Genre: Magical Realism, middle-grade/young adult Published: Levine Querido, April 2024 My Rating: 5/5 stars with a warming ghostly glow... "For us, it’s easy to mistake The Below for home." In my very first review of Elatsoe back in 2021, I named it “one of those magical books I wish had been around when I was a child”, as it would’ve been a foundational book for me. Luckily, that never stopped me from adoring it all the same as an adult, and joyfully adding it to my all-time favourite list. Since then, I’ve reread it a number of times and have been well on my way to considering Darcie Little Badger a favourite author, sheerly based on my love for this one book. Then came the announcement I didn’t see coming; a new book in the same world, functioning as a prequel to Elatsoe. After finishing Sheine Lende, I can confidently say that I’m no longer “considering Darcie Little Badger might become a favourite author”; she is an all-time favourite for sure! The Story: Sheine Lende is set in the same world as Elatsoe, and functions as a prequel to Ellie’s story. Although there are references to the first book throughout, the story follows a completely new cast of characters and can be read as a standalone as well. We follow Shane, Ellie’s grandmother, whom we already know has lead an interesting life, and shared the same talents of communicating with (animal) spirits. Shane works with her mother and their ghost dogs, tracking down missing persons even when their families can't afford to pay and authorities don’t seem to care. When her mother, alongside a local boy, is next in line to disappear after a strange interaction with a fairy ring, Shane takes it upon herself and her ghost dogs to return her home safely. Together with her brother, her friends, and her lone, surviving grandparent - who isn't to be trusted - set off on a journey to find them. But they may not be anywhere in this world - or this place in time. What I loved: I’ve mentioned before that Elatsoe is one of those quintessential comfort books for me. There is an almost indescribable quality to the writing that radiates comfort, warmth and whimsy, despite not shying away from heavier subject matter. Sheine Lende, carries forward that same atmosphere through its shared themes. Both stories are essentially about family and generational -love (covering both biological family and found-family alike), and how these connections to our supporting networks can carry us through the darkest of times. The worldbuilding is rooted in Apache mythology, from an own-voice perspective of the author. I deeply admire how the author manages to honour her culture and history by intertwining threads of generational- and cultural trauma specific to the native America experience, whilst also writing about themes universal enough to be relatable for readers from a variety of backgrounds. None of this was a surprise of course; I knew full well that Darcie Little Badger was capable of this kind of writing from reading Elatsoe. What díd surprise me was how invested I got in the new cast of characters from page one. I didn’t think Shane would be able to hold a candle to my love and investment in Ellie and Kirby, yet I think I loved both protagonist equally in the end. Ellie and Shane are distinctly different, strong characters, but share a very important quality. They both are strong because their community allows them to be. They stand on the shoulders of giant and know themselves to be backed by the ghost of the generations that proceeded them. That powerful sense of connection is the backbone to anchor of the story and the beating heart of my love for it. This is where I’d usually include my “what I didn’t love”-section, but I honestly have no points of critique to give here… Elatsoe did something truly special for me: it’s the kind of book that feels like a strengthening and encouraging hug from a loved one. I didn’t think Sheine Lende, would be able to match that, but it absolutely did, maybe at times even surpassing it for me personally! This is a gem of a novel, that I cannot recommend highly enough. Many thanks to the author and Levine Querido for providing me with (yes, I’ve said it!) my most anticipated ARC of the year. All opinions are my own. You can find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Literary fiction, dystopian Published: Grove Press, April 2nd 2024 My Rating: 4/5 stars “If you’re heading out to sea to find the spirit of your beloved, then go while something rare and infinitely lucky is hanging in the sky.” A grief-stricken man sets sail on Lake Superior against the background of a dystopian future-America wrecked by climate change, political- and economical division and more. Although the cover-blurb makes allusions to an “Orphean narrator”, what follows is more of a personal Odyssey on a micro-scale, but with the lyrical impact worthy of an epic comparison. We follow Rainy, a gentle giant of a man, on his journey across the waters of his metaphorical grief over the loss of his wife Lark, as well as the literal waters of Lake Superior. What starts as an introspective and almost meditative journey, slowly offers a broadening scope of the world around, and with that a better understanding of how the events of Rainy- and Lark’s past brought him here. What I loved: With Enger's name, and the allusions towards Greek mythology attached to it, it won’t come as a surprise that this is an incredibly ambitious novel from a structural and literary point of view. I was blown away by its achievements in that regard. It strongly reminded me of Station Eleven (one of my all-time favourite novels!) in tone, themes and personal impact on me as a reader. I personally especially loved the first half, where the scope is tight and inward focused on Rainy, the solitary sailing, and the many weathers of Lake Superior mirroring the different faces of his grief. In the second half, Rainy spends less time alone, meeting up with different passengers and passers-by, which give us a glimpse into the dystopian world at large. This slow spiraling out felt incredibly natural and well-paced. Without spelling it out in detail, we learn everything we need to understand the America that Rainy lives in. Pandemics, political crisis and a wealth-disparity so large that the 16 richest families are known as “The Astronauts”, for being so far removed from the rest of the population. Enger needs few words to paint a bleak and vivid picture. Yet still, just like Station Eleven, Engers novel is a testament to the power of modern dystopian literature. Unlike the bleak and utterly “hopeless” classics, there is a defiant optimism and hopefulness in these modern stories. A faith in humanity’s potential for empathy and connection, if not on a societal scale, then on a smaller one. Through these connections, the characters on Engers pages (again, mirroring Emily St. John Mandel’s masterpiece) find their way back from survival to living. What I didn’t love: My biggest disappointment was a matter of expectation vs reality. The blurb refers to “lunatic storms, sentient waters and rising corpses from the warming depths”, hinting heavily at a magical realism element to the story. Especially in combination with the references to Greek myths, these elements wouldn’t have felt out of place here. Unfortunately, these are all strictly metaphorical, and no actual magical realism is present in the text. Although I like the imagery it conjured up in my head, I couldn’t help but feel a little mislead by the blurb. My second point of contention relates to a single character; Sol. Whether it was the way her character was written; a fairly blank slate for Rainy to bounce off. Perhaps even the performance of the audiobook-narrator on doing an unconvincing “kids-voice”… Regardless, I never really got a feeling for their father-daughter-like dynamic. . It was clear that the author was going for something profound (think Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us), but it just fell short in that comparison. Regardless of that small piece of critique, it was one of the best-written literary dystopians I’ve read in a while. It doesn't hurt either that the cover is just as much a piece of art as what's inside. Highly recommended for fans of Station Eleven, The Road and The Last of Us. Many thanks to Grove Press and RB Media for providing me with an (audio)ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. You can find this book here on Goodreads.

It’s no secret that I’m an avid lover of children’s books, even as an adult, and I truly believe that reading together with your kids can be such a powerful tool of connection. Even if you don’t have any kids or teens in your life, these books still hold plenty of value and depth for adult to enjoy them too. Consider these my top 10 favourite middle-grade- and Young Adult novels respectively, as well as some honourable mentions. You will notice some themes (specifically disability, grief and coming of age), that you might have come to expect from me… Note that these are not just my personal childhood-favourites (released when I was a child); that’s a separate list entirely… The majority of these I’ve read as a teen or in my early twenties, and have stood the test of time- and reread as all-time favourites. All titles will be linked to their respective Goodreads pages for your ease of navigation. Middle-grade (age 10-14 approximately): A Monster Calls – Patrick Ness Genre: magical realism For the longest time, this was my number one all-time favourite book... Heartfelt ánd heartwrenching; this book helped me through a lot, dealing with a situation that had some overlap with the protagonists. I still cannot re-read it without a pack of tissues nearby... At seven minutes past midnight, thirteen-year-old Conor wakes to find a monster outside his bedroom window. But it isn't the monster Conor's been expecting - he's been expecting the one from his nightmare, the nightmare he's had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments. The monster in his backyard is different. It's ancient. And wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It wants the truth. 2. This Appearing House – Ali Malinenko Genre: horror Again, another book that has a very personal connection to an experience I lived through. Books about childhood cancer are rare, let alone books that portray a child surviving cancer, without being paraded around as an inspirational hero for others to gawk at. This Appearing House offered that much-needed representation in the best way possible, whilst combining it with an approachable haunted house horror-tale too. For as long as anyone could remember there wasn't a house at the dead end of Juniper Drive... until one day there was. When Jac first sees the House, she's counting down to the five-year anniversary of her cancer diagnosis, when she hopefully will be declared NED, or "no evidence of disease." But with a house appearing, and her hands shaking, and a fall off her bike, Jac is starting to wonder if these are symptoms--or if something stranger is happening. Two classmates dare Jac and her friend Hazel to enter the House. Walking through the front door is the way in. It's definitely not the way out. There's something off about the House; Jac can feel it. The same way she knows it's no coincidence that the House appeared for her five-year marker. It wants something from her. And she won't be able to get out until she figures out what. 3. Elatsoe – Darcie Little Badger Genre: fantasy One of the coziest and most heartwarming stories about family and community-support I've ever read. Bonuspoints for having the best pet companion (a ghostdog named Kirby). Imagine an America very similar to our own. It's got homework, best friends, and pistachio ice cream. There are some differences. This America has been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not. Some of these forces are charmingly everyday, like the ability to make an orb of light appear or travel across the world through rings of fungi. But other forces are less charming and should never see the light of day. Elatsoe lives in this slightly stranger America. She can raise the ghosts of dead animals, a skill passed down through generations of her Lipan Apache family. Her beloved cousin has just been murdered in a town that wants no prying eyes. But she is going to do more than pry. The picture-perfect facade of Willowbee masks gruesome secrets, and she will rely on her wits, skills, and friends to tear off the mask and protect her family. 4. The Secrets of Haven Point - Lisette Auton Genre: fantasy, disability This book had everything I could've wanted in a middle-grade novel, in my disability-fiction and more. A lovable full cast of disabled but very capable heroes, a sea-side adventure with a sprinkle of mermaid-magic, and beautiful underlying message about friendship, found-family, love and acceptance. When Alpha Lux first arrived at Haven Point, washed up ashore as a foundling baby, it was nothing more than an abandoned lighthouse surrounded by ramshackle empty houses. Raised by a mermaid and a maverick sea captain with a kitten in his beard, Alpha has seen Haven Point grow into what it is now; a refuge for disabled kids like herself in need of place to belong. When Alpha spots a strange light on the headland one day, she discovers their safely isolated community might be in danger of being discovered by Outsiders. With their home under threat, she and her fellow Wrecklings must decide what kind of future they want . . . and what they're willing to do to get it. 5. The Girl from Earths End – Tara Dairman Genre: magical realism/fantasy, disability/illness Gifted gardener Henna embarks from her island home to search for the plant that might save her papa’s life in this story of love, grief, and growth. Twelve-year-old Henna loves living with her two papas and cultivating her beloved plants on the tiny island of Earth’s End—until Papa Niall grows seriously ill. Now Henna is determined to find a legendary, long-extinct plant with miraculous healing powers, even though the search means journeying all the way to St. Basil’s Conservatory, a botanical boarding school rumored to house seeds of every plant ever grown. At St. Basil’s, Henna is surrounded not only by incredible plants, but also, for the first time, other kids—including her new roommates: wisecracking, genderfluid P, who gleefully bends every rule they come up against, and wealthy, distant Lora, who is tired of servants doing everything for her, from folding her clothes to pushing her wheelchair. But Henna’s search for the fabled healing seed means she doesn’t have time for friends—or so she thinks. 6. Hazel Bly and the Deep Blue Sea – Ashley Herring Blake Genre: contemporary, grief/trauma/mental health A novel about a girl navigating grief, trauma, and friendship, that perfectly bridges the gap between middle-grade and Young Adult. Hazel Bly used to live in the perfect house with the perfect family in sunny California. But when a kayaking trip goes horribly wrong, Mum is suddenly gone forever and Hazel is left with crippling anxiety and a jagged scar on her face. After Mum's death, Hazel, her other mother, Mama, and her little sister, Peach, needed a fresh start. So for the last two years, the Bly girls have lived all over the country, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. When the family arrives in Rose Harbor, Maine, there's a wildness to the small town that feels like magic. But when Mama runs into an old childhood friend—Claire—suddenly Hazel's tight-knit world is infiltrated. To make it worse, she has a daughter Hazel's age, Lemon, who can't stop rambling on and on about the Rose Maid, a local 150-year-old mermaid myth. Soon, Hazel finds herself just as obsessed with the Rose Maid as Lemon is—because what if magic were real? What if grief really could change you so much, you weren't even yourself anymore? And what if instead you emerged from the darkness stronger than before? 7. Mathilda – Roald Dahl Genre: magical realism It's a modern classic for a reason, and deserves its place on my list. What was once my childhood-favourite novel stands the time as a tale of resilience, finding your strength and making the best of a suboptimal situation. Matilda is a little girl who is far too good to be true. At age five-and-a-half she's knocking off double-digit multiplication problems and blitz-reading Dickens. Even more remarkably, her classmates love her even though she's a super-nerd and the teacher's pet. But everything is not perfect in Matilda's world... For starters she has two of the most idiotic, self-centered parents who ever lived. Then there's the large, busty nightmare of a school principal, Miss ("The") Trunchbull, a former hammer-throwing champion who flings children at will, and is approximately as sympathetic as a bulldozer. Fortunately for Matilda, she has the inner resources to deal with such annoyances: astonishing intelligence, saintly patience, and an innate predilection for revenge. 8. Impossible Creatures - Katherine Rundell Genre: fantasy A boy called Christopher is visiting his reclusive grandfather when he witnesses an avalanche of mythical creatures come tearing down the hill. This is how Christopher learns that his grandfather is the guardian of one of the ways between the non-magical world and a place called the Archipelago, a cluster of magical islands where all the creatures we tell of in myth live and breed and thrive alongside humans. They have been protected from being discovered for thousands of years; now, terrifyingly, the protection has worn thin, and creatures are breaking through. Then a girl, Mal, appears in Christopher’s world. She is in possession of a flying coat, is being pursued by a killer and is herself in pursuit of a baby griffin. Mal, Christopher and the griffin embark on an urgent quest across the wild splendour of the Archipelago, where sphinxes hold secrets and centaurs do murder, to find the truth—with unimaginable consequences for both their worlds. Together the two must face the problem of power, and of knowledge, and of what love demands of us. 9. The Healer of the Watermonster – Brian Young Genre: magical realism, mental health One of the most underrated books on this list: a fantastic, heartfelt and own-voices magical realism story with deep roots in Navajo mythology. When Nathan goes to visit his grandma, Nali, at her mobile summer home on the Navajo reservation, he knows he’s in for a pretty uneventful summer. Still, he loves spending time with Nali, and with his uncle Jet—though it’s clear when Jet arrives that he brings his problems with him. One night, while lost in the nearby desert, Nathan finds something extraordinary. A Holy Being from the Navajo Creation Story—a Water Monster—in need of help. Now Nathan must summon all his courage to save his new friend. With the help of other Navajo Holy Beings, Nathan is determined to save the Water Monster, and to help Uncle Jet heal from his own pain. 10. How to Disappear Completely – Ali Standish Genre: contemporary Last but not least, consider this a place-holder entry to this authors entire ouvre. I've loved every single novel I've read from Ali Standish and consider her a favourite within the genre. How to Disappear Completely is probably her most underhyped one; hence why it get's a shout out. Don't let that stop you from checking out the rest of her backlog though! While her grandmother was alive, Emma’s world was filled with enchantment. But now Gram is gone, and suddenly strange spots are appearing on Emma’s skin. Soon, she’s diagnosed with vitiligo—a condition that makes patches of her skin lose their color—and the magic in her world is suddenly replaced with school bullies and doctor appointments. But when Emma writes one last story in the journal she shared with Gram, something strange happens. Someone writes back to her, just like Gram used to. Who’s writing to Emma? And just what is her story going to be, now that everything is so different? Honourable Mentions: Some books I personally loved growing up, that didn't quite make the list... Amari and the Ghost Brothers - B.B. Alston Genre: fantasy You may have expected Harry Potter to make an appearance on this list. It didn't for multiple reasons. First, you don't need me to tell you about that series. Second, why recommend it when there's a series that gave me very similar vibes with more inclusivity and without the author behaving badly... Amari and the Ghost Brothers is a must-read for those in need of another magic school narrative, but with more of the nuances and sentiments relevent to the twenty-teens and twenty-twenties... Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne Genre: fantasy, classic We all know the big, yellow bear and his stuffed animal friends. These stunningly drawn books still contain a lot of wisdoms for kids and adults alike... Little Sophie and Lanky Flop – Els Pelgrom Genre: magical realism, disability/illness Yes, it's another childhood cancer narrative. This one makes the list because it's the one that was available for me at the time and helped me through some things... If This Appearing House had been around back then, I feel I would've prefered that, but Kleine Sofie en Lange Wapper (translated as Little Sophie and Lanky Flop) still make for a worthy addition to the list. Departure time - Truus Matti Genre: magical realism Another Dutch book that did a lot for me as a kid, and has since been translated into English. The translation is slightly choppy, but the story at its core is near and dear to my heart. Hour of the Bees - Lindsay Eagar Genre: magical realism, disability/illness Having a grandparent with dementia is an experience that many children will unfortunately experience. If you're ever on the hunt for a book to open up that conversation with your child; Hour of the Bees might be a perfect entryway to do so. Not Quite A Ghost - Anne Ursu Genre: horror In very similar fashion to This Disappearing House, Not Quite A Ghost combines a haunted house-narrative with representation of (chronic) illness. As my most recent read, this hasn't had time to cement itself in my heart as strongly as the "full entries" on the list, but it might me a strong contender for the future. The Girl Who Drank the Moon - Kelly Barnhill Genre: fantasy Wildly and Widely beloved by many, this magical modern fairytale of found-family and magic is a classic in the making. Ronia the Robbers Daughter - Astrid Lindgren Genre: fantasy adventure Finally, this one is purely to satisfy my own nostalgia. I grew up on the adventures of Astrid Lindgren's characters, and Ronia and Birk were my favourite duo. With the re-emergenge of "cottage-core" among adult readers, I feel this book is duo for a second-era overseas. Click here for Page 2: Young Adult favourites

Young Adult (ages 14-19 approximately) We Are Okay – Nina Lacour See also: Watch Over Me by the same author Genre: contemporary, LGBTQ+, grief Although I said these were in no particular order; this one is the exception. We Are Okay truly is my favourite young adult novel, and for sure within my top 5 of books period. You go through life thinking there’s so much you need… Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother. Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend, Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun. Now, months later, alone in an emptied dorm for winter break, Marin waits. Mabel is coming to visit, and Marin will be forced to face everything that’s been left unsaid and finally confront the loneliness that has made a home in her heart. 2. Bridges of Clay – Markus Zusak See also: The Bookthief by the same author Genre: contemporary, grief, mental health Five Dunbar brothers are living – fighting, loving, grieving – in the perfect chaos of a house without grown-ups. Today, the father who left them has just walked right back in. He has a surprising request: Who will build a bridge with him? It is Clay, a boy tormented by a long-buried secret, who accepts. But why is Clay so broken? And why must he fulfil this extraordinary challenge? Bridge of Clay is about a boy caught in a current, a boy intent on destroying everything he has in order to become everything he needs to be. Ahead of him lies the bridge, the vision that will save both his family and himself. It will be a miracle and nothing less. If you're familiar with the authors debut novel The Bookthief, you might know to keep your tissues at the ready for this one... 3. Six of Crows – Leigh Bardugo Genre: fantasy This one needs little introduction... Although I liked the Grishaverse, it is this second duology set in the same world that truly rose above its peers for me. I have yet to find more than a handful of fantasy-series that have matched my investment for these characters... Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone. . . . A convict with a thirst for revenge A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager A runaway with a privileged past A spy known as the Wraith A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first. 4. Strange Creatures – Phoebe North Genre: contemporary, mental health/trauma What do you do when the story of your life no longer makes sense? Or if the reality of that story is too dark to accept at that time? You create a new story of your own… This idea is at the core of Phoebe North's deeply personal and hardhitting novel Strange Creatures. We follow the story of Jamie and Annie, an inseparable pair of siblings; basically twins except for their date of birth. Alike in almost every way, they promised to always take care of each other while facing the challenges of growing up different in suburban America. And when life became too much for them, they’d escape into their own space; a wooeded area just behind their house. They transform this place into the land of Gumlea, where fantasy and reality merge together, and where nobody could find them. Until Jamie disappears, and Annie is left behind… Unable to process any other faith for her brother, Annie becomes convinced that Jamie has escaped into Gumlea one final time, and she will do anything to follow him there, and bring him back. Told from three separate perspectives, we witness the fallout of a tragedy on a family, friends and a small town community; from the harsh reality of growing up, to the stories we tell ourselves to keep going… 5. A Heart in a Body in the World – Deb Caletti Genre: contemporary, trauma/mental health When everything has been taken from you, what else is there to do but run? So that’s what Annabelle does—she runs from Seattle to Washington, DC, through mountain passes and suburban landscapes, from long lonely roads to college towns. She’s not ready to think about the why yet, just the how—muscles burning, heart pumping, feet pounding the earth. But no matter how hard she tries, she can’t outrun the tragedy from the past year, or the person—The Taker—that haunts her. Followed by Grandpa Ed in his RV and backed by her brother and two friends (her self-appointed publicity team), Annabelle becomes a reluctant activist as people connect her journey to the trauma from her past. Her cross-country run gains media attention and she is cheered on as she crosses state borders, and is even thrown a block party and given gifts. The support would be nice, if Annabelle could escape the guilt and the shame from what happened back home. They say it isn’t her fault, but she can’t feel the truth of that. Through welcome and unwelcome distractions, she just keeps running, to the destination that awaits her. There, she’ll finally face what lies behind her—the miles and love and loss…and what is to come. 6. Where You See Yourself – Claire Forrest Genre: contemporary, romance, disability Where You See Yourself combines an unforgettable coming-of-age tale, a swoon-worthy romance, and much-needed disability representation in this story about a girl who's determined to follow her dreams. By the time Effie Galanos starts her senior year, it feels like she’s already been thinking about college applications for an eternity—after all, finding a college that will be the perfect fit and be accessible enough for Effie to navigate in her wheelchair presents a ton of considerations that her friends don’t have to worry about. What Effie hasn’t told anyone is that she already knows exactly what school she has her heart set on: a college in NYC with a major in Mass Media & Society that will set her up perfectly for her dream job in digital media. She’s never been to New York, but paging through the brochure, she can picture the person she’ll be there, far from the Minneapolis neighborhood where she's lived her entire life. When she finds out that Wilder (her longtime crush) is applying there too, it seems like one more sign from the universe that it’s the right place for her. 7. Like Water – Rebecca Podos Genre: contemporary, romance, LGBTQ+, caregiving A gorgeously written and deeply felt literary young adult novel of identity, millennial anxiety and first love and learning your parents are fallible. In Savannah Espinoza’s small New Mexico hometown, kids either flee after graduation or they’re trapped there forever. Vanni never planned to get stuck—but that was before her father was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, leaving her and her mother to care for him. Now, she doesn’t have much of a plan at all: living at home, working as a performing mermaid at a second-rate water park, distracting herself with one boy after another. That changes the day she meets Leigh. Disillusioned with small-town life and looking for something greater, Leigh is not a “nice girl.” She is unlike anyone Vanni has met, and a friend when Vanni desperately needs one. Soon enough, Leigh is much more than a friend. But caring about another person stirs up the moat Vanni has carefully constructed around herself, and threatens to bring to the surface the questions she’s held under for so long. 8. The Mirror Season - Anna Marie McLemore Genre: Magical Realism, Romance, LGBTQ+ You can consider this one a sort of pageholder title as well, as I basically just wanted to feature an entire authors catalogue on this list. If you're ever in the market for an LGBTQ+ story, told in the most lushes prose you've ever encountered; look no further than A.M. McLemore. They manage to cover harrowing topics in the most gentle and wonderous way... Graciela Cristales's whole world changes after she and a boy she barely knows are assaulted at the same party. She loses her gift for making enchanted pan dulce. Neighborhood trees vanish overnight, while mirrored glass appears, bringing reckless magic with it. And Ciela is haunted by what happened to her, and what happened to the boy whose name she never learned. But when the boy, Lock, shows up at Ciela's school, he has no memory of that night, and no clue that a single piece of mirrored glass is taking his life apart. Ciela decides to help him, which means hiding the truth about that night. Because Ciela knows who assaulted her, and him. And she knows that her survival, and his, depend on no one finding out what really happened. 9. Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy - Laini Taylor Genre: fantasy, romance Similar to Six of Crows, you will have heard me talk about this one before if you're read my Fantasy Favourites list too. Daughter of Smoke and Bone holds the honour of being the only "romantasy" series I've ever enjoyed to date... In general, Karou has managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she's a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand-girl to a monstrous creature who is the closest thing she has to family. Raised half in our world, half in 'Elsewhere', she has never understood Brimstone's dark work - buying teeth from hunters and murderers - nor how she came into his keeping. She is a secret even to herself, plagued by the sensation that she isn't whole. Now the doors to Elsewhere are closing, and Karou must choose between the safety of her human life and the dangers of a war-ravaged world that may hold the answers she has always sought. 10. The Hungergames – Suzanne Collins Genre: dystopian Last but not least is the quintessential read of my personal teenage years (which might date me horribly...) This dystopian series rekindled my love for reading after a long rut, and still stands the test of time for me in terms of quality. In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before—and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weight survival against humanity and life against love. Honourable Mentions: The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas Genre: contemporary A powerful novel, inspired by the Black Lives Matters Movement about one girl's struggle for justice after losing her best friend to police violence. The Astonishihg Color of After - Emily X.R. Pan Genre: magical realism A magical realism novel about grief and chasing your roots, following a Taiwanese-American teen who becomes convinced her mother turned into a bird after her death. Breathe and Count Back from Ten - Natalia Sylvester Genre: contemporary, disability/illness In this gorgeously written and authentic novel, Verónica, a Peruvian-American teen with hip dysplasia, auditions to become a mermaid at a Central Florida theme park in the summer before her senior year, all while figuring out her first boyfriend and how to feel safe in her own body. The Last True Poets of the Sea - Julia Drake Genre: contemporary A striking novel about a teenage girl dealing with complex grief during her summer at the coast of Main, researching into her families history of shipwrecks. If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio Genre: mystery, thriller, dark academia Did you ever wonder: what if The Secret History, but for young adults, and with Shakesperean theatre instead of Greek Mythology...? Regardless, here it is, and it's brilliant. We Are The Ants - Shaun David Hutchinson Genre: sci-fi, magical realism, LGBTQ+ A thoughtprovoking novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving. Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button. Only he isn’t sure he wants to... Catfish Rolling - Clara Kumagai Genre: magical realism Magic-realism blends with Japanese myth and legend in an original story about grief, memory, time and an earthquake that shook a nation. Click here for Part 1: Middle Grade Favourites

