Middle grade contemporary fantasy. A young girl who lives with her grandparents above their bookshop in London, England, discovers that certain people, she among them, can literally enter books, have conversations with characters, and directly observe or even participate in the stories therein. Through the story, she and the reader learn more about the hidden …
YA sci fi. Set on a future earth that is well down the path to climate apocalypse. Follows two teen girls, one living as a scientifically brilliant (and seemingly neurodivergent?) high-status resident of one of the aerial eco-cities that an older generation created as an attempt to reduce humanity’s impact on the planet, and the …
Literary fiction. Follows a blue-skinned boy being raised as a god in an ashram run by his father outside a small village in Tamil Nadu, India. The promotional copy on the book jacket does not make this clear, but because it becomes evident to the reader pretty early on (though not to the protagonist) I …
YA contemporary. A young woman at the end of high school has spent every spare moment over the last few years making a podcast called *Artists in Love* with her boyfriend, with whom she is in one of those ‘perfect couple’ high school relationships. Except he breaks up with her and announces he’s leaving town …
A scholarly history of workers in media, publishing, design, advertising, and related professions in New York from the 1930s to the 1970s. Across the decades in which capitalism took on a mass consumerist shape, it traces changes in these industries that were so central in that process. And it examines the ways in which workers …
An anti-productivity book, of sorts. In most books that are either directly or indirectly about how we individually make use of our time, the goal is to enable the reader to do more. Now, I don’t actually often read that sort of book, at least in its most blatant neoliberal-cult-of-productivity manifestation. But I have been …
Fantasy. I picked this one up because the author makes bookish content online that I quite like – her taste in books isn’t the same as mine, but it’s related, and she’s smart and politically interesting so I enjoy her videos. The book is a vaguely-medieval-Europe, dragons-and-castles-and-magic sort of fantasy that I don’t read a …
YA contemporary fantasy. A young Black woman in Brooklyn whose touch, and sometimes mere presence, causes plants to grow, bloom, move. From a hitherto unknown relative, she inherits an old mansion outside a small town in upstate New York. Adventure ensues and she learns more about her powers and the heritage she has been born …
Fantasy novella. The premise is that when enslaved people who were pregnant were thrown or jumped overboard from slave ships and subsequently died, their foetuses did not die but came into the world transformed into beings of the sea. Over the years, some of these “wajinru” survived, found each other, and built a society. In …
Speculative short stories, mostly set in worlds close to but distinct from our own. Quietly weird, often unsettling or vaguely sad. The writing wraps around and immerses you, doesn’t spoonfeed, so there were some I didn’t understand, but the collection as a whole was definitely to my taste and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Originally posted by Scott on …