Tantalizing Tales — July 2024 — Part One

I honestly can’t believe that it’s the second Friday of July already! I feel like the start of this year absolutely dragged, but no time at all has passed since March. What’s up with that?

As usual, I’m behind with my work reading and am frantically going through what Hugo nominees I can before the voting deadline on Friday the 19th. I also had the misfortune of being afflicted with a migraine partway through the half day I took off yesterday to take my kids out for general enrichment. Luckily, it was Free Slurpee Day — as my kids would not stop reminding me — and the brain freeze from the frozen beverage (as well as the Excedrin Migraine the sympathetic store clerk sold me) really helped me get through the pain so that I could get the kids through their list of promised activities: sushi, a matinee screening of Inside Out 2, then trips to 7-11, the park and the library, phew! But it did put a significant crimp in my productivity otherwise, which always makes me feel like I’m floundering. Did I 100% identify and cry with Anxiety during yesterday’s movie? You absolutely betcha.

But at least I have this column to help round up the terrific titles that have just come out that I don’t yet have the time to read! First up, we have Lo Patrick’s The Night The River Wept. After months of mourning her miscarriage, puttering around and becoming increasingly irked by her husband (relatable, tbh,) Arlene seizes the change of pace that comes with accepting a job at her local police precinct. When she takes to poking around old case files, she unearths the cold case known as the Deck River Tragedy. Three children were murdered, with the prime suspect committing suicide days later. Arlene recruits the suspect’s prickly, investigative-minded aunt and the station’s straight-laced, tight-lipped receptionist to help her as she reopens the case. This one came to me highly recommended, and I’m super eager to find time to dive in.

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I was also really excited to crack open this next book, even before it was selected as Dakota Johnson (!) x TeaTime Pictures’ July Book Club pick. Pink Slime is award-winning Uruguyan author Fernanda Trías’ United States debut. It’s a work of speculative fiction in translation that examines relationships and commitments at the end of the world.

In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague — eerily reminiscent of our own pandemic of the recent past — a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. Algal bloom poisons the air, flaying all who come in contact with it, while a mysterious corporation churns out a revolting pink paste made of animal by-products, one of the last remaining sources of protein available. Everyone in this small coastal city must hurry indoors when alarms warning of a red wind blare, go dumpster diving for any semblance of food, and hoard the few rations they do have available. Any sounds of nature are a thing of the past as it’s every person for themselves.

In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator tends stubbornly to her few remaining relationships: with her prickly but emotionally vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still cares, stuck in the chronic care unit after exposure to the wind; with the boy she nannies, afflicted by a terrible condition of insatiable hunger, because his own parents can’t manage him for more than a few days at a time. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows – even if staying means being left behind.

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For a different take on the end of the world, we turn to Hemant Nayak’s A Magic Fierce And Bright, which has one of the loveliest covers I’ve seen in a while! The tip of that spear almost seems to glow on the dust jacket of my hard copy. The magic-filled YA science-fantasy novel inside is set in a post-apocalyptic, alternate-universe India where technological prowess and magical abilities coexist.

Technomancer Adya wants nothing more than to be left alone. Content to be loyal to no one but herself in the isolated jungles of South India, she dreams only of finding her lost sister, Priya, and making enough money to take care of their family. It’s too bad that her rare ability to wake electric machines—using the very magic that wiped them out five centuries ago—also makes her a coveted political pawn. Everyone seems to believe that her technomancy can help them win the endless war for control over the magic’s supernatural source.

These senseless power struggles mean little to Adya. But when her enemies dangle news of her sister before her, she’s all too quick to leap at the chance to bring Priya home—even if it means teaming up with a rakish, disreputable thief in order to do so. With the threat of invasion looming ever larger on the horizon, Adya must reconcile the kind of person she is with the kind of person she wants to be, and untangle the web of intrigue, conspiracy and deceit that threatens to take all of India down with it.

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This next book unfortunately reached me after my deadline for review over at Criminal Element. I’m so intrigued by the premise of this true crime title tho! Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and cutting yet compassionate prose to the 2016 murder of her own friend in Carrie Carolyn Coco.

On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving the friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn had been a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?

This is the question that plagued Sarah, driving her obsessive need to understand this horrifying tragedy. In Sarah’s exploration of Carolyn’s life and death, she spent thousands of hours over the course of six years interviewing Carolyn and Render’s friends and family; poring over court documents and news media; attending memorials for Carolyn, and Render’s trial; and reading obscure writings and internet posts from both parties. Even as this work helped her glean a deeper understanding of her late friend, the man who killed her and the reasons for the crime, Sarah couldn’t help but turn her gaze to the greater forces that enabled it. The result is this striking homage to Carolyn’s life, and an excavation of a society in which murderous crimes committed by white men have become a disturbing norm.

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Kelsea Yu’s debut novel It’s Only A Game was dropped onto my desk completely unsolicited a short while ago, but was definitely sent to me by someone who knows what I like to read and what I wish I had more time to do besides read!(Play video games, to be clear, not commit crimes, lol.)

When Marina Chan ran from her old life, she brought nothing with her, not even her real name. Now she lives in fear of her past being discovered. But when her online gaming team is offered a tour of their favorite game company, Marina can’t resist accepting, even though she knows it might put her fake identity at risk.

Then the creator of that game is murdered during their tour. Whoever killed him plans to frame Marina and her friends for the murder unless they win four rounds of another, far more dangerous game. This game requires them to lie, trespass and steal. This game could destroy everything Marina’s worked so hard to build. This game is one that she might not survive.

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And to cap this fortnight’s round-up, we have the appropriately titled Summers End by Juneau Black, the latest installment in the charmingly anthropomorphic Shady Hollow cozy mystery series. I adore this series, which should give you some idea of how much work I have that I fear I won’t be able to review this book in timely fashion either.

It’s late August in Shady Hollow and the heat has intrepid reporter Vera Vixen eager to get away. She agrees to chaperone the local school’s annual field trip to Summers End, an ancient tomb built by an early woodland culture, alongside her good friend, bookseller Lenore Lee.

Alas that their excursion is less cooling than chilling, as they enter the tomb to find bones that are distinctly more modern than historical. Vera and Lenore soon discover that the deceased was involved in a recent excavation at the site and was very unpopular with their colleagues, including Lenore’s sister Ligeia. Now the fox and the raven have to delve into the worlds of both academia and archaeology to clear Ligeia’s name and determine which creature thought they were clever enough to get away with the perfect murder.

This unique take on dark academia is full of Easter eggs for literature lovers and I want to read it so badly! I really am the living personification of the “so many books, so little time” adage, lolsob.

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Let me know if you’re able to get to any of these books before I do, dear readers! I’d love to hear your opinions, and see if that will help spur me to push any of them higher up the mountain range that is my To Be Read pile!

And, as always, you can check out the list of my favorite books this year so far in my Bookshop storefront linked below!