Book Reviews

Book Review: A LETTER TO THE LUMINOUS DEEP by Sylvie Cathrall

| Jessica Crawford

A Letter to the Luminous Deep: The Sunken Archive: Book One by Sylvie Cathrall is a 400 page novel published in 2024 by Orbit.

Genre:

Cozy Fantasy Romance/Mystery

Opening Line:

Dear Scholar Clel,

Instead of reading further, I hope you will return this letter to its envelope or, better yet, crumple it into an abstract shape that might look quite at home on a coral reef.

Synopsis:

A charming fantasy set in an underwater world with magical academia and a heartwarming penpal romance, perfect for fans of  A Marvellous Light  and  Emily Wilde’s Encylopaedia of Faeries.

A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. The letters they share are filled with passion, at first for their mutual interests, and then, inevitably, for each other.

Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.’s home, and she and Henerey vanish.

A year later, E.’s sister Sophy, and Henerey’s brother Vyerin, are left to solve the mystery, piecing together the letters, sketches and field notes left behind—and learn what their siblings’ disappearance might mean for life as they know it.

Inspired, immersive, and full of heart, this charming epistolary tale is an adventure into the depths of a magical sea and the limits of the imagination from a marvelous debut voice.

My Thoughts:

This epistolary novel is told through a formal academic yet delightful tone, and is full of fantastical mystery and cozy romance. There is queer and disability representation, which is great. Although there is a romance, there is no steamy content, and there is no violence. The overall story was intriguing, but the execution was kind of a miss for me.

This book is comprised entirely of letters, journal entries, excerpts, reports and such. And while the writing is amusing and did in fact have me laughing out loud at times, every character has the exact same voice. Everyone sounds absolutely indistinguishable from anyone else in their manner of speech…er, writing. Though the ideas behind the story are enchanting, with this voice problem and the relatively slow and plodding pace, it wound up being a bit boring to get through. I had to talk myself into picking it back up to read on.

And then of course it doesn’t really end because it turns out it is the first book in a planned (series? duology?), a fact I was not aware of until after I had it in my hands.

I generally don’t like comps because they so often disappoint, as reading is such a personal and unique experience for each reader, but I personally agree with the comparison between this book and Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, tone-wise, although I myself enjoyed the latter much more.

Epistolary, cozy academic romance, and underwater sci-fi/fantasy mystery are all terms that appeal to me, but in the end the detractions outweighed the delights for me, and I don’t think I will bother picking up the sequel.

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Book Review: THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore

| Jessica Crawford

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore is a 496 page novel published by Riverhead Books in 2024.

Genre: Literary Mystery

Opening Line:

The bed is empty.

Synopsis:

When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

My Thoughts:

This character-driven mystery was super engaging, managing to be both propulsive and emotionally resonant. It’s a missing persons mystery (two, actually, and the question of whether or not they’re related) with a generous helping of Rich People Behaving Badly. I don’t know that it really does anything that new or different, but a short way into reading this book I found I didn’t want to set it down, and finished it all in what I think was basically two sittings!

Rich people, thought Judy–she thought this then, and she thinks it now–generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.

The story takes place on a wilderness preserve in the Adirondack Mountains in New York State, where characters have learned a healthy respect for the forest, its bounty as well as its dangers (AKA it’s features as well as it’s…bugs. Ha!) Chapters follow a rotation of several people: the missing teen’s bunkmate, their camp counselor, the investigator looking into her disappearance, and the mother of the missing children. The timeline also jumps back and forth from the 1950s, 1961, 1973, and the summer months of 1975, and the author makes this clear through the use of a header at the beginning of each chapter. I think Alice’s chapters hit me the hardest–how small her husband made her feel, the purity of her love for Bear.

Only with her son did she have a connection that existed outside any hierarchy of authority. She loved him plainly, without condition or complexity. And she believed he loved her the same way.

I’m going to miss being with these characters. I’d say there is an excellent chance this book will wind up as one of my top ten reads of the year!

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Book Review: STILL THE SUN by Charlie N. Holmberg

| Jessica Crawford

Still the Sun by Charlie N. Holmberg is a 299 page novel published by 47North in 2024.

