Category Archives: Fiction

Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher

by Rebecca

I have started the spooky season off right with a pair of eerie fantasy horror novellas that I highly recommend (although admittedly not to my 6-year-old cousin for whom I had to do some quick page flipping to find a section I could read aloud without introducing any concerning concepts.)

What Moves the Dead
by T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon)
2022

This first novella is a retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which I actually only read in full afterwards, although I vaguely knew the gist of it through literary osmosis. The original is a bit of a slog with a lot of words about not much happening. In contrast, Kingfisher goes above and beyond in developing some of those details into full plot arcs and monster development, creating a cozy horror story that is deeply unnerving, with a wonderfully unique character to be the narrator.

Also, not to get into spoilers beyond what the cover already shows, but I feel like this book could be part of a triptych with Entangle Life and Little Mushroom to really cover the full expanse of literary discourse on fungi.

The narrator is Alex Easton, a retired soldier from Ruritania, a fictional eastern European country that apparently has a long history of being a fictional setting, and has — in this story at least — a running gag about how miserable the country is in pretty much every way, but it’s still home. An interesting twist that reminds me of the Cleric Chih series is that in the Ruritanian language, soldiers have their own dedicated pronouns, and thus anyone who doesn’t like their born pronouns can swear in as a soldier and get a soldier’s pronouns as part of the deal along with PTSD and various other injuries.

Easton is fascinating enough, that it’s no wonder that the one-off story became a series, and thus the second book is:

What Feasts at Night
by T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon)
2024

This is another cozy horror novella set in the 1880s, that follows pretty soon after the prior one where Easton is hoping to recover from the events at the House of Usher, although would have preferred to do so in an apartment in Paris rather than in an old hunting lodge in Ruritania, but events conspire to bring Easton to rural Ruritania, an unexpected death, and some deeply superstitious villagers. The characters are a delightful as they try to get along, despite having distinctly different perspectives, and the world-building perfectly creepy in the way it presents the world as dangerously uncertain about what is happening and even more uncertain about what to do about whatever is happening.

Kingfisher does an excellent job of both taking advantage of and subverting some of the standard writing tropes to keep both the reader and the characters uncertain. The supernatural elements are introduced into the world building in a way that feels all too natural and realistic.

The third book in this series, What Stalks the Deep, just got published last week and I’m on the list for it as soon as it hits my library, but wanted to give it a call out here as well. It’s coming soon!

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!

Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival 2025

by Rebecca

I almost skipped the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival, held in the downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library, because I was tried and busy and distracted and when I went to double-check the time and location, the website was definitely geared towards families with young kids.

I’m really glad that I went though! There were probably about 50 artists’ booths and while the content was all family friendly (some of the artists had left some of their creations at home in order to keep the selection family friendly) there was still plenty of things that I found interesting. I forgot to come with a suitable amount of cash, but a number of the vendors did take credit cards, and I acquired a few more fascinating items.

100 Demons Dialogues
by Lucy Bellwood
This is a sweet little book that has some serious emotional impact, as Bellwood personifies her internal critic as a little demon that follows her around, and she refutes its arguments as she continues to work on her art. It’s remarkably inspiring.

to and fro
by kat tuesday
This is a short (24 pages) compilation of three of the author’s works, including Peek and Plover in Another Blasted Cave, and is just generally kind of adorable. In some ways it feels like the kind of sketch/doodle story that you might create when you’re bored in a meeting with only your note pad available, except that it’s both really well done and finished.

Click
by Duncan Bryk
This has some fascinating background world-building of some sort of magical-realism steampunk post-apocalyptic situation, except that it’s all through the point of view of a mouse that only explores within the one odd mansion and only interacts with the very strange caretaker of that mansion. The caretaker clearly knows more about the situation than the mouse, but the mouse is their only companion as well. The overall sense is a combination of intrigue and melancholy.

Resilience
by Ari Coester
This is a tiny zine (ie, an 8.5×11 paper folded to create an 8-page booklet) about the anti-bird spikes that corporations install in their signs and how the birds build their nests right on top of those spikes. Adorable!

What To Do
by Jackalyn Fleming
This is another tiny zine that consists of a flower wondering what it’s purpose in life is. Having bloomed, it wonders what’s next and asks the people around it. It turns out that the bee has opinions but the bird doesn’t care. It’s both hilarious and feels timely.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare in three panels each
by Mya L. Gosling
I’ve followed this artist’s work for years and was delighted to get a physical copy of some of her work. It’s hilarious, and also really well done. Just, taking each of Shakespeare’s plays and stripping them down to the bare minimum (and perhaps significantly beyond) of plot points. It feels a bit like poetry and a bit like a series of teasers.

