Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend, as you will find out if you read to the end and see that I am in the acknowledgments for the honestly light and easy work of being Brandon’s pal.

Good news for those of you who wait until a series is complete to read it: this is the second book in a duology! So you can just pick up Catalyst and Castoff and read them together, if you haven’t yet. I’m going to try not to spoiler the first book too much, which is going to leave me vague, because this is definitely my favorite kind of sequel: the kind where the consequences follow on hard and fast from the first book. Happily for those with shaky memories, there’s a quick summary at the beginning of this one.

So there are airships! There are strange vast somewhat personified forces! There are people working out their relationships in the face of personal and social change! It’s that lovely kind of fantasy novel that almost might be a science fiction novel in its concern with human interactions with truly alien intelligences. I love that kind. I want more of that basically always. And if it can come with airship adventures alongside the ponderings of the nature of intelligence and caring about others, even better. Very glad this is about to make it out into the world so I can talk to more people about these books.

Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains. This is the most like Oliver Sacks of anything I’ve read since Oliver Sacks died, and one of the ways in which that’s the case is that Anand is writing from her own experience as a neurologist but also as someone who has gone through relevant symptoms and has a particular perspective, so: in the tradition of Sacks rather than attempting to clone him. If you like “weird things brains do oh goodness” stories, this will be your jam, and it sure was mine. Also Anand is meticulous about gender: if there are relevant studies that talk about the occurrence of a particular condition among trans women as compared to cis women, cis men, or trans men (or etc. with other groups in the spotlight), she will note them as clearly and calmly as she would something about cis women, treating it all as part of our composite picture of how the brain works and what affects it. Highly recommended.

Charlie Jane Anders, Lessons in Magic and Disaster. This book completely wrecked me. It’s in some ways a gentle story about subtle and small-scale magic and about human relationships in our own structurally substantially unequal society. It’s also about long-term grief where most stories that touch on grief are fairly short-term (months or 1-2 years) or muted somehow, and it’s the only recent book I recall really delving into helping your parent with their grief while you, an adult, deal with your own differently-shaped grief for the same person. It’s really beautifully done, I wanted to be doing nothing else but reading it once I started reading it, and also it was emotionally devastating in parts.

Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation. Sometimes I feel like the most confusing parts of history are not the really distant ones–who doesn’t like a good Ea-Nasir joke–but the things that happened just before you arrived or as you’re arriving. They’re simultaneously foundational to a bunch of the world around you and happened while you weren’t looking, in ways no one thinks to teach you formally. For me, born in 1978, the Iranian Revolution is one of those things, so when I spotted this on the library’s new books table I picked it up immediately. This is a detailed history from someone who got to interview many of the Americans involved, and who is committed to not oversimplifying the benefits or detriments of the shah’s reign. I could have wished for somewhat deeper Iranian history, though there was some, and stronger regional grounding, but also those things can be found elsewhere, it’s all part of the process. The fact that there’s an American flag on the cover of this book as well as an Iranian flag is not an accident. A book that was focusing on Iranian relations with for example France in this period would have a very different take.

Stephani Burgis, A Honeymoon of Grave Consequence. Discussed elsewhere.

Robert Darnton, A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution. This is a microhistory of booksellers and their job routes and wares in the pre-Revolutionary era. Of all of Darnton’s books, I’d say this should be low on the list for people who are not deeply interested in the period, least of general interest. Luckily I am deeply interested in the period. So.

John M. Ford, From the End of the Twentieth Century. Reread. Satisfying in its own inimitable way. Those poor skazlorls.

Karen Joy Fowler, Black Glass. Reread. And the threads Karen was pulling out of the genre/literary conversation at the time were so different from the ones Mike did, I hadn’t intended to read them in close proximity to compare and contrast but it was kind of fun when I landed there.

