A Sorceress Comes to Call

T. Kingfisher
Completed 3/31/2025, Reviewed 3/31/2025
5 stars

This was an amazing book.  My reason for calling it such is not because of the plot or the world building or anything else technical about the book.  It’s because it so perfectly described the inner working of an abused child.  Cordelia, one of the two main characters, is a fourteen-year-old girl whose sorceress mother has a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder.  Cordelia is just an appendage of Evangeline.  She controls her through a spell of obedience and doesn’t allow her to lock her bedroom door.  Evangeline even causes Cordelia to hurt herself, with the classic lie, “It’s going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”  While it makes for a difficult read, the emotions are real, and that makes this pseudo-regency fantasy that much more profound.  This is a nominee for the 2024 Nebula.  Unlike Kingfisher’s 2023 Hugo winner, Nettle and Bone, “Sorceress” is a much more worthy nominee for either award.  I place this just slightly below Someone You Can Build a Nest In for my choice for the Nebula.

The story takes place as Cordelia turns fourteen.  It begins with a gruesome example of the obedience spell where Cordelia and Evangeline are in church while the daughter is under the spell.  A fly annoys her but she is powerless to do anything to shoo it away since the spell has total control over her body.  I immediately bonded with her, hoping she would find a way to break out of her mother’s control.  Cordelia has only one friend whom she met while riding her mother’s horse, Falada.  The horse is Evangeline’s familiar.  One day, Evangeline announces she is going to be married and will do her best to marry Cordelia into money as well.   The mother finds a way to move into the house of Samuel and his sister Hester, where she proceeds to manipulate Samuel into falling in love with her.   In the meantime, Cordelia lets Hester and a few other ladies in on the fact that Evangeline is a sorceress.  Together, they try to find a way to stop Evangeline from carrying out her plan which seems to grow more nefarious as time goes on.

Besides Cordelia, Hester is the other main character.  The story is told in third person from both their perspectives.  At first it was a little tough to follow, but quickly came together.  Hester is a spinster, having refused engagement to the love of her life, Richard Evermore.  She lives with Samuel on their large estate.  She’s a rather salty older woman.  In fact, when she invites several other ladies to a party at the estate, I could imagine the ladies being played by Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and a few other grand dames of English film, sitting around, playing cards, throwing shade at each other.  Hester, and her friends as well, are that well developed.  Samuel is rather bumbling and Evermore is typically too polite as an older English gentleman would be.

Evangeline is perfectly nefarious in her behavior toward Cordelia and full of contempt for anyone who might stand in her way.  She’s a three-dimensional character, occasionally showing some humanity and weakness.  Lastly, Alice, Cordelia’s maid in Samuel and Hester’s house, is delightfully normal.  She surprises Cordelia, and us, with her friendliness, care, and spunk.  The family butler also has some personality up his sleeve.  He surprises you, especially during the buildup to the climax.

The prose, as in all of Kingfisher’s books I’ve read, is beautiful.  The details make the characters come alive and the world building thorough.  It’s the little things, like Imogene’s obsessive card playing, that signify the strength of the prose without seeming flowery or filler. I give this book an enthusiastic five stars out of five.  The depth of emotions is profound, wrenching my insides throughout the book.  I was glad this book was short because I don’t think I could have handled the intensity lasting longer than it did.  So this is another book that may not be for all readers if you have triggers by reading about an abused teen.  On the other hand, there is redemption, as a good story would have.  It’s just getting there that may be difficult, unless like me, the pacing grabs you carries you through to the end.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In

John Wiswell
Completed 3/23/2025, Reviewed 3/24/2025
5 stars

Loved this book.  It was a little like Grendl, told from a monster’s POV, but with great dark humor in the beginning which sucks you in.  Then when it gets serious, it’s too late.  You’re hooked and have to see it to the end.  It’s the most original and imaginative book I’ve read in a long while.  It was nominated for a 2024 Nebula Award, having read two nominees so far, this is the one to beat.  

The book begins when a monster, mistakenly called a wyrm, is awakened from hibernation by wyrm hunters.  They’ve found and entered her lair.  The monster, known as Shesheshen, is mostly a blob, but can shapeshift into anything if she has recently eaten something like it.  Shesheshen swallows some bones from her lair and poses as a human girl in a red riding hooded cape 😊 and tries to escape.  She ends up killing and eating one of the hunters, with the other two escaping.  She goes into town in this form, but is spotted by the other two hunters.  When she goes out into town again, she uses the bones from the dead hunter to construct a new body, named Siobhan.  After a series of events, she falls down a ravine.  She wakes up being taken care of by a woman named Homily.  It’s clear from the inuendo that Homily is attracted to Siobhan, who after some deliberation, decides that Homily is a good enough person to build a nest in and lay her eggs.  However, as time goes on, Siobhan starts to feel affection for Homily and a complicated relationship unfolds.  It is marred however, by the family of the eaten hunter who is out to kill the monster, who they say has cursed the family.  

