sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: alternate earth

This book is more deliberately YA flavoured than Novik's previous novels, featuring that now-classic trope of magic boarding school. The main character is a teen girl named El who is in her second-to-last year at the Scholomance, a school with no teachers and lots of deadly magic monsters that want to kill/eat the teenagers who inhabit it. (Students attend this school anyway because the rate of survival for magic teens outside the Scholomance is even worse!) El is an outsider who doesn't have friends and allies to help her survive school the way many of the kids do. But the boy who's the best at killing monsters seems weirdly invested in helping her, much to her suspicion!

Tbh my main opinion of the book is that it leaves me cold. I just never really cared! It's slick and well paced and well written, and very more-ish, but it doesn't feel to me like there's much actual heart in it. Like, I was warned it is a bit of a horror novel, but it didn't ever feel even a little bit horror to me because despite the high stakes for all the characters at all times, the stakes never felt worrying. Lots of people will die gruesomely and it's fine, basically? I think it might be a better book if it leaned more into the horror actually!

But as it was I just slid along easily through the prose to the end of the book and only had a bit of a small feeling about what was happening like, once. A little bit.

This is not Novik's usual flaw in writing, in my experience, and it's weird! Usually I CARE even if I'm mad about her choices. So I'm not sure what happened here. Especially since her most recent book before this one (Spinning Silver) was so absolutely brilliant and I adored it, and this feels like such a large step down. A really disappointing reading experience for me.

Novik does also continue her tradition of writing books that clearly and obviously need lesbians and have no lesbians, much to my dismay (and, okay, some amusement). El's male love interest Orion OBVIOUSLY needed to be a butch lesbian instead and it's a tragedy he isn't. (Not as much of a tragedy as the lack of lesbians in Spinning Silver and Uprooted though. Those ones demanded lesbians, whereas this one merely would be better with lesbians.)

On a final note: the first thing I remember hearing about this book when it came out was that it's racist, so I do feel the need to acknowledge this aspect. There was one passage about a black character's hair that was notably bad, and Novik has removed that passage from future editions and issued an apology; the ebook I read did not contain the passage in question. The other issues that I've seen raised, I've seen people of colour having widely disparate opinions as to whether they're actual issues in context or not, so I as a white person do not feel qualified to have an opinion about who's right. So that's just something to keep in mind for people interested in reading the book. But as you can probably tell from the review above, I'm not exactly recommending the book regardless!

The thing about this series that has been nagging at me from the first book, but haven't been able to articulate to myself until now, is that it is simultaneously too hopeful and not hopeful enough. It makes it hard to believe in the hopeful future the books are clearly trying to work towards. ( cut for spoilers for the end of this book ) And one of the the other effects of this hope/hopelessness is it also kind of makes me feel like the efforts at diversity are asking for an ally cookie instead of feeling like what would actually happen in the version of history posited by the series. Given how sexist/racist/homophobic/etc the powers that be are, would they really be letting all these people into space? Even given the dire urgency caused by the asteroid? Bigoted people will shoot themselves in their own foot facilitate their continued bigotry tbh!!

I rated the previous books in this series highly and wrote positive reviews, but I had a sense of unease all along that I just ignored because I couldn't figure out what I was reacting to. I'm still not sure I'm able to fully explain my position here, but. The above at least points towards it.

Anyway, let me talk more about this book specifically! This book focuses on a different female astronaut than the Lady Astronaut herself. The hero of this book is Nicole Wargin, caught between her professional ambitions and her role as a political spouse to support her husband. I really enjoyed this aspect of the story. But the main driving plot of the book is: there's one or more saboteurs on the moon, endangering everyone in the nascent colony there! And this was EXTREMELY STRESSFUL for me to read about, which made the whole book super hard for me to actually read. I nearly gave up on it several times.

This was made harder by the fact that I was reading it while away in a provincial park on a canoe trip with no internet access, so I couldn't google for spoilers to lower my stress levels as I otherwise would have!

I also was not a fan of the fact that ( spoilers! )

Anyway I do overall still like this series, but not as much as I once did.

Oh boy. Hmm. Where to start? A brilliant book, but I have some complicated feelings about it, so let's see if I can work through those by writing about it!

