Tag: bookses precious

Ben Aaronovitch, False Value. There are a lot of Douglas Adams references in this latest volume of the series, but it’s not a Douglas Adams pastiche. Which is good; hardly anyone can “do” Douglas Adams well. What’s not as overt is that this is doing a lot of the kind of light satire of the tech industry (British version) that Charlie Stross does in his Laundry novels. That, as much as I like the Rivers of London, Charlie Stross does better in his Laundry novels. So I really hope that this is a one-off within the series; it was fun to read but not one of the better entries in the series, to my mind.

Elif Batuman, The Idiot. This book languished on my library list for years because the title–even knowing it was probably a Dostoevsky reference (it was)–was just not appealing. As in Dostoevsky, this is not “idiot” in its general usage but more in the sense of “naive, innocent.” It’s the story of the first year of college and the summer after, for a girl who is not particularly driven, not particularly directed. It’s very well-written, and I enjoyed reading it, but if you want coherent plot this is not your book.

Elizabeth Bear, Machine. Discussed elsewhere.

Molly Brooks, Sanity and Tallulah. This is a middle-grade comic about two little girls who live on a space station, one of whom is disaster-prone and one of whom merely needs lectures on consulting ethics boards before experimenting on live subjects. And receives them. This was so much fun. I immediately put it on my list to give to my younger niece for her birthday.

Agatha Christie, Poirot Investigates. Kindle. A series of Poirot short stories, reasonably light, about as successful as mystery shorts usually are (which, for me, is not very), occasional brief forays into ethnic slurs and stereotypes as one expects from Christie but not a dominant theme of this work.

George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Kindle. This is Eliot’s last, experimental book; it’s a series of character impressions in the titular character’s persona. It’s quite funny in spots, very modern. It’s by no means the first Eliot I’d recommend, but it will cause an Eliot completist no pain. Except…once you get to the last chapter, where “Theophrastus Such” is trying to defend Jewish people from the antisemitism of the time…yeah, unless you have a specific interest in watching what it looks like when someone thinks they’re helping and are not helping, you can skip that part, the book is over when it ends and it’s not going anywhere wonderful.

Hao Jingfang, Vagabonds. This is the kind of book I used to see a lot, where the characters earnestly explain Mars and Earth to each other and navigate the cultural conflict between the two planets with a lot of talking that illuminates ideas about the present-day world. Most of the examples of it that I read as a teenager were written by Americans, so having a Chinese version is an interesting lens on the same subgenre. I enjoyed this a lot and would like more of Hao Jingfang’s work to be translated, even if there were elements (internalized sexism, for example) that I didn’t like as much.

C.B. Lee, Not Your Sidekick. This is a classic superhero origin story. If you know these stories, you’ll know the beats in this one. However, it will be a lot of fun for some readers to get to experience those beats with in an Asian-American and queer context, and it won’t do anyone else any harm either.

Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. I ended this volume mad at the modernists, because if I say, “Ken Liu is a sentimentalist,” everyone will think that’s meant to be a bad thing. But he is: the stories in this volume are very emotion-focused speculative fiction. The heart comes first here.

Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits, and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World. I often say “does what it says on the tin,” and this does not. It is not, in fact, a general accounting of those categories. It’s the story of one Albanian family, around the time of the Battle of Lepanto. Which is an interesting thing to do! but not perhaps what you might think you were getting from the title.

Eliza Nellums, All That’s Bright and Gone. This is an adult novel told from the perspective of a 6-year-old girl whose mother has just had a major schizophrenic break, as she tries to figure out what happened to her older brother and in fact what’s going on in her family at large. This is the first book in ages where I’ve read the last few pages first to make sure certain traumatic plot points are not the case, and they are not. Enough trauma happens to this kid as it is; I was not up for reading a first-person fictional account of a 6-year-old being assaulted, and lo, that was not in this book. The ending is human and hopeful, but it is a harrowing ride at some points along the way.

Danny Lavery writing as Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Something That May Shock and Discredit You. Witty pop culturally focused essays, many of which are about his transition, not all. A very fast read.

