Tag: book reviews

#REVIEW: The Only Way Out is Up, by Django Wexler

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Absolutely true fact: I only bought this book because of my inner magpie. I have the Broken Binding version, which has the same cover but also has matching purple/pink sprayed edges, and for whatever reason I am an absolute whore for that color. I have two of Django Wexler’s books; Goodreads tells me I enjoyed The Thousand Names and The Shadow Throne when I read them in 2013 and 2014, but for some reason that is entirely lost to the mists of time I never picked up the third volume, and I haven’t read anything of his since. Well, I’m going to have to add Thousand Names to my second chances project next year, because I stayed home from work again this afternoon and I read this damn thing cover-to-cover in more or less a single sitting.

I am not exactly sure what a “progression fantasy” is, if I’m being honest, or how much such a thing overlaps with a LitRPG; this book calls itself a progression fantasy and Matt Dinniman blurbs it on the cover, but it doesn’t have the emphasis on video game/RPG mechanics like leveling and ability scores that LitRPGs have. Wexler himself calls it “Pokémon with robots,” which … isn’t entirely wrong, but there’s a lot more going on than what you might think from that description.

At any rate: the main character is Taj, a young scrapper who lives in a slum literally built among the remnants of an underground junk heap. The surface is kilometers away, and occasionally showers of metal or giant objects fall from the sky and kill people. Taj turns out to be talented with … well, not quite robotics, as sigilcraft is an interesting combination of magic and technology that doesn’t quite line up perfectly with “robots,” but it’s close enough for this piece and you can see from the cover that there’s clearly something mechanical running around with him. At any rate, his robot is named Star, and because of a particular sigil Taj discovered, Star can both communicate mentally with Taj and to all appearances appears to be sentient. Taj supplements scrapping with occasional petty thievery, and one night he sneaks up to a higher (and thus wealthier) level of the giant pit he lives in and robs a young woman named Ky. Ky takes one look at Star and offers him a better deal: she’ll bankroll him into a tournament for combat versions of these robots in return for his help with some shit she has going on, and we’re off to the races.

So the Pokémon angle is the fighting robots, mixed with a heist novel, a closed-off postapocalyptic society reminiscent of Dust or Fallout, a magic sigil system that reminds me of the tech in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders Trilogy, and some great character work. I like Ky and Taj a lot, and Taj’s semi-adopted found family and the menagerie of fixers, gamblers, gangsters and aristocratic degenerates they encounter throughout the book are uniformly fun, as are the little glimpses of society aboveground you get here and there. My only real complaint is that the book could have used a little bit more breathing room, although as long as the books I’ve been reading lately have been, it was nice to sit down and blast through something short. There are a few questions that I assume are going to be dealt with in sequels– Taj is awfully good with sigilcraft, and everyone he encounters expresses disbelief that he’s been able to cobble Star together with essentially scavenged parts, and then there’s Star’s apparent sentience, which is kept a secret from most of the other characters throughout the book. Revelations are coming, I’m sure.

Definitely worth giving a look, and then give it a prominent place on your shelf so you can enjoy the pretty colors.

#REVIEW: The Barn, by Wright Thompson

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I probably shouldn’t write this tonight. I spent the first hundred pages of this book thinking about putting it down, not because it was bad but because it wasn’t exactly the book I thought it was when I picked it up. I bought this book on sight in Barnes and Noble, and I didn’t know it existed prior to finding it, and I had to flip it over and look at the back to be certain it was about Emmett Till’s murder. There are a lot of barns in Mississippi, and there have been a lot of murders. And the title of the book does not mention Till.

It becomes clear fairly quickly upon starting to read it that The Barn is not only a history of the Till murder. It’s a memoir before anything else, I think, and if it’s a history of anything it’s a history of Mississippi, framed around the young man’s murder and the barn he was killed in. Often when places are mentioned, their distance from the barn is the first thing you find out about them, carefully measured down to the tenth of a mile. “Secret history” makes it sound like it’s going to be digging up long-buried stories, which actually is accurate, but mostly because Mississippi has never been interested in the truth. Mississippi buries history like a fucking professional, you see. Lying about itself is in the state’s blood.

