September 30, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Kronologic Cuzco 1450.

Kronologic: Cuzco 1450 (buy from Amazon · Miniature Market) is the second game in the Kronologic series of competitive logic-puzzle games that started with 2024’s Kronologic: Paris 1920, which I liked quite a bit other than worrying that the puzzles might be too easy for older/more experienced players. This second game comes with a new theme and 15 new mysteries to solve, coming in three “scenarios”, with the first two fairly straightforward while the third is kind of bananas.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Kronologic series, each case revolves around six characters moving around a map of six locations across six time periods, and you have to figure out something specific, such as (in the first five cases here) what one location was visited by only two characters in total, and when those characters were there at the same time. On your turn, you get one clue of your choosing, which you get by combining a location and a character or a location and a time period. All information in the game takes the form of character-time period-location; you can combine either of the first two with a location to get the missing bit.

The location cards have grids of symbols on the back, which you’re not allowed to look at directly; instead, you take the character or time period overlay and place it over the location card to get two clues. One clue is public, a number that tells you how many characters in that location at that time, or how many times that character went to that location, that you must read out loud. The second clue is private, and will tell you one time period when the character was in that location, or one character who was in that location at that time period.

Each case starts out with a map showing you all characters’ locations in the first or sixth time period and some paths between locations that are blocked or are one-way. Characters can’t stay in the same location in consecutive time periods, so you know they must move and can try to deduce their locations in time periods before/after known locations. The goal is to get enough clues to deduce that case’s solution.

The first two scenarios here are familiar enough in format that anyone who’s done some logic puzzles should get the hang of the game fairly quickly. The third scenario is where it gets much harder: characters move in ‘dances,’ sequences of movements, and in the last few cases you don’t even know which character moves according to which dance. I mentioned my concern that the Paris box wasn’t hard enough. I do not have that concern with the Cuzco box. If the first ten cases aren’t hard enough, the last five really should fit the bill.

There is an expansion for the Paris game called Panic at the Opera & the Cursed Lovers, with 10 new cases, but I haven’t played it (it requires the original, which I no longer own) and it’s only available in a few places, like Noble Knight Games, while it’s out of stock at Miniature Market.

Tagged 
September 29, 2026  ·  2 comments

Audition.

A middle-aged woman gets a note from an attractive young man about half her age, who asks her to have coffee with him, where he reveals to her that he believes she might be his mother. In the first telling, she says that’s impossible, but ends up helping him try to start his career in theater. In the second telling, he isn’t just her son, but he grew up with her, and is merely coming back home to live while he gets his career going.

In Audition, Katie Kitamura explores her main character-narrator twice over, and the result is that the character changes, but our perception of her changes even more, not least because of what western societies tell us about motherhood and women in general. The first half, where the young man isn’t her son, shows her as colder, less empathetic, more calculating, while the second has her warmer, but also more anxious and submissive. One of this year’s Pulitzer finalists, it’s a terse exploration of how we* see women based on their roles and the actions of the men around them.

* Especially me, a man raised in an even more patriarchal era than our own, and raised around a lot of traditional gender roles and stereotypes.

Kitamura’s prose is sparse, almost clinical, especially in the first half of the book, where Xavier (the young man) isn’t her son because she has never carried a pregnancy to term. In that story, she’s been unfaithful to her husband Tomas many times, so when he spots her with Xavier in a restaurant, he might suspect this is her latest lover. The combination of her treatment of Tomas and her rational, almost emotionless reaction to Xavier’s appearance and the possibility of an alternate history comes across as even more surprising because she’s a woman – even though that clouded lens is ours.

Right around the midpoint, Kitamura begins part two, which might as well be a separate novella, as it opens with Xavier returning home to live temporarily because of his demanding new job as an assistant to the director of a play in which his mother is acting. That he is her son is assumed – there’s no transition to this new scenario – and only as the story unfolds do we see how her character is changed, along with that of Tomas, who is the philanderer in this half. Now the narrator is anxious, eager to please both her son and her husband, and becomes submissive to the point of reducing her importance and presence in her own apartment.

