Title: Our Share of Night
Author: Mariana Enriquez
Translator: Megan McDowell
Genre: Fantasy horror, fiction, family drama

If Mexican Gothic left you craving more South American fantasy horror, Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez of Argentina (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) has you covered. This is a family epic intertwined with the dark machinations of a macabre cult and its impact. It's also a splendid allegory for the evils of colonialism and generational trauma. This book was #15 from the "Women in Translation" rec list.

The book begins with Juan, a powerful but ill man who acts as a "medium" for the cult to commune with its dark god. Juan, struggling with the health of his defective heart, the wear-and-tear of years as the medium, and the grief and rage of his wife's recent death (he suspects, at the orders of the cult he serves) is desperate to keep his son Gaspar from stepping into his shoes, as the cult wants. Juan's opening segment of the book is about his efforts to protect Gaspar.

From there, the book branches off into other perspectives which give background to both the cult and the family. This is a great way of giving us a holistic and generational view of the cult, but it does drag occasionally. Gaspar's sections--in his childhood and then later in his teens/young adulthood--together make up the majority of the book, and while enjoyable, do amble off into great detail about his and his friends' day-to-day lives, such that I did wonder sometimes when we were getting back to the plot. I don't like to cite pacing issues, because I think that gets thrown around a lot whenever someone didn't vibe with a book, but the drawn-out length of these quotidian sections doesn't fit well with how quickly the climax of the book passes and is wrapped up. I would have liked to have spent less time with Gaspar at soccer games and more on his plans for addressing the cult.

However, on the whole, the book is a fun, if very dark read. It also serves well as a critique of Argentina's moneyed class and of colonialism in general, and how money sticks with money even across borders. Here, Argentina's wealthy have more in common with English money than with the Argentine lower classes (and that's how they want it). The cult, populated at its upper echelons by the privileged, is an almost literal blight on the land, willing to sacrifice an endless amount of blood, local and otherwise, to beg power off a hungry and unknown supernatural entity.

It brutalizes its mediums, which it often plucks from poverty to wring for power and then discard. Juan was adopted away from his own poor family at six, under the insistence his parents would not be able to pay for the medical care he needed, and he is the least-abused of the cult's line of mediums. As soon as the cult sets their eye on his son, Juan must begin scheming how to keep Gaspar away from them.

Although he acts out of love of his son, Juan is also a deeply flawed person. He is secretive, moody, lies constantly (there is actual gaslighting here) and doesn't hesitate to knock Gaspar around to make him obey. The more he deteriorates--a common problem with all cult mediums--the less human he becomes. Part of this is his work, but much of it is also attributable to years of being used by the cult for its ends and the accumulated emotional trauma. This, of course, is then inflicted on Gaspar through his father's tempers and secrets.

Similarly flawed are the other members of the immediate family. Juan's wife Rosario, despite a better nature than her parents, still supports this cult and is eager for Gaspar to follow in his father's footsteps as a cult medium, in part for the prestige it will bring her as his mother. Gaspar, although far more empathetic and gentle than either of his parents, eventually grows up with his father's temper. Watching him grow from a sweet-natured little boy into the troubled young adult he becomes after years of his father's abuse and neglect is painful, but realistic.

The book is also unexpectedly queer. It's not often a book surprises me with its queerness, because that's usually what landed it on my radar in the first place, but this one did. Juan and Rosario are both bisexual and later in the book we spend some active time in Argentina's queer scene, including during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. 

An ambitious novel that for the most part, pulls off what it's trying to do. As mentioned, I wish the ending had gotten more room to breathe, and I would not have minded this coming at the cost of some of the middle bits of navel-gazing, but I still felt the story was satisfying. 

Title: Looking for Smoke
Author: K.A. Cobell
Narrators: Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Katie Anvil Rich, Jordan Waunch, Julie Lumsden
Genre: Crime thriller, murder mystery, fiction

Earlier this week I finished another commute audiobook, Looking for Smoke by K.A. Cobell. This is a crime thriller/murder mystery that takes place on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. When a teenage girl is found strangled at the Indian Days summer powwow, four of her classmates become the prime suspects in her murder. 