I find it difficult to name a single particular genre to be my "favourite" above the rest, but if you forced my hand, I think I might go with scifi/speculative as of this moment. Not a surprise therefore that this list contains a bunch of my all-time favourite novels. From hard space-sci-fi to literary speculative; I feel like there's something for every type of reader on this list, and I hope to help you find at least one title to add to your TBR. Note: books are mentioned in no particular order; I can't do it to myself to pick a favourite amongst my precious children... 1.      Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel See also: The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility by the same author I'm mentioning these novels together as, although they can be read as standalones, they take place in the same universe, and I love them equally. If you loved one but haven't read the others, I highly recommend you get on that ASAP. You can read them in any order, but I recommend publication-order (Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, Sea of Tranquility) to make the most out of the cross-references. Individual reviews of each can be found on my blog and/or Goodreads. Synopsis of Station Eleven: Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end. Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed. 2.      Southern Reach Trilogy – Jeff Vandermeer The first book in this genrebending trilogy stands to date as what is probably my all-time favourite novel ever, for reasons highly personal to me that I've talked about plenty of times. Although I can see that not everyone will share that intense love, as they don't carry the personal connection I felt to the story, it still holds up as "objectively" one of the best speculative horror series I've ever come across. Synopsis Annihilation: Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one anotioner, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything. 3.      The Martian – Andy Weir A story of extraterrestrial survival that is simulateously smart, harrowing and a lot of fun, featuring one of my favourite protagonists in the genre. The Martian took me by surprise when I first read it, but has stood the test of time and multiple rereads for me. It also spawned one of the quotes that I've adopted to be my life-motto; "things didn't go as planned, but I didn't die, so that's a win..." Synopsis: Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first. But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him? 4.      Cage of Souls – Adrian Tchaikovsky See also: Children of Time, The Doors of Eden, Shards of Earth and Alien Clay by the same author There is no way I could go about this list without mentioning the King of (space) Sci-fi in my personal book; Adrian Tchaikovsky. Not only has this man produced some of the most intelligent and well-written sci-fi stories I've ever read, he also shares my slightly niche interest in weird biology and ecology. Cage of Souls encapsulates the aspects of his writing that I adore the best, but any of the abovementioned books by him could've featured on this list as well. If you enjoy a well thought-out world, built off the back of true to life science with deeply relatable and human characters as well as truly alien aliens: give Tchaikovsky a try! Synopsis Cage of Souls: The Sun is bloated, diseased, dying perhaps. Beneath its baneful light, Shadrapar, last of all cities, harbours fewer than 100,000 human souls. Built on the ruins of countless civilisations, surviving on the debris of its long-dead progenitors, Shadrapar is a museum, a midden, an asylum, a prison on a world that is ever more alien to humanity. Bearing witness to the desperate struggle for existence between life old and new, is Stefan Advani, rebel, outlaw, prisoner, survivor. This is his testament, an account of the journey that took him into the blazing desolation of the western deserts; that transported him east down the river and imprisoned him in verdant hell of the jungle's darkest heart; that led him deep into the labyrinths and caverns of the underworld. He will treat with monsters, madman, mutants. The question is, which one of them will inherit this Earth? 5.      Our Hideous Progeny – C.E. McGill I have a strange relationship with the classic novel Frankenstein… I didn’t enjoy the original text in the slightest, but still consider it one of my favourite classics for the legacy it spawned, and the string of homages/retellings/discussion-pieces that followed it. Our Hideous Progeny is perhaps the best example of that. It's not so much a retelling of the original, but a continuation that builds- and improves upon the story in the best way possible. On the surface, it's a classic gothic tale of scientific ambition, hubris, and creation like the original. Just below, a feminist outcry for the unsung women in scientific history and an exploration of queerness, otherness and learning to embrace the hideous-side of oneself. Then in the depths; a narrative of illness, body, childlessness and legacy, that struck a personal chord in a way I didn’t anticipate. Synopsis: Mary is the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein. She knows her great uncle disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the Arctic, but she doesn't know why or how... The 1850s is a time of discovery, and London is ablaze with the latest scientific theories and debates, especially when a spectacular new exhibition of dinosaur sculptures opens at the Crystal Palace. Mary, with a sharp mind and a sharper tongue, is keen to make her name in this world of science alongside her geologist husband Henry, but without wealth and connections, their options are limited. But when Mary discovers some old family papers that allude to the shocking truth behind her great-uncle's past, she thinks she may have found the key to securing their future... Their quest takes them to the wilds of Scotland, to Henry's intriguing but reclusive sister Maisie, and to a deadly chase with a rival who is out to steal their secret. 6. The Book of Strange New Things – Michel Faber Continuing on with "space-sci-fi" but approached from a very different direction: we now have a philosophical novel about the ethics and morality of first contact. The Book of Strange New Things is one of those stories that has lived rent-free in my mind ever since I read it, and still has me debating some of the questions it posed. It touches on many of the quintessential themes of the genre in a unique way, and truly shows the humanity of its characters (both from this world and out of it). Synopsis: It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC. His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter's teachings—his Bible is their "book of strange new things." But Peter is rattled when Bea's letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling. Bea's faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter. Suddenly, a separation measured by an otherworldly distance, and defined both by one newly discovered world and another in a state of collapse, is threatened by an ever-widening gulf that is much less quantifiable. While Peter is reconciling the needs of his congregation with the desires of his strange employer, Bea is struggling for survival. Their trials lay bare a profound meditation on faith, love tested beyond endurance, and our responsibility to those closest to us. 7.      Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro An intimate, dystopian coming of age tale of friendship, memory, magical thinking and the ultimate acceptance of what (we perceive) cannot be changed. I bawled the first time I read this and couldn’t put it out of my mind for months, and it still continues to gain more power over me upon rereads. Synopsis: As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is modern classic. 8.      Solaris – Stanislav Lem From a modern classic, to an actual "classic-classic". What more can I say than: this truly stands the test of time... Synopsis: When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. The Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, though its purpose in doing so is unknown, forcing the scientists to shift the focus of their quest and wonder if they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their hearts. 9.      Blindsight – Peter Watts This one is for the true "hard-sci-fi" lovers out there. A first-contact novel that is dense with science, rich with lore and truly terrifying with its cosmic implications... Synopsis: It's been two months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist--an informational topologist with half his mind gone--as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. 10.   Dark Matter – Blake Crouch Last but not least, I had to put at least one sci-fi thriller on this list, so I went with the book that first introduced me to the genre and actually kept me up at night because I couldn't put it down. Out of all the books on this list, this might be one of the most accessible ones, and a perfect start for those wanting to dip their toes in the genre. Synopsis: Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters. "Are you happy with your life?" Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." In this world he's woken up to, Jason's life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible. Is it this world or the other that's the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe. Honourable Mentions 1.  Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes The powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache. 2. How High We Go In the Dark - Sequoia Nagamatsu A debut that follows a cast of intricately linked characters over hundreds of years as humanity struggles to rebuild itself in the aftermath of a climate plague. If you loved Station Eleven, you have to give this one a go too. 3. One Word Kill - Mark Lawrence A teenage boy suffering from terminal cancer gets wrapped up in a metaphysical mystery when his Dungeons & Dragons session turns stranger than fiction... Nailbiting tension mixed with an actually fantastic representation of the teenage experience with life-threatening illness. 4. Borne - Jeff Vandermeer In a ruined, nameless city of the future, a woman named Rachel, who makes her living as a scavenger, finds a creature she names “Borne” entangled in the fur of Mord, a gigantic, despotic bear. Truly strange, truly brilliant, truly Vandermeer-ian... 5. To Sleep in A Sea of Stars - Christopher Paolini A space-epic by the pen of renouned fantasy-author Paolini, in which a female Xeno-archeologist finds herself at the center of a galaxy-spanning odyssey of transformation, when an alien entity fuses itself with her body. 6. The Night Alphabet - Joelle Taylor A speculative literary novel penned in the most stunning prose imaginable, in which a woman tells the kaleidoscopic tale of her life, guided by the map of the tattoo's she picked up along the way. A tale of queerness, identity and what is meant by “inhabiting a body”, rather than “being” one, from our modern day to the cyber-lit nights of a distant future. 7. Generation Ship – Michael Mammay The beginning of a new human colony must face tyrannical leaders, revolution, crippling instability, and an unknown alien planet that could easily destroy them all.

Genre: Horror, Romance, Novella Published: Titan Books, November 2023 My Rating: 1/5 stars I haven’t been thís annoyed by a protagonist, whilst simultaneously being in awe of the abhorrent way in which they were written in a long time!. That’s about the only outstanding accomplishment this novella had to show for itself… I’m sorry to say, but this read like fanfiction of the worst kind otherwise… The premise of a cottage-core, sapphic novella that takes a dark horror-turn along the way, sounded so promising, but unfortunately things begin to fall apart from the get-go. Let’s begin with the introduction of our main character Rosemary. Only she goes by “Ro”, because she’s not like other girls. She loves books instead of partying, references “quirky things” like Twilight and Studio Ghibbly wherever she can, and definitely isn’t into Adulting ™… Yes dear reader, we’ve got ourselves an unironic Manic Pixie Dream Girl protagonist... When you introduce a protagonist to me in this cliché of a manner, I immediately lose al investment in them, and unfortunately, that was completely the case here too. Although Ro is definitely the worst offender, her fellow-characters don’t fare much better. Then there’s the issue of the story (and its “twists) itself… I genuinely don’t understand the raving reviews from my fellow readers on here that praise the story for its surprising twist, as the exact thing that first popped into my mind upon reading the synopsis, actually was what passed for a “twist ending”. I’ve seen many reviewers praise this book for its beautiful writing when it comes to setting and sensory descriptions. To me, that didn’t even partially make up for the utter cringe the writing was otherwise… If you’re tolerance for all of the above is higher than mine, you might want to sample this to see if it’s for you. Otherwise: I recommend you give this one a pass. Find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism Published: Algonquin Books/Recorded Books Audio, April 2024 My Rating: 3.5/5 stars “It’s a cemetery for stories” the woman replies. “con su permiso, how does one bury a story? If a story is never told, where does it go?” the woman answers with a question. The story she told her sister, where has it gone all these years of her silence. It’s a question Filomena has never asked herself before.” This is one of those novels where I feel conflicted on how I should go about rating it. Based on my own experience, this was a 3-star read; well-written and polished, but lacking the emotional resonance to make it truly memorable. That being said, objectively, I think this deserves more than that. I can 100% picture a large audience that will adore this book, and will hail it as the “instant classic” the blurb promises. The story: Cemetery of Untold Stories is a novel about storytelling, and the way our own narratives and how we choose to pass them on define our legacy. We follow Alma, an acclaimed author nearing the end of her life, as she inherits an unwanted plot of land near her hometown in the Dominican Republic. She immediately has a vision on what to do with the land: dedicating it to be a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. During her time putting together this cemetery, Alma begins to relay these stories to her groundskeeper Filomena, and soon the two form a beautiful connection to each other, and these stories alike. What I liked: Already a veteran author, it’s beyond doubt that Julia Alvarez knows how to tell a vivid story. Cemetery of Untold Stories lives up to that legacy. The prose polished to perfection, its (at times almost meta) themes of storytelling and creating ones own legacy are consistent throughout and feel quite personal to the author as well. I can always appreciate a novel with a strong sense of setting and place. Through the combination of her atmospheric descriptions, as well as the frequent intersplicing of Spanish sentences, Alvarez honors her own Dominican roots, as well as those of her characters. In more than one way, the story feels very personal to the author, paralleling elements of her own life as a storyteller too. I appreciated that human connection, and think it added to the strengths of the book. What I didn’t like: My main complaint is that this novel, ironically, felt a bit like a cemetery of “lost stories” in itself at times: a collection of scraps that happen to be put in the same place over time, but don’t share a deeper connection. It brought a bit of a disjointed feeling to the whole at times, and made it hard for me to follow the different storylines. That disconnection carried through the entire story for me. Do you know that feeling of walking across a cemetery ground and feeling slightly empty upon realizing that all these gravestones represent full people and lives lived… Yet because all you see of them is their headstones, you can never truly grieve or care for them, the way you would someone you knew personally? That’s the way I felt about all Julia Alvarez’s characters; like they were cardboard (or gravestone) outlines, slightly too polished and slightly too impersonal to care about… Despite the fact that I didn’t personally resonate with the story, I still feel comfortable recommending it, especially to fans of the likes of Isabel Allende (whom work I personally feel very similarly about). The audiobook is a great way to experience this novel, specifically considering its themes of oral traditions and telling stories over the course of generations. The narrator does a beautiful job voicing the characters and does their bilingual nature justice. Many thanks to Algonquin and Recorded Books for providing me with an audio-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. Find this book here on Goodreads.

