A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher

Red Wombat Studio, July 2020

Mona is fourteen years old, an orphan, and learning the art of baking from her aunt. She'll inherit the bakery, someday.

Oh, and she's a wizard.

Not a great, powerful wizard, like the ones who defend the city. She can't throw lightning bolts, or talk to water. She can, however, get dough to do amazing things. Sometimes she makes the gingerbread men dance to entertain the customers--although some customers get more nervous than amused. Her familiar is her sourdough starter, Bob. Bob can be a little scary, for people who aren't Mona, but he stays in his bucket in the basement, and it's mostly Mona who deals with him. It's a peaceful, productive, enjoyable life.

Then one morning, she comes in to start the baking for the day, and finds a dead girl in the kitchen. She wakes her aunt and uncle, her uncle fetches the constables.

The Bone Witch (The Bone Witch #1), by Rin Chupeco (author), Emily Woo Zeller (narrator), Will Damron (narrator)

Blackstone Audio, March 2017

Tea is growing up in a small village, with several sisters and brothers. Her older sisters are witches, with useful and unalarming powers related to water, or to plants, for instance. Everyone expects that Tea will also be a witch, and she expects that her powers will be similarly domestic and useful.

However, when her brother, Fox, is killed in a battle, and his body returned to his family for burial, Tea, in her grief, accidentally resurrects him. She's not a nice, normal, domestic sort of witch; she's a bone witch--a necromancer.

A Secret Scottish Escape, by Julie Shackman

HarperCollins UK/One More Chapter, ISBN 9780008455767, May 2021

Layla is looking forward to her wedding, in a few months time, to Mac. He's older, a prominent author, whom she met when she was interviewing him for a feature article. He's away on a trip to London to meet with his agent...

Except he isn't. He didn't leave Scotland. Layla is shocked when she's notified that Mac has died, of a heart attack--while having sex with his ex-wife.

This sends Layla reeling, and initially she's determined to leave Loch Harris, where she's lived her whole life, to start over. After this shocking end to her hopes and plans, she wants to start over, where not everybody knows her and her story. Yet she loves Loch Harris, and Mac has left her an unexpected inheritance. She looks around her village, and sees what an injection of money and imagination could do for it.

2021 Hugo Voter Packet Best Fan Writer Finalist Cora Buhlert, by Cora Buhlert

Pegasus Pulp Publications, May 2021

Hugo season is upon us, the finalists have been announced, and there's a Hugo Voters Packet in preparation--but Cora Buhlert, one of the finalists for Best Fan Writer, has decided to make her contribution to the Hugo Voters Packet available without waiting, and for all interested, not just those who are members of DisCon III.

And I have to say, this is what fan writing is all about. 

She's included reviews of current media (The Mandalorian, Rogue One, Star Trek Discovery, Star Trek Picard) from the perspective of a knowledgeable and thoughtful fan, commentary on the CoNZealand Hugo Awards ceremony, "Retro Reviews" of actual and potential Retro Hugo nominees, and a well-argued defense of the importance of the Retro Hugos themselves. 

Time and Again, by Clifford D. Simak

Open Road Media, December 2015 (original publication December 1950)

Twenty years ago, Asher Sutton disappeared in the star system 61 Cygni, a system that the otherwise galaxy-conquering humans have failed to penetrate. Now he's back, in a ship with catastrophic damage he shouldn't have survived.

Yet he's alive, uninjured, healthy--and changed. Perhaps not entirely human, anymore. And, though it's not obvious, he's not alone.

Asher Sutton also has a message--for humans, for androids who are no different from humans except for numbers on their foreheads, the inability to reproduce biologically, and being property, and for the rest of the living beings in the human-dominated galaxy.

It's a message that will change the galaxy.

It's a message that some want to suppress, some want to hijack, and some want to help him spread.

A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler, by Lynell George (author), Adenrele Ojo (narrator)

Penguin Random House Audio Publishing, ISBN 9780593458617, May 2021 (original publication September 2020)

This is an account of how Octavia E. Butler became Octavia E. Butler, the wonderful writer we loved, and lost too soon. Lynell George gives us Butler's life and development into a writer through Butler's own eyes and words as much as possible.

