David Yoon

There is this pervasive sense of unease threaded throughout the book, like an unseen menace lurking in the margins. Digging into the dried shrimp fish food in place of any available snacks seems like it's ripe for some sort of reveal. The weasel infestation threatens something more. The reluctance to stay the night at a friends home, only to find yourself falling into a troubled sleep amidst the blue green glow of aquarium lights, tilts to some creeping fear.

Nope. It's not that the looming menace is revealed to be a pile of laundry with the flick of a switch - we're never truly afforded a glimpse at anything that might lend some shape to our unease.

Maybe that disquiet is meant to be paired with the notions of parenthood. There's the breeding of discus fish, the power of the mother weasel, and the parade of friends with their newborns as the narrator and his wife struggle to conceive a child. And maybe that's all the more ominous given the current population crisis, with Japan seeing the lowest number of births in a century paired with the fact that it enjoys one of the highest life expectancies.

Maybe I'm just grasping at straws, a Western reader that needs more resolution to allay my unease, but I just couldn't fully connect with this one.

I like Brené. Her work on shame is incredibly powerful. But now, post viral TED Talk, she's doing high priced executive sessions at Pixar, and getting invited on Oprah. With Rising Strong we get Brené not only thinking of her research on resilience but also buttressing her brand. I kept thinking, stop trying to make “rumble” happen. Same goes for chandeliering and the acronym BRAVING. It felt like the utmost of restraint that kept her from slapping on a ™ after half of these.

I get it. We do have to wrestle (or rumble) with our feelings and pay attention to how we're framing our own story. How that narrative is often fuelled by our own biases, self-doubt, and need for comforting patterns that can do away with the discomfort of ambiguity. But that's all easier said than done. When we're face down in the dirt it's not always clear how we negotiate our way to something better. And the book did not help. The examples given were so far removed from anything I was familiar with as to be completely abstract. I never felt I was given better tools to find my way to “rising strong”.

Maybe it's enough to just point out the dysfunctional ways we tend to react when we're down on our hands and knees. To advocate for more curiosity about our emotional state and working on the self talk to something better. But that would have been a much shorter book.

Castillo is a self-professed “bossy Virgo bitch ...irritatingly sure of myself and my convictions” and it shows.

I had to read this twice because I felt my initial knee-jerk recoiling against the book needed further examination. It's a pop culture smorgasbord as Castillo invokes everything from the X-men, HBO's Watchmen, J.K. Rowling and Jane Austen and should hit me where I live.

I'm here for her assessment that writers of color are often served up as some kind of “ethical protein shake”. That too often they are called upon to provide “the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.” I'm nodding along wholeheartedly, I like what I'm hearing, but it's also a lot. Castillo lives in the strident, purple prose of the confidently righteous. And then I think, is my objection gender biased, have I internalized the dominant white supremacist status quo and resorted to tone policing?

I feel that way throughout the book. I've never read Joan Didion and don't care to defend her either. It feels too much of “not like other readers” but perhaps Castillo could have just as easily come for my fav DFW. I've never watched a Wong Kar-wai movie so don't share that spark of recognition. The second time around I was able to better piece it together and realize I like what she's saying but just didn't connect with the florid seething, unevenly mixed with far too hip asides. It probably just means I'm old, complacent, and doddering towards irrelevance.

There is a nostalgic comfort in reading Heather Havrilesky. She of the immediately recognizable blogger voice which is both a blessing and a curse. For me she is forever stuck in the 90's — I imagine her big headed comic avatar as rendered by Terry Colon at Suck.com opining on the tragedy of marriage. It is a beautiful disaster, a tornado of emotion, a sinkhole of nagging doubts, a glorious drag. And Havrilesky wastes no time weighing in on her phlegmy, walking heap of laundry that she chose to marry 15 years ago when an emboldened fan, clearly overstepping the parasocial boundaries of online fandom, emailed her a mash note. Suddenly she finds herself in the suburbs with two kids and obsessing over the possibility of a tiny infidelity.

