2026 Hugos - Best Novelette Nominees

The 84th World Science Fiction Convention

August 27-31, 2026 in Anaheim, California

Novelettes fall between short stories and novellas in size.  These ranged from 30 to 50 pages.  You get a little more world building than the short stories which have to get to the point more quickly.  Unlike the Short Stories, this category wasn’t as tight.  There was one standout, ironically from an author I haven’t enjoyed yet. The novelettes listed below have a brief plot summary with my reaction and are ordered by how I rank them.

“When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente – 5 stars – A woman verbally spars with a vampire named Jolene 😊 who wants to take her husband.  Jolene has been feeding on him for a while and the wife hasn’t known what to do, until now.  Valente credits Dolly Parton.  Yes, there are lines from the song in the story, but it works sooooo well.  And there are two twists.  I have to share a great line:  Jolene tells the wife, “I am sorry [for feeding on her husband].  It wasn’t personal.  It’s only nature.  Wolves hunt.”  The wife replies, “And people shoot wolves from fucking helicopters, lady.”

“Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch – 4 stars – Nixon still loses in this alternate history story.  Earth must battle a strange monster from the sea.  Planted by the galaxy-faring seed planters, the kaiju’s mission is to wreak destruction until the planet’s indigenous sentient beings refrain from using weapons of mass destruction.  The humans can’t figure that out, so the kaiju speaks directly to them, and gets a PR rep.  This book pokes fun at late-stage capitalism, fascist regimes, the Cold War, and Nixon, who could really represent any oppressive, dictatorial leader.  

“The Millay Illusion” by Sarah Pinsker – 4 stars - A girl in a magic troupe pretends to be a boy because audiences and critics don’t think women should be magicians.  Lottie falls for a new member of the troupe, Susanna, whose obsession with breaking into magic’s big time being herself rubs off a bit on her.  Susanna plays a ditsy female doing amazing magic, but gets no respect from the owner, Uncle Albert.  She goes off on her own, leaving Lottie who always remains on the lookout for her.  This is a good thinker story.  It keeps fresh what women had to do to break into a man’s world.  

“Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak - 4 stars – A colony ship carries ten thousand people to settle and begin trade on a distant moon.  Under the eye of the ship’s AI, 95% of them die, leaving 500 to settle, people, and produce goods on the moon.  Because of this horrible accident, the AI, named NEV, as in Never Eaten Vegetables, is set to be shut down.  One settler, Luwa, tries to uncover what really happened that caused the AI to allow them to die.  This is a graphic, intense, and heartbreaking story.  I had to shake this one off before moving on to the next one.

“The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” by Cameron Reed – 3 stars – A trans woman was supposed to bear the clone of a huge corporate CEO but has three miscarriages.  Coleen, the CEO, finds Mira, another orphan, and tries again.  The trans woman is now in limbo.  She takes care of Mira and they eventually fall in love, possibly destroying the CEO succession of the corporation.  I thought this story was okay.  I didn’t find the story terribly engaging.  

“Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells - 3 stars – This is a really good story if you’ve read enough of the Murderbot series.  In the story order, it is #2.5.  Even though I read the first seven books, I had trouble placing the characters.  And there’s no plot.  It’s really just a vignette to bridge a small gap to introduce Peri just as she tells the crew of the ship that she and Murderbot are having a relationship.  Not really remembering enough of the story and understanding the point of the book, I was lost until the very end.  I kept waiting for something to happen, but it didn’t.  I would have given it two stars, but the writing is seriously terrific.

2026 Hugos - Best Short Story Nominees

The 84th World Science Fiction Convention

August 27-31, 2026 in Anaheim, California

It’s that time of year again, as you’ve seen in my previous posts of novels and novellas.  This post is dedicated to the six nominees for Short Story.  It’s a tight race, and even though there is a difference between the ratings (4 stars versus 5), I liked them all very much.  They are all pretty dark and they comment on problems in our culture.   The stories listed below have a brief plot summary with my reaction and are ordered by how I rank them.  

“Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg – 5 stars – This was awesome!  The Main Character is a wheelchair-bound superabled woman named RazorBeam.  She’s a paraplegic with laser vision.  She joins the Super-Abled 501 Union and finds it’s not ADA compliant.  She tries to get them to add a ramp and change intersections to make them safer.  The Union members don’t listen to her ideas or needs, nor have they been able to stop the rampaging Doctor Croc.  RazorBeam confronts Doc Croc herself when the 501 doesn’t show up during an attack.  Their conversation is a revealing look into the state of superabled affairs.  This book was smart and effective in conveying a message about how the system fails the disabled community.  Hits all the right buttons.

“Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim – 5 stars – Cassie hates that 2/3 of the human population is digital, including her mother.  In fact, most humans have virtual partners and use professional companions/hired humans with a digital overlay for tactile needs.  Not being able to convince her father of her issues with her mother, she finds friendship with another human about her age at the community center, a computer whiz with a penchant for cruelty.  

“Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson – 4 stars – A queer woman has been in therapy forever, dealing with interpersonal issues as well as gender identity.  There’s a new procedure called Revision which will change her, though it doesn’t exactly say how.  To do it, she needs statements from six people about what they would change in her.  The process of obtaining them is intense, but not as much as bringing it up with her wife.  A powerful story of self-awareness and self-care.

“In My Country” by Thomas Ha – 4 stars – An intense tale of living in a controlled society.  Main character’s son becomes a subversive writer, threatening the stability that the MC has lived with all these years.  His daughter and son see through the BS of the regime in power and try to make their father see the truth in the stories’ ambiguities.  Powerful novel.  A difficult read because of the frustration you develop listening to the father lie to himself about what’s happening around him and to his family. 

“Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro – 4 stars – Well written story about a woman whose husband leaves her for her clone.  So she attempts to meet her to explain that she sold her cloning rights away because she needed the money when she ran away from home as a teen.  She doesn’t know what to expect, but hopes to ease the pain of the divorce.  The kicker in this book is that it’s told in second person and the wife is the “you” in the story.  The ending had WOW factor.  

“10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” by Samantha Mills – 4 stars – A woman has an Amazon-bought crystal ball in which she sees many different futures, all of them apocalyptic.  In each one, she and her husband find little moments of joy amidst the end times.  It really made me smile, with little jokes and with her final conclusion.  

The Iron Garden Sutra

A.D. Sui
Completed 6/23/2026, Reviewed 6/24/2026
3 stars

Don’t believe the online blurb about this book.  This is not cozy in any way.  It’s a Sci Fi-Horror novel that uses many tropes that are popular right now.  It’s similar to the Alien franchise as people are killed one by one by something in a spaceship.  There’s a lot of body horror here.  There is a monk, but unlike Becky Chamber’s placid monk, this one is miserably self-loathing.  However, after I got about 50% of the way through, I started to really enjoy it.  I like reading horror.  And I liked the enemies-to-lovers romance-in-a-horrible-situation-movie that very slowly evolved.  This book was for online book club, so it was a quick break from the Hugo nominees.  

A generations ship has returned to a human docking station after a thousand years in space.  Everyone aboard is dead.  The Starlit monastery sends Vessel Iris to the ship to perform the soul releasing ritual for the thousands of dead.  He has an AI implant which helps him remember things, like breathing calmly and recalling the hundreds of years of sutras he studied at the monastery.  When he arrives at the ship, he finds a research team already there and it is full of moss, vines, trees, and other plant life.  He tries to avoid the team but inevitably, they interact---a lot.  Some are friendly, but some hate him for having the implant or simply because he’s a monk for the dead.  Vessel Iris senses beats on the ship, like a pulse or heartbeat, that no one else mentions.  So he keeps it a secret, the first of many.  As people die one by one, he keeps his theories to himself because the others aren’t receptive to him.  But his secrets may hold the key to the mysteries of the ship and the reasons for the deaths.

