THE MAID, a lightly-sweetened lemonade of a book...refreshing!

THE MAID
NITA PROSE
Ballantine Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

NOW $2.99 ON KINDLE (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misreads the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her, codifying it into simple rules that Molly could live by.

Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life’s complexities all by herself. No matter—she throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. She delights in donning her crisp uniform each morning, stocking her cart with miniature soaps and bottles, and returning guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel to a state of perfection.

But Molly’s orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed. Before she knows what’s happening, Molly’s unusual demeanor has the police targeting her as their lead suspect. She quickly finds herself caught in a web of deception, one she has no idea how to untangle. Fortunately for Molly, friends she never knew she had unite with her in a search for clues to what really happened to Mr. Black—but will they be able to find the real killer before it’s too late?

A Clue-like, locked-room mystery and a heartwarming journey of the spirit, The Maid explores what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different—and reveals that all mysteries can be solved through connection to the human heart.

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

My Review: This is a locked-room mystery, narrated by a naïve narrator who genuinely, unfeignedly does not understand what is happening or why it unfolds the way it does. Its bones, then, are excellent. A well-trodden path is a gift and a curse for writer and reader. What makes or breaks the reading experience is the voice the author tells the story in.

Having edited books for a living, Author Prose is very much aware of this reality. It makes her achievement in creating Molly the Maid, ironically surnamed "Gray", contextually appropriate but nonetheless impressive. Molly loves her world, the job of being a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel.

There’s nothing quite like a perfectly stocked maid’s trolley early in the morning. It is, in my humble opinion, a cornucopia of bounty and beauty. The crisp little packages of delicately wrapped soaps that smell of orange blossom, the tiny Crabtree & Evelyn shampoo bottles, the squat tissue boxes, the toilet-paper rolls wrapped in hygienic film, the bleached white towels in three sizes—bath, hand, and washcloth—and the stacks of doilies for the tea-and-coffee service tray. And last but not least, the cleaning kit, which includes a feather duster, lemon furniture polish, lightly scented antiseptic garbage bags, as well as an impressive array of solvents and disinfectants, all lined up and ready to combat any stain, be it coffee rings, vomit—or even blood. A well-stocked housekeeping trolly is a portable sanitation miracle; it is a clean machine on wheels. And as I said, it is beautiful.

There is nothing about a housekeeping trolley that has ever creased my cranium before now. I'll never be so blind again. It's a rolling chemistry experiment, though I don't see that with Molly's appreciative eyes.

What strikes the neurotypical reader is how very clearly Molly isn't One of Us. She has her meltdowns, logically enough, when overwhelmed by the chaos of Life (which of necessity includes death); we'd do the same if Chaos obtruded on our day the way it did Molly's as she discovers the lifeless body of repeat hotel guest Mr. Black. The fact is, Black is well named. His death wasn't an accident or an illness...he was Murdered and the police, unfamiliar with Molly's, um, state of being, rapidly assign her the role of Suspect.

And then the Universe springs into action.

Molly, you see, is a gem. She's being used by some bad people whose moral compasses aren't calibrated right, she's being set up to take a fall she can't even see, and she is...crucially...possessed of seriously good luck in her friends. There is no question that she is the proof one always wishes for that there are some Forrest-Gumpian stories that aren't cloying. However, I will not lie to you: anyone...and I mean ANYone...who says "we are all the same in different ways" to me is going to get a truly Tongan response.... Still there is a beauty in the repetition and reassembly of cliché in service of a Message. Well, when that Message is a positive and a constructive one, which is what this fun read exemplifies to the point of being the illustration in the dictionary under "message fiction." It is, though, this Message-y nature that leaves a fifth star off my rating. I could hang with the repetitive reminders of Molly's neurodivergence. I was not quite so willing to overlook the "different ≠ bad" catechism, or the "pretty ≠ good" catechism. Learning to see beyond surfaces? Yes, yes, a maid whose oft-repeated mantra is to "return your suite to a state of perfection" is the perfect messenger for it, got it, stop now. But there was no Stop button....

