Tag: Fantasy

The Slantwise Histories by Alix E Harrow (Speculative Short Stories)

This is a collection of previously published stories that the author describes as the “pleasures I have devised over the last decade.” Her “preoccupations and grudges, infatuations and nightmares.” This goes a long way to explaining the diverse set of stories included in the book. Before I tell you how and what I thought about the stories, let me first state categorically that in terms of pure writing, Harrow is one of the best. Her language, humor, compassion, insight and the insistent way she wrenches reactions from the reader are unsurpassed by other writers in my experience. I don’t always care for the subjects of her writing (or the feelings they wrench out of me!) but the quality of her writing is never challenged.

I think about the stories in this collection in three categories (and they aren’t the “Almost, Always, and Again” divisions they are separated into in the TOC — I still don’t get that). My favorites are the humorous stories with the utterly unexpected but totally integrated twists. Most feature a wry wit that recognizes and pokes fun at the very essence of our fears and aspirations. These contain plenty of quality banter (which I love) and often lovely inserts of modernity into canonical tales. The stories in this category are: The Knight and the Butcher Bird, The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly, The Long Way Up, and A Witches Guide to Escape: a Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies. The next category clearly aligns with Harrow’s “grudges and nightmares.” They are dark, often depressing (for the emotional sponge that I am), and have a tendency to feature stereotype “Bad Guy” groups. For example, in these stories, all the men are misogynistic a**holes, and all corporations are greedy, abusive, and evil. Great stories, but I don’t like perpetuating these polarizing descriptions. Lastly, quite a few “queer” stories — tales of discovering and exploring someone’s sexuality, often in a speculative fiction setting. These were well done, but not something that I search for.

I’m not usually a short fiction reader — I love to get deep into a novel and stay with it for a while, but it is hard for me to pass up anything that Harrow writes. I had no problem simply skipping a story or two that didn’t work for me and focus on enjoying the rest.

Thank you to Tordotcom and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on October 20th, 2026.

Line of Descent by Adam Oyebanji (Science Fiction)

An engaging space opera serving as a prequel to Oyebanji’s last book — Breaking Day. The action opens in the ~100th year of a 130 year voyage — humanity’s first bid for the stars. The inhabitants are Generation 5 of a carefully controlled population program, and tensions around whose “lines of descent” will be propagated are high. Reproductive rights, privacy, surveillance, and secrecy are some of the issues that have caused serious rifts in the population, leading to strong feelings and increasingly dangerous actions. And now the Captain is nearing his termination date and a vicious battle between the two candidates for the position will remind most of us of our own recent electoral “conflict.”

I like Oyebanji’s writing — it is clean and accessible, and encompasses technical detail, action, and cultural norms with equal fluidity (and equal time). The idea of a “generation” ship evolving different customs, conventions, and beliefs is not a new one, but I enjoyed his take on where the fracture points might occur and what issues could lead to polarization and rupture … and how the “government” might tackle an attempt at reconciliation given the limitations of a truly isolated environment. Plenty of obvious parallels to issues today.

Interesting and relatable characters and faction / hierarchical relationships; good world-building including mechanisms of recycling, decay, and the impact of unavoidable accidents in such a removed environment; and a plot equally comfortable with action and personality. This is Oyebanji’s 5th book in as many years, and I have enjoyed all but one of them (not sure what happened with that one!).

I appreciated Oyebanji’s bio, which you can find on his webpage — adamoyebanji.com — shows his humor and his interesting background!

Thank you to DAW and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on November 17th, 2026.

Fair Ones by Lydia Millet (Literary Fiction)

A slow paced (but exquisitely written and perversely engaging) novel rich in insightful discourse and doubly rich in character depth. At the core is a trio of best friends: Mara, Jen, and Claire — single New Yorkers operating at various edges of the wealthy. Claire — a high school guidance counselor and beauty queen; Mara a tutor for prep school students; and Jen the brainy former journalist and culture editor. It’s billed as a double novel — part one is Mara’s story, launched immediately after Claire’s sudden and violent death; part two is Jen’s story, taken up a year later and continuing with the evolving relationships, secrets, and healing.

