Boulder Bookaholics Book Club

Interested in reading a novella that was a finalist for the 2024 Locus Awards? Novellas are books under 175 pages.

A sinister, subversive retelling with crystalline prose that reveals, feather by feather, the tensions--between pragmatism and passion, family legacy and freedom, art and commerce--that has always burned at the core of this ancient Japanese folktale.

A teenage girl is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mother, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. For six years, it's been just the three of them. When her mother brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children's lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mother abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands. One fiercely pragmatic teen, forced to grow up faster than was fair, will do whatever it takes to protect her family—and change the story.

Orphaned in the England of the later Stuarts, Henry Esmond is raised by his aristocratic, Jacobite relatives the Castlewoods. As a young man he falls in love with both Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, her beautiful, headstrong daughter, and is inspired to join the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to reinstate James Stuart to the throne. Thackeray valued Henry Esmond more than any of his other novels and it displays many of his own memories and emotions.

Description from Goodreads.com

Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52318.Wild_Seed

Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex or design. He fears no one until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss and savage anyone who threatens her. She fears no one until she meets Doro. Together they weave a pattern of destiny (from Africa to the New World) unimaginable to mortals.