Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss

A- #BookReview: Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah PinskerHaunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, horror, paranormal
Pages: 161
Published by Tordotcom on September 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

On the set of a kitschy reality TV show, staged scares transform into unnerving reality in this spooky ghost story from multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Sarah Pinsker.
“Don’t talk to day about what we do at night.”
When aimless twenty-something Mara lands a job as the night-shift production assistant on her cousin’s ghost hunting/home makeover reality TV show Haunt Sweet Home, she quickly determines her new role will require a healthy attitude toward duplicity. But as she hides fog machines in the woods and improvises scares to spook new homeowners, a series of unnerving incidents on set and a creepy new coworker force Mara to confront whether the person she's truly been deceiving and hiding from all along—is herself.
Eerie and empathetic, Haunt Sweet Home is a multifaceted, supernatural exploration of finding your own way into adulthood, and into yourself.

My Review:

This wasn’t the book I planned to read this week, but after yesterday’s book I needed something with a bit harder of an edge, or a bit more adventure in its heart, or something other than cozy relationship fiction. I also needed something short because I flailed a bit.

I picked this out of the virtually towering TBR pile because I read the author’s “One Man’s Treasure” as part of my Hugo reading this year. I didn’t think it stuck the dismount but the story was a whole lot of fun as it went along.

And the premise of this one also looked like a whole lot of fun. I’m not sure whether it’s more fun or less fun if you believe, as I do, that “Reality TV” is an oxymoron, an inherent contradiction in terms. (And come to think of it, there’s another recent horror-adjacent story with a similar premise, The Holy Terrors by Simon R. Green – but Haunt Sweet Home is a much better, and more original, story.

Haunt Sweet Home lies at a surprising intersection of tropes and genres. OTOH, it’s a bit of an exposé of how the not-so-ghostly sausage of spooky reality TV shows get made. On a second hand, it’s about the grind of clinging by one’s fingernails to the lowest rung of the entertainment ladder – and discovering that the work is the thing one has been looking for all along.

And then there’s that third, ghostly hand, which really surprised me by circling back to Susan M. Boyer’s Liz Talbot series and thereby tying itself to yesterday’s book, as the protagonist, Mara, seems to have manifested or acquired or midwifed or all of the above, a sort of family ghost of her very own. By a method that owes more than a bit to Pygmalion – not the play or any of the adaptations of the play including the movies, but the original Greek myth about the man who sculpted his perfect woman and brought her to life.

Mara doesn’t sculpt a perfect paramour. Instead, she sculpts a perfect – or at least a more functional – version of her very own self. A version of herself that is a bit better at people, a bit less of an indecisive screw-up, much less of the family joke, and a whole lot better at believing in herself.

And very nearly decides to throw it all away. Because she’s started to believe entirely too many of her family’s so-called jokes than any one person can stand.

Escape Rating A-: I liked this a whole lot, and in fact a whole lot more than I expected to. Clearly, I don’t believe “Reality TV” has anything to do with actual reality, so reading a story that lampooned that genre at every turn was a good choice for me.

I also liked the horror-adjacency of this one, even though that’s why I had passed it by earlier in the month. I wasn’t sure how adjacent the horror was, but as it turns out the answer is – VERY. The TV series is simulating horror, manipulating or editing reactions to make it seem like horrors are happening – but everyone involved is very aware that it isn’t. Except for a bit of a tease at the end which just makes the whole damn thing work even better!

What really makes this story work is the character of Mara. She seems to be an afterthought for her whole family, the butt of every joke and the person voted least likely to succeed at every turn, to the point where she’s internalized all of that attitude.

It hurts her but she can’t make it stop. Every single thing she says or does goes through the family story editing machinery until it comes out that Mara is always lifeless, feckless and useless. She’s become entirely self-effacing because it no longer matters what she does – not even to herself.

At least not until her alter ego, her creation, her ghost avatar, Jo, comes into the picture. Because Jo IS Mara every bit as much as she is her own self. Jo sees Mara for who she really is on the inside – and isn’t in the least bit shy about telling Mara all about herself – no matter how much Jo KNOWS it’s gonna hurt. Because it needs to.

Someone needs to make Mara listen to the truths she doesn’t want to hear, and who better to make herself listen to those truths than herself? So Jo’s very existence, and Mara’s family’s reaction to a ‘better’ version of Mara forces Mara to confront those truths and do something about them. Which they do. Together. Even if it broke my librarian heart to watch them destroy most of a library to get there.

In spite of the terrible treatment of that poor library, it was still a terrific end to a really fun story.

A++ #AudioBookReview: The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A++ #AudioBookReview: The Daughters’ War by Christopher BuehlmanThe Daughters' War (Blacktongue, #0) by Christopher Buehlman
Narrator: Nikki Garcia
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy, grimdark
Series: Blacktongue #0
Pages: 416
Length: 13 hours and 14 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on June 25, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Enter the fray in this luminous new adventure from Christopher Buehlman, set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief .
The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men.
They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and still they wage war.
Now, our daughters take up arms.
Galva ― Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill ― has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind.
The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted ― not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.

My Review:

I finished The Daughters’ War for the second time over the weekend, but I was so deeply into the story, the characters and simply the world between the pages that I had to sit on even attempting to write a review for a bit – to let the SQUEE calm down some. But I also felt compelled to reread the first book set in this world, The Blacktongue Thief – which I did. Which didn’t tone the SQUEE down AT ALL.

The book hangover was huge after my first read of Blacktongue, and after my first read of The Daughters’ War earlier this year for Library Journal, but this time I listened to the thing – and the book hangover is absolutely epic.

Now let me attempt an explanation – which is still going to have a LOT of SQUEE in it. Because damn I loved this book – and I fell hard into Blacktongue again, too. So hard.

The title of this book immediately tells the reader just how badly this world is totally wrecked. You see, the first war between humans and goblins was the Knights’ War, because the noble Knights beat the goblins back on their swift and equally noble horses. So the goblin mages created a poison, a bioweapon, that killed all the horses. The second war, not even a decade later, was the Threshers’ War, because the goblins cut the untrained farm boys sent to fight it like they were threshing wheat. This war is the Daughters’ War because that’s pretty much all that’s left to fight this time around, less than a decade after the end of the Threshers’.