In this book, Cara is a traverser, someone who travels between different versions of the world for her job. The reason she can do this: she's dead in most other versions of reality, and you can only go to worlds where you don't already exist. So most traversers come from difficult backgrounds, the kind of lives where you have a lot of near misses with death. Between her history and her job, she has something of a complicated relationship with her own identity, and with the concept of death! She also has a complicated relationship with her handler, Dell, involving flirtation from Cara and a certain degree of mutual attraction, and Dell keeping firm boundaries that make it clear she'll never be willing to respond or act on this attraction.

It's a book with a lot to say about what makes a person who they are, about class dynamics and the huge effects they have on everyone's lives, about what it means to love someone (both platonic and romantic), and about evil capitalist tech bro billionaires.

All of this is GREAT. But I found the book very slow to start; it took quite a while before I was into it. And even after I got interested, it took even longer for me to be really invested. I think this might be because the book is doing enough unexpected things that it took a long time for me to be able to settle into an understanding of what sort of book I was actually reading! Not to say that unexpectedness is bad; just that when I don't know what to expect, I can't emotionally prepare, and so I hold myself at a further emotional reserve from the story.

Anyway eventually I was invested indeed, and cared a lot about everything, and also found it all really interesting! But then I was once again thrown by the ending.

( a bunch of spoilery discussion of the ending )

At any rate, despite the issues I had, I do really think it's an amazing book and I'm so glad I read it. I will be thinking about it for a while, I think!

Content note: Cara is a survivor of an abusive intimate partner relationship, and although that relationship is in her past, it's relevant to her present and so you hear a lot about it.

Reading through this novella, it at first came across to me as boring but unobjectionable, but the more I thought about it the more frustrated I got, and by the end I was quite out of patience with it.

The basic premise: in a dystopian future that for some reason strongly resembles the historic American Wild West, a young woman named Esther runs away from home to join the Librarians, ostensibly upholders of the dystopic status quo, but secretly they're working for the rebellion.

Esther decides to join the Librarians because she wants to make herself Be Good according to her dystopian society's ideas of what is good, and the Librarians are supposed to be kind of the ideals of that. But when she finds some Librarians and tells them what she wants, it becomes extremely clear that they do not match that society's ideals of Good. Very not.

Esther seems to me to turn far too easily from Desperately Trying To Be Good, to willingly helping out the rebellion. She also goes too fast into being into a new love interest, just days after her father murdered her previous long-term partner! It's kind of alarming, honestly. It feels too much like she's there just to be a blank outside pov for the reader to follow along with, introducing the reader to the idea of who the Librarians really are, instead of being a real person in herself. (Tbh though none of the characters feel like people to me, I never felt like I had much of a sense of who any of them were)

The Librarians are also awfully fast to trust this outsider with the knowledge of what they really do. And how is the entire Librarian force secretly on the side of the resistance, when they are hired and supported as tools of the state--that needs explaining on how that could happen! Sure, maybe a strong minority of resisting Librarians would make sense, but it seems like all of them are???

Like the Gailey novelette I read for the hugos last year, this book seems to involve things happening/being the case because it'll make the story say the things the author wants to say, whether it makes internal sense to the narrative or not. Which is a way of telling a story that really frustrates me. You can say things with a story, obviously, but it needs to work in the context of the story being told, imo!

Also I don't love the Wild West-adjacent setting. Why is that the vibe Gailey decided to go for? The wild west has been traditionally used as a narrative setting to be actively or passively racist against Indigenous people, and this story does not say anything at all about Indigenous presence (or lack of presence) at all, and it just ignores the thematic implications entirely. So it seems to me that the Wild West is just being used because it's a ~fun setting~ instead of interrogating the inherent issues with the genre. That's sure uncomfortable.

I loved this book!

It's YA fantasy, and it's very much doing its own thing instead of following the usual YA fantasy tropes. It's a little urban fantasy, a little magical realism, a little horror (if you're a wuss like me), a little humour, and no romance whatsoever for the main character.

Ellie is a Lipan Apache teen, in a version of the world where various fantastical and magical things are real. Ellie's family has passed down a secret for raising the ghosts of dead animals, and she shares this ability.

When Ellie's cousin dies in what looks like a car accident, he tells her in a dream that he's been murdered by a man named Abe Allerton. Now it's up to Ellie, her best friend Jay, the ghost of her dead dog Kirby, and her family to find out what happened and bring justice to pass!

