The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths. A murder mystery set in modern-day Norfolk, England. Ruth is single, overweight, nearing forty, and lives alone with her two cats – all of which is extremely horrifying to her religious parents, though Ruth herself couldn't give a fuck. She's also a professor of forensic archaeology, and is called in by the police to investigate the discovery of a child's skeleton in a nearby bog. The skeleton turns out to be two thousand years old, which is unfortunate in the mind of Detective Nelson, who'd hoped to solve a ten-year-old cold case concerning a missing child. When another young girl disappears, Ruth and Nelson team up to investigate if the two cases are linked, and what clues might be hidden in a series of anonymous letters about archaeology and pagan beliefs.

I was super excited for this book, because bog bodies + murder mystery is basically what I want to be reading all the time. Alas, the execution was not what I was looking for.

It's not terrible; Griffiths is particularly good at describing a landscape, and the windy, barren (fictional) Saltmarsh, haunted by the cries of birds and the smell of the sea, is a fantastic creation. I also found Ruth herself an extremely likeable character; the scene where she turns down her ex-boyfriend because she'd rather be alone than with someone she only has a vague fondness for made me very happy. And as a mystery, The Crossing Places works perfectly well. I didn't guess who the killer was until the reveal, though mostly because every single character seemed suspicious.

No, what bothered me was the archaeology. Which actually surprised me! I'm not generally picky about the accuracy of fictional portrayals of archaeology; I can watch Indiana Jones with a content heart. And yet, the archaeology in The Crossing Places drove me crazy. I think because Griffiths was so clearly trying to be accurate, while actually being, uh... extremely dubious (they find a well-preserved bog body in 2010, and the excavation is finished after a weekend and didn't even make the local news? people are stashing two thousand year old gold artifacts in their houses? a tiny, community-college type university has an entire department of archaeology complete with PhD students?). Oddly, the police work is equally full of mistakes (random consultants can just take home letters from serial killers – not photocopies or scans, but the actual, original letters?). There was also an attempt to draw a meaningful parallel between the bog bodies of the Iron Age and the modern killer that just wasn't informed enough or insightful enough to work.

In short, a book that just wasn't successful. However, it's the first in a series, and I think I might go ahead and give the sequels a try? My copy of The Crossing Places included the first few chapters of Book #2 in the back, and they already seem to be much improved, archaeology-wise. If Griffiths realized that she needed to do more research after finishing this one, I can hardly criticize her for that.


The Red Chamber by Pauline A. Chen. A retelling of the Chinese classic 'Dream of the Red Chamber' with more focus on the female characters and with a style more in line with modern tastes (that is, not being 2,500 pages long and with an actual ending). The story in set in mid-1700s Beijing, in the women's quarters of a rich and influential household, and focuses on four of the younger members of the Jia family:
– Daiyu, an orphaned teenager who was raised in the south in a poorer branch of the family; she's sent to join the main household in Beijing where she's not always prepared for the level of opulence and politicking expected of her. She's naive, idealistic, and earnest, which quickly leads to her falling in love with main character #2, Baoyu.
– The heir of the Jia family, Baoyu is hugely spoiled: a handsome, charming, intelligent young man who's never been forced to actually work at anything. He refuses to study for the Imperial Exams and get a job, despite the family's need for both his future income and influence. For most of his life, it's been expected that he would marry main character #3, Baocai.
– Baocai is not as beautiful as Daiyu, and she has a reputation for being cold and stiff, but underneath her outer poise she's insecure, worried about her good-for-nothing brother, and uncertain of how to deal with Daiyu stealing Baoyu's affection, despite her early friendship with Daiyu.
– Finally there's Xifeng, who married into the family. She's smart, organized, good with money, and keeps the entire household running, but she can't get pregnant, leading her husband to desert her and turn her best friend into his new concubine.

I haven't read the original 'Dream of the Red Chamber', so I can't comment on how true this version is to the original. The writing here is nothing special – if anything, frequently too blunt and plain – but the story is engaging, with frequent twists and turns, and nice shift from individual personalities to larger cultural trends. I also quite liked Chen's new take on the ending; I can't imagine it's how the original planned to wrap up, but it worked for me.

Overall, I can't say that The Red Chamber does anything to stand out from the rest of the extremely large genre of historical fiction/women's lit, but hey, at least now I'm somewhat closer to having read one of global classics of literature that I've always meant to get around to.

The Case of the Reincarnated Client - Tarquin Hall.The fifth book in the Vish Puri series, murder mysteries set in Delhi. This one, though set in 2016, mostly concerns a murder that took place in 1984 during the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Puri's own father was a police detective at the time, and investigated the death of Riya Kaur, suspecting that she was actually murdered by her husband, who used the riots to cover up his own crime. Unfortunately Puri's father was never able to prove anything, and the case haunted him until his death. Now Puri's mother ("Mummy-ji") believes she has found the proof – in the form of recovered memories from a woman who claims to be Kaur's reincarnation. Puri's skepticism about the supernatural runs up against the impossibly accurate information Kaur's supposed reincarnation is able to provide.

Meanwhile, the government of India releases a surprise announcement that all paper money must be exchanged at banks for new paper money within the next 48 hours, or else it will become worthless. It's part of a plan to reduce the black market, but Puri finds himself both with a buttload of cash to exchange and no time to do so, and clues to a suspected money launderer.

Despite the seriousness of both cases, the Vish Puri books are always funny, cozy, and full of lots of food porn – especially street food. They're light mysteries, overall; a subplot concerns a bride who wants to know why her groom is such a loud snorer, for example. I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as I've enjoyed the previous books, unfortunately, but it's still a fun series that does a wonderful job at capturing the feel of Delhi.

(Also, I read this book while on a trip to India earlier this year, and it finally cleared up my confusion at why everyone refused to take my old cash!)
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London by Sarah Wise. Nonfiction about a historical true crime case. The late 1700s and early 1800s saw the fantastical-sounding profession of "resurrection men": specialists in grave-robbery who stole fresh corpses to sell to doctors and medical schools, who needed them to practice surgery, study anatomy, and expand our knowledge of how the human body worked. The most famous of these Resurrection Men are probably Burke and Hare, who in Scotland in 1828 got tired of digging up bodies and decided to create their own instead. Eventually convicted of sixteen murders, Burke and Hare and their crimes became enormously famous.

