sophia_sol | Entries tagged with author: t kingfisher

Any book by Ursula Vernon (the author behind the Kingfisher penname) will have certain features, and those inherent features are ones that keep me coming back book after book to everything she writes. I love how she does worldbuilding, and I love her practical get-things-done heroines, and I love how everything's always grounded in the odd specific annoyances of what it would actually be like to be in the fantastical circumstances she writes about. And she does SUCH good road trips! So many opportunities to run into fun NPCs and cool regional worldbuilding!

I'm not quite the right audience for her paladin romances, unfortunately -- I think because I just get too irritated by the depth and breadth of their ability to feel guilty about absolutely everything. But I keep reading them because I'm having fun with everything else anyway, and because the wider arc of the business with the dead god fascinates me, and we get a bit more about it every book!

This book, though, feels to me a little less successful than the previous paladin romances in the series. It feels a bit too much to me like several different books squished into one, I think, instead of like multiple strands of the same book, and I just don't love all of those books.

click here for spoilery thoughts

There's the one where Marguerite is trying to get herself free of the Red Sail by finding the missing artificer and leaking the plans for the salt-making mechanism and thereby destabilizing the economy of the whole region, and there's the one with the Dreaming God's paladins and the Saint of Steel's soul-scarred ex-paladins dealing with the demon who wants to be a god, and there's the one about the romance between Marguerite and Shane.

The first one is a perfectly good spy plot, not really my go-to genre of book but fun enough, and I do enjoy the temple of the white rat being willing to meddle in these things.

The second one is FASCINATING to me and I want to think about the implications forever and I want more details!!!

The third one is....yet another guilt-ridden paladin romance.........also featuring a spy who doesn't trust anyone but just KNOWS in her HEART that she can trust HIM and he's the exception to everything about how she's conducted her life. It's just really really not my kind of romance story. Also both of them are extremely allosexual and are continually having their higher brain functions disabled by how attractive the other person is and it just seems comically over-the-top to me, an ace person who Doesn't Get It. (okay I AM charmed by the type of kinky not-quite-bondage that Shane turns out to be really into when Marguerite is like, ok I gotta find SOME way of achieving good sex with this guy who can't get out of his own head about anything.)

I'm sure the romance part of the book is good for some people! but that's um. not what I read Kingfisher romances for, surprise surprise.

So let's go back to the demon who wants to be a god, shall we? I was FASCINATED by Wisdom and by what demons are. And by the implications of what a god is, too, tbh.

Wisdom seems to genuinely care about its followers to some degree, has figured out how to live as a part of the world, has thoughts and feelings and motivations and relationships and goals. It's definitely been doing some worrying stuff, but is it any more evil than a really powerful human can be? What ARE demons, and what makes them appreciably different from gods, in the end, in this world? They clearly CAN have comparable types of bonds with humans if they so choose, and some gods are definitely terrible if I'm remembering stuff from previous books, so why couldn't demons have the possibility of being basically okay.

And what is Hell? It's the place where demons are from, and it's the place where paladins can bind a demon to never be able to leave (if they're powerful enough to manage the binding), and from what little we hear from Wisdom about it, it seems like an undesirable place to be. Wouldn't most folks kind of suck in some respect if their entire prior existence was in a place like Hell?

I really hope this series is going in a direction of non-evil demons tbh! maybe even....some of the major gods today having previously been demons? Maybe the saint of steel was a demon and someone murdered him because of that!

anyway my increasing pro let-demons-be-people agenda means I feel weird at the end of this book about Shane taking up with the Dreaming God in the end, the god who is well known to be virulently anti-demon. Is this god unambiguously a good guy and nothing else?

I'll be very curious to see where this whole plot continues!

This is the latest T Kingfisher dark fairy tale retelling, and like, if you've read these by her before then you know the kind of thing you're getting into. And I have, and I do, and as always I am here for it.

I don't have a great deal to say about this one, but in this particular case the T Kingfisher trademarked "practical heroine who does the hard thing that needs to be done" is also a bit of a wet blanket. I love her.

Also,

click here for some spoilers

I love that in the end Toadling doesn't actually have to decide between exploring her connection with Halim and returning to the love and acceptance of her greenteeth monster family, because she's going to outlive him by centuries, so she can go hang out with him while he's alive and then go home again after.

Another of Ursula Vernon's fairy tale books under the pen name T Kingfisher, though this one is not inspired by a specific fairy tale, and is more a novel told in a fairy-tale-ish mode.

