Amanda
Content Warnings: Death of a sibling, car accident, grief, guilt, self-harm ideation, blood/gore, gaslighting, cyberbullying, parental grief
Such Lovely Skin does something clever with the evil doppelgänger premise—the monster is more than a corruption, it's a photocopy set to maximum contrast so that all Viv's worst qualities are printed in ink too dark to deny. Viv is a Twitch streamer, a chronic liar, and someone carrying the weight of her little sister's death. When a demonic mimic enters her life, it starts destroying everything she's built—but here's the thing: Viv has spent so long lying for sympathy and scattering rumours like salt that no one believes her when she insists the horror isn't her fault this time. It's the girl who cried wolf turned up to eleven, and the wolf is wearing her face.
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne's debut is viciously smart about the mechanics of consequences. The horror here isn't just supernatural—it's the slow-motion realisation that Viv has built a life where the truth can't save her because she's spent years making herself unbelievable. The doppelganger is terrifying, yes, but it's working with materials Viv already provided. It takes every lie, every slick manipulation, and turns them to tools—dismantling her life with a butcher's systematic attention to the joints. It's The Ring with receipts, and the bottom line is brutal.
I know some readers will balk at Viv's voice—the internet slang, the "ugh" and "wtf," the gaming jargon—but I'm from the internet, as they say, and it read as authentic to me. Schlote-Bonne clearly knows online culture, and more importantly, she nails the particular hellscape of being a young woman trying to build a platform online. The casual misogyny, the weaponised doubt, the way Viv's history of lying intersects with broader cultural unwillingness to believe girls—it's all there, and it's not subtle. Shouldn't be. Isn't—not for those of us up to our chins in it.
The grief, too, is handled with an unflinching clarity that I appreciated. Viv isn't grieving in acceptable ways, and that's understandable. She's numb, she's selfish, she's trying to throw money at her parents as penance instead of giving them honesty. Meanwhile, her parents are drowning in their own loss and can barely see her, which is its own kind of grief. I lost a son, so I recognise that particular drowning—Schlote-Bonne doesn't reach for the parents' hands to pull them out, which is the only honest choice. It's ugly. Uncomfortable. Grief has the texture of rot lodged deep in a place you can't reach—behind the ribs, maybe, or the back of the throat. Schlote-Bonne doesn't sanitise it, and she offers no easy grace for the wreckage grief leaves in its wake.
It's possible some readers might flag the twists as predictable, but there's a difference between obvious and properly telegraphed. The clues are there if you're paying attention—but that's good craft, not a failure of surprise. A plot twist you can't possibly see coming often means the author cheated. Is it the most challenging mystery to unravel? No, but not every story needs to be. Schlote-Bonne plays fair with her structure, and the satisfaction comes not from shock but from watching the pieces click into place.
Ultimately, at times Viv isn't likable, and that's the point. She's done real harm—to Ash, to anyone who believed her, to the foundations her life is built on. The book asks whether someone like that deserves saving, and more interestingly, whether she can save herself when no one else believes her capable of truth. The answer is complicated. Knotted. The kind of knot you can't untie without cutting something away.
Such Lovely Skin is fast-paced, genuinely creepy, and smarter than it needs to be. I'm still thinking about that final scene—the one where you realise the doppelganger might have been the honest one all along. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Either way, bad photocopies leave residue. This one's still dark on my fingertips.
Originally posted at marvelish.me.
Content Warnings: Death of a sibling, car accident, grief, guilt, self-harm ideation, blood/gore, gaslighting, cyberbullying, parental grief
Such Lovely Skin does something clever with the evil doppelgänger premise—the monster is more than a corruption, it's a photocopy set to maximum contrast so that all Viv's worst qualities are printed in ink too dark to deny. Viv is a Twitch streamer, a chronic liar, and someone carrying the weight of her little sister's death. When a demonic mimic enters her life, it starts destroying everything she's built—but here's the thing: Viv has spent so long lying for sympathy and scattering rumours like salt that no one believes her when she insists the horror isn't her fault this time. It's the girl who cried wolf turned up to eleven, and the wolf is wearing her face.