Less well-known is that, a few years later, London had its own murderous Resurrection Men. In 1831, several of them shopped around the corpse of an dark-haired fourteen-year-old boy, until one of the prospective clients decided the body was just a little too fresh and detained the Resurrection Men until the police could be called. Ultimately the corpse was identified as that of an Italian beggar-child who had made money by displaying white mice – though, as Wise shows, there's an equal amount of evidence that he was just a regular English kid, and the popular identification of him as the "Italian Boy" probably has more to do with contemporary Londoners' romanticization of the attractively-exotic poor than anything else.

I love historical true crime because it's capable of being a fascinating window into a particular time and place, and Wise really delivers. She provides deep dives into topics like the rivalries between London's various medical schools, the functioning of the Smithfield Meat Market, the child trafficking between Italy and England for a constant flow of those "adorable" beggars, the inner workings of the Newgate Prison, and daily life in a poor suburb of 1830s London. If you're only looking for the details of a gorey crime, The Italian Boy is probably not the book for you. But if you, like me, are excited to learn the intricacies of the politics of police uniforms in 1820, than I highly recommend it.

The Italian Boy also had a lot more pictures than is typical for a nonfiction book, nearly one for every other page: maps, portraits, images from broadsheets, newspaper headlines, etchings of famous beggars, and more. It was a surprise, but a nice one.


The Fall of the Wild: Extinction, De-Extinction, and the Ethics of Conservation by Ben A. Minteer. A collection of six essays on the philosophical considerations involved in protecting wild species. I picked up this book because I'm hugely interested in de-extinction (the actual ongoing research to try and revive various extinct species through cloning and/or genetic engineering; the passenger pigeon is one currently closest to success, though the project on the woolly mammoth is probably more well-known), which Minteer is not a fan of. In general, I'd call Minteer a moderate for his views on conservation. Take the issue of zoos, for example. Several groups have called for their widespread closure, but Minteer doesn't go that far; instead, he points to the role of captive breeding in preventing the extinction of the California Condor or the Arabian Oryx, as well as the possibility of zoos inspiring visitors to become more involved in conservation. But he's not for massive deregulation or the too-close confinement of animals either.

Unsurprisingly, he's against de-extinction. His argument mostly centers on the idea that if humans know that we can 'fix' extinction, we won't try to prevent it as strongly. I don't find this convincing; it's not like de-extinction is easy, cheap, or simple, and I can't imagine extinction ever coming to seem unimportant, no matter how many technological fixes might exist.

But despite my disagreement on that issue, I very much enjoyed The Fall of the Wild. Minteer's writing is thoughtful, clear, and engaging, and he doesn't stick to theoretical philosophy, but tells multiple interesting stories. I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of Zootopia, a not-yet-built zoo in Denmark that will be an immense, wall-less, cage-less landscape where animals wander free and humans peek at them from hidden enclosures. The story of the relocation of 500 elephants from one nature preserve to another several hundred miles away, done via helicopter and trucks, was also fascinating. Minteer frequently refers to Aldo Leopold (an American conservationist from the early 1900s), whom he has modeled his thinking after. Leopold sounds incredible, and Minteer's summaries of his life and philosophy were a new area to me, but one I found very compelling.

Overall a very intelligent and readable book if you're at all interested in the topic.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

The Elementals by Michael McDowell. A horror novel set in 1970s rural Alabama. Family matriarch Marian Savage has died, and her relatives gather for a period that's half mourning and half summer vacation. They consist of her son Dauphin and his wife Leigh; her other son, single father Luker, and his 13-year-old NYC-raised daughter India; her best friend Big Barbara, who is also Leigh's mother; and long-time servant Odessa. They head to Beldame: three massive houses perched on a sandspit that arches right out into the Gulf of Mexico, so isolated that they can only be reached at low tide. But only two of the houses at Beldame are inhabited; the third has long been abandoned, left to slowly fill with the omnipresent sand.

The real star of The Elementals is its sense of place, and Beldame is a location to stick in your mind. It features the exact opposite of every horror cliche, and yet is still wonderfully terrifying. The inescapable, languid heat of a Deep South summer; the blinding white sunlight; the feel and sounds of a wooden house sucked dry of any moisture; and most of all, the constantly shifting, blowing, trickling sand. The characters are interestingly fucked-up, with the sort of complex family dynamics and long-held secrets (except for Odessa, who is one hell of a Magical Negro stereotype, so be prepared for that) that is required of a Southern Gothic novel, full of tensions that are revealed and become more relevant as the horrors mount up. And speaking of horrors, they're left fascinatingly unexplained – the elementals of the title live in the empty third house, but what they are and what they want and exactly what they did or did not do are all left as open questions. There's no resolution to them, no rules they obey or clear story tropes they follow, and that sense that they might disappear or they might follow you home and there's no way to know which really adds to the lingering creepiness of the novel.

Still, it's all about Beldame. God, there's a haunted house that deserves the renown of the Stanley Hotel and Hill House.


The Guest List by Lucy Foley. A thriller novel (whoops, picked it up because I thought it was horror, but it doesn't quite fit into that genre) set on a small island off Ireland in the modern day. Jules is the CEO of an extremely successful lifestyle website; Will is the star of a 'Man vs Wild'-esque reality show; together they are having a lavish wedding designed to be focus of many a Pinterest board. Unsurprisingly for the reader, the night of the wedding a massive storm hits the island, knocking out the electricity and cutting them off from the mainland. And then a dead body turns up.

The book immediately jumps back in time to a few day before the wedding, allowing us to slowly meet the many guests and employees, all of whom have conveniently linked Dark Secrets. Meanwhile, the clues build regarding A) who's dead, and B) who killed them. By the end, it's less a question of "who had a motive", and more "Jesus Christ, everyone on this island has a motive, it's just a matter of who got to [Dead Person] first".

This is a supremely silly book that should only be read while sitting on a beach half-drunk on something fruity. I read it two weeks ago and already most of the characters and details have slipped forever out of my memory, which tells you a lot about what to expect. The sheer overload of tragic backstories, unlikely coincidences, dumb motivations, and shocking twists means that it's hard to take any of it seriously. That said, if you're in the mood for a compulsively readable collection of cliches, you really could do worse than The Guest List. It's a lot of fun in its tropiness.


