News & Notes

The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Grey by Kathleen Kaufman. 5/5

I enjoyed this lovely and original imagining of spiritualism in Scotland, London, and America in the late 19th century. After years of scamming unsuspecting people, Nairna Laith suddenly finds herself contacted by an actual spirit–who communicates with her not from the dead, but from the past. It’s an excellent twist, and I liked how author Kaufman used details and practices from history in order to show how different her protagonist is. It’s a great gothic story, full of intrigue and desperate researchers doing terrible–and ultimately somewhat redemptive things—and rivals in the seance business. It’s also full of women advocating for themselves and learning how to do so, developing positive (or at least mutually beneficial) relationships instead of rivalries, and helping others instead of using them. A perfect read for a rainy day, or a sunny afternoon, with a cup of strong Scottish tea.

The Genius Bat by Yossi Yovel. 4/5

I love bats and I loved learning more about them in this detailed, conversational book. I personally will never travel into a jungle or swamp or bat cave to hang out with bats, but I loved getting to read about Yovel’s experiences doing exactly those things. Bats are remarkable animals, and never in a million years would I have thought about how they experience gravity or that they use their nostrils for more than smelling. Some of Yovel’s anecdotes are a little off topic (some are way off topic), but most are bat-related in at least some way. The meat of the book–all of the history of learning about the bat–is fantastic,

Bad Indians Book Club by Patty Krawec. 2/5

I may have to sit with this longer before I can write a truly full review, even a short one. It’s a complicated book about complex matters like indigeneity, belonging, representation, religion and belief, While author Krawec offers up deeply personal thoughts and beliefs about what it means–or can mean–to be indigenous in North America–this book is less about exploring those things through others’ writing and more a memoir of Krawec’s interactions with other authors, both indigenous and non. While I would usually find this fascinating, there are a few things that kept me from enjoying it, The first is that Krawec doesn’t always read in good faith, and in cases cites white writers for what she reads as anti-indigenous views, when in truth they were pointing out the appalling attitudes of others. A second is that Krawec, even in claiming that the book and its related projects came from giving a reading list about indigenous people to a non-indigenous reader, comes across as a gate-keeper, arguing that non-indigenous readers cannot critique indigenous writing because it is not for them or of them. Thirdly, repetition throughout bogs the book down and makes it feel preachy (as does the gate-keeping). I wanted to be illuminated by this book, to be challenged to think more deeply about indigenous literature I’ve already read, and find new things to read to further help me understand indigenous thought and experience. Instead, I was turned off and bored all too often, and finished the book with the feeling that my reading of indigenous lit isn’t welcomed by indigenous authors. I hope that’s not right. Finally, Krawec’s cavalier footnotes–in which she admits not bothering to look up peoples’ full names, offers back-handed compliments, and breezes past what might have been meaningful material–further serve to make the book unwelcoming. An author can’t be bothered? Then why should readers bother to read?

The Door on the Sea by Caskey Russell. 2/5

In this YA book, a young man is chosen to find and capture a valuable weapon from an invading ad seemingly unstoppable alien/high-tech/magical force that has come to conquer his world. Drawing on multiple Indigenous peoples’ myths and religions, author Russell creates an interesting earth-like world, but the main characters and their growth is dull and predictable: an angry warrior learns to trust the young, bookish man who’s put in charge of her; the young bookish man learns to become a leader and fighter. Another young man, a warrior and his father, as well as two characters displaying true difference–a wolf who understands human languages and a man whose people live with (and speak the language of) bears–feel like side characters thrown in merely to help the main characters–in gaming terms, they’re NPCs without much motivation or interests of their own. A final important character–a foul-mouthed, crass raven—accompanies the party because he has to (maybe?), but is neither interesting nor funny nor really seems necessary. As such, the book drags and the characters move interminably from place to place and the encounters they have at each place feel forced and don’t help the story or characters develop. It’s a shame, because the setting is interesting and the story could have been exciting and well-paced and full of fun (and pathos). But it isn’t..

