lightreads

Chasing Cassandra by Lisa Kleypas

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:45:45 GMT

Chasing Cassandra

2/5. Victorian romance about the self-made railway magnate who claims to have only five emotions falling for a lady who has few distinguishing characteristics other than big boobs.

Boring, saccharine. She teaches him what love is. In addition to the above judgments, this is also eyebrow raising because the hero is heavily coded as on the spectrum, and the book has a definite tone of “fixing” him.

Content notes: Sexual assault as plot device.

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All Hail Chaos by Sarah Rees Brennan

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:34:32 GMT

All Hail Chaos

3/5. Sequel. More isekai about the girl dying of cancer going into her favorite grimdark fantasy and fucking it up a lot.

Over it. Too long, and with a bad case of middle book syndrome where everyone is separated from each other, thus removing several central friendships that held the first book up. Also, we experience a dizzying sequence of plot twists and setups. I don’t know, it’s one of those reading experiences that I don’t mind while it’s happening, because this is quippy and fast to read. But then I put it down and I’m like, “okay no actually I’m annoyed to still be reading this? And this is so busy quipping and plot twisting that it forgot to be about anything at all?”

Content notes: A lot of violence. Characters who are walking red flags. Cancer. People being shitty about someone having cancer.

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Darksight Dare by Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:20:15 GMT

Darksight Dare

4/5. New Penric novella. I keep complaining these are slight and boring, but this one turns it up a notch. And alert! Alert! We have demon POV! Is it the demon we all want POV from? No. But it’s one of the things that makes this one more interesting, so I’ll take it.

I will also say that this book sets up a magical disability cure situation that actually landed more or less okay with me. Partly it’s not really a cure, it’s replacing sight with a kind of magical perception that is markedly different from human in both directions, less and more useful. And also because she challenged the overtly stated position that the disabled person had to have this, life was not worth living, etc. Did she challenge it with particular depth? No. But again, I’ll take it.

I did think for a hot second that this one would also complicate the role providence plays in these books. Penric does that thing he does where he has problem A, and unrelated person B comes along at exactly the right time, and Pen goes, “Oh, well, you must be the solution to this problem because that’s how ~~narrative~~ providence works,” and he jams them together and it all works out beautifully. Providence, in this world, being something of a fig leaf for wild degrees of coincidence and narrative convenience. Here, Pen does that with even more slapdashery than usual, and it gets much messier before it gets better. I thought maybe, maybe she was finally ready to engage with the whole mechanism of these books, but no, not really.

Content notes: References to suicidal ideation, mutilation

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On the Calculation of Volume (Volume I) by Solvej Balle

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:49:00 GMT

On the Calculation of Volume

3/5. First of seven volumes in translation from the Danish about an antiquarian book dealer who finds herself repeating November 18 over and over again.

I like books that take a cerebral spin on a speculative concept, and this one is that. But I was lukewarm on this book, in which everything is meticulously observed and very little happens. I understand that there is some actual movement in later books in places other than inside the protagonist’s head, but I don’t know if I’ll stick it out. It’s not the literary pretentions that get me; those are generally well done. But the jacket described this as having “the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper,” and man, IDK, that is correct and also not a thing I want.

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Lone Women by Victor LaValle

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 23:49:19 GMT

Lone Women

3/5. Historical horror about a black woman in the early twentieth century leaving the burned out remains of her family home in California to homestead in Montana, dragging with her a terribly heavy trunk that must never be opened.

Not for me. I should just give up on historical horror. It’s having a moment, but I’m not into it. This has spare, interesting omniscient writing, and it’s doing all sorts of stuff with race and gender and privilege. But I think its ending is unearned and it didn’t really bake the metaphors about family secrets and disability in ways that worked for me.

Content notes: Graphic violence, mob violence, an implicit threat of corrective rape that does not appear, transphobia, bigotry of many sorts, reference to infanticide, child abuse.

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Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 01:22:08 GMT

Nonesuch

4.5/5. A young woman stumbles sideways into a world of the occult and a fascist scheme to alter the course of history in London during the Blitz.

I broke my own rules on this one. I swore off WWII books a few years ago and never looked back. But this one is speculative, and a few people talked about it in glowing terms, and I was feeling experimental.

And this is so good. Good as a story about antifascism and magic and the financial markets, yes. Also good as an intimate, granular portrait of life under the Blitz. Also also good in that it serves up a complicated, thorny, gorgeously specific romance.