Gigi Griffis, And the Trees Stare Back. This is not my usual sort of thing–creepy YA with eventual explanation–except for one major factor: it’s set in the lead-up to the Singing Revolution in Estonia. Really great integration of historical setting and speculative concept, bonded hard with the characters, loved it. Most of the historical fiction I read has me reading through the cracks of my fingers, wincing at what I know is coming but the characters do not. This was the opposite, I spent the entire book super-excited for them.

Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty, Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of the American Prairie. I am always disappointed to find out that I am already pretty expert in something, because I learn less that way. The American Prairie! Soil restoration, water conservation, habitats, farming…it turns out I already know quite a lot about this. Darn. If you don’t, here’s a good place to start.

John Lisle, Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA. Ooooof. This is another “I saw it on the library’s new books shelf” read for this fortnight, and its portrayal of CIA misbehavior was…not a surprise, but having this amount of detail on one project was…not cheering.

Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. If you internalized the idea that historians should be effaced as completely as possible from the writing of history, in the pretense that the history wrote itself really, this will not be the book for you. Ada Palmer is as major a factor in this book as Machiavelli or any of the Medicis. If, on the other hand, you enjoy Ada’s classroom lecture voice, it comes through really clearly here. There are some places where I was clearly not her target audience–I honestly don’t have a personal investment in what Machiavelli’s personal religious stance was, so the chapter about why we want him to be an atheist was speaking to a “we” I am not in. Still, lots of interesting stuff here. Including, surprisingly, cantaloupes.

Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You. This is a thriller about social media influencers in the group that would have been called “Mommy bloggers” a generation ago, set in the Mountain West. It’s very readable, and if you know anything about tradwife influencers you’ll see lots of places where it’s spot on. I think people who read a lot may find the twists less twisty, but it doesn’t rely solely on twists for its appeal.

Joe Mungo Reed, Terrestrial History. I haven’t had a satisfying generational epic in a long time. This one spans Earth and Mars, with point of view characters in four generations and multiple points on their partially shared timeline. My preferences would have been for more of everything, more all around–for a generational epic this is comparatively slim–but still very readable.

Sophy Roberts, A Training School for Elephants: Retracing a Curious Episode in the European Grab for Africa. The subtitle calls this a curious episode. It is instead a staggeringly depressing demonstration of how colonialism was fractally horrible. Zoom in a little closer! more horrors! hooray! No. Not hooray. And Roberts is clearly not claiming it is a cause for celebration, but…well. For me this microhistory was more upsetting than illuminating. Maybe I should stop looking at the new books shelf at the library for a minute.

Jessie L. Weston, The Three Days’ Tournament: A Study in Romance and Folk-Lore. Kindle. Comparison and contrast of different appearances of a particular legend throughout western/northwestern Europe and England. Nostalgic for me because I used to read a lot more of this sort of thing.

Darcie Wilde, A Purely Private Matter, And Dangerous to Know, A Lady Compromised, A Counterfeit Suitor, and The Secret of the Lady’s Maid. This is not all the Rosalind Thorne mysteries there are, but it’s all the Rosalind Thorne mysteries my library had. If you like the first one, they are consistent, and I think you could probably start anywhere and find the situation and characters adequately explained. Regency mysteries! Do you want some of those? here they are.

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

Margaret and Riven solved all their problems in A Marriage of Undead Inconvenience, didn’t they? Sure they did! They realized their true feelings for each other, they found a method to cope with Riven’s vampirism, set Margaret up to do the academic research she loves and found a lost artefact, and even overcame the forces of inheritance law! What more is there to say?

About that.

Their honeymoon is supposed to be calm and quiet, in a remote inn. But they’re not the inn’s only guests–and having a mainstream human like Margaret on the premises can be disturbing for other supernatural beings who are hoping for peace and acceptance. Margaret and Riven were hoping to have some time to get to know each other better–a traditional honeymoon for an untraditional couple–but instead they’re drawn into the problems and puzzles of the people around them–and the remote forest in which they live. The search for Reflection’s Heart is on!…with one or two interludes of honeymoon sweetness along the way.