Some of the many things I love about this book:

1. The protagonist is explicitly asexual (and probably aromantic), but a big deal isn't made of it, it's just a fact about her and there's no ace 101 speeches by characters or narrative.

2. Ellie's family is deeply important to her, and a relevant part of all she does. So many books about young people (teen and child) are about separating the kids from the adults in caring roles in their lives, so that the kid has space to Make Big Decisions and Accomplish Things. Ellie does these things, but in the context of a family who love her and are doing their imperfect best.

3. Speaking of Ellie's family, her six-times-great grandmother is a major character in the book despite never showing up because she's been dead for generations, and I love her very much.

4. The way magic is integrated into the world as a totally normal and expected thing, and yet there are still these moments of the numinous with it. The prehistoric ghost ocean!!

5. Ellie and her family's indigenous identity informs so much about them, their lives, their priorities, and their experience of living in the USA, but the narrative is never didactic, instead it's "yup this is how things are"

6. Super compelling, I didn't want to put it down.

7. The background b-plot romance between Jay's sister Ronnie and a new young vampire, Al, was surprisingly great. Also the buff bridesmaids. They only show up briefly but they're a delight.

8. GHOST MAMMOTH

A collection of short stories by a renowned sff author. I've read a few Chiang stories before, but this was my first time reading a bunch of his work at once and my overwhelming impression is that he's very good at writing a very specific type of story and that type of story is mostly not my thing.

Chiang's stories are all "here is an idea, let's see all the ways we can use a narrative to explore the full implications of the idea," and characters are used solely as props for the narrative explorations rather than as full people worth being interested in. And I must say he's really good at coming up with interesting implications for his ideas and conveying them in a narrative!

But the thing about writing this sort of story is that it turns out that if I don't particularly care about the idea then I don't particularly care about the story, and at their worst the stories read like an essay with a thin veneer of storytelling. And even if I DO like a story I don't CARE about it, I'm just like "hmm how interesting" and then move on, because I'm not drawn in emotionally.

Occasionally Chiang does manage to integrate a character arc a little more fully into the idea he's exploring, stories where the idea and the human interest combine and affect each other. These are the strongest stories imo. "Stories of Your Life" is one of these, and it's rightly one of his better known stories - the one the film Arrival is based on, not that I've seen the movie. But I actually had a bit of a Feeling at the end of the story, and it's the only story of the bunch to manage that. It's about a linguist working to decipher the language of an alien species, and the way that her experience with the aliens affects her experience of her life, though also of course about exploring ideas around what language is and what it does.

I'd say the other strongest story in the collection is the last one, "Liking What You See: A Documentary." Although that MIGHT be just because I found it the most compelling idea to explore amongst them all It's about being able to turn off people's ability to see some humans as more beautiful than other humans, and what that would mean for a society.

Anyway. Not sure I'll bother to seek out more of Chiang's work specifically. He's very talented, for sure, but for the most part his works are aimed at a different kind of reader than me.

(Okay no I am going to probably read more of his work, apparently his book Exhalations includes a story about time travel and the Thousand and One Nights, so I need to read that story.)

Yesssss new Zen Cho book! I love Zen Cho's books! This one is a bit of a departure from her previously published novels. It's a novella, and it's....well, Cho describes it as fanfic for a (nonexistent) wuxia tv show, which means it's approximately in the wuxia genre but with different priorities.

And I must say, I am so glad I didn't read this book until after being introduced to MDZS/Untamed fandom, because the vague knowledge of wuxia I've gleaned from reading wangxian fic allowed me to appreciate this book far more than I think I otherwise would have. And for the record: this book is GREAT.

Set in an alternate version of Emergency Malaya (a particular time period in Malaya history that I didn't previously know anything about, but was really effective in the context of the story being told here), the narrative focuses on a group of bandits and the nun who joins them.

The characters are a delight, as is watching the interaction between them, and their emotional responses to their own and other peoples' complicated pasts. The relationship between Tet Sang and Guet Imm is particularly great for this.

And it's also wonderfully queer, but like, complicatedly queer, in the best possible way. Queerness is not always tidy! There are not always conclusions! Not everything fits into a binary! AMAZING.

