JUNE/PRIDE MONTH/2Q2026 IN REVIEW

amazing advertising artwork promoting the new Dune movie

It was Pride Month here on my blog. I focused on queer reviewing for the whole month (and a little bit of May). I wrote twenty-eight specific-to-Pride reviews. Twelve of those were June 2026 DRCs (out of twenty June 2026 DRCs reviewed this month, and a slightly appalling SEVENTY-FOUR June DRCs I received. Seriously...one less than my LibraryThing home group's annual goal in one month?! Who do I think I am, Biblio-Terminator?).

I'm torn between The Invention of Nature, a biography of my elder sibling in gay-maleness Alexander von Humboldt, and Medea Sang Me A Corrido as my favorite Pride reads. I thoroughly loved Villain but it was less clearly queer than Hench so got a hair less luuuv from me. The Summer Boy was a lovely read, a story I felt was aimed directly at me; yet it wasn't as energetic, as actively pursuing my attention as my two favorite candidates. I read two Steven Rowley stories, liked both, but...not quite enough to warble my fool lungs out over them. It was a good 2026 Pride crop, one to savor in memory, and makes me very glad I didn't pressure myself with a numerical goal so I didn't fret about "making progress" or other such artificial stricture. I'm labeling this tracking project a successful trial. Maybe I'll aim for a numerical goal in 2027. I have a solid eight months to decide, no rush....

In June overall, I wrote thirty-six reviews. I received a slightly appalling SEVENTY-FOUR June DRCs; thus my reviewed-DRCs percentage is a barely tolerable 48.6%. I'm obviously quite greedy, and a fast reader, but THAT is worrying me. It could be years before I review those generously gifted-to-me books! I must work on my s(h)elf control.

Of the sixteen reviews for not-QUILTBAG books in June, one stands out like a lighthouse in the living room as a "please please pleasepleaseplease read this book": The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow. It's important. Please read it. Get it from your library if you don't want to spend money on it. Just read it. Please. In those sixteen non-QUILTBAG reviews there were no fictions that I found terribly exciting. The crappiest book I read in June was Puck, and I am not kidding when I tell you the one I'm talking about here gets lost in one's search-results options because the hockey-romance craze is INSANE! Puck-the-character adapted here from Shakespeare turned me off completely.

So I soldier onward to July, and the third quarter of 2026. I expect to see a dramatic decrease in my blog's engagement because Bluesky no longer allows me to access it through my browser...it insists on being the only thing on my screen, being vertically formatted, and thus unreadable for me. I do not expect them to reverse course so I'll be on their site at most a few times a day. I hate it when tech scum make decisions for me. They *never* get it right. ENSHITTIFICATION is real. Like the way the goddamned motherfucking AI decided I wanted to capitalize "enshittification" when I did not.

The second quarter of 2026 saw me write reviews for 105 books in total, sixty-three in their publishing month. That's out of a total of 171 DRCs received for this quarter, or 37% reviewed in the month they were published and 60% of my total reviews written. I was most eager to read The Violence: My Family's Colombian War because Author Adriana is an old friend's daughter-in-law, who happens to be a very talented writer. It was a great success in the marketplace, and with me. The second of my two current possibilities for 2026's six-stars-of-five read is a non-fiction book for the first time ever: A Bird's IQ: Innovation, Intelligence, and Problem Solving in the Avian World is by Louis Lefebvre and translated from French by Pablo Strauss. It was a surprise to me how much of Author Lefebvre's earlier novel-writing training held over into his non-ficton prose creation without making it feel as though he was book-horning pretty sentences into places they felt brummagem or incongruous.

Overall, I liked non-fiction a lot more than usual this quarter, with some tippy-top reads as well as a true shocker coming from that genre. The shocker was Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living by Peter Jones; self-help's a genre I view with great skepticism based on what "They" tell you it is, ie a way to fix problems. It's much more interesting to me as a barometer reading of the culture's current obsessions, and the average person's most pressing personal fears. This book managed to be a bit of both. That was a pleasant surprise, plus I liked Author Peter Jones's presentation of self.

Looking ahead to July, I'm not going to kid around: I have forty-two DRCs of July-date reads unreviewed out of forty-three received (as of 1 July, it could go up as the month wears on). I want to get half of those reviewed. I plan to prioritize political books as we head into midterms this quarter. I've got a lot of political-reads noted already from years gine by. I've always held back because so many people I know just flat refuse to put in the work of reading the books. That's no longer something I can factor in to my review-writing queue. The stakes are too high to pander to lowest-common-denominator reading habits.

Can't make y'all read the books, or the reviews, but you'll have to make a conscious choice to skip them.

Happy Incoming 2026

↟↟↟↟↟↟↟↟↟What I want to say to 2025's ghosts, ghouls, and gross old pedophiles. I've already said elsewhere that I won't be focusing attention on the number of books I've read, or any of the rest of the numbers game, because it feels like bragging. I have none of the pressures on me that normal people have. I've got my datastick of notes from reads as much as thirteen years old, never written into reviews for any number of reasons. I have a huge hoard of rage at the kakistocracy fueling a desire to do something, a disability that doesn't allow that something to be kinetic, and so I write.

