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2026 Hugo finalists!

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:30:15 GMT

Here, or behind the cut with my comments!

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Notes from a Regicide

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 03:08:46 GMT

Notes from a Regicide, Isaac Fellman, 2026 novel. I did not think much of the other of Fellman's books I've read, the 2022 novella The Two Doctors Gorski, but I'd seen this one recommended highly by people whose opinions I respect, so figured it was worth a try. And I'm glad I did: I didn't completely love it, but I definitely liked it more than Two Doctors. It is a very slow book and low on plot; mostly a lot of very detailed character study. Closest comparison maybe something like Malafrena, a nineteenth-century Romantic novel being written in the modern day, in this case set in the medium-far future and principally concerned with (what seemed to me like) a very now-specific experience of transness, and secondarily alcoholism and/or being an artist.

Me being me I was most interested in the speculative elements, and since my ebook expires at midnight let me put a bunch of quotes behind the cut and talk a little about some worldbuilding choices.

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Stranger Things Season Five

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:33:40 GMT

Stranger Things Season Five. We finally finished watching this dang show. I actually found the finale pretty entertaining, which was a pleasant surprise. So much of this season has made so little sense or come so totally out of an uninteresting left field (why does this show star extremely minor background character Holly now? never figured that one out) but they managed to flail their way to a fun final battle and if that isn't D&D vibes what is.

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Project Hail Mary

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 23:16:52 GMT

Project Hail Mary, 2026 film. I thought they did a good job adapting the book and it made a nice movie. In particular good jobs with the visual design and with keeping their eye on what kind of story they were trying to tell and making sure they told that story.

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The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:56:49 GMT

The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal, KJ Charles, 2015 or 2017 paranormal romance. A series of short stories taking place across the late 19th and early 20th century about a journalist and a ghost hunter, as their relationship develops out of sex-for-supernatural-reasons into a long-term thing, riffing on various bits of British folklore and Victorian occult pulp fiction. An entertaining end to "KJ Charles week" here.

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A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:52:46 GMT

A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel, KJ Charles, romance novel. Sequel to The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, following a minor character from that book some years later. You don't absolutely need to have read that one but this one will spoil many events of that one so I would probably read them in order for maximum fun. Like the previous, Charles is very good at making a plot conflict a relationship conflict and vice-versa. Good stuff.

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All of Us Murderers

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:35:10 GMT

All of Us Murderers, KJ Charles, 2025 novel. A sort of meta-Gothic mystery with bonus romance, extremely page-turny as Charles tends to be. I had to have Dental Work and managed to get myself *three* Charles books in preparation/consolation, although, not to jinx anything, but so far at ~24 hours I am in less of a state of being unable to do anything but languish than I thought I might be. Anyways, I recommend this one even if you aren't specifically looking for Distractions, (although if you don't like Charles' romances I don't think you'd like this even though it's less primarily a romance).

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2025 Otherwise Award

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:50:41 GMT

The 2025 Otherwise Award has a winner, an honor list, and a long list, here with descriptions or below the cut with my comments.

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my full 2026 Hugo nominations

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:35:35 GMT

Here's my entire nominating ballot, unless I make any last-minute changes.

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my 2026 Hugo short fiction nominations

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 05:09:50 GMT

Short stories:

Wire Mother, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld.

Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness, B Pladek, Lightspeed.

The Repairers of Reality, Shaenon K. Garrity, Drabblecast.

10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills, Uncanny.

Six People to Revise You, J.R. Dawson, Uncanny.

Novelettes:

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed, Reactor.

Phantom View, John Wiswell, Reactor.

The Twenty-One Second God, Peter Watts, Lightspeed.

Barnacle, Kate Elliott, Reactor.

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2025 Online Short SFF Fiction - Post Two

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 04:11:34 GMT

A few more recommendations. I have not done as much reading this year as I would have liked to but I'm running out of time, so, here's what I have.

Short stories:

Unbeaten, Grace Seybold, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Nice riff on "swords into plowshares" and "pen is mightier".