( this discussion of the queerness probably includes spoilers )

I used to love this book when I was a teen but I haven't read it for a VERY long time because I had the growing suspicion that if I were to read it again I would discover that some of Orson Scott Card's execrable prejudices had made it into the narrative. The other day I pulled it off my bookshelf with the thought that maybe it was finally time to get rid of my copy, but I glanced at the first page and all of a sudden I felt the need to reread it again first, something I thought I'd never do.

And having now done so...I was absolutely right about the execrable prejudices, and I'm mad about how much I still care about this terrible book. Look: the premise underlying the whole book is that the worst possible thing for human history would be Christopher Columbus NOT voyaging to the Americas. You can't escape the fact that the very premise of the book is insultingly, enormously racist - and then it piles on more racism and sexism and so forth on top of that, in the reading of it.

Pastwatch is a group of researchers in a post-environmental-catastrophe future, who develop technology to be able to look into the past. And as they do so, they begin to realise that maybe it would be possible to change the past in order to bring about a better future with less suffering and unhappiness. The story of the researchers is alternated with sections of historical fiction about Christopher Columbus, the figure the researchers eventually settle on to be the centre of their plans.

When I was a teen, I didn't notice most of the terrible things this book does and loved it for the things it does do well. And there ARE some very good things about it!

I loved all the characters in the Pastwatch sections and how dedicated they are to understanding other kinds of people, to promoting the importance even of the overlooked and oppressed, to listening to anyone and engaging from a basis of equality. I loved Tagiri especially, her compassion and her oddness, and how it's her oddness specifically that allows her to do the things she does instead of conformity being valued. And as a white person I had the privilege to be able to have it be nice to think of Columbus as a fundamentally good person who merely got some things wrong. It's comforting to think of a world where people are willing to redeem themselves even if they do evil things, that they can learn better and do better, that we can all make a better future together. And the writing is engaging and readable, and the very idea of Pastwatch is just endlessly interesting to think about.

BUT. There's such a big but there.

It is so racist! In that way where it is clear that the author thinks he's doing amazing at being an ally by including such racial diversity amongst his characters.

The very idea of writing a book where noted colonialist, slaver, and murderer Christopher Columbus is one of the GREATEST PEOPLE TO EVER EXIST IN HUMAN HISTORY is just breathtaking to start with.

(Why yes, the book DOES explicitly say that there's nobody else who can compare to Columbus' greatness other than the Noah figure!) (And yes, the Noah myth IS prioritised over the other flood myths of the region when discussing the historical reality behind the myth!) (And no, the idea that plenty of overlooked people could have been just as great if they hadn't been prevented due to circumstances beyond their control is never thought of!) (And obviously the idea that "great" could possibly mean anything other than "influential" is never considered!) (and yes I have reached semantic satiation on the word great and it doesn't sound like a word anymore! :P)

( cut both for spoilers and for discussions of racism, sexism, ableism, and christianity-centrism )

This novella, which is about people being able to be in contact with versions of themselves from alternate universes where they make different choices or have different things happen to them, reads to me more like a thought experiment and an excuse for examining ethical questions than like a narrative. It has all these extensive sections just explaining the premise and the ramifications it would have on the world, and follows the stories of a bunch of different people to further explore what it would mean. The author has clearly thought through everything very carefully and presented his thoughts clearly, which I appreciate, but that's the majority of what the story has going for it, to me. So although it was certainly interesting, and I did get somewhat invested in a couple of the characters, overall I just didn't find it as engaging as I would like.

I'd been looking forward to this novella for a while: f/f epistolary fiction featuring time travel sounded so exciting to me! I'm disappointed to discover that the way these things were done in this particular book didn't really work for me. Sigh.

So the book is about Red and Blue, both agents in a time war, on opposite sides of the war, who start taunting each other via letter and then fall in love.

And like, I guess my problem is that the whole thing just felt so ungrounded to me. I had so little sense of what actually happened on their various missions and why, or of how their disparate worlds in which they grew up might have affected them differently, or even just of any distinction between the two main characters because their voices were so similar.

And it does exactly what I said in my last book review that I don't like to see in a romance novel: it is so tightly focused in on the relationship between the two leads that it doesn't really have interest in anything else, and just kind of gestures vaguely at the greater context the two of them live and work in.