This is one of the rarest of rare cases where the old saying that “There never was a good war or a bad peace” doesn’t feel strictly true. Because the goblins USED those brief years of peace while the humans WASTED them.

Readers of The Blacktongue Thief will remember Galva as she will be, as in that story she’s 30 years old, a hard-bitten, cynical, heart-sore veteran of the Daughters’ War, on a mad quest to save her queen, her country, and quite possibly her whole entire species from the idiocy of the so-called powers that be who seem to be wasting yet another peace.

The story of this book, The Daughters’ War, is the story of how this Galva got to be that Galva. How the 20 year old swordswoman and newly fledged Corvid (read that as war-raven or murder-bird) knight came of age, lost her innocence and her naiveté, as well as her faith in pretty much everything she once believed, including her family and her country – or at least the king who usurped its throne.

So this is Galva’s story, which means it’s a story about the cost of war and the price of peace, and the question of which one is higher than the other and whether either will prevent the actual extinction of the human race. Because it’s also a story about the damage a small man can do to shield himself from the knowledge that he is truly small and the way that power and privilege can blind a whole society to the destruction that is happening all around them because they rather maintain their power than save everyone’s future – including their own.

And over and under and through all of that, The Daughters’ War is a poignant, lyrical, heartbreaking paean to times and places that are no more, told by someone who develops a truly cynical perspective on command and control and the lack thereof and the high price that may be paid because humans are gonna human even if it kills them all.

Escape Rating A++: I don’t give A++ ratings often as that’s kind of the point of the thing, but The Daughters’ War absolutely earned one – as did The Blacktongue Thief three years ago. My one and only disappointment with this book is that I can’t seem to find any information on whether or not the author will be returning to this world – but that was also true after Blacktongue so I still have hope.

After all, Galva’s – and Kinch’s – world is so FUBAR’d that there are plenty of possibilities for more stories where these two came from. And I want them. BAD. Seriously BAD.

Ahem…

I keep talking about the two books, The Daughters’ War and The Blacktongue Thief, as though they are intertwined. Only because they are. Blacktongue was published first, but Daughters’ War comes first in the internal chronology. So it doesn’t matter which one you read first. Whichever one you can get first will be fine – especially if you like your epic fantasy with more than a bit of grimdark – because their world is very grim – and both Galva and Kinch are VERY cynically aware of that grimness.

Although I have friends who don’t like grimdark who STILL enjoyed Blacktongue, that I think I’ve convinced to read Daughters’ War. The author does such an excellent job of getting inside his characters’ heads to let the reader – or especially listener – see the world from their point of view that he carries the reader through the grimdark exceedingly well. I fully admit, however, that I got so into the characters and their perspectives that both books made me cry more than once each.

The stories are a bit different in tone, as Kinch is an extremely unreliable narrator and Galva is the exact opposite. She hates lies, lying and liars, while he can’t stop any of the above – sometimes not even to himself. He’s also a bit of an optimist in spite of his circumstances, while she’s definitely a pessimist.

Both stories are told in the first-person singular, so we spend the entire story inside each of their heads. Which does serve as a kind of a hint that they each survive their own adventures. It’s the audiobook that really got me in both cases, not just that we see the world from their perspectives, but that excellent choices were made for narration in both cases (the author chose himself for Kinch which says something about several somethings but absolutely worked). So if you like audiobooks these are excellent and Nikki Garcia did every single bit as fantastic a job “being” Galva as the author did Kinch.

I have to conclude this review and I honestly don’t want to. I simply do not want to be done with this world and these characters. I hope that this review and my general, overall squee about the marvels of this series will convince you to give it a try as well. Because both books are seriously awesome and well worth a read – or even better – a listen.

#BookReview: We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida, translated by E. Madison Shimoda

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida, translated by E. Madison ShimodaWe'll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida, E. Madison Shimoda
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, magical realism, translated fiction, world literature
Pages: 304
Published by Berkley on March 8, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A cat a day keeps the doctor away…Discover the award-winning, bestselling Japanese novel that has become an international sensation in this utterly charming, vibrant celebration of the healing power of cats.Tucked away in an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can only be found by people who are struggling in their lives and genuinely need help. The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take” their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.Throughout the pages, the power of the human-animal bond is revealed as a disheartened businessman finds unexpected joy in physical labor, a young girl navigates the complexities of elementary school cliques, a middle-aged man struggles to stay relevant at work and home, a hardened bag designer seeks emotional balance, and a geisha finds herself unable to move on from the memory of her lost cat. As the clinic’s patients navigate their inner turmoil and seek resolution, their feline companions lead them toward healing, self-discovery, and newfound hope.

My Review:

Kyoto’s Kokora Clinic for the Soul can only be found if you really, really need it. You’ll probably only even hear the rumor about its existence – and a rather confused and confusing rumor at that – if you are in need of the service they provide.

If there’s an ache in your soul – even if you think that ache is in your mind, and you have the patience to circle the block and not let yourself get convinced that you’re, pardon the expression, barking up the wrong tree, you’ll see a poorly maintained building in the shadows behind newer and much taller ones, down an alleyway that can be found “east of Takoyakushi Street, south of Tominokoji Street, west of Rokkaku Street, north of Fuyacho Street, Nakagyō Ward, Kyoto.”

It’s the place where the young and slightly scatterbrained Dr. Nikké and his taciturn receptionist Chitose will prescribe you a cat for whatever ails you.

Shuta Kagawa is depressed and miserable. His job at a seemingly successful financial management firm is actually hell on Earth, with an absolute demon of a boss. (Not literally. Probably not literally. Comparisons could certainly be drawn). He wants to quit, but he doesn’t want to disappoint his parents. He wants a real life instead of a sentence to purgatory. He thinks that the Kokora Clinic provides some kind of mental health therapy.

Which they do, just not in any way that he imagines. They prescribe him a cat named Bee. And she gives him something to focus on besides his own angst. She changes his life – sometimes willingly on his part, but mostly not so much – and the lives of everyone around him. That the people around him at the end are absolutely NOT the same people around him at the beginning is just part of his cure.

Shuta and Bee’s story is the first thread of a delightful tapestry, that gets woven, one prescription – and one cat – at a time, by two practitioners who know just what it means to leave a part of your soul behind.

