The cover of The Game of Hearts by Natania Barron. Showing a regency house and two gentlemen with ornate scrolls around them, on a dark blue background.
I received this title as an eARC that I requested directly from the publisher.
Third (and final) book in the Love in Netherford series. (Regency, but with witches, vampires, and werewolves). This time, it’s Roland and Basil’s story. The whole Netherford gang is here, and once again they pull together to save each other as the high witch goes missing, warders cannot find their wards, and Roland finds something that resembles a job. Roland and Basil spend half the book in a slow burn, and when they finally truly connect, it’s glorious.
This wonderfully queer set of love stories reminds us that we deserve love, just as we are, right now. The relationships are shown with care and tenderness, and also with a wrenching understanding that sometimes love has a cost, so it’s important to be certain that cost is one you are willing to pay.
Five stars. Loved this series from beginning to end. Highly recommended.
Cover of The Finest Print by Erin Langston; A bearded guy with an open shirt holds a woman in a dark teal dress as she leans up against a desk.
Powered right through this one. Belle is the disgraced daughter of a judge, who wants to write. Ethan is a newspaperman who has worked his way up, and now randomly inherited a print shop, but one that is in significant debt.
The solution? Penny bloods: cheap sensational fiction for the masses.
Langston creates fantastic sexual tension between her leads, and she also did her homework as far as printing history goes, both in terms of equipment and legal aspects. I never thought I’d say “sexy compositing scene” in a book review, but she did it, she did it well, and I’m here for it.
Highly recommended, especially for publishing nerds. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
A black girl dressed in black carrying a skateboard and a white girl in a white top and denim shorts with a cast on one arm are walking down a brightly colored street holding hands.
I received this as an eARC on Netgalley
This is a delightful Sapphic summer young adult romance.
Heaven and Saylor, who have moved in close circles but not known each other well, despite Saylor’s quietly unexpressed crush on Heaven. Both have initial plans for the summer that get thwarted, and then spend the rest of the summer getting to know each other, and slowly and gently falling in love. Weatherspoon does a great job of building their relationship bit by bit, moving from quiet individual longing to openly caring for one another. If you’ve read Weatherspoon’s adult romances, note that the “spicy” level of this one is appropriate for its young adult context: it’s not explicit, just emotionally intimate. Weatherspoon also does an excellent job of depicting young folks learning to advocate for themselves, articulating their own feelings, needs, and goals clearly.
The cover of The Subtle Art of Folding Space, which features hands holding chopsticks picking up multidimensional dumplings on a blue background.
I received this as an eARC via NetGalley. I’m a long-time fan of Chu’s shorter work, so I was thrilled to read his first novel.
This was absolutely delightful. Chu is a master of compelling prose, characters you care about, and worldbuilding that includes food you definitely want to eat.
Ellie’s whole family are part of the folks who create, verify, and maintain the skunkworks, a series of mechanisms that create the universe Ellie lives in, and is tied to other nearby universes. Ellie’s sister Chris is emotionally abusive, and has spent much of Ellie’s childhood trying to kill her as a way to “toughen her up.” Ellie’s mom Vera begins the novel in a coma. Her death sets off a series of events that threaten both Ellie’s universe and all of the others. Ellie and her friend Daniel (whose particular way of folding spacetime while verifying skunkwork plans and builds creates food that will make you hungry) need to solve the mystery of why exactly there is so much built up around Ellie’s mom.
The novel focuses on making distinctions between people who are family by birth and those who are family by choice because they act like family, the intergenerational ties that can mess us up, and the importance of ensuring that when you build something out of non-Newtonian physics, you do it *right.*
The cover of Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. A fish-shaped space ship is against a dark space sky.
This has been on my TBR for quite a while and I’m so glad I finally got to it.
I absolutely loved this. Loved, loved, LOVED this.
This is a “a bunch of people who feel like misfits become found family” story. With music, spaceships, demons, and donuts. It will all make sense eventually as you go along. I promise.
Aoki weaves a tenderness through this story that carries you along straight through to joy. Highly recommended.
The cover of Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell. Depicts Shesheshen, an all-black tentacled monster wearing a witch hat, with Homily a human woman, lit by firelight in the foreground.
This is one of those novels I’m finally getting around to in my overly large TBR. And I’m glad I did.
For a story ostensibly about a generations-long battle between a monster and a family trying to destroy a monster, this is incredibly sweet. And cozy. It worked as bedtime reading.
Yes, Shesheshen is a shape-shifting monster who consumes humans. Shesheshen is also awkward, ill-at-ease, taciturn, and really just wants to be left alone. But as the resident monster in her area, that’s not a possibility. The local family in charge wants her dead, and periodically sends assassins to her lair.
Then, after being injured, Shesheshen meets a human named Homily. And now Shesheshen is having a whole lot of feelings about a human, and is making distinctions between humans in general and Homily in specific. Shesheshen begins to shift her approach –and her sense of self — as this relationship blossoms.
As the story unfolds, we see repeatedly that the humans in the story are the *actual* monsters. While I’m generally not a body horror person, this novel makes it manageable (think along the lines of T. Kingfisher), and the sweetness of the care that Shesheshen and Homily put into learning to build their relationship together when neither of them have had healthy models AT ALL for that is a delight.
