As much as I really wanted to like this, for me this was a book that had crazy vibes but didn't fully deliver on them in a way that satisfied me as a reader.


I want to start by saying that the premise is fascinating—we have an amnesiac protagonist who wakes up in some unknown woods with a cultlike group of cannibalistic individuals he doesn't seem to know, and is immediately drawn into their plot to reach the top of a sacred mountain and resurrect the old gods of the world. The language and word choices that create setting are gorgeous, and they paint a vivid picture of the stark, claustrophobic, unfamiliar landscape through which the characters are moving. The way the cannibalism scenes (of which there are *many*) are described in a way that genuinely turned my stomach a couple of times, and I'm a pretty unflinching reader in general.


Unfortunately, I think it's in the very limited character perspective that things start to fall apart for this book. We have no information about our protagonist, Kestrel, whch makes it immediately difficult to connect with him as a reader. We don't get a ton of insight into his actual personality even as the book progresses—for the most part it seems like Kestrel's main personality traits are 1) determination to escape (valid), 2) affection for Shrew (also valid, but sort of out of left field and not interrogated very deeply), and 3) his growing desire to eat human flesh (gross, and also really not the cause of very much reflection). I think there were a lot of opportunities to do the character work and create a more compelling protagonist even from our amnesiac friend, but the author brushes past them in favor of moving the cast along, so ultimately I was left not really caring about the stakes or the action.


Overall I would say that this book is wonderfully atmospheric and genuinely creepy in some places, but it doesn't hit the mark for me in terms of making me invested in the way the story is going to play out.


Thank you to Quill & Crow and NetGalley for the ARC, which I received in exchange for an honest review!

I admit I'm kind of struggling to figure out how to rate this book, because while it was beautifully written and experimental in very fun and engaging ways, it was also fucking devastating and I don't think I'm likely to reread again because my heart can only handle so much! 

I feel like the best word I can use to describe this book is "messy." I don't mean that in a negative way, in fact quite the opposite -- the messiness of the interpersonal relationships, the politics of the world, and the characters' internal motivations is actually really compelling, and I think that messiness does a lot to drive the story forward. Hammer is so jaded that she's completely unable to be optimistic or hopeful about the world or her place in it; Naias is so blinded by her ambition that she doesn't realize that it's not possible for the oppressed to gain their liberation by convincing the oppressor to like them. And in the end, none of them are able to escape the yoke of empire.

(Actually, the premise of this novel can be succinctly summed up in the words of Audre Lorde: "The master's tools can never dismantle the master's house." Obviously she was writing in a very different context, but the words themselves echo -- throughout the novel, even as they rage against the empire that subjugates them, all of the characters still try to work within the boundaries of that empire to plot their escapes. They are really only to achieve liberation and rebirth when they finally raze the whole thing to the ground.)

I found that this was a book where many of the characters were deeply unlikable but nonetheless compelling. In a similar vein to my review of Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory, it reminded me once again that people deserve liberation from oppression regardless of whether I find them individually likeable. Earlier I mentioned the book being interestingly experimental, and this was one of the experimental bits that I really enjoyed: having a narrative voice that not only directly addresses the reader, but also is quite incisive in its challenge to what I'm sure many readers (including myself) were thinking.

"Tyranny doesn't happen in the blink of an eye," she says. "It is a slow descent, helped by the complicity of those who think they have no power." Later, she adds, "I would've acted differently, you say, thinking up all the different vectors that make you special I would've seen this for what it was. I would stand up against injustice." These were well-timed interjections for me, located around 75% of the way into the book, when things are just about to break bad in a major way and when many readers (talking about myself here) are making comments in their Notes app like "Khall is so annoying lmao girl stand UP." 

Anyway, this book was crazy. It was also devastating and brutal and I probably wouldn't read it again or recommend it to people who don't like being depressed after they're done with a book. Also, a horse really hates to see Elaine Ho coming, I fear. But this was a beautifully written book and even though I need to go lay down and think about my life choices for a while, I really did enjoy the journey.

I picked this book up genuinely at random off the recommendation of a stranger in a TikTok comment section and then I read the whole thing in 4 hours. This book was genuinely so much fun? Once again, I love a concept that really makes me go "How did you even think of this?" and in this case, an iteration of 1969 Madison, WI but with magic and demigods really made me ask that question. 

My likes: The magic in this world was interesting and complex but also not fully explained, which somehow just made it feel even more realistic, like the characters have no need to mull on how magic works because it's just such a normal part of their lives. 

I also was a little worried, based on the time period, that there would be quite a bit more overt homophobia, and I was pleased to be wrong about that—there are some oblique intimations that maybe someone else out there might care about two men in a relationship, but none of that ever shows up from a key character, not even the ones with whom the MCs have tense relationships. As someone who generally prefers not to run into much homophobia in my fantasy (because there's enough of it in the real world) that was really refreshing for me. 

Lastly, I just really enjoyed the personalities of the two MCs. I like that they're very different people with very different backgrounds but it's also clear how and why they would be attracted to each other, magical spoiler reasons notwithstanding. And even though the progression of their relationship is... somewhat nontraditional and definitely not super linear, it's still a believable relationship that isn't forced through any contrived misunderstandings in order to drag out the will-they won't-they tension. 

My gripes: Honestly, none really? I guess maybe it would have been fun to see a little more about where the magic system actually comes from, and I could make a case for dragging the climactic scenes out a little bit just to build suspense, but overally I thought this was a fun and quick-paced book. 

Super glad I took that random TikTok comment rec and now have a new series to hyperfixate on!

I want to start with the things I liked about this book, beginning with the magic system. This review does contain spoilers so please read cautiously! Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan for the ARC, which I received in exchange for an honest review.

