Molly O'Neill's Blog

I am so glad October is done! It has been a very busy month for me, starting off with a wedding in the UK and then flying back to Sydney and almost immediately jumping back into sitework. The one upside is the beautiful spring weather that has finally arrived in NSW - and the blooming of the jacaranda trees on every corner. I also announced my new book, Nightshade and Oak, and will be kicking off my preorder campaign and trailing some hints, quotes and covers very soon! In between fieldwork...

I write this from my desk in Sydney, having just returned from a trip home to England. It was great but a little weird to see the old...

Change is afoot! It’s the first day of Spring here in Sydney and for those of you in the other  hemisphere I guess it is the first day of...

Dear Readers, I have had an absolutely jam packed July, starting off with a book-crawl weekend through the indie bookshops of the Blue...

The Winter/Summer Solstice has come and gone: 2025 is officially halfway through. I hope you are having a good year, and doing your best...

That was the merry month of May! For all my northern hemisphere readers I hope you enjoyed the spring and are ready for a warm summer,...

Hi Y’all!   I skipped my March in Review because I only read a couple of books and didn’t feel I had enough to say to support a post but...

I am a little late writing this month’s round up of books but I hope you can forgive me. It has been something of a whirlwind here in Sydney as my debut novel Greenteeth was finally sent out into the world! I had a truly wonderful few weeks, encompassing the final trade reviews, a fantastic launch event surrounded by friends and family, and a couple of interviews and livestreams with various great people!

 

I am now drifting back to earth and catching up on my regular tasks; foremost among them my review of February’s reading. I actually managed to pack a lot of reading into 28 days, I found it a great distraction from the book release nerves! I read eight books and this is what I thought.

 

Thornhedge – T Kingfisher

Short novella retelling of the Sleeping Beauty myth, told from the point of view of a changeling girl who is locking up the beauty to protect the world from her. I found this a pleasant and easy read, though not my favourite of Kingfisher’s excellent work. It contained the second depiction of Greenteeth I have ever read, outside my own, and I did like them very much, I thought my Jenny would get along with them excellently.

 

Commonwealth – Ann Patchett

My third Patchett, after Tom Lake and The Dutch House and I fear by reading them in reverse publishing order I am experiencing diminishing returns! Patchett is definitely improving as a writer, and I thought Tom Lake was just great but I struggled with Commonwealth. The story follows two families that merge and then split, across fifty years from California to Virginia and back. Patchett doesn’t focus on any of the big scenes: infidelity, death, marriage, but instead looks at the inbetween times, and just mentions the headlines. I found this technique interesting in concept but in execution rather frustrating. It also took me less than one chapter to decide that the stepfather figure was my mortal enemy, and I wished him nothing but misery, and that really tinted my enjoyment of the book. I will give older Pratchett one more go, probably Bel Canto, and then I will just wait for her to put some new work out.

 

Please Look After Mother – Kyung Sook Shin

Korean translation. When a family’s elderly mother goes missing in Seoul, her adult children have to search the city to find her, all while reckoning with their own preconceptions about her. Ooh this is a tough one to review! It was excellently written but quite hard to read. I really liked the different narrators voices, and the portrayal of the childhood each of them experienced. I thought that there would be a reveal that the adult children were all selfish and ignoring their mother’s life, but it was much more complex than that, and I think the end point was that no children can ever truly know their parent. The ending quite took my breath away and left me blinded with tears for a moment. A really fantastic book.

 

The Last Blade Priest – WB Wiles

The Last Blade Priest is a return to classic fantasy writing but utilising all sorts of new ideas and tropes. The story is set in a world once ruled by an empire aligned with a mysterious mountain-worshipping cult but now being taken over by a new meritocratic force.  The narration is split between one of the few remaining scions of the religion and a builder conscripted into the invading army. I liked this book a lot, the writing was descriptive and felt cinematic. There was a slight weakness in the character building which left me a little underinvested in their stories but I’m eager to see where the story goes next.

