Review: "Someday Perfect" by Kat Schneider

Someday Perfect by Kat Schneider
Published April 2026 via Random House Graphic
★★★★

Meg is off to Bible camp for the summer. She'll be back with her friends, and after a recent switch to public school it's something of a relief to be back around people who share an upbringing. But this year, she's also starting to feel the restrictions of Bible camp in ways that she hasn't before, and starting to notice the differences in how boys and girls are treated. And there's a boy, and she likes him, and she thinks he likes her too—but the rules make it hard to know what to do about it.

This was a very highly anticipated book for me this year. I've read a strange amount about conservative American Christianity for someone who did not grow up with religion, but then, conservative American Christianity feels more and more politically relevant these days. And Someday Perfect feels so terribly on point and aligned with just about everything else I have read on the subject. Meg loves Bible camp...but she isn't so sure that camp is fair. She believes what her parents and teachers and pastors have told her...but she's starting to wonder if there are limits to that belief. She's excited to have a part-time job at camp...but doesn't think it's fair that the girls should pay to wash their own clothes, but that the boys have their clothes washed (also by the girls) for free. And she definitely doesn't think it's right that a skirt that falls just above the knee, and that her parents are presumably okay with, should get her in trouble.

The climax of the book is almost tangential—that is, it's relevant to one of the book's major plotlines, but the biggest difference (Meg starting to question the unquestionables she's grown up with) is subtler. I think this one will punch hardest for those who grew up with conservative religion and have since rethought some things, but it's an excellent book regardless of your background.

Review: "The Hearing Test" by Eliza Barry Callahan

The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
Published March 2024 via Catapult
★★★

A young woman in New York—not named until the very last page—wakes up to hearing loss that is both abrupt and progressive. It throws an enormous wrench into her personal and professional life, and she drifts through the next year from appointment to appointment and half-baked connection to half-baked connection.

It's an odd book. Very stream-of-consciousness, which will work for you or won't. I found it helpful that I knew going in that it was stream-of-consciousness, which isn't really my jam but at least set my expectations appropriately. It was fairly quick going, though I had to stay quite focused, as the narrator's train of thought switches tracks very often. There are also lots of literary and other references, though I stopped trusting their accuracy when the narrator mentioned a plane crash and said that the sole survivor's mother (who was also on the flight) was never found; as it happens, I've read about that plane crash, and that's not true.

I know nothing about Callahan other than what's in her bio (and even that I only skimmed), but a few things made me wonder whether there are parts of this story, like that last page, that are her own. Maybe literally nothing more than the bare bones of her bio, and in any case it doesn't really matter, but I suppose I can make a bit more sense of it if there's some element of personal experience here.

Recommended mostly (or only) to those who are in for stream-of-consciousness and general malaise.

Review: "Beyond Limits" by Shelley Sella

Beyond Limits by Shelley Sella
Published June 2025 via Beacon Press
★★★★

Sella was an abortion-care provider for decades, in Kansas and then in New Mexico, though her interest in reproductive health long preceded her specific calling to third-trimester abortion care. In Beyond Limits, she follows six patients—three with fetal indications for abortion, and three with maternal indications—through the paths that led them to her clinic and then through the steps of a third-trimester abortion.

Third-trimester abortions are rare, but the situations that drive women to seek them are not. What really differentiates third-trimester patients from those in the first and second trimesters is the degree of desperation they feel. (loc. 158)

I'll keep this short: This book will not change the minds of people who believe that third-trimester abortion (or abortion in general) is never acceptable; Sella herself nods to this in the book. What it can do, though, is speak to people who simply want to know more, and to those who have ever wondered why someone wouldn't just get an abortion earlier, or go the adoption route, and so on. Sella does discuss these things, directly and in detail, but also:

There are better questions to ask instead of why did she wait so long? And the answers to these questions should inspire compassion rather than judgment. What were the barriers to abortion care the patient faced when confronting an unwanted pregnancy? What were the life circumstances that compelled her to seek an abortion in the third trimester? (loc. 2390)

Wholly recommend to anyone looking to learn more.

