Today I am taking a break from book promo to give you a nice new batch of something I haven’t done in a while - reviews!

In 2025, I wrote no reviews, even the most casual recommendations post; I started the year vaguely intending to, but my brain rebelled against every attempt. I think I needed the time away - to shake off the last bits of old pressures I used to feel around reviewing that are not appropriate to the moment anymore. But by the end of the year, I was pretty solid on how I wanted to do it when I started again.

So here’s how we’re going to do this. I want to write a recommendation post four times a year - with today, the spring equinox, being #1. I'm going to mix up all types of media and all years of publication. All of them will be things I read, watched, or played in the past three months - since the winter solstice, in this case - but some are new and some are old and I literally do not care what is and isn't eligible for the awards cycle.* I want to divide up the works, not by format or length, but by how they made me feel - because there are all sorts of different ways to like a work of art, and teasing out those different ways is what interests me as a reviewer right now.

(*I might or might not do a "caring about the awards cycle" post later in the year, at the traditional time. We’ll see.)

Right now I think there are four or five emotional categories, but they might not all show up in every single rec post, and I also reserve the right to come up with more categories on a whim.

Flights of Fancy

Here’s Category #1, and probably the one that will have the most things in it, most of the time! Flights of Fancy are the works that did a very good solid satisfying job of absorbing my imagination. The ones that skillfully drew me away to some other vivid time and place, tugged on my heartstrings, seduced my senses or made me cheer. This is the first and broadest category that I think of when I think of good storytelling, though as we will see, it's not the only one.

Micaiah Johnson - "‘Brokeheart’ GPT” or “A Superintelligent Being Reads Pat Rosal” (short story, January 4, 2026, The Sunday Morning Transport)

Lately, stories about AGI and superintelligence have become a hard sell for me. I used to love them! But now my first thought is always "ugh, okay, is this going to prop up Silicon Valley's most self-serving narratives or what?" Thankfully, Johnson's story survived my initial skepticism and became a pleasant surprise. I like the small but crucial reversal of certain tropes: instead of humans being afraid of what the superintelligence might do to them, the superintelligence is frightened of humans - partly because of some of our own, present-day misuses of genAI. The AI narrator’s naively logical voice, disoriented and unused to viewing itself as a single self, reminded me of all the things I used to love about this type of story. (Autistic people still overidentify with robots, confirmed.) I also love that a poem, of all things, is what fatally shakes the superintelligence's understanding of the world. I still wish it didn't have "GPT" in the title since that is a very specific line of language models belonging to a specific company and those language models are not going to achieve sentience no matter what the company's marketing department tells you, but, you know, whatever. It’s still a rare AI story that manages to rise above all that.

Joemario Umana - "O ASHY WINGS STILL FLUTTERING" (poem, December 22, 2025, Strange Horizons)

I'm bad at reviewing poems, actually! When I like them, I just want to fling them at people incoherently and say "this!" But this is a very poignant description of something I recognize a version of in my own experience, and it's done lyrically and with beauty.

P.C. Verrone - "The Husband" (short story, January 14, 2025, PodCastle)

A bisexual man is (consensually) taken as the latest bride of a vampire who already has three female wives. He has difficulty adjusting to his new life at first, and the other wives don't know what to make of him, but eventually he rises to the challenge in creative ways. This was well-written enough (and hits the tropes solidly enough) to hold my interest throughout, but what really clinched it for me is the ending - both so unorthodox and so oddly sensible, as a solution to all of the characters' problems, that now I wonder why more vampire stories haven't ended this way before.

John Wiswell - "Phantom View" (novelette, October 2025, Reactor)

Wiswell has a way with sweet-but-creepy, sympathetic monsters; he always knocks them out of the park. I wasn't sure about this one at first - stories about people's parents are sort of complicated for me - but it really gets going once Wiswell's protagonist and the mysterious blur in his house start to communicate. I love the complexity of what's going on: the blur's motives and feelings are only partly ever discernible; the narrator projects all sorts of things onto it and you can see where those projections are coming from, without quite always knowing how true they are or aren’t; it helps him and fails him and frustrates him and still ultimately guides him to something that he desperately needs.

Comfort Reads

There’s been so much discourse about “cozy fiction,” what it is and what it isn’t, what its merits are relative to other modes of storytelling. I do not intend to get into that discourse in this post, except to say that I don’t begrudge anybody any reading that makes them happy in any way - but that personally, when I read cozy fiction, it usually does not make me feel happy or cozy as advertised. I’m sorry, cozy fiction authors. It’s me, not you. (There are some exceptions, one of which is listed below!)

