2025 Hugo Finalists: Someone You Can Build a Nest In

This post is part of the series, Reading the 2025 Hugo Finalists for Best Novel, where I am reading through all the 2025 Hugo Award Finalists for best novel. These are not book reviews. Just some scant thoughts as I think through a voting order.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell deals with themes that most other Hugo winners I have read do not (or do little): dependence, pain, family, parenting, "otherness", self. It is a challenging read, yet has some good dark humor and a lot of action and adventure packed in.

The opening paragraphs set up the world of the novel splendidly and makes one eager to read more (quickly, in my case). From her very birth, in memory, of Shesheshen to her hibernation and immediate peril there is action and interest in her experiences -- I felt on "her side" right away and carried that relationship through the whole novel.

Then the introduction of Homily and slow unrolling of her life and relationship with Shesheshen made for an amazing story that was times silly and other times difficult to read and face. Homily's dependence on her family and Shesheshen's confusion over her feelings about Homily mixed so well even while keeping a pretty fast action pace with the Wulfyre's hunt for the wyrm.

The ending was satisfying and my only real knock on the story was in the penultimate Part Seven. Shesheshen's confusing (even in the state she was in) with her sister felt a little unbelievable and predictable as it was playing out. And to some degree I lost the path of the Baroness in this section -- she seemed to kind of fade away inexplicably (OK, so a bomb had something to do with it) and then reappear in a much less favorable position for herself. That is, after her encounter with Shesheshen I would've expected her to seek out Epigram and Homily instead of allowing Homily and Shesheshen to connect again.

Overall though, this was a challenging and entertaining read. Wiswell's dry, dark humor in places reminded me of Connie Willis and Martha Wells. And reading the acknowledgments at the end made it clear that Wiswell poured a lot of himself and his experiences in to the novel. That was surely no small task and I'm thankful he was able to make it work so well.