Reviewed by Frankie Martinez

A powerful story of humanity, nature, and the fight for truth.

In a world where most of humanity has fled to live deep in Earth’s underground, Violet Murphy refuses to leave her family’s farm on the surface. Located in Fulminara, one of two habitable islands left on Earth, the Murphy estate is home to Violet, her horse Firestorm, and the relics of her family’s agricultural research.

Life is peaceful until one day, officers of the government’s Science Bureau arrive to conduct the annual census and invite Violet to visit their facility underground in the capital of Apricus. What is supposed to be a presentation on the Murphy family’s developments in food generation devolves into an unsettling interrogation—one which leaves Violet drugged and imagining the voices of what she believes are trapped animals in the stark hallways of the Bureau, pleading for help.

When Violet returns home and feels an unusually close sense of comfort from Firestorm, she is convinced that the voices she heard were real.

Meanwhile, there are others experiencing a strange connection with animals. Emily Steuben, an Earth preservationist, discovers ducklings at her home for the first time in three years after being led there by other animals’ insistence. Jack Collins, a retail director, is hunting a doe on the surface when he is suddenly struck with the deer’s fear, so much that he leaves and decides to swear off hunting for the rest of his life. Mason Agu, a computer programmer for the government’s Infrastructure Bureau, is spending a quiet evening at home in Apricus, until he gets a strong feeling from his cat that something has happened next door to his elderly, beloved neighbor.

The four strangers come together after responding to Violet’s vague online forum post about a “special connection to animals” and quickly become fast friends. As their bond grows, so do their questions about the government, especially after learning about Violet’s interrogation there.

The organization’s increasingly strange activities—starting with the census and leading to the announcement that they’d be evacuating Aprica permanently for an unknown, habitable land—lead the friends to start an investigation into the Bureau, one that leads them down a dangerous path to the truth.

Imber is about the light and dark in the world, highlighting both the comfort of the bonds between living things, as well as the strength to fight against overwhelming odds.

Mistina’s debut is filled with expansive, dynamic descriptions of nature and humanity. The novel’s quiet opening is moving and immersive—Violet walks through her family’s estate, remembering the day she found a dead hawk, only to find Firestorm peeking through the windows of the greenhouse in search of Violet’s mother after her untimely death.

Mistina is also playful with her portrayal of gestures and movement. Each character interacts with one another in unique ways: Jack can’t keep his eyes off of Violet’s freckles; Mason’s deep voice contains a childlike innocence when he’s around his cat or Firestorm.

Because descriptions are so detailed and plot details are so heavily focused on the government’s secret plans, the pacing of the story can be quite slow. There is something comforting about it, especially in the first parts of the novel that are more focused on worldbuilding and the friendship between Violet, Jack, Emily, and Mason, but it also does not quite match the content in the novel’s latter half with its somewhat shocking violence. A lot of information is jammed into the last half of the novel because of this. While Imber does reach a satisfactory, open-ended conclusion in the larger story about evacuating humanity from Earth, I longed for more important plot threads between the four friends.

But that’s also because I wanted to linger in Mistina’s world for just a little bit longer without the government’s evil plans. While lies, deceit, and the end of the world run underneath the surface of the novel, Imber is a gorgeous portrait of humanity, rich with the warmth between people and their chosen companions, whether they be family, friends, or animals.

Thank you for reading Frankie Martinez’s book review of Imber by Deborah Mistina! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Nick Gardner

Love conquers all, even the bizarre fantastical creatures from other realms.

Sheriff Sol Jefferson loves his wife, Yaya, more than anything. In their quiet island community of Webberley Island off the coast of Oregon, their mutual attachment to each other is easy, but when a red, seemingly invincible creature appears on the beach and begins murdering innocent people, their love is put to the test. While Sol and Yaya seek answers to this creature’s existence, their world is challenged and expanded to include other realms, new powers, and even dinosaurs.

