Author: Marissa Lingen

George Abraham and Noor Hindi, eds., Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. Some poets in this new to me, some I’d read in their own collections. I think one of the benefits of a collection like this is that it’s much harder for an uncareful reader to think “I guess I don’t like Palestinian poetry” because there’s so much variety of it, even the stuff that’s focused on Being Palestinian as opposed to all the other things Palestinian poets write poems about.

Lloyd Alexander, Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen. Rereads. Ha. “Rereads.” Probably the most reread books of my life after the first decade. I was just thinking that maybe this would be the reread when I got nothing new out of them except continued enjoyment and then I came upon the passage that made me cry about living in Minnesota in early 2026, thanks, Lloyd. (Seriously though thanks, sometimes we need the catharsis.)

Rebecca Boyd, Exploring Ireland’s Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes. Glad that a friend talked about this, because it does exactly the sort of thing I like where it talks about where the interior walls went in a typical building changing over time and what that meant socially and where people stored their hazelnuts and that. Material culture for the win.

Andre M. Carrington, ed., The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories. A book club read, and I feel like reaction was not unified but more unified than a lot of the other books we’ve discussed–a lot more closer to “we all think this is a very good story,” “nobody likes this story but we all respect it,” etc. Still a lot that’s worth discussing here.

Christopher de Hamel, The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts. Lavishly illustrated and focused on the people who have been focused on the manuscripts. If you’re a person who thinks of yourself as having friends and kindred souls across spacetime, de Hamel is with you, and here is a book about some of his and the (increasingly old) books they loved.

Peter Dickinson, King and Joker. Reread. One of the most coming of age coming of age stories I have ever read in my life, wrapped in a tidy murder mystery, with Dickinson getting to do an alternate history of a type that is often neglected, the fairly minor change type. I still do like this for its complicated relationships that are allowed to stay complicated.

Amal El-Mohtar, Seasons of Glass and Iron. Discussed elsewhere.

Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. Creative nonfiction about the effects of violence at every scale, sweeping where I would have liked it to be specific, readable but not really what I was looking for.

Rokeya Hussain, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag. Mostly historically interesting rather than fun reads for me: this is the work of a very early 20th century Indian feminist writer who used the structure of a dream to talk about the future–popular at the turn of the last millennium, from what I can tell. It was very much a “nuh uh we don’t suck, you suck” vision in places, but one can understand that in context. And now I know.

Ange Mlinko, Venice: Poems. Literal and figurative Venice, waters and references. I liked this in a mellow sort of way, even though they aren’t all mellow poems.

Jared Poon, City of Others. I’m not sure what’s getting us so many good Singaporean authors available in the US in the last decade or so, but I’m for it, I’m absolutely for it. This is in the “weird magical things handled by a specialist in a modern city” subgenre, which I like depending on the skill of the author and the interest of the magical things, and this has both skill and interest.

Anthony Price, The Labyrinth Makers. Reread. Several of the other spy things I had recently revisited from the mid-late twentieth were, frankly, stupid, and I was a bit worried that this, which I remembered as non-stupid, would also be stupid. It was not. Whew. It was clearly a spy novel written both by and about a white British man in 1970, but with less of the attendant gender stuff and a lot less of the attendant race stuff than one might fear in that context. There are several more in this series, which I will also be revisiting as I get around to it, I think. One of the virtues of this series is that I remember them varying considerably; we’ll see if and where that also ends up being one of its drawbacks.

T.K. Rex, The Wildcraft Drones. Discussed elsewhere.

John Sayles, Crucible. This is exactly what I wanted out of a John Sayles novel. I’m pretty sure he didn’t write it just for me, but he could have. (This was also true of A Moment in the Sun and Yellow Earth.) This one is centered on Detroit in the Great Depression, with tentacles as far north as the UP and as far south as Brazil. It has Sayles’s use of multiple perspectives that are genuinely different to make for a richer story of its placetimes and their people. Love it. I did notice that his rather too frequent habit of italicizing the single syllable of a word that would make the sentence sound like it would if David Strathairn was saying it, but you know, we all have our quirks.

Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped. I had enjoyed the others of Sebastian’s things I’d read, two mysteries and an historical novel, all with a m/m love story in them, so I thought, hey, maybe I will like a genuine romance by this author, maybe we have found the place where my taste and genre romance overlaps. Answer: not quite. I read the whole thing, and it was fine, it’s a nice book with nice people in it, but all the questions I had for the narrative were not the ones it was interested in answering. I can easily imagine describing a book the same way–“two actors who have been on the same science fiction TV series for years fall in love and have to navigate their personal, professional, and public selves”–and having it be focused on the questions that interest me…and that would not be this novel, which was largely interested in their relationship. Which is exactly what its genre claims it will do, and the people who are looking for that will likely find it very satisfying. Ah well, it’s good to explore these things to find out.

Una L. Silberrad, Success. Kindle. I spent a lot of my college years and just beyond thinking and talking about the way that the image and self-image of physics and chemistry changed after each of the two World Wars, but it’s still fascinating to stumble upon something like this, a pre-Great War book that lionizes its engineer hero to a degree that’s been impossible since my grandparents came of age, that seems to take as its thesis that brilliant engineers gotta brilliant engineer, that assumes as obvious that of course a British engineer has the right to sell his weapon plans to France and Germany…in a novel that came out in 1912…. I continue to enjoy the places Silberrad actively rejected some of the standard romance plots that don’t fit her characters. This is a book that also has places where I’m not sure whether she’s actually neutral on there being background Jewish characters, but there’s room for that reading, so I went with it. (Narrative: so lots of this guy’s friends were Jewish; me: same, buddy, same; narrative: now on to the plot that has nothing to do with his pals; me: sure, okay.)

Rebecca Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Another essay collection, about building the new in a time of turmoil, not one of her more outstanding books but still worth a read.

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn (The Irish Member). Kindle. Is it Trollope’s fault? the thing where people want to tell the stories of the emotional and professional lives of politicians without being, you know, political? Because I hate that thing, and here’s a bunch of it–quite a large bunch–he is no more committed to brevity here than he ever was. The ending only makes sense structurally: you can see that’s what he’s working towards, but not because he’s making anything make it satisfying, just because that’s what this shape of thing is going to do and by God it does it. The thing is, it’s Trollope, so this is not his least satisfying book, not by a long shot, because he manages not to make Finn a cartoon Irishman, thank God, except that it makes me say, okay, look, you could see some of the trouble of being a shunned ethnic minority in this context? yes? and yet when it came to Jewish people in your other books? yes? no, apparently no? But also it is not nearly one of the most satisfying Trollope books, because the tropes don’t play well with the actual characters he’s written. I see that there’s a sequel, so I looked up a synopsis, and I think he saw that he’d done the same thing, but it doesn’t make me want to read the sequel really, because I will get even angrier at the treatment of at least two characters as tools of the titular character’s arc, I think.

Olivia Waite, Nobody’s Baby. A novella with an unusual shape of mystery enabled specifically by the science fiction setting, which is much more satisfying to me than having science fiction upholstery and mystery engine. There were a few bits that were more mannered than I’d like, but I’d just been reading Trollope and may have gotten oversensitized.

Lesley Wheeler, Mycocosmic. Poems both metaphorically and literally about fungi, definitely right up my alley and I bet right up the alley of several other people around here too.

Darcie Wilde, The Matter of the Secret Bride. Another of the Rosalind Thorne mysteries–one of the two my library didn’t have, so I read it a bit out of order. It’s the kind of mystery series where that doesn’t matter greatly, and the places where it touches on actual history were entertaining as hoped.

