You may be born into a family, but you walk into friendships. Some you’ll discover you should put behind you. Others are worth every risk.
I liked thisYou may be born into a family, but you walk into friendships. Some you’ll discover you should put behind you. Others are worth every risk.
I liked this a lot more than I thought I would, and I cried a lot less than I expected. As a matter of fact, I didn't cry at all.
I actually don't like books that make me cry, I get enough of that with life. And that's what They Both Die at the End is about: living. It's about not wasting your time with your insecurities, about living the time you have left the fullest. It was hopeful in an unusual way, and I think I read it at the right moment - this is definitely the kind of book you have to be in the right mood for.
I'm not sure which genre this book is. It has sci-fi elements which feel like contemporary fantasy, but it reads like a contemporary. The only thing I know is that I loved it.
They Both Die at the End is told in two perspectives, but sometimes there are some not-so-random chapters from the point of view of minor characters. This format reminded me a lot of The Sun Is Also a Star, but TBDatE had way less pretentious conversations and it was queer, which are welcome improvements.
I'm glad painful queer books that are not about queer pain exist. Books like this are the only sad queer books I want to read. Also, almost everyone is a person of color. Rufus is Cuban-American, Mateo's parents are from Puerto Rico.
But the reason I loved this? It never felt like tragedy porn. You know that kind of book. The emotionally manipulative one that uses tragedies to make the reader feel sad, and does it clumsily (an example: literally all sicklit books ever). They Both Die at the End never did that. I never felt manipulated, and that made me love the story and the characters so much more.
And I loved the entire cast. It's a m/m love story that lasts one day, but it's also a story about friendships - I loved the Plutos a lot. I just really like to read about friend groups. Rufus was my favorite character. I don't get attached to male characters that often, for some reason, but when I do I really love them. He makes some awful decisions sometimes, but he's great. He and Mateo actually worked as a couple, which makes everything even more sad. I believed in them, even if they knew each other for only one day (and they never felt unrealistic to me).
I didn't care that the worldbuilding, especially the DeathCast app, was never really explained. It read like contemporary fantasy, and that wasn't a problem for me. I liked how the book chose to explore DeathCast's effects on everyday life more than its inner workings.
There's only one thing that... bothered me: the idea that living with anxiety isn't really living. I understand why someone would think that way on the last day of their life - as in: I wasted all my time being self-conscious and I never really lived - but I'm not sure how I feel about that....more
I once thought I hated sci-fi books. That was before I decided to try the adult ones instead of limiting myself to YA, as YA sci-fi tends to 4.5 stars
I once thought I hated sci-fi books. That was before I decided to try the adult ones instead of limiting myself to YA, as YA sci-fi tends to disappoint me more often than not.
The Collapsing Empire is one of the books that helped me understand I actually love this genre, and I'm so glad I decided to pick it up. I may haven't found a young adult book that gets the mix of politics, science and action right yet, but this one does. It's also surprisingly easy to read, for an adult book heavy on politics. It's violent, but it also made me laugh a lot.
The first time I read it, I rated this book a full five because I was surprised by how much I liked it. With this reread, I decided to lower it to 4.5: some of the character weren't as developed or as interesting as they should have been.
It mainly follows three PoVs: 🌟 Cardenia Wu, the new empress, who is trying her best to rule a collapsing empire. Deserves better, but she's kind of bland; 🌟 Marce Claremont, a physicist. He's kind of a stereotypical character, as he's a socially awkward, physically weak scientist, and while I didn't feel strongly about him, I did end up liking him; 🌟 Kiva Lagos, merchant and disaster bisexual (it's canon!) whose vocabulary is mainly composed by swear words. This would have been irritating in any other book, but not here - I loved her and her rude pragmatism a lot, she's my favorite PoV character.
One thing that I missed the first time I read this book was the environmentalism. The empire is falling apart, but (most of) the people in power are either in denial or trying to make more money out of the situation, because priorities. It's really entertaining how disgusting some people - like the villainous Nohamapetan family - can be in those situations, but the parallels with global warming aren't....more
It's difficult for me to put into words how much I love this book. Or this series. Just the fact that I can't tell which of the three books I like theIt's difficult for me to put into words how much I love this book. Or this series. Just the fact that I can't tell which of the three books I like the most is something, since before reading this series, I could always easily rank my favorites.
