sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: queer

A novella about the Matter of Britain, featuring Percival the Grail Knight as a young woman. Griffith's prose is beautiful, and she's doing some interesting things with this interpretation, and I found the beginning of the book compelling, but ultimately....idk, I finished the book feeling oddly dissatisfied. I'm not sure what I wanted done differently, I'm not sure what wasn't working for me.

( some spoilers for the ending, as I try to talk through what didn't work for me )

Dangit I wanted to like this book!!

Sequel to last year's A Marvellous Light, a book I enjoyed but felt rather like it wasn't focusing on the story I wanted it to focus on. This one.... unfortunately continues the trend, though in a slightly different way.

Maud and Violet are two young women on a trans-atlantic ship voyage, who get caught up in a mystery surrounding a murder and a missing magical object. Together, they work to solve the mystery, accomplish their various goals, and navigate their growing relationship with each other.

There are many things to like about this, and honestly it is executed very well. There's good stuff between Maud and Violet, and the amount of trust and vulnerability they're a) interested in sharing with each other or b) capable of; and there's a fun cast of secondary characters in the restricted environment of a ship at sea. Some of the food descriptions really stuck with me, and I don't usually notice food in books! And we get to find out more about the Forsythia Club, the group of old lady magicians who had fascinated me so much in the last book.

But the story being told here is really a lot more hijinks-heavy a story than I usually prefer, featuring two main characters who are both hijinks-generators in their own ways, so I just wasn't really into the vibe for the first, like.... at least half the book.

And then I was teased with an AMAZING idea that then didn't go anywhere near what I was hoping and expecting for such an idea!

( cut for spoilers )

At any rate, highly recommended for anyone more into hijinks than me. I really did like the characters and their relationship!

And the next book is going to feature my favourite secondary character from this book, apparently: Ross, the class-conscious pornography-smuggling reporter. I'll be interested to see where that goes! And I hope there'll be more of Mrs Vaughn in the next book.

A graphic novel telling a story in a series of character vignettes about the points of tension and points of connection in a small Mennonite community in southern Manitoba.

It's....hmm. It does a great job of giving an accurate and nuanced portrayal of the current state of the Mennonite community and the conversations of the current time in Canada (including: relationships with indigenous people and the history of residential schools; queer people's degree of welcome in churches; relationships with war and the military; dynamics between modern megachurches and more traditional churches; voluntourism; and more). I 100% believed in the realness of every single character in this book. And it left me unsettled at the end, but in a good way? idk the whole thing is somehow both melancholy and hopeful.

I do wish though that the book was saying something more though than just holding up a mirror to go "this is who we are." I mean there's value in that! But it wasn't quite enough for me. But maybe that's just, like, where we're at with fiction that actually explores Mennonite identity: there's so little Mennonite fiction out there that we can't get beyond just going for representation through depiction.

I also struggled in places to follow the story — although the art is great, it is not quite distinctive enough in how it depicts all the many different characters, and I had a huge amount of trouble following who was who as they interwove throughout each other's stories. And checking the character cheat sheet at the front didn't always help as much as I wanted it to.

I did love that the book is clearly by someone who at the very least knows birders, and might be a bird enjoyer himself. (but it doesn't go overboard on the bird content, just makes choices of what birds to include that aren't birds the average non-birder would have thought much about!)

Overall.... I'm glad I read it. I'm curious how it would read to someone who isn't intimately familiar with the things it's depicting, though!

A children's graphic novel, an Anishinaabe retelling of the story of Alice in Wonderland featuring a nonbinary kid as the Alice character. It's fine, but the story is too disconnected and random to develop much interest for me - though that might just be that I have no particular attachment to or familiarity with Alice in Wonderland, which I gather is also pretty disconnected and random. But the art is nice, and it's never bad to have more Indigenous and queer representation for kids, in stories they recognize!

I first heard of this book via a rec from

sineala, and I'm so glad, because ahhh I loved this book so much! It just really hit the spot perfectly, of feeling like a classic secondary-world fantasy of my childhood while also being well written and interesting and queer. So much of the sff I read these days is either historical fantasy or futuristic sci-fi, and though both are delicious, I'd forgotten how good it can be to sink your teeth into a nice well-built secondary world fantasy and immerse yourself in that created world.

And it's a book published in the 90's that's textually queer! This aspect isn't forefronted, but it's subtly-yet-clearly woven into the worldbuilding throughout the whole book, in a way that's probably possible for an oblivious het to not even notice, but is blatant to anyone else.

