PORTRAIT OF A WITCH UNDONE, charming and fun and amusing

PORTRAIT OF A WITCH UNDONE
K.S. SHAY
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 2, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Thirteen stolen works of art. One haunted marsh.
And a Boston witch willing to risk everything for the friend she’s already failed.

An atmospheric, eerie debut for readers of Starling House and A Discovery of Witches, Isabella Stewart Gardner art heist aficionados, witchy girls, burnt-out former gifted kids, New England history buffs, the coven curious, ride-or-die friends, folklore fanatics, and anyone who’s ever wanted to wander through the looking glass.

Once, Maeve Ryan was the strongest witch of her generation. But Maeve messed up a spell to contact the Lady of the Fens, an eerie Revenant who lures the unwary to their deaths in the brackish marshlands of the North Shore. Maeve destroyed her reputation, hurt her best friend Ash, and tainted herself with unbound, wild magic that transforms witches into insane Revenants.

With unbound power eating away at Maeve’s mind, all she wants is to get rid of her magic. Forever. But Ash’s research into how the spell went awry leads in an unexpected direction: the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and a link between the Lady and a decades-old art theft worth $500 million. When Ash disappears through a stolen painting’s empty frame, Maeve has to follow.

Inside is the Other Marsh, a haunting, deadly realm where only the Lady’s rules apply. Within this half-world lie secrets about North Shore’s history, Maeve’s failure, and the fate of the masterpieces that disappeared over three decades ago. But as Maeve fights toward the truth, she risks her friendship, her coven, and her life against enemies hiding in plain sight.

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

My Review: The hardcover might be preferable to order, y'all:

Are these endsheets to die for or what?

And then there are the seven maps that this bloody program will not let me upload; just know that they'll enhance your reading experience for the mappish among you, like me. They're there because this is an undertaking to explain the long-ago, still unsolved, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. After almost forty years, I think it's safe to say the solution presented here...it's magic...might as well become the final word. Nothin' else but the death of some powerful people will bust open the truth and maybe not even then, so heck...why not magic?

Maeve, all of twenty-three during this story, is a really interesting magical practitioner. She's filled with insecurity after very publicly failing at an important working that unintentionally hurts her bestie in the Salem coven. This is the woman who still comes to her rescue when the cursed apartment she lives in is overrun by frogs...without harming the frogs. It was refreshing. Not a frog-fancier, me, but I do get the joke about witches who famously use frogs in magical working that don't turn out well for the frogs subverting that silly stereotype. Also subversive of stereotypes is the way these witches actually *fly*on*their*brooms* and still don't play it for a cheap snigger.

There's a male main character. He is Maeve's "love interest." Nothing about this part of the plot adds anything very interesting to the story. I'm moving on. The interplay among the coven members really exemplifies the use...bordering on overuse...of the miscommunication among people who have one big thing in common but little else drawing them together. It's a problem as the mystery of the art heist steadily takes over the coven's activities; the stolen artworks are, like much art, imbued with magical capability of being bridges between worlds. Maeve is forced to do her best magic in the scenes where she's working to focus everyone on the common goal of regaining these stolen portals. May not be all spells but it's for sure magic.

Maeve has the chops innate in her to be a leader, but she's twenty-three. The action spins out of her control as we-the-reader watch, amused and bemused, while the coven attempts solving the heist for their own, not-law-enforcing, purposes. It is clear Maeve could become the focus of a series with her coven as they redress imbalances and resolve mysteries. I hope they all come back soon. I also hope potential future lovely, fun reads will show Maeve grow into her leadership and not rely on the chaos that comes from poor communication again. Magic carries in its basis the wildness and chaos of Life, untrammelled; Maeve can shape that, can form it...if she's written that way.

Debuts seldom come with this much promise. Hope it's pointed in a positive way.

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

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

Rating: 4.25* of five

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

You always wanted magic to be real.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA, The Cosmic Wheel series book one

THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA (The Cosmic Wheel #1)
A.D. SUI
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding.

Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy and guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI construct for companionship.

The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years. A relic of Earth’s dying past, humanity took the ship to the stars on a multi-generation journey to find another habitable planet yet never reached its destination. Its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Vessel Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.

Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship.

But the ship's plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Vessel Iris with his AI construct may be their only hope for survival. . .

IN OUTER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOUR PRAYERS

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

My Review: What if Murderbot was a Buddhist monk, and arrives on a derelict generation ship to guide its long-dead colonists through samsara to the Light, but a bunch of irreligious bumbling academics need saving from...beings...while he's trying to do his work? Yes, this time he's male, and has a...situationship...with his AI. That's a major friction point with the normal humans he needs to save, because all life is sacred even when it's stupid and nasty.

