REVIEW: The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (2.5 stars)

Another book from my Hugo Nominee reading list and while I made it through this book, I'm still not entirely sure what I read.

On the surface, Pell (who becomes the abbess, Yarrow) and Kew (who becomes the guardian Hawthorne and changes from boy to woman) are teens thrust into roles with responsibilities they aren't quite prepared to handle. They both go off on quests to help save their home and we follow their adventures through Red, Yellow, Blue and Black tower controlled regions.  The Beast is awakening and winter has come too early and the other sisters / Lady creatures have to be "warned."  What will they do? Will they help or is this just part of the cycle that they expect?

The premise, once you start looking for it, is actually pretty dark. The West Passage is basically a closed system where people are manufactured through ritual consumption. There are these giant beings called the Ladies, and they're not really rulers; they're products. Made from honey that's derived from processed human remains (mellified man, which is apparently a delicacy that cures illness). Ravens in Grey Tower tear the bodies down and fly off - though we don't have visibility into this process, I suspect that the flesh goes into special honey.  There are even more special types of honey (like thistle) that create or pacify the Lady creatures. Some people are "simple skin" people - but a lot of people are chimerical with rabbit ears, trout heads, tree branches for hair, or very owl-like and laying eggs.  Everyone enjoys honey and mead as a regular part of their diet - but specific "vintages" or types of honey are reserved for the Lady creatures.  At least one Lady creature has a poisonous bite and will eat other Lady creatures.

The Beast everyone's afraid of? It's the 6th Lady, the source of the whole system, been sleeping/imprisoned under Grey Tower the whole time. When the system starts failing and she wakes up, the "victory" is basically: accept what you are. Hawthorne (who is Kew transformed) goes inside a giant tree. Yarrow goes back to Grey Tower to continue her role as Mother/abbess of the birth/death doulas.  Does the cycle keep going? Does something else happen? That's a genuinely interesting premise. 

For me, the problem is that even with the medieval art style illustrations,  I can't really picture what these creatures look like.The illustrations help, but you're reading 500 pages where you're asked to hold incomprehensible morphologies in your head while the narrative moves through dream logic. There's no conventional plot. Characters have no interiority — and I realize now that's kind of the point (they're products of a system, not people), but it doesn't make them engaging to read about.

The ending is resignation, not resolution. Yarrow knows now. She goes back anyway. That's bleak, but it's also just... static.

Compared to Perdido Street Station, which I gave Perdido 3 stars partly because Miéville does similar territory — massive city built in/on a dead creature, systemic oppression, strange biology — but he makes it inhabitable. You can see those ribs on the horizon. Isaac and Lin have interiority and actually choose things that matter. The weirdness is immersive, not obscuring.

The West Passage uses obscurity as its central feature. The dream logic, the baroque description, the resistance to conventional narrative — that's intentional. Some people will find that captivating. I found it exhausting.

The book has an audacious premise underneath, but it's buried under 500 pages that could've been half that length. Pechaček prioritized concept over character, atmosphere over clarity. I don't find myself invested enough in what happens next to pick up a sequel, if there is one.  "The West Passage" was built to be analyzed and argued over - more than enjoyed.  With that in mind, I'm sure this will be an excellent book for discussion in a book club or in a college lit course.

REVIEW: The West Passage by Jared Pechaček
RATING: 2.5 stars

When Authors Abuse Their Protagonists: Narrative Design and the Denial of Agency

Some books don’t just constrain their protagonists—they sideline them. Not because the plot requires it, but because the author is more invested in something else: satire, format, descriptive indulgence, shock value. The character becomes a tool rather than a person. Their agency is limited, their interiority is thin, and their autonomy is withheld because the author has other priorities.

Two of these books—Yesteryear and Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales—are recent reads that I rated two stars specifically because of this pattern. The third, All the Light We Cannot See, I read in 2019 and rated one star. It remains the clearest example of how an author’s priorities can completely override a protagonist’s agency.

Natalie: Drugged for Satire and Reproductive Servitude

In Yesteryear, Natalie is drugged by her husband and family for fifteen years. Her memory breaks apart. She can’t trust her own perceptions. It’s domestic horror, but Burke doesn’t treat it as horror. Natalie’s confusion becomes a device for mocking influencer culture and manosphere rhetoric. She’s written as judgmental and foolish, and the book frames her chemical imprisonment as a kind of deserved consequence.

And then there’s the reproductive servitude. Natalie may be foolish, unkind, or driven by shallow goals, but none of that justifies forcing her through nine children, several of whom are conceived via turkey baster. The book tries to justify this by having her promise Caleb’s father—Doug, the three‑time presidential candidate—that she’ll give Caleb “lots of babies” and build a “big American family” on the Idaho property Doug purchased for $5 million. But buying land does not entitle you to a woman’s reproductive labor. It doesn’t make her a “good wife” to have nine children. It makes her exploited.

Even within the story’s own logic, the promise doesn’t hold. A vow made in her twenties does not explain why she’s still being artificially impregnated into her early forties. It doesn’t explain why she and Caleb share a bed when neither of them is interested in sex with the other. It doesn’t explain why her reproductive life is treated as an obligation rather than a choice. These pregnancies don’t deepen her character or advance the plot. They’re not consequences of her decisions. They’re consequences of the author’s decisions.

The solo birth at forty to a blue, oxygen‑deprived infant is the same problem. It’s dreadful to read and completely unnecessary. It doesn’t illuminate any theme. It doesn’t catalyze change. It’s just another moment where the narrative punishes her instead of developing her. Her reproductive life becomes a spectacle—a place where the author can escalate suffering without earning it.

The parallel storyline with Caleb's mother Amelia, also chemically diminished, gets dropped. The book sets up a family-wide pattern of controlling women through pharmaceuticals and then abandons it. Natalie never gets clarity about what happened to her. The ending doesn’t resolve whether she escapes, stays, or even understands her situation.

Her fractured state isn’t a character arc. It’s a narrative convenience. The satire takes priority over the character.

Emily: Denied Interiority in Service of Format

Across the first two Emily Wilde books, Emily reads as possibly neurodivergent: literal, structured, uncomfortable with emotional reciprocity, and reliant on observation rather than introspection. These traits make sense within the journal/field‑note conceit. Her voice is clinical because the format is clinical. She processes the world through taxonomy, classification, and data. Even her one moment of longing for Wendell is immediately reframed as a recurring physical sensation she’s been tracking: a feeling she notes rather than experiences.

But in the third book, the format shifts. The “journals” become more like standard first‑person chapters with date stamps. The writing leans into immediacy rather than documentation. And as the format loosens, Emily’s characterization loosens with it. She suddenly has more fluid emotional reactions, more spontaneous commentary, and less structured observation. The traits that previously read as neurodivergent become inconsistent—not because Emily has grown, but because the narrative device has changed.

This is the core problem: Emily’s interiority isn’t rooted in who she is. It’s rooted in whatever the format requires. When the journal conceit is tight, she’s clinical and distant. When the narration becomes more conventional, she becomes more conventional. She isn’t allowed a stable inner life because the author is more committed to the epistolary device than to the character herself.

Meanwhile, Wendell remains consistently thoughtful—protective cloaks, tailored clothing, specialists for his dying dog, an entire library commissioned for her research. Emily responds by complaining the journals are too fancy. She doesn’t examine his care or her own reactions to it. She doesn’t let any of it matter.

By the third book, the distance isn’t restraint. It’s avoidance. Emily is kept emotionally inert because the format demands it, not because the character does. The format takes priority over the character.

Marie-Laure: Infantilized for Descriptive Prose and Shock Value

Doerr’s prose in All the Light We Cannot See is undeniably beautiful, but Marie-Laure is written as an “Angel in a Glass Box.” She’s blind, so she’s treated as incapable of basic tasks—packing, dressing, washing her own hair. Her father does everything for her. Her disability becomes a device for sensory description rather than a lived experience.

She survives the war, earns a PhD, works in a museum, writes books. She does all of this while blind, yet the narrative never allows her access to the medical intervention that would restore her sight. Cataracts are treatable. By the book’s timeline, she lives in an era where surgery is available. But the author keeps her blind because her blindness serves his aesthetic.

Instead of giving her autonomy, he adds more cruelty—rape, traumatic brain injury, land mines, a magical diamond subplot. Shock value accumulates while her agency stays static. The prose takes priority over the character.

Across all three books, the protagonist is sacrificed to something else:

• Burke’s satire replaces Natalie’s agency.
• Fawcett’s commitment to format replaces Emily’s interiority.
• Doerr’s descriptive agenda replaces Marie-Laure’s autonomy.

None of these characters are allowed to become fully realized. Their constraints come from authorial preference, not narrative necessity.

A protagonist doesn’t need to be likable or triumphant, but they do need the chance to be a person. They need interiority, choice, contradiction, growth, failure—something that belongs to them rather than to the author’s agenda.

When a book denies that, the character becomes a prop. The narrative calls it sophistication, restraint, realism. But the cost is paid by a protagonist who never gets to want anything, understand anything, or choose anything.

That’s why Yesteryear and Emily Wilde’s Compendium landed at two stars for me. The concepts work. The prose works. But the protagonists are never allowed to fully exist, and the books treat that as a feature rather than a flaw.

All the Light We Cannot See earned one star because it takes this pattern to an extreme—Marie-Laure’s agency is not just limited, it’s systematically erased.

When character sacrifice becomes the foundation of the narrative, the narrative itself is weakened. No amount of technical polish compensates for a protagonist who’s been denied the chance to be a person.

REVIEW: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (2-stars)

Yesteryear is as domestic horror disguised as homesteading satire. Burke establishes almost immediately that Natalie is unreliable - she references a Whole Foods that may not have existed in her supposed era (there's only one WF in Idaho, est in 2012 in Boise) and describes a 500-acre property with the reverence of someone who probably has no idea how long a mile is (500 acres is less than 1 mi by 1 mi squre). These aren't authorial oversights. They're tells.