The first three months of 2024 are already behind us, and I’m happy to report that I’ve had an incredible time reading-wise. In fact, I’ve had few reading-years as good as these past few months when it comes to the quality of the books I’ve read, and I can’t wait to share some of the standouts with you.Out of the 38 books I completed, I selected 5 favourites and 3 honourable mentions. I will also briefly touch on all the new releases and ARCs I’ve read, as well as my rough readingplans for the next quarter. Favourite Books: Dreams of the Dying by Nicolas Lietzau My first read of 2024 set the year of on a strong trajectory, as I immediately found a new favourite in this independently published high-fantasy epic. It all begins with a dream..: the empire is on the brink of collapse as the emperor lies suspended in a preternatural coma, seemingly caught within a web of his own dreams. Jespar Dal'Varek, a mercenary haunted by his own memories of the recent war, accepts the seemingly impossible job of tracing the cause of the emperors affliction. His journey will not only lead him across the Archipelago of Kilay, but eventually, through an arcane magical practice, within the dreams of the emperor himself… I might be slightly biased on this one, because I already adored the world of Enderal from its game adaptation in the form of a Skyrim conversion-mod. Still, I don’t think it would’ve made a difference for my ultimate verdict... Beyond a shadow of a doubt; Dreams of the Dying is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read in my life. It’s combines a fantastic story, with brilliant character-work, and looks at philosophical and existential themes, without becoming too heavy-handed with them. From its beautiful writing, to its tense and immaculately paced plot, to the memorable cast of characters that grew on my like friends: this is as close to perfection as a fantasy novel gets for me. Death Valley by Melissa Broder A woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike. What follows is a hallucinatory hike across a seemingly impossible desert. I won’t lie to you: Death Valley is a strange novel, that won’t be to everybody’s taste. Yet it’s the exact kind of strange that I personally adore. Suspend your expectations of a survival story across the desert: this is a survival story of a woman left alone with her own mind… I didn’t expect to relate to our extremely messy protagonist as much as I did. Yet in its own eccentric way, it was a near perfect exploration of themes of family, father-daughter-relations, caregiving/hospice care, love in all its forms and the grief that matches it. If you’re open to a bit of experimental and strange fiction (think: Ghost Music, Our Wives Under the Sea, Swim Home to the Vanished), I highly recommend you give this one a try. You might be surprised with a new favourite like I was… Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill I have a strange relationship with the classic novel of Frankenstein… I didn’t enjoy the original text in the slightest, but still consider it one of my favourite classics for the legacy it spawned, and the string of homages/retellings/discussion-pieces that followed it. Our Hideous Progeny is perhaps the best example of that. This debut(!) novel doesn’t so much reimagine, as continue the story of Frankenstein, from the perspective of his great-niece Mary Frankenstein.  Mary, with a sharp mind and a sharper tongue, is keen to make her name in this world of natural science alongside her geologist husband Henry, but without wealth and connections, their options are limited. That is until Mary stumbles across her great uncles letters, and the idea of recreating his experiment starts to take root in her mind. Not with a human body, mind you, but with an entirely new (or should I say “ancient”?) creature of her own.  I plan on writing a full review of this novel, which might take some time as there’s so much to unpack here. Suffice to say: Our Hideous Progeny is my favourite read of the year so far. On the surface, a classic gothic tale of scientific ambition, hubris, and creation like the original. Just below, a feminist outcry for the unsung women in scientific history and an exploration of queerness, otherness and learning to embrace the hideous-side of oneself. Then in the depths; a narrative of illness, body, childlessness and legacy, that struck a personal chord in a way I didn’t anticipate. Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris I was completely blown away by the stunning prose and vivid imagery in this indie-debut, that desperately needs more recognition that it got! In this eco-horror novella with strong themes of queerness and grief, we follow a female artists who, struggling with a bout of artblock, is gifted a solo cabin-holiday by her girlfriend in hopes of sparking her creativity. Surrounded by the brackish waters of the lake and oppressive swamp-mists, Rita’s mind indeed begins to blossom with uncanny visions. Told alongside the descriptions of the series of painting created during her trip, we follow Rita’s journey in the natural bog, as well as the swampy depth of her own mind. Thematically, you can probably see why this is something I’d love… An exploration of grief over the loss of a parent, queerness, death and rebirth, all through a lens of natural beauty and terror. What makes this novella standout is its stunning language, that reads almost like an extended poem. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett From an incredibly underhyped book, we move on to one that deserved all the hype that it did get upon its release. The Tainted Cup is Robert Jackson Bennett’s latest release that manages a perfect blend of fantasy with a murder-mystery-detective. We follow a famous, highly eccentric detective and her assistant as they are called in to investigate the puzzling death of an Imperial officer. The manner of his death is far from ordinary, seemingly having sprouted a tree from within his body… Our detective-duo soon find themselves on the trial of a string of poisonings with a biological contagion, with ties into the high societies of the empire.Everything about this story was as brilliant as I’d hoped. From the intriguing mystery, to the exquisite in-depth worldbuilding to the Sherlock-and-Watson like dynamic of our protagonist duo. It’s not an easy task to write brilliantly intelligent characters, with genuinely funny banter between them, but Bennett manages to nail it at every turn. As an added bonus; I loved the themes of neurodivergence and embracing the strengths of differences within this story and its protagonists. I can’t wait to see more of these characters as the series continues. Honourable Mentions: Sheine Lende – Darcie Little Badger It doesn’t feel fair to name a book that hasn’t even released yet as a favourite, since you guys will have to wait for its release to get your hands on it. That being said; my ARC of Sheine Lende 100% deserves to be mentioned among my favourite reads of the past three months. This prequel to Elatsoe captured every bit of the comforting, supportive and magical vibes that the original did. Full review can be found here. Shark Heart – Emily Habeck I was surprised by how emotionally touched I was by this magical-realism tale of chronic illness, caregiving and love. We follow a couple in the year following the husbands diagnosis with a strange affliction; one that will gradually turn him into a great white shark. Although the premise sounds a bit ridiculous in itself, the execution is a brilliant look at chronic degenerative illness and the toll it takes on not just the person, but their loved ones around them. Terrace Story – Hilary Leichter Like Death Valley, Terrace Story received mixed reviews, but was the exact kind of strange that I personally love. It’s a bit of a puzzle of stories within stories, following a couple who’ve just moved into a new apartment, only to find a door to a terrace which wasn’t previously there before. This door only seems to appear when their friend Stephanie visits, and the three of them decide to use terrace as a place to tell stories to one other. It's a magical realism novel about grief, love, memory and creating space for the aforementioned. Not an easy read, but a satisfying and perfectly crafted one at that! Recent Releases: -            Mislaid in Parts Half Known - Seanan McGuire Book 9 in the widely beloved portal-fantasy series The Wayward Children. And this time it has dinosaurs... Ultimately, this was deeply underwhelming. Full review here Rating: 2.5/5 stars -            Not Quite a Ghost – Anne Ursu A middle-grade ghost story that cleverly intertwines a classical haunted house narrative with a tale of a young girl facing chronic illness. Brilliantly done, and perfect for fans of This Appearing House (which I absolutely am one of!) Rating: 5/5 stars -            The House of Broken Bricks – Fiona Williams A literary fiction novel about a family of four in the aftermath of a tragedy. Highly recommend if you enjoy family-saga’s and stunning nature-writing in rural America. Full review here Rating: 4.5/5 stars -            What Feasts at Night – T. Kingfisher The sequel to one of my favourite horror-novella’s of 2022, that unfortunately didn’t quite live up to its predecessor. What Moves the Dead was a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, andWhat Feasts at Night continues the story of those characters in a completely original story that deals with war, trauma and PTSS. Rating: 3/5 stars -            Infinity Alchemist – Kacen Callender Unfortunately, one of my most anticipated novels of the year turned out to be my biggest disappointment. This is Kacen Callender’s “adult” fantasy debut. (Quotation marks, because it very much reads like YA) following a duo of young alchemists in a world where the magical sciences are only available to the most elite few of society. Apart from the great LGBTQ-representation I’ve come to expect from Callender, this book had few redeeming qualities for me. Riddled with plotholes and infuriating characters, I can’t recommend it. Full review here Rating: 2/5 stars -            Into the Sunken City – Dinesh Thiru Another slight disappointment that I should’ve seen coming, based off my lack of success with YA lately. The premise won me over however; a sci-fi story set in a flooded future America, where the treasures of old-time cities lie buried beneath the treacherous waters. We follow a team of teenage divers as they set off to explore the flooded ruins of Las Vegas, in search of treasure to secure their family’s financial safety. Rating: 3/5 stars -            Gogmagog – Jeff Noon and Steve Beard I’ve had a bunch of  hits with “weird” literary fiction and horror before, but not too many with “weird fantasy” yet. Gogmagog changed that! This quirky mix of fantasy, sci-fi and steampunk follows an eccentric group of characters on a ferry-ride across a murky river, possessed by the ghost of a long dead dragon. Sound bonkers? Absolutely… It’s also equal parts entertaining and perfect for fans of Jeff Vandermeer or Neil Gaiman. Full review here Rating: 4/5 stars -            Midnight on Beacon Street – Emily Ruth Verona Ah yes, I fully fell into the hype with this one. Marketed as the ultimate YA-thriller with vibes of classic 80’s horror-cinema, this ended up being quite middle-of-the-road for me. Teenage babysitter Amy copes with her anxiety disorder by enjoying the predictability of classic horror films. When one night of babysitting thrusts her into a real-life horror-film-scenario, she must use all her wits and strength to protect not only herself but the two kids she’s caring for. Overall: this was just okay. It’s the kind of story that I didn’t mind reading, but never gave me any particular thrill, nor will I remember much of it by the end of the year. Judging my the extremely low average Goodreads rating, I wasn’t alone in that feeling… Rating: 2.5/5 stars -            A Botanical Daughter – Noah Medlock After the great success the last (queer) Frankenstein-retelling, I was even more excited to dig into this one. A captivating tale of two Victorian gentlemen hiding their relationship away in a botanical garden who embark on a Frankenstein-style experiment of bringing to life a daughter from plant- and body-parts. Bonus points for having the best cover of the year so far. Full review here Rating: 4/5 stars -            Fervor – Toby Lloyd Although I really enjoyed this novel upon its own merits, I feel like it was done a disservice by being mismarketed as something its not. Fervor was being heavily marketed as a possession-like horror story, with hints of Jewish mythology. It is not…  This is at heart a family saga, following three generations of a Jewish family coping with the effects of the aftermath of war-trauma and the effects of their (cultural) identity. As such it’s a strong piece of literary fiction, and I wish it had been properly marketed as such. Read my full review here to go into it with the right expectation. Rating: 3.5/5 starts -            The Tainted Cup – Robert Jackson Bennett See above -            The Haunting of Velkwood – Gwendolyn Kiste A modern ghost story in which a strange event turns a complete neighbourhood into a ghost town overnight. Years down the line, the three sole survivors of the night return to the now quarantined area, in search of answers and closure. This had a few elements I adored, but overall left me just a little underwhelmed. I was reminded a lot of Catfish Rolling with regards to the themes, and couldn’t help feeling like it came up short in that comparison. Rating 3/5 stars -            Fog and Fireflies – T.H. Lehnen A middle-grade/YA fantasy novel that carries that feeling of the classics like The Golden Compass and The Neverending Story. In a town surrounded by everlasting mists, it’s up to the children to guide the walls and protect the village from the monsters within the fog. Following a breach of the walls that sees her best friend taken into the fog, teenage Ogma sets of into the unknown to retrieve her friends and save the ones she loves. Full review here Rating: 4/5 stars -            Colossus – Ryan Leslie A cerebral sci-fi novel about a man set off on a journey through space, in search of answers after his wife commits suicide by taking a drug that promises to reveal the meaning of life seconds before it takes your life. Perfect for fans of Solaris, although in my opinion, not as effective as that. Full review here Rating: 3/5 stars -            Sleeping Giants – Rene Denfeld Leave it to Rene Denfeld to tell a heartbreakingly harrowing story in the most tender way possible... Sleeping Giants combines the tale of a sister investigating the suspicious death of her brother years prior, with an intimate look into the American foster care system and all its flaws. It’s not an easy read, but Denfeld’s compassionate and observant writing does the topic every bit of justice it deserves. Rating: 4/5 stars -            The Night Alphabet – Joelle Taylor Finally, another example of poets writing novels and creating magic with their words in the process. I actually ran out of sticky notes trying to tab all the stunning and memorable lines throughout this book. The Night Alphabet a speculative literary novel that opens with a woman entering a tattoo-parlor with an unusual request. She wishes final tattoo to add to her already extensive collection of them; a single line that connects them all. Throughout the tattooing process, she takes her tattoo-artists on a journey “across the map of her life”; each tattoo revealing a story of her past and weaving an integrate pattern of a turbulent life lived. Possibly the most striking prose out of all the books mentioned, combined with a kaleidoscopic journey of queerness, identity and what is meant by “inhabiting a body”, rather than “being” one. If you enjoyed the likes of Salena Goddens Mrs Death Misses Death, or the works of Carmen Maria Machado; don’t miss this one. Rating: 5/5 stars Q2 Reading Plans I can keep this fairly short as I don’t have any strict plans to speak of. The most prominent chance, compared to the previous few years is going to be the fact that I’m not joining any readathons this season, specifically not the Magical Readathon, which has been a staple for the past few years). I still love this readathon, but with everything else going on in life, I don’t want to restrict myself with any form of set-TBR. With regards to posts asides the regular individual book reviews, you can expect at least a new version of the Books-in-Pairs (if you liked this book, try that one), as well as a continuation of my All-Time-Favourite-per-Genre project. Happy reading until then, and may your reading year be as great as mine started off…

Genre: Sci-fi Published: Independently Published, March 2024 My Rating: 2.5/5 stars I’ve been on a “cerebral-sci-fi-kick” for a few months now, so when this independently published novel’s synopsis came to my attention, I immediately felt like it might just scratch that itch. Although I was fascinated and by the themes and ideas explored here, I was ultimately left with mixed feelings overall. The Story: We follow Clay, an economics professor whom rationally centered life is uprooted by the passing of his wife Karla, by her own hand. Karla, equally filled with scientific curiosity as himself, has taken an elusive drug called Dying Wish, which supposedly reveals the nature of reality moments before it claims your life. This loss drives Clay on a quest for answers. A quest that will eventually lead him to the deepest recesses of space, and his own memory alike… What I loved: Our story is told in three parts, and throughout the first part I was utterly engrossed. We are introduced to Karla and Clay, as well as the world and the themes that will be explored throughout. Without going into full-spoilers; this book dives heavily into the philosophical and cerebral side of science fiction. There are no gun-blazing space-battles here. Instead, we’re quickly entrapped in a web of multiverses, parallel realities and the concept of “quantum immortality”. The set-up is fascinating and hooked me in. Unfortunately, the story didn’t fully fulfill the promise of its premise. What I didn’t love: In the second part, we find Clay as one of the few survivors of a hibernation-failure aboard a space-vessel; his only companion being an AI that prompts him to question everything he thinks he knows. The interactions between the AI and Clay are supposed to feel philosophical, but due to the way they’re written, felt extremely flat and tedious to me. I honestly lost a lot of steam throughout this second part and had to push myself to keep reading, hoping for a satisfying ending. That only partially delivered… Overall, this novel does a great job of asking questions, and a rather poor one at answering any of them. That might be by design, but I’m not sure Colossus pulled it off. Often, leaving unanswered questions only works if the story convinced me enough that the author knows the answers, but deliberately choses to withhold them from the reader. In this case, I wasn’t convinced the author knew that himself… Additionally, it didn’t help that the author tried to cram in so many classic sci-fi themes into one story. Sentient AI’s, quantum theory, the multiverse, space travel and its effects on the mind, pharmaceuticals, immortality and so much more, all make a brief appearance. Every new element subtracted from the strength and coherence of it all, rather than adding to it. I’d have preferred if the author had chosen a single topic to explore in depth, rather than skimming over so many briefly. Many thanks to Netgalley and the author for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. You can find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult, Middle-Grade Published: Aspen & Thorn Press, April 2024 My Rating: 4/5 stars "Why do we grow more scared as we get older?" "Because we know better." Every now and then you come across a new release that feels like you’re reading a modern classic. Whether it be the themes, the writing itself, or how reminiscent it feels of another classic; there’s a certain charisma to these stories that makes them feel special. This week I’ve had the pleasure to read not one, but two of these stories. One of them, Impossible Creatures, has already garnered plenty of well-deserves praise and love. The other is an upcoming indie title, that I’m therefore even more excited to put on people’s radar. With vibes of The Neverending Story, a world reminiscent of Miyazaki, and a story that feels like a folktale told at night around a campfire: this is a release to keep your eye on. The Story: In a world blanketed in a never ceasing fog inhabited by nightmarish creatures, humans are confined to isolated settlements that sail the fog like ships. Ogma lives in one of these settlements, and is part of the team of children guarding the walls and sounding the alarm whenever one of the fog-phantoms approaches. Her job is an important one, and one only children can do, as the older you grow, the more susceptible you become to the fogs treacherous calls. One day, Ogma’s town is attacked by shadows from the fog. In an attempt to save those she loves, Ogma sets off on a journey into the unseen, where she must rely on her wits and her friends in order to survive. What I loved: The immediate standout here is the quality and depth of the worldbuilding Lehnen put into this story. From the setting of the fog-drowned world with its floating settlements, to the fearful creatures that inhabit it, to the history and lore of the wizard-war that created this situation: it feels like Lehnen knows this world inside out, and is excited to take you on a journey through it. The plot offers a good balance between action and character interaction, and Ogma and her traveling band make for great companions on this trip. I especially love how Ogma was a strong female character, that isn’t afraid to recognise that she still needs help and support from her friends (something that unfortunately is quite rare in Young Adult fiction). Another element that made the story feel similar to modern classics like The Neverending Story is how well it translates to different age-ranges of reader. I would classify the story somewhere between the upper-end of middle-grade and the younger side of YA (12 to 15 years), but it’s core-themes of friendship, fear, growing up, growing older and growing apart translate perfectly to adult readers as well. What I didn’t love: Fog and Fireflies is a debut novel, and has some struggles typical of that. Most notably, it struggles a little around the half-way point. After a fascinating beginning, there’s a bit of a drop in pacing, as well as a very quick expansion on the world and magic-system that doesn’t quite feel like it gives the reader enough time or information to adjust. Although the author seems to know the lore of his world inside out, he struggles at times to keep the reader up to pace. I hope the next book in this series will expand further on this worldbuilding and fill in the gaps that were left in my understanding. That brings me to my second point of critique: I wish the Goodreads page and marketing had been a little more clear about the fact that this is the start of a series, not a standalone fantasy. To me, this wasn’t a problem, but know before going in that this is a satisfying story in its own right, but it does have some open ends after you flip the final page. As a final aside, I’m happy to let you know that I had a great mailexchange with the author, in which he stressed how much he values accessibility, and an audiobook is in the making so visually impaired readers can enjoy the story too. If you know me, you know how deeply I appreciate an author (especially indie!) thinking of such things. Many thanks to T.J. Lehnen and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. You can find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Magical realism, horror, classics-retold Published: Titan Books, March 2024 My Rating: 4/5 stars “A family! Simon, of course! That’s what binds people together. if we can be a family then contextual issues solves itself. Mutualism, homemaking, protection… and if ill providence robs one of a birth family, one simply as to find another. Or make it from scratch.” I originally intended to save this one until closer to its release-date, but once I got my hands on the ARC there was no controlling myself. Let me tell you the story of how a humble debut novel became my most anticipated release of (the first half of) 2024, and most importantly, whether it managed to live up to that insane hype I set for it… The Story: A Botanical Daughter somehow managed to include not one, but two of my recent literary hyper-fixations in its set-up: it’s a Frankenstein-retelling ánd centers around botany/herbology/plant-magic. We follow a duo of two queer (in more ways than one) Victorian gentlemen, living a secluded life in caring for a large botanical garden at the edge of town. Here, away from the judgmental eyes of their peers, they’re free to express their love for each other and practice their respective scientific projects; for Simon, the art of preservation and taxidermy, and for Gregor, the care and cultivation of exotic plants and fungi. For their next project however, their joined talents will work together to a creation that will surpass anything either of them have done on their own. In a Frankenstein-esque experiment, the two set off to build a living human from body-parts, plants and fungi. What I loved: Upon first glance, it was clearly the concept, themes and “vibes” that attracted me to this book most, and I’m happy to say that Noah Medlock made excellent use of all of them. Thematically it strikes all the notes you might expect from the synopsis and it being a Frankenstein-retelling: there’s the ethics and complications around science and creation, the exploration and redefinition of the queer and the “monstrous” and a generous helping of found-family and paternity. All of it is wrapped in lush descriptions and botanical imagery, which brings the story to life before your eyes in vibrant and verdant colour. Medlock gives his writing a distinct Victorian edge, which was hit-or-miss for me personally, but was a nice nod to its source of inspiration. If you want to get a feeling for the vibes this book will offer, look no further than the stunning cover-art. It perfectly combines the beauty and tranquility of nature, and the almost cottage-core-cozy vibe the book has, whilst contrasting it a few creepy and unsettling events sprinkled in. Cozy-cottage-core and horror sound like they shouldn’t work together, but somehow this is a genre I want explored further. Might I propose we coin the term “cottage-gore” for it…? Room for improvement: Beware, very mild spoilers ahead to illustrate my points, more indepth spoilers to be found in my Goodreads-review linked below. Although I overall loved this debut, there were two aspects that kept my enjoyment from being at a full-5-star-worthy-level. Firstly, there were the characters and their narrative voices. As much as the plants and setting came to life for me, the characters did not. Simon, Gregor, Jenny and Chloe all felt a little too flat and lacking in distinct personality for me. The personalities they did have were fairly one-dimensional and a few “change-of-mind-moments” and character interactions fell flat for me as a result. In particular, the falling out between Gregor and Simon over Chloe’s “monstrous nature” felt unearned. Neither of them had expressed such strong opinions beforehand, so the emotional change of heart felt too abrupt. Secondly, some of the themes I mentioned I loved were also explored too shallowly for my liking. With the set-up created, there was so much more emotional and ethical depth to be explored here. (I cannot illustrate this point without giving away a major plotpoint, so if you're interested to read more, please visit my Goodreads-review and check under the Spoiler-tag.) Had this been done, in combination with more rounded and complex character-development, I would’ve had a new favourite on my hand. Regardless of the room for improvement, I had a wonderful time with this novel and am looking forward to what Medlock writes next. Many thanks to Titan Books for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. Readalikes: - The House in the Cerulean Sea if you’re looking for more cozy-gay-cottage-core with a helping of found family. - Mexican Gothic or What Moves the Dead for more botanical/fungal horror. - Our Hideous Progeny if you’re looking for the best feminist/queer Frankenstein adaptation penned to dated, in my personal humble opinion. Find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Literary, Contemporary Fiction Published: Avid Readers Press, March 2024 My Rating: 3.5/5 stars “We have arrived at a paradox. To live as a jew is impossible, and not to live as a Jew is equally impossible. Both paths are obscene, both insult the dead. Our subject today is whether it is possible to speak intelligently about the Holocaust. There are men who have claimed, some with great authority, that it is not possible.” Right off the bat, let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room that admittedly changed the lens through which I went into the story. This book is being done a disservice by its marketing team by being marketed as a horror/ghost-story. It is not… It’s a literary fiction novel about the relationships and connections within a Jewish family and the multigenerational ripple-effect that the trauma of the Holocaust sent through it. Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of “horrors” interlinked within this story; horrors of the aftermath of war, of the inhuman crimes taking place in WWII, of substance abuse and mental health, of neglect and abuse, and many more. But this is not a horror-novel, but a family tragedy at its core. What I loved: Viewed as a generational-saga instead of primarily a work of horror, Fervor succeeds in many aspects. We follow three generations of the Rosenthal family, largely centering around Hannah, a devout mother and believer in the literal interpretation of the Old Testament (specifically the existence of literal Good and Evil). Hannah is a journalist, living with her husband in North London and currently working on a partially fictionalized biography of her father Yosef’s life and the horrors he lived through as a Holocaust survivor. Her taking of these events stirs up a lot of friction within the family. Caught in the crossfire are Hannah’s two adolescent children Tovyah and Elsie. Things take a turn for the worse when Elsie becomes drawn to the darker sides of Jewish mythology and her mental health starts to suffer in turn. Fervor would make for a fantastic book-club pick as there are so many important discussions to be had here. Discussions on religion, cultural identity, generational trauma (in particular the “ownership” and right to speak of said trauma), and many more. I loved how Toby Lloyd chose to touch on these subjects, without spelling things out or moralizing the reader. A lot of the dynamics involved are implied through character-interactions, which enhances that feeling that there’s so much more under the surface with this family than first meets the eye. All of the characters are flawed in their own ways, some irredeemably so. Yet all of them are written to be understandable, considering their circumstances, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do. The level to which Toby Lloyd manages that (considering it’s a debut too!) is impressive! What I didn’t love: My biggest critique is the continuous distance I felt to the characters, which I think was mostly due to the choice of POV. A large chunk of the story is told from a perspective outside the core-family; as an outsider looking in. Personally, I would’ve preferred a more claustrophobic inside perspective, as I feel it would’ve fit the story and tone better. Finally, I have to circle back to the mismarketing. It may seem unfair to critique a book heavily for something outside the authors control, but as a message to the publishers its importance to a books success can’t be understated. This book got lucky with me, as I happen to like both horror- ánd literary fiction. Readers who expected an exorcist-like novel about a teenage girl divulging and unhinging into Jewish Mysticism (which is not an unfair expectation coming off the marketing!) will come away disappointed. I truly hope the publisher will address this, as to make sure the book reaches its correct audience. Many thanks to Avid Reader Press for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. Find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Literary Science Fiction, Novel in Verse Published: Titan Books, April 2024 My Rating: 3/5 stars Calypso is a piece of experimentally penned sci-fi that I somewhat struggled with, despite the fact that I appreciated many of the ideas behind it. The Story Our story opens with Rochelle, a passenger on the colonyship Calypso traveling towards an exomoon coined Terra Nova, waking from cryo-sleep. Rather than the promised new world waiting for them to settle it, Rochelle finds the ship in turmoil. The majority of her fellow-passengers have perished, and the remaining few are scattered throughout the ship that has become overgrown by the tendrils of a complex, sentient forest-ecosystem. As Rochelle pieces together the events that took place during her statis, she uncovers a legacy of war and conflicting ideals and philosophies that brought the ship to its current state. As she grieves both the losses of her past and her imagined future, Rochelle must come to terms with her stance and beliefs on the matter… What I loved: When I say experimental sci-fi, I’m mostly referring to the very unique format, which reads more like an extended verse than a traditional novel. Throughout the story, we follow 4 distinct POV’s: our protagonists Rochelle, botanist/biologists Catherine, engineer Arthur and a man solely known as The Herald. Each of their POV’s is told in distinctly different formatting, playing with rhyme, meter and positioning of words on the page. All that is enhanced by beautiful illustrations at every POV-switch, which I enjoyed in the ARC-format, but I’m sure will be even more beautiful in the finished (printed) copy. Part puzzle, part poem, part philosophical musing, the joy of Calypso is in the journey, so I won’t spell out the themes and discussions it engages with in too much detail here. In broad terms, think a lot of the classics of space-faring-sci-fi: nature-vs-technology, religion and ethics, the meaning of “being human”, and the contemplation of time and distance through memory. That last part provided some of my favourite moments in Calypso as Rochelle thinks back on her past on Earth and the family she left behind, who she knew would be dead for decades before she would even wake from cryosleep. What I didn’t love: Two points of critique stand out to me after finishing Calypso. First and foremost was how much I struggled with the non-traditional format. This isn’t an easy book to read, and it’s intentionally so. It’s very much on the literary- and experimental side of sci-fi and it requires you to indulge it a lot when it comes to just exploring ideas. In other words: this will alienate a lot of readers that would prefer a simpler and more straightforward narrative. Which brings me to my second point. Although I’m personally okay with putting in the effort with a more experimental style, there does need to be an exceptional pay-off at the end. I was a bit let down on that end. In taking on all the Great Themes of Space-scifi, I felt like I didn’t gain any new ideas from this book itself. The discussions on hand all felt like I’ve read them before, and the format didn’t click with me personally in a way that added to that experience. Your mileage may vary with this one. If you’re in the market for an ambitious, experimental novel with a focus on ideas rather than plot, this might be the perfect fit for you. Looking for a more traditional space-romp? Perhapse consider looking elsewhere... Many thanks to Titan Books for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. Find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Horror Published: Word Horde, June 2016 My Rating: 3.5/5 stars “But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?” The Fisherman is a piece of contemporary Lovecraftian horror that combines the classic terrors of the deep waters with the drowning depths of grief. From that description, you might be able to guess that I had high hopes this would be a new genre-favourite. Although it fully started out as a 5-star read, like plenty a fisherman’s tale, it grew bigger and more grotesque the further it got, and eventually lost much of its nuance for me… The story of The Fisherman is told in three parts, and takes on a nested structure; a fisherman recounting another fisherman’s tale so to speak. In part 1, we are introduced to our two protagonists Abe and Dan. The two former coworkers have developed a friendship around their shared experience of grief over the loss of their families. They take up fishing together as a substitute for their individual, much more unhealthy coping mechanisms. One day, Dan suggests a new fishing spot by the name of Dutchman’s creek; a river mysteriously absent from traditional maps. On their way there, they stop at a diner, where they learn more about the strange folklore and superstition surrounding the creek from the stories of a local man. The tale he recounts is a Fisherman’s-tale if there ever was one, and takes up the entire middle-third of the novel. We eventually circle back to Dan and Abe in part 3, as they have their own encounter at Dutchman's creek: one completely personal to them, yet eerily mirroring the tale they've just listened to. In short; I adored a part 1. It was melancholic, contemplative, ominous and  filled with subtle but resonant statements on grief, loss and memory. Had the entire book continued in this vein, I would have found a new favourite for sure. In part 2 however, we veer into full-on fantasy territory, and this was where the book lost me. I didn’t care for the full secondary cast of characters that were introduced and the action lost its subtlety and became too blatantly-Lovecraftian for me. Think more grotesque Leviathans and fish-monsters and less existential dread. Part three regained some of the psychological suspense I felt in part 1, but never got back to the level I wished it had. Granted, Langan sure understands Lovecraftian horror to a tee. I loved a lot of the elements and references present, as well as the brilliant oceanic imagery. The scale was just tipped a little too far towards “physical monster”, rather than psychological ambiguity for my personal taste. Also, I could’ve absolutely done without the image of a man fucking a fish-corpse, thank you very much… You can find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Fantasy, New Weird Fiction Published: Angry Robot, February 2024 My Rating: 4/5 stars This was a weird one, but in the best way possible. Fans of Jeff VanderMeer, Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman, place your pre-orders now, because you don’t want to miss this wild ride! Long review incoming, because I really found a lot to love here. The Story: Cady Mead, an elderly woman with an enigmatic past as a river-taxi captain, now lives her retirement days out drunk, holed up in a rundown seaside resort and trading her bawdy tales for shots of rum. All that’s about to change, when two strangers seek her out, asking for transport across the dangerous river Nysis to the city of Ludwig. Intrigued by their story and request, Cady accepts perhaps the most treacherous quest of her career: ferrying a ragtag group of misfits across a murky river possessed by the ghost of a long deceased dragon… What follows is a journey that is equal parts fantastical and unmooringly strange. What I loved: Both Jeff Noon and Steve Beard have made a name for themselves within the field of “New Weird Fiction” and the two of them use their individual strength with great synergy in this collaboration. As you might have been able to guess from the synopsis, Gogmagog’s worldbuilding takes center-stage in its success, and I had a blast exploring it alongside our crew of equally unique characters. The strange ecosystems of a polluted ghost-river, the grimy steampunk-esque cities on its banks and the gritty folks with their own quirks and histories inhabit its ports, all add to the vividness of the world of Ludwig. And by “vivid”, I don’t mean “bright”; the world of Gogmagog is everything but… Noon and Beard paint a landscape rich enough to smell, but the smell is one of rot and decay, and the bodies of inhabitants that have survival on their mind rather than cosmetics… (I’m looking at you here Cady…) I wouldn’t want to visit Ludwig or the river Nysis, but thanks to the skill of these authors, I nonetheless felt like I was right there on the muddy shores. Similarly unique and vivid are Gogmagog’s characters; a cast of mismatched weirdo’s out of a Becky-Chambers-fever-dream. There’s a robotic body-guard, a resurrected soul, and a young girl with a strange connection to ghost and shadows, including that of the river itself. Last but not least, we have Cady herself, whom Haegra-heritage makes her only partially human herself. Although it took me a while to get a feeling for their characters, besides their obvious quirks, I found myself invested in their (back-)stories soon enough, and came to care for at least some of them more than I anticipated. Much to the credit of their well-written wit, that might admittedly be hit or miss for some readers… As befitting of the genre of New Weird: there’s plenty more to explore beneath the surface than first meets the eye. I will let you embark on that treasure-hunt for yourself, but let me say that I appreciated some of the references, motifs and themes explored in here a lot. What I didn’t love: The story-structure follows a take on the (unlikely-) hero’s journey up the river, exploring the worlds backstory as we move along. Noon and Beard don’t take the reader by the hand, so don’t be surprised if you feel slightly lost before you gain a footing in the story. Although I was happy to go along with the ride, and felt like it really paid off to do so, I can see how this will bother some readers. My only major issue with Gogmagog’s plot was its pacing, which felt distinctly unbalanced. Don’t get me wrong: a lot of action happens. Too much in fact to realistically take place in a single day. The same can be said for the character-interactions, their growth and relations. Had the authors not made the timeline so clear (1 single day!), I would’ve guessed the journey took about 2-4 weeks at least… That at least would’ve felt more realistic. For being só action-packed, there’s a bit of a lull in the middle, where one too many port is called and events begin to feel repetitive. Luckily that was only brief and easily forgivable. On a final personal note: be aware that there’s plenty of (what I’d call) “potty-humor” in the book. Comedy derived from bodily-grossness and Cady being completely disgusting and uncivilized for the sake of it. If, similar to me, that brand of humor generally doesn’t seem to work for you; approach with caution. Many thanks to Angry Robot and Dreamscape Media for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I highly recommend the wonderfully narrated and produced audio-version; Matthew Lloyd Davies brings the characters to life in a way that text alone couldn't have conveyed. You can find this book here on Goodreads.

