New story out! “If the Weather Holds” appears in the Mar/Apr 2025 issue of Analog. For all the work we have ahead, we’ll need a big team…and just the reasonable people won’t do. Analog is available for order here.
Yes, I wrote this because the Indigo Girls left this title lying on the table when they called their song “The Wood Song.” The ways of creativity are mysterious and here we are.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
The premise of this book is that two upper middle class Black people from Detroit from a century apart can sometimes see and talk to each other through the expedient of Greer, a ballet dancer from 2025, going briefly back in time to 1925 and meeting Monty, a doctor. The parts of this book that are about upper middle class Black Detroit, in both eras, are great. Extremely well written, and if you have any fondness for Detroit at all (I do), you’ll see some of the stuff you love there. Woods is herself a Black woman from Detroit, and this is a love letter to her community.
It’s the science fiction side that lets me down, unfortunately. It’s not that the science of it is handwaved, I’m totally fine with that. It’s that the personal relationships are. Greer has a chronic illness that seems to be somehow related to the time jumps, but how is not clear, and that’s the sort of thing that comes with pitfalls when you’re writing about chronic illness. Sure enough, at one point Greer’s best friend Leah chides her that she has to stop the time jumps because she’s changing the timeline too much–but her control over them is very minimal–and Leah’s logic is that Greer is being selfish in trying to find enough changes that she doesn’t have a chronic illness, because what she has will not kill her. But…it’s undiagnosed. It is a major plot point that this mystery illness is undiagnosed. So who knows whether it would kill her? Why is it not okay for Greer to want to not be debilitated? And also why is Leah so sure that the tiny interactions Greer has with the past–she doesn’t, for example, warn Monty about the stock market crash or anything like that–are going in negative directions? None of this is fleshed out because it isn’t Woods’s focus.
At the very end, but only the very end, Greer is trapped in the past, unable to get back to her family, friends, or career. It’s made very clear that she still suffers her chronic illness and dies with it. Meanwhile Monty…gets to pursue his restless dreams in Paris due to Greer’s influence. So…the woman with the chronic illness is punished for having a largely volition-free interaction with this condition, but the able-bodied man gets to live his dreams because of it? I was not left feeling great about the ending to this book.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
This is listed as a standalone companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, which is a Great Gatsby reimagining. I would quibble with that: I don’t think it would stand alone very well. It opts not to lean in on the explanations of the magic, which is great for the pacing of the novella IF you’ve read the novel and remember it reasonably well. Which I have. I also think that “standalone” is a pretty weird adjective for this novella, since it seems to me to lean heavily on you knowing The Great Gatsby well to see what it’s even doing.
Which to me is not a problem. The Great Gatsby is a very famous book, readily available, and The Chosen and the Beautiful is in print and also available. And I want novellas to be doing different things, I want there to be a range of types of connectedness that stories can have. But don’t kid yourself. This is very much a “what about long after” sort of story of consequences, this is about “what next” for those two books in combination. This is not a standalone meditation about the consequences of the 1920s as WWII is breaking out, or about the fate of people magically created as doppelgangers for other people that it, in this volume, has talked about the process for extensively. It doesn’t have to be, in order to be an interesting read.
Nadine Akkerman, Elizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts. Akkerman is very, very opposed to calling her The Winter Queen, which is a shame because it’s one of the most awesome regnal nicknames a person has ever had. Other than that I really liked this, it was very thorough and also told you important contextual things like what Christian IV and Axel Oxenstierna were doing at the time, which a great many histories of British and German people forget to do.
Mary Beard, Emperor of Rome. This is not a chronological study of individual emperors, it’s a conceptual study about the experience and trappings of emperorship in Imperial Rome, which is far more interesting than who poisoned whom which day. There’s a reason she’s one of the big popular historians of antiquity at the moment.
Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 17-22. Kindle. We’ve entered the school dramatics phase of the school story trope!
Tim Clarkson, The Makers of Scotland: Picts, Romans, Gaels, and Vikings. A short and straightforward history of first-millennium Scotland and how it coalesced into an actual country, with attention to several major influential groups as listed in the subtitle. Not flashy but fine.
