Reviews and Comments

Another novel existing in the near future, a dystopian future where the government employs surveillance and mysterious algorithms to imprison and enslave its citizens. So that's the United States... today, actually.

The problem is that the future is approaching way more quickly than we would have liked. Yesterday I saw news footage of the people they were deporting, no due process, no oversight, no idea who these people are or why they were accused of being violent gang members. They were being treated worse than animals. What I saw was horrific but I think it's obtuse to call it unprecedented or shocking, unless you really have not been paying attention to the history or character of this country.

Uhh, back to the book. There's a scifi angle in here, some billionaire asshole who solves insomnia with a chip implanted into people's brains, which they can then (of course) use to spy on people's dreams and report them to the government. (I have to say though, as someone who struggles with sleep, I completely understand the appeal here. Like if anything could get me to allow someone to put a chip in my brain, it would be the possibility of getting solid restful sleep every night.)

An algorithm calculates a citizen's social credit score based on the incredible wealth of information they possess about everyone, and if you score low enough (and violent/disturbing dreams count against you), you're admitted to a rehabilitation center, where you work long hours doing menial work for some corporation and try to be on your best behavior because any infraction lengthens your stay.

Sara is a new mom to twins, she's exhausted, she gets the chip, she has stress dreams, and unfortunate circumstances combine to put her just over the risk level. She's admitted for 21 days; she's been there for almost a year, waiting for a hearing.

I think the novel meanders a little too much, could have been tighter and more compelling. It was a good read, and in the end I think my expectations were a little too high, I wanted it to be more profound than it was maybe.

But it's going to be a good one for book clubs. A good book that might make other middle-class women who do everything "right" pause and realize that they are not as safe as they imagined. Sara never does anything violent; even at the end, when she is pushed to resistance, she doesn't turn to violence. Her crime is that of "disrespect." (Sometimes she is wonderfully but subtly disrespectful to people who don't deserve respect, but for the most part she is just standing up for herself and her rights.) And as a woman, particularly a woman of color, that damns her.

Another novel that I didn't absolutely love but would recommend without hesitation to most people, particularly the book club crowd in 2025. I do like that it concludes that our only hope lies with each other other, with small moments of community and resistance. Anyway, the second the government has access to my dreams, I will be disappeared into Gitmo immediately.

Ok, bad news first: Lake Superior is not sentient in this book, and I shouldn't assume things about books from random phrases I see in reviews.

Good news is that this is an excellent read, and in fact of everything I've read so far this year, this is probably the book I would recommend to a patron asking me for a good solid novel. And it does take place on my beloved Lake Superior (a fictionalized version at least, although the Slate Islands do exist!)

It's another one of those novels that takes place in the near future, the almost apocalypse, where daily life is still largely recognizable but just a little twisted. The rich are known as astronauts, although all they do is suck the life out of everyone else down here on Earth. Indentured servitude/legalized slavery is back in a big way. There's a popular suicide drug called Willow sweeping the nation. The Lake is warming up and dead bodies from decades earlier are rising to the surface. Parable of the Sower vibes.

The novel starts with Rainy and Lark, a couple designed to be thoroughly loved by the reader. She's a former librarian/current bookseller, he's a musician (bassist). They take in a squelette (a runaway worker) who has, unfortunately, stolen a great quantity of the coveted Willow and is being pursued by very bad people. When those bad people catch up to him, Lark is murdered, and Rainy is on the run in their sailboat.

There's a touch of magical realism here--or at least the possibility of magic. Rainy is sailing across the Lake because he believes there might be a possibility of seeing his wife again on the Slate Islands, where they once had a dreamlike encounter with a woman she believed to be her favorite long-dead author.

For me, the best parts of the novel take place after he takes in Sol, a little kid in a bad situation in one of the coast towns. He trades his bass for her freedom and they go off searching for her only remaining family member. Sol is fantastic. She takes no shit. She belives is justice and will fight for it with whatever tools available, including fire. (Hell yeah Sol.)

Towards the end we take a curve into full dystopia and they end up on one of the research ships, where people are essentially enslaved and are either medical experiments or maintenance workers. "What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage." I won't go into how it ends, except to say that I don't think readers will be disappointed.

This novel lost me a little by being a bit too sentimental and perhaps a little too idealistic for my taste. It's the kind of novel that will make my mom cry her eyes out, but it did not have that effect on me. But it was beautiful and I loved the journey across the Lake, the author clearly loves Lake Superior just as much as I do.

Absolutely delightful historical fiction centered around the real life heist of the holy corpse of St. Nicholas in 1087. Anderson is a hell of a writer but what I loved most about this one is that it chooses to take medieval stories and myth seriously, choosing to dwell in ahistoricity (or as the author puts it, "the willful inaccuracy demanded by the European Middle Ages themselves") and the effect is very entertaining. It's a perfect way to approach the period, where it feels like everyone has built their identities around stories and traditions handed down to them. "There is no line between vision and delusion."

At the same time, it's remarkable how much of this madcap story is actually based on historical events. Ok, there definitely wasn't a dog-headed guy there. (Unless.....?) It feels like a time when nothing is really known and anything is possible. Maybe you have a weird dream and your abbot tells you that it means you're going to have to steal a saint's corpse. Maybe a monk and a relic thief fall in love. The world is full of wonders. Hilarious, fun, queer, a treat for fans of the more bizarre side of the Catholic church or for anyone interested in medieval European history.

Reading has been slow lately because the world is a lot. This was slow going for me for a while but it punched me in the gut by the end. Our main characters are The Prophet, a man who has received visions his entire life that he interprets as religious; Michael, the 15-year-old girl he rescues from her pimp; and of course, the cowboy-hat-wearing Two-Step Devil who torments him. The Prophet lives an isolated life in the mountains, estranged from his son, turning his visions into paintings and transforming his little cabin into a piece of art. (I swear that this is based on a real folk artist... I'll research that when I've had more coffee.) He doesn't rescue Michael so much as kidnap her, but she slowly learns to trust him and finds a temporary peace living with him. But no peace can last, and we already know how their stories end. Towards the novel transforms into something between a tragedy and a religious revelation, beautiful, unique, and dark. As the Two-Step Devil says, "You fleshsacks will want to look away. You must bear witness."

I was trying to describe this book to a coworker and I told her "it's historical fiction, it's kind of a comedy?" Then I described the plot to her and watched her eyes widen with horror. Ok, so maybe it's a black comedy.

It's 412 BC and Sycracusan potter Gelon is a huge fan of Euripides, just absolutely nuts over the guy. Athens has just failed in their conquest of Sicily, and there's a whole quarry full of starving Athenian soldiers with nothing in particular to do except starve to death. And hey, some of them can even recite some Euripides. Obviously, it's time to put on a play.

If that sounds fucked up, well, it's kind of a fucked up book. It does not shy away from brutality or violence, and it is also genuinely hilarious and occasionally delightful, and the kind of addictive read that I didn't want to put down. The entire series of events is narrated through Lampo, Gelon's less accomplished and decidedly less enthusiastic friend, who is mostly hoping to earn enough to win the freedom of Lyra, the enslaved woman he's in love with. Lampo is refreshingly self-aware and tends to roll with the punches; he seems to take the absurdity of the situation in stride. He is a deeply flawed man who nevertheless loves his friend and who gradually comes to care for their Athenian actors, even when he's acting like an ass towards all of them. I liked him very much.

Despite its horrors and its absurdities, this was a fun read for me. There are twists and turns, acts of gods, mysterious benefactors, and, of course, poetry. I won't go into the conclusion of the novel, except to say that I found it satisfying and moving.

"Yet, he reasoned, perhaps in the end it was fitting, for his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story."

This book is even more disturbingly relevant right now than Parable of the Sower. It is absolutely surreal reading this at the present moment. Skerrit winning on the “Make America Great Again” platform and empowering the worst people in the country to be as violent as they want in the name of religion and patriotism. Crazy science fiction, right. It was kind of bizarre how the news seemed to parallel what I was reading in the book.

Establishing an official state religion and allowing Crusaders to kill and enslave in the name of Christianity. (Meanwhile Trump establishes a “White House Faith Office” and pledges to root out “anti-Christian bias.”) They use ugly half-trucks called maggots to terrorize people, and yes I absolutely imagined these as Cybertrucks. (Meanwhile the state department plans to spend $400 million on armored Cybertrucks.) The U.S. goes to war with Canada, people are put into re-education camps, families are torn apart, books and even the concept of stories are banned, and so on; things that are already happening right now in 2025 and other things that may happen soon. It’s a brutal read, even more so than Sower, I would say. It lets its characters build community and hope, only to tear it away again.

I really love the inclusion of Larkin/Asha’s narrative. Not just because it gives us an outside, critical perspective on Olamina. It’s moving and disturbing in its own right. Asha and her uncle Marc are fascinating characters to me. Particularly Marc, who can’t face the reality of the organization he’s pledged himself to. He is also, in his own way, trying to take care of his community and be a faithful servant over a few small things. And I understand Asha’s feeling of abandonment. Lauren had a choice; I believe she made the right choice, the only choice that was true to her character, but it was a path that led her further away from finding her daughter.

When my book club discussed Sower a lot of people expressed frustration with Lauren and her insistence that Earthseed’s true purpose was to find a home for humanity among the stars. Asha shares that frustration and anger towards her mother, feeling that Earthseed could do a lot more good down on Earth, and that it’s fundamentally immoral to use that money and power for space exploration instead. It’s a good argument. And of course Lauren believes that giving humanity this purpose is the only way we can break our violent patterns, and we’ll never know if she was right. It would have been very interesting to know where Butler would have gone in further novels. I love her books because she presents a lot of interesting questions without easy answers, with complicated characters that we may not even particularly like. This feels like a good ending, even though it’s not the happy, hopeful ending we might want, it’s a lot more uncertain and realistic. Some actions can’t be taken back, some things can’t be forgiven, and at the end you just hope that you’ve done some good in the world.

I love my book club so very, very much. We had such a great discussion around this book, a lot of different perspectives, a lot of venting and support, some minor threats of violence may have been made against public figures. We have people from all different walks of life and I heard some things tonight which made me realize things in the U.S. are even worse than I thought they were. But I also looked around the room and saw a group of people that I could build community with, even though we're practically strangers. I could extend trust to them, I could fight drugged up pyromaniacs with them. It's hard to be hopeful right now but maybe hope isn't the point. I feel less panicked right now because I spent time with other people who have no delusions about what's happening and who are ready to take action in whatever small way they can. We love you Octavia.

I knew this was going to be difficult to read at this particular moment in time, especially for someone with a great deal of anxiety whose government is falling down around them. But hey, I don't have to resort to cannibalism quite yet, so I got that going for me.

I love post-apocalyptic books and I love survival stories so I have always loved this book. It's been a long time since I read it, and in fact many of the things I remembered were actually plotpoints in Talents. (Rereading that next.)

But to me the core of the book is the universal truth that humans need each other. We need community in order to survive. We need cooperation, and compassion, and hope. God is Change and we are helpless to stop that, so we help each other instead. Shape the future, shape God. A lot of this book is starting to make too much sense to me.

This book got me. I didn't think it was going to get me, but it did. Finished it while ugly sobbing in the staff breakroom. I would read it again immediately, but I'm also not emotionally prepared to read it again.

Adina is an alien. She's sensitive to certain noises. She's asexual. She is almost always entirely alone, and very rarely feels understood. She sends reports on human behavior back home to Planet Cricket Rice through an old fax machine. It's been a long time since I found a character in a novel so powerfully and profoundly relatable.

At the end this turns into a novel about grief and loneliness and it tore my heart out. "Maybe the part of you that wants to be alone is bigger than the other parts of you." Just stab me directly in the heart next time Bertino. This one is for all the people out there who don't feel at home in this world. I hope we find a place to belong to.

I read this one pretty slowly. It's a long book, I'm not really into Arthurian legend at all, and it took me a while to get into it. But I love Grossman, and I love how he takes fantasy tropes and makes them very human and recognizable. This book was no exception.

If you're into Arthurian legend, I have no idea how it will hit you. I have no idea exactly how Grossman played with these legends, because my knowledge of them comes entirely from movies that don't even focus on Arthur. The closest adaptation I've seen is probably Monty Python's Holy Grail (which is quoted at the beginning of the book, nice).

Of course, this book isn't really about Arthur either. We're exploring the world immediately after Arthur leaves it. It's a broken world, stuck between a magical past and an uncertain future, abandoned by God. (Extremely relatable.) The book follows our main man Collum and the leftovers of the Round Table as they stumble in and out of adventure, searching for some way to make everything right.

Our characters start off rather one-dimensional but Grossman slowly fleshes them out beautifully. They are complicated. They lose fights, they make bad choices. They're in love with the wrong people, they're traumatized, they're hiding secrets that could destroy them. They felt like real people in a mythical world.

The story was always unexpected and honestly it was a pretty fun rambling fantasy read. (Dark, though. There is a lot of real human pain in this novel.) And in the end I did care for these characters deeply. I cheered at one pivotal moment of violence (which was every bit as satisfying as LOTR's "I am no man" moment). I teared up at character deaths. I mourned with them. I wanted Collum to triumph and the world to be healed. But that is not quite how the world works, even this one. This is not a novel with easy answers or simple endings, and that's what I loved best about it. Sometimes the world is broken, and all you can do is try to mend your own small corner of it.

"Maybe terrible things would happen in the future, maybe it was empty, a waste land. But there could be seeds buried there, too, deep down below the dry dust, where hidden springs still flowed. It was deep winter, but there was still hope for renewal. The grail could be found. A new king could rise. The land could live again."