Reviews 8-11-26
The City by S.C. Mendes. 4/5
A solid supernatural thriller set in an alternate San Francisco and its literal undercity, a place of magic and torture and trafficking and rare beauty. While some of the dialogue feels awkward, and the whole subplot about the would-be homicide inspector returning to work with juveniles was unnecessary, this book was a good read. It’s inventive and original–and exceptionally gory and full of body horror, so be warned–and has good character development and is well-paced. When’s the sequel coming out?
The Gates of Midnight by Helene Wecker. 5/5
This is a lovely epilogue for the Golem and the Jinni. Separated by fear and circumstance, the Golem and the Jinni make do with midnight phone calls, but clearly long for one another. When threats to both of their lives and freedoms and those of those for whom they care arise, they are slowly reunited and work to find ways of escaping danger and protecting their friends. Best read after the others in this series, The Golem and the Jinni and The Hidden Palace.
Theatrecy by John Kinski. 1/5
I found the premise to be interesting, but the book itself is an indulgent hot mess, written mostly in dialogue that is circular, dull, and lacking in wit. As a comedy of errors, with heavy developmental editing, this might be passable, but as is, it’s a slog without much reward.
Tomorrow We’ll Be Prey by Anna Polonyi. 5/5
An archivist who grew up with a family curse on her head finds that family lore and stories aren’t always what we think they are. Spurred by an account in a book she’s working on, Ava abruptly leaves her job and life in Paris to investigate the story behind the curse, and in doing so encounters beasts of all kinds. Beautifully written, this novel captures the feeling of excitement that finding a clue to the past can offer, particularly when it’s a past that bears heavily on the present.
The Book of the Jaguar by Victor Ladis Schultz. 5/5
This is an incredible, wonderful book. Schultz deftly spins out a story over the course of many vignettes, an enormous arc with dozens of stories layered beneath, alongside, or above it. Álbaro Ceynos is on a quest to return his fallen comrades’ remains to their families, and in doing so, we meet and learn about tose fallen, their lives, their relationships, and what happened to make Ceynos the only survivor of his company. Every story is beguiling and fascinating, every observation Ceynos makes, every comment he offers, are threads in the creation of the fabulous tapestry of the company’s demise. Along the way, there’s elegant and expert world-building and character creation, and Ceynos himself changes and develops over the course of his journey. Highly recommended.
Line of Descent by Adam Oyebanji. 3/5
A decent locked-room–or locked-spaceship–mystery/police procedural, albeit with an unconvincing romance (did anyone else suspect Teagan as a villain?) and I suppose now-mandatory horrific protagonist-trauma. Faisal is a cop on a ship bound for a planet outside of the Milky Way who finds himself in a complex case involving politics, reproductive rights, bureaucratic corruption, murder, and mutiny. He solves parts of the case, but the denouement really only comes with the villain monologuing at the end, which feels rather anticlimactic. The world-building feels half-hearted, mostly achieved through the descriptions of a wrecked part of the ship; everything else is kind of standard to a lot of today’s spec fiction: calling a day/unit of time a “sol,” having hydroponic gardens for feeding everyone, clans defending their territories and power, awkward invented swears and slang. The characters are too often sketches and stereotypes without real personality or depth. Line of Descent isn’t bad, but it’s not something to go out of your way for, either.
The Camp Muralist by Jacqueline Sheehan. 1/5
Lordy, this was bad. The plot is obvious and dull, the characters are utterly flat, the writing overall sounds like a bad translation from another language, and the dialogue within that is execrable. There’s no tension in the narrative, there’s nothing particularly interesting in the narrative, and there’s a complete lack of originality to the narrative. There are characters shoehorned in who have no reason to be there except for ticking a box: romance? yes, shove in Nick and shove in Patrick, we’ve got “romance,” although neither have an iota of chemistry. Death of a young person? yes, make Juliet dead, we’ve got “tragic young death.” This was just awful. I’d give it a long, detailed review of everything that made it bad, but it’s not worth it.
Nebula Awards Showcase 61 by Thomas Ha; Eugenia Triantafyllou; P. A. Cornell; Marie Croke; Somto Ihezue; Wen-Yi Lee; H. H. Pak; J. R. Dawson; E. M. Linden; Aimee Ogden; Effie Seiberg. 5/5
This is a good collection with a lot of variety and some truly outstanding and original stories, poems, and novellas. I liked “The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” by E.M. Linden, about what happens when you leave your ghosts behind, and “The Name Ziya” by Wen-yi Lee, about power, magic, and capitalism, as well as Effie Seiberg’s excellent take on superheros and ableism in “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything,” and Marie Croke’s “Our Echoes Echoing Through the Marsh,” which is enormously atmospheric and full of beauty and danger.