And it's all achingly familiar with the gnashing of teeth, petulant griping, murderous thoughts and another example for good comedic measure. It is the classic sitcom setup where amidst the chaos you imagine the action frozen in place and the author quipping “you're probably wondering how I got here”. Havrilesky eventually comes around to the understanding that she is certainly with her favourite human on the planet before dashing off for another round of hijinks.

An ancient plague released from the Arctic permafrost through global warming begins to decimate the world. Victim's cells begin to work erratically, kidneys hard at work trying to become lungs, brain cells convinced they need to be building a heart. The body shuts down, skin becomes translucent and those infected slip into a coma and die. Death becomes so prevalent that the funerary industry has completely taken over the banking system giving rise to Mortuary cryptocurrencies and the ubiquitous presence of funerary skyscrapers and malls across the nation's cities.

How High We Go in the Dark is a collection of short stories where each chapter is a meditation on grief and loss in the face of this global pandemic. But it's lovely, hopeful and wild. When the stakes are this high it's all that much more important that there is love and community and the persistent impulse to keep moving forward. When the end of the world comes it's not the doomsday preppers hoarding canned goods that survive. Those who make meaningful connections, retain hope and create neighbourhoods where everyone works together to build abundance - that's where the magic lies.

Nagamatsu connects these disparate stories and callbacks abound with little details travelling across chapters until they resolve into a larger whole. I fell in love with a talking pig and a widowed introvert tentatively inviting his neighbours for a BBQ. I thrilled at the euthanasia theme park and the forensic body farm. I saw the inevitability of death being commercialized with shared urns where neighbours could intermix their ashes to save on money and space, contrasted with elegy hotels where the plasticized dead are preserved as crematories struggle to keep up with demand, and inventive disposal techniques abound like liquifying remains to be turned into ice sculptures to melt into the sea.

But these are just wonderful bits of colour and detail among the more restrained explorations of grief and loss and love that just hit me where I live.

It's a Gen Z Mad Max Fury Road meets The Stand set exactly one second in the future. This is what you get when you ask ChatGPT to fictionalize the news as it's understood by Reddit. It's the mutant offspring of Don't Look Up savagely violated by Fight Club. I mean it could be scathing satirical fun if it wasn't hewn so close to how the world works now.

It does kick off with a promising start. A massive teenage suicide epidemic seems to have gone viral. Massive numbers of kids impassively off themselves leaving the enigmatic symbol A11 behind. One of the victims is 17 year old Claire Oliver, daughter of the CEO of Rise Pharmaceuticals that has made millions on the sale of oxycodone. Her brother is shuttled off to be heavily medicated and therapeutically placated at the ritzy Float Anxiety Abatement Center where he meets a monk-like 14 year old who has the temerity to be referred to as the Prophet.

He's roped Simon into his mission that will involve thinly veiled counterparts to Jeffrey Epstein, Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump, the Sacklers, QAnon, Proud Boys and Juggalos alongside characters that refer to themselves as Tyler Durdens, War Boys, Katniss, Cyclops, Legolas and Randall Flagg. And maybe therein lies the problem. The line between Hollywood dystopia and our real world farce is hopelessly porous. The book is unwilling to commit to being a cynically fun satire or novelistic thrill ride and in trying to do both instead ends up feeling ponderously nihilistic and a bit of a buzzkill. So it goes.

Every year there's a novel that's just everywhere in the bookish water you're currently swimming in. For me last year it was S.A. Cosby's Razorblade Tears which felt ubiquitous, as if it were algorithmically targeting me. It kept creeping in my feeds, insisting on being read but never quite making it into the cart. I'm glad I finally succumbed.

This is the perfectly violent, odd couple, revenge thriller. Ike “Riot” Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins are the most unlikely of companions. Sure they're both middle-aged men that have served hard time, but Buddy is an alcoholic, trailer park living redneck while Ike is trying to fly straight and narrow as an entrepreneurial Black man running a successful property maintenance business. It is only when their respective gay sons are brutally executed do they find common ground. The police investigation has gone cold and they're not content to let this heinous crime go unpunished.

