This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​A young hacker is pulled from the quiet life she has built for herself to solve the mystery of a missing dream artist in All That We See or Seem, the first in a gripping science-fiction thriller series from Ken Liu (The Hidden Girl; The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories).
Julia Z gained notoriety in her past as the "orphan hacker." Now, she maintains a minimal digital footprint and struggles to pay the bills. But when lawyer Piers Neri comes to her for help to determine whether a ransom video for his missing wife is legitimate and, if so, where she might be, Julia winds up in the alleged kidnapper's crosshairs.
Piers's wife, Elli Krantz, is an oneirofex, an artist who weaves together the dreams of an audience for a "vivid dreaming" experience. The video came from someone she had been dreaming with one-on-one, and to free her, he demands that Piers send him something he claims Elli took.
Liu has created an inventive vision of an AI future, full of thrilling near escapes by engaging and clever characters. Julia's inclination toward anonymity means she has never participated in vivid dreaming; discovering what the ransomer wants will require her to find new ways to use her hacking skills, manipulating the remnants of files from vivid dreams that were never intended to be recoverable. All That We See or Seem does not contain much moral ambiguity, but Liu's thoroughly despicable villains here are nonetheless fun foils for Julia's heroism. Readers will be eager for the next installment of Julia's adventures. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: A hacker searches for clues to a real disappearance in virtual dreams in this gripping science-fiction thriller.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness. 
​Even in Tartarus, the great labyrinth builder reckons with the death of his son and confronts his failures as a father and a man in Seamus Sullivan's debut novella, Daedalus Is Dead.
Daedalus's son, Icarus, famously flew too close to the sun with the wings his father built for the two of them to escape from King Minos. The wax melted, and Icarus crashed into the sea and died. Years after escaping, building a monument to his son, and trying and failing to find any trace of Minos's daughter Ariadne, Daedalus dies of an infection. But King Minos, now also dead, judges the souls in the underworld, and even though Persephone herself takes Daedalus into her service, Minos will not allow him to see his son again. What's more, the Minotaur runs loose in Tartarus, devouring the spirits of heroes. But as Daedalus encounters people from his life, he realizes the stories he told himself about his actions don't always match the perceptions of others.
This nonchronological telling of events flits between Daedalus's time in the underworld and his memories of Icarus's childhood and their eventual flight from Crete. Sullivan heart-wrenchingly conveys a father's grief at the loss of his child. By giving the Minotaur a preferred diet of heroes, he also explores what exactly made a hero of Greek myth, and whether heroism and virtue have anything in common. The result is a devastating examination of fatherhood and masculinity. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: In this devastating examination of fatherhood and masculinity, Daedalus spends his time in the underworld reckoning with his son's death and confronting his own failures.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
An adolescent sorceress must find a way to lift the curse she accidentally cast on her heroic brother in The Summer War, a touching fantasy novella by Naomi Novik (The Last Graduate; Spinning Silver).
Celia's father was made a grand duke after winning the century-long Summer War for the kingdom of Prosper. He chose two of his wives strategically and raised his older son, Argent, with the plan to marry him to a royal princess and make himself the power behind the throne. But that plan comes apart the day that Argent returns from his first summer games as a knight just long enough to declare he is leaving the kingdom. In her outrage at being abandoned, Celia shouts at her brother that she hopes no one else ever loves him again, only to realize too late that her ancestral sorceress powers have awakened, dooming him to her unintended prophecy. When Celia's marriage opens a new conflict with the faerie-like summerlings, she, Argent, and their neglected middle brother, Roric, will need to find a way to save one another.
In only a brief novella, Novik skillfully presents a fully imagined world, shaped by discord and the heart-wrenchingly rendered grief of nearly immortal beings. As is appropriate for a faerie story, curses and oaths in this world are binding; even the siblings' enemies are caught in a trap they don't entirely deserve. The light, fairy tale-like language enchants from the first page, and will be sure to delight fans of Alix E. Harrow. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: A young sorceress's curse on her brother sets off a touching tale of intrigue and family bonds that can't be broken in Naomi Novik's novella, The Summer War.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
During the 75th-anniversary year of what Billy Wilder called "the swimming pool story" during its development, Ready for My Closeup: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream by David M. Lubin offers a lovingly detailed look at the production of the classic film.
