Source: publisher

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.

Grade A #JointBookReview: How a Game Lives by Jacob Geller

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #JointBookReview: How a Game Lives by Jacob GellerHow a Game Lives by Jacob Geller
Format: eARC, hardcover
Source: publisher, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: essays, gaming, nonfiction, storytelling, video games
Pages: 208
Published by Harper Collins, HarperPop, Lost In Cult on November 18, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Over his illustrious career, Jacob Geller has written and produced a sprawling collection of video essays. Deftly interweaving video game analysis with complex narratives about art, politics, and history, Geller’s work positions games as vital tools for understanding each other and ourselves. How a Game Lives re-examines ten of Geller’s most iconic essays accompanied by his brand-new commentary, afterwords on each piece by some of the industry’s best writers, and stunning original artwork by Kilian Eng and other exceptional artists.

With videos like “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art”, “Every Zelda is the Darkest Zelda”, and “The Legacy of the Haunted House”, Geller has taught audiences how to think about the art that’s affected them. How a Game Lives immortalises those works and more, and provides boundless insight into the construction, philosophy, and afterlife of each essay.

Marlene’s Review:

There’s power in stories, though. That’s all history is: the best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine. – Varric Tethras in Dragon Age: Inquisition

I’ve always loved this quote because it manages to combine how I feel about games, how I feel about their characters, what makes some games live in my imagination and even my heart for decades while and even after playing them – along with the reason I’m playing in the first place. It also kind of explains why I decided to dive into How a Game Lives AND, a whole lot about how I approach the world, whether real or imaginary.

Because I play games FOR the story, to be INSIDE the story, to experience the story as a character within it and not just a consumer of it. And some of those stories LAST, not just Dragon Age but also Mass Effect, Horizon Zero Dawn and Final Fantasy X. They feature stories that can still move me and characters that I still think about – often quite fondly. (I STILL miss the original Elder Scrolls game, Arena. The sequels have never quite lived up to the first. Your gaming mileage may vary.)

The stories in games, whether games I play myself or games that I watch Galen play (he loves a good platformer where I tend to throw the controller across the room and hit one of the cats) also inform my own writing about other stories in other formats. I review books, particularly science fiction and fantasy, and there’s plenty of cross pollination between them.

As there is with pretty much every other form of storytelling, which is what games and books and movies and any other form of media ARE. If, as one writer said, “Man is the only animal that blushes…or needs to,” then stories are how we deal with some of that blushing, whether we use it to excuse or explain or change the subject entirely. Stories are how we process the world, and the stories in games are part of that processing.

A part of me is tempted – HIGHLY – to just talk back to How a Game Lives. Not to argue, but to continue the conversation, because that’s part of the point, both for the original video essays and for the book I have in real, live, hand. (I seldom get print books for multiple reasons, but this is one of the rare cases where I requested an actual, physical, reading copy from the publisher and I’m glad I did. The format works MUCH BETTER in print, but if you have to read the ebook use a black background layout for readability. Still, get the real book if you can.)

A huge part of me wants to add more fuel to the various contextual fires. I’ve read two books recently that I would have had even more appreciation of if I’d seen Geller’s essay “Fear of Cold” first, as both Michael Nayak’s Symbiote AND Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me reference John Carpenter’s The Thing in very similar ways. Also The Blackfire Blade uses golems, but it uses them in the same way that Dragon Age Origins does, starting with an ancient artifact and an unwilling victim, and I kind of want to throw that on the discussion in “The Golem and the Jewish Superhero”, along with the more traditional, if decidedly female, golem in The Maiden and the Monster.

And I would love to do a really deep dive with someone about the issues raised in “Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything?” because the question at the heart of that essay is both profound and applicable to way more than just THAT series. It’s all about the structure of narratives that in effect reinforce the status quo while doing their damndest (and most likely ours) to pretend that the status quo is neutral when it never is. Which, in its turn, jumps straight off a cliff into discussions about how opening up gaming and other media to traditionally underrepresented viewpoints supposedly ‘ruins some people’s childhoods’ and goes against a canon that originally reinforced that status quo and whether or not viewpoints in the public sphere or in art in general should be restricted to the acceptable. That way lies tyranny and book banning and I could go on all day because these essays made me THINK and that’s always an excellent thing.

Before I get down off my soapbox here, I can’t leave without adding a quote from another long-running media property, because the more I think about it, the more apropos it is. It’s part of a dialog between the still somewhat idealistic Bashir and the ever mysterious and frequently duplicitous Garak in Star Trek Deep Space 9.

Bashir: Out of all the stories you told me, which ones that you told me were true and which ones weren’t? Garak: My doctor, they all were true. Bashir: Even the lies? Garak: Especially the lies.

So I’m not here to review How a Game Lives, because it isn’t a book that lends itself to that treatment. I’m here to talk about what the book made me think about. The trick for me, much as it seems like it can be for the author, is to wrestle those thoughts into a coherent mass less than the size of, oh, say, The Lord or the Rings or the movies it spawned.

I’ve been playing computer and video games for nearly 50 years. I built my first computer out of a Heathkit in 1979 and one of the first things I did was type game code onto cassette tapes from books, because 1979 predates just about everything including even floppy disk drives and color monitors. The first games I remember purchasing were the original Zork, followed by the other Infocom text adventure games because, well, that’s what there was. I also had an Atari but that came later.

In other words, I’ve always played games, and I still do. I play because it’s fun – even when it sometimes literally hurts. There are games I play, like Diablo, because there are just some nights when pixels need to die. But the games that live, the ones that stick with me, are the games with big stories and fascinating characters, and that’s true whether I’m the actual player or whether I’m watching Galen play. Some games, like most of the Assassin’s Creed series, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn and the Uncharted series, tell great stories and make fantastic television.

So the question of ‘How a Game Lives’ or ‘What makes a game live’ are questions that I’ve been wrestling with for a long time. From a personal standpoint, the games that stick with me are the ones that make me care for their worlds and their characters, which is why Final Fantasy X has stuck with me for more than 20 years, what made the Dragon Age series infinitely replayable – at least until the latest iteration, and why I can’t make myself replay the Mass Effect Trilogy in spite of how good it was.

When I was first offered a review copy of this book, part of what appealed to me as a reviewer was that it presented an opportunity for both Galen and I to get a say. My experience of playing computer and video games is longer, but his is broader, and in the context of this book, he’s played many if not most of the Zelda games which rightfully warranted a chapter of their own in How a Game Lives – because those games certainly do.

So here’s Galen’s essay in response to “Every Zelda is the Darkest Zelda”

Childhood memories can grow dim, but one of the NES-era Legend of Zelda games was quite likely the very first game I played on a home console during a trip visiting a family member. The most vivid part of that memory was how difficult it was to deal with the Tektites; I didn’t get very far before it was time to return home.

Ocarina of Time was the Zelda game that first truly sunk its claws into me; after that I played many but not all of the successor games. It combined a good story with interesting puzzle-dungeons and a successful illusion that there was always more to its world over the next hill. That sense of having a world to explore that felt lived reached a peak in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. To this day, a game that combines good writing, a world to explore that feels real, and environmental storytelling is like catnip to me. It doesn’t have to be a true open world—Final Fantasy X isn’t, for example—but as long as the world has verisimilitude and rewards poking around its corners, I’ll probably enjoy exploring it.

While double-checking some facts for this review, I was reminded that Ocarina of Time came out in 1998; i.e., the year I graduated college. That fact might inspire one of the common questions regarding a platform for telling stories that sometimes still stings: “Aren’t you a bit old to be playing that?” (Marlene’s comment: At this point in my life, when I get questions like that, I just laugh. I’ve got nothing else – or at least nothing else polite – left to say.)

