#SFFBookClub

Your job is not to know what it once was or what it will become. Your job is to simply enjoy it.

This book opened by describing itself as a circular tale, and as promised it truly did meander through various layers of stories to get back where it started. In some ways this reminded me of the Orphan's Tales books by Catherynne Valente, in its use of nested layers of stories that all interconnect a bit to tell something bigger in the whole. But Orphan's Tales is quite explicitly a story about stories, and here... I'm unable to quite put my finger on what this book is doing. It's definitely a story about sisterhood. It's a story about the grief of inevitable separation and change. It's a story about memory and creation.

I did enjoy this book, and especially enjoyed the stories of Magali and Wisa. I was amused the academic interludes. I liked the weird worldbuilding: magic space whales, "sailing" through the black sea of the universe of island planets, a portal that only children can go through. But overall I also don't feel like any of these elements quite cohered for me (even as I also wonder how much that's just on me as a reader).

This was our book for the September 2026 #SFFBookClub.

I've not been making enough time for reading lately, but I have been enjoying this book a lot as I slowly make my way through it. #SFFBookClub

#SFFBookClub book from a few months ago. I read this quickly and enjoyed it, but it also felt very thin. The overall arc seemed sort of formulaic, and it just never got me caring enough about its world or characters for the ending to make me feel very much.

This was on the #SFFBookClub poll but never got picked.

The Bewitching is three intertwined stories that all revolve around witchcraft. In 1998, struggling grad student Minerva is researching Beatrice Tremblay who wrote a novel the Vanishing roughly based on the disappearance of her friend Virginia. The second thread is that Minerva gets a chance to read Beatrice's journals, and so we hear Beatrice's perspective of mysterious and traumatic events of 1934. The final thread is Minerva's great-grandmother Alba who tells Minerva a story on her deathbed about events from her childhood in 1908.

At night the three of them talked on ICQ about meaningless and profound topics.

I am a sucker for parallel stories, but I especially love how rooted each of these different narratives are in highly specific times and places.

As a horror story, the pacing reminded me a lot of her previous book Mexican Gothic. There's a slow foreshadowing of creeping horror where things are going slightly awry (or maybe it's coincidence). And then, very late, there is a mask off moment where it's explicit what is happening. Having three intertwined stories that each have their own arc of tension only makes this stronger.

The Navigating Fox is a novella that feels like a piece of a larger novel that's been extracted, loose threads and all. Or, maybe it's just uninterested in filling in all the details and giving explicit answers. I wish this story had been a novel to give it space to stretch its wings.

The best part of this book is all of the worldbuilding details. I love the idea of animals that have been given voices and are now knowledgeable (and self-conscious). I love the various societies and their interactions with an overseas empire that has started extending into the land of this novella. I loved the ideas of how a society that treats animals as people would need to operate. There's just so much going on here in the margins of this book over a core parallel telling of two journeys.

One thing my partner always says about writing is that he doesn't need every detail spelled out, but he has to believe that the author knows these things. This is all to say that this not a book to read for a strong sense of closure, even if you can read between some lines. It feels coherent overall to me, but with a lot more loose threads than I had expected going in.

#SFFBookClub

There's a lot of neat things going on in this book, but there's also a number of things that didn't quite land for me. I'm struggling to have a solid opinion, so here's a mishmash of drive-by thoughts.

I do love this book's thematic mantra of fixing broken things. It's clear that many characters in this book are broken (emotionally), and it's clear that the Boston timeline is broken (structurally, via capitalism largely), but it's less clear to me what sort of fixing is truly going on, especially in a multiverse sense.

Obviously Martin, Stirling, and Melissa are putting in work for their community, but the rest of it just seems like talk (or something a future book in the series will get to). I wish there was more clarity about how Jace had broken his oath to repair the broken parts of the universe, and what that oath actually means to Jace and Corinne. (Has Harnett sworn this same oath? Also, what is this oath as compared to the Network's "greatest good" motto??)

I think the pacing of the end of the book is also a little harmed by this being part of a series. There's clearly a climactic confrontation, but it largely feels unresolved, leaving lots of pieces for the future.

This sounds like a lot of complaints, but I enjoyed my read here. I do love a telepathic dog. I love the idea of talking to a therapist about portals to other worlds. I love Jace and Corinne working together for a shared goal while also being so misaligned. I love Martin still working to care for Reina even when Reina is not his sister. Overall, my favorite part of this book was all of the characters.

(This was the #SFFBookClub book for March 2026.)