This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
A woman plagued by the memory of a college affair with a professor finds insight and understanding through a surprising spiritual guide in Dear Monica Lewinsky, a witty and emotional exploration of young womanhood by Julia Langbein (American Mermaid).
"Saint Monica Lewinsky was consecrated by the collective force of the American conscience during the second decade of the second millennium AD," concludes the prologue, a tale of secular martyrdom that precedes the story of Jean Dornan. Between her sophomore and junior years of college, Jean became entangled with a professor while studying in France. The aftermath left her unmoored, but 20 years later, an invitation to his retirement party sets her truly spiraling. She turns to her old diary and makes a connection for the first time: the year of the affair was the year of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. Realizing how callously she had written about Lewinsky, Jean calls out to her for forgiveness. Saint Monica appears.
With plenty of heart and a keen eye for human nature, Langbein depicts Saint Monica guiding Jean on a journey through the summer of the affair. Dear Monica Lewinsky shifts between Jean's present and her past, while interspersing stories of female saints who were characterized into the roles of virgin or whore. Revisiting her past through adult eyes, Jean comes to understand not only how completely her professor failed her but also the power that her young self exercised, for better or worse, in her naïveté. This incisively funny academic satire is nuanced and thought provoking. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Three women are compelled by infection, friendship, and ambition to abandon their established lives and travel toward the Pacific Ocean in Westward Women, Alice Martin's debut literary science fiction.
In 1973, a strange affliction starts affecting young women across the United States. It begins with an uncontrollable itch and drives them to travel west. Though some inexplicably recover, others disappear and are never found, and some are even murdered. Aimee endures a lonely college graduation and calls her best friend back home only to discover that Ginny has left. Aimee always planned to return and stay in her hometown, but she feels compelled to find Ginny and make sure she is safe. Eve is a journalist desperate for an angle on the "Westward Women" story. She's heard rumors of a man called the Piper who transports women on a bus. Teenie rides with the Piper, desperate enough from the itch when he found her not to question his motives. As the disease begins to influence her mind, Teenie's only other desire is not to forget her lost sister.
Martin crafts an intricate plot that inexorably brings these women together while illuminating how women's desires are often pathologized or suppressed. The line between sickness and health blurs as the uninfected seek answers and the infected find their symptoms mysteriously soothed. The result is a moving and otherworldly look at the delicate balance between freedom and the ties that bind. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
Unanticipated life, rather than death, demands the attention of ship's detective Dorothy Gentleman when an infant mysteriously appears at her nephew's door in Nobody's Baby, the delightful second science fiction cozy mystery by Olivia Waite (The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows).
The population of the Fairweather generation starship is supposed to be fixed at 10,000 for its centuries-long voyage. As passengers age and die, their consciousnesses are copied from their memory books in the library into new adult bodies, engineered to be unable to reproduce. Yet somehow Dorothy's nephew, Ruthie, and his husband, John, have found an infant in a basket on their doorstep, and now Ruthie is asking his aunt questions about babies. Furthermore, the baby appears to be well cared for. Dorothy sets about investigating who the child's parents are and how he came to be abandoned, but other logistical questions persist. For instance, with no allowance for births, will the baby be able to be classed as a passenger and granted the right to have his memory backed up?
As in Murder by Memory, the first Dorothy Gentleman novella, Waite melds a charming cast of characters with a mystery that takes full advantage of the possibilities in a generation ship's distinctive environment. Dorothy's shrewd eye and sharp turns of a phrase make her a most witty narrator. Although those who read the first mystery might want to see more of Violet, Dorothy's potential love interest, Waite includes enough hints here to keep readers hoping for more romance to come. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
In the darkly comic satire Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky (Poor Deer; Chouette), a young woman harboring a repressed fascination with the macabre teeters between an outwardly perfect life and a craving for radical, violent change.
