A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

Posted on December 8, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Billed as historical fantasy, with a strong thread of queer romance, this was an absolutely delightful and fun read – not always joyful in the moment-to-moment struggles of its protagonists (whom I loved), but ultimately deeply satisfying. There was romance (and sex), intrigue and angst, wonderful humor, and a complex magical world. I’m excited for book two, and beyond.

We first meet Reginald Gatling in his final moments, and witness his torture and death by magical means at the hands of assailants unknown. They want to know where something is, and all they get from him, past a secret-binding spell, is the location: his office. In the next chapter, we meet Sir Robert (Robin) Blyth, who is irritated and mystified by his new job replacing the missing Reggie – in Reggie’s office. (Here we also meet the indomitable Miss Morrissey, assistant to Reggie and now Robin. As both a woman and a person of Indian descent, she is exceedingly rare in British civil service, and will prove to be one of the most capable, awesome, and entertaining characters in this story, although a relatively minor one.) And in bursts Edwin Courcey, who had been Reggie’s special liaison and is now to be Robin’s, although they do not get off to a good start. For one thing, Robin has no idea what his job is supposed to be.

What quickly follows is Robin’s “unbusheling,” which is what the magical world calls it when a nonmagical person is let in on the big secret that magic does in fact exist. Turns out that in Britain’s already heavily stratified society, there is a yet another distinction between magical and nonmagical families, and even the former can have the odd, unfortunate nonmagical individual – like Miss Morrissey, whose sister is a very capable magician. And then there is Edwin, who comes from a powerful, wealthy, magical family, but is the bullied younger son, and though an enormously accomplished academic student of magic, has vanishingly little power of his own. Robin is an athlete, a jock, not a scholar, and though he has a title, his estate is nearly bankrupt, and he has a much-beloved younger sister to care for on his civil servant’s salary. Add to all of this the mystery of the missing Reggie, a curse soon (and violently) set upon the freshly unbusheled Robin, Edwin’s own family traumas, and an enigmatic threat to the magical world as we know it – indeed, maybe the world overall – and Edwin and Robin may need to figure out how to get along with each other even if it does not come naturally.

Phew. I’ll stop here, with much left unsaid. This was a completely absorbing, page-turning adventure, and when we finally got to the sex-and-romance (after a long slow burn) it was a great relief. (Fully realized sexual content, if that’s a concern.) This magical world and its rules are complex, even sometimes a bit overwhelming – but that’s Robin’s experience too, so we’re just wrestling with it all by his side, and will probably survive as he does.

This book is pretty heavily male, but I cannot understate the value of Miss Morrissey, who may not have magic but outdoes all the powerful men who surround her in cleverness and the ability to get things done, including some scathing (and hilarious) observations about gender in society. I would follow Miss Morrissey anywhere. Book two does promise to be centered on women, although (from a glance) unfortunately not Miss Morrissey. I’m still 100% in.

Rating: 9 swans.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily Austin

Posted on December 5, 2025 by pagesofjulia

As its protagonist wrestles with grief and challenges to intellectual freedom, this inspiring and very funny story showcases the power of love and libraries.

In the opening scene of Emily Austin’s fourth novel, a librarian named Darcy narrates her response to a patron watching porn in the library (mainly, per policy, to leave him be). From here, Darcy’s story unfolds to grapple with love, grief, mental health, the importance of libraries, and the navigation of personal, professional, and public relationships. Is This a Cry for Help? continues in the vein of Austin’s winsome work (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead; We Could Be Rats) with a disarmingly candid narrative voice, outrageous humor, and serious thinking on tough topics.

Darcy has a good life. At her public library, she gets to help a messy cross-section of humanity: not only the toddlers, book clubs, and precocious teens she originally imagined, but also people who lack stable housing or who struggle with substance abuse or mental illness, job seekers, immigrants, and people with opinions different from her own. She has a wonderful wife with whom she shares her authentic self, two cats, and a lovely home. But when Darcy learns of the death of her ex-boyfriend Ben, she is thrown off balance. The disruptions to her carefully organized life are often hysterically funny even as they are harrowing and tragic.

