Spring sampling
Reviews of two books being published in spring
Welcome to season sampling: a if-you-guys-enjoy-it-will-be-consistent series where I take a handful of books set to be released in each season and review them, spoiler free. A taste test, if you will.
For spring we have two: Solace House by Will Maclean and Aviary by Maria Dong. I aimed for three but realized the publishing date for Aviary was fast approaching so alas, I only have two for this sampling.
Solace House by Will Maclean
Release date: May 7th, 2026
Synopsis in a sentence: Over the course of a summer, a group of students are tasked with cleaning out a dead man’s house and uncover arcane secrets.
Solace House is one of those books that is given the descriptor ‘sprawling’, and rightly so. It’s ambitious, and although I had a few gripes with it, I would recommend it solely based on its labyrinth-esque nature. Our narrator is part of a group of students that clean out a dead man’s house that is wall-to-wall covered in junk, which of course they discover is not all junk. Slowly, we learn about the man’s obsession with reaching a different realm and the things he left behind that create a portrait of a madman who may or may not have been mad at all.
The book does a phenomenal job at creating a sense of curiosity and dread. It makes you want to know what is going on, and a mysterious plot line is meaningless without this investment from the reader. As for the dread, nothing is outwardly horrific by itself; the discoveries are strange but nothing haunting. It’s only when it comes together, when the fragments meet, that you belatedly realize it’s rather horrifying.
Unfortunately, it takes over half of the book to get to this point, which brings me to my main issue: it simply could have been shorter. I appreciate that Maclean wanted to cement the atmosphere and setting, but there was too much that could’ve been cut without losing anything integral. Though, I will say it’s not difficult to read; I didn’t find the prose too stuffy, and the beginning went by quickly.
With it being compared to The Secret History, you expect a certain air about the prose, which was present, but competing with a shallow kind of prose that was almost the opposite. Some of the dialogue is chunky, some natural; some of the prose is smooth and evocative, some simplistic and awkward. It felt at times like two different writers, and it made it difficult to get immersed in.
It doesn’t engage in the same sardonic underpinnings that The Secret History does, but our narrator does seem Richard-like, uninterested and unmoored. Sadly this doesn’t make for a particularly interesting guy, which, as Jenna Clare pointed out, was likely by design—but I think the book as a whole could have benefited from stronger characterization.
It lost me by the end. The crescendo it comes to is rushed and almost boring, and after the strange post-ending bit, it feels hollow. As I said, though, it was clever, disorienting, and for the most part, I enjoyed reading it.
Aviary by Maria Dong
Release Date: April 7th, 2026
Synopsis in a sentence: Follows a woman who uses her late sister’s passport and identity to leave South Korea for the United States and becomes entwined with a strange artist program.
Hee-Jin’s sister, Hee-Young, arrives dead at her door from a bizarre overdose after being in the United States for an artist residency program. Hee-Jin sees an opportunity to escape her life and flees to take her sister’s place, where she uncovers a swirling, menacing thing at the center of the residency.
Aviary had many aspects that I enjoyed. Hee-Jin and Hee-Young are polar opposites, both fleeing from their undocumented status in South Korea in different ways: where Hee-Jin is timid and seeks comfort in invisibility, Hee-Young was willing to risk more to live her life. Hee-Young haunts the narrative — both figuratively and literally — and it makes for a compelling dynamic. It explores splintered identity through Hee-Jin, and the way her past continually influences everything she does.
Calleigh, the wife of the man who runs the residency, is one of the most interesting characters; her tightly controlled internal thoughts are marred with such oppressive doubt—thoughts about her husband and her accident and her worthlessness. It’s miserable to read because it’s exceptionally clear that she’s been forcibly moulded into the shape she is in by the world and by the men around her — into this shape of a woman who bows and buckles and digs her heels in to keep from surfacing from her little protective bubble wherein she needs a keeper.
The women make the story: trapped, taken advantage of, controlled, beaten down, but women who dream of something better, who love one another, who are in need of comfort and care and all the things they strategically are kept from in the ‘house’ at the core of the story—which also includes the man at the core of the story.
Sadly, that was about all I enjoyed about it. It suffers from the same dragging out that Solace House does, characters tell us their fear and guilt are doing things instead of allowing us to feel it through their thoughts and actions, and too much exposition takes the form of characters laying out every detail in dialogue.
This may be a small gripe, but I think if you’re going to market something as queer, it shouldn’t feel like both an after-thought and that it was almost entirely forgotten about halfway through. The narrative is not about queer women as much as it just mentions it offhandedly a few times, which I know is how some books are, but I wish there had been more focus on it.
Aviary wasn’t for me, and that’s okay! I would still encourage any of you to give it a read if it sounds interesting.
Thank you all for reading. Please let me know if season sampling is something you would like to see more of!