Reviews of favorite books

Fiction: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

10/3/2026

The Bewitching is told from three points of view: Minerva, a scholarship student at an elite New England college in 1998; Her grandmother, Alba, as a teenager in 1908 living on the family’s ranch; and a few chapters from the 1934 diary of a horror writer named Beatrice.
Telling the story through three separate characters in three separate timelines works for the most part, though I found myself feeling distant from the story at times and not equally invested in all three plotlines.
There was enough mystery and suspense to draw me along to see how the story turned out. The villains were foreshadowed, and the resourcefulness of the surviving women given just enough setup to make the climax plausible without overplaying it.

I struggled to identify with the main point-of-view character Minerva’s social isolation and stubborn skepticism. Like her, I was a scholarship student at a well-regarded college, a coffee-addict, and cautious when confronted with unfamiliar ideas, yet I felt little empathy for her. Despite this distance, there were enough curiosity seeds to keep me reading, anxious to discover what happened next—and the exciting ending made the novel well worth reading.

Having a skeptical character is often used to encourage the reader’s suspension of disbelief, but Minerva didn’t draw me in.
I found her prickly and a poor decision-maker. Her self-denial bordered on becoming implausible at times.
Seriously, when you’ve had more than one run-in with a hostile man on campus, don’t walk through the woods alone at night. Accept the ride home from your friend.

Alba (1908) is the most vivid character and most relatable. She’s a teenager infatuated with her handsome uncle Arturo, who’s cultured and well-dressed. She dreams of living in the city like him. Though she strives to mimic his sophistication, she’s also drawn to the simple magics and superstitions of the locals, and one boy in particular, Valentin.
Rumors of a curse haunting her family after her father’s death lead her to follow Valentin into the hills to consult witches. She is quoted throughout the book saying “When I was a young woman, there were still witches.”

I was least interested in Beatrice’s diaries (1934), perhaps because the chapters often opened and closed with an obvious “hook.” For example:
Opening. “Some moments return to us, intact and incandescent, undimmed by the passage of time. It is like that when I remember that December of 1934 and the night Virginia Somerset went missing.”
Closing. “That was when I spotted the terrible darkness in Virginia’s eyes. The seeds of tragedy had taken root by then.”
Opening. “The boy showed up at our dorm two weeks before Halloween.”
Closing. “I think we are all terrified children attempting to shield ourselves from the true horror, and that we recognized the indications of a great evil, a terrible darkness, stretching out like a gnarled, clawed hand that scratched the back of our necks.”

The author did a wonderful job deftly sketching the world and secondary characters. Here a friend of Beatrice describes both her and the milieu of 1934 at an elite college:
“Betty was a poor girl trying to move up in the world and I was a Jewish boy from Brighton. And there was the fact that she liked women, and I didn’t find anyone attractive, so that put us in a different spot than the others.”

The author masterfully sets up the book’s exciting dual climax, playing with the female characters’ push-pull of fear and desire, of cleverness and self-doubt:
Minerva: Rather than phoning [her friend] Hideo, she stopped by the liquor store and purchased a bottle of wine and a six-pack of beer. She stuffed them in her backpack and walked to campus. . . . “I come bearing gifts,” she said, and pulled out the beer.

Alba: The bites on her wrist and breast stung, but he’d hardly drunk from her, a sip or two and nothing more. Yet the strength of him was frightening. . . .
He’d been kind to her before, he’d played the sweet lover, moving gently. But that was not his nature. He was a glutton.
She’d thought to make her flesh into a snare, but he was terribly strong, and as he burrowed his head into her shoulder, muttering a word that was more a growl, she wondered whether he’d trapped her instead. . . .
I’ve hunted you, she thought. But then again, the hunt is not over until the quarry lies unmoving and cold.

Minerva: She craned her neck while slowly tugging at the backpack’s zipper. . . .
She finished unzipping the backpack’s pocket. [NAME’s] back was to her, but [NAME] looked over [a] shoulder at Minerva and Minerva stilled her hands. . . .

I’m going to die, she thought. I’m going to die, but I’m not going down easily.
. . . Minerva felt . . . like she waved a piece of meat in front of a great white shark. . . .
“I’m going to thoroughly enjoy drinking your blood and eating your heart.”
“I hope you choke on it.” . . .
It ought to work. Then again, it was simply a story she’d heard late at night. It might have been made up. It might not work on someone like [NAME]. ...

Every item she’d brought into that room vanished as if it had never been, leaving behind only a sour scent.

Alba: His eyes vivisected her where she stood, even as his voice was a velvety whisper, and she knew he did not lie. His sincerity made her want to weep. . . .
Under his skin she felt the throbbing pull of magic, the power embedded in his bones, and, deeper yet, the awful extent of his appetite. He’d eat her whole. . . .
“My love,” he said. His voice was appallingly soft, tinged with an unbearable affection that was ghastlier than his cruelty.

Part mystery, part fantasy, and drawing heavily from Gothic/Last Girl horror tropes, The Bewitching, builds to an intense crescendo, and leaves open the possibility of future threats, as a good story should.

Read more gothic fantasy/horror: Mexican Gothic, What Moves the Dead

Fiction: The Valkyrie by Kate Heartfield

9/25/2026

The Valkyrie excels on all levels: fascinating characters, a propulsive plot, historical depth, and intriguing magic.
The novel begins with the Norse god Odin exiling a Valkyrie named Byrnhild after she questions his divine judgement when choosing which warriors to cull from battle (Valkyries bring the souls of culled warriors to Odin's hall in Valhalla). She falls to Midgard (the mortal realm) and loses her Valkyrie abilities of flight and invisibility. She does retain her fighting skills and knowledge of rune magic—and her stubborn persistence.
When she hears of a lindworm poisoning the land, she puts herself into a magical sleep so she can gather supernatural strength to fight it.

The creepy lindworm attacks the human kingdom of Burgundia during a betrothal ceremony between Princess Gudrun and Atilla the Hun’s brother. The fragile peace with the dangerous Huns is shattered, and Gudrun’s brother King Gunnar disappears, leaving Gudrun to prepare their people for battle.

Meanwhile, the would-be hero Sigurd hunts the lindworm, Fafnir, for his foster-father. He has a magical sword crafted specifically to kill the creature, but is an unschooled swordsman and has no magic of his own.
He naively “rescues” Brynhild, cutting her magical sleep short.
She has garnered supernatural strength, but not enough to kill Fafnir alone. And her spears are no match for the lindworm’s tough hide.
She and Sigurd team up to trap and kill the monster, in what becomes a harrowing fight—and superb example of crafting tension, suspense, and exciting action scenes.