Siddhartha Deb, Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India. Kindle. Helpful point of view on history that I lived through on the other side of the planet but was substantially unaware of, really glad to have more context as this seems unlikely to get less important over time.
Joshua S. Levy, Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop. Full disclosure: I wanted this to be a Jewish Sal and Gabi, and that is an unreasonable expectation. Instead it is a very nice middle grade science fiction novel about two boys from very different strands of Judaism sorting out their very important weekend in Groundhog’s Day fashion, a good time.
Robin McKinley, Beauty, Rose Daughter, Spindle’s End, and Sunshine. Rereads. It was interesting to watch her develop her fairy tale novel approach, because Beauty was written when novels based on fairy tales were very rare, and it is a very straight-up retelling. And Rose Daughter is a bit later and has a bit more personality, and Spindle’s End is after that and has a lot more personality. Spindle’s End is more of a fantasy novel with a fairy tale structure, rather than just a fairy tale expanded into a (short) novel form. Sunshine…well, I was glad that I intended to do some baking that day anyway. And it’s still got such a weird ending. But worth it.
Naomi Novik, Buried Deep and Other Stories. I found this to be a very mixed bag, which might mean that there’s something for everybody or might just mean that it’s a very mixed bag. I was surprised by how much I liked the crossover between her dragon universe and Pride and Prejudice, because that is usually the opposite of my sort of thing, and while I can’t say it’s in the running for my favorite story of the year, it was a good time.
Morgan Parker, Magical Negro: Poems. Trenchant cultural commentary in very biting poem form, glad to have read this.
Hache Pueyo, But Not Too Bold. Discussed elsewhere.
Arthur Ransome, Winter Holiday. Reread. The most comfort of comfort rereads. The thing about it is that I haven’t reread this since I learned that winter in England–even in northern England–doesn’t mean what it means here, and it’s all there on the page once you know–the idea that the lake freezing is rare, that they’re incredibly lucky to have this grand adventure. The other thing about this book is that it is so entirely pro-quarantine about infectious disease that the rambunctious children do not try to break quarantine. None of the adults seriously considers sending kids who might have been exposed to mumps (but do not in fact end up having mumps) to school to give it to the other children. This is a plot device, but it’s also a deeply held belief that I think will be something of a relief to some of my friends in the current era.
May Sarton, Collected Poems, 1930-1973. I know there was some May Sarton in an anthology I read and reread as a child, but for the life of me I can’t find it here, it just…didn’t stick. And that’s sort of how the rest of this collection went: I could read it, I wasn’t annoyed reading it, there was a stanza here or there that hit what it was aiming at, but I don’t think Sarton is ever going to be one of the poets I really love. Well. They can’t all be.
Jo Walton, Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown. Rereads. This…is maybe not the most cheerful time to read an alternate history trilogy about the rise of fascism in midcentury Britain, but also cheerful is not the only thing we need, and the voice in these is so solid. Also though I spent an entire afternoon upset that [redacted] still dies in the last book on this reread.
Alison Weir, Queens of the Conquest: England’s Medieval Queens. Parts of this book drove me absolutely up a tree, parts were fine, and then we got to the last section, about the Empress Maud, and I was absolutely done with Weir, just plain done. Instead of taking into account the absolute hostility many chroniclers had to a woman exercising solo power ever, Weir speculates that maybe the Empress Maud sucked because of menopause. What. What. Stop that.
John Wiswell, Wearing the Lion. Discussed elsewhere.
This is the eulogy I gave for my grandma today:
When I was eight years old, my grandpa told me, “Rissy, if there’s anything your grandmother can’t do, it’s not worth doing.” When I mentioned this to Grandma decades later, she said, “Really, he said that about me? Oh, that’s nice.” Long pause. “It’s not what he said when he came home from work and found me taking a sledgehammer to the wall of the spare room, though.” I think that over the years Grandpa learned that if Grandma thought she could do something, she probably could, and it was best just to get out of the way and let the magic happen.
My grandma was a hard worker, and you never knew what she’d turn up able to do next. Re-plumb a toilet? Sure, she’d done that. Fancy cake decorating? Did that too. Growing the fruit to make and can her own jams? Grandma was on it. Painting ceramics? A lot of people didn’t realize her Santa Claus decorations were all Beverly originals.