In his essay “Every Zelda is the Darkest Zelda”, Geller provides an answer: video game stories—or at least the ones that are written well—can grow along with the player. The experience (and hopefully wisdom) one gains as one grows older can turn a cartoon tale that features thwacking energy balls back and forth with Ganon into an exploration of adult themes such as maturation and picking up the pieces from a disastrous war…that the heroes lost. It’s not for nothing that Archive of Our Own has 329 fanfics tagged “Link has PTSD”… for a game series that also features a lot of charm and humor. As Geller points out, however, the darkness of some of the themes is balanced by a fundamental sense of hope: not necessarily the adolescent hope that Good will beat Evil and All Will Live Happily Ever after, but the messy adult hope that amelioration from disaster is, while partial, also possible.

I really appreciated Geller giving me a fresh way of looking at one of my favorite game series. The essay (and the afterward to the essay by Matt Margini) by itself is worth the price of the book. I’m glad Marlene suggested that we do a joint review; I will be following Geller’s work henceforth.

Escape Rating, well, not this time. Neither of us precisely escaped while reading this book. Instead, separately and together, we engaged with this book in a very real way, leading instead to a rather personal Reality Rating of A. Anyone interested in a discussion of video games as art, as storytelling, as a reflection on the world that game players and game creators inhabit is going to be riveted even though their brain is likely to explode while reading – and or diving back into these essays original video format.

Meanwhile, I’ll be keeping my eye out for Geller’s just announced NEXT BOOK, which, based on the book I’ve just finished, may have THE most appropriate title EVER with You’re Not Overthinking It, no matter how much the author fears he – or for that matter his readers and viewers – might be.

 

#BookReview: The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
#BookReview: The In-Between Bookstore by Edward UnderhillThe In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill
Format: ebook
Source: publisher
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, magical realism, queer fiction, relationship fiction, sad fluff, time travel
Pages: 263
Published by Avon on January 14, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A poignant and enchanting novel about a magical bookstore that transports a trans man through time and brings him face-to-face with his teenage self, offering him the chance of a lifetime to examine his life and identity to find a new beginning.
When Darby finds himself unemployed and in need of a fresh start, he moves back to the small Illinois town he left behind. But Oak Falls has changed almost as much as he has since he left.
One thing is familiar: In Between Books, Darby’s refuge growing up and eventual high school job. When he walks into the bookstore now, Darby feels an eerie sense of déjà vu—everything is exactly the same. Even the newspapers are dated 2009. And behind the register is a teen who looks a lot like Darby did at sixteen. . . who just might give Darby the opportunity to change his own present for the better—if he can figure out how before his connection to the past vanishes forever.
The In-Between Bookstore is a stunning novel of love, self-discovery, and the choices that come with both, for anyone who has ever wondered what their life might be like if they had the chance to go back and take a bigger, braver risk.

My Review:

There are two sayings about home, and they usually contradict each other. There’s the one about home being the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in, and the one that says you can’t go home again.

Darby never thought he’d want to go back to his tiny Illinois hometown, but he’s about to turn 30, the start-up he’s been working for has just folded, and the rent on his New York City shoebox apartment is going up at the end of the month to a point he couldn’t even have afforded when he was working. He has zero idea what to do with himself about any of it.

He needs a break. Or a breather. Or a reset. All of the above. So, even if Oak Falls is the last place he ever thought he’d want to go, it’s where his mom is – and she’s just about to move out of his childhood home into a brand spanking new condo.

Darby can help her move. He can take a breath and figure out what comes next for him. He can even, maybe, figure out why his first and best friendship imploded just before he left town all those years ago. He kind of needs to, because he may have blown up his friendships in NYC on his way out of town this time around in exactly the same way.

History repeats, or Darby’s patterns do – even when they kind of don’t. Because Oak Falls Darby was pre-transition, and NYC Darby is post that milestone. Although neither Darby is quite as sure of their place in the world as either Darby had ever hoped to be. At least NYC Darby is sure of who he is – even if he’s not sure where to go from here.

So he goes home. To find that Oak Falls isn’t nearly as unwelcoming as he thought it would be – either in his present – or for that matter, in the past, in that last summer before everything changed.

The changes in Oak Falls are everywhere – except for one place. When Darby steps through the doors of In-Between Books on Main Street, while the outside world may be in the early 2020s, the world inside the store is frozen in 2009, complete with 2009 Darby sitting behind the register, drowning in teenage angst and alienation, uncertain about what box they’ll get shoehorned into if they never leave Oak Falls, afraid that they can’t be who they were meant to be in a place that seems to have no room for anyone who might be any kind of queer.

In that liminal space, where the Darby that is can maybe, hopefully, possibly, pass on a bit of information if not wisdom to the Darby that was, there might be a chance to make things better in the present by changing the past.

Unless Darby accidentally follows in the footsteps of Marty McFly in Back to the Future and wipes himself out of existence altogether.

Escape Rating B: From one perspective Darby’s story is a peek at what would happen if one really did have a chance to go back in time and tell one’s younger self the things they know now that they didn’t know them. Even if that message is just “it’ll get better”. But Darby has things they need to know, and things they want to fix. They have a bit of a mystery to solve in the past, in the hopes that it will make things better in the present. If they can work up the courage to talk to, well, themselves.

At the same time, there’s another mystery they need to solve in the present – or perhaps it’s a function of taking off the blinders of teenage self-centeredness and angst. Darby wasn’t exactly wrong in that they didn’t fit in Oak Falls as a teen. Then again, Darby didn’t fit inside his own skin as a teen – and he reflected that outward and inflicted it on everyone more than he remembered that he had.

In other words, Darby is surprised AF that there’s a queer community in Oak Falls, and he wonders how he missed that it even existed when he was in high school. He’s astonished that so many of the kids he knew then, who he thought were all as straight as could be, mostly weren’t. Including his best friend.

The story develops slowly over the course of the book, and a lot of that slow pacing is dealing with Darby’s angst and impostor syndrome in both the past and the present. He was so busy looking inward in the past that he didn’t see the people around him, and in the present he’s just as busy looking at how much it feels like he’s failing at adulting on every level that he’s missing the damage he’s unintentionally doing to the people around him.

But even as Darby is working through his internal struggles, there’s also the two outward ones. The big one, the magically fantastic one, the one about the bookstore that’s letting him talk to his past, and whether he can use that window through time to give himself a better future by figuring out the break in his past. Then there’s the mystery in the present, the issue of who Darby wants to be now that he’s supposedly grown up and whether he wants to be that person in Oak Falls or New York City.

So I loved the parts about the store, enjoyed the parts about returning home and getting a sample of the life he might have had if he’d stayed, but could have done with a bit less reflection on general teenage angst. Your reading mileage on that part may vary.

In the end, what really worked for me in this story is that it doesn’t end in a romance. Not that the potential isn’t there – because it is. But because in order for the romance to work, someone would have had to twist themselves into being someone – or at least somewhere – that they weren’t meant to be based on the choices they’d already made.

Darby’s magical bookstore visits gave him the chance to see what his life might have been if he’d gone down the other leg of the trousers of time. But that life is on another branch of the multiverse and he recognizes that and the story is all the better for it.

Which left me with one last saying stuck in my head, “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!” Making this story some of the fluffiest sad fluff that ever fluffed. Because it is sad. The life that Darby catches glimpses of would have been a good one – if he really had known then what he knows now. But he didn’t and it isn’t and the story is better for not having tried to wring out a happy ending that in the life Darby actually had, in this branch of the multiverse, was not meant to be.

