Book Review: A Palace Near the Wind by Ai Jiang

 A vividly stylised tale of a woman pulled from her homeland and all she knows into a baffling and hostile new world.

A Palace Near the Wind, the new novella from Ai Jiang, follows Lufeng as she is required to leave her homeland of Feng to marry the king whose palace encroaches ever closer onto their lands. Her grandmother hopes to use this marriage to limit that encroachment - halting it for a decade - but Lufeng has little hope, as she follows not only her mother but two of her sisters into marriage to the king, whose relentless industry is destroying the land that Lufeng and her people hold dear. The story follows her into the palace, and uncovering what the world outside Feng is truly like, and the extent of the trouble she finds herself in.

The bare bones of the story - girl must marry for political reasons to save her home, and then use her smarts/gutsiness/curiosity/magic/other redeeming quality (delete as appropriate) to find out what's going on and save those she cares about - is not a new one or a particularly exciting one. So go many of the stories I grew up reading. What matters here is how Jiang has presented it, both in the creation of the setting and in the crafting of Lufeng's point of view.

Focussing on the setting first, Jiang eschews obvious tracts of exposition, and so it takes a little while of immersion to grasp quite what's going on in this world. Lufeng's people, the Wind Walkers, seem to be a predominant part plant. They have sap instead of blood, trichomes on their bodies, possibly some sort of pine needles for hair, and bark for skin. Because the narrative is told very firmly from within Lufeng's perspective, these are only revealed through the words she chooses to use for herself and her actions, and so while the difference is obvious from the start, the full extent of it only resolves as she has others against which to compare herself - the difference only resolves via that comparison.

At which point it becomes clear that this is a world of at least three people - the Wind Walkers, humans, and Water Shifters, possibly with a fourth that have some effect on the earth. Lufeng's people can see further, hear more and be carried by the air itself, and as she moves into a world far apart from nature, she feels the absence of her gifts in the stifling confines of a human palace. Again, the extent of her abilities is not explained, and again this is due to the depth of the perspective immersion within her point of view - if one were to hold this up against "show don't tell" as a standard, Jiang could not be found wanting on the show end of the scale. Such limits or rules as there are must be gleaned from witnessing Lufeng in her use of her abilities. In general, this is an approach I prefer in worldbuilding and magic "systems" - magic for me feels more magical when it occupies a more inuitive space than a scientific one, and Jiang absolutely embraces that approach, even in a world that clearly contains scientific elements. 

However, in the extremity of approach and of immersion within Lufeng's worldview, there is a downside, at least when paired with another noticeable feature of Jiang's writing. It is a somewhat hackneyed criticism of fantasy to suggest it will use a high falutin synonym at any possible opportunity - why an eye when one could have a pellucid orb, right? It's been quite a long time since I've read anything that justified that critique (though my teenage and early twenties reading was absolutely rife with it), but it does, at times, feel like A Palace Near the Wind strays in that direction. In some places, it does feel justified - Lufeng isn't human and so it is natural that the way she talks about her body doesn't align with how I might. But there are times, especially early in the narrative, where it just feels like it goes too far. One specific example that stood out was how Lufeng, at the start, never talks about her eyes - it's always lids and sight instead, even when the phrasing heads into awkwardness like "When my lids fell slack". Perhaps the wind walkers don't have eyes then? Except, just the once, later in the story, she does switch to "My eyes refused to shut". So it's a stylistic choice. But I'm afraid it's one that doesn't work for me, because there are just a few too many awkward synonyms, clunkily talking around things that could be handled more simply. I am not one to call something overwritten, but this... this might be, just a little.

And perhaps it wouldn't be a significant issue, except that it dovetails with yet another aspect of the storytelling, and they both exacerbate each other, to the detriment of the whole.

When I say that the narrative perspective is deeply rooted in Lufeng, I should also say that this means the reader's knowledge of the world is severely closed off with it. Lufeng is an intensely naive character, with a very restricted knowledge of the world outside Feng. It is a success of Jiang's writing how thoroughly this infects the narrative - it thoroughly colours everything. However, it also means there are often moments, pieces of information, sights and sounds, where it is evident I as the reader would understand, but Lufeng doesn't, and so my understanding is occluded by hers. When this happens because of a naive protagonist, I find this approach maddening - the feeling of information artificially kept from my grasp is just something I cannot cope with. It is the exact same experience I had when recently rereading Nona the Ninth. Nona herself is so thoroughly limited in what she can see and understand in the world, and the narrative perspective is so successfully wedded to that understanding, that it's like watching the events of the story through misted glass. The feeling of wanting to take an intellectual cloth to wipe off the condensation persists, and taints the narrative for me.

