The Reluctant Queen by Sarah Beth Durst (audio)

Posted on May 25, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Following The Queen of Blood is The Reluctant Queen, at center position in this trilogy. I continue to admire Durst’s worldbuilding and characters, imagination, and the hard choices and moral gray areas she presents. On the other hand, the sedate pacing that I felt worked in the Spellshop series is getting a little less effective here.

I fully expected the title to refer to Queen Daleina, who took the crown at, I think, nineteen years old. Not the strongest heir to the throne – in fact, she might be the weakest in terms of pure magical power – she is the only survivor of the massacre in the coronation grove, and therefore the new Queen of Renthia. She was decidedly reluctant… but is not the titular character. Instead, here comes a big plot twist and a spoiler but from quite early in this novel: Daleina is sick, soon to die, and therefore Renthia needs a new heir on standby, stat – but, let’s review again from book one, all the other heirs were killed when Daleina became queen. So, unusually, there ensues a great big scramble for one. Here we learn that, before the academies where Daleina and her peers were trained, Renthia used to find its women and girls of power – its heirs – in an older way: the champions traveling the villages, looking for regular citizens. And so that’s what Champion Ven does here.

And he finds a gem. Naelin is a woodswoman, a wife (to a pretty worthless husband) and a mother to two young children. She has always kept her power hidden, believing it will only get her killed, as it did her mother before her. But when Ven discovers her, he finds that she is the most powerful woman he has ever known, even in her raw, untrained form. She is also staunchly opposed to taking on responsibility beyond her family unit. It takes much of the book to convince her that the sense of duty she feels toward her own children may need to expand to the entire land.

One thing this book kept me thinking about was the tension between ego and chest-thumping, and a true sense of service. I already said that Daleina struck me as a pretty reluctant queen in her own right; by contrast to Naelin, she was there on purpose, training with the specific goal of maybe becoming queen, but not because she thought she deserved it or was owed it or wanted the glory. She struck me as being always clear that it would be a burden, a responsibility, and it was about keeping people safe, not about promoting herself – in contrast to the previous queen, and to some of her classmates at the academy (one in particular). Naelin is even more reluctant, resistant to helping anyone she did not birth herself – at a level that eventually felt pretty selfish to me, in fact. I felt a little impatient with her slowness to realize that queendom is not a prize, but a responsibility; and in turn, those around her who were in a position to advise, never took this tack directly enough for my tastes.

Some of this is due to the classic need, in storytelling, to hold back the revelation of certain details. Some of this is due to an accurate portrayal of human nature. But I sometimes felt like we could have moved things along a little more quickly than we did. Durst excels in painting a picture, a scene, and an inner turmoil. Sometimes she may indulge in a little more of that than serves her story. Especially when we got into some really high-stakes action episodes, I think we could move past the inner monologue, and especially when the inner monologues were reviews of character elements already very well established throughout the book.

I’m still stoked on these characters and the stakes of their world, and excited about where Durst chose to leave the plot hanging for book three – I’m genuinely invested in finding out what our queens will do next about the tricky situation we’ve left them in. So, a little impatient with pacing sometimes, but still in.

Rating: 7 cakes.

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Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran

Posted on January 9, 2026 by pagesofjulia

The horrors of coming-of-age meet ectoplasm and spiritual mediums in a boarding-school gothic that confronts fear, longing, authority, and death.

Avery Curran’s Spoiled Milk is a gothic boarding-school tale of suspense filled with small and large horrors, schoolgirl skirmishes, lust, death, and the supernatural.

In the fall of 1928, Emily Locke is settling into her final year at Briarley School for Girls in the English countryside as one of a tight-knit group of seven upper-sixth girls. Emily’s family life is unhappy–not unusual among her year, but perhaps especially so–and Briarley has been her effective home since she was 11. Her very best friend, the girl she loves, is Violet, “next to whom all others paled in comparison. She had always seemed more real, more vivid than the rest of us.” The book opens on Violet’s 18th birthday, when the whole school celebrates and fawns over her. “I hoped that later she might give me one of the silk ribbons that tied the parcels together, pressing it into my hand before bed like a mediaeval lady giving a knight a favour to tuck into his armour.” It is also the night that Violet dies. When the girls gather after the funeral for a midnight feast to honor her in their own way, they find that the freshest milk on the school grounds has inexplicably gone bad. These are the first clues that more change is afoot than the girls’ coming-of-age.