As a reviewer of many disability- , illness and care-giving related novels, as well as a medical doctor during the daytime, the number one request for a topic to cover has been "readable medical non-fiction". It took me far longer than I'd hoped to compile this list, as I frankly still don't feel completely confident that I've read enough to make a fair selection. That being said, from the top of my head, I can already give you a few of my personal favourite non-fiction books with medical themes, that impacted my journey as both a patient, caregiver and medical professional. For this list, I picked only non-fiction works aimed at a general audience (no medical textbooks or "occupational literature". I've allowed a combination of memoirs, informative non-fiction and essay collections, most of which are written from an own voice perspective. Without further ado, let's get into my personal favourite Non-Fiction books on medically related subjects. 1.      When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi A memoir by a succesful neurosurgeon, after he's diagnosed with terminal lungcancer at a young age. I loved and related to, not only his description of his journey with his own health, but especially the way it changed his views on practicing medicine as a whole. Finished and published posthumously by his wife (and care-giver), be sure to keep your tissues ready when reading her afterword... Publishers description: At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. 2.      This is Going to Hurt – Adam Kay The humourously retelling of the diaries of a junior doctor hit home to my personal experience in the field in many ways. It made me laugh, and made me deeply sad in the span of just a few pages. Basically, the extremes the that working in the medical field in reality tends to come with. Publishers description: Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know – and more than a few things you didn't – about life on and off the hospital ward. 3.      Mans Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl Although this isn't a self-help-book by any stretch of the imagination, it has helped me and many others in dealing with trauma, whilst also introducing us to one of the foundational pillars of psychiatry. The book is split in half; the first being a personal account of Viktor Frankls experiences of being a prisoner and doctor in a concentrationcamp during WWII, and the second being an introduction into the main principles of logotherapy. Both were equally impactful and the lifelessons Frankl so succinctly describes are ones I've often taken to heart. Publishers description: Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. At the heart of his theory, known as logotherapy, is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of what we find meaningful. Man's Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in America; it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living. 4.      Some of Us Just Fall – Polly Atkin A memoir that beautifully integrates nature-writing with the author's experiences with her body and health, in relation to two chronic illnesses: Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Hemochromatosis.  It’s about the artificial border between health and illness and the shadowland those with chronic or incurable conditions inhabit. It’s about falling “in between” diagnoses, when you have not one, but two condition at a young age. It’s about genetics, family, history, nature, bodies and more. Publishers description: After years of unexplained health problems, Polly Atkin's perception of her body was rendered fluid and disjointed. When she was finally diagnosed with two chronic conditions in her thirties, she began to piece together what had been happening to her - all the misdiagnoses, the fractures, the dislocations, the bone-crushing exhaustion, the not being believed. Some of Us Just Fall combines memoir, pathography and nature writing to trace a fascinating journey through illness, a journey which led Polly to her current home in the Lake District, where outdoor swimming is purported to cure all, and where every day she turns to the natural world to help tame her illness. Polly delves into the history of her two genetic conditions, uncovering how these illnesses were managed (or not) in times gone by and exploring how best to plan for her own future. From medical misogyny and gaslighting, to the illusion of 'the nature cure', this essential, beautiful and deeply personal book examines how we deal with bodies that diverge from the norm, and why this urgently needs to change. This is not a book about getting better. This is a book about living better with illness. 5.       Sitting Pretty – Rebekah Taussig Although we don't share our disability, the experiences Taussig describes in this memoir are universal enough to people struggling to fit in a world that wasn't always made with them in mind, that I found myself tearing up in recognition more than ones. Smart, insightful, full of character, and often hitting me personally right where it hurt: Rebekah Taussig has written the best piece of disability non-fiction I've read in a long time. Honourable mention to A Face for Picasso by Ariel Henley, which did very similar things and which I loved almost as much. Publishers description: Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling. Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. 6. Constellations - Sinead Gleeson Yet another hybrid of disability-memoir and essays. This one makes my list for the sheer quality of the writing, allusions and metaphors employed. It's one of the most beautifully written text I've read in years, period, let alone on this topic. I cannot wait to read the authors fiction debut that is set for release later this year. Publishers description: How do you tell the story of life that is no one thing? How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? And how do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland? In these powerful and daring essays, Sinead Gleeson does that very thing. In doing so she delves into a range of subjects: art, illness, ghosts, grief, and our very ways of seeing. In writing that is in tradition of some of our finest writers such as Olivia Laing, Maggie O'Farrell, and Maggie Nelson, and yet still in her own spirited, warm voice, Gleeson takes us on a journey that is both personal and yet universal in its resonance. 7. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - Siddhartha Mukherjee How does one write a comprehensive "summary" of the history, technicalities ánd human impact of something so complex and hetrogeneous as cancer? The answer apparently is: just like this. I'm using this entry as an umbrella-spot for all of Mukherjee's works, as after cancer, he also went on to tackle cell biology in The Song of The Cell and Genetics in The Gene: an Intimate History Publishers Description: Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” 8. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot Combining the personal lifestory of an unsung heroine of medicine, with the history of cancer-research, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks isn't just a fascinating and emotional tale, but an essential one for anyone in the medical (research-)field. Publishers Description: Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her enslaved ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — a land of wooden quarters for enslaved people, faith healings, and voodoo — to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family — past and present — is inextricably connected to the history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. 9. Being Mortal: On Medicine and What Matters in the End - Atul Gawande Palliative care is one of the medical topics that is closest to my heart, so I had to include at least one book that deals with this topic here. Although there are quite a few contenders, I selected Being Mortal, as it's one of the most accesible ones out there. Considering the importance of breaking the taboo surrounding death, dying and palliation; that alone made it worth a mention. Publishers Description: Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering. Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified. 10. Between Two Kingdoms - Suleika Jaouad Last on my list, because it's the book I enjoyed least whilst reading it. Most of that was due to how close to home this hit. Between Two Kingdoms is a memoir covering the author's experience as a young adult with cancer and the "in-between-lands" that follow it. Unlike the 9 previous titles, it's not a book that I like to reread regularly (I might not ever), but it's probably the one I'd gift you, if I wanted you to understand the "young-and-cancer" experience. Publishers description: It started with an itch - first on her feet, then up her legs, like 1,000 invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward - after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant - she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal - to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked - with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt - on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again. Are you missing your personal favourite, that you think I might love too, on this list: feel free to send me a recommendation. Or check below, if maybe, the book is already on my TBR and due for a reading soon. Medical Non-Fiction on my TBR/Radar: Do No Harm: Stories of Life and Death and Brain Surgery - Henry Marsh Complications: a Surgeons Notes on an Imperfect Science - Atul Gawande Slow Medicine: the Way to Healing - Victoria Sweet Little Earthquakes: a Memoir - Sarah Mandel The Undying - Anne Boyer Confessions of a Funeral Director: How the Business of Death Saved My Life - Caleb Wilde Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life - Harriet McBryde Johnson

Poetry 1.      Ariel – Sylvia Plath The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' and 'Paralytic', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963. 'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.' A. Alvarez in the Observer This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series with five other cherished poets, including Wendy Cope, Don Paterson, Philip Larkin, Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald. 2.      Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit – Jen Campbel Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit explores disability, storytelling, and the process of mythologising trauma. Jen Campbell writes of Victorian circus and folklore, deep seas and dark forests, discussing her own relationship with hospitals — both as a disabled person, and as an adult reflecting on childhood while going through IVF. 3.      No Matter the Wreckage – Sarah Kay Following the success of her breakout poem, "B," Sarah Kay releases her debut collection of poetry featuring work from the first decade of her career. No Matter the Wreckage presents readers with new and beloved work that showcases Kay's knack for celebrating family, love, travel, history, and unlikely love affairs between inanimate objects ("Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire"), among other curious topics. 4.      Grief is the Thing with Feathers – Max Porter In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal. 5.      Songs of Innocence and Experience – William Blake The work compiles two contrasting but directly related books of poetry by William Blake. Songs of Innocence honors and praises the natural world, the natural innocence of children and their close relationship to God. Songs of Experience contains much darker, disillusioned poems, which deal with serious, often political themes. It is believed that the disastrous end to the French Revolution produced this disillusionment in Blake. He does, however, maintain that true innocence is achieved only through experience. 6.      Me (Moth) – Amber McBride Moth has lost her family in an accident. Though she lives with her aunt, she feels alone and uprooted. Until she meets Sani, a boy who is also searching for his roots. If he knows more about where he comes from, maybe he’ll be able to understand his ongoing depression. And if Moth can help him feel grounded, then perhaps she too will discover the history she carries in her bones. Moth and Sani take a road trip that has them chasing ghosts and searching for ancestors. The way each moves forward is surprising, powerful, and unforgettable. Here is an exquisite and uplifting novel about identity, first love, and the ways that our memories and our roots steer us through the universe. 7.      Time is a Mother – Ocean Vuong In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong's poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break. Short Stories 1.      Salt Slow – Julia Armfield This collection of stories is about women and their experiences in society, about bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of its characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession and love. Throughout the collection, women become insects, men turn to stone, a city becomes insomniac and bodies are picked apart to make up better ones. The mundane worlds of schools and sea side towns are invaded and transformed by the physical, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to the bodies of its inhabitants. Blending the mythic and the fantastic, the collection considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new. 2.      A Portable Shelter – Kirsty Logan In their tiny, sea-beaten cottage on the north coast of Scotland, Liska and Ruth await the birth of their first child. They spend their time telling stories to the unborn baby, trying to pass on the lessons they've learned: tales of circuses and stargazing, selkie fishermen and domestic werewolves, child-eating witches and broken-toothed dragons. But each must keep their storytelling a secret from the other, as they've agreed to only ever tell the plain truth. Ruth tells her stories when Liska is at work, to a background of shrieking seabirds; Liska tells hers when Ruth is asleep, with the lighthouse sweeping its steady beam through the window. As their tales build and grow along with their child, Liska and Ruth realise that the truth lives in their stories, and they cannot hide from one another. A Portable Shelter is a beautifully produced collection of elegant, haunting short stories from one of Britain's most exciting new talents 3.    The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night – Jen Campbel Spirits in jam jars, mini-apocalypses, animal hearts and side shows. A girl runs a coffin hotel on a remote island. A boy is worried his sister has two souls. A couple are rewriting the history of the world. And mermaids are on display at the local aquarium. The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night is a collection of twelve haunting stories; modern fairy tales brimming with magic, outsiders and lost souls. 4.      Fen – Daisy Johnson Daisy Johnson’s Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a – well what? 5.      Forget the Sleepless Shores – Sonya Taaffe In Forget the Sleepless Shores readers should expect to be captivated by many ghosts and spirits who inhabit brine, some from tears of heartache and loss, some from strange bodies of water, not necessarily found on the map but definitely discovered through charting a course though the perilous straits of author Taaffe's imagination, which is eerie and queer (by every definition of the word). 6.      Tales from the Inner City – Shaun Tan Tales from the Inner City is a collection of incredibly original stories, rich with feeling, strangely moving, almost numinous. And when the reader comes to the artwork, it's like walking into an amazing room, and then throwing open a curtain to see a brilliant scene that makes you understand and appreciate everything you've encountered in a deeper way.