Darcy has just returned to work after a two-month leave of absence following a mental breakdown brought on by the news of Ben’s death. “Before this happened, if someone told me they were off work on stress leave, I might have been judgmental too. Now I understand that issues intensify when we smash them down into our boots.” She is not at her strongest for the new challenge of an alt-right self-appointed journalist harassing the library and Darcy for what he deems a series of moral infractions, including the porn-watching patron. Her community holds an array of political views and opinions on topics as personal as Darcy’s identity as a lesbian, and these values will be called into question by an attempted book ban.

Darcy’s first-person narration lets the reader see her puzzle through the motivations of those around her, parsing social cues and questioning her own choices. Since the breakdown, she’s been seeing a therapist (a process she finds “hokey,” but she’s making an honest effort), and she is well served by her earnest analysis of the actions and motivations of herself and everyone around her. “I’m not just thirty-three; I’m twenty-seven. I’m eighteen. I’m nine. I was just born. And I have to carry all of those versions of myself, the feelings they have, and the mistakes they’ve made, everywhere I go.” Thoughtful and self-aware, if often awkward, Darcy strives intentionally to live as best she can. Is This a Cry for Help? portrays a stressful period in her life, but one she ultimately inhabits with wisdom and grace. Hilarious, wrenching, endearingly odd, Darcy’s story is both enlightening and somehow comforting.

This review originally ran in the November 10, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 pigeons.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Dandelion is Dead by Rosie Storey

Posted on December 1, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A grieving sister finds that hope, silliness, angst, and even love may be possible amid loss in this astonishing first novel.

Rosie Storey’s debut, Dandelion Is Dead: A Novel About Life, is a glittering riot of grief, laughter, missed connections, absurdities, and the joys and pains of life’s many facets. From one unexpected turn to the next, this story will keep readers emotionally engaged and yearning alongside its protagonist.

Poppy Greene is 37 years old and deep in mourning. It has been 231 days since her older sister, Dandelion, died “and, somehow, it was spring again.” Dandelion had been wild, irrepressible, author of all the sisters’ adventures; without her, Poppy (a professional photographer, ever the observer) is unmoored. Going through her sister’s phone, she clicks on a dating app and, on a whim, answers a message from a year-old match. When Jake asks for a date on Dandelion’s 40th birthday, it feels like fate, or magic, or Dandelion’s mischievous hand from beyond the grave. Poppy does not set out with the purposeful intention of impersonating a dead woman (nor of cheating on her longtime boyfriend, Sam), but she finds Jake incredibly magnetic, and soon begins a romantic relationship in her sister’s name. Dandelion Is Dead alternates between Poppy’s close third-person point of view and Jake’s, revealing his own intense attraction to the woman he knows as Dandelion, and his own past traumas. Poppy and Jake are both awkward, ungraceful, and heartfelt in their romance; both commit dishonesties that threaten everything they value.

The aptly named Storey excels at whimsy, delightful comedy, and pathos. Her plot is composed of debilitating losses, madcap adventures, treacheries, secrets, love, and striving. The profound charm and appeal of Poppy and Jake lie in their contradictions. They suffer terrible losses and make poor choices; they are capable of both sweetness and betrayal. The cast is enriched by Poppy and Dandelion’s lifelong friend Jetta (and her loyal husband); the young son Jake is devoted to, and his masterfully nuanced ex-wife; Poppy’s unsympathetic boyfriend; and of course, the mythic Dandelion herself. While its subtitle feels accurate, this debut is also clearly a novel about grief. Poppy learns that if she is going to find a fulfilling life after losing her sister, she must grapple with her own mistakes and those of her loved ones, even those she’s lost. Dandelion Is Dead is a scintillating achievement in emotional range, humor, and wisdom. Poppy Greene thinks she is the less magnetic sister, but no one who meets her will easily forget her.

