Book Review: Sunrise on the Reaping

This Hunger Games prequel explores Haymitch Abernathy's backstory—a gift for die-hard fans, even if it follows the usual formula

In 2023, we got President Snow's prequel: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. And now, in 2025, we get the painful history of Haymitch and what he experienced during the 50th Hunger Games (which takes place about 24 years before the first book in the series).

Haymitch is reaped from his home in the coal-mining District 12, and as it's the especially evil Quarter Quell, joins 47 other teens from around Panem.

If you've read any Hunger Games books, you're well aware of the formula they adhere to: Homey Domestic Scene, Tramautic Reaping, Travel, Parade, Training, Arena, Brutal Fighting, Multiple Violent Child Deaths, and Victory. Yes, it's a format, but it's somehow always entertaining. Collins writes not only overarching themes well —rebellion, hope, sabotage— but also the small details of a character's inner world. That's what makes the books so different from the movies. Both are great, of course, but the novels are primarily one character's inner monologue as they experience horrific events.

Our boy Haymitch is footloose and fancy-free prior to his reaping, in love with a girl name Lenore Dove and working part-time for a bootlegger. It's interesting reading Sunrise on the Reaping when you know Haymitch will end up the sole survivor of his Hunger Games, and it's utterly tragic knowing that he ends up an alcoholic to escape the trauma that followed him out of the animatronic arena.

The best part of the book is also maybe what some people will complain of—the surprise appearance of other beloved characters. Other folks have called it fanservice, which is an exceedingly overused term when it comes to criticizing gargantuan works of IP. Personally, I loved it.

When my girl Effie Trinket turns up as a college student, it was like seeing a lost-long friend. I shrieked! And when Mags makes bean stew for the District 12 tributes, I wished I could have been in the kitchen with them. It's the small, memorable moments that make the world so lived-in and addicting to read.

Did the world need to see all of the various backstories of these and other characters, including a young Plutarch Heavensbee and a (younger) Beetee? Personally, I love every single glimpse into the Hunger Games world, so for me the answer is a resounding Yes.  One thing about me is: I'm always, always going to read a new Hunger Games book. But some of the things we learn about the featured characters also help subtly explain both their motivations and actions years later in Catching Fire—like how Haymitch knew about the rebellion and the plot to rescue Peeta and Katniss.

But the opposite argument is that we didn't necessarily need to be reminded that these games are brutal, that President Snow will absolutely destroy everyone you love, or that rebellion is somehow always brewing in the Districts AND the Capitol.

And yet we keep eating these books up. Every generation of these characters somehow carries on the flame of rebellion in the face of absolute brutality. And as for us readers, we'll continue to be here for every iteration with mockingjay pins on our bags and three fingers raised in salute.

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10.

Bonuses: Effie Trinket, no one on Earth could ever make me hate you.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Anime Review: Sakamoto Days

A likeable action comedy with lots of found family and redeemed villain vibes

In the realm of anime, plots align on a continuum ranging from edgy intensity to pastel-colored comedy. Netflix’s new anime Sakamoto Days gives us more of the latter, but with just enough swirls of unexpected intensity to keep viewers guessing what will happen next. Sakamoto Days is the story of a stoic, top-level, lethal assassin who turns into a frumpy, mild-mannered family man, but has trouble keeping his violent past life at bay. Despite focusing on the more slice of life elements, the show leans into the fantastical, which means various assassin characters can shape-shift, mind-read, and become invisible. Like a sharp pinch of salt in a sweet dessert, this story infuses a contrast of drama, violence, and sci-fi to counterbalance the soft glow of family life and friendship. However, the series never dives too deeply into true seriousness and remains a likeable, found family action/comedy. For fans who are waiting for the next season of Spy x Family to drop, Sakamoto Days is a decent option to tide you over.

Taro Sakamoto is a notorious hit man working for the nation’s top assassin agency. He's a stoic, handsome, loner, with super-human reflexes and an impossibly high kill-count. His life changes when he meets an ordinary young cashier, Aoi, at a late-night convenience store, and all those years of repressed emotions implode into insta-love, marriage, and the birth of their adorable daughter, Hana. Sakamoto and Aoi open a convenience store and live happily in the neighborhood. Sakamoto also recreates himself from a sleek, muscular assassin to a (seemingly) larger, older, unthreatening, frumpy everyman. Of course, his past kill count and his abandonment of his elite assassin agency cause him to have multiple bounties on his head. Which means life will never truly be normal for him. While he busies himself stocking shelves or sweeping floors, vengeful assassins inevitably seek him out and are deceived, or at least temporarily confused, by his changed appearance. But Sakamoto is still very much a killer. He can easily dodge bullets, crush steel, and MacGyver ordinary objects into weapons. The thing that keeps the show and his life from turning into a bloodbath is not his physical abilities, but his willpower. Early in the series, we discover that his cheerful, unassuming wife knows all about his past and has made him promise not to kill again as a condition of their marriage. When cruel assassins come after him, Sakamoto has to figure out how to protect his family and stop, maim, or otherwise defeat them without fully killing them. Unfortunately, he still has his killer instinct and is often depicted imagining killing others (even allies).

