Yesteryear. By Caro Claire Burke. Alfred A. Knopf, 2026.
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
Genre: thriller
Series: N/A
Summary: Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
***Full review below.***
CONTENT WARNINGS: moderate sexual content, injury detail, reference to statutory rape, pregnancy/childbirth, suicidal ideation, animal death, drug use, miscarriage, violence, racism, infidelity, homophobia
OVERVIEW: Of course I'm going to read the Trad Wife critique novel. Why do I need to explain myself? I just wish the tradwife critique novel had been better. I think the hype set expectations too high, and really, you might only enjoy this book if you enjoy thrillers.
WRITING: Burke's prose is fine. It reads clearly and it moves quickly; so in that regard, I think it's appropriate for the genre. But I also think it isn't very memorable and reads a bit like it's trying to be a film rather than a novel.
PLOT: The plot of this book follows Natalie, a conservative woman who marries young into a rich Repiblican political dynasty and begins producing "tradwife" social media content. One day, she wakes up to find herself transported to the 19th century, and it's clear that it isn't the life she wanted for herself.
This book's marketing made it seem (to me, at least) that a lot of the plot would take place in the past. However, the 19th century storyline is sparse and most of the weight is on narrating Natalie's life from age 18 up to her thirties. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that if you're here for the historical stuff, you will be disappointed.
But even as it stands, I think the 19th century plot could have done more to interact with and enhance the flashbacks of the past (21st century). Granted, some things do parallel one another, but I think the actual pioneer stuff could have done more to make a point (rather than just show misery).
Also, because this is a thriller, this book has little intetest in really digging into its themes, instead opting for an ending that, in my view, fell kind of flat. If you enjoy thrillers, the ending might seem typical of the genre, and I fully admit that it is wrong of me to want this book to be something other than what it is trying to be. I wanted it to be more reflective, but Burke was clearly more interested in the drama of it all, so if the latter is more your bag, you might have a good time.
Still, there were some things I liked about this book. I thought it was smart to have appearances and facades be a recurring theme; it tied together Natalie's past with her social media career and even made the ending feel thematically connected. I also appreciated the complexity that was given to Natalie at the beginning when she realized that no one truly talked about the realities of childbirth and motherhood. In those moments, I felt sorry for Natalie even though I despised her as a character for all the other abhorrent ideologies she held.
CHARACTERS: Natalie, our protagonist, is fine, but she's not someone I necessarily felt strongly about as an individual. Most of what made her intereting was that she was an avatar that embodied a combination of ideologies that are typically bound up together: she's one of those people who believe in "traditional" family values but are hypocrites underneath it all.
I think Burke was smart, however, to not just have Natalie be simply horrible. There were moments in Natalie's life that felt more complex and made me feel complex things: for example, almost as soon as she marries and has a baby, she discovers that those "perfect" happy family portraits are a veneer, but rather than be honest, she throws her lot in with upholding the fantasy. These moments made Natalie more of a tragic character, but still, her choices were so awful that it was difficult to feel much sympathy for her.
Supporting characters were fine. Caleb, Natalie's husband, was a trust fund baby who had no real ambition. He was ok, but his descent into the doomsday prepper, man-o-sphere space felt like it happened mostly in the background. If this book wasn't a thriller, I think a lot more could have been done to explore the connection between these and the tradwife ideologies.
Natalie's mother was fine in that she demonstrated where Natalie got her religious indoctrination from, but I liked Natalie's sister more as a comparison between a fake "tradwife" and a real one. Natalie's sister shows the realities of having no education, no career, no financial independence, amd many children with a patriarchal man as well as how that life is a threat to a woman's well-being.
Perhaps the most interesting character to me was Reena, Natalie's college roommate. Reena herself wasn't terribly fascinating to me, per se, but Natalie's obsession with her over the years really gave Natalie a dimension that I appreciated. Natalie is constantly thinking about what Reena's life might be like and how Natalie's compares, and that competitive streak and need to "win" against a "liberal" was really helpful when showing what Natalie's goal really was.
TL;DR: Yesteryear does some interesting things with its characters, but in the end, it doesn't want to be anything beyond a thriller.
I’ve been spinning like a chicken on a spit ever since I heard about the whole ‘AI generated story places in renowned Commonwealth Writing Prize’ scandal and now has come the time to regale you with my Opinions™️ about the matter, because it’s hit on some thoughts I’ve had for a while re: how I approach writing, both fanfic and original fiction… and thoughts I’ve had as a reader. long read, strap in.
tldr scandal speedrun: story by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir just won the Caribbean regional prize at the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize ie one of the biggest short fiction awards in the world (almost 8000 entries this year) and was subsequently published on Granta's website, as all regional winners are. readers start flagging that something is off, and it quickly becomes clear that the story is almost certainly AI generated, and obviously the press and wank started up, media coverage, and my all time favourite part: Granta editor Sigrid Rausing uploads the story into an AI to ask if an AI wrote it and then puts out a statement that pretty much says ‘probably, but guess we’ll never know!’ (SORRY THIS PART IS SOOOO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME LMFAO 😭)
much of the earlyish discourse has focused on the AI detection question, what does this mean for literary prizes going forward, how do we verify human authorship. some responses have been very good/interesting (the Africa is a Country piece especially). what I want to yap about is what the judges' response to this story tells us about how postcolonial writing is read by the institutions that gatekeep it and readers who dismiss it (and this puts it perfectly with Arundhati Roy as an example), what the judging panel’s language reveals when read as a critical object in itself, and why the failure mode here is so damaging. tldr: the story is dogshit and so clearly AI generated you can even see the AI’s ‘thought’ process, but the mainstream reactions are slagging off the wrong thing, and for reasons that have little to do with AI.