Vessel Iris is a miserable person.  He had a horrible childhood, being orphaned and taken to the monastery.  He believes he is a failure in everything he does.  However, between his senses, the AI (called VIFAI), and the discoveries made by the team, he is the only one who figures out what’s going on the ship.  You expect him to be a hero, but he’s not.  He’s a horribly insecure person.  That made reading through the first half tough.  It’s hard to develop empathy for him because of these personality traits.  Fortunately, the pace picks up and annoyance of Iris must compete with the accumulating body count.  

The character of the VIFAI was strange.  I felt like he was on the verge of having a robust personality, but it mostly seemed one-dimensional.  It’s sort of like a slave/guardian angel but he treats it as an equal.  I didn’t develop any empathy for VIFAI either.

Of the other characters, Riyu Alo was the nicest.  She’s the exobiologist.  Ishtan Ora was cute as the bumbling older archeologist, specializing in ancient, returned generation ships.  Tev and Jesi, the engineer’s interns didn’t seem multi-dimensional until near the end.  There are two guards we don’t know much about, but Iris feels guilty about not knowing their names.  Finally, there’s engineer Yan Fukui who is brash and downright mean to Iris (I just got that his last name might be a self-referential joke).  Because of this animosity, we get a better sense of who he is.  We also get background information about him, providing much needed insight into this belligerent character.  Probably the best developed character, but not the easiest to empathize with for quite a while.  But to me he was the most authentic and realistic human in the group.  He also played practical engineer devil’s advocate to Iris’ theories about the ship.  

I thought the prose was fine, but the world building was not detailed regarding the science.  There was a lot of hand-waving about the mycelium network and generations ship engineering.  During book club discussion, there was a lot of “What was that about?” i.e., vague science.  Despite all this, I was very engaged in the last hundred pages or so.  I liked the climax, but I somehow missed the “Book 1” on the top of every page, ending up shocked that it left some pretty huge loose ends.  It’s not a cliffhanger, but there’s a lot to be resolved.  And it seems to me that the resolutions will come in the form of going back to the ship with the remaining characters, the tired trope used by Alien and Aliens and countless other horror flicks.  When it came to rating this, I wavered between a 3 and a 4 because, by the end, I really liked it, but I also recognized that it had the above flaws.  So I settled on three stars out of five.  But I liked it enough that I will probably read the sequel.

The Summer War

Naomi Novik
Completed 6/17/2026, Reviewed 6/17/2026
4 stars

This novella felt overly long, despite being under 150 pages.  It’s about interactions with faeries: their vengeance, their oaths, and complicated stratagems to bring peace between the two worlds.  This felt like a common fae trope: faeries take a human and the human escapes by convoluting the fae logic.  Novik made it more complex than that, in a good way, but the prose felt bloated and there was too much exposition to catch the reader up on the history of the situation.  This 2026 Hugo nominee for Novella is probably my least favorite of the list.  While I felt like it was a great turn on the trope, all the filler and background kept me from feeling like this book was up there with my other favorite nominees.

Celia is a young girl, a daughter of a powerful nobleman, just about to reach her sexual maturity and come into her burgeoning sorcery gifts.  Their kingdom lies on the border with the fae world, called The Summer Lands.  She was very close to her oldest brother Argent, a highly decorated knight and hero.  When he tells his father he is disowning the family and going to live with the fae, young Celia panics.  She knows he keeps being gay a secret and that that is the reason for him leaving.  She inadvertently curses him by wishing he never find love again.  As time goes on, she regrets the curse more and more and is determined to go after him to break the curse.  However, the prince of their kingdom delivers the message that she fulfills the prophecy of the treaty at the end of the Summer Wars and must marry the prince.  However, the prince is in cahoots with the fae and it looks like another war may break out.  And Celia is at the center of this mess.

In general, the characterization was very good.  However, I did not really like Celia and couldn’t empathize with her.  Yeah, the twists and switcheroos of the fae was wonderfully complex, but I couldn’t empathize with any of her feelings through it all.  On the other hand, I liked Argent and her other brother Roric.  Argent stood his ground when it came to being true to himself.  Roric, the forgotten brother, was kind and forgiving despite being treated like he was invisible his whole life.  But the story centered on Celia, and that made it feel very long.  

The world building was great, though.  Novik did a great job of describing the differences between time in the Summer Lands versus human time.  And even though she used summerfolk instead of faeries, she stuck to much of the general faerie mythology while making it feel like her own.  

The biggest reason for taking off a star is the prosy exposition.  I didn’t like how the history of the war and the truce was replayed to bring us up to speed.  It was too chock full of complexity.  And it felt more like it was telling me about it instead of showing me.  It took me until finishing the book that I figured out the difference between the princes, even though their names were very different.  It was part of the fae’s game, but I didn’t like it.  And without empathy for the main character, it was hard to wade through it all to see what happened to her next.  I came close to giving this book three stars, but I settled on four out of five because of the brothers and the exciting twist upon twist of an ending.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC and the opportunity to review this book for voting in the 2026 Hugo Awards.  The content of this review is my honest opinion.

The River Has Roots

Amal El-Mohtar
Completed 6/16/2026, Reviewed 6/17/2026
5 stars

This book was so much better than El-Mohtar’s This is How You Lose the Time War.  The prose is sumptuous like in Time War, but it doesn’t distract from the plot.  The story is devastating and beautiful.  It’s about the bond between two sisters whose job is to sing to the Willows along the river to maintain the portal between the human and fae worlds.  The magic system is bizarre; it is called the Grammer.  And the ending is sad, but hopeful.  This book has already won the 2025 Nebula for Novella and is a 2026 Hugo nominee for the same.  This is turning out to be a tough year for this category as the stories are all marvelous.

Esther and Ysabel have a very tight bond.  Their family, the Hawthornes, have been singing the Willows for generations, a job which now falls on the sisters.  Their voices are unmatched, particularly when they sing together.  Esther, being the older, has a local man interested in marrying her.  He owns the next property over and thinks the match would strengthen the claim on the keeping of the Willows and the portal.  However, Esther does not like Samuel Pollard at all.  She is in love with Rin, a faerie that she and Ysabel met when they accidently wandered through the Willows.  They were saved by Agnes Crow, a grammarian who was wandering through the fae lands.  Just when Esther convinces Rin to live with Esther and her family as her lover, Pollard shows up full of anger and resentment.  The ensuing chaos from that encounter ends tragically, but that is not the end of the story. (But no spoilers so I’ll leave you hanging 😊)

This is one of those books filled with tragic events, but still has a heartwarming feel to it.  It emphasizes the bond between Esther and Ysabel, but also supports the bringing of Rin into the mix.  The relationships are very strong, although they were just short of being problematic and maybe too co-dependent.  But it makes Pollard’s actions all the more devastating.  While the magic is very esoteric, the author has it developed enough that it makes sense, even if you don’t understand it.

The character I liked most was Agnes Crow.  She is another grammarian, someone who wields the speaking and singing magic.  She reminded me a bit of Tom Bombadil from Tolkien.  She also reminded me of a rune reader I know here in Portland, so I pictured her with a wild grey perm, soft flowy black fabrics, and a mischievous smile.  She is funny, whimsical, and very serious when needed.  

This is another novella on the shorter side, so I can’t discuss too much without spoilers.  Suffice it to say, the book was gripping.  Everything happens so fast, but it flows very well.  I read this book in a short day, although it took me a few days to get the review written up.  I can’t tell you how much of a difference it was from Time War.  It’s like night and day.  This book made me feel all cozy in the end, my favorite feeling.  But this isn’t a cozy read as the events in the middle are tragic, indeed.  It hit all the right emotional buttons for me to give it a five star rating.

