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.

Review: "Once We Are Safe" by Alessandra Carati

Once We Are Safe by Alessandra Carati
Translated from the Italian by Linda Worell and Laura Masini
Published October 2025 via Amazon Crossing
★★★

At home, I asked my mother if it was true that the war was coming. "No," she said, "it will never come to this village." I believed her. (loc. 92)

Aida is six when her family flees the Bosnian War and takes refuge in Milan—their village is no longer safe. It's temporary, her parents assure her, assure each other, over and over again. They'll be back to the village before they know it. But the war drags on, and they get settled in Italy, and by the time it's safe to go back most of what they knew is gone.

We didn't even hug goodbye. Everyone kept saying that it wouldn't be for long—two weeks at most, and then we'd go home. (loc. 159)

I was eager to read this because I've read precious little about this time and place. I was too young when the Bosnian War was happening to know that it existed, and it was only ever an afterthought in my history classes. And beyond that, even Italy in the early 90s is not something I've read much about. Literature in translation...yes please.

I found that the structure of the book impeded my interest somewhat, though. The book is short, and the chapters shorter; I sped right through. But each chapter feels more like a snapshot than anything: Despite the brief nature of the chapters, there's often a gap of time between one chapter and the next—sometimes only a day, sometimes much longer. Sometimes the breaks are longer; Aida jumps from seven years old to choosing what to study in high school, and later she jumps from studying classics in high school to a professional degree that she's previously shown no interest in. Her parents, meanwhile, change little; her mother never gets beyond the grief of leaving her homeland behind, or of losing so many of her loved ones.

There's one line that reminded me of something in The Unbreakable Heart of Oliva Denaro: I couldn't understand why Abraham didn't just defy God and try to keep his son anyway. Babo would never have given up a male child, not for all the world, not even if he'd been asked by Allah. (loc. 572) It's striking for the understanding Aida has as a young child—she's still about six when she says this—how much more boys matter in her world, in the world generally. Her statement is neutral, matter of fact; it doesn't occur to her that her father might think the same way about a daughter. This is followed up on somewhat throughout the book, but I think I wish it had been covered a bit further. Aida's younger brother, who is born after this point in the book, eventually becomes the focus of the family's energies, though for different reasons than Aida expresses here, and so too does the book lose focus on what it is to have a homeland torn apart by war. I wish there had been a bit more of a sense of place; I didn't pick up all that much of a sense of being either in Bosnia or in Italy, and if the story had been picked up and put in the context of a different conflict, I don't think all that much would have to be changed.

So...glad to have read this, but I'm not sure how well it will stay with me. A quick read, though, and always nice to pick up something about a situation I don't know enough about.

Review: "Strangers" by Belle Burden

Strangers by Belle Burden
Published January 2026 via The Dial Press
★★★★

Burden had a picture-perfect life—a New York apartment and a summer house; an excellent education and legal work she enjoyed, but also the financial flexibility to be a stay-at-home parent; three kids; a happy marriage that had lasted almost twenty years. And then her husband walked away from it all.

Strangers traces their marriage, and the dissolution of it—the man she thought she knew, and the red flags that it just didn't occur to her to see, not in the context of a happy marriage. There are...a lot of labels that could be applied to her now-ex-husband; I'm reminded of A Beautiful, Terrible Thing, in which that author and her therapist decide that the ex-husband in question must have a personality disorder. But Burden applies none of those labels: She simply tells the story of what happened, and acknowledges again and again that she'll probably never know why.

It's a painful story to read. I had to put the book down briefly at around the 1/3 mark, because it was so clear that some financial decisions throughout their marriage were going to come back to haunt Burden. I say there were red flags, and there were, but: it's also so clear that she couldn't see the red flags for the green, and so clear that so many others also would have seen just the green. Also painful: Burden's discussion of people's reactions, both after her husband left and after she started publishing material about the split. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but it's still staggering to think how many people will tell women to hush, be quiet, take on his shame as your own. Talking about her life being torpedoed treated as something equally bad as, or worse than, her ex-husband torpedoing her life in the first place.

