Library Journal: Lex has been traveling the world since graduating college. She’ll go anywhere but home: Memphis, TN. Rather than facing her mother’s unsettling death, she immerses herself in words, creating a lexicon of her own lived experience. Yet after a heartbreak and with help from her godmother Cami, Lex returns to Memphis for what she assumes will be a short visit. Instead, Cami gives Lex the opportunity to learn her mother’s life story. Through her mother’s own words in diary entries from before Lex was born, this daughter begins to question who she is and how many ways there are to define family. A quick and intimate read, Cook’s second novel (after How To Bury Your Brother) embraces the classic story of a daughter realizing that within her mother was a woman she never knew, who was as spirited and strong-willed as Lex herself. Though the plot is predictable, this isn’t frustrating. The familiarity and assurance that you know what’s coming is rewarding and endears the characters to the reader. VERDICT Readers of Southern and women’s fiction will become deeply immersed in this mother-daughter narrative.
Jun 102021
Booklist: Sharpson’s debut novel takes place in the 2200s in the Caspian Republic, a totalitarian state that is in theory a safe haven from “the Machine,” inhabitants’ term for the rest of the world and its utopian society administered by and populated with sentient AI. The narrative follows Nikolai South, an operative for StaSec, one of the two security forces in charge of maintaining the status quo in the Republic. When a prominent, rabidly anti-Machine journalist dies and is revealed to have been an AI living in a clone body, South is assigned to look after the AI widow of the deceased as she comes to view her husband’s remains. He is thrown into a whirlpool of intrigue as various factions conspire to use the widow’s visit for their own ends, and is simultaneously dragged back into his own muddled past by the widow’s resemblance to his own dead wife. Well-written and suitably grim, this picture of one dystopian holdout in a utopian world should please many sf readers interested in visions of a post-AI future.
Locus and Aurora Award finalist Premee Mohamed’s THE VOID ASCENDANT, the highly anticipated conclusion to the Beneath the Rising trilogy, and an additional novel, to David Moore at Solaris Books, for publication in Spring 2022, by Michael Curry.
Clarion West graduate Eden Robins’ SHOWSTOPPER, pitched as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel with magic, set in post WWII Chicago in a women’s only comedy club, where 23-year-old Franny Steinberg stumbles in one night and discovers that some jokes have the power to literally transform their audiences, and falls in with a group of female stand-up comedians all looking for their own transformation, to Christa Desir at Sourcebooks Landmark, in a two book deal, for publication Fall 2022, by Cameron McClure.
Film rights to Nicole Glover’s The Conductors have been acquired by Queen Latifah’s Flavor Unit Entertainment in association with the Jim Henson Company, via Geoff Morley at UTA in association with Jennie Goloboy.
Audio rights to Elizabeth Sims’s RITA FARMER MYSTERIES, YOU’VE GOT A BOOK IN YOU, and TIGHT RACE, to Kim Budnick at Tantor Media, in a five-book deal, by Katie Shea Boutillier for Cameron McClure.
French rights to British Fantasy Award finalist Cassandra Khaw’s NOTHING BUT BLACKENED TEETH and THE ALL-CONSUMING WORLD, to Pygmalion, by Zuzanna Brzezinska at Anna Jarota Agency in association with Michael Curry.