The project of this blog is reviews of sf/f work, with a focus on stuff nominated for the Hugo Awards. I'm going to shoot for one post a week, where each post takes a year's worth of novellas, ranks them, and gives a brief review of each novella. Hopefully they'll mostly be good, but who can say!
2026 has a pretty strong slate of novellas, and my favorite three were all fairy tales. It was hard, honestly, to rank the top three; each had their own distinct charms, despite the generic overlap, and on a different day I might rate them differently.
My Ranking:
- 1.
The Summer War, Naomi Novik
- 2.
Cinder House, Freya Marske
- 3.
The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar
- 4.
What Stalks the Deep, T. Kingfisher
- 5.
Murder By Memory, Olivia Waite
- 6.
Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz
A note on spoilers: It's hard to know how much to say without spoiling things, and Leaflet doesn't have spoiler tags yet. My rule of thumb is to not give any details that wouldn't show up on the back of the book // the store page's summary. If this stops you from reading, please let me know and I'l calibrate appropriately going forward.
And my reviews:
1) The Summer War, Naomi Novik
Oh, what a perfect little story that embodies what I love so much about the novella as a form. It's short enough that it only needs to do one thing well, and it's long enough that that one thing can be complicated and psychologically deep.
The story has the feel of something I've heard before, but I can't place it as a retelling of a particular fairy tale (unlike Uprooted or Spinning Silver, Novik's closest comparable stories). It, like River and Cinder, spends a lot of time on sibling relationships, and it's equivocal and rich in a way that lesser stories often aren't. Novik is an empathetic storyteller who's interested in the psychological reality of her characters, even in unreal circumstances, and that shines through here.
I like, too, Novik's portrayal of faeries - a strong suit shared with Cinder and River. It's easy to err on the side of 'sexy dangerous elves,' but Novik takes seriously the relationship with the seasons, the weird balance of ephemerality and timelessness, that kind of thing. I don't want my faeries to be too much like vampires, which a weaker novel can fall into. Well worth the read, and, today, it's my favorite of the lot.
Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕 (5/5)
2) The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar
A gem of a fairy tale of a novella that has a lot in common with my second pick. I do feel a little ashamed about how much I liked this one, given how precisely it's aimed at my interests. Of course I'm going to like a fairy tale where the magic at its heart hinges on the etymology of grammar and grimoire and glamour. Sometimes I have a knee-jerk resistance to something that's too far up my alley, but I didn't feel that way while reading this at all.
El-Mohtar's prose is lyrical and lovely, with a riverlike rhythm that's appropriate given the novel's setting, and the same flights of poesy that elevate 2020's Hugo-winning This Is How You Lose The Time War (co-written with Max Gladstone) are present here. El-Mohtar writes prose like a poet, and if I was ranking these novellas purely based on prose this would top my list.
The story is simple but effective, centering around two willow trees, two sisters, their two suitors, and two worlds. It teems with vivid images that pin the abstract in words, which coheres well with the themes and the story itself. And while I wasn't often surprised by the story (which is fine! fairy tales aren't supposed to surprise, necessarily!), I was delighted again and again. Strongly recommended.
Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗 (4.5/5)
3) Cinder House, Freya Marske
Ah, but as soon as I start writing this review I feel like maybe Cinder House is the year's best. Marske turns Cinderella into a haunted house story, with Ella as a ghost. It works well. I'm sure I've read other stories where the ghost who haunts the house feels their emotions in the different parts of the house - their rage in the boiler, that kind of thing - but it felt fresh and evocative here.
Markse is especially good at thinking through the magic of the world she brings to life here, which is challenging and impressive in the space of a novella and makes her setting feel expansive. We get details that generally come out naturally, as characters discover them, and both the questions and the answers are interesting and have the kind of logic to them that I can really sink my teeth into.
If I had to complain about something, and I suppose I do, it's that the prose doesn't feel quite as generically appropriate as River or Summer. What stands out about those two is the dreamlike, repetitive rhythm of the writing. While House's best images are memorable, the sentence-by-sentence writing doesn't have the poetic force of the other two. But the characterization is strong, the voices come through, the ideas are creative, and the pacing is good. If you like Summer and/or River, you'll probably like this.
Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗 (4.5/5)
Oh no, these reviews are too long. I'll be shorter for the rest!
4) What Stalks the Deep, T. Kingfisher
This novella is the third in Kingfisher's Sworn Soldiers series, and both of the previous two (2023's What Moves The Dead and 2025's What Feasts At Night) were nominated for Hugos, so it's not a surprise to see this one here. To preface this review: I am a fan of Kingfisher's work and read most of her novels in a frenzy a couple of years back. She's prolific, her batting average is high, and I love some of her novels. I quite liked What Moves The Dead and enjoyed What Feasts At Night, and more or less enjoyed Wolf Worm, her newest novella, but it's possible I've burned myself out on this style of story.1
It pains me to admit, thus, that I think Stalks garners diminishing returns. Alex Easton remains a wry, self-deprecating narrator with an interesting point of view, but the wit doesn't sparkle quite as brightly, the characterization isn't as well-drawn, and the emotional stakes aren't nearly as high as in some previous efforts. If you liked the other two books, this one's not going to give you a bad time, and I'll still probably read the next one in the series.
That's what's great about the novella, though! Even if it doesn't totally land for you, you're done with it in a couple of hours at most. I enjoyed this well enough while I was reading it, and I wasn't sad to finish it.
Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑 (3/5)
5) Murder By Memory, Olivia Waite
This is the first book by Waite I've read, and it always makes me happy to see fresh names on the nominee list. A murder takes place on a generation ship that's a few hundred years into its journey, and the ship detective (a cool idea!) has to figure out what happened. Clues are discovered and persons are interrogated. We even get a dame! The mystery unspools nicely, but the overall effect is a slight story without enough of a real emotional core to land for me.
Unfortunately, this didn't do much for me. I liked it a bit more than I liked Mary Robinette Kowal's The Spare Man (a 2023 Hugo Best Novel nominee), another well-received ship detective story, but less than Mur Lafferty's Station Eternity. If you liked those other two books, you'll probably enjoy this, and I enjoyed it well enough, but nothing about it flabbergasted me, and I want to be flabbergasted by my books, thank you very much.
Rating: 🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑 (3/5)
6) Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz
I think Newitz just isn't for me. I read and did not care for Newitz's 2024 The Terraformers despite a summary really excited me, and I had the same experience here. On paper, Automatic Noodle sounds great to me - self-aware robots wake up in an independent California and start their own restaurant! each chapter is from the perspective of a different one of the robots! But Newitz is emphatically not a poet, and although her characters have distinct motivations and personalities, their internal voices all read more or less the same to me. Plus there are a few horny bits here, like in Terraformers, that weirded me out. YMMV, there, though.
I think I just wanted more out of this. I'm happy to think about robots that have complex thoughts and motivations, but I don't want my robots to basically be people. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model (a 2025 Best Novel finalist) is a great example of what I'm talking about; I'm fascinated in the psychology of something whose mind is structured very differently from our own. Newitz doesn't really seem interested in that, and enough of her readers like what she's putting down enough to nominate this. But I'd give it a miss. Read Service Model instead, or Sim Kern's The Free People's Village if you want a community-focused-near-future thing. Or read this, I don't know, I'm not a cop.
Rating: 🌕🌕🌑🌑🌑 (2/5)