It's what I can do, so it's what I will keep doing until ICEstapo starts coming for domestic enemies of the kakistocracy. Emptying that data stick of the backlog of more-or-less coherent notes taken might last me the year, if I get even close to 2025's levels of success in writing away my emotional pain. My reviewing schedule for 2026 will begin on the second...there will be hashtag events during the year that I'll announce the weekend before they begin...I still won't post reviews on Tuesdays (traditional book-release day in the US) until publishing slows down the new-books firehose in December as #Booksgiving hots up. The most exciting books of 2025's reading were translations so I'm definitely continuing my focus on reading translated literature in 2026.

Y'all already know about my six-stars-of-five read for 2025 (the whole list is at the bottom of this post): THE REMEMBERED SOLDIER by ANJET DAANJE, and translated from Flemish by David McKay via the estimable tastemakers at New Vessel Press (Support an excellent indie press!). My review should say it all about the layered, subtle evocation of memory's centrality to identity, about the effort love takes, about the nature of desire and its propulsive projective power. It's the kind of (long!) read that I want to put in peoples' hands to explain themselves -to- themselves.

It is a New York Times 100 Notable Books designee, it was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Fiction, on lists from Publishers Weekly and LitHub and the Wall Street Journal...it deserves the patient companionship and compassion of readers seeking a window into forming...discovering...identity through its loss and rebuilding Trauma does not have to be war, you know. The world can, and does, do similar devastating things to us callously and carelessly in the course of Life. Buy one, tree book or ebook, ask your library for one so they'll know people want it, get on their wait list for it, or get one via their ILL program. It is a good, impactful story told the best way a story can be: carefully, caringly, with the cares and the needs of its characters and its readers at its heart.


Since the entirety of 2026 is looking politically unstable, I'm making a point to review books that treat that instability as a chance to reflect on how we got here, so we can get out...and stay out. I'm not a bit sure anyone will enjoy it. It is urgent not to lose sight of the reality that our right to read and think and behave like, about, and what we think is best is very much under attack. 6870 times in the 2024-2025 school year alone. Guess whose identities were targeted most often. "Books by authors of color, by LGBTQ+ authors, by women. Books about racism, sexuality, gender, history. PEN America pushes back against censorship and the intolerance and exclusion that undergird it." I recommend joining PEN America to support a key player in the fight to oppose and reverse the school bans.

𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝗥𝗢𝗧𝗛𝗞𝗢, Untitled, 1968 Oil on paper mounted on canvas Pace Gallery, London Photo by Chris Weekes

I'll end on the image of a Rothko that evokes my sense of peaceful hope, optimism, and faith in humanity. I wish all of those things to every living one of us. No matter who; no matter where; no matter what.
ALL MY 6*-OF-FIVE REVIEWS

1994. MONTANA 1948...the original; the perfect read!

2013. THE SONG OF ACHILLES
2014. MATTERHORN
2015. EUROPE IN AUTUMN
2016. MARGARET THE FIRST
2017. MISSIONARY
2018. CIRCE
2019. BLACK LIGHT
2020. YOU EXIST TOO MUCH
2021. COVE
2022. KIBOGO
2023. THE WORDS THAT REMAIN
2024. GLORIOUS EXPLOITS
2025. THE REMEMBERED SOLDIER

SEE YOU ON BOXING DAY!

Another #Booksgiving done and dusted. I hope at least a few reviews piqued your interest in a title you wouldn't otherwise have heard of.

It feels good to be able to write to a few readers, hopeful feelings stir when I see signs of folk checking in to see what's on offer. Writing hundreds of reviews in 2025 has kept me sane, prevented me from falling into a pit of despair as the world changes around us all in ways I hate and must (to keep faith with my moral beliefs) resist in the only ways I can.

Thanks for reading, and I do not mean just my words...thanks for being a reader. It matters how you get your stories delivered. It matters that you develop the habit of getting your stories in more than one way, from more than one source. Your choices matter. Don't lose sight of that fact in the days, weeks, months, and years you'll be told that they do not matter. No one bothers to insist that something truly irrelevant and unimportant does not matter. It's the same kind of high-control social engineering as making rules against actions and beliefs. No one ever tells you not to do something unimportant, or bad for you, unless they mean it's bad for them in some way. (Safety is never the real reason for warning labels, it's to prevent you from being able to sue them.)

Well, that turned dark. Let's sweeten the tone: I found an excellent six-stars-of-five read for 2025 in THE REMEMBERED SOLDIER by ANJET DAANJE, and translated from Flemish by David McKay via the estimable tastemakers at New Vessel Press. My review should say it all about the layered, subtle evocation of memory's centrality to identity, about the effort love takes, about the nature of desire and its propulsive projective power. It's the kind of (long!) read that I want to put in peoples' hands to explain themselves to themselves.

Support an excellent indie press! It is a New York Times 100 Notable Books designee, it was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Fiction, on lists from Publishers Weekly and LitHub and the Wall Street Journal...it deserves the patient companionship and compassion of readers seeking a window into forming, discovering identity through its loss and rebuilding...trauma does not have to be war, you know. The world can, and does, do similar things to us callously and carelessly in the course of Life. Buy one, tree book or ebook, ask your library for one so they'll know people want it, get on their wait list for it, or get one via their ILL program. It is a good, impactful story told the best way a story can be: carefully, caringly, with the cares and the needs of characters and readers in its sights.

