Category: Book Reviews

Book Review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

personby Amy Casey
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Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy kept me up late reading, lost in its churning waves. Tender character studies and a tense, gratifying plot play out on a wilderness stage, all set to the ticking time bomb of our warming world. I deeply felt the pulse of this book, with its seals and kelp, tears and blood, whales and albatrosses. We can’t save it all, but some things we can. Some wounds can’t be repaired, but some can. Some things die. Some things live. Some voices we never stop hearing.



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Book Review: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

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The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A transportative fable (and bonus short story!) from a magical mind. Amal El-Mohtar’s novelette THE RIVER HAS ROOTS reads like something both from the past and the future, where fairy realms are taken as one of life’s facts and the physical forms people take are up for grabs, depending on which side of the fae boundary they happen to be on. Plus, it acknowledges the deep power of willow trees, something that anyone who has gone behind a willow’s curtained branches, especially as a child, can attest to. A folktale for any era, this book is as comforting as a dog-eared old fairy tale, read aloud to wide-eyed listeners learning of dangerous promises and healing spells for the very first time.

Also, the short story at the end was so fantastic! I am eager for El-Mohtar’s next collection!



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Book Review: We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard

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We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


WE ARE DREAMS IN THE ETERNAL MACHINE by Deni Ellis Béchard is a grieving. It’s a labyrinth, it’s a lullaby, it’s a night terror. The way this novel looks at the explosive potential of technological innovation, political violence, censorship, and human ingenuity is a lasting, stalking presence. I love the way this book asks what we as human beings might one day build, break, or think we deserve, and what the thing we built might decide to do instead. Left me uneasy, but in awe.



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Book Review: From the Wreck by Jane Rawson

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From the Wreck by Jane Rawson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book was insane. Fabulism meets historical fiction meets generational drama/trauma meets cultural commentary meets well-meaning alien life forms who just kind of accidentally muck things up big time. Fascinating!



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Book Review: Blob – A Love Story by Maggie Su

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Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


BLOB: A LOVE STORY is a gelatinous and generous debut from Maggie Su. The fantastical premise–what if you could mold a sentient blob into the ideal partner?–is grounded by the nightmare of being in one’s moorless early twenties. The protagonist’s life is a study of despair. Humor pervades the unraveling in a way that cuts through to confront the reader, daring us to ask if hitting rock bottom can or should be laughed away, asking us to consider if our vices and hurts can ever be evicted from the childhoods where they were formed. Within a fever-dream of a plot, Su raises interesting questions about cruelty, autonomy, bodies, and goodness.



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Book Review:The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

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The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


THE STARLESS SEA by Erin Morgenstern is a party that I am very late to, but after reading it, I feel certain that the story itself was expecting me to arrive, just now, just as I am. This book is an indulgent, comforting, and surreal homage to the power of a literary life. The way Morgenstern builds a spiral of recursive symbols goes up, down, and especially forward. The book is built from specific old rules that govern the magic of reading itself: the same elements can be endlessly remade into new stories, and even the same stories, when they are read at different times in our lives, can meet us anew. The particulars change throughout the epochs, but many stories emerge from the place in imagination where they were born to become important pieces of what we call reality–and this book is surely one of them.

Need to spend some time in another place, entirely away from whatever this timeline is? These 500 pages are a wonderful prescription.



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12 Bytes: How We Got Here, Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

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12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Thoughtful writing that approaches the rise of AI from a take-no-prisoners feminist angle. Winterson deftly weaves a history of artificial intelligence that intertwines religious belief, scientific breakthroughs, and the stories that have been told and refashioned about both across the centuries. At the very core of the human imagination are the questions ‘What am I? What is a mind? What is power? What is a person? What is a god?’ This book approaches all of that with clear eyes, and reads like a bell tolling for us simple, embodied human beings.



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Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

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Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Wow. Isabel Cañas’ novel VAMPIRES OF EL NORTE is a stunning, searing book. Speculative fiction can reveal truth in ways that realism simply can’t, and Cañas uses that to her full advantage in a book balancing sweeping romance with seething horror in the Rio Grande Valley of the 1840s, as the shifting border between Mexico and America was being redrawn in blood.

While the historical basis of the book is nearly two centuries in the past, it is markedly relevant, vampires and all. As Cañas mentions in her final note, “…I wrote this book for my family. For every one of us has been asked variations of the question ‘when did your family come to this country?’ […]
I have realized that the answer is, in fact, a question itself. A question that became the heart of this book.
‘When did this country come to us?’ “



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The Stars Did Wander Darkling by Colin Meloy

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The Stars Did Wander Darkling by Colin Meloy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Colin Meloy’s superbly eerie middle adult fiction doesn’t shy away from unanswered questions or grotesque imagery. THE STARS DID WANDER DARKLING is a wonderfully creepy tale inspired by 1980s American small town life and what I can only assume are some of the weirder wells of Meloy’s expansive imagination. Really appreciate how he trusts his readers to spin part of the web. Favorite character: Randy, the horror-movie obsessed video store owner.



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The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

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The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Super fun and jaunty little time-travel mystery that doesn’t take anything seriously. A fun treat for those who will catch the many British literary references and especially who have a love for Jane Eyre–it was very fun for me to read shortly after reading that classic for the first time earlier this year. While a very insignificant part of the book, I absolutely loved the ubiquitous but never explained genetically engineered pet dodos. Caution: the humor is very British. Proceed accordingly.



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