sophia_sol | Entries tagged with pub date: 2018

A collection of short fiction by NK Jemisin. I don't have a lot to say about this collection, tbh! Jemisin's a good writer, and she has a bunch of very good stories in her. Like in almost any short story collection*, I don't love every story in the collection, but when you're reading a collection by a writer who works for you, the baseline level of worth-reading in the collection is still not bad. And some of the stories are excellent!

A few of the stories in the collection I've read before, but most of them are new to me, and the ones I already knew were worth rereading.

My biggest problem with this collection, tbh, is the ongoing war between my descriptivist values and prescriptivist instincts for language, as applies to the title of the book. "Until" as a word is actually a derivative of "till" so if you want a short form of "until," "till" is right there! You don't need to go for "'til"! That's a form of over-correction! But given the prevalence of "'til," including (obviously!) in professionally-edited writing, I think I am losing this one, and I need to learn how to accept it. Sigh. The eternal struggle.

*every story collection except Zen Cho's Spirits Abroad, where I love every single story!

I seem to be going on a bit of a nonfiction spree this month for some reason. I think I've read as much nonfiction this month as all last year!

This one is about how fascism works, surprise surprise! It's a clear, cogent, thoughtful read, and full of helpful examples drawn from history and from various countries' fascist trends in the current political climate. It's very readable and very distressing.

The author is Jewish and clearly feels strongly about the topic, and for good reason; and that passion, backed up by a strong commitment to evidence-based arguments, makes it a powerful read.

(Note that this book quotes hate speech from fascists, including slurs and various dehumanizing and violent language, so be warned to expect that.)

The book is written as a call to action, to be able to recognize and resist fascism when you see it. It was published in 2018 and continues to be unpleasantly timely.

I discovered the graphic novel tag on Libby a few days ago and have just been motoring through a whole pile of random ebook graphic novels that looked interesting to me, mostly not even pausing long enough between reading them to write down any thoughts. So here's a collection of very haphazard short reviews of a bunch of graphic novels! Yes most of these ARE middle grade, I love middle grade fiction and I super gravitated towards those when wandering through the options.

Witches of Brooklyn, and Witches of Brooklyn: What the Hex?!, by Sophie Escabasse

These are cute middle grade graphic novels about an orphan girl who lives with her aunts, discovers she's a witch, and learns about friendship and magic and being who you are. Quick and charming reads!

The Fire Never Goes Out, by Noelle Stevenson

A collection of Stevenson's biographical comics they wrote each year since 2011, along with other art and notes. It's a glimpse into a young person growing up and discovering who they are and how to live with mental illness and trying to figure out their identity, but all written in a very distancing and non-specific way (understandable, as much of this was written while the author was actively struggling with these things), so although it was interesting, it didn't fully capture me.

Be Prepared, by Vera Brosgol

A story about a girl with Russian immigrant parents who always feels like an outsider among her peers, and then learns about RUSSIAN SUMMER CAMP! Unfortunately, camp is not everything she dreamed. I loved this book, the art and the writing work so well together to capture the main character's experiences, and I loved that it was a book about camp where the conclusion actually was "hey it turns out camp's not for everyone and that's okay."

They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker

A memoir of Takei's experiences as a child in Japanese internment camps in WWII. Really powerfully done. I loved the way the book manages to show both how genuinely hard it was, and also how much child-him was oblivious to the real seriousness of what was happening to him and his family.

Snapdragon, by Kat Leyh

Delightfully queer story about a girl who feels like an outsider, an old butch lesbian witch who lives in the woods and articulates roadkill skeletons, and a lot of ghosts. I loved it!

Heartstopper (volume 1), by Alice Oseman

This is really just the first part of a multi-part story, but volumes 2 and 3 are checked out and I have to wait for my holds to come in to be able to actually finish! Alas. Anyway this is a gay high school love story between two boys, and I enjoyed it, but the art made it really hard for me to tell the new love interest Nick apart from the mean ex Ben, which was an ongoing problem.

