News and Reviews June 2025
This Monday I held a table read for the libretto for This Is Jane, the abortion-rights opera I’m working on with composer Angela Elizabeth Slater, and to make sure the dogs didn’t do anything to disrupt it, I sent them to doggie day camp and to get groomed. They came home beautifully brushed and trimmed and smelling like piña coladas. The table read was great, and the libretto is now about as finished as it can be until Angela begins setting more of it and needs me to make tweaks as she goes.
I’m currently teaching Session 1 of Guerilla Opera’s Summer Libretto Labs; Session 2 begins in July. I have an excellent group of participants who have terrific ideas and are thoughtful and truly engaged with creating new texts for new operas. On July 1, the application for the 9-month Writers’ Collective opens at https://guerillaopera.org/eventcal/2025/4/30/summber-libretto-lab-application-closes-lx9zj, so if you’re interested in becoming part of a libretto-writing cohort in which we meet twice a month for discussion and workshopping, I encourage you to apply. You don’t need any prior writing experience, so don’t self-unselect! Guerilla Opera offers financial aid and you can join one of two differently scheduled cohorts to best fit your schedule. Email me if you have any questions about it!
Scholarly Stuff
This week and again in August I’m giving presentations on music and sound in M. R. James’s ghost stories. This week, at the Unquiet Shores conference, I’m talking about music and sound in his seaside stories “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” and “A Warning to the Curious.” In August, at Romancing the Gothic’s “A Warning to the Curious” conference, I’m talking about “Oh Whistle” again but this time along with “Martin’s Close.” It’s been a treat to re-read James—his ghost stories are among my favorites—for these projects. If you’ve never read any, you can find them for free on Project Gutenberg.
Opera News etc.
If you’re in the Portland, Oregon, area, hie thee to New Wave Opera to get your tickets for their upcoming production of Marie Curie Learns to Swim, one of my operas with composer Jessica Rudman! The production will run September 19-21, and tells the story of Curie’s tragedies and triumphs in a series of flashbacks she experiences on a seaside holiday with her daughter Irène, who tries to get her mother to listen to her concerns about the safety of their work with radium.
On November 22, Opera Contempo of Salt Lake City will put on two workshop productions of Act 2 of another one of my operas with Jessica, Protectress. Opera Contempo did a terrific workshop performance of Act 1 in 2023, which you can learn about and watch here: https://kendraprestonleonard.hcommons.org/protectress-an-opera-in-two-acts/.
My other projects right now include Toads & Tardigrades, a libretto in which a tardigrade takes the audience through time, selecting mascots of various past ages and extinctions, and tells the audience about the candidates for the Anthropocene Extinction; at the same time, a team of scientists search for signs of an endangered toad living in the wild. It has a happy ending and is customizable to include things to do to help the wildlife and plants in the performers’ own neighborhoods. The music is by Jessi Harvey, eco-composer extraordinaire. I’m also working on a song cycle with composer Rob Gross and mezzo-soprano Molly Noori about disability rights and the 504 Sit-In in particular. If you’re not familiar with this part of disability rights history, check it out on Wikipedia.
Other Stuff
I’ve also been volunteering with Authors Against Book Bans and Strong Women-Strange Worlds (SWSW), both excellent organizations working to protect free speech and promote authors. SWSW hosts two one-hour author readings a month, one on the first Friday and the other on the third Thursday. You can sign up for event info here. If you attend the events live, you can enter to win free books, consultations with authors, and other cool things.
