REVIEW: The Faith of Beasts (The Captive’s War #2) by James S.A. Corey (3-stars)

In The Faith of Beasts, James S. A. Corey continues the story of humans absorbed into the Carryx empire, a vast, indifferent system that does not see them as people but as biological resources to be sorted, assigned, and made useful. The Carryx believe themselves to be the smartest species that has ever existed, and their bureaucracy reflects that confidence: enormous, impersonal, and uninterested in the needs or perspectives of any other species. Humans must adapt to Carryx expectations, learn to be useful, and hide any attempt to build or maintain culture if it impedes with anything that is useful to the Carryx. Within this setting, the book raises questions about how culture survives under constraint, how family or community function when continuity is fragile, how sex and gender operate across species with radically different embodiments, and how the Carryx themselves might relate to other hives beyond the one we see. I'll examine how those questions shape the book’s understanding of survival inside an extractive system.

Although the humans experience disorientation around time, this is not something the Carryx impose intentionally. The Carryx have their own planet, their own (artificial) sunlight cycles, and their own internal logic. Humans are simply placed inside a system that was never designed for them. The result is a continuous background condition: the humans cannot reliably track days or seasons (few of them have views out windows). The narrative never confirms whether the humans have been captive for a year, or ten, or forty. However, we do know that the humans are mostly past reproductive age by the time we get to the second book because the Carryx expect the humans to be a "self sustaining" population - if they die out, they are no use. The humans have no idea if the Carryx have imprisoned other humans, destroyed all other humans, or if they are the last humans in existence. They agree to set up a project to grow human babies in a lab. Babies still take nine months to gestate, but beyond that biological fact, time becomes a blur. This is simply the texture of captivity. When you are absorbed into someone else’s world, you lose the reference points that once told you who you were and how long you had been that person whether you are a human in the Carryx world, or the Spy absorbing multiple humans and their memories and also living in the Carryx world (much like a Russian doll).

Inside that disorientation, the book’s most compelling work is in how it treats culture as something that must be rebuilt quietly and carefully. Dafydd realizes that the lab‑grown babies will have no inherited culture unless the humans create one. The real danger is that the next generation will grow up culturally blank, shaped entirely by Carryx expectations. At the same time, the humans begin to understand the Carryx not through translation devices but through cultural analysis. A choreographer, initially furious at being assigned to menial work, becomes essential once someone points out that if the Carryx communicate through posture and movement, then someone trained in movement is exactly the person who can interpret them. That insight opens the door to understanding the soft Lothar’s “grooming” behavior and eventually the Deep Lothar’s overhead communication network -- the silent but apparently intimate system the Carryx use to pass and discard information. These moments show humans learning to read an alien species from the inside out, using the tools of culture rather than technology.

Family appears in the book as the smallest unit of continuity. It is not treated sentimentally, and the narrative does not rely on a “save the baby” melodrama. Instead, (chosen) family or community becomes the structure through which meaning is transmitted when everything else is unstable. The fear is not that humans will go extinct biologically; it is that the next generation will grow up without any human culture at all and will believe that this slavery is the way things have always been. The human captives somewhat reluctantly begin to coalesce around this sense of purpose to create a culture and future for these new humans born in captivity.

This connects the book to other works that explore continuity under pressure: Old Man’s War, where memory of family and loved ones center identity when bodies are interchangeable; Mickey7, where clones are replaceable but relationships are not; Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood, where the human family is dismantled because it resists assimilation; The Handmaid’s Tale, where reproduction becomes a political battleground; Foundation, where the Genetic Dynasty tries and fails to manufacture family; and Murderbot, where personhood emerges through chosen relationships. Across these works, family is the mechanism that carries meaning when systems treat bodies as tools.

At this point, it is useful to pause on Lilith’s Brood, because it sits very close to what Corey is doing and also very far from it. The Oankali, like the Carryx, see humans primarily as a resource: a set of genes, traits, and capacities that can be folded into their own long project. They are also convinced they know better than humans what should happen to humanity. But where the Oankali frame this as a “trade” — your genes and autonomy in exchange for survival and transformation — the Carryx do not bother with that language. There is no pretense of mutual benefit, no narrative of uplift. The Carryx do not ask whether humans consent to being used; they do not even recognize humans as people in the same sense they recognize themselves. That difference makes the Carryx feel colder than the Oankali, even though both operate from the assumption that their own perspective is the only one that matters.

This connects to a broader point about survival inside an extractive system. Nothing expands forever — not populations, not cultures, not civilizations. When fiction fixates on continuity or the next generation, it is rarely just about biology. It is about meaning. It is about the fear that whatever we are — our culture, our values, our sense of self — will not survive the pressures we are living under. In The Faith of Beasts, the Carryx are not trying to erase humans; they are trying to extract value from them. Humans are sorted, assigned, and used according to Carryx priorities. The danger is not extinction but absorption and becoming nothing more than a resource within someone else’s system.

In some ways, the Carryx bureaucracy reads like capitalism taken to its logical, pan‑galactic extreme — an all‑consuming, efficiency‑driven, extraction‑oriented system that treats every species as raw material. Not malicious, not sadistic, just utterly convinced of its own rightness and its own superiority and entirely goal focused: eliminate the Deathless Enemy. Everything else is incidental, including the lives, cultures, and histories of other peoples, even entire planetary ecosystems. The Carryx do not torment; they optimize. They do not rule through fear; they rule through process. Their indifference is the horror, not their intent.

It has the same cold logic as a market that expands until it touches everything, and then keeps expanding because it cannot imagine doing anything else. At the same time, there is something of Brazil in the Carryx world: the scale, the indifference, the way the machinery of the system becomes more real than the people inside it. The Carryx don’t torment humans; they simply don’t notice them except as inputs. The nightmare isn’t cruelty - it’s bureaucracy without limit, purpose, or external check.

The Carryx also maintain order within their own ranks through ritualized maiming. If a Carryx offends or violates protocol, an arm is broken — swiftly, without ceremony, and without lingering attention. It is not cruelty; it is procedure. Characters notice the scar tissue and hardened bands on the arms of various Carryx, physical records of past reprimands. The speed and indifference of these punishments underline how the Carryx understand discipline: not as moral correction, but as a mechanical adjustment to keep the system functioning. Even their own bodies are treated as tools to be corrected when they deviate.

Human sexuality in the book is fluid and unremarkable. Jessyn talks about relationships with men and women. Several men have had romantic and sexual relationships with each other. None of this is treated as unusual. And yet the narrative voice remains committed to a binary gender framework that feels out of place against that backdrop. Characters are still described with "he or she," even in contexts where "they" would be the obvious choice, especially in a future where bodies can be modified, inhabited, or entirely replaced. The world of the story contains species that can change sex, a Swarm that can transition across bodies, and multiple peoples with different forms of individuality — yet the prose itself stays anchored to a binary that feels outdated for 2026, let alone a far-future setting.

The Carryx push further than human fluidity. The subjugator-librarian is explicitly described as having been female, having had children, and then giving that up to take on her current role. Sex, for the Carryx, is functional and mutable, something they can change when their social position requires it. The Swarm goes further still. It does not just inhabit bodies; it reshapes them. It transitions from Jellit to Else to Clae, altering physical form over a few days with enough calories. It is effectively a transsexual, pansexual, and panspecies entity, capable of becoming almost anyone.

And yet, the Swarm never attempts to inhabit a Carryx body, even though the Carryx are not telepathically linked and such an infiltration might reveal far more than taking over humans. We know from Livesuit that the nanites are human created technology, originally designed to interface with human physiology and cognition. Surely the humans responsible for that technology had other species in captivity. If they were willing to use it on humans why not develop nanites to occupy other species and improve their spying and intelligence-gathering and end this neverending conflict sooner? The book does not explain why the Swarm limits itself to humans, and that absence stands out in a story so concerned with knowledge, power, and survival. This ties directly into the identity questions in books like Old Man’s War and Mickey7: if memory can be copied and bodies replaced, what exactly is the “you” that survives? If the Swarm is a copy of the memories of the humans it has assimilated, who is the Swarm? Does the Swarm have an identity?

The question of personhood also runs through the way the Carryx and the Swarm are written. The Carryx do not pretend to uplift humans; they sort, assign, and use. Dafydd becomes the collaborator who believes he is buying humans time, and he is not wrong, but it is unsettling to watch him internalize Carryx logic. When he breaks a man’s arm to prevent a work stoppage, he is not being gratuitously cruel; he is accurately predicting what the Carryx would do and trying to forestall something worse. The Carryx even ask him about the human soul. They have never observed evidence of one. Dafydd explains it as a cultural idea meant to comfort people afraid of death, and the Carryx dismiss it as irrelevant. To them, humans are biological machines with interesting problem‑solving capabilities.

