Murder by Memory is a murder mystery queer space opera with an added pinch of existential horror squeezed into the span of 103 pages. Waite does a masterful job shaping out a human history of a world on pause and with a unique way preserving the living memory of earth while on an interstellar journey spanning lifetimes. The concept of memory preservation taking the form of data storage, filing away memories and lives in a library for future use and as a form of rest is unique. Where most science fiction I've consumed relies on cryogenic sleep to keep memories of earth alive in the minds of those traveling to or colonizing remote planets, the world Waite creates extends life through a sort of cloning process compatible with a data record upload. This cloning is imperfectly human, which I appreciated when reading this in 2025, seeing a resurgence of eugenicist ideals on the internet, in science fiction, and in the rhetoric of the unqualified nepotism hires currently in the highest medical offices in the United States. The characters bodies age and die. Issues stemming from expected and unexpected genetic complications and the follies of old age still impact them as they live and die in new bodies. More memories are made and those that remain from their time on earth lives on.

As the start of the series, setting and characters are very well fleshed-out, setting the groundwork for future books while still neatly tying up the main plot of the story.  Waite's writing is very intentional with her language. Every word progresses the story. She makes a murder scene beautiful in its detail, defines the shape of a forest aboard their ship, and makes secondary characters interesting and multi-dimensional. The plot starts with an emergency protocol in which the ship's detective, Dorothy, who had had herself shelved after a loss, is automatically woken up and inserted into the nearest body by the electrical storm-addled ship's AI when her memory book is destroyed. Investigating the events that lead her to being reconstituted leads her to uncovering a murder, layers of conspiracy, and a desire to live. At the start, everyone and everything is battened down in the hopes of avoiding injury and damage to the ship, it's AI, and the stored memories. Dorothy draws the reader through a ghost ship, alone in the dark in normally vibrant and busy thoroughfares on her way to find her nephew Ruthie, and his mysterious, but loving partner. This style of storytelling allows the world to be unfolded before the reader in easily consumable pieces before we're introduced to the hustle and bustle of life on the HMS Fairweather.

With the extended lifespans of the characters and their perpetual rejuvenation, age becomes more of a theoretical concept. It was really neat to see Dorothy, who despite being in Gloria's young body, understand herself to be elderly, as she was when she last died. It was neat to see her grappling with what it means to be young and feel attraction again. I look forward to seeing more of her relationship (if you can call it that) with Violet, as more of the series is published. Their shared love of knitting has so much wholesome potential, despite the circumstances of their meeting.

This was a fun collection of bite sized history stories. Part of the schtick of it was to have a twist reveal at the end of the story that contextualizes the people/places/things involved. That's not necessarily my favorite storytelling convention, but it was, overall, and enjoyable listen. I'd heard some of these before. My favorite was the interstitial sections where Mahnke was interviewed by a friend and fellow history podcaster. Their conversations and the glimpse into their respective writing processes was really enlightening.

S. A. Barnes's Ghost Station is horrifying in layers. She has a talent for laying the groundwork for information that becomes vital later in the book. Augmented reality as refuge, becoming augmented reality as horror was a really neat way to psychologically horrify the characters and the readers.

Using Liana's innocence as a teaching moment to lay out the murder spree of "Bloody Bledsoe" as well as how the rest of the crew views the Bray family was a well-thought out tool to tell information directly to the reader. That scene in the shuttle was like watching an estranged member of the Kardashian family, who was trying to live a normal life have their identity called out by a blue collar worker upset with the comments Kim Kardashian made about "nobody wanting to work these days," and get pounced on  with conspiracy theories by chronically online people, while a family member of the person Caitlyn Jenner killed in the 2015 car crash seethes quietly in the corner, plotting revenge. Not a one-to-one comparison, but close. 

I had some issues with how the romance between Severin and Ophelia was built up, and with Suresh, in general, but I also don't think a book has to have likable characters in order to be good. I think my feelings with that aspect are a bit complicated. I fully thought the plot twist was going to be that Ava wasn't actually dead. I was fully banking on her being an insane stow away on the ship, who the whole crew was trying to hide from Ophelia. I didn't expect smuggling to be the culprit.

