Review: "The Dreaded Pox" by Olivia Weisser

The Dreaded Pox by Olivia Weisser
Published February 2026 via Cambridge University Press
★★★★

Slip back a few hundred years and catch a carriage (maybe after a ship?) to London, and maybe you have an idea of what you could expect—or maybe not. And probably the pox doesn't factor into those calculations, but it should...because if The Dreaded Pox is anything to go by, the pox was everywhere.

In London of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "the pox" was something of a catch-all diagnosis for just about everything that we now know as sexually transmitted infections, and there was a thriving economy built around the pox: potions and pills and recipes and, ah, rather more disturbing cures.

Weisser doesn't get into what those cures actually did. I'm guessing that in most cases the answer was "nothing good" (honestly, the book made me wonder just how humanity has survived this long; I will spare you the description of some of the side effects of mercury treatments, but...), but the point is more how the pox, and pox treatments, came into play socially: how society understood the pox and how it was transmitted; who was considered suspect or blameable (hint: racism, sexism, and classism, plus general xenophobia, were major players); how the pox factored into certain types of trials; how it could tell a story that people sometimes socially could not.

And yet, midwives did not wield the same authority in court as medical men. The very subject of midwives' expertise – women's bodies – paradoxically made their knowledge suspect. (loc. 2303*)

The actual text of the book is short—some 40% is notes—but it makes for an engaging read and an unusual lens into history. Somewhat academic but very accessible for the lay reader. I'm not sure, after all this, just how much brain space the pox took up in the average Londoner's mind or how likely one was to end up with said pox (or, for that matter, what the scene was like in smaller places), but I loved the comparisons Weisser draws to more modern ailments. How far we've come, and yet how little some things have changed.

One for those who like those corners of history that are often left to gather dust in the corner, and also for those interested in medical curiosities of both the then and the now.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Snack" by Eurie Dahn

Snack by Eurie Dahn
Published February 2026 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★★

—and there may indeed be people who snack on fruits and vegetables and, certainly, these foods qualify as snacks. However, this book will not take any part in this business. (loc. 709*)

Snacks are secondary...except maybe in their status as a cash cow, and except maybe in enjoyment of food. In Snack, Dahn examines the experience of snacking and some of the cultural considerations that make it what it is.

This isn't really a microhistory; snacking is so broad a topic that you'd need a much longer book (series!) to cover it all, and Dahn doesn't try. She defines snacks by six categories: absence of fire, lack of utensils, duration, portability, volume, and vibe. There are qualifications to most of these (for example, I won't be eating a tub of yoghurt with my fingers anytime soon), but on the whole it's a reasonable definition—though, as someone who is on the whole not too interested in cooking and perfectly happy eating some crackers and veggies and hummus for dinner (my partner despairs), I suspect that I have more overlap between meals and snacks than many.

I'm on record, repeatedly, as loving this series; that holds. How can you not love a reference to The Flamin' Hot Cheetos to academia pipeline (loc. 469)? And more than that, I appreciate that Dahn looks at the sociocultural implications of snacking—both the "back to childhood" sense that a particular snack can bring and the ways in which snacks, and (for example) playground reactions to snacks, can differ so widely.

I do not know if you know much about US public school culture in the 80s and 90s but dried squid and fish jerky were not necessarily hot commodities on the playground. (loc. 982)

Now I'm thinking that I'd like to see an anthology about snacks—essays from authors from different parts of the world, or different parts of a country, or who grew up in different eras, talking about the snacks they grew up with and how their relationship to snacking has changed...is that an odd thing to wish for? Probably. Now you'll have to excuse me while I go make myself a snack...

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Our Numbered Bones" by Katya Balen

Our Numbered Bones by Katya Balen
Published February 2026 via HarperVia
★★★★

When Anna leaves London for a writing retreat in rural England, she is at loose ends—bogged down in grief, unable to do so much as start her overdue book, not sure how to move forward or if she even wants to. Then the body surfaces in the marsh—not a recent body, not something for the local police unit, but someone from a much different time. And Anna is drawn to that body, that woman, in ways she cannot explain.