Martyr!

by Anna

By Kaveh Akbar

This is capital-L Literary novel about a depressed young poet searching for the meaning of life and death, and I should absolutely hate it, but I was riveted! I guess that’s a testimony to the writing. The protagonist is still quite annoying, the sort of drug-fueled tortured artist that intrigued me in my 20s and just exhausts me now. But even within the first few pages, I ran across lines that I knew would stick with me for a while.

I never would have even picked it up if it hadn’t been recommended by what is becoming one of my favorite e-newsletters, Death by Consumption.* The recommendation includes this quoted passage:

Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.

And I thought to myself, well, yes, of course we all want to be happy, contented, and rich; who doesn’t? So I felt like I needed to read the book to find the counter argument. I didn’t really get an answer, but instead got a lot to think about over the next few days and weeks. (Danny also calls it “short but expansive” and I believe his definition of short has been warped by the enormous tomes he usually reads, since this comes to a healthy 331 pages, but it was a quick read, with short chapters from rotating viewpoints that pull you in for ‘just one more.’)

Also, about halfway through the book, there’s a surprise twist that adds a significant mystery that I wasn’t expecting at all, but helped balance the tortured artist side of it all. That said, I found the ending both confusing and upsetting, which could have been intentional but I got the sense that I was getting caught up in details and missing the big point of it all. I was incredibly grateful to google for autofilling my search of “Martyr! Kaveh Akbar…” with “ending explained” and finding an hour-long lecture on youtube, as well as a decent sized reddit thread.

*Side recommendation: I first started following Danny Gottleib’s writing when he was doing a tongue-in-cheek Julie & Julia thing called Danny & Gweneth, where he tried to make all of Gweneth Paltrow’s recipes with ingredients he could find locally in the Midwest. He ended up moving to NYC and switched to a general media recommendation newsletter that I look forward to every week.

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

by Rebecca

The River Has Roots
by Amal El-Mohtar
2025

This author has a way of using language to create worlds like lucid dreams. She makes metaphors so strong and pervasive that they’re world-building. It lives in the space between poetry and prose, and reading it feels like a way to slow the frantic pace of my thoughts and set my brain to a reasonable rhythm. I’m in awe of her writing.

This story is a retelling/re-imagining of the classic folk song, The Two Sisters. And of all the versions I’ve read/heard, I like this one best. It’s not a long book, only 100 pages, and includes many beautiful black-and-white illustrations.

El-Mohtar is one of the co-authors of This Is How You Lose the Time War, which was extremely good but also complicated in a way that required more focused concentration than this book did. This story feels closer to Nghi Vo’s The Singing Hills Cycle books, which is also a high complement.

Love, Death + Robots: The Official Anthology : Volume One

by Rebecca

Love, Death + Robots: The Official Anthology: Volume One
2021, audiobook 2025

I have not watched the animation series, but I’ve heard good things about it and I saw that this audiobook existed and so I got it and listened to it on my work commute. And I didn’t quit halfway through, though I was extremely tempted. It has some of the worst writing I’ve ever read/heard. Like, at least one story that’s right up there with Eye of Argon, and others that were close runners up. What’s also crazy is that, as I was listening, increasingly appalled with each new story, I realized that they were managing to cover a wide range of ways in which writing can be poorly written.

In retrospect, I realized that there were two entries that are explicitly screenplays and thus can be forgiven (I suppose) for going into details about exact camera angles, and scene changes, and repetitions of the exact time of day even though it didn’t change, but wow was it hard to get through on my commute. The fact that one of those screenplays (“The Witness” by Alberto Mielgo) literally opened with “a beautiful woman is naked in front of a mirror, applying make-up” felt like such a stereotype/cliche that I wondered if it was intended as a spoof. Sadly, if it was intended as satire, it never made any particular point.

A lot of the stories (“Suits” by Steve Lewis, “Sucker of Souls” by Kirsten Cross, “Shape-Shifters” by Marko Kloos, “Blind Spot” by Vitaliy Shushko, “The Secret War” by David W. Amendola) had men with overwrought machismo fighting slavering aliens, with the type of clinical descriptions of violence and gore that I might expect from an audio-description of a visual media, but not from even a book adaptation of a movie. (“Lucky Thirteen” by Marko Kloos, has a woman with machismo fighting human soldiers, but the rest remains the same.) Text and video are different types of media and text is better served trying to describe the impact of violence/gore on the characters rather than just a description of a picture. However, most of them couldn’t even make their violence impactful. Plus, a really eerie pattern I noticed was how in these stories, there was all this extreme violence between the “main characters “good guys” who feared for this lives but stayed strong through it all because they needed to protect their people, versus the “bad guy” alien others who were mindless killing monsters with no thought or culture of their own, only an endless desire to kill humans. But their actions were the same, extreme violence towards one another: just one side was good and one side was bad. It felt like video games for armchair warriors, who wanted to feel powerful and liked gun statistics and weren’t at all interested in the source of any given conflict.