In 1974, the Patty Hearst story dominates the media and 19-year-old Celia Dent craves "revolutionary changes" in her own life. She tells herself that she is lucky to have her husband--whom she always calls "my Drew"--to look after her since her strict mother's death, despite his shoves and scolds, which she reasons "felt neutral, not violent." Working in the billing department for the phone company, she's in a position of power over the customers she can cut off ("ripping your lips," as they say) but is kept on a short leash by the male floor supervisors. One day a co-worker tells the lurid tale of how a woman further up the corporate ladder was murdered by a jealous husband mid-tryst. Thoughts of love and death begin to haunt Celia in a near-erotic obsession. She begins to imagine scenarios such as stabbing Drew through the ear with her mother's old nail file. She spontaneously stays in the city late after work to meet a regular caller to the billing line. Then she takes one risk too many, setting off unavoidable, violent consequences.
The first-person narration is bitingly clever, and Oshetsky vividly explores how a girl who was blamed since childhood for being wild can first seek steadiness with an abusive man and then grow to embrace her wildness. Celia makes for an immensely appealing noir antiheroine. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission of Shelf Awareness.
A brush with death leads a man to a new life and a new awareness of a beautiful, dangerous world hidden all around in Strange Animals, the first novel by poet Jarod K. Anderson (Something in the Woods Loves You).
Green twists his ankle and falls off the curb, then sees a bus coming toward him--then he's standing on the sidewalk again. Afterward, he feels called to the Catskills. During his first night at the campgrounds, he wakes before dawn to a translucent deer being chased by a horned, wolf-like creature that leaps onto the hood of his car and speaks to him telepathically. Green's neighbor, Valentina, tells him that that he is a cryptonaturalist, or someone "who studies hidden nature," and he accepts a position as her apprentice. There's been a series of possibly natural but unlikely deaths in the area, so understanding cryptids quickly becomes not only an academic matter but also vital to protecting the community Green is coming to love.
Anderson, creator of The CryptoNaturalist podcast, presents the vibrant, wonderous creatures that one would expect and depicts the quirks of humanity with equal love and attention. From the moment that Green asks the gas station attendants for directions to a campground, the residents of this little corner of the Catskills come across as a charming collection of misfits, ready to welcome the sort of person who feels called to them. The potentially world-altering threat of one of these cryptids is a bit too perilous to call Strange Animals a cozy fantasy, but it offers true heart and found family in a sometimes incomprehensible world. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​A return to her family's isolated cabin in the woods of Wisconsin leaves a woman unmoored and profoundly altered in Hemlock, a queer rural gothic exploration of addiction and heritage by Melissa Faliveno (Tomboyland).
Sam plans to fix up the cabin, named Hemlock by her father, and make a quick sale of it. She has a cat and a long-term boyfriend in Brooklyn, and she told them both she'd be gone only a couple of weeks. But a dusty six-pack she discovers in the cabin's basement puts an end to 10 months of sobriety, and while she sits on the porch one evening, a doe speaks to her in the voice of her vanished mother.
Using the remote landscape to its full potential and embracing the equally threatening and comforting possibilities of country life, Faliveno creates an air of menace and instability as Sam seems to simultaneously find and lose herself. Far from her straight-passing life, her body begins to change, becoming something more androgynous or possibly feral. Her sense of time begins to slip, and maybe her sense of reality does too, filling the novel with a dreamlike quality that leaves open the questions of what is real and what is hallucination. By returning to her roots, Sam may discover who she is meant to be or find herself doomed to repeat her mother's fate. Her battles with sinister forces, internal and external, are a powerful depiction of the struggle to escape the generational cycles of addiction that ground Hemlock's eerie sense of the uncanny. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness. 
​In Ace Atkins's rollicking adventure, Everybody Wants to Rule the World, a scheme by Russian spies brings together a once-famous crime writer, a teenager who suspects his mother's new boyfriend is a KGB agent, and an FBI agent investigating the murder of an employee at Scientific Atlanta who had access to top-secret information.