And, well. About that.

Here’s the cover of the UK version of this book:

I literally made this discovery five minutes ago, as I sat down to write this; the first thing I do whenever I’m writing a book review is find a high-res copy of the cover, of course, and … well.

I am surprisingly angry about the title change, and I really want to know which one was the original title. I feel like the UK subtitle has to be the original one; I can see changing the title from that to the more sensationalistic, less specific US version despite how fucking awful a decision I think it was, but altering the title from the US version, especially the way the cover emphasizes Till’s name, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like the average British citizen, or even the average British reader of nonfiction about America, probably doesn’t know who Emmett Till is? Or, at the very least, his name has significantly less salience over there than it does here? I could be wrong, I suppose, and it might be worth pointing out that we have one cover that does not mention Till and one cover that does not mention Mississippi. And, again, this book is more about Mississippi than it is about Emmett Till.

I’ll do some digging tomorrow and see if I can find out the story of the title change. It’s 2026; maybe Wright Thompson is on Bluesky. You never know.

One way or another, once I got out of my own head and started judging the book for what it was, rather than what I thought it was going to be, it’s a phenomenal piece of work, and even if the title was changed for the most base and cowardly reasons– and, Christ, the title of a book about Emmett Till getting changed to omit Till’s name is the most Mississippi thing that could possibly have happened– I can’t blame the book for that. And the third section of the book, called 1955, tells the story of the murder well enough. I don’t know that there’s enough in a straight history to fill 400 pages, but the way Thompson weaves hundreds of years of Mississippi and US history around the events of a single night in a crumbling barn in a shithole town in the middle of nowhere makes it an impressively hard book to put down. The research that went into this book is detailed and exacting, the prose soars, and I sat down and tore through the last 170 pages in one sitting immediately after finishing dinner tonight. This is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read this year. You should read it.

#REVIEW: My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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An interesting thing happened while I was thinking about reviewing this book: I popped over to Goodreads, saw my review, and knocked it down a star. Don’t misunderstand me; that change was from five stars to four, and this is still a book I enjoyed reading and can recommend to people. But if you’re going to read something by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and you should, you ought to start with Cursed Daughters, which I can be much more enthusiastic about.

MStSK begins on the floor in a bathroom, as our main character Korede uses bleach to remove the blood of her sister’s murdered boyfriend. Her sister, Ayoola, is perching on the toilet, blood drying on her body, as she waits for her sister to remove the evidence of her kill. Later, the two of them will dump the body off of a bridge into a lagoon below, hoping the local wildlife gets to it before anyone finds it.

(There are going to be some spoilers, more than I usually have in a review, so be aware of that. The tl;dr of the rest of the review is that I think this book would have been better if it had more room to breathe, and I don’t think it lived up to its own promise. It’s not a bad book, it’s just a distinct step down from Daughters.)

It is, as it turns out, the third boyfriend Ayoola has murdered, and the third Korede has helped her dispose of. Strangely, the police don’t seem to have noticed any sort of pattern, although Braithwaite is quick to emphasize how easily bribed and incompetent Nigerian police are. Ayoola is eventually questioned about this current boyfriend’s disappearance, but the body is never found and she’s never in any serious danger of arrest. And we don’t really get any details about the previous killings.

Here’s the thing: I read this in a couple of big gulps (and it’s short, so you probably will too) and in the moment it was a fun and interesting read. And it’s still a fun and interesting read, but it’s one of those books where a couple of days later the holes are going to start to show. Ayoola is younger and prettier than Korede, and has much better luck with men, and Korede is the more studious and responsible one as well. And eventually Ayoola meets the hot doctor that Korede has a crush on at her job (she’s a nurse; Ayoola is unemployed) and of course he falls for her, and this is supposed to be where the big emotional crux of the novel is, as Korede tries to decide what to do about the whole situation, but it just sort of fizzles. Ayoola temporarily abandons the doctor to fuck off to Dubai with another guy, this one married, and he somehow dies of either food poisoning or a drug overdose while they’re gone, a story Korede immediately doubts, and eventually she tries to stab the doctor but he ends up stabbing her himself in self-defense. Then Ayoola finds another man, and the book ends as Korede comes down the stairs in their home to meet him.