But the real horror is Caleb's systematic drugging of his wife. Over 15 years, he and his son (and possibly his parents) keep Natalie in a pharmaceutical haze whether it's Valium or horse tranquilizers is hard to say.  The first valium were supplied by his mother Amelia, who spends her own days drinking Chardonnay and disappearing into chemical dependency. Natalie's memory gaps, her inability to recognize her own children, her confusion about what's real: these are the direct consequences of chemical control. By the final section, Natalie can't distinguish between actual events and delusion, and we genuinely don't know if that final interview with her college roommate happened or was another drug-induced hallucination.

This is genuinely dark stuff. But here's where the book loses me: Burke sets up Amelia's parallel decline as a smoking gun: the mother-in-law visibly wasting away, cognitively compromised, on the exact same substances that Natalie consumes. This detail appears and disappears. The author never returns to it. We never see Amelia's story, never explore what it means that an entire family operates on the principle of chemical control of women. Shannon tells Natalie directly: "In order for me to be a homewrecker, you would have to have a home for me to wreck, and you don't. You don't even have a family. What you have is a business." That line is devastating:  it delivers the realization that Caleb's entire family conspired to build and maintain a fantasy that kept Natalie compliant and isolated. And then the book largely abandons this realization.

The children are parentified to catastrophic degrees. Mary, at 15, slaps her mother across the face and lectures her on behavior while complicit in drugging her. Clementine initially leaves at age 16 with all but one of her younger siblings, and returns 15 years later to rescue the rest of them.  She says in response to learning her mother is "constantly moving in and out of a pharmaceutical haze": "Perfect. That's just perfect." By the book's end, we learn Mary has written her own story and works at Whole Foods, which feels like authorial commentary, but it's never clarified. Maybe it's paid advertisement or a wink at influencer endorsement.

Burke's satire of influencer culture and manosphere rhetoric has real bite. But the cost of that satire is steep: the characters are abused to the point of becoming cautionary tales rather than people. Natalie could have been a story about a woman who realizes she's trapped by a man and a family invested in her delusion and chooses to leave, or chooses to stay, or discovers the trap was never real. Instead, we're left in ambiguity that feels less like literary technique and more like the author chose psychological torment over resolution.

The unreliability works as a narrative device. But by the end, you're not reading about Natalie's survival. You're reading about a woman so thoroughly broken that you're not sure what's real anymore and the book never quite earns that level of darkness because we come in late in the game.  Does Natalie simply deserve this fate because she's unkind? How ironic.

UPDATE: Opting out of the Catholic Church

 This is a short update to my post: Opting Out of Churches: I Wanted to Get Excommunicated, But Here's What Actually Works

I have received the signed USPS postcards for both Catholic churches;  the church nearest me in the same state has already sent back a letter confirming that they have annotated their records and that my contact information is not in their files.  Still pending the postcard from the Lutheran church. 

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett (2-stars)

Another Hugo reading list book, "Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales" is the 3rd book in the Emily Wild series. Emily's refusal to have an interior life stops reading as restraint and starts reading as evasion.

Throughout the trilogy, Emily processes experience clinically. She journals about magical encounters like they're field notes. She observes Wendell's emotional labor without reciprocating it. She finds him physically attractive but fundamentally mismatches his values. And when she finally admits to missing him—the single moment of genuine emotional depth in this 300+ page book—she frames it as clinical observation: "I missed Wendell with a sudden and painful ache that left me short of breath, a sensation that would have surprised me had I not been experiencing it regularly, even when he'd been there beside me." Even her longing is processed as data.

This wouldn't matter if the book was actually a journal or field notes. Real journals have interiority. Real scholars question their own biases and feelings. But these "journals" just read like convenient first-person narration. The dated chapter headers feel like window dressing—there's no sustained reflection, no self-examination, no moment where Emily genuinely reckons with why she's with Wendell or what she actually wants.

Wendell doesn't just observe her needs—he solves them thoughtfully: protecting her with Veil-sewn cloaks he carefully adjusts as circumstances change, tailoring her clothing so she actually looks like herself instead of a shapeless outline, commissioning faeries to create an entire library of journals for her work. Emily's response is to complain they're too fancy. She doesn't examine these acts. She doesn't thank him. She doesn't let them matter.

The book compounds this by piling narrative complications onto an already thin emotional foundation. A wicked stepmother a la "Snow White" repents offstage and asks for "just give me a nice ADU, Dear"—completely unearned, never explained. A grandfather's secret journal reveals a unashamed faerie serial killer who drips blood everywhere and lives in the castle. A new layer of lore gets grafted onto the existing mythology. None of this deepens Emily or Wendell's relationship. It just makes the book busier.

What's genuinely interesting gets sacrificed to plot density. Wendell created a love nest for the lesbian couple from the previous book and lets Emily visit them—that's touching and unexpected. But the characters remain one-dimensional plot devices. There's an underwater castle accessible only to mortals that serves as sanctuary, a refuge where different rules apply—but Emily never considers it as her own safe space. Poe (the small one) gains depth and affection, but Emily never advocates for herself, never asks what she actually wants from faerie queenship, never negotiates with the people making her clothes about functional specifications even though she's the actual the queen.

She won't put her notebooks in the magical pockets of her new garments because she's afraid they'll disappear. She picks the plainest gown from many options because she's committed to being unremarkable. She refuses special treatment based on an unfounded and implied belief she doesn't deserve it. This isn't humility. It's a refusal to inhabit her own agency. And after three books, that refusal has shifted from interesting neurodivergent coding into something more like punishment.

The book abuses Emily through systematic self-abnegation and refuses her the depth it claims to offer. You finish reading journals that never actually examine the person writing them. The abuse isn't physical or magical—it's narrative. Emily is kept so carefully at a distance that you never know what she actually feels or wants, and neither does she.

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett 

RATING: 2-stars

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett (3 stars)

The Emily Wilde books are part of my Hugo nominee reading list.  I found the second book amusing and fun to read. The plot engine works well: Emily and Wendell flee Cambridge after publishing groundbreaking research, pursued by Wendell's homicidal stepmother who wants to eliminate him as a rival claimant to the faerie throne. They rescue two missing academics trapped in faerie limbo, then Emily ventures into Wendell's kingdom to retrieve his cat—the only thing that can cure him of mysterious poisoning. She agrees to marry him. They reclaim his throne. The adventure elements are engaging, the stakes escalate pleasantly, and there's genuine pleasure in the narrative momentum.

Fawcett's interiority remains primarily Emily's, though a section where Wendell writes in her journal gives us his voice—a good choice that shows rather than tells his emotional investment. The relationships with the "small ones" (Poe and the new character Snowbell) gain depth and genuine affection. Supporting characters like Emily's niece Ariadne and department chair Farris Rose function primarily as plot devices. Rose begins as an antagonist wanting to fire both Emily and Wendell, but after the assassination attempt and magical fiasco in Wendell's class, he joins the trip and becomes an ally. Both characters are so flat and superfluous that removing them from the story would not materially change the narrative.

But the central problem persists: there is no real chemistry between Emily and Wendell. Emily finds him physically attractive:  he has the prettiest golden locks and his green eyes make her lose composure. But that very marginal physical attraction exists alongside a fundamental mismatch in how they value and experience the world. Wendell is pathologically tidy, finds deep satisfaction in decorating and arranging spaces, attributes this to "house elf" ancestors. Emily observes that his efforts make spaces feel better, but she doesn't feel the drive to do it herself. She appreciates the outcome without understanding or sharing what motivates him. When she's shocked at how much better a space feels after he moves the rug and cleans the floor, she's making an intellectual observation, not experiencing genuine connection with his values.

This echoes the first book: he decorated the cottage and said "if you don't understand, you may never get it." She still doesn't understand. He continues performing emotional and domestic labor while she benefits and observes without meeting him. This includes tailoring and enchanting her clothing items so that she is protected but also looks more stylish.  There’s a lot of repeated emphasis on Emily being “mousy” and unattractive.  The "opposites attract" framework doesn't create interesting friction or genuine connection, just one-directional emotional labor that the book frames as romance. Wendell's "unrequited love finally requited" arc resolves with Emily agreeing to marry him while he is unconscious and because it solves a practical problem and she's attracted to him, not because she's actually reciprocating his emotional investment.

There's also a darker undercurrent: enchantments work like being roofied or groomed. Emily experiences memory gaps, foggy recollection, loss of agency when enchanted. The book treats enchantment similarly to predatory grooming—what happens to her with Wendell's stepmother, what the ice king did to her in Book 1. Having her agree to marriage with a faerie king after experiencing that kind of violation, without the book explicitly reckoning with the trauma or consent issues, is troubling. The romantic resolution doesn't acknowledge the gravity of what's been done to her. There's an implied sex scene in a tent in the Alps (Wendell uses magic to enchant her cloak into comfortable bedding), but it's not graphic—it codes as Young Adult despite the kidnapping, roofying, and manipulation throughout.

The anachronisms continue and deepen. Everyone wears cloaks constantly, but historical photos from 1900-1910 show people in snowy regions wore winter coats and jackets, not cloaks. It's another example of using historical aesthetic detail: cloaks feel old-fashioned and atmospheric but demonstrate either a lack of  understanding of what people actually wore or failing to establish this aesthetic for this alt universe. This joins the real taxonomy words for invented faerie classifications and the other tonal inconsistencies from Book 1. The "cozy" label seems to mean "not dystopian" rather than actually cozy; the book is clearly a fantasy mystery/thriller with romantic elements, and the romance isn't working.