Last Meal Aboard the Awassa, Kev Coleman, Lightspeed. A doomed ship has a party. (This one from the Locus list.)

The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead, E.M. Linden, PodCastle. Migration and memory. (Nebula nominee.)

Six People to Revise You, J.R. Dawson, Uncanny. Letting other people fix you. (Nebula nominee.)

ETA: The Fate You Choose, Nadia Radovich, Apex. Atalanta choose-your-own-adventure.

Looped, Nadia Radovich, Heartlines Spec. A time loop, with knitting.

Five Things You Can See, Nadia Radovich, Strange Horizons. Future selves.

Novelette:

Barnacle, Kate Elliott, Reactor. NOVELETTE. Life in a company town.

ETA: The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Uncanny. NOVELETTE. A meta story about fantasy books and what they mean to people. (Nebula nominee.)

Novellas:

The Chronolithographer's Assistant, Suzanne Palmer, Asimov's. NOVELLA. A young man avoiding the sea becomes a printmaker. Palmer is always a good time.

Murder on the Eris Express, Beth Goder, Asimov's. NOVELLA. A spaceship AI and a mystery.

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Saltcrop

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:06:58 GMT

Saltcrop, Yume Kitasei, 2025 science fiction novel. Two sisters in a post-collapse near future sail in search of the third. By description this sounded like something I would be into but I wouldn't have finished it if I hadn't been reading it for a book club; I just never wanted to know that much what was going to happen next. There was one cool vivid scene on the boat with unexpected music and an aurora and phosphorescent whales, I liked that. And I guess I'm interested in different takes on this kind of world and this was one.

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one more graphic novel, and picking some graphic novels

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 01:43:58 GMT

Drome, Jesse Lonergan, 2025 graphic. Stunning fantasy epic that blew me away with what it did with color and formal structure. Lonergan establishes a five by seven grid of square panels and then combines and subverts them in fascinating ways, bringing the gutters in to become motion lines and new divisions. The comic opens with an invocation of the four colors of printing, cyan magenta yellow and black, in a creation of the world sequence, and returns to that in a very meta way in the climax. There is *so much* going on in the character and world design and paneling and the way panels act as both time and space and the use of negative space and callbacks to sword-and-sorcery comics and retro superhero costuming and amazing vivid action sequences and mythological weight (no spoilers but there was definitely some "wait, is this... ??", except not exactly). Funny moments and touching moments and sometimes actually manages to hit larger-than-life heroic grandeur. But really it comes back to the art. Everyone else is writing free verse and this thing is a villanelle. Damn.

So, if Drome has catapulted its way to the top of my Hugo graphic nominations, where does that leave the rest of the list. To recap, I have read: The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor, Second Shift, In the Land of Simplicity, Flip, The Other Jay & Eve, Who Killed Nessie?, Testament, A Song for You & I, Strange Bedfellows, part of A Garden of Spheres, and Drome. From which I guess, picking in more or less favorite order, I want to nominate: Drome, Nefarious Nights, Flip, Testament, and then... maybe Song? for the last slot? Or maybe Simplicity has more of a shot at the ballot, and it would be neat to get that on? Hmmm.

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more graphic novels

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:36:01 GMT

A Song for You & I, K. O'Neill, 2025 graphic. Beautifully drawn and colored coming-of-age fantasy in which a pegasus-riding trainee ranger befriends a violin-playing shepherd and mutual personal growth ensues. Quiet, simple, and lovely, perfect for fans of Kiki's Delivery Service or maybe Blue Delliquanti's Across a Field of Starlight.

Strange Bedfellows, Ariel Slamet Ries, 2025 graphic. Also YA; a college dropout in a good-future space colony ("utopian" feels more laden than I want to say here) develops a late-blooming superpower to bring things from his dreams into reality, including his high school crush. A terrific premise that didn't always work for me, especially reading it right after Song for You & I. They're very similar books at the core - two young people whose interaction helps each of them figure out what's holding them back - but felt very different to read, in a couple of ways.