But my favorite part is the heroine. She is one of the most electric main characters I’ve encountered in a long time. She is sharp and clever and driven and slutty and prickly and brave, and she absolutely makes this book go.

I will stop gushing now, except to say that also, I was getting confused around the 95% mark of this book, because the thing got resolved? But it’s a duology? So what is going to happ—oh. Oh my god. Wow. Okay. What a fucking ending. What a perfect deployment of that thing where a MC spends an entire book not not not thinking about something, so that you can kind of intuit the shape of it in negative space, but then it actualizes on the page and it all makes perfect sense. It’s a cliffhanger, to be clear.

Content notes: Blitz, WWII, violence.

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Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman

Mon, 18 May 2026 20:29:33 GMT

Operation Bounce House

3/5. Standalone scifi about a twenty-something loser dude on a colony planet who has to face off against mechs piloted by privileged Earth kids who have been duped into wiping out his population.

In a stroke of bad luck, my library hold for this came in at the same time as I was reading his latest Dungeon Crawler book. Comparing the two is unfortunate. They are interested in a lot of the same things – AI as menace and companion, the little guy fighting back against corporatized violence as entertainment, communities working together. But this standalone lacks the depth and complexity his series has accumulated, to say nothing of the charm. I mean, let’s be real here, Carl is not my favorite protagonist. But compared to our narrator here, he is a work of Joycean complexity. Our narrator here has a terminal case of get out of the way so the far more interesting women around you can make this story go. At one point, he’s moaning about how he just can’t commit to his girlfriend, and he’s like “maybe it’s because she’s too good for me.” Buddy. That’s the first insightful thing you’ve said in 50,000 words.

Anyway, I could also complain about how this book doesn’t manage that tricky swing from comedy to war violence, or how it doesn’t know how to land this story that is kind of about chickens and pigs and kind of about social media and kind of about a terrible band, oh and also about how to turn a bunch of nice colony farm kids into terrorists.

Look, it’s entertaining enough, but read Dungeon Crawler instead.

Content notes: Violence, massacres.

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Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Sun, 17 May 2026 22:50:07 GMT

Children of Strife

3/5. Fourth book in this loose series about uplifted spiders etc. in a spreading galactic civilization that only functions because humans have been infected with an empathy virus. This is the shrimp one, nominally, though that is not terribly important to what is going on aside from on the thematic argument level.

A good if overlong entry. I have the opposite opinion of many, apparently. I thought the last book (Children of Memory) was tight and poignant and layered. And I thought this fourth book was bloated and pretty obvious. Whereas a lot of other people did not like the third book and are calling this a return to form. Shrug.

Anyway, yes, he needed to cut a huge amount of the villain POV here, as he could have done just as much with half as much. I do think this book is making a more nuanced argument about the empathy virus than he’s made before. It’s this weird thing where he pitches a very dystopic idea in utopic terms. I.e. that humans would be incapable of participating peacefully in a multi-species society of explorers without having our brains permanently altered. He’s always been to ‘isn’t that just such a great solution?’ about something that I think is complicated at best. Anyway, this book lets it be more complicated, and lets us live more in the state of being unable to fit in, unable to get along. It's by way of tearing down the idea that only through conflict can we grow, which is fine if obvious, but still.

Content notes: Violence, attempted human sacrifice, alien body horror stuff

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A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman

Sat, 16 May 2026 17:00:54 GMT

A Parade of Horribles

4/5. Dungeon Crawler book, do not start here, it will be incomprehensible. I had a good time in the midst of an awful week, here are some random thoughts:
• It’s fun to read a book where you suspect the author wrote a specific scene for the audiobook. They got the rights to “Take on Me,” and that’s all I’ll say about that. For those who don’t know, these audiobooks are extremely good, but Audible exclusive, bleh.
• Big lore dump. Did that clear anything up, really? I mean, no, but points for trying.
• I’m not positive he meant to do this, but at least one character gestures at the sex worker / NPC comparison I have been thinking about since early on. I.e. people considered disposable nonpersons by narratives.
• This book ran on rails for the first part in a way we haven’t seen for a while. I wasn’t sure I liked that, but he found ways to make it narratively interesting, and ultimately there’s a good in-universe explanation for it.
• Interesting game-breaking here. I was speculating that he would need to do something like that in this specific book before I even opened it and yeah, right on the money.
• The cat is still the MVP, obviously.

Content notes: Gore, general grossness, the AI being a rebirthing pervert and a million other kinds of perverts.

