There’s something kind of funny about this time of year for me. As of tomorrow, we’re halfway to Halloween which feels like a holiday I can actually get behind. And today is Beltane, which is technically the halfway point to summer… my least favorite season. So I’m standing right in the middle of two very different energies and trying to appreciate both.

Last night was Hexxenacht, or Witches Night. Traditionally it’s tied to warding off spirits and welcoming in spring energy, but for me it looked like a virtual ritual, lighting a few candles, and settling in with The Craft and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It felt quiet and a little nostalgic, which was exactly what I needed.

Beltane has a very different feel. It’s a fire festival, all about life, growth, desire, and everything waking up at once. It’s louder in energy, more alive, a little harder to ignore. Instead of rituals inside, I spent today out exploring Whidbey Island. It’s close enough to home that it still feels familiar, but different enough that I can start pulling pieces of it into Woods Bay. The mix of water, trees, and small town spaces felt right for that kind of inspiration.

Tonight I’m leaning into the slower side of it. I’ll sit with the full Flower Moon, pull a tarot spread, and just see what comes up. I’m planning to leave out some water with an intention and drink it tomorrow. Nothing complicated, just taking a moment to pause and let things settle.

I was outside most of today, and honestly that felt like the most important part. Being in nature, noticing things, letting everything feel a little more vivid than usual. Beltane is supposed to be about life at its peak, and even if summer isn’t my season, I can still meet it halfway.

If you want to experience the past, I highly recommend reading A. Rae Dunlap's The Resurrectionist—a haunting, gothic debut set in 1828 in Scotland. With chilling anatomical descriptions, a hilarious cast, and a touching queer love story, it is absolutely mesmerizing.

If you want to explore the future, I highly recommend reading Veronica Roth's Seek the Traitor’s Son—a sweeping dystopian fantasy set on a futuristic Earth. Blending romance, sci-fi, fantasy, and dystopian, it is an irresistible genre-straddling story.

The audiobooks of both are incredible! Seek the Traitor's Son features a spectacular full-cast narration, and Tom Kiteley's performance in The Resurrectionist could not have been more captivating.

Seek the Traitor's Son releases on May 12, and while you wait, The Resurrectionist is available now!

Happy May everyone! I am SOOO excited for this months fantasy and thriller picks!

For fantasy we will be reading The Bone Ships!! I am genuinly so excited to get into this series, it has been sitting on my shelf for awhile

For thriller, we had a tie so guess we will read both!! So we will be reading Strange Pictures and The Maidens! I will be listening to the maidens on audio :)

Make sure to join the discord that’s linked on my page so we can all discuss! Happy reading 🩷

How is it May already?

For May, I'm excited to discuss The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan with you and hope that you'll pick it up, too!

Here is my schedule for discussion:

• May 1: Chapter 1-4 (p.1-72)

• May 8: Chapters 5-9 (p. 73-164)

• May 15: Chapters 10-14 (p. 165-241)

• May 22: Chapters 15 - end (p. 242+)

So, now on to my thoughts on chapters 1-4!

I've heard some recent critique of the dystopian elements of this book (that we haven't really gotten to yet). But these first chapters remind me why I love this book so much, as the themes are evident from the beginning.

This is my 3rd time reading it, but on my first time reading it, my daughter was just a bit older than Harriet. While my circumstances were different than Frida's, I very much related to what Frida is going through.

Here are a couple of themes I observed:

Us vs. Them

Repeatedly we're reminded that Frida isn't like "those" mothers who harm their children. Class and race separate her from the "those" people who don't deserve to be mothers with an emphasis that it's not typically mothers from her neighborhood under investigation. While Frida isn't white, she is "pale enough" that she will likely be treated better than others who are not.

The Expectations on Mothers

Frida is on trial for her mothering. While I think we would all agree she made a bad decision, it's not hard to see why she was brought to that point. The expectations on mothers is high, but the supports are lacking.

And now that Frida is under investigation, even reasonable and typical behavior will be frowned upon. She must be perfect.