What happens as a result, though, is the unraveling of a long and ugly strand of American society, a series of horrible crimes that are so...repellent...to persons and so easy to distract institutions from pursuing, that it really isn't on for me to go into it. I will say that there's not one miscreant who gets through this wringer unsqueezed. That's enough about the crime parts. The resolution parts are shaped to suit Molly the Maid's comprehension level, which expands exponentially as she navigates the shoals of her grieving for her Gran's death, for her sad coming-to-awareness of the venality of people, and her sudden awakening to the fragility of Truth and Innocence in a world that needs answers instead of solutions.

Molly and Gran used to watch Columbo reruns together, so Molly's primed for a policing style that doesn't exist in reality when she's enmeshed in a dreadful web of lies and betrayals in her safe place, The Regency Grand Hotel. She's arrested for a crime she knows she didn't commit, and her tormentors aren't even slightly interested in her life-long passion for truthfulness. The issue is, of course, that even her truthfulness is weaponized against her by the miscreants using her innocence to cover their crimes. But, crucially, Gran's long shadow nurtured relationships that Molly, all unknowing, can depend on for her very life. Right there in the hotel! And she surprises herself by being able to reach back to the hands held out to her. Though there is a serious difficulty in that she doesn't immediately see them as helping hands.

Seeing is a recurring theme for Molly. Her being seen, being acknowledged, is a huge issue in her life...people don't see maids, and even her co-workers don't as a rule see Molly. The names of the characters are almost all colors or qualities of sight...Stark, Rosso, Green among others...and Molly's perceptions of the Regency Grand are of its colors and presentations of shiny, glossy surfaces. It's not subtle, goodness knows, but it's very effective because of the narrator's neurodivergence. It's very easy to see that this brightness of vision is intentional and it's all down to interpretation for Molly to be able to present what she's so clearly seen in self-exculpatory ways.

The final scene, a lovely piece of courtroom theater, will make Florence Pugh a bigger star than she is when the film is eventually released. It is so very,very satisfying that I can only blush while reporting the honest truth that I cheered a little and even had a humidity condensation event around my ocular area.

Don't tell anyone.

HIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL, trigger warning for laughter, joy, middle finger for toxic masculinity

HIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL
EDGAR GOMEZ
Soft Skull Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

WINNER OF THE 2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR GAY MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Gomez’s witty memoir follows a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing his gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo—from his uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.—and the bath houses, night clubs, and drag queens who helped him redefine pride.

I’ve always found the definition of machismo to be ironic, considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated with queer people, the enemy of machistas . . . In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold on to pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others.

A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a “high-risk homosexual.”

With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.

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

My Review: What makes a memoir worth reading? This is not an idle question: I don't read many memoirs because, when I ask myself what makes *this* memoir worth expending some of my ever-shrinking supply of eyeblinks on, the answer is "not this" more often than not. Coming-of-age novels get the same call and readerly response. I, too, was a tacky young slut...do I need to know how that felt to you?

Turns out I do. This time.

We meet young Edgar in the back seat of a taxi in Nicaragua, riding along to wave his mother goodbye as she flies back to Orlando, where he is from. He's thirteen. He's clearly figured out he's queer, even if the details are...a bit hazy. But what isn't hazy, at all, is the rage and loathing that "being queer" will subject the young man to, so he does what so many do: He shuts himself, his full authentic real self, into a sealed, invisible space and just powers through whatever bullshit awaits him.

Think about that. Just stop posturing and sit with the reality that you, either through homophobic action or indifferent inaction, are requiring children, teenagers, vulnerable dependents unable to save themselves, to endure the mental-health-destroying reality of sealing away a part of themselves simply in order to survive in this world they did not make. (Yes, you did and do make the world, you adult about to click away, every time you say or silent agree with some asshole's homophobic crap.)

Edgar Gomez survived by making his sealed prison an egg, a seed, where his flamboyantly feathered and exuberantly sexual self could gestate and form. How many whose strength isn't as adamantine as his fail at this? What's the suicide rate among teens? Those are closely linked. And thankfully less often, what are the rates at which the fagbashing culture produces mass murderers? Omar Mateen? He could have, given a different amount of strength, been Edgar Gomez. The similarities between the upbringings of the two disturbs Gomez, he says explicitly.

