Annual Book Sale 2025: My Son's Books

As usual, we attended the Planned Parenthood Book Sale that runs for 10 days in September; the first few days and the last few days are the busiest; we went five times this year. 

My son's tastes usually are in the fantasy or science fiction genres. Below are a few of the books that my son purchased this year.

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

Originally published in 2022; this trade paperback edition was published in 2024.

This is a cozy fantasy about a lesbian couple who want to leave their current lives behind and open a bookstore in a remote location where no one can find them. The problem is that one of them is a private guard to a powerful and cruel queen, and the other is an important and powerful mage. 

Note: I just finished reading this book and I enjoyed it a lot. It seemed to me to go just a bit beyond the bounds of cozy, but that was fine with me.

Dinotopia Lost by Alan Dean Foster

Dinotopia is a fictional utopia created originally by James Gurney in 1992. In the first book, Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, which had illustrations, Arthur Denison and his son, Will, are shipwrecked on island where humans and dinosaurs live together in harmony. James Gurney wrote three more books about Dinotopia, but other authors have also written spin-off books in the series. In Alan Dean Foster's Dinotopia Lost, published in 1996, a ship with a crew of pirates lands on the island.

Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Andrew Bromfield (Translation)

This book was first published in 1965 and seems to be a combination of science fiction and fantasy. Humorous and satirical.

This description is from a summary at Goodreads: 

Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving north to meet some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of hitchhikers, who persuade him to take a job at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional Institute involve all sorts of magical beings—a wish-granting fish, a tree mermaid, a cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a dream-interpreting sofa, a motorcycle that can zoom into the imagined future, a lazy dog-size mosquito—along with a variety of wizards (including Merlin), vampires, and officers. 

The Protectorate Series by Megan E. O'Keefe

This series is a space opera trilogy, that begins with Velocity Weapon (published in 2019, 544 pages) and continues the story with Chaos Vector (published in 2020, 546 pages) and Catalyst Gate (published in 2021, 608 pages). The 1st book sounds very good, and I have read good reviews of the 2nd and 3rd books. 

This excerpt from the review at Kirkus is the best description of the first book in the series that I could find.

The last thing Sanda Greeve remembers is her ship being attacked by rebel forces. She's resuscitated from her evacuation pod missing half a leg—and two centuries—as explained to her by the AI of the rebel ship that rescued her. As The Light of Berossus—aka Bero—tells her, she may be the only living human for light-years around, as the war wiped both sides out long ago. Sanda struggles to process her injuries and her grief but finds friendship with the lonely spaceship itself. Sanda's story is interspersed with flashbacks to the war's effects on her brother, Biran, as well as scenes from a heist gone terribly wrong for small-time criminal Jules. The three narratives, separated by a vast gulf of time, are more intertwined than is immediately apparent. When Sanda rescues Tomas, another unlikely survivor, from his own evacuation pod, she learns that even time doesn't end all wars. Should she trust Tomas, a fellow human but a rebel soldier who has his own secrets—or Bero, the ship that saved her?

                            Velocity Weapon

                  

                              Chaos Vector

                                Catalyst Gate