As a result, one of the comedy elements is Sakamoto intellectually figuring a way around each person’s (technical) death. When pushed to his limits, Sakamoto reverts to his original youthful slim form, but can still fight with lethal power in either version of himself. Over time, Sakamoto attracts an extended found family, including telepath assassin Shin, orphaned mafia princess Lu, and quirky sharpshooter Heisuke. Each episode provides backstories of the various side characters and even the antagonists.

While the family vibe of the show may seem like a redo of Spy x Family or Way of the Househusband, Sakamoto Days has some fun plot elements that make it unique. First, the family dynamics are appealing. Sakamoto’s wife Aoi knows about his past and understands the demands he faces in trying to remain undercover. Their decision to keep his name as the store’s name seems to willingly invite trouble. Despite this, she insists that he not actually kill, and apparently views this as a form of atonement for his past murders. Aoi as the knowledgeable wife is reminiscent of Kagome’s informed and practical mother in Inuyasha, who pragmatically packed supplies for her daughter’s dangerous adventures. Having Aoi aware of the reality of the situation, instead of keeping her in ignorance, is a nice change of pace. Sakamoto Days also leans into the fantastical elements of the narrative. Like Anya in Spy x Family, former hitman Shin is an orphan with lab-created telepathic abilities. He often endures hilariously stressful moments sensing Sakamoto’s periodic and graphic desire to kill him when Sakamoto gets annoyed. Shin’s antagonist, Seba, can become invisible. Additionally, Sakamoto can change his body size like Choji Akimichi in Naruto. However, Sakamoto also magically changes his features, becoming younger, losing his facial hair, and changing the style of his hair.

Despite Sakamoto’s determination not to kill, the other assassins have no such reservations. There is plenty of on-screen killing in the show. The result can be a jarring influx of blood and slashing in the midst of funny or endearing scenes. In one episode, Sakamoto’s adorable little daughter Hana shows a strong moral compass by showing compassion to a defeated assassin.

Sakamoto Days doesn’t provide a great deal of deep philosophical introspection. Instead, we have a light, endearing journey from cruelty to kindness. The true internal struggle of the story is Sakamoto’s determination to keep his vow not to kill despite his clear continuing desire to do so. That honesty is refreshing, and Sakamoto’s own struggles mirror and support the misfit assassins he takes into his family. Not every anime needs to be powerfully intense, and Sakamoto Days gives us permission to laugh out loud even when the world is filled with cruelty.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• light comedy adventure break
• found family and redeemed villain tropes
• simple storytelling with fantastical elements

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris - Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Review: The Tufa Novels, by Alex Bledsoe

Irish fairy Appalachian hillbillies playing bluegrass

In the creation of his Tufa chronicles, Alex Bledsoe has perfected the art of carving out a niche for oneself in a rich and varied field. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a series so utterly confident in being distinctly what it is. The foundational conceit is this: uncountable millennia ago, some of the Tuatha Dé Danann (that’s Irish fairies, in case you didn’t know) got exiled from their homeland and ended up in the mountains of Appalachia. Time passed, they interbred with local humans, and also got really into Smoky Mountain Bluegrass music. Now, in the modern day, the Tufa community keep largely to themselves, living in rural Cloud County, Tennessee, in an odd sort of numinous hillbilly squalor. One minute they might be sprouting wings and flying off in the night winds; but the next morning they’re sitting in a ratty lawn chair in their underpants, throwing beer cans in the front yard of a double-wide trailer. Some of them might be playing transcendent music and singing fit to break your heart; others might be poaching deer or driving beat-up pick-up trucks, drinking straight bourbon out of a paper bag and looking to harass pretty girls. They live in Needsville, Tennessee, a town with a bed & breakfast, internet, grocery stores, schools, and a small tourism industry associated with its location in the Smoky Mountains—except sometimes outsiders can’t seem to find Needsville, and cell phone signals fail to get out. Bledsoe’s genius is in balancing these two worlds effortlessly, so that each feels as real as the other, both equally foundational parts of what and who the Tufa are.

Because the Tufa are, truly, a product of two worlds. After aeons in Appalachia, they are no longer Tuatha Dé Danann, and all of the books center around themes of duality and identity: How much ‘pure’ Tufa blood is necessary to retain whatever it is that makes a person truly Tufa? Sometimes it seems as if an unbroken bloodline is vital to preserve the magical heritage; other times the magic emerges from people who have been the product of multiple generations of couplings with humans. Sometimes it seems as if the Tufa magic derives from their Tuatha origins; other times it seems as if they’ve found a new source of power and identity in the entities that belong to the mountains of Tennessee. Some Tufa have been alive since their original arrival in Appalachia, exempt from the standard human relationship with time, remembering everything about who they once were; others have been born in America, and feel more tied to the human world around them than the supernatural roots of their ancestors.