I am not always against this sort of approach - having the narrative infected with the protagonist's worldview in a way that limits the reader's understanding of the world. Indeed, it's present in the other two The Locked Tomb books and I find it very effective in both. But there's something about tying it to a character so naive that their understanding is lower than me, an outsider to the narrative but with plenty of metanarrative understanding of the genre. There's a tension between the protagonist's ignorance my metaknowledge that just doesn't work because I have all the understanding and none of the information through which to fuel it, while the protagonist has the opposite. In Nona, at least on the first reading, this is mitigated by the puzzlebox nature of the narrative - I come into the story armed with information from the preceding two books, and can try to treat it as a riddle to be solved with prior knowledge. It is only on the second go, when all mysteries that can be solved have been solved and I am left with only Nona's internal monologue and processing, that the absence becomes a troublesome one. The lack of understanding, of specifically mature emotional processing and contextual response to the world, is not a fun place to be for me, without mitigation.

And while not to the same extent, I have the same problem with A Palace Near the Wind, and Lufeng's perspective. She is more emotionally mature than Nona, but very sheltered, and without a great deal of contextual information and worldliness that would allow her to process how people act outside of her expectations of behaviour and the world. And so she too is limited, and finds those around her most of the way through the story a black box. And so I too am cut off from them as emotional and realised people, because the information I would need to form those impressions never makes it through the filtering lens of Lufeng.

This is the first book in a series, and while Lufeng only shows a little growth over the course of the book, it is possible that her scope of the world will expand in the subsequent stories. I hope so, in fact. But within the bounds of just A Palace Near the Wind? I think it's a significant problem. I cannot get over how artificially obfuscatory it feels to be limited like this, even as I recognise the skill in how well Jiang has committed to the immersion.

It also gives the story - clearly deliberately - a feeling more of a number of events befalling Lufeng, rather than something she is an active, driving participant in. This, I mind less, but it is noticeable how little impact she has on the story until towards the end. In many ways, it has the feeling of prologue to it, of this being the set up to get Lufeng to a place of action later on, from which she may have the understanding to start having an impact on the story she finds herself in, now she begins to have the context of it all. I would certainly be interested in seeing if that were the case. But purely on the bounds of this story as itself and only itself? I struggled with it.

Which is not to say the whole thing is a wash - there are moments, especially when Lufeng is in her homeland, where Jiang's skill at descriptive prose comes to the fore. In describing the natural world, especially tactile things, the immersion that bothers me so much for its limits comes good and makes something entirely wonderful. I also enjoyed the depth of that immersion when it is focussed inwardly - Lufeng's awareness of herself, her body, her feelings is fascinating and delightful, and I could happily read much more like that. Likewise, the descriptions of using the skills her people are born with captures some of the magic I love to see in the fantastical - unexplained but evocative and described with more feeling than explanation. And the setting is an interesting one - it begins with what feels far more traditionally high fantasy or mythic, before bringing in elements of science and technology that clash with those assumptions, making this something richer and more textured, more unexpected. But it never has the chance to develop into something truly exciting, because of the limitation of Lufeng's worldview.

Ultimately, there were glimpses of something wonderful, enough to tempt me to continue the series, but the problem of that perspective immersion never quite allowed me to settle in and enjoy them. I kept turning the pages, hoping, but finding what I wanted eternally out of reach.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Evocative, beautiful descriptions of the physical and the natural
• Deep embedding in the mindset of the protagonist

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Ai Jiang, A Palace Near the Wind, [Titan Books, 2025].

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

Book Review: Idolfire by Grace Curtis

An engaging and entertaining novel that does most, but not quite everything, that it says on the tin

In a world of fallen empires, lost gods and the power to channel divinity, Kirby, a young woman from a dying village, sets off on a quest to find the stolen icon of goddess Iona. Kirby is convinced, with some solid evidence, that Iona’s absence is the reason why the community suffers under a curse that is slowly and steadily strangling it. Meantime, Aleya, the overachieving daughter of the current ruler of the powerful city of Ash, is finally given a quest (a Calling) to prove her worth, which sets her off on the road as well, to the same destination as Kirby: to a city that once ruled the vast and now fallen empire of Nivela.

This is the story of Grace Curtis’s Idolfire, a resolutely standalone fantasy novel.

