A Fan's Playground

Today I listened to the audiobook of The Empress of Salt and Fortune, rereading the book for the first time since I read it four years ago. It continues to be a very good book, and it's one that's very well suited to listening to as an audiobook, given the nature of the story it is telling.

But. This is not a review that's intended to convince other people to read the book. (Though you should! it's great!) Rather, I have a burning need to talk about spoilers, with people who have already read the book too and have opinions on some stuff.

Click here for the spoilers

Ok so. There's clearly SOMETHING going on with the identity of Rabbit vs In-yo, right. But I'm not clear on what???? Are Rabbit and In-yo one and the same person? Did Rabbit and In-yo swap places and swap identities, and if so, at what point in their lives? If there are hints that I'm missing here I would LOVE to hear more!

Ok one other note on the book, while I'm here and talking about it, actually.

right I suppose this is spoilers also

I really appreciate that it's a story about monarchy/royalty/empire that makes the ruler compelling in a way that gets you on her side while also being unflinchingly real about the death and destruction that inevitably comes from such a ruler and such a person. Impressive! I love it.

But really I want answers to the questions in my first spoiler cut!!

Disclaimer: this book is written by a friend so I am biased going in. But on the other hand this book is amazing and I'm not biased at all in saying that!! (I am, for better or for worse, the kind of person who Will always have honest critiques available to offer on request.)

Lady Eve's Last Con is set in space in the far future. Our viewpoint character, Ruthi, is a con artist infiltrating high society in order to get revenge for the way her sister was treated by one of these rich dudes. Too bad the older sister of the dude she's conning is so compelling!

(the back cover of the book says Sol is Esteban's YOUNGER sister but the cover copy writer is wrong. She's older. and she very much has older sibling vibes, and that's important.)

Anyway I adore both Ruthi and Sol, and their relationship with each other, and their relationship with their respective younger siblings. And also the worldbuilding, of the specific satellite where the action is taking place, and the broader universe it's situated in!

The connection between Ruthi and Sol is so palpable, and you really believe in why they would be interested in each other, despite everything else going on between them. And each of them stand out so well as Very Specific People with their own foibles and drives and values and interests. And the secondary characters are great too - really their own people as well.

And there' some delightful stuff about the bias of pov, even though the book is all through Ruthi's pov. Through much of the book you see Esteban very much through Ruthi's eyes and she doesn't like him at all -- but you hear a bit nearer the end about what Ruthi's sister saw in him, and he's the same guy but with a different lens of interpretation put on things and you can see why someone would love him!

And the way Ruthi imagines herself versus the way her sister sees her omg! SIBLINGS.

There's great class-related content, and great jewish-identity content, and great lesbian con-artist content, and great space content.

and the way it's written is just so funny and delightful and heart-felt and well-phrased, and and and.

I wish I'd written this review more promptly after finishing the book because I feel like I did have other elements I would have enjoyed talking about more fully! but I did not, so this is the review I have for you. I loved it wholeheartedly! Highly recommended.

I thought I had taken more detailed notes on these books to be able to write up a proper book review! These are three volumes in an ongoing manga series which I think is based on a webnovel? but I might be wrong about that. Many things are confusing to me.

Anyway! I saw this recced as a fun transmigration story that had similar vibes to moshang from svsss, and I was like, sold.

The premise:

Our main character, Kondou, gets accidentally sucked from our world into another realm along with a teen girl who is the special chosen one with amazing powers who's the only one who can save the world. Kondou, who isn't supposed to be there, is meanwhile like: "Welp. Better find some way to keep myself busy if I'm here." And volunteers to join the palace accountancy department.

The love interest, Aresh, is a handsome but taciturn captain who takes it on himself to save Kondou from his own self-destructive tendencies.

The first volume felt to me like it was mostly set-up, and it had promise but I didn't really feel like I had a good handle on the characters or their relationships.

