Category: Uncategorized

Lois McMaster Bujold, Dark Sight Dare. Kindle. This is a very nice novella. It is not twisty, it is not startling, it is a very kind story about people doing their best with difficult circumstances. I don’t think it’s the best place to begin the series, but it’s a pleasant addition thereto.

William Dalrymple, Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42. Kindle. It’s a really useful and thoughtful book, but what it is not is uplifting. Great Game my arse. Anyway it’s still worth knowing this stuff, it affects the modern world and remains interesting.

Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. Oh this was so good. Oh my goodness, this was so good. Again not with the uplifting, except that in some ways it was, that people’s determination to free themselves and their families was actually pretty wonderful, and hearing the details of how they did it–this should be taught in more schools all over North America, this was absolutely great. Some people fled completely naked! They just got out, and reading about their communities and lives was really neat.

Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Kindle. I was on vacation! I’m so much fun to take on vacation! This is a book about the early AIDS epidemic in Haiti and featuring Haitians abroad, and it does actual math and science about how the Haitian people were far, far more sinned against than sinning here. Not fun times but useful to know–and Farmer wrote a new preface about dealing with new pandemics, alas that he should have to.

Margaret Frazer, Shakespeare’s Mousetrap. Kindle. The supposed secret history of Titus Andronicus and its role in (fictional) actual murder; I think this is my least favorite of her shorts, and probably I should just stop reading them, completeness is not an unmixed virtue.

Sarah Gristwood, Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Kindle. Queens and princesses and what they did and where they went, not enough breadth in my opinion but still better than nothing.

Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. Kindle. This is a book from about ten years ago, and it’s heartbreaking how real and deadly these problems already were then, and how much worse now.

W.F. Kirby, The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country. Kindle. You can probably tell from the way this is titled that it is a quite old book. It maddeningly is not the Kalevipoeg but rather a sort of summary of the Kalevipoeg. Kirby blithely informs us that he has omitted many irrelevant passages, some of which might have been of great interest to me, but this is very much a beggars/choosers situation. It exists, I could read this much at least, welp.

E.C.R. Lorac, Murder in Vienna. Kindle. Golden Age puzzle-type mystery. I did not bond with any of the characters, but it rattled along reasonably well and I will keep reading this author.

Casey McQuiston, The Pairing. Kindle. I continue to explore the boundaries of what romance I might like, and the answer here is: eh. It was briskly written, it was amusing, it was fine on a train…and I continued to want the character relationships with other people to matter.

Linda Proud, Pallas and the Centaur. Kindle. Second book in her “Botticelli trilogy,” historical fiction set during the Italian Renaissance. This is mostly not fantasy (no centaurs were harmed in the making of this book) except for the bit where someone might be possessed by a deity from antiquity. I think it will work better if you’ve read the first one, so you know what she’s doing with her fictional central characters in the middle of all the real historical figures.

Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. I didn’t set out to have a slavery theme in the nonfiction reading in this fortnight, but I found this in the Museum of Archaeology and History in Montreal and knew I wouldn’t find it again readily. It was really good at nuance and variation in ways that were extremely informative.

D.E. Stevenson, Miss Buncle Married. Kindle. The second in its very light series, and don’t start with this one; you’ll enjoy the central characters more if you have the perspective on where they started. Short. Fun.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Monday Starts on Saturday. Kindle. A reread technicality: this is a very different, and much better, translation than the one I read a few decades ago. I feel like this is particularly crucial for speculative satire. Luckily for me, this edition translates the title as “starts” whereas the other translates it as “begins,” so it will be easy to keep track of which one I want. Surreal and funny.

Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys. Kindle. I read this because I trust Claire Tomalin as a biographer, not because I have a particularly keen interest in Pepys, and it did not disappoint. Her sense of context, her ability to be thoughtfully positive where possible without losing track of her subject’s flaws–she’s one of the best in the business, and this is an interesting book even if you’re not completely fascinated with Pepys.

Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne. Kindle. The ending spelled itself out in such clear detail from the outset that I can’t really say it’s one of my favorite Trollopes, but it’s not one of my least favorites either, as he wasn’t notably bigoted in any particular direction–and in fact he seemed to be arguing for acceptance of “illegitimate” children as full members of society. It was a reasonable thing to read on a plane.

Vanessa Walters, The Lagos Wife. A thriller set in Nigeria among the foreign-born wives of wealthy Nigerians. While the twist ending wasn’t my favorite, the multiplicity of cultural perspectives was exquisitely well-done and nuanced. I’ll keep an eye out for anything else Walters chooses to do.

Posting a bit early because I will be on vacation until it’s time to do another one of these, and doing a whole month at once is too daunting.

K.J. Charles, Unfit to Print. Quite short mystery and m/m romance, with intense conversations between the characters about what kinds of pornography are and are not exploitative. Not going to be a favorite but interesting at what it’s doing.

Agatha Christie, The Unexpected Guest. Kindle. I’ve read Agatha Christies before, and this sure is one. Absolutely chock full of loathsome people and not particularly great about disability. Jazz hands.

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Kindle. I finished reading this just so I could complain about it accurately. My God what a terrible book. I wonder if I should be skeptical of all “new histories of the world.” I suspect so. The thing is that he does such a completely terrible job of actually talking about the Silk Road that this is still largely a book about the British and American empires, but not a detailed accounting of their presence in the region. Partition of India? never met her. Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution? how could that possibly matter, probably not worth the time. What. Sir. So many things I would like to know about Central Asia and still do not know, because Frankopan fundamentally does not care. Not at all recommended, I read it so you don’t have to.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories. Kindle. Some really lovely and vividly written stories here. Not all to my taste, but it’s rare that a collection is.

Ariel Kaplan, The Kingdom of Almonds. I really just love getting to write “the thrilling conclusion.” I really do. Don’t start here! This is the third book in its series, it is the thrilling conclusion! Start at the beginning, the beginning is still in print, and this is going to wrap things up nicely but you won’t know how nicely if you don’t read the whole thing.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death Came Softly and The Case in the Clinic. Kindle. Cromulent and satisfying Golden Age mysteries, with Golden Age assumptions but not as bad as in your average, oh, say…Agatha Christie.

Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: An American Life. Kindle. Well-done bio of a fascinating person, lots of what was going on with the Transcendentalists, early American feminism, loads of people you’ll want to know about and then Fuller herself trying to fight her way through a system entirely not set up for people even remotely like her. She’s part of how that changed, and she died a horrible death fairly early all things considered, and Marshall handles that reasonably as well.

David Thomas Moore, ed., Not So Stories. Kindle. The real stand-out piece for me in this book was Cassandra Khaw’s, which opened the volume. What a banger of a story, and how perfectly she nailed the Kipling-but-modern brief. Worth the entire price of admission. (Okay, this was a library book, so my price of admission was free. Still, though.)

Anthony Price, The Hour of the Donkey, The Old Vengeful, and Gunner Kelly. Rereads. I am finding the middle of this series less compelling on reread than the early part. I don’t remember the individual late volumes well enough to say whether it just went off a cliff never to return or whether it will bounce back a bit before the end. One of the problems is that I am just not that keen on his WWII stories (The Hour of the Donkey), and he keeps trying to write women and doing it badly. Anthony, apparently you spend all your time with plain women thinking how plain they are, but it turns out that many of them have other things on their mind, and thank God for that. Sigh.

Una L. Silberrad, Princess Puck. Kindle. What a weird title, it’s a nickname that one character gives the protagonist and only he uses. This feels like…it feels like it’s got the plot of a Victorian novel but even though Queen Victoria has just died five minutes ago, Silberrad can no longer really take some of the Victorian axioms quite seriously. She is very thoroughly an Edwardian at this point, in all the ways that felt modern and challenging at the time, and as much as I love a good Victorian novel, I’m all for it.

Maggie Smith, Good Bones. Kindle. I always feel odd when the best poems in a volume are the ones that got widespread reprinting, but I think that’s the case here. And…good? that many people should have seen the best of what’s in this? I guess?