This review originally ran in the November 7, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 Twisters.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Yosemite Wildlife: The Wonder of Animal Life in California’s Sierra Nevada by Beth Pratt; photographs by Robb Hirsch

Posted on November 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Environmental leader and lifelong Yosemite lover Beth Pratt partners with biologist and wildlife photographer Robb Hirsch to offer Yosemite Wildlife: The Wonder of Animal Life in California’s Sierra Nevada, the first book in 100 years to address this national gem’s diverse animal wildlife. With more than 300 images, Yosemite Wildlife is also rich in Pratt’s accessible prose; this thorough survey of observations and storytelling is designed to update a 1924 publication for the historical record. As a beautifully produced, large-format, glossy presentation, it also exhibits Pratt’s and Hirsch’s expertise and passion for a place that is much more than just its famous geology and dramatic scenery. With plentiful archival records, historical images, and personal stories from park staff and naturalists, it’s an informative document as well as a stunning visual feast.

Conservation success stories and profiles of Yosemite’s human defenders over the years accompany Hirsch’s sumptuous images of the iconic black bear and mule deer, the Sierra green sulphur butterfly, the northwestern pond turtle, raptors and songbirds, dragonflies and butterflies, charismatic predators, shy shrews, quirky herptiles, and more. Exquisite.

This review originally ran in the November 4, 2025 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 8 push-ups.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Maximum Shelf author interview: M.L. Stedman

Posted on November 24, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of A Far-Flung Life, here’s M.L. Stedman: Capturing the Vast Sweep of Events.

M.L. Stedman was born and raised in Western Australia and now lives in London. The Light Between Oceans was her first novel. Her second, A Far-Flung Life (Scribner, March 3, 2026), examines tragedy, memory, loss, secrets, and the power of love in a family saga set against the vast, stark landscape of a Western Australia sheep station.

Where does the germ of such an expansive plot begin?

M.L. Stedman
(photo: Johnnie Pakington)

It’s different for everyone. I don’t plan what I write–it just sort of turns up, from an image in my mind’s eye, or a random thought. Setting is always crucial for me, too, and Western Australia is a natural place for my stories to arise. I’m drawn to intractable problems, which, because they have no “right” answer, force us to examine our underlying values: as with The Light Between Oceans, there are knotty ones at the centre of this book.

I wrote the story over a very, very long time, and it just sort of grew and took shape organically over years. Characters turned up bit by bit, out of nowhere: they might be prompted by seeing a face, or hearing a phrase, or sometimes, they just materialised when I started to imagine a scene. The process is quite mysterious to me.

How was the process or experience of this novel different for you from your first?

The biggest difference was the time it took–I wrote my first book in about three years or so. It was harder to find uninterrupted space to write once The Light Between Oceans was published. As to what’s changed–I’d say the whole world. From that point of view, it was a great luxury to spend so much time in the remote imaginary setting I’d created, where e-mails and smartphones didn’t exist, “far from the madding crowd.”

Do you have any organizational tricks, for plot or timeline, for example?

When it comes to writing, I’m both organised, and not organised. I’m organised in that I set aside time for it–being at your desk increases the chances of actually writing something. I’m not one of those writers (whom I envy), who can say “I’ve got a spare hour between festival events, so I’ll write a few pages of my novel.” I need long, uninterrupted stretches.

I think it’s important to find out how you write best, and do that: if you’re a planner, plan. If (like me) you’re not, and story turns up as your fingers hit the keyboard, don’t fret about the lack of a plan. I don’t write in chronological order. Often, scenes aren’t remotely linked, and then, with time, like mushrooms underground, little connections form by themselves and suddenly things fit together. It’s risky, of course–you have to be prepared to discard strands that turn out to be dead ends. But in discarding, and discovering what the story is not, you narrow down what the story is. For me, the trick is to stay, to wait, and to trust.

Is “forgetment,” for “the opposite of a memory,” your own coinage?

The concept of “forgetment” is foundational to the book. Anyone who spends a long time thinking and writing about memory will probably eventually notice that there’s a word for things we remember (“memory”), but not one for things we forget. I came up with the word “forgetment,” but didn’t investigate beyond its absence in the Oxford dictionary. When I finally did Google it years later, it turned out–not surprisingly–that other people had thought of that word too.

