THE TUXEDO SOCIETY: A Novel, excellent fifteen years ago, moderately fun now

THE TUXEDO SOCIETY: A Novel
PAUL RUDNICK
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: If Guy Ritchie directed an episode of Queer Eye, it might look something like this hilarious and action-packed spy thriller by Paul Rudnick, acclaimed screenwriter and author of Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, that blends espionage and social commentary, with an elite, gay secret society.

They are fierce patriots. They are licensed to kill. And they are really, really gay. Welcome to democracy’s secret weapon, the Tuxedo Society.

When Andrew Birnbaum, a struggling actor making ends meet by working in a candle shop, gets invited to have dinner with the exclusive Tuxedo Society by his best friend, Brock, his life takes an unexpected turn. What seems like a group of wealthy socialites gathering for gossip and cocktails quickly spirals into a world of espionage, danger, and hilarity.

Andrew soon meets Reggie O’Malley, a Navy SEAL with a penchant for black tie, who recruits Andrew to join the society’s covert mission to protect national security. Armed with gadgets like an inflatable life raft backpack, a yoga mat that doubles as an assault rifle, and, of course, an AMEX Black Card, Andrew quickly finds himself tackling spies, thwarting assassinations, and facing a host of unexpected threats in settings from the White House to the Vatican to the Summer Olympic Games.

The stakes escalate when Andrew and his comrades are sent on a jet-setting mission to uncover the truth about an ancient artifact. Along the way, they clash with oligarchs, crooked senators, and a smarmy televangelist with sinister plans for world domination.

Packed with Paul Rudnick’s signature wit, The Tuxedo Society is a wild ride through decadence, danger, and unexpected heroism, as Andrew discovers that saving the world might just be the role he’s been waiting for.

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My Review: Take all the silliness of a Bond flick and sprinkle fairy-dust on it, detomate a glitter bomb in a 1979 bath house, pipe in Bette Midler and Streisand and Cher interspersed with Romanovsky and Phillips, and...for the five of you still reading...and here's you a read. The trappings of the twenty-first century feel like they're set dressing. Like, this cisqueer white man cabal of queens sounds like Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. Pastiche of the ways and words of the Good Old Days, fun for a while but...wears thin.

I'm the target audience for this book. I liked it. I really laughed, in pleasure, at the jokes. It gave me the happy nostalgia of knowing someone out there still remembers my heyday.

But it's twenty-fuckin'-twenty-six, y'all. Plug your hearing aid into the charger. Suicide bombers are fiendishly hard to track down using modern data analysis...gaydar shit-sure got no chance. I think we're past this kind of spying being used for humor because we're past this kind of spying being usable in real-world settings, which is always the fun of an espionage novel. It's not realistic or the CIA/NSA/MI{numeral} folk would be on the publisher, the writer, and the writer's mama with every resource they possess; but we-the-reader need to feel it *could* be and that it *could* happen like this.

But there are some lines that truly glitter like well-cut diamonds. Can't quote them because no really good examples don't also spoil stuff, annd if you don't live in fear of the Spoiler Stasi, you haven't been nastygrammed by any of 'em yet. Spoiled things.

Still a fun read, but one I'll send you to the library to check out, not your Bookshop.org cart.

THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES, cute while being trenchant

THE INFINITE SADNESS OF SMALL APPLIANCES
GLENN DIXON
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: In a near future, where even the smallest of appliances are sentient, a young Roomba vacuum sets out to save the humans of her house from a rising technological power in this compelling, original novel.

In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.

But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he’s lived in for fifty years.

With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie’s formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.

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My Review: I was pretty sure this read would be very twee and deeply, annoyingly cute. I might've sat through a few too many playings of The Brave Little Toaster in the late 1980s, resulting in my willingness to read about Kirby the vacuum cleaner's great-grandappliance Scout the Roomba.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

I was charmed by Scout as she becomes self-aware, chooses her name based on what she overhears abour Scout in Harold's reading aloud, then decides to become Atticus and fight the Grid (aka AI-dominated society) to keep Harold in his home.

Why Harold and Adrian become aware of the self-awareness of the machines around them and do not immediately light out for the hills, I could not tell you. I went with it because I also watched WALL-E raptly and accepted its lapses of logic because I was enchanted by the pluck li'l guy's selfhood. Same situation here. I did not think the worldbuilding was very well-handled but I was willing to skip it because this is a feel-good story with elements of social commentary that I agree with. As a card-carrying old man I thought Harold was very well-drawn compared to anyone else. Except Scout. She's the star of the show. A Roomba on a mission is clearly not to be messed with. Kate, the daughter he and Edie lost to her own foolish stiff-necked pride, was not much more than a place-holder, and that was just fine by me. I saw plenty of her in the flesh over the decades so no further text needed please and thank you.

So my verdict? Check it out of the library on the day you're a bit bored of the world's evils yet not steaming mad at the idiots who keep shoving their unwanted greed-increasing systems into our homes. You'll be rewarded by a gentle, sweet individual in Roomba form who wants to do the right thing by those she has learned to care for.

I wish Sam Altman and that fuck Zuck were more like Scout and less the bastards behind the Grid.

SKYLARK, Author Paula McLain's dual-timelines historical Paris novel

SKYLARK
PAULA McLAIN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife weaves a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below—where a woman’s quest for artistic freedom in 1664 intertwines with a doctor’s dangerous mission during the German occupation in the 1940s, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time.

1664: Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpêtrière asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined.

1939: Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized.

A spellbinding and transportive look at a side of Paris known to very few—the underground city that is a mirror reflection of the glories above—Paula McLain’s unforgettable new novel chronicles two parallel journeys of defiance and rescue that connect in ways both surprising and deeply moving.

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My Review: Tunnels, underground/out of sight communication, hidden pathways...thematically this is the heart of Author McLain's story. The literal, factual tunnels under Paris start us out on the careful and hazardous reality of being a woman or, later, that other despised minority a Jew...yes, women were a social minority, rendered voiceless and affectless the way minorities always are...so we're going underground to follow them as they fight to survive without being Seen and still being effective actors in society. Spoiler alert: It doesn't go well.

There ya go. That's the story. It took almost five hundred pages of pretty sentences to get there.

They are pretty sentences but honestly, taken out of context they're pretty much meaningless. Describing a sculpture made by a side character, "... a lark with wings unfurled, fashioned from pale limestone with such delicate precision that it seems almost alive," is lovely...but its entire reason for being described is in fact its meaning and that's a gestalt. This is not a criticism of the writing, it's a statement of why I'm not quoting a lot more pretty sentences.

In my opinion reading this really interesting story-idea could have been a lot more fun had the author been less pretty and more concise in her writing. It's a fine way to spend a weekend in the company of two people marginalized for being...unpopular because they're Other...but I don't know that I felt adequately entertained to justify the length of time it all took to come together.

IS THIS A CRY FOR HELP?, Emily Austin had me crying "Uncle"

IS THIS A CRY FOR HELP?
EMILY R. AUSTIN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five by the skin of its teeth

The Publisher Says: Emily Austin, the bestselling “queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines” (Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus), returns with a luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries.

Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake.

But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community, and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs.

Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

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My Review: Grief is a hugely powerful, astoundingly complex, and very misunderstood emotional state. It is often portrayed as something one "gets over" it "moves on" from, but it isn't. It's your bass thrum throughout life when the loss you're grieving is deep enough; otherwise mourning, the act of displaying grief, will poultice the poison out effectively.

