Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die

by Anna

By Greer Stothers

Like everyone else, I’ve been watching Heated Rivalry, completely smitten with its unexpected (to me at least) beauty and sensitivity, so this book was a bit of a whiplash. Written in broad farce, every character and situation is absolutely ridiculous, but once I acclimatized, I had a wonderful time.

I’ve been following Stother on social media (okay, tumblr) for years for high quality cat content on the gorgeous Pangur and Grim, so figured I owed them a preorder of any book they put out, but the title definitely sweetened the deal. The basic premise from the very beginning is that the death of a cowardly knight is prophesized to bring the downfall of an evil sorcerer, so the knight has no recourse but to flee to the sorcerer himself for protection against pretty much everyone. It spirals out from there, and nothing is quite what it seems. A spoiler so minor and obtuse that I think it is more of a teaser: it occurred to me afterwards that if you wanted a comedic fantasy version of The Handmaid’s Tale for some wild reason, you might end up with something similar to this??

With knights, sorcerers, elves, and a handful of mythical beasts, a more natural comparison is to Nimona, and I was somewhat braced for a twist from cute and quirky to poignant. However, instead of poignant, it got real weird, which I love. The blurb on the front says, “Come for the silliness, stay for the twists” and it’s not wrong! The twists cover so many different fandoms that it felt like a brilliant kaleidoscope homage, but in a much more cohesive and satisfying way than you’d imagine. In top reader praise, I started to read slower as I got toward the end to stretch it out more, and upon finishing, immediately went back to read my favorite parts again.

Cinder House by Freya Marske

by Rebecca

Cinder House
by Freya Marske
2025

This is shockingly good! It’s only 136 pages long, a retelling of the Cinderella story, and it starts with Ella’s death, because she’s a ghost for the entire story. The prince is, notably, not a ghost. Also, I have rarely hated a character as much as I hated the second step-sister.

Marske manages to create an incredibly well-developed and fascinating world of magic and politics, a cast of characters who are each unique and complex, and a host of delightful but seemingly-loose threads that all get pulled together into an incredibly satisfying conclusion. All the pieces and plot points were laid out ahead of time such that no action or event happens without plenty of backing for why and how, and yet the twists and turns were still surprising and exciting, and all the more wonderful for how everything slots perfectly into place. I read this in a single evening and am giddy with it! I highly recommend!

I Want To Be Left Behind by Brenda Peterson

by Rebecca

I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture here on Earth, A Memoir
by Brenda Peterson
2010

This is an excellent book and I found it quite difficult to read. I read it one chapter at a time with breaks in between and had to renew my library check-out. It’s 275 pages across twelve chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue. It’s a memoir about growing up in an extremely devout Southern Baptist family during a time of great social change where her values and the values of her family are increasingly diverging.

Her whole extended family are devout Southern Baptists who talk excitedly about looking forward to the Rapture, are stalwart Republicans who supported the Vietnam War, don’t believe in global warming, and don’t approve of those hippies. They are also loving people who care for her and for each other, live closely with nature, hold holiday feasts like no one else, and support their friends and neighbors. Peterson realized relatively early that she didn’t have the same faith or beliefs as her family, and thus struggled with how to be true to herself and her beliefs without hurting her loved ones. In a warm and welcoming social group that is all looking forward to the end of the world when they’ll be taken directly to heaven, how can she say that she actually wants to stay behind and protect the world instead?

The twelve chapters of the book progress through time from Peterson’s young childhood, through her education and exploration of other faiths, her young adulthood of trying to find a career path, to being the established nature writer that she grew into. Every chapter is a story about the stretch, pull and tug of growing into someone that doesn’t fit with her family but is also forever a part of that family: how the love and discomfort go side by side, for both her and her family members.

It is very timely as US politics become ever more polarized. I highly recommend it.

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl

by Rebecca

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
written by Ruth Reichl
read by Bernadette Dunn
2005

This is a fascinating and funny book that kept me well entertained on my commute, and I may need to check out the hardcopy from the library after this because the author includes recipes between chapters and there are a couple of ones that sounded fun to try. The book is a memoir of the author’s time as the food critic of the New York Times, starting with her being head-hunted from the LA Times to a decade later when she accepts an offer from Gourmet Magazine, and it is wild! The New York restaurant scene is intense! When she discovers that restaurants are preparing to identify and cater to her specifically in order to sway her reviews in their favor, she decides the answer is to check them out while in disguise: costumes, wigs, and whole personas are created in order to fool the waitstaff and see what the food and service is like for whoever she is being at that time.