D.E. Stevenson, Spring Magic. Kindle. This is such an interesting reminder that during WWII people were still writing upbeat contemporary novels sometimes. A young woman goes and finds a life by herself, away from the crushing control of her aunt, near a military outpost during World War II, and nearly all the other characters are highly involved with the war. But it doesn’t have that fraught feeling that books with that plot would have if the war in question was over. We have to be sure that the proper characters will have a quite nice time, because the target readers are in the same situation and would prefer to think more about introducing small children to hermit crabs, figuring out something useful to do, and resolving romantic difficulties than about, hey, did you know that death is imminent? So. Possibly instructive for the present moment in some moods. Not a hugely important book, which is fine, they don’t all have to be.

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds. Kindle. Dischism is when the author’s interiority intrudes on the narrative, and gosh were there several moments when I could see Trollope’s own mental state peaking through regarding the titular objects. “She was tired of the Eustace diamonds.” “He wished he had never heard of the Eustace diamonds.” Shh, it’s okay, Anthony, we get it. Because yes, this is not a title tossed off about something that’s only peripheral to the story. The Eustace diamonds are absolutely central to the narrative. The thing that’s fascinating to me is that the entire plot depends on a sensibility about heirloom and ownership that was as completely foreign to me as if the characters had been going into kemmer and acquiring gender. They are fighting about whether the titular diamonds are properly the property of a toddler or of the mother who has full physical custody of him. And Trollope makes that fight clear! It’s just: wow okay what a world and what assumptions.

Darcie Wilde, The Secret of the Lost Pearls. Kindle. This is not the last in this series, but it’s the last one I got a chance to read, and honestly I think it’s the weakest of the lot. Wilde (Sarah Zettel) still and always has a very readable prose voice, but it felt a bit more scattered to me than the others–so if you’re reading this series in order and wonder if it’s going downhill, no, it’s just that it’s quite hard to keep the exact same level for a long series.

Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. Reread. I’m going to be on the Plains of Abraham in May, and I would like to be able to know what I’m looking at. Also I really love this book. He’s so good at the spots where different cultural assumptions clashed disastrously, and he managed to notice that that was happening between colonists and metropolitan British and between different Native tribes from very similar regions as well as between those groups with theoretically larger differences.

K.J. Charles, The Henchmen of Zenda. Kindle. I had to get a new ereader this month, and one of the up sides (down side: I just want to buy things once and have them work forever) is that this one accepts library books. So I went through my wishlist and found bunches of things that the library had in ebook but not in physical copy, hurrah. This was one of them. It was fun, it was…if you wanted the kind of action-y thing that The Prisoner of Zenda was but with modern sensibilities and LOTS of gay sex, this is that. It’s not more than that, but it’s also not less.

Peter Dickinson, Some Deaths Before Dying and The Tears of the Salamander. Kindle. Two very, very different books in genre terms–the former is a meditation on old age with a crime or two here or there, the latter is a kids’ fantasy painted in generally bright colors. What they have in common–what a lot of Dickinson has as a common point–is the willingness to let some people just be rotten, to just go with that and have other people have to oppose it or work around it, and to know that it isn’t necessarily the people they’d have expected would be. Neither will be a favorite but I’m glad I read both.

Nicci French, What Happened That Night. I feel like the subgenre of “college friends back together after at least a decade [in this case three], probably with some murder” is bigger now than it used to be, that in some ways it’s taking the place of “high school reunion, probably with some murder.” I have room for both, but I admit I prefer the college friends because of the element of being able to choose for yourself for the first time, and not always choosing wisely but understandably either way. I also feel like the college friend version tends to be more individual, less dealing in archetypes, both for the friends and for their college experience. I didn’t find the very ending of this one particularly satisfying, but it also wasn’t bad enough that I won’t try more of French’s work.

Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief. Okay, so I did not expect to like Tennyson ever, and then my dad died and now I do like Tennyson, I’m as surprised as anyone really. But this sort of thing, where there is a person working in the arts and someone traces the influences of contemporary science on their work: I could read this kind of thing all day. Yes please.