The narrative point of view reinforces the limits of what can be known. The book uses a selective omniscient perspective. We get insight into the Carryx, the humans, and the Swarm — but not into the Lothar, the Deep Lothar, or the other species in the Carryx empire. We learn a great deal about Carryx hive politics — the Sovran, the daughter‑challenges, the bureaucratic logic— because the narrator lets us see it. The humans, however, do not know any of this. They are interpreting behavior from the outside, and captivity means living inside a system whose rules you cannot see. Meanwhile, the Lothar remain opaque. We do not know how they think or organize themselves. The Deep Lothar are even more mysterious. The same goes for the rest of the species the Carryx have absorbed. The humans are surrounded by other peoples, but they do not share language, culture, or history. They are all trapped in the same empire, but not together.

The Carryx themselves invite comparison to a supercolony, but with important differences. Dafydd eventually realizes that the palace world might not be the original hive. The Sovran they are dealing with could be a daughter who flew off and formed a splinter hive. This implies there may be other Carryx colonies, other Sovrans, other hive structures operating elsewhere in the galaxy. The structure echoes the Argentine ant supercolony that runs up the Pacific coast, where ants from different nests recognize each other as kin and cooperate, while ants from other species are treated as enemies. The Carryx succession system complicates that analogy: queens kill or are killed by their daughters. That raises questions the book never answers. What happens when two Carryx hives encounter each other? If queens fight to the death within a lineage, does that logic extend to unrelated Sovrans? Would two hives merge? Would they battle? Would they even recognize each other as kin? Do they already communicate across hives in ways the humans never see? The possibility of multiple hives -- each with its own Sovran, its own history, its own daughter‑line -- makes the Carryx feel less like a monolith and more like a fractal empire whose true shape is still hidden.

The Swarm sits at the intersection of all of these questions. It was supposed to be a weapon, but once it begins living among the humans, it becomes something else. It shifts bodies, expresses preferences, and pushes back when Dafydd tries to control it. It is not just a tool, and that is precisely the problem. The humans want it to be a weapon. The Carryx want it to be a threat they can contain. The Swarm wants something neither side fully understands. This ambiguity connects to the identity questions raised in Corey’s story “Livesuit,” where assimilation and memory continuity blur the line between person and instrument.

What stays with me is not just the brutality of the Carryx system, but the range of responses to it. Some species simply go with the flow — like the snail‑creature who watches a planet‑killing aurora and finds it "interesting" rather than devastating. Humans, by contrast, keep trying to make meaning inside the machinery. Jessyn and Garral build alliances, connect with human children and a soldier left behind on a planet victimized by a recent Carryx attack. On the palace world, Dafydd and the Deep Lothar conduct a low‑key trust experiment by typing messages into a floating word processor and never hitting "send," while the humans talk about songs and ethics for babies born in captivity. Rickar has a conversation with a subset of the Swarm that makes clear it has its own agenda, even as some parts of it are losing the thread of the human memories it carries. And then Rickar dies. The book gives him a memorial. I didn't grieve him.

That points to a structural tension the series hasn't fully resolved. The selective omniscient narrator pulls you up to the system level — the Sovran's politics, the daughter-challenges, the cold logic of Carryx bureaucracy — while keeping you at arm's length from the characters who are supposed to make you feel the cost of that system. Ironically, the Carryx sections often land harder than the human ones, because the narrator actually lets you inside Carryx logic. The humans get less of that treatment. Their arcs — managing illness, discovering love — are legible and earned, but they illustrate the book's themes more than they surprise you with who these people turn out to be. The worldbuilding is meticulous. The universe the series constructs is genuinely strange and worth thinking about. But a third book will need to find a way to make you inhabit these characters rather than just witness what happens to them.

A note on Murderbot: Martha Wells achieves what this series is reaching for by the simplest possible means — locking you inside a consciousness that is funny, defensive, unexpectedly tender, and working things out in real time. You don't observe Murderbot surviving. You survive with it. That difference turns out to matter enormously.

Further Reading

• Captive's War wiki project on GitHub-- https://github.com/JonathanGupton/captive_war/tree/master

• Old Man’s War — John Scalzi

• Mickey7 — Edward Ashton

• Lilith’s Brood (Xenogenesis Trilogy) — Octavia E. Butler

• The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood

• Foundation (especially the Genetic Dynasty arc) — Isaac Asimov

• The Murderbot Diaries — Martha Wells

• Livesuit (short story) — James S. A. Corey

REVIEW: The Faith of Beasts (The Captive’s War #2) by James S.A. Corey

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson (3 stars)

 I just finished the 2025 Wonder Woman Hugo nominee and, by Hecate, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. The artwork is fantastic and the portrait-style alternate covers scattered through the book are gorgeous. Visually it’s everything you’d expect from a Hugo finalist.

The story is basically Greek mythology with Diana pasted in. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s definitely not a traditional Wonder Woman narrative. Persephone shows up. Diana eats a single pomegranate seed “out of love,” which binds her to spend one month a year in the Underworld. I couldn’t quite tell if that was meant to be for her mother’s sake or just part of the general mythic logic the book is following.

They also changed her backstory so that she sacrificed her right arm to cast a spell. The reveal comes late, but it’s actually one of the more interesting choices. She’s an amputee, a witch, and still a powerful warrior. The book doesn’t treat the missing limb as a tragedy. It treats it as a mythic cost, which is a very different framing than superhero stories usually take.

Prometheus even shows up, which is when I finally gave up pretending this was a Wonder Woman story at all. He gives Diana some of his blood to forge the Nemesis lasso, and he also creates a zombie Pegasus. Yes, really. It still has feathery wings, but the body is a black skeletal shape, and Diana “feeds” it with magic like it’s some kind of Underworld rescue horse. At that point the book wasn’t even pretending to be DC canon. It was just doing its own mythic thing and letting Diana tag along.

Steve, the love interest barely registers as a character. He’s rescued (alive) in the Underworld for reasons that never quite gel. After defeating the enemy to live on Earth as we know it as an incarnation of Medusa - she appears "stuck" and Steve, the Wonder Woman Whisperer, steps up to remind her she’s actually Diana and she transforms back. They otherwise have zero chemistry.

The part that actually worked for me was the relationship between Diana and Circe. In this version Circe is her adoptive mother, not a villain, and the story keeps circling back to that bond. There’s a line about how you learn to love a child by raising it, and that feels like the real heart of the book. Everything else — the battles, the romance, the transformations — is secondary to that relationship.

I kept waiting for Athena to show up, since she’s the one who sprang from Zeus’s head, not Artemis or Diana. But the book isn’t interested in Athena at all. It’s interested in Circe, in chosen family, in the idea that Diana is who she is because someone loved her into being.

The ending is pure Greek myth. Diana shows mercy, tries to avoid killing, does what she has to do, rescues her mother, and leaves the Underworld. Then the story just stops. No epilogue, no wrap-up, no superhero-style resolution. The quest is over, so the tale ends.

I liked parts of it. The art is stunning and they have alternate covers sprinkled throughout that are stylistically different portraits of Wonder Woman. The adoptive-mother theme is lovely. The disability reveal is handled with more grace than I expected. But the whole thing is a bit of a mishmash. Some readers will love this version of Diana as a mythic heroine. Others will miss the clarity and grounding of a more traditional Wonder Woman story. It’s ambitious, uneven, and definitely memorable.

REVIEW: Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson

RATING: 3 stars

REVIEW: Sense and Respond by Jeff Gothelf (3-stars)

A Practical Book for Leaders Moving Beyond Industrial‑Age Thinking

Most business books either bury you in abstract frameworks or force you through a fictional executive’s personal life to make a point. Sense and Respond doesn’t do that. It stays grounded in real examples and focuses on the mechanics of modern work: feedback loops, adaptive planning, and the shift from industrial‑age certainty to software‑age change. That alone puts it ahead of a lot of what’s out there.

Industrial‑Age Planning vs. Software Reality

One of the strongest parts of the book is the way it explains why traditional planning models don’t translate into software. It’s not because industrial planning is outdated or wrong. It’s because it was built for a completely different category of problems.

If you’re building a bridge, you’re working with fixed materials, established safety requirements, and environmental conditions that are mostly knowable. The physics don’t change halfway through the project. You can plan that work with confidence because the domain is stable.