The worldbuilding in general though is all really good. It's doing things that are interesting and specific and well integrated, and clear about what it's doing without ever feeling infodumpy. And I love how the city where most of the story takes place feels lived in and full of real people living their various intersecting lives, and with enough references to other cultures (and the tensions of living in a multicultural city with Histories between the various cultures) that the city feels like part of a larger world too. And there are enough references to things that have changed or happened in the past, including the recent past, that it doesn't feel stagnant; it's a living city, a living world.

Anyway the actual plot/characters. Rathe is a pointsman (....sort of a policeman, but with enough specificity about their place in the culture that it doesn't feel to me at least like it carries with it all the burden of associations a modern reader brings to police) and Eslingen is a mercenary soldier temporarily between jobs; together, they fight crime! That is, the city has recently had a more than usual rash of children disappearing, ones who seem very unlikely to have simply run away from home, and no bodies have been found, so what could have happened to them?

The mystery doesn't have Shocking! Twists! but unfolds well and interestingly, and

spoilers

I was pleased that in the end all of the children were recovered safely.

Anyway it looks like there are 4 more books in the series, and I want to read all of them! Though my library only has 1 other, so we'll see how far I get.

It occurs to me, a couple days after I finished reading Sam Starbuck's fourth romance novel, that even though I read these novels on AO3, they should still count as books I read! He's publishing them all and everything!

So I have retroactively added three books to my count for last year (Fete for a King, Infinite Jes, and The Lady and the Tiger) and now I guess I'm writing a review for all four at once.

I've been following Starbuck's fanfic for years, under the name

copperbadge, but last year he started on an original series of linked romance novels set in a tiny fictional European country, along the traditional Ruritanian lines, and I was like, sure, why not. The books feature plenty of queer characters (and only one of the four is about an m/f couple), a country where kingship is an elected position, and lots of feel-good content. Also two of the four have neurodivergent protagonists.

Of the four books, I liked Fete for a King (about a young king and a loud American chef) and The Twelve Points of Caleb Canto (about two Eurovision contestants) the best; the two middle ones (king emeritus and podcaster; two nobles doing politics) didn't land as well for me for a variety of reasons.

Overall the writing style in this series trends strongly in the direction of quippy dialogue for everyone, resulting in me feeling that there's very little sense of there being individual voices for the various characters. I also find constant quips to get kind of exhausting to read after a while, personally.

I also don't love that the focus is on a royal family. Yes, this is not a hereditary monarchy, and yes, the family is very open and welcoming to providing support to whoever appears in their ambit, but....idk. I think this may be one of those things where shining a light on the fact that the book knows hereditary country-leadership is bad means that I'm just more primed to notice ways in which the solution to the problem is imperfect.

The books are very readable, good-hearted, fun, and happy-ending-guaranteed. But I'm not sure I'm going to keep reading them.

This is a graphic novel memoir written by a person of my generation about eir relationship with gender over the course of eir life. Kobabe is genderqueer and seems to be somewhere on the ace spectrum and grew up in fandom, just like me, and grew up with similar cultural references and touchpoints. I've spent so much of my life reading books written in bygone eras (whether a decade or two centuries out of date!) that seeing a book where the author's life seems familiar is honestly odd, lol! But eir relationship with eir body and gender and sexuality is all ultimately very different than mine, as is eir family and the context in which e grew up. And e mostly hung out in different fandoms than me, too!

Anyway Kobabe is clearly skilled at comics and I enjoyed reading this journey through eir experiences, and it's clearly brave of em to put this out into the world, and it's just nice to have more narratives of the ways that queer experiences can look!

The book does feel like it ends a little abruptly, but the author was 30 or so at the time of publishing and that's still honestly early in one's journey through life, so it's perhaps not surprising that there isn't a satisfying conclusion to wrap it all up with, and it's still a good ending.

Look, there's another queer Great Gatsby novel, obviously I had to give it a try! This one's premise is: what if Nick and Gatsby were trans men and also explicitly textually into each other, plus Nick and Daisy are Latinx. And like, yeah, sure, I'm in!

Unfortunately, though I think the book is successful at what it's doing, it turned out to not work for me personally on several different levels. It's a good, readable, thoughtful, queer book with coherent themes and sympathetic yet imperfect characters doing their best, which should be my jam. And just about every criticism I'm able to come up with, there are reasonable reasons the choices were made, and I can understand and sometimes even appreciate those choices! And yet as a whole I was left dissatisfied.

