This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​In At Dark, I Become Loathsome, a grotesque yet moving horror novel from Eric LaRocca (You've Lost a Lot of Blood), the conductor of a macabre ritual to help those contemplating suicide forms a disturbing connection with a potential subject.
Ashley Lutin has always considered himself to be a "horrible creature," and he has only sunk more deeply into darkness in the years since his wife died and his young son went missing. A "self-loathing bisexual," Ashley worries that he may have driven his son away with his fears that the boy might be gay--"I just didn't want him to be like me." To help others who have often "thought that the world would be a better place without [them]," he has created a " 'fake death' ritual," through which they can confront death by being buried alive. But not long after receiving news about his son's disappearance, Ashley is approached by a new client who tells him a story that both revolts and intrigues him. He begins to lose the careful balance that has contained his self-described loathsomeness in the dark.
An expert in body horror, LaRocca skillfully uses the unsettling stories that fascinate Ashley to drive home the ugly burden of guilt he feels over his son's fate and his own sexuality. As Ashley careens out of control, readers will be breathless and on the edge of their seats, waiting to find out whether the truth will set him free. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: The creator of a ritual that helps people confront death finds himself losing ground to his own demons in this shocking body horror novel by Eric LaRocca.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade is a revelatory examination of the political significance of John Milton's epic poem, reaching back to its origins in the 17th-century English Civil War and pursuing it into 21st-century prison classrooms.
Reade, an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University London, included Paradise Lost in a class he taught in a New Jersey prison while completing his doctorate. His students' "respectful but not reverential" reaction gave him a fresh perspective on how to read Milton not only in the context of modern life but also in the context of Milton's, whose understanding of charity required advocating for self-determination in the face of "state religion, censorship, [and] monarchy."
After providing an overview of Paradise Lost's genesis, Reade delivers an accessible, engaging accounting of what it has meant to 12 readers ("or groups of readers," in one case), including Malcolm X, Thomas Jefferson, and Hannah Arendt. In the 18th century, revolutions in the American colonies, France, and Haiti produced writings that echoed the arguments of Milton's devils against tyranny, while others used the imagery of Satan's forces to represent their colonizers. These contradictions continue through the centuries as Reade offers examples of how radicals, reactionaries, liberals, and conservatives have made Milton's epic their own.
While some general knowledge of Paradise Lost may increase the likelihood of readers picking up this book, Reade explains and quotes from enough of the poem that previous expertise is not necessary to enjoy his work. With Reade's patient guidance, readers will come to appreciate its relevance for their lives as well. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: This accessible, engaging examination of Paradise Lost reflects on its significance to political and social movements from the 17th century to the 21st.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Mother of Rome by Lauren J.A. Bear (Medusa's Sisters) is an inventive reimagining of the origins of Romulus and Remus, central figures in myths about the founding of Rome. This engaging historical fantasy highlights the power of women who seize control of their own destinies.
Rhea Silvia's life as a princess hasn't been perfect. Her mother and brothers have died, so as her father's sole heir, her future betrothal is of vital importance. But a sudden coup makes Rhea's situation even worse: her uncle seizes the throne and declares that she must become a vestal virgin. Determined not to let her uncle decide her fate, Rhea plots with her cousin, Antho, for one night alone in the woods, which she spends with the god Mars. When Rhea becomes pregnant and is sentenced to death, it takes all her wits and bargains with the gods to ensure that her twins are born and survive to found the city that will become an empire.
Stories of classical Rome contain few details about Rhea Silvia. By adding a new twist to the original myth, Bear constructs a vivid tale of a fierce woman driven by maternal love. The rest of Rhea Silvia's family--some inventions by Bear--flesh out a novel of palace intrigue that illuminates how oppression can repeat itself in families and cycles can be broken. Antho, a princess who seems to live a more conventional life, serves as a particularly moving example of survival amid abuse. Fans of Madeline Miller and Claire Heywood should snatch this up. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: This radical reimagining of what became of Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, is a powerful story of devotion triumphing over oppression.

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.