Darcy is living in a new world defined by grief. It blindsides her, happily married as she is to the Dickensianly yclept Joy. The grief that blindsided her is for Ben, the last man in her romantic life, at his early and unexpected death. It's the end of some part of her that never developed, that she wasn't pining after; as I've got cause to know from my own life that does not matter a bit to the emotional core. When you've once been in love you are always somewhere in your being connected. Plus she really hurt Ben as she was leaving him. Add to this Darcy's many pulls and demands as an involved, community-building librarian involved in a PR debacle. She had an emotional collapse—been there, Darcy—as a straw too many got loaded on her people-pleasing back.

As soon as she returns to work, Author Austin piles on some very relatable First-Amendment challenges for Darcy to manage: a library patron accesses porn on the library's computers. This is part of the protected access all citizens share, it was done within an appropriately restricted area, and yet other patrons complaining leads to lunatic, high-control (ie fascist) nutjobs mounting a campaign to shut down, censor, restrict lots more than just online porn viewing.

Here's where I got a bit...done...with the story. I'm down with the community-building librarian facing off against those in the community who want to control others' behavior. I'm delighted by a lesbian coping with her unhappy sense of having unnecessarily hurt a man in the process of self-discovery. I'm thrilled by Darcy being in a loving, supportive partnership that enables her to interrogate her compulsion to please everyone to her own detriment (as women are trained to do. But all at the same time? Yes, I'm aware that Life does not have handy-dandy pause buttons on the events that one's required to deal with. Fiction does have that function. It's detrimental to a story's legibility as an emotional journey to lard in more and more and more in only three-hundred-ish pages. There a reason Jean-Cristophe and Middlemarch and War and Peace took skatey-eight skabillion pages to tell their stories. Readers need time to consolidate their emotional responses into their factual learning of plot events.

More breathing room, please. And get rid of Kyle the c-a-t.

I'm not sorry I read the story, but I wouldn't read it again despite my warm, approving glow at the ending.

THE SECRET OF SNOW, cozy, sentimental Swedishness

THE SECRET OF SNOW
TINA HARNESK (tr. Alice Menzies)
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This lyrical runaway Swedish hit follows a reclusive, elderly couple who cross paths with a pair of twentysomething newcomers in a small mountain town, revealing an unexpected, shared history and the reclamation of a nearly extinct culture.

Meet Máriddja: eccentric, eighty-five years old, and facing a cancer diagnosis. She’s determined to keep the truth about her illness from her husband Biera, while also finding someone who can take care of him once she’s gone.

Meet Kaj: a new transplant to the village, recently engaged to Mimmi, and mourning the death of his mother. One day, when Kaj unexpectedly finds a box of Sámi—the indigenous people of Scandinavia—handicrafts belonging to his mother, he unlocks something he never anticipated, something that will change his life for years to come.

A “brilliant debut” (Aftonbladet Söndag, Sweden) full of humor and heartbreak, The Secrets of Snow movingly grapples with grief, love, and the power of history.

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My Review: As with most bestsellers, this story is pitched right down the middle. Take one old (straight, natch) couple facing end of life issues of varying but intense urgency. Add one young (straight, natch) couple facing relationship teething pains and life traumas. Connect them by geography in a place small enough to breed affinity through enforced proximity. Add a glaze of native cultural issues. Give the old woman an iPhone and have her repurpose Siri as a confidant for comic relief. Serve.

It's fine if this is dessert after a hearty substantial meal. This is presented as the meal. If these were the concluding chapters of a much longer book that dug into Kaj's relationship with his mother and dialed down the awkward obvious coincidence that's telegraphed early and often, and the roots of Mári's anguished love for Biera (though who wouldn't be mad for someone who thinks his wife "was generous with everything, including her dignity" when everyone else thinks she's a madwoman!), I'd be wadding up the Kleenex with the rest of y'all.

It's a debut novel, and as I've said many times I grade on a curve for debut novelists, or I'd be a lot less tactful in expressing my dissatisfaction. I now turn your attention to the marvelous, evocative writing. Particularly effective, probably even moreso in Swedish, is the evocation of Sámi culture...the indigenous folk of the Arctic are about as well-presented in Sweden as First Nations people are in Canada, and only Black people are presented worse than Native Americans in the US. Author Harnesk does not stint on her vocabulary. Menzies, our translator, has worked hard and successfully to render the tone of the original. I don't speak Swedish, but there's a feel, an aura around a really well-made work of prose that comes through in the very best translations. It came through here.

While understanding why this became a bestseller does not add to my desire to praise it, I predict all y'all would love the read if you gave it a try. The Fredrik Backman bus, the Shelby van Pelt posse, the Sally Hepworth squad, should bypass the library hold list and put your credit cards on the line. This book is aimed right at you. Any reader wanting a lingering look at love, grief, and a lifetime of being true to your lights finally being rewarded should get it from the library. Request it if you don't see it in the catalog.

It's built to make you feel the warm glow of goodness.

THE SIX LOVES OF JAMES I, frankly opposing historical homophobia...and queer-identity appropriation

THE SIX LOVES OF JAMES I
GARETH RUSSELL
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A groundbreaking and insightful exploration of King James I, enigmatic successor to Queen Elizabeth I, from the “meticulous researcher” (The Wall Street Journal) and author of the “enjoyable and readable” (Philippa Gregory, #1 New York Times bestselling author) The Palace.

From the assassination of his father to the explosive political and personal intrigues of his reign, this fresh biography reveals as never before the passions that drove King James I.

Gareth Russell’s “rollicking, gossipy” (Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets), and scholarly voice invites us into James’s world, revealing a monarch whose reign was defined by both his public power and personal vulnerabilities. For too long, historians have shied away from or condemned the exploration of his sexuality. Now, Russell offers a candid narrative that not only reveals James’s relationships with five prominent men but also challenges the historical standards applied to the examination of royal intimacies.

This biography stands as a significant contribution to the understanding of royal history, illuminating the personal experiences that shaped James’s political decisions and his philosophical views on masculinity and sexuality.

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My Review: I'm in two minds about this read. I like the writing; I'm open, if not warmly welcoming, to the subject being included among our queer ancestors; but he was still medieval about religious stuff, and was inimical to "witches" among his subjects. (There were not, and are not, witches in the sense these people used the term. Pace, modern wiccans.) It really, really bothers me that Edward Gorey is co-opted to be One of Us, when he explicitly said he was not. (Go read my review.) So James VI and I? I'm not mad at or about the folks who want to say he was gay.

It's evident to me, after reading this book, that his greatest love was George Villiers. It appears to have been reciprocated, as much as we can know these things about people 400 years dead (as of this year). The extant evidence supports the conclusion that this complicated, traumatized, deeply and passionately emotional man was lucky enough to find some people...his wife Anna of Denmark, the aforementioned George...in his lifetime who met him where he was, who offered him the precious gift of companionship. Inasmuch as a royal can experience such a commoner's thing, more especially then when royal power was less trammeled than today.

Author Russell is scrupulous in making you au fait with his sources. He specifically says, on the occasions he makes a logical leap, that this is what he's doing. Where people in the past used the lens of homophobia to "tar" a man's reputation (viz, Frank Barlow's William II) with the stench of sodomy, much more often than not the "charge" was made absent solid evidence, and for some sort of political or ideological reason. As my best example, in this book Esmé Stewart, 1st Duke of Lennox, frequently accounted as James's first love(r), is shown to have been at most a crush, with no evidence pointing to a more intense relationship.