Long plot description, but a lot happens at the beginning of the story.  It is told third person from Shesheshen’s POV, and begins with much dark humor about eating people, the tastiness of marrow, the use of their bones and organs for posing as a human, and the finding of someone to lay eggs who can lovingly let the newborn monsters eat their way out of them for nourishment.  Even when as Siobhan, she starts hanging with Homily, the tentativeness of the development of their relationship is also humorous.  Homily and the monster are wonderful characters.  The monster, of course, because she is naïve about how her appetite for people affects other people, although she has always been careful to only eat people who are banes to society.  Homily is a much more complicated character.  She was terribly abused by her family and doesn’t have any survival skills or defense mechanisms to function as an adult when in any sort of conflict with them.  

It starts to get more serious when the Baroness appears with her two daughters.  It turns out the dead hunter was her son, and now she is on a rampage to avenge his death.  The Baroness and her daughters are pure evil.  They have no redeeming qualities.  I’d say they’re two-dimensional, but I also found them believable.  An abusive mother who has groomed her children to be ruthless, cunning, and entitled like herself.  It’s often hard to read the sections where Homily interacts with them, knowing what a kind person she is from her relationship with Siobhan.  This can be a trigger for some, because the abuse is realistic.  Fortunately, Siobhan has a reasonable understanding of human behavior, having spent most of her life eating those who deserved it.  She comes to Homily’s defense and plots her own way to take out the family.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  It’s shockingly fantastic for a first novel.  I adored Shesheshen and her growing relationship with Homily.  The showdown with Baroness is fantastic, but more interestingly, the epilogue chapters could have started their own sequel.  The prose is wonderful.  The world building simply fantastic.  The characters, all very believable.  I highly recommend this book for anyone with a dark sense of humor and who can handle reading the abuse.

Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory

Yaroslav Barsukov
Completed 3/22/2025 Reviewed 3/22/2025
3 Stars

I’ve started reading the 2024 Nebula nominees and this is the first of the bunch.  It’s a beautifully written novel with lovely prose.  It’s an expansion of a novella previously written by the author.  I had not read the novella so I had no preconceptions about the plot.  The plot is interesting, reminiscent of the arms buildup and one-upmanship between the East and West during and after the Cold War.  One of the antagonists is clearly a stand-in for Putin.  Though not exactly reflective of the international chaos of this specific moment in time, it is still a lesson in authoritarian rule and misinformation.  Unfortunately, I found the book to be less engrossing than many other reviewers on the internet.  My attention varied throughout my reading despite having good, long, uninterrupted concentration on the book.  

Shea Ashcroft was a minister in his own country until exiled for not following the queen’s orders to gas an unruly mob, which Shea’s conscience wouldn’t allow.  He’s sent to a neighboring duchy to oversee the construction of a tower that is both a show of national ego and force.  When he arrives, it is already over a thousand feet high, with more to build.  It is being kept up by devices invented long ago by an immigrant race from another dimension.  However, the details of the devices have been lost.  All they know is that it has anti-gravity properties, allowing for easier construction.  Lena, a woman from the court of the duke, believes that the completion of the tower will bring forth the appearance of a Mimic Tower which will signal the apocalypse.  In the meantime, a neighboring kingdom run by despotic prince in the absence of his father is also building a rival tower.  Shea finds out the truth behind the towers and the other dimension and vows to stop this mad, ego-driven arms race.  

The characterization was pretty good.  Barsukov brings out the tortured past of the main characters, including Shea, in bits and pieces to explain motivation and give them depth.  One thing I didn’t like was that Shea had a sister named Lena whom he often reflected upon.  I found it an interesting parallel to his relationship with the other Lena, but ultimately confusing.  His affair with the other Lena muddled the distinction between the two as he remembered scenes from his childhood.  