Butler's full name was Octavia Estelle Butler; her mother was Octavia Margaret Butler. In her younger years, she went by Estelle. Estelle was a quiet, shy girl--and the more she pursued her ambition to become a writer, the more she realized she needed to develop a more assertive, outward-facing personality.

Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley (translator), (author unknown)

MCD X Fsg Originals, ISBN 9780374110031, August 2020

Beowulf is a classic that comes down to us from Anglo-Saxon times, written in what we now call Old English, and so, except for scholars of Old English, today we read it only in translation.

This is a wonderful translation that's fun, exciting, thoroughly enjoyable.

I'm going to assume that, as Beowulf is more than a thousand years old, and is a popular choice for teachers to assign to high school students who will never even thing of studying Old English, spoilers are not really an issue.

The basic story, of course, is that a Danish king has built a great mead hall, Heorot, where he and his thanes feast, drink, and generally party every night--until Grendel, a never really described "monster," being greatly annoyed by the noise, starts visiting nightly to kill, carry off, and eat men from the court. The Danes are unable to kill him, and this, obviously, puts quite a damper on the partying. 

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, by Garth Nix (author), Marisa Calin (narrator)

Penguin Random House Audio Publishing, ISBN 9780593171875, September 2020

In a 1983 that is perhaps slightly different from the one we remember, Susan Arkshaw turns 18 on May 1, and shortly thereafter goes to London. In three months, she'll be starting art school. In the meantime, she wants to find her father, whom she has never met and about whom her mother has told her almost nothing, including not telling her even his first name.

She does have some clues, though, including a few items that may have belonged to her father, and the name and address of one potential candidate--"Uncle" Frank Tingley, who sent her cards at Christmas for years. When she reaches his home, though, she finds that "Uncle" Frank does not seem at all a likely possibility, and moreover seems to be a rather creepy person she'd rather not be associated with. As she's preparing to sneak out of the house, a very attractive young man comes in, and sticks Frank with a pin, which causes him to disintegrate into dust--which is not the kind of creepy Susan had been worried about.

A Knot of Sparrows, by Cheryl Rees-Price

The Book Folks, March 2021

Winter Meadows was raised on a commune, until events not fully discussed in this book led to him living in town and discovering the benefits of central heating and other comforts. The change didn't lead to him abandoning the beliefs he was raised with. Those beliefs didn't prevent him from becoming a police officer, and eventually a Detective Inspector, investigating a murder in a small Welsh town.

Seventeen-year-old Stacey Evans is found murdered, and a surprising number of people have potential motives for murder. She had recently dumped the teenage boyfriend her parents believe she didn't have. She had been involved with several married men in the village. She had mercilessly bullied and harassed another teenage girl, Erin Kelly, who committed suicide as a result. In Erin's case, it's not just her mother and father who might have wanted Stacey to pay for what she did. There's also Donald Hobson, another teenager, Erin's best friend, who has made no secret of blaming Stacey for her death.

The Assassins of Thasalon (Penric and Desdemona #10), by Lois McMaster Bujold

Spectrum Literary Agency, May 2021 

Two years after The Physicians of Vilnoc, an assassination attempt on Learned Penric's brother-in-law, General Adelis Arisaydia, fails only because Penric is right there with him, and Desdemona, his demon, is paranoid and alert. What's disturbing about this attempt is the method: a sorceress attempts to kill Arisaydia by the use of her demon-given powers. 

A Temple-trained sorcerer wouldn't do that; it would cost them both their powers and their standing as a sorcerer, because the White God would immediately take and destroy the demon. A hedge sorcerer wouldn't do it because they wouldn't have the knowledge or the training to try. Who is this assassin, and what is her motive?

There's reason to think that the motive may lie in the deteriorating political situation in Cedonia, where Arisaydia has both enemies, and people who may value him as a potential ally. When Penric sets a trap, using Arisaydia as bait, the capture of the sorceress-assassin reveals a plot that to General Arisaydia and Duke Jurgo might seem almost like normal politics, but to Penric, a Temple sorcerer of the Bastard, is both sacrilegious and horrifyingly cruel.