Burden is not vindictive here. I think it's fair to say that she's writing from a place of pain but also a place of healing, one where she can express how it felt but also see a way forward. And...I'll be honest. Burden is careful in how she writes her story, careful to strip out any remaining vestiges of anger, but I have no such compunctions; I am going to cheerfully hope that the publication of this book simultaneously sets Burden up financially and make's her ex's life a social misery. (Surely that's the barest of bare minimums due to a man who would intentionally, and for no apparent reason, abandon his wife and kids and then do his best to ruin them financially—something he seems to have been preparing for for years?)

A well-crafted story, and a reminder to be a decent person—in your own relationships, and when talking to people about theirs.

Thanks to the author and publisher for inviting me to read a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Archie, Vol. 4" by Mark Waid and Pete Woods

Archie, Vol. 4 by Mark Waid and Pete Woods
Published 2017 via Archie Comics
★★★

And into volume 4 we go! This picks off right about where volume 3 left off, with the crush of the third volume actually going somewhere (I wasn't sure it would). I'm sure there were similar subplots in the original comics, but if there were they never went very far. We also get a bit more from the Blossoms, though theirs seems to be a long-haul sub-plot (info drabbled out across volumes).

But if the Blossoms were the big bads (well, Cheryl, anyway) of the previous volume, it's Reggie this time. He hasn't had much role in the series so far, but...here he is, leering at girls and pushing Archie's buttons until Archie snaps. And that snapping leads to one of the stupidest decisions of the series...and then some other equally stupid decisions. (Spoiler: If you're trying to stop an illegal car race, the thing to do is not to drive headfirst into it.) Archie gets off scot-free, of course, because the cops know Reggie as a troublemaker, and...honestly, that's sort of a problem, no? Oh, very consistent with the Archie comics of old, but it's very much a "reputation is all that counts" thing. And of course the volume ends on a cliffhanger...which I suspect will not last more than midway through volume 5, but hey! Not quite there yet.

Review: Short story: "Famous Once" by Jane Green

Famous Once by Jane Green
Published February 2026 via Amazon Original Stories

In another life, Astrid Lane was a model married to a rock star. Then things came crashing down—his affairs, mostly, but also a mysterious death with numerous open questions. Decades later, Astrid is living a much quieter life, working as a caterer and struggling to pay the bills...but when even her daughter starts asking questions, Astrid can't help but get involved.

This short story made for a very quick read, though in a way that also felt a bit rushed. We learn a bit about Astrid's earlier life (meeting her rock star husband, flashing forward to the relationship not working out as she hoped) plus of course the present day. A lot less about the mysterious death; the woman who died is little more than a name. There's a brief threat against Astrid, a briefer worry about what uncovering the past might lead to; and then basically a jump to the conclusion. Ultimately I think the brief length of this story is working against it; there's enough time to get interested in the various threads of the story but not enough time to explore any of them in depth.

I'm also, if I'm honest, uncomfortable with the way Astrid's (ex) husband, Callum, is portrayed so positively. When Astrid first has a conversation with him (in the backstory part of things), his manager has just sexually assaulted Astrid. Callum's reaction boils down to "yeah, he's an asshole but good with money, so I keep him around", and...I guess Callum's non-apology is supposed to be enough to make it okay that he willingly associates with this abusive sleazeball. (As I write this, the news is full of revalations from the Epstein files. Callum isn't responsible for somebody else's actions, no, but who one willingly associates with—and what one knows about one's associates' actions—is telling.) And yet Callum is portrayed throughout as someone who is still dynamic, whose fatal flaw is that he's not faithful; he's portrayed of someone deserving of sympathy for eventually being held ever so slightly accountable for his ongoing relationship/friendship with the manager.

So...has its moments but did not have the substance or space to be really satisfying.

(One thing I did find funny: When Astrid's daughter discusses where an article could be published, she mentions <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>The Sunday Times</i>, and <i>The Daily Mail</i>...how the NYT has fallen, to be mentioned in the same breath as a rag like <i>The Daily Fail</i>!)

<i>Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.</i>