The Emily Wilde books are part of my Hugo nominee reading list. I found the second book amusing and fun to read. The plot engine works well: Emily and Wendell flee Cambridge after publishing groundbreaking research, pursued by Wendell's homicidal stepmother who wants to eliminate him as a rival claimant to the faerie throne. They rescue two missing academics trapped in faerie limbo, then Emily ventures into Wendell's kingdom to retrieve his cat—the only thing that can cure him of mysterious poisoning. She agrees to marry him. They reclaim his throne. The adventure elements are engaging, the stakes escalate pleasantly, and there's genuine pleasure in the narrative momentum.
Fawcett's interiority remains primarily Emily's, though a section where Wendell writes in her journal gives us his voice—a good choice that shows rather than tells his emotional investment. The relationships with the "small ones" (Poe and the new character Snowbell) gain depth and genuine affection. Supporting characters like Emily's niece Ariadne and department chair Farris Rose function primarily as plot devices. Rose begins as an antagonist wanting to fire both Emily and Wendell, but after the assassination attempt and magical fiasco in Wendell's class, he joins the trip and becomes an ally. Both characters are so flat and superfluous that removing them from the story would not materially change the narrative.
But the central problem persists: there is no real chemistry between Emily and Wendell. Emily finds him physically attractive: he has the prettiest golden locks and his green eyes make her lose composure. But that very marginal physical attraction exists alongside a fundamental mismatch in how they value and experience the world. Wendell is pathologically tidy, finds deep satisfaction in decorating and arranging spaces, attributes this to "house elf" ancestors. Emily observes that his efforts make spaces feel better, but she doesn't feel the drive to do it herself. She appreciates the outcome without understanding or sharing what motivates him. When she's shocked at how much better a space feels after he moves the rug and cleans the floor, she's making an intellectual observation, not experiencing genuine connection with his values.
This echoes the first book: he decorated the cottage and said "if you don't understand, you may never get it." She still doesn't understand. He continues performing emotional and domestic labor while she benefits and observes without meeting him. This includes tailoring and enchanting her clothing items so that she is protected but also looks more stylish. There’s a lot of repeated emphasis on Emily being “mousy” and unattractive. The "opposites attract" framework doesn't create interesting friction or genuine connection, just one-directional emotional labor that the book frames as romance. Wendell's "unrequited love finally requited" arc resolves with Emily agreeing to marry him while he is unconscious and because it solves a practical problem and she's attracted to him, not because she's actually reciprocating his emotional investment.
There's also a darker undercurrent: enchantments work like being roofied or groomed. Emily experiences memory gaps, foggy recollection, loss of agency when enchanted. The book treats enchantment similarly to predatory grooming—what happens to her with Wendell's stepmother, what the ice king did to her in Book 1. Having her agree to marriage with a faerie king after experiencing that kind of violation, without the book explicitly reckoning with the trauma or consent issues, is troubling. The romantic resolution doesn't acknowledge the gravity of what's been done to her. There's an implied sex scene in a tent in the Alps (Wendell uses magic to enchant her cloak into comfortable bedding), but it's not graphic—it codes as Young Adult despite the kidnapping, roofying, and manipulation throughout.
The anachronisms continue and deepen. Everyone wears cloaks constantly, but historical photos from 1900-1910 show people in snowy regions wore winter coats and jackets, not cloaks. It's another example of using historical aesthetic detail: cloaks feel old-fashioned and atmospheric but demonstrate either a lack of understanding of what people actually wore or failing to establish this aesthetic for this alt universe. This joins the real taxonomy words for invented faerie classifications and the other tonal inconsistencies from Book 1. The "cozy" label seems to mean "not dystopian" rather than actually cozy; the book is clearly a fantasy mystery/thriller with romantic elements, and the romance isn't working.
If Book 3 continues with zero chemistry as the baseline and expects readers to accept "he loves her, therefore they belong together" as sufficient romance, I'm not interested. The adventure plot can only carry so much weight.