it has been actually infuriating to watch a significant chunk of the online reaction use this nonsense piece of writing as a launching pad for a much broader dismissal. someone posts the bench-men sentence or the sunrise-over-a-sink sentence as evidence of AI, and then in the replies someone else will say some shit like "well this is just what postcolonial writing is like" or "I've read prize-winning stuff that reads exactly like this". and suddenly we're not talking about Jamir Nazir anymore, we're talking about whether this entire mode of writing, postcolonial literary fiction, global south prose ‘in general’, varied and distinct language plays associated with everyone from Roy to Walcott to Kincaid, as somehow inherently gaudy, unmoored, purple, a performance of profundity that collapses under scrutiny. sheer vim against styles of writing unfairly and lazily judged as ‘florid’ and ‘overwrought’, ie people calling for the clinical manicuring of prose through a lens of anti-AI progressivism.
and this rage has very little to do with AI or this AI generated story, and a lot more to do with the epistemology of reading across cultural difference:
what assumptions are you making when you encounter prose that doesn't do what you're used to, and how do you distinguish between:
this is doing something I don't have the framework to follow/yet
and
this is doing nothing
the uncomfortable answer is that a lot of people, at levels high above the average reader mind you, being prize judges and all, don't make that distinction. they experience the unfamiliarity and name it as failure, as excess, as incoherence, as the literary equivalent of noise, without asking whether the problem is in the text or in the reading, or they fall prey to a manifestation of ‘trim the fat culture’ (good post on this).
this is not an accusation of bad faith reading necessarily; it is just what happens when you read without the relevant context and without the intellectual curiosity to notice that you're missing something and attempt to find it. telling, however, is how quickly that experience of unfamiliarity, in this particular case, became a generalisation. not "I find this story's specific metaphors incoherent" but "I find this kind of writing incoherent", as if “this kind of writing” is a stable category and not just something this AI slapped together. a sliding from the fraudulent to the traditional that happens with striking confidence, and one which you do not see applied with the same ease to, say, Western European modernism, where the response to difficulty tends toward "I need to read more Woolf to understand Woolf" rather than "yucky stinky Woolf is AI-slop”.
anyway. here is my favourite sentence from the shitty AI story:
"she had the kind of walking that made benches become men."
and like it’s my all time favourite sentence ever because like. what does it mean. what is it doing. why is it there. what decision was made in its construction and to what end? and I just could not come to a conclusion because the real answer is that no actual decision was made, because decision-making requires an engagement with the writing, requires a reasoning for the sentence to exist in the way it does, and this exists across all literary prose styles, from the sparsest to the lushest. the bench-men sentence is difficult to interpret, but not in a ‘this is difficult to interpret which makes the reward of interpretation sweeter’ way, it is difficult to interpret in a ‘there is nothing under this sentence’ way, and that is made very clear when even the slightest interpretative pressure is laid on the story.
anyway, turns out the judges of one of the world’s biggest literary competitions did not apply that pressure. caribbean regional judge Sharma Taylor described Nazir's language as "sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy" and like man this isn’t to dunk on Taylor personally but i think that sentence, in being a diagnostic object, is in itself a diagnostic object as to the whole scandal here: it’s evaluative language that doesn’t touch the text itself, a string of compliments whose terms don’t require a unique object. "precise yet richly evocative" is a sentence that could describe anyone from Chekhov to MT Vasudevan Nair.
what it cannot do is tell you what is precise about Nazir's objectively vague, dreary sentences, or where exactly economy manifests in a story that opens with three subordinate images somehow being unable to create even half an image. the judges either didn't notice or didn't give a fuck, and imo the honest interpretation there is that the evaluation was matching the text against a prior model of what this kind of writing is supposed to feel like, rather than what it actually does.
the main vulnerability of this kind of matching-against-model judging criteria is that it can only flag deviation from the expected shape, not absence within it. a story that inhabits the expected form, even hollowly, passes muster. a story that does something actually unexpected might fail on those same grounds, whether or not it's extraordinary. the AI machine got through to the prize list not because it fooled sophisticated readers into thinking they were reading a great work of literature, but because the reading operation in use did not require that experience of reading great literature to complete successfully. you just needed the vague shape, and the machines are good at making vague shapes.
what shape?
seemingly lyrical, lush, image-dense, located in rural poverty or landscape-as-metaphysical-weight, threaded with folk memory and unresolved grief, incantatory, myth-grabbing, rum shops, zinc rooftops, zinc-hair. what the AI has done is precisely what it is built to do: grab tiny scraps and fragments from actual prize-winning postcolonial stories and shoved them all together into an amorphous, senseless mass, knowing what it is supposed to do but not knowing how to do it. and so to me the most astounding/horrifying aspect of this scandal is how the judges who one can safely assume, based on their credentials, are very familiar with ‘world literature’, proved unable to tell the difference between a form inhabited and a form vacated.