Reviews: dungeons, poetry, fantasy, gothic
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Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. 4/5
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series--of which this is the first installment--was originally written on reddit and self-published. It's goofy fun that's a little bit in the manner of "in another world" anime. Here, Carl and his ex-girlfriend's champion show cat Princess Donut just happen to survive the collapse of all buildings on earth when alien raiders arrive at the planet ready to mine its resources. Survivors are given the option of entering an RPG/video game-type dungeon or taking their chances with the raiders, and Carl and Donut plunge into the dungeon. There, they encounter all of the tropes of gaming: spells, guides, monsters, weapons, traps, et al., with the added bonuses of appearing on shows watched by the aliens--lots of different aliens, in fact--and getting sponsored and being sent gifts, a la The Hunger Games. This book chronicles levels 1-3, during which Carl and Donut fight a variety of foes, help the survivors of a nursing home, and acquire skills and loot. If you like Twitch game play-throughs or D&D/SFFH IP tie-in novelizations and fantasy novels that don't require too much thought, or are a gamer and will get all of the in-jokes and references, these are for you. I'm not rushing to devour them for being clever or particularly beautiful or rich in terms of characters or world-building, but they're fun.
Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman. 4/5
Book 2 of this series, in which Carl and Donut and their allies continue to fight, this time in a medieval-style town. Not only do they need to survive the level, they've also now got quests to undertake and have level up in race and class. As with the first book, it's amusing, particularly if you know the tropes that are being used and occasionally skewered. Dino fans will like Donut's new pet, and we get more info on guide Mordecai and the politics behind the game and its creatures. Also, Carl continues to blow stuff up.
The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman. 4/5
In this third book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Carl and Donut are still killing and leveling up, now with Katia, an added party member who was separated from her previous group. Carl discovers a book written by previous crawlers that helps him create new explosives and other devices, Donut continues to up her Charisma, and instead of the medieval setting, there are trains and sad monsters as well as more shows and bounty hunters. As with the previous volumes, this one is entertaining if you're familiar with the tropes of gaming; folks who like puzzle quests will like this one especially. It's fantasy popcorn, perfect for a light summer read, albeit one with the deaths of some previous characters.
The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman. 4/5
In this installment of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Carl & co are in a jungle, wreaking havoc on the system that runs the game as well as the hunters who pay to try to kill the crawlers. Donut is in fine form, as are all of the characters, and the pace continues to zip along. I like how the story has become more multi-layered as it's progressed, and that the characters develop and learn and become more fully realized all the time.
Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan. 1/5
Let me address the generative AI issue first: Qudan has stated that about 5% of the book was written by AI, mostly the sections where the protagonist is using AI to help her get out of a creative doldrum. I don't care how or where or why Qudan used AI or whether she was trying to make a point: generative AI is based on intellectual property theft. My own work has been scraped to "train" gen AI. It is a repulsive, unethical, anti-creative practice. I do not want to be reviewing anything that uses gen AI.
In contrast with Qudan and the protagonist's use of AI is the protagonist's resistance to the idea that language changes over time; she wishes to stop the use of loanwords in Japanese from other languages. This is what we call prescriptivism in linguistics: that there are rules that dictate what is good linguistic practice and what is not. I do not believe in prescriptivism; I'm a descriptivist. So here I have a main character who I find repellent on two fronts: gen AI use and her rigid approach to language. You can see how this is contradictory, right? But that never gets addressed in a meaningful manner.
To sum up: Author uses gen AI. Protagonist is unsympathetic and mirrors author's use of AI. Can I give this negative stars? It's really too bad, because there is some very interesting stuff about language going on in the book. But I'm only interested if I know it's written by a human.
The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed. 5/5
In this third novella in the series that began with The Annual Migration of Clouds and continued in We Speak Through the Mountain, readers discover what Henryk is up to while Reid is at university. In the world of these books, Mohamed creates a simply astonishing and deep world in which climate and disease have caused a radical upheaval in life on earth. While the first two books focused on Reid, a smart young woman with an unfortunately common chronic and terminal illness called Cad, this entry gives us her friend Henryk's story of leaving their city for a smaller settlement where his uncle lives.
Both Reid and Henryk struggle with survivor's guilt, ethical challenges, and physical trauma (this is not a series for the squeamish), and in the aftermath of a tragedy, Henryk is desperately trying to prove his worth--the idea of having worth and what that means, exactly, being a central theme of the books. Henryk will, I think, come across to readers in one of two ways: as a sympathetic, self-punishing young man seeking meaning and connection in his life, or as a not-very-observant or oblivious and incapable self-pitying and needy child; the canny reader will see how he is both, and how both aspects of his personality give him a lot of room to grow in different directions. We get to watch this growth over the course of the book, and the ending feels very right for readers who know the previous volumes.
