against the world...in this case more like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact than the Kellogg–Briand Pact, one ending when they began a war and the other still in force. Teddy's attraction to Wade is different than the usual alliance of convenience only neither knows it until it's been the glue between them for quite a while.

It's quite a common experience, the different relationships/same people one. As always there's an event that brings out the need to discuss what each feels as adolescence presses its hormonal buttons. Wade, being straight and it being 1956, doesn't respond very kindly or acceptingly towards Teddy, hastening his departure for the big city of Vancouver.

Life, as is its wont, happens; Teddy becomes Ted, a good-looking young queer-about-town exuberantly exploring the joys of sex and the consolations of friendship. It's a story I've read oh so many times, set in a place I've never been but recognize as a cognate with my natal place San Francisco, my coming-of-age place Austin, and my home Manhattan. It's the island of safety in an unsafe world.

That safety, the sense of it being okay to be yourself, is what makes this such a magical read. Its hormonal passages aren't lacking in number or excitement. Its more important idea, though, is the safety to explore the hormonal drives because there's a safe place to do it, albeit still without any legal protection; but a loving group of likeminded people to cushion the fall from the heights of Love and the pangs of loneliness that follow the ends of things. That's honestly more important in the long run.

Of course a novel will always need resolutions to big unresolved threads in a life. Reality doesn't impose such conditions on us. We-the-reader need to know, though, what happened to Wade who stayed behind.

We find out.

It was a pleasure to be with these young gay men in their youth, distant by decades from my own youth and most of a century removed from the present. It is vital to have these words of witness from someone who was there to understand it from the inside, who lived its reality and thought it good to bring those moments to life for us who followed in time. I hope those younger than I am will find those words, realize how similar humans are to each other, how much different their own time is from the story's time and hopefully to find those differences contain mostly improvements.

We live in a time of miracles being commonplace. Appreciating that is a great way to honor those who worked for a world better than their own to come into being.

HOW TO DATE A FANATIC, two halves make a funny-shaped whole

HOW TO DATE A FANATIC
ARUNI KASHYAP
HarperVia (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country's political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.

Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

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My Review: India's right-wing horrible human beings are enough like our US versions that I was stressed for Rohit from the get-go; I was also reminded that au fond, humans are not different anywhere on this globe. The same insatiable desire to control others in every way, the same pressure to conform or else, the same kinds of violent resistance and repression, for reasons only cosmetically different.

The reason I'm not offering perfect ratings and warbles of delight for this clear-sighted takedown of the repression and conformity machine is simple: Dhruv's a bastard. Rohit needs to get over his addiction to an emotionally unavailable man, and that story is *uncomfortably* close to home. It's all on Rohit, of course, Dhruv's uninterest could've been more kindly expressed but that is not incumbent on any of us to come up with in the moment. Rohit losing himself in the pursuit of distraction is deeply relatable. His choices are very interesting to me because they're further evidence of human nature being consistent across cultures.

Where the mess that is the authoritarian horror India lives under (and the US seems to be rushing to emulate) takes hold of the narrative, the second half becomes more a political argument against authoritarianism while backgrounding Rohit's emotional life. The shift in tome is always going to be tricky to navigate; I didn't feel it was all that well handled. I was taken from one focus, on the intimate life and choices of Rohit, into another, the violent and vicious reactionary response of a right-wing regime to gay men.

Both were very involving, though a reader looking for more of the first story might not like being catapulted into the second much. Readers interested in the second stiry might have preferred it to be more than just lightly foreshadowed from the beginning. It's this dichotomy between the (roughly) halves that stalled me out at four stars. There are that many because I really liked and invested in Rohit and his happiness. Sure, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and demand he get on with finding someone who deserves his love. But he really deserves that kind of happy ending. (Other kinds too but permaybehaps on the page in my imagined other story...not this unsteamy one.)

A successful read for all my quibbly niggles, a story I'd enjoy seeing more of, should a follow-on tale eventuate. That ain't the most common end to a review I write about a book that frustrated me!

THE FIRSTS: A History of French Superheroes, fun and relevant and undemanding

THE FIRSTS: A History of French Superheroes
XABI MOLIA (tr. Alexander Hertich)
Dalkey Archive (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The ugly side of superheroes

What if you suddenly had superpowers? What would you do? How would your friends and family react? What would your obligations to society be?

The superheroes’ first missions—combating terrorists or rescuing disaster victims—are a boon to France. Yet while these actions bring the country pride, unity quickly starts to unravel. These superheroes, ultimately, are human. Paparazzi are everywhere. One has an affair with another’s wife. Another questions following the government’s imperialist agenda. Meanwhile the public carps on social media.

Molia takes our fascination with superheroes and adds a cutting portrayal of contemporary social mores to create an entertaining and disturbing work with deep dystopian underpinnings.

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My Review: Remember the 1995 one-hit wonder "(What If God Was) One of Us?" It was a monster hit around the world. Its central question was one I think troubles people; it makes us all wonder why her and not me, why is there such an unfair randomness to divinity, what Greeks explained as someone being a demigod like Achilles or Herakles.

What we now call "superheroes."

In the labyrinth of the human soul, the superhero is tucked into a corner along the same stretch of hallway as the demigod. It's about wanting the anthropomorphic Divine to share more substance with us, not seeing the genuinely miraculous, divine acts of creation we interact with daily: my meds, the ones that keep my blood free of oversupplies of uric acid, the ones that keep mmy heart beating in normal rhythm, the computer I'm typing on, the phone you're reading this on, the software, the microchips...all designed by a human, all manufactured by human-designed machines...miracles surround us, the divine in us engendered them. But we use our miracles profligately. The computer and internet that give us access to the immense body of knowledge that's enabled wonders also gave us social media and streaming news.

I think of the first examples as Divine, the last as what we humans do when our reach exceeds our grasp...or demigods those superheroes come to life. Philosophical 3am maunderings aside, the novel The Firsts uses our overreach to explain our grasp to us. The ordinary people with superpowers are observed, as we all are, and reported on, scrutinized as celebrities are as part of their bargain for our attention. It's not the newest wrinkle in the communal brain, the soap operas that are comic books have pulled this idea out every so often. I'm not blaming or running down the book or its author, no idea is totally new or it would be ignored or rejected. Delivering dystopian stories can't really add a burden of novelty onto the already painful message of self-examination's fruits.

