How to Stop Time is an unexpected jewel of a book. Matt Haig hits just the right buttons for me. There’s a sliver of that beautiful British humour, yet it never pitches over too far into the absurdity of, say, Christopher Moore—which is not a bad thing for Moore, but for this particular story, would have been over the top. It has moments of deep, abiding sadness and grief, yet it also rides to the zeniths of happiness and satisfaction. In short, this is the kind of romance I will tolerate and the kind of story that is perfect for sitting on one’s deck and reading all Sunday afternoon.

Tom was born in the late 1500s and ages very, very slowly. So while not immortal, he can’t exactly have a normal life. He made the mistake once of falling love, and of course that didn’t work out great. Now, four hundred years on, Tom is part of a secret society of his fellow “albatrosses”, yet he isn’t a big fan of how the society operates. He really just wants a normal life, even if that might forever elude him. Also, Tom has a daughter who inherited his longevity but of whom he lost track in the seventeenth century. To what lengths will Tom go to find her?

Haig uses an intermittent flashback structure to good effect. We flit back and forth between “now” and Tom’s past, see him cozying up to Shakespeare or playing piano in London and Paris or sailing to Tahiti. Haig balances the intersection of Tom’s life with persons of historical interest and realism; there’s always a temptation with these kinds of narratives for the protagonist to have been this instrumental figure in history or something, and I usually don’t like that. Instead, we see a man just emphatically trying to live his life, and finding it very difficult, on account of all the not-aging. We see Tom slowly developing his own morality, the way his time with Hendrich influences and warps that morality. Tom is not a bad guy—I’d go so far as to say Hendrich is not a bad guy either, just that his methods are questionable—but he gradually accepts Hendrich’s perspective, at least for a century.

The prose in this book just works for me on a level I seldom see. The descriptions aren’t too much (I don’t visualize when I read, so I appreciate the sparseness), yet it isn’t clinical either. There is heartfelt depth of feeling as Tom reacts to how badly he handles things with Camille, or how he’s struggling to reconnect with Omai even as he realizes he sounds too much like Hendrich. It’s nice to see his vulnerability despite being so much older than the “mayflies” he consorts with. Although Tom’s internal conflict begins from the predictable problem that the people he loves will age faster than him, Haig amplifies this and explores beyond it into new territory, like the idea that Tom’s interests don’t always align with the society that he has joined.

My one real critique of the book is that the climax and resolution are far too rushed and too flat. When Tom inevitably encounters his missing daughter again, the reunion is rushed from a narrative point of view, in my opinion. I would have loved more build-up, more suspense and drama, and much more time afterwards to process it. Haig wraps up everything rather quickly. Although the primary conflict has ceased, it’s dealt with so quickly and almost off-handedly that I don’t feel like it gets a proper send-off.

Still, How to Stop Time held me captive for a Sunday afternoon on my deck. And that is a pretty good feeling indeed.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the eARC!

Maren is seventeen years old and ready to strike out on her own. Well, not exactly on her own. She has a girlfriend, aka a heartmate, Kaia, who is the more adventurous of the pair. They are head-over-heels in love for one another—but when an elite group of Aurati, women who do dirty work for the repressive Emperor, show up and abduct Kaia for purposes unknown, those roles have to change. Maren leaves the village she’s known for her whole life and gets a job at the nearby dragon fortress, the only place in the world that can rear and train dragons for the Emperor’s elite Talon force. Maren’s plan is simple: steal a dragon, rescue Kaia. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, as it turns out, and of course that’s the beauty of Shatter the Sky. The narrative twists and turns, and just when you think you’ve figured out every possible ending, something else happens. There are certainly moments that feel predictable, but one thing I can’t accuse this book of being is boring.

Shatter the Sky reminds me of another fantasy book I recently read, Smoke & Summons. Both books create fantasy worlds that are new and different from what I’ve seen in a while. I would love to spend more time in these novels’ worlds, learning about the cultures and histories and goings-on. Both books have interesting female protagonists (I’m trying to avoid the nebulously cliche “strong”), although they have extremely different upbringings, and Maren at least has a bit more initiative. Mostly, though, both books have similar issues in terms of pacing. I compared Smoke & Summons to a Doctor Who story, and the same critique works here.

This feels like it should be more than one book (despite it not being that long as it is). Earlier I praised how Wells introduces new twists all the time, and I do like it, but some of the twists come too late to be as effective as I’d like. This is particularly true at the climax, where we essentially get a new antagonist, only for Maren to dispatch them a few pages later.

I want to interrupt my own critique at this point, though, because I do have to praise the climax and how Maren decides to deal with what is essentially a hostage situation. True to its title, this book is the equivalent of “Fuck it, let them all burn,” and in a much more satisfying way than that Game of Thrones episode, if you know what I mean. I’m very happy this is the ending Wells gives us rather than something a lot more complicated.

