Category: Book reviews

Pink Moon by Roshan James. 1/5
The concept sounded interesting but the poetry just isn’t good. It’s a trite and formulaic and boring.

Just a Fika by Beck Erixson. 1/5
So, you’ve got a ghost grandma who’s intent on fixing you up with one of two brothers, except she won’t tell you which one she prefers, and she and her ghost buddies spy on you at all times. Who you gonna call? Yeah, this effort at a rom com didn’t work for me. On top of annoying grandma, there’s the guy who gets drunk and licks the protagonist, is stalker-y, and is otherwise inappropriate–and the protagonist thinks it’s ok? No. Just no. And the title is a non-starter. Introduce the term “fika” in the book, not on the cover.

Plus-Size by Mekdela. 1/5
This was a big disappointment. The essays and critiques in this volume are written at about the level of your average high schooler. Mekdela offers little context and less analysis in her takes on pop-culture, making it inaccessible and not very useful for readers who haven’t consumed the same media that she has. Her writing reads more like a repetitive TikTok script than serious commentary, and there were numerous many contradictions over the course of the book.

Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen by Sarah James. 1/5
I really liked the way this book began with a happy throuple of a playwright and two actors, because not many books aimed at mainstream readers have this kind of representation. But then it all went to hell and devolved into a mess of stock characters, red herrings the size of airplanes, and a dull ending. None of the characters have much depth, the story drags, and the ending feels completely untrue to the protagonist.

The Bookbinder by Pip Williams. 1/5
Sisters Peggy and Maude work for Oxford University Press as bookbinders, sewing the pages together for books. It’s the only life they have ever envisioned for themselves, being born to a single mother (who was also a book binder) and having no other prospects. Maude is written as autistic and echolaliac. Peggy is supposed to be her foil as an intellectual, and as Maude’s caregiver. But as the Great War begins and progresses, Peggy has to deal with classism, studies to try to earn a place as a student at Oxford, falls in love with a Belgian refugee, and has to decide between a life of books and thinking and writing and a life of children and housewifing. Maude makes friends apart from Peggy and shows Peggy that she can live more independently with the help of neighbors. I appreciate that it’s about women having ambition and going for what they want, but there are looming problems with the book. I really didn’t like Williams’s book The Dictionary of Lost Words, and I don’t like this one much either, because Maude is used as what’s called a narrative prosthesis, something that disabled characters often are–she’s a device upon which to hang the story of the able-bodied people in the story, namely Peggy. Maude is also an example of inspiration porn, which is when an author shows the accomplishments of a disabled person as a great triumph or rare event, all to make the non-disabled feel inspired. People who like historical fiction about this time period and about women will probably like this, but if you care anything about the portrayal of disability, give it a miss.

A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias Buckell. 1/5
In a world where reading is forbidden, a librarian is a hunted man. Ok, so far, so good. But then we add in a very stereotypically sassy teen from the ruling family, stereotypically corrupt rulers, stereotypically fierce warriors, and a bunch of jokes so bad that they ruin the mood of the entire book, and you get this. It’s a bit of a mess, really, Is it a serious SFF novel? The aforementioned terrible jokes–through which we’re supposed to understand that the earth of the novel is the future of our own earth (actually, the earth of the novel is a part of our earth that broke away or blew up or something and is now a flat chunk of land orbiting what’s left of earth. There’s a pointless series of flat earth jokes through the whole book. Like I said, messy.)–make it feel silly, like a Pratchett novel without the cleverness. Is it a parable about literacy? Maybe? The people who can and do read are reading books of our earth–Bradbury, Dumas–in an overt gesture from the author that he’s writing about the same things that they did, or is borrowing from them. About tech? Maybe? There’s a killer robot from outer space. About politics and war? Maybe? There’s a lot of “i must kill you” that becomes “I could never kill you” in just moments, not convincingly written. The characters aren’t particularly interesting or memorable, and I got really tired of the teen protagonist swearing she’d do one thing and then abandoning it and then swearing to do another thing and abandoning it, so….it was tiresome reading. Thanks to this review, you don’t need to do it!