Ophelia's character is deeply complicated by her parentage, and I think it was an interesting take on an unreliable narrator to have a character who can't trust herself. The use of someone with whom the characters had a strong emotional attachment to lure them towards the towers was also a neat tool, allowing Ophelia to fight against the thing that the others are drawn towards. 

I wasn't expecting Liana to die as horrifically as she did, though she was characterized as almost too good for this world, so I guess it makes sense. Birch dying first, and not sparking a witch hunt for Ophelia immediately was unexpected. Kate being willing to leave a crew member behind, after taking the for emergencies only gun out of its locked case while searching for the manic Birch early in the book, was not surprising. Same for Suresh's extreme vanity foreshadowing his disfigurement at the hands/will of the towers.

I wasn't expecting this book to have a happy ending, but I'm kind of glad it did. I wanted to know what happened to the Brays with the release of the proof Ophelia had found/Kate had revealed. But I also think it could have been spookier not to know what happened to them.

Another beautiful book by Sarah Stewart and David Small! While The Gardener will always be my favorite of their books, The Library is a fantastic read. Though anachronistic, I greatly enjoyed that Elizabeth Brown kept the same three cats her entire life (They could be look alikes, but I'm choosing to believe!). The teddy bear mirroring her throughout her life was also a sweet touch. There's a lot of richness in the main illustrations and in the border and marginal doodles. I also really appreciated that Elizabeth's happy ending isn't forsaking books for love, as could have been implied when she's noted not to be interested in partying when her friends are, but is instead donating her books to be shared by her whole community, and living out her life with her equally bookish friend.

Thank you to Nghi Vo and Netgalley for the eARC of this book.

While I enjoyed Don't Sleep with the Dead, I do not believe this should have been advertised as a stand alone. The world building was rich and the characters and settings were interesting and well-written, but I often felt throughout the book, as if I was on the cusp of understanding, or found myself having questions that would have been answered had I read The Chosen and the Beautiful. While enjoyable on its own, I think it would have been a richer experience had I read The Chosen and the Beautiful first.

Nghi Vo has a gift for writing setting that has a richness and an agency of its own, turning it almost into a character in its own right. Her mastery of magical realism really shines in this book as she integrates people made of living paper and locations that have rules one must follow in order to be admitted into the grit, bigotry, and the stresses of life faced by people living and dying in New York and Paris on the cusp of World War II. 

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry was an interesting read, though early on, Tyson's reading voice nearly put me to sleep more than once. Starting the book made me realize that I wanted more from it. It covered a very far reaching surface level understanding of notable moments and people in the history of astrophysics, and the science behind how we understand the universe. Alas, as a person in a hurry, I wanted more depth than the book has to give.

Holy shit, I loved this book! As a person living in this world, and loving the people I've grown up with, who were the adults in my life when I was a child, and who have complicated and sometimes conflicting world views, but who are also fundamentally good, Kara's relationship with her Uncle Earl, as the foundation of the book, was wonderful. I also deeply love Kara's relationship to the museum of Natural Wonders, Curiosities, and Taxidermy, both in its role as space and character. Some of the decisions the characters made (marking their island with a stick, going into the world of the willows to begin with, etc.) felt like bad life choices to make in a horror novel, but as I have to remind myself often, characters aren't aware of the genre they're in. Their actions wouldn't be out of place if the world they were going into was wonderland. They don't get to know in advance that they're entering a world that bears them ill will (with the exception of the warning in the form of the corpse they find locked inside the bunker they enter the willow world through, but one person's horror is another person's home as already proven by the sense of comfort and home Kara finds in the Wonders museum)