Genres: Fantasy (primary), science fiction, romance

Opening Line:

Something is missing.

Synopsis:

An ancient machine holds the secrets of a distant world’s past for two intimate strangers in the latest romantic fantasy adventure by Wall Street Journal bestselling author Charlie N. Holmberg.

Pell is an engineer and digger by trade—unearthing and repairing the fascinating artifacts left behind by the mysterious Ancients who once inhabited the sunbaked planet of Tampere. She’ll do anything to help the people of her village survive and to better understand the secrets of what came before.

Heartwood and Moseus are keepers of a forbidding tower near the village of Emgarden. Inside are the remnants of complex machines the likes of which Pell has never seen. Considering her affinity for Ancient tech, the keepers know Pell is their only hope of putting the pieces of these metal puzzles together and getting them running. The tower’s other riddle is Heartwood himself. He is an enigma, distant yet protective, to whom Pell is inexplicably drawn.

Pell’s restoration of this broken behemoth soon brings disturbing visions—and the discovery that her relationship to it could finally reveal the origins of the towers’ strange keepers and the unfathomable reason the truth has been hidden from her.

My Thoughts:

Well wasn’t this just a wonderful fantasy/sci-fi story! I was a little nervous going into this because I felt a bit lukewarm about the other book I’ve read by this author, but this was quite good!

Our POV character Pell is a short, dark, strong woman with a passion for tinkering with unearthed Ancient tech. She lives in a small community with no children, in a desert, next to an impenetrable pink crystal wall and an inaccessible tower, where the sun remains in the same place in the sky at all times, although there are cycles when a tone is heard throughout the world and mists descend. As you learn about this world she lives in you will have no idea what is going on, but just sit back and relax and all will be explained in good time!

One day a tall, pale stranger (there are no strangers on this world!) shows up at Pell’s door asking for her help. He and his companion have access to the tower and it’s filled with broken machines that they desperately need functional once more. Can she figure out how to repair them? While working on the machines, Pell begins to experience visions that feel like they might be hidden memories…She has fixed these machines before.

As I said, for a good portion of this book you have no idea what’s going on, and I got pretty annoyed with Pell and her associates at times (SO MANY TIMES she says, “I need answers, and you have them!” and they refuse to tell her anything or even explain that there is a good reason why they can’t tell her, so she gets angry and has a tantrum, over and over again ad nauseum). Additionally, I lost count of the number of times a character smiling is described as “his/her lip ticked”. And all the details about the machine repairs made my eyes glaze over.

But once we finally get some answers about what this world is and what is truly going on, it was absolutely epic. I will spoiler tag the rest only because when you start this book you’re supposed to be as clueless as Pell, but it was really quite wonderful. SPOILER, BEWARE! You’ve got full lore about different types of gods fighting a war against Ruin, and a plan to actually halt a planet from turning in order to imprison the enemy and stop him/it from destroying, well, everything. And demigods diminished by tendrils of the void. Epic! END SPOILER

I found this story to be unique and interesting and pretty rad once revealed in its entirety. I will now gladly read more of this author’s work!

Note: there is a romance, but any steaminess that happens is fade to black and not explicitly on the page. And if you’re reading this book BECAUSE you like romance, just know that the falling in love bits already happened before this book starts (and were just forgotten for…reasons I cannot reveal without spoiling things). As far as violent content, there is one pretty mild physical confrontation.

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Book Review: MARY: AN AWAKENING OF TERROR by Nat Cassidy

| Jessica Crawford

Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy is a 405 page novel published by Tor Nightfire in 2022.

Genre: Horror

Opening Line:

There’s a corpse in the bathtub.

Synopsis:

Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.

But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.

Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.

Then the killings begin again.

Mary’s definitely going to find herself.

My Thoughts:

“Don’t call yourself crazy. That’s a word people use to make you small. Don’t do it for them.”

Holy moly, this book is bananas, but in the best way!

Normally I much prefer spooky supernatural horror to gory horror, but although this book is capital G Gruesome, there is so much more to it. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything quite like it!