The Legend of Charlie Fish by Josh Rountree. 4/5
This is a short, quirky novella about found family and the mysteries of the world set just prior to and during the hurricane of 1900 that nearly leveled Galveston, Texas. The work is much like a folk tale told from different perspectives, and each perspective is finely created and perfectly employed to tell a story about very special orphans, a fish-man, a pair of scoundrels, a smart and ruthless woman, and the man who loves her. It’s a fun read full of love for Galveston and perfect for a day at the beach there.

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward. 5/5
Surrounded by spirits and the knowledge of women who came before her, Arese–called Annis–finds ways of surviving her enslavement, being sold and forcibly marched across the South, and finally, establishing a precarious existence as an escapee. Ward, as eloquent as always and enormously imaginative, creates Annis’s material and spiritual worlds with detail that sharpens our understanding of Annis’s journeys, the way she thinks, and how she navigates dangers of both. The incorporation of spirits with their own characters, flaws, and desires, is a clever device as well as an interesting exercise in thinking about religion and religious diversity among enslaved people in North America.

The Breakaway by Jennifer Weiner. 4/5
I was surprised to find myself liking this book, which many will categorize as a romance but for me was about women finding solidarity among other women. I liked the fat-and-fit protagonist, the way everyone teams up to help get one character an abortion, the fact that older folks are depicted as active–both on their bikes and in bed–and that, for the most part, the characters are thoughtful, learn from their mistakes, and try to do better. The romance is just a cherry on top, not the entire focus of the protagonist’s life, and even with the sweet ending there’s no promises made. It’s a smart book.

Mister Magic by Kiersten White. 3/5
This rather surreal novel about people on a children’s TV show that’s been written out of history makes much more sense after you read the author’s postscript/endnote about leaving the LDS church and how the whole book is basically a metaphor for that. It’s a fine read if you don’t know, a decent kind of para-supernatural mystery of the type where the narrator has none of the knowledge everyone else has, and especially knowledge about her.

Nightbreaker by Coco Ma. 2/5
If I had to guess, I’d say Nightbreaker was pitched to an agent with the phrases “Hunger Games meets Mazerunner meets The Walking Dead” and “great movie and video game adaptation potential.” The protagonist and her peers attend special schools where they learn to either hunt monsters or conduct research on monsters. When the end-of-year exam goes badly, students have to hunt monsters to save other monster-hunters. Eventually–shock! (not)–we learn that the monsters used to be human and that the monster-hunters who “keep the city safe” are pretty terrible themselves. There’s a lot of running and fighting but none of the characters are terribly developed and when people die there’s not much of a sense of loss either to the other characters, the reader, or the plot.

The Grimoire of Grave Fates by Margaret Owen, Hanna Alkaf. 2/5
I like the concept of this book–each author writes from the POV of a different character to move the story along. But while some individual chapters and characters were unique and interesting, others didn’t do much for either the story or me. Set at a school for magic, the story centers around the murder of a loathsome professor, who is unfortunately a cardboard cut-out whose behavior can only be explained in this day and time by complicit, cowardly administrators. The mystery-solvers (sort of) are students, most with motives and opportunities to have killed him. Because of the multiple POV structure, there’s a lot of repetition, loose threads, and a very slow pace. None of the student or other characters really stuck with me, and I doubt I’ll ever re-read it.

The Untimely Undeath of Imogen Madrigal by Grayson Daly. 5/5
It’s a wonderful thing to fall into a world where some things are familiar–tea, books–and others are not–poets having enormous power, the nuns of the Sisters of the Good Death, and more. Daly creates a fabulous and original world and characters for this novel, which, despite dealing with the half-undead, is charming and cozy and delightful. It’s got Victorian plot devices used in excellent ways, including land-grabbers, lost siblings, and unexpected romance. Make your own cup of tea so no one can poison you, and settle in for a good read.