It's a great premise that's easy to get wrong. Cosby shows great restraint portraying the oil and water buddy dynamic. We've seen countless iterations on screen and this could have been a cliched mess but every beat feels earned. Meanwhile the stakes keep getting ramped up. This is Elmore Leonard, meets Walter Mosley thrown in a blender with Quentin Tarrantino. While Ike and Buddy learn a little acceptance about their sons' lives it hasn't tempered their rage in any way and it makes for a satisfying ride the whole bloody way.

So a transgender, self-taught violin prodigy escapes her abusive family and happens to be discovered by the “Queen of Hell” who hopes she will be the seventh and final musical soul consigned to damnation which frees her from her debt to the demon Tremon. Meanwhile intergalactic refugees escaping the “Endplague” are hiding in plain sight at Stargate Donuts where they replicate doughy treats to sell while quietly constructing a warp gate for some imagined future filled with Imperial tourists.

Thats a lot, and I haven't even mentioned the sentient AI seeking some sort of autonomy, a violin repairer contending with her family's legacy and rampant duck abuse. (no assortment of waterfowl should, in good conscience, be fed the sheer volume of donuts evidenced here)

With that many balls in the air you don't pay too much mind when a couple fall to the ground. There is no shortage of nitpicking and lost threads that could be argued, but honestly with so much plot you're just holding on for the ride. I love that Katrina's trans identify is her superpower and Aoki writes about musically so beautifully that I wished I still had my viola to pick up (even if only to remind myself once again why I put it down in the first place) I adored the argument of how technical perfection isn't enough and that there is an ineffable art to evoking the notion of “home” in your craft whether it's a concerto or a cream-filled. And there's the budding romance, the growing confidences, the looming deadline, the inevitable sacrifices and the unexpected curveballs just kept me turning the pages. I might quibble with the plot holes but I can't complain about the propulsive story.

Our author suddenly finds himself unencumbered with his regular Toronto newspaper job and, remembering an all-too-brief visit to Yellowknife for a literary festival, packs his bags and heads North to work at the local paper. The Yellowknifer is a slim, twice weekly rag unique in that it focuses solely on Yellowknife, no reheated stories from wire copy — also clearly an early inspiration for Bidini's The West End Phoenix a local community newspaper he would launch on his return to Toronto.

And the book is a series of dispatches that upends any notion I have of this Northern capital city and the work of small town journalism. The folks at the paper might hew to certain stereotypes - some have landed here after being kicked out of everywhere else while for others this is but a pitstop to bigger and better - but the Indigenous Dene people are armed with a steely pragmatism and the folks that call Yellowknife home (“people live here!” As the mayor famously said on TV) are ok with who they are, free from big city pretension and wide-eyed small town optimism. It's a clear-eyed rendering of a summer in Yellowknife from a consummate storyteller (and a damn fine musician - Your Tragically Hip might get all the love but Whale Music is still the best Canadian album ever)

Inspired by some historical non-fiction focused on German astronomer Johannes Kepler, this is far more fun than a 17th century witch hunt should be. Katharina Kepler is an independently wealthy widower who loves her cow Chamomile, swears by her herbal remedies, and has raised some capable children, one who has gone on to big city fame as the Imperial Mathematician. Clearly she's a witch!

Accused of poisoning Ursula Reinbold, a Leonberg Karen with eyes on Kepler's wealth and fuelled by a not insignificant amount of petty jealousy, Katharina is quick to dismiss the outlandish claims. But apparently you don't need social media and infotainment channels to stoke the fires of fake news. Pretty soon folks are coming out of the woodwork, certain that in light of this new information previously benign incidents could in fact be attributed to Katharina's witchy powers. After all, according to some residents, “The matter of how we came to know is simple — we already knew.” Who can argue with logic like that?

With the help of her neighbour Simon, Katharina shrugs aside the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and embarks on a warm and witty defence, going high when they go low. Four centuries later it still echoes our current climate.

You might be tempted to dismiss Beaton's ability to tackle a more weighty memoir if you've only known her from her Hark! A Vagrant days, but she nails the industrial desolation of a Syncrude mining operation — the biting cold, the hulking machines, and the poison spewing industry of it all. That implacable desolation mirrors her own experience as she arrives in the oil sands in the hopes of severing the “weighted anchor” of $40K of student debt in a place where women are outnumbered 50 to 1.