Some people have Christmas and Easter grandmas. Some people have vacation grandmas. I had great holidays and vacations with my grandma, but I had an all-the-time grandma. I had a grandma who stood me up on a chair to stir the blueberry muffins when I wasn’t big enough to reach them yet and showed me how to prune her beautiful roses when I was running through the nearby sprinkler. I had a grandma who was around to teach me how to pop the trap off a sink and how to shuffle a deck of cards.
And WOW could she play cards. She could play any game you put in front of her, and probably beat you at it. Not only was Grandma an incredibly smart card player, but she was improbably lucky. She would draw just the right cards, just the right Scrabble tiles–Grandpa called Scrabble “Beat the Hell Out of Richard” because of the number of times she thoroughly schooled him at it. But she didn’t get mad if she didn’t happen to win any particular game, for two reasons: first, because Grandma just didn’t get mad that much. I spilled an entire glass of chocolate milk over her white pants when I was four, and the only problem we had was that the two of us couldn’t stop laughing about it. And second, because games were mostly an excuse to spend time with people. To spend time with all of you.
Young or old, rich or poor, any race or religion or sexuality, Grandma could talk to anybody–and she did. Jesus would never have had to give my grandma a parable to tell her who was her neighbor, because she never met a neighbor she didn’t want to make into a friend, and she never met a friend she didn’t want to fold into the family. Just a partial list from when I was around–I know there’s a lot more–she made friends on a train with a Finnish nurse, hugged a random British lady at a war memorial after sharing stories of their lost loved ones, and had a fascinating conversation on a Swedish ferry boat with a guy who was in a biker gang. Everyone in the world interested her, and she let them know it.
Grandma was a storyteller–me too, it’s my actual job. That’s not unrelated to having a grandma who was the family historian. She wanted me to have the names and dates right, but she also wanted me to know who people really were. She never confused Joe with David or Cathy with Cindy because even with fifty-five nieces and nephews, she knew them too well to do that, she knew their actual stories. I grew up not just being able to rattle off “Ardean Leona Don Thelma Vince Lois Harlan Bud Gale Donna Grandma Doris Dud,” but to know that Uncle Harlan loved to sing and Aunt Leona was an absolute killer at the bowling alley.
At her eightieth birthday party, she wanted me to come meet all her friends–and what she really wanted was for me to have a special word for each one so that they’d know that she had been talking to her family about them. So that they would know that they were important to her. So I stood there with her for over an hour, saying things like, “Now, this is your friend who’s from Philadelphia?” “You’re the knitter, right?” “I hear I’m not supposed to mess with YOU at the bridge table!” Because Grandma had been talking to me about them, but more importantly she had spent my whole life teaching me to listen to the kind of tidbit that told you things about a person and made them feel like they were special to you. And she had spent my whole life doing it with my friends the other way around, so she taught me how it works.
My grandma lived a long, happy, accomplished life. But out of all she ever did, what she wanted most in the world was for you all to feel wanted. For every single one of you to know that you were special to her. In her obituary, we wrote that she would want us to list you all by name, but for Grandma that wouldn’t be enough. She’d want me to tell a story about herself WITH every single one of you, every friend and every single family member, to tell the world how special you were to her.
I don’t think she always saw that that made her the special one.
I.
The truth is
We’re all born with a natural speed
And mine is a bit
Overclocked. I’ve always been like this.
When I was a kid
My aunt tried to tell me
To go to bed with a book to fall asleep.
Laughed when I took two.
Stopped laughing when I came padding out
In little stocking feet
In need of more.
There’s room for words in here.
II.
The truth is
I don’t like the way I feel
When I scroll on my phone: jittery.
Anxious. It’s hard to say this
Without sounding like I’m claiming a virtue
I’m not. I just don’t like
The fidgety feeling. Also
I was born with more than my share
Of executive function.
I brought enough for the whole class.
So it’s easier for me to do
What I mean to do. To find my intention.
III.
The truth is
I was probably bitten in infancy
By a radioactive bookworm,
Though there is no record of this.
IV.
The truth is
I like to read. Reading is what I like best.
I squeeze it in
When I can. Stir the soup. Read a little.
Fold the laundry. Read a little.
Do my work. Read a little.
Call my mom. Read a little.
