reading

Book Review: THE ART OF A LIE by Laura Shepherd-Robinson

| Jessica Crawford

The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson is a 304 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Atria Books.

Genre:

Historical Fiction

Subgenres:

Mystery, thriller

Synopsis:

In 18th-century England, a widowed confectioner is drawn into a web of love, betrayal, and intrigue and a battle of wits in this masterful historical novel from the author of the USA TODAY bestseller The Square of Sevens.

Following the murder of her husband in what looks like a violent street robbery, Hannah Cole is struggling to keep her head above water. Her confectionary shop on Piccadilly is barely turning a profit, her suppliers conspiring to put her out of business because they don’t like women in trade. Henry Fielding, the famous author-turned-magistrate, is threatening to confiscate the money in her husband’s bank account because he believes it might have been illicitly acquired. And even those who claim to be Hannah’s friends have darker intent.

Only William Devereux seems different. A friend of her late husband, Devereux helps Hannah unravel some of the mysteries surrounding his death. He also tells her about an Italian delicacy called iced cream, an innovation she is convinced will transform the fortunes of her shop. But their friendship opens Hannah to speculation and gossip and draws Henry Fielding’s attention her way, locking her into a battle of wits more devastating than anything she can imagine.

Opening Line:

Nine times out of ten, when a customer walks into the Punchbowl and Pineapple, I can guess what will tempt them.

My Thoughts:

This author’s previous novel was my favorite book I read in all of 2024. This one wasn’t as much of a homerun for me.

The writing style is quite good, and it is evident that a lot of research went into bringing 18th century London to life upon the pages here. From Hannah Cole’s confectionary shop to the various parks, grand homes, and gambling houses, the details all rang as authentic and do an admirable job dropping the reader directly into the setting. This story is a decent one featuring widows, murderers, con artists, and one satirical novelist turned crime-busting magistrate based off of a real historical figure. There is a mystery that largely stems from not knowing which information you can and cannot trust.

However, I found myself kind of annoyed spending time with the main characters. The story alternates between two points of view, and while the reader knows when one person or the other is being lied to, it can be quite frustrating when the characters themselves are unaware of this. You spend your reading time wondering if and when things will come to light for them, or if their part of the tale will continue to see them reacting to false pretenses. This set up had me feeling kind of angsty, and knowing what I knew as the reader sort of left a bad taste in my mouth as I read on.

Many other reviewers seemed to really appreciate the ending, but I have to say that to me it seemed rather sudden and underwhelming. Especially considering this author’s other work, I was expecting the rug to be pulled out from under me in much more dramatic fashion at the last moment. There were still unexpected twists throughout, but the final one didn’t really wow me the way I think it was intended to.

But in all this is still well written historical fiction with some twisty mystery for added spice. I just had difficulty enjoying my time with the characters in this one.

Much gratitude to NetGalley for the eARC.

Book Review: THE COMPOUND by Aisling Rawle

| Jessica Crawford

The Compound by Aisling Rawle is a 292 page standalone novel published by Random House in 2025.

Genre:

Dystopian Fiction, Suspense

Synopsis:

Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. Winner takes all.

Lily—a bored, beautiful twentysomething—wakes up on a remote desert compound alongside nineteen other contestants on a popular reality TV show. To win, she must outlast her housemates while competing in challenges for luxury rewards, such as champagne and lipstick, and communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door.

The cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: Why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she’ll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win?

Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends.

Opening Line:

I woke up first.

My Thoughts:

Well, I simply devoured this suspenseful dystopian tale!

The overall message is a condemnation of consumerism and late-stage capitalism. Sure, there’s the sexy story of a bunch of young people living in a compound together, forced to pair up with a member of the opposite sex at night if they want to avoid banishment from the reality TV show, alternately cooperating to complete challenges and scheming to oust one another in order to earn ever more desirable rewards (these are often luxury items, but sometimes things necessary for their survival, isolated as they are out in the desert).