I was talking to my roommate about how much we struggle with manga like My Hero Academia and Bleach (walk with me, I swear it's relevant) because it seems that the creator's solution for writing themselves into a corner is to give the protagonist a new skill out of nowhere that will somehow miraculously aid them in escaping their current circumstances. Aside from the classifications of magic, which were already interesting enough, the thing I liked the most about the magic system is how the skill tree is sort of built in, so there's an in-world mechanism for leveling up existing skills through practice and circumstance--which in turn makes it much less jarring when those skills do develop! I also like that the magic school isn't set up as some kind of egalitarian paradise, but rather that it's acknowledged and wrestled with in the text that there's privilege in being able to attend Paragon, and that not everyone has an equal shot at acceptance. 

Secondly, I think the exploration of gender in this book is really interesting. One of the reasons I was interested in reading is because I feel that own-voices trans narratives deserve more of a space in the sci-fi/fantasy literary world, and to that end I think Petra Lord did a really masterful job of exploring the nuances of gender expression in a world where you can theoretically swap between sexes whenever you want (as long as you have the money for it). She does a fantastic job of exploring how alien and claustrophobic Ana's Edgar body feels to her as someone who is decidedly female but stuck in a male body, and how much more at ease she feels when her outsides match her insides -- but she also explores Nell/Wes's somewhat more ambiguous feelings about being born in a female body and now living in a male one, and Nima's feelings about being both at once. The thoughtful handling of these different relationships to gender and sex were one of my favorite things about the book.

Also, the prose was just really lovely! Even on a line-by-line level I felt that descriptions flowed smoothly and that the figurative language was fresh and interesting without seeming overwrought. Interestingly, the word choice also neatly straddled the line between old-fashioned and modern, which gave a sort of timelessness to the setting. Just from an "enjoyment of reading" perspective I really enjoyed that.

However, there were also a few things that were big misses for me. A couple of them are rather minor, so I'll get them out of the way first:

• Why does the word manga exist in this world when Japan doesn't? In fact, early on in the book we get quite a lot of manga references -- that she's a romance manga reader, that her Codex skill is named after a skill in her favorite manga, etc. -- and then after about one-third of the book we never hear about the manga again.
• Nell/Wes is unable to remember her mother's surname following her Ousting because of the memory blocks, but she can remember her father's full name even though they have the same last name. Shouldn't she be unable to remember either OR remember both?
• A curse was used to remove the entire Shenti language from the world, but when Ana enters Khaiovhe's pocket universe she hears characters speaking Shenti. 

The other things that were misses for me were a little more significant. The first is that we're told, repeatedly and by many characters, that Ana is an incredible strategist and a genius planner, and yet we rarely -- if ever -- actually see her strategize on-page. It seemed that most of the planning she does is off-page and only referenced once the action is over. In fact, what we see even more of on-page is Ana rushing headlong and thoughtlessly into danger, then getting her ass kicked -- and more than once, that ass-kicking ends with her somehow succeeding in her goal anyway because the person who kicked her ass is so impressed by her strategy skills. (Huh??) I wish that there had been more work done on-page to establish Ana's critical thinking skills and ability to strategize and come up with plans and gambits for her crew. It just felt quite a lot like the reader is being smacked over the head with the idea that Ana is great at planning, but we're kind of expected to believe it without evidence.

The second bigger miss for me is honestly the whole country of Shenti. The "enemy" country with the bloodthirsty dictator who wants to conquer the whole world, who sends his citizens to "redemption camps" when they outlive their usefulness to the state (or when they commit petty crimes)... is just China? Some of the names of the camps that Khaiovhe liberates are actual Chinese words ("lianhua" means lotus flower and "Hengshui" is an actual city in Hebei province, for example) and others, like Qinhua and Meidong, are pretty clearly meant to draw from Chinese. I guess I personally am just a little tired of second-world fantasy novels using China as the stand-in for the evil warlike nation that the protagonist nation is fighting against, even if it's shown by the end of the book that Caimor isn't all it's cracked up to be either.

All in all, I do think that this book has a really interesting premise, and I think Petra Lord has an absolutely stunning writing style and does a fantastic job with navigating the internal lives of her protagonists. I think she's created a lush and interesting world of magic that is full of potential for incredible storytelling. I just hope that the editors of this and the next books will pay a little more mind to the things mentioned above. Even though this installation didn't totally hit for me, I plan to stay tuned for the second and see where this world will go!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I fuck so heavy with this series... what an absolutely masterful weaving together of stories. This review contains spoilers so be warned!

I appreciate so much about this whole series but in particular I want to highlight that Fonda Lee is an absolute craft master of echoes—Chekov's gun, the way she plants things that pay off 200 pages later, and also how she creates these little moments that mirror each other in different ways across the story. In particular, the way she has Hilo learn how to use his jade abilities to deflect a car bomb and then like half the book later, just when we've forgotten about him learning how to do that, he gets blown up by a bomb and ends up protecting himself from it?! She had me a nervous wreck waiting to find out if Hilo would still be alive and I didn't even remember that he probably had the skills to handle an attack in that way! 

I also love and absolutely hate the way she will mercilessly kill a beloved character on-page for... really what seems like almost no reason. As furious as I was at Ru's death, and despite having said that it seems like no reason, the fact is that it is for a reason and I know what that reason is: to really drive home how easy and how fast it is for someone to be killed in this jade world she's created. 

Fonda Lee has created a completely gorgeous world in this series and I'm devastated that there's not more to read, but I guess that just means I'm going to have to go right back and start over again with Jade City, huh? I will be thinking about this series for a long time. 