Most of the other characters were interesting in various ways.  The dowager queen who was being secretly drugged by her son’s doctors was very well done.  Her meanderings between lucidity and fantasy were tough to follow, but well written.  I felt the frustration of Shea as he tried to coax the truth about her son from her.  At first, I didn’t like the fact that both the prince and the queen’s dog were both named Rudi, but it illustrated her mental state and the frustration in Shea’s search for the truth.  I also liked Brielle, the tower’s architect.  She was very believable with her self-doubts and their historical context.

I was disappointed in the other dimension.  I could only conjure cartoonish images of the giant baby chasing Brielle and Shea and its King Kong-like climbing of the Mimic tower.  I also felt it wasn’t explained well how and why the immigrants from that dimension left it, with only a giant baby remaining.  On the other hand, the treatment of the immigrants by both kingdoms was devastating and similar to the plight of immigrants in our own world.  

In writing this review, I realize that this is one of those where the parts were greater than the whole.  The writing is terrific, which is a hallmark of Nebula nominees.  The world building is meticulous.  The characters have depth and motivation.  The politics of the courts were intense, but did not alienate me.  But ultimately, I felt less than satisfied when I finished the book.  Something was missing, which I can’t readily identify.  Hence, I gave this book three stars out of five rather than the four stars I toyed with throughout my reading.  I would probably read more by Barsukov because his work is very readable and his ideas are pretty original.  

Brothersong

TJ Klune
Completed 3/15/2025, Reviewed 3/15/2025
5 stars

Oh my oh my oh my.  I thought the fourth and last book of the Green River series would simply more of the same.  Well, it was, but it was also so much more.  Not only does it provide a dramatic conclusion to the threats to the Bennett clan, but it is also perhaps the best character study of all four.  This one details the life of Carter, the oldest brother of the family, Beta to his Alpha, little brother Joe, but illuminates the growth and conflicts of a pansexual person.  A pansexual person is attracted to another regardless of gender.  It overlaps a bit with bisexuality which means being attracted to both genders.  Here, Carter, who had always dated women, finds himself falling in love with Gavin, an Omega wolf who is a man.  It explores his own internalized homophobia despite his embracing of his gay brother Joe and his asexual brother Kelly.  It’s also an astounding story of what someone will do for the person they love, even if it means the ultimate sacrifice.  

In the last book, we found that Gavin was the son of the evil witch Robert Livingstone, who has lost all his power but has now become a ten-foot-tall uber-Alpha, and the half-brother of Gordo, the witch for the Bennett pack.  To prevent Livingstone from destroying the Bennetts, Gavin acquiesces to his father’s desire to have him return to him, even though he has been living with the Bennetts for several years, albeit in wolf form.  Gavin finally appeared as a human at the very end of the book as he returns to his father, and breaks Carter’s heart.  This book begins with Carter deciding to go look for Gavin and bring him back to the pack.  He succeeds, but also unleashes the fury of the Livingstone who is now determined to completely obliterate the Bennett pack, wolves and humans alike.  It builds up to a final astounding climax which requires sacrifices for success.

In the previous two books, I thought the internal journey of the main characters took too long, getting a little repetitive here and there.  However, Carter’s journey of love and self-affirmation was so well done, I didn’t mind the length at all.  It seemed natural and necessary.  He struggles with his love for Gavin, never having been in love with a man before.  He’s afraid of the magnitude of his love, that Gavin may never shed his Omega confines, and of course, the mechanics of loving another man.  Yet his love for Gavin is so great, he risks his own return to the feral Omega state by leaving the pack for over a year to search for him.  Then when they return, he struggles with his own demons and doubts just to be able to express his profound love, verbally, emotionally, and sexually.

What I like best about all the books in this series is that the dialogue and first-person narration is so natural.  It reads like thoughts and conversations with real, earthy people.  While the prose is wonderful, it’s the narrative that shines.  I was constantly astounded by word choices appropriate for Carter, as well as all the other characters around him.  And by this book, the number of characters featured has increased greatly.  There’s even a few characters from the town, non-clan, who really shine as well.  The townspeople are also like another character themselves.  By the end of the second book, the people of Green River are told the true nature of the werewolves and the extended Bennett Family.  In the third book, Carter becomes mayor and Kelly the sheriff.  The Bennetts and the townspeople become so intertwined, they become an unofficial part of the clan themselves.  One townsperson, the crochety Will, tells Carter when the latter tries to get them to leave town before the big confrontation with Livingstone, that they won’t.  They will defend the town and the Bennetts.  “You are our wolves.”  It nearly brought a tear to my eye.  

