Ilmar is a conquered city. Only a few years before Adrian Tchaikovsky’s imaginative novel, City of Lost Chances, opens, it was taken by the Palleseens as part of their quest to “perfect” the world. Tchaikovsky’s cast of characters provide a wonderful selection of vantage points to watch as the city begins to spin out of […]
Aki Ito has always looked up to her older sister, Rose. Rose was beautiful. She was popular. She was fearless. She was the one to strike out to Chicago to make a new life after the Ito family was incarcerated in Manzanar along with thousands of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. So […]
Trigger warning for suicide. Graeme Macrae Burnet works his metafictional magic again in Case Study, a tale of unreliable narrators and unstable identities. The narrator of this book—also named Graeme Macrae Burnet—has been working on a biography of a controversial psychologist when he receives a set of five notebooks from a woman who believed that […]
It’s definitely a sign that you’re going to have a bad day when you wake up dead. One would think that Kai, the protagonist of Martha Wells’s electrifying novel Witch King, would be used to it. This isn’t the first time he’s woken up dead. He is a demon, after all. But waking up dead […]
Late in Kevin Barry’s amazing novel, The Heart in Winter, rumors start to race around Montana and Idaho as people recount what they heard about Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie’s doomed love. It sounds like a tall tale or sordid scandal or a blues song the way folks tell it. They’re not far wrong. There […]
Beggars can’t be choosers. Neither can women doctors in 1833, apparently. Protagonist Hester Reeves agrees to treat and care for a dying old man so that she can make enough money for her small family to resettle in a nicer part of London. At least, Hester thinks that’s the only task she’s expected to take […]
Trigger warning for maiming. The Regulai name is legendary. Davico di Regulai’s ancestors include warriors, politicians, and bankers who shape not just the city of Navola but the world around them. Davico was raised to be the perfect heir to his master manipulator father, but Paolo Bacigalupi’s engrossing new novel Navola is a tale of […]
It’s rare (so rare that I can’t think of another example) that I read a sequel that I loved more than the first book in a series, but that’s the case with The Undermining of Twyla and Frank, Megan Bannen’s sequel to The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy. Bookish friends, I read this book in […]
In a short note at the beginning of Erika Rummel’s fascinating novel, What They Said About Luisa, the author explains the historical inspiration for the book. Luisa de Abrego, a formerly enslaved woman from Seville, had the first known Christian marriage in the New World. She married Miguel Rodríguez in St. Augustine, in what is […]
Trigger warning for references to rape. Life for medieval women in Western Europe was supposed to follow a few paths. Women were expected to become wives and mothers, or perhaps take religious vows. Aline Kiner’s The Mirror of Simple Souls shows us one of the few alternate paths for women in the 1300s: beguinage. Neither […]