The Rose Field (The Book of Dust #3)
by Philip Pullman
Fantasy/Young Adult
Description (from Goodreads):
Picking up right where The Secret Commonwealth left off, this story finds Lyra alone in a city haunted by daemons, searching for her beloved Pan. Malcolm Polstead isn’t far behind, searching for Lyra. And they are both racing toward the desert of Karamakan, following the trail of roses said to hold the secret of Dust.
My review:
Can’t talk about this one without spoilers. It’s not enough to merely say it’s another grand adventure with characters we’ve come to love, but that Philip Pullman leaves a lot of threads hanging at the end. Or is it? Okay, quit reading here.
Maybe Philip was getting a little tired of Lyra. Maybe it was me. Only a little, mind; I love The Rose Field only a little less than I loved La Belle Sauvage and The Secret Commonwealth. And I’m delighted to see Lyra and Pan reunited at last. But:
– Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi (They paved Paradise/And put up a parking lot) will evermore, in my mind, be the soundtrack for the rose world Lyra and Pan finally reach. That was jarring. Well, at least now we know what the alkahest is, and I’m with ya on that one, Big Phil.
– Lyra and Malcom as a thing? No way that wouldn’t have been creepy. Thank you, Mr. Pullman, for realizing how readers would have reacted to that and pulling back before you went too far.
– I thought we killed god. So how are there still angels, and how could it be that the one Lyra encounters on the ferry is her intellectual inferior?
Well, here’s for a less profit-driven, more interconnected world, and oh lord wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all had dæmons? That conceit alone has made Pullman’s twin trilogies immortal, never mind his brilliant way with words.
Never Flinch (Holly Gibney #4)
by Stephen King
Fiction/Mystery/Thriller
Description (from Goodreads):
From master storyteller Stephen King comes an extraordinary new novel with intertwining storylines—one about a killer on a diabolical revenge mission, and another about a vigilante targeting a feminist celebrity speaker—featuring the beloved Holly Gibney and a dynamic new cast of characters.
My review:
This was one of five horror novels under consideration for our Halloween book club read and discussion. It wasn’t chosen, but since I had previously read and enjoyed one of King’s Holly Gibney novels, I decided to read it on my own.
From my review of the previous novel in this series, Holly (Holly Gibney #3):
Holly Gibney is the protagonist of two previous novels. I didn’t know that when I picked this novel off the New Reads shelf at my library, but it became instantly apparent via frequent and repeated references to cases and villains Holly had investigated (and killed) before. This novel can stand alone, but King makes it clear he wants you to go read the earlier installments, and his frequent hints intrude on the story.
Which is okay, the story that is, but as with some of the lesser King novels I’ve read, it’s windy, winding, and frustratingly slow. On top of which is Holly, a fussy and prudish person with irritating habits. There are points in the novel where she makes intuitive jumps about the missing persons cases she’s investigating that I simply did not buy. The hand of the author, helping her make connections and deductions, is a bit too visible.
In Never Flinch, Holly hasn’t changed: she’s still fussy and prudish. Nor has King: his plotting is still windy, winding, and frustratingly slow. Incidents from previous Holly Gibney novels proliferate; Holly continues to make less-than-believable intuitive jumps in solving cases. In this novel, Holly, a waif of a person, strains credulity as a hired bodyguard, and a kick-ass one at that.
Whereas the previous Holly Gibney novel I’d read had a supernatural element and could be considered scary, this one’s bad guys are a pair of everyday maladjusted sickos, repellent but not all that frightening. Never Flinch would have been an iffy choice for our book club’s traditional Halloween read — mystery/thriller yes, horror no.
Woven into the plot of Never Flinch are themes of feminism, pro-choice activism, and sensible precautions against Covid. The earlier novel, Holly, was similar in this respect, and as with that novel, this one gets some one-star reviews from the anti-woke/do-my-own-research crowd.
Definitely a lesser King novel, but even the lesser ones are decent reads.
Lucky Day
by Chuck Tingle
Horror/Science Fiction
Description (from Goodreads):
Four years ago, an unthinkable disaster occurred. In what was later known as the Low-Probability Event, eight million people were killed in a single day, each of them dying in improbable, bizarre strangled by balloon ropes, torn apart by exploding manhole covers, attacked by a chimpanzee wielding a typewriter. A day of freak accidents that proved anything is possible, no matter the odds. Luck is real now, and it’s not always good.
My review:
I host book club every October. Since I was born on Hallowe’en (and since the host gets to pick the category), I opt for horror, suggesting four or five titles for club members to choose from. I included a Chuck Tingle novel on this year’s list and the group voted for it, no doubt because last year we read and liked an earlier Tingle work, Bury Your Gays.
This one’s a bit harder to like IMO. As with BYG, LD’s lead character, Vera, is on the LGBTQ spectrum, about to enter into a same-sex marriage and dreading coming out to her mother. But this is just a a scene-setter for a violent and bloody “low probability event” that over the span of approximately twenty minutes kills or grievously wounds seven million people around the world, with the greatest impact occurring in the United States, and Vera at the center of one of the LPE’s bloodiest, most gruesome manifestations.
