Winter Song by Rebeca Lee Morales

Posted on October 23, 2026 by pagesofjulia

During a small-town Midwestern winter, a young felon who proclaims his innocence and a police chief nearing retirement face off in this debut novel of hard questions and strange loveliness.

Rebeca Lee Morales’s first novel, Winter Song, is quietly astonishing.

In the deep, cold winter of 1986, in a small Minnesota town, police chief Gordon Trent sits alone in the cold house he shared with his late wife, pondering his approaching retirement, which he intends to delay as long as possible. He shares cold toast with the dog, attends the scene of a death by apparent suicide, and visits with an old friend, a retired fellow officer. Then the narrative shifts to focus on Byron Lugo as he is released from prison. Now 26, Byron has served his time for vehicular homicide: a hit-and-run for which Byron is very sorry, but he has always maintained his innocence. Having regained his freedom, he is determined to get his life back: job, car, house, fiancée–although the latter has married someone else. Trent’s belief in justice is, more than ever, what gets him through his work and his life; Byron’s insistence that justice has not been served is unwavering. The two men persist in calm, polite, staunch disagreement, until one of them is proven correct, and lives are once again upheaved.

The town that serves as backdrop, Montevideo–known as Monte–is as clearly portrayed as any of its residents, who make up a cast of colorful, flawed, but sympathetic men and women laboring at a no-frills, working-class existence. These include the woman who runs the thrift store, Byron’s soft-spoken father, a diner waitress, and Byron’s small but unwavering group of friends. The novel’s action rises to bar scenes with dancing and pool, a demolition derby, and an act of startling violence. But much of its greatest drama takes place in subtler moments: conversation, reflection, the pulling back of a covering drape. With grace, humor, and wise observations of human behaviors, Winter Song examines what everyday people can and cannot, or will not, live with; forgiveness, justice, friendship, and community; and the question of whether a fresh start is truly possible.

Morales has captured an American town and the human condition, in all their wounds and splendors, and in simple dignity. With deceptively deep focus and nuance, she applies an attention to detail that exalts even snow in “heaping begrimed ramparts” and the stark struggles of humble existence. For all its many tragedies, and a good dose of dramatic irony, this novel is searingly beautiful and surprisingly hopeful in the end.

This review originally ran in the September 21, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cups of coffee.

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Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

Posted on October 19, 2026 by pagesofjulia

From the author of Yolk comes this utter delight about two young people struggling to find their ways and their people. I loved it!

We meet Penny just as she’s getting ready to leave home and head off to college, which can’t come soon enough. She figured out in ninth grade “that she wouldn’t be popular until she was a grown-up and that was fine because life was a long con,” and she’s always been awkward. She has a boyfriend she barely knows and doesn’t much care for; it’ll be a chore to break up with him, but he was only with her because he has a thing for Asian girls anyway. She’s used to the microaggressions, like her teacher’s need for her to be “exotic” despite being born in Seguin, Texas. She loves her mom Celeste, who is needy, emotional, and obsessed with beauty products, but she’s also furious with her. It’s a great relief to head off to UT Austin, where she hopes to pursue her writing.

Then we meet Sam, a few years older, who sleeps on a mattress in a storage room upstairs from the coffee shop where he works. Sam would like to be developing as a documentary filmmaker, but he’s broke, estranged from his mother, struggling to keep away from a toxic ex, who, oh joy!, has just told him she’s pregnant.

And wouldn’t you know it: Penny’s assigned college roommate turns out to be Jude, a privileged, bubbly young woman who was briefly, by marriage, related to Sam. Jude and her best friend Mallory latch onto Sam, dragging Penny along for a first meeting which is deeply awkward but also reveals a magnetism that is mutual, though neither realizes it.