Experimental Film by Gemma Files. A horror novel set in modern-day Toronto. Lois is an ex-professor of Canadian film history and a local film critic, desperate to find some sort of work in her field. This search is complicated by her young son Clark, who has severe autism and needs more patience and attention than Lois is able to give him – at least in the opinion of Lois's mother. Then Lois stumbles across several film reels from the 1910s made by a woman named Iris; the movies are all variations on the same bit of Slavic folklore, a dangerous entity known as Lady Midday (who I totally thought had been made up by Files until googling just now, and I was going to congratulate her on a truly realistic-feeling bit of fake folklore, but never mind!). The production date of the films would make Iris the first Canadian female director, and Lois sees the chance for her career to skyrocket: her research on Iris could lead to a book, a documentary, traveling exhibits, and more. There's just the matter that Iris's connection to Lady Midday seems to have been more literal and supernatural than anyone can rationally accept, and that Iris's life parallels Lois's in eerie ways, including another autistic son.

Gemma Files is an author I've been meaning to check out for ages; I've pushed her off for no better reason than that I have a ton of authors fighting for the top of my TBR list. But I'm very glad I finally made it to her, because Experimental Film is a FANTASTIC book. It's absolutely, wonderfully creepy (definitely outright scarier than most of the books I read this Halloween – the only contender would be The Only Good Indians), though surprisingly I'd classify it as folk horror, not what I expected from a book themed around film. Nevertheless, that's what it is, and really really good folk horror at that. But in addition to being scary, Experimental Film is an incredibly well-done take on several different topics: motherhood and the expectations parents put on their children, the value of work (not in a Protestant-ethic-Capitalism way, just the joy of creating something meaningful and lasting), and the difficulties and bliss of finding someone who understands you. The writing is lovely and plays around storytelling structure – not excessively so, this isn't House of Leaves, but enough to be interesting – the characters are compelling, the horror is supremely horrific, and it's just a good book all around.

On an entirely random note, why are Yazidi beliefs so incredibly popular with horror writers? Nothing wrong with the Yazidi, of course, but they're quite a small ethnic group, and it's odd to see them appear everywhere from Lovecraft to Experimental Film, when there's nowhere near the same name recognition for, say, Mende or Sami beliefs. I suppose it's probably a case of once one person does it, everyone else follows, but it's still odd to me.


A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill. A novel set in modern-day small-town Texas, whose genre is extremely difficult to describe. The best I can come up with is "literary fiction about horror fiction". The plot is similarly difficult to describe, primarily because the narrator isn't even born until about a hundred pages in, but I will try: Noah's family has always had an intimate relationship with horror. His mother and father's courtship centered around horror movies, Lovecraft's stories, and haunted houses; when Noah was a child, their primary income was from a haunted house run by his family; he met his own future wife when she was an actor at one of those evangelical Hell Houses. On another level, Noah's family has dealt with less fictional horror: the death of his father at a young age from brain cancer; a sister's sudden disappearance, presumably kidnapped; another sister's deep depression and suicide attempts. And on yet another level, Noah has been regularly visited from a young age by a werewolf-like monster who only appears when Noah is alone, but who can fly and take Noah other worlds. This monster is real within the world of the book but is also a fairly unsubtle metaphor for inherited mental illnesses and family trauma, and it usually works better in that regard than as an actual character.

Horror fiction that is not-so-secretly a metaphor for real issues is a longstanding tradition within the genre, from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and "The Lottery" to more modern examples like Get Out and HBO's Lovecraft Country. Yet I don't feel like A Cosmology of Monsters fits in with those. It doesn't take the horror half of the equation seriously – there's no attempt to be scary or take the supernatural aspects as a real problem to be solved. It's more like Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation: a film that uses Japan as a setting to evoke a certain mood in the characters, but which is very much not *about* Japan. That's exactly A Cosmology of Monsters's relationship to horror.

Since it's not horror, that leaves only literary fiction: a deep dive into the personality and dysfunctions of one particular character and one particular family. Which is all very well for those who enjoy literary fiction, but unfortunately I tend to find it boring, and A Cosmology of Monsters was no exception. I mean, yes, it's well-written, it's insightful, it's a sharp portrayal of loss and depression and disconnections, and yet... I just wasn't engaged. Recommended if you're a fan of literary fiction, but not so much for the horror fans.


And I have now completed reviews of everything I read in October! \o/

Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg. A vampire novel set in modern-day small town North Carolina. Sophie and Natalie are lifelong best friends, both single mothers to infants, both doing nothing much with their lives: in their early twenties, working at Waffle House and living in a trailer park. Until one night they cross paths with a vampire named The Whistler and wake up dead. Natalie, the more steely-willed of the pair, figures out what's going on and immediately abandons both their babies to her own mother out of fear of what she might do to them, and forces Sophie to join her on an endless road trip that's more about losing themselves than going anywhere in particular. Meanwhile, The Whistler becomes increasingly obsessed with Natalie and how to shape her into the perfect eternal partner, which sets off problems with his previous eternal partner, a woman known only as Mother.

Here in the year of our lord 2020 it's more or less impossible to do anything new with vampires. Every possible permutation of the myth has already been done and redone. But having said all that, I really enjoyed the spin Motherless Child gives to the old story. It takes the route of emphasizing that vampires are dead – not sexy immortals, but cold corpses somehow still inhabited – and underlines it with gorgeous prose:

As she pushed out into the night, she realized she even knew what the whistling in her ears was. Not cicadas. Not power lines. Not the echo of the Whistler's breath in her ears. Just the sound the world makes rushing through a pipe or pooling in a cistern. Whipping through a dead place, with neither heartbeart nor blood rush to impede it.
***
"Does it still feel good to you? The guys, I mean."
Now Sophie looked startled, almost guilty. After a moment, she shrugged. "It feels warm."
"Yeah," Natalie said.
"Especially their mouths."
Which was exactly right. Mostly, these last few nights, Natalie found herself hovering around their lips, in the same way she'd once crouched beside the tiny space heater her mother used, on surprisingly frigid Charlotte winter nights, to heat the trailer. That, apparently, was what sex would be about from now on. The ghost of tingling. Mostly heat.
***
And in the meantime, through the agony and the haze of her own tears, she'd stare, like Sophie, at the way the world looked when it was lit. How could I possibly have forgotten so quickly? But she knew the answer to that. She hadn't forgotten, really. This sight – this impossible green, this radiant orange, the daily blossoming of the whole planet – couldn't be forgotten, because it couldn't be remembered. Could not be held in a human brain. That's what made it such a daily revelation. All her life, she'd been told that death was unimaginable, unknowable. When it truth, it was life that could never be imagined. Life was just too big.

