Apparently when you dream of a house, the house is you. (The other people in your dream are also all supposedly you? I don’t know. I love interpreting other people’s dreams but I do think it’s a lot of the time nonsense.) When you dream of finding new rooms in your house, for instance, it’s meant to represent exploring new sides of yourself. Whether that’s true of dreams or not, I don’t know, but I like the alignment of house with self. One of the reasons (I suspect) house-hunting and house-renovation shows are so popular is that it’s fun to…
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Cat Sebastian has become one of my go-to romance authors for just consistently tender romance content. (My favorite and most tenderest is The Ruin of a Rake, but they’re all terrific.) Her latest, Hither Page, is set between the wars in England and features a shell-shocked doctor who has retreated to a small English town to escape his memories of the war. Meanwhile the titular Leo Page has been sent to the small English town to investigate a suspicious murder and discover whether there’s any Spy Stuff afoot. Although I don’t tend to like romances that follow a single couple…
Leave a CommentIt’s June and I have been reading some YA and I will be so honest with you: A lot of it has let me down a little bit. I’m going to start with the one that I thought unequivocally was terrific, and then I’ll work forward and we will get through this together. Genesis Begins Again was an impulse grab at the library, and I’m so glad I picked it up. It’s a YA book that feels written for young teenagers, and specifically for black girls. Debut author Alicia D. Williams is dealing with difficult topics, and she never talks down…
Leave a CommentKJ Charles is a favorite romance author of mine, so the occasion of her releasing a new book is always cause for celebration. But the very early standalone Think of England has always been a particular favorite, so I was thrilled to learn that KJ Charles had plans for a prequel novel, an f/f murder mystery set at a shooting party at an English manor house in the Edwardian era. Proper English follows the talented shooter Pat Merton, who is competent and sensible and has never had much time for romance — until she meets her dear friend’s new fiancee,…
Leave a CommentIn the year of our Lord 2017 (of unfond memory), I read these two stories about sweet little bots doing their best, and it launched me into a new state of being in which I read short fiction so much that I have had to commission a logo about it. The main one, admittedly, was “Fandom for Robots,” but a very close second was Suzanne Palmer’s very sweet “The Secret Life of Bots.” So it was with great pleasure that I learned she has her debut novel out this year: Finder! Fergus Ferguson is a finder, and he’s been tasked…
Leave a CommentOOF. Tear my heart into tiny pieces, why don’t you, The Vela writing team? If you haven’t yet heard about Serial Box, my friends, you are missing a trick. They do serialized fiction — mostly SFF — with some of the most incredible writers working today. The Vela (out tomorrow!) brings together some of my truest new faves from the past few years: Yoon Ha Lee, who wrote Ninefox Gambit; Becky Chambers, who wrote The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; Rivers Solomon, who wrote An Unkindness of Ghosts; and SL Huang, who wrote Zero Sum Game. Of course,…
1 CommentI am no longer in my memoir phase, my friends. I just am not. When I read Educated last year and recommended it to all and sundry, I added the caveat that I am no longer in my memoir phase, except for weird-culty-religion memoirs, as those are my catnip. But then I saw the synopsis for Sounds Like Titanic, a memoir about a violinist who fake-performed in a professional ensemble for a famous composer who played a loud CD of his music on top of the fake performances the ensemble players were doing. I expected Sounds Like Titanic to feel…
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