Escape Rating B: There are a LOT of books similar to this one, where the central location is mysterious or mythical or just difficult to find, where that place connects a series of stories that at first don’t seem connected at all, where there’s just a touch of magic or magical realism, where the overall experience ends up being a bit bittersweet. Not all of the vignettes have happy endings, but they all have cathartic ones.

I picked this up because I LOVE those kinds of books, and this one has cats, which is always a win for me. Certainly the idea of being “prescribed” a cat caught my imagination, as it did several people who saw this title in my Stacking the Shelves and Sunday Posts where this title was featured. Because really, a prescription for a cat – complete with cat! What’s not to love?

But, if the concept behind the prescription seems a bit familiar, that’s only because it has become so through books such as Before the Coffee Gets Cold and many others. Of the ones I’ve read so far, this reminds me of the most is The Full Moon Coffee Shop, so if you liked that you’ll probably like this and vice versa.

What makes this one work is the way that the prescriptions all have different results. Shuta Kagawa does, in the end, adopt Bee. They rescue each other, which is what often happens with companion animals who become part of our lives and hearts. It’s kind of what we expect in ALL the stories  – but that’s not what actually happens.

In other cases, the cat opens people’s eyes to their own situations. The cat doesn’t need rescuing, it’s the human who needs a different perspective – even if that perspective is that it’s time to let go – whether of a human relationship that isn’t working or holding on too tightly to the grief over the loss of a pet. Different situations require different forms of closure, after all.

The magical realism magic of this story rests in the disappearing/reappearing clinic and its origin story, which the reader is led to slowly and carefully over the course of the book. But the fun magic is that Dr. Nikké’s and receptionist Chitose’s labor of love for both cats and humans becomes so successful over this course of prescriptions that it looks like they’ll be keeping their doors open – when they can be found at all – for a long time to come.

A- #BookReview: This World is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: This World is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-GiwaThis World Is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, science fantasy
Pages: 176
Published by Tor Nightfire on September 10, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

This World is Not Yours by USA Today bestseller Kemi Ashing-Giwa is the perfect blend of S.A. Barnes' space horror and Cassandra Khaw's beautiful but macabre worlds. An action-packed, inventive novella about a toxic polycule consumed by jealousy and their attempts to survive on a hostile planet.
After fleeing her controlling and murderous family with her fiancée Vinh, Amara embarks on a colonization project, New Belaforme, along with her childhood friend, Jesse.
The planet, beautiful and lethal, produces the Gray, a “self-cleaning” mechanism that New Belaforme’s scientists are certain only attacks invasive organisms, consuming them. Humans have been careful to do nothing to call attention to themselves until a rival colony wakes the Gray.
As Amara, Vinh, and Jesse work to carve out a new life together, each is haunted by past betrayals that surface, expounded by the need to survive the rival colony and the planet itself.
There’s more than one way to be eaten alive.

My Review:

This one seemingly begins in the middle, and it kind of does, but also kind of doesn’t. Yes, that’s a bit cryptic but sometimes so is this story – in a good, creepy and utterly chilling way.

The chapter numbers count down and not up, and it’s a countdown. I knew from the beginning it wasn’t counting down to anything good, as that first chapter makes it seem like the situation has already gone to hell in a handcart. The second chapter initially made it seem as if the story might be counting backwards, as the people who definitely broke apart in that first chapter are together – or back together – in the second.

It’s only as I read further that I figured out that the chapter numbers were a countdown to something terrible that hadn’t yet happened. As though a bomb was going to explode when the count reached zero – which it sorta/kinda did, but not in the way that I was expecting.

So consider that countdown a shadow of things to come, that whatever it’s counting down towards is going to be destruction, or annihilation, or both. Definitely both.

There’s a saying that “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000.” On the colony world of New Belaforme, it’s at least her third time at bat, and this time she has actual hands to hold that otherwise metaphorical weapon.

And this time around she’s aiming past the metaphorical bleachers all the way around the world and out into the stars.

Escape Rating A-: There are multiple ways to approach this story, just as there are multiple ways that it approaches its ultimate designation as SF horror. Expect to be increasingly creeped out as the story creeps its way into that ending.

But in the beginning, it’s the story of a triad relationship that’s teetering on the edge of self-destruction before it gets tipped all the way over into utter annihilation. Jesse, Vinh and Amara absolutely do love each other, but it’s not a good or healthy kind of love because it’s riddled with lies. Lots and lots of lies.

All of which are based on each thinking they’re not “good” enough for the others – although each has very different definitions of good. They’re all putting up a front, they’re all pretending that everything is hunky-dory, that Jesse is their best friend and Vinh and Amara have a happy marriage – in spite of Amara’s family’s violent disapproval of her marriage to a woman who has no money, no connections and seemingly no prospects.

They cling to each other because none of them have anyone else, and they cling to their still-struggling colony planet because they think they can make a go of it out of the reach of Amara’s family’s vast influence.

It all works, barely, until their colony is invaded by their on-planet rivals, and the resulting rules and restrictions claimed to be necessary for survival and success tear their little world apart by adding an additional player to their game.

And in those myriad upsets of their own private status quo, the planet steps in and uses them for its own purposes. Because it’s had just about enough of its human pests and it’s time to start over. Again.

I have to admit that I was expecting to discover that Amara’s family were actually the “big bad” in this scenario, that they had engineered the invasion in the expectation that their wayward child would return to the suffocating family fold. It’s not like that story hasn’t been told before, after all.

Instead, this is a story where this planet’s equivalent of Gaia manifests as an actual persona, and she has a mission and an agenda to keep the planet in ecological balance at ALL costs. Once she’s decided that the humans are incapable of being anything other than what they are – greedy and rapacious – well, a planet’s gotta do what a planet’s gotta do.

Which is where the horror comes in. It’s very much the SFnal kind of horror, like S.A. Barnes’ Dead Silence and Ghost Station, or Ness Brown’s The Scourge Between Stars, but because this is set on a planet and not in the black of space, the results are different, but just as chilling because the planet gets a say in who she’ll allow to live on her and humans have just not made the cut. And that’s where the horror intersects a bit with the weird and eldritch worlds that Cassandra Khaw plays with our minds in.

Consider this compelling story in the scary borderland between SF horror and fantasy horror, between magical realism and spaceships consumed by monsters out of the black and make sure you read it with the lights on.

But if you had a good, creepy, chilling reading time with any of the above, This World Is Not Yours will creep you right out in the very best way..

