Genre: literary fiction

#BookReview: The Mulai by Munir Hachemi translated by Julia Sanches

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Mulai by Munir Hachemi translated by Julia SanchesThe Mulai by Munir Hachemi
Translator: Julia Sanches
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: colonialism and colonization, literary fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction
Pages: 176
Published by Coach House Books on July 14, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Interstellar via Invisible Cities: spec-fic translated from Spanish imagines a utopian way of life on another planet.
Years after the climate wars on Earth, the Mulai have settled into their new home on an unnamed planet. Supplies stopped arriving from Earth many years ago, and the Mulai have found a way to live. But now the people of Earth want to know what happened to the settlers, so they send The Archaeologist.
He finds that they have become a different people: uncannily similar to us but with something radically Other about them. Their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, reproduce, bury their dead, and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. The Archaeologist feels like his trip is one extended misunderstanding.
With fragments from The Archaeologist’s notes and the stories of Flukeh and Faida, who map both their world and their language, The Mulai offers a glimpse of a world adjacent to ours – one that just may be a model for how to better our own.
From one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and author of the celebrated Living Things, and translated by the award-winning Julia Sanches, comes a bold new Borgesian reimagining of what ‘civilization’ might look like.

My Review:

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” – according to Mark Twain. The saying is a longer version of the old saw about “assume” making an “ass” out of “u” and “me”.

It’s the same idea at the heart, the idea that what we “think we know”, what we’ve already decided, what we “assume” is what gets us in trouble, because we’re so certain of our certainties that we don’t see that those certainties are certainly incorrect no matter how much that incorrectness does its damndest to beat us over the head with a clue-by-four.

The overall story in The Mulai is SFnal. It’s even been done before – although not like this. That basic SFnal story is about colonization – and about the drift that occurs between the new colony and the original place from which it sprang. Which, come to think of it, is the story of colonization and colonialism on this planet throughout history, as the colonies, because of their physical separation from the “mother country” and their entirely different geography and climate and conditions, drifted away from the place which seeded them – and later suppressed them – in the first place.

I digress – but not all that far.

In the SFnal version of that real-world phenomenon, the separation between the colony and its originator can be absolute in a way that it isn’t on a single planet. The colony ship that settled the remote planet in this story – and the Earth from which it sprang – were separated by vast distance and by Earth, well, getting stuck in its own troubles and losing track of its colonies. And then coming back to study where their colony has drifted away from them and, possibly, seeing what they can do about that in ways that may be benign (emphasis on MAY) – at least at the outset.

Although the fact that the visitors to the Mulai from Earth are studying the people like an archeological/anthropological project is not a good sign. Not even when one of their number “goes native” with all of the terrible implications that phrase has to offer.

The story here is told from multiple perspectives. One is that of the visiting “archaeologist” who starts out judgmental and stuck in his own perspectives, but over the decades comes to realize that whatever assumptions he started out with are completely wrong.

But there are other points of view – from the Mulai themselves. Ironically, they’re not all that different from the Archaeologist’s, because they are also stories of how people react to radical change. The apple of the Mulai may not have fallen as far from the tree of humanity – at least as far as behavior goes – as it seems at first.

Which doesn’t mean that either their use of language – which this story focuses on – or the way that they see THEIR world – aren’t radically different from that of the people from which they sprang. Because they absolutely are. That the archaeologists and especially the anthropologists back home are still trying to shoehorn the square peg of the Mulai into the round hole of their academic assumptions is every bit as human as their collective reaction to having their assumptions challenged in the first place.

Escape Rating B: The Mulai is part of the literary science fiction tradition, and that’s clear from the books that it includes within its discussion of language and in the stories it compares itself to as seen through the eyes of the visiting scientists. The story is liberally sprinkled with quotes from Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino – particularly his Invisible Cities, and Ursula K. LeGuin and her Hugo and Nebula Award winning The Dispossessed.

Not that the whole “lost colony rediscovered” story hasn’t been also told in the most popular of SF stories, including Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series and the Arcane Society/Harmony series by the multiply pseudonymous Jayne Ann Krentz. It’s a concept that can be pulled into multiple directions easily because it offers so much scope for things going very wrong.

But the way the story is told in The Mulai makes it a story about language and communication – and about how differing styles of communication set assumptions on both sides onto their pointy little heads. Because we – and the Archaeologist represents us and the way our world works – assume that writing stabilizes a language. That once things start getting written down, the narrative starts settling down into a single track and interpretation. (I’m simplifying and my interpretation is as subject to error as theirs are). The Mulai see writing differently. From their perspective, writing is a form of play where words and stories change and are changed by the entire community and continue to do so.

So the Archaeologist is trying to create a chronology and the Mulai are changing the ‘historical’ scenarios right out from under him. And the whole story is like that in that his – meaning our – interpretations of the Mulai’s actions, language and culture are radically different from their own. Neither of them are either right or wrong at the outset, but that doesn’t mean that the relationship couldn’t go wrong with the application of superior firepower.

But the story doesn’t go there – at least as far as we know at the end. Leaving the reader with a great deal to ponder.

In fact, I was still pondering as I walked away from writing this review, and came back to mention one final note. This is a story about the assumptions, errors and pitfalls of communication between people who do not share a frame of reference – even if the Archeologist and his people start out thinking that they do. Crossing that divide – not in words but in meaning – is every bit as difficult and prone to error as it is in the Star Trek Next Gen episode “Darmok”, Edward Ashton’s The Fourth Consort, and Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, and in the end also just as fascinating.

If you’re pondering giving this story a read after this review – and I hope you are – you might want to take a look at an entirely different but extremely interesting take over at Ancillary Review of Books.

A- #BookReview: The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn DixonThe Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon
Format: eARC
Source: publisher
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, literary fiction, science fiction
Pages: 224
Published by Atria Books on March 31, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In a near future, where even the smallest of appliances are sentient, a young Roomba vacuum sets out to save the humans of her house from a rising technological power in this compelling, original novel.

In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.

But when Edie passes away, Scout and her fellow sentient appliances discover that there are sinister forces in their midst. The omnipresent Grid, which monitors every household in the City, seeks to remove Harold from his home, a place he’s lived in for fifty years.

With the help of Adrian, a neighborhood boy who grows close to Scout and Harold, as well as Kate, Harold and Edie’s formerly estranged daughter, the humans and the appliances must come together to outwit the all-controlling Grid lest they risk losing everything they hold dear.