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne's debut is viciously smart about the mechanics of consequences. The horror here isn't just supernatural—it's the slow-motion realisation that Viv has built a life where the truth can't save her because she's spent years making herself unbelievable. The doppelganger is terrifying, yes, but it's working with materials Viv already provided. It takes every lie, every slick manipulation, and turns them to tools—dismantling her life with a butcher's systematic attention to the joints. It's The Ring with receipts, and the bottom line is brutal.
I know some readers will balk at Viv's voice—the internet slang, the "ugh" and "wtf," the gaming jargon—but I'm from the internet, as they say, and it read as authentic to me. Schlote-Bonne clearly knows online culture, and more importantly, she nails the particular hellscape of being a young woman trying to build a platform online. The casual misogyny, the weaponised doubt, the way Viv's history of lying intersects with broader cultural unwillingness to believe girls—it's all there, and it's not subtle. Shouldn't be. Isn't—not for those of us up to our chins in it.
The grief, too, is handled with an unflinching clarity that I appreciated. Viv isn't grieving in acceptable ways, and that's understandable. She's numb, she's selfish, she's trying to throw money at her parents as penance instead of giving them honesty. Meanwhile, her parents are drowning in their own loss and can barely see her, which is its own kind of grief. I lost a son, so I recognise that particular drowning—Schlote-Bonne doesn't reach for the parents' hands to pull them out, which is the only honest choice. It's ugly. Uncomfortable. Grief has the texture of rot lodged deep in a place you can't reach—behind the ribs, maybe, or the back of the throat. Schlote-Bonne doesn't sanitise it, and she offers no easy grace for the wreckage grief leaves in its wake.
It's possible some readers might flag the twists as predictable, but there's a difference between obvious and properly telegraphed. The clues are there if you're paying attention—but that's good craft, not a failure of surprise. A plot twist you can't possibly see coming often means the author cheated. Is it the most challenging mystery to unravel? No, but not every story needs to be. Schlote-Bonne plays fair with her structure, and the satisfaction comes not from shock but from watching the pieces click into place.
Ultimately, at times Viv isn't likable, and that's the point. She's done real harm—to Ash, to anyone who believed her, to the foundations her life is built on. The book asks whether someone like that deserves saving, and more interestingly, whether she can save herself when no one else believes her capable of truth. The answer is complicated. Knotted. The kind of knot you can't untie without cutting something away.
Such Lovely Skin is fast-paced, genuinely creepy, and smarter than it needs to be. I'm still thinking about that final scene—the one where you realise the doppelganger might have been the honest one all along. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Either way, bad photocopies leave residue. This one's still dark on my fingertips.
Originally posted at marvelish.me.
I snagged Fatima Daas’s The Last One because someone—I forget both where and who—mentioned it had won France’s Prix de Flore. Look, I’ll admit it, I’m a magpie for any book that makes the French literary crowd uncomfortable enough to shower it with accolades.
What blindsided me? Three hours hunched over the book in my café’s corner, forgotten coffee cooling while I devoured what felt like diary/therapy notes/novel all at once. Because that’s the thing—this is all and none of those. Daas scripts autofiction like someone who has cracked a certain code: that some truths can only spill out when form itself is broken. I’ll disclaim up front—there are aspects of her experience I can witness but never walk through, situations I can hear but not fully parse. While I may not understand her specific experience of straddling multiple worlds, I am familiar with mine, and I recognise a sense of sisterhood within the pain.
Daas scripts this impossibility in story-shards that sprinkled through a disjointed timeline—it’s daring enough to earn France’s Prix de Flore and brave enough to refuse a resolution. “My name is Fatima Daas.” Forty times this refrain returns—forty! It’s a name twin—given to both writer and written, in a way that triggers vertigo: what’s testimony, what’s invention? The echo resonates less like certainty and more like someone studying their own cracked mirror, checking her reflection, waiting for the pieces to find a new form.
