Author of Color – Marked for Plot

The Language of Liars – Award-Worthy in all the Right Ways

This book has all of the elements that typically appeal to me: it’s a novella, engages with questions of linguistics and ethics, and it asks the reader to be uncomfortable. The Language of Liars blew me out of the water. The opening sections left me with the feeling that this would be a good book, worth reading and recommending, but it got better and better. Every chapter sucked me in a little bit more until I sat in bed, story finished, thinking about the ending and its implications. I was not super enthralled by the 2025 novella nominations from most major awards. The Language of Liars has the right blend of thematic ambition, accessible writing, and the backing of a traditional publisher that make it an excellent candidate, and I will be happily advocating for it to make some waves on the awards circuit this year. To anyone who likes their stories to shine a mirror on our world without being too obvious about it, this is for you. There’s enough here for me to happily teach this novella in my Genre Fiction elective, and I’m desperately hoping one of the book clubs I participate in picks it up, because there’s so much to talk about from the last few chapters.

Really, truly an excellent piece of writing. Plus, the book is short and straightforward enough that the content-to-time-investment ratio is one of the best I’ve read this year.

The Premise:
Ro is a talented linguist, hoping to be the first in generations of his species to jump into another’s body. He succeeds, possessing a Star Eater who, like all of their race, mine the cosmic space dust necessary for faster than light travel. He has been trained for this moment, hoping to gather the information and skills needed to save the slow death of the universe’s society, which depends on the service (exploitation?) of the enigmatic aliens.

Read if You Like: autism-coded characters, uncomfortable questions about how you (the reader) live life, musings on linguistics

Avoid if You Dislike: straightforward prose, lack of clear solutions to problems, monolithic intergalactic governments

The Dawnhounds – Fungal Cities & Fascism

The Dawnhounds was the Beyond Binaries Book club pick over on r/fantasy. We had our midway discussion last week and will be wrapping it up on August 27th! This is a book that feels extremely ahead of its time, and fans of Perdido Street Station are going to enjoy it greatly. It’s the type of unapologetically political Fantasy that has been getting more and more traction, but this was written in 2019. I left feeling mixed about this book overall, but I got my concussion right around the halfway point, which definitely is when I started enjoying the book less. For those whom are drawn to the weird worldbuilding and ardently political themes, I think it brings a lot to the table.

The Premise:
Yat is a police officer in a city that has adopted biotechnology to replace the steel and iron of its former oppressors. She tries to do right by the city, but as a queer woman, she gets little respect from other officers. After she is murdered and comes back to life with the blessing of some eldritch power, she gets wrapped up in a conspiracy far bigger than she can imagine. Her path takes her to a pirate crew that has answers about what happened to her, and a realization about the system she worked inside.

Read if You Like: vaguely indescribable interludes, weird cities, characters having a crisis of faith, insect bullets

Avoid if You Dislike: spores, negative depictions of police, the power of LOVE, authors refusing to explain everything

The Girl With a Thousand Faces – Hong Kong Never Felt so Haunted

Sunyi Dean’s debut novel The Book Eaters is the type of story that I have spent three years thinking about. Needless to say, there was no question about whether or not I’d pick up her sophomore work. Craft remain Dean’s strength, as do characters that don’t quite line up with easy moral labels. However, I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as The Book Eaters. As has been the case (and probably will continue for at least another week or two), lingering concussion effects are partly to blame. Not entirely though, I think.

The Premise:
At the end of World War II, Mercy found herself on an island outside Hong Kong with no memories. Thirty years later she is a ghost talker in the haunted Kowloon district, working for the leader of the Snakeskin Triad. She been seeing visions of a drowned woman, and they’re getting worse. It turns out that an evil spirit has very special plans for Mercy, and she’s not going to enjoy them one bit.