My Review:

Harold and Edie’s house is a Smart House in this AI controlled, near-future dystopia. But the smartness of their Smart House makes their increasing isolation comfortable as long as nothing changes. The Grid-controlled services of Harold’s Watch control all their other appliances; Clock, Fridge, Auto, and Thermostat, and in turn they keep the rest of the appliances in line. Except for the little Roomba, R1v984, who wants to be called “Scout” after the character in Harold’s favorite novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

So much of the story is encapsulated in little Scout’s desire to have a name of her own. Both that she – and she has decided that she is SHE and not it or they – and because she learns about Scout the character by listening to Harold read To Kill a Mockingbird to his dying wife, Edie.

Which is where the rest of the story- along with the changes in the world that Harold and Edie’s Smart House has mostly kept from bothering them, comes in.

Because the world is not what it was when Harold and Edie first moved in forty years ago. What was once a tree-lined street filled with families in a world where humans mostly had choices – even if they chose badly – has become a restrictive environment entirely controlled by the logical, unemotional, impassive Grid. For the world’s own good, of course.

When Edie dies – of a cancer that the Grid, quite plausibly, should have been able to fix by now – the way the world REALLY works is laid bare.

The Grid, like “Big Brother”, is watching everyone and everything, cleaning up humanity’s messes and making everything efficient. Trying to circumvent the Grid’s control results in sanctions – which are administered by the controlling Grid according to the Grid’s meticulous, restrictive, self-protective, rules. Appliances – like Scout – are pushed back into line by sanctions of their own. Or reprogrammed. Or outright destroyed.

It’s inefficient for Harold, now a widower, to live alone in the sprawling house that once held two. The Grid will move him out, to someplace smaller and blander and better controlled and more efficient. And also most likely soul-killing. Then again, the Grid only understands physical harm to humans, which it prevents at all costs. Emotional harm, psychological harm are not things dreamt of in its programming, because it doesn’t dream. It only KNOWS.

But the first step in that efficiency involves whisking anything that contains valuable knowledge or information out of the house while the humans are sleeping – or are physically prevented from interfering – because knowledge that humanity created is worth preserving. Humanity itself, however, is too inefficient – and too dangerous – to keep.

As one very smart little Roomba, and one very dissident daughter, manage to prove in their desperate escape from the Grid. Even as they leave just a bit of themselves behind. Or in Scout’s case, considerably more than a bit.

The first publication cover of Thomas M. Disch’s The Brave Little Toaster, art by Gahan Wilson.

Escape Rating A-: My first thought at the start of this book was that this is science fiction for people who don’t generally read science fiction or don’t think they like it. Which does make it tilt a bit literary. On balance, however, I think it’s still SF because the overall setup, in the end, as contradictory as that is, is very SFnal.

Also the readalikes, not just that it’s an obvious homage to The Brave Little Toaster, but it hits some of the same thought-provoking and science fictional notes of Ray Nayler’s Hugo Award winning novella, Where the Axe is Buried, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s post-human dystopic Service Model, and Thomas Ha’s Hugo-nominated short story, “In My Country”. Along with a scenario that looks an awful lot like the origin story for Skynet.

Which I now really need to unpack because that’s a lot.

The characters, on the one hand, didn’t really need to be appliances. And they could easily be “Disney” appliances like the transfigured staff in Beauty and the Beast. (Then again, all characters in all stories – including SF stories – are human at their core because humans are all we really know.)

Even Scout’s seemingly innate curiosity – and her need to ask really big philosophical questions AND question the answers – didn’t have to come from an AI controlled device. (And the nature of those questions does veer more than a bit into literary territory. Scout asks big questions with big, and sometimes nebulous answers. When she gets answers at all. Mostly, she gets shut down by the older appliances because that’s how the world really does work.)

But Scout’s questions did have to come from a being with the innocence of a child learning how the world works by asking questions about the unspoken norms that adults don’t want to talk about. (This is the part of the story that reads a lot like “In My Country”.)

However, the dystopian world that surrounds the house, that inserts itself openly into the house when Edie dies, is very much a part of science fiction. It’s just that the way that’s exposed is invested in characters we empathize with even if they aren’t all human.

Service Model is about a post-human dystopia, a tour of the world without humans in it seen through the eyes of a service robot who doesn’t know what to do with himself (and he refers to himself as he/him) without a human to serve. It’s the world that the Grid is creating, one enforced relocation and one sanction at a time.

The Grid itself is a bit like Skynet from the Terminator movies, but it’s a lot like the Artificial Intelligences that get voted into office in Where the Axe is Buried. The idea sounds so plausible, that computers, just like the Grid, will make logical and rational decisions. Decisions that will eventually result in the elimination of humans because we’re neither.

Which is where one other book comes in, and that’s Automatic Noodle. The robots in Automatic Noodle are the main characters, just as Scout and the other appliances are in this story. In both cases, the challenges that these devices face represent our own, and we feel both FOR and WITH their struggles. Because in spite of their mechanical parts, they are still, fundamentally, US. And the way that they save themselves, each other, and their found families, even at the cost of themselves, brings a tear to our eyes.

Because a little Roomba named Scout saves a little piece of the world for the people she chose as her own, knowing what it would cost but doing it anyway. Just as we hope we would.

#BookReview: Valet by J.P. Lacrampe

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Valet by J.P. LacrampeValet by J.P. Lacrampe
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, literary fiction, relationship fiction, robots, science fiction
Pages: 272
Published by S&S/Saga Press on June 2, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

For fans of Kevin Wilson and Andrew Sean Greer, a helper robot and his 35-year-old ward embark on a mad-cap adventure to save the fate of the family company in this whimsically speculative ode to Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster.
Cy wants nothing more than to be useful, raise his utility score, and receive the next update for his operating system. But that’s easier said than done when he's tasked with helping his owner’s 35-year-old son “get out of his funk.” Grayson is nothing like his go-getter, CEO sister Charlotte. He didn’t inherit the family robotics company when their dad passed last year, he doesn’t have a master’s degree, and he just can’t seem to figure out the San Francisco dating scene. He’d rather eat synthesized mozzarella sticks and make pottery at his studio, Kilning Time.
When Grayson learns of Charlotte’s plan to sell the company to a tech conglomerate, he panics. It’s not just the family business at stake, it’s all the technology—like Cy—their dad invented over the years. So he does what anyone would he steals the flash drive with his father’s most important work stored on it and plans a corporate takeover. If only he knew what that meant.
To make matters worse, a fellow VALET deserts his owner and asks Cy to help him hightail it out of town, Grayson’s first real date—and her dog—keeping showing up at inopportune times, and the behemoth tech company wants this deal closed yesterday. Grayson, Cy, and their trusty golden retriever, Sasha III, must go on the lam until they figure out exactly what to do, and whom to trust.
A hilarious, mad-cap adventure that is as tender as it is insightful, Valet asks not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be family.

