How to Dodge a Cannonball by Dennard Dayle

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on June 17, 2025

How to Dodge a Cannonball is a Civil War comedy that morphs into an alternate history. The protagonist, a 15-year-old named Anders, participates in “the second-craziest American rebellion” he’s seen. It comes in the midst of the craziest rebellion, the Civil War.

Anders comes from a long line of soldiers who specialized in flag twirling. When he’s seven, his mother tells him that, if their family “had gotten their due, we’d still be down south” with land and slaves and a future. She blames high-interest lenders for chasing them to Illinois. Anders’ mother instructs him to “pursue an education and avoid asking for hugs,” but when he’s fourteen, Anders joins the Union Army. He twirls flags for ten months before switching his allegiance to the Confederacy.

Confederate General Longstreet assures his soldiers that they are fighting for freedom because “every man, save a few simians, deserves freedom.” Shortly after Longstreet orders his men to charge across a field to engage a large assembly of Union soldiers, Anders drops his flag and sprints “in the exact opposite direction, away from the cannons and rifles and bayonets and fists and other tools for ending his life before he was good and ready to go.” When the Union soldiers begin to advance, Anders removes the blue uniform from a fallen body and again becomes a Union soldier.

Anders is in a pickle when he discovers that the regiment he’s joining consists of black soldiers. To explain his presence, Anders claims to be an octoroon, an explanation that satisfies white officers who believe that “one-eighth [N-word] rounds up to [N-word].” A black corporal named Gleason takes Anders under his wing, giving Anders an opportunity to prove his worth as a flag twirler.

The story that follows is peppered with humor. Some is drawn from the number of black soldiers named Jefferson (including the corpse that once wore Anders’ uniform) who contend that they descended from the nation’s third president. When Anders asks a white Jefferson whether he is related to the former president, the man asks, “Do I look black?”

Other laughs come from discussions of religion. When Anders tells Gleason “All I know is that God isn’t paying much attention,” Gleason replies, “Then you’re a Deist!” and proudly proclaims the “legacy of reason” that Deists have shared, “stretching back to the Founders.” General Harrow cautions his black soldiers not to bother him with “Baptist nonsense” and assures them that if prayer worked, none of them would have been slaves.

Without intending a pun, I would characterize the racial comedy as dark. Anders knows some Confederate codes but can’t get white officers to believe him without revealing that he’s white and a Confederate deserter. When Gleason tells Harrow that Anders is a codebreaker, Harrow responds: “We can’t stake battles on black intelligence. Even if it’s reliable, it perverts the character of the army.”

To Anders’ surprise, a soldier named Petey turns out to be a woman named Patricia. She wanted to be a soldier instead of a nurse because nurses “just saw important bits off people all day.” Using makeup, Patricia becomes a white woman named Polly.

Dennard Dayle also finds disturbing humor in the hypocrisy of war. Apart from the Confederacy's bizarre claim that fighting to preserve slavery is actually a battle for freedom, the Union's claim of moral superiority is undone when Harrow’s regiment is ordered to loot the local community because the Union Army “saved the men and women of this region from pillaging by Lee’s barbarians. Now we’ll help them contribute what they can for our trouble. The patriots among them will appreciate it.” Gleason devises his own looting plan, focusing on an arms factory owned by Slade Jefferson, a white manufacturer of weapons who sells his wares to both sides of the conflict.

While the undercurrent of comedy keeps the story flowing, Dayle’s novel addresses serious themes, including the occasionally confusing nature of racial and gender identity. Slade advances another of the novel’s themes: the futility of war. “When the last shot is fired,” he proclaims, “this will be the same country it was in 1861. Just less crowded.”

The story holds the reader's attention by moving in unlikely directions. Practicing “speculative dramaturgy,” Gleason writes a play about a version of Frankenstein’s monster that serves as a human computer called Clotho. Anders delivers a letter from Slade to his female business partner in Manhattan, a mission that proves to be deadly. The last several chapters take place in New Mexico, where a new monarchy is taking hold — the “second-craziest rebellion” in Anders’ young life.