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City of Others by Jared Poon

Sat, 09 May 2026 19:23:37 GMT

City of Others

3/5. Urban fantasy about a middle manager in a government agency in Singapore intended to keep the supernatural elements of society quiet.

Okay. Kind of Rivers of London but with a queer protagonist and far less voicey. Though it turns out the voiciness goes a long way to selling all the infodumping you need to do in a fantasy like this.

A good time, with a particularly interesting set of magical ideas. But I suspect someone made him cut, like, 25% of his manuscript or something, because there’s a lot of jerky pacing and weird gaps where I’m like ‘wait, we just met this person and now she’s a core part of the team and we all care about her? Did I miss something?’ Also, it’s all trying just that bit too hard to tie into a neat thematic bow (grief and letting go). Very debut, is what I mean. Naturally it is going to be a series; I might keep going, I might not.

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Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Wed, 06 May 2026 17:28:12 GMT

Platform Decay

4/5. A good outing. Murderbot does a complex rescue in corporate space, and there are juveniles, terrible.

Things I like:

Getting a nuanced and varied look at just what life in corporate space looks like, particularly for average people. And how those people deal with the various kinds of violence and oppression that surround them. A lot of this was extremely sketchy and gestural before, but this book does a huge amount of background work on adding texture to the world.

Wells playing out some of the consequences of the governor module hack code being out there now in ways that the fandom has been chewing on for a while.

Murderbot getting to snark a bit on the ways that Preservation’s utopia is also sometimes really full of itself and incorrect about its own righteousness, as utopias do.

Emotional self-awareness (oh no, terrible, how could a murderbot have a worse fate).

So yeah, pretty good, even with the tragic absence of most of the usual main cast and crew.

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Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher

Sat, 02 May 2026 18:48:33 GMT

Wolf Worm

3/5. Historical horror about an illustrator hired to draw insects for a scientist’s book. But something is up in the woods around his North Carolina home.

Me: I’m reading T. Kingfisher’s bug horror.

My wife: I don’t know if I can read that one. Report back.

Me: I’m one-third in. It’s fine. She’s using some of the same moves I’ve seen her use before, gothic overtones, creepy staring animals. Nothing horrible has happened yet.

Her, a day later: How’s the book?

Me: You do not want to read this one under any circumstances.

Her: …Ah.

Yeah, I think I just do not like her horror. This is good at what it’s doing (insect horror, body horror) but it is just so over-the-top gross in a few places in ways that do not work for me. Her sensible spinster heroine is a highlight, as usual.

Content notes: Hoo boy. Insects, torture, captivity, body horror, mind control.

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Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:13:05 GMT

Chain-Gang All-Stars

4/5. A near future dystopian America where the carceral system has an entertainment component under which inmates can “voluntarily” enter a reality show program where they fight to the death for a chance at freedom. This book is about a lot of people in and around that system, but centrally two women stars of it.

This is brilliant and beautiful and deeply humane while being about inhumane things. Some have complained it’s on-the-nose which, like, yes? I’m sorry, did you want subtlety in this critique? What good would that do?

Which leads me to the structure of this book. Tonally, it is a sustained scream, modulating with the kind of pain it is expressing. And then sprinkled throughout are footnotes. Some didactic, some painful, some about our current prison statistics, some about these fictional people. It is a really interesting choice. The author called it an “ethical” one which I am interpreting to mean that he is not interested in giving readers a chance to weasel out of understanding some of what this book is putting down. I think that is also a really smart way of confronting the thing that has wrecked other books like this. The problem is that it’s really hard to tell a story that is critiquing violence and suffering as entertainment without also entertaining your reader with violence and suffering. And the approach taken here is one of the best I’ve ever seen at negotiating that.

Content notes: Oh boy. Violence, murder, torture, mentions of rape and domestic violence, structural and personal racism

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Truthwitch and Windwitch by Susan Dennard

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:59:53 GMT

Truthwitch and Windwitch

3/5. First two books of five in this upper YA epic fantasy about two chosen sisters separated by circumstance trying to find their way back to each other as war brews and there’s an underlying magical plot happening, and obviously there’s a prophecy.

These are definitely a cut above the norm. They have that frenetic YA pacing and some POV bloat even by book two, neither of which are my favorite. But they also have a density to the worldbuilding and a thoughtfulness about character that you don’t usually get. As well as a commitment to super slow burning the romances. Also, there is a sort of chosen one character (though that gets complicated as we go) and she is refreshingly, wonderfully a hot mess. If there’s an arc towards heroism here, it’s a long, slow complicated one full of lots of impulsivity and bad decisions.

