Reviews of favorite books

Fiction: Behind the Throne by K.B. Wagers

5/28/2025

Behind the Throne tells the story of criminal gunrunner Cresson Stone, a.k.a. Princess Hailimi “Hail” Bristol, who is forcibly brought home to become the empire’s heir after her sisters are murdered. We experience Hail’s devotion to her deceased sisters in real time and through short flashbacks. Her mourning for her sisters, and her dead lover from her gun-running days, gives her character depth and nuance.
Hail is a foul-mouthed rebel who wants nothing to do with her stern empress-mother or the viperous imperial court. But she’s forced to assume the role of heir to discover who murdered her sisters—and to keep her vicious cousin Ganda off the throne.

Cousin Ganda is deliciously backhanded, taking every opportunity to advance herself at Hail’s expense, an old dynamic between them: Ganda does everything right publicly and is widely admired, but is cruel and vindictive towards Hail in private, using Hail’s temper against her.

Hail vigorously resists being squeezed back into her old role of princess, a fun reversal of the usual fish-out-of-water story. She’s savvy, insightful, and worldly-wise from her days out in the far reaches of the galaxy, but often too hot headed for her own good. It’s fun to watch her learn to rein in her temper over the course of the story.
The bonded pair of men who tracked her down to her gunship are assigned as Hail’s bodyguards. Emmory is the most intriguing of the pair: a man of exceptional skill who can also match Hail’s snark with ease. His partner, Zin, is the more even tempered of the two, but also a lethal killer. Hail’s evolving relationship with Emmory and Zin forms the emotional spine of the story, and it’s a delight to watch their mutual trust and teamwork develop.

The multi-planet empire is a matrilineal society (inheritance through the mother) many generations removed from India, but with many of the Hindu gods and rituals handed down across millennia. Hail has an affinity for the elephant god Ganesh, and he plays an important role in guiding and comforting her throughout the novel’s challenges.

Another intriguing element of the novel is the dynamic between Hail and her mother, the empress. Her mother has been diagnosed with dementia, creating a time crunch for Hail to garner support as heir, and the strained history between these two fascinates.
The empress sees Hail as ungrateful, rebellious, and unfit for the throne—but her only remaining blood heir—and she's determined to force Hail to fulfill her duties correctly.

Hail slides back into her old role of a whiny, unsatisfied teenager whenever she’s around her mother. Though they have little time together in the book, the author makes every moment count. It’s a treat to see the two women slowly come to respect and understand each other.

The story is full of political intrigue and Hail weathers multiple assassination attempts with the help of her dedicated team of bodyguards.
Meanwhile war is brewing between the empire and an old intergalactic foe.
The plotters who killed her sisters are slowly revealed through multiple twists and turns, but it’s difficult for Hail and her allies to know how deep and extensive the conspiracy is until the climax.
All is revealed in the end, though the actual mastermind and some of the more powerful conspirators escape (to provide a quest for the next book), but there’s enough resolution to provide a satisfying ending to this story.
Behind the Throne isn't a particularly deep science fiction story, but it's a fun read that kept me turning pages until the very end.

Reviews of other fun science fiction books:
Pledging Season; All Systems Red (and sequels); Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (and sequel).
Other fiction inspired by India: The Jasmine Throne and Covenant of Water

Nonfiction: The Art and Science of Connection by Kasley Killam

5/19/2025

The Art and Science of Connection uses scientific studies to illustrate the many ways social health improves our physical, mental, and emotional well being. For example: “Connection in various forms is linked to a range of benefits for the body, including a stronger immune system, lower risk of disease, and greater overall health.” And, “having close relationships seems to be as important as exercising and not smoking when it comes to maintaining our cognitive abilities as we age.”
Conversely, a lack of social connection is detrimental to our health:
“you are two to three times more likely to die in the next decade if your relationships are lacking, regardless of your other health habits.”

The author provides self-assessment tools to explore different relationship styles: frequent versus infrequent interaction; casual versus intense connection. Mine: “You thrive on infrequent interaction and deep connection.”
She also provides multiple strategies for improving our social health. For example, someone who feels stretched too thin may need to rest and ease back on socializing. Someone content with their social networks may focus on sustaining or deepening these bonds. She asks, “Is your overall social health strategy to increase your number of [social] sources, maintain or reduce your number of sources, deepen your connections, sustain your connections, or a mix of these?"