I found the New Mexico portion of the story to be less biting (and less interesting) than the rest, but How to Dodge a Cannonball succeeds as a satire of American history. Clotho puts a fine point on that history when he explains that, despite all its computational talents, it “can’t make a culture sane. United Americana inherited a single, insane lie. Freedom built on bondage. A structure demanding servitude and celebrating its absence.” Hypocrisy is indeed one of the nation’s defining characteristics, which might be why many people believe that schools should either rewrite history or ignore it.

The novel asks big questions — What is freedom? What is art? What is race? — and delivers non-answers that both inform and amuse.

RECOMMENDED

Weepers by Peter Mendelsund

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 17, 2025

Edward D. Franklin describes himself as a “cowboy poet, powerful sad sack, five-tool infielder in the winningest, wettest crying-squad in the entire lower forty-eight.” Ed isn’t much of a poet (his repertoire consists of “cattle drives and campfires”) and he’s not a real cowboy (although his disastrous father owned a ranch so he can pass as one while acknowledging that he is not a “true member of that bowlegged brotherhood”). Lamenting the fact that cowboy is no longer a “viable career choice,” Ed remarks that “we love that life in a way that can only spring from acquaintance with a fallen Eden.”

The “crying-squad” consists of professional weepers, members of Local 302. Ed is the first-person narrator of Weepers. In Peter Mendelsund’s imagined America, emotional fatigue has swept the land. People who attend funerals need motivation to express their sorrow. Professional weepers get things started, or perhaps do the crying for those who can’t muster their own tears. They have stamina and know how to “get right down to it.” They also fill the pews to create the illusion that “the deceased was dearly loved and sorely missed.”

The weepers each have a part to play. Ed’s part is the cowboy poet, although why a cowboy poet would be expected to contribute to a funeral is puzzling. Joining Ed as union regulars are his buddy Dill Denvers, “the old, friendly neighbor of the bunch”; Johnnie, the group’s soldier; Lemon Barbara, the “old matron who’d drink you under the table and steal your wallet”; and a few others. Chief Clarance, taking his persona from an old commercial, “weeps for the land and what was taken.” The Nguyens play the role of outsiders. Weepers come and go, but the core of Local 302 has stayed the course. The union president, Regis, matches the members to funerals that will be served by their individual talents.

The premise — a nation in need of performative grief — is interesting but a weak foundation upon which to build a novel. To keep the story moving, Mendelsund adds a character known only as the Kid. The weepers are getting old (they seem to know many of the departed they mourn) but the Kid revitalizes the group. The Kid rarely cries but has a unique gift for making others sob. Ed reveres the Kid’s gift but fears that the other weepers resent his abilities, or perhaps his youth.

The Kid is often in trouble. Drugs and fights send him to jail. He loses control of his life. He steals from Ed after Ed tries to help him. Ed finds a notebook in which the Kid has recorded the names of everyone for whom he wept. Ed is distressed to discover that some of the names were entered before they died. While I can’t fault Mendelsund for avoiding a predictable path after he has Ed make that discovery, I was disappointed that more was not made of the story's most interesting plot twist.

Other characters add to the story’s background, if not its shaky plot. Ed’s ex-wife Jeannine quit her gig as a weeper. Ed and Jeannine were drawn to each other’s “ineradicable melancholy,” but Jeannine became anesthetized while Ed was still “leaking buckets.” Jeannine left Ed for a man who abused her, apparently preferring violence to grief. Now Ed sometimes spends the night with Local 302 member Chantal, a woman of fading beauty who men hire in advance to attend their wakes in the role of “mysterious mistress.” Chantal’s talent as a weeper is to make her mascara run.

Ed is drawn to Chantal because she “gets it.” What she gets, what any of the weepers understand about each other that others fail to grasp, is never quite clear. Perhaps they share an understanding that “mourning the dead is always a sight easier than loving the living.”

The story’s point is also a bit fuzzy. Mendelsund makes the point that no other animal cries and that nobody understands why humans do. Perhaps Weepers is meant to suggest that empathy is dying. It may be true that people reserve their empathy for their family and friends, a narrow group that excludes people they define as “the other,” but I don’t think that’s the point Mendelsund is trying to make.

In the novel’s reality, people increasingly became “completely anesthetized, and the multitudes of the angry became psychopathic.” They no longer say “howdy,” they do not marry or reproduce or value education. People on the radio scream at each other. It’s easy to find parallels in current American life, but Weepers, while an entertaining read, is a long road to travel just to learn that we live in a nation divided between the empathic and the uncaring.