The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen

Wow, this was incredible! The weaving together of the stories of a young Vietnamese teen trying to come to terms with his gay identity and how to tell his parents, and his mother's experience of being a Vietnamese immigrant who left her family behind and being caught between the world of her mother and the world of her son, and the fairy tales they read to each other that allow them to connect and communicate with each other. The three elements dip in and out of each other constantly, but each is monochromatic in a different colour, allowing you to easily follow how everything's connected without feeling lost. It also does a good job of making the art speak without words, which is something I don't always do a good job of following, but it really works for me here. The whole book is about different ways of communicating, and it uses its own form to enhance that theme. SUPER good.

Operatic, by Kyo Maclear

I see what it was going for, and I liked the bones of it, but it didn't quite all gel together for me, unfortunately.

How Mirka Got Her Sword, by Barry Deutsch

A perfectly fine story about a Jewish girl who wants to fight monsters. Nothing wrong with it, but it didn't excite me either.

Jane, the Fox and Me, by Fanny Britt & Isabelle Arsenault

The main theme of the book appears to be fatphobia -- but the art depicts the main character as being just as skinny as anyone else in the book, and nobody is in fact noticeably fat? So the theme of the art and the theme of the story end up being in tension with each other in a way that really detracted from what it was trying to say. Also the fatphobia the main character experiences doesn't actually ever really....get dealt with or addressed much. She finds a friend and then she feels better about everything, including her weight. (And, in a much pettier complaint, the fox of the title hardly shows up at all!!)

I like to browse the recent books section of the libby app, to see what recent ebooks my library has acquired, and sometimes it really pays off! I hadn't even heard of this comic series before, but I saw it and was immediately intrigued, and when my holds came in on the four volumes collecting the whole series, I read them INSTANTLY and was totally drawn in.

The premise: a sports anime, but make it explicitly queer. High-school aged boys on a boarding school fencing team! Nicholas is the lead character, a scholarship student whose good instincts in fencing are held back by inferior technique. He has placed himself as a rival to Seiji, a dedicated and consistent fencer with years of training who doesn't know how to be anything but serious, and Nicholas is determined to beat him -- and also be friends with him.

I love both of them, but I also love all the other characters. They're all individuals, with their strengths and weaknesses (both on the fencing piste and off), and their own relationships with the other characters. And I was going to mention here which of the other characters I was most interested in but uh it may be basically all of them? I was riveted through the whole of the story.

The four extant volumes take us through team tryouts and to the end of the team's first practice match, and now that I've finished them I'm desperate to read more. Unfortunately that's all there is!

It looks like there are also some novels by Sarah Rees Brennan continuing the story, but I've found Rees Brennan's writing pretty hit-or-miss for me, so I'm feeling a bit skeptical about giving these a try. I want to read more of this story as written by CS Pacat! SIGH. Has anyone else read the Rees Brennan Fence novels, and can tell me more about how they are?

I was inspired to reread this book because of how much I didn't care about A Deadly Education when I read that one. And I love Spinning Silver? So much?? It is GOOD. The themes and the worldbuilding and the plot and the characters are all in harmony with each other, working together to create one story with a whole lot of power. I had remembered I'd loved this book but I'd forgotten just HOW good it is.

I paid more attention to people's expressions of sexual interest (or lack thereof) this time than last time, because of discussion in the comments to my review of A Deadly Education. (Thanks

lirazel for inspiring me to look at this more closely, with your comments on Mirnatius!) And tbh as a book Spinning Silver is fairly uninterested as a whole in people's sexualities! Much more interested in questions of power and privilege and belonging, and sex can be a part of all that, but it's definitely secondary in this book. Which is fascinating to see, given how much priority is given to sex by a lot of books and a lot of society, and I really appreciate it.

I am particularly interested in Staryk sexuality, because the Staryk lord clearly sees sex as a right that is owed to one's spouse. But also something that can be bartered away for something of equal value (equally high value!). How would a Staryk think of the notion of desire? Is it even a relevant concept in their framework? They're so alien in a lot of the ways they arrange their society, why not in this as well!