Some stories go beyond a solid idea and a good execution, beyond even a lucky meeting of idea and author. A few other books were truly extraordinarily good in my 2025 reading. I enjoyed my Jess Zafarris reads the most of any in October, Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology and Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds were each separately delightful...read together I was giggling and snorting my way through the month. "Rantallion" is my new favorite weird word to unleash on the unsuspecting. Jess and Rob's video podcast, Words Unravelled on YouTube, is a must listen every week.

August was, as always, Women In Translation Month (#WITMonth); as usual it was a solid month of pleasure reads. Funny way for me to say it, though, because it was the month of Fang Fang's Soft Burial, anything but a "pleasant" read...the true nature of memory seemed to be my August accidental theme. It's memory's loss that clues us in to the centrality of memory to identity, to selfhood; I got that from a male perspective in The Remembered Soldier and a female one in this read. Dementia is a better guide to the effects than is the soap-opera stuff we're trained to think of. It's brutal, devastating; it's happened to many for no causal action on their own part, and that's the worst, cruelest, most repugnant part.

Back in June, the most satisfying read I had was The Surge, Adam Kovac's war story via Tortoise Books. It's told in laconic warrior-appropriate prose. It exemplifies an experience I do not think soldiers will ever have again as AI and automation turn war into a weirdly impersonal industrial slaughterhouse...as we're seeing in this year's oil war they're starting in Venezuela. Moving on...May brought a lovely, up-buoying quality via Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature that made it my beacon-of-sanity read. This book was genuinely smile-granting. I hope it will go on to become a standard text in biology classes (once sanity is restored and we start teaching again).

In April, a good month for reading, I read my first merman/man romance, When the Tides Held the Moon, amusing enough if...well...silly. Laurent Binet's superb Perspective(s) elevated my mood. Not so elevating was Sad Tiger, likely the most important book I read, possibly in all of 2025, for what it has accomplished in the world with the conversation around incest and assault it has started.

I liked The Case of Cem best of March's reads because it made polyphony its most interesting point through the device of a court case in the Afterlife. More Earthly and still legally based was the utterly infuriating The Man Nobody Killed, the latest from Elon Green. What an enraging travesty of justice! I still boil up over it. In a translation-heavy year of reading, an early delight was the extraordinary Río Muerto, my first all-five-stars read of 2025, by Ricardo Silva Romero and translated from Spanish by the gifted Victor Meadowcroft. Voiceless narrators don't come better than this; many language-choice delights in its pages. My January best-quality read, Fire Exit by Morgan Talty, was this Native American talent's first-ever novel. Aaalmost all five stars from me, and happy to give them I was!

I began 2025 deeply unhappy and very, very scared. I'm ending it much the same, but with the perspective that there's always, always the heartening world of literary imagination to grant a different view to a reader. In writing reviews of books I've read over the past ten-plus years, I've learned that I am a creature of deep greed, insatiable hunger, for that magic of storytelling: the gift of perspective.

I have never in my life been more grateful to be a reader than I am right now.

PIONEER SUMMER, banned in Russia, authors forced to flee, publisher put out of business...buy now

PIONEER SUMMER
ELENA MALISOVA & KATERYNA SYLVANOVA (tr. Anne O. Fisher)
Abrams Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$24.30 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This star-crossed gay romance is a #1 bestselling TikTok sensation that made international news and catalyzed one of Russia’s largest-ever crackdowns on LGBTQ representation

The banned gay romance that took Russia by storm . . .

In the waning days of the Soviet Union, two teenage boys find each other at Pioneer Camp, a patriotic summer program similar to the Boy Scouts. Yury Konev, 16, anticipates the weeks ahead of him with boredom and dread, but things change when he meets 19-year-old counselor Volodya. The two boys are drawn to each other, and though both fear the consequences of their illegal attraction, its gravity pulls them together.

Now, 20 years later, Yury returns to the abandoned camp to reminisce on the relationship that changed his life forever—and discovers that not all history is destined to remain in the past.

Cowritten by a Ukrainian–Russian duo and originally published by an independent publisher, Popcorn Books, Pioneer Summer became a TikTok sensation and runaway #1 bestseller in Russia. Catalyzed by this success, Russian Parliament officials and anti-LGBT activists began a campaign to ban the novel and others like it, an effort which became law just two months after the second book in the series was published. The authors were forced to flee the country, and Popcorn Books ceased publication.

But they—and we—will not be so easily cowed. Beginning in the summer of 2025, Pioneer Summer will become available for the first time in English, with the other two novels to follow.

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

My Review: I don't care if the sound of the book makes your nosehairs combust from discomfort, outrage, or just plain homophobia, if you possess a single functioning neuron the stakes of buying a copy of this book with or without the intent to read it ought to compel you to spend the money.

