If I was in Quincy, Massachusetts, in the 90s or the canonical present for the course of this novel, I would’ve given Swallowtail ‘s serial killer exactly what he wanted: attention and a little bit of artistic appreciation. If I was a teenage dancer, I probably would’ve ended up dead, too.

Swallowtail by Emily Ross follows Samantha Star, a painter turned detective, as the haunting memory of her best friend’s murder rears its ugly head through the death of a local teenage dancer named Megan. The cases are eerily similar, featuring a grotesquely posed corpse, an allusion to a tragic Greek heroine, and a butterfly on the throat. Samantha grapples with her trauma as more dead girls appear, picking off members of Samantha’s daughter’s dance troop one by one, as the killer closes in on their shared unfinished business. Ultimately, Samantha must discover the truth behind her friend’s murder for the sake of her daughter’s survival and identify the true mystery behind the butterfly, the Greek tragedies, and the fuzzy memories of a knife.

Man, I love a small-town mystery. The claustrophobic feeling of a community that knows everything makes it feel like there are secrets and answers hiding around every corner. Quincy is a breathing place, and though we see only a select few landmarks, the characters we meet imply a larger, interconnected setting. New England has an atmosphere unlike anywhere else in the U.S., history weighs heavy like the fog, and you can’t tell me that something ancient doesn’t loom in those woods. The general air of mystery adds the perfect aesthetic to a mystery, even if it doesn’t use the folklore of the area itself. I’d absolutely stop and get a drink in this town, though probably not while somebody’s out there murdering teenage girls. That feels a little stupid.

The story’s central mysteries are intriguing and layered, though if you know enough about the cited Greek myths, some of the surprises aren’t surprising at all. The point of a surrealist art piece is that you’re not supposed to immediately understand what you’re looking at, but you understand the vibes, so to describe this book using the word surrealist (as noted multiple times in the synopsis and blurbs) feels disingenuous. The crime scenes are horrific, but they’re literal. I think that’s part of the point. The killer we meet throughout the story is an artist bitter from being pushed aside and ignored for his genius. He wants so deeply to be an artist that he blinds himself to art, perverting the medium into an almost jokey mimicry of itself. He’s trying too hard to be surrealist. A surrealist mystery is a neat premise, but by the way a mystery works, we can’t lean too hard into the surrealist and expect it to go well.

My major gripe with this novel is the lackluster dialogue. The opening chapters explain dynamics and plot points almost like info-dumps for the reader. I understand why that’s necessary when there’s so much ground to cover, but the conversations in the early chapters made me feel like the dialogue served as a way to directly address potential questions with immediately available answers. Take this section from Chapter Two, for example:

It’s a short example, but it embodies my issue. We have no time to unpack or discover things for ourselves. Why do we start the story here? Easy. It’s the anniversary of Sam’s trauma and her friend’s death. Rather than let it be brought up naturally, implied through the chapter header of Twenty Years Later or through Sam’s behaviors and thoughts, it’s immediately fed to us and checked off the list. It feels staged. Of course it’s staged, it’s a novel, that’s how fiction works, but moments like this take away from the exciting part of reading a mystery and this isn’t the only time this happens. Here’s another example from Chapter Five:

To be fair, this conversation is between Sam and her therapist, so the language is bound to be a little more direct and intentionally prying, but it’s another example of where I want more restraint in the dialogue. Real people aren’t going to explicitly go Oh yes! This very specific instance is common and important right now! Let me tell you the thing that you clearly are referring to even though you already know what I’m talking about, because there’s a third party here that needs context! It feels like we can’t be trusted to connect the dots between scene and information, like they exist separately and can’t be integrated without literal and direct leeway.

It’s early in the book, we have to establish all the info. I get it, but I want to discover when Sam discovers. I want to understand Sam, the details of the case, and the relationships I’m presented with, but I want to be trusted to catch on. It’s a trend in literature recently to overfeed the reader. Give us everything we could ever want so we can close the book, be satisfied, and not think too hard about it. That’s great. That’s what keeps many people reading, and I’ll never fault somebody for reading what they want to read (if it’s written by people, fuck generative A.I.). I want to be trusted to put in the effort. I don’t want my mysteries easy. I don’t want my characters stereotyped, their psyches explained like instructions in a manual.

TLDR: I had a great time with Swallowtail. The atmosphere was right, the characters performed their roles as intended, but I wish I felt less like my hand was held through finding the connections. I will be keeping an eye on Emily Ross’s work, as well as the growing catalog from Galiot Press in the coming months.

Originally published at https://leahskay.substack.com.

I have to preface reviews with a public reminder that reviews are not marks of merit. Books are subjective and opinions are to be taken with that understanding, especially when the opinion is coming out of my dumb ass mouth. I like what I like and I know why I like it, or dislike it, but that does not make my word objective truth. That’s the point. Reviews are articulated opinions meant to aid in making a decision on whether we pick up a book or not and should NOT be where you form your opinions wholly. I’m just one reader who wants to talk about her thoughts.

That being said, this is what I’ve read lately, and this is what I thought about it! Yay books!

Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola ★★★★☆

Helen of Troy, 1993, is a reimagining of the stolen beauty’s mythos as a gorgeous, redressing Helen as a restless housewife in 1990s small-town Sparta, Tennessee. Her birth from an egg, marriage to Menelaus, famed abduction/escape (depending on the source) to Troy by the crowned prince Paris, and other epic details of Helen’s story are stripped of their glitter and soaked in pre-9/11 Americana. It’s dirty the way Chuck E. Cheese is dirty, and I’ve yet to find another book that feels that way without trying to make a martyr out of itself.

Poetry, as I’ve come to know it, often relies on details of environment and feelings to connect with the reader in a sort of open-armed, ethereal think-space. It is often purposefully vague in its speaker to offer the most room for interpretation, development, and interjection, but Helen and her environment are so detailed that it feels like we’re following a person rather than a metaphor (though she is for sure both).