There's blood and gory death and hypnosis and all the other things that go along with vampires as well, but it's Hirshberg's invocation of death that has stuck with me. And the ending. That ending! Goddamn. It's a cliche to talk about 'strong female characters', but the final choices of Natalie and especially her mother are some cold-ass, steel-spine strength to remember.


Remina by Junji Ito. (Sometimes also titled Hellstar Remina, but my copy just had Remina) A sci-fi horror manga set in Japan in the near future. An astrophysicist discovers a new planet, whose existence seems to prove the reality of wormholes to other dimensions. A pretty significant discovery! And one that wins the scientist both the Nobel Prize and naming rights to the new planet, which he calls after his teenage daughter, Remina. Remina herself is soon a media sensation, becoming a pop star and advertising celebrity. Of course, this is a horror story, so things begin to go wrong: the planet Remina turns and somehow heads towards Earth at nearly the speed of light, and other planets and stars in its path disappear. As Remina comes closer, it becomes clear that it's not quite a planet, given that it has a massive eye and tongue; that it's eating everything it passes; and that Earth is its target. People unsurprisingly panic, and a cult suddenly arises, playing on these new fears to put the blame on Remina and her father. The cult argues that the Oguros have somehow summoned the planet, and the only way to save humanity is to sacrifice them.



The middle and late section of the book get a bit repetitive as the same plot plays out over and over again: the cult finds Remina, attempts to kill and/or torture her, a man saves her, she escapes. The only change from one round to another is that Remina's clothing becomes ever more tattered and scanty. That said, there are some fantastically creepy images throughout: Remina tied to a cross as a massive eye opens in the sky behind her; a nuclear-blasted corpse, its skull grinning through heat-tightened skin; a body melting into goo when exposed to the toxic atmosphere on the planet Remina; the constant mob of screaming mouths and reaching hands, shouting "Kill Remina!" and "Remina the witch!".



Overall, it doesn't reach the heights of terror Ito is capable of in stories like 'The Enigma of Amigara Fault' or 'Uzumaki', but it's nicely scary little story about cosmic horrors and why the brutality of man is scarier than anything out of space.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

The White Road by Sarah Lotz. A horror novel set in modern-day England and Nepal. Simon is a mid-twenties slacker, working at a coffee shop and half-heartedly running a website of dumb videos – until he decides that the perfect click-bait would be footage of actual dead bodies. He chooses those of a group of young cavers who were trapped and died in a sudden flash flood; due to the difficulty of getting into this particular cave in the first place, the bodies have been left there since their tragic death a few years ago. Simon hires a stranger off the internet to serve as guide to this closed-to-the-public cave, and off they go.

Unsurprisingly, things go wrong. Simon comes out of the cave with a pretty serious case of PTSD, as well as hearing voices – the incarnation of darkness? the ghosts of the cavers? the memory of the guide? something else yet again? – as well as the footage he searched for. After it's uploaded, the site suddenly becomes profitable, and Simon's friend pushes him into climbing Mount Everest to film more dead bodies. In what is a more implausible turn of events than seeing ghosts, Simon manages to secure a place on climbing team despite extremely little experience on mountains, and is shortly thereafter making his way to the summit. Meanwhile, the book turns to the story of Juliet, who is racing to be the first woman to climb Everest without using oxygen tanks. She's been having some weird experiences up there alone on the ice; experiences that seem tied to what Simon witnessed in the cave. This tension is summed up by a T.S. Eliot quote which is repeated again and again throughout The White Road:
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
there is always another one walking beside you”
Nicknamed "the third man", this real concept (described by multiple climbers and other people in extreme life-or-death activities) stalks both Juliet and Simon, a confusing, mostly unseen presence whose intentions are ultimately left unclear: malignant or helpful?

Lotz is a writer who is extremely good at depicting an environment and making you feel like you're there. The cave and Mount Everest are both excellently vivid settings, and she wrings every drop of creepiness out of them. I also found the details of how mountaineering works to be fascinating; granted, I've never read much about Everest before, but I had no idea of quite how complicated and long the process of preparing to climb it is. So that's all well-done.

Now for the negatives: the cave portion is by far the scariest part of the book, and it only takes up the first quarter or so; everything after that is a gradual let-down of realizing that The White Road is just not going to reach those same heights. I think caves might be inherently scarier than mountains – after all, I can think of dozens of creepypastas and horror movies set in caves, and none on mountains.

The characters are a collection of interchangeable cardboard cutouts; none of them feels three-dimensional or real. To be fair, flat characters are a pretty common problem in horror, and not one I necessarily mind if the scares are there. The flatness is all the more emphasized in that Simon has a habit of nicknaming everyone he meets after various media references: "Depressed Harry Potter", "a low-rent version of Tom Cruise", "Tilda Swinton [...] not in looks exactly, but in presence", and so on.

The opening caving section is wonderfully terrifying, and the Mount Everest portions are interesting as a story of mountaineering, but overall The White Road is a fairly forgettable book. I enjoyed it, but I'd only recommend it if you've already read 'Ted the Caver' and watched 'The Descent' and are desperate for more.


The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones. A horror novel set on a modern-day Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Years ago, four friends – boys in their early twenties – do something bad while out hunting for elk one winter. Not terribly bad, not anything worse than the dumb things a lot of us get up to in our late teens or early twenties, but these four are spectacularly unlucky in that one of their victims turns out to be something more than the usual elk. And now she's out for revenge.

Part One of the book focuses on Lewis, the only one of the friends to have left the reservation; he's seemingly the most successful, with a wife, stable job, and new house. This part of the The Only Good Indians is mostly psychological horror. Minor creepy occurrences begin to build, but the constantly lurking question is if they're actually happening, or if Lewis only thinks he's being haunted and is about to do some real bad things because of that misconception.