I do want to lead off with that. In a world of trilogies, duologies (which appear to be especially popular these days) and other extended series, this is a story that wraps up everything in one volume. You will get a complete story here of the two (and then a third) main characters, complete and whole. Kudos to the author for managing that feat.

Idolfire is advertised and marketed as “A character-driven science-fantasy road trip book with sword fights and a slow-burn romance. An epic sapphic fantasy roadtrip inspired by the fall of Rome.” We do get most of that in this book.

First up, the characters. Our two main protagonists, Kirby and Aleya, do take their time to meet, and their sapphic romance is definitely a slow burn in the squabbling-squabbling-acceptance-sparks sort of affair. It should be said that this fantasy world is resolutely queernorm; their relationship is just an accepted part of human relations in this ’verse. And while Kirby may have been shy and barely kissed anyone before, Aleya definitely has had prior lovers (and we meet one while on the road). So the bones of all that are good, and a lot of the novel works on the engines of its characters, both when they are apart and then when they unite.

Their relationship and their natures are an excellent engine for drama and events that unfold during the course of the novel. While Kirby can’t fight her way out of a paper bag at the beginning (despite having what might be a magic sword she can barely swing), she has practical skills for living off of the land that Aleya does not. Aleya has trained as a fighter all her life (see the above mention of sword fights),  but also has diplomatic and administrative skills (after all, she does want to rule Ash, or thinks she does). Aleya is also the one that can use the titular Idolfire, using the belief and power of gods stored in relics and other items in which it resides. The power unleashed by this does degrade and use up the relic, and it is tied to the nature of the god/dess herself. If you use a statue consecrated to the God of War, you are going to get war and martial-based effects, not healing.

Let’s continue. It is definitely a road trip book of the first water, as they both are not only traversing the landscape; they are in many cases following the old straight-line implacable roads of the fallen prior civilization, the Nivelans. This is where the “Fall of Rome” inspiration comes in, as the Nivelans have built their roads in what many readers would recognize as a “Roman” mode: straight lines, and damn the geography that is in its way. Roads that most definitely do not harmonize and work with the landscape, but rather seek to dominate it. There are a couple of names and other things that also tag as Roman, but in the main, though, while the author was inspired by the fall of Rome (as she says in the acknowledgements/afterword), I saw a different model and inspiration that she does call out in the aforementioned back matter, but I think is a fairly more dominant influence overall in the book. You might have guessed it already with a city-state named Ur.

Yes, this book and its world very much run on lines inspired by Ancient Mesopotamia. We have a world that is mostly city-states (with a fallen empire for good measure). We have a world where there are a ton of local deities, and those deities and their worship are tied directly to the land, and can be, in fact, stolen. Curtis relays an incident in the back matter where this actually happened in real-life Ancient Mesopotamia, and that incident shapes Kirby’s life and story profoundly as a result. And Mesopotamia, with its palimpsest of prior civilizations, fallen cities, ruins, and more, is very much the model for the landscape of the road trips that Kirby and Aleya go on, separately and together. Even the realm that the city of Ash sits in is called Ur, after a famous Mesopotamian city state.

Mesopotamia, the Land Between the Rivers, is an inspiration and a model for fantasy that gets a lot less play than Greece or Rome or Egypt. The author is not unique here: Harry Turtledove’s Between the Rivers is very much in the mold of this book. That book uses a godly point of view, but the whole idea of this fractured Mesopotamian landscape of rising and falling civilizations, tons of deities, and a city-state-based mentality with the occasional and irresistible eruption (and then decline) of empires resonates between Curtis’s work and Turtledove’s. I can also find resonances in L Sprague De Camp’s Novaria novels and stories, and the Godserfs series by N. S. Dolkart. Also, Kirby’s home village of Wall’s End, at the edge of the huge ruined city of Balt, reminded me strongly of Pavis, a massive ruined city in the RPG world of Glorantha, which itself as a setting takes a lot of its notes from ancient Mesopotamia.

But in the main, Ancient Mesopotamia is a rich (and underused) setting for all this, and one that more authors could definitely take ideas from and claim as their own. Thus, Curtis takes advantage of that and uses it effectively and deeply to give a real richness to the road trip. A road trip across the fallen Roman Empire? Tired. A road trip across Ancient Mesopotamia? Wired.

