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793 reviews

Ancestors: Identity and DNA in the Levant by Pierre Zalloua

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adventurous informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was published in the US by Random House on May 6th, 2025. 

What do we inherit when we inherit identity? In Ancestors, geneticist Pierre Zalloua ventures into the tangled roots of the Levant to answer this question — not with certainty, but with curiosity and care. Both rigorous and tender, this book is a rare offering: a scientific inquiry that refuses simplicity, a cultural meditation grounded in genetic data, and a love letter to a region too often flattened by war, empire, and myth.

Zalloua begins by dismantling race — not just as a construct, but as a colonial invention. Through his accessible crash course on DNA and human evolution, he traces our shared origins, migration out of Africa, and the genetic mingling of Homo sapiens with Neanderthals and Denisovans, locating some of these first encounters right in the Levant. From there, he walks readers through thousands of years of movement, separation, and cultural formation — documenting how geography, climate, and war shaped the genetic fabric of the region.

But what makes Ancestors remarkable isn’t just the science — it’s Zalloua’s refusal to let genes define identity. Again and again, he reminds us that culture, language, and belonging are fluid. That indigeneity cannot be mapped with a microscope. That the Levant is not a battleground between East and West, but a convergence — a cradle of alphabets, gods, migrations, and meaning.

There are moments when the prose sags under the weight of data, especially in the final chapters, but even then, the heart of the book pulses strong. Zalloua’s critique of the Arab League’s cultural erasures, his deconstruction of “Semitic” identity, and his efforts to uncover the vanished Phoenicians are all grounded in a politics of preservation — not as nostalgia, but as resistance.

If you’re a reader drawn to science with soul, histories that resist binaries, or a reimagining of identity beyond the nation-state, Ancestors is well worth your time. It doesn’t just map genes — it maps the ever-unfinished story of human belonging.

📖 Read this if you love: cultural histories that resist borders, anti-essentialist takes on identity, and accessible science writing with heart.

🔑 Key Themes: Genetics and Identity, Indigeneity and Migration, Cultural Hybridity and Belonging, Anti-Racism and Colonial Critique, Ancestry and Epistemic Humility.
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Eleven Percent by Maren Uthaug

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adventurous mysterious reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

2.75

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was released in the US by Saint Martin’s Press on April 22nd, 2025.

Eleven Percent opens with a promise: Lilith, Adam’s first wife, reclaiming power. I was intrigued. A world where the patriarchy has fallen? Where the divine is feminine, menstruation is sacred, and women are in charge? Sign me up. But the novel’s execution didn’t quite deliver on its compelling premise.

Set in a speculative matriarchy, Uthaug’s story is fragmented across multiple perspectives—Medea, a snake-breeding outcast; Wicca, a reluctant priestess with irregular periods; Silence, a mute sister haunted by the past; and Eva, a trans woman hiding her history. Men are now the subjugated class, kept in state-run centers for sex and reproduction, and religion has been restructured around “the Mother.” While the setup is rich with potential, the storytelling left me disoriented more often than intrigued.

Uthaug’s writing is provocative and heavily symbolic—there’s a lot of blood, snakes, sex, and ritual—but the narrative felt more like a collage than a cohesive whole. Just when I began to invest in one thread, the perspective would shift again. And while the novel critiques the dangers of flipping oppression rather than dismantling systems, it leans too heavily on shock value without anchoring it in a believable or emotionally resonant world.

By the end, I wasn’t sure what had happened—or how I was meant to feel. The ambition is admirable, and I appreciate its refusal to hand us easy answers. But it’s hard to follow a story when the world-building is this thin. This is one of those books where the concept is sharper than the execution. If you’re drawn to religious reimaginings and dystopian gender satire, it might spark something for you. For me, it was more confusing than compelling.

📖 Read this if you love: dystopian explorations of gender, provocative theological reimaginings, and speculative fiction that asks more questions than it answers.

🔑 Key Themes: Matriarchal Power Structures, Cycles of Oppression, Gender Essentialism and Ritual, Feminine Erasure and Control, Myth and Reclamation.
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Overgrowth by Mira Grant

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mysterious reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.75

“I was an alien. I was not of this world. And one way or another, I was going to have to reconcile that with a lifetime lived among these people, who had been my friends and my family and my home.”

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was published in the US by Tor on May 6th, 2025.

What if you always knew you didn’t belong—but no one believed you?

In Overgrowth, Mira Grant gifts us a sci-fi horror that is part alien invasion, part existential exploration, and all heart. From the moment a comet seeds Earth with eerie, sentient flora, Grant roots her narrative in dread and wonder. What grows from those seeds—literally and metaphorically—is a richly layered story about identity, transformation, and the uneasy intimacy of being seen.