Science fiction's used the media-snippets (notably, prize-baitingly The Sheep Look Up, about fifty-five years old) and for centuries before that epistolary novels (Dracula for one) fake that same sense of immediacy and intimacy of perception, for generations. updating it for newly available tech underlines the basic reality of the human desire to share...willingly or not...our fellows' and our betters' deepest depths. As long as they're glowed up, glossy, and either unthreatening or in some way humiliating to them but never to us.

It's not fresh, then, the format of this story's delivery, and it obeys all these rules. It's French so its reactions to two superheroes' scandalous infidelity is more gleeful in tone than the US puritanical moralizing judgment, but really what we have here is not groundbreaking fiction or social observation or advancement in techniques of writing.

But it's a damn fun day or reading as people, ordinary people, grapple with the tweaked superpowers we all factually possess (you read that list-paragraph above, right?); if you go into this read expecting a good time that's not as demanding of your concentration and thinking as most stories from this publisher are, you can enjoy a well-told tale in a format not new or fresh but well-used in the story's service.

THE BOOK OF THE JAGUAR, alt-hist post-Conquest fantasy

THE BOOK OF THE JAGUAR
VICTOR LADIS SCHULTZ
Fairwood Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The legions of New Serraña have a sacred custom: when a legionnaire falls in battle, a member of their company must bear the body home to the dead soldier’s family. Álbaro Ceynos is the only surviving member of his company. He’d been garrisoned at Presidio Los Primos, known as the realm’s safest assignment, until a fabled monster emerged from legend, crept down from the mountains, and laid waste to the old fortress.

Now, with one horse, one wagon, one sword, and all his slain brethren, Álbaro the bonebearer roams a decaying empire, bringing home his comrades' remains. As he meets an array of mourners who move him to question past choices and future commitments, he’ll reveal how the tragedy unfolded, death by death, and how it is that he yet lives.

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My Review: Survivor guilt meets Odyssey in a fantasy-tweaked New World, one that's in a timeline not much like our own. and yet it's still recognizably the culture of merged Indigenous and Spanish Mexico...a bit like a folded down the long axis sheet of paper is still folded in half, just not what you're used to. I was fascinated.

The Presidio of Lost Souls has been obliterated. As is incumbent on a survivor of a group of soldiers, Álbaro bears his comrades' earthly remains...their bones...back to families that mourn, families that barely notice, families that want Álbaro to bear witness to the fallen man's existence...all the normal responses that accompany a person into their afterlife. It's a tidy way to do both world-building and character development in enough depth to keep we-the-reader invested and interested in both things.

It was a success to me in more ways than the usual following a story. I lost interest in the why of Álbaro's presidio's destruction almost immediately...invisible creatures aren't going to hold my interest for long as objects of folklore. As Álbaro met his companions' families and learned the whys and wherefores of their presence in the Presidio of Lost Souls among the other "slow horses," to use the Apple show as touchstone, I was more and more invested in the cultural landscape he inhabits. The different histories Álbaro learns that conflict with or outright contradict what his companions presented, the ones that minimized troubled pasts and magnified happiness...well, that just plain ol' human nature.

And that's the thing I most enjoyed about this novel. Chapters are episodes, the framing device isn't always as integrated into the chapter's story as I'd expect it to be, but the humanness, the humanity, the humane response of Álbaro to each family, outweighed any niggling nitpicks I could come up with. In my memory, this is a way of experiencing a cultural landscape I did not recognize in a physical landscape I often did. I was always interested in the different families' grief responses. I was always aware that Álbaro was responding to the grief as a kind of atonement. I was always involved in the lives lived, and all too often that's not an investment I can make in other SFnal stories.

It's a fascinating debut in a well-thought-through not-quite-consensus reality. I hope you escape seeking readers will give it your time and treasure.

UNTAMED COAST, historical mystery set in Alaska

UNTAMED COAST
KEVIN C. MORRIS
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A late-night mayday call drives a grieving man to embark on an unexpected journey along the wild Alaskan coast, unraveling a decades-old mystery of stolen gold, missing women, and murder in this atmospheric and propulsive debut novel.

After the loss of his wife, Marconi Franco is content drifting alone on his boat through the isolated waters of Southeast Alaska with no real destination in mind. But when a mysterious distress signal cuts through the static on his radio one sleepless night, Marco feels an overwhelming pull to help the woman whose plea he heard—a pull he can't explain or ignore.

His search for the missing woman draws him to Radioville, an abandoned 1930s communication outpost now decaying on an uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska. There, Marco begins uncovering fragments of a story long a Depression-era theft, a shattered marriage, and a disturbing pattern of disappearances. As he sifts through the past, his own grief starts to mirror the tragedies that echo across decades, and his search draws the attention of someone determined to keep the truth buried.

Told across three evocative timelines—a radio operator in 1938 collecting more than just telegrams, a young woman in the 1980s fighting to survive her abusive husband, and Marco in the present day searching for a voice in the static—Untamed Coast is a story of fierce determination, missed signals, loneliness and connection, and the unseen ripples that reverberate across generations, standing the test of time and the tides.

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My Review: "Marconi Franco" is one of the most nominative-determinist monikers I've run across in fiction. I think Author Morris took a big swing with it, making Marconi the center of the 2017 timeline, and could've whiffed on it very badly...and didn't. That's skill, sure, but even more luck as he's a debut author. I can readily see ten ways he could've fumbled such a "joke" but Marco never becomes a one-liner in a narrative that splits among grieving Marco who misses his late wife Michelle; Anya from 1982, struggling to survive marital abuse in a remote, isolated life fishing with her husbeast; and in 1938, there's gold-struck Joe Baxter in Radioville, a communication outpost who helps isolated prospectors stay alive while scheming how to get rich.

Yes, it's the radio that connects them all. As that oddness in the spacetime continuum plays out, though, Author Morris evokes immersively the bleak, spare beauty of maritime Southern Alaska, allowing readers to really *get* what it is that binds these characters to the life they've each chosen in harsh, unstable conditions.

The mystery of what connects the lives of each character is well-handled. It's always a danger to think in "supernatural" terms, and never moreso than when characters exist in separate timelines. In maritime Southern Alaska, there are a lot of details to survival in a really complicated dance of detailed actions, dangerous situations that have changed very very little in a long time, and thus things in concrete reality that have commonality among Marco, Anya, and Joe. I wouldn't call this a thriller, though there are moments throughout the stories that do indeed cause intense responses; I'd say it's a suspense novel because even in the not-thrilling moments, there are deeply drawn scenes of uneasy peace that feels unlike rest, there are oddball, off-kilter moments that point your attention irresistible *there* and away from *here*...lots of thought went into how to keep your reading finger turning pages.