Sleep No More by Seanan McGuire. 5/5
This newest installment of McGuire’s October Daye series picks up immediately after the previous book and takes off running. Or, well, walking quickly, because that’s what happy, obedient changelings do. Toby and much of fae is trapped inside an illusion, and her loyal family members have to save the day by convincing her that she’s not just a servant created for her sister August. This conceit, which normally would cause me ridiculous anxiety, works really well here, and McGuire does a wonderful job of showing readers how Toby would always have been herself when faced with adversity. This book will make almost no sense to readers unfamiliar with the series, but hey–it’s a great time to start at the beginning, knowing that this is waiting for you when you get there.

Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig. 2/5
Apples seeded by a demon intent on destroying the world grow on and in human flesh and make the eaters evil. The demon part was a little too light, hence the need for a explaining section at the end; the history bits were good framing; the horror is pretty horrifying; the nods and shout-outs to actual people, various inspirations, and such were not too annoying; and the pacing was slow.

A Year in Practice by Jacqueline Suskin. 2/5
Meditations and guided crafting exercises for connecting with the natural world, but a little too cute and using a little too much woo for me.

Small Change by Jo Walton. 5/5
Jo Walton’s Small Change books are classic speculative fiction. In a world where Britain made peace with Nazi Germany, Walton shows how fascism creeps into everyday life, how governments that cater to the rich fail everyone else, and how the work of individuals can make a difference in fighting against inequality, racial and religious hatred, and the loss of rights. I thought these books were brilliant when I first read them a number of years ago, but they are even more important now as Britain and the US are in danger of very real homegrown fascism.

The Search for Us by Susan Azim Boyer. 5/5
Samira and Henry unexpectedly that they’re are half-siblings, and when the family members raising them won’t tell them anything about their Iranian dad, they take matters into their own hands. At the same time, Samira’s trying to get her addict brother into treatment and help with family finances, and Henry’s being manipulated by his aunt and uncle into a life he doesn’t want. I love that this is about family and sibling relationships, about codependency, about social strata, about racism, and about incarceration. The characters are solid and their journey feels real.

Random Acts of Medicine by Anupam B. Jena; Christopher Worsham. 1/5
This is Freakonomics: Medical Version. It replicates some of the problems with the Freakonomics approach, hedges its bets in presenting case studies, and is boring. The cases are cherry-picked, the data-mining is questionable on various levels, and the authors make claims based on speculation. I’m appalled that the Freakonomics effect has continued, and that people read this kind of work without fully understanding what’s being studied and analyzed.

Bittersweet in the Hollow by Kate Pearsall. 4/5
The trope of backwoods witches, mysterious creatures, horrific sacrifices, and high school ex-lovers reunited feels a little overdone these days, but I did enjoy most of this novel about a clan of witches, food magic, missing kids, and a small town’s dark history. I don’t love the themed family names; the cutesy other names, like “Caball Hollow” (really?); and the lack of everyday things most people would have, like insurance on their businesses and such, but despite these things, the plot moved along well enough and the characters were fairly interesting and grew through the book. A fine summer read with a glass of blackberry wine and some lemon scones.

North Woods by Daniel Mason. 3/5
Lots and lots of beautiful writing. Lots. And while I enjoyed the beauty of the language, very little actually moved me. I think this is in part because the narratives of individual people or creatures are ephemeral to the story of the land itself–they become, to a certain extent, meaningless. Many of the stories would have been compelling had not the slow, inexorable description of the land and plants been in the foreground. And perhaps that’ s deliberate, and that this is a book that reminds us that one day humans will have been but a blip in the geologic record.

Day by Michael Cunningham. 4/5
Just as The Hours was a novel about AIDS, Day is a novel about COVID-19. And as in most of his work, Cunningham employs lucid, clear writing that manages to dance around its topics without every quite settling on them or presenting them in full to the reader. Readers of Day will need to piece together relationships and timelines and such as they go, although there are fewer–if any–surprises in Day than there were in The Hours. The writing pays attention with delicacy to intimate moments, showing readers possibilities and developing the characters, and is a requiem of sorts for those lost in the pandemic.