I wanted to shrug off the city and slip into someone else, someone far away. (loc. 75*)

There's something about centuries-old bodies in bogs that really captures the imagination. I read this partly because of how much Ghost Wall intrigued me, I think; it was an itch that Excavations (which is not at all about bogs) deepened rather than scratched. When I visited a bog outside Tallinn a couple of years ago, with its eerily clear water and spongy soft ground on either side of the wooden walkways, my mind drifted again and again to ancient bodies in bogs.

I'm trying to think how best to describe Our Numbered Bones: eerie, perhaps, though not overly so; sharp but swathed in soft edges; theoretically fragmented but grounded in dirt, in bog, in grief.

The only story tapping its way in my brain is the one I ever want to tell. The words of it are chattering in their chains. (loc. 421)

This is an odd one (mostly for some stylistic choices) and a good one. I'll note that this one comes with a trigger warning or two around the grief part of things; it's late in the game before Anna's full backstory is told, so I'm reluctant to give details, but there are both complicated family dynamics and recent loss to consider. Approach with caution if there's been recent loss in your life, but it's a good one if you're interested in character-driven stories with interesting settings.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Review: "The Ex-Perimento" by Maria J. Morillo

The Ex-Perimento by Maria J. Morillo
Published February 2026 via Berkley
★★★★

Maria has it all worked out—her next career step, her boyfriend's (imminent, she's sure) proposal, what the wedding will look like and where they'll live and vacation. Yes, her boss is a bit of a diva, and no, Alejandro's family doesn't like her much, and no, her friends and family don't like Alejandro much...but they're meant to be. That is, until he breaks up with her, and the resulting fallout torpedos her job, and suddenly all of those plans are dust. There's just one thing to do: Get Alejandro—and with him her job—back.

I read this for the setting. I've read precious few books set in Venezuela—the most recent was Paula Ramón's memoir Motherland, I think, and the idea of a romance novel set in Caracas piqued my interest. So I think this'll be a two-parter: the romance, and the setting.

The romance: In her quest to get Alejandro back, Maria enlists Simón, the lead singer of one of her favorite bands...who just so happens to be the on-screen talent she's assisting at the temporary gig she scores while trying to find her way back to her journalism job. As a male lead, Simón is super solid: He's honest about what he thinks of Maria's "experimento" (that Maria can do better, but if Alejandro is the guy she wants, she's going about it all wrong), but when Maria is determined to sally forth anyway, he commits to his job as wingman. There's clear chemistry between Maria and Simón, but he lets her figure it out on her own time, which felt surprisingly refreshing. It probably helps that his band is written as popular, but in an up-and-coming way rather than an international-sensation way—the book doesn't have to take pains to paint him as down to earth despite his success, because that success is...aspirational without being unrealistic, I suppose.

The setting: I'm guessing here, but I'd say that Morillo is making a concentrated effort to depict a Venezuela that she knows and loves—not the side of Venezuela that is so often depicted in the international news. I've never been to Venezuela and am running on guesswork and Googling, but my understanding is that most people in Venezuela are not living as comfortably as Maria. I noted three (relatively oblique) mentions of Venezuela's precarious political/financial situation in the book, but other than that the book is largely written in a way that suggests that the worst is over and things are stable again. Again, mine is not the analysis I'd trust on the subject, but I don't know how realistic it is. That isn't really a criticism, though: This is romance, not hard-hitting nonfiction, and more than that I can well imagine an author from a country that does not get a lot of press, let alone good press, wanting readers to come away from the book focused on the country's treasures, not its struggles. So: Don't read this to learn about Venezuela's current political situation, but do read it if you like having fuel for your wanderlust.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Pilgrim Wheels" by Neil Hanson

Pilgrim Wheels by Neil Hanson
Published 2015 via High Prairie Press
★★★

Let's set the scene: It's March of 2015. I'm weeks away from quitting my job and flying on a one-way ticket to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago. I've read almost every book about the Camino that I can find and have moved on to looking for more general books about pilgrimage. I'm also desperate for adventure and for books about adventure, and a book about someone cycling across the US fits the bill.