And it's very good at being a dark fairy tale, with the sense of the power of magic underlying everything, and the deadly sort of fairness/unfairness of the world. I loved it.

Vernon's prototypical protagonist type is a person who meets a horrible situation and responds with: "well, there's a thing that needs doing and I don't want to do it, but nobody else is going to, so I guess I'm going to figure it out." And this protagonist type is extremely soothing to me. I will read these characters of Vernon's endlessly.

I will say that I don't think that the merging of the two timelines of the story is done as smoothly as I'd like. The book opens in medias res in a dramatic episode, and then we go back in time to where the story starts, jumping back and forth between the two timelines until the backstory catches up with where the story began. The jumping back and forth part worked fine, and the linear narrative afterward worked fine, but the joining between the two was honestly pretty confusingly handled to me and I had to work at it to follow what had just happened with the timeline!

But that is absolutely my only complaint about the book and everything else is just SO great. It's the story of a princess named Marra who's pleased to be relegated to live in a nunnery because she's just not good at the whole politics thing and finds fibre arts much more interesting, but when the knowledge of something truly horrible occurring is thrust upon her, she goes on a quest to get the thing dealt with. On the way she collects various allies and travelling partners, every single one of whom I adore as well.

( cut for spoilers )

I've been in a bit of a reading slump, so I pulled out T. Kingfisher's latest, because you can't go wrong with a Kingfisher.

This one, Illuminations, is a children's book about rival magic families in an alternate universe Italian city-state, which of course gave me inescapable dwj vibes, but this one is doing its own thing!

It's a very good and charming book, with solid themes, but I found the first lengthy part of the book very stressful since it involved everyone thinking badly of the main character with her unable to defend herself because of secrets she has to keep. And people spend a good while not trusting each other and not talking to each other. But thankfully the book recognizes that this is a problem, and sets out rectifying it much more promptly than it would have in another book, which I appreciate! Still meant though that I spent more of the book than I like being stressed rather than enjoying myself.

One of the things it's doing is the classic children's book thing of depicting important lessons about friendship, and you know, this is one of the things I love about children's books, that they DO highlight the value of friendships and the work needed to be a good friend to someone, and how worthwhile that is. Learning how to navigate jealousy in a vital yet platonic relationship in your life is key actually!

Overall: maybe not my fave Kingfisher, but a quick read and a solid book.

EVEN MORE just under the wire, here are my thoughts on the hugo nominees for best series!

1. The World of the White Rat, by T Kingfisher

I have read every single book in this series, some more than once. Do I find Kingfisher's obsessions with paladins and with large breasts irritating? I do. But everything else about the series is delightful, and I just find her writing to be immensely comforting/comfortable to read. I've been following her work since I was a teenager reading her weird extensive descriptions that were more like mini-stories about her deviantart paintings, and I just like how her brain works.

2. The Green Bone Saga, by Fonda Lee

Well, I've only read 20% of the first book in this series, but from that sample I can tell that what the author is doing here is very well done and very compelling. I really enjoyed what I was reading, but I just cannot handle reading books about crime families, I'm afraid, and when I looked up spoilers for the rest I was like NOPE. Not what I want to read, even if it is good! I definitely recommend this series, but for other people, lol.

3. The Kingston Cycle, by CL Polk

I've only read the third book in this trilogy, Soulstar, and although it was basically fine, it felt too simplistic and too lacking in the feeling of weighty reality in the various hard and bad things the book addresses.

4. Terra Ignota, by Ada Palmer

I have adored Palmer's blog Ex Urbe for many years; her extensive posts about florentine history are fascinating to me, though she hasn't been doing much of that for the past few years, I'm assuming because she's busy with other things. (Her series of posts on machiavelli and his context is particularly excellent, and I find her spot the saint series great fun!) So I was excited when I heard she was writing novels! But. I tried the first novel and was soooooooo bored. I could tell it was probably doing interesting things, and I think I might have even eventually found my way round to finding it worthwhile, but I just could not force myself to keep my attention on it despite multiple attempts.

5. Merchant Princes, by Charles Stross

I read the first book in this series when it came out in 2003, more or less enjoyed it at the time, but never felt strongly enough about it to keep up with the series as it kept coming out. This summer I gave it another go, and got a decent way into the first novel, and my main reaction was that it's so very, very much of its era that it feels out of place to be in conversation with the current genre. And to me it didn't even feel INTERESTINGLY of its era, but just kind of dated and boring. I don't know where he's gone with the series since then, whether the newer books feel more relevant and exciting, but tbh I found the first book tiresome enough that I didn't bother finishing it, and felt no motivation to keep going.