Nevertheless, I very much enjoy comfort reads/watches and go for them all the time. It’s just that my comfort reads are more likely to be other, weirder things, like thinky nonfiction about a topic I’m really curious about, or re-reads of my own books that I already wrote. Or else - less weird - it’s a cozy video game where nothing is too difficult and I can just putter around. Either way, when I encounter a piece of media for the first time and find that it soothes or comforts me really well, I want to put it here in this section.

The boundary between this category and "Flights of Fancy" is porous and vague. A work that comforts me often still contains some level of thrills, spills and drama - it's just that the drama is kept within a certain type of safe bound. Your mileage may vary. I just like these.

Heather Fawcett - "Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Fairies" (novel, January 2023, Del Rey)

Did I say cozy books don't work for me? Here's an exception. This one is weapons-grade adorable in my exact preferred way. The titular Emily is a Victorian-era professor who is among the world's most brilliant minds at dealing with faeries, but who prefers to be left alone with her research all day, only grudgingly tolerating the presence of other humans, or anything else unrelated to her professonal special interest. (I 100% read Emily as autistic, although the term isn't used.) Doing difficult field research in a remote and wintry village, she's unexpectedly joined by her longtime rival, Wendell Bambleby - a charming and chaotic man whom Emily has long suspected may secretly be a faerie himself. Mysteries are investigated! Sparks fly! The faeries in this book are just eerie enough to be interesting - they often reminded me of a lighter version of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - but never quite frightening enough to derail the burgeoning faerie/human romance that every reader can see coming long before Emily does. Her grouchy narrative voice is a delight, and now I have to get the second and third books just so that I can watch these two adorable losers finish figuring their relationship out. In the darkest parts of a pretty harsh IRL winter, this book was a balm.

The 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games

It’s always a comfort watch for me, but let's be real, I think the competitors at this Olympics were feeling the geopolitical malaise just like the rest of us. It wasn't Canada's best Olympics ever. There were a startling number of upsets, crashes, and unexpected losses on all sides. The hockey games hurt to watch in ways that I suspect are nothing to do with hockey itself and everything to do with, sigh, geopolitics. There were also all sorts of bright, beautiful, thrilling, victorious moments, and brave, bittersweet moments where people picked themselves up and kept going, despite it all.

There’s just something that always resonates with me so deeply about this. To me, the Olympic spirit is about loving something so much that you devote your whole life to getting maximally good at it - not out of any capitalistic imperative, but out of sheer obsession. And then you get up in front of the whole world to show them what you can do, to invite them to share this thing you love with you. I am extremely not good at any sport ever, but I think that serious artists have a kinship with serious athletes. I think that we share the same intense, consuming, publicly visible love of the thing we are doing. And, you know, sometimes the moment when the whole world is watching is a moment where the thing doesn't go your way. But that is not the point. The point is the love.

The Ones That Haunt Me

Meanwhile, this category is for stuff a little stronger than a Flight of Fancy. Sometimes a story messes you up and you thank it, you know? The works in this category punched me in the gut or burrowed into an uncomfortable part of my brain and it would be oversimplifying to say that I liked them, but it was really well done and I was glad it happened.

As with “Comfort Reads,” there is absolutely no scientific way to distinguish between a sad, creepy, or provocative story that goes into Flights of Fancy and one that goes here. It is entirely vibes and how I happened to feel in the moment. Nonetheless, at the moment, the distinction is important to me.

Phoenix Alexander - "Doppel Doppel Gang Gang" (flash fiction, December 31, 2025, Baffling)

A playful but disturbing bit of flash horror about a high school dance crew that encounters... something. The choice to tell this one entirely in dialogue and sound effects works really well, especially in the story's second half as events ramp up; the work that my brain had to do, filling in whatever visual it could to account for what I was "hearing," made it creepier than if the whole thing had been told in normal prose. It also makes the story clip along very, very quickly in a way that makes it difficult to look away. The ending gave me that classic feeling of "oh my God, what the fuck did I just read."

Cailín Frankland - "Death is a Drag Queen" (partly-prose poem, December 31, 2025, Baffling)

I was a little bit mad at myself for how many Feelings I Felt with this one. I was like "oh come on, this is so conceptually simple, this is a thing I have already heard queer poets say 1000 times." Apparently I still really needed to hear it once more, and in the romantic, vivid, but spare way that Frankland says it. This is a piece that could be read aloud for Trans Day of Remembrance, which is probably all the content warning that you need.