We meet Anastasia as a child warned never to enter the woods, and like all the best horror books, she does. What returns is not quite the same girl. Or maybe it is. As an adult, she goes by Stasia, living in Seattle, working tech, and still insisting she’s an alien sent to warn of an invasion. Most treat her story as trauma-induced delusion—until a broadcast arrives from the stars.

What unfolds is a slippery, haunting exploration of what it means to be human when you’ve always felt other. Stasia is a brilliant protagonist: alien in form, alienated in life, cuttingly funny and quietly grieving. Her voice is a balm for anyone who’s ever felt like an imposter in their own skin, or in their own community.

Grant’s prose blooms with strange beauty. The vines crawling beneath Stasia’s skin aren’t just body horror—they’re metaphor made flesh. Trauma and transformation are never separate here; instead, they’re intertwined like roots and memory. The novel digs deep into themes familiar to many queer and neurodivergent readers: disbelieved truths, found family, bodily autonomy, and the terrifying intimacy of letting someone care for you when you feel unknowable.

Even as the ending rushes past in a slightly-too-neat conclusion, the emotional stakes never wither. Overgrowth is less about saving humanity and more about who counts as human to begin with. And who gets to decide.

If you’ve ever been called dramatic for telling the truth—or told you were “too sensitive” when you were just right—Stasia might feel like coming home. Even if, like her, you were grown in a garden meant to devour you. Weird, wrenching, and deeply tender. Highly recommend.

📖 Read this if you love: queer sci-fi, neurodivergent-coded protagonists, slow-burning existential dread, and metaphor-rich body horror that doubles as a meditation on trauma and belonging. 

🔑 Key Themes: Alienation and Identity, Difference and Disbelief, Bodily Autonomy, Found Family, Belonging Beyond Humanity.
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Bitter Texas Honey by Ashley Whitaker

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dark emotional funny fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was published in the US by Dutton on April 15th, 2025.

Ashley Whitaker’s Bitter Texas Honey is a messy, biting, and darkly funny portrait of a “formerly” bisexual woman crawling through the wreckage of addiction, patriarchy, and self-delusion in search of—well, something. Set against the humid backdrop of Texas politics and family dysfunction, this novel follows Joan West, a would-be writer and former leftist party girl turned legislative intern, as she tries (and fails) to wrangle meaning from her chaotic life and half-finished novel drafts.

Joan is not the kind of protagonist who invites admiration—she’s obsessive, self-sabotaging, and desperate for validation, especially from men who barely earn it. Her hunger for literary greatness, filtered through the lens of male mentorship and artistic masochism, is both cringeworthy and painfully familiar. The novel’s sharpest moments come when Winstead skewers this dynamic, laying bare how patriarchal conservatism infects even the most radical of intentions. Joan is a woman taught to distrust her own interiority, and it shows.

The book teeters between satire and tragedy, and I mean that as a compliment. Winstead’s prose is feral and funny, stitched with wry internal monologue and sudden moments of tenderness that gut you. Joan’s addiction to Adderall is handled with nuance—never romanticized, always uncomfortable—and the threads of generational trauma and mental illness, especially through her cousin Wyatt, pulse throughout the novel like a quiet scream.

That said, the ending left me wanting. There’s something unresolved in the book’s take on artistic transformation—Joan’s recovery arc gestures toward healing without quite landing it. I wasn’t sure if the satire ultimately condemns or indulges Joan’s choices, and while that ambiguity is probably the point, I found myself craving more clarity. What does it mean to write your way out when the world keeps writing over you?

Still, Bitter Texas Honey is a feral little book with a big, confused heart. It’s for the recovering girls, the too-much girls, the girls who highlight their own breakdowns and call it research. Read this if you’re tired of tidy narratives about healing—and ready to wade into the murk instead.

📖 Read this if you love: messy femme narrators, dark humor laced with addiction and ambition, and books that blur the line between satire and sincerity. 

🔑 Key Themes: Addiction and Control, Patriarchy and Artistic Legitimacy, Mental Illness and Family Estrangement, Writing as Obsession.
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Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 28%.
I picked up this book expecting an investigation into the impact of AI on human creativity and creative expression. 30% of the way through the book, the only mentions of AI were the chapters presenting ChatGPT's responses to the excerpts of the book that Vara provided to it. The other chapters explore the early days of the internet and the creation of Amazon and Facebook. While Vara touches on surveillance capitalism and other oppressive aspects of these technologies, her analysis is primarily funneled through confessional memoir aspects relying her own experiences with these platforms. This simply wasn't what I was looking for or something I'm interested in at this time. Fans of Naomi Klein's Doppelganger may like this better than I did. 
White Magic by Elissa Washuta

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

4.25

"Really, I just want a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder, but I suspect that if we could excuse the stolen pieces, there would be nothing left."