The book’s throughline seems to mirror the psyche of its subject. It’s full of segments that resist tidy assembly and a formal—or informal—approach that echoes Marguerite Duras in its refusal of conventional narrative coherence. Chapters are either compressed into single breaths or expanded into run-on confessions. In therapy sessions (rendered in second person, that self-distancing grammar of dissociation), Fatima explains she is “several women”—the dutiful daughter kneeling for prayer, the lover stealing kisses in dim-lit back-room bars, and the writer whose words splinter under the weight of what cannot be reconciled. When she prostrates herself at dawn while Nina sleeps unknowing in their bed, the scene splits like an egg—the yolk of devotion, the white of desire, and the shell of silence keeping them separate even as they share sheets and sink water.
Between the housing projects of Clichy-sous-Bois and Paris’s literary salons stretches a distance no metro map measures—not just the RER B’s forty-minute journey but the weight of 2005’s fires that began on those streets, marking who belongs and who burns. The author captures this cartographic contradiction through code-switching that falters between its tongues. French phrases get draped with Arabic that the narrator wears like borrowed finery. These gaps persist, even filtered through the English translation, as if each untranslated word is a walled garden the narrator can’t find the gate of.
Her mother’s hands fold laundry with the mechanical precision of someone who has learnt that order is the only balm poverty permits. Fatima writes in the same cafes where intellectuals dissect the diaspora, having never calculated its daily algebra: How many lies buy one fact? How much shame purchases passage? How many mispronounced syllables until silence seems safer?
Queerness and faith occupy the same body, twin embryos competing for space, nutrients, and survival. Neither wins. Daas grants neither one a victory—a refusal that disrupts French literary culture’s appetite for clear moral positions, its republican insistence on singular identity. She writes of weariness instead. No, that’s not quite right—she writes of the cost, the weight of permanent revolution against oneself: masturbating then making ablutions, each ritual gesture rendered with startling specificity that makes sacred practice legible without diminishing its mystery; memorising Quranic verses while planning escape routes from family dinners where girlfriends cannot be named.
The prose embodies this paradox: when Fatima finally, damningly, introduces the wrong person as “my friend”, the words arrive pre-emptively cloaked in their own inadequacy. Longing here is a telegram sent in a dead language—perfectly formed, utterly un-understandable. Daas joins a small but vital tradition of queer Muslim writers who refuse to choose between sexuality and spirituality—a lineage especially resonant for anyone who knows the fatigue of defending multiple marginalised identities. It’s not my lineage, but I’m grateful for the chance for this glimpse into it.
Perhaps most striking is how Daas builds on North African traditions of disrupted narrative and linguistic resistance. The narrator remains gloriously, necessarily unfinished. The narrator once again fails the driving test. A novel abandoned mid-sentence, like all the others before it. Even the book’s title suggests both finality and ongoingness—shifting from the French La petite dernière (the youngest daughter) to The Last One in English, the translation opening existential questions that the original rooted in birth order. A last attempt at wholeness? The last lie before candour? The last woman she’ll try to be before accepting she must be all of them, none of them, or the spaces between them?
I snagged Fatima Daas’s The Last One because someone—I forget both where and who—mentioned it had won France’s Prix de Flore. Look, I’ll admit it, I’m a magpie for any book that makes the French literary crowd uncomfortable enough to shower it with accolades.
What blindsided me? Three hours hunched over the book in my café’s corner, forgotten coffee cooling while I devoured what felt like diary/therapy notes/novel all at once. Because that’s the thing—this is all and none of those. Daas scripts autofiction like someone who has cracked a certain code: that some truths can only spill out when form itself is broken. I’ll disclaim up front—there are aspects of her experience I can witness but never walk through, situations I can hear but not fully parse. While I may not understand her specific experience of straddling multiple worlds, I am familiar with mine, and I recognise a sense of sisterhood within the pain.
Daas scripts this impossibility in story-shards that sprinkled through a disjointed timeline—it’s daring enough to earn France’s Prix de Flore and brave enough to refuse a resolution. “My name is Fatima Daas.” Forty times this refrain returns—forty! It’s a name twin—given to both writer and written, in a way that triggers vertigo: what’s testimony, what’s invention? The echo resonates less like certainty and more like someone studying their own cracked mirror, checking her reflection, waiting for the pieces to find a new form.