So I'm happy to accept Author Russell's well-founded and -informed conclusions about the rest of the King's emotional life. As the life of a king, as the lives of us all, is mostly spent outside the bedchamber and away from our intimate partner, the pretext of the book must needs fall away as events demand attention depart Mary and George territory. (Excellent show, Nicholas Galitzine {George Villiers} naked is a most enjoyable view to have.)

The reign of the king was bound to be complex. He succeeded the longest-ruling, to that point, monarch of the country; he was the first ruler to have an explicit, publicly acknowledged right to both British thrones; he was in power at the dawn of the modern world with its marvels and mysteries supplanting the certainties of his own world, the one he was raised in. It was a morass of warring interests, as the world has always been; James was not always the best one to make good, for the time and information he could have, decisions.

An unenviable position as monarch of two countries who had been at war for centuries, and whose mother he never met because she was imprisoned and murdered by his predecessor. Fractious nobles, upstart commoners, churchmen jealous of their vanishing prerogatives (this despite or because of his commissioning if the King James Version of the Bible), kidnappings, assassination attempts...this is the "remember, remember, the Fifth of November" king...it's no wonder he was paranoid and prone to act as if people were out to get him. They all too often were. It still left me wishing he would pull his head out of his medieval ass and get with the modern world borning in his care. It's irrational, unfair, and quite pointless, but it shows how very invested Author Russell got me into King James.

In all, a read I enjoyed more than didn't, that I finished in a very good time, and found more reasonable and more honest about its royal subject than the vast majority of the biographies I've read.

Your royal-watcher should get one this Yule. A strong corrective for the ick-factor fall of Andrew Windsor.

THE MIDNIGHT KNOCK, does several #Deathtober-y things, none well

THE MIDNIGHT KNOCK
JOHN FRAM
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A locked-room mystery meets white-knuckle horror in this mind-bending thriller, where strangers must survive a deadly night in a remote Texas motel.

In the frigid west Texas desert, weary travelers converge at a lonely roadside motel nestled at the foot of a massive mountain. Ethan and Hunter have left behind a corpse, a fire, and a horrific act of violence. Kyla and Fernanda are fleeing for the border. Stanley and his granddaughter are returning from Mexico with a mysterious man in hot pursuit. All of them are on the run from something. All of them are hiding something.

And somehow, they’re all connected to the motel’s other guest, an enigmatic woman named Sarah Powers.

Within hours, Sarah is dead. The strange twins who run the Brake Inn Motel inform the surviving guests that her murder demands justice. The guests are given an ultimatum: uncover the killer by midnight—or die when the protective lights around the motel go out.

Because something very old and very dangerous lurks in this corner of the desert. And it’s hungry.

But nothing at the Brake Inn Motel is quite as it seems. As time ticks away, alliances fracture, secrets unravel, and the guests will not only have to confront the violence of the past—they will need to face the darkness within themselves.

A masterful blend of psychological tension, supernatural horror, and layered storytelling, The Midnight Knock pushes the boundaries of what a mystery can be. And with its unforgettable climax, this novel cements John Fram as a contemporary master of the genre.

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

My Review: Gore for the sake of being gory isn't my usual fare; I'm no fan of "supernatural" stuff because I don't believe it's real; but a locked-room mystery, now...with those fripperies added on, let's see how this plays out.

Okay.

Why the people just...accept...that there's a deadline against which they're required to work Or Else puzzled me. So that one woman died...why should that mean anyone else will? Why not just shove past those overbearing twins and start walking til you have cell service?

I'm not the platonic ideal of a reader for this story, as you see. I'm pretty much off this storytelling beam for good from when Groundhog Day-type time loops start happening. The Ship-of-Fools trope was really powerfully evoked by everything from the setup to the ragging on gabardine as a suiting-material choice. I'm sure someone not prone to laughing at Saw movies because they're so deeply dumb will get much more out of the read than I did.

That said, I thought the rural West Texas setting was effective, for me anyway. It's a dry, unnervingly empty place, and the place being at the foot of a mountain is unsettling amid so much nothing-much. It wasn't enough to overcome my reality fetish but it was a solid choice.

When I'm told a story is a locked-room mystery, I expect there to be a serious, logical, undeniable reason the cast can not...not do not, not choose not to...leave. I also expect the mystery to make daytime-world, no spookieghouliewoo-woo reasonable sense. Not delivered. Plus I did not care about the affront to Ma'at that was this victim's murder. I was glad she was dead.

So on balance, I'll say you know your spooky-season reading needs so are best equipped to determine the fit between you and this story. I don't regret reading it, but I still wish I'd got the promised mystery at the least.

ANGEL DOWN is hands-down my favorite WWI novel

ANGEL DOWN
DANIEL KRAUS
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now...the paperback comes out on 12 May 2026 for $18.00! Preorder at this non-affiliate Bookshop.org link.

WINNER OF THE 2026 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION!

A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2025 selection!

Rating: 4.5* of five

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

The Publisher Says: The critically acclaimed author of the “crazily enjoyable” (The New York Times) Whalefall returns with an immersive, cinematic novel about five World War I soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel that could hold the key to ending the war.

Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.

What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.

Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict.

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My Review: I learned early in life that humans are vile, irredeemable homunculi, ruled by hatred, greed, and envy. Church was a solid training ground, thank you Jesus. So the story of the men in this tale wasn't a revelation or a surprise, nor an insulting calumny on humankind. It merely felt like I was hearing from a cheerier, more forgiving soul-sibling of mine.

Did anyone I know read Ducks, Newburyport? That hugely long sentence has a smaller sibling now in Kraus's latest, weird-stop-full-out toccata for literary pipe organ. It's about greed and hate and jealous loathing and fear...it's about humans trying to cope with transcendent realities while in the mire of fantastical pestilential mud. It's what your soul wants and your body resists while you can't even see a yard ahead because you need not to be slaughtered.

Unlike Lucy Ellmann's genius work of transcendence in the quotidian...I'm too intimidated to review it, there's just too much in there I want to read aloud to you!...this sentence is more compressible. It feels like Author Kraus did what Warhol did in Empire...turned on the camera after framing the shot then went away...but the point of this story is not to watch as time passes but watch as feelings, desires, emotions pass. It's a Zen in-joke. It's the kind of technique that some bounce off hard. It's meant to enable you as reader to get inside a flow of experiences of reality without ever feeling you are limited to just one. White space is your resting point; the absence of periods/full stops is your clue to the emotional reality of the Great War these people are utterly mired in, consumed by, entrapped entombed enmeshed inside.

The experiences are all, mental emotional psychical transcendent one and all, all of them are brutal and honest and unsentimentally crudely Earthy. In the midst of a grinding torturous killing machine with no end to the horror pain cruelty waste dehumanization, how else could they be? An angel from God in Her Heaven wounded and suffering? A divine being in need? A war experience that encompasses this! An actual angel laid low and so accessible to the traumatized men in need of a miracle....

So now, this being the case, what do these men do? Why do they hesitate or even reject doing the "obvious" and stopping the War? but a nagging voice insists it’s a miracle, which only pisses him off, he’ll be goddamned if he’s going to start believing in miracles here in hell

Bagger is our PoV. He is not one bit better than he is forced to be. He is canny, savvy to the ways of the world; he has a limited intellect, and if he has a soul, I saw no evidence of it. Arno, his foil, is Lumpenproletariat on legs, though more redeemable in my eyes than Bagger.

