13 - The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling
14 - End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami
15 - City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett
16 - East of West: The Apocalypse, Year One by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta
May
17 - Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
18 - Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera
19 - The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine
20 - Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
June
21 - Cinder House by Freya Marske
22 - The Starlit Wood (ed. Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe)
23 - What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher
24 - Umineko WHEN THEY CRY Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch by Ryukishi07 and Kei Natsumi
25 - The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
26 - Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
27 - The Summer War by Naomi Novik
You can also read all my reviews (and an achingly day-by-day record of what I'm reading) on my Goodreads!
I am reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog for this month's litfic and my god this might be the most stereotypically French novel I can imagine (derogatory).
Also a fun cultural time capsule in the sense of being entirely unselfconcious and confident in its withering and contempt fueled snobbery though.
2026 Book Review #29 – Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman
This was my nonfiction book for May, and one I’ve been looking forward to for some time. I mostly know Wyman as a podcaster, but he’s a good podcaster and I would consider myself a fan, and his last book (The Verge) is probably one of the best pop-histories I’ve ever read. Lost Worlds doesn’t reach those same heights – by turns overambitious and a bit hindered by choices of format and framing – but that really just means it’s only very good instead of excellent.
The book claims an incredibly broad scope for itself, stretching across almost a myriad of years from the end of the last Ice Age to the Bronze Age Collapse near the end of the second millennium BCE. This is in Wyman’s telling the foundational period in which humanity began developing the technologies and modes of organization (agriculture and animal husbandry, cities and villages, states and religions, etc) which framed and set the terms for everything that followed and for the ever-compounding complexity that defines both our modern world and whatever it will develop into.
Specifically, Wyman positions the book as a counterargument against the received grand narrative of just how this occurred, the linear and schematic rise of agriculture, villages and hierarchical states in the Fertile Crescent and China (plus one or two tardy or stillborn other examples). Ideas and technologies which then spread across and conquered a primitive world. Wyman’s thesis is that the Meso- and Neolithic world (let alone the Bronze Age) was far busier and more complicated than that, and that the package of ‘civilization’ inherited from Mesopotamia, Egypt and northern China isn’t much of a package at all, with ‘pristine’ sites of development containing different combinations of the qualities and signs of social complexity bundled together in it appearing all over the world. Drawing from case studies across the globe, he makes as strong a case as he can to discard the teleology that most (probably inevitably) bring to the period, and argue that nothing about what we tend to locate as the actors and protagonists of (pre-)history was unique or even uniquely impressive – that similar things were tried and failed utterly, and that different modes of organization achieved results just as great for centuries at a time. It’s only looking back from millennia later, when both structural advantages and a great deal of contingency and chance have left Uruk and Anyang the meta-cultural ancestors of basically every aspect of global human civilization, that they seem inevitably victorious or in any way the most important sites of their eras.
As mentioned, I’m a regular listener to Wyman’s podcasts (currently Past Lives), which I feel may actually have damaged the experience of reading the book. Unsurprisingly (given what he’s been spending his time researching), the current season is about paleopathology and what we can learn from prehistoric remains from the dead and the culture they hailed from. Beyond the general thematic overlap, a lot of the book is dedicated to case studies that have also been the subject of an episode of the show, and cover essentially the same information in a very similar lens. At least a few times (especially with chapter introductions and conclusions) I’m pretty sure the book text is just an edited version of the podcast script (or vice versa). Which isn’t any sort of ethical issue – they’re both his work, obviously – but does make at least a few sections in every chapter end up feeling redundant to me personally.
I can’t confidently blame this on the same thing, but I suspect one of my bigger structural gripes with the book has the same origin. Each chapter feels a bit as if it’s an essay or episode of its own, to be read at some remove from what came before and after – or, at least, that’s the explanation my mind jumps to. Whatever the reason, the introductory and concluding text for each clearly and explicitly restating the thesis of the book for a page or two in every one might have some didactic value but when you’re reading this in a short stretch it gets old. An unfortunate fraction of the reading experience was spent going “okay I get it already!”