Read if You Like: haunting visuals, competent women in their 50s, casual queer representation, ghost cat sidekicks

Avoid if You Dislike: unconventional narrative structures, shifting POV (including 2nd person), depictions of drowning

A Long and Speaking Silence – Delicious Food, Deficient Social Skills

The Empress of Salt and Fortune is one of my all-time favorites, and I have a lot of love for the Singing Hills Novellas. I actually use two of them in my high school genre fiction class for a novella-focused book club. They had some of my favorite explorations of how truth isn’t always a single idea, that a story is just as powerful as an action, and using framing narratives in novel and interesting ways. This book, like some of the other recent entries in the series, mostly lacks those elements. I implore you to set aside your expectations and come in open to something a bit different. I enjoyed the book a lot more once I gave up those comparisons – it was hard though.

This is technically #7 in a series, but the novellas are all independent and can be read in any order.

The Premise:
Chih is new to their job and has arrived in a river town preparing for a festival. Their purse is stolen, so they wait tables as waves of refugees enter the city. They collect stories, do their best to help others, and listen to the advice of Almost Brilliant. Mostly though, they’re desperately trying not to fuck up while they fake it until they make it.

Read If Looking For: mouthwatering food descriptions, a story focusing on Chih, sassy birds, the exhaustion of working multiple jobs

Avoid If Looking For: fresh examinations of refugee themes, explorations of truth and multiple perspectives

If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light

Short Fiction anthologies generally don’t get much mainstream traction. Most genre fiction readers, myself included, tend to not pick them up. I never read them until I started participating in r/Fantasy’s bingo challenge and discovered that they can be really incredible. If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light had been getting mentions in both genre fiction and short form circles. It’s a translated work from Korean, and I’m trying to read more work not published in English, admittedly in a very unfocused way. This collection won’t rank in my favorites, but I think people who are more ardent science fiction fans will enjoy it, while people who primarily see themselves as fantasy people – like me – may resonate less with it.

Broad Overview:
This anthology of science fiction is thematically focused on belonging and personal connections in a world that is set up to push people apart. Oddly, it has an emotionally distant style. The closest analogues in English are some of the older science fiction writing that cared more about exploring an interesting premise than the modern conception of stories and characters. This didn’t necessarily work the best for me, despite plenty of interesting ideas that Cho-yeop dove into. Unlike the older US sci fi, there isn’t a consistent desire for the technology or aliens to be realistic and intricately detailed. Instead, Cho-yeop seems more interested in presenting ideas and their ripple effects rather than exploring the underlying logic supporting the technology and biology that each story focuses on.

Novella Readathon #29: Riot Baby

Platonic love is a topic that I’ve been craving more and more of in my reading, especially this month. Riot Baby has been languishing on my shelf for three years, and my craving for sibling bonds explored better than in my previous few reads finally got me to pick it up. I left the story conflicted. What Onyebuchi does well, he does phenomenally. However, I almost liked this story more as vignettes rather than as a cohesive novella.

The Premise:
This book follows siblings Ella and Kev throughout their childhood and early adulthood. Ella has powers akin to Jean Gray (a wide swath of extremely powerful abilities including precognition, destructive telekinesis, astral projection, etc), and Kev is a techie. The book’s main plot comes when Kev goes to jail, warping both his and Ella’s conception of what living in such a world looks like. However, the book doesn’t follow a traditional plot structure (you won’t find overarching antagonists here other than society itself), instead keeping Ella and Kev’s emotional journey as the focal point of the story.

Read If: you want a story about familial – not romantic – love, character centered stories are enjoyable to you

Avoid If: clear plot structures or well-executed speculative elements are important to you

Novella Readathon #27: The River Has Roots

I adored This is How You Lose the Time War, and I’d been meaning to get around to more work by Amal El-Mohtar. After reading three other Hugo nominees, this seemed like a logical next step. It is the third fairy tale novella nominated for the Hugos this year. I didn’t dislike this book, but I also didn’t fall in love with it like so many others have. Certainly I’d put it lowest in my Hugo rankings.

The Premise:
Esther and Ysabel are sisters who grow magical willow trees on the banks of a river flowing from the fae realms. Their devotion to each other and the songs of their work keep them as close as sisters can get. However, Esther has suitors; a neighbor looking to expand his financial empire, and a fae whose customs are alluring and frustrating. The story’s focus places relatively equal weight on the sibling and romantic relationships, with Esther getting a heavier focus than Ysabel.