Alan and Sairung Wright’s characters are without flaws, inherently good. While they battle demons, mages, and giant humanoid serpents, it’s easy to pick up who is good and who is evil. Sol, the sheriff, always does what’s right and is the voice of reason when his friend, Toby, for example, chooses to fight a creature using hand-to-hand combat rather than a gun. And Sol’s passion for Yaya, depicted as always kind and reasonable, draws him to her side as her protector for most of the book. Though their portrayal as absolute moral people may be simplistic, it makes the contrast more pronounced when the two are pitted against the seemingly incurable evils of other realms.

The novel begins with a bang, with a monster and murder on the second page, and the gore is a gut punch, filled with decapitations and slews of blood. After Sol sees a man cut open on the beach, the pacing is breakneck, each short chapter depicting a gruesome murder from shifting perspectives.

But the book takes a turn after the first fifty or so pages, moving into sci-fi and supernatural fields that are, for lack of a better word, totally weird. The realistic world of Webberley Island expands to involve otherworldly “realms” filled with creatures that sometimes resemble a child’s imaginative drawing brought to life. The descriptions of this other world are intriguing, unique, and easy to visualize, but some of it tones down the pacing with an abundance of worldbuilding. The pacing does pick up for the final third of the book, featuring action-packed showdowns between Yaya, Sol, and an increasingly imaginative series of murder-bent monsters.

The Wrights’ imagination sets Two Suns apart from other horror or thriller novels. If the reader isn’t too queasy from the gore, they may even see the humor in the creatures’ designs. With the humor, the horror, the science fiction, and the supernatural all rolled into one, Two Suns is a difficult one to categorize, but the read is easy, intriguing, and filled with enough strangeness to expand the limits of the fictive dream.

Thank you for reading Nick Gardner’s book review of Two Suns by Alan Wright and Sairung Wright! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Joelene Pynnonen

A convention-breaking novel that explores the intricacies of human experience

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Paul, a young doctor working in an intensive care unit, discovers a piece of writing online. Touting itself as a New World Storyline, it grows and changes as people around the world interact with it.

In this New World book, an author, a musician, and the doctor begin a dialogue about the state of the world. They lament the formulaic nature of stories, bitterly reject the palatable scene that is now music, question the ethics of medicine, and discuss the state of the world.

As this novel progresses, more people arrive to partake in the discussion. Between shifts at the increasingly overrun hospital, Paul realizes that he is becoming a part of this strange new story. As others get caught up in the narrative, it becomes clear that the story is closer to his reality than he might have expected. And that it has the power to change everyone who encounters it.

The Other Book is an experimental work that draws on existing literature to showcase something new. Layers of rich intertextuality are woven through the discussions in this novel. It draws from sources that are both ancient and contemporary, from as far back as Gilgamesh, the Bible, and Norse Mythology to books like Sophie’s Choice.

The perpetual question posed in these pages is, what makes a book? Or, perhaps more specifically, what makes a story? Is a dialogue held by several people on the nature of the world, and of the Arts, considered one? This question permeates through the text, as there’s no clear answer.

While The Other Book is experimental, it builds on existing narrative forms. The novel within the novel is written in a similar way to a script but is more analogous to current online stories told through a series of screenshotted message exchanges. In a modern sense, this could be considered an epistolary. The characters within the pages write to each other, and the interactions become the body of the text. A perpetual, ongoing story that shifts to new characters but seemingly is without end.

The prose in The Other Book can be difficult. This is partially because the descriptive language is stylized, formal, and challenging rather than conversational. The issue this poses is that we need to comprehend the ideas being explored in order for the experiment to land. There’s also a white page problem happening in The Other Book —not much description to ground readers into the novel. There’s the feeling of reaching around in the dark, looking for a marker to orientate yourself. Instead, we find difficult to decipher dialogue happening in a vacuum.

This is a creative philosophical journey that probes at the heart of what makes us human. An ultra-modern take on traditional storytelling conventions, it opens readers to the possibility of seeing an old story with fresh eyes. The Other Book is a read that hosts a wide range of interesting discussions.