and I really don’t like bringing up my literary/academic credentials (derogatory) etc etc on here anymore, because it at times positions me in an uncritical way I don’t intend or enjoy and I spent my early months in fandom realising just how very uncomfortable I was with the image I inadvertently curated as a result of coming straight from that sort of literary-academic space. so to put it very basically: I have spent my academic career broadly specialising in the very style and period of postcolonial literature that this AI story is attempting (badly) to emulate. my focus has always been south asia but i have also worked extensively with caribbean lit especially early on, and i’ve been taught/examined by some very well known caribbean writers and literary scholars, etc etc. ie i’m just trying to say that this post isn’t just me talking about a vague grievance with literary cultures but something i’ve been neck deep in for 10+ years now, ie i do know my shit and am not just knee jerk wanking, even though frankly i don’t think i should have to explain my background because way too many people are being way too confident with the ‘i have been writing for THREE BILLION years and they gave ARUNDHATI ROY THAT BITCH the booker prize’ atm…
anyway the reason I’m so brainrotted about this is because this exact literary-cultural problem was one of the things that led me to structure my longfic, Prayers to Broken Stone, in the way I did. the fic itself is totally irrelevant here so you’re not missing anything if you haven’t read it or are unfamiliar with the Silmarillion, I’m just referring to how the first quarter of that fic deliberately contains every single postcolonial miserycore cliché that appeals to a literary-prize, Western Anglophone, and diasporic audience’s ideas of what ‘Global South’ world-literatures should look like (and ngl I feel like I probably went too hard on this because so far I know at least 5 ppl familiar with the genre who justifiably almost dropped the fic before the mic drop because of the beginning being Like That… sorry guys. i will probably do it again 😭).
anyway after that, and very abruptly, the story takes a hard pivot to what it actually is, which is not an apolitical portrait of India, not diasporic literature about the Indian subcontinent, not even an Indian novel about Kozhikode, but a Kozhikodan novel about India, down to the style: my writing in general tends to lean on carnivaleque and incongruous tonal whiplashes between ‘lowbrow’ humour, abject tragedy and direct critical fourth-wallfucking commentary, but that whiplash is turned all the way up to 100 in Prayers and the humour especially is taken to borderline slapstick levels, and that style is evocative of Kozhikodan literary cultures (see—writings of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who is mentioned in the story in that Comrade Maedhros lies claims they are great buddies lmao), only that most writing from the region is in Malayalam, etc.
the reason i mention the fic here is that objectively speaking, those first few chapters, the ‘series of clichés’ ones, are the ‘clearest’ part of the story when it came to writing it. those chapters were written to directly evoke the vague shape of ‘prizewinning postcolonial giants’ of South Asian literature, both the brilliant and incisive writers and the floggers of diaspora-gaze miserycore, providing a series of aesthetic signals to those texts: the joint-family ‘madhouse’, the separated twins, the daddy-issues-as-father-of-the-nation-issues, the family-as-country, the dried rivers, the symbolic heirloom bangle, the utopian pre-imperial regional historiography, the diasporic returnee, the rotting house, the familial disconnect. Roy, Rushdie, Mistry, Lahiri, Desai, Seth, Ghosh, rinse and repeat.
do I personally enjoy every single one of these authors? no, I would probably cagefight two of them at least. what I am saying though, is that that their writing isn’t some kind of incomprehensible mess that nobody aside from their little tiny id-group can understand, not amorphous or vague or too overwrought to comprehend. their prose, all differing styles, can be rich, lush, playful, meandering, yes. but they are not unclear: they’re so clear that the positionality of the authors, their class and caste backgrounds, their educational and migratory trajectories, are often painfully evident (hence the cagefighting). the reason i used those aspects in my fic to signal towards a particular kind of globally lauded postcolonial literature is because those signals are clear, not confusing.
ie it is not a case of ‘global south’ writers being incomprehensible, it is a case of readers walking into a garden with a few flowers they haven’t seen before and immediately going ‘damn, look at this jungle. can’t navigate it but i’m sure it’s great, ok bye’ then turning the fuck around and writing the travelogue anyway. which is to say, applying a colonial reading practice to postcolonial writing.
and there’s a similar, though differently approached, aspect in globally renowned caribbean anglophone writing: a history of deliberate formal difficulty. where the difficulty isn’t some ambient mystery or marker of ‘serious’ literature but a formal consequence of a model of storytelling. eg. Selvon's Creole narration in The Lonely Londoners was a decision with costs+purposes about what it would mean for Moses Aloetta's interiority to be rendered in standard English versus in a voice that had not been, at the time, admitted to the Anglophone literary canon, rather than being the inevitable default of a Caribbean writer. Harris's dissolving frames in Palace of the Peacock are not difficult because Harris was apathetic to comprehensibility but because the Guyanese historical consciousness the novel examines does not easily resolve into stable subjectivity.
