dawn.vogel | April 8, 2026
The Dead Withheld by L. D. Lewis (Neon Hemlock, 2025) is a queer, gritty, urban fantasy novella that I absolutely flew through once I started reading it. The worldbuilding is fantastic, as are the characters inhabiting that world! Dizzy Carter is a private investigator and deadwalker, a type of witch who can communicate with the […]
dawn.vogel | March 25, 2026
Adria Bailton’s Worlds Divide (Balance of Seven, 2026) is a wonderful young adult sci-fi novel of love despite the odds centering a non-white young woman with a disability and touching heavily on mental health issues. Nina has always been able to “slip” into other worlds, but it’s an ability she can’t control, leading to significant […]
dawn.vogel | March 18, 2026
Tea and Treachery at the Infinite Pantry by Jo Miles (2026) is a delightful cozy mystery set in a fantastical world, filled with tea, delicious foods, cats, and the promised treachery! Glendevyn is the recently appointed head curator of the Infinite Pantry, a museum dedicated to food. When the preservation spells that keep the museum’s […]
dawn.vogel | February 25, 2026
The Iron Below Remembers by Sharang Biswas (Neon Hemlock, 2025) is a charming novella that mashes up academia and superheroes with a largely LGBTQ+ cast of characters. Professor Laxman Yadav, who specializes in art history and archaeology, is brought in to examine a recently unearthed artifact, a rare example of a fully intact technology from […]
dawn.vogel | February 4, 2026
The Cellar Below the Cellar by Ivy Grimes (Apex Book Company, 2026) is a folktale-inspired horror novella with a fascinating cast of characters and themes of family inheritance and isolation. While Jane is visiting her grandmother, an extreme solar event wipes out power, communications, and even car batteries, stranding her in the semi-rural location. As […]
dawn.vogel | November 19, 2025
ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, edited by Marissa Van Uden (Apex Book Company, 2025), is a collection of previously published stories from a wide variety of venues that look at a variety of issues related to climate change, capitalism, and colonialism, along with other aspects of ecological fiction. A number of the stories in […]
dawn.vogel | September 24, 2025
I learned about Juliet Brooks’ book, A Fae in Finance (Orbit Works, 2025), while I was at Seattle’s Worldcon in August, when I chatted with another attendee who was a friend of the author. When said friend explained it as “human trapped in the realm of the fae but still has to work her day job,” […]
