Book of the Month is … damn. There is no Antimemetics Division? Sublimation? Challenger? The Empire of the Vampire series as a whole? Angel Down? Seriously, throw a dart. July was ridiculous.
#REVIEW: Sublimation, by Isabel J. Kim
In my review of Angel Down a couple of days ago, I talked about how I generally don’t like it very much when authors try to screw around with structure in novels. I was forced to eat my words with Angel Down’s unorthodox single-sentence structure, and now I’m about to review a book where a good half of it is written in second person.
Yes, second person. As in everything is “you did this” and “you did that,” like an old Choose Your Own Adventure book. And again, when I realized what I was looking at, I very nearly sighed and put the book down. And again, if I had done that, it would have been a huge mistake, as this is one of the more original science fiction books I’ve read … well, okay, since There Is No Antimemetics Division, which wasn’t even two weeks ago, but before that? It was a while.
Sublimation is more or less set in the real world, with only one real change to how the world works, but man, that one change is a doozy. Sometimes, when a person crosses a border, a person will leave a copy of themselves behind in the original country. Those people are entirely separate human beings, referred to as instances of the original person. Sometimes they adopt different names, sometimes they simply move on with their lives and keep their original names and identities. If instances physically touch each other, they recombine into one person, but keeping the memories and experiences of both people, who may theoretically have had many years to diverge from one another. Different cultures over human history have dealt with instantiation in different ways; sometimes it’s regarded as good luck, sometimes … not so much, but the book is clear that this has been with humanity forever. Odysseus comes up repeatedly; Adam and Eve left instances behind when they left Paradise, and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are referred to as instances of God.
This is, in case it’s not clear, one of those books that has Big Questions to ask, and if you are an immigrant this is going to hit you hard, and while instancing doesn’t necessarily happen based on major life decisions, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to meet a version of myself who had turned left in places in my past where I chose to turn right. And, again, this is a huge thing– different countries treat citizenship of instances differently, especially since it happens when people are crossing borders anyway. And it’s not a situation where one person is the “original” and one is the instance– they are both instances, and there is no original person. There is technology that has recently been developed that does allow instances to touch each other, and when both of them are using it there’s a 95% success rate in preventing recombination when they touch. But up until recently, this was permanent if you didn’t have a way to get back to the person you instanced from.
The main characters are all instances; one a young woman named Soyoung/Rose whose mother took her to America when she was a child and she grew up there; “Rose” is the American version, and Soyoung remained in South Korea. The other is a friend of hers, Yujin/YJ, who moved to America for college. While Soyoung’s instantiation wasn’t intentional, Yujin actually hoped to split, and plans to recombine after both the South Korean and American sides of him have gotten their educations and their careers started. Soyoung and Rose haven’t talked in years. Yujin and YJ talk nearly every day. Soyoung’s mom instanced also, so there are versions of “mom” in both countries.
The story begins when Soyoung/Rose’s grandfather in South Korea dies, and Rose returns for the funeral, seeing her instance for the first time in nearly two decades. And Soyoung, who has gotten engaged in the meantime, forcibly integrates them without Rose’s permission. Meanwhile, YJ works for the company that makes the anti-reintegration technology, and it turns out they’re about to debut a new product that can re-split a pair after they have reintegrated, back into their separate instances, with their original memories intact. Yujin and Soyoung are old friends; Rose did not know YJ.
And … well, we’re off to the races, with corporate espionage, familial betrayal, generational guilt, emotional manipulation and a cat hilariously named Mr. Crouton all in the mix.
(Right, I forgot to mention it: when the subject of a chapter is an instance, the chapter is written in second person. When Soyoung and Rose integrate, the narration shifts to third person. It’s a good example of how playing with structure can work.)
I loved this book. I love the premise, the execution was great, and Isabel J. Kim is absolutely on my list of authors I’m going to continue to keep my eyes on in the future. This was a really remarkable piece of work. If you like smart books written by smart people you absolutely want to read this one.