Some of the stories (“Sonnie’s Edge” by Peter F. Hamilton, “The Witness” by Alberto Mielgo, “Beyond the Aquila Rift” by Alastair Reynolds) had an interesting concept and/or twist that I would have enjoyed seeing presented better and with less of a look at the authors’ sexual issues.

“Beyond the Aquila Rift” was actually the first story (ie, the seventh story) that I thought was genuinely well-written. And then it swerved into focusing on a middle-aged dude’s feelings about his extra-marital affair and it mostly stayed there for the rest of the story, pushing aside the interesting science fiction scenario and reminding me of the stereotypical English professor writing a novel about having an affair. The author tried his best to make the affair plot-significant and mostly managed to make the protagonist so self-centered he came across as a sociopath.

There were some decent stories. (“The Dump” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Ice Age” by Michael Swanwick, “Alternate Histories” by John Scalzi.) It’s too easy to forget them when I think back on the book. But they were there. They were short, but interesting and fun and funny.

There were two genuinely good stories that I enjoyed a great deal and actually recommend. Luckily, I can even provide links to them (the written versions, not the audio):

“Good Hunting” by Ken Liu is excellent and heart-breaking and heart-warming and all that about China losing it’s magical culture during the British colonial period and then regaining it in a steampunk fashion.

“Zima Blue” by Alistair Reynolds is fascinating and thought-provoking and I have so many thoughts about it but also don’t want to provide any spoilers, because the story itself is so well laid out in the way it presents the situation and slowly makes the reveal, and then leaves the reader to continue to thinking about all the implications for days afterwards. It’s about an artist who went through extreme body modifications in order to have experiences no one else could, and the reporter who interviewed him about his final piece.

Detroit Zine Fest 2025

by Rebecca

I hadn’t been quite sure what to expect from the Detroit Zine Fest, but was delighted to discover that it was like a local mini Small Press Expo. Maybe somewhere between 50 and 80 vendors? Thus, it was still slightly overwhelming to browse through all the stalls, but was also delightful and I bought a number of really good zines:

Michigan Cryptids by Shi Briggs
A Michigan Unnature Journal by Shi Briggs
These are two books, 12 pages each, about cryptids natives to Michigan, with absolutely gorgeous illustrations and short descriptions. I don’t actually know much about cryptids, so I’m not sure how much these were researched versus created, but I did recognize the Michigan Dogman as a thing. But the black and white illustrations are so beautiful and creepy and inspiring.

Thank You by Eddie Roberts
2023
This is a gorgeous and pointed poem about the culture of consumerism and the push-pull of gratitude for getting things you desire with the discomfort of always having more pushed upon you. It described many of my own conflicting feelings. The author also experiments with some really interesting typography effects.

Passages by Liana Fu
2019
Is a series of poems and musings on being Chinese diaspora going to visit Hong Kong and trying to learn Cantonese, struggling to figure out where they fit in the world where all their native cultures see them as other, and how this intersects with the ongoing cultural struggle of Hong Kong itself under an increasingly oppressive Chinese government.

Of Course I’d still love you if you were a worm, but like we might have to renegotiate certain aspects of our relationship, y’know? It’s a big adjustment: A guide to safely and responsibly loving your partner post wormification by Seth Karp
This is hilarious and also the best kind of crack-treated-seriously brochure. It’s clearly a take-off of the “Would you still love me if I were a worm?” meme, but reminds me even more of an elaborate version of the Jack Harkness test meme. It’s got advice and perspective on what to do if your significant other spontaneously turns into a worm. (Step one: ask what kind of worm? There are different kinds of it will effect your decision.)

Helianthus by Jone Greaves
There is Something in the Basement by Jone Greaves
Instructional Musings for Encounters & Summoning by Jone Greaves
Intent to Carcinize by Jone Greaves
I spent some time trying to figure out which of Jone Greaves’ zines to get since they were all such fascinating titles and wound up getting four of them, each of which is unique and fascinating and thought-provoking. I’ve been getting into short-story writing competitions recently and I feel like these are all examples of how it’s done: to create a world and a concept and maybe a character in just a few pages.

