I’ve written before about how Kritzer is basically a Cassandra of our time for better or worse. The better is that she remains ultimately hopeful about humanity and its basic goodness. The is worse is, well, the current political environment.
In Obstetrix, an ob/gyn who has just been acquitted after providing the last abortion in North Dakota, is kidnapped by a Christian fundamentalist cult to provide birthing services. Kritzer packs a lot of plot and nuance in a fairly short novel for a very propulsive read. It’s a little bit Handmaid’s Tale, but like Kritzer’s stories is more ultimately optimistic.
The back blurbs describe it as “chilling, gripping, all too real” and “an intense day-after-tomorrow thriller,” which I worry could turn off non-horror readers. This is most definitely not a horror and to my mind, not particulary scary, though it is, of course, a bad situation to understate it a bit. I guess for me this feels like an action thriller through the female gaze. Instead of large-scale shoot-em-ups, Kritzer is more interested in the small details of daily life and how one balances safety with resistance to authoritarianism within that space.
I checked out this book based on the recommendation from Samantha Irby’s newsletter and the gorgeous, gorgeous cover, and was absolutely enthralled! I wasn’t quite sure how to review it without spoilers, but Kinsey sent me a substack dialogue on the book which manages to avoid all major spoilers and which I have a lot of responses to.
Honey is inevitably compared to My Sister, The Serial Killer, which I also loved (and which Rebecca and I dialogue about in the comments), and is considered another entry in the “female rage fiction” genre, while I would argue that Honey is a direct commentary on that genre.
For me, a closer comparison would be to American Psycho (which, granted, I watched but didn’t read), in which the author is trying to show the ultimately banal shallowness of evil and violence that is too often elevated in our society. Protagonist Yrsa is working on her dissertation on the cultural victimization of Black women, and attempts to frame her own violent impulses in an academic context, theorizing that the only way to escape victimhood is to become the violence instead.
I found Yrsa to be deeply unlikeable, though a fascinating narrative voice, which I assume was intentional. It is clear that she has a whole slew of issues stemming from a family history that I wish had gotten a little more page space and which play out across her relationships with just about everyone. The novel felt to me like it was more about how Yrsa uses academic framework as an excuse to lash out and avoid any sort of clear look at herself or the world around her. And to my mind, Yrsa herself begins to recognize this over the course of novel. I read Honey as more of a critique on female rage fiction, that elevating stories of female violence does not in fact lead to equality but only more violence.
As a slight cynical aside, I saw this described as “dark academia,” and coming from a family chockfull of professors, murders aside this seemed to be just regular academia, though not particularly complimentary.
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews May 31, 2026
I am obsessed with this book; it scratches right at my id and I adore it! The main character Maggie is a modern woman in our real world who has been obsessed for years with a fantasy novel series that was never completed, something along the lines of Game of Thrones or Wheel of Time, except only two books, but she has read them multiple times, has all the details memorized and cares deeply for the characters who all have complex and often devastating lives. In this book, Maggie wakes up one day in the world of that book series, in the opening chapter with absolutely nothing except for her knowledge of how dangerous this society is and what the future holds. What she learns relatively quickly is that if she is killed, she will return to life. Which is a decidedly mixed blessing in a world where torture is just not that uncommon.
But over the course of this book, Maggie uses her knowledge of the world to A) improve her own situation, going from naked and alone in a ditch, to having many allies and socializing at the highest level, B) saving her favorite characters from their tragic fates and giving the villains their just rewards, while C) stumbling over the fact that knowledge from a book does not always perfectly translate into easily recognized personal experiences.
In a time when anxiety in the real world is high, it was great to read a book where the main character knows what’s happening and works to fix it, innocent people get saved and guilty people face consequences. It’s a hefty 470 pages but reads very quickly. I have, in fact, already read it twice now and I am desperate for the sequel to come out despite this first book having been published only 20 days ago. I am ready to read more!