Now, that said: two caveats, to close this out: first, this is getting seriously mixed reviews– it’s at 3.65 on Goodreads right now, which is normally not a great sign. Usually, that means that a book isn’t great; other times it can just mean it was written by a Black person or has a gay relationship in it. Now, I can see the second-person aspect causing some people to put it down immediately– again, I almost did– so that’s going to account for some of it, but I looked through some of the reviews and didn’t immediately feel like the people who weren’t big fans of the book were stupid, so maybe if you’re on the fence look at some other reviews and see what folks had to say.
Second, I do not understand the title. The physics definition of “sublimation” is something that moves from a solid state directly to a gas, much like “melt” means to move from a solid to a liquid. That does not seem to apply here at all. The psychological definition, and I’m pulling straight from Merriam-Webster here, is “to divert the expression of (an instinctual desire or impulse) from its unacceptable form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.” And that almost feels like it should fit, but … not really. If you’ve read this and you can explain the title, I’d love to hear it. I mean, Instance or Instantiation were both right there.
Unread Shelf: July 31, 2026
Y’all! Look! Progress! Actual progress!
#REVIEW: Our Sister’s Keeper, by Jasmine Holmes
I feel like I haven’t started a review with “Man, look at that awesome cover” in a while, but look at that awesome cover.
I had planned to review an entirely different book tonight, and I have a couple of movies to talk about as well, and I can already tell I’m going to have to review the book I’m reading now, and tomorrow and Saturday already have the traditional first-and-last-of-the-month book posts planned, so expect a flurry of review talk around here for the next few days. I picked this up last night specifically because I thought I could finish it by the end of the month; I was once again taken by surprise by an Aardvark book, basically not putting it down other than for sleep until I finished it, and at just over 300 pages, it’s a quick read.
Did you see Get Out? You should have. I don’t appear to have reviewed it here, but it’s a great movie.
Imagine that Get Out was a book.
(If it was a book, tell me, because I didn’t know that and I want to read it.)
Imagine that Get Out was more about feminism than racism.
Now imagine that Get Out was about feminism and set in a fictional Black free town in Mississippi in 1927, just a few years after the massacres that destroyed the Black communities in Rosewood, Florida and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
And buckle the fuck in, because this one is a hell of a ride, with a fantastic twist toward the end– hell, a couple of them– and I don’t know what the hell is going on with July right now, because I’ve had too many DNFs and too many six-star reads for a single month. I’m not even gonna give you any details beyond the setting. Go in blind. Just trust me. And damn, somebody shove Jasmine Holmes a huge pile of money and make a movie out of this. Jordan Peele? You out there? This is your next project.
#REVIEW: Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus
Every time I say this, I expect to get some pushback from someone, and I never do: World War I was a war that was fought for absolutely no reason at all, and every single person who died in it died for nothing. World War II is widely regarded as The Last Good War; its predecessor may have been the most wanton waste of human life I’m aware of. It was fought at a time where the technology to kill people far outstripped the technology to defend them, and every single thing about it was horrible.
Daniel Kraus, author of Whalefall, has written a book about World War I, where a group of American soldiers discover an angel dying in the mud in no-man’s-land between American and German positions. I read Whalefall when it came out in 2024, and I was surprised just now to discover that I five-starred it when I read it; my memories of it are not especially positive and I was expecting to discover I hadn’t liked it very much. I almost didn’t pick this book up, and then it won a Pulitzer, and FOMO kicked in, and to hell with it, it was cheap.
But I didn’t almost not buy it because I didn’t like Whalefall. I almost didn’t buy it because the book is structured as a single sentence, 304 pages long.
And the thing is, call me a philistine if you want, I’m generally not fond of people who try to fuck with structure too much in books. I like my narratives straightforward and my narrators reliable. I like dialogue to have quotation marks around it. I like all the text in a book pointed the same way. And I like sentences and paragraphs to be reasonable in length. I like a good long sentence once in a while, anyone who has read me for more than a few days knows that; 304 pages is Too Long.
So here’s the good news: if you have avoided this book because of the single-sentence thing, it’s absolutely a gimmick, and it’s almost unworthy of the book, to be honest. Here’s a randomly-chosen two-page spread:
You will note that there are, if not precisely paragraph breaks, certainly gaps between clauses that serve as such, and note the image break in the top left as well. The book also has chapters. Now, you’ll also notice that every paragraph starts with “and,” which you should expect to see a lot of, and all of those “paragraphs” end with commas, so technically this is all one sentence, or at least part of it.