The book touches on the “loneliness epidemic” afflicting a growing number of people around the modern world. The pain of loneliness is very real: “We literally feel physical pain alongside the emotional pain of not belonging, of being cast out by peers.” This reminds me of the television show Survivor, where people are voted off the island—which I find too excruciating to watch!
The author says, “loneliness is like hunger: a message to your brain that it needs something it’s not getting.” The antidote is developing healthy social relationships. Because “Loneliness is often a self-focused internal experience[;] If you feel lonely, volunteering can be an especially helpful approach.”

One exercise called the Curiosity Game can help build or deepen relationships by asking provocative questions, such as:

What is something you were afraid of when you were younger, that you’re no longer afraid of today?
What is a big risk you took that has paid off?
What are you most excited about these days?
Who was the biggest influence on you when you were growing up?

Beware, engaging in vulnerable conversation requires discretion: “opening up has to be done selectively and thoughtfully with people who are trustworthy and at moments that are appropriate.”

Another helpful skill is “intentional guesting: the act of choosing whether, why, and how one attends a gathering.” For example, when you receive an invitation, are you excited? Filled with dread? “This should help you identify whether that relationship, community, or activity is generally nourishing or draining to your social health.” And whether or not you want to attend this particular event at this time.

The author spends the last third of the book discussing ways to create a global social health movement, and argues that not all cultures are amenable to fostering social health:
“In general, people tend to prioritize independence and self-sufficiency in cultures that value the individual, as in the US and Australia, whereas people tend to prioritize interdependence and group harmony in cultures that value the collective, as in Brazil and India.”
This part of the book was less engaging for me than the earlier sections focused on individual social health, though I did enjoy her examples of places around the world working on fostering stronger communities.

The author’s takeaway message: “You do have to make relationships a priority, experiment with strengthening your social muscles, and build community where you live, work, and play.”
The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health Is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier provides the tools to achieve this social well-being.

Other books you may also enjoy: Supercommunicators and Say the Right Thing

Short Stories: Kissing the Witch by Emma Donaghue

5/12/2025

Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins is a collection of fairy tales that transform the original stories into entirely new narratives. The stories are connected by a causal thread, with each successive tale serving as backstory to the preceding one.
There are some typical hallmarks of fairy tales: talking animals, magical transformations, enchantment. Yet the stories are also grounded in realism, so that they feel both ancient and contemporary, timeless and timely.
The fairy tales they’re based on are recognizable in most cases; others are less familiar—but it hardly matters since these stories stand on their own as compelling narratives of female resourcefulness and agency. And each story takes the narrative in unexpected directions creating a delightful reading experience.

The book begins with a retelling of Cinderella which begins with this opening line: “Till she came it was all cold.”
  We meet a young woman grieving for her mother and haunted by “shrill voices” inside her head driving her to sweep and clean the empty house. Then a stranger who knew her mother arrives and things change.
  “My old dusty self was spun new. This woman sheathed me in blue velvet. I was dancing on points of clear glass.”
  Cinderella asks to attend the ball:
  “Isn’t that what girls are meant to ask for?”
  When the prince proposes, she has a completely unforeseen—but absolutely perfect—response that reshapes the tale entirely.

“The Tale of the Bird” juxtaposes themes of safety and freedom. The first line: “When I was young as you are now I learned to save my own life.”
Here we meet a young wife whose husband insists on keeping her “safe” by trapping her inside the house when she becomes pregnant.
One day she finds a swallow near death who flew in the chimney. She nurses the bird back to health. “I could have kept it beside me, a silk-tethered plaything, but what would have been the use of that? I took it to the highest window in the house and let it out.”

