HOW TO DATE A FANATIC, two halves make a funny-shaped whole

HOW TO DATE A FANATIC
ARUNI KASHYAP
HarperVia (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this compassionate, poignant novel set in contemporary India, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit’s life soon becomes more complicated as the country's political tensions erupt on campus, sparking a turbulent student-led movement that entangles Rohit when Dhruv joins the fray, a tipping point that changes Rohit’s life forever. Set against the vibrant, volatile tapestry of modern India, Rohit and his friends must learn to navigate the challenges and triumphs of queer life to survive in an unpredictable political landscape.

Propulsive, tense, and charged with humor and tenderness, How to Date a Fanatic is an exploration of identity, connection, and the enduring hope for a better future in a rapidly changing world.

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

My Review: India's right-wing horrible human beings are enough like our US versions that I was stressed for Rohit from the get-go; I was also reminded that au fond, humans are not different anywhere on this globe. The same insatiable desire to control others in every way, the same pressure to conform or else, the same kinds of violent resistance and repression, for reasons only cosmetically different.

The reason I'm not offering perfect ratings and warbles of delight for this clear-sighted takedown of the repression and conformity machine is simple: Dhruv's a bastard. Rohit needs to get over his addiction to an emotionally unavailable man, and that story is *uncomfortably* close to home. It's all on Rohit, of course, Dhruv's uninterest could've been more kindly expressed but that is not incumbent on any of us to come up with in the moment. Rohit losing himself in the pursuit of distraction is deeply relatable. His choices are very interesting to me because they're further evidence of human nature being consistent across cultures.

Where the mess that is the authoritarian horror India lives under (and the US seems to be rushing to emulate) takes hold of the narrative, the second half becomes more a political argument against authoritarianism while backgrounding Rohit's emotional life. The shift in tome is always going to be tricky to navigate; I didn't feel it was all that well handled. I was taken from one focus, on the intimate life and choices of Rohit, into another, the violent and vicious reactionary response of a right-wing regime to gay men.

Both were very involving, though a reader looking for more of the first story might not like being catapulted into the second much. Readers interested in the second stiry might have preferred it to be more than just lightly foreshadowed from the beginning. It's this dichotomy between the (roughly) halves that stalled me out at four stars. There are that many because I really liked and invested in Rohit and his happiness. Sure, I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and demand he get on with finding someone who deserves his love. But he really deserves that kind of happy ending. (Other kinds too but permaybehaps on the page in my imagined other story...not this unsteamy one.)

A successful read for all my quibbly niggles, a story I'd enjoy seeing more of, should a follow-on tale eventuate. That ain't the most common end to a review I write about a book that frustrated me!

WISDOM CORNER, second Virgil Wounded Horse thriller

WISDOM CORNER
DAVID HESKA WANBLI WEIDEN
Ecco (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Winter Counts comes a new thriller about life—and death—on the Rosebud Indian Reservation.

Virgil Wounded Horse is desperately trying to escape his past as a hired vigilante on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. But when a legendary figure from the reservation is murdered, he’s forced to return to the job. Making matters more complicated, threats are coming from the Pine Ridge 705—a street gang from a neighboring reservation who want to expand their reach into Rosebud—and Mitch Gagnon, a shady politician who will stop at nothing to gain more power.

With a heated tribal council election looming, as well as new revelations regarding past injustices at the local Native boarding school, the stakes grow even higher. Will Virgil find the justice he’s seeking before it’s too late?

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

My Review: Coming to terms with harms and wrongs you've done, even when you thought you were right to do them, is a tough passage of adulthood. It's necessary to face up, and if necessary 'fess up, in order to move past your own guilt and self-trauma. Of course, that leaves all the nightmares of trauma caused from without...but starting within is always sound policy and strategy.

Picking up where Winter Counts left off is this story of Virgil Wounded Horse doing his damnedest to keep his homeplace from succumbing to the depredations of the worst, most amoral forces from without and those within who care little for humane results and lots for power and the money that flows along side it. Virgil knows from the inside the seductive nature of power, enforcing criminals' will isn't a lot different from enforcing The Law℠ in its particulars only in its motivations (hopefully its results too). Challenging Virgil's sense of rightness is the death by murder of Jerome Iron Shell. Beloved by many for his warmth and wisdom and stock of lore, whatever led someone to kill him makes Virgil angry as well as woriied for his inamorata Marie Little Bear. Her deepening involvement in politics on Rosebud Reservation is clearly not safe sonve politics is almost certainly what got Jerome killed...how to make your former-gang-enforcer boyfried edgy and worried for you was never easier for Marie. She's the one whose request for him to staighten up, work the sunny side of the street, thus not add to her hurdles getting into government to start cleaning up generations of greed and indifference, has Virgil in knots. To her credit, Marie Little Bear is very much on the side of Justice and Fairness so as Virgil discovers corruption and greed, Marie stands shoulder-to-shoulder damn the consequences.

