→ October 31, 2025
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Someone You Can Build a Nest In.

John Wiswell won this year’s Nebula Award for his novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In, while also making the shortlist for the Hugo for Best Novel and winning the Locus Award for Best Novel. It’s a queer love story that tries to approach some enormous questions about the meanings of family, secrecy, and what it means to trust and be trusted, but it gets bogged down too much in the details of how its shapeshifting protagonist works.

Shesheshen is that main character, a shapeshifter with no natural form who lives by eating living creatures – including humans – and absorbing their body parts to create facsimiles of them, although she* can also use inanimate objects to take the places of bones and other hard physical structures. Thus she can imitate a human’s form and even some of its senses despite lacking a circulatory or nervous system. She recalls being born from a sac of eggs within a host human and having to defend herself when her siblings tried to attack and presumably eat her, eating them instead to survive. She lives in a castle outside a town whose residents fear a “wyrm” in the countryside, and the story opens when three adventurers, one the scion of a noble family, invade the house to try to kill her – despite not knowing what manner of creature she is – and collect some sort of bounty. She survives the battle but is wounded, and when she wakes after a fall, she finds herself in the care of a traveling woman named Homily who rescues her and nurses her back to health. Shesheshen develops feelings for Homily, something she has never experienced before, which becomes far more complicated when the full picture becomes apparent.

* I believe Wiswell used she/her pronouns for Shesheshen, while specifically identifying other characters as nonbinary, but obviously the concept of gender for a literal shapeshifter is a bit silly.

Shesheshen learns early on that there’s a connection between Homily and the people who want her dead, and also realizes that Homily thinks she’s a human, but despite coming close multiple times she decides not to tell Homily the truth until much later in the story (mild spoiler, but obviously that reckoning is coming at some point). This presented the most compelling aspect of the entire narrative, even more than the “will they/won’t they” between the two main characters or the eventual conflict between Shesheshen and the Baroness Wulfyre, who has sworn to kill the wyrm and take its heart so that she can lift a curse on her family. Instead, Shesheshen goes through the very familiar and normal set of rationalizations as she vacillates between coming clean – hi, I’m a human-eating monster of no fixed shape, also I think I love you – and avoiding the inevitable conflict and recriminations, both of the actual truth and her choices to deceive Homily for what turns out to be quite some time. It’s a superb portrait of the internal monologue that people who are conflict-avoidant (raises hand) go through, and the lies we even tell ourselves to rationalize our decisions.

Wiswell’s a fine prose writer, but there is just way too much ink spilled here about Shesheshen absorbing and digesting parts of the humans and creatures she attacks. The issue isn’t so much that it’s gross – it is kind of gross, but I’ve seen worse, and Wiswell’s descriptions aren’t lurid – but that it occupies so much of the page when we should be following the plot. There’s a lot happening in this book, and I’d say at least one very big twist, and it gets a bit drowned by all the blood and viscera being spilled by Shesheshen and some of her enemies.

Wiswell has a neuromuscular disorder and other disabilities, which he speaks about often and incorporates into some of his work; I was looking for the possible metaphors for disability and visibility in Someone to Build a Nest In, but if they’re there, I missed them, and thus possibly missed some significant context for the story itself. All I saw was a mildly interesting love story (where you know they’re getting together somehow, although it could prove tragic in the end) boosted by Shesheshen’s moral dilemma and the wrong choices she continually makes, even as she tries to convince herself they’re the right ones. That made for a solid novel but hardly the best of the year, certainly not over finalist The Book of Love by Kelly Link, which remains the best new novel I have read this year.

Next up: I just finished Theft, the newest novel by Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, and started Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn.

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→ August 15, 2025
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The Ministry of Time.

Kaliane Bradley entered the crowded field of time-travel fiction last year with her debut novel The Ministry of Time, earning a Hugo nomination for Best Novel and landing a coveted spot on Barack Obama’s best-of-2024 list. It’s a marvelous book that does this sort of fiction right: it’s very light on the time-travel parts, and spends extremely little time worrying about the mechanics or the paradoxes, instead jumping off time travel for a story that is by turns philosophical, psychological, and quite romantic.