Software is the opposite. The problem space shifts while you’re working. User needs evolve. Market conditions change. Technology capabilities expand. You discover constraints as you go. The environment is fluid, and the cost of change is low enough that learning as you build isn’t just possible — it’s necessary.

That’s the core point the book gets right: industrial planning is built for certainty; software work happens inside uncertainty.

Experiments as a Normal Operating Rhythm

The book pushes hard on the idea that experimentation shouldn’t be a special event. It’s not a one‑off discovery sprint or a quarterly research push. It’s part of the regular operating rhythm. The author suggests talking to customers every six weeks. In 2026, that’s slow, but the principle holds: if you’re not in regular conversation with your users, you’re not building a product. You’re building a guess.

Small experiments, quick tests, and ongoing validation are still the most reliable way to reduce risk in software.

Parallel‑Track Agile That Actually Works

One of the most practical ideas in the book is the separation of discovery and delivery. Expecting a single team to “innovate” and hit delivery deadlines at the same time is unrealistic. A parallel‑track model — one track focused on figuring out how to solve the hard problems, the other focused on shipping — is cleaner and more humane. It reflects how real teams actually work when they’re not being forced into fantasy timelines.

Give Teams Problems, Not Requirements

Another point that still holds up: developers should be given problems to solve, not a list of requirements to execute. When you hand a team a pre‑defined set of tasks, you’re not using their expertise. You’re treating them like a feature factory. And you’re cutting them off from the feedback that tells them whether their work mattered. Teams need visibility into outcomes, not just velocity charts.

Who This Book Is Actually For

It’s also important to acknowledge the book’s age. Written in 2017, it predates a lot of what defines modern product work today. If you’ve spent years in Agile environments, worked on design systems, or led empathy‑first projects, much of the book will feel obvious. Not wrong — just foundational. And in 2026, with AI reshaping delivery and late‑stage consolidation changing how teams operate, the examples don’t fully match the complexity of what teams face now.

But that doesn’t make it irrelevant.

The book is genuinely useful for people who are early in their leadership journey or who are coming from traditional command‑and‑control environments. It gives them a clear contrast between two modes of working and concrete examples that make the shift understandable. It’s a better starting point than dropping someone straight into a stack of Marty Cagan books. It gives them anchor points before they dive into deeper product thinking.

The VUCA Reality (Even Though the Book Never Uses the Term)

The author never uses the term VUCA, but he describes it constantly. Software, marketing, and consumer‑product work all operate in environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. User behavior changes quickly. Competitors move fast. Information is incomplete. Signals are messy. You can’t manage that kind of work with planning models built for stable, predictable domains.

The book doesn’t name VUCA, but it circles the idea over and over: you need continuous sensing, iterative response, and teams empowered to solve problems because the environment demands it.

If You Want a Next Step

If you want to go deeper into why planning models must match the problem domain, How Big Things Get Done is a good follow‑on. It comes from a completely different world, but it helps clarify why software can’t be managed like the Golden Gate Bridge.

After that, Marty Cagan’s books are the natural extension. They go much further into empowered teams and outcome‑driven product leadership. But they can also feel impossible to implement in traditional command‑and‑control environments. For leaders who are still operating inside those structures, the gap between Cagan’s ideal state and their current reality can feel too wide to cross.

That’s where Turn This Ship Around fits in. It offers a clear, concrete example of how to shift from a culture of followers to a culture of leaders, and it does it in a way that’s easy to understand even without a military background. It shows what distributed authority looks like in practice and how to build competence and ownership at every level. For many leaders, it’s a more accessible bridge between industrial‑age habits and the kind of empowered teams Cagan describes. 

REVIEW: Sense and Respond by Jeff Gothelf

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars (2006) by Patrick Lencioni (3-stars)

I’ll be honest: I’m not usually a fan of the “business fable” format, and this one has all the classic early‑2000s fable tropes. The personal‑life padding, the pregnancy storyline, the protagonist’s wife designing his logo — none of that adds anything. It feels dated and unnecessary, like the book is trying to make the protagonist “relatable” in a very specific, very last‑century way. But in 2006, people often needed these ideas wrapped in a story to actually absorb them. The fable structure made the message feel safe enough for leaders who would have tuned out a more direct approach.

And despite the saccharine framing, the book has a can‑do energy that, for a moment, made me wonder whether going freelance as a consultant was a viable option. It’s written to make you feel like you can walk into a messy organization, diagnose the dysfunction, and rally people around a shared purpose. That tone is part of why the book works, even if the personal‑life filler is something we could all do without.

The moment that actually matters: listening

The strongest part of the book isn’t the crisis or the characters or the manufactured drama. It’s the moment the protagonist realizes he actually has to listen to people. Not the performative “I hear you” version, but the real “tell me what you think the problem is” version. That’s the turning point. He stops trying to impose a solution and starts trying to understand the motivations, fears, and incentives of the people involved. Once he does that, he can help them find a common cause that isn’t just “stop being political” or “work better together.” People don’t align because someone tells them to. They align when they see themselves in the problem and the solution.

Workshops that actually work

Another part of the book that lands well is the use of workshops. Breaking people into groups, giving them space to talk, and letting them surface the real issues is simple but powerful. It reminded me immediately of how a group director organized our team at a large software company that was transitioning from traditional off‑the‑shelf products to cloud‑based SaaS. He didn’t lecture at us or hand down a vision from a podium. He put us into groups, gave us real problems to solve, and let us figure out the patterns ourselves. It worked. We saw real, recognized success because people were engaged, aligned, and actually talking to each other.

And then the team was split up because the organization insisted on grouping people by role. Program managers with program managers, designers with designers. The exact opposite of what had been working. The book captures that dynamic perfectly. Cross‑functional collaboration works, but organizations keep reorganizing themselves away from it.

The environments that suffer most are the ones where people are just mean

One thing Lencioni does well is highlight how much damage people do when they rely on stereotypes, reductionist labels, or just plain meanness. The environments that suffer the most in the book aren’t the ones with the biggest strategic problems. They’re the ones where people stop seeing each other as human beings and start treating each other like caricatures. That part felt very real.

You can have the best strategy in the world, but if people are dismissive, snide, territorial, or operating from assumptions about “those people over in that department,” nothing moves. The fictional drama exaggerates it, but the underlying pattern is familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organization.

And this is where Sense and Respond quietly overlaps. Even though it’s a very different kind of book, the author stresses the importance of people getting along socially and actually connecting. Not in a forced team‑building way, but in the sense that teams who like and respect each other simply work better. They share information. They surface problems earlier. They don’t default to defensiveness. Both books, in their own ways, point to the same thing: the social fabric of an organization matters more than the process diagrams.

The part the book doesn’t say out loud: communication skills are the real issue

Here’s where I diverge from the book. The story resolves because the protagonist listens, empathizes, and helps people articulate their needs. But the book never names the actual skill set behind that shift. This is where Nonviolent Communication comes in.

If more people in corporate environments understood how to express their needs clearly, hear other people’s needs without defensiveness, separate observations from interpretations, and navigate conflict without escalation, a lot of the so‑called silos and politics would evaporate. Not all of it, because incentives and structures still matter, but the day‑to‑day friction would drop dramatically.

Most organizational gridlock isn’t caused by strategy. It’s caused by miscommunication, assumptions, and emotional reactivity that no one has the tools to name or address. The book hints at this through the story, but it never says it directly. The real lesson isn’t “create a rallying cry.” It’s “learn how to communicate like an adult.”

Why the book still works

Even with the storytelling format (which I still think is unnecessary), the book works because it taps into something real. People want to fix broken systems. They want to feel connected to a purpose bigger than their department. They want to contribute without getting caught in territorial nonsense. The book isn’t a manual for organizational design and it’s not a deep dive into incentives or systems thinking, but it is a reminder that people want to work in environments where they feel heard and aligned.

Sometimes a story is enough to get someone to see that.

Where to go next

If someone finishes this book and wants to go deeper into the part that actually matters -- the human part -- I’d point them toward Nonviolent Communication. Not the corporate‑sanitized version found in many books, but the real thing. It’s the best framework I’ve seen that gives people a usable way to express needs, hear other people’s needs without spiraling, and navigate conflict without turning it into a referendum on someone’s character.

Both Silos and Sense and Respond hint at this. They show the symptoms. NVC gives you the underlying mechanics. It’s the difference between “we need to break down silos” and “here’s how to talk to each other in a way that doesn’t create them in the first place.”

If more people in corporate environments had even a basic grounding in NVC, a lot of the friction, misinterpretation, and territorial behavior that slows organizations down would disappear. Not all of it — incentives and structures still matter — but enough that the work would move faster and the culture would feel less like a minefield.