One of Violet’s birthday gifts was a contraband book called Spiritualist Phenomena and Mediumship. “Supernatural exploration was the sort of thing one always hoped might happen at school,” but Briarley has always been staid and safe, if a little boring, until now. With Violet gone, Emily and her remaining classmates determine to find out what happened–who or what killed her, and why the food at the school has begun to taste strange. They contact a medium in the village. They try a séance of their own. The relationships within their small group are strained by jealousies, conflicting priorities, and secret affections. Emily’s chief rival is Evelyn, whom she finds both infuriating and fascinating. “Evelyn’s people were Presbyterians,” and she opposes their spiritualism as unchristian and wrong. But the oddities and accidents at Briarley intensify even as Evelyn’s discomfort grows, and their experiments with the spirit realm feel ever more life-and-death, until it seems that no one will get out of Briarley alive.

Spoiled Milk contains echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in Curran’s intimate, first-person, reflective voice for Emily, among other similarities. Tensions rise for the small group of girls in this closed-room thriller, as petty rifts give way to serious terrors, and readers will keep guessing until the final pages. Classic, but still surprising, Curran’s first novel will satisfy gothic fans.

This review originally ran in the January 5, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 satsumas.

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Haven by Ani Katz

Posted on January 5, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In a masterpiece of tension, set within a lavish island community for the corporate select, a disappeared infant calls into question everything one mother thought she knew.

Ani Katz’s Haven is a chilling story about an apparent utopia that is anything but. As Caroline boards a ferry with husband Adam and infant son Gabriel for an exclusive getaway on a lovely island enclave, she is, first of all, relieved. After a trying period of his unemployment, Adam’s job with corporate giant Corridor gives him the means to join an elite group of friends and coworkers in a spaceship (Caroline’s description) of a house on the outskirts of Haven, a longtime home of the rich.

Caroline has never quite understood what it is that Corridor does–something with “infrastructure”–but she’s grateful that Adam is employed and seemingly less depressed. Now she hopes to relax, get to know Adam’s friends a little better, perhaps strengthen her bond with Gabriel, maybe even get some artistic inspiration back. Ever since becoming a mother, her photography has suffered. She attempted a project about motherhood, but “was getting bored with her baby as a subject.” Even on the island, seeking subjects, she worries: “What if she never made an interesting photograph again?” But in Katz’s tautly plotted psychological thriller, it turns out that photography may be the least of Caroline’s concerns.

Caroline’s roommates for the summer, Adam’s Corridor colleagues, indulge in eating and drinking to excess and unfamiliar, unnamed drugs, but they also coo over Gabriel and give Caroline the occasional break for a proper shower. She is trying to lean into the novel, luxury experience. The island’s wider inhabitants, however, strike her as being just a little off. Tinkly laughter, choreographed dance, and uncanny children degrade into shadowy threats: angry islanders, old rituals and sacrifice, and corporate surveillance. Then comes the nightmarish morning when Caroline wakes up and Gabriel is gone. As she searches for her son and the truth of what happens in Haven, she will come to question even the rules, and the people, she thinks she knows best.

If Haven ever begins to feel like it might trend toward the formulaic, be assured that Katz (A Good Man) is about to twist her tricky narrative again, always catching Caroline, and readers, unawares. This masterpiece of tension turns absolutely terrifying by its finish. Technology, hubris, deception, and mistrust combine in an unsettling corporate dystopia that asks what ends would justify which means. Riveting, thought-provoking, and ever surprising, Haven is not for the easily unnerved.

This review originally ran in the December 23, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 hats.

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Warning Signs by Tracy Sierra

Posted on December 22, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young boy faces a variety of dangers when he enters deep snow and high mountains with his father in this enthralling novel of horror, suspense, and psychological intrigue.

Tracy Sierra (Nightwatching) conjures a terrifying narrative with Warning Signs, in which a 12-year-old boy grapples with hazards on several levels. This novel of horror and abuse is both enthralling and thought-provoking, liable to keep the reader up all night for a single-sitting read or to inspire nightmares–all worthwhile for the masterful handling of serious topics.