Song is, like I mentioned, beautiful - it's set in a medieval-ish world that values harmony with nature, and drawn with a lot of attention and panel space given to scenery, from big vistas to close-ups of specific birds or plants, Miyazaki-style, a slow detailed richness of the world around the characters that gives the characters more emotional weight. Very peaceful and relaxing to read. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is in a very busy high-tech future, and the art reflects that - crowded pages, crowded panels, crowd scenes, a couple of different ensembles of secondary characters, inclusion of text elements like search results and chats and social media (some of which was so low-contrast I skimmed over it rather than squinting to read every word). An effective match of content and style - but *a lot*, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming.

And then also, Song is very, very chaste - the big romantic climax is a kiss on the cheek - which felt reasonable for the Miyazaki-like tone and possibly middle-grade audience. Bedfellows, on the other hand, is also weirdly chaste, with a Big Deal being made out of a couple of kisses, and... it just felt off to me? Like, yes, Not Everything Has To Be Porn, but something felt infantilizing to me about the way the relationships of these nominally college-aged young adults were rendered suitable for a younger-YA audience. Dreams are such fertile territory for the weird, the disturbing, the unsanitized, the id, but here they're pastel, quirky, dragons and unicorns. There was a one-off line about the idea of making out with your own dream-projection being masturbatory that felt particularly prudish, like, what's wrong with that, exactly? I'm sure not everybody would immediately fuck their dream of their high school crush if they projected that dream into reality but would a twenty-year-old really be scandalized by the *idea*? It felt like the kind of pearl-clutching neo-puritanism you sometimes get on Tumblr, the "there is s*x here MINORS LOOK AWAY" nonsense, and I think I personally would have found this book more interesting if it was a little more visceral. Get some horniness into those dreams, and a little horror too, maybe, or a more adult take on the whole idea, generally. Made me really appreciate that Simplicity and Other Jay & Eve didn't shy away from sex (and in the case of Simplicity, some very non-pastel dreams about desire and monsters from the id). I mean, there's nothing wrong with Young Adult! Every book its reader! I just thought it was a neat story (it was a neat story, a nice satisfying plot) and I would have liked it if it was catering a little bit more to me. :)

ETA: Also I'm fascinated by the way Song and Bedfellows and Flip all use climactic or major-turning-point dance sequences to convey intimacy and joyous catharsis. Something about how the silence and stillness of the comics page leaves a big space for the reader to "complete the scene" filling in the implied music and motion thus heightening the emotional impact from that reader investment, I don't know.

A Garden of Spheres, Linnea Sterte, 2025 graphic. I read maybe 100-120 pages of this and it was very pretty but I had no idea what was going on and I felt disconnected rather than intrigued. I don't mind slow and I don't mind having to work a little but I think I need a little more of a thread to follow. :/

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Mickey 17

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:51:05 GMT

Mickey 17, 2025 science fiction movie directed by Bong Joon Ho and staring Robert Pattinson as a hapless space colonist who has agreed to be killed and reprinted over and over again as a way to escape Earth. I'm always excited to see a movie try to do what I might call "real science fiction" and there were some interesting elements and moments but I didn't really feel like it all hung together. Maybe if it had tried to do a little less? I was more interested in the sfnal or personal character story than in the political satire parts. I mean, I was interested in seeing a movie do a multiple-bodies story, and I'm interested in first-contact stories, but I didn't end up feeling like it said anything particularly interesting about either, alas.

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some graphic novels

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:34:53 GMT

I still hope for another round of Annual Take Advantage Of My Best Friend's Comic Purchasing Day, but in my first pass at sitting in her living room and reading her books, I enjoyed:

The Other Jay & Eve, Emma Jayne, 2025 graphic. What if you and your roommate got duplicated for money and then you met up with your duplicates and then you found out they were *engaged*. An obviously instantly compelling premise with good execution, although I initially felt like it didn't reach a satisfying conclusion, but on further reflection I think it worked, and definitely worthwhile overall.