I loved this book for the very real and thoroughly explored lives in relation to the catastrophic experience and the mad swirl of collateral damage resulting. New friendships, new discoveries, new reactions, new regrets, new hopes. The plot progresses, sometimes in very surprising (but utterly believable) ways. Social commentary throughout in characters’ thoughts, reactions, and evolving sense of self. Plenty of existential considerations as well as political discussions and a sense of societal duty (rather than entitlement). I found so many great quotes. I liked the fact that each character worked hard at understanding what made a “good person” and how they could best achieve that label, while also having the awareness of the layers of hypocrisy that lurk just below the surface. I also liked how well the author painted people from the different perspectives of the other characters through the kind of dialog / discussions we all have.

Quintessentially a New York story, and yet, typical for stories about New Yorkers, the characters are all NY transplants and so we travel from a Jain community in California, to the woods in Maine, to elite boarding schools, to high priced, drug infused Wall Street lofts in discovery of backstories. We consider white collar crime, dementia without financial resources, and the search for meaningful occupation. And we are surprised with a creeping, surreptitious solution to a mystery we didn’t know existed. We “join” in the discussion of a wide variety of topics from multiple perspectives on everything from climate change to the pros and cons of capitalism, to the real meaning of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (that was a hoot). Millet’s books have a kind of dream like quality for me because I feel like I am occupying so many different heads at once. I loved this book.

Quotes:
“We had our daily routines, inside millions of others, and along the edges of those routines there was always the prospect of the story taking new turns. Because the city contained multitudes. So if the story changed, we’d figured, maybe we’d be excited all over again. Even the pandemic hadn’t driven us away. We’d survived.”

“In more neutral terms, she explained, they were both aware that pleasure and so-called ‘being in love’ are based on neurological novelty. And that the brain can’t be trusted not to take a relationship for granted. If they hung out together for too long a stretch, the dopamine surges would flare out.”

“If I tried to join in, throwing out a quick word of agreement or question, they’d gaze at me anthropologically. Like they were tolerating my naive opinion the way you’d tolerate a well-meaning foreigner who doesn’t speak the language.”

“Still, if you took away words, music lasted for centuries, I thought. A distillation of sadness that never aged. Unlike the person who’d felt it.”

“‘Economically underprivileged,’ was what the school called them, but Claire said poor kids; economically underprivileged was a privileged euphemism.”

“Although, she’d added, they outsourced their misery. Norway, for instance, claimed to be leading on carbon-neutrality but got most of its money from exporting a s***load of fossil fuels. Plus they went around slaughtering whales. Like the Japanese.”

“I never wanted kids. Even back when being gay meant you probably couldn’t have them. For the middle and upper classes, it’s a way of replacing anxiety about society with a fixation on the domestic. So you don’t have to strain your compassion by worrying about anything beyond the home front. Because you’ve already met your daily quota struggling to raise your young You can give up your ideals and your unresolved tension over the existential crisis of the ongoing death of the planet. And be praised for it. Since breeding’s sanctioned as the highest form of love.”

“There’s no such thing as a gift horse, Mara. Richard’s a regular horse. And the deal with horses is, you have to take care of them. You have to feed them. Muck out their stalls, Clean the first and shit from their hooves with a rasp. And ride them on a regular basis.”

“I don’t have a heart at peace, with my ex-wife. With that woman, I have a heart at war.”

“Plus Richard bloviated more if another professional was present. Especially Eli, who he saw as highly intelligent and yet, as a forensic pathologist, not fully conversant with current readings of late-stage capitalism. Richard would shift into enthusiastic lecture mode while Eli, likely exhausted from eight hours poking around in gnarly corpses, nodded politely and endured. I had to break into the lectures to save him.”

“So what did I do, again? With all that was given to me? And the answer would be, I ate. Mara claims social boredom makes me act out. But I don’t act out enough. If I did, I wouldn’t get so bored.”

Thank you to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on October 6th, 2026.

Taipei Story by RF Kuang (Literary Fiction)

College freshman Lily Chen heads to Taipei for a summer Chinese language intensive. Having only retained the Chinese she spoke before leaving the mainland for California when she was four, she hopes to both improve her skills and get closer to the heritage that never really felt like hers. It’s a grueling and isolating experience — and when her grandfather dies in Guangzhou and she is unable to attend because she hadn’t procured a mainland visa, she achieves a whole new level of reflection about what heritage and culture really mean to the emigre.

What could be a straightforward coming-of-age story becomes something else completely in the hands of the stunningly talented Kuang who layers meticulously detailed observations with deep and evolving reflection and multi-dimensional insights. We learn about Chinese culture, politics, and history from the subjective viewpoint of our shy, thoughtful, possibly overly analytic young woman. Following her train of thought is half the fun of taking in all that she learns from the experience — all coalescing into the gestalt that is an individual.