Beautiful Malady by Ennis Rook Bashe.
The poems collected here are interesting and compelling, and are sure to raise some controversy in the disability community, especially because author Bashe struggles with loathing her chronically ill body and trying to find a way to live with it with pride and care. Her demonification of her illness and body is at times understandable but more often problematic: her combative, disparaging sorties to her own organs and systems is potentially very triggering for readers who are chronically ill or disabled, and runs contrary to the anti-eugenicist advocacy practiced by many in the disabled community. While Bashe’s writing is imaginative and original and clearly passionate, I can only recommend this with extreme caution.

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. 2/5
Unjustly sent to a boys’ reform “school,” a Black boy is brutalized by both the Whites in charge and the White boys doing time. As his sister and her allies rush to get him out–by means legal or not–he’s tapped as a ghost hunter because of his ability to see haints, of which the school has many. The setting feels very real, and the haints are predictably grotesque. But the pacing often feels off–I don’t think people have long conversations while standing still when they know they’re being hunted by dogs and men with guns, for example. Other aspects of the storytelling feel rushed, and while time is an important factor in the story, some events seem to fall too quickly to make much sense. The characters are not particularly interesting or deep.

Pig by Sam Sax. 5/5
This is a marvelous book of poetry and thought and connections. It’s a wild ride and a brilliantly-written collection, full of pigs and religion and violence and masculinity and foodways. It’s so good I read it twice right away, and I can’t wait to talk about it with other readers.

All the Dead Shall Weep by Charlaine Harris. 3/5
In this new installment of the Gunnie Rose series, we find the narrator duties split between Lizbeth Rose and her Felicia. There’s a lot of miscommunication and pain caused by cultural differences, a lot of dead folks, most of whom are bad guys but one of whom is a true loss, and much unhappiness all around. While some of this gets resolved in the end, most of the book is prologue to another adventure that apparently begins in its last pages, and which will get us a new book in the series. I didn’t love this one the way I did the others in the series. It’s not that it’s badly written or plotted; it’s that it really does feel like spending time waiting for things to get figured out, waiting to get all the ducks in a row for the next book. It’s a stepping-stone between narratives, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis. 4/5
In typical Willis style, this is a sweet and entertaining romp. One alien and four humans zigzag across the American West, trying to figure out how to get where they need to go to help the alien find his people and get home. Along the way, there’s Las Vegas, gambling, terrible truck-stop fashion, lots and lots of Westerns, conspiracy theories, real Men In Black, and love. It’s a delightful read, even if the bits where everyone is locked up by the MIB is a little overlong.

Bread and Circus by Airea D. Matthews. 3/5
There is some truly excellent poetry in this volume, poetry that is personal and moving and expressive. There’s a lot of erasure poetry using texts related to capitalism and finance and regulation that sometimes worked and other times was too poorly formatted for Kindle to be read as it should be. My primary criticism of the collection is that there is too much in it, and that it’s not well-organized or very cohesive. Abrupt jumps from topic to topic or from one method to another can be great, and might have worked well here, but the poems seem haphazardly ordered, and even though Matthews presents strong pieces throughout the book, it’s hard to understand why they’ve been placed they way they are, and what meaning, if any, readers should take from that. The over-stuffed-ness of the collection hurts it some too, as there are weaker poems included that don’t do the author any favors. A tighter, leaner collection of the most successful, hardest-hitting poems would have served Matthews better.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. 2/5
This was not for me. I’ve read other work by Lorrie Moore and have enjoyed the work she does with words and meanings and connections, but this felt too manic for me, a constant swirl of guilt and memory mixed in with too much inanity to make it interesting or enlightening. It does capture some of the emotion of feeling hopeless and useless in the face of death, and the desire to push past that into a realm of irrationality and non-acceptance well, but to an introspective and repetitive point that felt meaningless to read.