form is so often part of the argument across literature, across the English canon itself, and normally in literary criticism, ‘difficulty’ is approached epistemologically alongside aesthetically. this is common knowledge yet the first part is something that appears to be hard to grasp for people reading and commentating on ‘world literature’.
what is this form doing that another form cannot?
you can answer that question for Harris and Selvon and Ghosh and Roy and man, I think he’s so fucking annoying sometimes, but you can even do it for Rushdie. you cannot do it for "coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all". and this impossibility has nothing to do with foreignness or excessiveness but because the question, when applied to this AI generated piece of writing, has no answer.
and like… what does that tell us about what the judges were evaluating? imo it tells us they were at least in part evaluating surface-level compliance. compliance with recognisable genre conventions and an expected register, and so with the right signals of “authenticity”. and in the case of ‘Global South literature’, these conventions include an emphasis on the rural, the embodied, the rooted, the mythical.
an AI is very good at compliance because compliance is, quite literally, what AI does: every LLM is trained on the corpus of what has been rewarded before and thus it reproduces the patterns of that reward. if the judges were themselves rewarding compliance with a known type, then of course the AI passed with flying colours, because they were, in effect, running the same operation as the LLM model: matching input against a predetermined template instead of engaging with the work itself.
not to use my favourite cliché, but this specific scandal having played out in the way it did pretty much evidences how these two things, the upper echelons of the global literary prize circuit judging panels and generative AI, are less ‘warring factions’ and more ‘two frat bros fisting each other while saying no homo bro’, ie comorbid counterparts.
and so imo the question that should haunt every future Commonwealth Prize shortlist is not "did an AI write this?" but "what model of literary value are we using to judge Anglophone literature?”, and “why the fuck are we doing that???”
bc if your aesthetic criteria are vague enough that a sentence like "the grove isn't a ledger; it's a mouth — it closes only when it's satisfied" reads as "vivid, lush imagery" delivered with "quiet authority," then your judging criteria is less criteria and more vibes. you are literally just playing a high-stakes vibes-based game of Pin the Tail on the Mango whilst wilfully ignoring how vibes are precisely what AI large language models are the best at faking.
anyway, like I said in my intro, this scandal is already sliding into a secondary discourse in which ‘Oriental™️ opacity/incomprehensibility’ is being treated as the general category, of which this AI-generated confusion is just the most recent instance. you can watch it happening in real time, unbearably prolonged: people who rightly found the Nazir story incoherent, reaching way too easily for other examples of postcolonial prose they also apparently found incoherent or “purple”, prose that is, in fact, doing things they just didn't know how to follow. the AI story has handed a lazy, sneering and dismissive reading practice the veneer of clinical diagnosis.
that is the horribly ironic thing here. reader after reader, openly admitting to doing the exact same lazy, apathetic reading of postcolonial literature as the literary prize judges they are (rightly) criticizing have done with this AI story, have been doing for human-writing from the global south for all this time. “ewww this is what that writing looks like when a machine does it" (correct) is sliding so so so easily into "ewww this is what that writing looks like" (not correct). dog after dog, chasing tail after tail.
and that slide, from a machine having ‘successfully’ impersonated prize-winning prose, to a panel of judges who clearly weren't really reading, to the genre itself being defined as imitable machinery, is imo the most damaging thing to come out of this whole affair, and the people most hurt by it are the writers who have fuck all to do with Jamir Nazir, who is clearly just a chancer who fucked around and found out.
because somewhere in those 8000 entries, there is a writer, possibly many writers, who solved their riddle, who knew what every sentence was doing, who had made the thousand small decisions that constitute a story, and whose difficulty (if their story was difficult: difficulty is subjective and not a default, as we have established) could easily be accounted for. that writer did not win, because the judges were not looking for them. and now, in the aftermath, the interrogation of the incident continues to refuse to ask the questions that would have found them.
I first thought it would be blowing smoke up my own ass to finish this post with a quote from my own story. and then I remembered that this is my circus and you are all my monkeys, so I will indeed be ending with a (spoiler-free, context-unnecessary) quote from the final chapter of Prayers, from one of the fic’s multiple fourth-wall breaches, this one explicitly addressing both the character of Maedhros, a gay Muslim man in postcolonial India, as well as the attritional impact of global Anglophone prize cultures on ‘national literatures’, explaining the structure of the story and touching on the reading-practice I talk about in this post, this cold, dismissive flattening based on the reader’s refusal to comprehend the unfamiliar. Emphasis obviously made just for this excerpt:
Humanity has tried many times, with fanfare and floodlights, to hold the great white shark within glass walls. When a young female was placed in the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, its keepers marvelled for a day, two days, then watched as she rammed herself against the tank walls, snout bloodied and refusing food until her body yielded to exhaustion. In San Diego, one was found dead within two weeks. More recently, in a public aquarium, a six-foot juvenile circling its tank like a condemned spirit, colliding with the corners until its skin peeled raw, was released after months only to die on the way back to the sea. Each attempt ended the same: a slow unravelling, a remarkable animal’s vast strength curdling inward, its shimmering blue-mapped body drifting in a pale echo of the life denied to them.