It goes badly and yet Beaton exhibits far more empathy than you might expect. This could have easily been a sensationalist story, given to all the salacious detail and harrowing experiences — exactly what a reporter from the Globe and Mail kept fishing for in a later chapter to fill out her preconceived story. But Beaton can't help but wonder how the loneliness, homesickness and boredom might affect someone's brother or dad or husband.

So many have come from away, from coastal towns where the fishing has dried up, the mines long since closed, where opportunity requires a plane trip away from family, from home. It's a place where the death of hundreds of ducks in a tailing pond receives more national interest than the poisoning of Native lands, mining operations set up right next door to Indian settlements where young people are increasingly dying of cancer, the plants and animals spoiled by the poisons sent into the environment. And there are the workers and the mental toll that isolation breeds, the ugly aspects of self revealed, the people chewed up by this extractive industry. This is one hell of a memoir.

Maybe it just plays better in Korea with its BTS recommendation and possibly different norms around therapy. Here in the West being able to take part in therapy is more a point of class distinction, while social media has normalized the open and frank discussion around mental illness to the point people are falsely laying claim to neurodivergent traits for a strange sense of clout. Still there is the thrill of eavesdropping on a therapist / client conversation and, at least for me, repeated feelings of recognition. But then again the self-loathing, tendency to extremes, body dysmorphia, insecurity, and general melancholic malaise discussed here — well isn't that just the current resting state of just about everyone in our social media saturated world?

Maybe it can provide some sense of relief to those suffering from mild depression, or at least a sense of being seen. That is huge and I don't want to dismiss the value others may find. Maybe I'm oblivious, I'm the dog, drinking coffee, being engulfed in flames exclaiming “This is fine” but the book just didn't work for me.

Saudade, or the nostalgic longing for something that doesn't exist. It's like a Korean Stand By Me - evoking something at once familiar and resonant but wholly different than my own experience. As a second generation Korean-Canadian am I just tokenizing my own culture? Maybe it's just my version of the Western Cowboy mythos that instead tugs at some idealized Korean sentiment.

How do I explain? Insu is a biracial Korean/German coming of age in a Korean army base during the early 1970's. He's an amalgam of three generations of my family from my folks growing up on the peninsula beneath the shadow of the Korean War, my free-wheeling youth in an age before cell phones and social media, and my own biracial Korean/Dutch-German daughter. It evokes so many of the small towns I visited on my repeated trips to Korea, the funeral mounds in the hills we'd tend to for Chuseok, the lingering presence of the American military, and the barter and grift culture that still pervades. It's a story that tugs at something foreign yet strangely familiar.

Insu is returning to Korea after some time away in the United States which provides a familiar lens from which to view his days spent with his friends around the military base. But in this Korea the black market hustle and hidden club houses comes up against Taoist alchemy, geomancy and transexual shamans. It gets at the unique tensions between the old and new, East and West, Korean Han and American optimism.

Insu is generally large-hearted and sincere, able to navigate the world with adolescent brio. The women here have a different experience and the routes they take through the world carry echos of the Japanese occupation and the continued American presence. Hella Han.

I'm grateful to Spiegel & Grau for reaching out with an advance copy, and so totally nailing what is obviously the white hot centre of my reading wheelhouse.

It wasn't working for me at first. I found it wide-eyed and simple, not realizing that McCurdy is subtly adjusting her voice to reflect the age she's writing about. It's a small thing, but done well as we see her moving into her petulant teenage years and then into the revelry and rebellion of young adulthood.

While it's specific to Jennette's experience as a Nickelodeon child star, it's also the perfect encapsulation of what we've long been witness to. From the conservatorship of Britney Spears to the entire D'Amelio clan cashing in Charli's initial TikTok fame which has shades of Lindsay Lohan's camera hungry parents. Sadly this isn't an especially new story.

Debra McCurdy is still a one of a kind monster. Hypocritical hyper-religious Mormon when it suited her, to capitalizing on her bout with cancer for points, she exploited, bullied and manipulated her daughter into becoming a child actor so she could live vicariously through her. She encouraged her anorexia so Jennette could land child roles longer, which inevitably led to her bulimia. Weirdly insisted on showering with her daughter until she was 17, and became fiercely co-dependent on Jennette as her star began to rise.

