Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 7/19/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: another whiplash lineup here, buckle up…at least you can boogie a little bit before the crushing weight of seasonal depression and/or a doomed relationship gets to you.

Enjoy this week’s review!

SUNDAY SONGS: 7/19/26

“Glass Mountain Trust” – Mark Ronson & The Business Int’l.

More little Madeline lore: Record Collection dominated my elementary school music taste. I haven’t revisited the whole thing, but every song feels nostalgic even if I don’t remember it as clearly. Mark Ronson assembled a disparate team of Avengers for this album (Simon Le Bon, Q-Tip, Rose Elinor Dougall, Spank Rock, and Boy George are just a handful of them), but the result is a surprisingly cohesive collection of pop songs. Chances are, that’s owed to Ronson’s talent as a producer—the glossy, neon sheen he applies to these songs make them feel like a machine all his own—he has a very distinct synth sound on this album. “Glass Mountain Trust” was one of the ones that I’d forgotten about, with D’Angelo serving as the lead vocalist. Even if you took away the metaphor of the glass mountain, the electronic atmosphere of this track feels glassy, all shiny and transparent. From D’Angelo’s rippling vocals to the drum machine that seems appear and disappear in thin air, “Glass Mountain Trust” proves Mark Ronson’s innate ear for intricate pop music.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Red Star Rebels – Amie Kaufman – “Formidable, the structure surrounding me only looks/I bust right through the glass, one attempt and that’s all it took/I wanted to remain feeling safe, but it just can’t sustain me/It feels more like a trap, gotta break out, won’t let it contain me…”

“Stonemilker” – Björk

I’m nearly done listening to all of Björk’s discography (and if I keep at it like this, I should be able to finish it all before her new album in 2027, EEK), but I’m pointedly afraid of listening to Vulnicura. I know it’ll devastate me. I just need to rip off the bandaid. “Lionsong” already guts me on every single listen, and I know that it’s objectively not the most brutal song on that album, so I’m already cooked. “Stonemilker” seems to be one of the more toned-down songs on the album, but it’s no less emotionally vulnerable. Björk’s dissection of the dissolution of her relationship with Matthew Barney is as raw as the open wounds she describes in the lyrics; her plaintive pleas for connection and understanding carve a rift in the notes themselves. But it’s the central metaphor of trying to connect as being as fruitless as “milking a stone” that drives home the emotions—there’s a lingering sense that their relationship is destined for failure, and she knows it. It’s a six minute lament of futility, the final toss of an anchor before it gets lost in the stormy waves.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Memory Called Empire – Arkady Martine – “A juxtapositioning fate/Find our mutual coordinates/Moments of clarity are so rare/I better document this…”

“Za” – Supergrass

Even in some UK publications, the impact of Supergrass on Britpop goes woefully understated, especially post-“Alright.” They were crafting album after album of some of the tightest British rock tracks time after time, with a mind for experimentation and a devoted admiration to the great British rock bands of years past. But if there’s anything that they’re hardly acknowledged for doing, it’s making a killer opening track. I mean, come on—“In It For the Money?” “Moving?” Dude. If I had that many genius album openers up my sleeve, I’d be able to die happy. “Za” deserves a place among those ranks as the cinematic opener to Life on Other Planets. What starts as a spacey synth that belongs at the beginning of a documentary about the universe unfolds into a classic rock ballad, with electric guitars arm in arm with sci-fi keyboards. Sure, there’s not much going on the lyrics department, but “Za” was built to indulge in instrumentals, not lyrics. It’s the perfect introduction to the album, which swerves in all manner of rock-adjacent directions, but wasn’t afraid to explore the outer space of Supergrass’s musical capabilities. It’s a classic.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Full Speed to a Crash Landing – Beth Revis – “Love/I see it in lies/It shines like the winter sun/So why don’t we get it on…”

“Gronlandic Edit” – of Montreal

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? came out around when I was in kindergarten. I remember my dad playing it pretty early on in the car, and when I first heard “Gronlandic Edit,” my tiny, barely-grown mind was just enraptured. Something about that chord progression cracked something in half in my brain like a geode. I wanted to hear “Gronlandic Edit” over and over. Looking back, it was a sign of things to come that this toddling five year old who liked pink, Zoboomafoo, and stuffed pigs was also fixated on an of Montreal song. Pretentious music taste foreshadowing? Depressing music foreshadowing? Gay foreshadowing? Probably all three.

To this day, “Gronlandic Edit” retains that enchantment that first snagged me when I didn’t have the words to describe it. I recently revisited it thanks to Kevin Barnes’ episode of Life of the Record about Hissing Fauna, which was, admittedly, a real downer. They explained that song after song, they were holed up in their ex-wife’s hometown in Norway trying to turn their depression into something upbeat just to feel something. Indeed, “Gronlandic Edit,” which starts off with a hypnotic, funk-like bassline and electronic claps, begins with a description of Barnes sarcastically singing: “I am satisfied hiding in our friend’s apartment/Only leaving once a day to buy some groceries/Daylight, I’m so absent minded/Nighttime, meeting new anxieties.” Sometimes you make bleak-sounding music to articulate your bleak feelings, but if you’re Kevin Barnes, you try to dance the seasonal depression away. Whatever the case, “Gronlandic Edit” remains infectious—the immaculate construction of the chord progression of the chorus somehow makes a string of notes into a key that bottles the deep-seated yearning residing in Barnes’s heart. Their layered harmonies rise as though in prayer, dismissing of organized religion and yet simultaneously desperate for something to pray to in order to anchor themself through their disarray. (It’s a common theme throughout Hissing Fauna—just see “A Sentence of Sort in Kongsvinger” and its prayers to “a saint nobody has heard of.”) It’s a self-deprecating cocktail about outer and inner concerns, especially the biting barbs he directs at himself in the lyrics about the “faker indie star” (yowch, give yourself a little credit…).

It’s no wonder that Barnes doesn’t look back on Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? fondly. The whole album is an unforgiving chronicle of self-loathing, parenthood fears, marital tension, and seasonal depression. And yet there’s a reason why it’s held up for so long—it’s some of the most meticulously crafted indie pop of the 2000’s. There’s always some beauty to be found in the darkest of times, even if you have to force it out of yourself just to see it.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Ephemera Collector – Stacy Nathaniel Jackson – “Daylight, I’m so absent minded/Nighttime, meeting new anxieties/So am I erasing myself?/Hope I’m not erasing myself…”

“Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” – The Magnetic Fields

When “Andrew in Drag” gained traction on TikTok last year, I was surprised that a lot of people took it seriously—not as a song poking fun at the confines of heterosexuality and masculinity, but as a tragic tale of a repressed, closeted man who could never fulfill his queer desires. I kept thinking to myself: wasn’t the jokiness obvious? Were the lyrics—full of rhyming innuendos and dick jokes—not enough to clue people in that this song wasn’t at least partially silly?

Sure, it’s TikTok, the place media literacy goes to die, but then I remembered—I used to think that “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” was playing it straight too. Stephin Merritt is a trickster and frequently sarcastic in his songwriting, but he’s written his fair share of sincere songs (see: “The Book of Love,” which is about as genuine as you can get with a love song). And then I saw The Magnetic Fields on the anniversary tour for 69 Love Songs, where they played this song—and explained that it was a parodic, Sonny & Cher-style duet about a couple who hate each other’s guts. When I first heard it in high school, it just depressed me—and that’s saying something, given that my musical diet at the time primarily consisted of Car Seat Headrest, Radiohead, and Sparklehorse. But it struck me as so achingly tragic: this woman built her whole life around her husband, only for him to only respond “yeah, oh yeah” to all of her darkest fears about him, and then he murders her? It sure is bleak.

But after that revelation at the live show, “Yeah! Oh, Yeah”‘s sarcasm is blatant. A lot of it was evident in the performance, where Claudia Gonson’s mischievous grin and Stephin Merritt’s drier-than-dry delivery of each “yeah, oh yeah” gave the song’s intended nature away. “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” is full of mockery, from the playground “ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah” of the chorus, to Merritt’s exaggeratedly villainous portrayal of the gold-digging, murderous husband. The more Gonson’s fears escalate, the funnier each utterance of “yeah, oh yeah” gets—it goes from simply confirming that the husband isn’t in love with her anymore to “would you really kill your wife? Yeah, oh yeah!” It’s all very camp—it’s hard to expect anything less from The Magnetic Fields.

