The Song Behind Today’s Review Title

Two books. Two different genres, and completely different subject matter. Yet the words “maybe together we can get somewhere” manage to capture both titles. Those words convey the spirit of determination in our once young country that led to the creation of National Road, while at the same time expressing the caution and dedication of the group of people struggling in the darkly oppressive universe of The Faith of Beasts.

The line is, or course, from the song Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. The first single released from Chapman’s debut album in 1988, the song reached number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Chapman’s version of the song has over one billion streams on Spotify and has been certified Platinum in six countries.

In 2023 the song was re-recorded by country music singer Luke Combs. His rendition won the Country Music Award for “Song of the Year”, making Chapman the first Black songwriter to ever win a CMA award. Combs manager noted that “Luke is a songwriter too and Tracy is one of his favorite artists”, while Chapman was quoted as saying “I'm happy for Luke and his success and grateful that new fans have found and embraced Fast Car.”

One of my best concert memories is of seeing Tracy Chapman perform in, I believe, the Chicago Theatre in the late 1990s or early 2000s with my now husband Tony. We were in the upper tier of seats, and I smile every time I remember being surrounded by a group of happy lesbians as we all jumped out of our seats to dance and sing out the chorus to Give Me One Reason.

You can hear Tracy Chapman perform Fast Car in the official music video here on YouTube.

Author Brady J. Crytzer calls himself a “specialist of the frontier history of North America” and if his latest book is an indication, it’s a very apt description. This book paints a vivid picture of the evolution of the American frontier from the days of Revolution through the mid to late 1800s.

The National Road takes us on an engaging journey into one of America’s most transformative early infrastructure projects. Crytzer has taken what could have been a dry account of roads and logistics and spun it into a highly readable narrative brimming with early American ambition, risk taking, and full-on nation building. The surveyors, settlers, travelers and politicians who people this history helped shape our early republic.

Crytzer writes with the assurance of a historian who has done his research, and the storytelling instincts of a talented narrator. The result is a tale of political debates, engineering challenges, and frontier dramas that gallops along without ever losing momentum.

The “National Road” at the heart of this book is our country’s first ever federally funded interstate road. We are not talking about our current interstate highways, built as a result of the vision of President Eisenhower. This is a much earlier effort that goes all the way back to our first President, Washington, who dreamed of connecting the nation’s Eastern Seaboard with the edge of the frontier in the Northwest Territory - that early “western frontier” so far away over the Appalachians - in what today we call “the Midwest”.

This is the story of our early nation through the lens of its first significant infrastructure project, and it is so well done that I zipped right through it. Read it for its fascinating stories of a young United States, and for both its well-known and its forgotten history.

RATING: Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

OVERALL COMMENTS: A highly readable look at the story of our early nation through the lens of its first significant infrastructure project.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I received an advance reviewer’s copy of the ebook through NetGalley, and courtesy of the publisher Diversion Books. The book is available to the public starting today, April 14, 2026.

The Faith of Beasts is the second book in a planned trilogy series called The Captives War, written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the duo who write together under the pen name James S. A. Corey. I reviewed the first book, called The Mercy of Gods last June.

In that first book the authors, out of necessity, spent time creating the world of its characters, and explaining their place in it, before then dashing that world apart through an alien invasion, and sending those characters into strange and uncharted territory. With that already behind us, this second book is rooted not in spectacles of alien worlds or strange species, but in the moral and psychological weight placed on the humans at the center of the story.

Our heros are captives on an alien world, slaves to a race of beings - the Carryx - who do not care if they or the entire human species live or die. How they cope and what they do to survive continue to be the focus carried from the second half of the first book.

Somewhere off-stage is the “deathless enemy” of their captors, revealed in the first book through the presence of a “swarm” being who inhabits a human host, using that host as a vessel to conduct its spy mission. In The Faith of Beasts more about the deathless enemy is revealed.

This is a tightly paced book focused on well-written and empathetic characters. I liked it better than the first book. Read it for the smart, character-driven science fiction.

RATING: Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

OVERALL COMMENTS: The second book in The Captive’s War trilogy is a character-driven, fast paced science fiction novel. An absorbing, rewarding read from the duo who brought us The Expanse.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I received an advance reviewer’s copy of the ebook through NetGalley, and courtesy of the publisher Orbit Books. The book is available to the public starting today, April 14, 2026.

The other books on my nightstand over the last week:

NO OTHER BOOKS READ

Honestly, fitting the two featured books into this one week was a lot.

TWO BOOKS I’M CURRENTLY READING

As I thought last week, I’ve had to set aside The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell, but I’ll be eager to get back to it. There is also a sci-fi novella on my To Be Read list that keeps calling to me. It’s called Twice-Spent Comet by Ziggy Schutz. It was shared with me by indie publisher Meerkat Press, and I promise I’ll get to it soon.

WHAT’S NEXT

I have a whole bunch of reviewer’s copies stacked up for the next month and a half. Next week I’ll be reading and reviewing two of them - the sci-fi novel The Many by Canadian author Sylvain Neuvel and what looks to be a fun nonfiction read called If This Be Magic, subtitled “The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation”.