Who Killed Nessie?, Paul Cornell and Rachel Smith, 2025 graphic. A murder mystery at a convention for mythological creatures, which one newbie hotel worker has been left by her coworkers to staff. Fun premise and a bunch of the joke made me laugh.

Testament, J. Marshall Smith, 2025 graphic. A nun and a caretaker robot, the last survivors of a one-way mission of planetary exploration, contemplate their situation. This is exactly the sort of thing I like - space nuns, quiet sad thinky stuff about how space exploration might really work and who would do it and what it would be like, beautifully illustrated alien biology. Recommended to fans of To Be Taught If Fortunate, Scavengers Reign, and maybe anyone who remembers whatever that Robert L. Forward novel with the one-way mission was.

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2026 Nebula Nominees

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:08:17 GMT

I have my laptop back! There is much rejoicing and also catching up! The one thing I will say about having my battery and remaining functional port fail more or less simultaneously is that I only had to pay the open-the-case fee once, yay efficiency, otherwise I do not recommend it.

Anyways! Some things have happened, such as the Nebula nominees coming out! Here, or below the cut with my comments.

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Flip

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:57:14 GMT

Flip, Ngozi Ukazu, 2025 graphic novel. I started this once and didn't get very far but I started it again and I guess just had to be in the right mood because I was really into it. A body-swap story about a Nigerian-American scholarship girl at a ritzy private school with a crush on a rich white boy. Ukazu does great work with her expressive, appealing faces (she's the author of Check Please, and it's neat to see her bringing the style and skills she developed there to this new project) and tells a solid story with some funny and touching moments. Are we going to get this onto the Hugo ballot? Probably not, but is it way better than at least half the likely ballot? Heck yeah.

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2025 Online Short SFF Fiction - Post One

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:16:45 GMT

Hi! This is a big post of what I've read and am reccing so far, combining stories that I read during the year and liked, stories I picked up from other people's rec lists/eligibility posts/etc, and stories I read from the Locus list here. I have not yet read everything on the Locus list, nor have I gone through the TOCs of all my favorite magazines looking for stuff, so hopefully I'll have a few more posts. But I wanted to post these to get started. These are vaguely alphabetical by magazine, and I've divided out stuff that's on the Locus list and stuff that wasn't, so that people who have already gone through the Locus list can easily find the other ones. A few standouts or likely nominees in bold.

Short stories on the Locus list:

Wire Mother, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld. I think this is my personal frontrunner; this is really good.

Missing Helen, Tia Tashiro, Clarkesworld. Divorce and clones.

The Year the Sheep God Shattered, Marissa Lingen, Diabolical Plots. A small fantasy about art and magic and growing up.

35/F/Lane's Creek, Oklahoma, Hans Ege Wegner, Escape Pod. Remote work and connection.

Toothpaste Feelings, Sharang Biswas, khōréō. Symbiont, adjustment.

Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness, B Pladek, Lightspeed. AI in the classroom. Sadly probably prescient.

Courtney Lovecraft's Book of the Dead, Sam J. Miller, Nightmare. A drag queen medium does a podcast.

Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush, Ruth Joffre, PodCastle. Extinction, birder grief.

Pandora's Formula, Hannah Yang, Strange Horizons. I don't think the world would last a day in this scenario but I thought the story was good.

Short stories not on the Locus list:

Autonomy, Meg Elison, Clarkesworld. Self-driving cars.

In the Shells of Broken Things, A.T. Greenblatt, Clarkesworld. Disability, community.

Laser Eyes Ain't Everything, Effie Seiberg, Diabolical Plots. The superhero union building isn't ADA compliant.

The Repairers of Reality, Shaenon K. Garrity, Drabblecast. Art and humanity and meaning.

Question 3, Cliff Jerrison. Democracy!

All That Means or Mourns, Ruthanna Emrys, Reactor. Fungal symbiosis and human connection.

Murder in the Clavist Autonomous Zone, Rich Larson, Strange Horizons. This is about a small intentional community inside a techno-dystopia we only see secondhand; some nice worldbuilding and character work in a small space.

