2026/080: A Natural History of Dragons — Marie Brennan

What sort of woman, upon being kidnapped by smugglers in the middle of the night, would jump for joy at the thought of questioning them about dragons? [p. 130]

Set in a world reminiscent of our own in the nineteenth century, where dragons live wild in the remote heights and forests. Our narrator, Isabella (née Hendemore) -- who will, we are assured, later become the world's pre-eminent authority on dragons -- is the child of wealthy gentry. Aged seven, she dissects a pigeon with her brother's penknife to see how the wishbone works. Aged fourteen, she dresses as a boy to join the hunt for a wolf-drake that's plaguing the local farms. 

She would rather not marry: but her (excellent) father gives her a list of eligible young men who own Sir Richard Edgeworth's A Natural History of Dragons, and she encounters one of them, Jacob Camherst, at a menagerie. (Where, of course, she is not supposed to be.) Marriage ensues. And Jacob proves willing to let her accompany him on a scientific expedition to the remote, somewhat Slavic-flavoured land of Vystrana. There, Isabella sees her first wild dragons, and makes some discoveries, and has plenty of adventures. Not all of these are cheerful.

Isabella, with her passionate drive for knowledge and her often-reckless decisions, reminded me strongly of Amelia Peabody (see Crocodile on a Sandbank and others), though she has the added complication of being a teenager. She's intelligent, driven and thoughtful -- though sometimes not as considerate of humans as of dragons. And she grows up very quickly in this novel. I did enjoy it, though the pacing was uneven and I'd have liked more worldbuilding: and the dragons (beautifully illustrated throughout by Todd Lockwood: you don't get that in an audiobook) were quite distinct from most fantasy dragons, being neither vocal or amiable. I got a real sense of them as creatures of flesh, blood and bone -- their bones being especially intriguing.

I think this suffered by my reading it so soon after The Signature of All Things, which also featured a female scientist and was also unevenly paced: that was a more literary novel than this grand adventure, though. I intend to read more of Brennan's series, because I'm fascinated to discover what Isabella does next.

Read because: fancied something light; the 'Exploring Science Fiction and Fantasy' reading challenge has 'Dragons' as a prompt; I bought this book in 2017, which is a long time for it to languish unread.

2026/079: A Magical Girl Retires — Park Seolyeon (translated by Anton Hur)

In an act of balance, the universe conferred power on those who had the least, and that was why magical girls existed.

The nameless protagonist of this short novel is 29 years old, unemployed and burdened with credit-card debt. She's also still mourning her dead grandfather, a watchmaker, whose trade she once dreamt of following. One night she decides to kill herself by jumping from a bridge. But she's interrupted by a stranger, a magical girl (the 'girl' is not age-specific) named Ah Roa, who believes that our protagonist is the Magical Girl of Time -- the most powerful Magical Girl of all.

Our protagnist is taken to a union meeting, and learns that magical girls -- the phrase is synonymous with 'female superheroes' -- have to deal with the harsh realities of the world, just like everyone else. Every Magical Girl gained their powers at a moment of powerlessness; every Magical Girl has to work, to pay the bills, to deal with everyday microaggressions. And some aspects of a person are deep-rooted: when our protagonist finally manifests her talisman, it turns out to be ... a credit card

This is a short, sweet novel, only 160 pages in print; the audiobook, narrated by Shannon Tyo, is under three hours, and I listened to it in a single evening. Though it's ultimately life-affirming, there are dark undercurrents: also a hint of sapphic romance, a nihilist Magical Girl who doesn't think humanity worth saving, and an exciting encounter with terrorists at Heathrow Airport. 

Read because: 'Listen to an audiobook by an author of Asian and/or Pacific Island descent' prompt in the Libro.fm 2026 Audiobook Listening Challenge. The author is Korean.

2026/078: Slow Gods — Claire North

It is not that I am not moral, in my own way.
It is simply that sometimes, rather like the rules of physics that should contain me, I forget. [loc. 1814]

Reread for book club: my initial review is here. This time round I listened to the audiobook, not least because I was intrigued by how the narrator (Peter Kenny) would handle the multiple pronouns... extremely well, as it turned out.