Raven Stratagem is as good as its predecessor, but very different from it, with a much wider focus that doesn't concentrate on only one battle. Which means that the clockwork efficiency the first book had in its pacing and plot is lost, but so much is gained from this multi-PoV approach: a new perspectives on the Hexarchate, more details on key players, and wonderful characters. If Ninefox Gambit was about a siege on two layers, Raven Stratagem is a war playing on many fields at once - in the form of battles just as much as in the form of mind games.
Another thing that Raven Stratagem is better at is readability. I won't lie, Ninefox Gambit might be the most fascinating book I've ever read, but it's objectively a challenge. Raven Stratagem has all the subtlety and lying and perfectly foreshadowed twists with less of the over-complicated scenes (which I loved, but still) involving sci-fantasy weapons the first book was full of. However, there are a few typos here and there, which I didn't notice in either the first or the third book. It also feels lighter - not because the Hexarchate is suddenly less horrible, one could argue it's actually getting worse, but because for most of the book the atrocities aren't as explicit as they were in the first.
But what I like the most about Raven Stratagem is the humor. It's darkly funny, and it makes the character feel like real humans in a terrible universe. When it comes to really dark books, I often stop caring about the world, but the lighter moments are what keeps me invested, and the Hexarchate is so beautiful and weird and at the same time unapologetically terrible that I can't help but be fascinated by it. Also, I don't think I could ever bring myself not to care about those characters.
Machineries of Empire is the story of Jedao, but most of it isn't told in his PoV, and in this book specifically, he is the antagonist - the antagonist you want to see win. And I love this kind of set-up so much. The PoV characters are: 🌌 Kel Khiruev, the general of the swarm of which Jedao took control of. She's a dark-skinned bi/pan woman whose loyalty to Kel Command is wavering. She's tired, deserves better but struggles to admit that even to herself, and she studied engineering, which is now her favorite hobby. (This series has more women in STEM than half of the sci-fi books I've read together.) 🌌 Shuos Mikodez is the Hexarch of the Shuos faction. He's brown-skinned and aroace. He has the worst attention span, refuses to sleep, claims to not know about ethics and morals but still cares sometimes, on some level - which many people around him wouldn't believe. He's an extremely entertaining person to read about, competent but still often misinformed and always walking the line between "volatile but functional" and "complete disaster". 🌌 Kel Brezan is an unconventional kel who managed to escape Jedao's takeover, and who wants the swarm to be returned to the rightful general. He's grumpy, just wants to have a normal Kel life, and wants to demonstrate that just because formation instinct doesn't work for him, that doesn't make him disloyal. He's a trans man. I love him more with every reread. The tired and annoyed character who doesn't want to be there is always the most relatable one.
I loved how in this book there are three very different main character arcs following people who have very little in common but that are all about loyalty and betrayal in some way. Also, the non-PoV characters are just as well-drawn as the PoV ones, and I want to specifically mention: 🌌 Shuos Zehun, who is non-binary, always followed by their cats, and always trying to talk some sense into Mikodez and mostly failing; 🌌 Andan Tseya, who is probably my favorite character in the book. She's a secret agent, a terrible person, and a very good liar, but is far more graceful about it than most people in this series. And the scene in which she basically seduces Brezan by telling him that she was clearly not trying to seduce him hard enough? Wow. Also, she canonically slept with the villain out of spite. I love her so much, and I love her romance with Brezan too, but can she marry me instead Tseya is a trans woman.
(Also, of course, I love Jedao, but I don't think I need to talk about him again.)
In this book, there's also a scene narrated by Hexarch Nirai Kujen, which never fails to make me feel sick, and which is basically... emotional foreshadowing for how half of Revenant Gun will feel.
Trigger warnings: genocide, death, torture, really dysfunctional sibling dynamics (includes incest: while it is not stigmatized in this society, it isn't romanticized by the book). Memory loss/erased memories/manipulation. Mentions of: transphobia, suicide, mass shooting, rape....more
The Stars Are Legion was one of my favorite books of 2017 and my first adult sci-fi book. A year later, I still think it's one of the weirdest things The Stars Are Legion was one of my favorite books of 2017 and my first adult sci-fi book. A year later, I still think it's one of the weirdest things I've ever read - it's an all-female, all-lesbian space opera - and it was even more interesting on reread.