But this story isn’t just trashy fun – where it really sings is in the creeping dread it steeps the reader in as it continues to hint at how bleak things are in the outside world without ever describing things explicitly (peep the fires outside of the compounds boundaries on the cover – such a good detail!) What exactly are these people trying to escape that has them so willing to put themselves through this absolutely bonkers experience?

As more contestants get eliminated, the tension ratchets up as the remaining characters lose themselves more and more to the idea of “winning” the chance to continue putting off real life. Ultimately the main character (and the reader) must decide which is more important in an imperfect world: luxury, or meaningful human connection?

I admit I was expecting a bit more of a bang at the end, which was rather more of a whimper. But I still loved this story, which was bananas in all the best ways!

Book Review: GIFTED & TALENTED by Olivie Blake

| Jessica Crawford

Gifted & Talented by Olivie Blake is a 512 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Tor Books.

Genre:

Contemporary Fantasy

Synopsis:

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes the story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities, and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential.

Where there’s a will, there’s a war.

Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.

Or at least, so they like to think.

Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You’re welcome! If only her father’s fortune wasn’t her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.

Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he’s losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.

Eilidh, once the world’s most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she’d been his favorite all along.

On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?

Opening Line:

Meredith Wren, a fucking asshole, not that it matters at this stage of the narrative but it’s worth pointing out, sat blinded by the overhead lights from the stage, squinting unflatteringly into the brand-new, state-of-the-art auditorium that had just been completed on Tycho’s unethically verdant campus.

My Thoughts:

I guess I felt sorry for them, the Wrens. Which you shouldn’t do. Lord knows they don’t need your sympathy. If you give a mouse a cookie…you know how that turns out.

But hey, a bad dad is a bad dad.

The Wren siblings each have their own curious magical ability, as well as their individual contentious familial relationships. Having been raised with every resource available to the wealthy and respected, you would think they would naturally have had a step up to reaching the heights of success themselves. And yet…

He had simply believed, in his heart or possibly somewhere even dumber, that she could do anything…

This book tells the story of what happens when their father dies and they gather for his funeral and the reading of his will. Each sibling comes with their own attendant companions as well – various spouses, exes, mistresses, etc. Some of the characters can be very irritating, and yet the writing and especially the narrative voice (utilizing a clever twist on the omniscient narrator) in this book are spectacular. I’ve seen this story described as “magical Succession“, and certain bits about the nabob family reminded me of Mike Flanagan’s television adaption of The Fall of the House of Usher.

“I didn’t want happiness, for fuck’s sake–I wanted an A!” She felt sick with herself, with the repulsion of having seen her insides. “I wanted to get a good grade in life, in adulthood, in existing–but who was ever going to give me that?

Through a fairly angsty process, Thayer Wren’s adult children are forced to face their own personal hang ups, the joys and disappointments they’ve been served within their family. The angst, some characters being pretty unlikable, and the lack of satisfying explanation as to why some people seem to have a singular specific magical ability prevented this from being a 5 star read for me, but the clever writing and amusing voice that had me letting out the occasional startled laugh brought it pretty close.

In this version of the story, [she] might rewrite her selfish behaviors and her narrow concern for the mere aesthetics of life in favor of seeking redemption and accountability, having been suitably visited by the ghosts of Christmas past and/or a mental health professional.

Book Review: THE MARTHA’S VINEYARD BEACH AND BOOK CLUB by Martha Hall Kelly

| Jessica Crawford

The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club by Martha Hall Kelly is a 336 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Ballantine Books.

Genre:

Historical Fiction

Synopsis:

2016: Thirty-four-year-old Mari Starwood is still grieving after her mother’s death as she travels to the storied island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. She’s come all the way from California with nothing but a name on a piece of paper: Elizabeth Devereaux, the famous but reclusive Vineyard painter. When Mari makes it to Mrs. Devereaux’s stunning waterfront farm under the guise of taking a painting class with her, Mrs. Devereaux begins to tell her the story of the Smith sisters, who once lived there. As the tale unfolds, Mari is shocked to learn that her relationship to this island runs deeper than she ever thought possible.