Review: The Good, the Bad and the Uncanny edited by Jonathan Maberry

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Good, the Bad and the Uncanny edited by Jonathan MaberryThe Good, The Bad, & The Uncanny: Tales of a Very Weird West by Jonathan Maberry, C. Edward Sellner, Keith R.A. DeCandido, James A. Moore, Greg Cox, Josh Malerman, Carrie Harris, John G. Hartness, Jennifer Brody, Scott Sigler, Laura Anne Gilman, Aaron Rosenberg, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, R. S. Belcher, Marguerite Reed, Maurice Broaddus, Cullen Bunn
Format: eARC
Source: publisher
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fantasy, horror, short stories, steampunk, Weird West
Pages: 350
Published by Outland Entertainment on December 19, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Gunslingers. Lawmen. Snake-oil Salesmen. Cowboys. Mad Scientists. And a few monsters. The Old West has never been wilder! THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UNCANNY presents sixteen original and never-before-published adventures by some of today’ s most visionary writers who have spun wildly offbeat tales of gunmen, lawmen, magic, and weird science. Saddle up with Josh Malerman, Scott Sigler, Keith DeCandido, Cullen Bunn, R.S. Belcher, Greg Cox, Jeffrey Mariotte, Laura Anne Gilman, Aaron Rosenberg, Maurice Broaddus, John G. Hartness, Carrie Harris, James A. Moore, Marguerite Reed, C. Edward Sellner, Carrie Harris, and Jennifer Brody! These tales twist the American West into a place of darkness, shadows, sudden death, terror in the night, bold heroism, devious magic, and shocking violence. Each story blazes a new trail through very strange territory – discovering weird science, ancient evil, mythic creatures, and lightning-fast action. Edited by Jonathan Maberry, NY Times bestselling author of A DEADLANDS NOVEL, the Joe Ledger Thrillers, V-WARS, and KAGEN THE DAMNED.

My Review:

I don’t normally start reviews by talking about the author’s – or in this case the editor’s – Foreword. In fact, I very seldom read the Foreword because I’m too interested in getting to the actual story – or in this case stories – to take the time. And they’re generally not all that fascinating. But I read this one and got hit with a sense of nostalgia so strong that I can’t resist mentioning it here. Because the editor and I grew up with those same Westerns on TV pretty much all the time in our childhood, and because we both emerged with the same favorite, The Wild, Wild West.

Not that awful 1999 movie. I mean – and the author meant – the one, the only, the original TV series with Robert Conrad and Ross Martin. I still remember, and can hear Ross Martin’s voice in my head, talking mostly to himself, as he often did, as he was whipping up “the spécialité de la maison of the Hotel Desperation!” to get them out of whatever fix they’d gotten themselves into in that act of the four acts that made up each weekly episode. It’s a VERY fond memory.

So, if you have that same fondness for Westerns – especially those that touched on, or were touched by, or dipped their whole entire six-shooters into the very, very weird, or if you’re a fan of more recently published ‘Weird West’ inspired stories such as Charlaine Harris’ Gunnie Rose series and Laura Anne Gilman’s Huntsmen, or if you just plain love it when the things that go bump in the night are armed with fangs, claws AND six-shooters, this collection might just be your jam.

It certainly was mine. It was mine so much, in fact, that this is one of the rare occasions when I’ve rated each story in the collection individually, so that you can get the full-bodied flavor – complete with actual bodies, for each and every one.

“The Disobedient Devil Dust-up at Copper Junction” by Cullen Bunn
Mad scientist meets even madder gremlins as Professor Dimitri Daedalus and his Navajo partner Yiske arrive in remote Copper Junction Utah, summoned by the Professor’s old mentor to be his next sacrifices to the gremlins tearing up every single human tool in town with applied chaos and malice, only to end in fiery glory sailing off a cliff. Good fun. B

“Devil’s Snare” (Golgotha #1.5) by R.S. Belcher
In spite of being part of a series, this story stands quite well alone. Love-lorn scientist/engineer Clay Turlough, who combines bits of both Dr. Frankenstein AND his monster, gets dragged out of his latest attempt to ‘save’ his ladylove by a more strictly medical case of a poisoned boy, his widowed mother, and the man who is a bit too invested in both. A-

“Bad” by Josh Malerman
Borderline horror about two idiots who think they can rob the most secure bank on ‘The Trail’ by pretending to be one of the bank’s regular depositors. A pretense they intend to enact by literally stealing the man’s face. A hard read because the murdering bank robber wannabes are really, really TSTL to the point where the story is just blood, guts and idiocy. D

“Bigfoot George” by Greg Cox
Gold fever grips a gang of humans claiming a strike in Bigfoot country. The ringleaders think they can treat sasquatch the way they treat their fellow humans – only one of those fellow humans isn’t to both the humans and the sasquatch’ detriment. The humans are nasty in ways that are all too familiar, but the heel-turn of their not-so-human companion is epic enough to nearly redeem their mess – if not them. C+

“Story of the Century” by C. Edward Sellner
A tale of angels and demons, vampires and newspaper reporters. A reporter with a nose for news follows a bounty hunter on the trail of a demon who can wipe out whole towns in a single breath, only to find herself the last witness to an epic confrontation between celestial and demonic forces that wakes a legacy she had no idea she possessed. B

“The Stacked Deck” by Aaron Rosenberg
A card sharp with a magic touch wins his way onto a gambler’s paradise of a riverboat cruise only to learn that the stake he’s playing for is his soul and the deck has been stacked by a demon who believes he holds all the cards. The weird side of the weird West with a fascinating magical system of drawing cards from the ether. Maverick would have fit right in. And won. B+

“Desert Justice” by Maurice Broaddus
A black man with a righteous cause, the will to back it up and the grief not to care if he goes down in the fight takes up a magical badge to battle the evil spirit of the dead Confederacy that white men are using to vilify, subjugate and lynch blacks who stand up for themselves in the west after they fled the ‘legal slavery’ of the sharecropping system. If you enjoyed the author’s novella Buffalo Soldier you’ll love this one too. I certainly did. A

“In the End, the Beginning” by Laura Anne Gilman
A still heartbreaking but slightly more hopeful alternate magical version of the white man’s invasion of the west. It can’t be stopped, but powerful spirits CAN, if they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their magic in the cause, alter the means by which it happens, in the hopes that the ones who can’t be stopped are the best of their kind and not the worst.  A

“Nightfall on the Iron Dragon Line” by James A. Moore
The inevitable train story because no western or weird version thereof would be complete without one train story. The concept is interesting, and a story about a lawman bringing in a dangerous criminal always works in westerns but this one needed to be longer for all the disparate elements – especially the worm and the Chinese engineers – to come together. C

“Simple Silas” by Scott Sigler
This is straight up horror and the story relies on the protagonist having an undefined intellectual disability (because they were back then) in a way that just makes the whole thing more uncomfortable than compelling. D

“Hell and Destruction are Never Full” by Marguerite Reed
A bounty hunter captures a man for more money than she’s ever seen in her life and doesn’t want to hear about the real reason the bounty was set – until she comes face to face with a vampire and his renfield who plan to shut up a witness and get a meal out of it at the same time. That this has a happy ending is a big surprise. It’s not the standout in the collection but it was pretty good all the same. B

“The Legend of Long-Ears” by Keith R.A. DeCandido
A meeting that never happened between two legends, Calamity Jane and Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves. Calamity is a seer who drinks to keep her visions of the future at bay, while she does her best to keep the chaos agent known as Long-Ears from taking more lives than he’s due. She saves Reeves but can’t save them all. However, she saves so many that Long-Ears himself travels the west telling any who will listen the tale of his greatest and most respected enemy. This one seems like the quintessential weird west story, or at least one branch of it, with legends meeting, native spirits interfering, respect between enemies and tragedies all around. A+

“The Night Caravan” by Jennifer Brody
A post-apocalyptic tale where the desert has returned, while technology and fallout have bred monsters and settlements are far apart while travel puts you in danger of being ridden by one of the monsters. The mix of high tech and low villainy with a mythical utopia that is probably a boondoggle makes the story interesting. B

“Dreadful” by John Hartness
A middle-aged widow and a tired vampire-hunting cowboy team up to wipe out a nest of vampires that is eating their way across the west like locusts. Separately, they’re victims, together they might just be enough to get the job done. And if there’s an after, they might have a chance at being happy in it, together. B+

“Thicker Than Water” by Carrie Harris
Families are terrible. His brothers are human monsters. Her sisters are sea monsters. But family is family and blood is thicker than water, even when the deck of the ship is awash in it. This one just wasn’t my cuppa, and I’m trying really hard not to think about what the tea in that cuppa would be made of. C

“Barnfeather’s Magical Medicine Show and Tent Extravaganza” by Jeffrey J. Mariotte
Another one a bit too high on the creep-o-meter for me, about a magical circus tent that steals children and eats them to keep itself and its avatar powered – or perhaps the other way around, pursued by a lawman hoping to rescue children who are already gone. C

Escape Rating B: I had to do math to get to an overall rating, just as I did for the review of a previous collection by this publisher, Never Too Old to Save the World, which is going to end up on my Best Books list for this year because I’ve referred to it so often.