The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern. 2/5
Sim Kern’s writing on the climate crisis is once again set in a fictional Texas, this time in a world where Gore became president and instituted a war on climate change. Now, a supposedly green initiative threatens Houston’s historic–and poor–Eighth Ward, and a bevy of characters are ready to fight to stop it. Except that they aren’t characters. Instead of developing characters, the characters here are all ideas. Protagonist Maddie, who is such a flat, nothing character that it makes me want to yell, stands for and represents White Guilt. Marxism and Intellectual Thought are embodied in Gestas, who is serving an in-home prison sentence for fraud. Red, Maddie’s lover, represents Fear and Self-interest, as does her ex, who is also White Business/Money/Gentrification. The characters, such as they are, are wonderfully diverse in gender and race and other kinds of identity, and could have been so much more. Kern illustrates the difference between legal protest and sabotage, between action and revolution in ways that will make some readers think. Overall, though, the lack of real characters and a strong helping of pedantic exposition makes the book drag and ultimately lose its point of action.

A New History of the American South ed. by Brundage, W. Fitzhugh (ed.), Edwards, Laura F., Sensbach, Jon F. (associate eds.). 5/5
A solid collection of essays that question historiographies of the “South,” offering new ideas and interpretations of the region, it’s nebulousness, and how we address its problems and strengths. This is a much-needed book particularly for students and newcomers to the field, and provides a wealth of approaches and points of view.

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett. 5/5
This romp is just as much fun as the first Emily Wilde book, albeit with less sexual tension between Emily and her Faerie lover Wendell. The story ranges over a wide field, and we get new characters, new kinds of fae, and a host of tramping around in the mundane world and several fae ones. Even if you haven’t read the first book, if you like new and fun takes on faery stories, academia, and fantasy lands, this one’s for you.

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz by Garth Nix. 5/5
I have always loved Nix’s takes of Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz, the knight and ensorceled puppet who go around a wide and wonderful–and horrifying–world, killing off godlets that might end the world, or kill all the people, or other terrible things. These godlets, the places and objects they inhabit, and their allies and enemies all drawn exceptionally well, as are Hereward adn Fitz. Some of these stories were ones I’ve read before, but others were new, and they are all treats. Anyone who likes fantasy will want to give these a try, and readers who are already fans of Nix’s other work but haven’t encountered these yet will love them.

A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather. 5/5
This queer, fantasy novella set in 17th century London is excellent. The world-building is fantastic, the back-story of the protagonist is deftly created and told, and the characters were rich and fully-fledged. While I don’t always like the incorporation of actual historical figures into fiction, the use of the Wrens here was very well done. I am 100% going to seek out other work by this author.

Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor. 1/5
I understand that this is an early work by Okorafor, but it is a complete catastrophe. The fatphobia alone is enough for me to not want to read any of her books going forward–and I have been a fan of hers. It’s unacceptable, especially in this “Deluxe, expanded edition,” even if the protagonist feels that one fat man in particular is fat because he’s been traumatized. The book itself is very messy and not very good–it demonstrates the origins, perhaps, of some of Okorafor’s ever-present themes and ideas, as well as her desire to write about wrongs that are righted and how to live peacefully with nature. But it just doesn’t work. Trying to explain magic with science is never a good ideas, and it doesn’t make sense in this book. The characters are utterly flat, have no development, and are boring. They scream a lot and there’s lots of lying and betrayal and the protagonist never learns anything from these lies and betrayals and mostly mindlessly follows around her hero, who is basically a fascist. It also doesn’t know what audience it’s for: YA readers, as it seems adjacent to her Zarah the Windseeker, which is for YA readers and excellent; or adult readers, for whom the massive amounts of violence and language like “camelshitting” as a deragatory adjective is fine. Why Okorafor wanted to re-release this book is beyond me.