It’s not a magic fix. It’s just the part we keep skipping. I also kept thinking about how many people insist on keeping their “work life” and “personal life” completely separate, as if those two selves don’t influence each other. If someone is rigidly compartmentalized in their own life, they will bring that same separation into the workplace. And I don’t need to know the details of someone’s cancer treatment or their partner’s high‑risk pregnancy to understand that people need space and time to handle the realities of their lives. The point isn’t the specifics. The point is recognizing that people are whole humans, and organizations function better when they acknowledge that instead of pretending everyone is a blank, interchangeable worker during business hours.

REVIEW: Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars (2006) by Patrick Lencioni

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (3-stars)

 Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is a sharp, bleak portrait of dissociation that reminded me at different moments of Less Than Zero, Slaves of New York, and even a very dark, sedated version of Bridget Jones’s Diary. It’s a novel about a young woman trying to chemically erase herself, and a city that barely notices.

The unnamed narrator moves through early‑2000s Manhattan with a kind of anesthetized privilege. She gets an art‑gallery job not because she cares about art, but because she looks like someone who should be standing behind a white desk in black clothes. The gallery’s instructions — don’t show the price sheet too quickly, memorize the artists’ faces, no sleeping on the job — tell you everything about the ecosystem she’s drifting through. She’s valued for the silhouette she cuts, not for anything she thinks or feels.

Trevor, the on‑again/off‑again boyfriend, is a perfect example of that dynamic. He behaves like an early social‑media influencer before the platforms existed — someone who curates a lifestyle instead of a personality (or boundaries, or morals). Everything about him is surface: the parties, the vacations, the women he cycles through for validation. When the narrator calls him repeatedly threatening suicide in graphic, bloody terms, he leaves his girlfriend Claudia to come over — not out of concern, but because it fits his pattern of using women as emotional and sexual pit stops. She takes a cocktail of drugs, gets into bed naked fully expecting him to show up (or not), and regains consciousness while she’s giving him oral sex. He then drops off a DVD player as if he’s doing her a favor, announcing that VCRs are “on the way out.” He’s not malicious; he’s just shallow in a way that feels almost archetypal for that era. And the narrator accepts this treatment because she’s already dissociated from her own worth.

Dr. Tuttle, her psychiatrist, feels like she wandered in from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — the spiritual cousin of Hunter S. Thompson’s “as your lawyer/as your doctor” companion who encourages every bad idea. She dispenses pills with crackpot confidence, and half the medications seem invented. It’s funny, but also unsettling: the narrator’s entire self‑destruction is enabled by someone who should be helping her, and instead treats her like a walking prescription pad.

Ping Xi, the artist who uses her unconscious body for a project, is one of the strangest and most revealing figures in the book. He exploits her, yes, but he also treats her with a sideways politeness — apologizing via sticky note for leaving a burrito wrapper in her apartment, buying her a white fox‑fur coat that must have cost a fortune. He sees her exactly the way the art world sees her: a beautiful cipher with more cultural capital than selfhood. She eventually gives the coat away, along with almost everything else she owns, as if shedding the identities other people keep trying to hand her.

Reva, her best friend, is the emotional counterweight. Reva is striving, anxious, constantly performing competence and friendliness. Her abandoned food and exercise journal — discovered after her mother’s death — is the saddest artifact in the book. It’s the inverse of the narrator’s pill‑counting: one woman trying to control her life into submission, the other trying to erase hers entirely.

Reading this, I kept thinking about people I’ve known who used pills or alcohol to check out — friends who believed they had “earned” the right to disappear for a weekend, or who drank their free time away because it felt safer than being present. The novel captures the fear underneath that impulse: the fear of feeling anything, the fear of being seen, the fear of being unworthy of love. The narrator’s dissociation isn’t glamorous or rebellious; it’s a defense mechanism that’s calcified into a worldview.

Her relationship to her parents is one of the most telling threads. She never names them, just as she never names herself. She keeps their house because it represents, in her mind, the idea that she was once loved — even though her mother was critical, controlling, and emotionally distant. She clings to the house as a symbol of a love she doesn’t actually believe she deserved. That sense of unworthiness runs under everything she does.

By the end, she’s more adrift than when she started. Her fixation on the footage of a woman falling from the World Trade Center — possibly Reva, possibly not — is macabre and telling. She projects a fantasy of “freedom” onto a moment that was pure terror. It’s dissociation dressed up as interpretation, a new obsession replacing the old ones. The experiment didn’t give her clarity; it just hollowed her out further.

Moshfegh’s writing is sharp and often darkly funny, and the psychological detail is precise. But the emotional arc left me cold — intentionally, I think, but still cold. The book is compelling, unsettling, and smart, and it’s also a near‑perfect illustration of anomie in the classical sense: a person cut loose from any real social or emotional structure, drifting through a world where modern consumer capitalism offers only surfaces, transactions, and distractions. The narrator’s dissociation isn’t just personal; it’s structural. It’s what happens when nothing around you feels meaningful enough to hold you in place. For me, a solid 3‑star read: memorable, well‑crafted, and deeply bleak, but not something I connected with beyond the intellectual and observational level. 

REVIEW: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman (3-stars)

I recently finished Liz Wiseman’s 2025 book, Multipliers, and while I appreciate the intent behind the framework, I walked away feeling like I’d read a well‑packaged version of ideas that have been circulating in leadership circles for years. It’s not that the book is wrong — it’s that it’s not new. And in some cases, it oversimplifies the very real complexity of how people and organizations actually work.

Research to Support a Framework: My training in sociology makes me suspicious of repeated claims of quantification of things like "productivity."  Wiseman repeatedly cites percentages of “productivity” people report under different types of leaders. But the more I read, the more I wondered: How exactly are we measuring this?

The appendices describe structured interviews and multiple rounds of coding, but the core data is still self‑reported perception, not actual productivity. And in knowledge work, “productivity” is a slippery concept. Some of the best thinking happens:

• in the shower
• on a walk
• during a commute
• while knitting or exercising
• in the quiet space between meetings

If someone says they’re operating at “70% of their capability,” what does that even mean? It certainly doesn’t map cleanly to output. Insight doesn’t happen on a clock, and the brain’s default mode network  (the part responsible for creative leaps) activates when we’re not visibly “producing.” So if you're always "busy" -- can you actually be productive or are you just following the ruts in the road?

So the numbers make for good storytelling, but they’re not metrics. They’re sentiment.

The more I read, the more it felt like Wiseman started with the Multiplier/Diminisher idea and then went out to collect stories that fit the model. There’s nothing wrong with that, and most leadership books do it, but it’s different from discovering a pattern organically.

Once you’ve worked inside large organizations, you’ve seen dozens of these frameworks come and go. At Abbott, for example, we had the “in the box / out of the box” model -- another metaphor wrapped around basic human behavior.

Some of Wiseman’s recommendations are genuinely solid:

• run 30‑day experiments
• give people ownership
• ask better questions
• encourage people to bring solutions, not just problems

But these aren’t new ideas. They’re foundational leadership practices. They show up in Agile, Lean, design thinking, and every decent management training program of the last 30 years.

The User Manual Trap: One section encourages leaders to identify their “native strengths” and create a personal user manual so others know how to work with them. In theory, this is great. In practice, it can go very wrong.

I once worked with a CMO who had a user manual that was… memorable. Snarky, rigid, demanding, and completely inflexible. Instead of creating clarity, it broadcasted:

“Here are all the ways I refuse to adapt. Please adjust yourselves accordingly.”

A tool is only as healthy as the person using it. And a user manual can reveal more about a leader’s blind spots than their strengths.

Culture is the real missing ingredient in this book, and this is the part most leadership frameworks gloss over.

You can teach people any model you want: Multipliers, Radical Candor, Situational Leadership, “in the box,” “above the line,” whatever the flavor of the year is — but unless the organization has:

• psychological safety
• aligned incentives
• leaders who model the behaviors
• trust
• clarity
• and buy‑in at every level

…nothing changes.

Frameworks don’t transform organizations. People create culture, and there are many conditions required for cultural shifts.  Rarely are culture changes top-down. Without the right environment, a leadership model becomes vocabulary, not behavior.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

If someone wants a leadership book that actually grapples with complexity, I’d recommend:

• David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around - a true operating model for distributed decision-making (see my review http://www.livegreenwearblack.com/2017/12/review-turn-ship-around-true-story-of.html) 
• Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code - a grounded look at psychological safety, belonging, and high‑performing teams (see my review http://www.livegreenwearblack.com/2018/02/review-culture-code-secrets-of-highly.html)

Both authors understand that leadership isn’t a set of behaviors you adopt, it’s a system you design.