I especially enjoyed the retelling of Snow White. She and her stepmother are initially close and it is the king who teasingly introduces a competition between them by asking, “How am I to judge between two such beauties?”
When the king dies, the queen asks Snow White to swear fealty, but instead she runs away: “I decided to leave it all to her, and leave her to it. I filled my hems with gold pieces and slipped away.”
She meets a gang of woodsmen and becomes their cook and housemaid. When the queen visits her, and Snow White neglects her duties, the woodsmen chastise her and warn her to stay away from the queen. This is ultimately a tale that contrasts how women serve men versus when women create solidarity with each other.

“The Tale of the Spinster” gives “Rumpelstiltskin” a very different outcome.
  A young spinster is subject to her mother’s greed until the mother sickens and dies. On her deathbed, her mother says, “if I have trodden you underfoot it was to wash out the dirt. If I have trampled you, it was to mesh your fibers into something useful.”
  The spinster can’t keep up with the orders after her mother’s death so she hires a simpleton to help. With an employee, the spinster starts flirting with customers and enjoying life. When the simpleton tries to leave, the spinner begs her to stay, offering more and more incentives, until she promises her firstborn child. In the end it is the simpleton who proves wise.

A reimagining of “Sleeping Beauty” hides behind “The Tale of the Needle.” It begins, “When I was the age that you are now, I had never done an hour’s work.”
The narrator is an imperious princess: “The only lesson I had to learn was the list of my virtues: how my face was the fairest, my wit the sharpest, my heart the most angelic, my singing the most comparable to a lark’s in all the land.”
When she enters puberty, she becomes discontented and curious about the castle’s tower where she isn’t allowed. Her parents get her a kitten to distract her, but when the kitten scratches her, they have it drowned. Furious, the princess finds the hidden passageway to the tower and meets an old wise woman who offers to teach her to use a spinning wheel . . .

“The Tale of the Voice” provides insight into “The Little Mermaid,” with a desperate girl longing for a wealthy son’s love: “He stood at the side of his merchant father like an angel come down to earth.”
“The morning after I saw this man in the marketplace I woke up sick to my stomach and decided I was in love.” Desperate, she visits the witch in a cave, demanding to become “a woman he could love.”
The witch says, “Whoever he is, he’s not worth what you’ll pay.” But the girl insists and the witch takes her voice. Later in the story the witch explains, “People never value what they get for free.”

There are thirteen stories total in Kissing the Witch and each has something interesting to say about how women gain power or give it away, and how to navigate the world on one’s own terms. I was disappointed the last story didn't circle around to the first, yet it’s a fascinating collection and well worth a read.

Other short story collections with reimagined fairy tales:
The Starlit Wood, Mythic Journeys, Not a Princess, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women
Novels based on fairy tale retellings:
Sistersong; The River Has Roots; A Sorceress Comes to Call; Thorn;
Thornhedge; Girl, Serpent, Thorn; The Book of Gothel

Fiction: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

5/8/2025

A Drop of Corruption is an incredible adventure featuring the brilliant and unpredictable investigator Ana Dolabra and her dedicated assistant Dinios “Din” Kol introduced in The Tainted Cup. This time they’re thrust into a jungle coastal town on the outskirts of the empire to unravel a locked-room murder. Ana quickly deduces that they’re dealing with an extraordinary criminal mastermind—who stays several steps ahead of their every move.
Din has left behind the love of his life. He tries to lose himself in sex with strangers to relieve his loneliness. “Afterward: when all was spent, and the shuddering grew still, and the sweaty limbs atop my own grew cool. Only then could I hold them and make the world small [and] controllable.”

A perpetually mud-covered, tobacco-spitting Apoth guard named Malo becomes Din’s guide and sarcastic sidekick in the investigation. Malo has enhanced hearing, sight and sense of smell, which allows her to track smugglers hiding in the swamps. She’s an absolute delight: a loyal guard, defiant of authority, and protective of the downtrodden, she takes Din to task for being overzealous and getting in her way. She also makes quite a few hilarious jokes about the scent of his “undercarriage” after he’s had sex.

The story highlights the Apothetikal branch of the empire: chemist-geneticists who modify plants, fungi, and insects to heal sickness and suppress contagions.
I enjoyed learning about the various types of apparatus the “Apoths” use in their work: multi-spouted samovar-type pots, ceiling nozzles squirting extracts and oils, and healing nests. Their tools have a steampunk sensibility, but with organic components dominating the “machinery.”
The Apoths also work offshore in the Shroud, a strange half-living structure where they harvest the magical blood of fallen leviathans, the strange sea monsters that come ashore during the wet season.