The second volume started getting into the good stuff! However this is where my notes oh so helpfully stop, and I read the these multiple months ago so I remember approximately nothing of substance, lol. The relationship vibes are cute, I enjoy that Kondou and the chosen one do still feel a sort of friendship connection with each other since they transmigrated together even though they're very different and end up in very different spheres in this world, iirc the plot/worldbuilding development started to go somewhere in book 3, etc.

I like it and I'll be interested to keep reading! assuming I remember to keep on top of it as it comes out, lol. Which like. it's me. no guarantees.

Over on mastodon I'm participating in a group readalong of TGCF, one chapter per week, and a few weeks ago we finished the first volume of the official translation so I might as well crosspost all my thoughts over to here as like, my book review? Yeah okay here we go! Putting it all below a cut to save your reading page


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When I watched The Untamed (hereafter CQL) in 2021, my immediate thought upon finishing was that I HAD to read the book (hereafter MDZS) that it was based on. Now, more than two years later, I have finally done that.

And it's so good you guys!

And also, really very different from CQL.

I knew that already, because on top of the way that inevitably at least some things get changed in any adaptation process, I understand that the complex system of chinese censorship has standards for a wide variety of different things not being allowed to be shown on tv. And several of those things are integral to the version of the story in MDZS.

Being now familiar with the versions of the story told in both tv and book, I think the difference that's the biggest is the moral universe being presented by the themes of each story. CQL is the story of a person who always tries his best to do what's right, and is treated poorly by society because of it, but eventually is able to triumph. MDZS is the story of a person who makes some huge mistakes and then has to (gets to?) learn how to live with them.

Both are wonderful stories worth telling! And they have a lot in common. But they are not, in the end, the same story. Going forward I will definitely be paying more attention to which version is being tagged as the fandom when I open fic!

I do feel like I'm not quite up to writing a coherent review of the book right now though. I read the first two-thirds or so back in April, and then accidentally took a multi-month break from reading it, and then read through the remainder over the course of the last few weeks. So the beginning portions of the book are fuzzy in my head and easy to confuse with everything else I have read about CQL/MDZS and the fanfic of both, and it's hard to hold the shape of the entire narrative in my head.

But I do have a few more notes! Most of which are varyingly spoilery for either or both of CQL & MDZS

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idk I feel like I'm spending most of this review talking about MDZS only as relates to CQL which feels a bit unfair to MDZS as the originator, like I'm not respecting it as its own thing! But it's hard for me to talk about it in any other way after having spent the last two years so much in the fandom. If I'd come to MDZS before I ever knew anything about CQL this would be reading very differently!

At some point I do want to do a closer reading of MDZS to appreciate it better for what it specifically is doing, like the way I'm currently doing a TGCF close read on mastodon. There's so much fruitful stuff to pay attention to in any work by MXTX.

Anyway please rec me fic that is particularly good at being based in MDZS canon! I want to spend more time exploring it!

I mad the fatal mistake of not writing down my initial impressions immediately upon finishing the book, so this review must rely on my inconsistent memory. Can I remember the things that struck me that are worth talking about?! Tune in to the rest of this post to find out.

To Shape a Dragon's Breath is a wonderful alternate-earth historical fantasy novel, with a main character from a culture based on post-colonial Indigenous people in North America. In this context of trying to maintain their way of life despite the devastations of disease and colonial rule, Anequs is a teen who finds a dragon egg and bonds with the new-hatched dragon. By the rules of the colonial government, all dragoneers must attend an academy to learn how to safely control their dragon's powers, so Anequs must leave her home and immerse herself in a culture and a schooling system that were not designed for her.

The author does a wonderful job of showing the many different ways indigenous people respond to the impossible situation they're put in, post-colonization, with no good answers; and the many different big and small manifestations of racism that they face, by people both well-meaning and malicious. Anequs finds both friends and allies, but even within these people she is often having to deal with their own internalized racism.