If Book 3 continues with zero chemistry as the baseline and expects readers to accept "he loves her, therefore they belong together" as sufficient romance, I'm not interested. The adventure plot can only carry so much weight.

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett 

RATING: 3 stars

REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

This is the first book in a Hugo-nominated series and a genuinely fun book to read. Fawcett has created a premise with real charm—the faerie economics, the slow-burn romance between Emily and Wendell with its constant crackling tension, the humor that runs through the scholarly voice. The adventure works; the magic feels tactile and interesting. There's genuine pleasure in following Emily through the woods to find an enchanted tree, in watching Wendell charm his way through social situations that would paralyze her, in the domestic sparring between them where he understands something she keeps missing. The anachronistic elements—the wood-splitting lesbians, the bohemian freedom of the village community—read as charming rather than jarring. Fawcett isn't trying to write a museum piece of 1909 England; she's creating a world where faeries are real and certain social rules bend differently. That's actually enjoyable. And yet, as I read, I kept bumping up against choices the book makes about what it wants to be, choices that create real tensions between the story it's telling and the framework it's supposedly working within.

The author presents us with an alt universe where faeries exist and can be studied—but are elusive enough that few people really have deep knowledge of them. Our chief protagonist, Emily, is a relentless researcher driven by a deep desire to learn new facts and collect data. She's an intellectual and an adventurer who strives to be "first." She's balanced by her friend Wendell, a handsome bon vivant capable of charming just about everyone around him.

The book operates across three distinct layers:

Layer 1 -- Faerie Economics: The premise works beautifully: fieldwork to go find faeries, ask them questions, learn about how they operate. They don't like money or metal, but value trades of goods for information, for example. The trade of the brownie Poe of bread for shoveling snow is a great example and maybe that's "cozy." These are the faerie economics and the delightful surface-level details—descriptions of household furnishings and nesting that create a genuinely charming tone.

Layer 2 -- Romance and Reciprocity: The adventure parts are genuinely interesting and fun. Hiking through the woods to find an enchanted tree or a faerie winter fair, the magical artifacts and words are all engaging as are the "fight" scenes and magical conversion. The "will they/won't they" tension between Emily and Wendell is well-maintained. The role reversal in the domestic sphere is particularly effective—where she questions the value of decorating the rental cottage because they'll only be there a short time, and he basically says "if you don't understand, you may never get it" but she lets him do it anyway.

Interestingly, I'm reading "A Little Bit More Social" by Nicholas Epley in parallel, and there's a fascinating dynamic between Emily and Wendell. She wants to be "by the book" and pay for all her meals while doing fieldwork to avoid bias, but creates bias by doing so. Wendell has to teach her about developing trust through genuine connection and allowing others agency. Creating space for reciprocal interaction is what allows relationships to develop. By the end of the story, Emily demonstrates through her advice to Aud about gifts for Wendell that she's picking up on this—she now thinks of him and what would make him happy, translating the villagers' gratitude into something meaningful to him specifically.

Layer 3 -- Horror: But then there's the third layer: kidnapping and child trafficking, homicidal rage and torture. Emily being enchanted to control her and cutting off her own finger with the axe to maintain some control is sheer body horror. The horror of being enchanted and the clinical way she processes that entire traumatic experience—journalling it, trying to track days—suggests something important about her character.

In some ways, Emily is neurodivergent coded. Her inability to read danger and heed warning signs (even with Wendell standing on the other side of a river bank warning her and trying to get her to step back); her incomprehension of Wendell's care for her and her repeated mentions that she can't "read" the emotions on his face (and the faces of others), constantly creating misunderstanding by not reading others or social norms; the horror of being enchanted, cutting off her own finger and processing that entire traumatic experience clinically—these all suggest neurodivergent coding. Interestingly, this context helps explain what might otherwise be historical implausibility.

The book is set in 1909-10, yet the social environment doesn't really communicate that era. Emily Wilde is a professor at Cambridge, an institution that didn't grant women academic status until 1948. Women could not get a Cambridge degree until after WWII, let alone be a tenure track professor. Forget about holding an academic position. And while Wendell reaches out to Emily's host in fake Iceland to arrange to show up—suddenly her squalid cottage is a 3-bedroom house with space for Wendell and his two student assistants to join Emily. In the early 20th century, an unmarried woman and unmarried man sharing lodgings would have been highly irregular and would have had serious consequences for both of them professionally.

More problematically, Wendell is casually sleeping with village women in the house he's sharing with Emily and the students, and no mention is made of why casual sex is laughed off in an era when reliable birth control and social norms were opposed to this sort of behavior. He is potentially leaving women pregnant or infected with STDs, and the book glosses over that predatory behavior as part of his "charm." The women are grateful for the opportunity to have slept with him and think of him as a sex doll? There are no shotgun weddings, and it's all much more bohemian than I would imagine for an isolated rural village in fake Iceland.

This might be less concerning if Emily's neurodivergent coding explained her obliviousness to these dynamics. But the book itself doesn't address the consequences; it simply ignores them.

Sometimes, I think that authors choose to set books in the pre-technology past just to avoid the complications of computers, internet and cell phones. The stories read like they are set in contemporary times except for descriptions of long skirts and horse-drawn conveyances.

It's telling that Fawcett renames Iceland but keeps Cambridge. If she were truly committed to building an alternate world free from historical constraints, renaming the university would have been trivial—call it Ashford College or Thornton University. But she keeps "Cambridge," and that choice reveals the problem. Cambridge carries centuries of institutional authority and prestige; it lends credibility to Emily's position in a way an invented university wouldn't. But that same real name also carries the historical baggage that women couldn't actually be there as degree-granting students in 1909, let alone as professors. By keeping the real institution's name while ignoring the real constraints, Fawcett gets to have it both ways: the atmospheric weight and authority of a real place, without having to reckon with what that place actually was. It's selective use of historical detail taken to its logical endpoint—keeping what feels grounded and authoritative, discarding what complicates the narrative.

Once you suspend disbelief entirely for this alt world—there's a Department of Dryadology at Cambridge that has female professors and students in 1909—then we can move on to some of the other challenges, such as a young villager having a same-sex love interest in another village that is accepted by her neighbors as normal and sweet. Okay, Boston marriages were not unheard of at that time, but the later conversation about dating history and a spurned lesbian lover attempting to burn down a barn was emblematic of how alternative we're talking here.

Finally, my other objection is the description of "cozy." There's not much cozy in kidnapping and torture, so I can only imagine that the "cozy" part refers to the emphasis on clothing and household furnishings. It's more like a fantasy mystery/thriller with romantic elements and a scholarly framing. The academic tone and the relationship growth don't erase the fact that there are serious crimes and real harm happening. The contrast between Emily's intellectual, almost humorous observations and the actual darkness of what's going on might feel tonal, but that doesn't make it cozy.

One last note: Emily overly depends on the word "habit" to a noticeable degree.

Opting Out of Churches: I Wanted to Get Excommunicated, But Here's What Actually Works

As a child, I felt I had no choice in the matter of religion:  baptism, first communion, confirmation, going to church on weekends or catechism on Tuesday nights when I would rather be doing anything else. 

I have often wondered: why I couldn't just request excommunication from the Catholic Church? There should be a certificate, right?  It seemed simple: I don't believe in it, I haven't participated in it for decades, and I don't want to be counted among its members. Surely there was a form. A process. Something.

With all the recent headlines about the schism created by the Vatican excommunicating six bishops and 750 priests and any lay followers of Society of Saint Pious X (SSPX) -- I decided to dig into this a bit more.  What I learned is that excommunication is something the church does to you and it is a punishment for heresy or transgression. You can't request it. You can't opt in. It's an action the institution takes when it decides you've crossed a line. If you just want to leave quietly, you're still in their files.

But there is a way out. Not excommunication. Something better: formal defection. Annotation. A paper trail that says, explicitly and on record, "I was here, and then I chose to leave, and this is not my belief system."

That's what I'm doing this week. That's what I'm asking you to consider too, if you've ever felt the same frustration I did.

I was baptized at a Lutheran church when I was a few months old. I didn't have a choice in the matter - my parents made that decision for me, without my input, without my understanding, without my consent. It was just what people did and it was considered "normal."

By the time I was in elementary school, we switched to catholicism, adding more sacraments to the list:  holy communion and reconciliation.  I was a kid in third, fourth, fifth grade - still not choosing, still just doing what my family told me to do because that's what you did. Then confirmation, as a minor making a "choice" that wasn't actually a choice. My mother says I could have said "no" but she made it really clear that there would be hell to pay and I actually thought that there would be an earthquake and the roof of the church would crack open if I did that. 

I haven't stepped foot in a church for worship or services in nearly forty years. I don't identify as Christian or with any other religious tradition. These childhood commitments that were made for me but don't represent me. They never did after I was old enough to think for myself.

And yet, somewhere in those institutional files, I'm still being counted. In their membership numbers. In their statistics. In their records of who belongs to them.

Any genealogist knows: Churches keep detailed records. Baptisms. Sacraments. Confirmations. Communions. These are logged, filed, and retained indefinitely. They use these records to calculate membership numbers, which they report to their denominations, which get used in funding decisions and institutional statistics. You're in their database. If you were baptized anywhere, you're counted. Even if you've never set foot in that building again.

Here's what really bothered me: fifty years from now, when someone in my family is doing genealogy research, they're going to find those records and they'll think, "Oh, she was Catholic/Lutheran."

They won't know that I never chose this. That these were things done to me as a child by my parents. That I spent the last forty years not believing any of it.

The record will misrepresent me, not maliciously, but completely. It'll tell the future a story about who I am that isn't true.

This is a data problem. It's a consent problem. It's an institutional power problem.

We spend a lot of time talking about data privacy. About opting out of data brokers. About getting your information removed from credit reporting agencies. About controlling your own digital footprint. But for some reason, when it comes to religious institutions, we just... accept that they keep records on us in perpetuity, count us in their membership numbers, and there's nothing we can do about it.