Read If Looking For: the power of sisterhood, conjugation-as-magic, unknowable fae, lush prose, high quality audiobook production

Avoid If Looking For: tense plotting, twists and surprises, rigorous thematic work

The Last Contract of Isako -Corporate Samurai in Space

Fonda Lee won my heart with The Green Bone Saga, but I’ve been less thrilled with the work that she’s released since then. That’s how I felt when I got to the halfway point of The Last Contract of Isako. The book won me over in the back half though, which reinforced that Lee is going to be an author I follow closely. This book has a lot of her hallmarks from Greenbone Saga – complicated character relationships, a clear sense of culture in the world, and a small number of highly impactful fight scenes – and I eagerly await what she puts out in the future!

The Premise
Isako is a Contractor, legally connected for life with a company Director. She is one part spy, one part guard, and one part voice of reason. Unfortunately, her boss just lost a corporate war, and she consigns herself to Resigning. Before she can take the long walk into the cold, saving oxygen and water for those with life ahead of them, she is given one final job. Her joints ache, she’s disillusioned with her work, and she just wants it all to be over. For the sake of her daughter – whom will receive her retirement bonus only if she fulfills her duties till the end – Isako will do everything she can to prevent Sandbar Uchi from getting confirmed to the Board of Directors. Things get personal when she realizes something terrible has happened to his contractor & her former apprentice.

Read If Looking For: realistic-feeling dystopias, the cutthroat realities of terraforming, late-late-late stage capitalism, protagonists past their prime, atypical endings

Avoid If Looking For: characters tearing down The System, modern senses of morality, chosen ones or zero-to-hero

Novella Readathon #21: The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain

Sofia Samatar has been on my reading list for a long time. I always figured I’d start with The Winged Histories, but this novella kept getting rave reviews, and I love a school/academia setting. I knew this story dealt with class displacement from the chatter, but I wasn’t prepared for how sharply Samatar wields the pen … or perhaps keyboard. This is yet another author that I have now committed to reading more of; I wanted this project to lessen my TBR, but it has in fact done the exact opposite.

The Premise
The Fleet travels from mining site to mining site, remaining for generations before making a long journey to a new source of resources. The boy is one of the Chained, laboring in the darkness beneath, and the professor is one of the ankleted, a sort of middle working class. Some of her friends don’t bear any fetters at all. The professor brings the boy out of the darkness, ‘liberating’ him to her class and installing him as a student at her university. It does not go as smoothly as she’d like. As the two grapple with the chains they bear, they both realize they have much more to learn.

Read If Looking For: thematically dense stories, nuanced yet archetypical characters, the pointlessness of meetings and committees

Avoid If Looking For: plot heavy books, tidy endings, school settings featuring classroom scenes, happy vibes

Novella Readathon #19: Cabaret in Flames

Last year one of my favorite reads was Pueyo’s debut novel But Not Too Bold, which was a delightfully gothic monster romance – with an emphasis on monster. Cabaret in Flames was one of my most anticipated releases of the year, and I’m mostly disappointed in it. As with some of my other three star novella reviews, I still think it’s worth a look for readers who are excited about the specific premise and tone of Cabaret in Flames, but not for a more general audience.

Elevator Pitch:
Ariadne is a doctor, and her patients are Guls, creatures with unnaturally long lives who can feed only on human flesh and blood. When a strang Gul comes looking for her 5-years vanished mentor, she is forced to confront her dark past that Erik saved her from. This Gul, Quaint, wants to find Erik and asks for Ariadne’s help as they travel to a Rio De Janerio club that serves Guls almost exclusively.

Read If Looking For: characters processing intense childhood sexual trauma, monster romance, stories unable to be separated from their setting (Brazil, in this case)

Avoid If You Dislike: why the fuck won’t you two just talk to each other!, uninspired prose