I MAKE MY OWN FUN, a title you'll look at differently after the read

I MAKE MY OWN FUN
HANNAH BEER
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An unhinged romp through fame, obsession, and fandom

Everyone knows Marina, the A-list movie star. But very few know Marina, the absolute monster.

Years at the top have proved that whatever Marina wants, she gets. But when she meets bartender Anna, Marina discovers something that can't be Anna's affection. As Anna remains unmoved, Marina's advances become more desperate, and her obsession more dangerous.

The price of fame is heavy—and someone will have to pay for it …

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

My Review: Mmmkay...so...see it's like this. There is not one shred of realism in this weirdness. Marina has five Oscars and she got them when not yet thirty.

Five. OSCARS.

Park them carpin' natterin' nabobs of emotional negativity in the punchbowl, y'all. Go with it. So Marina's in London for...something, I forgot what, doing her "Miss Relatable Superstar oh I'm just plain folks" shtik that sells out theaters, bored with the fact it keeps working, but nothing gonna change her runnin' the con, because a superstar girl's gotta feed the hordes of hangers-on. Marina goes out, worn out after another day of faking sincerity in search of booze and babes (the hot PR-inspired boyfriend is with his little sidequest lad—everybody's bi). (Oh, Marina? She likes girls too.)

And there SHE is: Anna the food-service worker, starstruck and ripe for the plucking. Marina plucks, well tries to anyway. Anna is...not impressed.

This cannot be allowed. You just know the whole world, from the folks Marina catfishes on various dating apps to the fellow A-lister "friends" she's secretly fed to the internet wolves for shits and giggles, has always fallen right into or back into her orbit at the merest crook of a pinky from Marina. Anna, though, declines the part she's been cast to play.

I hope you saw Tár. Marina's the Hollywood version of her, very very sure she is worth all the trouble and pain she causes all around her because she is A Star. There is more than a little of the Fatal Attraction thing goin' on with the way Anna keeps ducking out and trying to get away, which Marina's sure is just playing hard to get. Not so much Marina...Anna sees your real face and wants no part of looking into the abyss of selfishness and self-regard you represent. You're running out of time, passing the line of 30 aka career death, and Anna is failing to hide your desperation and trappedness from you...how dare she?! You *deserve* Anna's utter devotion! You're YOU!

Bitter, angry celebrity-obsessed woman caught in what she knows inside is the beginning of the end refuses to examine her actual reality to see what she wants to try next. Told in a headlong, obsessive rush, maybe even too much of one, Author Beer's debut novel is a howl of outrage that the /marinas of the world get as far as they do, that what the Marinas of the world do to others is only partial repayment and charged to the wrong account for what's done to them. The ending, honestly rushed and abrupt, works because there are unreliable narrators like Christie's Dr. Sheppard, and then there are the Marinas. This ending, abrupt as it is, makes the sheer awfulness of Marina fluoresce. It's so so sad, and so so appropriate, and just truly satisfying for what it subtextually points to.

There is not one soul in this book I felt like I wanted to rescue, teach sense to, or even get to know better. I know it's a novel but it truthfully made me look askance at everyone involved in the celebrity-influencer world again.

Summer sudsy thriller fun! I say feed your inner cynic a story to keep it from gluing you to the next season of The Traitors.

TEMPORARY PALACES: A Novel, lovely reckoning with the past story

TEMPORARY PALACES: A Novel
JEFF MILLER
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the fevered summer of 2001, charismatic activist Rob and his collective set up a squat in an abandoned house. His bandmate and lover, Ben, watches anxiously as his own plans are threatened by Rob’s choice of radical politics over music. Meanwhile, photographer Alex finds herself torn between documenting the chaos of the scene and saving the friendship that binds them together. When the police break up the squat, Rob vanishes, and the dream dies.

Ten years later, Alex and Ben find each other again—she’s conquering Montreal’s contemporary art world, he’s running a thriving restaurant in Ottawa. But their success feels hollow. As they excavate their shared past, they must confront the ghost of Rob’s disappearance and the trauma that pushed them apart.

Pulsing with the raw energy of basement punk shows and DIY creativity, late-night manifestos and first heartbreaks, Temporary Palaces is a blazing debut that captures a generation caught between idealism and survival, art and activism, the dreams that define us and the compromises that save us.