Also words are my job, so sometimes
This looks like:
Read a little. Read a little.
V.
The truth is
Last month I sat by my grandmother’s bed
While she died. And I read.
I read in the hospital. I read in hospice.
For most of it
She no longer wanted to talk
Rarely asked for water
So I read.
Mystery novel after mystery novel
Justice following justice
Until her end. Books sustained me
While I tried to let go
Of sustaining her.
Books were not her refuge
But because she embraced me,
She embraced them being mine.
I would rather mourn
With Tennyson than without
With Dylan Thomas than without.
I hated last month
But I got through it with books.
That’s how.
(Periodically someone asks me. This was today’s answer.)
Review copy provided by the author, who is a close friend.
John Wiswell has a lot of thoughts about monsters, and a lot of thoughts about family. We’ve been treated to musings and permutations in various short stories and in his first book. Now with his sophomore effort, these themes come into play in a new playground: Greek myth.
Specifically, the Labors of Hercules.
Why does the most famous product of Zeus’s philandering bear a name that gives glory to his wife? What did Hera think of the whole situation–and what did Heracles? Is there anything to the labors other than roaring, stomping, and carnage? If you’ve ever read anything by John before, you’ll be unsurprised that finding a way forward through vengeance involves a lot more gentleness and humor than in the original. When the Lion of Nemea gets a name and personality, you know you’re in for some very different labors than ever before, and the sly commentary on both Greek myth and our current mores had me startling the people around me with my giggles. Wiswell’s Heracles is one of the most earnest heroes you’ll ever find–and his deeply felt sincerity has a piquant contrast in Hera’s vengeful rage. Highly recommended, John does not disappoint.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
First: arachnophobes should not read this novella. No, seriously. Do not. The cover is not an overdramatization of how arachnid-laden the book is, if anything the cover is an understatement. It is constant spiders up in here. Flee while you still can.
Okay, for those of you who did not run screaming from that: I am not the target audience for this book, I think. I’m not actually opposed to wall-to-wall spiders (seriously, literally), but this is the kind of sapphic monsterfucker book that I think would be intolerable if it was about straight people, and I don’t actually find it less intolerable this way. “Sure she literally eats people on a whim, but she has never felt truly seen and I truly see her” uh cool story pal but not actually a cooler story with “she” than it would be with “he.”
I know that there is a target audience for this book! That “she is a horrible giant spider lady who does horrible things in a vividly described setting, and then the sex” is something some people really, truly want. If that’s you, here it is, no shaming here, just: wow is that not for me, I will be somewhere else.
Mario Alejandro Ariza, Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe. Ariza has some weird ideas about what personal resilience might mean, but other than that this is a passionate and thoughtful book that does exactly what it says on the tin.
Clara Benson, The Body on Archangel Beach, A Case of Perplexity in Piccadilly, The Scandal at 23 Mount Street, and The Shadow at Greystone Chase. Kindle. Look, here’s how the last three weeks have gone: I show up at the hospital or the hospice, I read a mystery novel more or less straight through while waiting for Grandma or a member of the medical staff to need something, which they mostly did not. Some days I read two. These sure are mystery novels in the series they’re in, and I sure did read them. I hate the love interest in the Angela Marchmont series. HATE. So that made the back half of the series less fun for me. But basically? they still functioned as historical mysteries when I needed them to. Would I have read them eventually? Certainly. Would I have read all of them in a fortnight in other circumstances? I sure would not, and that will apply to some of the rest of this post as well.
Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 14-16. Kindle. The middle of a serial that is doing some fun school tropes on Mars. I’m not caught up yet, but I’m closer.
P.F. Chisholm, A Famine of Horses. Thank heavens this is the first one in its series and I like it, because the strategic mystery novel supplies have been pretty endangered here. This is an historical with Sir Robert Carey on the Scottish border during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. If that sounds like fun to you, it probably will be.
Agatha Christie, A Caribbean Mystery, Elephants Can Remember, Murder in Mesopotamia, Ordeal By Innocence, Sleeping Murder, and The Hunter’s Lodge Case (Kindle last one only). These are as varied as hers generally are, from a nice enough puzzle story to a really loathsome book I recommend that you not read. (That one would be Ordeal By Innocence, which manages to be toxic about suicidality, adoption, incest, and probably a few more things I’ve forgotten in recoiling from its horrors.)
Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Kindle. The emphasis on the necessity of respect for solving social problems is an interesting thread through this book. As her selection of Ferguson as the titular example indicates, this book predates a lot of recent developments, and it’d be interesting to see what, if anything, she would say or analyze differently now.
Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Three interesting women of different religions and nationalities, and an analysis of what their gender did to shape their lives in the same era but very different contexts. Interesting stuff.
Giorgio De Maria, Twenty Days of Turin. Dark Italian surrealism, I didn’t really resonate with it but am always glad stuff gets translated.
Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All There Is. This is kind of a weird book, because it’s very much a memoir of Gretel Ehrlich–not an autobiography, it doesn’t have the comprehensive structure of an autobiography–but there isn’t really a clear memoir throughline either. Home, maybe? I don’t know, if you’ve liked Ehrlich’s work before (I have), this is more of it, just don’t expect a cohesive work.
Margaret Frazer, A Play of Heresy, A Play of Piety, A Play of Treachery, The Sempster’s Tale, The Simple Logic of It. Kindle. I feel like I could see the shapes of two different things she was setting up for herself and then didn’t have the chance to do, which is a shame. I also feel like she got to see how she really really liked doing political mysteries late in her career, which, more power to her.
Yoel Hoffman, ed., Japanese Death Poems: Written By Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death. This had very strong “edited by a white guy when I was in grade school” vibes to its surrounding materials, which were copious, but the poems themselves were interesting.
Togzhan Kassenova, Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb. I particularly liked how this went into the nuts and bolts of activism and both national and international politics that went into this decision. Fascinating stuff. This is the book I bought myself for my grandpa’s birthday this year, and it was a great choice, he would have called me at least four times to read passages out.
Rose Macaulay, I Would Be Private. This is one of Macaulay’s lesser novels, a satire on shallow publicity. It’s about a family that unexpectedly has quintuplets and their attempts to flee the press. Some of it is very very funny. Some of it is attempting to be non-racist and not hitting the mark. Some of it is not attempting. I would not recommend this to anyone but completists and people studying media saturation/personal publicity, but I am one of the former, and I’m glad I’ve read it.
Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season. Discussed elsewhere.
Noel Streatfeild, Dancing Shoes. Reread. This is one of the lesser ones, I think–weirdly I also think it’s the first one I ever read. The thing that’s interesting about it to me now that I’ve read Streatfeild’s adult novels is that I think this is the children’s book where she attempts to acknowledge the kind of low-brow characters who show up fairly often in her adult work–Hilary is a good dancer but has no ambition in that direction, would much rather have fun in the chorus, will grow up to be a chorus girl and ideally find a nice man and raise babies. She does not gain depth over the course of the book because the plot is not about that, it’s about sisters accepting themselves and each other for who they are. Which I like a lot actually. “Everyone has to do the thing you value” is not okay. What I don’t really like is the ending–I feel like Rachel would be happier if she had some other talent and interest, and there’s no reason she shouldn’t except that this is what a happy ending looks like for a lot of Streatfeild’s children’s books.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
One of my complaints about noir written in this century is that some of the people who try it are trying for an aesthetic rather than depth. Onyebuchi has both here. There is the form of noir, which is easy enough, but also its deeply disaffected substance. The reality of French colonialism in West Africa has seriously informed this short fantastical novel–there is a richness to the details, even the ones that are not within our physical realm. It feels simultaneously extremely fresh and specifically creative–post-colonialist genre noir West African fantasy, not very common in publishing to date–and so well combined that it feels natural, almost inevitable. It’s a hard balance to pull off, and Onyebuchi does it beautifully here.
Boubacar has had a run of catastrophically bad luck, and his work as a private eye is not going well. Disappearing women (cut to bloody ribbons!) on his doorstep do not make him feel like his luck has turned. And his city–which is his all the way through, French occupiers’ and indigenous dugulen’s quarters both fitting and neither fitting him–is getting more full of gory mysteries by the day. It’s hard for Bouba to stay true to his inmost self when he’s not sure what that is–and maybe getting justice is more important anyway? but if he could see his way clear to both….