Mary is coming up on her fiftieth birthday and she’s not doing so great. Twice in this book she visits a male doctor and tells them each about the insomnia, the panic attacks–she even tells one of them the full truth, that she can’t look into a mirror without seeing her face in the reflection bubble up and burst in putrefication. Both doctors respond with, “And when was your last period?”

Due to an unfortunate series of events, Mary finds herself making the trip back to the isolated desert town she was born in, the town that was terrorized by a serial killer until he was killed by police nearly fifty years before. And then the killings start again.

You might like this book if you like unreliable narrators, vengeful spirits, true crime podcasts, and cults. You might like this book if you like your horror with a side of the absurd to surprise a laugh out of you now and then. You might like this book if you’re familiar with the nightmare that is perimenopause. You might like this book if you cheered when Neville Longbottom finally stood up for himself, but even moreso if your response to Stephen King’s Carrie was, “Good for her.”

Just bear in mind there is a whole lot of grisly subject matter here. If, like me, you’re able to look past that to all the amazing things about this story, then buckle in and get ready for one wild ride!

This book includes no steamy content, but all of the explicit on-page violence.

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Book Review: MIDDLETIDE by Sarah Crouch

| Jessica Crawford

Middletide is Sarah Crouch‘s 288 page debut novel published by Atria books in 2024.

Genre: Literary Mystery

Opening Line:

Gray foam slapped the bow of the Crestliner as it zipped north across the still waters of Puget Sound.

Synopsis:

In this gripping and intensely atmospheric debut, disquiet descends on a small town after the suspicious death of a beautiful young doctor, with all clues pointing to the reclusive young man who abandoned the community in chase of big city dreams but returned for the first love he left behind. Perfect for fans of All Good People Here and Where the Crawdads Sing

One peaceful morning, in the small, Puget Sound town of Point Orchards, the lifeless body of Dr. Erin Landry is found hanging from a tree on the property of prodigal son and failed writer, Elijah Leith. Sheriff Jim Godbout’s initial investigation points to an obvious suicide, but upon closer inspection, there seem to be clues of foul play when he discovers that the circumstances of the beautiful doctor’s death were ripped straight from the pages of Elijah Leith’s own novel.

Out of money and motivation, thirty-three-year-old Elijah returns to his empty childhood home to lick the wounds of his futile writing career. Hungry for purpose, he throws himself into restoring the ramshackle cabin his father left behind and rekindling his relationship with Nakita, the extraordinary girl from the nearby reservation whom he betrayed but was never able to forget.

As the town of Point Orchards turns against him, Elijah must fight for his innocence against an unexpected foe who is close and cunning enough to flawlessly frame him for murder in this scintillating literary thriller that seeks to uncover a case of love, loss, and revenge.

My Thoughts:

Sarah Crouch’s debut novel Middletide is ostensibly a mystery, with a love story to boot. Chapters alternate timelines, from 1994 when the small Washington town’s doctor is found hanging in the forest, to a time period stretching from 1973 up until that event. (I honestly couldn’t say for sure why the author chose to set the main thrust of her story in 1994. Was it because long distance communication and the maintaining of relationships would have been more difficult? To highlight isolation and loneliness?) When Elijah left for San Francisco to try to make it as a novelist, he broke Nakita’s heart. Years later, after failing to realize his dream, Elijah makes his way back to Point Orchards and becomes a homesteader. Can he convince Nakita to give him a second chance? And what do these things have to do with the future hanging death of Erin Landry?

While the mystery was decent, the procedural aspects of it were very hard to swallow. Law enforcement and the court did things I found very hard to believe. I did like many of the characters in this story, and the romance overall was pretty okay, other than a few times when Elijah really had me cringing at his behavior (e.g. his condescending ultimatum to Nakita on New Year’s Eve). The writing on the sentence level was fine, if a bit simple.

What I thought this book did BEST was create a vivid sense of place (a small town and American Indian reservation in the Pacific Northwest), and portray the sense of pride and satisfaction one can take in supporting oneself off the land from the fruits of their labor.

So overall this was a decent read, although it was mostly the vibes I appreciated moreso than the details of the story.