What’s hard to like, you ask? For me, it was the Vera’s deadpan first-person narration of the LPE, a series of grotesque events so contrived and unlikely as to be literally impossible, so removed from reality this reader for one had no sense of horror whatever … more like “What is this shit I’m reading?”
From there, the novel pairs Vera, an LPE survivor, with another LPE survivor, a government agent assigned to investigate the LPE and mitigate its ongoing effects, an agent with ICE-like (ICE under King Trump, that is) powers and freedom from accountability. The pair form a sort of X-Files Mully & Scully team, and guess what? Additional LPEs are happening all the time, a bit of knowledge suppressed by the government.
I struggle to find meaning in this novel. Like Vera, the LPE sent me into an existential stupor: if this can happen, what does anything mean and why should I care? In Vera’s case the question’s about life. In mine, it’s about the book. I think Tingle’s hypothesis is that good and bad fortune are not entirely random; if, for example, someone has found a way to manipulate fortune in his or her favor, a portal between realities opens and a tsunami of ill fortune temporarily surges into our universe. Uh, okay, that’s a thought. But how does it relate to life, to living, to good or evil, to anything? What is this book about?
A masturbatory exercise in fantasy, this. Though well-written and with believable characters, the story seems more a half-drunken ten-minute bar conversation between Neil Gaiman fans than a proper horror novel.
Light Years From Home
by Mike Chen
Science Fiction/Mystery
Description (from Goodreads):
Every family has issues. Most can’t blame them on extraterrestrials.
My review:
This was my book club selection for January 2026.
My overall reaction was frustration, mixed with irritation. Mike Chen’s storytelling method is to drag things out, setting up scenes where the reader expects important things to happen or for issues to be resolved, only to stop short and take narrative detours. His characters, always on the verge of resolving conflict by explaining themselves to one another, contrive not to get there for chapter after chapter.
This is a family drama with a science fiction overlay, neither one fully developed.
Observer
by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress
Science Fiction/Thriller
Description (from Goodreads):
If we can alter the structure of reality, should we? In Observer, scientist Robert Lanza, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, is joined by Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author Nancy Kress to confront the space between biology and consciousness.
My review:
Tor offered me a copy of Observer to read & review.
It’s difficult to avoid spoilers, but I’ll try. The experiments at the heart of this science fiction thriller have to do with proving a theory emerging from quantum physics: that nothing exists until it is observed. That the things we observe, from the world around us down to such details as the linoleum on the kitchen floor … and the kitchen itself … are actually energy with no physical form until humans observe them. And once the first human sees that mountain range or kitchen, every other human on the planet will see exactly the same mountain range and kitchen. But wait, are we then not unformed energy as well, incorporeal until we ourselves are observed?
That’s not all … whenever any human or presumably beast or insect does something that produces a result that could have gone two or three ways, two or three alternate realities pop into existence, with additional realities popping up for every additional result branching off from the first two or three, and the humans, beasts, and insects in those alternate realities are as real as you or me.
Oh my god here we go.
Look, reader, just buy in long enough to get to the thriller part, where doctors and scientists start planting microchips in test subjects’ brains and plugging them into a supercomputer which tracks their movements and activities in alternate realities the test subjects create themselves … worlds in which loved ones do not die but live on, or where test subjects who are in fact dying can grab a foothold and keep living.
You’re going to have to wade through pages and pages of theorizing to get to the alternate realities, which start small but take a dramatic turn once the project’s data is leaked to the Dark Web, but I’ve said too much already. Actually, what denizens of the Dark Web do with these alternate realities is probably the most realistic speculation in the novel, along with the reaction, once word gets out, of evangelicals, anti-science types, and fellow scientists.
I didn’t get irritated until the project leaders invite 60 Minutes to the island to interview a neutral outside observer, a veteran war correspondent, who has agreed to be implanted and experience an alternate reality herself. Instead, Mike Wallace or whoever sits down with George, the lead scientist and man behind the theory for an improbably-long interview about the science, and we don’t get to see the war correspondent’s interview at all … we’re just told it happened and was good. Well, that isn’t enough! We’ve already read the science behind the theory, which fills up almost half this unnecessarily-long novel … we want some actual experiences “next door,” walking in the test subjects’ shoes! At the very end, we do get a little, along with some feel-good speculation that it may be possible to communicate between realities.
I wrestled between a three- and four-star rating. The characterization, at least that of a few main players, is okay, but there are way too many of them and most get short shrift. I gather there is solid science behind some of the theories explored in this novel, and I for one could not have explained things any better than the authors did. Even when I was irritated with it, as explained above, I couldn’t put the book down. All in all, Observer provides plenty of food for thought. Science fiction with actual science, go figure. So four stars then.
The Catch (Slough House #6.5)
by Mick Herron
Thriller/Espionage
Description (from Goodreads):
Set in the same world as the Slough House series, this explosive novella by bestselling spy-master Mick Herron, is a treat for his massive fan base.
My review:
Sad short (and how) story about a former intelligence agent gone to seed (and alcohol). Includes a chapter from another, unrelated story. Both firmly in the Slough House world. Worth a read if you’re a Mick Herron/Slough House fan. Don’t expect to feel good afterward.