The book’s throughline seems to mirror the psyche of its subject. It’s full of segments that resist tidy assembly and a formal—or informal—approach that echoes Marguerite Duras in its refusal of conventional narrative coherence. Chapters are either compressed into single breaths or expanded into run-on confessions. In therapy sessions (rendered in second person, that self-distancing grammar of dissociation), Fatima explains she is “several women”—the dutiful daughter kneeling for prayer, the lover stealing kisses in dim-lit back-room bars, and the writer whose words splinter under the weight of what cannot be reconciled. When she prostrates herself at dawn while Nina sleeps unknowing in their bed, the scene splits like an egg—the yolk of devotion, the white of desire, and the shell of silence keeping them separate even as they share sheets and sink water.
Between the housing projects of Clichy-sous-Bois and Paris’s literary salons stretches a distance no metro map measures—not just the RER B’s forty-minute journey but the weight of 2005’s fires that began on those streets, marking who belongs and who burns. The author captures this cartographic contradiction through code-switching that falters between its tongues. French phrases get draped with Arabic that the narrator wears like borrowed finery. These gaps persist, even filtered through the English translation, as if each untranslated word is a walled garden the narrator can’t find the gate of.
Her mother’s hands fold laundry with the mechanical precision of someone who has learnt that order is the only balm poverty permits. Fatima writes in the same cafes where intellectuals dissect the diaspora, having never calculated its daily algebra: How many lies buy one fact? How much shame purchases passage? How many mispronounced syllables until silence seems safer?
Queerness and faith occupy the same body, twin embryos competing for space, nutrients, and survival. Neither wins. Daas grants neither one a victory—a refusal that disrupts French literary culture’s appetite for clear moral positions, its republican insistence on singular identity. She writes of weariness instead. No, that’s not quite right—she writes of the cost, the weight of permanent revolution against oneself: masturbating then making ablutions, each ritual gesture rendered with startling specificity that makes sacred practice legible without diminishing its mystery; memorising Quranic verses while planning escape routes from family dinners where girlfriends cannot be named.
The prose embodies this paradox: when Fatima finally, damningly, introduces the wrong person as “my friend”, the words arrive pre-emptively cloaked in their own inadequacy. Longing here is a telegram sent in a dead language—perfectly formed, utterly un-understandable. Daas joins a small but vital tradition of queer Muslim writers who refuse to choose between sexuality and spirituality—a lineage especially resonant for anyone who knows the fatigue of defending multiple marginalised identities. It’s not my lineage, but I’m grateful for the chance for this glimpse into it.
Perhaps most striking is how Daas builds on North African traditions of disrupted narrative and linguistic resistance. The narrator remains gloriously, necessarily unfinished. The narrator once again fails the driving test. A novel abandoned mid-sentence, like all the others before it. Even the book’s title suggests both finality and ongoingness—shifting from the French La petite dernière (the youngest daughter) to The Last One in English, the translation opening existential questions that the original rooted in birth order. A last attempt at wholeness? The last lie before candour? The last woman she’ll try to be before accepting she must be all of them, none of them, or the spaces between them?
The Atlantic—salt-bitten and memory-laden—beats beneath every clause of Cantoras, and Caro De Robertis (they/them) times their prose to that tidal metronome, letting sentences drift eastward onto Uruguay’s raw ocean edge. Some clauses stretch out like the low-tide flats while others are cast out to sea, where they leave periods bobbing like bottle-caps. Reading it, I heard the waves breaking in my own ribs: the prose brims with wind-whipped grit yet slips into the lyrical just as easily. What makes the novel sing isn’t only its technical poise—those long, wave-tossed cadences against staccato spray—it’s the way each page insists that queer joy can be both intimate and revolutionary all at once. The book hands you contraband tenderness the way a friend might pass you a match in a blackout: casual and necessary.
Flaca and Romina start out planning together in a cramped bedroom, knowing that five women in one place would be more than a sleepover—it’d be an outlawed assembly. Under the junta, five was the magic number that turned friendship into “conspiracy” on paper; each of them loving other women turned that danger electric. Yet, somehow, these central five dared it anyway—building a hidden world out of laughter, cigarettes, and midnight whispers, where the threat of prison and worse only thickened the bond. In this story resistance is brewed, not broadcast: a dented cuia of maté—leaves gathered where Guaraní caretakers still tend the riverbank—circles clockwise. Sip, pass, and breathe even as a patrol spotlight slices the darkness and the slur “cantoras” scuffs over the sand. De Robertis shows us that fear can hone our wit without halting it. Laughter, barbed and buoyant, is often the brightest armour.