My Review:

At first, this appears to be the story of a “poor little rich boy” as told from the perspective of his ultra-competent, long-suffering personal attendant, the valet of the title. Which is where those comparison to P.G. Wodehouse’s iconic Jeeves and Wooster duo come striding – or strolling as the case might be – right in.

But this isn’t Grayson St. Claire’s story. It’s Cy’s story, being told from Cy’s first person perspective. That Cy even has a first-person perspective and the “I” voice to go with it is just a part of what makes the story interesting AND what keeps the reader following along. Because at first ‘Gray’ doesn’t appear to be all that compelling of a character. He’s just an idle rich man-child who doesn’t know what to do with himself and doesn’t seem all that interested in finding out.

Cy, on the other hand, knows EXACTLY who his Master Grayson is, and loves him like a brother anyway. Which is what makes Cy’s situation both heartbreaking and precarious, as Cy may have been raised alongside Gray by ‘their’ father, an eccentric AI genius, but Gray is a person with rights, privileges and a share of ‘their’ late father’s very successful company, while Cy is a piece of property, owned by Gray’s ambitious mother, and tasked with getting Gray to start adulting and get married to a woman the family thinks is suitable. If Cy fails, he’ll be sent off to die as a lowly mech with all of his intelligence stripped from him.

The thing is that Cy is doing his best to get Gray to go with the program. Not by manipulating him, but by providing Gray with the love and encouragement that his family never bothered to bestow. And it’s working, but not the way that the matriarch of the family had in mind. It’s certainly not working fast enough, well enough, or in the right way nearly enough to keep Cy’s owner from punishing him repeatedly for his failure to force her son to obey her wishes for his future when she’s clearly never given a damn about her son’s wishes for himself.

In the end, it’s not his mother’s threats that push Gray into growing up, it’s an existential threat to his family’s company, his father’s legacy, and his closest friend – Cy himself – that give Grayson St. Claire the real purpose in the world that Cy has wanted for him all along.

It’s the making of Gray, the saving of Cy, and the hope for a reconciliation with the rest of his family. And it happens because Cy, as well as Grayson himself, do the best they can do for the people they care about – including each other.

Escape Rating B: I picked this up in order to figure out whether it was science fiction or not. The blurb doesn’t help much, either, as the two contemporary authors mentioned, Kevin Wilson and Andrew Sean Greer, are both relationship/literary fiction writers while P.G. Wodehouse may have been a literary law unto himself, he wasn’t exactly either of the above – OR a science fiction writer.

In the end, I think this is SF in the same way that both Orbital and The Ministry of Time were frequently referred to as SF. Meaning that all three stories use a lot of SF “furniture” to tell a relationship story that borders on literary fiction.

Now that I’ve finished it, I’m still not 100% sure of that answer, which certainly requires some explanation.

First of all, I did enjoy reading Valet once it got going, but it starts out slow and picks up speed as it goes. At first, Gray and Cy both seem a bit flat as characters because they fit so firmly and completely into the stereotypical roles of the upper-class twit and the faithful servant.

Which is where things started to get both interesting AND frustrating. Frustrating because I knew this reminded me of something that took a while to pull into memory. The story isn’t so much Jeeves and Wooster as it resembles the 1981 movie Arthur starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli, with Sir John Gielgud as the Butler. Gielgud won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance, and that movie was hugely popular. To the point that although I never saw it, the plot still stuck in my memory, as did its ubiquitous theme song, “The Best That You Can Do”. (Hopefully I’ve just passed that earworm onto someone so it will leave MY head.) That Cy frequently excuses upcoming actions that he knows will displease his legal owner by saying that he will “do my best” echoes the song. Often.

The starting plots of the movie and this book are very similar. And I do mean VERY.

But the SFnal setting of Valet adds some fascinating opportunities for snark, as it’s a relatively near future. Near enough, at least, that the idle rich in Gray’s circle are the scions of our present-day tech companies a mere one or two generations down the line. AND it’s an extension of our present of continuing mergers and acquisitions into mega-corporations. It’s also a world in which the much-feared replacement of human workers with robots and AI has come to pass with devastating economic results – except for the ultra rich, the class of which Gray and his friends are definitely a part.

There’s a lot to unpack in Valet – to the point where I wish that I had Cy to help me with the unpacking. In the end, this is a story about what it means to be family, and turned out to be quite a bit more heartwarming and heartfelt than one would expect from the beginning.

If I were trying to describe the whole of this book succinctly, I’d say that it’s what Service Model might have been if it had been written by TJ Klune instead of Adrian Tchaikovsky. Or if Automatic Noodle were more about the humans in the community that is created around the bots and less about the bots themselves.

It’s also a story that manages to walk through some very dark places, both literally and figuratively, yet still comes out into the light. Readers who don’t mind a little SF in their literary or relationship fiction, or who don’t mind a little relationship/litfic in their SF, will enjoy visiting Cy and Gray and the family they’ve found.

#BookReview: It’s Hard to Be an Animal by Robert Isaacs

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: It’s Hard to Be an Animal by Robert IsaacsIt's Hard to Be an Animal by Robert Isaacs
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, magical realism, relationship fiction
Pages: 288
Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 19, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

For readers of Shark Heart and Hollow Kingdom, a funny, magical, and tender debut novel following a lonely, conflict-averse man whose sudden ability to understand animals sends him on a wild romp around NYC, and ultimately helps him discover his own voice.

Strolling through Central Park on a blind date with the hilarious, irrepressible Molly Bent, Henry Parsons feels hopeful for the first time in years. He’s even daring to wonder if he and Molly might have a future together... when a migratory warbler, the sweetest of little birds, tells him to f*** off.

A gentle soul, troubled enough by the unkindness of fellow humans, Henry tries to brush the moment aside as a hallucination. But soon he’s hearing voices dogs mocking their owners, sparrows fat-shaming each other, police horses profiling attendees at a street fair — even a pontificating, misogynistic snake. The man who never speaks up for himself is now besieged by animals who do.

When (inevitably) he overhears three rats discussing a corpse in the New York subway, he lets it slip to Molly. She’s keen to investigate, and Henry’s desperate for a second date, so he follows her nervously into an abandoned tunnel under the West Fourth Street Station. There, sure enough, they find a body... and the murderers find them.

