Month: February 2025

Saying Farewell to Booklist

I quit reviewing for Booklist. Or, more accurately, I let my editor know I need to take a break from reviewing for an unspecified amount of time.

I’ve been debating this move for a couple years, honestly. I’ve been really struggling to make myself read for a while now. I kept thinking I’d get back into it, that my reading mojo would come back, or at least that I could make myself do it, but it’s just been getting worse. I’ve been turning in my reviews later and later, and it stresses me out. I no longer feel that Booklist can rely on me for this task, which isn’t fair to them, and I no longer enjoy it because it feels like too much pressure.

I need a break. If I don’t feel like reading, I want to be able to just not read and not feel guilty about dropping the ball.

I hope I’ll want to read more if it’s just for fun and not an assignment. In truth, I’ve always had this issue: I didn’t read a single assigned text all through primary school. If you tell me I HAVE to, then I don’t want to! I have a powerful contrarian streak. Reading has always been an indulgent happy place for me. I don’t want it to be work. I’m a little surprised I was able to keep up these reviews successfully for as long as I did.

I’m clearly still coming to terms with this decision. But I feel like it’s the right decision for me right now.

There are a couple reviews I already submitted which haven’t been published yet, so I’ll post those when they are. But then I won’t be doing any new ones.

I’m curious: I used to write long-form book reviews of stuff I read just for fun. But I pretty much completely stopped writing just-for-fun book reviews once I started reviewing for Booklist. I wonder if I’ll go back to it. I prefer being able to analyze things in depth, so maybe this has also been part of my struggle. Working within the strict character limit of Booklist reviews was a fun challenge, it taught me a great deal and made me a better writer, but I’ve never been interested in brevity.

Anyway, that’s a thing I did. If you enjoy my reviews, I feel a bit bad that I’m ending them, but I think I need to. I may take them back up again in the future. We’ll see.

Book Review: The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton

Cover of the book The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton
The Fourth Consort
by Edward Ashton
St. Martin’s, 2025

This review was first published by Booklist on February 1, 2025.

Life isn’t going so well when Dalton Greaves gets recruited by the alien Unity coalition to be a “ground pounder”—someone who makes first contact with newly discovered, sentient species. Competition for first contact comes from the Assembly, a different coalition of aliens. When Dalton makes contact with the minarchs—a tentacled, insectoid, predatory species—things don’t go at all to plan. He and his partner end up stranded on the minarch planet along with an Assembly “stickman” and get caught up in local political conflicts. Dalton becomes the fourth consort of the minarch queen, forms an unexpected truce with his Assembly enemy, and lands in a fight for his life. Ashton (Mal Goes to War, 2024) excels at creating compelling characters. Especially impressive is how believable his different alien races are: each has its own culture and motivations, and they all make sense. The conflicts that drive the action arise from the miscommunications between them. Speculative fiction is a lens for us to reflect upon ourselves in interesting ways, and this is ultimately a delightful examination of what it means to be human.