Little Vladdy Pu-Pu (I saw an image of him with cartoon bunny ears and stil can't stop laughing, singing "Little Bunny Foo-Foo" in my head with his name inserted...gawd how I wish Randy Rainbow would do one of his epic takedowns on him!) is TACO's hero/paymaster (or else why is he exempt from the tariffs?), and role model for his desperately accelerated drive to create an authoritarian state in the US. The 2023 law (see link above) that targeted the book's Russian publisher has similar aims to the many drives to censor and remove these books from public libraries, so you can bet—given the recent distressing ruling in the Llano County case—a lot of prior obedience and censorship will be occurring in the US publishing sphere. The one and only way to hurt capitalists is also the way to make them pay attention: money. The more queer-themed books you buy this Pride Month, the louder your voice is in the war against censorship and the rollback of human rights that will follow it unopposed success. Remember the universal truism that it might not be your turn today...but tomorrow is anothe thing. These christofascist scum have already lied about reproductive rights enshrined in law and every person with a uterus did not and has not risen publicly to shout down and decry this incredibly, horrifically invasive and demeaning government intrusion into private lives (read about this arrest and explain how you're too tired too poor too busy too too too to do more than wring your hands) so They are speeding up before 2026 flushes 'em down a Whataburger toilet. That is, if They don't simply cancel outright our right to vote....

This particular book is a charming romantic confection featuring young men falling into first love. In many ways it felt to me like reading a new-adult (aka "YA with pubic hair") version of Heartstopper but Russian. I was predisposed to like it because of its political meaning, much like I think Abolitionists liked Uncle Tom's Cabin *shudder*. It ended up not being even a small bit like that. I found the young guys in question a bit thinly drawn for my personal taste, but background is (I'm informed) in the very setting, nothing else really needed for a Russian/Ukrainian reader. Okay, I'll go with that...and it's not like we don't spend plenty of time with the guys while they're falling in love. It's really quite charming, if protracted...then comes the ending, and yes indeed I will be requesting the next one as soon as it has a release date. I not only want to support the creators and the publisher, I want to know if "Volodya and Yury" will be the new, matured "Nick and Charlie."

I really hope so.

SAINT ELSPETH, character-driven post apocalyptic story

SAINT ELSPETH
WICK WELKER
Indepently published
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Why did they come?

When they appeared across the sky, speculation wheeled around the world—the aliens were from heaven, the invaders were from hell… or they were proof that neither existed. But when they landed, curiosity gave way to suspicion and the nations reacted with nuclear force, setting off a chain reaction that left the world in ruins.

Twenty years later, instead of nearing her retirement, Dr. Elspeth Darrow struggles to forget the loss of her child and husband by plunging herself into the work of operating the last remaining hospital in San Francisco. With medical supplies running out and working herself to exhaustion, Elspeth must embark on a risky salvage mission into the heart of the Neo California danger zone. Here, she discovers the disturbing truth: the aliens have returned.

As the mystery of the aliens' purpose on Earth unravels before her, Elspeth must hide what she discovers from reactionary despots, all vying to bring Neo California under their control. Aided by a band of pre-war scientists and new-world medical students, Elspeth races against astronomical odds to reveal the terrifying truth that might save the world—or finally destroy it for good.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM PRIME BECAUSE OF THAT BASTARD BRYCE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: End-of-the-world stories don't work because the author just uses them as a backdrop, instead of setting a story that really can't be told another way in that milieu. That was what happened between me and The Road. This always gives me the eyeroll disease, the one where I see my brain from rolling them away from Mad Max-level violence and artificially amped fridging stakes.

Saint Elspeth doesn't do that. Elspeth's character doesn't change...she was always basically a good (if cynical) person, always motivated to do the right thing...and the world around her does change though not the ways one would wish them to. So, a lot like Life, I'm sure you'll agree.

Setting the story at a time of great change and making Elspeth the solid referent not Humanity's scumbaggery shifts this from "how many End-of-Everything stories do we really need?" to "we really need more people like this to shine their light" without making the entire enterprise cloyingly sweet. It's down to the way the story is made: the setting doesn't alter her; she unfolds into the new world, becoming more herself and offering more and more of the genuine help and healing she's always given instead of being forced to find them in the awful new world.

I'm making this sound terrible. It isn't. I give it five stars because I was involved and excited by the action, and invested in the main character, all the way through. I finished the book about an hour ago and am contemplating a re-read already. I even followed the author. I never follow authors.

It's really good stuff. Read it soon...2024 is pretty damn dystopian, one needs an antidote. Here's one that takes you into the dark corners, pulls your heartstrings, and then allows you to believe that a decent if flawed person with a good heart *can* make a positive difference.

BRIGHT FUTURE: An Anthology of Diverse and Inclusive Science Fiction

BRIGHT FUTURE: An Anthology of Diverse and Inclusive Science Fiction
Various Authors
Story Origin
Price unknown to me

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Spaceships, space stations, and distant planets. Stampeding elephants, a talking dog, and a hungover captain without a ship. An ensign far from home, a stowaway, and a pair of runaways. This anthology features stories of a diverse and inclusive future by six up-and-coming indie authors.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM STORY ORIGIN. THANK YOU.

My Review: Teaser-taster collections are very risky reads for me. I am frequently left irked by them, especially when they have excerpts from longer works. A bullet dodged here, then, since these are all tales from established storyverses the authors are working within, with one exception; with another exception, they're the inciting incidents in the series. I'm entirely on board with most of the stories because the authors have high-quality craft chops.