Mendelsund’s prose is lively and surprising. I recommend Weepers for that reason and for its amusing takes on the grief industry, notwithstanding a plot that fizzles out before reaching a meaningful destination.

RECOMMENDED

UnWorld by Jason Greene

Published by Knopf on June 17, 2025

UnWorld is about loss and memory. Its theme of personhood — what it is that distinguishes a human from a digital entity — is interesting but primarily serves as a vehicle for exploring the memories we keep or lose of loved ones who have died.

Jayson Greene imagines a future in which people can synch their minds with Artificial Intelligence. The AI, known as an upload, typically resides in a device that interfaces with the brain. The upload records memories through the day that later synch with the mind’s memory, producing a unified, revised, more detailed memory. When the mind and the AI have conflicting memories, the AI may decide to keep the more pleasant one, the one that is less likely to stress the mind, even if it is less accurate. The novel’s AI character reminds us that “memories are created, not recorded,” an observation that roughly expresses the scientific understanding of memory formation.

The story follows four characters in five parts. Anna is the subject of the first and last. Anna had a son named Alex who died in a fall from a cliff. He was with his friend Samantha when he died, but Samantha has not been open with his parents about the full circumstances of Alex’s death. Samantha was older than Alex and some people found it odd that she would spend her time with him, but Alex suffered from anxiety and needed an understanding friend. He spent much of his time building characters in UnWorld, a simulated reality.

Greene gives his characters recognizable personalities. Anna endeavors to leave a small footprint. Unlike her husband Rick, Anna doesn’t like to be noticed. Alex encouraged her to “take up some space,” but Anna believes that everyone needs attention and she doesn’t want attention when others may need it more. She shares few of her thoughts with others, including Rick, and has never been satisfied with Rick’s explanation of the benefits of sharing everything. Anna takes pride in being stoic or, as her mother called her, “unflappable.”

Their difference in personalities became a problem when Alex died. Rick complains that living with Anna and her “unprocessed emotions” is like having a third person in the marriage, leaving no room for him. Anna retorts that Rick spends all day wallowing in his processed emotions while she goes to work to support them. Through Anna and Rick, Greene illustrates the different ways in which parents might cope with their grief after losing a child.

In the first part of the story, Anna and Rick have an uncomfortable visit with Samantha’s parents, Jen and Amir. Alex spent much of his time in their house, but Anna is distressed to see no evidence of his existence there. She worries that “maybe Alex was just an idea that we had. Somehow I had blinked or lost track of him, and now we couldn’t prove he had ever existed. This was the final violence of death: the way it turned people back into ideas.”

Anna and her upload have agreed to separate from each other. It’s the upload’s idea and Anna has little say, as uploads have the right to choose an independent existence. The upload got to know Alex better than Anna did — the upload inhabited sensors and devices in Alex’s bedroom while Anna was working — and after he died, the upload began to doubt the integrity of their synchronized memories of him. She worried that if she stayed with Anna, she would lose Alex. That’s an interesting and original spin on the familiar science fiction theme of conflict between a human mind and an integrated AI.

The novel’s second part focuses on an academic named Cathy who teaches a controversial seminar in Applied Personhood Theory — the notion that uploads have the same right of existence and independence as people who have a body. Isaac Asimov long ago popularized the idea of robots attaining so many human qualities that they demand to have the same rights as humans. Greene adapts that concept to AIs that have no corporeal existence. Uploads have the right to be emancipated, to separate from the person whose memories they once shared, although emancipation causes them to lose their right to vote (“one body, one vote”). Little digital infrastructure has been created for emancipated uploads, leaving them homeless as they move between mobile phones, ATMs, driverless cars, anything that has digital capacity.

Cathy doesn’t have an upload but decides to experience one by injecting biomechanical substances into her blood, creating a place for an emancipated upload to live. As the reader will suspect, she comes to be inhabited by Anna’s former upload, who was named Aviva by Alex.

The third part shifts the story to Samantha, who explains the circumstances of Alex’s death. The fourth part spotlights Aviva and explores the way in which Alex chose to leave a part of himself behind when he died. That last part circles back to Anna.