Time whips back like a boomerang tide—just when you think you’ve skipped to safety… splash! Yeah, it’s the same water, but it’s a new decade as we step into 2013. Pepe Mujica’s in the big chair (when he’s not chauffeuring himself in his famously scruffy VW Beetle), and Uruguay has just signed the dotted line on marriage equality. The news comes by phone—tidy and inconclusive—while a cat, collected as any revolution, lounges on a battered suitcase kept by the door, just in case. Many of us today are being reminded what these characters clearly remember: passports expire, sure—but promises? They can curdle faster than the milk lounging in my fridge door.
Maté gurgles. Salt gusts. A battered radio pirates forecasts, figures, decrees; its twitching aerial mimics river reeds rehearsing rebellion. Even static turns polyphonic, a stammering choir refusing silence as songs, once buried, sing back to life—not ghosts, but grounded voltage. When the syntax of this story snakes, it does so while it mirrors the covert paths these women trace. Every stylistic swerve moonlights as both the map and the territory. Survival is a collective thing, and language—mocked or mumbled—cuts loopholes into the law.
By the last page, reciprocity resounds. Jokes, alarms, and hand-me-down radios tug tomorrows toward the shore, hauling future listeners with them. The sand remembers older pacts than roadside checkpoints, and the sea holds its impartial elegy. Cantoras tunes us into a frequency that outruns the static, asks us to lean close, then leaves us listening for the next unruly voice.
Read this book if you want language to reroute statutes, if you believe a gourd can double as megaphone, if you crave a tale where fear and wit clasp elbows and stand together. Skip it only if you need your sentences tamer and your rivers clearer. Otherwise, pour whatever passes for decent yerba maté where you live, crack open the battered paperback, and tune your radio’s dial—I’ll meet you in the static.
The Atlantic—salt-bitten and memory-laden—beats beneath every clause of Cantoras, and Caro De Robertis (they/them) times their prose to that tidal metronome, letting sentences drift eastward onto Uruguay’s raw ocean edge. Some clauses stretch out like the low-tide flats while others are cast out to sea, where they leave periods bobbing like bottle-caps. Reading it, I heard the waves breaking in my own ribs: the prose brims with wind-whipped grit yet slips into the lyrical just as easily. What makes the novel sing isn’t only its technical poise—those long, wave-tossed cadences against staccato spray—it’s the way each page insists that queer joy can be both intimate and revolutionary all at once. The book hands you contraband tenderness the way a friend might pass you a match in a blackout: casual and necessary.
Flaca and Romina start out planning together in a cramped bedroom, knowing that five women in one place would be more than a sleepover—it’d be an outlawed assembly. Under the junta, five was the magic number that turned friendship into “conspiracy” on paper; each of them loving other women turned that danger electric. Yet, somehow, these central five dared it anyway—building a hidden world out of laughter, cigarettes, and midnight whispers, where the threat of prison and worse only thickened the bond. In this story resistance is brewed, not broadcast: a dented cuia of maté—leaves gathered where Guaraní caretakers still tend the riverbank—circles clockwise. Sip, pass, and breathe even as a patrol spotlight slices the darkness and the slur “cantoras” scuffs over the sand. De Robertis shows us that fear can hone our wit without halting it. Laughter, barbed and buoyant, is often the brightest armour.
Time whips back like a boomerang tide—just when you think you’ve skipped to safety… splash! Yeah, it’s the same water, but it’s a new decade as we step into 2013. Pepe Mujica’s in the big chair (when he’s not chauffeuring himself in his famously scruffy VW Beetle), and Uruguay has just signed the dotted line on marriage equality. The news comes by phone—tidy and inconclusive—while a cat, collected as any revolution, lounges on a battered suitcase kept by the door, just in case. Many of us today are being reminded what these characters clearly remember: passports expire, sure—but promises? They can curdle faster than the milk lounging in my fridge door.
