The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow

 

The tone of this novel is ... really, really weird. It's set ... less than a century in the future, in a time when all sorts of environmental crises have gotten much worse, but when there are people who are clear on what needs to be done and determined to do it: The world is much worse, but people seem somehow better, at least the POV and (most of) the people he cares about. Of course, there are obvious bad people who for whatever reason/s would rather just see everything burn, at least so long as they and their stuff are still safe and there's still some rump of society for them to be the top echelon of. It took like half the novel for things to really kick, and there's really not much moral complexity in it, and the ending sort of looks like hope, except the world is on fire. It's moderately well-written on most levels--to riff on a line Doctorow riffs on, he wasn't typing with boxing gloves on--but the moral simplicity of it does in the end weigh against it. On the other hand, the novel's point is worth extracting and restating: If people would just do the fucking right thing/s now, we might end up with a world that's not on fire, and wouldn't that be nice?

What You Leave Behind by Wanda M. Morris

 

This is not a very good novel. I almost quit reading it a few times, because the prose just sort of lay there like a dead thing on the page, and the story was managing to be pretty obvious. On the one hand, I'm glad there weren't any stupid-rugpull-twists; on the other hand, seeing where the novel's going more than a hundred pages before it gets there at least means the novel isn't surprising me, which means it also probably isn't interesting me. It's pretty clear from the afterword that the author was at least as interested in drawing attention to an issue--a genuinely shitty thing that's impoverishing the poor and enriching the wealthy--but she seems to have kinda forgotten to make the story engaging. Oh comma well.

The Shadows We Hide by Allen Eskens

 

This is not a great novel, not a particularly great crime/thriller novel, but it's not horrible, either. Even though the structure is kinda looping and non-linear, it's not very complex or complicated--there are some twists that border on rugpulls, that'd probably play better in some visual medium than they do on the page, especially with a first-person narrator who's clearly making an explicit choice about what to tell, and clearly stringing on along the reader in a way that makes little to no diagetic sense; but the narrative does manage to carry on past those, and things to clear up, and those twists end up revealing about as much about the narrator as they do about the mystery he's found himself in the middle of. There are some thematic concerns floating along, mostly about people not being lost causes, but they very much mostly serve the story rather than the other way around. The first half or a little more is a bit of a haul, but the back end is a nice resolution. I might grab something else by this guy at some point, which I guess means it might be better than "not horrible."

Stiletto by Daniel O'Malley

 

This is another spies-in-a-magic-world novel, a sequel to *The Rook.* It's laden with startlingly funny turns of phrase, and the characters in it are well-differentiated and the story is well-structured. There are some moments that play like either wild absurdism or hard realism, could go either way. It's clear there's at least one more novel in this arc, and I know there's a prequel. I probably wouldn't pick those up on my own, but there's a pretty good chance someone else in my house will, and I'll probably read them, then. The first novel was pretty self-contained, but this one is much more clearly setting up a sequel, which seems to be a thing that happens: The first novel is a complete story, then the author has to keep setting up the next book. That's most of why I don't mostly bother with anything other than First Books, but the writing here is charming and entertaining enough that I'll keep biting.

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

 

Ms. Harrow writes novels that are strong magic, and this might be the most powerful thing of hers I've read, heady and hefty--never more so than when it's at its most understated. There are obvious metaphors and echoes and reflections and connections of and with the real world, here; there will be those who see this as a strongly political novel (and I wouldn't be inclined to disagree with them). The language is persistently beautiful, and after a bit of a rough start things  come together then tighten into a spiral that leads to an ending with weight.

Alter Ego by Alex Segura

 

This not so much a sequel to Secret Identity as a follow-up: While there are come connections, there aren't a lot of major characters in common. The story focuses much less on the dying industry in the dying city (comics in NYC in 1975) and leans much more toward telling the story of people working out how to reconnect with a past self, for what are mostly good reasons. It's non-linear as hell, happening in mostly two timelines with smatterings of others, but everything is clear--even/especially as it becomes obvious there are tragedies in it that have approximately nothing to do with comic books. There's also a wide bold streak of art-vs-commerce stuff happening, here, complete with a strong statement about LLMs and suchlike and what they create and whom they screw. This is less of a mystery, structurally, but it might be a better novel than its precursor, for all-a-that.

Providence by Max Berry

 

After reading something by this author and thinking it was better than I would have expected, I saw this in the library and figured I'd give it a shot. There's some wonky science at work in this novel, but once you get past that, it plays out well enough as like a space-opera kinda turned inside-out. The human characters have all sorts of virtues, but most of what they do doesn't really matter; the AI does basically everything. I have to believe that's kinda Barry's point, here, that unnecessary--maybe even pointless--isn't the same as meaningless. The prose is pretty solid, the pacing and characters all good, a decently written--if kinda dark--novel.