This is the first book in a Hugo-nominated series and a genuinely fun book to read. Fawcett has created a premise with real charm—the faerie economics, the slow-burn romance between Emily and Wendell with its constant crackling tension, the humor that runs through the scholarly voice. The adventure works; the magic feels tactile and interesting. There's genuine pleasure in following Emily through the woods to find an enchanted tree, in watching Wendell charm his way through social situations that would paralyze her, in the domestic sparring between them where he understands something she keeps missing. The anachronistic elements—the wood-splitting lesbians, the bohemian freedom of the village community—read as charming rather than jarring. Fawcett isn't trying to write a museum piece of 1909 England; she's creating a world where faeries are real and certain social rules bend differently. That's actually enjoyable. And yet, as I read, I kept bumping up against choices the book makes about what it wants to be, choices that create real tensions between the story it's telling and the framework it's supposedly working within.
The author presents us with an alt universe where faeries exist and can be studied—but are elusive enough that few people really have deep knowledge of them. Our chief protagonist, Emily, is a relentless researcher driven by a deep desire to learn new facts and collect data. She's an intellectual and an adventurer who strives to be "first." She's balanced by her friend Wendell, a handsome bon vivant capable of charming just about everyone around him.
The book operates across three distinct layers:
Layer 1 -- Faerie Economics: The premise works beautifully: fieldwork to go find faeries, ask them questions, learn about how they operate. They don't like money or metal, but value trades of goods for information, for example. The trade of the brownie Poe of bread for shoveling snow is a great example and maybe that's "cozy." These are the faerie economics and the delightful surface-level details—descriptions of household furnishings and nesting that create a genuinely charming tone.
Layer 2 -- Romance and Reciprocity: The adventure parts are genuinely interesting and fun. Hiking through the woods to find an enchanted tree or a faerie winter fair, the magical artifacts and words are all engaging as are the "fight" scenes and magical conversion. The "will they/won't they" tension between Emily and Wendell is well-maintained. The role reversal in the domestic sphere is particularly effective—where she questions the value of decorating the rental cottage because they'll only be there a short time, and he basically says "if you don't understand, you may never get it" but she lets him do it anyway.
Interestingly, I'm reading "A Little Bit More Social" by Nicholas Epley in parallel, and there's a fascinating dynamic between Emily and Wendell. She wants to be "by the book" and pay for all her meals while doing fieldwork to avoid bias, but creates bias by doing so. Wendell has to teach her about developing trust through genuine connection and allowing others agency. Creating space for reciprocal interaction is what allows relationships to develop. By the end of the story, Emily demonstrates through her advice to Aud about gifts for Wendell that she's picking up on this—she now thinks of him and what would make him happy, translating the villagers' gratitude into something meaningful to him specifically.
Layer 3 -- Horror: But then there's the third layer: kidnapping and child trafficking, homicidal rage and torture. Emily being enchanted to control her and cutting off her own finger with the axe to maintain some control is sheer body horror. The horror of being enchanted and the clinical way she processes that entire traumatic experience—journalling it, trying to track days—suggests something important about her character.
In some ways, Emily is neurodivergent coded. Her inability to read danger and heed warning signs (even with Wendell standing on the other side of a river bank warning her and trying to get her to step back); her incomprehension of Wendell's care for her and her repeated mentions that she can't "read" the emotions on his face (and the faces of others), constantly creating misunderstanding by not reading others or social norms; the horror of being enchanted, cutting off her own finger and processing that entire traumatic experience clinically—these all suggest neurodivergent coding. Interestingly, this context helps explain what might otherwise be historical implausibility.
The book is set in 1909-10, yet the social environment doesn't really communicate that era. Emily Wilde is a professor at Cambridge, an institution that didn't grant women academic status until 1948. Women could not get a Cambridge degree until after WWII, let alone be a tenure track professor. Forget about holding an academic position. And while Wendell reaches out to Emily's host in fake Iceland to arrange to show up—suddenly her squalid cottage is a 3-bedroom house with space for Wendell and his two student assistants to join Emily. In the early 20th century, an unmarried woman and unmarried man sharing lodgings would have been highly irregular and would have had serious consequences for both of them professionally.
More problematically, Wendell is casually sleeping with village women in the house he's sharing with Emily and the students, and no mention is made of why casual sex is laughed off in an era when reliable birth control and social norms were opposed to this sort of behavior. He is potentially leaving women pregnant or infected with STDs, and the book glosses over that predatory behavior as part of his "charm." The women are grateful for the opportunity to have slept with him and think of him as a sex doll? There are no shotgun weddings, and it's all much more bohemian than I would imagine for an isolated rural village in fake Iceland.