That said, I do have some caveats: First, sometimes events do tend to work out for Maggie in a variety of ways that just fall nicely into place via authorial intent rather than because it makes sense plot ways. I’m giving that a pass because it’s that kind of book: everything is going to work out, the world is on her side, it’s fine. Second, and more seriously, the narration is somewhat casually pro-war crimes. Like, the bad guys commit atrocities and need to be stopped because of that but the good guys also commit atrocities and get reassured that they only did what was necessary to achieve their goals, so it’s all good. I’m fine with giving that a pass too because this is escapist fiction, but in today’s real world climate it does make me nervous to actually recommend anything promoting that moral stance.
But over all, this book just hits so many right notes, has so many great scenes, and keeps me delighted all the way through.
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.
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!
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.
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.
This is delightful and hilarious and a surprisingly quick read despite being fairly long. The story pulled me along as the plot goes on wild side-quests and the main character goes on wild tangents. I adore the main character, Halla, a housekeeper who had come into an unexpected inheritance that involves some really angry dis-inherited relatives that she has to avoid. She was happily living her life, more or less, and would have continued to do so if not for the need to avoid the awful relatives which has led to acquiring a magically haunted sword, running away from home, meeting bandits on the road and having to escape them, meeting police chasing the bandits on the road and having to escape them, and increasing number of hijinks that domino ever onwards.
The second main character, Sarkis, is the magically haunted sword and also a barbarian from a distant land, who is used to being used as a warrior by other warriors, and is now a companion for an escaping housekeeper and isn’t quite sure what to make of the situation. We slowly get more of his backstory over the course of the book, but (in my opinion) his true delight is to be the outside perspective on Halla and her situation. It’s hilarious!
I was also pleased to see confirmation in the afterward that this was going to be a trilogy. Since it was published in 2018, I assumed the other two would already be available. Alas! Book 2 of the trilogy is due to be published in August 2026. Hmph. I will wait.
I also realized about a quarter of the way in that Swordheart is set in the same universe as the author’s Saint of Steel series, of which I have read the first three of four:
Paladin’s Grace (Saint of Steel, Book 1) 2020
It’s actually only as I was putting together this review that I realize from the publication dates involved that these books were written after Swordheart, and thus these are in the Swordheart universe rather than vice versa. I had read a great essay about the social history of perfume and how closely perfumers were tied to alchemists and to poisoners and someone had recommend this book in the comments and it really is fabulous. Set in a generic historic fantasy setting with gods and demons and paladins, our main character Grace is a perfumer trying to make a living, but having to fight systemic sexism every step of the way. And also accusations of being a poisoner. Meanwhile, the main male character is a paladin’s who’s god has since died and thus his own status is deeply in question. I really enjoyed the deep dive into the perfuming business as well as the interesting theological perspective. After I read it, I immediately put a hold on the remaining books in the series:
Paladin’s Strength (Saint of Steel, Book 2) 2021
Paladin’s Grace had introduced four paladin’s who had survived the death of their god, and there was a book for each of them to figure out how to continue living when the religion they had devoted themselves to was so thoroughly disbanded. This is the second book and continues to do some amazing world-building on what religions there are and how they interact with one another and with their gods and I do love a deep dive into fantasy theology.
Paladin’s Hope (Saint of Steel, Book 3) 2021
This is the third book in the series and I probably should have taken a break rather than reading one book after another because I remember liking it well enough, but just loosing some steam in reading them back-to-back-to-back. I really love Kingfisher’s characters and world-building, but this book focused more on the overarching series plot of a massive villain in the background who must be routed out before they destroyed all of society or something like that and I just didn’t find it as interesting.
I’m pretty sure the reason I didn’t review these here before was because I’d been planning to review the whole series in one go but then didn’t get around to reading the final book: Paladin’s Faith. However, I’ve gone ahead and put a hold on that at my local library and plan to read it in preparation for Daggerbound being published in August 2026.