For this all-time-favourite series, I’ve made an attempt to narrow each genre-list down to a top 10, and have managed to do so for the majority of them. Literary fiction proved one where that was a hopeless endeavor from the start. Not is it my most-read genre by a hefty length, the sheer variety of books within it (and all my unique reasons for loving them), meant I settled for a top 17 and a bunch of honourable mentions instead. As with the other lists, these are subject to change, and may be pushed off into the honourable mention-section, as new favourites come along. With that being said, consider this a list of the literary favourites that I wouldn’t want anyone with a similar taste to mine to miss. Top 15 Favourites 1.      Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies – Maddie Mortimer Sitting currently at the top of my favourites-list is a book that’s close to my heart thanks to its subject-matter, as well as its brilliant prose and characterwork. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is the lyrical tale of a woman, her body and the illness that coinhabits it. Told from the perspectives of Lia herself, her daughter Iris and the (callous? Cynical? Caring…?) voice of the disease itself, we follow her life after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. A coming of age story, at the end of a life.Lia, her husband Harry, and their beloved daughter, Iris, are a precisely balanced family of three. With Iris struggling to navigate the social tightrope of early adolescence, their tender home is a much-needed refuge. But when a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, the secrets of Lia’s past come rushing into the present, and the world around them begins to transform.Deftly guided through time, we discover the people who shaped Lia’s youth; from her deeply religious mother to her troubled first love. In turn, each will take their place in the shifting landscape of Lia’s body; at the center of which dances a gleeful narrator, learning her life from the inside, growing more emboldened by the day. 2.      Migrations – Charlotte McConaghy See also: Once There Were Wolves by the same author Stunning nature writing and descriptions of the arctic oceans are combined with a phenomenally intimate exploration of grief, trauma and a woman’s escape from the remnants of her old life. Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. When Franny's dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption? 3.      The Glass Hotel – Emily St. John Mandel See also: Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility and The Singers Gun by the same author. This entry can be seen as a placeholder for all of Emily St. John Mandel’s novels, all of which can be read separate but take place in a shared universe. Since Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility are already featured on my Sci-fi favourite list as well, I’m giving this spot to The Glass Hotel. Mandel’s talent for brilliant character work, stunning prose and attention for small moments of beauty amidst quiet melancholy give a different meaning to the words “bitter-sweet”. Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call. 4.      Ghost Music – An Yu See also: Braised Pork by the same author Magical realism, Mushrooms and Music sounds like a combination that shouldn’t work, but An Yu somehow managed to craft something incredibly out of it. A wonderfully layered and lyrically told contemporary, set in Beijing, takes a surreal turn as a young woman contemplates the mold she feels pushed in, and the loss of the opportunities that passed her by. For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago, but her husband Bowen, an executive at a car company, has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. He resists even when his mother arrives from the southwestern Chinese region of Yunnan and begins her own campaign for a grandchild. As tension in the household rises, it becomes harder for Song Yan to keep her usual placid demeanor, especially since she is troubled by dreams of a doorless room she can’t escape, populated only by a strange orange mushroom. When a parcel of mushrooms native to her mother-in-law’s province is delivered seemingly by mistake, Song Yan sees an opportunity to bond with her, and as the packages continue to arrive every week, the women stir-fry and grill the mushrooms, adding them to soups and noodles. When a letter arrives in the mail from the sender of the mushrooms, Song Yan’s world begins to tilt further into the surreal. Summoned to an uncanny, seemingly ageless house hidden in a hutong that sits in the middle of the congested city, she finds Bai Yu, a once world-famous pianist who disappeared ten years ago. 5.      Our Wives Under the Sea – Julia Armfield See also: Salt Slow, shorts-stories by the same author. My number 5 teeters the edge between horror and literary, but due to my undying love for it, I’ve elected to feature it on both lists. Unnerving in its atmosphere, and yet deeply relatable and tender in its emotional resonance, this tale of trauma and its ripple-effect on a F-F relationship has cemented Julia Armfield as an instant-favourite author. Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah is not the same. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has brought part of it back with her, onto dry land and into their home.Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp. 6.      The Tidal Zone – Sarah Moss Another book that made its way on my list for being a “disability-favourite”. You’d need to read my full review to grasp its full significance for me personally, but this story of family, caregiving and a sudden and abrupt realization of mortality and the fragility of health will never leave its special place in my heart. Adam is a stay-at-home dad who is also working on a history of the bombing and rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. He is a good man and he is happy. But one day, he receives a call from his daughter's school to inform him that, for no apparent reason, fifteen-year-old Miriam has collapsed and stopped breathing. In that moment, he is plunged into a world of waiting, agonising, not knowing. The story of his life and the lives of his family are rewritten and re-told around this shocking central event, around a body that has inexplicably failed. In this exceptionally courageous and unflinching novel of contemporary life Sarah Moss goes where most of us wouldn't dare to look, and the result is riveting - unbearably sad, but also miraculously funny and ultimately hopeful. 7.      Never Let me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro In at number 7 is a modern classic, deserving of that title. An intimate, dystopian coming of age tale of friendship, memory, magical thinking and the ultimate acceptance of what (we perceive) cannot be changed. I bawled the first time I read this and couldn’t put it out of my mind for months, and it still continues to gain more power over me upon rereads. As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is modern classic. 8.      The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath Not many classics have left such a deep impression on me as The Bell Jar did when I first read it as a teenager. Although it’s gotten some flack for being “modern-sad-girl-core”, to me, suffering from genuine depression at the time of reading it, The Bell Jar put into words something I’d felt but hadn’t been able to put words to. Capturing the essence of not only depression, but an adolescent kind of Weltschmerz, this novel transcends decades and is still as relevant as it was when Plath penned it. The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic. 9.      Violets – Shin Kyung-Sook Violets is an absolutely haunting exploration of unmet desires, infatuation, and the fear of being forever unseen and overlooked. This was such a layered experience, filled with motifs of flowers, Greek mythology, language and more, that grew on me with every following page and continues to live rent-free in my mind. We join San in 1970s rural South Korea, a young girl ostracised from her community. She meets a girl called Namae, and they become friends until one afternoon changes everything. Following a moment of physical intimacy in a minari field, Namae violently rejects San, setting her on a troubling path of quashed desire and isolation. We next meet San, aged twenty-two, as she starts a job in a flower shop. There, we are introduced to a colourful cast of characters, including the shop's mute owner, the other florist Su-ae, and the customers that include a sexually aggressive businessman and a photographer, who San develops an obsession for. Throughout, San's moment with Namae lingers in the back of her mind. 10.   Where the Forest Meets the Stars – Glendy Vanderah Where the Forest Meets the Stars is one of those rare women’s fiction novels that perfectly strikes the balance of being heartwarming and melancholic, but not sappy. It follows the story of a young woman slowly finding her way back to life, friendship, love and her job as an ornithologist in training, after the subsequent losses of her mother and her own health to breast-cancer. After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises. The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles. With concerns about the child’s home situation, Jo reluctantly agrees to let her stay―just until she learns more about Ursa’s past. Jo enlists the help of her reclusive neighbor, Gabriel Nash, to solve the mystery of the charming child. But the more time they spend together, the more questions they have. How does a young girl not only read but understand Shakespeare? Why do good things keep happening in her presence? And why aren’t Jo and Gabe checking the missing children’s website anymore? 11.  Burntcoat – Sarah Hall With the COVID pandemic as a significant and recent even within my personal life and early career in medicine, it’s likely not a surprise that at least one “pandemic-novel” made it on my list. Burntcoat stands out above the rest by a mile for me, for being so much more than just a pandemic-novel. With its intimate scope, it covers not only the lockdown, but a complicated relationship, a woman’s journey with her body, chronic illness, and cycles of caretaking. It’s a novel that was difficult to read on occasions, but grew stronger and stronger on me over time. In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. The symptoms are well known: her life will draw to an end in the coming days. Downstairs, the studio remains lit - a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and even darker world. 12.   My Dark Vanessa – Kate Elizabeth Russell In this profound, brave, insightful, nuanced and at times frighteningly relatable novel Kate Elizabeth Russell explores the relationship between a precocious fifteen-year old and her charismatic but manipulative teacher, 46-years her senior. From the perspective of both teenage-Vanessa and her adult self, looking back, we explore the inner conflict, ruination and lifelong aftermath this affair brought.Not only the writing, but the character exploration in this novel make it impeccable, memorable and one of the most harrowing, yet compassionate and nuanced (towards the victim) explorations of grooming out there. In this profound, brave, insightful, nuanced and at times frighteningly relatable novel Kate Elizabeth Russell explores the relationship between a precocious fifteen-year old and her charismatic but manipulative teacher, 46-years her senior. From the perspective of both teenage-Vanessa and her adult self, looking back, we explore the inner conflict, ruination and lifelong aftermath this affair brought. 13.   On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong Had this list been ranked purely on quality of writing, Ocean Vuongs works might have been a lot closer to the top. As a poet by trade, Vuong knows how to spin a phrase and does so to great effect in this heartwrenching coming of age novel. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. 14.   The Museum of You – Carys Bray Structurally brilliant, observant and written in beautiful prose, The Museum of You struck a personal note with its portrayal of a father-daughter relationship, and the way it’s shaped by the absence of the mother. A deserving favourite of 2020, and a book that stands the test of time for me, on both a personal and technical level. We follow Clover, a young girl with a fascination for museums and a deep desire to know her mother, who passed away when she was very young. Her father took his wife’s death hard, and has locked his grief away (literally) by keeping all his wife’s possessions in a dedicated room and sealing the door. Unable to talk to her dad about her mother, Clover takes to the locked room to find her own answers about her mom’s life. Piecing together the bits, Clover curates her own museum filled with mundane objects of a woman she wish she’d got to know. 15.   The House of God – Samuel Shem Objectively, the writing of this book shouldn’t qualify it for a place on this list, but I cannot deny the impact this book has had on me and many medical doctors (in training) with me. It’s a cult-classic for a reason, and perhaps a testament to the exact points it critiques that it’s still as relevant to medicine today, as it was in 1978. Six eager interns—they saw themselves as modern saviors-to-be. They came from the top of their medical school class  to the bottom of the hospital staff to serve a  year in the time-honored tradition, racing to answer the flash of on-duty call lights and nubile  nurses. But only the Fat Man—the Clam, all-knowing resident—could sustain them in their struggle to survive, to stay sane, to love and even to be doctors when their harrowing year was done. An account of a first-year medical intern, written in humorous but scathing critique of the medical system as we know it. 16.      Tripping Arcadia - Kit Mayquist This book belongs in that incredibly niche genre of truly-dark-but-strange-academia-books that I adore. It is tense, sexy, critical and filled with a slow-building rage that few authors convey so effectively. Relatable for anyone who’s ever been frustrated by academia or elitism in medicine, effective for anyone who’s ever felt out of place, and irresistible for anyone who enjoys some good dark-botanical-prose… Med school dropout Lena is desperate for a job, any job, to help her parents, who are approaching bankruptcy after her father was injured and laid off nearly simultaneously. So when she is offered a position, against all odds, working for one of Boston’s most elite families, the illustrious and secretive Verdeaus, she knows she must accept it—no matter how bizarre the interview or how vague the job description. By day, she is assistant to the family doctor and his charge, Jonathan, the sickly, poetic, drunken heir to the family empire, who is as difficult as his illness is mysterious. By night, Lena discovers the more sinister side of the family, as she works overtime at their lavish parties, helping to hide their self-destructive tendencies . . . and trying not to fall for Jonathan’s alluring sister, Audrey. But when she stumbles upon the knowledge that the Verdeau patriarch is the one responsible for the ruin of her own family, Lena vows to get revenge—a poison-filled quest that leads her further into this hedonistic world than she ever bargained for, forcing her to decide how much—and who—she's willing to sacrifice for payback. 17. Death Valley - Melissa Broder Death Valley, for now, sits a little lower on my list, for two reasons. First, it’s one of my most recent reads and needs time to settle in my mind before I can tell if it deserves a spot closer to the top. Second, it’s a marmite-book that I realize not everyone will love in the same way I did. In many ways similar to Ghost Music, this is a book filled with quite a bit of weirdness, framing themes that I deeply relate to and care about. That combination seems to be a winner for me… In Melissa Broder’s astounding new novel, a woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike. Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant. Honourable Mentions Rebecca - Daphne DuMaurier As I consider myself somewhat of a fan of gothic-style-literature, this list would'nt be complete without a mention of the quintessential Gothic-Godmother Rebecca. It doesn't make my true top, as it there are other (more modern) adaptations that have had a deeper personal impact on me, but for its impact on the genre as a whole, Rebecca deeply deserves to be at the top of my honourable mentions. The Secret History – Donna Tartt This book had a huge impact on me when I first read it, and stood as an all-time favourite for a while. That being said, I haven’t reread it in years and am not sure if it holds up to the test of time upon reread. Snow Falling on Cedars – David Gutterson A literary court-thriller about a Japanese-American man, facing trial for the mysterious murder of a local fisherman. For similar reasons to The Secret History; this used to be an all-time favourite, dating back to my teen years, yet I haven’t read it recently so I can’t tell if it holds up to the scrutiny of my adult mind. Where the Crawdads Sing – Celia Owens Another court-room narrative that combines themes of prejudice, forbidden love and coming of age under unusual circumstances, all pressed together under a dense atmosphere and lush nature writing. The Unseen World – Liz Moore In a very similar vein to The Museum of You, The Unseen World explores a young woman’s search of answers about the lives of a deceased or no-longer present parent, who they’ve never fully got to know. In this case, a daughter getting to know her brilliant computer-developer father, through the lens of his AI-project, after she gradually loses him to dementia. The Lightkeepers – Abby Geni In this tense isolated narrative, we follow Miranda, a nature photographer who travels to the Farallon Islands, an exotic and dangerous archipelago off the coast of California, for a one-year residency capturing the landscape. Along the way we uncover elements of her own past, as well as those of the handful of people with her on the islands. Aquarium – David Vann A harrowing literary look into a dysfunctional family through the eyes of a young girl with a fascination for the ocean and aquariums. 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World – Elif Shafak A sensory reflection on a life on the streets of Istanbul, told through the perspective of a young woman's final moments between life and death after an attack on her life left her bleeding to death in a dumpster. Unforgettable. Everything Under – Daisy Johnson A hallucinatory magical realist tale with hints of European folklore, exploring language, storytelling and the complex relationship between a mother and daughter living an isolated life on a houseboat on the canals of Oxford. Yerba Buena – Nina LaCour A literary contemporary following the blossoming relationship between two women, on their journey to heal from past grief and trauma, and learn to trust and love again. Mrs Death Misses Death – Salena Godden Walking the line between prose and poetry, this lyrical novel explores the perspective of Death, as a working-class woman, living her day-to-day life. Sight – Jessie Greengrass A stunning homage to mother-child-relationships that managed to move me, resonate with me and break my heart at times… It's a marmite-read based on its format alone, but managed to completely charm me personally. Latitudes of Longing – Shubhangi Swarub A book that feels like a journey: an exploration of different continents where you can feel, smell and taste the world around you through Swarub’s words. Along the way you meet characters that feel real enough to be actual encounters along your travels, where you get a glimpse of their personal lives as you pass through.

Genre: Science Fiction Published: Harper Voyager, October 2023 My Rating: 4/5 stars Space-sci-fi tends to be hit or miss for me, but Generation Ship is the exact kind of sci-fi that I love. Thought provoking, well thought through, and focusing more so on the people and societal aspects of space-exploration than fancy-aliens and space-guns, this book had me hooked from beginning to end over the course of its 600+ page narrative. For over 250 years The Colony Voyager has traversed space on its way to the distant planet of Promissa, in an attempt to establish the first human colony on a planet outside our solar system. Aboard, alongside humanities brightest engineers and scientist, is a micro-society of roughly 18000 inhabitants. Generations have passed since their departure from Earth, and the ships strictly regulated way-of-life as dictated by their forebearers who left terra-firma, is all the passengers have ever known. All that is about to change when their ultimate goal becomes close enough to touch. With only months until their arrival on Promissa, tensions on the ship begin to rise. Not just about what they will find on this new frontier, but more so on the implications it will have on their way of life and the structure they’ve lived by for generations now. What I loved: What makes this novel unique amongst its fellow alien-planet-novels, is that 75% of its narrative length takes place aboard the ship before  touch-down, focusing on the impact of the anticipation of the upcoming changes on society aboard. Had you told me that in advance, I might’ve been hesitant about that idea, but it was that first 75% of the novel that I absolutely loved. Exploring the ship, their systems and laws, and the way of life they’ve had to adopt to survive in these cramped circumstances, and getting to know the various characters within it, exceeded all my expectations. Then, seeing al these paradigms shift in the light of a new situation and over generations (considering neither the “original makers” of these rules, nor the situation that birthed them are present anymore) was só well done! The different POV’s really helped create a well-rounded view of the situation and its many sides. Each character felt memorable and unique, both in their role on the ship as in their stance on the events at hand. The atmosphere was tense, stakes were high and I was fully invested in the faiths of those aboard. Throughout the first 450 pages or so, this book was bound for a place among my favourites, and a strong 5-star read. Although enjoyment-wise, I’d still happily have given it that, the ending made some choices that dropped that rating back to a 4. What I didn’t love: The ending was a bit too ambitious for its own good, and tried to introduce one too many new concept on top of everything it had already established. The arrival at the planet simply came too late in the story to allow enough development-time for such a big new piece of information. If you're interested in more details, you can find a spoiler-filled section in my Goodreads review, but for the purposes of this post, I'll keep it spoiler-free. Had Mammay wanted to explore these extra elements properly, it would’ve almost required a 600-page sequel. I would’ve happily read that sequel, mind you, but didn’t like it as an afterthought in an already great society/politically-based sci-fi. You can find this book here on Goodreads

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy Published: Faber&Faber Ltd, February 6th 2023 My Rating: 2/5 stars “We’re all made of energy” Ash said quickly. “We all practice alchemy naturally, with every breath and every thought and emotion. To say that only a conveniently wealthy few can legally become alchemists is bullshit.” I feel like I’ve cycled through all 5 stages of grief, before finally landing on acceptance that I didn’t like this book… With its great concept and a powerhouse of an author behind it, Infinity Alchemist was one of my most anticipated books of 2024, but the final result was something that I couldn’t enjoy, despite my best efforts… Many of Callender’s strengths that made me love their contemporary work in the past are present here as well, but unfortunately, I just feel like their talent doesn’t translate too well to the cornerstones of the fantasy genre. The story follows Ash, a 19-year-old trans-boy who works as an assistant groundskeeper at Lancaster, a magical academy where only the most elite are permitted to study Alchemy. Although Alchemy is innate in some individuals, its practice is highly regulated and only allowed with a license, making it impossible for the less-privileged of society to get a foothold in. Ash, knowing his background will exclude him from a place at the academy, has been practicing alchemy in secret. When one day, he crossed paths with Ramsay, a talented apprentice with secrets of their own, the two join forces in a quest for a powerful alchemical text, known as The Book of Source. Their journey will change their lives, and potentially the future of alchemy forever. What I loved: Callender is know for their amazing LGBTQ+ writing, and the representation in Infinity Alchemist is just as good as you’d expect from them. We have a trans-male protagonist, a genderfluid protagonist (Ramsay, who changes gender-expression and pronouns on a chapter by chapter basis), and a polyamorous relationship that wonderfully subverts the tropes of the love triangle so overdone in YA-fantasy. All of these elements are just allowed to be present on page and are never made into a “big deal”, or larger message. I personally love that form of representation, and wish we’d have more of that. I do have to say that Ramsay’s changing of pronouns got in the way of readability in some chapters, and will bother some readers. There are instances where it can become confusing to have one of the characters change pronoun midway through a paragraph. Especially in the case of multiple male characters, it’s often not clear if the “he/him” the text refers to is aimed at Ramsay or other male characters. Personally, I felt it was an issue of the writing, not the pronouns themselves, but it’s worth a mention. I also loved the discussion the book brought up about elitism and privilege in the context of academia. That, as well as the other messages about polarization, acceptance and more, were very powerful and resonated with me. In a contemporary novel, a compelling cast and strong message might have been enough to carry a novel. That doesn’t work for a 400+ page piece of fantasy, which is where Infinity Alchemist takes a tumble. What I didn’t love: Carrying the novels ideas, is a very weak plot, hampered even further with glaring pacing issues. The story basically boils down to a McGuffin-chase, that stretches out too long and is ultimately wrapped up far too fast and easy to be satisfactory. I cannot stress these pacing issues enough. Without hyperbole, I wanted to DNF this book every single time I put it down for a break. I would’ve done so too, had this not been a review copy. I simply couldn’t get invested in the story, for multiple reasons; most prominently, the characters. I’m okay with an unlikable or flawed main character, but I found Ash to be insufferable. He’s quick to anger, selfish and immature, which I can all excuse since he’s supposed to be a teenager. What I can’t excuse is his self-pitying and often hypocritical attitude towards those who he sees as “more privileged”. He demonizes the elite for thinking they’re better than others, whilst simultaneously kicking down at all the scholars for “being book-smart” and “only learning facts”, whilst his self-taught alchemy is “the real, practical thing”. On several occasions, he actually mocks Ramsay for studying for her tests and learning within the traditional education system, and it comes off as ignorant and disrespectful. Your background should never exclude you from an education, but on the other hand “being self-taught” doesn’t put you above those who did receive an education. Your background also doesn’t exclude you from putting in the work, and the only examples the author provides us (unintentionally!) is Ash not doing that. Granted, Ash does go through some character-development, but much of it happens past the 90% mark, and feels very sudden and unearned, lacking the proper build-up. The same goes for the (romantic) relationships; the characters don’t spend enough (page-)time together for me to believe their strong emotional connection, or be invested in them. It doesn’t help either that emotional beats (for example, a characters traumatic backstory) are consistently told, not shown. Apart from the characters, the world wasn’t developed enough either for me to fully feel invested. We’re told that Alchemy has shaped society in many ways, but we never see it’s implications for the larger world outside the school-walls. We’re told that The Book of Source is almost akin to a Holy Grail, and yet we only encounter about a handful of alchemists looking for it… There’s mention of the many Houses, but none of them actually feel distinct or developed beyond a house-name… The framework is there, but it needed so much more development to work. Which is a shame, considering the book already feels overly-long and bloated as is. Overall, I really wanted to love this authors debut in the fantasy genre, but the quality simply wasn’t there for me. I highly recommend their contemporary works (King and the Dragonflies, Hurricane Child and Felix Ever After), but suggest you skip this one… Many thanks to Faber & Faber for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. You can find this book here on Goodreads

Genre: Literary fiction Published: HarperNorth, January 2023 My Rating: 2/5 stars "Breathing in enough to be given life, softening the pain a little, finding some colour in all the grinding grey. Remembering that something else was possible, that it could change. That was all I could hold on to, never daring to consider that it actually would change. That I would." Whenever a book is this universally panned by critics, it sometimes paradoxically gets me even more intrigued by it. It’s not morbid curiosity that drives me towards these books. The low rating indicates to me that it has at least done something unique and different and isn’t just a “mediocre people-pleaser”. I go into these reads genuinely hoping to find a marmite-read that I find to be a delicious bitter-sweet delight. In reality, the experience is often very much like the one I had with actual marmite: I hate it, and now understand why others do to. 240 pages later, all I can say is: I get it now. I get what the author was going for, and I also get why they didn’t succeed. Fray is an experimentally stylized novel about a daughter wandering the Scottish highlands in search of her missing father, who in turn after suffering a supposed mental break, disappeared whilst “looking for” his deceased wife in the wild. The bleak and inhospitable nature around her creates a stark background for our unnamed protagonists grief and guilt over her double loss; the loss of someone missing without resolve, and the loss of someone certainly gone for good. Throughout the first 40 pages or so, I was actually loving the atmosphere and the way the characters inner monologue unfolded. It reminded me stylistically of the likes of Infinite Grounds and Lanny; a stream of consciousness, hallucinatory mix of nature-writing and psychological musings. which can be hit-or-miss, but happened to work for me (especially in the case of the latter). Then, after that 25% mark, I began to see the cracks emerge, and slowly watched the novel crumble apart. Essentially; this should’ve stayed a short-story. Had the author stopped at that 25% mark, it would’ve been a 4-star story, and nothing much would’ve been lost. After this point, repetition set in. Unstructured, disjointed and draining repetition. You could argue the symbolism here: it being a reflection of the character’s “working through grief in real time”. I would’ve accepted that as part of the novel, had their been an end-point to this journey. Instead, this book is all wandering and eventually goes nowhere. There’s no pay-off, no ending, no conclusion. In the end, the characters are in the exact place they left from. Some readers may see their own experience with complex grief and/or trauma reflected here. To me, there just was no point to reliving that experience, without any pay-off or new insight to be gained. In short: a bleak, disjointed “wandering” of text, that has a single message and “feeling” to convey. Unfortunately, it conveyed that in the first 40 pages or so, and the rest of the story did little but take away from its strength. Find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Literary Fiction Published: Faber & Faber, January 2024 My Rating: 4.5/5 stars “The smell of rain moves through the house. There’s a storm coming. It wakes the dead, who yawn and stir inside the soil to wait with dry throats.” Tough Jamaican roots grow deep in English soil in this beautifully written fiction debut about a multicultural family reconnecting after a joined grief threatens to split them apart. Meet the Hembry’s; a patchwork family of four, that may not seem to like they belong together upon first glance, but clearly had a tight and loving bond before tragedy struck. There’s Tess, of Jamaican heritage, struggling to find her footing in the cold English countryside. Yet she’s never been more unmoored than by the grief she’s suffered recently. There’s Richard; an Englishman of few words, who withdraws from the family to avoid painful memories. Then there’s the “rainbow twins”: who no-one believes to be actual twins due to their different appearance and skintone. Max, who takes after his father, and now often gets himself into trouble at school for running off with Sonny too much. And “golden-boy” Sonny; dreaming and ethereal, with his head in the clouds (or in his case: the nature around their house). Although we don’t know the nature of the loss that befell the family, we feel its effects from page one. Through their four perspectives, we learn not only what happened in the past, but also how a broken family strives to become whole again. There are books you read for their story, and there are books you read for the way that story is told. The House of Broken Bricks firmly falls into the latter category. Fiona Williams’ stunning nature-writing and poetic prose, turns a relatively simple story into a hauntingly beautiful experience, that actually managed to tuck on my heartstrings a bit. First of all, the language on display is often just a joy to read by itself, although it might be a bit too much on the purple prose side, depending on your personal preferences. The book is populated by lush nature-imagery and gorgeously crafted sentences like: “In the mellow heat, I feel myself expand so grief sinks into my marrow to become hard, as close to the underside of my skin as bone, yet soft, deep melding like the sinews that support my pelvis, which ease and stretch as I move about the house.” In the wrong context, this can distract from the story and feel “overwritten”, but in this case it’s woven into the story so naturally, that it only enhances it. Secondly, structurally, this book was really well crafted. It’s divided by fours in more ways than one. Each quarter of the book follows one of the four seasons in the English country-side, and each of these seasons reflects “a season” of the family’s journey. Another way the story is split into fours is by its narrators: Tess, Richard, Sonny and Max all taking turns and revealing their part of the story. One of the hardest things to do for an author, is write multiple distinct narrative voices for their protagonists, but Williams nails that here. Without even reading the title-headers, I was able to easily decern who was talking, just by the language used, and how it fit the character. Tess (who clearly suffers from a form of depression after what happened), fills her parts with a feeling of longing an melancholy. Sonny’s are almost dreamlike and filled with wonder about the world that surrounds him. Max’s are observant and matter-of-fact, whereas Richard’s (the only narrative told in 3rd person) feels distant, reflecting his literal withdrawal from the rest of the family. Third and lastly; the reveal of the story feels inevitable in the best way possible. There are no cheap “twists”; that wouldn’t fit the story. Instead Williams slowly reveals what has already happened in a way that’s deeply bittersweet and memorable. Fans of literary fiction with themes of family, grief and multicultural interest, who don’t mind their prose on the lyrical side, will devour this novel. I absolutely did. Many thanks to Faber & Faber for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. Find this book here on Goodreads

Genre: Fantasy, Novella Published: Tordotcom, January 2024 My Rating: 2.5/5 stars “I don’t think we get second chances with our own injuries” said Sumi. “All we can really do is try to clean up all the broken glass before someone else gets there.” Mislaid in Parts Half-known marks the ninth and penultimate novella in the Wayward Children series, and is one of the few that actually reads like a sequel to its predecessors, and cannot be read easily as a standalone. Our story takes place directly after the events of Lost in the Moment and Found, and follows the continuation of Antsy’s story. As established, Antsy has a talent for finding Doors and that talent is put to full use when she takes the Wayward-gang on a world-hopping adventure. As you’ve come to expect from the series; friendships are to be built, and life-lessons are to be learned. As you may or may not have suspected from the cover; this time, dinosaurs are involved as well. Full disclaimer: I’m not a Wayward Children’s fangirl…I can see its mass-appeal, but ever since Every Heart a Doorway it’s been a 3-star series for me. To speak in McGuires own terms; these books are high-whimsy, medium-logic and low subtlety. Although I love her imagination in the worlds and atmospheres she crafts, the message behind each of these novellas is so heavy handed that it often irks me. That being said, book 8 stands out as my favourite of the bunch, and I was actually excited to see the resolution to Antsy’s narrative. Book 9 does provide that resolution, but does it in a far more whimsical, playful and weirdly low-stakes manner. We see the crew adventuring, and (literally!) running with dinosaurs. Yet as far as development goes: this felt like it could’ve been shortened and incorporated into  Lost in the Moment and Found without losing too much. Do I recommend this book? Maybe… If you’re a diehard Wayward Children’s fan, it’s an essential in the collection. It may not pack as much of an emotional punch, but the adventure-romp it does bring is a welcome breeze of fresh air after the previous two more intense novellas. If you’re on the fence on the series, this one isn’t going to convince you. Taking into account their extremely steep pricetag (honestly, these novellas are among the most overpriced and capitalistic suckers in current publishing and we NEED to call that out), this would be more of a library-borrow than an immediate purchase for me. Many thanks to Tordotcom for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. Find this book here on Goodreads