6. No Award

7. Wayward Children, by Seanan McGuire

I've read multiple books in this series for past hugos, and what I've read of it actively frustrates me enough that I do not personally feel able to countenance voting for it to receive an award, though I know it speaks to other people.

Latest in Kingfisher's series of paladin romances! I love the worldbuilding in this series, and I always love Kingfisher's no-nonsense characters who do the things that need to be done. So even though paladins aren't my jam, this was an auto-buy for me, as Kingfisher under any name always is (except when she writes horror).

In a pleasant turn of events, this is an m/m romance, so I didn't have to deal with more paeans to the attractiveness of large breasts, lol. Kingfisher does continue to be a very allosexual writer of romances regardless though, with her characters evincing strong sexual attraction to each other's physical appearance before they even know each other (and also after). It continues to be a fascinating (and uncomfortable) look into a very different experience of the world than mine.

Anyway!

I love mortician Piper, and I continue to love the gnoles and how different their culture is from humans, and I love the weird horrible trap that they all have to navigate (and the things it says about the ancients!), and the not so subtle hints about how corrupt police organizational structures will eventually affect even decent people who join it, and.....I continue to just barely tolerate Kingfisher's obsession with paladins. And unfortunately yet another paladin is the other half of the romance, and I had to suffer through his enormous weight of guilt and self-flagellation which all of Kingfisher's paladins have in spades. SIGH. Hanging a lampshade on the paladins' tendency towards needless guilt does not actually make it any more interesting to read about, imo!

The OTHER thing is that the epilogue ends with a CLIFFHANGER, dangling tantalizing new information about the dead god and sharing NONE of it, and dangit I really need this series to continue asap because the through-line about the dead god is riveting even if the paladins aren't.

Okay I've now read all the Lodestar finalists! (the hugo for YA basically.) Here's how I'm voting. Links to my complete reviews from the titles of each book.

1. Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Badger

I adored this book! Idek, it was just perfect to me. My review of it is basically just a list of things I loved!

2. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, by T Kingfisher

Fascinating and odd and with a lot of heart, like Kingfisher's writing so often is, and I loved every bit of it.

3. Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn

Good at being exactly the kind of book it is, and it explores some important themes, but I found the monster-fighting to be kinda boring, personally.

4. Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko

An uneven debut novel, but with a lot of promise, and some things done very well.

5. Cemetery Boys, by Aiden Thomas

A very slow start and some uncomfortable implications in the ways the themes tied together, but I enjoyed all the various complicated relationships in the book.

6. No Award

7. A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik

Competently written but I never felt compelled to care about anything that was happening.

A collection of mostly short stories and a few poems, by Ursula Vernon under her penname T. Kingfisher. I'd read most of these works before, in the various venues they'd been published, but there are a couple new ones, and also it was nice to revisit the ones I'd read before.

A solid collection, where even the works that I like the least I still like a fair amount -- unusual for a short story collection! I just really like Vernon as an author and she rarely goes wrong for me. The two stories about Grandma Harken are probably the best of the collection, but there's other great ones too, and I got something out of all the stories.

Here's my thoughts on the six short story finalists for this year's Hugos! None of my fave stories for the year ended up on the list, despite me nominating them and everything, but so it goes. I at least like this list better than the short story list from last year! There's even a story I like well enough to be voting it #1 without complaint!

I'm putting these down in the order in which I will vote for them.

1. Open House on Haunted Hill, by John Wiswell
Aww, I'm charmed by this! I love the pov of the haunted house, and the decisions it makes as it tries to bond with people. This is the only story on the list of finalists I hadn't already read before, since it's not published in one of the venues I regularly keep on top of, so it was a pleasant surprise.

2. Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer
I like it for what it is, but it's pretty lightweight and short, and feels more like an introduction to an idea/world than like a story that's complete in itself.

3. Metal Like Blood in the Dark, by T Kingfisher
It's interesting and I found it compelling, but I don't like it.

4. A Guide for Working Breeds, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Okay so I like the idea of robots rebelling against the capitalist framework they're trapped in, through the power of FRIENDSHIP, but the focus on cute dogs is not working for me, and the voices of the main characters feel pretty one-note, so the story didn't really resonate for me.

5. Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse, by Rae Carson
A decent story, but it's about a) zombies and b) giving birth, so I'm just not that interested.