It seems like Kitamura is exploring how becoming a mother changes both a woman’s actual character – the narrator in part two isn’t a tradwife, but I couldn’t help but think of that misogynistic trend – and how everyone around her treats and sees her. Kitamura’s thumb is on the scale here, of course, but she’s playing fair with the parent’s instinct to give up things for their children, even if it’s to the point of giving in when they shouldn’t. (I have struggled with this myself, so I was especially primed to see the second story this way.) The stereotype that mothers are caring and warm while women who aren’t mothers, regardless of the reason, must be cold and lacking in empathy is reasonably pervasive in our society, and Kitamura pushes both of those generalizations to reasonably extreme points to expose them.

I would have picked Audition over Angel Down for the Pulitzer, although I think Audition’s prose, while direct and quick to read, lacks some of the beauty or energy found I would hope to see in a winner of any such literary prize. Her language is more clinical in the first half, while she doesn’t entirely shed that in the second half; if you love the prose of Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver, you might connect with Audition more than I did. I engaged more with the novel’s philosophical aims and the thought experiment within than I did the language or even the dual main character, although that ultimately was enough to get this over the line for me.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Eric Ambler’s Passage of Arms.

Tagged , ,
September 26, 2026  ·  6 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/26/26.

One column at The Athletic this week, my hypothetical award ballots for the five major player awards other than NL Rookie of the Year, for which I actually voted this year. My minor-league player of the year column will run tomorrow (Sunday).

Plans for my free email newsletter this past week were derailed by a few things, not least of which was me losing a day and a half to getting my flu & COVID shots. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok. I’ve noticed an uptick in folks trying to reach me via DMs with baseball questions – I can’t possibly answer all of the individual questions I get, but I do answer the majority of questions I get in public spaces, like the comments under my Athletic stories or on Bluesky.

And now, the links…

  • Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for the open Senate seat from Michigan, claims he worked on an auto-plant assembly line helping build Chrysler LeBarons, using that as a way to position himself as someone who understands Michigan workers. The UAW says he’s lying: He worked at an aftermarket facility that modified cars, never worked at any Chrysler factory, and was never a UAW member.
  • A new UN report says that women in Gaza are facing heightened risks of sexual violence as a result of the war, due to the breakdown in the societal order. The Jerusalem Post story I linked noted that the UN report doesn’t mention Hamas’ role, which seems like a large omission for reasons they explain in the article.
  • Utah Republicans are subverting democracy there, overruling the voters and setting up extralegal courts to avoid giving Democrats a single Congressional seat from the Mormon-run state. Some LDS women are fighting back.
  • A group of researchers are suing NIH over the blatantly political policy of screening grants for anything that hints of DEI or woke or whatever bogeymen scare the Trump Administration.
  • The same AI-detection tool, Pangram, has also ruled that an acclaimed novel by Haitian-Canadian author Thélyson Orélien was likely AI-written, causing the Prix Goncourt committee to remove the novel from its shortlist. The case is more complicated, in part because the author writes in French while Pangram was trained on English texts, and because of subsequent discoveries that Orélien plagiarized content in articles he wrote over a decade ago.
  • DoorDash spent $1.4 million in the NYC mayoral race last year, most of it to a super PAC that ran disgusting anti-Islam ads targeting Zohran Mamdani. Turns out they did it to try to avoid consequences for wage theft, as Mamdani’s office just settled with the company for $131.5 million.
  • A measles outbreak that began earlier this year in Bangladesh has killed over 1000 children since the spring. This outbreak isn’t due to anti-vax propaganda, but due to poverty, where malnutrition weakens the immune responses even of vaccinated people, and the country’s extreme population density, which helps the highly contagious virus spread.
  • What came before the Big Bang? We’ll never know, of course, but Scientific American talks about how physicists come up with theories about it.
  • The mother in that viral clip at a Giants game, where she was carrying her baby and a substantial amount of food while no one appears to be helping her, wrote a response to the online reaction, where she defends her husband and explains that they’ve even received death threats over the video.
  • New Order/Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris spoke to Vulture about the best songs by those two bands to help promote the release of the 16-CD Eternal (Live) box set of previously unreleased live Joy Division concerts.
  • The New York Times covers two men in England who are doing a podcast about their efforts to learn and play a board game called The Campaign for North Africa, which is known for being abstruse, extremely detailed (Italian units get a “pasta ration”), and long enough that few, if any, have ever finished it. There is at least one user on BGG who says he has finished the game, and I see no reason to doubt him.
  • Two pretty big Board Game Kickstarters this week: John D. Clair’s Electrify, co-designed with Ian Hutchinson, has some shared DNA with Clair’s Space Base. They’re both engine-builders, but this game has less luck than Space Base, at least in the base game.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
September 25, 2026  ·  1 comment

A Drop of Corruption.

