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Yesterday I concluded Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes, translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. This story was originally serialized in a paper, first published in the 1950s. It is structured as the covert diary entries of a dissatisfied housewife in Rome.

The book deals with various themes of generational conflict, the impact of both World Wars, and Italy’s economic downturn, but the heart of the book is the diarist, Valeria’s, fight to create and maintain a sense of self. Her struggle is contained so neatly in the fact that no one even calls her by her name—to her aging, aloof parents she is always and forever “bebe,” and to her grown children and even her husband she is “Mama.” She has no real friends to speak of.

Valeria keeps her diary hidden from everyone in their too-small apartment, terrified that her husband or adult children might find it. Frequently, she threatens to swear off writing in it and destroy it, emphatic that she’s only become more unhappy since she started it. This is because the more Valeria keeps track of her life, the less satisfying she finds it.

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Yesterday on a lovely walk through then neighborhood I reached the end of The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso. This is fantasy/action novel, set in a world in “prime” reality, beneath which sits ever-descending “echo” layers of reality. The further down you go, the stranger and more dangerous things get. At a New Year’s party, things get unexpectedly tricky when the entire party is pulled down through the echoes.

Our protagonist is Kembral Thorne, a “hound” whose job is to retrieve people, animals, and other things that are pulled or “fall” into the echoes. This party is Kem’s first step back into society after having her first baby two months earlier.

Of course, when things start going wrong, Kem can’t help but get involved. It’s her job.

I’ll say again, I do love queer lit with adults. YA is great and I’m so happy that teens today have access to so much queer lit, but online queer book recs can skew very YA. Here, Kem is very much someone at least in her thirties—she’s got a baby, she’s reached a senior role in her career, and her concerns reflect this position in her life. While she and her quasi-rival Rika have the sort of skittish interactions you might expect from people who are into each other and unwilling to admit they are into each other, they don’t reach the level of comic avoidance or overwrought drama of teens or young adults.

I liked the ebb and flow of Kem and Rika’s relationship. These are two people who already have history and have kind of already had their big, relationship-ending squabble before we even get to this party, which is fun to unravel over the course of the evening. They have some cute moments, some artificially-amplified angst, but are generally enjoyable.

The worldbuilding here is fine. It’s serviceable for what the novel is doing, but we don’t really get a look at much else outside of the party except when Kem ventures out into the echoes, which becomes increasingly less frequent as they descend. There’s some fun stuff, some spooky stuff, some aesthetic stuff.

The book pushes a little hard on maintaining the status quo when the status quo isn’t that great (I think it could have made this more believable with more discussion, but the book is really more about the action than the political debate) and I did think one character’s fate was a cop-out, especially given the former. Violent change to the system is wrong but we’ll all shrug and smile when this criminal we couldn’t nail down conveniently dies without a trial.

On the whole, I enjoyed this one, but it’s nothing earth-shattering. I put the next book on my TBR though because I do want to see what Rika and Kem get up to next.

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I don’t know how I keep timing these so that I finish my audiobook and my paper book one right after the other. This weekend I also wrapped up The Black Fantastic, an anthology compiled by Andre M. Carrington. Thank you to pauraque for bringing this one to my attention! This is a collection of “Afrofuturist” stories by Black authors. If you want more detail, Pauraque has done individual reviews of each story which you can read here; I won’t get that specific.

With the usual caveat that all anthologies vary in quality, I enjoyed this one. There were a lot of very different stories, from some really fantastical stuff to ones that are just a little bit to the left of the world as it stands. On the high end of things, pieces like A Guide to the Native Fruits of Hawai’i by Alayna Dawn Johnson, where the protagonist grapples with her decision to collaborate with a group of vampire invaders to prey on the locals (and the metaphor of vampirism for the way Hawaii is treated by wealthy Americans is not lost in the shuffle); or The Orb by Tara Campbell, which was both strange and unexplained, choosing to focus not on the “why” or “how” of the situation but again on the moral quandary of its main character.

On the lower end, ones like The Ones Who Stay and Fight by NK Jemisin, which felt…narratively unclear, to say the least. It is either a satire of the kind of utopia writers create where its status as utopia is essentially dependent on eliminating any disagreement or contact with the outside world…or it’s a whole-hearted endorsement of that view. And if I can’t tell which, I tend to think the author’s failed at their purpose; or Ruler of the Rear Guard by Maurice Broaddus, which seemed to end just as it was getting to the plot.

Overall, I had fun with this anthology. SFF short story collections, done well, are such a scintillating showcase of creativity and I felt that here.