BONUS: Suki Waterhouse, an avid Magnetic Fields fan, recently performed a duet of “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!” with Stephin Merritt, and she does a pretty solid job at Claudia Gonson’s part:

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Here Beside the Rising Tide – Emily Jane – “I thought if we lived apart/We could make a brand-new start/Do you want to break my heart?/Yeah, oh yeah…”

That’s it for this week’s songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (7/14/26) – Machine (White Space, #2)

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Thankfully, after last week’s disappointment, we’ve got something to save the track record for Disability Pride Month. I started Elizabeth Bear’s White Space trilogy earlier this year, and I knew I wanted a physical copy of book 2. It’s one of the great joys in life when a sequel is better than the first book—and Ancestral Night was already a 4.5-star read for me, so this was huge! Machine was a fantastic step up for a series that’s already a cut above the rest.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Machine (White Space, #2) – Elizabeth Bear

Dr. Brookllyn Jens is a special kind of doctor. Her patients are usually aliens, and her status as an emergency specialist means that her job description tends to involve having to jump out of spaceships. It’s already a job that keeps her on the edge. But when Dr. Jens and her crew discover two ships that have been abandoned for thousands of years, they uncover a mystery with layers upon layers of disastrous implications. With a strange, antiquated AI, an entire human crew in cryosleep, and a potential conspiracy on their hands, Dr. Jens and her crew must race against the clock to make sure that everybody makes it out alive.

TW/CW: ableism, misogyny, medical content, xenophobia, violence, murder

Genuinely, my sole problem with this novel is the title. Elizabeth Bear thought out this intricate and complex space opera world full of thousands of aliens and unique space travel, and couldn’t think of a more memorable title than Machine? I mean, yeah. There sure are Machines. Lots of ’em. But come on, really.

As much as I enjoyed Haimey’s story in Ancestral Night, I really think that making the White Space series several collected companion novels was the right move. It expands the intricate world that Elizabeth Bear has crafted in so many exciting ways that were only possible through the eyes of a different cast of characters. I loved the ways that the Synarche and all of the different species within it were fleshed out. Bear’s writing is as sharp as ever—her voice is so witty and hilarious, but she also knows just how to stick the landing when it comes to the more climactic or serious moments. The pacing was top-notch, especially considering that Machine is nearly 500 pages long—I blew through hundreds of pages at a time, and Bear never lost me.

I absolutely adored Dr. Jens as a protagonist, and Bear’s willingness to let her protagonists be messy yet lovable people made her shine. Dr. Jens has such a dry sense of humor, and her wry observations about the world around her made Machine such an entertaining read. But beyond that, I loved her continuous self-reflection—about the ideas she’s constructed about herself, but also about her work and the world around her. The supporting cast was so vibrant and lovable—it was a treat to see Cheerilaq again, first off, but all of the characters were so delightful and added a real human (and syster) authenticity to Core General’s staff. Sometimes your coworker gets on your nerves for no discernible reason, and they’re also a massive cetacean-like being getting wheeled around in a massive tank. On that subject, I loved all of the new Systers that Bear introduces. My creature design brain predictably became that meme of the dog with the propeller beanie and the giant lollipop seeing all of the truly alien aliens that populated the Synarche. But Bear went beyond good creature design and into crafting memorable, multilayered characters, which is what makes her space opera stand out in the end.

In particular, the expansion of the AI and robots in the Synarche was one of the most intriguing aspects of the world that Bear discusses in Machine. The whole plotline with Helen Alloy was one of the most well-executed. I love how Bear interrogates the objectification of women and how sci-fi has historically translated this into female-presenting robots. The visceral discomfort that Dr. Jens has that Helen was specifically created to have a hypersexualized, feminine form felt was like seeing the sun peer through the clouds after decades of weird men writing all kinds of messed-up sex-bots. It’s treated with the appropriate level of disgust—both on Helen and Dr. Jens’s part. Helen’s manipulation also ends up being vital to the later twist, and her entire arc of deconstructing the lies that she was programmed with was handled with such tenderness. Beyond the robots, I think that thread of treating people who have been brought up with hateful ideologies and not immediately dismissing those with different opinions was one of the best aspects of Machine; Bear’s insistence that people—human, alien, or AI—are not inherently bad, only victims of harmful ideas, was so necessary.

Bear’s take on disability in a sci-fi context was also such a respectful and well-researched one! She listed off several sensitivity readers in the acknowledgements, and their work paid off—for someone who seems to be non-disabled, by all accounts, this might be one of the most caring representations of a disabled person and their struggles in sci-fi I’ve seen by a non-disabled author. Dr. Jens has a chronic pain disorder, and she has a special exo-suit that manages some of her pain, but not all of it—sci-fi tech still has limitations in the far, far future. She still aches and gets physically taxed from her daring missions. Granted, I’m not chronically ill, but it felt like Bear paid so much attention to how Dr. Jens’s symptoms would present and how her high-stakes profession would affect it. Additionally, there’s a lot of talk about how disability is handled in the future; there was lots of discussion of “rightminding,” a process that, among other things, mitigates the effects of some mental illnesses. It would’ve been so easy to just slap it on as a cure-all technology, but Bear’s approach was one that I rarely see in sci-fi. It’s not necessarily “disability isn’t cured,” but it’s handled on a case-by-case basis, there’s an understanding that different kinds of disabled people have different needs and opinions about how they want to live with their disabilities with the technology available. This rejection of the one-size-fits-all approach to disability was a breath of fresh air, and wasn’t afraid to get into the nuance of how disabled people live their lives.

Disability wasn’t the only issue that gets dealt with in a refreshing amount of nuance. Bear was not afraid to get into the weeds with this novel, and it made my reading experience so much better. Machine, more so than its predecessor, gets into how a utopia and utopian ideas can be twisted into something sinister. It all feels very Ursula K. LeGuin—the Synarche is without a doubt an ambiguous utopia like The Dispossessed. (First off, I liked that Bear interrogates the ethics of “rightminding” targeting potentially “dangerous ideologies,” and how that ends up being decidedly non-utopian.) I appreciated that Bear discusses how well-intentioned utopias can be co-opted into vehicles for hatred, but also how that revelation wracks the people who genuinely believed in this utopia—people like Dr. Jens. Her arc in having faith in her hospital and the Synarche was so human—her entire reality and faith in the organization she devoted her life to is messily upended. But the realization that she comes to—that you can take the good work you wanted to do and the faith in your fellow people outside of corrupt organizations and do your own work—was one that feels so vital. I also loved the thematic potential of the infectious meme—not unlike the spread of a hateful ideology—that is treated as an infection that has to be weaned out with attention and care. Bear’s depictions of that crushing realization and how Dr. Jens and her coworkers pick up the pieces was so heartfelt, and a very potent message in this day and age.

All in all, a spectacular companion to Ancestral Night that expanded Elizabeth Bear’s masterfully crafted space opera universe with pulse-pounding action and heart. 5 stars!

Machine is the second book in the White Space trilogy, a series of companion novels set in the same universe; it is also includes Ancestral Night (book 1) and Folded Sky (book 3). Elizabeth Bear is also the author of several other series, including the New Amsterdam series (New Amsterdam, Seven for a Secret, The White City, Ad Eternum, and Garrett Investigates), the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy (Dust, Sanction, and Grail) and many others

Today’s song:

still going through my mom’s records from the ’80s. this remains peak.

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 7/12/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: four years of Sunday Songs (!!), and the vibes are nothing short of baffling. Buckle up. And if you happen to get unexpectedly bopped on the head by falling fish, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 7/12/26

“The Earth Died Screaming” – Tom Waits

I know the expression “[xyz] could kill a Victorian child” is overused, but my shuffle recently made the transition from this song to “L to the OG,” and I feel like that could reasonably put a Victorian child into a coma. It almost put me into one.