Anyway, back to my critique: this book is somewhat untidy. It’s an example of the difference between an entertaining, satisfying story from a competent writer and a grand slam of an experience from a grandmaster of a genre: the former is good, and I’ll definitely read it, but the latter is one or more strata above. Shatter the Sky is a satisfying, fun story about a woman trying to rescue her love. When it delves into deeper issues of oppression and politics, it never quite manages to make those work organically within the narrative.

As far as the romantic elements go … meh? I love Maren’s character development. She starts off somewhat withdrawn, whereas Kaia is the bold one. Their roles kind of reverse. Kaia’s experience dampens her spirit, for now, whereas Maren has awakened to a strength and fire within herself that she hadn’t even suspected existed. Nevertheless, the relationship itself is nothing to write home about. And there’s some weird moments mid-way through the book where Maren might be attracted to someone else, and it’s kind of awkward? In other words, for all its romantic inciting forces, this book is not itself much of a romance.

Shatter the Sky is probably the type of book some people have been waiting for: a story where the damsel in distress is being rescued by another woman, who plans to do it on the back of a dragon. That is, objectively, badass. It’s a fairly well-written book with a window on a world that is intriguing enough that I want to know more. That being said, it’s still very much a debut fantasy novel, rough around the edges and with that gooey centre that is delicious perhaps because it wasn’t baked quite long enough.

As much as I think the finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine might be one of the best TV finales ever, I do wish we had seen (canonically, on screen) what the aftermath of the Dominion War brought. It’s one thing to tell a war story—and DS9 told it well—and another to talk about after the war. About picking up the pieces, rebuilding, and healing wounds of all varieties. Aftershocks is exactly that kind of book. Marko Kloos drops us into a solar system five years after the last official shot was fired and, through a select cast of characters, asks us to consider how we would rebuild trust, empathy, and our own personal lives. Thanks to 47North and NetGalley for the eARC!

Perhaps the main character, because we meet him first and get the most pagetime with him, is Aden. At the beginning of the book he is a prisoner of war, because he was on the losing side. He is soon released, time served, and finds himself adrift in that way released prisoners often are. Aden is in no rush to return to his home planet of Gretia, to be found by his estranged father of means, yet he doesn’t know where else he might belong. Kloos introduces other perspectives: Dunstan is the commander of a Rhodian battleship that witnesses some very unusual activity; Idina is a Palladian infantry sergeant who loses her entire squadron in a devastating ambush and then gets put on peace patrol duty; Solveig is the heiress to a Gretian family business suffering under sanctions and war reparations.

Each of these characters is trying to move on in some way, to some degree, although you will grow attached to them by varying amounts. For example, as much as I liked Dunstan, we don’t learn as much about his backstory as we do some of the others, so I’m not entirely sure what his deal is. Idina might be my favourite. She goes through a lot in a short amount of time in this book, yet she remains true to herself and still develops as far as her character goes.

Kloos makes it clear that there is something untoward happening in this system, hints at a conspiracy or Xanatos gambit behind the scenes. From strange piracy behaviour to mystery attacks and the destruction of mothballed fleets, it’s as if someone is trying to stir up trouble—but to what end? If you’re looking for answers, without spoilers I’m going to tell you that you won’t really find them. Aftershocks doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, but it’s definitely not a standalone book. Indeed, my major grip with this novel is just how little Kloos ties together the characters’ stories. There is definitely some overlap; don’t get me wrong. Clearly the connections are there. I just was expecting the storylines to converge towards the end, and when that didn’t really happen, it left me disappointed.

I’m willing to cut Kloos a lot of slack, however, simply because I enjoyed the sandbox we got to play in. Lots of tantalizing hints about the origins of this system without anything along the lines of a huge infodump. The technology is handwavey at times, yet also fairly familiar—commtabs and artificial gravity, etc. Oh, and do you like naval-inspired space battles? Because have some good naval-inspired space battles happening here, particularly in Dunstan's chapters. Great combination of AI and human responsibilities, really intense and suspenseful scenes of stalking a target, deciding when to go hot, etc. This isn’t the main focus of the book by any means; I wouldn’t call Aftershocks military SF per se—but it’s just enough to satisfy me without being more than I really want in a book.

So on balance, I liked Aftershocks. It’s good without being particularly great, and you know, that’s really all I want in the end. I’ll take great when I can get it, and I’ll wax poetic and reread it and talk about how it changed my life. But this is a nice science fiction adventure full of intrigue and both interpersonal and intrapersonal drama, and I am totally here for it. Give me more!