Multipliers isn’t a bad book. It’s just not a deep one. It offers a tidy framework, some useful language, and a handful of practices that can help leaders reflect on their impact. But the real work of leadership - the messy, human, systemic work - lives far beyond any model. If you want to change an organization, you don’t start with a framework. You start with culture, safety, and trust. Everything else is just packaging.

REVIEW: "Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves" by Sophie Gilbert 2025 (3 stars)

What Girl on Girl Misses — and Why the Context Matters

Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl raises compelling questions about comparison, competition, and the ways women learn to see themselves through the eyes of others. Her cultural analysis is sharp and, at times, painfully resonant—especially in her exploration of homogenized beauty standards, the commodification of empowerment, and the pressures amplified by visual media. These examples matter; they’re part of the lived reality of contemporary womanhood in the U.S.

But Girl on Girl is also a very specific slice of culture—rooted squarely in U.S. mainstream pop culture and overwhelmingly centered on white, middle-class, millennial experience. And without deeper grounding in the systems that produce these pressures, its arguments risk confusing the medium for the message, attributing cultural shifts to the platforms that broadcast them rather than the forces that shape them.

This isn’t a failure of observation. It’s a failure of context. And that’s the heart of my frustration with the book.

Gilbert details how today’s visual culture—Instagram, reality TV, celebrity aesthetics—encourages women to benchmark themselves against a narrow, commodified ideal of femininity. She’s right that beauty “is for sale,” referencing industries in the U.S. and Brazil that promise transformation through consumption: hair, lashes, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, luxury wellness, and endless self-optimization.

But this phenomenon didn’t begin with millennials, nor with digital culture.

Long before ring lights and filters, beauty in the U.S. functioned as a market-regulated system of value—something women were expected to invest in as a form of social and economic capital. Gilbert herself quotes Tressie McMillan Cottom’s insight at the beginning of Chapter 5: “Beauty isn’t what you actually look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.”

This line—framed in Girl on Girl but underexplored—points directly to larger structures.  These aren’t just cultural quirks—they’re baked into bigger systems. White supremacy sets the rules, capitalism cashes in, perfectionism keeps us striving, and American exceptionalism tells us it’s all our fault if we don’t measure up.

In this context, beauty is not merely cultural. It is political and economic.

Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” Gilbert, however, often flips this—treating the medium (porn, Instagram, reality TV) as if it were the cause of women’s suffering, rather than the conduit for ideologies that long predate those technologies.

• Porn did not invent sexualized expectations of women.

• Reality television did not invent beauty hierarchies.

• Instagram did not invent comparison.

These platforms amplify, accelerate, and intensify what the culture already demands. By attributing relational difficulties, sexual scripts, and self-worth issues primarily to media exposure, Girl on Girl risks implying that the problem lies in women’s “overconsumption” of harmful images rather than in the systems generating those images in the first place.

Media are mirrors, not architects.

Much of Girl on Girl reads like a chronological catalogue of pop culture, weaving together celebrity moments, viral trends, and reality-TV storylines. A significant portion of the book is also devoted to detailed descriptions of sexualized imagery and violations against women, which, while illustrating cultural pressures, can feel sensationalized and at times overshadow attempts at systemic analysis.

While Gilbert’s examples of beauty, comparison, and commodified empowerment are compelling, they are also largely drawn from a very specific cultural context. Much of her analysis centers on U.S. reality television, celebrity culture, corporate feminism (#Girlboss, Lean In), Instagram aesthetics, and narratives about ambition and beauty. This narrow focus highlights the pressures experienced by a particular slice of society, but it can make the patterns she identifies feel culturally specific rather than reflective of broader, systemic dynamics.

This matters because it makes the analysis feel culturally specific rather than structurally universal. The pressures she describes—competition, comparison, and self-surveillance—exist globally, but the forms they take vary widely across class, race, nationality, and culture.

By treating these pressures as if they are primarily millennial phenomena shaped by social media and pornography, the book overlooks deeper continuities across generations and histories of patriarchal control. These tensions are not new. They are simply newly branded, turbo charged and monetized.

Gilbert references racial disparities but doesn’t fully integrate intersectionality into her argument. The experience of beauty and comparison is profoundly shaped by race, class, disability, and nationality—but Girl on Girl remains focused on the dominant narrative of white, U.S.-based feminine insecurity.

And while the book centers women, a broader sociological view reveals that men and boys are also being shaped—and harmed—by these systems.

And it’s not just women.  In her book Men Who Hate Women, Laura Bates shows how boys and men are also trapped in these systems—though their pain often gets weaponized instead of commodified. These forces flow from the same systems of patriarchy and capitalism. The pressure to perform masculinity, to dominate rather than connect, to seek status through appearance or achievement—these are also forms of gendered control.

Girl on Girl is thought-provoking and at times emotionally powerful. Gilbert is deeply attuned to the lived experiences of comparison, aspiration, and insecurity among contemporary women. Her observations ring true—because the cultural patterns she highlights absolutely shape the world we live in.

But the story she tells is only one layer of a much larger structure.

Beauty standards, competitive femininity, curated empowerment, and the commodification of selfhood are not new problems created by digital media. They are expressions of systems that long preceded the technologies that now broadcast them.

When we focus on the images, we risk missing the architecture. The question is not simply why women compare themselves, but who benefits from a society in which women (and increasingly men) are: perfectible, self-surveilling, relentlessly optimizing, and continuously investing in their own inadequacy. The problem is not women looking at the “wrong screens.” The problem is the systems that built the screens—and profit when women lose themselves in the reflection. That’s why, for me, Girl on Girl is powerful but incomplete. It captures the feeling of living inside the mirror—but doesn’t fully explain who built it, nor what a better world would look like.

REVIEW:  "Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves" by Sophie Gilbert  2025 

RATING: 3 stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: Smitten: Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence, and How to Make Love Last by Tom Bellamy (2.5 stars)

I came to Smitten curious about the psychology of limerence — that intense, euphoric, often obsessive state that masquerades as love. While I don’t doubt limerence exists, this book offers more breadth than depth. It’s readable and occasionally insightful, but lacks original research and leans heavily on secondary sources. For a book that claims to explore the neuroscience of love, it feels more like pop psychology than rigorous analysis.

One of the book’s core issues is that it tries to do too much for too many audiences. Is it a basic primer on limerence? A neuroscience explainer? A self-help guide for people suffering from limerent obsession? It’s unclear. These goals could have been better served by splitting the material into separate books or at least distinct sections with more focus. As it stands, Smitten reads more like a collection of long blog posts than a cohesive, well-structured work.

Bellamy is clear that limerence is not a mental illness:

“Experiencing limerence is not a symptom of mental illness, a psychological wound or an emotional failing. For most limerents it is a normal part of the process of falling in love, albeit with a force that has a fierce and alarming power.” (Chapter 5)

He also addresses attachment theory, noting that while limerence is often associated with anxious attachment, it’s not exclusive to it:

“More than half of the population who do not have an anxious attachment style are limerents. But—and it is a big but!—eight out of ten people who have anxious attachments are limerents.” (Chapter 6)

Bellamy introduces a taxonomy of archetypes who supposedly attract limerent individuals — the damsel in distress, tortured soul, agent of chaos, bad boy/girl, the rock, the leader, the guru, the free spirit, the mysterious stranger. These are interesting sketches, but the framing implies intentional manipulation. In reality, these people may just be living out their own unresolved narratives. As I wrote in my notes: “Maybe they just have their own movie going.”

One of the few moments that rang true for me was in Chapter 14, where Bellamy writes:

“Limerence fades. Regardless of how spectacular the thrills are at the beginning of a relationship, expecting that euphoric connection to last more than a few months is unrealistic. Quite apart from how exhausting it would become, it doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Limerence is the drive to form a pair bond tight enough to result in conception; it has no real role in making it last.”

This echoed something I told an ex who broke up with me after more than two years together because “we get along too well, you’re too nice to me.” We were compatible intellectually, physically, emotionally — but they said, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” When I asked what being in love meant to him, they described a pattern of unreciprocated obsession that lasted “until they blocked my number/stopped speaking to me.” That’s not romance — that’s limerence as compulsion.

Chapter 15 is even titled “I love you but I’m not in love with you,” but instead of exploring the emotional fallout of that statement, it focuses on infidelity and the vulnerability of limerent individuals to extramarital obsession. It’s a missed opportunity to unpack how limerence can sabotage healthy relationships — not because the partner is lacking, but because the limerent person is chasing a feeling that’s unsustainable.