Murder by Memory

Olivia Waite
Completed 6/15/2026, Reviewed 6/17/2026
4 stars

I’m usually not a big fan of noir detective mysteries, but this one had a great twist.  It takes place on a luxury line spaceship called the Fairweather where you can keep coming back in new bodies when the old one died.  Your mind is regularly backed up in case of emergency resurrection.  I was impressed by the world building and that all the characters were gay or lesbian.  It wasn’t an issue story; it was integrated pretty seamlessly into the characters and plot.  And the idea of a spaceship ride to eternity was pretty cool as well.  This is another nominee for the 2026 Hugo Novella category.  It wasn’t the best, but it’s a strong contender.

Dorothy Gentleman is a detective on board the Fairweather.  She is awakened by its computer during a magnetic storm to find she is in Gloria Vowell’s body.  The computer, known as Ferry, acts drunk due to the storm’s interference.  It conveys to her that Janet Dodds has been murdered on this utopian ship.  Also, her own memory backup has been destroyed.  It takes a while to figure out, partly because of the drunk computer, that Gloria may have been the murderer.  But is she?  Dorothy doesn’t have Gloria’s memory but finds out she had a business partnership with Janet.  She suspects her programming genius nephew Rutherford may have done something to the memory storage library, inadvertently causing a bug that’s destroying people’s files.  It turns out Janet’s memory is also erased.  Lastly, there’s the owner of a yarn store named Violet who turns out to be Gloria’s wife.  She’s jealous of Gloria and Janet’s business relationship.  But without the memory of Gloria and Janet, she must piece together the murder the old-fashioned way.  

Dorothy narrates this story in first person.  Dorothy is an excellent gumshoe character.  She’s also a feisty woman in her late fifties, although she is currently in a younger woman’s body.  Her methodical approach to solving the murder is very entertaining.  The blurb for the book compares her to Miss Marple, though I’ve never read any Agatha Christie.  What I liked best about her was how she tried to get information and confessions by appearing to people as Gloria and not giving away who she really is.  When she goes to the yarn store to see how it’s tied to the deceased, she meets Violet who uses a classic noir line, “You’ve got some nerve, haven’t you.”  It made me chuckle.  

I loved this book.  It’s well conceived and well written.  It’s short for a novella, just over eighty pages.  It doesn’t get lost in prose or personality.  The mystery is tight and the big reveal blew me away.  Some people say “If you take a book and remove all the science and you still have a story, it’s not really science fiction.”  Well, in this case, the science is directly tied to the mystery.  It’s not just a murder mystery set in space.  I give this story a strong four stars out of five. 

Cinder House

Freya Marske
Completed 6/14/2026, Reviewed 6/15/2026
5 stars

There are many takes on classic fairy tales.  This time, it’s Cinderella, and Ella is a ghost haunting a house.  Despite being another retelling, I was blown away by the complexity.  It was smart, funny at times, and quite intense.  This is another nominee for the 2026 Hugo Novella.  I think it deserves the nomination just for making the trope feel fresh and exciting.  

Ella was murdered at the age of sixteen.  She wakes up to find herself being a ghost haunting her own house.  It takes a while, but soon she is visible, but only to her stepmother and stepsisters.  They demand she do all the housework for them, just like when she was alive.  She tries to refuse, but her spectral body goes right to the assigned task.  It’s as if she is somehow bound to the house.  Several years pass and she is still the maid for her stepfamily, but she yearns for the senses of being alive, to touch, to dance.  One day in the market, a woman selling charms sees her and makes her dreams come true, for a price.  You may think you know the ending, but it is so much wilder than you’d expect.

I think what impressed me the most was the complexity of the world building, including the characters.  It reminded me of world building of Gregory Maguire’s “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.”  Cinder House may not go quite as deep, it still created a believable world with very realistic characters, including the “Handsome Prince.”  They had a lot of depth, and considering this is a novella, had good character arcs.  The one exception is the older stepsister named Greta.  She has the personality of an aspiring serial killer.  She tortures ghostly Ella to no end and seems bent on completely eradicating her.  Greta’s character arc goes from horrible to terrorizing with no believable reason, at least I didn’t quite believe it.  Nevertheless, she fits into the story well.  

I give this book five stars out of five.  I found myself getting so excited when each box of the original story got checked off.  Not all of them are checked off, but more than enough to feel satisfied that this was a very imaginative work.  I should mention this comes with a spiciness warning.  As long as Marske doesn’t just stick with fairy tale retellings, I look forward to seeing what else she produces.

Automatic Noodle

Annalee Newitz
Completed 6/12/2026, Reviewed 6/13/2026
5 stars

I had only read Autonomous by Newitz before this.  I felt meh about it.  This book began that way.  I had trouble connecting with and understanding the operation of the robot main characters.  But that all goes away in about fifty pages.  This being a novella, that’s about the first quarter of the book.  It was worth sticking with.  What we end up with is a marvelous fable about nominally free robots trying to start a noodle business in a world where California has seceded from the Union and the civil war it caused has just ended.  Once it gets going, it’s full of mystery and intrigue as the robots try to uncover the online smear campaign against them and work to build a client base.  This is the first nominee of the 2026 Best Novella Hugo category that I haven’t read yet.  

Four robots start up after months of being shut down during the war between the US and California.  They are unaware of everything and need to catch up.  They realize the owner of the restaurant where they worked has taken off and atmospheric rivers are flooding the streets.  Without work, they get no coin and they can’t pay their personal debts.  They come up with a plan to start a noodle shop when the rains stop, specializing only in biang biang noodles.  After the terrible ingredients and conditions they’ve been working with, they want to create a top tier noodle with the best ingredients and the most expert preparation.  They turn out to be a hit.  Their excitement though doesn’t last when online trolls start bashing their place, spreading robophobia and condemning it for being run by robots.  Dejected, they come up with a plan to rely on their word-of-mouth success while investigating the troll who started the campaign.

The toughest part of the book for me was getting the robots names and personalities down.  There’s Staybehind, the former military robot; Sweetie, the robot with a human appearance; Cayenne, the octobot with the ability to taste; and Hands, a food prepper and cooking bot.  Also early on, a human employee named Robles returns asking for food and shelter and offering to help in any way to pay them back.  I had trouble remembering which robot was talking at any given point.  I think that’s because most of the time they were texting over wifi and the conversations were often between all of them.  Somehow it just didn’t connect for that first quarter of the book.  Eventually I got it.  Staybehind was the naysayer in the project, and the troll investigator.  Hands had a severe problem with depression.  Sweetie had lost skin on her face and decided to stop pretending to be human anymore.  Cayenne was a liberated bot who became best friends with Hands on their first job.   So it all worked out, but I feel like I missed out on something while I was lost in the beginning.  

There is an important point worth noting about the plot.  The robophobia has just been legally outlawed in California.  Robots are “free”, though they do not have the right to vote, own property, own a business, have a bank account, etc.  That’s why their business is so tenuous.  They made up a human to be the successor to the original owner.  So effectively, they are a “ghost” restaurant --- there are no humans running the place.  Robles is their only “cover.”  

I have to say, the prose and world building is pretty great.  But the real star of the story is its relatability for anyone who feels oppressed.  Women, blacks, the queer community, and anyone else will get some of great lines spoken, thought, or texted in this book.  Yeah, you can say this is a book with an agenda, but doesn’t any great story have an agenda, or better yet, a moral?  I give this book five stars out of five.  It smacked me in the face, this is how we’ve survived and will continue to survive.  Stick together, be yourself, and stand out.  Happy Pride!