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

My Review: Youthful idealism and the irrepressible need to create meet, collide, intertwine, then break apart. After decades apart, two survivors of these intense youthful heartbreaks meet again and start sorting out the pieces of everyone's wreckage. They each have some from the other, and from vanished Rob, and both have used these bits and shrapnel to create the less volatile selves needed for settled adulthood.

They've each built a life that suits their ideas of themselves as developed in the nuclear reactor of Changing The World, but haven't seen each other as they've done that building. The mercurial, elusive Rob, on the other hand, left lots of shards in their souls. Coming to terms with wild, passionate love that explodes is probably one of the most relatable love stories ever written. Alex isn't sure she can sort out her feelings, Ben is sure he can't despite his now-grounded life doing the most nurturing, practical thing anyone can do: feeding people for a living.

Alternating PoVs per chapter kept the momentum of each character's story moving at a solid pace. I never lost sight of their personal or mutual struggles with the way the past-them blew stuff up, made their passionate connection into sharp flying pieces of toxic pain that flew into each other as well as shoved their greatly belovèd Rob away. Neither knew then that guys like Rob, men on a mission to tear shit down and burn the pieces, never stay in one place, never settle into the lovely mundanity of learning one other person's heart well enough to recite their tells. This story is the pair of them finding out what passion costs, how long you have to pay the interest on its loan of excitement, and what illusions sustained them that might still be viable.

Nostalgia for that time in life I can understand and share. I recall the Aughties very, very differently from these characters. Of course, the US is not Canada and a middle-aged man is not an idealistic young person embarking on life. My take on Author Miller's novel is one of seeing a story unspool, taking an interest in it, and remaining at a remove because it wasn't my past.

A pleasure to read all the same.

LETTERS TO KAFKA, introduction to a life unjustly ignored in Anglophone literature

LETTERS TO KAFKA
CHRISTINE ESTIMA
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 paperback, available now

Bookends with Mattea Roach interview with Author Estima.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka.

In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story The Stoker from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence.

Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.

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

My Review: Modeling to a world unwilling to see what principled resistance to authoritarianism looks like, Milena Jesenská could be no more perfect a subject to study in 2025. Christine Estima has done it for us, and presented her findings in an involving, intense novel of Milena's life. The incident igniting her rise to resistance is a simple and practical one: she needs income. Her then-husband can't, in 1919 Vienna, provide for them. Having very recently read Kafka's stories and being moved deeply by them, Milena writes to request permission to translate them into Czech. Her aim is to get income...the result is to become utterly, passionately entwined with Kafka. It was not primarily a physical affair, only two known meetings, but a deep and consuming love.

The story here, however, is Jesenská...the woman, the intellectual, the object of desire for many members of the Vienna Secession. Reading this book of her own words, stitched into the author's gap-filling prose, I was unable to conceive of a good reason this vibrant and impassioned liver of life and lover of justice was so unfamiliar to me. I know the reason...she's a woman, misogyny's polarizing lenses filter those people out...but talk about stupid! Writing Milena Jesenská out of History is a wrong I hope we will see righted more and more. A resister of Nazism, not a Jew but friend to Jews and accomplice to their escape from certain death, person whose life trajectory includes Ravensbrück, is someone to be celebrated loudly and often. Never more than now.

The mind that created cultural touchstones Gregor Samsa and K., that saw Reality in place of consensus reality, said to Milena: "Milena, if a million loved you, I am one of them, and if one loved you, it was me, if no one loved you then know that I am dead. - FK". A spirit that can elicit this deep and passionate love from one whose life is known by him to be quite short is one worth knowing and celebrating.

A DAUGHTER'S PLACE, voices for the voiceless at last...but what they talk about...!

A DAUGHTER'S PLACE
MARTHA BÁTIZ
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping historical romance inspired by the real-life daughter of Miguel de Cervantes, celebrated author of Don Quixote

Madrid, 1599. Following her mother’s sudden death, fifteen-year-old Isabel goes to live in the family home of her father, the poet and war hero Miguel de Cervantes, a man she has never met. Forced to pose as a maid to conceal her illegitimate status, Isabel must adapt to a new way of life with her jealous cousin and protective aunts while she waits for her father to return from Seville. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Esquivias, Miguel’s pious and faithful wife Catalina similarly awaits his return, blissfully unaware of Isabel’s existence.