The narrator of The Ministry of Time is a British-Cambodian woman, like Bradley, and has been working in various government agencies when she’s tabbed for a special project as a ‘bridge’ to one of six people that the British government has plucked from history and brought to the present. There is a single time-travel door, and while the government hasn’t mastered its use – far from it, as we learn – they went through history and found people who were otherwise about to die, usually in horrible ways, to ‘save’ them by way of making them guinea pigs in a massive experiment. The narrator’s charge is Commander Graham Gore, who was aboard the HMS Terror during the doomed Franklin Expedition in the Arctic waters north of and around what is now Nunavut, where the search for a Northwest Passage to Asia led to the death by exposure and starvation of over 100 men, along with no survivors. The Ministry extracted Gore, knowing he would die shortly anyway (so his removal would not affect the historical timeline), and put him in the narrator’s care, housing them together in a shared apartment once he’s released from several weeks of confinement and forced re-education so he and his fellow time travelers, some of whom came from the 1600s, would know what a car is or how money works.

There is a thriller here within The Ministry of Time – as you might imagine, the British Crown’s intentions here are hardly pure or altruistic – but the novel is a love story at its core, as the narrator and Graham develop feelings for each other from very early on, despite the gulf between them in times, cultures, and ethnic origins. (Race and racism are frequent fodder for dry humor in the book, especially as the various ‘expats’ from times past, all of whom are white, struggle to adjust to a multicultural society where a whole bunch of words are no longer suitable for common use.) The relationship comes across as natural, almost inevitable, including the required element where one gets furious at the other and appears to break things off, which here happens simultaneously with the big twist and leads to a slightly ambiguous but extremely satisfying conclusion.

Bradley also has a knack for creating supporting characters who manage to be three-dimensional and yet still useful in various ways, often for humor but occasionally for purposes of intrigue or suspense. The narrator’s own handler, Quentin, might be a conspiracy theorist, or he might know more than he lets on. Maggie, from the 1600s, turns out to be a saucy wench (channeling my inner Laurence Sterne here), and gets to explore her sexuality in a way that would never have been permitted in her time. Arthur was about to die during World War I, and has a harder time adjusting to the fact that he’s now in a time when his life and liberty won’t be at risk just because he’s gay. And Adela, the Ministry of Time’s Vice Secretary, starts out as a sort of comic relief taskmaster character, but plays an increasingly essential role in the plot as the story develops.

I said before reading The Ministry of Time that I thought it was going to win the Hugo, because it had so much hype and positive press behind it, and because the last ten nine authors to win the Hugo for Best Novel have all been women, with only one of the other six nominated works written by a woman author. Bradley’s work also includes significant explorations of race, sexual orientation, and culture, again all things the voters have tended to favor, over the sort of hard sci-fi that dominated the award’s first 40-odd years – with the winners then nearly always white men. (One exception is The Calculating Stars, the 2019 winner, one of the worst novels ever to take this award. The author was the President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association at the time.) Now that I’ve read it, I also think it’s going to win because it deserves it* – it would be an upper-half novel among all the winners, probably the best novel to win since N.K. Jemisin’s three straight wins, just edging out T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone. It’s sci-fi, but it’s literary sci-fi, one that uses a single speculative element to tell the sort of story an author couldn’t tell otherwise, and those are nearly always the best examples of the form.

*The other three nominees I’ve read, all of which were good: Service Model, A Sorceress Comes to Call, and The Tainted Cup.

Next up: Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, a classic of 20th century Italian literature.

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→ May 20, 2025
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Mice 1961.

Mice 1961 was one of the three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which ended up going to a fourth book, Percival Everett’s James, causing a minor kerfuffle that I didn’t think was warranted, given how amazing James is and the awards it had already won. In the interest of completeness, however, I decided to read all three finalists to see if any had a reasonable case. Not only does Mice 1961 not have any argument that it should have won over James, it’s just a badly written, badly constructed book, one that never should have sniffed the final three (four).

Mice 1961 is built around two sisters, Jody and her albino sister nicknamed Mice, who you might have said at the time was a little off or perhaps “touched,” and today we might speculate was on the spectrum or something of the kind. The sisters are orphaned, their father long out of the picture, their mother recently deceased, and they live on their own in an apartment with the narrator, a peculiar woman named Girtle who was herself an orphan and ran away from some kind of institution. Mice, the younger of the two, is still in high school and is mercilessly taunted and bullied by the other girls because she’s different – she looks different, of course, and she tends to fixate on small things and ask the same questions repeatedly. The story takes place the night of a big party, to which their whole Miami-area town has been invited, and Jody’s efforts to get Mice to the party so she can socialize while also keeping an eye on her sister.