Fast-forward a decade. I'm slightly less desperate for adventure...but Pilgrim Wheels is still on my to-read list, and I've finally gotten my hands on a copy.

I'll cut to the chase: This wasn't the book for me. It's pretty short (more on that in a moment), so it was a fast read. It's more interesting to read about a journey when there's an inner journey as well as an outer journey, though, and to me this felt mostly about the outer journey. A bit repetitious (lots of commentary about hills, wind, highway vs. smaller roads). There's a fair amount of ruminating and riffing on various subjects, but mostly the thoughts felt relatively surface level. Also on the surface level: discussion of how attractive various women are (over and over and over again), including once a promise to the reader that one particular woman who stopped to make sure Hanson and his friend were okay wasn't flirting (I don't think any female readers needed that assurance, but maybe the target reader is a man). It got...pretty tedious.

One of the things Hanson ruminates on is how the experience of traveling is different when you're on a bicycle (or on foot, or sometimes on a motorcycle) than it is from an air-conditioned car (...or a scooter with car support). He tries quite hard not to be judgemental about it, or at least to check his default judgement and look at it from a different perspective. It comes up a lot, though, so I ended up with the sense that he kind of had to push himself to the different perspective. Even this comment about what people are eating: The early risers in town stop by to pick up their coffee and donuts as Dave and I wolf down liquid and calories (loc. 2388).

I find this phrasing so accidentally fascinating. It's not the first (or the last) time that Hanson refers to eating as "liquid and calories" (liquid: 7 mentions, one of which is unrelated to food; fluid: 7 mentions; calories: 28 mentions, almost all of which are in the context of "gather[ing] calories at the convenience store", etc.). Maybe he's not a foodie (fair, neither am I), and I understand the necessity of just taking in huge amounts of both...calories and liquids...when you're on this sort of adventure, which just requires a lot of energy. But of course those early risers he mentions are also fueling themselves, even if their caloric needs for the day are different. Am I overthinking this? 100% yes. But here we are.

Anyway. I either forgot (likely, as it's been ten years) or never noticed that this is only part 1 of the story—the second half of Hanson's journey is covered in a second book. So although the Kindle version of this is under 200 pages, part 2 is almost 300 pages, making the whole story almost 500. I don't plan to pick up part 2 anytime soon, and that's fine (I sort of just wanted to check off a book that has been on my TBR for a decade!), but I think I might have enjoyed this a bit more if the two books had been tightened into one ~300-page book.

Review: "Tall Water" by S.J. Sindu and Dion M.B.D.

Tall Water by S.J. Sindu and Dion M.B.D.
Published August 2025 via HarperAlley
★★★★

Nimmi has grown up in the US, living with her father and communicating with her mother only through letters—but when her father has the opportunity to return to Sri Lanka, where Nimmi is born and her mother still lives, she's desperate to go too. Sri Lanka is still at war, though, and Nimmi soon feels in over her head. And: It's December of 2004. None of them can know what's coming.

This is a graphic novel for young adults, but it's one for readers who can take heavy themes. The major themes are the war in Sri Lanka and the Boxing Day tsunami—Nimmi finds herself witness to the first and right in the middle of the second. (I was going to say that it doesn't hold back, but I don't think that's entirely accurate—for all that Nimmi witnesses, she's on the periphery of violence and presumably has significant protection conferred by her dual citizenship; this would be a very different story if it were about someone living in the thick of it. Nimmi hears some of those stories, but she and the reader are spared the worst of it. She sees bodies (I remember reading news story after news story and just not being able to comprehend the scale of the disaster), but the reader is again spared the worst of it.

It's well done. I didn't need the mini romance of the book (I never need the mini romance), but there's a lot of complexity packed into a relatively short story. War, natural disaster, romance, identity, family history, family reconciliation...I hope this ends up in a lot of high school libraries.