The cover for The Infinite Loop: Archives and Time Travel in the Popular Imagination, by Lynne M. Thomas and Katy Rawdon. The title information is in a white band across the center; the top and bottom contain a bright salmon-pink rondule graphic that repeats.
“The Infinite Loop: Archives and Time Travel in the Popular Imagination engages archivists and devotees of science fiction alike by exploring common tropes within the genre—and common assumptions in the archival profession—and providing context. Presenting a book that can serve as a teaching text, readers’ advisory guide, and thought-provoking page turner, Lynne M. Thomas and Katy Rawdon:
-connect the concepts in their book to cultural heritage practices that encourage critical thinking about archivists’ roles in documenting our times.
-explore dozens of novels, short stories, movies, and TV series (particularly Doctor Who), spotlighting different science fictional approaches to writing about time travel while pointing out how archives and archivists are represented in different time travel stories;
-examine how various cultures and societies view and understand time differently, using works such as Octavia Butler’s ”Kindred,” Toshikazo Kawaguchi’s ”Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” and Rivers Solomon’s ”An Unkindness of Ghosts” to show how differences in temporal perception affect the presentation of time travel in their works;
-look at stereotypes, outdated views, and biases depicted within time travel depictions of archives, comparing these portrayals with real-world archives and historical records;
-discuss ways in which understanding time travel fiction can help archivists improve their relationships with the public and encourage more accurate fictional depictions of their work; and
-connect the concepts in their book to cultural heritage practices that encourage critical thinking about archivists’ roles in documenting our times.”
Katy and I are super proud of our work on this book. We’re deeply grateful to Connie Willis for her foreword, and to Bethany and Amy, our editors, for getting us through the process.
You can snag a copy at the ALA store (or suggest that your library purchase one!)
The cover of Rebel of the Regency by Ann Foster, featuring a white woman in a white regency dress wearing a fetching hat with bright red and black flowers on it. The title is written in a font that recalls paint/graffiti.
I received this as an eARC via Netgalley.
This is a well-researched yet accessibly written popular history of Caroline of Brunswick. Rebel of the Regency re-inserts Caroline into a historical narrative where she is and has been routinely erased. And, as is right and proper, Prinny comes out looking like the absolute jerkface that he was absolutely thoroughly documented to have been.
The author uses a fair amount of popular cultural references as touchstones and parallels to make Regency politics more understandable. It’s very much framed as “here’s the hot goss about what happened with Queen Caroline” but that doesn’t move it away from being eminently readable and enjoyable. Yes, it’s absolutely Team Caroline if one needs to take sides. Caroline comes off as a likeable yet still flawed human, which is far better a portrait than has traditionally been attributed to her, when she’s acknowledged at all in histories of the Regency that don’t treat her as a footnote/inconvenience.
This is perfect for fans of Bridgerton and other Regency romance (from Austen to Milan and more) who want more actual historical background on the period, and to read about a Queen who had rather 21st century sensibilities in many ways, despite being born in the late 18th.
the cover of The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst. It features a gently lit cottage surrounded by brambles and flowers.
This is a warm hug in the shape of a book. Durst noted in her acknowledgements that she hoped to write something that felt like drinking the good hot chocolate, and she absolutely succeeded.
This is perfect bedtime reading. Just enough peril to keep it interesting, but at levels that still let you sleep. I used it as my bedtime reading, and it worked beautifully for wind-down.
Think of it as a Hallmark film, but with fantastical/magical elements that aren’t Christmas related, and you’ll get the tone about right.
Kiela is a librarian in the capital city of the empire. She’s got a sidekick named Caz who is a magical talking spider plant. Kiela just wants to do her library work, talking to as few people as possible while caring for magical tomes that she’s legally forbidden from casting spells from. Unfortunately, there’s a rebellion against the corrupt empire, and the library burns. Kiela saves as many of the magical books that she can, and flees to Caltrey, her home island.
She thinks she’ll settle down quietly in her childhood home on Caltrey, hide, and be left alone. She’s wrong about that in several ways, and the point of this book is Kiela learning that she doesn’t have to do everything herself. She becomes part of the Caltrey community. She finds Larran, a cinnamon roll of a guy who literally shows up with cinnamon rolls in his first appearance. He has carpentry skills, and he helps wrangle the local merhorses. She finds her mom’s old cookbook, and opens a jam shop using her mom’s recipe. So, yes, she leaves the Big City and Returns Home to learn the meaning of Community. Just like in a Hallmark movie.
The community of characters is delightful, and if you need a “neighbors take care of neighbors” moment right now, this has all the reassurance and hope you could need.
Read this as part of my exhibition prep. This is an engagingly written look at all of the different ways in which humans turn each other into monsters, how we handle difference, and how slippery the whole concept of “monster” can be. It’s a historical exploration of the idea of difference, and of monstrosity, and it looks at these things with a global outlook, and a commitment to noting where things like colonialist power play into monstrification. This is a holistic approach, not a linear one, so you will find yourself wandering around the world and timelines a bit as you read, but this is a feature, not a bug, as it thematically lays out all of the different ways that humans keep re-cycling through the process of pointing fingers and saying “you are different” and what our reactions to that experience are… and can be instead.
Confessions of a Curator, Editor, Geek 