Their second meeting is sort of perfect, and (as the back of this book has it) sort of the opposite of meet-cute: Sam has a panic attack on Sixth Street, thinks he’s dying of a heart attack, and Penny rescues him. She recognizes what he’s going through. They exchange numbers, and call each other ’emergency contact.’ From there, contact is near-constant, but only via text message. Within the little screen, their connection is sublime: all awkwardness falls away; “even on text, where there are no inflections or nuance or tone for non sequiturs. You’ve always spoken fluent me.” Penny and Sam would not be the first or the last people to find it easiest to confess their deepest, most vulnerable feelings in a format that’s not face to face. It’s the perfect relationship – if they can just keep it out of the real world. They can’t, of course.

I love that this novel about weird, wounded, awkward young people does wind up a very sweet romance, by a circuitous path. And neither has to change themselves, although they will open up a little. This process opens them up just a touch to the rest of the world, as well, and Penny and her mother even have a bit of a moment. It felt like an echo, because I had just watched 10 Things I Hate About You (for the first time!) with the main teenager in my life, and had a chance to observe that we don’t have to bend ourselves toward ‘normal,’ whatever that is – we just hope to find our own particular brand of weirdo, the ones whose eccentricities match or complement our own. (A song lyric: “I’m lookin’ for baggage that goes with mine.”) It feels wholesome, and preserves what is most odd and wonderful about Penny and Sam.

I’m already working on getting into more of Choi’s work.

Rating: 8 pieces of sheet cake.

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Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson, transl. by Elizabeth Portch

Posted on October 12, 2026 by pagesofjulia

“Where are they going?” asked Moomintroll.

“To places where I’m not,” Snufkin answered…

“Loaded with cinnamon, sharks’ teeth, and emeralds,” said Moomintroll.

I got this off a list of recommendations, somewhere! (isn’t that always the way) that I can’t find now; I think it was a list of cozy winter reads. It’s my first introduction to the Moomins, although apparently they’re a force in the world – and visually just a little familiar, so who knows.

The Moomin household (in the Moominhouse) includes a bit of biological family – Moominmamma, Moominpappa, and Moomintroll – and quite a few more found, or built, or adopted, like the Snork Maiden (Moomintroll’s romantic interest) and her brother Snork, Moomintroll’s best friend Snufkin, the Hemulen, and the Muskrat. Etc. This family is all love and caring, even when there is bickering. We meet them first as they prepare for winter and a long sleep: “All Moomintrolls go to sleep about November. This is a good idea, too, if you don’t like the cold and the long winter darkness.” (I read that later on in the Moomin trajectory, they do discover that winter can be fun too.) And then they awaken, and interact with each other and with their world in a spirit of joy and wonder. Moomintroll, Snufkin, and Sniff find a hat, a great glorious top hat, that changes things (and people!) into other things – this will cause many problems, and some fun, before it is time for the hat to move on.

This book is marked as being for ages 9-12, and that feels about right. I enjoyed ripping right through its chapters (stories? but linked). I think they work well for younger readers, or for older ones looking for simple, parable-like tales. I can imagine wanting to spend more time in the simpler world of the Moomins. And the illustrations are delicious! Glad I found this quirky series.

Rating: 7 pancakes.

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Free Love: Adventures in Marriage and Polyamory by Michelle Tea

Posted on October 9, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Through the context of the author’s own adventures in marriage and polyamory, and interviews and research, this thoughtful study explores various means of living “many loves.”

By the time she sat down to pen Free Love: Adventures in Marriage and Polyamory, Michelle Tea had indeed lived an adventurous life, “from straight to bi to lesbian to dyke to bi again and now and forevermore the one-stop shop of queer,” among other journeys in identity and lifestyle, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. In this work’s opening present day, she is a wife (“a relationship that took root in the landscape of my divorce”), a mother, and–not for the first time–grappling with the concept of monogamy. She is easing into the idea of “nonmonogamy as a real orientation within [her],” and in these pages, explores its various forms, in history, in her personal life and preferences, and through interviews with friends and acquaintances as well as cultural figures. Always open and nonjudgmental about a range of ways of nonmonogamous life, Free Love is a fascinating and candid analysis.

