2026/149: Tyrant Lizard Queen — Riley Black

Peering at [dinosaur skull] AMNH 5027 now, I see empty orbits that housed eyes that saw sunrises and sunsets, jaws that enclosed a tongue that tasted the world, a body driven by hot blood pumped by an incredible heart. I see one astonishing part of an ancient world that beckons because it requires our curiosity to envision. [loc. 182]

Subtitled 'The Love, Life and Terror of Earth's Greatest Carnivore', this is paleontologist Riley Black's account of the life of one T. Rex, from hatching to depositing her own eggs. It's fiction in the sense that Snaggletooth, our heroine, is an individual imagined by Black: it's science in the sense that Black's footnotes and appendices provide solid evidence, or plausible explanation, for every aspect of Snaggletooth's imagined life. And it is subversive, providing a critique of gendered stereotypes of dinosaurs, and joyfully depicting sexual play between Snaggletooth and another female T. Rex.

I was captivated by Black's depiction of the Cretaceous world, from meteorological events to the impact of huge, multi-ton creatures on the environment. Her prose is lyrical, and she often focuses on sensory details (not least the appalling stench of carnivorous dinosaurs). She describes how T. Rex uses its mouth, rather than its vestigial arms, for most of the things we might imagine using our hands for: 'capturing prey, pulling limbs off carcasses, scraping the last carrion from a skeleton, scooping water to drink, or carefully carrying their babies' [loc. 244]

Tyrant Lizard Queen is packed with detail, with a naturalist's close observation, and with cutting-edge science: it's immensely readable, doesn't require specialist knowledge, and I'm looking forward to rereading (and highlighting like mad) when the ebook drops in price a little.

An excellent interview with Riley Black.

Read because: I was fascinated by The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, and preordered this as an audiobook (read with warmth and humour by Wren Mack).

2026/148: Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea — Emily Wilson

Following Lattimore in his courageous defiance of contemporary English idiom, Mendelsohn presents Odysseus as if he were enduring a journey very much like driving through Milton Keynes – a nauseating and banal passage through one traffic circle after another. [loc. 2925]

Subtitled 'Journeys through Ancient Literature', this collects a number of essays by Emily Wilson (author of that damning review of Nolan's Odyssey). She discusses the art of translation, and the ways in which the modern world responds to, revisits and repurposes the classical world and its culture. She is often funny, and often extremely scathing.

There are chapters on Roman comedy, on Stoicism (and its malappropriation by wealthy technocrats, on Edith Hamilton, on Helen of Troy, and -- longest of all -- on her own experience of translating Homer's works. She's adept at mapping ancient tropes, stereotypes and behaviours to modern life: I especially enjoyed her comparison of WAP with Ancient Athenian comedy. I also liked her 'Twenty Rules for Translators', which explore the ways in which a translation can be made fresh and still honour the original. 

There's also an essay about the controversy surrounding the English-language translation, by Deborah Smith, of Han Kang's The Vegetarian: "what matters most ... is not whether Smith preserved Han’s syntax (she certainly did not), but whether she managed to turn an important work of Korean literature into a novel that was equally powerful in English translation." ploc. 465] As a monoglot fascinated by language, this book helped me think more clearly about translation and about what gives a text its unique flavour.

Read because: on offer. Having bought the ebook, I also bought the audiobook -- read by the author, often vehemently, and very listenable.

2026/147: You Had Me at Hola — Alexis Daria

He wanted to kiss her again, but it wasn’t in the script.

Latina soap star Jasmine Rodriguez is back in New York after a successful stint in LA that ended with a messy breakup and unwanted tabloid fame. She's put together a 'Leading Lady' plan -- 'Leading Ladies do not end up on tabloid covers. Leading Ladies don’t need a man to be happy.' and so on -- and is determined to make better choices. Filming's about to start on a new TV series, Carmen in Charge, in which Jasmine's romantic interest is played by heartthrob Ashton Suárez (who happens to be her grandmother's favourite telenovela star). But their first meeting doesn't go well (he spills coffee over her silk shirt and doesn't realise she barely speaks Spanish) and Ashton is -- for good reason -- an intensely private person, hard to get to know. 

But this is a romance: we know how the story ends, even if the proto-couple are not great at communicating (in any language except perhaps Body). The ending is almost certain; it's the journey that is unpredictable. I enjoyed the chapters that focuses on script and filming, and 'Carmen' and 'Victor' overcame their issues: Daria was great at showing how Jasmine and Ashton brought their own experiences to those roles. (Also loved the intimacy coordinator, and the LGBTQ+ representation in the cast!) And I was impressed by the epilogue, in which both characters are shown dealing with their long-standing emotional baggage.

