All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella by Danielle Teller

read by Jane Copland

In the spirit of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, All the Ever Afters takes a familiar tale and turns it on its head by telling from the point of view of the villain. In this case the villain-turned-protagonist is Agnes, Cinderella’s purportedly evil stepmother. And oh boy, do we get a different picture of what kind of person Cinderella really is.

To begin with, this is very much Agnes’ tale, not Cinderella’s (she’s actually called Ella), though of course that fabled beauty plays a tremendous part in Agnes’s life—and not just by spreading those nasty rumors about the woman who eventually becomes her stepmother. Ella is an ethereally lovely child with an extremely tenuous grip on reality; she’s also the spoiled only daughter of a drunken lord, in whose household Agnes becomes a laundress when her family can no longer afford to keep her.

Agnes works in the drunken lord’s household for a number of years, under the supervision of a lazy, despotic sadist of a head laundress. She has a fair amount of contact with the lord of the manor, first because as the lowest-ranking servant in the house she can be made to deal with him when his drunkenness has made him unusually difficult, and then because she proves herself equal to the task of jollying him along. He develops a fondness for her; he is, nonetheless, a frightening individual to be around when he is in his cups, which he usually is.

Eventually her fortunes improve and she becomes a better sort of servant in a better sort of household. Much later, after numerous ups and downs as her hopes for a better life are repeatedly dashed because of a society and legal system that are stacked against the poor, Agnes returns to work for Ella’s father—as a senior servant. Now that she has more say in how things are run, her understandable bitterness comes out in petty ways. But overall she runs the household well, including handling its still-drunken lout of a lord and his spoiled, mentally unstable daughter, Ella.

The “wicked stepmother” rumors start here, as Agnes tries to find ways to get Ella to learn the responsibilities of running a household and to have some appreciation for the hard work that all of the servants do for her. And Agnes does, by something of a miracle and much to everyone’s disapproval, end up marrying Ella’s father. And no, that’s not the end of the story—but I’ve already given away a lot.

Basically, if you like a good, solid retelling of a fairy tale with richly detailed world-building, especially ones from non-traditional points of view, you’ll like this one a lot. It’s a really good example of the genre.

I’m Just a Person by Tig Notaro

read by the author

Full disclosure: I have a massive crush on Jett Reno, Tig Notaro’s character on Star Trek: Discovery. That may or may not have influenced my review.

Those of you who aren’t Star Trek folks (though honestly, what do you do with your time???) may have heard of her famous stand-up routine where she began with, “Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer.” If you haven’t heard of it, go google it now.

Basically what happened was, Ms. Notaro was hospitalized with a painful and life-threatening condition, and her mother died after a freak accident, and her girlfriend broke up with her, and she was diagnosed with bilateral invasive breast cancer, all within 4 months in 2012. Bringing it to her standup routine in that raw way was her way of trying to be as alive as possible.

This memoir is about that year—the four-month period just mentioned, and the 8 months or so that followed. It’s full of all the despair and hope and chaos and love and confusion and connection that you would expect. Ms. Notaro was of course knocked completely flat by all of this; she doesn’t claim any special strength or courage. Quite the opposite. She’s not self-deprecating in the least, but she’s honest and straightforward and utterly humble.

And she managed to face her world falling completely apart with a kind of grace. A very human grace, peppered with failures and lapses in kindness and common sense—but still, a grace. I think that, and her unflagging sense of humor, derive from her refusal to refuse to face the facts, tempting as it might have been. 

That’s what I find admirable about her. And what I admire and appreciate about the book is her willingness and ability to keep the raw parts raw and not try to gloss them over or tie a pretty bow around them. At the same time, while the reader does accompany Ms. Notaro to the depths of the worst days of her life, there are notes of humor and hope throughout.

I wish her a long and happy life. And I hope you will check her memoir out. It’s harrowing sometimes, but it’s also beautiful and satisfying and will give you all the feels.