Chapter one introduces Zach, aged 11, his younger sister, Bonnie, and their mother, Grace. They are skiing uphill into the mountains of the American West, toward a hut where they will meet with other friends. Grace, an expert outdoorswoman, educates her young children in assessing avalanche risks, in survival, and how to manage fear. Chapter two jumps forward a year. Zach is 12, headed into the same mountains with his father, Bram. Bonnie has stayed home with a nanny; Grace is gone, for reasons not immediately explained. Where Grace was kind and patient, Bram is visibly short-tempered and exasperated. Zach fears him. They are to meet a group of men and boys at a backcountry ski hut for a fathers-and-sons ski trip, organized by Bram for the purpose of securing investments from the wealthier men he envies and courts. Zach has a role to play, but has always failed his father so far, never the rough-and-tumble, thick-skinned son Bram desires. Ironically, Zach’s skiing and outdoor survival skills (thanks to his mother) far surpass Bram’s, an imbalance that will matter in the coming days.

Over the long weekend, Warning Signs ratchets up the tension until it seems it can carry no more–and then ramps it up again. Zach is aware of at least three distinct threats: the perils of the natural world, including a very real risk of avalanche; his father’s irascible self-interest and capacity for cruelty; and a mysterious creature stalking the dark and treacherously cold high-altitude woods. Bram’s gathered group of men and boys presents a dangerous combination of skill and ignorance, hubris and machismo; Zach possesses good training and instincts, but as their youngest member, will be overlooked and ignored in an irony of Greek-tragedy proportions. Through it all, Zach (in close third-person perspective) continues to mull the absence of the dearly beloved Grace, and approach the horrifying truth about her loss.

With its triple-punch of terrors natural, human, and unknown, Sierra’s sophomore novel is truly and profoundly frightening. Beyond the fine art of the horror or thriller novel, Warning Signs also considers domestic abuse and control, class and ambition, and how we try to care for those we love. Discomfiting, chilling, and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the December 2, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 lost mittens.

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Witchcraft by Sole Otero, trans. by Andrea Rosenberg

Posted on September 8, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This graphic novel follows an unusual household over several centuries in Buenos Aires, Argentina, through various characters whose lives are impacted, if not ruined, by three enigmatic sisters.

Argentinean comics artist Sole Otero (Mothballs) offers a tale that meanders through historical and speculative fiction with Witchcraft, a graphic novel that spans centuries in Buenos Aires. In Otero’s evolving but recognizable visual style, the opening scene emerges spookily from the fog, as a ship arrives in Nuestra Señora del Buen Ayre in 1768. (One of a series of footnotes explains that this was the original name of Buenos Aires, given by the conqueror Pedro de Mendoza.) Readers see three women disembark with their goat, taking with them the three-year-old son of another passenger, to the latter’s wails of despair. From these early, atmospheric pages, a sense of unease is established and maintained.

The following sections of the narrative undertake large jumps in time. In more or less present-day Buenos Aires, a man tells his friend a scarcely credible story of nude women dancing around entranced nude men, with a goat and a chalk circle and “this super creepy music.” In an earlier, historical setting, a Mapuche woman goes to work at a grand estate for three sisters who are both feared and respected in their local village, to a horrifying end. In modern times, a reclusive woman exchanges e-mails with a similarly lonely man, the veterinarian who came on a house call to look at her sick cat; he tells strange, disturbing tales about his family and the elderly goat they want him to save. A nunnery sends an allegedly evil orphan girl to live with three sisters who normally adopt only boys. From these and other narrative threads, populated by spirits, witch hunts, pleas and losses, readers begin to piece together the fractured story of the María sisters and their unusual, perhaps supernatural, habits.

Otero’s style of illustration varies somewhat between sections, but is often distorted or off-kilter, and highly detailed; in full color, her characters’ facial expressions and contortions advance the unnerving atmosphere of the larger story. Page spreads may include carefully spaced panels or no panels at all; text style likewise shifts, with infrequent footnotes to help readers along. This results in a sinister, mysterious, and deeply compelling reading experience. Translated by Andrea Rosenberg (who also translated Otero’s Mothballs), Witchcraft blends horror, dark magic and dark humor, rage and righteousness. This disjointed, sometimes discomfiting, entertaining story addresses colonial power and indigenous resistance alongside ritual, sex, and sacrifice in an eerie, phantasmagoric package not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the August 18, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 trees climbed.