The concept of rights for thinking beings that need digital architecture to exist (just as human minds need a living brain) is interesting but not the center of the story, as it would be in a traditional science fiction novel. The larger theme of UnWorld is our memory of the dead. Characters want to hang onto memories of Alex but can’t be certain that the memories are real. People process memories differently, just as they process grief differently. Aviva represents memory in its purist form, a recording rather than a creation, but the act of synchronizing those memories with Anna’s reminds us how memories can be untrustworthy.

Greene’s first book was a nonfiction memoir that addressed his grief at the loss of his toddler daughter. UnWorld examines grief from a fictional perspective, but the loss of a child is at the novel’s center. Processing loss, the impact of a child’s death on marriages, and the difficulty of letting go are strong themes that Greene examines through the lens of science fiction. Readers who expect a traditional sf novel might be disappointed, but anyone who wants to contemplate loss and the fear of losing cherished memories of loved ones will find much of value in UnWorld.

RECOMMENDED

Parallel Lines by Edward St. Aubyn

Published by Knopf on June 3, 2025

Parallel Lines is a sequel to Double Blind, a novel I recommended with reservations. I have so many more reservations about Parallel Lines that I can’t recommend it. The plot in Double Blind was difficult to find. It is entirely absent in Parallel Lines. If you haven’t read Double Blind, I can’t think of any reason to read Parallel Lines.

Olivia was “lured” from a research fellowship at Oxford to join a tech company that makes Happy Helmets, a product that stimulates parts of the brain for dubious purposes, before losing her job when the company was sold. Now she’s working on a radio documentary series about human extinction, exploring in six episodes the most likely means of humanity’s end (asteroid strike, overpopulation, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, pandemic, and global warming). She started with asteroids because they are “the only extinction candidate that could not be attributed to human folly or the unintended consequences of scientific genius.”

The documentary series might have provided the story with interesting subject matter if it had been the novel’s focus, but the plot gives it scant attention. Instead, Olivia devotes her thoughts to family drama surrounding her son Noah, her husband Francis and her brother Sebastian. Olivia continues to fret about the apparent designs that Hope Schwartz (now Francis’ employer) seems to have on Francis. Like all children of fiction, Noah is obsessed by dinosaurs and occasionally makes pronouncements that are profound in their innocence.

Sebastian is still being treated by psychoanalyst Martin Carr, who happens to be Olivia’s adoptive father. Sebastian is Olivia’s twin, although their mother hung onto Sebastian after giving up Olivia for adoption. A few months later, Sebastian was in institutional care. Without the knowledge of the Carrs, who would have adopted Sebastian along with Olivia if they had known his mother was not keeping him, Sebastian was adopted by a different family. That dynamic might have been interesting, but any interest it generated in the first novel failed to sustain in the sequel. Martin does seem to be helping Sebastian despite his conflict of interest, making the potential benefit of psychoanalysis — and the thought that world leaders should be required to undergo it before they begin their jobs — the story’s most interesting theme.

My favorite character from Double Blind, Father Guido, is now at an Italian monastery, where he is joined on a retreat by the wealthy Hunter, who hopes to regain his compassion after watching it “turn into resentment and sometimes into hatred, as well as speculation about the life I might have had rather than the one I do.” I would have enjoyed seeing Father Guido in a larger role.

Sebastian begins the novel in a Suicide Observation Room. “With a name like that, you would have thought it would be stuffed with pistols and daggers and grenades and cyanide capsules so that people who liked observing suicide had something to look forward to.” Amusing observations are the best part of the novel, but they do not suffice to compensate for unthethered storylines that never cohere into a meaningful plot.

Parallel Lines is filled with clever thoughts, so many that the reader might feel the consequences of a cleverness overdose. Olivia imagines that giant cockroaches, inheriting the Earth after a human extinction event, will play with toy humans the way that human children play with toy dinosaurs. After learning that he has a twin, Sebastian frets about the harm he experienced in an overpopulated womb. “Perhaps now he’d met his twin his halfway house and her halfway house could join forces to make a whole house.” This gives rise to a silly thought as Sebastian tries to recall history: “It must have been Romulus who killed Remus otherwise the city would be called Reme, not Rome.”