I enjoyed this collection, well, not quite as much as Never Too Old, but still quite a bit. Even the stories that went too far into horror for my personal tastes, or the couple that just didn’t work for me, still added to the overall feeling of ‘those thrilling days of yesteryear’ even if it was a weirder and more uncanny yesteryear than The Lone Ranger ever imagined.

Or perhaps especially because it was a whole lot weirder and considerably more uncanny. Just as marvelously as The Wild, Wild West so often was.

Review: Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 edited by R.F. Kuang

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 edited by R.F. KuangThe Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 by R.F. Kuang, John Joseph Adams
Format: eARC
Source: publisher
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: anthologies, fantasy, science fiction, short stories
Series: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy
Pages: 320
Published by Mariner Books on October 17, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

“Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages,” writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. “The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird.” The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises. Women can’t lie or fall in love. Fathers feed their children ghost preserves. Souls chase one another through animal incarnations. Yet these stories are grounded deeply in our reality. Out of these stories’ weirdness emerges the cruelty of border enforcement, the horror of legislation restricting reproductive freedom, the frightening pace of AI. The result is a stunning, immersive, intensely felt experience, showing us less of what the world is, and more of what it could be.

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 includes Nathan Ballingrud • KT Bryski • Isabel Cañas • Maria Dong • Kim Fu • Theodora Goss • Alix E. Harrow • S. L. Huang • Stephen Graham Jones • Shingai Njeri Kagunda • Isabel J. Kim • Samantha Mills • MKRNYILGLD • Malka Older • Susan Palwick • Linda Raquel Nieves Pérez • Sofia Samatar • Kristina Ten • Catherynne M. Valente • Chris Willrich

My Review:

This collection begins with a kind of a story getting into a bit of the nitty-gritty of just how this collection of stories was assembled. After all, it’s a fairly big ask and an equally large task to distill one year’s ENTIRE SF/F short fiction output into a book that has to be, if not all things to all (SF/F) people, at least serve as a representative sampling of the best works of an entire year in a genre that ranges from the dark heart of a monstrous villain’s soul – if they have one – to the furthest reaches of the stars – and covers everywhere and everywhen in between.

Not all stories will work for all readers, something that is especially true in such an encompassing genre, one filled with niches that may or may not even all occupy the same literary planet.

All of that being said, this collection is guaranteed to have its delightful moments for any reader of science fiction, fantasy, or any of the times, places and spaces in between.

For sheer reading pleasure, my favorites in this year’s collection were fantasy or at least fantasy-ish. Notice I said for reading pleasure, as other stories in the collection in other niches hit different places in my reading brain.

The story I loved most and hardest is, far and away, Alix E. Harrow’s “The Six Deaths of the Saint”. A story that reads like fantasy even though in the end it has SFnal elements. I loved this one because it’s a story about myths and mythmaking, but it’s told through the perspective of the person being made into a myth who finally breaks free of the legend that has accreted around them. That it happens with the aid of a love so great it makes Westley in The Princess Bride seem like he’s not even trying just adds to both the glory and the heartbreak of the story.

While Alix Harrow’s story blew me away, there were two other stories, just a bit lighter in tone, that I also adored.

“Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology” by Theodora Goss sits on the border between fantasy and SF, and I’m still not sure where it falls. This is fun because it begins as an exercise in imagination that becomes real, at least for situations where The Velveteen Rabbit is an imaginary country instead of a child’s toy. A group of high school students create an imaginary country, send scholarly papers to scholarly journals about the imaginary country, add Wikipedia pages about the imaginary country they’ve created – and it starts turning up in the news, the real news, and suddenly everyone remembers Pellargonia as if it’s always been there. The story is about the kids confessing what they’ve done, as though they can put the Pellargonia genie back in it’s magical bottle after it’s already become the center of a possible war.

The last of my fun favorites is “Cumulative Ethical Guidelines for Mid-Range Interstellar Storytellers” by Malka Older which is, at least in setting, actual science fiction. But it reads as if it’s in the same voice as the author’s wonderful SF/steampunk/mystery series, The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, with its tones of otherworldly academia where the politics and the strictures are still awfully vicious because the stakes are awfully small. It’s a story about what should be done instead of getting it done, and it’s just a lot of fun.

As much fun as those three stories were, there’s a second set of stories that captured me because they speak to the present moment in ways that chilled me to the bone. Because everything seems to come in threes, there are three stories in this category, at least for this reader, as well.

“Rabbit Test” by Samantha Mills and “The CRISPR Cookbook” by MKRNYILGLD read as responses to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in that they extend the loss of bodily autonomy represented by that decision and slide it down the slippery slope as far and as frighteningly as possible into the ramifications of that loss and the many future restrictions it might lead to.

Last, but equally not least, and also in response to the current events surrounding AI being taught to take the place of humans and human interactions, “Murder by Pixel” by S.L. Huang takes a deep dive into just how toxic and downright disgusting AI chatbots can become – and just how humans made them that way.

Escape Rating A-: It’s always difficult to rate collections like this one, because reading mileage varies widely, one person’s meat is another’s poison, etc., etc., etc. Howsomever, there was only one story in this collection that I bounced off hard, and that’s rare for me. Usually there are several. And I loved “The Six Deaths of the Saint” really, really hard, and a whole bunch of the other stories I either really enjoyed or really stuck with me, so I’m rounding this one up to an A- for all of those reasons.

To make a long story short – as is this collection’s whole, entire purpose – if you don’t generally read SF/F in the short form (it’s not usually my jam) but want to get a picture of what happened last year, this collection is a great place to read!

Review: The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church by Rachel L. SwarnsThe 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns
Format: ebook
Source: publisher
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: African American History, history, U.S. history
Pages: 326
Published by Random House on June 13, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

“An absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church, whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and, thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On Juneteenth
In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion. The story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. One of those descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church’s money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape. The other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns’s reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.
Swarns’s journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells a bigger story, demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the Catholic Church in America and bringing to light the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.

My Review:

The 272 is a book that asks the questions, “What does the past owe to the present?” with the inevitable follow-up, “If a debt is owed, how and to whom does it, can it, should it, get paid?” Putting it another way, it’s a book that exemplifies the famous quote from William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

That Faulkner, at least according to his Wikipedia page, was “a towering figure in Southern literature” adds more than a bit of irony to the mind-boggling appropriateness of the quote, as the history that is detailed in The 272 and the issues that history raises, are very things that Southern literature often dealt with through stereotyping and/or sweeping narratives dealing with issues of race and racism under the biggest rug they could find.

The 272 lifts that rug, on the slaveholding and slave trading history of the Catholic Jesuit Order in the United States and the early years of the Jesuit’s first American college, now Georgetown University – and their creation of all the Jesuit colleges that followed. It does so by taking the reader into the history of one family, the Mahoneys, who were owned by the Jesuits, sold by them, broken apart by them, and tracing that family’s history through sales, relocations, forced separations and joyous reunions, from the first documented member of that family, a woman whose freedom was easily stolen because she was black, all the way down to a man who is sitting in his own office at Georgetown University as his distant cousin relays to him that his employer once owned his ancestors.