Tea (Against Memoir; Valencia) merges her own past with external sources, in the context of interviews and conversations, so that her voice remains present throughout. For example, she talks with scholar-historian-archivist Jeanne Vaccaro, writer/musician Brontez Purnell, and an artist she calls simply Z because “I’m charged with protecting her anonymity, so crucial for her exciting, global sex life.” Tea describes her own fantasies in the context of the 1989 film Last Exit to Brooklyn, adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1964 novel. She shares joys and heartbreaks, ecstasies and pains, in anecdotes of relationships and every part of her life. Through storytelling, she introduces less-familiar readers to terms like “metamour” (the partners of one’s partner) and “compersion” (the opposite of jealousy; “a feeling of shared happiness or fine-fellow-feeling at my partner’s extracurricular dalliances”). With friends, historians, researchers, scholars, and cultural icons, she discusses sex, desire, shame, free love communes, government control of women’s bodies, risk aversion, the “relationship escalator,” plural marriages, motherhood, aging, and jealousy, always through a lens of queerness. Tea reports that it is an ongoing struggle to both love and deepen bonds with one or several individuals, and to remain open to a wider world: “It’s so hard to strike the balance of held, beloved security, and raw, autonomous adventure.” The challenges of polyamory are real, she acknowledges, but in refrain, she also argues, it is worth those challenges.

Free Love demystifies, educates, explores the margins, and questions received wisdom. To that end, Tea hopes her reader finds in these pages “inspiration… revelation, permission,” and, perhaps most simply, more love.

This review originally ran in the September 14, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cards.

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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (audio)

Posted on October 5, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Best book of the year. Thanks, Liz

An epistolary novel, via audiobook with a multitude of narrators: Maggi-Meg Reed reads the correspondent herself, Sybil Stone Van Antwerp, a formidable woman turning 73 when we first meet her. The rest of the cast read the parts of others, those who correspond in turn with Sybil, and several of these read more than one role: Jane Oppenheimer, Carly Robins, Jeff Ebner, David Pittu, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Mark Bramhall, Petrea Burchard, Robert Petkoff, Kimberly Farr, Cerris Morgan-Moyer, Peter Ganim, Jade Wheeler… and “various,” who I assume are Steve West and Jen Siebert?, two names verbally credited on this production but who I can find nowhere in print (so I’m inventing those spellings, sorry, best effort). While usually a single narrator handles a novel well, changing voices for different characters, I do appreciate the choice here. For one thing, a letter rarely opens with “Dear Sybil, this is John” or whatnot, and as I learned the voices (and accents!), it helped.

So. An epistolary novel, told entirely in letters (and less frequently, emails or notes) to and from our eponymous main character. Sybil is a hell of a character. I would call her, especially early on, indomitable, indefatigable, domineering, pushy, opinionated, bossy – some of these being the things we call a strong woman when we don’t like her very much. This book has pulled off that rarity: a generally unlikeable protagonist whom we still care deeply about. I did find myself applauding Sybil from time to time, especially later in the book, but she’s not easy to like. She is a flawed but eventually deeply sympathetic character, who has lived more than seven decades and has collected her share of disappointments and regrets. Remarkably, she is still capable in her 70s of learning new ways to be, trying new things, and – rarest of all – admitting she was wrong. By the end I’m quite proud of her (although I’m still not sure she’d be easy to like). We follow her selected correspondence for most of a decade, until it ends. And in these years, as Sybil puts it, her life is very full. Among other things, she entertains two suitors; finds some of her biological family for the first time (after adoption as an infant); embarks upon international travel for effectively* the first time; experiences a life-altering medical change; and navigates several important apologies or discussions of old wrongs. These are deeply impressive.

[*with an important exception which she argues should not count.]