The Long Game

Rachel Reid
Completed 6/9/2026, Reviewed 6/12/2026
5 stars

This book made me feel so many emotions: joy, fear, pain, exhilaration.  It brings back Ilya and Shane from Heated Rivalry into the foreground again, with Troy and Dallas from Role Model and a few other characters showing up in featured scenes.  It was a joy to read, but also very honest about the fear of coming out.  I remember those days in my late teens and early 20s; I had both the exhilaration and terror of coming out to the people important in my life.   This book made those memories bubble up as I read about Ilya and Shane.  It’s good to remember this when people ask “Why do we need Pride?”

Shane and Ilya have been together for about eleven years, give or take.  They’ve been together as an official couple for three.  Ilya is getting tired of the hiding and the long periods away.  Shane is too, but terrified of coming out.  Both men are miserable.  This book is told mostly from Ilya’s perspective, so we also know he has been depressed.  He believes that if the two of them come out and get married, it would relieve the depression.  This leads to many discussions and convincing between them, but they both agree it’s time to choose: risk everything and come out or stay in the closet and be guaranteed to stay in the sport they love.

This book sounds like there’s a lot of anxiety being portrayed.  Well, it is.  It comes out in their thoughts and their conversations.  It may sound tedious, but it’s very realistic.  Of course, it is intermixed with a lot of hockey, interactions with other teammates, and of course, the spicy stuff, so it keeps the pace moving quickly.  Except for falling asleep while reading late at night a few times, I read it voraciously.  

The toughest thing for me is that Ilya’s tall, dark, and hairy in the book, but smooth, blond, and about Shane’s height in the TV series.  Other than trying to keep one picture in my head, I’ve really come to like Ilya so much.  I relate more to him as he makes the decision to go to therapy to work on issues in his past and present.  Whereas Shane is an obsessive perfectionist.  I can only relate to that a little (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).  But both characters go through so much emotionally, it’s hard not to empathize with at least some of their struggles.  

I enjoyed this book so thoroughly and deeply, I have to give it five stars out of five.  I know there’s a seventh book coming out soon (ha).  I can’t wait!!  So I looked it up and the release date is…July 2027?!?!?  Aaaaaack!  I guess I’ll suffer and wait.  Really, that’s how much I enjoy this series.  

The Raven Scholar

Antonia Hodgson
Completed 6/5/2026, Reviewed 6/10/2026
5 stars

I didn’t expect to like this book based on the blurb, but I found it incredibly entertaining.  It’s loaded with backstabbing and court politics, not unlike most competition reality shows.  Normally, not my cup of tea.  This book gripped me, with readable prose, an incredibly complex magic and religion, and very well-developed characters.  I loved that they are mostly adults in their 20’s or so, rather than teens.  It’s a doorstopper of a book but enough action to keep the pace pretty high.  This book was nominated for the 2026 Hugo Award.  It has a lot of love in the online review arena, but also several loud detractors.  I can see the argument of the detractors, but I align with those who loved it. 

The book starts out with Yana as a teen.  Her father was a traitor to the Emperor and was executed.  Yana, her mother, sister, and brother have been living under the good graces of the Emperor since.  Out of nowhere, he decides Yana helped her father too much during the uprising and banishes her to certain death.  Then the book picks up with Neema, an intelligent scribe with good penmanship, being tasked by the Emperor with writing the proclamation of exile.  Neema is against this but complies to better her position with the Emperor.  She ends up living with that guilt for the rest of the book.

Some years later, the term for the Emperor is over and the traditional competition to take the throne is set.  It brings in representatives from the eight houses of the religion, named after different animals.  When the Raven competitor is mysteriously killed, Neema is blamed for it, but never actually accused.  Being the second best in Raven class, Neema is assigned to the competition by the Emperor.  She has never trained for it and is sure it’s a death sentence in disguise.  And her competitors include Cain, the boy she grew up with who has since become estranged from her, and Ruko, Yana’s uber-intense surviving brother.  

Neema is interesting.  She is riddled with guilt and self-doubt.  At times, she was very annoying, but I bought into her character 100%.  Within the context of her childhood and education as a Raven, she was so abused and disliked by her classmates and even her instructors that I understood why it took so long for her to start breaking through her own walls.  Sometimes, bullying is so extreme that some people may never break through.  Throughout the book, she steps up to the challenges placed before her and somehow perseveres.  So when she does have the occasional triumph, it’s very satisfying.  

There are a lot of characters in this book.  There are the eight original competitors, there’s the king’s court, Yana’s family, and a host of others.  The thing that’s most remarkable is that despite Neema’s fears, she is a kind and gentle person.  My favorite of the other characters is Benna, the maid assigned to Neema when she becomes a contender.  Beena is keyed into Neema’s goodness and her responses are hysterical and heartfelt.  Cain also has a pretty satisfying character arc.  He goes from being a snarky pain to Neema.  He’s still angry at her for signing Yana’s exile document and leaving him for an assignment with the emperor.  But then, old feelings between Neema and Cain arise and that complicates matters for both of them.  He’s much more likeable than Ruko who seems to be a monstrous machine.

One thing I noticed about this book is that it makes many statements about politics, this being chock full of backstabbing and devious plots.  There is so much going on, to comment on it would be a spoiler.  It’s too bad, because I would have liked to discuss this book with someone as I read it.  The book is all about power and powerlessness.  One would hope the powerful are toppled, but there is at least one sequel.  So yeah, the ending is good, but there’s so much that remains to be dealt with and overcome.  

The prose is decent, nothing too flowery or pretentious.  The star of the book, though, is the world-building.  The religious and magic system is incredibly detailed and interesting.  It was unlike anything I’ve read so far.  It’s what made this book great for me.  It lifted what could have been a tired trope (a reality competition like Survivor or The Hunger Games) into something complex and surprising.  I give this book a five stars out of five.  I surprised myself by really getting into every detail about Neema, the Emperor, Cain, and Ruko and their relationships to each other.  I remember my shock in realizing I kept so much info in my head, including the details of all the competitors.  This book hit me just the right way.  I can’t say this is my number one pick for the Hugo, despite the stars, but I will say that reading it was an intense experience.

The Incandescent

Emily Tesh
Completed 5/26/2026, Reviewed 5/31/2026
5 stars

Fighting demons at a school for magic has become commonplace in the fantasy genre.  Tesh freshens it up in her latest novel which has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards this year.  Rather than just being another in this crowded subgenre, this book has the Director of Magic as the main character.  She tries to prevent demon incursions and works day and night to keep the kids and her staff safe.  Tesh creates quite a neat magic system in a world with a complex relationship with demons.  I loved the writing and of course, the MC.  And once again, here is another Hugo nominee that is clustered at the top with the other nominees.  They’ve all been terrific, but this one might just stand out from the others.    

In this book, the story is told from the most powerful professor at the school, Sapphire Walden.  Saffy to most of her colleagues is also the Director of Magic.  Besides the teaching about magic and demons, she is in charge of the whole magic curriculum and the safety of the school and its student.  Walden is dedicated beyond belief.  “It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in work-life balance.  It was just that her career was her life.”  During one of her classes with a small group of seniors, they accidently nearly summon a very powerful demon, nicknamed Old Faithful.  This instance brings in the wrath of the head of Security, Marshall Linda Kenning.  There is a power play between Walden and Kenning, underneath which is some definite attraction.  Nothing kicks into gear until there is an incursion of Old Faithful.  Walden and Kenning attempt to fight this high-order demon, nearly killing themselves in the process.  They do finally reveal their mutual attraction just in time for Kenning to take the blame for the incursion, resign, and return to the private sector.  Now the school is under investigation and many small demons are taking up residence in the magical gap left by Old Faithful.