As far as steamy, there is only kissing in this book; in regards to violence, there are just the details of the investigation into a death by hanging that happened off-page.

I have devised a rating system for sexual and violent content for when I review books. Here are the keys:

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Book Review: A MOST AGREEABLE MURDER by Julia Seales

| Jessica Crawford

A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales, is a 300+ page debut novel published in 2023 by Random House.

Genre:

Cozy mystery/historical fiction with a hint of romance and heaps of humor

Opening Line:

In the English countryside there was a small township called Swampshire, comprised of several lovely mansions and one disgusting swamp.

Synopsis:

When a wealthy bachelor drops dead at a ball, a young lady takes on the decidedly improper role of detective in this action-packed debut comedy of manners and murder.

Feisty, passionate Beatrice Steele has never fit the definition of a true lady, according to the strict code of conduct that reigns in Swampshire, her small English township–she is terrible at needlework, has absolutely no musical ability, and her artwork is so bad it frightens people. Nevertheless, she lives a perfectly agreeable life with her marriage-scheming mother, prankster father, and two younger sisters– beautiful Louisa and forgettable Mary. But she harbors a dark secret: She is obsessed with the true crime cases she reads about in the newspaper. If anyone in her etiquette-obsessed community found out, she’d be deemed a morbid creep and banished from respectable society forever.

For her family’s sake, she’s vowed to put her obsession behind her. Because eligible bachelor Edmund Croaksworth is set to attend the approaching autumnal ball, and the Steele family hopes that Louisa will steal his heart. If not, Martin Grub, their disgusting cousin, will inherit the family’s estate, and they will be ruined or, even worse, forced to move to France. So Beatrice must be on her best behavior . . . which is made difficult when a disgraced yet alluring detective inexplicably shows up to the ball.

Beatrice is just holding things together when Croaksworth drops dead in the middle of a minuet. As a storm rages outside, the evening descends into a frenzy of panic, fear, and betrayal as it becomes clear they are trapped with a killer. Contending with competitive card games, tricky tonics, and Swampshire’s infamous squelch holes, Beatrice must rise above decorum and decency to pursue justice and her own desires–before anyone else is murdered.

My Thoughts:

This is a delightfully humorous Regency era locked room mystery! I agree with the comparison to the Bridgerton TV show crossed with an Agatha Christie novel, plus some hilarious ridiculousness added for flavor.

Miss Beatrice Steele and her sisters are expected to make advantageous marriages. There are very strict rules of decorum in Swampshire, England, and unfortunately, Beatrice’s interest in reading about murder investigations is quite explicitly forbidden in The Lady’s Guide to etiquette. She is therefore delighted when, one stormy evening at a ball at Stabmort Park, a guest is murdered. Here is her chance to conduct her own investigation while seeming helpful rather than morbid! The investigation is a twisty one, as it seems there are multiple members of Swampshire society hiding their own unseemly secrets.

This was a good mystery story, but the best part is the humor! From Mr. Steele’s constant silly pranks at the most inopportune times, to the frequent allusions to the fact that Beatrice’s youngest sister might be a werewolf without ever addressing it head on, and the explanation that no one else ever attended Miss Bolton’s theatrical productions because all of Swampshire happened to misplace their invitations in their fireplaces – this book was a hoot! The letters, article excerpts, play scripts and other little bits in between chapters are also a nice touch.

There is a bit of a romance burgeoning in this story. At the end of the book is a sneak peek at Book 2, which is the first I learned that this was going to be a series – this book could work perfectly well as a standalone, only the romance has not yet come to full fruition. I, for one, look forward to reading more about Beatrice and Inspector Vivek Drake simultaneously antagonizing and growing to care for one another as they solve crimes together in London.

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Book Review: I CHEERFULLY REFUSE by Leif Enger

| Jessica Crawford

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger is a 336 hardcover standalone novel published April 2, 2024 by Grove Press.

Genres: Dystopian, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Opening Line:

Here at the beginning it must be said the End was on everyone’s mind.

