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 might be the hallmark of AI-generated prose working within learned patterns rather than unconscious linguistic variation. 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