( Read more... )

So like. As I said. My issues with this book are me problems, and I can imagine a different reader experiencing this as a five-star book, where for me it's solidly 3 stars and not a bit more.

So I'm nil out of 2 so far on queer Gatsby retellings that work for me. But if/when I hear about another one, though, I will return, ever-hopeful that maybe the next one will be the one that works for me!

I got this book from

skygiants' review, and like, reading through this book I could ABSOLUTELY see how it is obviously the poison for Becca, Becca's poison, but also: I read the first two pages and was immediately confident I would like this book too. And I was right!

It is a historical fantasy novel with three main characters. The first two are an angel and a demon who live together in a Jewish shtetl in Poland as chevrusas, or study partners in their study of the Talmud, but who for a variety of reasons end up immigrating to the US. The third, Rose, is an extremely lesbian Jewish teen girl who immigrates to the US as well, for opportunities and for adventure and for getting away from her best friend Dinah who had the temerity to marry a man. Then they all get involved with labour activism! And also dealing with ghosts and dybbuks and gentile demons and oppressive immigration policies and more.

The three main characters are all so different from each other and I adore all three of them so so so much! Never ever a moment of disappointment on switching viewpoints, just excitement to spend time with that character again. Also: the narrative itself is a character with an "I" which I love too. Actually I would have loved if this was an even more prominent feature too! Love me a book where the narrative isn't trying to disappear into the background but has its own opinions separate from that of the characters it's writing about.

Plus the book as a whole is suffused both with very Jewish and very queer vibes and I love this about it. I am not Jewish myself so cannot speak in detail to that aspect of it, though I always love to read books that go all in on depicting very specific experiences like this! And the queerness....ohhhh it was beautiful. This book not just a book with queer characters; the whole narrative is queer in its soul, and I love that for it. And for me, reading it!!! It's just like, this is a book that understands me.

( minor spoilers I think )

At any rate, thank you Becca for the rec because this was a GREAT read.

Note: I was given a free copy of this ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Schemes of the Wayfarer is an f/f secondary world fantasy novel featuring the commander of the capital city's guard, and a woman who has spent the last 10 years or so in the Wilds - a place known for its strange creatures and unsettling magic, that changes the people who spend time in it.

I enjoyed the worldbuilding of the novel a lot, the way that various magical things and non-human beings were a normal part of life that people don't spend a lot of time thinking about. And I wanted to know more, tbh! I loved the opening conceit, the major river that the people who live in this country have been unable to travel down for 30 years because the key that allows you to do so safely has been lost. And I super enjoyed a spoilery reveal that happens later in the book!

Click here if you want the spoiler!

The treasurer is a dragon!! Loved this, and loved how when you looked back over what you'd heard about him earlier it made total sense.

The novel is competently written and drew me along through it easily and comfortably, but to be honest I spent a lot of time being frustrated by some aspects of characterization.

Keth, the viewpoint character, is the commander of the guard and is supposed to be very good at her job. And part of the job is, by its nature, spending time in political situations. But we spend a lot of time seeing Keth being bewildered by things and making silly blunders (eg drinking too much wine on an empty stomach and blurting out things she doesn't mean to say), even though she's successfully held this job for many years. She comes across as young and insecure and inexperienced. Which then makes the times when she thinks about how OBVIOUSLY she couldn't help picking up something about politics over the years feel like it lands wrong, because that's not the Keth I've seen! It just felt inconsistent to me. (She does, for the record, seem decent at the half of her job that involves actually commanding the guard.)

Theraine, the love interest, I never felt like I really understood entirely or saw who she was as a person. I never got a sense of what her time in the Wilds had actually done to her, for example. But the most frustrating part:

I think this is also spoilers, though less spoilery this time

She's supposedly the puppetmaster behind everything that happens in this book, orchestrating it all for a specific purpose. But I never actually got the sense that that was really happening? Idk, it kept on being referenced, and every time I would be like OH RIGHT, I FORGOT, because it just never felt relevant or intrinsic to either the plot or the character. But this is like, even the title of the book! It's supposed to be the point! I guess I just wish this was somehow integrated better.

And then there was the relationship between Keth and Theraine. They knew each other in their school days, when Keth apparently beat up Theraine multiple times, and haven't seen each other since school. And they're both just so casually fine about the beating up, and laugh about it, and very quickly act as if they're close and trusting friends, and it just feels off. Later it comes out that they had one positive interaction when Keth was leaving school, but honestly that does not feel like enough. So it's just weird.