Priya Sharma, Ormeshadow. Emotionally dark fantasy, rather than vampirely dark fantasy. Family drama, mostly, until the very end.

Nisi Shawl, ed., New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. I particularly enjoyed stories by Tobias Buckell and Indrapramit Das, but honestly this was just a fun volume in general.

Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. An interesting look at how distributive justice is necessary but not sufficient for comprehensive justice. If you’re up for social justice theory, this is a good addition to that reading list.

Review copy provided by the author, who is a dear friend.

This is in the same universe as Ancestral Night, and some of the major characters of the are minor characters here. I actually howled, “Mantis COOOOOOOOP!” at one crucial point. (Mantis cop. Mantis cop.) But also there’s a whole slate of new characters to enjoy including Mantis cop’s timid compatriot omg this species okay I am fine now. I’m fine.

But really though: I have not had enough fun science fiction where humans and aliens have established friendships and working relationships, lately. It is a subgenre I like so much, and I basically never have enough of it. And this one has hospital drama! And faster-than-light travel drama! And people doing their best to get their heads together!

There is also some serious consideration of community, and of how to handle breaches of trust, both individual and community. The questions of how to be a functioning adult that come up in Ancestral Night are foundational, but this one expands on them further. With multiple-atmosphere hospital drama and mantis cop. I really really like this, okay? You’re going to want one. It’s a prime example of Bear continuing to grow as a writer–and I liked the stuff she started with.

Einat Admony and Janna Gur, Shuk: From Market to Table, the Heart of Israeli Home Cooking. I leafed through this. It looks reasonably good about spice blends and techniques, especially if you’re new to cooking with Middle Eastern flavors.

Chaz Brenchley, The Bone Mask Boys, Chapters 1-3. Kindle. The beginning of a new serial, set on the same canal-laced Mars as his Crater School stories but with a very different tone and plot type, much darker and more procedural.

Oliver Bullough, Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus. I wish this had been more “history and traditions of Caucasus people” and less “how Caucasus people have been screwed over by Russians, repeatedly,” and yet one sees, in context, how the latter is important. I feel like the ethnic composition of this region is fractally interesting; the more I learn about it, the more I think, oh, but this has just scratched the surface really.

Zen Cho, The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo. Kindle. This was a frothy romance novella that I picked up because I like Cho’s other things, and it was great fun and allowed the titular Jade to have fun and not be punished for it.

Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Kindle. I picked this up expecting it not to demand much of me, and lo, that’s what I got. I was a little surprised at how sketched in things were, how little detail–it’s a very bare bones style. Anyway, Poirot is here, Hastings is here, random startling prejudice for no plot-related reason is here–mostly fun if you are braced for that last category, over quickly, but not something I would say anyone simply must read.

Sarah Churchwell, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby. I was grateful that Churchwell was very careful to say that the murder trial she was writing about, in parallel with writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald in this book, was not meant to be an exact copy or direct source of The Great Gatsby, that she was very very clear on not overstating her claims. At the same time I felt like it left the book a little disjointed, here are two things sort of nearish each other, and it didn’t come together wonderfully, it just sort of sat next to each other. Fine but not thrilling.

Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Discussed elsewhere.

Katharine Duckett, Miranda in Milan. This is the aftermath of The Tempest, Miranda’s return to a society she never knew as an adult and all the politics and magic that follow thereby. A charming novella.

Carlos Hernandez, Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe. I was so excited for this book and it did not disappoint. My favorite parallel-universe-wrangling Miami duo are back, with just as many wisecracks and tugs on the heartstrings as before. If you haven’t read Sal and Gabi Break the Universe yet, go back and start there, it’s a treat. But so is this. Universes are so much trouble!

Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing. Beautiful essays about place. I went and put everything else she’s written on my list after I read this. So satisfying.

Sim Kern, Depart, Depart! Discussed elsewhere.

Steven Koblik, Sweden’s Development from Poverty to Affluence, 1750-1970. If you don’t want what it says on the tin, don’t read this book, because it is not doing anything else. If you’re interested in the Hats vs. the Caps (if in fact you know what the heck that means), this may be a book for you. It was clearly published very shortly after the period covered, so it’s not that anything magical happened in 1970.