About explicitness...the title of this memoir probably makes many of y'all wince and cringe. Now...imagine that title is instead A DIAGNOSIS and applies to you when you seek PReP meds like Truvada, potentially life-saving means of not contracting HIV. The way not to die? Be officially sick...this is the world that laughing at fag jokes and failing to challenge laws that don't apply to you because you don't much like the people they *do* apply to leads to. Failing to vote for politicians whose mandate included equal civil rights for all has led us to a place where court-mandated rights are under threat because the scumbags have finally got their pet judges, the ones who let idiotic laws like the Texas Bounty Hunter Enabling one stand, onto the Supreme Court. This is the world that a title like this one, its in-your-face "this is my reality and you no longer get to pretend you didn't know" like some 1930s German, has urgency and necessity multiplying the force of its legitimate demand for your eyeblinks and dollars.

FADEOUT, fifty-two years of Brandstetter in the world but no films?!

FADEOUT
JOSEPH HANSEN
Soho Syndicate (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Re-Publisher Says: Published fifty years ago, a time when being gay was illegal in 49 out of 50 states, Joseph Hansen’s first Dave Brandstetter novel shattered stereotypes and redefined the Private Eye novel as we know it.

Five decades after its original landmark publication, Joseph Hansen’s Fadeout is as fresh and important as ever. Preceded only by a handful of gay protagonists in crime fiction, Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter, a ruggedly handsome World War II vet with a quick wit, faultless moral compass, and endless confidence, shattered stereotypes and won over a large reading audience, a feat previously considered impossible for queer fiction.

Set in the mid-1960s, Fadeout centers on the disappearance of a southern California radio personality named Fox Olson. A failed writer, Olson finally found success as a beloved folksinger and wholesome country raconteur with a growing national audience. The community is therefore shocked when Olson’s car is found wrecked, having been driven off a bridge and swept away in a fast-moving arroyo on a rainy night. A life insurance claim is filed by Olson’s widow and the company holding the policy sends their best man to investigate. The problem is that Olson’s body was never found. Not in the car. Not further down the river. As Dave Brandstetter begins his investigation he quickly finds that none of it adds up.

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

My Reviews: First, a 2013 rumination:

I've recently completed a re-read of all twelve Brandstetter books. Why the heck not, it beats writing a new ending for my own book, right? Especially a book I thought of as done, but...oh heck, never mind.

My crazy mother bought this book when it came out because she liked mysteries. It was a little too hard-boiled for her, but she got the next three or so because she just loved the writing. When I was about 12, she handed this one to me when I expressed my joy at reading The Maltese Falcon with the offhand remark, "oh well then, this one'll slay ya."

Wow. A gay OLD man! People like me before there was a me!!

That really mattered to me, since there was such a lack of public and accepted gayness in the Austin of 1971. I remember knowing there were gay guys at the University because the sister who went there complained about it. I remember knowing the term "gay" from a friend of that same sister's who used it, and explained it when asked. The sister in question said, "oh geez he means queers, Rich, the faggots who mince around yelling about rights."

My mother is not the only judgmental and nasty woman I grew up with.

Well, that sort of interchange made Brandstetter all the more pleasurable for me to read! I loved him for being himself, despite his own father's disapproval, and for being a widower...a relationship ends before the series begins, and it was a revelation to me that such a relationship was *possible*. What a wonderful man Joseph Hansen must be, I thought, to create this unicorn of a character.

As the mystery unfolds, Dave Brandstetter does too. He learns so much about the victim, and so much of that resonates with him...Dave just can't stop the grieving he's going through for his dead love from connecting him to the people in his life, even as he makes the honorable choice not to take comfort that's offered to him by someone even more vulnerable than he is.

What I know now as someone older than the old man I thought Dave was in the book...Hansen knew what he was talking about when the subject is grief and grieving. Dave's pain made me weep as a kid. It does so much more to the grief-veteran old-man me...makes me sit, shocked, as I'm taken in to this most personal and intimate of places. Sex is less intimate than a person sharing this passage with you. As a re-reader, I had my initial youthful response in mind. Then the reality hit, and the impact was profound.

When there's writing like this, storytelling like this, out there in the world, why are so many people gobbling down so much crap?