This book is gross. Take this seriously. If you are bothered by gore, body horror and violence, you shouldn't read The Stars Are Legion. It's a biopunk space opera with horror aspects, it's supposed to be gross; if "gross" isn't what you're looking for, don't read biopunk horror! It's like reading erotica when you hate sex scenes. Don't do that to yourself.
I love the worldbuilding. This book is set in the Legion, a group of cephalopod-like world-ships who are at war with each other and rotting alive with their inhabitants. These inhabitants, who are all women, get pregnant regularly (parthenogenesis!), but they don't necessarily give birth to children. You could also give birth to a cog. Or slugs. Or a whole world. Also, there are buildings of bone and sinew, raining saliva, cannibalism feasts and people walking through the veins of the giant cephalopod-like thing (...which is, by the way, a good choice of mollusk for the setting, as cephalopods are the only mollusks with a closed circulatory system! It's not like I would have called clamworlds inaccurate, nothing about this is real science, but I appreciate this kind of details.)
It's unique and unforgettable and so weird - I loved every moment of it, even when the description made me want to put the book down because I'm not actually that into body horror. And the worldbuilding wasn't the only thing I loved about this, of course.
I love Zan. I usually hate plotlines that have something to do with amnesia because the character who loses their memory has usually no personality for most of the book, but that's not the case with Zan. She's brutal and desperate for a better future, and she is, deep down, a good person. Jayd scares me. She is a fighter too, this is a book about brutal women, but she's the kind of character that gets what she wants through intrigue and seduction and lies. And then there's Rasida, who is the villain of the story, maybe in love with Jayd, maybe not. There's a messy, really unhealthy f/f/f love triangle in this book (don't get into this looking for a romance! It's not) with a villain ship, and that's what I didn't know I always wanted. There's something fascinating about unhealthy relationship portrayed as such in SFF, and I couldn't put the book down.
Yes, there are some unanswered questions, and the pacing isn't always perfect (travel books rarely have perfect pacing), but I found this deliciously evil even on reread, especially that plot twist I should have seen coming with all that foreshadowing but didn't.
Also: if you ever decide to read this, don't skip the "Annals of the Legion" excerpts by Lord Mokshi. They're placed in a way that makes you feel like Lord Mokshi is trolling you, and maybe you're right.
4.75 stars A Line in the Dark is the first contemporary mystery I've ever loved.
It's a story about unhealthy friendships and relationships between thre4.75 stars A Line in the Dark is the first contemporary mystery I've ever loved.
It's a story about unhealthy friendships and relationships between three teenage girls, all three of them queer.
The narrator is Jess Wong. She's Chinese-American, she has always loved art, and she's in love with her best friend Angie. This crush is unrequited, and that becomes even more clear when popular, beautiful Margot starts flirting with Angie. But Margot and her rich friends are not good news - under the money and the pretty faces there are many secrets. Not the ideal situation, but guess what - it gets worse.
I really liked Jess. She struggles to fit in, and she's not flawless. I love reading about contemporary characters who are flawed and somewhat unreliable narrators. They feel real to me. All the side characters were memorable. Characters like Margot are fascinating and a bit scary, and Angie surprised me too. Everyone stood out to me.
Mystery/Thriller books with queer characters are not common, and A Line in the Dark is a mystery in which there are more than two lesbians, and none of them dies.
It's noteworthy that I never had to force myself to read this. I was never bored. And that rarely happens to me with contemporary books.
Half of this book is told in first person, the other half in third person present, and surprisingly, this didn't bother me. Maybe because I knew it was coming, maybe because I was really invested in the story, I don't know. But I think this PoV shift made sense.
However, I don't think the execution of the mystery aspect was perfect. The ending was unsatisfying, and it should have been longer. You shouldn't sacrifice the ending just because you want to shock the reader - that felt messy....more
The Gallery of Unfinished Girls the best YA standalone book I’ve ever read.
It’s a coming-of-age magical realism novel following Mercedes Moreno, a bisThe Gallery of Unfinished Girls the best YA standalone book I’ve ever read.
It’s a coming-of-age magical realism novel following Mercedes Moreno, a bisexual Puerto Rican painter who finds the Red Mangrove Estate, a magical building in which every artist is the best version of themselves.
