Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss

A- #BookReview: Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous by Autumn K. England

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous by Autumn K. EnglandField Guide for the Formerly Villainous (Everyday Magic, #1) by Autumn K. England
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, queer fantasy
Series: Everyday Magic #1
Pages: 368
Published by Poisoned Pen Press on June 2, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

STARDEW VALLEY meets STUDIO GHIBLI in a charming cozy fantasy about healing, redemption, and the subtle magic of simple living. Perfect for fans of Can't Spell Treason Without Tea and The Spellshop. Welcome home, weary traveler.
When Oaklin Nettlewood accidentally joined an evil world-ending cult, mind control magic forced them to do unspeakable things. Years later, the realm's heroes have finally saved the day, defeated the villain, and shattered the last remnants of the spell...leaving destruction in their wake. And so, with a spell-damaged memory and whole bushel of trauma, Oaklin escapes to a small farm on the edge of Mossley's Rest and swears an oath: After all the things they were forced to do with their magic, they will never use it again. Ever.
The no-nonsense ghost granny who lives in Oaklin's house has other ideas. As she coaxes Oaklin out of their shell and back into the world, they find companionship (a grumpy horse and a very good dog), friendship (a local bard and magical baker who should just kiss already), and tentative romance (a paladin-librarian who makes Oaklin's heart come alive for the first time in ages.) Magic even seems possible again―though strictly for foraging magical mushrooms and protecting the farm from bugs.
Healing comes in gentle waves, and Oaklin doesn't have to do it alone. So what does it mean when an inquisitor comes to town to hunt former cultists just as Oaklin begins to think that maybe, just maybe, they deserve a happy ending after all?

My Review:

Oaklin Nettlewood has found themselves on the thorns of a dilemma. I know that phrase is normally HORNS of a dilemma, but not in Oaklin’s case. Not just because of their name, but seriously because they are caught among WAY more than just two dilemmas. They’re working their way through a whole thorny nettlebush of the things, and they’ve just barely gotten started.

Oaklin has just taken possession of their new farm, on the outskirts of the friendly, flourishing village of Mossley’s Rest. They are in dire need of a fresh start, and they’re hoping that the new job and the new location will help them get that start, well, started.

Which is where the first of many, many of those thorny dilemmas crop up.

Oaklin needs a fresh start because their original start, in a farming village in a different part of the country, was wiped out as part of the villainous Enchantrix’s War of bloody destruction. Oaklin survived, while his former village did not, because Oaklin was on the other side. The Enchantrix’s side.

Not willingly, and not even knowingly, for multiple senses of both phrases. The Enchantrix’s troops, one and all, were mind controlled by the Enchantrix’s magic. (Sort of like a powerful, wide-spectrum, widespread Imperius curse only longer lasting and with more magical oomph.)

Oaklin lost six years of their lives to that mind control spell – which was so thorough it made even the years before the spell dim, hazy and covered in shades of darkness. They remember bits and pieces, but nothing coherent or cohesive.

The spell broke along when the Enchantrix was defeated and slain. Leaving Oaklin and the other survivors a guilty, tattered remnant of who and what they used to be. While Oaklin and the remaining mind-whammied former cultists were officially pardoned for the crimes their bodies committed while their minds were controlled, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a whole lot of people who STILL want to punish them for what happened.

Oaklin has come to Mossley’s Rest to hide – and to hide themself from their own magic which made them vulnerable to the Enchantrix’s control in the first place. Which leads right smack dab to another one of Oaklin’s dilemmas. The farm they’ve just sunk their meager savings into was originally the property of the village’s land witch, and it was protected so that it could only be purchased by someone capable of taking the witch’s magical place.

Something that Oaklin has vowed not to do, ever again, because of just how much and how terrible the evil they committed with their magic was – even if it wasn’t under their control.

But the last one of Oaklin’s dilemmas is also the first part of their healing. The farmhouse is haunted. The ghost of the prior owner, the village’s beloved land witch, is determined to coax, cajole or outright pester Oaklin into becoming the farmer, land witch and protector that the village needs to survive.

Whether Oaklin or any random Inquisitors, want them to or not.

Escape Rating A-: There’s a LOT to love about this Field Guide, but the reason that this is a A- rating instead of higher is that Oaklin Nettlewood begins – and middles – the story not loving themselves AT ALL. While there are plenty of reasons they believe they shouldn’t love or even like themself, they’re wallowing in guilt and self-loathing. It’s not a question of whether they deserve the abuse they are heaping upon themself, because that’s not the point. They don’t deserve any of it but they’re not ready to hear that yet. AND they’re suffering from flashbacks and PTSD and PTSD about the flashbacks, all of which make sense but are hard to read and go on a bit too long or in too much detail from a reader’s perspective.

Oaklin is bogged down in guilt, and the story gets a bit bogged down along with them, even though they deserve none of it (and neither does the reader). It’s also very dark – again, with good reason – but it does make this reader wonder about the actual level of coziness in this supposedly cozy fantasy. The setting itself is plenty cozy, but Oaklin’s journey through it isn’t nearly so cozy along most of its way, although they do achieve a happy ending with a mere, but appropriate, touch of bittersweet.

The setting is a cozy fantasy like Adenashire, but the story is as much sad fluff as it is cozy. The story as a whole is very much Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore, but set in Adenashire with Violet’s levels of angst, regret and reaching for a new start after a villainous first act. Also, like Violet Thistlewaite’s story, there is a romance in this one but the romance is not the center of the story.

So, while this is a story about getting away from yourself, it’s also a story about coming into yourself. Oaklin starts out in a very dark place for some terribly excellent reasons. Along their way, they reach outside themselves – or reach back into themselves for who they might have been if they hadn’t thoroughly disrupted their life.

But as much as this is Oaklin’s story, and it very much is their personal journey, it is also a story about the power of community to support, the way that connection fosters growth and happiness, the joy of being both wanted and needed and the contentment of finding a place of one’s own writ both large and small.

But the heart of the story, the thing that gives it just that perfect note of bittersweetness to make Oaklin’s happiness earned in the fullest measure, is the healing power of forgiveness. Because above all else, Oaklin needs to forgive themselves and they need to feel forgiven by those they have wronged. The story can’t end until they do.

An ending that gives Oaklin the strength and the closure that they need to move on with the life they finally feel they’ve earned. And if that ending also manages to leave the reader with just a bit of a tear in their eye, well, even thorns need a bit of watering every now and again.

#BookReview: Cash and Gravity by Perrin Pring

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Cash and Gravity by Perrin PringCash and Gravity: A Novel (The Chevy Cole Series) by Perrin Pring
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: action adventure, dystopian, space western
Series: Chevy Cole #1
Pages: 320
Published by Diversion Books on May 26, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

"This may not be the future we want, but it feels right, which is sort of terrifying, sort of exciting, and, in Perrin Pring's hands, nothing short of spectacular." – Stephen Graham Jones, NYT Bestselling author of The Only Good Indians
A thrilling sci-fi western and the first in a genre- and mind-bending series bearing shades of Old Man’s War, Murderbot Diaries, and The Monkey Wrench Gang.
A high-stakes chase across the American West. A device that could change the world. Three unlikely allies thrown together by fate. 
In the not so distant future, six mega corporations and their privatized armies have supplanted the American government. They compete for resources, market position, and the ultimate long game prize of colonizing the stars. 
Chevy Cole left her conservative family behind for life as a Launch Tech marine and never looked back, proud of her role as a first-into-the-fire grunt, even if she were well below the revered female super soldiers known as Aces. When rumors spread that one of the Big Six has created a fusion device that would put the stars within reach, all-out war looms. 
After the catastrophic failed siege of a Nevada mine leaves most of her comrades dead, Chevy encounters a dying Ace in possession of a mysterious package and a this Ace is a man. Joined by Dolon, an aging mercenary "phantom" sent by Launch Tech to transport the package to an Idaho safehouse, the three form an uneasy alliance. 
As they try to outrun a rival corporation’s ruthless agents across the desert in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, Chevy realizes that their survival may also determine who controls the future. But when greed is the only rule of law, who can she trust? 