The books in this series stand alone well, each telling a complete story, fully contained within its covers. The best ones lean into the duality of human and supernatural by bringing in an outsider to witness or engage in the events of the story. In the third, Long Black Curl, a rock star crashes a plane in Tennessee in the 1950s and wanders in the woods until a local hunter welcomes him to spend the evening by his campfire. When he walks out again, it is the 21st century. In the fourth, Chapel of Ease, a puzzled Broadway actor, dazzled by the talent of a new playwright in town, finds his way to Needsville, where he looks to solve an unanswered mystery embedded in the musical whose lead role he plays. In the last, The Fairies of Sadieville, we get a layered narrative construction: the main story has two graduate students arrive in Needsville to research an old movie hidden in a sealed film canister. They uncover the story of another town in Cloud County, from the first decades of the 20th century, which was, briefly, a coal town, until it disappeared from the face of the earth, from all remaining maps, and from everyone’s memory. The story of what happened in the coal town itself cycles back to a third embedded narrative, in which the Tufa themselves are new arrivals to North America, no longer the mysterious indigenes mystifying outsiders, but outsiders themselves, mystifying to the locals.

Structurally and thematically, these books are very strong. The vibes are rich and specific; and the setting is rock solid, fleshed out with recurring characters whose personalities are distinct and serve to make the town of Needsville feel real. And throughout each story, we have the running theme of music, the heart of what the Tufa are. They sing, they play; and though the fractures in their community run deep, all is temporarily set aside when they come together to make music. All the books are built upon this foundation.

Narratively, Bledsoe takes pains to avoid the easiest tropes that might cheapen the impact of what he’s built. For example, in the first book, The Hum and the Shiver, the main character, Bronwyn Hyatt, is returning to Needsville after having spent time in the military. A mission went horribly wrong; she was captured, injured, and sexually assaulted (or ass-fucked, as she puts it, because one thing the Tufa are not is decorous in their language). She doesn’t remember much of what happened, but the process resulted in the loss of her magic, and for various Tufa-internal reasons, it’s a matter of some urgency that she recover it. The book thus sets up a kind of tension, in which it seems that the only way to recover her magic is to relive the memory of her assault: face the trauma, accept it, and only in this way can she move forward. I was squirming the whole time as this plotline played out, because it seemed as if it was building towards some horrible kind of titillating climax involving an on-page rape.

But rather than fulfill that trope, Bledsoe sidesteps it neatly. Bronwyn decides that, actually, she’s perfectly happy living without the memory of that horrible thing happening to her. The lost magic does not need to be a metaphor for her imperfect sense of self that can never be whole until she relives the atrocity. She can find a way forward without going through it all again. I’m not thrilled that this plotline existed, because rape-as-motivation is gross and bad; but given that Bledsoe decided to invoke the trope, I’m impressed at how he subverted it.

This discomfort from the first book carries through the whole series in small ways. In every book there is always something that rubs me just a bit the wrong way. For one, the narrative is extremely male-gazey. Not maliciously so—and it’s clear that Bledsoe is trying super hard not to be a jerk about it. We’ve got explicitly matriarchal power structures, combined with cultural norms that do not shame women for promiscuity or unmarried pregnancies. But still: there are an awful lot of highly sexy Tufa ladies who shimmy and purr and wriggle in a way the men do not match.

Other books make narrative decisions that (for me) don’t quite work. In Chapel of Ease, the whole book is built around a mystery that never gets answered. There are thematic reasons to justify leaving the mystery unsolved, but they depend on the magic of the Tufa music to fill in the gaps. I haven’t got the Tufa music outside the book, so I walked away feeling unsatisfied. In The Fairies of Sadieville, the nested narrative is a clever conceit, but each narrative is increasingly shallow. In principle this could act as a commentary on the way history can become simplified, losing nuance in the memories that are preserved only as stories. Except, like the unsolved mystery in Chapel of Ease, it doesn’t work: many of the Tufa were there at the events being portrayed, so the simplification cannot be the result of oral traditions smoothing out the snags of real history. And most egregiously, the fifth book, Gather Her Round, culminates in an act of shocking brutality that we are invited to interpret as justice, but which I can only see as murder.

These books are not perfect. But they are unlike anything else I have read. Redneck fairy bluegrass musicians is something that feels like it should be a joke; but in Bledsoe’s hands, the Tufa are portrayed even-handedly, virtues and vices alike; and the result endows them with dignity and respect for their otherworldly wonders, alongside a clear-eyed acknowledgment of their undeniable humanity.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10: Well worth your time and attention.