If no one gives this book to Alan Ritchson's first-look company (he must have one, Reacher's such a success) to develop into a limited series for Prime, it will be a shame. He'd *slay* as Marco. Or Joe, if he prefers. (Not Anya, though.)

FRUITS OF OUR LABOR, very trenchant, very loudly thinking about taboo topics

FRUITS OF OUR LABOR
IAN PATTERSON
Shiraki Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new world is emerging, one parthenogenetic birth at a time.

In a near-future America where women have just achieved asexual reproduction, Samara yearns for freedom from her dying relationship, and a child of her own—fully her own.

As parthenogenetic birth takes hold and the role of men in the survival of the species diminishes, protest and outcry sweep across the nation. Sierra, one of the first “partho babies”, is bullied relentlessly as she grows up and seeks her place in this new pressure cooker of changing gender roles and norms.

And in the aftermath of the “Days of Horror”, a period of violent backlash from displaced men, a professor of history looks back on the rise of PG birth in an attempt to understand the impact of this era of upheaval on the world.

Together, these three converging perspectives tell the story of a profound societal transformation that asks who gets to have autonomy, who gets to write the future, and who that future is for.

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

My Review: What fresh hell is this, Dorothy Parker famously (sort of) said. It's probably a situation that sounds perfect to some, reproducing only yourself; it eliminates some troublesome, destructive friction in society.

Does it? Would it? Could it?

"Maybe it’s evolution, maybe it’s divine influence, but at the end of the day, does it matter? I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t think I’m special at all. I’m just the first woman to figure out she didn’t need a man to have a baby. I bet you we’re all capable of it, of self-birth. And if every woman out there focused on it like I did, I think we’d find our true power. And it would change everything."

It's a novella, under 160pp, and it's told in multiple timelines; pay attention, or who is speaking to you could easily slip away from your awareness. It's well-paced and well-designed to make its points with facts (parthenogenesis is seen in all other lineages, but not mammals, so it's not a stretch to see how it might develop) and conjectures (the Manosphere would have hysterics over this and it's not hard to see how violent the response would likely be to this). As an exploration of an idea this is fascinating. As a summation of the awful state of gender politics, it's chilling. And as a meditation on what is invisible to those in the binary mindset, it's...essentialist. No one transmasc has a viewpoint at all; I'm not surprised, because we're talking about exalting Woman, after all. No one transfem is in the book, either; are these oversights or just biases that permeate culture so deeply they're invisible in this Brave New World of all women?

Can't get to a perfect five, but I can definitely say I think more about these issues of sex-essentialism and gendered violence in this framework. I'm fascinated by every twist and turn in the compact story, and hope y'all will be too.

PRECIOUS CHILDREN...to whom? why?...questions with more answers than I expected

PRECIOUS CHILDREN
MARY G. THOMPSON
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A wealthy family trying to cheat death is overmatched—by a stubborn teenager hiding in a body that looks just like their son. In this taut tale of genetics and entitlement, nature vs. nurture goes horrifically wrong.

Dina Blake’s fourteen-year-old son, Geoff, has just died for the second time. But everything will be okay. The Blake family’s wealth has bought them thousands of clones of each of their children. These children are farmed out to loving families, but with the caveat that the bodies are always available to the Blakes.

After Geoff dies, the Blakes upload their son’s memories into Nathan, who is an unwilling host, desperate to stay with the family who loved him.

Dina’s younger daughter, Di, is terrified because she knows something her parents don’t—the memory transfer doesn’t always go as planned. The Geoff who’s been living with them since his first death isn’t the person her mother thinks he is, and the families of the bodies the Blakes steal aren’t all innocent.

When Geoff returns to life in Nathan’s body, he has to contend with Nathan’s frustrating desire to live and his unexpected ability to fight for his life. For some children to live, others must die. Dina must decide how far she’ll go to protect her children, and Geoff must find out if, and who, he’s willing to kill.

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

My Review: A scathing, unnerving judgment rendered on the Cult of Mother, the repellent entitlement of wealthy people, the absence of ethical consideration in fertility treatment's grey areas...a very modern set of concerns not that often addressed in either fiction or public debate.

There's no guts'n'gore, nothing supernatural, none of the usual markers of horror that do not appeal to me; instead we're immersed in a world where the privileged are able to command the use of the underprivileged as breeding stock for their own children at the expense of children of their own. A take on the same story as Never Let Me Go, the horror of it is more pointed as it's brought to a conflict point the Ishiguro novel never sought...the struggle of one person to survive at the cost of explicit death for another character in the same body.

Dina's one relatable trait is the single, vague qualm she sort-of has about killing an actual person to have her piece-of-work son back. It's sad that it was permitted by Authority to come to this, the entire practice should never have been permitted at all, but at least her repulsive entitlement took a slight ding at this appalling practice at last.

I'm not sure this is the lesson I was meant to take away from the read but it's the one I internalized: There is no way in which privilege does not warp the privileged in very ugly ways. Dina's ambivalence about her willingness to kill someone else's child to get her own back is too little too late for my tolerance; and this is less speculative than it's pretending to be, more prediction of things to come.

Deeply unsettling meditation on the repugnant greed that dominates our world. A read that's stuck in the corners of my mind.

THE EYE OF GOLIATH, Argentine Jekyll-and-Hyde take after the Great War

THE EYE OF GOLIATH
DIEGO MUZZIO (tr. Rahul Bery)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dark, propulsive literary gothic novel that puts a modern twist on Stevenson and Poe, from a thrilling new voice in Latin American horror.

“Impossible to stop reading. It has all the fascinating tension of great literature.” — Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

In this deliriously inventive twist on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Argentine powerhouse Diego Muzzio conjures a haunting story of shattering war trauma and the disturbing proximity of sanity and madness in his English-language debut.

In 1920s Edinburgh, war veteran Dr. Edward Pierce develops experimental therapies to treat mentally ill patients whose cases have been rejected by conventional psychiatry. One night, he receives a visitor who asks him to take on an unusual new patient: David Bradley, an engineer who was sent to inspect the conditions of a lighthouse on a remote island in southern Argentina. The sojourn was a disaster, and he returned completely mute, his body overwhelmed by a single compulsion: to swim and swim, in any environment, to the point of total exhaustion.