E.C.R. Lorac, Death on the Oxford Road. Kindle. An older British mystery, with a really delightful older woman character who has muscular dystrophy and a history nursing in the Great War. Just the sort of thing I like when I’m in the mood for this sort of thing, will seek out more of her stuff.

Sarah Gold McBride, Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America. I was happy with how this book handled race and gender, but I was a little disappointed it didn’t go into more detail about subcultural signaling with the infinite varieties of facial hair that were au courant at various times in the stated period, and I felt like there were a lot of questions where more comparison with what was going on in the outside world would have been illuminating. And it wasn’t terribly long, so I felt like there was room for it. Ah well.

Ange Mlinko, Distant Mandate: Poems. Sometimes I’m very glad to have encountered one thing before another, and this is one of those cases: I found Venice far more resonant than Distant Mandate for reasons I’d have to go through with a fine-toothed comb to figure out. Not sorry to have read either, but I’ll likely return to the other one and not to this.

Solvejg Nitzke, The Elegance of Ferns: Portrait of a Botanical Marvel. This is very brief and lavishly illustrated–I went around the house singing “Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about ferrrrrns” for the whole time I was reading it, but luckily for my family that was not very long. (Nirvana joke, sorry, don’t worry about it.) It’s not what I’d call a deep dive, but if you have days in these parlous times when you could benefit from reading a nice quiet book about plants, complete with pretty pictures–and I know I do–then this is that.

Gin Phillips, Ruby Falls. There is a character in this called Ruby. She does not fall. It’s just that that’s what the place is called. If I was from the South I might have taken that for granted, but I’m not, so I wanted to warn you. Anyway it is about the Tennessee waterfall and all the adjacent underground caves and trails, and it is very, very claustrophobic and full of grim natural danger (underground caves are not safe, buddies!) as well as the more tiresome human kind. The plot hinges on one of the most obvious questions of identity that one would ever think to not mistake, and Phillips makes it clear that it is in character for the person who is an idiot to be an idiot, but…still an idiot plot in that sense. Luckily there is a lot more cave stuff to think about instead. Again willing to try more from this author, again not fabulously impressed by the ending.

Anthony Price, The Alamut Ambush, Colonel Butler’s Wolf, October Men, Our Man in Camelot, Other Paths to Glory, War Game, The ’44 Vintage, and Tomorrow’s Ghost. Rereads. This is about half this series (not quite half), and I didn’t read it all in one go like this the first time through. I have clear favorites and unfavorites, and there’s a pattern to them: basically I think that Price is at his best when he’s writing about British men, and the more he’s trying to do something else the worse the book was. I’m not sorry to have reread The Alamut Ambush (not actually the better for exoticizing both Arab and Israeli characters approximately equally) and Our Man in Camelot (his Americans are SO BAD), but I also won’t have any need to do it again, and Tomorrow’s Ghost left a bad taste in my mouth (THIS is what you’re doing with your first female protag in the series, Price? really?). On the other hand, Other Paths to Glory and War Game were really good at what they do. I didn’t stop here because of lack of enthusiasm, I had library books intervening.

Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown. I’m not at all sure why this is a separate book, except that it had its own strong effect in 1938 and its author didn’t do other things to collect with it? It’s an epistolary short story about the breakdown of a friendship as one of its members is swallowed as an Aryan into the Nazi regime and the other stays safe as an American Jew. It is harrowing, and one can only imagine its effect at the time.

Nghi Vo, A Long and Speaking Silence. Discussed elsewhere.

Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens. Kindle. I really like how she gives the political and cultural background for what these scientists were working around in getting to appropriate locations with useful equipment to measure the Transit of Venus in the mid-18th century. It was a good book to read in close proximity to Crucible of War, lots of stuff proximate to each other but not covered in both volumes. Also I find the early assumptions that each new method will work well and give great answers right away extremely touching. Science: it takes a minute, and you learn different stuff than you expected.

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.