And even fellow mothers are holding each other to these standards. Any weakness or struggle must be hidden, while the front of perfect, sacrificial motherhood is showed to others.

And finally, Frida is holding herself to unreasonably high standards, being her worst critic. This has always been me (even before becoming a mother) to the point where my parents would regularly tell me that they wouldn't punish me for less than perfect grades, because I would punish myself plenty.

Some questions for further discussion:

• What stood out to you from these first few chapters?

• Did you relate to Frida? Did you find yourself judging her?

• What about Gust and Susanna?

Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!

I hope you're all doing as best as you can be and taking care of yourselves. It's time to vote for the June book club!

Two unlikely heroes embark on quests to win God’s favor in this outrageously entertaining, profoundly heartfelt novel that announces an ingenious new voice in the tradition of Chain-Gang All-Stars, No One Is Talking About This, and Martyr!

Yara can’t comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family and reeling from a destructive relationship, Yara has never felt weaker—but with nothing left to lose, they strike a deal. Abandoning their solitary days of embroidery and obsessive cleaning, Yara reluctantly embarks on a perilous odyssey designed to prepare them for the daunting mission ahead.

Meanwhile, Adrena, a disillusioned prophet with a terrifying secret power, is determined to become the hero of this story. Desperately seeking the glory of God’s approval and the promise of heaven, where she hopes to reunite with her beloved mother, Adrena must first persuade Harpo, the leader of the Good Guys, that her plan is God’s will.

As their journeys unfold in a series of unforgettable adventures, Yara and Adrena are propelled toward each other and transformative revelations about life, death, and destiny in this intensely captivating, irreverent epic from a singularly brilliant new voice in fiction.

Dog Days unfolds in the long shadow of freak violence--where language stammers, time loops, and the body remembers what the mind can't.

"An incandescent book, a landmark in how to bring language to bear on the unspeakable. Beautiful, uncompromising, rigorous and totally original."--Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City

In 2009, Emily LaBarge and her family were held hostage while on vacation. A crocheted blanket was placed over her head while Mrs. Doubtfire and "Agnus Dei" played on repeat.

In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, "just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out"--otherwise it will never leave. She tries to find "the good story" neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?

A high-voltage synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory--drawing upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It's a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm--Dog Days writes into this question. How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.

"Obscenely good and very funny."
—Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book

In Avigayl Sharp’s brilliant and bold debut novel, Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong.

Though she's vowed never to return to her hometown in the middle of the country, the holiday season sends her careening back into the orbit of her overbearing, maladjusted family. Drunk at a bar on the frigid afternoon of the seventh night of Chanukah, she encounters the figure from her adolescence who may or may not be responsible for violating her, bringing her down, and ruining her life. The past collides with the present—but catharsis and closure are nowhere to be found. Not at the bar. Not in her childhood home. And certainly not in the unruly spirals of her mind.

Serious yet irreverent with a delirious velocity, Offseason reimagines the conversation around trauma while reckoning with the doomed project of “speaking your truth,” the compulsion to repeat, and whether we can be transformed by art and love.

National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda returns with a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence, and the loss of innocence.

"Mónica Ojeda is a dazzling black sun in the astral chart of contemporary horror." --Fernanda Melchor, author of Paradais

In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival's so-called "celebration of life." Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.

Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun blends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.

Four very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading The Hill by Harriet Clark in May, today is your last day to sign up.

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Except that I'm 2 days late. Listen, this is my hobby, my real job is running 2 businesses, swimming lessons on the side, and attempting to raise 3 white boys to be good human beings when the entire world is telling them to be entitled shits. Nina Pool has no MUNEY, I have no TIME.

So what did you miss due to my untimeliness? Let me try to be QUICKABOUTIT

Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein (Tachyon Publications) — A near-future satire asking what happens when AI gets just a little bit smarter and the people profiting from it remove the guardrails. Or...is that the future at all? Sounds like now. Epistolary structure (had to look this one up, it's formatted in a series of emails, data readouts, chats, transcripts etc.) Tachyon is indie and this is very timely in this day and age of tech bros and their accountability-free playground otherwise known as Silicon Valley.

