Author: Meghan Siegler

(Thomas Nelson, 352 pages)

Courtney Walsh’s newest novel, Brighter Than Before, was the right escape at the right time for me. Main character Claire is 46 (same), unexpectedly single (same) and an empty nester (same). The journey to the inevitable happy ending that awaits Claire was a balm for my soul. That’s not a spoiler — this is undeniably a happily-ever-after novel.

The book starts out a bit heavy-handed with a scene that has Claire, the jilted ex-wife, eating an absurd amount of junk food in her car while stalking her ex and his new girlfriend. Let’s just say she ends up soaking wet and the subject of a very embarrassing viral video. It all felt a little dramatic — and yet, the emotions behind the actions are so real that I can see how Claire’s actions may not be so far from reality. I personally have never resorted to stalking an ex, online or otherwise, but I hear it’s a thing.

That moment for Claire is, at least, her rock bottom, and she realizes it’s time for her to make some changes and move on. So she does, literally and figuratively. She starts by making a list of what she really wants in life (a question that her therapist asked her months prior that she couldn’t answer at the time):

“I want a job or career I love.

I want friends. Real ones.

I want to live in a new city.

I want a dog.

I want to figure out who I am — apart from a wife and a mom.

I want a place where I fit in. I want a place where I belong.

I want a hobby …

I want to do the things that scare me.”

Claire crosses off No. 3 on her list immediately, selling her house in Denver and moving to an apartment in Chicago, where she’s always wanted to live. With her daughter Minnie attending college in London and her country-club “friends” casting her aside, she has no reason not to.

Claire meets some fun, quirky people in Chicago, often thanks to her list, which encourages her to make friends, try to belong and do things that scare her — like meeting new people. She meets neighbors as well as a stranger who quickly becomes her friend after standing up for Claire in what could have been another publicly humiliating incident.

And, of course, there are some love interests as Claire navigates the new-to-her world of dating via app. Without consulting Claire, Minnie creates Claire’s profile and sets up dates for her (another change in relationship dynamics that shakes Claire’s sense of self as she ultimately gives in and allows herself to lean on her adult daughter for help). She racks up quite a few terrible dates — so real — before finding a man with a little more potential who makes her feel safe.

And then there’s Miles, who owns the apartment building Claire is living in. She pegs him as a player from the get-go as she watches women come and go from his place night after night. Somehow, though, he ends up being an ally, even joining Minnie in her attempts to jump-start her mom’s love life. Against Claire’s better judgment, she allows Miles to join her ever-growing group of new friends.

Claire also takes a leap of faith career-wise, opening a bakery with money from the house sale as her ex continuously tries to tell her she’s going to fail and he’ll figure out how to bail her out before it’s too late. And she does fail, at first, with a distracted mistake leading to some pretty gross baked goods that, of course, make quick social media news. It could be devastating — but obviously not in a happily-ever-after story, so don’t expect a big plot twist. Do, however, expect some heartwarming feels as Claire’s newfound friends step in and help.

It’s hard to be middle-aged and have your whole life turned upside down. The question is, when the dust settles, what are you going to do about it? Claire grieves, deeply, for a year, then pulls herself out of it and creates a life that is most certainly brighter than before. The story is full of hard truths but also plenty of hope for those of us who could use it. B+

Featured Photo: Brighter Than Before by Courtney Walsh

(Entangled Publishing, 464 pages)

It’s been a minute since I’ve been so enraptured with a book that I removed myself from real-life obligations to immerse myself in a different world, and I have no shame about the fact that the book that brought me to this magical place is a young adult novel. Dragon Cursed is in good company, living on the same shelves as The Hunger Games and Harry Potter.

My skepticism in starting this was less about the genre and more about whether I wanted to read another dragon-themed book, having recently read the non-YA Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros and other dragon-adjacent books. I’m glad I didn’t let that stop me. Dragon Cursed is unique despite some typical tropes, and it’s fun, fast-paced and full of compelling characters. I loved the heroes and hated the villains — and I love that sometimes it was hard to know who was who.

This was only my second experience with an Elise Kova novel, but she’s published many fantasy/romance books and series for adults and young adults. Prior to this I listened to her most recent adult novel, Arcana Academy, on audiobook and really enjoyed it.

Dragon Cursed is set in Vinguard, where dragons are an eternal threat to the people. The main character, 18-year-old Isola, was deemed “Valor Reborn” at age 12 after she survived a face-to-face encounter with a dragon. She then spent six years training with the vicar of Vinguard, who pushed her to her limits, assuming she has the ability to battle the Elder Dragon, as Valor had done.