But, c’mon. One of the reasons for paragraph and sentence breaks is to give the eye a place to rest, and the commas do that perfectly well. You will not notice, as you’re reading, that this book is one long sentence.
You will also notice that it never slows down, and it never lets up, but that’s more a function of the writing than the structure. Kraus could have sprinkled periods at reasonable places throughout this text without changing a single word and the character of the narrative itself would not have changed one whit. And, honestly, read those few paragraphs, and you’ll know whether you want to read this or not; follow that instinct.
I will say that I did really enjoy this book– it’s not on my 2026 shortlist, but if there’s going to be a book that sneaks onto my end-of-year list without having been on the shortlist, this will be it; it just depends on how well it sticks with me. It’s a better book than my recollection of Whalefall, certainly, and I suspect if I reread Whalefall tomorrow I would still think so. The sheer hopelessness of the WWI setting and the idea of saving a downed angel was a good enough high concept for a book to begin with, and the voice of the novel is perfectly matched to the setting and the characters. There’s also one other narrative trick in the last part of the book that I’m not going to spoil but which works very well; the book ends perfectly.
Well, sort of. You’ll see when you read it.
I have another Daniel Kraus book on my TBR shelf, one that just came out; he wrote a science fiction novel called The Sixth Nik, which means I’ll have read three of his books and they’ll have been from three wildly different genres. I know he’s got a ton of other books; Nik will determine whether I start seeking out his back catalogue or not.
Choose your own review
I had a shingles shot yesterday, because I’m old now, and my doctor warned me that the shingles shot has a higher than average chance of kicking the ass of the person it’s administered to. I wouldn’t say the shot has kicked my ass, but I’m definitely not in the mood for anything today and more than a little dumber than usual. So I’m not writing a real post tonight, but I will tell you that I’ve finished two books and watched two movies in the last few days that, under other circumstances, I might review. If you’re especially interested in my opinion on any of these, let me know, and I’ll move it up in the queue.
(There’s no queue. But if anybody wants a review of any of these, you’ll get it.)
Three of these will be at least mostly positive. One, and you can probably guess which one, will very much not, and since you already know I hated it, I’ll just give you actual reasons.
Monday, June 27
I had a doctor’s appointment today, and after the doctor’s appointment, I had to run over to the post office to mail a couple of packages. You will note that the post office is closed on Sunday, and while it isn’t impossible, doctors that have regular appointments on Sunday are few and far between. However, since today is Monday, neither of those things were a problem for me today.
I got a call yesterday(*) that a medication was ready for me at my local pharmacist. On the way back from the post office, I drive past my pharmacy, and I did not turn into the parking lot of the pharmacist to retrieve my medication, because it was Sunday. No more than five minutes after leaving the post office.
I’ve been talking about renewing my teaching license; I decided to go ahead and get myself set up with my required CPR certification today, since I had discovered (unsurprisingly) that I do, in fact, need to have an in-person training where I interact with a CPR dummy and can’t do the whole thing online. So I need a class, and that’s probably best done before school starts. Conveniently, there was one available next week on Wednesday, on June 29, which seemed good, so I paid for it and then opened up my calendar to put it in my schedule.
And it was good that I did that, because it is, in fact, the 27th, and typically on the 27th of any month it takes two days and not nine before it is the 29th.
EDIT: You will notice that the headline for this post says “June 27” and not “July 27.” I swear to you that I did NOT do that on purpose, and now I’ve noticed it I’m leaving it in. My doctor should perhaps have checked for recent head injuries.
(*) JESUS, YESTERDAY WAS ACTUAL SUNDAY. THIS HAPPENED ON SATURDAY, TWO DAYS AGO.
#REVIEW: The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell
This had better be the worst thing I read this year.
More on it later, possibly, but I have a terrible movie to watch before I talk about the terrible book. Needless to say, I have no idea who Michael Korda is, but I don’t believe he even read this fucking thing.