Riot New Media

Note: This blurb discusses miscarriages. As if being a mother isn’t frightening enough, Beams delivers a horror-tinged historical novel about an expectant mother and the hospital where she convalesces during her pregnancy. It’s 1948, and Irene Willard is pregnant for her sixth time, after five miscarriages, and desperate to have a baby. So for this pregnancy, she turns to an unorthodox hospital in the Berkshires, run by a husband and wife duo of doctors. The doctors believe they have a way to stop miscarriages from happening, and at this point, Irene is willing to try anything. Her husband leaves her in what they hope are the doctors’ capable hands, where she is poked and prodded and monitored. Cut off from her husband and the rest of the world, Irene befriends the other expectant patients, and in her travels around the hospital grounds, finds a secret garden that seems to have an almost supernatural energy that calls to her. As the doctors’ treatments for the expectant mothers start to go sideways, Irene investigates the garden more and discovers it’s a place that may hold both her deepest desires and fears in its walls. It’s like Shirley Jackson wrote The Secret Garden for adults! (And maybe a book to read at another time if you’re currently expecting, because it is INTENSE.) (CW include sexism, gore, body horror, miscarriage, pregnancy trauma, and death.)

Backlist bump: We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories by Clare Beams

This is a fun romantic fantasy that draws from Pacific Island mythology. Hanalei of Tamarind has been forced to live a life in exile after her father commits a serious crime. But after years of studying the seadragons as she battles homesickness, she thinks she has found a way to return to Tamarind. It involves a seadragon egg, which they call dragonfruit, and which is said to be magic. Meanwhile, back at Tamarind, Sam is the remaining heir of the island’s royalty, but only women can rule, so he must find a queen very soon, or get a dragonfruit to cure his ill mother. When old pals Hanalei and Sam are reunited after many years apart, it looks like they may be able to solve both of their problems by working together. They can’t fight their attraction, but they will have to fight the dangerous people out there trying to get a dragonfruit of their own. It’s an exciting YA romantasy in a lush setting with seadragons — what more could you ask for? (CW include animal cruelty and death, violence and injury, illness and loss of a loved one, racism, slavery, and xenophobia.)

Backlist bump: Year of the Reaper by Makiia Lucier

And this last book, I have not read, but I am so excited to get it. I wanted to mention it because I feel like more readers in the States need to know about Scarlett Thomas. I have always thought she writes such unusual novels, which I have enjoyed, and I was happy to see that she was referred to as “one of the UK’s most interesting authors” by Kirkus Reviews. This is being billed as a modern gothic about a couple whose honeymoon on a tiny Greek island goes wrong. From the first day they arrived, things at the hotel where Evelyn and Richard are staying haven’t been working out. Evelyn clashes with the hotel’s owner, who seems to be putting the moves on Richard, and people keep telling them about “the sleepwalkers,” a couple who recently drowned on the island. Things are only going to get worse for the couple when a storm separates them and they’ll have to face the secrets of their past in order to keep their new marriage together. I really don’t know what’s going on in the book even though I have read the description, but I am HERE FOR IT. Thomas plus suspense and secrets on a Greek island sounds likeThe Magus meets Rocky Horror to me. My body is ready.

Backlist bump: The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas

This week, I am reading Graveyard Shift by M. L. Rio (a new book from the author of If We Were Villains, which I know so many of you loved) and While We Were Burning by Sara Koffi. I also watched the second and third episodes of Elsbeth. (Having almost two months between episodes one and two was reeediculous.) It’s very formulaic and silly, but that is exactly what my brain needs right now. Plus, I love Carrie Preston, from way back when she was in My Best Friend’s Wedding. The song stuck in my head this week is “You’re Somebody Else” by flora cash. And here is your weekly cat picture: Millay is not impressed that her brothers are behind her on the couch. She thinks they are — wait for it — copycats.

That’s all for this week! I appreciate you more than I can say, friends. Thank you for joining me each Tuesday as I rave about books! I am wishing you all a wonderful rest of your week, whatever situation you find yourself in now. And yay, books! See you next week! – XO, Liberty

“We don’t leave the children we were. We simply grow around them like a tree will, in the end, grow around a bicycle that’s been left against them…” —Susan Fletcher, The Night in Question