Maté gurgles. Salt gusts. A battered radio pirates forecasts, figures, decrees; its twitching aerial mimics river reeds rehearsing rebellion. Even static turns polyphonic, a stammering choir refusing silence as songs, once buried, sing back to life—not ghosts, but grounded voltage. When the syntax of this story snakes, it does so while it mirrors the covert paths these women trace. Every stylistic swerve moonlights as both the map and the territory. Survival is a collective thing, and language—mocked or mumbled—cuts loopholes into the law.
By the last page, reciprocity resounds. Jokes, alarms, and hand-me-down radios tug tomorrows toward the shore, hauling future listeners with them. The sand remembers older pacts than roadside checkpoints, and the sea holds its impartial elegy. Cantoras tunes us into a frequency that outruns the static, asks us to lean close, then leaves us listening for the next unruly voice.
Read this book if you want language to reroute statutes, if you believe a gourd can double as megaphone, if you crave a tale where fear and wit clasp elbows and stand together. Skip it only if you need your sentences tamer and your rivers clearer. Otherwise, pour whatever passes for decent yerba maté where you live, crack open the battered paperback, and tune your radio’s dial—I’ll meet you in the static.
This book came to me as a metaphorically dog-eared suggestion from my friend Eliot, and I’m so glad they suggested it; it’s just the sort of book I love. In The Last Hour Between Worlds, the latest release from Melissa Caruso, the author builds up catastrophes like a clockmaker who’s bent on breaking time. She coaxes loose each cog until the whole contraption convulses, collapses, and casts loose pieces to ping across the floor—okay, that metaphor got away from me.
Even in moments when Kembral, our protagonist, is staring down impossible choices, the book won’t hand us heroes wrapped in moral certainty. And she’s not even supposed to be working; she’s on leave! Instead, we watch people scrabble for meaning when every path leads through wreckage, their words worn thin by the particular—and too familiar—fatigue that comes from having no good options left. What cuts even deeper than this philosophical weight is how Caruso lets her characters speak with brutal honesty instead of pretty lies. Maybe I’m hearing echoes of my own bone-tiredness in Kembral’s voice, but heck—I know many of you are just as exhausted as I am with impossible choices, these days.
The fantasy elements in the story work like emotional architecture—and yes, I realise I just called magic “architecture”, but bear with me here. Caruso makes reality itself intentionally wobbly. Each “echo” carries extra freight. When the world goes “blurry, like someone erased it and wrote over it,” trauma gets literalised through magical realism that keeps metaphysical concepts tethered to recognisable human hurt. Think of how a teacup’s hairline crack creeps along, almost invisible, until one morning it splits clean through in your grip. It’s much like that, though the metaphor is too gentle for what Caruso serves up. It reminded me of reading The Fifth Season for the first time—that same feeling of the world literally breaking apart, except Caruso’s happen faster and with less warning. Her world-building moves without mercy, fractures fast, as new terminology piles up during crisis scenes like debris in the clean-up after an explosion.
There are moments when dialogue digs up character traits like an archaeologist, where voices and personality traits get the dirt brushed off of them, and suddenly you’re seeing the messy bits people usually keep buried. Kembral’s “respectfully, this isn’t the moment for dramatic gestures” made me physically wince—it’s deflection dressed up in desperate, sarcastic politeness. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to reach through the page and shake her or hide under a blanket because my own conflict-avoidance was being called out so hard. The Midwesterner in me totally gets using manners as armour when things fall apart—I once said “excuse me” to a door that hit me in the face. Caruso weaponises that kind of courtesy like she knows it as well as I do. That’s a precision which can, sometimes, read more like authorial commentary than authentic human response, but here? I think it works.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but Caruso’s treatment of consent under coercion felt less like abstract philosophy and more like lived experience. There are moments I desperately want to spoil—seriously, the restraint is killing me—where Caruso won’t let sacrifice be pretty or easy. She makes you engage with the awful necessity of it, and the text earns these story beats through an accumulation of scenes brimming with impossible choices. There are no easy outs.
But here’s what surprised me: Caruso trusts us to sit with discomfort. We don’t get an answer to every question. She doesn’t show us a justification for every choice. Kembral just has to live with the wreckage she’s made, sometimes, just like we so often do. You know what? I’m okay with that. It’s actually refreshing in a genre where most problems get solved by either stabbing something or having a heartfelt conversation—preferably both.