This would be less of an acute issue if the book wasn’t already far too short for its subject matter. To be fair, it never claims to be a definitive survey of late prehistory, and clearly positions itself as being more a corrective to the existing popular narrative than providing anything but the broadest strokes of a replacement for it. Still – the world is very big and 10,000 years is an absolutely indescribably long time. Even fitting a couple handfuls of the most prominent and well-researched sites and cultures to exist during it requires draconian limitations on how much time can be spent with any given case study, let alone the neighbours and rivals mentioned offhand in relation to them. The result is that many of the book’s case studies feel a bit perfunctory, a few pages of interesting introduction just crying out for more detail (or, at least, a further reading section at the end of every chapter).
So, having spent the last 500 words complaining, allow me to clarify that this is in fact a very good book. Even being entirely up to date with Wyman’s other work, there was plenty here that was entirely new to me and fascinating discussions of the food production complexes that emerged in different areas and how they supported (or necessitated) the societies which relied upon them. The book takes a mildly Pollyanna-ish perspective on several of the examples of different models of ‘civilization’ it discusses, but that’s easy enough to look past and the actual content is reliably interesting – I certainly know far more about a lot of Neolithic and Bronze Age societies than I did before reading this (such as that they existed), and the broader discussion of human development and migration and the (incredibly relative) explosion of population growth and social complexity as the climate shifted after the last Glacial Maximum and (moreso, and more consequentially) the Younger Dryas cold spell.
Beyond the thoroughly reiterated thesis of the whole book, there were a few conceptual takeaways that have now thoroughly lodged themselves in my brain. The line drawn between the (roughly contemporaneous) intensive expansion/development of the first traditional and fully-formed states in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley and the extensive expansion/development of the (proto-)Indo-Europeans across the Eurasian Steppe and the (proto-)Polynesians across the Pacific, especially. Four different examples of novel technologies and modes of social organization being used to increase a given region’s carrying capacity by orders of magnitude, and in so doing shape the course of human history, all beginning within a few centuries of one another.
Running through all of this – through basically every paragraph – is the book’s other unifying thesis: archaeology and especially paleopathology are incredibly amazingly cool, and the past couple of decades have given them one revolutionary advance after another. Our ability to analyze the artifacts and physical remains of people who died millennia ago is so advanced and in-depth it verges on necromancy. A mummified body gives us their age and cause of death and whatever other injuries they might have had, sure – but also how generally healthy they were, where they grew up, how often they travelled in their life, what they had been eating for the period before they died. The revelations to be wrung from ruins and buried villages are scarcely less impressive. Wyman is clearly a bit awe-struck and deeply enamoured of the potential of all this, with numerous lengthy digressions into the exact tools and techniques used to glean this or that piece of information. It’s hard to blame him.
Not as rigorous or focused a book as I would have liked, and I’m slightly disappointed that it’s not the very different book I thought it was from the title and half-remembered marketing copy. Still, entirely worthwhile read if you’re at all interested in late prehistory.
June Book Reviews: The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
Book club book (and I am NOT happy with the person who picked this one...). In The Glass Bead Game, a biographer recounts the life of Joseph Knecht, who rose to prominence in the isolated intellectual sect of the Castalians. But even as Knecht ascends to the abstract heights of the Glass Bead Game, he begins to question the very purpose of the Castalians...
It feels a bit strange to log on to goodreads dot com and write up a review for the 1946 winner of the entire Nobel Prize, but we stay silly! Particularly since I disagreed strongly with the central premise. In the misty future, Castalians are an elite, educated sect who are originally elevated as children from the lower schools. They are exclusively boys, and they study a neutered curriculum composed of only philosophy, mathematics, philology, and music. Biology is functionally taboo, as is history, engineering, and anything else that reeks of the practical. I was surprised something as tangible as music was permitted, but of course, the Castalians are proscribed from actually composing. We spend six hundred pages agonizingly pondering if the Castalian life is sustainable, when the answer seems obvious from about page five. How can any scholarship thrive when it is predicated on the idea that more abstraction directly correlates with more value? Also, needless to say, it's blazingly sexist. The only women who merit half-line mentions are somebody's wife, or somebody's mother. Women are entirely excluded from not only Castalia, but apparently all intellectual life, although I couldn't swear to this since Hesse is so profoundly disinterested in addressing the subject. And this is NOT just "the attitudes of his time." Glass Bead Game was published in 1943, post-dating Sayers' Gaudy Night (prominently centering women in academia) by nearly a decade. I think the cherry on top of the whole "Castalia question" is when I looked up Hesse's biography and discovered that he had refused to denounce the Nazis, as his scholarly ethics proscribed commenting on worldly affairs. Or something. Talk about being on the wrong side of history.