My Review:

I came into this one kind of expecting Cash and Gravity to both be people. Literally. I was expecting those to be the names of the protagonists. Let me disabuse you of that notion right now, because they’re not.

Instead, they are the forces that power the narrative of the story. Gravity, the force of nature. The principle that Earth, or any large mass, pulls things towards it from space. Like lifeboats ejected from dying spaceships. And dropships built to drop from orbit with a cargo of space marines.

And cash, you know, money. The thing that really makes the world go ‘round. Or, in the case of this story, and increasingly in real life, the thing that allows a person to buy what they need and go where they must and manage to keep themselves off the ever-tightening grid of networked cameras and transactions.

The thing that allows a person to hide their very existence – if they’re very, very careful about it. And very, very lonely.

Those forces are what bring space marine Chevy Cole, ‘Ace’ Izan and ‘phantom’ Dolan together on a mad dash across America’s desert southwest in this megacorporate controlled future.

Their slowly crumbling world is controlled by six megacorporations, Launch Tech, Exoterra, Tsilokovsky, Jinzhan, Lua Um and Alpha Orbital. Of course, there aren’t six superpowers. There are two superpowers, L-Tech and EXO, and the rest are lesser beings orbiting the two giants. Who are, of course, locked in eternal conflict.

Or they were, when scientists based on a tiny, low earth orbit EXO space station discovered, or created, the SFnal equivalent of the mythical philosopher’s stone. But the future isn’t interested in turning base metal into gold, and they’re already working on eternal life. The device that EXO has in their hands does something better and even more dangerous. It’s a (relatively) safe fusion battery that can produce infinite energy – or ultimate destruction.

Launch Tech has massed all of its forces to steal the device while it’s still on that vulnerable space station. That, as it turns out, was the easy part. Cash and Gravity is the story of the hard part, of three people in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, banding together to get the fate of the universe, and themselves, to safety before the clock runs out.

Before their equally determined – and even more dangerous – pursuers catch up to take them down, and out, and the device and the world’s future from their hands.

Escape Rating B: The idea that megacorporations will take over the world is not all that far-fetched, far-flung or far into the future – at least not in SFnal terms. There are plenty of stories with that type of set up. Just take a look at Murderbot – and you might as well start looking in that direction from the beginning because there are definitely a lot of Murderbot feels in Cash and Gravity.

Not the SecUnit itself, but the world that made it possible – and has expanded that control out into that universe. From a certain point of view, the story in Cash and Gravity is a variation of how Murderbot’s megacorporation-controlled universe got to be that way.

Alternatively, and with just as much plausibility, the world of Cash and Gravity descends from the corporate-controlled Earth in Nicole Kornher-Stace’s Firebreak, or Natalie Zina Walschots’ Hench and Villain, complete with corporate-created and sponsored media-darling heroes. Because that’s here too, and the way that got to be that way isn’t nearly as pretty as those media darlings’ faces and public images make things out to be.

But in its actual journey, it has a lot of the space western vibes of Firefly. That Firefly was also set in a universe where megacorporations ruled – even if some of that rule was thinly disguised by planetary governments who were equally corrupt – makes the resemblance that much stronger.

Of course, it’s not the setting that gives Cash and Gravity either its heart or its compelling pace. What makes this story sing – if occasionally off-key – are its characters and the way that desperation and danger bonds them together in spite of themselves.

Three people who should not have ever met, a hermit, a hero and a space marine. The hero has the device. The space marine has the brawn to protect him. The hermit has the ability to keep them off the grid until they reach their ‘plan Z’ pickup point.

When they first meet, they don’t trust each other, they’re not prepared for each other, and they don’t even like each other. Chevy’s there by accident, Izan wasn’t supposed to survive the drop, and Dolan wasn’t supposed to worry about anything but the device.

But Dolan can’t abandon them, Izan is too space sick to get anywhere on his own, and Chevy needs a new squad to protect to keep her stable in the civilian world she never dealt with well even when she was one.

They find a family – or a squad in Chevy’s case – that none of them were expecting. Their teamwork carries them through even as their tentative plans fail to survive the first contact with their enemy. But it’s that same sense of team and family that lets them keep it together even as everything falls apart. And helps them start putting the pieces back together the way they should be when their bosses try to convince them of a solution that is very, very wrong.

In the end, I had some mixed feelings about this one. Obviously, it reminded me of a lot of books I’ve read, and I’d throw in the Valor/Confederation series by Tanya Huff and Old Man’s War by John Scalzi to represent the voices of Chevy and Dolan. At the same time, the villains of the piece, whose perspectives we also get to experience first hand, were more caricatures than characters (that they are nameless throughout didn’t help) and I’ve seen that phenomenon a bit too many times too close together recently to enjoy it again here.

I did love the pulse-pounding pace of the story, the road trip tour of their sorta/kinda functional but slowly crumbling America AND especially the way the team gelled into a family that stuck in spite of the absolute heel-turn betrayal at the end. Which, admittedly, I saw coming.

On balance, I liked this one because I liked the protagonists. The story absolutely does pull the reader down the road right along with them, and the ending was the kind that was right, dammit, and opens the door wide for a second book. Which I’m going to be right there for because they’ve all earned whatever their version of a happy ending is and they deserve to get it.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Last Mandarin by Louise Penny and Mellissa Fung

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Last Mandarin by Louise Penny and Mellissa FungThe Last Mandarin by Louise Penny, Mellissa Fung
Narrator: Eunice Wong
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: political thriller, suspense, technothriller, thriller
Pages: 400
Length: 13 hours and 16 minutes
Published by Minotaur Books on May 12, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A standalone thriller co-written by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Gamache series and an award-winning journalist.
In a fast-paced, all-too-real thriller co-written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny and award-winning journalist Mellissa Fung, global politics become personal for two unlikely heroines. Alice Li, a first-generation Chinese-American, is an erstwhile food blogger who has lived in the shadow of her mother, Vivien Li. A Chinese dissident who escaped China after Tiananmen Square, Vivien is now a globally recognized human rights activist and passionate advocate for a free and democratic China.
When security and fire alarms go off simultaneously all around the world, setting off a panic, the signal is traced back to China. As world leaders scramble to respond, Vivien and Alice are called to the White House in hopes Madame Li can decode the Chinese intentions.
While it makes some sense that the President would turn to Vivien, since she regularly advises world leaders on the actions of today’s Chinese government, what isn’t clear is why they’d want to talk to Alice.
After looking at the evidence, Vivien says that the only thing worse than the Chinese government being behind it, is if they are not. It would mean, she explains, that some clandestine element within China is calling the shots. That the President of China has lost control. And an unstable China cannot be good for anyone.
Or perhaps that’s exactly what the shrewd old politician wants everyone to think.
Caught up in the chaos, Vivien and Alice are uniquely placed to stop the next, cataclysmic attack. But there are forces deep within both the American and Chinese governments intent on stopping mother and daughter. The estranged pair, who excels at misunderstanding each other, must figure out how to work together.
The increasingly frantic search for answers takes the women from the Oval Office to an office building in Akron, Ohio, from the noodle shops of Hong Kong to the necropolis of the first emperor. Along the way they must decode an old legend, and an old language invented by women, for women.
The Last Mandarin is an electrifying study of absolute power and voracious greed, political terror and personal conviction. But it is also, as to be expected from the minds of Louise Penny, beloved author of the Gamache novels, and Mellissa Fung, an acclaimed international journalist, an intimate examination of choice, of sacrifice, of memory and myths, both cultural and personal. It is the story of a mother and daughter, as well as a compelling international thriller about the precarious balance of power across the world, and within a family. And what happens when both break down.

My Review:

The Last Mandarin is a bit of a “six impossible things before breakfast” kind of story. Then again, our perspective on the frequently insane events of this tale is named Alice – and she often doesn’t believe what’s happening either, even while she’s in the midst of experiencing it.

Especially while she’s experiencing it.

The story begins with food blogger Alice Li in the restaurant of one of Washington D.C.’s premier hotels, watching resentfully as seemingly everyone in the room sidles up to the table to pay homage to her mother Vivien. Vivien Li, a refugee from the People’s Republic of China just after the 1989 protest and massacre at Tiananmen Square, has made a name and reputation for herself in the U.S. as a renowned human rights activist, an outspoken speaker against the communist regime that continues to control and suppresses the people of her homeland and an expert on the politics and history of the country she fled.

