Just book reviews!
Reviewed here:
Fiction:
Cape Fever by Nadia Davids. 4/5
The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale by Joe R. Lansdale (author), Joe Hill (introduction). 5/5
To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose. 5/5
The Last of Earth by Deepa Anappara. 3/5
It Was Her House First by Cherie Priest. 5/5
To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage. 3/5
Book of Night by Holly Black. 2/5
The House of Illusionists by Vanessa Fogg. 1/5
Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko. 2/5
Fiend by Alma Katsu. 5/5
The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death by Helen Marshall. 3/5
The House of Two Sisters by Rachel Louise Driscoll. 4/5
The Butcher's Masquerade by Matt Dinniman. 4/5
Poetry
The Poems of Seamus Heaney by Seamus Heaney. 5/5
An Absence of Fear by Holly Peppe. 5/5
Nonfiction
America’s Most Gothic by Leanna Renee Hieber; Andrea Janes. 5/5
The Abortion Market by Katherine J. Parkin. 2/5
Gemini by Jeffrey Kluger. 1/5
Fiction
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 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.
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.
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.
Poetry
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.
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.
Nonfiction
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.
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-man 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.