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

read by Cassandra Campbell

The power of this story is the compelling writing—and it’s a very powerful story. Despite the stupid cover, which makes it look like a YA fantasy romance (it’s not!!!), and despite the title, which someone ought to be fired for because it manages to be both deceptive and non-descriptive. This story is so much better than it needs to be, and so much better than I expected when I picked it up. I just wanted a good time-travel romp; what I got was much deeper, deeply satisfying, both emotionally and intellectually.

The story starts when Kate and Ben meet at a party at a rich girl’s uncle’s apartment in New York, attended by idealistic young political activists at the turn of the millennium. They hit it off right away, almost in spite of themselves. Ben isn’t quite looking to fall for someone, and Kate is super quirky, to the point of not quite seeming to live in the same reality as everyone else. But chemistry is chemistry.

What Ben is slow to realize is the degree to which Kate’s reality differs from his. She has dreams of another life—a life in which she’s the mistress of an Elizabethan nobleman. And she takes these dreams very seriously. How could she not, when sometimes, when she wakes up from them, reality has changed? It might be a small change, like suddenly there are blinds instead of curtains on her bedroom windows. But nobody else ever remembers things the way she does, or seems to realize that anything was ever different. 

Gradually the changes get bigger and bigger, and always, Kate is the only one who remembers how things were before. She comes to the realization that she actually is traveling to the past in her dreams, and that small things she does there are changing the future.

As the changes become bigger and bigger, and the world keeps changing—always for the worse—it becomes harder and harder for Kate to keep her grip on the current state of things. And when she can’t remember who the president is, or why people allow so many billboards and cars all over the place, Ben and her friends and family increasingly see her as mentally ill and out of touch with reality.

And maybe that’s actually the case…? Is this actually a time travel story, or just a story about someone with a remarkably detailed structure of delusions? Could 2001 have been entirely different if Kate hadn’t decided to advise an acquaintance to leave London during a plague year, and then put a good word for him in her lover’s ear? Or is that as ridiculous as it would sound to you or me in the real world?

All of this would be fascinating in any case. It’s just such a good story premise. But what makes it truly compelling for me is the way Sandra Newman writes. 

She’s just so good at depicting what happens between couples when they argue, what goes on in their heads and how they try to express it and what happens when that goes wrong. She paints such a clear and realistic picture of how people who think they are very sensible and attuned to what matters can actually completely miss seeing the elephant trampling all over the room. She’s a master of the telling emotional detail, and writes it in brilliant, insightful, and unsentimental strokes.

I walked away from it in a daze. Verdict: read this book. 

Life by Keith Richards and James Fox

read by Joe Hurley, Keith Richards, and Johnny Depp

If you’re above a certain age, it may surprise you to learn that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger aren’t baby boomers. They’re members of the Silent Generation, by two or three years. But the band they formed, along with Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Ian Stewart is such an intrinsic part of the baby boom generation that I think we’ve got to give them honorary membership. To this day, if you want a lively debate among Boomers (not to mention a significant portion of Genexers), all you’ve got to say is three words: “Beatles or Stones?”

And Keith Richards’ autobiography is necessarily a biography of the Rolling Stones—from his point of view, of course. And it turns out that he is disarmingly charming. James Fox captured his voice, first over hundreds of hours of interviews, then in writing—and he did a fantastic job. If you listen to the audiobook, Johnny Depp does some of the narration (mostly in the first few chapters and then again for a bit near the end) but Keith does quite a lot of it himself, and it’s wonderful to hear his stories.

For me the most fascinating part was how the band got together, and then their early days—both before they became famous and then after they really caught on. There was a certain early-to-mid-career part, where the sex and drugs were very present but not yet all-consuming, where Keith was fascinated with learning and perfecting his five-string open tuning, and when the relationship with Anita Pallenberg was first occurring and then was at its best, that feels to me like a golden age—if not in Keith’s life, then in the course of the book. 

