A struggling journalist is sent to investigate a suspicious town in South Wales in this offbeat novel.

An automotive journalist at the Gentleman’s Periodical in London, the unnamed narrator (nicknamed “Skeeter” by his boss) fears he’s finally reached the peak of his creativity. Wanting to escape from the “tyranny of language,” he longs to find the one word in the English language that can sum everything up. “I need to find the right word, the perfect word, the one that tells everything. I need to find the immaculate word.” After submitting a one-word car review at work, his boss, Christina “Tina” Evans, decides enough is enough. To help him find his way back to a normal writing life, she gives him a new assignment: investigating a town called Blaenavon in South Wales, where Tina is convinced something weird is going on. As readers soon find out, the town mysteriously looks like it’s stuck in the 1980s, but the cars are in immaculate condition, and there’s a new sports center with an Olympic-size pool. Skeeter, along with a little help from his B&B hostess, Mrs. Williams, and the family hedgehog, Madame Taiko, sets off to figure out what’s going on. A colorful, zany cast of characters brings life to the town of Blaenavon. The novel suffers from some pacing issues however: It takes too long for the story to get going, with the author’s verbosity slowing the opening down. Once Skeeter starts meeting the townspeople, the pacing gains momentum, and the novel flourishes nicely around the halfway point, when an explosion in a mine shakes up the plot. Throughout the novel, the author hints at conflicts but never elaborates on them. This writing approach unfortunately makes for an ending that asks more questions than it answers and leaves the story with no real closure.

An inconsistently paced, uneven novel that needs a stronger sense of narrative purpose.

In shoeless’ novel, an American-born daughter of Nancy and Mr. Bumble—two characters from Charles Dickens’ classic 1838 novel, Oliver Twist—returns to Victorian London seeking answers about her family’s past, and her own destiny.

Olivia Cranehill arrives in the Smithfield district from Upstate New York, intent on tracing the life of the mother she never knew. Raised by her adoptive father, Sakata, a former Japanese soldier-turned-restaurateur, Olivia has a disciplined martial bearing and the curved blade of a wakizashi, hidden beneath her clothes. Her first encounters in London set the tone for a tale that blends mystery, nostalgia, and quiet revelation. Olivia learns pieces of Nancy’s story from her mother’s old friend, Bet, including her self-imposed captivity with the violent Bill Sikes, her fierce loyalty to Fagin’s boys, and the talismanic objects she left behind. When Bet produces Nancy’s white, knitted shawl, Olivia feels “as if they were just one touch apart, fingertips reaching across time.” An engraved pocket watch becomes yet another thread tying mother and daughter together. The author expands the Dickensian tapestry by weaving Olivia’s own trans-Atlantic upbringing into the plot. Interludes recall her training with Sakata (“You must turn away, be meek and live for tomorrow….sometimes, to lose is to win”) and her eventual mastery of the sword, illustrated in a quiet but deadly scene in which she decapitates a wasp in midflight. These details lend her a self-possession that’s rare among Dickens’ female characters. The plot widens when Olivia sets out to find Sir Oliver Twist, the boy her father once helped, who’s now risen to aristocracy. Her walk through the capital is as much a tour of Victorian contrasts as it is a narrative progression, rich with street-level vignettes and historical texture. The novel succeeds as both homage and expansion: familiar names—Fagin, Sikes, Twist—surface in altered roles, reframed by time and circumstance. Olivia herself is a magnetic protagonist: disciplined, physically formidable, yet emotionally vulnerable in her search for belonging and truth.

A skillfully rendered literary return, anchored by a hero worth following.