Elissa Washuta’s White Magic is not a roadmap—it’s a haunting. A nonlinear, feral, sacred constellation of essays that refuses clean resolution, instead conjuring the disorientation of memory, trauma, and survival under colonialism. It’s a book that breathes in grief and exhales clarity, even if that clarity is sharp enough to cut.

Across these essays, Washuta excavates what it means to search for spiritual belonging in a world where white settlers have plundered, repackaged, and sold back pieces of Indigenous culture like costume jewelry. As a Cowlitz woman living in the Pacific Northwest, she probes the spiritual theft embedded in white witch aesthetics, astrology memes, and self-proclaimed decolonial “healing” spaces that erase the very people they claim to honor. Her prose is elliptical and incantatory—sometimes dizzying in its fragmentation, always deliberate in its power.

Washuta writes through addiction and into sobriety, tracking the historical introduction of whiskey by settlers to Native communities and connecting this legacy to her own struggle with alcohol. She unspools memory: of sexual violence, of misdiagnoses and psychiatric gaslighting, of land loss and desecration. And she makes it clear that these are not separate threads—they are part of the same colonial snare.

Through Catholicism, myths of Lilith, ghost stories, and the eviction of the serpent spirit A’yahos from Duwamish land, Washuta interrogates who gets to be holy, who gets to haunt, and who gets erased.

I first fell in love with Washuta’s voice in My Body Is a Book of Rules, and her writing here is no less luminous or unflinching. That said, I found myself craving a bit more cohesion. The breadth of topics and shifting essay structures sometimes pulled me out of the otherwise spellbinding momentum. For me, a tighter container could have sharpened the already powerful impact of her themes.

Still, as a white reader, I was grateful for how this collection made me sit in discomfort—and more importantly, made me question what parts of me seek safety through performance rather than practice. This book is not meant to be consumed; it’s meant to be metabolized slowly, like bitter medicine or ancestral spellwork.

It’s not easy, and it shouldn’t be. But I’m better for having read it.

📖 Read this if you love: nonlinear memoirs, unflinching writing on trauma and survival, or meditations on Indigenous identity and spiritual reclamation.

🔑 Key Themes: Colonialism and Cultural Theft, Spiritual Disorientation and Belonging, Addiction and Recovery, Indigenous Resistance and Sacred Storytelling.
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Be Gay, Do Crime by Kristel Emma Buckley, Molly Llewellyn

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2.75

Oh no, I hated this one - sorry, Mols!

My two favorite stories from this collection are ones that had been previously published in other collections (the ones by Myriam LaCroix and Aurora Mattia). There were a lot of these stories where I simply had no idea what was going on. There was also a surprising lack of crime... I joked several times while reading that this would've been more appropriately titled as "Be Gay, Be Messy." Most of these stories center weird gay women being weird and cringe. There was also a surprising lack of diversity to the queerness in this book; the stories almost solely center cisgender sapphic women. In short, I liked what this collection was trying to do more than I liked what it actually accomplished (sorry again, Mols!).

Thanks to my love Lanelle for reading aloud to and with me <3
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The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

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challenging reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

Audiobook review disclaimer:
I process sound less clearly than text (trauma brain things), so my audiobook reviews tend to be shorter and more surface-level than my usual ones. I don’t take notes while listening, and I often come away with impressions rather than detailed analysis. Still, I’m committed to reviewing every single book I read, even when the format changes how I engage. This is my way of honoring the listening experience—with softness, presence, and care. Thanks for reading!

Review:
I listened to this in almost one sitting! Very propulsive and interesting. I liked the anti-surveillance vibes and resonated with a lot of what Chan was critiquing re: our concepts of motherhood. I could've gone without the emphasis on Frida's romance and sex life, though. I get it - mothers should also be allowed to have desires and act on them, even if it's messy. I just don't think it resonated super well with the rest of the book and, as a queer woman, I definitely could've gone without the description of the massive dong.  All in all, though, I enjoyed this! Chelsea Bieker fans will find a lot to like here. 
I'll Tell You When I'm Home by Hala Alyan

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

Thank you to Avid Reader Press for the gifted ARC! This book will be released in the US on June 3, 2025. 