Robert Jackson Bennett won the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novel with his fantasy/mystery mashup The Tainted Cup, which introduced the world to Ana and Din, an eccentric (to put it very mildly) detective duo who operate in a world that combines medieval trappings with an alternate science built around biohacking and the exploitation of massive and deadly sea creatures called leviathans. The story was solid, if a little more convoluted than that of the typical mystery novel, while the two main characters were the novel’s biggest strength, and the setting was innovative and curious enough to make me want to spend more time within it.

Bennett has written two more novels in the series already, the second of which, 2025’s A Drop of Corruption, was nominated for this year’s Hugo, losing out to The Everlasting. As in the first book, we have Ana and Din working to solve a murder that is hard to fathom and that will ultimately expose a broader conspiracy of graft, betrayal, and, of course, corruption. Set in the neighboring kingdom of Yarrow, which Ana and Din’s native empire Khanum will be taking over in an arrangement that sounds similar to the transfer of power in Hong Kong, the book goes deeper into the weird science that powers this fictional world, and the very bizarre ‘enhancements’ people within it use to do this difficult work.

Ana is the Sherlock Holmes/Nero Wolfe here, a savant who is nearly always blindfolded because she says the visual stimuli of the world are too much for her senses to handle. Din is her faithful assistant, more sagacious than Dr. Watson and more serious than Archie Goodwin, and has himself been enhanced as an engraver who can record things he sees in his mind, as if he had an eidetic memory. Their partnership, awkward and tentative for most of the first book, is more solid and more fluid here, so we step almost directly into their work to solve the first murder – which, mild spoiler here, gets solved far sooner than you might expect because of the way it expands outward into a larger story.

Again, the characters are the real thing here, although in this book Bennett has dropped more clues that might help readers piece together the ultimate solution. (The intermediate one I just mentioned isn’t solvable in that way.) Din gets more screen time than Ana, and it helps flesh out his character more, although if you jumped right to this book without reading the first, you might think Ana is two-dimensional and a bit of comic relief when her oddness is inherent to her character. One of the new characters introduced here, Malo, who has an enhanced olfactory sense, is a strong comic foil for Din, and balances his overly serious manner with her sarcasm.

The setting was what really sucked me into A Drop of Corruption. I’ve played a handful of role-playing games, almost entirely computer ones with a little D&D and its ilk in high school, and I would absolutely play the hell out of a roleplaying game set in this world – especially Yarrow, which is richer and stranger and more foreboding than even Khanum, with political intrigue and what sounds like a massive grey-market economy, along with a people hostile to almost any stranger. Fantasy novels almost always seem to involve magic on some level; Bennett replaces that with his science, which involves the use of plants and fungi to alter people and even create buildings along with the chemical enhancements that many of these characters have undergone. It’s highly imaginative, yet also coherent enough to work with the story rather than detracting from it.

The story is overlong, but the core mystery and its resolution are tighter than that of the first novel, and there are definitely more clues to catch if you’re that sort of reader. (I wish I was, but I am not.) The first murder is a locked-door mystery, part homage, part parody, and that’s about the only thing I sort of figured out here – how it was done, but not who did it. Bennett’s ambition in his plotting works for and against him, making the narrative broader and more interesting, but resulting a book that’s quite long for the genre. I’ve read a few hundred mystery novels by myriad authors and have read very few of this length, mainly by Anthony Horowitz in some of his novel-within-a-novel works. I was pulled through the book quickly – it’s 450 pages and I read it inside of six days – as much because of the characters as my desire to find the solution to the story.

Bennett also slips in a little social commentary here that the first novel lacked, some obvious (hey, slavery is bad!), but some more timely, such as Din’s family story that serves as a metaphor for the crushing pattern of medical debt in the U.S., and the main plot’s exploration of what happens in a world without regulations. Yarrow is an absolute monarchy, but Khanum is also an autocracy, and Bennett should continue to explore what that means for his main characters, who, for now at least, serve its emperor.

I will confess I’m glad to see the next book in the series, A Trade of Blood, came in under 400 pages. I’m a fan, and would have read the third book regardless, but I’ll be happy to see Ana and Din get to the point a little more expeditiously. As for this year’s Hugo, I’m fine with this book being on the shortlist but not the winner; it’s not as good as The Incandescent or The Everlasting but I’d probably put it ahead of Death of the Author.