I think I was destined to stumble upon more Tom Waits eventually. I guess he’s been having a bit of a minor moment, what with the recent needle drop in Wake Up Dead Man and his emergence from hibernation on Massive Attack’s biting anti-war track “Boots on the Ground” (which samples this song!). I’d also been familiar with him from his feature on Sparklehorse’s “Dog Door”; the words “gremlin,” “goblin,” and “chaos” have lost all of their meaning thanks to Tumblr, but if there’s anybody who actually sounds like a gremlin on that song, it’s Mark Linkous. And then here comes Tom Waits bellowing like an ogre. The whole experience of “Dog Door” is like witnessing some bog goblins performing a sacrificial ritual in an abandoned shed with some rusty nails and a fish skeleton. Great stuff. It’s peak, just trust me.

Bone Machine in particular vaguely fascinated me from afar—it always seemed to pop up on my Apple Music recommended albums. Of course, my brother ended up being the impetus for me finding this song. Is the fact that I’ve had “The Earth Died Screaming” on repeat on and off for a few weeks a cause for concern? Probably. But it’s such a captivating herald of the apocalypse. Wait’s signature growl is probably the only voice that could properly convey the bleakness of this vision of the end of the world. We’re talking Biblical levels of apocalypse here—the Devil’s shoveling coal, for one, but the last line of the last verse invokes the plague of locusts, so we’re already off to a great start. Waits’ rasping delivery of “Bring me some water/Put it in this skull” might set the atmosphere more than any of the others. Some of the lyrics are truly spine chilling—I don’t know why, but the invocation of army ants picking off the bones of whoever’s left after the initial onslaught of ungodly abominations gives me the willies. And the way that Waits’s lips seem to form around the words “it rained mackerel, it rained trout” cement this song’s feeling of being passed down as an omen of doom between haggard street preachers. The percussion, which marches on like a dirge, sounds like it’s being played on the dusty ribcage of a horse. I can almost imagine a Cab Calloway-like parade of skeletons marching along to this song. All of the instruments are sparse here, and the Lisa Germano-esque organ outro only adds to the feeling of foreboding. It all feels very Cormac McCarthy to me, and if not for the fact that I hated The Road, it would’ve been my book pairing—it’s a bleak tale, a world populated by dust, bones, and dirt roads that haven’t seen human feet in years.

Wait’s storytelling is what keeps this from going fully into The Road territory, but more notably, I think it’s the romance. It’s not a ballad by any stretch. But the fact that the rotted connective tissue of the chorus, howled by Waits, is “The earth died screaming/While I lay dreaming/Dreaming of you” sets the tone for the song—every post-apocalyptic trope is happening to Earth in an unrelenting barrage, but he’s still dreaming of that you. Amidst the horror, there’s fleeting bright moments—”I walk between the raindrops” for one, one of my favorite lines from the whole song—and maybe that’s the real human instinct of perseverance during the apocalypse, even while you’re getting pelted by locusts and fish.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Anthem – Noah Hawley – “And the great day of wrath has come/And here’s mud in your big red eye/The poker’s in the fire/And the locusts take the sky…”

“Peter the Dog” – mary in the junkyard

At long last…Role Model Hermit, everybody!! The album I’ve been anticipating for years has been out a little over a week now, and the shine hasn’t worn off. It’s such an excellent spread of the things I love best about mary in the junkyard. It’s a lovingly-sewn patchwork of remnants of their earlier sound and the more mature songwriters that they are now, full of off-kilter, Radiohead-esque chord progressions paired with whimsical lyricism evoking folklore and landscapes populated by weird little Jim Henson puppet creatures. Role Model Hermit is a world of vegetable gardens, reincarnated mice, hungry dogs, and men turning into trees. All of it showcases a kind of storytelling that’s more than comfortable veering into the fantastical while retaining the weepy, angry vulnerability that endeared them to me in the first place.

The one major drawback of Role Model Hermit is that the most memorable tracks were the singles. It’s kind of a rough move to release almost half of the album as singles before the release (six, if you count the fact that they frequently played “Thou Shalt Sprout” before the album came out), and although there wasn’t a bad song on the album, none of them live up to early standouts like “Crash Landing” or “New Muscles.” Even so, the album remained full of surprises—”Peter the Dog” was a standout on the first listen. This is the aforementioned hungry dog, a comfortable but hungry creature that eats all of the narrator’s fears and anxiety. It’s one of the more painfully vulnerable songs on the album—it candidly captures that feeling when you think you’re out of the woods when it comes to anxiety or any other kind of issue, and then the feelings start to resurface: “I don’t understand my tears/I’ve been doing so well/And the big black dog ate all of my fear/And I was starting to smoke.” I love the imagery of the dog (Peter, apparently), because to an extent, these feelings are like a domesticated animal: you’ve learned how to treat them and lived with them, but even the most rigorous training can make old habits resurface. But the comfort that comes with this dog is that you can always train it more, and you can calm it down just as easily: “And I’m made of strong stuff/But I’ve always got this pain in my head.” mary in the junkyard have never shied away from this kind of vulnerability, and it’s resulted in so much fantastic songwriting; but their earlier songs were more scattershot in the lyrics, embodying their old Instagram bio of “angry weepy chaos rock.” But “Peter the Dog”—and Role Model Hermit as a whole—feel like the result of them really honing in on their songwriting, and the end product has resulted in their most impactful songs to date.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Heaven’s Graveyard – Grace Curtis – “I don’t understand my tears/I’ve been doing so well/And the big black dog ate all of my fear/And I was starting to smoke…”

“Death is Not the End” – Chelsea Wolfe

SHE’S BACK!!

So there’s definitely an album on the way. There has to be, she’s already announced a tour! Chelsea Wolfe recently reemerged with two new singles, this track and “The Dark.” I liked “The Dark,” “Death is Not the End” was, without question, the stronger of the two; while the eerie, meandering goth-folk of “The Dark” is solid but listless, “Death is Not the End” feels like much more fortified vision of a song, coalescing into the best parts of what I like about Chelsea Wolfe. Her ethereal whispers and the pluckings of an acoustic guitar assemble themselves like a skeleton before the real skin and muscles—the ascending, doom-y guitar as foreboding and ragged as a stormy cliffside—shield it. Amidst the crushing instrumentals in the latter half, she muses in her true gloomily poetic fashion, about the nature of death and transience: “This life heaves a sigh/Relief amid night/To water I return, in sea-dress/Seal-skin locked away for a time.” I, for one, fully support Wolfe’s selkie arc—her visuals for this set of singles return to the well-trod ground of “Chelsea Wolfe looking like a modern-day goddess in various biomes,” but the video for “Death is Not the End” is perfectly suited to the lyrics, with Wolfe clad in frilly tulle amidst kelp and a stony beach with bony spires rising from the shore.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Soul Keepers – Devon Taylor – “Let it wash over/Unspoken/Like the mouth that eats the tail/I keep hoping death is like the ocean…”

“Cancer of the Skull” – Cameron Winter

The last time I talked about Cameron Winter, he had a much sunnier outlook on life. Heavy Metal really seems to run the gamut of emotion, because we’ve gone from embracing the bumpy road of love to the battle between having to work an unsatisfying job and desperately wanting to create. Granted, enough of the lyrics have enough quirkiness to them to suggest that Winter at least has something of a humorous outlook on things: “Cancer of the ’80s/I was beat with ukuleles” sounds abjectly goofy out of context. For me, that’s what prevents “Cancer of the Skull” from being purely pessimistic for me—like the swaying rhythm of the acoustic guitar, Winter documents the boat-on-the-sea pendulum swing between devoting yourself to work and devoting yourself to creativity. There’s a bevy of interesting instruments that work themselves into the fabric of the songs, from the warbling organ to the grasshopper boings of the barely-audible jaw harp, and they all serve to make this push-and-pull feel like Winter’s “pirate’s crazy-eyed quest,” adding a degree of sarcastic grandeur to something that most creatives have to grapple with once in their lives. Winter’s rich vocals, layered one on top of the others, make the thesis of “Oh, songs are a hundred ugly babies/That I can’t feed” into the kind of chorus you’d drunkenly sing around the fire—and oof, yeah, that’s such a fantastic distillation of having millions of ideas but neither the time nor the patience to attend to them.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Embassytown – China Miéville – “I came here to sleep in your infamous kitchen/You’re holding out a baby’s shoes/I can’t take ’em/I pray to a pirate’s maniac religion…”

“Voyager” – PJ Harvey

What is it about songs called “Voyager” that always end up gutting me one way or another? I think it’s just the inherent bittersweetness and cosmic smallness that comes with evoking Voyager I. Yowch. Granted, PJ Harvey’s version didn’t really destroy me until I looked closer at the lyrics, but boygenius? Yup. I’m still reeling from their “Voyager” three years later. Damn you, Phoebe.