“I stay up at night and worry. I worry about the land. I worry about what I will give you. What I can pass down. My paltry jewelry box. I cannot give you Latakia, Gaza, Akka, al-Majdal. I cannot give you Iraq Sweidan. Baby, it doesn't exist anymore. Baby, you can't find it on a map.”

Some books read like sutures—tender and brutal all at once, stitching the ruptures of exile, womanhood, and memory into something whole. Hala Alyan’s I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is exactly that: a memoir written from the hollowed center of longing, a raw meditation on wanting a child while reckoning with what it means to have lost a homeland.

Structured through the months of her child’s development in a surrogate’s womb, Alyan charts a terrain where infertility, sobriety, diaspora, and fractured marriage converge. She writes, “I was an almost-mother,” situating herself in that liminal space of not-quite and no-longer, where waiting becomes both the act of love and the architecture of grief. From Gaza to Syria, from Beirut to Brooklyn, Alyan gathers the shards of generational memory—what has been bombed, buried, forgotten—and asks what it means to pass on stories in the aftermath of so much erasure.

Her prose is searing and incantatory, pulsing with metaphor and repetition that mimic the circular ache of trauma. In Hala’s hands, womanhood is a choreography of wanting and waiting; home is something you build from the wreckage of assimilation and the ashes of imperial violence. Addiction, miscarriage, divorce, and diaspora aren't separate traumas but interwoven threads in the story of one woman's becoming. The book doesn’t romanticize survival—it honors the mess of it.

This is not a quiet memoir. Alyan writes motherhood through surrogacy without apology, refusing to sanitize its hunger or heartbreak. She resists the tidy narratives we’re handed about womanhood—what it should look like, what it should cost—and instead offers something raw, ruptured, and luminous with truth. Her grief for Palestine is no backdrop; it is the bone-deep drumbeat of the text. Every page aches with what has been stolen, what cannot be reclaimed, and yet what must still be remembered. “What is a story that forgets its origins?” she asks—and in doing so, insists that memory is an act of resistance, and grief, a form of love.

This book will resonate deeply with anyone who’s lived in the borderlands of identity, who has searched for a home in their body, lineage, or longing. For those told to keep their pain quiet, Alyan offers a counterspell: the truth is worth telling, even if it trembles. I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve read in years—an offering to the diasporic, the motherless, the almost-mothers, the survivors, the storytellers. Thank you, Hala, for this book. I won’t soon forget it.

📖 Read this if you love: raw, lyrical memoirs of diaspora and identity; stories of surrogacy, motherhood, and grief; intimate explorations of displacement and cultural inheritance. 

🔑 Key Themes: Loss and Belonging, Surrogacy and Womanhood, Palestinian Diaspora and Generational Memory, Trauma and Resilience, The Politics of Home and Inheritance.
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Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I picked up Mapping the Interior expecting a ghost story—and instead found a raw, aching exploration of what it means to inherit both love and trauma. Stephen Graham Jones’s spare, dreamlike prose made me feel the narrator’s heart pounding in the dark cracks under his family home, where grief and cultural erasure ultimately bled together.

From the opening scene of a twelve‑year‑old sleep‑walking into his father’s ghost, Jones lures you into a house that’s “bigger and deeper than you knew,” a perfect metaphor for the hidden wounds we carry. The narration shifts seamlessly between the child’s urgent, almost scientific cataloguing of clues—beads, seizures, engine parts—and moments of startling poetic clarity. This juxtaposition of innocence and insight makes the novella simultaneously unsettling and heartbreaking.

At its core, Mapping the Interior is an act of reclamation. The father’s unexpected appearance in Native regalia becomes a haunting emblem of all the ways colonial violence and addiction cut fathers—and their children—off from cultural continuity. As the boy races through the night’s shadows to save his brother, he’s also racing toward an impossible reconciliation: loving and loathing the man who both failed and formed him. Jones doesn’t flinch from the brutal cost of that journey, culminating in a finale that feels less like an exorcism than an act of survival: “This is what it’s like to kill everything your father could have been.”

While the novella’s brevity sometimes leaves you yearning for more of its world, its concentrated emotional power will linger long after you’ve closed the book. For readers who believe that books can map the darkest corners of our past—and light a path toward healing—Stephen Graham Jones offers a ghost story that is as much about carving out a future as it is about laying old wounds to rest.

📖 Read this if you love: introspective horror, intergenerational trauma narratives, and stories that blur the line between reality and haunting.

🔑 Key Themes: Cultural Erasure and Inheritance, Grief and Familial Ghosts, Native Identity and Survival, The Violence of Memory and the Possibility of Healing.
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