Tag: book reviews

#REVIEW: The Radiant Dark, by Alexandra Oliva

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I have reached a point where I am getting a truly absurd number of books every month through book box services of one stripe or another, and every time I think I’m going to get my shit together and cull one or two of them, I discover a book like The Radiant Dark, which was not on my radar in any way before it showed up and caught my interest via, in this case, my Aardvark box. Alexandra Oliva has written a couple of other books before this, but she’s new to me, and anything that can consistently feed me new authors that I like is going to continue to get my attention and my money.

The Radiant Dark is part alternate history, part science fiction, and part family saga; it starts in 1980, and at first I thought I had managed to pick up what feels like the third or fourth book in the last month or so featuring a struggling young mother with a baby and a useless husband. And, well, it is that, for a little while, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Very early in, President Carter announces that a signal emanating from a specific region of outer space has been conclusively proven to have intelligent alien origins, from an unknown exoplanet approximately eleven light-years away. And because of the distances involved, any message that gets sent back is going to take eleven years for the aliens to receive, and 22 years minimum for Earth to receive any sort of response. The book isn’t solely concerned with the communications, of course, but there have to be time skips to keep it from being a thousand pages long. Oliva also has a defter hand with her characters than you might think at the beginning of the book, and the relationship between Carol, her son Michael, and her daughter Rosanna (called Ro for most of the book) is the emotional center of the book. Carol’s husband quickly becomes her ex-husband, but he’s a complex character in his own right, and while it seems clear who the hero and who the goat is early on, it gets muddled up nicely in the fashion of most dysfunctional families pretty quickly. Ro in particular has a very strained relationship with her mother, and she will eventually become a mother on her own. I genuinely feel like even if they hadn’t had the first contact/science fiction side of this book, it would be well worth reading just because of the way it explores the family dynamics.

Ro turns out to be a world-class astronomer, and is one of the first people to decipher the second message the aliens send us, 22 years after the original beacon. She is snatched out of her Ph.D program by a world-renowned scientist who wants to use the knowledge the aliens have sent us to start looking for other potentially habitable planets and, possibly, other intelligent life– although the aliens make it clear that all they have been able to find so far is us. She presents it as a generational effort, something that she doesn’t plan to survive to see the fruits of. By the time the book ends in the 2030s, humanity has colonized the Moon and sent people to Mars, so obviously there’s some divergence from our own history, as you well might expect.

I was not expecting to enjoy this nearly as much as I did, and this is the rare book that I will recommend because I find the characters so compelling. I like good character work, of course, but it’s rarely at the forefront of my reasons for liking a book, especially one so suited to my interests as a first-contact science fiction novel. But I think it’s best to read this as a family saga with a side dish of sci-fi rather than the other way around; if you go into this solely as a sci-fi person, I think you’ll come out disappointed. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the aliens do show up eventually, but don’t read the book waiting for that reveal. That’s not the book Oliva wanted to write. Go in with your expectations calibrated appropriately, though, and you’ll end up with a read that I think stands a pretty good chance of showing up on my end of the year list. Check it out.

#REVIEW: The Caretaker, by Marcus Kliewer

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

This is one of those books that you finish, put down, and then mutter “Fuuuuuck…” under your breath.

Marcus Kliewer has, I believe, written two books. I read his debut, We Used to Live Here, and reviewed it here. My review was a little on the mixed side; WUtLH features a really unreliable narrator, a literary trick I generally don’t get along with very well, and its genre is mindfuck. One thing that I’m noticing as I’m rereading the review, though, is that I finished the book in one sitting.

I also finished The Caretaker in one sitting, and I did not have “read an entire book cover to cover” on my to-do list for today. Now, granted, this isn’t a terribly long book, coming in under 300 pages and with a largish font on top of that, but I genuinely did not put it down once while I was reading it. This means that Marcus Kliewer has written two books, I have read them both, and I didn’t put either of them down while I was reading them.

That’s … really impressive.

The Caretaker is also a mindfuck, although not as intensely so as WUtLH. The main character, Macy Mullins, is a twenty-something and a bit of a fuck-up, with a doozy of an anxiety issue on top of that. She’s the parental figure for her younger sister Jenna, a seventeen-year-old with a penchant for casual shoplifting. Macy is broke and jobless, and the sisters are about to be evicted from their apartment when Macy happens to spot a want ad for a temporary caretaker position. She interviews and discovers that she’s being offered nine thousand dollars, a life-changing amount of money, for the simple task of three days of house-sitting. The house is old and isolated, buried deep in the wilderness off the coast of Oregon, but despite her sister’s reservations she jumps at it.

Oh, and there are some minor things you need to do while you’re house-sitting. No big deal. The former owner had some, uh, quirks, and maybe some OCD, and maybe a lot of OCD, and his wife promised him that as long as she lived in the house she’d keep up his little rituals that he thought literally kept the world safe. A promise is a promise, though, right? Here’s the list. Again, no big deal. Simple stuff.