That's not right.

Formal Defection: The Thing That Actually Exists

Turns out both the Lutheran and Catholic churches have processes for this.

The Catholic Church has a thing called "formal defection" in their canon law. It's not heavily publicized. Most priests probably won't bring it up. But it exists. If you were baptized Catholic and you want to formally withdraw, you can request it.

Lutheran churches handle it differently, but they do honor formal withdrawal requests and will annotate your baptismal records.

The key thing -- and this is important -- is annotation, not erasure. We're not trying to pretend the baptism never happened. It did happen. It's part of the historical record. What we're doing is adding a notation that says, "This person was baptized/confirmed/received communion, and they have formally and voluntarily withdrawn from this institution and should not be counted as a member."

That notation matters. It preserves the truth of what happened while also making it absolutely clear what the person's actual position is. Future genealogists won't be confused. The record won't lie about who I am.

How to Actually Do This

It's straightforward, and you don't need a lawyer or a priest to hold your hand through it.

Step one: Identify which churches you have sacramental records with. If you were baptized, you know that one. If you did first communion or confirmation, you know those churches too.

Step two: Write a letter to each church. Keep it simple. Include:

• Your current name
• Your name at the time of the sacrament (maiden name if applicable)
• The approximate date you were baptized/communed/confirmed
• A clear statement that you are permanently withdrawing from the church and do not consider yourself a member

Step three: Make your requests explicit:

• Remove your name from all active membership rosters
• Place a formal, permanent notation in their historical records (baptismal register, sacramental records, whatever they call it) stating that you have formally withdrawn
• Send you written confirmation that this has been done

Step four: Set a boundary. I put this in mine: "Please process this request administratively without sending clergy, elders, or parish representatives to contact me for exit interviews or outreach. I expect my privacy and decision to be respected."

They might not honor that boundary. But it's worth stating.

Step five: Send it certified mail, return receipt requested. You want a paper trail.

What to Say: The Template

I'm sharing the language from my own letters because it works. Here's what I used:

---

[Your mailing address]

[Date]

[Church name and address]

Dear [Pastor/Father name],

Please accept this letter as formal notification that I am permanently severing all ties and withdrawing my membership from [denomination], effective immediately.

[Brief context about when you received sacraments, under what name, and that it was decided by your parents/family, not by you]

These childhood actions did not reflect my personal beliefs then, nor do they now. I do not consider myself a member of [the church/this religious institution].

I request that you immediately take the following actions:

- Completely remove my name, contact information, and records from your active parish membership and administrative rosters.

- Place a permanent, formal written notation next to my entry in your [baptismal/sacramental/confirmation] register explicitly stating that I have formally and voluntarily withdrawn from church membership.

- Reply with a brief written confirmation to my mailing address verifying that my record has been updated and annotated.

Please process this request administratively without sending clergy or parish representatives to contact me for exit interviews or outreach. I expect my privacy and decision to be respected.

Sincerely,

[Your current name]

---

That's it. Clean. Direct. No emotion, no explanation, no room for debate. You're not asking permission. You're informing them of an action you're taking.

Why This Matters

If you've ever wondered, "Why can't I just opt out? Why am I still counted? Why do they get to keep my information?" this is your answer. You can opt out. There is a process. It's just not advertised, and most people don't know it exists.

This matters if:

• You were raised in a religious tradition you no longer identify with
• You're atheist or agnostic and tired of being counted as a member of something you don't believe in
• You converted to a different faith and want your records to reflect that
• You're just deeply uncomfortable with institutions keeping records on you without your ongoing consent
• You want your genealogical record to be accurate about who you actually were

It matters because your institutional identity shouldn't be determined by what your parents chose for you when you were an infant. It shouldn't persist just because you never formally objected. And it shouldn't be used in statistics that misrepresent your actual beliefs and affiliations.

The Bigger Picture

This is a workaround. It shouldn't have to be. Ideally, churches would make this easy. They'd have a form. A process. A way to formally withdraw that didn't require you to figure it out yourself and send certified letters.

But until they do, this is how you take back control of your own institutional record.

I'm sending my letters this week. I'll update this post once I get responses—which churches honor the requests, how quickly they process them, what they actually do with the annotations. Because real data matters. This isn't just theory; it's something people can actually do.

If you've been sitting with the same frustration I had—wanting out, not knowing how—now you know. You have more agency than you think. Your records belong to you. And you can demand they reflect the truth about who you actually are.

Go reclaim your institutional autonomy. The churches can survive without counting you.

REVIEW: "Talk to Me Nice" by Minda Harts (3-stars)

 Talk to Me Nice reads like a warm pep talk — as an audiobook, it feels like a supportive voice in your ear reminding you of things you already know but sometimes forget to practice. Minda Harts brings her trademark encouragement and identity‑centered perspective, offering relatable scenarios and steady affirmations aimed at helping readers find their voice and navigate early workplace dynamics.

For seasoned leaders or anyone who has read widely in communication, influence, or organizational behavior, this won’t break new ground. The concepts are familiar, and the framing is intentionally simple. But that’s also the point: this is a book designed for people at the beginning of their professional journey. The journal prompts at the end of each chapter are especially useful, giving newer professionals a structured way to reflect and build confidence.

I’d recommend this most strongly for early‑career readers — even older teens — who are just starting to think about communication, self‑advocacy, and leadership in a methodical way. As an audiobook, it’s an easy, encouraging listen. For more experienced readers, it’s pleasant reinforcement rather than revelation.

A Few Notes From This Year's Hugo Reading List: Do Not Sleep on the Novellas!

I loved every novella nominee I read this year. Most of them would work just as well, maybe better, for a young reader as any of the 650-page books currently marketed as YA or YA-adjacent. That's really the whole observation here. I'm not trying to relitigate the "why is YA bad" discourse that's apparently already all over TikTok -- I haven't watched any of it, and I don't need it to have an opinion based on what I actually read this season. I just want good books. Age category is beside the point.

The novellas earned their length. I went into this year's Hugo process already planning to rank Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz #1. I'd read it as an ARC last year and loved it. It's doing something genuinely distinct within the same broad territory as the rest of the category: identity, chosen family, and fulfillment, but through non-human, non-binary characters — robots and synthetic humans figuring out their own gender identities on their own terms (robot sex included, and it's funny). But the competition this year is genuinely stiff; every novella I picked up held its own. The Summer War by Naomi Novik, Cinder House, and The River Has Roots are all doing versions of the same thing from a different angle: twisting traditional fairy tale and mythological structures toward something that actually values female agency, love, and family — without tipping into sappiness or self-importance about it. (Cinder House in particular is spicy and genuinely weird, in the best way.) None of these books pad. Every worldbuilding choice and character beat is there because the story needs it, not because there's 500 pages to fill.

The doorstoppers didn't earn their length. I read Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar earlier this summer: 650 pages, nine Guardian Animals, a map promising nine palaces the story barely visits. There are real ideas in there (a genuinely compelling possession theme, a court intrigue plot that could've carried the whole book alone), but they're smothered under too many subplots and minor characters, all competing for space and none getting quite enough to develop properly. Bloated and thin at the same time -- that's what happens when length substitutes for structure instead of following from it.

I saw the same failure mode, from a different angle, across Tracy Deonn's Legendborn trilogy. Book one set up something specific — a grieving, academically advanced 16-year-old navigating exceptional circumstances, grounded by her father and her own competence. By book three, that infrastructure is just gone: her father barely appears, the protagonist's sidekick goes from the most competent person in the room to a coma-bound plot device for someone else's arc, and thematically loaded material — root magic as gendered power, a trafficking plot involving children — gets raised and never examined. Where Hodgson's problem is too many ideas with no room to breathe, Deonn's is real ideas set up carefully and then abandoned as the series goes on. Different mechanism, same result: a book that's long but not full.

Age classification isn't the variable that matters. Some of my favorite reading this Hugo season was the graphic novel category — The Space Cat, written by Nnedi Okorafor with art by Tana Ford, aimed at a much younger readership than any of the above, and doing more with confident, uncluttered storytelling than a lot of the "adult" nominees managed at ten times the length. A good book knows what it's doing with the space it has. That's it. That's the whole thesis.

Tomato Sauce - Equipment Essentials

If you are new to canning and curious about what kind of equipment you may need - here's an overview of what I use.  Typically, I can 100-150lbs of tomatoes in the fall and end up with 30-50 quarts of marinara.  I do not put in any spices, garlic or salt -- I halve the tomatoes (usually a roma variety like San Marzano, or Early Girl), squeeze the seeds and juice gently into a stainless steel mesh colander that is sitting in a bowl, and then process the tomatoes through the manual food mill.   I save the juice from the seeds to freeze and add to soups later (it also reduces the cooking time a bit - you'd be surprised how much water is in the center with the seeds). 