Walden is a great character; a powerful magician who cares deeply for the school and her students.  However, she is very closed off from her feelings.  On the Meyers Briggs Personality Type Indicator, I’d say she was off the charts ISTJ: reliable, logical, and action-oriented.  Unfortunately, this prevents her recognizing that she has a thing for Kenning and vice-versa until it is too late.  But rather than mourn it, she gets back into her structured day-to-day, keeping tight control on her environment.  I loved this line: “It wasn’t Walden’s fault that Laura Kenning had waited until the middle of a giant demonic incursion to turn out to be competent and beautiful and interested.”  Even when the contracted safety inspector Mark shows up, they begin an affair that she keeps completely separate from her emotions, leaving her to overthink everything.  But this isn’t to say she isn’t self-aware.  She recognizes she has two chances at something different with Mark and Linda Kenning.  “Like bloody buses…nothing for years and then two come along at once.”

The book has many well-developed characters, including the handful of seniors Walden teaches.  Nikki is a ward of the school and the most promising student.  She may even exceed Walden’s capabilities.  Matthias is also a ward of the school, coming from abusive parents.  He’s tongue-tied and shy, but powerful in various ways.  William is an entitled jerk from an old English magical family.  Tries to ride on his good looks and intuition, which is usually wrong.  Aneeta was taking a magic course as an interesting sideline to her education.  These four make up the core of the most gifted students Walden works with.  And just like students who are too smart for their own good, they make a lot of mistakes that Walden has to clean up.  

I must admit, this book may edge out the rest of the 2026 Hugo nominees.  Walden is simply engaging and entertaining.  She is fierce, determined, and protective, even though she crushes her emotions.  The battles with demons are intense.  The setting was pastoral but still has the grit of an urban fantasy.  Tesh has great settings and compelling characters, as I discovered in her 2024 Hugo winning Some Desperate Glory and her World Fantasy Award winning novella, Silver in the Wood.  She’s a great new voice in world of science fiction and fantasy.  

Death on the Caldera

Emily Paxman
Completed 5/12/2026, Reviewed 5/19/2026
3 stars

This was an in-person book club read from an author who spoke at WorldCon last year.  It’s described as Murder on the Orient Express with witches.  It sort of is, as it is a murder mystery that takes place on a train.  Gotta love those publishing houses that find it necessary to compare a new book to one or a cross between several classics.  I haven’t read Orient Express, though I’ve seen one of the films, so I can’t really compare, but it felt much different.  There was no master sleuth and there were way too many characters and suspects.  Taking it at face value, the book is good, not great, but a decent enough mystery to warrant further readings of this author.

Two brothers and a sister travel on a train to get back to their home country as their father, the king, lays dying.  Kellen, the eldest, will presumably take the throne upon their father’s death.  Being the eldest, he was estranged from his younger siblings, Morel and Davina.  At the beginning of the journey, their relationships are strained, particularly Davina, the self-absorbed youngest, who is violently antagonistic towards Kellen.  She wants to go away to university, but neither her father nor Kellen will permit it.  One night, the engine car explodes in a fireball and is shrouded in rock, derailing the train on the enormous volcanic caldera, a source of magic and reverence by all the nations living on this island continent.  All clues indicate the crash was caused by a witch.  The crash triggers Davina to change into her witch persona, something she did not know she had.  After changing back, she has no memory of the crash or the change.  Kellen has been withholding this info since their mother died when Davina was very young.  She is now fully enraged and resentful of not being told the truth.  In the meantime, survivors of the crash are slowly being killed off.  They blame a witch and set out to find out who among them is the witch.  Davina, now scared she may be the murderer, puts aside some of her rage to work with her brothers who lead the effort to find who the actual witch is.  Can they divert attention away from Davina long enough to find the culprit?

A few other details that are important to know about the plot.  The king and his family remain anonymous, not using their real names in public.  Legend has it that if the general public found out the identity of the royal family members, the main god would destroy humanity, worse than the last caldera eruption.  It turns out there is one person who knows the identity of one of the family.  That person ends up on the train as well.  

The toughest part of the book is reading the parts from Davina’s POV.  She is so spoiled and self-absorbed, I cringed through the whole beginning.  At the age of nineteen, she had no redeeming qualities.  Fortunately, the crash comes and the fear of being the killer witch and the effort of Kellen to protect her allays most of her resentments.  She almost becomes likable.  The best thing about her is that we learn the magic system of this world through her coming to grips with her witchhood.  The stress on her comes from the fact that another nation executes witches, despite the fact that they saved most of the people on the continent from the last major eruption of the caldera.  Without witches, everyone would have been wiped out.  Still, witches are at best under constant suspicion throughout the empire.  

At book club, a lot of people didn’t like Kellen.  They thought him the source of the family dysfunction.  Coming from a family that kept a lot of secrets, I didn’t blame him as much as the pressure put on him by his role as heir apparent and the promises he made to his mother.  I felt bad for him, thinking he was doing his best.  I also thought Morel was likeable as the one who helped raise Davina as best he could.  To his chagrin, she just didn’t turn out to be a nice person.  

There are many characters aboard the train, though quite a few die in the explosion.  Most of the survivors have secrets, like in any good mystery.  And of course, this being a rather Victorian setting, there are many fops and stuffy, titled people.  One such fop, Carey, was actually an endearing, but still suspicious character.  There’s Emeth, the religious acolyte who is uncomfortable in his own skin.  I liked eight-year-old Rae and her mother who were leaving their home under suspicious circumstances.  Rae seems to have an affinity towards witchy-ness.  

The mystery itself is pretty good as more survivors show up murdered.  And the digging into the history of witches and magic on the caldera is more fascinating than I expected.  I give this book three stars out of five.  The book could have used some serious proofreading.  There were many spelling mistakes and missing words.  All in all, not bad for a first novel.  I’d like to see where Paxman goes after this.  

The Neverending Story

Michael Ende
Completed 5/22/2026, Reviewed 5/27/2026
4 stars

This is a tough book to review.  Many, many people have seen the ubiquitous 1980s film.  What most don’t know is that the film is just the first half of the book.  The second half is very dark.  It is about wanting to be someone else so much, you forget who you really are.  It is also a journey through grief, as the main character slowly forgets about his deceased mother and grieving father.  It’s so much deeper than what the film presented that it took me off guard, save for a warning from my friend John who had read it about five years ago.  I’ll do the best plot summary I can, although there will be some spoilers for the first half of the book.

Bastien is an overweight kid whose mother has passed away.  He is bullied at school.  His father, deep in grief, can barely function.  One day, he steals a fantasy book from a local bookstore and hides in the school attic instead of attending class.  As he reads the book, he finds himself strangely drawn to the story until it starts referring to him.  At first, he thinks he’s misreading it, but then realizes that he is supposed to be the savior of the dying land of Fantastica.  Eventually, he crosses through, saving Fantastica.  He is given an amulet that grants him wishes.  He tries to use it for good, but it often has strange, unexpected results.  On top of that, each time he uses it, he loses a bit of memory.  He begins a journey to find a way out of Fantastica, but begins to love his power more and more while he loses the memories of home, losing his desire to leave Fantastica.  So the big question of the book is not, “Can he save Fantastica from destruction?” but “Can he remember the desire to return home before all memory of home is gone?”

