Review: "Limelight" by Andrew Keenan-Bolger

Limelight by Andrew Keenan-Bolger
Published February 2026 via Penguin Workshop
★★★★

Danny dreams of something more. Life is better than it was—there's less money, but now that he and his mother are out from under his father's thumb, there's more room to breathe. But Danny has bigger dreams...and a chance at a performing arts school in Manhattan seems like maybe, maybe a way to make those dreams come true.

This book is a love letter: to New York of the 90s, to found family, to teenagers coming out and figuring themselves out. In Manhattan, Danny is a fish out of water—his Staten Island roots run deep—but he learns, and the people he meets are also willing to learn, and gradually his world grows bigger and brighter.

There's a bit of an element of magical realism here, and usually I'm not keen on that, but it worked really well in Limelight—a combination of the voice of the narration (which sometimes zooms out a bit) and the light touch of the magical realism. The characterization of the teenagers is great (in places the book reminded me of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda), and Danny's mother is wonderfully complex. It's the 90s, and she's not ready to contemplate the possibility that Danny might be anything other than 100% straight, but the way she phrases this makes it clear that she's coming from a place of heartbreak (I don't want to say too much, but it makes sense in the book), not shame or hatred.

There's some family stuff throughout the book, and I'm not sure how to feel about the ending—it's what the book builds to (well—one of the things the book builds to), but there are a couple of ways that plotline could have gone within that, and as it is some things still feel a bit unresolved. But...if I had to guess, I suspect that Keenan-Bolger is pulling on real-life experience there, either his or that of people in his circle. And sometimes not everything can be tied up with a bow, especially when you're a teenager with so much of your story left to write.

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

Review: "Everything Changes Everything" by Lauren Kessler

Everything Changes Everything by Lauren Kessler
Published February 2026 via Balance
★★★★

When Kessler set out on the Camino de Santiago, she was navigating grief, and she needed to take that grief somewhere. Call it a reason or a purpose or a call.

This, also, is a lesson of the Camino that translates directly to life: that occasionally and gloriously, there are true aha moments, but mostly there is the long slow toward making sense of who you are. (loc. 1762*)

I came into this have read 1) nearly every memoir about the Camino that I've been able to get my hands on and 2) two of Kessler's previous books, one of which I loved and one of which I loved less. The combination seemed like pretty good odds, to be honest, and—as it happened—the odds made good.

There's a lot here: Kessler weaves between the now and then, between her journey on the Camino and all the things that came before. She's slow to share the details of that Before, so I won't spoil anything (the shape of it becomes clearer and clearer as the story goes on, but, you know...in its own time), but suffice it to say that the details are a doozy.

One of the things I love so much about Camino memoirs is that although the path may be the same—there are multiple Camino routes,** but the Francés is the most heavily traversed, and even on other routes the basic idea is the same—each person's journey is different. Walking through restlessness or grief or change; walking with months and months of preparation or only the barest of knowledge; staying in cheap municipal lodging with fifty bunks to a room or in boutique hotels with crisp sheets and hot showers; processing big things or simply having an adventure. Maybe this is what I love so much about memoir in general.

Kessler makes excellent work of telling a complicated, messy story with very little judgement or shame. Parts of the story are quite dramatic, and it works in the book's favor that Kessler stays steady throughout, drawing on journalistic skills to tell the story without letting emotion (and to be clear: very valid emotion) take over. I wouldn't recommend this as the only Camino book you read, but down the line or as something to read when thinking about grief? Yes.

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

**And judging by Kessler's social media, the Francés is not the last one she walked

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

Review: "Why Fly" by Caroline Paul

Why Fly by Caroline Paul
Published February 2026 via Bloomsbury Publishing
★★★★

A meditation on flight, relationships, and adventure.

We were like those knitters who knit to pass the time in DMV queues and then unwind what they've done almost dispassionately, then knit again. (loc. 343*)

I read Paul's Fighting Fire a decade ago, and it's one of those books that I still think about on a regular basis. Now—Fighting Fire hits one of my more random reading interests, while I don't have a particular interest in flight. But Paul's writing is so tight and engaging, and it's so clear how much she loves flying (and in particular, flying gyroplanes! I didn't even know gyroplanes were a thing) and how much she's thought about it. This is a love letter to flying, and also a love letter to a deteriorating relationship (I promise this makes sense in the book).

Why Fly travels through historical record and memoir and recent aviation events, mishaps and triumphs. It culminates in a cross-country gyroplane trip, and my gosh, while this does not make me want to learn to fly (which is just as well; flying lessons are not in my budget), it does make me want to backtrack and read Paul's Tough Broad.

One for flight enthusiasts, yes, but also one for those who are just curious.

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

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

Review: "Dino Scores" by Lola Faust

Dino Scores by Lola Faust
Published February 2026
★★★★

Lola Faust is back, and I've never—well, actually, it's the middle of February, so I've definitely been happier. But a new Lola Faust book improves that a lot.

Me: There's a new Lola Faust book!
(pause)
Partner (sounding very weary): The dinosaur woman?
Me: Yesss!
Partner (even wearier): Uh-huh.