Bitter Fruit by Tempest Black. 1/5
A plodding, dull thriller that lacks thrills. This police procedural is full of cliches, a heavy reliance on established generic tropes, and cardboard characters. The characters who are falling in love have no chemistry; the characters meant to irritate the protagonist aren’t remotely believable or capable of getting under the reader’s skin; even the villain is lackluster. The writing is wooden and uninteresting, and it was a chore to finish.
Saved by the Spell by Tanya Huff. 5/5
I love this take on “dark academia” in which it’s a faculty member at a magic boarding school who’s the protagonist. Saved by the Spell is smart and fun, with Easter eggs for genre readers, a quick-moving plot, and good characters. My only complaint is that I want more: more about the school, more about the teachers and students, more about the magic culture of the book’s world. I want more character development, more details about how magic works, more about characters’ relationships. I’d like the publisher to tell Tanya Huff she can have two hundred more pages to flesh it all out more. But maybe there will be a sequel, with more of those things. I sure hope so.
Love Me Like a Rock Song by Shelly Jay Shore. 5/5
This is a sweet and gentle novel, full of self-discovery and love and Jewish folklore. It’s a story of queer joy, empathy, and connection. I love it. As with Shore’s previous novel, Rules for Ghosting, this book draws on Jewish culture and customs to create characters and relationships, with a solid dose of pop culture–in this case, pop music–and magic. Delilah’s self-centered, controlling fiancee leaves her on their wedding day, and Delilah decides to go on their honeymoon trip–a road trip through queer America–on her own. But as she prepares to begin the journey, she’s saved from walking into traffic by Emmett, a golem making a journey of their own. Delilah and Emmett hit the road together, The ensuing travel, romance, and education they have is charming, even if the tension and conflict that comes is a little predictable.
The Best Short Stories 2026 edited by Jenny Minton Quigley. 4/5
Some truly excellent stories, and, as with any collection, a few that made me wonder why they’d been included. I did like the authors’ statements about how their stories were written–in some cases that was more interesting than the stories themselves. Particularly recommended: Colm Tóibín on Irish nationals living illegally in the US; “Where Are You and Where Is My Money” by Ucheoma Onwutuebe; “Case Study” by Weike Wang; and “The Ghost Coat” by Catherine Lacey. A good selection for a book group.
The Nuremberg Women by Natalie Livingstone. 5/5
The Nuremberg Women is a much-needed account of the many women–and a few in particular—who were involved in the Nuremberg Trials in all sorts of ways–as a hostess for the accused and witnesses alike, an artist drawn to Hitler, brilliant legal scholars, translators and interpreters, and more. Elegantly written, meticulously researched, and full of compelling detail and information, this is a must-read for anyone interested in history, who makes that history, and who gets remembered and why. It’s also a model and springboard for much more research that can be done in this vein, and I hope it inspires grad students and researchers everywhere to dig into the history of women not just in the Nuremberg Trials, but in war and post-war activities everywhere. Highly recommended.
The House of Gardenias by Isabel Cañas. 5/5
Spoiler alert: ghosts get revenge, most satisfactorily so. A young woman taken in by a matriarch estranged and then reunited with her family learns the truth behind the family’s wealth and power, and with the help of a restless, clever, witty, traumatized, and dedicated ghost, decides to bring them down. It’s a great story, especially if you’re ok not having the protagonists get an HEA in a physical sense. It would make a good pairing alongside AJ Hartley’s Steeplejack series, for adults or younger readers.
The Water House by Nneoma Ike-Njoku. 5/5
Set just before and during the Biafran War, The Water House is a beautifully written, atmospheric story about a young woman separated from her family at a young age and her return to her family home in desperation, where she finds she has run towards, and not away from, danger. The publisher’s blurb compares it with Rebecca, and it is in some ways similar, but it is a far deeper book that engages more directly with class and religious abuse, with misogyny and colorism, with parental sacrifice, with love, and with the terror of not knowing things others seem to know, of outsider status, of social humiliation, and of learning to take steps and not being swept away, out of control. It’s a stunner. Book groups should take note.
Incarnate by Alma Katsu. 4/5
This is a quick, modern take on A Portrait of Dorian Grey mashed up with Rumpelstiltskin, and a great take on generative AI and the desire for internet fame and influence. What happens if you make an an AI avatar, and then make a deal with an unknown but clearly powerful entity to become that avatar in living form? What happens when you’ll do anything to maintain that identity, or suddenly need to be rid of it? Protagonist Dorothy, a quietly sociopathic visual effects artist, wants to impress her boss and get out from her feelings of inadequacy, and makes a deal that seemingly gives her everything she has ever wanted, until it isn’t. Katsu sets up Dorothy’s story beautifully and gives the reader just enough information to tell the story in an effective and suspenseful way, even if you know what will inevitably happen.