Dava Sobel does it again.

I love learning about science, but you know what I might love even more? Learning how we know what we know about science. Take the stars, for example. How do we know what they're made of without ever visiting them? How can we possibly know how big, or massive, or far away, or hot they are? The fact we've managed to deduce such knowledge from the surface of this planet is nothing short of astounding in my eyes, yet how often do we really stop think about the processes behind those deductions? That's why I love reading science history. Moreover, when we do read those kinds of accounts, they too often fixate on lone geniuses, almost always men, toiling away in obscure labs until their eureka moment.

The Glass Universe is an antidote to that kind of portrayal. Sobel soberly recounts the efforts of the astronomers and computers whose ideas and labour helped us answer some of the questions I asked above. Those computers and some of the astronomers were women, yet their names are not often mentioned alongside the names of male astronomers. Without their work, however, the Harvard Observatory would not have been able to complete the work it did in cataloguing and uncovering the mysteries of the sky. I can't help but perceive a double meaning to this book's title: “glass” refers not only to the glass photographic plates over which the women pored but to the idea of a “glass ceiling” that many of these women encountered during their careers.

Subtitle aside, this is not really a book about the lives of these women. Sobel relates details of their lives but in a very cursory way. There's a reason for that: there are just too many of them. Sure, you could write a whole book about Mina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swann Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaspochkin … but that’s a lot of books to write, and a lot of overlap. Sobel instead focuses on the overall picture, and while that sacrifices some fidelity on the biographical end of things, it provides a much more accurate portrayal of science as it enters the twentieth century. Gone are the days of lone scientists or small couples working in private labs. Welcome to the industrial age of science.

So it’s not surprising, in this way, that Sobel focuses as much on the life of the Harvard Observatory as she does on the lives of the women who worked there. She spends a lot of time discussing the actions of its director, Edward Pickering. He and his successor, Harlow Shapley, share the distinction of being champions of a more equitable workplace, recognizing and wanting to acknowledge equally the contributions of the women who worked at the Observatory. I appreciate the level of detail and nuance Sobel brings to the exposition of the challenges that these women faced in being accepted and recognized. It wasn't as simple as basic sexism about whether or not women are capable of scientific work and thought. Plenty of men were happy to let the women toil and contribute, just so long as we didn't get too crazy and label them professors!

The Glass Universe covers a roughly seventy-year period of time at the Observatory, from the beginnings of the Henry Draper Memorial project to the post-War era of government-funded science. I love how Sobel traces the development of a few specific strands of knowledge related to the glass plates: specifically, the evolution of the spectral classification system, both in terms of its scientific justification and the adoption of it by the International Astronomical Union. At the same time, we see the Observatory expand and the profession of astronomer further develop into an academic field. All of these various strands of history fascinate me, because I love learning about how we used to do things differently from how they are done today. It's amazing how much of our knowledge of the stars comes from women staring at small plates of glass for hours at a time, counting stars and looking at spectral lines. It wasn't easy work or exciting work, but it unlocked so much understanding!

I also really enjoyed seeing the evolution of our understanding of the universe itself. Shapley, for example, was a proponent of the idea that the Milky Way was the observable universe, as opposed to the Island Universe theory that holds the Milky Way as a single galaxy among many. Sobel tracks the developing evidence for and against these theories, and how Shapley reacts. I have a two-volume collection from the early 1920s called The Outline of Science that I really need to dive into and review one of these days; it's just so cool and wild to read about what we thought we know versus what we know now—and wonder how much we'll have to revise in the future.

One caveat lector: although Sobel briefly explains how we can use spectrography to learn about the makeup of stars, The Glass Universe does assume a certain amount of astronomical knowledge beyond the average layperson. As someone with a general interest in astronomy but not an amateur astronomer myself, I was comfortable but would have been happy with some refreshers. I don't think that a lack of knowledge will leave you struggling or reduce your enjoyment—this is more history than it is science. Nevertheless, that basic understanding helps you with the context of these discoveries.

The Glass Universe helped to fill in some gaps in my knowledge for sure. It chronicles important developments in astronomy as well as the changing scientific method itself. Dava Sobel exhorts us to remember the many intelligent, dedicated women who have left their marks (literally) on the history of this science and whose years of effort brought us so much knowledge of the stars.

I was 22 when I first moved away from home for a significant period of time. Even at that age it was hard to be away from everyone and everything I knew for so long. So I can understand Suzette’s apprehension, returning home to LA following a school year in New England. On top of the distance, she has to renegotiate her relationships, particularly with her brother. Little & Lion is a moving story about making the best decisions you can when it comes to helping the ones you love—and sometimes making decisions you regret. Brandy Colbert takes some standard tropes—girl comes back from a bad year at a boarding school, everyone feels different to her, not really sure where to go from here—and breathes new life into them by telling a well-crafted, character-rich story. I would like this to be a movie.