I do not deny they are vicious creatures. But it is not viciousness that makes it impossible for them to survive in the aquarium. The old fables and new films, the man-eater, the blood-frothed wave, the lurking fin, have all mistaken the matter entirely. The thing that kills the great white shark in captivity is the billowing cage: the narrowing circle of water, no current to guide their gills, the confiscation of the horizon. In captivity they turned to self-excoriation, scraping themselves to ribbons on the glass, starving in protest, dragging their bodies into stillness. As if potential had been so thoroughly written into their marrow that the denial of it was a kind of murder. What we mistake for noble resilience is in fact the beginning of a long derangement. A creature built to know the endless universe, driven into madness by the closing-in of incomprehensible walls.
And so we, in our hunger for marvels, have reduced an oceanic immensity to an ornament, a sole symbolic bangle on a slender wrist, a riddle turned spectacle. In that act of enclosure, the essential vastness of the creature is stripped away, its thousand-mile wanderings and salt-scored pilgrimages compressed into a parody of itself in a ghost story projected on glass.
What is offered to the crowd is no shark but the space where a shark once was: a wonder gutted and repackaged, its enforced silence masquerading as our unspoken understanding even as a scream writhes in every bubble.
As we behold the captive great white shark, Arwen, we do naught but applaud its absence in our lives, gild the blade which vanquished its truth, and heave a sigh of relief for the barrier between ourselves and the beast. We build shrines to the wonders we swallow whole. We raise gardens tomorrow from the cities we raze today.
But perhaps there is light on the horizon for humanity. Perhaps one day, we will learn how to keep the great white shark in a cage. And in turn, maybe it will learn how to rasp itself down for the onlooker and pace circles into borrowed water, each turn narrower, each wall closer than the last. What is witnessed is not the beast but its mutilation, a spectre stripped of horizon and turned inward on itself, a hollow spectacle mistaken for a radiant life.
The tank allows for neither possibility nor invention, and so the tale of the great white shark contracts into a pattern of bruises, the persistence of a body against limits it was never meant to know. The water becomes a neverending sentence, telling the story of a ruin that can only end in its own undoing. I wanted to be a writer, Arwen. I have always wanted to be a writer. You know that. You have always known that. And yet anything I ever write will only ever be an un-writing of the things other people have already written of me. Even my letters to you.
It is amazing, now that I think of it, what desperation can do to a story.
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. By Bart D. Ehrman. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Genre: history, religious studies, history of Christianity
Series: N/A
Summary: The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs. Some groups of Christians claimed that there was not one God but two or twelve or thirty. Some believed that the world had not been created by God but by a lesser, ignorant deity. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human.
In Lost Christianities, Bart D. Ehrman offers a fascinating look at these early forms of Christianity and shows how they came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. All of these groups insisted that they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all possessed writings that bore out their claims, books reputedly produced by Jesus's own followers. Modern archaeological work has recovered a number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners. Ehrman's discussion ranges from considerations of various "lost scriptures"--including forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter, Jesus's closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus's alleged twin brother--to the disparate beliefs of such groups as the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various "Gnostic" sects. Ehrman examines in depth the battles that raged between "proto-orthodox Christians"--those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the New Testament and standardized Christian belief--and the groups they denounced as heretics and ultimately overcame.
***Full review below.***
CONTENT WARNINGS: discussions of antisemitism, cannibalism
When I'm in a reading slump and need my brain to be picked, I go for Bart Ehrman. I enjoy his books because while they're not full-fledged academic monographs, they respect the reader's intelligence enough to discuss the complexities of ancient history.
Lost Christianities is no different. I enjoyed learning about the various types of early Christianity from the Ebionites to the Marcionites to the Gnostics. Ehrman does a good job explaining the complexities of these groups and their relationships to one another while being transparent about what he is simplifying and why. In this sense, Lost Christianities is a good springboard for more comprehensive or deep, rigorous study.
That being said, I don't think I'd recommend this book if you don't have some basic understanding about Biblical apocrypha, church history, and (generally) how manuscripts work. Ehrman does a good job laying out some of the basics, but this isn't meant to be a study for people who have never thought about how we even got "the New Testament." If you're unaware that the Gospels, for example, weren't written by the apostles, then you should probably start with a different monograph.
But that's no fault of Ehrman's - he's not trying to hold your hand, but he's also not pretending to be comprehensive. He's showing you a door - granted, a complex door, and one that you need to do the work to walk through. And I, for one, find it absolutely fascinating.
TL;DR: Lost Christianities is an excellent introduction to the various forms of Christianity that existed in the first and second centuries AD. Though this book isn't comprehensive, what it does contain is intellectually stimulating and a good starting point for further academic study.
ok so. so we’re just. not reading now. wow ok. ok!!! booktok says we should remove half of the fun from reading!!! wow!!! (i found this in a video and apparently it’s not just this person doing it. it’s. quite a few of them. just to make that clear.)
The Correspondent. By Virginia Evans. Crown, 2025.
Rating: 3.25/5 stars
Genre: contemporary fiction
Series: N/A
Summary: Sybil Van Antwerp is a mother and grandmother, divorced, retired from a distinguished career in law, an avid gardener, and a writer of letters. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books.
Because at seventy-three, Sybil has used her letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. But as Sybil expects her life to go on as it always has, letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life.
