The 2025 Book Post – Noel Rappin Writes Here

One exciting thing about this year’s book wrap up, at least to me, is that I wrote mini-reviews all year, so these reviews should have a stronger tendency to sound like I actually read the book. And also this will come out in March and not, like, May.

Another exciting thing, again, for me, is that I think I finally cracked my personal dilemma about How To Rate Books.

So, this is like the nerdiest thing ever, but basically I’ve never quite known what to do with 5 star or 1-10 ratings for books.

I have a pretty good system for finding books I will like, and I do, in fact, like about 90% or so of the books I read at least a little. So on a 5 star scale, basically everything is a 4. Storysite gets around this by allowing you to have quarter-point gradients, but it’s not clear to me that the difference between giving a book 4.25 and 4.5 stars carries any meaning. And expanding the scale so that most of the books that I like are 1-2 on the scale breaks with the understanding of what a “one-star” book is.

Now, here’s where some of you are going to roll your eyes. Because a baseball analogy dawned on me. The scale is:

Out: I regretted reading this
Walk: I was neutral about this book
Single: On the whole I was glad to have read this
Double: I liked it and would recommend it easily
Triple: I will enthusiastically tell you about this book whether you like it or not
Home Run: This book became my personality for a while
Grand Slam: This book became my personality for a long time

I like this. It successfully gives the message that most of the things I finish have at least some value to me, while also making clear the distinction between a home run and a double. (I do seem to read a lot of doubles). It also extends nicely on both ends (strikeout, double play, three-run homer, grand slam), and lends itself nicely to descriptions like “double stretched to a triple” or “could have been a double, but the batter held at first” which to seem, at least to my weird brain, to be metaphorically useful. And which, you’ll be glad to know, I have generally restrained from in this post.

And, best of all, I pretty quickly got to a place where I’d finish a book and my gut would say “single”.

And so, off we go, this is every 2025 book that was a “double” or higher, plus a small smattering of books I rated “single” that I thought were worth talking about.

Within each group, books are sorted by when I read them, which is not helpful to anybody except that any little references that I built up all year while writing mini reviews should still work.

In some cases, where I thought it was fun, I threw in the first line of the book. I also think I got every case where the marketing blurb for the book referenced it as a combination of two other books, and we’re going to mock those for a while.

Onward:

Single +

A Passion for Passion by Alice Fraser

Elevator Pitch: Do you like satiric fake romance novels?

Why Did I Read This: Fraser is one of my favorite funny people going right now.

Alice Fraser is an Australian comedian and writer, probably best known in the US for being one of the regulars on The Bugle podcast, but she’s also hosted a series of her own podcasts. Her podcast “The Last Post”, was a daily dispatch from an alternate reality that got stranger and stranger over time, and one of the features of that reality was romance author D’Ancey LaGuarde, whose regular book releases would be reported on the podcast.

Fraser has an amazing ability to toss off extremely plausible and somewhat satiric novel synopses (her current podcast Realms Unknown starts each episode with a fake description of an SF/F story in the genre being highlighted in that episode and I swear that a good 75% of them sound like they’d be outstanding). This book is a collection of descriptions of LaGuarde’s novels, and a sort of retrospective of her faux career and a few other romance related satires.

The jokes here are both broad and specific, the kind of satire that comes from really knowing and loving a thing. And if they get a little repetitive they are still pretty good jokes.

Back After This by Linda Holmes

Elevator Pitch: A woman goes on a bunch of dates for a podcast. Solid pitch, could easily have sold in the room.

Linda Holmes had the possible misfortune to release her “woman goes on a bunch of dates for a podcast” novel, at roughly the same time as a separate “woman goes on a bunch of dates for a call-in radio show” novel was released (First Time Caller).

Anyway, as a very, very long time Linda Holmes fan, I liked this one better.

Our main character is a podcast producer – Holmes’ background as a podcaster for more than a decade makes this feel lived in. She’s talked into going on a series of dates for a new show while getting advice from an influencer, but at the same time she has a series of meet-cutes with different people, possibly accidentally including her actual true love.

It’s a solid book, I liked that Holmes made the influencer character complex, the job dynamics seem real, and the relationship is charming.

Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

Elevator Pitch: Financial shenanigans in the tech world of the early 80s.

Why Did I Read This: I need to come up with a better joke here than “because it’s Cory Doctorow”.

I admit I don’t quite get what Doctorow is trying to do here. Which is not unusual for me, with respect to his fiction career. (I should say, I have tremendous respect for his fiction career.)

This is the third book about Marty Hench, forensic accountant to the tech world, each book taking place earlier in the timeline, so this one is basically Marty’s origin story against the backdrop of the computer industry of the late 70s and early 80s, which I’ll admit at least some nostalgia for.

(There’s actually way less connection between the three books than you’d think.. I mean, I have a notoriously bad memory for characters, but I did search the other books, and I don’t think there’s much overlap of the supporting characters). I’m not completely sure why we’re telling the story backwards, but I am also not Cory Doctorow.

Anyway, Hench gets hired by a company that markets really bad computers to religious organizations, taking advantage of the religious community. Turns out the bad guys are being undercut by ex-employees who are reverse-engineering their stuff to remove lock-in.

Hench realizes almost immediately who the bad guys are and switches sides. Things escalate. There is accounting and violence.

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis

Elevator Pitch: Magic School. But Magic Elementary School. And your POV is the parent. The official blurb is “Big Little Lies goes to magic school”. While I could imagine that describing a book, it decidedly doesn’t describe this book…

Do The Math: Scholomance, but adorable?

Do we have a consensus definition of “cozy” in “cozy fantasy”?

Of course we don’t. It’s hard to do without being circular on the definition of cozy, but here goes.

If something is billed as “cozy”, I expect it to cover most of these points:

Low stakes
Relative lack of on-screen violence or gore. (Some would add on-screen sex)
Leans into a “cute” or “adorable” aesthetic
A sense of a community or found family, or of a character or characters finding their place in the world
A lack of cynicism, earnest sincerity tends to carry the day

I’ve seen a definition that also suggests that a cozy fantasy can’t have a romance, but I think that’s too restrictive, there’s all kinds of cozy romances.

Does that track? Score each of those on a 0,1,2 scale, add them up, and you get a 10 point scale.

Legends and Lattes scores about a nine, I think. Can’t Spell Treason without Tea scores about seven? Goblin Emperor scores… I make it six (it has higher stakes than the others). Galaxy and The Ground Within scores about an 8.

Which brings us to GGSPTA, which I score as about an 7-8. But it also has a character who is deeply anxious about her child and whose marriage is really not doing well. Large chunks of this book did not make me think “cozy fireside read”, even though parts of it did, and parts of it are genuinely funny.