Specifically about Mirnatius though, I could still come down in multiple directions on whether he's ace or not. He spends a lot of the book very firmly rejecting the idea of having sex with his wife, and also the cousin who's in love with him, and also the idea of getting together with anyone else. And his priorities (when has the opportunity to have his own priorities) do not go in that direction. But there's also this quote, from Mirnatius's pov:

Under normal circumstances, when my friend wants itself a meal, it doesn't usually last long. I just hold my nose and dive deep until the screaming is all over, then cover things over and occasionally send a compensatory purse to the appropriate destination. I have had words with it about snatching up awkward people like noblemen and the parents of small children, to a little grudging effect, but that's only because it's not very picky. Unless I do something stupid like smile encouragingly at a serving-maid or a well-turned footman, even in broad daylight, in which case I'm sure to find their staring corpse in my bed a few nights later.

To me this reads like Mirnatius has been carefully preventing himself from ever letting himself have any interest in anyone, because the demon will take it as reason to immediately kill that person. Now, he might still be ace regardless, he hasn't really had the opportunity to learn whether he's sexually into anyone because he's been the property of the demon his whole life, and the answer might be no! But the answer might also be yes?

And it's also possible that he's only appreciating serving-maids and well-turned footmen in an entirely platonic way, but the corpses being left on his bed, and the smiling at them being a problem even in daylight, at least implies otherwise.

Idk! It's all real interesting though!

(I still feel firmly that the Mirnatius-Irina relationship is not a romance though, or even pointing towards becoming one, despite what I've seen allo people say in reviews. Emotionally intense, absolutely! But the one does not necessarily lead to the other.)

On another note, I wonder what Miryem's cousin Basia thinks of her wedding being crashed by a tsar and a Staryk king having a duel with each other! Not exactly the most auspicious of beginnings there. I hope Basia and Isaac have a nice life after that.

Also, last time I read this book, I didn't pay enough attention to the fact that Miryem using that tunnel to save her Staryk lord from imprisonment means it becomes no longer an option for the Jews of the city to escape should public sentiment turn it too dangerous to be Jewish there in the future. On my first read I was too focused on some other rather pressing questions, like what's going to happen next in this book?!? But like. That is not a minor thing to be giving up!

Even though Miryem and her family have a happy ending, even though Irina is now taking charge of the whole country with the intent to protect everyone, there's still that always-lingering threat of danger to Miryem's larger Jewish community. And Miryem's choices make that threat just a bit more dangerous. Which is of course part of one overall theme of the book, of making the choices you have to make when there are no good options.

Anyway this is all just a bunch of meandering thoughts on points I found of interest in this read-through, if you want something better approaching an actual review of this book then maybe check out the review from when I first read it!

Middle-grade historical fiction, set in 1932 in the USA. Cal and his father are hoboes after losing their farm in the Great Depression. Cal has been raised to think of himself as white and to present as white to the world, to save him from the stigma of being known to be Indigenous. But when his father has to leave him for a time, his father makes the difficult choice to send him to an "Indian school," in fact the same residential school he went to as a child, because at least there he knows Cal will receive an education and food and a place to stay. And because he knows that the administration has changed and the worst of the abuses are no longer perpetrated there.

Cal is understandably bewildered by this new information about his and his father's identity, and also upset at the thought of leaving behind a) his father, and b) their nomadic lifestyle.

But when he gets to the residential school, he discovers that despite the major issues there's actually something there that's really worth his time: community with other Indigenous kids, learning Creek language and customs, and feeling like he has people among whom he truly belongs. All of which is of course completely antithetical to the point of residential schools! But you can't truly stop people from making connections with each other.

I was fascinated to read this portrayal of some of the complexities around residential schools. I remember a few years ago when I went on a vacation that took me to Manitoulin Island, I went to the Ojibwe Cultural Centre, which had an exhibit up about residential schools, and had reflections from many people about their experiences attending residential schools. And the range of experiences was much wider than I was expecting. Residential schools are unquestionably a bad thing for Canadian and American governments to have enacted, don't get me wrong. But the students took what they could from the opportunities they found (or made!) at school.

And questions of identity, and what really makes you what and who you are, are of course big in this book, which I always enjoy.