Suzette, known as the eponymous Little only to her stepbrother Lionel, has a lot to figure out. Her parents sent her to boarding school literally on the other side of the country, an action her mother expresses some regret over. Now Suzette has to decide if she wants to return to that school or stay in LA. If she stays, she will be closer to the struggles of her brother, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and is having a rough time treating it. Suzette likes to think she has ways of reaching her brother, of helping him figure out what’s best. Maybe that confidence is misplaced.

Colbert has a talent for letting her characters wander through this narrative and discover themselves. Almost from page one, we know Suzette is questioning her sexuality. She’s might be bisexual, yet she hasn’t really committed herself to that label. She has very frank conversations with several people about this issue, and I love how each person provides slightly different feedback to Suzette, yet all are tolerant and accepting of her situation. Colbert models the plethora of ways on can be compassionate and, frankly, not an asshole when someone you care about comes out to you, especially if they are questioning. Each person Suzette talks to reaffirms that her sexuality should be a non-issue, and that her labels are hers alone to determine, to change in the future, to reject entirely if that’s what she chooses.

Although I really do love Colbert’s overall portrayal of sex and sexuality, her development of the subplots around Suzette’s romantic relationships leaves something to be desired. It’s great that Suzette is honest with one of her love interests about what she’s going through. With the other one though … not so much? Too much is left unspoken. It never really feels resolved, and I’m not sure Suzette demonstrates what she has learned from those moments. Colbert’s choice to have Suzette attracted to a male character and a female character simultaneously is bold yet quite challenging given the stereotypes that surround bisexual people. It’s not my lane to dissect this treatment, but there were scenes that left me wondering how bi readers will react to this portrayal.

Similarly, I don’t have the perspective to comment fully on the portrayal of mental health (specifically bipolar disorder) in this book. I do like the way Colbert handles the question of medication, although even there I could see room for more nuance. As far as Lionel’s characterization goes, the flashbacks really help to establish his personality and relationships with Suzette. Unfortunately, present-day Lionel is such a cipher. Part of me thinks this is intentional—we’re seeing Lionel as Suzette sees him, as this new unknown, this person her brother has become while she was gone. Again, though, I’m not sure this is sufficient to avert problematic one-dimensional representation of mental illness. Who is Lion, other than someone who has bipolar disorder?

The same could be said for many of the supporting characters. Oddly, Rafaela gets a fairly developed backstory. The rest? Shoulder shrug. DeeDee shows up any time Suzette needs a lesbian perspective. Emil has Ménière's and likes to run and has always had the hots for Suzette? Everyone else is … there. Little & Lion is one of those books where you rub off the shiny veneer and realize that it’s more like a stageplay at heart: the sets are thin and unevenly painted, and the background actors are in the background for a reason. This is a criticism but not a complaint—like I said at the beginning of my review, I still think this book would make a lovely movie. But there’s a difference between dimension and depth when talking literature.

Little & Lion undeniably has elements of a coming out narrative to it. As noted above, however, it isn’t so much about coming out as it is about questioning more loudly. Colbert really understands that, for queer teenagers, grappling with your sexuality in a heteronormative world is part-and-parcel with growing up in general. That’s what Suzette does here; that’s really the main theme of the book: the weird, liminal space between being a child and being an adult. At seventeen, Suzette really is neither. She’s too old to be a sheltered kid whose parents call all the shots. Yet she is still too young and inexperienced to feel confident making all the decisions on her own.

Suzette’s interactions with Lionel, as well as the way Colbert dives into the family’s relationships in general, are so sweet and tender. There is so much love in Little & Lion, and not all of it is romantic and sexual, which my aro/ace self is so happy to see. To offset the darker parts of this narrative, Colbert offers us multiple moments of happiness and contentment in this blended family. This is where the book truly excels: when you let yourself get wrapped up in the emotional content long enough to feel invested in Suzette’s growth. And I think she does grow.

I like that the one plot thread is left dangling, unresolved. It felt appropriate, that we don’t learn what happens next. I’m not clamouring to know. I want Suzette to go forward, to make more mistakes, to find some successes. It doesn’t really matter to me who she ends up with, or even what she decides about who she is. That’s kind of the point: it’s not like, at seventeen, you can really have it all figured out. Sometimes the snapshot perspective that YA novels give us can be deceiving if we forget that "happily ever after" doesn't mean "happily static forever." Little & Lion leaves us with a reminder that nothing is constant, and I like that.