And that’s not to say that tears don’t fall throughout the book.  The steamy scene where Gavin and Carter finally consummate their relationship is just as emotionally devastating as it is exhilarating.  And Gavin’s journey back to humanity, through the eyes of Carter, choked me up a few times as well.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  It’s simply breathtaking.  I give the whole series five stars as well.  As a whole, it’s a masterpiece of world building, mythology, and storytelling.  It’s the best werewolf with gay relationships I’ve ever read.  And I read a fair number several years back when I was curating my LGBTQ+ Resource List for Worlds Without End.  Klune continues to be one of my favorite authors.  While I’ll be taking a break from him to read the Nebula and Hugo nominees as they come out, I look forward to returning to his mind, especially for his series he himself laughingly calls “Shrek erotica.”  And just for reference and linking, the earlier three books in this series were Wolfsong, Ravensong, and Heartsong.

Heartsong

TJ Klune
Completed 3/3/2025, Reviewed 3/6/2025
4 stars

I was surprised by this book.  It follows Robbie, an outsider who joined the pack in the first book.  He was sent by the Alpha of all to spy on the Bennetts, but ended up finding a home there and falling in love with Kelly.  However, something happens to Robbie.  He seems to turn on his new family, then disappears.  This book picks up with Robbie having no memory of the Bennetts and once again working for the Alpha of all and her kindly, elderly witch.  I didn’t think I’d like this turn of events, but I did.  In fact, I loved it.  My only negative comment is that once again, the dissonance of the main character goes on for what I felt was way too long.  This book took me around two weeks to read, not because it was slow going.  Just the opposite.  It was riveting.  However, I was on a Star Trek cruise to the Yucatan and found myself spending more time with the other cruisers than alone with my book.  Oh well.  The cruise was great.  And I can’t wait to start the last entry in this series.

As with all Klune’s books, I just love the prose and the easy dialogue.  It’s so natural, no matter how deep and philosophical it gets.  I feel like I’ve become part of the Bennet family of werewolves and humans coexisting in their unique pack.  I’m actually going to use the characters as inspiration for my next DnD campaign.  😊

Robbie turned out to be a lot more interesting than I thought he’d be.  Before this book, he fell in love with Kelly who turned out to be asexual, and it worked for both of them.  Then he has complete memory loss and becomes indoctrinated in complete hatred for the Bennetts.  He attacks the Bennetts, but they capture him and bring him back to Oregon where they spend most of the book trying to figure out the witchery that caused the memory loss.  Of course Robbie takes a long time believing this and the resolution does not seem clear or easy.  Most of the book is his gradual coming to accept what he’s being told about his real past.  It’s long, occasionally meandering, but ultimately fulfilling.  

The character development of Michelle, the Alpha of all, is noteworthy, as she is basically the bad guy.  There’s also the witch who seems to have Robbie under his spell, Ezra, who seems more like a sexual predator than the mentor he purports to be.  Since Robbie spends a chunk of the beginning of the book with them, the characters are fleshed out well, which is not necessarily usual for the bad guys.  The rest of the pack, including the human members, all continue to develop as well.  Elizabeth’s character is simply wondrous as she mothers, supports, and challenges the pack behind the two Alphas, Joe and Ox.  

I give this book four stars out of five, mainly for the reason I noted above.  Sometimes the angst just goes on a little too long, but the depiction is certainly believable.  What began with a bang in Wolfsong and continued strongly in Ravensong, keeps going here.  The last book centers on Carter, who has his own revelations in this volume, mainly around an Omega who joined the family once the Bennetts broke the spell causing the Omega outbreak.  It will be interesting to see what develops through him to reach what I expect will be an epic conclusion.

Orbital

Samantha Harvey
Completed 2/15/2025, Reviewed 2/15/2025
2 stars

I wanted to like this meditation on space and Earth from the viewpoints of six astronauts in the International Space Station.  It had pretty prose, but not much else.  There’s no plot, just reflections on life in space and sweeping observations as the ISS orbits the Earth sixteen times in one twenty-four-hour period.  And at two hundred pages that should have been right up my alley.  But alas, it was not meant to be.  I could only read about wonder for so long before I got bored and my mind drifted.  At one point, I fell asleep and my e-reader slid back about twenty pages.  When I awoke, it took me about fifteen pages of reading to realize I had already read those pages.  This won the Booker Prize, which is the big book award in the UK.  I’ve only read two other Booker Prize winners, Possession by AS Byatt and Life of Pi by Yann Martel, both of which I loved.  I think Orbital won because it was pretty, and perhaps it could be because it’s a literary tip of the hat to Science Fiction.  Just guessing. 

