Caro

The premise sold me instantly. Climate change has trashed the Earth, there's acid rain, a floating island of garbage the size of Texas, and a drug called deleria that lets you see into other timelines. Cas is investigating why her ex Yana blew herself up along with all her research. Great hook, and the first stretch of the book is honestly really good.

The problem is it doesn't go anywhere new after that. Most of the book is Cas inside her own head, drug tripping through realities and thinking about Yana, and it just loops. Same beats again and again. By the halfway point I was kind of bored and the whole climate angle that drew me in had faded into the background.

And I never warmed up to the characters. Cas makes the same dumb choices on repeat and her thing with Yana feels more like obsession than love, probably because we never actually see their relationship, we just get told over and over how intense it was. Hard to care when you're only told and never shown. The writing itself is fine and the ideas are interesting, I just wanted to like it more than I did

I tore through this one, it's such a fast read that "one more chapter" turned into way past midnight (even though these are some long chapters). Rishi shows up at Stanford as this burnt out teenage climate activist who just wants to stop saving the world for five minutes and actually live, study literature, fall in love, mess around. Then COVID empties the campus and she ends up on a farm collective with everyone, and the book turns into this messy tangle of politics and desire and people figuring out what they owe each other. The pandemic setting could have felt gimmicky but it gave the whole thing this trapped, pressure cooker feeling that really worked for me.

What got me most was watching Rishi keep making the exact same mistakes, falling into the same patterns and situationships and never quite learning. Normally that drives me up the wall, but here it felt painfully real instead of annoying, very true to being young and a bit lost. My one tiny gripe is the thing with Georgia, because we never find out what that email says since Rishi just deletes it without reading it, and the nosy part of me really wanted to know. But that's probably the point. Four stars, quick, queer, smart, and stuck with me for days.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

Dead Batteries looks like a post apocalyptic survival story on the surface, but it's really about one mother and her autistic, nonverbal son trying to hold their tiny routine together after a virus wipes out almost everyone. May and Davis live in an abandoned library, and the whole world has narrowed down to scavenging batteries for Davis's old Game Boy. That little lifeline carries so much weight, and Maupin clearly writes it from the inside.

What stayed with me is how honestly the book shows the labor of caring for a kid who can't speak for himself. The mental load, the physical exhaustion, the constant scanning for the next meltdown, none of it ever lets up. As someone neurodivergent myself I found a lot of it painfully familiar, even though Davis's needs are nothing like mine. May carries something that would flatten most people, and the book never turns her into a lesson or a tragedy. She just gets to be tired and scared and fiercely loving.

My one real gripe is that the middle drags. Once Bird turns up with his proposition the pacing slows to a crawl, and that same exhaustion that makes the book powerful starts to feel repetitive on the page. A few things get implied rather than explained too, so I reread some passages and still wasn't sure what happened. The ending won me back though, and it's surprisingly tender. Four stars, and I'll be thinking about May for a while.

I really wanted to love this one but it just never fully clicked for me. The setup sounds great on paper: Moon is a washed up actress and recovering addict mourning her lover and former TV husband, and her daughter Stevie is stuck in her orbit, broke and dying to get away from her mom and from Hollywood altogether. When money gets tight they end up crammed into the glass walled pool house out back while their actual house gets rented out, and things get even messier when Adam, Moon's old TV son and Stevie's lifelong crush, shows up for the funeral. So there is a ton going on, and yet for some reason I kind of struggled to get into the story almost the whole way through.

I think part of my problem was that I never really found a way in emotionally. The book has plenty to say about class, fame, grief and that whole post pandemic LA emptiness, and I could see what Choi was going for, this idea of two women play acting a perfect family in a place where the perfect family was always a fiction. But it just didn't resonate with me the way I hoped. I kept waiting to feel something for Moon or Stevie and mostly I just watched them from a distance.

That said I do not think it is a bad book at all, it just was not for me, and honestly a lot of that is probably a me thing rather than a Choi thing. The writing is sharp and she clearly knows this world and these glamorous messy people inside out. Three stars feels about right, there were flashes I really liked and the themes are genuinely meaty, maybe I just was not in the right headspace for it.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

Preaching to the Choir was a decent read but not what I expected from Tchaikovsky. I picked it up because I love his sci fi stuff and I was hoping for something twisted and gory in that gothic old money mansion setting. The atmosphere is definitely there, the Enderbough family estate is creepy and the vibes are on point, but the horror stays pretty tame the whole way through. If you are going in expecting real gore or shock value you will be a bit let down like I was.

The setup is fun though. Elena tagging along to her boyfriend's once in a generation family reunion and slowly realizing something is very wrong with this "old money" family works well as a premise. The family dynamics and the sarcastic British old money insults were honestly some of the best parts for me. Tchaikovsky is good at building that slow dread and the mansion itself feels like its own character.

Where it fell short for me was the payoff. The reveal felt a little underwhelming and safe, especially coming from an author who usually goes all in on wild sci fi concepts. It is not a bad novella at all, just more restrained gothic horror than the visceral gore I was hoping for. Solid but not his best work in my opinion, 3.5 stars.