As Miguel works on the manuscript that will become his masterpiece, Don Quixote, the years pass and Isabel grows into womanhood, falling in and out love, uncovering family secrets, and yearning for the legitimacy denied her by a rigid and callous society. Capturing two tumultuous decades of Golden Age Spain in rich historical detail, Martha Bátiz paints a compassionate portrait of a family on the precipice of great change and the fiercely independent woman at its centre striving to make a life of her own.

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

My Review: Isabella, Cervantes' bastard daughter, was (intentionally) the shining star of the read. She was resilient enough to accept her circumstances as they were. It's not easy...take it from someone who could not, cratered, and then built back. Her way forward was always to find the bottom then push against her obstacles. I admired that.

Catalina, Cervantes' wife, was a really nasty, pious, pinched bag of judgment, blame, and nastiness. I was quite pleased her god judged her and found her "heart's desire" (read: social ambition/status symbol) to be deniable. Luckily we spend more time seeing the trail of viciousness and destruction she leaves than in her company or I'd be psychotic with rage. Constanza, his niece, is...well...let's say that in a novel that fails the Bechdel test on every level from idea, through execution, to effect on the reader, she is the most egregious offender. No woman in this book is not thinking about a man, usually Cervantes, for more than a couple pages at a stretch.

That's period-appropriate, though in a story told by a professional translator in modern vernacular, it feels a bit...disingenuous...not to toss us a few scenes of either not-period self-awareness or incongruous anger at the oppressive system. Hey ho. Such are the things that lose good work stars in my readerly firmament. It's mildly irritating to me, but a committed feminist without a solid grasp of the early modern world's prejudices might not be as mild-mannered about it.

A big mitigating factor for me was the fact that this story centers women who are, as is so often the case, utterly ignored by History. Centering them would've been better, but the fact that there is no PoV dedicated to Cervantes makes the words they speak (even though they're about him) their own...more than History ever gave them. The bigger mitigating factor is Author Bátiz doing such a stellar job making me feel the passage of literal decades in the past. That takes skill, to convincingly make the time between events feel so intensely present despite the story taking place in the past. If Author Bátiz ever writes a mystery, I want to be first on the DRC list. Her suspense muscles are powerful!

Isabella's journey is a darn good read, deserves the praise it's received, and does the best work available to it by offering voices to women History silenced.

Did they have to talk about men so much?

EVERYTHING IS FINE HERE, debut novel of coming-of-age and coming out in queer-hostile Uganda

EVERYTHING IS FINE HERE
IRYN TUSHABE
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A tender coming of age novel set in Uganda in which a young woman grapples with the truth about her sister in a country that punishes gay people.

Eighteen-year-old Aine Kamara has been anticipating a reunion with her older sister, Mbabazi, for months. But when Mbabazi shows up with an unexpected guest, Aine must confront an old her beloved sister is gay in a country with tight anti-homosexuality laws.

Over a weekend at Aine’s all girls’ boarding school, sisterly bonds strengthen, and a new friendship emerges between Aine and her sister’s partner, Achen. Later, a sudden death in the family brings Achen to Mbabazi’s and Aine’s home village, resulting in tensions that put Mrs. Kamara’s Christian beliefs to the test. She issues an ultimatum, forcing Mbabazi to make a difficult choice, but Aine must too. Unable to convince Mama to reconsider, Aine runs away to Mbabazi’s and Achen’s home in Kampala. There she reconnects with Elia, the sophomore at Makerere University she’s had a crush on for a while.

Acclaimed writer Iryn Tushabe’s dazzling debut novel, Everything Is Fine Here, explores the choice Aine must make, and its inevitable and harrowing results.

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

My Review: How any parent, let alone one who has actually given birth, could reject their child to obey a bizarre (and demonstrably untrue) imaginary bully in the sky's idiotic rules is utterly beyond my ability to comprehend.It made this story one I could never fully commit to. In setting this dynamic at the center of several characters' awakenings, societal and personal, the author's veracious presentation of Mrs. Kamara's conflict between her religion and her love for her children left me out.

It isn't simply that I don't *like* it, this reality, the truth of many many families...some I've known quite well...is so alien to what I know of parenting and the love of a parent for a child that I quit believing the story's heart of truth. It *is* truth, I'm fully aware. I simply can't get over that utterly insane and viciously cruel behavior attributed to "moral" people, so I end up outside looking in.

That's why this powerful, beautifully written novel only gets 4 stars.