So how to explain my four and a half stars, when everything I've said either points all the way up or all the way down? I'm missing one key thing to make it the holotype war-fantasy story to rule them all: Why? Within the story, the why? never comes. I understand it's deliberate, it's a choice not a lapse. I still think a "why"...why Bagger, why now, why angel not demon...anchors a story set in a brutally real setting better than a lingering question does.

Gore, wickedness, horror, and all, it's one of my favorite reads of 2025.

THE CONFESSIONS: A Novel, a lens for Reality's more upsetting lumps

THE CONFESSIONS: A Novel
PAUL BRADLEY CARR
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A high-octane, high-concept thriller for fans of Blake Crouch, Harlan Coben, and Gillian Flynn from former Silicon Valley journalist turned bookstore owner Paul Bradley Carr.

Millions of letters arrive in the mail.
Murders are uncovered, affairs revealed, family secrets exposed.
These are the first Confessions.
This is our last chance.

LLIAM is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, built to make the toughest decisions for its users. Where to work, who to marry, and even who should live or die. But when LLIAM suddenly goes offline with no explanation, the world is thrust into chaos, paralyzed by indecision. Stocks plummet, stores are shuttered, planes sit grounded on runways as humanity scrambles to re-adapt to an uncertain, analog world.

Then the first letters arrive…on every continent, in every language, mysterious envelopes arrive in the mail, exposing people’s darkest secrets, and most shocking crimes. All beginning with the same chilling “We must confess.”

With millions of people suddenly made to confront their past transgressions, and society fast unraveling, CEO Kaitlan Goss must track down the only person who can help undo the resulting violent Maud Brookes, an ex-nun who taught LLIAM what it means to be human.

But when Maud receives a letter herself, revealing Kaitlan’s own unforgivable sin, the two women are forced into a deadly game of deceit as the world teeters on the brink.

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My Review: I'm not 100% clear on the principle of LLIAM running things, then crashing, and as a consequence of crashing, all the ugly little secrets LLIAM knows being revealed, being presented as "confessions." How so? A confession is something one makes, offers, is corced into offering. This isn't what happens in this story. It comes from outside.

Okay, I've whined about it, and this explains my not-perfect rating.

The rest is all "go" and a wild-ass ride it is. What a weird idea and how fully I buy into the social chaos this event sows. It's a seriously unnerving idea that explores what we do not want to look at: The machine already knows literally everything about is. We're wrapped in a cocoon of denial about it, but one day the inevitable cocoon-rupture will occur. What will happen then?

By following several PoVs, Author Carr affords us the chance to form an overview of social and societal chaos as information reorders the attention economy. I think, if anything, he goes easy on us, but there's very good reason to pull back. It can feel over the top as it is; but there's a top to go over in storytelling, not in reality.

I am not always impressed with the turns of phrase in the story, and above I've expressed my main reservation; but what I hope you'll understand is these aren't pleasure-killers. This is a near-future tech thriller that is well-conceived to get and keep you hooked with its openness to examine the *reasons* this specific story could, and might, occur.

I agree with every one of the publisher's comps. The idea is one I can imagine Crouch or my insta-buy SF author, Adam Roberts...he wrote this in his novel Jack Glass, and it seems to me relevant to this story:

“Do you know where the past and the present intersect?" Jac asked him.

"Where?"

"In your mind, only. It's the only point. Otherwise, the past is further away than the furthest galaxy. We know it, intuitively, because we understand the irrevocability of past action, and sometimes that makes us sad." He looked into Gordius's face, trying to read his expression, but the fellow wouldn't make eye-contact with him. "But it ought not to make us sad. Another name for that irrevocable gap between past and present is—freedom.”

It's a fascinating story, proving again that no tool is not also a weapon. The use of the past as a weapon in the future is never a tired trope since it is the basis of all relationships.

This is the kind of read I seek out to keep my mind from hardening into only one solid shape.

METALLIC REALMS, "elegiac, sweet-talking mourning raga" for a world that dared to disappoint Himself

METALLIC REALMS
LINCOLN MICHEL
Atria Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wildly inventive and entertaining novel about a sci-fi writing group whose fictional universe and personal dramas begin to collide and collapse from the critically acclaimed author of the “timeless and original” (The New York Times) The Body Scout.

Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln’s life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns—he has a greater calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written The Star Rot Chronicles. Written collectively by Michael’s best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle and his misfit sci-fi writing group, the Orb 4, the stories follow Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew on their mind-bending adventures across the Metallic Realms, from solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime to interstellar love triangles. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished—until now.

But the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest multiverse ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the funhouse reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group’s fallout begin to emerge. As he labors away in hiding, Michael has just one to bring the Metallic Realms to the world. No matter the cost.

Metallic Realms is a genre-breaking ode to golden-age science fiction, friendship, creativity, and the power and perils of storytelling.

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

My Review: Michael Lincoln is NOT Lincoln Michel. He tells you so. Orb 4, to a writer, agrees. It's about all they agree on.

Are you at all involved in geekdom, fandom, nerdery online? Are you vaguely aware of the idea roman à clef? Do you need something to make you laugh before it makes your ego say, "hey! wait a minute!", and rub its thumped nose?

Here's you a book.

Since reading Upright Beasts some years ago, then falling under the sway of what I called "{w}hat would happen if Gattaca and Moneyball had a bastard love-child" aka The Body Scout a while back, I've quite fancied my trips into Author Michel's head. He's facetious, rowdy, and disrespectful. I'd spank him if I met him in person, or maybe not since I think he'd like it, but on the page this is really fun stuff.

I'll assume you've read the synopsis. It's accurate as far as it goes. Lincoln Michel's a caustic and sarcastic soul, so it's not one bit of a surprise that Michael Lincoln is, as well. You think *I* say hurtful things? I'm the Canadian Ambassador to the Court of St. James's by comparison to this guy! No quarter is offered, no opportunity for a well-phrased dig is passed up. Think Dorothy Parker without the waspish edge, replaced by a cruel condescension.

Why, given all that, did I rate this 4.5 stars? Because he's unkind but he's not wrong. The beady eye in the scope is gonna shoot a vital part but he won't miss because he's seen the anatomy too close-up to mistake his aim by so much as a millimeter. And by Grabthar's Hammer, he really is funny.

Will you like it? Are you a Trekkie? A Tolkien/"high fantasy" fan? Then no. Are you exasperated by clever-clever satirical stuff? Avoid like it gots the cooties. A deeply-dyed AO3 lover? This way plagueships lie.

I had moments of stiffened-spine outrage (Ca'Raan? Really? That's where you're expending firepower?), but all's fair etc etc and being a whiny li'l bitch would only make the Big Bad Bully glow with satisfaction. So not gonna make some PC case with less than half my heart. Laugh at yourself, look at how your detractors portray you, because it's how they see you. No one knows they need a comb until they're told. He's telling us.

But get it from the library, no sense handing him your money to get insulted.

THE BALLAD OF JACQUOTTE DELAHAYE, ladypirates who love ladies

THE BALLAD OF JACQUOTTE DELAHAYE
BRIONY CAMERON
Atria Books
$28.99 hardcover, available romorrow

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This epic, dazzling tale based on true events illuminates a woman of color’s rise to power as one of the few purported female pirate captains to sail the Caribbean, and the forbidden love story that will shape the course of history.

In the tumultuous town of Yáquimo, Santo Domingo, Jacquotte Delahaye is an unknown but up-and-coming shipwright. Her dreams are bold but her ambitions are bound by the confines of her life with her self-seeking French father. When her way of life and the delicate balance of power in the town are threatened, she is forced to flee her home and become a woman on the run along with a motley crew of refugees, including a mysterious young woman named Teresa.