It's a good story, it's got levels to think about that open like hatches hidden under green stuff then turn into wormholes, gates, passageways through reality into your busy monkey-brain. Whirling in my monkey-brain was a sneaky little thought: why do monks, who famously renounce the world, decide to help us worldly denizens of samsara (apparently Sanskrit for the same concept as "gefilte" or "mashed up and stuffed") only when we die?

But that's trespassing into religion, its uses and motivating ideas, its sacred territory....

What to enjoy about the monk with an AI sharing his brain, albeit in a subservient role, is the fertile territory for human nastiness to get directed at a "holy" person by the deeply secular people around him. I'm envious of Vessel Iris because he lives in a world of only a few tiny remnant religious nuts. Sounds like heaven to me. (See what I did there?) My missing parts of the fifth star came from my deep dislike of the Harry-Dresdenish self-recriminating litany of personal abuse Vessel Iris feeds himself. Since the book is all inside Vessel Iris' head, and since I want to shove him out an airlock about once every twenty pages, it made for a choppy, months-long reading experience. I made the deal with myself that I couldn't Pearl-Rule a book set on a failed generation ship with serious botanical Nostromo vibes and a monk who's treated like we'd treat a sex-trafficking politician for having an AI in his brain.

I don't think everyone will love this read. I'm not sure *I* loved this read. But I was completely unable to abandon ship. I lurked through the overgrown halls celebrating with nasty schadenfreude every time whatever it was picked off another creepy academic. I did not, in other words, root *for* anyone in the story, not even the dead colonists whose reasons for seeking a new world...well. I didn't like anyone. It wasn't an easy investment to make.

But it was one I absolutely did make.

This is a very philosophical horror-of-sorts story of how fear and safety are too deeply intertwined to be separable, no matter how much one tries to treat them as opposites or even antipodes on a spectrum. What happens when you're only safe when you're afraid is a subtle and fascinating frame to hang a space-locked-room mystery on.

It felt to me like the story smashed into a brick wall when Vessel Iris started in on his self-flagellation, but I stipulate that as a me problem. Leaving aside my annoyance I think the pace of the action is rising at a good storytelling clip; the ideas never got too top-heavy, causing weird bends in the plot (a major flaw in Becky Chambers' stories from my PoV); and the resolution was very nicely capping off the plot while not too obviously blaring the sequel-is-coming horn.

It might not be for you, but you will know within the first 10% if it isn't. Read a sample; there are genuine pleasures to be had in the story for people who don't have my oversensitivity to self-flagellation.

THE MEMORY HUNTERS, Tsai's first fantasy novel in The Consecrated series of anti-colonialist sapphic tales

THE MEMORY HUNTERS (The Consecrated #1)
MIA TSAI
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$23.80 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Inception meets Indiana Jones in this propulsive fungal science fantasy following a headstrong academic and her equally stubborn bodyguard as they unearth an ancient secret that rocks the foundations of their society—and challenges their unspoken love for one another.

Kiana Strade can dive deeper into blood memories than anyone alive. But instead of devoting her talents to the temple she’s meant to lead, Key wants to do research for the Museum of Human Memory. . . and to avoid the public eye.

Valerian IV's twin swords protect Key from murderous rivals and her own enthusiasm alike. Vale cares about Key as a friend—and maybe more—but most of all, she needs to keep her job so she can support her parents and siblings in the storm-torn south.

But when Key collects a memory that diverges from official history, only Vale sees the fallout. Key’s mentor suspiciously dismisses the finding; her powerful mother demands she stop research altogether. And Key, unusually affected by the memory, begins to lose moments, then minutes, then days.

As Vale becomes increasingly entangled in Key’s obsessive drive for answers, the women uncover a shattering discovery—and a devastating betrayal. Key and Vale can remain complicit, or they can jeopardize everything for the truth.

Either way, Key is becoming consumed by the past in more ways than one, and time is running out.

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

My Review: Memorycelium? Mycelium accumbens? We're gonna need a bigger vocabulary for brain stuff. After this apocalypse, there's now a fungal component to our species, in the form of a mycelial memory-sharing capability.

I'm shuddering convulsively, yet really intrigued; this is not the first fungal horror-tinged sci-fantasy of this millennium. Amatka, T. Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead; decades ago, Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels featured "Thread," the mycorrhizal threat to all Pernese life; the pop-culture phenomenon that is The Last of Us...all using the fungi to bring the scares, to reduce humanity to something fungal's prey or at the least its dependent.