Don Kulick, A Death in a Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea. Kulick goes into a great deal of detail about his interactions with a village that had a unique language when he first came into contact with them. He’s very interesting about process–about literally how, as a procedure, people shift from using their own language with their friends, their families, their children, to…not. To using their larger language’s common tongue even without enforced mandates that they do so. He is much clearer than most white anthropologists about his own humanity, talking about when and how he left the village on various occasions, what he and the villagers give each other, etc. rather than positioning himself as a great objective authority. A lot to think about here.

Rose Macaulay, Noncombatants and Others. Kindle. I am astonished that she managed to get something this complex and thoughtful and non-jingoist published about the Great War in the middle of the Great War. The characters are thrashing around trying to make art and often failing and trying to cope with major social upheaval and quite often failing at that too and it’s amazing. There are a few offhanded prejudiced remarks/idioms but nothing plot-critical that I recall, so it’s more a “this is a novel written in 1916” warning than a “this author is deeply invested in this toxicity” warning–and at least to my way of thinking (your mileage, of course, will vary), it is very much worth enduring them, because the things Macaulay is invested in doing are phenomenal and not much seen elsewhere. Even now.

Susan Palwick, All Worlds Are Real. A thoughtful and big-hearted short story collection. As I would expect from Palwick.

Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, eds., The Mythic Dream. This volume of myth retellings is a generally good read with several exceptional standouts. My favorite stories were by Arkady Martine, Carlos Hernandez, Indrapramit Das, and Amal El-Mohtar.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold Wars. Well, this was depressing. It’s about the politics of who can get jobs and who can get played in terms of the two World Wars and also the Cold War. It’s really useful to know this stuff but not, shall we say, an uplifting experience.

Veronica Roth, Chosen Ones. I am particularly fond of books about ramification. Okay, so you’re the chosen ones and you defeated the Dark Lord: what next? This book is entirely made of What Next. Its superheroes are struggling, and the things they discover in the process of sorting their own issues get pretty intense.

Patrick Samphire, Shadow of a Dead God. Discussed elsewhere.

William Shakespeare, Richard III. Kindle. Reread. This was specifically for a novella I’m contemplating, so it was the kind of reread that comes with eccentric note-taking.

Lynne and Michael Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 34. Kindle. Favorites from another strong issue include “High in the Clean Blue Air” by Emma Törzs and “A Being Together Amongst Strangers” by Arkady Martine.

Nghi Vo, The Empress of Salt and Fortune. I particularly liked the questioning, probing structure of this fantasy novella as it unfolded, a blossom structure as understanding grew.

Review copy provided by the author, who is the husband of my friend.

If you’re an adult who reads fantasy, you probably read some fantasies in this sub-genre when you were a teenager. Depending on how old you are, you may have read loads of them. I know I did. Mennik Thorn is a disreputable, down-on-his luck mage who is barely scraping by. He has scruffy friends from his impoverished early childhood who lead him into ill-conceived and sometimes illegal activities–but he’s loyal, and he loves them, and hey, wisecracks will ease your way through a lot of hardship in life.

Yep, it’s one of those, with a couple differences. One is a cool worldbuilding twist–magic comes from the remains of dead gods, whoa, awesome, okay, let’s keep going with that and see where it takes us. (Don’t worry, Samphire will.) The other is that Shadow of a Dead God, unlike a lot of the parts of this subgenre I read as a teenager, is refreshingly not chock full of sexism and racism. Basically, if you like a fantasy like this, it’s the thing you like! but without the bits that horrify you when you think about them a minute! All the fun, none of the “wait he had his protagonist say what?”

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a novella about a trans guy whose Houston home floods and about his life with a dybbuk in a shelter in Dallas. If you read that sentence and thought, “ooh, that might be for me if it’s done well!”, congratulations, you are correct, this is definitely for you.

Noah’s experiences in the emergency shelter are about as much sunshine and lollipops as you’d expect, but there are some rainbows to be found in the community that he both builds and finds there. It’s perfectly drawn of imperfect humans–Kern has noticed that even excellent allies don’t always share the same priorities, and negotiating those with kindness and patience in the face of deteriorating conditions can be hard, sometimes feeling impossible. Kern draws these relationships so very well.