Highlights:

• Bluegrass music

• Hillbilly redneck fairies

• Rural squalor

• Not always successful narrative decisions

References: 

Bledsoe, Alex. The Hum and the Shiver [Tor Books, 2011].

Bledsoe, Alex. Whisp of a Thing [Tor Books, 2013].

Bledsoe, Alex. Long Black Curl [Tor Books, 2015].

Bledsoe, Alex. Chapel of Ease [Tor Books, 2016].

Bledsoe, Alex. Gather Her Round [Tor Books, 2017].

Bledsoe, Alex. The Fairies of Sadieville [Tor Books, 2018].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison

A third round of walking places and drinking tea, amidst the horrors.

Throughout the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy, Katherine Addison has made clear time and again that this is a complex world with complex, intertwined problems, and none can be solved without having some effect on several others. Each book shows Thara Celehar, a priest of the god of the moon and death, called upon as a Witness to unravel knots that seem impossible to be disentangled, and in so doing uncovering more and more problems that need to be solved. In many ways, this is a thesis that runs through Addison's other work in the same world - The Goblin Emperor - in which Maia, the titular ruler, must learn the boundaries of his new role in charge, and that every action has reaction, in order to begin to rule either competently or successfully.

It is no surprise, then, that this third installment in the series features what seems to be a culmination of this thesis – a problem so intertwined that it binds up with the potential financial collapse of the whole empire. If that were the case, if we did have a problem whose just resolution was a mire of compromise, it would be a fitting end to a well constructed trilogy.

Except… that culmination happens around ¾ through the book. And while, in both its foreshadowing and the way the characters discuss it, it seems to be fulfilling that entire purpose, in the execution and the aftermath, it manages to undercut itself so completely as to hollow out the entire arc. A deeply frustrating resolution to something so well crafted.

And yet, all is not lost, because there have always been several things going on at once in these books. Alongside the steady emphasis of complex problems, there has been an equally steady emotional progression happening for Thara Celehar. When first we met him in The Goblin Emperor, he was visibly depressed, burnt out and full of inexpressible grief, a situation only mildly improved by the time he comes to us as a protagonist. Through the course of The Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones, Celehar manages almost unwittingly to gather around himself people who come to care for him, often very deeply. Over time and with a pacing that reinforces the difficulty and realism of the progression, these friends begin to make him realise that he is not alone in the world, that he can ask for help and be answered, that he need not suffer in silence, that he is wanted and loved. This thread also reaches its crescendo in The Tomb of Dragons, and where the other failed, this one, in a perhaps unexpected way, succeeds admirably.

Part of that success comes in its definition – Celehar does not finish the story full of renewed vigour, ready to tackle the entire world. It ends, instead, in hope, and in the beginning of possibilities for new things. His perspective has constantly been one with no presumptions on others, no expectations, nothing that suggests he might hope for more than the bare minimum possible. Through The Tomb of Dragons, however, we start to see something kindling in him that sees people – new people – in a different light. Little flashes of different patterns of thought, starting to catch himself admiring a guard captain with vivid eyes, for instance. At the same time, some of his existing relationships reach their own crescendo – there is a particularly evocative scene in which he demands to know what one of those close friends wants from him, a question thoroughly indicative of his way of thinking. The answer is, of course, friendship. It has been clear to me throughout why his friends seek him out. It is meant to be clear to the reader. The crisis point is reached when Celehar’s determination to deny himself the truth cannot be sustained anymore. Only once this crisis passes can something new begin to grow in its place.

What Addison has, I think, done well here is to have this crisis of friendship happen alongside that burgeoning attraction, but separate. This has been a series very much about a man struggling with the experiences he’s suffered and the world he lives in, with the grief of his lost beloved. Having his friends be a fixed point, a certainty that grows and grows throughout the series, feels like an anchor point to his healing, or a safe haven. Having, after so long, a new attraction grow that is not entangled with this emotional safety net feels like both a safe choice, and a healthy one. It also gives an interesting contrast in how we see, through Celehar’s eyes, his approach to someone he finds attractive versus the baffled acceptance of a new friend. There’s a difference there, and being able to see it beginning from a fresh spark makes it all the more hopeful.

And then, there is a third strand, a little subtler under the other two, of the winds of change beginning to blow through the empire. This again has been seeded throughout Addison's books in this world, and again is starting to bubble a little closer to the surface in this final part of the trilogy, though still quite subtly. In some ways, it makes sense - the world of the books is patriarchal, hierarchical, tradition-bound and rigid. Of course change would come slowly. It is one of the many interconnected problems of the books. So to an extent, the very limited scope of the end point of this arc - seeing Celehar change the way he thinks about the world, catching himself when he observes a group and instead of seeing "ah, a bunch of elves", realising it's a bunch of elven men - is in keeping with what we've seen so far. This is a world where change is limited and incremental. Why would it be different here? And yet, at the same time, it is somewhat disappointing to see. Celehar's colleague, Tomasaran, has become a core part of the circle of friends he has gained, and has been instrumental in his beginning to recognise the gender-based flaws of the society in which he lives. It feels cold comfort that the best she can hope for is "a man starts to see she maybe was kind of right that everything sucks for her".