The fundamental problem with Mice 1961 is that these characters all suck. They’re not interesting, they’re not three-dimensional, and they’re certainly not sympathetic. Mice feels like a parody of an autistic person, and the fact that she’s an albino (Levine never uses the word, but I’m fairly sure that’s the case here) and also somewhat developmentally disabled feels particularly insulting; albinism is a recessive genetic condition unrelated to intelligence. Jody is constantly worried about her sister, but in the way you might worry about a valuable piece of jewelry, not another human; there’s no sense anywhere in the book that Jody cares about Mice, and she does almost nothing to addressing the bullying other than complain to the police officer who (I think) is sweet on Jody and humors her whining. I spent most of the book wondering if any of these characters weren’t really there, especially Girtle, because so much of what they say and do seemed nonsensical, and Girtle often describes things that she couldn’t have seen without becoming part of the scene. It might have been a better book if she were a ghost or spirit or something else unreal, because I couldn’t figure out what her purpose was other than to be a sort of third-party narrator without requiring Levine to use the third person.

The party takes up most of the latter half of the book, and it’s full of local people who speak and act in bizarre and totally unrealistic ways. The party is a potluck, and at some point there’s a contest, sort of, although it’s more like each person announces what they brought and then maybe someone jumps in to insult them. I mean, I wasn’t at any potluck parties in 1961, but I think they were probably more fun and less full of assholes than this one.

Needless to say, I hated this book from start to finish – and I can’t even figure out what its point is. Why does this book exist? What is it telling me? This isn’t some moment in time or history or the culture that required documenting. It’s not a story about interesting people, and it’s not a story about larger issues like gender or race or the times a-changing (which they were in 1961). Absurdity for its own sake wears out its welcome very quickly. How this book made the final three in the Pulitzers is completely beyond my understanding.

Next up: I just started Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue, the first of her six mysteries featuring the character Inspector Alan Grant.

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→ April 28, 2025
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The Book of Love.

The Book of Love is Kelly Link’s first novel, coming nine years after her third short story collection Get In Trouble was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – a rarity for genre fiction of any sort. This novel, following a quartet of teenagers after three of them end up accidentally dead and are purposely brought back to life by a demon of questionable intent, is a damn masterpiece.

The novel opens with Susannah mourning the disappearance and presumed death of her sister, Laura, and two of Laura’s friends, Daniel – Susannah’s putative boyfriend – and Mo, a year earlier. But it turns out they were just mostly dead, and in the second chapter, we meet the three of them, plus a fourth character, as the guy they thought was their boring music teacher Mr. Anabin reveals he’s brought them back from the death place, and that he’ll give them another chance at life, altering everyone else’s memories so they think the trio were just away on a study-abroad program in Ireland. It turns out that this is part of a more complex deal between Mr. Anabin and another demon (or whatever he is) named Bogomil, whose history is longer and more complicated than anyone imagined. We follow the four as they try to figure out how to fulfill Mr. Anabin’s requests so they can stay alive while also navigating their relationships with each other, with people in their New England town of Lovesend, with a new visitor or two, and with an all-powerful evil entity who would like nothing better than to just eat them all up.

Link builds the world of this book piecemeal, giving us hints as we go along as to what lies just beyond the ‘door’ through which the three friends passed, even holding off on introducing or explaining some key characters until well into the narrative. It adds to the book’s dreamlike atmosphere, which itself connects to Susannah’s dreams about Bogomil and the way Mr. Anabin and later other characters play with sense and memory, while also keeping the reader from becoming too omniscient, so we can better feel the confusion of the troika as they seek to understand their situation and their changing abilities.

The book overflows with interesting characters, highlighted by the fantastic four at the heart. Susannah and Laura are sisters, opposites in nearly every way, but believable and fleshed-out, even more than the two boys. Daniel’s a bit of a goof, a well-meaning one, the guy who drifts through life while good things happen to him; while Mo is a more tragic figure who hates Daniel for exactly that reason. The way the four interact, with fights and tiffs and real moments of emotion, may be the greatest strength in a book that is as strong as any I’ve read in a year.