The language is approachable and skillful, nips right at the edges of all my childhood nostalgia, and roots itself deeply in themes of domestic mundanity, a woman’s place in history, and all the messy parts of being a small-town pariah. Also, the golden shovel poems (poems that use the end of every line to quote another poem/phrase/statement from a separate piece of media) are so clever that I find myself going back into the book to find all the easter eggs.

My Heresies by Alina Stefanescu ★★★☆☆

My Heresies uses the trendy pink cover (seriously, look around your local bookstore and tell me you don’t see pink on all the new releases somewhere, it’s a thing) to highlight a tongue in a wedding ring, so I thought I was in for some mouthy language about marriage troubles, but I found myself delightfully surprised to see the full lifetime of a girl turned woman. The deeply personal narrative leaves no room for the reader to interject herself and instead puts Alina’s lineage, childhood musings, and adult fears on full, public display.

I felt a little lost reading this book. The language often felt breathy, purposeful in its connections but spacious in its logic, in that classically enrapturing way I was always taught poetry was supposed to be. It felt like a masterclass I was underprepared for. I would’ve read this in class and cried because I didn’t get it. I leave this book feeling like I’m not smart enough to appreciate it for what it is and does, but what I do know is that “Alternative Index Discovered in Franz Kafka’s Notebooks” might be one of my favorite experiments in poetic form I’ve seen in years.

Quoting it here doesn’t do it justice, but look at this section of the poem and tell me this isn’t cool as hell:

These come from across citable sources, so there’s no room to fudge a line to make it mean what you want it to mean. All you can do is stitch them together. Alina looked at these throwaway notes and saw something breathing. I’m in awe of that level of appreciation and attention. I want to be more like that.

While My Heresies isn’t for me, I deeply appreciate anything that makes me think. I’ve never thought about linden and kudzu this much. I don’t know that I’d ever thought about Romania at all outside of Jeopardy! I knew nothing of Paul Celan, the art of socialization, what a Parousia was, or what an etude sounded like, until this book prompted me to look.

Originally published at https://open.substack.com.

I’m writing a book.

That shouldn’t be a surprise, considering anyone who has ever picked up a book by choice has probably thought about writing one at some point. To be swept up into a story with characters that make you feel seen and understood, to experience scenarios you can’t imagine having to live but endure a strange voyeurism for their suffering, to hold the heft of three-hundred-something pages of words and thoughts that could change your life…there’s nothing else to call that but magic.

We hold authors in such sentimental esteem, beloved bastards lucky enough to make a living on their words, and with the rise of generative A.I. as an alternative to actually learning the skill, it seems like everybody’s an author. Some of those authors get agents, get acquired by major publishing companies (colloquially known as the Big Five), get all the advances and dream perks of being a traditionally published author at a huge company. Some even skip a lot of those steps by self-publishing their work, then getting acquired by Hachette less than six months later, getting re-published with a new cover in the United Kingdom, and a promise of a special U.S. edition coming in the next year! One year from first publishing to international sensation! What an amazingly lucky streak!

And then it’s revealed that the book is partially plagiarized and the rest is written with AI. Some books get cancelled in the U.S, their shiny U.K edition removed from shelves, their Goodreads rating obliterated with betrayed readers, and their career shattered by your second book. Some! Some should be none, but as of right now, some is at least one;

Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, everyone!

As someone writing a book myself, I’m angry and I’m going to be mean about it. After all, Mia Ballard accomplished every writer’s dream through cheaters’ means. I don’t think she expected it to blow up as big as it did and for the AI reveal to be the end of her potential authorial career, but this will be a borderline impossible thing to come back from even when the dust settles. I’m usually pretty forgiving of books I dislike, disagree with, am uncomfortable with, or just plain don’t like, because somebody poured their heart and soul into making something for people to consume, knowing we’d consume it. We can be cruel to that kind of vulnerability.

I’m not going to be nice about this. While there is a real person behind this book, and a real life and career ruined, that real person attempted to absolve themselves of the vulnerability of writing a book by giving the power over to a computer.

I work in an office building where we’re semi-cordial with each other, and a few of my colleagues know that I spend my lunches and free moments writing at my desk. One of them asked me the other day how the book was going. We got talking about quantity of projects, the types of things I write, and eventually a question slipped out.

“Do you use any AI to write them?”

Quickest no of my life. It came off a little rude, I’m sure, judging by the surprise on his face. I apologized for it, but the idea that I’d spend so much of my time hitting that backspace at my desk just to clean up AI writing is one of the most insulting ideas anyone could present me with. I do my own work. I was that annoying kid in school who refused to let anyone cheat off her paper or take the multiple-choice answer if I could write an essay to explain why I’m right.

I know not everyone is like me.

Time, energy, financial situation, background, opportunities, and a whole lot of luck have to come together for a career in words to go well. Humans love an easy way out; it’s hardwired into our brains to find shortcuts to process overwhelming amounts of data and information, and in this age of technology, everything is right in front of us, begging us to use it, to take some of the weight of existing in an age overloaded with access away from us. I understand why it happens. I have some empathy for people. I get it. But the minute we give into that temptation, we give away the one human thing we have in this data-driven society we’ve built. Humans make art because we feel things. We trust authors to craft something with their art that makes us feel and think. That is what gives literature value.

And yet, we have Shy Girl slipping through the gatekeepers of modern literature and it is presented to us as something we should value and consume with our precious time. How could editors not notice? How could all of those beta readers, acquisitions officers, reviewers, and countless public consumers be fooled into believing the book was genuine? There are no set rules for detecting AI in writing, which is why it’s so dangerous to accuse an author of using it. All of AI’s tells are born from a database of real novels, grammar, concepts, and writing styles. AI checkers might tell you that anything written by Plath or Joyce is AI because of hyphens or that Rupi Kaur’s books are AI because of pale metaphors and direct language. The only accountable way of knowing is disclosure from the author themselves, which it seems Mia Ballard did when confronted by someone on the backend of this publishing deal. And that’s the looming danger of AI for authors, aspiring and established.