Alice has spent her entire life in her mother’s shadow, never measuring up to whatever unspoken plans and ambitions her mother had for her. Alice is still standing in Vivien’s shadow, dragged along in her mother’s wake, when every single alarm and warning system on the entire planet – and the space surrounding it – goes off at once. Everywhere, all at once.

And Vivien – with Alice in tow – is dragged from the hotel to the White House to speak to the members of the President’s inner circle about the source of what can only be considered an attack. Because whoever did this, however they accessed every warning system everywhere, including the space station in orbit and literally all the civilian and even military ships at sea, did it from somewhere in China.

Not that the country of China was exempt from what happened. Only that someone there must know something. And that Vivien – or one of the President’s advisors – should have seen it coming. But they didn’t.

All they have is one last text from one of Alice’s old college friends. She thought Liam was just a fellow food blogger, but his message was clearly more – and so was he. Whether he was a spy, a double agent, or merely an agent of Vivien Li’s own private spy network is something yet to be determined.

But Alice Li is determined to find out what really happened. As well as with figure out who, and what, her mother really is. It might make more of a difference than either Vivien or Alice can imagine if Vivien can manage to look past her own hubris to understand who her daughter really is, and what she’s really capable of, as well.

Before it’s too late.

Escape Rating A: This story is more than a bit of a wild ride. It’s the kind of story that the late Tom Clancy used to right, filled with paranoid plots, insane situations, mutually assured destruction brinksmanship, and the potential end of the world as we know it. (That Clancy is both dead and still publishing new books fits right in, as that’s just as impossible as much of both his – and this – story.)

But the impossibilities are in the details, and in the characters who find themselves thrust into the position where they are the only ones who CAN save the world. Even as the people who believe they are the powers-that-be gibber in paranoia and delusions and paranoid delusions that might even be partially true, worrying about vast hidden conspiracies and whether or not they’ll be blamed for the destruction.

The idea that the world is much more vulnerable than we think it is, and that world leaders are simultaneously afraid of each other – with reason – and have more in common with their enemy counterparts than their own people, can be, and probably is, both counter to what we believe AND entirely true. (That concept comes straight out of old Cold War espionage stories, where the enemy agents in the same situations understood each other better than the folks back home understood them – and vice very much versa.)

Again, even if the details of this story seem over-the-top. Which they mostly are.

At the same time, it’s easy to see co-author Louise Penny’s fingerprints all over the way this story works. There’s an ongoing thread through her beloved Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries in regards to hidden, deeply rooted, long buried, patiently waiting gigantic conspiracies. And that’s exactly what’s at the heart of this story – even if their motives are different from Gamache’s usual run of antagonists.

Because the story here combines human and political plausibilities and possibilities with the implausibility of its heroes and historical antecedents which careens hard into Dan Brown and the arcane, hidden historical meanings and implanted codes of, well, The Da Vinci Code.

And it’s that juxtaposition of the likely with the quirky and otherwise downright impossible that readers will either fall into in fascination or bounce off of hard and fast.

I fell hard, for the most part. I loved the conspiracy theories and the historical underpinnings. The strained relationship between Chinese dissident turned civil rights activist Vivien Li and her resentful adult daughter Alice grounded the story in the real even more than the plot wrapped around the real-world bogeyman of artificial intelligence run amok in cyberspace.

The way that the new conspiracy is steeped in the myths and legends of Chinese history will either captivate readers or push them out of the story. I love those kinds of details, but reading mileage definitely varies.

Readers who set aside their disbelief, or at least let it rest for a while, will enjoy The Last Mandarin a great deal. It’s the kind of espionage thriller that we don’t see nearly as much of as we used to. In that sense, and in its choice of foci and protagonists, it reminds me a bit of The Silver Fish as well as both Clancy and several of M.L. Buchman’s series, particularly his Miranda Chase series.

It’s also a story that is even better in audio. I listened to Eunice Wong’s narration – she’s a great reader for Alice – and got so caught up in her reading that I was up until 3 am finishing the audio instead of switching to text and wrapping up in a single hour. It was worth it.

So if you can wrap your willing suspension of disbelief around this combination of implausible heroes and not nearly as insane as we’d like them to be conspiracy plots, The Last Mandarin is a fascinating and fantastic read. In multiple senses of both words!

A++ #BookReview: Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> book reviews
A++ #BookReview: Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne PalmerOde to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, hopepunk, post apocalyptic, robots, science fiction
Pages: 416
Published by DAW on May 26, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Forty years ago, the world nearly ended.
Be is an old robot who was there, and doesn’t want to think about what happened, or what role they played in that conflict. They have settled into a life of isolation in the abandoned ruins of an old mill in the former New York Botanical Gardens, disinterested in what has happened in the outside world since they stepped away from the war. Someone out there, though, has not forgotten about them, and when they are attacked, their person vandalized, and one of their leg stolen, they set out to find the thief accompanied by a cyborg dog and a human mechanic.
The world has changed, but the recovery from the war is uneven and faltering, and Be begins to suspect a malicious hand trying to rekindle the old conflict and finish what was started. In order to stop them, Be needs to come to terms with both their own past and who they have become, and how everything and everyone else they knew has changed in their absence. Being left alone is no longer an option, and peace may be impossible.
This is a story about coming to terms with your past, with who you’ve become and who you still want to be: a tale of resilence and hope, an ode to those struggling to become whole in a world half-broken.

My Review:

This one just blew me away. To the point where I had to let it settle for a day before writing this review, so that I could be coherent enough to say something more than just SQUEE! (Fair warning, I’m still going to squee because this was so awesome.

Initially, I picked this up because I loved the author’s Finder Chronicles, and the universe-weary voice of the series chaos-magnet protagonist, Fergus Ferguson. I wasn’t expecting more Fergus – I mean, it would be nice to get more of that series but Fergus’ AND HIS FRIENDS’ odds of survival degrade with each story so they’re all better off if he stays retired.

In Ode to the Half-Broken, from the perspective of its initially unnamed protagonist (and its name is DEFINITELY an integral part of the story) I got something entirely different – but equally as fascinating if not just a bit more – in every possible way.

It all begins when our unnamed main character wakes up in a bathtub in a ruined building, covered in EMP chips, disconnected from the network – and from most of their own senses. Minus one leg. As our point of view character is a bipedal mech, the loss of a leg is a significant impairment to mobility.

It gets better. Both in the physical sense and in the sense that the story just keeps getting better and better. We’re already invested in this mech’s dilemma/mystery and the story just keeps getting more involving as it goes. Just as the mech does.

The story takes the form of a great American road novel, as our mech sets out from their violated home base in the abandoned wilderness of New York City’s Central Park to find, first and foremost, someone who can restore their mobility. So that they can hunt for whoever, whatever and most importantly whyever their person and their sanctuary was invaded.

What it finds is a world going both right and wrong at the same time. As it gathers a team around it – to its own surprise – made up of different types of mechs from tiny drones to a former trainmech now embodied in a minibus, from a cyborg dog to a human mech mechanic – it trades its former solitude for a cooperative life with others pursuing the same goals and supporting each other through a landscape that is both trying to recover and being pushed towards a deeper disaster.

There are clearly opposing forces helping, hindering and hampering their quest on all sides. As the danger ramps up, the unnamed mech, now calling itself “Be”, is forced to explore a past they hoped they’d left behind them in order to protect their friends in the present in the hopes of finding a brighter future that seems to always be out of reach.

Afraid, very afraid, that if they reclaim their former identity, that future will already be lost.

Escape Rating A++: Reading this got me through a four-hour power failure. By got through I mean that I was so caught up in the story that I was able to ignore the beeping, fweeping and outright wailing of seemingly every single computing device and attendant uninterruptible power supply in the entire house. For FOUR hours. Which is, come to think of it, an appropriate metaphor for this story as its all about mechs and AIs and their integrations or cohabitations – or not – with humanity in this post-apocalyptic world that is doing its damndest either to get out of its current dystopia and/or shove that dystopia into full-on not just end of the world as they know it but end of everything.