The shape of the ending is particularly wonderful at a time like this: a turning toward kindness and toward community in a world that would make it easier to shut others out. The speculative element ties in excellently with the real world strengths of this novella. I’ll be looking for more by Kern.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the third in its series, and you absolutely should not read it without having read the first two. There’s enough to keep track of here if you have a fighting chance of knowing what’s going on from having actually read it; having to guess and fill in why people care about Tain Hu and who Aminata is anyway and…look, there is an entire thread of magic/social connection that’s based on how people relate to each other, you’re going to want to know what the heck is going on before you dive in here.

If you have read the other two books, here’s what you need to know here: this book does not ease up on disgust or treachery. If anything it doubles down. And…there’s a plague that is made much worse by people behaving foolishly. Actually there are several plagues. The plague element is not lessened here. At all. For some of you, that will feel comforting, like the thing you’re living through is being validated by the book; but if you’re otherwise interested in this series and think, oh God, not that, not now, then I advise you to get your copy and hold off a bit on reading it, because there is no dodging a certain contagion-related theme here.

Does it stick the landing, though. I would say yes, yes it does. People behave like themselves, actions continue to accrue consequences at an alarming rate until the very end. Could there be more told in this universe? absolutely. Is this particular story left unfulfilled with pieces hanging? not at all. The empire and its denizens and outliers are all going somewhere in this book, not just wandering indefinitely. The title character has several quite large revelations about herself and her world, she is proven right about some things but not everything, so if you’re a person who hates it when series just ramble on indefinitely, fear not, this is not one of those.

Gavin Chappell, translator, The Saga of the Volsungs and Other Stories. More legendary saga weirdness. So much to work with here.

Nino Cipri, Finna. This novella about evil wormhole Ikeas is…maybe not the most relaxing thing to read when you’re dealing with home improvement woes? But compelling and fun and recommended and grandmaful.

P. Djeli Clark, The Haunting of Tram Car 015. This is a fast-paced, fun novella in the same world as some of Clark’s previous work. The world is clearly delineated quickly so you can dive into the story. Beautifully done.

Zoraida Cordova, Incendiary. Toward the very beginning of this book, I said to a friend that it was mainly good for its world-building because its plot was very YA-fantasy-standard, and ten pages later something happened that entirely turned that on its head. There was a turn for the more expected toward the very end, but in general this is not doing exactly the same thing as you might expect, and also the worldbuilding is fun.

David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialist World. This is a terrible title. Epstein is not opposite to specialization in this book, he’s opposed to trying to get people to specialize exclusively or at extremely young ages. And he has a lot of data about how trying to make your two-year-old into the prodigy of your choice is not going to work particularly well, with side trips extolling the virtues of intellectual freedom on an interpersonal/emotional level. The ending sort of wandered, and I think I am not the target audience for this book, as I have long been a proponent of Letting Kids (And Also Adults) Mess Around Trying Stuff. But if you are also such a proponent and want bolstering for your arguments, here it is.

Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. This is exactly what it says on the tin, no more and no less. If you want to sort out more of what was going on in the Balkans when, this is a very straightforward version of that. If you’re looking for the quirky weird corners of history, this is not the book, but if you want a basis for putting the quirky weird corners of history into context when you find them later, this is a reasonable place to start.

Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds. Discussed elsewhere.

Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays On Artists and Writers. The titular essay was particularly engaging here, but there was a lot of varied material that interested me, in the “oh, and here’s another thing” way of good essay collections.

John Pollack, The Pun Also Rises. A new acquaintance at ConFusion talked about this book, which was written by a competitive pun champion. Which is apparently a thing! And this book gives examples of how that works! But also he goes into the history of puns and their function and reception. It’s short and, well, punny. I got a copy for me and a copy for a dear friend so that we would both have this experience, like it or not.