After an incredible climax halfway through, which makes it very, very clear that this haunting is real, The Only Good Indians switches genres to essentially become a slasher story, complete with a really excellent Final Girl. Though the mental games continue, and I love how most of the deaths are not done by the monster herself, but by how she's able to mainpulate one character against another. The worst horrors are the ones you commit yourself, after all. There are so many amazingly frightening images left behind by this story: a silhouette half-glimpsed through the blur of fan blades; an elk calf, kicking its way out of the womb; the removal of teeth; an old car falling off the cinderblocks it's propped on; ants on a boot. God, just – this book is so filmic, and so good, and so scary.

I had high expectations going in, and The Only Good Indians succeeded over and above them. The early buzz made me think would be literary fiction, perhaps more concerned with social justice than with monsters, and while it handles that aspect of the plot wonderfully, it's also a genuinely terrifying horror novel, one of the scariest I've read in a few years. Honestly, I loved this, and if you've been putting off reading it, stop that! It's Halloween season, and the perfect time to get yourself a copy of The Only Good Indians.

Note: several dogs die gruesomely, in ways that are graphically described. As do humans and other animals, but I know a lot of people are particularly sensitive to dog-death.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

Vienna by William S. Kirby. A murder mystery/retelling of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons", set in modern-day Europe with a Holmes and Watson who are both women and also in an explicit relationship. This book was sold to me as "lesbian Sherlock Holmes", and to be fair, it succeeds on that front – which is probably all that matters to many of you.

Justine Am is a world-famous supermodel, currently doing a tour of the capitals of Europe for an art project in which various photographers shoot her posing with wooden mannequins from the 1700s. She's also an ex-med student, which I suppose makes her the Watson of this story. Vienna is an autistic savant (there's a little bit of jargon at one point about how autistic savants aren't really a thing, and she actually has some other rare condition, but she's clearly written to be an autistic savant despite that ass-cover), with a photographic memory for everything she's ever read, incredible math skills, and a tendency to be pulled into geometric patterns in a way that can lead to seizures. Which I suppose makes her the Sherlock? Someone has to be, at any rate. Vienna is also an orphan with a mysterious past connected to her extremely rich and powerful "uncle", a British lawyer and nobleman.

The book opens with Justine in Vienna's bed after a mildly dissatisfying one night stand. Matters grow more complicated when Justine's boyfriend is shortly thereafter murdered and Vienna becomes the first suspect. Despite being thrown together under these not-promising circumstances, they discover a real connection and fall in love. Meanwhile, the boyfriend's murder is only the first in a string of deaths which seem to be connected to Justine's photo shoots – someone is using her as an opportunity to get access to the mannequins. Figuring out who, and why, is the only way for Justine and Vienna to stay alive.

The relationship is well-written – I'm always a fan of characters who have sex first and take a while to catch feelings – but the mystery is complex and arcane to the point of silliness. It involves astronomy, anarchists, assassinations of the 1800s, alchemy, ancient Egypt, and is weirdly alliterative, I've just now realized. The solution also depends on believing that the royal families of Europe (including the Hapsburgs) are secretly still in charge of everything and have regular hidden meetings to maintain society. Which would have been outdated in 1904, the publication date of the original Holmes story, much less 2015.

That's not the only odd thing about Kirby's writing. Justine is constantly called out for behaving "like an American" or a "crass colonial" by other characters, while this is actually not a thing that comes up all that often in my experience of living in Europe. She herself makes strange allusions to this supposed deep contrast between American and European culture, such as when she worries that a joke about Romeo and Juliet in front of a British crowd will set off "a riot, but the laughter seemed good-natured rather than derisive. How had she gotten away with mocking the country's greatest hero?" Vienna's British accent also struck me as a bit stiff and unrealistic, but not being British, I'll leave the final call on that to the experts.

The weirdest plot twist of all is when Justine loses her modeling career because it comes out that she's dating another woman. It's not even the added complications of Vienna being visibly autistic or involved in the case about Justine's boyfriend's murder that supposedly drive the nail into the coffin, but simply her gender. 2015 is not that long ago; I find it extremely doubtful that anyone would lose multiple modeling contracts due to a lesbian relationship.

Kirby's writing is highly oblique, with dialogue that often jumps from topic to topic with no transitions and plot developments that never entirely spell themselves out. I usually admire this style of writing, with its do-it-yourself approach to the reader who's left to figure out meanings and connections for herself. But Kirby occasionally goes too far, producing scenes that are just baffling rather than ambiguous.

Overall, I mostly enjoyed Vienna, despite this review sounding like a litany of complaints. It's just that the things that bothered me were all so unusual that I couldn't resist describing them in details, even though they were minor.


Medea and Her Children by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, translated from Russian by Arch Tait. A novel focusing on Medea, a widowed and childless woman living alone in the Crimea, and her large and messy Greek-descended family, who arrive at her small village every summer for beaches, parties, and gossip. The style is lyrical and frequently shifts in time from the present moment (which seems to be around the 1970s, though I don't think it's ever explicitly stated) to various events in Medea's memory, stretching all the way back to her parents' lives at the dawn of the 20th century and covering every important moment in between. Despite brief references to the many major political upheavals this period covers (WWI, WII, the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars, the death of Stalin), the focus is very much on the family and its petty dramas: dead parents, marriages, divorces, affairs (SO MANY AFFAIRS), illegitimate children, children sent to live with siblings or grandparents or cousins, house renovations, careers desired and discarded, and so on. The best passages are those describing the landscape of Crimea, its mountains and steep paths and the scent of the ocean.

Medea and Her Children falls into a certain style of 'literary fiction' that just doesn't work for me. I never engaged emotionally with any of the characters, although the writing is certainly lovely. There's all sort of major tragedies in the narrative, but I don't feel them much when the style comes off as so distancing and almost deliberately disorienting, choosing not to reveal characters' motivations or histories. Ah, well. At least there are some gorgeous turns of phrase.

Hello everyone!

I aten't dead. Just extremely, extremely busy in these odd times. I hope you all are also well! And I hope that soon my life will calm down a bit and I can return to checking DW on the regular.

In the meantime, I have been doing a lot of reading, though alas, not so much with the typing up of my thoughts afterwards. Since I can't leave my house, I've been focusing on finally getting around to reading all the big tomes on my bookshelves, the ones that usually I put off because they're too big to fit into my purse. They, uh... mostly haven't been great. Further proof that I am far too easily seduced by a pretty cover. Anyway, here's two I did manage to write up!

Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney. A novel set in New York City in 1870s. Georg Geiermeier is a recently arrived immigrant, and his various adventures manage to hit upon every single remotely memorable thing happening in the city at the time: the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, P.T. Barnum's circus, the explosion of the Staten Island Ferry, working on the sewers, laying cobblestones on the streets, German immigrants, Irish immigrants, Black immigrants, female doctors, secret abortionists, new factories, old Brooklyn farms, street life ('Gangs of New York' style), a night in the Tombs, sex work, life in Five Points, the freezing solid of the East River, and on and on. Gaffney's determination to namecheck every element of her research ends up feeling somewhat ridiculous, and by the end I started to laugh whenever she brought in yet another historical event.

All of this pointless scene-setting provides the background for a fairly bland narrative: Georg falls in love with Beatrice, a member of the Whyos gang, which leads to a rivalry with Johnny, the leader of the gang who wants Beatrice for himself. Meanwhile, a sadistic arsonist/serial killer becomes convinced that Georg is to blame for his own incarceration, and is determined to get revenge. None of these characters are particularly interesting, and the plot never manages to do anything surprising. It's not improved by Gaffney's odd stylistic choices – occasionally butting in with an omniscient narrator to inform us of things like "but Georg wouldn't know that for another two years" or "none of them suspected that the problem was already solved". She doesn't do this often enough for it to become a consistent feature of the book, but it appears just often enough to give a further distancing effect to any emotion the reader might have been developing for the characters.

Overall it's cliched, it's frustrating, and it's mostly just boring. Is there anything exactly wrong with Metropolis? No, not really. Are there thousands of better historical novels out there better than this stale melodrama? Very much yes.


The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily by Nancy Goldstone. Nonfiction about Joanna I, who ruled Naples (her titles as ruler of Jerusalem and Sicily were more hopeful than accurate) in the 1300s, and who has been considered 'notorious' ever since due to rumors that she had her husband violently murdered. And possibly also for her role in inciting the Western Schism (that time when the Catholic church had two simultaneous popes, each of whom of course denounced the other as the antichrist).

Goldstone is here to redeem Joanna's reputation, instead showing her as a dedicated, competent, and successful ruler. And also not guilty of husband-murder since, as Goldstone says, if Joanna had wanted to get rid of her husband she likely would have had him subtly poisoned and not publicly attacked by goons to be beaten and hung. It's a fair goal, but unfortunately I came away from the book feeling like I just don't care if Joanna was good or bad. There's dozens of chapters about intricate Italian politics and backstabbing and alliances (and goddamn this is really a book that could have used a Character List; I had such a hard time trying to remember who was who), but none of it seemed to have many long-term consequences, nor was any of it interesting enough to read about for its own sake. A lot of the most fascinating bits in the book were relegated to the status of tangents, when I could have read much, much more about them: the Salerno medical school, which allowed female students and possibly teachers; repeated, devastating outbreaks of the plague; the free companies, roving bands of unemployed mercenaries who were a constant background threat in 1300s Italy; the family of a African formerly enslaved man who rose to become major political figures in Joanna's court.

I think Goldstone would have been better served by including a chapter or two focusing on Joanna's historical reception in the centuries since her life. She very briefly complains that Joanna didn't get an awesome tomb, unlike most members of her family, but that's not enough. The premise of the book is 'I am reclaiming this notorious historical figure for the side of good', but I think the average American has no name recognition of Joanna at all, pro or con. Goldstone needs to actually show us that Joanna was hated, not just tell it. That likely would also have helped with my ultimate not-caring, since part of my problem was that a great deal of the stuff Goldstone dwells on didn't seem to matter much to the grand scheme of history.

Eh, it's not a bad book. The topic is fine and the writing is fine. It's just that I prefer my interesting-facts/amount-of-text ratio to be much higher.

The Companion by Kim Taylor Blakemore. In 1855 rural New Hampshire, Lucy Blunt is a servant in a rich household that revolves around the beautiful, blind, capricious, and laudanum-addicted mistress, Eugenie. Lucy's attraction to Eugenie is quickly reciprocated, a circumstance that elevates Lucy from kitchen maid to formal companion – displacing Eugenie's previous companion, Rebecca – as their relationship becomes sexual. But Lucy has secrets she can't afford for either Eugenie or the jealous Rebecca to find out, even if she could be certain that Eugenie loves her rather than only using her as a temporary distraction. To complicate matters, the entire story is being told in flashbacks as Lucy sits in jail after being found guilty for murder – though who she murdered, and why, and under what circumstances, and even if she is actually guilty, are all questions left unanswered until the climax of the novel.

First things first: The Companion is extremely similar to The Confessions of Frannie Langton. We have a maid in love with her mistress, whose habit of consuming laudanum makes her emotions and actions unpredictable; the maid ends up accused of murder; the story is told in flashbacks, coaxed out by a lawyer or journalist as the maid waits in jail. Both use the plot to comment upon the sexism and classism of the mid-1800s, though The Confessions of Frannie Langton also has a lot to say about racism, while The Companion brings in the issue of abilism.

To contrast them, The Confessions of Frannie Langton makes excellent use of gothic horror tropes to serve new, anti-racist purposes, while The Companion is more straightforwardly historic-fiction in style. On the other hand, I thought that the characterizations were stronger in The Companion, particularly Lucy's fellow servants, such as the motherly but proud Cook. The emotional relationship between Lucy and Eugenie also worked much better for me than the one between Frannie and Marguerite. But both books are gorgeously written and handle their chosen social issues with care and insight.

It's hard to complain about too many thoughtful lesbian historical murder mysteries! It's the genre I've always wanted and never knew existed. Read these both!
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn by Hannah Holmes. Nonfiction about one suburban homeowner in Maine and her intense study of her own backyard. Holmes learns about not just the easily visible animals (the squirrels, the ravens, her adorable relationship with a chipmunk that she trains to eat out of her hand) but the unseen: insects, fungi, the roots of plants, the water runoff, the heat bubble created by her house, the soil, even the deep-down geology. Her style is very similar to Mary Roach's – an intelligent, curious, and humorous generalist who interviews experts to learn more, with a non-insignificant part of the book being her own mishaps, misunderstandings, and difficulties in finding the right experts. Holmes does end up advocating for her readers to adopt her approach (growing a freedom lawn – no grass, just native species however messy they might look, no fertilizer or pesticides), but overall it's a book of interesting facts, pleasantly delivered.