Yoojin Grace Wuertz, Everything Belongs to Us. I felt like the ending of this book did not really come together at all. The things Wuertz was trying to do with class at the beginning just fell apart, and especially how they tied in with the title mostly fell apart, and the bit where people actually overcame their obstacles to reach their goals mostly happened off the page between the last proper chapter and the epilogue. I hate to spoiler something like this, but I know that infant death and particularly infant death for plot convenience are very, very bad things for some of my friends to encounter unawares, so I’m going to say right out: there is a baby who is on the page for a large chunk of the novel and whose presence is not convenient, and then he just dies off the page and no one has to have any emotional reaction to it. Which is too bad, because the beginning was very promising, and we don’t get a lot of novels in English about Seoul in the late 1970s. Endings are hard, I’ll tell you that for free.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The line between mosaic novel and themed short story collection is a very blurry one, but I spent 99% of this book fairly sure that it was in the latter category. And then I got to the end and I don’t know any more. These stories are linked thematically and by their science fictional world conceit. There’s not an overarching character arc for any characters told in these tales.

…unless, as I was carefully taught as a high school sophomore, the setting can be a character, in which case there absolutely is character arc here, and a very settling/satisfying one too. These science fiction stories have a consistent thread of using technology to reach out to the natural world and to heal the things that are already broken in our time. There’s a wide range of characters–dolphins, robots, cats! humans I guess if you need those!–and they are generally not perfect but doing their best, which is basically my favorite kind of characters.

I am not the target audience for the type of mini-comic that appears in a few places throughout the book, but these particular examples of the form are charming and fit well with the stories around them. I feel like “now, more than ever” is one of those cliches I don’t want to lean too hard on in 2026, but also now, more than ever, we really do need stories about doing the best we can with what we’ve got, and these are that, and I’m so glad they’re all in one place to lean on.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

This morning I wrote to another friend, “I’ve finished reading Amal’s new collection, and now the only problem is how to write a review that’s laudatory enough.” “A good problem to have,” my friend correctly noted.

Seriously, though. I’ve read most of these stories before, but when I came to each one, it was a matter of, “Oh, I loved this one!” rather than “Oh yeah, this one.” There is a stylistic and thematic inclination to the stories that never rises to sameness. It’s such a distillation of why I have been consistently happy to see these stories (and a few poems!) in the venues where they’ve appeared, for the years they’ve been appearing.

If you were hoping that this would be a source of new Amal stories, you’ll have to keep waiting, this is the kind of collection that’s a culmination of previous work rather than a revelation of new. But it’s a beautiful slim volume, I’m thrilled to have it, I will press it upon my friends and relations, hurrah. Hurrah.

Ruth Awad, Set to Music a Wildfire. A poetry collection that is very directly about her experiences as a daughter of a Lebanese immigrant and her father’s experiences in Lebanon. Interesting but not particularly subtle; I’m not sure it’s fair to demand subtlety on these topics.

M.H. Ayinde, A Song of Legends Lost. A thumping big fantasy. Did I read this because one of the characters is eating plantains very early on and I love plantains? Well. That wasn’t the only reason. But the things it said about the worldbuilding drew me in and kept me going for many hundred pages.

Shane Bobrycki, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages. Bobrycki noticed a gaping hole between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance when it came to the influence of large group behavior in Europe, and this book is him examining what we know about that, what crowds there actually were, what impact they had on the life of their cultures and why. He manages to remember that Europe does not just mean Italy at first and later France and England, which is always nice.

Eliane Boey, Club Contango. I really like Boey’s prose, and this started out well for me, but as the narrative bore inexorably down on the plot twist and I could no longer pretend it would not be that particular plot twist–which I had foreseen at the very beginning and really hoped it would not be–I grew more and more frustrated. Here’s hoping her next thing doesn’t lean on a twist of that particular sort.

Sarah E. Bond, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire. Bond is clear and explicit about where she’s drawing parallels between modern unions and ancient groups that have similar traits, and she’s willing to make her arguments about them specific rather than handwavey. A corrective for too much of the assumption that the people of the past were not like us, and an angle on the ancient world more interesting to me than most.