The love and the hope and the genuine human interlinking that is a family takes place among the people rejected by this vengeful god. I think if that as a powerful indictment of the belief system. The young women all seem to accept the reality of god while declining to accept the rules they're told are ordained by him. That resistance is delightful to me, and is expressed as a firm rejection of patriarchy: "...she'd read enough novels to suspect when patriarchy was disguising itself as romance," as I practically weep with jubilation.

A note to my more vocal women negative commenters: Logic and evidence dictate that honest men oppose patriarchy solely for its demonstrable and unconscionable wastefulness; self-preservation demands that gay men...I am one...oppose its procrustean dualistic insistence on a gender binary. That I benefit from it does not mean I must be blind to its evils and insensitive to its costs. Please stop DMing me about it. (This same attitude is applicable to my old white man's opposition to racism.)

The most fun I had reading this Uganda-set novel was its evocations of the life lived there, the backdrop of the natural world...not paraded in some weird tourist-trap way, rather that Aine (our PoV character) notices what is natural for her to notice. It's a solidly built world. It feels to me like I could get off a bus there and not feel culture shock because the rhythms and the ethos aren't completely unfamiliar after reading this story. That is some excellent writing, Author Tushabe.

A truly honest, very emotionally centered, coming-of-age and coming out story. One that is set in a world very hostile to women and to queer people. This is a gift to US readers from a place and at a time when understanding the costs and injustices of repression could not possibly be more important. Reading is, always, an act of resistance. Resist ignorance of what misogyny and homophobia deprive their human victims of.

THE CREATION OF HALF-BROKEN PEOPLE, new African Gothic novel from Windham-Campbell Prize winner SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU

THE CREATION OF HALF-BROKEN PEOPLE
SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook, available tomorrow

LONGLISTED for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award...the shortlist of six will be announced on 7 April 2026, the winner(s) in May's festival.

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Stupendous African Gothic, by the winner of Yale University’s Windham–Campbell Prize

A modern Gothic story set on the African continent, The Creation of Half-Broken People tells the tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum, a place filled with artifacts from the family’s exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon’s Mines fame.

Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of people protesting outside the museum. Instigating the protesters is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. The nameless woman knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, she finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions.

With a knowing nod to classics of the Gothic genre, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu weaves the threads of a complex colonial history into the present as she examines the collusion of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism in creating and normalizing a certain kind of womanhood.

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

My Review: What I loved about this read started from the first line: "There was a time before this. I did not always live in the attic."

I defy anyone who reads my reviews not to want to know what happens next.

One thing that happens is our narrator (nameless here, and like the second Mrs. de Winter, seamlessly unobservedly nameless throughout) meets and becomes entangled with the ominously named "John B. Good IX"—did your arm hairs just prickle with anticipatory dread or is it just me?—at the scary age of twenty-one. Legally responsible, emotionally clueless. Truly a moment in one's life when The Worst can happen without any way to avoid it.

*gleeful hand-rubbing*

So the story unfolds as a heartfelt homage to the centuries of gothic novels and tales that have come before it. The events, the relationships, the emotional devastations that come to each living one of us, all occur in a logical order as demanded by the arc of acceptance in emotional maturation. The struggles, the demands we place on Life for it to conform to our momentary desires, the sudden storms of others' emotional demands blowing our lifeships ever farther from safe harbors...all present and accounted for. As an experienced purveyor of stories...she's a filmmaker, several earlier novels to her credit, graduate of Stanford's film studies program...Author Ndlovu doesn't slow her roll for anything unnecessary, or lard in the always tempting useless "grace note" that reduces the reader's momentum.

Lush descriptive language will always get praise from me, I enjoy it for its own sake, and this is replete with it. It's a plus that I, old white US man, am taken into a sensory world not already familiar to me. I'm also fully on board with the not-subtle anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal messaging of the entire enterprise. What, then, explains my chary star rating? Surely my delighted warbling comes in a full-five review!

Nothing's perfect. I kept feeling the ghost of gothics past brushing by me, trope by trope. It's not a *bad* thing in and of itself, the story told here is remixed from the very best of its forerunners. It is, however, still a remix. I do not have a way to tell a gothic story that breaks new ground, not being a supergenius or time-traveling visitor from the storytelling future. Yet as I kept reading (and I never stopped from giddy-up to whoa) I got these flashes of "that's from this story!" I do not know if they were precisely the ones Author Ndlovu had as inspirations. I do feel, when that sensation comes very frequently in a story, a small sense of disconnection from my full-on engagement with the narrative flow.