That sounds worse than it is, partially because I’m still in the bad mood I’ve been in all week, but I think the main problem with this book is missed potential. It’s about 220 pages long, and I think it could have used another thirty or so at least, and another hundred pages wouldn’t have been a problem. There’s a lot of backstory spent on Ayoola and Korede’s deceased (and abusive) father, and a side plot about a man in a coma who Korede has been caring for and using as her own private confessional, who wakes up and remembers more of what she told him than she expected. He wakes up and decides he’s in love with Korede, divorces his wife, and sort of hints around that he’s willing to hold what he knows over her head, but it doesn’t end up going anywhere.

So, yeah. Read more Nigerian fiction. Read Braithwaite. Just don’t start with this one.

Choose your own book review

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Since reading “Threshing Day,” I have finished four books. That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds; they’re all really short. That said, let me know if you want to see any reviews of these, since I’ve got a bit of choice paralysis going on right now:

Version 1.0.0

I only just started Nicked tonight, but it’s about stealing St. Nicholas’ corpse, and it’s already sent me scurrying to Wikipedia to check a historical claim which turned out to be true. It’s only 220 pages, though, so I’ll finish it just as quickly as the others. The short version is that I enjoyed all of them, but let me know if you want more details.

#REVIEW: The Rouse, by China Miéville

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading, Reviews2 Comments

I’m not gonna lie. Y’all, I have no idea.

I assume I’m not the only person who does this; when I am reading a book I know I’m likely to write a review of, I read it with that eventual review at least somewhat in mind. I’m not always likely to take notes or anything like that, but bits and pieces will jump out at me and I’ll stick them in the blog-part of my brain to discuss later.

The problem is that I could say literally anything about this book and I’m pretty sure it would be true. I hated it and it was brilliant. I loved it and it was exhausting. It’s got a complicated, detailed plot and it makes no fucking sense at all. I cannot tell you, as I’m sitting here, whether its central mystery was ever resolved, as it’s entirely possible that it was resolved in such an oblique manner that I missed it. Bits of it are, literally and without a trace of sarcasm or exaggeration, gibberish. At least six different languages make their way into the book, none translated, some not in Latin characters. There are two different main fonts, at different sizes. I don’t know what percentage of the words in this book Miéville straight made up but whatever you’re thinking it’s way higher than that. The book is largely dialogue, mostly of the circumspect and elliptical variety, but there isn’t a single fucking quotation mark in the book and sometimes it’s very difficult to tell who is talking or whether someone is speaking or thinking, and sometimes that’s because the characters themselves do not know if they’re thinking or speaking out loud.

One of the main characters spends a couple of chapters kidnapping children, exposing them to eldritch horrors, and returning them to their parents. The eldritch horrors in question: a literal ghost under a white sheet. The other’s vaginal secretions are more important to the story than vaginal secretions have ever been in a book before. She also occasionally drips from other orifices.

If China Miéville had not written this, I would never have finished it. But no one other than China Miéville could have written the fucking thing in the first place. You should pick this book up if and only if you are already a big fan of China Miéville. Not “I liked the Bas-Lag books.” You should pick this book up if and only if you have reread either Kraken or The City and the City, on purpose and of your own free will. And if that is the case, you already own it.

It is 1260 pages long and you will not have any idea what is going on the first time you read it. Expect to have to read it at least twice. There are four hundred and sixty-seven characters and they all go by their last names and one of them changes his name midway through the book for a reason that technically is given on the page but still doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. The lead antagonist might be Satan. The lead antagonist also might be one of the main characters. Or one of their friends. I’m really not sure.

The following is the entire “Plot” section for this book on Wikipedia as of 7:54 PM on September 29, 2026, and at least one of these sentences is not true:

The novel revolves around the suicides of multiple British army soldiers. It is set during the Cold War.