 

Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I switched gears from reading Tchaikovsky’s fantasy to trying his scifi with this epic universe-bending story about the descendants of a lost earth. Lightyears from earth lies a planet seeded with new life as part of a forgotten experiment to terraform new worlds. Now the survivors of the old earth are coming and will have to reckon with what was left behind. This story follows two threads: the spaceship humans and the planet bound spiders that have developed without them. I loved the spidery half of this book but struggled to really connect to the humans (classic weirdo problems). Book 2 combines the threads so I’m keen to start that.

 

The Chequer Board – Nevil Shute

A return to my public access book pile – The Chequer Board follows a man diagnosed with a terminal injury who decides to find the three men who were kind to him as he lay in a prison hospital ten years previously. Then they were all at the low point of their lives and he wants to help them now if he can. The first thing to say about this book is that there are some DEEPLY racist words used. I’m talking the N-word used pretty liberally to the face of African-American characters. However, if you can get past that this is actually a pretty liberal book for its time. It was published in 1947 and features multiple mixed race relationships and marriages in a positive light, discusses the racism of the American south as a stupid and pointless evil, and even promotes as heroes the anti-colonial Burmese fighters. I enjoyed the stories and found it a relaxing read, albeit with some jumpscare slurs.

 

Round The Bend – Nevil Shute

My second Shute of the month, and this was a little weirder. It follows an Englishman setting up a small charter airline in the Middle East in the aftermath of the war and the rise of the oil powers in the region. But it’s also about the charismatic mechanic he employs and the new religion that forms around him. So that’s very odd. I liked this book but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me and I couldn’t really work out what it was saying. There is some major criticism of the White Australia policy when one of the Sikh pilots can’t land in Australia or the entire baggage handler and ATC staff across the nation will go on strike. Shute accurately characterises this as terrible, but it’s a startling reminder that this was happening up until the 1970s.

 

My last read of the month – Pastoral is set at an English Bomber Command base during the war and follows a romance between a pilot and a radio operator. Something I found a little frustrating was how much these two acted like dopey teenagers – but then I realised they were only 23 and they were almost the oldest people on the base! That really put things into perspective for me and I stopped expecting them to act like adults. There was a really sharp contrast between the gentle courtship and the nightly risk of death when the pilots flew off to bomb Germany. There were a few moments when I had my heart in my mouth but it was definitely worth the ride.

 

 

January 2025 – how was it for you? I’m just so excited that we’re finally in February – which is my book birthday month!!! Reviews are pouring in and it’s so incredibly exciting to see the photos and tags on socials. Please keep them coming!

 

This month seemed to stretch out forever, I barely read for the whole last week and still managed to knock out 12 books. Luckily they were almost all excellent.

 

Glorious Exploits - Ferdia Lennon

Starting the month off strong with a book I meant to read all last year – Glorious Exploits tells the story of a couple of Sicilian fishermen who decide to put on a production of Sophocles’ Medea acted by Athenian prisoners of war in a quarry outside the city. I love when historical fiction explores areas that aren’t WW2, the Tudors or the Romans so I snapped this up and finished it in a day or so. It’s much more lyrical than I was expecting, but overall I enjoyed the prose and the characters managed to toe the line of being sympathetic and historically accurate.

 

The Heroes - Joe Abercrombie

Somehow this is the first time I’ve read this book (well, listened to) and it quickly became one of my favourites from Abercrombie. I love a book that focuses on one battle or siege and this covers just three days in the fight between the North and the Union. There are old favourites in the cast: Black Dow, Dogman and lots of new faces to love: Wirrun of Bligh forever! This was a really great read and I think that I can call the title of Fictional Character Most in Need of Intensive Therapy now. It’s Bremer dan Gorst by a country mile!

