Reviews and Comments

Locally-connected story of escape from slavery in Georgia and public life on the abolition circuit in Massachusetts and England. While there are many moments of intrigue and risk, the somewhat dry telling is well-riddled by neatly connected reminders of slavery's implications in wealth everywhere they travel, and the novelty of the 'white slave' in drawing abolitionist crowds repeatedly highlights the deep veins of racism and misogyny even in those risking more or less to end slavery.

Nicely elucidated clear translation, compared to others there's nothing florid and mostly less poetic (reading alongside LeGuin's equally spare version in particular here), interspersed with short essays on commentary, lived experience, and the translator's challenges for a text so embedded in culture and so dismissive of language as a way to approach Dao.

Covers familiar ground of critiquing particular views of conservation baselines and biases in a deeply-human-entwined view of nature, a complex world left room to be complicated. Not as strong as her later Wild Souls, or Tree's Wilding.

Spiritually infused poetry that slips between weeds in the garden and fleeting seasons and omniscient conversation beyond these bounds to ask of life in the crevices.

Subtle feeling mystery unraveling in a slight and mythical magic of historical China setting that meditates on friendship, vengeance, and moral obligation. Quite wonderful.

Bookclubbing.

Unsatisfying in that way that means unresolved and complicated, deftly unwhole. Many sharp edges here to trip on as the tensions balance, themes of science and religion and addiction and belief and knowing and honesty and confiding, all these tragic things with holes in the middle.

An escalating absurdity of doing nothing. Opting out of society, non-violence and coercion, office work and monotony and sanity, it goes on too long and is just right.

a good middle book, less angst but less satire, more complicated feels about genocide and cute aliens

An ecologist's popular appeal to replace lawn with native plants - echoing EO Wilson and Margaret Renkl, calling on all to set aside half for ecological conservation in a mass distributed preserve - and the broad beneficial effects of gardening for ecosystem health: grow lots of bugs to feed lots of birds and beyond.

Compact and quiet novella on the gift of empathy in hard life.

A bizarrely imaginative and gripping queer climate road novel deeply evoking its two narrative poles in Ethiopia and India, querying class and privilege and sexual violence.

Churchill and the Blitz, with source material from many ancillary characters who might have been more fascinating as the focus, which is tightly on Churchill's movements in his first year as PM. Necessarily selective while trying to add color and context from family, secretaries, and Germans, this doesn't tie up well for me but is nonetheless well written and researched.

Loved the world setting and intensity of the determined women leads in an epic murder-magic-catastrophe, though the whodunnit procedural hunt for obscured informants plodded some for me.

Madcap mashup of music theory appreciation, 80s mech battles, queer and starstruck. The first third's dry and cataclysmic wit at the end of the world shifts to a somewhat more conventional (?) military space soap opera rom com, I do wish it had kept the gay piano bar Douglas Adams vibe more prominent.