Review: "Living Proof" by Tiffany Graham Charkosky

 

Living Proof by Tiffany Graham Charkosky
Published October 2025 via Little A
★★★

Charkosky was eleven when her mother died of cancer. It was a tragedy, and it tore her life apart—but cancer is common, and Charkosky and her family found ways to move forward as best they could. But decades later, when she and her husband were trying for their second child, Charkosky got news that turned everything upside down again: There was a good chance that Charkosky's mother's cancer stemmed from a genetic condition that made certain cancers almost inevitable, and if she'd had it, there was a 50-50 chance that Charkosky and each of her siblings had inherited it.

Almost two years passed between that car ride and actually losing her. The part that seems the cruelest is that my memories of her sickness have eclipsed most of my memories of her life. (loc. 263)

I read this partly because I read A Fatal Inheritance not too long ago. In A Fatal Inheritance, the author describes a different genetic quirk that made cancer run rampant through his family, and he dives into the science behind it and the quest to figure out just what went wrong. It's both fascinating and devastating.

Living Proof doesn't go so much into the science (Inheritance is part memoir, part reportage; Proof is straight memoir), but it's equally devastating to consider all the factors that Charkosky had to consider, starting with the simplest: get tested or not? Testing doesn't change the facts, but it might change the outcomes; knowing that you have a gene that predisposes you to major medical things can mean regular, targeted testing in the interest of catching things before they're a problem. It also means upheaval, and complications like suddenly being ineligible for life insurance, and deciding whether to have preventive surgeries, and wondering whether your own children have gotten the gene. And for Charkosky, it wasn't just herself—she had two siblings who had the same chances of inheriting the gene that she did, and they had to make their own decisions about whether or not to get tested, and what to do with the information either way.

It's a lot to wrestle with. Charkosky does a good job of unpicking those things, which are of course further complicated by the grief of having lost someone to the same thing you're now facing. I hate the subtitle, perhaps irrationally so ("how love defied genetic legacy" reads to me as "how love cured a gene mutation", which of course is not what it means, but still), but it's otherwise an interesting read, especially if you're curious about the ways genetics can get tricky.

Review: "Starving Doll" by Bleuen Gauguin

Starving Doll by Bleuen Gauguin
Published August 2025
★★

What the (sub)title says—this is a memoir of an eating disorder. This is a pretty grim one; the book starts with a difficult relationship with Gauguin's parents (the relationship starts with emotional abuse and never really deviates) and moves on to unhappiness after unhappiness. I'm not sure I'd describe it as angsty, but it's one of those terribly unhappy books that is really devoid of any levity or joy that might break things up; even when Gauguin describes starting a graduate program that interests her or entering a new relationship, the focus goes almost immediately to, for example, the new lover's faults and why things clearly (to the reader, if not to Gauguin in the moment) aren't going to work out. And hey! Sometimes that's how life feels—if things are dark enough emotionally, it can be hard to find any joy even when it should exist. But it's not all that fun to read something that is mostly that pain and has no glimmers of light, no sense of looking back from a happier place.

I also struggled with the lack of context for the book. For a significant chunk of it I was trying to figure out where the author is from—from the name I guessed France or French Canada, but since the name also seems likely to be a pseudonym (among other things, there's a random mention of Paul Gauguin, who is never mentioned again), that's not a sure thing. I started flagging the limited clues I could find: mention of Gauguin's brothers taking holidays to Florida and Montreal, a mention of the author's monthly budget, which was in euros, and finally(!) a comment that she was going to Paris over the weekend to visit her brothers, which I guess answered the question. (Well. Kind of...could still be, e.g., set in Belgium.) But that's it. I think a bit more setting might have helped break up some of the darkness, plus give a bit more more, you know, sense of place and time.

So not really the book for me, but you never know til you try.

Review: "I Will Always Love You (Maybe)" by Dana Hawkins

I Will Always Love You (Maybe) by Dana Hawkins
Published February 2026 via Storm Publishing
★★★★

Meet Cute in Minnesota is back, this time with an unexpected pairing! Colby has isolated herself since losing her wife six years ago—her golden retriever is all the company she wants or needs. And Josie loves her work as a vet tech, but in every other part of her life she's restless. They don't have a meet-cute so much as a meet-stress...but then Josie offers to help Colby out with Kona, and it just so happens that a storm sweeps in. And suddenly they have all the time in the world to get to know each other.