But we’re not here to talk about that “Voyager.” PJ Harvey’s newest track, a companion to an upcoming stage show by musician and physicist Professor Brian Cox, is a synth-driven slow-burn meditating on the probe that was launched into space nearly half a century ago. Amidst methodical keyboards that evoke the inner workings of a rocket, Harvey details its ongoing journey through the heavens: “Dark nights, dark days/Frozen, silent/Bearing Earth-songs.” The lyrics are simple and quite sparse, but it fits the construction of the song, a glacial build from keyboards into a grand orchestral hum. But then…ow, there was no need to gut me with the reference to Carl Sagan. Or, at least, that’s how I interpreted this line: “Look back at us/As a speck of dust/Darkness our home/Bear it through love.” It’s awfully similar to this line from page 371 of Contact: “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” …excuse me while I keel over into the fetal position for the next hour. FUCK.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Contact – Carl Sagan – “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (7/7/26) – Climate of Chaos

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

I wanted to kick off Disability Pride Month with something positive, but unfortunately, I don’t think that it’ll be the case. Whoops. They can’t all be bangers. I was intrigued by the concept of Climate of Chaos, and excited by the premise of a disabled main character navigating a dystopian world. Unfortunately, Climate of Chaos was not the Hunger Games successor that it purported itself to be.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Climate of Chaos – Cassandra Newbould

Fox LaRosa lives in the climate-ravaged wilderness of what was once Seattle. While the rich get to live in luxurious, climate-proof domes made by the infamous Aegis Corp, people like Fox and her sister Rabbit live on the edge of death—made worse by the mounting medical debt that Fox has been carrying ever since she became disabled. To make matters worse, a strange new virus is creeping its way up north, and if it hits Fox and her commune, it could spell disaster. But when Rabbit is kidnapped on a routine heist for medical supplies, Fox must fight her way into the rotten heart of Aegis Corp in order to find her sister—and figure out what Aegis wants with her.

TW/CW: medical trauma, violence, pandemic/epidemic, ableism, loss of loved ones, police brutality, loss of loved ones

The other day, I was watching BookLeo’s retrospective on the YA dystopian craze of the late 2000’s-early 2010’s, and she mentioned that one the most common plot elements throughout the books is that the inciting incident is that the protagonist has to find their missing sibling. I never even considered that, but it’s everywhere. If anything, Climate of Chaos is proof that the trope is alive and kicking today. It’s a foolproof inciting incident. Pour one out for all of the missing brothers and sisters that get put through the wringer for the plot in YA dystopias.

As a whole, I was disappointed by Climate of Chaos, but I’d like to acknowledge the positives, because there were some great aspects of this novel. We’re at least a decade out from the huge wave of Hunger Games copycats, but the issue that a lot of people had with them was that their dystopian worlds tended to be removed from real forms of oppression and didn’t make sense. Climate of Chaos, however, grounds its dystopia in two very real-world issues: climate change and medical debt. Newbould did an excellent job of going into all manner of ways that climate change could negatively impact our world in the future, from the more obvious weather changes to the spread of new diseases, the latter of which becomes very relevant to the plot. The discussions around medical debt and the poor treatment of disabled people under our healthcare system were very timely, and it pointed out that conditions for many disabled people are as dystopian today as they are in this fictional, far-flung future. And while I had my issues with Fox as a character, it’s so wonderful to see a disabled girl kicking butt in a YA book like this. Her cane being able to extend out of her belt and fold back into itself was indisputably badass, as was the fact that the cane had an extendable blade at the end.

Aside from those points, Climate of Chaos was unfortunately weak. There was some serious work that needed to be done with the characters. I hate to say it, but I think the only reason that Fox stands out from other teen dystopian protagonists is the fact that she’s disabled. Her entire personality is that unnecessarily gritty, edgy persona that you get when you’re trying to make a character sound “hardened,” to the point that it was overexaggerated. Half of her dialogue sounded straight out of Zack Snyder’s DC movies. It got old quickly. Apart from that, most of the characters were hardly characterized beyond a few base traits, and some—even the main characters—were only distinguished by the fact that Fox is friends with them. Cely at least had a distinct personality, but Asher and Eamon, despite being some of the central characters, didn’t get much beyond “boys who are friends with Fox.” Towards the end, there was also a faint indication that Asher and Fox had some sort of romantic chemistry, which felt forced, but more importantly, completely unearned—their relationship is a complete plateau from the beginning to the end of the book, and there was nothing that convinced me that there was any sort of romance brewing between them. It was all just the absolute bare minimum of character work.

The worldbuilding was largely hit or miss. I think Newbould did a decent job of establishing how the world (particularly Seattle) got to where it is in Climate of Chaos, and the structure of the different rungs of society made sense. The themes of inequality between disabled people and poor people were the only things keeping Aegis Corp from falling into the “the government is bad, but we’re not going to tell you anything except for that it’s bad” trap, but it was pretty close. Without spoiling, I think the reveal about Aegis Corp and the Vi (yes, that’s what they call the virus 🫩 peak YA dystopian cornball terminology lives, folks) was the most nonsensical part of the plot; with the established plot about the Harvest House, I feel like that erased all of the rationale for why Aegis Corp used the Vi in the way they did. At a certain point, there’s things that don’t even make sense for a comically mustache-twirling fictional government to do, just because the stuff that they’re doing would be such an unnecessary and unjustifiable drain on their resources.

Ultimately, I think the biggest issue with Climate of Chaos was that I never once felt like Fox or any of the other main characters were truly in danger. Despite them undergoing the notoriously dangerous Storm Runner trials with a ridiculously slim survival rate, all of the main characters came out without a scratch. Seriously! The main characters had a laughable amount of plot armor, and after about the halfway point, I just gave up on caring about any of them—Fox, Asher, Eamon, Cely, Trew, and all of the other main characters are completely fine, even though they’ve been exposed to a deadly virus, been in danger of being killed by their bloodthirsty teammates, and were almost gunned down by their Storm Runner superiors. Eamon is inside a factory that nearly explodes, and he comes out unscathed…give me a break. It just reeked of Newbould liking them too much and refusing to let any of them even get the smallest scrape on their knees. I didn’t even care that Fox had been taken to the Harvest House, because I knew by then that she’d come out the other side completely fine—and guess what? SHE DID. Along with the worldbuilding, this is what made me lose faith that any of the characters were actually in danger in this supposedly dystopian world.

A related sidenote: I don’t have chronic pain, so take this with a grain of salt, but other than Fox having to use her cane in a few situations, wouldn’t she be in excruciating pain during something as taxing as the Storm Runner trials? It’d be exhausting even for a nondisabled person. Granted, I remember an instance of her sneaking painkillers, but I feel like even that wouldn’t erase the pain of having to fight a bunch of other teenagers to the death day-in and day-out.

All in all, a YA dystopia that had its heart in the right place, but failed to make its dystopian world fully believable. 2.5 stars.

Climate of Chaos is a standalone, but Cassandra Newbould is also the author of Things I’ll Never Say and the editor of the anthology Every Body Shines: Sixteen Stories about Living Fabulously Fat.

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Books

♿️ The Bookish Mutant’s Books for Disability Pride Month (2026 Edition) ♿️

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Monday, bibliophiles!

Here in the U.S., July is Disability Pride Month! It seems like every year, representation—and all-around recognition—for disabled people only progresses by millimeters. Time and time again, it’s left on the back burner by so-called intersectional activists, continually ignored from unaccommodating public education to inaccessible infrastructure in the biggest cities and the smallest towns. It’s gotten bleaker still with the damaging rhetoric spread by R.F.K. Junior and by the Trump administration at large. And we’ve somehow let the r-word insidiously creep back into common use. I feel like it’s relevant that when I was in high school, I frequently heard people call their phones “autistic” when they were broken or not working—2019 wasn’t as long as ago as people would like to think. Dehumanizing disabled people has always been baked deep into the roots of our language and slang—and yet it’s so easy to just switch words around.

