Title

Author: JD Bennett

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: October 31, 2025

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Horror

Length: About 45 pages.

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

***Intended for adult readers*****

Magic, Science, & Lions, OH MY! is a collection of short stories that include horrifying tales of a rapist eating monster, the staging of a war between fairy tale and folklore characters, and, of course, aliens.

Content Warning: Poisoning, politics, domestic violence, and murder.  I skipped over the story about the rapist eating monster and so will not be including it in my review. (Yes, I read the rest of them!)

Review:

Some fairy tales have sharp teeth.

”The (Attempted) Murder of a Pot Head” showed what happened after the protagonist was poisoned at a family reunion and had to try to figure out who might have been the culprit and what their motivation was. There was a plot twist involved in the investigation of this crime that I don’t want to reveal in my review for spoilers reasons, but it was as clever as it was attention grabbing and showed off Ms. Bennett’s writing abilities nicely.

Anyone who reads the title of “The Confession” can almost certainly make an educated guess about what it is about. What surprised me about this piece was the complete lack of any fantasy, science fiction, or other speculative fiction elements to it. While I thought it included some interesting ideas and had a satisfying ending, it felt out of place in this collection due to that.

By far my favorite story was “Lion in the Mirror” due to how it blended real-life events like the repeal of Roe vs. Wade in the United States to some heavy fantasy elements of a storyline featuring a likeable and intelligent main character. This is the sort of storytelling that grabs my attention and doesn’t let go, and I loved coming up with various theories about how the fantasy themes could be reinterpreted as metaphors for various experiences that many women encounter in their lives, particularly for those of us who are part of one or more other minority groups as well.

Magic, Science, & Lions, OH MY! kept me on my toes. 

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I love this topic but struggled to come up with an answer for it because I don’t read many fiction books that share weird facts in them.

Finally, I thought of a response. When I was a teenager, one of my English teachers assigned “The Landlady” by  Roald Dahl to us. I’m afraid I must spoil the ending of this horror mystery tale in order to write my post, so do go read it first if you’re not already familiar with what happens. It’s a short read.

Now that you’ve all had a chance to read it for yourselves,  this tale was about a young man who was meeting up with a landlady who happened to have a room available to rent to him. She was a rather strange woman who seemed to be obsessed with taxidermy. The story ends with the young man drinking a cup of tea she offered him that tasted faintly of bitter almonds.

We were all confused about that detail until our teacher told us that cyanide tastes like bitter almonds.

Yes, she poisoned him. After he died, she was planning to taxidermy him just like she had with her previous two boarders.

We were all a little horrified by how this story ended, but it was a memorable one for sure!

Apologies to Susan @Bloggin’ ’bout Books, but I haven’t visited many exciting bookish places. My books generally come from the public library, and I simply do not have the budget to travel to other countries.

Unless you want to hear stories about me reading encyclopedias from the 1960s at my grandmother’s house when I was a child, I’ll have to tweak this topic a little in order to participate. 

Therefore, here are ten bookish places I’d like to visit that are either the settings for famous works or have beautiful libraries or festivals there:

1. The W.E.B. Du Bois Center Library in Ghana

2. The Library of Alexandria in Egypt (If it still existed, of course).

3. Prince Edward Island, Canada

4. The Jane Eyre trail, Peak District

5. The Ake Arts and Book Festival in Nigeria

6. Amsterdam

7. Kyoto

8. Cartagena

9. Buenos Aires

10. Chimurenga Library in South Africa

Title

Author: Leigh Kimmel

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: April 29, 2023

Genres: Science Fiction, Horror, Alternate History

Length: About 20 pages.

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

In Soviet Union, genetic engineering does you. Yona wondered why everyone kept steering him toward a military career, until one of his teachers noticed his aptitude for genetics. Now he’s the personal student of Academician Voronsky, working in a secret genetic engineering facility in a closed town. However, Yona keeps having to spend as much time babysitting the Academician’s adopted son Kolya as actually doing genetics. When this extra assignment becomes a frustration, Yona learns just how quickly privileges can be retracted. And then he starts learning just how deep the secrets of the Soviet human genetics program really goes. A story from the Grissom timeline (Gus on the Moon universe). Caution: Contains intense material that may be disturbing to some audiences. Reader caution advised

Content Warning: Pregnancy, birth, cloning, and brief references to infanticide.