• Food mill - I have a Vittorio Food Mill which jams up but it's a good option
• Cooking/Stockpots: At least two large pots for sauce:
  
• Cuisinart 4-Piece Cookware Set, 12 Quarts, Chef's Classic Stainless Steel Pasta/Steamer, 77-412P1 (purchased for $75 in 2010, now $120 on Amazon)
• Prime Pacific 18/10 Stainless Steel 20 Quart Stock Pot With Glass Lid (paid $50 in 2010, now $68 on Amazon)
• I really like the 20 Qt pot and use it more thanI thought; this particular one has a very nice heavy bottom that helps minimize scorching/sticking. I also use cast iron heat diffusers on my stove burners.
• Bowls & Colanders: Very large colanders and stainless steel bowls - I got my massive colanders from family/garage sales
• Canning Equipment:
• Hot water bath canner (can be had cheap/free if you ask on Buy Nothing groups or check thrift stores)
• Pressure canner: In 2011, I upgraded my hot water bath canner to a Presto 01781 23-Quart Pressure Canner and Cooker which cost me $85 on Amazon (it's now a whopping $185).  Totally worth it and a real upgrade from hot water bath canning for quarts of tomato sauce as well as low acid canning in bulk.
• Jars, lids and bands! Ask on your local "Buy Nothing" group and look for these in thrift stores - a dozen jars costs around $12-15, so a used mason jar shouldn't cost more than 25-50 cents in a thrift store (they are smoking crack if they charge more for these mass produced items). 
• Always check your jars for cracks and feel the top edge of the jar for nicks or "flea bites" that convert them to dry storage or hobby use but no longer safe for canning.
• Lid rack is optional and nice to have
• Jar funnels - I have three of these. They are incredibly helpful for reducing spills when pouring into your jars.  Look for aluminum versions at thrift stores and online - much better than buying the plastic versions.
• Pyrex Measuring cups:
• I got an 8-cup Pyrex measuring cup as part of a set of 3 from Amazon for $17 in 2015 (now $26) and it is one of my favorite kitchen items:  I can dip the clean Pyrex container into the sauce, use a silicone spatula to wipe the bottom and pour cleanly into the sterilized jars next to the stove.  The L-shaped handles hook onto the edge of the pot while I am cleaning jars and preparing the next batch.
• Wooden spoons, silicone spatulas, knives, and lots of towels for cleaning and wiping your area (I just throw wet towels right into the washer and run a load after).

TIME: this is the most important part.  You can do this in one day but pay close attention to your stove and the flame height.  You don't want to reduce your sauce too quickly -- it will bubble and spatter and you risk scorching on the bottom of the pot.  If you do start to scorch - don't panic - pull it off the heat, pour the sauce into big stainless steel bowls you have on hand and THEN scrape and clean the pot. This way you don't have as much burned flavor in your sauce.  If you have time to leave it on super low overnight - this will result in much thicker sauce, fewer jars, and less canning time. 

If this is a lot for you - there may be options - some states have canneries that are available to the public.  My friend goes to Castlewood Cannery (https://www.russellcountyva.us/237/Canneries) which has a gorgeous operation for canning whatever you bring.  These places don't all have websites - you have to call and have a conversation to find out what they offer.  The Pick Your Own website suggests contacting your local ag extension office and they have a list of canneries and community kitchens here: https://pickyourown.org/canneries.htm

REVIEW: "The Ana and Din" mysteries, Books 1 & 2 by Robert Jackson Bennett

I have to confess, it took me a minute to really get into Tainted Cup—I picked it up and put it down (or let it expire off Libby) a few times well before the Hugos. One of my "Scent Head" friends who loves a good Diptyque candle came to visit me in July (and brought me a Diptyque candle) and told me how much he had really enjoyed the Ana and Din mysteries. I threw myself back into both books and I'm really glad I did.

It's a strange "bio-punk" kind of world—they have advanced gene editing and can (apparently) resurrect extinct races of intellectually superior but possibly less stable beings, but they don't have cell phones and use mycological solutions for HVAC and lighting (do they even have electricity?). One thing I'm not sure they do in this world is have FUN. Everything seems to be quite a lot of work to be part of this empire. Din has undergone some serious genetic changes in order to become an "engraver"—and he triggers his eidetic memory skills with scents. Ana, well, she's a different animal. Literally. One tic in this book is that her smile is repeatedly described as "predatory," which makes me think she must be smiling like an absolute lunatic (thinking Jack Nicholson in The Shining).

These are more detective novels than murder mysteries and the world-building is sometimes opaque and challenging to track, but that's why we have ebooks to search for words and recall context, I suppose. I also listened to the audiobooks for both of these books, and found them to be very enjoyable. 

Din is a dyslexic, tall, dark and handsome young man who isn't averse to surreptitiously picking up a few "skills" here and there to help with his investigations. He seems to be pansexual but has a same-sex romantic attachment from the first book, Tainted Cup. He also blows off steam by picking up one night stands.

Ana appears to be late middle-aged with wild white hair—a genius with yellow eyes like a wolf or a cat when she's not blindfolded to reduce stimulus. She fuels her genius for identifying patterns from Din's reports and the mountains of books she reads with a paleo diet of raw animal flesh in breathtaking quantities. While Din comes from a commoner background, Ana's background is a bit more mysterious—and it's a mystery she maintains on purpose, surprising Din with her ability to roleplay in the moment to manipulate social elites, and with the breadth and depth of her knowledge.

Ana is a savant operating on a totally different level from everyone around her. For example, when she tasks Din to visit the island where all the Leviathan extractions are processed and learns he will be wearing a full PPE suit with helmet, he worries about how he will be able to provide a proper report. Din can't easily supplement his memory with written notes the way other investigators might.  Ana has already solved the problem in a way Din never could have anticipated. It's the kind of moment that reminds you why she's indispensable: she thinks several moves ahead, in directions nobody else is even looking. And Din seems to be learning.

The map of the empire raises questions. In our world, we know where seals, sea lions and turtles come ashore to reproduce, or where salmon spawn and die. We work around those patterns to help avoid interspecies conflict. The people of this world build right in the path of these incredibly dangerous creatures (no two of them look the same) and put people in real jeopardy despite erecting massive walls and staffing them with trained military personnel.

There are defenses in concentric circles, with the most elite, protected areas in the first ring, farthest from the sea. Yet farther north at the top right of the map, we see no wall because the Leviathans don't come ashore there. There's also heaps of court intrigue and empire negotiations with a holdout kingdom—which holds the processing area for the Leviathans. It seems like everything this empire does is to create as much discomfort for the people as possible. It's always hot and wet, but people wear heavy wool uniforms that are incredibly uncomfortable. If it's practically a coastal jungle, why do they all have to wear heavy capes as part of their uniforms? The empire does not have the best interests of the people at heart. Obviously.

We are somewhat limited in our view of this world, from Din's perspective, which means we don't know what lies beyond the sea, or even to the west of the landmass we see on the map. Does anyone go there? What else is on this planet? Is it just one big landmass with a few islands off the coast? We aren't getting massive info dumps about "the whole world," which I appreciate a lot. This world is developed in a way that builds intrigue and lets me follow where Din is leading me.

While the main "mystery" is mostly solved early in A Drop of Corruption, the pair spend the rest of the story chasing the elusive killer and trying to pin down the connection to a massive bio-pharma plant that processes (and perhaps cultivates) the critical ingredients for the mysterious Leviathans that live in the adjacent sea—which form the basis of all the genetic modifications that people utilize in this world.

What I really liked is that both books wrapped up the primary problem and challenges by the end and along the way - the author built a foundation of details for the characters, their interiority and personalities that intrigued me and was able to keep that momentum going through the second book. I'm very much looking forward to the third book.

REVIEW: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (4.5-stars)

 "A Drop of Corruption" is a detective novel masquerading as a mystery—which is to say, Bennett solves the central puzzle early and then uses the remaining 300 pages to chase a serial killer and a massive bio-pharma conspiracy. It works because the characters are this good.

Din is a dyslexic engraver whose eidetic memory triggers on scent. Ana is a wild-haired genius in her late middle years who reads obsessively and fuels her pattern-recognition with raw meat in staggering quantities. Their partnership is the book. When Din must enter a sterile bio-pharma clean room where his usual scent vials are forbidden, Ana creates a solution: a scent made from his sweat and the plants and leather of his PPE. It's the kind of detail that reveals everything about how completely she understands him.

The world-building is opaque and sometimes infuriating—how do they have gene-edited extinct races but no electricity? Why heavy wool uniforms in a coastal jungle? Why build walls in animal migration paths?—but that's intentional. We see only what Din sees. The empire is hostile and nonsensical because that's what empire does. It extracts maximum discomfort while calling it order. It doesn't have your best interests at heart. It never does.

Both the audiobook performances are excellent. The mystery doesn't break new ground, but the character work, the worldbuilding contradictions, and the relationship between Din and Ana are enough to carry you through and leave you wanting book three immediately.

REVIEW: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

RATING: 4.5-stars

REVIEW: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (5-stars)

 Yes, it's a retelling of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." Yes, the premise is fairly well telegraphed the moment we meet Eugenia Potter, amateur mycologist (and — naturally — a relation of Beatrix). None of that stopped me from finishing this 150-page novella completely won over. I'll be damned if I can find a reason not to give it five stars.

The real triumph here is Alex Easton's first-person narration. Instead of leaning on atmosphere alone to do the work — the easy move for a haunted-house retelling — Kingfisher gives us a narrator with a distinct interior life: what Easton values, how they think, how they feel. It never tips into info-dumping, the prose is complex and nuanced without slowing the story down, and there are genuinely funny bits woven through the dread, which keeps the book from ever feeling like a pure mood exercise.

Easton's invented home country of Gallacia is a great example of worldbuilding done right — it's stitched skillfully into real European geography and history rather than floating free as a vague fantasy backdrop. One of my favorite small touches is the distinction Angus and the villagers draw between "canny" and "not canny." It's a tiny bit of invented cultural vocabulary that does a lot of heavy lifting, letting the book talk around the horror before it's ready to name it directly.

Compared to books it clearly sits alongside — Mexican Gothic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers — what sets this apart is how much empathy Kingfisher builds for her core cast: Easton, Denton, Potter, and Angus. I found myself genuinely invested in their outcomes, which isn't a given in this kind of "creeping wrongness" story, where the reader often figures things out well before the characters do. (Roderick and Madeline, unsurprisingly, get considerably less of that sympathy — as Poe fans would expect.)