Lubin, professor of art at Wake Forest University and former writer for Rolling Stone, begins with writer-director Billy Wilder's youth and coming-of-age in Vienna during the heyday of silent movies. He presents a thorough yet chattily accessible history of the people involved in Sunset Boulevard and how they came together in a film that dances on the line between reality and fiction. Recounting how Gloria Swanson had gone from silent-film "it" girl to low-budget talk-show host, how William Holden's failure to break out of handsome but bland secondary roles fostered in him a sense of desperation, and how Erich von Stroheim's directing career abruptly ended after his sole collaboration with Swanson, Lubin sets forth a clear case for how these actors portrayed funhouse-mirror versions of themselves to create an incisive Hollywood satire. Lubin's examinations of film conventions found in crime thrillers and screwball comedies also illustrate how Wilder played with genres and maintained suspense in a movie that depicted its narrator as dead in its first scene.
Aficionados of movie classics and those intrigued by storytelling will enjoy peeling back the layers of one of the great films of its era. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: This loving look at Sunset Boulevard shows film fans how one of the great cross-genre classics was produced.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
A professor of probability whose life was shattered by a cataclysm known as the "Low-Probability Event" makes one last attempt at doing something meaningful in Lucky Day, a wildly inventive horror novel by Chuck Tingle (Bury Your Gays; Camp Damascus).
On the day that Vera Norrie comes out to her mother as bisexual and announces her engagement at her book-release party, an outbreak of terrifyingly absurd violence kills nearly eight million people. Four years later, she remains in the grips of depression. Then Agent Layne from the Low-Probability Event Commission asks for assistance investigating a casino that Vera wrote about in her book. The casino should be statistically impossible to operate at a profit and may be connected to the LPE. Vera's anger is enough to go back into the world.
In his erotica, Tingle has long been an expert at using the absurd to startle his readers into new ways of thinking. Never has he done so more thoroughly in his horror work than in Lucky Day. Scenes such as an attack by a typewriter-wielding chimpanzee dressed as William Shakespeare are as brutal as they are surreal. The central characters, Vera and Layne, are affected by their respective experiences during the LPE in markedly different ways. Layne, with his startlingly contrasting combination of ruthless Machiavellianism and enjoyment of simple things such as different kinds of ice cream, is simultaneously a delightful foil and a menace. As Vera discovers how to find meaning in the face of powerlessness, Tingle once again reminds readers that love is real. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: In Lucky Day, Chuck Tingle's absurdist horror novel about the randomness of disaster, a professor learns how to find meaning in a world where it seems like nothing matters.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​A cavalry field doctor educated in the occult hires two killers to accompany her on a quest to undo a decades-old mistake: resurrecting her husband. Josh Rountree's The Unkillable Frank Lightning is a heart-wrenching, Frankenstein-esque novel set against a bleak backdrop of the western United States.
In 1905, Catherine Coldbridge sets out on a train to Texas with the Dawson brothers. No matter how much whiskey or laudanum she drinks, she is haunted by the memory of summoning her husband's soul back to his body and unable to shake the feeling that she touched "a darker corner of reality." Her only hope for atonement is to track him down with Cowboy Dan's Wild West Revue, in which he is performing as the Unkillable Frank Lightning. That is, if her magic will even let her untie his soul from his body again.
Chapters alternate between 1905 and 1879, when Frank was killed in a Sioux attack just two weeks after their wedding. Rountree (The Legend of Charlie Fish) skillfully builds suspense as he shares Catherine's memories of the horrific event that separated her from Frank after she brought him back to life. Tension mounts as he fills in the details of what happened before and after the resurrection until he finally reveals it on the page. With spare prose and a sympathetic eye, Rountree conveys the wild grief that drove Catherine to the resurrection, her later recoiling from those powers, and Frank's complicated emotions about being returned from death. The Unkillable Frank Lightning is for fans of dark westerns and classic retellings. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: In this heart-wrenching western-set Frankenstein, a doctor haunted by her mistakes struggles for a way to atone.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Three young women from different centuries wrestle with hunger and carve out lives for themselves in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, a haunting tale of immortality, death, and lesbian vampires by V.E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue; A Darker Shade of Magic).