So yeah, I get why this one floats to the top of everyone’s lists of YA fantasy. It does really have something. Two books worth, which is saying a lot for me, since I’m lucky to make it a quarter into anything YA these days. So when I say I’m good after two books, that’s actually a compliment. If you want chewy plotty long YA that prioritizes platonic sister relationships and lets all the character arcs breathe, here you go.

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Testimony of Mute Things by Lois McMaster Bujold

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:30:54 GMT

Testimony of Mute Things

3/5. I picked this up because A meal of Thorns had a great episode on Paladin of Souls, and I was like ‘oh yeah, damn, that book did slap.’ And then like a fool I picked up this recent novella instead of rereading PoS.

This is fine. It’s a capsule story set much earlier in the timeline, which means a much younger and less seasoned Pen is solving a murder. A perfectly serviceable hour of entertainment, well-observed and characterized, but not much more than that. Kind of made me sad, actually. You could get an interesting podcast episode out of the Penric stories as a whole. There is some theology stuff to chew on there, and some gender stuff and some parenting stuff. But most of the entries on their own? No.

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Exadelic by Jon Evans

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:54:40 GMT

Exadelic

1/5. I am a more evolved human who DNF’s books now, so it has been a long time since I finished something and was this mad about it. See, what happened was I started this while sick and injured and under a lot of stress, and quickly realized it’s bad, but I thought it was boring protagonist bad. Dumb Silicon Valley dude wank fantasies bad. But entertaining enough to create mild noise in my brain, and it sounded like more effort to get a new book, you know?

And then I read the last quarter and now I’m mad and I’m crawling out of my hole to tell you about it.

Let’s back up. This is a scifi technothriller about a boring software middle manager dude who gets told he is of cosmic importance by a new AI, sending him off on a journey through the multiverse and time to try and save the world. One of those scifi books where the author had a huge pile of things (magic as software exploits, occult horror AI, multiverses, Dyson Spheres, the Black Dahlia, etc. etc.), refused to discard a single one of them, and stitched them all together with an afterthought of a narrator who somehow got less and less interesting the more time we spent with him. Also, the sex in this book is seriously cringe.

But then I got to the part where – I’m not going to spoiler cut this. I’ll keep it to general situational vibes, but if you really don’t want to know, stop here. There’s a point where our loser protagonist ends up in a future where humans are so scared of AI that they have outlawed all progress and live in a weird, stunted leisure society. Their fear of AI is pretty legit considering there is a history of Ais committing genocide. But the whole point of the book is to sneer at this society and for our protag to think snidely about how they have a slave class of sub-intelligent robots, and he’s got to fix everything by allowing free and rampant AI development.

Which, like. I’m not one of those people who froths at the mouth about how AI kills kittens or whatever. But my dude. My man. What. The fuck. It’s the smugness about the slave labor that gets me. Like, excuse me? Slave labor is not an exclusive feature of stagnant societies. Exploitation is often the engine of progress! Including in the AI boom right the fuck now!

And it’s not like he’s making a big intellectual stand here – the book isn’t even internally coherent enough for that. Our protagonist himself is literally exploited for labor at multiple points! By AIs!

Ugh. At least being this annoyed has cleared my sinuses.

Content notes: Torture, drugged sex, noncon

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Time of the Cat by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:52:52 GMT

Time of the Cat

3/5. Sci-fantasy time travel about the future scholars paired with talking cats to romp through history.

Connie Willis, but make it way zanier. I picked this up the day our cat went into the kitty ER (he’s fine, he ate approximately four feet of ribbon but they got it back out without surgery). It was good for that day spent waiting, but after that exhausted/worried interval there was still more book, and it went weirder and more spaghetti splat than I wanted. Like there was so much happening in this book simultaneously, and all of it – the zany talking cat parts and the far future parts and the multiple factions parts and the romance parts and the trying-to-be-serious memory loss parts – were all treated with the same cheerful rush, which left me unsatisfied.

A good head empty no thoughts day book, but otherwise, kind of a frenetic mess. Also, I genuinely don't know why the protag was still into the love interest by the end, she did not sell me on that in the slightest.

Content notes: Memory manipulation.

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What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:42:09 GMT

What Moves the Dead

3/5. Historical fantasy horror novella about a nonbinary former soldier going to the literally moldering home of old friends, and getting caught up in a whole fungus horror situation. (This is the Fall of the House of Usher one, if unclear).

