The story opens in 1995 with the suicide of a woman named Nilima, which sends her husband, Ripon, spiraling into grief. The couple ran a poultry farm and sold eggs in Bangladesh, but after inclement weather and the disease Ranikhet ravaged their brood, it appeared they would not be able to pay off their loan. The woman’s death also leaves behind an infant daughter; the husband is unable to take care of her by himself. The narrative cuts to the present, when a young woman named Irene Sebastian travels to Bangladesh on a work trip. While there, she contacts an NGO to investigate the adoption of a little girl brought to the United States. It becomes clear that the crying baby left behind by the grieving widower and his dead wife is now the adult Irene, and Mohit uses the rest of the novel to fill in her life story after her arrival in America, including a traumatic car crash and an adoption by a white American couple. This is a novel about self-discovery and family with an affecting opening vignette; the husband’s all-consuming grief remains the story’s most memorable element, and Irene’s adoptive mother’s leukemia diagnosis adds an additional moving emotional layer to the latter half of the novel. Unfortunately, Irene isn’t very well drawn. She is an overachiever, idealistic about her globalist satellite company, Starlink (and her boss, Elon Musk), but Mohit characterizes her as overly deferential and vacuous. (What does she find so meaningful about this company and her work? It’s unclear.) The reader learns very little about her inner life, and the prose often reads as flat and cliché (a character “absorbed [information] like a sponge”; another experiences a “storm swirling in her mind”). With an outcome that feels inevitable, there’s little here to encourage the reader to keep going.

This debut story collection lifts its title from a 1909 manifesto co-authored by urban designer Daniel H. Burnham, which also provides the epigram invoking the city’s motto: “Urbs in Horto—a city set in a garden.” More than a century later, that garden is no Eden. There are way more cracks than flowers: cracks in the foundation; psychological cracks in the narrators and characters, whose vernacular provides the style of these stories. Cracks in their relationships, their marriages, their families. Yet there is also great resilience, through the survival skills necessary in a city that plays rough. In “Enumerator,” the opening and longest story, Margaret Cieslak-Jablonski, a Polish immigrant, loses her American husband and gains a job as a census taker. She lives on a block so undistinguished that it isn’t considered part of any of the northwest neighborhoods around it: “No one wanted to claim that swath of poor transients, weedy lots, and industrial waste.” Her temp job has her tracking and counting those who are ever farther off the grid. And she’s very good at it, learning the stories of those who had otherwise evaded scrutiny and gaining entry where she isn’t legally permitted. “Out of Egypt” follows, with a teenage boy named Izzy Bramaciu apparently unconscious in the hospital, from a car accident arranged by his scamming father for insurance fraud. Then “Chez Whatever,” where very white Lincoln Park finds a Black girl increasingly frustrated and resentful in a Valentine’s Day blizzard, following a fight with her more privileged white girlfriend. “Dibs” explores the Chicago tradition of saving winter parking places amid the gentrification of a frequently changing Humboldt Park. The progression of the stories connects neighborhoods, with protagonists in one story becoming bit players in another.

The legacy of feminist author Anzaldúa (1942-2004) looms large. Her groundbreaking book Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) remains a touchstone for generations of scholars and activists. An editorial note explains that Anzaldúa had been developing her “Prieta stories” alongside nonfiction for her whole career. While a few came out during her lifetime, this book represents their first complete publication. Like her other work, it resists genre and other literary conventions. Anzaldúa mixes English and Spanish throughout (translations are provided at the end of each story) to tell the tale of a young girl’s awakening into a queer identity. Some stories are sexually explicit while others veer into the supernatural. In each, Prieta confronts family and community members who both love her and expect her to conform to traditional notions of gender and sexuality. But Prieta cannot betray herself so easily. Over time and facing many obstacles, including homophobic lovers and crooked bosses, she cultivates a sense of embodied power. Others may go along to get along, but she’s one with both the land she lives on and with the celestial—so much that she finds it nearly impossible to be anything but her authentic self. The stories document Prieta’s sensory experience in granular detail to the exclusion of character development and traditional elements of plot, though they do follow Prieta’s arc from childhood to adulthood. Over decades, Anzaldúa labored to offer this painstaking, relentless exploration of the queer experience in all its richness as part of quotidian life. Prieta’s story is a foundational piece of the dam against erasure and marginalization Anzaldúa spent her life building.