Just over two years ago I read and reviewed Hannah Witton’s first book, Doing It!: Let’s Talk About Sex. I loved seeing a YouTuber I respected and whose videos I so enjoyed meet with success in book form. With The Hormone Diaries: The Bloody Truth About Our Periods, Witton does it again. Based this time on a long-running series on her channel chronicling her journey of self-exploration by discontinuing her birth control pill, The Hormone Diaries aims to inform its readers about menstruation and other hormone-related issues for people with ovaries and uteruses. With a target audience of 15+, the book does this in an approachable, reassuring way. It’s this combination of compassionate cleverness and clear research effort that makes Witton a great educator.

Despite its subtitle and provocative cover art, this book is about way more than periods. That’s part one of five, the others being: contraception, disorders, hormones and being trans, and pregnancy. I would have a difficult time trying to decide which of the parts are the most valuable; I learned so much from every part of the book. For example, while I understood the basics of menstruation, it was really interesting to see Witton explain the nuances of the subject, the ways it can vary for people, and the different products that exist to help deal with it. Similarly, I had a pretty solid idea about how the pill works, but I wasn’t aware of its sordid backstory and the truth behind the reasons for the 7-day break. It’s these kinds of things that had me asking one of my best friends on the phone, “Uh, did you know this??”

Some positionality, I guess: I’m a cis man. Now, that doesn’t mean I’m out of the target audience—on the contrary, I think this book is just as essential for people like me as it is for, say, a teenage girl trying to learn more about her period in a society that is hellbent on shaming her for it. And I’m quite impressed that Witton manages to achieve a tone that keeps the book accessible to such a wide audience. Nevertheless, it should be obvious that in my review I’m coming at this from the point of view of the outsider. These are issues that I’ve never dealt with. I’m reading because I’m curious, because I want to build my empathy for all the lovely people in my life who have these hormone-related experiences. I want to be able to participate in the conversation knowledgeably and responsibly.

I really like how inclusive this book is. Witton achieves this in two ways. First, she is conscious about her language. We associate menstruation with womanhood, yet as Witton points out, some people who menstruate aren’t women, and many women don’t menstruate. So the idea that menstruation makes one “a woman” is fallacious and actually harmful. This book acknowledges the existence and experiences of trans and non-binary folx, particularly through the second way: Witton includes a plethora of short letters submitted by viewers of her Hormone Diaries series. These come from all around the world and include cis women, trans women, people young and old, pre-menopausal or peri-menopausal or post-menopausal. (The one notable omission, as far as I can, is that the book doesn’t seem to mention intersex people. I don’t know if that’s outside the scope of the book because many conditions fall under the intersex banner, so it’s very complicated, or what. ) While Witton supplies the information, and adds her educated opinion about the subjects, she lets her fan contributors share stories far more diverse than she, alone, could provide.

These letters also serve the important purpose of expressing differing opinions. For example, one person writes an encomium of the combined pill and its effects on stabilizing her mood, while another person breaks up with their pill because of weight gain. Some of her contributors love tampons, others despise them. Witton is upfront about not wanting this book to be a guide or a solely her view on the “correct” ways to manage a period, use contraception, etc. She tries to equip the reader to make their own decisions, and part of that is to share different opinions on topics.

The only time Witton really gets polemical is when she addresses an underlying social justice issue: women’s pain is not taken seriously. This is particularly evident in the chapter on disorders, diseases, and infections, as well as the pregnancy chapter, but it runs throughout The Hormone Diaries. By and large Witton tries to keep her tone upbeat and even jocular, but when this issue comes up, her frustration and anger is palpable—to good effect, and with good reason! A great deal of suffering related to periods, hormones, etc., might be alleviated if we as a society cared more about women’s health and the health of people who menstruate or can get pregnant. Hence, it would be a mistake to write this book off as simply an educational text: like all of Witton’s project, there is a strong foundation of social justice and equity.

No book on such an important issue could be perfect, of course, and I have some minor critiques. Although its contributors are international, the book on the whole is quite specific to the UK when it comes to its information about health services and outcomes. I suppose that’s not surprising, and it isn’t a flaw in the book, but it’s worth being aware of this, especially if you’re reading it outside the UK. On a related note, fertility-tracking or awareness apps get mentioned a couple of times. Some of these apps have made the news recently because of privacy concerns, either in terms of selling users’ data to related industries, or even selling the data to your employer! Technology can be such a great tool for quantifying and helping one understand one’s body, and I think Witton is right to discuss its pros and cons so candidly here. Just be aware that, as with any technology, privacy and who has access to your data should be on your mind.