“Women have always been cast as caretakers, peacekeepers, and forgivers. We’re told to endure, to adapt, to rise above. But sometimes, the only way to heal is to rage. Sometimes, justice isn’t quiet or clean; it’s feral and bloody and unapologetic.” -from SHY GIRL

(This is considered one of the tell-tale signs of an AI passage: the triple descriptors that either explain exactly what the metaphor is meant to infer OR couples unusual or unnecessary adjectives together. This passage does the trick of triples…well, three times. AI loves threes.)

I don’t want to write about my book’s themes, plot, or characters publicly because somebody could just plug it into AI and write it instead. A self-important thought, but an honest one.

I don’t trust that a beta reader won’t scan my work with AI and call it a day because it took too long, the deadline was creeping in, or they just got too busy with life.

I don’t trust that editors will look at my work with their actual eyes and not just scan it for trends that AI is predicting will sell well.

I have to take everyone at their word, hope for the best, and press forward. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that when shown evidence that my fears are founded.

I care. I have to trust that the right people will care. I will never use AI to write my work. Once it’s out in the world, I can’t control what happens to it or who uses it for what reasons. While my work is in my hands, it will never have a single word written by generative AI in it.

I’m writing a book, with my own hands, thoughts, dedication, and soul-ripping desire to claw my way into the fabric of history with almost narcissistic devotion. I write because I want to make something real. I understand that it’s easier just to type a couple of sentences, skim over the text, and call it good enough. After all, that’s what is being reinforced when things like Shy Girl go as far as they do. I don’t want it easy. Easy defeats the point. Friction is how critical thought happens, how problems are forced to be solved, and how we notice things need to be changed.

Books deserve to be written. People deserve to write. And we should be allowed, encouraged, and honored to do it ourselves. You’d have to pry creating something I’m proud of with my own skills out of my cold, dead hands.

And AI, I’d like to see you try.

Originally published at https://leahskay.substack.com.

I spend four days a week in Midtown, my little cottagecore heart battered down by Sauron-style skyscrapers, blinding neon ads, and balding topiaries planted in concrete bowls to trick us into believing we’re getting our basic habitat needs. I’m harsh on the city, the claustrophobic discomfort it tucks around my sensibilities, but one of the most rewarding parts of NYC is finding the city’s weirdness. Not grown men rolling out from beneath subway seats or men throwing each other up and down the stairs (both of these happened to/around me), but the wholesome weird: scratch and sniff deodorant campaigns, a store specializing in sock puppets and pet rocks, fashion girlies taking mid-greenlight editorials, and Dinosaur, the High Line ‘s resident behemoth pigeon.

How can anyone hate anything when there’s this guy?

Dinosaur lives on the High Line Plinth, a small seating area on the walkable overpass stretching almost a mile and a half along the Hudson side of Manhattan. The High Line is a brief reprieve from the gridlock below and lets walking be leisurely instead of a race to find the smallest open spaces between you and literally the slowest walkers you’ve ever seen. The creator, Ivan Argote, says the artistic intention behind Dinosaur ‘s scale and subject is a spit in the face of grand monuments to undeserving historical figures and challenges the power imbalance between human and bird. While it’s true humanity owes the pigeons an apology for the invention of the telegram and the birds’ subsequent abandonment (that’s an essay for a later time), the general culture has decided the primary purpose of the statue is: P I G E O N. And we all know cultural interpretation outweighs intention in the history books, don’t we?

National Pigeon Appreciation Day was celebrated this year with an outpouring of avian adoration around Dinosaur ‘s aluminum feet. Events included a Zumba hour, Mother Pigeon’s Impeckable Puppet Show, panels on sustainable urban planning for wildlife populations, music collaborating with the BirdSong Project, and a pigeon impersonation contest. This kind of wholesome weirdness is what makes living in NYC bearable for me. Look at all this whimsy! This community! This harmless fun!

Wow, Leah, this sounds like the perfect combination of everything good in NYC! Are the powers that be really planning to kill off this beloved icon?

Of course they are. We can’t have anything free and fun, look where we live!

To my sentimental dismay, Dinosaur was never intended to be a permanent fixture. Argote won his space at The Plinth from a pool of over 80 other submissions, and thus, we’ve had a year and a half of Dinosaur supremacy. We got so used to seeing this giant pigeon, idolizing his empty-headed stare, parading at his feet in an outburst of city pride, that we forgot the gentle giant was never meant to stay. Other artists deserve their chance to shine, to make their mark on the skyline with whatever massive installation takes the space next. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s sculpture, The Light That Shines Through the Universe will be taking center stage on the Fifth Plinth this spring in the form of a twenty-seven-foot-tall Buddha. A symbol of peace and balance amidst outrageous war and division across the world, to be sure. It should be a celebratory moment, and I love to celebrate artists making art (so hell yeah Nguyen!), but there’s an undercurrent of disbelief and mourning for the beloved giant.

In a moment of such indecision, unpredictability, and sterile pessimism in people and their intentions…it’s hard to welcome any change. This pigeon is a surefire smile, a stupid wall-eyed testament to people loving silly things with meaning and interpretation reliant on critical thinking. Sometimes, we just want to look at a pigeon and know he’s going to be there tomorrow. But we can’t. Pigeons die. Statues crumble and are replaced. Buildings get smoother edges and less character. Everything grays.

I can count on New York to provide me with another fun, weird thing to love (looking at you, Twisted Spine), but I have to be honest. I’m nervous at the idea of turning another corner near my bland day job and finding nothing but a sea of gray slab skyscrapers full of people in suits that think the color green in business wear is daring. I’m sure The Light That Shines Through the Universe will be marvelous. Maybe I’ll look more into Buddhism because of it. It’ll be beautiful, shiny, and new. I’m excited to see it.