Isola doesn’t believe she’s Valor Reborn. She’s terrified that she’s actually dragon cursed.

Being dragon cursed means someday transforming into a dragon that can and will destroy anything and everything. To prevent this, every year Vinguard holds a Tribunal for all 18-year-olds.

“Every moment of this Tribunal is a test — a test to ensure that a dragon cursed does not draw breath within the walls of Vinguard,” the vicar says. If there are any signs that there’s a dragon within a tribute, he is killed by Mercy Knights, so called because it is seen as an act of mercy to kill someone before they become a beast.

Heading into the tribunal, Isola worries that every challenge she faces could out her as dragon cursed. She’s not alone, though. She’s there alongside her best friend, Saipha, as well as a few enemies who seem to dislike her because of the attention she’s received as Valor Reborn. And then there’s Lucan, a maybe enemy or maybe friend, who follows her as if he’s been assigned to watch her every move. Lucan was taken in by the vicar and is assumed to be his prodigy, but Lucan’s motives become less clear as he both hurts and helps Isola throughout the trials.

The “is he friend or foe?” trope of course paves the way to a simmering romance between Lucan and Isola. It’s PG, definitely YA appropriate, and just the right balance of frustrating tension, complicated feelings and tender moments.

My 17-year-old daughter just finished the Empyrean series and loved it — except for the rather explicit spicy scenes. So I gave her Dragon Cursed and assured her that it is full of action and drama and dragons, but way lighter on the intimacy.

One minor complaint: The use of magic was confusing at times. There were several instances during the trials where I thought, “Wait, what just happened?” I’m pretty new to the fantasy genre, though, so that could be my lack of understanding of how, for example, sigils work. Fantasy requires a fair amount of suspending disbelief anyway, so this didn’t impact my enjoyment.

Finally, one small pet peeve: the book jacket and promo materials call the human city “Vingard,” but throughout the book it’s “Vinguard.” The first edition of the book is so visually beautiful and the story so well-written that it’s a shame this was overlooked.

Regardless, Dragon Cursed is a fun, moderately suspenseful, lightly romantic addition to the ever-growing lineup of dragon tales. A

Featured Photo: Dragon Cursed by Elise Kova.

(St. Martin’s Press, 287 pages)

From Hollywood stars who microdose the drug to people who were once hundreds of pounds overweight, many people have found Ozempic and its imitators to be game-changers. Ozempic has also been a game-changer for Novo Nordisk, the Denmark-based company that brought the drug to market at a time when its fortunes were failing.

In the 1990s the company had what was internally described as “an innovation problem,” Aimee Donnellan explains in this deep dive into the history of Ozempic and similar drugs. But Novo Nordisk had a promising project, a drug to help people with diabetes. It was a synthetic version of a gut hormone called GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide 1), discovered through research on anglerfish caught in Boston Harbor, and it proved a powerful means of lowering blood sugar in people with diabetes — and, fortuitously, of helping these same people lose weight.

The weight loss industry has long been profitable in America, and it was clear there was money to be made. Ozempic was used for weight loss off-label; word spread and so did its use.

Several researchers did the work that would lead to this breakthrough, among them Danish chemist Svetlana Mojsov, whose work preceded the approval of Ozempic by more than a decade. But science is as competitive as politics, especially when its result is lucrative, and Donnellan takes up the banner of Mojsov here, presenting her as a woman done wrong by men who attempted to take credit for her work (and might have succeeded had she not kept detailed notes).

The story of the behind-the-scenes infighting seems incongruent with other parts of Off the Scales, which can’t seem to decide what sort of book it wants to be.

Donnellan, a Reuters columnist who covers the pharmaceutical industry, begins with the story of a marketing specialist in Michigan who lost more than 100 pounds on Ozempic and saw her world change. At work Sarah started getting promotions, even though her performance was the same. “At her parents’ house, her father, previously loving but somewhat absent, seemed to take a newfound interest in her. She could visibly see how proud he was of her. Now 34, she had never before seen this look on his face.”

Through Sarah’s story and others, Donnellan offers a picture of lives changed. Formerly invisible people gain social status as their bodies shrink and gain peace as the “food noise” that had dominated their lives quiets.

She also shares disturbing stories, like that of a Los Angeles hairstylist who lost weight on Mounjaro, albeit while also taking an anti-nausea medication because she constantly felt sick. After four months a friend told her she looked gaunt; she started getting facial injections to restore volume to her face. (Donnellan notes that not everyone can afford dermal fillers.) Moreover, Donnellan writes, “for a small minority of GLP-1 users, the side effects are so severe that they may wish they never even heard of the medication.”

