Lucas Stoffel

Children of Memory Book Review: Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series has been doing something quietly remarkable: using hard science fiction to ask genuinely philosophical questions about consciousness, identity, and what it means to be a thinking being — and then making you care about the answers on an emotional level. Children of Memory, the third entry, continues that tradition while pushing into territory that's stranger and more unsettling than anything in the pr

Remarkably Bright Creatures Book Review: Here's the pitch, and I need you to stay with me: a lonely seventy-something widow named Tova works the night shift mopping floors at an aquarium. During those shifts, she develops a relationship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus in one of the tanks. Marcellus is old, he's dying, and he's smarter than almost every human who walks past his enclosure. He also knows the answer to a mystery that has haunted Tova for thirty years...

I'm going to review Atlas Shrugged as a novel, not as a philosophy textbook, because that's what it is — a novel — and it deserves to be engaged with on those terms even if the philosophy has consumed every conversation about it for sixty years. Book Review.

Magical children, a grumpy bureaucrat finding love, and a six-year-old Antichrist named Lucy who collects buttons and just wants people to like him. That's The House in the Cerulean Sea, and I'm not even slightly embarrassed by how much I loved it. TJ Klune — who won the Alex Award for this novel — writes the kind of fantasy that feels less like escapism and more like therapy.

I need to be honest with you: when my book club picked this, I wanted to run. Classic literature. John Steinbeck. I'm a sci-fi and YA reader. I live in the NYT bestseller list, not the Western canon. But the whole point of book club is to try things you wouldn't pick up on your own, so I took it up. And East of Eden completely blindsided me.