If my “one-on-one-off” pattern of previous years holds true, it’s 2024’s turn to be a fantastic reading-year. With some of these anticipated releases, I have high hopes that this prediction might come true. In previous years, I’ve attempted to narrow this list down to my 10 most anticipated releases. This year, I’m adding 5 continuations of series I’m in the middle of to that mix. At this point, we all know release-dates are subject to change as they year progresses, so take all of them with a small grain of salt. Because of that, and to change things up slightly, I've ordered this list not chronologically, but based on excitement-level at the time compiling it. Starting off with my most-anticipated release, and working my way down: Private Rites – Julia Armfield Expected release date: June 6th Why I’m Excited: Julia Armfield previous two works are among my all-time-favourites and I’ve been impatiently waiting for whatever she does next, ever since Our Wives Under The Sea. If it’s anywhere close to the quality of her other works, this is already a strong candidate for the favourite-list of 2024. Synopsis:  It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves and the cities have retreated to higher storeys. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway. As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Soon it becomes clear that others have also taken an interest in both his estate and in them, and that perhaps their inheritance may not be theirs alone. 2. Sheine Lende – Darcie Little Badger Expected release date: April 16th  Why I’m Excited: I’ve been eagerly awaiting anything by this author for quite some time now, but had never expected a companion to one of my all-time favourite novels. Not a direct sequel, but a loose companion to Elatsoe was more than I’d ever hoped. Synopsis: Shane works with her mother and their ghost dogs, tracking down missing persons even when their families can't afford to pay. Their own family was displaced from their traditional home years ago following a devastating flood - and the loss of Shane's father and her grandparents. They don't think they'll ever get their home back. Then Shane's mother and a local boy go missing, after a strange interaction with a fairy ring. Shane, her brother, her friends, and her lone, surviving grandparent - who isn't to be trusted - set off on the road to find them. But they may not be anywhere in this world - or this place in time. 3. A Botanical Daughter - Noah Medlock Expected release date: March 19th  Why I’m Excited: the cover drew my in, the synopsis had me hooked and the sneak-peak I read of the first chapter had me invested. Frankenstein-meets-botany in a Victorian horror novel. If that doesn’t sound like my perfect horror novel, I don’t know what will… Synopsis: It is an unusual thing, to live in a botanical garden. But Simon and Gregor are an unusual pair of gentlemen. Hidden away in their glass sanctuary from the disapproving tattle of Victorian London, they are free to follow their own interests without interference. For Simon, this means long hours in the dark basement workshop, working his taxidermical art. Gregor's business is exotic plants – lucrative, but harmless enough. Until his latest acquisition, a strange fungus which shows signs of intellect beyond any plant he's seen, inspires him to attempt a masterwork: true intelligent life from plant matter. Driven by the glory he'll earn from the Royal Horticultural Society for such an achievement, Gregor ignores the flaws in his plan: that intelligence cannot be controlled; that plants cannot be reasoned with; and that the only way his plant-beast will flourish is if he uses a recently deceased corpse for the substrate. The experiment – or Chloe, as she is named – outstrips even Gregor's expectations, entangling their strange household. But as Gregor's experiment flourishes, he wilts under the cost of keeping it hidden from jealous eyes. The mycelium grows apace in this sultry greenhouse. But who is cultivating whom? 4. Alien Clay – Adrian Tchaikovsky Expected release date: March 28th  Why I’m Excited: this needs little explanation: Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of my all-time favourite novels and I will basically read anything by him that sounds even remotely interesting. The story of an xeno-ecologist sent to a prison colony on an alien planet sure foots that bill. It’s synopsis reminds me a lot of Cage of Souls, which happens to be my favourite book by the author. Let’s hope it strikes the right balance between being like that one, but not too similar… Synopsis: The planet of Kiln is where the tyrannical Mandate keeps its prison colony, and for inmates the journey there is always a one-way trip. One such prisoner is Professor Arton Daghdev, xeno-ecologist and political dissident. Soon after arrival he discovers that Kiln has a secret. Humanity is not the first intelligent life to set foot there. In the midst a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem are the ruins of a civilization, but who were the vanished builders and where did they go? If he can survive both the harsh rule of the camp commandant and the alien horrors of the world around him, then Arton has a chance at making a discovery that might just transform not only Kiln but distant Earth as well. 5. The Tainted Cup – Robert Jackson Bennett Expected release date: February 6th  Why I’m Excited: this book hits so many of my buzzwords, it’s unbelievable. A fantasy-detective story in which a protagonist duo ala Sherlock and Watson investigate a murder in a dystopian world where plant-based magic is central. SIGN ME UP NOW. Synopsis: In Daretana’s most opulent mansion, a high Imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree spontaneously erupted from his body. Even in this canton at the borders of the Empire, where contagions abound and the blood of the Leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death at once terrifying and impossible. Called in to investigate this mystery is Ana Dolabra, an investigator whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol. Din is an engraver, magically altered to possess a perfect memory. His job is to observe and report, and act as his superior’s eyes and ears--quite literally, in this case, as among Ana’s quirks are her insistence on wearing a blindfold at all times, and her refusal to step outside the walls of her home. Din is most perplexed by Ana’s ravenous appetite for information and her mind’s frenzied leaps—not to mention her cheerful disregard for propriety and the apparent joy she takes in scandalizing her young counterpart. Yet as the case unfolds and Ana makes one startling deduction after the next, he finds it hard to deny that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective. As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the safety of the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect. 6. Hagstone – Sinead Gleeson Expected release date: April 11th  Why I’m Excited: Sinead Gleeson is the author one of the most beautifully written memoirs I’ve read in years, so I already know her way with words is incredible. Of course, I can’t wait to see how that translates into her fiction-debut. Synopsis: The sea is steady for now. The land readies itself. What can be done with the woman on the cliff? On a wild and rugged island cut off and isolated to some, artist Nell feels the island is her home. It is the source of inspiration for her art, rooted in landscape, folklore and the feminine. The mysterious Inions, a commune of women who have travelled there from all over the world, consider it a place of refuge and safety, of solace in nature. All the islanders live alongside the strange murmurings that seem to emanate from within the depths of the island, a sound that is almost supernatural – a Summoning as the Inions call it. One day, a letter arrives at Nell’s door from the reclusive Inions who invite Nell into the commune for a commission to produce a magnificent art piece to celebrate their long history. In its creation, Nell will discover things about the community and about herself that will challenge everything she thought she knew. 7. Toward Eternity – Anton Hur Expected release date: July 9th  Why I’m Excited: this one might be a bit of a wild-card as it’s technically a debut. That being said, Anton Hur has lent his narrative voice to many a translation that I’ve loved, and it always intrigues me to see what someone so skilled with words can conjure up on his own. Add to that the literary-sci-fi genre and the comparison to Emily St. John Mandel, and I’m basically sold. Synopsis:  In a near-future world, a new technological therapy is quickly eradicating cancer. The body’s cells are entirely replaced with nanites—robot or android cells which not only cure those afflicted but leaves them virtually immortal. Literary researcher Yonghun teaches an AI how to understand poetry and creates a living, thinking machine he names Panit, meaning Beloved, in honor of his husband. When Yonghun—himself a recipient of nanotherapy—mysteriously vanishes into thin air and then just as suddenly reappears, the event raises disturbing questions. What happened to Yonghun, and though he’s returned, is he really himself anymore? When Dr. Beeko, the scientist who holds the patent to the nanotherapy technology, learns of Panit, he transfers its consciousness from the machine into an android body, giving it freedom and life. As Yonghun, Panit, and other nano humans thrive—and begin to replicate—their development will lead them to a crossroads and a choice with existential consequences. 8. Enlightenment – Sarah Perry Expected release date: May 7th  Why I’m Excited: Sarah Perry’s fourth novel returns to the setting of her best work The Essex Serpent, with a completely different historical tale about astronomy, faith and lifelong friendship. I love Sarah’s writing and can’t wait to see what she does with this latest concept. Synopsis: Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London. Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other. 9. The Spellshop – Sarah Beth Durst Expected release date: July 6th  Why I’m Excited: it’s Sarah Beth Durst writing cosy fantasy with cottage-core vibes… And if nothing else, the cover will be a piece of art to brighten up my shelves… Synopsis: Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people, and as librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she hasn’t had to. She and her assistant, Caz, a sentient spider plant, have spent most of the last eleven years sequestered among the empire’s precious spellbooks, protecting the magic for the city’s elite. But a revolution is brewing and when the library goes up in flames, she and Caz steal whatever books they can and flee to the faraway island where she grew up. She’s hoping to lay low and figure out a way to survive before the revolution comes looking for her. To her dismay, in addition to a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor, she finds the town in disarray. The empire with its magic spellbooks has slowly been draining power from the island, something that Kiela is indirectly responsible for, and now she’s determined to find a way to make things right. Opening up a spell shop comes with its own risks—the consequence of sharing magic with commoners is death. And as Kiela comes to make a place for herself among the quirky townspeople, she realizes that in order to make a life for herself, she must break down the walls she has kept so high. 10. Ghost Station – S.A. Barnes Expected release date: April 9th Why I’m Excited: despite the fact that the authors last book burned me, I’m still in desperate need of a good sci-fi horror book. I’m truly hoping this one will scratch that itch. Synopsis: Psychologist Dr. Ophelia Bray has dedicated her life to the study and prevention of ERS—a space-based condition most famous for a case that resulted in the brutal murders of twenty-nine people. When she's assigned to a small exploration crew, she's eager to make a difference. But as they begin to establish residency on an abandoned planet, it becomes clear that crew is hiding something. While Ophelia focuses on her new role, her crewmates are far more interested in investigating the eerie, ancient planet and unraveling the mystery behind the previous colonizer's hasty departure than opening up to her. That is, until their pilot is discovered gruesomely murdered. Is this Ophelia’s worst nightmare starting—a wave of violence and mental deterioration from ERS? Or is it something more sinister? Anticipated Sequels/Series-Continuations: Mirrored Heavens – Rebecca Roanhorse Book 3 in the Beyond Earth and Sky trilogy Expected release date: June 4th Tidal Creatures – Seanan McGuire What Feasts at Night – T. Kingfisher Sequel to What Moves the Dead Expected release date: February 13th Greenwild: The City Beyond the Sea – Pari Thomson Book 2 in the Greenwild Saga Expected release date: June 4th Somewhere Beyond the Sea – TJ Klune Prequel/Companion to The House in the Cerulean Sea Expected release date: September 10th My most anticipated releases will make up half of the 20 books that will function as my 2024 Master-TBR, which you can find on my Goodreads. Here you can also keep track of my reading throughout the year, if you fancy a more shortform format than this blog. With that, we reach the conclusion of my Year in Review of 2023, and quick glance ahead at 2024. I hope you had incredible holidays, and I wish you the best for your new (reading) year. Happy reading!

Compiling my favourites list was a bit of a different experience compared to the past few years. Where the struggle was often in narrowing down the number of great reads, 2023 was a year where very few books felt like true new favourites. I’ve read a lot of enjoyable books, but few that feel like they will stand the test of time for me personally. Additionally, there’s a very clear theme in the 11 titles, that I want to mention. Although disability- and chronic illness-fiction has been a huge part of my reading for years now, both for my own entertainment and as an editor/reviewer/sensitivity reader, never before has it dominated my Yearly Favourites-list this strongly. Almost all of them have at least an element of this to their story, so if you aren’t interested in this topic, my list may not be helpful to you. The fact that so  many of these made it on the list is a testament to what’s been on my mind this year, but also to the quality of these books, to all stand out in the midst of the 133 books I finished this year. As always, this list is roughly ranked, based off my own personal enjoyment, and only includes first-time reads (no re-reads!) and books released at the time of posting (no 2024-previews or ARCS). That self-imposed rule was more relevant than ever, as without them, my top 3 would just by rereads of some of my all-time favourites. Special shout-out to The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger and The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher. When it comes to first-time-reads, I’ve selected a top 10, in rough order based off my own personal connection to- or enjoyment of the book. Without further ado, let’s get into my top 10 reads of 2023: 10. Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham In the number 10 spot, we have a book that might as well have topped my Underrated list, as it’s currently stuck at only 200 ratings on Goodreads and I’ve heard absolutely no other reviewers talk about it. Part of me understands it might be a bit of a marmite book, but a far greater part remembers this as one of my most memorable reading-experiences of the year, earning it a well-deserved spot here.Swim Home to the Vanished is a magical realist parable, exploring a man’s grief over the loss of his brother through the lens of Diné mythology. It’s an incredibly layered experience that requires some suspension of disbelieve, but resonated with me personally a lot. Bashams prose is incredibly striking and lyrical (let alone considering this is a debut!) and his character explorations, paralleling the mythological elements are something I haven’t seen done before in quite this way. Magical, lyrical, beautiful and written by an indigenous American author on a culture I loved learning more about. Full review 9. Now She is Witch by Kirsty Logan Over the past few years, the genre of “feminist witch fiction” has become so oversaturated that I’ve burned out on it a little bit. Leave it to one of my all-time favourite authors however, to put a spin on it that makes me adore it again. Logan’s signature style, themes, deep atmosphere and stunning prose were all there, and like a true word-witch, she put a spell on me with her writing once more. Our story opens with the stark image of our protagonist Lux burying the remains of her mother in a poison garden. Having lost not just her mother, but her home and roots to accusations of witchcraft, Lux sets of on a journey into the woods. What follows is her life’s travels, making her way from a group of vagrant theatre plays, to a final position as the kings food taster, all the while accompanied by a mysterious woman named Else, who she grows closely connected to. This is a story of feminism, but not the obvious shouty-kind I’ve seen in the genre before. It’s about ghosts, grief, poisons and nature, motherhood, love and learning to trust in life again. Simply stunning. Full review 8. Where You See Yourself by Claire Forrest In the number 8 spot, we have the first of my disability-fiction reads to make the list: a novel that wasn’t just a well written young adult contemporary, but also depicted a relatable experience I’ve never seen described before within the genre. In Where You See Yourself, we follow 17-year old Effie in her senior year of high-school, navigating proms, moving out of her parental home and most importantly: selecting and applying to colleges. For Effie, the process isn’t has carefree as it seemingly is for her classmates. Being in a wheelchair because of Cerebral Palsy, Effie has to consider not only curricula, admittance criteria and the campus-atmosphere of different schools, but also matters of accessibility, housing, travel distance and more… I was completely open to love this book, but I didn’t expect to relate this much to the representation of being a disabled teen and college student. Effie’s story is such a deeply powerful one, that I’d honestly wished had been around when I was 18 and encountering similar events. What truly sets this book apart is its well-roundedness in depicting the disability aspects ánd the realities of “regular teen-life”, side-by-side without making one seem more profound or important over the other. The own-voice experience of the author shines through in her respect for the characters experiences: she has a disability, but also lives a full teen-experience of first love, academic pressure and more, and both are equally relevant to her identity. At the end of the book, Effie has to make an important choice that I won’t spoil. However, I deeply appreciated the choice that was made, as well as the reasons behind it. Depending on what you expect going in, it might not be the choice you expect, but it’s one that I deeply respect, and wish I’d had the maturity to make at that age… Full review 7. Tripping Arcadia by Kit Mayquist At number 7 is the lowest average-rated book on my list, with only a 3.5 on Goodreads, and I cannot understand what possessed the general public for rating this so low. I was drawn in by its description as a “queer, dark gothic novel with themes of poisons, power and privilege” and I wasn’t disappointed. I will try to keep the plot-synopsis vague, as it’s best to experience this one as it goes. We follow a med-school dropout, forced to leave her dream behind due to financial issues in the family. Desperate for any source of income, she takes a job as a physician’s assistant for a private doctor attending to the ailing son of Boston’s most elite families, suffering from a mysterious illness. Despite the red-flags throughout all of the interviewing process, she is quickly taken in by this morally ambiguous job, getting wrapped up in a world of pharmaceutical corruption, nepotism and the intoxicating power of wealth and extravagance. The incredible split between her own background and her new surroundings send our protagonist spiraling, questioning her own ethics and developing a stronger desire for revenge along the way. This book belongs in that incredibly niche genre of truly-dark-but-strange-academia-books that I adore. It is tense, sexy, critical and filled with a slow-building rage that few authors convey so effectively. All of these characters are the definition of morally grey and often unlikable. Yet still, the critique of academic pressure, nepotism and out-of-touch-ness of elite academia (especially within medicine!) is something I and many others like me will relate to on some level. I can see how this book might not be to everyone’s liking, but it certainly was to mine. 6. Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson I feel like this book barely needs an introduction or explanation at this point… The first release in Brandon Sandersons “Secret Project” series of books he wrote during the COVID-lockdown, completely blew me away, and I was far from alone in that opinion. This standalone novel, set in the Cosmere Universe, follow Tress, a young woman who embarks on a daring journey across the seas to rescue her best friend Charlie, who’s fallen prey to the Sorceress of the Midnight Sea. Except the seas in the Cosmere Universe, aren’t your typical bodies of water… Instead, Tress has to traverse the treacherous currents of oceans made out of fungal spores, each type of them highly toxic or volatile, responding to agitation in deadly ways. Helped along the way by a lovable cast of (pirate) characters, including a talkative rat, Tress’ adventures are some you won’t easily forget. In short: Sanderson has described this book as “Cosmere, meets the whimsical storytelling of the Princess Bride”, and he nails that vibe. From the plot, to the whimsy, the characters and the hilarious narrative tone of our unreliable narrator Hoid; this story was whimsical fantasy perfection to me. With 2023 being the year of “cozy fantasy”  for many, this was the kind of cozy fantasy that I’m here for: not low-stakes romance with a drizzle of D&D-inspired world building, but epic fantasy with whimsy and heart to inspire that same warm and cozy feeling inside. 5. Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett Speaking of cozy books: I didn’t have a lot of luck with cozy fantasy, but weird, cozy, slightly absurdist contemporary apparently worked just fine for me. Unlikely Animals is a difficult book to describe, as its plot sounds like complete chaos and its charm is almost inexplicable. That being said, the author somehow managed to make me fall completely in love with its characters and setting, and ultimately hit me with quite the bitter-sweet emotional gut punch at the end. In short, the story follows Emma Starling, a med-school drop-out returning to her small New Hampshire hometown to visit her father, who’s dying from an undiagnosed brain-disease. Emma is reluctant to return home, where she’s been quite the celebrity on the ground of being rumoured to have an almost magical “healing touch”. Emma, who’s never actually healed anyone to the best of her knowledge, feels the expectation this rumour brings heavy on her shoulders. Meanwhile, as her father’s condition progresses, more and more bizarre events unfold. Clive Starling’s hallucinations of small animals and the ghost of a long-dead naturalist Harold Baynes inspire him to random acts of animal-kindness, with increasingly chaotic results. We follow Emma, as she juggles her increasingly dysfunctional, but insanely wholesome family, as well as her new temporary job as a substitute teacher for a bunch of middle-graders, and (thanks to her dad) an adopted pet dog and fox...   As you can probably tell from the synopsis, this book is a bit bonkers, but Hartnett’s poignant writing and lovable characters add such a layer of depth to this quirky tale that I couldn’t help but fall in love. I highly recommend this book if you’re in the mood for something wholesome with a potentially bittersweet touch, and don’t mind a little bit of weird in your stories. 4. Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit by Jen Campbell I’ve been a fan of Jen Campbell’s work (both her writing and her content on Youtube) for years now, so I’ve had this book on pre-order ever since its first announcement. With expectations that high, I feared I was setting myself up for disappointment. Yet somehow, Jen Campbell lived up to, and even surpassed some of my expectations. Please Do Not Touch This Exhibit is a poetry collection, in which Jen explores her experiences growing up with a disability and chronic illness, from childhood to adulthood, and ultimately through the process of IVF. Her almost magical, whimsical metaphors and writing style make these difficult topics a lot more accessible to read about.  To say I personally related to this collection, would be the understatement of the century. It’s certainly in my top 3 poetry collections of all time, and the highest that poetry has ever made it on my Yearly Favourites-list. Considering the subject-matter, make sure you’re in the right state of mind before picking up this collection, but other than that, I cannot recommend this one high enough… Full review 3. The Girl From Earths End by Tara Dairman Speaking of books that made me cry, there’s always That-One-Middle-Grade book that manages to make its way into the top three, by absolutely wrecking me beyond anything an adult epic tragedy can do. This year, it was this incredible surprise, that I basically only picked up because of its stunning cover. The Girl From Earths End is a middle-grade fantasy story about a young girl who’s raised on an island by her two loving adoptive dads, spending their days attending to the local plants and extended gardens. When one of her dads falls incurably ill, twelve-year-old Henna hatches a plan to attend the archipelago’s most prestigious botanical academy, and gain entry to their greenhouses, where a mythical plant with almost magical healing properties is rumoured to be housed. What follows is a story that’s warm, uplifting and sad at the same time, with an inclusive cast featuring a bunch of positive representations (including different ethnicities/cultures, and non-binary- and disabled main character). There’s found family, (non-romantic) love and friendship, acceptance and inclusion, holding-on and letting go. Without spoiling anything: there’s no magical cure-all-trope here, but something far more nuanced and realistic, and the ending is just as emotionally striking as the journey before. A beautiful coming of age tale that perfectly balanced it’s narrative and emotional beats, and had me laugh ánd cry throughout. Full review 2. Catfish Rolling by Clara Kumagai In the number 2 spot, we have one of my first reads of the year, and one that has lived rent-free in my mind ever since. It’s a debut novel that blends elements of sci-fi and magical realism with the haunting reality of the aftermath of a devastating natural disaster, and its rippling effect through time and the lives it’s affected. In this alternate reality Japan, an earthquake so tremendous it split and shook not only the Earth, but time itself, hit the islands. Since then, the hardest-hit areas have fractured into zones; time-anomalies where each geographical area flows its own pace of time. These zones are off-limits to everyone but a select handful of scientist studying them. Sora’s father is one of them. Both Sora and her dad have been obsessed with the time-zones, ever since their emergence, for different reasons. Her father hopes to find answers, and an escape from his crushing grief. Sora hopes for even more; to find a timeline where her mother who passed in the earthquake is still present. This book haunted me for the entire year in the best possible way. It’s perfect combination of worldbuilding, slight mystery-plot and incredibly well-done character-work and explorations of grief, memory and time make it a stand-out favourite. Although it’s marketed towards a young adult audience, I think this book would work perfectly for adult speculative readers as well, thanks to its beautifully integrated ageless themes. Full review 1. Some of Us Just Fall by Polly Atkin Honourable mention: Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad An unprecedented event in my reading wrap-ups, but here we are: my favourite read of the year is a disability-memoir. Not just one, but a second honourable mention as well…I’ve read my fair share of disability-fiction, non-fiction and memoirs over the past few years, and am truly honing in to my likes and dislikes in them. As a result, I’m encountering more “middle of the road ones”, but also more all-time favourites that truly strike home on both a personal and a more objective writing-level. Some of Us Just Fall by Polly Atkin exemplifies all that I love in the genre. Polly Atkin describes her experience living with two chronic conditions: Ehlers Danlos syndrome and hemochromatosis, and the way those two have shaped the world around her and those close to her. It’s about the artificial border between health and illness and the shadowland those with chronic or incurable conditions inhabit. It’s about falling “in between” diagnoses, when you have not one, but two condition at a young age. It’s about genetics, family, history, nature, bodies and more. What sets Polly Atkins work apart from other disability memoirs is her ability to elevate her personal experiences to a new level, by placing them into new words and context; in this case nature-writing. An often felt sense (although unpopular) about disability-memoirs is questioning “who was this written for?”. Many of them simply describe an individual’s experiences with their particular disability, almost as if you’re reading a diary. You can tell the author got something out of writing their experience down, but as a reader, that isn’t always automatically the case. Reading these narratives as a non-disabled person, you may not be able to relate, nor does it help you understand the experience in particular, just seeing it written down. As a disabled person however, you might recognize those experiences and feel “yes, that’s what it’s like”, but gain no deeper insight.Polly Atkin, by linking her narrative to nature-writing, storytelling and other metaphors, does elevate the genre to a higher level. This isn’t simply a published diary; it’s a work of writing-excellence with the potential to be impactful to many readers out there, by lighting their recognized experience from an angle they might not have viewed it from before. As an honourable mention, I have to name Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad in this same position too. This book did many of the same things as Polly Atkin’s did, even drawing on some of the same literary sources and metaphors. Yet in my personal opinion, Atkin writing and insight, just beat Jaouads by a hair. That being said, Between Two Kingdoms had the benefit of relating to me personally just a little closer, as it describes a crude break in life causes by cancer. Something I can relate to far too well. That also made Between Two Kingdoms a more difficult read for me, and one that frustrated me at times, ultimately leading to me deciding it was an honourable mention, rather than a first-place winner. Full reviews for both these works are in the making, yet because they’re so close to me, they will require a bit more time for me to get my thoughts in order. Until then, I highly recommend both of them, whether you’re a veteran of the genre, or wanting to explore it for the first time. Full review of Some of Us Just Fall Full review of Between Two Kingdoms As always, links to full reviews of all these books (where I have them) will be linked. Tomorrow, I will be back with my final entry in my Year in Review Series, talking about my most anticipated books for 2024.