In short, the world hasn’t exactly gotten kinder to any of us in the disabled community. But recently my best friend sent me this hilarious (and wonderful) reel, and it reminded me of the endurance of our community:

Yes, this is totally goofy. But it’s true. Despite all of the rampant campaigns to dehumanize and outright eradicate disabled people in all aspects of life, we are still here. The disabled community is as diverse as our struggles, but we have weathered all of them. There are countless issues that we have to face, in the highest forms of government and even in the simple ways we interact with friends and strangers. But if there’s one thing that the disabled community has done, it is endure—and endurance is nothing without community. The strength of our community is what has allowed us to create a more accessible world, little by little, and it is the key for making the world a kinder and more accessible place to be.

Also, four years out from my installation of this post where I talked about the absolute dearth of SPD representation out there (see 2022 in the “previous lists” section below), I’ve finally read one more book with a main character with SPD. Halfway through 2026, and it was one of the best books I’ve read this year by a long shot. Thank you, Jamie Sumner. Representation matters. 🩵

NOTE: my memory (and the internet) is imperfect, so if I’ve misrepresented/mislabeled any of the specific rep in these books, don’t hesitate to let me know!

KEY FOR TERMS IN THIS POST:

  • MC: Main character
  • LI: Love interest
  • SC: Side character

For my previous lists, click below: 

Let’s begin, shall we?

♿️ THE BOOKISH MUTANT’S BOOKS FOR DISABILITY PRIDE MONTH (2026 EDITION) ♿️

FANTASY:

SCIENCE FICTION:

REALISTIC/HISTORICAL FICTION:

*the POV character in Pod is a dolphin, but I feel that the representation still counts.

NONFICTION:

TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK! Have you read any of the books on this list? What are your favorite books with disability rep? Let me know in the comments!

Today’s song:

THIS JUST IN, ROLE MODEL HERMIT IS A BANGER

That’s it for this post! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 7/5/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: in honor of the 250th anniversary of our glorious, flawless United States of America, I’ve concocted a color scheme that pairs well with the sickly algal green of the Reflecting Pool. God bless America, or something. Worry not: there’s enough women, queers, and people of color to give half of the White House a stroke. D.E.I.!

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 7/5/26

“Lost Boys” – Phoebe Bridgers

SHE’S BACK!! SHE’S BACK, THIS IS NOT A DRILL! LOST WEEKEND COMES OUT THIS AUGUST!!!

Returning to music—and the public eye—was always going to be a tall order for Phoebe Bridgers. In the absence of new music since 2022, her fame has unexpectedly skyrocketed. It’s so bizarre to think that when I got into her music in 2019, she was on par with artists like Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail, or Jay Som in terms of recognition, and now she’s selling out arena shows…whiplash, for sure. Opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour was likely the turning point. Either way, when she finally came back, there would be an inevitable torrent of naysayers and unwarranted speculation. I almost still can’t believe that she’s back.

Most of my thoughts about “Lost Boys” coalesced while I was listening to it on repeat while making a grilled cheese, which feels strangely fitting—here’s a song with themes of immaturity and not wanting to grow up, and there I stood with the ultimate kid’s menu dinner. (At least it wasn’t American cheese and white bread.) But the doubts kept swirling around in my head. Is the production too polished? Are the horns and tempo too much like “Kyoto?” Was Punisher the only trick up Phoebe Bridgers’s sleeve after all? Sure, I maintain that the production feels on the unnecessarily slick side (damn you, Jack Antonoff). And it does ring similarly to “Kyoto.” But “Lost Boys” feels like being invited into something new. It feels like the lulling into a false sense of security before the sound of Lost Weekend unfolds in earnest.

Yet even if it wasn’t, “Lost Boys” would be a worthy addition to Bridgers’s catalogue. The “Kyoto” comparison is apt because they have that same quality of feeling like a reckless sprint—both to escape something they should’ve confronted long ago. Imagery of fantasy and escapism melds with Bridgers’s usual structure of very modern vignettes—these lost boys are emblematic of the kind of escapism she longs for, but she’s equally damaged by being in the company of that amount of emotional stuntedness and immaturity. It’s a bittersweet concoction, made all the more so by the effortless shifts from whispery reflection to the raw-throated count-off before the final chorus. “Fun” isn’t the word I’d normally describe Phoebe Bridgers with, but I can’t help but feel a rush of excitement every time I listen to this song—there’s something ecstatic about it amidst the uncertainty. Maybe it’s the fact that both Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus quietly contributed backing vocals. Either way, “Lost Boys” is a strong start for Bridgers’s long-awaited return.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? – Temi Oh – “To another life/Where they make you cut your hair/Impatient with a rifle and your papers/Weightless, but not scared…”

“All My Loving” – Jim Noir

Jim Noir’s new album, The DLC Tapes, is now available exclusively on Patreon and Ko-Fi! If you’re financially able, I highly recommend this album alongside Programmes for Cools.

After all this time…not one but TWO Jim Noir albums this year! We truly have a bountiful harvest on our hands. Alongside Programmes for Cools (now available on all streaming platforms), Jim Noir has released The DLC Tapes, an album of 13 more songs previously released as part of the Jim Noir EP Club. (This song is technically a double-dip that I featured all the way back in 2022, but it was well before I even started writing these posts. If any song deserves it, it’s this one.) From the start of the Programmes announcement, I was holding out hope that “All My Loving” (originally from EP 7) would make the cut—it was one of the best tracks from his entire run of EPs, a delightful piece of catchy, ’60s-indebted jangle-pop. Granted, the changes from EP 7 to The DLC Tapes are minimal—mainly just the production—but it was exactly what I was hoping for. “All My Loving” was already a prime example of just how neatly Noir has carved his niche over the years—it’s proof that his craft has only gotten better as the years have gone by. The cleaner production amplifies the cheery, dreamy mood of the track—the harmonies, the starbursts of space-age synth, and the warm organ all get their flowers with this fresh coat of polish.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Cybernetic Tea Shop – Meredith Katz – the lyrics are minimal, but the electronic, cozy feel of this track wouldn’t feel out of place in a tea shop run by robots.

“I’m a Fool to Want You” (Frank Sinatra cover) – Mitski

If there’s any artist who genuinely baffles me with the unexpectedness of their cover choices, it’s Mitski. Case in point: for the 10th anniversary of Puberty 2, Mitski released an extended edition that included two extra covers: one of One Direction, and one of Frank Sinatra. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that Mitski was throwing darts at a board with all of the most popular artists of the past 70 years and covering whatever they landed on. But both of these covers—yes, also the One Direction one—show off the many different facets of her artistry that frequently show up in her original music. Her cover of “Fireproof” has notes of her more straightforward rock days, especially from Bury Me at Makeout Creek.

“I’m a Fool to Want You” is almost the exact opposite. Accompanied only by grainy, droning synths, she turned Sinatra’s swell of big band strings into some of her most desolate-sounding music. The comparison that immediately came to mind was This Mortal Coil’s cover of Syd Barrett’s “Late Night”; both are incredibly sparse in their instrumentation, letting both of their vocalists unnervingly tremble to their hearts’ contents, and shining a spotlight on the more abjectly dreary parts of the lyrics. The latter part is more applicable to “Late Night,” but Mitski’s interpretation “I’m a Fool to Want You” turns a lovelorn ballad into something weighed down with deep-seated shame. Without the backing of an orchestra and a chorus of voices, “I’m a Fool to Want You” becomes almost unbearably ominous and lonely…in typical Mitski fashion.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Salvation Gambit – Emily Skrutskie – there’s a very “dark, ominous, abandoned spaceship” atmosphere that Mtiski creates with those droning synths.

“Sea Life Sandwich Boy” – Horsegirl

On the subject of songs that take me back to high school…

“Sea Life Sandwich Boy” occupies a brief but distinct place in my memory: sometime in the winter of 2021, during my senior year of high school—the start of my eventual Horsegirl awakening. This song will always be arm-in-arm with The Beatles’ “Oh! Darling”—I was listening to both of them on repeat at the time. It’s very indicative of Horsegirl’s early days—a very ’90s sound, a random, jokey title unrelated to the song, and vocals buried in grainy effects. No band starts out in their prime, but I’d say that Horsegirl started out damn near close—”Sea Life Sandwich Boy” could have easily been a standout on Versions of Modern Performance. Swimming in airy harmonies and precise riffs that make each note flicker like stars cut out of paper, “Sea Life Sandwich Boy” was an ambitious single for the band, but one that pays off to this day.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Amelia, If Only – Becky Albertalli – this is a very high school roadtrip playlist kind of song—exactly what this novel is.