There were a few other minor issues that I noticed as I read, but those I would have been fine overlooking if the characters and their relationship worked for me better. Sigh, I wanted to like this book! And there were good things about it. But for me as a reader, I want books where I can really care about the characters, and I couldn't quite get there with these ones.

I've been on and off for years about whether to read this book, because I've heard that it's really amazing but also that it's a hell of a read, emotionally speaking. But recently I was encouraged to read it, so I gave it a try, and both things are indeed true about it, and in my opinion it is worth it! You know how it is, I sobbed wholeheartedly for the last 50 pages of the book because I cared SO MUCH and it got me SO BAD.

Code Name Verity is a work of historical fiction set in WWII featuring two young women who are best friends, working on the side of the Allies, one as a pilot and the other as a spy. I loved Maddie and Julie SO MUCH, and they love each other so much too, and war really really sucks!!

I absolutely did look up spoilers before going in, so that I could brace myself for what would be coming, and I'm glad I did. I think it would be an even harder read without that knowledge!

Anyway it's a brilliant book and I highly recommend it, as long as you are ready to be punched in the gut by feelings!

Whew, I'm done reading TGCF!!! I read the first half in the officially published translation, and the second half in a fan translation since the official one isn't all published yet, but let me tell you I am ABSOLUTELY going to be rereading the whole dang thing once the official tl is all out.

Anyway! What a book! What a lot of book in which a lot of things happened! I've been reading this thing for over a month, fairly consistently, and it took me this long because I gather the english translation is something like 750,000 words long?!? That is Long.

But what this means is that I feel like I do NOT remember everything that happened well enough to feel like I have a good grasp on the Things that the book is trying to do as a whole. How do all the themes tie into each other? What ARE the themes? This is hard to say when I had trouble even keeping track of who was who amongst all the different secondary characters, because a book this size can fit SO many secondary characters in it, and most of them have at least two completely different names if not more.

(Mu Qing and Feng Xin were particularly bad for this because they go by those names, and also by Nan Yang and Xuan Zhen, and ALSO by pseudonyms where they're pretending to be their own underlings. I absolutely 100% could not keep track of them by all these different names and as a result have very little sense of which is which between them, which I can tell is Problems!)

Anyway anyway! This is a chinese danmei webnovel about a guy who becomes a god (and then stops being a god, and then goes through that cycle a few more times...), and about heavenly politics between all the different gods, and also about the ghost who loves him. And I LOVED it.

There were some parts that got a bit tedious (some of the fight scenes went on a bit long, I will not lie, but then I think this about MOST fight scenes, lol) but overall it was remarkably moreish for the entire very long length.

It's a book about how choices make you who you are, I think, and about the importance of having people in your life whom you can love and trust and rely on. And the way these themes are intertwined with the love story between our hero Xie Lian and the ghost king Hua Cheng is just completely delightful. I adore Xie Lian as a main character and a viewpoint character. He's so endlessly fascinating! He's 800 years old by the time of the main events of the novel, and he's been through a lot (understatement), and he's made very definite and deliberate choices about what kind of person he wants to be. But at the same time, he's spent most of those 800 years living a life where he prioritizes the well-being of pretty much everyone except himself, because he sees that as his job - and in his relationship with Hua Cheng, he finally is introduced to the idea that it doesn't have to be selfish for him to allow happiness into his life, and to have someone prioritize him. I love them both very very much.

I feel like there's a whole enormous thread of another theme I cannot comment on though because I do not know enough about either a) Chinese cosmology or b) cultivation novels as a genre. Which is that although it seems to be the goal of all cultivators to cultivate successfully enough to ascend into godhood, in this book godhood does not uhhhhhhhh seem to be that great. Heaven is full of petty squabbles, a lot of the gods kinda suck in an exciting variety of ways, and you still have jobs to do and paperwork to complete and roles to live up to and asshole coworkers to try to get along with, and so on and so forth. Basically: it doesn't seem to be any better than ordinary human life, except that you get fancy palaces and exclusive access to Brain Twitter (dubious prize). There definitely seems to be questioning of like, why is this the goal? Is this worthwhile? Should we be aiming for something else instead? But again! I do not have enough context for this entire thread of questions to be sure of WHAT it's saying with all this!