The story spans personal experiences (some so honest as to be cringeworthy for me) as well as uncovering some fairly horrific stories from her Chinese ancestors (think Khmer Rouge) — stories nobody had ever told before. What parts of history do you integrate and what parts better left alone? I also loved the focus on linguistics — obviously an intense interest of the author. She goes into just the right amount of detail about how language affects our thinking, how difficult it is to communicate anything even slightly complex without the grammar, vocabulary, and structure available to native speakers, and how she worked to reprogram her brain to be able to speak and read more or less seamlessly.

This is billed as a novel but it felt like an incredibly well-written memoir to me. In any case, I enjoyed every minute of it!

Thank you to William Morrow and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on September 8th, 2026.

The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer (Literary / Mystery / Romance Fiction)

This is an unusual book. What starts as an adventure story that blurs the lines between reality and fiction via a coven of magic infused “Book Witches,” veers off into a more meaningful, touching, existential, and incredibly meta story about the importance of literature within our lives and the incredible love and connection between authors, characters, and readers. I laughed through most of the book, but was brought to tears (of the poignant, meaningful variety) multiple times in the last half.

Rainy March is a Book Witch — “sworn to defend works of fiction from all foes real and imaginary.” She has a magic umbrella, a feline familiar (Koshka the non-Russian, Russian Blue), and a few mysteries of her own past to consider. Her adventures are humorous and quite literary (if you’re a reader you will enjoy traipsing through many of your favorite books as Rainy works to fix breaks and prevent the “Burners” from having their incendiary way). Rainy falls for the dashing (and fictional) Duke of Chicago during one of her rescues. This goes against the rules, but does make the story more interesting (and a lot more complicated). The seven section headings of the book are genres — Romance, Mystery, Fantasy, Non-fiction, YA and Horror, Thriller, and Science Fiction — and the plot does a good job of navigating through the sections in an eponymous fashion.

Clever, funny, and often poignant writing that takes an intricate worldview and serpentine plot and makes them accessible, fun, and intriguing. Some beautiful lines which I can’t include without giving too much away — except this non-plot centric funny one: “Two more !s? Something needed to be done about this punctuation abuse.“ I’m quite guilty of this abuse myself, sadly, hence my appreciation for the line. Some interesting historical tidbits on works of literature — my favorite about Nancy Drew: Apparently Nancy Drew was rewritten in the 60s to make her less feisty, a little older and better behaved. Not only did I have no idea, but all my copies are the rewrites! Grrr. Lastly, I loved the dedication: “Dedicated to librarians book, sellers and teachers fighting the good fight to save our stories and to all the world’s bedtime story readers.”

Inspired by a spate of actual book burnings in the 70s — fun, educational, and moving.

Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on April 7th, 2025.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (Fantasy)

A heroic fantasy novel with a YA slant from the author of Spinning Silver and Uprooted. Think Harry Potter meets Hunger Games with the ironic style of The Name of the Wind.

The action takes place at Scholomance — a school for the magically gifted. Unlike Hogwarts, however, there are no kindly Dumbledores anxious to help you survive and master your skills. Indeed, there are no teachers, or adults, or even any communication with the outside. Induction into the Scholomance is sudden and permanent. The only way out is to graduate, and there a lot of malevolent beasties that will do their best to ensure you make a tasty magic meal rather than a full wizard.

El (short for Galadriel — don’t ask) has an affinity for mass destruction — not what you want if you desire to be a “good witch”! She is roundly shunned by most — but is this because of her affinity for evil or because she is rude, off putting, and endlessly defensive? And the local hero, Orion Lake, keeps saving her life. How annoying!

The world building is complete and awesome — crawling with outlandish and execrable monsters, arcane rules and physics that doesn’t work in any way that I’ve experienced. Full of action (which normally bores me but somehow the sarcasm and wit and characters that I cared about in spite of myself carried me along quickly). Some not-so-thinly disguised political commentary on the haves and have-nots, but well-done and not completely one-sided. Overall enjoyable. I admit to liking Spinning Silver and Uprooted a little bit more but found this eminently consumable. Looks like it may be a series based on the last line of this book (not a cliff hanger in any sense but a promise of more to come).

I forgot to add that our heroine comes from Cardigan, Wales. That doesn’t have a lot to do with the story but it’s a beautiful place and I was tickled to find it in the book.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group — Ballantine and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on Sept. 29th, 2020.