I’m fascinated by how the “known now” becomes the “lost past.” In the book, there’s a reference to Sleeping Beauty, in which a whole castle disappears from memory. The fact that we accept that story so readily bespeaks how familiar we are with the process of “un-knowing.”

I’m also interested in the role of forgetting in forgiving (there’s a reason we say “forgive and forget”). Humans have been outsourcing memory since they first drew on cave walls. Writing supercharged this, and lately, technology has increased it exponentially, so that the most trivial things are now indelibly recorded and subject to instant recall, without context. Does this mean as a society we’re losing the ability to forget, or at least, as individuals, to choose what is remembered about our lives? If every fault or grudge or transgression remains fresh in our minds, does it diminish our ability to forgive?

Was the close third-person perspective, shifting between characters, always the plan, or did you play with a few points of view?

Writing in the third person comes most naturally to me. That said, I also think about the characters in the first person, seeing the world through their eyes. I’m very conscious of how characters see themselves and each other, and, in A Far-flung Life, how the omniscient narrator sees them all. We switch between the characters living their lives minute to minute, struggling through peril to an unknown future, and the omniscient narrator, who reminds us of the vast sweep of events in that timeless, imperturbable landscape. I find that “eternal” perspective reassuring, comforting.

What was the role of research in this novel?

Research is one of my favourite aspects of writing. For this book, I travelled a lot within Western Australia, read a lot, listened a lot: to people; to the sound of the wind in the trees and the night creatures of the Australian bush; above all, to the deep silence that envelopes the far-flung places I describe. I spent a long time in archives, exploring records that left my fingers covered in the red dust that filled the pages. I was incredibly fortunate to speak to pastoralists (like “ranchers” in the U.S.) and geologists and other people of the generation in which Australia “rode on the sheep’s back,” who recounted their stories and guided my research. I studied rocks and sheep (I even had a brief taste of shearing a wether, under very close supervision!). I visited various stations, sometimes hitching a ride on small aircraft visiting remote places, or delivering supplies to a station cut off by floods.

I must pay tribute to librarians and archivists, the unsung heroes keeping “forgetment” at bay. In this era of austerity and automation, I fear these quiet champions of knowledge are an endangered species. But computers could never replace their wisdom and enthusiasm.

What might you work on next?

Ha! If I knew, I might even tell you. But the ink is barely dry on this book. Once it makes its way out into the world, I’ll look forward to retreating to my imagination again, following up a few little threads of ideas, to see what they want to grow into.

This interview originally ran on October 30, 2025 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Filed under: interviews | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Maximum Shelf: A Far-Flung Life by M.L. Stedman

Posted on November 21, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on October 30, 2025.

M.L. Stedman (The Light Between Oceans) awes and transports readers with the astonishing A Far-flung Life, a sweeping family drama spanning the latter half of the 20th century. Layers of tragedy and compelling, nuanced characters are set against a vast, indifferent landscape in Western Australia.

The MacBride family has run a sizable sheep station for generations, with quiet success, in a dispersed but close-knit community whose respect they have earned. “The MacBrides had the touch, it was said: sensible but shrewd, careful but not mean.” The novel opens with landscape, scenery, and color: red earth, blue sky, dust-green vegetation, the “straight vermilion line” of a road through sparse trees. Against this backdrop, three MacBride men travel “like unpacked Russian dolls” in a Bedford pickup truck across the expanse of their sheep station, “nearly a million arid acres.” Phil drives, accompanied by his sons, Warren and Matt, and a trailer full of sheep. It is fitting that the reader meets this landscape before its human inhabitants; Stedman will consistently reinforce that contrast. It is early 1958, and the date, January 10, will reverberate through the MacBride family history for years to come.