It’s also a book I find really hard to describe. It’s sad, but it’s the happiest sad book you’ll ever read. It’s character-driven and has barely any plot, but so much happens. It’s surreal, it has magic in it, and yet it feels more real than real life. The first time I read The Gallery of Unfinished Girls, I described it as a love letter to in-between moments. And it is � I think the right word to describe it is �liminal�. It’s about how awkward growing up can be, the weight of your dreams and insecurities, and the things you can’t bring yourself to put on paper or say out loud. It’s about the magic of these awkward moments, because the awkwardness is worth it. I haven’t found another YA book that describes how it’s like to be a teenage girl as well as this one does.
It’s also a love letter to art. I have read many books from the point of view of main characters who are artists, and yet none ever got into what it’s like to not like your art, to feel discouraged by its imperfections, to not be able to create when something in your life is making you feel stuck � stuck because you have a crush on your best friend and you don’t even know if she likes girls the same way you do, stuck because you don’t know what will happen to your very sick grandmother, stuck because you’re afraid to think about your future. This book is about those feelings. Mercedes gets introduced to a magical palace where everything she’ll create, every moment, will always be the best version of itself, with no flaws. And I loved how this aspect was explored. The Gallery of Unfinished Girls talks about perfectionism mostly from the point of view of a painter and also talks about the feelings of a musician (Mercedes� sister, Angela) but I think everyone who has ever been an artist will be able to relate to those feelings on some level � I do, because I felt and sometimes still feel some of these things as a writer. When you’re stuck, beginnings are the hardest part � the flaws glare at you, and you can’t unsee the fact that everything that looked perfect in your head is imperfect, maybe even ugly, once you try to make it real. And that’s when you’re tempted to lose yourself in dreams and fantasies, and let your art live only in your head � or, in Mercedes� case, in a building where everything is perfect but doesn’t exist outside.
But this aspect of The Gallery of Unfinished Girls isn’t only about art. It’s about living as well. Life is messy, life is difficult, and life is scary. It’s much easier to live in your dreams when everything around you feels broken, when you feel like there’s no hope for those dreams to ever become real. This is a book that understand this aspect of growing up. It doesn’t judge or tell you that dreaming is “giving up on your life� or “not really living� (I’d love to never see that kind of message again; there are moments in your life that hurt too much, and sometimes you need to take a break. But you need to come back, eventually.) It just tells you that maybe the outside is worth it, and maybe you can move on.
This book has a nostalgic feel to it. It’s not happy, but it’s hopeful enough that I can’t describe it as a sad book, either. It’s about moving forward, and if it makes you sad it’s because it makes you feel, and it made me feel a lot of things. It’s the exact opposite of the books I describe as “emotionally flat�, and the perfect example of how to write a book about sad things without exploiting them for shock value. It made me feel so much because I related to the main character, and she is a very well-written character. Her voice, her thoughts - everything about her narration stood out to me because it felt real, and also because sometimes it was like seeing some of my thoughts on a page.
I don’t think I can do the writing justice. It’s simple and flows and works so well. Everything about this book was so defined and detailed it felt just like real life, even with the magic � maybe even because of the magic: I’ve always thought the magic of everyday life is in the details. I also thought the atmosphere was perfect: I’ve never been to Florida, but I felt like I was there. To those who say that contemporary books don’t have any worldbuilding, I say that there’s still the difference between those in which the character float in blank space and those in which readers who have never been to the US are able to visualize how things look like.
The side characters are all memorable: Angela was my favorite and I'd read a whole book in her PoV, but I’m also partial to Victoria, the maybe-queer, Italian-American (!!) girl Mercedes has a crush on. Maybe I have low standards, but it’s the first time I've seen an Italian character who is not a stereotype in an American book. She is a dancer, her parents don’t own a restaurant, she has no ties with the mafia (...yes this happened), and she is not homophobic. I love her. I also loved Evie (another queer girl! And she’s not there for relationship drama!) and everything that has to do with Lilia Solis, but I can’t explain why without spoilers. For a book in which there’s very little plot, so many interesting and unexpected things happen.