In 1985 Atlanta, Ga., Peter knows there's something funny about Gary, his mother's boyfriend. He has a hard-to-place accent and both a gun and a cassette of Russian music in his car. Peter's mother works for a company with Department of Defense contracts, and Peter thinks Gary is a spy. He approaches Dennis X. Hotchner, who recently wrote a magazine piece about KGB spies, to ask him for help. Dennis initially refuses to buy it, but after prodding from his former-defensive-end-turned-drag-queen friend, Jackie, and events that suggest Peter is in genuine danger, the author and the Tina Turner impersonator join in, becoming embroiled in an FBI investigation that leads to a nest of Soviet agents and double agents.
Atkins (The Sinners; The Innocents) weaves a splendidly intricate web of intersecting plots that is as successful for its comedy as for its nonstop action. Nearly every chapter contains the sort of well-played surprise that feels inevitable as soon as it is revealed, and delightfully funny dialogue ensures that nobody thinks the over-the-top antics are meant to be taken too seriously. Fans of Carl Hiaasen's and Dave Barry's thrillers should look a little further north from Florida to experience Everybody Wants to Rule the World. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Valkesh army sergeant Nix Marr reluctantly accompanies the woman she once loved to look into a crime in an isolated outpost and discovers the danger to her heart is the least of her worries in This Gilded Abyss, the first volume in the Titan's Wrath steampunk horror trilogy by Rebecca Thorne (Can't Spell Treason Without Tea; Alchemy and a Cup of Tea).
Subarch Kessandra is beloved, the only member of the royal family to serve in the army. Nix wants to leave their affair buried in the past, but Kess wants Nix to accompany her to the underwater city of Fall to investigate a massacre, and Nix's parents could use the benefits of royal gratitude. On board the submersible to Fall, Kess explains that the massacre appears to have been the result of a disease characterized by uncontrollable, violent impulses--and it rapidly becomes clear that the disease is present on the submersible.
Thorne has crafted a taut, atmospheric fantasy full of both romance and peril. Nix and Kess have few people they can trust on their claustrophobia-inducing ship, and it's by no means clear if they can trust each other. The gradual pace at which readers learn what brought about the end of their romance mirrors their cautious reconciliation. Scenes of cinematically described violence combine with the latent disease's lingering menace to generate an inescapable sense of suspense. Fans will be eager to see what awaits in the next installment. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: A horrific threat emerges on a submersible on its way to an underwater city in the taut, atmospheric first volume of Rebecca Thorne's sapphic steampunk trilogy.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Rattkin bookseller Fern discovers that what seems like the perfect life isn't necessarily what she needs in Brigands & Breadknives, the third in the heartwarming Legends & Lattes fantasy series by Travis Baldree.
Years ago, a young orc adventurer named Viv spent a summer recuperating and working in Fern's bookshop. Readers of the series will remember the details from Bookshops & Bonedust. Viv recently settled down and opened a coffee shop, and now she has convinced Fern to move her bookshop next door in the city of Thune. But even though the renovations and grand opening of the new shop go beautifully, Fern can't shake the feelings of dissatisfaction and hopelessness that have plagued her for years. One sad and drunken night, Fern crawls into the back of a cart owned by Astryx, a legendary elven blademistress, and passes out. She wakes too far down the road to turn back, since Astryx must deliver a captive goblin, Zyll, for a bounty. Nobody's sure why Zyll has a bounty on her head, but it's big enough that it will take all Astryx's fighting skills and a bit of help from Fern to keep rival adventurers from stealing her away.
Although this entry deals with more traditional epic fantasy adventures than the previous ones, it maintains the familiar warm and fuzzy tone. Fern faces the weighty reality of disappointing people who care about her, but Baldree's clever narration and the antics of Zyll and others keep the tone from getting too heavy. Series fans and newcomers alike will delight in Fern and her friends. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: In this cozy fantasy adventure, the heroine bookseller learns that discovering where she truly belongs requires leaving her comfortable life.