BOOKLOVES

Ten years ago the sun cracked apart in the sky and fell. Nobody has seen a dawn since. Crops rotted, vampires came ashore, and humans learned to eat each other and call it practical. Into that permanent midnight walks Kyrene, a bounty hunter carrying a blade gifted by the goddess of justice, who has never […]

Synopsis: The past doesn’t wash away. It just freezes over. For fourteen years, Alex Neitzel has lived a life built on a foundation of silence and blood money. To the residents of Champaign-Urbana, he is a wealthy, solitary remote copywriter. To his teenage children, Sammy and Cecelia, he is a ghost—a cold, self-absorbed father who […]

A raw, profane, systems-minded dystopian novel about extinction, memory, control, and the ugly cost of calling survival “salvation” Salvation Reigned starts with an alarm bell: “Our clock is a countdown.” Travis James Peterson’s debut brings a former data scientist’s imagination to a violent and profane dystopian future where survival has become its own kind of […]

Artful and insightful—an accompanying character study and prequel to a timeless classic Classics are classics because they go on resonating generation after generation, and they continue to offer ground for succeeding writers to build upon. From Aeschylus to Madeline Miller, people have been reimagining and adapting the heroes of Homer, for example, for over two […]

Three teenagers walk into a police station the morning after a barn party. Two bodies were left behind in the dark. Every one of them swears they are telling the truth, and every one of them is lying about something. That is the deceptively simple hook of Killing Sadie by Rachel Peterson, a young adult […]

When ethical issues test a robot’s fundamental programming, it spawns a thoughtful exploration of self-discovery. Tessa (aka Tessaract 256) is an advanced robot model, designed as a Cranial Augmentation Technician that can surgically heal human minds, even enhance intelligence. She lives with a robot assistant and companion, Tucker. Tucker is a mechanical dog, but she […]

A richly imagined Dickensian prequel that breathes luminous life into the Ghost of Christmas Present—and the generous soul who became him. In The Ghost of Christmas Present: The Spirit of the Frozen Thames, the second volume of Scott A. Johnson’s Ghosts of Christmas Trilogy, Johnson answers one of Dickens’s most tantalizing unanswered questions: who was […]

Some romances announce their intentions in the first chapter. This one does it in the first text message, when a lovestruck third baseman admits his heart trips over itself every time his sister’s best friend pops up on his phone. Just for the Plot by Meghan Quinn is the second book in the Bay Area […]