Author Archives: Anna

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Anna

By Omar El Akkad

I’ve been checking out so many cozy mysteries and fluffy romances in a desperate attempt to drown out the news, but can’t seem to stick with any of them. I finally decided that the cognitive dissonance wasn’t doing me any good, and I should just face reality directly.

This was a painful read, of course, but I felt relief as well to finally read a direct encapsulation of my growing general discomfort and discontent: “One must also believe that, no matter the day-to-day disappointments of politics, opportunism or corruption or the cavalcade of anesthetizing lies that make up the bulk of most every election cycle, there is something solid holding the whole endeavor together, something great. For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow.”

This. This is what I’d been feeling, and then feeling guilty about it, like I was just being fatalistic and giving up, which El Akkad also addresses as a way the status quo tries to harangue people into continuing to toe the general line. This is what I felt working the polls during the 2024 primary, with the justifiably furious voters participating in the uncommitted protest (which is still being ignored and minimalized by the Democratic Party). I tried to explain my sympathy for these voters (and own participation) to more centrist liberal relatives who couldn’t understand why people couldn’t take a ‘rational’ approach of voting for the lesser of two evils, when both parties were literally killing their family members. I only wish I had El Akkad’s eloquence: “What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point.”

Though I would hesitate to try to categorize this book, I would guess it falls primarily in a cross-section of politics and ethics. However, El Akkad weaves in his family and his own personal experience with displacement and immigration, providing small, individual snapshots that create a necessary balance and foil for when the sheer scale and scope of the genocide becomes too much to take in cognitively. This blend reminded me strongly of Why Are They Angry With Us?, which also bares some stark similarities between how Israel is treating Palestinians and how the USA treats Black Americans.

Mid-book, I had tickets to see Hamilton (which absolutely lived up to the hype 10 years later!), though I wasn’t at all sure I’d be in the right frame of mind for a rah-rah-founding-fathers show. Luckily, it was way more about how messy and deeply flawed the start of this nation was, with unacceptable compromising being made around slavery by people who should have and did know better, or at least that was my takeaway at this point.

Hamlet

by Anna

by The Royal Exchange Theater (on Kanopy)

I want to expand the scope of reviews on this site for a few reasons: 1) I have cut all my paid streaming subscriptions because fuck them; 2) I currently only stream on Kanopy through my library, which seems relevant to this site; and 3) I just watched the Royal Exchange Theater production of Hamlet starring Maxine Peake, and it is intense!

First of all, it is over three hours long, so I watched it over a couple of nights. It has a super pared down set, which I imagine was really intimate in person, but I worried the effectiveness was getting a little lost on the small screen. In the end, though, the acting, Peake in particular, is so combustive that it all hits stronger than any I’ve seen before.

Peake’s performance feels like the dark side of Mary Martin’s famous Peter Pan. With her blonde pageboy cut, Peake captures true teenage dirtbag, making her Hamlet an absolute disaster of a person. Most performances of Hamlet elevate it to an artistic but fairly straight-forward tragedy. Peake’s Hamlet is a very young man in a horrifying situation making everything much worse by his poor judgment and resulting terrible behavior.

I really love Shakespeare performances, but it has been too long since I’d seen one that felt like it brought a fresh approach to the text (shout out to Scotland, PA, one of my favorites, Rotten Tomatoes be damned). This one blew my hair back in a way that I expect was similar to the audiences at the Globe seeing Hamlet for the first time. It wasn’t always a fun experience (Hamlet really can be such a brat), but I was enthralled!

Wine for Roses

by Anna

By Emily O’Malley Liu

Our weather in the Midwest has been real wonky the last month – a couple of weeks ago, we had temperatures in the 80s, which made everyone itchy to start planting their (our) gardens. Every professional was warning us to hold our horses, that we are not frost-free until Memorial Day, and sure enough this week we’ve gone down to a freeze, which has made me very cranky.

All this to say, Wine for Roses, a gentle, queer retelling of Beauty and the Beast, was not only soothing for my general nerves but for my gardener nerves, too. I can’t plant any of my own seeds yet, but I can read all about Ethan, a gardener hired to restore the rose garden at an estate overseen by a reclusive trustee. Bless Liu, who even filed down some of the rougher edges of the original story. When I told Rebecca about this book, she asked how it deals with the whole kidnapping, and I was like, oh, there is no kidnapping, it’s just straight employment! My poor frayed nerves were starting to twang a bit towards the end, as well, but Liu managed to capture the general feeling of the original without the guilt and dying.

