Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell Book Review

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 Someone You Can Build A Nest In 

By John Wiswell 


Won 2024 Nebula Award

Won 2025 Locus Award for Best First Novel 

Finalist in 2025 Hugo Award 


Published Year: 2024

Page Count: 310 pages 

Medium Used: Kindle Scribe 

Genre: Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Horror, Action, Drama, Romance, Monsters, 2026-read. 

Rating: 5/5😇😇😇🥰🥰




Loved this one! Absolutely. Reading this, I couldn't slurp in the chapters continuously. I took them in snatches, got a break going elsewhere (into other books, silly 😋) and returning to digest more of this story. This is not an ordinary tale. John Wiswell is an immense talent. What he has created is not just a monster that lived while the story was read and forgotten afterwards. This creature thrives in memory and imagination. It doesn't have one concrete shape or name or body parts, organs..anything for that matter. It is a shape shifter that can ingest bodies whole. It has no conscience that stops her from harming anyone or anything that can safely be absorbed into herself in private. She has an egg sack formed within her body that she needs to plant into someone else so that her offspring are born. So imagine what would happen when such a creature falls in love with a mortal woman (human). She wants that woman to be the nest for her egg sack. But before she can do it, she learns of a dark reality of what would happen to the host of her egg sack when the children are born. In a shocking twist, she also finds that someone else is after her egg sack. In an intriguing and utterly spell binding read, we see what she eventually does with the egg sack. What does she value more - love for the human woman or an extension of her blood/monster line? 


I liked how amazingly well written the characters of Baroness, Homily, Homily's sister Epigram and the monster Shesheshan are. How very engaging the novel was throughout. There were more than a few Ew and Ew Ew moments for me in this but still I couldn't resist getting back to the book. Like when Shesheshan ingested rosemary wine and excreted it out with her lung into her boot. Or like how she ate the muddled brain matter of Epigram and eventually grew her within!  Do read it! A must read for all fantasy lovers! Definitely a surprise awaits you - like me - if you underestimate it only as a debut work! The pacing is perfect. The world building is good too. I wish there would be a follow up book to this - just so we see more of what happens with Homily and Shesheshan. 🥰

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