Review: "Abider" by Melissa Crowe

Abider by Melissa Crowe
Published September 2026 via University of Pittsburgh Press
★★★★

But this morning / in the wet grass I saw rotting / windfall pears clustered with bees / who, vibrating, seemed both / ravenous and surprised by their luck. (87*)

Meditative and lush, full of wanting and requited and unrequited yearning, people who fit just right at exactly the wrong time and those who used to fit and no longer do.

I like having to work for poetry (me with my prose-laden, non-poet brain), and work for this collection I did. I read this slowly, a poem here, a few poems there, to allow each page time to percolate. Lots of layers here, lessons learned and unlearned, a balance of learning where the writer belongs and knowing that there are so many possibilities, but they can't all be true at once.

I'm not so wild anymore. / Even untutored, I learned how a woman's / meant to temper her hungers, cross her legs // and shut her mouth. But I taught myself to feel / good. Can't unlearn. (18)

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

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

Review: "Damned if She Does" by Sarah Stankorb

Damned if She Does by Sarah Stankorb
Published September 2026 via Broadleaf Books
★★★★

In Disobedient Women, Stankorb zeroed in on women who forced a church reckoning. Now, in Damned if She Does, she steps back to look at women who, on the whole, concluded that they couldn't make the change that they wanted to—and so they cut their losses and left.

This is a book about women and the church. But it's also a book about where people start to draw a line within a community to which they once were willing to give their time and money and entrust their children. (loc. 125*)

I've found religion fascinating for a good long time, though what interests me is generally less the specifics of a person or community's beliefs and more how they interact with those beliefs. This sort of thing has been incredibly topical of late, as certain strands of religion get wound ever more tightly around the neck of American politics, and in many ways that's exactly what this book boils down to: What happens when people take a good hard look and ask themselves how much of what they've been taught to believe is about belief and how much of it is about power.

Stankorb handily ties together personal stories with broader looks at history and context—why women, in particular, are leaving churches; why men are staying. (Short answer: power. Slightly longer answer: Power structures within churches are typically set up to reward men, not women, who are involved.) What "leaving" means varies, of course, and what this will look like in the long term (how many will leave, and how many will stay, and what trajectories those groups will take) remains to be seen—but in the context of the US right now, it's pretty on point.

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

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

Review: "Someone to Daydream About" by Sydney Langford

 

Someone to Daydream About by Sydney Langford
Published March 2026 via Farrar, Straus and Giroux
★★★

Natalie just wants to make enough money to save the Deaf Center her family runs—and Felix, pop star extraordinaire, needs an ASL tutor and is willing to spend $$$ to have Natalie on call 24/7. It's a match made in heaven...if they can just get their dang teenage hormones in line.

I have a habit of reading a book description once, putting the book on my TBR, and then completely forgetting what it's about by the time I read the book. Why reread the description when you already know it's something you want to read? By the time I picked this one up, I'd forgotten that deafness (which I suspect was why I shelved it in the first place) was a feature of the book, so I had the unexpected/unplanned experience of reading a bunch of books involving deafness in a row—The Queen's Granddaughter, which has a significant side character with hearing loss; Someone to Daydream About; Mother Tongue, which is a memoir about deafness and deaf culture; and (at the time of writing, one of my current reads) The Hearing Test, which is about a woman who experiences sudden hearing loss.

I like getting the different takes, and I love that Natalie is so passionate about making sure sign is accessible to her community. There's some quiet conflict about money and accessibility, which makes sense—if Mother Tongue reinforced anything, it's that the deaf (and Deaf, for people who prefer the capital letter) community is continually and systematically pushed to the margins.

I did wish that a bit less of this book had been so...awash in teenage hormones. I thought for a while that I would have liked the book better if it had been coded more adult romance (with older characters, etc.) and less YA romance, but I think the author might be quite young, which makes the target audience make a little more sense here. That is...maybe I'm just over the hump of my YA reading days (and so this book is for many people, just not so much for me), but I'd still have preferred a little less teenage dramatics. I enjoyed this a bit more in theory than in practice.