​An aviatrix continues her family's legacy of magical investigation during Prohibition in The Improvisers, a thrilling stand-alone volume in the Murder and Magic series by Nicole Glover.
Velma Frye, pilot and former bootlegger, acts as an investigator for a magical rights group as part of her extensive travels across the United States. When she comes across an enchanted pocket watch that causes a brawl to break out at an air show, she goes home for advice; the Rhodes family has been wielding celestial magic and solving crimes since the Civil War, but this case is ultimately Velma's. When she discovers the watch is only one of many dangerous magical artifacts, she sets out across the country to track them down--accompanied, whether she likes it or not, by annoyingly persistent and charming reporter Dillon Harris.
Glover blends mystery and adventure while creating a vibrant cast of characters and expanding a narrative universe she first introduced in its mid-19th century into a new era. The intricate suspense as Velma tracks magical objects across the country and the ultimate confrontation over their theft evokes the classic thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock and Clue. Readers of Glover's novels starring Velma's grandparents (The Conductors; The Undertakers) will delight in seeing them again, but those starting fresh will also fall in love with the complex and brilliantly rendered extended Rhodes family. Fans of Maurice Broaddus, Alix E. Harrow, and the Loyal Leagueseries by Alyssa Cole should have their eye on Glover. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: In this thrilling stand-alone volume in Nicole Glover's Murder and Magic series, an aviatrix hunts for dangerous magical artifacts with help from an irritatingly charming reporter.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​A young woman in 14th-century Provence risks everything to cultivate her talents and serve her city in Eleanore of Avignon, the engrossing historical fiction debut of Elizabeth DeLozier.
Eleanore Blanchet learned to be an herbalist and a midwife from her mother, who, in turn, studied under her physician father. While gathering ingredients for her remedies, an accidental meeting with Guigo de Chauliac, physician to Pope Clement VI, brings Eleanore an opportunity: she will use her knowledge of herbalism to treat the pope's ailment, and de Chauliac will take her on as an apprentice. Then Queen Joanna of Naples, accused of murdering her husband, comes to Avignon for trial. The pregnant queen insists on having Eleanore for her midwife, but with plague ravaging the city, Eleanore and de Chauliac will need to muster everything they have to find a treatment.
DeLozier paints a vivid picture of life on the margins of a medieval city. Eleanore's mother, abandoned at the end of her life by those who thought her knowledge was evidence of witchcraft, stands as a sharp warning of what could happen to a woman who steps outside of her place--which is even more of a risk to an unmarried woman like Eleanore. The tension rises as the plague spreads throughout the city and religious fanatics gain power, threatening Eleanore and the Jewish colleagues of de Chauliac with whom they consult in search of a cure to protect those who could turn on them at any moment. The result is a gripping portrait of a woman's bravery in a city on the brink. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: A young woman must use her extraordinary skills to protect her medieval city, a place where being an extraordinary woman could be a fatal danger.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Brought together by a legendary hero, an exiled Valkyrie and a princess determined to protect her people find a place for themselves beyond the bounds of the Norse sagas in The Valkyrie, a vivid and inventive reimagining by Kate Heartfield (The Embroidered Book; Alice Payne Arrives).
Although Brynhild has been exiled from Valhalla and is no longer a Valkyrie, Odin isn't done with her yet. Maybe she defied him when she took the road to the east against his advice, or maybe he'd been manipulating her from the start. But there she finds a lindworm, "a great scaled serpent, with clawed feet and a head like a dragon's." She also finds the man with whom she'll fight it, Sigurd, whose deeds will live through the centuries. Meanwhile, Gudrun, a Burgundian princess, has been betrothed in a strategic alliance with one of the Hunnish brother-kings, but Attila seizes sole power and uses the lindworm to besiege the kingdom.
