Dale Stromberg's 3 favorite reads in 2023

• 2023
• 2024

A tale of the world’s end should be intense, and I love how Cascade is driven by ethical urgency, its gallows humour lurching grippingly into dead seriousness.

As ancient magic cataclysmically awakens (in a clear analogue to climate change), media tycoons, wizards, researchers, and anarchists strive and struggle. Some hope to mitigate catastrophe; others choose to unleash evil—racism, xenophobia, the sadistic thrill of the jackboot—for political gain. All politics are petty at the end of the world, but we remain sadly human.

For me, what lingers past the final page is a vision of humanity within catastrophe. If we are our own greatest enemy, we are also the reason we carry on. Magic, like nature, is indifferent to suffering. To be saved, we must save each other.

To truly know who you are, I must hear your story. So it is with “Maya,” the narrator of this extraordinarily original novel. To learn her identity, we must trace the tale of her existence within a Mesolithic federation of villages struggling with food scarcity.

I’ve never read a novel like Noema; this starts with its setting. Its meticulous depiction of complex lifeways humanizes Mesolithic people and culture. These communities, like ours, confront a changing planet; scarcity and instability trigger human savagery. Their survival depends on finding harmony.

Through all this, we explore who “Maya” is and, in so doing, confront the ambiguities of identity. This duality—part meditation on humanity’s role in nature, part investigation into selfhood—is one thing that makes Noema memorable to me.

This book’s vivid originality and dark, immersive power gripped me. Kaschock reinvents storytelling to serve a story that couldn’t be told any other way.

Sleight is a kinetic performance art that could only exist on the page, making it doubly remarkable how fully Kaschock convinces us of its eerie power and destructive potential. Sisters Lark and Clef, both sleightists, have been marked and maimed by the art; their otherworldly capabilities are enlisted by iconoclastic, amoral impresario West to fashion a performance in which art becomes atrocity.

 Kaschock trusts readers to do the work of reading—to linger on notions that zig when we expect them to zag. The world she drops us into is bewildering but painstakingly constructed; her words captivate with linguistic surprises and penumbral malaise, sadness, and threat.