Meanwhile Jennette herself was wrestling with being sexualized onscreen as such a young age, of having to take increasingly irate direction for what was her first ever kiss, to being manipulated, lied to and dismissed. All while she trying to uncover who exactly she was when the cameras weren't rolling with an upbringing that never provided her with the tools to deal with it all.

It's unbelievably frank, even-handed, and even empathetic when Jennette could have justifiably taken a torch to everyone involved in her formative years at Nickelodeon. One hell of a debut.

20 year old Kenji is a nightlife guide for foreign sex tourists in Tokyo. He encounters Frank, an American looking for a good time in the red light district of Kabuki-cho on the last remaining days of 1996. Something is off about Frank and Kenji is somehow convinced this tourist is the man responsible for a spate of grisly murders in the area.

Far too much time is spent explaining the commercial sex-trade in Kabuki-cho. Meanwhile when Kenji takes a break from obsessing over how he's convinced Frank is clearly a murderer, he otherwise despairs over the culture he was raised in and the emptiness of Japanese life. It's a lot of tense set-up for an otherwise conventional, if not gory resolution. The back third of the book could have made for an interesting short story but all told it felt disjointed, meandering and uneven.

The upcoming movie finally pushed this to the top of the TBR pile. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's 2017 New York Times article helped ignite the #MeToo movement and this is the tense account of the months leading up to the Weinstein expose. And while it's a damning portrayal of a sexual predator with decades of abuses to his name, it is as much the story of the apparatus surrounding him that facilitated his actions, looked the other way, and even sought to capitalize on the situation for their own benefit.

Gloria Allred and her daughter Lisa Bloom, known for taking on high-profile sexual harassment cases, are shown as mercenary opportunists seeking to obtain fat settlements accompanied by NDAs, muzzled victims, 40% cuts and lucrative book deals. David Boies, also known for representing Elizabeth Holmes (as revealed in the equally riveting book Bad Blood) is shown as a dogged defendant of Weinstein, utilizing the private Israeli agency Black Cube to surveil Twohey and Kantor and employ agents in the field to pose as feminist advocates and conference organizers to lull the journalists into false confidences. Not to mention the entourage of Miramax executive and board members that looked the other way, convincing themselves that this was just some marital infidelity.

Nearly five years later it can be a dispiriting read at times. The final chapters recounting how Christine Blasey Ford spoke out against Brett Kavanaugh before he was to be appointed for life to the Supreme Court we see him claiming his staunch support of women, down to the hours he spent coaching his daughters in basketball - only to overturn Roe v Wade. But more than that this is a testament to dogged journalism. We see how hard the work is to carefully construct, diligently verify and work against deep pocketed interests highly motivated to dissuade anyone from learning the truth. How this relies on the support of institutions and it's just as much a testament to the power of reporting in an environment when it's increasingly being doubted, touted as fake, and completely sidelined.

I'm all in for a first time novelist making her literary debut at 64 and absolutely killing it. You might dismiss this as a feminist fairytale set in the 1960's if it wasn't for the fact the writing is just so delightfully sharp and fun. Naturally Elizabeth Zott is at once gorgeous, smart and fearless - the love of her life Calvin Evans is a Nobel Prize nominated scientific wunderkind, her kid is clearly a genius in the making, and even their dog Six-Thirty is a thoughtful animal with a growing understanding of English words under his collar. Even when Elizabeth Zott begrudgingly transitions out of the labs of the Hastings Research Institute and into the mid afternoon slot as the host of a TV cooking show, her Supper at Six inevitably becomes a nationwide sensation. This smart but wacky ensemble can't help bring to mind the equally lovely Where'd You Go Bernadette - and like Maria Semple's book, Lessons in Chemistry is also coming out with its own adaptation featuring Brie Larson.

But it's not all sugar and spice here, Elizabeth has to contend with misogyny, petty jealousies, dismissiveness, sexual assault and intense grief to say nothing of the sheer nail biting unknown of being a first time mom. This isn't an overburdened, navel gazing examination of feminist empowerment - I can only imagine how plodding and morose it might have been if this were about a man - rather this is a wry story of one woman's satisfying engagement with adversity, being underestimated and getting it done in spite of it all. Sure it follows a sort of too good to be true bookish logic and conventional story arc that nonetheless should not get in the way of enjoying what is an entirely entertaining, fist pumping read.