I enjoyed the banter between the characters and the fact that they don't (and can't) take the terror too seriously. The phrasing and voice of the characters makes a lot of sense after seeing T. Kingfisher talk. The writing in this book matches her speech and humor very well. The setting plays a major role in how the characters interact with each other and cope with their circumstances, turning it into a character-like antagonist. I enjoy the way Kingfisher blurs the line between character and setting in horrible ways, integrating those Kara and Simon find in the willow world into their setting as a way to introduce the creeping dread of the place, and to build the horror bit by bit. I also found it refreshing to have a main character in an adventure novel, who is older

As someone who was living in the Allentown, PA area both in 2014 and during the COVID-19 pandemic, hearing the town name was a jump scare and a half. Reading this book, after living through a pandemic and adhering to lockdown procedures while watching former friends and neighbors disregard them completely, it was strange to see the optimism McGuire had for how humanity (especially America) would react to a pandemic.
This book really is a detailed explanation of why ecoterrorists need to seek out education about what it is that they're destroying and/or releasing into the general population.
I almost cried when the book shifted to Marigold's POV.

TBH, I probably would have rated this higher if I had read it before the COVID 19 pandemic happened

Thank you to Seanan McGuire and NetGalley for the e-ARC.

Though Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear is one of the shorter books in the Wayward Children series, with the depth of the storytelling and the time traversed on the page, it felt much longer. It's easily one of my favorites in the series. As the story progresses and Nadya grows older and gets married, I began to question my understanding of her in Beneath the Sugar Sky. I wondered how I hadn't realized she was as old as she becomes in Belyyreka. Nadya has family in Belyyreka. She is loved and accepted as she is in Belyyreka - curious, loving, and wild. Her curiosity as a scout leading to her drowning once again and her being returned to Earth in the nearly eleven year old body she'd first drowned in are a tragedy lived in an instant and a lifetime. This explains a lot about her temperament earlier in the series and her willingness to stay behind in the halls of the dead.

I really appreciated how McGuire handled Nadya's limb difference as a part of her and her storytelling. To be born without something is to not know what it is to live with it, and therefore not to know what it is to miss it. Nadya's characterization, as both strong willed and obedient made for an intriguing character study in the face of her adoptive parents trying to force their idea of what it means to be whole and normal onto her, as she already believed herself to be such. The immediate acceptance and love she find in Belyyreka in opposition to the pressures to conform she faces in America, in particular, makes it feel like home in a way that is tangible and enviable for the reader.

It wasn't until after I finished the book and thought about it for a hot minute, that it clicked that Burian is also disabled. The two choose each other with the understanding that they can and will adapt and grow without the expectation of adherence to any sort of physical standard tied to morality. They grow together with the knowledge that they are just as whole and valuable as the rest of their community. The family Nadya finds in Belyyreka and the standard in that world for the drowned to be enveloped into a chosen family by choice is something beautiful. It's not perfect, as we're shown when Nadya meets Alexi, but it is a world where family is not defined by blood and love is freely given.

As I told my roommate, while halfway through the book, "the real bad guy we found along the way is Trump 2020."
Published in 2020, Clown in a Cornfield is what must have felt at the time an extreme, worst case scenario version of what was playing out at the time during Trump's first term and second campaign cycle. Unfortunately, reading this in 2025, it feels almost realistic. There's a pretty massive generational divide, culturally, especially in rural areas. The political divide that comes up between generations seems to be becoming quite the gulf in a lot of places, and this book explores the extremism of that in a bloody, often anachronistically funny way.

I think it was a really unique take by Cesare to have a slasher feature the nearly teens of the generation that grew up with regular school shootings and lockdowns -

especially so as the killer clowns are the town's adults acting to kill the children they've deemed to be a "blighted crop." The kids have more lockdown and emergency procedure training than any civilian should need to, and that, mixed with Rust's safe gun use practice and discipline means that they're a better trained counter-strike team than any of the people trying to kill them could have expected. Janet's death was horrifying, especially knowing that she maybe could have lived had she not saved her friends, and that her stepfather was one of the people doing the killing.

I'm so glad Rust survived, and I really enjoyed how the expected love triangle between Cole, Quinn, and Rust was circumvented. I love rural queerness so much, as a rural queer person.