Our main character, Vivian, had her life turned upside down when her kindergarten-aged daughter was bitten by a werewolf. She is directed to the title academy as a place where her child can get the attention she needs, but that also makes her an outsider among the somewhat insular parent body and there are so many things about the magic world that Vivian doesn’t know. Including a prophesy that seems to be targeting her daughter. This is sort of satire and sort of not, Vivian gets to a very dark place mid-book before eventually recovering herself. I’m not normally a fan of “we weren’t really in danger” as a plot resolution, but on reflection I think that the choice of actual plot mechanic is funny enough to overcome my reluctance.

I liked it, maybe not as much as I hoped to, but I still liked it.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman

The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook by Matt Dinniman

The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman

Elevator Pitch: As noted online multiple times, this series is deeply resistant to elevator pitches

Why Did I Read This: It sounded ridiculous to me but a lot of people I trust recommended it including Alice Fraser, so there you go

Recommended If You Like: cats; absurd satire; deeply weird politics

So, I think the first thing to say about this is that I read five books in this series this year (well, the last one actually bled over New Year’s) and my overall reaction is to say in my best Benoit Blanc Voice, “It makes no damn sense. Compels me, though”.

In the first few pages, Earth is destroyed by unimaginably powerful aliens, who turn the entire planet into a video game, which is also streamed across the entire galaxy. Carl, our hero, has survived through sheer luck, and with the help of his cat Donut, who quickly becomes sentient, (don’t complain, the cat’s the best part…) now has to survive the game.

He’s got stats, there are weapons and power-ups, and healing potions and NPCs and the whole slightly bonkers aesthetic of a video game crossed with the even-more bonkers aesthetic of reality TV.

This book, as far as I can tell, does for LitRPG what Legends and Lattes did for cozy fantasy, becoming a point of entry for a sub-genre that people didn’t even know they wanted.

Is it good? That’s maybe the wrong question. It’s a lot of fun. Carl’s fine – he’s your basic SF hero who is extremely good at avoiding functional fixedness, but Donut is the real star.

One thing that helps is that over the course of the books, Dinneman widens the story. It’s probably a bit much to say he is querying the premise, but he does take seriously the idea that a galactic society that puts together this kind of entertainment regularly is deeply messed up.

Oh – and once I thoght of this this, I couldn’t unsee it. This book totally is the modern Battlefield Earth – a nobody from Earth takes on a galactic power that has conquered Earth using nothing but his guile and wits. Dinneman is more tongue in cheek than Hubbard, but there’s a lot in common.

Tea You at the Altar by Rebecca Thorne

Alchemy and a Cup of Tea by Rebecca Thorne

These are book three and four of a series, you probably want to start at the beginning.

“Will they or won’t they” is not the only romantic trope – “they already do and they are great together” is also a lot of fun. The Thin Man is a beloved classic for a reason.

I’ll note that this series, which I would consider cozy or cozy-ish, does have pretty high stakes.

It does have a tight community focus, but only because people come from around the world to the location. There’s a relative lot of violence and tension. Whether it’s cute or not is an open call.

Anyway, I like this series a bunch, I think the characters are fun (there aren’t many books that have a character willing to go with puns the way Keyanthe does…), and I love banter from characters who are already together.

I don’t know this really as cozy as, say Spellshop, but I do think it’s a lot of fun.

The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison

I mean, I guess you have to admire Addison’s ability to continue to write stories in the Goblin Emperor world and only give us small glimpses of the actual Goblin Emperor (Maia does make a minor appearance here, which was welcome).

Instead, we continue to follow Celehar, a perfectly good character who has perfectly good adventures – he bargains with a ghost dragon.

(I’m mostly kidding here, I don’t like bugging authors for the books they don’t write, but Maia is one of my five favorite characters of the last decade or so, and I kind of would love to know what’s happening with him.)

This is one of those books that doesn’t quite go where you think it’s going to go – the ghost dragon moves things along quite a bit. I liked it, and I curious what Addison will do now that this series also seems closed.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

Elevator Pitch: The moon turns to cheese. It’s funny til it’s not.

Recommended If You Like: cheese-based humor; weird apocalypses

This one shouldn’t work at all. But actually it’s pretty gouda. That’ll brie the last cheese pun.

The premise is that suddenly the moon turns to cheese. Not a metaphor. Actual cheese. Not just the actual moon, but all moon rocks on earth also change.

You would think this is the setup for a ridiculous comedy, and it starts that way. Each chapter of the book is a different vignette, more or less one a day. They do intertwine, but basically they are all kind of standalone.

Then it gets a little more bigger in scope as people grapple with what it means to have moon suddenly change into cheese. The book is careful to point out that just because people don’t know how the change happened yet, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rational explanation for it somewhere.

Eventually the smart people realize that the cheese moon is unstable, suddenly getting a lot less ridiculous and turning the book into the most delicious disaster novel ever.

This book succeeds at what it’s trying to do to kind of an astonishing degree – make you take seriously a genuinely goofy premise. I liked this more than Scalz’s more serious novel this year.

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst

Elevator Pitch: The coziest fantasy that has ever been cozied. The blurb says “Like a Hallmark rom-com full of mythical creatures and fueled by cinnamon rolls and magic” – seems about right.

“Cozy” is an inherently vague word, but if it doesn’t apply to this book, I’m not sure what it would possibly apply to. On the cozy scale I listed above, this scores like an 11 out of 10. It’s so cozy, that for the rest of the year, I assumed that I had written the cozy definition seen above for this book and was surprised when I went back and saw that I had written it for a different book.

Our heroine is a librarian at one of those great fantasy libraries of magic but we don’t learn much about it because it’s sacked by rebels on page 2, and she escapes with her life, a boatful of books and her friend, who is a sentient spider plant. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that a sarcastic sentient spider plant is very much “cute aesthetic”

With no other options, she returns to the outlying isle of her birth, which has mer-horses, adorable bakeries, and a deep problem with the lack of magic help coming from the main empire.

Can she find allies, friends, and more than friends, while solving the problem and thwarting those who would do harm? This is the kind of book where the nominally dark and forbidding forest actually turns out to be populated by adorable animal-shaped sprites. Where the various characters have skin in all shades (our main character is blue – to be clear, I thought this part was awesome).

I’m not immune to the charms of a sentient spider plant, and I had a good time with this one, but it’s kind of thin. But adorable. Probably this year’s winner of the “light but cute but light but cute” award.

As for the sequel, if you read The Spellshop and think “good book, but not enough talking plants”, then boy howdy is this sequel for you.

Our sequel concerns the woman who created the sentient spider plant. In The Spellshop we learn her punishment was being turned into a statue. In this book, she gets better and finds herself on an island with a bunch of magical greenhouses stocked with sentient plants and one grumpy gardener.