The part of this review that’s above the rating doesn’t NEARLY encompass the depth of the story or my complete fascination with it and utter absorption in it. I’ll try some more here.

As readalikes kept popping into my head as I read this story, I realized that I’ve read a lot more robot/mech/AI stories in the past few years than I thought – and I thought I’d read quite a few. Thinking about those stories, and the whole of Ode to the Half-Broken, I think the way it plays out in my head is that it’s a trip through the post-apocalyptic dystopia of Service Model, but the dystopia is more like Shining Smith’s world in Junkyard Cats, hoping to get through its Mad Max style dysfunction to a post-post-apocalypse that has the hope and the healing of A Psalm for the Wild-Built, but with a level of interspecies/intermech/intereverything cooperation like Automatic Noodle. I could throw a few more books on that pile, particularly American War by Omar El Akkad, because the way this dystopia has fractured has a uniquely American feel. Not that Europe probably isn’t in just as big a mess, but if we were viewing this story from Europe, or Asia, or anywhere else in the world, it would look different. Just as fucked up, but different.

Ode to the Half-Broken is certainly a great American road novel, but the road it’s travelling on was created, bombed, and irradiated by the actual, literal four horsemen of the apocalypse. One of whom is trying to make the apocalypse worse, one who is helping the world recover, one who is actively fighting against any further collapse and one who is along for the ride, being a good boi AND a good friend every mile of the way.

I’m not even close to describing just how good this was. But I’m going to stop trying because I hope I’ve teased you enough to get you to read it. The characters were fascinating, fantastic and utterly real, from the narrator to the toolbox mechs to the dudebros and the warmongers. The world felt like one I could step out of the door and walk right into – even if that would be a bad idea for numerous reasons. It felt, well, both real and fully-realized and entirely too possible.

And yet, in the end, just as there was in Automatic Noodle but entirely differently, there’s hope. A hope that all the characters are clinging to – and so is the reader.

Grade A #BookReview: The Summer Share by Jenn McKinlay

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Summer Share by Jenn McKinlayThe Summer Share by Jenn McKinlay
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, family life fiction, friendship fiction, relationship fiction, romantic comedy, women's fiction
Pages: 368
Published by Berkley on May 26, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

When two misfits discover they’ve inherited the same beach house, sparks fly in the most unexpected ways, in this hilarious and heartfelt rom-com from the New York Times bestselling author of Summer Reading.
Free-spirited travel influencer Hannah Spencer has spent five years touring the country in her vintage van. An unexpected inheritance from her Pops brings Hannah to Cape Split, North Carolina, where she learns she’s the new owner of a worse-for-wear seaside beach house. Or, rather, fifty percent of one. Turns out Simon O’Malley inherited the other half from his Gramps.
As Simon and Hannah spend the summer tag-teaming repairs on the crumbling cottage, they discover the house was once home to a timeless love story. Soon, they begin to wonder if the house’s romantic past may be a good omen for their future together. But there’s one problem—Simon is set on selling the property at the end of the summer.
Hannah thought one summer at the Split would be enough, except it isn’t like any place she’s ever been, and Simon isn’t like any man she’s ever known—and she’s thinking about putting down some roots. She just needs Simon to see their budding relationship and this newfound community the same way or their first summer share might also be their last.

My Review:

I picked this up because I loved Witches of Dubious Origin. While I wasn’t exactly hoping for the same kind of book, because Witches is cozy fantasy and this book is more cozy small town romance/relationship, I was still hoping for some of the same sensibilities – and certainly some of the same charm.

Those things I definitely got!

The meeting between Hannah Spencer and Simon O’Malley isn’t so much of a “meet-cute” as it is a meet really, really awkward with a big surprise inside. Literally inside the beach house on the Outer Banks they each thought they’d inherited from their beloved grandfather which turns out NOT to be a solo inheritance.

Hannah inherited her HALF of the cottage from her “Pops”, while Simon inherited HIS half from his beloved “Gramps”. Now they’re stuck with each other – according to their grandfathers’ wills – for two whole months during a glorious Outer Banks summer. At the end of the two months, they can each do what they like with their half. But that assumes they’ll be on something like the same page at the end.

They sure don’t start out there, not on the same page, not even in the same book. She wants to stay. After five years of being a travel influencer, Hannah is ready to stop living out of her van. The minute she sees the cottage, she recognizes that she’s tired of running from her past griefs and traumas, and that this gift from her “Pops” is a golden opportunity to make both a home and a homebase for herself and her big, goofy, Harlequin Great Dane, Dude.

Simon needs to sell. He needs the money to support his brother Charlie’s long-term medical care – and keep their rapacious father away from Charlie’s medical conservatorship and the money invested in it. And he can’t make the kind of living he needs to on the Outer Banks to make sure he has enough to be there for both of his adult siblings, because he KNOWS their father won’t.

But the story isn’t just about Hannah and Simon and Dude. (Not that Dude doesn’t steal every scene he galumphs into.) Not even though the romance that steals up on Hannah and Simon is lovely and hesitant and hot and sweet in all the right ways.

The romance that steals the story is the one that started 60 years ago, between two young men who met and fell in love over a contested fishing spot, during one golden Outer Banks summer – before one shipped off to war and the other began the life he was expected to have. Only to find each other decades later, and return to the place they were happiest, with time enough for a second chance with the love of their lives.

A secret they both kept from their entire families for decades, leaving their grandchildren with a chance for happiness of their very own. If Hannah and Simon can step out from their own secrets and traumas and grab the opportunity with all four hands – and four paws.

Escape Rating A: I picked this up early because it looked like the precise antidote for my reading slump – which it definitely turned out to be. I had a terrific reading time, to the point where I almost wish this was the start of a series because as much as I loved the main characters and THEIR story, I’d love to go back and see more of the whole community. They were great folks AND I need to see how ‘The Dude’ is abiding.

What’s driving me crazy about this book is that I can’t decide whether it’s a romance that just happens to, well, happen in the midst of a story about family relationships, found families, family secrets and a great community – or if the shoe is on the other foot and its a relationship story in which a romance occurs in the present because a different romance occurred in the past.

I know I’m splitting hairs a bit, but for my reading group it’s a serious question and I keep waffling about the answer.

Whichever comes first, the romance or the circle of family and community relationships, the story is delightful – and not just because of Dude. Not that he’s not a HUGE spread of icing on this delicious (book) cake.

What made this book work for me is the way that different plot threads played off against each other – and that the changes and revelations happen at what feels like a realistic and human length of time – and not in an instant.

Because three stories intertwine in The Summer Share. The one at the top of the pile is the ill-advised, somewhat hesitant, emotionally complex slow-burn into conflagration romance between Hannah and Simon. They’re surprised at their joint inheritance. They’re shocked at the secret their grandfathers were keeping. They’re hurt that the person they thought they were SO very close to kept such a huge secret for so many years.

At the same time, discovering that secret – and investigating the whole story of their grandfathers’ secret life in the OBX, brings them together AND connects them with the community. A community that had taken Bobby and Billy into their hearts and is more than happy to take their grandchildren to that same place. One startling revelation at a time.

And underneath all of that are the issues and family relationships and traumas that Hannah and Simon came to the cottage with in the first place. All the things that need to be resolved before they can get to their own happy ever after.

In the end, I had a lovely reading time on the Outer Banks with Hannah and Simon. And Dude. Mustn’t forget the Dude. Their troubles felt real, their solutions felt solid, and their happiness was definitely earned. This is a book that will leave readers with a big smile on their faces, whether they come for the romance or for all the intertwined relationships that make a community and a life.