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We Lie Here by Rachel Howzell Hall

Posted on June 9, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This tense, suspenseful thriller slipped easily along with the momentum of a well-designed plot, for the most part. There were a few hiccups in the late-middle for this reader, but the finish got me, and this author deserves a hat tip for the big reveal which in hindsight feels almost obvious, but I never did see it coming.

We meet Yara Marie Gibson when she’s on her way back to Palmdale from Los Angeles. L.A. holds her moderately successful (it’s still early) career as a writer for television, her awesome boyfriend Shane, and her young-adult life; Palmdale, in the Antelope Valley in northern Los Angeles County, is home, and it’s trying to kill her. The novel’s first line is “The city of Palmdale takes my breath away,” and she means it literally. Yara suffers from severe asthma and allergies, worsened by anxiety, which is in turn worsened by her family in general and her mother in particular, plus the fact that her mother and sister smoke cigarettes every waking moment, and indoors. Yara is highly motivated by the party she’s throwing for her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary, a very elaborate affair for which she’s footing the bill; nobody even pretends that her younger sister Dominique is not her mother’s favorite, but Yara is driven to give her parents this gift. Her father seems loving, but Barbara Gibson (who goes by a multitude of nicknames in Yara’s first-person narrative) is the sort of figure who sucks all the oxygen out of a room – this works metaphorically as well as in the sense that Yara, again, cannot breathe here…

These 400 pages take place over just a week or so, as Yara prepares for the party while choking to death in her childhood bedroom, and a series of strange events and characters arise: mysterious long-lost family members show up and disappear, threatening messages new and old come to light, bodies are found. There are numerous fights and shouty phone calls, and old secrets from before her parents’ marriage come to light. The Gibsons are a family with some messes and dysfunction–in other words, perfectly normal, if not perfectly healthy. They are also “the only Black family on the block,” and Yara is always aware of the impact of race on her life and safety. There are links to old Black Hollywood royalty, and racism both then and now.

A plot element that threw me for much of the book was Yara’s amateur sleuthing, which is accepted as natural by so many characters, including an old friend of hers who is a sheriff’s deputy. It didn’t quite follow for me that Yara’s job as a writer for a fictional TV crime show, and her blood relationship to a recently deceased woman (potentially a murder in which Yara would be a suspect), would qualify her to get the inside information she receives from such an official source; I expected a little more leave-it-to-the-professionals. This was a minor sticking point, but it lasted long enough for me (a hundred pages or more?) to impact my experience of the book. A lot of Yara’s personality, bless her heart, is her anxiety, forgetfulness, and breathing difficulties. And (highlight white text to reveal spoilers): at the discovery that her father was married before he married her mother, Yara’s reaction is more violent than I found likely. I mean, I guess she might have heard of this before, but the way she flips out felt outsized to me. I did pause and remind myself that we don’t all react to anything in the same way; and it’s clear that Yara’s parents’ marriage carries a lot of weight for her, thus this big party. Ah well. I coached myself through it.

As I said, in the middle portion of the book, there were some draggy bits – especially as I dealt with these small but persistent questions. But it does pick back up again! My experience of the novel’s opening pages was electric: Hall grabbed me with scene, dialog, sensory detail, and a strong sense of place, and anxiety about family is pretty universally relatable; it was a great start. And by the big crescendo and denouement (including a compelling epilogue), we were right back on track and on pace. It was an enjoyable fictional world to sink into, overall: escapism, suspense, momentum. Not perfect, but well worth the price of admission.

Rating: 6-and-a-half puffs on the inhaler.

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The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Posted on May 9, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Former best friends reenter a scene of horror in this clever, terrifying novel about the dangers that lurk in friendships, home, and the self.