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim. 1/5
Let’s ignore, for now, the challenges of writing about autistic characters. Instead, let’s focus on how this book is overstuffed with unnecessary and un-followed-up-upon things and characters. Kim tries to do too much, and the book suffers, especially the characters, none of whom are ever more than flat, shallow, and undistinguished. The protagonist, Mia, apparently talks a lot (in comparison with whom?) and is supposed to be a genius (?) but that didn’t come out much. John and Hannah were just line drawings with a value attached: has an accent, is nice. The missing dad is so vague that his presence or lack thereof didn’t seem to make much of a different; only when it was revealed that he was a total asshole experimenting on his own children and withholding vital information from his wife and family did I think of him at all, and then only briefly so I could write this sentence. Eugene, the autistic sibling, is only vaguely constructed as well. The cops are cartoons, and so is the therapist. The attempts to treat racism are noble, but are quickly swept away. And the overstuffing: Mia’s boyfriend (who seems very much like a late draft afterthought), their fight, her not telling her parents of her change in major, the grandmother’s rape, the toothbrush thing, even Angelman symdrome–none of these filled out the characters or their lives or had much to do with the meat of the novel. Mia’s chart at the end, showing the readers all of the possible variations of what might have happened? That doesn’t show much trust in the readers to be able to figure out the nuances of things on their own, and is just so much more stuff.

As for writing autistic characters, I know Kim did research and interviewed people and met autistic nonspeakers and other folks, and yet, Eugene is still often a caricature of an autistic person.

I’m sure plenty of people will like this book and that book clubs will spend time discussing the possibilities Mia (Kim) lays out in a handy chart form for them, but it’s not something I can recommend.

Herrick’s Lie by T. M. Blanchet. 1/5
This is the second book in a series, and despite the author’s attempts to tell you things from the first novel, it will not make a whole lot of sense if you haven’t read that first installment. It’s the kind of somewhat goofy fantasy you find in Daniel Pinkwater’s books, although not quite as charming; truth be told, I found it overwritten and kind of tedious. If you liked the first one, though, go for it–you might like this continuation of the story.

Grey Matters by Kristen Costello. 2/5
I think this collection will resonate with a lot of readers, but it was not for me. The poems, I felt, relied too often on cliche, on memetic tropes, on language that didn’t communicate very clearly. I read each section carefully, but ultimately felt like I was reading the same poems over and over. There is clearly emotion present in the writer’s process, but the words she uses bang on a bit monotonously because the vocabulary of the collection is small.

What You Want by Maureen N. McLane. 5/5
This is a great collection of poems that deal with the ephemeral and the everyday all at once, and honestly so. McLane writes without censoring–or at least it seems so–and that makes her work feel very real in an earth(l)y way. She reminds us that poets can make words that can wrap around anything–lobster traps, stoplights, paintings–to give readers a new way of seeing and hearing and thinking about the world around them.

Exits by Stephen C. Pollock. 5/5
This is smart, clever, and often beautiful poetry; when it’s not beautiful, it’s because it shouldn’t be: Pollock expresses despair and anger just as well as amusement and pleasure. The imagery is superb and original, and the word choices startling, surprising, and attention-grabbing. I can’t wait to read more of the author’s work.

The Black Angels by Maria Smilios. 1/5
A great topic that deserves a lot of recognition and consideration, but the book is poorly organized and struggles to have a good through-line.

Menewood by Nicola Griffith. 5/5
I didn’t want Menewood to end. I wanted to stay with Hild, out in the wind, looking at the world and knowing things. This is a gorgeous book, detailed and sensuous and raw and painful and strong and full of life everywhere. It follows Hild over a short period of time as she moves through various roles, always seeking ways to keep her people and lands safe, always thinking and considering and observing. It’s a long read, yes, but every single word pulls its weight as Griffith draws the reader into 7th-century Britain; the language is fascinating, and the way description is worked in is perfectly fashioned. My summer plans include re-reading Hild and then immediately following it with a re-read of Menewood.

There are a few typos: I caught “food” for “fool,” and “Leofdag” for “Leofdaeg.” Towards the end of the book, the long i mark is missing from words like “wīc” and “scōp.”