A note: Holmes, like most nature experts, dislikes invasive species. However, there's a short section where she goes way farther than most, including a quite graphic description of the death she wishes upon sparrows and starlings. Anyone who can't read about animal death might wish to skip the first few pages of Chapter Eleven.

A Death in Harlem by Karla F.C. Holloway. In 1920s Harlem, in the middle of an awards ceremony for Black artists, one of the winners, a beautiful young woman (Black, but light-skinned enough that she could have passed for white, if she'd chosen to) falls out of a window to her death. Did she jump? Was it an accident? Or was she... murdered?!?! Weldon Thomas, the city's first Black policeman, is on the case.

The problem quickly turns out to be not a lack of motive, but too many motives. Almost everyone seems to have a potential reason to kill Olivia: the prominent doctor she was rumored to be having an affair with; the doctor's wife who was seen fighting with Olivia earlier in the day; the wife's best friend (and former lover) who was angry at being spurned when Olivia came on the scene; the white art collector who was present at the awards ceremony but mysteriously disappeared immediately afterwards; Olivia's maid who knew too much; Olivia's former maid who left her for a better job; the wife's maid who is determined to protect her employer; the mayor's son, who was drunk and in Harlem that night; and on and on. Every single character has at least one dangerous secret.

I love stories set during the Harlem Renaissance and I love murder mysteries, so I was very excited for A Death in Harlem. Unfortunately this is Holloway's first time writing fiction, and it really shows. The characters all feel one-dimensional, none of them get an arc or chance to deepen, there's too much switching between different POVs, and much of the dialogue feels stiff and unrealistic. Whenever there's a bad guy, Holloway practically has them twisting their mustaches and cackling evilly as they praise their own villainous deeds. Which... I'm sure plenty of white people in 1920s NYC were horrible racists! But here they come off less as examples of historical accuracy and more like signs around the bad guys' necks so that the audience knows who to boo.

On another note, Olivia's life and death are paralleled with that of a poor, dark-skinned sex worker; they both arrive in NYC on the same day and later die on the same day, but while Olivia is formally mourned and her case investigated, the other woman's death passes unnoticed. This is a nice conceit, but the other woman essentially disappears from the book after the first few chapters, and her plot is never drawn into the main story. I get what Holloway was trying to say with this, but I don't think it worked.

I would read another book by Holloway, because I liked many of her choices and think she has potential, but this one was a bit meh.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


In light of the trashfire that has been the Romance Writers Association over the last few weeks (a brief summary for anyone who hasn't been following this story), I decided that it was an excellent time to catch up with Courtney Milan, who I have loved for a long time but whose most recent books I hadn't yet read.

After the Wedding by Courtney Milan. A historical romance set in 1860s England, the second full-length novel in The Worth Saga (there are also three novellas in the series). Lady Camilla Worth was once the daughter of an earl. But as a young girl her father was convicted of treason and committed suicide, and Camilla went to live with a distant relative. When he got bored of raising a 12 year old, he passed her on to a yet more distant relative, who did the same, and again, and again, each time reducing her status a little more. By age twenty she's working as a common servant for a village rector, who constantly threatens her with hell because she once had premarital sex. She has no way of contacting her remaining family and won't even try, completely convinced that they want nothing to do with her.

Adrian Hunter is the son of an extremely successful Black businessman and a white abolitionist. Now he's a wealthy and competent businessman himself (supervising a porcelain factory, which was a cool historical detail), but he really wants to prove to his brother that their uncle, a white bishop, is worth trusting. The bishop says he'll publicly recognize the Black side of his family if Adrian just does him one favor... go undercover as a valet to spy on the bishop's ecclesiastical rival. In short order Camilla and Adrian are servants in the same household, caught alone in a room together, and forced into a (literal shotgun) marriage. Adrian knows that if they want a successful annulment, they can't sleep together or otherwise appear to be married, which leads to a lot of EXTREMELY IDDY pining as they slowly fall in love and yet can't touch or even talk about it.

So, yes, it is a historical romance with many of my favorite tropes: fake marriage, angst, searching for family, lots of humor, finding inspiration through reading dusty court records (okay, this isn't a trope I've previously encountered but I loved it), and, of course, sooooo much glorious pining. I also adored many of the side characters, particularly Adrian's brother, who was amazing and who I was extremely excited to discover is slated to be the hero of the next book in the series.

On the negative side, After the Wedding had much less to do with the Opium Wars/treason/bigger plot of the Worth Saga than Once upon a Marquess did, which was a disappointment to me because that's definitely the part of the series I'm most interested in. After the Wedding is a bit of a shallower book. On the hand, I devoured the whole thing in only two days and had a great time while reading, so I can't complain too much.


Mrs Martin’s Incomparable Adventures by Courtney Milan. The third novella in The Worth Saga (this comes immediately subsequent to After the Wedding, but they're so disconnected from one another that it doesn't really matter). Mrs Bertrice Martin is a 73 year old widow, immensely rich, with nothing much to bother her except that her Terrible Nephew keeps trying to steal her money and rape her servants. (Which, I mean, is quite the problem.) Also she's lonely and everyone in her life keeps treating her like she's stupid and fragile. Violetta Beauchamps is a 69 year old boarding house manager, the latest victim of Terrible Nephew's habit of running up debts that he doesn't intend to pay. As a result of his actions, she's out of a job and out of a home. She plans to con Bertrice into giving her enough money to retire on, but quickly gets caught up in Beatrice's plans to ruin Terrible Nephew's life. Along the way, they fall in love.

As much as I adore the idea of elderly lesbian seductions, Mrs Martin’s Incomparable Adventures works better as a screwball comedy than as a romance. The various mishaps they subject the Terrible Nephew to (geese, offkey renditions of the hallelujah chorus, paying all the neighborhood's sex workers to avoid him) are unrealistically over-the-top but frequently hilarious. Bertrice's unflappable confidence leads to some fabulous dialogue: "Oh, for God's sake. Forty-nine is extremely young. If forty-nine is not young, that would make me old, and I am not old. I have reached the age of maturity to which all humans must particularly aspire; to dismiss this pinnacle of perfection as old age is to demean all of humankind."