There are two “stories’ being told in The 272 that weave together in a braid that begins with one indentured black woman on a Maryland plantation in 1676 (during this period both blacks and whites came to America as indentured servants to be freed at the end of their term of indenture) and ends with her hundreds of living descendents learning that they are all part of one family that was bought, sold, twisted and torn by a single institution. An institution that still exists and was able to survive to the present day because of the money that institution received for selling the crops and goods their direct ancestors produced and finally selling their ancestors themselves in one massive slave sale that was hidden in plain sight in Georgetown University’s records.

And there’s the flip side of that story, of the priests and the church that they served, mendaciously espousing the idea that it was more important to save those same slaves’ souls than it was to care for their bodies or, most especially, to grant them the freedom that their very order had come to America for. And to never see the contradiction and the hypocrisy in their teaching and their practices. To only see the money that could be made by selling their labor or their bodies. That money kept Georgetown itself financially afloat after years of mismanagement AND provided the seed money for the network of Jesuit colleges that exists to this day.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Or so goes the other famous quote about the past, attributed to L.P. Hartley. Which leads to the questions raised at the very beginning of this review, the question of what does that past owe to its descendants in the present? What does Georgetown University, the institution that still exists today because of that mass slave sale back in 1838, owe to those people in that past, and re-sold and torn apart by that same institution, even though that debt can only be paid to their descendants in this present day? It’s a question that is still in the process of being answered.

Reality Rating A-: Nonfiction is always hard to rate, because there are two factors involved. There’s the story being told, and then there’s the way that story is being told. The two parts don’t have to be in sync, and they aren’t quite here.

The story that’s being told in The 272 is a compelling one. It deals with racism and history and politics and money and religion. That’s not merely lot but any of those topics are more than meaty all by themselves to have the potential for a thought-provoking or even mind-altering book. And The 272 certainly does both.

The history, although in the main the story follows a pattern that is well-known, by focusing that pattern of promises made, promises broken, families broken, freedom sought, sometimes found and always abrogated by the reality of who holds power over whom on a single family traced through history the reader is made to feel its effects in the way that the dry recitations of history often do not.

That being said, the story as written is still just a bit dry. It is history and it does relate a lot of archival details that I personally found interesting. But the author resisted the temptation to put words or feelings into the heads of people whose words and feelings were not left in the historical record. (Which has the potential to be a whole discussion of its own.) That choice makes the history feel authentic, but also puts the reader at more of a distance from the narrative.

What does, however, add to the compulsion to read The 272 in pretty much one sitting is that the words and thoughts of the Jesuit priests who conducted this, let’s call it a legal atrocity and crime against humanity were recorded in their own words, and that racism, self-serving stereotyping and self-dealing hypocrisy ring off every page. It’s a drumbeat that echoes in the reader’s head long after the last page is turned.

The sale was never hidden, because it never needed to be. Which should be a crime in and of itself. But it faded into the shadows of history and seems to have been quietly swept under that rug until the mid-2010s. That’s when buildings named for the two perpetrators of this heinousness were being remodeled and research blew the dust off the archives sheltering the reputations of those ‘founding fathers’ of the University. Which led to a series of articles in the New York Times, the renaming of the buildings, this book, a family reunion of the Mahoney family from all parts of their eventual diaspora, and an ongoing series of dialogs between the University and the descendants on that question of what does that past owe to this present.

What brought me to this book this week is Banned Books Week. Not because this book has been banned or challenged – at least not yet – if only because it was just published in June 2023. However, this is a book that absolutely has the potential to be challenged and even banned because of the very questions that it addresses. The book challenges the ‘accepted’ narratives not just around slavery but also around the Catholic Church, which is the single largest denomination in the U.S. today. (There are more Protestants, but the Protestants are split among multiple denominations.)

The common thread among the books that get banned and challenged is that they tell stories that question accepted narratives and history. There are ongoing attempts to rewrite the history of slavery in the United States, trying to reframe it in ways that make it seem anywhere from less awful to downright benevolent, that have the goal of erasing the proven concept that the history of racism and slavery in the U.S. has a continued effect in this country and especially on the People of Color within it to the present day that still needs to be addressed.

The 272 asks questions, similar to the questions raised in The 1619 Project, which has been banned and challenged repeatedly in the years since it was published. The 272 has a tighter focus, but will still cause the same discomfort among the same people who The 1619 Project made uncomfortable. As a consequence, I will not be surprised, although I will be frustrated, disappointed and angry, to see The 272 on the list of banned and challenged books in the years to come – even if this is one of those times when I would very much prefer to be wrong.

Review: Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Review: Starter Villain by John ScalziStarter Villain by John Scalzi
Narrator: Wil Wheaton
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: publisher, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, superheroes
Pages: 272
Length: 8 hrs 5 mins
Published by Audible Studios, Tor Books on September 19, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Following the bestselling The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi returns with Starter Villain, another unique sci-fi caper set in the strangest of all worlds, present-day Earth.
Inheriting your mysterious uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might imagine.
Sure, there are the things you'd expect. The undersea volcano lairs. The minions. The plots to take over the world. The international networks of rivals who want you dead.
Much harder to get used to...are the the sentient, language-using, computer-savvy cats.
And the fact that in the overall organization, they're management...

My Review:

It’s a truism that “dogs have owners, cats have staff” and in that context, Charlie Fitzer is absolutely the staffer for ‘his’ cat, Hera, and her newly adopted kitten sister Persephone. In fact, Charlie is more Hera’s pet than she is his, something that he is forced to become all too aware of as Charlie’s situation sinks its teeth into him – figuratively and even literally.

As the story begins, Charlie is so far down that he can’t even see ‘up’ from where he’s standing. He’s a journalist without a job because journalism is dying. He’s divorced. The dad he spent the last several years taking care of is dead, and Charlie is living in his dad’s house but only owns one quarter of said house – while his three siblings want him OUT so they can sell it. He wants to buy a local bar so he can get out of substitute teaching and maybe build a life again.

And his great uncle Jake just died, which Charlie only knows about because he used to be a finance journalist – and a good one – and he still can’t resist listening to the finance news. He’s not expecting a legacy from Uncle Jake because Charlie hasn’t seen Uncle Jake since he was FIVE and barely remembers the man nearly 30 years later.

But Uncle Jake, who Charlie always believed was a parking lot magnate – which he was – was also something else. Something Charlie gets more than a glimpse of when he attends Uncle Jake’s funeral and one of the other attendees attempts to stab the corpse.

Uncle Jake was clearly not just in the parking lot business. And now, neither is Charlie. Which is how he discovers that Hera isn’t just a cat, and that truth is not only infinitely stranger than fiction – but that it downright inspires it in ways that Charlie could never have imagined.

At least not until he found himself mediating labor disputes between the management of the not-exactly-secret, über high-tech, super villain headquarters that Charlie himself is now in charge of and a pod of genetically engineered, super-intelligent and seriously pissed off dolphins who are planning to go on strike.

Escape Rating A: Charlie starts out Starter Villain in WAY, WAY over his head. Part of his charm is that he never loses sight of that fact. He’s always aware that he hasn’t got a clue, and isn’t likely to get one any time soon, and is secretly panicking about it every other minute. Which is a big chunk of why we like him and end up rooting for him so hard, because his inner voice is asking the same questions that a lot of us would be asking in his place.

The setup of Charlie’s world is hilarious and frightening AF at the same time. So much of what happens is utterly silly and bizarre, but with Charlie as our window into this universe we get to secretly giggle – sometimes guffaw – and Kermit-flail in panic right along with him. What makes it work is that the only thing about the over-the-top-ness of it all that Charlie takes seriously are the murders and death threats – which are legion. The trappings of wealth and power are hollow – at least as they apply to him – and he takes all of it with a grain of salt and a look behind the curtain.