The book is divided into sections based on the personas she creates, including discussions of how that persona came to be. She worked with a family friend who was an acting teacher to develop her first character, and others came in a variety of ways from mimicking a stranger she noticed to having a friend insist that they would dress her up. There’s at least on vintage clothing shop she describes that I desperately want to visit!

Reichl is clearly some kind of supertaster who can both identify and enjoy all kinds of food and I loved hearing her raptures about the flavors and textures and experiences at all of these restaurants she reviewed. At one point, Reichl describes her rules for her dining companions: they could order as much as they thought they could eat, but there were to be no repeat dishes on the table and she got to take a bite of every dish. It sounded amazing and I wish I could have had the chance to eat with her. Apparently, such meals were a semi-regular charity auction item, but the usual winners thought it meant that they could have a free meal at an expensive restaurant rather than seeing the background on how a restaurant critic judged the experience. A missed opportunity!

Despite not being able to experience it in person, this book is a great look at how a restaurant is more than the food, it’s the experience as a whole: the setting, the service, and the expectations. And it can all vary wildly based on who you are perceived to be and what your expectations are. My conclusion though, was that in addition to that, the restaurants have to contend with the mood that the food critic happened to be in that day or week or month. I was also struck by how often she would compliment a dish by describing it as unlike anything she’d ever had before. And I get it: she’s eating out *a lot* and thus having something unique would be a wonderful experience, but a unique dish would not necessarily be good for someone who wasn’t already glutted by standard fare.

Restaurants do come in a range, and restaurant reviews are useful resources, but at the same time, absolutely all of it should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, I really enjoyed the book!

Murder at the Rummage Sale

by Anna

By Elizabeth Cunningham

Okay, this book is wild; I’m not even sure how to write this review. My uncle gave it to my mom for Christmas as a joke since my mom absolutely loves yard, garage and estate sales. None of us knew anything about it but it sounded like a charming cozy at a church bazaar full of small-town eccentrics, so I pretty quickly snagged it from her.

It is a murder mystery, though it takes 100 pages for the murder to happen (after a sneak peek prologue). The main investigator is a somewhat overlooked single older woman, though she is oddly… fae? There is a fair amount of woo-woo overall in the book, both vaguely witchy and strongly Christian. I didn’t actually think much of all the prayers and scriptures at first, since it all takes place at a church of course, until God starts answering back, and then I realized, oh, this is Christian-Christian.

I did some half-hearted research into the author, and I’m still not sure quite how to classify her or this novel, actually. She writes in her bio that she is descended from nine generations of Episcopal priests, and her most well-known series appears to be a Mary Magdallen/Jesus fanfic? That said, she really doesn’t seem to be overtly proselytizing.

In fact, most of the characters are struggling with their faith and falling well short of basic standards of morality (not just the murderer). We know this because the book rotates through multiple points of view from a whole slew of unhappy congregants, all with hidden hatreds and fears. Honestly, I really should have hated this book (I hated at least half the characters) but I was just agog.

I caught on to the identity of the murderer fairly early in the book, but even that didn’t diminish my interest. This book was so overall strange to me that I wasn’t sure if they were going to solve the case through human means, divine intervention, or at all. I’m pleased to report that it ends as bonkers as it began, and has a sequel that sounds like it stretches genre definitions even further. I’ll probably end up reading it out of sheer morbid curiosity, but I’m catching up on The Thursday Murder Club next.

The Gods of Gotham

by Anna

By Lindsay Faye

Whew, this book… I picked it up because it is the same author as the excellent Jane Steele, but whoo boy, are there some timely commentaries here. Set in 1845, New York City is recovering from yet another major fire, facing a huge influx of Irish immigrants due to the potato famine, and establishing the first politically organized police force, all to much turmoil. It’s a little disconcerting to have the ‘Nationalists’ of the time ranting against “a standing army” of the new police. The parallels of the past and present create a somewhat dizzying double vision (one character explaining the uphill battle for acceptance that the new police are facing: “New Yorkers eat incompetent for breakfast… and our criminal population couches their arguments in the language of patriotism”).

