IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, a chilling title that blooms as you read its story

IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS
ADA HOFFMANN
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A script supervisor for an AI media conglomerate is caught between her intense need for an orderly life and her deeper, darker queer desires. From the creator of the Outside trilogy, a heartfelt interplanetary epic of identity, longing, and a space pirate who smuggles inappropriate stories.

Kelli Reynolds loves creating stories more than anything in the world. But on Callisto, a generative AI company called Inspiration owns everything, including all the media, and only Inspiration determines which stories can be told.

Kelli has a rare and coveted job in which her autism is to her advantage: She precisely edits AI output into “appropriate” stories for Inspiration’s massive TV audience. Her proudest creation is the pirate Orlando—a dashing do-gooder based on stories she used to tell friends.

Reenter Kelli’s ex-boyfriend Rowan, the person Kelli based Orlando on. Back when they were teenagers, their relationship was a secret. Kelli had thought that Rowan, a trans man, was her schoolmate Em, a girl.

Rowan is tangled up in the black market after he needed to get money for gender reassignment surgery. He needs Kelli’s help with something . . . illegal. So, now Kelli has to decide: Will she risk the safe, tidy story of her life now for the world she once wished for? What would Orlando do?

Passionate, dangerous, and tender, Ignore All Previous Instructions is a sweeping, poignant novel about censorship, forbidden love, and growing up.

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

My Review: When one entity controls the entirety of a resource, controls all access to that resource, and the resource in question is valued highly by enough people, you have the makings of a great story. Food...oil...microchips...stories, doesn't much matter what it is, if there's a control of access you're looking at an inevitable reckoning for the controllers. They will do literally any- and every-thing to keep you, the dupe, hooked on whatever it is; they will cause hideous suffering and death just to keep their power and privilege.

Is this ringing any bells? Anything at all coming to mind?

That's the story Author Hoffmann is telling us. If that story is not to your liking, this is not the read for you.

The execution of the basic story is good. It offers the Resistance becoming an outright rebellion; it uses the characters' genuine, relatable emotional realities to deepen our readerly investment in the events. I was deeply invested in Rowan's multiple axes of rebellion, personal and moral; I found Kelli's deeply personal path through coming to awareness of the wrongs being done to her and to everyone else very convincingly limned by a very talented wordcraftworker.

Why I don't offer a perfect five is Rowan's direct PoV being limited to flashbacks. I found that jarring, when we have Kelli as the direct PoV in past and present. I looked for a structural reason that needed to be the way we were getting the story, but couldn't find one. Kelli's job as a script supervisor, with high-masking autism-spectrum disorder, is very very well used to set stakes believably. Her borning realization of the evil she participates in is *chef's kiss*.

Highly recommended for culture warriors most of all!

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND, much-anticipated and praised successor to ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND
ANTHONY DOERR
Scribner
$30.00 hardcover, available now

WINNER OF THE 32ND ANNUAL READING THE WEST BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION!

A bargain at $7.99 on Kindle (non-affiliate link) until Monday, 27 June, that is.

Rating: 3* of five

On The Guardian's Best Fiction of 2021 list

A BEST BOOKS OF 2021 – FICTION SELECTION FROM BOOKPAGE!

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK FOR 2021!

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BUZZIEST WORKPLACE BOOK OF 2021!

The Publisher Says: Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.

Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

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

My Review: My rating seems mingy, doesn't it. It did to me...I was fully expecting to five-star this bad boy. I wanted to five-star it. I five-starred All the Light We Cannot See, and it was (like this book) a braided-perspectives structure telling a deeply felt and emotionally fraught story.

I blame it on the sci-fi bona fides I have learned to demand of mainstream writers.

Author Doerr's gorgeous sentences are all here:

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.
–and–
“Repository… you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”
–and–
There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.

His gift for the pithy aperçu is on display, too:

“Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”
–and–
"Boil the words you already know down to their bones," Rex says, "and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up."

That last is particularly resonant to me. Cloud-cuckoo Land, invented by Aristophanes in his play The Birds, never existed (as far as I am aware) in the form posited by Author Doerr in this story. Big ups to him for actually fooling me into looking up "Antonius Diogenes Cloud Cuckoo Land" to be absolutely sure of it, though.