Other characters in this book I had strenuous feelings about:

- Ling Wen! I find her FASCINATING. A civil god who is really really really good at administrative work, such that when she rebels, the entirety of heaven is kind of lost without her! It was sooooo funny that when she and Xie Lian are fighting at one point, Xie Lian automatically goes to update Ling Wen about the situation because as the administrative manager of heaven she needs to know, and then is like. Uh. Right. She knows because she's HERE. FIGHTING ME. But we get remarkably little of her internal life and I want to know more about what's going on with her!

- He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan. Obviously! Beefleaf!!!!! God their story is so deliciously painful. One of those things where there is no way for there to be a happy ending but you can't help hoping anyway.

- Guzi - the poor kid! I spent so much of the book being like, auuuughhhhhhh this is so horrible that he's so attached to his dad but that asshole qi rong is possessing his dad and so he's running around after QI RONG endlessly, and then you get just this tiny info drop near the end that actually his dad was the worst and he's so attached to qi rong as his father because qi rong is actually the best dad he's ever had? (low, low bar) Anyway I still hate qi rong but. I want guzi to be able to have a better experience of family :(

This isn't exactly a book review, since it is kind of hard to review just volume 1 of an 8 volume novel, but I just wanted to check in to register how much I love Xie Lian already! There's clearly A Lot that we don't know about him yet, but from everything we see of him he's just....I love him. I'm looking forward to finding out more, both about him and about Hua Cheng (even more of a mystery so far!!!!) and also about all the other characters beloved by fandom who haven't had a huge showing just yet.

Really not sure WHAT I just read or how to explain/describe it, but dang I was into it. It's kind of science fiction and fantasy at the same time, it doesn't do a lot of explaining what it's doing or how the worldbuilding works but just sort of presents it to you, and it is not linear. Its use of language - of languages - is fabulous, and the rhythm of the prose. I love how Wilson writes!!! And the way he can draw characters and worlds so well in such a short space.

And the whole thing is written with such confidence that it just carries you along through the things that don't make sense as an understanding is gradually built up in your mind of the things that matter.

The one issue is that I'm not quite sure how I feel about the ending.

( spoilers for the ending! )

The other thing is a technical issue with the ebook copy I have, which is a collection: In Our Own Worlds #2: Four LGBTQ+ Tor.com Novellas. And there are some footnotes in Sorcerer of the Wildeeps; not a lot, but the ones that are there are important. And they are placed at the end of each chapter with no link to take you from your current page to the footnote and back again. So when you get to the footnote you've entirely forgotten the context of what was being footnoted. This is highly unhelpful! I kind of want to reread in hard copy now. Or a better ebook.

I've tried to read this book once before, and found myself just never coming back to it when I was only partway in, because I just wasn't drawn to it enough. But I finally was like NO let's DO this because I'd heard some interesting things about it!

And I do find the gender stuff about this worldbuilding interesting! But honestly that was about it. This book is a short novella, and it is structured as like...peeks into the life of the main character over the course of decades, and although that could be an interesting structure, I never felt like we went in deep enough at any of the peeks for me to care about the characters or the plot. It was fine? It was readable. I was just kind of bored.

Okay so this is a stand-alone book that is set in the same universe as Everina Maxwell's first novel, Winter's Orbit. It is also about two guys falling in love IN SPACE and it is so much fun!

Somewhere I saw one of those graphs with one axis being Cause Problems - Solve Problems, and the other being On Purpose - By Mistake, and with the main characters of this book placed firmly in the "cause problems on purpose" quadrant and YES and it is SO GOOD. And the best part is that they are extremely different flavours of this, but they work so well together. One of the leads is approximately as chaotic as a person can get, and clearly thrives off of it, he loves the feeling of being like, well what would happen if I did THIS completely bonkers thing on impulse and see where it goes. The other lead is the kind of person who memorizes regulations and can recite them at will, and has a very firm set of principles and morals, and is perfectly comfortable causing problems for other people via unorthodox applications of rules in order to effect what he thinks is right. TOGETHER THEY WILL - well, you'll find out.

And I love how the combination of these two characters making Choices means that the book kept on going in directions I was totally not able to anticipate. I recognized tropes, and then the narrative just zoomed RIGHT on by the expected arc of those tropes to do some other weirder thing!

It's got an excellent balance of relationship building and plot building, too. The author talks in the end-note about how it'll read for people coming it either from the romance genre or the scifi genre, and as someone who loves both, I think its way of integrating the two was perfect.

I also loved how many wonderful secondary characters the book contains, both sympathetic and less so! The sister, the aunt, the dead gen-parent, the previous governor, the governor general, the two rankers....all of them were amazing. (yes I am bad at names, how did you guess.)