Originally published at https://leahskay.substack.com.

I need you to look at something.

Is this a poem?

This was posted directly to Twitter to be marveled and advertised as the latest addition to a backlog of short, subversive poetics for a small lit mag. An editor read this poem and thought it was unequivocally a poem; something rich, with interpretive space and meaning, enough to select it from the slush and put their publication’s name on it. I’ll be honest, if this came across my desk, I’d have rejected it immediately but commended the confidence it takes to send something so sparse. After a quick Google of what guimp and pilious mean (both to do with hair, it seems), I was left with a single thought: is this seriously a poem?

I have been asking this question since I was first confronted with “ We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks in high school. I have to give Ms. Baker props, because the look of shock and confusion on all of our faces must’ve been hilarious. The poem had rhythm, which was the only saving grace in our teenage eyes, but what do you mean a poem doesn’t have to rhyme? That was the rule. There were rules to follow, rubrics to adhere to, so that when we read our textbooks and turned in our little experiments in literature, we had something to be graded on. And yet, when Ms. Baker turned to our objections and sat on her desk, all cool and calm like she was running her own Dead Poets Society out of a freshman English class, she asked us something I personally have never fully bounced back from; what rules?

Nobody can give me a straight answer on what a poem is or how to write one. The lovey-dovey answer is that poetry is a feeling, a clever use of language that brushes the edges of a concept with an emotional varnish translated through line breaks and otherwise unacceptable grammar structure, but that’s too idealistic and fluffy to teach anyone anything. The literalist definition is that poems use rhythm and aesthetics to evoke meaning, as if prose and other literary forms cannot. So which is it? What is it not? What makes something undoubtedly a poem and what makes it something different?

When I agreed to become the Poetry Editor for a passionate lit project online ( Bloomin’ Onion, love ya), I thought I’d find the elusive definition of poetry hiding in the inbox: a pattern I’d recognize in myself, my tastes, in writers’ works, in the secret editor handbook that’s distributed by the literary elite in the mail when you agree to become someone who makes decisions…but then I see something like Castro’s work and it makes me reevaluate. Is there a reason that I read it and feel a dull pain behind my eyes and the overwhelming fear that I’m missing something? Is it bad? How can it be bad if good is so diverse that it borderlines on senseless?

I know what I look for in poetry. I like a sense of grounding, niche and specific references, and work that trusts the readers to understand without overexplaining. I don’t want to be told what to think, but I also don’t want to be left in the dark with fancy words in a shape so vague it has no edges at all. Rupi Kaur, easily considered one of the most popular modern poets under the age of thirty-five, exploded onto the literary scene doing exactly what I dislike and has made more than a living with her dedicated, passionate fanbase. I don’t like her work, but does that make it less of a poem than anything by Mary Oliver, or “ The Red Wheelbarrow “ by William Carlos Williams, or anything being written in a high school classroom after they read “We Real Cool” for the first time? It doesn’t, because there’s no definition of what a poem is. Not functionally.

So how do you know if you’ve written a poem?

By all evidence, you don’t.

You write something, and at some point, a mystical feeling comes over you, like the Holy Spirit or a good buzz or rapid and sudden revitalization of a dead horse to beat again. It just is. It just happens. And you will never know why. I suppose that should be thrilling, the true spirit of human creativity, the elusive muse manifest. I find myself standing in a sea of poems, or things calling themselves poems, begging me to see them as they are and love them, and I clutch my own work and beg it to tell me what it wants to be.

I scrap thousands of ideas and one-off lines like debris from an eraser and scream into a well to feel better. What am I supposed to be doing? How do I get better at a skill that has no benchmarks? Caring less isn’t an option. There’s no point to learning if I don’t care. I dig my heels into the ground and throw myself at the wall over and over and over until something that feels right comes pouring out of whatever ego wound I’ve given myself and hope it’s poem-shaped. I can’t rely on that. I can rely on skill, practice, foundations, and patience.

Maybe someday I’ll have the confidence to put two words to my name, declare it a poem, and trust the world to get it, but I don’t think that’s the kind of poet I want to be. I just have to figure out what a poem is.

Originally published at https://open.substack.com.

You don’t need me to tell you why I dove in. Read that again. How could I not?

Here we go, the once-over: Our narrator wakes up with no memory of who he is (classic), running through a moody English forest with the name Anna on his mind and a gunshot ringing in the distance (not classic). He learns that he, the mind called Aiden Bishop, is the same as the body he currently inhabits, and that he will live out the actions of various bodies in a quantum loop to witness the death of wealthy heiress, Evelyn Hardcastle, from all angles. Aiden has eight days to reveal the truth about Evelyn Hardcastle’s death or risk being quantum blinked out of existence by the laws of time and space, according to a seemingly omniscient overseer disguised as a rich man’s footman hiding in the estate.

Oh, and there’s other people who are guest-starring in other bodies and if they get the answer before Aiden does, he blinks out of existence.

And if he sleeps, he wakes up in a different body that can override the host’s will in order to act out the day as intended.

And there’s a masquerade so you don’t know who anyone is.

Also, there’s tea (it’s England).

If that once-over is any indication, this book is dense and interconnected with pushpins and thread on a detective corkboard somewhere in Tutton’s writing space. The level of organization it takes to keep up with over 400 polished pages of mystery is, I think, only possible if the author is fixated or on a crazy number of stimulants. Seriously imagine it; one correct version of the day where Evelyn is meant to die, the eight characters that play out their days so that Aiden has perspectives to jump into, all the side characters like maids and footmen that Aiden never inhabits but have plot relevance, other characters with this body-hopping power that also influence what happens to the eight characters during the day, all the clues, single lines of dialogue that mean different things depending on the person hearing them and the body inhabited…it’s absurd. I’m usually hesitant when books are unique or bend the limits but this? It’s Game of Thrones complex without the dragons and sex, from a writer’s standpoint, anyway.