Bradley’s fragmentary diary reveals how this rational, disciplined man became the deranged individual brought to the sanatorium. Full of bizarre details and echoes of macabre events, it guides Pierce in his studies of his patients, propelling him into scientific terrain that grows increasingly grotesque.

With an ingenious structure that creates doubling and uncertainty at every turn, The Eye of Goliath is a masterfully tense novel that unites classic gothic atmospheres with disturbingly modern psychological horror.

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

My Review: A lot like seeing the narrative's events in the sweeping beam of the lighthouse that figures so heavily in poor David Bradley's utter unwinding. Pierce tries to tug the strips of anxiety back into overlapping armor-plate relationship as the are in most of us. Pierce's major problem with that technique has been, until now, the Great War's soulless killing machine dehumanizing men in battle.

David Bradley's issue is not the same though his condition, a mind unraveled by inputs beyond the owner's capacity to process and respond to in any adaptive manner, is the same. Compulsions to repetitive action are present in the men not able to build mental spaces that can contain their horror very often resort to obsessive actions to create rituals of safety. Spurious safety is still preferable to the events that left their minds in wreckage. We're vouchsafed access to the diaries Bradley kept at the lighthouse where...something...destroyed his psychological equilibrium; yet neither we nor Pierce, tasked with reversing this damage, know what the heck it was even *with* the diaries.

It's a very good thing the novel is short because that would be really tough to sustain over an Ann Radcliffe-length novel. We're definitely in gothic horror territory here, particularly given Pierce's own responses to everything, but not so deep into it there are ghosties and ghoulies and other accoutrements of gothicness.

It says here.

Ambiguity is always your friend in writing and reading good gothic fiction; don't pin too terribly much of the story to recognizable territory and the reader will do the work for you, will in fact make your story "better" because you love this trope and the author does not so doesn't explicitly use it so your mind fills it in where ambiguity is left. I wish more horror writers saw the utility of that! If you, o writer, are not as weird and twisted as Clive Barker, do what Author Muzzio did: keep it short, leave room for we-the-reader to people the events to our scare levels, and off you go...and so will your readers.

I'm only down a half-star because I found Pierce's entry into the gothic felt forced, felt incompletely integrated into the way the men he's treating's mindset. I don't think my pleasure in the read would've increased had his own psychotic break been more completely explored. It would've added page count without necessarily improving my eerie experience.

Which was, as said above, eerie and satisfying; it was the flipside of the model story's splitting the personality on purpose. It was a very involving, fast read. Psychological-disturbace avoiders, go to the next book on the shelf! Eerie creepy weirdness fanciers, come sit with me by the fireplace.

Maybe we can light a fire.

CROSSING THE WINE-DARK SEA: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, non-fiction from the translation giantess

CROSSING THE WINE-DARK SEA: Journeys Through Ancient Literature
EMILY WILSON
Liveright (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 1 September 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "An enthralling and profoundly relevant book." —Salman Rushdie

"I adored reading these joyful, illuminating, and engrossing journeys through ancient literature." —Madeline Miller

From the most celebrated translator of our time comes a visionary exploration of how translation reshapes and enriches our understanding of the ancient world.

In this sharp and often entertaining tour through antiquity, Emily Wilson—whose renditions of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad have captured a generation’s imagination—explores the complicated terrain of reading and writing about the ancient past. Drawing on twenty years of scholarship and teaching, Wilson explores the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work.

Across chapters that range from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitation of Greek models to contemporary debates over “foreignizing” and “domesticizing” styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender, sexuality, violence, humor, and power complicate our readings of ancient works, and how translation always risks denaturing what is unique and strange about the ancient world.

Brilliant, erudite, and yet accessible to readers with no classical background, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is at once an introduction to the wonders of Greek and Roman literature, a manifesto for the value of translation in a rapidly changing world, and an invitation to encounter ancient cultures anew.

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

My Review: What I expected was more jabbing at Christopher Nolan for his 3.25/4 master's thesis on the subject of "How The Odyssey Reflects the 21st Century's Everlasting Love for Homeric Misogyny." I did not get that. What I did NOT expect was her comparing Aristophanes in translation to Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B in their "WAP" music video by saying "...his linguistic effects depend, like theirs, on the artful manipulation of rhythm and sound in words and imagery."

I seriously doubt her father, eminent Victorianist A.N. Wilson, would approve of his first-born child even knowing what any of that meant...I was, I confess, the mildest bit shocked. (I sat with flycatcher-mouth for five minutes.)

So, well, Author Emily Wilson does not travel by any more conventional a route here, discussing the weird and wonderful (except Lucretius, Satanic forefather of poetical obscurantism *ptooptoo*sign of the horns*) world of ancient imaginations as recorded in their stories than she did when she asked "tell me about a complicated man." And that decision has honestly received far, far more attention that it merited, mostly because it dares to be clear and to express an accurate assessment of the story that follows. I think her honesty in choosing the use of the word "slave" throughout her translation alone gives an excellent reason for the existence of this book.

The ancient world whose literature has made Author Emily's career was so incredibly unlike our own world that it seems to me the term "translation" is too mild, almost dismissive, when applied to the task of explanation and explication it masks. No basic assumptions are shared; no ideas about humanity, about the manner in which the world goes about its work, remains in common. What does remain in common is human nature, human emotions, humanness itself. Language and culture are not the same but the creatures creating them are.

I found the reading experience very illuminating. I will say that someone from the intellectual background, with the education, and leading the professorial life she has, is not going to come across as just folks or someone you'd meet in the canned food aisle of the Walmart. I would be shocked to see her in Walmart, given the scolding she dished out to Nolan for filming his beautiful-looking but brovian story in Western Sahara. Intersectionality is very much on ortholefty lines. I'm not knocking her! I too am more ortholefty than centrist, so yay...but it really shows. Not everyone will like it.

Not everyone should. I want Author Emily's brave new world with its people who are open to seeing the strangeness of the past clearly and honestly and still not Revering, not at all rejecting, its truth, to come to pass. Now I need to read Iliad to see what she does with Achilles and Patroclus.

I have high hopes. Among my higher hopes are that you'll pick up this tendentious work of recontextualization, recentering, and renewal of our human roots.

THE DISAPPEARERS, deeply angering and saddening Booker Prize longlistee

THE DISAPPEARERS
MARLON JAMES
Riverhead Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences.

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica begin rehearsals for a play. Though strangers to one another, they share an inescapable truth: All of them are gay. And they live in a world that refuses to accept them.

