The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles

July 28, 2023
It's 2070, and best friends Cat and Kaye live in Montreal's Crater, which is a deep and vast abyss that has replaced the city after an asteroid hit it 30 years before. When Cat pulls Full-Moon, a ""pixipaper"" book made of bots too small to see, off her mom's boyfriend's bookshelf, she doesn't know it will consume her and Kaye's life. The book is a novel about teenage werewolves that face a fabled sea monster after the monster has destroyed a ship that set sail from their village. Cat and Kaye become obsessed with the book, as does a dedicated cult following. Switching between chapters of the book and the lives of Cat and Kaye as they navigate this postapocalyptic world, Guriel (Forgotten Work, 2020) has written a story with heart, intrigue, and mystery all while employing rhyming couplets. Lovers of science fiction will find this unlike anything they've read before. It is a story about two young women coming of age in a brand-new world order with whales, werewolves, bots, and the power of stories.

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July 1, 2023
Canadian poet Guriel returns to the whimsical world of Forgotten Work (2020) for an even more bonkers epic. If Guriel's fiction debut about a musical scavenger hunt was 1970s-era space rock, this book is full-on Lord of the Rings via Ralph Bakshi with a scattering of cyberpunk tropes to keep things spicy. Like its predecessor, it's not easy to read unless you're the sort who finds rhyming couplets roll off the tongue, but the author's playful disposition and quixotic milieu remain infectious. The book alternates two storylines, juxtaposing a young scholar's fascination with a famous work of YA fiction with the text of that novel, also composed entirely in rhyme and concerning itself with seafaring werewolves. When Kaye's friend Cat drags her to a convention celebrating The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, she's not terribly impressed, but something about the book's depictions of pirates and monsters gets under her skin, as does the mystery of the book's author, Mandy Fiction, who vanished into thin air in 2052. Guriel's book desperately needs focus, but it has plenty of startling imagery to enliven the reader's journey. There's clever wordplay satirizing corporate culture (apparently ZuckTube and ZikZok remain inescapable in the future) but also dystopian vistas, like the crater where Kaye lives and where Montreal once stood. Meanwhile, the teenage lycanthropes onboard the Lucy Dread sail treacherous seas in search of a sea monster dubbed a "Moby." Soon, Kaye is invited by her eccentric professor Emmett Lux to join him for a research assistantship in Japan, where her relationship to Fiction's fiction becomes even more Byzantine. Those who can manage the linguistic gymnastics needed to navigate the journey--laden with pop-culture references and winking observations about the fickle nature of fan culture--will reap strange rewards. Clever and exasperating by turns, a mishmash of poetry, The Princess Bride, and myths from old worlds and new.

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