THE HOLLOW PLACES is a horror novel where the comforting place is the museum full of taxidermy and the sight of willows strikes genuine fear and terror. Some things are worse than dying.

I love the friendship between Simon and Kara. It begins with banter developed by two people who saw each other casually in public, then slowly was permeated by the strange intimacy of sharing the same secret terrors. The world-building is great, I like the contrast between the museum and the willow world. Spending so much time in the museum before the bizarre events begin helps make the museum and its strangeness feel cozy and safe. The willow world hangs in this balance that drives terror both in what is actually shown and what its existence implies. I care about content warnings and I'm genuinely impressed by how creepy this was with so little that required specific warnings. It builds horror in the gap between what's expected and what actually happens, and while that's by no means new in horror, it's done with great care and precision so that I could never quite relax when it was quiet. The creepiness builds slowly, with a few specific moments that were terrifying. That time in between where things are a bit off but nothing extremely traumatizing is happening are so essential to the difference between reading a story about someone having a very bad time, and having a book make me so stressed that I have a bad time too.

It's masterfully written so that guessing the cause early does nothing to stop the horror and actually makes the anticipation even more stressful. So much of what I loved in its little details would be spoilers to describe, but suffice it to say that the explanations about the nature of the monsters and the cause of the strangeness helped my curiosity but maintained my worries for the characters.  I loved this, and I'm adding T. Kingfisher to a small but growing list of authors that make me feel safe while reading horror, a genre that until recently I've had a hard time getting into. 

THE ECHO WIFE gripped me from the first line, using calm and precise language to build a horrific tale of abuse and death. Every revelation drops like a stone into water, raising the level by inches until it feels like it can hold no more.

This is a well-paced thriller which doles out disturbing news just often enough to be unsettling. Evelyn's descriptions consistently bury the lede, pondering first the reactions and consequences to some very important piece of information before finally circling back to say what caused the fuss in the first place. It reshapes the weight of these moments to emphasize how dealing with each horrible (and sometimes not so horrible) event affects those who remain. It's disassociation in book form, as if Evelyn isn't ready to look at what's going on and must approach everything at an angle in order to have any chance of reaching it at all. I especially love the complex discussions about the ethics of cloning, the difference between what Nathan did and what Evelyn does, if there is one. 

It's about healing, clawing back by inches what was taken and filling in new things where the old bits are lost forever. Figuring out what bits of Evelyn and Martine belong to themselves, leaving space for them to want different things even though they started out as the same person. It's shaped by the absence of an abuser, the gap left behind by someone who demanded that every thought fit his needs. 

HOW WE FALL APART is a dark academia thriller where four Asian-American high school students have to find their former friend's true killer before their darkest secrets are dragged into the light.

I love Nancy as an unabashed morally grey character. She has things she wants and lines she won’t cross (at least so far), but those lines don’t seem to be dictated by other people’s expectations. It’s the difference between wanting to not be bad and not wanting to get caught. Jamie Ruan, only present in flashbacks, is a fascinating and complex character, shown in a way that makes it easy to understand why Nancy would both hate her so much and have been her friend for so long. I don't feel like I really got to know Krystal and Akil that well in the present, Alexander had much more of a presence, and Jamie's shadow loomed large over the whole thing. 

I wish “The Incident” hadn’t spent so long being teased before finally being explained because I prefer feeling like I could guess what’s happening before it’s revealed and this style meant I couldn’t, but the payoff was worth it and I ended up liking the final revelation. Glancing back through the early parts of the book, it had some pretty consistent but subtle foreshadowing as to who was involved, even thought I'm pretty sure it would be tricky to guess why one a first read.

The ending begs for a sequel and it looks like one is planned. As it stands, there’s enough closure to be satisfying, but it teases potential future developments that I hope can play out in another volume.

DARLING follows a teenage girl named Wendy, brand new to Chicago, moving back to the city where her mother grew up. On her first night, barely moved in and with the boxes still packed, a strange boy comes in her window and promises her an adventure, or at least a great night out. But the other girl waiting on the ground is his ex, his idea of a good time involves ducking police on the train, and the kids on his "family" have fear in their smiles. Then the detective shows up. 

This absorbing thriller retells PETER PAN in a modern setting, paralleling the events of the original but placing it in a new context, wonderfully transforming it. Detective Hook is a great antagonist, getting in the way but not being the true villain of the story this time around. I love Ominotago, she plays a much larger role than the original Tiger Lily got to have, and it was great to find a retelling which gave her a bigger part rather than removing her in an attempt to address the racism in the original (or worse, not addressing it at all). She's very involved without being part of Peter's "family", and she's just a great person. TinkerBelle started out seeming like a life-sized version of the kind of nasty fairy I've known before, but here her standoffishness and distaste for Wendy have an actual reason and add so much to this version. The Lost Boys and Ominotago's friends are pretty cool and there's time to get to know most of them as the night wears on. My favorite new character is Fyodor, no contest. This retelling also figures out what to do with the "Never Bird", from a scene so bizarre that I haven't run into an other adaptation yet which features it.