Reid and Henryk spoke to me personally--as someone for whom returning to my parent's home after having left it for educational experiences would have been, to me, a terrible personal failure, these stories helped me see how coming home doesn't always have to be interpreted that way, and can in fact be a sign of strength and compassion and consideration. The First Thousand Trees does stand on its own, but your reading of it will be richer if you read the other two books first.
Canyon and Cosmos by Don Lago. 2/5
Wow, no, this just isn't for me. I love nature writing, and poetry and prose about places and phenomena, but Canyon and Cosmos was pretentious and long-winded and ye gods dull. I didn't know you could make these topics dull. I know I'm in the minority here, based on other NetGalley reviews, but I just did not enjoy this. With a good, strong editor, and a better sense of objectives and meaning on the author's part, this would be a better book, but as is, I struggled to get through it. There are some passages that are more interesting and less full of hyperbole and such, so it gets 2 stars instead of just 1 .
The New Book by Nikki Giovanni. 3/5
The thing about Nikki Giovanni is that sometimes she as a superb poet, full of spit and fire and snappy wordplay and smart writing, and other times you really wish someone had told her to keep some of her poems in drawers or something because they can be cringeworthy and awful. This collection is a mix of the two. It's also a mix of genres--poetry and addresses and letters--in which there is an awful lot of overlapping text. I think as an editor I'd have curated this a bit more carefully so as to avoid readers reading the same passages repeatedly, or with tiny and not very meaningful alterations. I found the strongest poems to come near the end, and these are some of her best. Others, especially ones written in the heat of a moment (and not revised or edited?) are weaker and come across too often as superficial and lacking in real thought. Unless you're a completist in terms of collecting her work, get this one from your library.
Angel Eye by Madeleine Nakamura. 2/5
I have to admit that I found the earlier book in this series a little too drawn-out and talky, and the protagonist, while sympathetic, not very compelling. This installment is much a retread of the primary plot of the first book: Someone is Doing Bad Things, and said Bad Things get pinned on Innocent People, and People Suffer. I wish the world was a little richer and more interesting--it has all of the elements, but none of the depth or engagement between characters and the world that can make a world fascinating to the reader. Overall, it's not terrible, but I really hope the next one in the series has a more original plot and better immersion.
Ancestors by adrienne maree brown. 2/5
Perhaps I needed to read the first two books in this series, but I didn't get into t his much. There's a lot of homage to Octavia Butler, which is is terrific, but also in some ways like in Butler's Parable books, the characters and situations often feel more allegorical than concrete and real, and I ended up not really caring about anyone or what happened to them.
Algospeak by Adam Aleksic. 1/5
Algospeak is what you want to read if you can't be bothered to read more in-depth studies of how language is changing in response to online memes and tropes, and advertising. It's full of interesting anecdotes, but light on analysis, a superficial accounting of topics the author finds interesting. It's hard to write about the influence of the ephemeral things language does, that's true, but even if some of the terminology Aleksic writes about here is passe already, there's so much more to be said that is passed over for more examples of memes. And speaking of memes, the author isn't very good at defining them, or tropes, or any other terms he uses throughout. Even just a little extra scholarship would improve this.
Beasts of Carnaval by Rosália Rodrigo. 3/5
Beasts of Carnaval is a lovely fantasy full of evocative and engaging imagery and lush description, drawing on Caribbean and African lore. It's too bad the characters aren't quite as well handled. Every time it seems like we might get to know one of them more deeply, the plot intervenes, leaving them superficial and unexplained. Likewise character relationships, at which the author hints and hints at developing but ultimately reveals as lots of nothing. Too much of the novel felt like a film treatment instead of a novel. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not a novel: it's a film treatment. I'd much rather have read a novel with character and relationship development and getting to the truth of the place and characters and emotions. This is dazzling, but the dazzle is rhinestones, not diamonds.