Thank you for reading Joelene Pynnonen’s book review of The Other Book by Alexey L. Kovalev! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Gabriella Harrison

In which an irresistible adventure to an exoplanet transforms into a moving story about the complexity of sisterhood

Lissy and her crew just finished a horrendous mission. Their reputation within the space-salvaging industry is wrecked. So when she and her boyfriend find something with the potential to cleanse their reputation and wipe all their financial woes away, they’re quick to take it. But it’s going to take her sister, an anthropology professor at a prestigious university, to make it happen.

Despite the disaster of their last mission, the crew is eager to get started. Lissy’s sister, Therese, is insistent on following due process. That would help them all in the end since she needs to publish about the discovery, but it doesn’t win her any friends within the crew, especially since she is new and an introvert perceived as a snob.

Once they finally begin, it is immediately obvious that something is very wrong. The religious colony that inhabited the exoplanet before their arrival believed to have left fifty years ago for unknown reasons. The strange thing is that they left all their personal possessions behind. There is no evidence of a massacre. They’re just gone.

Things become even stranger when the rest of the crew finally see what they dub “The Anomaly.” A glowing artifact with an indecipherable origin that captivates everyone who looks at it. While everyone is still figuring out what to do, one of the crew members becomes sick, and things really start to go downhill from there.

The Glass Garden is a mystery-driven science fiction that unfolds over three days. On the first day, the crew arrives on the exoplanet, and The Anomaly is studied. The rest of the crew is introduced through Therese’s keen eyes: handsome Carver, whose main purpose in the crew seems to be to sweet-talk people and maintain peace; Tsieh, a sharp-eyed skeptic and brainiac; and McArdle, the hard-to-please pilot and mechanical whiz of the crew.

On the second day, they split into two teams; one conducting a proper in-depth study of The Anomaly and the other exploring the site where the previous colony stayed and trying to salvage anything of value. By the third day, they’re barely hanging on.

From the beginning, Therese is withdrawn, sitting at a corner of the ship’s galley, sipping coffee and observing her new crew members while remembering times when she has felt left out: “…she had flashes of the first day of sophomore year, sitting in the cafeteria of a new high school knowing absolutely nobody, hoping someone would sit with her, terrified that they would.”

With Therese, author Jessica Lévai aptly captures how easy it is to misunderstand an introvert who doesn’t know how to join a conversation with strangers. Balancing out Therese’s perspective is the equally nerdy Tsieh, who observes her reclusiveness as creepy: “She was probably listening, but not contributing, which was spooky as hell.”

Then Lissy enters, “splashing into the pond with all the subtlety of a rock thrown by a kindergartner.” Lissy is her younger, more vibrant, and daring sister. As the story progresses, the sibling rivalry and her resentment toward Therese for their mom’s preferential treatment toward her and repeated disregard of the career of a space salvager are evident. During one of their arguments, she remarks, “You never stand up for me when Mom tells me to get a real job or go back to school. It’s obvious you think I’m beneath you.” Amid the chaos of their mission, interactions such as this ground them in their humanity—a quiet reminder that beneath all the tension, they’re still just people. Unfortunately, Lissy’s sentiments rub off on the rest of the crew, and Therese must prove herself to belong.

The alien cave system of the exoplanet is brought to life through tactile, sensory detail, especially when the characters peel off their masks and interact physically with The Anomaly. These artistic details create an immersive and emotionally evocative atmosphere that is both magical and menacing, evoking awe and dread in equal measure. For instance:

“One wall of the cavern was lit as if from behind, and upon it were…images. Like a stained glass window in an abandoned cathedral…the images impressed on it reminded her of Tiffany lamps at the art museum, but more free, more alive. These were the flowers that watched martyrs put to death and grew exuberantly, mockingly, from their remains.”

Despite its emotional resonance, The Glass Garden leaves a few questions unresolved. While the ambiguity surrounding the sick crewmate is intentional, it doesn’t exactly provide closure, and readers may find this frustrating. The lack of psychological buildup, such as Therese and Lissy’s final decision concerning The Anomaly, can make some character decisions feel sudden, but in the novella form, these are likely to save space and allow for the reader to ponder the truth in the silence.