Anyway, let's start with the content notice:

Homophobia, biphobia, homophobic language and slurs (Russian and English), Canada, Canadians, Canadian media, gun violence, death, mild-to-moderate limited-scope gore, voyeurism (lack thereof), sports, toxic masculinity, Russia, Chechnya, rain (a lot), Vancouver, Yaletown, Gastown, seagulls, Seattle, anxiety, being picked last for a sports team, fainting, tuna melts, dinosaurs (genetically modified), Kyle, assholes (physical and metaphorical), organized religion (assorted), athleisure, hyperlocal brands, international brands, poetry, hockey (loc. 5*)

This is in many ways the most standard of any of the romances Faust has written—the author's note at the end acknowledges that it parodies Heated Rivalry (which I have not read; I read one gay hockey romance and concluded that I'd need more interest in both hockey and m/m romance to continue...apparently I make exceptions if there are dinosaurs involved) and that it is not erotica but contains a sex scene involving a prehensile tail (loc. 1204), and if you think I did not spend some time going "dear god, no" in that scene, then you do not understand what these books are or why I keep reading them against all logic. Note that the sex is otherwise very tame—erm, as far as it goes—so if you've been curious about dino romance but haven't yet worked up the courage to go there, this is a decent entry point.**

In what other romances do you get the words His breath smelled meaty and bloody (loc. 275) when the characters are tantalizingly close to hooking up? And don't get me started on how far the vending machine metaphor is pushed...

"You smell like steakhouse," Khasanov murmured with amusement, stepping away.

The moment shattered. Stone's head spun and his shoulders sagged. How could he have been so careless...

"It is good thing I like steak." (loc. 547)

This is horrifying, obviously, though maybe it's less horrifying to less ardent vegetarians. (Come to think of it...what is Stone's diet made up of?) But that is genuinely part of the joy of these books; they lean in hard to exactly what they are, so hard that you think they might topple over, and yet here they are, still standing. I did get stuck for a while on some of the logistics: If Stone is cold-blooded (and I do sort of love that this comes into play), is playing an ice-based sport really in his best interests? (Is living in Canada at all really in his best interests?) Should he really, on the cover, be wearing shorts at the ice rink? (Can he maintain enough heat on the rink even by moving quickly? And while we're on the cover, how do his feathers extend through his sleeves?) I know, I know; I am missing the point.

All he wanted was to ride this dino-man into the sunset. (loc. 442)

This review does not need to be as long as it is; you need very little other than the cover to know whether this is something you'll find entertaining. If not, that's okay! But you're missing out, I tell you.

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

**The things I find myself saying when I read these books!

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

Review: "Stock Photo" by Simona Supekar

Stock Photo by Simona Supekar
Published February 2026 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★★

Let this book be a tale about how when some things are seen, they cannot be unseen. (loc. 96*)

For years, Supekar had a job that I've never so much as considered: she keyworded stock photos. In addition to giving her an inside view of an industry that most of us have probably spent very little time thinking of, it illustrated the way representation matters...and the way representation so often doesn't happen.

I read this because the Object Lessons series is a delight, and the books almost always teach me something...and Stock Photo delivered, because really, I have spent very little time thinking about stock photography. There was a brief moment when the sale of stock photos could make a comfortable living for photographers, but the market has changed, and with AI it is changing again.

(Notes Supekar: The AI site generator I used to create this image asked me to "Select All Pictures of Film Reels" to confirm that I was human. (loc. 182))

AI plays a role in the dialogue here, as well it should, but mostly Supekar's focus is representation: who appears in stock photos, and in what contexts; who is readily findable as a doctor or lawyer or woman laughing alone as salad, and who is represented mostly as a person hitting a piñata or as a drug user or as a terrorist. And alongside that: what landscapes one can readily find, and which cultures' foods, and which keywords are popular when.

Other than representation, what interests me most is the positivity with which Supekar talks about stock photos in general. To the extent that I've thought about them, they mostly read as "stuff I wouldn't want on my walls"—either too much manufactured quirk or too generic, I guess. So it's nice to have the food for thought of what else they can mean, and how they can be useful in so many contexts.

Three and a half stars; not my top ever Object Lessons book (that's still Pregnancy Test), but satisfying.

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

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

Review: "The Summer I Fell" by Sli Ndhlovu

The Summer I Fell by Sli Ndhlovu
Published October 2025
★★

A brief young adult romance set in South Africa. My library recently started purchasing large numbers of indie/self-published ebooks, which is a decision that intrigues me—I'm both glad that indie authors have the potential to get more of an audience and appalled by some of the blatantly, and blatantly terrible, AI covers. (The cover comment is not about this book, but if you've seen the sort I'm talking about...you know.) I'm very curious about what their criteria are (and also, perhaps, what the overall reception is), but I have nobody to ask, so...here we are.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I read this out of curiosity, and as far as I can tell it's a self-published book by a young writer. Young characters with big emotions and family drama and family money and a lot of angst and hormones. Reminds me a little of some of the fanfic I read as a teenager, not so much for the plot as for the angst/emotions and general writing style. Would have been a better fit for me as an also angsty teenager; as it is, I'm glad to have gotten to read something outside the mainstream but am unlikely to continue with the series.

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.