Review:

DNA only tells part of the story.

Genetic engineering is one of those topics I often like to see covered in the Science Fiction genre because of how many different ways it can be approached. While I don’t want to go into too much detail about what exactly what happening  in this facility, I thought the narrator asked some interesting questions about how important genetics are to how someone turns out that might be of special interest to any readers out there who might be related to people who are incredibly different from them in crucial ways. That is to say, you can be a blood relative of someone and share very little in common with them.

I struggled with the violent content in this short story due to how unnecessary it felt for plot development. Horror is a genre I’ve been moving away from, so this made be of greater interest to readers who still like to read that sort of stuff.  Still, there was one particular scene I thought was egregious and could have easily been cut out without ruining the effect of the chilling world Yona knew in general.

The descriptions of the medical facilities were my favourite part of this short story. They were given so much attention that I could easily imagine what it would be like to visit or work there. One bright moment that stood out to me the most involved how the fetuses interacted with each other before birth. I could have read many more pages about them if such a thing were possible due to the funny things they did to each other.

All the Little Hedgehogs made me shudder. 

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Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

I’m not a very picky eater, so this is going to be a short list.

I do not like alcohol (and have medical reasons to avoid it now anyway), so any wine, beer, or other alcoholic beverage made in Ontario isn’t something I will be imbibing.

Sushi Pizza. There’s a restaurant here in Toronto that serves it. While I love pizza, sushi is one of those foods I’ve never learned to enjoy. The seaweed wrap for it is far too salty and chewy for my tastes. Maybe it’s because my family never ate sushi when I was a kid?

Sausages. There are farms in Ontario that make all sorts of sausages, and I rarely if ever like any of them. Meat is something I eat, but I enjoy it far less than something like a warm, crusty loaf of bread with a little vegan butter and cherry jam on it.

This will be a short list this week as I’ve more or less lost interest in reading series. Too many of them have either ended unsatisfactorily for my tastes or never been completed at all.

With that being said, here are a few exceptions to that rule for me that I still need to finish:

1. The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) by Philip Pullman

2. Children of Time (Children of Time, #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

3. Semiosis (Semiosis, #1) by Sue Burke

If you know of any speculative fiction series published in the last 10 years or so that were excellent from beginning to end, please share!

Title

Author: P.B. Cannon

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: November 2o, 2012

Genres: Science Fiction, Romance, Historical

Length: About 137 pages.

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

Abandoned on an alien planet, Second must learn to co-exist with a group of primitives in order to survive. A tale of the acceptance of differences and of unconditional love.

Content Warning: Polyamory, sex scenes, pregnancy, birth, and bullying for physical disabilities and differences.

Review:

Love comes in many different forms.

I enjoyed seeing how much trust the author put into assuming readers would figure out some things on our own. Not every aspect of these characters’ lives was spelled out plainly, and a few of them could only be uncovered by taking note of subtle clues that fit together in specific ways once one was well into Second’s adventures. There’s something to be said for believing that one’s audience is intelligent and patient enough to do such things, and it’s one of the reasons why I keep returning to Ms. Cannon’s work over and over again.

While physiological differences between Second and the people they met on the alien planet they visited were described in detail, I would have liked to see a little more attention paid to the world building as well, particularly as it related to culture and religion. Second had grown up with certain assumptions about how society worked that weren’t always well fleshed out but that did have a heavy impact on how they interacted with nomadic people they met on their travels. This could have easily been a five-star reading for me if more time had been spent on such things.

The romances were handled nicely and I thought they contributed a lot of character development to this novella. This is something I’m saying as a reader who only occasionally dips my toes into this genre and is not easily impressed, but the author put in all of the work that was required in order to make these subplots flow smoothly with the main storyline. They were ultimately well done.