The magic in the story takes two main forms: Brynhild's rune magic based on knowing specific symbols, and animistic magic that draws from nature. Gudrun’s mother is able to draw on the Rhine River and Gudrun learns to coax plants and sometimes small animals to help her. Both types of magic are easy to comprehend in the novel's context, and play critical roles in story events

The author embeds the reader in the fifth century with realistic details:
There were markings of mortals on the land: hoofmarks in the dried earth, the sharp stump of a felled tree, a small pile of whitening dog dung.
I [Gudrun] walked around the room, pouring my mother’s beer into every cup. It smelled a little grassy; she brewed it with myrtle, yarrow, rosemary, and God knew what else. (For the fascinating story behind this description, read the author’s annotations).

Two “villains” in the book, the lindworm Fafnir and Atilla the Hun, both call themselves “the scourge of God.” And both, it turns out, are being used as playing pieces in a divine strategy game.
The novel deftly explores the tension between mortals at the mercy of cruel gods, and gods who approach mortals with kindness.

Brynhild’s relationship with Odin provides a thematic framework for exploring both mortals’ relationships with the divine and daughter/father bonds. Brynhild initially holds Odin Allfather in high esteem, but that changes:
I thought he cared about my welfare, and the welfare of all his followers. . . . "When his choices seem strange to us, the failure is in our understanding, not in his choices. He can see the future. Nothing he does can be without a greater purpose. " Now I know a god can go wrong, and he can go very far wrong indeed. . . . How I wanted to be that girl again, the one who believed Odin was the source of light and love.

In the end, Brynhild must come to terms with Odin's betrayal and assert her agency—similar to mortal daughters finding a way to love our flawed fathers and assert our personhood within a patriarchy that would keep us small.

A related theme is believing what we’ve been taught. Brynhild is one of many women dedicated as girls to the father-god Odin the Deceiver. She “knows” that the goddess Freyja is an evil sorceress. When Brynhild meets Freyja, the goddess says:
“Unlike Odin, I don’t steal living people to do my work for me.”
[Brynhild] “Nothing is as I thought it was.”
“Of course not. You were taken by the Liar [Odin] as a child.”

The novel is also a love story, exploring the nature of casual sexual trysts, marriage, jealousy and romantic love. Both Gudrun and Brynhild navigate political treachery and deception in their marriages, and use perceived jealousy to their own ends—a wonderfully clever twist on the original tales.
The book’s conclusion is entirely satisfying, with the surviving characters choosing lasting love and sailing together into their own story.
The Valkyrie won the Aurora Award for best novel. Highly recommended.

Read other excellent historical fantasies:
The Witch’s Heart, Song of the Huntress, The Queens of Innis Lear, Ithaca

Nonfiction: How Flowers Made Our World by David George Haskell

9/20/2026

“When flowers evolved, they upended and transformed the planet. …
“They created habitats like tropical rainforests and prairies, catalyzed the evolution and diversification of bees, butterflies, birds, mammals, and many other animals.
Today 90 percent of all plant species on the planet are flowering plants.”
So begins How Flowers Made Our World, a fabulous exploration of the many ways flowers create, nurture, and sustain interspecies communities with color and style.
By highlighting the community-building aspect of flowers, the author expands the limited scope of evolution’s “survival of the fittest.”

“The first cells on the planet, 3.5 billion years ago, lived in communities held together by reciprocity and mutual interdependence. [And] flowering plants took this ancient practice of symbiosis and extended it in unprecedented ways.” In doing so, they outcompeted more solitary life forms.

Sea grasses make their own habitat, accumulating “as much as three centimeters of sediment a year.” The larger the sea-grass meadow, the slower the water current, and the more sediment that settles to nurture more grasses. The sea cows and manatees that graze sea grasses “evolved from hoofed land mammals about fifty million years ago”!

These underwater grasses survive by creating internal “scuba tanks,” air channels that run from the sunlight-kissed leaves to the “roots buried in oxygen-starved mud. Air channels also buoy the leaves, holding them up to the light.” The grasses also harbor bacteria in their roots that provide nitrogen “fertilizer” in exchange for excess sugar. “Worldwide, seagrasses are among the most threatened of all habitats.”

Flowering weeds are “good at arriving on recently disturbed soil, swiftly dropping roots, unfurling their leaves and flowers, then flinging fruits to the wind or onto animal fur in the hope of finding a new patch of exposed soil. [Long before] bulldozers and spades, these weeds sought recently burned soil, exposed areas around fallen trees and landslides [and] the churning aftermaths of hooved and burrowing animals.” Because we frequently plow, till or otherwise disturb the soil, we’ve essentially “remade the world in the weeds’ favor.”

Weeds tend to reproduce quickly, which means they can adapt swiftly to changes in their environment.
“The arms race between chemical manufacturers and plants has bred what are now called “superweeds,” plants so resistant to one or more herbicides that they become a stubborn presence in agricultural fields.”
A stubborn infestation of bindweed helped me accept that my gardening days were over. Like the many-headed hydra of Greek myth, pulling the weeds merely created more—and they regenerated from mere scraps of root.

Fun facts/great quotes:

The sunflower and orchid families “include more living species than all mammals and reptiles combined.
“If plant life stops, all life stops.”
Flowers “enthrall animal senses with floral aromas and colorful petals” to attract pollinators—and encourage human cultivators.
“Flowering plants mother and feed the world.” [As wheat, rice, corn, barley and other grains]
“Almost all newly germinated orchids [are] entirely dependent on fungi for their food, a radical departure from the sunlight-fueled growth of most young plants.”
Prairie grasses encourage fire by providing ample dried fuel and grow tasty leaves to promote grazing—both of which favor fast-growing grasses over brush and seedlings.
If the 2023 world cereal harvest were stacked in 110-pound sacks it “would reach to the moon forty times.”
“When attacked by insects, plants release volatiles into the air and soil that summon parasitic wasps, predatory mites, and insect-killing nematode worms. The bodyguards, drawn by plants’ scent, kill the plant-eating pests.”
Bat-pollinated flowers have "reflective cups to bounce back the echolocating sounds of bats, the acoustic equivalent of a brightly colored bloom.”
“Jasmine and violet were considered masculine scents in medieval Islamic cultures” and rosewater was considered “both masculine and feminine in the Middle East” where it has been used for over three thousand years.
“Flowers and humans alike flourish in relationship with others and wither in isolation.”

The author notes that science is “always wrapped in the cultural context of its time and the prejudices of its practitioners.” An example is the Linnaean classification system used to categorize our living world:

“By using the Linnaean system, we value database consistency over local knowledge. We turn living kin into abstract categories. … Linnaeas took the task of naming upon himself, with the explicit intention of centralizing authority.”
Even more disturbing are the chemical toxins and horrendous environmental destruction supporting the floral and horticulture industries. “In our pursuit of beauty [we] inadvertently cause harm, often to the very life processes that we want to nurture in our gardens.” Bees and butterflies are among the pollinators dying from toxins infusing many nursery plants.