Next up: A book off the Hugo longlist, There Is No Antimemetics Division, by Sam Hughes, who writes under the pen name qntm.

Tagged , , , ,
September 24, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Canal Houses.

I’m a little bit of a sucker for games that have you building colorful houses. I don’t know why they speak to me so; they might just remind me of places I’ve traveled, including Italy and some places in the Caribbean. Walking in Burano is probably my favorite of these, and I just reviewed Tenby, which is a little more complex.

Canal Houses is the first English version of a Dutch game first published as Grachtenpand in 2024, asking players to build pastel-colored houses along a canal in Amsterdam. Houses all start with a shop on the ground floor, any number of window cards you’d like, and ideally a roof on top. You gain points from the shop and roof cards if their buildings meet the criteria shown on those cards, while the window cards have the four features – cards, birds, flags, and flowerpots – that appear in most of those criteria. The game ends when someone plays their fourth roof card, at which point you score all shops and roofs you fulfilled, take 1 point for every flowerpot, and then give 4 points to the player with the largest contiguous block of cards of the same color.

It’s also a card-drafting game, so you’ll start with a hand of three cards, drawing one from the deck of your choice, then playing any of the four cards you hold, after which you pass your entire hand to your left. You must build upward; each building must start with a shop, and then windows (you could build without one, but it would score nothing), and then the roof. Once you’ve placed a card, you can’t move it, and a building with a roof on it is permanently finished.

I don’t like the term ‘cozy’ in board games or mysteries, but if you know what that word means in this context, sure, Canal Houses has it. It’s light, very fast (you place cards simultaneously), and the only player interaction within the game is when you pass the cards. There’s a two-player variant that’s more directly competitive, skipping the card-drafting aspect, where you also can’t build a roof unless the building fulfills its requirements; I haven’t tried it, but I think I might prefer that with two players. (Mysteries can’t be “cozy.” Someone’s been murdered. Maybe multiple people. That’s not “cozy.” That’s just shit writing.)

I do think Canal Houses is a great family game – it’s very quick (15-20 minutes), and quick to learn or teach. It does have a ceiling, pun intended, because there are so few ways to score, and the window cards have plenty of those icons on them. It becomes just a medium challenge to fulfill your shop/roof criteria, unless someone is able to get their fourth roof down quickly to speed the end of the game. I love the packaging as well – it’s a small, narrow box that will barely take up any space on the shelves. It’s a solid grade B for me, a filler game I’ll gladly keep and throw in the bag on trips.

Tagged ,
September 21, 2026  ·  2 comments

Crook Manifesto.

Colson Whitehead followed up his second Pulitzer Prize win with the first book in what has become his Harlem Trilogy, the action-packed, dark crime novel Harlem Shuffle. Set in the early to mid 1960s, the book introduced us to Ray Carney, the prosperous owner of a Harlem furniture store who occasionally fences stolen goods, although he’s less involved in criminal enterprises than his late father Big Mike or his cousin Freddie. The second book about Ray, Crook Manifesto, is itself a triptych of stories featuring him and some of his less scrupulous acquaintances, set in three different years in the 1970s against the backdrop of a rapidly changing New York City. It’s a pale successor to the first novel, with far less interesting plots and a shallower look at its social and physical setting than Harlem Shuffle offered.

Ray is still running his furniture store, and has largely left the criminal scene entirely by the time the story opens in 1971, when his young daughter asks for tickets to an upcoming Jackson 5 concert. Ray asks around to see if anyone has a hookup when he lands on the crooked cop Munson, who conscripts Ray into a fencing job that touches multiple underworld elements and ultimately threatens Ray’s life. Two years later, a blaxsploitation film shoot in Harlem brings us Ray’s muscle man Pepper, a side gig, along with some scenes in Ray’s store, but the project goes sideways when the lead actress disappears. In 1976, Harlem is beset by arson cases, many set by landlords torching their own buildings for fraudulent insurance claims. When one fire nearly kills a young boy in the neighborhood, Carney decides to investigate, running into a major real estate scam that sets him against some of the most powerful people in the borough.

