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Book Review: THIS KINGDOM WILL NOT KILL ME by Ilona Andrews

| Jessica Crawford

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews is a 480 page first novel in a planned trilogy, published by Tor Books in 2026.

Genre

Fantasy

Description

Outlander meets Game of Thrones in this blockbuster new epic fantasy series from the #1 New York Times bestselling author duo Ilona Andrews.

When Maggie wakes up cold, filthy, and naked in a gutter, it doesn’t take her long to recognize Kair Toren, a city she knows intimately from the pages of the famously unfinished dark fantasy series she’s been obsessively reading and re-reading while waiting years for the final novel.

Her only tools for navigating this gritty world of rival warlords, magic, and mayhem? Her encyclopedic knowledge of the plot, the setting, and the characters’ ambitions and fates. But while she quickly discovers she cannot be killed (though many will try!), the same cannot be said for the living, breathing characters she’s coming to love—a motley band that includes a former lady’s maid, a deadly assassin, various outrageous magical creatures, and a dangerously appealing soldier. Soon, instead of trying to get home, she finds herself enmeshed in the schemes—and attentions—of dueling princes, dukes, and villains, all while trying to save them and the kingdom of Rellas from the way she knows their stories will end: in a cataclysmic war.

Opening Line

Rain drenched the city, cold and relentless.

My Thoughts

The premise of this book was so fun!

Imagine if a fan of the A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) series woke up one day IN the fantasy world of the books. Context makes it clear they are in the beginning of the first book, plotwise. They know the key players, they know the events that are to come, and they have the opportunity to try to alter the course of things. They could thwart the major villains and save their favorite characters from terrible fates!

This is what happens to Maggie, but in the world from her own favorite fantasy series. Throw in the fact that any time she dies in Rellas, she comes back to life. The author of her books never finished the series (another parallel to our example books…), and in fact he seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth. What in the world, real or fantasy, is going on here?!

Well, we won’t learn the answer to that question in this first installment, but this is a planned trilogy (hopefully to be completed one day!) On that note, though, be aware that this one does end in a way that will make you wish you had the next book already within your reach.

So this was a great story idea and I had a lot of fun reading it, but I also have to say that this is my first Ilona Andrews book and the writing, friends…well, it’s not great. It’s not terrible, but it’s not great.

One of my biggest gripes here is how they (wife and husband writing team) handle physical descriptions of characters. There are a lot of characters, and when each is first introduced, they are described in full detail in the following order: build, skin color, eye color, hair color, hair style, material and color of each and every visible item of clothing and accessory on their person. One scene featured three men entering a room, and the next four paragraphs are dedicated to listing these things off one by one for each of them. Since this happens ad nauseum, the descriptions themselves got a eyeroll-inducing as well. Three characters have sand colored skin (whichever sand that might be referring to), two with olive skin, one with dark tan skin, one with golden tan skin, one who was naturally pale but had acquired a permanent tan over the years (it doesn’t work that way), brown skin, dark brown skin, rich brown skin, russet skin, even and warm beige skin, beige skin with a peach undertone, and a deeper shade of beige skin with a cool undertone. Yikes.

Apparently Maggie pays very close attention to these details, because at one point she notes a person’s skin, hair, and eye color and immediately knows which character from the books it must be.

Other aspects of the story get infodumpy as well, as something crops up that Maggie already has full knowledge of from reading the story, and so the next few paragraphs will be an explanation of it all, like a character’s background and upbringing and the major events in their life that brought them to the point of their current attempts at political machinations, for example.

The details of the world itself also had me raising my eyebrows a bit, as it’s described as a pretty typical medieval fantasy setting, but has running faucets, lots of different types of paper, and Maggie mentions brushing her teeth (not rubbing them with powder). There’s also something weird about how they use the active voice that I can’t quite put my finger on.

To wrap up my (most major) complaints, it seemed like only one of two authors tried to interject humor in the form of referencing things like Homer Simpson backing into the bushes. Maybe it wasn’t just one of them, maybe they both added it as a reminder that our POV character is from our own modern world, but it only happened sparingly and so really stood out as not matching the overall vibe of the rest of the story. And also, I don’t think they did a great job with the romance in this book. It was very lackluster.

