SPEAK EZ, clever, endearingly endowed with dog energy, paranormal lesbian romantic suspense

SPEAK EZ
ELLE E. IRE
Bywater Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$20.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When a mysterious dog shows up during the renovation of the Big City Little Theatre, one woman falls in love with the victim of a century-old homicide who might not be as dead as she seems. And now it's a race against time to ensure she stays that way.


On New Year's Eve, in 1923, someone walked into Michelle "Mickey" McFadden's queer speakeasy hidden beneath the Big City Little Theater and shot her and her dog, EZ, dead. Or . . . sort of, mostly, kind of dead, maybe? Because instead of crossing over, they become trapped within the bar's cinderblock walls. And though EZ eventually manages to wriggle his way free, Mickey remains, her spirit frozen in time.

In 2022, employees of the Big City Little Theater begin encountering a stray dog sneaking in and around the premises. When Ciara, the theater's bookkeeper, saves the dog from being hit by a truck, she begins to suspect there's something odd about the mysterious canine and makes it her mission to catch him and either return him to his owners or keep him as her own.

That is until Ciara and her friends happen upon the sealed-up speakeasy in the theater's subbasement --and find the dog inside. But how did he get in there when the door was locked? And why are there bullet holes in the otherwise beautifully preserved bar? Their discovery launches them on the investigation of a lifetime, complete with an ancient murder to solve, strange occurrences to explain, and a missing person to find.

When Mickey's spirit, which has been trapped in the mysterious in-between for the past hundred years, begins to find her way out, she and Ciara finally come face-to-face. And it's more than the speakeasy's old wiring that makes sparks fly. Ciara's falling hard for Mickey and Mickey for her. Can they solve the murder and figure out how EZ returned to the world of the living before the clock strikes midnight on the next New Year's Eve?

Because if they don't, they're pretty certain Mickey's time will finally be up—this time for good.

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

My Review: EZ the dog better be coming back. The women, well...if that's how I get EZ back, okay.

I had a lot of fun with this read because I'm all about ghostly love, and even lovin'. It's very clear these women would smoke up a train station with their chemistry. Any author who can get me to invest in the love of two women is an author whose chops as a storyteller are superior. Developing Mickey into someone I was interested in seeing get justice for her century-old murder took some doing. Her post-death time in the walled-up speakeasy in the basement of the theater where Ciara works isn't detailed...in fact the way Mickey's existence gets handled is mostly with believable "I don't know"s and much pondering without a lot of resolution, which is fine by me.

All the characters are fun to listen to. Mickey's not all that different from the others, something I'd usually frown over, but the four in the group are witty enough that I let it go. What counts in a crime novel is solving the crime, right? Not to me, though I'll admit the pleasure of reading a series mystery is a satisfying solution to the crime and the crew around the sleuth. I don't know the author's plans, but it seems to me that, after this story, she's likely to stop. As long as she brings back EZ somehow, okay by me.

So the murder does have a solution that we are given adequate means to think through. I won't talk about it because the Spoiler Stasi is ever-vigilant, but it makes sense and it works. It's also part of the reason I think this could be a satisfying standalone story. I like the idea of this story existing in and for itself, not needing to carry forward baggage.

What cost a half-star off perfect-fivedom was my sense that Ciara needed too little time to adjust to Mickey's...unorthodox...existence. How does Ciara just buy into this decidedly offbeat mode of being? No obvious anxiety around any of it, which I'm not really prepared to accept all the way; so a measly half-star off instead of a whole one, because once they get to bantering, well, it's just utterly clear why they love one another.

Very much a story to keep the #PrideMonth reader involved, entertained, amused, and invested.

CAPITANA, not quite a success, not quite a flop

CAPITANA
CASSANDRA JAMES
Quill Tree Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Prepare to set sail with this riveting romantasy—the first in a duology—that’s filled with complex characters, sizzling romantic chemistry, and page-turning action. A must-read for fans of Daughter of the Pirate King, Together We Burn, or Fable!