I also like that this book isn’t a romance. I know we’re all looking for more f/f books � I am too � but I think there’s value in queer stories that aren’t a romance and aren’t in any way tragic. Since this book is about the fact that most things are worth trying even when they don’t work out, I thought this decision made sense. Also, the ending is kind of open in this aspect. (Headcanon time: I totally believe that Mercedes and Victoria got together a few years later.)...more
The second book by this author, When the Moon Was Ours, is one of my favorite books of all times. I went into Wild Beauty expecting it to b4.75 stars.
The second book by this author, When the Moon Was Ours, is one of my favorite books of all times. I went into Wild Beauty expecting it to be a new favorite, and I don't know if it was. Am I disappointed? I don't know; this was still really good.
I loved seeing three generations all living together in one house. Different generations living very close or even in the same house is not that unusual where I live, but I rarely see it in American books, even in speculative fiction (we all know fantasy parents are either dead or missing). So that was great, and I loved how the cousins were so close they were like sisters.
The writing made the whole book feel magical. It's slow, but it's not a book you'd want to read quickly, anyway. But while it's not fast-paced, there is a lot going on. The descriptions are vivid, evocative - they make you feel what is happening, and they're not only beautiful. Sometimes they are creepy. Sometimes they give you the chills, like the manteca colorá scene. Also, one of the main symbols is the indigo milk cap, Lactarius indigo. Fungi in a young adult book! (Yes, that's important to me. Like plant magic.)
Most characters are brown, and many characters are queer. The five Nomeolvides cousins are all bisexual.
Twice as many paths to trouble, their mothers would whisper. As though their daughters loving men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world. There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart. They loved who they loved. They broke how they broke.
This is just... it's so magical and it has a meaning. It doesn't always feel removed from reality. It's not complicated writing for the sake of it. And that's what matters.
I liked the characters; Estrella was the best. At some point she burns down the car of the man who is threatening her family, and I really didn't expect that, but I should have. I also liked Fel, and the romance between him and Estrella. To see them growing close as Fel slowly discovers more about his past was great. And painful.
The main thing I didn't like: This book is obsessed with romantic love. Romantic love is so special it is a poison that can make people disappear (the love-is-a-curse trope, as usual. (view spoiler)[And of course it wasn't actually romantic love that made people disappear! Because that would make the romance too difficult, we just needed the amatonormativity for the conflict! The curse is always romantic love at the beginning and it is never romantic love at the end, but it hurst aro people all the way through. (hide spoiler)] I hate this trope.).
One of the main symbols of this book is the starflower. Starflowers keep growing on the ceiling of Estrella's bedroom. That was supposed to feel magical, I guess, but I'm Ligurian. We use it to make (the best) ravioli. If I told you that I'm worried because my ceiling is covered in spinaches it wouldn't feel that magical anymore, would it? I just couldn't take it seriously....more
The synopsis describes Radiance as a �decopunk pulp SF alt-history space opera mystery�. If you’re thinking, are you sure, isn’t that a little too manThe synopsis describes Radiance as a �decopunk pulp SF alt-history space opera mystery�. If you’re thinking, are you sure, isn’t that a little too many genres?, I’m going to say: the description is wrong, but only by omission; Radiance is that and more. I think I lost count of the genres, they kept spilling from this book’s pockets like pictures in that old tumblr meme. Noir? Horror? Fairytale? Gothic? New weird? This book has all of them, all the while making fun of the idea of a linear narrative. A more accurate description would be �meta genre soup�, but I doubt that would make it to the back cover.
This whole book is built on wonder. It draws you in with its beautiful writing � this book has my favorite prologue, which is of course meta material about prologues and somehow still works � and worldbuilding, then starts weaving the mystery of a woman.
Before moving to the next point � the woman, our Severin � I want to dedicate a paragraph to the setting and atmosphere, because they deserve it. This novel is set in a solar system in which every planet is more or less inhabitable by humans and already has its (very weird) life forms. We read about filmmaking culture in the moon cities, kangaroos on Mars, vanished towns from Venus, the bridge of flowers between Pluto and Charon, the salt winds and encrusting corals of Neptune. It’s beautiful, it makes no sense, I wouldn’t change anything about it.
Then there’s the reason I love this book as much as I do, the substance: Severin Unck. An androgynous, bisexual character in a decopunk universe that is in many ways still backwards; a child-actress-turned-documentarist who is seeking reality in a world of nice-looking lies; a character who hates fiction stuck under layers and layers of genre. And, as this book says, dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.