This might be less concerning if Emily's neurodivergent coding explained her obliviousness to these dynamics. But the book itself doesn't address the consequences; it simply ignores them.
Sometimes, I think that authors choose to set books in the pre-technology past just to avoid the complications of computers, internet and cell phones. The stories read like they are set in contemporary times except for descriptions of long skirts and horse-drawn conveyances.
It's telling that Fawcett renames Iceland but keeps Cambridge. If she were truly committed to building an alternate world free from historical constraints, renaming the university would have been trivial—call it Ashford College or Thornton University. But she keeps "Cambridge," and that choice reveals the problem. Cambridge carries centuries of institutional authority and prestige; it lends credibility to Emily's position in a way an invented university wouldn't. But that same real name also carries the historical baggage that women couldn't actually be there as degree-granting students in 1909, let alone as professors. By keeping the real institution's name while ignoring the real constraints, Fawcett gets to have it both ways: the atmospheric weight and authority of a real place, without having to reckon with what that place actually was. It's selective use of historical detail taken to its logical endpoint—keeping what feels grounded and authoritative, discarding what complicates the narrative.
Once you suspend disbelief entirely for this alt world—there's a Department of Dryadology at Cambridge that has female professors and students in 1909—then we can move on to some of the other challenges, such as a young villager having a same-sex love interest in another village that is accepted by her neighbors as normal and sweet. Okay, Boston marriages were not unheard of at that time, but the later conversation about dating history and a spurned lesbian lover attempting to burn down a barn was emblematic of how alternative we're talking here.
Finally, my other objection is the description of "cozy." There's not much cozy in kidnapping and torture, so I can only imagine that the "cozy" part refers to the emphasis on clothing and household furnishings. It's more like a fantasy mystery/thriller with romantic elements and a scholarly framing. The academic tone and the relationship growth don't erase the fact that there are serious crimes and real harm happening. The contrast between Emily's intellectual, almost humorous observations and the actual darkness of what's going on might feel tonal, but that doesn't make it cozy.
One last note: Emily overly depends on the word "habit" to a noticeable degree.
REVIEW: Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
RATING: 3-stars
As a child, I felt I had no choice in the matter of religion: baptism, first communion, confirmation, going to church on weekends or catechism on Tuesday nights when I would rather be doing anything else.
I have often wondered: why I couldn't just request excommunication from the Catholic Church? There should be a certificate, right? It seemed simple: I don't believe in it, I haven't participated in it for decades, and I don't want to be counted among its members. Surely there was a form. A process. Something.
With all the recent headlines about the schism created by the Vatican excommunicating six bishops and 750 priests and any lay followers of Society of Saint Pious X (SSPX) -- I decided to dig into this a bit more. What I learned is that excommunication is something the church does to you and it is a punishment for heresy or transgression. You can't request it. You can't opt in. It's an action the institution takes when it decides you've crossed a line. If you just want to leave quietly, you're still in their files.
But there is a way out. Not excommunication. Something better: formal defection. Annotation. A paper trail that says, explicitly and on record, "I was here, and then I chose to leave, and this is not my belief system."
That's what I'm doing this week. That's what I'm asking you to consider too, if you've ever felt the same frustration I did.
I was baptized at a Lutheran church when I was a few months old. I didn't have a choice in the matter - my parents made that decision for me, without my input, without my understanding, without my consent. It was just what people did and it was considered "normal."
By the time I was in elementary school, we switched to catholicism, adding more sacraments to the list: holy communion and reconciliation. I was a kid in third, fourth, fifth grade - still not choosing, still just doing what my family told me to do because that's what you did. Then confirmation, as a minor making a "choice" that wasn't actually a choice. My mother says I could have said "no" but she made it really clear that there would be hell to pay and I actually thought that there would be an earthquake and the roof of the church would crack open if I did that.
I haven't stepped foot in a church for worship or services in nearly forty years. I don't identify as Christian or with any other religious tradition. These childhood commitments that were made for me but don't represent me. They never did after I was old enough to think for myself.