Where the novel doesn’t do what it says on the tin, then, is the phrase “science fantasy.” For me, and I think, as is commonly accepted in the fields of genre, science fantasy is a fusion of the ideas, concepts, trappings and motifs of fantasy with science fiction. It is the original “peanut butter in my chocolate / chocolate in my peanut butter” subgenre, and discussing it in full detail might be beyond the remit of this review.. But while Idolfire has some excellent fantasy elements, as outlined above, there is no science fiction in this work whatsoever. There is, unusually, a moment of *science* that recalls a real-life remarkable event in ancient history, and it delighted me that Curtis slotted it in there. But that doesn’t make it science fantasy either.

Instead, a different subgenre of SFF fits this novel better. It’s a well-made and cromulent sword-and-sorcery novel, not a science fantasy novel. Sword and Sorcery fits as a much better label for this book. Swordswoman (and her companion), fighting, adventure, road trip, strange gods, weird magic, and the like. Could I see Kirby and Aleya and Nylophon (I’ll get to him in a moment) wandering around Hyperborea, or Lankhmar, or Ranke or, even more recently, and really on the mark, the sword-and-sorcery world of Howard Andrew Jones’s Hanuvar? Absolutely. I think the label “science fantasy” does this book a disservice, and “sword and sorcery” reflects more accurately what this world and its characters are like, and what the reader can expect as they navigate the book. Is Sword and Sorcery a limiting label? Possibly that is a subject beyond the remit of this review.

But enough of that. Let’s dig back into this book and what it does. So, aside from our two protagonists, we are given two additional characters and points of view. The first is a mysterious one, where Curtis uses a second-person point of view to inject mystery into this character, whose identity and nature is only slowly revealed in the course of the novel. That character provides some parallax to the events and backstory of the novel, and to reveal more would be spoilery.

The other character is Nylophon. Nylophon is a mercenary soldier from the mercantile realm of Carthe. It’s not quite Carthage, although that is clearly meant to be a bit of an inspiration; the Carthe hire themselves out as mercenary soldiers and make bank on it. Nylophon has clawed his way to a small command by luck and perseverance and making the right friend (lover, implied; Nylophon is queer as Kirby and Aleya) to basically save his life. After a disastrous encounter with our two main protagonists, he takes on a Javert-like role, and also his is a story of redeeming himself and coming to terms with who he is. Even if he is rather a prat for a lot of the novel, he does in the end get better.

Finally, a word about the writing, and especially the dialogue. The novel crackles when the characters engage with each other, and the descriptions of the world, their adventures and the landscapes come out well written and engaging. Combat and swordfighting, although present and a highlight in the book, isn’t as lingered over in the text as other things; the writing here is economical and to the point, much like Aleya’s own fighting style. Where the novel comes off the best of all is in the whole road trip, from sea voyages to the Nivelan road, to some of the truly strange things our protagonists encounter along the way. There is a great sense of atmosphere here.

Like I said at the start, the story is completed in one volume, with some fillips and twists as our two protagonists (and yes, Nylophon) make their way to the culmination of their quests, and find that the city of Nivela, their destination, is not quite what they expected at all. There are real moments of heroism and completion here, especially for Nylophon, who gets a “payoff scene” in the climax of the book that he clearly has been working toward ever since he was introduced in the narrative. The novel satisfies, in the end. The author promises more fantasy novels in the future, and I am quite reasonably happy to give them a go.

You can also read Roseanna's review of Grace Curtis’s Floating Hotel here at the NOAF blog.

Highlights:

• Interesting pair of primary characters on a road trip adventure

• Strongly imagined Mesopotamian-flavored fantasy setting

• Not a science fantasy after all, but very much worth reading

Reference: Curtis, Grace. Idolfire [DAW, 2025].

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

TV Review: Severance season 2

After you've betrayed yourself, can you trust yourself again?

After its season 1 ended in a thrilling cliffhanger, Severance took its sweet time to return to screens. And it (literally) hit the ground running: now our protagonist, Mark, knows that Gemma, his wife, is still alive, hidden somewhere in the restricted levels of his workplace. Now he'll need to enlist the help of his other self, the separate identity the company created for his job, but he has his own budding romance to worry about. An added problem is that said love interest is Helly, the work self of the company's heiress, whose agenda appears to be not fully in line with her father's or her unwitting coworkers'. Meanwhile, the rest of the Macrodata Refinement team have to deal with the consequences of their escape attempt: Irving struggles to keep a sense of purpose now that Burt has retired (even though their external selves seem to be getting acquainted), and Dylan still hasn't gotten over the revelation that he has a full family—but what he learns from pursuing that route may not be the antidote to loneliness he's seeking.