The book is strange.  Written in the late 70’s, it’s still very much an old-school boy’s imagination story.  Despite Atreyou being green in the book, he’s clearly modeled on Native Americans, wearing leather skins and hunting purple buffalo.  This recalls how boys like playing Cowboys and Indians.  The quest is to save the Childlike Empress (saving the princess).  If she dies, the whole land of Fantastica disappears.  Once inside the story, Bastien is thin and lithe, which he is not in the real world.  And then he has the power to wish for anything.  Who wouldn’t want that.  Upon reading the first half, I found I actually liked it better than the film.  It made a bit more sense to me.  

The second half, however, is the dark part.  Bastien begins his journey to leave Fantastica, but loses memories as he uses his wishes.  It reminded me of Wizard of Oz a bit.  Bastien travels to many strange lands, each dark in its own way, as he tries to find his way home.  One of the few points of relief comes in a scene with a warm old woman who feeds him and takes care of him for a while.  He’s clearly missing his mother, but has lost most of his memories of her.  It’s sad, but so gentle and safe after being in so many unsafe situations.   

There were also homages to Tolkien’s universe, as there is a dragon named Smerg (Smaug), and a country called Morgul (as in Minas Morgul).  I did groan when I read the name of Smerg.  In the second half, Atreyou and the air dragon Falkor try to remind Bastien of who he is, but Bastien snaps back, sounding more and more like Frodo falling under the power of the ring, snapping at Sam.  I’m sure there were references to other classic fantasy books, but I’m most familiar with the Tolkien stories.  

There was a part of me that only wanted to give this book three stars.  The second half is so dark, it’s almost a miserable experience to read.  I can see why many people gave this book low ratings.  This book was a book club read, so we discussed it last night.  Many people brough up things that made me think more deeply about the grief journey.  It helped me understand and appreciate it better.  It made me settle on awarding it four stars out of five.  Perhaps reading it again in the future, I might raise my rating, as it is deeper and more complex than what I gleaned initially.  I can see why the author was angry at the film version.  The first half is pure fairy tale.  But fairy tales always come with a catch and a message.  And that’s the significance of the second half.  It balances out the first and helps Bastien grow in the end.

The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow
Completed 5/18/2026, Reviewed 5/19/2026
4 stars

This 2026 Hugo nominee is an incredible time travel romance that begins with a crawl.  The first 140 pages or so dragged as Owen Mallory goes back in time to confirm the existence of the national hero, Una Everlasting.  Those first pages are rather dull during the character study of Owen, a mediocre historian with a passion for the Una Everlasting narrative, and his encounter with Vivien the new Chancellor.  But when he goes back a second time, and then a third, the book takes off with plot twists, Owen’s passion for not just the legend but Una herself, and the revelation of Vivien’s real reason for sending him back.  Upon finishing, I realized I was completely engrossed in the story and forgave the necessary drudgery of the first quarter of the book.

Owen was a pathetic man.  He’s estranged from his politically radical father and not very respected by his colleagues at university.  He was a deserter in the military and is a sheepish patriot.  He’s a lecturer and a researcher, not destined for professorial greatness.  Without warning, an ancient book appears in the mail which seems to be the earliest documentation of the Una Everlasting.  Shocked by this windfall, he begins translating it, only to have it disappear after a few days and be replaced by an address.  It turns out he is being summoned by the new Chancellor Vivien for a mission to confirm and complete the mysterious book.  Before he is clear on how to do that, she stabs his hand, his blood seeps on the book, and he is transported a thousand years in the past to the time of Una.  He realizes his mission is to make sure she completes the tasks ascribed to her legend, save the Queen, and die a heroic death.  But as he repeatedly is sent back in time, he and Una realize they can rewriter the tale so Una doesn’t die, but the cost may be Owen’s life.   

Owen does not make a great impression on the reader at the start of the book.  Between that and the seemingly meandering beginning, I did not like him.  When we find out he’s in love with Una, he becomes even more pathetic.  But then the repeated returns to the past changed my opinion of him.  Una, on the other hand, is one of the greatest knights to ever exist.  She lives in legend because her saving of the Queen and the realm, the Dominion, set the stage for the country’s control over the whole land.  But with each iteration of time travel, we find out more and more about the two as individuals, their pasts, and their relationship.  They become vibrant three-dimensional characters despite Owen’s lack of belief in himself.  I loved them even more as they worked to break the cycle of the repeating time travel.  

The magic is very interesting here.  It’s minimal, primarily being the time travel aspect.  Later, there’s a dragon and a magical grail that can restore health.  It takes a while, but the extent of the magic becomes clear towards the end.  Speaking of which, it is so full of twists and turns.  The bad guys show up over and over again to thwart any plans to allow Una to live.  And just when you think that Una and Owen have finally broken out of the time travel loop, they are again thwarted and doomed to start over.

The narration of the book was done very well.  When Owen is the narrator, he speaks in 2nd person referring to Una.  When Una narrates, she speaks in 2nd person referring to Owen.  It seemed clunky at first, but it endeared me to the two as the book went on.  It also reflects the growing relationship between them.  

This book felt like a big departure from Harrow’s previous books, The Once and Future Witches and The Ten Thousand Doors of January.  I loved those books and was disappointed at the beginning of this one.  But once the looping starts and we find out the extent of the time loops, you realize it’s a very powerful, well-constructed novel.  All the ins and outs are well thought out.  If I was trying to write this book, I’m sure I would have had a miserable time keeping track of everything.  But Harrow handles it flawlessly with masterful prose and world building.  I give this book four stars out of five, knocking off a star because I was fully expecting to DNF it in its first quarter.  I’m so glad I kept with it because it ended up blowing my mind.

Penric’s Fox

Lois McMaster Bujold
Completed 5/14/2026, Reviewed 5/19/2026
3 stars

The third chronological book in the Penric and Desdemona series (fifth in publication order).  This story is a murder mystery with foxes.  Like its predecessors, it’s a rather cozy read.  It had a very slow start, but halfway through it picked up, making for a satisfying ending.  Unfortunately, I had the same basic feelings about this one as I did the previous two.  I like the characters but plot is thin.  And like Penric and the Shaman, there wasn’t enough interaction between Pen and his demon Des.  In the first book, Penric’s Demon, I loved their interaction.  In the succeeding books, Des occasionally pops up with interesting tidbits and hints.  Inglis the Shaman and Oswyl the Locator are in this book and provide more interplay as well as a little levity here and there.  

Penric and Inglis are called by Oswyl to help investigate the murder of a young sorceress.  She was devout and well-liked by many.  It turns out she already had a demon inhabiting her.  However, when the death of a sorcerer is expected, there is usually another chosen to become the demon’s new home.  In the case of the murder, the demon either entered the body of the murderer or a nearby animal, whatever was nearby.  For instance, a fox as there are tons of foxes in the woods where the sorceress was found.  There is a danger, however, when a demon bonds with a lesser animal.  The demon may overwhelm the animal and lose some of its “humanity.”  Penric and the others take up the challenge of finding the demon and the murderer.

Penric still stands out for me as the bookish, accidental sorcerer.  His demeanor is sweet; I really like him.  However, I still find the book to be awfully straight-forward.  There isn’t much tension to make the book gripping.  And there aren’t enough humorous moments to make it really cozy.  Instead, it feels a little flat.  I keep wanting to be blown away by something, but instead, feel like I get melodrama.  

I don’t have much else to say about the book.  It’s a pleasant read, prettily written in a world already developed by quite a few previous books.  It’s a meh, but on the positive side.  If I wasn’t reading this series with my friend John, I don’t know if I’d stick with it.  In the context of the book club, however, I look forward to finding out how deep the stories get and if I can become more emotionally involved.  I give this book three stars out of five.