My present-day response to re-reading this glory of a noir story:

Revisiting this read still more decades later, I am much more impressed with Author Hansen's feat of derring-do in writing the absolutely ordinary Dave as a queer gent of a certain age. These are excellent California Noir novels, as Michael Nava says in his Introduction, and it is homophobia and nothing else that keeps Hansen off the lists of the great practitioners of this art.

I thank you, Soho Syndicate, for republishing the series. Thanks, Edelweiss+, for the DRC. Most of all, and most heartfelt indeed, are the thanks I offer to my forerunner Joseph Hansen for holding the spiky branches back and showing my ever-searching eyes the safest path to being a good man was the honest one.

When all is said and done, when this mystery is...not solved, exactly...resolved, let's say, one feels that Justice has been served and the world's wicked, awful ways aren't triumphant when it really mattered. This time.

SAM, a truly surprising look at New York's gay world on the cusp of Liberation

SAM
LONNIE COLEMAN
Goodness Knows Who
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The 1959 Reviewer Said: In ONE Magazine (pp23-24), "M.J.B." said of this surprising book:
Lonnie Coleman's satisfactory new romance is a perfect example of misconception, one held to a certain extent by the author, of realism: it is not, simply because the author is on occasion more specific than otherwise as to situation and explicit as to word, life without glamor and an expose of the sordid. SAM is a good honest love story wherein the hero finds or appears to find the man of his dreams. In the trappings of 20th century New York it is still the Victorian drama of Love Triumphant, and I, for one, am all for it.

Sam (the name is an obviously homely touch) is Samuel Kendrick, a publisher by disposition as well as heritage who lives luxuriously in Greenwich Village with his faithful man-servant, Custer, an old family retainer. Custer rightly disapproves of Walter Roland, a handsome but untalented actor who satisfies Sam's physical needs for the sake of his own comforts. His dearest friend is a former employee, Adeline, pregnant by her irate husband, Toby, who rightfully but unfairly and even viciously reacts to their friendship with brutality and sadism going beyond the pale.

Sam gives a large party to help Walter get a part in a new show, even though he is aware that if the part is Walter's he will have to give Walter up to the leading lady, an aging actress with a large following and a larger penchant for men younger than herself. The party crystallizes all the ill-feeling pent up in Toby, in Jane, a former girlfriend of Walter's, in the McKenzies (she is to produce the new play), and in Walter and Sam. Reeve Keary, an aging tante appears as a gadfly to worsen the situation. Walter goes off to the aging actress and Sam to the Turkish bath.

It is the adroit and capable handling of the situations that now evolve, the tragedies that ensue, the loves that slowly begin to emerge that makes SAM the pleasant reading that it is. For the people are recognizable and for the most part rather true to life, or to those portions of life that Mr. Coleman here has chosen to confine himself. Sam is a little wooden, Richard (who appears late in the book) is almost too good to be true, Toby is not completely realized and has all the cards against him, but with all this there is a certain native honesty that gives the book some distinction.

Unfortunately, the library of homosexual literature is so small that SAM will shape larger on our shelves than it might otherwise. In any case it would earn the space it took!

Think of it, a happy ending, and a touch of humor, too!

KINDLED IT UP ON A WHIM.

My Review: First, read this:

"I don't like people the way I used to. I look at them sometimes on a street or in a theater and think: 'My God, what doltish sons of bitches you all are.' I get along with them, but they don't mean anything to me. You do. Walter does. Most of the others bore me. It's dangerous to feel that way about people. When you do, you've begun to die. Poor Reeve today. He was trying to be nice, and I've laughed with him a thousand times over just such things as he was saying. But I don't have the desire or energy any more."
–and–
He had known pain, but only his own. It was the first time he had felt another's pain, and he would never be entirely happy again. Happiness supposes security, and there is no security when mortality is comprehended.
–and–
Some hurts heal slowly, some quickly, and some never. Quickness of healing is not a measure of superficiality in a wound. Deep wounds may leave a negligible reminder, and slighter ones may, by their scars, proclaim a Civil War. So is it with emotional wounds and scars.