None of which I think makes it a bad book, just that the things this book is interested in doing are different than the things I'm interested in reading about. Alas.

A lovely collection of short stories being sold with all proceeds going to support UCLH Charity's COVID-19 appeal. A thoroughly enjoyable book, with an intention that the stories within are at least somewhat optimistic. Also they're all various flavours of sff. Also a high percentage of queerness. All of which is WHAT I WANT out of a story so YAY.

The stories I loved the most (I HAD FEELINGS) were, in order of appearance:

Storm Story by Llinos Cathryn Thomas, about people working together to survive on a generation ship crossing an endless ocean in search of land

Bethany, Bethany by Lizbeth Myles, about changelings and sisterhood

Seaview on Mars by Katie Rathfelder, about having survived the early hard years of a colony establishing itself on a new world, and how to live in it now that you're old and the colony's thriving

A Hundred and Seventy Storms by Aliette de Bodard, about a spaceship who's a person and her human cousin, doing their best to support each other in difficult circumstances

This is New Gehesran Calling by Rebecca Fraimow, about a diaspora being connected to their community and their identity in various ways via underground radio

My second-favourite stories (still all very good!) were:

Upside the Head by Marissa Lingen, about a concussion researcher with an experimental treatment to help people with post-concussion syndrome recover, and the hockey players who grow in new directions as a result. I felt invested in the concussion researcher and her work, but I felt a bit distant from the experimental subjects.

Four by Freya Marske, about seeing the good in the world and in other people and continuing on, even when there are still bad things that happen, and also about the four horsepeople of the apocalypse. I struggled with remembering names because three different significant characters had names with very similar vibes to me, so I kept getting Felicity and Patricia and Olivia mixed up with each other, which made it challenging to follow. And I was sad that uh Olivia's (I think??? it was Olivia?) story didn't have a happy resolution within the narrative, but the overall feel of the story was still really lovely and great.

St Anselm-by-the-Riverside by Iona Datt Sharma, about an alternate-universe Earth dealing with a Chilling instead of global warming, and a completely different pandemic. A little too close to home for me to be fully into it right now, and I had a brief moment near the beginning where I thought the fantasy plot stuff was going in a COMPLETELY different direction than it actually was and now I secretly want that story instead, but as a story it's still very good despite the things I was bringing to it.

I found The Girls Who Read Austen and Love, Your Flatmate to be just kind of boring to me, I didn't love the (unintentional?) thematic implications of Low Energy Economy that the abject suffering of workers under capitalism is worth it because the work they do allows other people to thrive, and I don't feel like I quite followed enough of the beginning of Of A Female Stranger for the payoff to be successful for me.

So yes, not every story worked for me, because that's just the nature of short story collections, but a very respectable percentage of them did! Sometimes I finish a collection having only felt strongly about a couple stories in it, but this one didn't have that problem. A good collection, very worth reading, and your money goes to a good cause!

Well, time for me to talk about the Hugo novel nominees as a group. You may notice I have not posted reviews for all of them. This is because I did not even finish most of them! The novel options this year contain a lot of books that are just not to my personal taste.

The bottom two books in my ranking are ones I never would have bothered even picking up and trying if they weren't on the Hugo list, and the middle two probably would have languished on my tbr list forever due to there being so many other books that sound more appealing to me to prioritise. On the other hand we also have one of my favorite sci-fi novels ever written on the list this year, so hey, can't complain too hard!

My voting order is as follows. I've linked the book titles to my full review for the ones where I did read the whole book.

1. A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine
Absolutely brilliant in so many ways and I completely adored it.

2. Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Mostly very compelling and I really liked it, but given that I'm too much of a wuss for horror, it was rather much for me.

3. The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders
I read about a quarter of it and got the distinct impression that it's very like the other Anders novel I've read: very well written, interesting, and unusual, but I can't quite actually LIKE it. So I didn't really feel inspired to continue.

4. The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E Harrow
I read the 100 page sample provided to voters. The ideas had potential but I bounced off of the narrative voice. Having a distinctive voice can be a gamble because either it really works for the reader or it really doesn't, and I admire the attempt, but this one's not for me.