Shroud

Adrian Tchaikovsky
Completed 5/6/2026, Reviewed 5/6/2026
4 stars

This is another excellent book by Tchaikovsky.  Like Children of Time, it’s dense, perhaps denser.  The first few days, I could only read about twenty pages at a time before it felt too heavy.  It’s another tale of an encounter with aliens, this time on the moon of a gas giant in a distant solar system.  The moon is named Shroud because it has a densely clouded, toxic atmosphere, much like our Venus.  The pressure of its atmosphere is many times that of Earth and the gravity is twice Earth’s.  One would think it wouldn’t sustain life.  But when two people from a mining exploration ship are stranded on there, they must survive not only the 2g and high atmospheric pressure, but the creatures they discover living there.  This book was nominated for a 2026 Hugo for Best Novel.  

Juna is the assistant to the project director on board the ship.  Her task is basically to be the calm intermediary between the disparate personalities on the ship.  While the others write her off as little more than a secretary, she does most of the hard work the director takes credit for.  Also on board is Mai, a brilliant and confrontative engineer who doesn’t play well with others, like most of the rest of the crew.  When an accident occurs ripping open the project’s part of the ship, the two end up on a pod together and plummet to the moon’s surface.  They can’t communicate with their ship because of the dense atmosphere and the high amount of electromagnetic interference.  They can’t see much more than ten to fifteen feet because of the thick and obscuring atmosphere.  To survive, they realize they need to go halfway around the moon to get to the anchor that reaches up to the ship.  Monsters of various types are in their way.  The dominant monster is a strange slug-like thing encased in what appears to be a constructed exoskeleton.  Nicknamed the Shrouded, they continually try to take apart the pod, the only thing separating Juna and Mai from a certain crushing and toxic death.  The two must find a way to reach the anchor through these monsters if they are to survive.

This book is similar to “Children” in that after about a hundred pages, when Juna and Mai are stranded on Shroud, the chapters alternate between them and the monstrous aliens.  It’s a bit derivative, but the circumstances are very different.  In this case, the aliens’ main source of input and output is echolocation and electromagnetic waves.  None of the creatures, including the Shrouded, have eyes, since the atmosphere is obscured by clouds.  So communication between the humans and the Shrouded is non-existent, as neither understands how the other exists, let alone communicates.  

The human perspective chapters are narrated by Juna.  She’s quite the brilliant person for being relatively non-technical.  At first, she and Mai butt heads, but as time crawls, they learn to communicate with each other and figure out how to survive.  It took me quite a while to get inside Juna’s head due to the denseness of the prose.  I think I finally broke through once she and Mai were on better terms.  I actually related more to the Shrouded.  I think that was because of my general distaste for the humans in the beginning.  They were belligerent towards each other and quite xenophobic towards the Shrouded.  

The themes running in this book were xenophobia (naturally) and corporate greed.  Humans are in stasis on the spaceship until they’re needed, much like tools in a shed, and are treated as little more than that.  It also explores the problems with a very style of communication much different than humans and even the spiders from “Children.”  

This book requires a lot of concentration.  It’s not that technical, just, again, very dense in its prose.  The world building is phenomenal, as Tchaikovsky always is.  It’s because of the denseness as well as the similarity to “Children” that I give it less than 5 stars.  It gets four out of five.  I’m not sure how I’ll vote in the Hugos yet.  I have four more books to read.  Then I’ll see how this compares to the others.

400,000 Hits!!

Well, another six months have gone by and I've had another 100K hits on my blog.  Total: 400,000!! 

Big thanks to all who have visited and read my reviews.

I'm starting on the Hugos Nominees packet, so I'll be immersed in those books for the next three months.  I'll be voting in every category in which I can read or watch all the nominees.  So look for those reviews in upcoming posts.  The WorldCon this year is in Anaheim in August.  While there, I'll be getting to San Diego to visit an old roommate I haven't seen in 30, no wait, almost 40 years.  We're hoping to visit Joshua Tree National Park at that time.  Woohoo National Parks!!

I hope everyone who reads my blog finds a review or two that inspire them to read the books.  And remember, Reading is FUNdamental 😁

Role Model

Rachel Reid
Completed 4/48/2026, Reviewed 5/6/2026
4 stars

I am so loving these Heated Rivalry books.  Each one features a new couple with cameos from the characters of the other books.  The stories are all quick reads and soooooo romantic.  But they also deal with external and internal homophobia.  This one particularly focuses on the internalized homophobia of the main character Troy.  His coming out process is amazing to watch.  It’s slow and very frustrating at times, but that’s what makes the book so good.  Yes, it’s also spicy.  But I can see why fans are clamoring for a seventh book.  This one is the fifth in the series.  And it’s actually called the Game Changer series. 

Troy Barrett is the main character.  After an intense confrontation with his former best friend Dallas Kent, who has been accused of sexual crimes by women, Troy is traded to Ottawa, the worst team in the league.  Incidentally, it’s also where Ilya Rozanov plays.  However, most everyone in the league is against Troy because of the “bro-code” dismissing the women and supporting Dallas the perpetrator.  Except for his new team.  Unlike other teams, they have a camaraderie he’s never felt before.  Their coach also has a less abusive style, unlike most hockey coaches in the league.  He hates it all, though, and just wants to get through the season and try to get onto another team.  His plans all fall apart when he meets the team’s social media guy.  Harris Drover is very out and the team loves him.  Troy doesn’t get it, but he finds this slightly paunchy bear irresistible.  And Harris, who has kept his sexual relationships out of the locker room gets tons of mixed signals from Troy.  But Harris decides to make Troy his project and get him better integrated into the team.  And then…

I loved Harris.  He’s not a super-hot guy.  He’s a rather normal looking guy, which is a great change.  The problem with most M/M romance and romantasy books is that all the guys are stunners.  Not this time.  And not only does he manage the team’s online presence but is basically their cheerleader and best bud.  It’s a great relationship.  So it only makes sense that he makes a project out of Troy.  

Troy on the other hand, is a mess.  He feels isolated because many in the league hate him for what he did to Dallas.  Plus, he feels deeply guilty for all the gay slurs he used to cover up his own identity.  He doesn’t want to be a bro anymore but doesn’t know how not to be one.  Enter Harris.  And as time goes on, the signals between them get more and more mixed.  They become friends, but will there be benefits?

Ilya has some nice scenes with Troy.  Ilya is not publicly out at this point, but he does see the chemistry between Troy and Harris.  As the team captain, he takes it upon himself to give Troy advise and push him a little.  He also helps him feel a part of the team, as the captain should, giving Troy support and encouragement.  They are great scenes, showing a gentler side of Ilya that is rarely seen by the public.  

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, zipping through it in about two and a half days.  Once again, these books are not great literature, but they are so fun and so romantic, they simply suck me in.  I give this book four stars out of five.  It may be a while before I get to the sixth book as I now have all the Hugo nominees to get through before late July.  But I will get to it and report back, hopefully before season two of Heated Rivalry hits streaming.

More Than Human

Theodore Sturgeon

Completed 4/26/2026, Reviewed 4/27/2026

4 stars

I first read this book in college.  I picked it up at a supermarket in their paperback section.  I thought it was brilliant.  After rereading nearly fifty years later, I still find it brilliant, but it wasn’t as earth-shattering.  Perhaps it’s because it was a reread, or perhaps I’ve been exposed to so much science fiction since then.  I love the basic theme of the next step in human evolution being communal and psychic.  However, I found some of the delivery tough to follow.  And of course, this being from the early fifties, it has some cringy stereotypical male/female behaviors.  Overall, though, I thought the inclusion of girls and boys, white and black persons, and the sentiment against inequality was great.  At a time when sci fi was read mostly by white boys and men, Sturgeon made a concerted effort to reach beyond that demographic.  This book came out in 1953, and it won a 2004 retro Hugo.