Jacquotte and her band become indentured servants to the infamous Blackhand, a ruthless pirate captain who rules his ship with an iron fist. As they struggle to survive his brutality, Jacquotte finds herself unable to resist Teresa despite their differences. When Blackhand hatches a dangerous scheme to steal a Portuguese shipment of jewels, Jacquotte must rely on her wits, resourcefulness, and friends to survive. But she discovers there is a grander, darker scheme of treachery at play, and she ultimately must decide what price she is willing to pay to secure a better future for them all.

An unforgettable tale told in three parts, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye is a thrilling, buccaneering escapade filled with siege and battle, and is also a tender exploration of friendship, love, and the search for freedom and home.

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

My Review: I think this is a story of two halves: the first half, a survival story rooted firmly in its rime and place; the second more of a fantasy fulfillment that didn't follow the rules of the first half.

The delights, so to speak, of feeling transported to the slave economy of Santo Domingo, there to meet Jacquotte and see the milieu she was destined to live in...many. The characters, the situations, the atmosphere of the town, were all set up sufficiently clearly that I invested in them. That's most of the battle in my reading world. So I was rockin' along, expecting a five, or at worst high-four, star read.

Then came the twenty-first century.

Jacquotte and company all start having very modern conversations about rights and feelings and equality. I suspect this is not realistic not because we haven't seen it before...the cultural conversation has been dominated by the white oppressors for millennia, how would it get reported?...but because this woman and her cohorts have, until now, behaved and spoken more or less like the period demands. The shift was the jarring part, not what was shifted to.

There's action, there's love, there's a lot to like. When we go off into the second half's fantasia, it's still a good read with swashes being buckled and derring being done. It just wasn't congruent with the first half. They're both enjoyable, make no mistake. I'm glad I read the story. I'm glad to get to know Jacquotte.

Be better prepared to suspend disbelief than I was and get even more out of the story.br />

1795: THE ORDER OF THE FURIES (The Wolf and the Watchman #3) ends the Winge brothers' trip through Enlightenment Stockholm

1795: THE ORDER OF THE FURIES (The Wolf and the Watchman #3)
NIKLAS NATT OCH DAG (tr. Ebba Segerberg)
Atria Books
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The spellbinding and eerie finale to the #1 internationally bestselling “cerebral, immersive” (The Washington Post) historical trilogy follows two unlikely allies as they struggle to end the reign of a powerful cabal of depraved hedonists in 18th-century Stockholm.

For more than a year, brilliant lawyer Emil Winge has dedicated himself to capturing the diabolical Tycho Ceton, with the invaluable assistance of one-armed army veteran and watchman Jean Michael Cardell. Their mission is made more difficult by the ever-increasing paranoia gripping Sweden’s royal family, who fear that a bloody revolution is brewing. A letter with the names of the revolutionary conspirators is said to be in the possession of Anna Stina Knapp, a good friend to Cardell. Now, Anna is missing and Cardell is determined to find her before the secret police take her into custody.

While Winge and Cardell fight for justice and for life, they find themselves caught between powerful enemies—those who will do anything to maintain the status quo, and those who will only be satisfied with its total destruction. Niklas Natt och Dag brilliantly concludes his immersion into the dark and turbulent waters of 18th-century Stockholm.

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My Review: Dark, turbulent story finishes the arc of this series with the finality of an amputation saw. We met Cecil Winge and Mickel Cardell in 1793 as a truly appalling series of crimes come to light. These men, one in the terminal stages of the Great White Plague (tuberculosis) that ravaged the cities of the time, refuse to just accept that human beings can be treated in the vile ways they've seen without any consequences. Solid Enlightenment values on display, then. A human being has innate worth and dignity, and the kind of killing being perpetrated by someone(s) is an affront to that dignity.

It is hard for us to get into that mindset today. The privilege baked into the world we live in is now centered on money as worth and virtue; then it was god-given by birth. Whose vagina you were shoved out of was, forver and ever, the Place you occupied in this world and the next. Is it, I often wonder, better to base stuff on money? I mean, just look at the scum who hoard huge piles of money and get immense privilege! Unlike the old aristocracy, no one prepared them in any way for the responsibility of "high" social position so they waddle about, dribbling crudeness and outgassing idiocy like this wasn't a disgusting display of vulgarity.

Ahem.

Back to the book: The "high-born" people committing the crimes Mickel and the Winge brothers (Emil takes Cecil's place in the last two books of the series) are sufficiently enraged by to pursue them clearly don't have any noblesse oblige in them either. They behave disgustingly, but in private. The results of their disgusting behavior are simply dumped and there's no absolutely clear-cut way to pin it on the perpetrator(s) or to hold them accountable.

It's in the book! That's not me being political!

What happens in this last volume is the culmination of honest, honorable men pursuing justice across a corrupt landscape of privilege and abuse of power. It's a landscape that is absolute in its wins and losses. That is what suits the PTB, after all, since it's their thumbs on the scales of justice. The disgusting crimes, ones that repulse all honorable people of every station, in this book are less...meaty...but just as awful. The essential crime in the entire series, the one thing that unites the books and makes the reader invest in the characters and stories, is the abuse of power by the powerful. The lives of ordinary people are ruined at a whim, are altered for the worse by someone who has no consequences for that alteration. The team who set out to change that are doing so, bit by bit, in the teeth of a gale blown directly at them by men who do not want any precedents to be set that challenge their control.

The fierceness and appalling cruelty of the fight shows that they know the stakes are existential. Lose this one battle against two little nobodies and lose, once and for all, the Absolute Rights they presently enjoy. The force applied to Mickel and the Winges only makes sense when you look at it from the position of those whose power is at stake. The power that the little guys are fighting to take, the justice that they seek for victims cruelly used, is not out of proportion, that is overtly revolutionary, so why is it being resisted so fiercely?

Because once limited, absolute power dissolves. If held accountable for *this* crime, there is no longer immunity, no longer a usable reason to quash future and further reckonings. Why do you think there's something called a "consent decree"? The entire apparatus of Sweden's absolute monarchy topples if these two little men win Justice for the victims they're fighting for!

Do they, in the end, win? Read the book(s), dark and violent as they are, because I'm scared of the Spoiler Stasi. Those women take no prisoners.

1794: The City Between the Bridges , second The Wolf and the Watchman tale, translated by Ebba Segerberg

1794: The City Between the Bridges (The Wolf and the Watchman #2)
NIKLAS NATT OCH DAG (tr. Ebba Segerberg)
Atria Books
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A #1 international bestseller, this atmospheric and breathtaking sequel to the “cerebral, immersive page-turner” (The Washington Post) The Wolf and the Watchman explores the darkness hidden beneath the splendor of 18th-century Stockholm.

Stockholm, 1794: A young nobleman, Eric Three Roses, languishes in a hospital as the rest of the city claims that he belongs in a madhouse. Riddled with guilt, he writes down the memories of his lost love—his beautiful wife who died on their wedding night.

The young woman’s mother also mourns her death and, desperate for justice, begs for help from the only person who will listen to her: Jean Mickel Cardell, the one-armed watchman. But she isn’t the only person seeking him out.

Emil, younger brother to the brilliant lawyer and detective Cecil Winge, finds the watchman to demand his late brother’s pocket watch back. Instead, Cardell enlists Emil’s help to discover what really happened at the Three Roses estate that dreaded wedding night.