The Synopsis: Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of Rainy, an aspiring musician setting sail on Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. An endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, he seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. After encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, he eventually lands to find an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, a crumbled infrastructure, and a lawless society. As his guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his wake.

My Thoughts:

This meditative dystopian story is brimming with gorgeous prose (and also a fair number of instances of turns of phrase I did not understand, prompting me to wonder if the author was not American–but it turns out that is not the case). In a bleak near future with collapsed infrastructure, a U.S. headed by a proudly illiterate president, and more and more people choosing to shuffle off this mortal coil in search of something better, Rainy and Lark have managed to make a happy life for themselves. When they let a young man board in their home, trouble follows right behind him. Rainy finds himself on the lam in a sailboat on a capricious Lake Superior. As he grieves for the life and love lost to him and attempts to evade those who would do him harm, he encounters numerous strange characters, along with a girl who needs him (and vice versa) more than either would like to admit.

It’s taken me all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.

But beyond the beautiful writing and the likable main character who was easy to root for, my overall feeling while reading this book was one of melancholy. So even though I appreciated the author’s skill with words (the main villain is described as a “relentless hellhound and necrotic Adonis”!), how glad am I that I set sail with Rainy on his journey? I’m still not sure myself. 3.75 stars

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AAPI Heritage Month Reading

| Jessica Crawford

It’s AAPI Heritage Month! Here is a stack of books by Asian American and Pacific Islander authors that I’ve greatly enjoyed, plus my current listen on audio (How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, which I am loving) and a book in my TBR I have on deck (A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal).

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a science fiction epistolary novella featuring time travel and a queer romance, and was published in 2019. It won Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and Goodreads Choice awards. I read and rated it before I began the habit of writing up reviews on every book I read, so I don’t have my personal thoughts on this one, but I remember being pretty blown away by it. Here is the synopsis:

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.

Chlorine by Jade Song is a young adult contemporary fiction novel featuring body horror a la mermaid, published in 2023. I did post my thoughts on this book here in this blog before, but here they are again:

A classic trait of girlhood – forever confusing your desires with that of an older man’s.

Wow!

This book is a little bit like if you crossed The Vegetarian with The Art of Starving. It’s Young Adult contemporary fiction (LGBTQIA+) about Ren Yu, who has loved mermaids ever since she was a little girl. She took to the water right away herself and now swims competitively on her school’s cutthroat swim team. As one of the school’s top swimmers, she has a parasitic relationship with her touchy-feely, quick-to-anger coach, Jim. She and her teammates follow very specific dietary protocols that vacillate between pasta parties and restricting to snacking on small portions of protein throughout the day. Her father leaves to return home to China, she suffers a concussion that threatens her athletic career, and her family expects her to get into an Ivy League school.

Amidst all this stress from a human life catering to human sensibilities and values, Ren Yu experiences an epiphany: she’s not actually a human after all, but has always been a mermaid herself. She is not afraid to take matters into her own hands in order to complete the transformation for her to transcend to her true form.

Star athletes had to be delusional enough to think they could withstand physics and gravity enough to fly up onto the first-place podium and shine with the sheer force of athletic ability; there was nothing more bold than a star, after all, visible with the human naked eye despite its death eons ago.

There were only a couple of things I struggled with in this book. One was the author’s descriptions of being a menstruating woman. If someone’s periods were as Ren Yu’s are described, they should definitely tell their healthcare provider (although, over the course of this book, Ren Yu does learn to not trust in the competence of any medical professionals). And the fact that it took two hours for her mother to teach her how to insert a tampon? And the blood smeared all over the bathroom stall walls and her teammates hands? The trauma of an IUD insertion? I don’t know, maybe this author has just had vastly different experiences with these things than I have, but also I think Ren Yu was supposed to have extreme experiences to assist her in coming to the realization that being a mermaid would be vastly superior to being a human woman. One other part that made me want to gag was two characters getting freaky next to the bathroom where the guy just took a dump and now everything smells like his poop and he asks the girl, “Can you guess what I had to eat?” And then they commence to grind on each other and make out (barf!)

But besides those things, I thought this was a great novel about how the mind can attempt to deal with the pressures and traumas of being an adolescent human.