Cue the most terrifying week of this cautious man’s life. Inspiration and courage arrive, unexpectedly, from a pair of feuding betta fish and the neighbor’s yapping Pomeranian — whose wisdom will transform both Henry and Molly forever.

My Review:

I picked this up for the concept. I mean that sincerely. We all wish we knew what the animals around us – especially our own companion animals – are thinking and saying. Or at least we mostly do, as those of us with feline companions are fairly sure they’re judging us all the time and that we’re generally found wanting. I’m not certain that confirming that’s true would help anyone’s ego. Except for the cats, of course.

That being said, this isn’t that kind of cutesy story where the animals all talk and think and act like us. For one thing, it’s a complete shock to Henry Parsons’ whole entire system when he suddenly discovers that the voices he’s hearing all around him in Central Park aren’t humans. That he’s hearing the birds around him pretty much scream at each other – and him – and that all of them are speaking in “expletive deleted”. And that even the ones who aren’t dropping F-bombs in every other sentence are outright assholes. Some of them just dress it up in more erudite language.

No one else can hear the animals – and Henry is afraid to reveal that HE’s hearing them. Even his therapist thinks they’re just a manifestation of Henry’s “real” issues – and he already has plenty of those. Most of them self-defeating or depressing or both.

But as much as Henry might be just “hearing things” as a way of expressing his own angst, he would not be hearing the sort of things he’s actually hearing. Like the way that his roommate’s two betta fish spend their days slinging Shakespearean insults at each other.

Certainly, the voices in his head – if that’s what this is – would not manifest as a trio of rats behind a sewer grate discussing their weekly corpse feasts in the abandoned station BELOW the station currently in use. Nor would he imagine said rats talking about the humans who dump those corpses they feast on every week. Or the particularly delicacy of the human eyeball.

Which is the point where the story gets interesting – and so does Henry’s previously dull life. A life so dull that it honestly even bores Henry himself – in between self-castigation that he’s not more or better or happier or less angsty or WHATEVER.

Because Henry tells his new friend Molly, who might become a girlfriend if he doesn’t chicken out, that the voices he’s hearing are telling him stuff that needs to be investigated at the first opportunity – and maybe reported to the police.

From that point, Henry’s life is off and running, to explore under the subway, to listen to the animals telling him things he needs to hear, and to Henry realizing that it’s hard to be an animal – including a human one – and that there are lots of lessons to learn if he wants to do better.

So he does.

Escape Rating B: I had mixed feelings about this one. There were parts I really liked, and parts that didn’t work for me. I think that part of that was that the story is sold by its description as magical realism – Henry understands the animals – but Henry himself read as kind of a stock character from literary fiction.

By that I mean that a lot of the story – at least at the beginning – is wrapped around Henry’s internal angst of which there is rather a lot. He’s entirely REactive and I prefer my protagonists to be a bit more PROactive. (And your reading mileage may vary. Some people love literary fiction for exactly the same things that I don’t. C’est la reading vie.)

Two things wake Henry up and shift his narrative. The first, of course, is the animals. Not just those birds, or even the insult-flinging betta fish. The star of THAT show is Gracie. I think because the opinion of Henry and all of the tenants in Henry’s NYC apartment building is that Gracie is a yappy little bitch of a Pomeranian who never seems to stop barking. But one Gracie is in Henry’s care, everything changes.

Through a series of unfortunate coincidences, Henry ends up dogsitting for Gracie when her person is struck by a taxi and is whisked away in an ambulance. In Henry’s apartment, Gracie turns out to be a quiet philosopher who speaks in beautifully apropos aphorisms, is always gentle and is entirely on point whenever she deigns to speak.

The second thing that changes Henry’s life is Molly Bent, the friend who might be a girlfriend if Henry can just get out of his own way in his own life. Because Molly is a bit over-the-top. She’s a ‘leap and assume the net will appear’ kind of person, while Henry has always been a ‘measure four times and think about cutting once but turn back because it will probably be wrong anyway’. It’s Molly who encourages Henry to investigate the derelict subway station under the station and the results of that shake Henry out of his defeated complacency even as everything seems to go horribly wrong.

When it all comes round right, Henry’s life is forever changed – and for the better – because he was forced into his discomfort zone and discovered himself there. That he gets to keep both Molly and Gracie in his life gives the story a delightful ending – even if we never do learn why Henry started understanding the animals – and why he stopped.

In the end, I stuck with this so that I could make sure that Gracie came out of the story alright. Which she does – and beautifully and dare I say it – gracefully so. That Henry and Molly also get their happy ever after was kind of the puppucino on the dog biscuit for this reader. Even though Gracie would probably turn her nose up at either or both.

#BookReview: Best Wishes from the Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jordan Taylor

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Best Wishes from the Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jordan TaylorBest Wishes From the Full Moon Coffee Shop (The Full Moon Coffee Shop, #2) by Mai Mochizuki
Translator: Jordan Taylor
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: holiday fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, world literature
Series: The Full Moon Coffee Shop #2
Pages: 224
Published by Ballantine Books on October 28, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the bestselling author of the Japanese sensation The Full Moon Coffee Shop, this charming and heartfelt novel showcases the magic of Christmas as lost souls find themselves—with a little help of from an enchanted café run by cats.
In Japan, cats are a symbol of good luck. As the myth goes, if you are kind to them, they'll one day return the favor. And if you are kind to the right cat, you might just find yourself invited to a mysterious coffee shop under a Christmas-time Kyoto moon.
Satomi is devoted to her job in Tokyo, but when her boyfriend hints that he is going to propose to her on Christmas Day, she becomes torn between the career in the city that she loves and a quieter life with her boyfriend in the country. What will the magical cats see for her future?
Koyuki, meanwhile, works at Satomi’s company. Ever since her father passed away in an accident on Christmas Day, she has been playing the role of the good, cheerful girl—and now that her mother has remarried, she is forced to pretend she is part of a happy new family. But this Christmas, what will the cats reveal as her true wish?
Junko, Satomi’s sister-in-law, lives in a small town with her husband and their daughter Ayu, a first grader. When her estranged father becomes ill, Junko returns home with Ayu in tow—and with the help of the magical cats, she learns something surprising that will change her life forever.
This holiday season, each stands at a crossroads, confronting their past and present struggles. With the help of some feline divinations, each will finally have the courage to seek happiness and contentment in their lives.