“We humans are causing a mass extinction, a collective act of stupendous harm and disrespect for the living Earth. [But,] Flowers made our world and they will remake” the post-human world.

There’s lots of fascinating science in this book, from biology to genetics to paleontology, laid out in easy-to-grasp language. The author’s colorful stories and poetic language make these facts come alive:
“Bees sense rose volatiles through hundreds of minute hairs that fur each antennae, along with odor-sensitive pits between the hairs. Scrabbling through a flower must be an intense aromatic thrill for the bees, every sensor slathered.”
“The [rose’s] aroma is a brocade, soft sweetness textured by threads of golden spice and a few strands of musk.”
“[L]avender is the signature aroma of [Provence, France], a lively, slightly astringent, herbal smell, like pine resin dressed up for a Saturday night.”

When we interact with flowering plants, our senses become “enmeshed with more-than-human lives.” Flowers are “there to get attention. They’re there to be alluring. And we are seduced [just] as we should be.” Gardeners, flower lovers, environmentalists, artists, anyone who looks to nature for spiritual solace, and science nerds will all find something to love in How Flowers Made Our World.

Read other books by award-winning David George Haskell: The Forest Unseen and Sounds Wild and Broken
Read more about our fabulous plant cousins: The Hidden Life of Trees, The Light Eaters,
Serving Plants, Whacky Weeds, The Green Man

Fiction: Paladin’s Strength by T. Kingfisher

9/5/2026

I am deeply in love with Paladin’s Strength, the tale of two colossal people navigating a short-person’s world, told with warmth and wry humor.
Our main characters are:
Clara, a lay nun of the convent of Saint Ursa, trying to find and rescue her kidnapped sisters.
  Istvhan, a former paladin of the Saint of Steel god, posing as a mercenary captain escorting oak barrels to a distant city.
  They meet after Istvhan kills a local boy in an unavoidable duel. Clara, who was rescued by the locals after being left for dead, is given to Istvhan (along with a sword) as forfeit from the dead boy’s family.

The author makes excellent use of the characters' large size. They jam themselves into short beds and sit at low tables with their knees at their shoulders, and are always grateful for open spaces:
Istvahn straightened up with a sigh of relief and felt the vertebrae in his neck crackle.

Handsome Istvhan is sensitive to the effect his large size has on others, particularly women:
The larger part of power was understanding the power you had over others, even if you would rather not have that much power in the first place. . . . And so, he went to great pains to be a courteous, polite lover. When he flirted, he made absolutely sure that the other party was just as interested as he was. He did not ever want to see fear in a woman’s eyes.

The prose is straightforward and engaging, yet with deeply immersive moments:

Banked firelight left orange splashes across her skin, and the shadows of the wheels were edged in purple.
She had never been in a city this size before and the smells and the sounds formed a multi-layered din that left her squinting, despite it being an overcast day.

The exploration of gender roles is especially delightful. We soon learn that big, strong Istvhan accepted this assignment in part to escape a voracious female lover:

[She] had nearly run him into the ground [and] he’d been looking forward to a few months of celibacy to recuperate. . . . He had taken the assignment to the north with a sense of relief, and not just because he was having a hard time keeping up with her. . . . He’d been worn to a shadow. Human flesh could only take so much.”
Istvahn reminiscing: His old sword-master would have groaned to see how he was gripping [the stave], but she would also have been the first to admit you worked with what you had.
Istvhan expressing admiration:
Clara walked like she was taller than everyone else and knew it and if anyone cared, be damned to them. As someone else built to a different scale than the rest of the world, he admired that.

Though our two main characters are mostly heterosexual, this is not a restrictive world:
Clara did wish occasionally that she was the sort of woman who could love another woman as more than a sister. . . . Sister Rose and the Sister Apothecary, for example, had been devoted to each other for over a decade.
Istvhan describes the character Galen when he smiles at Clara:
Istvhan knew that smile meant absolutely nothing but friendship--Galen had definite tastes and they did not run to women--
Clara mentioning a transgendered man:
“One of us lived as a brother, but he was very old when I was a novice and he had the same parts as the rest of us.”

The book also touches on meaningful themes, such as theology when Clara speaks about her relationship with Saint Ursa:
“I talk to Her in my head. I pray. If I didn’t have Her, I suspect I’d pray to someone else. Perhaps She’s just the name I put on that which I pray to, and it’s easier to picture the divine as someone who understands [me].”

And ruminating on old emotional pain:
You learned better and you got on with things. You learned that you were what you were, and tried to be the best version of that person, because you were never going to be anybody else. And you stopped envying other people because everyone had problems you didn’t know about.

Istvhan’s take on friendship:
“. . . we love our friends enough not to put them in situations where they will be called upon to do things that they cannot do.”
Him reassuring Clara:
“You are not a failure, you know,” he said, “simply because you can’t endure something unendurable.”

I laughed out loud many times reading this novel.
* Here is Istvhan feeling tempted:
Paladins were famous for resisting temptations, but life was a lot easier when temptation kept at least ten feet away and only offered easy things, like wealth and vengeance and earthly dominion.
* Istvahn and Clara trading quips:
“Nuns are sadists,” he muttered. “I always knew it.”
“And paladins are martyrs.”
* Istvahn gets an earful from an elder:
“I do appreciate your advice, sir,” said Istvahn. Politely.
“No, you don’t,” said Doc Mason. “The young never do.”
* Istvhan being self-conscious:
He walked up to the tree, trying to look harmless and good-natured and also sexy, which was a complicated thing to convey. He wasn't sure what to do with his hips.

Suspense and tension build throughout the novel, delivering an exciting climax in which both main characters give their all despite being discouraged or terrified much of the time. Without giving away spoilers, I will say Clara’s connection with her saint is especially intriguing. I felt deeply bonded to both main characters, rooting for them to triumph against the world and with each other.
Paladin’s Strength is a mature romantic-fantasy, but it’s also a sword and sorcery adventure, a fantasy-mystery, and a well-written yarn that held me close from start to finish. Highly recommended.

Read more fabulous fiction by T. Kingfisher:
Paladin’s Grace,  Swordheart,  Thornhedge,  Hemlock & Silver,  What Moves the Dead
Read other fantasy-mystery:
The Tainted Cup,  A Drop of Corruption,  City of Stairs
Read other romantic-fantasy:
Best New Romantic Fantasy,  The Unspoken Name,  Fire Logic,  The Everlasting

Nonfiction: Sitting Pretty by Rebekah Taussig

8/23/2026

Rarely has a book made me feel so deeply understood. Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body is an essay-memoir by disability advocate Rebekah Taussig. She articulates the challenges and joys of life with altered abilities; her legs are paralyzed from childhood cancer and she navigates the world from a wheelchair.
The author has a thoughtful and thought-provoking take on life in a differently-abled body, and the gifts of adaptive aids and accessibility.
For example: “We don’t tend to equate a person wearing glasses with ‘disability,’ even if that same person would have been considered disabled in another time and place.”