The City Between the Bridges: 1794 is a suspenseful race for the truth before it’s too late from an author with a “thrilling, unnerving, clever, and beautiful” (Fredrik Backman, #1 New York Times bestselling author) voice.

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

My Review: Splendidly grim; staggeringly brutal.

Really, I could stop typing right there. What you need to know is: The first book isn't a necessity to read before this one, but I recommend it. If that book's truly dreadful crimes don't cause you to blench, this one's won't either plus you'll already know Mickel Cardell...he's central to the point of view of Enlightenment-era Stockholm from below our usual ten-thousand-foot aerie of aristocracy of the mind or the law. History glosses over so much.

The author and the translator must have worked closely together on this series to maintain such a clear sense of the language being used with great exactness and concision. The way the imagery unfolds is gripping, especially in the more awful parts...and there are plenty of them!...so I'm not going to spend a lot of keystrokes specifying the CWs. Trust me, if you need a content warning, you might shouldn't pick this series up. Bodies and minds are abused, ground down, commodified. No one in this book has a shred of a chance at happiness.

If that matters to you, shop elsewhere.

What you'll get in this shop is a very trenchant take on the role of power in corrupting the powerful's souls. What happens when no one can say no to you is never pretty. What happens to others is downright horrifying. It behooves the reader willing to come down the fetid alleys and swim across the reeking canals to realize what dehumanizing and Othering costs the Othered, but also those passively complicit in it.

The manner in which the story is constructed, multiple apparently disconnected viewpoints, isn't at first obviously going to lead us to Stockholm and Mickel. Be patient...it will. But that polyphony that feels so alienating early on is, in the end, an effective tool for conveying the reality of the story to the observing eye of the reader.

I don't for a second think too many will see the ending coming. That is praise, coming from me. I can't honestly say I felt ma'at upheld in the resolution. Because nothing on this wide green Earth can redress the balance of horror and misery unleashed on the people in it. But it doesn't stop being worth the trip.

So no happy happy, joy joy. But a lot of seriously good points being made in prose more than up to the task of delivering the burden of the tale in unforgettable ways.

JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM, clever, amusing, witty even! But...

JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM
RYAN O'CONNELL
Atria Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Read this interview with Author O'Connell on LitHub!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the star of Peacock’s Queer as Folk and the Netflix series Special comes a darkly witty and touching novel following a gay TV writer with cerebral palsy as he fights addiction and searches for acceptance in an overwhelmingly ableist world.

Elliott appears to be living the dream as a successful TV writer with a doting boyfriend. But behind his Instagram filter of a life, he’s grappling with an intensifying alcohol addiction, he can’t seem to stop cheating on his boyfriend with various sex workers, and his cerebral palsy is making him feel like gay Shrek.

After falling down a rabbit hole of sex, drinking, and Hollywood backstabbing, Elliott decides to limp his way towards redemption. But facing your demons is easier said than done.

Candid, biting, and refreshingly real, Just by Looking at Him is an incisive commentary on gay life, a heart-centered, laugh-out-loud exploration of self, and a rare insight into life as a person with disabilities.

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

My Review: No one, looking from the outside in, will ever know what others are enduring, surviving, overcoming...or hiding. The author's got a track record of blowing the doors off handy hiding places...go watch his first show, Special, if you're in any doubt...and he's brought his unsparing honesty to bear on fiction about the supremely ableist gay-male world. Being a gay male, that's what he knows, so that's perfectly fair. It's a solid, explanatory fact that the author, writer for and star in the Peacock revival of Queer as Folk as well as the creator of the Netflix series Special based on his differently-abled-gay-guy memoir I'm Special and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves, is also the partner of Jonathan Parks-Ramage of Yes, Daddy fame.

This, then, is a Personage within QUILTBAG creativeland. I expected that I would be treated to outstanding stories told in superbly structured chapters.

I didn't get that.

I did get the expected honest and unflinching, no-bullshit presentation of Elliott's struggles with what I'd call impostor syndrome, fear of rejection, and a huge self-confidence deficit stemming from being gay and having cerebral palsy. I got hefty doses of snark and sarcasm; I got unblinking acknowledgment of the harm divergent career paths and the temptations of sudden financial freedom present in a couple's life. I got the eternal, and unwinnable, struggle of people to be monogamous when there is a vast smorgasbord of yummy side dishes available in any number of technologically assisted ways.

It was a lot of fun to read the author's one-liners, eg: "Lately I’d been feeling more and more that monogamy, like capitalism or keto, wasn’t sustainable, but I couldn’t be sure Gus was on the same page." It was not quite as much fun to have the funny one-liners be the book. It's like reading a really hilarious Twitter thread. (Seriously...seventy-four chapters is way, way too many for three hundred-ish pages.) After a while, enough with this...I'm working harder than I think I should have to to get the laffs. It's the comedy set that goes on too long, the Saturday Night Live skit that refuses to end.

It's also the man's first novel, these are common problems with comedic first novels, and there's not one thing in here that I didn't think belonged; it's just that it belonged in a slightly different structure. There's a great deal of sexual material and a great deal of discussion, in what I found slightly cringe-worthy (ie, dismissively dealt with via humor) terms, of substance abuse. It really highlights a very significant issue I felt as I got deeper and deeper into Elliott's story: He's really blind to his white cismale privilege. He's disabled, and an addict; but he deals with those problems from a very, very high platform that puts him in reach of all kinds of support and help.

Lamenting the innocence of 2012 wasn't a great idea, either, Author O'Connell. Things were easier? For men like us, maybe, but things are only getting better too slowly for others not white, not male, and not well off. We're still MILES ahead in this miserable race called "being American." Using self-deprecating humor to deflect negative awareness of one's privilege isn't a viable strategy in this day and age. (Maybe that's what the author meant about 2012 being easier?)

On balance, then, while I laughed and even found a lot of the self-reflection (primarily done at the end of the book) moving, I was too aware of some problems with the way this book was conceived and executed that, quite honestly, I didn't expect to see in 2022's publishing environment.

THE CHARM OFFENSIVE, keeping struggles real...in a fairy-tale world? Go on!

THE CHARM OFFENSIVE
ALISON COCHRUN
Atria Books
$11.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it’s no wonder then that he’s spent his career crafting them on the long-running reality dating show Ever After. As the most successful producer in the franchise’s history, Dev always scripts the perfect love story for his contestants, even as his own love life crashes and burns. But then the show casts disgraced tech wunderkind Charlie Winshaw as its star.

Charlie is far from the romantic Prince Charming Ever After expects. He doesn’t believe in true love, and only agreed to the show as a last-ditch effort to rehabilitate his image. In front of the cameras, he’s a stiff, anxious mess with no idea how to date twenty women on national television. Behind the scenes, he’s cold, awkward, and emotionally closed-off.

As Dev fights to get Charlie to open up to the contestants on a whirlwind, worldwide tour, they begin to open up to each other, and Charlie realizes he has better chemistry with Dev than with any of his female co-stars. But even reality TV has a script, and in order to find to happily ever after, they’ll have to reconsider whose love story gets told.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LIBRARY. THANK GOODNESS FOR LIBRARIES...USE YOURS SOON!

My Review: Reality TV isn't. I realize that's just the most startling thing you've ever read, but it is true. What it is, though, is made by real people and it features real people, with real emotions and feelings; they aren't dolls or puppets or robots. And while that's not something I expect most adults really need telling, intellectually, it's not...um...real. Somehow. (There will be, one day, a better vocabulary for these feelings-at-a-remove. I live for that day.)

