Strange Lights
Mira González
Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 978-1967967148
Bindery Books, October 2026, 464 pages

 

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re setting forth on a sprawling journey of cryptids and crappy relatives, relationships and relatively normal Winnebagos (citation needed*), and what it means to have a found family you might not want to find out who you actually are—that’s right, it’s Strange Lights, a heart-wrenching and heartwarming novel by Mira González!

Strange Lights follows the perspective of Reggie (for the most part), an investigator of paranormal occurrences, albeit one burdened with the attentions of a wild toddler named Eldi (short for El Diablo, who may or may not be the Chupacabra). Reggie and Eldi (who may or may not be a Chupacabra but absolutely loves her stuffed animal “Goat”) are on the trail of another paranormal researcher (Calvin) who threatens to reveal dangerous truths about the magic and mayhem lurking beneath society’s normality. Unfortunately, as much as Reggie wants to make Calvin go away, he’s kind of hot, so of course he has to stick around (for research purposes, pinkie promise). Reggie has secrets to hide, many of them pertinent to the situation at hand; hijinks and hilarity and horror ensue, along with a galaxy-spanning secret that might just disrupt everything everyone (including Reggie) knows about their lives.

There are also smooches, relationship issues, disturbing slaughters of common livestock (you were paying attention to the previous two mentions of the Chupacabra, right??), trust issues, more smooches, possessed robot vacuums, swarthy werewolves, and feelings of oneness with the cosmic vastness of our universe, so, uh, you know, I’m just saying. Caveat emptor.

Anyways, now that I’ve piqued your attention, Strange Lights is one of those books where the extremely unordinary is presented with all the blasé of ordering an iPhone at your local soda jerk, and it’s that immediate commitment to the universe that really drew me in.

*You don’t need to know why the Winnebago is in possession of a thousand magical rooms; you just need to know that it’s named Winnie.

For those of you who read those previous two sentences (or perhaps, three, or perhaps the entire paragraph before that) and went “WTF?!,” it’s that kind of trust a book like this asks of its readers; that you’re willing to keep track of characters mentioned over fifteen chapters ago as a throwaway gag; that you understand what it means to be hated and loved by those you love and hate; that you’re willing to accept magic as something actually real without the need for numbers or systems; but also, that you recognize when someone is trying to connect with everyone around them and asking you to connect back in return. González shifts the storyline’s pace from skeptic to believer and back in whiplash waves, but the overwhelming message here is that without tethers to each other, regardless of how we identify, we’re all doomed to a voidlike abyss, and that’s no place for anyone to be.

Honestly, that’s what I enjoyed most about Strange Lights. The idea of connecting to people who were willing to connect with us, no matter how bad things seemed, no matter what mistakes we made before. The trust in others, even when that trust might be betrayed. The family in this book isn’t just a found family; it’s an earned family, one that struggles with and against each other even as they fight for something better. It’s that kind of humanity that really makes me want to recommend it to other people.

In short (and in long), this is a complicated, emotional story that demands an equally complicated review, so all I can end with is that I really enjoyed the themes of wanting to belong, wanting to understand, and wanting for something better. All of us deserve a space in our communities, no matter how monstrous others might think us.