Prince Elias of Gledann, the resentful heir of a domineering and abusive king, is forced into a politically motivated marriage with Princess Fu Liling of Toguan. Liling is both a dutiful daughter and a reluctant pawn; her bond with her own powerful father grants her unusual privileges as she steels herself to manipulate foreign courts. Meanwhile, at the Gledann Military Academy, the peasant-born squire Emmeline York struggles with illiteracy and prejudice, hoping for independence from her violent family. Valena Hemlock, a witch-in-training from the secluded hamlet of Gildacrest, longs for her magical powers to emerge, as she’s isolated and insecure in a community defined by supernatural excellence (“It’s never going to happen for me. I’m never going to be a competent witch”). The novel frequently shifts perspectives, painting a vast fresco of dynastic intrigue, coming-of-age anxieties, and imperial rivalries. Ambition, inheritance, and the burdens of parental expectations weigh heavily on each main figure. Holmes imagines a world in which gendered hierarchies, religious rites, and political marriages drive conflict. The titular floating castle is simultaneously a locus of intrigue, a prison for Liling, an engineering marvel, and the site of symbolic and literal disaster. The novel boasts strong worldbuilding in the rich ceremonial details of Toguan’s court and the earthy rituals of the Gildacrest witches, but the narrative is weighed down by extensive exposition and occasionally clunky prose. The characters can feel like mouthpieces for the author’s themes rather than fully fleshed individuals. The dialogue leans into blunt declarations rather than suggestion or subtext, and the pacing sags through the cycles of rituals, hunts, and lectures. Readers who relish intricately cataloged court customs will find satisfaction, but others will be left impatient for the story to locate its true center.

After the influx of refugees from the ongoing genocide, Dževahira Torlak, who goes by Seka, lives in besieged Srebrenica with her parents, grandparents, older brother, her mother’s sister and sister-in-law, as well as an uncle and two young cousins. Her family has taken in two refugees, Edina Muharemović and her son, Ramo, who is Seka’s age. As the family works to survive continual bombing, snipers, disease, and hunger, Seka and Ramo grow close and begin a romance as the years go by. In imitation of Anne Frank, Seka, who’s Muslim, writes in a diary to her friend, Zora, a Serb who evacuated with her family before the war. Seka’s writing eventually brings her into contact with a journalist from Australia, where Zora now lives. Alyssa, the journalist, enlists Seka to write an exposé of the corruption in Srebrenica, which stems from closer to home than Seka first realizes. While the novel doesn’t require foreknowledge of the Bosnian genocide, Pajalić doesn’t provide much scaffolding; readers may want to research as they read. In an introduction, Pajalić provides trigger warnings, an index, and a glossary, all helpful tools for this harrowing story. According to the author, the “novel blends factual history with fictional storytelling to explore themes of justice, trauma, and complicity.” She gathered information for the novel from interviews she conducted with survivors of the genocide. Essays based on these interviews are collected in another of Pajalić’s books, Fragments of History: The Essays Behind the Stories. The novel, a thriller, deploys the drama and tension of the genre, though the action falls a bit flat during one character’s sudden villainous turn. Devastating descriptions of the gory consequences of war are the standout scenes here. Still, Seka experiences moments of beauty and joy, all lushly described: “I lost myself in the music, the anonymity of the darkness around us, the heaving bodies, and closed my eyes as I moved.” The novel skewers the international community’s complicity in genocide, which continues today.