Astrid Hawk

I'm giving this 4.5*, because I think it's not quite a 5* - not quite one of my all-time favorites - but certainly stands above what I've recently marked 4*. I loved the relationship between our two main characters, and I definitely enjoyed the ingenuity in the premise of this - how Weir came up with a somewhat scientifically-plausible situation that put Ryland out in space far from Earth, and then kept building on the science he made up to create plausible problems and puzzles on top of that. And of course it's fun watching Ryland figure out how to work out these puzzles and solve all these problems using just the materials and knowledge he has on hand.

The first half of the book read like conversations I used to have with my best friend in high school. One of us would come up with a question - "what would happen if X came in contact with Y?" or "what would you do if you were stuck in XYZ situation?"- and then he'd ask me additional questions to goad me on while I tried to reason out a logical answer just based on principles of physics (and later, principles from our college engineering classes). We typically didn't ever get to the point of actually pulling out a calculator or pencil and paper, but sometimes we did just to get a feel for order of magnitude of things. I loved the early parts where Ryland is trying to figure out where he is and what he's doing, and is reasoning it out based on the little information he has on hand plus his knowledge of math and physics.

For those who complain that there is a bit too much math... there is actually 0 on-page math. I actually found myself wanting more of it. I took astrodynamics in college (I have an aerospace engineering degree with a space focus... astro, as we called it then, is kind of essential :) ), and I wanted to see the orbits, insertion paths, and escape velocities sketched out and calculated. I wanted to actually see the math that resulted in the constant tallying of grams of fuel being used. If Weir has a calculation notebook lying around somewhere that he used, I'd totally read that version of the story.

Weir does take a few significant scientific shortcuts in this book - which of course happens all the time in science fiction, but I'm not used to seeing from Weir. The one that stands out, and which I can discuss without spoilers, is that he relies heavily on a fictional material that his main character has named xenonite, which is apparently a substance made from xenon in solid form that has practically mythical qualities. Xenonite can't be cut or dented by any of our earth-built tools; it can be shaped into just about anything; it can be used to create almost any kind of surface including transparent surfaces; it can withstand a huge range of temperatures and pressures and pretty much the entire periodic table of elements; it can bond to any earth-rendered metal or composite material. And our characters go through xenonite like it's an infinitely renewable resource, without much consideration for how much of it was actually brought on board to begin with. It's a bit of an odd juxtaposition against the rest of the materials mentioned in the book, which are typically assigned quantities or volumes or some kind of limit. Xenonite feels limitless, both in what it can do and its availability.

I think perhaps my favorite element of the book was the first contact element - how Ryland goes about discovering properties of extraterrestrial life and figuring out how it works and how to communicate. Are the various life forms realistic? No idea. Probably not really. Maybe the unicellular ones are plausible. The multicellular ones are likely more imaginative. Either way, it's fun reading about how Ryland encounters them and tries to figure out what he's dealing with.

And of course Rocky. On his own, Rocky is probably not a compelling character, just as Ryland really isn't (in fact, the flashbacks to Ryland's life on earth, and especially his interactions with Stratt and other scientists got a bit dull for me). But Rocky and Ryland together are great to "watch", as they learn to work together and develop a real friendship.

I don't know if I'll ever re-read this, but it was definitely a great ride and deserves the hype.

Read as a First Reads July 2026 pick. Based on the cover and the synopsis, I thought this would have similar tone and aesthetics to Madeline Miller's works - I really enjoyed Circe despite the fact that I've never been able to summon an interest in Greek mythology. Unfortunately, this book compares unfavorably to Miller's work.

I was initially drawn in by the first couple of chapters, where we meet Del (short for Asphodel) in the midst of brewing up a magical concoction to use at a summer festival of the gods in the underworld that evening. She's living alone on her island of trees and flowers, and the initial descriptions are lush, succulent, and colorful. Unfortunately, this tone does not persist through the book once Del starts interacting with other mythological figures, whereupon the atmospheric setting is dropped in favor of describing family Drama (capital D intended) with teenage dialog. Every character behaves in a juvenile manner, and while I realize some of this is true to Greek mythology in general - gods were always capricious, impulsive, shallow, and vindictive - the moralizing that the author tries to do through Del and all this Drama feels heavy-handed, as if trying to explain things to a child. (And this may be a nit, but every time Del has an angry response to something, she has "rage-red flowers blooming in her throat", which is such an overt, recognizable metaphor that it can really only be used once... but the author uses it at least 6 times throughout the book, making it seem like she very quickly ran out of ways to describe the feeling of anger.)

I struggled (and failed) to care about any of the characters. The lies they told and past actions they tried to hide seemed increasingly more "much ado about nothing" - everyone was harboring unmitigated resentment for something done to them in the past, and it was up to Del to discover the lies and fix the problems. Just a very teenage-girl-with-diary kind of style to me, and I couldn't care about the other gods at all. Pretty much everyone was the same character, behaving petulantly and vindictively and then finding ways to justify it. Even when Del finally embarks on a Fates-given "quest" over halfway through the book, when I thought we'd get into some interesting plotting and puzzle-solving, it's just more family Drama - Del solves all the puzzles in fits of revelation, and the actual resolution comes down in all cases to a lot of yelling and threatening and tears and confessions and more threatening.

Perhaps worst of all, about halfway through, we're "treated" to some very abrupt and very explicit sex scenes. I guess the good thing is that they're all smushed together in the same spot, so they're easily skippable. I don't have an problem with smut in principle, but it really didn't fit with this book at all, and felt cringey in the abrupt and blunt language used to describe them.