The Inheritance (Book 1 of The Breach Wars) by Ilona Andrews August 2025
This book is fun! It would a guilty pleasure if I were still at a point in my life where I was willing to feel guilty about a simple pleasure. This book is good because it makes me happy. The authors clearly had fun writing it and I had fun reading it, and if I were going to try to compare it to Great LiteratureTM, then there would be some issues, but that’s not the league it’s in, and in the league of fun pleasures, it’s a wild success!
I also get a kick out of knowing that these authors clearly read/watch the same Dungeon Adventure genre of Korean comics/anime that I do. The premise: a decade or so ago, mysterious portals starting appearing that would produce monsters that had to be fought and the portals closed; at the same time some people gained a whole variety of super powers perfectly suited to fighting the monsters; people formed guilds to organize the fighters, and thus plots involve both fighting monsters and political shenanigans with wealthy celebrity fighters and saving people. Probably the most well-known in this sub-genre is Solo Leveling, my favorites are: Traces of the Sun and Mission: Save the Hunter, but I’ve probably tried at least a dozen others. There are a lot of takes on this and now Ilona Andrews are writing their own and I am here for it!
This is also an interesting break from Ilona Andrew’s usual writing in that it is a pure adventure story with no romantic plot line. Not only that, but there is a character in the first chapter who is set up as the obvious love interest who winds up being a minor villain instead. I was delighted by the twist!
There is significant overlap in the world-building for this story with their Innkeeper Series, which I would normally link to a prior review of but am shocked to discover that I haven’t previously reviewed any of those stories. The Innkeeper Series is a great deal of fun, starting with:
Clean Sweep (Innkeeper Chronicles Book 1) 2013
which introduces Dina Demille who runs a small inn in rural Texas that caters to a very specific clientele: interplanetary visitors who want absolutely safety for the duration of their stay and who, in turn, promise to not make it too obvious to an unaware general human population that Earth is very conveniently located as a waypoint for a lot of very strange travelers. Shenanigans regularly occur.
There’s enough specific overlap between the societies of aliens introduced in the Innkeeper series and some background discussed in The Inheritance that I would expect them to be set in the same universe but there’s also enough different in the standard Earth culture, that I’d expect them to be entirely different. I’m definitely curious about what will be revealed in book 2 of the Breach Wars series or book 7 of the Innkeeper series.
Also, Ilona Andrew’s next book, due in 2026, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, is their take on the transmigration sub-genre in which the main character of the story is a regular person in the real world who wakes up inside a story that they’ve been reading with full knowledge of the oncoming plot. Most well-known is probably Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, my favorite is probably Cleric of Decay, and I have at least started half a dozen other stories on Manta or Webtoons with the same concept. I hope Ilona Andrews are having as much fun with these as I have been!
Testimony of Mute Things by Lois McMaster Bujold October 2025
A new Penric & Desdemona novella! Yay! This is a delight and while it is the fifteenth story written, it is set chronologically as the fourth in the series. As much as I enjoy Penric as a family man who is famous/infamous and experienced, it is wonderful to see the younger Penric still getting himself established and being underestimated and relying more on older mentors to help him figure out his next steps. And, interestingly, in this we learn more about Ruchia, Desdemona’s prior host, and look at what it means to have friendships with people who are a combination of mortal and immortal. Ruchia is dead, but Desdemona continues on and thus so does Ruchia’s imprint.
Something that I find particularly delightful about this series as a whole is that the publisher listed on Amazon is Spectrum Literary Agency which is not, in fact, a publisher. Lois McMaster Bujold is retired. She was a wildly successful science fiction and fantasy author with 27 novels (at least), many short stories and compilations, and translations, and some years back she declared that she was retiring. And in her retirement, she apparently entertains herself by writing novellas and doing the equivalent of self-publishing but with the full support of a literary agency with full editorial work, and just no marketing at all. She doesn’t need to do any marketing, because fans such as myself are more than willing to just check back every so often to see if there’s anything new and be ecstatic when there is!
Biblio-therapy 