And yet, somewhere in those institutional files, I'm still being counted. In their membership numbers. In their statistics. In their records of who belongs to them.
Any genealogist knows: Churches keep detailed records. Baptisms. Sacraments. Confirmations. Communions. These are logged, filed, and retained indefinitely. They use these records to calculate membership numbers, which they report to their denominations, which get used in funding decisions and institutional statistics. You're in their database. If you were baptized anywhere, you're counted. Even if you've never set foot in that building again.
Here's what really bothered me: fifty years from now, when someone in my family is doing genealogy research, they're going to find those records and they'll think, "Oh, she was Catholic/Lutheran."
They won't know that I never chose this. That these were things done to me as a child by my parents. That I spent the last forty years not believing any of it.
The record will misrepresent me, not maliciously, but completely. It'll tell the future a story about who I am that isn't true.
This is a data problem. It's a consent problem. It's an institutional power problem.
We spend a lot of time talking about data privacy. About opting out of data brokers. About getting your information removed from credit reporting agencies. About controlling your own digital footprint. But for some reason, when it comes to religious institutions, we just... accept that they keep records on us in perpetuity, count us in their membership numbers, and there's nothing we can do about it.
That's not right.
Turns out both the Lutheran and Catholic churches have processes for this.
The Catholic Church has a thing called "formal defection" in their canon law. It's not heavily publicized. Most priests probably won't bring it up. But it exists. If you were baptized Catholic and you want to formally withdraw, you can request it.
Lutheran churches handle it differently, but they do honor formal withdrawal requests and will annotate your baptismal records.
The key thing -- and this is important -- is annotation, not erasure. We're not trying to pretend the baptism never happened. It did happen. It's part of the historical record. What we're doing is adding a notation that says, "This person was baptized/confirmed/received communion, and they have formally and voluntarily withdrawn from this institution and should not be counted as a member."
That notation matters. It preserves the truth of what happened while also making it absolutely clear what the person's actual position is. Future genealogists won't be confused. The record won't lie about who I am.
It's straightforward, and you don't need a lawyer or a priest to hold your hand through it.
Step one: Identify which churches you have sacramental records with. If you were baptized, you know that one. If you did first communion or confirmation, you know those churches too.
Step two: Write a letter to each church. Keep it simple. Include:
Step three: Make your requests explicit:
Step four: Set a boundary. I put this in mine: "Please process this request administratively without sending clergy, elders, or parish representatives to contact me for exit interviews or outreach. I expect my privacy and decision to be respected."
They might not honor that boundary. But it's worth stating.
Step five: Send it certified mail, return receipt requested. You want a paper trail.
I'm sharing the language from my own letters because it works. Here's what I used:
[Your mailing address]
[Date]
[Church name and address]
Dear [Pastor/Father name],
Please accept this letter as formal notification that I am permanently severing all ties and withdrawing my membership from [denomination], effective immediately.
[Brief context about when you received sacraments, under what name, and that it was decided by your parents/family, not by you]
These childhood actions did not reflect my personal beliefs then, nor do they now. I do not consider myself a member of [the church/this religious institution].
I request that you immediately take the following actions:
- Completely remove my name, contact information, and records from your active parish membership and administrative rosters.
- Place a permanent, formal written notation next to my entry in your [baptismal/sacramental/confirmation] register explicitly stating that I have formally and voluntarily withdrawn from church membership.
- Reply with a brief written confirmation to my mailing address verifying that my record has been updated and annotated.
Please process this request administratively without sending clergy or parish representatives to contact me for exit interviews or outreach. I expect my privacy and decision to be respected.
Sincerely,
[Your current name]
That's it. Clean. Direct. No emotion, no explanation, no room for debate. You're not asking permission. You're informing them of an action you're taking.
If you've ever wondered, "Why can't I just opt out? Why am I still counted? Why do they get to keep my information?" this is your answer. You can opt out. There is a process. It's just not advertised, and most people don't know it exists.
This matters if:
It matters because your institutional identity shouldn't be determined by what your parents chose for you when you were an infant. It shouldn't persist just because you never formally objected. And it shouldn't be used in statistics that misrepresent your actual beliefs and affiliations.
