The Nebula Awards are soon to be announced, but you have a little over a month to do some reading if you still want to make up your mind before the results are in. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association will announce the winners on June 7, 2025, at the SFWA’s 60th Annual Awards Conference in Kansas City, Missouri (June 5-8 2025). You can actually attend if you want to–in person or online.
The SFWA gives awards to different types of speculative fiction in various categories–novels, short fiction, novellas, and so on, with the awards going to the best of the best published in 2024, as judged by their membership. I set myself the task of reading all the novels short-listed for this year’s awards. Then I reviewed them all in this series of posts. Now that I’ve read them all and thought about them all, which novel would I choose if I were choosing the winner? Full disclosure: I’m not! But if I were?
Here are the short-listed books nominated for best novel:
For various reasons (see my reviews here), I would not choose Barsukov’s or Chandrasekera’s novels, and that’s in spite of my enthusiastic review last year for Chandraskera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which went on to win–deservedly–both a Nebula and a Locus award.
The other four novels are all wonderful books. Do read them! (Well–read Chandrasekera’s if you have a lot of patience and/or a lot of political/cultural knowledge of Sri Lanka. It’s certainly the most serious book on the list.) Asunder has an amazing system of magic, amazing world-building, and a really interesting relationship between the two main characters. A Sorceress Comes to Call is incredibly good fun, and if you are a Bridgerton or Jane Austen fan, and if you love English country house murder mysteries, you will probably love this book. See my reviews here.
The two I love most, though, are Kelly Link’s The Book of Love and John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In. Both are very ingenious. Both are heart-warming but not in a sappy way. I think the writing and character motivations of Link’s novel are maybe slightly better, so I guess I’d go for that one. But Wiswell’s is just great, too. See my reviews here.
A reminder: ALL of these novels have their ardent fans, or they wouldn’t be on the short list. You may love even the ones I don’t love, or don’t love as much as the one I chose. You may love them–or not love them–for reasons I don’t share. And that’s just fine. De gustibus non est disputandem. Or as my old mother would put it, “Everyone to her own taste, said the old woman who kissed the cow.”
The Nebula Awards, sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, have announced their short-list of nominated speculative fiction published in 2024. The short-listed books nominated for best novel are:
I’m reading the short-listed books in alphabetical order by author, which means I’m coming at them randomly. The two books I’m reviewing in this post, Kelly Link’s The Book of Love and John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In, are two of the most clever and engaging novels I’ve read in some time. Another great pairing–both books are about love in unexpected forms, both are sweet-natured but not Lifetime/Hallmark movie sweet, and both have an interesting and subtle political underside.
This novel had me at the moment one of the characters knocks on the door of another character RIGHT in the middle of a song she is writing, and she says, “Sit wherever, Person from Porlock.” Oh, wait. As a member (former member? have they kicked me out?) of The Porlock Society, I have to tell you the novel had me far before that moment, because that one happens in roughly the middle of the novel, and there are many fun and clever moments before that. This amazing urban fantasy novel is the story of three high school friends who have died and then suddenly find themselves sucked through a portal back into their old lives. The three, and another one who sneaks through the portal into life with them, have to compete to see which ones get to stay and live their lives, and which ones must return to the land of Death–not to mention solving the mystery of what actually catapulted them into Death’s waiting room in the first place.
I really enjoyed this novel. Considering the age of the main characters, I suppose this is YA? I don’t really know. It uses none of the usual YA tropes, and I (much, MUCH too old for YA) enjoyed it immensely. As the title tells us, this is a book about love–love of all kinds. The characters are wonderful, funny, and real. As I mentioned, the novel is sweet-natured without being saccharine or sappy. That is a true feat of magic if ever I have seen one. Magic saturates this book–old and rotting magic, newly discovered magic, magic refused–and its magic system is very ingenious. Meanwhile, the setting is perfectly realistic small-town America, with a subtle political message. You’ll know it when you see it–the moment when the statues get off their plinths, and even before then. I suppose you could think of The Book of Love as that type of portal fantasy where the fantasy beings make an incursion into the real world, rather than the reverse Harry Potter kind.
The novel perhaps goes on a bit too long, but there are a lot of moving parts and narrative threads to knit up. Besides, who can possibly resist a novel with a character who slaps a sticker on her guitar reading “This Machine Kills Gods”? The writing is really wonderful, too. I’m a sucker for that.
Good lord. ANOTHER sweet-natured book about love that is neither saccharine nor sappy. What are the chances? This one has all the horror trappings you could possibly desire. The main character is a monster out of your worst nightmares. You know what “monster” really means, don’t you? It comes from a Latin word meaning “to show” or “demonstrate,” and another closely-related Latin word meaning “to warn.” Monsters are the uncanny, warning of the disapproval of the gods. They are the malformed, the nightmare Other. When the Roman poet Horace wrote about Cleopatra, he called her “fatale monstrum”–fatal monster, a warning of the unnatural (her unnatural power as a woman, I suppose) and how the unnatural can tear societal norms apart.