I don't know about you, but I feel Seen. Sam Kendrick, the hero either speaking or thinking these lines, is a younger...ouch...version of me. And the wonderful part is that I can shut the Kindle on him if he gets tiresome! Can't do that on your own sweet self, can you.

This book was not a hit in 1959, and it came out from a publisher not of the Top Drawer like Author Coleman worked for...Collier's...but did he know his people or what! I'll bet there wasn't a gay guy's coffee table that didn't sport that gawdawful lavender cover with its limp wrist on the front practically screaming, "FAGGOT!!" in Anno Domini 1959. It sported that rarest of things, a happy ending for its queers, and it was not the least bit shy or reticent about it. I don't know of many, if any, contemporaneous tomes with that claim to fame. The wonderful thing about that was the same then as now: A future is only possible when we believe it is, and seeing it in a book can be a lifeline. Someone GETS me! Someone IS me!

I'd like to think that, in the ten years between SAM coming out (!) and Stonewall, it helped men who flat could not imagine that people like them (load some extra venom on it, you know, so they don't miss the point!) could even aspire to happiness with someone they loved. I'd like to believe that it crept out of old boxes into young hands and entered young minds...nothing seriously salacious in these pages...to show them there's a future that is not bleak, solitary, miserably alone.

I surely hope it did.

And then, mirabile dictu, there is the almost-divinely-inspired definition of what we now call Found Family, or Made Family:

There was something else between Addie and Sam, something she could not explain but that she knew. It was what they meant when they said they were family to each other. It was a special intimacy provided by the sensitivity they felt to each other's thoughts and looks and words. The mystery of why it happened between Sam and Addie, and not between Sam and someone else, or Addie and someone else, would remain a mystery to the end of their days.

Probably the most important concept in the whole novel. Knowing that people could matter to you, could love you, could be there with you and for you because you're you not in spite of your being yourself, probably saved more lives than any other thing in these pages. Certainly not the smoking that literally everyone does on almost every page! Gawd has that not aged well.

There are characters in SAM whose very existence one wants to deny, but I'm here to tell you I've met every single one of these people in the flesh. Often had to be nice to them in spite of having the urge to fling them into the East River. I will say that, to a one, they got their just deserts in these pages and I couldn't be happier. There are people whose lives change after the almost criminally unfilmed Grand Party Scene so utterly, in such a contrived fashion, that I wonder how Author Coleman (he of Beulah Land fame, or infamy) thought he could get away with it. Oh, that reminds me: Gender and race relations are very much of their time. Author Coleman was one of those who called women "ladies" and Black folks "Negroes" but he was no forerunner of PC/Woke culture.

So, for a buck and knowing that it's not going to overload you with politics, I'd call this straight people safe and a worthwhile read for all of us 21st-century denizens who imagine this passage in history is Utterly Unique. Back when Cadillacs and glasses frames had fins, the world we think of as ours was pushing itself into being. Go on, risk the buck and the three hours!

OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA, historical thriller of 17th century America

OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA
LEAH ANGSTMAN
Regal House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Out Front the Following Sea is a historical epic of one woman’s survival in a time when the wilderness is still wild, heresy is publicly punishable, and being independent is worse than scorned — it is a death sentence. At the onset of King William’s War between French and English settlers in 1689 New England, Ruth Miner is accused of witchcraft for the murder of her parents and must flee the brutality of her town. She stows away on the ship of the only other person who knows her innocence: an audacious sailor — Owen — bound to her by years of attraction, friendship, and shared secrets. But when Owen’s French ancestry finds him at odds with a violent English commander, the turmoil becomes life-or-death for the sailor, the headstrong Ruth, and the cast of Quakers, Pequot Indians, soldiers, highwaymen, and townsfolk dragged into the fray. Now Ruth must choose between sending Owen to the gallows or keeping her own neck from the noose.

Steeped in historical events and culminating in a little-known war on pre-American soil, Out Front the Following Sea is a story of early feminism, misogyny, arbitrary rulings, and the treatment of outcasts, with parallels still mirrored and echoed in today’s society.