In Chapter 16, Bellamy suggests channeling limerent energy into self-improvement. This reminded me of my ex’s cycles of intense infatuation — not just with people, but with hobbies. He would dive deep into culinary knives and sharpening techniques, then Afro-Cuban drumming, then pottery. These weren’t casual interests; they were full-blown obsessions. I can’t help but see a connection between limerence and adult ADHD — especially the dopamine-driven novelty-seeking, emotional impulsivity, and hyperfocus that characterize both.

Chapter 17 introduces a “recovery mindset,” reminding readers that “limerence is happening in your head” — that it’s the limerent person who makes the object seem special. Bellamy advises readers to “check your instincts,” avoid self-medication, and accept that you can’t “just be friends” with a limerent object. He encourages building a life of purpose, listing traits like honesty, self-awareness, openness to renewal, courage to face discomfort, an internal locus of control, decisiveness, and action orientation.

“Creating a life without limerence... may not be as flashy and exciting as the thrills of limerence, but it is a deeper, more profound contentment. Finding a purpose, a goal you care about, a vision of what your life could be like if you took control of your destiny, shifts you from a state of passive dependency to one of active motivation. Living with purpose means you stop depending on the LO for comfort, stop following their lead, stop letting their behavior dictate your mood.”

This is solid advice — and probably the book’s strongest section — but it comes late and without much psychological depth. Bellamy doesn’t explore how neurodivergence, trauma, or attachment styles might shape limerent behavior. Nor does he offer tools for people who are in relationships with limerents — those of us who are “too nice,” too stable, too real to compete with the fantasy.

In the end, Smitten is readable and occasionally insightful, but it left me wanting more. More research, more nuance, more empathy for the people caught in the wake of limerent obsession. It made me want to revisit Dorothy Tennov’s original work — and to seek out more rigorous writing on the psychology of love, obsession, and neurodivergence.

REVIEW: Smitten by Tom Bellamy

RATING: 2.5-3 stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: Till Death Do You Part: A dark LGBTQ romantic thriller by Marisa Billions (3-stars)

 Another page-turner from Marisa Billions, opening with a gripping scene before diving into flashbacks. This suspenseful thriller is rich in detail about middle-class Southern California life and romance. I especially enjoyed the New Orleans references, which added depth to the setting, and appreciated that the romantic scenes were subtle rather than explicit.

I would’ve liked more insight into the protagonist’s emotional journey—particularly her sense of being underappreciated and losing her identity. Some of the marital arguments felt a bit stilted, while the chemistry with the new love interest was compelling, though it made me reflect on the line between genuine attraction and limerence.

After reading four of Billions’ books, I have to ask: where can I find a successful lesbian who’s emotionally available and not prone to jealous rage?

REVIEW: Till Death Do You Part: A dark LGBTQ romantic thriller  by Marisa Billions 

RATING: 3-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: We'll Prescribe You Another Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #2) by Syou Ishida (3 stars)

 I loved the first book, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, for its whimsical yet emotionally resonant storytelling. Unfortunately, the sequel didn’t quite live up to that promise. While the concept remains charming—a mysterious cat named Dr. Nikké prescribing feline companions to help humans navigate emotional challenges—the execution this time felt uneven and occasionally tone-deaf.

Much of the book’s attention is oddly focused on documenting cat poop and butt-sniffing, which detracts from the emotional depth of the stories. One quote from Dr. Nikké stood out for the wrong reasons:

“It’s no bad thing to be choosey about your cat, whether it be about its appearance or breed...”

This framing misses a valuable opportunity to promote fostering and rescue. Instead, it implies cats are interchangeable based on aesthetics or breed preference, which felt unsettling.

The first story arc had potential—a young woman with a distant, emotionally unavailable boyfriend is prescribed three purebred cats with distinct personalities. I expected a message about choosing companions (human or feline) based on emotional compatibility rather than looks, but the theme was never fully developed.

The second story, about an elderly man and his grandchild, was confusing but seemed to culminate in a shared mission to help neighbors find lost cats. The third story, featuring a jealous younger sister and a disconnected household, was more compelling. The prescribed munchkin cat helped bridge emotional gaps and reinvigorate family bonds.

The final story, centered on the older brother (a shelter worker), introduces a strange twist: Dr. Nikké appears in human form, borrowing the brother’s appearance. This creates confusion for the sister, but oddly, the brother doesn’t notice the resemblance. The mechanics of Dr. Nikké’s magical transformation are murky—he’s lethargic and locked in a pen, yet somehow projecting himself into the clinic. Is he dying? Exhausted? The ambiguity feels less magical and more inconsistent.

Overall, the book has moments of charm and insight, but it lacks the emotional clarity and thematic cohesion of the first volume. I’d love to see future installments embrace the realities of animal rescue and deepen the emotional arcs of the human characters.

REVIEW: We'll Prescribe You Another Cat (We'll Prescribe You a Cat, #2) by Syou Ishida 

RATING: 3 stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: Powerfully Likeable: A Woman's Guide to Effective Communication by Kate Mason (3-stars)

 Kate Mason’s Powerfully Likeable offers a timely and compassionate message: women can—and should—embrace both power and likeability without compromise. While the book’s tone is warm and conversational, it often reads like a podcast transcript or a series of blog posts, with personal anecdotes that sometimes illuminate but frequently overwhelm the core message.

One of the strongest chapters focuses on self-advocacy, particularly Mason’s story about working with a new manager during a promotion cycle. Her decision to create a one-page factual document listing her accomplishments—complete with metrics—was not only strategic but empowering. It’s a concrete example of how women can make their work visible and advocate for themselves effectively.

Mason also addresses the reluctance many women feel in claiming expertise, highlighting how hedging language (“I’m not an expert, but…”) and ritual apologies can undermine authority. Her advice on clear, confident communication—like using “Sushi Train Logic” to structure arguments—is practical and memorable, though often buried under layers of repetition.

The chapter on rest and overpreparation feels underdeveloped. While Mason introduces a useful four-step rubric for strategic preparation, her treatment of rest is cursory. She misses an opportunity to explore transitions, boundaries, and the mechanics of unplugging—topics that deserve more than a passing mention.

Ultimately, Powerfully Likeable is a book with heart and good intentions. It’s best suited for readers who enjoy coaching-style storytelling and are looking for encouragement rather than a tightly structured guide. For those seeking a more concise, research-driven toolkit, this may feel like a 1,400-pound tuna when a few well-cut fillets would do.

REVIEW: Powerfully Likeable: A Woman's Guide to Effective Communication by Kate Mason 

RATING: 3-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: Out of the Blue: A dark sapphic romantic thriller by Marisa Billions (3-stars)

 The final book in Marisa Billions’ trilogy, Out of the Blue, takes a sharp turn into thriller territory—and it’s a wild ride. This time, the spotlight shifts to Sophie, who has left her manipulative husband behind (with a hefty divorce settlement) and relocated to the Pacific Northwest to start fresh. She opens a yoga studio, makes quirky new friends, and begins to build a peaceful life. But peace doesn’t last long.

Soon, Sophie starts receiving threats, and women’s bodies begin washing up on the shore. The town is gripped by fear, and Sophie suspects her ex-husband is behind it all. Her new partner—who also happens to be the town mortician—adds a macabre layer to the story, offering detailed insights into the victims and their gruesome deaths.

The plot thickens with cults, kidnappings, and a murder spree that seems to be orchestrated by Sophie’s ex’s new love interest, who has started a cult of her own. The motive? Revenge for Sophie’s divorce settlement—though the logic is murky, the tension is real. Emma and Morgan return to help Sophie, and the story barrels toward a violent, chaotic climax. 

<spoiler>Emma ends up killing one of the attackers in the same way her first wife Bailey was killed—a chilling full-circle moment that ties back to the first book.</spoiler>

This final installment is twisty, dark, and at times over-the-top, but it delivers on drama and emotional payoff. Sophie’s arc—from manipulated cult member to survivor and business owner—is satisfying, and the return of Emma and Morgan gives the trilogy a sense of closure. It’s not a neat ending, but it’s a cathartic one.

REVIEW: Out of the Blue: A dark sapphic romantic thriller by Marisa Billions 

RATING: 3-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: Into the Blue Again by Marisa Billions (3-stars)

 After the intense and twisty "Like Sapphire Blue," I jumped straight into "Into the Blue Again," which shifts gears into a more introspective, emotionally layered story. Emma is released from prison early and begins the difficult process of rebuilding her life. This book is less about external conflict and more about healing, trauma, and the messy, nonlinear path to redemption.