This is a workaround. It shouldn't have to be. Ideally, churches would make this easy. They'd have a form. A process. A way to formally withdraw that didn't require you to figure it out yourself and send certified letters.
But until they do, this is how you take back control of your own institutional record.
I'm sending my letters this week. I'll update this post once I get responses—which churches honor the requests, how quickly they process them, what they actually do with the annotations. Because real data matters. This isn't just theory; it's something people can actually do.
If you've been sitting with the same frustration I had—wanting out, not knowing how—now you know. You have more agency than you think. Your records belong to you. And you can demand they reflect the truth about who you actually are.
Go reclaim your institutional autonomy. The churches can survive without counting you.
Talk to Me Nice reads like a warm pep talk — as an audiobook, it feels like a supportive voice in your ear reminding you of things you already know but sometimes forget to practice. Minda Harts brings her trademark encouragement and identity‑centered perspective, offering relatable scenarios and steady affirmations aimed at helping readers find their voice and navigate early workplace dynamics.
For seasoned leaders or anyone who has read widely in communication, influence, or organizational behavior, this won’t break new ground. The concepts are familiar, and the framing is intentionally simple. But that’s also the point: this is a book designed for people at the beginning of their professional journey. The journal prompts at the end of each chapter are especially useful, giving newer professionals a structured way to reflect and build confidence.
I’d recommend this most strongly for early‑career readers — even older teens — who are just starting to think about communication, self‑advocacy, and leadership in a methodical way. As an audiobook, it’s an easy, encouraging listen. For more experienced readers, it’s pleasant reinforcement rather than revelation.
I loved every novella nominee I read this year. Most of them would work just as well, maybe better, for a young reader as any of the 650-page books currently marketed as YA or YA-adjacent. That's really the whole observation here. I'm not trying to relitigate the "why is YA bad" discourse that's apparently already all over TikTok -- I haven't watched any of it, and I don't need it to have an opinion based on what I actually read this season. I just want good books. Age category is beside the point.
The novellas earned their length. I went into this year's Hugo process already planning to rank Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz #1. I'd read it as an ARC last year and loved it. It's doing something genuinely distinct within the same broad territory as the rest of the category: identity, chosen family, and fulfillment, but through non-human, non-binary characters — robots and synthetic humans figuring out their own gender identities on their own terms (robot sex included, and it's funny). But the competition this year is genuinely stiff; every novella I picked up held its own. The Summer War by Naomi Novik, Cinder House, and The River Has Roots are all doing versions of the same thing from a different angle: twisting traditional fairy tale and mythological structures toward something that actually values female agency, love, and family — without tipping into sappiness or self-importance about it. (Cinder House in particular is spicy and genuinely weird, in the best way.) None of these books pad. Every worldbuilding choice and character beat is there because the story needs it, not because there's 500 pages to fill.
The doorstoppers didn't earn their length. I read Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar earlier this summer: 650 pages, nine Guardian Animals, a map promising nine palaces the story barely visits. There are real ideas in there (a genuinely compelling possession theme, a court intrigue plot that could've carried the whole book alone), but they're smothered under too many subplots and minor characters, all competing for space and none getting quite enough to develop properly. Bloated and thin at the same time -- that's what happens when length substitutes for structure instead of following from it.
I saw the same failure mode, from a different angle, across Tracy Deonn's Legendborn trilogy. Book one set up something specific — a grieving, academically advanced 16-year-old navigating exceptional circumstances, grounded by her father and her own competence. By book three, that infrastructure is just gone: her father barely appears, the protagonist's sidekick goes from the most competent person in the room to a coma-bound plot device for someone else's arc, and thematically loaded material — root magic as gendered power, a trafficking plot involving children — gets raised and never examined. Where Hodgson's problem is too many ideas with no room to breathe, Deonn's is real ideas set up carefully and then abandoned as the series goes on. Different mechanism, same result: a book that's long but not full.
Age classification isn't the variable that matters. Some of my favorite reading this Hugo season was the graphic novel category — The Space Cat, written by Nnedi Okorafor with art by Tana Ford, aimed at a much younger readership than any of the above, and doing more with confident, uncluttered storytelling than a lot of the "adult" nominees managed at ten times the length. A good book knows what it's doing with the space it has. That's it. That's the whole thesis.