Meanwhile, I think I can decisively state that this book did not win a Nobel for the prose. Hesse tends to a heavy stolidity that becomes tiresome after just a few paragraphs, let alone six hundred pages:
For them, and especially for the writers of those days who had a distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal.
Perhaps if we are feeling generous, we can fault the grim hand of the translator here... I do think that we are not meant to take the biographer's pompousness seriously, nor trust him entirely as a narrator. After all, he writes as a Castalian burnishing the record of a great, if ultimately flawed, luminary. There's a tantalizing implication at the beginning of the novel that the saintly Knecht burned down his secondary school to conceal his disciplinary record, but the bare hints are not enough for me to pry up the biographer's facade. Although I will say the only examples of Knecht's own writing we get—the self-insert historical lives he wrote as a student—are remarkably conceited. Despite the narrator's protestations, I don't see much evidence of humility there.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't take a shot at Hesse's depiction of "the Orient"—and it's definitely "the Orient" here. In his student years, Knecht develops a fascination with Eastern philosophies, which are depicted with at best, ignorance, and at worst, outright contempt. Unlike the sexism, the racism here is of Hesse's time, but I don't think that justifies it. We can quibble whether Knecht's/the narrator's opinions are truly Hesse's opinions, but stop telling me with an air of great authority that in China everybody addresses others as "Elder Brother", regardless of rank. I'd like to see you try that one.
Six hundred pages of empty windbag capped with a pointless ending. The Germans always put me to sleep anyways... Hard pass on this one.
Okay having reread the finale for this book of Pale Lights now that the whole thing is out, I fear I'm a bit cool on it.
The structural experiment jumping across the timeline for the eleven scenes is blunt and clunky, but also does serve a real purpose in terms of resolving all the running plots in an order that carries some momentum and thematic cohesion.
Which could really have been avoided entirely by just actually resolving any of these half-dozen threads and character arcs before the finale. You really don't need to do them all at once! Especially when you're splitting reader attention between so many side-villains with them all. The resolution to the lenslight plot works but felt very rushed and unearned, and to a lesser extent the same thing's true of how Morcant was dealt with (a shame, because it's a very cool beat in theory).
(The student association scene worked really well by contrast, just because it felt like there was enough groundwork for it laid.)
This book's entirely sincere dramatic speeches on the power of love and friendship and epilogue of top brass boggling at how the unluckies are the main characters of reality also just kind of made my teeth ache in a way book 2's didn't. Unsure why.
Starting The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport and to be clear the book only ever gestures/flirts with this more than actually is it, but a few scenes so gesturing has kind of sold me on 'gender-flipped cyberpunk Aladdin' being a cute concept.
2026 Book Review #28 – The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Every month, I try to read one book that is one of a) written before the turn of the millennium, b) in translation or at least c) written and published in a different cultural and commercial context than the vague Anglo-American ‘international standard’ morass. This is partially out of a vague drive towards self-improvement, and partially because this is a great way to read some real gems I’d never have heard about or gotten around to otherwise. The Mayor of Casterbridge is not one of those. I am truthfully not sure how it ended up on my TBR list – it’s been at least a year or two since it was added – but it’s not like it’s a work I can really recall ever having heard of before. For good reason, as it turns out. Some consolation can be found reading it as a historical text and primary source, but mostly it was just a big heap of wasted time.
Originally written and published as a serial in the latter 1800s, the book follows the turbulent life of the eponymous mayor, one Michael Henchard, and his household. Which is far more melodramatic than you might expect the affairs of a wheat-merchant and small-town notable to be, beginning as it does with him at 21 drunkenly selling his unhappy wife to a sailor at a market fair. The resulting shame makes him swear off liquor for twenty years, and instead dedicate himself to diligent industry. Well over a decade later, he is a wealthy merchant and a mayor, and on one eventful night his long-lost wife and his almost forgotten daughter arrive in Casterbridge, seeking a safe haven after the sailor was lost at sea. Michael welcomes them back, especially when he realizes that his daughter does not know of his great sin and thinks him some distant relation by marriage to her mother. What follows are several years of what’s hard to summarize except things happening – ruin, redemption, romance, one unlikely episode after another, and most of all an achingly detailed and vibrant world for it all to take place in.