(ALSO WHEN DO I GET MY TV SERIES PLS I BEG!)

This was such fun read and I loved it! 

The base premise of "what if grad school but for D&D classes" is absolutely delightful, and although I could absolutely see the Critical Role influence a mile away I thought this was such a fun and fresh interpretation! As an avid D&D player myself I am hugely in favor of stories set in that kind of universe, particularly if they have a new and modern twist, so this book was a perfect fit into that niche for me. 

I also really like the type of storytelling where you can tell that there's something major in a character's past, but the character themselves doesn't reveal it until later on and mostly thinks about whatever it was in little glimpses—I find that much more realistic than a big info dump at the beginning of the story, because after a certain amount of time I think a lot of us don't consider our traumas to be a narrative, rather we think about the bits and ways it affects our daily lives but don't necessarily reflect on the whole. Getting to learn about Sebastian's past in little bits, seeing how it impacts the development of his relationship with Elethior, and yet not really getting to put the entire picture together until the very end was a really interesting tactic and I felt that it paid off well here.

The sort of stumbling way that Sebastian and Elethior interact with each other and slowly get closer was really satisfying for me, and even though I'm not normally one who goes for the "persistent misunderstandings" trope I think that it was executed quickly enough here that it didn't drag on unnecessarily and actually contributed to the characters' development, which was nice. 

Lastly, what a super satisfying ending. I feel like Sara Raasch really understood the assignment and executed on it perfectly. 

What a fun book, I'm so glad I got the rec on TikTok and then saw it on the shelf at the bookstore!

 

This was a very enjoyable read for me! I absolutely loved seeing a high fantasy epic adventure plotline reimagined through an Indigenous lens, and I found myself really rooting for and mourning these characters as they went through their trials and tribulations.

I also really enjoyed that this book is so clearly influenced by Indigenous oral storytelling traditions. The little asides from the narrator to the reader were a nice touch, and I appreciated that they were so often phrased as if the narrator expects the reader to be part of the tradition while also giving enough information to clue you in if you aren't. (For example: "As you know if you are of the sea...")

I will confess I struggled a little with the Tlingit language that's interspersed throughout, but that's primarily because I'm not very familiar with the language; once I was able to get into the flow of reading, it was easy to remember which words meant what, even if I still wouldn't feel confident pronouncing them aloud, and they really did a lot to add flavor to the story overall.

If I had one very minor gripe, it would be that I feel that the Koosh could have been slightly more humanized or at the very least compelling -- I felt that we didn't get enough from him to convince me that Elan's decision to travel to the Door was justified by anything other than pure intellectual curiosity. Or maybe it's enough that Elan is motivated by pure intellectual curiosity! But after such vivid descriptions of the destructive power of the dzanti, I guess I felt like I needed a little more to feel like it was worth it.

Overall I really enjoyed this book and would certainly recommend it to any readers who like fantasy/speculative fiction, especially if they're interested in Indigenous fiction. Thank you to Solaris Books and NetGalley for the ARC, which I received in return for my honest review!

 

You know, I just really did not think I was going to like this sequel as much as I did! Sequels are pretty risky in general especially when the first book concluded well, but because the release of The Brightness Between Us was actually my introduction to this series (when I spotted it at random on a shelf at B&N) I felt like I was obligated to give it a try.

And I am sure glad I did, because this was so very well done. Funnily enough I actually started out this book by thinking that the kids were annoying as hell, and then I realized that actually, I was also annoying as hell at that age -- developmentally appropriate annoyingness? It was a small thing but really served to underline that really, no matter what planet you're growing up on, humanity has certain things that are intrinsic. Like being a know-it-all as a young teenager.

Additionally, the split narrative of what's happening on Minerva versus what's happening down on Earth was handled nicely and I felt that each segment really served to support the other, rather than feeling like two totally discrete storylines happening at the same time. I obviously wondered, like probably everyone else, what would have happened to the OGs back on Earth, and now my curiosity is not only satisfied, but another mystery from Minerva is also solved, allowing for an ending that might not exactly be *happy* but is almost certainly what they needed.

Being a huge sucker for a soulmates-type narrative as well, this was just a delicious meal for me. What do you MEAN they were destined to be together in every possible timeline! What do you MEAN, ELIOT!!!!

Overall, four out of five stars from me, really gorgeously done follow-up that feels necessary and not gratuitous at all, and which led to a wonderfully satisfying conclusion(?) to the series. 

 

Yaa Gyasi's cover blurb really says it all: "Tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought." What an absolutely beautiful love letter, what a gorgeous meditation on the challenge and struggle but also the irrepressible beauty and richness of Black culture.

I will say that if you're looking for a plot-heavy book where A Lot of Things Happen, this might not be the book for you. This is more of a close, intimate exploration of one individual's mindset and the way they move through the world around them, rather than being a novel that's driven by plot beats and the forward motion of a story. But if you're interested in that kind of introspective, deep character exploration, then I would absolutely recommend this book.

Maybe because the book is so short (only 160 pages!), this is a work where it feels like every single sentence is contributing equally to the story. As you read, you get not only an exploration of the artists and thinkers who shaped our narrator's worldview, but also this incredibly vivid, lush world that's build around him to the point where you can almost feel the heat of summer or the rain in winter and understand how those things contribute to the emotional state of the characters. 

All in all, this was an absolutely gorgeous read, a very quick one at that (at least for me) but one that didn't leave me wanting at all. Between the thoughtful character exploration and the vivid and skillful use of figurative and descriptive language throughout, I felt so connected to these characters and what they're going through, and overall absolutely loved this book.

One recommendation though: Read with a notebook and pen handy so you can write down all the names of musicians, artists, songs, books etc. that get mentioned!