Donnellan presents these and other stories without judgment. Toward the end she touches on what may be the most underreported part of the story: how these drugs will affect the culture as people who use them change their eating habits (several writers have tried to tackle this, as Kari Jenson Gold did in a First Things essay titled “The Night Ozempic Came to Dinner”). Donnellan suggests that changed eating patterns may spell doom for fast food restaurants and the makers of ultra-processed food, and says weight-loss drugs may also affect alcohol consumption.

But we are new to the GLP-1 world and we don’t know the drugs’ effect decades out. Donnellan’s examination, while sometimes disjointed and uneven in its readability, raises interesting questions. B-

Featured Photo: Off the Scales, by Aimee Donnellan

Alexandra McCollum has conjured some incredibly endearing characters in Into the Midnight Wood, their debut novel about two comically disparate roommates, each trying to figure out who they are and what they want amidst family drama, dark magic and a tenuous friendship.

I’m relatively new to the fantasy/romantasy genre but in the past year have devoured many books that feature magic, witches, fae, vampires, gods and god complexes, dark academia and other common tropes, but most especially strong female main characters — which is wonderful and commendable, but also made Into the Midnight Wood a refreshing change. Its main character is David, a cisgender gay man, whose roommate and love/hate interest is Meredith, referred to as he/him in the story but who outwardly rejects labels, often dresses femme and is romantically attracted to all genders.

McCollum calls the novel a “queer contemporary fantasy romance that is intended for adult readers” on their website, the latter part alluding to the fact that there are several very explicit “open door” scenes.

Along with the spice, this book is laugh-out-loud funny, thanks mainly to the dialogue between David and Meredith, and to Meredith being a vibrant, charismatic human. But David has lived with him for five years and has grown tired of Meredith’s quirky behaviors. As he tries to remind himself of why he’s looking for a new place to live and a chance to be rid of Meredith for good, David starts a tally, a la “10 Things I Hate About You” — David, though, is mentally cataloging not 10, but 100 things that are “wrong” with Meredith.

David’s list is full of annoyances, some of which are incredibly inane and some of which would absolutely get aggravating over time.

A small sample:

“#11: His accent.” Because “David had never before heard someone manage to sound both American and British at the same time, yet Meredith somehow accomplished it.”

“#13: He persists in outfitting his dog in this humiliating fashion,” referring to Bianca’s rhinestone collar.

“#23: He never puts anything back in its proper place.”

“#48: He insists on holding an impromptu funeral for a rodent.”

“#94: He acts as if an absence of hours or days has been years,” David mentally tallies after Meredith runs up to hug his friend (before noting with a semblance of surprise that he’s kind of missed Meredith greeting him that way.)

But behind Meredith’s persona is a more subdued, almost defeated, side that starts to seep out as his family, full of disapproval and a brother who crosses the line of typical sibling squabbling into full-on emotional abuse, re-enters his life. There’s a wedding at the center of this reunion, because all good family drama happens when there’s a wedding involved.

So where’s the magic? Most of it happens in the Midnight Wood, while the rest of the book is set in a relatively normal, human-occupied place — with a few exceptions that are sprinkled in here and there with little explanation and zero world-building. But it’s an enchanting space, and I didn’t feel any real need for an explanation as to why David and Meredith are fully human while their neighbor, Mrs. Jupiter, is a straight-up witch with a cauldron and a penchant for casting spells. There are hints of otherworldly creatures mentioned throughout as well, like a real estate agent who is presented as human — or, at least, not presented as not human — who turns out to have tentacles.

But the Midnight Wood is where most of the magic happens. It’s where Meredith seems to have a connection with a lot of the creatures he meets in the Midnight Wood, like magic mice (hence the rodent funeral noted in #48). He seems to feel at home in these woods, engaging with misfit beings who, like Meredith, are hard to define.

There’s some dark magic looming among the trees too though, in the form of Erlking of the Midnight Wood, who feeds on others’ misery and is especially interested in getting to Meredith’s deep, dark feelings that he tries so hard to shove down. It’s an interesting way to bring life to Meredith’s self-loathing, essentially taking on the form of a monster that threatens to destroy him if he gives in to his despair.

Could this story have been told without the moderate dose of magic? Probably. But the magic tempers the serious themes, adding a dose of whimsy without taking away from the real, heartfelt messages.