I didn't love everything about the book though. My biggest frustration is that Cal has a gift of being able to see true visions of the past/future, in a book that's otherwise straightforward historical fiction. This felt weird and out of place to me. Having exactly one element of fantasy, that's never explained, in a book that's not that genre is just like....what are you doing. Especially since this gift becomes a crucial element in the climax of the book.

Ah well. A pretty good book overall, at least! And I'm glad I read it.

As you may know if you read my book posts regularly, I am a wuss. And this is a work of apocalyptic fiction. And I am a wuss!! It's very tense and emotionally intense in places. It's really good though so I am glad I read it.

Set in a community of Anishinaabe people on a remote reservation in northern Ontario, when issues start occurring everyone's just like "ah yes just another day on the rez, of course the power's out and nobody's telling us what's up." But soon it becomes clear that the situation is bigger than just their community, and something they can't expect to be fixed anytime soon.

Something I appreciated about the perspective this book brings to the genre is that Indigenous people have already been through several apocalypses, brought upon them by the white colonizers. A recurring theme of the book is the various members of the community doing their best to learn their traditional ways and traditional language, when for many years Canadian governmental policies deliberately divorced them from being able to maintain their traditions and heritage. They have already been working to rebuild in a post-apocalyptic setting.

So as an elder in the community tells Evan, the main character, their people have survived the apocalypse before and they'll survive this new one too.

This is a short novel but it packs a lot in. And it doesn't bother with irrelevancies such as: what actually went wrong in the south, what's the cause of this particular apocalypse? There are other priorities!

My only criticisms are that the opening of the book is a little infodumpy, and the time skip near the end of the book is a little disorenting. It's also a little male-focused in a way that makes you think "ah yes a man definitely wrote this" but not in like, a "the man who wrote this hates and/or doesn't understand women" kind of way. But this book is excellent at doing the things it sets out to do, and I highly recommend it.

I really enjoyed this book, once I got past the slowish start! It is the author's first book, and there are a few ways in which that manifests, but overall a great read.

It's a scifi/fantasy futuristic YA novel featuring a girl (Amani) from a colonized culture who is kidnapped and trained to be a body-double for the princess of the colonizers, Maram. The complex relationship between Amani and Maram is great, and the way that Maram is clearly a cruel and difficult person but also a teenager who's had a very hard life and hasn't had the opportunity to learn to be better.

( Read more... )

But! I still loved the book! I had a lot of feelings and cared a lot about the characters, and was totally into the things the book was interested in focusing on. And I'm super pumped to read the sequel. (Apparently Maram gets a queer love interest!!!)

Well I kind of disappeared from view here for a while! I just got kind of tired and overwhelmed. But some rest has done me good and I'm back with another book post. Today's book thoughts are for two novellas by the same author that I read back to back so I figured I might as well post them together.

A Duet for Invisible Strings, by Llinos Cathryn Thomas

A nice little fantasy f/f novella, featuring two musicians. I liked it a lot, and I loved Heledd, and the slow reveal of what was going on with her. But the ending felt pretty abrupt, and the off-balance power dynamics throughout made me feel uneasy about how this relationship will work out - Heledd looks up to Rosemary so much, sees her as the one who is competent and in control, and there's a ten year age gap and they met when Heledd's pretty young and also she works for Rosemary. Which would have been fine, if the book was interested in exploring how these power dynamics affected their relationship, but it wasn't. So I wanted to love this book, but it wasn't quite there for me.

Sparks Fly, by Llinos Cathryn Thomas

Unfortunately this one works for me even less than A Duet for Invisible Strings. This one is a sci-fi f/f novella, featuring two women who work in a zero-gravity performance art form, one as a performer and the other as a teacher.

I struggled with understanding the performance art form in question - the performers are in antigravity pods, and the display seems to be mostly about the light coming from the pods? So it feels like there's much less scope for the artistry of the performer, if it's just about zooming around in little space pods while the performer isn't even visible. And it even talks about how it's possible to program the pods to do the routine themselves! So what's the performer in there for then?? It sounds like the only art is in the choreography, and the performers are just there for no reason.

It's possible I'm not properly visualising or understanding the art form, but as it is, it just didn't make sense to me. So that was one major barrier to me, that I couldn't appreciate the thing that these two women had dedicated their lives to.