This sequel novella is a sweet, fun adventure with themes of acceptance. It’s perfect for days when a little smidge of escapism is just what you need.

Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky. This is the latest of the Rivers of London series, with both Peter and Abigail getting point of view in alternating chapters. If you’re enjoying that series so far, rejoice, here’s another. And it’s up in Scotland, which was good for me because further north and may be good for you because variation in setting. Do I feel like this is one that moved the arc plot forward immensely? No, I really don’t, this is one where he wanted to let the characters do some things. And they did. Okay.

Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. The jarring thing about this book is that it reads exactly like the essays I’m reading about Ukraine, Gaza, etc. in New York Review of Books (and, to a lesser extent, London Review of Books) in terms of tone. Occasionally that’s comprehensible because some of those essays are still being written by Timothy Garton Ash. Sometimes it’s just a boggling moment of “oh gosh it’s been like that the whole time.”

Christopher I. Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China. When you were a teenager, did you have a friend whose father insisted that everything of note had been invented by his own ethnicity? And would occasionally pop up while you and your friend were in the kitchen getting a snack to give you another example? I have seen this with Irish, Chinese, Hungarian, and Italian dads, and there may have been more I’m not remembering. Well, I don’t think Mr. Beckwith is actually Scythian (…some of the dads in question were not actually their thing either), but other than that, it’s just like that. And the thing is, he might be right about some of it. He certainly seems to be right that taking a contradictory and known hostile account as our main source about an entire culture is not a grand plan. It’s just that I feel like I want more information about whether, for example, the entire field of philosophy from Greece to China was actually invented by Scythians, whether most reputable scholars would agree with his theories that Lao Tzu and the Buddha were both meaningfully Scythian, etc. But gosh it sure was something to read.

Ingvild Bjerkeland, Beasts. One of the questions that arises with literature in translation is how unusual a particular shape of narrative is in its original. Because in English, this is a very, very standard post-apocalyptic narrative of two siblings’ survival. Is it similarly standard in Norwegian? I don’t know. Possibly I don’t know yet. Anyway, it was reasonably pleasant to read and short, if you’re looking for that sort of thing, but for me it doesn’t have a particularly fresh take on the tropes involved.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Adventure of the Demonic Ox. Kindle. Penric’s children are growing up. He’s not that thrilled. Having to deal with a possessed ox does not help matters. I wouldn’t start here, because I think it leans on having a sense of Penric and Desdemona from the previous volumes, which are luckily all still available.

Rebecca Campbell, The Other Shore. Discussed elsewhere.

A.R. Capetta, Costumes for Time Travelers. This is a cozy that is actually cozy for me as a reader! Gosh. That rarely happens. I think part of the strength here is brevity: at 200 pages, it’s only trying to do some things, not everything, which gives me fewer loose…uh…threads. So to speak. But also Capetta is quite good at focusing my attention on the stuff they care about, which is a major skill in prose. And: time travelers! getting clothes from somewhere specific! Fun times! I will probably give this as a gift more than once this year.

P.F. Chisholm, A Clash of Spheres. This is a case where I am really frustrated not to have the next one RIGHT NOW, but I generally don’t do that (more on why in a minute). It’s very much more in the land of politics than of mystery per se, but a good Elizabethan era [Scottish/English] Border politics novel, much enjoyed, last line cliffhanger aaaaagh. (It is also book 8 in its series. Don’t start here. Chisholm expects that you will know various things about the characters and setting and care proportionately, and I’m glad she does, it works for me…but I’ve read all the preceding books. I recommend that.)