Part of Crook Manifesto’s problem is that the stories are too short, and Whitehead packs in so much action – it’s a quick read – that there’s very little space for the bigger picture he’s trying to paint of a city in decline, or at least a neighborhood in decline as other, whiter areas hold their ground. The third section, about the constant threat of fires, whether deliberate or not, has a more profound point about the intersection of racism, corruption, and ineffective (if not outright counterproductive) public policy choices, even by those who profess to be trying to help economically disadvantaged areas. Whitehead barely gets to any of that because he’s racing through the story – sometimes literally, given the speed of some of the fires – and has to get us to the twist ending, which wasn’t all that surprising given how few possibilities there were for the solution to the mini-mystery anyway.

The first section with the crooked cop has the slowest buildup, but it does capture the noirish vibe that characterized most of Harlem Shuffle, particularly once Munson has Ray hooked enough that there appears to be no physical or figurative way out for the protagonist. We know Ray survives to part two, so that’s not much of a plot point, so Whitehead instead creates a situation where Ray’s predicament gradually gets worse, and he realizes it’s getting worse, until there’s the slightest opening for something to happen that gets Ray out of this in one piece. As I was reading that section, I was hoping that would be the worst of the three, because Whitehead was setting up something larger, but it ended up the best section by default.

I’ll still check out the third book, Cool Machine, at some point, but it’s another triptych, which doesn’t give me very high hopes for it.

Next up: The fourth of this year’s Hugo nominees for me, A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett.

Tagged , , ,
September 19, 2026  ·  4 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/19/26.

This week at the Athletic, I did my annual column on players I was wrong about, previewed the Arizona Fall League rosters, and held a live Q&A on Thursday.

I’m due for another issue my free email newsletter this week. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok. I’d love to hear any feedback on my videos on the latter two so far, particularly around their length.

And now, the links…

  • One of the best and most horrifying longreads of the year comes from WIRED as they explain the “burnerverse,” where anonymous accounts on X trade nonconsensual intimate videos and images, and then try to ruin the subjects’ lives by doxing them and contacting family and friends. The story centers on University of Florida student Maddie Kowalski, who is fighting back with lawsuits even in the face of a tepid police response (two of her accused tormentors remain on campus). One of the other burner accounts unveiled here was of Jacob Gomberg, a pitcher at Indiana University; I reached out to their Athletics Department and received this comment: “Yesterday we were made aware of charges filed against Jacob Gomberg in Alachua County, Florida. We take these allegations very seriously and promptly turned the matter over to the University’s Office of Civil Rights Compliance who will continue to gather information, assess the matter, and determine any next steps.”
  • Hackers stole a Flock camera, extracted its software, and revealed how it collects data on cars and people.
  • Four measles deaths so far in Pennsylvania, while the vaccine-denial crowd is busy trying to claim that none of those were actually due to measles. That’s four preventable deaths due entirely to the efforts of the misinformation crowd that has also seized power in the Republican Party.
  • Meanwhile, Thomas Ross, the Republican candidate for MO-161, was arrested and charged with attempting to plant drugs on his primary opponent. He won the primary by 31 votes, but has since withdrawn, allowing the party to replace him with Louise Secker, the woman he tried to frame.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
September 18, 2026  ·  1 comment

My tomato sauce recipe (for now).

I grew up Italian-American, eating some variety of pasta tomato sauce multiple times a week, plus some homemade pizza (with dough purchased from the same place for 25-30 years), but I didn’t grow up with a family tomato sauce recipe, and even into adulthood, when I made it from scratch, I’d almost always use canned tomatoes – which, out of season, are the better option anyway. (For years, when I would only need a small amount of sauce for pizza, I’d buy a jar of good sauce that had zero added sugar; Trader Joes has one that’s excellent for that.)

The last few years, however, we’ve grown so many tomatoes that we can’t eat them fast enough, and I’ve started getting into making sauce from fresh tomatoes. It’s not difficult, although the two things you need are time and a food mill, and I fully understand that some people have neither. It is amazing how different the finished product can be when you start with fresh tomatoes – and, contrary to what every cookbook and almost everything on the internet has told me, you can make a good sauce from any tomatoes you grow.

So here’s my current iteration of sauce from fresh tomatoes, as simple as I can make it, with six ingredients, one optional. It’ll keep a week-plus in the fridge and freezes for much longer, although I always use it up within a few days. You do need a food mill to get the skins off fresh tomatoes; you can follow the same ratio with canned tomatoes, but can hand-crush them if you’re willing to live with a few extra seeds, and I would probably simmer it for a shorter time because they’ve already been ‘cooked’ once in the canning process.

Tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes

2-3 pounds fresh, ripe tomatoes (the smaller the tomatoes, the more total weight you want)

1 onion, diced

1-2 Tbsp olive oil

Salt

¼ cup vodka (optional)

1-3 tsp minced thyme, to taste

1. Put all tomatoes in a saucepan or skillet with a cover over medium heat. Cook about ten minutes, covered, shaking the pan often to prevent sticking or scorching, until the tomatoes have started to burst their skins.

2. Pour everything – tomatoes, skins, juices, whatever – into a food mill set over a bowl large enough to hold at least 3 cups of liquid. Mill everything until no more pulp comes through the disc. (I have two discs for my food mill and I use the one with smaller holes for this.) Set the bowl aside and toss or compost the skins and seeds left in the food mill.

3. In the same pan, add the olive oil and sweat the diced onion with a pinch of salt over low heat until translucent, 7-10 minutes. You don’t want any browning here.

4. Add the milled tomatoes, the thyme, and the vodka (if using) and simmer 30 minutes to 1 hour over medium-low, stirring often, until the sauce is visibly thickened. The ultimate consistency is up to you, but there’s a lot of water to evaporate here. You can also skip the mincing and throw thyme sprigs in the sauce for the whole simmering stage, then discard them, if you don’t have time or prefer not to have the leaves in the sauce.

5. Season to taste with more salt, and black pepper if desired.

That’s all I use – no garlic, no basil (I love it, but it can overpower the tomatoes here), no cheese, and absolutely no sugar. I know sugar is a contentious topic in tomato sauces, and maybe if you’re using out-of-season tomatoes that have less sugar in them, you might want to add it … but I hate what sucrose does to the flavor and texture of tomato sauce. It’s cloying, and I think that because it’s hygroscopic it tightens up the sauce’s consistency. I want my tomato sauce to taste like tomatoes.

That’s just my palate, though. This is a template for a tomato sauce. You can add garlic if you want. Or crushed red pepper. (Add enough, or maybe use fresh chilies, and you’ll get an arrabbiata sauce. But you’ll need a tray.) Start with 4 ounces of diced guanciale or pancetta, drain the fat, set the meat aside, then add ¼ heavy cream at the end before adding back the meat, substituting basil for thyme, and you have pasta alla vodka. Skip the cream and alcohol, use guanciale/pancetta, add a lot of black pepper to serve, and you have pasta all’amatriciana. You can swap in white wine for the vodka; it’ll be sweeter and a little tangier, but the alcohol will still boost the flavor by liberating some alcohol-soluble compounds in the tomatoes.

I also use whatever shows up in the garden, which is always a mixture of red and yellow tomatoes, varying from grape and pear tomatoes up to round ones the size of a racquetball. Yellow tomatoes are less acidic than red, so I wouldn’t go more than half yellow because I’d worry the sauce would be too bland and might spoil faster. Yellows are also sweeter than red tomatoes, which further reduces the need for adding any sugar. You can make a pretty great uncooked sauce from yellow tomatoes, come to think of it, although I haven’t done that in ages.

Anyway, I hope that’s helpful to someone. If you’ve got your own method – or something passed down from your ancestors – I’d love to hear it.

Tagged , , ,
September 17, 2026  ·  4 comments

The Everlasting.

Mousy academic and erstwhile war hero Owen Mallory uncovers a mythical manuscript about the folk hero Una the Everlasting, only to learn that the book is actually a time machine – and that he needs to go back in history to make sure that the real Una does what she’s supposed to do according to the myth. The two fall in love, however, which makes completing her legend a bit complicated, since it ends in her death. And so Owen goes back in time again, and again, egged on by the War Minister of his country, Dominion, to try to set the story straight, until he eventually discovers that someone else is writing their story, too.

Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting won the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year, quite handily according to the voting, and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, while acquiring what appears to be a dedicated fan base online for its sweeping romance, a love story that literally knows no bounds of time. The time-travel bits don’t add up here; you have to suspend your disbelief early and go with the flow, pun intended. That’s not a serious flaw when the time-travel aspect comes in service of a larger goal, and in The Everlasting, a story about power and loyalty and courage, that goal is evident. Where the story falls short, however, is in its two characters, and the weak chemistry between them that undermines much of the love story.