 

A- #AudioBookReview: A Deadly Episode by Anthony Horowitz

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: A Deadly Episode by Anthony HorowitzA Deadly Episode (Hawthorne & Horowitz, #6) by Anthony Horowitz
Narrator: Rory Kinnear
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Hawthorne and Horowitz #6
Pages: 384
Length: 8 hours and 4 minutes
Published by Harper, HarperAudio on April 28, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the global bestselling author of Moonflower Murders and Close to Death comes an unputdownable new mystery in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series.
‘Easily the greatest of our crime writers’ Sunday Times'Nobody does this crime fiction better than Anthony Horowitz’ Crime Time FM'Anthony Horowitz is a national treasure' Ragnar Jónasson
---------
The Word is Murder, the first book in the Hawthorne series, is about to be made into a major feature film.
The actors have been cast, the script written, and filming has already started in Hastings.
But when Hawthorne and Anthony visit the set, they find a far from happy family.
The director’s pretentious, the screenwriter’s an eco-warrior, the two stars hate each other, and the producer has run out of money.
And things are about to get much, much worse.
In the middle of shooting, the actor playing Hawthorne is stabbed – which leaves the real Hawthorne with no choice. He has to step in and investigate his own murder.
Because the killer may not have got the right man. Was it Hawthorne himself who was meant to be the target?
A Deadly Episode is a wild ride through a world that the author knows only too well, and the most personal case Hawthorne has had to deal with so far.

My Review:

This series has been very meta from the very first book, The Word is Murder, but this sixth “episode” in the series is even more meta than the previous ones. And OMG that’s saying something.

They’ve always been meta (“A movie, book, or conversation is described as “meta” when it consciously references or comments upon its own medium or nature”) because the author, his more-or-less, somewhat sorta/kinda, real-life self is a character in the book who acknowledges all along that he’s writing the book – no matter his mixed feelings about the person/character he’s made famous, former Metropolitan Police Chief Inspector Daniel Hawthorne – AND about the way that Horowitz himself is treated by Hawthorne and pretty much everyone else when Hawthorne is around. Very much like a second banana – and an afterthought of one at that.

This time around the murder occurs on the site of a previous murder that was investigated by Hawthorne and Horowitz. In fact, on the site of their very first case, written up as The Word is Murder.

But not exactly the same site. Because this murder takes place on the set where The Word is Murder is being filmed. And this time around it’s Hawthorne himself who is the victim. Not the real Hawthorne, of course. Merely the actor playing Hawthorne in the production.

Not that there aren’t plenty of people around the set AND in Hastings where it’s being filmed who wouldn’t love to stick a knife in EITHER the real or the fictional Hawthorne. Neither of them has made a lot of friends in whichever business they’re in. Although not the same way. The real Hawthorne is a single-minded misanthrope who (mostly) pisses people off to get the job done. The actor playing Hawthorne, on the other hand, is a real piece of work with all the negative connotations of that phrase.

So Hawthorne has been murdered, and Hawthorne is investigating while Tony is, as usual, a day late and a pound short, following behind a character who will figure out whodunnit – no matter how twisted the path to getting there – without anyone giving poor Tony half the credit he’s due for getting yet another mess of a case into shape for eventual publication.

Then again, Watson didn’t get the credit he was due, either. And it hasn’t stopped a single one of us from getting caught up in THOSE cases. Or, for that matter, Hawthorne’s cases, with Tony tagging along behind and never quite catching up to the solution until Hawthorne lays it out for him – and the reader – on the proverbial silver salver – no matter how tarnished either that platter, or Hawthorne’s reputation or poor Tony’s ego, have gotten in the process of the investigation.

Escape Rating A-: This is the rating I usually end up at with this series, with the exception of The Twist of a Knife which I loved.

The reason I generally end up at A-, and why I did here, is that the initial parts of the story generally make me feel mean. Which needs a bit of an explanation.

Part of what makes the series as a whole equal parts interesting and meta is the life imitates art imitates life of the whole thing. Anthony Horowitz, the real-life author, is also Hawthorne’s very much put upon sidekick ‘Tony Horowitz’. He hates being called Tony, but he can’t get people – particularly Hawthorne – to stop doing it. He’s disregarded at every turn and it just weirds me out. Because if the real person were as much of a whiny, petulant, doormat as the character is, he wouldn’t have half the successful career that he actually has. And yet, so many of the details of the story that set up each book do mirror the author’s real life. There’s a disconnect for me in the early parts of each book in the series because it’s all Tony’s internal angst and reluctance to get involved with Hawthorne again and that part is getting a bit repetitive.

But as soon as the body drops, the story is off and running. I just find myself wanting to scream at ‘Tony’ to “get on with it already” frequently and often up to that point.

Speaking of screaming at the characters, I generally start these books in audio (in the car when I’m alone and can scream to my heart’s discontent), and the narrator, Rory Kinnear is always excellent and does a terrific job differentiating all the voices AND dragging me through the parts I’d skim in text. Once the story gets going – once that body hits the floor – NO narrator is fast enough and I switch to text because I HAVE to know whodunnit.

The series as a whole is very quirky, the sort of thing that if you like it, you like it, but if you don’t you don’t. I LOVE them once somebody dies – which sounds terrible – but I find the scene and stage-setting at the beginning to be a bit of a slog. However, I think that’s a ‘me’ thing. I want my protagonists to have more agency than Tony seems to have in his own (fictional) life, but from his perspective it’s clear that Hawthorne is the protagonist whether Tony likes it or not.

Again, meta.

The case in this one was particularly twisted because it’s wrapped up in the shared past of many of the participants in this film shoot AND it’s tied up in a surprising bit of Hawthorne’s past that he has refused to share details of with Tony – and therefore with the reader. (And he still doesn’t even when he does which is a fascinating trick in itself.)

This series is one where the detective keeps all the details VERY close to the vest and drives his sidekick crazy with it. So Tony doesn’t know and we don’t know (I didn’t) because we don’t see most of the truth behind the scattered clues because Hawthorne ALWAYS has information we don’t.

So if you’re looking for a ‘fair play’ mystery you won’t find it in the series. But if you’re looking for twisted suspense that will keep you well suspended, Hawthorne and Horowitz – but mostly Hawthorne – are going to pin you to the edge of your seat until the bitter end.

Initially, I thought that The Word is Murder was a one-trick pony. I’m thrilled that it hasn’t been, and that this series shows no sign of ending. I’ll be back for Hawthorne and Horowitz’s next case, whenever that next body drops.

#BookReview: And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B- Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: And Side by Side They Wander by Molly TanzerAnd Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: post apocalyptic, science fiction
Pages: 112
Published by Tordotcom on May 19, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

An intergalactic art heist by a ragtag group of underqualified misfits. What could go wrong?

For three hundred years, humanity’s greatest works of art have been on loan at the Museum of the Seed-Born. It was finally time for them to come home...but the alien curators were disinclined to return them.

Force was out of the question. Earth’s government was they were not going to press the issue. So, all we had was guile and hubris to fuel our little intergalactic art heist.

My old friend Tarquin was our leader, but not the captain. That was Tchik-tchik, though whether Tchik-tchik was our insectoid pilot’s name or species is still unclear to me. Misora, with her extremely illegal biotech mods, was our muscle.

Jack was there to hack the security systems of the biggest museum in the galaxy. He was a sensynth, a sentient synthetic being, and the most powerful machine intelligence on Earth uncorrupted by alien technology.

My name is Fennel Tycho. I’d like to tell you I was there because of my expertise in Art History. Truth is, I was there because without me, Jack would not have agreed to go. He was notorious for being difficult to work with—but it was a mistake to think I could make things any easier.

A meditation on the nature of love, life, and the "culture of the copy," And Side by Side They Wander asks the In a future where there are clones, androids, and a sentient mycelium that creates fungal simulacra, who is real and what is fake?

My Review:

There are PLENTY of science fiction stories that begin in the aftermath of humanity having reached the brink of self-destruction. Sometimes we fail the test, leading to a post-apocalyptic dystopia where our descendants curse our self-centeredness. I’ve read and reviewed LOTS of those stories.

Sometimes we succeed in spite of ourselves. Both Star Trek and the In Death series, two ‘verses I never thought I’d be grouping together, have a World War III or equivalent in their backstory. Both cases where humanity stepped over the line of self-destruction but managed to claw themselves back from complete annihilation before it was too late.

But in Star Trek, along with many other stories including this one, humanity manages to either save themselves or reach for the stars via alien intervention. (The movie Star Trek: First Contact sets up that future. I still hear “Magic Carpet Ride” whenever I think of this one. I digress AND I’ve possibly given you an earworm.)