You might not be surprised to learn that things don’t go well. Otherwise this isn’t that much of a book, right? Macy babysits the house and makes sure none of the lights turn on in the middle of the night. She makes a ton of money, buys a used car, and gets her and her sister back on track now that she can get to work. The end!

Nah.

Full disclosure: I got sucked directly into this book and it dragged me along at a breakneck pace until I was done with it, and it might be the kind of book I wake up tomorrow and find a dozen huge plot holes in. The three major book services I use for ratings– Amazon, Goodreads and Storygraph– all have it at under 4 stars, which isn’t alarming, necessarily, but it means the book isn’t exactly garnering universal acclaim. But oh, man, the ride it takes you on is great. It’s creepy as hell and the main character makes nothing but bad decisions from start to finish and if I could have found a way to cover my eyes and read the whole book through the cracks in my fingers I might have, except I haven’t found a way to turn pages or hold a book while I’m doing that. But I’m keeping a close eye on this Kliewer fellow from now on; I actually picked this one up from Aardvark without immediately realizing it was the We Used to Live Here guy. I will not be forgetting his name again.

Give it a read. Just make sure you have a few hours set aside before you do.

Read these four books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

The thought of writing full reviews of all of these makes me tired, and it’s been a long day and my wife is out of town for the next eight days for work so I’m kinda crabby and tired already, and I’ve tried to write these for a week and not gotten anywhere. So we’re going to do this! I’m going to post four book covers! You should read those four books. If you want to know more about them, ask me in comments, and I’ll either respond in comments or write a full review of them this weekend sometime when I’m feeling more like a human being who can be engaged with in society.

At any rate, Canticle woke up my Religious Studies Brain, and after finishing it I immediately texted my friend with a doctorate in theology and insisted that she read it as soon as possible. This is historical fiction and is the only book on the list with no real genre elements, and God, it was so good. So so good.

I could have done without the romance angle in Weavingshaw, but everything else about it is so good that I can overlook it.

This was awesome, and one of the rare books that I wish was longer, especially for those of us who don’t really know anything about Moroccan culture. I wanted more story after The Thing happens, but The Thing doesn’t happen until very late in the book.

Absolutely brilliant, although I’m uncertain why Kay used his fictional Sarantium and didn’t just use Constantinople. I mean, there’s bits of magic and the supernatural here and there, so maybe that in and of itself is why, but I could have accepted a Byzantine Empire with that stuff. I have the sequel to this on my shelf already, though, and this is my first book by Guy Gavriel Kay, but I suspect I’m going to read a lot by him this year.

#REVIEW: Girl Dinner, by Olivie Blake

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

This week I’m going to try to catch up on book reviews I should have already written, so naturally I’m going to start with the book I just finished yesterday. I’m not completely sure what caused me to pick this up beyond amusement at the title and the lovely pink stained edges; I feel like there was something else but it was a while ago.

Girl Dinner is a flawed book in a lot of ways; the middle is kinda flabby, the end comes out of nowhere unless I seriously missed something, and a lot of the time the characters, either being academics or literal sophomores, have their heads firmly implanted in their asses. There is a lot of navel-gazing in this book, to mix metaphors, and it gets tedious sometimes.

But despite that, fundamentally the book works, and I need somebody else to read it and talk about it with me. The book is a satire– mostly, at least– and explores the intersection of academic feminism, modern femininity, social media and Greek (specifically sorority) culture, with just the tiniest little squirt of the supernatural over it all for, y’know, flavor. The two main characters are the aforementioned sophomore girl who is rushing one of the most exclusive sororities on campus, and an exhausted adjunct professor with an eighteen-month-old and a husband who isn’t worth much. The characters’ stories start off entirely separate other than that they share the same university, but by the end of the book everything knits itself together really nicely, at least up until the wait, what? that happens on the last page.

I handed this four stars; I wouldn’t be too pressed if you gave it three, and if the middle hadn’t been a little much I might have given it five, if only because I know enough academics to know (and I say this with love) that navel-gazing is kinda y’all’s thing. I need someone who thinks it sounds interesting to read it and then be my friend, because I want to talk about it with someone.

Monthly Reads: May 2026

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading2 Comments

What I’m learning, looking at this, is that I should have written more book reviews this month. Because Canticle, We Burned So Bright and Sailing to Sarantium could all be Book of the Month and I only reviewed one of them.

#REVIEW: From the Depths, by Emily Renk Hawthorne

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I don’t like writing this kind of review.

I was sent this book by Emily Renk Hawthorne’s publicist for a review– not only was I sent this book, but also the first book in the series, in a nice hardcover edition, and when I cracked this open to read it I discovered she’d actually sent me a copy with a signed bookplate in it, which genuinely makes me feel bad about how I’m going to review the book. I’m going to keep this brief: I liked Book One, Of Mountains and Seas, well enough, but it had some problems; my review was mixed but ultimately I liked the book enough to request and read the sequel.