Now, reading all that might make you nervous, but the beauty of a book like this is that the author, publisher, and book designer all know exactly what they’re dealing with. Mystery books have a lot going on (and this one, again, see above, is insane) so there’s a lot to learn. I steer away from fantasy and sci-fi novels for that reason, since there’s often so much frontloading of context, names, places, and worldbuilding that I’m overloaded at the beginning or bored because there’s no plot. Mysteries are centered in one location, with one premise, with a limited number of characters, though complex and interwoven. There are so many small design choices outside of the actual story that make this novel approachable without giving away too much.

It’s got a map — that’s fun, and helps us visualize the location. The chapters are separated by days to help us figure out what host we are and where that puts us in context. Clever! An active choice! Could be annoying to some because there’s no table of contents and you have to keep putting the book down and coming back to it (me)! But my favorite thing is the invitation at the beginning of the book. The invitation dictates every important character you’ll meet in the novel, at least the ones of status, with a quick descriptor of their job/reason for being invited. I had to reference this sheet multiple times throughout my reading to keep straight everyone’s names and roles, which could be a knock against the novel because you should be able to get everything you need from the prose itself (eye-roll). But I had something I could easily reference and reorient myself with, and I’d rather have an engaging story with supplemental resources than be intimidated by information and left feeling like I can’t keep up. Who wants to feel dumb? Who wants readers to feel dumb? Love it when designers get to do their thing. Love it when writing is functional.

Next time you read a book you like or see a cover, look for the designer/artist info and give them a little high-five in your head. They don’t get enough credit.

One of my main gripes I have with the book is the very thing that I praised earlier: the complication. This is not a transit read. This is not a book to pick up if you have obligations other than reading this book. The complication is intriguing, but at times, it can feel like it’s suffocating itself and therefore suffocating the reader. I will never damn a book for demanding attentive reading, interpretation, extra thought, and focus. I will, however, warn you against picking up this book if you don’t have a weekend solely dedicated to eating, sleeping, and reading. I found myself missing so many details and having to cycle back in order to understand where I was in the story, which ate into my reading time because while I’m fortunate enough to have time to read at all, I have a job that’s not reviewing books. I lost steam towards page 320, and with another 100+ to go, I found myself trudging along just to see how it all played out instead of being excited to learn the secrets that once gripped me. The book is complicated so it’s long, but I think we could’ve done with one fewer subplot to bring it back to something manageable. My sticky notes became less frequent, my notes less intense, and my attention lagging. I’m an avid mystery fan, but even I have some limits.

It baffled me completely when it became Sci-Fi.

The premise of a time-loop at all should’ve keyed me in earlier, but the extent to which knowing the reason we’re looping changed my attitude toward the events and ultimately left me feeling a little deflated. As it turns out, Blackheath Manor was once the real scene of an unsolved murder, that of Evelyn Hardcastle, that continues to remain unsolved. However, the version of which we stand in as Aiden is a complete technological fabrication, a simulation intended to rehabilitate prisoners and solve unsolved crimes of the past at the same time — a real two-for-one special. The other people guest-starring in bodies are vicious criminals, the titular Anna whom Aiden begins with being a political terrorist who murdered Aiden’s cop sister. The Blackheath simulation is reserved for the worst of the worst, and for some glossy reason, Aiden was allowed into the simulation as an innocent man to enact revenge on his sister’s killer. The whole time Aiden was hopping through bodies, the wardens of the simulation were manipulating the game to help Aiden escape and trap Anna inside forever.

This revelation was one straw too heavy for me. It turns Aiden into this absolute hero, altruistic in all of his goals, and the epitome of the good guy. Tutton frames it as ‘I did bad things too but look at me now’ since he went after Anna for the murder of his sister, but the way everything is concocted in his favor undercuts what could have been a conversation about morals, redemption, and what we do in an environment with no actual consequences. We like detective stories because the detectives are smart, not perfect or moral. Aiden is literally described as an innocent man whose only character trait seems to be believing Anna can change from being a terrorist to a good person and consistently “losing” himself in the hosts he’s embodied.

Ultimately, this book lands somewhere between a fun gothic mystery novel with an interesting device and a philosophy lecture in forgiveness and rehabilitation skinned like one. The clear moral message, the final reveal of Evelyn’s murderer, and the complete story feel…underwhelming. Everything is right in front of you, explained as clearly as a synopsis, with a successful escape and a dead conspirator. Complication is the root of this story: there’s always an ulterior motive, a hidden secret, something layered on something else to weave this incredibly thought-out plot.

TLDR: 3.5/5 Clearly well-loved and cared for by the author but the ending feels too neat to be satisfying. Beautiful atmosphere, interesting characters, and tropes are familiar but not boring. Intrigued. A little disappointed.

If it hadn’t been for the outward influence of book club, I probably never would’ve picked it up. Maybe to admire the cover, the sparse and spacious pink table and the black void, but never because it sparked my interest. I’d call this book a romance from a mile away, a literary-focused one maybe judging by the interpretive cover, and that’s not a genre I tend to flock towards when I have options. However, book clubs are book clubs, and the suggestion wheel spins, and so here we are. Everything deserves a fair chance, especially if someone went through the trouble of writing it (because that’s hard enough as it is).

I’m a writer! I’ve had lovers! It’s perfect! I’m in!

The quick once-over goes as follows: Casey Peabody is an aspiring author in 1997 still begrudgingly hopeful that her six-year-old novel will be the next big American classic. She works at a restaurant to fund her aspirations, lives in a potting shed converted by a shitty landlord with a cute dog, and spends her free time loathing her peers that “sold out” (got jobs that pay off their debt, lived in houses with real walls, etc.). After a fling with a married man at a writing retreat, Casey returns to her mundane life in Boston to grapple with her recently deceased mother. She becomes entangled with another writer named Silas who is grieving his dead sister through poetry and leather jackets. At the same time, she meets another, more famous writer named Oscar and his two motherless children. And now, if you can imagine this next part with some breathless soap opera drama, Casey must her sexually charged triangle to fuel her novel and fall in love with just one of these two eligible bachelors or risk losing it all to her debt, maybe cancer, definitely literary superiors.