TW: body dysmorphia, sexual assault

Published in 2018, The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan is another young adult contemporary fiction novel dealing with mental health, this time tied to the grieving process. Sadly, my Goodreads review of this one is basically saying that I forgot to write a review while the details were fresh in my mind, but I do remember that I LOVED this book. Here were my thoughts, such as I could recall at the time:

“Oh, I haven’t written a review for this yet? Well for now suffice it to say there are many haunting and lovely things in this story of a girl who loses her mother to depression, goes to Taiwan to meet her grandparents, and undergoes some fantastical experiences while under the influence of grief and insomnia.”

As mentioned above, I have yet to read A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal, but I have it in my physical TBR and plan to read it soon. For now all I can comment on is that gorgeous cover!

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo is historical fantasy based on Chinese folklore that just came out earlier this year. Again, I posed a review of this book on this blog previously, but in case you missed that, here it is:

An emotional and intriguing tale incorporating elements of Chinese folklore, presented as historical fiction with a side of magical realism.

Chapters alternate between two POVs. Snow’s chapters are told in first person past tense (presented as her diary entries), Bao’s in third person present. Both were equally fascinating, although I did at times take issue with being pulled from one storyline at a particularly good part to shift back to the other. But chapters were never super long, so you never have to wait long to switch back.

Snow is a fox, the kind that can take the form of a human. Once she planned on making the thousand-year journey, a morally refining spiritual pilgrimage, with her mate. But after the greed and cruelty of humans shatters their world, she sets out on a mission of vengeance instead.

Meanwhile, Bao is an older gentleman who has had the ability to hear when someone is lying ever since his childhood nanny prayed to a fox spirit for him. Using his talent, he has become a freelance investigator of sorts. When he is tasked with discovering the identity of a woman found frozen to death in an alleyway, he finds himself on a path that seems to be leading him ever-closer to the subject of a lifelong fixation of his: foxes.

I really liked the unique and fully fleshed characters in this book. The mythological elements added a very nice mysterious and enchanting touch (what is just superstition, and what is something more?). But what resonanted the most with me was the story of grief, and the changes people go through as they process it. I love how the Yangsze Choo’s novels always feature this beautiful mix of magical and moving.

This was a great book, but I think The Ghost Bride by this same author is probably my favorite of her works so far.

I am currently listening to How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu on audio. Published in 2022, it’s dystopian science fiction composed of interconnected stories about a near future that is all too believable. I am loving it, even if it is rather depressing so far! But since I haven’t finished it and written up final thoughts yet, I will just share the synopsis here:

Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter’s research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.

Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.

Please feel free to share here some of your favorite AAPI authors and books!

Book Review: 2024 HIGH CALIBER AWARDS

| Jessica Crawford

This is a collection of the winning entries to a science fiction/fantasy/military novella contest, published by Cannon Publishing (J.F. Holmes), with writing from Kevin Harris, Sam Rob, Brian Gifford, SC Visel, K.M. Sykes, Tim Hanlon, Doug Goodall, J.P. Staszak, and John M. Campbell.

One of the authors is a coworker of mine, and an all around great person, and so I purchased this anthology to read his work, but the quality of writing across the board was great!

Each story here was either a 3 or 4 star read for me. If some of them were turned into longer works I might rate them even higher – the shorter form just doesn’t always work for me personally, and although these meet the word count for novellas, they just felt a bit more like short stories to me, giving readers a snapshot of life in the imagined worlds rather than a complete and fully fleshed-out story arc. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that format, I just find it’s harder to wow me with it.

There were two entries that I wound up skipping, but again it was a personal taste thing, not a quality thing. One had a very interesting premise but the entire story was the details of a single battle, and as a reader (and even while watching movies), I find nothing more boring than that. But obviously that’s me, and if you found yourself picking up this anthology because of the “military” bit in the description, then clearly there is a good chance you will feel differently!

But overall I really enjoyed these stories of monks, trolls, alien invasions, and dark magic. There is a lot of talent on display here, and these authors are worth keeping an eye on for sure. Bravo, everyone!

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