Unfortunately, having completed From the Depths, I feel that it has all of the same problems as the first book, and introduces a few new ones besides, while simultaneously not showing some of the strengths of the first book. Mountains and Seas jumped back and forth among several different periods in time, for example, and rewarded paying attention. This may be the first time I’ve ever complained about a straightforward narrative, but it’s a much simpler text. Mountains and Seas had a clear villain. This book’s bad guy is a nonsentient puddle of silver goo. That’s not a joke.

The author’s habit of choosing the wrong word continues to be an issue as well, and starts off on the very first page, where the word “sinkhole” is repeatedly used to describe the first appearance of the goo. I’m not going to get into the details, but the phenomenon being described in that first chapter is simply not a sinkhole. Sinkholes do not happen indoors.

I gave this two stars on Goodreads and Storygraph; one less than Mountains and Seas. I cannot recommend that you read it. I’ll leave it at that.

From the Depths releases on June 9.

And another one gone

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, TeachingLeave a comment

That’s twenty-two years, I think? Twenty-three? Who the hell knows.

One of the things that happened at the event we went to last night was recognition of three retiring faculty members, and in fact there was a reception immediately afterward for them that we did not attend. The three had been teaching for, respectively, 29 years, 36 years, and a staggering 42 years, all at the same school.

If I retire from teaching, rather than eventually just quitting, I’ll surely be at at least 29 years. 36 is quite a bit harder to imagine. But 42? Imagine having taught for 22 years and still having the equivalent of an entire career to go before retirement. She was where I am and was barely halfway through. The notion that I’ll still be alive in 2046 much less still teaching is genuinely too terrifying to take seriously.

It turns out I was being very optimistic by suggesting that I might be able to come home from the last day of school and still have the mental capacity necessary to write a book review. Further complicating the problem is that various parts of my personality are at war with various other parts of my personality over how to write it, and the whole thing still needs to cook a little bit longer. It’s already got the lowest rating I’ve ever given a book I was sent for review; the question remaining is how … I dunno, I wanna say honest, but I think I mean abusive, I should be in the actual text of the thing. I am trying to tamp down my inner barbarian here, is what I’m saying. The only question is whether that’s the right move.

Probably. But we’ll see. The review definitely won’t be tomorrow but I’ll try to have it up on Saturday.

#REVIEW: We Burned So Bright, by TJ Klune

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment
It’s his best book.

It’s his best book. It’s not super close, either; The House on the Cerulean Sea, which is still a book I love immensely, is going to have to be demoted.(*) I sobbed at the end of this book. I am not a sobber. I do not sob, Goddammit.

This book got me.

The story is simple, and told quickly; Bright is a novella, clocking in at only 176 pages, and I read it in a single sitting. The world is about to end, and there is nothing we can do about it; a rogue black hole has been identified in deep space and it is heading directly toward Earth. At the beginning of the book there is about a month left until the planet and every living thing on it ceases to exist. This could have been a huge, doorstopper story, but Klune keeps the focus tight: a married couple, Don and Rodney, who are both in their seventies and have been together for over forty years, and have one last road trip that they have to undertake, one last task that they must complete together, before the end of the world.

I’m not going to tell you much more than that. Klune takes his time revealing the reason for the trip, focusing mostly on Don and Rodney’s relationship and the small number of other people they encounter along the way, including a young family who have not told their children what is coming, a roving community of hippies, and one unfortunate young woman whose mind has broken under the strain of waiting for the apocalypse. It’s clear that there is danger out there; there are references to some areas under martial law, and one panicked flight from a gunfight, but the focus of this book isn’t on a world gone mad or a perilous journey. There are some obstacles to overcome, but this is a quiet book about a quiet pair of men; Klune isn’t interested in telling an action story here.

My sole gripe is minor, and may actually be wrong: I’m pretty sure that a rogue black hole heading toward Earth would not have some of the effects that this black hole has. There’s some fuckery with gravity going on toward the end that I found kind of distracting (and there’s some interesting discussion about said fuckery in the author’s afterword, as apparently how much fuckery to include was a point of contention between author, editor, and early readers) and the black hole manages to eat several other planets on the way to Earth, implying they were all in a nice neat little row for it. This is possible but doesn’t happen very often. The gravity stuff is within artistic license. I’ll live, is what I’m saying, and the only reason it got to me is that I’m an astronomy nerd. The emotional core of the book does not care one whit about what that black hole should be doing, and the emotional core of the book is going to kick you in the ass.

Even if you’ve never read any of Klune’s books before, absolutely pick this one up. Read it on a day when it’s raining outside and you have a few hours to yourself and maybe you’re a little sad. It’ll be worth it.

(*) Third, The Bones Beneath My Skin; fourth, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, then everything else.