Jessica Lévai’s The Glass Garden is a surreal and thrilling science fiction novella that prompts you to wonder what truly exists beyond Earth, and it succeeds greatly in balancing introspection and action. Therese’s archaeological mindset provides a steady rhythm of analysis and reflection, while the unfolding mystery of The Anomaly keeps the tension alive.

Thank you for reading Gabriella Harrison’s book review of The Glass Garden: A Novella by Jessica Lévai! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

A compelling folkloric exploration of the push and pull of family life and the power of choice

Set seaside in the Orkney Islands, just north of Scotland, Selkie Moon follows Isla, the daughter of a fisherman father and a mother whose erratic and often animalistic behavior begs questions of her origins. Isla’s mother disappears frequently, sometimes for days at a time, and she fights frequently with Isla’s father. 

While Isla’s mother prefers to school her children in the natural world, swimming in the surf and combing the beaches, her father wants to move the family inland to attend a proper school and better integrate with society. After the birth of her brother, Callan, and a terrifying incident in which Isla watches her father have the webs cut from between Callan’s fingers, the separation between Isla’s parents threatens to become permanent. It is up to Isla alone to get to the bottom of her mother’s possible selkie bloodline while also figuring out her own place in the world. 

In an author’s note at the end of the novella, author Kelly Jarvis gives a brief overview of selkie folklore and also explains how Selkie Moon diverges from common themes. Rather than hit the reader over the head with the fact that Isla’s mother is (possibly) a selkie, Jarvis allows the title of the book and subtle clues to let the reader know what Isla, the narrator, does not. Though Isla knows that her mother is a not-quite-normal human—that she is somehow tied to the sea and separate from the hoi polloi—it isn’t until late in the book that her mother’s origins are laid out for Isla. This slow revelation of Isla’s mother’s selkie-dom is perfectly timed, allowing the reader to focus on how the family handles the mother’s strange clicking sounds, for example, and how the mother does her best to focus on her children. While Selkie Moon could be considered a book about a selkie seduced by a human and stuck in human form, it becomes obvious early on that it is a book about family and about the choice one has to make to put family above self. 

It is this folkloric approach to family that gives Selkie Moon its edge over other family dramas, a certain beauty that both separates the story from modern life but also draws parallels to the realist’s world. Through language alone, Jarvis paints a world that is easy for a reader to be swallowed into. As Isla hits teenagehood, she begins to see similarities between her mother and herself, comparing their faces to “two oval moons with glowing freckle-kissed skin.” 

And the setting—with its aurora borealis, its “simmer dim,” and its islands that, “float in the frigid waters where the North Sea kisses the Atlantic”—is one that feels almost fairytale-esque, a dreamy place that makes the family conflict so much more tense. As Isla realizes that the magical world she lives in isn’t so perfectly divine, the experience turns both devastating and enlightening. 

In just over 100 short pages, Kelly Jarvis has crafted a unique addendum to selkie folklore, expanding it beyond the mere seduction that leads to selkies shedding their seal skins, their wildness, to struggle through the tame and mild life of the land. She has bent the folklore into a relatable story about family and choices, encouraging the reader to see that family, school, and home is a choice. The question is one that compares wildness to tameness; like anyone, both Isla and her mother must choose.

Thank you for reading Nick Rees Gardner’s book review of Selkie Moon by Kelly Jarvis! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Peter Hassebroek

Balanced storytelling and evocative descriptions elevate a seemingly implausible premise to a convincing, palpably absorbing adventure.

The stresses of entrepreneurialism are encroaching on Mark Forster’s home life. To assuage his wife and two daughters, Mark takes the family to Hawaii for a week of snorkeling and poolside relaxation. If on his own, Mark would spend the entire time scuba diving. He does pack his gear but promises to limit it to early morning trips to maximize family time.