Michael Brown, The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371. Definitely what it says on the tin, from the top-down perspective rather than anything about what these wars were like for the rank and file. Did you know the Scots were not a restful people in this era? welp.

Steph Cherrywell, The Ink Witch. I loved this so much. It’s MG fantasy that’s actually funny rather than adult-trying-too-hard, it’s got ink magic and a tarantula familiar and a lovely fierce trans heroine whose plot is not about being trans, it’s about magic quests and family politics and mermaids and yeti and running a little motel. It’s so great, I’m so happy about this book.

P.F. Chisholm, A Taste of Witchcraft. At this point in this series (this is book 10, don’t start here), we are no longer talking about an historical murder mystery series but more generally an historical adventure series. This one goes very, very vividly into the tortures accused witches suffered, so if you’re not feeling up for that, maybe not this one. It also features quite a bit of my favorite characters in the series, though.

Sunyi Dean, The Girl With a Thousand Faces. Discussed elsewhere.

Nicola Griffith, She Is Here. A short collection of essays, poems, and short stories. Most of the essays were familiar to me from previous sources, but they go well here thematically. I love Griffith’s novels, but her shorter work does not feel as strong or essential to me. For me this is a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

Bassem Khandaqji, A Mask the Color of the Sky. A novel about a young Palestinian man who has aspirations in both archaeology and fiction–who is writing a novel about Mary Magdalen, or trying to–who looks at the wider world and wants a wider life. And then he finds an ID that will allow him, with his particular appearance, to readily pass as a Jewish Israeli, and he does that for a while, and it’s the sort of book where the complications are primarily internal, emotional, mental, about his place in the world and his identity, rather than thriller novel shooty-shoot complications. It’s short and fairly straightforward.

Margrit Pernau, Emotions and Temporalities. Kindle. This is one of a series of short monographs that I downloaded a while ago, and it’s the first where I’ve really felt that the format limited content beyond what was useful. I wanted a lot more context on emotionality and assessments of past/present/future in the cultures Pernau was discussing; I felt like more and longer examples would have strongly benefitted her argument. Ah well, I’m told you can’t win them all.

Dana Simpson, Unicorn Secrets. This is the latest of a collection of daily strips of the comic Phoebe & Her Unicorn, which I don’t read daily, I read them in collection form. It is nice and fun and nice. Is this the best of them, no, but it does what I wanted it to do, it is a pleasant diversion.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. Reread. So one of the things I didn’t fully notice when I read this the first time, 25 years ago on a friend’s futon waiting for another friend’s wedding, is that this is an almost perfect balance of Victorian and modern novel. Specifically: money is allowed to be the main concern. Money is discussed in detail, what food you can get for it and what clothes and what marriage will do about it and how we feel about that. Marriage is still considered to be the main way that women handle money, but no longer the only way (and the ending makes that matter rather than blurring to a romantic “isn’t it lovely that the marrying couple just happens to have enough funds after all?” that some of the other books both Victorian and modern fall back on). It is very matter-of-fact about sex and sexuality for its publication date, but not in a smarmy or overbalanced way. This is also one of fiction’s non-evil stepmothers, and bless her for that.

D.E. Stevenson, Miss Buncle’s Book. Kindle. A very gentle comedy about a spinster in a small village who writes a novel with keen observations of all her neighbors and sets the whole town on its ear. I’m fascinated by the line Stevenson manages to walk between letting the Great Depression feel real (Miss Buncle needs her book to make her money! it’s not quite as money-focused as I Capture the Castle but still) and still keeping it upbeat for the people who were reading the book as an escape from that very same Great Depression. Not terribly deep, fairly predictable in its larger plot though not necessarily in its scene incidentals, fun all the same.