The author says, “We should bring disabled perspectives to the center because these perspectives create a world that is more imaginative, more flexible, more sustainable, more dynamic and vibrant for everyone who lives in a body.”

[Disabled people] “have our thumbs on the heartbeat of adaptability, we know how to imagine a more flexible world; our very existence, our everyday lies, are an exercise in imagination.”
This might sound like the science fiction premise of a disabled woman adapting to a dystopian hellscape (Furiosa), but also applies to our world:
“The most consistent, most universal, most shared experience in having a body is that they all change, and if you live long enough, they all start to slow, forget, fracture, ignore orders, and revolt. [When we resist disability], we’re all left less equipped, less adaptable for the inevitable challenges in life.”

The author deftly describes the challenges of living in an ableist world (which ignores or neglects its differently-abled citizens):
“Ableism pushes assumptions like: Some bodies/minds/modes are inherently and always preferable to others. Hearing/speaking is always better than deafness/signing. Bipeds walking is definitely preferable to paraplegics wheeling. Each of us has a ‘whole,’ ‘unmarred,’ ‘perfect’ body that we are meant to have; the paralyzed, autistic, deaf version is just a sadder, lesser version of that original intent. … I don’t need my paralyzed legs to be erased in order to be seen as able, healthy, beautiful, whole, successful, or happy.”

Oxygen concentrator backpack courtesy Amazon.com

In July 2025, I went on supplemental oxygen for my pulmonary sarcoidosis. I’ve gotten more adept at transitioning to and from the house, the car, and into the community, but I think through each step and anxiously guesstimate how long my oxygen concentrator’s battery will last and where can I plug it in if I run out of juice. The author describes my new world:
“There’s a fundamental difference between the experience of a person who wakes up taking for granted that they will, of course, have access, and the one who wakes up and wonders whether they’ll have access, how they’ll find or fight for their access, and what they’ll do when they don’t have access.”

Part of this systemic ability-prejudice comes from our capitalist culture, which maximizes productivity:
“We live in a world that rewards women [and me] who can push themselves beyond their maximum capacity, but not a single woman alive can maintain that push indefinitely.”
Corporate culture has “turned us into work machines who regularly abuse our bodies to demonstrate our value—sleep less, work harder, always! They’ve made us ashamed to ask for help, to take medications, to use mobility aids.”
The gift of altered ability is breaking this stranglehold of over-productivity. For example, not being able to drive and push through an eight-hour day opens up new, gentler ways to move through the world.

The author also critiques the role of differently-abled characters in literature and art. Disabled characters are often obsessed about a cure to restore normalcy. “It’s an old, uninformed, one-dimensional read on disability that burns on the stinky fuel of nondisabled fears.”

Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchett courtesy Wikicommons

“Stories written about marginalized people embed themselves in our culture and are used to justify our politics, to arrange our school systems, to determine a hospital’s budget.” Narratives of disability are shorthand for “something incompetent and unreliable, helpless or dangerous, not worth living or inherently wrong, sinful, or contagious, impotent or taboo, perverted or sexless. And these manifest into tangible results from neglect to hate crimes, condescending laughter to sexual assault, unwelcome prayers to exorcisms, pity to assisted suicides, infantilization to police violence, dismissal to invasive medical procedures, familial rejection to domestic violence, idolization to social isolation.”

One potential result is real-world violence against disabled and “othered” individuals. “...disabled women are three times more likely to be sexually assaulted than their nondisabled peers and [it’s estimated] that 80 percent of disabled women have survived sexual assault.”

“Maybe when someone’s difference scares you, that’s the precise moment to lean in …”
For me, it is such a kindness when waitstaff look me in the eye and treat me like a human being; when they look at me, not my machine and mask.
“If you want to be genuinely, actively real-deal ‘kind’ to disabled people . . . Recruit disabled engineers and dancers and office administrators and comedians and lawyers and speakers and teachers to participate in your world, and do your best to make that world accessible to them. ... including disabled people is a kindness to all of us. Because listening to voices that are typically silenced brings to the table nuance, endurance, creativity, beauty, innovation, and power.”

“Let’s agree that disabled people are an essential, vibrant part of our world [and] deserve to be treated as such.” Many accommodations made to assist disabled bodies benefit everyone. “When curb-cuts were originally designed, the idea was to create accommodations for wheelchair users. … But something else happened, too. Parents pushing strollers found trips around the block a bit easier. And so did people on bikes and scooters, people rolling luggage, vendors with food carts …”
Closed-captioning helps folks with hearing impairments access video content, but it’s also great for understanding thick accents or if you want to mute the TV and follow along. Everybody wins.

The author dares to dream of an inclusive, accessible world:
“An accessible future is shaped by the fundamental understanding that we all have bodies, that those bodies are different from one another, and each is worthy of profound admiration, care, and respect. The aging body, the female body, the body in pain, the injured or sick body, the fat or short or asymmetrical body, the racially stigmatized body, the body that needs to use the bathroom, the blind, deaf, paralyzed, tired, nonbinary, hungry, bleeding, transitioning, seizing body. Every single one. … This future won’t appear out of thin air; we have to create it—little by little—as we practice listening to, caring for, and respecting all of our bodies. Please. Let’s create this world for each other.”

Sitting Pretty had many more insightful observations than I can include in this review, but I’ll close with two powerful quotes:
“Maybe there aren’t happy endings, maybe life is more like a bowl of soup flavored with contentment and angst, victories and heartbreaks, joys and defeats, rage and peace, and maybe it’s a special thing when you get to share that soup with anyone.”
And: “…all of our bodies carry a multitude of strengths and failures, and sometimes those are one and the same.”
Highly recommended.

Read more about differently-abled bodies: Being Seen, Disability Visibility, Disability Intimacy
Read fiction from wide-ranging perspectives: Amplitudes, So Many Beginnings,
The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fischer, Someone to Build a Nest In

Fiction: Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip

8/16/2026

Winter Rose loosely reimagines of The Ballad of Tam Lin, where a mortal woman must hold fast to her shapeshifting fairy lover to pull him into the mortal world.
The characters give this story depth:

Wild-haired, barefoot, wood-roaming Rois who narrates the story;
Her dependable sister, Laurel, who is engaged to Perrin, a simple farmer;
And the mysterious Corbett rebuilding his cursed family estate.

Corbett seems intent on wooing beautiful Laurel away from Perrin, and Rois becomes obsessed with him and his family curse.

