Reviews and Comments

The way we grow up sets our definitions of what “normal” is. Childhood prepares us for the way we interpret and react to the world around us: with fear, with enthusiasm, with curiosity, with anger, etc. In Love is a Burning Thing, Nina St. Pierre takes us into a childhood where constant motion was normal, with a mother who saw plots and divinity everywhere, when a young girl had to be the parent as often as not. St. Pierre’s long look back is full of questions about mental illness, faith, responsibility, and (maybe) forgiveness...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

There’s a floating aphorism about everyone fighting a battle we know nothing about. This has never been more true in the case of Vesper Wright, the protagonist of Rachel Harrison’s hair-raising novel, Black Sheep. Four years before we meet her, Vesper left her family, friends, and community to scrape together an independent life as a waitress at a TGIF clone of a restaurant...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Anna Noyes’s The Blue Maiden is a strange book, about a strange pair of sisters. Before we meet the Silasdottir sisters, Noyes shows us the darkest chapter in the history of Berggrund Island. In 1675, a priest manufactured a witch hunt, leading to the death of dozens of women. One of the few survivors only avoided being murdered because she was pregnant. Her descendant is Silas, the father of Ulrika and Beata Silasdottir...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Charlie Parker returns in The Instruments of Darkness, by John Connolly, the twenty-first book in the series. Parker has been bruised and battered by his work as a private investigator, but he can’t stop when there’s a chance that he can take a measure of evil out of the world. Evil is absolutely real for Parker. He can sense the presence of supernatural evil when it begins to infect our world. It’s a wonder Parker can still joke. This entry in the series sees Parker taking on two evils: a child murderer and a pack of neo-Nazis...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Baroness Sylvie Devereux would enjoy her life a lot more if she wasn’t haunted by the fear that her past might catch up to her. Before she married her baron, Sylvie and her sister Charlotte were the Mothe sisters. They conducted seances and banished ghosts for whoever could pay. Now that she’s a member of respectable society, Sylvie does her utmost to keep that past far away from her. Unfortunately for her, that past has just turned up across the street from her home in the opening pages of Carmella Lowkis’s intriguing novel, Spitting Gold...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Baru Cormorant’s life changed forever when she was a small child. Her recollections of life with her hunter mother, shieldbearer father, and blacksmith father sound idyllic. Her mother taught her about the birds that lived on their island. Her fathers taught her about tradecraft and keeping her ears open. But when the Empire of Masks arrived with their paper money—and, later, their plagues and schools and “hygiene”—her childhood was obliterated. Years later, Baru Cormorant walks a fine line between obedience and treachery in Seth Dickinson’s powerful novel, The Traitor Baru Cormorant...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Time travel stories usually follow the exploits of someone rocketing through time to change history. This person ponders the various time travel paradoxes or wrestles with the implications of an ever-splitting multiverse. All of which is to say that Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is a unique look at the perils of time travel. Instead of travelers deliberately injecting themselves into history, a mysterious British Agency has used a recovered time machine to “rescue” five Britons from the past from their inevitable deaths by pulling them into a future ravaged by climate change. Our narrator is one of the few civil servants in on the secret, selected to help acclimate one of the “expats” to life in the twenty-first century...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Pâtca is on the run in Doina Ruști’s The Book of Perilous Dishes (carefully translated by James Christian Brown). She flees from her small village when her grandmother is accused of witchcraft. Unlike so many others accused like this, Pâtca and her family really are witches. Sadly, their knowledge is no match for a pissed-off mob and Pâtca must seek refuge in Bucharest, only to learn that this is just the first in a series of unfortunate events...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Before the studio system was broken up by the Supreme Court, film studios would sign actors up to multi-year contracts. Actors under contract would not only be told which films they would appear in but also told which parties to go to, when to go to rehab, and sometimes placed into fictional relationships. Show business wasn’t just what the audience saw on the screen. It continued in the newspapers and magazines and, perhaps especially, in the gossip columns. Edie O’Dare, the protagonist of Lindsay Lynch’s novel Do Tell, is rapidly approaching the end of her seven-year contract and is unlikely to see a renewal. In 1938, there weren’t many legitimate ways for an unconventional woman to make a living...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Cleric Chih returns in The Brides of High Hill, Nghi Vo’s fifth entry in the Singing Hills Cycle. Chih is once again on the road and collecting stories. This time, they have fallen in with a small family on their way to see their daughter married to the wealthy lord of Do Cao. This daughter has insisted that Chih follow along to keep her company. The daughter’s parents are less cheerful about their newest companion. Politeness keeps them from tossing Chih out on their ear. Before long, I daresay that Chih would have preferred to be tossed out on the road...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Human rights lawyer Eve J. Chung draws inspiration from her family’s history to tell the story of Hai, one of the eponymous Daughters of Shandong. Hai is one of four sisters born to the wealthy Ang family. Although the family is privileged, Hai’s life—and the lives of her mother and sisters—is a miserable one of hard work and regular humiliation at the hands of their grandmother. Things get even worse when the Chinese Civil War rips through the country and the Angs abandon Hai, her mother, and her other sisters to keep an eye on the family home until “things blow over.” This novel is difficult to read as the female Angs face violence, hunger, illness, bureaucracy, and relentless sexism...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

There are very clear rules about being an assassin and Eveen the Eviscerator (it was one time, she says) follows them very carefully. After all, being an assassin is the only reason that she’s alive…well, not actually alive. She’s undead. In her first life, she made a promise to serve Aeril, the Matron of Assassins, for one hundred years. In P. Djèlí Clark’s beautifully plotted and highly entertaining novella, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, we get to witness Eveen’s greatest caper...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Louie arrives at the (fictional) Takoda reservation in Louisiana, unwittingly just in time to help his niece Noemi after she suffers a personal tragedy. He’s been gone for years, only coming back for the annual powwow. It’s been ten years since his last visit as Indian Burial Ground, by Nick Medina, opens. Over the course of the novel, we’ll learn what pushed Louie away—and how Noemi came to be stuck in arrested development...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Necessity is the mother of invention. In Kalyna’s case, invention takes the form of cold reading, intelligence gathering, gumption, and a fair amount of lying. The necessity comes from her family. She is the last in a long line of people gifted with the ability to see the future; Kalyna did not get this gift, though she does her damndest to make her customers believe she did. In Elijah Kinch Spector’s highly entertaining novel, Kalyna the Soothsayer, necessity strikes again when Kalyna’s gift is “requisitioned” by a nearby prince and is spirited away by the prince’s agents in the dead of night...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.