Ethan Tapper, How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World. I was a bit disappointed in this, which aims at being a lyrical memoir of a life in forestry. The lyricism is repetitive (which is harder to forgive considering how short this volume is) and in places twee (writing some sections about himself in the third person as “the man” did not work for me), and in general there was a great deal less how than I hoped for. He talked about what he was doing, he even talked in general terms about those who might not understand how killing plants could help a forest ecosystem. But as it was memoir rather than science essay, he felt no need to go into the evidence behind his positions–and, crucially, actions.

Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is such a fresh and vivid fantasy, it is achingly sad and exciting and wry by turns. I am so glad I got to read this. It tangles two timelines, the “past” of the 1940s and the “present” of the 1970s, both in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City slum and then reaching out to the areas around it. Mercy Chan doesn’t have any memories when she washes up on the shores of Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation–a terrible time to be friendless and unprotected. But she isn’t quite either thing, because she has Bao, her maogui (cat ghost)–not a type of spirit known to be friendly, but Bao has apparently made an exception for Mercy.

Bao won’t be the last of the local ghosts, spirits, and gods we meet in the course of this book (although he is my favorite). Mercy’s talent at communicating with ghosts has given her steady work with the triads for decades. Now her past is catching up to her, and if she can’t remember what it was, her future looks imperiled–and so does the future of Hong Kong itself. This is a book that seeks kindness in a world that doesn’t always think it has room to be kind, and I found it to be a very satisfying read indeed.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also I’ve been friends with both authors for a good long while.

Which makes this a very weird book for me to read, honestly, because I met both Jo and Ada through SFF fandom and conventions, through all writing and talking and thinking about genres, and so a lot of the first third of this book is, for me, “the obvious stuff people talk about all the time.” Well, sure. Because Jo and Ada are people, and I am around them talking about this kind of thing all the time (or at least intermittently for more than twenty years in one case and more than fifteen in the other, so it adds up), so naturally their points of view on genre theory are in the general category of “stuff I would logically have been exposed to by now.” It’s a bit “Hamlet is just a string of famous quotes strung together,” as reactions go: kind of the cart before the horse. And it means that there are a few things that are in the category of “oh right, there’s the thing I always disagree with Jo about; look, she still has her own idea about it rather than mine, go figure.” This is to be expected given the long and winding discussion it’s been, but it makes it a bit harder for me to say useful things about what it will look like to most readers.

So the first third of the book is the part that most obviously fits the title–it’s the section that has the largest-scale thoughts about the nature of genre qua genre. The second third was the most satisfying to me: it was thoughts on disability and pain. I think a too-casual reader might mistake it for random padding to make this book book-length without requiring Jo and/or Ada (some of the sections are co-written and some are written solo by each author) to write more entirely new material. But no. Absolutely not. The way that Jo and Ada process disability is strongly shaped by each of their perspectives as SFF writers and readers, and the way they process SFF is–sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly–shaped by their lived experiences as disabled people. Some of our personal stories are about the project of science fiction and fantasy. Jo’s and Ada’s are. And they’re useful–powerful–to see on the page like this. This is where knowing people for a quite long time doesn’t give me a “yes I have already been here” reaction, because three disabled friends do not talk about disability and personal history and its place in the speculative project in the same way as two of them would write about it for a general audience. It’s a view from a very different angle, which is great to have. The last section is more miscellany, still related to the title but more specifics, less sweeping theory. It’s labeled craft, and this is true, but in a broad sense–there are pieces about The Princess Bride and optimism and censorship as well as about protagonists and empathy in a structural sense.

I wonder if people who come to this book from reading mostly Ada rather than both but by the numbers more Jo would see how Jo has influenced Ada’s prose voice in the joint pieces. For me, the stylistic commonalities with Inventing the Renaissance were really striking, but if you’d come directly from reading that I wonder how much you’d be saying, oh, that’s got to be Jo Walton because it’s not really what I’m used to from Ada Palmer solo! Co-authorship is an interesting beast, and I feel like there’s a difficult balance here that’s partially achieved by having pieces by each person solo as well as the two together. I’m not sure I can immediately come up with another thing like it that way.