Honestly, though, these are incredibly minor quibbles compared to the wealth of information and relief, I’m sure for some, that The Hormone Diaries offers. As much as I loved Doing It!, I’m pleased to say that for her second effort Witton has stepped up her game. Her writing is even better; her topic is focused and delivered extremely well; I learned so much. My only true regret is that I didn’t get a chance to read it much in public so I could make a statement as a very dude-looking dude reading a book about periods with these bloody panties on the cover. Maybe for a re-read sometime?

First, huge shout-out to the Oxford comma lurking in this title. Yeah, it’s kind of a big deal.

Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is an anthology of queer Indigenous science fiction and fantasy by Indigenous authors. That’s it, and yet it is so much more. I really liked Hope Nicholson’s comment in her foreword about how some stories aren’t meant to be told, or at least, do not need to be shared with just anyone. This is something I've become more aware of as I learn more about the traditions of the Anishnaabeg on whose traditional territory I reside. As a teacher, there is the well-meaning temptation to just grab any old story from another culture and use it in the classroom because diversity! Yet as Nicholson reminds us, there’s more to it. In many Indigenous traditions, stories are associated with particular times and places for the telling, or they are passed on from elders and other knowledge-keepers—you earn the privilege of getting to tell certain stories. So now I’m trying to be more mindful of how I bring stories from various cultures into my classroom.

It’s tempting as a reviewer to remark first on the Indigeneity of these stories and then on the queerness, as if these dimensions can be teased apart and separated. That’s not possible. These are not queer stories that are also Indigenous, or vice versa; they are queer Indigenous (or Indigenous queer, whatever order you choose) stories. As Niigaan Sinclair points out in his piece, two-spirit concepts of gender identity and expression are distinct constructs of various Indigenous cultures and don’t easily fit within any Eurocentric models of gender, even ones that recognize queerness. As far as I can tell, from my perspective as an outsider, to be Indigenous and queer is a journey to decolonize oneself, and it’s really something. I can’t say what this book would mean to someone who fits those labels.

What I can say is that this book represents so much creativity. It’s science fiction, but many of the stories are subtle in their speculation. I quite liked Richard Van Camp’s “Aliens,” in which the aliens are present but don’t actually figure much in the story (and indeed, if you read the story, you might reach the conclusion that the title doesn’t refer to those extraterrestrials at all). Or “Transitions,” which could probably exist in our present day universe. And then you have more explicitly science-fictional tales, like “Imposter Syndrome,” which I could so see being a very moving short film.

It positions Indigenous people in the here and now, or in the future even, which is a very bold thing to do in a present that still very much likes genocide and white supremacy. I love finding stories about Indigenous people that don’t locate them in the past. Moreover, so many of these stories lack intense central conflicts. I’m pretty sure it was Le Guin who turned me on to the idea that conflict is not necessary for a story to work. It’s easy, but it isn’t necessary. These are stories about loving or being loved, either loving others or loving oneself, about acceptance and discovery and healing. There are moments of sadness and joy, downs and ups. But they are universally euphoric in the assertion that they are about people who live and breathe and eat and sleep and shit and love. And it’s this no-nonsense approach to the storytelling, this refusal to capitulate to the settler gaze’s voracious hunger for trauma porn and wise old Indigenous people, that is so exceptional.

I’ll conclude with a shout-out to my library, which shelved this book as YA. I don’t know if I agree that it’s young adult. Most of the stories are about adults. Nevertheless, I really do think the YA section is where this book belongs. I hope teens who are trying to find themselves stumble across this slim, approachable volume—or are directed there by a well-meaning, supportive librarian or other trusted voice—and have their minds open to the possibilities that they can be who they are, or who they want to be, on terms of their own making.

Sometimes novels are really philosophy tracts in disguise. If you’re Neal Stephenson, this usually turns into an unwieldy doorstopper that uses its tremendous bullk to beat the reader into submission. If you’re Herman Hesse, you write a kind of novella that is also pretty dense yet somehow manages to be simple and light at the same time. Siddhartha is one of those delightful early twentieth-century novels that by modern standards do not work at all as novels, yet it still has a lot of merits.

The eponymous protagonist is a member of the Brahmin caste and eager to discover the path to enlightenment. The novel is somewhat episodic, as Siddhartha chases enlightenment in one direction or another. First he and his friend leave their home village to become sayanas, holy scholars who live in poverty. Although Siddhartha’s friend Govinda is rather taken with the life, Siddhartha himself finds it hollow and devoid of the enlightenment he seeks. They hear tell of a new type of holy man, a guy named Buddha, who is attracting all sorts of attention. So they journey to where Buddha teaches. He’s all right, and Govinda is smitten and joins the following. Siddhartha, alas, searches onwards. He takes up with a courtesan, who introduces him to a merchant, and from them he learns much about pleasure on the mortal plane. Yet still, enlightenment eludes him. It isn’t until he meets a poor, older ferryman that Siddhartha even approaches understanding enlightenment.