Unusually for the Lockdown Bookclub, everyone liked the book! We discussed the supernova as a metaphor for climate change (everyone knows it's happening but some people refuse to believe it can be that bad); what constitutes a god (the title has plural gods: is Maw one? is the Consensus?); why a couple of us initially read Maw as female; whether North's space opera is comparable in scale and scope to the works of Iain M Banks (I think we agreed it was, though more humane and compassionate, and without awkward / improbable sex scenes: also, first-person narrative).

Read because: bookclub pick.

2026/077: The Palace Beneath the Sea — Lauren Wiesebron

"I am the korrigez who founded Ys, both above and below the waves... and now I am here to take back what's mine and lay waste to what never should have been built!" [loc. 4508]

Nolwenn and her family are lighthouse keepers, defending the city of Ys. They use lenses to focus the moon's rays, to kill teuthes -- great monsters from the deep -- that threaten the sea-defences. She's been lucky, finding seasilk (a rare and precious commodity that can protect against the black tide) and is summoned by the queen, who flirts with Nolwenn and tells her to fetch enough seasilk to provide shield-nets for the lighthouses as well as the city.

Nolwenn recklessly rows out one night and is attacked: but she's rescued by a merperson, a korrigez who she names Morvan after the chieftain in a popular serial. Morvan takes Nolwenn to Ys-below, a coral palace deep in the ocean: she learns a lot (some of it rather uncomfortable) and falls in love, but yearns for her family, for sunlight, for air.

The worldbuilding is a delight: I loved the reimagining of the Breton folk tale about a city drowned by the sea. The half-humanoid, half-fish korrigez (Breton for 'mermaid') are fascinating, as are the ecology and economy of Ys-below. Coral for communication! Wiesebron is a marine ecologist and admits in her afterword that 'the fantasy of suddenly sprouting fins is one that I enjoyed, albeit from the safe and dry distance of my pen and paper' [loc. 4923] And I loved the resonances with the in-universe fiction 'Leylou Among the Korrigez'.

But I do think this novel could have done with another edit. There are pacing issues: the first third of the book is really slow, and the last third feels rushed. There are typos and infelicities: 'discretely' instead of 'discreetly', 'it's' instead of 'its', someone knowing something and a few pages later not knowing it. And Nolwenn, though she's twenty-three, sometimes behaves like a much younger girl: she's prone to impetuous behaviour, and doesn't always know the rationale behind her own decisions.

Really interesting setting, slightly disappointing prose -- but there's a fascinating romance, and a suitably epic finale.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date was 21st May 2026.

2026/076: A Fair Maiden — Joyce Carol Oates

Just a roll of the dice. She was risking nothing. No danger in upscale Bayhead Harbor, which was very different from Atlantic City, fifty miles to the south, where Katya Spivak would never have been so naive as to go to a man’s house, no matter how harmless he appeared, how gentlemanly or how rich. [p.13]

Katya Spivak is sixteen years old, working as a nanny for a rich family in the upmarket coastal town of Bay Harbor -- a far cry from her working-class origins in New Jersey. One day, while admiring lingerie in a shop window, an elderly man asks her what she would choose. He is Marcus Kidder, nearly seventy but still elegantly dressed: a former author of childrens' books, a sophisticated artist. He befriends Katya -- is it friendship? -- and gives her not only money but attention (commodities lacking until now in Katya's life): and, chastely, beguiles her.

For three-quarters of the novel (which is only 166 pages in print) this seems like a routine seduction, with an older man preying on a very young woman -- albeit one who, because of past experiences, thinks she can handle whatever Kidder might do. Katya's independence and confidence, though, is at least partly a facade covering an absent father (who she misses a great deal), a neglectful mother who tries to borrow money from Katya to pay her gambling debts, and an emotionally distant employer. Kidder's attention seems harmless at first, and even when it becomes less so Katya is convinced that she can handle it. 

Then, when the ante is upped, a fairytale is told, the story of an old king and a Fair Maiden: and it is the pivot on which the whole story rests.

