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.

I got this book a while ago and don’t remember why I got it in the first place. I’d say this book is about half fiction and half philosophical musings. There are long lecture-type sections about a variety of topics including alchemy, intoxicants, and the limitations of science. He claims all food is really sunshine and only seems like it’s other things because matter is the carrier of sunshine. He claims liquid can sometimes go against the force of gravity. I kept wishing he’d just get on with the story rather than lecturing us so often and at such great length.

“Most people don’t change the world, and yet, most people still matter.”

Nisha works in an abortion clinic in Chicago. The forty days leading up to Easter are the most difficult as there’s extra protesters during Lent. To make things even worse, her ex-boyfriend Aaron now works at the clinic with her. He used to be an anti-abortion protester so she doesn’t trust him.