If you look at my Cozy criteria, the sequel scores about a 14 out of 10:

Low stakes – for most of the book there are only two human characters, the stakes couldn’t possibly be lower. Huge, epic revolution is far, far in the background.
Low violence – yeah, no violence
Cute aesthetic – the book has a sassy talking rose plant, so I’m going to go with “check”
Found family / Community – check and check, literally in this case in that the male lead basically finds his family
Lack of cynicism — yep, that too.

It’s also a prototypical grumpy/sunshine romance.

And for all that, the book basically works. (There’s a little too much fretting about whether she’s going to get in trouble for breaking the laws about magic that we, the reader, know are already dead letters). But I actually like the magic system in these books, there are a lot of descriptions of plants, and it’s got small dragons. It’s fine, it’s all fine.

One Death at a Time by Abbi Waxman

Do The Math: Hacks + Erin Brockovich + Knives Out

I think so much about books that are surprises or disappointments, that it’s nice to sometimes find a book that is exactly what I think it will be.

Waxman, who has written a lot of romance or romance-adjacent books, takes a swing at a murder mystery. Our amateur detectives are… well, quite a pair. The famous one is an actress in her sixties, once a huge star, then wrongfully imprisoned for killing her husband.

On her release, she’s become a lawyer, specializing in advocating for the wrongly accused. The other one is her AA sponsor, who becomes her personal assistant.

The characters are great and feel unique, Waxman has always been good at narration. I’m not 100% sure I completely understood the through line of the plot, but this is a setup for a series if I’ve ever seen one, and I hope it gets there.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

Recommended If You Like: Taylor Jenkins Reid fans should feel at home, a lot of people noted the similarity to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

Award For: Goodreads Reader Favorite for Romance

This is Emily Henry’s sixth adult romance novel. Five have won Goodreads awards for best romance (all but the first, so five in a row). I’d say she’s established herself as the most popular romance author in the country right now. And there’s a reason for it – she’s really good.

One thing that happened to me this year is that I got just a bit burned out on romance books, but I stuck with a few authors that I really like, and Henry is one.

Our main character here, Alice, is a journalist. She’s obsessed with Margaret Ives, a midcentury celebrity, a notorious heiress who burned bright, burned bridges, and has been out of the public eye for decades. Alice has tracked her down and is trying to secure the rights to write a biography. Hayden, an award winning biographer, has also been invited, and our heiress declares that she will spend one month working with both of them before announcing which one she trusts with her story.

As somebody online pointed out, a strict NDA is one way to keep your romance characters from fully communicating…

The book bounces back and forth from Alice’s perspective to Margaret’s story, ostensibly from the eventual biography. Alice and Hayden fall for each other because of course they do. Henry does a very good job of creating a plausible and interesting backstory for Margaret (also, the description of Hayden’s previous award winning book seems quite plausible in a way that is hard to do).

Your enjoyment here is going to depend somewhat on your patience for sorting out the details of Margaret’s story, there’s a lot of backstory and a complex family tree. Alice and Hayden have a good story but Margaret is a good third of the book and if you aren’t into that part, it’s going to feel slow. I liked it, so I liked it.

Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood

As I said, I did kind of burn out on romance novels this year, no particular reason, it happens sometimes. Ali Hazelwood was another one I kept up with and she had four books come out this year, of which this was probably my favorite. (Deep End was also good).

One of the reasons I started reading romance novels was to try to understand how they work – what does an author do to make a story compelling against a backdrop of a lot of expected plot beats. I’ve never felt that it’s a problem for a story to have expected plot beats, but it does place the burden on the author to make me care what happens anyway.

This book is a follow-up to Not In Love, our viewpoint character is Maya, she’s the 24 year old much younger sister of the previous book’s main character. She’s had a probably-requited crush on Conor, her brother’s 38 year old best friend, for about four years. The age gap is the “problematic” in the title. We have a lot of Hazelwood tropes here – Maya is in STEM, though she’s bolder and less quirky than some other Hazelwood characters. The MMC is emotionally unavailable in part because he’s covering for how much he’s crushing on the FMC.

In most of the other Hazelwood books, though, the characters start as rivals, and in this case they are already close friends. Maya’s viewpoint voice is strong and funny and determined to break down Conor’s resistance. Hazelwood sets this in Sicily, a part of the world she clearly loves, there’s enough background wedding drama to keep things moving. Overall, I very much enjoyed this. This book has a fantastic cover.

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Why Did I Read This: I’ve liked Reid in the past, and the subject matter is definitely up my alley

Do The Math: Apollo 13 + 12 years + romantic subplot

Award For: Goodreads Reader Favorite for Historical Fiction

I have two quibbles right off the bat:

The book centers around a fictional space shuttle accident in December 1984. While of course you can write about any historical fiction thing you want, as somebody who pretty clearly remembers Challenger, which happened in January 1985, this felt a little weird.
I can’t remember the other one. It’ll come to me. Wait, I’ve got it. We get the viewpoint of two astronauts who actually go into space and the both separately come to the conclusion that, all things considered, they’d rather be on the ground. That’s certainly a choice.

I can’t speak to the technical accuracy. Reid says flat-out at the end that she took significant artistic license. My guess is the facts of the accident are broadly plausible for “melodrama” levels of plausible and that she played pretty fast and loose with the NASA staffing rules to have an astronaut in space for one mission and then as the main Mission Control contact on the next mission six weeks later. (They did used to run missions that close together, though). That’s just a guess, though.

Anyway… Our main character is Joan, and we meet her in 1979 as an astronaut trainee and in 1984 at Mission Control during the aforementioned accident.

On board the shuttle is another astronaut named Vanessa, and as we move in the older timeline, we see Joan and Vanessa fall in love, which at that time meant absolute secrecy. So we go back and forth between the accident in 1984, and the 1979-1984 timeline gradually revealing the relationship between the two.

There’s nothing exactly surprising that happens, though I have to admit that it somewhat harrowingly depicts what a same-sex romance against the background of the early 80s needed to look like. It wasn’t that long ago, I was alive, if not adult.

Nothing surprising, but it’s all quite well done, it’s easy to root for the characters (though there are a couple of bits with side characters that don’t really go anywhere) and when it comes time for the big speech, the big speech delivers. Honestly, what more can you ask for?

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older

Why Did I Read This: See previous raves in previous years…

Opening Lines: “A storm was writhing over Valdegeld, its tendrils churning Giant’s ever-present fog and pressing sleet and freezing rain through the atmoshield and onto the august buildings of Valdegeld University and auxiliaries, including my—less august, but evocative and comfortable—lodgings.”