Emma Flint, Other Women. So…I’m part of the problem here. I know it. I talk a good game about how evil is largely extremely mundane and unglamorous, and how we really need to think about whether the way we portray villainy in fiction is fueling unproductive assumptions about some of our moral opponents being geniuses when some of them are in fact very venial, grubby, and straightforward. Well. This is a book with two narrators united by one man, and that man is one of the most banal villains in all of fiction. The only reason he can charm anyone is 1) extreme good looks, but as this is prose, you will have to be willing to imagine that yourself for it to work; 2) they are very very vulnerable. They are desperate. This is a book about the “extraneous” women of the 1920s, after the mass male casualty event that was the Great War, and how vulnerable such women could be, particularly with the gender norms and assumptions of the time. It is based on a true story. Its prose is reasonably well done. Also I did not enjoy reading it and do not recommend it, because “Look, isn’t he gross? but basically very mundane?” is not something I like spending a whole book with. So I continue to be part of the problem, and I continue to think about what to do about that, but in the meantime, meh, still not thrilled with this book.

Sheldon Gellar, Democracy in Senegal. Absolutely a straightforward book about democratic norms and practices in Senegal and how it is similar to and different from other countries in the region, how it is influenced by France and how not. Absolutely the book it’s claiming to be.

Sarah Hilary, Tastes Like Fear. This is why I don’t put the next book in a series on my wish list until I’ve read the preceding one: because sometimes I will just be D-O-N-E after the mess an author makes of a book in a series I’ve previously enjoyed. This book was published less than a decade ago, which is far, far too recent for not one of the investigators to run into a person they have identified with one birth gender IDed as another gender and have nobody say, “Oh, well, what if they’re trans.” The response instead is not overtly transphobic but is kind of a disaster both in terms of handling of gender and in terms of the logistics of the actual murder mystery at hand. Not recommended, and it’s killed my interest in the rest of the series.

Rebecca Lave, Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science. Definitely not what it says on the tin. This is instead an attempt to wade through and adjudicate the effects of a single outsized personality on the field of stream restoration. Which was sort of interesting as a case study, and it’s short, but also I was hoping for stream restoration. Oh well, I have another book to try for that.

Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal: A Travelers’ Portrait. In this one, on the other hand, you’ll never guess what they did. That’s right: they sure did go to Portugal. This is a very weird book, a giant compendium of short accounts of British people who went to Portugal for various reasons (grouped by reason). I like Rose Macaulay a great deal better than the average person on the street, but this is not the good end of her prose, including paragraphs that stretched for more than three pages at a go. If you want to know things about Portugal, go elsewhere unless it’s super specific stuff about really obscure British travelers. If you’re a Rose Macaulay completist, come sit by me, and we can sigh in mild frustration over this book. If you’re not in either of those categories, this is definitely not for you.

Alastair Reynolds, The Dagger in Vichy. Kindle. This is tonally different from the other mid-far future stuff Reynolds has been doing, and I’m here for it; I like to see people branch out a bit. I don’t know whether he’s been reading some of the same historical mysteries as I have, but I ponder the question not because I feel like anything is derivative but because some of the same interesting ideas may have come into play. In any case, this is short and fun and I like it.

Nicole C. Rust, Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders–And How We Can Change That. This is also short and fun and I like it. Okay, maybe brain disorders are not an entirely standard shape of fun. But Rust is very thoughtful about what hasn’t been working and what has/might, in this field, and her prose is very clear, and I recommend this if you’re at all interested.

Vikram Seth, The Humble Administrator’s Garden. Kindle. There’s a groundedness to these poems that I really like. They have a breadth of setting but a commonality in their human specificity.

Dorothy Evelyn Smith, Miss Plum and Miss Penny. I’m afraid the comedy of this light 20th century novel did not hit particularly well for me. It didn’t offend–there were not racial jokes, for example–but it was just sort of. Not hilarious. It’s the story of a middle-aged woman who takes in a younger woman in need, is rightfully much annoyed by her, and learns to appreciate her own life a lot more thereby. I’m not offended by this book. I just don’t have any particular reason to recommend it.

Sonia Sulaiman, ed., Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Science Fiction. I really like that there is a wide variety of tone, emotion, speculative conceit, and relationship with Palestine here. As with most anthologies, some stories were more my jam than others, but I’m really glad this is here for me to find out.