The Witch of Willow Sound by Vanessa F. Penney. 3/5
While this has a lot of inconsistencies that made me clench my teeth as I was reading, the basic premise is fine if very predictable from early on. Fade is an interesting character who could use a bit more personality (and a LOT less of using the pseudo-swear "frig" all the FUCKING time which was even more annoying than the inconsistencies); her aunt Madeline is well-created; too bad we can't get her alive. Mostly I found the novel uneven. Characters appear and disappear and should have more of a role; the rock over the town is just kind of silly; the sweet and charming archivist could have been more rounded-out; and the plot with the evil mayor could have been handled with more subtlety and less hammy over-the-topness. I'd love for this to get one more round of developmental edits to really bring it together.
The Dagger in Vichy by Alastair Reynolds. 2/5
The Dagger in Vichy feels a lot like one of Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric and Desdemona novellas, although the setting is clearly a post-apocalyptic earth and the story is a bit of a riff on Emil St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, but with supernatural elements (or are they forgotten scientific techniques?). An old playwright tells of an episode from his youth with a traveling theater company, when a mysterious entity drives his master to murder and puts the young man in danger from humans and constructs alike while traveling through a devastated and dangerous France. While elements of the story are good, even intriguing, the author uses disability/ableism to effect the murder, and in a hackneyed way. The characters a bit dull and not terribly original or memorable; the setting is perhaps the most interesting thing about the book. It'd be nice if an editor could do something about the ableism before this gets its full release and if the characters were less old chestnuts and more real.
If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You by Leigh Stein. 4/5
Social media influencer competitions as gothic novel, check. Cautionary tale about the media, check. Ghosts and violence and horror, check. Within all of these tropes is a surprisingly solid novel about how people evaluate their lives, measure themselves against others, believe in lies even when they know they're lies, and seek happiness in worlds that seem utterly antithetical to it. The set up--a man with a famous but collapsing mansion invites influencers to create a "hype house" and compete with one another for sponsorship--allows Stein to bring together a swath of different people at different times in their lives, with radically different goals. Their interactions feel mostly real, full of ambivalence and uncertainty and mistakes and realizing things too late, and the characters are mostly interesting and sympathetic, except for a few who remain underdeveloped. So if you're into reality TV or YouTube videos, and like a mystery, you'll probably enjoy this.
It Wasn't Easy to Reach You by Daniel Meltz. 5/5
Yearning, appealing, full of fresh language and old stories narrated in new ways, this collection of poetry is a strong entry into the realm of queer poetry chronicling the lives and desires and tragedies of Gen X and Gen Y. Meliz's observations of everyday objects and emotions are deft and true; the writing feels honest and open and often conversational. I'm looking forward to teaching this in my poetry classes, and to Meltz's novel.
Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson. 5/5
After getting me hooked on his writing with powerful, deadly, and revolting artifacts in his earlier books, Rosson gets me once again with this new and wonderful entry into vampire lit. With Stephen Graham Jones's The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, this is the summer for revisiting everything you know about bloodsuckers and revel in new interpretations and points of view. In Coffin Moon, Duane, a Vietnam vet, unknowingly insults a vampire, leading to almost everyone in his family being slaughtered. Only his niece Julia survives, and she has no intentions of letting the killings go unpunished. Thus begins a journey full of fear and horror and transformation and testing relationships. It's fast-paced, full of beautiful and startling language, and a joy for horror readers.
Twelve Stories by American Women by Arielle Zibrak. 5/5
I'm delighted that this volume--in a prior edition, a collection of writing by white women of the middle or upper classes--has been updated and expanded to include stories from María Cristina Mena, Zitkala-Ša, and others. The stories are gems, touching on highly relevant topics and each deserving of wide reading and sharing. This would be a great selection for a book group or as part of a class in American literature.
Stay cool, friends, and be safe at the protests.