american novels

July 1, 2025 · 2 comments

Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

Will Leitch’s Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is the heart-warming story of a police officer and divorced dad of an 11-year-old son who discovers he has terminal brain cancer and decides to die on the job so his son can get more cash in death benefits. It’s definitely the most enjoyable book you’ll read about dying of glioblastoma this year.

(Disclaimer: Will’s a friend – someone I’ve actually spent time with on multiple occasions – so there’s just no way I was going to be objective about this book. If I had disliked it, I just wouldn’t mention it at all, so bear in mind that this is one time you can actually accuse me of bias and be correct.)

Lloyd is a cop in Atlanta, the son of a decorated, hard-nosed, military-minded cop who was a sort of legend in the force himself until he died of a heart attack, possibly hastened by the case of a serial killer that he couldn’t solve. He learns at the very start of the book that his headaches are caused by an aggressive type of brain tumor called a glioblastoma that will kill him in a matter of months, and do so in ugly fashion as he starts to experience memory loss, extreme mood swings, and pain in his head he describes as “lightning bolts.” He doesn’t tell anyone at all about the diagnosis – not his son Bishop, his partner Anderson, his boss, his ex-wife, nobody but his doctor. He realizes that his life insurance policy isn’t going to do much for his son, paying for about a year of college if they’re lucky, and realizes that there are large payouts coming to any officer who dies in the line of duty, so he decides to find a way to do just that, only to learn that he’s a pretty good cop and not that good at the dying part.

Lloyd’s letters to his son, which he calls his ten edicts, are interspersed throughout the narrative and lend some gravity to the proceedings, which otherwise are quite jovial for a story about a guy with a time bomb in his brain and a gun at his hip. (To say nothing of his car, which is a weapon in its own right when Lloyd’s behind the wheel.) Those poignant interludes are an accurate reminder of every parent’s nightmare – that you won’t be there when your kid grows up to experience all of the big moments, to tell him how to change a tire or ask someone on a date, to answer the phone (or a text) when something’s wrong and they need their mom or their dad. The real genius of the book is that those moments aren’t sappy or maudlin, which they could so easily be. They read as honest and clear, probably clearer than any of us could really be if we sat down and thought too hard about what writing that kind of letters really meant, and as a result they hit some big emotional notes without dragging down what is otherwise a fast-paced novel with some great action sequences once Lloyd decides he has a literal death wish.

I would still rank Will’s first novel, How Lucky, as my favorite of the three, because I think its protagonist, Daniel, is such an incredible, compelling character, and I love the way the tension builds in that story. That’s not a knock on Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, as they’re different books with clearly different goals. There are even nods in this book to Will’s second book, The Time Has Come, that I won’t spoil, and a few other Easter eggs scattered here and there. I’d say Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is his most earnest book, but I feel like that word has morphed into a backhanded insult, like a pat on the head for a writer who’s mailed in the emotional stuff in most of their previous works. It’s very thoughtful, getting the details right in the important ways, and even in more trivial ways, like details of what an Atlanta cop’s daily routine might be like, that most readers wouldn’t even notice. (I only realized it after reading the acknowledgements.) It’s a novel with a big heart that earns your response through its honesty, with a strong main character and some levity to get you past the fact that the main character is staring death in the face from page one.

Next up: I actually finished Rita Bullwinkel’s gimmicky, Pulitzer-finalist novel Headshot last week and am reading Masashi Matsuie’s The Summer House.

Tagged american literature, american novels, contemporary novels, dark comedy, highly recommended

June 24, 2025 · 1 comment

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond.

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond lives up to the absurdity of its name, although I’m not sure if it reaches whatever the goals of its authors, Percival Everett and his colleague James Kincaid, may have had in writing it. It’s an epistolary satire, written entirely in the form of letters and emails between those two, a foppish dandy named Barton Wilkes who works in Sen. Thurmond’s office, an editor at Simon & Schuster and his assistant, and others, as the plot to write the book of the title becomes increasingly convoluted and the behavior of several people involved becomes unhinged.

The aide to Sen. Thurmond, Barton Wilkes, is positively nuts, as I think is clear from the first few pages. He proposes the book to Simon & Schuster, arguing that Sen. Thurmond is uniquely qualified to opine on the subject of Black people in the United States since Civil War, in part because he was alive for pretty much all of that period. Somehow, he gets an editor, Martin Snell, interested in this preposterous proposal, possibly through some acquaintance with Snell’s assistant Juniper, and the project progresses far enough that Everett and Kincaid come in as ghost-writers. The plan is that Wilkes will send them the Senator’s notes and they’ll turn it all into a book somehow. Of course, the Senator’s actual involvement in or awareness of the project becomes an open question, Wilkes and Snell both appear to be perverts, Everett and Kincaid can’t stop sniping at each other, there’s a possibly mobbed-up rival editor at S&S, and somehow Juniper’s sister ends up part of the story, too.

The obvious target of the satire is Thurmond, who was Senator for about 120 years and spent most of that time pushing white nationalist ideas, particularly anything related to segregation. He split off from the Democrats after World War II, running for President in 1948 as a “States Rights Democratic” candidate and carrying four states. (Since then, only one third-party candidate has earned any electoral votes, another racist windbag, George Wallace, in 1968.) The Thurmond in this book is well aware that he’s about to die and wants to both set the record “straight” on his legacy and possibly grease his path into some sort of afterlife. Everett and Kincaid don’t want any part of whitewashing (pun intended) the Senator’s grim history, and it’s not like they’re getting much money from the project either, although it seems to offer some professional benefits to Kincaid within the story. (I wondered if he was even a real person, but he is, and his specialty is on the sexualization of children in Victorian literature and culture.) Thurmond’s an easy target and the two take him down rather efficiently, although they could obviously have spent even more time lampooning him as a sort of Foghorn Leghorn in Nazi garb and discussing the legacy of his legislative initiatives.

What I didn’t understand was all of the frippery around that part. Snell and Wilkes both seem to be sexual predators of a sort, and Juniper spends most of the novel trying not to become the victim of either of them. Juniper then finds himself farmed out to Vendetti, the editor who definitely does not have mob ties, a switch which ends up putting two people in the hospital. It’s not homophobic, and I’m not sure either Snell or Wilkes is ever identified as gay, but the authors seem to play these two men both trying to sleep with another young man for some kind of humor I didn’t exactly get.

In the end, this book also didn’t land for me, just like American Desert, although that had the benefit of a more coherent narrative and more of Everett’s brilliant prose. This book is comical, and has plenty of laughs, but mostly it’s just so unrealistic that you’ll wonder what we’re doing here.

Next up: I just finished my friend Will Leitch’s newest novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, and started the last of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalists, Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot.

Tagged african-american literature, american literature, american novels, epistolary novels, percival everett

June 12, 2025 · 6 comments

American Desert.

I guess it was inevitable that I’d eventually find a Percival Everett novel I didn’t love. I wouldn’t say I hated or even disliked American Desert, but it is my least favorite of the nine Everett novels I’ve read so far, primarily because what happens between the shocking opening and the superb conclusion is so disjointed.

Ted Street is a professor at USC who is married with two kids, often unfaithful, and about to be denied tenure. On his way to walk into the ocean to kill himself, his car is hit by a UPS driver, and he is decapitated. In the middle of his funeral, three days later, he sits up in his coffin – his head reattached by a clumsy mortician – and starts talking. Chaos ensues, Ted becomes a media sensation, and he finds himself stalked by religious nuts and government operatives. He also begins to see his own life with much greater clarity, and discovers that by touching someone he can see into their memories, which becomes one of the main ways he navigates his way out of trouble … which is how he spends most of the novel, as he’s hounded by all of those groups and just wants to get back to his family.

The premise of American Desert isn’t entirely new, but it’s still a strong start: If someone appears to truly come back from the dead three days later, there’s going to be a huge public reaction to it, from fascination to terror, from religious fervor to scientific inquiry, and media there to try to make a buck off it. It opens up questions about mind-body dualism, life after death, the meaning (or lack thereof) of life, and more. You’d get people claiming he was the Second Coming, and probably people trying to kill him, and every scientist and crackpot in the world would want a look.

Everett hits all of those points, more or less, with varying degrees of success. The main problem with American Desert is that his focus on sending up his targets in religion, science, and the government subsumes and ultimately overwhelms Ted, who becomes more of a pawn within the story than he should be. His character is inherently interesting, but the story doesn’t get very deep into his character, particularly the question of what, if anything, this second chance at life means for him. He recognizes that his first life was a series of screw-ups, and now he has not just a fresh (okay, perhaps a poor choice of words for an animated corpse) start, but he also sees the world, including his own life, very differently.

This a mild spoiler, although the book is twenty years old so I’m not too concerned, but one of the most fundamental issues with the construction of American Desert is that Ted is barely with his family in the book – in fact, his wife and kids end up going to Catalina Island for a weekend after he’s been kidnapped, leading to a whole separate and very uninteresting subplot around the three of them and Ted’s sister-in-law. The dynamic of a man returned from the very, unequivocally dead to his family, with a literal new lease on life, where he is fully aware of the harm he’s perpetrated and ways in which he’s failed his wife, kids, and himself would be fascinating. In the process of satirizing various institutions, however, Everett largely skips this part entirely. It made for a book that moved quickly, with lots of plot, but without the depth that characterizes all of the other eight of his novels I’ve read so far.

Next up: Dr. Susan David’s Emotional Agility.

Tagged african-american literature, american novels, percival everett

June 4, 2025 · 3 comments

Assumption.

Percival Everett’s Assumption is a triptych of a novel, three neo-noir detective stories featuring the same character, Ogden Walker, a deputy in a small town in New Mexico who’s confronted with three murders in fairly short succession, each of which seems to revolve around at least one person who isn’t who they claim to be. The first two proceed almost traditionally, although Everett is still playing around within the confines of the genre; the third, however, slides into a hallucinatory haze where Walker’s reality is suddenly open to question.

Walker is a Black man in a town that’s largely not Black, with its share of white racists, but also plenty of Latino and indigenous residents, and as you might expect in a small-town mystery or detective story, he kind of knows everyone and has his usual haunts where everyone knows him. He’s got good enough relationships with his boss and his co-workers, even though it becomes clear that Walker is a reluctant cop, and is close to his mother, who lives in the same town and whose house he visits several times in each story.

The first case starts when the possibly-racist Mrs. Bickers turns up dead just a few minutes after Walker visits her to take away her gun, turning into a larger mystery when her estranged daughter shows up unannounced. The second involves a couple of sex workers who end up dead in not-so-rapid succession, again tapping into a bigger story as Walker investigates it. The third starts out innocuously enough, as Walker stumbles on a field & game warden catching a poacher, with Walker taking the poacher’s nephew – maybe – to try to find the kid’s home while the warden takes in the poacher. The warden turns up dead and the kid disappears, making Walker a suspect and causing him to question everything around him.

Everett can’t help but allude to some of the masters of the form, with a line about “the postman ringing only once,” paying homage to the greats even as he upends and inverts the very genre he’s mimicking. The first two stories read like great works from Cain, Chandler, and Thompson, with the same stoic tone and grim imagery, right down to the matter-of-fact descriptions of corpses and gunfights. The third is where Everett gets imaginative, as the story quickly turns into a fever dream of sorts, with Walker trying to solve the crime to keep himself out of jail, while a second strand follows the cops investigating him, and the two stories seem to diverge in impossible ways.

Walker is a typical Everett protagonist – a stolid Black man experiencing some existential doubts, in a job he doesn’t love, either a bachelor (as Walker is) or someone who has distant relationships with women. He’s an outsider in this town in multiple ways, even though he has cordial relationships with most of the locals; he doesn’t have close friends, and he is keenly aware of his status as one of the few Black people there. The pointlessness of the killings he sees wears on him, as he questions the utility of his job and the meaning of any of what’s happening in front of him, including the scourge of meth and the cycles of poverty and violence. What begins as a traditional detective novel – even the triptych format has a history in the genre, as Rex Stout authored several Nero Wolfe books that comprised three semi-related cases – ends up flipped on its head as a story of deep existential despair.

The contemporary review in the New York Times compared Assumption to the Inspector Maigret detective novels by the French writer Georges Simenon, which also have an existentialist bent, a clear line of descent from Sartre and Camus in style and substance. Maigret has more panache than Walker, though; he’s a gentleman detective in many ways, a French Roderick Alleyn, while Simenon’s stories end with far less bloodshed. The similarity is philosophical, rather than stylistic, although I appreciated the reference to another of my favorites.

Next up: I’m about three-quarters done with Lois McMaster Bujold’s Brothers in Arms.

Tagged african-american literature, american novels, detective novels, highly recommended, percival everett

June 3, 2025 · No comments yet

The Unicorn Woman.

Gayl Jones was a major figure in 20^th century Black literature, publishing her first novel, Corregidora, in 1975, and continuing to write novels and short stories until her husband, who was a fugitive from justice for over a decade, sent a bomb threat to a local hospital and then killed himself in a standoff with police. Jones then withdrew from public life and writing for 23 years before returning with the 2021 novel Palmares, which was one of the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, losing to one of the worst winners in the award’s history (The Netanyahus).

Jones returned last year with a short novel, The Unicorn Woman, that also made the list of finalists for the Pulitzer, losing out this time to one of the best winners in the award’s history (Percival Everett’s James). The Unicorn Woman is a wisp of a tale that isn’t about the title character at all, if she even exists, but follows a Black WWII veteran named Buddy Ray Guy who becomes obsessed with the woman after seeing her at a carnival freak show, altering the course of his life.

Buddy can’t get the image of the woman, whom he finds unspeakably beautiful to the point of questioning not whether her horn is real, but whether she is a real person, out of his head, and spends much of his itinerant life afterwards chasing her, either literally or just metaphorically. His relationships with other women do not last, in large part because he is still obsessed with her – or the idea of her, of some sort of unrealistic, unattainable perfection that lodges in his mind and doesn’t leave enough room for a real romantic relationship. He repairs tractors as an irregular job, but moves around the country, sometimes chasing word that the Unicorn Woman is appearing in this city or that one, but more often seeming to move without purpose.

There’s just so little to this novel – aside from some dense prose that contradicts the wispiness of the story – that it lacks the tangible hooks to connect you to the story. There are side characters here and there, but none has much depth or even exposition time; there’s mention of one, a woman named Kate who worked on the tractors during the war but lost her job when the soldiers returned, and who refused to take a clerical or other lesser job. Her story might have made a better novel, and it certainly would have added some depth to this one.

Instead, it’s a work of metaphor and symbol more than it is a conventional novel, the sort of book that works better in a literature class than it does on your night stand, like Pedro Páramo or The Unconsoled, or maybe even The Vegetarian. The Unicorn Woman is on display to be seen, judged, and ogled by the world, but appears to have no agency or even an identity independent of her horn. Her value is what someone else can extract from her. She doesn’t exist as a character in the novel, so by default she must stand for something or someone; my interpretation is that she stands for all women, objectified, used, and discarded by the men in our society. Buddy doesn’t fare much better, though, as he’s returned from war to find a country that doesn’t have a place for him. Even is name is generic, as if Jones wanted to be sure we saw him as some sort of faceless everyman.

It’s probably clear that I wasn’t impressed by The Unicorn Woman, as it just seems like such a meager work to take the honor of one of the three (four) best American novels of its year. It’s possible this was just another way to honor Jones herself and her return to writing. I just don’t think of awards that way; this isn’t a lifetime achievement award, but an award for a specific book. There may be layers of meaning here I just didn’t get. The story itself wasn’t strong enough to sustain the rest of the book for me.

It’s still better than Mice 1961, though.

Next up: I’m reading one of the Miles Vorkosigan novels, Brothers in Arms, which I think is the only one I hadn’t read from the time period where his alter ego, Admiral Naismith, is part of the stories.

Tagged african-american literature, american novels, pulitzer prize

May 8, 2025 · No comments yet

Rite of Passage.

In a not-too-distant future, where Earth is uninhabitable and humans have spread out to other star systems and colonized hundreds of worlds, a civilization on a starship has an unusual initiation for its adolescents called Trial: They’re dropped on one of those colony worlds with no information and no supplies, and if they survive for a month and are able to hit their rescue button, they pass. Many don’t return.

Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, winner of the Nebula Award for Fiction in 1968, sounds like a YA novel by modern standards – and read that way, it’s quite a good one, not least because the main character, a girl of about thirteen named Mia Havero, is extremely well-written. She’s spirited and smart, but arrogant to the point of obstinacy, and her relationships with her peers, notably her best frenemy Jimmy, feel realistic within the artificial setting of the story.

Mia narrates the book, so we know she’s survived Trial already, but the bulk of the book comes before she, Jimmy, and their group are dropped on a hostile planet, as she recalls some of her adventures growing up on the starship and getting into various sorts of mischief. She sneaks around the ship through the air ducts, going to forbidden areas and learning things about their makeshift civilization that only people like her father, one of the ship’s political leaders, would know. She also struggles to make friends, between her father’s position in the hierarchy – with some hints at significant political divisions among leadership, including what the starship’s relationships should be with the colonies – and her own attitude, something she struggles to understand.

Kids employ two general strategies during Trial – turtle, hiding out as much as possible to survive the month with minimal risk; or tiger, exploring the world and making an adventure out of it. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would choose tiger in reality, but Mia does, and of course runs into trouble almost immediately. This world has a native simian population that the human colonizers have enslaved, assuming they’re not sufficiently sentient or intelligent to have basic rights, one of many things during Trial that affects Mia’s very limited worldview.

There are other events throughout her month on the colony world that also force her to reconsider past prejudices, which is where the book really clicks. What comes before Trial is fun, but trivial; she runs around the ship like a kid who’s a little too smart for her own good, narrowly escaping punishment and/or death, thinking that she’s invincible in the way most kids do. Trial is stark, a way to weed out the weak or unintelligent in the thinking of the starship’s authorities, but it’s also a strong metaphor for the ways in which teenagers become adults through experience. For me, it was college, where I was first exposed to people from other backgrounds and beliefs, first forced to reconsider things I’d always assumed or believed to be true, and first forced to take care of myself for any period longer than three weeks. I did not have to escape angry colonists mad that my home ship wouldn’t share all their technology, though.

The prose and general style in Rite of Passage feel slightly dated, and give the whole book the YA feel I mentioned earlier – this is what a lot of sci-fi writing was like in the 1960s. A huge part of Robert Heinlein’s bibliography reads just like this, to pick one, even his books that weren’t explicitly for young adults. Some of the ideas Panshin is pushing still resonate today, including ideas of colonialism and imperialism, or the moral obligation of developed nations to share technologies or medicines with the rest of the world. And content that might have seemed “adult” in 1968 is pretty tame by modern YA standards – there’s some violence, and one reference to Mia having sex that’s almost entirely off-page (thank goodness), and that’s it. I was pleasantly surprised at how well this held up, given how poorly some early sci-fi award winners – the ones that haven’t maintained their status atop the genre – have fared over the last half-century.

Next up: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.

Tagged american novels, coming of age novels, nebula award, science fiction

May 5, 2025 · 7 comments

Telephone.

Percival Everett’s Telephone is the most serious of the six of his novels I’ve read so far, with the only humorous elements some of the smartass dialogue coming from his main character. A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which it lost to the inferior The Night Watchman), Telephone finds Everett exploring how people respond to grief and the search for meaning in a world that appears to have none at all.

Zach Wells, another author surrogate for Everett, is a geologist and college professor who lives with his wife and their one child, a daughter named Sarah, who is the apple of Zach’s eye like Bonnie Blue was in Rhett Butler’s. Sarah starts to have absence seizures and reports some other neurological symptoms, and when Zach and his wife take her to the doctor, they learn that she has a fatal neurodegenerative disorder called Batten disease that will kill her in a few years, and on her way to dying, she’ll lose her faculties and won’t even recognize her parents.

Meanwhile, Zach orders a piece of clothing off the internet and finds a note that just says “ayúdame” (“help me”) in one of its pockets. He orders another item from the same place, and gets a similar note. He’s stymied, but eventually decides he has to do something to figure out if there is someone in trouble wherever these garments are made or repackaged. And at work, he has a younger colleague who procrastinated for years on publishing her work and now may not get tenure as a result, but Zach finds that her work is good enough and embarks on a late push to save her.

In just about all of Everett’s books, at least the ones I’ve read, he’s asking important questions and only hints at the answers. Here, Zach is a tragic figure from the start – his father killed himself, his marriage has stalled, he doesn’t seem to particularly like his work – and the one facet of his life that seems to give him real joy is going to be taken from him in the cruelest possible fashion. When you can’t save the most important person in the world, do you turn to try to save someone else? A colleague you respect, not even a friend, just someone who you think deserves more than she’s getting? A complete stranger, or more than one, who may not even exist, and if they do it’s in another country and maybe you’ll get killed trying to do it? Would any of this matter in the grand scheme? Would it help you save yourself?

Where Telephone ends up was something of a surprise, as I’m used to Everett concluding his novels in uncertain fashion – at least three of the other five lacked concrete resolutions to their plots. Wells gets an ending in fact where the ambiguity is interior to his character. Has anything changed? When he goes back to his regular life, will he be altered by the experiences, or has he just pushed away the grief that will be waiting for him at his front door?

Wells is an Everett stand-in in the same vein as Kevin Pace, the protagonist of So Much Blue, as middle-aged men facing some kind of emotional crisis, although Pace’s was more of his own making and Wells’s definitely is not. They’re well-developed, flawed, and very realistic. They make mistakes, especially in their marriages. They do not talk easily or openly about their feelings. And they are ill-equipped for what hits them, a combination in both cases of how they were raised and the choices they’ve made as adults. Telephone is just another piece of evidence in the case for Everett as our greatest living novelist.

Next up: Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, a satirical novel by In Koli Jean Bofane, who appeared in the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

Tagged 2020 novels, african-american literature, american literature, american novels, highly recommended, percival everett

April 28, 2025 · 1 comment

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.

Tagged 2024 novels, american novels, contemporary novels, fantasy, highly recommended

April 22, 2025 · 1 comment

Uprooted.

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2015, inverts the usual formula for the “chosen one” story about a child who turns out to play an extremely important role in a history-changing event, and whose powers are critical in the way that event unfolds. The protagonist here, Agnieszka, isn’t even the one her village believes is going to be chosen by the local wizard, called the Dragon to serve as his apprentice, and she’s hardly the sort of student the Dragon was hoping for, but her presence there sets off a broad, violent conflict that will determine whether their society can survive or will be overrun by the sentient forces of the Wood. It’s smart and vaguely subversive of the traditions of this trope, although it becomes unspeakably violent in the resolution in ways I found hard to stomach.

Agnieszka lives in a small village near a dangerous forest called the Wood that acts with malevolence, corrupting anyone who enters it or eats its fruits or leaves and causing them to commit violence against anyone around them, like automatons under the Wood’s command. She’s chosen to become the next apprentice to the Dragon, the wizard for this particular part of the kingdom, a stern, cold man who takes a young girl under his tutelage every ten years or so – but after they leave his service, they never return to their original villages. Once Agnieszka gets to the Dragon’s tower, however, one of her friends from her village ends up corrupted by the Wood, which would normally require her execution to protect the rest of the valley, but Agnieszka finds a spell that might remove the corruption from her friend. That in turn attracts the attention of the crown prince, whose mother disappeared into the Wood many years before, and who demands that the Dragon and Agnieszka come with him into the forest to find and rescue the Queen.

Much of what Agnieszka does – or what happens to her – is a combination of circumstance and her own tenacity, making her an interesting lead character but not a terribly complex one. She’s driven by a simple sense of right and wrong that is fundamentally humanist; she refuses to sacrifice a single life, ever, even if it has the potential to save many other lives down the road. Some of this is wisdom, as she realizes the path of killing everyone corrupted by the Wood has no end to it, as it doesn’t stop whatever force underlies the Wood’s endless thirst for territory, but Novik defines Agnieszka more by the high value she places on an individual life. Again, it makes her interesting, but not very deep.

The Wood ends up the more intriguing character, so to speak, although I got a bit lost in the explanations of what exactly is behind the Wood’s sentience and its Anton Chigurh-like drive to kill anything in its path without regard for anything about the victims. It’s a better exercise in world-building than character development, saved by the fact it’s well-written and mostly well-paced.

The body count in Uprooted is enormous, enough to make George R.R. Martin jealous; it’s most likely a comment on the futility of war of any sort, but Novik’s tone towards the massive losses of soldiers in the last two conflicts borders on the callous, and it’s out of sync with Agnieszka’s almost single-minded focus on saving any individual life she can. This was ultimately what turned me against Uprooted, even though I enjoyed most of the read; it just devolves into pointless violence, with one scene that recalled the trench warfare of World War I, and there’s no real point to any of it. Characters climb over piles of dead bodies to continue the fighting, and often don’t even understand why they’re doing so. It’s just too far removed from what powered the first three-fourths of the book. I wouldn’t recommend against Uprooted, but in the end it just didn’t get over the line for me.

Next up: Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Tagged american literature, american novels, fantasy, nebula award

April 7, 2025 · 2 comments

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.

Tagged 2024 novels, american novels, fantasy

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