Lesbian romance has come, my gosh, so far since I was a semi-closeted teenager trawling through Fun Home to make lists of every book mentioned and try (and mostly fail) to find them at the library. Romance in general can be quite hit-or-miss—like any genre, of course, but there's so much romance out there, and...everyone has their own tastes. (Incidentally, I once upon a time aced a job interview in which I used my dislike of alpha heroes to illustrate how I was comfortable working on things that I was not personally interested in. But I digress—that's another, more heterosexual story.)

I haven't read the first of this series yet (just the second and now third), but this has confirmed for me that book 2 was no one-off. Hawkins does such a wonderful job of subverting romance tropes. Is this a forced-proximity romance...sure. Am I sick of every romance novel and its mother being defined by its tropes, yes yes. But there's remarkably little tension of the negative sort: no sniping and getting in each other's way and misunderstanding each other. Instead we have two characters who sometimes clash...and then they talk about it, and they figure it out. They hook up, and they both have misgivings (for different reasons), and there's an awkward moment and then they talk it through. Even the secret Colby is hiding pans out in an unexpected way: It's clear that at some point that secret will come out, but it's less clear what shape that will take, or how much control Colby will have over how it comes out. It's clear fairly early on what the most dramatic option would be, but Hawkins neatly sidesteps that and goes for something more subtle (if still with its own fair share of heartbreak).

Not sure if this series will continue, but I'll happily keep reading if it does.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Medicine at 50° Below" by Mary Ellen Doty

Medicine at 50° Below by Mary Ellen Doty
Published February 2026 via Nelson Bond Publishing
★★★

Doty was new to her role as a nurse practitioner when she took a job that was off the beaten path—literally and figuratively. A clinic in the remote wilds of Alaska needed staffing, and a two-year commitment would pay off her loans and give her (or so she thought) a relaxed entry into her field.

I picked this job in a similar manner to the way I picked my husbands—hot, exciting dates, commitment in the middle of the night, and then donning dark glasses the next morning to block out any sunlight on our way to the chapel. (loc. 192*)

As it turned out, Doty loved it, and stayed well beyond her two-year commitment—but it was not relaxed, and she soon learned that there were deep staffing shortages for such positions, both because of the challenge (she was a one-woman family medicine clinic and emergency department and preventive health services clinic all rolled up in one) and because two years is a long time to uproot yourself and your life. And eventually it occurred to her that there must be a better way.

The first half of the book I found really compelling—Doty finding her footing in Alaska, falling in love with the community, the community gradually starting to trust her. (The previous provider was...not one to inspire trust.) It was not easy, and she does not make it out to be: It was more than she signed up for, and she quickly understood why so many didn't stay the distance; she was effectively on call 24/7, and depending on the situation it could be just Doty standing between life and death.

We had been flying for over an hour and a half, and not since that last small mountain to the northwest of Fairbanks—about 150 miles ago—had I seen a road. (loc. 107)

In the second half of the book, Doty describes leaving her first posting in Alaska—first for somewhere a bit less isolated, then back to her home territory of Montana, where she tried and quickly became disenchanted with corporate medicine (basically the opposite of what she'd been doing in Alaska). When she realized she wasn't the only one, she started to dream up a better model of locum care for remote clinics in Alaska, one that would let providers from the lower 48 practice the way they wanted to practice without uprooting themselves and would ensure continuity of care for remote communities. I admit that I did not find this part of the book as interesting; I find medicine (and especially the less discussed parts of medicine, such as work in villages with extremely limited resources on hand) compelling to read about, but the stress and frustration of building a start-up rather less so. A lot of that material is about long hours in cramped quarters, overworking to the point of burnout, and meaningful dreams, and while there are absolutely readers who will love this, for me as a reader that part of the book wasn't as engaging.

Still. This was the hardest work I had ever loved, writes Doty (loc. 801); that she was able to take that feeling and translate it into something that enabled other people to love the same work is nothing short of wonderful.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.