Severin might be dead, but she comes alive in a way most fictional characters will never; there’s an energy to the way she is written, even though we only see her in pieces. This book is made up of transcripts of interviews, documentaries, movies, advertisement, diary entries, and the movie Severin's father is making to come to terms with her mysterious disappearance � to give himself closure, to give himself an answer, to do her justice. Can he? In a book that is often far too weird to make sense of, its portrayal of the father-daughter relationship and grief is nothing but human. These are things we know, and Percival Unck’s search for the perfect movie about Severin might be an unusual coping mechanism, but it’s understandable.
However, that’s also where things get truly weird: as Radiance itself says, the lens does not discriminate between the real and the unreal. Well, neither does the book: the boundaries between its reality and the fictional narrative built inside of it get more and more blurred as the story goes on. Understating what actually happened to Severin is a challenge, but this time I think I have a solid theory. After all, a nonfiction girl stuck in genre soup stands out as a thorn would, or a pin, or something so sharp reality might cut itself on it.
Something to keep in mind: Radiance is a book about seeing and being seen. Severin, with her neverending series of stepmothers, a Gothic filmmaker for a father, and a life spent around cameras, is constantly watched and looking for answers, for the truth (her death is far from the only mystery). The answer is in the eye, but what answer are you going to get when your truth has been put together like a movie?
Another thing I didn’t get the first time I read this book, at least not fully, is just how queer it is. Severin isn’t the only bi character, and the happy ending of a very specific subplot is one of my favorite details in an otherwise bittersweet book.
It’s over-the-top, of course. It’s too much, and it makes for a very slow read � I wouldn’t try to get through Radiance quickly, even though once I got into the story it singlehandedly resurrected me from my reading slump. The only thing I didn’t like about it is the one thing I don’t like about Cat Valente’s books: it borrows details from various cultures in a way that sometimes makes for some of the most interesting symbolism I’ve ever seen� and sometimes feels thoughtless, as it often happens in American SFF. When that happens, the book ends up feeling like a parody of itself. It’s nothing compared to the epically-failing situation in Palimpsest, however, and I wouldn’t have thought much about it had I not known that it’s a pattern for this author....more
The Bear and the Nightingale is a historical fantasy novel set in rural medieval Russia, and one of the best books to read during the winte4.75 stars.
The Bear and the Nightingale is a historical fantasy novel set in rural medieval Russia, and one of the best books to read during the winter. It was the first book I read in 2017, and now it's the first book I read in 2018 - its wintry atmosphere makes it the perfect book for the season. It feels like a dark fairytale, beautiful and magical, but not without its creepy aspects. Winter in Russia is not an easy season, and as an old threat rises due to the carelessness of men, so do the dead.
This book follows Vasilisa "Vasya" Petrovna and her family. She's Pyotr Vladimirovich's daughter, and she has the sight. She can see and speak with the chyerti (guardian spirits from Russian folklore), she can talks with horses, she has seen something terrible when she was a child exploring the wood. The Bear and the Nightingale is her story; you see her grow up, and you can't not love her - she is a wild, magical girl living in a place where not conforming strictly to gender roles marks you as a witch. Everything gets worse when her devout stepmother and a new priest from Moscow come to the village.
The religious conflict is the heart of this book - because of Christianity, men are forgetting the old ways, leaving behind "paganism" and "fairytales" They are not feeding the domovoi and the stables' vazila. That makes them vulnerable to the monsters who live at the edge of the woods: upyry and something worse - the bear, who is Frost's brother.
Frost himself is a significant character - he is Morozko, the winter king, the blue-eyed demon in the fairytale of Vasya's childhood. I loved his scenes, and I hope to see more of him in The Girl in the Tower. Other things I loved were the historical details and political intrigue. I want to see more of that too, and possibly also more of Vasya's family. They were well-developed, but so were all the side characters, including the human antagonists (you understand them, even when you hate them) and Vasya's animal companions. I mean, one of my favorite characters was a horse.
The writing was lovely - it wasn't as heavy as I thought it would be (yes, I always have this fear when it comes to historical fiction), and the atmosphere was perfect. This may be a slow-paced novel, but it's also one of the very few books that managed to keep me awake at night during a reread because I didn't want to stop. It's that good.