I was also really impressed that Author Tsai didn't use her bullhorn to blare romantasy at me. The women are, um, entwined (it's only now occurring to me how very fungal a lot of romantic metaphors can sound) but are learning to trust instead of falling in lust/love. That comes(!) afterwards, and after a great deal of personal discovery. Vale, solid guardian and uberpractical peasant, learns more than skill with weapons is needed to keep Key, highly pressurized and stressed entitled solipsist that she is, from coming to greater harm. Vale has to learn that Key's social heritage is more than a gilded footstool to climb over everyone else; it requires Key to adhere to certain modes of being that both of them are discovering have costs to their benefits. It's a slow-burn bi awakening, not instaluuuv, and it requires some deep reflection on both their parts, to fully *get* how they fit together.

What else it requires for these women to accept their love bond is Vale's conventional, clearly queer boyfriend's response to the situation. As they become A Couple, Vale and Key aren't frictionlessly gliding into place at each other's side. The family that Vale is supporting with her guardian job over Key has to have precedence over all as she's their support; Key's position in the social, quasi-religious (my take is it really isn't religious in terms I understand, it's more like academic orthodoxy on steroids) order of memory hunters is intensely important and demanding; it's all threatened by multiple axes of the events in the story.

Key's latest memory extraction is such that its details really put the burner on high under the stewpot. This is one strong indicator that this is a series-starting tale. There's a received wisdom about why this world that Key works to uphold through her memory extraction is how it is. Key accidentally makes a discovery that flies in the face of the received wisdom. Hijinks ensue.

And how! Vale has some awful blowback, Key learns (begins to learn anyway) that not everyone is protected by talent and position, they both start pulling on loose threads...we all know how much authoritarians love people asking questions! especially impertinent ones with the word "why" at their core...and, well, there's A Lot going to happen here pretty quick. Just not in this book.

Key's not a bundle of joy to read about. Her entitlement shines bright. It makes her insensitive to Vale's practical needs. Jing, Vale's "boyfriend," just needs to come out already, he's so hot for his own guardian Cal. Vale needs to step up her boundary-setting game big time. She might want to look in a mirror once in a while to see why she's getting attention. But honestly I forgave them all because this is clearly book one in a series. Most all these are scene-setting issues for future resolution.

I was also willing to put the hazy world-building on hold for the same reason. "But WHY" becomes less urgent when you know there will be another book. I'm eager for it. Though if Jing and Cal don't end up together, and if Key's mother the high priestess doesn't get unalived early in the next story, I'm kicking off big time.

WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON, my first merman/human romance!

WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON
VENESSA VIDA KELLEY
Erewhon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In Coney Island, true love rises to the surface. With lush illustrations and buoyant prose, Venessa Vida Kelley forges an unforgettable New York fairytale.

Benigno “Benny” Caldera knows an orphaned Boricua blacksmith in 1910s New York City can’t call himself an artist. But the ironwork tank he creates for famed Coney Island playground, Luna Park, astounds the eccentric sideshow proprietor who commissioned it. He invites Benny to join the show’s eclectic cast and share in their shocking secret: the tank will cage their newest exhibit, a live merman stolen from the salty banks of the East River.

More than a mythic marvel, Benny soon comes to know the merman Río as a kindred spirit, wise and more compassionate than any human he’s ever met. Despite their different worlds, what begins as a friendship of necessity deepens to love, leading Benny’s heart into uncharted waters where he can no longer ignore the agonizing truth of Río’s captivity—and his own.

Releasing Río could mean losing his found family, his new home, and his soulmate forever. Yet Benny’s courageous choice may just reveal a love strong enough to free them both.

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

My Review: Give the author your most intent awareness as you read this statement of her purpose in writing this wonderful (if just slightly too YA-inflected, bye half-star!) illustrated novel.

The character of Benny is, from the start, someone I loved. His self-talk is laced with Spanish, which I find pleasant. I know lots of y'all don't like "foreign" words in your reading, but there aren't a lot of better ways to get you to think about how Othering works, how much it costs. If *you* don't want to make minimal efforts to grasp another's thoughts if they happen not to be in English, why on Earth should they make any effort for you?

Moving on.

The idea of the story is finding True Love is awakening to the belovèd's essential commonality with you as you understand yourself.

