Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
Lee and Sen live in the same house, centuries apart, but their timelines keep overlapping and the more it happens, the more they realize their lives are more deeply entwined than they thought. An unreliable narrator, a shocking twist, and a pervasive sense of dread throughout the entire novel make for the perfect gothic formula. The house behind the sword ferns is not what it seems, and finding the truth may cost Lee and Sen more than they bargained for. I sacrificed sleep to get to the end of this book, desperate for the elusive answers that Kylie Lee Baker masterfully strings along.
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker, (List Price: $30, Hanover Square Press, 9781335001559, April 2026)
Reviewed by Charlie, Square Books in Oxford, MS
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“When I sat down to write this novel, it ended up going in a completely different direction than what I had intended. I’d originally wanted to write an unrequited love story. As I was writing the first few scenes, I was like, “Oh, these people actually both love each other, so that’s not working. Also, I really feel the need to explore how this character has come to love in this way, and to deny herself love in this way.
Julia Langbein says that the inspiration for her new novel, Dear Monica Lewinsky, came to her during a visit to the house where she grew up: “I had to go clear out my old childhood bedroom, and I found a diary from 1998 in which I had been disparaging of Monica Lewinsky in a way that was just very casual and normal for people at that time…It was this moment of compunction — we all recognize we had it wrong — but the writer in me was like, You’re picking up on some idea of Monica Lewinsky as a kind of saint whose public life completely fits with the stories of the early martyrs.” 