We all know I am somewhat dead inside, so perhaps it is not surprising that I found this only mildly creepy, after having been told it is absolutely terrifying. Take that as you will. I enjoyed this, but it’s not really my sort of thing and I feel no need to carry on with the series. I do wonder whose decision it was to use “they” on the jacket copy re our protagonist rather than the textual neopronoun used in the book. I say ‘hmm’ about that. The background to the whole pronoun situation, and the historical context in this fictional tiny European country, is kind of great, though.

Content notes: Fungus horror, dead bodies moving horror, body horror, animals being creepy.

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Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:46:04 GMT

Chilling Effect

3/5. Adventure scifi featuring a Latina space captain trying to go straight with her ragtag crew, until the space mob kidnaps her sister.

I enjoyed the first half of this – repetitive but in a rompy way, messy family dynamics, great crew of women and aliens, unapologetic about the Spanish sprinkled in and not spoon-feeding translations of everything, did I mention Latina space captain. But it overstayed its welcome by a good 40,000 words and the last third is a hot mess. For real, if you find yourself as an author doing a “character is secretly a [redacted!]” okay, fine, but then if you do the exact same plot twist with literally the exact same redacted on a different character 30 pages later, you’ve just got to stop yourself and cool it, you know?

Points for cute interspecies romance (though I’m me, so I have questions about how the fade-to-black sex worked, exactly).

Content notes: Violence.

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Sunward by William Alexander

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 01:03:38 GMT

Sunward

4/5. Slim scifi novel about a woman from the moon running currier jobs, while on the side she raises up baby Ais, who require care like extraordinarily precocious children.

I’m hard to charm so far this year, but this book managed it. It’s sweet in the right places, thorny in others, and does a fun/interesting tour of parts of this futuristic solar system. This pleased and distracted me during a difficult week with its space parrot and road trip.

I will say that it has odd pacing, which suddenly clicked into place for me when I looked up the author and discovered he’s previously written middle grade. Ding ding ding. This is a novel concerning mostly adult topics, but paced like middle grade. It may be less jarring if you go in knowing that.

Content notes: Violence, robots treated like property while obviously being people (not by the protagonist)

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DNFs

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:21:19 GMT

Swordcrossed by Freya Marske

I’ve really liked some of her other books, but this one (secondary world M/M fantasy) just did not click. I got it from the library three times and appreciated Marske’s writing (always a highlight) but the trope set and the relationships just did not get me. Probably better if you like the inveterate liar falls in love thing.

Heavenly Bodies by Imani Erriu

Booktube strikes again. Enemies to lovers romantasy about the princess of the shadow kingdom kidnapped by the sunlight kingdom to train to kill a god. I was told this had good banter. The first 15% did not demonstrate that, just a lot of ham-handed writing and some cartoon sketchy worldbuilding. Meh.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

I think his Underground Railroad is genius. Which is saying something, since I generally do not like when a book has a speculative twist but gets shelved as literary. This falls in the same camp – it’s a literary take on the post zombie apocalypse thing. Meh. Genre has done it better, with more interesting people (our main character here is deliberately a boring sad sack, but still), and at least the genre book wasn’t like “but what if capitalism was the zombie all along, huh, huh, huh? How about that?” Well, okay, some genre books do that, but we don’t have critics shouting about how brilliant and innovative that is.

Luminous by Silvia Park

Literary scifi about three siblings (two human, one robot) in a future unified Korea. I developed a near instant dislike for this book. I am told it is interesting and goes deep on the relationships between humans and robots. Robots in this future being property and commodities as a formal matter, but as a functional matter serving as everything from members of the family to romantic partners to servants to victims of horrendous abuse, often more than one of those. There was something about the prose style that was like sandpaper to my ear, and I could tell in just the quarter I read that there was going to be a certain emotional grotesquery here that left me nauseous. It’s supposed to, but meh, no thanks, life’s too short.

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Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:45:49 GMT

Of Monsters and Mainframes

3.5/5. The one about the ship AI and medical AI who are frenemies but stuck on the same ship together, and how they and a werewolf and a mummy and a vampire and a bunch of spider drones go on a revenge mission against Dracula.

If that sounds wacky zany and like a whole bunch of things got thrown in a blender, correct.

I enjoyed this, even including the sometimes odd mix of humor and horror. (This book doesn’t really have humans, except as occasional set dressing, generally as corpses). The AI POV here is particularly good. The ship AI has vastly more processing power than the medical AI but no “human interaction protocols,” so yeah, that’s how that goes. I actually laughed out loud, which is rare for me.