I don’t know that I will attempt much more plot summary. Evans offers a full cast of fascinating characters as correspondents, including Sybil’s family (one adoptive brother with whom she is close; one adult child with whom she is not) and loved ones (her best friend with whom she has exchanged letters since they were children), strangers (authors and other public figures), and friends new and old. I felt the most tenderness for Sybil when she was addressing children, which she does with remarkable gentleness and wisdom for someone who can also be quite harsh, and when she was facing her own old mistakes. There is a customer service representative she emails with, who becomes quite something else (despite one of Sybil’s more face-palm faux pas in her opening missive). The richness and variety in these correspondents is delicious. I especially appreciate that while many of her regular letter-writers are of her generation, there is some diversity in age as well as in most every other sort of identity. Sybil tells us that we’d be surprised: much of the time she writes to someone, they write her back.

The argument is made that it’s easier to tell hard truths in writing than out loud, and we do get some heavy confessions and storytelling, from Sybil and from others. It is often a sad book, and Sybil is troubled and scarred, but she is as strong and awesome as she is flawed, in the end. I did really appreciate such a nuanced portrait of a protagonist who is both older and not automatically likeable; I think the novelist’s feat here is complex. I can’t stop thinking or talking about it, and I feel sure this will be the best book I read all year.

Rating: 9 cakes.

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Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin (audio)

Posted on September 21, 2026 by pagesofjulia

From the author of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, I found this earlier novel for younger readers. In a nutshell, I appreciated its thought-provoking nature, but some parts left me not entirely comfortable. I found the dialog a little stilted (‘however’ and ‘nonetheless’ in the voice of young people in informal settings). There was much good here; I’m stimulated by the way it has me thinking about life and death and aging and choices. My feelings are too complicated to make an unqualified recommendation, but I would love to discuss it with somebody!

Liz Hall is fifteen, nearly sixteen years old when she is hit by a taxi while riding her bike. She dies from her injuries, and wakes up on board a ship bound for Elsewhere. This afterlife resembles Earth in many ways, and people can be reunited with loved ones – and pets – there, although with a crucial twist: in Elsewhere, as time goes by, people get younger, not older. Liz has just fifteen or so years to create a new life in this new place. And she is pissed: she misses her old life, she wanted to turn sixteen and get a driver’s license, she wanted to go to college, maybe get married someday. Now that she’s getting younger again, she feels cheated. It takes some time for her to come to terms with the new set of options available to her. Meanwhile, we encounter other stories: Liz’s grandmother, who died when Liz was in utero (and is now approaching a youthful 40 years old); Liz’s favorite rock star, dead of a drug overdose; another teenaged girl; the head of the Division of Domestic Animals; a young man who still pines for his (still alive) wife.

The possibilities and limitations of the world of Elsewhere were interesting to me. I did appreciate the worldbuilding aspect, the creation of new rules, although not all my questions were answered. (For example, residents here choose an avocation, where they work for the joy of it. There is currency, although it seems to be just for pleasure spending. What of sustenance and the basic necessities? Are they free, or actually unnecessary? What of classes and classic divisions of society? There is a utopian aspect that’s not explicated to my satisfaction.) As Liz experiences her own losses – and gains – I was fascinated by some of the thinking she goes through. Perhaps foremost in my head: in this world, we seem to dread aging. Liz dreads getting younger. That alone got me thinking about the advantages of aging. Also, the option to watch the living on Earth through apparently magic binoculars got me thinking about the old question of what we’d choose to know if it were knowable. Do you want to know what people say about you when you’re not there? Do you want to know when you’ll die? Or how? Liz knows how much time she has left in Elsewhere, but as she learns, that doesn’t dictate what she’ll do with her time.

The most difficult issue of the book I will spell out for you here in white text, as is my practice for spoilers. Highlight to read, or skip it. Because of aging backwards, we can wind up with a couple that appears to be decades apart in age although they were better matched on Earth, because one died much younger than the other. But what of this: a man dies, say, in his 20s. A girl dies, say, in her teens, but because it has been decades since the man died, their Elsewhere selves are about the same age. Is it okay for them to date? The man has lived 20-something plus ten-something years: he is now ~35 to her 15. Seriously? …The important detail is whether he is now emotionally and experientially 35, or 15. I’m not sure Zevin has answered this to my satisfaction: it seems to vary case by case. I was unsure how to feel, and a little creeped out by such a relationship.