But his recounting of how heroin took over his life, and heroin and paranoia took over Anita’s, and all the difficulties with parenting and with the deterioration of the friendship between Keith and Mick, is also deeply interesting. All of that went into making Keith the person he is at the end of the book, too—that, and the various deaths in his circle of family and friends and co-famous-people, and new relationships we don’t get to hear so much about anymore.

It’s not possible for me to listen to the Rolling Stones with new ears. I’m too familiar with their canon up to about Tattoo You, and I don’t care enough about anything they produced after that. But after listening to this book, and stopping frequently to listen to the song being discussed, I can say I have listened to their work with, at least, new appreciation. For the history of each track, of course, but also for the artistry that went into so much deceptive simplicity. And there was definitely artistry—technique and concept both. Keith geeks out about all this in several places, and I found it oddly charming.

In the end I can say that Keith Richards is a man of depth and complexity who follows all of his passions well beyond the dictates of common sense—which is the reason for his genius as well as numerous brushes with the law and with death. In short, he lives up to his reputation. 

Which is not to say that all of the rumors are true; according to him, at least, some are and some aren’t. And the truth behind at least one major one will remain forever a mystery if he has his say. No, I won’t tell you which is which. Read the book! Go on, I dare you.

Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma

read by Stephanie Racine

I’m not sure how to categorize this book. It's not a psychological thriller, though we do spend a lot of time on the edge of our seats wondering, claustrophobically, what's really going on. It's not contemporary realistic fiction, because people travel to and live on another planet. It’s not exactly science fiction, either—though a lot of it takes place on that other planet, in a near-future that’s scarily like ours.

That planet, Nyx, is a lot of things—on a surface level it’s what the narrator describes it as, a barren planet sufficiently Earth-like as to make colonization and eventual terraforming a possibility. Scratch just a little below that surface, though, and Nyx is a sort of anti-Earth, a symbolic and literal refuge for social media refuseniks who romanticise grandiose and permanent acts of rebellion, or for those who just can’t cope with life under the modern social panopticon. Its presence in the book, at the beginning at least, is clearly more about our current social ills than about actual and literal heavenly bodies.

So: in addition to being straight-up entertaining and a quick, fun read, this book is definitely literary, working on several levels and raising more questions than it answers. In fact, if I were teaching a freshman lit class in college, I'd want to assign this book, for those very reasons.

And so we come to the fourth paragraph on this review and I’m not sure I’ve even begun to tell you what you want or need to know. I may, in fact, have already scared you off from reading this novel. But in case you're still considering reading it (and I do recommend that you do), you’ll want some basic information. So:

It’s set in the near future, as I’ve said. A near future that’s maybe halfway between Life As We Know It here and now, and that Black Mirror episode where people constantly rate each other and their ratings affect what jobs they can have, what housing they can live in, and so on. What’s really different about this near future is that a wormhole has opened up on Earth. A one-way wormhole that leads to the planet Nyx, which humans are colonizing.

Nyx is beautiful and pink and Instagram-perfect, populated by like-minded folks who have no interest in being connected to the World Wide Web—which is a good thing, seeing as how the wormhole is one-way only. Once they go to Nyx, they can’t send home so much as an email. (And yet, strangely, social media posts complete with luscious images are sent to Earth on a daily basis, and they arrive just fine.)

Our protagonist, who does social media for a living, isn’t exactly a wiz at critical thinking. What she is is exhausted with her life and with having to pretend that it’s better and prettier than it is. She’s also suicidal—not that she wants anyone to know. After spending her entire (young) adult life putting a good and socially acceptable face on everything, she’s ready to pitch it all and head to where things are real, even if there’s no return from there. Especially since there’s no return from there.

And naturally, once she’s there and it’s too late, things aren’t quite what they seemed from Earth. A slow, intensely creepy unraveling of the minds and lives of the Nyxians ensues. And that's where I need to stop in order to avoid spoilers.

Read this book. Just don’t expect to know quite what to make of it, even after you’re done with it.