One of the best things about Severance is the richness of levels of interpretation that it allows for. While Season 1 focused mainly on the corporate dystopia side of the story, season 2 aims inward and explores the personal trauma side. We knew that Mark's reason for undergoing the severance surgery was to avoid experiencing the pain of having lost Gemma, which creates the separate identity that lives during office hours in his stead. An implication that was not immediately obvious in season 1 is that this process resembles the survival mechanism that occurs in people with dissociative identities: to protect itself, the mind creates other selves who will bear the burden of trauma that the core self finds too much to face directly. As we discover Gemma's whereabouts, the reason she's being kept there, and how that relates to the real purpose of severance technology, we find more dots to connect that bring us nearer to the full picture: in fulfillment of the doctrine of its mythologized founder, Lumon plans to permanently subdue the Four Tempers.

A key step in this plan is Macrodata Refinement. In this season we learn what those funny numbers our protagonists spend endless workdays sorting mean, and the answer reveals yet another side to Lumon's unflinching cruelty. In fact, even those most loyal to Lumon can be tossed away without a thought. We saw in season 1 how Harmony Cobel went through a collapse of her entire worldview (and season 2 reveals the extent of how much she actually did for Lumon); this time it's Seth Milchick who gets pushed to the limit of his patience, not so much by the employees' already established rebelliousness but by the totalitarian capriciousness of upper management, whose disciplining methods start to grow increasingly degrading.

Another important shift relates to location. We get more episodes set outside of Lumon, some of which are the highlight of the season, which showcase how far and how deeply Lumon's reach has corrupted the world around it. These episodes help us better understand the motivations of Harmony, Burt, Seth, and even Gemma and Helly, but these are the kind of brilliant revelations that don't close off follow-up questions. Yes, now we know what those characters want, but why would they want that?

This insight into hidden motives and strange choices informs the central relationship of the season: that between Mark and his work self. Each half of his identity knows only part of the puzzle about Gemma, and they're going to need to work together in order to rescue her. But of course, it's hard to join forces if each Mark exists only while the other doesn't. The external Mark's efforts to communicate with his workplace half escalate in desperation until both versions of him realize how little they know each other and how incompatible their goals truly are. And here's where the story's various interpretative possibilities come into play. Rather than a separate character, office Mark can be seen as a part of Mark's mind that he's neglected and refused to acknowledge. It's a substitute self that helps him skip the necessary steps of his grieving process. After so much time spent nurturing such an unhealthy coping strategy, it shouldn't be surprising that the original act of self-betrayal becomes multiplied. Mark, who has been suffering intensely without the love of his life, should know better than to try to inflict the same pain on someone else. And yet, in his moment of need, that's exactly what he offers to his other half. The latter's response is shocking, but understandable.

After a stellar first season, Severance found a way to raise the bar even higher. Somehow managing to juggle the interpersonal tension of the panoptical workplace, the dark dead-ends of unprocessed grief, and the ever-worsening difficulty of staying true to oneself under a system of coerced devil's bargains, Severance continues to be a masterpiece of psychological intrigue and imaginative storytelling.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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

Video Game Review: Hollow Knight Voidheart Edition by Team Cherry

Before you enter the world of silk and song, fill your heart with the void.

For those of you who may have dodged the indie gaming scene since 2017, Hollow Knight is one of the sparkling gems that come up in conversation quite frequently. Partially because of its overall quality and difficulty, and partially because its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong—announced in February of 2019—is not only highly anticipated but also missing in action. The most recent update from the developers confirms that “the game is progressing nicely” and that it really does exist. After finally taking the time to play Hollow Knight, I can understand the hype and the anticipation (albeit with a few caveats). Hollow Knight Voidheart Edition is the full package containing the base game and all of its DLC.

Hollow Knight is a beautiful, thrilling 2-D Metroidvania that focuses on platforming, melee/spellcasting combat, and exploration. The art is clean and crisp and manages to balance the contrast between adorable characters and infected monsters, with other intimidating friends and foes. Everything is hand-drawn, and the animations look and feel so precise and purposeful. The game has a charming aesthetic that is instantly memorable, and the style is consistent throughout all the biomes. Each level has a specific look and feel, a different history portrayed with a paintbrush instead of words. From the City of Tears to Queen’s Gardens, entering a new zone brings both a chance to enjoy Team Cherry’s beautiful aesthetic, as well as the chance to ponder the history of the new section of Hallownest.