Cassandra Morris narrates in a very youthful voice that might match Liz’s own (the bulk of the story is told in her close third-person). It was sometimes a little hard for me to listen to – and maybe that’s what it’s like to be inside a fifteen-year-old’s head. (Bless their hearts.) I think she gave a good performance. But on the whole, the experience of listening to and thinking about this story I would term, not enjoyable, but thought-provoking.

Rating: 6 sets of pajamas.

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Sweet Pea by Kit de Waal

Posted on September 14, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A protagonist rich in vulnerability, empathy, and resilience faces sorrows with boundless love in this unforgettable novel of good cooking and built family.

Kit de Waal’s Sweet Pea is a novel about pain, kindness, and forgiveness, experienced through the life of an everywoman West Indian immigrant to England. Its unforgettable protagonist, Paulette, translates loss and insult into caring time and time again.

“Paulette was lucky. She slept in the same bed as her grandmother until she was six years old.” She has no mother, but “barely feels the loss because she… can’t imagine being loved any better than Granny loved her.” When Paulette is 11, she and Granny immigrate to working-class urban England, where, at the novel’s opening, Paulette works as an auxiliary nurse. She is 29 years old and yearning for a family, but her boyfriend, Denton, drags his feet. It is only upon his death in a car crash that she learns he already had a wife and three children of his own.

Awash with grief and betrayal, as even the friends who comfort her simultaneously scorn her naïveté, Paulette struggles through, finally achieving her longed-for pregnancy by way of Denton’s best friend. Garfield is an attentive partner and father, but their relationship is not based on love and does not last. Paulette again soldiers on, this time with the prize and star of her life: her son, Bird. As he grows into a young man, she loves him powerfully, with enough to spill over for friends, lovers, patients, neighbors, and another young boy whose life intertwines with Bird’s, and with Paulette’s, for good.

In prose rich with feeling and detail, de Waal (My Name Is Leon) imbues these events with significance even when they seem mundane. Paulette’s excellent West Indian cooking, the mutual support she shares with a chain-smoking Irish neighbor, the simple comfort she finds in cleaning and the odd cocktail buoy her. She aches for family, connection, belonging, and for her native St. Kitts. “All the English summers in the entire world would never make up for just one day from the childhood she took for granted. Light so white you had to hide under a tree, skies so blue, trees so green, the whole world bright like pirate’s treasure, amber, rubies, sapphires.”

Endlessly tending to others, at work and at home, Paulette builds an unusual family for herself despite all odds. Those she cares for hurt her, but this is perhaps the human condition, and she is rewarded by caring anyway: fumbling, wise, and willing to try again. Sweet Pea is a refreshing novel of compassion and redemption.

This review originally ran in the August 24, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 yellow quilts.

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Maximum Shelf: When They Find Me by Carter Wilson

Posted on August 24, 2026 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 August 5, 2026.

Carter Wilson’s 11th novel, When They Find Me, is a super-charged thriller about family ties, the legacy of trauma, and the tension between morality and survival. The story opens with an immediate adrenaline hit: “The old man says this is where our target is hiding. Somewhere in this little town. Expanse, Colorado.” A young woman named Riven has just arrived in the cold and snow, traveling in a beat-up old RV with Boone, her brother, and their father, who calls himself Coyote. Boone and Coyote have both killed before, but their task in Expanse is to set up Riven’s first kill. The target is the man Coyote maintains ruined their lives, years ago, when they lived in Idaho–“Back when we were domesticated. Fed on routines. Sleeping in real beds. No blood on our hands, no need for constant vigilance.”