Phil MacBride has known since his feet could reach the pedals not to swerve to avoid a kangaroo. But under the January sun, he makes a fateful error. Back at their homestead, hours later, Phil’s wife, Lorna, and daughter, Rose, open their door to two policemen, from whom they learn of lives both ended and hanging in the balance. The consequences of the crash that opens Stedman’s masterful novel will tumble and tangle MacBride lives for generations. Amid unspeakable tragedy and threads of hope, a note of whimsy cuts through: also introduced in this opening chapter is the outright oddity of a fully rigged pearling lugger. The subject of legend, the boat abides in its own structure, known as “Monty’s shed,” for the late Montgomery MacBride, Phil’s uncle, who won the vessel in a bet but never got to sail it. The MacBrides maintain the tradition of oiling its timbers, keeping spiders and termites at bay, and placing a beer in its bow every year on Monty’s birthday. Matt MacBride–thrown from the truck on that January day–as a younger son, was destined not to inherit the sheep station but to make his own way in a larger world. He had longstanding goals and dreams springing from Monty’s boat. Now everything has changed; but the pearling lugger remains in its shed, storing potential.

A Far-flung Life follows the remaining MacBrides as they continue to scrape life and livelihood out of a hardscrabble home with fragile concepts of morality and honor, and the power of love. They weather births and death, secrets, and scandals both experienced and kept hidden. Throughout every loss and recovery, their fate remains tied up with the land: “Our lives come and go like these gold-rush towns. We arrive, we grow, we thrive, then we’re gone. Then the forgetting happens, and once-solid foundations are barely traces in the earth, from unguessable lives. Whole communities and the ties that bound them are blown away with the dust.” Stedman excels at description of both landscape and the human experience, and alternates applying this close attention to the events in her characters’ lives and to the larger world in which they live. “In the end, we’re all looking for a place to ride out the storm of life. Among all these husks of houses and fossils of trees, we are like hermit crabs, borrowing a shelter for a time, and moving on.”

As the MacBrides carry on after the crash, their lives will continue to call upon big themes, including inexorability and change, innocence, and the handling of painful truths. Stedman generally employs a shifting close third-person perspective, allowing her reader to see through one character’s eyes and then another’s, finding out at different points what they know. This careful reveal not only of events, but of various characters’ knowledge of events, is central to the complexity of the MacBrides’ secrets. Another significant theme is the tension between memory and forgetting. One young character, in asking questions that his elders can’t or won’t answer, coins a term, “forgetment,” for what is forgotten–“the opposite of a memory.” This concept recurs throughout a plot that revolves around what its protagonists can’t remember and what they wish they didn’t.

Like the heartrending The Light Between Oceans, the MacBrides’ story interrogates ideas of right and wrong in specific and complicated cases, and the experience of humans writ small against a vast landscape. “This land has seen improbable things: the evolution of marsupials and monotremes; of flightless birds and animals that fly. It’s seen continents split and islands arise. It’s seen oceans turn to desert and desert turn to glaciers. And it’s watched people drag their little lives across its surface, flat and unforgiving.” By the end of this epic and wrenching family saga, readers will care deeply about lives that are “destined to join the vast ocean of human forgetments.” Heartbreaking and painfully beautiful, A Far-flung Life will haunt and comfort long past its final page.

Rating: 8 goannas.

Come back Monday for my interview with Stedman.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Cape Fever by Nadia Davids

Posted on November 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A lonely colonial woman offers to write letters to the fiancé of her maid and the two become disturbingly intertwined in this evocative gothic tale of race, class, and spirits.

“I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.” South African novelist Nadia Davids’s twisting gothic drama Cape Fever, her U.S. debut, opens by highlighting narrator Soraya’s ability to read, which she keeps from her employer. Soraya goes to work for the settler Mrs. Hattingh in 1920: hired as a combined cleaner and cook, the younger woman understands that the elder is not as wealthy as she wishes to appear. In the colonial city in which Mrs. Hattingh reigns over a large, lonely home, Soraya’s close-knit, loving family lives in the nearby Muslim quarter; Soraya is permitted by her employer to visit only rarely. Her father is an artist in religious calligraphy, creating beautiful works of prayer and devotion. The word “proclaim,” he instructs her, is “also read, recite. You see? For us, to read, to recite, is one,” and “The person is a pen. The person is paper.” Soraya’s fiancé, Nour, is an accomplished scholar who works on a farm while saving for teachers’ college.