Two days in, Mark rises early to join a scuba tour group. He isn’t enamored with its participants, particularly a younger man on a scooter with propellers. Once in the water, however, the tranquil sea life allows him to disregard the others. He shares his observations, enhanced by an almost encyclopedic level of knowledge about diving, the ocean, and its inhabitants. The real payoff comes with a tense, up-close encounter:

“Its rows of gills were fully open, giving me a ringside seat to gaze into its massive maw. Bloody hell, it was so silent. We watched with great interest as it turned and made a few passes before swimming onward.”

Only the great white doesn’t swim onward. Instead, Mark finds himself isolated, as if primed to become the shark’s prey. A disorientating hit from what he assumes is the shark, but could be the scooter, dislodges his equipment prior to losing consciousness.

When he comes to, he sees his tour boat ready to return, but it ignores him. In fact those divers are not the ones from his tour and they, along with others in the area, avoid Mark. He’s confused until realizing all they see a great white shark, but not the man inside looking out.

Abandoned, there’s nothing Mark can do but coordinate with his host. The first order of business is adapting to the complications of his new anatomy. For instance:

“My arms were now pectoral fins, which explained why I could not see them. I could control them, and they affected my orientation in the water, but I lost the fine dexterity I associated with individual finger movement. Now, it felt like I was wearing mittens all the time.”

He learns to rely on his host’s instincts for hunting and other basic survival while asserting his human will and wit to steer it to discover what’s going on, then what can be done about it. The detail in which all this is put forth earns the suspension of disbelief that makes his long passage through the Pacific Ocean, on a quest for answers and solutions, such an enjoyable read.

He struggles to ensure he and his host—with an instinctive will of its own—keep moving in his preferred direction while contending with threats along the way. Never mind the emotional toll of separation from his family. This odyssey mixes adventure and observational tour as Mark encounters sea life and sea vessels, with the episodes ranging from humorous to harrowing, from compelling to informative. Each whets one’s appetite for the next. 

Alas, there is always the fear of a letdown in how such a drama concludes, let alone is explained, especially with such a tough act to follow. But the resolutions are satisfying and, like everything else in the novel, clearly articulated.

An Ocean Life challenges one’s suspension of disbelief, then rewards it with an exciting firsthand experience that exceeds its humble title. Mark is a tour guide sharing an experience rather than merely imparting facts. The reader truly shares his wonder at seeing and experiencing things otherwise inaccessible to humans.

Thank you for reading Peter Hassebroek’s book review of An Ocean Life by T.R. Cotwell! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Eric Mayrhofer

Funny, casually progressive, and unafraid to be weird as hell, Sasha DeVore’s sci-fi adventure delivers one cozy apocalypse.

What if God came to Earth? One pretty famous book already deals with that. As for the others—from Left Behind to The Leftovers—they all paint a pretty dour picture of what might happen if the Almighty made a sudden return to mortal affairs. That’s why Sasha DeVore’s take on the second coming is so refreshing.

Following Alex, a teacher trying to hang on to her last remaining neurons after a burnout-inducing school year, God, Science, and a Really Dumb Experiment catches up with her right as God makes a grand, dramatic entrance that upends life as humanity knows it. 

As Alex navigates a new, divine normal and tries to save the world, readers get to delight in a cozy adventure that mixes all the trippy-ness from the Book of Revelations with a dash of pulpy, weird science to make something wholly original.

The most obvious deviation from traditional, doom-and-gloom second-coming stories is how cozy DeVore’s book is. That’s partly due to the easy, breezy writing style that makes the book such a page turner. DeVore makes everything feel blessedly low-stakes. It helps Alex feel indomitable, giving her a little edge when she needs it. For example, Alex starts revealing the littlest bit of insecurity and resentment when dwelling on her relationship with her mother: “Nothing I did was good enough for her. Wearing flannel wasn’t girly enough. The music I listened to wasn’t classy enough. My career choice wasn’t smart enough. I didn’t have enough money. Not enough friends. Not enough grit. Not enough.” Just as quickly, though, DeVore’s writing helps Alex swoop out of any threat of doldrums. When deciding between the end of days and her mother’s wrath, she says, “I much preferred the apocalypse.”