It's also a book in which the phrase "men are horrible" is repeated approximately once per page, so if you're in the mood for that, it's extremely the book you want. And aren't we all in the mood for that sometimes? The author's notes say that Milan wrote this in the shadow of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, which... yeah, it definitely feels like a book for that moment. I could have asked for a bit more sexual tension between the main characters, but eh, it works great as a comedy if not as a serious love story. Another light, fast read.

Also there is cheese toast. No one can dislike a book that praises cheese toast.

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. A fantasy novel set in 1920s Mexico. (Apparently the author is insistent that this is not YA, but both the writing style and characters felt incredibly YA-ish to me, so... *shrugs* Decide for yourself.) In a small town in rural Yucatan, young Casiopea is used as servant by her rich grandfather and looked down upon by the rest of her family, especially her cousin Martín. Until one day when Casiopea is left alone in the house and out of spite opens a locked chest in her grandfather's room, only to release the ancient Maya death god Hun-Kamé, who was trapped there by his twin brother in a battle for control of Xibalba, the Underworld. Now Hun-Kamé and Casiopea are linked; her morality seeping into him allows him to exist in the world of humans, but it will only last for so long before she runs of out of life and they both die permanently. In the short time they have, Hun-Kamé must travel across Mexico (stopping at Mexico City, Mérida, El Paso, Tijuana, and a luxurious spa resort on the Pacific coast) to regather what his brother stole from him before the two gods can meet again in battle; he brings Casiopea along, allowing her to see the outside world she always dreamed of. Meanwhile, Hun-Kamé's twin chooses Martín as his own mortal champion (gods are fond of parallels, you know), using him to force Casiopea back home.

As I said, the prose struck me as very standard YA, particularly at the beginning of the book. (Which I don't mean as an insult; lots of genres have their standard styles.) It did seem to deepen and become more complex as the story went on, though I'm not sure if that was a choice of Moreno-Garcia's, or just me becoming more used to her writing.

On the other hand, I really loved the worldbuilding. Hun-Kamé and Casiopea meet all sorts of other characters from folklore, and not just from Maya mythology – there's figures from European, modern Mexican, and other Indigenous groups in here as well. Though the Maya connections are obviously the most prominent, and are really, really well-done. The scenes set in Xibalba itself do a wonderful job of conveying its creepy otherworldliness.

I absolutely loved Hun-Kamé's characterization. Moreno-Garcia gives him an agelessness, a stillness, and a detachment which felt so plausible for a god, and a death god (however benevolent) in particular. His slow transformation as morality grows in him was very effective. Speaking of characterizations, I also appreciated that Moreno-Garcia gave even the 'bad guys' a lot of empathy and understanding as to the root of their actions. Finally, the relationship between Hun-Kamé and Casiopea was fantastic. This is possibly the very best god/mortal romance I've ever read, and its resolution just could not have been better.

So, overall: do I recommend it? The beginning is definitely not as good as the latter parts, and it still comes off as fairly YA-ish, but if that's a genre you enjoy, you really should check this one out.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.


The Changeling by Victor LaValle. Sort of fantasy, sort of literary fiction, all entirely wonderful. This is the story of Apollo Kagwa, a young father in modern NYC. His own father disappeared from Apollo's life so early that he barely remembers him, and consequently he struggles with learning to be a father himself. The first hundred or so pages of The Changeling are a non-fantastic, mundane but enthralling account of Apollo's life: how his parents met and divorced, how he grew into a rare book dealer, how he met and wooed his wife Emma, her pregnancy, her sister's role as at-home midwife, the birth of their son. It's all sweet and surprisingly engaging despite the lack of suspense or, really, plot (Apollo's obsession with posting too many baby photos on Facebook was so adorable that it made me coo out loud, and I DON'T EVEN LIKE BABY-FIC, Y'ALL).

And then everything changes. It starts when Emma is either being stalked or is descending into a particularly hallucinatory bout of postpartum depression; Apollo is fairly firmly convinced that it's the latter, but the narrative leaves either possibility open. This culminates in a horrific scene of violence (look at the title and think about the recommended response to changelings in the original stories, and you'll have some sense of what happens) that leaves Emma missing, Apollo filled with a desire for revenge, and everyone else in their lives confused.

The Changeling is mostly about fatherhood: good fathers, bad fathers, generational differences in fathering styles, how one becomes a father, how one fails at it despite the best of intentions. Even a first-edition of To Kill a Mockingbird that provides a major MacGuffin is signed by Harper Lee herself with “Here's to the Daddy of our dreams". Despite this, The Changeling is not a book about daddy issues, which is a slightly different thing and one that (in my opinion) is way overdone these days, but something rarer and more profound. It also makes the lack of Emma's perspective (who is very clearly having her own complex adventures just offscreen) a deliberate choice about where to focus rather than simply shunting aside the main female character, which it could have descended into but miraculously doesn't.

The Changeling is also about fairytales. Not just changelings, who of course are central (and the paired scenes where first Emma and then Apollo finally learn the truth about changelings are far scarier and more primal than any of the other modern literature about changelings that I've read; though I wouldn't put the book as a whole into the horror genre, those two scenes absolutely qualify), but also witches, Rapunzel, trolls (both the internet kind and the lives-in-a-cave, turns-to-stone-in-the-daylight kind), three magic wishes, and Maurice Sendak. Plus the American Dream, ideas of masculinity, and white supremacy – all their own kinds of fairytale – which twist and turn on the tellers.

There's so much I loved in this book; I can't fit it all into this review. NYC is depicted vividly and precisely, which I am always a total sucker for: pilgrimages to the Strand! dancers on the subway! the sounds of Riker Island! the gray of its winters and the surprising green of its little parks! Zipcars and long waits for the bus! Libraries crowded with screaming children and the barren emptiness of the beaches in winter! Race (Apollo and Emma are black) is omnipresent in the book while rarely being directly referenced, in a subtle portrayal of how it's both unimportant (everyone has parental anxieties!) and yet absolutely central to modern life. Also, somehow this book made me cheer for an app download, which is not a thing I previously thought possible. The Changeling manages such a wonderful mix of grief and humor and shock and optimism. It's the perfect novel.

I loved every single word in this book and cannot recommend it highly enough. Don't make the mistake I did of waiting two years to read it! READ IT NOW. It hooked me from the very first page and never let me down.

In summary: READ IT. SO. GOOD.