The other issue, which is even more important to me, is that the shift in relationship dynamics between the two of them felt off to me. It's an enemies-to-friends-to-lovers storyline, but honestly both of them start out fairly unlikeable in how self-centred and arrogant they each are, and their shift to first appreciation of each other and then love feels to me unearned from what the reader is actually shown on the page.

It's too bad that neither of these two novellas worked for me! But I really liked the short story I've read by Llinos Cathryn Thomas before ("Storm Story" in Consolation Songs), so I'm not going to give up on giving her a try just yet.

Trying something new here, and writing a book review by comparing two books to each other, instead of giving each their own space!

So I read two romance novels recently with #ownvoices autistic representation, which is excellent! And now I want to talk about them in relation to each other, because I ended up liking one of them far more than the other.

A Girl Like Her by Talia Hibbert I read last month, and I don't really remember all the details anymore but it was super great. I liked how unapologetic it was (and Ruth was!) about Ruth's autism. Being autistic informs Ruth's life and choices, but it's never presented as bad or a problem to be overcome. The relationship between Ruth and Evan was lovely, and it was very affirming for me to read a book like this about a neurodivergent person being deserving of love just as she is. I had a lot of feelings about that which I had trouble putting into words at the time (and still do) but: yes good.

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang, on the other hand, I just finished and although there were some things I really liked....I had some arguments with aspects of it. Here's my issues.

1. This is just a me thing I know, but it is a book with a LOTTTTTTT of focus on sex. That's just not one of the things that draws me to read in the romance genre, so it was tedious being like, I wanna just skip past all the endless sex but there's important character moments sprinkled into the sex sometimes so I can't.

2. It felt to me like the male lead, Michael, was bulldozing past Stella's stated boundaries way too often. And this was portrayed as positive persistence in getting past her barriers, instead of boundary-crossing and bad. And yes, he always turned out to be correct in reading what she actually wanted vs the no she was saying, but that doesn't stop his behaviour from being inappropriate, and it eventually started to make me really uncomfortable.

3. Philip....OH BOY. Philip sexually harasses Stella multiple times, but this is presented more as a thing around Michael's jealousy, or around Philip being a bad match for Stella, and less that he is a SEXUAL HARASSER WHICH IS A BAD THING TO BE AND AUTOMATICALLY TAKES YOU OUT OF THE RUNNING AS A POTENTIAL PARTNER. Ughhhhhh.

Compare points 2 & 3 above to A Girl Like Her, which was consciously careful about consent, and which explicitly dealt with the fact that one of the leads had previously been in an abusive relationship and that it was fucked up.

I liked Stella, and I liked that over the course of the The Kiss Quotient she learns to be more accepting of her autistic traits, and that it doesn't mean there's something wrong with her, while not dismissing the real challenges she experiences in an allistic society. But did she have to learn it with a boundary-crosser like Michael??

The two books feature women at very different stages in their path of understanding and accepting being autistic, and both are great and have value in being represented! But as a romance novel, A Girl Like Her worked wayyyyyyyyyyy better for me than The Kiss Quotient.

Ahhhhh this was amazing! I've been hearing good things about this book for a while but the Hugos were the kick in the pants I needed to finally prioritise reading it.

I found the first 100 pages a bit of work to get through, so with how easily distracted I was from reading I didn't really retain a lot of what I read, but everything after that I was just THERE for it completely and it totally made up for the slow start.

Empire of Sand is a Mughal India inspired fantasy, featuring a young woman named Mehr caught between her two cultural heritages. Her father is an Ambhan nobleman, and her mother a part of a persecuted people-group, the Amrithi. Mehr inherits a certain magical ability from her mother's people, which puts her particularly at risk.

What happens after 100 pages: ( I guess this is spoilers but I'd consider it more in the way of enticement )

I love reading books where the setting and context matter to the story being told, and this one definitely delivers. Your standard vaguely-medieval-european-inspired tolkien ripoff type of fantasy doesn't really care about that stuff (even though Tolkien himself definitely did!) and one of the great things about reading books like this one is that the different cultural context inspires different kinds of worldbuilding. For example, the magic of this book is inspired by Indian classical dance, and especially the way that the movement and placement of hands is communicating a great deal. And this book's themes see balance as important, rather than the binaristic notion of Good Triumphs Over Evil. It's great!