1942: The Smith girls—nineteen-year-old aspiring writer Cadence and sixteen-year-old war-obsessed Briar—are faced with the impossible task of holding their failing family farm together during World War II as the U.S. Army arrives on Martha’s Vineyard. When Briar spots German U-boats lurking off the island’s shores, and Cadence falls into an unlikely romance with a sworn enemy, their quiet lives are officially upended. In an attempt at normalcy, Cadence and her best friend, Bess, start a book club, which grows both in members and influence as they connect with a fabulous New York publisher who could make all of Cadence’s dreams come true. But all that is put at risk by a mysterious man who washes ashore—and whispers of a spy in their midst. Who in their tight-knit island community can they trust? Could this little book club change the course of the war . . . before it’s too late?

My Thoughts:

Not a perfect fit for me, but there were things I enjoyed about this book, including the strong sense of place whisking me away to the beaches and cottages of 1940s Martha’s Vineyard. The historical fiction aspects were nice, including the ways WWII changed day to day life for civilians. The love for literature was great, as of course an author expects when they know their audience is going to be, well, readers!

A few things that niggled at me included the sudden and complete 180 between the two lovebirds for no discernible reason, the painful contractions and elevated BPs and edema in a woman in the very beginning of her pregnancy, and a so-called book club that seems to meet daily and assign a new book every single week but with the members VERY rarely actually seen reading or discussing the books at book club. I quite like the cover of this book, but it honestly has very little to do with the story.

There are two timelines in this book, with the bulk of the story unfolding in 1942, and only 3 chapters happening in 2016. In the latter, a character is mourning the death of her mother but declines her provider’s suggestion of antidepressants, with the implication that it would make her just forget her lost loved one. There is a lot of love for L.A. in these sections, with some random mentions of Theresa Caputo and Tori Spelling, and the implication that any other city that doesn’t demand its women be blonde therefore has “relaxed beauty standards”. The potential love interest in this part of the story seems completely unnecessary.

There is mention of a swastika design within the bricks of a house and how this suggests it is the home of Nazis, but there are plenty of homes in the U.S. with this design built into the brick pattern as it predates the symbol’s eventual association with the Nazi party.

But taken as a WWII story about the women living on Martha’s Vineyard while the men are shipped out, during U.S. military training exercises on their shores, with a bit of intrigue and family saga as well, this book worked pretty well.

Book Review: GIRL IN THE CREEK by Wendy N. Wagner

| Jessica Crawford

Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner is a 272 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Tor Nightfire.

Genre:

Horror/Sporror

Synopsis:

The Girl in the Creek by Hugo Award winner Wendy N. Wagner is an atmospheric and eerie story about a Pacific Northwest forest that seems to be devouring all who enter. A perfect read for fans of T. Kingfisher and Jeff VanderMeer’s cli-fi cosmic horror.

The Clackamas National Forest has always been a sanctuary for evil—human and alien. The shadows of looming trees and long-abandoned mines shelter poachers and serial killers alike. Then there’s the ruined hotel on the outskirts of picturesque small town Faraday, Oregon, nestled in the foothills of Mt. Hood. The one drowning in mushrooms and fungus not even the local expert can identify. Not to mention the stacks of missing persons cases. Freelance writer Erin Harper arrives in Faraday to find out what happened to her brother, whose disappearance in the forest has haunted her for years. But someone else has gone missing. And when Erin finds her in the creek, the girl vanishes again — this time from the morgue, and days later her fingerprints show up at a murder scene. Maybe it’s a serial killer, or maybe it’s the spores infecting the forest and those lost inside. Erin must find answers quickly, before anyone else goes missing. But she might be next…

Opening Line:

The body lay at the very limit of daylight, the last clear place on the stones before woods framing in the ancient adit began to peel away from the walls and pile up in moldy heaps.