Soon her obsession becomes attraction when she meets Corbett at the village dance:
I felt the quick blood beat in my fingers touching his shoulder, his bare hand. His eyes came back to me, as if he felt something pass between our hands. I did not know, until then, that you could disappear into someone’s gaze, that bone and heart and breath could melt like shadow into light, until only light was left.

But Corbett sets his sights on her sister Laurel, wooing her with flute music:
It was a song out of a forgotten kingdom, out of the deep, secret heart of the wood. It burned wild and sweet in my throat, in the back of my eyes. It lured and beckoned; it gave us glimpses of the land beyond the falling leaves . . . He stopped as abruptly as he had begun, his eyes sought Laurel; she stared at him, her face flushed, her eyes wide, startled, as if she had just seen him for the first time, stepping out of the light.

The author’s prose is often poetic, and layered with symbolic impact:
Fire streaked the dark; moths flew toward the flames, dancing around them, compelled and doomed, until fire touched them and they dropped like autumn leaves.
Light and shadow slid randomly over our faces as we talked: now revealing one eye and concealing the other, now stroking clear a straight jawline, now hiding a smile or a little anxious frown.

Rois glimpses the Fairyfolk who haunt the wood:
A shadow detached itself from the wind, dipped its mouth to the water and drank. Harness rang with small bells. I lifted my eyes from spark to spark: light on a stirrup, a rein, light on a pale moonlit face chiseled of ivory and ice and night.

Then she meets the Fairy Queen, who shackles her with thorn bushes:
She wore glittering air and spindrift snow, and a mantle made of tiny living animals in their winter white. She stroked one or two, smiling; their eyes were wide and terrified, their crying voices mute. “I know what your heart sees. I will show you.”
“Who are you?” I whispered. Cold racked through me; the thorns tightened their hold. She was something wild in my wood, the glint of an eye on a lightless night, the formless shadow the moon reveals tangled in the shadow of a tree. “Who are you?”

“I am night,” she said, and it was. “I am winter’s song,” and I heard it. “I am the shadow of the bloody moon and all the winds that harvest in it.” I felt them. “I am the dead of winter.”

Corbett disappears and Laurel starts wasting away from her love for him, similar to the myth of the Leanan sídhe. Rois is determined to find Corbett and end her sister’s wasting illness—the same strange state that led to their mother’s death.

The climax of the story is Rois holding tight to Corbett in Fairyland, echoing the Ballad of Tam Lin, but with visceral and powerful details:
Roses bloomed in my hands; their thorns clung to me as tightly as I clung to them. Blood streaked my fingers, as if the blood-red petals bled. And then they flamed. . . . My skin was melting from my bones; finger bones were melting as I held his burning hands. I sobbed without noise; everything burned, even words.

A Fairyland character attacks her grip on reality:
“Even now you imagine you are here, trying to rescue someone you think you love, who in the waking world scarcely noticed you. He did not love you there, so you dream a world where he must need you, where he must be grateful to you. That is why you are forcing yourself to suffer this in your dreams. So that he will be grateful and love you. In your dreams.”

In the most poignant scene, a semblance of Corbett assaults Rois with her own fears:
“I have been lying all along. I have never loved you. I don’t want you here with me. If I loved anyone at all—it was Laurel. You know that. You have always known that. . . . There’s something difficult in you to love. Something scarcely human. You are too wild, Rois.”

When Rois returns to the mortal world, there’s no sign of Corbett and her frail sister is near death:
I did not know who I had rescued in the wood: Laurel, or Corbett, or all of us, or if, in the end, I had only rescued myself.

The ending of Winter Rose is exquisite: a chance to start anew, free of past hurts.
A great read if you enjoy Irish fairy tales, Oneiric stories exploring the boundaries between dreams and reality, romantic fantasy where love is hard-earned, or underdog characters with dogged determination.

Also by Patricia McKillip: The Book of Atrix Wolf
Read other books exploring Fairyland: The River Has Roots,  The Starlit Wood
Read similar romantasy novels: The Unspoken Name,  Thornhedge,  Paladin’s Grace,
Swordheart,  Fire Logic,  The Everlasting

Fiction: The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia McKillip

8/6/2026

The Book of Atrix Wolfe begins with a powerful mage trying to stop a war: “The formless fury took shape in his mind then, into a vision more terrible than war or winter: something that both armies would end their war to flee from. He fashioned his making out of black, endless winter night, the fire from burning arrows, the last words of the dying, the cries of the dreamers, the images in their nightmares. He made it out of the bloody claw-print of a raven in the snow, out of the reflection in the eye of a warrior staring into the raven’s eye, out of the hunger and cold and hopeless fury of those trapped within the castle walls, the cries of children wearing themselves to sleep . . . ”

One theme of the story is how the powerful summoning in the opening, which took the form of a death-wielding Hunter, continues to resonate: two heirs of the opposing armies from that war are students at a famous mage’s school. Both believe the other’s family is responsible for summoning the dark rider, though both families suffered greatly in the ensuing mayhem.
Their teachers maintain the summoning mage’s identity remains a mystery.

During a magical game of hide and seek, one of the two heirs, bespeckled Talis, prince of Pelucir, hides in the pages of a book. Which turns out to have been written by Atrix Wolfe, the most famous graduate of the school.
When he is subsequently summoned home, Talis takes the inexplicable book with him.

Meanwhile, at Castle Pelucir, we meet a kitchen drudge named Saro, who mindlessly scrubs pots and grills all day. “She was dependable, like fire; if she was fed, she worked. She never cried, she rarely smiled. She never spoke.”
At night, when everyone else sleeps, she scries in the wash cauldron and sees beautiful riders on white horses in a golden forest and a castle made of ivy and rose vines.
We also meet Atrix Wolfe, who lives alone in the mountains. He’s the local Wild Man who heals animals with herbs and poultices—but never magic. He dreams of riders on white horses in a beautiful forest, one of whom shoots him with an arrow: “He woke, astonished.”

The author slowly braids these three characters together: Saro the kitchen drudge hears gossip about the return of Prince Talis. The prince locks himself in a haunted tower to study Atrix Wolfe’s book. While on a hunt with his brother, he meets the Queen of the Wood and her entourage mounted on “Three white horses with eyes of bone and shadows of hoarfrost.”
He immediately falls under the queen’s spell: “Her eyes were gold and dark, troubled, in a face at one imperious and vulnerable and so beautiful there seemed no word, in human language, for what he saw.”

When no one else will take lunch to the prince into the haunted keep, they send Saro. She is sensitive to the magic of the tower, seeing an overlay of the vine castle of her scrying.
Prince Talis is the first person who sees her as a person (more than a useful drudge) and is kind to her: “No one ever saw me [as you did]. They saw a dirty pot, or a clean pot.”
Atrix Wolfe dreams of his hidden book and searches for it: “He thought of stone, and, for an instant, became stone, crossing distance as if it were not time and place but simply memory.” He learns Talis has taken it to Pelicur and sets off to find it.