I would say this is a solid entry in the murder mystery genre. The book alternates perspectives between the four classmates, which allows the author to do some fun things keeping the reader on the hook. One character will make a big discovery only for the POV to pop over to another who doesn't have that information, so Cobell can keep information from the reader without it feeling too forced. The audiobook has a separate narrator for each POV, which was also fun (although I didn't care for Eli's reader) and if you're prone to picking up and putting down your audiobook in the middle of a chapter, this helps you keep track of whose POV you're in.

Cobell uses the format of the crime thriller, like Marcie Rendon in Where They Last Saw Her, to draw attention to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), but the book still feels like a novel its own right; it never feels like just a tool for explaining the MMIW issue. And it's an important issue that deserves a lot more attention. The statistics on violence against Native American women are shocking--even if you think they're bad, they're probably worse than you're imagining--and specific stats get highlighted in the text and in the author's note at the end. In this way, I think the book has enormous social value. Cobell uses her characters to personalize the problem and show the comorbid impacts of poverty and drug use on the reservation. 

Outside of its interest in the MMIW crisis, I don't think the book does much that's particularly groundbreaking. The teens band together to try to solve the mystery and absolve themselves, as you'd expect. At various times they suspect each other, family members, law enforcement. Cobell keeps you on the hook while offering reasonable suspicion for a number of characters. She avoids my least favorite move in the murder mystery genre, which is pinning it on some rando at the last minute.

The ending is pretty explosive and I enjoy some of the things she does with perspective here as well. We the readers know what the killer thinks of their crimes because the text tells us. But the other characters never hear that explanation except third hand, and many of them simply don't believe it. And that feels real--they end the story with their own version of the truth and there's simply no space for that to be corrected (and why would they believe the word of a killer anyway?) The killer feels a little one-dimensional, but the motives make sense, if they're unsurprising. The motivations behind most violent crimes are pretty repetitive. 

The prose is fine. We're reading from the perspective of teenagers, so expect a lot of melodramatic metaphors and jumping to conclusions based on minimal evidence.

Overall, this book tells an important story. It was entertaining as a narrative and sheds light on a community that deserves a lot more attention.

Title: Affinity
Author: Sarah Waters
Genre: Fiction, romance, queer lit, historical

I finished my second Sarah Waters book this week after devouring most of it on my flight to Texas and she has surely done it again! This book was Affinity, a much less-talked about one of her novels, which concerns Victorian lady Margaret Prior, who in an effort to overcome her grief for her recently deceased father and a mysterious illness that gripped her around that time, decides to become a "Lady Visitor" to a women's prison: someone who comes to talk with them from time-to-time. She almost immediately becomes enraptured with a young medium, Selina Dawes, doing time for murder and assault. 

I don't usually like to do extensive summaries in these reviews, but I want to highlight what USA Today called "thinly veiled erotica" in this book. This book is best approached, I think, with a measure of dream logic (or porn logic, if you prefer), where things can be deeply erotic in concept that in real life would certainly not be. Nothing illustrates this better than the opening chapter of the book.

In the opening chapter, Margaret makes her first visit to Millbank prison. Waters does an excellent job of making the prison itself a terror; a winding maze of whitewashed, identical hallways inside a cocoon of pentagonal buildings set unsteadily into the marshy bank of the Thames within which Margaret immediately becomes turned around. She is passed from the gentleman family friend who first suggested she become a Lady Visitor to the matrons of the women's side of the prison, a realm populated entirely by women. As Margaret passes into this self-contained place which feels entirely removed from the rest of the world (the prisoners are allowed to send correspondence four times a year) she becomes keenly aware of the strange blurring and even erasure of the boundaries, rules, and customs of the outside world. Furthermore, Margaret is reassured over and over again that she is, effectively, in a position of power over all these vulnerable women, trapped in their cells and subject to the harsh rules of Millbank. The prison fully intends for Margaret to be someone for them to idolize and look up to, someone whose attention can make them strive to better themselves. Margaret, a repressed Victorian lesbian, is dropped into this strange realm of only women in which she operates above the rules that strictly govern the rest of them. 

It is in this state, after this long journey through Millbank, that Margaret first catches sight of Selina Dawes, and is taken from the start.