#BookReview: Follow the Stars Home by Diane C. McPhail

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Follow the Stars Home by Diane C. McPhailFollow the Stars Home by Diane C. McPhail
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, U.S. history
Pages: 304
Published by Kensington on August 20, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A captivating reimagining of the intrepid woman who – 8 months pregnant and with a toddler in tow – braved violent earthquakes and treacherous waters on the first steamboat voyage to conquer the Mississippi River and redefine America. 
The acclaimed author of The Seamstress of New Orleans brings to life Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt’s defiant journey of 1811 in this lush, evocative biographical novel for fans of Paula McLain, Gill Paul, Allison Pataki, and stories about extraordinary yet little-known female adventurers…
It’s a journey that most deem an insane impossibility. Yet on October 20th, 1811, Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt—daughter of one of the architects of the United States Capitol—fearlessly boards the steamship New Orleans in Pittsburgh. Eight months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, Lydia is fiercely independent despite her youth. She’s also accustomed to defying convention. Against her father’s wishes, she married his much older business colleague, inventor Nicholas Roosevelt—builder of the New Orleans—and spent her honeymoon on a primitive flatboat. But the stakes for this trip are infinitely higher.
If Nicholas’s untried steamboat reaches New Orleans, it will serve as a profitable packet ship between that city and Natchez, proving the power of steam as it travels up and down the Mississippi. Success in this venture would revolutionize travel and trade, open the west to expansion, and secure the Roosevelts’ future.
Lydia had used her own architectural training to design the flatboat’s interior, including a bedroom, sitting area, and fireplace. The steamship, however, dwarfs the canoes and flatboats on the river. And no amount of power or comfort could shield its passengers from risk. Lydia believes herself ready for all the dangers ahead—growing unrest among native people, disease or injury, and the turbulent Falls of the Ohio, a sixty-foot drop long believed impassable in such a large boat.
But there are other challenges in store, impossible to predict as Lydia boards that fall day. Challenges which—if survived—will haunt and transform her, as surely as the journey will alter the course of a nation . . .  

My Review:

Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt clearly did not believe that adventures were things that happened to other people. Because she absolutely had her own adventures for her very own self, in spite of her gender, the times she lived in, the overwhelming number of naysayers, and that she was pregnant. On her second trip, she was, in fact, very, very pregnant.

Follow the Stars Home is a reimagining of her story, fictionalized so that it can be told from her perspective, as she accompanied her husband Nicholas Roosevelt on not one but two history making journeys from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. On her first journey in 1809, she traveled by barge and by flatboat, finishing up in a rowboat after a series of mishaps and outright disasters.

That trip was merely a scouting mission for the trip yet to come, the one that we get to take with her in 1811. The first successful attempt to conquer the Mississippi River with steam power. If their journey was successful – and it was – steamboats plying the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers would change the face of the fledgling United States with the speed of passage both down and UP the rivers against the current, for both passengers and especially – and profitably – cargo.

But the Roosevelts have to succeed to make that future possible. This is the story of that fantastic journey through territory the U.S. had yet to claim, on the way to a Manifest Destiny – for good and ill – that the Founding Fathers could only imagine.

All they have to do is keep the boat, their finances and their marriage off the rocks.

Nicholas J. Roosevelt, wife Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt, and their grandson J. Montgomery Roosevelt Schuyler, ca. 1848

Escape Rating B+: Follow the Stars Home is a story about being in the rooms where it happened – even if those rooms are powering down the Mississippi at the then astonishing rate of 12 miles per hour – and then steaming back up again.

Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt is the kind of unsung heroine whose accomplishments should have been shouted to the skies, but who is instead reduced to merely ‘Nicholas Roosevelt’s wife’ in the accounts of their history making journeys.

Instead, at least according to this fictionalized account – and it’s the version I WANT to believe in – she was as much of a full partner in this venture as the times and social conditions allowed – if not just a bit more. She’s certainly a real-life historical figure that it would be fascinating to know more about. Because she didn’t just marry into history, she was born to it. Her father, Benjamin Latrobe, was the architect of the U.S. Capital and many other buildings in the new capital of the newly formed United States.

A father who did not approve of his daughter’s marriage to his own friend and fellow engineer, a man more than 20 years her senior. (It’s not so much the age gap that gives this reader pause, but rather that they became engaged when Lydia was only 13.Your mileage and your judgment on that subject may definitely vary.)

The story in Follow the Stars Home is one that should be wider known, and I was certainly thrilled to learn about Lydia and her place on both epic journeys and in history.

That being said, her perspective on the events as they happen – at least her fictional perspective on her current situation, past experiences and her misgivings about them both – was a bit more domestically focused than I would have preferred. I was there for the adventure, the journey itself, and for the changes that happened after.

I fully recognize that’s a ‘me thing’ and may not be a ‘you thing’. In fact, I believe that a LOT of readers will be all in on that domestic perspective, because it was clearly damn difficult to manage a household, keep her toddler Rosetta occupied and more importantly out of trouble, AND give birth to her second child – at a scheduled stop in Louisville and NOT actually ON the steamboat – as history was being made.

I came to Follow the Stars Home for the history, but I stayed for this terrific portrait of a female adventurer who just plain isn’t as widely known as she ought to be. I sincerely hope that this marvelous story helps bring Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt to the more prominent place in the historical record where she truly belongs.

#BookReview: Passions in Death by J.D. Robb

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B- Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Passions in Death by J.D. RobbPassions in Death (In Death, #59) by J.D. Robb
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: In Death #59
Pages: 368
Published by St. Martin's Press on September 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Homicide Detective Eve Dallas hunts a killer who turns a wedding party into a murder scene in the latest novel by the #1 New York Times bestselling author, J.D. Robb.
On a hot August night, Lt. Eve Dallas and her husband, Roarke, speed through the streets of Manhattan to the Down and Dirty club, where a joyful, boisterous pre-wedding girls’ night out has turned into a murder scene. One of the brides lies in a pool of blood, garroted in a private room where she was preparing a surprise for her fiancée—two scrimped and saved-for tickets to Hawaii.
Despite the dozens of people present, useful witnesses are hard to come by. It all brings back some bad memories for Eve. In her uniform days, she’d suffered an assault in the very same room—but she’d been able to fight back and survive. She’d gotten justice. And now she needs to provide some for poor young Erin.
Eve knows that the level of violence and the apparent premeditation involved suggest a volatile mix of hidden, heated passion and ice-cold calculation. This is a crime that can be countered only by hard detective work and relentless dedication—and Eve will not stop until she finds the killer who destroyed this couple’s dreams before the honeymoon even began…

My Review:

The villain in Passions in Death was almost as much of a ‘dooser’ as the villain in the previous book, Random in Death. And that’s unfortunate for this particular entry in the long-running (59 books and counting!) In Death series.