I herewith employ the time-honored tradition of this blog, the Bryce Method, of offering a story-by-story opinion of each piece.

Case File #7: The One with All the Elephants by Jeannette Bedard strikes a delightful, amusing tone as it merges the SF and Fantasy strands of SFF in one quite engaging story. I was hugely amused, to the point of laughing out loud, when I read "She pulled out an old tablet—the kind once used in the elementary classrooms of my grandparents or maybe their grandparents." Exactly as I'd feel if someone pulled out a slate! But I think Detective Flo's partner, Ned, who eats spicy cricket tacos, made the whole story of mini-elephants on a space station come alive for me. If this is in a series, can't find it; if it isn't, please make it one. 4 stars

Jurassic Dark by SI CLARKE brings characters from monadnock-of-indie-SF Si Clarke's Starship Teapot series in a suspenseful, eerie tale in homage to Arthur C, Clarke's iconic, A Walk in the Dark, charmingly dramatized by The Black Dog Chronicles here. It really, truly is a delightful homage, too. Spock is a hilarious character, beak and all. Shake it, Spock! 4 stars

The Blood of the Forgotten by Dani Hoots is a novella set in a world I don't have any experience with, so I spent the whole read wondering what the heck led these two children...sixteen and eighteen, more or less...to be where they were, to what they decided to do, to the final decision in the story that, frankly, squicked me out. The Kausians, which our sister-and-brother narrators happen to be, were very interesting; because I haven't read the series, I had to be okay with gleanings of their essence. It was, sadly, a read I found unsatisfying. 3 stars all for potentials unrealized.

The Arno Manoeuvre by D.M. Pruden will, I'd bet, spawn follow-on tales...it feels like there's more than enough room for more stories in this setting, part of the author's Shattered Empire series. A main character in the series, Captain Pavlovich, is a mere Ensign on his first assignment in this novella. It takes place in a dark, dreadful time in the storyverse's history, and uses the always effective narrative technique of first-person cinematic viewpoint to follow Ens. Pavlovich as he comes by his ability to command and to control...himself, and his own narrative. Battle scenes aren't for everyone; be aware that they are detailed and contain triggering events for those with PTSD. 5 stars

Endigo: Trystero Origins by Dave Walsh is the set-up novella for his series, Trystero. The way the Trystero gets its name, and its captain, in the series to come is a terrific take on the old plot of the passing of the torch. It's a good tale, well told, and has all the action you'd want to see. 4.5 stars

Impounded by John Wilker, first story in that author's Space Rogues series. It felt like the almost-R-rated version of Star Trek: The Original Series, and I don't mean that in a good way. I disliked Wil Calder, the series' main character, almost as much as I disliked Kirk. Not to my taste; possibly to yours. 3 stars

POLLAK'S ARM, beautiful, maddening, horrifying, so very desperately sad

POLLAK'S ARM
HANS von TROTHA (tr. Elisabeth Lauffer)
New Vessel Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: October 16, 1943, inside the Vatican as darkness descends upon Rome. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up the city’s Jewish population the next day, Monsignor F. dispatches an envoy to a nearby palazzo to bring Ludwig Pollak and his family to safety within the papal premises. But Pollak shows himself in no hurry to leave his home and accept the eleventh-hour offer of refuge. Pollak’s visitor is obliged to take a seat and listen as he recounts his life story: how he studied archaeology in Prague, his passion for Italy and Goethe, how he became a renowned antiquities dealer and advisor to great collectors like J. P. Morgan and the Austro-Hungarian emperor after his own Jewishness barred him from an academic career, and finally his spectacular discovery of the missing arm from the majestic ancient sculpture of Laocoön and his sons. Torn between hearing Pollak’s spellbinding tale and the urgent mission to save the archaeologist from certain annihilation, the Vatican’s anxious messenger presses him to make haste and depart. This stunning novel illuminates the chasm between civilization and barbarism by spotlighting a little-known figure devoted to knowledge and the power of artistic creation.

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

My Review: First, read this:

Rome is so eerie these days. The city seems caught in the chokehold of some immense, capricious beast, especially at night. Pollak said the same thing, worded a little differently, but similar. A monster lying in wait, outwardly quiet, but ready to strike at any moment. Every monster strikes eventually. It's in its nature. Those of us harbored here in the Vatican feel a wave of gratitude and relief whenever we reach a building that the German embassy has marked as Vatican property. It's like a magic spell keeping the monster at bay. One may feel safe here.

In a nutshell, that's the book's burden of meaning. In this tightly paced read, you'll be subjected to a high level of frustration because it's just not possible not to be. These are Jews fleeing Nazis by hiding behind the Vatican's skirts. ... Talk about emotional whiplash.