Speaking of the apocalypse, that light humor is a great counterbalance to what is some truly bizarre spectacle. When God arrives on Earth, courtesy of a science experiment gone wrong (God’s presence explored through the lens of science is great, by the way), reality warps like a Dali painting. Alex describes a lake that suddenly becomes home to “mermaids and a giant lion-turtle, and a more elusive creature I’m sure was supposed to be a Loch Ness monster.” Those are far from the weirdest wonders DeVore offers in her vision of the end of days, though—readers can expect everything from hallucinated cats to giant kaiju ants, but it’s all too fun to spoil here.

And that’s the word to sum up the whole book: Fun. God, Science, and a Really Dumb Experiment is a breezy escape and a fresh take on apocalypse stories that readers will eat up, never regretting they spent a little time having an adventure at the end of the world.       

Thank you for reading Eric Mayrhofer’s book review of God, Science, and a Really Dumb Experiment by Sasha Devore! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph

This chaotic & gory quest to stop a cult from supernaturally resetting planet Earth is both an all-in adventure and a cheeky read.

In Izzy’s father’s suicide note, he admits to being the serial killer who went viral for the murder of six victims across the globe, seemingly unconnected but for the fact that all their femurs were taken as a souvenir. His letter describes these murders in detail and provides directions to find each person’s remains. When he’s found, his body had been “burned and blackened beyond recognition.”

In addition to the suicide note, Izzy’s father—though she prefers not to call him that; he’s Nathaniel now—left a puzzle box and a letter with his lawyer, who delivered it to Izzy in person at his funeral. When she was a child, Nathaniel made these sorts of puzzle boxes and designed interesting tricks for Izzy to discover, each box with its own opening method. Now, six months after his death (and six months of hell for Izzy), she learns that he set up a treasure hunt for her to follow, in hopes that she can “finish his work.”

Izzy—who enjoyed her life with her pet rat and her job as a cleaner for the “the local leader in crime scene cleanup”—wants no part of this mission. She immediately threw the first puzzle box away, recovered only because her friend Felix literally dumpster dived to salvage it. (Every time I see a dumpster from now on, I’ll be thinking of this line: “The dumpster seemed to be watching her approach, its plastic lids open like a beast eager for a treat.”) Author Morgan Mourne is so skilled in scene description in both mundane and horrifying ways I’ll never forget.

With each puzzle box, Nathaniel left a new letter for Izzy to decode, leading to clues about where she can find more femur bones and next steps. Each letter is less cryptic and more informative, sharing the truth behind why he did what he did. This still   doesn’t convince Izzy to follow the trail Nathaniel had set up for her. 

What really kickstarts Izzy’s dark, disturbing treasure hunt is the fact that creepy men keep following her around asking about items in her possession—one going so far as to show up at a blood-and-guts-soaked apartment she’s cleaning and forcing a femur into her hands. 

Izzy’s friend Felix—a collector of occultish artifacts and the owner of a bookshop called Hex & the City—and their mutual friend Dr. Nakahara—a professor of occult studies—help Izzy by connecting the clues she decodes from the letters to supernatural theories they’ve researched, eventually coming to the conclusion that Nathaniel was gathering seven specific femur bones in an attempt to keep them away from a doomsday cult. 

This specific cult is on a mission to gather the bones to supernaturally reset planet Earth, erasing all evidence humans were ever here, and putting themselves in charge of all nature when it begins afresh. With each new puzzle box they find comes a letter less cryptic; every set of instructions leading to a more dangerous mystical bone. “Each [bone] harbors massive destructive potential. If all seven bones are not united during the Convergence, then each bone will activate its own curse.”

“It wasn’t because I was some kind of monster,” Nathaniel writes in one of his letters to Izzy. “I thought I was saving you, saving everyone from unimaginable terrors.” 

The Bone Collector’s Daughter begins as a story about a young woman trying to escape her father’s dark legacy, forever written into her surname, but along the way, it transforms into a story of friends fighting to stop the exponential damage this cult is trying to inflict on the world. 