Note: Sharlene Teo summarizes this book brilliantly as "both ultra contemporary and timeless in its examination of mental health and existential and social purpose, it's the most hilarious and razor-sharp depiction of office politics I've ever read. The protagonist, Iris, hates earht so much she volunteers to participate in a reality show set on another planet."

See the entire article here.

Earth Abides by George Stewart

read by Jonathan Davis (introduction written & read by Connie Willis)

Earth Abides was my first post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. Way back in the 8th grade, my English teacher, Mr. Felker, assigned it to the class. (We also read Flowers for Algernon that year, and the room was decorated with black-and-white photos of Marilyn Monroe. Go figure.) The book made such an impression that that post-apocalyptic became one of my handful of favorite sub-genres of science fiction, which I'd already developed a taste for, and I’ve never stopped reading it. To this day, if I leave my house at some ungodly hour and the streets are deserted, I think to myself, “It’s like Earth Abides out here.”

First published in 1949 (and the winner of the first International Fantasy Award in 1951), this novel is very much a product of its time. There’s all the breathtakingly casual racism, sexism, and jingoism that you’d expect (though to give him credit, I think Stewart, a UC Berkeley professor, really was trying quite earnestly to be open-minded and open-hearted). What’s wonderful about it to me, though, is that it’s also very much a product of its place. And its place is the San Francisco Bay Area—specifically, Berkeley. More specifically, the Berkeley hills.

This, more than anything, helped me put myself in the shoes of the protagonist, Ish. When he comes home from a solitary camping trip (where he’d been working on his graduate thesis in geography), he’s coming home to his parents’ house on a fictional street within walking distance of Indian Rock Park. He uses both the university library on the UC Berkeley campus and the main public library downtown. As time passes, he makes his way through numerous familiar landscapes and neighborhoods, going so far as to describe billboards that were still recognizable to a local reader more than 30 years after the book was written. 

Ish goes on to mark the passage of days and years by watching where, along the horizon dominated by San Francisco to the south and Mount Tamalpais to the north, the sun sets—much as I used to do when I lived in a house with a western view in the Berkeley hills. (Though, unlike Ish, I had the help of up-to-date calendars and society generally.) He chisels the number of each passing year onto the face of one of the enormous rocks at Indian Rock Park, describing recognizable things there like the bowl-shaped depressions where the area's original inhabitants used to grind acorns and a cave-like area formed by two rocks leaning together. 

Ish—short for Isherwood Williams, though also, without doubt, meant to call to mind Ishi, the last of the Yahi people who himself walked down out of the hills into what we think of as modern civilization and lived out his in Berkeley, where he worked as a janitor when he wasn’t being studied by anthropologists—Ish is a familiar type in a university town. Like many academics, he lives very much inside his own head. He thinks of himself more as an observer of than a participant in life. He credits this tendency of his as the major factor that helps him, having survived a pandemic that has killed off all but a handful of humans on Earth, to keep himself together.

He does go into a sort of shock, of course, after his civilization dies. It’s not possible to survive something that has killed off 99% or more of your species without enduring major emotional trauma. But he doesn’t descend into drink or any of the other excesses now freely available to him; he doesn’t commit suicide, either quickly or slowly; and he doesn’t build a false life for himself, pretending nothing has changed. He observes; he accepts; and slowly, over decades, he becomes the nucleus of a group of more or less stable folks who start a new society in the rubble of the old.

Of course he’s not perfect. Far from it, even in his own terms. For one thing—and I couldn’t get over this as I was reading—he’s strangely passive about certain things. For example, he’s very aware, as an educated person, of the importance of literacy—and yet he doesn’t read stories to his own children or encourage his neighbors to do it when the time comes; he just grouses about the fact that none of the kids are learning to read. He does eventually start a school of sorts, but by the time the community’s children arrive there they are big kids with no background or interest in literacy. Those who aren’t already too old for school and don’t already have kids of their own, that is. 

And instead of thinking this through and encouraging parents and grandparents to start reading to the littlest ones at home, he throws his hands up and decides the new society he’s creating is just going to have to be too illiterate to use the treasure troves of knowledge that are available to them.