So Starter Villain starts out looking like a short course in how to become a supervillain in a few, not so easy, morally ambiguous lessons, only for both Charlie and the reader to ultimately learn that they’ve been outvillained every single hilarious step of the way – and so has everyone else.

There are a couple of niggles that kept this from being an A+ grade, and one that almost put it over the top anyway, because in the end I had an absolute ball with Starter Villain, and not just because of the cats. Although they certainly helped – in exactly the way that cats always do.

The early part of the story is a really hard read – pretty much right up to the point where ‘Tobias the Stabber’ tries to stab Uncle Jake’s corpse to make sure the old man is really dead this time. It’s hard because Charlie is just so far down during that first part of the story, and circumstances continuously hammer that point home to both Charlie and the reader to the point where it feels a bit like ‘piling on’. That’s probably intentional, but it still makes that first part a bit more of a slog than I generally expect from this author.

Speaking of whom, the other niggle that is not a ‘me’ thing but may be a ‘you’ thing is that Charlie is very much the author’s avatar in this one. The bleed through from the author’s public persona to Charlie’s character is obvious. I like the author’s public persona, I’ve been to a whole bunch of his readings and events and often read his blog, Whatever, for his signature brand of giggles, snark and well-thought-out malleting. But I recognize that he’s an acquired taste. I’ve been rather thoroughly infected, and clearly so have a lot of others or his books wouldn’t make the New York Times Bestseller list on the regular. But if you’re not at least neutral to that taste, Charlie Fitzer may not be your jam. If so, I think you’re missing out but YMMV.

The thing that almost put Starter Villain over the top into an A+ anyway is that this is my second ‘read’ of Starter Villain. The first time around, I read it for a Library Journal review, which turned out to be Starred Review and the SFF Pick of the Month that month. So I did love it but that first bit was just hard. (I liked Charlie too much to enjoy watching him suffer – especially from inside his own head.)

This time around I was able to listen to the audiobook (THANK YOU TOR BOOKS!), narrated by Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: Next Gen fame. Wheaton is channeling the author’s public persona so hard and so well that I nearly caught myself checking a couple of times that it really was him and not the author himself – who does do an excellent job of reading his own work at conventions and on book tours.

But all of the above means that, as the character reads like an avatar of the author’s public persona, and the actor is excellent at channeling that same voice, the reading feels almost seamless, like we’re directly in Charlie’s head the whole time and Kermit-flailing right along with him.

In short – which I realize I haven’t been AT ALL – this means that you really, really need to read Starter Villain – especially if you like cats and are sure they’re the ones really in charge of you, your house, and pretty much everything else in the world. And if you have or can create an opportunity where listening to this book in audio will work for you, make it so because it’s even better in audio.

Guest Review: Chef’s Kiss by TJ Alexander

Posted on by Amy Daltry | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews> Guest Review
Guest Review: Chef’s Kiss by TJ AlexanderChef's Kiss (Chef's Kiss, #1) by T.J. Alexander
Format: paperback
Source: publisher
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, queer romance, romantic comedy
Series: Chef's Kiss #1
Pages: 308
Published by Emily Bestler Books on May 3, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A high-strung pastry chef’s professional goals are interrupted by an unexpected career transition and the introduction of her wildly attractive nonbinary kitchen manager in this deliciously fresh and witty queer rom-com.
Simone Larkspur is a perfectionist pastry expert with a dream job at The Discerning Chef, a venerable cookbook publisher in New York City. All she wants to do is create the perfect loaf of sourdough and develop recipes, but when The Discerning Chef decides to bring their brand into the 21st century by pivoting to video, Simone is thrust into the spotlight and finds herself failing at something for the first time in her life.
To make matters worse, Simone has to deal with Ray Lyton, the new test kitchen manager, whose obnoxious cheer and outgoing personality are like oil to Simone’s water. When Ray accidentally becomes a viral YouTube sensation with a series of homebrewing videos, their eccentric editor in chief forces Simone to work alongside the chipper upstart or else risk her beloved job. But the more they work together, the more Simone realizes her heart may be softening like butter for Ray.
Things get even more complicated when Ray comes out at work as nonbinary to mixed reactions—and Simone must choose between the career she fought so hard for and the person who just might take the cake (and her heart).

Note from Amy: I realized as I was writing this that I’ve been gone from these pages since the beginning the COVID-19 pandemic; my last review was for Melanie Yaun’s PsyTek. In the early days of the pandemic, just weeks after that review was posted, we lost Melanie, so the rest of that story, sadly, is lost to us, as is her brilliant work at our shared day job, her joyous wit, and her dear, dear friendship.  In the time since then, I’ve not been as much of a reader or writer as I have been in the past. But the subject of today’s post, perhaps, marks a turning point for me, where I can get back at the keyboard.

Guest Review by Amy: Two people, who get a crush on each other and spend most of the book circling around that fact through an assortment of tribulations, until one of them apologizes and says they’ll never mention it again, and the other says, “wait, what?” and they ride off into the sunset together.  Tropey as it comes, right?  That’s the basic recipe for a rom-com, isn’t it?

When I saw a queer romance, involving a chef, I was all-in. I love to cook (ask Marlene!) and I love queer romance almost as much as I love sci-fi.  If there’s ever a queer romance set on a spaceship involving the ship’s cook, I may spontaneously combust. (Marlene’s comment: Ryka Aoki’s marvelous Light from Uncommon Stars is more cooking than cheffing, but there’s a spaceship and a queer romance and donuts and it’s marvelous. I’ll be prepared to pick up your pieces if you combust upon reading.) 

Escape Rating: A+:  One of the things that makes a whole lot of romances work is that they draw the reader – usually a female – into identifying with the – usually a female – protagonist.  It’s a formula that has driven Harlequin’s success since before Marlene or I were born.  But what happens when the reader is not drawn into the world of the protagonist from whose eyes we are seeing the story, but to their love interest?  In my case, that is what happened in Chef’s Kiss.  Our protagonist, and the lens through which we see author TJ Alexander’s New York City setting, is Simone, a trained chef, who works at a fairly staid old media company producing recipes in a test kitchen. She’s happy with her situation; it’s her dream job!  Sure, it doesn’t pay as well as it could, perhaps, but the magazine has been losing subscriptions for a while now, because 21st century, you know…

Other reviewers, and indeed, the book’s back cover, call Simone “high-strung,” but to my eyes, that is kind of a cheap shot, as no one calls her that between the covers of the book, and I’m just not seeing that. She’s a bit uptight, perhaps, something of a perfectionist, and rather resistant to change, certainly.  So when the publisher of the magazine calls her in and tells her their whole business model is changing to creating video content, and then she discovers that the long-time kitchen manager has been replaced by a much younger and more energetic person who is going to change literally everything in her orderly world, she is, to put it mildly, kind of agitated about it. I get that, and I don’t think that classifies as “high-strung.”  She’s just behaving…well, like I might, in her shoes.  And I’m not high-strung.  Am I? (Marlene’s comment: No, you’re not. Or I am too and we’re NOT going there because cheap shot is still cheap.)

It doesn’t take long, of course, until the bisexual Simone falls for the tall, good-looking and energetic new soul in the kitchen, though – Ray is super-cute, enjoys wearing a leather apron, and looks really good in it. But they’re just colleagues, you know…then, just friends, of course…

The publisher’s video guy accidentally posts a clip of Ray being hilarious and awesome on the magazine’s channel, and it goes viral, and all of a sudden, the strategy for media is changed, and Simone and Ray are co-hosting a hit show on YouTube, much to the chagrin of the company’s arrogant social media manager.  Things rock on pretty well, until…

Okay, I’m going to have to level with you here. I’m not an unbiased reader; Ray is non-binary, tending toward masculine, and I’m non-binary, tending feminine. When Ray comes out at work, they have mixed results. While Simone and the other kitchen staff are supportive, management (including that snooty social media maven) are not, continually dead-naming and misgendering them. And Ray tells their allies in the kitchen to not make a fuss, because they cannot lose this job – and when we as readers are informed of why, when Ray tells Simone, my heart just broke for them.

