Olivia Waite

2 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Olivia Waite

Our columnist on the month's best new releases. Credit... Michela Buttignol Despite romance's reputation as light comfort reading, the genre has a bass line of chaos pulsing through it - the distinction being that romance presents chaos as survivable, even if your entire world is upended.

3 weeks ago | reactormag.com | Olivia Waite

Note: Spoilers for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Imperial Radch trilogy will, obviously, abound. So it seems only fair to spoil a little bit of the following essay itself, and tell you that I’m going to start by saying one of the most stupefyingly obvious things someone can say. It’s going somewhere, I promise. The thing about space is that tea doesn’t grow there. Tea grows on Earth.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Olivia Waite

Our critic on the month's best new releases. We all sometimes have to put up shields between ourselves and the rest of the world. But safety leaves us solitary - we need love and understanding, and both those things require us to be open and vulnerable. The characters in this month's romances are unusually closed-off, leading to uncommonly glorious endings when they finally drop those shields.

1 month ago | audiofilemagazine.com | Olivia Waite

Blair Baker narrates this sci-fi mystery. Dorothy Gentleman is a detective aboard the HMS FAIRWEATHER, an interstellar passenger ship--spaceship, that is. To her surprise, she wakes up in an unfamiliar body just as a murder victim is found, a situation that leads to several more terrible developments. Baker's depiction of Dorothy's initial confusion over her predicament quickly gives way to confidence and competence as she finds her investigative footing.

1 month ago | crimereads.com | Olivia Waite

Let me be very obvious at the start and say: a murder victim can’t tell you who the killer is. Locked-room mysteries are puzzling because the only person you’re sure was in the room is the one person you can’t ask for testimony. That’s also what makes locked-room plots such challenging things to read or write — a baffling impossibility turns out to be an illusion with a material explanation.