“While I’ll Keep Writing Songs for You” (feat. St. Vincent) – Mon Laferte

Sure, this is Mon Laferte’s song, but it seems like a sign that St. Vincent is almost done ripping holes her tights and setting things on fire. Laferte and St. Vincent collaborated on “Tiempos Violentos” (“Violent Times“) off of Todos Nacen Gritando, her Spanish translation of All Born Screaming; There, Laferte delivers a visceral scream that rivals Annie Clark’s, but “While I’ll Keep Writing Songs For You” is worlds away from the battered rage of Todos Nacen Gritando. Instead, Laferte and Clark’s voices form harmonies that are nothing short of soul-warming—they’re seriously such a match made in heaven. “While I’ll Keep Writing Songs For You” is a somber, sleepless ballad about trying to cling to a static, depressed lover who barely seems to respond to her affection. Clark and Laferte’s wordless preludes almost say more than the lyrics, purely plaintive as though they’re trying to get the last word out in the emptiness of space. Laferte’s music video feels laser-attuned to the feel of the song—her she is, all dolled up and surrounded by flowers in her shopping cart, but the world beyond her borders on colorless.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Our Wives Under the Sea – Julia Armfield – “Will we ever be ok?/You left hair in the shower again/Why don’t we laugh instead/There is no need/To argue over stupid things/You are still depressed/While I’ll keep writing songs for you…”

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Monthly Wrap-Ups

May/June 2026 Wrap-Up 🪭

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Wednesday, bibliophiles!

I’m back with a wrap-up, and we’ve officially passed the halfway mark of 2026…jeez. Currently reporting you within hours of melting into a puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West from this heat. I feel like I should start paying my swamp cooler for the labor it’s been putting in for the past month. Stay cool and hydrated, everybody!

Let’s begin, shall we?

GENERAL THOUGHTS:

I’m coming to you in a very different place than I was while writing the March/April Wrap-Up, which is, for the most part, a welcome thing. Between my honors thesis, finals, and graduation, I had been constantly on for the most part. Sure, I had some time to squeeze in some fun and relaxation, but it was just go, go, go for most of the semester. But now I’ve got myself a nice Bachelor’s degree, and I’m spending it…not doing much. For right now, that’s exactly what I wanted.

I’ve spent most of the past few two reveling in the free time I have right now. I have several very disparate goals that I’ve set for the summer (exercise more, write one short story per month, and don’t buy any more yarn…send help, I’m drowning in yarn over here) that (knock on wood) I’ve managed to stay true to. But I love the routine I’ve set for myself. I love my college town, and I love taking walks to the local coffee shops, writing for an hour or two. (More often than not, those trips have also resulted in a trip to the record store, which has…[ahem] put a slight dent in my bank account. Maybe I need to put a ban on that too.) But ultimately, this summer has felt comfortably exploratory so far—I’m slowly trying new things, but they’ve all extended into cherished parts of my weekly routine.

So mostly, May and June have been about creativity. I’ve been more locked in than ever with my knitting, even if the results have been less than optimal. I’ve done so much more drawing and sketching. I’ve made more time to practice my guitar. I’ve written the most since I stopped my honors thesis. And I have more time to read than just before bed! Imagine that…

MAY READING WRAP-UP:

I read 13 books in May! It was really all over the place with a 5-star read and a DNF in the same month, but I read so many exciting books this month, both from new-to-me authors and familiar ones, focusing on AAPI authors for the Heritage Month.

1 – 1.75 stars:

All This Could Be Different

2 – 2.75 stars:

The Subtle Art of Folding Space

3 – 3.75 stars:

Flight of the Fallen

4 – 4.75 stars:

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

5 stars:

See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

FAVORITE BOOK OF THE MONTH (not counting re-reads): See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love – 5 stars

See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

REVIEWS:

SUNDAY SONGS:

BONUS:

JUNE READING WRAP-UP:

I read 14 books in June! It’s the most books I’ve read in a month in 2026, definitely owing to being freed up by summer. Though my ratings were once again all across the board, they trended towards positive ones—and I had some excellent reads from new and familiar queer authors for Pride Month!

2 – 2.75 stars:

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

3 – 3.75 stars:

Where Sleeping Girls Lie

4 – 4.75 stars:

Heaven’s Graveyard

FAVORITE BOOK OF THE MONTH: Idolfire – 4.75 stars

Idolfire

REVIEWS:

SUNDAY SONGS:

BONUS:

Today’s song:

That’s it for this wrap-up! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (6/30/26) – Where Sleeping Girls Lie

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles, and if you’re a fellow Coloradan, happy Election Day! Get your ballots in by 7 pm today for them to be counted! (And preferably cast your vote for Julie Gonzales for Senate—we need somebody truly progressive, not another AIPAC-backed old white dude in office.)

we don’t need hickenlooper anymore, get him outta here…

I was a fan of Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s Ace of Spades back when it first came out in 2021. Even though it’d been almost five years since I’d read a book of hers, I figured I’d give Where Sleeping Girls Lie a shot. Although it was by no means perfect, Where Sleeping Girls Lie was still a tense and fast-paced mystery.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Where Sleeping Girls Lie – Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Sade Hussein is ready to start over—no matter the cost. Freshly an orphan and homeschooled all her life, she’s enrolled in Alfred Noble Academy, a cutthroat boarding school where only the most privileged earn a spot. She has her reservations, but she finds comfort in Elizabeth, her roommate and fellow outsider. But when Elizabeth goes missing and the faculty of ANA doesn’t seem to care, Sade knows that the school has something sinister lurking beneath the surface—and she’ll do anything to expose it.

TW/CW: rape/sexual assault themes, suicide, animal death, substance abuse, murder, loss of loved ones

WARNING: this review contains spoilers! Proceed with caution if you want to read this book and haven’t yet.

It’s been almost five years since I read Ace of Spaces. My tastes have inevitably shifted a bit. But it says something that Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s writing feels just as sharp, even though I’m no longer in the target audience. Where Sleeping Girls Lie is a timely mystery that kept me hooked!

Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé has still got it. Where Sleeping Girls Lie is, for the most part, both excellently plotted and paced. This book is just over 400 pages (on my Kindle edition, at least), and I managed to blow through it in only two days. (Yes, I know I’m a fast reader, but for me, that’s still saying something.) Every beat of the mystery of Elizabeth’s mystery—and the sinister underbelly of ANA that gets exposed in the process—was meticulously planned, and I loved how the back-and-forth between Sade and Baz developed along with the clues they discovered. It was so grippingly written, and Àbíké-Íyímídé did such an excellent job of spreading the mystery and reveals out in a logical but still fast-paced way, giving enough breathing room between reveals to keep me hooked for the whole novel.

I also really enjoyed the dynamic between Sade and the other characters. Although there were times when Àbíké-Íyímídé’s writing felt a little too YA and her humor didn’t always land, she did a fantastic job writing the effortless rapport between all of the main characters. The dynamic between Sade and Baz was sweet, but I think I enjoyed the slow-burn romance between Sade and Persephone the most; in an age group where it’s so easy to write halfhearted insta-love, Àbíké-Íyímídé’s gradual, will-they-won’t-they dynamic between the two girls was one that I was rooting for from the start. As with her other novels, there’s diversity aplenty—it’s always so cool to see protagonists like Sade (Black, Muslim, sapphic, and has depression and C-PTSD) in the spotlight, and the diversity in this novel felt so effortless and natural. And as Where Sleeping Girls Lie deals with all manner of slimy, predatory characters, I enjoyed the nuance that Àbíké-Íyímídé applied to the many gross characters (especially Jude and August)—they weren’t cardboard villains, but realistic manipulators who had built up charming exteriors and skirted around the blame for their reprehensible actions.