Review: "Half Light" by Mahesh Rao

Half Light by Mahesh Rao
Published September 2026 via Pushkin Press
★★★★

2014: Two men meet in a hotel in Darjeeling. Neville, a hotel guest, sees promise of a hookup; Pavan, a hotel employee, sees mostly the likelihood of ruin.

2018: Pavan and Neville meet again, by chance, in Mumbai. The country is changing, and the Supreme Court is on the verge of handing down a decision that will (in effect) determine whether homosexuality is decriminalized.

In a few weeks they would be told by the court whether this time they would be allowed their freedom. The news pieces said it would be the last such opportunity in their lifetimes. It was written down for anyone to read and so Pavan supposed it was true. But it felt like a distant matter, which would have no bearing on his life, whatever was decided. (152*)

This makes for a fascinating read. I like stories about experiences and cultures that are not my own (I always learn something), but more than that, what interests me is the ways in which Neville and Pavan are so deliberately different. Neville isn't wealthy, but his family is comfortably middle-class; he has education and opportunities and, perhaps more than anything, the cosmopolitan and (when he wants it) anonymous background of Mumbai. Pavan, meanwhile, is from a rural place with far fewer options and far more opportunities to fall through quicksand; materially, he has less to lose, but he also has a whole lot less of a safety net than Neville does. Experience has taught Neville that he can push the boundaries with impunity; experience has taught Pavan that the closer he stays to the straight (no pun intended) and narrow, the safer he will be.

For much of the book I wasn't sure whether this was a pairing I was meant to be rooting for. It's not a pairing Pavan wants, necessarily; his risk–reward calculations are different than Neville's. It is a pairing Neville wants, but that's less because of Pavan himself and more because...well, initially because Neville is bored, perhaps, and later because he's not used to being told no. But if Neville doesn't come off terribly well, it's intentional and what makes him and interesting character, and I'd rather have interesting characters than bland perfection. (Though they way my heart leapt into my throat at the climax!) They're from different classes and possibly different castes (my partner, who is from India, asked if Pavan's last name was mentioned, which would tell him something about caste dynamics between the two men; I could not find a last name, so who knows, but in any case let's assume layers upon layers of complicated dynamics), and their actions cannot help but be informed by their individual backgrounds and circumstances. No tidy endings here, but a lot of food for thought.

Recommended as a snapshot of a time and a place and perhaps of human fallibility.

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

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

Review: "Becoming the Ocean" by Erin Russ

Becoming the Ocean by Erin Russ
Published September 2026 via Twenty Fourteen Press
★★★★

Upending their lives and taking to the seas was supposed to solidify their marriage. Instead, what became clear was that something had to give.

We had never sailed alone together on the ocean, and never overnight. [...] Neither of us had ever stepped foot onto a sailboat until we owned our own, so we had to learn everything: from how to raise and lower the sails, to how to avoid hitting rocks and capsizing. (loc. 304*)

Despite an irrational dislike of boats (I am an excellent swimmer, but there's just something about the idea of being out beyond the sight of land and knowing that you're too far out to swim to safety if need be), I have a thing for "packed up my life and sailed away" sorts of books. Russ went into the sailing adventure with limited (though, for their purposes, adequate) boating experience and even more limited confidence.

Brian oozed competence—it's what had drawn me to him all those years ago. He had all the qualities I desired and wanted to attain for myself: he was confident, capable, and knew who he was[...]. Initially, I'd hoped some of his confidence might rub off on me. But over the years, I'd ended up hiding behind it at the expense of my own. It was easier to let him take the lead than to risk making a mistake. Now, I couldn't see past him. Everything I knew about myself—from my likes and dislikes, to my sense of who I was—had taken shape within the confines of our relationship. And I only knew how to be the person Brian wanted me to be. (loc. 332)

So it's a sailing story and a relationship story and a self-discovery story. It's evident early on that the status quo of the relationship suits Russ's husband well, but Russ less well; the question becomes what to do with that, and what their relationship will look like when all is said and done. The events of the book took place some number of years ago, which for book purposes is great; it means that Russ has had the time to think it over and process and figure out how the pieces fit together. The emotions are still there but not the same kind of raw that can come across when the story is still new. I'm curious about more of the what came after, but I also understand why it's out of the scope of this book.