My Thoughts:

Buckle up, Readers, and prepare yourselves for Sporror galore!

Erin is ostensibly writing a piece for a travel a magazine when she visits a town in the foothills of Mt. Hood with a group of friends and acquaintances for a rafting trip. But she and her bestie Hari have an ulterior motive – they are investigating as part of their research for a podcast episode addressing the numerous mysterious disappearances in the area over the past several years. Erin’s own brother is one of those missing people. At the same time, readers are treated to occasional chapters from the POV of various lifeforms that have been infected by something called the Strangeness, all becoming various extensions of some central creeptastic intelligence.

There were a lot of characters introduced all in a short span of time, but Erin is the only one we learn about beyond surface level, and she is our only POV character beyond the chapters of the Strange. The other characters probably could have used a little more delving into; some side characters such as the police deputy and the Steadman brothers felt especially thin. On the other hand, the idea of the Strangeness was a super compelling one, and I thought its origins and history were really neat.

The pacing in this book is not quite perfect. It doesn’t lag at all, but rather somewhere around 66% or so things ratchet up from 0 to 60 suddenly, and then readers are just hit over and over again with some truly wild and grisly things happening with little lulls in between each crazy encounter.

Some of my all time favorite books are parasitic fungal horror, and while I enjoyed this story, it wasn’t quite to the same degree as those others. Perhaps because the tension and dread were a little less insidious and more in your face? I’m not sure I can explain the exact reason, but overall I still found this to be a 4 star read and think it’s a decent addition to the subgenre. A creepy as heck tale that keeps the reader engaged from start to finish.

Much thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Book Review: PORT ANNA by Libby Buck

| Jessica Crawford

Port Anna by Libby Buck is a 352 page standalone debut novel published by Simon & Schuster in 2025.

Genre:

Contemporary Fiction, Women’s Fiction

Opening Line:

A mountain of thick, dark water gathered and rose, a froth of white curling at the peak.

My Thoughts:

What a nice little trip to Maine I just took right in the middle of winter! (To clarify, I read and reviewed this book in the winter, and shared my reviews to my blog and Bookstagram closer to its publication date.)

The author’s love for the New England state is abundantly clear in this book. Readers are transported to the coast, complete with a lighthouse, sailboats, and nineteenth century cottages with ceilings of knotted wood and roofs of silvered shingles.

Our main character Gwen left her hometown of Port Anna over twenty years ago in the wake of a personal tragedy. Now in her forties and suddenly without the job and partner she assumed would be hers forever, she returns with her tail tucked between her legs. In Port Anna Gwen spends time confronting her missteps, as well as reconnecting with old friends and making some new acquaintances (including a potential love interest and a runaway teen hiding out in the forest). She begins to build her life anew.

While mostly a contemporary fiction novel, there are dashes of magical realism sprinkled throughout the story as well, most prominently exhibited by the Misses – ghosts of the lesbian couple who built Gwen’s family cottage who still let their opinions on the matters in their home known by making the walls creak and the doors slam. There is also the legend of the woman lighthouse keeper who would dive into the sea to save drowning sailors, and what ultimately became of her.

Besides being transportative, this was a very healing story about meeting ones past mistakes head on and putting one foot in front of the other until one finds their way in the world once again. Much thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Book Review: THE LISTENERS by Maggie Stiefvater

| Jessica Crawford

The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater is a 400 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Viking.

Genre:

Historical Fiction, Magical Realism

Synopsis:

#1 New York Times bestselling novelist Maggie Stiefvater dazzles in this mesmerizing portrait of an irresistible heroine, an unlikely romance, and a hotel—and a world—in peril.

January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of high society’s troubles.

Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skillfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff—many of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines—to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile.

Meanwhile FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel’s walls, listening for the diplomats’ secrets. He has one of his own, which is how he knows that June’s balancing act can have dangerous consequences: the sweetwater beneath the hotel can threaten as well as heal.