There are moments in which Soraya feels something like fellowship with her employer, when she intuits that “every woman, rich or poor, madam or maid, dreams of escape.” But working for and living with Mrs. Hattingh, under power structures bigger than the individual, is deeply unpleasant. “She’s never understood the scale of what she wants and asks for.” Soraya retreats, in her small room, into the stories and characters that have come to her all her life: the Gray Women, as she terms the spirits that she alone can see; a seawoman with ink for blood; a woman who makes a baby out of soap. She finds Mrs. Hattingh’s house is teeming with spirits.

Mrs. Hattingh introduces a new comfort and stressor when she offers to write to Nour on Soraya’s behalf. As one woman takes the voice of the other–and intercepts the correspondence that arrives in return–their identities blur in disturbing ways. Soraya holds what she can of her own life in private and cherishes her visits to her family’s home, until even these are forbidden. In the increasingly claustrophobic manor, the tension between the two women builds, resulting in complex layers of psychological intrigue amid themes of class, race, love, grief, and haunting. In Soraya’s compelling voice, Davids blends mysticism, quiet power and resistance, and pain born of a long stretch of history in this unsettling tale of suspense. Cape Fever is beautiful, discomfiting, and moving.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the October 28, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 pickled lemons.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Forty Acres Deep by Michael Perry

Posted on November 14, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A loan from a dear friend, from one of his favorite authors, and I can see why. This novella-length story was absolutely grim, but often funny, too, and deals with some serious messages. I don’t do this often, but let me give a big **content warning** for suicide.

It begins:

Harold had come to consider the accumulating weight of snow on the farmhouse roof as his life’s unfinished business. Daily the load grew… on his heart, his head, the creaking eaves.

A few paragraphs later:

She died a month ago, and he hadn’t plowed the driveway since.

That sets the stage pretty well for us, and all on page 1 (no spoilers). Harold has lived on the same farm all his life, inherited from his father, in a vague midwestern setting where they get a lot of snow. They were dairy farmers, but the economics of that lifestyle got increasingly hard, and then the barn burned – with the cattle in it – a trauma as well as a financial blow. He turned to beef cattle, although one hard winter, with he and the wife both down with the flu, he had to send them to market at the worst time of year, and thus got out of that business. He tried cash crops, but the prices dropped out of beans and corn, too. He leased the land to a farmer who never showed up in person; instead he sent “hired-hand agronomists with wands and laptops and satellite-guided monster machines.” There is a definite note of ‘things these days’ and ‘good old days,’ phrases against which Harold – to his own derision a part-time follower of philosopher and poetry – consciously rebels. He is an old, straight, white man, and he notes his own prejudices and old-fashioned attitudes, and actively interrogates them.

“She” was his wife, and when she dies, Harold wraps her in blankets and puts her out on the porch. He can’t bring himself to face the world. Instead he shovels the walk to the chicken coop, cares for the hens and eats their eggs with canned beans, almost his only remaining provision. He runs the kerosene-powered torpedo heaters, pointed up at the pole barns’ roofs, hoping to keep them from collapsing under the weight of the snow. He ruminates, contemplates, checks remembered quotations in his old philosophy texts. We see him visit town just a few times, where he has a minor but meaningful interaction with a barista whose context could hardly be more different from Harold’s. (It doesn’t take much interaction to hold significance for Harold, who mostly speaks only to his chickens, or himself.)

Harold is an interesting character. When he discovered Montaigne as a teenager: “instead of what he expected a French philosopher might write about, he found references to sex and farts. This was silly and appealed mostly to his dumb teen prurience, but it also implied that philosophy might be accessible and relevant even for a horny rube in barn boots.” He is both country farmer and philosophy student, both privileged old white guy and actively interested in the pronouns, the rainbow flag, and the new ways of thinking. He knows he’s not accomplishing anything big here, but I think you’ll join me in respecting his small curiosities.