 

Chain-Gang All Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

My run of unbelievable books continues with this instant classic. Set in an America only slightly worse than what we currently have where death row prisoners fight to the death for the entertainment of the masses. I really don’t read enough mainstream ‘literature’ and this inspired me to occasionally trust the NYT when they say a book is incredible and pick it up. This book was so easy to read and so hard to process – I would recommend it to anyone.

 

Sorcery and Small Magics - Maiga Doocy

Being an author who writes cosy-adjacent fantasy I am very picky about the genre, and it took me a while to pick this book up from my tbr pile. But on a sunny day just after New Years I packed a bag for the beach and grabbed this to read on the train. Eight hours later, sunburnt and entirely content I finished it and immediately went to rate it five stars. Sorcery and Small Magics manages to be cosy and charming but also interesting and complex – with a magic system that made immediate sense to me. I had such a good time reading this book and will reread before the next in the series comes out – hopefully on another lovely beach day.

 

Uprooted - Naomi Novik

One of my all time favourite books! This is my fourth or fifth re-read and I enjoyed it as much as ever. Novik really knocks it out of the park in prose, characters, ideas, plot. Just a great time.

 

The Lifecycle of Software Objects - Ted Chiang

Novella following a software engineer who develops pet AIs for a cyberspace company and then has to reckon with the consequences of raising a new form of sentient being. Very thought provoking and an easy read.

 

House of Open Wounds - Adrian Tchaikovsky

My god this was a great book. I read a review that said that it was an odd choice for Tchaikovsky to follow up his fantasy take on Les Miserables with a fantasy take on MASH and that’s about half of why this book was so much fun. There’s a much closer focus on a few characters than on the previous book in the series but you still get the sense of scale, of a huge war that still has very personal effects. For the first three quarters of the book I was really enjoying the read but I didn’t think there would be much resolution. The fact that the author managed to braid every single loose end into the perfect conclusion literally blew my mind and I absolutely loved it.

 

White Cat, Black Dog - Kelly Link

Short story collection. I am trying to read more short fiction and have been meaning to try out Kelly Link for a while. I found this very mixed. Some of the stores were wonderful, some bafflingly bad. Highlights for me were The White Cat’s Divorce, Prince Hat Underground and The White Road. The others were all good to fine, with the exception of the dire The Game of Smash and Recovery. I definitely want to dig into more Link now and check out some of her longform novels.

 

Island of the Blue Dolphins - Scott O'Dell

Short children’s book about a woman living alone on an island off the coast of California after her tribe is evicted/murdered. Sweet enough account of living in the wilderness and connecting with nature with a hopeful ending that was rather ruined when I looked up the real story.

 

The Angel of the Crows - Katherine Addison

Addison wrote an all time favourite of mine: The Goblin Emperor, so I had high expectations of this supernatural pastiche of Sherlock Holmes. It almost met them. It borrows heavily from both the original text and from various adaptions, so that it never feels quite original but the various magical denizens of London were laid out in an interesting way and I did like the idea of the angels as Addison writes them. My complaint would probably be that if you are going to trail that Fallen Angels are the ultimate big bad then they should really appear in the text! This book also had me exclaiming “Is anyone in this story not secretly a woman?” at multiple junctures.

 

The Tricky Business of Fairy Bargains - Reena McCarty

I was given an advance copy of this book, which is due out next year, and enjoyed it a great deal. Full review to come closer to release date but definitely add this to your list if you liked Sorcery and Small Magics.

 

The Company - KJ Parker

My latest Parker, but the first one he wrote under this name. I found this less enjoyable than some of his later work but a bit more thought provoking. The Company is a group of five men, once elite soldiers, now retired and somewhat at a loose end. Their old commander pulls them out of their mundane lives and takes them off to a deserted island to set up a colony. It hits all the classic Parker notes: logistics, backstabbing, competent people messing up, but there is a strong theme of the different types of destruction that war can wreak. Almost no one falls in battle but instead farmers are ruined by corpses rotting on their land, survivors never really leave the war behind and everyone is damaged. I might have enjoyed this more in a less glorious reading month but among the abundance of excellence it didn’t stand out.