Also in Expanse, Annie Wolfe and her 12-year-old daughter, Coral, live away from mainstream society, offline and in hiding. They keep go-bags and weapons at the ready. They’ve equipped their home with a secret underground bunker. They have Harley, “the least ass-kicking dog” Annie has ever known, but she’s good at alerting. Annie fears those who may be hunting them from a past life.

On December 23, as a potentially record-breaking snowstorm descends, Riven enters what she believes to be the house of her intended target. Instead, she finds Annie. This random accident–a simple mistaken address–sets off a chain of events that will change their lives forever.

The odds of these two armed parties stumbling upon each other may seem unlikely, but Expanse is a special place. “No one in this town discusses real names,” and everyone seems to be hiding from something. Riven’s intended victim had hoped to outrun the past that brings Coyote to Colorado. Annie, his neighbor, is on the run from something else: her own old trauma, the loss of her husband, and irrevocable damage to herself and to Coral.

After their initial confrontation, Riven and Annie are joined by Coyote and Boone in Annie’s home, and they settle into their closed, snowbound environment. The three home invaders stand opposed to Annie and her dog, Harley; Coral is hidden away, hopefully in safety. Hours pass. Weapons are aimed, questions asked. The strain increases steadily as both physical and psychological threats multiply. Coyote came for revenge but insists his “pack” stay and seek a twisted “truth.” Truth is a shifting target, however, for these men and women variously hunted or hunting.

Wilson’s two narrators are flawed but sympathetic, with redemption seeming to hover just over the horizon. Riven in particular seems poised on the edge of a major change: “And here I remain, the one with all the power. The power to choose. The power to kill. The choice of being an animal or human.” This will-she-or-won’t-she charge contributes to the general unease.

Alternating chapters are told from the two women’s first-person perspectives and move between the present setting–December in Expanse–and earlier times. In those flashbacks, readers slowly put together the past ordeals of the present-day antagonists. Annie, under a previous name, was married and lived in Miami. After the events leading to her husband’s murder, she barely escaped with Coral to make a new life. “All women have my kind of fury,” she posits. “All that’s needed is the trigger to unleash it.”

Riven, like Coral, witnessed terrible things as a child. Through her eyes, readers watch Coyote’s mental health deteriorate. He commands his children to stop calling him father. He calls his family a pack, says they’re on migration, demands they live by his version of an animal code: survival without sentiment. (As an Easter egg for returning fans, Coyote has named himself after a character in Wilson’s third novel, Revelation.) Coyote is entirely lost in his fantasies, but Riven remains ambivalent, closely watching her beloved brother Boone, wondering if there is any shred left of “the kid who used to sneak me extra food, who still stands a little closer to me when the old man’s voice sharpens. He’s straddling some line I can’t pull him off of. Half in the dark, half reaching for the light.”

The circumscribed setting in a secluded, snowed-in, modest home, and the expansive interior worlds of the various parties, offer a remarkable contrast. Despite spanning only a handful of hours in the present, tightly defined space, When They Find Me journeys to past timelines, memories and fantasies without sacrificing its fast pace. Riven grapples with taking agency in her own life, questioning what she remembers and who she wants to emulate. Annie’s past losses and old enemies remain ever-present for her, as she worries for Coral and avoids the ghosts she’s not ready to face. This chilling novel of suspense is accompanied by occasional pencil-shaded sketches, illustrating scenes. Each holds a hidden element that contributes to the immersive effect and sense of mystery. Taut pressure, high stakes, and compelling characters combine in this unnerving thriller from an experienced writer.

Rating: 7 Christmas songs.

Come back Friday for my interview with Wilson.