One night the men are savagely beaten and one of them is killed. As their bodies heal, the survivors begin to face the hatred and contempt that the violence laid bare. Some try to ignore what happened. Others double down on retribution. Some disappear completely.

In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

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

My Review: Y'all do not know what it means to be at risk of your life for what you do in your bedroom. It's okay with church ladies, sports stars, politicians, dumb fucks on street corners, to insult, threaten, jeer at, and...if there are enough of them...chase and beat you, often enough to death, because of what you do in your bedroom.

It's the reality of being yourself as a queer person. It's not different in the US, only for the most part quieter.

So these 640 pages will come as a illusion-threatening denial-generating surprise to the majority of you. It will cause knee-jerk "no, it's not *that* bad." Yes. It is.

Yes. It is.

This story is based on real events. It should shame every one of you who's made a homophpbic joke, laughed at stories with lisping queens, or any of the other minstrel-sho-with-fags stuff you've seen and heard, because it Others and thus aids in desensitizing murderous idiots. Maybe you didn't mean it to, but it did and it does. I don't think any of you will read this book, so let me tell you what happens:

A bunch of gay guys get together to put on a play that no one is forcing anyone to watch. A gang of those guys who make the jokes you laugh at decide they don't like the fact they're doing this, so they go to the place the rehearsals...not even a public performance...take place, and beat the actors for daring to address the feelings and concerns of people like them before, I remind you, the play that no one is forced to watch unless they choose to so severely one loses his sight.

And one dies.

The remaining six are traumatized.

Because y'all hate people. Who do not ask you to participate in sex, celebrate Otherness, or even make yourselves aware of individual acts of entertainment's existence. "*I* didn't do that" no, but did you ever fail to stop a joke to deride a bigot to interrupt a hate-filled sermon?

No. You did not.

So these eight men lost lives they weren't through living, altered or ended, because no one ever stood up and said "what you do to these men you do also to me" and stood in solidarity at a grocery store, in a meeting, at a dinner party, and said "stop."

Sleep tight.

August 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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The Women in White by Sarah Pekkanen

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The next thriller from #1 bestselling author Sarah Pekkanen combines a decades-old mystery with spine-tingling paranormal elements in this twisty novel of the seen and unseen.

Extrasensory perception.
The Gift.
A Sixth Sense.
Or something else…

In 1964, four remarkable young women at a prestigious university became the subjects of parapsychology experiments by a visionary scientist. On the cusp of a historic breakthrough, the women mysteriously vanished and the program was erased from history.

Decades later, Riley Bell, newly divorced and desperate for a fresh start, accepts a caretaker job for an elderly widow named Betty. Riley steps into a home that is frozen in another era—no microwave, television, or cell phones, and Betty has never heard of the internet.

Why has Betty lived in such profound isolation for so many years, and why does she need Riley now? As the story unfolds across two timelines—Betty’s 1960s era of 5 o’clock martinis and high-stakes experiments, and Riley’s quest to uncover the truth about the missing women—old secrets rise to the surface. And the only way to survive is to confront the mystery that has lingered for sixty years.

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

My Review: It's not you, book, it's me...I am allergic to storylines about parapsychology now. I had no idea this would happen; I've enjoyed stories in this vein fairly recently. I'm really disappointed.

So my rating is only for me, I need to remind muself not to ask for ESP/parapsychology tales anymore ::sad trombone::


St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) will gladly accept $14.99 from you to get the ebook onto your Kindle. I say do it, though without fervor.

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Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy (tr. Jennifer Croft)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: How do you keep a friendship intact, when Alzheimer's has stolen the common ground of language, memory, and experience, that unites you?

In brief, sharply drawn moments, Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations records the gradual loss of a beloved friend, M.L., a disappearance in ways expected (forgotten names, forgotten moments) and painfully surprising (the reversion to a formal, proper Spanish from their previous shared vernacular). There are occasions of wonder, too—M.L. can no longer find the words to say she is dizzy, but can translate that message from Spanish to English, when it's passed along by a friend.

This loss holds Molloy’s sense of herself too—the person she is in relation to M.L. fades as her friend’s memory does. But the writer remains: 'I’m not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there’s nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe.' In 2007, at New York University, she created the MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish, which was the first programme of its kind in the United States.

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

My Review: In under 100pp, the terrifying journey that is dementia is not possible to plumb...only to evoke. It's a quick hit of a terrible drug whose side effects are agonizing.

I did not feel I was particularly drawn in as a short story can do; nor was I afforded insight; nor was I entertained; it was fine sentence-by-sentence writing and image-making but not storytelling.

Charco Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants $15.95 for an ebook. Ask the library to get one.

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This is Amiko, Do You Copy? by Natsuko Imamura (tr. Hitomi Yoshio)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Other people don’t seem to understand Amiko. Whether eating curry rice with her hands at school or peeking through the sliding doors at her mother’s calligraphy class, her curious, exuberant nature mostly meets with confusion.

When her stepmother falls into a depression and her brother begins spending all his time with a motorcycle gang, Amiko is left increasingly alone to navigate a world where she doesn’t quite fit.

Subtle, tender and moving, This is Amiko shows us life through the eyes of a unique, irrepressible, neurodivergent young character.

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

My Review: Very interesting look at Japanese culture through the eyes of a young, naïve girl who is also neurodivergent. It is very much her book, in the manner of the French récit; but I know so little about Japanese culture that much flew above my head.

I can't tell if that is my problem really perceiving Amiko's affect on others, or if it is her naïveté that presents the obstacles to her success communicating with others.

Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) needs $11.99 for you to legally access the ebook. An afternoon's involving if slight reading so do it if you're in that mood.

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January by Sara Gallardo (tr. Frances Riddle, and Maureen Shaughnessy)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A revelatory, pioneering masterpiece about the life, rape, and abortion of a 16-year-old Argentine farmworker—now in English for the very first time

With echoes of Edith Wharton’s Summer, this radical feminist novel broke the silence around abortion to reshape the way women’s bodies and rights were perceived in 20th-century Argentina.

Perfect for readers of Tove Ditlevsen, Annie Ernaux’s Happening, and Claudia Piñeiro’s Elana Knows.

In the sweltering Argentine pampas, all things bow to Nefer. Reeds nod when she digs her heels into her horse, unripe peaches snap and fall as she gallops past. Sickly-sweet air bends, churns in Nefer’s throat.

Nefer measures the distance between her body and the table, and feels something filling her up, turning against her. Her belly swells.