6. The Mermaid Astronaut, by Yoon Ha Lee
The prose style feels so distancing to me that I just glaze over when I try to read this story. I think it's going for a fairy-tale feel, given that it is clearly inspired by The Little Mermaid, but it doesn't land for me. Sometimes when I push through to keep reading a story that is boring me at the start, it picks up eventually, but I skimmed my way all the way to the end of this one and never got pulled in. Which is too bad because I think the things it's trying to do are probably interesting.

Paladins aren't really my thing and paladin romances aren't really my thing, but T. Kingfisher's writing really is, so here I am again! I am riveted by her world, and her plot, and her characters, and her narrative voice, and this book delivers as always.

But the romance. Sigh. Kingfisher knows how to write one type of romance and it is getting old. Especially all the talk of very large breasts. Okay, we get it, you're distracted by how sexually attracted you are to the other person's body, including at inconvenient moments, let's move on to the actually interesting things, shall we?

But there's lots of interesting things in between all the inconvenient sexy thoughts, so you know, worth it! I just think the book would have been better if it were in a different genre than romance :P

I did really like though that the book featured a romance heroine who is Very Large And Tall And Strong, And Has A Hearty Appetite Commensurate With Her Size And Physical Activity. Not a body type that's often allowed to be a romance heroine! This was great.

Anyway, the plot point of the mysterious headless/head-only murder victims from the last book in the series is picked up again, plus extra plot from the Order of St Ursa, which results in our two leads (Clara and Istvhan) travelling together on a road trip (Kingfisher sure likes those! And I do too, so we're good there :D) as they pursue their quests.

The book is uh.....gorier and creepier than I usually go for, but it works for me when it's Kingfisher writing.

I do feel uncomfortable about one aspect of the book.

cut for spoilers

They discover the person who's been making the evil clay murder-heads, and it turns out he's neurodivergent in some way, and he didn't mean to be evil he just wanted someone to love him, and then he dies at the end. Do not love this as rep; it falls into some real unfortunate stereotypes. I'm certain this was something where the author just didn't think through the implications, as she's usually careful about representation, but still--do not like.

Honestly the part about this that got to me the most, though, even though it's really fairly minor, was that when Clara and Istvhan are talking to him to get information, they don't give him false names. Instead they use his brain problems and his perceptions of his own failings against him to just....never give him their names at all. Multiple times over the course of the conversation. I hated this SO much. It felt viscerally Bad.

At any rate though, I continue to be invested in the series and will definitely be reading whatever comes out next!

T. Kingfisher has a new book out!!! AWW YEAH. This is an odd book, like Kingfisher's often are, and I loved it. She's so good at writing books which have a very specific vibe, with practical-minded main characters who do the thing that needs doing because someone's gotta, and with a great deal of darkness but a darkness that does not overwhelm because there are those people who will do things because someone's gotta, even when it's scary.

Kingfisher is also good at including just enough odd and specific details that make her worlds feel really lived in, like she's really thought through the specific variety of weird that's normal here because everywhere is weird in its own way. And like she's aware that the minutiae of your lived experience matters - like, it's really inconvenient for example to try to fight off a murderer when you're wearing pants that are too small for you. It might be a silly detail but it adds to the feeling that what's happening is really happening and I love it.

Anyway this book is about a 14 year old apprentice baker named Mona who can do small magics with baked goods, and discovers a dead body in her bakery one early morning. Then it turns out to be about a bunch of other things as well, like the untrustworthiness of police, what it means to be a hero and why it's not all that it's cracked up to be, how unfair it is when the people in charge won't DO something when there's a big problem that needs fixing, a woman whose power is to control dead horses, and a sourdough starter familiar named Bob.

Mona is wonderful, the street kid Spindle she ends up allying with is a delight, I adore Knackering Molly, and I thought the choices Kingfisher made around the Duchess were really interesting.

All in all an excellent book.

Alrighty, next up on the Hugos ranking docket for me is the YA category. Technically speaking not a Hugo (it's the Lodestar Award) but voted for on the same ballot, so hey.

This was a strong category! A good proportion of the books in this one are worthy and admirable, even if not all of them are perfectly to my taste.

Here's my final ranking, with links in the titles to full reviews for the books I finished:

1. Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge
Amazingly inventive and captivating and just great all around and I love it.

2. Riverland, by Fran Wilde
Superbly written and effectively emotional.

3. Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer
A fun, quick, easy read.

4. Minor Mage, by T. Kingfisher
Good and grounded and kind of upsetting (in an appropriate way).

5. Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee
Doesn't take the dangers faced by its preteen protagonist seriously enough, but an interesting setting/worldbuilding.

