Gunderson, Christine. Friends with Secrets.

Seattle: Lake Union, 2024.

Five years ago, Nikki Lassiter was a highly regarded, tough as nails, television news anchor who had never missed a deadline, and she loved her job. Then she got married at thirty-six and now, at forty-two, she’s a stay-at-home mom who has just had her fourth kid, can’t keep track of the twins’ kindergarten schedules, and finds herself weeping in the baby formula aisle at Target. The checker congratulates her on her grandchildren and her somewhat feckless husband is between paychecks. And their savings account is dwindling.

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Sagas, L. M. Cascade Failure.

NY: Tor, 2024.

This is the debut work of an author of whom I have been able to learn absolutely nothing — not even his or her full name or gender. What is obvious is the level of talent displayed in this vivid and gritty space opera. A “cascade failure” is what happens when a small part in a complex, interconnected system fails, leading to the failure of other parts, which causes the failure of even larger parts, until the whole system comes crashing down like a Jenga tower. It’s a term generally used in engineering but it can refer just as well to human social systems, and that’s the case here.

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Roberts, Nora. The Collector.

NY: Random House, 2014.

Roberts is one of the best there is at portraying characters. The people who inhabit her stories are always drawn in more than three dimensions, including the supporting players, and she does this largely through their dialogue, the way they present and express themselves. As someone who has written occasional fiction, I can testify that this is far from easy to accomplish. It’s a skill, in fact, that many authors never quite master. Roberts has that skill, and in spades. [And I’ll warn you up front that this review is a bit longer than my usual – but there’s a whole lot of story here.]

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West, Natasha. The Honeymoon Hijackers.

West, Natasha. The Honeymoon Hijackers.UK: The Author, 2023.

This is a pretty good rom-com with a queer slant, and set in England, though the comedy part tapers off halfway through the narrative and things become rather more serious. Which is a good thing in this case, since it makes for a much more interesting and involving story. It’s not uncommon to open a story of this sort with a bride being abandoned at the altar, but in this case it’s a gay wedding and the two brides abandon each other. (One of them got too drunk at her bachelorette party the night before and screwed the male stripper her friends had hired. Ah, well.)

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Pratchett, Terry. A Stroke of the Pen.

NY: Doubleday, 2023.

Neil Gaiman was not only Terry Pratchett’s sometime co-author but also a close friend for many years, and as he notes in his Introduction to this collection of twenty “lost stories,” in the eight years since his death, Sir Terry has evolved into almost a mythic figure. That’s not a bad thing — Terry was indeed a lovely person — but it can be misleading, especially to younger fans who didn’t grow up reading the Discworld novels as that world slowly developed, watching as their author likewise matured over time. The stories presented here weren’t really lost, only more or less deliberately mislaid — Terry never mentioned their existence to even his agent in later years — and they go some way to redressing that more recent view of his work.

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Smith, Jennifer E. This Is What Happy Looks Like.

NY: Little, Brown, 2013.

As I have said several times in past reviews, Jennifer Smith is simply one of the most reliable authors around when it comes to high-quality young adult fiction. She writes romances, but they’re always credible, without an ounce of fluff anywhere, and the relationships between her characters are unfailingly believable. When it comes to real-world emotions, and the strain they can put you under, this is simply one of her best.

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Addison, Katherine. The Angel of the Crows.

NY: Tor, 2020.

Like many kids of my generation, I was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes in my youth, and I also read a number of Holmesian pastiches during my career as a librarian. Some of those were much more successful than others, but this one is certainly different from any of them, and far more original. I have a deep and longstanding interest in worldbuilding — the creation of a wholly new world, physically and socially, that’s internally consistent — and Addison’s first book, The Goblin Emperor, was very successful in that regard. This one ticks all my boxes, too, even though the actual plots and subplots of the story are sometimes a little shaky.

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