Books I've Rated 4 / 5

• Emperor of Ruin

  by Django Wexler

  Finished 2026-07-24

• The Cuckoo

  by Leo Carew

  Finished 2026-06-26

  I really enjoyed this one. The series was fun, but I think this had some of the best, most evocative scenes in the series. The pacing to the end of the book was a little strange, a little anticlimactic, but oddly, I found I kind of appreciated that – not a tidy bow on a series that didn’t have a clearly desirable outcome.

  I’m painfully aware of how fantasy is used – often unintentionally – as a vessel for smuggling right-wing and racist ideologies; and a series that centered on two explicitly western European, mostly Anglo, societies trying to genocide each other, with strong Nordic influence and themes deeply intwined with toxic masculinity, is certainly not immune to those criticisms. But in the end, I think it could have been much worse in that regard. Bellamus was a fascinating and sympathetic antagonist, and while men definitely outnumbered women in the story, at least a few women have strength and agency, and the men were generally layered and human. Not a perfect book in that regard, for sure, but far from an outlier in the subgenre.

• A Conspiracy of Truths

  by Alexandra Rowland

  Finished 2026-06-18

  A delightful read. The whimsical storytelling style, in the voice of the protagonist—very much in the vein of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams—could easily be something that took me out of the book, because a voice like that is hard to make natural; but it was very well executed. The constrained first-person perspective had me wishing, at times, to get out and see the world a bit more; but I enjoyed it all the same.

• The Knight and the Moth

  by Rachel Gillig

  Finished 2026-04-13

  This was a fun and engaging world. It kind of straddled the line between a fairy tale and a more standard fantasy, and I guess I found that a little disorienting because there are different tropes, different expectations for each. At times, it seemed like the obvious next question was not asked, or next discovery was not discovered – the latter could be chalked up to subverting expectations, but the not so much the former. I think that’s where the genre confusion came in: fairy tales often just kind of skip over the details and you have to roll with it, but this felt a bit more grounded, so those missed details stood out.The twist at the very end was simultaneously obvious and extremely frustrating: give us a minute with our victory, come on!I liked it enough that I’ll probably pick up the next.

• Strange Houses

  by Uketsu

  Finished 2026-03-11

  I have mixed feelings about this book. For one: it hooked me right away; it’s the first book I’ve read cover-to-cover in a written format in years—I’m working on a few other, longer books, but mostly I’m listening to audiobooks. And I was entertained the whole way through. So for that: four stars. But also, it’s kind of silly. For me that was actually probably a good thing; I’m not a big horror reader and I don’t like the feeling of being terrified. So the silliness reduced the initial creepiness to a tolerable level. But now that I’m done, I can’t really shake that silliness.

  Within the first few chapters, Uketsu and Kurihara have apparently figured out the absurd scenario at the center of this all, with basically no mistakes. The scenario is silly and far-fetched, and there are so many other ways to read these house plans—sinister ways, even—that the fact that they supposedly got it just right is bothersome.

  I’ll say this, though: if it was the author’s intent to leave people theorizing, they’ve certainly got me there. But the most satisfying theory I can come up with just feels a bit too far from any possible author’s intent, or at least any well-written plot: that the whole thing presented by the two women was a fabrication, simply to satisfy the curiosity of these people who were investigating, by engaging the theories they had published in the newspaper; sending them in the wrong direction, and wrapping it up with a bow. In that way, they engaged these silly, paranoid delusions, and threw them off the scent of any number of much simpler criminal conspiracies. We never meet either of the children supposedly at the center of this plot, nor even their mother. They’re conveniently in hiding by the end of it all. The loose end this leaves is the neighbor, but I suppose that could just be one more person sent to shore up the story.

  All of this is why I have to give this book a decent rating: despite the many flaws that can be pointed out, in the end, I was engaged and it’s kept me thinking about it since.