I was surprised and a little shocked with how easily this list filled up this year. Subjectively speaking, 2023 didn’t feel like a bad reading-year with a lot of duds, but once I sat down to list them here, I found there were sadly a lot more than I thought. 15 to be exact… I’ve debated doing two separate lists this year; most differentiating between Most Disappointing and Worst. To keep the burden of negativity to a minimum, I’ve combined them both into the same post. The important distinction between the two is my level of dislike. The disappointing ones are mostly 2-star reads, that definitely have an audience. I just wasn’t part of it.The worst books are all one star, and I would actively recommend against reading these. Without further ado, let’s work our way down the list, starting with the “okay” ones, and descending to the worst of the worst. As always: links to full reviews and Goodreads pages are provided. Most Disappointing books: 10. Jackal by Erin E. Adams Rating: 2/5 stars Starting off the list, we have a book I was hesitant on picking up because of its mixed reviews. For the first 80% or so, I couldn’t understand why people would dislike this. It’s a tight and almost claustrophobic narrative about a young black woman who returns to her county-hometown to attend her friend’s wedding. At the party however, the brides young daughter goes missing, and old patterns of racial prejudice and mistrust reemerge. It’s atmosphere and commentary had it on track to be a 4-to-5-star read, right up until the ending which completely botched it. It’s one of the most extreme examples of an ending completely ruining everything that came before for me. Full review 9. A Black and Endless Sky by Matthew Lyons Rating: 1/5 stars To be fair, I have no one but myself to blame on this one, as I should’ve looked into the reasons this was rated so low, and adjusted my expectations. A Black and Endless Sky follows a brother and sister on a roadtrip cross-country to their hometown of Albuquerque. When Nell is caught up in a strange accident on an abandoned industrial in the Nevada desert, she begins to experience creepy and haunting symptoms. Based off the synopsis I was expecting a more psychological, supernatural (possession?) horror featuring sibling relationships. Possibly some unknowable Eldridge Horror lurking underground and hitching a ride up to the surface through our protagonists...? In other words: I was hoping for suspenseful, cosmic and psychological. What I got instead was a book about exclusively detestable characters beating each other up in increasingly violent ways… Instead of psychological, this book takes the route of violence and gore for its source of horror, and we all know how that tends to work out for me… 8. Oh God, The Sun Goes by David Connor Rating: 2/5 stars Oh God, The Sun Goes escapes a place higher on this list because I already went in knowing this would be a bit of a gamble. Experimental fiction that describes itself as “hallucinatory” or “dreamlike” is hit or miss for most readers. This one was a big miss for me. Extremely overwritten and finding itself far more profound than it actually was, I was annoyed throughout most of my reading experience. There’s a single metaphor that this book hinges on (the sun vanishing, and a man traveling in search of it), and it’s far from subtle or impactful. Either more subtlety or development, ór more self-awareness of how on-the-nose it was, would’ve been required to make this work. Full review 7. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk Rating: 1/5 stars At number 8, we have the one book on this list I DNF-ed, simply because I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. Flight is sold to be a cerebral novel with a central theme of travel, movement and flux, referencing mythology, science, and body along the way. It’s my type of book on paper, but the execution just didn’t work for me at all. With its structure of separate short-stories/essays and chapters that don’t form a cohesive narrative, this was one of the most disjointed things I’ve ever read. There was a lot of potential regarding the underlying ideas, but it all got lost in translation due to the chaotic form and writing style. Full review 6. The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer Rating: 2/5 stars My most recent read of the bunch wasn’t a bad book by any means; it just had the potential to be great and missed that mark by a long shot. Mikki Brammers debut follows a young woman with a tragic past, who works as a Death Doula (the equivalent of a midwife for the terminally ill). The concept intrigued me, as someone who’s done a lot of work in oncology and palliative care, and I was really hoping to see it done in a balanced way. Unfortunately, I disliked how sugarcoated this was. I love the idea of showing palliative care in a positive light, and emphasizing the joys and beauty this work can have. I don’t like the way this book pushes the same over-romanticized depiction of death and terminal illness we often see in media. Full review 5. Shy by Max Porter Rating: 2/5 stars Max Porters incredibly distinct writingstyle has given me some favourites like Grief is the Ging With Feathers and Lanny, so I had high expectations going into this one. Unfortunately, this almost felt like it was written by another author. To be exact, it read someone doing an impression of Porters writing, without grasping what truly made it great in his other books. Porter does his “Porter-gimmicks”, but doesn’t hit the same emotional beats he did in his first two books. Shy follows a teenage boy over the cause of one night as he walks the streets of an English city with a backpack filled with rocks. It starts off with an almost foreboding tone and narrows in on the boys inner monologue. My problem was that it overall felt off tonally, and therefore failed to drag me into the mind of our troubled teenage protagonists. Instead of investment in his character, I felt annoyance at the author for trying to push “edgy-teen-speak” into a semi-poetic format. I will continue to follow the authors work, and hope that this is a one-off, rather than a change in tone of his overall writing. Full review 4. Ascension by Nicholas Binge Rating: 2/5 stars Similar to the number 6 entry, Ascension isn’t a bad book by any stretch of the imagination. It simply made this list because it had the potential to be amazing, but got stuck at mediocre. Ascension is a sci-fi-horror novel about a group of scientist how explore a natural formation that seemingly defies the rules of physics and reality; a mountain that rose from the sea in a single night, with a summit obscured from view by thick clouds. This books main problem was a bit of an identity crisis. On the one hand, it emulates a very cerebral and existential narrative, reminiscent of Solaris or Annihilation. On the other hand it has passages that feel like a B-horror-creature feature. Either way would’ve worked for the story at hand, but because the novel doesn’t commit to one or the other, and incorporates both of them, the whole feels unbalanced and jarring. Full review 3. Assassin of Reality by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko Rating: 3.5/5 stars There was bound to be at least one sequel on this list, yet it still saddens me that it had to be this one. Assassin of Reality is sequel to one of my favourite novels of all time that I’ve been anticipating for years. Unfortunately, none of the magic, uniqueness or mystery present in Vita Nostra translated into Assassin of Reality. I can’t go into too much depth without spoiling the first novel, but in many ways, the sequel tries to do the same things again and again, but without the mystery and ambiguity of the first book. For me, that took away some of its biggest strengths. Let alone that this book redcons some of its earlier events in a way that actually felt like a kick in the teeth to readers of Vita Nostra. It's important to mention that I still recommend Vita Nostra, even as a standalone. I personally wish I would’ve left it at that. Full review 2. Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree Rating: 3/5 stars This is the point where we reach true unpopular opinion territory… With Legends and Lattes, I feel like I fell complete victim to the hype, and it immediately came to bite me in the ass. 2023 felt like the year of cozy-fantasy, Travis Baldree’s Indie Darling had a big hand in launching this genre into popularity. Described as “high fantasy, low stakes”, we follow an orc warrior, who has had enough of a life of questing and adventuring, and decides to settle down and open a coffee-bar in her fantasy-hometown. My main critique of this book was that it wasn’t just “low stakes”; it was low effort. Cozy isn’t the same as shallow or boring, but Legends and Lattes constantly edged on the latter. I like that it popularized a niche subgenre, but the book itself fell far short of the astronomical hype. Full review 1. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabriella Zevin Rating: 2/5 stars Speaking of astronomical hype: I finally read everybody’s favourite book of 2022… and kind of hated it. This book let me down in two distinct ways. It had some great potential, but the John-Green-feeling writing style and fairly overused clichés it employed just didn’t work for my personal tastes. What really let me down however, was the disability representation and the use of an extremely tragic event in a throw-away manner that didn’t sit well with me. I have a full (long!) review in which I explain my thoughts in more depth. For the longest time, I felt I was alone in my opinion, but in recent months I’m finally seeing more and more people recognize the same issues I had, which makes me feel a little less alone. Full review Worst books: 5. Where Darkness Blooms by Andrea Hannah In the number 5 spot we have a YA horror novel that was not only written poorly, but also fell into the same trap that many of its counterparts did this year (yes, I’m looking at you What Stalks Among Us…). Once more for the people in the back: girl-power-feminism does not equal hating on all men… Also, using sexual assault as a plot point to drive home the point that all men are trash, is cheap. Had the rest of the story been good, these elements would’ve been enough to land it in the disappointing-pile. Unfortunately, combined with cringy writing, plot- and worldbuilding-holes galore and a shallow unlikable cast of characters, there was no saving this one… Full review 4. The Secret Life of Souls by Jack Ketchum A book about ghosts, dogs and the soul connection between said dog and his owner, should theoretically be something I might love. Not Secret Life of Souls however… This is a one-star, not necessarily because of harmful content, but simply because I hated every second I spent reading this book. I list multiple reasons why in my full review, but most glaringly: every single character was irredeemably evil, and there’s plenty of abuse (physical and emotional) against children and animals on page that I really just wish I hadn’t subjected myself to. Full review 3. Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Echo and Hex) Not just one book, but an entire authors backlist comes into the number 3 spot. Thomas Olde Heuvelt is one of the Netherlands most prolific horror-authors that actually made it big oversees. He also happens to hail from the same hometown as myself and I’ve quite liked his latest two releases. For that reason, I was excited to pick up his backlist books; the ones that launched him into popularity in the first place. And boy, was I disappointed. If there was an award to be given for “Most Improved Author”, Olde Heuvelt deserves a nomination, because compared to his recent work, these books were abysmal. Linked below are full reviews of Hex and Echo that explain my dislike in more depth, but in short: a lot of misogyny and strange obsession with boobs/chests, plot holes galore, and a constant tendency to mistake raw humor for being an jerkish edge lord… Full review of Hex Full review of Echo 2. Lump by Nathan Whitlock My worst two novels of 2023 share an uncomfortable reality; I read both as ARCs, from the perspective of a disability/illness reviewer. I gave both 1-star ratings and reviews, before they were even released, despite how awful that always makes me feel. Both these books had content that I felt was insulting/harmful, and so there was no other rating that felt appropriate. Lump only got saved from being my number one for the fact that it’s at least a little self-aware about it. Lump is the story of a young woman diagnosed with breast cancer, but mostly told from the points of view of multiple side character in her life. From the very first page it reminded me of one of my most hated books of all time Komt een Vrouw bij de Dokter, and unfortunately, everything I hated in that book was present here too. What is framed as a woman’s journey with cancer, is mainly the story of the man by her side cracking jokes at her expense. There’s a difference between writing a satirical novel about cancer, and making the actual victim the bud of the joke. Lump didn’t get that memo. Full review 1.     A Little Heart by Vladarg Delsat What would grind my personal gears more than a book with harmful portrayal of cancer…? That’s right, a book with harmful portrayal of disability/illness aimed at children. A Little Heart is a middle-grade novel about a young girl with a life-threatening heart condition, who’s enrolled in a magical school ala Hogwarts, where we follow her life and developing friendship with a boy in her class. This book without a doubt has some of the worst and most vile depictions of chronic illness I’ve ever seen, and the worst part is that it’s written by a medical doctor who’s clearly deeply unaware that his way of viewing his disabled child-protagonist is harmful. For more details, I refer to my full review, but I cannot stress how much I recommend against reading this book. The reason it made my number one, apart from its target audience being children, is how much it reflects some of my frustrations towards fellow medical professionals, as an MD with a disability myself. The misunderstanding between these worlds, and the sheer ignorance from either side towards the other, is a frustration I have in day-to-day-life. So to see it in my reading as well, made it have an extra impact on me personally. Full review Tomorrow, we will leave my bookish complaints behind for the penultimate part of my Year in Review, discussing my favourite reads of 2023. Feel free to check back in for those.

With only 10 spots on my favourites-list each year, there are bound to be more that deserve a shout-out. None more so than the books that haven’t gotten a lot of love or publicity through other channels. That’s where one of my favourite posts of the year comes in: my Most Underrated Books of 2023. I’ve rated all of them 4-stars or higher, yet at the time of writing all of them have less than 1000 ratings on Goodreads. We’ve got some indies as well as some traditionally published novels, spanning a range of genres, so hopefully there’s something here for everyone. 1.      The Wickwire Watch by Jacqueline Hagen Rating: 4.5/5 stars Starting off the list strong, we have the start of an independently published fantasy series that took me by complete surprise. The Wickwire Watch, on paper, has some elements I don’t typically jive with (cheek-child-protagonist in an adult fantasy story, steampunk-ish elements, very British humor…). It somehow combined all those elements into something utterly unique and completely charming. The best way I can describe this, is if Locke Lamora had a little brother who happened to be British… The story follows young orphan Ink, who accidentally pickpockets the wrong item of the corpse of a deadman: a watch with strange magical qualities… Now he’s haunted by dark Spektors and his only chance of survival lies with a group of rogue fugitives from law. From here, a wild mix of horror, thrills, humor, and a strangely cozy found-family story follows. I’m in the middle of the third book as of writing this, and can happily say the series holds up so far. 2.      The Ghost Theatre by Mat Osman Rating: 4/5 stars Once we’re at it, let’s stick with that historical-London setting for a while, but move the clock to the Elizabethan era. Here we have The Ghost Theatre, another historical fantasy novel that took me by surprise. In this, a messenger girl with the unfortunate ability to foresee the future in the patterns of birds, teams up with an underground theatre-group, performing politically activistic plays under the London night-skies. As their hallucinatory performances incite rebellion among the city's outcasts, Shay forms a special bond with their leader against backdrop of the plague and a London in flames.If I compare The Wickwire Watch to Lies of Locke Lamora, I have to compare The Ghost Theatre to The Night Circus, but with a slightly darker European vibe. Although I have to say I didn’t love it as much as I did Erin Morgenstern’s masterpiece, it’s a strong contender for everyone looking for something with a similar vibe. Full review 3. Greenwild by Pari Thomson Rating: 5/5 stars At number three, we have our first middle-grade read. Released less than 6 months ago, I still have hope this will take off among the masses, but I’m happy to help it along. Greenwild was an absolutely delightful tale that ticks a lot of my middle-grade-boxes. It follows 11-year old Daisy, who’s eccentric mom goes missing on a supposed research-trip to the Amazon Rainforest. Looking into the disappearance, Daisy uncovers the secret life her mum has kept from her for years: a life as a botanical witch in a hidden place where Green Magic is real. What follows is a tale of plant-magic, family, friendship, adventure and a magical school. If Hogwarts had only Hufflepuffs and Herbology classes, it would look something like this. I can’t wait for the second book in 2024, to see where this magical adventure takes us from here. 4.    The Secrets of Haven Point by Lisette Auton Rating: 5/5 stars Another magical middle-grade adventure deserving of a lot more love, is The Secrets of Haven Point. I read this as a sensitivity-read on the topic of disability in middle-grade and fell in love with the beauty of this story. It follows a commune of kids, all with various disabilities or bodily differences that made them outcasts from the world, living and adventuring together in a lighthouse by the sea. Looked after by a mermaid and a sea-captain with a cat living in his beard, they live a sheltered but happy life. Until Outsiders threaten to discover their place and put into question the safety of their way of life. With a lovable cast of disabled but very capable heroes, a sea-side adventure with a sprinkle of mermaid-magic, and beautiful underlying message about friendship, found-family, love and acceptance; this was an absolute hit for me. Full review 5.      Mothtown by Caroline Hardaker Rating: 5/5 stars I might as well have put Caroline Hardaker’s debut novel Composite Creatures on the list, as it’s as underrated and as strange as this one. Her sophomore novel Mothtown however, was even more unique and haunting, so it deserved the spotlight here. This is a magical realist story about a boys decent into strangeness following the loss of his beloved granddad. This is basically all I can say without spoiling, and I truly recommend you go into this book knowing as little as possible, and go down the rabbit hole with the protagonist. Fans of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke will love this one. Full review 6.      The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Ghosts by Soraya Palmer Rating: 4/5 stars Caribbean spiritual folklore meets a grounded multigenerational saga of a Jamaican-Trinidadian family, in this stellar debut by Soraya Palmer. Based on blurb, themes and genre, this quickly rose to the top of my Anticipated-releases of 2023 list, and I'm happy to say that it did not disappoint.Although it has some pacing issues typical of a debut, Soraya Palmers narrative voice brings this story of 3 sisters, and the generations of women that came before them to life in vivid colour. I recommend this book if you’re looking for a magical-realist family-story, mixed with cultural elements and mythology we don’t see too often represented in western media. Full review 7. The Swimmers by Chloe Lane Rating: 4/5 stars The Swimmers is a difficult book to recommend, as its equally difficult subject matter makes it something that won’t resonate with every reader. Yet for the people it does resonate with, it has the potential to be something incredibly powerful. This short and deeply intimate novella follows a New Zealand family over the cause of only a few days, counting down towards the death of the mother. Literally counting down, as her death is scheduled in advance. Twenty-six year old Erin recounts the story of the week her mother, suffering from a degenerative motor-neuron-disease, decides she wants to take her life (and death) into her own hands. Unable to suffer further bodily deterioration, she plans the day of her death and asks her sister and daughter to help her. Not only in the act itself, but in what she calls her “final frolic”: the days leading up to it. As mentioned: this book deals with incredibly heavy topics, and left a deep impression on me in multiple ways. On the one hand, it’s such a time- and place-bound book, as the fact that euthanasia is illegal in New Zealand is such a shaping element of the events. It really set me, as a Dutch person, where euthanasia is legal, thinking about the cultural framework of it all. On the other hand, the experience of spending those last days with a dying loved one (especially knowing it’s their final days), is such a universal yet personal one, that I deeply resonated with it. The surrealist feel of it all; how it makes the smallest things feel incredibly large, and the larger things feel insignificantly small. Chloe Lane captures that perfectly. Minimal writing, minimal length, but maximal emotional impact. 8.      Wolfwood – Marianna Baer Rating: 4.5/5 stars With a great story and a stunning cover to match, it’s a mystery to me why this Young Adult novel didn’t take off the way it ought to have. It’s a difficult book to describe in just a single sentence, but it’s a contemporary story with magical realist elements that covers themes of art, class, privilege and a complex mother-daughter dynamic. A teenage girl gets caught up in the world of art-forgery and high class society, when her mother (a formerly famous painter, now strapped for money and inspiration) turns down a job that could launch them out of financial trouble. I love YA novels that balance their heavier themes (in this case: class, privilege and mothers mental health) with their plot and characters “regular teen-drama”. Wolfwood strikes that balance well. As far as comp-titles go: think the fantasy elements of The Hazelwood meets the social commentary of Tripping Arcadia… Full review 9.      Forget the Sleepless Shores – Sonya Taaffe Rating: 4/5 stars The penultimate spot on this list goes to the final book I finished this year; a short-story collection with themes of water, ghosts and the murkiness of memory and loss. Short story collections rarely make it to my favourites, as it’s incredibly rare for me to like every single story in a collection. This was the case for Forget the Sleepless Shore as well, yet overall, this was one of the best and most coherent collections I’ve read in a long time. Incredibly consistent in its tone and themes, and penned in stunning prose, this is a must-read for everyone who’s fascinated by the strange connection between water, memory and hauntings across cultures and time. 10.      Violets - Shin Kyung-sook Rating: 5/5 stars Yes, I’m fully aware that I’m cheating with this final one, as it has just over 1000 Goodreads-ratings. Yet considering this spans translations across the entire world and multiple languages, that is still a criminally low number for a book of this quality. Violets reminded me in many ways of one of my favourites of last year, Ghost Music by Ann Yu. It’s a haunting coming of age tale about a South Korean girl, spanning her childhood in a rural village to her early twenties in a large metropolis. Along the way we cover the intimacies of her daily life, as well as large themes of identity, violence (in its many forms), womanhood and being seen. For such a short book it’s an absolute masterpiece of character-crafting an layering, that deserves far more recognition that it got. Full review I will be back tomorrow with my worst and most disappointing reads of 2023, followed by my favourites list on December 30th. Despite this not being my best reading-year, I still have plenty to talk about…