The further Izzy gets into this quest and the more letters from her father she reads, the more the story transforms—next into the complicated emotional journey of a daughter working through the trauma of everything her father has put her through. Was he doing good, just in his own way? His death starts to become more painful the more she learns. 

A nostalgic, emotional ribbon threads itself through the journey of Izzy learning that her father may have had honorable intentions, while she relives positive memories of her childhood and remembers the man she believed her dad was then. More than that, this quest leads Izzy to realizing that her father saw her as capable, brilliant, talented, and creative. What first felt like a burden now feels like a responsibility, a legacy she wants to uphold. 

“All these damned letters with their cryptic clues, puzzles, and references, and he always trusted her to figure the shit out. How could he have so much trust in her?”

And there’s lots of action: Felix is beat up so many times by the henchmen trying to   rob them of the puzzle box and bones that it becomes almost a running joke between them. We enter a world of gadgets built for surveillance and self-defense, and later, in order to protect the bones they’ve found from the cult, the trio signs up for a super high-tech safekeeping company that uses their biometric data to personally safeguard their belongings. “So we’re basically turning into walking passwords?”

In terms of content that readers should be aware of in this novel, other than the blood, gore, and murderous cults, it’s only mentioned once in passing, but we learn that her motherkilled herself and Felix’s younger brother diedin a similar situation involving a group on the hunt for occult-related items.

The tone of this book feels so much like The CW show iZombie and the TV series Lucifer, both of which understand the seriousness of solving the murders they’re tasked with, but their lead characters are such unserious people that it never gets too dark. It’s the casual, upbeat, bright and cheerful let’s-get-on-with-it tone of a day out with your quirkiest, closest friends—even if that day out is an errand to secure trackers and weapons because you’re being stalked by a cult.

This book will be a hit with readers of cozy murder mysteries, not because it’s cozy exactly, but for the way it revolves around a small group of bookshop friends in a situation that pulls them out of their regular social circle and requires they use each of their interests, hobbies, and connections to complete the mission successfully. I loved the playful chapter titles (Chapter 14: “Yeah, I Had Visions;” Chapter 57: “Uh-oh” Chapter 34 “Aunt Joan’s Creepy Frigging Basement,”) and I’d recommend this book (from personal experience) for readers with ADHD or brain fog, because the short chapters each include one fast-paced, focused scene, which enables readers who struggle with focus to dive into this story effortlessly.

I was often struck by the brilliance of the prose while reading even the most shocking, gory scenes. On rainy days outdoors, I’ll forever think of Izzy standing at her father’s graveside, in thick mud “that sucked at her shoes.” I could hear the sickening squelch as the guts dropped out of the bodies in one of the most unsettling scenes of the book.

Author Morgan Mourne somehow keeps this subject matter dark and upbeat. There are many amusing moments in this fierce adventure, like when Izzy learns that the seven mystical bones would wake at any signs of human destruction to the earth and damage to the planet’s natural state, and she blurts out “Okay, so the bones are definitely awake.”

While there are a few unanswered questions once you sit and think about it (and which I’m growing hopeful means a sequel), The Bone Collector’s Daughter is a thrilling, heartwarmingly horrifying tale that is gory and gruesome and a complete joy to read. An entertaining journey with genuine heart, unexpected friendships, disturbing darkness, shocking twists, and a cast of people you’d like to hang out with—if they weren’t officially on the radar of a vicious, murderous cult and the literal and hallucinated monsters they can unleash.

Thank you for reading Andrea Marks-Joseph’s book review of The Bone Collector’s Daughter by Morgan Mourne! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Alexandria Ducksworth

D.L. Gardner sure knows how to keep the fantasy alive.

Welcome back to the island of Cho Nisi! This time, the legendary island is under a major threat: its magic is fading. Someone has stolen the island’s ability to protect the land from foreign invasions. Once it’s gone, they’re vulnerable against anybody who is willing to take over their long-reigning kingdom. 

12-year-old Maurice, the son of King Arell and Queen Ericka, is more worried about the current island’s state than anything. He sets out against his parents’ orders to seek help, but it will come in the form of a mythical dragon. 