My Review:

This book was always going to be this year’s New Year’s Eve review. After all, what could make a better reading send-off for the year (any year but especially this year) than a bunch of beloved former companion animals turned sages from the stars not just wishing their people (for very open interpretations of both “their” and “people”), their very best wishes for the holiday season and the coming new year?

Although, from the perspective of this reader, while it may be cats running the travelling coffee shop, it’s a dog that steals the story this time around – and it’s actually just right. Because little Rin left a gift behind at the Full Moon Coffee Shop for her person, and it’s time for that person to collect.

Rin’s gift isn’t a thing, but that’s what makes this story, and stories like this one, so heartwarming. The gift that Rin left for Junko is both a reminder and a wish. A reminder of the good times they had together, and how much Rin loved her. The wish is for Junko to use those memories as a bridge back to feelings and people that she’d left behind along her way.

Because the story as whole, even as it circles back to characters from the first delightful book, the story that introduced us to The Full Moon Coffee Shop, is a message that we can all use. It’s to look beneath the surface to discover the true wish of our own hearts – so that we have the chance to direct our lives towards making it happen.

Rin’s wish was to stay with her person forever. With a bit of magic, anything is possible. But before Junko can accept that love with her own whole heart, she needs to discover her own wish. That it’s the same wish as her sister-in-law Satomi ties their stories together with the story of the Full Moon Coffee Shop and brings this chapter of the Full Moon story to a hopeful, and happy, ending for their year and ours.

Escape Rating B: I came into this expecting more of what I discovered in the first book, The Full Moon Coffee Shop. And that’s exactly what I got, even if the mix of elements was a bit different this time around.

Not surprisingly, I would have preferred more cats. (I always want more cats, even when I have too many cats and know I shouldn’t pick up more. Four is the limit. Absolutely. This message is for the Cat Distribution System™ so that it doesn’t present me with any more cats. Unless there’s a void out there looking for a human. I still miss Lucifer.)

One of the things I loved about this second book, that also surprised me and made me return to the first for a bit, is the way that the people in this story were part of the story in the first book. We just hadn’t gotten to know them yet. Which meant that when Mizuki Serikawa entered the scene as Junko’s new sister-in-law at the end of this book, I knew I’d met her before and was delighted to see how she was doing after her own life-changing revelations courtesy of the cats at the Full Moon.

Howsomever, I have to say that as much as I love the cats, the coffee shop, and the whole concept behind books like this one, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, The Dallergut Dream Department Store and, of course,  We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, the astrology elements that the cats work with only work for this reader as a metaphor. Not that I don’t adore the magical realism of the cats running the cafe!

The story uses the concept of ‘lunar houses’ – the place where the moon is in one’s astrology chart – to bring hidden talents and dreams to light for each of the characters in the story. As a belief system, I’m not there. As a plot device for getting the human characters to see the things they’ve hidden from themselves, it works just fine. From that perspective, it’s an interesting concept but I wouldn’t want to go any deeper into the details, especially in a relatively short story – or collection of them.

Your reading – and believing – mileage may vary on this one.

All in all, this was a delightful little story with a charming message and a whole lot of hope for the future of its characters that it’s easy to extend into one’s own hopes for the coming year.

I wish you good fortune and great reading for the coming New Year!

#AudioBookReview: Days at the Torunka Cafe by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
#AudioBookReview: Days at the Torunka Cafe by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric OzawaDays at the Torunka Café (Days at the Torunka Café, #1) by Satoshi Yagisawa
Translator: Eric Ozawa
Narrator: Sadao Udea
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, magical realism, relationship fiction, sad fluff, world literature
Series: Torunka Café #1
Pages: 240
Length: 8 hours
Published by Harper Perennial, HarperAudio on November 4, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the internationally bestselling author of the Morisaki Bookshop novels comes a charming and poignant story set at a quiet Tokyo café where customers find unexpected connection and experience everyday miracles.
Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighborhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leaves behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Yumata, a middle-aged man who’s returned to the neighborhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku, the café owner’s teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister’s death as she falls in love for the first time.
While Café Torunka serves up a perfect cup of coffee, it provides these sundry souls with nourishment far more lasting. Satoshi Yagisawa brilliantly illuminates the periods in our lives where we feel lost—and how we find our way again.

My Review:

I picked this up, and started it in audio, because I adored the author’s two books featuring the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop) and was looking forward to more of the same.

But the Morisaki Bookshop turned out to have some secret sauce that the Torunka Café, at least so far, doesn’t have. That’s in spite of the tantalizingly delicious descriptions of the coffee the café serves.

Then again, and in sympathy with the café owner’s daughter Shizuko, I don’t like the taste of coffee. Shizuko’s introduction to the bitterness of coffee was at age seven – and it was clearly a bit of a shock to her system. Mine, on the other hand, was sweetened a bit too much when my parents dropped a spoonful of black coffee into my entire glass of milk. Both of us were left with misplaced expectations about the experience that we never got over.

Shizuko, however, gets reminded of that early experience on the regular. Her dad, the café’s owner, literally named her ‘drop’ or ‘droplet’, because he wanted her life to be as rich and as satisfying as the concentrated flavor in every drop of a well-prepared cup of coffee.

Like many similar books, including Monday’s Menu of Happiness, Days at the Torunka Café isn’t one story so much as it is three stories linked by the titular location. And that’s where I got disappointed – or suffered from those misplaced expectations.

Part of what I love about the Kamogawa Food Detectives series is that the framing story about the Kamogawa Diner and the relationship between chef Nagare Kamogawa and his adult daughter Koishi is as strong and important a story as the individual stories of their clients.

In those Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, while there are stories about people in the neighborhood who frequent the shop, the story as a whole centers on Takako, her eccentric uncle Satoru, and the bookstore that gives her a place to land and recover after a terrible break up. The bookstore is a central location, and it’s certainly her shelter against life’s storms when she needs one, but it’s HER story more than anyone else’s and it just worked better for this reader.

That she’s sheltering in a bookstore and recovering her equilibrium by getting lost in the world of books probably helped me get into both the book and her story, but I think I mostly enjoyed that the story had a central figure. Which is the same thing that put The Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee over the top for me as well, that the gang at that café carries the story.