Marking down only for the structure, which is simultaneously messy and repetitive. Quite the trick. I was willing to roll along with it for a lot of this book, because I was enjoying myself, but at a certain point I could have used a tad less spaghetti on the wall, you know?

Content notes: Mass death by vampire, werewolf, etc. AI equivalent of mind control.

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JD Robb/Nora Roberts

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:41:57 GMT

Stolen in Death

3/5. A nice entry that returns to the intimate murder mystery format, with a throwback (and hopefully a permanent conclusion) to an old storyline about Roarke’s past. There’s been something a bit tying-off-loose-ends feeling about the last few books. I mean . . . reasonable.

Mind Games

3/5. Standalone about the woman with largely undefined psychic powers who becomes mentally linked with the man who murdered her parents; also, a romance with a former rock star. This one is okay, by virtue of having only a soupcon of paranormal. She can’t handle any more than that. I will say, her general, IDK, emotional investment in prisons was on full display here. She’s just really, really interested in prison being absolutely and unlivably terrible, and wants you to know about that in the sort of sensual, loving detail she otherwise reserves for descriptions of home renovations. I have tried to unsee how deeply invested in this she is, but I can’t, and it honestly creeps/grosses me out in every book now.

Content notes: Murder, animal harm, the psychic equivalent of internet spamming someone and telling them to kill themselves.

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The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:19:50 GMT

The Everlasting

3/5. Fantasy about the soldier turned scholar who ends up going back in time (and back . . . and back . . . and back) to meet the lady knight who is pivotal to the founding myth of his nation. Arthurian time travel about nation-building and myth creation and racism.

Man, I don’t know what it is, but I just do not like Alix Harrow books the way I should. Even this one, where the overwrought quality of her writing finally has a story to match its tone. The writing in some sections is notably strong, I should say. But there is something in every single one of her books that I cannot put my finger on, and it just annoys the crap out of me.

I will admit this is structurally clever. The narrative gets rewritten multiple times to create new founding national myths, and she manages that while not being too terribly repetitive, and also establishing a few important touchpoints that orient the reader to how the angle of history has changed in just a few sentences. That is well done.

I still don’t know. The one objection I can concretely point to here is that I don’t like the way this book centers nation-building around the ego and trauma and psychopathy of one single person. The metaphor of it all collapses there, because that’s not how this works. Systems of racial oppression and societal violence don’t form on the whim of a single person, and there is something trite in the way Harrow has her villain reconstructing this nation over and over again based on, like, ten minutes of history that get played out a thousand years before the modern day events. Which is a real objection – I think that is a weakness of the book. But it’s not the thing I found annoying and off-putting, and I still don’t know what that is.

I’d bet on this to go on a bunch of award lists, though, just you wait.

Content notes: Racialized oppression, violence in war and otherwise, discussion of the killing of civilians, mention of stillbirth and sexual assault, something that is not the death of children but awfully close.

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Slow Gods by Claire North

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:46:11 GMT

Slow Gods

3/5. Science fiction about a guy who grows up in and gets crushed by a kleptocratic fascist state, and how he is transformed, and what happens when an alien arrives to tell the scattered worlds of humanity that a supernova is about to wipe half of them out.

Interesting. Lots of things to say here. First, to be clear, you won’t ever catch me arguing that North isn’t a talented and unusual writer. She’s a good stylist, too. This book is science fiction in set dressing, but that’s wrapped around an eldritch and fantastical core that she is too smart to ruin by explaining or caging. I won’t spoil it more than to say that a lesser writer would have made this book about the protagonist’s attempts to understand the weird and creepy thing that happened to him. Instead, the reader understands that, mostly implicitly, and the book can go on about its business of being about immigration and politics and cultural preservation and assimilation.

Also, this is a book about autism. An autism metaphor, specifically. North has said this was a result of her own recent diagnosis, and I’m not in the business of critiquing how a person processes that in fiction. I will say that I would be critiquing the substance of it if this were not own voices, because I think parts of the portrayal (the equivalent to autism meltdowns, in particular) lean into a kind of scary stereotype of the violently uncontrolled autistic person. But because it is own voices, I’ll sit here and defend North’s right to process as she sees fit, even if that means grappling with some stereotypes in a messy way that didn’t land, at least for me.

All in all it’s an interesting book and I’m glad I read it.

Content notes: Fascist hellscapes – debt slavery, violence, imprisonment, medical experimentation, mass death and genocide through negligence.

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