I also can't stop thinking about how efficiently this book does everything it sets out to do. It's maybe 150 pages, and in that space it builds a fully realized main character, a functioning invented culture, a mystery, real dread, and real humor — with nothing that feels like padding. Which raises a question I keep coming back to: why can't YA do this? So much YA now comes in these 600-plus-page doorstoppers full of repetition and recontextualization, like the book doesn't trust the reader to have retained anything from fifty pages ago. There's nothing in What Moves the Dead that's explicitly "adult" — no content a teen reader couldn't handle — and I think it would genuinely appeal to kids who like goth and horror. The queerness in it works in a way that feels completely natural, not like an Issue being addressed, just part of who Easton is. It's a good reminder that "for teens" doesn't have to mean bloated, over-explained, or afraid to trust its reader.

The audiobook version was also quite engaging. I listened at 2x — it's a bit slow at normal speed — and kudos to the narrator for still sounding good at the faster pace.

A short book that does an enormous amount with its page count. Highly recommended, especially if you're a Poe fan or you liked Mexican Gothic. Looking forward to the next two books in the series, and then on to the Ana and Din duology.

REVIEW: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher 

RATING: 5-stars

POSTSCRIPT: This is the second “retelling” of a well known story that I have completed this summer in my Hugos quest. I also read Cinder House by Freya Marske, another Hugo nominee, this one a retelling of Cinderella — also short, and also a genuinely fun, relatable, enjoyable spin on a story everyone already thinks they know. Between the two of them, I'm impressed by how much these authors have managed to take classic stories and folk material and turn them into something that feels different, but is still just as engaging and fun as the source material. It's a nice reminder that a retelling doesn't need extra length to earn its place — it needs a clear point of view on the original.

REVIEW: Oathbound by Tracey Deonn (2-stars)

I read Legendborn and Bloodmarked specifically because Oathbound is a Hugo nominee. Without that context, I wouldn't understand the extent of what's gone wrong.

The most obvious sign is textual. Across the trilogy, Deonn relies on a single formulaic construction to describe facial expressions: [facial feature] + quirk/quirked. In Legendborn, this appears 8 times. In Bloodmarked, 7 times. In Oathbound, it escalates to 15 instances (14 "mouth quirks," 1 "eyebrow quirking"). A human writer naturally varies: smirk, grin, curve, twist, tighten, narrow. Instead, this book locks into a template structure applied across different body parts, which could be a tell that the author is reading a lot of romantasy (I read somewhere it's a trendy term) or just has an editing blind spot. This pattern escalation across a 656-page book is not stylistic choice; it's mechanical repetition. But the textual issues point to larger structural collapse.

The book abandons every piece of emotional infrastructure established in the previous books. Bree's father doesn't appear at all. There's no acknowledgment of where he's been while his daughter has been missing for 8-12 months. Alice, who was observant and strategic in the previous book, is injured and falls into a coma where she is reliving her own death in some kind of purgatory-equivalent. Alice appears to exist only as motivation for Mariah's quest and involvement in the plot tangles. Edwin, Bree's father, gets brought back extremely late in the book through an enchanted ring that connects him with his dead wife. He goes willingly because of that spiritual connection. But then he just disappears from the narrative. He's acknowledged just enough to close a plot loop, then discarded.

This third book doesn't resolve the actual story. Bree entered a mentor-protégé relationship with the Shadow King. She chose to stay with him, to self-erase her memories of her other life to become "untouchable." That's psychologically complex territory: what happens when a traumatized girl decides the only way to survive is to disappear into power. But the book doesn't interrogate that. Instead it piles on seventeen other threads: the Crown, the collectors' auction, the gene therapy conspiracy, the trafficking of underage magical girls, the Whodunnit hotel lockdown. The actual story, the psychological fallout of Bree's choice to erase herself, gets buried under plot noise.

Descriptions of clothing and hair that aren't thematic anymore.  There are multiple paragraphs just describing outfits. There’s repeated backstory repeating from previous books, and internally (at least three sections describing a Medium’s capabilities).  In this book – the first person narration rotates across a pile of secondary characters including Natasia, William, Mariah, & Nick – a choice that dilutes rather than deepens Bree’s story. Natasia's chapters don't advance understanding; they just add pages. Emil is introduced, solves a plot problem by tunneling underground, and disappears with Bree's relief. He's a plot device, not a character.

The gender breakdown bothers me: all the root craft practitioners -- save Emil, who exists only to move earth -- are women. If that's intentional, it's saying something about gendered access to certain magic. Root magic as women's magic. That could be sophisticated thematic work. Instead, it's just there, unexamined.

The trafficking element also bothers me. Why underage magical girls? Why not adults with suppressed or latent powers? An adult woman on antidepressants who doesn't know she has access to root craft—that's a story about how medical systems suppress female power. Or even menopausal women who can’t figure out why they feel the way they do (it is the opposite end of teenage development afterall, leaving fertility vs moving into fertility). Instead, Deonn targets children who can be "shaped" into tools. One is a story about reclamation. The other is a story about containment. She chose containment.

The heteronormativity is frustrating. Bree's caught in a love triangle between Nick and Selwyn, and the book treats it as inevitable that she must choose one or the other. Why can't she be in love with both of them? Why can't they agree to share? The book forces a binary choice for no reason except to enforce cultural norms of jealousy.

The conclusion doesn't resolve anything. The Whodunnit hotel lockdown where the host tortures and kills people on stage while guests stand around under mesmerizing forces? The logic falls apart. Why would anyone stay? The Crown turns out to be a Maguffin. The Shadow King bargain has vague consequences. The whole thing feels like it was written under severe time pressure—plot beats checked off, character arcs abandoned, thematic work buried under filler.

I'm rating this 2 stars because a Hugo nominee should demand better editing, better structural decision-making, and a clearer understanding of what story it's actually telling. This book does none of those things. It's 656 pages of potential buried under padding and pattern repetition. The fact that no one seems to be asking whether this was AI-assisted—or at minimum heavily revised under deadline—is its own problem.

REVIEW: Oathbound by Tracey Deonn 

RATING: 2-stars

REVIEW: Bloodmarked by Tracey Deonn (2.5 stars)

 Legendborn set up something genuinely specific: a 16-year-old who's grieving, intellectually advanced enough to do early college, suddenly pulled into a hidden magical world. She's fitting in with older students, proving herself academically, dealing with her mother's death, and managing phone calls from her dad who grounds her in reality. That friction between normal teen life and exceptional circumstances is what made the first book work.

Bloodmarked expands the world, but it loses the girl at the center of it. Halfway through this book, college has become scenery. Her father is barely present. The smart teen navigating exceptional circumstances—which is actually rich territory—gets flattened into magical plot escalation. The grief becomes motivation rather than something Bree is actually processing.

The ancestral magic system is genuinely interesting and represents the book's strongest footing. Vera was the enslaved first ancestor who made the original deal—a prayer for safety and protection while pregnant and escaping. The Hunter heard that prayer, hijacked it, and agreed to a pact that binds every daughter in her lineage, including Bree, to him forever (aside:  seems like a major disincentive to pray if it's a party line with eavesdropping demons). The women in Bree's bloodline have all died relatively young—some in childbirth—and they were warned to avoid tapping into the ancestral power altogether, trying to shield their daughters from the death sentence they inherited. But Bree, as the King, can't avoid it. She has to use the very power that's killing her bloodline. Arthur himself possesses Bree at times, another layer of violation and control over her body. She has to fight her way out of his dream world with Nick and Selwyn to reclaim her own agency. 

That's sophisticated territory: how a Black woman inherits not just power but the violence embedded in that power—slavery, rape, a demonic pact, and a curse of early death. The book also explores how demons exploit language in negotiations, preferring to leave things open-ended while those with less power have to be meticulous with every word. Accessing the magic costs your life. It's sharp work about how power structures exploit vulnerability. Bree's hair as an expression of her power is thematically sharp too. When she channels energy, her carefully styled hair erupts wild and loose. That's not just description; that's her interiority made visible. The gene therapy element adds something sinister.

But then Bree burns it all down at the climax. She destroys her ancestral streams. It's devastating and desperate and born from real rage. And then the book doesn't actually explore that. Instead of sitting with the psychological and magical fallout of severing all connection to her ancestors—which is genuinely complex territory—Book 2 just piles on more plot. More magic system exposition. More descriptions of clothing and hair that aren't doing any thematic work. More repeated explanations of what a "Medium" is, as if readers forgot. 

The structural problems run deeper. Two 16-year-olds in an early college program, away from home, in a dorm with minimal adult oversight, participate in hazing rituals that cause serious physical injury. The only adults present are either distant and ineffective or openly hostile to Bree's authority. The Order itself—the secret society that's supposed to accept her based on their own rules and traditions —doesn't accept a Black girl as their King. That institutional racism and sexism is a wall the teenagers have to battle from within their own organization. Bree's grandmother living in her head is not parental protection; it's neglect with a magical gloss. Her father was her emotional anchor in book 1. In book 2, he's gone. 

When the malicious adults on campus become a direct threat, they flee and end up as a “last resort” at The Crossroads, a supernatural bar where they encounter a Cambion proprietor in their search for the story’s equivalent of a powerful sorceresss in the rootcraft world. Alice does heavy lifting here - she's observant, strategic, worried about real-world consequences. She sees fraud being committed by an employee and uses that information to negotiate their way out with the proprietor. She saves them. And then at the final battle at the climax - Alice gets injured and falls into a coma. Her competence is demonstrated and then she's neutralized and completely sidelined for the next book. She ends up as a plot device or motivation for other people's quests (like Mariah). That's not character development. That's abandonment of the infrastructure that made book 1 matter. 

The romantic intensity described here reads like an adult's fantasy of what teen attraction should feel like, not what it actually is. The book expects this restrained physicality to carry emotional weight it hasn't earned through interiority.