I doubt this would present anyone but the most seasoned readers any kind of problem. It did not reduce my enjoyment of this story's merits by much at all. I recommend it to all y'all who want to read a deeply emotionally resonant story.

THE SEVEN SKINS OF ESTHER WILDING, making art out of grief

THE SEVEN SKINS OF ESTHER WILDING
HOLLY RINGLAND
House of Anansi Press
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting, magical novel about joy, grief, courage and transformation from the international bestselling author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.

‘On the afternoon that Esther Wilding drove homeward along the coast, a year after her sister had walked into the sea and disappeared, the light was painfully golden.’

The last time Esther Wilding’s beloved older sister Aura was seen, she was walking along the shore towards the sea. In the wake of Aura’s disappearance, Esther’s family struggles to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister’s death, Esther reluctantly travels from Lutruwita/Tasmania, to Copenhagen, and then to the Faroe Islands, following the trail of the stories Aura left behind: seven fairy tales about selkies, swans and women, alongside cryptic verses Aura wrote and had secretly tattooed on her body. The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is a sweeping, deeply beautiful and profoundly moving novel about the far reaches of sisterly love, the power of wearing your heart on your skin and the ways life can transform when we find the courage to feel the fullness of both grief and joy.

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

My Review: Pretty, pretty chapter-opens and lovely sentences to console and condole the woman in a time of loss, particularly effective if the loss is a much loved sister.

Doesn't sound like me, does it? It's not me, I'm not the target audience. It's not me, my sisters aren't close this way, either to me or to each other. It's not like I'm someone particularly sentimental...but many, many are, and I think the fact that I read many, many, many pages of this book speaks loudly of its merits.

Has one of your giftees lost a sister, or (worse) a friend as close as a sister? Is there a abig grieving hole in your life for someone you shared a big part of your life with? These "skins" or fables (re)enacted in search of an involuntarily severed connaction with a fellow woman might offer some balm for the wound.


Not incidentally, the tales offer some very useful and constuctive perspective on loss. See below.


This is a terrific book, since it kept me reading. I recommend it happily.

PARK CRUISING: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path, where "We" = adult gay men

PARK CRUISING: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path
MARCUS McCANN
House of Anansi Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate look at one of culture’s most enduring taboos: public sex.

Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers.

Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann’s ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police indifference to violence to examine cruising as a type of world-building. The result is a series of insightful and poetic walks through history, law, literature, and popular representations of cruising in search of the social value of sex. What McCann ultimately reveals is a world of connection, care, and unexpected lessons about the value of pleasure.

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

My Review: The book takes a "pro" position on this fraught topic, and uses rgetorical flourishes to distract from the difficulty of the central issue having no easy solution. Had he made his argument solely about entrapment I'd be all over it; but I do not, in the most intense possible terms, want to encounter straight people or lesbians in the throes of passion.

No.

YEEECCCHHH

So why should they want to see what I'll avidly watch? The book's strength is its weakness; complaining that they do it, why shouldn't we, is very much an adolescent attitude. Confine yourself to the cruising, and I'm supportive; but the minute someone's genitals come into public view for sexual use, and that's a hard (!) no from me.

Nudity doesn't seem to me to be shocking, so public nudity, while *I* ain't doin' it...sunburned balls sound horrifying to me, and the peeling process is too grisly to contemplate...I agree that the laws around it are clearly designed to make purseylipped prudes safe from the vapors, and should be repealed. Body shame is a major source of social control. Best to jettison it, and the case for this bit is a good one. Unlikely to succeed, though, because the Vaporous Vanguard will screech about their little no-neck monsters being corrupted and that ends any and all discussion. Otherwise you who oppose them are A Pedophile, and once those screeches start, you are toast. Does not matter in the slightest if they are true or not, these screeches are stickier than blood, and utterly indelible.

The book is an interesting read but not a how-to manual or even an advocacy guide. It will shift no one's position. It's good for starting conversations about how society enforces a standard of conduct that is inherently judgmental, and unfairlt enforced, and clearly the laws are written to give gay men nightmares about their sex lives being judged and punished in a way y'all straight people's are not.

Useful, then; just not effective as a tool for short-term attitude change.