The case in Passions in Death is just a case, just as it was in that previous book. Even if there is a touch of painful nostalgia in it, as the victim, Erin Albright, was murdered at the ‘hen party’ for her and her bride-to-be, in the same club, in fact the very same room, in which Dallas was nearly murdered at her own such party the night before her wedding to Roarke three years previously.

Now Erin is dead, her bride-to-be has a memorial to attend instead of a wedding, and Dallas has to figure out who killed the bright young artist just as her life was about to reach a new pinnacle of happiness.

The problem for Dallas is that, initially at least, all she has is the victim. There are no obvious motives, the usual suspects all have alibis because they were all dancing on stage with each other, drunk and just a bit high on happiness, as the murder took place. Or were they?

All of which means that Dallas will have to dig, and dig hard, into every single one of those supposedly happy partygoers to discover who in Erin and her fiancée Shauna’s tight-knit little tribe wasn’t nearly so happy as they pretended to be.

Someone who was cold and calculating enough to plan what initially appears to be a perfect murder, while still hot-headed and vicious enough to strangle a victim who trusted them up close and personal via a piano wire digging viciously into their neck.

It’s not an easy case, made more difficult by Dallas’ own memories of that room, and of its location at an old and dear friend’s club. But it’s Dallas’ job, and she’s damn good at it – even when the initial leads are as slim as they are in this case.

Escape Rating B-: While this story doesn’t represent a trip to the angst factory for either Dallas or Roarke, it represents a bit of a literal return to the past in the way that the story circles back to a few of the locations of the earliest days of Dallas’ life in New York City.

So the story manages to touch on a bit of nostalgia – without diving into the dark corners of either of their psyches. That they have places that feel nostalgic in the story is a reminder that, although the writing of this series has taken 30 years of the author’s and the reader’s time, it has also encompassed a bit over three years in Dallas’ and Roarke’s lives.

A lot has changed for both of them, and for the found family they have gathered around them, in those three years, more than enough for them to get a bit nostalgic at revisiting earlier scenes, but not nearly as much change as the world outside the series has experienced in three DECADES.

I’ve said in my reviews of many of the books in this series that the cases tend to fall into two categories. Sometimes a case is just a case – and this entry in the series is definitely one of those. Sometimes the case threatens a member of Dallas and Roarke’s extended family or does a deep dive into the dark parts of one or both of their pasts. Those stories get painful, and yet they are often the most compelling of the series.

As long as they don’t happen too close together, because no one does well dredging up that much trauma too often – not even the reader.

And not that the ones that are just cases can’t also be compelling. I’m thinking particularly of Origin in Death as well as the more recent Faithless in Death. But this one just wasn’t, and that’s because the killer was even more of a ‘dooser’ (that’s dick+loser) than the villain in Random in Death.

Come to think of it, their dooserness wasn’t the only thing the two villains had in common. Which doesn’t help the case for the story or the doosers.

There also wasn’t nearly as much news about the fam as I normally find both comforting and amusing in this particular entry in the series. This could also be my own disappointment carrying over to my feelings about the whole thing, as I was REALLY looking forward to reading this and it just wasn’t as compelling or comforting a read as I hoped.

Your reading mileage may certainly vary.

Howsomever, the next book in the series, Bonded in Death, looks fascinating as it looks like a trip to the angst factory, not for Dallas or Roarke, but for Roarke’s father-figure, his majordomo Summerset. Hopefully this new book, coming in February, 2025, will represent a return to form after Passions in Death and Random in Death, which were okay but just not up to the series’ usual high standards.

Grade A #BookReview: The Kill List by Nadine Matheson

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Kill List by Nadine MathesonThe Kill List (Inspector Anjelica Henley, #3) by Nadine Matheson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Series: Inspector Anjelica Henley #3
Pages: 448
Published by Hanover Square Press on August 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

While an innocent man sits behind bars, a serial killer with a gruesome signature has started killing again. And only Anjelica Henley can stop him.
After twenty-five years behind bars, Andrew Kenan has just been exonerated. Newly discovered DNA evidence proves that he was not the cold-blooded serial killer the world thought he was, the one who sewed his victims' eyes shut before burying them alive. Before Kenan can taste freedom, however, he is found dead in his prison cell. And Inspector Anjelica Henley, who worked the original investigation, is left in shock.
Henley never thought she'd have to revisit one of the most horrifying cases of her career. But now, after evading justice for twenty-five years, the true killer is back, and so is their gruesome signature. Can Henley stop them once and for all? Or has the Serial Crimes Unit finally met its match?
Drawing on her experiences as a criminal attorney, and exploring themes of race, class and justice, Nadine Matheson's newest entry in the Anjelica Henley series is her darkest, most adrenaline-fueled mystery yet.

My Review:

I picked this up because I was utterly riveted by the first two books in the Inspector Anjelica Henley series, The Jigsaw Man and The Binding Room. It’s taken me nearly a month after the publication date to brace myself to read the book, because this is a series where the word “enjoy” doesn’t actually apply to the reading of it.

Riveted, on the other hand, certainly does. Compelled, also. Certainly glued to the edge of my seat for nearly four hours, unable to put the thing down out of fascination and fear that something else even more terrible was about to happen.

Which, to be fair, it generally was.

Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley is a member of the (London) Metropolitan Police Serial Crimes Unit. It’s a unit that didn’t exist in 1995, when the serial killer the press dubbed “The Burier” began his spree of kidnapping young women, torturing them, raping them, burying them until they died of asphyxiation, then digging up their bodies and staging the discoveries of their corpses.

Then 15-year-old Anjelica Henley’s best friend Melissa was the first – but certainly not the last – of The Burier’s victims.