But this is the core tension of this world. Much though I love The Goblin Emperor specifically and the series generally, it exists within the problem of its themes, and those themes - all things in a complex society are connected to other things, power has a price and limitations, even an emperor cannot act unilaterally and without consequence, people can only do their best and try to make things a little better if they can - come with downsides. A "burn it all down" approach simply would not work within what Addison has set up. From the starting point we are given, fixing a racist, hierarchical and sexist society incrementally would take an extremely long time (if it is indeed possible). And so there cannot be, without upending everything the series leads us to expect, the kind of true, whole resolution that would be emotionally satisfying - much as Celehar's personal emotional arc ends on the hope of better things, so too does this sense that things are moving towards the better in the empire. And while, when those limits are imposed only on the scope of one person, I find them not only reasonable but more satisfying than the alternative, I cannot necessarily say the same when the scope widens out to a societal level.

This is a theme that simply cannot get closure, unless Addison plans to keep on writing through hundreds of years of in-world history, or write a revolution. I recognise the narrative necessity of it, and my own frustration, and both are legitimate, but in tension with one another. I wonder if that's the point - am I intended to feel this frustration, and that to be part of the emotional payoff? This is a series that works within something flawed and terrible to tell stories digging into specific ideas. To expect full catharsis would go against my understanding of the terribleness of the world. If it was intended to make me keep thinking about it, it's certainly worked.

Possibly, on an emotional level, I want something impossible. I want this story about a man walking places, drinking tea, and solving connected problems that require compromise and imperfection, and I want something that comes to a grand, satisfying conclusion that fits within my own views of the world and what a "good" ending looks like. And I want those both to happen in a way that feels well-written, plausible and grounded within the thematic framing of the world. But I can't have all of them. So perhaps the solution is to reframe my thinking a little.

Stories, to be worthwhile, do not need to come to conclusions that fully satisfy my moral expectations of the world. It is possibly to explore something in a bad or messy situation, and have that story achieve something thematically interesting through the mechanism of that exploration, without necessarily "fixing" all the problems. Through this lens, though there are still problems, I think The Tomb of Dragons succeeds much more admirably. If anything, the problem becomes and insufficient commitment to the thesis of eternal compromise, rather than an inability to reject it. 

And so… two incompletely successful strands to the story, and one successful. And yet… I found I liked it anyway. There is something deeply comforting in the repetition throughout this series of Celehar’s walking between places and asking for things, and going to tea with people. There is always purpose in both, enough to sustain a plot drive, but at a pace that just feels… comfortable. It’s so mundane, amid occasional intrusions of strangeness and excitement. Whatever else Addison does or does not do, I always find myself happy to spend the time as Celehar wanders about, trying to solve problems in small, connected ways, and it is just as present here as in either of the other two books in the series. While there is that disappointment that some of the thematic promises were not fully upheld, Addison did hold up what turns out to have been the most important part of the bargain for me – this quiet, meandering experience of Amalo, tea shop and bureaucratic problem by tea shop and bureaucratic problem. It is the feel of the thing, more than anything else, that I craved. And I got that feeling. Whether the lingering thoughts about the bounds imposed on the scope of the story resolve ultimately into something I like or dislike, the fact is that I am continuing to think about it. And that, too, I craved.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Continues the tone and pacing well-executed in the previous books
• Murders are indeed solved, can confirm
• Tea, walking and cats

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Katherine Addison, The Tomb of Dragons, [Tor Books, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto

Stick it to the trillionaires with the debut heist novel Hammajang Luck.

Makana Yamamoto’s sci-fi debut Hammajang Luck is the perfect escapist read for these trying times. Edie has been released from prison and comes home after eight years, determined to go straight, except something about their release is off. The partner who betrayed them to the cops in the first place is waiting for them, Angel Huang. Of course, Angel has a job for Edie—the biggest and last score they will ever need.

Edie says no and tries to find a job on the Kepler Space Station, but they’ve been blacklisted by the industry that controls the space station for all practical purposes. Joyce Atlas is a tech trillionaire with a thin veneer of philanthropy, but his neurologic tech is making people easier to manipulate, control, and harm. With no job or propsects, Edie is forced to turn to Angel, and the more they learn about Atlas and his plans, the more disgusted they are. The job quickly becomes personal.