I really like the couple dynamic between Virgil and Marie. As the vileness and ugliness that Jerome was aware of, and trying to get acknowledged, intertwines with the appalling greed that land development supports and rewards, Virgil...and Marie...learn even the lowest acts they know happen now aren't a patch on those committed in the not-distant past. It serves to make them both, together and individually, more determined to be forces for improvement and restoration.

The series is definitely one I recommend to y'all who're needing more than polite white ladies looking into polite little family deaths. Cozies are like pineapple: tasty, tangy, but not healthy when they're the only thing on the dessert menu. Switch it up with a trip to South Dakota.

ASTRONAUT!: A Novel, a metaphor for escape from here-and-now that makes it sound so...frictionless

ASTRONAUT!: A Novel
OANA ARISTIDE
W.W. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.99 hardcover, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending July 28, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A tense, darkly funny, and politically resonant novel of life under authoritarian rule.

Romania, 1989, the twilight of Ceausescu’s dictatorship: A time when every neighbor, every friend, every family member may be an informant for the regime. When news emerges of a man-eating bear terrorizing the country, two bright lives collide. Constantin, an idealistic police detective—prone to daydreaming and scribbling fairytales in his notebook for his four-year-old son—is tasked with solving the string of mysterious deaths. Lia, a rebellious, inquisitive schoolgirl pining for more color in her life, is unwittingly drawn into an elderly neighbor’s secret plot against the regime. The decisions they make amid the constant gray skies and fear of speaking out will have sweeping consequences—for themselves, for their families, and for their country. Astronaut! is a chilling, suspenseful, and resonant tale by a dynamic new novelist.

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

My Review: What a claustrophobic read. At eery turn there's a wall, at every corner there's an uneasy dread of what you'll find when you turn it. Even the fun of a kid wanting to give Mama a special birthday gift...disastrous, unmitigatable harm follows.

I was uneasy, I was unnerved, and I was totally hooked. I stopped feeling like I was reading a novel pretty quickly. I winced, chuckled hollowly, got staring prickles, I felt as much a part of the cold greyness of 1989 Romania as a guy in the sunshiney summer of 2026 New York City is likely ever to feel. Lia is in the midst of things she does not realize are seismic shifts. Her sense of self-preservation hasn't taught her what safety is yet. She barrels into danger as she searches for the vibrancy and color of her home country. Honestly I wondered where she might've seen that, the eternal dankness and foggy grey of 1989 Romania was so pervasive.

Then we shift our story attention to detective Constantin, tasked with solving a brutal death, one that lends itself in its mindless ferocity of commission to the spurious explanation of a bear attack.

One that just happens to take place near the hunting party at Dictator Ceaușescu's hunting lodge.

These narratives don't appear to be connected at first. Constantin escapes from the Orwellian "investigation" he's performing to instructions from...well...Securitate (the secret police)? who can be sure, they're very secretive these secret police never doing anything directly that Constantin's seen just by innuendo and "they said"-style rumors. He writes fairy tales for his much-loved son Sandu. The fairy tales are so completely adorable and so trenchant that I want illustrated books of them!

Sandu's story-lessons in how things really are in the world are all so trenchant and targeted that they become our primary means to follow the backgrounded collapse of the Ceaușescu regime. It's a clever and enjoyable way to tell me a larger story behind the story I'm paying attention to. More violent vicious deaths occur that Constantin feels he needs to escape from absorbing, as he turns to creating stories about an astronaut (not the Party-approved term "cosmonaut" please note) to make up in his mind for the nonsensical stories titillating the people about bear attacks with escape from Earth's surly bonds entirely.

