Dark Water Daughter by H.M. Long
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
H.M. Long’s lovingly crafted fantasy world in DARK WATER DAUGHTER is immersive, exciting, rich with lore, and absolutely I-want-to-live-in-this-book-worthy. Any fan of a certain pirate-y movie franchise will find themselves an absolute treat here, with just as much magic, action, and tension, but in a frigid winter sea where snow swirls and sailors can see their breath. Absolutely captivating with satisfying payoffs while still retaining enough mystery to propel readers into the sequel with the force of cannon fire. A downright pretty read.
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What I’m Reading…
Book Review: Eye of a Needle by Jessica Lynn
Eye of a Needle by Jessica Lynn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
EYE OF A NEEDLE is a searing short form debut from author Jessica Lynn. It’s addictive to the point that you’ll blaze through it in one sitting. Tension on simmer and sumptuous prose explores religious trauma and the merits of gut instinct. Southern gothic meets supernatural in this tale drenched in dread, blood, and sticky summer heat.
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Book Review: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA broke me a little bit, but wow was it good. A tale as insidious as it is inventive, and as much surrealism as it is a life drawing, this story is a slow-burn time bomb. Anxiety, devotion, grief, and ghosts… sink into this one and expect to fall down further than you might be prepared to go. I adore the absurd, especially when it’s taken extremely seriously, and that’s exactly what this is.
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Book Review: Underland by Robert Macfarlane
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is truly remarkable–epic in scope, minute in detail, and so densely interwoven between adventure writing, cultural commentary, scientific discovery, mythology, and immediate sensation of place that it really transcends categorization. At heart, Macfarlane is an adventurer, but one who subverts the “physical challenge as personal journey” trope, pursing instead enlightenment on a cosmic level, uniting all of human history and all of earth’s time as perceived through his shamanlike experiences of the world’s beneath-places. The deeper you dig, the closer science and art become related, and Macfarlane takes us all the way down in UNDERLAND.
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Book Review: Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Snatched IDAHO, a 2017 debut by Emily Ruskovich, out of a Little Free Library in my neighborhood. I was gently stunned by the author’s superhuman command of language and ability to break a heart with every sentence, binge reading it in one weekend. Ruskovich started with a haunted place she couldn’t explain and imagined decades of time and an entire community of characters that spring up around one hypothetical moment of tragedy. And it feels so brilliantly real, it’s almost impossible to describe. This book is agonizing in the greatest way. I don’t even know… speechless!
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Book Review: Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
ORBITAL is one of so many, many books that I’ve read which are set in space. But it is the very first book I’ve read which, in the reading of it, feels like actually being in space. Dreamlike, cyclical, removed, focused, questing, massive and tiny, lost and tethered. More like a poem than a novel, it’s a view from above. A unique read that takes its own strange time to say what it has to say.
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Book Review: Venomous Lumpsucker by Neal Beauman
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ned Beauman’s VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER is a bold, scathing, and brilliant commentary on the impact of human industry on the natural world. It’s funny, incredibly dark, and grusomely incisive. 0% lyricism, 100% wit. But always with an honest love that you can tell is probably still alive, way down there, somewhere in the brackish depths.
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Book Review: Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Neil Shubin’s YOUR INNER FISH is a gift to fish nerds, fossil hounds, and curious souls everywhere. In writing that hums with genuine energy and contagious passion, Shubin unlocks the building blocks of natural history present in our own bodies, from genome to bones, with surprises around every gill. Read it and see how you = fish in deeper ways than you might’ve surmised.
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Book Review: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Before continuing on with this review, I feel like I have to disclose that I am a person who knows a bit about Shakespeare. As a former English literature instructor, I’ve read Hamlet perhaps upwards of 30 times. It is my favorite play and one of my favorite works of literature for reasons that strangely enough are very personal and have little to do with the centuries’ worth of cache that has cemented the play in the human imagination.
So when I picked up HAMNET, it was for my love of Hamlet. And what I found there surprised me. I am in awe of Maggie O’Farrell’s ability to wholly inhabit an invented reality she has created in place of a complete historical record. This is by no means a story that attempts to replicate the most plausible sequence of events in the life of Shakespeare’s family. However, it is a book that is a testament to how imagination allows us live in and walk around in the idea of the past.
Many works of historical fiction really attempt to tell the story of an era, of a sweeping struggle, a wide-reaching moment in culture, and this book really does not do that. I respect that choice. Instead, O’Farrell tells the story of one house and one family, making their world feel hyperreal and all-consuming. This book intentionally refuses to illuminate much about the life of Shakespeare himself, in fact never naming him, but I do feel that it helped me understand things about the deep love that O’Farrell had for the possibilities, the pains, and the desires that surrounded him. Emotionally rigorous, extremely interior, and clearly written with respect for the dead, assuming the best of them, that they were capable, that they tried.
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Book Review: Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier
Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
SINGER DISTANCE by Ethan Chatagnier is a story that recognizes how incredible minds approach problems from angles that are anything but straight-on. Much the same, Chatagnier gives us a story of mathematical brilliance focused not on the genius herself, but on the complementary mind most oriented to her despite all her human failings, resulting in a propulsive scientific mystery that is also a generous love story, one that contends with personal histories in a way that feels radically like home even within an alternative historical timeline a few hops over from our own. What a book.
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