BUT, all that being said, nothing was egregious enough to prevent me from thoroughly enjoying the book! I do think it would benefit from some sort of character guide to reference while reading. I understand there are spoilery reasons why they can’t provide just a list of all characters, but at least something with the Great Families, their key members, and the family’s particular brand of magic would have been very helpful. This is a pretty hefty book, and by the end we saw characters brought up again one or two hundred pages after they were first introduced, and I had not recollection of who they were supposed to be.

Despite these complaints about the writing my final rating was only knocked down to 4.5 stars because I still had a ton of fun reading this story, and likely will read on in the series when the next book becomes available. Hopefully that won’t be too long of a wait!

Note: I started with the audiobook until I got my hands on the hardcover, and felt similarly about the narration as I did the writing technicals: not terrible, but not great either.

Book Review: THE CHILDREN by Melissa Albert

| Jessica Crawford
The Children by Melissa Albert is a 416 page standalone novel with a publish date of June 2, 2026

GENRE

Fantasy, Horror

DESCRIPTION

An intoxicating, haunting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, contend with the vine-like creep of legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she lives in the wooded shadow of her family’s isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of her mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where her magical adventures have made her a household name. In reality, Guinevere’s childhood isn’t the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and her older brother are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the lichen-clotted woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother’s name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family’s legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she’s spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark history lies behind their mother’s creative genius?

Wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, The Children whispers to you from the hallway outside your bedroom, lights flickering as you turn the pages of a book that didn’t seem so scary a moment ago. It’s a story for anyone who’s ever revisited an old favorite and found it cast in a darker light, the line separating magic and memory blurring as the gap widens between the authors we imagined and the people they turn out to be.

OPENING LINE

Rain lashed the windows.

MY THOUGHTS

Wow, Melissa Albert really writes the most delicious dark fairytales!

This adult novel is fantasy with horror vibes. It alternates between two timelines, one of which is in the 1990s when Guin, her brother Ennis, and their parents lived at the Farmhouse in a rural area of Vermont. Their mother, Edith Sharpe, writes five books in a bestselling children’s fantasy series, using her own children’s names and likenesses as the main characters (without their consent, mind you). The home becomes a sort of bohemian commune where other artists of all stripes and talent levels show up and stay for indefinite lengths of time. Meanwhile, the children are left to their own devices (read as: neglected). There was supposed to be a sixth and final book in the Ninth City series, but a tragedy at the Farmhouse leaves the children orphans, and Edith never writes it.

The creeping dread just beneath the surface in this part of the story is masterful. Because there is something wrong with the Farmhouse. There are all the strange carvings, the poem etched into the wall, the stifling and uneasy room their mother writes in; and while none of the adults in their lives seem to pay the children much attention, it feels like they’re always being watched by…something.

The second timeline is current day, when adult Guin has taken on the mantle of mascot for the Ninth City series, and hasn’t spoken to her brother in years. Ennis has avoided and successfully evaded her ever since the night their parents died. But now it seems he is extending an invitation to Guin to come see his newest art instillation, titled Mother. Will it be a reunion or a reckoning? Will it reveal with any more clarity the events of the night of the fire?

Oh, this was such a fun read (as long as you appreciate talented writing giving you the heebie jeebies)! I confess I didn’t 100% understand all of the particulars revealed at the end, which was a bit unsatisfying, but the vibes were ON POINT and I am so excited to keep reading whatever Albert decides to write.

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Book Review: AUNTIE HEROES (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 74)

| Jessica Crawford

Auntie Heroes is a 252 page anthology published in April 2026 by Raconteur Press.

This is a fun collection of short stories featuring little old ladies as the heroes. After all, who suspects them, or bothers to give them much thought at all? Their perceived status in society allows them to get away with quite a lot, sometimes saving the day–whether that means through espionage, monster hunting, or stopping unwanted guests from crashing a wedding.

Several, but not all of the stories, feature sci-fi/fantasy elements. I found it to be a well-written bunch. Some of my favorites were Salon and Subversion by Tuvela Thomas, Walking the Beans by Rick Cutler, Calhoun Blood by D. S. Ligon, and The Squamous Among Us by Spearman Burke.

And once again, the artwork and illustrations by Cedar Sanderson added another level of delight to this anthology.

Book Review: WOLF WORM by T. Kingfisher

| Jessica Crawford

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher is a 277 page standalone novel published March 24, 2026 by Tor Nightfire.