The book is not heavy on plot, and some reviewers have called it dull, but I was riveted. The plot is the development of Margaret and Selina's relationship, and the progress of Margaret's mindset on the question of whether Selina's powers or real, or if she's just a very talented con artist. These are by nature things which progress gradually. Practically, it's true that not much happens: Margaret visits the prison. Margaret goes to the library. Margaret has a disagreement with her mother. But her mental and emotional changes across the book are significant. 

There are also the vibes. Waters does such a good job of capturing a very gloomy, gothic atmosphere where Margaret (and the reader!) are constantly sort of questioning what's real and to what degree and there's a powerful sense of unease that permeates the entire story. It ties in so well with Selina's role as a spiritual medium and the Victorian obsession with such things; it creates a very holistic theme and feel to the book that I just sank into.

On the flip side of the erotic view of the prison we see early in the book, Waters also uses it to terrifying effect to simulate the paranoia of a closeted gay person at this time in England. As Margaret's feelings for Selina develop and become more explicit, she lives in terror that the matrons of the prison will realize that her interest in Selina is not the polite interest of a Lady Visitor in her charges. She is always analyzing what the matrons can see in her interactions with Selina and what might go under the radar; she is constantly wondering if rude comments or looks from this matron or that is simple rudeness, or a veiled accusation of impropriety. The panopticon pulses around Margaret more and more but she can't keep away from Selina even to protect herself from the danger of being caught.

On the whole, I thought this book was fantastic. I enjoyed it even more than Fingersmith. Waters was really cooking here and I've added several more of her books to my TBR, because she obviously knows what she's doing.

Title: Homegoing
Author: Yaa Gyasi
Genre: Fiction, historical fiction, family drama

Homegoing is family epic by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi. It follows the descendants of two half-sisters in Ghana in the 18th century: One, Effia, marries a British governor there. The other, Esi, is captured in raids and sold into slavery in America by that same governor. Gyasi's novel traces the story of their family from there. 

As I'm sure you can imagine just by the novel's description, Homegoing is a heavy book. It's not long--only 300 pages--but the subjects it deals with are dark. Homegoing shines a very personal, intimate light on historical atrocities and it is unflinching in the stark reality of those things. However, it is not sensationalist--the things that happen, particularly to Esi's family, are shocking, but not because Gyasi is playing a gotcha game with the reader, simply because we know these things really happened. This isn't a story about real people, but it is true, in that sense--these things did happen, to generations of people. 

Each chapter is a generation of the family--chapter 1 is Effia's story about marrying the governor, chapter 2 is Esi's story about her capture and imprisonment, chapter 3 is the story of Effia's son Quey, etc.--which allows Gyasi to span centuries of history, shining a light both on the development of Ghana first as it is brought under the yoke of colonialism, through its fight for independence, to regaining its sovereignty; as well as the struggle of Black Americans first against slavery and then on the successive attempts to maintain racism in the state: Jim Crow, chain gangs, the war on drugs. 

While there is great suffering in Homegoing, Gyasi also shows, I think, that joy exists even in the worst times. Even the hardest-suffering of Gyasi's characters still have hopes and dreams; they still fall in love; they still have inside jokes with friends; they still dance and sing and teach children to walk and try to preserve the memories of their loved ones. Homegoing documents an almost unfathomable amount of hardship, but it also knows that life will always try to find a way.

The novel is obviously very well-researched. Gyasi has put a lot of effort into a holistic understanding of both Ghanaian and American history and it shows.  

Although we don't get long with most of the characters, each of them stands out as distinct from one another. Gyasi does a wonderful job of showing their own mindsets, opinions, virtues and vices, relationships with their family and their history, and how that intersects with that character's particular struggle. 

Really a very well-done book. I know I'm going to be thinking about this one for a long time, and I think it has undoubtedly earned its place on the various recommendation lists where it sits. If you are squeamish about the subject material, or not someone who usually goes for books that deal with such heavy issues, I would strongly suggest giving this one a try anyway. It matters that we remember not only that these things were wrong, but why they were wrong, and Gyasi shows that here in vivid detail. It's really worth the read.

Mae's Top Reads of 2025!

I wanted to put together a little highlight reel of the year's reads, so here it is!