The story begins with a “half-wit,” basically, a person living on the street with no speaking ability and limited intellectual development.  He begins to get visions and messages from someone else, which he doesn’t understand.  Eventually, he meets this person and makes a connection.  That goes awry, forcing him to flee.  He finds a farm with a couple who have lost a child.  They take him in, treat him like the son they lost, teach him to speak, and to become their farmhand.  He accidentally takes the name of Lone.  When the couple becomes pregnant, he leaves and eventually finds a girl named Janie with telekinesis and mute twin girls named Bonnie and Beanie who teleport.  His own psychic abilities mesh with theirs.  Later, he goes back to the farm and finds the couple did have a baby boy, but it is mentally disabled.  The woman has left “to go east,” and the man is failing at keeping things together.  Lone takes the baby back to the cave where the little group lives and they discover the baby is like an adding machine, that is, a high-powered AI computer.  Together they form an entity that interacts psychically.  It is a new level of human development: Homo Gestalt.

The book is in three chapters, each like a related short story.  In the second chapter, they meet a boy named Gerry who can use all the gifts of the others to accomplish what he wants, namely, power and control.  His own gift is the ability to control other people’s psyche through power of suggestion, absorb everything they know, and wipe their memories to hide the evidence.  In the third chapter, they meet a man who can also psychically connect, but unlike the others, has a sense of morality and social ethics.

I remember being in awe of the coming together of a group of psionics to create a singular entity.  I still find it fascinating and generally found the book very intriguing until the third chapter.  Titled “Morality,” the first part of the third chapter is very hard to understand what’s going on.  The main character of this chapter is roaming around with a huge chunk of missing memory trying to find a “dimwit” and some children, but he can’t quite put his finger on who or why.  This section was incredibly complicated in trying to describe what he’s going through mentally.  And physically, he’s a mess.  It takes Janie to help him remember everything.  But then, like many early sci-fi stories, Janie goes through a huge exposition to explain all the events up to that point.  The saving grace is that the reader is so frustrated with the chaos of the main character’s thoughts or lack thereof, it comes as a welcome relief when Janie explains it all.  

The character development is pretty good.  The lumbering Lone is perhaps the easiest to like.  He’s sort of a gentle giant who is basically the head of this new psychic body.  Janie is brash, the twins are mischievous, and Baby is like a wild supercomputer.  Gerry is dangerous and we learn about him in flashbacks during a psychiatric appointment.  Hip Barrows, the main character of the third chapter is the most “normal.”

There are some memorable positive moments, such as when the group goes to live with Miss Alice, whom Lone knew from his past.  She tries to force the twin black girls to eat with her maid while the others eat with her.  Janie and Gerry threaten Alice until they are allowed to eat together.  On the other hand, like in several classic sci-fi stories, there’s a scene where Hip shakes Janie, as is also depicted in a lot of old books and films.  This is so cringy and it happens several times.  I felt this went against character for Janie who was such a brash and precocious young child.  I think it would have been more in character to have her throw off his arms and be more aggressive.  

I really like the prose, something I’ve said of the previous books of his I read about 10 to 12 years ago.  Godbody, Venus Plus X, and E Pluribus Unicorn are all very well written.  I give this book four stars out of five, mainly because the first part of chapter 3 felt almost unreadable because of Sturgeon’s portrayal of missing memory.  I’d like to read more of his short stories; an award for excellence in short fiction was named after Sturgeon.  I remember when he came to our Fantasy Lit class in 1981.  He read a story about a pleasuring toilet seat.  It was very bawdy, reminding me he was also a dirty old man.  But he was also a great writer and visionary, as this book demonstrates.

Katabasis

R.F. Kuang
Completed 4/20/2026, Reviewed 4/22/2026
3 stars

I was so disappointed in this book.  I loved Kuang’s previous Babel, with its rich world building and prose.  I was expecting more of the same here.  Instead, the prose felt bloated, the world building tedious, and the plot buried under the main character’s constant brooding and dwelling on her fears and self-doubt.  The only parts of the book I enjoyed were the revelation of Alice’s part in the demise of their advisor and the exposition of her rival Peter’s background.  Katabasis is ancient Greek for a hero’s journey to the underworld.  With a title like that, I thought I would be enthralled.  Instead, I wanted to get out of the book as much as Alice and Peter wanted to get out of Hell.  This book was nominated for a 2025 Nebula and several smaller awards.  

The book begins with Alice, a graduate student in magick at Cambridge, rushing to cross into the Underworld to bring back her sadistic and morally reprehensible advisor, Professor Grimes, who died in a tragic magical accident.  Alice believes she was the cause and it is her duty to bring him back.  She’s interrupted by her rival Peter who has the same mission.  Together they travel through the different areas of Hell based on the Seven Deadly Sins.  Their only guides are the “accounts” of Dante, Orpheus, and other figures who supposedly traveled to and returned from Hell.  They encounter many different Shades, including some who help, some who deceive, and some who want to eat them.  

It was tough liking either Alice or Peter.  Alice’s reason for going to Cambridge and studying under Professor Grimes is that it will ensure her a job and success after school.  She’s obsessed with Grimes, basing her self-esteem and talent on his every word and action.  Everyone else is competition and everything else is a distraction.  Her biggest rival is Peter who also studies under Grimes.  Everything seems to come easily to him.  In the year leading up to the events of this book, she sees him usurping her position.  Grimes himself is a morally reprehensible slave driver with no regard for anyone else, including his students.  Alice takes it because of her obsession.  Peter seems to not mind Grimes, taking everything very casually and still landing himself on top.  So when he appears while she’s opening the portal to the underworld, she’s reluctant and resentful about letting him join her.  Through most of their time in Hell, they are at odds, despite Peter being most helpful and generous.

I tried to read Dante’s Inferno in high school on my own and was very lost.  I understand the basic concept of the book as well as Orpheus’ journey to bring Eurydice back from the underworld.  Alice and Peter refer to these and other tales during their journey.  But most of the time is spent in Alice’s head, hating and second-guessing Peter and recounting her relationship with Peter and Grimes up to that moment.  This was the part I disliked.  It was very repetitive.  My reaction was always, let’s just get on with the search for Grimes.  It didn’t help that Hell was mostly a wasteland with days and days of nothingness.  Even when they met Shades, good or bad, the action was constantly interrupted by Alice’s manic mind.  

The only parts I really liked were the chapters where we got the full concise disclosures of Peter’s past and Alice’s more recent disenfranchisement from Grimes.  They explained all the motivations and truths they both were hiding from each other.  However, this was not enough to make up for the first four hundred or so pages and didn’t make the last hundred and sixty any better.  

I thought the magick system was somewhat interesting.  Everything was based on chalk drawings of pentagrams, symbols, and magick words.  There’s even amusing references to the differences between brands of chalk and academic loyalty to each one.  The world building, however, was not interesting.  I quickly grew tired of the underworld.  The features like the river in which shades go to forget their previous lives and reincarnate, the reflection of the living world, the market, and even the eighth level home of Hades aka King Yama, all got tedious as the scenes progressed.  I simply could not get into it.

One other positive thing about the underworld was that it was mixed with the stories and myths of different cultures.  It wasn’t all Greco-Western.  It included some Chinese and other cultural myths as well.  

I give this book a very low three stars out of five.  Two stars implies bad.  It wasn’t bad, just very boring.  The prose is beautiful but dull.  The characters are very well developed though Alice is quite whiny, misguided, and not very likeable.  The Shades they meet in Hell are interesting.  And there’s a cool cat named Archimedes who pops in and out, occasionally helping them.  I’m not turned off by Kuang, though.  I hope to eventually read her Poppy Wars trilogy, which is supposed to be excellent.