Joan Coggin, The Mystery at Orchard House, Why Did She Die?, and Dancing With Death. So I finished this series all in one gulp, which I wouldn’t have done if a friend had not lent me the last two, but…they did, so here we are, no regrets whatsoever. They’re very much on the light end of mystery, and Lady Lupin remains funny and generally quite kind. I don’t know that they’re going to change your life except for giving you some pleasant hours in your life, which…sometimes is the kind of changing your life a person needs right now.

Kate Emery, The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide to Murder. This is a YA mystery from an Australian writer, and while I don’t know a lot of Australian teens, the voice feels authentic to me. Another on the light end of mystery, successfully so.

Jamie Holmes, The Free and the Dead: The Untold Story of the Black Seminole Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America’s Forgotten War. I really appreciated having a lot more about this period filled in. I feel like the way that American schools taught the Trail of Tears, at least when I was in school and I strongly suspect now, sort of…had it happen in isolation. Did not encourage people to do the math and realize that the Southern whites who were “defending their way of life” had in many cases had that land and that way of life for less time than I’ve lived in the house I live in now. The relationships between Black Americans and Native Americans have been complex and interesting, and a book that focuses on some of that also does a better job of decentering whiteness than many histories, so hurray for that.

S.L. Huang, The Language of Liars. Discussed elsewhere.

Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Woman-Led Uprising. Oof, the timing on this one. Well. It’s an earnest account from two writers, one of whom was on the ground for the events described. This is very recent history–2022-24 or thereabouts–so if you don’t have any familiarity with Iran outside that period you’ll probably want additional reading before or after reading this, but I think after would be fine, I think you could learn about these brave women now and get more of their backstory later with no problem.

Judy I. Lin, Song of the Six Realms. This was secondary world YA fantasy that frankly did not stick with me particularly well. There was a girl musician swept away to a magical realm with peril and stuff, and it was fine, it did just fine at that, but I wasn’t really driven to seek out more of the author’s work.

C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game. For my group of friends I am very much toward the “non-game-enthusiast” end of the spectrum, so one of the things that was interesting to me about this book is that he could be very clear about what things appeal to game enthusiasts in ways that I could understand even if I didn’t share them. But I think the parallels and cross-connections with games and metrics, and how to keep that from growing toxic, is some really useful stuff, worth thinking about.

Karen Parkman, The Jills. This was a very readable thriller that ended up mildly disappointing to me in the end. The protagonist is a member of the Buffalo Bills American football team’s cheerleader group, the Jills (if you’re like me you did not know that they had a special name), and another of her cheerleader friends goes missing. She has dealt with missing loved ones before because her sister has struggled with addiction, which makes for compelling backstory in a thriller context. However, I felt like several of the plot twists were not very smart (“what if your stalker actually helps you out and is not the real problem” no stop that), and the ending pulled its punches both on dealing with the toxic aspects of professional football cheerleading that it had started to gesture at and at making the protagonist deal with her personal life choices and history.

Cat Sebastian, After Hours at Dooryard Books. I am a tough sell for romances, and I don’t want to say “but this isn’t a romance” just because I like it. It is, it is a romance between two men in 1968. It is also an historical novel about grief. It is both, it can be both, and it is very beautifully both. It also involves raising a baby and learning to be a family. It is also about moving forward from things you are not proud of without denying they’ve happened. I love this book. I am so glad about this book. I picked it up because two different friends said it was just what they needed right now, and it was just what I needed too.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a novella with a whole range of aliens with different language features, wildly different environments, etc. Several of my friends just stopped reading this review to go pre-order or request that their library do so. You are correct, if that is the sort of thing you like, this sure is that thing.

What it does less successfully, I think, is the twist ending. I feel like this is a book that is for people who like science fiction about aliens, but for me, as soon as I knew the premise, I knew the ending, and I was correct. So if you’re reading for the aliens, come on in; if you’re reading for a clever twist you did not see coming, this is not that novella, that is not where Huang spent time and energy.