The Burier’s spree came to an end in 1996, when Andrew Streeter was convicted of all five monstrous killings. While Streeter protested his innocence repeatedly at his trial, at his conviction, and frequently and often over the twenty plus years since, the fact that the killings stopped convinced even the doubters that they had the right man – even if there might have been a few – or even more than a few – irregularities in the way the police handled the case.

But those irregularities have come back to haunt Anj, the entire SCU, and every single person who ever had anything to do with that old case. Because Andrew Streeter, the man everyone simply knew was guilty, had gotten the attention of a high-profile “Innocence Project” that successfully convinced a review board that those irregularities were the result of a police cover up and corruption that stitched him up for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with his actual guilt or innocence of the crime for which he was convicted.

He was merely convenient. Or in someone’s way. Or both. Almost certainly both.

And now that he’s about to be released from prison, the hunt for The Burier is starting all over again. Unless he starts hunting for them, first.

Escape Rating A: I’m not joking about the utterly mesmerizing four hours it took me to read this from beginning to end. I think the only times I moved were to adjust my legs to accommodate whichever cat had nestled into my lap and frankly I was glad of the comfort.

A comfort I desperately needed, because comfort is absolutely the last word I would use to describe this book OR the series from which it sprang. Compelling, yes. Fascinating, also yes. Riveting, absolutely. But comforting, no, not even in the ending which is not so much cathartic or relieving as merely a sigh and a pause between this story and the fresh hell that its unanswered questions inevitably lead to.

This is a hard book, and that’s made it difficult to get my thoughts into order and pour them out through my keyboard.

Why?

Because there are at least three elements to the taut suspense of this thriller, and each one is more of everything than the last. Surprisingly, the case of The Burier, with all of its chilling and even visceral horror, isn’t the worst of what the characters face.

Except for Henley, none of the current members of the SCU were involved in the original case. And Henley’s involvement was as a witness and victim-by-association. Whatever guilt she may feel – however much she might second guess her behavior then – she wasn’t actually responsible for any of the events – and neither are any of the other current members of the team.

It didn’t happen on their watch – although they are being held accountable for cleaning up the rather obvious black eye that has materialized on the face of the Met as a result of it.

Which is where the story veers into the worse, because it’s not just that Streeter was framed then. It’s that their deceased boss, their mentor, is being framed now, that his handling of the case then is responsible for this miscarriage of justice.

Unless, he wasn’t the bent copper who focused the case on Streeter, manipulated evidence and witnesses and knowingly put the wrong man in jail. A possibility that seems even more obvious as the way that the present case has been dumped in their collective laps has made it crystal clear that the Serial Crime Unit has an enemy within the Met who absolutely is out to get them all.

The question of who, what, when, where and why of that fact, while less terrible in the blood and guts sense, is a bigger and worser question for a unit that sees each other as family – whether that’s healthy or not – and sees that they are all falling over the edge in one way or another. Watching each other fall apart, knowing that someone has a figurative knife in their backs even as they investigate a killer who literally stabs his victims before he does the rest of his terrible work ratchets up the tension of this case even as it powers the story straight into the next book – which we’ll probably have to wait a nail-biting two years for.

A fact which makes this reader want to curse even more than the characters in the story do.

#BookReview: The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse KirkwoodThe Full Moon Coffee Shop (The Full Moon Coffee Shop, #1) by Mai Mochizuki, Jesse Kirkwood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, magical realism, world literature
Pages: 228
Published by Ballantine Books on August 20, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Translated from the Japanese bestseller, this charming and magical novel, inspired by the myth of cats returning favors to those who care for them, reminds us that it’s never too late to follow our stars.
In Japan cats are a symbol of good luck. As the myth goes, if you are kind to them, they’ll one day return the favor. And if you are kind to the right cat, you might just find yourself invited to a mysterious coffee shop under a glittering Kyoto moon. This particular coffee shop is like no other. It has no fixed location, no fixed hours, and seemingly appears at random to adrift young people at crucial junctions in their lives.
It’s also run by talking cats.
While customers at the Full Moon Coffee Shop partake in cakes, coffees, and teas, the cats also consult them on their star charts, offer cryptic wisdom, and let them know where their lives have veered off course—because every person who visits the shop has been feeling more than a little lost. And for a down-on-her-luck screenwriter, a romantically stuck movie director, a hopeful hairstylist, and a technologically challenged website designer, the feline guides will set them back on their fated paths. After all, there is a reason the shop appeared to each of them…

My Review:

It will not surprise any reader of my reviews that this book had me at cats. And it was expecting something a but cutesy, but also heartwarming and charming because a) cats and b) this book is part of the recent trend of interconnected vignette novels that kicked off – or at least into high gear – with Before the Coffee Gets Cold – a trend which I’ve been enjoying very much.

So I was expecting a similar combination of magical realism with a touch of cozy fantasy and/or cozy mystery, just with a whole lot of cats.

I fully admit I was NOT expecting the astrology bits, but we all get our paradigm shifts where we find them and the logic of what causes them doesn’t have to be the same for everyone. So even though the astrology explanations didn’t work for me except as a metaphor, as a metaphor they worked just fine.

What got me in the heart was the way that the story managed to come full circle and tie itself up with a truly beautiful bow. If, as this book posits albeit a bit sideways, if the Rainbow Bridge touches down on Earth  when the moon is full so that the cats we have loved and cared for have a chance to give us a bit of a push when we need it – I’m there for it.

Escape Rating B: At first, the stories seem a bit random, as they often do in this kind of book. I’m thinking of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, The Dallergut Dream Department Store, What You are Looking For Is In the Library, and my personal favorite, The Kamogawa Food Detectives.

When the two cats deliver some rather tough love to the down-on-her-luck, has-been writer, it’s not just her life that needs to change. The following stories connect back to her, and to a time in her life when her dreams were still in front of her.

And they could be again if she just takes the more practical aspects of the cats’ advice. As she does.

What I wasn’t expecting – but should have because these books often work similarly – was that all the people involved remember her, remember her fondly, were inspired by her in their own ways, and were part of an event in their brief time together that affected them all deeply even if they didn’t specifically remember it.

It’s that event that leads back to the cats, and to a truth about animal companions regardless of species. That it’s not just that we rescue them, as this teacher turned scriptwriter and her students once did. It’s that they rescue us as well.

And it’s that truth that makes the whole story not just work, but work with a smile and just a touch of a tear at its just so delicious bittersweet ending.