The man narrating the book, K., to Monsignor F., is the one sent on the delicate, but very important for the Vatican, mission to see that Ludwig Pollak is brought to safety in the Vatican's boundaries. Pollak, a Jew, is about to be deported and, as we reading the book know from before we so much as blink, that means death for an elderly man, his diabetic wife, and his disabled progeny. K. is busily trying to instill in an elderly man who's been exiled from his Roman home before (for being an Austrian subject during World War I), who's lost his first wife during exile and been forced to serve an Emperor he had no slightest regard for, but who's been fêted and celebrated by that Emperor before and who now wants nothing to do with the Jew...there are simply too many miles on the clock, K. Pollak winds his hours down by emulating Sheherezade and using K.'s ears to pour his meaning into. After all, K. will survive and Pollak, well...the past means more to him:

One tends to think the weather was nicer and people were friendlier when remembering the past, and although it's not true, there is some truth to it. Every memory has its own truth; otherwise it wouldn't exist.

So we're going down the garden path with a man who's been mistreated many times, in many ways, for being a Jew. For being an Austrian in Italy, for being Czech in Austria, and a Jew to boot. This is a man whose life is Art. He's been ushered in ahead of Barons to the presence of J. Pierpont Morgan because he has, knows, can connect the dots...

What could possibly surpass the exhilaration a collector experiences after making a significant find or finally acquiring a piece he has long coveted and lost sleep over? This realm of terrific, silent joys has revealed itself to me as well, Pollak said; it may be the only joy that truly exists. Collectors, he continued, are the most passionate people on earth. People prepared to venture into the foulest corners of the criminal code to take possession of a teacup, a painting, or some other objet d'art.

And Morgan is not the first powerful man who has used Pollak's art-sense to make something extraordinary his own, or explain why what he has is extraordinary from Pollak's vast stores of knowledge. It is this quality of Pollak's mind that K. is called upon by the gods, via the peculiar institution of the Vatican, to witness. It is this extraordinary votary of Art who is, at long last, saying out loud why his life mattered and what he has done cannot be undervalued because of his Jewishness. It is there, in all its glory, the objet d'art and the sculptures and...and...and...it's physical. While Pollak as a name might vanish (not really, though not for lack of the world trying) his work remains:

Pleasant memories cannot exist, Pollak stated for no reason I could figure, if the experience itself wasn't pleasant. Or, he asked, can they? He didn't think so; he had written down everything important, or at least, everything that seemed important to him, because who knew what would prove important in the long run?

False modesty, or real, we the readers know that Pollak always knew what was always going to be important in the long run: Art. He was correct. This récit gets its title from a discovery Pollak made in the early 1900s, a piece of a sculpture made in Greece in times most ancient, and spoliated by the Empire's vast greed for Art and what were, even to them, antiquities.

from the Musei Vaticani

They {their arms} are not, however, extended in pride but in a fight against death, to fend off the snakes. Their death is certain. Whether one is fighting death or fighting certain death makes all the difference. Is it noble? Pollak asked. Naïve? Quiet? Grand? Or is it just terrible, plain and simple?

This is the sculpture in question. The right arm, the one bent at the elbow ever so slightly, is the one recovered by Pollak, and then donated to the Vatican Museum...he explains why in the text, but that is something you'll need to read for yourself, there's no way to excerpt it without typing many paragraphs. For this splendid act of generosity, he is awarded all sorts of attention and perks in the archeological community, and his (barely post-Dreyfus Affair) Jewishness is grandly overlooked as the crowned heads pin medals of merit all over him. The arm completes the emotional arc of the story of Laocoön as the gods mete out punishment for his unforgivable act of hubris. Read the story, I am not discussing it here.

When Pollak returned from his Austrian exile, he resumed his life-long career in service to the culture industry. His life spent as an art dealer, now spent being the director of a museum dedicated to sculpture, a collection assembled by an old friend of Pollak's. I don't imagine it will surprise you to know that there were vicissitudes...and betrayals...and that Pollak, in the end, cared less for any of that than he cared for the art, and for the stories inherent in caring for Art. The Vatican (for better or worse) has a very long memory. They sent K., a car, and their urgent invitation to Pollak and his family to accept rescue from certain death.

It's different in the Vatican, I quietly offered, and you know it. ... You will be safe there. And they're expecting you. I sleep very little, he said, barely at all now. It must be nice. How could I possibly wake them when the world they'd wake up to is the world they'd wake up to? I didn't know how to respond. We sat there in silence until he, rather than getting up and rousing his family, resumed his tale.

Despite the urgency, the despairing urgings of K., the certainty of death...is not troubling Pollak. He knows, from his connection to Laocoön, that the gods send what they will and it's not up to puny mortals to complain. He saw what was coming. He was, at sixty-plus years of age and in frail health, not going to argue with the gods again. Men, as he has bitter cause to know, are not creatures of reason. They are snakes, they are beings without character but with brute, brutal strength, when they serve their passions:

Not one of them wrote about what they saw; instead, they wrote about what they thought. And when a man thinks long enough about what he wants, it eventually becomes what he sees.

It is nothing but the truth, put in the mouth of Ludwig Pollak, guilty of the crime of Jewishness in a world where the powerful hate you for that unforgivable breach.