Perry is a masterful writer. Harold’s story is almost unrelentingly, deeply depressing – that’s hardly a strong enough word. Nothing goes right, everyone he’s ever cared for is dead, there is nothing left to hope for. His story is also extremely funny: Harold possesses a remarkable sense of humor, and Perry renders it in prose that often surprises while commenting (cynically, of course) on the American condition. “Another yoga-panted woman was griping down at him from her Denali over how much he undercharged for digging her prairie restoration patch.” “After sundown the horizon to the west glowed with encroaching fitness center, brewpubs, and mitotic apartment complexes.” Even as the snow-buried landscape obscures, buries, kills, it is beautiful, and so is this book: both story and line-by-line writing. Harold has a hell of a vocabulary, too. He makes fun of himself for knowing how the meaning and spelling of ‘jejune’ but not how to pronounce it (me neither, Harold). Echolalia, misophonia, cotyledon, vermiculite, hyperacusis, exudation, popple whip.

One of Harold’s last backhoe jobs was for a wealthy architect who hired him to rearrange a set of decorative boulders amidst the shrubbery surrounding a cavernous riding stable. Afterward, when they were settling up, Harold said, “Nice pole barn.” He truly intended the compliment. The architect stared at him blankly for a beat, then, as if dictating from behind a lectern, declared, “It is a custom barndominium-slash-hippodrome.” Harold waited for the slow grin that would concede the absurdity of the extravagant jargon, but after an uncomfortable straight-faced silence, the man slipped an iPhone from his velveteen corduroys and said, “Do you accept Apple Pay?” Omnipresent, Harold thought, were the signs that contemporary culture was leaving him the dust. “Nope,” said Harold, and handed the man an invoice scribbled out on a carbon paper slip.

Lest you think this is overly crabby: Harold (and therefore, obviously, Perry) is aware of his own part in this caricature. At an entirely separate set of reflections, “You are being petulant, he thought. And grandiose.” He excels at the unwieldy, surprising, barking-laugh-out-loud list: “the world’s privileged hordes were content to skate along on… the secondhand grease of star-spangled draft-dodgers peddling hot water heaters, bald eagle throw rugs, and resentment.” Etc.

It’s not all this wordy. “At first light every tree branch, every blackberry cane, every stick and stem was a hoarfrost wand. The sky was clear, the air was still, and sunlight splintered every which way.” It can be as clean and smooth as snow-covered fields, where every tool or piece of garbage is softened over into something vague and beautiful.

This is a masterful piece of art. Extremely grim and dour, but beautiful.

Rating: 9 pictures.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk

Posted on November 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

As much as I loved the Kingston Cycle, it’s tempting to say this is my favorite Polk yet. I am really digging the combination of historical setting (including lots of lush clothing detail – not really my area but it’s surprising, richly enjoyable in Polk’s capable writing hands), romance and strong feeling, with a fantasy / speculative framing but around very approachable values. This author has mastered that combination, and it is extremely satisfying to this reader.

In this case, please meet Beatrice Clayborn, the elder daughter of a banker father who has squandered the family’s wealth, and a magician mother who has been collared, literally, so that she cannot practice magic. This is the cost of marriage for female practitioners in the culture Beatrice has been born into. Men have the opportunity to study and improve their practice; women are bound. Beatrice chafes at this rule; she has been practicing her magic in secret, searching for the coded grimoire that will allow her to become a mage. If she succeeds, she will make herself unmarriageable, thereby disappointing her father, but she will also be able to help him improve the family’s financial situation. If she fails, she will be married off to a man of her father’s choosing, collared, denied her true self. We are introduced to Beatrice on the cusp of the bargaining season: she is being presented to high society as an ingenue (read debutante), for the purpose of attracting a suitor (preferably several) and eventually an advantageous marital match.