Marra is just a beautiful storyteller from the sentence level right up to the macro plotting effort involved in satisfyingly closing out nearly a dozen different character arcs, often with beautiful, melancholic effect. There's the toupee'd b-movie mogul Artie Feldman and his girl Friday Maria Lagana. Maria has left her father Giuseppe behind in exile in San Lorenzo Italy, now recreated on a Hollywood soundstage. There's a German miniaturist Anna Weber who finds herself in Utah recreating German tenements. Shakespearean actor Eddie Lu who dreams of something more than simply playing Asian caricatures. Passport photographers, widowed great-aunts awaiting death, and a mother with a suitcase filled with the dirt of her homeland. Woven throughout so many of these stories is the constant tension between reality and artifice during the lead up to the Second World War. Even more compelling and bizarre is that much of the book is drawn from actual events. German Village existed just an hour outside of Salt Lake City and the roofs of Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica were covered to look like a sleepy suburban enclave complete with actors high above pretending to mow their lawns and hang laundry to fool potential bombers.

And can Marra turn a phrase, here the prose is often inflected with the sharp pulpy dialogue of Philip Kerr's WWII Bernie Gunther thrillers and the pop of early Hollywood hustle. But threading throughout is the shimmering lyricism I've come to expect from Marra. Fascism, racism, paranoia and propaganda are all explored and it's less a mirror of our own time and more a reinforcement that sadly this is as it's always been.

Having never read The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G.Wells perhaps I'm missing out on the frisson of recognition when Moreno-Garcia harks back to the original. Maybe my understanding of the original as an outright horror story had me expecting a bit more bite here. This is a restrained tale that's less terror and more Tempest - especially when Carlota Moreau falls for the handsome Eduardo Lizalde, arguably the first man she has seen on the estate that wasn't her father or the tortured majordomo Montgomery Laughton.

There is so much table setting going on, the many pieces stacked up against one another, piled ever higher and higher as the story progresses and yet it somehow manages to resolve not with a bang but a whimper.

This is essentially an endearing desert fairy tale, made ever more remarkable in that it was imagined while the author endured 15 torturous years in Guantanamo Bay which was the basis of his previous work Guantanamo Diary.

Ahmed is a Bedouin camel herder in search of his prized camel Zarga, promised to his son Abdullah. Ahmed and his faithful camel Laamesh set off into the Sahara armed with the songs of his father. He will encounter poisonous snakes and barbaric nomads while navigating the unforgiving environment of the desert landscape. He is shored up by bedouin hospitality and the occasional tea and smoke. And while he attests to the absolute truth of his tale, sworn on the belly button of his only sister and the Sixty Holy Chapters, in the end he admits that a little pepper and salt never hurt any story. This was a tale well seasoned and easy to relish.

Our city, much like so many others in North American right now, is struggling with homelessness, income precarity, and a generation that is seeing the possibility of home ownership slip from their grasp. A study shows that a third of households in the US pay more than 30% of their income just on rent and mortgages - but this was pre-pandemic, pre-supply chain disruptions, pre-double digit inflation.

Our obsession with single family dwellings needs to adapt. The 20th century's mass exodus into suburbia, fuelled by elitism and racism has eroded our sense of street-level community, increased social isolation, pushed us into car-dependency, and driven our tendency to conspicuous consumption as we struggle to fill our homes and “keep up with the Jones.”

Author Diana Lind proposes some possibilities available to us like Accessory Dwelling Units (or tiny homes), co-living arrangements, multi-generational housing and changing the zoning that often prevents any of this from happening. There is little talk of affordable housing here though. Gorgeously designed tiny homes that populate our social feeds are hardly an inexpensive alternative, and co-living feels more like up-cycled commune living for the affluent dot-com set looking to work remotely around the world.