6. The Wicked King, by Holly Black
I read the first couple chapters and the last couple chapters and it's just not up my alley. It's about a mortal girl in Faerie and being involved in the various complicated backstabbing politics of that realm; so far so promising. But: a) as I feared there don't seem to be any characters I actually like, AND b) the mortal girl doesn't actually appear to be....very good....at the kinds of necessary machinations and manipulations. Which means that I don't have any reason to want to hang out in her head, if I don't like her and can't even get pleasure from watching her be really good at being bad. So I didn't bother reading the rest.

More Hugos! More middle-grade in the YA category!

And oh dear, this book is....upsetting, to me. At least unlike Dragon Pearl this one agrees with me that it's not right for a 12 year old kid to have to shoulder so much responsibility? But the kid (Oliver) has to anyway, and over the course of Minor Mage he faces a lot more really awful stuff than Min did in Dragon Pearl. It was not fun for me to read about.

Kingfisher has said that a lot of people tell her this is NOT a kids book even though she thinks it is, and you know, I actually think I'm on Kingfisher's side here. It might not be the right book for all kids, but I can imagine there are some who would get along with this sort of thing. But I'm just the wrong audience for this book at any age.

( Read more... )

Not a perfect book but pretty much just what I wanted/needed to be reading right now. (thank you to

michelel72 for reccing this book to me like a month and a half ago!) Kingfisher is reliably compelling and entertaining and good-hearted, and writes the kind of book I can just disappear into instead of being constantly distracted from reading by my other thoughts.

This is a romance novel and also a murder mystery in multiple directions and also one of the lead characters is a paladin whose god died. It's got a lot going on! But Grace and Stephen are both people who have been through really awful traumatizing things and have survived and manage to go on to find happiness even if their past never really leaves them, and it's lovely. Also my favourite nonbinary lawyer-priest Zale shows up again in this one and I love them a lot. Kind of makes up for the enormous amount of earnest guilt all the paladins have going on which I had to wade through. (Paladins are not exactly my character type.) I got rewarded with Zale's presence!

And I really loved Grace's profession as a perfumer, and how throughout the book she is always, always noticing what things and people smell like. And how competent and dedicated she is at her craft. I also loved the strong bonds between the 7 paladins and how much they clearly cared about each other, and also the friendship between Marguerite and Grace. I want to know more about Marguerite's story and everything she clearly has going on!

Also I find it really interesting how very, like, specifically Kingfisher's romance leads are interested in each other's bodies, it's not like "oh they're so hot" or whatever, the narrative makes it very clear exactly what they each find compelling about each other's bodies--and as someone who has literally never found anyone sexy ever I find it really interesting. I appreciate Kingfisher spelling it out for me instead of just assuming I understand sexual attraction. And somehow she does it in a way where I'm like, ok, sure, that's weird but I believe you, whereas in some romance novels when characters are busy being physically attracted to each other I'm just like YOU'RE ALL ALIENS AND NOT THE INTERESTING KIND. I think it's because Kingfisher's writing is just so no-nonsense about everything all the time. And also, on balance, her focus in this tends to be more on how the viewpoint character feels upon seeing or interacting with the other character's body, rather than on the objective attractiveness of the part in question.

(Also Kingfisher makes her leads believably interested in each other as people, not just sex objects, which I really appreciate and which definitely helps too.)

Anyway the ending of this book wraps up many things nicely but there is one specific plot thread which is very definitely left unsolved and aaaaaa I just want to knowwwwwwww!!! ( Read more... )

These two books are really the first and second half of the same story so I’ll review them together. This is a darker story that takes place in the same world as Swordheart, though a little bit earlier in the timeline. (The aftereffects of what happens in these two books are clear in Swordheart!)

A rag-tag group of mostly-criminals is sent off on what’s probably a suicide mission to stop a war by finding out the source of the horrifying enormous destructive living automatons sent out by the opposing side of the war.

The two main viewpoint characters are a woman who mainly works as a forger, and an ex-paladin wracked with guilt who was once possessed by a demon and killed a bunch of nuns while possessed. (He’s no longer possessed, but the dead demon still lurks in the back corners of his mind.)

Also on the mission are an amoral assassin and a 19 year old misogynistic scholar-monk. Eventually they get a gnole too.