Our protagonist, reluctantly shoehorned into the police by his politically ambitious brother, quickly discovers a pedophile ring run by a large political donor, at one point described as “a benefactor, one might even say a very personal friend.” (book copyright in 2012, by the way). It is a gripping mystery, dramatic character study, and stringent love letter to New York City, all very well written, and I honestly struggled to get through it.

All struggles were on me as a reader, though, and this novel helped clarify my personal reading tastes. Having recently read and loved Women’s Hotel, also a historical love letter to NYC of sorts, in which little actually happens, I realized that I very much prefer stories that are smaller in scope, focusing more on daily life than sweeping cultural changes. While ratcheting up action and suspense of course keep me riveted, I also start to feel a little overwhelmed by it all and unable to really sink into the writing itself.

At the same time, the news has been an absolute maelstrom, and I’m struggling to focus on anything at all at this time. I’ve started and stopped any number of books over the last few weeks, so the fact that I read all 400+ pages of this one is a real testament to the writing, regardless of how I feel about the narrative after the fact.

The Book of the Frog by Sally Coulthard

by Rebecca

The Book of the Frog
by Sally Coulthard
2024

This is a beautiful little book and frogs are a lot more diverse than I had realized! Frogs have been around for somewhere in the order of 250 million years. Then 66 million years ago, dinosaurs went extinct after a meteor impact, and frogs survived:

“When all the dust had settled, and the world began to recover, the number of frog species ballooned rapidly. From the ruins of the Chicxulub impact, anurans emerged victorious and went on to colonize new and exciting ecological niches. With such an uncontested landscape to occupy, it’s perhaps no surprise that frogs and toads are now found in a wide and often bewildering range of different habitats. From Arctic pools to steamy treetops, underground burrows to urban back gardens, the resilient little anuran has made them all its home.”

The book is only 170 pages long, but covers a wide range of topics including evolution, reproduction, skin, sound, movement, food, and culture, with references and further resources at the end. The book gives generalized descriptions of frogs as a whole family while also highlighting some of the really interesting species that prove to be the exceptions. There’s apparently very few description of frogs as a family that doesn’t involve an exception for at least one species. My favorite might be the Brazillian Pumpkin Toadlet which jumps with no further control and careens through the air until it descends like any other not-particularly aerodynamic object, because it’s one of the handful of species of frogs that never learn how to land. Or it might be the Izecksohn’s Brazillian tree frog which, unlike most other frogs, is not carnivorous, likes to drink the nectar of the milk nut tree, and is the only known pollinating amphibian. There are so many awesome frog species!

The author alternates between describing frogs — both generally and specifically — with ideas for how the reader could help frogs — from creating ponds for breeding and protected places for hibernation to lobbying against poaching to participating in citizen science projects. While Coulthard celebrates how resilient the frog family is, she also address how a lot of species are going extinct and a lot more are under direct threat from a variety of sources including habitat loss, global warming, and four decades (so far) of their own fungal pandemic.

Over all, it’s a lovely little book, fun to read, and quite inspiring. I took pictures of the references and resources pages before returning the book to the library, but I might need to buy my own copy just to have.

Sequels

by Rebecca

A Mouthful of Dust
The Singing Hills Cycle #6
by Nghi Vo
October 7, 2025

In the acknowledgements after the story, the author describes her editor telling her, in 2020, that maybe the readers weren’t ready for this story. In 2024, the editor was like, okay, yeah, this will be fine. Likely because the world has been rough and we’ve become accustomed to it. I think the editor was right. This is a more difficult story than some of the others, and none of them have been particularly light, but it was still so very good.

Cleric Chi and Almost Brilliant arrive in the town of Baolin to learn stories of the legendary famine that’s long enough in the past that it feels safely distant to the reader and to Cleric Chi, but recent enough to still have an immense and ongoing impact on the residents recounting their stories of what they did when their whole city was starving.

What Stalks the Deep
Sworn Soldier #3
by T. Kingfisher
September 30, 2025

Alex Easton, the sworn soldier from Gallacia, travels to America… specifically to West Virginia, to an old abandoned coal mine where Dr. Denton’s cousin has gone missing while exploring the cave. Denton specifically requests Easton’s help because the preliminary evidence has been deeply creepy to the point of unbelievable, but after their shared experience in the first book in the series, at the House of Usher, Denton is sure that Easton won’t immediately dismiss it. Easton would very much like to dismiss it because it is deeply creepy but instead sees the whole investigation through, all the way to the very creepy end.