And there's the Morgaine/Morgana problem: Deonn perpetuates the patriarchal Arthurian trope where Morgana has to be the villain. Marion Zimmer Bradley showed decades ago that you can retell this legend by centering Morgaine's agency and politics. Instead, the Morgaines here are just malicious adults extracting value from the young. They're not complex. They're functional antagonists. That was a choice.

Ultimately, Bloodmarked had the bones of a stronger book. The ancestral magic system was compelling. The college setting grounded the magical stakes. The grief was real. The smart teen navigating both normal and exceptional pressures was genuinely worth exploring. But instead of deepening those threads, the book widened the magical plot and lost the girl. It set up a devastating choice about ancestral connection and then buried the fallout under 400 pages of unnecessary description and repeated exposition. 

I'm rating this 2.5 because the potential is there. But the execution abandoned the original premise that mattered.

REVIEW: "The Millay Illusion" by Sarah Pinsker (3-stars)

Hugo nominated novelette "The Millay Illusion" is really engaging and well written. On the surface it’s about stage magic in the early 1900s; underneath it’s about gender, power, and how a system can erase a woman even while applauding her tricks. The style reminded me modern period stories about women who are navigating complex social structures that don't benefit or recognize them (such as "Tipping the Velvet).  As a reader, I was pulled into our narrator's story and felt like I was led off a bit of a cliff at the end. There's a lot of ambiguity that may polarize readers into "loved it" or "hated it."

The narrator, "Lottie," accepts the roles that men put her into - whether it's her father deciding she travel as "Julius" or her uncle deciding within minutes of meeting her she'll be "Johnny Chess." She is trained to notice details to predict behavior and manipulate her audience. Then she meets Susanna who joins the troupe at age 15. 

Susanna the only person in the story doing anything genuinely new, and of course she’s the one the men dismiss, steal from, and eventually push out. Our narrator — a mentalist who prides herself on noticing everything — misses the actual point entirely. She can read a stranger’s tells but can’t recognize patriarchy even when she’s lugging buckets for it. She inherits Susanna’s act without inheriting any of her courage, which is the saddest part of the whole thing.

As for the Hugo nomination: this is exactly the kind of story the Hugos love. It’s not about the magic tricks; it’s about the system around them. It’s about how women disappear from history while someone else performs their work “the proper way.” It’s subtle, it’s sharp, and it’s doing more than it looks like at first glance.

If you like stories where the narrator is competent in all the wrong ways, this one’s worth the read - you can find it on the Uncanny Magazine website here: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-millay-illusion/

REVIEW:  "The Millay Illusion" by Sarah Pinsker 

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: "Legendborn" by Tracey Deonn (3-stars)

This was my first Tracy Deonn book — I’m reading the series because the third one is a Hugo nominee — and Oathbound definitely gives me the context I needed. The worldbuilding is ambitious: grief, generational trauma, and a whole modern network of Arthurian descendants (apparently thousands of them, mostly in the U.S.) operating out of UNC like a magical Highlander chapter. There’s even a Hunger Games–style competition element, where the fate of the world hinges on getting the right supporters aligned with the right scions.

I alternated between audiobook and ebook, and the “Southern” accents in the audio were rough. I lived in the South for four years, and these sounded more like caricatures than actual regional voices.

The YA framing also feels strained. These are 16‑year‑olds in dorms with almost no adult oversight, navigating hazing, injuries, and adult‑coded emotional intensity. Bree’s grandmother “in her head” is meant to function as guidance, but it reads more like narrative neglect. The racialized “blood vs root” magic divide doesn’t hold up under scrutiny — both sides bind, both gatekeep, both hide their histories — so the binary feels more ideological than real.

There’s also a lot of focus on hair, clothes, and outfits. I know this is a common YA trope, but it doesn’t add much here. The scene where Bree tries on eleven dresses for a fancy secret‑society gala wasn’t tense — just personally terrifying to me. I’ve never understood why these books treat dress‑up moments as emotionally essential; it feels like padding rather than character insight.

As a GenX reader who grew up on The Mists of Avalon, I’m also tired of the default patriarchal trope where Morgaine/Morgana’s descendants are automatically coded as “evil.” Deonn didn’t have to perpetuate that. Given that the first book already revealed that people in power were lying — and were responsible for opening the hell gate — I’m hoping the Morgaine lineage is another place where the official story is false and we’re going to see that lie unravel in later books.

But overall, I did think this was an interesting Arthurian retelling. Making a young girl the “King” — and having Arthur literally possess her — adds a compelling gender‑transcendent angle to the myth. The way characters refer to Bree as their King is one of the more refreshing updates to the Arthurian canon.

I appreciate the way Deonn reimagines Arthurian power through Bree — not just in terms of gender, but perceived race. Having a young Black girl become “King,” and having Arthur literally possess her, reframes the myth in a way that acknowledges slavery, rape, escape, and generational trauma while also redefining who gets to inherit power. It’s one of the more interesting updates to the Arthurian world, and I’m curious to see how far the series pushes that idea.

Interesting world, uneven execution. I just hope the next books don’t repeat too much backstory (a la late‑series Harry Potter, which bloats with recap every volume).

REVIEW: "Legendborn" by Tracey Deonn

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: The Summer War by Naomi Novik (4-stars)

I read this as part of my summer Hugo Nominee reading list.  This novella is a fun, sassy twist on fairy-tale tropes, in the vein of "Cinder House" and "The River Has Roots." Celia isn't a princess in any traditional sense — daughter of a military leader who earned his power through competence rather than birthright — and when she's tricked into marriage with "the enemy," she has to work her way out through collaborative, culturally-grounded diplomacy rather than rescue. Under 150 pages, tightly plotted, genuinely surprising in places, and it earns its happily-ever-after. My first Novik and it won't be my last — I'm looking forward to more.

REVIEW: The Summer War by Naomi Novik 

RATING: 4-stars

REVIEW: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (3-stars)

I read this as part of my 2026 Hugo nominee list. WARNING: the betrayals in the book aren't the only betrayal on offer. That first chapter pulls you in with a whole setup around Yanara and Ruko, then abandons them: an 8-year gap gets explained in drips across the remaining 650 pages. I expected the twins to be the emotional core; instead, Ruko's psychological reckoning with condemning his sister to an exile death march tour might have been the most interesting character study in the book but is skipped entirely.

The book layers overcomplicated twists onto YA-style romance: essentially Miss Scarlett and the Duke meets Tehanu (Nisthala's transformation is asserted, not earned). It reads like a clash of recognizable templates (Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Survivor, Jerry Springer) and stacking templates doesn't create synthesis, it creates noise. Sex is mentioned; nothing about it is sexy. The humor (Sol and the chicken gambit are charming) reinforces the YA register rather than complicating it. Adult fantasy humor tends to be darker and more ironic; here it's a distancing mechanism, not a depth one. Games swing from unnecessarily brutal to actively boring (Neema tidies an office for the Ox challenge).

Hodgson keeps choosing "what would make a good Netflix episode" over the genuinely interesting material — Ruko and Nisthala's arcs left on the table for tournament spectacle.

"Raven Scholar" features too many subplots and minor characters – this results in characters competing for space and not getting quite enough to develop properly. Backstory and world-building are info dumps and frequently repeated, a common YA tic. This could have been a trilogy: the court intrigue, the tournament, and the dragons island -- each deserved its own book. Nine Guardian Animals are promised; Dragon, Raven, and Fox carry the actual weight. Nine palaces on the map; the narrative inhabits three or four. The map's "Grand Canal" is geographically a lagoon, and its "richly utilized" spaces (Menagerie, Tombs, Library, no Crow Palace despite the Solitary Crow's importance) go mostly unvisited — right labels on the wrong things, an inadvertent metaphor for the book. The map's own infrastructure (roads, farms, a monastery) also undercuts Yanara's forest exile and reminds me of people being lost in the woods in “Blair Witch Project.”

Worst trope offenders: Neema learning to fight from books commits to neither comedy nor cost; the Andren Valit plot stacks implausibilities (16-year appearance-stealing impersonation + imprisoning his own son to steal another 24 years) until it's accumulation, not construction; the magic system has no legible constraints and functions as a plot-convenience dispenser; the villain is flat-diabolical with a lover accomplice, straight YA shorthand.

The book’s best ideas are the possession plot lines. The Solitary Raven ("Sol") inhabiting Neema's ribcage, the Solitary Crow vs. the flock, the Fox in Cain — this gestures at something genuinely compelling about identity destabilization when a divine presence shares your body, in line with a broader current SFF pattern (Witch King, Murderbot, Old Man's War): what makes identity stable when the container is unstable or shared? Nisthala's branding literalizes this — "Upon this turn of the Eternal Path, you are mine" (p. 304) is ownership inscribed on skin. The Andren Valit plot is the same theme again, just too implausible to carry weight. Raven Scholar raises this question across a strong ballot and then walks away from it. A book centered on what Raven/Dragon possession costs its hosts would have been stronger than the games structure around it.

Sometimes, we want to root for the author’s characters -- Benna and Fenn are the most genuinely human characters. The Raven fragment narration (Borg-like collective consciousness) is fun and underused. Sol in Neema's ribcage is a strong formal/emotional device, as is the all-caps different-font DRAGON/Raven internal communication. These moments show what Hodgson can do outside the tournament's service — which makes the structural bloat more frustrating, not less. There's a good book (arguably three) visible inside this one.

The Neema/Cain romance runs on template rather than earned chemistry; the book ironically builds a more convincing pull toward Ruko, then discards him. Compare The Everlasting, where Una and Owen's tension is earned because the time loop makes every connection carry its own impermanence. When interiority is thin, the book compensates by dressing people elaborately (gems, rose oils, the amethyst-hidden Raven crown) -- the same move it makes with borrowed culture: dress it in fantasy fabric and hope the renaming reads as invention.