Riding the exciting, brightly lit, antigravity-simulating speeding circle to nowhere

Discovering that commonality is often a matter of luck, of being the right place...and in the right receptive state...relative to the belovèd. Benny has the unfathomable good luck to be exactly where his belovèd needs him to be, to possess (through coping with his own exoticized, colonialism-imposed identity) the precise skills necessary to make his belovèd free from horrifying, degrading circumstances, and the right life experiences and wounds and battlescars to know what this degradation really is, both inside and out.

It's a novel, y'all. Of course he does.

The funny thing about degradation is it's never univalent. It degrades the powerful to use their power this way, makes them and their ideology wrong in fundamental ways. It uplifts the degraded into positions of being the focus of the powerful's imaginations, of being the means by which the powerful define their power. It creates a bond and a camaraderie, an essential amount of community and connection among those being subjected to it.

No one you love is too heavy to carry

Degradation contains the seeds of its own destruction. Remember that. I assure you the powerful do. It is the source of divide-and-conquer tactics.

Benny and Río, his merlove, are in that powerful position of being too weak to elicit a violent response from their oppressors. They're the ones who must exert force to accomplish their goals, so it pays to be under the radar. Their love blossoms over the accustomed obstacles of the Hurt/comfort subgenre of romance. It does so even more powerfully than most because Río is not human and cannot live in a human world without a LOT of devoted infrastructure.

I'll spell it out for some of our more entrenched worldview-havers: This is more than an exploration of gay men in love and building their own world across serious cultural boundaries. If that's as far as you've seen, you're correct. But "if he could see inside my dreams and see himself there" is the early stop on this train. This is also a metaphorical exploration of transgender reality in our world. It's never been easier to be trans; it's never been harder to be part of the overculture, because now that same easier existence thanks to a crude but improving infrastructure means They can see you. It's a distorted view, but you're no longer invisible to them.

To find a mate you have to be visible

But what a beautiful, Technicolor dream world awaits!

LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR, #WITMonth Japanese YA fantasy page-turner

LONELY CASTLE IN THE MIRROR
MIZUKI TSUJIMURA (tr. Philip Gabriel)
Erewhon Books
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a tranquil neighborhood of Tokyo seven students are avoiding going to school—hiding in their darkened bedrooms, unable to face their family and friends—until the moment they find the mirrors in their bedrooms are shining.

At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives into to a wondrous castle straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale. This whimsical place, oddly lacking in food and running water but full of electrical sockets, is home to a petulant girl in a mask, named Wolf Queen and becomes their playground and refuge during school hours. Hidden within the walls they’re told is a key that will grant one wish, and a set of clues with which to find it. But there's a catch: the key must be found by the end of the school year and they must leave the premises by five o'clock each day or else suffer a fatal end.

As time passes, a devastating truth emerges: only those brave enough to share their stories will be saved. And so they begin to unlock each other's stories: how a boy is showered with more gadgets than love; how another suffers a painful and unexplained rejection and how a girl lives in fear of her predatory stepfather. As they struggle to abide by the rules of the game, a moving story unfolds, of seven characters trapped in a cycle of misunderstanding and loneliness, who are ultimately set free by the power of friendship, empathy, and sacrifice.

Exploring vivid human stories with a twisty and puzzle-like plot, this heart-warming novel is full of joy and hope for anyone touched by sadness and vulnerability. At the heart of this tender, playful tale is a powerful message about the importance of reaching out which shows how with one kind act you can change your life for the better, and more importantly, you can change the lives of others.

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

My Review: A story about coming out, though not the kind that phrase currently evokes. These socially maladroit and thus ostracized middle-schoolers are magically transported away from the bullying horrors of that age...the characterization of reincarnation as an endless round of middle-school lifetimes makes me so very glad I'm not A Believer...but, of course, there's a price to pay for this act of rescue. The seven of them must open up, honestly share their experiences, and only then will they be truly safe.

Well. That sounds like something I'd be sharpening my flensing knife with a ghoulish grin on my face, doesn't it? More adolescent exceptionalism! And with an added splodge of fantasy goo! "Oh he's gonna go to town on this one!"

Not this time.

Any story in which adolescent readers are encouraged, without bludgeoning, to share, and to respect the gift of sharing from another, gets my vote. Then to put it in a fantasy world that protects the wounded ones? Bonus points! To go on with the worldbuilding in a way that connects their safe escape spot back to the world they're rescued from, yet without the toxicity they need rescuing from flooding in after them? Rare and delicate flower, let me inhale you! The most usual problems are here, the bullying and the losses of safety and love. Each person's also shown to be made aware from the response to the issue that led the sufferer to this magical safe space of how much different the same stimulus can feel to different people.