But the thing that Author Cochrun did, in creating gorgeous OCD-having anxiety-experiencing Charlie, is something I think the world of reality TV, Romancelandia, and the entire entertainment world could do with a lot more of: She humanized the beautiful façades in a kind, supportive, and genuinely entertaining way. Her decision to make gawky, geeky Dev into a multifaceted man, her decision to have these two men, fractured and frantically trying to keep their heads above the dark, cold waters of mental illness's difficult times, find and learn about and accept each other is something still too rare. It is laudable, and the way she made it believable earns my admiration.

I can see a lot of eyes rolling at the idea of a gorgeously chiseled six-pack-sportin' tech millionaire having anxiety and OCD problems. Truth is many beautiful-looking people are beset by issues that onlookers don't think to wonder if they experience. The very idea is foreign..."if I only had money and/or looked like X I'd be happy all the time!"...but it honestly should shame us how much stock we put in that nonsense. People have problems. And when they're rich or beautiful or famous, they shouldn't. So when they do....

Brava, Author Cochrun, for slapping an ace on top of that tired old trick.

Then there's the Fun-Guy trope! Life of the party, always a laugh...he couldn't be depressed, he's got this great job and look at how many people he laughs his nights away with!...but the same logic applies. It's another good deed done to remind us that there's no one immune from the hurts of being alive. Putting the two of them together in this highly artificial, addicted-to-surfaces world was a great idea, and one that Author Cochrun pulled off with admirable aplomb.

What works well, works well. There's a minor plot-point left dangling, and there were two (2) foul, heinous, scum-dripping w-bombs. So there went that half-star. But there's no reason to go full-tilt ramming-speed mental when a medium-steam rom-com featuring two genuinely love-worthy, genuinely love-giving, thoroughly sweet men gets told in sentences like this:

Charlie hasn’t met many people like this—people who don’t make assumptions about you when they discover your brain doesn’t work like theirs; people who don’t judge you; people who simply stay with you and ask what they can do to help. People who trustingly hand you all of themselves in PDF form.
–and–
{He} curls into the fetal position inside the shower. This is what regret tastes like: regurgitated tequila and dirty cotton balls.
–and–
“It doesn’t have to be,” she says, “and you’re not obligated to figure it out, or come out, or explain yourself to anyone, ever. But also”—she drops her hands from their spectrum and tucks an arm around his shoulder—“labels can be nice sometimes. They can give us a language to understand ourselves and our hearts better. And they can help us find a community and develop a sense of belonging. I mean, if you didn’t have the correct label for your OCD, you wouldn’t be able to get the treatment you need, right?” {hear the Gospel of Saint Parisa, everybody!}
–and–
He pauses, and {his lover} explodes. “That’s such bullshit! There are so many people who have done actual terrible things who are actively working in tech! Mark Zuckerberg exists! And firing someone for having OCD—that’s got to be illegal."
–and–
"I don’t think happily ever after is something that happens to you...I think it’s something you choose to do for yourself.”

There's just no reason not to get this book, sink into it, and let the beauty of its fantasy world soothe crappy, warlike reality's wrinkles and creases right out of your face to be replaced by smiles.

CAROLINA BUILT, fictionalized story of a superbly determined woman's battles

CAROLINA BUILT
KIANNA ALEXANDER
Gallery Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook edition, available now


Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This “exuberant celebration of Black women’s joy as well as their achievements” (Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author) novelizes the life of real estate magnate Josephine N. Leary in a previously untold story of passion, perseverance, and building a legacy after emancipation in North Carolina.

Josephine N. Leary is determined to build a life of her own and a future for her family. When she moves to Edenton, North Carolina from the plantation where she was born, she is free, newly married, and ready to follow her dreams.

As the demands of life pull Josephine’s attention away, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to pursue her real estate aspirations. She finds herself immersed in deepening her marriage, mothering her daughters, and being a dutiful daughter and granddaughter. Still, she manages to teach herself to be a businesswoman, to manage her finances, and to make smart investments in the local real estate market. But with each passing year, it grows more and more difficult to focus on building her legacy from the ground up.

“Filled with passion and perseverance, Josephine Leary is frankly a woman that everyone should know” (Sadeqa Johnson, author of Yellow Wife) and her story speaks to the part of us that dares to dream bigger, tear down whatever stands in our way, and build something better for the loved ones we leave behind.

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

My Review: It's always been hard to be a woman. In the US, it's always been hard to be Black. Now put the two disadvantages together...that's what Josephine Leary is up against. She's equal to any task, though; the novel begins in 1870, during the last days of Reconstruction. Having lived her childhood as a slave, Josephine knows that every single act she takes in this life has to have as its aim the increase of freedom and the assurance of security for herself, her husband, and their two daughters, as each addition to her life is made.

Her slaveowner was also her father, and that piece of "good luck" played out in her favor. She was able to buy the barbershop she and her husband ran together from him. And from there forward, it was all Mrs. Leary and all the way up Sweety, her husband, backed her.

Until her success threatened his Manhood.

It's a testament to the author's ability to pace a story that I didn't just quietly close the book and ignore it at that point. I know it happened; I am told it still happens. But it makes for dull reading, the expected flaw in the expected place. But to her credit, Author Alexander dwells on it not...it's not like it's played down but it's not protracted either.

What made me so dad-blamed mad that I screamed at my Kindle (for which I apologize to my roommate, he was sleeping and was utterly terrified as I shouted "NO SHE DID NOT!!" into the dark) came close to the end of the book when there's a fire that deprives Mrs. Leary of her (uninsured, of course, she was a Black woman, who'd write that policy in the 1890s?!) hard-earned gains! But...and this is where I almost cheered but was too shy to wake the grouch up again...she still owned the land. And she chose to rebuild, to build back better.

Unlike certain scumbag politicians with "R"s after their names.

Well, that all sounds very five-starry, doesn't it? But there's a four up there...and I feel generous giving it. The fact is that this is a very dialogue-heavy novel and there's not much vigor in the dialogue. It's not awful but it doesn't lend itself to quoting the quotable quotes. There's not any.

"The only thing that truly frightens me is the idea that I might not take full advantage of the gift of freedom. I refuse to let that happen."

And that is as snappy as it gets. I'm in total agreement with the sentiment. I just wish it had more oomph behind it.

But in the end, this is an historical novel and it's a lot better served by thinking of it as a novelized biography. Josephine Leary very much deserves to be remembered for her indomitable will, her savvy, and her sheer cussèd determination to overcome every obstacle the world shoves in front of her. Reading the story is a good, and a worthy, way to honor the memory of such a remarkable person.

THE SELFLESS ACT OF BREATHING, a deeply felt meditative look at the cost of modern life

THE SELFLESS ACT OF BREATHING
J.J. BOLA
Atria Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

A FILM IS IN THE WORKS! "I thank my readers and I look forward to reaching a new audience, via a new medium, and helping us all — which is the reason I wrote this novel — to remember that no matter how we feel, we are not alone,” says Author Bola.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Transcendent Kingdom meets A Man Called Ove in this heartwarming novel about a Congolese-British Londoner who decides to go on one last adventure in the United States, determined to end his life once his savings run out.

As a charismatic teacher living in London, Michael Kabongo strives to alleviate the injustices he sees around him: for the students who long for better lives, in memory of his father’s tragic death, and to end the violent marginalization of Black men around the world.

But after a devastating loss, he decides to embark on an adventure in the land of the free—the United States of America. From Dallas to San Francisco, Michael parties with new friends, engages in fleeting romances, splurges on thrilling escapades, all with the intention of ending his life once all his savings run out.