A+ #BookReview: Anatomy of Evil by Will Thomas

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Anatomy of Evil by Will ThomasAnatomy of Evil (Barker & Llewelyn, #7) by Will Thomas
Format: eARC
Source: purchased from Amazon, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Barker & Llewelyn #7
Pages: 327
Published by Minotaur Books on May 12, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In London of 1888, Private Enquiry Agent Cyrus Barker takes on his biggest case ever—the attempt to find and stop the killer terrorizing Whitechapel: Jack the Ripper
Cyrus Barker is undoubtedly England’s premiere private enquiry agent. With the help of his assistant Thomas Llewelyn, he’s developed an enviable reputation for discreetly solving some of the toughest, most consequential cases in recent history. But one evening in 1888, Robert Anderson, the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID), appears at Barker’s office with an offer. A series of murders in the Whitechapel area of London are turning the city upside down, with tremendous pressure being brought to bear on Scotland Yard and the government itself.
Barker is to be named temporary envoy to the Royal Family with regard to the case while surreptitiously bringing his investigative skill to the case. With various elements of society, high and low, bringing their own agenda to increasingly shocking murders, Barker and Llewellyn must find and hunt down the century’s most notorious killer. The Whitechapel Killer has managed to elude the finest minds of Scotland Yard—and beyond—he’s never faced a mind as nimble and a man as skilled as Cyrus Barker. But even Barker’s prodigious skills may not be enough to track down a killer in time.

My Review:

Private Inquiry Agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn have been on a collision course with this particular date with destiny since the very first book in this series, Some Danger Involved, opened in 1884 with Barker taking Llewellyn on as his apprentice.

This seventh book in the utterly riveting series of their adventures has reached the ominous year of 1888, the year that “Jack the Ripper” terrorized the streets of London’s most desperate and notorious neighborhood, Whitechapel.

Every single police agency – and there were plenty of competing jurisdictions and agencies in London in the autumn of 1888 – wanted the glory that would come from catching the killer – and zealously guarded their patch and every single scrap of evidence they managed to acquire.

In this compelling take on the investigation into the Whitechapel Murders, Scotland Yard, reluctantly and with a ridiculous number of caveats and restrictions, deputized Cyrus Barker and his apprentice-turned-assistant Thomas Llewellyn into the Metropolitan Police Department in order to avail themselves of Barker’s much vaunted expertise in investigation and manhunting.

And, in all probability, if all else failed, to have him on hand to use as a scapegoat if they couldn’t manage to close the case.

Which, or so history tells us, they didn’t. Unless one of the many conspiracy theories had it right after all, and the truth would have lit a powder keg that Scotland Yard was incapable of putting out.

Escape Rating A+: I picked this book when I did because I was on a long flight and needed something that was guaranteed to take me away from my current circumstances. I was one hundred percent certain that Barker & Llewelyn were the men for the job.

Which they absolutely were.

The fascinating thing about this particular entry in this long-running series is that its focus isn’t on the lurid details of the crimes, but rather on the intricate details of the investigation – including the interdepartmental rivalries, the political shenanigans, the conflicting social mores of the time and the various factions that needed protection – or demanded it – as well as the potential consequences of any of the various possible resolutions.

Barker and Llewelyn find themselves in the one place neither of them ever expected to be. They’re not just in the thick of the investigation, but they are embedded firmly into the Metropolitan Police. Barker prefers to be his own boss and run his own show, and Llewelyn is an ex-con. While neither of them expected to be welcomed in the Met with open arms, they’re continually astonished that they are there at all.

At the same time, the experience fosters respect on both sides that honestly neither side believed was possible. It will be interesting to see how and even whether that continues in future stories.

But the Ripper killings took place at the dawn of forensic science – and many of the techniques were still being hotly debated – even as “Jack” cut a bloody swath through Whitechapel and left damned few clues behind him – while the gutter press did their damndest to gin up readership with sensationalism.

The story runs at a compelling, page-turning pace as Barker and Llewelyn gather and discard clues and theories even as they walk the streets of Whitechapel night after night in an attempt to learn the territory so they can spot anything out of place – while they observe the day-to-day and night-to-night life of this district that most well-heeled Londoners would just as soon forget with understanding and empathy instead of the judgment and derision exhibited by their current colleagues and their usual clientele.

In the end, Barker gets his man – with Llewelyn’s able assistance – just as he always does. That the solution seems plausible even though justice can’t truly be served feels right, true to the circumstances, and even surprisingly satisfactory – in spite of the lack of historical closure.

Saying that I had a “good” reading time with Barker & Llewelyn this time around feels wrong – because the whole Ripper case is awful. I appreciated the way that the story dealt with the evidence of the actual killings without sensationalizing them more than has already been done elsewhere and plenty. The in-depth details, very much on the other hand, of the investigative processes of the police and the sheer amount of manpower they devoted to the case were fascinating.

And of course, I love these characters, so taking them out of their familiar haunts and watching them still get the job done added new layers to them, their association and their story. Which means that I will definitely continue my journey with Barker & Llewelyn with the next book in the series, Hell Bay, the next time I need to be swept away to Victorian London.

Grade A #BookReview: New Adventures in Space Opera edited by Jonathan Strahan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: New Adventures in Space Opera edited by Jonathan StrahanNew Adventures in Space Opera by Jonathan Strahan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, short stories, space opera
Pages: 338
Published by Tachyon Publications on August 13, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Have you ever wanted a faster-than-light trip to the future? Are you tired of reading science fiction novels that feel like they’re taking literal eons to finish? These fifteen award-winning and bestselling science fiction authors, including Charlie Jane Anders, Alastair Reynolds, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Tobias S. Buckell, Ann Leckie, and Sam J. Miller, and more, are here as your speedy guides to infinity and beyond.
In “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance,” a cloud-based contractor finds a human war criminal clinging to the hull of the ship. The clones of “All the Colours You Thought Were Kings,” about to attend their coming-of-age ceremony, are plotting treason. During “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime,” two outlaws go on the run after stealing a device from a space cult.
Here are the new, adventurous―and most efficient―takes on interstellar battles, sentient spaceships, and political intrigue on a galactic scale. Discover where memories live and die, and where memes rise and fall in moments. Remember, the future is sooner than you think, and there’s only so much time for visiting it.