Last year for book two of this series, I talked about how beautiful the writing in this series is.

This year, I want to talk about how beautiful the world building is.

The mystery is great, I was originally somewhat skeptical of Older spending so much time with Mossa and Pleity separated, but in the end I think it was mostly worth it to get to see Pleity investigate on her own.

So, separate from that I want to talk about the world building here, because I think Older does something subtle and heartbreaking here. We have this Jovian community that is in many ways lovely – not tremendously prosperous, perhaps, but growing and stable. Pleity is a scholar. She’s a Classical scholar, which means she studies old Earth. We are given to believe that Classical scholars are much more respected than Modern scholars, who study Jupiter and also do stuff like, you know, science.

Pleity’s research is part of the ongoing Classical project to re-introduce life back to earth. Specifically, Pleity is attempting to research things like the normal proportions of different animals in a forest from textual analysis of novels. I think that we, the readers, are supposed to believe this is a doomed pursuit, but in-universe, Pleity is a highly respected scholar. When she meets a Modern anthropologist of Jupiter, she’s confused – why would anybody want to study the people of Jupiter?

Older does a thing, where a character says that something was a “deeply human” thing to do, but they don’t mean it the way you or I might say it, they mean it to mean “carelessly destructive”. And eventually I realize it – this culture is deeply traumatized and suffering from collective survivors’ guilt. And it’s a background note, but it’s such a thoughtfully played background note. This series is beautiful.

The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso

The Last Soul Among Wolves by Melissa Caruso

Why Did I Read This: Another recommendation from Alice Fraser

Opening Lines: “It’s easy to fall into the wrong world”

The “If I had a nickel meme” but for books where Raven is a symbol for learning. To quote the dragon in Raven Scholar, “there are other birds”.

This book features a thing you don’t see all that often in fantasy worlds – the main character has a two-month-old, and she’s on her first night away, so when the book starts, she’s already tired, happy to be out, feeling guilty, and also has no idea how to talk to people anymore. (It’s some slightly modern diction for a more Victorian-era setting, but I mean, that’s, like, every fantasy book.)

She’s at what you can think of as a New Year’s Eve party when things get weird. And by weird, nearly the entire party dies of poisoning, then the clock strikes the hour and they are get better, but the entire party has shifted to another level of reality. Which is, apparently a thing that can happen in this world, which has multiple layers of reality stacked on top of each other.

We then get a kind of a mash up of a time-loop, a game of Traitor (since somebody in the party is triggering the changes), and some weird magic things. Also there’s a romance, which is not the main point, but which worked. (I’m usually all in on “they met as kids but as adults they don’t recognize each other” as a trope.)

Caruso does a good job of making each loop distinct, which is good, because there are like 11 of them, and the magic system is unique and mostly interesting (there are times where it feels contrived, and times where it seems less weird than maybe it presents itself to be).

Still, the mystery was good, the ending was satisfying.

As for book two, this is going to sound like a dig, but I mean it as a compliment – Caruso does a fantastic job here coming up with a premise that is both obviously related to the first book in the series, but which is its own thing with it’s own plot arcs and story beats.

This time round, Kem is called upon by an old friend to help with what turns out to by your run-of-the-mill “all your friends got inscribed in a cursed magic book, and now all the people in the book are going to die except one, who gets to own the magic book”. That old thing.

This builds on the events of the first book, it feels more like it’s setting up a long ongoing series than a trilogy, but I don’t really know what Caruso is planning. I’m in, though, this series is good.

Wait, sometimes this information is, you know, available. From the author’s website: “The current plan is for three books! It’s the sort of series I could expand indefinitely if the opportunity arose, though.”

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Elevator Pitch: Robots open a noodle restaurant in future San Francisco

Recommended If You Like: Noodles, of course, but also robots

So, given the cozy scale referenced above, this scores an 8 or a 9. You don’t see cozy SF as often as you see cozy fantasy, that’s for sure.

It’s about a group of robots that decide to start a noodle restaurant in a future San Francisco still recovering from California’s war of independence.

The robots are “human-equivalent” intelligence, and are thus nominally free under California law, but can’t own property, and are subject to discrimination, like, if somebody thinks your noodle restaurant is run by robots, you might get review-bombed. This is a novella, and there’s not a lot of plot, it’s mostly vibes, it’s a found family story where the family is robots. Good vibes, it’s a very sweet story.

One of my new fascinations is the difference between fictional AI and real world AI. Newitz is obviously sympathetic to the robots here and their desire to just run a restaurant and feed people and eventually create a community space. Newitz is also very much against the use of LLMs in creative fields at the moment. I’m not saying the positions are opposed, you can articulate why the two things are different and should be treated differently. But I still think it’s interesting that the idea of an artificial sentient is still so compelling, even with our artificial non-sentient LLMs. I also think it’s interesting how little the science fiction conception of AI has in common with AI as we are all currently living it.

Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read

Elevator Pitch: Hate Muti-Level Marketing? You don’t know the half of it.

Well executed history of Multi-Level Marketing in the USA from its emergence out of the world of direct door-to-door sales to its current status as evil behemoth with too much political clout. The author is pretty clear that there is no actual distance between legal MLMs and illegal pyramid schemes and the only reason the MLM’s have managed to stay legal is through a combination of obfuscation and buying influence. Kind of a grim story, actually.

Royal Gambit by Daniel O’Malley

Elevator Pitch: The Rook is back!

For the second time in a row, I only found out about a new Daniel O’Malley book after the fact, which was weird.

Anyway, this is book four and I guess it’s a universe now, with four stories that largely don’t share protagonists. For the record, this book is more of a sequel to book 2 with its Grafters and its royal family ending, so book 3 is more of a side quest.

Our viewpoint character is Alix. Like most children in this world who exhibit supernatural abilities in the UK, she’s taken by the Checquy as a small child. Unlike most, because she is of a noble family, the Checquy finds it useful to sort of embed her as a playmate of the princess, which has basically earned Alix the enmity of all sides – her Checquy peers distrust her because she had extra privileges as a child, and her parents are intent on mining her for all the power they can extract from the Checquy, and the princess is a little skeptical of her because she is obviously keeping a secret.

As we start, the actual Prince of Wales is supernaturally murdered, and Alix is both investigating the crime and protecting her friend the princess. This is more of a thriller/police novel than the other Rook books, and it’s a pretty good one. A nice side effect of O’Malley’s somewhat, um, exuberant descriptions of the supernatural in these books, is that the range of possibilities for what this killer is capable of is nigh-infinite and the investigators seem truly terrified. I also think the killer’s motivations were both surprising and interesting. It did have a little less of the joyful weird descriptions of past Rook books, and I did miss that, but overall, fun.

Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher

Elevator Pitch: Kingfisher takes on Snow White. Kinda.

This based on Snow White in that it has a character named Snow, a magic system involving mirrors, and something like a poisoned apple.

Everything else is different, which is something of a Kingfisher hallmark these days.

Look, I enjoyed this book, the characters are charming, the magic is creepy and unique, there’s a couple of real nightmare images. Does it have a lot of micro tropes that are, like, common to Kingfisher’s books? Yes. Did I mind? No.

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett

Elevator Pitch: Hallett takes on the high-stakes, hard-driving world of English pub quizzes.

Recommended If You Like: I feel these books are choose your own adventure adjacent in I way I can’t quite articulate

This is another of Hallett’s murder mysteries through found texts, in this case a wannabe documentarian is sending information to a Netflix producer to convince Netflix to fund his documentary about a mysterious death at a pub in rural England.

As is the case with other of Hallett’s novels, we have a combination of text threads, emails, recorded text and other records, and as with her other books, information is very much withheld from you to make the plot points pop. This book is really upfront about that – we get an email from the documentarian from time to time telling about the amazing upcoming twist.

As a result, this one is less of a fair play mystery than other Hallett books.

Anyway, I basically liked it – your milage may vary on the big twist and the general structure, but it’s fun and twisty, and as a little bonus it ends up being surprisingly gentle to a character that you think is being made fun of most of the book.

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman

The first thing I want to say about this book is that what Osman is doing here is really hard.

It’s a mystery novel where at least a dozen characters are, at least briefly, viewpoint characters. The main characters are incredibly charming and the characterization is very precise. You know which characters are good at things that others are bad at, and it never seems to be for plot contrivance.

He makes it look easy, but if it were that easy, I’d read 50 books a year that do it instead of, like three.

Anyway, the character stuff here continues to be good and genuinely touching – especially in this case the focus on one of the mother-daughter relationship. My main quibble here is the plot itself, it’s got a dash of “the stakes were never really as high as everybody thought”.

There’s two stories that you think are going to intertwine, but they don’t really, and Osman at the end gives a little “you thought the flashy story was the real story, but actually it was this other thing”. He almost pulls it off, but not quite.

Don’t get me started about the Netflix movie…

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

Elevator Pitch: What if Miles Vorkosigan, but gothic horror

Book three in the Sworn Soldier series. This time, our hero Alex is in West Virginia investigating a very creepy mine that turns out to be somewhat Lovecraftian.

Not a lot really to say about this, except to marvel that the same person can put out “Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking”, “Swordheart”, and this.

We Had A Hunch by Tom Ryan

Why Did I Read This: There are a few sentences that pretty much guarantee I’ll consider your book and one of them is “Former teen detective grows up”.

Do The Math: The official marketing says “Nancy Drew meets Yellowjackets”, and I guess Yellowjackets is a stand in here for “adult characters dealing with weird teenage trauma”?

In this case, we’ve got three teen detectives, the Van Dyne twins, your classic “children of the police chief” teen detectives and teen hacker and reluctant detective Joey O’Day.

25 years ago they got in way, way over their head and as a result, the twins’ father and one of their boyfriends were killed.

Now, 25 years later, they’ve gone their mostly separate ways. But a copycat is back in their small town….

Strong premise. If you think it would be a great setup for, say, an eight episode Netflix series, good news, it’s already been optioned. I tore through this one pretty quickly, and I think it’s triple-level for about the first 80%. Eventually we reveal both the original killer and the new killer, and I think one of them was well-planted, and one of them is maybe a little more dubious. (Both of them depend on the characters being sociopaths and able to lie convincingly for a long time, which, fair enough I guess).

Still the end didn’t quite hold together for me, I think it drops to a double. It caused me to go back and read Tom Ryan’s previous adult mystery.

Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree

Opening Lines: “Fuck,” cried Fern, ducking back inside the carriage a whisker before a clawed and scaled hand sailed past.

Recommended If You Like: Talking cutlery, emotionally unavailable heroes, basically if you like the T. Kingfisher White Rat books

Just so we’ve all got this straight, Baldree released Legends & Lattes in 2022, and basically kick-started a new subgenere of low-stakes fantasy stories.

By his own admission, he tore up his first try at a sequel and eventually wrote Bookshops & Bonedust, which is a prequel. (Not that you asked, but all three books style themselves with the ampersand in the title).

This book takes place after Legends & Lattes and features Fern, introduced as a bookseller that Viv befriends in Boookshps & Bonedust. Fern is moving to open a shop next to Viv, which starts to look like Legends & Lattes, but when that all goes very smoothly you start to expect that something else is going on.

Fern is dissatisfied as a bookseller, and literally stumbles into an adventure through the expedient of drunkenly falling asleep in a wagon belonging to Astryx, a famous hero and bounty hunter.

Let’s go to the scoreboard:

Disaffected middle-age heroine
Emotionally unavailable hero
Forced on a common quest
Cutlery with a human soul that talks
Cute-coded non-human chaotic creature

Oh – I thought, Baldree has written a T. Kingfisher novel. It’s not quite as good as, say, the Paladin books, but it’s in the ballpark. It’s more violent than the previous two in this series, I should warn.

I was in on the emotional conclusion, so I guess that’s good.

Higher Magic by Courtney Floyd

Elevator Pitch: Can you have cozy dark academia? The official blurb says “cozy dark academia novel for fans of Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series and R.F. Kuang’s Babel”… which, thank you, you have suggested a cozy novel and a dark novel, both of which take place in the past… which this book does not. So, shrug?

Why Did I Read This: Author Max Gladstone recommended it highly

Opening Lines: “The classroom door shimmered, and I scowled at it”

This book, and I say this with love, is subtle as a brick.

Our main character is Dorothe Bartleby and she’s a grad student in Magic. As we meet her, she’s flunked her first oral qualifying exam and has one more chance to pass or get kicked out.

Magic, in this book, can only be done by people born on a new moon, which is a clever way to limit magic usage without making it feeling like a chosen one or eugenics element.

Anyway, Dorothe is trying to prove that early novels were literally magic, and along the way she inadvertently creates a magical skull that narrates her life whether she wants it to or not. In the background – and this should be a spoiler but it’s on the dust jacket – students who ask for disability accommodations are vanishing. So, subtle like brick, but also fun?

It’s trying to be both cozy and dark academia, a mix that doesn’t always work (the cozy part depends on us not fully internalizing that dozens of students have been magically kidnapped). The skull bit works better than you’d expect (or than I expected), and I was on board at the end (though I think the end doesn’t quite hold on its own logic).

Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher

Why Did I Read This: Kingfisher is mostly an insta-buy

Opening Lines: “Selena picked her new home for no better reason than the dog laid down on the porch.”