The world map of Orrun visually tracks East Asia: northern mountains as Himalaya/steppe, central heartlands as imperial China, Helia occupying the position of a colonized periphery ("Dragon Mouth Bay" is not subtle). The cultural sourcing blends the Chinese zodiac (Ox, Tiger, Monkey, Dragon's supremacy, a cyclical cosmology) with North American vision-quest traditions and generic fantasy signifiers.  These are sources never designed to fit together, producing incoherence rather than synthesis. Fox works better than the rest precisely because trickster figures are archetypal across many traditions rather than lifted wholesale from one. Most Guardian Animals do no imaginative work at all: Tiger is feline, Bear is bearish, the name tells you everything and the book just confirms it. Contrast Pratchett's Nac Mac Feegle or the Auditors of Reality: genuinely invented, hard to visualize precisely, philosophically load-bearing because they're invented. With nine animals and a whole empire to build, the opportunity was new cosmology. Instead we get raided mythology.

The in-world plot compounds this: Helia functions as a reservation, its people dragged into imperial succession politics against their will; Dragon food is toxic to outsiders, marking biological otherness; Dragon Scale, a sacred substance, gets extracted and sold to the empire's wealthy as a recreational drug, mixing vision-quest framing with MDMA-style effects in a way that's pharmacologically incoherent and reveals the borrowing as aesthetic rather than considered. Nisthala's branding (see above) is colonial branding on a child from a sovereign people, literalized. The full extraction loop reads as unreflective reproduction, not critique — appropriation without coherence is still appropriation.

Magic & dragons: Le Guin did the chosen child, the dragon island, the exile with stronger characters, no games, and the interior journey fully shown. The court intrigue alone could have carried this book; the tournament was a concession, not a strength. Nisthala's arc from burning, isolated child to someone who can face down a god is asserted, not shown. Hodgson gives you the branding imagery and cuts to the destination.

“The Raven Scholar” is more worthy than a surprising number of other candidates as a Hugo nominee. The book that it could have been -- centered on Raven and Dragon, on Helia's relationship to empire, on Nisthala's real interior journey and Ruko's psychological haunting, with invented cosmology instead of borrowed and blended signifiers -- would have been something. Good bones, buried under too many costumes. This lands with 3-stars -- could have been 4-stars but I don’t really care about the characters and dislike unnecessarily abusing characters, RIP Yanara.

REVIEW: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson 

RATING: 3-stars

2026 Hugo Nominees Reading List

On this page:

• Best Novel
• Best Novella
• Best Novelette
• Best Short Story
• Best Series
• Best Graphic Story or Comic
• Best Related Work
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
• Lodestar Award for Best YA Book
• Best Poem
• Astounding Award for Best New Writer

Best Novel

Title	Author	Publisher	Rating / Review
A Drop of Corruption	Robert Jackson Bennett	Del Rey / Hodderscape	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.Review Related essay
Death of the Author	Nnedi Okorafor	William Morrow / Gollancz	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.review coming
Shroud	Adrian Tchaikovsky	Tor UK / Orbit US	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.review coming
The Everlasting	Alix E. Harrow	Tor US / Tor UK	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.Review
The Incandescent	Emily Tesh	Tor US / Orbit UK	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.review coming
The Raven Scholar	Antonia Hodgson	Orbit US / Hodderscape	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.Review

Best Novella

Title	Author	Publisher	Rating / Review
Automatic Noodle	Annalee Newitz	Tordotcom	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.Review
Cinder House	Freya Marske	Tordotcom / Tor UK	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
Murder by Memory	Olivia Waite	Tordotcom	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
The River Has Roots	Amal El-Mohtar	Tordotcom / Arcadia UK	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.review coming
The Summer War	Naomi Novik	Del Rey US / Del Rey UK	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.Review
What Stalks the Deep	T. Kingfisher	Nightfire / Titan UK	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.review coming

Best Novelette

Title	Author	Publication	Rating / Review
"Kaiju Agonistes"	Scott Lynch	Uncanny Magazine #62	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
"Never Eaten Vegetables"	H.H. Pak	Clarkesworld #220	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.Review (opens in new tab)
"Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy"	Martha Wells	Reactor, Jul 10 2025	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.Related essay
"The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For"	Cameron Reed	Reactor, Apr 2 2025	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.review coming
"The Millay Illusion"	Sarah Pinsker	Uncanny Magazine #67	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.Review
"When He Calls Your Name"	Catherynne M. Valente	Uncanny Magazine #65	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

Best Short Story

Title	Author	Publication	Rating / Review
"10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days"	Samantha Mills	Uncanny Magazine #63	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
"In My Country"	Thomas Ha	Clarkesworld #223	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
"Laser Eyes Ain't Everything (opens in new tab)"	Effie Seiberg	Diabolical Plots, May 16 2025	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.review coming
"Missing Helen"	Tia Tashiro	Clarkesworld #226	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
"Six People to Revise You (opens in new tab)"	J.R. Dawson	Uncanny Magazine #62	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.review coming
"Wire Mother (opens in new tab)"	Isabel J. Kim	Clarkesworld #229	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

Best Series

Series	Author	Publisher	Rating / Review
Emily Wilde	Heather Fawcett	Del Rey US / Orbit UK	TBR
October Daye	Seanan McGuire	Tor US / DAW	Will Not Rate
Old Man's War	John Scalzi	Tor US / Tor UK	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. (aggregate, books 1–4)Review (Books 1–5)
The Chronicles of Osreth	Katherine Addison	Tor US / Solaris UK	TBR
The Craft Wars	Max Gladstone	Tor / Tordotcom	TBR
White Space	Elizabeth Bear	Saga Press / Gollancz	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

Best Graphic Story or Comic

Title	Creator(s)	Publisher	Rating / Review
Absolute Wonder Woman Vol. 1: The Last Amazon	Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Mattia de Iulis	DC Comics	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.Review
A Girl and Her Fed	KB Spangler & Ale Presser	agirlandherfed.com (opens in new tab)	★★Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel	Le Guin, adapted by Fred Fordham	Clarion Books / Walker UK	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.Review
The Invisible Parade	Leigh Bardugo & John Picacio	Little, Brown / Orion UK	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.Review
The Power Fantasy Vol. 1: The Superpowers	Kieron Gillen & Caspar Wijngaard	Image Comics	★★Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
The Space Cat	Nnedi Okorafor & Tana Ford	First Second	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.Review

Best Related Work

Title	Author / Creator	Publisher	Rating / Review
Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction	Paul Kincaid	Briardene Books	TBR
Inventing the Renaissance	Ada Palmer	U of Chicago Press / Head of Zeus	★★Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
Last War in Albion: "The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)"	Elizabeth Sandifer	Eruditorum Press	TBR
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler	Susana M. Morris	Amistad	TBR
"Ragnarök vs the Long Night" (podcast)	Ashaya & Aziz	History of Westeros, Aug 10 2025	TBR
The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom	Renay	Google Spreadsheet	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

Title	Writer(s) / Director	Platform	Rating / Review
Andor (Season 2)	Bissell, Gilroy, Gilroy, Willimon	Disney+	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
Frankenstein	Guillermo del Toro	Netflix	★★Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
KPop Demon Hunters	Kang & Appelhans	Netflix	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
Mickey 17	Bong Joon Ho	Warner Bros.	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.Review (w/ Superman)
Sinners	Ryan Coogler	Warner Bros.	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.review coming
Superman	James Gunn	DC Studios / Warner Bros.	★Rating: 1 out of 5 stars.Review (w/ Mickey 17)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Title	Writer / Director	Platform	Rating / Review
Doctor Who: "The Story & the Engine"	Inua Ellams / Makalla McPherson	BBC One / Disney+	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
Murderbot: "All Systems Red"	Paul & Chris Weitz / Roseanne Liang	Apple TV+	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.Related essay
Murderbot: "The Perimeter"	Chris & Paul Weitz / Paul Weitz	Apple TV+	★★★★★Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.Related essay
Pluribus: "We Is Us"	Vince Gilligan	Apple TV+	★★Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
Severance: "Cold Harbor"	Dan Erickson / Ben Stiller	Apple TV+	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
The Wheel of Time: "The Road to the Spear"	Rafe Lee Judkins / Thomas Napper	Amazon Prime Video	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

Lodestar Award for Best YA Book

Title	Author	Publisher	Rating / Review
Among Ghosts	Rachel Hartman		TBR
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe	C.B. Lee		★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.Review
Holy Terrors	Margaret Owen		TBR
Oathbound	Tracy Deonn		★★Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.Review
Sunrise on the Reaping	Suzanne Collins		TBR
They Bloom at Night	Trang Thanh Tran		TBR

Best Poem

Title	Author	Publication	Rating / Review
"Care for Lightning (opens in new tab)"	Mari Ness	Uncanny Magazine	★★Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
"Hex Supply Customer Support Log (opens in new tab)"	Elis Montgomery	Strange Horizons	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
"How to Become a Sea Witch (opens in new tab)"	Theodora Goss	The Orange Bee	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
"Landing: Seattle"	Brandon O'Brien		★★Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.
"The Mourning Robot (opens in new tab)"	Angela Liu	Uncanny Magazine	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
"The World to Come (opens in new tab)"	Jennifer Hudak	Strange Horizons	★★Rating: 2 out of 5 stars.

Astounding Award for Best New Writer

Author	Notable Work in Packet	Rating / Review
Sophie Burnham	Sargassa and Bloodtide	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.Sargassa / Bloodtide TBR
Kamilah Cole	So Let Them Burn	TBR
Antonia Hodgson	The Raven Scholar	★★★Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.review coming
Molly O'Neill	Greenteeth (excerpt)	TBR
H.H. Pak	"Never Eaten Vegetables"	★★★★Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.review coming
Jared Pechaček	The West Passage	TBR