Sing, Memory by Makana Eyre. 3/5
This is a solid but somewhat plodding account of Jewish music-making in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during WWII. Eyre focuses first on Rosebery d’Arguto, a professional musician who organized and led choruses and instrumentalists in performing newly-composed songs. D’Arguto died in the camp, but one of his fellow prisoners was Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a non-Jew who appears to have had an exceptional memory for lyrics, and, one assumes, melody and harmony. Kulisiewicz remembered hundreds of songs composed in the cap, which he dictated after being freed. Eyre focuses on the lyrics far more than the rest of the music, but then this is a book for general readers, not musicians or music scholars. She also follows Kulisiewicz’s life after the liberation of the camps, in which he never recovered from the trauma he suffered. The emphasis on lyrics is a little unbalancing, especially as there are no musical examples or links to musical examples to actually hear the pieces, and the writing is a often uneven, but I’m sure plenty of people will find the story inspiring.

You or Someone You Love by Hannah Matthews. 5/5
A beautifully written and compassionate chronicle of abortion care in America–who gets abortions, who doesn’t or isn’t allowed to, who the caregivers are, what their own abortion stories are. As an abortion doula, author Matthews helps women navigate the process of getting an abortion, choosing what kind of abortion is best for them, getting funding if they need it, and giving them in care they need during and after their abortions. Woven throughout the narrative is the story of Matthews’s own abortion. The writing is honest and full of care and love. I wish everyone would read this book, and understand why abortion care is medical care, and why keeping it safe and legal is so crucial.

Unpapered Edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez. 5/5
This is an excellent collections of essays on what it means to be indigenous, who gets to decide if someone is Native American, the complicated legacy of popular culture “Indians,” the claims of “pretendians,” and other issues in identity. Not all of the authors agree–some argue heatedly against one another–but all of the essays are thought-provoking and important.

Sleeping with the Ancestors by Joseph McGill Jr.; Herb Frazier. 1/5
The premise of this book is promising: a man grappling with slavery in the US decides to sleep in surviving “slave cabins”–the shelters where enslaved people were forced to live–and document his experiences. But in addition to one sleepover being much like another, the author’s wandering focus and long asides without clear connections to the premise or anything else is terribly distracting. If the author dictated this as an oral history account, it would make more sense that there are these issues. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, in which case this needs a lot of editing. It was a real disappointment.

Momenticon by Andrew Caldecott. 2/5
I liked the author’s earlier work, but this seems to be convoluted for the sake of being convoluted, There are megacorporations running and ruining the world, improbable holdouts and survivors, loads of reality-altering drugs, several murders, a romance, and some good characters, but there was just too much horse-trading instead of actual plot.

Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen. 5/5
This is a thoughtful, searching, and moving memoir. Nguyen and her family fled Vietnam for the US at the end of the war there, leaving her mother behind. In this book, she teases out this complex event and how it has affected her. When she finally reconnects with her mother, she is a young adult–to whom she is very generous in her writing from a later point in life–and the relationship is elusive. But the memoir also focuses on Nguyen’s life and her own role as a mother, and how motherhood influences her thinking about her own mother and her step-mother. This is an open, honest book, and should be on every book club’s list.

Loot by Tania James. 5/5
I’ve seen “Tippoo’s Tiger” several times at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and I was fascinated by the way author James uses it as a touchstone for the life of one of its creators, Creating a fictional woodcarver, Abbas, James uses his life to mirror the upheavals of the British Empire and its dealings with India, the colonial forces fighting one another at the same time as the ancestral peoples for control over wealth and land, the daily lives of people affected by these conflicts, and how individuals sought to make unique lives for themselves. The book is a wild ride, and adventure pursuing a tiger; it’s beautifully written, the characters feel enormously real, and the destructions brought by Empire are deftly chronicled.

