#saltcrop

faves of 2025: sci-fi

Saltcrop

Project Hail Mary

A Letter to the Luminous Deep/A Letter From The Lonesome Shore

Local Heavens

Ymir

Children of Time/Children of Ruin/Children of Memory

The Left Hand of Darkness

Volatile Memory

Power To Yield and Other Stories

cafe reading

books I’ve read in 2025 📖 no. 108

Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei

One of my anticipated new releases this year. In Saltcrop, three sisters live in a tiny town on an almost unrecognizable future Earth ravaged by climate change and crop blight. When Nora goes missing from her job studying crop failure, Skipper drags practical Carmen on a sailboat odyssey to track Nora down and rescue her.

This is, first and foremost, a book about sisters. The narrative is divided into parts, with the first section narrated by Skipper, the second by Carmen, and the last by Nora. One of the chief delights of this novel is in the unreliable narration. It's fascinating to compare how each sister remembers the past differently, from Nora leaving for college to their mother dying when they were children. Kitasei also does a good job giving each woman a different flawed voice: Skipper is dreamy and aimless, Carmen ruthlessly practical and overly trusting, and Nora idealistic.

The setting swings into truly disturbing body horror at times. The fungal blight that devastated their world infects both plants and animals with impunity, and there were a concerning number of scenes where Skipper and Carmen ate a fish with five eyes and little paws or something. Which doesn't even begin touch the slow horror of watching the fungus infect Carmen's body... The worldbuilding does edge a little too much into simplicity for my taste at times. I dislike how pat it is to make a single company responsible for most of the world's problems. Yes, it's a lot easier to resolve narratively, but make it at least a handful of companies for decency's sake.

Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei: Review by Niall Harrison

October 27, 2025

It is a bit of an adjustment to go directly from Everything Will Swallow You, in which it some­times seems as though every rock and tree and hill has a name and a history, to Yume Kitasei’s Saltcrop, in which almost no places do. The three sisters at the heart of the tale grew up in relative poverty in a small town. The eldest, Nora, went off to university in the city a decade ago, but has recently vanished in mysterious circumstances; the youngest, Skipper, and the middle sister, Carmen, set out to find Nora, which involves first sailing up the coast to the city and then on to another country, and then across an ocean, and so on. The odd thing about it is that the novel is clearly set in the near future of our world, and the characters clearly know where they are – they have maps, and GPS, and there are sentences like, “The announcer explains the music was played by the national orchestra of a country to the south across the sea.” This is not a case of in-world lost knowl­edge. Moreover the reader is given just enough information from other cues to go beneath this surface, and work out that the story probably starts on the Eastern Seaboard of the US, that the city Nora studies in is probably Boston, that the first country visited is probably Canada, that the ocean crossed is probably the North Atlantic, which probably takes them to Norway, and so on. But none of it is confirmed. It’s a strategy that I found gave Saltcrop a dreamlike quality, made it feel like a fable of the future even when it was discussing genetic engineering and agribusiness.

faves of 2025: no romance

(i generally mention in my reviews the exact amount of 'no romance', but these all have near to nothing, only past relationships etc.)

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

Kill The Beast

Project Hail Mary

The Javelin Program/The Antarctica Conspiracy

Saltcrop

Ymir

Demon Engine

Audition For The Fox

The Reformatory

Cradle and Grave

Something Extraordinary

The Underwood Tapes

All four of these are bangers tbh. There are also about 27 more superlatives I'd like to give Seraphina, including Most Flexible Allegory, Most Autism, and Best Use of the Word "Camelopardine." 10/10 great reading month