Genre:

Horror

Description:

Something darker than the devil stalks the North Carolina woods in Wolf Worm, a new gothic masterpiece from New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher.

The year is 1899 and Sonia Wilson is a scientific illustrator without work, prospects, or hope. When the reclusive Dr. Halder offers her a position illustrating his vast collection of insects, Sonia jumps at the chance to move to his North Carolina manor house and put her talents to use. But soon enough she finds that there are darker things at work than the Carolina woods. What happened to her predecessor, Halder’s wife? Why are animals acting so strangely, and what is behind the peculiar local whispers about “blood thiefs?”

With the aid of the housekeeper and a local healer, Sonia discovers that Halder’s entomological studies have taken him down a dark road full of parasitic maggots that burrow into human flesh, and that his monstrous experiments may grow to encompass his newest illustrator as well.

Opening Line:

The rail station was very new, the paint still bright on the lettering that read SILER STATION.

My Thoughts:

She’s done it again, folks!

This book combines two of my very favorite things to read: T. Kingfisher’s writing and parasite horror (especially of the Gothic variety).

This story is full of creepy crawlies that will make your skin shiver, but also the author’s signature strain of human warmth. Sonia Wilson is a thirty year old spinster at the turn of the nineteenth century when she takes on a job as the illustrator for a naturalist’s book cataloguing parasitic insects and their life stages. She lodges at his home in North Carolina, befriends his small staff, and enjoys walking in the woods when not using his library of specimens to make her watercolor renderings. But some of the woodland creatures, sporting botfly larvae warbles, are acting strange. Why does no one want to talk about the illustrator who came before her? And why is the padlock on the shed she stumbles across in the forest on the outside, as if to keep something in rather than out?

In the acknowledgments, Kingfisher explains she used to live near a population of squirrels that were infested with botflies, and the idea for this novel was born when she thought, “Huh. What would happen if one of those latched onto [redacted]?” And reader, the resulting story did not disappoint!

You’ll need a fairly strong stomach (or barf bucket on hand) to read this book, but I cannot recommend it enough. All the wriggling, necrophagic stars for this one!

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Book Review: HOMEBOUND by Portia Elan

| Jessica Crawford

Homebound by Portia Elan is a 304 page novel being published by Scribner on May 5, 2026.

Genre

Science Fiction, Cli-Fi

Blurb

Five interlocking lives. One beloved story. A dazzling adventure across centuries and continents in search of the things that hold us together.

It’s 1983 and Becks can’t wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. She’s nineteen, blasting her Walkman, and hiding from the fact that her beloved uncle, the only person who understood her, is dead. But she has work to do: he left her a half-finished game to complete—one last collaboration to find her way out of loneliness.

Little does she know, what Becks is making will echo far into the future and shape the lives of a scientist, a sentient automaton, and a flinty sea captain in ways she cannot imagine. All are bound together by their search for connection—and by a futuristic traveler on a mysterious mission through space.

A novel about our deep interconnectedness, Homebound is a clear-eyed, hopeful adventure into humanity’s future and capacity for love.

Opening Line

I love the way a computer program doesn’t just describe something; it is the thing.

My Thoughts

A young woman grieving the death of her uncle in the 1980s takes up the mantle of completing the video game he left unfinished. 600 years in the future, their joint creation is still impacting lives.

This book felt like a cross between Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin with I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger (and maybe just a tad of Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovzky). It’s got video game development, androids, and a bleak future on Earth after climate crises. I appreciated the themes of loneliness versus connection and the power of stories. But I felt similarly about this book as I did those others: there were things I quite liked about all of them, but taken as a whole just weren’t a home run for this reader. I’m not sure if it’s because I failed to feel much of a connection with the characters, or if it was the format that didn’t work for me (two timelines, a gameplay log, and emails). But I do think there will be readers who it’s a perfect fit for, and I think especially anyone who enjoyed the other books mentioned above should consider picking this one up.

Thank you to Scribner and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.

Book Review: HOW TO BE OKAY WHEN NOTHING IS OKAY by Jenny Lawson

| Jessica Crawford

How to Be Okay When Nothing is Okay by Jenny Lawson is a 288 page book published by Penguin Life in March of 2026.