 

After I read Come Closer, my chief complaint was that I was tired of women protagonists in horror novels who are unable to recognize their own haunting or who, rather than fight against the entity, just accept their fate and let it do what it wants. I know that this is a common theme in horror for a reason but I guess at a certain point I'd just like the women to take a W, you know?

And for that reason I am super glad I read Diavola. While a lot of the plot beats are very classic for a haunting story -- a big old house, a mysterious force, unexplained happenings that people around the protagonist are willing to write off -- and there is an element of the entity following Anna home to haunt and attempt to consume her, there is also a huge thread of Anna being unwilling to just let that happen. Or rather, she does to an extent, enough to do some damage to her life before she gets her ass in gear and goes back to kick some ghost butt.

I think that was what I enjoyed most about the story. Of course the writing is very atmospheric, I loved the descriptive language that was used especially around the property and house in Italy, but the thing I loved the most was Anna's willingness to commit to NOT letting some centuries-old lady with a grudge use her for an agenda. I loved how much agency she had and even though she spends most of the book being treated kind of like crap by her family, she's not beaten down to the point of submission but rather uses that to fuel her desire to fight back.

There were a lot of things I think this book did really well, and also a couple that maybe could have used some fleshing out -- for example, we're introduced to these ghostly neighbor kids who end up not really mattering all that much, and I feel like there could have been a little more buildup in the family's interactions with other villagers not only to establish that the house itself is a creepy and reviled place but also to help us as readers understand the history of what happened there.

That said, overall this was a really enjoyable read for me and I'm glad I picked it up! Thank you for healing in me what Come Closer broke, lol. 

 

Okay, genuinely I picked this book up for the lols because it was randomly recommended on my Kindle Unlimited page, so tell me why this was actually weirdly thoughtful and introspective as well as being spicy? 🤪

In seriousness, I went into this expecting pretty much your standard human/non-human smut that focuses much more on the, er, intimate details than it does on the actual world that the characters exist in, but that's not at all what you get out of this. I mean, don't get me wrong, there is definitely smut, but there's also quite a lot of detail about the world and society that make the whole narrative ring a lot more true. 

For example, our main character Violet is a recent college graduate who's facing pressure from her parents to either find herself a job or move back home -- extremely relatable as a college graduate who also got a degree that didn't lead directly to a ton of job prospects. She takes a job at the "milking" farm without entirely knowing what it would entail, then promptly kind of panics about it and has a whole conversation with herself about whether the pay and benefits are worth it, ultimately deciding that she'd rather work there than face going back home to live with her parents. (Real as hell, girl!) 

Lastly, one thing that I feel is often missing from books like this is a realistic look at a society that contains both humans and non-human or human-hybrid populations. This book I felt did a good job of exploring how those tensions would play out in society without, as some books do, leaning too heavily into the "separate but equal" heavy-handed metaphor for racism in the modern US. Obviously there are parallels, but it doesn't feel like being hit over the head with it, which I appreciate as it allows the reader to naturally come to that inevitable conclusion. 

Honestly, for a book I picked up with low expectations I am very pleasantly surprised and will probably continue to read the rest of the series!

After spending quite a while trying to decide where to start with this one, I'm going to try to split this review up two ways, based on the style and the content.

Stylistically, I find the prose in this collection absolutely decadent. Vanessa Fogg is unbearably talented; her sentences are tight and often spare, but with every single verb and adjective seemingly chosen to be as incisive and exquisite as possible. Her stories full of fragmented sentences that help to buoy along a sense of otherworldliness in both the Closer and Farther sections of the collection. I also often felt that her choice of language was tailored closely to the setting of each story, so that at no point was there a sense of disconnect between the world and the words being used to describe it.

Content-wise, I fear that I'm obsessed with every single story! Some of them were funny, some of them were tender, some of them were frightening ("Traces of Us" made me cry on the airplane; "Fanfiction for a Grimdark Universe" made me laugh out loud; "Sweetest" genuinely scared the crap out of me). And yet I think that at the core, all of them were bound together by this common thread of humanity.

The first half of the book, Closer Worlds, is dedicated mostly to stories that feel very firmly tethered to the world that we currently occupy. There are references to familiar places and people that give the stories a strong sense of being located somewhere in our timeline, not too far from us either in the future or the past. Even in the stories that don't name the setting (e.g. "Taiya"), the choice of words and the actions of the characters suggest something familiar even in its strangeness.

In contrast, the latter half of the book, Farther Worlds, is full of stories set in places totally outside the Earth we know, in fantastical worlds with demon kings and dolphin spirits and students of illusion. The language with which these stories are written make them feel rich with otherness, both in the descriptions of the magics and spirits and in the landscapes where the stories are taking place.

But whether or not the story is taking place in a distant world or a nearby one, the one thing that ties all of the stories together is this poignant exploration of the core desire to connect with each other and to find beauty even among the struggle and the suffering. I think at the end of the day if I were going to try to describe what this collection is about, that's what I would say. Each of the stories was a beautiful read on its own, but told together they really drive the message home.

If you, like me, are not usually a reader of short story collections, but you like speculative fiction and have an appreciation for well-crafted and beautifully-written prose, I would definitely recommend you give this collection a shot.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for the chance to read!

For New York poet and heiress Ivy Yada-Lovell, being thrust unexpectedly into the English gentry when her brother inherits a title is like entering a new world entirely. Berkshire is a place steeped in tradition; although women can marry women and men can marry men, titles can be inherited only by blood-related sons and well-bred women are expected to follow well-bred paths. At first, Ivy thinks her only duties in her new home will be to learn how the upper class works and find her brother a wife, but when she finds herself falling for one of the daughters from the neighboring estate, Ivy will be forced to not only confront her own presuppositions, but to much better understand the society in which she now lives if she has any hope of keeping her new love.