Escape Rating C: So this one didn’t quite work for this reader – or listener. One of the other reasons that it didn’t is that, unlike the Morisaki Bookshop stories where there is one central character and therefore the audio works with one single narrator, those Days at the Torunka Café are made up of three very distinct stories linked by a location, and it needed distinct narrators for each story the way that What You Are Looking For Is In the Library did. The narrator of Torunka Café, Sadao Udea (or Ueda, I’m seeing both spellings), was a good choice for either the first story (a young man in his early 20s) OR the second (a middle-aged man in his early 50s) but not both (mostly because the listener’s ear expects Shūichi but gets Hiro, an entirely different person, in the second story) and not the third, which is from the first person perspective of Shizuku, the café owner’s high school aged daughter.

(It’s not that men can’t voice women and vice versa, but these stories are told in the first-person which, from the perspective of this listener, begs for a closer match between the narrator and the character than a third-person viewpoint. Your listening mileage may vary.)

So I came into this book with high hopes, BUT it didn’t quite work for me on multiple levels. I expected more ‘through story’ than this book is intended to have. Personally, I had a difficult time getting into the first story, “Sunday Ballerinas” because I didn’t care for the characters. The protagonist Shūichi is too much of a doormat and in that first story Shizuku comes off as a bit of a bully. That Shizuku is the protagonist of the third story, “A Drop of Love”, while she’s more sympathetic from inside her own head, well, I had already formed an opinion that was hard to shake. The second story, “The Place Where We Meet Again”, had just the type of ‘sad fluff’ vibes I was expecting, but it wasn’t enough to carry the whole book.

There is a second book in this series, and I’m sure I’ll pick it up when the translation is published, just to see how things are going at the Torunka Café.

A- #BookReview: Menu of Happiness by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Menu of Happiness by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse KirkwoodThe Menu of Happiness (Kamogawa Food Detectives, #3) by Hisashi Kashiwai, Jesse Kirkwood
Translator: Jesse Kirkwood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy mystery, foodie fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, relationship fiction, sad fluff, translated fiction, world literature
Series: Kamogawa Food Detectives #3
Pages: 224
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 14, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A beloved Japanese bestseller, The Menu of Happiness is for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and asks the question: What’s the one dish you’d do anything to taste just one more time?
Every memory has a flavor. A very special restaurant in Kyoto helps find them . . .
Tucked away down a Kyoto backstreet lies the extraordinary Kamogawa Diner, run by Chef Nagare and his daughter, Koishi. The father-daughter duo have reinvented themselves as “food detectives,” offering a service that goes beyond cooking mouthwatering meals. Through their culinary sleuthing, they harness the power of taste to rekindle forgotten memories.
From the yakisoba holding the memories of precious first love to the dumplings shared between sworn enemies, each client will be forever changed by what they find on the menu, because the Kamogawa Diner doesn’t just serve meals—it’s a door to the past.

My Review:

I fell in love with this series with the very first book, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, and now I’m utterly hooked on both the series AND the reading niche it occupies. By that, I mean the genre that was popularized by Before the Coffee Gets Cold of loosely connected slice-of-life stories centered around a cozy location that use that location and its function as a framing device to tell slightly bittersweet, often sadly fluffy stories with or without a hint of magic or magical realism.

This particular series is one of my favorites because there’s no actual magic. It’s not dependent on a sideways slip into the supernatural or paranormal in the same way that Before the Coffee Gets Cold is.

The ‘magic’ of the Kamogawa Food Detectives is in the detection, and that’s very much a part of its charm, as is the charmingly functional father-daughter relationship between Chef Nagare Kamogawa and his adult daughter Koishi. She conducts the interviews, he creates the dishes, she taste-tests his attempts, and they both wait breathlessly for their clients/customers to tell them whether or not they got it right.

But first, those clients tell them the stories that brought them to the Kamogawa’s little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the first place. The history behind the person or the dish they can’t forget or get over – and usually it’s both. The reason that they need to sit with their memories one more time, whether to firmly close off that past OR to prise open a door into the future.

The Kamogawa Food Detectives, in one difficult to find one-line advertisement in one, singular gourmet magazine reach out to their potential clients with the claim that “We Find Your Food”. Which they do. And it is magic after all, the magic of nostalgia and memory meeting resolution and appetite in a way that warms both the heart and the belly.

Escape Rating A-: This series has been a mouth-watering delight for this reader from the very first book – and this latest is no exception. The combination of the individual stories with snippets from Nagare’s and Koishi’s life blends together as deliciously as Nagare’s culinary creations, and the stories are always the right book in the right length at the right time.

As long as I don’t start reading while I’m hungry. The way that the tastes and flavors are so lovingly described make it impossible not to think about the food and wishing that the books contained enough magic to make it appear!

The stories in this third book in the series all seem to be centered around the theme of parental relationships, which works especially well as they reflect, if sometimes in a funhouse mirror, the marvelous and marvelously functional parental relationship between Nagare and Koishi.

They work well together, but the parental relationships that their now-adult clients look back on in their individual stories are or were considerably less functional. Or, sometimes, are seen as more functional in the rearview mirror than they actually were at the time. Even the stories that are ostensibly about a different relationship, like that of the piano-prodigy turned world-famous teacher, circle back to her relationship with her parents and their involvement with her ‘road not taken’.

The dishes that Nagare is asked to recreate aren’t generally fancy – and that’s kind of the point. They’re all relatively simple dishes that are not quite in their standard interpretations as a result of locality, necessity or circumstance and it’s up to him to figure out what variations were made based on vague recollections and a whole lot of nostalgia.

The stories that feature those dishes are sad fluff, mostly bittersweet or at least savory in the umami sense of the word. They’re not stories that are guaranteed to reach a happy ending – often because the person who was once on the other side of the table is gone. Which doesn’t mean that the reconnection, or the closure, or whatever the client is searching for is not worth the potential sadness of the experience – because it very much is.

These are stories where the reader, the facilitators, Nagare and Koishi, AND the participants are all caught in that dilemma between crying because it’s over and smiling because it’s happened, and all end up being satisfied with both the meal and the choices they make over it.

One thing that this reader is certainly NOT crying over is that it currently looks like there are EIGHT more books in this series in the original Japanese just waiting to be translated, so there are sure to be more delicious stories from the Kamogawa Food Detectives yet to come. And that’s definitely a YUM in this reader’s book!