And Side by Side They Wander takes place three centuries after that alien intervention on this future version of Earth. The Celerians gave Earth everything they needed to clean up their pollution-filled environment, roll back climate change, feed, clothe and house their people, and just plain move on from multiple near-extinction level catastrophes to booming post-scarcity economy.

It all sounds too good to be true – but Earth’s remaining governments were WAY too desperate not to take the deal. After all, by the time that particular flock of chickens would come home to roost – if they ever do – those politicians would be long dead and it would be their successors’ successors’ problem.

The cost of all that generosity was simple. The Celerians celebrated artistic creativity – and Earth’s history was a veritable treasure-trove of art. The cost of saving the planet was to let the Celerians take all of Earth’s greatest artistic treasures back to their home planet for safekeeping – and the treasures absolutely did need safekeeping.

The Celerians promised to let Earth have their treasures back when THE CELERIANS decided that Earth had not merely survived but had made the strides necessary to be careful and responsible stewards of their own planet and their own artistic legacy.

Did you notice the catch there? The humans who made the deal clearly didn’t – or were too desperate to care. Probably both. The Celerians get to decide when Earth is ready on their schedule and their timeline by THEIR criteria. We all know how that’s going to go, don’t we?

Earth thinks they’re ready after three hundred years. They certainly are by their own definition. But the Celerians never intended to return Earth’s artistic treasures and Earth hasn’t yet developed the faster than light travel they’d need to come to the Celerian homeworld to argue their point.

Which is where this story comes in, a story which, on the one hand, manages to prove that the Celerians are right, that humanity is not yet “civilized” enough to get their stuff back, and on the other, that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, and on the tentacle hiding behind my back, that some gifts do come at just too high a price for everyone involved.

Escape Rating B-: That’s a lot of intro for a rather short book. I’d apologize but I believe that this novella is using all of that SFnal trope-y backstory to make itself short. Meaning that it kind of expects that the reader knows at least bits of what sorts of SF came before it so IT doesn’t have to get into the weeds of all of that.

So if you’ve ever seen Star Trek: First Contact, or read any post-apocalyptic stories however they turned out, or heard of the famous Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” where the rescuing aliens’ equivalent of the Prime Directive turns out to be a cookbook, the history that leads to this story will have some familiar notes to it.

For this reader, the clearer antecedents besides the above were Down in the Sea with Angels by Khan Wong, Full Speed to a Crash Landing by Beth Revis and At Stars’ End by Anna Hackett. While the story actually within these pages had a lot of both Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon and especially To Be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers. This one starts out seeming to be like To Be Taught but ends up more like Volatile Memory – with one hell of a twist.

On the surface, this is a heist story. The Celerians aren’t going to give up Earth’s treasures, so this ragtag crew is going to steal them back. What makes the reader follow along is the way that the individuals on the crew – and their relationships with each other – both embody and reveal the way that the world has developed in the centuries since the Celerians’ intervention – and the ways that it hasn’t.

After all, humans are STILL gonna human, and the warts and all of human behavior are writ very large across this small story. As it drills down through the relationships, it also takes on two rather big topics. One is the nature of art and creativity, and what the differences are, if they exist, between an original work and its perfect copy, and whether and how much that matters.

The second, much more intimate topic, is the difference between love and obsession. What is love if it’s not requited? What will we do for love? And what happens when the lover realizes that the object of their affection is incapable of returning it because love wasn’t programmed in?

In the end, there was a LOT going on in this novella, but I’m not sure it stuck the explosive dismount. The philosophical meditations on art and artists and originality were interesting, and I’m left wondering if the book was intended as a vehicle for those meditations. The romantic elements aren’t romance at all – and I don’t think they were intended to be. I think they were intended to poke at the nature of romantic obsession with unattainable people and how toxic and self-erasing and defeating it can be.

I wanted this to be about the heist, and it’s really not. The heist is more of a frame for everything else, up to and including the self-centered, self-absorbed, destructive capabilities of humans to break the toys they can’t keep for themselves.

In the end, I liked this more for what it reminded me of than I did for what IT actually was. Your reading mileage may vary.

A+ #BookReview: Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Villain by Natalie Zina WalschotsVillain (Hench, #2) by Natalie Zina Walschots
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, superheroes, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Hench #2
Pages: 464
Published by William Morrow Books on May 19, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Boys meets Starter Villain and Assistant to the Villain in Natalie Zina Walschots’s electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench, in which the Auditor must confront the near-impossible in order to right the many wrongs in the superhuman industry…or cause more of them. She’s not picky.
Anna, better known to superheroes as the Auditor, has carved out a name for herself. Any hero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, success should taste she has an incredible job with lots of perks, and her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated and literally ground to a pulp.
But Anna still has her sights set on a greater destroying the Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good, and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.
Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has vanished without a trace, leaving Anna to examine all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty fill the air, and fear that this moment of triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.
Anna soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her…someone much more the Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. This isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as the fight spirals deeper and deeper, with new foes popping up every day—she’ll need more than just her superpower—data research—to keep ascending through the supervillain ranks.
It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

My Review:

The story in Villain picks up immediately where Hench left off. I mean immediately, meaning that Villain is not a standalone and you need to start with Hench. And it’s SO worth it.

But the location is, surprisingly from the Auditor’s perspective, in a complete and absolute slough of despond at Leviathan HQ. Leviathan’s arch-nemesis Supercollider has been reduced to a puddle of goo – literally – but Leviathan isn’t the one responsible for reducing his greatest enemy to a living sludge-pile. That honor goes to Quantum Entanglement. Leviathan is standing on that fine line between hate and love – because Supercollider was his lifelong nemesis, they even trained together before Leviathan turned to the darkside – and he’s grieving and can’t either admit it or deal with it.

The Auditor doesn’t actually care who disposed of the bastard, just that he’s out of the superhero business. What Quantum Entanglement’s name implies is what she actually did. Supercollider may be technically alive – but he can’t be fixed. No one is certain he can even be killed because of the nature of his superpowers.

But they are absolutely certain he is out of the game – even if Superhero HQ, AKA the Draft – is lying through their collective teeth rather than let that particular cat out of the super-secret bag.

The Auditor wants to kick the Draft while they’re down. But Leviathan is emotionally AWOL. His staff and followers believe that he died in the showdown that took Supercollider out. The Auditor is one of the few that know the truth – and it’s just about killing her to keep the secret from her own people.

Her weaponization of spreadsheets has turned into a position of crisis management – and she pretty much hates it. Nearly as much as she loves her not-exactly-human boss who isn’t exactly talking to her at the moment.

The reader feels her frustration at the delay of action in both her professional AND personal lives. Not that they aren’t pretty much one and the same by this point in her career as Leviathan’s right hand hench.

Once the Draft’s lies about Supercollider start exploding in their faces, they kick the can right down the road to Leviathan’s court. They blame him for the death of their hero, a death the Draft itself caused as either a last-ditch medical attempt to unentangle the blob – or a mercy killing.

The Draft brings Leviathan back from the metaphorically dead – and it works. It works for their PR machine, but it also works for Leviathan’s psyche. He’s back, he’s in charge, and he’s eager to let the Auditor, HIS Auditor, take up the reins of being evil to her heart’s content, yet again.

Even as the Draft makes a “Hail, Mary” pass at converting the Auditor back to their side – along with any other hench they can manage to convince that good is better. Even if, or especially because, true hench know that the Superhero side isn’t better – it’s actually worse.

Made even more so by being such sanctimonious, hypocritical, twats about the vast amount of damage that they do – especially to their own.

Escape Rating A+: Villain is an utterly compelling story about crisis management and the truly villainous power of SPREADSHEETS!

It’s also, and more notably, the follow-up to the extremely awesome Hench, which was – and still is – “decadently delicious villainous competence porn” as I said in my review of Hench back in September 2020, OMG during the pandemic, and have been hoping for a sequel for FIVE AND A HALF YEARS. I kind of gave up hope.

Which doesn’t mean that I wasn’t thrilled to see this appear, and that I didn’t gobble the whole book down in a day. (Howsomever, if the final copy of this book is REALLY the estimated 368 pages of the estimate the type is going to be miniscule. My kindle eARC had over 7000 kindle locs – which means it was approximately twice that long. I STILL finished it in a day – admittedly a long one.) (I wrote this review several months ago. The page count has been revised UPWARDS by 100 pages. Which feels a whole lot more realistic. OTOH The Draft obfuscates and hyperbolizes JUST LIKE THIS.)