OVERVIEW: I first heard about this book from my mom, and while this isn't the usual genre I go for, it was at my library so I picked it up. I was pleased that it was an epistolary novel (you don't see many of those these days), and some parts were charming. As a whole, I think it was fine; it didn't blow me away and wasn't very subtle, but it was competent.
WRITING: Evans is very good at writing in her protagonist's voice. Because Sybil is the main character and writes the majority of the letters, it's important to get her voice down and I think this book was successful. The other characters also had distinct voices, but some of their letters are rather brief so it's hard to fully judge.
The other aspects of Evans's writing are fine. Nothing about the prose really blew me away but everything felt neat. I don't think it's a bad writing style but it's also not super inspired, in my opinion.
PLOT: The plot of this book follows seventy-something year old Sybil van Antwerp over the course of several years as she writes to friends, family, and acquaintances. Sybil writes aboit everything from her ancestry to her failing vision to her past as a law clerk. Over the course of the novel, we learn much about her past and about her relationships with people around her.
Some of the mini arcs are charming and touching, such as Sybil's relationship with her daughter and ex-husband. I also liked that Evans held back just enough to let her foreshadowing do her work and for the reader to piece together some things for themselves.
I also think, however, that some of the story arcs could have hit harder. Letters by nature rely heavily on telling rather than showing, so a lot of those big moments in Sybil's life don't hit as hard precisely because we're being told a lot of things.
I also just don't think the advertising of the book helps much. The summary promises a reckoning with Sybil's past, but it's not this big, dramatic thing that keeps you in suspense. While it's fine if you prefer something more quiet, I was kind of expecting something more impactful; the revelation about the case from Sybil's past was ultimately anticlimactic, but I'm not sure if that's a fault of the book or the fault of the marketing.
Lastly, there were some entries that I just don't think helped the book much or weren't very compelling to me. There were a few letters written to real-life authors that seemed to be mostly flattery (like how Diana Gabaldon knows so much about Scottish history! Please.). There were also some entries that had a tendency to read as summaries or info dumps. Given the shortish length of this book, I think a lot more work could have been done to make these entries feel more integrated.
CHATACTERS: Sybil, our protagonist, is fairly charming so it's easy to like her, despite her flaws. I liked that she had loud, bold opinions and that she was stubborn. I liked that she had a tendency to overshare with relative strangers and end up with a new friend. I also liked that she had a clear character arc, though I could nitpick how compelling this was shaped. There were some iffy things about race that I'm not sure about; nothing major, but a few details here and there that made me wonder.
Side characters were fine and I think they were woven into Sybil's story well. I liked Harry, the kid with home problems and suffered from bullying. Watching him find safety with Sybil was nice. I also liked the complicated relationship Sybil had with her daughter, Fiona, and the close confidantes that were Felix (Sybil's adopted brother) and Rosalie (her best friend). Seeing Sybil get some pushback was useful for her growth, and I think these characters were used well for that.
TL;DR: The Correspondent was a fine epistolary novel that delves into character. While suitable for readers who mostly want something quiet, it just didn't dig deep enough for my personal tastes.
Summary: When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing inspirational daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?
***Full review below.***
CONTENT WARNINGS: divorce, miscarriage
As a disclaimer: I'm aware there is an accompanying journal, but I don't have a copy, so that might change how some people interact with this book. You might like it better with a workbook/journal.
I like Maggie Smith's poem "Good Bones" so I decided to check out what she had to say in this book. I'm not on many social media sites, so a lot of this was new to me, but unfortunately, I can't say I was impressed. While the ideas were nice, I personally found much of this book ordinary and repetitive.
Most of this book is little quotes. I presume they're Smith's little inspirational tweets, but I'm not on Twitter/X. Personally, I didn’t find them very memorable, profound, or helpful. While some of them have nuggets of wisdom and probably could prompt some deeper thought, they also repeated the same ideas over and over again. They grew tiring after a while.
The mini-essays were better. Smith's explores moments of her life in these sections, gesturing towards a reflection without leading the reader by the hand too much. I do with these sections were longer, but if all you have time for is a page or two, I prefer the essays over the tweets.
Still, I can't say that this book is bad. Smith writes well and I don't think it is meant to be more than a collection of motivational writings. If you like inspirational quotes, you'll probably find this book motivational.
Me, however - I need something more meaty.
TL;DR: Keep Moving is fine as a collection of inspirational quotes. While it isn't badly written, it's just not the kind of book I find useful or resonant.
Summary: Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell. There are wrongs that echo through the ages, friendships that outpace the claws of death, loves that leave their mark on civilization, and promises that nothing can break. This is one such story.
Annelid and Leveret met after the war, but before the peace. They found each other in a torn-up nation, peering through propaganda to grasp a deeper truth. And in a demon-haunted wood, another act of violence linked them and propelled their souls on a journey throughout the ages. No world can hold them, no life can bind them, and they'll never leave each other behind. But their journey will not be easy. In every lifetime, oppressors narrow the walls of possibility, shaping reality to fit their own needs. And behind the walls of history, the witches of the red web swear that every throne will fall.
