Do I always say it’s been a busy month? Perhaps I do. But this one has had a mix of deadlines, illness, overscheduling–oh right, and also sports–and the long and short is that it ended up being a relatively light reading month. But when short fiction is involved, a light reading month usually still means a couple real winners, and I certainly still have stories to talk about. Let’s get to it.

Short Fiction

As usual, I’ve posted two short fiction reviews this month which I won’t repeat here, one of this month’s issues of Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus and one of the horror anthology The Map of Lost Places. 

March Favorites

I did have a couple worth shouting out in both linked reviews, starting with L.S. Johnson’s transformation novelette “Something Rich and Strange” and continuing with Anna Burdenko’s “Pollen” and G.M. Paniccia’s “Codewalker.” From everything else? It’s:

• The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead (2025 short story) by E.M. Linden. My favorite short story of the year so far is also the second of my favorite 2025 short fictions to involve a people forced to migrate away from their ancestral burial grounds and their ancestral ghosts. Maybe there’s something in the water? At any rate, this one is poignant, heartfelt, and beautiful.

Strong Contenders

• For Whom the Hair Grows (2025 short story) by Tia Tashiro. It’s a Rapunzel retelling with a twist that’s both clever and a little bit easy to see coming, but Tashiro’s excellent storytelling make this one a strong read.
• Old Wells (2025 short story) by Thomas Ha. Ha has been writing at a high enough level lately that I can be pretty sure any new story will be worth the read, even if it’s not an all-timer. This is effective weird folk horror, with Ha’s typical excellent building of tension and some unstated horrors at home that nicely play off the horrors outside.
• Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness (2025 short story) by B. Pladek. This one is doing a ton thematically–hitting everything from generative AI to bigotry to censorship in education to struggles seeing through the eyes of another generation–with every aspect painted in bright lines. There are times that it feels a little too on the nose, but it all comes together in something of a tragic character study that gives the reader plenty to think about.

Others I Enjoyed in March

• The Scientist Does Not Look Back (2024 short story) by Kristen Koopman. I’m not usually an audio person, but the formatting for this one–told in a series of recorded notes–makes this one a perfect candidate for the form, and the Escape Pod reader performs admirably. As for the story? I’m not a retelling guy in general, so a sort of Orpheus and Frankenstein mashed up with gay romance isn’t necessarily my style. But the portray of the lead’s emotions at the loss of his lover is excellent.
• Some to Cradle, Some to Eat (2o25 short story) by Eugenia Triantafyllou. Somehow I read two retellings mashed up with queer romances (this one sapphic) this month. This one also does a nice job with the lead’s perspective, here as a girl unsure of how to build relationships knowing her parents are monsters.
• A True Account of a Pre-Teen Blob (2025 short story) by Marie Vibbert. This caught my intrigue with some over-the-top unpleasant family dynamics that had some sinister overtones, but it’s not a story about digging into whatever is wrong under the surface so much as the pre-teen lead’s attempts to escape them, whether through physical distance, distraction, or magic.

Novels and Novellas

Reviews Posted

• The Martian Contingency (2025 novel) by Mary Robinette Kowal. The fourth novel in the Lady Astronaut series plays the hits but shows some common late-series flaws.
• The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years (2024 novel) by Shubnum Khan. A two-timeline tale is a period romantic tragedy and a contemporary Gothic in a South African setting. The contemporary story is uneven, but the period drama is fantastic.
• On the Calculation of Volume (2024 novel) by Solvej Balle. The opening of a literary Groundhog Day-style time loop story is meditative and compelling, but it doesn’t stand alone and doesn’t necessarily whet the appetite for a seven-volume saga either.
• Our Lady of the Artilects (2022 novel) by Andrew Gillsmith. A supernatural sci-fi thriller intimately concerned with the theological and philosophical consequences of machine sentience.
• A Drop of Corruption (2025 novel) by Robert Jackson Bennett. The weird fantasy mystery sequel to The Tainted Cup brings back pretty much every reason people loved the first.

Others I Read in March

I said it was a light month. . . I have started a couple books and read a non-fiction, but this section is pretty trim.

• Saint Death’s Herald (2025 novel) by C.S.E. Cooney. The sequel to my favorite novel of 2022 feels a bit like an extended side quest. It suffers from repetition, but benefits from strong writing and tying up a lingering loose end from the first book. Full review to come.

SPSFC

My judging team has sorted through our quarterfinalists and evaluated a few runners-up from other teams, ultimately advancing Time of the Cat and A Swift and Sudden Exit to the next round. The zany time travel novel and sapphic time travel romance will join ten other books from the other five teams. The semifinals will be split into two groups of six, with three teams evaluating one group and three evaluating the other, each choosing the top half to advance to the finals. My team will be reading the following six:

• Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin
• Bisection by Sheila Jenné
• Proliferation by Erik A. Otto
• Time of the Cat by Tansy Rayner Roberts
• On Impulse by Heather Texle
• A Swift and Sudden Exit by Nico Vincenty

Look for reviews trickling out from both myself and my teammates over the next few weeks, with official team scores to start in late May and the finalist announcements in early June.

Miscellanous

I wrapped up the bulk of my 2024 reviewing with the Awards Season Edition of my 2024 Recommended Reading List, complete with my ten favorite pieces of short fiction published in 2024. It’s also the end of the Bingo year, so keep an eye out for a wrap-up post and a 2025 planning post in April.