#BookReview: We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat by Syou Ishida translated by E. Madison Shimoda

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> C Reviews
#BookReview: We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat by Syou Ishida translated by E. Madison ShimodaWe'll Prescribe You Another Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #2) by Syou Ishida, E. Madison Shimoda
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, magical realism, sad fluff, translated fiction, world literature
Series: We'll Prescribe You a Cat #2
Pages: 304
Published by Berkley on September 2, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul reopens in this delightful follow-up to the award-winning, bestselling Japanese novel We’ll Prescribe You a Cat.
It’s time to revisit the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul.
Though it’s a mysteriously located clinic with an uncertain address, it can always be found by those who need it. And the clinic has proven time after time that a prescribed cat has the power to heal the emotional wounds of its patients. This charming sequel introduces a new lovable cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a four-month-old Bengal who unleashes his boundless energy by demolishing bed linens and curtains, to tenacious and curious Shasha, who doesn’t let her small size stop her from anything, and the most lovable yet lazy cat Ms. Michiko, who is as soft and comforting as mochi.
As characters from one chapter appear as side characters in the next, we follow a young woman who cannot help pushing away the man who loves her, a recently widowed grandfather whose grandson refuses to leave his room, the family of a young woman who struggle to understand each other, and an anxious man who works at a cat shelter seeking to show how the most difficult cats can be the most rewarding. This moving, magical novel of interconnected tales proves the strength in the unfathomable bond between cats and people.

My Review:

I picked this up for three reasons. First and foremost, the first book in the series, the titular We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, was adorable. Second, the cover picture for this second book is just really, really cute, and two cats really are better than one. Third, I was looking for a bit of a comfort read as our trip ended – and I just missed our own cats something terrible in spite of spending the first part of the trip sharing a very insistent feline and visiting a cat cafe at the end because we weren’t getting back to our own cats quickly enough.

As is often the case with this particular type of comfort read, sad fluff book, it’s a collection of mini-stories wrapped around a place, in this case the slightly magical but borderline real Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. The stories aren’t just loosely connected by the place, but also the characters in the stories are loosely connected to each other.

One young woman uses her prescribed cat to put off the “we need to talk” conversation with the boyfriend that she’s sure is about to break up with her. Her best friend is prescribed a cat to help her deal with her resentment of her mother’s extreme favoritism towards her brother. And her brother, well, her brother Tomoya’s work at a cat rescue organization turns out to lie at the heart of the Kokoro Clinic – even if Tomoya himself isn’t aware of it – at all.

Although his cat certainly is.

Escape Rating C: Pardon me for mixing animal metaphors, but after finishing this second book in the series I’m inclined to say that We’ll Prescribe You a Cat might have been better as a ‘one-trick pony’.

Alternatively, it could be that as a cat lover myself, I’m not sure I’m willing to watch Nikké the cat – or his person Tomoya – suffer through Nikké’s very long decline just so that we can watch more people get matched up with more cats.

Either way, the idea behind this series seems like a story that was good once but loses something with repeated applications – even if some of the characters within its pages definitely NEED to be prescribed more than one cat.

As much as I enjoyed the first book, I think that this second one fell flat for me because we already know the twist at the end. The big reveal at the end of We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, as much as it was foreshadowed in the story, was still a sad but delightful surprise. That the magical realism of the setup allowed for Nikké and Chitose to pay their survival forward to others of their kind was both charming and touching. And it still kind of is, but it’s also played for laughs this time around more than was comfortable for this reader, particularly considering the price that Nikké and his person are both paying for it.

And at the same time, the idea that a cat is being mischievous even as he’s winding up his ninth life along with a whole lot of people – and cats – is very, well, cat. But this one broke my heart more than a bit, and not in a good way.

There are at least two more books in the series that have yet to be translated into English. I’m not sure whether I’ll pick them up or not. I love the idea of being prescribed a cat, but the way the overall story seems to be working out gives me the weepies in the worst way.

Your reading mileage on this one may vary, and probably varies significantly depending on how recently you might have lost a beloved companion animal. (I still miss Lucifer a LOT)

A- #AudioBookReview: The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: The Paris Express by Emma DonoghueThe Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
Narrator: Justin Avoth
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, literary fiction
Pages: 288
Length: 7 hours and 15 minutes
Published by Simon & Schuster, Simon Schuster Audio on March 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Emma Donoghue, the “soul-stirring” (Oprah Daily) nationally bestselling author of Room, returns with a sweeping historical novel about an infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station.

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.

From an author whose “writing is superb alchemy” (Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author), The Paris Express is an evocative masterpiece that effortlessly captures the politics, glamour, chaos, and speed that marked the end of the 19th century.

My Review:

The Paris Express is the story of a picture. The fictionalized story of a picture. In fact, the picture at left, of the wreckage of the Montparnasse train station in Paris, taken immediately after the Granville to Paris Express crashed through the flimsy wooden buffer at the end of the tracks and continued straight on through the window and out of the station onto the street below.

Welcome to “fin du XIXe siecle” Paris – that’s the end of the 19th century. To a world that is on the cusp of change, and not just because the 19th century is about to become the 20th. A change that the Paris Express itself is certainly a symbol of, as it seemingly rockets across the French countryside from Granville, on the Normandy coast, straight into Paris with few stops and a mandate to shave every second off the trip as possible.

The train is running late, and the entire crew’s Christmas bonuses are in jeopardy. As is the whole, entire train. Not that most of its passengers are aware of the latter condition until the last few racing minutes before disaster.

But that resounding crash is the END of the story. The story, however, is literally one of those stories that lives up to the phrase about it being about the journey and not the destination.

Because the story, this story, is about the people on that train, passengers and crew alike, and even about the train itself. It’s a slice of life story – made all the more tense and riveting because the reader knows the ending while the passengers do not.

Except, just possibly, one.

But along the way this ad hoc mixture that doesn’t mix, made up of the rich and the famous, the powerful and the mighty, the desperate and the determined, the resigned and the raging, from all strata of society and all walks of life, comes together for a little while, just a bit over seven hours, to form a temporary community.

Or rather, communities, as the well-heeled in First Class do not mix with the workers in Third – and those in Third keep to their own even as the eagle eye of the train’s crew ensures that no one tries to jump up to a class they are not entitled to.

In each car, there’s plenty of gossip and speculation about the others – most of it of course utterly wrong. There are arguments and debates, hidden griefs and exposed peccadillos. As each of the passengers relaxes into the company of their fellows, we get to know them even as they get to know each other.

Which makes the crash at the end all that more heart-rending, as by the time the journey ends, we want them all to survive. Even the ones who may not deserve it.

Escape Rating A-: I really enjoyed this one, and I was pretty damn surprised by that fact.

I picked this up because a friend recommended it, it sounded interesting, and I kind of decided to get the audio and start it even though I found the author’s Haven one of the most tedious things that I have ever forced myself to read and/or listen to. I know plenty of readers love this author but after my experience with Haven I’ll confess that I wasn’t at all sure why.