I didn’t love this book as much as some of Ursula Vernon’s writings, but I still really enjoyed it - even a book that’s not really my thing is a good time when it’s Vernon writing it. (The kind of book that has an assassin as a major character is just really unlikely to ever do it for me. Also I don't have paladin feelings, and this book was written in direct response to Vernon's frustrations with how paladins are usually portrayed, so.)

But the book does have fascinating worldbuilding, interesting characters, the usual Ursula Vernon delights. I was particularly interested in gnole culture, and in Learned Edmund’s character development!

I wasn’t a huge fan of the romance aspect of this duology, idk. It just didn’t quite work for me. Probably because I lack the aforementioned paladin feelings. But it wasn’t as major an element as in Swordheart so it was fine.

Overall a worthwhile read.

A romance novel by Ursula Vernon! I am extremely charmed and delighted. I mean, obviously I was going to be, it is impossible not to enjoy the things she writes.

This is a romance novel about a middle aged woman and an immortal dead guy trapped in a sword. Which like. I AM THERE FOR THE PREMISE but then the execution absolutely backs it up too.

Halla’s been her great-uncle’s housekeeper for years, and when he finally kicks the bucket he leaves her estate to her. Which would be fine and dandy except....the rest of the family does not agree with this outcome of his will. So Halla’s locked in her room to Think About What She’s Done in order to make her marry her cousin so that her aunt can have control over the estate.

And then she discovers that if she draws an old sword decorating the wall in her room she’ll get a strange man showing up in swirl of blue lights! Who says she’s his bearer and he’ll protect her!

Obviously they then run away together in order to find a lawyer to back up the reading of the will. As you do, because Ursula Vernon’s characters tend to be sensible about things.

Road trip time!

And then even more road trip time once they pick up the lawyer, who’s a delightful nonbinary religious person who becomes a major secondary character.

I...I don’t know how best to describe the appeal of Vernon’s writing, but just something about how she approaches writing - the characters, the plot, the descriptions, the sense of humour, etc - just really really works for me. I wish I could explain better why this book is so good and you should read it!

(One of the details though that I really loved about this book was Sarkis’s belated realization of Halla’s protective strategy of acting like a stupid woman not worth anyone's time when she's faced with dangerous men, and how when he first met Halla she was doing exactly that to him. Amazing. I love Halla so much.)

This is the last of my read-in-2016 books to post!

Ursula Vernon (under her penname T. Kingfisher) released this story as an online serial over the last several months, and it ended on December 29. It was wonderful following it as a serial, with new updates to look forward to twice a week! And when I read the last part it was weird to think that was actually over.

It's a portal fantasy, and stars a girl named Summer who gets sent to the magical world of Orcus by Baba Yaga in search of her heart's desire. She meets friends, but she also meets awful things happening. The whole thing is done with Vernon's usual depth and soul, as well as her usual delightful quirkiness, and the combination of these things makes for a wonderful book. In the early stages of release, Vernon seemed to be somewhat nervous about presenting this book to the world, thinking it maybe too odd to really work for people, but: it works. It really works. It's wonderful.

It's hard to know how to talk about this book in more detail though, because I was reading it for months, so a lot of the details were already fuzzy by the time I got to the end. But I highly recommend it, and you can read the whole thing here.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/271420.html

This is a collection of fairy tale-related short stories and poems, many of which T. Kingfisher had earlier posted on her blog as Ursula Vernon. So a number of these stories I'd read before, but some were new to me, and at any rate I don't object to rereading a good short story!

I thoroughly enjoyed the majority of the stories and poems in this book. Kingfisher's just so good at writing stories with emotional impact, striking details, and thoughtfulness. And with both love for and a critical eye towards the fairy tales she's riffing on.

There were only two entries that gave me an "eh" reaction, those being Night and Odd Season. Everything else was really great!

In my opinion the strongest entries were the bluebeard story, the loathly lady story, and the snow white story. And the titular story, Toad Words.

Dang though, I just want to read T. Kingfisher's fairy tale reimaginings forever and now I'm out of ebooks to buy! I hope she writes/publishes more soon.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/258450.html

You guys this book is so gooooood

And okay there are many things to squee about but let me start with ( everything is spoilers, whoops )

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/258075.html

Sings-to-Trees!!! Gosh I love the dude. I was first introduced to him when Ursula Vernon* posted about him to her livejournal, lo these many years ago. And now he's in book form! Along with a bunch of goblins.

(Here's a round-up of what Vernon posted about Sings-to-Trees back in the day, all of which is definitely worth reading; incidentally, my god, I've been following Vernon's online activity for more than a DECADE. )

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