5. The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley
Read more than a third in the hope that maybe at some point it would stop being boring but that was as far as my patience could take me, and honestly I'm impressed I made it that far. I'm told it does get more interesting once you get more into the meat of the plot, but if it takes that long to get there then you've lost me. Which is too bad because the time travel element at least sounded kind of interesting.

6. Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire
Read about a quarter of it and just.....did not care. Evil people manipulating children in order to take over the world is just not a plot I am interested in. And the child characters themselves were also not particularly compelling to me, even if I could have otherwise been interested in hearing about psychic friendship.

This novella is just so impressive and powerful and transportative. Wow. Gosh.

But it's also one of those books that's good in ways that I find hard to talk about, which always makes me so mad because how am I supposed to convince other people to read a book if I can't explain just why it's so worth reading???

Anyway it's about an underwater community of people descended from folks who were thrown overboard from slaving ships, from the perspective of the Historian of this people, as well as the perspective of the Remembrances that the Historian carries on behalf of all of them.

And it's about like, generational trauma and healing, and neurodivergence, and queer love. And Rivers Solomon is just such a good writer!

This novella is a complete delight! Taking place in early 20th century Cairo, in a version of the world with supernatural creatures and mechanical automatons and an altered political reality, the setting feels to me almost like the main character of the book. Throughout the events of the actual plot (the titular haunting), is woven in the city's focus on an upcoming decision on whether women will get the vote, and the climax of both parts happen simultaneously.

Hamed, the viewpoint character, is a government worker in a ministry focused on the supernatural. This too is grounded: the sort of job where he has to worry about departmental budgets and paperwork, not glamorous exciting missions. Together Hamed and his junior partner Onsi must investigate whatever is haunting one of the city's tram cars and attacking passengers, and hopefully exorcise it.

In the process they meet all sorts of interesting Cairene city folk, including: a genderfluid djinn, a woman who works in a restaurant who enjoys discussing supernatural philosophy, an emancipated automaton, a subculture of women dealing with the supernatural in an entirely different way than Hamed's ministry does, and a whole lot of people agitating for suffrage.

Hamed is a very practical-minded man who wants to be modern in his thoughts but is only mostly there. He's an interesting choice of viewpoint on this vibrant and diverse city but I think it works. And I really liked the comparisons between him and Onsi (eager, wants to do things right, easily distracted by his enthusiasms), and between him and all the various women we meet.

( spoilers for the end )

Time for the Hugo nominated novelettes! As a whole, I ended up liking the options in this category much more than what was in the short stories this year.

Here's my thoughts on each of the 6 novelettes. I'm listing them in the order for which I will vote for them, top to bottom choices.

Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin

( Read more... )

Omphalos, by Ted Chiang

( Read more... )

The Archronology of Love, by Caroline M. Yoachim

( Read more... )

Away With the Wolves, by Sarah Gailey

( Read more... )

The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, by Sarah Pinsker

( Read more... )

For He Can Creep, by Siobhan Carroll

( Read more... )

Here's the thing. I was introduced to the Chrestomanci books when I was a kid, and I adored them and reread them a lot. But this entry into the series was published years later, when enough nostalgia factor had set in that Conrad's Fate felt to me like an odd interloper into a world I loved, rather than being a fitting sequel.

It's a perfectly good book! But it feels like fanfiction in my head rather than the real thing. Like, relatively good fanfic? But the author is too interested in her OCs and there's not enough focus on the canon characters. :P

I mean, I know that's how these books work, every book in the Chrestomanci series focuses on a new main character, a new set of people, a new storyline. Christopher-as-Chrestomanci might be the running through-line but he's only the main character in one book, so he and the people he's close to just sort of weave in and out of other people's lives in the other books. And that's fine and good! And the bits of teenage Christopher and Millie one sees in this book are perfect. (I love how willing DWJ is to be like "here are all the reasons Christopher is kind of terrible despite being very likeable" because YEAH. I love him dearly but he has. Flaws.) But I still can't help feeling like this particular book isn't canon, because I didn't grow up with it in the same way. (The Pinhoe Egg isn't either, to me.)

Anyway this is definitely a me problem not a problem with the book. Sorry, Conrad, I just can't muster up the strength of feeling to care about you!

This book is a sequel to another book (Deep Secret) which I didn't really love, but this one is about pretty different things so I thought I would give it a try.