Desperate, Nefer visits a local medicine woman who is known to perform abortions but Nefer becomes too afraid to explain why she is truly there.

She attends confession at church but cannot confide in the priest. During a fierce argument with her mother, she finally blurts out her secret.

A radical feminist text, January was the first Argentine novel to represent rape from the survivor’s perspective and to explore the life-threatening risks pregnancy posed, in a society where abortion was both outlawed and taboo.

With a narcotic musicality and voice scorched through with honesty, Gallardo hangs before us an experience that has been lived and ignored a thousand times over. Nefer closes her eyes. We careen to her and we see.

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

My Review: I quibble with "has been lived and ignored a thousand times over" and would put "billion" in that place. I have not read the Spanish version; I can say the English one might be more...flattened out, unmusical...to me as a man who has a pretty simple idea of how to fix rape: Teach your fucking son to keep it in his pants. "No" means no, "stop" means stop. Do it anyway and we lock you in a room with her family and a baseball bat, whatever's left of you raping bastard after five minutes we arrest or bury as appropriate. No further questions.

Abortion is healthcare, healthcare is a human right.

Archipelago (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges $13.99 for an ebook.

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Black Box: The Memoir That Sparked Japan’s #MeToo Movement by Shiori Ito (tr. Allison Markin Powell)

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The internationally recognized sexual assault memoir that revolutionized a feminist movement around rape, stigma, and silence in Japan.

In 2015, an aspiring young journalist named Shiori Ito charged prominent reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi with rape. After meeting up for drinks and networking, Ito remembers regaining consciousness in a hotel room whilst being assaulted. But when she went to the police, Ito was told that her case was a "black box"—untouchable and unprosecutable.

Upon publication in 2017, Ito’s searing account foregrounded the #MeToo movement in Japan and became the center of an urgent cultural and legal shift around recognizing sexual assault and gender-based violence. As international outlets covered every step of her story—even documenting it in the BBC film Japan’s Secret Shame—this book launched a societal reckoning. At the end of 2019, Ito won a civil case against Yamaguchi.

With careful and quiet fury, Black Box recounts a broken system of repression and violence—but it also heralds the beginning of a new solidarity movement seeking a more equitable path toward justice.

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

My Review: Rape is a disgusting criminal act of bodily and psychological violation; it is the world's most common crime; it's also, for its frequency of occurrence, the least prosecuted because no one wants to believe the victim.

No one believed my mother was raping me, so I relate, Ms. Ito; but your courage while rage-fueled was ultimately what changed the game in Japan. I hope your example continues to inspire victims of rape to come forward in their legions to seek, and receive, justice.

Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) wants a pretty hefty $17.95 for any edition. Be prepared for graphic, horrifying words evoking graphic, horrifying acts.

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Variations on the Body by María Ospina Pizano (tr. Heather Cleary)

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A constellation of short stories illustrate the intersecting lives of women on various peripheries of society in and around Bogotá, Colombia.

In six subtly connected stories, Variations on the Body explores the obsessions, desires, and idiosyncrasies of women and girls from different strata of Colombian society. A former FARC guerilla fighter adjusts to urban life and faces the new violence of an editor co-opting her experiences. A woman adrift in the city she left as a child looks for someone to care for, even if it has to be by force, while another documents a flea infestation with a catalog of the marks on her flesh. A little girl copes with her anxiety about the adult world by exacting revenge on her nanny, who she thinks belongs to her.

Combining humor, heartbreak, and unexpected violence, Ospina constructs a keen reflection on the body as a simultaneous vehicle of connection and alienation in vibrant, gleaming prose.

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

My Review: Six stories in ~127pp that came across like weirdly semi-autonomous chapters in a surreal novel, not quite different enough to be full stories but instead feeling to me as though Author Ospina is re-writing the same idea from different angles.

"When she reached that age of abstract yearnings that concentrate in and cloud the body, not long after she moved to the United States with her parents, Aurora used to scrape the bottom of her yogurt cup in desperation, ashamed of her desire for so much more when it was clear there was nothing left, sensing that her distress meant something else, something wretched and essential she couldn't put into words." It's finely wrought but seemingly undifferentiated from the others. I hope we see more, and more developed, other ideas soon.

Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks for $16.95 for any edition. Need a short read to get into in fits and starts? It's perfect for you.

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So We Look to the Sky: A Novel by Misumi Kubo (tr. Polly Barton)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This shocking, boisterous novel was a runaway bestseller and award winner in Japan

Searingly honest and sexually explicit, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student, Takumi, and a woman ten years his senior. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting a secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, each exploring different aspects of the passages of life and the hardships ordinary people face.

A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high school girl, spurned by Takumi, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; Takumi's best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious, senile grandmother; and Takumi's mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own.

Narrating each story in the distinctive voice of its protagonist, Misumi Kubo weaves themes including sex, love, the female body, gossip, and the bullying that leaves young people feeling burdened and helpless into a profoundly original novel that stays with you for its affirmation of the raw, unstoppable force of life.

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

My Review: I feel a bit dimwitted because I did not get how these stories cohered into a novel at all. Braided stories don't usually flummox me like this; the framing device did not relate to the other stories enough for my old queer's brain to follow its story logic.

However heterosexual I'm not, I did get involved in the events herein and recommend the read to straight people.

Arcade (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) ants what I find a pretty steep $17.95 for the ebook.

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Migratory Birds (Undelivered Lectures series) by Mariana Oliver (tr. Julia Sanches)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sensitive, stunning debut on movement, migration, and loss, in the vein of Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks.

In her prize-winning debut, Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver trains her gaze on migration in its many forms, moving between real cities and other more inaccessible territories: language, memory, pain, desire, and the body. With an abiding curiosity and poetic ease, Oliver leads us through the underground city of Cappadocia, explores the vicissitudes of a Berlin marked by historical fracture, recalls a shocking childhood exodus, and recreates the intimacy of the spaces we inhabit. Blending criticism, reportage, and a travel writing all her own, Oliver presents a brilliant collection of essays that asks us what it means to leave the familiar behind and make the unfamiliar our own.

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

My Review:

"A place at once empty and full, Cappadocia inspires bewilderment. Which is why it is useless to try and take in the landscape with only your eyes. Trees are few and far between and sunlight pours mercilessly onto your skin, drenching it." –and–
A man pilots a yellow ultralight across the sky. His name, Bill, Bill, Bill, is the last thing he hears before his feet take wing. All liftoffs are the same, he thinks, a ritual by which we become birds. As the body rises, the mind blots out all sounds and refashions them one by one, as if they existed in isolation. First heartbeat, then breath, then saliva moistening the throat; then the whoosh of air as the ultralight’s wings break it into a white trail.