I’ve tried to read some “professional” reviews of the book; most of them are paywalled, unfortunately, but I did read one where the reviewer was honest enough to admit that he doesn’t have any idea what the fuck the book was about either. He still recommended the book. I get it.

I gave it three stars on Goodreads and Storygraph; it cannot be ranked using such a pedestrian manner as stars.

The physical copy of the book is really fucking cool, but I read it digitally, because a lot of time I read laying down and I would have broken my nose on this fucker at some point.

I’ll write another review after I read it again. When will that be? I have no earthly idea.

93%

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Just a bit over a hundred pages left, and I was going to try to get you a review tonight but one of the cats decided it would be a better idea if we took a nap in the chair instead. The Kindle says I have an hour and sixteen minutes of reading left, and it usually overestimates but that puts me uncomfortably close to bedtime for someone who also doesn’t have lesson plans for tomorrow ready yet.

So another placeholder blog post tonight, and hopefully a review tomorrow, and then straight into the first of Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s three Wheel of Time books, because I am nothing if not a glutton for punishment.

Four quick book reviews

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I read books, did you know that? Let’s talk about a few of them real quick:

 A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.

“A bold and biting satire, Yesteryear…will have you cackling and gasping right to the final page.”
—Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid series

I already own a book called Trad Wife, and I realized the other day that there is another book called Trad Wife coming out soon, and I sort of feel like I should buy that too so that I can put them next to each other on the shelf. Simple things please me, I suppose.

Read those. Don’t read this. It’s one of the worst books I’ve finished this year. It’s not a “satire” so much as a book about an asshole, the twist at the end is mind-blowingly bad, and it squanders every bit of goodwill the premise– which is genuinely interesting– might engender in the reader. Everyone in it sucks.

“One of 2026’s literary triumphs.”—Boston Globe

From the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungocomes a vivid, moving novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires.

Spoiler alert! Everyone is gay. Everyone is gay. And no one will admit to anyone else that they’re gay, except everyone kinda knows that the gay people are gay, and if anything this is a better satire of repressive religious environments than Yesteryear was, and this book isn’t a satire either. I enjoyed this one, although the fact that the main character is John-Calum and his father is John (thus the “John of John”) led to me getting embarrassingly far into the book before I realized that Old John was getting some POV bits here and there and the author wasn’t just randomly swapping between calling his main character John and calling him Cal. You can absolutely blame me for that but I will feebly point out in my own defense that had their characters on the page been more distinct I wouldn’t have been able to make such a dumb mistake. POV John and Cal’s Dad John from Cal’s Perspective are very different characters, let’s leave it at that.

I still don’t know what literature is, but this was enjoyable, and I look forward to Shuggie Bain, currently on my Unread Shelf.

Stephen’s god died on the longest day of the year…

Three years later, Stephen is a broken paladin, living only for the chance to be useful before he dies. But all that changes when he encounters a fugitive named Grace in an alley and witnesses an assassination attempt gone wrong. Now the pair must navigate a web of treachery, beset on all sides by spies and poisoners, while a cryptic killer stalks one step behind…

From the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of Swordheart and The Twisted Ones comes a saga of murder, magic, and love on the far side of despair.

Okay, granted, the phrase “love on the far side of despair” is right there, but just be aware before you get into this that it’s a romance. No, it’s not a romantasy, it came out in 2021 before that word existed, but I wasn’t aware of what I was getting into when I picked this up. That sounds like a criticism; it’s really not. I don’t mind romance, and I don’t mind romantasy, either, a lot of the time, but I really feel like the cover and the copy lead you to expect a certain kind of book that you will get tantalizing glimpses of here and there but is not this book. That said, I’ve already ordered the rest of the series, and I may reevaluate the first book once I’ve read the rest of them. I don’t remember being a huge fan of The Twisted Ones, which is the only other T. Kingfisher book I’ve read, but she’s got about a thousand books so there’s a lot to dig into with this author.

New York Times bestselling author Shannon Chakraborty sets sail into the second adventure of pirate Amina al-Sirafi as her quest to track down magical artifacts brings her to the island lair of a sorceress whose woven enchantments are impossible to flee.