The story meanders at times, yet it never feels padded and certainly doesn’t slow down for anything or anyone; the final quarter or so seems to move at top speed, as the trio figure out some things about their predicament and the various competing forces lock Lovesend under a spell that may end in the destruction of the entire town. I don’t know if Link entirely stuck the landing here; it’s imperfect, but not bad by any means, just perhaps a little too tidy, where everyone gets some variation of a happy ending – or at least not a sad or tragic one. The denouement with the final boss is also of debatable quality; it works, barely, but again relies on a little hand-waving that this is all just fine and go with it. And I did go with it, to be clear.

If you like the work of Neil Gaiman, which I always have, but are looking for similar literature by any other author for obvious reasons, this is the most Gaimanesque novel I’ve ever read. It has dark, creepy elements, and it sits on both sides of the divide between life and death, with flawed main characters and demons from the benevolent to the purely evil. It has the feeling of an impossible story, that no one should be able to write this well, with prose this clear and clever, with characters this three-dimensional, and with a story that nearly sets the pages on fire as you progress. It’s on the list of finalists for this year’s Nebula Award, and I have no idea how the Hugos whiffed on it. The Book of Love is a marvel.

Next up: Alexei Panshin’s Nebula-winning novel Rite of Passage.

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→ April 7, 2025
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A Sorceress Comes to Call.

T. Kingfisher won the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel for Nettle and Bone, a dark fantasy novel with an indelible main character and outstanding prose, using the fantasy trappings in the setting rather than relying on them to drive the plot (or in lieu of one). Her latest novel, A Sorceress Comes to Call, has been nominated for this year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel, and it features more compelling characters and strong writing, although this time around Kingfisher leans more into the magic aspects of the story and it’s not always to the book’s benefit.

Cordelia is a 14-year-old girl who lives with her mother, Evangeline, a sorceress and a generally awful human, a clear Mother Gothel figure who uses her powers to leech money from men and to keep Cordelia in line – making her Obedient, where Evangeline can completely control Cordelia’s every action and word, while Cordelia is locked in and able to see everything that she’s doing and saying. Evangeline’s most recent “benefactor” appears to be done with her, so she takes her vengeance and sets off in search of new prey. She ends up ensnaring the Squire, whose sister, Hester, sees right away that Evangeline is bad news – referring to the woman as Doom in her thoughts – and eventually realizes that Cordelia is her mother’s prisoner, not her accomplice. The two must work together to try to stop Evangeline from marrying the Squire and casting Hester and all the servants out, and at the same time to free Cordelia from bondage, while, of course, Evangeline is not one to take opposition lightly and lashes out in violent ways.

Kingfisher is a hell of a storyteller; even when Sorceress started to veer more into using magic to resolve major plot points, she never lets her foot off the gas, and almost every plot twist is both well-earned and ratchets up the tension significantly. Cordelia’s a little bit of a cipher as a character because she’s so beaten down by her mother’s iron grip that she hasn’t had a chance to develop much as a person, so Hester ends up the real heroine, and she’s a star. She needs her own series of mysteries or something similar, because she’s rich and complex, smart but not unreasonably so, a little funny, a lot self-deprecating, and torn between her romantic inclinations and her fierce desire to maintain her independence. This becomes her story more than Cordelia’s by her force of personality, and watching her think and work through the problem of Doom is every bit as compelling as reading a classic Agatha Christie novel.

Where Sorceress loses a little bit relative to Nettle and Bone is in how much it relies on magic to resolve the major conflicts of the story, and how Kingfisher does so. After one of the big plot twists, an entirely new paranormal thing happens that hadn’t been introduced or even implied previously in the story, and it is critical in the ultimate plan to defeat Doom forever. That plan also requires the use of a ritual that doesn’t rely enough on the ingenuity or strength of the characters; they just have to get Doom in the right place and say some words and poof, which reminded me of that insipid show Charmed. That ritual follows a long stretch of time within the book where Hester, Cordelia, and some of their allies spend days poring through books looking for the solution, which is the only part of the book where the plot slows down.

Kingfisher does eventually stick the landing here once you get past the magical hand-waving that gets us to the climactic battle, with an incredibly tense series of scenes through the fight itself and a balanced epilogue that treats both of the protagonists fairly and in ways that are true to their characters. I’m hoping we see Hester again somewhere, as she’s a marvelous creation and too good to waste on just a single book. Kingfisher has said in interviews that she was inspired to write this by reading Regency romances, so perhaps she’ll decide to continue in that vein and bring Hester back for another go.

Next up: I’ve just finished Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and begun Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, the latter the winner of the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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