What really struck me in reading this is how similar Easton is, as a character, to John Watson: not necessarily the brightest, although not stupid by any means, but definitely dedicated, and more inclined to get into trouble than they’d like to admit. This is an investigation with no brilliant detective, just a group of individuals trying their best.

The other thing that struck me is a spoiler about the monster in question that I really want to share but also don’t want to give away! But this book makes me wonder if there are trends in the way new horror monsters are developed and how much horror writers crib from one another. Or maybe I just don’t read enough horror to recognize the less common but still regular tropes. But there are similarities to a very different book I previously reviewed!

In the meantime, both of these series are delightful with some remarkable similarities to one another, despite their decided differences, based on the narration by laid-back nonbinary main characters who find themselves in situations. I highly recommend both these series.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Graphic Edition)

by Anna

By Timothy Snyder

Well, this was a long overdue read. My uncle gave this to me years ago; I read the first lesson (do not obey in advance) and got so bummed out (by all the people and institutions doing just that) that I set it aside for far too long until I couldn’t ignore the necessity of it any longer.

Timothy Snyder knows well that this is both a difficult read and a very important one, so he’s made it as accessible as possible. I have the graphic edition, illustrated by Nora Krug, who has previous written about reckoning with her German history.  The graphic novel comes in at a tidy 120 pages, broken down even further into 20 clearly delineated lessons that run 2-4 pages each. I had assumed it was condensed from the original, but the original also turns out to be a well compressed little chapbook as well.

This book is a perfect example of the idea that it takes a real expert to write on a topic briefly and clearly. It is clear that decades of research have gone into this, and the reader gets the final fruit of all that labor, organized into these 20 practical lessons. This is not an academic or historical treatise; Snyder has done his best (which is better than most) to create a roadmap for readers to push back against the erosion of freedom and democracy.

Each lesson starts with a short explanatory paragraph, followed by more context. Snyder weaves in events and quotes throughout history, 1930s Germany of course, but also 1960s Soviet Union bloc and US slavery, among others; not in flagellation, but a push to really work to learn from the history available to us. Despite the temptation to just tear through it and get it read, I set myself the schedule of only one lesson a day, so that I had the time to really think through and internalize each one.

Wicked Plants, Wicked Bugs by Amy Stewart

by Rebecca

Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities
by Amy Stewart
read by Coleen Marlo
2009

Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects
by Amy Stewart
read by Coleen Marlo
2011

These books were each between four and five hours long as audio books, so not all that long as these things go, and were kind of a stream of mini non-fiction cozy body-horror stories, which is a crazy intersection of genres but that makes it all the more fun.

In many cases, they’re not even precisely stories; more like entries in a lexicon: something between a dictionary, encyclopedia, and field guide. Not something I would normally sit down and read, cover-to-cover, but I could easily set the audiobook to play without worrying about being too distracted from driving. I didn’t so much learn the details of anything in particular, but got all sorts of inspiration for writing, either mysteries with weird symptoms or science fiction/fantasy with weird creatures and societies. (It turns out there are plenty of peculiar creatures and societies right here on Earth!)

The various entries are interesting and funny, horrifying and gross, but also somewhat disappointing, especially in the few cases where I just happened to know more about a given topic than the author does. They fit into much the same niche as Mary Roach‘s writing, but the comparison doesn’t do them any favors. Mary Roach does deep dives and really digs into the crazy/scary/gross topics she writes about while Stewart accurately introduces the books as something of a dilettantes look at the subjects rather than any sort of expertise. Stewart writes from the perspective of a lay person with a very human-centric perspective. The application of modern protestant morality to the plants and bugs she discusses is done humorously but also distracts from how cool they really are when viewed simply as themselves rather than through the lens of their impact on humans.

I’m incredibly impressed with Coleen Marlo’s reading skills. She not only seamlessly reads the scientific names of each entry, but just overall does a wonderful job of reading the book in such a way that it just flowed smoothly. I didn’t spend any significant time thinking about her voice because it was just naturally the sound of the book. It can be difficult to properly value the skill that takes until you try listening to an audiobook by a reader who doesn’t have it.

To sum up, Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs were both good for what they were: not deep but fun and interesting and inspirational for fiction writing ideas.