Unlike Jade City, the first novel in the series, this installation is less insularly focused on the clans of Janloon and much more interested in the way that Janloon interacts sociopolitically with the rest of the world around it. If you thought Fonda Lee's worldbuilding was impressive when she was only focusing on one nation, just freaking wait until you see how she handles the global politics of an entire world. Like, genuinely the way she writes these countries interacting with each other and the delicacy of the meetings and politics made me Google to find out whether she holds a degree in international relations.

(In case you were curious, it doesn't seem like she does -- she does have an MBA though!) 

I'm writing this review from the perspective of someone who's already finished the series, and in hindsight it's really clear to see the way that Fonda Lee was guiding the establishment of setting across the trilogy. Jade City was all about Janloon; Jade War now allows the reader's viewpoint to expand outside that nation and see how the clans and jade warriors are received and perceived in other nations around the world. While Jade City made it seem like the war between No Peak and the Mountain might be something that could be won solely on Kekonese soil, Jade War makes it clear that this won't be the case -- that both clans will need to expand their worldviews if they want to have a hope of staying relevant and overcoming the challenges that face them.

It really is such an impressive talent for a writer to be able to craft a narrative that spans so many different countries as well as so much time and still keep the reader engaged and not lose them along the way. Even though Jade War spans a longer time period and is much more expansive than Jade City, because Fonda Lee spent so much time in Jade City making sure the readers were intimately familiar with her characters, the second installation is equally easy to follow and in my opinion lost no intrigue from the expanded viewpoint.

Far from being a "weak link" in the series (as second books often are), I found Jade War to be a necessary building block and interesting all on its own merits.

This was a reread for me, having already completed this series once in like 2023 maybe. And once again I do understand why this series is so polarizing! The content is pretty heavy—there are on-page depictions of assault (sexual and otherwise), there's slavery, there's fantasy racism, there's just a lot going on. 

But like I said in my review for Dark Heir, I feel like one of C.S. Pacat's strengths as a writer is in his ability to navigate the moral grayness of institutions and circumstances in a way that feels authentic while still remaining hopeful. This is true throughout the entire Captive Prince series, and this is the book where she lays the groundwork for the way that relationships and attitudes will change and grow throughout the rest of the trilogy. Neither of the two main kingdoms in this series are particularly sympathetic—both participate in slavery, both have some somewhat archaic (by my modern American standards) attitudes toward women and consequently some very narrow definitions of masculinity. It's no surprise that Laurent and Damen are therefore not always particularly sympathetic protagonists, since their attitudes and behaviors are informed by the cultures that shaped them.

That said, what I do think a lot of readers miss in this series is that Pacat isn't condoning these attitudes and expectations. On the contrary, especially on this reread it seemed pretty obvious to me that a lot of the work the books are doing is getting Damen and Laurent to overcome the circumstances that inform their behaviors, to break away from those expectations and to make their own decisions and grow stronger as a result. A lot of the 1-star reviews I've seen for this are like "eww rape shouldn't be titillating!" and like... yeah! It shouldn't! And it's not, it's pretty clearly always presented in a negative light even when the characters themselves don't necessarily see it for what it is (yet).

For me personally this book is a really excellent example of building from the ground up, both in terms of the world itself and the characters who populate it. I've very rarely read an enemies-to-lovers story where I actually buy that they were enemies to start with and slowly start to fall for each other, but in my opinion Pacat pulls it off without it being cheesy or contrived. It takes a long time and a lot of work for the relationship to blossom and that, along with the hard and sometimes embarrassing work that the characters do to unlearn the negative things they've carried with them from their upbringings, is what makes this series so endearing to me.

(Two notes: One, again, C.S. Pacat is genderqueer and uses both she/her and he/him pronouns, so I've used both throughout this review. Two, because I read all three of these books in close succession I'm going to use the same review for all three, sorry!)

This was a reread for me, so obviously already a book series I enjoyed... but once again I am reminded of why C.S. Pacat is the only bitch I trust with a real enemies-to-lovers arc. This book is such a tense but ultimately satisfying payoff of so many plot threads that were woven through the previous two books, and I really love how many subtle (and tbh sometimes less subtle) moments there are where Damen and Laurent really get to serve as mirrors for themselves earlier in the series. You get to see where some of those motivations came from and how they moved through them to get to where they are now.

This was a reread for me, having already completed this series once in like 2023 maybe. And once again I do understand why this series is so polarizing! The content is pretty heavy—there are on-page depictions of assault (sexual and otherwise), there's slavery, there's fantasy racism, there's just a lot going on. 

 

For a short book this was well-paced in my opinion, and I think Gran does a good job of letting the narration reflect Amanda's declining mental state. It was a quick read but an impactful one.

However -- and I recognize that this is maybe a petty complaint -- I do wish that Amanda had a little more agency in this book. I think maybe I'm just tired of horror stories where women get the short end of the stick.

Like, on the one hand I recognize that part of the horror element of a book like this is that the narrator isn't powerful enough to resist the entity that's trying to take them over, and to that end, as I said, I think Gran does a really good job of letting the actual language and narration reflect the way that Amanda's mind is fracturing. You really do get a sense, while reading, that the words themselves are being used to reflect the way the demon is taking her over, and that's a gorgeously unsettling experience to read through! 