A major focus is Emma’s relationship with Morgan, a woman she met while on the run in the first book. Their connection deepens through letters and Morgan’s handwritten journal, which Emma reads while incarcerated. Morgan’s story is deeply unsettling—she’s haunted by the ghost (or guilt) of her fiancé Jonathan, who died by suicide in a way designed to punish her emotionally. The ghost is cruel, manipulative, and clearly a manifestation of her unresolved trauma.

But Morgan’s past goes even deeper. She was part of a disturbing cult-like community where she was emotionally manipulated into marrying into a hetero couple. She was drawn to the wife, Sophie, but not the husband—who ultimately forces himself on her. This part of the story is handled with a raw, unflinching honesty that adds to the emotional gravity of the book.

Despite all this, Emma continues to show Morgan compassion and patience. She offers her multiple chances, even sending her airfare to help them reconnect. Their eventual reconciliation feels hard-won and emotionally satisfying, though the road there is anything but smooth.

This book is quieter than the first, but no less intense. It’s a deep dive into guilt, forgiveness, and the long shadows of trauma. If you’re already invested in Emma’s journey, this is a powerful continuation that rewards your emotional commitment.

REVIEW: Into the Blue Again by Marisa Billions 

RATING: 3-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: "We'll Prescribe You A Cat" (3 Stars)

We'll Prescribe You A Cat is a collection of short stories—or so it seems at first. Each chapter introduces a new character, a new struggle, and a new cat. But as the book unfolds, the stories begin to interlace, revealing a deeper, interconnected narrative centered around the mysterious Clinic for the Soul.

The clinic itself is a marvel: it appears when you need it most, staffed by an imperious nurse and a delightfully silly vet who, instead of pills or therapy, prescribe cats. Not just any cats—the cat you didn’t know you needed. The kind that curls up in the hollow places of your life and fills them with warmth, mischief, and meaning.

The book never explains how the clinic works, where the cats come from, or why it sometimes disappears. And it doesn’t need to. The magic lies in the acceptance that healing can be whimsical, that transformation can arrive on four paws, and that sometimes the best prescription is a purring companion who chooses you.

If you’ve ever been chosen by a cat—or wished you would be—this book will feel like a warm, knowing nudge from the universe.

We'll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida,  E. Madison Shimoda (Translator)

RATING: 3 stars

REVIEW: Stone and Sky (Rivers of London, #10) by Ben Aaronovitch (3-stars)

 I’ve been a fan of Ben Aaronovitch’s “Rivers of London” series since my good friend Matt first loaned me books 1-5 of the series many years ago.  I thoroughly enjoyed the sense of humor, the urban fantasy worldbuilding and its commitment to diversity. I have been looking forward to the latest installment in the series – which includes graphic novels and novellas.  

Unfortunately, plot and character seem to fall short in “Stone & Sky,” and I found more than a few distracting representational and structural issues that reduced my overall enjoyment.  More than previous installments in this series, this one (combined with my recent reading of the “Springtime Masquerade” and the two most recent graphic novels) illuminated questions about authenticity, authorial gaze, and the limits of metaphor in fantasy fiction.  

From uneven portrayals of queer relationships to the infantilization of magical beings, from the overuse of white male cultural references to the stylized rendering of dialect and slang, Stone & Sky reveals cracks in the series’ inclusive veneer. What emerges is a pattern of selective authenticity—where some identities are explored with depth and care, while others are flattened, exoticized, or reduced to narrative shorthand.

Queer characters have been present throughout the series—Thomas Nightingale, the emotionally reserved wizard, and Augustus “Gussie” Berrycloth-Young, a flamboyant figure in The Masquerades of Spring. Yet their romantic or sexual lives are treated with restraint, stylization, or humor. Nightingale’s queerness is acknowledged but rarely explored with emotional intimacy. Gussie is rendered as a campy, comedic figure whose attraction to men is more implied than deeply felt.

In contrast, Stone & Sky devotes significant narrative space to Abigail Kamara’s emotional and romantic attraction to Ione, a new female character. Abigail’s feelings are described with vivid emotional texture—her longing, her confusion, her desire. This disparity raises a critical question: why is a teenage girl’s same-sex attraction rendered with such depth, while adult queer male relationships remain emotionally muted?

Abigail is portrayed as a teenager in Stone & Sky, though her exact age is never explicitly stated. Based on the series’ internal timeline, she was born in 2000, which would make her 24 or 25 if the book is set in 2024–2025. However, the tone of the narrative—and the way her emotional development is framed—suggests she is still in her late teens. 

The narrative lingers on Abigail’s feelings for Ione in a way that feels less like a teenager discovering her identity and more like an adult imagining what that discovery might feel like. The emotional intensity, combined with the sensual framing, risks crossing into voyeurism -- especially given that the author, a white man in his 60s, is writing from the perspective of a teenage girl.

Writing across lines of identity—age, gender, race, sexuality—is not inherently problematic. But it requires care, humility, and a deep understanding of the lived experiences being portrayed. When a teenage girl’s romantic feelings are described with more emotional and sensual detail than any adult relationship in the series, it raises questions about authorial intent.

Is this Abigail’s authentic voice, or is it Aaronovitch’s projection of what a teenage girl might feel? The line between empathy and appropriation is thin, and in Stone & Sky, it feels increasingly blurred. The result is a portrayal that risks centering the author’s imagination more than the character’s truth. Back to Abigail’s voice in a moment.

Complicating matters further is the fact that Ione is not just a girl—she’s a siren, a magical being capable of manipulating human emotion through song. This raises a fundamental question: is Abigail’s attraction to Ione genuine, or is it the result of magical influence?

If Ione’s presence or voice can enchant anyone, then Abigail’s feelings may not be uniquely queer—or even uniquely hers. They could be induced, universal, or illusory. The narrative does not clearly interrogate this possibility, instead presenting Abigail’s emotional / hormonal / pheromonal experience as unquestionably real. This ambiguity undermines the authenticity of the queer representation the book seems to offer. If the attraction is magically induced, then it’s not a story about queer identity—it’s a story about manipulation and consent.  Is Abigail truly consenting if she’s under the influence of glamour?  Ione is presented as being at least 18 and heading off to uni – which further complicates the consent issue.  

The Rivers of London universe is populated with magical beings—faeries, selkies, talking foxes, river gods—who often serve as metaphors for marginalized or misunderstood communities. While this can be a powerful narrative device, it also risks reinforcing stereotypes through fantasy proxies.

The fae are portrayed as beautiful and emotionally distant; the foxes as tribal and cunning; the rivers as territorial and often exoticized. These portrayals can feel like stand-ins for real-world racial, ethnic, or social groups—especially when their behaviors are framed through suspicion or danger. As Borowska-Szerszun (2021) notes, Aaronovitch’s work attempts to challenge the “habits of Whiteness” in fantasy fiction but also reveals the “friction and negotiation” involved in representing difference.

When magical beings are used to explore social issues without naming them directly, it creates a safe distance for the author but also a lack of accountability in how those metaphors land.

Characterization of voice, intelligence and other traits is another very noticeable part of “Rivers of London.”  I remember the first time that I read D.H. Lawrence and couldn’t understand the dialect representation of the “lower class” manner of speaking.  Aaronovitch frequently and unevenly represents Jamaican patois, Scottish, Irish and Caribbean English phonetically as “dialect,” while “standard” British or American English is not, implying a linguistic norm and effectively othering some of the characters.  Using this technique can reinforce caricatures or reduce characters to their accents.  It also creates a power imbalance in representation – regional or ethnic pronunciations are marked as “different” or “exotic” while others are normalized.  

For example, more than in previous books in the series, Abigail’s dialogue is peppered with contemporary London slang, including terms like “bare,” “peng,” and “peak,” which are common in Multicultural London English (MLE). This is consistent with her earlier portrayals as a sharp, streetwise teen from South London who is very smart, picks up Latin and is training to be a wizard. However, in this novel, the use of slang feels exaggerated—almost performative—and stands in contrast to the way other young characters speak. Ione and her cousin Duncan, despite being close in age to Abigail, speak in a more neutral, almost formal tone (aside from occasional “Scottish as dialect” representations).

This inconsistency raises questions about why Abigail’s voice is so heavily stylized. Is it meant to emphasize her “urban” identity? If so, it risks reducing her to a stereotype—especially when other characters of similar age and background are not written with the same linguistic markers. It also reinforces a sense of “othering” within the narrative: Abigail becomes the “voice of the streets,” while others are allowed to speak more generically.