Happy New Year! I’m so pleased we’ve finally shrugged off 2024, completed the first quarter of the 21st Century and moved into the real future: 2025. Now that’s proper space numbers, get me a flying car that runs on soda cans stat!

I knew going into 2024 that it was going to feel like a bit of a holding pattern. I signed my book deal back in April 2023 and it seemed like an incredibly long time to have to wait. I tried to make the most of the last year; writing my next book, working hard at my day job and spending as much time with friends and family as possible – but it still feels incredibly exciting that 2025 has arrived and my book baby is almost here!

If you’re reading this then you probably already know that Greenteeth is available for pre-order at all good bookshops, and I encourage you to do so! If you’re one of the kind souls who have already pre-ordered it and sent me your receipt for gifts I am happy to tell you that I ordered the prints and bookplates last week and should be posting them out by mid Jan. If you know anyone who wants them but hasn’t pre-ordered then now is the time as I will be closing the incentive campaign a week before publication.

Well I think that’s all the housekeeping settled, let’s move on to the main topic of this post: Books I Read in December!

I had a bit of a rushed start to the month, where I spent a lot of time driving to and from site, so by 11th December I had only finished one book – the audiobook I read in the car. Happily my site work finished shortly after this point and I was able to settle into a happy twenty days of reading – wherein I finished another eleven books. Here is what I thought of them.

Last Argument of Kings – Joe Abercrombie

Audiobook re-read – but I had completely forgotten what happened. I am loving the First Law books so much more on this go around, but I think this is actually one of the weaker ones. The balance of the story felt a bit rushed, after the slow pace of TBI and BTAH this book really packs in another 2-3 books worth of plot, just to finish the story. I wonder if this is because Abercrombie had committed to a trilogy, as is the modern standard for fantasy books. I think a 4-5 book series to cover this storyline would have suited it better. Regardless I still enjoyed this book very much, I liked the final reveals even if they were a bit mashed together and I started listening to the next standalone book straight away.

Some Desperate Glory – Emily Tesh

A book I had been meaning to read all year and finally got around to. Some Desperate Glory tells the story of Kyr, a girl raised in a decaying spaceship populated by the last vanguard of human separatists in a future when earth has been destroyed. She runs away rather than join the breeding program, taking a captured alien with her to try and exact revenge on the aliens that destroyed her planet.

So! This is a fascinating book, and I can see why it won the Hugo. It is taking inspiration from all sorts of classic SF tropes and inverting them. I thought I knew what was going to happen from about two chapters in and I was somehow both right and wrong which I enjoyed very much. I did like how Kyr was portrayed as unlikable, Tesh really doesn’t pull back on writing her as Little Miss Fascist in the first half of the book. However I thought there was still something missing for me.  The writing, combined with the teenage protagonist, made the book feel a bit too YA for my tastes and I did think that the villains tended to be a bit too strawmen in order to make Kyr’s choices more clear cut. I would have liked a messier moral maze to really bring the whole story up to  a five-star read. On the whole, I thought this was a really interesting book and am excited to see what Tesh does next.

The Dreaming Vol 2 – Queenie Chan

This is the second in Queenie’s The Dreaming manga series and I enjoyed it as much as vol 1. The story gets darker and twistier and the drawing is as lovely as ever. Definitely pick this up if you’re looking for a manga set in Australia.

Adventures in Volcanoland – Tamsin Mather

The only non-fiction book I read this month and I think I was probably not the target audience! This is basically Volcanology 101, interspersed with case studies and stories from Mather’s field trips around the world. If you didn’t know the subject matter I think it would be very enjoyable and interesting. Unfortunately as a geologist I did know almost all of it and was looking for a slightly deeper take on the topic. I would still recommend this to anyone looking to learn more from a standing start though!