As a philosophy text, this book actually isn’t that explicit. Although Siddhartha meets many teachers, much of what Hesse seems to be aiming at is subtextual. You have to pay attention to Siddhartha’s thoughts about the people he meets and the situations in which he finds himself. The first two acts of the novel drag a little, because not much happens beyond Siddhartha flailing around trying to figure out his life, like any young person. When Siddhartha re-enters the temporal world to consort with Kamala and Kamaswami, the book picks up because suddenly we have a contrast to the ascetic Siddhartha we’ve always known.

Still, it’s definitely the ending of the book that packs the greatest punch. Vasudeva is transparently the most enlightened person we see, his secret being, of course, that he isn’t out there seeking enlightenment so desperately like Siddhartha. He listens to the river, as well as the people he ferries across it every day. When Siddhartha joins Vasudeva and begins to look at life from this angle, it’s his first true step towards understanding that enlightenment is not a destination but the whole journey.

Though not portrayed openly as such in the book, Siddhartha’s time with Vasudeva definitely has queer subtext to it. You could read it as homoerotic; as an aromantic asexual I prefer to headcanon it as queer-platonic, as something more complicated than the casualness of friendship but not strictly defined as sexual/romantic attraction between the two of them. The situation reminded me a lot of the episode of The Magicians where, in their quest for one of the keys, Quentin and Eliot end up living a lifetime together, raising a kid, and only then can they complete the puzzle that demonstrates enlightenment.

When Kamala shows up once more with her son by Siddhartha in tow, the book takes its turn towards its climax and conclusion. Kamala, the only named female character, is fridged for the sake of the plot—this book doesn’t pass the Bechdel test by far—and Siddhartha's son becomes an undisciplined thorn in his father’s side. This pierces the bubble of placidity that Siddhartha had shaped around himself. This is probably the most powerful theme of the novel: discard the illusion that contentment is a progressive, permanently attainable state of being. Unexpected events, change, will always arrive. What’s most important is that you make the most of what you have, when you have it, and then adapt as circumstances around you demand.

So, Siddhartha left me feeling pretty chill. It’s always interesting reading a book about Indian philosophy from a white guy, and arguably, this is a book about a white guy’s journey through understanding certain tenets of Indian philosophy rather than a story about an actual Indian man taking the journey. This is the only work by Hesse I’ve read, so I can’t compare it to his other works or place it in any other kind of context. Still, it was an interesting read that got me thinking about contentment and happiness and made me sound wise when talking to one of my best friends, so there’s that.

The common reaction to people seeing what I was reading with A Terrible Thing to Waste was, “Environmental racism? What’s that?” So I explained it to them, fairly succinctly I think, because it really isn’t that difficult of a concept. Indeed, when I mentioned that, historically, decisions about where to dump waste and where to build factories and how to zone cities or rent houses have disproportionately affected marginalized and racialized people, most of those who asked nodded and went, “Oh, yeah.” Maybe that’s just a sign of the crowd I hang out with. But it really isn’t that hidden, not in an era where we know the names Flint, Michigan in the United States and Grassy Narrows, here in Canada. Harriet A. Washington’s book isn’t edifying in the sense that it reveals this heretofore unseen racism. Rather, A Terrible Thing to Waste is electrifying in the depth to which Washington chronicles the scientific background of this phenomenon, the historical connections, and the social and economic consequences.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a free copy of this book in exchange for a review.

Washington begins with a frank discussion on IQ. I found this beneficial, and indeed, I appreciated the way in which she challenged some of my views. Aware of the racist associations with IQ testing, I was in the camp of “throw it all out.” Yet Washington points out that, although not really great for measuring general intelligence as it first claimed, IQ tests do seem to correlate with many of the skills that predict success in a lot of the office-type jobs that predominate in America these days. So in that sense, I guess I see the utility of such a measure, even if what we do with it is ill-advised. Washington reminds my privileged white self that as long as IQ is used in any serious form, it behoves us to try to level the playing field of IQ testing, as it were, rather than simply pretend it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter.

From there, of course, she delves into the nature of IQ testing and its racist background. Then she pivots into discussing neurotoxins (such as lead) and their effect, especially cumulatively and especially on children. I want to warn you: parts of this book are just heartbreaking. It’s sickening—and frankly should be sickening to any reader—to think that right now millions of people are exposed to debilitating toxins simply because of where they live. I challenge you to listen to how poor, Black families can’t even sell their homes because the pollution on their land has gutted the value, trapping them in a vicious cycle of toxic poverty.