The dark Hunter begins to stalk all three human characters: Talis in his haunted tower, Saro in her kitchen, and a desperate, shapeshifting Atrix Wolfe: “He melted deep into the rock, stayed there, hearing the Hunter’s hounds howling in fury, and feeling the wild wind shake the face of the mountain as it searched for him.”
And the Queen of the Wood draws Talis back into her realm, charging him to bring Atrix Wolfe to her.

Meanwhile, Saro finds the book and tries to read it alone that night:
“The fire spoke; wood snapped, pitch hissed. A spit-boy snored. Someone under the table whimpered with dreams. A dog barked in the yard. . . . She held the writing up to her ear and listened; she stroked it with her fingertips. It remained as mute as she.”

Talis has grown up listening to tales of the day the Hunter killed his father and feels surrounded by ghosts of a war kept alive by others’ memories. He bears this ancestral legacy as long as he can, until he can’t. He tells his brother, the king: “This war has never ended--Atrix kept it alive, and you, and everyone in this house.”

The book deftly explores the nature of power, and the belief that powerful mages “must involve themselves in a continuing flow of power, for power unused, power neglected or refused, will find its own shape, its own destructive path in the world.”
Another moving theme is the nature of forgiveness. Talis says: “I have to hate him. Otherwise I might forgive him.”
And nature plays a powerful role throughout, personified by Atrix's shapeshifting and the Queen of the Wood. Her face “seemed to belong to the places he loved most, among the elegant, wild faces of wolf and hawk and snow leopard, the faces in mountains, in amber, in blue running water so cold it burned.”

The Book of Atrix Wolfe is an Otherworldly tale of a magical wood told in lyrical, enchanting language. It’s a story of the use and abuse of magic. A terrifying version of the Wild Hunt. A sly account of the imbalances of power and status in a quasi-medieval world. A reimagining of The Ballad of Tam Lin. A deft description of shapeshifting. A beautiful incorporation of Land Magic.
And a lovely romance: “He opened his mouth to answer. Then he answered her without words.”

Read more immersive magic: Winter Rose, Spear, Song of the Huntress, Sistersong, The Queens of Innis Lear,
The Wild Hunt, Land Magic, The Green Man

Fiction: Malinalli by Veronica Chapa

7/22/2026

  Malinalli invites the reader into 16th century Mexico. The main character, Malinalli, “was the Nahua interpreter who helped Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés communicate with the native people.” She was a slave gifted to Cortés, who renamed her Marina.
  It’s always fun to explore the past through “forgotten” or sidelined characters, and this novel is no exception. Today, Malinalli is generally vilified for her role in the destruction of Aztec civilization as Cortés’s interpreter. In this novel she’s associated with an equally reviled goddess, her namesake, the fearsome sorceress-serpent Malinalxochitl.
  The plot provides many twists and turns, but the strength of the novel is its immersive portrayal of indigenous life.

Some engaging worldbuilding elements are worked into conversation, as when her mother, who was from Tolteca, says:
“My people invented the healing arts and read the secrets of the earth so well, they could uncover mines of turquoise, amber, crystal, and amethyst just by running their fingers through the land.”

Or through Malinalli’s actions:
“I got down on my knees and prayed to Ometeotl, the dual god, both a man and a woman. ‘Oh Great Lord and Lady of All Created Things … May your heart take pity on me. May you help me, answer me, why . . .’ I burned paper that I’d painted with my blood to make it more worthy of their attention. But Ometeotl must not have heard me or seen the smoke of my offering, for no answer came.”

And when she enters the Temple of Eighteen Moons to become a priestess:
“Unlike my village, where prayers were made with offerings of hearts and blood to Huitzilopohtli to encourage the birth of corn and mark the harvest, the Temple of the Eighteen Moons was a center of learning dedicated to worshipping the gods Quetzalcoatl and Feathered Butterfly, who brought life, not death. … We paid them homage with incense and flowers, honey and corn, and colored streamers made of our finest paper.”

Other explanatory elements are told in Malinalli’s conversational style, as if she’s confiding in the reader as a trusted friend:

“The sacred calendar of days was filled with rituals that honored the gods of rain and wind, the goddesses of the earth, corn, and rivers. The world had already been destroyed and reborn four times by tempests, floods, jaguars, and windstorms, and now we were living in the time of the Fifth Sun, which was destined to end with a rumbling of earth so great that it would swallow everything that lived, even the sky.”

This works well as foreshadowing for the disaster coming with the Spaniards. Unfortunately, there are times the author’s explanations become stilted, tidbits of fascinating research she included, even though they didn’t directly support the overall story.

   There are times the writing soars, as in this chapter opening after she’s met a beautiful Mayan man:
“Pakal Balam.
His name was a burst of sunlight upon waves of foam.”

  Or this description after they become lovers:
  “As his men laid iguana eggs, orchids, and copal at my feet, and the world turned twenty shades of green, my heart turned to him. My thighs felt caressed by feathers each time he looked at me. The blue sign that marked me as a temple woman became hot to the touch. Every word he spoke enrobed the air with precious jade. His feet stirred the grass to music. His face appeared in the sky every time I opened my eyes.”

Another excellent passage occurs when she and her friends try to sneak into Tenochtitlan, the capital city of Moctezuma. The author highlights the tension with a standalone paragraph:
“We gained a fifth passenger: silence.”

Her enslavement highlights the interchange of worldbuilding and plot:
“For four days we walked in a single line, a human chain, through the jungle, our collars secured to a long pole. My cut and bruised feet made every step painful, but I did not falter. Woe to those who could not keep up, or who tripped, because the collar and pole that kept us tethered were unforgiving, dragging you until you could right yourself again.”

And upon arrival at their destination:
“There is a saying that anything in the world can be bought in Xicallanco for the right price. Cloth as sheer as a sigh with a sparkle to rival the moonlight. Parrots that could recite the story of the Hero Twins or any tale you liked. Concubines skilled at performing the Twenty-Four Arts of Pleasure. Emeralds the size of iguana eggs.
And now I, too, would be traded.”

She’s sold to a wealthy man. Her training to become a concubine by an experienced courtesan was great fun to read:
  “There is the Soft Kiss, the Exchange of Breaths, and the Touching Kiss, where you use the tip of your tongue to explore [his] mouth. To incite passion,” she continued, “there is the Pressing Kiss That Knows No limit and the Fiery War of Tongues.”
  Malinalli’s opinion of learning intercourse skills:
  “After a few days of Captured Butterflies and the Cascade of Flower Petals, I was relieved when she returned to lessons regarding the kiss.”