If the extensive foreword and prelude by the folks at Oxford World Classics are to be believed, Casterbridge is quite transparently based on Hardy’s home town, down to the geography and architecture. If so, this is quite the remarkable guidebook to how such towns in England’s rural southwest were laid out and functioned in the period. No detail is spared when describing environments or the rhythms and routines of everyday public life. The town and populace of Casterbridge are both more sharply drawn and more compelling as characters than several key actors in the narrative. In painting a vivid picture of how a place like Casterbridge functioned and what it was like to live there (at least for the classes Hardy considers humans and not a sort of mildly malevolent goblin – which is to say I have some doubts about the accuracy of his idea of lower-class life), it’s actually both informative and even pretty interesting.
It’s just not a great sign for a melodrama when the most interesting parts are the exposition about how modern townsfolk now used the old Roman amphitheatre just outside of it. The actual plot is less one coherent narrative than a long string of overlapping episodes, the seams of being first written and published as a serial often painfully obvious. The general gist of it is Michael slowly being humiliated and undone by the weaknesses of his own character and his poorly treated daughter and the diligent striver of a Scot he hires as a manager needing to find their ways in life, with and despite the elder generation’s help and ‘help’.
It is also to no small degree a character study of Michael, who is deftly drawn and comes across as a very real (if mildly exaggerated and more melodramatic than usual) kind of guy. An insufferable ass on several fronts, but of a type that has continued to thrive up to the modern day. The rest of the cast fairs less well, rarely growing much more complicated than or really developing beyond the personality and character they are introduced with. Which is something of the underlying theme of the whole story – there’s a fundamental core to you, it might be messy and conflicted and self-contradictory but it’s never going to change, and in the end the exigencies of life will balance out and it is that character which will determine how you live and how you die.
This is also just a relentlessly and unselfconsciously Victorian book. I’ve heard it said that to get a sense of a culture’s self-conception it’s better to study its mediocre and commercial art than the work of its geniuses and savants. The former will give you a much clearer picture of the common sense and worldviews actually common among (at least) the creative classes and their audience. The Mayor of Casterbridge seems a fine example of this.
I won’t type away my fingers going over too many examples of how, but for one – I can’t say this is the most sexist book I’ve ever read, but it’s certainly sexist in a very distinct way. Three of the book’s five really narratively significant characters are women, and the book views all of them on a strict scale from condescending approval to contempt. It doesn’t hate women, or really hold much anger or malice towards them at all, but it is simply taken for granted that they are a simpler and more fragile form of life than men and that attaching themselves to a good one is really the only great aspiration any of them should (or indeed does) have. And one of the three really does faint and then shortly after die after from a shock and social humiliation, which I hadn’t previously realize actually happened in Victorian literature and wasn’t just a hyperbolic cliche describing it.
One unexpected point of interest was the extensive foreword written by the Oxford World Classics people about the process of actually assembling this edition of the text, which required going into some detail about its publication history and how both minor word choices and whole chapters and subplots changed between print runs, as well as the number of unintended errors which slipped through seemingly every time a new run was set. I did not even slightly appreciate how fraught the whole business was, or how difficult keeping a book consistent across multiple editions was in the analogue era. Fun and unexpected bits of trivia, anyway.
I can’t really imagine why anyone else might be considering picking up this book save for academic interest or as part of some grand project. But if you’re looking for something to read you can do far, far better.
So the friend I got Works of Vermin as a birthday gift lent it to a coworker, who has finished it and apparently thinks it's the best thing he's read this decade.
Just thought you might enjoy knowing your recommendation of it is atp successful to at least the third degree.
Yaaayyy my evil influence spreads... It's fun to hear that it was a big hit not only with you, but also with your friends and associates. Works of Vermin is so well-executed and also deeply weird, and I'm glad it's finding its people. Lots of its people, in fact, as it recently got shortlisted for the Le Guin prize:
Congratulations to all those selected!
Last year's winner was Rakesfall, so Ennes is in good company.