The Sea Captain’s Wife by Tilar J. Mazzeo. 2/5

Mary Ann Patten took over command of her husband’s ship when he became ill and while she was pregnant. Having already sailed the world with him for more than a year, she put down a mutiny and brought one of the world’s fastest clipper ships into harbor with its cargo. Hers is a great, fascinating story, but this book manages to focus on her family history and that of her husband and their property rather than her competence and abilities at sea, and does it in a tedious way. It’s really a shame, because the research is seems meticulous and the story one that deserves better telling.

The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey. 5/5

Most reviews of The Book of Guilt are going to tell you that if you liked Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, you’ll also like this. They’re right: the two books are outstanding companions for one another. Both project a fascist Britain, cloning, and young people seeking out their origins and trying to understand their purpose and seeking meaning in life. Both involve government ministers and original art and enigmatic caregivers. But they are also very different books. Chidgey’s story involves three young and very naive–although not entirely innocent–boys growing into young men, cared for by Mothers, awaiting the day that they, too, like their departed peers, will get to go to Margate to live in a big beautiful house and play at the amusement park there. Although they’re identical triplets, the boys are very different people, and through the voice of just one of them, Chidgey manages to give them all voices and personalities that are clear and unforgettable. Where Ishiguro’s book is horrific and elegiac, Chidgey’s is horrific and, well, horrific, and the denouement and epilogue are astonishing and bold. It’s a masterpiece, and a must-read.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez. 5/5

I loved Enriques’s Sunny Places for Shady People, a terrific dark collection, and now in this non-fiction book, I get to see where so many of her ideas came from. In Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, Enriquez visits numerous famous and little-known cemeteries, seeking out death and its representations in an entertaining, revealing, often quirky way. Every place and tomb has a great story, and now I can’t wait to dig deeper into the histories of some of the places she visits. What’s really remarkable is that this isn’t just an account of death or dark tourism, but travels that delve into history and politics and art history and much more, and very personal histories for the author. I know I’ll be rereading this.

Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley. 5/5

Sisters in the Wind is another tour de force from Boulley, excavating the legacies of children who grow up apart from their native families, the horrors of the foster system, and healing after abuse and coercion. Daunis and Jamie from Firekeeper’s Daughter are back, and the main character is Lily’s half-sister Lucy, who was raised by her white father. The plotting is expert, the characters carefully created and developed, and the whole of the book is beautifully put together, It’s as good as Firekeeper’s Daughter and better than Warrior Girl Unearthed. Highly recommended.

Reviews 7-18-25

America’s Most Gothic by Leanna Renee Hieber; Andrea Janes. 5/5

This is another winner from these authors! Delving into histories from all around the world, Hieber and Janes focus on the ghosts of women and the places they haunt–and why they’re associated with those places. Using feminist approaches to history and folklore, they deftly tease out the underlying meanings and phenomena behind these hauntings and lore. It’s a perfect read for anyone interested in ghosts who wants to know more about the was in which a ghost story is born and grows, and what feeds it as part of that process.

The Abortion Market by Katherine J. Parkin. 2/5

In this study, Parkin focuses on the money-making side of abortion care, specifically leaning into its use by eugenicists and population-control advocates; she also points out how abortion has historically made money for men. Unfortunately, in her desire to hammer home how bad eugenics is and how population-control is always eugenicist in its motives (it isn’t), she misses the opportunities to show how other models of abortion and funding for abortion worked in the period before Roe. There’s no index for this book yet, but my own searching showed almost nothing about the countless women-run networks of abortion facilitators and providers, very little about women-run mutual aid networks for funding, and nothing about the way organizations like Jane got wealthier women to lend and donate funds to pay for poorer women’s abortions. If I hadn’t read the author’s acknowledgements, where she decries Dobbs, I’d have thought this was a book by someone seeking to vilify abortion access as a whole, rather than trying to expose some of its problematic history and the effects of that history. In addition, it’s dry and dull, and slow reading–it reads like an unrevised dissertation, and could really use a solid edit for tone and pace.