Prose like this is...fine. In small doses. I hit my maximum dose before the book was over.


Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) charges you $14.99 for the ebook. I might not be thrilled with it, you might be; at least it's not wasted money.

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In Bad Company (Sandhamn Murders #9) by Viveca Sten (tr. Marlaine Delargy)

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sandhamn Island’s archipelago is a beautiful place to visit. For a mother on the run, it’s the only place to hide in a novel of escalating suspense by Viveca Sten, bestselling author of Still Waters.

Building a case against Andreis Kovač is a risky strategy for prosecutor Nora Linde. A violent key player in Stockholm’s drug trade and untouchable when it comes to financial crimes, he has the best defense money can buy. To topple Andreis’s empire, Nora’s working a different angle. It’s personal. Nora’s critical witness is Andreis’s wife, Mina—if she’ll testify.

Mina has suffered her husband’s rage too long. It’s nearly cost her her life. Still carrying the traumas of the Bosnian War, Andreis can be triggered like an explosive. He must be taken down. And as the trial looms, Mina and her infant son must disappear. The police have found her a safe place to hide on Runmarö Island in Sandhamn’s archipelago. But there’s no shelter from a man as powerful and merciless as Andreis. Especially when he’s being crossed.

His campaign of terror has just begun. He’s prepared to crush anyone who stands in his way: Mina, Nora, and everyone they know and love. Andreis is coming for them. This time, Nora is on the defense.

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

My Review: It's time I left the series behind. I was not involved in this one at all, and after finishing it felt no relief, no regret, nothing at all.

It could be comparison bias after The Camino, it could be Bosnian-War criminal fatigue, it could be I'm just tired of Nora...but poke me with a fork, I'm done.

Amazon Crossing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) requests and requires $14.95 for a paperback.

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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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An Ordinary Violence: A Novel (58%) by Adriana Chartrand

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Terrible things happen side by side with the ordinary.

Dawn hasn't spoken to her brother, Cody, since he was sent to prison for a violent crime seven years ago. But when Dawn's seemingly perfect life in the big city implodes, she is forced to return to her childhood home and the prairie city that still holds so much pain for her and her fractured family. Cody is released from prison with a mysterious new friend by his side, and Dawn must follow increasingly sinister leads to uncover their nefarious plans to access a dangerous supernatural network.

As the lines between right and wrong blur and dissolve, Dawn reckons with trauma and violence, loss and reclamation in an unsettling world where spirit realms entwine with the living—and where it is humans who carry out the truly monstrous acts.

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

My Review: "Maybe that's why Violet talks to her, why she can feel a buzzing sometimes, an insistent mechanical whine from somewhere distant that, if she listened hard enough, might turn ou to be the sound of her name, hissing through a hundred thousand alien throats."
I made it all the way to that line before my experiment with #Summerween blew up. Maybe I need actual fall, leaf-changing pumpkin-carving fall, short-day clock-turning fall, to put me in the mood for spooky shenanigans.

Or maybe this just isn't great and I'm done.

Spiderline/House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link) asks $18.99 for a paperback.

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Accidental Genius: An Oral History of The Room (32%) edited by Andrew J. Rausch

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: Accidental Genius features intimate and laugh-out-loud commentary from The Room cast and crew, including interviews from its star Greg Sestero.

What a story indeed! A rollicking recollection of experiences from the legendary “so bad it's good” film. This comprehensively chronicled book offers a fascinating glimpse into the cultural phenomenon that brings together die-hard fans and newcomers alike.

Everything you could have possibly wondered about The Room all in one book!

Take a look at Tommy Wiseau's infamous 2003 release through the eyes of the people who made it. Get the low-down on bizarre audition calls, film set antics, and accounts from the very first fans who experienced The Room at its earliest screenings. Also including interviews focusing on the aftermath of the movie: Sestero’s The Disaster Artist, where are they now, and its lasting legacy.

Here you will get a glimpse of how it all began, why it remains popular, and just what audiences still get out of this unusual film that people love to hate.

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

My Review: I thought these were essays on the OTHER bad movie, from 2015, but that one's just called Room. The 2003 excrescence these snippets are about was too ghastly to watch so I really didn't...I heckled and jeered. That was kinda fun, I guess, but not enough to read about the reeking shitpile I've tried to forget seeing.

CLASH Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
has the effrontery to ask you to PAY for this! $18.95 no less...any edition...I'd laugh if I wasn't so pissed off at being pissed on by that Wiseau...person.

THE CULTURE OF LIES, last collection of essays I have of Dubravka Ugrešić's to review

THE CULTURE OF LIES
DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ (tr. Celia Hawkesworth)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugrešić's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life.

With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall.

Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded "a traitor" and "a witch" in Croatia.

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

My Review: A collection of very wise, trenchant, and tendentious essays to cap off #WITMonth.

Shifting from Yugoslav nationality to Croatian was not a seamless process for Author Dubravka. A new passport under a new governing entity does not change the passport holder's identity or thought processes or, dangerously, political beliefs. Dissent is even more dangerous in a newly created state struggling to distance itself from the burdensome and ill-fitting imposed identity and ideology. Author Dubravka didn't fit in when Yugoslav was a political state's demonym, but neither did loads of other folk. "Croatian" as a political demonym is new enough that to dissent from the new ruling class is to risk losing the right to use it. This is where Author Dubravka ended up, an ethnic Croat instead of a Croatian citizen.

Labels don't matter much to me in my white US male's privilege. Unless I insist on bringing my Otherness to the fore, I can simply walk around being an "American," a label that makes me wince at its arrogance. Author Dubravka did not exist in that bubble of certainty. Her identity, dissenter, observer, critic, meant her labeling got complicated quickly in the upheavals of Communism's death throes. The wry tone of these works does not foreground a thing I perceive, possibly that I interpolate, the trauma and pain of losing an identity, a building block of selfhood. It's clear the fact of that loss is central to Author Dubravka's work; she does not wallow or lament but rather observes and analyzes. I still feel an edge of strong emotion despite it not being foregrounded.