Readers looking for more along these lines might like Love with a Chance of Drowning.

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

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

Review: "We're All Going to Die Tonight!" by Veronica Bane

We're All Going to Die Tonight! by Veronica Bane
Published September 2026 via Delacorte Press
★★★

It's bad enough that the Coastal Canyon debate team didn't do well at their competition—first a flat tire forces them to trek through the woods to their Airbnb, and then there's no Internet. And then comes the blood...and the body.

This made for a fast-paced, quick read. Not quite a locked-room thriller (the teens aren't sure whether there's someone outside or whether one of their own is responsible for the blood and the body and so on), but they're in over their heads pretty much before they even know there's something to worry about.

We get the story from all of the teenagers' perspectives, with each chapter moving from one character to another. All seven of them have their POV moments, though the chapters aren't evenly split (i.e., we're in some characters' heads significantly more than others). I had mixed feelings about so much changing between characters. The voices are distinct, which is helpful, but I still found myself flipping back to check whose perspective I was reading (harder with seven voices than with, e.g., two!). On the other hand, multiple POVs makes it harder to predict who will and won't survive (since only one POV suggests that that character, at least, will). There's some effort to make at least some of the characters possible to root for, which also helps; we have some seriously toxic characters and some people I wouldn't want to be stuck in an elevator with, but we also have characters who are imperfect but doing their best.

The actual mystery ends up being a bit convoluted. I guessed some of the pieces before the end, but not most of them, and while I am fond of mysteries where I don't figure it all out, I do think that any semicompetent investigator would have a field day unpicking the real story. (To say nothing of what they would have made of the scene if the original plan had gone exactly as planned!)

Would be good as a beach read, or for travel—keeps the attention and doesn't require too much thinking.

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

Review: "The Secret to Belonging" by Megan E. Freeman

The Secret to Belonging by Megan E. Freeman
Published September 2026 via Atheneum Books for Young Readers
★★★★

It's the 80s, and our narrator dreams of a fresh start in college—somewhere far away from California, far away from her brother's addiction, far away from the parents who have poured so much of their love and energy and focus into helping (or enabling) her brother that it often feels like there is none left for her. And when they use her college fund to pay for yet another round of rehab, well, there is her college dream gone to dust too. And so she finds herself, on little more than a desperate whim, applying to study abroad and accepting an opening in Norway, a place she can barely locate on a map.

Because I am predictable, I read this for the setting—I always want more fiction, and more YA fiction specifically, that takes place in far-flung but less-travelled places. (I love a good book set in Paris or Rome, sure, but those are also easy to find; give me travel fiction set in Finland or Botswana or Kazakhstan, please.) And when our narrator goes in, she goes all in: Again, it's the 80s (though this is only mentioned in passing, well into the book), and she cannot spend her time in rural Norway on the Internet; she can write letters to friends, yes (and home on occasion), but mostly she learns to study and socialize in Norwegian, and she learns what it is like to live in a family that does not have her family's demons.

the post arrives / a letter from Alison / a postcard from Maura / you feel giddy / you feel rich (loc. 763*)

(Every family has its demons, or at least its skeletons in the closet. But for our narrator, it's still refreshing to think that there is something out there beyond what her own family has been able to offer her.)

It's a complex book with a lot going on. I enjoyed the use of verse here—it made for a fast read without feeling as though it was just short sentences with extra line breaks. The characters, too, are allowed complexity. Perhaps my favorite thing is the quarter the narrator is given, relatively early on in the book, and what happens with the quarter; I don't want to say too much about it, but it's such a small moment that speaks volumes about the narrator and the way she views her family situation.

Really glad I picked this one up. I hope it makes it into lots of high school libraries and encourages kids to think beyond the confines of their towns.

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

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