This is a collection of seven short stories, all of them speculative in nature. @supergirled already did a very detailed review of each story so here are one-line summaries:

1. aliens from a lost planet come to earth
2. humans encounter aliens on another planet
3. humans can now live on other planets... for a price
4. emotions become accessible and purchasable in physical form
5. people can upload their minds before they die
6. humans born and raised in an isolated, utopian commune go and experience the real world when old enough
7. an astronaut about to embark on a big mission learns the truth about her aunt's disappearance before the same failed mission

My favourites are 'The Materiality of Emotions,' 'Archival Loss,' and 'Pilgrims,' which I realise as I am writing are the least space travel-y stories here, but I felt the most touched by the portrayal of human relationships and contradictions represented here. Their plausibility in the near future intrigued me, although I hope not within my own lifetime.

Similar reads: • 'Launch Something!' by Bae Myung-hoon • 'Exhalation' by Ted Chiang

"Loss, I think, is the plot of a woman's life, and madness is grief's younger sister frolicking on eager toes."

Where on earth is the well-deserved hype for this book???? If you like realist multigenerational epics (think 'Pachinko,' 'Red Girls: The Legend of the Akakuchibas,' 'Middlesex,' 'Must I Go,' and 'There Are Rivers in the Sky') with a focus on female experience in extremely patriarchal environments, you have to read this one. I loved the myths and stories embedded throughout, passed down from elder to descendant, contributing to a long history of oral traditions and lending a polyphonous quality to the reading experience. The opening and closing stories bracket the narrative perfectly. There is also the added layer of India-Nepal relations and how drawing a border cleanly is not possible in real life.

At age fourteen, Meena is married to a much older man and leaves behind everyone she loves in India to start a new life in Nepal. Her husband disappears for long periods for work, and her MIL is (to me, with my contemporary sensibilities) abusive, constantly unleashing a torrent of verbal abuse and making her DILs work as farmhands and maids while her own pampered overaged daughter lazes around. The first snap occurs when Meena finds out her MIL has 'stolen' her dowry, the jewellery her own parents worked so hard for, to secure a match to a rich household for her SIL. She can't do anything, though. Story of her life. No matter what her husband puts her through, and it is a lot, her rage remains impotent and eventually corrodes her from the inside, turning her into the same kind of angry, bitter woman as the rest. But life goes on, and it must. Most surprising was the queer desire represented here, persisting and untameable in spite of futility.

Originally written in 2008 and translated in 2018, this is a story set in what feels like a bygone era but was actually not that long ago. The teenagers here put Justin Timberlake in their mp3s but also still worshipful of Nirvana and New Order. It feels like a time capsule, similar to Rika Yokomori's 'Tokyo Tango' but less gritty and more dark.

Crystal and Mina are friends who met through cram school, the one place they cannot escape no matter what else they do between classes. They both come from affluent families but it seems that money does not make life easier. Crystal does not realise, but she is gradually losing her mind. She distracts herself with boyfriends and substance abuse, but nothing works. When Mina's childhood friend commits a high-profile suicide, Mina has a breakdown and transfers out, exacerbating Crystal's own mental deterioration.

Crystal is a deeply unlikeable character but at the same time, it feels like she is the product of the environment she was raised in. Everything Mina said about her is true: she does have a superiority complex but being book smart is not enough to compensate for her misanthropy and cruelty. She has no friends besides Mina and the alienation takes a toll on her. As she teeters over the edge, the 'perfect' mask she wears in public also start to slip off. This is a disturbing portrait of a mind unravelling.

Trigger warnings: suicide, self-harm, animal abuse and death

I didn't expect this to be an actual contemporary take on the story of Bluebeard, but the allusion is made frequently enough in the earlier section to set up certain expectations. I have a feeling the omission was meant to avoid misleading the reader into thinking this would be femgore, feminist, or fem-anything. The plot itself is relatively tame even if suffused throughout with a sense of foreboding.

Frances grew up in the shadow of her much older sister and darling of the ballet world, Charlotte. She has always idolised Charlotte, who seemed like a comet, burning bright and so far away, so far ahead. They were pretty close, but all this changed when Charlotte dissolved her marriage to Johnny and became a cloistered nun in a French abbey six years ago, giving up her greatest passion and all other worldly delights. Before Charlotte becomes fully cloistered, Frances hears of Johnny returning to town and resolves to hunt him down to get the truth, even if it means taking the path Charlotte took.

Can women be serial killers? More specifically, can desirable and sexually active black women doing PhDs in Cambridge be serial killers by nature? It's a bold premise. The academic setting means the reader is fed tiny scoops of critical race theory, all the while the protagonist tries to justify her actions with readings (clever) and the excuse of testing out methodology (plausibly defensible).

Yrsa, the main character, is slippery and complex, her interiority not fully accessible even to the omniscient narrator. It's very difficult to put her in a box or attribute a cause. It's not exactly childhood trauma, not exactly rage against the patriarchy, but more subtle and ambiguous, a little bit of this and that. She's both victim and aggressor, sexually agentic but also unavoidably derogated, the hand of justice but also misguided where it counts. She studies about Black liberation but still wants to be fetishised by white partners during sex. Her rage runs cold, not hot, and the reader can never be allowed to find her actions justifiable. She's scary but compelling and I quite like this (possible) villainess.

"Is this what it means to be a mother, then? To be in constant, irrational conflict with one's own child? To be constantly challenged by the stubborn will of a creature who doesn't respond to logic or reason, and who always wins?"

