Romance

Cover of Shoeshine Boy and Cigarette Girl, by P.A. Cornell (cover art by Kim Herbst), featuring a dark-haired young man in a cap with a shoeshine kit and a smartly dressed blonde with a cigarette tray; they are looking over their shoulders at each other, with a futuristic cityscape behind them.
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Review: Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, by P.A. Cornell

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If you’re in the mood for a quick, cozy, elegantly crafted story, Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl, by P.A. Cornell, may be right up your alley. It’s highly stylized, so this novelette certainly won’t be to everybody’s taste, and the speculative elements could be removed without altering the retro-futuristic near-noir romance plot much, but it also has a great deal of charm. It also has a female protagonist you can cheer for, a smart one, who knows what she wants and takes action to get it. Additionally, it has a male co-protagonist who is, unfortunately, a sap. He’s a fool for love, but also foolish in other ways, not only trusting the wrong people but taking terrible risks with his own partner’s trust. After I lost most of my patience with him, fortunately, the book focused almost entirely on her.

Cpver of Ignore All Previous Instructions, by Ada Hoffman, featuring a cartoonish rocket ship flying above Jupiter. The title lettering is tinted blue and orange, matching the predominant colors of the gas giant as pictured.
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Book Review: Ignore All Previous Instructions, by Ada Hoffman

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I’ve been a fan of Ada Hoffman since I ran across some of their stories on podcasts (I reviewed their collection Resurrections here) and read their trilogy that started with The Outside (reviewed here by Kate Sherrod). Some of those stories and especially The Outside trilogy dealt with artificial intelligence, but there the term referred to the older idea of supercomputers gaining intelligence (and sometimes ruling humanity). Hoffman’s new book, Ignore All Previous Instructions, out today, deals with generative AI (Large Language Models using predictive text) rather than true AI, but because one corporation has bought all the rights to all stories of the past, present, and future (at least for anyone who lives near Jupiter), it’s also about who gets to tell stories, what stories are allowed to be told, and what happens with some people whose lives don’t exactly fit into the greatest-common-denominator story framework. It’s a great book, with thoughtful explorations of ideas and what feels like great characterization of an autistic lesbian storyteller who thinks following the rules will keep herself and others safe, and her former best friend, a hacker who delights in breaking what he considers bad rules. It’s also an exciting adventure with heartbreak, passion, and piracy (stealing from the rich and/or evil to redistribute ill-gotten gains to the needy).

Katabasis
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Review: Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang

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There are some rather lovely ideas and bits here, especially in the extensive worldbuilding. The arguments over the geometry and topography of hell are fascinating. But the ultimate ending as well as what the novel builds up to feels underwhelming. It builds to a conclusion that really didn’t match up with what the novel seemed to be trying to do. I enjoyed parts of the journey far more than the destination itself.

Cover of The Killing Spell, by Shay Kauwe, featuring colorful strips of Hawaiian-print cloth swirling around a black center, with red lettering for the title and orange-yellow letters for the author's name.
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Book Review: The Killing Spell, by Shay Kauwe

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I greatly enjoyed The Killing Spell, the debut urban fantasy novel by Shay Kauwe. I’ll admit that the first chapter was a little challenging for me, because the protagonist, Kea Petrova, starts out feeling a bit overwhelmed by her family responsibilities as the young head of a household, with siblings and cousins to support, and a somewhat unreliable magical talent. She continues to be off balance and seemingly gets in over her head when a political activist is assassinated and she becomes responsible for figuring out the killing spell and tracking down the killer, but eventually she hits her stride and finds some allies. She learns that she is most powerful when she stops trying to do everything by herself and leans into her heritage and her people’s connections with nature.

Poster for Dead Lover (2025), featuring a blond woman's face, a blue lightning bolt, and grimy hands, one holding shears and the other cupping a finger.
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Movie Review: DEAD LOVER (2025) Directed by Grace Glowicki

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An unnamed lonely gravedigger (director Grace Glowicki) from a long line of gravediggers (Family Motto: Dig deep. Dig hard. Never stop digging.) yearns for a worthy man to love, a good man to love her back. The problem is that her dedication to the job makes the gravedigger smell of corpses; her flesh, hair and clothes emit a putrid rot that would turn aside any potential suitor. She experiments with botanicals whose scents might mask the stink of death, but to no avail. Her loneliness builds until the untimely death and burial of a famous opera diva (Leah Doz) brings the deceased’s mourning brother (Ben Petrie) into her graveyard. Catching her gaze, the brother professes a strong attraction to the gravedigger’s malodorous state, rather than the repulsion she’s used to. An intense relationship follows, but the man admits to the gravedigger that he has sterility issues that make their desire for children and a family difficult. He elects to travel abroad for a new experimental procedure to treat his infertility, but en route home he is lost at sea, only his ring finger bearing the symbol of their love retrieved to be returned to the stunned and heartbroken gravedigger. Dig deep. Dig hard. Never stop digging. The gravedigger refuses to give up on her love, and sets out to use her botanical skills to grow her lover back from the severed. Which only succeeds in growing an exceptionally elongated and comical animate finger that desires a body. Thankfully, there’s the dead body of her lover’s opera-singer-sister just outside. Only the aristocratic former husband (Lowen Morrow) of this corpse might object, and the creature the gravedigger forms might be more monster than lover.

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Book Review: The Everlasting by Alix Harrow

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The Everlasting is Alix Harrow’s novel weaving myth, legend, time travel, destiny, and yes, a love story.  Owen Mallory is an academic, a scholar in the country of Dominion. He has survived the last war and is now studying the national myth of his country. He is drawn, however, into doing much more than reading and writing about the myth. He winds up becoming part of that very myth cycle.¹ Una Everlasting IS that myth, the national myth of Dominion. Everyone knows her story, the Perfect Knight, who fought treachery, dragons, enemies within and without and found the Grail to heal a dying Queen.Everyone knows her story. But the ending of her story can change. Details in her story can change. Indeed the very fabric of her story can change. If someone plucks at the tapestry of her story long enough… Owen’s story, and Una’s story, is the story of Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting.

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