What happens when some creature labeled a “monster” encounters love? What happens if that act rebuilds and reshapes societal norms? This novel puts its unique stamp on a fairly common horror trope, the monster who falls in love with a human. It’s much more than that, though. The novel is about Othering and the cost to society for doing so. The toll it takes on empathy and love. The difficulties and joys of found family. Radical transformation.
Reaching that point is complicated for Shesheshen the monster, and in the telling, Wiswell–like Link–scores some very clever political points. Shesheshen thinks nothing of devouring others. It’s how she lives, and now that she is mature, she needs to find a partner she trusts enough to lay her eggs in, “someone to build a nest in.” The eggs will hatch, the young will eat the nourishing, trusted partner, and the life cycle of her kind will go on. So when circumstances bring her in contact with humans as something other than a food source, she finds them endlessly mysterious. There are the rich people, she sees, and then there are the laborers. The rich people live off the efforts of the laborers. “What the laborers got out of it that kept them from eating the rich, Shesheshen didn’t understand. She was a mere monster.” As torch-wielding villagers hunt Shesheshen through the hiding places of their town, she marvels at their lives, especially their “binary system of justice that mostly served the landed,” and how their walls, built to keep the Others out, only keep the villagers in, “trapped with politicians and monsters.” If Shesheshen ever gets a guitar, we know what sticker she will put on it.
I suppose my only real beef with this book is that Shesheshen’s arc of personal growth to overcome Othering, and the arc of her beloved to overcome familial abuse, is too full of the trauma-informed self-help language of contemporary pop psych articles and books. That stuff kind of interfered with my willing suspension of disbelief. But I can see how the novel requires a delicate balance if it is going to work. In spite of that particular misgiving, I enjoyed reading Someone To Build a Nest In very much. It is a wonderful novel.
NEXT UP: I try to pick a winner. Full disclosure: the book I think should win and the book the judges pick is frequently not the same book!
The Nebula Awards, sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, have announced their short-list of nominated speculative fiction published in 2024. The short-listed books nominated for best novel are:
I’m reading the short-listed books in alphabetical order by author, which means I’m coming at them at random. The two books I’m reviewing in this post, Asunder, by Kerstin Hall, and A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher, certainly do make an interesting pair. Both involve intricate systems of magic, and both involve the matter of possession–one person taking over another’s body. There the resemblance ends.
This is a sometimes-thrilling, pretty consistently absorbing novel with a magic system so complex I never did completely figure out what it was all about. It’s a magic that punches you in the face starting on page one, a magic that must be unraveled as disaster looms. Meanwhile the main characters struggle with a state of possession that reads like the forced-proximity romance trope on steroids. Sometimes Hall’s novel goes off the rails. There’s a long sagging middle. Occasionally it veers into the bizarre, and not in a good way. Example: a method of mass transit that involves boarding a giant spider through its gullet and settling down to enjoy the view while the spider ambles off to the next town. Very few writers can engage in a China Miéville-level of weirdness without sounding outright silly. But just as I was starting to get bored and annoyed, Asunder brought off a stunning mid-plot surprise . Not a cheap thrills surprise, either. Not a surprise engineered by the need for a swerve in the plot–although the plot does swerve! Not the other kind of surprise just arbitrarily stuck in there because the author doesn’t know what else to do. No–this surprise rises organically from plot and character and genuinely changes the way we see both. I loved it. Throughout, big set-pieces stud the novel, gore- and horror-filled fights to the death with god-like creatures. At the end, I wasn’t really sure what had happened or exactly why. It seemed for a while that we were about to go veering off into romantasy, but Hall does not allow that. In spite of a kind of low-level confusion, I really enjoyed reading this novel.
Let’s say a Grimms’ fairytale and a Regency romance had a baby, and that baby was a real little horror. That would be this book. It was a delight to read. In a plot riffing off the Goose-Girl fairytale, T. Kingfisher (pen name for the author Ursula Vernon) spins the tale of a sorceress and her hapless daughter who set out to insinuate themselves into an upper-crust household. The sorceress hopes to ensnare the squire of the household into marriage, mostly in order to gain enough worldly advantages for her daughter Cordelia so that Cordelia can make a brilliant match with the squire’s filthy-rich bachelor neighbor. It is a truth universally to be acknowledged etc. etc. If the mother–a horror-infused Mrs. Bennet–succeeds, mother and daughter will live in comfort for the rest of their lives. The squire and his sister won’t fare so well. In fact, they could well end up murdered. People who turn out to inconvenience the sorceress often meet that fate. And then there’s the nightmare horse who is the sorceress’s familiar, trampling anyone who gets in his mistress’s way. As mousy Cordelia finds an affection she has never known among the squire’s household and the guests at his house party, she needs to rise to the occasion, grow a spine, and defeat her murderous mother. As with Asunder, horror, magic, and magical possession drive the plot. But what a difference in tone and outcome and just about everything else. A Sorceress Comes to Call was fun from page one all the way through. I loved reading it.
Fantastes 
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