This novel is based on a true incident in which, over a period of years, women in an isolated Mennonite colony in Bolivia were told they had been "ghost raped" when they were being systematically drugged and raped by a group of men in their colony. In this version, though I am unclear if this exact detail was based on reality, after their crimes were uncovered the men were only taken to the police for their own safety. While the rest of the men are gone, eight of the women hold a meeting do determine what they should do next: do nothing, stay and fight back, or leave. The women are all illiterate, but they want a record of the meeting, so they recruit the one man they are willing to trust with their plans, August Epp. The book is his minutes.

This is as slow burn of a drama as you would expect based on that description. Over the course of the book, the women wander from straight forward arguments about their options to topics such as whether or not they are animals (and therefore whether animal behavior provides a useful guide to what it's reasonable for them to do when threatened), if forgiveness for such terrible crimes can be required from them, or if it's even possible for any but God to offer it, and if they can forgive, whether it means they must stay or can only be achieved through distance. They ponder what if anything their religion now means to them, and for the first time discuss it as something they could interpret for themselves. It might make a fantastic play, except that I'm not sure how well August's narration could translate to the stage. He was born in the colony, but his parents were something of a pair of rebels, and left. He was permitted to return as an adult even after refusing to renounce his parents because they needed a teacher. He's an odd duck, an expression that he'd probably appreciate because he's quite fond of ducks. Since the women can't read the minutes, anyway, he embellishes them with reminiscences from his childhood and his unconfessed love for one of the women, Ona. The result is low action but high drama.

Overall: A

Hope Never Dies is "an Obama Biden mystery."

It's some time in between the end of the Obama administration and the present; Biden is getting used to life as a private citizen again and moping a bit about the fact that Barack doesn't call when he finds out that an Amtrak conductor he knows from way back is dead, struck by a train, with heroin in his pocket. Biden doesn't believe the drug angle, and so he sets out to find out what happened, with a little help from the Sherlock to his Watson.

I knew I had to read this book when the Kirkus review compared it to My Fellow Americans, my favorite movie that hardly anybody has heard of, where James Garner and Jack Lemmon play ex-presidents from opposing parties who team up to get to the bottom of a scandal in the current administration. While this was a clever, entertaining read, it didn't quite rise to that level of buddy comedy for me. Maybe it's because of the point of view: first person Biden. There are moments that achieve the silliness of the Obama/Biden memes from the last months of the administration, or the "Onion Joe" parody representations of the former VP, but the thing is that fictional!Biden isn't ridiculous in his own head, and that's where we mostly are. We see the comedy most clearly when we see the flaws in, for example, his idea of brilliant disguises reflected in Obama's eyes, although there are some action sequences that are so indisputably comic that they need no straight man as interpreter. In his head, Biden is lonely for his closest friend for eight years and wandering if he's all washed-up, and while no buddy comedy is complete without some self reflection, it shouldn't carry the story. The result was a decent two hundred-ish pages of entertainment, but not nearly as laugh out loud funny as one would hope.

Overall: B-

This review is based on a review copy received from the publisher at a conference.

Heather B. Armstrong participated in an experimental treatment for depression in which, ten times, she was put into a deep coma for fifteen minutes. She was the third patient in this study, which sought to replicate the effects of ECT with fewer side effects.

I was unfamiliar with Heather B. Armstrong prior to this book, although she discusses her background as a mommy blogger in it. According to her about the author she's one of the most popular, and I'll take her/the publisher's word for it, that not being an area in which I have any expertise. This book is getting a lot of comparison to Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan, and in some ways, that's accurate. Both books are intimate and unflinching looks at something going wrong with the brain and the recovery process from that. And both books are the stories of people who already wrote for a living and were well equipped to convey their stories themselves. If you're looking for more books in the "weird stuff happens with somebody's brain" genre, this is a great next choice. However, I do think it's fair to warn people that, in Armstrong's case, there's no question from the get-go that her issue is depression. For readers who liked Brain on Fire for its medical mystery/rare disease aspects, this is less likely to be a satisfying companion.

Overall: A

The Valedictorian of Being Dead will be available April 23.

Jasper Detchard has his own version of the events that were published as The Prisoner of Zenda. The heroes aren't so heroic, the some of the villains are marginally less villainous (although they'd be the first to admit it's only marginally), and the women are pulling more of the strings than Rassendyll ever knew.

I have a suspicion that The Prisoner of Zenda is one of those books where every adaptation/retelling is better than the original, and the only reason I can't say that I'm certain of it is that I've never seen a straight-up film adaptation of it all the way through. The first introduction I can remember to the basic plot was a two-part episode of Get Smart, and although I recognized it in several other books that I'd read in the decades since then I didn't bother to read the original until last year when Charles announced that her version was forthcoming. I found it to be decent pulp nonsense and that's about it. Now, Charles's take on the story will bear rereading. If you're familiar with the original, you won't have much trouble seeing how Detchard's side of the story fits into it. I could totally buy Rudolf V as a drunken debaucher and worse, given our brief introduction to him at the beginning of Prisoner. ​And that Flavia and Antoinette have schemes of their own makes more sense than anything Hope came up with to explain their motivations. I would say that this is the least genre-romance of Charles's books: Rupert of Hentzau is a sexy fellow and was so even in the original, and much sex is had between him and Detchard once the latter discards Black Michael's orders not to fraternize in that way, but I never felt like the book was driven by the question of how the two of them would arrive at a HEA or even a HFN. It's a gay swashbuckler more than anything else.

This book also features a pun so glorious that, even though I'd read about it on the KJ Charles FB group, I still had to stop for a minute when I actually read it and think "I can't believe she actually did that to me."

​Overall: A