Kate Quinn, The Serpent and the Pearl. If you thought, okay, I want some Borgias, but their actual history is not melodramatic enough, what if an historical fiction writer made them more melodramatic, this is the book for you. I kept reading it for the cook, and eventually the cook also got swept into melodrama. This is also not so much a story as the first chunk of story with a completely unresolved ending. The sequels are out, so at least you can go on with them if you like–and I know that this will sound great to some people, it would sound great to me in some moods and I read the whole thing. But the last bit went far enough over the top that I don’t know that I’ll be reading the sequel right away.

Molly Tanzer, Creatures of Charm and Hunger. Also a cliffhanger ending, but more resolved and satisfying, for me at least. This is the third in its series, and you’ll get things out of it if you’ve read the first two–there was a moment of “oh no oh no [character] run away” that came specifically because I have read the first one. But I do think it would work reasonably if you didn’t want the first ones and just started here, because each book is set in a different era with different central characters. This one brings the diabolists up to WWII.

Martha Wells, Network Effect. It’s Murderbot! In a full-length novel! It is what Murderbot in a full-length novel should be. While this is the first full-length Murderbot novel, it’s not the first Murderbot book, so go read the others and then wallow in this. Wallow.

F. C. Yee, The Iron Will of Genie Lo. This is also a sequel, a YA inspired by Journey to the West. It is so. Much. Fun. I love Genie and Yunie and all the other characters. I tore through this on a very stressful day and it was just the perfect thing, and you might need it if you ever have a stressful day too.

Jane Yolen, Curse of the Thirteenth Fey. This is the fairy backstory to Sleeping Beauty, with fairy family and fairy culture and fairy politics. You know where it’s going, but it’s still fun getting there.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Caralee is a traverser, someone who travels professionally between universes similar enough to her own to resonate with them. Like other traversers, she led a hard and risky childhood–you can only travel to worlds in which your other self has died, and Caralee’s other self has been in an entire metric ton of peril.

Oh, and also: her employer thinks she is one of those other selves, a more naive girl named Caramenta. When Caramenta was transferred into Caralee’s world and died from being in the same place as her double, Caralee took her clothes, her world-traveling tech–and her life. Or at least as much of her life as she could figure out. Luckily Caramenta was an assiduous journaler. Even luckier for Caralee, she’s a quick study–because these worlds are pretty universally brutal, and missteps could cost her everything.

Cara’s got a job, a safe place to live, a mentor, even a family–which is more than she had at home. But all of those things are threatened, and she is constantly having to maneuver around the ruling classes, who find her useful as a traverser but don’t have any interest in protecting her as a person. She has a history of being romantically involved with people who treat her like garbage, but it comes around in different ways in different worlds. Navigating all the different histories (which are kept deftly woven for the reader!) provides complication after complication for Cara as her expectations of one person shift to better fitting another–but even learning that anyone can be on her side is a major obstacle for her given her past. It’s a very different take on parallel worlds than most, and one I found interesting throughout.

David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. German history is confusing. Usually the more I learn about it, the more confused I am, reinforcing that it is genuinely confusing, not just my ignorance. But this book! This book was a bit of German history that actually straightened a few things out in my mind. Because it was German hydrological history! Canals and sloughs and barges and all sorts of things that you can actually trace a reasonably straightforward narrative about! So much water. It’s not a highly technical book, you don’t have to be a hydrologist yourself. It’s another of those “this is history too, and it’s not about crowns and battles” books that I like so much.

Marie Brennan, Driftwood. Discussed elsewhere.

Stephanie Burgis, Deadly Courtesies. Kindle. The next short story in a series about necromancy, crafting magic (in this case metalcrafting), and impending romance. Great fun.

Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses. This goes through plant sensory systems and what research there is about them (and what has been debunked). Hurrah for a comforting book about botany.

Isabel Greenberg, Glass Town. A graphic novel about the Bronte siblings’ juvenilia and also their relationships with each other. I read this to discuss it with a friend who is a great Gondal fan, but then it turned out she hasn’t had time yet. If you’re interested in the topic I think it would be a reasonable introduction.

S.L. Huang, Critical Point and Null Set. Discussed elsewhere, and also discussed elsewhere.

Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On Disaster Capitalists. A short book on what the heck is going on there, with competing views for handling post-hurricane devastation and what the future of the island should be. Klein is not trying to avoid taking sides, but I think the side she takes is reasonable, and she also provides some useful information I had not seen covered well elsewhere in the mainland US.

Mary Robinette Kowal, The Relentless Moon. Discussed elsewhere.

Naomi Mitchison, The Bull Calves. This is a thumping big historical novel set in 18th century Scotland. It is full of Scots dialect and people with very similar names who are related to each other, and I liked it anyway. Whenever there’s a Naomi Mitchison book on my pile, it’s what I want to read. They’re not like each other in overt ways, just in subtle ways.

Jenn Reese, A Game of Fox and Squirrels. This is a heart-rending book with a happy ending. Two sisters have had to move to their aunts’ house in Oregon because of their dad’s abuse, and the younger one gets caught up in a magical card game. And there is a lot of learning to trust and learning how to love people who love you well when you’ve had other kinds of love in the past, and it’s really good that way, but hoo, it is not easy, don’t think that the middle-grade age target makes it easy.

John Sayles, Yellow Earth. Speaking of good but not easy…well, no one was going to make that mistake with Sayles. This novel is about the North Dakota oil fields and the people around them, and…and…oh, it is not a “fun” book, but I loved it. I have generally believed John Sayles about the details of his work, that people say the things he says they do (adjusted a tiny bit for Sayles…), but in this book he is talking about various forms of my people, and he gets it right, he gets very tiny things right as well as large ones. A lot of flawed people trying the best they can, some of them not trying the best they can, and some people get genuinely happy endings, within the Sayles capacity. In this case the happy ending of the very last page felt like it was written just for me, so hey, thanks, Mr. Sayles, I love you too.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. This is a thin pamphlet that is all polemic, some of it quite reasonable polemic, but still. There are places where Snyder is acting in his capacity as a Holocaust scholar and times when he’s speaking more or less without evidence, just stuff that he as a human believes. I prefer the former category, but most of the latter are okay, if less interesting. Won’t take you long, but I suspect that most people who read my blog already know much of what they would gain from this.

Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence. This is very much a memoir rather than an autobiography. If you’re here for a recitation of the facts of Solnit’s life, in chronological order, you’ll be sorely disappointed. The focus here is to muse on how her work and her life have intertwined, and I found that very interesting. (She is another author I tend to want to read right away when I have one of her books on my pile.)

Tasha Suri, Realm of Ash. A sequel to Empire of Sand, but I actually think it would do all right as a stand-alone, if you’re looking for magic and thoughtfulness about empire and its costs. I enjoyed this.

Tade Thompson, Household Gods and Other Narrative Offenses. Kindle. A really good introduction to his short work, varied settings and characters.

Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Shattering autobiographical poems. Read slowly.

Raynor Winn, The Salt Path. This is a memoir of a couple who lost their farm, and also the husband got a terminal diagnosis, so they…decided to walk over 600 miles of English coast, Devon and Cornwall. They were flat broke and just started walking. There is quite a lot of focus on what they managed to eat, but also there are some really poignant moments, and a lot of thoughtfulness about who has access to what and why.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the third in the Cas Russell series. Cas remains, as she has been throughout, a computational genius with no past, who shoots people a lot. Her hazy past keeps catching up with her in pieces, and holding it at bay is taking a lot of her time and energy.

What’s worse, her friends have histories of their own, less hazy and more immediate–and substantially undisclosed to Cas. So when a teenage girl turns up saying that her parent is in trouble–and Cas didn’t even know that friend was a parent–there’s an extra level of adventure to the psychic manipulation/blowing things up that is Cas’s daily life.

What’s worse, she’s finding it hard to keep track of all the ways in which she’s being manipulated by different parties. There’s someone she’s supposed to remember–someone overwhelmingly terrifying–but who was he? Who was responsible for all the explosions? Who is impersonating whom here, and why?

I’m trying to be careful about spoilers for this thriller, because watching it unfold is a large part of the fun, but there are even more players with even more games than in previous volumes. I think this one stands alone somewhat better than Null Set, but I’d still recommend starting the ride at the beginning, with Zero Sum Game, for maximum impact.