Tantalizing Tales — February 2025 — Part One

Happy Valentine’s Day, readers! Love the day or loathe the day, we have a terrific slate of new book recommendations to complement your feelings toward the season.

First off, we have a new genre-bending standalone novel from TJ Klune, The Bones Beneath My Skin. With an enemies-to-lovers queer romance, speculative twists, road trip comedy and high-octane thrills, this is the perfect book for anyone who doesn’t want to stick with just one mood.

It’s the spring of 1995 and Nate Cartwright has lost everything: his parents are dead, his only brother wants nothing to do with him, and he’s been fired from his job as a journalist in Washington, DC. With nothing left to lose, he returns to his family’s summer cabin outside the small mountain town of Roseland, Oregon, to try and find some sense of direction.

The cabin should be empty, but it’s not.

Inside is a man named Alex. And with him is an extraordinary ten-year-old girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader, who isn’t exactly as she appears. Soon it becomes clear that Nate must make a choice: let himself drown in the memories of his past, or fight for a future he never thought possible. Because Artemis is special, and forces are descending upon them who want nothing more than to control her, no matter what she wants herself.

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If you’re in a darker mood than that calls for, check out Lucy Rose’s debut novel The Lamb, which opens with the indelible imagery of this sentence:

On my fourth birthday, I plucked six severed fingers from the shower drain.

Margot and Mama have lived in a remote cottage by the forest for as long as Margot can remember. Their quiet days are interrupted only when lost and wandering strangers – whom Mama calls Strays – knock on their door. First Mama plies them with wine, then she and Margot pick their bones clean.

But when a beautiful, white-toothed Stray named Eden appears during a snowstorm one day, Mama falls in love. The family dynamics in the cottage shift, and Margot finds that she must untangle her own desires and make her own bid for freedom.

This fable of the complicated and increasingly fraught relationship of a flesh-eating mother and daughter living on the edge of the forest is a metaphorical parable wrapped in a horror story inside a fairy tale, using cannibalism to dissect how women must swallow their anger, desire and animal instincts. If you’ve read my review of Delilah S Dawson’s Bloom, then you know that this is the kind of queer, feminist horror that I love.

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Another compelling book about feminine anger and the ways it’s been historically subverted is Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho. The familiar figure of the Victorian governess is transformed into a seething, sharp-edged critique of the way women’s anger has historically — and continues to be — contained, misunderstood or deemed unacceptable.

Winifred Notty is a bloodthirsty governess who arrives at Ensor House ready to face the class, gender and power hierarchies of Victorian England. Unlike her literary predecessors, however, Winifred doesn’t merely simmer in silent frustration: her rage is visible, violent and laced with dark humor. Her actions are a pointed response to those around her, especially the entitled Pounds family whom she serves, drawing parallels to today’s “good girl” myth and the modern-day pressures to keep women’s anger palatable.

(I’ve also just realized that this book is only 208 pages, which means that there’s a very good chance that I’ll be able to give it a full review soon!)

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If your own love life is less of a concern than the romantic travails of the teenagers in your life, check out Lisa A Phillips’ First Love, a non-fiction guide to helping your adolescents navigate relationships and heartbreak in the modern world.

In First Love, Ms Phillips chronicles the challenges that today’s adolescents face as they navigate crushes, dating and breakups — and the challenges adults face as they strive to provide guidance and support. Ms Phillips sheds light on how the relationships that teens have today are different from the relationships of their parents’ generation, including their reliance on technology and social media, the rise of young people identifying as LGBTQ+, high rates of depression and anxiety, and consent consciousness. She provides concrete strategies and insights from experts and teens themselves on ways that parents and other adults can help young people cope with the timeless issues of love and heartbreak.

Told from the perspective of a professor, mother and award-winning journalist, First Love is a critical resource for parents, educators, mental health professionals and anyone else who wants to understand the new realities of teen relationships, while helping teens become caring, self-aware and thriving young adults.

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Another kind of love altogether is the subject of Göran Rosenberg’s timely biography, Another Zionism, Another Judaism, depicting the life, times and thought of Rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis.

Born in what is now Lviv, Ukraine, in 1869, Marcus Ehrenpreis was not only the secretary of Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, but was also a grand rabbi of Bulgaria during two Balkan wars, a diplomat in defense of Europe’s minorities, a Swedish author compared to Joseph Conrad, and the chief rabbi of one of Europe’s few unscathed Jewish communities throughout the Nazi era. More than just a biography of a man’s life and work, this book is a literary journey by an award-winning Swedish Jewish writer and public intellectual, in search of that European Jewish world of meaning and hope that Rabbi Ehrenpreis so clearly embodied, so vividly articulated, and so relentlessly worked to explain, defend and salvage from his pulpit in Stockholm. The rabbi’s lifelong dream was to build a bridge between “Israel” and “the peoples,” and he believed that he could do so by bringing a spiritually and culturally revitalized Judaism into a new and self-asserted contact with the non-Jewish world. His Zionism was not about making Jews a nation like all others in a nation-state like all others, but about creating a spiritual and cultural center for the renaissance of Jewish life “amidst the nations.” Even as Jewish life in Europe was all but annihilated, he feared what Jewish nationalism might do to the spiritual heritage of Judaism.

This meticulously researched and beautifully written story of boundless hope, unrequited love and annihilated possibilities evokes a diasporic Jewish existence that would be harshly judged in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. It also reminds us of a Zionism that strived for something other than an ethnic-national fortress on a narrow strip of land in the Middle East.

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Finally, if you’re less interested in any kind of love but definitely into what I recently called “a fantasy of truth, justice and closure” in a surprisingly popular (for me) post on BlueSky, check out Christopher Fansworth’s latest crime novel, continuing the legacy of the late bestselling author in Robert B Parker’s Buried Secrets.

This twenty-second novel in the series finds Chief of Police Jesse Stone on his way home from a long shift when a call comes in for a welfare check on an elderly resident of the wealthy seaside town of Paradise, Massachusetts. Inside a house packed with junk and trash is a man’s dead body. It’s a sad, lonely end but nothing criminal… except for the photos of murder victims strewn around the corpse, on top of a treasure trove of $2 million in cash.

Jesse takes on the case and follows a trail of clues leading to an aging mobster who will do whatever it takes to keep the past from coming to light. Before long, Jesse has a price on his head as hit men converge on Paradise to take back the cash and destroy any remaining evidence. The real danger, however, might be coming from inside his own department. Jesse Stone must unearth the truth buried under the wreckage of a dead man’s life, before he winds up in the ground himself.

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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 in my Bookshop storefront linked below!