It’s become one of my most treasured bookish traditions by now: my fiveparter Year In Review series. Not only do I love putting these lists together to reflect on my own reading, I love seeing other people’s lists to get a feel for their reading-year and to gather inspiration for new books to add to my TBR. When it comes to my own reading, there’s been a rough pattern of on-again-off-again years. Every incredible reading-year is followed by a more mellow one, and 2023 fit that pattern perfectly. 2022 was one of my best reading-years ever, so it made sense that 2023 would be a little less exciting in comparison. There were a few more disappointments, and a few less all-time-favourites, but regardless I enjoyed my reading-year overall. Quick Stats: Number of Books Read: 133 Average rating: 3.7 stars Master-TBR update: Finished 28 out of the 30 books pledged, the remaining two will migrate to my 2024-Master-TBR. Mirrored Heavens had its release pushed back to 2024, and I simply didn’t get around to City of Saints and Madman in time to complete it. Longest Book: The Deluge – Stephen Markley (896 pages) Shortest Book: What Willow Says – Lynn Buckle (118 pages) Favourite Adaptations: when it comes to adaptations, this has to be the year of the Fall of the House of Usher. Not only did I love the modern book-adaptationWhat Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher last year, this year I had a lot of fun watching Mike Flanagan’s take on the story in his Netflix Original series by the same name. I don’t talk much about media besides books, but Mike Flanagan has been an all-time-favourite for me ever since The Haunting of Hill House introduced me to his work. I’m happy that his latest adaptation didn’t disappoint. Perhaps a little controversial, but my favourite game-adaptation has to go to Hogwarts Legacy. Regardless of my opinion of the author, the Harry Potter series and their subsequent PS2 games have a lot of nostalgia linked to them, and Hogwarts Legacy without a doubt as the game Potter-fans always wanted but never got. It’s clearly a labor of love from the developers and they don’t deserve to be cancelled for the sins of an author that had no hand in the creation of their final project, other than providing the source-world. Most Surprising Reads With those out of the way, let’s get into my first list of the bunch; my most surprising reads of 2023. I have 6 books to talk about, many of which I’ve already reviewed in full. I will link those, as well as their respective Goodreads-pages for navigational ease. 6.      The Center - Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi I picked up The Center, knowing fairly little about it, other than it being about a language-learning institute with possible cultish vibes. I expected a standard “cult-thriller”, and although the book certainly delivered on that aspect: it gave me so much more. It’s focus on academia, privilege, and the aspects of your identity that become entangled in attempting to enter an elitist group that you don’t necessarily feel privy to, elevates this novel into something far more than its backflap suggests. I also really loved its exploration of the learning of language, and how the act of translations affects the stories we tell. Completely up my alley, and far more fascinating than I’d ever gleaned from what I knew about it going in. Full review 5.      Emily Wildes Encyclopedia of Faeries – Heather Fawcett I don’t pick up books that I don’t expect to enjoy, but every now and then, I dó pick up a book that is completely outside of my comfort zone when it comes to genre. That was the case with Emily Wildes Encyclopedia of Faeries. As a general rule, there are a few tropes I avoid like the plague, and Faeries happen to be one of them. Without hyperbole, I can say that I’ve never loved a book containing them. Imagine my shock when I actually really enjoyed this one. Heather Fawcett put her own cottage-core spin on the genre, which in combination with the likable scholarly protagonist, made this the first faerie-novel I can actually recommend to fellow-fae-haters like myself. Full review 4.      In the Lives of Puppets – T.J. Klune This one makes the list for similar reasons Emily Wilde did: I’m not big on romance or “romantasy”, and I’ve hit a bit of a genre-fatigue with fairytale-retellings. A sci-fi-romance retelling of Pinocchio, therefore didn’t sound like my kind of book. But leave it up to T.J. Klune to somehow make this into something adorable that was just an overall joy to read. I’m beginning to trust this author to deliver when it comes to feel-good pick-me-up-books. Full review 3.      Blackwater – Michael McDowell Michael McDowell’s multigenerational horror saga, centering the inhabitants of the deep-south town of Perdido, is quickly on its way to modern-classic status. It wasn’t so much of a surprised that I loved this, but I hadn’t expected the level of immersion and investment I’d feel in it. From the town to its inhabitants, and their decades spanning conflicts; everything about Perdido felt so vivid and alive that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Similar to the next entry, it just missed a spot on my Favourites-list, but exceeded expectations to such an extent that it deserves a shout-out here. 2.      Mapping the Interior – Stephen Graham Jones Mapping the Interior is a 130 page horror-novella that managed to take up more time and space in my brain than any 500+ page book did this year. It follows a young Diné boy, wandering his own house in the depth of night, and encountering his years-dead father standing in the doorway. What follows haunted me with its imagery, but especially its emotional gutpunch that far exceeded what any novella had the right to. An absolutely incredibly written book, that had me excited to explore the rest of the authors backlist. 1.      Leech – Hiron Ennes The title of most-surprising read of 2023 goes to Leech, by Hiron Ennes, for the simple reason that I had no way to predict what was coming my way upon first picking up this book. Leech is a wholly unique and original piece of sci-fi-horror that explores themes of horror, medical science, identity and individuality, and class. It does so through a point of view, and a world that truly unlike anything I’ve read before in the genre. This had all the potential to be a new favourite, but unfortunately had its flaws when it comes to pacing and the ending, that kept it from making that list. That being said, it’s still a book I highly recommend you check out, if any of its themes interest you as much as they do me. Full review With that, we come to the end of my first Year in Review-list. Check back in tomorrow, as there will be a daily list, leading up to New Years Day. These will include my Most Underrated Books of 2023, Worst/Disappointing Reads, Favourites of 2023 and Most Anticipated 2024 Releases.

Genre: Young Adult Contemporary Published: Scholastic Press, May 2023 My Rating: 5/5 stars “He clears his throat. ‘I do hope you know that you could’ve let me know about your obstacles, and I would’ve been happy to meet you anywhere else.’ An obstacle is a traffic cone, a hurdle, a mild inconvenience that you sail over and continue on your way. A human being shouldn’t be called an obstacle. It’s a disability. Just say the word; it isn’t a curse word." I was completely open to love this book, but I didn’t expect to relate this much to the representation of being a disabled teen and college student.For better or worse; I did relate to it that deeply, and know I’m not alone in that experience. Claire Forrest has penned a deeply powerful and uplifting debut, about a life-experience I’ve never seen explored in young adult fiction before. I wish this book had been around when I was 18, but will happily take it now... We follow Effie during that quintessential “choices-period” of life, that is your senior high-school year. Everyone is making big choices about what colleges to apply to, where to move once they leave the house, who to take to senior prom and how to spend the next summer. So is Effie, only she has some other factors to take into consideration. Effie is a fulltime wheelchair-user due to cerebral palsy, and where her current hometown is adapted to her (and she to it!), the upcoming changes in setting provide a complete new challenge. Between campus- and city-accessibility, adaptive dorm-living, parental- and peer-pressure, and her own preferences, Effie’s choice comes down to a two-way: her dream-college of Prospect NYC, or the “safer” and closer-to-home in her hometown. One of them being clearly less willing to adapt to her needs than the other… Although the disability-representation was what spoke to me the most in this book (I’ve never seen the challenges of college-life explored this well before!), there’s far more to Effie’s story than just her disability. In fact, that’s what sets this book apart as a great, authentic and own-voice narrative. Claire Forrest depicts the disability aspects ánd the realities of “regular teen-life”, side-by-side without making one seem more profound or important over the other. She allows Effie the joys, hardships and drama of a full teen-life, experiencing first love, friendship, family-relationships, hobbies, academic pressure and more. All of these elements are equally formative to her identity; her disability being only one of them. I’m hoping this makes sense, but if you’ve read a bunch of bad-disability-writing you might understand why this is so unique in a genre where the disabled person is often so completely defined by their handicap, that they’re more of “a vessel for disability” than a full person in the narrative. Where You See Yourself is simply a great YA-contemporary; it has wonderful friendship, a supportive family-dynamic (with its occasional healthy conflicts of course), campus-exploring adventures and a well-deserved romance that was actually adorable. On a more personal note, what truly elevated this book into 5-star-favourite territory, was its message on the choice between schools, and why she chooses what she does. I won’t spoil her final decision, but I will go a bit into her motivations: don’t read ahead if you want to go in blind. Effie begins the novel convinced that Prospect is her perfect dream-college, only to find its campus, living-facilities and schedule not adapted to her disability. When addressing these issues, she’s met with… not directly ableism, but something far more realistic and prevalent: indifference. She soon realizes that there are no other disabled students at Prospect, and picking her “dream school” will mean being a pioneer for disability/accessibility, with all the challenges that come with that. I have been there…. There’s a quote from the novel that summarizes that brilliantly: “The thing is: I would’ve had to do all that anywhere, but at Prospect I would have to be an unpaid accessibility consultant too. It’s completely unfair to ask anyone to take on anyone’s fulltime salary job for them. I already have a job, and that’s to focus on being a student.” At 18 year of age, I don’t think I had the maturity and self-respect to make the choice Effie does in the way she does it, but mán do I respect her for it! Even if you may not agree with- or expect her choice, this is still a brilliant book and a new favourite for my disability-shelf that I will be shouting praise for for many years to come. Find this book here on Goodreads

Genre: Magical Realism/Fantasy Published: Harvill Secker, January 2023 My Rating: 4.5/5 stars “Perhaps coming so close to death, then stepping clean out of its jaws, made the world seem lighter.” Mothers and daughters, witches and herbalists, masked mummers and cursed rabbits as hauntings all inhabit the pages of this dreamlike novel that reads like a dark European folktale. With her signature style, intricately woven storylines and simply stunning prose, Kirsty Logan did it again. I already suspected this woman to be a word-witch, and with this latest novel, she put her spell on me again… Now She is Witch opens with a the stark image of our protagonist Lux burying the remains of her mother in a poison garden. Having lost not just her mother, but her home and roots to accusations of witchcraft, Lux sets of on a journey into the woods. What follows is her life’s travels, making her way from a group of vagrant theatre plays, to a final position as the kings food taster, all the while accompanied by a mysterious woman named Else, who she grows closely connected to. This novel clearly falls in that neo-subgenre of “feminist-witch-fiction” has become so oversaturated in the past few years that I thought I was done with it. Although Logan’s take on it strikes some of the same beats, she made it feel fresher, darker and yet more tender than any I’ve read before. This is a story of feminism, but not the obvious shouty-kind I’ve seen in the genre before. It’s about ghosts, grief, poisons and nature, motherhood, love and learning to trust in life again. It’s clearly a story of feminism, but not the obvious shouty-kind I’ve seen in the genre before. It’s also about ghosts, grief, poisons and nature, motherhood, love in all its different forms and learning to trust in life again. The realness of all these elements, in conjunction with the magical atmosphere of the setting and prose, made Lux’s story hit home all the harder. Although Logan’s style may not be for everyone, there’s no denying her incredible skill as an author. On a technical level, she keeps getting stronger and stronger with every release, and Now She is Witch is near perfection. Its pacing, its structure and its internally consistent motifs (Earthliness, light vs dark and the culmination of events at an equinox, the different “roles” a woman plays e.g. the maiden, the mother and the crown…) are so well thought out. Not even to mention the beautiful circularity of the story, and the way that shards from the first page fall into place and are mirrored once we reach the ending. Now She is Witch has me sleeping easy again in the knowledge that I can keep my self-appointed position as chair of the unofficial Kirsty Logan fanclub. It may not be everyone’s favourite, but “objectively”, I feel like it’s her strongest work to date. Honestly, what I wouldn't give for a sliver, a morsel, a grain of sand in the oyster of this woman's writing-capability... Find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Literary Fiction Published: Epoque Press, May 2021 My Rating: 3/5 stars “We live and walk upon these stories. She, least least, returns to me, having spurned the bird’s enticement. I couldn’t bear losing another.” We all know I’m always on the hunt for good disability-fiction (especially by disabled authors), so the Barbellion Prize has been a treasure trove of inspiration for me since its first rendition in 2021. One of the few nominees on that list I hadn’t managed to get my hands on yet, was What Willow Says. With its incredibly high 4.2 average rating on Goodreads, and nothing but positive reviews from people I trust, I was expecting this to be a new favourite. It wasn’t… Don’t mistake my 3-star rating for critique of the disability representation in this book: that was actually the aspect I really did enjoy. It was just the rest of it that didn’t work for me. Our narrative follows two unnamed protagonists; a granddaughter and the grandmother she lives with. The novel is formatted through journal entries, written by the grandmother, documenting their experiences exploring the woods and bogs around their hometown and bonding over their shared love of nature. What complicates and intensifies their bond, is the fact that the granddaughter is deaf, and they communicate exclusively through a sign-language of their own invention, as the grandmother struggles to learn BSL. Many of their interactions show aspects of the deaf-experience through the lens of nature- and bog-mythology. Just one example is present in the title: the daughters asking her grandma on describe the “language” the willow-trees make. My main issue with the novel was the writing. For such a short novella, with an intimate scope, a “less-is-more” approach to style would’ve felt appropriate. Especially considering we’re supposedly reading the journal entries written by the grandmother. Conversely, What Willow Says is extremely overwritten. It’s prose is thick as bog-peat, often employing unnaturally complicated word-choices that make it feel like the whole text was run through a thesaurus-application to “make it more literary”. Considering its themes of language, this may well have been intentional, but for me it made the book feel cumbersome at best and borderline unreadable at worst. Overall it’s a book that I’d recommend from a disability-fiction perspective, but as a novel in itself, it wasn’t for me. You can find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Middle-grade Published: Independently published by the author, december 2023 My Rating: 1/5 stars I don’t like to hate on independently published works, but when they are this horrifyingly bad and include harmful depictions of disability: I feel the need to actively warn people away from it. What was supposed to be an uplifting and potentially empowering story of a girl with a chronic heart condition entering a wizarding school, ended up as (yes I’m calling it!) my worst read of 2023. On a story-level: I struggled to find a single redeeming quality in this book. The plot is barely existent and focusses solely on the insta-love relationship between Helen and her love-interest Philip, who “lovingly and heroically” steps up to help our feeble protagonist. (more on this dynamic later) The magic-school seems more of an after-thought and barely plays into the story. There is no other conflict in the plot to be resolved, other than the protagonists illness (again, more on this later). The characters are flatter than cardboard: Helen is a fragile, damaged little girl and Philip is her loving helper. Their relationship is weak at the best of times, but far more often boarders on creepy and problematic. They are never portrayed as equal, Helen being dependent on Philip due to her disability, and their relationship is presented as far deeper than it has any right to be. From calling each other “my angel” after barely any page time together to an ACTUAL TEENAGE MARRIAGE; it all gave me the creeps, especially knowing this is penned by an older man... the part where he feeds her like a baby and its depicted as romantic/caring elicited a physical anger-response in me. Speaking of penning; I can’t tell if it’s the author fault or the translator, but the writing isn’t good. The prologue reads like every line was run through thesaurus.com, giving it a strange pretentious feel given its target audience. After that, the character development (absent), pacing and overall ability to tell a compelling story just aren’t up to par. On a representation level: Worse than all of the above; this book could serve as the poster-child for everything you can do wrong in disability-representation in (childrens-)fiction. I will try to keep it short and succinct, but honestly: it’s worse than I can convey here. Helen, our protagonist is portrayed as a completely passive victim to her life and body the entire time. Words like “weak” and “fragile” are constantly used for her, as well as all other characters referring to her as “girl”, and even “cripple” at one point. Note: that word isn’t challenged on page. This goes beyond characters being ableist; it’s fundamentally built within the story. Allow me to quote a literal passage of the book to show you just how little the author thinks of her (and subsequently disabled people as a whole…?) “I have no future, I will never be able to give birth to a child, to be a mother, just because I can’t handle the strain. So there will be no family. And what is the point of living if there is no happiness anyway.” Again: not challenged on page! Conversely, Philip is praised for the heroism of his caretakers role, perpetuating the idea that disabled people are nothing but a burden to their friends and family. Is it any surprise then, that the author pulls out the oldest and most-hated trope in disability-fiction as well? That’s right: we have a magical healing to achieve a happy ending… I saw it coming form miles away, and it still burned me. I cannot stress how inappropriate, hurtful and disheartening it is to still see stuff like this being written in 2023. Twisting the knife even deeper: this book is written by a medical doctor. A pediatrician at that… As a medical doctor ánd disabled person; this unfortunately made a lot of sense… The glorification of the caregiver, the objectification of the patient, the “must-cure-the-broken” mentality. It’s telling of a self-glorifying, pitying worldview within the profession that needs to go the way of the dodo. If you want some recommendations for better and more positive disability-representation, you can find a full list on my blog, which I attempt to keep as up-to-date as possible. Safe to say: this book won’t be joining it. Thanks to Netgalley and the author for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. You can find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Contemporary Published: St. Martins Press, May 2023 My Rating: 2.5/5 stars “Grief is just love looking for a place to settle.” The Collected Regrets of Clover left me incredibly conflicted on how to rate it. From a reviewers perspective, it’s such an easy recommendation, as I can picture the exact audience that would eat this book up. If Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine meets The Midnight Library sounds like something you would love; you’re going to adore Clover. From a personal perspective, I hated both those comps, and Clovers story was one of my biggest disappointments of 2023. The Good: I was originally drawn to this story, for its unique-sounding premise: a contemporary novel, told from the perspective of a bit of an eccentric young woman, who works as a death-doula: the equivalent of a midwife for the dying. Through her work she meets a variety of people (dying and not) who help her grow and heal past her own grief and regrets. This had the potential to be a contemporary(-romance) that was not only uplifting and cute, but also offered some depth and emotional balance as well. It certainly succeeds on the former half of that expectation, but not so much the latter… If you’re looking for a cute romance, featuring a bit of a socially inapt female protagonist leaving her comfort zone and exploring friendship and love: this is it. As for the emotional depth; there are some good passages. Cliché mostly, but only cliché because they are true. They are unfortunately few and far between. The Bad: I’ve seen plenty reviewers praise this for being “sweet, but not too saccharine”. I disagree: this was too saccharine for my liking. See also the Ugly-section… I also really disliked the character of Clover, who’s presented to be a wise, compassionate and selfless person, especially as she offers words of comfort within her job. Outside of her job however, she is shown to be an immature, naive, selfish, unprofessional and a complete hypocrite. She intrudes into people’s lives in ways that made it impossible for me to root for her as a protagonist. Snooping into clients personal affairs without consent, romancing the son of a client, not to mention actually spying on her neighbours with binoculars and it being played off as a “cute quirk”. Yikes… Worse than being an unlikable character, she’s an unbelievable one, with an equally unbelievable profession… The Ugly (A.k.a. why it personally rubbed me the wrong way): As some of you may know, I’m a medical doctor, working as a resident in Oncology and Palliative Care for the past year. On many occasions, I’ve felt like somewhat of a “death doula” myself… I’ve been at more than my fair-share of death-beds, both professionally and personally, and it’s because of that that I HATE the romanticization of death in media. The perceived wisdom and grace that’s put onto dying people, the misplaced “battle metaphor” of illness, the sanitized death-scenes depicting perfectly made-up people “drifting off into sleep”. It’s a slap in the face to what the real experience is like. I’m going to quote one of my favourite passages from The Collected Regrets of Clover: “Unfortunately, death isn’t always the peaceful slipping away that movies depict it to be – often it’s prolonged and very unpleasant. The sensory chaos of bodily functions shutting down or going awry. The gasping. The look of panic as people cling desperately to their final moments. Sometimes family members turn away or run out of the room to spare themselves from having such a confronting scene seared into their brains as the final memory of their loved ones. That’s why it’s so important to have someone like me there. Someone who won’t look away, no matter how harrowing it gets.” Ironically, it perpetuates those exact stereotypes it critiques here. Clovers job of Death Doula is presented to consist of roadtrips, fulfilling final wishes, and “doing fun things” with terminally ill people and their families. I hate to break it to the fans of this book, but this isn’t the reality of palliative care. It’s beautiful, it’s fulfilling and there are unexpected moments of joy to be had, but it’s also incredibly taxing and far from easy. I wish Mikki Brammer had gone into those aspects as well, rather than serving up a glazed and sugarcoated imitation of the truth instead. Many thanks to the publisher for providing me with an ARC on exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. You can find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: Literary Fiction Published: Jonathan Cape & RB Media, December 2023 My Rating: 4/5 stars Synopsis: A snapshot of one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space—not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but in orbit around our planet. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live. Review: Although marketed as a novel, Orbital reads more like an extended essay: a sort of existential musing on life, our planet, space-travel and our humbling smallness in the scope of things. When approached as such, it’s an incredibly successful work. It’s eloquent, stunningly worded and insightful, and manages the “largeness” of its themes without outstaying its welcome. It’s the sign of a brilliant author who understands their craft ánd subjectmatter, to be able to condense so much down into an under-200-page novella. Had Orbital been marketed as a literary essay, or piece of non-fiction writing, this would’ve been the end of my review: 5/5 stars, succeeded in everything it set out to do. Unfortunately, it’s marketed to be a novel, and as as a novel it falls flat in some requirements. A successful novel requires a few key elements: a setting, themes/message, characters and some form of plot/progression. Orbital delivers the former two, but not the latter. Our six cosmonauts never get enough page-time to develop into full characters, and simply exist as vessels for the authors ideas. There’s no development or arc to any of them, making all of them incredibly forgettable. Thematically, this might actually be the authors point: a commentary on how small and brief we all are. If I view the book through the lens of a non-fiction essay, that makes perfect sense. But if you go in expecting a novel with an actual storyline, character-interactions and development, I fear you’ll come away disappointed. Some notes on the audiobook: the narrator does a great job and she has a wonderful calming voice to listen to. Had I known beforehand the type of book this would be, I would’ve preferred a physical read. With literary essays, where the focus is so strongly on the language and writing, this is just my personal preference. Again: more of a critique towards the marketing than the actual book itself. Overall: if you’re in the market for a philosophical, literary essay on space, humanity and the environment, this one is for you! If you expect a space-novella with a plot and deep characters: you might want to reconsider. Thanks to RB-Media and Netgalley for providing me with an Audio-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. You can find this book here on Goodreads.

Genre: YA Contemporary Published: Bloomsbury, 2017 My Rating: 3/5 stars “It's enough to make you believe. Maybe not in symbols; maybe not in gods. But certainly in people.” I’m a little on the fence, but this was… better than I expected… YA-contemporary is outside my usual genre, and Christian fiction really isn’t my thing, but I surprisingly enjoyed a lot more about The Names they Gave Us than I anticipated. This is a heartwarming story about a teenage girl sent off to be a camp-counselor at a secular youth-camp, whilst her mother is going through chemotherapy for her stage-3 breast cancer. Lucy, raised a Christian, has been struggling with her faith ever since her mothers diagnosis: how can God do something so cruel to her and her family? She’s incredibly hesitant to go to a secular camp because of this, on top of wanting to be close to her mum in this difficult time. Pressed by her mother who insist she goes, Lucy agrees and sets off for a summer of change where she meets people that shape the way she views life in different ways. What I liked: First off; the summer-camp-vibes in this book were on point. I truly felt the found-family vibes and bitter-sweet-summer-days-feeling so characteristic to those moments. Second, I hate to say “for a Christian-book”, but I’m doing it anyway. “For a Christian-book: this was incredibly inclusive and positive about the topic of different religious beliefs and walks of life. Often, there’s a certain preachiness to these stories that felt absent from Emery Lords story. Lucy’s faith is an important element of the story, but there is so much more to it. Starting off, she has a very narrow world-view, almost looking down on the “hippie-kids” at the secular camp, but as she gets to know the kids and counselors and their often heavy backstories, she learns to see them for more than their faith or past. What I didn’t like: This book is far from subtle about its messaging, and at times that becomes a little grating. Every camp-attendee is written like a bit of a precious-snow-flake. They all come from underprivileged backgrounds and have tough life-stories, but handle it with such beauty and grace, as to inspire the main character. It feels a bit too much like “inspiration-porn”, in which a very privileged author/audience get to fawn over the strength of these “poor sad victims”. There’s also an element of minority-bingo at play, with an obvious token-character from different minorities being present at camp. Think: a trans-characters, black characters, an Asian girl, a teen-mum, etc. They all “represent” their minority, but don’t have too much development as characters beyond that. To me, that’s not inclusive writing; that’s lazy writing. The intentions were in the right place, but the execution wasn’t there. Overall, a 3 star read that had the potential to be much better, but could’ve been far worse. I’m glad I picked it up, but don’t think I have any interest in continuing to read this authors work in particular. You can find this book here on Goodreads.