I read a lot of Kingfisher, but they are all so good…

This is Kingfisher in horror mode. Our heroine is Selena, she’s fled to the desert to escape a bad partner and visit her aunt, only to learn that her aunt has passed on. She moves into her aunt’s house and eventually discovers that the roadrunner god is real, had an interesting relationship with her aunt, and would like to continue the deal.

Two quick notes:

For a novel that is nominally horror, this scores really high on the Cozy Scale, like 7 or 8, might even be higher than Brigands & Breadknives.

For no obvious reason, this book takes place at least 30 years in the future, there’s a reference to a moon colony, and the desert area is a “historical zone”, which is never fully explained. I’m great with this – I actually love it when authors do subtle SF/Fantasy stuff in the background, but I wonder if it confused anybody.

Triple

The Will of the Many by James Islington

Elevator Pitch: A Roman Empire coded magic school

Why Did I Read This: Big fave on BookTok

Opening Lines: “I am dangling, and it is only my fathers blood-slicked grip around my wrist that stops me from falling”

Do The Math: Beru Cormorant + Name of the Wind x Roman Empire + a bunch of other magic school stories

I was extremely into this for about the first two-thirds.

The magic system is very cool, and works as metaphor while also being interesting as not-metaphor. The main character is also interesting, and I think the book does kind of an interesting thing with the Chosen One trope, in that he’s basically explicitly set up to look like a Chosen One. There are some cool set pieces, characters that are meant to be smart are actually smart, but not infallible. It’s got a lot going on.

The last quarter or so of the book is basically a boss battle. It’s the Final Task of the school year, and it’s probably overly complicated, in that the book goes into a lot of strategy mishigas that is ultimately totally irrelevant. Then our main character gets a glimpse into what the real stakes are, and the literal last five pages make the book much weirder without explanation. So, at the end of the day, there’s a lot that isn’t really resolved (apparently this is a trilogy, but my guess based on where this one ended was duology….wait, again, this information is look up able, and trilogy it is) and while the scope of the series seems epic, that’s not a totally satisfying experience on its own.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

This is El-Mohtar’s first solo novella, she is one half of the duo responsible for This is How You Lose The Time War,. This book is fantasy, and fairy fantasy at that, about two sisters one of whom falls in love with one of the fae, and one of whom doesn’t. This is the kind of fantasy story that feels like folklore, is designed to feel like folklore, plus some flat-out gorgeous writing.

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal

Why Did I Read This: I love this series basically beyond rational thought

When I say that this is objectively the weakest book in the series, it’s still going to be one of my top five or so books of the year, because, as I said, I love this series beyond rational thought.

Unlike the previous three books, this one is less plot and a bit more vibes-based – all three previous books had very strong goals, this one is more of a mystery and character book. It’s great – Kowal really makes the possibility of the best minds in all the world working together look very enticing. But it’s also a little less focused, and we’re starting to get to the point where the plot is constrained by the fact that they are all prequels to the original Lady Astronaut of Mars short story (which I wonder if that makes parts of the plot feel weird given that a lot of the novel readers probably haven’t seen that story).

All that said, after a book in this series that ended with Elma saying the Jewish Mourner’s Kaddish, this one ends with her saying Shehechianu, the Jewish prayer of thanks, said in response to happy days. And, well Elma is pretty high on my list of fictional Jewish characters who seem to relate to Judaism the way that I do. It hit.

I should note there’s a thing here… Kowal admitted online using an early version of LLM (from, like 2022) to help convert real news articles to the fake news articles and to help narrow down the questions she was asking experts. This was before LLMs really became a flashpoint, and it was plausible to just putter around. Anyway, Kowal says there are maybe like 50 words in the book that come from an LLM. I don’t really care, personally, but it does seem like this will knock the book out of Nebula consideration.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

I read this back to back with The Spellshop and that’s quite a contrast…

Book two in what is, I guess, the “Ana and Din Mysteries” series. If anything, it might be a touch better than book one.

Fantasy series, an empire beset by magical titans, whose blood transforms the land. The empire has industrialized and weaponized the titan blood to create all manner of things, including, for example, Din, a person with perfect recall.

In this book, we’ve moved to the city that is the main refinery for titan blood, which is located an a great geographic location and a tricky political one, in that it is technically not in the empire, but in a neighboring kingdom. There’s a murder. Locked room. And a conspiracy. And eventually a story about what it means to have power, what it means to have responsibility, and what it means to be part of an empire that is so clearly made for a single purpose.

I’m not quite sure how Bennett does it, but the atmosphere of the book is practically tangible, you can touch it and smell it and practically hear the ground squish when the characters walk in the mud and wow I love this series.

When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory

Elevator Pitch: What if we were living in a simulation. I mean, what if we all, 100% knew for sure we were in a simulation?

Why Did I Read This: Gregory is the author of the amazing Spoonbenders.

Opening Lines: “…and there’s the tour bus now, green and bulbous, with long black mirrors drooping in front of its face like caterpillar antennae. It’s climbing out of the underworks of Manhattan, onto the upper level of the George Washington Bridge. CANTERBURY TRAILS is written across its side in white script.”

Do The Math: Canterbury Tales + The Good Place

I feel like this one didn’t get enough attention.

Everybody lives in a simulation. How do they know that? Well, starting seven years ago, once a week everybody in the world wakes up to see the words “you are living in a simulation” floating in front of them. Also, there are dozens and dozens of weird anomalies in the world, places where the laws of physics don’t apply. So people are pretty much convinced.

This book is unhinged in the best way.

Our main characters are a group of people who have gathered for a bus tour of several of the anomalies in the USA. (The bus company is Canterbury Trails, in case you had any confusion about what was happening…) Part of the fun of the book is how weird and inventive the anomalies are, and I won’t spoil it.

Part of the depth of the book is the range of reactions to things like what does morality mean if we are in a simulation? Do you believe in god or do you pray to the simulators? When did the simulation start? Are all the people in the simulation sentient?

There are also characters. A comic book writer and his terminally ill friend. A nun, with a Rabbi. A 17 year old influencer. A skeptic. The character arcs are interesting, especially the range of how they engage with the simulation.

This is a classic SF metaphor but not a metaphor book, and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

Elevator Pitch: I just knew this one would have a real humdinger of a marketing pitch, and lo: “A Deadly Education meets Plain Bad Heroines”. So, I guess I’ll take fictional boarding schools and death for $200, Ken.

What it really is, is magic school from the point of view of the administrators.

Why Did I Read This: Very strong prepublication buzz, and I loved Tesh’s last book.

Opening Lines: “Doctor Walden looked glumly at the form she had to fill in. At the top it said RISK ASSESSMENT.”