I also love when you have characters who have complicated relationships to other people, and characters who do bad things for understandable reasons. This book has plenty of both. Also there's themes of family and family of choice! Yessss!

All in all a book that made me care a lot about the people in it and immersed in the world it took place in, and that's pretty much everything I love most in a book, so YAY.

And there's a sequel out! Which looks great! Let's see how soon I can justify spending money on it. :D

Super cute romance novel, and lots of things to like about it.

I kind of feel like a broken record with how pretty much every time I like a romance novel, one of the things I say in praise of it is that I like how the characters have well rounded lives outside each other: friends/family they care about, jobs they're good at and passionate about, some cause that they're dedicating time and energy to, that kind of thing. But many romance novels DON'T have those things (still not over that terrible one I read where the leading lady quits her job which she loves and is good at, for the sake of her relationship with the leading man!!!) so I still appreciate it every time. It's important to me that it doesn't feel like the romantic relationship is the ONLY good thing in a character's life--that just feels uncomfortable, unrealistic, and unhealthy to me. And this book was good for having that more expansive view of its characters' lives! I loved Alexa's complicated but positive relationship with her sister, I loved how much she cared about the good she could do through her job in local politics, I loved how easily she made friends with that other girl (Lauren?) at the wedding, and how good she was at being friendly to people. And I loved how Drew cared a lot about the kids he was doctor for, and I loved his best friendship with Carlos.

I'm also charmed by the romance, with how much Alexa and Drew just enjoy each other's company so much, it's delightful. And the way he admires her being good at things! And he makes her feel more confident about her body! And it's nice how even though Drew is white, every time she tells him about something racist she experiences he just believes her and supports her straight off even if it's not something he ever considered before, she doesn't need to convince him of what her lived experience is.

I don't find everything about the book perfect though. And there are two aspects of the ending that particularly bugged me.

( spoilers for aspects of the ending )

Really enjoyed this one!

Nik's mediocre boyfriend of only 5 months proposes to her on the jumbotron at a sports game, making her have to do her rejecting of him in public. Carlos and his sister are nearby and feel sorry for her, and help her make her escape from all the attention! Carlos and Nik hit it off and begin what they agree is very definitely only a casual relationship, because neither is interested in anything more serious. Obviously.

I love me a romance novel with interesting friendships and/or family relationships for the leads, so we don't see them in a vacuum, and this book was good for that. I particularly liked Nik's friends!

I liked seeing how much enjoyment Nik and Carlos get from spending time with each other too - this isn't one of the romance novels where I'm in it for all the background platonic relationships and/or plot but don't care about the main relationship. I liked the romance a lot!

I appreciated that Carlos's arc involved learning how to take a step back and give more space for the women in his life to do things for themselves without his input or assistance, but I feel like his revelation was a bit late in coming, I would have preferred to see more of him actively working on that. It's such an ingrained pattern for him that it's going to take him a lot of very conscious effort to integrate the lessons learned. And the push-back came almost entirely from his family, not from Nik, other than the few protests from her at the very beginning of their acquaintance. Did she decide she was fine with this kind of behaviour from him? Did she just not want to make a fuss? Did she stop noticing he did that kind of thing? I would have liked to see her reaction to his character growth, since it's relevant for her too.

But that's just one minor detraction from what was overall a very enjoyable book. I'd heard great things about Guillory and that this was the one to begin with for her, and indeed it was lots of fun. I'll be reading more of Guillory in the future, I think.

A second-chance romance novella about a pregnant woman fleeing an abusive marriage, and the guy she knew for 6 weeks when they were teens who was her first love.

It's lovely! I love how supportive Samir is of Laura in this difficult time in her life, and how Laura re-learns how to feel strong and capable and worthy of attention once she's outside of Daniel's sphere of influence.

I don't have a lot to say about this one, but it's real nice. I liked it a lot.