That brings me to the main theme of Where Sleeping Girls Lie; I put trigger/content warnings at the top of all my reviews, but I would highly suggest keeping them in mind before reading this book. This novel deals a lot with rape culture, sexual assault, and how systemic misogyny protects powerful men from ever facing the consequences of their actions. While this novel is technically a murder mystery, there isn’t a singular “villain” to pin the crime on: the villain is the system, which I think is the best way to do justice to this issue. The resolution isn’t neatly tied in a bow, and all of the bad guys don’t get paraded off to jail; while Sade and the others get some semblance of closure, I liked that Àbíké-Íyímídé didn’t shy away from the fact that more often than not, rapists and misogynists are allowed by our patriarchal system to get off scot-free. Sade also has depression and C-PTSD, and while I can’t speak to the accuracy of the representation, I appreciated Àbíké-Íyímídé’s depiction of how such traumatic events can become deeply embedded into a person like her. It’s a biting indictment of rape culture that pulls no punches—exactly as it should be.

However, Where Sleeping Girls Lie faltered in the handling of its twists. Ultimately, what happens in the next two paragraphs is the main reason this didn’t get the full four stars from me. From the start, there’s the matter of Sade being an unreliable narrator; while Àbíké-Íyímídé maintains this for a solid amount of time, it feels like she all but abandoned the twist with Jamila until the last minute. We get Sade’s hallucinations/dreams about Jamila early on in the book, which were excellent in terms of building up the eerie atmosphere. However, they’re then completely forgotten, and there’s no further indication of Jamila’s role in the story until we get the reveal about her—to say that it’s put on the backburner is an understatement. It’s like Àbíké-Íyímídé completely forgot about her existence and then had to scramble to include her during the Big Reveal (with a capital B). I’m all for a surprise twists, but it feels like after the first 30 pages of the book, there’s hardly any indication that Sade has something that drastic to hide. I find it hard to believe that Sade didn’t even have a handful of fleeting memories of her recently dead twin sister throughout this entire thing.

The same can be said about the twist about Francis at the end of Where Sleeping Girls Lie. I get that the message was supposed to be that the “culprit” of the mystery was meant to be the system of patriarchy/rape culture/misogyny, and I appreciated that choice. But the twist about Jude being offhandedly killed by Francis out of nowhere just didn’t make much sense. Like with Jamila, it felt like Àbíké-Íyímídé had built up this intricate web for the Fishermen plot, and then forgot that there was supposed to be a culprit to the murder, and just threw a dart at one of the more unlikable characters just so that the more nuanced characters didn’t have to take the fall. The rest of the mystery of Where Sleeping Girls Lie was so well plotted that it just felt cheap to pin it on a relatively inconsequential character and move on.

All in all, a gripping YA mystery that grabbed my attention, but failed to clinch the full four stars for the handling of its twists. 3.75 stars!

Where Sleeping Girls Lie is a standalone, but Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé has also released Much Ado About Persephone, a short story set after the events of the novel. She is also the author of Ace of Spades, The Heirs, the co-author of Four Eids and a Funeral (with Adiba Jaigirdar), and has contributed to several short story anthologies, including The White Guy Dies First: 13 Stories of Fear and Power, Doctor Who: Origin Stories, Black Joy, and more.

Today’s song:

happy end of pride month. god, I love britpop.

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 6/28/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: sort of doing a 180 on Let’s Dance, and reverting to my high school self via Stranger in the Alps.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 6/28/26

“Virginia Plain” – Roxy Music

Seeing old photos of Roxy Music always cracks me up…5/6 of them look goofy as hell in all that leather and animal print, and then there’s Brian Eno over here casually serving enough looks to feed a family of four. Good god, I don’t think anybody’s gotten that closet to valiantly fighting male-pattern baldness and winning. The receding hairline fought hard, but damn if Brian Eno wasn’t fighting just as hard.

Okay, maybe I should go easier on the other members of the band, because “Virginia Plain” reminds me of why I love early ’70s glam rock so dearly. This song is just immaculate. It’s at that perfect, Ziggy-era moment in time right before glam fully broke into the mainstream. It’s all swagger, sheen, and pure skill—it’s a blast, but this song feels chiseled and streamlined to a meticulous level. Most of the Roxy Music songs I’ve heard instantly recall The Rocky Horror Picture Show to me, and Bryan Ferry’s seductive vocals feel so proto-Frank-N-Furter—I’d be surprised if Tim Curry didn’t take a few cues from him for his performance; the lyrics are classic glam as well (“You’re so sheer/You’re so chic/Teenage rebel of the week”). Phil Manzanera’s acrobatic guitar work soars, but it effortlessly shape-shifts from classic, guitar-based rock to electronic freakouts in mere seconds, leaving the space between the two eerily natural. I can’t imagine being alive in the ’70s and hearing Brian Eno’s space-age keyboards get unleashed in “Virginia Plain”—it would’ve cracked my mind in two, for sure. Some old British guy in 1972 definitely had a heart attack watching this. But to me, “Virginia Plain” embodies the best of glam rock: a sound that was meant to send a shock to the system, but pushed boundaries creatively as well as socially. It’s all shiny, leather boots and smudged eyeshadow, full to the brim with hard-earned confidence.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

You Sexy Thing – Cat Rambo – I know this series is called Disco Space Opera, but…it’s just the vibes. The overwhelming vibes.

“Would You Rather” – Phoebe Bridgers

CW: domestic violence

Unfortunately for you all, the pharb sleeper agent that’s been inactive since about 2023 has been reawakened. You’ve been warned.

One of the hallmarks of early Phoebe Bridgers tracks is that they often had male duet partners who were an odd fit, vocally—they’re all good singers, but their vocal ranges and styles run counter to Bridgers’s style (see also: “Garden Song”). I think that was the initial reason that, when I first listened to Stranger in the Alps back in high school, that I was turned off from “Would You Rather”; Conor Oberst duets with Bridgers in the chorus—he’s objectively a talented singer, but his nasally voice just does not mesh with Bridgers. The same can be said for the music video, directed by Phoebe Bridgers’s younger brother, Jackson Bridgers…her penchant for gallows humor aside, what’s Conor Oberst doing with that stupid grin on his face while lip-syncing along to “in a suicide pact with our family and friends” at 1:53? Read the room, my dude…

But as with several songs on Stranger in the Alps that didn’t grab me on the first listen, “Would You Rather” only gets better—and more devastating—with each listen; her best instrumentation sounds like watching embers from a campfire become stars in the sky, and the delicate plucking at 1:05 is one such beautiful moment. According to Bridgers, “Would You Rather” was inspired by a mix of events—her childhood home burning down and her brother being suspected as the culprit, as well as an undercurrent of domestic violence; even for someone so usually candid about her experiences, I’m not surprised that neither she or the song has divulged any details of the latter. Sometimes the only way to be vulnerable is to always have the safety net of metaphor—to protect yourselves and the ones you love. Yet at the heart of it seems to be their bond as siblings: the chorus of “Come to find out/I’m a can on a string, you’re on the end/We found our way out/Of the suicide pact of our family and friends” emphasizes the lifeline that they’ve built with each other in spite of the strife that surrounded them growing up. There’s a bedraggled, burdened hope to it; despite the sense of being trapped by family, their mutual connection is what keeps them afloat in the end.

If you or a loved one is/has been a victim of domestic violence, click here for a link to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Where Sleeping Girls Lie – Faridah Àbíké-Íyímíde – “Come to find out/I’m a can on a string, you’re on the end/We found our way out/Of the suicide pact of our family and friends

“Without You” – David Bowie

I owe you an apology, Let’s Dance (1983), I wasn’t familiar with your game.

It’s easy to think of the album as David Bowie’s sellout pop album, the one where he cast aside all the pretense of experimental daring and weirdness that he’d built up with the Berlin Trilogy and Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), not to mention the infamous “David Bowie Straight” magazine cover for an accompanying issue of Rolling Stone. Here’s the thing: yes, it is a pop album. But it’s not as if Bowie wasn’t making pop music for a significant portion of his career in the ’70s. Sure, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust was stranger than most things on the airwaves, but it was pop. This was just his ’80s pop record, and like the albums before it, Let’s Dance has so many enduring hits to spare. Sure, it’s more sparse than some of his other albums, and there’s clearly a few afterthought tracks that were just made to make it complete, with its slim eight-track, 40-minute runtime (lookin’ at you, “Shake It”). But let’s be real: it’s hard to measure up when the first track on this album is “Modern Love.” Come on.