Our lead character is one of the most powerful wizards in the world, who also is the head teacher at one of the most prestigious magical boarding schools in the world. Magic is not a secret in this world, but it’s dangerous and not very powerful, so even a prestigious magical boarding school is always looking at the bottom line.

Turns out that a boarding school with hundreds of young magicians attracts powerful demons (I guess that’s the Deadly Education hook), and right at the beginning of the book a very powerful demon that has been harassing the school for years is killed by our main character.

Wouldn’t that normally be the end of a book? You’d think, but in this case, the real danger is what happens next. There’s a student death from the past that lingers in the history of the school, which I guess is the Plain Bad Heroines hook. Then, well, then other things happen.

I loved this book, it’s unabashedly a love note to teachers, while being very skeptical of academia. The plot structure is a little weird (also true of Tesh’s last novel), but ultimately works. It’s very creepy when it needs to be, there’s a cute love story there, but ultimately it’s about what a teacher would try to protect, and also about continuing to live after making terrible mistakes.

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Elevator Pitch: The official marketing comps are “Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi”, which I admit does paint a picture. I guess if you squint Piranesi is dark academia? Otherwise not really sure what it’s doing in the mix, the books aren’t tonally similar at all.

Why Did I Read This: Boy this got some weird online discourse….

First off, per an interview, Kuang pronounces it “kuh TAB uh sis”, and not “CAT a basis” but also said she doesn’t really care how you pronounce it.

Alice Law literally Goes To Hell after her advisor dies in a freak lab accident that she feels responsible for. She’s accompanied by her frenemy Peter, in a world where Magic is real and where Dante and the others are non-fiction.

This is one of those buzzy internet books that I feel like I’ve been hearing takes on for months. I don’t really want to get into all the takes, but I do want to say a few things.

The magic, environment, and character arcs are all thematically resonant with each other in a way that is really rare in magical fantasy. The magic explicitly relies on delusion, Alice is a character defined largely by her self-delusions, and her trip into Hell takes her to characters basically trapped by their self delusions. When they all align, the book is very satisfying.
I’d like to introduce a trope named “Lipstick Incident”. A Lipstick Incident is something that happened in the past that caused two people to become estranged, and which is referred to repeatedly before actually being explained. Katabasis is a little bit of a fake out here – Alice refers repeatedly to something that caused her and Peter to no longer be close, but the eventual reveal, while bad, is kind of dwarfed by two other reveals that we don’t see coming because Kuang has been kind of distracting us with the Lipstick Incident. (Fine, I’m grabbing the term from the brief period where Mark Waid got to redo all of Archie comics, look it up, he really had a good thing going there until Riverdale came out and swamped him.)
I’d like to introduce a trope “obvious misunderstanding” – this one you can probably guess. Alice has an obvious misunderstanding with Peter about his notebook, this is, to me, one of the book’s most unforced errors. (The other, I think, is that the villains are underdeveloped) I do like that Kuang takes a big swing at about the two-thirds mark. And that we don’t learn Alice’s real motivation for a long time.
There was some online griping about the amount of sources that Kuang uses in the book, that it felt like a textbook or something. Worked for me, but it is a book that puts the “academia” in “dark academia”.
Triple. Wasn’t sure it would be. Is.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

Elevator Pitch: Oh, this got a fun one: “In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders’s own All the Birds in the Sky” – you don’t often see an author comped to herself. Alice Hoffman here is presumably the Practical Magic books? To me the comp here is Jo Walton’s Among Others, which had a similar magic system.

Opening Lines: “Jamie has never known what to say to her mother. And now—when it matters most of all, when she’s on a rescue mission—she knows even less.”

This was a roller coaster, at least for me.

I had been putting it off on fear that it would be too heavy. And not too heavy, but pretty heavy, for reasons I don’t need to get into.

We’ve got three stories here:

The main story, featuring Jamie, trying to get her mom back in the world after six years of mourning for her mom’s wife. Jamie can do magic, and tries to teach her mom.
A background thread featuring the entire history of Jamie’s parents’ relationship
A background thread involving the 18th Century woman authors that Jamie is researching for her dissertation – Anders clearly loves the research she’s done for this part, and it’s hard to blame her

Anyway, there’s a lot here to like. I’m fond of a magic system where you aren’t quite sure if magic is real. For a system without explicit rules, Anders does a great job making clear what happens at the end, and why. Like Katabasis, a very good case of the magic system reinforcing the themes of the book.

So, I was into this at the end, parts of which are lovely.

My main complaints:

At the end, the characters are really didactic in explaining the point of the story
I found it hard to read in long chunks, especially in the middle, in part because it’s so raw, so this isn’t really a complaint.

I guess I was sure this was a single for a while, but when I finished it, my brain said “triple”. But I’m still thinking about it – I’m guessing this is going to be a book where I remember the best parts and not the flaws.

The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud

Elevator Pitch: It’s the middle grade Understanding Comics

Why Did I Read This: Did you see where I said it’s the middle-grade Understanding Comics?

My love for the work of Scott McCloud goes back a long way, before Understanding Comics. I deeply wish that the Zot! omnibus books would get a digital release. That’s neither here nor there, I suppose. This is explicitly an attempt to do a narrative middle-grade gloss on Understanding Comics, a few kids get together in a cartoonist club, and a friendly librarian teaches them some of the lessons of Understanding Comics in a kid-friendly way. Sounds potentially dull, but these are two genuine masters here, so it’s actually quite charming and fun.

Dead Hand Rule by Max Gladstone

Why Did I Read This: Craft Wars!

Book Nine of Ten for the Craft Sequence, this was supposed to the ending book, but Gladstone wound up splitting it.

I do not recommend you start with this one. The Craft Sequence takes place in a fantasy world where magic is essentially based on law and finance. Except for the gods. And the monsters, I guess. There’s a lot, and it’s fun to see a fantasy world with basically modern tech and wild baroque imagination.

At the end of book 8, we had a situation where there is an overwhelming external force poised to destroy the world, and also an internal force that is, at the very least, determined to knock down any power that could stop the outsiders.

What do the existing powers do? They call a conclave. All the powerful people and nations mentioned or alluded to in the past books all come to the metaphorical table in our main city of Alt Coulomb to decide how to work together to defeat the foes. But who isn’t at the table? And who isn’t really interested in working together?

The first, like, two thirds of this book are really fun. It’s a bunch of big personalities having big debates against high stakes, with the occasional assassination attempt to liven things up. It’s maybe the loosest Gladwell’s writing has ever been – parts of it are the most Pratchetty this series have ever been, just with more evil squid overlords.

Then things start happening, which is also fun, but starts to run up against the limits of how to make the magic in these books comprehensible to the readers. Still, great book. Ends on a cliff.