Bargaining season involves all the primping (clothes! and maquillage), dancing, preening, and social chess you can possibly imagine. It is profoundly not Beatrice’s scene; but it is very much Harriet’s. Harriet is Beatrice’s younger sister, and although she can be a little hard on Beatrice’s nerves, she is also one of the elder sister’s greatest concerns. Beatrice knows that if she fails at bargaining season – if she reveals herself as a “difficult woman,” undesirable, fails to make a match – she will cost Harriet her own chance at the same. Harriet is actually good at these games, and likes them, and deserves her own shot. Beatrice needs to become a mage and prevent her own marriage – but not appear to fail at the social game. It’s complicated.

So she’s struggling to be attractive but not too attractive, and never objectionable (even when the most objectionable men are thrown at her, and even when they are unspeakably rude), and meanwhile she’s struggling to train herself to a very high level of magical performance – and she’s made a new enemy, who might be becoming a friend, and whose brother is interesting. Powerful, wealthy, gorgeous, a capable magician – and he shows a surprising capacity to listen to Beatrice’s opinions on women’s rights. But if Beatrice marries, even for love, even to a man of her own choosing, she will lose her magic forever. She might just wind up facing a lose/lose set of options. But what if there were another way?

I appreciate that Polk’s alt-historical setting feels accurate and real, and the issues at stake – women’s rights, mostly – are both modern and at home in her setting. (Feminism is not new, is it, nor the need.) And I guess part of the reason I find all those period-clothing details so interesting is that they are, in fact, about class and gender and those bargaining season politics. And maybe it’s just a little bit fun to read about the frills and lace and stomachers and fichus and other things I had to look up – I have no time for it in my real life, but part of the fun of reading is to experience other lives, isn’t it? At any rate. This novel was fun and wrenching and powerful and just absorbing, and I would read another twenty-five of them by this author; I hope they are writing furiously and keep doing it for a long time. What’s next??

Rating: 9 picnic baskets.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

The Gallagher Place by Julie Doar

Posted on November 7, 2025 by pagesofjulia

In this moody debut novel, new and old crimes on her family’s estate in upstate New York force a quietly struggling woman to confront loyalties and conflicts among family and friends.

Julie Doar’s first novel, The Gallagher Place, investigates old and new mysteries within a compelling family drama set in a striking landscape.

Protagonist Marlowe Fisher is an illustrator living on the Upper West Side and a loner, even surrounded by her powerful family and their estate. When she and her two brothers, as adults, discover a body on their property, the case reopens old wounds. Decades earlier, Marlowe’s childhood best friend vanished without a trace. The freshly murdered man and the long-missing teenaged girl do not initially appear linked, but the surrounding community has long harbored suspicions about the wealthy Fishers. Marlowe has always yearned to know what happened to Nora, although that desire presents new conflicts, having come under investigation once again.

The Fishers have always used the Gray House in upstate New York as a weekend and holiday retreat, “a wholesome family sanctuary to escape the crowded city life and the bittersweet pain of growing up too fast. A haven, her father sometimes called it. If that was the case, why did bad things still happen?” And bad things do happen, especially the disappearance of Nora Miller. Marlowe has never had another relationship as meaningful as her friendship with Nora, a local girl and an honorary, if part-time, fourth Fisher sibling, who wished desperately to escape her rural roots. Marlowe feels strongly: “Nothing mattered as much as the two of us.” The loss of Nora has shadowed Marlowe’s life ever since, culminating in a carefully hidden drinking problem.

The recent murder, and accompanying investigation into Nora’s disappearance, is both galvanizing and disturbing. As Marlowe embarks on her own inquiries, more thoroughly than ever before, she not only refreshes old pains but discovers new risks. To search for Nora means to interrogate her own memory, to learn uncomfortable truths about herself and her family, to confront class differences, privilege, and inheritances. This discomfiting process takes place in two timelines, against the backdrop of Dutchess County, N.Y., in the summers of the 1990s (when Nora and Marlowe were teenagers) and in the present winter of 2018. The Fisher property defines Marlowe’s greatest trauma and coming of age; she remains devoted to “the spirit of landscape” that inspires her art. A strong sense of place is central to this chilling novel about old secrets and what one might choose to uncover or keep hidden. The Gallagher Place is dramatically atmospheric, expertly paced, and haunting.

This review originally ran in the October 10, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 gifts.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »