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 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 1, 2026  ·  4 comments

The Incandescent.

Stories set in magic school have become commonplace to the point of cliché; unless the author is willing to take the story in a new direction, like weaving parody into a genuine story (Lev Grossman’s The Magicians), the work is going to suffer from comparisons to the very popular books in the space, including those by she-who-must-not-be named. In The Incandescent, Emily Tesh takes a different tack by setting her novel at a magic school, in an alternate-world England where magic is just part of normal life, while making her protagonist one of the teachers, as well as making at least two more significant plot decisions that set this delightful book apart from its peers.

In The Incandescent, Saffy Walden is a senior teacher who works primarily with some of the oldest and most advanced students at Chetwood School, a day and boarding school outside of London where Walden herself was a student twenty years previously. One of her academic and practical specialties is dealing with higher-order demons – most magicians can handle the lower-order imps who love to occupy electronic devices like photocopiers or even wall clocks, but Walden is one of the few magicians in the world who can handle the most difficult, higher-order demons, which may turn out to be significant. And since Chetwood is full of young magicians learning to harness their powers, it attracts many demons trying to break through from their plane into ours, including a very powerful one nicknamed Old Faithful who has killed some students in the past. The threat of Old Faithful leads the school to bring in a Marshal, a sort of magical security agent, named Laura Kenning, who immediately rubs Walden the wrong way, so you can probably see where that’s going.

The story of The Incandescent has multiple peaks, so if you were wondering, say, if the whole novel was heading towards a denouement where Walden fights Old Faithful, you may be surprised when the demon shows up before the book’s midpoint. It’s misdirection by adventure, as every subplot is interesting and intense, but Tesh’s ultimate goal won’t be apparent until quite close to the novel’s end, when she finally reveals where all of this has been going.

Walden is a wonderful main character, and by the time the novel is through, Tesh has given us a huge amount of her life story as well as insight into many aspects of her character, particularly her somewhat low interest in romantic relationships. She’s not aro, but she’s indifferent enough that romance ends up a tangential part of the story rather than the core plot point. Her flaws are realistic and fit within her character while eventually playing a significant part in the development of the plot. The Marshal, Laura Kenning, and at least two of the four students who comprise Walden’s main class are also well-developed and have some sort of arc within the novel’s various subplots, while several side characters show up and get enough screen time to feel more than two-dimensional. (I was particularly fond of Todd, the groundskeeper/maintenance guy who has some untapped magical potential of his own; he needs his own story at some point.)

When the actual climax comes, the whole ground beneath the book shifts, and the final fifty-odd pages are a full-on sprint, thanks to two twists, one I saw coming and one I didn’t. It all makes sense in hindsight, and Tesh set it up perfectly. An author has to earn this kind of massive plot shift, and Tesh did so, while staying completely true to her characters.

The Incandescent was nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, which Alix Harrow won for The Everlasting, as well as this year’s Nebula Award for the same. This is the first of the six Hugo nominees I’ve read, and I’m currently in the middle of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author. Tesh won previously for Some Desperate Glory, a sci-fi novel that was good but flawed, and this is a better work in almost every way, from plot to character development to playing with popular tropes. It’s also a more memorable novel. These characters and this wonderful setting will stay with me for some time, and while I don’t think it needs a sequel, I hope Tesh revisits this universe in some fashion.

Next up: I’m about a quarter of the way through Death of the Author, which feels like a very ambitious novel so far.

Tagged , , ,
August 10, 2026  ·  No comments yet

The Killing Moon.

Before she became the N.K. Jemisin, first Black woman to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel and first author to win that award in three straight years, she was an acclaimed but at least less-known author of sci-fi and fantasy novels and perhaps better known for her speech standing up to the Christian nationalist shithead Theodore Beale, a.k.a Vox Day, who was so mad about it he later tried to blow up the Hugos entirely. Then Jemisin published The Fifth Season and became a literary superstar, quite deservingly so, putting the focus squarely on her writing output.

The Killing Moon is one of her five pre-Hugo novels, a work that stands alone but that came with a sequel published a month later (The Shadowed Sun), forming the “Dreamblood Duology.” Reading it now, it’s easy to see the seeds that eventually grew into Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, and in some ways it features even stronger character development than those three novels worked into their vast plotlines, producing a book that’s lighter thematically but incredibly fun and gripping to read.

The Killing Moon takes place mostly in two rival cities, beginning in Gujaareh, where power is shared between the Prince, who succeeded his father to the throne, and the clergy of the Hetawa temple, who practice magic powered by dreams called narcomancy. Some clergy members known as Gatherers can enter dreams and reap “dreamblood,” which is an extremely powerful substance with addictive properties, while they can also guide dying people gently into death – or kill those the temple has deemed ‘corrupted.’

The story follows Nijiri, a young acolyte in the temple who becomes the protégé of an elder Gatherer named Ehiru, who is dealing with a spiritual and professional crisis after losing his focus during a gathering and failing to capture the target’s soul, leading to its destruction; and the ambassador from the neighboring city of Kisua, Sunandi, who visits Gujaareh in her professional capacity but becomes the target of an assassination plot involving Ehiru and Nijiri. The three of them begin to work together to unravel the conspiracy behind this scheme, to determine who or what is harvesting souls in Gujaareh beyond the purview of the Temple, and to stop a potential war between the two cities.

Jemisin creates a rich world here where religion, politics, and human frailty combine to create a world of deep uncertainty, where there are no clear ‘good guys’ and even our heroes are suspect. She reveals the mystery, or at least most of it, to the reader before the characters figure out what’s happening, so it’s not purely a mystery, but there is a mysterious element beyond the mere fantasy setting, where it isn’t clear who is actually pulling the strings – and why. The trio of heroes divide and conquer, moving to Kisua and then back to Gujaareh, even as Ehiru finds himself fighting a dark force inside of him that would make him a weapon for the very people he’s trying to unmask.

Jemisin does something interesting with religion in the plot of The Killing Moon that I haven’t seen before, at least not this effectively. Religion in this world is both a tool for succor and spiritual enlightenment and a tool of oppression, control, and self-enrichment. It is a balanced, honest portrayal of the role of religion in the last few hundred years of human civilization. I was tempted to say she comes out on the negative side of the ledger – it is certainly easier to interpret it that way if you weight the evil done by and through religion in this book more heavily than the kindnesses and solace it provides – but decided that was ultimately my own bias at play.

Although it certainly seems like Jemisin wrote the two novels as a single story, given their publication dates, The Killing Moon has a clear and decisive ending – and an extremely satisfying one that gets the right characters into the right positions, without relying on something beyond the worldview she’s created. Nijiri gets a proper end to his hero’s journey, more than Sunandi does, with a clear arc that takes him from the innocent apprentice to a man worthy of rising to the inner-circle status of his mentor. It made me want to read the second book, without actually needing to do so to complete the story.

Next up: I’m past the halfway point in this year’s winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel, Stephen Graham Jones’ horror novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

Tagged , , ,
October 31, 2025  ·  No comments yet

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.

Tagged , , , , ,
August 12, 2025  ·  5 comments

The Tainted Cup.

Nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup marries the classic detective story with high fantasy novels, with a story narrated by the detective’s assistant (think Archie Goodwin) because the detective can’t do the leg work (think Nero Wolfe), set on a world where civilization is constantly threatened by enormous aquatic creatures called leviathans that crash through the city walls and flood the town. It’s a slow build, but Bennett sticks – pun intended here – the landing, and by the end of the novel, both of the central characters have been so well developed that it felt like the middle of a longer series.

Din is the very young, very green assistant to an investigator named Ana, and finds himself at the scene of a very bizarre death: A military official with powerful connections, Blas, has been found disemboweled, killed by a mutant plant called dappleglass that essentially kills its host by sprouting a giant tree. The corpse is impaled upon the branches when Din arrives, and he finds that the wealthy family on whose estate the murder took place is away while their servants range from uncooperative to hostile. The murder turns out to be a small piece of a much larger conspiracy that runs all the way to the top, so to speak, as Blas was just one person killed in this manner and the body count will continue to rise over the course of the story.

In the world of The Tainted Cup, people – I’m assuming they are people, at least – can be augmented in various ways that enhance certain abilities at the cost of others, or perhaps of their health, sanity, or longevity. Din is one such augmented person, called a ‘sublime’; he’s an engraver who has the equivalent of an eidetic memory, ‘engraving’ everything in a scene into his mind through the use of specific chemical scents. Ana is an eccentric, not a sublime, but with superlative powers of deduction, choosing most of the time to remain blindfolded so that she can focus better on the problem at hand. She seldom leaves her lair, never visiting the crime scene, instead sending Din out to gather the information and report back using his engraving powers, making her a fantasy heir to Nero Wolfe in multiple ways. (If only she loved orchids.) Their relationship isn’t that interesting, at least not yet, as Din is so clearly the subordinate, and is often the straight man to Ana’s barbs and witticisms, although as the novel ends, multiple small events start to shift that balance of power to a more equal one and the door to a more Nero Wolfe/Archie Griffin sort of relationship opens.

Bennett has also built a fascinating world here, where humans are at the mercy of a larger species that threatens them, and the empire’s ability to maintain order and control of its people is at least in part predicated on their ability to protect them – or persuade them that the empire is their only protection. The investigation into the murder(s) exposes a complicated back story of multiple levels of corruption and a past catastrophe that killed scores and rendered an entire canton of the empire uninhabitable, a crime that ripples through their society to this day. It’s a complex supertext above the simple narrative of the detective story, and the latter allows Bennett to give the former so much detail and texture – the investigation propels the plot forward, and no one ever stays in one place, literally or figuratively, for very long.

The Tainted Cup is more detective story than mystery, however; I don’t think the reader is supposed to figure out whodunit, given that Ana figures out the culprits over a period of time, with one of the assassins identified with probably a third of the novel to go – except, of course, they’re an accomplice rather than the mastermind. I enjoy both genres, but the detective story depends much more on the strength of the detective character(s), while the mystery is usually driven more by how clever the plot is. Bennett has created two reasonably compelling characters already, with enough interplay in the last few chapters to start the development of their relationship and foreshadow a more interesting (platonic, to be clear) one in future novels. Ana could easily have fallen, or fall in the future, into cliché; she is odd, certainly, as Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are, but in different ways, and she’s a stronger detective character than Inspectors Alleyn or Montalbano, to name two other series I enjoy. Din shows more growth within this specific novel, as he’s young and naïve and wedded to formal traditions that Ana finds amusing or just silly. By the time we reach the conclusion, he’s learned substantial things about himself, and found his voice in a way that was almost as satisfying to read as the solution of the main mystery itself.

Next up: I just finished Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I fully expect to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year. I think it’s the best one and I think it checks a lot of boxes.

Tagged , , , , ,
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 , , , ,
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 , , ,
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 , ,
February 17, 2025  ·  4 comments

A Stranger in Olondria.

Sonia Samatar’s first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, first crossed my radar because N.K. Jemisin recommended it – many years ago, maybe close to ten at this point, enough so that I don’t remember even what Jemisin said beyond praising the book. It is an unusual work of fantasy literature, with a real emphasis on the second part: Samatar’s prose and narrative are smart and challenging, taking the reader on a vast, epic journey through a new world of literature, poetry, religion, war, and bigotry, all in service of her hero’s quest to give solace to the tortured soul of a girl who died without a proper burial.

A Stranger in Olondria starts in another place entirely, and seems almost mundane by comparison to what will follow. We meet young Jevick, the second son of his strict, wealthy merchant father; his older brother was born simple, and thus was a disappointment to their father, who wanted an heir to his trade. Jevick’s father hires a tutor to help Jevick learn the Olondrian language and some of its culture, a choice that turns out to be timely as Jevick’s father dies suddenly, leaving his son to take over the family business without any direct training from his father.

On the ship he takes with his small retinue to get to Olondria, he meets a couple with a young girl, Jissavet, near his own age, who is dying of a form of curse, the true nature of which will become apparent in very small slivers as the story progresses. Jevick reaches Olondria and is overwhelmed by the luxury and iniquity of the big city, but soon afterwards he is visited by a ghost, that of the young girl, who promises to haunt him until her body is found and cremated in accordance with her culture’s norms. These visitations mark Jevick as a holy man, as the Olondrians believe her ghost is an angel, and drops him directly into a simmering religious/political conflict (really, when are the two ever separated, in life or in fiction) that will eventually put him on the run even as he tries to assuage the ghost and find her body for a funeral pyre.

This is a work of depth, in almost every way. Samatar is writing for people who read literature, using words typically not found in contemporary fiction but more common in British literature of the 19th or early 20th centuries, and crafting a layered and unsimple narrative that demands your constant attention. This is not merely the story of a haunting, which would have given us just a rote adventure as Jevick and whoever his companion or the moment might be have to flee from one spot or another while also trying to figure out where Jissavet’s body is. Samatar has instead laced the story with epic, narrative poetry, and built a world beneath the plot where unseen forces are simmering just below the boiling point, an uneasy peace in Olondria that Jevick shatters simply by being there and confiding in one person that he has been visited by a ghost. (That person was his landlord, which shows you that you should never, ever trust a landlord.) Rather than populating the novel with idiosyncratic side characters, Samatar populates it with flashbacks, stories, and myths that further build out the world and explain different aspects of the various cultures in this world she’s created. It feels scholarly, unsurprising as Samatar is a professor at James Madison, and a poet, and the daughter of a Somali scholar/historian of some renown as well.

In December, I read Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which won the 2023 Nebula Award for Best Novel, but I never reviewed it in large part because I couldn’t decide what to say. Chandrasekera has also built an incredible, immersive world in his novel, one with political and religious undertones, but in the end, it’s unclear if the building was in service of anything other than itself. The story doesn’t really resolve – the bright doors of the title are a Macguffin, I’d argue – and the protagonist is in some ways a pawn, lacking the agency we expect in a main character. I liked the book as I was reading it, but then felt let down enough by the ending that I punted on a write up. A Stranger in Olondria helped me articulate why: If you’re building a fantastical world, I’m probably going to get sucked in fairly quickly, but you still have to pay it off in the end in the plot and/or the main character’s arc. Chandrasekera didn’t do that; Samatar did, and the Jevick who returns home at the end of her novel is an entirely different young man than the child who left it only some months earlier. It deserves a wider audience – and that’s probably why Jemisin was talking it up whenever she did.

Next up: I’m reading Robert Walser’s peculiar novel Jakob von Gunten, after which I’m going to try to tackle W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

Tagged ,
Elsewhere
BlueskyInstagramTikTokThreadsFacebookThe Athletic
Reach him
Klawchat and the newsletter
The site
HomeAboutBooksBlogContact

All written content © Keith Law, 2006 to 2026

Designed by