I was really hoping to like Casey, but more importantly, to understand Casey and find solace in the experience of another writer trying to build success from hard work and spite. I know that I’m in 2025 and she’s in 1997, literally my entire lifetime happens after this book ends, and so the changes in the literary scene are vast and evolving. However, the stereotype of the idealistic creative persists, conflating writers with listless dreamers and wealthy academics. Casey’s interpretation feels like something I would’ve seen on Tumblr as a teenager;

“I don’t write because I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.”

I think I rolled my eyes so hard I saw my brainstem for a second.

This motive isn’t uncommon among writers, but the lack of introspection and acknowledgment of the reasons we actually write infuriates me. There’s no writer without an ego. Writing is the physical proof of our thoughts, the act of throwing them on the page and claiming we have something to say to justify our existence and intelligence. I can say this because I’m also a writer, an also partially successful one with a novel on the shelf. We are not vessels for the muses to preach through. It’s a circle jerk. We want our words in the world because we want others to look at us and think we’re smart, cultured, an authority in our space with a honed craft. We want to be better than others, to have our words mean more because we wrote them with metaphors about blue curtains and red wheelbarrows. Look at this review! I’m proving my own ego: I read a book, I had opinions about it, I wrote a review for all of you to read, and I’m going to feel a certain way based on how other people respond to it. I don’t write this review for the sake of writing a review. If I did, you’d never see it, and we’d never be here.

And yet, Casey recognizes this hypocritical, egotistical relationship with writing in everyone but herself. Luke, the writing retreat fling, writes poetry (something clearly not as serious and important as real fiction) about bees and she dismisses it as annoying. How dare he write about something! Poetry? But she gets equally annoyed when others dismiss her writing the way. Casey literally embodies the struggling artist trope, waiting tables for rich families and eating the occasional “so you’re writing the next Best American Novel?” jab that I think every writer has tasted once or twice. The way that we rely on media to entertain us and then turn around and belittle the ones that make it because it’s somehow less concrete and useful is the epitome of hypocrisy, and then Casey (and writers everywhere) falls into the same easy trap is further proof of how egotistical this whole literary sphere is. Like no, girl, you can’t criticize them all for being annoying and then look at your work like its God’s gift to artistry. Writers aren’t martyrs on their own. Acknowledge it, please, even just a little bit. A sprinkle.

Writers & Lovers does, however, have these beautiful moments of depth that bleed through circumstances, interactions, silences that we get to linger in, a criticism that Casey faces in her own work. One of my favorites is when she’s at Oscar’s house for dinner and his sons are recounting a bedtime story that depicts the weakness and eventual death of their mother (I’d love to give you a chapter number to reference but this book has no chapter numbers and while that’s a formatting and stylistic choice, it makes finding anything in this book impossible unless you know the exact page number, and even then, if you have a different copy than I do, reader, good luck). Listening to Oscar’s sons discuss the death of their mother with the lightness and understanding of two intelligent but still young children while Casey grapples with the death of her own mother has a level of space between the scene itself and the literal explanation that this book leans on. We, the reader, are allowed to look at the scene, and do this magical thing called interpreting and filling in the blanks. That’s where literature is beautiful and impactful.

Up until now, we’d only been told about Casey’s dead mom with variations of “my mom is dead” with little subtlety, like the bluntness is somehow supposed to feel more realistic and justified with the mic-drop style comment. It feels like we’re not trusted to get it. We have to be reminded every three chapters because the opportunity to emotionally invest us in Casey’s dead mom has passed. We just keep looking at geese and getting sad. Sometimes we want to be told outright about thoughts, feelings, events, and history, so we can pack up the exposition and move on to the interesting stuff, like the scene listed above. These scenes are where books thrive. There’s not enough of it for me to justify the moments of jarring clarity because there’s nothing jarring about them. They’re just there, and I find them falling flat against the potential of what clearly Lily King has the capacity to do with her work. Don’t show me how interesting your work can be if you’re not going to use it. Don’t do that to me.

When I first got the book, I predicted the ending to my boyfriend (who was also reading it for book club and always had fifty pages on me). I said, “she’s gonna end up without the guys because they’re getting in the way of her writing and then she’s gonna get the big book deal and solve all of her problems through connections and luck.” I love doing this for books because often, I’m proven wrong and leave satisfied that it didn’t stereotype the ending or seal everything in shrink-wrap. I was seventy percent right (boyfriend’s estimate). I am a sidewalk psychic, I guess.

It’s a book about writing and being a writer, and so if you’re audience is writers, you can’t scare them with the reality of book publishing; you have to give us the ending of the first novel getting picked up by agents (almost immediately, eleven failures is cookie crumbs), a single revision that makes it perfect, and going to a bidding war with every high-end publisher in the country for a six-figure deal that automatically solves all of her money problems. It’s idealistic, and in my opinion, unjustified. Oh, but she got a guy at the end — the flaky, inconsistent one instead of the one whose only known flaw is an inability to see his own successes.

I don’t find her persistence admirable, I find her refusal to combine her dreams with an actual living to be almost a pity party of “why won’t the world just let me write?” Because we live in a society, girl. Only the rich have the time to sit around and write all day because someone else is financing them. Everyone else has to work, build, protect, and sustain themselves. Casey’s refusal to do that is rewarded with her dream right in the knick of time, because if she hadn’t gotten that call at that time, she’d have been screwed. It seems like the theme of the book wants to be about persistence, when in truth, persistence isn’t what’s rewarded, it’s immaturity.