The singular Chuck Wendig (Blackbirds and more) brings his trademark blend of humor, profanity, and shrewd observation to the weirdly charismatic The Staircase in the Woods. Chilling, disturbing, and deliciously entertaining, this horror novel stars a group of one-time best friends who reunite as adults across a chasm of time and trauma. Nick is as abrasive as ever, but at least he gets them all back together again. Hamish has traded in his Birkenstocks, jam bands, and extra weight for fitness, church, and family. Lore (formerly Lauren) has achieved professional success, but only through an increasingly belligerent go-it-alone approach. Owen (aka Nailbiter) is barely surviving his mental health woes. And Matty, once their golden boy, hasn’t been seen since that day in the woods in 1998. Five teens went camping, four came back out again. Now, more than 20 years later, they have a chance to try to find out what went wrong–or lose themselves like Matty did.

Four dysfunctional adults walk into a different set of woods, fighting among themselves and against their own demons, and enter a sinister otherworld that may have consumed their friend. Wendig’s narrative emphasizes the strengths and failures of friendship, and the difficulties of both childhood and adulthood. His snark is obscenity laden but also earnest in its compassion. The Staircase in the Woods deals in torture, violence, and abuse, especially within families, portraying how connection to place and the importance of home can cause at least as much pain as comfort. The result is haunting and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 2, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 cuts.

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Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Posted on September 27, 2024 by pagesofjulia

I really enjoyed Gods of Jade and Shadow, with the caveat for sensitive readers to beware a certain amount of gore and darkness. This one is imaginative, compelling, and surely fulfills its claims to the horror genre; but some of those more horrifying elements started to push my tolerances, which are famously high (though not limitless). I’d thought about putting this in white text, like I do spoilers, but I think it deserves a proper trigger warning: this novel not only deals in sexual contact without consent, but those scenes were heightened – at least in my feelings – by a mind-control element that caused the nonconsenting party to enjoy what was happening, as it was happening (although not before or after). This gave me a unique ‘ick’ I’d perhaps not encountered before. And in considering the book now, I find that part of the experience is overshadowing the rest for me.

It’s a good story, and well executed. I like the setting – beginning in 1950s Mexico City and then moving to a classically disturbing, possibly haunted, gothic mansion in disrepair, high in the misty rural Mexican hills. I like the details, including society’s dos and don’ts and the dresses and accessories of a popular, pretty, privileged young woman, our protagonist, Noémi Taboada. She’s plucky, thinks for herself, is unwilling to settle for a young woman’s few destined roles. These days, she’s thinking she’d like to study anthropology in graduate school. She’s well read, and also loves a party, a nice dress, and a fawning young man (and preferably a new one on a regular schedule). I like her.

Her cousin Catalina is a bit different, more demure, a few years older, enchanted by fairy tales and romance, which is how she ends up married to the enigmatic Virgil Doyle. Married, and spirited away to the yet more enigmatic estate known as High Place, on an abandoned silver mine. Where Noémi is to visit, and perhaps to rescue her.

High Place is bad news, its residents sinister (and dedicated to eugenics, ick again), its history very mysterious. Noémi is up for a lot, but this place may get the best of her. There’s always Francis, a Doyle cousin who might – on and off – be an ally. There’s a creepy old cemetery (of course), and something strange going on with the mushrooms. There are actually some really interesting ideas at play. But, like I said, the special ick I found here challenged me quite a bit.

I’ve left the rating at a 7. It’s a well-done story. But it’s left me feeling not so great. I’m intrigued enough to keep on checking out Moreno-Garcia’s backlist.

Rating: 7 cards.

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The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle

Posted on July 29, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Victor LaValle: I loved The Changeling, couldn’t make it very far into The Ecstatic, did okay with The Ballad of Black Tom. I have found The Devil in Silver quite intriguing and absorbing; I don’t guess I loved it as much as The Changeling, but it sure did take me on a trip, and I’ll be thinking about it for some time.

We begin:

They brought the big man in on a winter night when the moon looked as hazy as the heart of an ice cube.

The big man will turn out to be Pepper, and he’s being brought into the New Hyde mental hospital in Queens by a trio of detectives who couldn’t be bothered to process him into the actual jail, and instead have defaulted to a simpler drop-off scenario. This will have long-lasting consequences for Pepper, however. One of the quickest questions to arise in the reader’s mind: who among us would countenance this involuntary commitment process without coming across a little unhinged? If I am perhaps a little drunk, indignant, and arguing my absolute sanity, will I read as sane, or…? Tiniest spoiler alert ever: Pepper is not immediately released from New Hyde. However reluctantly, he makes friends (of a sort), although his assumption that they don’t need psych meds any more than he does will be tested.