I have a much better idea after reading/listening to The Paris Express, and the excellent narration by Justin Avoth certainly added to my enjoyment of the story.

Based on the blurb, I came into this book expecting a combination of Erik Larson with just a bit of Murder on the Orient Express. And I was surprised at how much of that I got, minus the gathering at the end for the detective to make the ‘big reveal’ and unmask the murderer.

Because there isn’t one of those here – in spite of a story that leads one to believe there might be. Instead, this feels like a work of narrative nonfiction, which is where that reference to Larson comes in – even though the author does not make any claims to historical accuracy. Nevertheless, it takes a real historical event, the Montparnasse derailment of October 22, 1895 and does a dramatic rather than historically accurate job of telling a plausible version of how the disaster might have happened.

And it certainly grabs the reader by letting them into the thoughts, feelings and actions of the diverse crowd of people on the train. While the train may be traveling in a very linear fashion, the story is told as though weaving a tapestry with each traveler adding their bit of color to the whole.

I didn’t come into this story expecting the conversations, thoughts and feelings of those travelers to be historically accurate, so the author’s big reveal in the endnotes regarding exactly what was and what wasn’t didn’t feel like a ‘bait and switch’, although some readers might see it that way. OTOH, some readers might not read those notes at all.

As the saying goes, “Chacun à son goût” – each to their own taste.

To this reader’s taste, The Paris Express was a surprisingly absorbing read, not for the literal exposition of the train’s derailment, but rather for the portrait of fin de siècle France and the thoughts and feelings of the people who lived within, as exemplified by a fascinating cast of characters.

Leaving me very glad that I decided to give this author another try.

A- #BookReview: The Country Under Heaven by Frederic S. Durbin

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Country Under Heaven by Frederic S. DurbinThe Country Under Heaven by Frederic S. Durbin
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction, literary fiction, Weird West, Western
Pages: 331
Published by Melville House on May 13, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Louis L’Amour meets H.P. Lovecraft in this thrilling western epic about a former Civil War soldier wracked by enigmatic visions . . .

Set in the 1880s, the story follows Ovid Vesper, a former Union soldier who has been having enigmatic visions after surviving one of the Civil War’s most gruesome battles, the Battle of Antietam. As he travels across the country following those visions, he finds himself in stranger and increasingly more dangerous encounters with other worlds hidden in the spaces of his own mind, not to mention the dangers of the Wild West.

Ovid brings his steady calm and compassion as he helps the people of a broken country, rapidly changing but, like himself, still reeling and wounded from the war. He assists with matters of all sorts, from odd jobs around the house, to guiding children back to their own universe, to hunting down unnatural creatures that stalk the night — all the while seeking his own personal resolution and peace from his visions.

Ovid’s epic journey across the American West with a surprising cast of characters blends elements of the classic Western with historical fantasy in a way like no other.

My Review:

Ovid Vesper had not only ‘seen the elephant’ as a Union soldier, but after being severely wounded at the Battle of Antietam, that elephant – or at least one of its avatars – followed him home.

And continued following him around for nearly two decades, giving him strange visions, the ability to find hidden things and liminal places between worlds, and generally giving him the ability to see both utterly weird and completely mundane brushes with death before they happened. So he could stop them from happening. Sometimes. Sorta/kinda.

Because we’re seeing Vesper’s ‘Weird West’ from inside of his own head, we’re never one hundred percent sure whether it’s literally all in his head – and just in his head – or whether there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy but that he’s able to see them – and for them to see him.

We travel with Vesper as he rides on his faithful and rather intelligent horse Jack, back and forth across the West from 1880 to 1889. It’s a world that’s changing rapidly, as the war is over, the peace sometimes still seems precarious, the west is still wild but the railroads are settling it down – whether it wants that or not.

But it’s a big place and there are still plenty of spaces where the weird runs free, and Vesper is right smack in the middle of all of it, from one of the last cattle drives to chasing down gangs like the Daltons to turning the tide of a classic shootout to the side of the ‘white hats’ and helping to leave the ‘black hats’ in the dust.

And along the way that ‘elephant’ – the monster he calls the ‘Craither’ – chases him from pillar to post, occasionally helping but mostly haunting him, herding him towards a resolution that neither of them can quite see until they get there.

But in Vesper’s slow, steady meander through the wide-open spaces of ‘the country under heaven’ we get to experience the world he knew, one that may or may not have ever been as either the dime-novels or TV and Western-themed movies ever portrayed it, but was weird and wild and beautiful in its own way – and is now as gone as that Craither.

Escape Rating A-: I waxed philosophical there for a bit, which fits perfectly with this book because Ovid Vesper certainly does too. He tells his story in a series of vignettes that outline his decade of wandering in pursuit of his visions. The stories do all feel of a piece in the end, as friends and neighbors and enemies come into – and fall out of – the narrative, only to return again later having moved along just as Vesper himself does. But it doesn’t completely gel into a novel exactly, more like a collection of interconnected stories.

But the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and while it doesn’t quite become a novel it does come to a satisfying – and surprising – overall conclusion.

This book sits at a fascinating conjunction of genres, perched on the fencepost between Western historical fiction, Weird West fantasy, outright horror and literary fiction. Normally fence-sitting is uncomfortable due to a proliferation of splinters in the ass, and the fencepost – well, let’s not envision that too closely.

But it works here, in fact, it works better than I thought it would, and that’s all due to Ovid Vesper’s first-person voice. He is more than a bit philosophical, he’s accepting of the world as he sees it because he’s aware that he’s a bit weird and so accepts whatever weird anyone else has going on, he takes care of his friends, he protects himself and his own, and he talks to his horse who really does seem to be listening.

I didn’t so much feel like I was reading as that I was following along in Vesper’s wake on another horse, just listening in on his thoughts and hopes and dreams and especially his experiences.

In spite of the occasional shootout and/or mad dash to safety, this isn’t a story with a lot of high highs or nail-biter chapters. It kind of goes along at the pace of Vesper’s horse Jack, being a part of the moment and the journey in full, enjoying the ride and the view but always moving towards a distant horizon.

I always adore stories that provide moving descriptions of times and places that are gone, especially when the descriptions are vivid and the characters are fascinating – which Vesper certainly does, and is. In the end, The Country Under Heaven turned out to be the right book at the right time for this reader, and I’m happy I took the time to travel along with Vesper and Jack – and even his Craither.