***Full review below.***
CONTENT WARNING: death (including child death), war, references to domestic violence, disturbing imagery, animal death
OVERVIEW: I saw this book at my local library so I decided to give it a try. After reading, I'm glad I took a chance but I'm not sure I know enough to really get the most out of it. I'm not one for books that don't at least have either characters or a plot that I can latch onto, so while I appreciated this book as a work of literature, I can't say I understood it enough to enjoy my reading experience.
WRITING: Chandrasekera's prose is beautiful and sometimes playful, alternating between lyrical passages that experiment with form and sound and funny little shifts in tone. Sometimes the prose takes center stage at the expense of character, plot, and the general sense of flow, so while I did think it beautiful, I also thought it tended to get away from itself.
The experimentation with genre from part to part was fun and engaging. Some feel more historical while others feel like drama (plays) and others feel like horror or sci fi. In this sense, the book really is polyvocalic and experimental, and I can appreciate that, artistically.
PLOT: There isn't a true plot to this book so much as there is a series of "short stories" that are more concerned with exploring a theme or idea than with character or narrative. I think I can identify some of these things, but I must admit that a lot of it went over my head. It's possible that I'm just not the target audience and I need to learn more about Sri Lankan history, folklore, and culture more generally. But I also think this book is intentionally being some degree of ethereal, refusing to let readers grasp its contents too readily.
CHARACTERS: It's also difficult for me to describe the characters of this book because they change so often (despite being loosely the same beings across time). Because of the goals of this book, character development and any kind of deep psychological work aren't really the point, so I found it difficult to really sink my teeth into any given protagonist.
TL;DR: While I can appreciate what Rakesfall was doing and the artistic merit of its form/prose, I just don't think I'm educated enough to get the most out of this book.
Incredibly violent take of mine but I actually don’t think you need to relate to a story in any way to enjoy it. You can enjoy a story even if you can’t point at a character and insert some aspect of your personality or identity into them. In fact I would argue the need for a character like that to be present in every single story you experience is a sign of stunted growth.
For everyone who ‘used to love reading’ but now hasn’t finished a book in years, you CAN get it back. Genuinely start bringing a book (preferably short and either fiction or a non fiction topic you already really enjoy) everywhere you go and when you have 5-20 mins waiting for the bus or at the doctors office or mechanic or whatever, get out your book and read it! You don’t have to finish it quickly or even read it often but it is so good for your brain and fun to get into the habit of reading more (and replacing being on your phone for those moments). Source: I read 0 books in 2023 and I’ve read 12 in the first 4 months of 2026
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother). By Rabih Alameddine. Grove, 2025.
Rating: 4.25/5 stars
Genre: contemporary fiction, lgbtqia
Series: N/A
Summary: In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned.
When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.
***Full review below.***
CONTENT WARNINGS: war, Covid/pandemic, sexual content, kidnapping/imprisonment
OVERVIEW: I saw a little bit of buzz about this book online so I decided to check it out from my library. Fortunately, I think it was worth the time; this book did an excellent job exploring character, and though there were some things that I think could have been tweaked to bring everything together a bit more, overall, it was a very strong piece of fiction.
WRITING: Alameddine's prose is well-crafted in that it does a good job feeling like his protagonist's voice (in addition to being clear, balanced, and affective). Though it doesn't come across as lyrical or poetic, it was still moving and made me care deeply about Raja and his mother.
I do think that some of the transitions felt a bit abrupt and some of the themes could have been explored more. By the end, I kind of felt like the story came to an abrupt conclusion. But these are probably personal tastes so don't take my criticism as a major strike against Alameddine.
PLOT: The plot of this book follows Raja, a gay man living in Beirut, as he narrated several "seasons" of his life. During his narrative, he recounts events such as bombings, war, imprisonment, Covid, etc. and all the while, his mother is there to both irritate and love him.
Raja's relationship with his mother was complex and deeply moving. At some points, she seemed to be bullying him to get her way, but it's obvious from the way she moves heaven and earth that she loves her son. Watching them interact brought me a lot of joy, and seeing their relationship go through ups and down kept me invested.
Other significant themes in this book include Raja's queerness and his complicated feelings about being Lebanese. A lot of it is hard to read; my heart broke for Raja when he is pressured by his family to be.more "masculine" and every time violence would occur in Beirut, I could feel Raja's sorrow and frustration. Nothing ever gets too graphic, but Alameddine has a talent for discussing heavy topics without showing too much trauma for shock value.
CHARACTERS: Raja, our narrator, is endearing in that he's kind of grumpy but deeply cares about his mother. He always insists that he wants to be left alone but is repeatedly dragged into situations by his extroverted mother, and watching him be mildly irritated or inconvenienced was honestly interesting and fun. But his story isn't always lighthearted; he experiences war and family rejection, and it's clear from the narrative that these things take a toll on him. But his mother is always in his corner, so watching him be supported gave me a warm feeling.
Raja's mother is strong-willed and fearless, and despite some of her behaviors, I found it impossible to dislike her. Watching her find her courage to stand up to her family on Raja's behalf made me tear up, and every time she showed up, berating men with guns and making army guys hide in bathrooms, I couldn't help but smile.
Supporting characters were well-used and complex. I liked Nahed, Raja's lesbian cousin, and the evolution of their relationship as they aged. Madame Taweel, the so-called "generator mafia boss," was charming and her friendship with Raja's mother created some interesting situations.