My Review:

These space opera stories aren’t exactly new as they’ve all been published before in a variety of not necessarily widely available sources. But all are from the last decade and every single story represents an author who is at the top of their game. And, for the most part, they are marvelous.

I’m usually hit or miss with short story collections, sometimes they work, occasionally they don’t, and often there are a couple of stories that go ‘clunk’ and not in a good way and/or one or two where I can see why people liked them but I’m just not the right reader for them.

This particular collection only had three stories that weren’t absolutely stellar – all puns intended. Which means that I read through the whole thing and had at least a bit to say about each, leading to an overall Escape Rating of A.

“Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance” by Tobias S. Buckell
What is the difference between having free will but not having any real choices and being bound by contracts and programming – but having time to work one’s way around both? What does it REALLY mean to be human? And how much time and freedom does one need to find ALL the loopholes – and exploit the hell out of them? Escape Rating A for an absolutely beautiful asskicking of an ending.

“Extracurricular Activities” by Yoon Ha Lee (2018 Hugo nominee in the Novelette category)
Well, this just moved Ninefox Gambit up the virtually towering TBR pile, because I think this story is set in that universe and features one of the same characters, Shuos Jedai. Obviously one does not need to have read the series to get into this story because clearly I haven’t but just as clearly I most definitely did. Translating this to Trek a bit, because that’s what I was doing in my head, this story is what you’d get if Starfleet sent Section 31 to deal with the Tribbles, used Harry Mudd’s ship as cover – along with a much better looking version of Mudd – and it all worked out anyway in spite of all the reasons the entire operation should go terribly, horribly wrong. This is a story that shouldn’t be nearly as light as it turns out to be – but it is and it does and it was a LOT of fun along the way. Shuos Jedai fails up REALLY HARD in this story and it really works. Escape Rating A

“All the Colors You Thought Were Kings” by Arkady Martine
A different empire, different memories thereof. Three teens about to become cogs in the empire, except that they’ve chosen to take it over instead. A plot, a plan, a triangle of either siblinghood or romance or both, and a million to one shot that comes through but probably won’t change things half as much as they hoped. Escape Rating A

“Belladonna Nights” by Alastair Reynolds
What is the quality of mercy, and what does it mean to remember? Neither of which questions feel remotely like they should go together. I was expecting something about political shenanigans and jockeying for position and/or a bit of a star-crossed lovers romance, and what I got instead was something beautiful and sad and surprisingly elegiac. Which is exactly what the story is, an elegy for a people long dead, as seen through the eyes of the one person willing to remember them. Escape Rating A-

“Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher (2021 Hugo winner in the  Novelette category)
Not all learning organisms are human, and not all learning is on the side of the angels. But when your opponent is definitely working from the dark side of the Force, even a machine has to learn to fight fire with fire. Reminiscent of T.J. Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets in its story of machines being required to learn the worst lessons from humans – because some of them already have. Escape Rating A+

“A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime” by Charlie Jane Anders
This was just so deliciously, delightfully and dementedly over the top that it’s rolling on the floor laughing its ass off on the other side. A belly laugh of a tale, with a sensibility and a naming convention reminiscent of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Escape Rating A-

“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard (2013 Hugo nominee in the Short Story category)
The weapons of conquest are not necessarily the kind that kill. Sometimes they just do their damndest to kill the culture instead and let the people conquer themselves. And sometimes the culture being appropriated manages to fight back in ways that aren’t exactly deadly weapons, but can be deadly all the same. Escape Rating A

“Morrigan in the Sunglare” by Seth Dickinson
Don’t read this one when you already have a sad because trust me, it won’t help at all. However, in its heartbreaking sadness it’s a beautiful story about what is, what was, what might have been, what it means to be human vs. what it means to have what it takes to defend those who are, what we owe to the people we love vs. what we owe to the people that love us AND it’s about saving what can be saved – even if that means we have to lose it. I have all the words and none of them convey this story properly because it’s beautiful and sad and HARD. Escape Rating A

“The Old Dispensation” Lavie Tidhar
My thoughts about this one went on two completely separate tracks. There are a TON of religious references in this far-future SFnal story, but what made all of that interesting was that every single one of those references, including place names and names of ships, originated in Judaism instead of any of the usual suspects. Very much on my other hand, however, the story doesn’t quite gel. The idea that the agent of the Exilarch was essentially dismembered and mind-raped was plenty creepy, and the whole idea of what the conflict was at its heart was kind of fascinating, but it didn’t pull together in the end and lost its way more than a few times in the middle. Escape Rating C

“The Good Heretic” by Becky Chambers
This was a heartbreaker in the best way, a story about friendship, and being true to yourself, and daring to be different no matter what it costs, and discovering that difference doesn’t have to mean bad or evil no matter what everyone else tells you. It’s part of the author’s Wayfarers universe but can absolutely be read as a standalone – I haven’t read Wayfarers yet but its moving up the TBR pile as I write. Escape Rating A++

“A Voyage to Queensthroat” by Anya Johanna DeNiro
There’s something in this one that reminds me of The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo, although I can’t totally put my finger on why. Part of it is the way that both stories are memoirs of secondary characters telling the story of someone famous and even legendary from a previously untold point of view, and that both have a gut-punch of an ending. I’m on the fence – with both stories actually – about whether the length was just right or whether there should have been just a bit more. Escape Rating A-

“The Justified” by Ann Leckie
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or of the one – even when the one is supposedly the ruler of all they survey. And sometimes the only way to obey an order is to disobey the person who gave it. I think I needed more background than I had, or something like that, because this one only sorta/kinda worked for me and I was expecting it to be a wow. Escape Rating B

“Planetstuck” by Sam J. Miller
This was a story that works and works heartbreaking well because it’s completely invested in and riding on its characters. So even though we don’t have nearly enough about how this particular universe works, it doesn’t matter because what we care about – and deeply – are the desperate feelings of its protagonist and its lesson that you really can’t go home again – no matter how badly you want to, because some gifts really do come at much too high a price. Escape Rating A+

“The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir” by Karin Tidbeck
A beautiful ending to a terrific collection. It’s a bit steampunk-ish, not in setting but in the feel of the way the world is set up, but the story it reminds me of most is Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis, in that this is also about the last voyage of a cruise ship that is much bigger than it appears from the outside. Escape Rating B