I love this as a retelling which keeps a bunch of the inherent scariness of the original but draws it out in a way that shows how truly terrifying it always was. You don't need to know other versions of the story in order for this to make sense, but it is unmistakably about Peter and Wendy. Some of the chapter lengths get a little oddly-sized because the events are aligned with chapter divisions in the original book, but the pacing works very well. The tension built gradually at first before getting very scary in the finale. 

PETER PAN is a witty and fantastic story with great observations about childhood, sexism, and the desire not to grow up but the inevitability of doing so. It's also deeply racist. I read it so you don't have to.

I enjoyed the feeling that there's no inherent division between magical and mundane, that Mrs. Darling walks in her children's thoughts and they were dreaming of Neverland long before ever setting foot on its shores. The way Nana is a nurse (nanny) and a dog, wholly both and frequently subject to the stigma of being a dog. She has days off, dresses the children, and has the respect of her employers, but also gets put in the kennel when Mr. Darling gets upset at her. There's a lot of witty observations about the societal place of women and girls, about the essence of children as joyful but heartless (what I would describe as not yet having a fully developed pre-frontal cortex, i.e. literally not yet able to fully consider consequences and to think of other people as having inner lives or experiencing hurt in the way one knows oneself can).

It has racism so baked into it that even if there were no other issues I could not recommend reading it. There's the explicit assumption that everyone other than the tribe members are British and therefore white, which is unlikely (especially for pirates). The book freely uses "white" to describe anyone not in the tribe generally, and the pirates in particular. The portrayal of Tiger Lily and her tribe was a checklist of racist stereotypes about North American Indigenous people. The most obvious issue is the constant use of a racial slur used to refer to them as a group, but that's not the only thing. The book's gaze clusters the tribe with animals, and refers to them with language that feels designed to treat them as inhuman. There's also the problem that putting Indigenous people on a magical island which has fairies and mermaids it treats the tribe as being equally fictional and fantastical as either of those non-existent creatures, which does harm to living Indigenous people then and now. Tiger Lily's most relevant contribution to the plot is to do something heroic off-page and then need to be rescued from death. On its own that feels related to the sexism which affects characters like Wendy and Mrs. Darling, but I don't think it can be separated from the racist portrayal of her tribe, since it doesn't deem her exploits worthy of being shown at all. At least when Wendy stands aside while the boys and men fight she gets a bunch of description of what she contributes before and after. Tiger Lily just gets rescued and then basically vanishes from the story. While I'm on the subject of sexism, for every really great insight about how sexism affects women and girls in the contemporary society, the narrator says something that just feels sexist and off. Like it does a great job of showing what is going on, but only realizes that half of the problems it portrays are problems at all. And that's before we get to the idea that Hook only has intuition because he has a feminine side, that Smee is portrayed as strange or weak for having a sewing machine, or the way that fatphobia is essential but unexamined in a pivotal plot event.

I'm glad to have read it because I've read so many other version of this story, but I doubt I'll ever read it again and I don't recommend that anyone else try. If you're interested in the story but are hoping for less racism then I recommend perusing  my list of retellings I've read, for PETER PAN and otherwise. 

AN UNSEEN ATTRACTION is a sexy historical murder mystery with great intimacy, communication, and explanations of taxidermy. 

Clem and Rowley's relationship is great to read. They don't have the best communication quite yet, but they're continually trying to understand each other better even before becoming a couple. The sex scenes fit the characters and shifted between developing their relationship and showing how it was deepening outside of those sensual moments. The murder mystery is very engaging and the resolution made sense without being too obvious. The stakes are very clear and the antagonists at interesting, I'm looking forward to seeing how the series moves on given how things turned out. The secondary characters don't get nearly as much time as Clem and Rowley (for obvious reasons) but their personalities come through really well and their various reactions to the very stressful circumstances made sense. 

NEVER LET ME GO is a quiet and circuitous reminiscence on a life lived which slowly unfurls into descriptions of an inescapable dystopian nightmare which proceeds at the ambling pace of ordinary existence, ending with a whimper. 

As a dystopia it’s quiet, the disturbing details coming in drips and drabs with a sense that Kathy as a narrator assumes the reader knows the system already and so is only paying attention to find out what her place was in it, not to learn what it is altogether. The narrative style meanders in time in order to be mostly clear in thought. It’s not linear, sometimes frustratingly so, but it was usually easy for me to follow because each bit of information is told based on its relevance to some other piece of the past. It has the disconnected quality of a long reminiscence while being generally understandable. 