Pixerina by Joanne Anderton (Bad Hand Books) — More horror than sci-fi but I don't decide the genre, if it's listed as scifi or if I just feel like it it's here. A ghost story about an artist who is obsessed with a house haunted by a little girl, only it's about writer's block for artists, and the little girl just wants a friend, but the artist wants a muse. Is that actually called artist block? Creative block? Listen, I just paint shitty pictures of my dogs, I don't know. What I DO KNOW is that Bad Hand is a small Australian indie press, gets zero marketing budget and is maximum deserving of your attention. I mean, LOOK AT THAT COVER!

The Blood Year Daughter by G.G. Silverman (Creature) — This is actually a horror short story collection. Silverman described it as "a response to my experience of being female, being the daughter of immigrants, and being disabled." Stories include a woman builds husbands out of gravel and slaughterhouse feathers, two sisters eat cinnamon-scented pieces of their mother, and a charming doctor’s murdered brides whisper warnings to his newest wife. I've seen someone describle it as "a rallying cry against the patriarchy." So no, it's again not really scifi, but it looks hella cool.

Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer (Penguin Random House/DAW) — 40 years after the world almost ended, a worn-out robot in the abandoned New York Botanical Gardens gets attacked and realizes old evils are stirring. I don't really know what that means but that's the blurb. Palmer has been featured in Clarkesworld multiple times and I'll read just about anything about robots. Hope-punk, themes of loneliness and purpose, comped to Becky Chambers' Monk & Robot, which if you haven't read is one of the most complete novelettes EVER. Seriously, how can she change your life in so few pages? Features a very good cyborg dog, which is obviously the most important detail.

The Radiant Dark by Alexandra Oliva (PRH) — Follows a family across fifty years after a first-contact event in Michigan connects their minds. It says Arrival meets Wild Dark Shore, neither of which I've heard of so there's that. Described as a "bold exploration of what it means to be human." Literary sci-fi, standalone. NGL, this cover sucks. Like who is making these decisions?

That old addage "don't judge a book by it's cover" is completely disregarding some pretty major tenets of human psychology. I don't know of a single reader who doesn't browse a bookstore based on covers (well, except maybe that guy who rips books in half to make them easier to carry in his pocket, who KNOWS what's going in in his brain.) Covers are SO IMPORTANT, especially to a newer author. Do better PRH!

A River From the Sky by Ai Jiang (Titan Books) Now THAT is a cover. I hope in person it's got embossing because that would be sexy. Science-fantasy novella sequel to A Palace Near the Wind. Which I haven't read, sorry, I wish I could read them all! Sisters Lufeng and Sangshu fight to protect their culture and their world. For readers of Nghi Vo and Amal El-Mohtar, WHICH I AM.

We Burned So Bright by TJ Klune (Macmillan/Tor) — Elder gay couple, 40 years together, rogue black hole incoming. They have one month and one last road trip to take care of unfinished business before Earth is gone. 176 pages. Remember that Klune pulled some problematic Stephenie Meyer shit with The House in the Cerulean Sea (If you missed it he used for inspiration the Canadian government's practice of abducting Indigenous children and placing them in residential schools for forced assimilation, made no public advocacy for First Nations communities, never addressed the backlash from Indigenous readers, and then wrote a sequel anyway.) So do with that info what you will. I know what I will do with it, and that's read an author who takes some fucking accountability. He doesn't get a snippet of his cover because I am petty.

WOW. I was not in any way QUICKABOUTIT. I make no apologies for rambling. I yam who I yam.

See you next week. I'll definitely be here, at my house, because with gas prices i can't afford to go anywhere.

— Zee

If you liked this and want more of whatever THIS is (unhinged book analysis, barely contained rage at the state of the world, and occasional Tamsyn Muir references and em dashes that I will never apologize for) consider subscribing for $5/month. Every cent goes to people who actually need it, because I have a day job and a cause, not a brand deal. This is my middle finger to Big 5 publishing, dressed up as a book blog. Come hold it up with me.