Heartfield makes the love story between Brynhild and Gudrun feel less like a new twist than a subtext that has always been present. Although their relationship frames the novel, each woman telling her side of the story to the other, its scope is worthy of an epic saga. Heartfield wrestles with issues of human versus divine will, the way a person can be corrupted by believing their own legends, and how people carry on even when overrun by clashes between great powers. Yet no matter how high the stakes become, the story never loses its heart. Fans of Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and Uprooted by Naomi Novik should snatch this up. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: This vivid reimagining of Norse legends spotlights a love story between a fallen Valkyrie and a princess with invaders at her city's walls.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​A young woman's experience of building friendships and studying curses at an elite magical university sheds light on tensions between the classes, the changing face of war in the early 20th century, and the perils of empire in The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, a vivid and moving historical fantasy from H.G. Parry (A Radical Act of Free Magic; The Magician's Daughter).
Clover and her brother Matthew both longed for new experiences when they were growing up in their small village in Lancashire. Clover had planned to become a teacher to help her family, but when Matthew returns from the Great War suffering from a faerie curse, she learns of the "magical world that lurked in the corners of our own--the world of mages and scholars, of hedgewitches and spellbooks and old Families." Determined to cure her brother, Clover wins a scholarship to the elite and magical Camford University. There she forms unlikely friendships with golden boy Alden Lennox-Fontaine, impossibly elegant Hero Hartley, and shy, eccentric botanist Eddie Gaskell. But the experiments they undertake uncover dangerous secrets, and not only does their joyous idyll come crashing down but its repercussions also come back to haunt Clover in the years to come.
Parry impeccably conveys the bonds of young friendship, the kind that's a love like no other and can cause pain like nothing else. The beating heart of those friendships keeps Clover's story grounded in reality even as she and her friends speculate about where, exactly, their university is physically located and experiment with forbidden faerie magic. Fans of V.E. Schwab will be enthralled. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: The power of friendship and the revelation of dangerous truths propel this novel that follows a young woman's journey through a magical university in 1920s England.

This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​Two sisters fight for survival in a world left in turmoil from a cataclysmic war between the gods in Andrea Stewart's The Gods Below, the epic first book of the Hollow Covenant series.
When Hakara was 15 and her sister, Rasha, was nine and they were alone in the world, divine restoration came to the land of Kashan. The god Kluehnn had promised to remake humanity at a price: half the population would be transformed to fit the new landscape, but the other half would die, consumed to fuel the restoration. Although Hakara attempted to flee with her little sister, they were separated just before the arrival of the shadow wall that divides the restored and unrestored lands. Ten years later, the war between Kluehnn and the other gods continues, and Hakara and Rasha are still trying to stay alive with no knowledge of what happened to each other.
The bond between the two sisters provides the heart of a novel that Stewart (The Bone Shard Daughter) populates with scheming nobles and royalty, ruthless devotees of the gods, and seekers of ancient powers, all vying for advantage in a splintered existence. When the sisters each learn that the other is alive, it is only the beginning of the emotional roller coasters of their journeys, and unanswered questions about the restored lands promise an increasing scope. Fans of epic fantasy series that put their readers through the wringer, such as those by George R.R. Martin and Robin Hobb, will be eager for the next installment in Stewart's series. --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 legendary witch and murderer takes center stage in a particularly vulnerable portrayal of her life story in Rosie Hewlett's The Witch of Colchis, originally published in the United Kingdom as Medea.
Ever since she was a child, Medea was reviled for her talent for magic. Although she was a princess, her father was abusive, her brother cruel, and her mother distant. She had a brief reprieve for a few years when she was allowed to study with her aunt, the sorceress Circe. As she matured, her father put her magic to use but valued her only as a tool. When the quest for the Golden Fleece brings Jason to her father's kingdom, is it any wonder that Medea is willing to open herself to the darkest magic to seize her opportunity to escape?
Hewlett's retelling of Medea's story remains largely faithful to classical sources in terms of events, but the way she unites stories from Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica, Euripides's Medea, and beyond, with focuses on Medea's youth at her meeting with Jason and her tightly circumscribed life as the daughter of a ruthless king, lends the novel an additional layer of pathos. Euripides's Medea might be a sympathetic figure of righteous fury, but Hewlett's version hints at her trauma and depression, conditions for which Medea does not have words, given the time in which she lived. Although Hewlett's prose is less poetic than Madeline Miller's Circe, readers of that novel who need more powerful women of mythology will be well served by The Witch of Colchis. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library