Y/N – Esther Yi

This one is on me. I clearly misunderstood the blurb and was expecting a really fun soapy/crime caper about a K-Pop stan who writes deranged fanfic and stalks the object of their adoration to Seoul. That would have been a really fun book. Instead, Y/N is a contemporary and IMO overly intellectual attempt at the same basic story. If this is your thing you will love it. It is not my thing. I finished it and that was the best I could do.

Vigilance – Robert Jackson Bennett

OK now we’re moving back to some good stuff! I loved this incredibly dark short novel about an America maybe 4 years in the future, where mass shootings have been gamified into a victim-blaming, gun worshipping orgy of violence. This was really well written and felt horrifyingly realistic. It reminded me a bit of Chain Gang All Stars (review coming in the Jan blog post) which I mean as a great compliment.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

Next up is a modern classic. I have never read any Shirley Jackson and the closest I have come to her work is from watching The Haunting of Hill House between my fingers. I can definitely see what Jackson is doing and while I think it is very good, it’s been so often repeated that reading this original story doesn’t feel as fresh and exciting as it must have at the time. Unfortunately I think this is the inevitable burden of the trailblazer!

Red Smoking Mirror – Nick Hunt

I picked this up in a bookshop in Auckland last month (Shout out Unity Books, what a delightful store!). I was immediately interested when it was listed as Alternate History (an underrated microgenre). Red Smoking Mirror is set in a Tenochtitlan that trades with Moorish Spain and is narrated by a Jewish merchant married to a freed Nahua slave. I loved this book, it really felt as if I was walking around medieval Mexico City with the smell of xocolatl and dust in the air. I liked how Hunt was clear about the gorier human sacrifice parts of the society, whilst still showing what an advanced and graceful city it was. It felt very balanced: neither demonising nor patronising. A really good read.

Liberty’s Daughter – Naomi Kritzer

I love Kritzer’s writing, from her short stories to her political blog but this was my first foray into her novels and I was hopeful that I would enjoy it. I did. Liberty’s daughter follows Beck, who lives on board a seastead platform constructed and run by a group of libertarian separatists somewhere in the pacific. Beck does odd jobs that take her all over the seasteads and as she does she uncovers the grimier parts of the new society she lives in  and starts trying to do what she can to untangle them. A very easy and entertaining book that still manages to say some interesting things about class and society.

The Good Wife of Bath – Karen Brooks

Read this in a single day! I half liked this retelling of Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath’s tale. The first half of the book was very good, focusing on the day to day life of Eleanor and her various husbands and friends in medieval England. The second half of the book takes a bit of a turn and I liked that less. I also found it pretty difficult to sympathise with the way that Eleanor KEPT MAKING THE SAME MISTAKES. She marries five times and three of those men have basically the same character flaws. Every time one dies she is happy to be free of them but then almost immediately marries another dud. This was a well written book though, so I’d keep an eye out for other works by Brooks.

Best Served Cold – Joe Abercrombie

Goodreads tells me that I have read this book before, but I had absolutely no memory of it. Honestly what a treat! Abercrombie is really cooking with gas here with the brilliant Monza Murcatto and her search for vengeance on the seven men who betrayed her. Also present are soft-hearted Northern warrior, Caul Shivers, treacherously loveable mercenary Nicomo Cosca, a pair of poisoners and a whole cast of equally brilliant side characters. In Abercrombie’s world nothing is ever simple or straightforwardly right or wrong and I just loved how the story unfurled. Continuing excellent audio narration from Steven Pacey.

The Butcher of the Forest – Premee Mohamed

Short novel to close out the year. A villager must trespass into the dangerous fae-adjacent northern woods to retrieve the children of the Tyrant who rules over her land. This was…okay! I loved the cover and I thought there were some interesting ideas in there but for some reason it just didn’t click for me. I will give it another try in the future to see if I was just done with books for the year!

So there we have it: the last 12 books of 2024. If you’re interested in everything else I read this year you can check out the backlog of posts on the blog and please stay tuned to see what wonderful reads I have in store for 2025. It’s gonna be a good year I can feel it!