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Book Review: One Level Down, by Mary G. Thompson

Cover of One Level Down by Mary G. Thompson, featuring a stack of cubes with clouds and skies on some sides and circuitry on others, with a little blond girl walking on one of the lower levels.

I found the focused self-control and resilience of the protagonist inspiring, and I was rewarded with a very satisfying conclusion. This is a novella with a compelling character and some really interesting ideas, and I will definitely be looking for more from Thompson.

Book Review: Root Rot, by Saskia Nislow

Cover of Root Rot, by Saskia Nislow, featuring what looks like a human circulatory system except composed of plants, roots, and vines, surrounded by fungi, worms, and other creepy-crawlies.

“After all, it’s so much easier and pleasanter to think that everything must be fine, and it’s one’s perceptions that are skewed, rather than the situation; surely, if something were wrong, one of The Adults would step in and fix it.”

Book Review: Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite

Cover of Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite, featuring a woman sitting in an armchair with her back to us, with her hair in a bun, amid shelves and shelves of books, plus some books floating in space.

The novella starts when Dorothy Gentleman wakes up and discovers she’s been uploaded off schedule and into the wrong body, and she finds out soon that someone else is dead. As one of the ship’s detectives, she shelves her personal feelings (that’s my little in-joke) and immediately starts investigating.

Book Review: The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar

Cover of The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar, featuring colorful flowers springing from a very winding green-and-brown stylized river.

The novella is a retelling of a reasonably well-known fairytale murder ballad, so alert readers may anticipate some of the story beats. There are two sisters, and a suitor, and a warning from beyond via music. But even if a reader has an idea of where the story is going, there are bends in this river of a plot.

Poetry Book Review: The Thorn Key, by Jeana Jorgensen

Cover of The Thorn Key: Fairy Tales in Verse, by Jeana Jorgensen, featuring a large keyhole in a dark, foggy void, with brambles at the bottom of the hole, atop an icy-looking surface.

It’s not a long collection, containing about 40 poems (some just a few lines, many several e-pages long), a foreword, a list of content warnings/triggers, a fascinating multi-page afterword, and an appendix that lists which fairy tales inspired which poems. I don’t necessarily recommend trying to read all the poems in one go, since that may blunt their edges and impacts, but rather reading a few per day, taking time to savor them.