And I loved the worldbuilding! Although different language and symbols are used, because latin is not the language of science and education in this world, it is clear that the power of a dragon's breath is to break down anything into its constituent elements and rebuild them according to the direction of their person or people. So Anequs in learning vitskraft is basically learning chemistry, and the symbology that can be used to safely direct the power of a dragon's breath to create only the things you want.

And it's fun, too, to see a version of the world where a viking style culture is the one that is dominant in the colonial era instead of british culture, and the ways in which it does and doesn't change things.

(I do think that if one were to carefully draw out all cultural ramifications there would be even more differences between that world and our own history -- eg the clothing would NOT be our world's 19th century western fashion! -- but I do understand that that might be too big a project to undertake, to make every single thing make sense within the internal logic while still making it recognizably 19th century to the reader.)

Anyway I found it a thoroughly enjoyable book with a satisfying ending, but also it's clear from the book that there's more coming in the series and I only wish I could read the rest IMMEDIATELY. But that is not how linear time and recently-published books work!

A future sci-fi story about what it means to have grown up in a radical militaristic doomsday cult in space - it does an amazing job of writing something incredibly readable from the pov of a horrible person. Kyr was raised to believe in the cult's values wholeheartedly so she is awful but she cares so MUCH about the things she believes in, and is so sure she's doing the right things, that the reader is drawn in anyway.

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This is the first time in my life that I have gotten to hold in my hands a real actual published book written by a friend of mine, and let me tell you, it is a GREAT experience and also this book lived up to absolutely everything I hoped for from it. Five stars, would collapse into a puddle of emotions again. And I say this without bias! I would have loved this book even if I didn't know Becca!

So The Iron Children is a scifi novella about cyborgs warriors and a robot nun and one squishy human traversing a treacherous landscape together in the midst of war, and also is about questions of identity and religious ethics and duty and kindness and freedom. I loved EVERYTHING about this, I adored all the characters, I loved the worldbuilding, I loved its careful pacing and the way it built on its ideas, I loved that it managed to pack so much into such a short book without ever feeling like it was overcrowded.

The book is told through three different POVs: the squishy human, Asher, who's a young nun-in-training getting thrown in over her head; Barghest, the leader of the cyborg warriors, whose dedication to duty is above and beyond the call of duty; and a character whose identity is a mystery until partway into the book but is definitely one of the other cyborg warriors. The first two characters get their POV sections in third person, but the mystery character's sections are in first person.

I have gone on record in the past as stating that I find it irritating when there's multiple povs and some of them are, for no reason, in a different person than the others.

BUT the key here is that there IS a reason in The Iron Children, and when there's a reason it works! It's got a destabilizing effect, to have one of the three in a different person than the other two; it shows that character as other, as separate. It works thematically! (Okay and incidentally it lets the name be hidden to allow a reveal later on as to which character this one is, which is convenient!)

And now let me go into the realm of spoilers because I have to to talk about everything else I love.

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ANYWAY read this book!!!

A romance novel parody of Harry Potter written in response to jkr’s transphobia. A good-hearted t4t story of trans joy that combines things making no sense with things that are actually wonderful and fascinating worldbuilding (of a world which is distinctly NOT the world of the original hp novels), with delightful fourth-wall-breaking aspects. There are a lot of typos, and the style is very consciously romance-novel-esque with lots of epithets and things, so it took me a bit to get into it, but once I was in I was honestly hooked.

Also the author, Chuck Tingle, is out here on the internet openly being his wonderfully autistic self without shame, and encouraging everyone to live a life that centres love and the knowledge of everyone's intrinsic worth, and I really admire that!

So thanks Chuck. LOVE IS REAL.

Awww, a perfectly lovely retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight set in WWII, that does all the things one wants in such a retelling. A beautiful little gem of a novella. Gawain is lovely and charming, the Bertilaks compelling, the secondary characters richly drawn as well, and the story is fully present in its setting. I loved it!