Another excellent Hugo nominee candidate for 2026, I'd have given this three stars right after finishing it — enjoyed it, moved on to read other books. I kept turning this one over in my mind and just about every thread I pulled on turned out to be load-bearing. That's a four-star book. Bring on whatever Tesh does next.
"The Incandescent" sprinkles in some excellent humor throughout. I also listened to this partly as audio book and quite enjoyed the narration.
Dr. Sapphire Walden runs Chetwood School's magic department the way you'd expect from someone who's spent two decades turning herself into an institution: forms, wards, risk assessments, six hundred teenagers with the theoretical capacity to accidentally summon something "approximately as destructive as a nuclear bomb." She's also got a tenth-order demon called the Phoenix bound into the tattoos on her arm, a decade-old leash she keeps because it's the only way she survived losing her boyfriend to a different demon at seventeen,at this same school. She says outright that she's the most powerful magician to ever walk through Chetwood's gates, and that's not incidental swagger. It's why she came back at all. This is the place that took Charlie from her as a student, and she's returned as the one person capable of standing between it and the student body, which makes the whole book as much a reckoning as it is a workplace story. On the surface this is dark academia with a competent forty-year-old at the wheel instead of a student, which is reason enough to read it. Underneath, it's doing something sneakier: the entire demon-containment premise is a metaphor for what Walden does to herself.
Start with the names: she's referred to as"Walden" like you would refer to someone in a news story, the military or sports team, or maybe this is normal for boys in UK public schools. It's a convention that gives her more authority than she feels her given first name would -- and creates distance dressed up as professionalism. "Dr. Walden" is a step further in, not out — the title she's earned and insists on from almost everyone, the credentialed self she holds up as a shield precisely because it can't be argued with. "Saffy" is the one people only get it after they've done something to earn actual vulnerability from her, not competence or tenure, and there aren't many of them. She sees her given name "Sapphire" as too "pretty" and feminine; she feels exposed by it and doesn't feel comfortable to use it. Her family likely would be able to safely invoke that name whether she liked it or not. Four names, four escalating layers of control over how close anyone's allowed to get, and the book only lets you hear the real one in the handful of moments she stops managing herself long enough to be touched. In a book literally about invocation and binding — where naming a thing is how you control it — that's not incidental. She's doing to her own name exactly what she does to demons: containment through diminishment.
The Phoenix itself is the same impulse taken to its limit. She didn't just survive a demon encounter and get stuck with the thing, she summoned a tenth-order demon during her PhD research specifically to prove she could bind and control something that size, and then kept it leashed in her own skin for over a decade as a kind of walking dissertation defense. It's not a trauma she's managing, it's an achievement she engineered: the ultimate credential, proof that even the most dangerous thing imaginable can be made to sit obediently under her authority. Which makes it the purest version of the "Dr. Walden" persona there is, not armor she happened to acquire, but armor she built from scratch and can point to as evidence she never needs anyone.
Laura Kenning, the school's Chief Marshal, is the person who gets to see past the armor, and their slow burn is genuinely good: two extremely competent people sparking off each other in the middle of actual crises. She's also the one Walden is most helplessly attracted to, which is exactly the problem. Mark, by contrast, she essentially falls into bed with, and the book is careful to show that it's never more than that — a body she can keep at "Walden" distance the entire time, no real self on offer from either side. That's precisely why he's safe. He was never going to ask for Saffy. Laura is the one who might, and the book doesn't let this be easy: the second Laura gets pulled away and real intimacy becomes possible, Walden reflexively fills the vacancy with the person who requires nothing of her. It's the same reflex as the name, just played out physically instead: whatever's dangerous, whatever might actually get in, contain it or swap it for something smaller. Her past relationships get the same treatment in the way they're described; even in memory she keeps them at surname distance, competent and clipped, nothing that reads like she ever let anyone see more than "Dr. Walden" required.