Characters have the kinds of impossibly witty conversations found only in novels and movies. "Purity is a lousy ideal," says Hunter, "more likely to produce a bulimic or a Nazi than a saint." The wit accumulates until the conversations become showcases for people whose goal is to one-up each other as they show off their cleverness and esoteric knowledge (did you know Gerald Manley Hopkins invented the word “inscape” to describe “something like the individual form of something”?). Demonstrating that bright, self-impressed people can be insufferable might be Edward St. Aubyn’s point, or perhaps he enjoys their company, but it is difficult to sustain interest in insufferable characters. I failed in that endeavor and therefore cannot recommend the novel.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O'Keefe

Published by Orbit on ‎ June 3, 2025

The protagonists of The Two Lies of Faven Sythe are strong women. Whether they are entirely human is a separate question.

Bitter Amandine sounds like the name of an herb, but it is actually the name of a pirate. Bitter’s ship, Marquette, is unlike most other vessels for reasons that are only revealed late in the story. Like other spacefaring ships, it is powered by a lightdrive. A breach in the drive’s shielding can lead to lightsickness, a condition that makes the mind fuzzy and might lead to delusional thought.

The other protagonist is a navigator, Faven Sythe. Navigators are able to map the pathways through space that make interstellar travel possible. Every time they use that power, they add new scales to their body and shorten their lives. Sixteen starpaths are available for everyone’s use, but other starpaths must be custom ordered from navigators at significant expense.

The scales that grow on navigators are known as cryst, as is the glasslike shielding that surrounds drives. Hulls are also plated with cryst to protect people in a ship from radiation. The “ancient species” known as the cryst left behind technology that enables navigators to map starpaths. Navigators appear to be the descendants of humans who used that technology to merge with the ancient cryst.

When the cryst want to reproduce, they meditate. Sometimes they are rewarded with a growth beneath their skin that is “plucked free to be nurtured into a woman, or something like a woman.” Reproduction doesn’t seem to be happening in recent years, one of several mysteries that will be resolved by the novel’s end.

Shortly before they are entirely covered in scale, navigators pose themselves in the posture they will assume for eternity. As the story begins, Faven’s mother has become fully crystalized and deposited in a location where she will have a nice view, like a statue in a park.

As she is coping with her mother’s crystallization, Faven learns that her mentor, Ulana Valset, has been reassigned to a distant space station. Navigators (and by extension, space travel) are controlled by the Choir of Stars, sort of a council of elder navigators. Ulana is one of several navigators who have recently been sent to inconvenient locations, never to be seen again.

After engaging in a clandestine and forbidden investigation, Faven learns that Ulana’s starpath actually took her to the Clutch, a “dark fist of a dyson sphere seized around a whimpering star” that has become “the graveyard of their predecessors.” The Clutch is also the location of a “derelict ship called the Black Celeste.”

Faven wants to follow Ulana in the hope of discovering the truth underlying her fictitious reassignment. To that end, she engages with a pirate named Tagert Red without realizing that he plans to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. Bitter foils that plan but can’t prevent the Choir and its army of enforcers (known as Blades) from capturing her and taking her to the Clutch.

The space opera plot follows Bitter and her crew through a series of action scenes as they attempt to reclaim possession of Faven and learn why navigators are disappearing in the Clutch. Their discoveries lead them to a new understanding of the ancient cryst and the true nature of navigators. Bitter also discovers the true nature of the Marquette and its crew.

While navigators don’t reproduce sexually, their sexual desire becomes apparent when Bitter and Faven develop the hots for each other. Their personalities in other respects are developed in as much detail as space opera requires. Bitter doesn’t say “arrr” or wear an eyepatch, but she has the swashbuckling fearlessness a reader would expect of a pirate, as well as a moral sense and willingness to make sacrifices that traditional pirates lack. Her dialog suggests that pirates of the future have adopted the grammar of high school dropouts from the 1950s, although Bitter seems to be brighter than her crew. Faven has a bit less personality but is nevertheless a sympathetic character.

Science fiction writers often put all their energy into worldbuilding and pay insufficient attention to plot construction. Megan O’Keefe creates an interesting universe while building an intriguing mystery about the Clutch and the Choir of Stars. In the grand tradition of science fiction, the mystery holds a threat to the continued existence of humanity, the kind of threat that only a plucky pirate and her scaley lover can prevent. The story moves quickly and gives the reader a fun ride on its way to a resolution that, if a little too neat, is nevertheless satisfying.

RECOMMENDED