If you’re looking for a typical romantasy, this isn’t it, but it’s well worth the journey if you’re looking for something enchantingly eccentric. B+ —Meghan Siegler

Featured Photo: The Midnight Wood by Alexandra McCollum

(Berkley Romance, 362 pages)

Sounds Like Love is a PG13-rated story that, as of this writing, ranks No. 1 in Amazon’s “feel-good fiction.” It has a romance at the heart of it, but is also a story about family and friendship, mostly set during summer at a beach town at North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Thus it qualifies as not just rom-com, but a beach read.

Joni Lark — who goes by Jo — comes from a musical family. Her grandparents owned a music hall, which was passed down to Jo’s parents. Her mother was a performer, and Jo grew up to be a songwriter of note. When we meet her, she’s at a concert of a pop star who shot to fame because of one of Jo’s songs. Although thirty-something Jo has enjoyed professional success, she herself is not famous, and so when she is escorted to a private balcony where a famous singer sits, he assumes she’s seeking a photo or an autograph, and is coldly condescending despite his dreamy blue eyes. He smirks three times in four pages, that’s all you need to know.

But Jo will have none of that, and flirty banter ensues, and also an unexpectedly intimate moment with the man, who used to be part of a boy band and is the son of an even more famous musician.

When Jo leaves the concert in an Uber, we know we will see Sebastian Fell again, even though the logistics are unclear, as she is leaving Los Angeles to visit her family in North Carolina.

Jo isn’t going home for a typical beach visit, however. Her mother has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and her father has asked her to come for an extended stay so the family can have “one last good summer” before God-only-knows-what sets in. She knows it will be a bittersweet time but soon realizes that it will also be complicated — her best friend, who happens to be dating her brother, has an edge to her that Jo can’t quite figure out, and her parents soon announce that they have decided to retire from the family business, the music hall called the Revelry that was a fixture in the community and had “weathered more hurricanes than years I’d been alive.”

Amid all this, Jo has writer’s block — she hasn’t been able to write a song in weeks and has clients waiting on her. And she has developed the strangest of earworms, strains of a tune that won’t leave her head — along with a man’s voice. Not only does she hear this stranger’s voice clearly, but he can hear her thoughts as well. They can converse silently, like imaginary friends.

OK, Supernatural it isn’t, and yet it sort of is — one of Poston’s other books, 2022’s The Dead Romantics, has been described as “paranormal romance” and her The Seven Year Slip (2023) involves a time-travel relationship. So suspension of disbelief is required with this author, who has built a large and devoted following.

So it’s important to not spend any time thinking about how this could actually be happening, but just go with the flow, as Jo and her new inner friend, Sasha, do. Neither rushes off to a shrink, but they continue about their lives, chatting up each other, and becoming closer as they do, even though they are also trying to figure out how to break this connection.

It is totally weird, this back-and-forth dialogue, until suddenly it isn’t.

Because who among us hasn’t experienced the proverbial voice — or voices — in the head? It’s only when they begin to suggest that we commit a crime that people become concerned. Of course, hearing the thoughts of another person while falling in love with them is a whole other matter, and that is no spoiler, given the title of this book.

Sounds Like Love unfolds in somewhat predictable ways; there are no momentous plot twists that leave the reader gasping. But it’s smart in its own way, and becomes more engaging as the story evolves. It’s not just a romance but an exploration of our unlived lives — what would have happened “If You Stayed” — which is, not uncoincidentally, the name of Jo’s most popular song. It is also the story of the long and poignant goodbye that takes place when a person you love is succumbing to dementia. (Poston says in an author’s note that the book came about, in part, because of her own experience losing someone to dementia, and the pain that comes from having a loved one say, “Who are you?”)

Fans of the romance genre will embrace Sounds Like Love, even more so if they’re into pop music. (Every chapter title is a line from a well-known song.) We don’t just experience songs as the soundtrack of our lives, Poston is saying here, but music is a building block of the people we become. “We were all made up of memories, anyway. Of ourselves, of other people,” Jo reflects at one point. “We were built on the songs sung to us and the songs we sang to ourselves, the songs we listened to with broken hearts and the ones we danced to at weddings.” Sounds like a bestseller, if not a movie.

Featured Photo: Sounds Like Love, by Ashley Poston

UnWorld, by Jayson Greene (Knopf, 224 pages)

If you could upload your memories and experiences into the cloud, would you? There’s an obvious benefit — having a backup copy of your brain when the original starts to fail. But what if the alternate “you” was just different enough to develop its own will, different from your own, and wants to strike out on its own?