Cape Fever by Nadia Davids. 4/5

While the plot is all too predictable, you’re not going to read this book for the plot. You’re going to read it for the language and description and ghosts and living characters and the sense of time and place and context, presented to you in such a way that you want to linger over sentences and have to remind yourself to breathe. In 1920, in a place colonized by whites, Soraya, a young black woman, takes a job as a maid of all work and cook, employed by a white widow whose mind and habits and moods are overbearing and unstable. Over time, as her white employer takes more and more from her, Soraya is strengthened by the ghosts of the house, her own courage, and her desire to be with family. The denouement is a relief and the epilogue lovely. Book groups should snap this one up.

The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale by Joe R. Lansdale (author), Joe Hill (introduction). 5/5

This collection of 16 horror stories, each with a short introduction by Lansdale, is a great introduction to his weird Westerns and other supernatural tales. There’s plenty of diversity among the stories, and each has its own particular kind of horror. Some of these are well-known in one form or another, such as Bubba Ho-Tep, but others have been less widely published or reprinted and will be new to readers. As in all of his work, Lansdale tackles race and racism, misogyny, domestic violence and abuse, and body horror in forthright ways, revealing to readers that a lot of horror is constructed by society. This collection would be perfect for a reading group paired with Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country or P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout.

To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose. 5/5

In this excellent sequel to To Tame a Dragon’s Breath, the story opens with Anequs, Theod, and their dragons spending time with Anequs’s family, and ends amid a battle between the Jarl and the (mostly) progressive thinkers of Kuiper’s academy and a white-supremacist faction bent on keeping both dragons and human rights from indigenous people. In between, Anequs fights colonialism and prejudices against non-white folks, polyamory, and much more, and the complications of politics both at school and outside of it become starker and larger. Although there are a few places the novel drags–a long section on skiltakraft, or Anequs’s world’s chemistry+magic field is particularly numbing and a few sections where characters explain other characters’ feelings to Anequs are pedantic–it mostly moves along quickly. The storytelling moves between action and scenes that move the narrative forward, and slice-of-life moments that flesh out the world, its people, customs, and history. It takes a while for the book’s crisis to come about, but all of the material leading up to it does–or will, I expect–be necessary in the end. This series is a fantastic take on the “magic boarding school” trope and is a terrific anti-HP story about young people doing right, understanding the stakes, and developing and growing and working with one another and protecting one another. I do recommend that readers start with the first book before reading this one, for context and clarity.

The Poems of Seamus Heaney by Seamus Heaney. 5/5

If you’ve only ever encountered Heaney’s work as a translator, or a few poems in isolation, this collection will be a feast. Bringing together the poet’s work from the 1960s to the 2010s, this collection is the only one you’ll need to develop an understanding of Heaney’s use of language, keen eye, and ability to capture the mundane and beautiful and extraordinary all at the same time. Dip in and out, or read whole sections at a time–either way, Heaney’s poems are revelatory and gripping.

The Last of Earth by Deepa Anappara. 3/5

In this languorously-paced novel, travelers trying to get to Lhasa encounter snow leopards, a “gentleman bandit,” and their own shortcomings. Anappara creates a large cast of characters and delves into their psyches as they push through storms and dust and rivers. The descriptions are detailed and expansive, even if the characters are not always well fleshed-out. This will probably appeal to book groups and readers who enjoy travel narratives; I wanted a bit more from the characters and plot.

