Four childhood friends leave their small town and move to Copacabana. Roommates Hugo (the chef), Dante (the narrator), Miguel (the doctor), and Piglet (the hacker) all feel like real people and interact realistically. There’s great characterization in this one.

“Fathers create their sons, but in the end it’s sons who invent their fathers.”

Necronauts is a very Utah book. It’s steeped in Mormonism, far-right conspiracy theories, Jell-O, sugar beets, and other local references. Many chapters are accompanied by a photograph with someone’s face scratched out. Also, there are many fathers who abandon their sons in these pages.

Cindy wakes each morning with something in her mouth such as a needle, a coin, or a bird. It’s delightfully weird. Just the sort of thing I like. She is living with her aunts and her cousins Mandy and Yangyang.

Cindy doesn’t remember her parents or where she came from. She comes to this house every summer, but doesn’t remember any previous summers. She discovers a room in the house she’s never noticed before. I have dreams like this, so this felt very dreamlike to me. Being in the room gives her the urge to hurt herself.

“To go to war is easy. It is peace that is hard.”

This is very reminiscent of Dune at first. There’s mentats (called scholiasts), sword masters, transparent shields that block fast projectiles but not swords, and a ban on thinking machines due to trouble in the past. The saying “Fear is the death of reason” replaces Dune’s “Fear is the mind killer.” Doctors also have a symbol tattooed on their foreheads. Moisture‐recycling clothing gets mentioned and the hero has a vision of countless billions of deaths that will occur in the future.

“The floor creaked down the hall, the kind of sound her mom would have told her was settling. Cass found it to have the opposite effect.”

Frankie’s twin sister Sofia disappeared years ago. Now, her body has finally been discovered inside a tree in an old abandoned house. Frankie reconnects with her old friends Poppy and Cass and new friend Marya to investigate what happened to her sister. Since the body doesn’t provide any additional clues, it’s not clear why Frankie didn’t investigate Sofia’s disappearance sooner, but whatever.

The stories in the first half of this book felt vague with nothing for me to latch on to, if that makes sense. The stories in the second half get better.

Children of the Savage City is the sequel to May the Wolf Die, but it reminds you of what happened before, so you can jump right in here if you haven’t read the first book or don’t remember everything that happened last time.

As a child, Willa was friends with the monster under her bed. In the present, she’s a famous artist and she has a feud with a television psychic, which is a fun set up.