Una comes from the archetypal wild-child woman warrior, wielding a magical sword that apparently can’t be broken or destroyed, often living by her wits and her hunting prowess, feared by many of the peasants of her time but revered in hindsight by the Dominion of the present day. Dominion has just recently fought a bruising war that resembles our World War I in some ways, and Owen, still a coward, turned out to be a crack shot, dispatching enemy soldiers until he was nearly decapitated in a battle that became a massacre. He’s returned from that war dead-set on becoming a historian with a particular interest in Una’s legend, so finding and translating an original manuscript of her story, or any of the artifacts associated with her, would make his academic career. When the book arrives, of course he dives in, and he remains devoted to the task until he notices several details that make him question the nature of everything, from the righteousness of his cause to his own free will. Yet he’s much more of a Nick Jenkins here, observing, noticing, more involved in the action than Jenkins typically was but still on the outside of most of it, and as such ends up a blander character whose primary attribute is the cowardice that he tells us about – but seldom shows in these pages.

The world that Harrow has created may be the book’s real strength, as it’s recognizable and, other than the time travel, plausible, while allowing her to play around with setting and style. There are subtle shifts in the prose and tone between the more medieval settings of Una’s ‘true’ time and the contemporary vignettes of Owen’s childhood, the war, and the aftermath, along with an unsubtle warning about fascism and people who’ll destroy everything, even time itself, to gain power. (I’d also note that the identity of the villain here is as obvious as a sledgehammer to the forehead.)

The Everlasting is also an exploration of the gap between myth and reality, and the way that history, especially oral history, can change over time while also changing those who follow and hear it. Una’s legend turns out to be very far from the truth, and Owen, who grew up hearing some of the folk tales and believes he may have met Una under a yew tree when he was a child, has to grapple with the difference between the Una of the page and the one he’s traveling with, and whose mission he must protect to save Dominion. As he changes the story, however, the future changes as well, not quite in an A Sound of Thunder way, but enough to lay out an argument that past and future are intertwined in ways beyond the merely physical.

I read The Everlasting expecting to be sucked into the characters and their romance, but for the most part, I didn’t buy it. (There is one very well-written sex scene, however, especially shocking for a genre that produces some of the cringiest sex scenes put to paper.) I found the political and historical narrative much more compelling, which is enough for me to recommend the book, but also left me knowing I didn’t get what many readers seem to have gotten, and feeling like maybe I just missed something. Instead there’s some padding here and there on the duo’s repeated quests that was probably part of how Harrow tried to build their chemistry, and without that foundation, those parts dragged.

I’ve only read three of the six Hugo nominees this year, but I’d put this behind The Incandescent and ahead of Death of the Author. A Drop of Corruption is on my to-read shelf right now.

Next up: Tattoo by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

Tagged , , , , ,
September 12, 2026  ·  4 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/12/26.

One post this week on The Athletic, a scouting notebook on Gage Wood, Zyhir Hope, and a couple of other Phillies & Tigers prospects. I feel like the minor-league schedule has been personally screwing me over the last month or so; I’ve been home and around to go to games, but the matchups have been lousy.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok.

And now, the links…

  • “I moved to New York to pay more in taxes – and I’m glad I did.” I resonated with this, having moved to Delaware in part for the lower taxes, only to learn that the outcome is worse public schools. Our taxes here should be higher, and people in many low-tax states don’t realize how much they’re losing in public services.
  • Kickstarter szn again: Tycoon Games has one up for Everdell Journeys, the latest game in the Everdell universe, with a card-drafting adventure rather than the forest city tableau- and engine-builder of the original.
  • Inside Up Games has a Kickstarter up for The Adventure Store, a deckbuilding trick-taking game built around the theme of buying equipment for your adventuring party.
  • The Kickstarter for the Clank! Big Box is already well over $1 million.
  • The annual Summit Awards honor games that represent historical themes through board gaming. This year’s winners include games about the 1968 protests in Chicago, one of the last Japanese soldiers to surrender after WWII, and queer life in early 1700s London.
  • Charlotte board game people – there’s a new FLGS (friendly local game store) opening in Camp North End called Good Game on September 19th. I’ll have to wait till spring to check it out, but I hope some of you can visit now and report back.
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
Elsewhere
BlueskyInstagramTikTokThreadsFacebookThe Athletic
Reach him
Klawchat and the newsletter
The site
HomeAboutBooksBlogContact

All written content © Keith Law, 2006 to 2026

Designed by