Genre:

Nonfiction, Self-Help, Humor

Description:

Warm, insightful, and witty, the first book of advice from New York Times bestselling author Jenny Lawson—aka the Bloggess

Jenny Lawson is full of contradictions. She’s a celebrated author but battles self-doubt, paralysis, and anxiety. She’s an award-winning humorist but struggles with treatment-resistant depression. The questions people most often ask her are, “How do you do it? How do you keep going even when it feels impossible? How do you keep creating?” This book is her answer.

In How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, Jenny shares more than one hundred humorous, heartfelt, and genuine tools and tricks that she relies on to keep her going even when her brain isn’t working properly due to depression, anxiety, and ADHD. She also offers tips to stay passionate and focused on creative endeavors, especially when everything around you is saying to give up.

With chapters like “Wash Your Brain More Than You Wash Your Bra” (sleep, you beautiful human), “Working on Easy Mode Is Still Working” (asking for accommodations is okay!), “Celebrate Good Times, Come On!” (make it a habit to celebrate the good things), and many more, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay is a balm and companion, reminding us all that we are not alone. It’s for anyone who struggles with self-doubt, guilt, motivation, and mental blocks and wants to rekindle their passion for creating. Funny, simple, empathetic, and full of hope, it will encourage you not to just survive but to find and curate joy in the face of difficult times.

My Thoughts:

While I have enjoyed Lawson’s other works (memoirs and coloring book) more, this collection of essays with actionable tips will be a wonderful resource to flip open during a bout of anxiety/depression/self-doubt/etc. It features her trademark humor sprinkled throughout discussions of serious topics. Oh, and her drawings, too!

I preordered my copy of this book from Nowhere Bookshop, the independent bookstore in San Antonio, Texas owned by the author herself. My version came signed with a page of silly stickers. Also a cutout of the delightfully absurd figure on the book’s cover, who is not quite the right shape to use as a bookmark, but who I employed in that way anyway since he brought me joy. I highlighted several lines and passages throughout the book—those that spoke to my own personal experiences, the ones with tips I think my children might possibly be able to make use of, and the ones that made me laugh.

If you have ever struggled with your mental wellbeing (probably everyone) and you like to laugh (hopefully most people), then you definitely need to check out Lawson’s work, even her social media pages. She is, as author John Scalzi says in his blurb for this book, an actual national treasure!

Book Review: HOW TO CHEAT YOUR OWN DEATH by Kristen Perrin

| Jessica Crawford

How to Cheat Your Own Death by Kristen Perrin is the third book in the Castle Knoll Files series of murder mysteries. It’s a 336 page novel to be published by Dutton on April 28, 2026.

Genre

Mystery

Description

From the gritty streets of 1960s Soho to the lofty galleries of present-day West London, two interlocking mysteries decades apart unfold in this latest instalment in the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Castle Knoll Murder Mystery series

Some secrets are deadlier than others

1968: Frances Adams is loving her new London life, and she’s stepped into a world of glamour thanks to her new friend, Vera Huntington–a magnetic socialite as mysterious as she is provocative. Vera dances around London like she owns it, taking Frances with her.

Present day: When Annie Adams heads to London to visit her famous artist mother, Laura, the last thing she expects to find is a dead body. Least of all for it to be Laura’s new protégée, left in an alley with her heart surgically removed from her chest.

Annie is no stranger to murder–after all, she’s solved a few already. And something about this case feels familiar. She’s read about one just like it in the journals of her late great aunt Frances, whose friend Vera was killed in the 1960s in the exact same way.

As Annie investigates, threats pile up on Laura’s doorstep, and it soon becomes clear that she’s next. With her mother’s life on the line, can Annie find the killer before it’s too late?

Opening Line

The neon lights of Soho bounced off the autumn puddles, their reflections half interrupted by the steady droplets of freezing rain.

My Thoughts

I think this was my favorite entry in the Castle Knoll Files so far!

Or, possibly, I now just have a greater appreciation for skilled writing and plots not riddled with holes when it comes to my reading of mysteries.

Either way, How to Cheat Your Own Death, book three in the series, is an engaging murder mystery that once again alternates between Annie Adams investigating with Rowan Crane in current times and the journal entries of her Great Aunt Frances that are tied to the case in some way. This one takes place in London, where Annie’s famous artist mother has welcomed her absent father back into their lives and has also taken on an apprentice in an uncharacteristic move. Laura Adams begins receiving threats in the form of animal hearts left on her doorstep, and then someone turns up murdered and dumped in her trash receptacle. As Annie and Crane work to figure out what happened, they also puzzle through what it might have to do with Frances’s history with a wealthy family in the 1960s, a murdered socialite, and a local art gallery.

