Jul 06 2026

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

I admit, dear reader, that I was finally unable to resist the hype surrounding this series and decided to go see what all the fuss is about. And the answer is: a lot, and most of it really good!

Full disclosure, the tipping point for finally getting me to pick this up was likely the successful BackerKit campaign for the tabletop role-playing game based on the Dungeon Crawler Carl book series, of which this is the debut. I was definitely interested in jumping aboard but am already so invested in various different (and too often unplayed) RPG systems, that I figured I ought to at least give the first book a read before committing more funds and time to the game. Ironically, the main beneficiary of my time since then has been Baldur’s Gate 3, a video game that I can only play in small doses because I find the controls curiously fatiguing.

But I digress. This book is frigging great! Carl is a Coastie who runs out of his apartment pantsless one winter night to chase after Princess Donut, the spoiled showcat of his very recent ex-girlfriend who herself is off on a yacht somewhere with her new man. When an alien syndicate proceeds to flatten every man-made structure on Earth’s surface — as well as everything and everyone within them — Carl and Donut are forced to find refuge from the cold in one of the dungeon entrances that suddenly pop up instead. These entrances lead to a massive, multi-level underground dungeon where everyone who enters must fight to survive… for the entertainment of a galactic viewing audience eager to send loot boxes to their favorites. Soon, Carl and a newly sentient Donut must figure out how to play the game without losing their sense of right and wrong.

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Jul 02 2026

Tantalizing Tales — July 2026 — Part One

Happy July, dear readers! If you’re in an area affected by high heat, I sincerely hope you have every opportunity to stay cool, especially with a good book or five to keep you company.

And as always, I have suggestions, including the recently published Pasha The Storm by the fabulous Lin Codega. If you’re not quite ready to see the end of Pride Month, then this queer swashbuckling adventure is definitely the book for you!

Bold, bawdy Pasha was once the most infamous pirate to sail the sister oceans. Now she’s in exile and worse: beholden to the irritatingly attractive Minister Atle, who’s plotting treason against the powerful Queen Thivaldis of Garda. The queen has built a navy fueled by necromancy, with aims of expanding her territories using whatever means necessary. Atle is determined to stop her, and believes that Pasha is the perfect pirate to steer the fleet’s stolen flagship into the mouth of a monstrous, legendary whale — an act which will hopefully cripple the queen’s efforts significantly.

But gods and ghosts stand in the way of Pasha, Atle and their crew. With the Queen of Garda in hot pursuit, will they be able to put an end to her dark dreams of empire without becoming sacrifices to her deathly magic themselves?

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Jul 01 2026

Welcome To Hell: From The West Bank To Gaza by Mohammad Sabaaneh

As someone who believes in the need for a Palestine free of occupation and genocide, it feels weird to say that nothing in this graphic memoir persuaded me further along towards that cause. The Israeli occupation is horrifyingly cruel, and the abuse the Palestinians continue to endure unthinkable. If, for whatever reason, you don’t already believe this and need further testimony, then this book will hopefully help open your eyes to an incontrovertible truth.

But nothing that Mohammad Sabaaneh chronicles in this book is particularly new to me. I honestly felt like a chorister getting slowly more numb at being preached to about things I already know. It doesn’t help that I don’t respond well to graphic violence. I don’t need to watch depictions of violence in order to empathize and want to agitate for change: on the contrary, being exposed to secondhand violence makes me retreat. Seeing cruelty done to others — especially if it’s not something I can step in and stop immediately — inflicts a psychological wound that I need time to recover from. If you’re like me, then this book probably isn’t essential reading for you either.

That said, bearing witness to the trauma of what the author and his fellow Palestinians went through is also important work. If you can do that, then by all means read this. Welcome To Hell is affecting and bleak and illuminates in greater detail the specific suffering of the Palestinian people. It’s also very much an agonized cri de coeur of someone who’s had to endure unimaginable and unnecessary pain at the hands of the deeply sadistic.

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Jun 30 2026

Uh-Oh, Hugo! by Jonathan Stutzman & Jay Fleck

This adorable book for beginning readers is perfect for anyone who loves cute animal illustrations, and especially those of delightful little pugs.

Hugo is a charming pug puppy who is ready for a day of big adventure! With his small child owner, he goes to explore the wider world, finding both enchanting experiences and significantly less magical mishaps. It’s a pretty standard tale of a type that, to a certain extent, I’m not sure kids are even allowed to experience firsthand any more, as Hugo and owner encounter wildlife and essentially roam around in meadowlands unsupervised. But that, I suppose, is the magic of picture books, that readers get to indulge in seemingly outlandish behavior without drawing down negative consequences on either themselves or their loved ones.

If that sounds unnecessarily snippy, forgive me. Modern parenthood is fraught, and to a large extent feels safer to talk about now that my kids are old enough to pursue outdoor recreation as they wish without shitty American neighbors calling the cops because any unattended elementary school-age child in the outdoors must surely be “neglected” and “abused.”

