Testimony of Mute Things by Lois McMaster Bujold

by Rebecca

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!

An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good by Helene Tursten

by Rebecca

An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good
by Helene Tursten
translated by Marlaine Delargy
2018

This is a delightful little book of five short stories starring Maud, the titular elderly lady who is up to no good. She’s like Miss Marple’s nemesis in a series of cozy noir mysteries.

In her late 80s, Maud has lived her whole life in the same apartment in Gothenburg, Sweden because there was a clause in the sales contract for the apartment building that her father’s children could live there rent-free for as long as they’d like. Maud has enjoyed living there her whole live (much to the dismay of the housing association board) and has saved up enough money to travels extensively in her retirement. She also saves by being casually criminal whenever the opportunity arises. As an apparently frail little old lady, Maud is generally treated well except when she’s condescended to. As an actually quite fit and capable little old lady, Maud sometimes decides that when she is not treated well, then that person should be removed from this life and goes about making that happen.

What’s particularly interesting about this book is that the narration isn’t on her side. She isn’t an anti-hero or a vigilante. She’s a killer who gets away with it by playing into society’s biases about little old ladies.

In addition to the stories themselves, I also got a kick out of the afterward/about-the-author section which described how Tursten is the author of two detective series, but she was getting burnt out writing about honest people supporting the law. Instead, she was inspired to write a story about someone on the opposite side of the law. And thus Maud came into being.

Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell

by Rebecca

Someone You Can Build A Nest In
by John Wiswell
2024

This book is very cute and very gross. It’s a remarkably sweet romance between a literal man-eating shapeshifting ooze and a member of a monster-hunting human family. The story is set in a hand-wavy historical fantasy setting mostly in and around one town but with knights and nobles and small kingdom politics happening in the background. In the opening scene, the monster Shesheshen wakes up from hibernation when a hunter enters her lair in order to kill her and harvest her heart. Instead, she kills and eats him, not necessarily in that order. Later on, she meets his sister Homily and falls in love. There are, as you can imagine, some problems that must be resolved for any relationship to work out.

The plot is tricksy with a couple of twists and turns that kept my anticipation high. It also side-stepped a lot of issues by having a main character who was so very inhuman that she, and thus to a certain extent the reader, just didn’t care about the ongoing body horror. It’s not horror to the point-of-view character so everything is fine!

I enjoyed the book and thought it was both fun and funny.

However, I do have some caveats:

One of them is oddly how sanitized the story is. Of course there is a lot of death and killing, but I was a bit taken aback by how few people Shesheshen actually winds up killing, despite her stream of conscious thought process that classifies people as highly edible. (Her thought process is hilarious!) Given that the author is upfront about monsters often being a metaphor for disability, it makes sense that he wrote a more misunderstood monster than a truly vicious one, but it also felt like he was trying to write both at the same time and couldn’t quite manage to reconcile the thought process with the actions so it doesn’t quite work out.

While the expectation of death and gore is obvious from the very beginning, there was a scene of extreme animal harm in the middle of the book that surprised me and broke the rhythm of the story for me. Spoiler: the animal does get rescued and does survive, but it’s an unpleasant scene that hit me harder than anything else in the book.

And finally, I think this book could have done better as a duology. The book is broken into eight parts and takes place over the course of a full year. The main plot and primary character arcs and half the year are covered in the first seven parts. The eighth section covers the other half of the year and a whole secondary character arc that gets skimmed through extremely quickly. It could have been a whole sequel, possibly from Homily’s perspective, but it felt very rushed as a too-long epilog to the main story.

But overall, this book was fun and enjoyable and a great build-up to Halloween.

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!

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.

Wicked River by Lee Sandlin

by Rebecca

Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
written by Lee Sandlin
read by Jeff McCarthy
2010

This is a wild ride. It’s a non-fiction black-comedy history book. It’s a collection of crazy stories about unpleasant people living awful lives and they are hilarious. Except that sometimes it gets grim enough that it overloads my sense of humor and just gets super depressing even in its ridiculousness. But it really is fascinating and an excellent look at American history and social movements. It’s kind of amazing how many patterns of events and types of people I recognize as being present in today’s world.

This is by the same author who wrote Storm Kings , which I enjoyed so much that I immediately checked out their other audiobook. Storm Kings is the better book, with a more cohesive storyline, while Wicked River is more a scattershot of stories and events, but it’s still very good and very impactful. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of life along the Mississippi, mostly pre-Civil War, skipping around in time and location, with a lot of stories about the lives of specific individuals and events. It gets into the nitty gritty of life and death and trade, the horrors of recurring epidemics, the cognitive dissonance of slave-holding societies, the lawlessness of the various settler justice systems, intermittent excesses of debauchery, celebrations of casual violence, ubiquitous drunkenness, and a vast cast of characters from all walks of life.

The book concludes with the Mississippi River Commission being established immediately post-Civil War and essentially taming the river, at the same time that railroads were replacing boats for transport. In the end, there’s a sense of nostalgia for the wildness that has been lost, because the river cultures were amazing and easily romanticized, even though, or perhaps especially because, they sound truly awful to have lived through.

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.

Storm Kings by Lee Sandlin

by Rebecca

Storm Kings: The Untold History of America’s First Tornado Chasers
by Lee Sandlin
read by Andrew Garman
2013

This is AMAZING! I had expected it to be vaguely interesting, enough to keep me entertained on my commute without being a problem to stop whenever I arrived. I had also expected it to be about modern storm chasers. Instead, it was utterly fascinating and surprisingly funny and I had to turn it off occasionally when I got to tricky intersections in my driving because the story was too distracting. For about two weeks, I started the majority of conversations with “In this book about weather….” because it just filled my thoughts and I wanted to share the fascination with everyone around me.

Via the focus on tornadoes, the book covers the development of weather research in the United States from colonial days to the present, following the work of maybe a dozen pivotal individuals driving tornado research. And let me tell you: the people who dedicate years, decades, or whole lives to the study of tornadoes are some truly fascinating characters!

Tornadoes by themselves are interesting phenomenon, but more than that, the books focus on tornadoes gives an amazing perspective on a wide range of history of the United States and the history of scientific studies in general, allowing the book to cover a wide range of issues without ever getting too far away from the primary topic. The book touches on Benjamin Franklin’s famous lightning experiment, the establishment of the Smithsonian, the displacement of American Indians, various arctic explorations, the great dust bowl, and a number of wars, all while discussing how these specifically related to the study of tornadoes. Sandlin does a really amazing job of covering long time periods succinctly and then covering specific events in minute-by-minute detail, and not letting the story he’s telling get bogged down in either.

The book also felt rather timely, as the current news reports storms and deaths and political decisions that interfered with factual weather knowledge, because it turns out that none of that is new or unusual to the weather service. This book is full of storms and deaths and the politics that go into deciding which facts to look at and which theories to believe. But it’s also distant enough to not be just one more bit of depressing news.

Overall, this book was fascinating and funny and horrifying and jaw-dropping, and I highly recommend it. Also the reader for the audio book is excellent.

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.