2024 NEBULA FINALISTS: A SORCERESS COMES TO CALL, a book you might misunderstand as bleak...it's hopeful

A SORCERESS COMES TO CALL
T. KINGFISHER
Tor Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

FINALIST for the 2024 Nebula Award! Winner announced at the 2025 Nebula Conference, 5 through 8 June 2025.

The Publisher Says: A dark retelling of the Brothers Grimm's "Goose Girl", rife with secrets, murder, and forbidden magic

Cordelia knows her mother is unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms, and her mother doesn't allow Cordelia to have a single friend—unless you count Falada, her mother's beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers.

After a suspicious death in their small town, Cordelia’s mother insists they leave in the middle of the night, riding away on Falada’s sturdy back, leaving behind all Cordelia has ever known. They arrive at the remote country manor of a wealthy older man, the Squire, and his unwed sister, Hester. Cordelia’s mother intends to lure the Squire into marriage, and Cordelia knows this can only be bad news for the bumbling gentleman and his kind, intelligent sister.

Hester sees the way Cordelia shrinks away from her mother, how the young girl sits eerily still at dinner every night. Hester knows that to save her brother from bewitchment and to rescue the terrified Cordelia, she will have to face down a wicked witch of the worst kind.

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

My Review: Dark it is. A dark retelling of a fairy tale I myownself think is entirely too dark anyway. A deeply unhappy story that centers on the evil deeds and wicked heart of Evangeline (follow the link for the roots of this name) as a sorceress, "one who influences fate or fortune," in its original meaning; the sense is always pejorative. It certainly needs to be in this case, as Evangeline (I don't trust y'all to go look it up: the mother's name Evangeline is a diminutive of Latin "evangelium" ("gospel", itself from Greek Ευαγγέλιο "gospel", meaning "good news"...the christian gospels, in other words, those horrifying fonts of millennia of misogyny and detrimental social control, applied to an appalling, cruel, controlling mother) is following the Grimm plot closely in her actions.

I don't know what to think of the inspiration of the story. I'm positive Author Vernon (real name) did not know the results of the 2024 US election as a matter of fact before this book came out in that August. I am a bir chilled by its timeliness, a story of an evil old sorcerous person manipulating a good, innocent girl to her detriment. I wish I was writing this in a spirit of "how did she know we'd defeat the evil old sorcerous party" instead of "if only we'd defeated the evil old sorcerous party" but here we are.

It felt to me, all the way through the read, as though I was being Entertained, that the trademark Vernon wittiness was deployed not organic to the story. It isn't a story where wit, comedy, humor in general, sit naturally. I was abused by a mother much like Evangeline: cold, manipulative, withholding, but always hiding behind a good god-fearing front. For me the read was a return to the times of my life where my anxiety issues were installed. It's a testament to how very effective Author Vernon's skill at storytelling is that I finished and rated the read almost five stars! It's a deeply anxious story, a mother who is not a nurturer or a caregiver in the good sense but rather one who gives her child victim cares that will last a lifetime of therapy. (Why has no fantasy novelist given their MC a therapist?)

My anxiety attacks aside, the story is true to its source material in its claustrophobia, its sense of physical as well as emotional deprivation of freedom. Cordelia's enforced motionlessness probably triggered more awful memories for me than anything else, and made me long for my Falada: The 1968 Bonneville belonging to my mother that I used to escape the misery of my "life" with her. I'm glad I don't have to re-read the book!

It sounds like I should be zero-stars-do-not-recommending it, doesn't it? So look at those almost-five stars and ask what the hell happened here.

Stories are the way people make sense of Life with the big "L" so they are good at their job when experiencing them is a powerful, bone-rattling experience. I think you can see this read rattled me! It shook my angry absorption in the horrendous return to 2016 into a new shape. It reminded me, by evoking feelings from the childhood I endured, that all things end. That even after they end, the consequences carry on...for good or ill, as we ourownselves choose to use them. That even in the midst of misery, someone we do not expect it of is aware of our problems and willing to help.

Rays of hope like this story represents are never more welcome than they are right now.

IF YOU EXIST, probably a better question than answer

IF YOU EXIST: In Search of a Reader Deep in the Future
LILLIAN MOATS
Three Arts Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: what? rate this how exactly?