In the early 16th century, Maria decides that if she must marry, she will marry someone who will take her away from Santo Domingo, Spain. She succeeds as far as becoming the wife of a viscount, only to find herself in a new kind of cage, until a mysterious widow offers her a choice. In 2019, Alice is determined to make leaving Scotland for Harvard into a new start. An attempt at spontaneity leads to a one-night stand, which in turn leads to a desperate quest for answers. Lottie, who left Alice while she was sleeping, made her own bid for freedom years ago. Now, she has taken to feeding her tender heart on memories in an attempt to avoid a terrible price.
Schwab has created a vampire mythos at once beautiful and dark. Occasional encounters between these women and others of their kind suggest a larger world with more approaches to living as an immortal predator, but most of the time the lens stays tightly focused on these three. The result is both expansive, as their combined story stretches almost 500 years, and claustrophobically close, as the women and readers are trapped in their hunger: for blood, for love, for freedom, for their waning humanity. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is a brilliant, emotional fantasy. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: In V.E. Schwab's lush, dark vampire fantasy, the lives of three women intertwine across the centuries.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Journalist Todd S. Purdum (Something Wonderful) makes a compelling case that the United States' most influential Latino Hollywood executive was also its first, the "I" in I Love Lucy, in Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.
Those who recall anything about Desi Arnaz beyond having his role as Ricky Ricardo tend to know him as the creator of the three-camera standard for television comedy. A closer look indicates that acknowledging this innovation only begins to hint at the heights to which he ascended as one-half of the founders of Desilu, which was at one point the largest producer of television in the world and, later, the company behind Star Trek. Mining Arnaz's own memoir and making skilled use of family scrapbooks, oral histories, and interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, Purdum gives readers an intimate and unvarnished depiction of a man who was described as harder to reach than the president but who never overcame his own tendencies to drink and philander.
A book about Desi Arnaz is, by necessity, also a book about one of Hollywood's notable power couples. Purdum sensitively conveys both the stormy nature of their relationship--Lucille Ball first filed for divorce in 1944--and the affection that endured long after their marriage ended. Arnaz sometimes said that his greatest skill was picking people, and Purdum leaves readers with new admiration for how well Arnaz used that talent and fresh compassion for his struggles, including the self-inflicted ones. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: The man who put the "I" in I Love Lucy finally receives his due as the United States' first and possibly most influential Latino studio executive.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​A journalist draws out the grim story of the accomplice to "the Demon Barber of Fleet Street" in The Butcher's Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett, a gritty Victorian thriller by David Demchuk (Red X; The Bone Mother) and debut author Corinne Leigh Clark.
Journalist Miss Emily Gibson is missing. Among her effects, the constables find a series of letters exchanged with a woman whom Miss Gibson believed may have been Mrs. Margery Lovett, hiding out in a convent instead of long since dead in Newgate Prison, as is widely thought.The woman and everyone else at the convent deny it, but as Miss Gibson pursues the truth, her correspondent reveals the events of her life. It's an account of poverty, oppression, and the macabre, graduating from the mundane violence of the butcher shop of her childhood to the doctor's house where she went into service after her father's untimely death.
Demchuk and Clark spin a hair-raising tale, marching readers toward the inevitable climax of Mrs. Lovett's narrative while also maintaining suspense about the fate of the missing journalist. It's clear that nothing good happened, but by whose hand and why? Musical aficionados should be aware that The Butcher's Daughter is set in the world of penny dreadfuls, not Stephen Sondheim, but it reaches beyond into a fully fleshed out portrait of Victorian slums. And if readers are reminded of other gory 19th-century legends, they may be on to something. Demchuk and Clark will keep them on the edge of their seats. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: Attend the tale of Mrs. Lovett, with more delightfully dark twists than heretofore imagined, in The Butcher's Daughter.