The History of a Difficult Child by Mihret Sibhat. 2/5
Welp, the title says it all. This could have been a really interesting novel about Ethiopia in the 1980s, but the “difficult child,” who narrates most of the novel, is both preternaturally wise and utterly lacking in knowledge and understanding, and was so annoying that it was a pain to finish the book. I came to loathe her completely. The issues the book addresses, though–poverty, war, class conflict, developing technology, lack of medical care, poor education, corrupt governmental and other institutions, identity, family structures and social customs–are fascinating. I just wish I could have read about them from a better perspective.

Wonder Drug by Jennifer Vanderbes. 5/5
Wonder Drug is a solid account of the history of thalidomide, including who knew what when and what they did or didn’t do about it. Like–I think, many people–I knew about thalidomide’s use in German, the UK, and the US, but never knew that in the US, it was never approved by the government and was handed out widely without prescriptions or tracking. Vanderbes’s writing is clear and compelling, and this book can serve as an excellent model for investigative reporting in medicine.

Built from the Fire by Victor Luckerson. 2/5
Built From the Fire promises to be an “epic story,” but aside from length, it doesn’t quite hit the mark. Telling the story of Greenwood, the Tulsa Race Massacre and its aftermath, and what came next as Greenwood was rebuilt–as told using historical accounts of families and individuals who survived it–author Luckerson focuses mostly on the Goodwin family, and mostly its men. It starts off well, with an excellent account of Greenwood’s early years and the horrific Massacre in which hundreds of Black citizens were murdered by Whites. But as the narrative goes on, Luckerson makes more and more assumptions without substantiation, and becomes more subjective about what happened as Greenwood tried to rebuild. At the end of the book, the story becomes mired in legislative details and minutia and that was completely numbing. I can’t help but think that there’s a better book out there chronicling Greenwood’s recovery.

The Resurrectionist by Paul T. Scheuring. 2/5
A poor man is hired by a rich man to dig up the body of a different rich man’s wife. Set amid the body-snatching days of Victorian England, when doctors needed more bodies than they could get for the study of anatomy, the details here are great but the characters are dull; the class-warfare angle is intriguing but not fully followed on; and overall the writing was nothing special. You can give this one a miss.

We Are Light by Gerda Blees. 5/5
Content warning: this book contains depictions of disordered eating.
This novel is an apt reflection of our times: if we believe things that have no basis in scientific reality, we can, and in many circumstances, will die, as did those who came before us and didn’t know what we know today about medicine and the body and the natural world. A woman who believes she can live on light and air starves to death, and her two housemates–one of whom directly encouraged her to believe this–are taken into police custody. Told using a brilliant conceit–each chapter is from the point of view of a different object or person–an orange, a piece of furniture, the neighbors–we learn the details of the story, one of manipulation and jealousy and depression. In the end, who is culpable, and for what?

Lilith by Nikki Marmery. 5/5
I loved this take on the story of Lilith, the woman who in Jewish myth is Adam’s first wife. I’ve been wanting a good Lilith novel for ages, and this is a great one. Author Marmery has clearly done a lot of research into the various aspects of ancient female goddesses, and it pays off–Lilith is a smart tale that blends archaeological history, the myths of the Bible, non-Biblical myths, Judaism and non-Jewish religions and more into Lilith’s autobiography, full of compassion and sass. I get the feeling that Marmery wasn’t quite sure where this story would go when she began it, but that it unfolded itself as she went, giving it a feeling of anticipation and openness and true grappling with ideas of how gods work and live and die. A treat to read, and a treat to ponder.

The Devil’s Playground by Craig Russell. 1/5
Doubleday, are you fucking kidding me? Why are you publishing this? One villain is a woman of color, described in the most despicable stereotypical language; the other is disfigured . Women are “broken,” and “icy” and “glacial,” particularly queer ones. The author apparently also has a thing for penis length, as readers are exposed to a number of references about it. This book is racist, misogynist, and appalling. Oh, and it gets a ton of info on early film history wrong, too.

Readers, want a book about silent film and the occult that doesn’t include all of thus utter garbage? I recommend Silvia Moreno’Garcia’s Silver Nitrate, which is brilliant.