Malinalli’s descriptions of the Spaniards delighted:
“Many of the women believed that the pale men were gods. I knew this could not be true, because of one thing: they smelled. There were reports about the odor that these beings gave off when they removed their shells, an alarming stench like crocodile’s breath and rotted meat. No god smelled of anything other than incense and sweet flowers and fields of gold corn standing proudly in the sun.”

And her take on the priests:
“[A cross] hung from the end of some dark and pretty beads that the holy men liked to rub between their fingers. I thought the beads served to calm the White Robes, for these men seemed as excitable as wild birds.”

Part of Malinalli’s backstory includes the murder of her brother and father by the all-powerful Aztec ruler in Tenochtitlan, Moctezuma.

She quickly decides to make Cortés her instrument of revenge, due in part to the Spaniard’s indomitable will:
  “Men enjoyed the sound of their voices, especially when they were speaking about grand plans and dreams. They fell in love with their words. But when Cortés explained that he was going to meet with the most powerful man in the world, he meant it.”
  She believes she can control the Spanish leader through her web of words:
  “I would dispose of him when I was ready.”

One of the most impressive events of the book is the battle between the Spaniards and the Tlaxcallans, whose fierce warriors “wore headpieces shaped like animal heads. Jaguars, eagles, coyotes, and owls moved as if these beasts possessed their human souls.”

Their elite Otomi warriors: “Their hair was shaved into bristly crests that fanned down the middle of their heads. They were naked, bodies decorate with tattoos in magical configurations meant to protect theme. In one hand, they held wooden sword studded with obsidian points, and in the other, wicker shield decorated with feathers.”
And a Tlaxcallan war-leader: “It was like watching the yellow tail feathers of a strange, giant bird. And now this bird moved toward the front line of warriors. When the smoke cleared, I could see that the feathered banner was attached to the Tlaxcallan battle leader’s back by a tall rack of wicker.”

Malinalli is terrified of these fierce warriors in their battle finery: “How are we to survive this? There are thousands of them.”

After twenty-one days of battle and thousands of casualties and deaths on both side, Malinalli decides to end the war by calling on her divine namesake, the serpent goddess Malinalxochitl:

“I lifted my arms, and without a spell to guide me, I summoned every serpent to come to my aid. The order slides sinuously over my tongue. My mouth and face framed by serpent-fanged jaws that were emerging from my head. I sensed the suppleness of silver scales, and elongation of my neck. I was nahual-animal now.”

This excerpt highlights two things:
1. The power of immersive worldbuilding’s ability to let readers experience different cultures (shapeshifting into a nahual-animal).
2. The distraction of clumsy, passive-voice writing: “My mouth and face framed by serpent-fanged jaws that were emerging from my head.” This sentence would be smoother ending after the word “jaws,” or re-written in an active voice: "Serpent-fanged jaws emerged from my head and framed my face.”

Malinalli dithers between wanting and not wanting to kill Cortés and Moctezuma. Both men are vile and arrogant, willing to let their people suffer and die for their own self-aggrandizement. Yet she wonders if she can change them with her silver tongue . . . This got tiresome at times. I also found the epic battle in Tenochtitlan rushed and hard to follow compared to the earlier passages of the story.
Despite these criticisms, the overall reading experience entertained and I enjoyed learning about 16th century indigenous Mexican culture.
If you’re a fan of historical fiction/fantasy, enjoy stories from the “monster’s” point of view, or are interested in indigenous cultures, Malinalli is a good reading choice.

Read other historical fiction: Babylonia, Ithaca
Read other indigenous-inspired fantasy fiction:
Fevered Star, The Marrow Thieves, A Snake Falls to Earth,
The Witch’s Heart, Song of the Huntress, The Queens of Innis Lear

Nonfiction: Clamor by Chris Berdik

7/15/2026

Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World—and How We Can Take It Back is a deep dive into the acoustics of sound, hearing, and the soundscapes that surround us. Sound is a wave of energy triggering a rhythmic cascade of molecules crashing into each other. When this cascade reaches our ears, the vibrations trigger hair cells sensitive to different frequencies of sound, and this information is conveyed to our brain where we interpret and react to it.
One of the peculiar elements of sound is that it’s transitory. A car alarm might “trigger a visceral, even furious response” but when it stops, “you do your best to return to sleep, get back to your work, or resume your conversation. Your mind moves on to more important matters—at least until the next interruption.”

But even brief interruptions can take a toll. For example, reading levels of second- and third-graders classrooms near an elevated train “lagged two to three months behind those of their peers in quieter classrooms; fifth- and sixth-graders on the noisy side were up to a year behind.” When sound mitigation measures reduced the noise, reading levels became equal.

Sleep studies indicate “that noise can splinter our slumber below the level of our conscious awareness, harming health even among people who claim not to be bothered.”
When we sleep, our eyes close, but our ears remain on guard duty “listening for potential threats. … From an evolutionary perspective, prolonged sleep is a necessary but dangerous behavior, because it makes us easy prey.”

Loud sounds invariably damage our hearing. When high-energy vibrations reach our inner ear, the hair cells shear, damaging the delicate nerve-cell synapses. “Noise-induced hearing damage is irreversible” in humans. Prevention is the best strategy. One scientist noted that earplugs are “cheap and easy. It’d be crazy not to use them.”

Humans aren’t the only ones affected by our noise-filled world.
“The spread of our mechanized din, alongside the glow of artificial light, into wild areas has brewed up what conservationists have dubbed a ‘sensory smog,’ hindering animals as they try to communicate, sense the presence of predators, hunt for food, ... woo mates, fight off rivals, care for their young, flee predators, and migrate ... a noise-saturated environment makes all those activities more taxing …robbing them of energy they can’t afford to lose."
One scientist noted: “Once you reduce noise by treating its source, it’s gone, and the recovery can begin right away.”

Sound pollution is especially problematic for marine animals. Because water is denser than air, sound travels four times faster through the ocean, which means noise from ships fills a large expanse. And because “light to see by is at a premium” sound is a critical sense for many sea creatures. For example, “baby reef fish and coral larvae begin life in the open ocean and find their reef homes partly by listening for them.”
“In a quieter ocean, [whales] could hear a mate or family member call from twenty kilometers away, but that’s now reduced to a kilometer or two. Noise adds to the fabric of what’s making it harder for these whales to get by.”

“Research vessels designed for enhanced quiet are equipped with precision engineered propellers, which churn up less [noise-inducing] cavitation.”
Adding “more streamlined hulls, drag-reducing coatings, and sound absorption in engine rooms, [can] achieve a drop of tens of decibels compared to typical ship noise. Ships with these upgrades are not only quieter, but also more efficient, which saves money on fuel.”