It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest. 5/5

Nobody writes a ghost story set in a house needing renovation or to be salvaged like Cherie Priest! (If you haven’t yet read Priest’s The Family Plot–go do so right now. Stop reading this review. Go read it!) I loved this story about a house and its spirits and the people they manage to connect with, and the story that emerges from the bits and pieces of history and ghostly loops in the building and its environs. While I’d have loved it to be longer, it’s a perfect story tied up with a bow at the end, well-paced, with great characters and descriptive detail, and clever twists and turns. I honestly could read haunted house stories by Priest all day, and eagerly await the next one.

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage. 3/5

This novel about generational trauma attempts to contain entire universes, but ultimately feels overstuffed and disjointed. Steph Harper, a queer Cherokee woman, is a toxic narcissist who has multiple opportunities to change her behavior towards others, but in the end, makes only half-hearted, insincere tries and can never really pull away from putting herself and her needs and demands first at all times. Even when she’s making big self-sacrificial gestures, she’s still only acting for herself and her own goals. Her straight sister Kayla is a different kind of narcissist, using her Native identity and a sense of self-righteousness as an Indigenous mother of a daughter to become an idol, only to fall and, without learning very much, or being willing to learn, start again in the same mode, always seeking attention and adoration. Their straight Cherokee mother actively impedes any bettering her daughters’ lives and sabotages them and lies to them because of her own trauma and inability to grapple with it in any meaningful way. Steph’s first lover is a much more nuanced character than the three Harper women, but her story is abandoned as soon as Steph is done with her,, and remains the only non-Steph first-person POV voice in the book, which is odd from a structural angle. There are other characters whose voices might have made the book more interesting and given it more facets: Steph’s other lovers, Kayla’s husband and daughter (although we do get letters written by Kayla’s daughter to Steph), others on Steph’s missions with her. The independent and easy-to-cheer-for Steph of the book’s beginning becomes a Steph who is intolerable, and while this book seems to end on a hopeful note, none of the women depicted in it seem to be able to think about others, let alone change for them. If that was the author’s point, she’s hit the nail on the head. If she was going for showing nuance and complexity and sympathy for the characters, well, then, not so much.

Book of Night by Holly Black. 2/5

Holly Black’s first adult novel (from 2023, being re-hyped in preparation for its sequel in September 2025) has some original and splendid ideas, excellent turns and twists, and needed one more round of developmental editing before it was really ready to go out into the world. While there are some terrific, well-thought-out characters and set pieces, there are also numerous pointless people littering the book as well as a number of loose and unneeded scenes that drag or add nothing to the core of the plot and the novel’s context. The basic premise is that in a world where magic and particularly shadow magic is real and accepted, a young woman who has been trained as a thief and a hustler becomes involved in a dangerous power play among various factions of the magic world. The magic is interesting and fresh, and deserved better, as did other facets of the novel. The ending, especially, comes across as cynical and slapdash, but I suppose that was in order to set up readers for the sequel. I’m not sure I care enough about these characters or their world to read that.

The House of Illusionists by Vanessa Fogg. 1/5

I was so eager to read this, as the descriptions made it sound terrific. Alas. The stories aren’t very original, are often maudlin, and the characters are almost interchangeable between them. The characters who upload their brains )a perfect, tragic couple) aren’t all that different from the brother and sister who are witnessing great cataclysms in the world, who are undifferentiated from the couple in which one partner mind-streams their high-risk surfing, who is a lot like the woman who can’t marry the man she loves and, being half water-spirit, walks off into the water. They’re also overlong and could really have benefited from strong editing; there are also errors of hypercorrection throughout, mostly in the “he gave the house to Fred and I” variety. Overall, these remind me of Hans Christian Andersen’s weaker tales in their length, boring and cloying sentimentality, and perfect, self-sacrificing characters.

Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko. 2/5

I tried really hard to get into Edenglassie, set in the 1850s and the present in Australia, but it never clicked for me. The themes and histories in it are important and ongoing–colonialism, indigenous identity, racism–but the characters weren’t very engaging, and the prose dragged too often and was repetitive. It was like reading a Dickens pastiche, almost, but without compelling drama; I always knew where the story was going to go, and was never pleasantly surprised by any originality.