This is the first in a trilogy, 'Primas of Power', featuring Jasmine and her cousins: the cousins have plenty to say in this novel, mostly about Jasmine's poor choices and about the issues shared by many Latino men. They're balanced, in this novel, by glimpses of Ashton's family: I really liked his father. And another aspect I appreciated was that, though some individual words or whole sentences were in Spanish, the meaning was clear from the context.

Emotionally and warmly narrated by Seraphine Valentine, who managed the sex scenes with aplomb!

Read because: my Libro.fm Audiobook challenge had a prompt for 'audiobook by a Latine author'.

2026/146: The Children — Melissa Albert

The children who grew up on these books and reread them later often say the same thing: These are darker than I remember. Crueler, stranger, more haunted by longing and loss. All good children’s books are. [loc. 515]

Guinevere Sharpe is the daughter of Edith, a wildly popular children's author whose death aged 31 left her 'Ninth City' series unfinished -- and her protagonists, versions of Guin and her brother Ennis, literally worlds apart. Ninth City fandom is eager to embrace Guin, and keenly awaits her forthcoming memoir, Ninth City Dreamer. The memoir is ghostwritten, because Guin burns everything she writes. She hasn't seen her brother since the death of their parents when Guin was eleven, but she knows that he's a controversial installation artist, and that there are rumours about the effects of his uncanny installations on others. And now, just in time for her book, he's announced a new show called 'Mother'.

In dual timelines, Albert slowly reveals the dysfunctional childhoods of Ennis and Guin, who lived with Edith and their father Llewelyn in an isolated and decidedly Gothic house in the woods. The children were left to their own devices a great deal while Edith wrote about characters with their names. (Llewelyn, a womanising artist, fell ill and neglected them as much as their mother did.) In the present day, Guin has a precarious relationship with her fiance Hank, and is infuriated by Ennis's new show. As she investigates his artistic career, she becomes uneasy. 

And throughout, there are glimpses of the Ninth City books -- portal fantasies in which fictional Guin and fictional Ennis have adventures in a mystical city ruled by a mysterious and menacing Architect -- and of unsettling moments in the house in the woods. The final revelations made a lot of sense, but also felt inadequately signalled and rather rushed: I would have liked more of the unsettling moments, and perhaps more exploration of a couple of them. (Grass in the snow?) Albert's prose is often luminous -- 'light moving like a cat’s paw through the warbled window glass' -- but her characters feel a little hollow.

Read because: I was struck by potential similarities to A S Byatt's The Children's Book (and possibly lured by this Guardian review), though in fact The Children is not that similar to Byatt's novel.

It would be a lie to say the life story she’d been selling was invented strictly for the paying public. It was Guin who wanted it to be the true one. Artist parents, busy but ultimately nurturing. Long days full of child-sized adventures, ending in family dinners and wood fires and bedtime stories. [loc. 4212]

2026/145: Bellweather Rhapsody — Kate Racculia

[Rabbit] worshiped and found peace, at the age of seventeen, the only way he knew how: in the temple of Beethoven and Debussy, of David Bowie and Led Zeppelin. They filled his secret heart and made it less afraid. [p. 66]

It's 1997. Seventeen-year old twins Alice and Rabbit (a.k.a. Bertram) Hatmaker are off to the Statewide conference, which draws in the best student musicians from across the state of New York. Alice refuses to harbour any doubts about her vocal talents, but that might change this weekend. And Rabbit, always the shyer twin, is hoping to find a way to tell his sister that he's gay.

The conference venue, as always, is the gently-crumbling Bellweather Hotel, whose concierge Harold Hastings remembers every Statewide since the 1960s. Also at the hotel that weekend is Minnie Graves, returning for the first time since 1982 when, at seven years old, she was a witness to a murder-suicide in room 712.

Alice is sharing a room (can you guess which one?) with Jill Faccelli, a talented flautist: Jill is the one who stands up to guest conductor Fisher Brodie -- a talented pianist until the tragic accident that destroyed his hands -- who happens to have been mentored by Jill's mother, conference director Viola Fabian. Another of Viola's protégés was Natalie, Alice's chaperone, whose love of music Viola destroyed with physical and mental cruelty. Jill, however, has a drastic plan that'll reveal Viola for the monster she is. 

There are multiple mysteries in this book: love, death, murder, justice, revelation and closure. I loved the way that connections past and present between the characters were gradually revealed, and the way Racculia writes about music: 'synchronicity with the universe. Physical proof of the three-part harmony between body and soul and song, all three living, dying, resonating'. Racculia imbues the story with a sense of grandeur and a deep emotional dimension. I keep thinking about this book, and how different everyone's lives will be afterwards.

Read because: I enjoyed the author's Tuesday Mooney Wore Black.