This is a breezy tour through interesting housing alternatives without getting into the systemic issues that drive the lack of affordable housing. It submits to the unstoppable growth of suburbs and strip malls, and avoids the NIMBYism that often stalls any sort of possible progress. Maybe not the book's purpose, but I can't help wishing it poked at those issues a bit more.

Sam Masur and Sadie Green first bond over Super Mario Brothers in the games room of a Los Angeles children's hospital. From this bitter-sweet, meet-cute we flash forward a decade to a chance encounter in a Boston subway station when Sam shouts the classic video game line “Sadie Miranda Green. You have died of dysentery!”

In this cold recounting it can feel manipulative, a bit pandering to the sensibilities of literary gamers. I felt the same way reading Zevin's earlier work, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, so clearly a book for book people. And yet I'm happily able to suspend that bit of cynicism and give myself over to the inevitable ups and downs rendered in the altogether capable hands of the author.

This explores notions of childhood trauma, disability, sexism, loss and violence threaded through a story filled with love, creative energy, fame and forgiveness. Add Sam's roommate Marx Watanabe and you've got a warm story about best friends that never gets bogged down in the minutiae of video game design or corporate growth. Naturally there's always going to be aspects of the “will they or won't they” for the leads but in the end it's all about hope, beautifully teased out throughout the read. Hope that becomes all important when life throws obstacles in our protagonists' way, and here are obstacles aplenty.

Reminded me of another great book called The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker that explored the creative tensions between friends. It's just as Sadie says here: “Lovers are common... True collaborators in this life are rare.”

Thanks to the Mayor of Flavortown, Cho's Delicatessens are thriving in Honolulu. Or at least they were. When the Cho's eldest Jacob heads to South Korea to teach English he manages to get himself possessed by the ghost of his dead grandfather who uses his body to faceplant himself trying to run across the DMZ into North Korea. Viewed worldwide, people stop coming to the deli, the Chos tainted by the mere whiff of a connection to Kim Jong-un and North Korea. Grace meanwhile is barely dealing beneath a persistent cloud of weed. All this before the 2018 false missile alert that sent the island into panic.

Amidst all that, this is an exploration into second generation immigrant isolation, questioning one's own sexuality, notions of community, reunification, nations subjugated by outsiders, separation and reconciliation. At least I think so - I felt unbalanced throughout as if I couldn't quite get a solid footing - as discombobulated as Jacob reeling under the thrall of Baik Tae-woo, the King Fool.

I do enjoy a slim novella, so it feels unfair to criticize the slight world building of a post-something, southwest hellscape where information is tightly controlled by the government, energy is scarce and life is precarious. I just could have used a bit more to chew on. Instead what I get is just cowboy set dressing and the knowledge that queer love in this world is dangerous. Well not so dangerous for our protagonist it seems who, days after her lover Beatriz is publicly hung, falls in queer love-at-first-sight. It's a novella, things move fast I suppose.

Subversive gun-toting lesbian librarians in an apocalyptic Wild West is as good a tag as any to hang your hat on, but this story needed more meat on its bones.

Let's just start with this little nugget. “Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns... Americans use ten times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre of turfgrass than is used in corn or wheat fields ...and grass clippings and other yard waste constitute 12 percent of all the material that ends up in U.S. landfills.” Just wow.

As the dust jacket reminds us, this is after all a collection of essays on our human-centred planet. To that end there are stories about the discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings, the history of Teddy Bears, Piggly Wiggly and Monopoly, examinations on the Yips and the photo Young Farmers from August Sander. As a whole it is entirely enlightening.

But it is also warm and heartfelt and lovingly in awe with world around us. It is the ritual of biking to the Indianapolis 500 with friends, an unabashed love of Diet Dr Pepper, wrestling with anxiety and watching Harvey while dealing with depression that puts author John Green front and centre of these stories. I love his outsized love for his brother, his wife and children, his friends and English football. It's no mean feat to unironically wear your heart on your sleeve and not come of as narcissistic or unbearably saccharine. It helps that he's been living his values out loud online for some time now with VlogBrothers, Crash Course, Project for Awesome and now TikTok. To trust the world, to show it your belly despite the intensely fragile part of you that is terrified of turning itself to the world - that in itself is extraordinary.