my new favourite bildungsroman + gothic vignette novel | Recent Reads #62

A run of recent reads leans hard into literary strangeness—witch trials, dream-fairy tales, cult paranoia, grief monsters—yet the strongest through-line is how form and perspective shape emotional impact. Across the picks, the most consistent praise goes to books that make their worlds feel precise (even when they’re uncanny), while the most common complaint is that scope, clarity, or endings sometimes blunt the psychological payoff.

Jill Dawson’s historical witch-trial novel The Bewitching is grounded in a real 16th-century case in War Boys, England, where one woman’s accusation spirals into wider charges. The prose is described as well researched and “yummy,” but the reading experience turns familiar: the narrative beats track what witch trials typically look like. That predictability exposes a weakness—character work feels distant and flat. The book’s broader scope also dilutes what could have been a sharper psychological study of Alice, the first woman accused.

Sarah Shann Leon Binham’s Meline is Sleeping goes in the opposite direction: instead of historical inevitability, it delivers experimental fairy-tale logic. Told through vignettes that blur dream and reality, it follows Meline as she falls into a deep sleep while her surroundings and her dreams bleed into each other. The writing is praised for impeccable control of prose and for building intricate meaning through compact, vivid segments—rich imagery paired with deliberate sparseness. Clarity can get fuzzy at the level of the overall narrative, but that confusion is framed as part of the point: the book asks readers to tolerate ambiguity because dream and waking life become indistinguishable.

Eliza Clark’s She's Always Hungry, a short-story collection, lands as unsettling and intriguing overall, with a recurring motif of hunger as perversion. Still, many stories follow familiar short-fiction arcs, leaving the reviewer wanting more subversive development—not just stranger concepts, but stranger trajectories. Ia Ginberg’s The Details (translated by Kira Joffson) is quieter: a nolla structured around pivotal relationships, where each chapter is self-contained and detail-rich but largely non-narrative. The appeal is methodical, lived-in specificity; the drawback is a wish for more urgency.

Arya Abber’s Good Girl centers Nila, an 18-year-old in Berlin whose parents are Afghan refugees and whose mother has died. The plot is described as partly plotless, but the book’s power comes from tactile, psychologically sharp prose and a theme captured by a line about getting into places even when you can’t get out. Nila lies about her heritage, and that shame drives her choices until the end, when everything clicks into focus. Marissa Crane’s A Sharp Endless Need also focuses on an intense bond—Mac and Liv, two basketball players whose chemistry turns increasingly intimate after a father’s death. The relationship is praised as visceral and compelling, but the reviewer feels the book’s high-school stakes and off-page growth make it read more like YA than adult fiction.

Nicole Cuffy’s cult novel Oh Sinners stands out for worldbuilding: multiple formats—reporting, documentary transcripts, Instagram posts, and Odo’s backstory—create a believable, intricate Nameless cult and a layered question of what counts as truth. Yet the ending is criticized as underwhelming, ending with fog rather than revelation. Ava Baltazar’s Mammoth is the least favorite of its trilogy: despite a distinct voice and unexpected turns, it includes extremely uncomfortable scenes and feels disconnected. Gerardo Sano Cordova’s Monstrilio, by contrast, is praised for humane, focused grief horror: a monster grown from a literal piece of a dead son’s lung becomes a symbol for family mourning.

Finally, Han Su Yang’s Winter Love returns to quiet emotional precision. Set in WWII-era London, it traces a doomed affair between Red and Mara through retrospective narration, making regret and fragility feel built-in from the first page. The writing is described as wise and unflinching—tender yet brutal—rendering the relationship’s emotional complexity both cerebral and deeply felt. The overall takeaway: these books succeed when their structure sharpens feeling, and stumble when scope or endings leave the emotional work unfinished.