However, I’m over here still trying to tone my SQUEE down and it’s not working. #sorrynotsorry

Stories about the toxicity of the superhero concept have been done – I’m thinking particularly of the TV series The Boys. Stories based on what the real world costs of superheroes among us have also been done. Hench was one of those stories, along with the Assistant to the Villain series. (Hench predates Assistant by several years. BTW.) It’s kind of an obvious idea to play with if you think about the damage to NYC in Marvel’s Avengers and wonder who the hell paid to fix it? (If you wonder a LOT there’s plenty of fanfiction that plays with THAT concept)

In Hench, Anna, now “The Auditor” embodied that damage. Literally. Supercollider broke her body, mostly by accident, and both he and the Draft ignored her – and other victims just like her. Then Supercollider targeted her – for fun.

No wonder she turned completely to the ‘dark side’. At least supervillains own the things they do.

This second book digs deeper, in multiple directions. The Auditor’s superpowered data analysis uncovers more dirt about the Draft and the damage it deliberately does to the budding superheroes it, well, drafts. She exposes their dark underbelly – and it’s very dark indeed under there.

At the same time, she’s at a crossroads in her own life – one that the Draft is more than willing to exploit after all the data analysis they’ve done on her. She became a hench, because she wanted to fight against the superheroes using the only talent available to her, data analysis. But her nemesis is out of the game. Her revenge fueled work is done. If she continues from this point, then it’s because she wants to be evil.

(This reader found herself wondering about the nature of evil in this story, because it feels like the same “evil is a matter of perspective” scenario as the Queens of Villainy fantasy series. Leviathan – and by extension his Auditor – is called evil because he regularly thwarts the plans of the supposedly good superheroes of the Draft. But the side of good is objectively not truly good. If the superheroes are not good, does that mean that the supervillains are not evil? I’m still mulling this one over. A lot.)

The one thing she’s certain she does want is Leviathan himself. There’s a romance there that I’m not sure is a good thing for the Auditor and not just because it reminds me a LOT of the very unequal power balance of the romance in But Not Too Bold – which was a borderline horror story. The physical power imbalance between Leviathan and the Auditor is inescapable, but the way that he exploits the many other facets of the power he has over her – he’s her lover and her boss, and because the perks of her job include her on-site luxury apartment he’s her landlord as well. If she gets fired, if she displeases him, she’s jobless, homeless and likely dead. But the icing on this particular squicky cake is that he has performed body modifications to her that give him the ability to see out of her eyes and hear from her ears 24/7 without her consent. She can’t even tell when he’s watching.

They do manage to negotiate a less inequitable relationship, but there was a lot of squicky non-consensual stuff going on for a while and I’m not sure whether the story as a whole was helped or hindered by it. It’s my mixed feelings on this particular score that made this an A+ review instead of an A++ review as Hench was.

Because as much as I worried over Anna’s situation, and as icky as she – and I – felt about Leviathan’s potential for constant surveillance and his overwhelming possessiveness and desire for control, I was still powerfully sucked into this story and could not tear myself away. Not that I tried terribly hard.

I think there is plenty more story in store for the Auditor. Now that she’s fully invested in being a Villain, and the superheroes and their Draft are on the ropes yet again, it’s time for her to climb the ranks of supervillain alongside Leviathan. Unless she decides to forge her own path – or it gets forged FOR her. Either way, I hope we see her again – at the top of her game – in a future book in this series. Because this one was definitely worth the wait!

Grade A #BookReview: Radiant Star by Ann Leckie

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Radiant Star by Ann LeckieRadiant Star by Ann Leckie
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Series: Imperial Radch
Pages: 360
Published by Orbit on May 12, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Ann Leckie returns to the world of the Imperial Radch in this standalone.
The Temporal Location of the Radiant Star has always been a source of both conflict and hope for the people of Ooioiaa. However, the imperial Radch see it only as an inconvenience, an antiquated religious site soon to be absorbed into their own, superior culture. But local politics is complicated, and the Radch have made one last concession: One last man will be allowed to join the mummified bodies in the temporal location to become a "living saint".
But this one decision will ripple out to affect every part of the city. Amidst a slowly worsening food shortage, riots, and a communication blackout from the rest of the Radch Empire, a religious savant will entertain visions of his own sainthood, a socialite will discover zer comfortable life upended, and a young man sold into servitude will find unlikely escape.

My Review:

If you’re wondering where this fits into the chronology of the Imperial Radch, well, so was I. If you’ve not read the Imperial Radch series that begins so marvelously, with Ancillary Justice, you might want to go back and do that. Because DAMN but that opening trilogy (Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy) is AWESOME.

Also it’s the record of events elsewhere in the Radch, the events that are causing so many difficulties on Ooioiaa, the tiny, remote, mostly disregarded and still in the process of being colonized by the Radchaai, the planet on which this story about colonization, colonialism and collateral damage takes place.

In other words, Radiant Star is a bit of a side story to the main action of the series. Or, at least it is from the perspective of the Radchaai governor, her staff and all the functionaries with her on Ooioiaa.

But only until Governor Charak concludes that the weeks she has been entirely cut off from communication and resupply from the vast bureaucratic empire of the Imperial Radch represents, not a mere technical glitch, but a disaster of such epic proportions that multiple gates in the empire’s vast travel and communications network are offline – AT THE SAME TIME.

She knows something terrible must have happened – but she doesn’t have any information to tell her precisely what and how bad the disaster might be.

Without access to the resources that keep both the economy AND, more importantly, the FOOD SUPPLY on Ooioiaa stable, and without the ability to call in “the cavalry” if that stability becomes UNstable, Governor Charak knows that her mission is in trouble.

Not that she doesn’t have enough personnel and especially ancillaries from her ship, Justice of Albis, because if she is willing to be bloody-minded about it she can put down any rebellion on the part of the population. But her mission is to govern these people, not conquer them. Killing a wide swath of those people – if it can be prevented – is against her mandate.

However, between the truly weird planetary conditions on Ooioiaa, the lack of imports from well, anywhere at all to supplement the food supply, a little bit of human stupidity and a whole lot of human greed, the native food supply on Ooioiaa can’t cope with the number of people it is currently supporting.

Inflation and food shortages are not enemies that Charak can negotiate with. She can use the ancillaries to guard what’s left, but her attempts to increase that food supply don’t just fail, they make the situation catastrophically worse.

People are starving on the streets. Well, nearly all of them. If Charak’s attempt to add to the food supply marks the human stupidity that fuels this mess – and it does – then the greed of the local officials who are hoarding food and stealing the little bit that does manage to come in through bribery and outright corruption – turns the whole thing catastrophic.

Fortunately for Charak, the rank corruption of the local officials stinks so badly that a lot of the population’s ire will be turned on them instead of her, once the crisis is over. If it doesn’t end in a planet of graves.

Escape Rating A: This was a LOT. Not necessarily in pages, but in density. There’s a lot going on on Ooioiaa and there’s a lot of story to tell and a lot to think about as that story gets told. Something which was definitely true in the original Imperial Radch trilogy. I think you could start here, because this is very much a side show to the main action of the trilogy. But, but, but, Ancillary Justice sets up this universe in a way that is a bit more focused because it’s filtered through one viewpoint, from a character who is very much learning how things work as they go, so the reader gets to learn along with them.

This story, while it’s to the side of the main one, is absolutely complete unto itself – but it relies on that prior knowledge – even if that prior knowledge isn’t exactly new – to allow the reader to immerse themselves in the story. So you could start here and the story here would work but I know I’d feel the missing-to-me bits floating around the edges and it would drive me bananas. (Your reading mileage may vary on this. I fully admit to being a completist.)

I absolutely did immerse myself fully in this story. This was a one-evening – well, one evening and night – read for me. I fell under its spell in the first chapter and didn’t emerge until I was done after midnight.