TLDR: 2/5 I think Writers & Lovers was trying to sell readers on the idea that if you just work hard enough, your dreams will come true, but I felt betrayed by the ease the solution came to Casey’s life through no actual legwork of her own. Her love interests can be shaved down to a simple case of matured/threatening to her sense of hard work and flaky/mysterious manic pixie dream boy. Her mom’s dead. Geese honk. The end.

We checked into a hotel that none of us would’ve ever afforded on our own. We got the stares. You know the ones. The rich-family-goes-to-fancy-resort-and-a-bunch-of-spring-breakers-walk-in kind of glare, and they were right. We didn’t belong there. I’d never seen a hotel with an indoor waterfall before. A lot of my experiences in Japan have centered around being the outsider, and when we walked into that hotel with our stay covered by credit card points, everyone knew we were not meant to be there. It didn’t matter, though. We were just there for a good time.

Our plan for Okinawa was the same as everyone else: swimming in the pool, sunsets on the beach, sipping cocktails at local izakayas, and tending to inevitable sunburns. Our first night we did exactly that. Late into the summer evening, full of sashimi and tempura, my friends and I meandered back towards our hotel with the carefree spirit of girls who knew it was safe to walk at night in Japan. Along the highway towards our hotel, the night winds rattled the palms enough to drop full fruits onto the asphalt below.

“What kind of fruit is that, anyway?” Heather asked.

She picked one up and examined it, offering it towards us for our inspection. It was small, naturally shaped unlike the ones at the grocery store, with brownish-orange flesh and green specks like something had punctured the surface.

“Are those teeth marks?” Erin added.

Another fruit dropped from the tree beside us. We looked up into the tree, stupidly, but the shadows of the thick brush disguised whatever was shaking the branches against the breeze.

And then something swooped overhead. Something heavy, with thick wings and heft enough to feel from over a foot overhead. Instinctively, we ducked down and looked up towards the moon, and in the silhouette of the Naha skyline, my friends and I resigned ourselves to death by giant flying bat.

Above us hung a thick brown bat with a wingspan that easily reached over three feet across. Shiny black eyes paid no attention to us as it swooped by on its nightly chase for stationary hanging fruit and French fries. It landed on a low branch where we could still see it and hung upside down, comedically bending the tree under its weight. Quickly snatching a fruit from the branch, it plunged its triangular face into the fruit, took a bite or two, and clumsily dropped it at our feet.

“No wonder people thought vampires were real,” Heather said in awe. “He’s like a little guy!”

“There are more,” Erin said, a little more apprehensive than Heather and I. “Look up.”

And she was right. Once you saw one, it was easy to spy the dozens of them flying and bouncing through the trees on either side of the highway. Wildlife was abundant in Okinawa, mostly in the form of crabs and friendly wild cats, but these were bigger and more intimidating than anything we’d seen. They were beautiful.

And absolutely terrifying, in an awe-inspiring kind of way.

The Ryukyu Flying Fox, named after the native people of Okinawa, is colloquially known as a Megabat because of its size. They live primarily in semi-tropical islandic countries like the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan due to the species’ love for humidity. Ryukyu Flying Foxes are classified as vulnerable by the IUCN, which I never would’ve guessed by the sheer number of them that flew over our head that evening. The numbers we saw did explain how these bats got bumped from endangered up to vulnerable, however, so I might just be unable to comprehend what those numbers actually mean.

Heather, Erin, and I abandoned our trek to the hotel and took a detour through the local park. The rapidly chilling evening didn’t stop us from whipping out our flashlights and spying more of these giant spectacles. We got eaten alive by bugs, so much so that the mosquito bites on my arms left spots in my gnarly sunburn. I’d never been anywhere tropical before, so every new thing just proved my bias that Japan was a magical place. Bats themselves hold significance in Japanese history and folklore, and while hunting down these creatures at the dead of night, I understand where it came from.

In American culture and most other western cultures, bats are synonymous with all the spooky scary things. I always associated bats with rabies because I watched some B-list medical drama where a girl got bit by a bat on a field trip and came down with rabies. However, in Japan, bats are symbols of happiness and good fortune. They’re revered for their ability to adapt to new environments and often associated with the Shinto goddess, Amaterasu, for bringing her sunny blessings even in the darkness of night. Folkloric bats have the ability to turn into water droplets and sprinkle luck onto those they land on.

During the day, my friends and I partook in everything Okinawa had to offer. We ate fresh tuna rice bowls for breakfast, swam in the gentle oceans with brightly colored guppies, and taste tested Blue Seal ice creams on the boardwalk of America Town. Normal tourist stuff, especially in Naha because of the American Naval base. But every moment we spent enjoying the sun, we quietly anticipated sneaking out of our ritzy hotel, dodging the gazes of rich parents sipping on expensive wine at the bar, to go be the annoying foreign tourists frolicking through the park in search of bats.

Heather was so enthralled by the bats we saw that she still brings them up, almost a year later. She donates to a bat sanctuary too. I love that she’s so excited by them and now claims them as her favorite animal, but I’ll resign to admiring them from a distance.

Heather, Erin, and I got really close on that trip. We found community in our other outsiders, expressed the fears and frustrations only other outsiders could feel, and reveled in the absolute insantity it was that we were living in Japan. The bats were just a vessel of these feelings. We didn’t want our nights to end. We chased down these seemingly mythical creatures, in awe with the world, and fully aware that nights like this would never happen again once we left that year, that day, that exact minute. Erin was moving back to Canada to be a flight attendant. Heather was planning to remain in Japan forever. I had no idea where I was going or what was coming next.

We were just there…running around in the middle of the night, in search of bats.

If you’ve spent any time online, you’ve probably come across those articles that claim natural remedies like essential oils and onion socks are the only ethical cure-alls on the market. Honey, specifically, is one of those miracle treatments often turned to as an example of natural medicines, and for good reason. Antioxidants, proteins, acids, and enzymes present in most types of honey (most specifically Manuka honey) have been proven to heal wounds, suppress coughs, kill harmful bacteria that cause Staph infections, and more.