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

My Review: I've been acquainted with, and even published by, Leah Angstman for the past decade. I am absolutely sure that I'd've rated this book even more highly if I hadn't been...such are the wages of sin, I'm afraid. I'm extra sure that nothing I've read in this COVID year has affected me as much as the tale of Ruth, a child of sixteen!, suffering under the sheer violent rage of an entire community of religious nuts. Regulars will recall my affection for the comic book Prophet Against Slavery, which trod similar outcast-for-being-honest ground. At least the Quaker prophet Lay was outcast, cruelly treated, with more than one slender reed of lovingkindness to support him...and I think Ruth's belovèd Owen, his oft-professed love for her notwithstanding, was a slender reed indeed...while being *actually*guilty* of what they accused him of.

That is not the case in this story.

Ruth's powerful mind, her greatest curse in a society that mistrusts women whole and entire but smart women most of all, also leads her to the only possible solution to her impossible conditions (given that the local Pequots aren't going to risk a world of trouble to take her in although they do offer her more honorable assitance than she had a right to expect)...and straight into a situation where she's in the path of life-storms and STORMS!!

It is as breathless a ride of a read as I'm able to take at my advanced age.

What made me invest myself so deeply in this unflattering depiction of theocratic society from the outside was my antipathy towards That Kind of Person. What kept the pages turning was my need to know: Are Ruth and Owen going to make it to the last page? will their love be rewarded with togetherness? And, this being a romantic novel not a category romance, there is no way to be sure. And I'll not spoil that for you.

(That was me being very cruel, but only to be kind...you need to read this book.)

30 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MYSELF, a truly pleasurable read that just could not be more fun to read

30 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MYSELF
RADHIKA SANGHANI
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When a British Indian woman's life hits rock bottom, she decides to change her stars by falling in love...with herself—a hilarious, heartfelt story from outrageously funny novelist Radhika Sanghani.

Nina didn't plan to spend her thirtieth birthday in jail, yet here she is in her pajamas, locked in a holding cell. There's no Wi-Fi, no wine, no carbs—and no one to celebrate with.

Unfortunately, it gives Nina plenty of time to reflect on how screwed up her life is. She's just broken up with her fiancé, and now has to move back into her childhood home to live with her depressed older brother and their uptight, traditional Indian mother. Her career as a freelance journalist isn't going in the direction she wants, and all her friends are too busy being successful to hang out with her.

Just as Nina falls into despair, a book lands in her cell: How to Love Yourself (and Fix Your Shitty Life in the Process). It must be destiny. With literally nothing left to lose, Nina makes a life-changing decision to embark on a self-love journey. By her next birthday, she's going to find thirty things she loves about herself.

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

My Review: You can't be sure you're reading a novel until Nina actually reads How to Love Yourself (and Fix Your Shitty Life in the Process). Really? A bit on-the-nose to reach her when she's in the clink! I mean, I'd just sit out the sentence before I'd read that. Still, Nina's pretty much looking at her (pretty comedic) arrest as an intervention from the Universe.

But, given her inability even to make a decent choice of only-phone-call recipient resulting in her return to her *truly*ghastly* mother's orbit, that could prove to be life saving. Or losing...it's a close-run thing whether she'll survive Daily Mailish history-chucking-out nightmare Mum. *I* almost didn't survive Mother Mistry. What a gorgon. In fact...just being totally transparent here!...I really didn't like wishy-washy, what's-the-female-nebbish-called Nina. I get it...a mother like that one would kick the sense and the sensibility right out of you. No one knows more or better than she does! Then there's drippy, dreary, depressed closet case Kal. Yeesh!

Why, then, am I reviewing it. Two words: Tantric. Sex.

You'll have to read the book to figure out why. But you'll have a lot of fun doing it, so I'm not wasting my tears for you. You're going to be glad you did, you nutty slacker. Glad you powered past the ex bringing his new squeeze to a party when Nina was guaranteed to be there...because dear ol' Mum dragged her. Glad you ignored the fact that a thirty-year-old online journalist needed her brother to explain doxing to her. Or when her self-immolative attempts to go up against a TV shock jock are so very, so painfully naive....

And let's be honest, folks, the sheer number of us humans who can use...really, really use...the truth behind Andrew Solomon's quoted-in-story quote, "The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality..." runs into the octuple digits. I suspect, though, that quite a lot more of y'all will follow Nina Mistry, Financial Abundance Manifester, in her (unorthodox but) proven effective plan to get the, um, kitty replenished.