Lia's absolute unwillingness to dim down her search for color, for life, in her country and her school leads her into a dangerous association with a real honest to goodness rebel. It's something she puts her whole heart into, this small role in a small eddy of the current of rebellion in 1989 Romania, leading her into a dangerous conflict with a Party official's daughter in her school. She is clearly, obviously the winner of a contest that girl was supposed to win..."he's at the top of the page, the bravest explorer of all. She gives him a light blue helmet and matching spacesuit, and he's smiling through the visor. Why the smile? Because he has just realized that the view from the outer space is like being deep inside a Christmas tree, and he is never afraid. Lia smiles back at him. She names the drawing, flattening the black letters across the surface of the sun, 'Astronaut!'"...whose prize was a face-to-face with Ceaușescu himself. Special classes, intensive training, the usual efforts to make sure no tinge of reality can intrude on the leader's dreamworld.

Lia and her family figure in Constantin's investigation...the part without the bear story in it...and as Lia's meeting with Ceaușescu draws closer, more and more strands of story logic bind them together. We discover Constantin's dark, painful secret; we watch Lia as she draws closer to murderous scum without feeling the appropriate level of fear; we are *frantic* to save whomever we can from the explosion looming.

It's a novel with a satisfying resolution. I will say nothing of the ending.

"We've grown numb. It's like this, kid: in wars, you have to face guns and cannons and soldiers, and the situation is somehow so obviously serious that we mobilise our courage, and our will, and so on. But here, we are supposed to be heroic at our kitchen table, at the factory, on the bus. We are supposed to risk terrible consequences just for saying some perfectly commonsense thing. It never seems worth it."

{Lia}'s pretending to listen, but really she's thinking how lucky she is Comrade Mantea is her friend. He talks complete gibberish but it never feels like he's lying to her. He's nice to her, and he has ideas, not only about grown-up problems but about everyone's problems.

Don't kid yourself: Oana Aristide will show you a mirror, she will shine a harsh raking light on you while she does it.

But she sees everyone's problems in the unflattering shadows.

WE WERE FORBIDDEN, feminist author at her tendentious best

WE WERE FORBIDDEN
JACQUELINE HARPMAN (tr. Roz Schwartz)
Transit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 9, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human defiance.

Wandering the forest in the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their march through its strange depths.

As part of her rigid schooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe—her punishment for doing so will be as disturbing as it is disproportionate.

Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed. She has not yet thought to pursue her own.

In varying ways, and across varying worlds, each of these women are trapped. Do they have the will to escape?

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

My Review: One of the most enduring stories in Western Anglophone culture is the princess in the tower, locked away and in the absolute control of A Man/A System/An Enemy, and how she must connive to survive with whatever degree of success the cruel, cruel storyteller allows her. Now firmly grounded in the reality of being female over the millennia, along comes Author Harpman with Translator Schwartz as amanuensis, extrapolating this cultural juggernaut to include all those trapped in subservience and obedience to high-control systems.

In "The Outcast" Author Harpman uses the most familiar iteration of the story. A teenaged girl is in the intertwining coils of adolescence and sexual maturation and cultural demands for conformity. It's harrowing to see Author Harpman's keen observations of fascism turned loose on one so hugely vulnerable and malleable...it is a shorter and refocused version of the juggernaut I Who Have Never Known Men and should appeal to those seeking more of that story only dressed in a shorter, more contemporaneous skirt.

Moving into times and ties more concrete, "The Broom Closet" is a woman's struggle to find her footing in 1920s Belgium. The demands of domesticity on women are different from those made on men even now; in the deeply conservative culture of postwar Belgium, where the battles that killed millions were barely over let alone their damage repaired, they were starkly different. As one adds the inexorable advance of marriage's compromises conflicting with the absolute tyranny of the need to create stories, the trap of cultural expectations springs shut. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own's observations made specific and played out with the intensity of "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Expanding the story logic to those enmeshed in the military of an apocalyptic future, "The Ardennes Forest" is the most immediately reminiscent in its setting to I Who Have Never Known Men while expanding scope beyond one woman's life. A group of conscripts are mapping and scouting the terrain for what they imagine, not unreasonably, to be a future battlefield. That future never comes. They continue the work they've been assigned.

Endlessly.

As the story goes into nothing deeply, it became obvious to me this is Author Harpman meditating on the tedious tasks of daily life performed under nebulous, ominous duress. There's a weirdly onanistic edge to the submission of these soldiers to their assigned task even as they begin to question what it is they're doing as nothing ever changes as a result of its self-similar patterns.