I know of a writer colleague who claimed to a foreign journalist that he was ‘the victim of repression’ under Yugo-communism, that his books were banned, and that he had been in prison. That colleague was never in prison nor was he ‘the victim of repression’ and all his books were regularly published. I do not believe that he was lying. Exposed to media brainwashing, terror by forgetting and collective compulsion, my colleague had simply forgotten his personal history, he carried out an unconscious mental touching-up, and in the general context the spoken lie became an acceptable truth. And after all, the foreign journalist had come to hear just such a story, in his Westerner’s head he already carried such a stereotype: the story of a repressed writer in the former communist regime and a happy end in the new, democratic one.

It's not a shouted pain, it's a carefully phrased analysis of trauma's aftermath that shows how very painful it was for all to need to re-craft selves when their world ended. New nationalisms, new canons, new ethnic expressions glorified...all processes we undergo in youth and that are painful enough to live through even in that more mentally agile passage of life; as an older, even an old, person...!

I am no one. And everyone. In Croatia I shall be a Serb, in Serbia a Croat, in Bulgaria a Turk, in Turkey a Greek, in Greece a Macedonian, in Macedonia a Bulgarian… Being an ethnic ‘bastard’ or ’schizophrenic’ is my natural choice, I even consider it a sign of mental and moral health. And I know that I am not alone. Violent, stubborn insistence on national identities has provoked a response: today many young citizens of former Yugoslavia, particularly those scattered throughout the world, stubbornly refuse any ethnic labels.

There is a lot to be learned for us in the US on the subject of nationalism and identity in 2026 that a public intellectual from a disintegrating polity can teach us from the 1990s. Author Dubravka felt, though, analyzed, contextualized for us already. I hope more of us will now absorb and appreciate that gift in our own parlous times.

THE DEVOTED, debut family-saga novel set in Hong Kong's criminal Triads

THE DEVOTED
CATHERINE CHO
Washington Square Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In this emotionally transportive literary debut about family and fate, a young Korean woman whose father is a leader in an infamous crime organization becomes entrenched in the dangerous world she once sought to escape.

Raised in Hong Kong by their Korean grandmother in a quiet village, Eunha and her brother Solomon live a sheltered life. Their father is a Dragon Head, a leader within the infamous criminal organization of the Triads. While their beloved grandmother does her best to shield the children from the constant hum of violence and fear that surrounds their father and his world, Eunha only has Solomon and their one permitted companion, a boy named Kai, for company.

But as Eunha grows up and marries into a supposedly respectable Hong Kong family, the veneer of her careful life begins to crack. When her young son is kidnapped, she is cast into the city’s criminal underground and back into the orbit of Kai, now a Dragon Head himself.

Will Eunha finally give in to the life she has strived so hard to rise above or was her future always fated?

The Devoted is at once a sweeping family drama, a moving account of forbidden love, and a story about a woman’s determination to choose her own destiny.

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

My Review: In my experience of this story, the devoted Eunha was the most important person. It's the longest récit on record. It should have been called "Eunha Says" because we're never shown the action but reported it by Eunha.

Interesting as the story of a Korean family of criminals in Hong Kong is, I'd really have liked it to include some other PoVs to give me a more rounded view of the genuinely involving events reported here.

The effect of Eunha telling me this story is that I have only her word that these acts and actions made her feel what I'm told she felt. I'm distant from the action; I'm not much invested in it. I get the point of Eunha being reserved, being non-demonstrative; I'd've felt it more as a character-building choice had I experienced directly at least some of the action either omnisciently or in an unrelated character's PoV. As it is, it's claustrophobic for me.

And what a shame that is! A story I myownself would've loved to get really sunk into, not trapped inside. It's a good story not very well told. I'd read another of Author Cho's works because I get that she's got The Eye℠ but didn't choose the most reader-involving way of telling what it saw this time around.

THE LIPETSK CONSPIRACY: The True Origins of Hitler's Luftwaffe (Tom Munro Aviation and Espionage Series #4), interwar Bonding

THE LIPETSK CONSPIRACY: The True Origins of Hitler's Luftwaffe (Tom Munro Aviation and Espionage Series #4)
WILLIAM FERNIE
Fernie Publishing Ltd (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Before the Luftwaffe terrorised Europe, it was forged in secrecy.

In the uneasy peace before WWII, Captain Tom Munro is flying for Deutsche Luft Hansa when he uncovers a clandestine military airfield hidden deep within Soviet Russia.

Coerced into supporting Germany's secret rearmament programme, he risks his life flying experimental aircraft and developing new, untested operational techniques all prohibited under the Treaty of Versailles. This test flying provides a unique opportunity to gather military intelligence of immense value to the British Secret Intelligence Service.

But Tom knows that he will not be allowed to survive with this vital intelligence and must attempt the impossible: escape with Germany's secrets before he disappears forever.

An interwar aviation/espionage thriller for readers of David Downing, Philip Kerr and Robert Harris.

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

My Review: Tom Munro is a very enjoyable PoV to follow as this based-on-facts thriller of Nazi Germany's preparations for war in the air. The prior three volumes in the series deal with the Great War, the Treaty of Versailles era, and now the period that enables the rise of the Nazi state.

It's a period I'm very interested in, and one that saw gigantic advances inn aeronautical engineering, materials science, and other sciences that are useful in wartime. As always it's the horrors of slaughter that drive change, and the economy's growth, and the terrible Othering of people in no way wrong, bad, or evil as the scum at the top try to justify the war "They" want by manufacturing enemies within and without.

What makes Tom fun to follow is mostly his test-pilot nous. It's fun for me to read about the planes realy being tested, really being studied in this pre-Depression time that has so much hope for a peaceful future that recedes and recedes while Tom and his ilk try to keep it alive. Yet here he is flying violation-of-treaty equipment to a secret base! One in Russia, no less...more serious skulduggery...and consequences for Tom in terms of using spycraft for...good?

Come for the history, stay for the gearhead talk, which you'll need to be getting along with that to be in the full story. I was captivated, you might not be, so be aware the jargon is plentiful and needed to make sense of the Lipetsk Russian airfield subplot. There are many politicosocial developments but they almost all incorporate technology and discussion of same.

There is yearning for his lost, belovèd fellow spy Alice, which is getting a bit wearing if I'm honest. Oh well. One must have a woman in a thriller, she motivates the main man. *sigh*

A complex and very very sensitive matter, Germany's resurgent ambitions and rebounding desire to lead the technological world, and the worries of her very recent opponents all buried in piles of dead people from that stupid war. And an ending to this story that's exactly right. All designed to give this old man reader the happy.

Be ready for the complexities on multiple fronts and it might do the same trick for you.