Reviews and Comments

An educator studies middle-grade kids exploration of and place-making in their neighborhood's hedges, woods, and interstitial empty lots as they begin to range away from home from age 8 to 11, and combining this small study with theory and his and others adult recollections of the role of secret, self-created, organized, and usually private dens and playspaces, centers this form of development in the preparation for a social self to emerge.

Captures this stretched moment of trauma and grief in a series of chained short stories along a future plague's long trajectory. While every one of these is raw and centers horrific loss, ending, and predictable yet abrupt disconnections in the family and social fabric, somehow they are also beautifully sweet, often funny, and all too recognizable without polemicizing any of our current specific polarizations.

Friends said this was among the first sci-fi they read as kids. I was expecting dated 50s space booster meets Hardy Boys, and not too far off, but also much more considered and expansive than that, with practical realism and moral and empathetic choices with consequential acts and a scope that somewhat plausibly keeps ratcheting this to a memorable quality sci-fi.

Bookclub default option.

Speculation from another era, these are all well-written, stylistically and structurally varied, and struggle to get past their prompt or conceit or timewarp. Oddly, "Spice Pogrom" was my fave.

At its best, sharp analysis of American conflation of morality and prosperity, less so as a Cold War text criticizing both US and USSR attempts to manage history while making soon-to-be-awkward claims about democracy's defenses against pursuing preventative war, factionalism, and ideological blind hubris.

War and military patriarchy turned upside down and poked full of satirical holes to fill with wit and wordplay, of course, enjoyable as always.

Modern dark magic and action richly set in a Malaysian context of spirits, gods, mothers and daughters, family status, face, identity, and revenge.

Deeply satisfyingly layered and interwoven, imagined Mayan/Belizean past and future solarpunk Earths, central struggles with violence and disagreement and revolt without compromising voluntary consent, paced like a jaguar moving through ruins.

This is the most incredible sweetly depressing plague/pandemic novel. Seriously dark.

Dipping back into Discworld, near abouts where I left off.

A man's hard life in Idaho panhandle, briefly carried from one near death to another.

Indicting colonial capitalism's responsibility for our modern environmental and poverty dilemma. Quick and smoothly focuses our attention on small acts, then global repercussions, offbeat books, then deep mysticism, to come back to the long-fought war of ideas and omnicidal violence we accept for the modern era's consumption and wealth.

A morality question of harm volleyed between players in broadly medieval conflict from the personal to all out war. Reads as homage to LeGuin than most Banks: while there's only one late line to connect this explicitly to the Culture universe (give or take), it's most clearly asking the same questions.

Last Culture novel for me to read, accepting that it may not be very.