I was intrigued with the threads of story around the paintings and Frances’s time as a university psychology student. There are some fascinating characters here, as well as some truly awful ones. There is also some movement on the romance front in this installment.

This book kept me up late to continue plowing through its pages to learn the truth. I will happily read any more that follow in the series!

My gratitude to Dutton and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Book Review: YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke

| Jessica Crawford

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is a standalone debut novel published by Knopf on April 7, 2026.

Blurb:

A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

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.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

Opening Line:

This is the last day of the life I imagined for myself.

My Thoughts:

America hates angry women. The Lord hates angry women. You hate angry women. Do not be an angry woman.

Except I am angry. I am very, very angry.

How to categorize this book? I wouldn’t say it fits neatly into any one genre, but I think the closest would be literary thriller. I found it exceedingly interesting, in a very angst-ridden and kind of icky way. I was super engaged and tore through it at a good clip, but goodness are these characters hateful!

[People like her] couldn’t possess a truly principled stance even if someone injected it straight into their faces.

Natalie Heller Mills has the perfect life for a traditional Christian woman – or at least, on Instagram she does. Her carefully curated social media presence shows a devoted wife and mother of five (with a sixth on the way), living on a farm in Idaho and eschewing many aspects of modernity in the name of providing her family with a healthy, all natural and organic lifestyle. Behind the scenes, she in fact has two nannies taking care of the kids, migrant workers running the farm, pesticides and modern appliances hidden from the camera, and a troubled marriage.

That was what they taught you in the forums: to be suspicious of everything. I’d watched [him] grow suspicious of schools, and then of the skies, and then of the world–and now, I realized with surprise, he was becoming suspicious of me.

Then one morning, Natalie wakes up in a home that looks similar to but different from her house, with a family that looks similar to but different from her own. There is no evidence of modernity whatsoever, her husband is the manly head of the household she had given up on him ever being, and they are living what seems to be the actual lives of early nineteenth century pioneers on America’s Western front. Is this a test from God? Is it some new reality show pushing the boundaries? Has she really been transported in time to live the kind of life she had falsely been claiming to live for all of her online followers?

The story is told with alternating timelines, when things are coming to a head in Natalie’s world of Instagram fame, and when she finds herself lost in what seems to be an entirely different world. Pretty much every adult character in this book is terrible, just the worst! But this allows the story to reflect on some key issues in today’s world, making for a lot of compelling social commentary.

Liars. Every Christian woman I ever met had been a big fat lying bastard. Lord have mercy on their big fat lying bastard souls.

I was all in for learning more about Natalie’s story and understanding what was really going on behind the scenes of her life, but for readers who require likeable characters to root for, be forewarned that you won’t find any here! Between all the people being horrible to one another and the fact that the final reveal felt a bit silly to me, I’m calling this a 4.5 star read for me. As long as you don’t count yourself among the group of readers mentioned above, I do recommend picking this very compulsive book up. And the Letter to the Reader included in the beginning explains that a movie adaption produced by and starring Anne Hathaway is already in the works, so stay tuned for that!

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the eARC in exchange for my honest review!

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Book Review: MAD SCIENCE: BITS AND PIECES

| Jessica Crawford

Mad Science: Bits and Pieces, edited by Dave Freer, is a 251 page anthology of science fiction short stories published March 11, 2026 by Raconteur Press.

My Thoughts:

This is a collection of short stories submitted by authors prompted to write something that fits the theme “Mad Science: Bits and Pieces”, however they chose to interpret that.

This was a well done batch of stories! Featuring a range of experiments from genetically engineered and neurally modified animals to cobbled-together inventions that don’t work as expected, these were fun science fiction vignettes. The stakes are quite high in most of them, and several utilize elements of humor in the telling. Personal favorites include UNCLE EUAN: SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED by Malory, SONG OF THE SEA BEAST by Bret Nelson, and PAST AND PRESENT by Nate Stone.

Overall the writing is decent, the illustrations add a factor of interest, and the faux advertisements sprinkled throughout are delightful. Well done, everyone!

Thank you to Raconteur Press for the eBook in exchange for my unbiased review.