Yes, this story is a rom-com. And yes, it’s got all the classic elements of one – the not-quite-understanding each other’s subtexts, the “I said things when I was drunk” night, the “we’ll never mention this again.” But there is a second story here, and it’s one that Simone shows us in some pretty sharp detail – Ray’s struggle for their identity and acceptance. Simone is there for Ray, as they are Going Through It, tending to them through what – for both Ray, and for me – are some of the toughest moments of their life. Ray’s path, because it mirrors my own, resonated forcefully with me, even though the details of their path are quite a bit different from my own. It’s the same struggle, really: the struggle to be themselves.  It is a struggle I have lived with for over a decade now, and seeing Ray’s life through Simone’s eyes brought me back to some of the difficult moments of that period.

Simone is going through her own struggle, too, being a mostly-closeted bisexual woman, and when she outs herself to her manager (in the discussion over Ray’s coming-out), you see her own frustration with the struggle she sees coming. It’s not on the scale of Ray’s, but it’s there, and we get to see her respond to that in a really rewarding way when she points out to her boss that “You’re the only straight person in the room.”

Cisgender and/or straight readers might not get that resonance, and for those readers who don’t, this is still a fantastically cute, sassy, well-crafted rom-com with a little steam and some great food for thoughtful reflection. If you’re one of those readers, that’s okay, though this reviewer’s hope is that seeing Ray and Simone’s struggles educate you a bit, and give you a better feeling for those people around you who may not fit in the same mold you do. For queer folk and their allies, though, there’s so much more to see and feel here. My one gripe about this book is that the ending came too quickly, the resolution a little bit deus ex machina for my tastes – the happy-for-now ending came quite abruptly, even though it was a good end to the tale. This was TJ Alexander’s first work, and I am going to read their second work, the follow-on Chef’s Choice, right away. I’m hungry for more.

Short and Unsatisfactory: Books and Reviews

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews
Short and Unsatisfactory: Books and ReviewsThe Piano Tuner by Chiang-sheng Kuo, Howard Goldblatt, Sylvia Li-Chun Lin
Format: eARC
Source: publisher
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction
Pages: 168
Published by Arcade Publishing on January 3, 2023
Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Winner of every major literary award in Taiwan, an elegiac and deceptively quiet novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate hearts—and music   A widower grieving for his young wife. A piano tuner concealing a lifetime of secrets. An out-of-tune Steinway piano. A journey of self-discovery across time and continents, from a dark apartment in Taipei’s red-light district to snow-clad New York. At the heart of the story is the nameless narrator, the piano tuner. In his forties, he is balding and ugly, a loser by any standard. But he was once a musical prodigy. What betrayal and what heartbreak made him walk away from greatness? Long hailed in Taiwan as a “writer’s writer,” Chiang-Sheng Kuo delivers a stunningly powerful, compact novel in The Piano Tuner. It’s a book of sounds: both of music and of the heart, from Rachmaninoff to Schubert, from Glenn Gould to Sviatoslav Richter, from untapped potential to unrequited love. With a cadence and precision that bring to mind Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, this short novel may be a portrait of the artist as a “failure,” but it also describes a pursuit of the ultimate beauty in music and in love. 

I’ve been caught between two books this week that should not have anything in common – and yet they do. And not just my reaction to both of them. So here you have two short but not so sweet reviews.

The Piano Tuner by Chiang-Sheng Kuo

This is the story of one man, his late wife, her music career and the piano tuner who lovingly tends her pianos. Or at least that’s how it starts, as the man, the widower Lin, is in the throes of dealing with his late wife’s music studio. Which is where he comes upon the aforementioned piano tuner. There’s a reason the book is named for that piano tuner, as it is really his story, told backwards, forwards and sideways, about his life and especially the choices he made to become a tuner of pianos instead of the concert pianist his prodigal talents would have allowed him to be. Through his life, we see both the choices that he let slip away – and the ones that he never believed were truly his to begin with – as well as his acceptance of his role as the trusted person working in the shadows who makes genius possible for others.

Escape Rating C: As the story slips from past to present, and from the piano tuner’s past to the widower’s past, it speaks of both of them interchangeably both the first person and the third person in a way that never allows the reader to be certain who is “I”, that first-person voice, as the narrative continues. It’s a confusion that kept tripping me up and dropping me out of the story, even as I already felt distanced from it by its steeping in classical music and the performance thereof.

Daughters of Muscadine by Monic Ductan
Format read: eARC provided by the publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages:144
Published by on November 14, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble,  Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Two events tie together the nine stories in Monic Ductan’s gorgeous the 1920s lynching of Ida Pearl Crawley and the 1980s drowning of a high school basketball player, Lucy Boudreaux. Both forever shape the people and the place of Muscadine, Georgia, in the foothills of Appalachia. The daughters of Muscadine are Black Southern women who are, at times, outcasts due to their race and also estranged from those they love. A remorseful woman tries to connect with the child she gave up for adoption; another, immersed in loneliness, attempts to connect with a violent felon. Two sisters love each other deeply even when they cannot understand one another. A little girl witnessing her father’s slow death realizes her own power and lack thereof. A single woman weathers the excitement—and rigors—of online dating. Covering the last one hundred years, these are stories of people whose voices have been suppressed and erased for too Black women, rural women, Appalachian women, and working-class women. Ductan presents the extraordinary nature of everyday lives in the tradition of Alice Walker, Deesha Philyaw, James McBride, and Dorothy Allison in an engaging, engrossing, and exciting new voice.

My Review:

Daughters of Muscadine is another book that got derailed by that question of who is “I”. These are linked short stories, all taking place in a small town in northeast Georgia that is part of the Appalachian Region. The stories are linked by two events, the lynching of Pearl Crawley in 1920, and the drowning of Lucy Boudreaux in the 1980s. Both stories are told by one of Pearl’s descendants, as Pearl still haunts the area decades after her death.

The idea that all of the stories in this collection are linked into a sort-of novel is an interesting one, but the execution of that idea fell apart at “I”. Many of the stories are told in that first-person “I” voice, but the possessor of that “I” changes from story to story without explanation. So they didn’t link the way I (there’s that “I” again) expected. Or much at all.

Escape Rating D+: I shouldn’t have picked this up right now, because it won’t be published until November. But more than half of the short stories in this linked collection have been previously published so I don’t feel as bad about that as I otherwise might. But I got lost, over and over, because the speakers seemed to change without much warning and just didn’t link into a whole. I think this just needed something it didn’t have in the way of an introduction to each story to set them into the narrative as a whole. The description in the blurb was awesome, but the book unfortunately did not live up to it.

My two cents and your reading mileage may vary.

Review: Pets in Space 7 by S.E. Smith, R.J. Blain, Grace Goodwin, Skye MacKinnon, Carol Van Natta, Honey Phillips, Carysa Locke, S.J. Pajonas, JC Hay, Kyndra Hatch

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: Pets in Space 7 by S.E. Smith, R.J. Blain, Grace Goodwin, Skye MacKinnon, Carol Van Natta, Honey Phillips, Carysa Locke, S.J. Pajonas, JC Hay, Kyndra HatchPets in Space 7 by S.E. Smith, R.J. Blain, Grace Goodwin, Skye MacKinnon, Carol Van Natta, Honey Phillips, Carysa Locke, S.J. Pajonas, JC Hay, Kyndra Hatch
Format: ebook
Source: publisher
Formats available: ebook
Genres: action adventure romance, science fiction romance
Series: Pets in Space #7
Pages: 1369
on October 4, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

Pets in Space® is back for a new year of adventures!