The book also just proves the point through action, which I appreciated more than any amount of subtext could have managed on its own. Every time Walden is actually in danger, it's Laura who shows up and has her back, no hesitation, competence meeting competence. Laura even takes the fall after the first incident which is what takes her briefly out of Walden's orbit at Chetwood. When Walden takes newly hired consultant (and uncle of a smarmy student) Mark out on a security check -- he disappears the second anything sketchy happens. He's not backing her up, leaving her to handle it alone. So no, I did not feel bad when he ends up locked in stasis in the void. The man is a tool who vanishes the moment something requires him to actually be present for someone, and the book quietly lets his behavior in a crisis do what pages of interiority couldn't: show you exactly why he was never a real option, whatever Walden or the Phoenix told themselves about it.
The book is also very funny about all this, which keeps it from tipping into self-seriousness. The Phoenix, once actually let out to have opinions, puts Walden on a fitness regimen — not as discipline, but because its whole argument is "you have this body, use it, why are you just letting it sit there and run risk assessments." It's more pointed than a demon just liking bodies: the thing she summoned specifically to prove her own control is the one voice that keeps arguing against control as the goal, in favor of a woman who's spent twenty years treating her own body as infrastructure actually living in it instead.
Later there's a gut-punch of a reveal that she's had Mark locked in stasis for months, which retroactively explains her blind spot: she wasn't fooled, she just handled the threat the only way she knows how, which is binding rather than confronting. What I found genuinely unsettling, though, is that the book never fully separates out whose call any of this was. She catches Mark stepping out with another colleague, and that seems to be the thing that tips the Phoenix but by that point Walden and the Phoenix are so fused that you can't tell where her own fury ends and the demon's takes over. Was the fitness regimen her, using the Phoenix as an excuse to finally treat her body like it's hers? Was locking Mark away her decision, or the Phoenix's, once it decided she couldn't be trusted to protect herself? The book doesn't answer that, and I don't think it's supposed to. It's the dissertation's whole premise coming back around: she proved she could control the Phoenix, and a decade later it's an open question whether the control was ever real, or whether it was hers to begin with. Not every demon in this book gets that kind of ambiguity, either — Old Faithful, who wears her dead boyfriend's face to torment her, is just monstrous, no interiority offered, and correctly gets fought rather than befriended. The book is careful about that distinction; it's not arguing everything scary is secretly fine if you just let it out, it's arguing you have to learn to tell the difference, even when the line runs straight through the middle of your own body.
There's a nice parallel running alongside all this in Nikki Conway, Walden's star student, whose own hesitation about leaving for university is running the same test at a different life stage — not "can I be loved" but "can I trust myself with more room than what already feels survivable." The book is smart enough not to make this a mentor-transmits-wisdom arc. Nikki doesn't learn from Walden's example; they're each stuck figuring out, independently, that the caution that once kept them alive has calcified into a ceiling. At the end of the story, they are both pecking those little cracks in their protective shells and preparing to spread their wings into something new and different - and I am cheering them on!
I have to confess, it took me a minute to really get into Tainted Cup—I picked it up and put it down (or let it expire off Libby) a few times well before the Hugos. One of my "Scent Head" friends who loves a good Diptyque candle came to visit me in July (and brought me a Diptyque candle) and told me how much he had really enjoyed the Ana and Din mysteries. I threw myself back into both books and I'm really glad I did.
It's a strange "bio-punk" kind of world—they have advanced gene editing and can (apparently) resurrect extinct races of intellectually superior but possibly less stable beings, but they don't have cell phones and use mycological solutions for HVAC and lighting (do they even have electricity?). One thing I'm not sure they do in this world is have FUN. Everything seems to be quite a lot of work to be part of this empire. Din has undergone some serious genetic changes in order to become an "engraver"—and he triggers his eidetic memory skills with scents. Ana, well, she's a different animal. Literally. One tic in this book is that her smile is repeatedly described as "predatory," which makes me think she must be smiling like an absolute lunatic (thinking Jack Nicholson in The Shining).
These are more detective novels than murder mysteries and the world-building is sometimes opaque and challenging to track, but that's why we have ebooks to search for words and recall context, I suppose. I also listened to the audiobooks for both of these books, and found them to be very enjoyable.
Din is a dyslexic, tall, dark and handsome young man who isn't averse to surreptitiously picking up a few "skills" here and there to help with his investigations. He seems to be pansexual but has a same-sex romantic attachment from the first book, Tainted Cup. He also blows off steam by picking up one night stands.