• When We're in Charge The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership

  by Amanda Litman

  Finished 2026-03-10

  I think this book has a lot of interesting things to say, some interesting insights about trying to be a person, and a leader, without losing your soul. A lot of it isn’t actually specific to the younger generations, except insofar as older generations were not, I guess, raised with the idea or expectation that their job, and their selves at their job, should be some kind of reflection of their own values and priorities. There are certainly parts of the book that feel a little cold, stereotypically capitalist—arguably still hanging onto an older way of doing things—but I think a lot of that is at least a valid perspective to be considered, even if I sometimes felt that I wanted to push back, and the intent behind even those sections was one of trying to survive or thrive in a the world that we all live in.

• Lessons in Magic and Disaster

  by Charlie Jane Anders

  Finished 2026-02-11

  I had less fun reading this book than others I’ve read by Anders. Which is not to say it’s a bad book, because it’s not. It’s just a different kind of book. There’s a lot of pain in this one, a lot of reckoning with a world full of hate and bigotry. Not every book needs to be an escape, but I’m not sure I prepared myself for how tough some of this book would be. Still definitely recommend it, as with basically everything else in the CJA catalog.

• The Toll

  by Neal Shusterman

  Finished 2026-01-09

  I think this wrapped up the series pretty well. I do feel like, at times, it was almost more of a kind of description of a possible ideal (with a big asterisk) future than a novel, and it almost left the characters behind as it did that. And I’m not actually sure I think the eventual state of affairs on Earth is any kind of improvement, all things considered. But it was internally consistent and thought-provoking. As I’ve said with the whole series, it takes some pretty interesting ideas and applies a kind of layer of cartoonishness to it all, but again, I think it stuck the landing for what it was well enough.

  It was interesting that at a certain point, I started wondering if the book was going to wrap up as an appeal to faith. There was a part of the book that very much felt like it was trying to draw parallels (beyond, obviously, the Tonists more explicitly) between The Thunderhead and some kind of deity—not just within the novels’ universe, which happened a lot, but more as a meta-narrative. In the end I don’t think it went that way.

  I do kind of wish we learned more about the world Citra and Rowan ended up building—we learned a bit about the Tonists through the theological interludes (and, disappointingly, learned how much information was clearly lost), but we only got a brief look at Citra waking up at the very end.

• A Curse Carved in Bone

  by Danielle L. Jensen

  Finished 2025-11-24

  This was a fun duology. The scope of this one broadened significantly and I think with a lot of books and movies that take a similar route, I find myself checking out—but I enjoyed all the twists and turns, for the most part, and I never lost sight of the characters at the center, which kept me invested. The epilogue was silly, though: she admirably swore off war… and then immediately un-swore it off in a scene that felt like the last scene of The Incredibles.

• The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association

  by Caitlin Rozakis

  Finished 2025-10-23

  Really enjoyed this. It’s cozy, but it’s a bit deeper than I might expect from something cozy. As a parent of a toddler just starting in childcare, I found that this resonated surprisingly deeply and the fantasy elements easily mapped, without being heavy handed, to real parenting concerns.

• When I Was You

  by Minka Kent

  Finished 2025-08-16

  Honestly a lot of fun. Lots of twists. Does well to play with the tropes of the genre and then subvert expectations. Also once or twice when I expected a twist and it went straight, in a pleasantly surprising way.

• Rabbits A Novel

  by Terry Miles

  Finished 2025-08-07

• The Spear Cuts Through Water

  by Simon Jimenez

  Finished 2025-08-01

  Another book that gets the “I’m clearly too dumb to fully appreciate this” bump. It took me a long time to get through, even on audio. I set it aside a lot. The writing is very poetic and often abstract, and it jumps between times, places, and perspectives regularly. On audio, at least, some of these jumps are very disorienting and hard to follow. I think it’s a very artful book, but I can’t say I enjoyed it.

• The Perfect Divorce

  by Jeneva Rose

  Finished 2025-07-24

  I had kind of forgotten how the first one resolved so it took me a bit to catch up to events. Fun thriller. The twists and turns were fun, kept me guessing, and didn’t usually feel cheap once revealed. I hope—expect?—there will be a third book that wraps up Sarah’s arc. If I’m supposed to be satisfied that she just keeps getting away with it… I’m not. It’s not that her adversaries are good, but she’s, you know, also not good.

• The First Sister

  by Linden A. Lewis

  Finished 2025-07-21