But in our capitalist, profit-driven world, shipping companies lack the incentive to voluntarily make upgrades to protect marine life and reduce reliance on fossil fuel.

Modern humans are “increasingly surrounded by gadgets and gizmos … washing machines, dishwashers, and coffeemakers chiming in about their completed tasks or the incessant phone and smartwatch pings from app updates, breaking news, and social media.” This can be mentally draining as well as annoying.
“As a result, one of the biggest noise challenges of our time concerns cognitive overload.” This noise-induced cognitive overload can become dangerous in hospitals, where beeping alarms are so ubiquitous, healthcare workers (and patients) mentally tune them out.
Highway and airplane noise are most often concentrated in vulnerable, impoverished neighborhoods, where the constant racket contributes to health problems as wells as poor school performance.

While obnoxious noises ramp up “stress and distraction, there’s mounting evidence that listening to nature sounds may be an antidote, relieving stress and restoring attention.”
Our “perception of noise is elastic, swayed by our attention as well as innate and learned associations with certain sounds. The same goes for our sense of quiet.” The author promotes thinking in terms of the overall “soundscape” in a given environment.

Soundscape design can have powerful effects on human environments.
For example, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts wanted an atrium cafe in an open area with high ceilings and stairwells, a recipe for a loud dining experience.
But the soundscape designers used “17,000 square feet of sound absorption that [was] artfully camouflaged within the atrium’s design … The steel beams supporting the glass curtain walls were faced with a black-metal grill that hid a thick layer of fiberglass insulation. Overhead, translucent vinyl [was] stretched across a steel frame [hanging] from the ceiling; perforated with tiny invisible holes, it sandwiched a 9-inch air gap that trapped sound.” They also used hidden speakers to provide ambient sound.

Another instance: a busy party street, with lots of bars and live-music venues, neighbors complaining regularly about the noise.
When calming music was piped in, the “vibe of the area changed dramatically, replacing the usual angry shouts, shattered bottles, car horns, and police sirens with something closer to groovy mood music. Compared to the typical Saturday night experience, the number of noise complaints plummeted, and police were able to keep a lower profile, even redeploying units to other parts of the city.”

Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World—and How We Can Take It Back makes the case that sound matters.
In the author’s words: “To care about chronic stress, distraction, sleep deprivation, patient safety, environmental justice, and habitat loss is to care about noise.”

Read more about sound in the natural world:
Sounds Wild and Broken, An Immense World, Being a Bird

Writing Craft: The Joy of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict

7/5/2026

The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers bursts with actionable advice and insightful examples.
Throughout, the author stresses that sex scenes, like all fictional scenes, must serve a story purpose and should be driven by the “needs, impulses, and histories of your characters.”
She notes: “A good sex scene is not always about good sex, but it is always an example of good writing.” And should include some type of conflict: between the lovers, with outsiders, within the setting, or between the lovers and society (Romeo and Juliet). A character wanting something their partner refuses (or is unable) to give them defines dramatic conflict.

The sex scene is usually more interesting if something goes wrong or leaves the lovers “angry, empty, still yearning, or unequally fulfilled when it’s over.”

Because sex can strip us of our defenses, it can reveal vulnerable emotions:
“What makes sex so powerful an urge is our desire to connect with another human being. . . .
. . . You long for an unfamiliar heartbeat against your skin but what you often get is someone else’s heartache, someone colder and more distant than the warm body you sought, or someone as fragile and needy as you are.”
And the needier characters are to connect, the “more interesting their disappointment and its aftermath can be.”

One of the more interesting tips was on including different surprise twists in sex scenes:

Action Surprise. An event that shifts our attention from the sex act, such as the bed collapsing (true story!), another character coming home unexpectedly, etc.
Dialogue Surprise. Speech that shifts our focus away from predictable sex mechanics, such as a mistress/lover asking about an adulterer’s spouse, or an off-the-wall question.
Distraction Surprise. Such as the noise of a child in the next room, an intrusive memory, entrancing dust motes in a shaft of sunlight.
Insight Surprise. When a character has a revelation or epiphany during sex.
Language Surprise. Unusual word choice or metaphors that encourage the reader to think about sex in a new way. Often includes highly specific details: “She tasted like frybread—thick, smoked, and fat-rich on my tongue.”

In general, a well-written sex scene should be about much more than sex; it should connect “to the total package of your characters’ needs and wants and to the larger story.”

The book includes a chapter on smoothly incorporating safe sex techniques: “the details should enhance the story in some way: by helping create dramatic tension and/or revealing something about the relationship, the culture, and the characters.”
The text also covers the specific gifts and challenges of illicit sex, married sex, casual sex, first-time sex, and solo sex (masturbation).

The colorful examples of effective sex scenes were one of the book’s biggest delights:
  “He moved in and out hard at first, making my head hit against the headboard. I wouldn’t have minded, except I was scared I might get knocked out, and then I’d miss the most important part; but that didn’t happen.” --The Floating World, Cynthia Radohata
  Then I feel like I’m laughing between my legs, and the laughing gets all mixed up with the colors and I’m afraid I’ll come, and afraid I won’t. But I know I will. And I do. And it be rainbow all inside. And it lasts and lasts and lasts.   --The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
  “. . . we spent our time together entirely in darkness, for we couldn’t turn on the room light, and we barely saw each other, except for what we could make out in the dim light from the motel sign outside falling through the blinds: rose-colored profiles, the curve of a thigh or shoulder, a breast, a knee. --The Sweet Hereafter, Russel Banks
  “I tell him how brave he is, taking such a chance. So are you, he says, we’re illegal up here, you know. Not ‘it’s’ illegal but ‘we’re’ illegal. He is so lonely, so very lonely, you can taste the need on his skin.”
  —“Contact,” John Lonie

According to the author, “All you need to know as you begin to write a sex scene is what one character’s expectations are. Conflict sets in when the other character can’t or won’t give her what she wants.”
“The best sex scenes arise from the needs, histories, and compulsions of your characters. [When writing] Include well-defined, clearly motivated characters, plenty of details, at least a little conflict, a few surprises, and dialogue where necessary.”
Ideally, the encounter will have a lasting impact on the point-of-view character and the plot.

The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers was first published in 1996 and the text is dated. Although the author includes LGBTQ+ voices and examples, her default is a heterosexual couple. She also frequently references what she assumes will be a universal aversion to writing about sex in general and masturbation in particular.
Despite these quaint limitations, the book provides enough substance for writers looking for guidance on crafting compelling sex scenes. The book served as a reference for a Writer's Digest course I took, "Let's Write About Sex, Baby!" by Katrina Kittle.

Read more helpful targeted writing advice: Writing the Other, The Emotional Craft of Fiction,
The Fire in Fiction, Dialogue, Crafting Emotional Resonance, Scene Architecture

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