July 2025 – Reviewed

Dear Readers,

I have had an absolutely jam packed July, starting off with a book-crawl weekend through the indie bookshops of the Blue Mountains, completing about a billion road culvert inspections and then heading off north to volunteer at the Garma Festival in the remote NT, the largest indigenous festival in Australia. As I sit down to write this month’s post I am completely exhausted and very happy. I hope your July went well too, and that like me, you managed to fit in some reading!

I read eight books this month and this is what I thought of them.

Eight Books of July

How to Survive History – Cody Cassidy

Audiobook listen. Cassidy is such a fun pop writer and I really enjoyed this book on how to survive the great calamities of history, from the Chicxulub asteroid to the Tri-State Tornado. I could have happily listened to another twenty of these episodic chapters, as he discusses the context and impact of each event as well as getting down into the specific actions you would need to take to survive. As someone who thinks about this happening to me quite a lot I found this a strangely soothing as well as interesting listen.

City of Others – Jared Poon

A whipsmart urban fantasy humming with the vibrant energy of Singapore and its chaotic magical inhabitants, this found family will welcome you in with open arms (and tentacles)! I was offered an arc of this book by the publisher and totally fell for the middle-management heroes navigating the government red-tape to save the day. I was thinking as I read it that this is such a great example of diversity in fiction, not just in the race of the characters and different settings, but in the author’s wonderful approach to the heroic powers and how they solved their problems. I could tell that it wasn’t a western author and I found their style so refreshing and enjoyable.

Colours in the Steel – KJ Parker

The first in an older trilogy of Parker’s, I was lucky enough to find a complete set in an excellent indie bookstore. I absolutely devoured this long but well-paced account of a city under siege. I could see a lot of the developing factors that will become classic Parker, fantasies of logistics and engineering, nomadic societies, hyper-competent protagonists stuck in a system that works against them. This would be a good place to start with Parker’s work.

Queen B – Juno Dawson

Unfortunately this just wasn’t the read for me. I felt the narrative voice leaned too heavily on modern sensibilities for a Tudor setting, and there were some historical anachronisms that dragged me right out of the narrative.

Jhereg – Steven Brust

This was a very interesting read for me in that I genuinely can’t tell if I enjoyed it or not. Jhereg is the first in a series that has been underway for forty years. Vlad Taltos is an assassin in a world where the dead may be revived and being killed can be only a temporary inconvenience. He is hired to kill a mysterious thief, who’s work threatens to destroy at least three of the Great Houses of the empire. He is assisted in this by his sarcastic Jhereg, a small kind of dragon with psychic powers. So where do I come down on it? I liked Vlad, and his Jhereg, and I liked the setting and the ideas, but it just didn’t grab me in the way I was expecting, I think because I’m not really a detective story reader. I shall have to read a few more to see how the world develops

The Red Palace – June Hur

This was a YA novel set in Joseon Korea. Now I know I just said that I am not a detective story fan but I did actually love this book about a palace nurse who investigates the death of four of her colleagues. I think I loved it because there wasn’t much mystery, it was evident from the start who the culprit was, and the story was more about the protagonist Jeongsu as she grows into her position, navigating the complexity of her birth as the daughter of a concubine, and builds friendships and relationships. A very enjoyable read.

The New Mother – Eugene Fischer

This is a short novella set in a world where an STD gives women the ability/burden of asexual reproduction. It follows a pregnant journalist as she writes a piece on the syndrome, framed through the view of an escaped victim of a religious cult who has had multiple daughters this way. I found it such an interesting read, both as an analogy for the pro-choice/forced-birth debate and as a look at motherhood. Definitely worth looking up the pdf online for a read.

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver

Definitely one of my favourite reads of the year so far, this is an Appalachian Adaption (so fun to say) of David Copperfield. I enjoyed the original and found half the fun of this was spotting the characters and seeing how Kingsolver had made them her own. I read this at the Garma festival and multiple people came over to say how much they loved the book, and we had some great conversations. I thought the setting and world of the book felt incredibly real and I loved how Kingsolver’s characters felt both true to life and noble representatives of their community. Demon is such a great lead and I was rooting for him from the first page. I think this will be one of the great American novels and should be widely read and studied, with the brilliant and devastating themes of poverty, community and survival in Virginia.