Radiant Star is science fiction of the type that Lois McMaster Bujold once described as “the romance of political agency”. While this is certainly about colonialism and colonization, those themes are explored through the people and the political machinations of those people on both sides of the equation. That Ooioiaa is a planet with its own long history, that it has been established and populated for millennia means that its people understand that this is what the Radch is and it’s what the Radchaai do and that they do not have the means to stop any of it. All they can do is attempt to preserve their culture and heritage for a few more generations.

The Radchaai, on the other hand, see the Ooioiaans as mostly civilized but not quite civilized enough. That the Ooioiaan religion includes a LOT of beliefs that the Radchaai find anathema (and vice versa) doesn’t exactly help this situation. That the Ooioiaan religious hierarchy is corrupt down to its bone marrow and fighting amongst its own factions doesn’t exactly make either side more tolerant of the other – but Charak has the power to force the issue. She can’t make the Ooioiaans worship the Radchaai god, but she can co-opt the Ooioiaan religion. That’s ALSO what the Radchaai are good at.

As much as I’ve talked about the situation, because it is fascinating and the workings – and non-workings – of the levers of power fascinate me, the story is told through its characters. After all, the reader can’t FEEL for a system – however intricate – but absolutely can feel for the people being jerked around BY that system. And of course, boo and hiss at the people who are being the jerks.

Which we do. Because there are plenty of both.

One of the fascinating things that we don’t see very often in SF or Fantasy is that a lot of this story centers around the religious practices of the Ooioiaans along with the machinations of their clergy in order to maintain and expand their secular power. Admittedly, the machinations we see plenty of in SF/F, but the actual practices, not so much. In that part of the story, Radiant Star brought to mind The Cemeteries of Amalo sequel subseries for The Goblin Emperor, both because The Goblin Emperor is an SF story, although with a fantasy feel to it, that is very much about political agency and political power, and because The Cemeteries of Amalo series which begins with The Witness for the Dead, views that world through the eyes of one of the members of its religious orders, someone who is themself a true, righteous believer but sees their superiors for the humans they are and their jockeying for power and positions as the distractions from faith that they have become.

The ending of this story tied the whole thing up in a bright, shiny bow that also looped in EVERYTHING that happened in the original trilogy AND swept up all the religious and political loose ends in a way that was the best kind of deus ex machina. Because the machina isn’t deus at all – it just has really excellent timing. Bringing this fascinating epic to a grand AND hopeful conclusion.

Just as hopefully, I hope that this is not the end of the Imperial Radch sequels. Because the three we have so far, Provenance, Translation State and now Radiant Star, have all been VERY worthy successors to that landmark (maybe that should be spacemark?) award-winning series and I would love to have MORE!

A+ #BookReview: Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Palaces of the Crow by Ray NaylerPalaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism, World War II
Pages: 384
Published by MCD on May 19, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In Ray Nayler’s speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect
Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl. Czeslaw is an underage Polish soldier who deserts the Red Army and runs into the freezing Lithuanian woods. Kezia is a Roma horse trader whose family is on the run from Soviet collectivization. As the German blitzkrieg crashes across the border in June 1941, all three are caught up in the onslaught. Along with Innokentiy, an abandoned boy who cannot speak, they are driven into the primeval forest, where they survive by forming an unbreakable bond with one another—and with Neriya’s intelligent crows, who for years have been bringing her intricate gifts suggesting they are no ordinary corvids.
As the war goes on, the crows warn the children of danger and help them hide from the human threats of the forest—not only the Germans but also Russian deserters, Polish partisans, fascist Lithuanian police, and the other bandits and outcasts wandering the benighted landscape.
From the Ray Bradbury Prize and Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist, and Hugo and Locus Award winner, Ray Nayler, Palaces of the Crow blends history and haunting speculative wonder into a story of survival, loyalty and the fragile beauty of life in the darkest of times.

My Review:

I picked this up expecting more of Where the Axe is Buried and/or The Tusks of Extinction. What I got was a bit more of The Mountain in the Sea, crossed with, of all things, Slaughterhouse-Five and just a touch of H is for Hawk. I wasn’t expecting that at all. If you are, check your assumptions at the door because this is an awesome, heartbreaking, riveting and frequently terrifying read – but it isn’t any of the things I thought it would be.

This is one of those “fiction is the lie that tells the truth” stories, about the parts of World War II that got buried by various governments in the post-war economic boom and the Cold War. And it feels like a truth, as it quotes from a searing collection of firsthand accounts from survivors of Belarusian villages burned by the Nazis (and looted by the partisans) during World War II. That book, variously titled “I Am from the Fiery Village” or as it is referred to in Palaces of the Crow, “The Autobiography of a Burned Village” grounds this fictional story in a reality that tears at the reader over and over – but also carries the reader over the magical realism-esq parts of the story, meaning those ‘palaces’ and the crows who built them, inhabited them, and sheltered the human protagonists of this story within them during a war that did its worst to kill them and everyone around them over and over again.

And did succeed in taking one of their lives – and leaving even bigger holes in the hearts and souls of those who survived.

The story is told from the perspective of four children who became adults in the crucible of war in the middle of territory contested between Russian and Germany in what is now the Republic of Belarus. Neriya, a Jewish girl whose shtetl was burned to the ground – like over six hundred others. Kezia, a Roma girl whose family and clan were slaughtered, like so many others. Czeslaw, an underage Polish deserter from the Russian army, and an unnamed boy whose last order from his mother was to be ‘quiet’ and hasn’t spoken a word since.

Palaces of the Crow is about their survival, all too often just barely, by the skin of their teeth, in the midst of crossfire between opposing armies and/or bands of desperate, barely human survivors, in a land laid waste by war. A survival made possible by the help and protection of a flock of preternaturally intelligent crows, who warned them of danger, herded them away from hunters, and took them inside the very heart of their vast nest to allow them to survive the war’s last, desperate winter.

That description is barebones and not enough. It doesn’t convey the desperation, the danger, the moments of joy or the love between the no-longer-children in this found family of lost souls. For that, you need to read the story, and you should. Because this isn’t a hero’s story of war. It’s a survivor’s story, and that’s the perspective that needs to be told – and remembered.

Escape Rating A+: I picked this up for the author, and that’s a good thing, because it’s both not what I expected and frankly not a story that any of the blurbs are having any luck summarizing. It’s also NOT, as some of the sites have it, in any way science fictional. It’s even dubious whether it is even in the realm of speculative fiction at all.

Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t like the author’s previous work, because it very much is. Especially The Mountain in the Sea. Their themes are surprisingly similar even though their settings are centuries apart. The Mountain in the Sea is a story about an attempt to communicate with other intelligences on Earth, set during a future period of global catastrophe when survival, any and all survival, seems to be in doubt.

Palaces of the Crow is also a story about attempting to communicate with, or understand the communications of, other intelligences on Earth, set during a historic period of global catastrophe when survival seemed to be in doubt.

If The Mountain in the Sea had been set in the world of Slaughterhouse-Five – without that classic’s science fictional elements, it might have been something like Palaces of the Crow. Only bloodier and even more horrifying albeit with a somewhat more hopeful, for certain, bleak definitions of hope, ending.

But that bleakness fits the characters, the setting and the perspective of the whole story. Because this story is not told from a Western point of view. World War II, as seen from the U.S., was a distant thing, a righteous quest for glory – whether it actually was or not. The war wasn’t HERE (except for the Aleutian Islands and the lower 48 still have a difficult time seeing any parts of Alaska as ‘here’) Even for Britain, there were lots of bombs and they suffered a terrible loss of life, but they weren’t invaded. France was invaded, but it wasn’t starving frozen as it was in Belarus. It was war and it was horrifying, but it wasn’t the frozen bleakness of Belarus and the stories of it are just different (All the Light We Cannot See might serve as an example of what this story might have been if it were set in France during the same time period). The bleakness of THIS story is very much an eastern European perspective and it’s not one we see often in Western literature.

There are two twists at the end. One I saw coming, the other led to that bit of hope in the ending that I wasn’t, but was very pleased to see. Not because it was happy – although it is if you squint a bit, but because it was home.

I’m back to where I was at the beginning, that this book is marvelous and heartbreaking as long as you check your assumptions about it at the door before you start. It’s the kind of story that you’ll be thinking about for a long time after you finish – and not just because of the crows.