It is no accident that New Vessel Press chose this title to come out hard on the heels of The Vanished Collection. Fiction and non-fiction about spoliation. The parallels between Pollak and Jules Strauss, the parallels in our own times' spoliation crisis and restitution failings. There is so much to be said about the concept of "Museums" in today's world, the one where facing up to the past is at last becoming effective...and the immensity of the hate-stoking that is working against the deepening of the many, many overdue reckonings with the Imperial Past (not to mention present). The world is, sadly for some and confusingly for all, changing. The problem with resisting that change is it does not work. It merely stores energy to be released in the eventual great change. 1789 ring any bells?

We live in interesting times. Read this slender, one-sitting meditation on just how interesting, just how much there is still to be accounted for and dealt with. You will be glad you did.

JAWBONE, making deities out of desperation in MeanGirlLand

JAWBONE
MÓNICA OJEDA (tr. Sarah Booker)
Coffee House Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award for Literature in Translation!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?

When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.

Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous “creepypastas,” Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.

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

My Review: White. Menacing, toothy, bony white. You'll need to recalibrate your horror-meter away from the endless dark.

I think many people are a little skittish about reading books that have truly, deeply dysfunctional women and girls as the predators as well as prey in a "human is wolf to human" tale. It seems to skeeve the Sanctity of Motherhood crowd the most, which is predictable and unsurprising. What it isn't is realistic. The three characters in this English-language debut horror/psychological thriller-adjacent story are actors in psychodramas they both inherited and participated in perpetuating...they are not, not one of them, victims.

I'd give Author Ojeda a gold medal for that, if I had one. I am mortally sick of sending women and girls the unending message that if uterus, then victim is a) immutable fact 2) a good dodge to avoid personal responsibility and accountability and iii) a necessary precondition to discovering one's agency. Anna/Annelise is, plain and simple, a stunningly effective manipulator. She is absolutely in control of her fate. She orchestrates everything around her to suit a narrative she builds, changes, improves to get more of the oxygen she craves: Attention. Fernanda, oh the poor thing I can hear readers thinking, is totally tuned in to her needs: she seeks extremes, she wants to defy and thus define her limits. And when we meet her, she is at last smashed against the hard limit of being immobilized. Fernanda, deeply and darkly aware of her young body's power to seduce, reward, pleasure her victims in motion and action, is never more completely the center of her captor's world than when she is rendered incapable of movement.

But Miss Clara, the nominal adult whose tenuous leash on her id has snapped, the possessor of power over her students as their guardian and cicerone, is utterly unable to exercise even a shadow of that power because she is so cracked and broken by her past. Her charges, like those things that prosecutors level at malefactors, like those vessels of energy that impart their essential power to a needy receptacle for it, are charged with the true nature of the quest in this polyphonic Passion Play: Boundaries.

Miss Clara has immobilized Fernanda to remove her from the harm she causes and is caused by Anna. In so doing, she creates the most brazen crucible for Horror among the "innocent" I've read in a solid decade or more. I've read that other reviewers, as well as some critics, conjure the shade of H.P. Lovecraft in describing the affect of this story. There is an element of the eldritch horror miasma inherent in any book entitled Jawbone wherein that word is used without distancing irony. But I myownself think this is horror of the Our Lady of the Flowers ilk, of the Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded strain. The events herein aren't of the explicit-conduct variety. They are sexual, these women, and they are absolutely sure that sexual is what they mean their acts to be, thus Genet; they are psychologically subtle, they are seeking and thirsting for subtler refreshment than just vaginal wetness, thus de Sade.

It is anxiety-crippled Miss Clara's terrible, terrible luck to meet privileged perverted Annelise. The young mistress of domination's most brilliantly subtle expression, the psychic force of the story on the unbalanced, determines to make of her youth a supreme weapon, the myth of purity. The White God she invents and that god's immediate claim on the unwavering attention of all with whom Annelise shares the words, is so carefully inflected that Miss Clara does not see but feels with blinding intensity the repeated reiterated regurgitated violations that broke her to begin with, that made with White no purity but putridity. No nobility and cleanliness and finality of bone. There is only the powder of mold as it rots flesh in wetness. There is the liminal space of menstrual cloth not yet used as a blood-dam. Annelise conjures the cruel capable whiteness of teeth, hardest objects in a body, necessary to rip and mangle the very stuff Humanity must have or simply lose all power and cease. Die. Though perhaps not entirely, if there is will and enough lust to use it.

As an act of Literature, translation is alchemical. Take this gleaming, golden thing, this extant object of crafted and intended meaning, and use the solvents and reagents of a different meaning-regime to produce gold. Again. In Jawbone, Translator Booker explains her kerotakis and its subtle distillates in a note before one reads the novel. I understand that impulse to assist the mainly monoglot US audience. It feels to me, at least, more like a way to emulate Annelise: I will take all the pain, hurt me and make me bleed, that I may give your dark input of uninterest or unwillingness to work for this experience of distillation into a finer, lighter, more potent Enlightenment its ashes and sands, its heats from sources not like the results. Not for this translator the mere bain-marie. Its coddling of like fluids to make of one the best and most palatable form it can take is too bland for this alchemy of hers. No custard of double-boiled entertainment comes from here. It is the hottest ash, the slowest heat exchange of crater-hot sand that takes the already intoxicating vodka into Everclear, into its superlative...but brutally unforgiving of misuse...form.

