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Childbirth is stressful and unpredictable in real life but, in Lina Rather’s brisk novel, A Season of Monstrous Conceptions, a touch of magic makes things even more so for the mothers who birth children who bear the marks of another world. Sarah Davis is an apprentice midwife, learning to help both mother and child survive the often traumatic labor. She also has a touch of the other world, herself, allowing her to manipulate the force that’s seeping into England in the wake of the Great Fire of London...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Hugo Contreras will be the first to tell you that he’s a fraud at the same time that he sells you healing candles and charms at the botánica where he works. His boss, however, believes that Hugo actually has the ability to see and talk to the supernatural. Both of these facts contribute to the unbelievable job offer that lands in Hugo’s lap at the beginning of A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, the frightening and affecting new novel by Raul Palma. If Hugo agrees to work a cleansing for the man he considers his worst enemy, he can wipe out the debt that’s been following him for decades...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Every book I’ve read by C.L. Polk is better than the last. I liked Witchmark. I enjoyed The Midnight Bargain. But Even Though I Knew the End entertained me and got me right in the feels; I loved this book. Even Though I Knew the End opens in a wintery, magical Chicago in 1940. Irregular investigator and thwarted magician Helen Brandt is quietly tying up the loose ends of her life when her best client sends her to a crime scene that Helen instantly wants to run from. The only thing that keeps Helen on the job is the promise from this client that she might be rewarded with the impossible: her soul and the chance to live a full life with her lover, Edith...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Ariel Kaplan uses elements of the fall of the Islamic states on the Iberian peninsula and Jewish myth to create a stunning world—and a stunning series opener—in The Pomegranate Gate. Our protagonists are forced to flee their homes when word comes that the Inquisition is coming to either force the Jewish people to convert or leave with only the clothes on their backs. Toba and Naftaly have barely been on the road a day when very strange things start to happen that change everything they thought they knew about the world. I am really looking forward to the next book in the series because this book ended with a hell of a cliffhanger...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

This is going to be a challenging review to write. There are quite a few things about All You Have to Do is Call, by Kerri Maher, that annoy me very much. These things annoy me so much that I’m not sure I’ll be fair to the book’s virtues. This book isn’t all bad; I’ve certainly read worse. And I think there are readers who will enjoy this whirlwind dip into the last months of the Jane Collective, before their arrest the year before the monumental Roe v. Wade decision was handed down...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

The title of Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is our first prompt to question the distance between our inner self and the self (or selves) we present to others. The parade of characters we meet brings even more questions about who we really are. These pages contain the confused, the dissatisfied, the brash, the claimants, the deluded, and more. It’s a dizzying array of psychology that refuses to provide solid answers to any of the questions it raises. I’m not complaining! A healthy dose of self-reflection is good for the soul...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Story-gatherer Chih returns to the Singing Hills in this fourth volume in the series, Mammoths at the Gates, by Nghi Vo. We previously visited Chih and their neixin companion Almost Brilliant on their adventures around the empire. Their mission was to gather as many stories and as much information as they could to bring back to the Singing Hills, to save for posterity. But every journey has to end someday and it’s been years since Chih was home...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

In Strangers to Ourselves, Rachel Aviv presents a series of portraits of mental illness, portraits that call into question a raft of preconceived notions about what it means to be considered insane. Aviv’s collection is one of the most evenhanded arguments for reconsideration of how we treat the mentally ill. It’s not a polemic against Big Pharma. It’s also not a call to ditch psychiatry wholesale. Instead, Aviv shows us that mental illness is just really complicated.

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

There are a lot of secrets in Jayne Anne Phillips’s haunting novel, Night Watch. They slowly unspool over the course of 300 pages in a way that made me feel like I almost couldn’t bear to hear another, while at the same time drawing me along until every bit of plot had been wrung out of the characters. But then, set against the turmoil and trauma of the American Civil War, I suppose it’s not surprising to see what the small family at the heart of this novel has to bear...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Iz Wilby is adamant that she will never work for the Crown. And, in Josiah Bancroft’s novel, The Hexologists, we learn just why Iz resists taking the job pitched to her by the king’s secretary. What starts as a relatively simple case of finding out if a blackmailer really is the king’s illegitimate child turns into a deadly game of magic and skullduggery. Thankfully for us readers, it’s enormously entertaining to watch it all unfold...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

Few friends can say, like the characters in Jesse Q. Sutanto’s highly entertaining novel Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, that what brought them together was a murder. Fewer still, I think, could say that a murder was when their lives started to change for the better...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.