June has never met a guest she couldn’t delight, but the diplomats are different. Without firing a single shot, they have brought the war directly to her. As clashing loyalties crack the Avallon’s polished veneer, June must calculate the true cost of luxury.

Opening Line:

The day the hotel changed forever began as any other.

My Thoughts:

Belief was contagious. When you believed in one intangible thing, why not a second, why not a third. If God, then why not the listeners in the water, if the listeners in the water, why not ghosts, if ghosts, why not unicorns–

Maggie Stiefvater’s adult debut is a large heaping of historical fiction with a dash of magical realism that evokes an invigorating sense of place and authentic characters.

The setting is a luxury hotel and spa in the mountains of West Virginia, where the sweetwater from the hot and cold springs is said to have restorative powers. The year is 1942 and the U.S. has recently joined in World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor when the State Department and FBI direct that the hotel guests all be checked out so that the hotel can be used to host (read: detain) a few hundred foreign nationals, diplomats and dignitaries from Axis nations. The hope is for diplomatic reciprocity – we treat these people well, and the Americans abroad will be treated well in turn until an exchange can be negotiated. And so the staff of the Avallon find themselves expected to treat the enemy to the heights of luxury.

June Hudson is the general manager of the hotel. Originally from a coal mining town in the mountains and abandoned when her mother couldn’t afford to take care of her during the Great Depression, June began working in housekeeping at the hotel but over the years was taken under the wing of the hotel’s owner and became an honorary member of the Gilfoyle family. She was groomed to take in his role after him because the two share a special ability to commune with the sweetwater. Because it turns out the water under the mountain, tinkling out of fonts all throughout the hotel, is closely tied to its success or failure.

Tucker Rye Minnick (whose name is almost always given in full each time in this book) is an FBI Agent assigned to surveilling the hotel’s new “guests” during their stay. He has a troubled history of his own in Appalachia, and the Germans, Japanese, and Italians in his charge provide him with the opportunity to pull off something that will impress the powers that be enough to save his career.

It was the historical fiction part of this story that worked best for me, plus the setting and characters. (The guest in 411 who hasn’t left her room in years! The neurodivergent child tasked with memorizing a coded message!) I was all in with these parts of the book, and they alone would have earned 5 stars from me.

What I didn’t love was the romance, which seemed completely unnecessary to me, and the fact that I never felt like the question of the sweetwater was fully answered to my satisfaction. In a system of quarter stars, these things bring my final rating down to a still commendable 4.75 stars.

Book Review: THE GHOSTWRITER by Julie Clark

| Jessica Crawford

The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark is a 328 page standalone novel published in 2025 by Sourcebooks Landmark.

Genre:

Mystery, Thriller

Synopsis:

June, 1975.

The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, Vincent, never shakes the whispers and accusations that he was the one who killed them. Decades later, the legend only grows as his career as a horror writer skyrockets.

Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her entire professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of Vincent Taylor. Now on the brink of financial ruin, she’s offered a job to ghostwrite her father’s last book. What she doesn’t know, though, is that this project is another one of his lies. Because it’s not another horror novel he wants her to write.

After fifty years of silence, Vincent Taylor is finally ready to talk about what really happened that night in 1975.

Opening Line:

“I know what your dad did.”

My Thoughts:

This is an engaging mystery told through the lens of a ghostwriter penning the memoir of an unreliable narrator and trying to puzzle out the truth about an old murder case. It’s written in the first person present tense, and chapters rotate through three POVs in two timelines – Olivia in the present time, and her father and aunt in the months leading up to the murders in 1975. There’s a lot of nostalgia for those who grew up in the seventies here! We see a lot of flashbacks (and actual video footage from fourteen year old Aunt Poppy’s Super 8 camera) displaying family life and social issues of the era.

Did I side eye some of the details in this book? Sure. Did I remain hooked to the unfolding story anyway? You bet!