All in all, I adored this book. If you’re on the lookout for a morally murky fantasy-mystery without clean heroes, then you’ll find rich material here. If you’re hunting for traditional heroic journeys or clear ethical answers, you’ll probably chafe against ambiguity that spurns such comfortable categories. To anyone who’s sensitive to themes of mass death or unstable realities, either skip this one or come in prepared—this book’s examination of catastrophic decisions shows no mercy.
This book came to me as a metaphorically dog-eared suggestion from my friend Eliot, and I’m so glad they suggested it; it’s just the sort of book I love. In The Last Hour Between Worlds, the latest release from Melissa Caruso, the author builds up catastrophes like a clockmaker who’s bent on breaking time. She coaxes loose each cog until the whole contraption convulses, collapses, and casts loose pieces to ping across the floor—okay, that metaphor got away from me.
Even in moments when Kembral, our protagonist, is staring down impossible choices, the book won’t hand us heroes wrapped in moral certainty. And she’s not even supposed to be working; she’s on leave! Instead, we watch people scrabble for meaning when every path leads through wreckage, their words worn thin by the particular—and too familiar—fatigue that comes from having no good options left. What cuts even deeper than this philosophical weight is how Caruso lets her characters speak with brutal honesty instead of pretty lies. Maybe I’m hearing echoes of my own bone-tiredness in Kembral’s voice, but heck—I know many of you are just as exhausted as I am with impossible choices, these days.
The fantasy elements in the story work like emotional architecture—and yes, I realise I just called magic “architecture”, but bear with me here. Caruso makes reality itself intentionally wobbly. Each “echo” carries extra freight. When the world goes “blurry, like someone erased it and wrote over it,” trauma gets literalised through magical realism that keeps metaphysical concepts tethered to recognisable human hurt. Think of how a teacup’s hairline crack creeps along, almost invisible, until one morning it splits clean through in your grip. It’s much like that, though the metaphor is too gentle for what Caruso serves up. It reminded me of reading The Fifth Season for the first time—that same feeling of the world literally breaking apart, except Caruso’s happen faster and with less warning. Her world-building moves without mercy, fractures fast, as new terminology piles up during crisis scenes like debris in the clean-up after an explosion.
There are moments when dialogue digs up character traits like an archaeologist, where voices and personality traits get the dirt brushed off of them, and suddenly you’re seeing the messy bits people usually keep buried. Kembral’s “respectfully, this isn’t the moment for dramatic gestures” made me physically wince—it’s deflection dressed up in desperate, sarcastic politeness. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to reach through the page and shake her or hide under a blanket because my own conflict-avoidance was being called out so hard. The Midwesterner in me totally gets using manners as armour when things fall apart—I once said “excuse me” to a door that hit me in the face. Caruso weaponises that kind of courtesy like she knows it as well as I do. That’s a precision which can, sometimes, read more like authorial commentary than authentic human response, but here? I think it works.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but Caruso’s treatment of consent under coercion felt less like abstract philosophy and more like lived experience. There are moments I desperately want to spoil—seriously, the restraint is killing me—where Caruso won’t let sacrifice be pretty or easy. She makes you engage with the awful necessity of it, and the text earns these story beats through an accumulation of scenes brimming with impossible choices. There are no easy outs.
But here’s what surprised me: Caruso trusts us to sit with discomfort. We don’t get an answer to every question. She doesn’t show us a justification for every choice. Kembral just has to live with the wreckage she’s made, sometimes, just like we so often do. You know what? I’m okay with that. It’s actually refreshing in a genre where most problems get solved by either stabbing something or having a heartfelt conversation—preferably both.
All in all, I adored this book. If you’re on the lookout for a morally murky fantasy-mystery without clean heroes, then you’ll find rich material here. If you’re hunting for traditional heroic journeys or clear ethical answers, you’ll probably chafe against ambiguity that spurns such comfortable categories. To anyone who’s sensitive to themes of mass death or unstable realities, either skip this one or come in prepared—this book’s examination of catastrophic decisions shows no mercy.