What the heck is all this in aid of...well, my olds, there is absolutely no better time than the New Year to manifest self-love and self-acceptance by reading something that will make you giggle, and squirm, and blush. Cringe comedy lovers, here's you a book! Silly self-help sozzlers, here's you a book! You are in need of grins? You are in luck, here's you a book!

And you know what? Many more books need to have "Namaste, bitches," in them.

Cornelia Funke's MIRRORWORLD series, LIVING SHADOWS: second of 5-book illustrated YA Dark Fantasies

RECKLESS: Living Shadows (MirrorWorld #2)
CORNELIA FUNKE (tr. Oliver Latsch)
Pushkin Children's Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Jacob has saved his brother from the Mirrorworld, but now he will pay a terrible price. A fairy's curse is burning in his heart, and to break the spell he must embark upon a perilous journey - with his trusty friend Fox by his side - to seek out the only treasure that could save him.

Jacob's search for the golden crossbow will lead him across hundreds of miles by land and sea, to an invisible, enchanted palace within the Dead City. It will bring him face to face with vicious beasts, bloodthirsty giants, and a deadly stone­faced rival.

It will test his courage like never before.

Living Shadows is the second book in the thrilling Reckless series.

First book reviewed here—Second book reviewed here
—Third book reviewed here—Fourth book reviewed here

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

My Review: I am convinced that this series is cruelly aimed at obsessive completist readers. The cliffhanger at the end of book one makes this book a MUST-READ NOW and, through the magic of Kindle, I was able to read the books back-to-back. I warn all who come after me: To sign up for this voyage into Mirrorworld is to commit to the whole cycle.

I am in.

What happens during the course of this book is that Jacob comes to understand something he'd never given much thought to: My love for you creates my responsibility for you creates a web of obligation that is endless...and as addictive as any narcotic. While we who have read the first book know what a price Jacob has paid, in fact what a price he paid after making a sacrifice that even he isn't quite aware of the dimensions of yet, we're probably not expecting the antagonist of this book.

In fact, I guarantee we're unprepared for the existence of the antagonist of this book. And that's probably Author Funke's most clever sleeve-ace yet. It plays well.

There are the accustomed delights of reading this series' world-building fillips. These are numerous, though enumerating them for you isn't really something worth doing in a review. There is a Fandom wiki, of course there is!, and I didn't look but am willing to bet there's fanfic on AO3. The reason is that Author Funke used every conceivable fairy-tale source to draw her world out from and has made it into a near-seamless whole. (Where there are seams that I can perceive, eg Goyls' method of transmission, it felt to me as though they were intentional not born of inattention to source material.)

The problem I had wth this entry is how kinetic, nay frenetic, it is. We go from pillar to post and back again; Fox is with us, Nerron the treasure-hunting half-Goyl whose existence is new to this book is against us; we're never for a moment at rest, able to take stock, pause to reflect. It's exactly what Author Funke intends, and it's a valid narrative technique but in this reader it creates a sense of distance from the characters. I'm so deep in the world that I don't get to experience his progress through his (final?) days.

Until I read this:

"If you catch your own children in the circle...then you can use the years you take from them for yourself. You're just taking back the life you gave them in the first place. The more of it, the better."

That was a gut-punch of a trap set for overeager treasure hunters, wasn't it?! And the sheer violence of the stakes set...if you're not a relative of the curse-setter, you're still going to die in the circle but it won't keep the curse-setter alive...could not be more urgent. Now that Jacob has found this evil place, he thinks he's trapped in the curse.

Fox, his shifter gal-pal, isn't having that. As always, the woman's love saves the man from his stupidity and greed. Though let's be fair to Author Funke, this time Jacob's greed was simply the desire to live that we all suffer from. And since Fox very much wants Jacob still alive, she's hardly just going to watch as he dies from a curse she can stop from progressing...if she's willing to do something that's very, very hard to do and commit murder.

Killing someone/thing in a struggle isn't murder. The intent to kill, the set purpose and the planning of the act...that's murder. Will she murder to save Jacob's life?

You'll have to read the book.

The ending is tremendously exciting.