This is a prequel to a series, but it also can be read as a standalone work.

Seed was heartwarming.

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One type of Canadian food I haven’t tried yet is Saskatoon berry pie, but I’d bet it will be amazing once I find a dairy-free version or recipe for it someday Everything else on this list is something I have eaten at least once.

I can’t possibly know what everyone has or hasn’t already tasted, so Wikipedia links are included in this post if anything I described is unfamiliar to you or you’d like to know more about them.

Maple syrup is at the top of my list for this topic because Southern Ontario is excellent at making it and it’s one of those foods that people buy here to give as gifts elsewhere. I know it’s collected in many other places on Earth, too, so I hope you all have had a chance to taste it if you wish to.

Poutine is delicious as well. You may not think that French fries, gravy, and cheese (or, in my case, vegan cheese) would go so well together, but they’re delicious. I prefer to add a few tablespoons of chopped green peppers for added flavour, although it’s not a traditional topping per se.

Butter tarts are something I wasn’t able to try until I finally found a bakery that makes a dairy-free version of them. Thank goodness for vegan and allergy-aware bakers is all I can say! They are an incredibly rich dessert that I adore, and I recommend them as well.

Peameal bacon sandwiches are a delicious lunch due to how rich and savoury this type of meat is. They’re typically served on the same sort of bun you might use for hamburger or veggie burger meat. I like to put some honey mustard on mine, but they’re good plain as well.

Nanaimo bars took some getting used to due to my dislike of shredded coconut, but they’re otherwise wonderfully fudgy and sweet.

Split pea soup is actually something my parents made on occasion when I was growing up in the United States. I didn’t realize there was a French version from Quebec, too, until I moved up here.

Finally, beaver tails are a classic Canadian treat. It’s a flat pastry that’s fried and then covered in toppings that range from a simple cinnamon and sugar to chopped up pieces of well-known candy or candy bars and copious amounts of icing. They are also teeth-achingly sweet, so you may want to consider splitting one with a friend or relative as a little bit can go a long way.

Thank you to Anne @ HeadFullofBooks for coming up with this topic! Here are books I’ve read in August over the past ten years. I can’t guarantee that I was reading them on precisely August 11 as I don’t keep track of such information, but they were all read in this month and all good reads.

2016 

The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction by Gregory Klages

Genre: History

Why I Liked It: Tom Thompson was a famous Canadian painter and one of the Group of Seven who created all sorts of art in the early 1900s. This book explores his life and mysterious death, and I thought the ending was quite fitting for a life that ended far too soon.

2017

Coping With Your Difficult Older Parent : A Guide for Stressed-Out Children by Grace Lebow, Barbara Kane, Irwin Lebow

Genre: Psychology/Self-Help

Why I Liked It: My parents are actually wonderful, but unfortunately I have other relatives in their age group who are only becoming more difficult to handle as they grow older. I’ve read multiple books about boundaries, dysfunctional families, (severe, untreated) mental illness, and self-care over the years to help me develop the coping skills I need for these situations.

2018

The Bedroom: An Intimate History by Michelle Perrot, Lauren Elkin

Genre: History

Why I Liked It: The wide range of topics it covered. Yes, there were references to sex in this book, but it also talked about many other things related to bedrooms and sleeping: central heating, how hotel accommodations worked in the past, how people slept in jails, hospitals, and sanitariums, and so much more.

2019 

Let’s Play White by Chesya Burke

Genre: SFF

Why I Liked It: This was one of those collections of short stories in which every entry was unique. I get a little bored with collections that repeat the same themes too often, so this one definitely stood out to me.

2020

Zombies, Run!: Keeping Fit and Living Well in the Current Zombie Emergency by Naomi Alderman

Genre: SFF, Health, Fitness

Why I Liked It: Honestly, the information in it is just as applicable to now as it was to 2020. Taking care of yourself during stressful times is incredibly important no matter what the threat is. The zombie angle simply added a dose of fun to what is otherwise a serious topic.