The character that I think could have had better closure was Boodie, a figure from Raja's youth. Without spoiling anything, I want to clarify that I'm not advocating for Boodie to have a different ending - I just think the ending he did get felt a little rushed and more could have been done to explore Raja's feelings.
TL;DR: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) features two protagonists that you can't help but love. Alameddine does a masterful job of creating compelling characters that are used to explore things like family, queerness, war, and community, all while inserting some humor and banter to keep things (relatively) light.
She Made Herself a Monster. By Anna Kovatcheva. Mariner Books, 2026.
Rating: 4.25/5 stars
Genre: historical fiction
Series: N/A
Summary: We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we’ve named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster?
Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays while the villagers sleep: animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then she eliminates the threat, and sows seeds of hope in her wake.
The village Koprivci is plagued by exceptional illness and misfortune, its children rarely surviving infancy. There, Yana meets Anka: a headstrong orphan who the villagers blame for their curse. As Anka approaches womanhood, the village Captain is grooming her for marriage against her will. Anka is powerless against him—that is, until Yana arrives. Together, the orphan and the vampire slayer hatch a plan: to conjure a monster so vile, it might provide cover for Anka to escape. But their plan quickly takes on a horrifying life of its own...
***Full review below.***
CONTENT WARNINGS: violence, suicidal ideation, animal death, references to child death, suicide attempt, injury/medical content, minor sexual content, references to physical abuse
OVERVIEW: Funnily enough, I heard about this book from a model in my figure drawing class. She was listening to it on audio while she was posing, and it sounded intriguing enough that I picked up a copy on independent bookstore day. Luckily, the book was also well-crafted and interesting; while I have some hang ups about thematic cohesion, this is nevertheless a string debut.
WRITING: Kovatcheva's prose is well- balanced, clear, and moves at just the right pace. It has a literary quality to it without being overly lyrical, meaning that it's relatively straight forward but takes great care to infuse its setting and characters with life. I loved the depth and complexity the prose created, and everything felt unhurried without being slow or without suspense.
PLOT: The plot of this book follows a handful of characters in a 19th century Bulgarian town. The town has suffered from a number of hardships that the villagers have attributed to witchcraft, and an outsider/con artist named Yana takes advantage of their superstitions to sell them her skills as a vampire hunter. Meanwhile, at the center of it all, is a young physician named Kiril and his cousin, 16 year old Anka, both of whom have been raised by their Uncle, called the Captain. The Captain is determined to marry Anka, and in desperation, Anka turns to Yana and a few other village women to escape.
Kovatcheva did a really good job creating tension and a sense of dread. Although this isn't a horror novel, I think the weight of Anka's future and the resistance to her marriage provided more than enough suspense to make me invested.
I wasn't entirely invested in the side plot to create a fake vampire, and perhaps that is indicative of my main complaint about this book. For all I liked the plot centered on Anka, I think the surrounding subplots could have been more thematically coherent. The plot about the fake vampire, for example, is all about creating a narrative that people will believe in order to make it through dark times. This an interesting theme, but I ultimately didn't feel like it did much to enhance the themes such as control over women's bodies and the dangers of superstition that were elsewhere in the novel. I'm sure that with a little more analysis, I could figure out something a little more coherent, but the "creating a narrative" was so prominent that I wish more was done to bind it to the other themes.
CHARACTERS: Anka, one of our protagonists, was easy to sympathize with because she is a desperate young girl trying to avoid marriage to an older man. Because no one seems to care what Anka wants (only that the Captain loves her), I was instantly and continuously on her side no matter what she decided to do. That kind of desperation not only made her a compelling character, but also gave her some agency since Anka was forced to take matters into her own hands.
Kiril, the physician and Anka's cousin, was frustrating in that he seemed to want to do good but treated Anka abominably. Rather than this making him a bad character, I think it made him more complex, and it also gave other characters the opportunity to push back and challenge his ideas about women. Kiril had a satisfactory character arc, so while I disliked him for most of the novel, he worked well as a narrative element.
Yana, the con artist/vampire hunter, was fun mostly because of her willingness to help Anka. I enjoyed the tender bond they formed and the way Anka challenged Yana's moral code.
Supporting characters were fine and were generally well-used. Yulia, the housekeeper with a knowledge of poisons, was enjoyable as yet another ally and I loved how a group of women came together to help Anka rather than force her to accept her fate. Nina, the widow who everyone believes is a witch, was interesting for the way she challenged Kiril and exposed his selfishness/hypocrisy. The Captain was likewise a compelling antagonist precisely because he wasn't cartoonishly evil but seemed to get away with horrible things because of all the excuses made about him being kind to certain people. Altogether, I think Kovacheva created a rich roster of characters and I felt invested in every one.
TL;DR: She Made Herself a Monster is an impressive debut novel with a stunning atmosphere, well-crafted prose, and characters with emotional depth. While I do wish some of the themes came together more tightly, I think this is a brilliant book about how women can seize agency for themselves, even if it's horrifying.
“Regarding setting, the court held that both works taking place in Alaska high schools was not protectable because Alaska is a public place and setting a teen novel in a high school is a common genre convention.”