Reading this book, I continually thought back to my country and our treatment of Indigenous peoples. I mentioned Grassy Narrows, famously a site of mercury contamination. But resource exploitation and colonialism go hand-in-hand in my country; hundreds of kilometres north of my city, the government and industry are anxiously attempting to build the Ring of Fire, a multi-billion-dollar mining operation for diamonds, chromite, and other important resources. The trouble is, this will inevitably result in environmental contamination—and it won’t be me who is exposed. It’ll be the First Nations who live in northern Ontario, some of them already in communities with poor drinking water. So Canada is little better than the States when it comes to this issue.

A Terrible Thing to Waste is laudable too in its multidimensional approach to this issue. Washington doesn’t just talk about lead poisoning or dumping, oh no. She talks about malnutrition. She talks about preventable, treatable diseases that rob us of brainpower. She covers so many aspects of this issue, each time relating it back to the fact that this is a race issue, because, as she says, even poor white communities are typically healthier than well-off Black communities. (She does note limitations of the research she uses. She says she wishes she could have explored poverty as a separate variable more, but that there is actually a dearth of data, especially when it comes to poor white people. And that is definitely a problem.)

Washington makes an interesting appeal to the reader in relating this problem to economic shortfalls. In addition, of course, to simply pointing out that this is racist and wrong, she argues that this hobbles America as an economic power. It diminishes the country's average IQ, and it robs the country of thousands of minds who might otherwise be bright, innovative, and useful. Honestly, this line of argument left me a little uneasy. I don’t like the idea of treating people as capital, of thinking about our potential based on how it impacts the bottom line. Nevertheless, I see what Washington is doing here. She’s trying to fight the racist capitalists on their own turf. She points out that the data do not support hereditarians who think “nothing can be done.” And thank goodness for that.

A Terrible Thing to Waste is harrowing and heartbreaking at points. It’s also chock full of logic, facts and figures, basically all sorts of cool science. It’s exactly the kind of non-fiction I want to read: social justice polemic backed up by research and challenging me to consider the ways in which our society fails marginalized people. Because I am a part of that society, and I need to know about this, in as much detail as I can handle, so I can start doing something about it. There was a time when companies lied to us and said lead was good for us. That time has passed. But the lies don’t go away; they just change costuming. We need to keep learning, and keep pressuring those in power, especially those of us who have the privilege of doing so in comfort and safety.

This book is a hot mess. I don’t even really know where to start with it.

The Dark Net is a horror novel with the basic premise what if demons took over our computers? It’s a mediocre take on the idea that our dependence on networked devices, our proclivity for screen-time, leaves us vulnerable—in this case, to possession, psychic hacking I guess. They do say that the eyes are the windows into the soul, right?

One of the problems with The Dark Net right out of the gate is that there are quite a lot of viewpoint characters, not all of whom stick around. The description of this novel, and the opening chapter, would have you believe that 12-year-old Hannah, who is going blind but has a technological novum that might allow her to see, is a main character. Yet after that first chapter we flit around to others, including a character who shortly thereafter gets killed off, returning to Hannah much, much later and briefly.

This has the detrimental effect of making it difficult to get to know our protagonists. The two we learn the most about are Lela and Juniper. One is a technophobic journalist in a stereotypical mode (though it’s useful and justified, I suppose, given what’s happening in the book). The other is a man who has left behind his old life to do the most good the best he knows how, except he also knows how to use a gun, if you know what I mean. Maybe we’re not supposed to get to know our protagonists too well, given how many of them end up dead, but then again, that’s why I don’t usually read horror.

The way in which Percy combines the supernatural element with the technological is not particularly clever. There is a lot of explanation of how hosting, servers, the dark web and deep web and TOR, etc., actually work. That’s cool. And I understand what he’s trying to drive at with the forces of Dark infiltrating the dark net (ha ha ha) and using it as a vector for a supernatural virus of sorts. But the execution just feels stunted, a total missed opportunity to do something truly cool. Instead we get something intense and gory and miasmically chaotic, but it isn’t that exciting.

Similarly, as Percy kills off characters for dramatic effect, we get a lot of hand-wringing from some of the survivors about how so-and-so’s death changes everything and now they have to step up and do something differently with their life. I mean, yeah, the death of someone you know should affect you and inspire some character development. But the development sometimes feels forced and pushy, like it’s trying to get characters to mature and grow faster than they are capable of doing.

In the end, The Dark Net is a gloriously messy ride that is fine if you want some nonsensical horror but is (a) not creepy enough if you want to be creeped out by your horror and (b) not deep enough if you want to investigate the psychology of our relationship with technology. I’d like to say it’s “missing the mark,” but I honestly don’t know where Percy might have been aiming with this one.