Anna, daughter of traitorous Lord, is just trying to make ends meet when a group of sorcerers kidnap her and take her to their airship. There, Anna learns who is behind the magic from Cho Nisi and the plan that’ll lead her back to Prince Barin, a man she once loved and was supposed to forget. 

Many things are at stake in Gardner’s latest Cho Nisi book. There’s great adventure and deep lore, but the story also develops various themes of bravery, politics, and traditional vs. modernity.

The slowly disappearing magic of Cho Nisi is one side of the kingdom’s problem, but it only signifies the loss of hundreds of years of history. While Arell and Ericka are prepared for the transformation, young Maurice is determined to keep the old traditions alive. 

Maurice, ever the one asking questions, gets his answers when he meets The Keeper, the last dragon to help him restore the island’s magic. Representing the rising modernity of Cho Nisi, Maurice’s parents are ready to rule a land of no more magic. Maurice, ironically part of the younger generation, represents the old ways fighting to stay alive. D.L. Gardner makes a number of smart choices when it comes to developing these characters and revealing their ideals. 

The arrival of the mysterious The Enchantress airship reveals there’s more to the Cho Nisi than we even realize. Yet, this is how we’ll come to know that there’s room for growth when new challenges arise. The people of Cho Nisi might have been used to their bows, arrows, swords, and ancient magic before foreign sorcerers arrived, but it blossoms into a great opportunity to grow stronger.

The Keeper is wonderful addition to the Cho Nisiseries! We’ve unlocked new entries to the world’s lore but returned to characters we’ve come to love from previous tales. Like the other books in the series, this book comes with loads of heart, acting as a reminder that there is enough magic in each of us to overcome any challenge.

Thank you for reading Alexandria Ducksworth’s book review of The Keeper (Sword of Cho Nisi) by D.L. Gardner! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Elizabeth Reiser

A spunky heroine must save her beloved Imaginationville in this fun middle grade fantasy. 

Zena, an outspoken and fearless 12-year-old, is on a quest to quell her inner villain in the first of a new series from author ~CRK. 

Fiercely independent, Zena lives with only her pet penguin Guinnie for company. She enjoys her quiet life in Wonder Prairie but is forced to leave the comfort of her home when she learns the aptly named Volea Villain is waging a war in Imaginationville (I*V). Once in I*V, Zena must rely on new friendships if she wants good to prevail. 

This complex, multi-faceted world is easy and exciting to visualize. From detailed descriptions of each location to a town tour via a super slide that all towns should consider adding, the imaginative worldbuilding helps set the tone nicely. From the scenery depicted of the town and the adventures of the misfit group of friends, it becomes quite clear that there is plenty of Anime influence on this book

Another area where ~CRK shines is in their creation of the friend group. Zena, for all her independence, is actually quite lonely, and the friends she makes along the way all seem to have traits that she has or aspires to have. For instance, her new friend, 5, has a great sarcastic sense of humor while his sister, Calla, is a kind and caring pacifist who embodies the patience Zena knows she lacks. It is a supportive friend group, and Zena realizes along the way how much she needs that element in her life. 

As the story progresses, it is also revealed there is something more complicated at play regarding the friendships Zena is forming, and the story is not necessarily what it seems. It is a compelling twist to the storyline that has been lurking underneath the surface, though the tone of the book changes significantly when this is revealed. 

This is a complex plot, and it is made more challenging due to an occasional lack of context. The introduction is a bit of a mystery since there are terms specific to the book and not used in real life, so it requires some patience, but we do later receive a useful character breakdown and a short story explaining the origins of Zena at the back of the book. As this helps explain the more complicated details of the story, I’d probably recommend you read this before diving into the book.

The Angel’s Curse is a successful middle grade fantasy that exudes the allure of an Anime hero’s quest. It’s darn close to impossible not to root for Zena to find her way, so jump on board before the next book comes out.

Thank you for reading Elizabeth Reiser’s book review of The Angel’s Curse by ~CRK! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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