Ana appears to be late middle-aged with wild white hair—a genius with yellow eyes like a wolf or a cat when she's not blindfolded to reduce stimulus. She fuels her genius for identifying patterns from Din's reports and the mountains of books she reads with a paleo diet of raw animal flesh in breathtaking quantities. While Din comes from a commoner background, Ana's background is a bit more mysterious—and it's a mystery she maintains on purpose, surprising Din with her ability to roleplay in the moment to manipulate social elites, and with the breadth and depth of her knowledge.
Ana is a savant operating on a totally different level from everyone around her. For example, when she tasks Din to visit the island where all the Leviathan extractions are processed and learns he will be wearing a full PPE suit with helmet, he worries about how he will be able to provide a proper report. Din can't easily supplement his memory with written notes the way other investigators might. Ana has already solved the problem in a way Din never could have anticipated. It's the kind of moment that reminds you why she's indispensable: she thinks several moves ahead, in directions nobody else is even looking. And Din seems to be learning.
The map of the empire raises questions. In our world, we know where seals, sea lions and turtles come ashore to reproduce, or where salmon spawn and die. We work around those patterns to help avoid interspecies conflict. The people of this world build right in the path of these incredibly dangerous creatures (no two of them look the same) and put people in real jeopardy despite erecting massive walls and staffing them with trained military personnel.
There are defenses in concentric circles, with the most elite, protected areas in the first ring, farthest from the sea. Yet farther north at the top right of the map, we see no wall because the Leviathans don't come ashore there. There's also heaps of court intrigue and empire negotiations with a holdout kingdom—which holds the processing area for the Leviathans. It seems like everything this empire does is to create as much discomfort for the people as possible. It's always hot and wet, but people wear heavy wool uniforms that are incredibly uncomfortable. If it's practically a coastal jungle, why do they all have to wear heavy capes as part of their uniforms? The empire does not have the best interests of the people at heart. Obviously.
We are somewhat limited in our view of this world, from Din's perspective, which means we don't know what lies beyond the sea, or even to the west of the landmass we see on the map. Does anyone go there? What else is on this planet? Is it just one big landmass with a few islands off the coast? We aren't getting massive info dumps about "the whole world," which I appreciate a lot. This world is developed in a way that builds intrigue and lets me follow where Din is leading me.
While the main "mystery" is mostly solved early in A Drop of Corruption, the pair spend the rest of the story chasing the elusive killer and trying to pin down the connection to a massive bio-pharma plant that processes (and perhaps cultivates) the critical ingredients for the mysterious Leviathans that live in the adjacent sea—which form the basis of all the genetic modifications that people utilize in this world.
What I really liked is that both books wrapped up the primary problem and challenges by the end and along the way - the author built a foundation of details for the characters, their interiority and personalities that intrigued me and was able to keep that momentum going through the second book. I'm very much looking forward to the third book.
"A Drop of Corruption" is a detective novel masquerading as a mystery—which is to say, Bennett solves the central puzzle early and then uses the remaining 300 pages to chase a serial killer and a massive bio-pharma conspiracy. It works because the characters are this good.
Din is a dyslexic engraver whose eidetic memory triggers on scent. Ana is a wild-haired genius in her late middle years who reads obsessively and fuels her pattern-recognition with raw meat in staggering quantities. Their partnership is the book. When Din must enter a sterile bio-pharma clean room where his usual scent vials are forbidden, Ana creates a solution: a scent made from his sweat and the plants and leather of his PPE. It's the kind of detail that reveals everything about how completely she understands him.
The world-building is opaque and sometimes infuriating—how do they have gene-edited extinct races but no electricity? Why heavy wool uniforms in a coastal jungle? Why build walls in animal migration paths?—but that's intentional. We see only what Din sees. The empire is hostile and nonsensical because that's what empire does. It extracts maximum discomfort while calling it order. It doesn't have your best interests at heart. It never does.
Both the audiobook performances are excellent. The mystery doesn't break new ground, but the character work, the worldbuilding contradictions, and the relationship between Din and Ana are enough to carry you through and leave you wanting book three immediately.
REVIEW: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
RATING: 4.5-stars
