Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. More of her written work can also be found in Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy edited by Kelly Jensen, and, if you’re feeling spicy, in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently co-host of the All the Books! podcast and one of the weekly writers of the Read This Book newsletter. She lives in Oakland, CA on unceded Ohlone land with her wife and a positively alarming amount of books. Find her on her Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkTree.
Today’s book recommendation is a newer release that combines science fiction and cozy mystery to create an incredibly fun and clever novella. In the past few years, I’ve come to deeply appreciate novellas and they are often what rescues me when I have a reading “hiccup.” Am I in a reading rut? Read a novella. Did I just read something incredibly heavy and need a palate cleanser? Read a novella. Did I just read something profound that has me reeling and gave me a huge book hangover? Read a novella. The novella I’m sharing today is definitely one that you should have on deck.
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Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
This book takes place aboard a sentient interstellar passenger liner called the HMS Fairweather. When we first slide into this story, the HMS Fairweather is a bit tipsy. Our hero, Doroth Gentleman, learns of this when she wakes up. What she also learns when she wakes up is that she has woken up in someone else’s body. Also, she wasn’t supposed to be waking up yet anyway. Regaining consciousness, especially in a body that isn’t hers, leaves her with many questions and very few answers. Thankfully, Dorothy Gentleman is one of the ship’s detectives.
The HMS Fairweather and her passengers are on a centuries-long trip through space. When a person on board dies, their consciousness is uploaded to a storage book and placed in the Library until their new body is ready. A person can choose to stay in storage and not be immediately loaded into a new body and some folks do this for a variety of reasons. The fact that Dorothy has woken up nonconsensually and in someone else’s body is very peculiar and not at all the standard operating procedure. She assumes that her nephew Ruthie has something to do with it, as he is impressively intelligent, always well-meaning, and a frequently unintentional agent of chaos.
Because of the way that consciousness is stored and bodies are regenerated on the ship, murder isn’t something that should be possible; however, when Dorothy has woken up, someone else on another part of the ship has been found murdered. Not only is someone killing bodies, but she finds that they are deleting people’s minds from the Library. The deeper Dorothy digs, the more complicated things get.
This novella is so much fun! It’s queer and smart and has some wonderful twists, too.
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English (US) · 