Short Reviews for December 2025
Half-Built Garden, Winter of the Dollhouse, Bastard Prince, Brief History of the World in 47 Borders
A Half-Built Garden, by Ruthanna Emrys (352 pp; 2022)
Who should read this? People who like solarpunk, or philosophical questions about environmental.
This was the first “Solarpunk” book I’ve read. It stars an environmentalist commune, on a world framed around a network of such communes that’s rebuilding the earth from environmental near-catastrophe. Corporations are restricted to their tiny islands where they can engage in meaningless status competition with each other; traditional governments still technically exist but are routed around.
And into this come space aliens, preaching that humanity needs to move into space to save itself from environmental catastrophe.
The plot is mostly around philosophical questions, being built up with growing suspicion of people’s true goals until things explode at the climax. It’s not the perspective I usually take, and I wouldn’t want to live in this world; I don’t agree with the characters’ pat praise of the commune’s philosophy and lifestyle. But it’s one willing to suspend my disbelief of for the book given how engagingly it’s explored. The characters are decently done, and I do really like how this author praises collective discussion over individual bold protagonists.
That said, plot-wise, the ending to the corporation plot arc feels too cheap and quick after how it was being built up - though it would’ve been very hard to time that climax at the same point as the other arcs’ climaxes, and the rest of the climax is well done.
I do have all sorts of unanswered questions about how this world works, especially around how the lifestyle shown could support the global population. (Or do modern-style cities continue offstage? Or was there a huge population decline? Perhaps due to the environmental catastrophe in the backstory?) But that’s not the focus of this book.
The Winter of the Dollhouse, by Laura Amy Schlitz (400 pp; 2025)
Who should read this? Kids or other people interested in a book about the hidden life of dolls.
I liked this kids’ book. Schlitz gives us a vivid, charming picture of the hidden life of dolls, which was interesting and at some points - such as the imaginary staircase in the dollhouse - truly charming. Beautifully, both the dolls and the human child protagonist (Tiph) and the adults all have a role supporting each other in the climax.
Tiph’s family conflict is handled mostly well - it feels raw at times but doesn’t stay there, and everyone’s shown to be sympathetically trying in the end no matter how far short they fell. The one point I wish had been done better is her concealing facts from her parents - she confesses them (or is forced to) to other sympathetic adults (which’s handled nicely), but by the end of the story still not her parents.
While this doesn’t reach the heights of Schlitz’s best, it’s quite a fun book and I’m glad I read it.
Bastard Prince: Henry VIII’s Lost Son, by Beverley A. Murphy (364 pp; 2011)
Who should read this? People interested in Henry VIII of England, his multiple marriages, and his inheritance questions.
Before Henry VIII’s multiple marriages, before his legitimate children, he had an illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy. Being illegitimate, he normally couldn’t inherit... but nothing was normal with Henry VIII’s quest for children. Still, Henry Fitzroy died as a teenager, without issue, before Prince Edward’s birth.
Murphy looks into his life, piecing together an engagingly told tale from dry government memoranda and short references in myriads of different sources. We see how his father obviously loved him, how he used him as a symbol in managing the realm, and how there’re clues he was quite possibly planning for him to succeed to the crown ahead of his daughters Mary and Elizabeth.
But then Henry Fitzroy died. And, after his death without actually having done anything, he was forgotten amid the cutthroat battle of court politics and the see-sawing of the English Reformation. Yet, the possibilities of what could have happened had he lived abound - as Murphy points out in a final chapter of well-grounded speculation at the end that’s the perfect bookend to this novel.
A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps, by Jonn Elledge (368 pp; 2024)
Who should read this? People who want a starting point for exploring the history behind maps, and who won’t take this as a stopping point.
This’s essentially a pop history compendium.
It’s pitched as a tour guide, taking the reader through various interesting or funny stories about international borders throughout history. I picked it up at first because I like maps and thought this would be digging into them, and at many points it did that and was fun to read.
But at many other points, I got exasperated. Elledge writes with a wry sense of humor where the people drawing the borders are usually the butts of the joke. Sometimes I have to agree that’s warranted, such as with the Wallonien nobility subdividing pieces of territory for gambling with no concern for the people involved. But other times, such as with the partition of India, I already know about serious concerns involved that Elledge is brushing over to poke fun at the people doing apparently-silly things for sensible reasons.
Could Elledge do otherwise in such a short article on each border? Well, he could certainly at least acknowledge the concerns existed. Plus, I can’t get past the couple inaccuracies I spotted on his maps, such as the interwar German border in Silesia.
So, this’s worth a glance, but I wouldn’t take it as the last word anywhere.
I know about Henry Fitzroy from Tanya Huff's two series of novels where he appears: Blood Price and its sequels, which pair him up with Vicki Nelson, a private eye in Toronto, and Smoke and Shadows and its sequels, which pair him up with Tony Foster, a production assistant in the Vancouver area. In these novels he's a vampire (which accounts for his still being active in the twenty-first century, as well as for his early historical death) and bisexual. I found them worth reading, and Huff doesn't come up with any egregious historical errors that broke my suspension of disbelief.