In a multiverse situation, a teen girl (Roddy) in one world is one of only two people to know of a magic plot to take down her country and wants to do something about this. And a teen boy (Nick) in another world is bored and wishes he could go traveling the multiverse. They both get into shenanigans until eventually their stories overlap.

So for two thirds of the book it felt to me like I was following two entirely different stories that kept getting interrupted by the other one, rather than interwoven narratives, which was rather a jolting experience. And really even after the stories converge they still feel so separate from each other, like Roddy barely cares about Nick's existence and has other things to worry about, while Nick is interested in her romantically but doesn't seem to actually like her as a person, and they just don't....There's no connecting between them, is the thing, they're both protagonists of their own stories and they just happen to have an overlapping climax. And this disconnect throws the whole rhythm of the book off, to me.

And like, there's plenty of interesting things going on, but the whole gaping lack of anything linking the two stories together emotionally means that it's all just kind of left flapping in the wind. Like the relationship between Roddy and Grundo, for instance! This is clearly a central part of both of their lives, and then everything crumbles to pieces after a dramatic revelation, and it's hugely affecting for both of them, but do we get any resolution on that front, on how they might be able to move forward from this? We do not.

And Nick's entire half of the narrative is mostly just him stumbling about to no great purpose, interacting with various characters and set-up pieces because they're there, he's got no goal or purpose, which is fine in a teenage boy but a bit harder to take in a protagonist of a fantasy adventure novel. Why is he one of the viewpoint characters, honestly? It feels to me like he's just there so we can have a viewpoint on various exciting bits of the multiverse DWJ wants to show us rather than because he's important to the story the book is trying to tell.

So all in all, this is certainly a very interesting and moreish sort of book (and there's so much else in it that could be talked about too!), but I don't think I actually really like it.

I loved this novella! Set in an alternate-history USA where the civil war ended with the country divided, and also steampunk, and also gods, the book is really good at bringing its setting to life. This New Orleans feels really real even though it's not quite like any version of that city that ever existed in our world. The narrative voice is also very strong and adds to the way the book draws you in.

And the characters! All of them so interesting! The book is satisfying in itself but it also leaves me wanting to know more about many of the people within it.

An f/f retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in a Vietnamese-inspired alternate world. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding stuff, with the sort of unexplained backstory with the Vanishers, where bits are revealed over time as it's relevant, that's just fully integrated into the characters' understanding of their world.

I also liked how it's clear the characters aren't speaking English even though the book is all in English, with all the references to how first-person pronouns in the language the characters' are speaking are gendered. And queerness is integrated into this - there's multiple nonbinary characters in the book who use gender-neutral pronouns to refer to themselves.

And there's lots of great platonic relationships in this book too, parent-child, and student-teacher, among other things.

But I struggled with the romance aspect because I just didn't feel like I was adequately shown why the Beauty-analogue (Yên) would be interested in the Beast-analogue (Vu Côn) as early as she is, other than Vu Côn being hot? Which like. Ehhhh. There's some very nice revelations where Yên realizes all of Vu Côn's admirable qualities but it's like, in the last 10% of the book, wayyyyyy after Yên was first interested in her.

I devoured this book in a single evening because I couldn't put it down, and then the next day I was just like I STILL WANT TO BE READING THIS BOOK because it was so great and I missed it.

This is the sequel to Zen Cho's first novel, Sorcerer to the Crown, but with a new focus and new main characters, so you don't have to read the first one to follow this one. (But you should because the first one's great too! I think I like this one even more though.)

Muna wakes up on a beach with her sister Sakti, both of them totally lacking in memories of their prior life or what brought them there. They're taken in by Janda Baik's most powerful magic-worker, Mak Genggang, and for a variety of reasons Muna eventually ends up on her own in England, where she has multiple priorities, not all of them aligned with the British school for female magicians which has taken her in. And shenanigans happen, as is of course inevitable.

Featuring: Amnesia! Sisters! Multicultural magicians! Aunts who are also dragons! Queer interspecies romance! Fairyland! Questions of identity! AND MORE!

I found myself a little let down by the ending - not by anything that happened in the ending, because it was all great, but I think the pacing was somehow off or something, because I spent most of the book just like, totally delighted by everything, and then the ending just....happened. But overall that's a pretty minor flaw in an otherwise incredible book.