Ahem, anyway! The prose lends itself beautifully to reading aloud, tho may feel a little clunky on the page. Hugo and his owner go through a variety of experiences that not only introduce readers to nature but also showcase how ups and downs are all a normal part of life, and that resilience and perspective are so important when it comes to sustaining joy. Honestly, my only quibble with the plot was in how the owner was so relatively blase about the skunk encounter. That’s love, being able to spend a whole day with a dog doused in skunk scent.

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Jun 29 2026

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

accompanied in the volume I received by the short story Johnny Hollowback And The Witch, which I actually preferred.

Which isn’t to say that the main novella here is at all bad! I very much preferred it to the last thing of hers I read, the wildly overrated This Is How You Lose The Time War. But it shared the exact same flaw that the earlier novella did, and which I’ll get into at length after a brief synopsis.

Esther and Ysabel are the youngest members of the Hawthorn clan, a family that has faithfully tended the Professors and the area around them for centuries. The Professors are a pair of intertwined willows on the banks of the River Liss, and pretty much mark the end of regular human lands in the area. Beyond the Professors are the Modal Lands, the border between reality and Faerie. As the Liss flows from Faerie, magic comes with it, growing into the willows that the Hawthorns tend and harvest, in exchange for songs at dusk and dawn.

It is song that captivates Rin, a creature from Faerie who falls in love with Esther. Esther loves them back, but not as strongly as she loves her little sister Ysabel. When Esther is murdered in the Liss, she risks everything to find a way to tell her sister what happened and to bring her murderer to justice.

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Jun 28 2026

Paladin’s Hope by T. Kingfisher

Galen, the paladin of the third Saint of Steel book, was seen in Paladin’s Strength as Istvhan’s second in command. He also had a reputation as happy-go-lucky, willing to bed more or less any man who struck his fancy, and able to catch them too. Paladin’s Hope begins less cheerfully: with a corpse. Observing the corpse are some men from the city guard, a gnole who is also with the guard, and Doctor Piper, a lich doctor, something of a medical examiner in the city’s setup. Like many smart and talented people stuck in the middle of bureaucracies, Piper is impatient with the obvious. “Well, if you want my professional opinion, this great god-damn hole in his chest is probably what killed him.” (p. 2)

Paladin's Hope by T. Kingfisher

Kingfisher takes the opportunity to tell the reader more about Piper:

Doctor Piper dealt with corpses and for the most part, he preferred them to the living. He didn’t mind living people, he was perfectly happy to meet them and talk to them and even work with them, but corpses never, ever asked stupid questions. You learned to appreciate that when you spent all day analyzing why and how people had died. The dead didn’t say things like, “Are you sure he’s dead?” when the man’s head was half off or, “Dear god, what happened?” when it was bloody obvious that someone had shoved a sword through him. The dead just laid there and go on with being dead.
He definitely preferred them to the city guard. Piper was suspicious of power, particularly power that thought it was the arbiter of justice. He knew Captain Mallory well enough to know that the man was that rarest of creatures, an honest policeman, but that simply meant his dislike was tempered with pity. Mallory did not engage in graft or extortion and for this sin, he had been assigned the poorest and most crime-riddled quarter of the city, where he could be handily forgotten until his superiors decided they needed someone to blame. (p. 2)

Piper’s sense of justice gets the book rolling. It transpires that this corpse is not the only peculiar one that has turned up lately, and Captain Mallory may be honest, but the city guard as a whole is not interested in how these men died. Mallory even goes to the trouble of warning off Earstripe, the first and so far only gnole on the city guard. Just as the badger-like gnoles are second-class residents, Earstripe is definitely a second-class member of the guard. If he has an idea that pans out, humans get the credit; if something goes awry, he is quick to get blamed. Earstripe himself is somewhat philosophical about his situation: being a job-gnole gives him status, and the community has decided that having at least one gnole within the guard organization is better than being excluded or holding themselves aloof. He knows he is not being treated equally, but what can one gnole do?

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Jun 27 2026

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

Dickie Bow got left behind by the spy game after the collapse of European communism, and never really found anything else. By the time that Dead Lions begins — it was first published in 2013 — he’s barely holding on with a job in a sex shop and a routine of steady drinking that will kill him later rather than sooner. But when an unmistakable Moscow spook turns up in his local, reflexes kick in, and it’s not long before he learns that some things will kill him much faster than an excess of booze. Dickie follows the spook without any preparation and with little thought; he figures that he can sort things out later. They go on a regional train, which is delayed and then cancelled by technical problems on the line. In the crush of passengers switching from trains to busses, Dickie feels a sharp prick to his thigh, but does not lose his man and they both board the same bus. The bus makes its way to Oxford where, as Herron writes, “it would deliver one soul fewer than it had gathered, back in the rain.” (p. 6)