Ximena Reale has spent most of her life at La Academia training to become a Cazador, a seafaring hunter who tracks down pirates. But her future is uncertain, thanks to her parents’ reputation. They were pirates, traitors to the Luzan Empire, and though they were executed when Ximena and her sister were young, they permanently damaged the Reale name.

Ability alone won’t earn Ximena the coveted Cazador cloak. So, when the legendary pirate Gasparilla returns and captures the Empire’s queen, Ximena offers to bring her back and capture the notorious pirate in exchange for a cloak. But there’s a catch: There’s only one cloak, and Ximena’s competition is Dante deLeon, an infuriating yet handsome classmate.

With their futures on the line, Ximena and Dante set out on a dangerous quest across the high seas. But can Ximena sail far enough to escape the legacy of her family, or will her relationship with Dante thwart her success in more ways than one?

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

My Review: Anarchy versus authoritarianism, in simplest terms. Neither side is presented in a terribly positive light. Reality having this extremely disagreeable habit of not being binary, I thought I'd like this book.

Not quite so much.

Ximena is far too impulsively sure she's Right, then remorseful when she's wrong, then back to impulsive action because she's Right...the cycle isn't going much of anywhere. No resolution makes recursion into repetition. That gets old fast. When it comes to the love interest, the cycle of assumption/acting on assumption/learning she was wrong should have consequences but it never does. It felt as though this character was impervious to learning. Kind of a drawback when you've set your story in a literal school. That it was basically a police academy, instilling authoritarian principles, was deeply unpleasant to me. You've encountered One Piece if you're interested in this story. That series of tales is 180° from this one in tone, in construction (One Piece hangs together), and society building.

Dante is described as handsome. In what way? Why is Ximena susceptible to his particular handsomeness? As it is, it seems as though Ximena is simply fixated on him, without reason or evidence we are able to see. His character, in the old-fashioned sense, is reprehensible. He lies and cheats to get what he wants...too much of that in the world already...and he spends zero time trying to engage with rule-loving Ximena for me to believe he sees her as any kind of person. She's just whatever he thinks she is, to him, and what kind of message is that to send to a YA-age girl?

So why did I bother to keep reading it? I'm a sucker for Hispanic-inspired cultures having grown up on or near La Frontera. I think the use of Spanish in the text is well done, coming at times that felt narratively natural. I enjoyed the school setting being presented as a positive even though I don't like or promote the authoritarian values it teaches.

The thing you should know about the author is, it seems she is in sympathy with the present US administration...thus explaining the positive presentation of authoritarianism...and, if huge amounts of gossip is to be believed, has regressive views about women's autonomy. I can't say I'd be all that surprised if I ever saw the evidence used to reach that conclusion. It *feels* like that would be her choice, from the manners and mannerisms given to different characters. I myownself have no direct evidence to support or refute the gossip.

I don't like the somewhat unsympathetic values asserted by the story, I have big issues showing the kind of "romance" that's in here to young women as a positive not a series of red flags, so I'm not recommending it. I'm also not angry I, an adult male, read it. If you're willing to see the positives I saw, or of you're culturally supportive of authoritarian stuff (what you're doing reading my reviews is beyond me in that case), it's okay. Please don't give it to an impressionable teen girl.

THE PHOENIX PENCIL COMPANY, debut magical-realism Chinese culture novel...very worthy Reese's Book Club pick for #PrideMonth

THE PHOENIX PENCIL COMPANY
ALLISON KING
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK!

In this dazzling debut novel, a hidden and nearly forgotten magic—of Reforging pencils, bringing the memories they contain back to life—holds the power to transform a young woman’s relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space.

Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she's always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade.

Though Yun rarely speaks of her past, Monica is determined to find the long-lost cousin she was separated from years ago. One day, the very program Monica is helping to build connects her to a young woman, whose gift of a single pencil holds a surprising clue. Monica’s discovery of a hidden family history is exquisitely braided with Yun’s own memories as she writes of her years in Shanghai, working at the Phoenix Pencil Company. As WWII rages outside their door, Yun and her cousin, Meng, learn of a special power the women in their family possess: the ability to Reforge a pencil’s words. But when the government uncovers their secret, they are forced into a life of espionage, betraying other people’s stories to survive.

