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.