The Essential Peanuts by Mark Evanier

This one is pretty straightforward, a history of Peanuts through 75 “essential” strips, each one augmented with a selection of strips on the same theme, and a bunch of short essays covering the history of the strip from Schulz’ childhood until his death and the continued life of the characters. Picks its spot, does the thing quite well, gets off the stage.

Slayers of Old by Jim C. Hines

Elevator Pitch: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Golden Girls” – maybe the easiest one of these on the board. That’s pretty much exactly it.

Opening Lines: “Forty years ago, I began keeping a list of annoyances that came with being a Hunter of Artemis. I’d gotten up to two hundred and four.”

Our heroes are, not to put a point on it, old. Jenny is a former Hunter of Artemis, which is Legally Distinct from being a Vampire Slayer. She’s Buffy, age 55, if Buffy had rage quit at age 20 and told the Watchers to pound sand. Annette is a little older, she’s a half-succubus former supernatural PI. Temple is near 100, he’s a magical protector, think Dr. Strange at age 100. Together they run a bookshop in Salem MA, and do not fight crime.

Until… Look, you think this book is going to be light and filled with jokes like staking a vampire with a cane while saying get off my lawn (my joke, not Hines’), and there’s some of that. Hines does a particularly good job with Jenny’s back story, it really feels like there’s a seven-season TV show back there.

But Hines is not afraid for the book to get a little dark. Jenny is dealing with real trauma from her time as a hero, Annette genuinely regrets some life choices. Temple is really aging and can’t do all the things he once could.

The eventual Big Bad is tied to one of those things, and I’m dying to describe it here because the Buffy fans will eat it up but it’s spoilers.

So the book is fun, deeper than you’d expect, nails the ending – I was reluctant to score it a triple because it’s kind of light, but really, what’s a triple if not those things.

Trope note, this book does the thing where there are short interstitial bits between chapters that are uncredited, but we become aware they are the Big Bad POV. I like this structure, I’m not sure how many other SF/F books I’ve seen it in (Ali Hazelwood uses it in a couple of her romance books.)

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

One of the problems with, like, the StoryGraph tracking and stuff is that it subtly pushes me away from long books.

And, so, I embarked upon Ron Chernow’s 1100 page biography of Mark Twain, which became my personality for a couple weeks in December 2025.

It’s hard to really review a biography, here are some thoughts. (I will note that the professional reviews of this book are pretty mixed)

The sheer breadth of Twain’s life is astonishing. He was wildly famous in his time, and almost absurdly well-traveled, and as a result, has some connection with nearly every person you can think of who was prominent in the US or Europe between 1870 and 1910. At least six US Presidents pop in. At one point, we go back to back between Helen Keller (Twain was the first to call Anne Sullivan a “miracle worker”) and Nikolai Tesla.
What people struggle with in this book is the length – the body of the book is 1050 pages. And the proportions. Huck Finn is published on page 340. The last 15 years of Twain’s life are fully half the book. At times, it reads like a biography of his daughters.
I can’t speak to what this book brings to the table in terms of new scholarship. There are critiques that it doesn’t really get Twain’s irreverence. I kind of see that? But also I kind of don’t.
It’s fun to think about what Twain would be in today’s media environment – he was made for the blog/newsletter/posting world. But he’d also either be a victim of wellness grifters or an actual wellness grifter…
As I’ve said before, when I really lock in to a book, I often want to read it aloud. Well, not Chernow’s book, but Twain. Specifically “The War Prayer”, a short-story/essay published after Twain died of which I was unaware and which could have been written yesterday.

Home Run

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Elevator Pitch: Just… trust me and read it? (Interestingly, it has a very prominent blurb from Alex E. Harrow, see next book)

Why Did I Read This: A lot of positive buzz online

Opening Lines: “Once they made sacrifices here, to appease the Eight. This was many thousands of years ago, but the rock remembers.”

Recommended If You Like: Non-hereditary empires, genuinely funny gods, tangled plots, ravens, weapons-grade doorstoppers

I saw a review of this that was basically “this is a book that, while you are reading it, you think ‘this is a good book’".

That sounds vague, I guess, but I completely get it.

This is a good book.

It’s a 650 page book that doesn’t feel long.

It’s a novel full of twists that all feel earned, I was genuinely shocked by a twist I didn’t at all see coming, which is rare.

It’s a book that keeps changing what’s going on – it’s a mystery, no it’s a trial, no it’s survival.

It’s a book with smart characters who are actually smart and plans that are actually well planned.

Also it’s funny and has a very unique narrative voice.

My only quibble is that it briefly threatens to get out of the author’s control in the last, say, 20% and that also a lot of the end of the book is setting people in place for book two, which kind of muffles the book from having a satisfying end on its own.

But, all that said, this is a very good book and if you at all like 650 page fantasy novels, you will probably like this.

Grand Slam

The Everlasting by Alex E. Harrow

Elevator Pitch: What if Replay was about Red Sonja?

Why Did I Read This: Harrow is a little hit or miss for me, but this book had outstanding buzz.

Opening Lines: “Several years after the war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.”

So about five pages into this book, I thought, this book is a triple or a home run depending on if it sticks the landing. Five pages!

Oh, it stuck the landing.

Our lead is Owen, he’s a scholar in a secondary world, modern age, studying Una Everlasting, a legendary hero. As the book starts, he receives a miracle in the mail. The miracle is a book, The Death of Una Everlasting, believed to be a myth. He sets about to translate it, and through some machinations, he meets with the ambitious Minister of War, and through other machinations, is sent back in time where he meets Una Everlasting herself.

That sounds contrived, you think. Buddy, you don’t know the half of it.

You think you know what will happen next. And kind of you do, but then at a critical moment, when Owen says he’ll never forget Una, his antagonist says, “you always do”.

Oh, you think, this isn’t a time travel story, it’s a time loop story.

And you think you know what will happen next. And kind of you do.

And mostly you don’t.

This book is so good on so many levels, I want to start with, the writing is, sentence by sentence, gorgeous. So many beautiful turns of phrase, and smart observations.

The plot is complex but comes together like the tumblers of a safe falling into place. You don’t think it’s going to be the kind of book where everything falls in line, but it is.

What Harrow does essentially in the background while we’re paying attention to Owen and Una is astonishing. What she does after she pulls the curtain aside is amazing, and what happens after that is heartbreaking.

It’s a romance, sure, but it’s also about stories, and what we fight for, what we fight for as people and what we fight for as countries and what makes a story something people will fight for. It’s an angry book, in places, it’s a deeply romantic book in places, it’s even funny here and there.

There’s so much craft here, in the service of so much to say. I think it pipped Raven Scholar for the win here at the very end of the year.