10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills, Uncanny. This one has a lot of buzz and I would have said was the frontrunner except for its surprising omission from the Locus list.

Novelettes on the Locus list:

A Random Walk Through the Goblin Library, Chris Wilrich, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. NOVELETTE. Like fantasy Godel Escher Bach.

The Twenty-One Second God, Peter Watts, Lightspeed. NOVELETTE. Hive minds.

Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Reactor. NOVELETTE. This one is weird and I have mixed feelings but it's interesting to see what Rosenbaum is up to.

After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens, Rachel Swirsky, Reactor. NOVELETTE. Vignettes from various different perspectives.

Phantom View, John Wiswell, Reactor. NOVELETTE. Illness and care and ghosts.

Novelettes not on the Locus list:

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed, Reactor. NOVELETTE. Sort of a Cyteen riff.

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F/February

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 05:13:02 GMT

F/F February continues with two more novels. A Scatter of Light, Malinda Lo, 2022, is a companion novel to Last Night at the Telegraph Club, set over 50 years later in 2013. I liked this a lot, and not just because we get a very nice update about Lily and Kath; I liked the romance and the stuff about art and the stuff about aging relatives and grief. It's been a long time since I reread A Ring of Endless Light but it might be a little bit in dialogue with that, or maybe that was just a coincidence.

Daughter of Mystery, Heather Rose Jones, 2014, has been on my to-read list for ages - since 2019, apparently, steadily creeping up in priority the more times someone recced it to me or it came up somewhere. My note said "fantasy Regencyish lesbian", which pretty much sums it up, but I will elaborate that it's a Ruritanian romance, taking place in Alpennia, a country located somewhere in the Alps between France, Germany, and Switzerland, it is low-magic fantasy but not quite no-magic, and would probably appeal to fans of Kushner's Swordspoint books. Exactly my sort of thing, in other words, as people keep telling me, and, yup, they were right, and I look forward to reading the rest of them (this is the first of several). (And perhaps I will ruminate a bit about whether there could be anything interesting to be explored in the idea of Alpennia coexisting with Orsinia or Gallacia...)

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Stranger Things Season Four

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 04:26:04 GMT

Stranger Things Season Four. Whoops, I've had this tab open for awhile, as I discovered when I went to post something else. The needle continues to swing between entertaining and annoying, and this season the balance may have tipped; too many plot threads I wasn't into. Kind of think they should have ended it last season. Although I like it more now that I've started reading it as itself an RPG - thinking about which characters are PCs vs NPCs, and thinking about the narrative from a standpoint of player engagement/satisfaction rather than single-author storytelling, makes so many choices make more sense. We'll probably still watch the last season eventually at some point?

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Heated Rivalry

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 03:54:04 GMT

Heated Rivalry, 2024 six-episode TV series hockey romance. Season one, I guess, since I guess with it such a hit they're going to do more. I was just as delighted by it as it was a safe bet I would be. An excellent exception to my general TV non-watching. (I guess that's a weird thing to say at a time when I've been watching enormous-for-me amounts of television watching Stranger Things, but there's like Family Activity Watching and then Personal Watching and they are different.)

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Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 03:40:01 GMT

Last Night at the Telegraph Club, Malinda Lo, 2021 YA historical. This one's been on my list since 2021 and I'm not sure what made me decide that now was the time. (Looking for some f/f to balance my m/m media consumption watching the gay hockey show, maybe.) Really well done - you can see why the cover is covered in awards - but also kind of wild to read at this moment in history when our fascist government is so desperate to take us back to this time of police raids on gay bars, criminalization of cross-dressing, and taking people's papers and threatening them with denaturalization and deportation. But I guess it's hopeful to think that Lily and Kath of the book are going to make it to Pride parades in their 30s and the 2004 San Francisco marriage licenses in their 60s, and maybe it won't even take us quite so long to work our way back this time. Anyways, Lo does an amazing job bringing a time and place to life, so much great detail here, highly recommended.