Several of the characters were pretty unlikeable. I enjoy sometimes reading something where I just hate a main character so I had a good time, but Ruth is a consistently unpleasant person for much of the book, and I wish Tommy had room to be more his own person. That said, in a story about how none of them get to be their own people in a larger sense it works really well, but if you're irritated by it early on you should know it doesn't really get better. 

I almost stopped 25% in, made it halfway then realized I’m not engaged and don’t care what happens next. It has all these pieces I normally like (the appearance of mysterious magic loner mentor helped me get to the halfway mark), but I just don’t understand why the main character is sticking around for the upcoming fight to the death with her sister. I can guess at a justification, but so far the book has provided excellent reasons for her to get out of there and none for going through with it other than that it’s expected. 

I thought at first that this was just going to be a thriller version of a werewolf book. I was wrong, and happy to be so. WHAT BIG TEETH is about a girl returning home after being sent away as a kid, only to find her family stranger than she remembered and wary at her reappearance. 

The beginning is a little slow, and at first it felt like the emotional stakes were just going to be how well Eleanor does or does not fit in with her strange and monstrous family. Instead, that family becomes the thing worth fighting for when Eleanor reaches for help to handle her family’s grief and instead finds only smiling terror. The real monsters aren’t what’s strange but rather what’s cruel, and this story rides that line without denying the wolves their teeth, but not hunting them for it. 

There’s a lot of catharsis for grief, old and new. When a major character dies early on, everyone who’s left reacts differently to their death, and the story gives space for the different shapes of their grief. I particularly love Arthur’s story. He’s a fascinating character handled very well. 

There’s a semi-speaking character, Margaret, who is treated rather poorly. When the other characters are people who turn into wolves, a person who seems to be half-coral, and [SPOILER], having the other person be someone who hardly ever speaks seems to equate this thing that is very real with these other definitely fictional forms of strangeness. I love her as a character, and she’s a crucial and active part of the finale, so I think overall the book understands her as a whole person but the other characters don’t always have that view. After much thought, I don’t see it as a problem for the story, and I’m glad that the overall message is that the years of subtle ableism were bad. These are messy characters who have hurt each other a lot over the years, so Margaret’s treatment is frustrating mostly because it’s thing that really happens, not because it’s worse than anything else.

Since the title invokes the idea of Red Riding Hood (“What big teeth you have”), I pondered whether this is a retelling of that story. My final answer is that it’s definitely not a plot-based retelling, but certain events (a girl traveling to her grandmother, the presence of wolves, people being swallowed) lead me to say that if you love retellings already this can happily be enjoyed in that light, though I think it’s probably inspired by that fairy tale but not strictly attempting to retell it. It does have a closer connection to its probable inspiration than some retellings I’ve read which were explicitly marketed as such, for whatever that’s worth.

RUINSONG is a slow burn sapphic tale of falling in love under brutality, and daring to hope for a better future even after being groomed into complicity. The opening chapters are brutal, slowly but inexorably describing a reign of death and torture in which a powerful queen demands complicity and service in exchange for life. The plot is at least 90% slowly inching towards maybe doing something concrete about it while an ever escalating series of discomforts befall the main characters, then the ending is very dramatic and sudden. I refer it to a series of discomforts because the worst stuff happens around Cadence rather than to her (very early on bad things happen to Remi and then keep happening). There's a sense (usually backed up by dramatic asides and tales of woe) that much worse things are constantly happening somewhere to somebody, but since they aren't literally happening to Cadence she's been reluctant to try and change things. I don't have a great sense of what the revolutionaries want other than to not be tortured and killed by the Queen (this is, admittedly, a very sound basis for a revolution so it's okay that other demands aren't a focus of the narrative). I think that I personally prefer books with more specific political intrigue with their revolutions, but that's not what this book is trying to be. The romance is slow burn, since Remi and Cadence don't feel free to do much of anything, let alone broach the topic of being girls who like girls. It barely feels safe for them to be friends, since Remi's very proximity is being used to control Cadence. 

The worldbuilding is fine, it's not very complicated because the story invests its detail in the Queen and the two girls, and the people around them. One thing this portrays very well is emotional abuse and manipulation, and the way that a combination of threats plus unpredictable enforcement can be used to break someone down and make everything feel pointless. The story is about whether Cadence will finally have something that it's worth standing up for, and I appreciate how the story shows why she didn't fight for things before. Even if her reasons seem silly or you can imagine yourself doing more in her shoes (some of her fellow characters think they might have done more), the characterization is so well done to explain why she hadn't before, but without excusing what she's done and continues to do.