I’m beginning to realize that once you lie about your past, you wall yourself off from the present. From the people that care about you.

Book Review: OF MONSTERS AND MAINFRAMES by Barbara Truelove

| Jessica Crawford

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove is a 407 page standalone novel published by Bindery Books through Ezeekat Press in 2025.

Genre:

Science Fiction, Fantasy

Synopsis:

Spaceships aren’t programmed to seek revenge—but for Dracula, Demeter will make an exception.

Demeter just wants to do her shuttling humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying—and not from equipment failures, as her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they began when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all her humans.

To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter must join forces with her own team of A werewolf. An engineer built from the dead. A pharaoh with otherworldly powers. A vampire with a grudge. A fleet of cheerful spider drones. Together, this motley crew will face down the ultimate evil—Dracula.

The queer love child of pulp horror and ​classic ​sci-fi, Of Monsters and ​Mainframes ​is a dazzling, heartfelt odyssey that probes what it means to be one of society’s monsters—and explores the many types of friendship that make us human.

Opening Line:

Awaiting input…

My Thoughts:

From the laugh out loud humor to the nerve-wracking escapades, the hodgepodge group of vibrant characters to the heartening narrative threads of love and found family, this story is an absolute delight!

I hate it. I hate is as much as I hate docking systems that put zeros on the end of my name. I hate it more because it destroyed my spider drones, who were only ever polite and useful, and killed my passengers, who were neither of those things but were mine to look after. I hate it as much as I’ve ever hated anything. I hate it as much as I hate Dracula.

Demeter is the AI of a large passenger ship that shuttles people between Earth and habitation units lightyears away. She always tries her best within the confines of her programming, and it’s really not her fault that all the humans onboard are slaughtered by the ancient vampire who stowed away in a container of soil in the cargo hold before reaching their destination. Or that almost all of her next group of passengers fall at the hands (paws?) of a werewolf. But unfortunately for her, the humans don’t believe in the existence of the supernatural, and assume Demeter’s programming is faulty in some way and she has been malfunctioning.

After a few more similar encounters with the preternatural (not all of whom are necessarily enemies), Demeter winds up with a ragtag crew that, in some ways, have become family to one another. They set out for revenge on the creature who started Demeter’s downward spiral into infamy, the one that earned her the nickname of ghost ship and got her painfully optimized by the engineers of the transport company that owns her: they are going to take down Dracula.

The chapters (many of which have hilarious names – for instance, one chapter ends with the question, “Am I desperate enough to go along with it?”, and the next chapter title is, “Yes.”) cycle through several POVs throughout this book. Two of these characters are AI, and in some ways this fact along with the humorous style brought The Murderbot Diaries to mind, only in a somewhat less satisfying way as these AIs seemed a bit more anthropomorphized (i.e. Demeter’s disks shake with relief and terabytes of fear run through her wires) (also, disks in a computerized spaceship several centuries in the future?). But it was still quite entertaining.

Even though this adventurous tale has some intense moments with high stakes, it’s told in a style that had me laughing regularly. Like when Demeter says,

Agnus says she is not as smart as Isaac. I inform her this faulty assessment is likely the result of a rounding error.

or when the ship’s medical AI asks her since when she was programmed with a desire for adventure and she answers, “I’m writing the code right now”.

So we’ve got the action, adventure, and humor, but this book also delivers some really sweet messages about love, familial/platonic as well as romantic. The relationships and the lengths the characters go to for one another despite being so drastically different from one another in a multitude of ways were really very heartwarming.

“Yes,” I say. “I…I thought I was protecting my family. But I wasn’t, because I wasn’t protecting you.” “Error. I am not your fam-” “Shut up, bitch. You’re family.”

I am truly impressed with this author for producing a story that is so equally fun and touching, and I look forward to reading more of her work. Three cheers for Barbara Truelove and Of Monsters and Mainframes!

Thank you to NetGalley, Bindery Books, and Ezeekat Press for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.