On the other hand -- you're telling me that she didn't even once notice that this demon was taking over her life until she was too far gone to do anything about it? It was like Amanda was just a passive observer in her own life, allowing things to happen to her, noting these weird happenings and doing very little to stop them. She goes to an occult shop once to get... an anti-demon potion of some kind and then pretty much does nothing with it. She starts missing huge chunks of time and doesn't seem to be all that concerned about it. 

I don't know! I think that maybe if there had been a little bit more of a struggle for control, even if it ended in Amanda being consumed by the demon, I probably would have felt a little more satisfied with this book. 

Nonetheless, it is absolutely gorgeously written and I did really enjoy reading it, so if you're into horror (especially demon possession horror) then I would certainly recommend it!

This was a reread for me, having already completed this series once in like 2023 maybe. And once again I do understand why this series is so polarizing! The content is pretty heavy—there are on-page depictions of assault (sexual and otherwise), there's slavery, there's fantasy racism, there's just a lot going on. 

As a big fan of C.S. Pacat's Captive Prince series and also an avid consumer of pretty much anything dark-magic-fantasy, Dark Rise hit my TBR as soon as it was released. However, I held off on actually starting the series until
Dark Heir came out, because I was under the impression it was a duology—uhh, spoilers, I was wrong! But that's fine, because both of the books are immensely enjoyable anyway and even though I'm furious (/j) with Pacat for leaving me on a cliffhanger, I still had a really good time getting there.

I am glad I read the author's notes on this one because I was thinking "damn, this is like Gossip Girl was even more racist and the stakes were way higher," and then at the end I read how the author was inspired to write it by watching Gossip Girl and observing how few people there were on that show who looked like her. So in that respect I think the idea definitely got across! The tension-building in this story is so excellent to the point that by the end you really don't know who the characters can trust, and there were a couple of scenes that made me feel like, for-real genuinely palpable fear for the characters. Beautifully executed.

I love reading a book that makes me think "how the hell did anybody come up with this idea?" And I really enjoyed the idea's execution here.

At the outset this book really just seems like pretty straightforward YA sci-fi fare. An astronaut wakes up on a spaceship midway through its mission and has to figure out what the mission is and what he's meant to be doing, with the aid of an onboard computer... Only, as it turns out, things aren't quite as straightforward as they seem. Honestly, having read Project Hail Mary not too long before I read this one, I was sort of thinking that it was giving Andy Weir -- only to be promptly proven wrong by the events of the latter half of the book.

Honestly, the plot of this was super fascinating. I think Eliot Schrefer did such a good job dropping hints about what was going to happen, but not so obviously that I was able to figure it out before things started getting revealed. I was interested in the way the characters were developing and the relationship between them, and there were definitely clues that things were about to break bad, but when things really started racing along that's when I started thinking to myself "How the f does someone even come up with this story?"

I also really appreciated the way that the characters' queerness was handled in the narrative. That is to say, it's basically uneventful and one of the least noteworthy things about either of them. I really find it refreshing when a character being gay or bi or otherwise attracted to the same gender isn't treated as any stranger a fact about them than their hair or eye color -- especially in speculative fiction books where society has theoretically evolved past that kind of social division or oppression.

This is a YA book and it does read like a YA book, but it feels like Eliot Schrefer is an author who understands that just because a reader is younger doesn't mean they're dumb. There are some pretty adult themes handled gracefully in this story and it really felt like the author was presenting them in an appropriate way and trusting the reader to be able to handle it. I enjoyed that, because I think YA readers are a lot brighter than some authors give them credit for and I hate nothing more than a YA book that feels condescending to read. 

All in all, I really enjoyed this and I recommend it to YA readers of speculative fiction!

I keep recommending this book to everyone with the blurb, "Imagine like an 80s Hong Kong gangster film but with superpowers," and that seems to really sell it for a lot of people, so let me start off that way! 

Honestly, I love this book and I think it is an extremely good stepping off point for a series. Jade City seems mostly to be about establishing the clans in Janloon and the jade abilities and responsibilities that come with clan membership, and I think Fonda Lee does a really masterful job with that -- she focuses tightly on this island nation and its capital city and the people who live there, and she really brings the readers in close to get intimate with these characters. She makes us come to care about them quite a lot -- for better or for worse, she says, still heartbroken...

Although the issue with a second-world fantasy novel can often lie in creating a believable magic system that has its own internal logic and also follows the laws of the world in which it resides, it seems like Fonda Lee has no struggles there. The jade system and the abilities jade grants are SO realistically and firmly rooted in the sociopolitical landscape of the world she created that it feels incredibly natural and just as much a part of life in Janloon as death or taxes. I honestly don't think I've ever read a fantasy series that had a magic system so deeply and intentionally rooted in the daily lives of the average people of the world that contains it. 

Also, not to be dramatic, but this book has exactly the same problem as the Redwall series: Please, Fonda, I beg you to stop describing extremely delicious-sounding food items if you don't plan on releasing a cookbook, it's just torture at this point!

For a very long time my Goodreads review of this book just said "NORA!!!!!!!!!" and that still encapsulates many of my feelings, so let me just preserve that for posterity.

I saw someone on TikTok not that long ago refer to AFTG as a "period piece," and while I did take quite a bit of psychic damage from that, it's not like they were wrong. The original series was quite obviously written during a different time period when Nora was a different writer, and a long time has passed between her writing those books and her starting on these, so it's no surprise that this Sunshine Court series has a slightly different tone. I think it's a positive -- the original books do have some language and themes that are reflective of the times (so to speak) and it's nice that Nora seems to be aware of that and is handling things differently in this series. There's more diversity, more thoughtful handling of identity topics, etc.