Darcie Wilde, A Useful Woman. A friend recently told me that this is the open pseudonym of Sarah Zettel, whose science fiction and fantasy I have enjoyed. This is one of her Regency mysteries–I understand she also writes romances under this name but I found the distinction to be clearly labeled, hurrah. Anyway this is just what you would want in a Regency mystery, good prose, froth and sharpness balanced, good times, glad there are more.

Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128. Flooding and river course changes! Environmental devastation and famine! References to James C. Scott in the analysis of how the imperial government handled it! Absolutely this is my jam. It’s a very specific work, so I can’t say that everyone should read this, but I never say that anyway, people vary. But if you have an interest in Chinese environmental history, or in fact in environmental history in general, you’ll be pleased with this one.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This collection featured stories I’d read–and very much liked–before as well as stories that were new to me. I read extensively in short SFF, so that’s not unexpected for any collection these days. What’s less typical is how consistently high-quality these stories are, across different tone and topic.

There is a rootedness to these stories that I love to see in short speculative fiction, a sense of place and culture. It doesn’t hurt that Campbell’s sense of place and culture is a northern one–not one of my parts of the north but north all the same. And forest, oh, this is a very arboreal book. There’s death and transformation here–these stories are like an examination of the forest ecosystem from nurse log to blossom, on a metaphorical level. I’m so glad this is here so that these stories are preserved in one place.

William Alexander and Wade Roush, eds., Starstuff: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Celebrate New Possibilities. This is that rare thing, an anthology of MG SF. Even rarer, the authors in it are generally experienced at writing for children but were not giving us (or the kids) a pile of tie-in stories, rather doing SF that works as short stories. Count me in. There were several favorites here with new work–Fran Wilde and Carlos Hernandez stood out.

Elizabeth Bear, Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, and Ink and Steel. Rereads. One of the strange things about having been in this business this long is that I can now have the entirely new experience of rereading something that a peer wrote twenty years ago, that I read when it was new. That’s basically what I’m doing with the Promethean Age series, and it’s fascinating to be able to see not just how a person might do some things differently but how my friend, specifically, definitely would. A person would not have someone’s female mage title be Maga in 2025 (ope); but I’ve been there the whole time for how my friend handles writing about trust and betrayal and other themes like the ones in this book, and…she wouldn’t do it the way she does now without having done it the way she did then. Looking forward to finishing the series reread when I’ve made a bit of a dent in my birthday books.

A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower. Reread. What’s interesting to me about the structure of all this on the reread is that Byatt sets it up for herself so she never has to make Frederica’s marriage work on the page. Frederica was married after the previous book, and by the time this one starts, the marriage is already absolutely ghastly. So we never have to live through the “oh, this is why she picked this guy, I see it now” moments. We can go with accounts, summaries…which are never the whole story. I also feel like it’s clearer to me on the reread that the level of domestic violence that had to be involved to be sure that the reader would take Frederica’s side was absolutely appalling. Which is not to say that level of domestic violence doesn’t happen, just…well. This is very well done, and I will want to reread it again but not often, oh lordy not often.

Agatha Christie, Murder Is Easy. This sure is a murder mystery by Agatha Christie.

Alexa Hagerty, Still Life With Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Oh gosh, this was extremely well done, one of the best books I’ve read lately, and also of course harrowing. Of course. The title tells you what you’re getting–specifically, the author did forensic anthropology on mass gravesites in Guatemala and Argentina–you should not be surprised at what is in here. And indeed I was not, because shocked and surprised are not the same thing, especially not in 2025. I think the thing that I found notable, that I have been turning over and over in my head as a speculative fiction writer for the last several years and not finding solutions to, is that there were very clear examples of how the people who are wrong–who are very wrong, morally wrong, villains of history wrong–very often do not have a point where they change their minds and see that they are wrong. And I think that we are ill equipped for shameless wrongs, and I am probably going to be thinking about that for many years more.

Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands. This is the latest Benjamin January mystery, and it leans on the complexities of family structure (emotionally as well as socially) in Louisiana in the early 19th century when the different sides of the family were racially differentiated. Which is an interesting thing to do, and I am still enjoying this series twenty-some books on.

Kat Lehmann, No Matter How It Ends a Bluebird’s Song: A Haiku Memoir. There is a whole spectrum of how nitpicky you are about what does and does not make a haiku, and if you are (as I am) toward the nitpickier end of that spectrum, you will find that many of these things are not haiku. They are brief, fragile, fleeting, fascinating. Sometimes it doesn’t matter whether they’re exactly haiku. (Also sometimes it might.)

Elizabeth Lim, A Forgery of Fate. This is an East Asian-inflected Beauty and the Beast retelling wherein the Beast is a water dragon and Beauty is an art forger. That part was great, and I find Lim’s prose compulsively readable. What was less great for me is that it featured the trope that if someone is being mean and unpleasant it means that he secretly likes you and is doing it to protect you from something something who cares. BIG NOPE from me, people who are mean and act like they don’t like you probably do not like you and should not get to have sex with you. (There is not a great deal of actual sex here. This is a YA. But still, message remains the same.)

Molly Knox Ostertag, The Deep Dark. The twist was very telegraphed for me, and I’m not sure that the author stayed fully in control of the metaphor throughout, but it was a fun coming of age self-acceptance magic comic that I will probably give to a young person in my life.

Victor Pineiro, The Island of Forgotten Gods. Discussed elsewhere.

Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be. This is nonfiction (title could go either way!) about marine life and how it is adapting (or not) to climate change, and it was very cool and full of a wide range of sea creatures. I like sea creatures. Yay. Also Scales was very conscious of walking the line where she reported accurately but did not inculcate despair, which in climate writing is crucial.

Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. This is very short and pithy, and probably people who are not disabled and spend less time with other disabled people than I do need it more than I do, but also it was a fast read and well done, good to know that I have this as a resource to recommend. Also kudos to our librarians for putting it on the Disability Pride Month display, which is where I found it. Also kudos to our librarians for having a Disability Pride Month display in this year of 2025.

Jennie Erin Smith, Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families and the Search for a Cure. This specifically deals with the families in Colombia that have strong clear lines of genetic tendency toward Alzheimer’s: how they have suffered, how they have been involved in Alzheimer’s research, the ways in which that has not been handled very satisfactorily by people with more resources and power. Smith interacts with these families as individuals and groups, as real people, and it is a correspondingly difficult read, and also a correspondingly worthwhile one.

Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty, and Christopher J. Dart, eds., How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond. Kindle. This is a series of papers mostly about the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire, with several that venture beyond that to historical parallels. It’s interesting stuff even if you aren’t someone who thinks about Rome all the time, definitely worth the time, and as with many of this type of collection, if you don’t find one paper particularly interesting, another will be along in a minute.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is an unsubtly sweet book, an homage to Puerto Rico and its people and also a lovely depiction of being a second-culture kid. Nico is a budding filmmaker, desperate to win the approval of the most famous Puerto Rican in the world, filmmaker and musical writer Juan Miguel Baranda. (I said “unsubtly,” didn’t I?) He’s spending a glorious summer with his abuela and his two primos, looking forward to lazy days at abuela’s house, glorious snacks, and beach time.

But the three cousins have far more adventure than they bargained for when they encounter a chupacabra–and the rest of the legends of Puerto Rico are not far behind. Nico and his family have to figure out what the mysterious creatures and sublime beings are trying to tell them, before the island they love faces devastation again–this time possibly for good.

Sometimes Nico’s angst about his movie career and his parents’ relationship slows the pace of this middle grade fantasy, but cousins Nessi and Kira are always there to pick up the pace–and Pineiro succeeds in what Nico hopes to do, painting a portrait of the island he loves so that the rest of the world can see what he loves about it.