And! It is about TELEPATHIC BONDING (and about pretending to be telepathically bonded!). Hot damn.

The funny thing was, as much as the book kept on doing its own thing, I was also unavoidably reminded of two other narratives I've previously read. The alien remnants stuff put me in mind of Tanya Huff's Confederation series, in terms of interacting with mysterious, powerful, and incomprehensible alien objects that can do unexpected things. And the brain powers and forced military mind-bonding to subjugate the powers of a particular type of person thing reminded me very strongly of astolat's Person of Interest fanfic Dangerous If Unbound!

Ocean's Echo is doing rather different things with both of these elements than either Huff or astolat, but it's fun that it still manages to be in conversation with other things I've read.

I thoroughly loved reading the whole thing, and kept on having to pause to like, scream silently inside my head about various aspects. Good times!!!

The third novella in the Singing Hills cycle! I absolutely adored the first two, so I was extremely excited for this one. It's a series that is about storytelling, and about the ways in which the teller affects what the story is and what details you get, and I looooooove this.

But having read this latest book, I feel sincerely like I'm missing something. I feel fairly confident the book is doing something that connects the various stories told within the narrative to each other, and I think also with the character Lao Bingyi in particular, in order to say things about the series theme. But I have no idea what! I ended the book feeling a bit obtuse. PLEASE explain it to me if you've read this book!!!!

Anyway without whatever it is that pulls the disparate parts together, the book felt very episodic to me. Lots of lovely details and I enjoyed it on the surface level of "Chih goes on a road trip and hears some nice stories and nearly dies a few times" but on that level it doesn't seem to fit with the other books in the series. It was nice though to get to see more of who Chih is as a person, though! You get to see more of that in this book than the previous ones.

But really. Please explain what I'm missing here! Was I just too sleep deprived when reading it to put some obvious hints together??

The last volume of scum villain!!!! Can't believe it's actually over. The first three volumes contained the entirety of the main story, so this one is a collection of all the extras. I hadn't read all the extras before, only the ones that were posted as additional chapters to the story, so I got to read new-to-me content, not just a new translation!

I had a variety of reactions to the various stories in this collection. There were plenty of great details and fun character stuff, and I was delighted to get to reread the Airplane extras! I love the Airplane extras. But not all the stories were of particular interest to me, as is kind of inevitable in short story collections. And also.....one of the stories, the succubus extra, contained an unpleasant slur for trans people, and that kind of threw me off.

My understanding is that in the original text, a slur is also used, so the translation is accurate in that respect. But I do think that there are other ways the translation could have handled this, to make it clear what the narrative is doing without just confronting the reader with a word like that unexpectedly.

Anyway my other main response to that is to be even more interested in sqq being weird about his own gender and also lbh's, lol. (will never be over

acernor's wife life!!!)

Overall I do still definitely recommend this book, but just, like, be prepared. (also: be prepared for bingqiu sex to um...not be a shining example of healthy communication about their needs and desires. it's very them! and also dear lord.)

Huh, this novella did some odd and wonderful things, playing back and forth and sideways with time and with what's real, and I loved it. I loved the rhythms of the prose too, and I loved the fascinating worldbuilding that you just got matter-of-fact hints of as major things happened offscreen while the book focused on things that were small and personal and familial.

I think it would have benefited from me reading it all in one go, because at least for me, I had trouble keeping in my head what had happened in my previous day's reading and I kept having to go back and reread previous chapters, but that might just be a me-and-my-memory problem.

Aqib's relationship with his (male) lover, his wife, his daughter, his brother, and his father are the major focus of the book, and all of these relationships are fascinating, and some of them are very unhealthy but still understandable. I was fascinated by the Blessed Femysade in particular!

And dangit, now I think I DO need to read the other novella by Wilson set in this world, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, which I'd previously skipped over because it looked like it wasn't going to have a happy ending and I didn't want to get invested!

This novella felt very....slight, idk. Historical fantasy set in 1940's San Francisco, and it was fine but honestly I found it boring? There were some nice details, but I didn't find myself particularly drawn in.

And then also..... there's almost no magic for most of the book, to the point where I was wondering why the heck the author had bothered to make it fantasy, and then all of a sudden there was a highly magical ending. The presence and importance of magic felt super unbalanced as a result, and the ending didn't feel to me like it fit at all with what had come before.

And another thing about the ending! ( cut for spoilers )