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The Queen of Sorrow by Sarah Beth Durst (audio)

Posted on August 21, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This third and final book in the Queens of Renthia series lives up to its name, with hardships and sorrows, but ends on a surprisingly hopeful note. The Queen of Blood was Daleina, and The Reluctant Queen was Naelin; this third titular queen is Naelin again, facing new challenges. Thematically, to some extent, these might be summed up as the tension between caring for one’s own, as individuals (in Naelin’s case, her two children) and caring for the masses (in Naelin’s case, her realm of Aratay, and perhaps even beyond it to the people of all of Renthia). A ruler with individual loved ones is ever in a position of conflicted loyalties, with no easy solutions. We also see in this book a return of an earlier antagonist. The spirits are bad enough – killers, but only by instinct, without much in the way of personality, or motivations beyond those instincts; and they may be managed, even somewhat humanely, by a queen who is both good and powerful. But then there is Merecot: powerful, but not entirely ‘good,’ she is ambitious, self-centered, and arguably amoral. Since book one she has been at least a little bit at odds with Daleina, who is undeniably good (Merecot would say, obnoxiously so), but distressingly unpowerful in her command of the spirits. Naelin is very powerful, but poorly trained, and compromised by her personal loyalties, as above; she might be the chaos to contrast with Daleina’s good and Merecot’s less-than-good. And yes, all three of these are pitted against the spirits, characterized almost as a force of nature (indeed, they are the embodiments of natural forces), but perhaps with more agency than we originally thought.

Whew.

As a series closer, The Queen of Sorrow is powerful: there is no question of the strength of the emotional experiences of each of our queens, and I’m stimulated by a number of secondary characters, too, including several loves (and one ex), a sister, and a mother-in-law-to-be, not to mention Merecot and her machinations (and predecessor). There are weddings, deaths, a wolf with a backstory, new worlds. There’s a lot of new for a series closer, and I see we do have a (standalone-ish?) “Tales of Renthia” book already, as well. I guess I appreciate that Durst left so much possibility, although it might be frustrating for the supposed final work in a series! I think the whole thing has been a feat of worldbuilding. There’s something about the darkness here that has kept me at a bit of a distance, that I can’t quite put a finger on, but I’m also gripped by the plot and completely invested – when I spotted that fourth book I knew I had to have it. I think I relate more closely to Durst’s cozier outings, but I want this kind just as badly. Maybe I’ll figure out how to better articulate this in the next edition.

Rating: 7 jewels.

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The Warbler by Sarah Beth Durst (audio)

Posted on August 14, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I have followed Sarah Beth Durst through cozy fantasies (The Spellshop and its sequels), darker ones (The Queen of Blood and her fellows), and now here, to a deeply imaginative and deliciously weird look at the choices we make and those we may try to make for others.

Different chapters focus on three different women in three timelines, but it is Elisa who steps forward as protagonist. She has never lived anywhere longer than ten months, and lives by an elaborate set of rules and strategies, taught by her mother, to leave no trace and take no souvenirs. A family curse, passed from mother to daughter, decrees that if she ever “puts down roots,” that concept will be come literal. Elisa will turn into a tree, as her mother did before her. In alternate chapters, we see Lori, also on the run, and Rose, who always wanted to leave her hometown but never got a chance. Is a home something to be desired, sought after, built, and cherished? Or is a home a cage? We meet many weird, twisting, fascinating characters: a handsome bookstore owner, a moon-eyed lover in Paris, a possibly suicidal woman dressed entirely in pink, a gloomy pair of young women, a mystical trio of blue-haired old ones, and a bird-obsessed recluse, among others. I am over the moon that Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman gets a cameo here, because that’s the book this one reminds me of – it may even inspire a reread.

The tension between staying and going, and what each of us fears and yearns for among these options, occupies much of the book. Also the gifts and the chains that come out of a mother’s love for her daughter, and the question of what power we have and should have to choose for others. There is romance, and there is some ‘light’ fantasy, but mostly, there is an examination of these big questions, absolutely within the gendered constructs of a society that historically encouraged women to care for husband, children, and home, and what it does and does not encourage now. But it’s not a pointed study, because it’s couched within mysteries, creepy bird collectors, the fine art of dumpster diving, the handsome bookstore owner, etc. I had the best time! And my appreciation of Durst’s work only grows. Onward.

Rating: 8 reels of microfiche.

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