Pretty covers though, right? At least they have that going for them.

There have been a couple of wins so far in January as far as my reading goes, but on the whole I feel like the misses have well outweighed the hits. And I’m writing this particular piece not to shit on these two books but because the way they didn’t work for me felt very similar: in both cases, I feel like the author never bothered to clearly define some kind of fundamental aspects about how the world of the books worked.

The Bookshop Below, as you might guess, is about a magical bookshop. The book is set in the real world, more or less, but there are these bookstores scattered around — it’s not clear exactly how many there are, but they feel a bit too important for the number of them to be limited to the few we hear about in the book. At any rate, the stores are sort of sentient, and so are the books in them, and they only allow the people they want to find and enter them, and a lot of the time when people buy books from the bookstore they’ll trade a personal memento or a tooth or a lock of hair or, in what feels like a bit of an escalation, a firstborn child for the book they walk out with. The main character is a high-end book thief who ends up owning one of these bookstores, and the story goes from there.

I am not someone who demands that magic be rigorously defined in the books I read. Brandon Sanderson is kind of the king of the meticulously crafted magic system, where he can end his books with charts and diagrams of the twelve different schools of magic that exist and how they interact and blah blah blah. Tolkien, on the other hand? Gandalf and Saruman and Radagast are wizards, and shut up is how their powers work. It’s difficult, reading LOTR, to say the words “Gandalf can’t do that.” His powers and his magic don’t work like that. Now, there is tons of lore out there and histories of Middle-Earth and all that, but at no point does Tolkien sit the reader down and explain how shit worked.

The thing, though? Tolkien knew how shit worked, he just didn’t explain it. You cannot make a reasonable argument that JRR Tolkien pantsed his way through LOTR even given the tonal shift between The Hobbit and the rest of the books. The man knew what he was doing, he just didn’t think you needed to know.

And the problem with The Bookshop Below is that I finished the book unconvinced that the author had really sat down and worked out exactly what was going on in her own book. And maybe this is me punishing the book for not being the book I wanted; I’ve certainly had moments like that before, but the books in this story are doing things like flooding the bookstore because they’re unhappy, and I feel like if you’re going to have a setup like that, maybe you devote a little more attention to your worldbuilding. There’s also this whole big thing where the magic of the bookstores and the books is powered by The River, which connects all the stores, and which at least some of the payments for the books are given to, but it’s not at all clear what the deal with The River is either, and I really felt like the book kind of ended up collapsing under its own weight by the end.

I read Alma Katsu’s Fiend today– it’s less than 300 pages in a pretty big font, so this was not a huge achievement– and it was deeply disappointing. The issue with Fiend is that all the characters are part of the same family, and the family runs this massive multinational corporation that has made all of them massively rich. There is a lot of talk about what is going to happen when the patriarch of the family (who is weirdly referred to by his first name throughout the book, including by his own children) dies, and who is going to inherit the company, and also who will become head of their “clan”, and I guess those two people don’t have to be the same person, blah blah blah. It’s treated as a given that the company is extraordinarily dirty, and there’s lots of talk about whether this son or that daughter is tough enough to run the company, or whether they should try to change how things have always been done; you’ve seen The Godfather, you get the idea.

I don’t think Alma Katsu had any idea at all what the Berisha Corporation actually does. The synopsis calls it an “import-export” company, but that’s immensely vague, and it’s not clear at any point what the company is actually for. There is talk of sweatshops and exploitation and there’s a Whistleblower at one point, but the whole thing is very these people are bad, and this company is bad, just trust me, and … it doesn’t take much for me to accept that a multinational corporation is evil! I’m all in on the “capitalism bad” train! But give me something here. Even the scenes where these people are at work makes it really clear that the author never bothered to think through what anyone’s actual job was, and interestingly this book also seems to exist in a world without email. People have cell phones and there’s a stray mention or two of AI so it’s not like it’s set in the past; it’s just a big weird blind spot.

Blech. The world’s descent into hell is accelerating on a daily basis so far in 2026; I’d appreciate it if I could at least have something good to read.