Pets in Space is back and better than ever! Featuring 13 original, never-before-released stories from some of today's bestselling science fiction romance authors, starring your favorite sci-fi pets. These furry, feathered, and slightly alien friends are always ready for a new adventure with their two-legged human and alien companions. From dogs to cats to sea creatures and unicorns, these romantic tales show that pets are more than just animals – they’re family.

This limited-edition anthology includes stories by some of the biggest names in science fiction romance. New York Times Bestseller S.E. Smith and USA Today Bestsellers R.J. Blain, Grace Goodwin, Skye MacKinnon, Carol Van Natta, Honey Phillips, Carysa Locke, S.J. Pajonas, JC Hay, and Kyndra Hatch, plus Leslie Chase, Winnie Winkle, and Candace Colt.

The Pets in Space 7 authors continue their vital support of HeroDogs, the non-profit charity that improves quality of life for veterans of the U.S. military and first-responders with disabilities.

★ Don't miss out — grab this limited-edition anthology before it's too late! ★

Exclusively in Pets in Space 7:
◆“Wynter and the Stone Dragon” by S.E. Smith: Love blossoms between a human king and an alien princess when a portal between their worlds opens.
◆“Life-Debt” by R.J. Blain: Hybrid human Viva and her pet fox have two rules: no names and no attachments. Why does the handsome man she rescued makes her want to break both?
◆“Marked Mate” by Grace Goodwin: An elite hunter pursues a dangerous criminal on an unsuspecting Earth, only to be distracted by a mysterious woman and her furry pet.
◆“Alien Abduction for Unicorns” by Skye MacKinnon: Unicorns are real, and alien Bruin is sexy as the stars. Can Scottish tour guide Tara forgive them for kidnapping her in the name of science?
◆“An Entanglement of Griffins” by Carol Van Natta: A space pirate and a pet sanctuary owner suspected of grand larceny get help from genetically-engineered griffins to recover the goods and find love.
◆“Cyborg Rider” by Honey Phillips: Can a bioengineered mole named Eglantine find a way to rescue the scientist and the cyborg who are depending on her?
◆“Healer Heart” by Carysa Locke: A telekinetic healer on a mission and a telepathic killer who is afraid to feel must trust an intelligent cat to help them save a group of children from death.
◆“Myra’s Big Mistake” by S. J. Pajonas: She’s burdened by a lifetime of disappointment. He’s been her secret admirer for years. Will a roll of the dice lead to a cosmic courtship?
◆“Desert Flame” by JC Hay: Dr. Cerridwen Lewis is prickly, foul mouthed, and quick to anger; in other words, she’s everything Captain Kal and his pet scythewing ever wanted.
◆“Death Angel” by Kyndra Hatch: How do you choose between your people and your mate? Especially when you're a Korthan cyborg captain and your human mate unknowingly holds the key to lasting peace or unending war?
◆“Written in the Stars” by Leslie Chase: Megan isn’t looking for love, especially not from an alien mercenary just passing through. But love, and her winged cat Nebula, have other plans.
◆“Liquid Courage” by Winnie Winkle: Powerful sea witch Morgan is determined to save her beloved ocean creatures from thieving aliens. Tony offers to help, but he's got secrets.
◆“Rhea’s Conundrum: A Witch in Space” by by Candace Colt: Eccentric witch Rhea only dreamed of the stars. So how did she and her snarky cat end up in a junk-picker spaceship with sexy alien captain C'tloc?

My Review:

Pets in Space is always an utterly marvelous treat. Every year an absolutely stellar group of science fiction romance writers get together to create this annual collection of space ships and adventure, featuring romance between humans and/or aliens, ably assisted by companion creatures, whether animals or AI, whether furry or feathered or something out of this world.

The proceeds from the sale of each Pets in Space collection go to charity, specifically to Hero Dogs, an organization which provides trained service dogs to heroes, specifically to wounded military veterans and first responders.

So the book supports a terrific cause, and the stories within are always out of this world. This is the seventh collection, and it contains a lucky THIRTEEN science fiction romance novellas in a whopping 1369 page book.

That’s a lot of book, and a lot of treats to savor until the next one arrives!

For me, the annual collection is a reading delight that will last through lots of reading time, especially over the winter with a cat in my lap and a cup of tea or hot cocoa at my side. It’s much too big for one sitting or even one weekend. I always want to take my time and enjoy every page.

This is a book that requires a plan of attack!

I confess that I always read the cat stories first. Partly because it’s always fun to imagine what cats would have to say if they could talk. And because my own feline overlords wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m supposed to reassure them that they’re the best cats in the universe and they aren’t shy about telling me so!

But seriously, I generally do read the cat stories first – as I did this time around. I save the stories about other animals, and in worlds I’m not familiar with, for times when I can dive into the towering TBR pile – or add to it – to get stories in the same worlds featured in the collection that are new to me.

So I’ll be treating myself to more of Pets in Space 7 over the months ahead.

Howsomever, I can’t leave you without making a few review-type comments about those three cat stories, “Healer Heart” by Carysa Locke, “Written in the Stars” by Leslie Chase and “Rhea’s Conundrum: A Witch in Space” by Candace Colt.

“Healer Heart” was interesting because it contained some elements of Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling series, particularly her genetically engineered and ruthlessly trained assassins, the Arrows. In the universe of the Telepathic Space Pirates there is also a group of genetically engineered assassins. And like the Arrows, some of those born and bred killers want more from life than just death. Which is where telepathic healer Nayla and the hunter cat Rasalas come in. While she personally wants to help one particular assassin, her assignment is to help assassin-trained children before the training is too deeply ingrained to be countered. She helps the kids with dogs, but it’s the cat pushing her to make things right with the man who broke her heart trying to protect her from himself.

There’s just so much to love in this one. Nayla is beating her head against the wall using her own gifts and training to help people who are determined to blame her for every break from tradition; the man she loves is terrified he’ll kill her if his training overcomes his reason; and the kids she is able to help are heartbreaking but hopeful. This universe is an absolute mess but this healer seems to have a cure for at least a bit of what’s ailing it.

“Written in the Stars” revolves around a woman stranded on a failing space station with her vast collection of books, her flying cat, and her determination to save up enough money to get back to something a little bit more like civilization. Megan is plucky beyond belief, and lucky beyond reason, as she finds both someone to love and a purpose for living in helping to rescue the space station from itself. Her winged cat Nebula is both very cat and very reminiscent of some famous literary felines, as Nebula is an intergalactic traveling version of the winged cats in Nebula-Award winning Ursula LeGuin’s lovely Catwings series.

Last but not least, “Rhea’s Conundrum: A Witch in Space” by Candace Colt. This one was my favorite because Rhea is a witch of a certain age who learns that love has not passed her by, and that she is not yet ready (if, admittedly, she ever will be) to settle down and help raise her grandchildren. Her conundrum is a devastating one, as the necklace that powered her journey to C’tloc’s spaceship can either take her back to her home or power his spaceship so that he can get back home, but not both. If she leaves, he’ll die. If she stays, by the time she manages to get back to Earth her family will probably be long dead. She can only live one life, and she has to make a bittersweet choice between loves – with the help of her very snarky cat. This one was a heartbreaker.

Escape Rating A: This collection is always a Grade A read, no matter when I pick it up or where I choose to dip into it at any given time. The stories are always a delightful range of styles and worlds and pets, and this year is no exception.

That it supports a wonderful cause while giving hours if not days of reading delight is just icing on a very lovely reading cake – with a puppuccino on the side.

But Pets in Space 7 is, as always, a limited edition. So if any – or hopefully ALL – of the stories appeal to you, be sure to get your copy before they fly off to the stars for another year. Because every collection, every year, is a feathery, whiskery, winged delight!