2026/144: Little, Big — John Crowley

...down the twists and turns of a long, long story, a boundless and-then... [p. 266]

A novel that starts with a marriage and ends with a death; that begins with something like the Cottingley Fairies and climaxes in dystopia; that is subtitled 'or, The Fairies' Parliament', but does not (perhaps) include any such event. It took me a long time to read Little, Big: I don't mean the multiple attempts that ended in putting it aside for another time, or even my sense of resistance to this acclaimed classic, but the six weeks from beginning to end. I liked it (most of it) a great deal. And I'm still not sure I have understood every aspect of the story.

Little, Big starts with Smoky Barnable walking from New York City to an estate named Edgewood to marry a woman known as Daily Alice. Or perhaps it begins well before this, with an American architect named John Drinkwater getting lost on a walking tour of Cheshire, and falling in love with a woman named Violet. The modern inhabitants of Edgewater and its environs, mostly descended from John and Violet, believe in a Tale, and in a nested series of larger worlds within our own world: one of these is Faerie. (It's worth noting that the word 'faerie' appears only three times in all 500+ pages of the novel.) And they are familiar with the inhabitants of that realm, who occasionally venture into the human world. We (perhaps) meet some of them, though their nature is never explicit.

A great deal happens: read the book, or the Wikipedia article. It happens Somehow (this word is almost always capitalised, to indicate the Tale): it happens in lexical fireworks (phthisically, squites, orgulous, ogive, mathesis, medicus, borborygmic, hortatory, gonfalon, operose, cerement, epops, gerb ...) and in sly allusions, in misdirection and in rambling non-linear accounts, in Nora Cloud's cards -- which are not traditional Tarot cards -- and the stories they tell, in photographs and in letters to Santa Claus. Which is not to say that it's wholly grounded in the mythic or fantastical: there are also soap operas,  alcoholism and Grand Central Station.

I note that the family tree at the front of the book (incredibly useful for determining the relationships within) is almost illegible in the ebook. Luckily a friend sent me a photo of it.

Read because: online book club, plus the fact that I have never read it despite repeatedly being told (by people whose tastes I share) how good it is. The online discussion has not yet concluded (Book Five, of six, is next as I write) and I may well have further, or different, thoughts later on.

... another story, a story about a world elsewhere, and a family whose names many knew, whose house had been large and populous with griefs and happinesses that had once seemed endless, but had ended, or had stopped ... [p. 537]

2026/143: The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood — H G Parry

A house named for Arthur’s last battle, passing down from guardian to guardian across centuries. A housekeeper whose appearance changed in different lights, and whose name echoed that of Arthur’s great enemy. A professor who neither she nor Tom had ever seen, whose name echoed Merlin. And all the while, the world at war, and the dreams coming faster and brighter and increasingly slipping through to the waking world. [loc. 3474]

Second Arthurian novel in a row, (though that was unintentional!), which like The Everlasting explores whether myths can be challenged or changed: "As long as the right stories were told afterwards, perhaps the truth could be whatever we were able to bring about."

Ellie Ambrose, a librarian at the British Museum Library, saw a quarter of a million books destroyed in the Blitz. Her superior, perhaps taking pity on Ellie's distress, sends her away from London to catalogue a private library in Wales. The only people at Camlann House are the housekeeper, Mrs Leaf, and the groundsman, Tom Wilder: the latter was a pilot, but was badly injured in a crash. People all over Britain are dreaming about King Arthur, but once Ellie's at Camlann House she starts dreaming instead about Nimue, Merlin's nemesis.

The second narrative voice is Nimue's own -- first-person, rather than Ellie's third person -- beginning with her childhood under the Lake, on the borders of the Otherworld. She, along with Lancelot du Lac and Mordred, was adopted by Morgan Le Fay, who tells the children bedtime stories about the people they will doom: Merlin, Guinevere and Arthur himself. But when Nimue (calling herself Viviane) arrives at Camelot and meets Merlin, he seems unwilling to fall in love with her...

The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood has a twisty plot, intrusions of myth and legend, a questing beast far from home, and a centuries-long plan. The dual narratives have different ambiences, with Nimue's evoking a post-Roman past populated by flawed heroes and very human myths, while Ellie's is peppered with the practicalities and horrors of a world at war. Ellie herself is pragmatic and unmystical, but has a mysterious past. Tom, the former pilot, was especially interesting as an exemplar of cowardice and courage. (I half-expected a romance between Ellie and Tom and was pleased not to encounter one.) I'd have liked more of wartorn Britain, but I think the two narratives were nicely balanced -- though I'm still not quite sure why more recent myths entered the story.

Read because: I've enjoyed other novels by Parry (A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, A Radical Act of Free Magic, The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door.