Mazywood by Tananarive Due. 3/5
Mazelle makes a wish at a legendary magic spring, and becomes a child star with the help of a supernatural creature that passes itself off as a performing dog. But her life isn’t happy, and she still undergoes the trials of racism and sexism and classism as her career goes on. The dog protects her until day, it can’t, and disappears. Mazelle continues to scratch out a show-biz living, though, playing to the white Hollywood stereotype as a lazy Black maid in a series of slapstick pictures. Tired and her star on the wane, she returns to the spring and wishes again, getting this time an uncanny animal that grows into a protective creature that does her bidding, including killing those who have damaged Mazelle and stifled her career. They lie mostly quietly…until Mazelle dies and her descendants decide to vacation at her remote ranch in the winter. This is a monster horror story in every way, plus the added material of Mazelle’s backstory, which is supposed to help us understand her motivations…I think? But she’s never a deep character, or a pleasant one, and I found myself wishing that the creature would just eat Mazelle and we could be done with it. But Mazelle’s descendants are a little better–at least the youngest generation of two sisters–and so eve if you come to hate Mazelle (even if you still understand her), you can at least root for them. Overall, this feels as though it’s been very quickly written, which might account for its relative shallowness and reliance on unoriginal inclusions and uses of cliched figures and tropes. Middle-grade readers who haven’t yet read a lot of horror and who might be intrigued by the idea of what happens if the monster isn’t inherently evil might like it.
She Haunts Me Still by De Elizabeth. 3/5
Yet another Shakespeare play churned up as a story of dark academia. She Haunts Me Still is light on the Shax, however, which is for the better. Instead we get unreliable narrators, curses, witchcraft, a (rather boring and typical evil-man-led) cult, possession/hauntings, and bi representation that leans perhaps a little heavily into the sad old bi=promiscuous trope. Is it terrible, like Thoughts Be Bloody? Nah, but it’s no great s/Shakes either. The characters aren’t well-developed, the language is repetitive and awkward, and there’s a lot of material that doesn’t meet either the “so what” test of relevance or the “why does this character behave this way” test of deeper development.
The Strangers by Naomi Alderman. 5/5
This is a beautiful and enchanting and brilliant book about grief and memory and loss and human nature. I can’t wait for this to be published so I can talk about it with other people who have read it. In t he meanwhile, put it on your pre-order list. In The Strangers, our protagonist–called Naomi Alderman–loses pregnancy after pregnancy, and then her mother. As she grapples with mourning these, she and her father capture an image of a creature never seen before, a nocturnal animal soon called a mimmoth. Mimmoths rapidly spread and fascinate the world, albeit for a brief time, causing scientists, conspiracy-theorists, and observers to create theories about them and their ways of life. Some humans find mimmoths that bond with them, a little, in gentle and exploratory ways, while the populations residing in areas where a mimmoth is killed experience declines in fertility. The presence of mimmoths near tolerant peoples, however, leads to enormous agricultural gains, ends to starvation and plenty for all. As character Naomi describes the arrival of the mimmoths, it’s easy to see parallels among immigrants, parents, benevolent aliens, and other cultures with the potential for great good, but also, on the part of the people already living in such places, great fear and hatred. Read it literally as a beautiful fairy tale, read it as a big metaphor as astute commentary on life today, read it as a memoir for how adults deal with parental loss and the inability to become a parent. Just read it.
Thoughts Be Bloody by Auden Patrick. 1/5
This Hamlet-based dark academia novel is clunky, full of annoying characters who revel in their ignorance and cruelty, full of repetition, and, worst of all, boring. There have been a ton of YA-ish dark academia Shakespearean retellings/adaptations lately, and this might be the worst one I’ve read. Spend your time reading something better.
The Lord of the Wood by E.M. Anderson. 5/5
This is a lovely fairy tale about courage and desperation and love and the ways in which people–human and not–find ways of making their lives better, even if only in small amounts, treasured moments, and short visits. It’s got sweet and solid queer representation, magic, personal rehabilitation and a fascinating world to enjoy.
Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson. 5/5
Our Noble Selves is yet another outstanding book by Kate Atkinson. The setting for this thriller-mystery-spy novel-slice of life spiderweb of connections and stories and experiences is the Festival of Britain, a post-war extravaganza designed to boost morale and energy and the economy during a period when food was still rationed and the nation essentially bankrupt. Amid the Festival are the main characters: a war journalist with CPTSD, his intrepid, clever, and hilarious step-daughter (please write a book all about Veronica’s adventures!), a number of wily spies, several fascists looking to rise in government and society, and the Boy, another fabulous, real, funny character. There’s murder and missing people, blackmail and ineptitude, all of it drawn together to a denouement at the Festival as royalty and commoners throng the visions of the Britain of the future. It’s brilliantly written and immersive, the pace is brisk, the story–and the larger meanings within it–important and fascinating and thought-provoking.