“Without You” is often regarded by critics as one of said afterthoughts to beef up Let’s Dance. I get where they’re coming from. For a songwriter like David Bowie, the lyrics are…well, yes, even as a fan, it’s a bit bland. But I feel like a three-year gap between releases after a powerhouse like Scary Monster (And Super Creeps) justifies it. Anybody would have to recharge after that. But “Without You” feels like Bowie’s take on a slow, yearning pop song, and he hits it out of the park. Strung with guitar flourishes that glimmer like string lights, “Without You” is a warm and wistful yearner, aided by the rich, graceful deepening of Bowie’s voice as he aged into his forties. Is it as instantly memorable or well-constructed as “Modern Love” or “Let’s Dance?” Maybe not, but it’s a damn good pop song.

As a bonus: even though they’re two distinct songs, Perfume Genius also has a great song called “Without You,” and for what it’s worth, it’s a good pairing with this song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Full Speed to a Crash Landing – Beth Revis – “Just when I’m ready to throw in my hand/Just when the best things in life are gone/I look into your eyes…”

“5AM Waltz” – Men I Trust

5 a.m. really is the perfect hour for this song. “5AM Waltz” is woozy in every sense of the word. Awash in reverb, the first two thirds feel like you’re stumbling around the kitchen in the middle of the night, trying to find the light-switch; it’s almost enough to feel directionless, but the directionlessness feels fully intentional. There’s lots of hyphenated genres that you find hints of—trip-hop, dream-pop, indie-pop—but whatever you’d call it, “5AM Waltz” is downright melodic and atmospheric, an exercise in crafting something memorable from less than two minutes.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Floating Hotel – Grace Curtis – fitting background music for a giant hotel in space, right?

“Oochy Woochy” – Graham Coxon

Chances are, if you haven’t listened to a ton of Graham Coxon’s solo work (like me), this song won’t give you a good idea of how his sound generally is. “Oochy Woochy” doesn’t sound anything like the frenetic, anxious indie-rock that he usually writes. But I think it’s proof of him being one of the members of Blur who was most willing to take risks with their sound, and it translated instantly when he had more creative freedom. I mean, this is basically a jazzy saxophone loop with a hip-hop-inflected beat. The lyrics amount to only “Oochy woochy/Yeah, baby,” with the later drawled like James Acaster. And it’s so fun. It’s the perfect walk-on song. That prolonged silence at the beginning allows the full force of the saxophones to bowl you over, and from there, it’s just such a fun, carefree groove to get lost in. Even the little quacking sounds punctuating the beat are strangely natural. He’s got range.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Killing Spell – Shay Kauwe – the ideal soundtrack for plunging into a crowded ballroom…somewhere in a post-apocalyptic L.A. with magic and murder running amok.

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!

Posted in Book Review Tuesday

Book Review Tuesday (6/23/26) – Heaven’s Graveyard

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

After my Idolfire freakout last week, I knew I had to get my hands on Heaven’s Graveyard as soon as I could. I put it on hold, but mercifully, it came in way sooner than I thought! YIPPEEEE!! It wasn’t as enchanting as Idolfire, but those are huge shoes to fill—Heaven’s Graveyard is still a cut above the rest.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Heaven’s Graveyard – Grace Curtis

Coda Callanuny has thrown herself into her university work. A student of archaeology, she’s been bent on solving a mystery that she’s been chasing since childhood: proving that Aleya, a figure of myth, was a real person and not a fairytale. But when a beloved professor—the only one who believes her theory—suddenly turns up dead, her chase for history becomes a chase for a murderer. It turns out that her professor’s findings could change the world, and in the wrong hands, could spell disaster. With the knowledge of a sunken, magical city in ruins, Cod must fight to protect the secrets that governments could kill for—and to protect the ones she loves.

TW/CW: murder, violence, misogyny, descriptions of injury, war themes, religious bigotry (fictional) animal cruelty, toxic relationship

First off, can we stop to appreciate how gorgeous the cover is? Aled Thompson’s artwork is truly stunning.

There. Have you taken sufficient appreciation time? Very well, onto the review…

Once again—like Idolfire, which was billed as science fantasy for…reasons, I guess, Heaven’s Graveyard isn’t science fantasy either. I’d put it more in speculative fiction or fantasy, since this is a fantastical setting and magic exists, but said magic doesn’t play a central role; there also isn’t enough “new” technology to qualify as sci-fi. But enough about my ramblings about genre misclassification and mismarketing, let’s get into how excellent Heaven’s Graveyard is!

With Heaven’s Graveyard, Curtis proves that she is a master of worldbuilding. Watching the more archaic world in Idolfire transform into something semi-modern was a fascinating feat. In terms of technology, I’d say we’re somewhere at the equivalent of the 1900’s-1930’s (radios, fantasy forms of high-speed transportation, fairly advanced warfare methods, etc.); aside from being a breath of fresh air in a genre where medieval and Victorian settings reign supreme, it was planned out so meticulously. Between the explorations of politics, education, and religion, it felt as vibrant and real as Curtis’s other worlds. I particularly liked how Curtis explored the rise of the new Procumbent religion, and how it had come to dominate much of the world and how it seeped into said politics and education. Stepping into Heaven’s Graveyard felt like I’d gotten a ticket to visit this world, which is a must for good genre fiction!

As always, Curtis’s characters shone in Heaven’s Graveyard. The central characters lacked some of the oomph that made Idolfire stick with me—I loved Coda (and Sparrow was despicable, but excellently-written as a manipulative but charming prick), but she lacked the pull that Aleya and Kirby had on me. I think part of it was just that kind of grand, mythic arc that they had wasn’t present here, and although Cod’s arc was emotional, it didn’t move me nearly as much as the former’s. Granted, I knew going in that it wasn’t going to be the same, but I just feel like the full effects of Cod and Sparrow’s disastrous relationship were glossed over, to the point where it almost felt like an afterthought. Thal grew on me much more than I expected, and I loved the relationship that she and Cod had towards the end. Like Idolfire, all of the kooky side characters felt so real and made the world feel so much more lived-in, and every glimpse made the world so delightfully human.

Like Idolfire, Heaven’s Graveyard excels at the balancing act of pairing humor with darkness. In this case, it applied to the murder mystery side of the plot. In spite of the murder of one of Cod’s beloved mentors, Curtis’s take on mystery was surprisingly funny. Most of that came from the fact that, in the first half of the novel, the main obstacle that Cod faced was the infinite layers of bureaucracy from the university and her colleagues thinking that she’s gone nuts. Yet Curtis maintains the stakes—both external and personal—involved in the mystery. I loved the first reveal about Nivela, and I loved how it tied into how this novel examined how history and historical discoveries are often manipulated for political gain. There’s a thematic thread from Idolfire about revelations that could shatter the carefully maintained foundation that a country/empire/etc. has built for itself that I appreciated. Fast-paced and full of mystery, Curtis’s blend of genres was a success.

It’s clear that Heaven’s Graveyard comes from a deep passion for archaeology and history. On the surface level, I loved Curtis’s depiction of historians and academia, from Cod’s relentless search for the truth to the bureaucratic hoops that she has to endure, even in a fantasy world. Cod’s quest to prove that Aleya was real formed the core of her character, but I loved how it tied into her character arc and Curtis’s exploration of history and obsession. Cod’s quest becomes one that blurs the boundaries of genuine desire to uncover history and her own ego, and I loved the nuance that Curtis afforded it. It also provided a timely commentary on how we often feel the need to push aside the wishes of other people and cultures in the pursuit of knowledge, and without spoiling anything, I love how Cod comes to the realization that she does. It shows not just a deep reverence for archaeology and historians, but a love for the people whose bones that this history once belonged to.

All in all, a masterful blend of fantasy, speculative fiction, and mystery that made every page worth the ride. 4.25 stars!

Heaven’s Graveyard is a companion novel to Idolfire, which is set 2,000 years before this story in the same universe; however, according to Curtis, they can be read separately from each other. Grace Curtis is also the author of Floating Hotel and Frontier.

Today’s song:

today’s oddly specific song fragment that I love: the way that tom waits says the word “mackerel”

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!