So what was the problem? It was the generation-ship element in which Konstance, in all our future, resides. An Earth that can muster the resources to create such a massive object, which has AIs as sophisticated as Sybil (I had to check...I'd've named it "Sibyl," so I verified that it wasn't before typing this), would not need to flee their home world. (Also, is running away from home because we've made a mess really all that hopeful a message in the first place?) It's part of the charm of 1950s sci fi that there were generation ships launched to escape nuclear-war ravaged Earth without anyone saying, "waitaminnit waitaminnit all those resources would be just ducky used on Earth to help people!" but it's 2021 and those sorts of naïve assumptions are scrapheap-of-history material. And yes, I got to the end... I know about the twist...but it comes very late and, for me at least, doesn't change the jarring code-switch from its intended if not entirely successfully sold hope-full to hope-less. The point of making this last-minute course correction was simply lost on me. It ended up making the whole narrative line feel like a cheat.

Another thing that *needs* to be scrapheap-of-history'd is the coding of villains as neurodivergent. One entire star vanished for that. This is all I will say on the subject.

In the end, though, it's the gestalt that doesn't happen that costs this beautifully told tale another of my stars. I expect, if I'm following five (or six, depending on your take on Aethon) main threads, to experience a coming-together, a thematic unity that makes each strand of the story stronger after I've reached it. This was, I'm very sad to say, missing in my reading experience, much as it was in my unhappy read of Cloud Atlas. A much more successfully gestalted example from my own reading is the near-future India of SF chunkster River of Gods, or the outstandingly exciting present-day crime-story chunkster also set in India, Sacred Games.

It verges on misery porn to use children's PoVs in highlighting the cost to innocents of the great human-caused upheavals of History. I'm very glad Author Doerr presented the misery of unnatural change from both sides of the 1450s fall-of-Constantinople story; no triumphalism allowed here. I was less convinced that the overarching thematic reach for Hope was successful, in that these children are all facing the awful, wrenching adjustments whether or not the world actually collapses around them. I mean by that, that the collapses are hard-wired and the survivors are going to be powerless to do more than respond to the New World Order. This vitiates any real hope, at least to my mind it does. That's more than the usual problem for me in this book's case because by its very nature...a story about stories and libraries and words in their eternally exciting welter of meaning, connotation, metaphorical freight...Hope should be the one thing that each character finds, retains, develops, has by the end of the tale.

In the final analysis, this is an Anthony Doerr book. Reams and reams of printer paper, a metric ton of toner, all used to commit the MS's supremely descriptive language to the page. Deeply felt and beautifully written dialogue. Thought-provoking and well-presented explorations of significant thematic concerns of the world right now. But this many pages in the present tense? I felt pummelled with the immediacy! urgency! of that choice, the sense that I was being asked to move through the story at far too rapid a clip. Your book club will, I am pretty sure, love it anyway or even because of this, will discuss it for the required hour and probably go over.

In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you're this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.
–and–
It's never easy. Past tense literally causes him back pain, the way it flings all the verbs into the dark. Then there's the aorist tense, a tense unbound by time, that makes him want to crawl into a closet and huddle in the darkness.
–and–
Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

I needed things I didn't get...a faster pace in each timeline, fewer flowery passages (though they are gorgeous!)...got things I didn't want (coughSeymourcough), and yet read the book from giddy-up to whoa. Never once did I so much as contemplate abandoning the read, and that is saying something.

This title is a FINALIST for the 2021 Best Fiction Award! The winner will be announced on 17 November 2021. My most sincere well-wishes to the author and the publisher for their success in this contest.

CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN, how the world looks to someone who isn't like the rest of us

CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN
SAYAKA MURATA (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
Grove Press
$15.00 trade paper, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending April 12, 2026

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. For her part, in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers' style of dress and speech patterns so she can play the part of a normal person. However, eighteen years later, at age 36, she is still in the same job, has never had a boyfriend, and has only few friends. She feels comfortable in her life but is aware that she is not living up to society's expectations and causing her family to worry about her. When a similarly alienated but cynical and bitter young man comes to work in the store, he will upset Keiko's contented stasis—but will it be for the better?

Sayaka Murata brilliantly captures the atmosphere of the familiar convenience store that is so much part of life in Japan. With some laugh-out-loud moments prompted by the disconnect between Keiko's thoughts and those of the people around her, she provides a sharp look at Japanese society and the pressure to conform, as well as penetrating insights into the female mind. Convenience Store Woman is a fresh, charming portrait of an unforgettable heroine that recalls Banana Yoshimoto, Han Kang, and Amélie.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY. THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IT!