Combining the cross-generational family saga and epistolary form of A Tale for the Time Being with the uplifting, emotional magic of The Midnight Library, Allison King’s stunning debut novel asks: who owns and inherits our stories? The answers and secrets that surface on the page may have the unerasable power to reconnect a family and restore a legacy.

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

My Review: I so very badly want Meng's superpower of Reforging that, once I encountered it, I was unable...okay, unwilling but really, really unwilling...to stop reading the story. Injecting an author's actual words directly into my veins?

Magical pencil me, Yun! (Or Monica, if you're now possessed of the power.)

So there you have it, laddies and gentlewomen. My officially enthroned favorite fantasy trope that utterly bypasses my usual Chosen-One Hidden Powers flush button. There really is a way around every prejudice. What didn't really ring for me was Monica's modern-day iteration of these magically delicious pencils made by Yun and her cousin Meng in 1937 Shanghai (all you Iris Chang readers know what the implications of that are already; if you haven't read Chang, go do so.) EMBR, Monica's boss's startup, seems to be a not-evil iteration of Facebook, in my own crude and unnuanced terms, and that's a concept so toxified by that fuck Zuck and his henchrats that I was preemptively squicked out by it.

It's a cool idea for a story, and one that feels like Author King has really gone into to develop her world's natural development. I think the decision not to go into how and what Meng and Yun have as a power paradoxically let me just accept it...use one of the pencils they created and in a future that's never defined by length or relationship, someone hip to the trick can utterly exist within the words you've created. Trying to build out a system around this would not have made it easier to believe.

As to *why* these pencils exist, this brings me to the almost-all-five starrèdness of the read: The entire book is suffused with a deep and highly loving sadness as memory, its utter unreliability, its undeniable centrality to one's identity and selfhood, are examined. Monica, Yun, all their ties and all the facts of their family's life, swept away in the fires of war; recoverable with this one astonishing instrument, writing itself entire in a new head. Monica's journey to understanding this...power, gift, supernatural geas...is tied back to Grandmother Yun and forward to new lover Louise. I've said elsewhere that reading is the act of thinking with another head.

Writing, creating stories, are under direct and explicit threat in a time of rampant and overly successful suppression of books, ideas, and fields of study. NASA's proposed budget eliminates entirely astrophysical research, funding for space-sciences fellowships, all Earth sciences research. Libraries suffer huge challenges to remove particularly queer books and media...all orchestrated and funded by certain religious groups. This is something I'm morally certain Author King is indirectly, and all the more effectively for it, commenting on with Yun and Monica's interconnectedness via the magic of stories to pass forward the truth and the facts of a violent past.

If you wonder how this can happen in the modern world, look at what's under attack...learning, information-gathering, all the weapons against ignorance and chaos. Resisting this, refusing to simply accept it, why this is a thing to be worked toward and desired, you should trust Shakespeare:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire, shall burn
The living record of your memory:

’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity,
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

It is impious to speak after Divinity has spoken.

BECOMING A VISIBLE MAN, 2nd edition, still nothing like it

BECOMING A VISIBLE MAN
JAMISON GREEN
Vanderbilt University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$34.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a clear and logical style, Becoming a Visible Man tackles the history, biology, medicine, philosophy, and politics that claim to define and control gender in the US.

Profoundly personal and eminently practical, Jamison Green clarifies transgender experience for transgender people and their families, friends, and co-workers. Medical and mental healthcare providers, educators at every level, business leaders, and advocates seeking information about transgender concerns can all gain from Green's integrative approach to the topic. This book candidly addresses the emotional relationships that are impacted by a transgender transition, and brings refined integrity to the struggle to self-define, whether one undergoes a transition or chooses not to.