There’s an interesting narrative that goes along with this book.  Many reviews say that it’s a love letter to Russia and Russian culture.  I didn’t get that.  Two of the astronauts are Russian.  Everybody gets along on the ISS even though they are supposed to remain separated for political reasons.  But I didn’t understand the criticism.  Maybe it’s because I tuned out so many times throughout the book.  Truly, the only character I got any sense of was Chie, the Japanese woman whose mother died that day.  She ruminates on how if her grandfather hadn’t been home from work sick, watching her baby mother while her grandmother went into town shopping, she would have been vaporized by one of the atomic bombs in WWII.  Anyway, back to the Russian criticism, I didn’t see anything that was particularly offensive, even in this time when the Russian dictator and his oligarchs are so brutally trying to obliterate Ukraine.  

I have little else to say about this book.  Despite being pretty, it felt like a waste of time.  Despite being a slim volume, I would much rather have read just about anything else.  I give this book two stars solely for the prose.  It had nothing else of value for me.  

Ravensong

TJ Klune
Completed 2/12/2025, Reviewed 2/13/2025
4 stars

This is the second in the Green Creek series, following Wolfsong.  It tells the story of Gordo, a human who is the witch for the Bennett werewolf clan.  I really liked the form, beginning in the middle of the last book when he and part of the clan went looking for the bad guy for three years.  We didn’t hear much of this story last time.  It fills in the gaps and at the same time, portrays Gordo’s younger years.  At first I was a little disappointed it didn’t follow Ox and Joe, but I became engrossed in his internal struggle with lifelong abandonment issues.  Like all Klune’s books so far, the theme is about family and kinship, love and loss, and it’s wrapped in supernatural action and conflict.  

Gordo’s father was the witch for the clan.  He had his son tattooed with sigils and magical art at a very young age so that he could build his power early.  But it was a horribly painful experience that was the first in a series of betrayals Gordon felt.  Later his mother died and his father left with the bad guys.  Gordo, at a young age, fell in love with the older Mark, the upcoming alpha’s brother.  However, because of the age difference, Mark never let Gordo too close, although he knew they would be mated.  Later, a group of religious fanatic hunters came and nearly obliterated the Bennett clan.  Alone, Gordo apprenticed as an auto mechanic from Marty, who eventually left the shop to him upon his death. Once the Bennett clan reorganized, they left Green Creek so that Thomas, the alpha, could take the role of alpha of all.  Gordo buried himself in his work, eschewing the remaining clan, especially Mark.  Years later, Gordo struggles with his huge resentments against Mark and the Bennetts as the new clan under the leadership of Ox and Joe rebuilds and faces new challenges from the new generation of hunters and an onslaught of magically-diseased Omega wolves.

Yes, another complicated tale.  But it exhibits the complex world building of TJ Klune.  The magic is not exactly well-defined, but it goes hand in hand with Gordo’s understanding of and growth in it.  Specifically, the magically-diseased Omega wolves are the result of ancient magic used by his father to destroy wolves.  Gordo has no knowledge of this magic, but by being genetically linked, his signature has some power.  The book also has several plotlines.  In fact, I felt like the book could have ended several times as each subplot gets some resolution.  It made the book feel a little long, but necessary as the complexity needed to be unraveled and overcome.  

My one real complaint with the book was five hundred pages of Gordo resenting Mark and fighting his true feelings for sooooooo long.  About two-thirds of the way, I was thinking, “Just join a twelve step program already and work through these resentments!”  However, they are also, oddly enough, motivation for Gordo’s defense of the clan as they fend off wave after wave of attack.  When the resolution comes, it’s a little too late, which is nice for a change, not wrapping up neatly.  But Gordo does grow, albeit gruffly.  

I really liked the continued presence, wit, and support of the other humans in clan.  They are mostly his mechanics from the shop and add color to Gordo’s dourness. With the gravity of the plots, they help break the tension with comical exchanges and sharp poignant insight.  Back on the wolf side, Elizabeth, Thomas’ widow and the matriarch of the clan, lends an intelligent and caring presence in her support of Gordo.  

I give this book four stars out of five.  It’s quick, engrossing, and devastating.  Another great book from Klune.  My only reason for not going five stars is the length and intensity of Gordo’s resentment.  It became old after a while, not giving the reader relief until the end.  The conclusion was very satisfying in its eschewing of a happy ending.  It sets the scene for the next book where the clan must overcome more obstacles to make everything right.  Will read the third book after a quick break for a book club book.