By Jessica Woodbury — Jun 5, 2025

Just the Books

Look. I have attempted to write a fun opener for this a few times and it keeps being not all that fun. But the more time that passes the more books that I will have to include in this newsletter! So for now we are going to say fuck it and just get straight to the books.

This year did not start well. Almost everything I enjoyed was not a new release. But it finally turned around and now that I'm finishing up summer reads it's much better. But I need to catch you up, so let's do it.

Every time I share a book that has some very difficult subject matter I want to apologize. But the thing is that I can be as sensitive to this stuff as anyone, so when I recommend a book with difficult subject matter you can feel assured that it is interesting, readable, and worth your time. I'm not going to say you have to read any book about a difficult subject, but I'll try to give you an idea of whether it's for you.

So let's just start by saying that Sleep is about child sexual abuse, though it is not graphic on the page, and we mostly follow our protagonist Margaret as an adult. The scenes we have from Margaret's childhood show us vivid moments in time so we have an idea of what she has been holding inside her all these years, in particular the way her family saw what was happening and chose not to acknowledge it in any way.

If you started a little later in this book it might feel like a lot of novels about modern middle-aged women, newly divorced mothers in Brooklyn. (I swear I've read like 6 of them in the last few months and started dozens more.) It's just that with Margaret, all this self-discovery is being held back by... well, by the past she has tried so hard for so long not to grapple with. Except it becomes much harder to do that when her daughters begin to reach the age she was when the abuse occurred. This is a book that pulled me right in, that I sped through, that has some deep emotional understanding, and that is now on my Best of 2025 list. It was not a chore to read at all, I thought Jones did a good job of showing us the gravity of what Margaret has experienced without enveloping us in trauma. It has an Ann Patchett blurb on the cover, so there you go.

Now, the other side of the coin. Trauma Plot is not a book that makes things easy for you. It is straight up about sexual assault and I can't say it is pleasurable. But I can tell you that I listened to the audiobook of this on a long drive and did nearly half of it in one sitting. I found it mesmerizing.

If Hood wanted to hook me, she did a good job by starting with an introduction that is almost a manifesto. It refutes the discourse of the mid-10's that centered on A Little Life (but included almost all work of memoir by women) attacking trauma and confessional writing as art. Hood makes a strong case that they were wrong, and the rest of her book stands as evidence. There is value in examining, in processing, in transforming traumatic experiences into creativity and art. And the book is not just Hood telling us about her sexual assaults, but it is a journey through understanding them, examining them, and writing about them. If you are a person who loves a narrative about narratives (and you know I am) this is some fascinating shit. This one has a Torrey Peters blurb (which totally worked on me, fwiw).

Let's get back into fiction, shall we? Though this isn't exactly light stuff, it's a different kind of brutal. Just some medieval bacchanalian body horror, as a treat.

I've found Starling hit and miss (loved Luminous Dead, didn't finish Death of Jane Lawrence) but this feels like a new level for her. Starving Saints is set in a fantasy world similar to our medieval Europe, where a King, his knights, and subjects have been under siege inside a castle for months. They are out of supplies, alive only thanks to the inexplicable magic of Phosyne, a former nun who isn't even sure how she managed the magic in the first place. Knight Ser Voyne is tasked with making sure Phosyne finds a way to feed the starving multitudes. But it's looking grim until a group of "saints" suddenly appear. This is a triple-point of view novel, following Phosyne, Ser Voyne, and Treila--a servant with a grudge and a taste for revenge. Their stories intertwine, twisting together, moving apart, a strange braid of perfect plotting.

This is a fever dream of a book, that is somehow also intricately and smartly plotted. This is not an easy thing to do, fever dreams don't tend to be very plot-heavy, but Starling deftly makes it all about tone and perception. The haziness of everything only makes you wonder more what is actually going on, and the stakes are about as high as they can be. While I don't always love the medieval-esque fantasy setting, this really uses it well, Starling really just needs the flexibility to create a religion she can use the way she needs to. And oh boy, does she. Definitely some significant gore, though it is often stuff you know is happening but don't see. That doesn't make it better, lol.

Decagon House Murders was one of my favorite golden-age homage mysteries. This is the 3rd "house" murder from the same author, Yukito Ayatsuji, and was a lot of fun. This is an intricate locked room mystery, and once again it is a mystery-lover's mystery relying on your understanding of and experience with tropes of the genre. And let me just say, you have never seen a house floor map like the one in this book. The title is not joking.

This is a tricky one to write about because it is absolutely a Go In Cold novel. Don't go past the very beginning of the summary. Suffice it to say, it begins with Lily waking up in a room she doesn't know in a house she doesn't know, gradually exploring to find other women there who have also just woken up in this new place. It is dystopian and I am very hard to please with a dystopian novel nowadays, but this one really did it for me. Super readable, and does what a good dystopia should do: has a strong point of view about our lives right now.

This goes really fast and is really well plotted, my first official "beach read" or "airplane book" of the year.

I will endeavor to come up with a good opener before June is over.

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