I'm fighting the feeling that I need to apologize for this rating after reading the author's notes at the back - it's clear she considered this a labor of love and that storytelling has been her passion since she was a child. Sadly this felt like it was actually cobbled together from a 9 or 10-year-old mythology lover's perspective, with some smut thrown in to appeal to adults.

Read for First Reads June 2026. Like another reviewer, I happened to read this right after reading Remarkably Bright Creatures - and unfortunately, this book has some obvious parallels but does not compare favorably. (For one thing, it's missing a grumpy octopus to make things right :) ).

Like Remarkably Bright Creatures, The Museum of Second Chances also features a slightly reclusive/anti-social older woman with no living family, living in a small town, working alone in a museum (in this case it's more of an antiques/secondhand shop that happens to display old things rather than sell them; in RBC it's an aquarium). Unlike the other reader, I did not pick this book from the June selections *because* of its similarities to RBC, but the similarities became obvious in the first couple chapters.

Our main character Evelyn is younger than RBC's Tova by about a decade (she's in her mid-60s), but she acts like she's in her 30s, or sometimes even younger. She is very anti-social and feels uncomfortable interacting with people in town, pre-judging them all and going out of her way to avoid interactions with them even when they're going out of their way to be nice. It was hard to empathize with Evelyn, even though I am an introvert and don't relish social interactions, because her outlook was incredibly naive. She didn't avoid interacting with people in town because they had previously shown themselves to be bad actors... she avoided them because she herself was naive and had never bothered to question what was going on around her; she had accepted things that happened to her in her past at face value, and never really confronted them.

The book's plot hinges around Evelyn and her business neighbor Della trying to save their repurposed boat sheds with prime waterfront property from being purchased by a modern fish 'n' chips restaurant chain. At Della's urging, Evelyn allows her "museum" to take the lead in a human interest campaign to save them for the town and prevent the outside investment by a (presumably predatory) enterprise. For the first half, or more, of the book, though, I really couldn't understand why it was compelling to try to save this "museum" to begin with. After they tried to find connections to some of the objects, it was clear that saving the museum was just serving as an entry point to a small-town story of community and rediscovery, but the museum of lost things and Evelyn's backstory was all rather pathetic and trivial and really didn't hold up for me.

As a feel-good story about community building and giving everyone around you a second chance, I also felt that this book underdelivered. All of the stories involved someone in a previous generation lying to their children or grandchildren, with the "feel-good" conclusion being that the younger generation (the book's protagonists), upon learning the truths, all individually conclude that it's better to have the truths out in the open in order to build positive relationships with the people around them, than it is to hide uncomfortable realities and deceive your children and neighbors. It was all much more superficial and predictable than the deeper issues in RBC. None of the characters in this book had much depth, and the seemed to share a unifying character trait of not wanting to do anything to better themselves or their situations until this outside force came in and threatened them. Evelyn in particular struck me as a frustrating character with little to define her aside from her reactions to things that had happened in her past.

Additionally, it annoyed me that Evelyn spent the entire book (as a mid-60s woman) desperately wanting to understand her parentage, after having spent the previous 50 years just sitting around and hoping that her unknown birth mother would come in and talk to her about a piece of lace in her junk display. It felt contrived and overly shallow - as if the author found a tick-list of tropes that are selling right now and tried to slot them all into the book (feel-good, community building, small town, rustic/sea setting, older protagonist, family secrets...).

CW: domestic violence. While it wasn't super graphic, it felt a bit off-color in the way it was depicted, and it annoyed me that that particular dimension was even in the story at all. Are there no other struggles that female characters can have that don't involve abuse at the hands of men close to them? Unnecessary and poorly addressed in this book in particular.

Even worse: one of the suggested "book club questions" at the end of the book asks if the abused woman should have left her abusive partner sooner. WTF people.

A viscerally violent story of confronting prejudices, past regrets and bad decisions, and building good relationships in a world where it seems like violence is the only answer. The writing is vivid, raw, and penetrating. It's not an easy story to read, but it's very well done. Adam Lezarre-White was a fantastic narrator and really brought the characters to life, complete with their histories evident in their voices.

Read as a First Reads July 2026 selection. This book was fine - hence the 3 star rating. Pacing is steady, the prose is professional, and the plot progresses rationally - all signs that this is an experienced author who has honed her craft.

However, as seems to be increasingly common these days, the title promises something that the book is... not quite. Lyssa Moore is a biography writer who lives in Oxford, and when she's hired to write the biography of a (possibly misunderstood) party girl lover of a rock musician from the 60s, she uncovers a lot of suspicious motivations and hidden truths wrapped up in her subject's story. Ultimately, this leads Lyssa to try to figure out who the woman really was, and whether her death was really the accident it's accepted to be.

The title makes it sound like this will be a fun buddy mystery - sort of a modern adult Nancy Drew. But it really isn't. Lyssa does discuss her work with her group of friends who live in her building, but they don't really accompany her on her fact-finding missions, and most of the book consists of Lyssa's interviews, 1 on 1, with various descendents and relatives of figures from her subject's life. Her friends do have distinct personalities, but because her interactions with them are few, they mostly just exist as caricatures of NPCs rather than critical characters in the story.

Because everyone Lyssa is writing about is actually dead, and her subject's controversial death occurred in the 60s so has long gone "cold", Lyssa has to gather information entirely through speaking to surviving relatives of the book's subjects and occasionally asking them to look for family heirlooms or records. As a result, the book reads more like a procedural than a live mystery. The so-called "Oxford Detective Society" doesn't have crime scenes to explore, or even suspects houses and offices to look through in secret. The entire book is interviews (with one brief car chase scene) - so it almost doesn't feel like a detective story at all.

That said, it wasn't a bad book, especially for a First Reads selection. It just isn't remarkable.