These questions are explored in Jayson Greene’s UnWorld, set in a not-so-unimaginable future where human beings are still the dominant life form on Earth but increasingly surrounded by sentient technology. This world is full of “uploads” — beings composed of the uploaded memories of the person they came from, the person to whom they are “tethered.” This has created an ethical quagmire for society — what happens when an upload wants to be emancipated from its tether? Should uploads qualify for personhood and be granted rights?

In the midst of all this, the everyday experiences of human life go on, with adjustments: self-driving cars are the norm, household chores are obsolete, the elderly in medical settings are cared for by robots. And despite all the technological advances, human beings are still dying.

Anna and Rick are grieving, having lost their only child, a teenage son, in what was either an accident or suicide — no one can say for sure. Neither is coping well; Anna, in particular, is bewildered by how quickly people expect life to resume its normal shape. “My pain was meant to crack the earth,” she thinks, while trying to get through an evening of socialization. “And here I was, not even half a year later, one of grief’s private citizens again. Were people’s memories really so short? Or was it just that you could never stop performing — falling to your knees, rending your garments — if you wanted to keep their attention?”

Compounding her anguish, Anna’s upload, who has been with her for eight years, has suddenly requested emancipation. The upload was a gift from Anna’s husband, and although she was unsure about it at first, she came to realize that the relationship was “the first and only time I’ve ever enjoyed my own company.”

“When we synced, my memories suddenly stood up straight, marched in line. Somehow, in that moment when I transferred the millions of little impressions I had gathered through the chip in my ear, up to her, and that tunnel feeling was established, the one that provided the link between her and me, I felt like my memories were being polished, pored over. Each one became clear, clean, interesting.”

Anna is distraught about the loss of her alternative self, whom she relied on for companionship; uploads, in addition to being storage, also serve as de facto friends. But she consents, and the upload disappears into the world, taking on the name Aviva.

The story unfolds through four points of view. After Anna, we meet a professor named Cathy who specializes in the “transhumanities” and upload personhood, and who has ingested a biomechanical chip in hopes of communicating with an emancipated upload. “It didn’t look too much like freedom to me, this new state of being: conventional uploads could vote on behalf of their human counterparts, but they couldn’t vote once they left their tethers…. We didn’t so much set them free as snip their tethers and let them float free like balloons loosed into tree branches.” Some scholars were talking about “fleshism” — what they considered the false idea that beings only had worth if they were encased in human flesh.

After Cathy, the first-person narrative flows seamlessly to Samantha, who had been the best friend of Anna’s son. Samantha and Alex were children when they’d met, two years apart in age and so close emotionally that “they rhymed.” The two were making a horror movie together when Alex died. Now Samantha keeps going back to the cliff where Alex either fell or jumped to his death, trying to figure out what happened, while she processes her own loneliness and grief.

Finally, we get to the perspective of Anna’s upload, Aviva, who, despite not having a physical body, feels pain when she disconnects from her human, not having neurochemicals that can rush in to numb it. Pain, she says, is “blinding, indescribable. It runs in all directions. I am made of this pain, I realize, and so is everything. … God made borders; he made solitude and alienation and loneliness and all the small cherished lockets we stuff our feelings inside just so we can hear something rattle when we shake them.”

It is in Aviva’s musings that Greene’s writing and imagination really take off. Thinking she might be dying, Aviva says, “I don’t even get to watch my life flash before me. What I get is a spilled bag of someone else’s memories, which float around me now, glinting in the cold way of all stolen things.”

All these beings are intertwined in ways we will not fully understand until the story’s end, when their connection, and the truth of Alex’s death, becomes fully realized. Along the way, Greene invites the reader to consider the future that might lie ahead of us, perhaps not the exact world that he has imagined here, but something similar. It hints at where we could go wrong, like when one of the personhood scholars writes a paper suggesting uploads would need to “create their own language, possibly out of range of human understanding, to communicate the privacy of their subjective experience.”

That’s exactly what we need, right? A world full of invisible sentient beings communicating with each other in a language that humans can’t understand?

Greene, whose first book, Once More We Saw Stars, was a memoir about the loss of a child, knows first-hand the terrible landscape of grief he navigates here, and his writing is compelling, even though at times, the voice that comes through these four female characters feels a bit masculine.

And some of the technology that is presented here as commonplace takes a suspension of disbelief for sure — but then again, so does most of the Mission: Impossible series. UnWorld is a cautionary tale in an age of artificial intelligence, while also a reminder of what it means to be human in that world. B+

Featured Photo: UnWorld by Jayson Greene.