And on top of that! I would fucking die for Jean and Jeremy actually. These fake lacrosse boys have me in an absolute chokehold. I really hate to use tropey language to describe characters because I don't want to minimize a long and complex series into a few sentences, but Jean really is the black cat character (who secretly has a soft heart and a desire to be loved) and Jeremy really is the golden retriever (whose constant smile actually hides the crushing weight on his shoulders). I love relationship dynamics like that and consequently this new series has me deeply fucked up. 

This book came out on my birthday and I read the whole thing in one night while at a hotel in Seattle to celebrate with my friend whose birthday is the day after me. Like, don't @ me. 

Anyway honestly I can't say that these books are the best ever written or that the narration is groundbreaking and Shakespearean. But what these books do have are characters with compelling motivations and strong internal logics (even if those logics aren't always the best) who are just trying to do their best with the shitty hands that have been dealt to them, learning how to be better for themselves and how to lean on each other as they go.

As always, respect the trigger warnings, but please do give the fake lacrosse boys a chance to break your heart! You (and they) deserve it! 

Wow! This book is like one long trolley problem. I like the way it grapples with the utilitarian ethics of the greatest good for the greatest number, and the morality of deciding who gets to live and who must die; I also like the Minority Report-esque angle of "is it right to punish a person (or a people) for a sin they haven't yet committed?" 

I liked this! It was a spooky read that was well-paced for the length, and gave House of Leaves vibes without all the turning the book upside down to read. It wasn't the most satisfying ending in the world, but the acknowledgements said he got a three-book deal so maybe there's a sequel?? Anyway, I enjoyed reading this despite my momentary confusion about why this girl in Oregon was pumping her own gas. (Which is legal now anyway so I don't know why it threw me off so bad lol)

I really enjoyed this read! It's more of a slice-of-life romance(?) type book than I usually go for, but I was intrigued by how it would handle the topic of Jude's depression in particular as someone who has been diagnosed with major depressive disorder myself.

Interestingly, although sometimes Jude's internal monologue felt like a drag, it didn't actually bother me because that too felt realistic? Which depressed bitches among us haven't gotten into a downward spiral and then though "man, even I think I'm a slog right now." I also enjoyed that it wasn't a case of magical healing dick or that Jude's depression was fixed by getting a new boyfriend. It was very clearly an up-and-down where sometimes he seemed to be doing okay and then something could kick his feet out from under him in the next chapter. By the end of the book I did sense a difference and a general upward trajectory but that had less to do with Faron himself and more to do with just having support and understanding while Jude gets himself back on track, I guess.

The one thing I wish there had been a little more of was exploration of Faron's feelings toward Jude. Of course it's a limited perspective book, but it would have been nice to get a little of what Faron was thinking through some of the events of this novel, as well as just understanding more of what attracted Faron to Jude in the first place.

I also like that it's noted in the text that there's sort of an inherent power dynamic between Faron as a Black man and Jude as a white man, but I do wish that thought had been explored with a little more depth, I guess. I kind of feel like it came up a couple times but there wasn't really much in the plot that demonstrated it out in the real-world day to day, if that makes sense.

But still, I liked the writing and enjoyed the story so four stars from me!

Unfortunately I just think me and V.E. Schwab are not destined lovers and that is A-OK! 

For me, however, this book was not interesting or compelling. I didn't like either Victor or Eli (who I presume are the titular Villains of the series) and neither of them had motivations that particularly compelled me. In fact, both of them pretty much just seemed like white men who feel that power and influence is owed to them for no other reason than because they want it... Is that the point? Maybe that's the point, but if so I didn't think the commentary was delivered effectively enough for the message to land.

Mostly I just spent my time reading of this book wondering when either of these two dudes was going to do something that made me feel like I actually cared about what they were up to.

I did like the side characters though! I liked Mitch and Sydney and the dog, and honestly I did think that the idea behind this book was interesting -- just that the two main characters weren't compelling enough to carry it for me. Alas! 

Many of the criticisms I see of this book have to do with "nothing happens." And honestly, in a way I agree! If you're the type of reader who is looking for action and a climax and a resolution, this really might not be the book for you, and that's totally fine. But I also don't think it's entirely fair to say that nothing happens.

This book was strangely both disquieting and oddly comforting for me. The premise is pretty straightforward, I guess: a group of women are kept in a cage guarded by men. The older women in the group remember life before the cage, but the narrator, who was either born in the cage or was a very young child upon arrival, has no such memories. Eventually, the women break free of their captivity and emerge out into a desolate, empty world, where they appear to be the only survivors.

There is no explanation given for why the world is how it is, or how the women ended up in the cage. Many of the questions a reader might naturally ask about the setting are never answered. And to me, it felt like that might have been the point, a little bit. The novel seemed to me to be an exploration of what it means to take control of your own life, even if that's desolate and frightening to do, because the alternative is so much worse. 

For me personally, it did help to contextualize the contents of this novel to know that Jacqueline Harpman's father was a Dutch-born Jew, and that she and her family fled to Casablanca during World War II; they didn't return until after the war ended, and much of her paternal family died in Auschwitz. I think knowing that made the bleakness of the novel make so much more sense -- this idea that it's better to take hold of your own destiny no matter how desolate it might be than to remain at someone else's mercy even if it's comfortable to do so.

This is definitely a quiet novel and does not contain much by way of action. It's extremely introspective about human nature, in particular women, and how women might act under circumstances like these. It left me feeling sort of unsettled but not entirely in a negative way, and is absolutely a book I'll be thinking about for a long time to come.

As someone who is not particularly science-minded myself, I sometimes find myself steering away from hard sci-fi because I'm worried about not understanding it. My godmother encouraged me to read this book ahead of the movie coming out, and although I was initially a little reluctant, I'm really glad that I did -- and that my worries about not being science-y enough to understand the book were unfounded!