Premee Mohamed - "The Butcher of the Forest" (novella, February 2024, Tordotcom)

If Heather Fawcett's faeries are just eerie enough to stay interesting, Mohamed's are a genuine nightmare - and the everyday necessities that drive her protagonist into the forest to meet them aren't much better. I loved the menace and dread of this short book but even more the deeply human, despairing, determined heart that beats underneath.

The More You Know!

Sometimes it's less about how you feel and more about what you learn. In an environment of information overload, this category is for works - mostly, but not necessarily, nonfiction - that explained something useful to me that I hadn't known before, and was glad to.

Jane Alison - "Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative" (nonfiction book, April 2019, Catapult Books)

When a book is trending among writers and I don't read it, I feel self-conscious and out of the loop. When a book is trending and I do read it, I feel self-conscious in a different way - like, sure, I jumped on the bandwagon. Is it newsworthy to say that I’m on the bandwagon? I don't know. Regardless, "Meander, Spiral, Explode" is the craft book that everyone has been talking about lately. It's focused on litfic (although there is an interesting shout-out to Cloud Atlas) but it does what it says on the tin: identifies patterns, in writing and in nature, that can serve as alternatives to the traditional rising-action-climax-falling-action triangle, and analyzes examples from existing literary works to show how those patterns can be used.

Personally, I spent a lot of time this year thinking about how to do the traditional plot triangle better. It was necessary to do that thinking because of the places where I was getting stuck in my craft. But Alison isn't trying to destroy the plot triangle so much as put it in its proper place, not as the be-all and end-all of structure but as one potential structure among many. The whole thing is playful and thoughtful and interesting and it made me really want to try out some of these alternate structures for myself. It filled my head with thoughts in a good way.

Isis Asare et al - "Feminist Futurism Versus Project 2025: An Empowering Speculative Salon"

I read this via the transcript that was posted in Strange Horizons on January 12, 2026, although the panel itself was held at Seattle Worldcon in August 2025! Either way, this panel was very welcoming and gave a lot of interesting food for thought. If you've been reading intersectional feminist speculative fiction discourse for a while then the ideas won't be wholly new to you, but I still found it helpful to have them all concentrated in one place. I came out of it with a lot of thoughts about things that my fiction only partly and sometimes does, and perhaps could be doing a lot more of.

(Although: sometimes, for purely selfish reasons, I gotta use my fiction as a scream pillow. So the dystopias are not going away. You’ve been warned :D )

Angus Hervey - "The Telemetry" (newsletter post, December 2025, Fix The News)

Someone linked me to this and I wish I remembered who. It was probably Ada Palmer, who links to this sort of thing on Bluesky regularly. (Yes, it's a Substack. Sigh. Sorry.) I read it on New Year's Eve and found it a welcome antidote to the general ambient doom that has been floating around everywhere these days. Some things are indeed very bad right now, and Hervey's writing doesn’t pretend those things aren’t real, but it points past them to a surprising number of other things in the world that are continuing, despite everything, to get unglamorously, usefully, incrementally better. They are by no means all small or all localized things. Some of them really surprised me. I have subscribed to their newsletter :)

(Oh, but if you are prone to eye squick, maybe skip the first section, because the first section is about how we developed a cure for a really gross eye virus. :P )

Bonus Section: Autistic Book Shout-Out

I'm not sorry that I stopped the Autistic Book Party series when I did; I don't miss feeling the self-imposed responsibility to somehow read and have deep thoughts on every single autistic book that comes out (which, of course, I never managed to do.) But I still love autistic books! And every once in a while I will shout out to a few of them here.

Isaac Fellman - "The Two Doctors Górski" (novella, November 2022, Tordotcom)

I like everything I've read from Isaac Fellman, and this short, brooding, lyrical bit of dark academia was as good as I expected, but nobody told me the main character is autistic? Maybe people did say it, and I've been so out of the loop that I missed it, or forgot? Well, whatever! Annae's identity as an abuse survivor is much more important to this story than her autism; the fact that she’s autistic is plainly stated but also goes by a bit fast and isn't hammered on in the way that some authors hammer repeatedly on autistic traits to make sure that you've noticed them. If you know what you're looking for, though, the abuse survival narrative and the autism go perfectly hand-in-hand. The trajectory of Annae's life - brainy and irritating as a child, then painstakingly teaching herself to be charming, then being targeted and taken advantage of because of that charm, combined with the autistic naivete she hasn't shaken off, and trying clumsily to rebuild her life in the aftermath - is painfully realistic and recognizable.

Also! Not going to write a full paragraph of review because I technically read it before the 2025 winter solstice, but how about Antonia Hodgson's "The Raven Scholar"? Another buzzy, well-written recent book that I didn't realize had an autistic protagonist (an adorable one, by the way) until I was already partway through.