The Publisher Says: If You Exist is a personal message written to one of our human progeny who might find it many generations in the future. The narrator, like others in her generation, faces her own mortality at the same time she faces the possibility of thousands more species, including her own, becoming extinct.

As a private heartfelt message to someone who may never exist, the writer likens her missive to “a note in a bottle set to sea in hopes of reaching you, if you exist in the future on some unfathomable shore.” The narrator shares her personal take on where humanity is now and where we might be heading depending on what choices we will make. She writes about climate change and such topics as human migration, racism, the pandemic, as well as her projected concerns about the possibilities of unbridled technical advancement and human redesign.

After offering her perspective on where hope could lie, the writer ends her note with “the stuff of fairy tales,” her positive fantasy in the final chapter called, “If We Could Meet.”

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

My Review: First, read this:

The impulse to hunt takes aim instead, to separate, conquer or eradicate whatever may be defined by some group as less than human. With the future of the planet now so much in doubt, I think it's a rare person who does not, at least unconsciously, align hopes for the survival of this world with either gathering or hunting.
–and–
What it means to be human is quite a different question from "What is human nature?" for which we finally realize there can be no answer except to include what any human culture has done or felt.

For me, the question of what it means to be human is more pressing than ever, though my own answers reside in recollected incidents, not in academic definitions.

Published to coincide with the author's seventy-fifth birthday on Monday, the twenty-third, this compact meditation on what the world is, what our role as humans in the world is, and why that urgently needs to change is the topic of the book. "Has the stranger been gathered in, or hunted down?" is quite probably the clearest statement of purpose any book could have, and it comes exactly on time as the catastrophic exit of US troops from Afghanistan unfolds.

Just as with refugees today, the pattern of slavery has always been that the darker skinned peoples were owned and abused by the lighter skinned. There were notable exceptions, such as ancient Africa where emperors of dark nations owned dark slaves from different tribes. Slavery was never just about color, but about power and wealth. ... Today, prejudice and brutality by many police in the U.S. have outlived legal slavery by more than a hundred and fifty years.

So you're reading this review and wondering what the point of my telling you about this small book written by someone who isn't a Big Name, hasn't written think pieces and hefty reports and the like, is? Because you have a vaccine-resisting climate-change denying (or at the least skeptical) aunt, or mother, or church elder. No one is talking to her. They're talking to Greta Thunberg (who comes in for some quiet praise here) and her mom. They're marshaling innumerable facts about chemistry and computing that say absolutely nothing to that friend, relative, elder.

I think she deserves the respect of someone sitting down and speaking to her, peer-to-peer, reminding her of *why* she made those decades of sacrifices and plans and worked so hard to bring about what she hoped would be a better world. And so did Lillian Moats...here, she's written the book she hoped to read and thus engage with a wider world of people who, like her, haven't been mindfully included in the world they made as it decides its future.

Yuletide is coming. Maybe a birthday before that. Try talking to the people you'd like to mobilize the way they need to hear you.

THE OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST, a welcome positive message in a world of depressing facts

THE OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST: Progressing Towards a Greener Future
DAVID R. BOYD
ECW Press
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges — climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved, while substantial progress is ongoing on others.

The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories. Endangered species — from bald eagles to gray whales — pulled back from the precipice of extinction. Thousands of new parks, protecting billions of hectares of land and water. The salvation of the ozone layer, vital to life on Earth. The exponential growth of renewable energy powered by wind, water, and sun. The race to be the greenest city in the world. Remarkable strides in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink. The banning of dozens of the world’s most toxic chemicals. A circular economy where waste is a thing of the past. Past successes pave the way for even greater achievements in the future.

Providing a powerful antidote to environmental despair, this book inspires optimism, leading readers to take action and exemplifying how change can happen.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME THIS ARC. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nine years on, this book hits different. We've just been through a truly horrifying US election, won by the lowest scum ever to win the world's most powerful political office; we can expect bad trouble to follow, on many fronts, soon.

That is going to require clear thinking and focused action. In its turn, that will require us to know where we are. The author presents his facts and draws very positive conclusions based on them.

No one can protect something they do not know the value, and the extent of. Learn! Don't despair...learn, and grown hardened to the messages of nihilism and misery and *shudder* change.

Protect our planet or we all go down together.