As he makes surprising new connections and faces old prejudices in odd but exciting new settings, Michael alone must decide if his life is worth living after all...

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

My Review: I tried to commit suicide in 2014. It was a very low point in my life. It was fortunate that my life didn't end because of the disordered thinking...a woman named Julie made a fortuitous call as I was beginning the process and sent the police to intervene...so I am here to write this review. This is also why I wanted to review this book, given the narrator's plan to end his life when his savings were blown. (Side note: Howinahell did he get so far on a lousy $9000?!)

It's not clear to me why the topic of suicide isn't a trigger for reupping the suicidal ideation machine in me. I can read about the deeply depressed and the suicidal in novels and feel so much compassion, so much sympathy...but no desire to emulate them, only to reach out to them and say "this is a permanent solution to a temporary problem." I've gone through a lot of introspective stuff (CBT works!) and think of the idea of death as, well, honestly it's undisturbing to me. Neither attractive nor repulsive, just a fact. And the manner of Michael, our PoV character, making his decision to go blow his money then die rang memory bells. "This final act, then nothingness" probably sounds better to the truly suicidally depressed than more emotionally overwrought ideation does.

Michael addresses us in the parts of the book set in London. He's fully present, he's struggling to do his teaching job well, and he's floundering in grief deeper than even he can tell...grief too deep to be solely about a recent loss. Michael's decision to leave for the US with that paltry $9000 and live until it runs out (he'd be in Delaware Water Gap, New Jersey, not San Francisco!) is narrated in third person, a choice I took to be representative of his dissociation from the life he was abandoning and refusal to invest in the life he was going to exist through in the US. It wasn't a choice I felt did the story any great service. I think it probably just confused most readers. And I'm not all the way sure I am correct in my analysis, there are other possibilities but I can't make one up that makes the least bit of sense to me except the dissociation one.

What elevates this debut novel above the pack it comes out with is the lovely poetical aphoristic phrase making:

We fight to be seen, for the world to know that we are here, only for us to be forgotten, to be invisible once again.

–and–

Have you ever loved, knowing it would end, but giving your whole heart regardless?

–and–

The thing about losing love is makes you feel like you can never love again, like you are not worthy.

–and–

Loneliness is being there for everyone, everyone, in the hope that someone will be there for you. But no one ever is. You are the sun, lighting the world of another, while setting yourself on fire.

–and–

And above all, it is love, that spark of bright light, that dazzling flame, ephemeral or eternal, may it find us, may it be us, the will that carries us forward, the bond that brings us back, from beyond this lonely feeling to healing; the selfless act of breathing.

The author might be making his fiction debut (correction this is the author's second novel, after 2017's No Place to Call Home) but he's an established poet (Elevate and Daughter of the Sun among others) and it's ever so clear that his phrases will sound gorgeous when spoken aloud. That is also, to be frank, the issue that led to me docking a star off the story's subjective rating: It's performative, it's got an eye on its look in the mirror of your regard. It is, in other words, like poetry is to me: phonied up, heightened, exaggerated to make some point that I think you, O Writer, should trust me to get all on my own. If, that is, you've done your part of the job....

What I hope you'll do is sample the book. Put a bit on your Kindle and see if the way the author slings the lingo hits your sweet spot. If so, there's nothing to prevent you from enjoying the book in its entirety. The first chapters are a good index for the voice the entire book has. While I'm here today because suicide didn't turn out to be the best option for me, this is not an apologia for the act or I'd tell you to avoid it. What leads a person to consider suicide: depression, a sense of alienation from the world around them, a loneliness that pervades this world of exclusion and judgment...all this is the subject of Author Bola's work.

This sadness, how it falls upon you, like mist or fog, not there, then sudden and all at once; a greyness, enveloping you, submerged under water. This sadness in your bones, each step heavier than the last raises questions: how much longer is this journey? How much longer can I walk?

This is an elegant distillation of the greyness of depression and the desperation of feeling it's endless because you've got no perspective where this isn't what you see...all of that is very, very real and very salutary for all of those whose world doesn't have it anywhere (all five of you) to get into your brains. It could make your empathy bumps bigger, spread your hugging arms wider, and tune up your "there, there, my friend" to a fresher pitch.

THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN, grim and deeply disturbing, but unputdownable

THE WOLF AND THE WATCHMAN
NIKLAS NATT OCH DAG (tr. Ebba Segerberg)
Atria Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One morning in the autumn of 1793, watchman Mikel Cardell is awakened from his drunken slumber with reports of a body seen floating in the Larder, once a pristine lake on Stockholm’s Southern Isle, now a rancid bog. Efforts to identify the bizarrely mutilated corpse are entrusted to incorruptible lawyer Cecil Winge, who enlists Cardell’s help to solve the case. But time is short: Winge’s health is failing, the monarchy is in shambles, and whispered conspiracies and paranoia abound.

Winge and Cardell become immersed in a brutal world of guttersnipes and thieves, mercenaries and madams. From a farmer’s son who is lead down a treacherous path when he seeks his fortune in the capital to an orphan girl consigned to the workhouse by a pitiless parish priest, their investigation peels back layer upon layer of the city’s labyrinthine society. The rich and the poor, the pious and the fallen, the living and the dead—all collide and interconnect with the body pulled from the lake.

Breathtakingly bold and intricately constructed, The Wolf and the Watchman brings to life the crowded streets, gilded palaces, and dark corners of late-eighteenth-century Stockholm, offering a startling vision of the crimes we commit in the name of justice, and the sacrifices we make in order to survive.

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

My Review: First, read this:

Under the skin, broken blood vessels wallow like a pack of leeches.
–and–
"You are indeed a wolf after all. I’ve seen enough to know, and even if I am wrong, you will soon become one. No one can run with the wolf pack without accepting its terms. You have both the fangs and the glint of the predator in your eye. You deny the blood thirst, but it rises around you like a stench. One day your teeth will be stained red and then you’ll know with certainty how right I was. Your bite will be deep.”
–and–
"Even sweat smells differently in the face of death, did you know that? Mix it all with gun smoke and you end up with the devil's own perfume."
–and–
The dead man whispered lipless accusations, his voice seething with worms.
"You were to bring me justice but you failed. The other has atoned with his life. You'll be next."

There is a darn sight more body horror, and psychological twists and turns, to this read than you're probably expecting from a series mystery. I do not think this is a typical book in any way, though, so I appreciate the publisher's dilemma in categorizing the book for B&N and Amazon.

It's not unrelievedly grim reading, though:

It is funny how everyone seems to want to help those who need none, while they will take long paths to avoid the need that is evident.
–and–
Those who are not able to make themselves understood simply repeat themselves at a higher volume.

I don't know if this is unique, but it's uncommon: These lines are definitely reflective of Author Natt och Dag's writing style in Swedish because he translated the book himself. CORRECTION! The book was translated by Ebba Segerberg, an able and prolific translator from Swedish to English. I apologize for my error. I do not know if or when the next book in this milieu will come out, but it's entitled 1794. It *has* been two years since it came out in Swedish, though.

Don't so much as twitch toward this book if you're not able to breeze through Stieg Larsson's horrible rape- and gore-filled tomes or Henning Mankell's more violent books about Wallander. In every line and on every page you're going to be challenged, and hard; rape, torture, murder, and a twisted vision of the upper-class privilege corrupting Sweden in its early Enlightenment days. As brutal as any Scandinoir, as evocatively written as Mantel's Sir Thomas More novels, and worth every flinch, gasp, and slamming shut in horror.