Month: November 2025

William Alexander, Sunward. A charming planetary SF piece with very carefully done robots. Loved this, put it on my list to get several people for Christmas.

Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Matthew Constantine, Expert Witness: The Weight of Our Testimony When Justice Hangs in the Balance. I picked this up from a library display table, and I was disappointed in it. It isn’t actually very much theory of the use of expert witnesses in the American legal system. Mostly it’s about Burgess’s personal experiences of being an expert witness in famous trials. She sure was involved in a lot of the famous trials of my lifetime! Each of which you can get a very distant recap of! So if that’s your thing, go to; I know a lot of people like “true crime” and this seems adjacent.

Steve Burrows, A Siege of Bitterns. I wanted to fall in love with this series of murders featuring a birder detective. Alas, it was way more sexist than its fairly recent publication date could support–nothing jaw-dropping, lots of small things, enough that I won’t be continuing to read the series.

Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays. Mostly interesting, and wow does she have an authoritative voice without having an authoritarian one, which is sometimes my complaint about books that are mostly literary criticism.

David Downing, Zoo Station. A spy novel set in Berlin (and other places) just before the outbreak of WWII. I liked but didn’t love it–it was reasonably rather than brilliantly written/characterized, though the setting details were great–so I will probably read a few more from the library rather than buying more.

Kate Elliott, The Nameless Land. Discussed elsewhere.

Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai. Analysis of Japanese supernatural creatures in historical context, plus a large illustrated compendium of examples. A reference work rather than one to sit and read at length.

Michael Livingston, Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War. Extensive and quite good; when the maps for a book go back to the 400s and he takes a moment to say that we’re not thinking enough of the effects of the Welsh, I will settle in and feel like I’m in good hands. Livingston’s general idea is that the conflict in question meaningfully lasted longer than a hundred years, and he makes a quite strong argument on the earlier side and…not quite as strong on the later side, let’s say. But still glad to have it around, yay.

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics. Also a disappointment. If you’ve been listening to science news in this decade, you’ll know most of this stuff. Osterholm and Olshaker are also miss a couple of key points that shocked me and blur their own political priorities with scientific fact in a fairly careless way. I’d give this one a miss.

Valencia Robin, Lost Cities. Poems, gorgeous and poignant and wow am I glad that I found these, thanks to whichever bookseller at Next Chapter wrote that shelf-talker.

Dana Simpson, Galactic Unicorn. These collections of Phoebe & Her Unicorn strips are very much themselves. This is one to the better end of how they are themselves, or maybe I was very much in the mood for it when I read it. Satisfyingly what it is.

Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. If you were hoping for a lot of detail on And Peggy!, your hope is in vain here, the sisters of the title are very clearly Angelica and Eliza only. Vaill does a really good job with their lives and contexts, though, and is one of the historians who manages to convey the importance of Gouverneur Morris clearly without having to make a whole production of it. (I mean, if Hamilton gets a whole production, why not Gouverneur Morris, but no one asked me.)

Amy Wilson, Snowglobe. MG fantasy with complicated friend relationships for grade school plus evil snowglobes. Sure yes absolutely, will keep reading Wilson as I can get her stuff.

Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. This went interestingly into the details of what people were eating and what other people thought they should be eating, in ways that ground a lot of culinary history for the rest of the century to follow. Ziegelman and Coe either are a bit too ready to believe that giving people enough to eat makes them less motivated to work or were not very careful with their phrasing, so take those bits with a grain of salt, but in general if you want to know what people were eating (and with how many grains of salt!) in the US at the time, this is very interesting and worth the time.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the second half of what is being called a duology, with The Witch Roads as the first half of the story. I would say it’s less a duology than a novel in two volumes. The first volume ends on a cliffhanger, and the second picks up basically immediately with no reintroduction to the characters, setting, and plot. So: one story in two volumes, now complete.

There were things I really liked about this and things that left me cold. I feel like the pacing was weird–the chapters are short, but that didn’t really obscure how many pages were spent on basically one argument. I also found the ending deeply unsatisfying–the situation of having a character possessing other people was basically glanced at as problematic and then embraced as a happy ending that was entirely too convenient for all involved.

But the return to our protagonist Elen’s past home, illuminating it with her adult eyes, was really well done, and I liked the courage and strength shown by the child she encountered there. I love having a fantasy that has an aunt/nephew relationship as one of its emotional cores. This duology simultaneously locates itself centrally in the secondary world fantasy genre of the moment and branches out to do things that I’m not seeing a lot of in other fantasy of this type.

Philip Ball, The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China. A history of China through its rivers. And other water, but really mostly rivers. Gosh they’re important rivers. Some of it was more basic than I hoped, but the part where he talked about the millennia-long conflict between the Confucian and the Daoist views of flood management–that’s the good stuff right there. That’s what I need to think over.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Testimony of Mute Things. Kindle. A neat little murder mystery fantasy novella, earlier in the Penric and Desdemona timeline than most of the others in the series. I really like that Lois is feeling free to move back and forth in the timeline as fits the story she wants to tell.

Traci Chee, A Thousand Steps Into Night. Demons and time loops and complicated teenage relationships with oneself and others, this was a lot of fun.

Max Gladstone, Dead Hand Rule. The latest in the Craft sequence, and hoo boy should you not start with this one, this is ramifying its head off, this is a lot of implication from your previous faves bearing fruit. I love middle books, and this is the king–duly appointed CEO?–of middle books, this is exactly what I like in both middle books generally and the Craft sequence specifically. But for heaven’s sake go back farther, the earlier Craft novels are better suited to read in whatever order, this has weight and momentum you don’t want to miss out on.

Rebecca Mix and Andrea Hannah, I Killed the King. A fun YA fantasy murder mystery, better as a fantasy than as a murder mystery structurally but still a good time with the locked room and the suspects and their highly varied motivations. Are we seeing more speculative mysteries? I kind of hope so, I really like them.

Lauren Morrow, Little Movements. This is a novel about a choreographer who gets a chance to work slightly later in life than would be traditional, of a group of Black artists who deal with insidious racism, of a woman who has miscarried and is trying to put her life and identity and romantic relationship back together. In some ways it’s a very straightforward book, but also it’s a shape of story I don’t think we get a lot of, the impact of being all of the people in my first sentence at once. It’s a very intimate POV and nicely done.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation. The authors were journalists in Russia early in the Putin era and had a front row seat to watching people they respected and trusted become mouthpieces for Putin, and this is that book. Unfortunately I think some of the answer to “how could they do this” was that many of them–as described by Soldatov and Borogan!–were already those people, and Putin gave them the opportunity to be those people out loud. I was hoping, and I think they were hoping, for more insight on how someone could become that person; what we got instead was insight into how some people already are and you don’t necessarily know it clearly. Which is not unuseful, but it’s not the same kind of useful. Anyway this was grim and awful but mostly in a very grindingly mundane way.

Serra Swift, Kill the Beast. Discussed elsewhere.

Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War. Amanda Vaill does not like Ernest Hemingway any better than I do, bless her, but when she picked her other subjects in writing about a group of journalists and photographers in the Spanish Civil War, she was apparently kind of stuck with him. Did that mean she learned to love him? She sure did not, high fives Amanda Vaill. Anyway some of the other people were a lot more interesting, and the Spanish Civil War is.

Jo Walton, Everybody’s Perfect. Discussed elsewhere.