My Review: I dunno, y'all. Miss Furukura and Shiraha aren't people I'd want to hang with. I kept reading their names as "Lieutenant Uhura" and "Sriracha," which didn't help me identify them as actual people.

Oh wait....

This is definitely a sharp, pointed tale. It takes on the internal and external expectations of women and their "proper" roles. It's a culture that is, in some disturbing ways, behind my own culture's flawed and unhelpful attitudes towards women. As this is a translation from a language with which I feel absolutely no kinship, I'll confine my observations about the writing to: this is a very quick read, possessed of enough narrative drive to make reading it with dilated eyes and a headache (as I waited to go home from an eye doctor visit) seem like a good idea. I was diverted, I cared a strangely large amount about Keiko Furukura, and while there was not one single surprise or twist in the tale, it was keenly observed and honestly told.

First we practiced the various phrases we needed to use in the store. Standing shoulder to shoulder in a line, our backs straight, we lifted the corners of our mouths to match the smiling face in the training poster and in turn called out the stock welcoming phrase: Irasshaimase! ... I was good at mimicking the trainer's examples and the model video he'd shown us in the back room. It was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech.

I have never been so glad in my life as when Author Murata stopped banging my eyeballs with "Irasshaimase" about halfway through the book. I am one of those subverbal-vocalizers, and that phrase got my entire limbic system into an uproar because, although I know Japanese pronunciation is dipthongless, I could *not* scan that alphabet soup to save my life, and the YouTube videos pronouncing it for me made my nose hairs hurt. I think Japanese is a hideous language. Cool words, great concepts, please don't speak it to me.

Anyway. So Lieutenant Uhura meets Sriracha and things get weird. Only they don't because, well, they're exactly alike and while that's an awful thing to say, it's just the truth. She's one step away from a serious psychiatric break when she visits her younger sister and interacts (sort of) with her infant nephew. He (Shiraha) is already broken, beaten by expectations he is incapable of meeting. Her broken self's saving grace is that she knows *she* is the problem:

"Um, you do realize you'll be fixed?"
"What?" {Shiraha} asked, as if he hadn't heard right.
"Oh, nothing. Hurry up and change so we can do the morning practice!"
A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment, so the likes of you are fixed right away I thought as I watched him taking his time getting changed. But I didn't say it out loud.

And that, in a nutshell, is why the tale kept me reading. I was fascinated against my will by the savvy that she brought to the problem of acting human when she quite simply isn't. She knows she lacks something, hasn't a clue what it is, and no one knows how to explain it to her; what she stumbles upon in the convenience store is a model she can emulate. A worker is supposed to BE the job in the convenience store and she needs someone to be. Perfection.

Poor Sriracha is an incel, as we call them these days, a loser/misfit/nobody whose essential wrongness comes from the other usual place this unsocialized-male issue comes from: He knows what being human means but he's too lazy to do it, then feels outrage and anger when he isn't given all the privileges being a human male customarily affords the Y-chromosomally endowed. Lieutenant Uhura can't grok this, since she's a hard worker and a genuinely indifferent-to-normal-humans person. She doesn't feel excluded, as he does; she realizes she is excluded and takes steps to minimize the exclusion so others will feel happier:

You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange—maybe that's what everyone means when they say they want to "cure" me.
These past two weeks I'd been asked fourteen times why I wasn't married. And twelve times why I was still working part-time. So for now I'd decide what to eliminate from my life according to what I was asked about most often I thought.
Deep down I wanted some kind of change. Any change, whether good or bad, would be better than the state of impasse I was in now.

See? Faultlessly logical. Not human, but deeply logical.

So fiction about the neurodiverse made my uncomfortable day of eye-doctoring, riding back and forth in a cramped position, and having to soak the bloodstains from my knee-rocks breaking through the skin due to sitting *ptooptoo* on sitting! for five hours, bearable. That by itself deserves praise. It's hard to know what to do about recommending such a quirky tale to others. In general, I'm against "must read" recommendations in all but a very few cases. I think this read will quite rightly polarize people's opinions, as did that "Completely Fine" thing that made me so bone-rattlingly mad that I Pearl-Ruled its condescending self. But this story, told by a person whose grasp on how to be human was tenuous and whose desire to figure it out was other-directed, is a different matter altogether. I might not love the way it ended, which I won't discuss, but I fully agree that it was an inevitable ending. I ended up glad I'd read it, and that's saying something.