Romance

A spoiler-free review of The Wild Beneath by Kelly Anderson: a debut built in five tidal movements around a coastal town destroyed by a tsunami, superb on grief and salvage, less sure about the man who walks out of the surf.

A spoiler-free review of Meet Me in the Garden by Nina LaCour: twenty-one years of a Creole painter's life from New Orleans to Watts, told in a present tense that refuses hindsight and counts what concealment costs.

A spoiler-free review of The Knave and the Moon by Rachel Gillig: a five-event tournament, a knight with no memory, a gargoyle who steals the book, and a duology close that trades one grief away too cheaply.

She is twenty-two years old and both her hands are black to the fingertips. In her country, sin does not stay private — it surfaces in the veins as a rot that climbs, then maddens, then kills. She has been killing for the Prophet for three years, and her skin has kept the receipts.

A concussed scholar falls on a wrapped sword, drags the blade free by accident, and a beautiful silver-eyed man appears and kills three bandits. The scholar's first question is whether he is addressing a seraph or an archangel. The man's first plan is to sit down by the road and wait for him to freeze.