(and if you want a low-commitment way to try Hibbert's writing out, you can get a copy of this one for free if you sign up for her newsletter on her website!)

A nonfiction book by a woman who went to Costa Rica as a missionary for 5 years with her family and ended up realising that the way Christian missions works is super fucked up. She has since become an advocate for mission reform, which is good, though I personally am of the opinion that the correct way to reform the industry is to just remove it altogether.

Wright's a very engaging writer, and I enjoyed reading her book in which she says a lot of true things about the stuff wrong with missions and missionaries in a funny, irreverent, and heartfelt way. And she even jokes at the end that most of her ideas on how to improve Christian missions involve gasoline and a match! But she still seems to remain more of an Evangelical than I'm really comfortable with. IDK.

At any rate I hope her book and her work are successful at least at helping convince well-meaning christians who haven't ever thoughtfully considered the issue that there are problems with missions, since I think that's the audience she's aiming at, not an audience like me.

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.

After hearing that the sex-to-other-content ratio of the last Beverly Jenkins book I read is perhaps not fully representative of her standard, I decided to give her another try, and hey, nice, this delivered! Only the normal amount of sex for a romance novel!

And overall, although I didn't love it, this was a perfectly enjoyable book to read, so I'm glad I gave Jenkins another try.

This is a historic western featuring a mail-order bride who is a little more....independent minded than the male lead expected.

I liked the deliberate focus on diversity, on the expected roles of different genders and different races in the historic context of the time, and how difficult these expectations can be on people's lives. It was delightfully earnest about this stuff, and it was clear the author had done some research.

On the other hand, there are other aspects of historicity where it's clear the author did not do research, such as the order of underclothes for women. (The shift goes UNDER the corset, for some very good and important reasons!) And various aspects of the prose struck me as intrusively modern as well, which kept throwing me out of things.

I like the two lead characters, but the arc of the romance didn't quite work for me, it's a marriage of convenience where the two of leads are clearly extremely different from each other, and yet they fall into love so quickly and easily. The male lead is still grieving the loss of his previous wife who died, and whom he thought was perfect, embodying all the ladylike and housewifely traits he thinks a woman ought to. The female lead is...not those things. And she doesn't suffer fools kindly and is very impatient with how much the male lead doesn't think her behaviour is appropriate. AND YET.

Oh well, I did like them, so I was happy for them to find happiness with each other.

There are other details in the book I really loved though. Like everything about the male lead's sister, Spring. (Yes, hers IS the only name from the entire book I remember, less than 24 hours after finishing reading it.) And the way that the female lead had a tendency to make conversation with the picture of the male lead's dead wife when she's alone in the house, that's really charming. And I liked that, despite the female lead's apprehension on being invited, the local Women's Society is actually something she finds worthwhile to be a part of.

(One other thing I feel compelled to note is that I am not entirely comfortable with the narrative approach to sex workers. There are three sex workers in the book, one of whom is a minor antagonist, one of whom is the female lead's mother who abandoned her, and one of whom took up the profession unwillingly and left it as soon as possible. It kind of comes across as saying that Sex Work Is Bad instead of having any kind of more nuanced approach.)

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.

Sequel to Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer, and if you loved the first book, this one is more of all the things that were so delightful about the first one. And as the author says in the end note: "sometimes funny things and sad things and magic and science are all mixed up together." EXACTLY and it is all done so well! I loved it.

Ahh, the quartet-long arc of Murderbot's complicated feelings about its relationships with other beings and about what it wants to do with itself is so good!

I've been hearing about the Murderbot novellas for a while, but kept on going back and forth on whether to pick them up based on different things I was hearing about them. But finally I decided to give them a try and I'm SO GLAD I DID! And also, actually, super glad I waited till now because it meant I could read all four of them together in one go. I feel like the series arc really benefits from treating it as a four-volume novel rather than as four separate books. Each book has its own story but they build together beautifully. And I think if I'd read the first one on its own I would have been a bit disappointed by it despite all the things that book does well, but because the end of the first book is not even close to the end of Murderbot's arc, I am instead delighted.

( spoilers of varying degrees for all four books )