There are other examples—that’s just the main one that stands out in my librarian's mind. And yet. As Stewart points out himself, via Ish’s internal maunderings, those who are left after the great disaster and its secondary kill aren’t necessarily going to be the brightest or best of humanity. They’re a random sampling, in the universe of this book, of those whose immune systems were able to fight off the virus, and whose mental habits were conducive to getting on with life afterward. They were all hardy in their various ways, yes, but really had no other traits in common, good or bad. They were just regular people, doing their best in a world gone horribly wrong.

And that is another great thing about this book. It’s not about scientists, or tough guys, or utopians. It’s about a cross-section of folks, and about the world they live in. It’s about the ants and the rats and the housecats and the dogs. It’s about the pavement and the grocery stores and the electric and water grids. It’s about our world, as it might have been if things had gone wrong in just that way. And it’s fascinating, even now.

Great Catherine by Carolly Erickson

read by Davina Porter

Let’s get one thing straight: I could listen to Davina Porter narrate her grocery list. All day. The woman has a voice on her. And that’s how I found this book: I was searching Audible for more books she has narrated. (Thankfully she’s narrated quite a few.) I wasn’t looking for history or biography in particular, and definitely not about Catherine the Great. All I knew about the Russian empress was the (apocryphal) story about her and the horse… and if you haven’t heard of it and you have delicate sensibilities, do *not* Google it. Trust me.

So, with that unpromising start, I dove in because I trust Ms. Porter’s taste. And because it was available as a downloadable audiobook at my library, so I didn’t even have to use my Audible credits for it. And I was not even a little bored or disappointed with the writing. In fact, this is a delightful book from beginning to end.

Ms. Erickson walks the reader through the life of the Russian autocrat from *her* unpromising start, which went on for years and years, through her glory days as a powerful and (mostly) benevolent philosopher-empress who refused to either forsake men or be ruled by one (thus earning the rabid distrust and scurrilous rumors of the world), to her final days, beset by ill health and scheming courtiers. And it’s a grand, sweeping epic, as its subject matter demands—though not especially long, at 381 pages, considering the amount of territory it covers. (See what I did there? Territory? Russia? Oh, never mind, you had to be there.)

Empress Catherine II of Russia began life as the not-especially-pretty but very well-educated Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst. Which sounds like a grand title and a fine start in life, and so they should have been, but nevertheless her parents were far from certain they’d be able to make a good marriage for her. Nonetheless they took a gamble and tossed her name in the imperial marriage hat, so to speak.

Young Sophia was immediately swimming for her life in a sea of intrigue, and there was no guarantee she wouldn’t drown in it. She had, for one thing, to somehow win the trust and approval of her fiancé’s paranoid mother, Grand Duchess Anna Petrovna, who ruled the court with every dirty trick imaginable when her iron fist didn’t quite seem sufficient. 

Then, once Catherine finally married, her husband, Peter III, was an insecure, abusive, controlling petty tyrant (in addition to being emperor of all the Russias). Fortunately for her, his rule was brief; he was completely unsuited to lead Russia or Russians (whom he despised and whose language he barely spoke) and was assassinated after just six months. (Just how much Catherine herself had to do with that is open to debate; Ms. Erickson has an opinion on the subject.) And incredibly, even with such suspicions roiling about amongst the populace, Catherine managed what amounted to such a tremendous PR campaign that she was swept onto the throne by overwhelming popular support.

What followed was a tremendously successful rule—they don’t call just *anyone* “The Great,” after all—during which she greatly expanded Russian territory, kept up a regular correspondence with Voltaire, and popularized the newly-available smallpox vaccine by having first herself and then her son, the imperial heir, inoculated. She also, as I intimated earlier, went through a succession of men. Serial monogamy was very much not the done thing amongst female rulers in that place and time, and female rulers who themselves weren’t ruled by men were terrifying to men generally, so this earned her a lot of very nasty rumors. Including that horse thing.