The leviathan's blood is used to augment individuals with specific skills: for example, Din’s perfect memory. The blood is also synthesized into specific reagents, which are shipped to the heart of the empire via canals dug through the inland swamps. Smugglers routinely try to steal and resell these valuable reagents—and it falls to Malo and her peers to track them down in the muddy swamps.

The murder that Ana and Din investigate was of a Treasury delegate sent by the empire to negotiate with the local nobility—all of whom have terrible teeth. The investigation is full of surprising twists and turns, including witnesses dying before they can divulge critical information, locals who hate Imperials like Ana and Din on principle, and a trail of bodies left by the mastermind killer.
Ana’s final push to solve the case is dazzling and an absolute joy to read. The criminal mastermind gets his just reward, as do his co-conspirators. Even more satisfying is Malo’s probable future in the Imperial Service and the tender bond between Ana and Din.

A Drop of Corruption is a five-star read: the writing is inspired, the characters are complex and fascinating, and there’s plenty of action, intrigue, and pathos.

The first book featuring Ana and Din is The Tainted Cup.
Also by Robert Jackson Bennett: City of Stairs, City of Blades, and City of Miracles.

Short Stories: The Starlit Wood ed. D. Parisien and N. Wolfe

5/3/2025

There are many delights in The Starlit Wood, an anthology of “new” fairy tales, meaning stories with a fresh twist based on traditional tales.
Each story is followed by a note from the author explaining their rationale and personal connection to the fairy tale they chose. I love when anthologies include this as it makes the stories more meaningful.
There are eighteen stories total, and I thoroughly enjoyed all but one (which was too “experimental” and disjointed for me to follow).
I’ve highlighted the stories that stood out for their exquisite writing, delightfully unique storylines, and resonate emotions.

“In The Desert Like a Bone” by Seanan McGuire pairs Little Red Riding Hood with the Coyote Trickster in a desolate Western setting. It’s an atmospheric tale with an empowering view of the protagonist, a young girl apprenticed to Coyote.
The dialogue when she faces her nemesis was a delight:
The knob turns. The door opens.
“You are an arrogant child,” he says, and his breath is whiskey and winter.
“The better to defy you, sir,” she says, and her words are summer in the desert, hot and cruel and unforgiving.

The author said of this tale: “her story is inherently one of betrayal by someone who was trusted, however unwisely, and of attaining adulthood through a single trip through the woods.”

Karen Tidback reworks a disturbingly sexist tale (“Prince Hatt Underground”) into a story of self-confidence in, “Underground.”
Similar to the original fairy tale, a girl (Hedvig) is married to a prince but never allowed to see his face (like the myth of Psyche and Cupid). In this instance, jazz records are the “dowry” paid for Hedvig’s imprisonment underground with her new husband, Lord Ruben, who visits her only in total darkness.
Afraid she's married a monster, Hedvig uses a lighter to view him and he’s stolen away by a scheming countess. Plucky Hedvig sets out to rescue him and in the process comes into her own.

Ruben remains a feckless whiner: “What am I supposed to do?" Ruben asked plaintively.
Hedvig’s reply: “Do better.”

Another great tale is “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar, the author of The River Has Roots. This story combines the fates of a woman who wears iron shoes in the hopes of saving her abusive husband (from the “Black Bull of Norway”) with a princess who is imprisoned atop a glass mountain as a prize for whomever can climb and reach her (“The Glass Mountain”).
Their two narratives converge when the iron-shod woman climbs the glass mountain and befriends the imprisoned princess. Ultimately, the two women rescue each other. The author said of her story: “I treasure the ways in which friendship can undermine the poisonously seductive narratives we sometimes trap ourselves in.”