And some, perhaps not as ancient as we would like, believed that with a little coaxing, honey could heal all ailments, and even prevent death as a whole. All you had to do was eat flesh from a mummified body.

It was just that easy!

As early as the 4th century BCE, honey had been used to embalm deceased bodies. Honey’s high sugar content dries out much of the bacteria that decomposes a body, so when applied to a body, the flesh of the person becomes stiff and gelatinous. Mellification itself is an ancient word used to describe the production and usage of fresh and fermented honey, including when it was an ingredient in embalming. However, the Mellified Man takes this practice one step forward.

In Arabia, a few men who reached the age of 70 wanted to help others as their lives ended. They dedicated the remainder of their lives to drinking and consuming only honey, until a hefty percentage of their bodily productions excreted honey-like substances. Their goal was to become as close to the ultimate healing substance of their time, suffering until the end in order to help future generations the best way they thought how.

The man then died because…obviously. He was then placed in a coffin, flooded with more honey, and sealed for one hundred years. After a century, it was believed that the combination of human contents and honey created a potent solvent that could cure all ailments when ingested.

This process is often confused with the Burmese practice of encasing high priests in honey as a holy symbol, and many of the details in both procedures are mixed, deflected, combined, and omitted. Also, it’s important to mention that the Mellified Man story is from a secondhand source, which brings into question the validity of the mythos.

While the Mellified Man’s origins are a bit misty, the act of medical cannibalism follows the same logic as treating diseases by bleeding out the sickness, adding crushed skulls to medicines for headaches, and sipping blood to increase wisdom and strength. It was often believed that the body healed the body. By supplementing the ailing part of the body with a healthy version, it was believed that the sick body would absorb the spiritual, physical, and medicinal benefits and heal itself. Ingestion was thought to be the quickest method to relief.

While modern medicine doesn’t recommend eating dead bodies anymore, we still apply the concept of using another’s body for our own healing. Transplants, transfusions, stem cell growth, antibodies, and more are all remnants of this concept.

We learn more about healing by watching a body heal, and while people in the 4th century didn’t have the same chemical and medical insights, there was a logic to their seemingly magical cure-all.

Sometimes you just have to eat a dead guy, I guess?

I think she just wants me in prison.

The desire for an alternative burial is nothing new, but when you come from a small Christian town like me, it might be hard to imagine doing anything other than burying yourself in the local cemetery. Cremation was an alternative practice for a while, but now it is equally, arguably more, mainstream as a classic casket burial. Now, even more alternative methods of disposing of your body are available for the people like my mother, much to my relief. She’s given me a comprehensive list of objections and stipulations to consider when proposing an alternate burial:

-must include water

-no dismemberment or bodily reduction of any kind

-absolutely no cremation (she’s terrified of burning, even in death)

-around the same price as a classic funeral

This list immediately knocked out some top alternative burials offered in my area. No ash diamonds, no becoming a sapling, no cloth eco-burial. Still, I remained hopeful that I’d find something that would satisfy my mother’s post-mortem dreams and keep me out of the government eye.

Option One: Water Cremation

When I first put the words water and burial into Google, this is the first thing that came up. Alkaline Hydrolysis is the scientific name for the process in which the deceased person is placed in a coffin or shroud within a vat of water and potassium hydroxide. Under heat and pressure, the body decomposes in under 24 hours. The final product is a brownish green slime with crumbly bones that are returned to the deceased person’s family as a form of ash. The sludge (which was once human flesh, tissue, organ, and fat) is then disposed of through the sewage system or fed to green spaces as fertilizer. Water Cremation first appeared in 1888 as a method to quickly turn animal carcasses into high-value fertilizer, and it wasn’t until 2005 that the first modern water cremator became public. It’s been monopolized by the Resomation company ever since.

My mother, not really trusting science from after 1995, immediately shot down this idea, citing the anti-cremation rule. Turns out, it’s not just about the fire. She doesn’t want to be turned to ash because, and I quote, “because then my sludge isn’t with my body.”

Moving on.

Option Two: Coral Reef

While I knew this one wouldn’t go over too well, I hoped the sheer coolness of this option would outweigh the fact you had to be cremated to do it. Coral reefs are dying out rapidly, and why not use your dead body to bring life back to the ocean?

This practice takes cremated human remains and mixes them with ocean-safe concrete to craft underwater structures. The fiberglass-concrete mixture doesn’t rust and offers refuge for aquatic creatures in its porous surface. The reefs can last up to 500 years, which hopefully, will be enough time for the reefs growing on top of them to be self-sustaining. And if you miss your loved one, you can visit them with a dive team and the exact coordinates given to you upon placement.

Like I thought, Mom immediately rejected the idea without hearing any further. As much as she wants to see the ocean thrive, she wants to physically be in it. Not buried in concrete, not turned to dust, but fully dissolved by the crushing current of the deep, deep ocean.

And I found a solution.

Option Three: Burial At Sea

This is mostly reserved for Navy veterans, but the U.S. government offers a full, legal burial at sea under specific parameters. The deceased person doesn’t need to do anything prior to their death, lucky them. Instead, you, the person in charge of the body, must apply for an MPRSA permit through the U.S. government, charter a boat to take them and the body at least three miles off the coastline, place your loved one in a biodegradable shroud or casket and wrap them in incredibly heavy chains, and inform the Environmental Protection Agency at least 30 days before you chuck your loved one in the water. This is usually done for cremated remains, which makes everything much easier, but Mom wants to be dumped full-bodied, so that’s what I researched.

I see some logistical issues with this. If Mom dies, I only have a few days to do something with her body before problems arise. So, am I supposed to anticipate her death and do all of this beforehand? What happens if she holds on for longer than I thought? Or is it easier than I thought? When the time comes, and I hope it won’t be for a long time, will it just fall into place?

I don’t want to find out any time soon.