The Eye of the Leviathan, MA Carrick (14 July). In an alt Spanish Golden Age, a faerie changeling teams up with his replacement to defeat conquistadors.
The Intrigue, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (14 July). Historical fiction about a con artist who falls for his victim's niece—all while they in turn are scamming him.
The Dragon Has Some Complaints, John Wiswell (14 July). An argumentative wild three headed dragon infiltrates a dragon riding academy.
The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood, HG Parry (21 July). King Arthur threatens to rise in WWII era England.
*The Lord of the Wood, EM Anderson (21 July). A clockmaker stumbles into an enchanted forest and its cursed master.
*The Felicity Complex, August Clarke (21 July). A young woman is created to serve paranoid billionaires in an apocalypse shelter.
The Demon Star, Jesse Aragon (28 July). Dune-esque epic space opera about a futile battle against the gods.
A Trade of Blood, Robert Jackson Bennett (11 August). The latest Holmesian biofantasy mystery.
Daggerbound, T Kingfisher (25 August). The sequel guy trapped in sword romance, this time m/m.
Wickhills, Premee Mohamed (8 September). A rogue intelligence agent is on the run while trying to hunt down a scientist beneath the city.
A Snake Among Swans, Hannah Kaner (8 September). A young heir marries an old warlord to save her country—and destroy her new kingdom from within.
Bodies of Magic, Freya Marske (15 September). The evil magic medical school murder mystery.
Dead Beat, Leigh Bardugo (15 September). The latest Alex Stern novel, in which a door to hell opens on the campus of Yale.
Mazywood, Tananarive Due (22 September). Multigenerational thriller about a Black filmmaker discovering the story of his grandmother, an actress.
The Thief and the Traitor Bride, VL Bovalino (29 September). A spy is sent to infiltrate enemy territory to find a relic—with her estranged husband.
*The Unhaunting, Micaiah Johnson (29 September). Horror about a suspiciously unhaunted house.
The Scarlet Ball, Nghi Vo (6 October). A young Vietnamese woman assumes a debutante’s name and face to compete for a demon husband.
A Wall is Also a Road, Annalee Newitz (6 October). An alien grad student studies ancient Pompeii.
Horngard, Elizabeth Moon (6 October). Big epic fantasy over the struggle for the throne in a neglected kingdom without a ruler.
The Book of the Dead, ed. Jonathan Strahan (6 October). Anthology arranged around the theme of death with an impressive turnout of authors.
Milkteeth, Caitlin Starling (20 October). A vampire broodmother struggles to control three fledglings.
The Slantwise Histories and Other Stories, Alix Harrow (20 October). Collection of short stories by the author.
Call Me Traitor, Everina Maxwell (27 October). A woman forged into a magical weapon must ally with a rank and file soldier on her mission to track down traitors in the desert. f/f.
Code and Codex, Yoon Ha Lee (27 October). Ancient jail traitor 2!!! Space linguistics edition.
Chateau Reverie, Natasha Siegel (27 October). Attendees to the Auction of Secrets bid their deepest truths in hopes of winning a wish, set during the French Revolution.
Saved by the Spell, Tanya Huff (3 November). Magic school from the point of view of a very tired teacher dealing with a new hero.
*new to me or unvetted titles.
Part 1 is here. January and later new releases beneath the cut:
Kill Your Darling, Mariana Costa (12 January). The reluctant millennia-old avatar of evil tries to break free of his fate—and his counterpart, the avatar of good.
The Flower Court, Kate Elliott (12 January). Two women, a lowly servant and the empress' most sophisticated handmaiden, are co-opted into searching for a noble's sister.
Godburned, Foz Meadows (26 January). A man forced into being the tool of a god reluctantly teams up with an investigator to find three missing children.
Where Fire Reigns, Jared Pechacek (2 February). The unknowing messiah is stolen by a fugitive airship crew in a salt desert.
The Literary Remains of Cornelia Fayen, Johanna van Veen (2 February). A romance author fleeing the reveal of her sapphic affair gets caught up in her brother's cursebreaking scheme.
A Devil of a Crime, T Kingfisher (9 March). A retired devil and a retired angel team up to solve a murder mystery.
Tyrant in the Cracks, Hache Pueyo (16 March). A professor and his assistant travel though alternate realities on a tropical island country.