Three stories of people in a system of depersonalizing cruelty, and how that strips an individual of any sense of agency; numbing the essential "You"ness of you into submissive obedience. I'm not a bit sure it will make new Harpman fans. For one thing, there are limits to the efficacy of compactness in the involving process of storytelling. I think these three stories are on the shortest end of that effort, possibly too short for anyone not already familiar with Author Harpman's thematic hobbyhorses to fully invest in them.

Existing fans are in for a treat.

THE CUT LINE, survival...contingent contentment...solitude

THE CUT LINE
CAROLINA PIHELGAS (tr. Darcy Hurford)
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the dog days of an Estonian summer, Liine flees to the countryside to put a conclusive end to her toxic 14-year relationship.

She undergoes every stage of separation in a lone farmstead amid forests. A lot of physical labor and gardening help her withstand her ex-partner’s threats, the incredulity of friends and family, and her own anguish.

Dread is pervasive in this novel. Set in the near future, it is filled with vivid depictions of the threat of climate change. All around Liine, nature is facing acute drought and heat. No less menacing is the presence of an expanding NATO base close to the cottage at the Russian border. The world’s largest military alliance is practicing for an attack. Explosions and shots ring in the distance while Liine tries to recover from fourteen years of violence.

Yet she simply follows the rhythm of nature as summer unfolds. While her environment changes around her, Liine—always in the garden chopping wood, weeding, sowing—undergoes profound transformations, too. The Cut Line is a story of fear, self-blame, grief, numbness, and anger ultimately giving way to hope and healing, joy and lightness.

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

My Review: Reckoning with the toxicity of Love is the most difficult emotional task I know of; it is the central concern of this story. In Liine's life there is no softness in the emotional gifts anyone around her grudgingly and contingently grants to her. She finally accepts her partner will never be a validating, accepting, kind force supporting her own betterment. Running away at last, she lands at a family property far from the city, where there is nothing much in the way of modern conveniences. She's also hounded...well...tracked down anyway by her family who think she should accept that her violent, withholding ex is as good as she'll ever get for a man to be with.

Been there, Liine.

Her stubborn resistance to submit to family or ex is rooted in her desire to survive, maybe begin to thrive. But there's a catch (of course there is): her rural haven is under severe stress from climate change; and it's very close to a NATO base provocatively situated close to Estonia's border with Russia, their former colonial power. Liine might have leapt out of the frying pan but it looks like the fire is fast approaching.

Her willingness to work hard is barely keeping her even with the environmental changes; her emotional healing work is under siege from the perfidious ex's smear campaign in their friend circle (after a breakup, Liine, walk away and let those who care follow you; those who don't are not your friends), and her family's pressure to go back; the NATO base is constantly "testing" ie exploding weapons in a cacophonous assault on nature. An environment that does not support her much-needed self-repair work. So what else is new.

It sounds very challenging, right? It really is; it really demands we invest in Liine to overcome her manifold obstacles to becoming herself, for herself, not answering to anyone else. If she can stay the course...if she can pull the heroic feat of self-reinvention off....

In under 150pp, you're not getting a full redemption arc. It's more a book about vibes, about being in the moment with the character. I was rooting for her to live each day, since she tells us directly that "at night I die several times" to make sure we get how intense the labor she does really is.

It comes from deep within, an anger I've never dared to feel before. It's a wild feeling of injustice that I've been treated like an inferior kind of being that doesn't deserve respect. Like someone who can be pushed about, who can be manipulated, who can be reproached, humiliated, and who won't fight back. Why didn't I fight back? Why did I put up with it all? I'm mad at myself as well. No, hold on a moment. That's another thing that's been planted in me: blame yourself, descend into an endless labyrinth where you find nothing but your own faults. Analyze only what you did wrong. Consider what you did to deserve it. And anyway, if it was so bad, why didn't you leave sooner? Stop.

That's a distillation of the work of recovery from abuse that can't be bettered.

What you're getting in this plunge-pool of a story is the dive not the swim. The ending isn't A Resolution; it's Liine committing herself to resolving the problems she came to sort out, to coping with the problems she has limited control over (nature, NATO), and being her own, real, honest self.

It is a gratifying story to read to me in this moment I'm making changes in my own life. It is not all tied up with a bow. That won't be to everyone's taste, some facets (eg going to her sister for...what? nothing happens) were not to mine. No perfect score from me; but a deep, enfolding read about a tough woman finding the strong core she needs to stand on while facing down the world.

And she does it for herself.