Lucas Stoffel

Where the Crawdads Sing Book Review: Kya Clark is six years old when her mother walks away. Over the next few years, her siblings leave too, one by one, until it's just Kya and her father in a shack on the North Carolina marsh. Then her father leaves. And Kya — barefoot, barely literate, completely alone — raises herself. The marsh becomes her mother, her teacher, her everything. She learns to read the tides, to identify every bird and shell, to survive in a world that has wr

The Secret of Secrets Book Review: I have read every Robert Langdon novel. I know the formula: famous professor, ticking clock, historical architecture, ancient symbols, a villain with a worldview, and enough twists to fill a theme park ride. I know it and I love it and I'm not apologizing. The Secret of Secrets delivers all of this, but something about this one feels sharper.

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...

Hugh Howey self-published a short story about a woman in an underground silo who volunteers to go outside and clean the sensors. That story became five novellas. Those novellas became an omnibus. That omnibus became one of the biggest science fiction publishing stories of the decade. And now it's an Apple TV+ series. But before all of that, it was just a brutally effective premise executed with total conviction.

John Scalzi's Lock In is a murder mystery set in a world where millions are locked in their bodies. Smart, fast, and deeply thoughtful about disability. Four stars. Book Review.

Of course I loved this book. It's about a rogue AI, and I love a rogue AI. LOL. Origin is Dan Brown doing what Dan Brown does best: taking a genuinely interesting intellectual question and building a page turning sprint around it. This time the question is the big one — where do we come from, and where are we going? — and the sprint takes Robert Langdon through the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Royal Palace of Madrid, and Gaudí's Sagrada Família in Barcelona.