Angel forms a crew of the best, from muscle to acrobatics to grifters. Edie is the runner in charge of helping them get in and out of Atlas’s secure vault. The space station is riddled with tunnels, but Edie still knows how to run through the space station’s guts while paying their respects to the station. It’s easy to die in these tunnels, and Edie has to deal with deadly electric discharge, dead ends, and venting atmosphere. While Angel’s plan seems solid, Edie wrestles with the guilt of possibly going back to jail and leaving their family in the lurch—their pregnant sister Andie and her two kids. But if Edie can help Angel pull off this job, then their money problems are solved forever.

The novel’s cover promises a sci-fi heist, and that’s what Yamamoto delivers. The sci-fi setting and focus on queer, underdog characters was a refreshing break from the often fantasy settings of other heist novels with perhaps one or two queer characters. Much like heist films such as the Ocean’s franchise, there’s an ensemble cast of characters to keep track of with all their specialties. Some of them become more multi-dimensional than others, such as Duke and Nakano, an older couple of queer grifters on which the plot hinges as they have to hook Atlas’s attention, but each character has a clear role to play in the story.

One reason the ensemble cast doesn’t get as much attention is due to the closer POV. At the heart, this is Edie’s story, and the reader sees Edie’s internal struggles as they try to piece their life back together after prison. Edie needs to reconnect with their sister and niece and nephew, and they feel sharply that they haven’t helped raise the kids or assist with the finances. Their niece Paige has cancer, and the extra financial strain has left Edie’s sister picking up additional shifts even at eight months pregnant. Because of the close focus on Edie, their family commitments are more fully developed than some of the heist characters, but the extra focus makes Edie’s internal struggles feel more intense as the guilt and fear of arrest weigh them down. 

Where the novel shines is how queerness is woven into the story without being the center piece. It’s an accepted part of the worldbuilding, and Edie’s pronouns are never questioned, but rather recognized immediately. This acceptance doesn’t mean there isn’t injustice, but rather re-focuses the issue onto class. As the story progresses, the depths of Atlas’s disregard for the station’s impoverished people becomes evident, impacting how the crew chooses to proceed. The queer-friendly worldbuilding in a somewhat dystopic space station was an enjoyable addition to the story.

At the novel’s heart, it leans into the fun of the heist and away from the issues—such as class—that are brought up. Ultimately, I found the balance to be effective except in one instance: Edie’s rebound after prison. They spent eight years locked up, and some brief references suggest it was a pretty bad time. That being said, Edie seems largely unaffected by their time in prison other than missing out on the lives of their sister and her kids. While it’s clear Yamamoto chose to focus on the romp, it felt untrue to Edie’s character and the situation that a poor, queer person wouldn’t carry some trauma from the prison system. 

In their bio on the back cover, Yamamoto says they love “imagining what the future might look like for historically marginalized communities.” This novel is a strong debut in that sense. One of my favorite parts of the novel was the inclusion of Pidgin. Including Pidgin and other cultural references to Hawai‘i in the far future is a powerful pushback against the homogenizing force of science fiction. I look forward to reading Yamamoto’s next novel and seeing how they continue to accomplish this artistic goal. 

--

Reference: Yamamoto, Makana. Hammajang Luck [Harper Voyager, 2025].

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.

 

Film Review: The Parenting

Hell is other people... 's expectations.

You know how conservatives keep saying that queer people are possessed by demons? Well, the new HBO Max horror/comedy/romance film The Parenting turns the tables and argues that the actual demon is intolerance. Picture this scenario: you're nervously introducing your boyfriend to your family, hoping that they'll like each other, and all of a sudden, the loving father you've known all you life turns out to harbor a hateful spirit inside of him, one that spews homophobic slurs and even attacks your boyfriend physically. In our supposedly modern times, that's a nightmare queer people still dread. That's why a jocular title like The Parenting is quite clever: although the format of the story is that of spending a vacation weekend at a remote haunted house, this is really a movie about being terrified of your own parents. While it draws copiously from the usual tropes of the haunted house genre, as well as the meet-the-parents genre, the movie wouldn't work without the queerness element at the center of it. This is a specifically queer fear that can only be faced and overcome through queer means.

The movie starts with a prologue in the 80s, on the night the series M.A.S.H. broadcast its final episode. That's an important signpost: although it was set in the Korean War, M.A.S.H. was widely perceived as an allegory for the Vietnam War and for the heated sentiments it sparked among Americans. The end of M.A.S.H. coincides with the end of an era of countercultural experimentation and the rise, in its stead, of the conservative nightmare that still haunts the American consciousness. And in that prologue, the manifestation of that nightmare is juvenile disobedience, which of course was tied to the Satanic Panic and the cultural anxieties about the fate of the nuclear family. In a deceptively simple scene, we see a mother struggle to get her kids to come to the dinner table, only to be dragged to the underworld by something sinister. It takes the son too, and lastly, the daughter, who until that moment had been locked in her room with as-of-yet unspecified female company. It's a very subtle hint, but yes, this character is definitely queer. A possible reading, given the events that will follow, is that this specific demon is one that consumes families where someone is queer, which is why it's significant that this prologue happens in the 80s. (We learn later that said female company is the quintessential incarnation of everything Reaganites were scared of: a sexually unafraid teenager with a goth-ish/punk-ish aesthetic and pagan leanings. It's this archetypal bogeyman that brings the demon into the house, which strikes me as a fitting encapsulation of the way the conservative mind blames the culturally deviant for the hatred thrown at them.)