Literally the point of this entire book is to learn the art of perspective in dealings with others.

I would like to experience no surprise, no extra frisson of happiness at this. The world would be a better place if I didn't. But I did, and I encourage all y'all with grands, niblings, kids of twelve or more, to grab this story up thence to present it ever-so-casually to them. It's a message, one of kindness and the presumption of goodwill on the part of all who are not genuinely rotten-souled, that I'd strongly urge getting into their heads.

Their dads and uncles, older brothers, and so on, as well.

DAY BOY, dark fantasy & WEIRD FISHES, subaquatic cli fi

WEIRD FISHES
RAE MARIZ
Stelliform Press
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: AN UNDERWATER TALE OF FRIENDSHIP AGAINST MONSTROUS ODDS

When Ceph, a squid-like scientist, discovers proof of the ocean’s slowing currents, she makes the dangerous ascent from her deep-sea civilization to the uncharted surface above. Out of her depths and helpless in her symbiotic mech suit, Ceph relies on Iliokai, a seal-folk storyteller, who sings the state of the sea and has seen evidence of clogged currents as she surfs the time gyres throughout the lonely blue. Navigating the perils of their damaged ocean environment, and seemingly insurmountable cultural differences, Ceph and Iliokai realize that the activities of terrestrial beings are slowing the spiralling currents of time. On a journey that connects future and past, the surface and the deep, the unlikely friends struggle to solve a problem so big it needs a leviathan solution.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. ***CW: rape***

My Review: I know a lot of folks are, um, squeamish about couples that aren't one-man/one-woman. Y'all gonna bust somethin' when it comes to intimate interspecies relations....

But my gosh! The worldbuilding in this novella would support a billion-page nonillionology for each of these cultures. And still the read manages to be truly satisfying. That is a major achievement. The consequences of human action starts the plot on its course; the circle of life gets closed in the end, but in a way I warned you about above.

I am delighted to say that every step leading up to the ending's unpleasantness contains no such activity. I can't say you're likely to be prepared for it with foreshadowing or desensitization. I can say it's stark and shocking when it happens, unambiguous in its cost, and fully part of the narrative arc.

And my goddesses did I hate it.

There's nothing like consequences to offer a lesson about what the author wants to say. I'm glad Author Mariz said it. But I still hated it.

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

DAY BOY
TRENT JAMIESON
Erewhon Books
$25.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A lyrical, tender story about role models and growing into manhood that reimagines the elements of the vampire myth in a wholly original way . . . while never breathing a word about vampires.

They worship the Sun: the only god as cruel as they are.

The Masters, dreadful and severe, rule the Red City and the lands far beyond it. By night, they politic and feast, drinking from townsfolk resigned to their fates. By day, the Masters must rely on their human servants, their Day Boys, to fulfill their every need and carry out their will.

Mark is a Day Boy, practically raised by his Master, Dain. It’s grueling, often dangerous work, but Mark neither knows nor wants any other life. And, if a Day Boy proves himself worthy, the nightmarish, all-seeing Council of Teeth may choose to offer him a rare gift: the opportunity to forsake his humanity for monstrous power and near-immortality, like the Masters transformed before him.

But in the crackling heat of the Red City, widespread discontent among his fellow humans threatens to fracture Mark's allegiances. As manhood draws near, so too does the end of Mark's tenure as a Day Boy, and he cannot stay suspended between the worlds of man and Master for much longer.

With brilliantly evocative, hypnotic prose, Trent Jamieson crafts a fang-sharp and surprisingly tender coming-of-age story about a headstrong boy—and the monster who taught him to be a man.

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

My Review: Erewhon does very, very interesting SF stories, like this wonderfully realized take on vampirism. The story of Mark, the Master/vampire's Day Boy coming of age in a system that is grotesquely unfair, is handled with care and with respect for his genuine struggle to come to terms with his privilege. As this is a struggle many, if not most of us with levels of privilege similar to Mark's have yet to engage with/in, the story isn't a Young Adult one. In my opinion, anyway.

I'd like to call y'all's attention to the descriptive prose. It is very well-handled. It doesn't overwhelm the momentum of the story, and it doesn't veer into for-its-own-sake lyricality. I'd excerpt some or you but the fact is it's best appreciated in its context...anything I call out won't have the impact I'm describing to you. Author Jamieson is one heckuva prose stylist and that alone's a reason for fans of the vampire genre, the post-apocalyptic genre, and social-comment fiction to read it.