Garth Nix sets “The Little Matchgirl” in the Old West in his story, “Penny for a Match, Mister.”
In this tale, a portal opens and an ethereal being crosses the Line when a man is killed under the full moon. The dead man’s orphaned sister, who sells matches to earn her living, becomes the instrument of his vengeance. Then a warden-marshal specializing in supernatural crimes arrives and things get very interesting from there.
I loved the author’s characterization of the original oppressive fairy tale in his author note: “It’s Okay to Be Poor and Freeze to Death, at Least You’ll go to Heaven with Granny.”

Kat Howard’s “Reflected” sets “The Snow Queen” in a quantum physics lab. The experiments use a hexagon of mirrors to transport one of the team members, Zack, into another dimension, but the mirrors shatter and they can’t get him back. Then it starts to snow where the mirrors had been and the lab gets colder and colder. The team gets Zack back, but he’s flat and “heartless.” It’s up to the narrator to piece him—and his heart—back together.

“Pearl” by Aliette de Boudard tells the story of a low-level tech, Da Trang, and an automated, self-repairing “remora” who helps him study for his exams to join the upper ranks.
The remora, Pearl, becomes a more-than-friend to him and helps him succeed beyond his wildest dreams. But Pearl becomes disillusioned by Da Trang’s new situation and escapes into the Sun. Everyone assumes she’s been destroyed, but Da Trang can’t let her go. He fashions remora after remora, sending them into the sun to find his beloved Pearl. It’s a bittersweet tale based on a Vietnamese legend with a surprising—and hopeful—ending.

The problem of “Sleeping Beauty,” says author Marjorie Liu, “is that ultimately, it’s a story about a woman who is far more attractive “dead” than alive, a woman who has little agency, who is forced into an unnatural sleep, raped while she is unconscious, and then, when she finally wakes, must go and marry the man who took advantage of her. "

Liu's retelling of this tale, “The Briar and the Rose,” is an evocative and compelling story, and my favorite of the book. Briar is a dark-skinned foreigner and trained duelist who works for an unnaturally beautiful courtesan:
“The duelist could have drawn her sword and removed his head before he even finished [speaking], but she was beyond the age where she needed to prove a point by killing. That had been the way of her youth, but no longer.”
Briar is the only one the courtesan trusts to be with her when she must retire to the tower once a week to sleep. While she sleeps, Rose, whose body the courtesan inhabits, awakens. Briar has fallen in love with Rose and the two women treasure these brief moments together.

Rose hates how the courtesan uses her body to seduce wealthy men and longs to break free.

Briar knows by Rose’s weakening state that the courtesan will soon discard her body for another, younger woman, and Rose will die. The tale becomes a race against time to unravel the mystery of Rose’s imprisonment and find a way to save her before the courtesan kills her and moves on. Rose secretly combs the courtesan’s memories and dreams to find the essential clue they need to unravel her evil magic.
The epilogue delivers a wonderful rumor of two foreign women living on the steppe. One eyewitness claimed: “They held hands even when they rode.”

“Spinning Silver” by Naomi Novik, the last story in the book, turns the “Rumpelstiltskin” tale on its head.

The narrator’s father is a kind-hearted moneylender who never collects what’s owed him. When her mother falls ill, the narrator takes it upon herself to collect from the townsfolk. She’s highly successful, but one day she brags about spinning silver into gold and is overheard by a fairy.
The fairy gives her a bag of silver, demanding she turn it into gold. “For fail me, and to ice you shall go,” the fairy says. In the city, she works with a jeweler to turn the fairy silver into a bracelet and sell it to the duke for a bag of gold. But then the fairy gives her a larger bag and makes the same demand. These are turned into silver rings. With the third bag of silver, the fairy tells her when she turns it into gold he will take her into his wintry fairyland and marry her.

In the end, the resourceful moneylender makes a deal with the fairy worth more to them both than marriage. A truly satisfying ending to the story and to the anthology as a whole.

Reviews of other worthy short story anthologies:
The Best of World SF, The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, Best New Romantic Fantasy

Fiction: Behind the Throne by K.B. Wagers

Nonfiction: The Art and Science of Connection by Kasley Killam

Short Stories: Kissing the Witch by Emma Donaghue

Fiction: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

Short Stories: The Starlit Wood ed. D. Parisien and N. Wolfe

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