Pepper is no hero, no wronged but upstanding citizen. He’s rather average, maybe a little of an underachiever or a slob, deeply unremarkable, but that’s the point – none of these qualities should have him locked up, drugged against his will, restrained to a bed for inhumane days at a time. The methods of the doctors and nurses on staff (no heroes among them, but like Pepper, regular human beings capable of small graces and big messes) aren’t the worst of what New Hyde has to offer, though. There appears to be a veritable devil housed in a secure room just down the hall. But is this antagonist truly what it appears? Just how sane is anybody? (Questions of the un/reliable narrator may arise.)

There are deeply compelling characters here, and profound pathos, crimes and forgiveness and oh so many questions. The story is fairly explicit about questioning systems: the hospital has purchased a software program for its ancient computer that is supposed to allow staff to digitize patient charts. But it bought the wrong program, instead winding up with one that is supposed to help homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure. Except that program isn’t really supposed to help homeowners, but just get them lost in a maze of paperwork until, oops, the foreclosure has gone through. “Most systems barely work, but those same systems cover their asses much more successfully.”

Pepper is our protagonist, and most chapters feature his close-third-person perspective, but select few center other characters – his friends among the patients, or the staff – and even beyond that (one memorably checks in with an enormous lone rat, and the philosophies of rats). Stories apparently pulled from the news blur the line between Pepper’s fictional world and our real one (see also LaValle’s author’s note, which I loved). Vincent Van Gogh plays an important role. This is a novel about mental illness, societal ills and broken/working systems, with horror and realism tangled up together. It’s hard to look away from, even in its most disturbing moments. LaValle is strong.

Rating: 8 butts.

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The Axeman’s Carnival by Catherine Chidgey

Posted on July 15, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Told in the voice of a magpie, with humor and wisdom, this unflinching portrait of nature picks at the thin veil between the elemental violence and drama of both human and animal worlds.

Catherine Chidgey (Pet; Remote Sympathy) offers a singular combination of compassion, desperation, dark humor, and slow-building terror with The Axeman’s Carnival, set in rural high-country New Zealand. The story is told through the unusual perspective of a magpie fallen from the nest and rescued by a woman named Marnie, who lives on Wilderness Road with her husband, Rob, a sheep farmer and competitive axeman. They’re “under a lot of pressure,” a refrain that contributes to a general sense of foreboding: a drought threatens their livelihood; Marnie mourns a lost pregnancy; she is isolated from the world beyond their farm. An ominous thread runs through their lives in ways that readers gradually become aware of.

The narrator shares memories of being in the eggshell, occupying the nest with his sister and brothers. “She lifted me into her pillowed palm” and a relationship begins. Marnie releases the magpie to his flock, but he chooses to return to the woman he adores; she names him Tama, and posts his pictures to the Internet, which gains Tama a following. The sheep station suffers setbacks, and Rob’s temper and drinking become increasingly menacing, even as he trains for the annual competition where he hopes to win his 10th golden axe, which will offer both the affirmation he craves and a badly needed monetary prize. Tama’s Internet fame presents a financial opportunity for the family, but also puts them in the public eye, with new risks. Tama’s view of events is curious, in both senses of the word; “that was how houses worked,” he repeatedly notes, with each strange or sinister observation.

Magpies are very smart birds. Tama relates the story with humor and wisdom. He mimics human speech and understands it well enough to communicate, and the reader benefits from his viewpoint as he describes events, with grim foreshadowing. “When I think about what happened later, I remember that day,” he says, of various small violences. “Rob honed an axe with his honing stone…. He ran the blade through the hair on his forearm to test the sharpness, and we watched his crime show about shapely murdered women with torn-off clothes who’d let their attackers in their front doors.” Rob’s temper, his taste for crime shows and murdered women, his axes and admirable strength, his jealousy and Marnie’s fear, all contribute to the reader’s trepidation of what is to come. But The Axeman’s Carnival has tricks up its sleeve, and Tama himself should not be underestimated.

This review originally ran in the June 18, 2024 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cashews.

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