Emphasizing the lives of transgender men (who are often overlooked) he elucidates the experience of masculinity in a way that is self-assured and comforting, not demanding or threatening. Self-acceptance and health are always at the core of his message. Green's inspirational wisdom has informed and empowered thousands of readers with knowledge and compassion. There is still no other book like it in the transgender library.

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

My Review: Most people are profoundly unaware of the entire experience of being outside the gender binary in a world totally predicated on it. I was one, until I wasn't anymore, and like the "eww-ick" homophobes I've known and known of over the years, I had no idea how my ignorance would come across to the trans people I knew and know.

It is worth an empathetic look into the lived experience of the people you're Othering.

This is the second edition of a book now twenty years old. It helps to understand that; it helps to know that, while some things have changed, more have not...or have not for the better. Reading Author Green's personal story of knowing he was a man yet having the body of a woman is deeply moving. It is important to learn this from a person whose gender dysphoria was severe enough that the long, complicated road to gender-affirming treatment was the best option. For anyone who thinks this is a simple thing, read this book.

A lot of Author Green's impact on the conversation around trans issues stems from being willing to educate others about the topic. This is very much a book aiming to teach...at times a bit too determinedly so, hence that missing half-star. It can feel overwhelming. It has taken me literal years to read the book. It is, for me, an occasion of deep shame to realize how in my ignorance I was insensitive to my trans siblings. So learning the parameters of the experience of being trans has been a difficult reckoning, a hard catharsis, and a reason to look deep inside myself.

I know many are now looking at this and shuddering, thinking "no thanks." I would have as well. I did, apart from small bursts, for a long time. Not greatly to my credit I've chosen the first Pride Month of the Felonious Yam's second regime to finish and review it.

If you're having trouble seeing how this can even be a thing, try this analogy I found in the book. I'm paraphrasing here but: biosex is the hardware; cultural gender roles are the software; one's internal gender identity is the operating system that communicates between them and is the "user interface."

It's hugely helpful to me to have a simile to turn to for deeper understanding. What this does is offer a way in to "getting" how issues can arise in any of these ways of existing in the world. It also acts as a powerful reminder that there is not one single way to be literally anything in this world. All of life is in spectrums. We're educated in the US...in the religious-nut-capitalist world more generally...to see binaries, of which there are few. They're very comforting for lazy or stupid people but if science has taught us nothing else it's taught us that comfort is only bought at the exorbitant price of ignorance.

The annotated bibliography is quite something. The idea of all these sources existing in spite of every attempt to silence or disappear them by the screaming bigots is impressive. It also helps explain the screaming bigots' urgency in erasing us all. Information leads people to learning, and the habit of mind we call learning is the most potent weapon against the unreasoning hatred that is required for fascism and authoritarians to rule.

Resist them. Learn about the facts of transness from someone who lives it, and is willing to teach you when you're ready to be taught.

MARGARET KILLJOY'S PAGE: THE SAPLING CAGE, transfem MC wants to save the kingdom; & A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS, queer, anarchist SF

THE SAPLING CAGE (Daughters of the Empty Throne #1)
MARGARET KILLJOY
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 ebook, availablle now

Rating: 4.5* of five

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 URSULA K. LeGUIN PRIZE! Winner announced on 21 October 2025.

The Publisher Says: In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in an own-voices story of trans witchcraft.

Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy.

When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. She soon discovers the dark powers threatening the kingdom: a magical blight scars the land, and the power-mad Duchess Helte is crushing everything between her and the crown. In spite of these dangers, Lorel makes friends and begins learning magic from the powerful witches in her coven. However, she fears that her new friends and mentors will find out her secret and kick her out of the coven, or worse.

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

My Review: Transfem main character in a fantasy novel? Yes please. What else, one might reasonably ask, would Author Killjoy (transfem herself) write? Short answer: Any-damn-thing she likes. The fantasy universe here is beautifully evoked, the system of magic is well-thought-out, the costs the use of magic exacts on the user are all both disturbing and condign, this is in short the kind of secondary-world fantasy one always hopes to find.

Lorel herself, our PoV character, is carefully delineated to be consistent: born a boy in a world where magic is only wielded by females, transfem Lorel (believably bisexual in desire) is clearly female coded from the off. She does not like violence, but can definitely motivate her aggression in defense of loved ones or in the face of inflicted violence. She's somewhat spottily presented to our mind's eye, in that her deliberate changes of gender presentation aren't detailed. I wasn't sure why someone presented as wearing a dress the last time she was described putting her hair in a man's topknot and passing after that. What happened to the dress? Was a dress a unisex garment? If not why make a point of her wearing one?

These are minor things to me, though, in the face of Lorel's journey into her true nature. Being within her society and still Othered, Lorel's way of observing the anarchist functioning of the witches was far less didactic than A Country of Ghosts (q.v.) It came across as an apprentice learning the ropes, watching the experts for tips and tricks, which is exactly what one expects. A coming-of-age story that's also a very risky coming-out story is a great set-up for a series about a fantasy world. It is, though, a set-up, so this is not a full story. There are, thank goodness, details left to develop...but that isn't always totally satisfying. I've knocked off a half-star for those holes falling too deep at times.

I loved the experience of learning about the magic system. I'm not going to go into it here because the idea is best encountered without early access to the facts. Discover with Lorel what magic is, can do, and exacts from its practitioners...and why.

I'm glad to say that, as book one of a trilogy, this is not full of tension-killing explanations. It will be interesting to see how Lorel, learning to trust herself as a transfem person, reconciles that with her culture's restriction of magical practice to biofem people. What will this do among the witches? Will the immediate consequences turn dire in this supremely cozy world?

Future books will tell!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS
MARGARET KILLJOY
AK Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An epic political fantasy in the tradition of Tepper and Le Guin that explores the question of what an anarchist community can do to resist the assaults that are sure to come if any such social formation were to exist.

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life.

A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

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

My Review: Very much in the same vein as The Dispossesed, a philosophical exploration of anarchy as a means of social organization. The horrors of hypercapitalism bashing into the anarchic anti-hegemony are always fun and interesting to encounter.

Told as a story, these ideas and attitudes make a much more lasting mark on the psyche than do more explanatory ideological works. It's easy to invest in the people Author Killjoy creates, as one might expect from the author of the Danielle Cain novellas.

There's nothing false, or clangorous, in Author Killjoy's work. There is no dumbing-down or slighting of issues that arise from this world's way of functioning. It's true that our ignorant interloper from imperialism needs to be brought up to speed. I don't think this counts as the dreaded infodumping, because the explicit intent of the story is to contrast a high-control system based on coercion crashing into a non-system of personal responsibility and collective action. Armies are fighting, and that should be impossible in anarchy...yet here we are, and Dimos (our stand-in) needs to understand why. He's set up as a muckraking journalist by temperament. He's shown to be an ill-fitting bit of grit in the imperial army's system, someone who is a misfit and outsider.

The way he's educated in anarchist principles of respect, for self, for others, for the natural world as it is absent religious stuff, is inspiring. I enjoyed the way Dimos's struggle to wrap his head around this utterly alien way of thinking is portrayed. After witnessing the imperials committing war crimes, his mind was more flexible and receptive. It made the way the Hron (literally "ghosts") explain their lives to him hit harder:

We are anarchists, and we are immortal. We are the country of ghosts, and we are immortal. We will fight them until we are dead, and our bones will fight them after. The memory of our existence will fight them…in each of their hearts we will brand the memory that those who are free will never yield. Today, let us be ghosts!
–and–
Take care of yourself. No, to hell with that, take care of your friends and let them take care of you. Do stupid things for them.

It's so very much not the way the individualistic empire invading them thinks; Dimos is slowly taking on board this radical reorientation of his worldview. Dimos is a bit of a gender essentialist, though being gay himself he might not have been...that's an authorial lacuna, along with the absence of enby folk among the Hron. I'm not sure he would ever bother to learn not to be, but it did actually clang through my awareness that he was an outsider among the Hron as much as within the empire he was born into.

A book that is so ambitious in its asks of the reader that it startled me how smoothly it went down. Every last one of my four stars was coated in a thick frosting of readerly happiness.

But ostriches? Really?

VZ: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Making of a Nation, urgent topic and sterling example of resisting fascists

VZ: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Making of a Nation
DMITRY BYKOV (tr. John Freedman )
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: How does a comedian become the face of a nation's fight for survival?

In VZ, celebrated Russian author Dmitry Bykov unpacks the extraordinary rise of Vladimir Zelenskyi—from a TV star to a wartime leader defying a global superpower. With wit and razor-sharp insight, Bykov dives into the moments that shaped Zelenskyi's improbable journey, revealing the man behind the headlines.

This is not just a story of one leader but of a nation on the edge, and the power of resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. Bykov offers a fresh, compelling take on Zelenskyi’s leadership, Ukraine’s struggle for sovereignty, and what it truly means to fight for democracy in the modern world.

For anyone eager to understand the making of a modern hero and the fierce will of a nation under siege, VZ is essential reading.

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

My Review: Ukraine's president, a former performer who took on a mantle of identity formation for the ancient land of Ukraine, gets a hagiography. Bykov is a prolific writer, twelve novels and a slew of other biographies in his pocket, but until Open Letter brought this book out, nothing in English either in the UK or US markets. As translated by John Freedman, a prolific translator into English, the Bykov touch seems to serve a need to balance uncritical praise and honest assessment.

Everything starts for the Anglophone with the competing systems of Romanizing Russian and Ukrainian. They are as different as English and American, or Portuguese and Brazilian. This means they need to be transliterated differently. It will strike US readers as weird, and feel "wrong" to many who, like me, lived our entire lives accepting "USSR" and "Russia" as synonyms, "The Ukraine" being uncritically assumed to be part of both.

Volodymyr Zelenskyi (a usage common in the text; I'll use it here as I prefer it to double-y which breaks my brain) is the president of Ukraine's name. Learn it. We're not dictating anymore, old white guys, we're learning what to call people, how to spell it, when to say it. The fascism our fathers, their grandfathers, fought a war to defeat is cultural as well as political. We need to shed our old assumptions.

Accustoming myself to Author Bykov's code-switching between transliterations was as challenging as learning when to use "tu" versus the formal third person. It got to be automatic, and served as effective signposting of a source's sympathies. It's going to take effort from the deeply acculturated to the Cold War's polarities. In a multipolar world, people like Zelenskyi are the feared and/or anticipated breezes from outside certainty. There's a lot in Zelenskyi's past that makes him a good stand-in for global changes to get the old certainties to unclench: he's charismatic, he's deeply convinced of his cause's rightness not simply clinging to his power; his government, unsurprisingly, faces a lot of bad press with accusations of corruption and self-dealing that ring false and hollow, so don't stick. Reading this rather-too-long book demonstrates why: This is a man of integrity and convictions accusing by his existence those who embody other "values."

What you gain by reading this biography is a clear sense of *WHY* Ukraine unites behind the figure of Zelenskyi: He represents them, he says the words they want to hear, he makes the sacrifices they make. This is Leadership 101, folks, it's either the best stage-managed con job in political history (in which case the world's leaders would unite to kill him as fast as possible) or he's sure he's Right.

Guess which one the invaders' ruler, too scared of his people to allow them elections that are free of thumbscaling determinism, wants us all to believe. I think I'm finally understanding the Slavic concept of "the holy fool" (bozhevilyi in Ukrainian) the longer I stew over the facts of Zelenskyi's choice to stand in Putin's way. It's that real belief that the way will be made for that soul who simply does not accept the world's verdict about reality. Any sane person would've taken the ride offered to evacuate him, not demanded the weapons to fight, the invaders of a major army with a dictator at its head who needn't fear election losses or civil unrest unseating him. (It says here...watch this space.)

I will say I can't offer all five stars because, absence of footnotes and all, there's simply an overwhelming amount of detail to absorb and not a lot of framing to do it within. It's not possible to give that without a lot more history; that's not what this book's about; so it's a little unfair but I'm a reader-response reviewer not a literary critic. I'm resolutely anti-christian and find a lot of the apocalypticism around the battles of this war framed in Holy War terms unpleasantly alien, when I think the humanity on each side is more than capable of doing their worst of their own volition.

I could simply be not "getting" these references inside the proper framework. I acknowledge this...and still slice off the remaining bits of a fifth star. So four thoroughly impressed, urgently motivated "buy me now" stars.

GREAT BLACK HOPE, debut gay Black author's tale of class, race, and their limits

GREAT BLACK HOPE
ROB FRANKLIN
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

On the ALA's 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.

An arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a young queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.

It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, a glamorous member of the Black elite, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as the lingering questions of how well he really knew his closest friend and what exactly happened to her that night. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, but the weight of expectations from his family of doctors, lawyers, and college presidents only pushes him further into his downward spiral. When his close friend Carolyn goes off the rails, Smith decides to return to New York to find out what happened to her and Elle. But it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life, drawn back into the city’s underworld where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.

Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the New York City nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.

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

My Review: How do you cope with stress? What kind of stress do you need to cope with? What happens when you can no longer cope, and your coping mechanism is what slides you the next step down your ladder? Are you made of the stuff that helps you hang on? Or is this the moment your life changes trajectory? Will it be up...or down?

Don't choose dull, ordinary challenges for your debut novel, kids. Take a lesson from Author Rob Franklin. Get in there and scrape the bones, break 'em open, pry out the marrow. Don't tell me another Hamptons-rich-druggie story, Fitzgerald owns "West Egg" already, and that snowy white "Less than Zero" guy wiped up the corners. Making your bottoming-out addict Black in this milieu feels revolutionary!

Unless you know what PG means, and who starred in which season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Young Mr. Smith isn't a unicorn, but he understands from the inside the burden and the unfairness of being a race man. He's got the money, the education, and the training to function in the top tier of the New York business world. Yet it costs him much more to claim his place there because he's Black...and gay.

It all comes to a head and begins to fry his brain as the novel opens with his arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons. A thing that wouldn't register for a white person, but despite his gigantic privilege among Black people, he's just another Black man among the really privileged. Awaiting his court appearance leaves young Mr. Smith a lot of time to process his stressors and figure out how to deal with New York life. We're along with him as the death...murder...of his bestie Elle absorbs a lot of his energy. If I had a complaint to air about the story, it's that the murder eats a lot of attention, and results in a lot of self-reflection, growth, and healing...but the resolution is so rushed it feels perfunctory.

I didn't get mad about it, though, because I felt it was all part of the voyage of discovery young Davey Smith was taking in front of me. I'm here for a young gay man discovering how much the world expects from you simply to have the things others just...get. I'm totally immersed in a story where someone privileged suddenly confronts the reality that privilege can be yanked away like any other "gift" from society. It's happened to me so I know how genuine his feeling of being forcibly unmoored really is.

I was never a party-party boy, so found Davey's interest in the nightlife uninteresting. It is just dull to me. I was ultimately able to enjoy the reflections on his loud, annoying, "fun" times because I don't and didn't like them at his age. I found myself thinking "no wonder I never liked that stuff!" a lot of the time. It made the read much more rewarding to me after I got past my own impatience with such an unserious, uninteresting "lifestyle" as clubbing.

In the end I was drawn into learning from the life Davey Snith led after I read this: “Identity was neither destiny nor salvation but a kind of animal trap, useful only if one was deft enough to claim the bait without tripping the door to the cage.” It's a pithy dose of home truth so it gave me a full and complete way into the club I'd pay money to stay out of in the flesh.

That half-star gone is my pound of flesh for being made to work so hard.