Gentle Laundry by India Johnson
2023
This is a surprisingly fascinating non-fiction 24-page zine about laundry. As someone who mostly learned to do laundry to the extent of put clothes in a machine with detergent and it will come out Officially Clean regardless of any evidence to the contrary, this zine opens up whole new worlds of understanding about what is actually happening and what detergents, soaps, bleaches, etc actually do. It’s also tonally very approachable, although by about halfway through I was feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the all the options and decision branches. But it’s valuable information to know and I have a few ideas for changes I want to try when doing my own laundry. Once I’ve tried a few things, I’ll need to re-read it to see what else.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

by Rebecca

A Psalm for the Wild-Built
by Beck Chambers
2021

This is a charming book that struck me immediately as a mixture of Nghi Vo’s The Singing Hills Cycle and Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot series with a bit of Mai Mochizuki’s The Full Moon Coffee Shop thrown in for good measure. It is also the first of a two-book series and I definitely need to check out the second book. Our main character is Sibling Dex, a monk who has been a gardener for many years but decides at the beginning of this book that they have received a new calling to be a tea monk: someone who travels around the countryside with a pop-up tea stall to provide the populace with tea and comfort. I do love fictional religious explorations and narrow focus narrations too about the tea and the carriage and the villages.

The setting is a quiet futuristic post-industrial utopia on a moon, several hundred years after the Great Awakening when the robots that manned the factories spontaneously developed awareness and declared that they were going to depart human society to explore nature and they didn’t want to be followed. In response, humanity had a Great Transition where they found a balance with nature and since have lived in essentially bucolic comfort. The exact details are not delved into, but it’s against this backdrop that Sibling Dex finds themselves yearning for something more than they have while being confused about how they can be dissatisfied with what they have. And yet.

And it is Sibling Dex, in the midst of their struggles to identify what they need that’s more than what they already have, who makes the first contact between humans and robots in centuries, with a robot who has come to see how humanity is doing. It is very much a culture clash of individuals who are both trying their best but also thoroughly confusing and confused by the other.

No solutions are found by the end of this book, but conversations are had and explorations of both ideas and locations. But overall it was very sweet and extremely relatable.

The Archer by Paulo Coelho

by Rebecca

The Archer
by Paulo Coelho
illustrated by Christoph Niemann
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
2020

I picked this up randomly at the library when I was searching for something else, and I’m glad I did. It’s a short book (only 160 pages) with beautiful illustrations, and it feels like a combination of Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The text is not quite poetry, but I want to refer to the verses rather than paragraphs, due to the care and curation that has gone into the prose. It’s a short book but not a quick read, not because it’s difficult but because it leads me to slow down and take breaks and think about what it’s saying.

It has an extremely basic framing story where a boy discovers that the local carpenter in his little village is a famous archer, and asks him how one masters archery. The archer says that he can tell the boy how in an hour, but doing so takes years. The bulk of the book is made up of the short descriptions on what it takes to master a skill and thus master oneself. It’s essentially a book of meditations, with the skill of archery being itself a framework for self improvement.

The framing story sets this book as fictional with characters and events — that was what had originally drawn me to it and I enjoyed both the opening and the closing chapters — but it feels more like nonfiction to me. This book consists of the advice man gives to a boy about how to live a good life: how to be a bow, aim an arrow, pick a target, and be respectful of it all.

Also, the illustrations really are gorgeous, in a very simple style.

The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki

by Rebecca

The Full Moon Coffee Shop
by Mai Mochizuki
2020
translated by Jesse Kirkwood
2024

This is a charming story about interconnected characters facing difficulties in their various careers getting their lives sorted out and on a better path, via dreams of a little pop-up coffee shop run by cats/gods who explain their astrology charts to them.

So, to break that down:

  • It’s charmingly written. Kudos to both the author and the translator!
  • The characters are all adults struggling with adult issues, which I definitely appreciated.
  • I also really enjoyed the magical-realism that merges very real world issues with mystical coffee shop: it’s hilarious as each character has their own approach to responding to having a magical experience in an otherwise non-magical world.
  • The explanations of the astrology charts got a bit repetitive for me as the reader and that was not helped by the characters responding with complete confusion at first but then quickly agreeing that now they understood where they had gone wrong with their lives and what changes they needed to make given what the planets said about them.
  • I was reminded of the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series, which I last read as a grade-schooler so my memory could easily be faulty, but had the same structure applied to kids having bad habits and a mystical person with powers teaches them to be better. A very cute series of morality tales, targeted young.
  • However, I did really enjoy the seemingly random interconnections of the characters, where each vignette includes as a side character the protagonist of the next vignette, as well as a reference to how much better the prior protagonist is doing having implemented the changes they needed.
  • The epilogue explaining why this all happened and how these character were connected by a good deed as children and thus earned the gratitude of the cat gods felt both unnecessary and contrived, as well as a bit disappointing, in that it restricted the possibilities of who might wind up finding this mystical pop-up coffee shop to just that one group.
  • But I did really enjoy the softness of showing characters struggling with failing career paths, finding a way forward into success and happiness.

All that to say: I enjoyed it but not without qualifications. I recommend it to readers looking for some soft reassurance and willing to put up with some basic lessons in astrology.