Despite being a game of few words, Hollow Knight still tells a story. I’ll probably receive a lot of flack for this one, but I kept thinking of Souls-like games throughout my playtime. I’ve never played a Dark Souls game, but I’ve played Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and Sekiro, and I have to say, despite Team Cherry not using any Souls games for inspiration, Hollow Knight feels precisely like a 2-D version of one of those games (though I suppose it could be said that Souls games are 3-D Metroidvanias). This isn't to say that's a bad thing or that there aren’t distinctions between them, but the similarities are rather uncanny. Nebulous story: check, lose currency upon dying and have to reclaim it without dying or you lose it all: check, enemies reset after resting: check, high focus on bosses/minibosses: check (just to name a few). There are a ton of parallels that one can draw from the game. If you like both the Souls-like gameplay system and 2-D games, you may very much like Hollow Knight.

The gameplay is pure and simple, though mastering movement in intense situations is where the complexity comes in. The game has an incredibly high skill ceiling: easy to learn, difficult to master. The game focuses primarily on combat, with platforming as a close second. The combat is the most challenging part of the game, especially the boss fights and overcrowded areas. Bosses and challenges that require platforming and aerial maneuvers while fighting can be extremely frustrating and require a lot of patience and practice. I could tell when I hadn’t upgraded enough when I had a lot of difficulty in a specific zone, so I’d go off and explore or upgrade my abilities.

While I found it a delight to discover a new zone, I sometimes found the road to discovery a bit of a chore. Sometimes the exploration flowed, and I felt like the game had a perfect pace, but other times I would get stuck, unsure of my next move. The beginning hours felt like a bit of a slog, especially before I got the Dash ability. The fast travel system isn't the most convenient, and considering enemies respawn every time you rest, I sometimes found it tedious to explore, especially when my next move was limited to only two options. The game is mostly cryptic, making discoveries feel rewarding, but it also makes getting stuck feel irritating.

As someone who places a game's story on the same level as (or in some cases above) gameplay, I find the enigmatic story not rewarding enough for some of the sufferings that I endured (which is the same way I feel about Souls-like games). Some of the challenges were so overwhelming or poorly paced that I almost put the game down entirely. While the Trial of Fools is still causing me grief, at least it’s optional (though the only reward is a currency I no longer have a use for). The main offender was the White Palace. Oh boy. For a game that has mildly challenging platforming interspersed between/with combat segments, this was a complete turn (and unfortunately necessary to advance the game). This level is a 100% platforming segment that not only overstays its welcome but is extremely difficult and out of place. I sincerely hope the developer learns from this and either completely omits content like this or makes it optional.

But I feel like I’ve been complaining too much. While the game can be frustrating at times, for the most part it is challenging and rewarding. Fighting a boss and learning its patterns, substituting different charms (little boosts to platforming/combat abilities) to get through an area/enemy, and discovering new zones easily make this game worth a shot. Not to forget the charming aesthetic and accompanying soundtrack. I love the calming music that plays in the City of Tears. Nothing like feeling a sense of peace while being attacked by a bunch of aristocratic insects. There’s a wistfulness that’s weaved throughout the soundtrack that can haunt and entrance at the same time.

When Hollow Knight is flowing, the game makes me feel like I’ve stepped into this microcosm of a larger world. Despite not being forthright with every historical detail, the few folks at Team Cherry made the world feel real, lived-in, and worth exploring. While I had the occasional disconnect because of uncertainty within the plot’s obscure framework, the overall feel was one of curiosity. What’s around the next bend? What’s behind that door? What do I get from defeating this boss and what does he have to do with the lore? Realizing a new ability would allow me to unlock a previously unreachable area was always a treat.

If you’re a fan of Metroidvania-type games, then you’ve probably already played Hollow Knight. To those who are fans of the genre and haven’t, I’d say it’s definitely worth a shot. To those who aren’t, you should answer a few questions before buying: Are you patient? Do you like a challenge? Is a sense of accomplishment from said challenge enough of a reward? Is discovery its own reward? Do you like backtracking and opening previously locked areas? If you answer yes to most or all those questions, Hollow Knight is probably worth your time. Its qualities significantly outweigh its flaws and make the wait for the sequel all the more exciting.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 9/10.

Bonus: +1 for beautfiul art and animation. +1 for worldbuilding, character design, and accompanying music.

Penalties: −1 for unbalanced difficulty spikes. −1 for exploration pacing issues. −1 for unrewardingly vague story elements.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

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.