Liu has created a marvelous world of hedge witches and casual magic set in an otherwise very prosaic rural Indiana. This is her first published novel, which shows in some loose details, but I’m very much looking forward to reading more from her, and I hope she continues to play around with this world, as well.

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.

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.

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.

How Lucky

by Anna

By Will Leitch

Man, it is my season for finally getting around to reading novels by authors that founded beloved defunct websites. Will Leitch co-founded Deadspin, and while he often wrote about sports, he was so clever and witty that I read all his posts anyway. Anyway, I was very much looking forward to reading a mystery by him, and it only took me four years!

I love an unlikely detective, and this was specifically recommended to fans of The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time, which was one of my first of the genre. In this novel, protagonist Daniel suffers from spinal muscular atrophy (SMA, described as similar to infant ALS), with a predicted lifespan of 21 years tops, though he is beating the odds in his early 20s and living independently though with round-the-clock assistance. He can’t speak verbally or move without his wheelchair, but still participates in more of life than many of us, which becomes a clear theme of the novel.

While sitting on his porch each morning, he regularly sees a young college student walking to class, and when one morning she gets in a car and then disappears, he appears to be the only witness. He is promptly dismissed by the police in the face of his disability, and his two closest friends jump in to help him continue to get his statement heard. This brings him to the attention of the kidnapper, which really ramps up the suspense.

The crime itself is fairly straight-forward, and is secondary to showcasing a number of socially-marginalized characters and how much they contribute to society as a whole. The end takes a startling swing toward high action, which felt a little jarring, but I’m not sure that wasn’t intentional as well. If at times the theme felt a little blunt, it is definitely a message that is needed more and more today: that everyone can contribute to our society in large and small ways, and that you get out of life what you put into it.

Women’s Hotel

by Anna

By Daniel Lavery

This novel is less about telling a story than evoking a place and time, but it does that so well that I didn’t mind the slight plotting at all. In fact, with everything currently going on, a sort of gentle pastiche of the past might be exactly what I needed.

Daniel Lavery, a favorite author of mine, can just really turn a phrase that had me giggling at basically just clever nonsense (which I mean as a high compliment). Almost every sentence is packed with both witticisms and what I assume is meticulously-researched details of the period, and though it could make for an occasionally dense style, it is also a most welcome distraction from everything in the present.

I’ve seen some low-star reviews complaining that you must love the narrative voice, because there’s not much else going on, and while I suppose I agree, I absolutely love the narrative voice! For me, Lavery does a great job of recalling the absurdist comedy of Three Men in a Boat and Wodehouse. And even with the very light touch, he fits in some poignant themes of personal responsibility, social responsibility, and the frequent conflict between the two, which is very relevant today and helpful to hear, like a gently prodding pep talk. This book won’t be for everyone, but for those of us it is for, it is marvelous!

Unsatisfactory Cozies

by Anna

Only the Cat Knows by Marian Babson

Yeah, yeah, I know… I didn’t particularly like the earlier book I read, but just like that one, I was suckered into the premise. After a suspicious fall puts his twin in critical conditional, a renowned ‘female impersonator’ takes her place in the strange rich guy’s compound where she lives and works. The whole cast of weirdos all hanging on to an enigmatic millionaire is very reminiscent of Elizabeth Peters’ excellent Summer of the Dragon, and this book suffers by the comparison.

As I found in the first book, Marian Babson lacks the key charm necessary to write a standout cozy mystery, though her plots are fun enough. The bare bones are there, but a lot more goes into a decent cozy than the average reader (or writer, I guess) realizes. The end, too, felt fairly abrupt, just wrapping up with the nearest available weirdo being the culprit without much setup, and the happily ever after for the rest of the characters felt fairly unearned as well.

A Deadly Walk in Devon by Nicholas George

Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s 2025, but cozy mysteries are taking an increasing amount of suspension of disbelief, and I may have reached my limit. I already have to accept that the police are concerned with justice and safety in this fantasy world (at least this particular protagonist is already retired), but also that murder is always wrong. Hear me out: maybe if someone is an absolute nightmare to be around at all times, when they eventually push someone too far, that’s just natural consequences.

So, I’m already struggling to believe that our protagonist is a good guy, though he is sympathetically written, and now I have to convince myself that the main investigation is even worth doing. Nicholas George is a capable writer, but this is a steep uphill demand. Overall the majority of the book felt like following a basic outline for a cozy mystery with all the boxes checked off in order, though the end took a bit of a dramatic turn. I’m guessing that George will find a more natural flow in later books, though I’m not invested enough to see.