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we meet our actual protagonists: two young gay men, very cute, very much in love, and very nervous about the special weekend vacation they've organized for their respective families to meet for the first time. As it happens, the house they've rented is the same one from the prologue. And sure enough, after night falls, things start making strange noises. So far, so normal for a haunted house movie. Except this is too similar to the sound of, as a character puts it, "interplay." Each couple believes the other couple is doing it, and the movie extends this joke for as long as it will give. Here we get our first impression of the precise nature of this form of queer fear: telling your parents about your significant other implies making your parents aware that you are a sexual being. This is true of any pairing of orientations, but parents of straight children have the privilege of not having to imagine other forms of "interplay."

This fear reoccurs later, when one of the couple's parents, already possessed by the demon, starts throwing around the kind of hurtful remarks that people with little imagination use against queer people. And bring up the problem of having little imagination because, truly, it seems to break queerphobes's brains to think about a gay couple having a sex life. In a curious reversal, other scenes in the movie push the two young gay men to think of their parents as sexual beings, in awkward reenactments of the Freudian Urszene where children happen upon their parents' naked bodies. In themselves, these scenes are well executed jokes. But in the context of the implicit sexual humiliation that the demon inflicts on our protagonists, the choice to cast the same gaze back at the parents exposes the absurdity of the intended attack.

So how do you defeat this demon? To complete this analysis of the movie's themes, I'm going to have to spoil the ending. One of our protagonists, saddened by his father's deteriorated state, decides to invite the demon into himself and then ask his boyfriend to kill him. Let's untangle what this choice means. As I said above, the actual demon is intolerance. Inviting the demon into yourself for the purpose of taking it down with you is the movie's way of representing a case of internalized queerphobia leading to suicide. Now let's take the metaphorical eyeglasses off for a moment, because this is the core message of the movie. In the nightmare scenario where you take your boyfriend to meet your parents and they react violently, internalized queerphobia leading to suicide is one of the possible outcomes. It has happened and keeps happening in real life. Fortunately, in the movie this plan does not succeed. As our protagonists discover, the true way to destroy this demon (of intolerance) is to starve it of a human host to invade.

You shouldn't expect any new tricks from this movie, either comedy- or horror-wise. But it works. The performances are enjoyable, the leading couple has a sweet chemistry, and the dialogues ring true to the everyday dynamics of a queer family. Only a content warning is warranted for dogs that die of slapstick shenanigans during the movie. Otherwise, you'll spend a fun time laughing and/or screaming at The Parenting.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Book Review: The Witch Roads

The first part of Elliott’s newest fantasy series that hits the power chords of her themes.

Elen is a deputy courier, a position she has gotten by luck, and skill, and a secret she dare not tell. She walks the roads of the province she lives in, delivering messages, scouting the terrain and always looking for the dreaded Spore. But when a prince from the Imperial Palace comes on a quest of his own, Elen, and her ward are caught up in intrigue, magic, adventure, and the revelation of long buried secrets on all sides.

Her story, the story of Kem, and of the prince are the heart of The Witch Roads, the newest fantasy novel from Kate Elliott.

The Witch Roads is a novel that I could spend an entire goodly sized review discussing just the plot and setup of the world that Elliott builds here. I am not going to focus so much on the plot on this one and after explaining the world, instead explore the book from a broader, thematic angle If you’ve read Elliott’s previous work, just about any of her previous work, you know that she likes complicated, intricate plots that a reader can sink into. Complicated characters. Intricate worldbuilding. But as much as I could tell you about the characters and plots, I want to tackle this a little differently.

So let me tell you about this world. Elliott has put us in the outer ring of an empire that has seen rises and falls, a stratified realm with strong class and social divisions and expectations of duty. We’re not quite at the borders of the Empire at our starting place of Orledder Halt, but we’re well removed from the center of power (that comes in the form of the prince and his entourage). This is a world that is rightly afraid and is fighting a battle against an incursion of something magical, dreadful and dangerous. It takes two forms--the Pall, which are whole areas covered by a dangerous fog, and the Spore, a magical corrupting power that can corrupt and control plants, animals... and people. The Spore is mostly found in the Pall, but can and does irrupt randomly in places and those irruptions must be dealt with quickly, or else whole communities are at risk from the Spore.

The titular Witch Roads are roads that the empire has built that resist the power of the Pall and the Spore alike. These are what allows the empire to still be an empire, although going off road is dangerous and that’s where people like Elen as deputy courier come in, as well as higher ranked people such as Wardens and Surveyors. This is thus an Empire trying its best to hold together and hold on against an implacable threat, as well as incursions from the aivar, who are non humans who are a threat at the Empire’s borders.