It is a high-wire act, as I would guess translating Joyce's Ulysses into hieroglyphics would be. Surviving tweaks to reality like multi-hyphenated English terms, which would make a Spanish-speaking ear and eye agog with Otherness, aren't readily apparently Othered. I fully understand and support the editorial decision not to use italics to indicate foreignness. For Spanish. But permaybehaps some of these oddities could be italicized for the Othering of English as it would be in an Ecuadorian ear? As it is, they just stub my reader's toe on their odd height and unyielding hardness.

It can feel, in the course of the read, humid to be in the abandoned spaces and the wildlands. I mean this in a visceral way. The reading of the games that Fernanda enacts, at huge, huge existential risk to Annelise, calls forth actual sweat from my reader's brow. In the stories, the words spun to whip the parties to Dionysian ecstasy and Pan-ic from the god itself work. That is not always to the benefit of Author Ojeda's actual novel. Overall, minding my place as bystander and accomplice but not perpetrator, I can't give the entire reading experience a perfect score because of those very few points where The Story showed herself from behind the obscuring mask.

Make no mistake, though, this is Literature and big, big fun entertainment caught in the slick, wet act of making passion real. Read it without your lady-gloves on. Read it with your speed turned lower than usual but used longer. Read it while you're avoiding something Social, some obligation that couldn't be said no to.

But read it now.

THE VANISHED COLLECTION, a family's heritage raped away by Nazis

THE VANISHED COLLECTION
PAULINE BAER de PERIGNON (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
New Vessel Press
$12.95 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five, for the message if not the messenger

The Publisher Says: It all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss: Renoir, Monet, Degas, Tiepolo and more. Pauline Baer de Perignon knew little to nothing about Strauss, or about his vanished, precious art collection. But the list drove her on a frenzied trail of research in the archives of the Louvre and the Dresden museums, through Gestapo records, and to consult with Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano.

What happened in 1942? And what became of the collection after Nazis seized her great-grandparents’ elegant Parisian apartment? The quest takes Pauline Baer de Perignon from the Occupation of France to the present day as she breaks the silence around the wrenching experiences her family never fully transmitted, and asks what art itself is capable of conveying over time.

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

My Review: Well, this review went through some changes. A lot like me as I read this book. I think the world needs to attend to the huge, stinking pile of denial in the center of Culture Inc. What happened to the art collected by Jews? It was stolen by the Nazis. Those bad Nazis!

...and then what happened? *blank stare*

In Author Baer de Perignon's tale of family, legacies, and fairness denied, you will learn that the reality is...nothing happened. Museums bear extraordinary responsibility for the nothing that happened. They don't want to give their ill-got gains back to the families whose rightful property it is. The whole raison d'etre of "the Museum" (in its broadest cultural-institution sense) is thus opened to serious question.

This isn't a small issue. The 2003-2011 Iraq war resulted in *appalling* levels of art and antiquities being looted or damaged, often destroyed. There is some tut-tutting over this. Not a lot, given the scale and value of it. Why? Because that leads to lots of awkward questions about how "the Museum" got the stuff in the first place. "Provenance" and "spoliation" in other words. Then that opens lots of graves "the Museum" wants to leave closed.

This isn't the first time that this issue has been raised, or wrestled with. Read a book called Goldberg's Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade (it's excellent, BTW, highly recommend it to you). The topic simmers along, looted antiquities are topics of concern on slow news days around the world. For a minute. They don't rate high on most folks' outrage meters. But the Impressionists and Academicians and Old as well as other Masters aren't talked about in media or entertainment almost at all (pace George Clooney's lukewarm The Monuments Men, which did poorly at the box office). Because people love them, come to see them in their hallowèd homes, are inclined to buy tat with the (profitably licensed) images on them (from "the Museum"'s store). The fact that many were looted from Jews by the Nazis is bad. But whatcha gonna do.

Nothing, for as long as possible, until the heirs of the murdered millions forget (I was *astonished* at the number of people Author Baer de Perignon met who just knew nothing about what had been looted, spoliated, from their ancestors!) or give up. "The Museum" will still be there, after all, taking in cash from ill-got gains they should've given back most of a century ago.

It is a scandal but no one wants to bring up the solution: restore spoliated property to its proper owners, or otherwise their descendants. As I read this book, I realized the case for this is unassailable. But I realized also why I had such trouble writing this review: I dislike the author.

She's quite sarcastic, very judgemental, has a serious oh-poor-me attitude. She snarks, in the text, about people she fawns over in the Acknowledgments. One assumes she thinks these people won't read the actual book.... Her scattered, disorganized research method draws criticism she fobs off as passing...but I promise you that her "mentors" did the real heavy lifting. I read this between the lines, I recalled many author Acknowledgments from when I was an agent that left out lots of realities not to the Author's Taste. And I realized that I support the message of repatriation, restitution, and acknowledging the harm done to generations of people simply because they were Other...but I dislike this messenger.

It's a shallow, personal response, and it shouldn't prevent anyone from picking up this book for its message of ma'at, fairness, justice, and the value of saying "I'm sorry."

Postscript: Sotheby's has auctioned the painting the author worked so hard to reclaim. Watch her conversation with the auction house's staff. In the end, it brought $1.23 million hammer price.