"It's a wonder that any woman ever agrees to be a mother, when the fruits of motherhood are inevitably conflict and remorse, to be followed by death and disembowelment."

Once, someone with a young child told me that even if their child was born disabled, they would still love and treat them the same, and I remember wondering if that was something a person can only say when they are safe in the certainty of their child's neurotypicality and physical able-ness. If I had read this book a few year earlier, I might not have had as much sympathy for the narrator as I do now. Tiny is mother to an owl-baby, the result of an encounter with a female owl- lover, but that does not matter to her husband who just wants to play house like all of his other siblings. She knew that this baby was different, likely inherited a gene from her, but nobody believed her until the baby was out and visible. Her husband can't take it so he absences himself and leaves her to raise her owl-baby on her own, accepting the diet of fresh kill or the daily smearing of excrement on the walls, completely isolated with no social support. One day, he becomes convinced that their daughter can be fixed through medical procedures, so he forces her through a battery of tests and experiments that aim to turn her into a 'normal' dog-child who can speak, sit still, and be non-violent in social settings. It ends just as you would expect.

I felt that this story did not allow the reader a neat and comfortable ending (or journey) because that would cheapen the experience that it is trying to portray, that of a mother trying to raise a child that the rest of the world believes better off dead. Of course any mother is going to be defensive of her child when faced with accusations of pathology, and of course only a mother is likely to view her own child's destructive behaviour as deserving of acceptance. Her perspective is understandable because this is her own child, who she loves. But at the same time, I don't think the special schools can be blamed for not accepting Chouette because no one else is obliged to love Chouette in the same way. In any case, no school can be fully inclusive, at most only accommodating of a range of needs, and Chouette falls out of that range, for better or for worse. It's not like Tiny does not know that her daughter will claw at people or peck their eyes out. She knows full well. 'Accidents' happen at the playground, and Chouette has not once displayed the ability to consider others' feelings or safety. Although I disagree with the belief that owl-children should be 'fixed' so they can have a "normal childhood," I also don't think it is reasonable to expect the rest of society to accept the risk to their bodily safety. It would be ideal if there was any kind of society out there that was made for owl-children, but there isn't. The best outcome really was for Chouette to never endure the company of humans again, to live free and empowered and independent. This is not a straightforward allegory for neurodivergence/ disability.

I love everything this author writes, be it her standalone novels on human-fae relationships or her 9-book dragon series (that I plan to reread). I was curious about this new work, given it's been eight years since 'Spinning Silver' and over a decade since 'Uprooted.' What would she write about now? What kind of fae? And is it going to be what people call Romantasy, a term that can be retroactively applied to the previous novels (which I disagree with)?

Turns out, I needn't have worried. It isn't often that I read a fantasy novel and think, This is it, this is the blueprint. The writing style has no excess, nothing superfluous. You won't see dialogue that's there just to pad the story. It feels very familiar and nostalgic, but the message contained is surprisingly contemporary, almost boldly so for a narrative that draws from more traditional forms and is associated with escapism. There's also a bit of a meta element given that we are reading a story within a genre that has certain trope expectations (fighting, politics, romance), while the fae in here are easily manipulated and massively hindered by their predilections for those exact tropes. The narrative is deceptively simple and, most importantly, fun. Humans having to think of ingenious ways to outwit the immortal fae is like advanced chess. I liked that magic is not the point here—nobody's problems magically go away because they have superpowers, but rather, through brainwork and communication.

All Celia ever wanted was the love of her older brother, Argent, but Argent left his family to spite their father and Celia is left heartbroken. She decides to build a relationship with her other, unacknowledged brother, Roric, and together, they support each other through childhood. Celia discovers she's a sorceress, making her the prime candidate for marrying the crown prince. She dreams of searching for Argent in the summer lands, but before she can do anything, she is summoned for her wedding. However, the royal family betrays her and gives her away to the summer lord responsible for the hundred-year summer war, as a necessary sacrifice for brokering permanent peace. Argent, now a famous and well-loved knight, arrives to duel for her freedom at the expense of his treasured friendship with the summer lord. They both have oaths they cannot break and something's got to give.

I picked this book up because of a conversation I had with @chatterreads thinking she was talking about another book with the same title, only to find out later that we were not talking about the same book haha. She strongly recommended it and we all know Danielle's taste in fantasy does not miss. I wish I knew of it back when it published in 2012, but perhaps I would not have appreciated the postapocalyptic pandemic setting as much as I do now. I am very, VERY grateful for vaccines and advancements in the medical field.

Thomas is an ex-knight-turned-brigand with a functioning conscience, just trying his best to not get sick and not starve to death. He saves a defenseless little girl from getting raped, after which he ends up becoming her guardian on her holy—but extremely dangerous—pilgrimage to Avignon through Paris. She is goodness and purity personified, constantly telling him not use the Lord's name in vain or forbidding him from taking life, and for her, he finds himself wanting to be better. However, this girl is clearly not just a girl, unless all little girls are personally protected by angels, have a direct line to divine instruction, or can heal others. He wonder if she is saint or witch.

The monsters they encounter are pretty terrifying but conceptually interesting. There is no shortage of fighting or gore. I really liked the fantastical element here, almost as much as how the Avignon Papacy is satirised. This book gives you everything you'd expect from a 'medieval horror/ dark fantasy' with a good old Good VS Evil core.

Similar reads: 'A Little Trickerie' by Rosanna Pike 'The Pretender' by Jo Harkin 'Once Was Willem' by M R Carey 'The Starving Saints' by Caitlin Starling Also, unexpectedly, The Witcher??