I loved the first Amina al-Sirafi book, which was my fourth-favorite book of 2024, and this was every bit as good as the first book, with an intensely creepy villain and a great, twisty mystery to unravel. I have a weakness for pirates and Arabian-themed fantasy, and, well, again, judge this book by the cover, which features a shipwreck and a griffon. I can read books about this character forever, and I want at least twelveteen more of them. Seven thumbs up.

#REVIEW: Taipei Story, by R.F. Kuang

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Goddammit.

I don’t like writing negative reviews of books by authors I like. I especially don’t like it when authors I like write two books in a row that I have to write negative reviews for. Kuang’s sixth book, Katabasis, wasn’t a bad book, and I didn’t dislike it, necessarily, but when you’re coming from an author whose books have nearly all ended up on my end-of-year best-of lists, a book not doing that is a downgrade. But I said in the review of that book that it might have fallen victim to my own expectations for it, and that I wanted to reread it at some point, and I still plan to do that.

Here’s the second-worst thing I can say about Taipei Story: it’s the first of Kuang’s books that I’m nearly certain I’m never going to revisit. Here’s the worst thing I can say about Taipei Story: if this was my first R.F. Kuang book and not my seventh, I would not be planning to pick up her next book.

And yet I’m still not willing to call it a bad book. If you are interested in character studies, and if the idea of spending just shy of 300 pages in the head of an American college sophomore who has moved to Taiwan for a ten-week intensive summer Chinese program sounds like something you might want to read, you will probably like this book! I am, unfortunately, not that reader. Character studies really aren’t my thing, and while I generally don’t need my books to be about people who are like me– I read about wizards and dragons and space aliens, for fuck’s sake– Lily is so closed off and so internal that I couldn’t find a way to care about her. And while I’ve studied enough languages to know that a ten-week residential Chinese course would be insanely difficult, it … doesn’t make for a good story, unfortunately. Lily doesn’t really do much over the course of the book. She doesn’t get along with her roommate, she has the most insanely awkward sex scene in the history of the written word, and that’s really about it.(*)

The meat of the story is supposed to be about when her grandfather dies, a grandfather who she barely knows because she lives in America and he’s still in China, and it leads to this mental crisis where Lily feels like she was learning Chinese to get to know her family and her history, and one of her few connections to China has just died, and her grandmother is sliding into dementia and barely remembers her most of the time. She has a few conversations with her mother where it becomes clear that she doesn’t really know much about her family’s history, partially because she never asked and partially because no one ever bothered to tell her anything, and she has a bit of a breakdown for a while, and I can imagine someone who finds this really fascinating, but it’s just not me.

I’m also frustrated because for the second book in a row I feel like forces external to the book have affected my opinion of it. In the case of Katabasis it was the pre-reading checklists and the idea that the book was super complicated and deep and you needed background knowledge to properly appreciate it that was circling around, and it just turned out to not be true. In the case of this book, Kuang’s grandfather literally died while she was in Taipei at an intensive residential language study. I would really like her next book to Not Be About Her. Do I get to tell her what to write? No, I don’t. Do I get to be disappointed by her choices anyway? I do. But the big difference between Kuang and Lily is that Lily is 19 and Kuang’s experience was in her late twenties, so she’s written Lily as less mature and able to process her feelings than she thinks she was, and again, it just didn’t work for me.

Again, the book’s not bad by any means, and I’m still in on day one for whatever she writes next. But this one just didn’t work for me.

(*) It was awful. I had to put the book down and walk away for a while. Like, the scene was supposed to be alienating and kind of creepy and weird, and it succeeded so much in that goal that it made me not want to read the book any more for a while. That’s sort of a compliment? But I’m still cringing from secondhand embarrassment right now, and I finished this book three days ago.

It is possible that you just read this piece and are surprised that I didn’t address The Controversy. That is because I find The Controversy to be so fucking stupid that I lose brain cells every time I think about it. If you are unaware of The Controversy, do yourself a favor and don’t look into it. If you are upset by The Controversy, go touch some fucking grass and find a real problem, you zygote.