Dead Lions by Mick Herron

After the first chapter, the reader is ahead of British secret services, and in particular ahead of Jackson Lamb, the head of the unit that is colloquially known as Slough House and even more colloquially as the slow horses: people who have screwed up badly in the line of duty, but who for one reason or another cannot be summarily fired. Lamb is soon on the scene in Oxford. The official verdict is heart attack — given Dickie’s health and habits, it’s not a surprising one — but Lamb knew Dickie from when they both worked in Berlin, which was then spook central. A heart attack is one thing. A heart attack when you’re on a bus without a ticket for any part of the journey, and less than £20 about your person is quite another. Herron gives readers some funny scenes as Lamb tries to moderate his usual abrasive manner so that he can get useful information from the train and bus staff at Oxford station without revealing his secret service affiliation. He doesn’t get a lot of information, but from between the cushions of the seat where Dickie Bow died, he finds something potentially more important: the deceased’s mobile phone. (Dead Lions is set in a time before smartphones were ubiquitous, so the phone is both more and less than it initially seems.) Going through the phone later, Lamb sees just how socially impoverished Dickie’s post-Service life had been. He also finds an unsent message without a recipient; one word, “cicadas.” It’s a code word Lamb recognizes from Cold War days.

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Jun 26 2026

The Strange Disappearance Of Imogen Good by Kirsty Applebaum

Okay, but what happens neeeeeext?!

That is less a complaint than a plea for Kirsty Applebaum to keep writing more books about the garden at the heart of The Strange Disappearance Of Imogen Good. The book itself opens with Imogen about to sneak into a forbidden garden, in hopes of ditching her once best friend Bex Baxter. The point of view in the next chapter switches over to Imogen’s cousin Fran, whose parents need to attend an important conference in a last ditch attempt to save their business. Her Uncle Pete and Aunty Liz are thrilled to have her come stay for six days, but Fran is bracing herself for the reception of her cousin Imogen, who is about her age. Imogen is neat and bossy in a way that chafes at Fran’s more chaotic nature. She’s honestly the main reason Fran doesn’t want to visit, much less stay at, the Stillness Estate.

She’s thus shocked when Imogen is nowhere to be found. More bewilderingly, everyone is acting like Imogen never existed, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. At first, Fran is tearful, thinking that everyone is just playing a cruel prank on her. The more she learns of Stillness Estate and the strange garden at its heart tho, the more she begins to wonder if maybe people aren’t pretending, and if something more sinister lies at the heart of Imogen’s disappearance and erasure.

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Jun 25 2026

Oracles by Olivia Sullivan

I’m pretty sure that this is meant to be an illustrated poem, but that’s not the only thing that baffles me about this purported graphic novel.

Leaving heartbreak behind, the protagonist pares down their physical existence and decides to go on a long hike in the woods. Things get weird very quickly, as the narrator starts hallucinating, presumably from having consumed something foraged that they shouldn’t have. Soon, they’re on a trippy mental journey (yes, Terence McKenna is name checked here and yes, I rolled my eyes hard) as they try to process their fresh grief over their breakup, their lingering grief over their mother’s death some time earlier, and their desire to turn their back on modern life and live in the woods a la Richard Proenneke (which I did not roll my eyes at. There is value in living a minimalist lifestyle even if it isn’t for me.)

But oh man, the romanticization of that “simple life” just made this so hard for me to care. McCandless Camping — a reference to the guy who essentially starved himself to death in the Alaskan wilderness — is presented as something aspirational, and y’all, I cannot. It’s not romantic to die because you’re a dumbass. Mr Proenneke knew what he was doing; Mr McCandless very much did not. I get that this was written in the throes of self-abnegation but honestly, to what end? Who benefits when you starve yourself in isolation? Are you going to subsequently go out into the world and spread a message of doing good for others?

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Jun 24 2026

Cinder House by Freya Marske

Unlike Doug, I knew that this would be a variation on Cinderella from the very first page, steeped as I am in my love for all fairy tale and mythological retellings. But like him I was immediately hooked by the premise that Ella, our heroine, essentially shuffles off her mortal coil on that very same page, only to be hijacked after a fashion by a sentient house still mourning the death of its previous owner, her father.

Cinder House by Freya MarskeBound to the house — in an elegant take on the term house-bound — Ella tries to claw out an afterlife for herself that isn’t simply fetching and carrying for her stepmother and stepsisters. It’s only by accident that she learns that she can roam the city, with a strict limitation of being instantaneously returned to the house at midnight. This restriction is explained to her by the figure who essentially becomes her fairy godmother. So when the prince of her kingdom announces a ball… well, the classic fairy tale is adhered to, tho in a feisty, feminist, fantasy way that acknowledges not only the challenges faced by the chronically ill and disabled but also by people in unconventional relationships.

And let’s be clear, this book is Horny with a capital H. I personally think it’s terrific representation for people whose physical circumstances, like Ella’s, leave them starved for touch and intimacy. While I don’t usually like to allude to reviews on other sites when writing my own, I do find it baffling that some people think that the kink depicted is non-consensual, when consent is clearly laid out beforehand. Hopefully, people will learn more about kink and consent through this book? I thought Cinder House was a great exploration of desire that balanced its descriptions of both raw emotion and joyful smut (and if this is what all Freya Marske’s books are like, then I’m in for a treat when I finally have time to dive into them!)

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