This book is beautifully researched, relying quite a lot on Catherine’s own diaries and other primary sources. It’s also a very skillful condensation of a very large life lived in a very complex time.

Verdict: read it.

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Gender Queer is a graphic memoir about coming of age as genderqueer and asexual. If you don’t know what any of this means, great! When you’re done reading this book, you will. But we can start here:

A graphic memoir is a memoir that looks like a novel-length comic book—it’s written and illustrated in panels, with word bubbles and so on. But it’s not a made-up story, and there are no superheroes or anthropomorphic animals. It’s somebody’s life story; specifically, the story of Maia Kobabe’s growing-up years.

The author identifies as genderqueer. That’s a pretty general label for people who don’t identify as either male or female—deep inside, they don’t feel like either, or maybe they feel like a little of both, or maybe which gender they feel like changes from day to day, or maybe the whole idea of gender, as either a binary or a spectrum, feels alien and wrong to their experience of the world and themselves--so the labels “male” and “female” both feel deeply wrong to them.

The author is also asexual, which is a sexual orientation (like straight, or gay, or bisexual, or any other label that identifies who you’re sexually attracted to). Asexuals (sometimes called aces for short) have no sexual desire for anybody, though some aces do enjoy romantic relationships.

So, those are the basics, extremely simplified. What this book does, skillfully, is help you *understand* all that, by showing it to you through the lens of one person’s experience.

You won’t just get exposed to the terminology (though that’s not a small part of this book); you’ll get a sense of what it feels like to grow up as a singularly-shaped peg that everyone insists should fit into either a round or a square hole. The author’s skill with words and pictures makes what could be a dry primer on gender into a story you will probably find yourself relating to—If you’ve ever been a teenager who feels at all different from their parents and/or peers, that is.

Definitely worth a read.

An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock

This is the first book in the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, though I read it (and read and re-read it numerous times as a teen and young adult) as a stand-alone book.

As the story begins, the universe is millions of years older than it is now and humanity has at last ceased to take itself seriously. It has also shrunk to a relative handful of individuals—but they are near-immortals with enormous amounts of power over their environment, their bodies, and, up to a point, matter itself. (Think of Q from Star Trek.) They use this tremendous power to sculpt fanciful landscapes and city-sized follies in which to throw parties and/or have sex, often at the same time. The point to all this being pleasure, and bonding, and to fight the one enemy left to them: boredom.

Into this ultimately decadent world arrives an alien, Yusharisp, from the far edge of the galaxy. He brings with him a dire warning: the universe is coming to an end. His own planet, in fact, has already been swallowed by the coming universal apocalypse, and he is traveling ahead of the wave of doom to warn as many planets as he can. 

What he has failed to predict (and could not have imagined) was that humanity was a species too fatally jaded to really believe his warning or to truly care if it is true—or perhaps too infantilized by millennia of any lack of real consequences for any action or event to truly understand the concept of finality. Also, humanity is, in this century, prone to keeping collections of captive aliens and time travelers. Yusharisp is snapped up by a colllector, preventing him (much to his baffled despair) from continuing his mission.

At about the same time, an inadvertent time traveler named Mrs. Ameila Underwood, from Victorian England, becomes part of someone else’s menagerie. Her captor brings her to a party to be shown off; there she’s spotted by our protagonist, Jherek Carnelian. His current obsession happens to be the 19th century, and he immediately becomes determined to fall in love with her.

Hijinks ensue, the plot thickens, and a Machiavellian individual’s machinations are slowly sensed by the reader—but not by poor Jherek, who ends up traveling to Victorian England, where he’s helpless as a newborn (though delighted by how friendly everyone is). Saying more would spoil the plot for you, so this is where I stop.

I don’t think anybody but Moorcock could have pulled this off. The wit, the vivid descriptions, the world-building--think Oscar Wilde meets Douglas Adams in the Q Continuum as painted by Salvador Dali. Like Q, these end-times humans have no concept of morality—how can they, when there are never any real consequences to anything, and what would be the point?  