Rather shockingly – there are assertions made about the communication abilities or styles of other species / characters in the book.  The selkies—mythical seal-people—are depicted as unable to speak English. Instead, they “bark,” and their communication is described in animalistic terms. This portrayal strips them of linguistic agency and positions them as less-than-human, even though they are sentient beings with their own culture, and clearly intelligent enough to be pursued and enslaved/indentured to work on deep marine oil projects. 

This is compounded by a moment in which Beverley Brook, a river goddess and Peter’s wife, mentions attempts to communicate with bottle-nose whales—and dismisses them as “kind of stupid.”  While this may be intended as a humorous aside, it reinforces a troubling pattern: magical or non-human beings are often portrayed as primitive, unintelligent, or linguistically inferior, especially when they don’t conform to human (and specifically English-speaking) norms.

The portrayal of the talking foxes adds another layer to this critique. These creatures are shown to be technologically advanced—they have specially adapted tools to access the internet, maintain networks with humans for medical care and transportation, and operate with a high degree of autonomy. Yet Peter remarks, “if someone taught them to be spies then their teachers left some major gaps in their vocabulary.” This line, while humorous, undermines the foxes’ intelligence and agency.

Moreover, the foxes’ speech is rendered in a simplified, stylized dialect. They use phrases like “big diggy thing” instead of “boring machine,” which may initially seem charming or whimsical. But this linguistic reduction can also be read as a form of intentional infantilization—a way of making their intelligence appear quaint or incomplete. It’s possible Aaronovitch intended this as a commentary on how the foxes perceive human language, or even as a subversive joke about humans needing things “dumbed down.” But without clear narrative framing, it risks reinforcing the very stereotypes it might be trying to critique.

In effect, the foxes are presented as a paradox: technologically sophisticated, yet linguistically and culturally “othered.” Their dialect becomes a marker of difference, and their intelligence is constantly undercut by the way they are spoken about—and made to speak. This mirrors broader patterns in literature where dialect is used to signal inferiority or exoticism, especially when applied unevenly across characters.

This kind of framing echoes real-world colonial and racial narratives, where language and intelligence have historically been used as tools of dehumanization and domination. When magical beings are denied language—or mocked for their perceived lack of intelligence—it reinforces a hierarchy in which human (and often white, Western) characters are the default standard of intellect and civility.

In a series that otherwise tries to explore multiculturalism and magical diversity, this kind of portrayal feels regressive. It undermines the richness of the magical world by reducing some of its inhabitants to caricatures or comic relief.

Finally, let’s address a few of the larger, overarching tropes including the “Immortal White Wizard.” Thomas Nightingale, born in 1900, is over 120 years old in the Rivers of London timeline. Yet due to magical intervention, he appears to be in his early 40s—an ageless, elegant figure at the peak of his physical and magical power. He is consistently portrayed as the most powerful practitioner, the calm center of magical authority, and the one who saves the day when things spiral out of control.

In contrast, Peter Grant—young, Black, and the series’ protagonist—is often associated with chaos, improvisation, and collateral damage. His investigations are messy, his magic unpredictable, and his victories often come at a cost. While this may reflect a more modern, fallible hero archetype, it also reinforces a troubling dynamic: the older white man as the eternal, infallible guardian, and the younger man of color as the well-meaning but unstable apprentice.

This dynamic is further complicated by the fact that Nightingale’s age is magically concealed, allowing him to retain the visual and narrative authority of a man in his prime, while Peter is constantly reminded of his limitations—by others and by the narrative itself. For example, someone mentions that they “pulled a Peter” in the story.  Ouch.

Why does the old white man get to be timeless, powerful, and composed, while the younger Black protagonist is framed as volatile and reactive? This imbalance echoes a long tradition in fantasy literature where wisdom, power, and control are embodied in white, male, often aristocratic figures, while characters of color are positioned as learners, disruptors, or comic relief.

I also saw that the canon namechecking to be rather overbearing and too “insider-y” to be enjoyable.  Throughout Stone & Sky, Aaronovitch peppers the narrative with references to iconic figures and franchises—almost all of them white and male:

• Star Trek (Gene Roddenberry)
• Saruman (J.R.R. Tolkien)
• John Connor (Terminator)
• Darth Vader (Star Wars)
• Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who)
• The Lord of the Rings (“One does not simply…”)
• Neil Gaiman, referenced via the phrase “Neil Gaiman black”

These references are often used for humor or shorthand, but cumulatively, they reinforce a very narrow cultural canon—one that centers white male creators and their visions of fantasy, science fiction, and heroism.

This is especially jarring given the book’s attempt to foreground a young Black British girl as a protagonist. Why is Abigail—who is otherwise written with a distinct voice and cultural identity—constantly filtered through the lens of white male geek culture? Why not reference Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Marjorie Liu, or even Afrofuturist icons like Sun Ra or Janelle Monáe?

Even the reference to “Neil Gaiman black” is problematic— not only because it reduces a complex aesthetic to a single figure, but also because Gaiman himself has faced recent criticism for his public behavior and comments. In a book that already struggles with authenticity in voice and representation, this kind of namechecking feels less like homage and more like cultural defaulting—a reliance on the familiar, rather than an effort to expand the canon or reflect the diversity of its characters.

A quick visit to any online forum or fan site will reveal that many longtime readers have noted that the series has become increasingly formulaic. Each book introduces a magical disturbance, a new creature or system, and a procedural investigation that resolves with a mix of magic and logic. In Stone & Sky, this formula is stretched even thinner. The early chapters focus heavily on a family camping trip, with little narrative urgency or magical intrigue.

While this may be an attempt to deepen character relationships or explore quieter moments, it contributes to a sense of narrative drift. The stakes feel lower, the pacing more meandering, and the once-vibrant magical world increasingly routine.  There’s simply too much padding in this book.

One recurring distraction in Stone & Sky is the level of detail devoted to what characters are wearing and how they look—often with commentary that feels judgmental, class-coded, or simply unnecessary. For example, a character named Mason is described in terms that go beyond observation and veer into critique:

“He was a short white man in his early thirties, brown hair, curls on top and short at the sides that didn't really suit a square face with a prominent nose and thin lips. At least his head matched the rest of him - broad shoulders, short legs, but a much better suit than I would have risked wearing to work. Dark brown wool, bought off the shelf, I reckoned, but then tailored. Despite the weather, he wore a lambswool pullover over his shirt.”

Peter is mixed-race, younger and from a working-class background -- why would he be even care if someone’s suit was bought “off the rack” and then tailored? I understand he wouldn’t want to risk wearing expensive clothing to work since he often ends up in situations where his clothing is damaged – but why would that matter in a passing evaluation of another person in a different role?

Descriptions like this don’t just paint a picture—they evaluate the character’s appearance, often through the narrator’s subjective lens and many of these observations come across as mean-spirited or superficial, especially when repeated across multiple characters. These moments rarely advance the plot or deepen character insight. Instead, they feel like narrative padding—a way to fill space rather than build momentum.

This kind of detail might have worked better in a graphic novel, where visual storytelling could convey these elements more efficiently and with more nuance. Given the success of the Rivers of London graphic novels, it’s easy to imagine Stone & Sky functioning more effectively in that format—especially given its visual settings, magical creatures, and dual perspectives.

Final Thoughts: Stone & Sky attempts to expand the emotional and magical scope of the Rivers of London universe, but in doing so, it exposes several representational and structural weaknesses. Queer male characters are emotionally sidelined; a queer teen girl’s feelings are spotlighted with intensity that may not be her own. Magical beings are used as metaphors for social difference, but often in ways that reinforce rather than challenge stereotypes. Linguistic choices—from stylized slang to infantilizing dialect—further complicate the portrayal of identity and intelligence.

The series’ once-fresh formula is losing strength and its cultural references remain narrowly focused on white male creators. Even as it strives for diversity, Stone & Sky often defaults to familiar tropes and voices—leaving its most radical possibilities unexplored.

Aaronovitch’s work has always aimed to be inclusive. But inclusion without critical self-awareness can lead to distortion. If Stone & Sky is meant to be a story of queer awakening, magical discovery, and emotional growth, it needs to ask harder questions—about power, about authenticity, and about who gets to tell whose story.

References (Other than the "Rivers of London" related books):

Borowska-Szerszun, S. (2021). Ethnic and cultural diversity in Ben Aaronovitch’s urban fantasy cycle Rivers of London. Journal of Contemporary Literature, 12(3), 45–62. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335318094

Follypedia. (2023). Abigail Kamara. Retrieved from https://follypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Abigail_Kamara 

Follypedia. (2023). Thomas Nightingale. Retrieved from https://follypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Nightingale

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.