This was my first Andy Weir book so I'm not sure how well this conclusion carries across his other works, but at least within this book I felt that although the science was well-founded and seemed realistic enough (to my untrained eye, anyway) it was also explained in such a way that it was easy to understand. I didn't feel like the explanations went completely over my head -- I was able to follow the logic and the explanations and more or less understand why a plan would or wouldn't work. Maybe this is in part because the narrator is a science teacher and he's explaining things to people who aren't scientists themselves... Whatever the reason, it super helped!

Another thing I found interesting was the way that the gaps in the narrator's memory are slowly filled in over the course of the book. Obviously the stakes for the mission are extremely high, so it's not possible for him to just sit around waiting to remember things -- he has to get to work and then also remember as he goes, which means by the time he finally remembers everything about the events leading to his participation in the mission, we're already in deep. That was a really effective narrative technique here, in my opinion.

My only mild gripe is with the ending -- I honestly, really and truly didn't think we needed the last chapter... But that's fully just because of my preference for storytelling, and it did not at all impact my enjoyment of the rest of the book. (Besides, it wasn't like I HATED the last chapter, I just think it might have been a little more punchy without it!) 

Overall, I'm glad I took my godmother's advice and I think this would be a great hard sci-fi book for someone like me who doesn't often pursue hard sci-fi out of fear of not understanding.

A fun read, and I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't as brainless as I thought it was going to be! I think this has a good combination of character, plot, worldbuilding, and politics without being overwhelmingly skewed in one direction or another, which is how I prefer my fantasy reads.

Praise: I love a good enemies-to-lovers, and I also love a good human-fey romance, so we were already off to a good start. Also, a lot of the "high" or "second world" fantasy I've read tends to set up bigotry between, like, orcs because they're ✨️so warlike✨️ versus the other ✨️more civilized✨️ species, so it was kind of fresh for me at least that in this book it seemed to be set up between high fey vs. humans based on their access to certain types of magic, with the "good" and "bad" magic being defined less by the actual results and more by one queen who was so pissed at her boyfriend she made his existence illegal.

(Side note, does anyone else feel that the terms high/low fantasy and second/first world fantasy are becoming increasingly meaningless as speculative fiction and specifically romantasy becomes more developed as a genre? Or is that just me?)

I also like that our main character isn't afraid to be emotional, but also that his emotions include rage and determination and bravery even when being brave means being stupid. He doesn't need to be saved by our big handsome prince, and in fact he's more than willing to kick the prince's ass and call him an idiot to his face.

Gripes: I think this book could have used a better editor. There are a lot of places where the sentence structure disagrees with itself: Page 112, "Practically hopping up and down as he reached the entranced, Cylvan just rolled his eyes and stepped off to the side." The first half of the sentence is grammatically describing Cylvan, but it's actually Saffron who's doing the hopping. And this exact structure shows up a lot. There are sooo many sentences that are structured "[Verb]ing, [character] does blahblah..." but in many cases the prose would be better served by a simpler construction, e.g. "Saffron was practically hopping up and down by the time he reached the entrance, but Cylvan just rolled his eyes and stepped off to the side." I don't know if this is the kind of thing anyone else notices but I noticed it to the point of being distracted by it, at least in the beginning.

Additionally, I do honestly feel like we skimmed past the part where Cylvan sets Saffron up to basically be gang-raped a little too quickly? Either that or I read a much more severe implication into the party scene with the powdered fairy fruits, but to me it felt like Cylvan gave Saffron the fruit knowing it would make him incapable of consent, which is why he split so fast after... And then it's like largely not touched on ever again, even in the scene where Cylvan is begging forgiveness. That was kinda wild.

But still, despite the above gripes I did enjoy the book and I'll probably read books 2 and 3, while crossing my fingers deeply that it doesn't take until the end of book 3 for them to finally figure it out and get together...

Rating: ★★★☆☆ - I enjoyed the read and would recommend it to people who enjoy this genre and subject, but at this time I feel I'm not likely to re-read.

Daunis is a child of two very different worlds, descended from both the historically French settlers of her Michigan town and the native Ojibwe people who live on a reservation nearby--and yet, she doesn't quite fit into either place. After putting her dreams of university on hold to care for her mother following a family tragedy, Daunis doesn't have too much going for her, except for Jamie--a new recruit on her brother's hockey team, who's kind and charming and very similar to Daunis in his relationship to his own Native family.

Soon thereafter, though, tragedy strikes Daunis' community yet again, thrusting her into the heart of a criminal investigation that takes her undercover to investigate the very tribe that she grew up with. But the more death, betrayal, and deception she witnesses, the more it calls into question how far Daunis is willing to go to protect her community, and in fact who her community needs protection from.

I absolutely loved this book--it literally made me cry twice. What an absolutely gorgeous exploration of not only the tragedy and pain facing Native rez communities today, but at the same time the joy and power of Native culture and community. It would be so easy for a less talented (or non-#OwnVoices) author to turn this narrative into tragedy porn, but Boulley expertly weaves together threads of generational trauma and institutionalized violence and colonization into a rich, thoughtful, nuanced tapestry. And woven in right alongside those threads of trauma are equally strong threads of good medicine and the wisdom of elders and powerful women and the strength and importance of indigeneity and language.

And the thing is, this isn't just fiction. As I read, I was also reminded of the continuing injustice for missing and murdered Indigenous women in the US and Canada every day, and how critical it is that we not turn our eyes away. These are real questions and problems that are faced by Native communities in the real world, and so my urging would be that if you read and loved this book like I did, that you also give your attention to the non-fictional Native people who need support in their fight against injustice and governmental neglect.