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2026 Hugos - my reading/recs so far

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:45:59 GMT

I haven't read much short fiction yet. Maybe soon. Here's what is (and isn't) in my likely nominations so far though.

Novel: The Incandescent, Snake-Eater, This Princess Kills Monsters

Also read: The Tomb of Dragons, A Drop of Corruption, Where the Axe Is Buried, Hemlock & Silver, Katabasis, When We Were Real, Harmattan Season, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, Motheater, Awake in the Floating City, The Martian Contingency, Honeyeater. (Some of these I liked more or less than others and would be more or less happy to see on the ballot, but The Incandescent is by far the front-runner for me and my nominations will at least somewhat be about gaming that. _This Princess_ is not going to come within ten places of the ballot - it's not even on the Locus list - so why not. I would pick Snake-Eater over Hemlock and would disapprove of getting both, although I kind of suspect we *will* get both unless Vernon declines for one of them.)

Novella: The River Has Roots, Automatic Noodle, Cinder House

Also read: Don't Sleep With the Dead, The Summer War, Murder By Memory, A Mouthful of Dust, What Stalks the Deep. (I am leaning towards not nominating series installments even if they were really good. Standalone supremacy, rah.)

Graphic: Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor

Also read: Second Shift, In the Land of Simplicity. (I guess I could nominate both if I don't find anything else I like better just to make a vain stab at getting something interesting on the ballot. Also Nefarious Nights is a sequel, so so much for promoting standalones, but in comics I feel like something more or less has to be a series or franchise or tie-in to get enough traction to get anywhere.)

Lodestar: Among Ghosts

Also read: Starstrike

Dramatic Long: Sinners, KPop Demon Hunters.

Also watched: Leviathan, Superman. (I would like to see Superman on the final ballot so I can give it my third-place vote and also displace something worse but I think it has a good chance of making the ballot without my nomination and thus would rather not dilute my nom for KPDH.)

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Second Shift and Simplicity

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:55:34 GMT

Realized the other day that rather than sitting around waiting for my intrepid graphic-novel-reading friend to tell me what 2025 graphic novels I should be reading, I could seek some out myself. Unfortunately I did not love either of these for Hugo purposes, and neither had the kind of breakout awesome that might be able to compete with inevitable frontrunners Prestige DC Cape Project, Adaptation of Classic Novel, and Latest Kieron Gillen, but it's still interesting to me to see a little bit of what's up in the adult SF graphic novel space.

Second Shift, Kit Anderson, 2025 graphic from Avery Hill, is about workers on a distant planet and the corporate AI that provides them with perception overlays and entertainments. I have to admit I do not love "but what is really real" plots even while I concede that this is an increasingly relevant theme in the age of bespoke AI slop. Also this book is oblique to the point of not really landing for me. I know from my own writing experience that sometimes I am thinking "surely I don't need to spell this out, that would be boring", but it's always more obvious inside your own head when you already know what you're trying to say, and I feel like this story could have used a little less trailing off and a little more actually saying things.

In the Land of Simplicity: A Novel, Mattie Lubchansky, 2025 graphic from Pantheon Books, is a near-future story about an anthropologist visiting a backwoods commune in post-United-States New York. An interesting contrast to Second Shift in that there is also some "what is real" stuff happening but it turns out to be clearer cut and more explained, and also a contrast in positing a possibility of resistance and escape from the corporation that Second Shift doesn't. And it was interesting to see how they both used the idea of the museum in different ways. Unfortunately, while it was at least clear in this book *what* was happening, I didn't really buy into it in a "this is a satisfying narrative" way. I hate to not love a queer book! I do like the way Lubchansky writes/draws about transness and bodies! And no blame to Lubchansky for not wanting to write a tragedy! But the improbability of the end, especially the bigger story we're asked to believe took place off the page, kind of undermined for me the personal character story the book is mostly about. But, I don't know. I guess it's a tonal fit. Maybe I'm too picky. Enh.

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