2021

Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected by Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Memoir

Why I Liked It: I don’t purposefully seek out information about the lives of my favourite authors because I believe they deserve privacy just like the rest of us  (unless they’re harming other people or something, of course). Therefore, I didn’t know about Ms. Okorafor’s botched back surgery or how it lead her to become an author until I read this. It was quite interesting!

2022

On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah-Yah Scholfield

Genre: Horror

Why I Liked It: Eveything up until the ending was perfect. The protagonist was nuanced and relatable and the setting was deliciously scary. I just wish the conclusion had been a happier one, but I’m still glad I read it.

2023 

The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler

Genre: SFF

Why I Liked It: This one had the opposite problem that Scholfield‘s tale did. The beginning was a little lacklustre, but the ending was so worth the wait. Once again, I’m glad I read it even though it didn’t match all of my expectations.

2024 

Gay the Pray Away by Natalie Naudus

Genre: YA

Why I Liked It: I related to it on so many different levels, from growing up in a conservative Christian homeschooling family to being a lifelong bookworm  to eventually coming out.

2025 

Ghosts, Trolls and the Hidden People: An Anthology of Icelandic Folk Legends by Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir

Genre: SFF

Why I Liked It: You all might remember how much I love myths, fairy tales, and folklore in general. This was a fabulous collection of just that.

Title

Author: Victoria Dillon

Publisher: New Harbinger Publications

Publication Date: March 3, 2026

Genres: Science Fiction

Length: 238 pages

Source: I borrowed it from the library.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

For fans of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale comes Ava, a provocative blend of speculative fiction and social commentary that takes readers on a gripping, thought-provoking journey into the fight for women’s autonomy in a politically charged Southern landscape.

What if the only way to reclaim reproductive freedom was to rewrite the very nature of birth itself?

Ten years after Roe v. Wade is overturned, twenty-two-year-old biologist Larkin finds herself unexpectedly pregnant in a country where choice is no longer an option. Initially uncertain, she embraces motherhood—until a devastating diagnosis changes everything. Trapped by Tennessee’s strict abortion laws, she is forced to carry her baby to term, only to endure the heartbreak of losing her hours after birth.

Years later, Larkin joins a radical scientific movement that could change a groundbreaking technology that replaces gestation with incubation, allowing women true control over their reproduction. When she uses it to bring her second daughter, Ava, into the world, she believes she has finally reclaimed her autonomy. But as Ava grows and begins to question the very choice that created her, Larkin is challenged in ways she never imagined.

Ava is a powerful, emotionally charged exploration of motherhood, bodily autonomy, and the far-reaching consequences of restrictive legislation. In a future shaped by loss and innovation, mother and daughter must confront the ultimate what does it truly mean to have a choice?

Content Warning: Miscarriage, misogyny, forced pregnancy and birth, and a baby who died of a fatal birth defect a few hours after being born.

Review:

Reproductive freedom is more than a catch phrase.

The science fiction elements were intriguing and like nothing I’ve ever seen in this genre before. I especially enjoyed the sections that discussed how human reproduction could be altered in order to make it much safer for pregnant people to experience. While I don’t want to give away too many hints about how the incubation process worked in this tale, I was fascinated by the technological changes that made such a thing possible and thought it was a good platform to discuss everything from sexism to bodily autonomy.

I would have loved to see more character and plot development At times this read more like an outline of a book than the finished product, especially when it came to exploring the character’s internal lives and how the invention of a new way for humans to reproduce might change society forever. As important as the messages were in it, I was underwhelmed by the execution of the storyline and kept wishing the author would give us more details about how everything worked and what the characters thought of these biological and social developments.

There was a cliffhanger ending here that made me wish to know what happened next. It will be interesting to see if other readers have the same reaction, but I thought it was a good place to end given all of the dramatic changes to society that had just taken place. The consequences of these actions could be far reaching and spur on multiple sequels if the author wanted to write them.

Ava was thought provoking.