The Kindle version I had also had thousands of errors, mostly the omission of letter combinations like “fi” and “fl,” so sometimes people would be sitting by a g tree around an re with its ames jumping up, and sometimes people would be su ering in di icult situations, and often the issue was so bad it took serious work to figure–sorry, gure–out what the text was supposed to say.

Gemini by Jeffrey Kluger. 1/5

While the Gemini program surely deserves more attention, this book doesn’t do it justice. There’s got to be a more nuanced and thoughtful approach than this one by Kluger, which is a long list of what and who went up when and how they came back, often told in a faux-folksy tone (no book needs to use the word “walloping” as often as this one does). It’s focused almost exclusively on the astronauts and their manly men ways, and their bosses and their manly man ways, eschewing much of the complexities of the political, social, and physical influences and effects of creating, maintaining, and making the program work. It’s an unfortunately superficial account that also uses problematic language and avoids serious discussion of NASA’s (also problematic) culture and practices. You’ll get a better overview of Gemini by reading the Wikipedia article on it.

Fiend by Alma Katsu. 5/5

A terrific, quick read of a horror novel about family and evil and a supernatural protector of the clan. Set in the present in the cutthroat world of a large, family-owned company, Fiend chronicles the rise (ish) and fall of Maris, the oldest daughter of the family scion and a woman determined to succeed at the family business. But the family is cursed–or is it blessed?–with the aid of a violent spirit. Maris is at first skeptic about the protector, but discovers soon enough that it is very real and very dangerous. I really liked the way the story ended, making it a parable, a bit, for our times.

The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death by Helen Marshall. 3/5

In this strange, fever dream of a novel, time and being are fluid, actions move the story backwards and forwards and sideways, and it’s easy to feel lost among the shifting identities and positions of the characters. It’s a story about inheritance and revenge and manipulation and myth. It’s a book you have to just give your mind over to, and not try to dissect exactly what is happening when and with whom; instead, it’s easier to float along and enjoy the complex whole rather than individual threads. At least, that was the only way I could read it and not keep falling asleep or trying to draw diagrams in my head to keep the various realms straight in my head. And that’s the reason it gets 3 stars: there’s only so much liquidy ambiguity I can take without it feeling repetitive and meaningless, and too many parts of the book fall into those latter categories.

The House of Two Sisters by Rachel Louise Driscoll. 4/5

This is a fine gothic novel centered around the Egyptomania of the Victorian period, in which a young woman, herself a highly skilled scholar, has been working with her father, participating in mummy unwrappings and heirogylphic translations for paying crowds. But when her father unwraps a shocking and very rare mummy, and dissects it, she believes that its curse descends upon the family, and she sets out to end it. There are some stock characters here–the vapid English tourists, former military men, and others–and the plot is fairly predictable, but it’s an enjoyable read for a summer afternoon.

An Absence of Fear by Holly Peppe. 5/5

Strikingly original language, beauty, pain, and a wry humor all combine in these poems. This is a collection to read slowly, savoring every phrase, re-reading stanzas before moving to the next, and lingering over word choices. Peppe’s writing is astonishing whether she’s writing about the sublime or the mundane. Highly recommend.

The Butcher’s Masquerade by Matt Dinniman. 4/5

As the Dungeon Crawler Carl series progresses, we get more and more information about the characters, and they begin to develop. With Carl, this is through his memories of a truly horrific childhood; other characters also discuss their lives prior to the alien invasion of earth. The politics of the different factions involved in the game become more complex, and Dinniman’s technique of building a scene, cutting away, jumping ahead, and the filling in the missing action works well to maintain suspense. I am unhappy that he’s chosen to call one of the classes “cretins,” as that’s a terrible ableist term from the real world’s past, and there is still some occasional other problematic language. At the same time, difference and disability are usually treated well, showing that characters of all body types and configurations are equally capable in the dungeon.