The Masquerade series by Seth Dickinson: This series is is all fantasy politics. There's no magic or fairies or prophecies, just Seth Dickinson's invented world and the titanic machinations of Empire. And it is electric...Baru herself is the epitome of ruthlessness. Her goals are noble—her desire to free her home, to end the tyranny of the Masquerade—but she will do anything to achieve those goals. She is a truly fascinating character, calculating, controlled, brilliant—and constantly tormented by the need to weigh her choices and the potential futures ahead.

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin: Le Guin captures truly great sci-fi because this work is so imbued with curiosity. Le Guin is asking questions at the heart of any great sci-fi work: What defines humanity? What can we achieve, and how is it done, and what does that mean for society? What is society? What does it mean to be alone? What does it mean to be part of a whole? To me, sci-fi can't be truly sci-fi without a measure of philosophy, and The Dispossessed has this in droves.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield: Armfield's writing beautifully illustrates this journey, and she does a particularly good job of doling out information a little at a time, so that the reader often share's in Miri's confusion and muddled state of mind.

The Originalism Trap by Madiba K. Dennie: Dennie does a great job making this book accessible to everyone...She doesn't stop at "here's what's wrong" either--she has proposal and suggestions for how to counter the outsized influence of this once-disfavored theory and what we as citizens can do to push back against it.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter: The book is obviously well-researched, and Hofstadter does a thorough job of documenting his sources and influences, as well as recommending additional reading on a broad range of topics touched on in his own book. So much of what he establishes here makes perfect sense when looking at modern American society. He so neatly threads the needle between where we started and where we are now that at some moments, it felt like the fog was lifting on something I should have seen ages ago.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez: Jimenez's writing is beautiful and vivid—for good or for ill, as there are some gruesome events that take place—and really sweeps you up in the events of the story. He also does a wonderful job capturing the emotional mindsets of the characters. In particular, I thought the way he handled the relationship of the two main protagonists, Jun and Keema, was very realistic given who they are, and the emotional payoff of his taking the time to work through that was so worth it.

And for the haters among us, below the cut are my most disappointing reads of 2025.

( Booooo )

Title: The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden
Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Illustrator: Michael Kaluta
Genre: Fantasy, fairy tale

First book of 2026! This was The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente with illustrations by Michael Kaluta. I have no recollection of how this ended up on my TBR and I was a little skeptical checking it out in the library, but I'm glad I stuck with it because it ended up being a lot of fun and I will definitely check out the second volume.

You might be a little confused in the beginning, as In the Night Garden is a series of nested stories within stories and the style takes a minute to get used to, but it's worth it. Valente unfolds a veritable matryoshka of tales into neat blooms whose petals all fit together. Retroactive reveals and recontextualiations are delightful here. 

Valente's vivid prose brings together her fantastical tales with such clarity; she attends frequently to all five senses, so that the reader knows what the characters are not only seeing, but hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling as well. There's obviously a lot of fairy tale inspiration here, but Valente definitely brings her own flavor. Women are almost always the hero of Valente's tales (though they play the villains too!) and there are such a great variety of them. Monsters abound too, but they get their chance to tell a tale too. (There's also some gentle ribbing at the Arthurian legends, with one witch lamenting about "all that questing" princes get up to.)

I was so engrossed in the work I didn't realize until quite late in the book how little romance factors into it. In a fairy tale inspired book like this, I would have expected a great many characters motivated by romance, but I can only think of two here who are primarily motivated by a love interest, and this delights me too. I'm arospec myself and while I enjoy a good tale of romance, I also weary of how frequently and totally it is centered in stories, so I was really enthused by how little that's the case here.

Friendship and family relationships do make frequent appearances though, and the friendship between the orphan teller of tales and the young boy hanging onto her words is the framing story. Love between mother and daughter, between brother and sister, even between strangers is a common thread.

She also avoids a pitfall I see in various modern fantasy stories which are so keen to explain the magic of their world they strip it of all mystery. Valente's world remains largely unexplained and asks the reader to simply take it as it is, which I found fun and appropriately mysterious.

The style of the book allows Valente to pull in a great many diverse characters and voices, which she does it well. Most impressive though is her ability to pull a cohesive tapestry out of all the various threads she's juggling.

A really fun and unusual story which I enjoyed a lot--a great start to a new year of reading!