Oates manages a happy ending, of sorts, and presents a duo of fascinating character studies: of Katya herself, out of her depth for most of the book, and making some bad decisions; and (at one remove) of Marcus Kidder, who we only ever see through Katya's eyes. I cannot say that I liked either of them: both manipulative, both a little lost. But I did feel compassion for both.

2026/075: The Signature of All Things — Elizabeth Gilbert

Alma’s world and the moss world had been knitted together this whole time, lying on top of each other, crawling over each other. But one of these worlds was loud and large and fast, where the other was quiet and tiny and slow—and only one of these worlds seemed immeasurable. [p. 162]

Alma Whittaker, the focus of this novel, is born in 1800 and grows up in a wealthy household on the White Acre estate just outside Philadelphia. Her father Henry grew up in poverty, impressed Sir Joseph Banks with his initiative and his horticultural gifts, and made his money cultivating cinchona, a remedy for malaria. 

Alma is brought up to be fascinated with the natural world and to think for herself. At first, the only surviving child of Henry and his Dutch wife Beatrix, Alma is rather lonely: suddenly she acquires an adopted sister, Prudence, who is beautiful but reticent. She and Alma (who is plain) are never close.

The girls grow up. Alma develops a fascination with mosses, and conducts scientific correspondence with botanists all over the world. Prudence marries and becomes a committed abolitionist: Alma marries rather later, but her husband -- Ambrose, an artist -- is ... not what she had expected, wanted, craved. After her father's death she makes some momentous decisions, travels to Tahiti (where Ambrose had been exiled), and thence to Amsterdam.

I've done my best to avoid spoilers in that summary: I found the novel very slow, but a lot happens, actually as well as emotionally. I very much liked Gilbert's depiction of Alma as a sensual, as well as an intellectual, individual: I was fascinated by Alma's mosses, and her theories. I did not warm to any of the other characters -- perhaps because Alma, though she loves them, maintains some emotional distance.

This is also, in a way, a novel about early nineteenth-century science, and especially the theory of evolution. Alma considers the possibility: 'those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them'. But there is no room in this world view for compassion, altruism, selflessness. Only on her return from Tahiti does she read of a new book by Charles Darwin...

Looking back on the experience of reading this novel, I find much to admire. Gilbert's prose has an Austenesque cadence that fits Alma very nicely ('her botanical drawings—which were never exactly beautiful, but always beautifully exact') and there are many vivid moments. But it felt so slow and claustrophobic while I was reading: and Alma's escape departure from White Acre, though an immense relief to me as well as her, did not immediately improve matters. And there's one scene, on Tahiti, that really bothered me: but ... spoilers.

...she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact. This fact was not merely true about the lives of human beings; it was also true of every living entity on the planet, from the largest creation down to the humblest. It was even true of mosses. This fact was the very mechanism of nature—the driving force behind all existence, behind all transmutation, behind all variation—and it was the explanation for the entire world. It was the explanation Alma had been seeking forever. [p. 434]

2026/074: Ring the Hill — Tom Cox

I didn’t see the Tor at its best that evening. Dusk was coming on but the weather was a little drappy — a Somerset word I’d recently learned, which means ‘starting to rain slightly’. Even without the benefit of one of its legendary sunsets, the view from the top pushed you back onto your heels, opening the world’s mouth and allowing you to see humblingly down its throat. [loc. 146]

Read by the author, so it felt almost like going for a long walk with Tom Cox and listening to him talk -- about moving house with plants and cats, about hares and the lack of them in the West Country as compared to Norfolk, about life on the Dartington estate in Devon, about his cats (I teared up hearing him talk about the deaths of two elderly felines).

The book is (notionally) based around hills: Glastonbury Tor, the hill in Derbyshire where he lived one winter, the hills of Dartmoor, et cetera. But Cox rambles in prose as well as in the countryside, so he might be walking up a hill and thinking about a pheasant named Clarence (though the pheasant does not know his name, of course). Ring the Hill -- the title is from a medieval text about nicknames for hares -- was gentle and funny, gorgeously written and endlessly intriguing. It made me want to get out in the countryside and walk for miles, preferably alone. And then go to the beach and swim in the sea^*.

^*Assuming no sewage alerts :(