*The Fall of Elvenesse, Kai Ashante Wilson (23 March). As elves face the apocalypse due to their cruelty, the last saint must venture into Elvenesse to ensure the survival of the free peoples.
The Seventh Banisher, AK Larkwood (30 March). Gothic fantasy about two cousins struggling to survive on an island in order to win their great-aunt's fortune.
The Lady of Thorns, Tasha Suri (1 April). A condemned prisoner is sent a quest to kill the Lady of Thorns in her labyrinth to win her freedom.
The Animals We Became, Finn Longman (2027). Retelling of the Welsh story of the flower bride. Reportedly contains t4t shapeshifting.
It's probably inevitable (even necessary) that the people who devote their lives to becoming as good as possible at some particular art or trade or w/e also develop a horrible outsized and self-congratulatory conception of how important and vital and fundamentally human it is. Doesn't make listening to them wax poetic about it in an interview any less insufferable though.
And I regretfully must also add Psychopomp & Circumstance to the long list of arguments for why 'horror' and 'stories which happen to have a ghost in them' should really be shelved separately from each other.
Beautiful (self-indulgent, but in a way I quite liked) prose and sense of place but like. Very much 3/4 slightly eerie scene-setting and 1/4 rushing to neatly and happily resolve everything as quickly as possible.
What do you mean Southern Gothic? That was one of the most relentlessly life-affirming, positive and optimistic things I've read all year. There were like one and a half scenes in the whole thing for which the label makes sense.
Challenge: make a poll with five of your all time favourite characters, and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone's favourite
Indrani easily my goat, but song has the ability to be so incredibly mentally unwell it’s an actual talent. She should never gain access to LinkedIn it would kill her
Reading Psychopomp & Circumstance - I mean mostly because that title is the sort of dumb pun that makes me smile, but also because it was on this year's Locus Award shortlist and the blurb seemed passingly interesting.
Anyway adding this to the long list of stories where my ability to enjoy the narrative luxuriating in the spectacle of well-to-do 19th century living keeps getting undercut by a nagging voice asking "where are all the servants?"
January Book Reviews: Everybody's Perfect by Jo Walton
I received a free copy from Tor Books via Netgalley in exchange for a free review. Release date June 30th, 2026.
I've read almost all of Jo Walton's books, so I was very excited to get an advance copy of her latest. In Everybody's Perfect, a series of linked vignettes follow the lives of people in the Serenissima, a strange misty Venice between worlds. Fortunes are won and lost, hearts are broken, and a new Doge slowly rises out of rumors.
Everybody's Perfect has nine point of view characters, each with their own section. All of the characters are loosely entwined, and every new section jumps to a new character introduced in the previous vignette. Each character is a different species from another world linked to the Serenissima, and all of them have the faces of Venetian masks: harlequin, dogheaded, garlanded by flowers, etc. This is a bit gimmicky as a speculative biology feature, but Walton does an excellent job making each culture feel distinct. Also, all of the characters feel fresh and individual, probably because they strongly disagree with each other on everything from basic facts of their world to judgements on other characters. For instance, scheming, ambitious magus Khadsha thinks compassionate Pell who volunteers for a charity is far too softhearted. Gina from our own February 2020 thinks Khadsha's visions of the future are entirely a scam, and she's discovered a bananapants scheme involving Venetian time travel supremacy on Earth which never comes up in any other character's section. It's a delightful mixed bag.
On a number of levels, this book hit what I want out of "cozy fantasy" but never quite find in books that are explicitly marketed as such. The book's stakes are mostly small-scale and intensely personal, with no titanic battles or fate of the world at risk. Still, they matter very much to the characters, whether it's living with chronic illness or the very young Yix struggling to keep her family afloat. While there's not much of a throughline in the plot except the collective manifestation of the doge in the background and the expanding consequences of an AIDS-coded deadly sexually transmitted plague, all of the stories refer back to each other and mesh together in unexpected ways. It felt like a cohesive whole rather than a collection of short stories.
A reading experience that felt very much like the best bits of reading a Septimus Heap book as a kid: all of the little stories at the back telling you about what happened to minor characters. Possibly not my favorite Walton book to date—it's a very competitive field—but bright, conversational, and intriguing, with a sharp touch for worldbuilding. Recommended.
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