With all their literally earth-shattering power, these people have created a surprisingly small world for themselves. Their only concerns are their own pleasure and the oddly conformist society they’ve created; they’ve lost their curiosity and turned inward to a remarkable degree, for a people with a historically unparalleled ability to satisfy their curiosity. And for all their access to knowledge, they’re shockingly ignorant about anything that doesn’t affect them directly (and much that does).

Jherek, meantime, is such an intriguing character--maybe the only truly interesting one on his planet. He’s the only person alive to have been actually born, in the old-fashioned sense, and maybe for that reason he’s a bit of a throwback. At the same time, he’s very much a creature of his time, an amoral, self-centered hedonist with no concept that there’s any other way to be. But Mrs. Underwood seems set to change that…

Well worth a read, especially as it’s both very much a period piece and oddly relevant to our times. It’s still my third-favorite Moorcock book (after Gloriana and The Warhound and the World’s Pain), and that still says a lot, even after all this time.

The Space Between: An Outlander Novella by Diana Gabaldon

 read by Davina Porter

I’ve spent a lot of my life in the Outlander universe. I started reading the novels when they first came out, but tapered off during the long wait between Drums of Autumn and The Fiery Cross. When that was finally published, my curiosity got the best of me and I had to dive back in and find out what happened to Jamie and Claire—but I had to start again from the beginning because I’d just forgotten too much. 

(Side note: rereading something you really enjoyed and discovering that it’s still just as delicious on a second read, when you already know what’s going to happen, is an incredible treat. Ms. Gabaldon really is a very good writer.)

Finally the TV series happened, but I was super skeptical about it. I saw the stills on social media, and the actors who played Jamie and Claire looked nothing like the Jamie and Claire in my head. I didn’t want my headcanon messed with, so I avoided it. Nevertheless it did have one effect on me: it reminded me that, after another very long wait, Ms. Gabaldon had completed another segment of the story arc. More reading to be done! And I’d never listened to the audiobooks. I had no idea what a treat I was in for: they were read by Davina Porter, whom I wasn’t yet familiar with.

That woman could read her grocery list out loud, and I’d listen. For hours. 

Then I finished listening to Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, and I needed more Outlander, so I finally gave in and gave the show a try. And found, to my surprise, that the actors who play Jaimie and Claire are actually very appealing once they start moving and talking; the stills, in which they struck me as looking like enormous waxworks, had been deceptive. (I think they were *too* beautiful in a way; it made them seem inhuman. With the human attributes of speech and motion, though, they are simply very very very beautiful. IMHO.)

And then the recent season ended, and I needed more.

I’d tried one of the Lord John novellas some years back, but in spite of being set in this universe and centering a character I quite like, I couldn’t get into it. I can’t even remember now which one it was. I’m just not a mystery-novel person. 

But when I heard about The Space Between, I was intrigued. It’s about Jaimie’s stepdaughter, Joan, who is headed to France to become a nun, because she hears voices and knows when people are about to die and she thinks a religious community is the only place she has any real chance of finding answers about this, or at least relative safety from being tried as a witch. It’s also about Michael Murray, Jaimie’s nephew, who is returning to France after the death of his wife. It’s also about… no, I can’t tell you who else it’s about, because actually that would be a huge spoiler. Let’s just say that mysteriousness abounds in this novella.

And it turned out to be a lot of fun. It’s more like a story arc on the TV series in its pacing than like the novels, but that’s not a bad thing. And it delves deeper into the occult and stays there longer than most of her novels, but in a shorter piece like this, that works well. And the characters are charming and the setting is vivid and there are all the other hallmarks of Ms. Gabaldon’s writing in this series.

In other words, this is a very worthwhile use of your time while you wait for the next full-length Jaimie-and-Claire novel. What, you didn’t know about that? It’s going to be called Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, and it’s due out later this year, most likely. You can read all about it, including some excerpts, here.