There is a richness to the world and its features that readers of previous Elliott novels will love. There are Griffin riders (a distant call to the Eagle Riders of the Crossroads universe). Strange ancient ruins. Cuisine, drink and food. The layout of officials residences. Heart Temples. Elliott packs a lot of story into her worldbuilding, it’s not only immersive, but it tells a lot about the story she is trying to tell. And there are funny and delightful bits in the worldbuilding too. When you read this book, read carefully how Halts are described in terms of name, setting and location. When you get it... you will get it. I was most amused.

But even more important than this world are the themes that Elliott hits. These are her power chords, you have seen these in other works of hers, but here she is...unleashed in a way few of her other books have really tried to grab. This is a platonic ideal of Elliott laying out themes she cares about on the table, all the while wrapping it up in that aforementioned worldbuilding, complicated characters and intricate plotting. When I think about this world, I think about the worldbuilding, sure but I think, more than in previous Kate Elliott’s books, about the themes she explores here.

Elliott’s first theme is bodily autonomy and choice. She tackles this in all of her main characters and many of the minor ones at all. Elen and Kem’s origins, which are slowly revealed throughout the book (until a Octavia Butler Wild Seed-like part at the end where all is revealed) are shown as a narrative of Elen, Kem and her late partner Ao’s desire to be able to control their destiny and fate and autonomy. Multiple times, it is revealed, they have been on the run in a search for that, fighting against worlds, places, people, who would take it away from them. Elen’s time in Orledder Halt where we meet here has been the longest time of peace for her...a peace disrupted by the arrival of the prince.

Kem fits into this because, and it is a spoiler, we learn that Kem has been seeking choices of their own, and in fact, although born female in body, has chosen to be a man. This choice, although a right, is challenged, and Kem’s seeking of his own path and autonomy is right from the first pages, when Elen is taking him on his rounds, seeking to offer him the path she had as a Courier. What Kem actually wants for himself finally becomes clear, and it is a constant struggle for the young man to find and hold his place and find his own autonomy of body and place in a society that is very much stratified and resists that. Elen’s concerns for Kem and her wardship (you could call it motherhood) and her hopes and fears for Kem run smack into Kem’s own desires and needs and it is a great source of conflict, drama and story.

And then there is the prince. The prince comes from privilege, power and people acceding to his power...except when it seems that others are scheming against him, in quite deadly fashion. But when he encounters a Haunt, and is possessed by the Haunt, we are once again set on questions of autonomy and power. The Haunt claims that he can’t possess someone unwillingly, but his possession of the prince seems like a borderline rule-skirting case at *best*. While the OG prince is an unsympathetic character at best, and the Haunt-prince very much more appealing (there are even sparks between Elen and him), we are always reminded of the autonomy problem--did the prince, who is, according to the Haunt, sleeping while the Haunt possesses him for his own ends, really a consenting party to this arrangement?

And then there are of course questions of loyalty, duty, sacrifice and honor that I’ve noticed in Elliott’s work at least since the Crown of Stars series. With Elen, the Haunted prince and everyone else on the road, the plotting and worldbuilding collide with that duty as the Haunted prince seeks his own end, the Prince’s retinue must be kept from knowing what happened, and Elen and Kem caught in the middle of it all. Intrigues and betrayals and tangled loyalties rise up in the minor characters, as Elliott expertly gives them their own arcs, minor spotlights, and story backgrounds. Like many of her works, the minor characters of Elliott’s work get more character building than some (to remain nameless) authors' primary characters.

There are also minor themes here and there, especially regarding the nature of history and what is recorded, and even a touch of exploring the consequences of colonialism and xenophobia as well.

I have enjoyed the shorter works that Elliott has offered lately (The Keeper’s Six, Servant Mage) and hope for more in those worlds, especially The Keeper’s Six (longtime readers know that I am all about multiverses, thank you very much). The Witch Roads is Elliott in full on fat fantasy (although this is not as long as some of her other fantasy and SF novels) mode. It's the first in a duology, and the ending is a stopping point, not an offramp point. But my nature as a Elliott stan is well known, and so I know what I am signing up for. And there is such richness in this story, that I can commend the book to you even if the story is not yet complete.

One thing, and its not Elliott’s fault, is that the Amazon page for the book gives away what turns out to be a tremendous spoiler that I am glad I did not read before reading the arc of this book. Caveat lector.

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Highlights:

• Big fat Kate Elliott fantasy in the Kate Elliott style. 
• Strong and immersive Worldbuilding
• Power chords of classic Elliott themes, unvarnished and in full force
• Beautiful and evocative cover.

Reference: Elliott, Kate, The Witch Roads, [Tor Books, 2025]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.