I've heard that as a novel set in Russia written by an American author, this is very accurate (unlike... many others) but there is one thing that didn't sit well with me. The author says this about the transliterations in the author's note:
First, I sought to render Russian words in such a way as to retain a bit of their exotic flavor. This is the reason I rendered Константин as Konstantin rather than the more familiar Constantine, and Дмитрий as Dmitrii rather than Dmitri.
Look, I'm not Russian, so I don't know how much of a big deal this is, but American authors: the "exotic flavor" isn't a thing, and the word "exotic" is something you should delete from your vocabulary when you're talking about people and cultures. It's othering. Stop....more
Ninefox Gambit is my favorite book. It's the kind of novel I could reread over and over and still get something new from - this was the sixth reread inNinefox Gambit is my favorite book. It's the kind of novel I could reread over and over and still get something new from - this was the sixth reread in two years for me, and I'm still discovering things about this world.
But let's get to what Ninefox Gambit is. This is a story about sieges: Cheris' siege of a space fortress, and Jedao's siege of (view spoiler)[Cheris' values, beliefs and mind (hide spoiler)]. And it is, in fact, a very twisty book, without needing that many shocking plot twists - just layers upon layers of mind games present and past, slowly unraveling towards a partial truth. I say "partial", because this book will almost never straightforwardly reveal that a certain character was lying in a particular moment, which, in a book in which most non-PoV characters are often at the very least lying by omission, makes for an interesting exercise in ambiguity. You know some of them are liars. Being able to tell when they're lying - well, that's not always as easy, and a few things are left for you to interpret.
I often see people say that this book is hard to get into, because "it doesn't explain enough" - which is said both about the way it relies on hints and subtext and about the worldbuilding, which is, admittedly, one of the most unique (read: outright bizarre) I've ever read. I strongly disagree. I really appreciate when a book trusts its reader to keep up, to figure things out on their own. Maybe it will take more of my attention, and it won't be an easy read, but I'm glad not to have to wade through infodumps every time I reread. It's a graceful writing choice, in my opinion. (Also: if a 17-year-old ESL speaker made it, you probably can too.)
Ninefox Gambit is deceptively short. It's barely longer than 300 pages, and yet it's one of the few books that managed to convince me that there's an entire universe of things happening outside the Scattered Needles siege, an universe with a complicated and often ugly history, and I love how wide it feels, how high the stakes are at the end. It mostly follows two characters, whom I love with my whole heard, even though they're terrible. 🦊 Kel Cheris, math lesbian and professional trouble magnet, narrates most of this book. She makes friends with AIs ("servitors"), joined the military faction because she wanted to fit in, and got caught up into a scheme that led her to be anchored to Jedao's ghost and leading the swarm (space fleet) in the Scattered Needles siege. Deserves a nap. Unlike many of the characters, she still has a somewhat functioning moral compass. 🦊 Shuos Jedao, bisexual disaster, was a general who lived centuries before the siege, and he is well known for never losing a battle and for having slaughtered his own army during his last one for apparently no reason. He's not the kind of person you think of when you think about mass murder - he's charming, far from unfeeling, likes talking to people, and is mostly a pleasant person to be around. Until he's not. With every reread, I realize more and more how much of a manipulative bastard he is - this is one of the few books in which the manipulative character not only was actually good at manipulating, but the book made me believe he was.
And the Cheris-Jedao dynamic? So fascinating. It reminds me of how much can be done with relationships that aren't romantic in the slightest when you develop them enough.
There are other relevant characters I love, like Hexarch Shuos Mikodez (the morally messed up and aroace highlight of book two), and Hexarch Nirai Kujen, the evil scientist who reads like the sci-fi version of a fae (cruel, beautiful, impossibly ancient). A few chapters are told from the PoVs of minor characters to show what's going on while Cheris and Jedao's ghost are in the command center. And even those characters left an impact on me, and that's not easy to accomplish.
I also, of course, love the worldbuilding to pieces. It's Korean-inspired space opera with a math-based magic system that is affected by people's beliefs and by the system of timekeeping they implement. It's fascinating and not easy to understand at first, but I loved it for its beauty and weirdness - for a bloodthirsty space dystopia where war and ritual torture are the norm, the Hexarchate is beautiful in an unsettling way. And it's also very queer; this book has an all-queer cast, and it's the demonstration that you can write about queer people living in objectively horrible places without writing queer trauma porn (there are no homophobia or sexism in this book, and it's still very much a space dystopia.)
And one last thing, before I turn this review into a book in itself: I love how this novel plays with ableist assumptions. The amount of people who don't try to dig deeper in the circumstances around Jedao's mass murder and take "madness" as a reason for what he did is... oddly realistic. As this book says, as straightforward as it ever gets, that's not how things work.
Trigger Warnings, if you need them - I think it's better to go into this prepared (they're not actually spoilers, but if you want to go into this without knowing anything more, don't open this): (view spoiler)[Death, mass shooting, suicidal ideation, dismemberment, gore. A man is sexually assaulted near the ending. Mentions of torture, manipulative behavior, graphic animal death. Memory loss/erased memories. Suicide (side character, in the past), suicide of a family member (another side character, in the past) (hide spoiler)]...more
When the Moon Was Ours is one of the best books I’ve ever read. If I had to write a list of the five best YA books I know, it would for sure be there. When the Moon Was Ours is one of the best books I’ve ever read. If I had to write a list of the five best YA books I know, it would for sure be there. I decided to reread it because I haven’t had the best luck with new books lately, and I’m so glad I did.
One of the strongest aspects of this story is the atmosphere. I don’t say this just because Anna-Marie McLemore’s prose is magical, which it is, but because there’s an attention paid to the details that is uncommon, even for a magical realism book. I felt like I could walk along with the characters in their world. I knew the colors, the smells, everything I needed to know about the setting. This is the kind of writing that makes you crave alfajores de nieve, that makes you think about candied starflowers and carved pumpkins floating down the river. This is the kind of writing that makes you visualize everything perfectly, and if it doesn’t, it’s because you don’t know how that specific kind of pumpkin, or chicken egg, looks like. (I looked up a lot of things on google images. I love when books help me discover new things.) This book also has a very autumnal feel to it, which makes it the perfect book for fall.
I don’t love this book just because it’s beautifully written. Like many of my favorites, to me When the Moon Was Ours is a very personal book. There are many reasons for that; one of them is the fact that, at its heart, this is a story about self-acceptance and the fact that people can still love you, care about you and accept you when you’re still struggling to accept yourself. This novel follows two characters: Miel, a latinx girl who is struggling with her past and the roses that grow out of her wrist, which she sees as a curse, and Sam, an Italian-Pakistani trans boy still coming to terms with his identity. Miel and Sam are already in love at the beginning of the book, and this story follows them as they learn more about themselves. I love them both and I didn’t care that this book has very little external conflict, which to some may look like a lack of plot (I disagree).
There is a scene in Sam’s PoV that stood out to me, the one in which he comes out to his mother. In this scene, he finally admits to himself that he isn’t a bacha posh (cultural practice in which girls live as boys until they reach adulthood) because he isn’t a girl at all, he is a boy. And there are some paragraphs in which he wonders whether not being a bacha posh and being trans make him less Pakistani. This is something I never see in books about marginalized white Americans, but when you are a marginalized person and every media that represents you is about people that aren’t part of your culture, this is a thing you wonder. You wonder whether it makes you less [culture], whether you’re making it up because [marginalization] is only a thing that happens to Americans. To see it in a book, from the point of view of a character who is of Italian descent, it meant a lot to me. Even just seeing a character of Italian descent who is not a stereotype in an American book means a lot to me, even though Sam’s Italian heritage isn’t relevant to the plot, even though there are some mistakes - listen. I love this book but to say that a character born in Campania was born near an ocean is such a geography fail � but I don’t care. Sam’s father comes from a family of Italian fishermen and so does mine, and I love when I find details that match.
There are so many other reasons I could point out to explain why When the Moon Was Ours is personal to me, but I’m going to write down just another one. I’ve never seen anyone mention this, but this book has specific phobia representation. Miel is afraid of pumpkins, and as someone who has an equally improbable plant-related phobia, I never thought I would see my experience in a book. Phobias are not a joke, even the ones that are odd, and this book gets it.
When the Moon Was Ours is also about so many other things. With the plotline involving the Bonner girls, four sisters who may or may not be witches, it talks about white people’s exploitation of brown people and their magic (which will become the main theme in Wild Beauty). It is a story about a trans boy in which he is neither outed nor assaulted (though there is some misgendering), which are sadly common tropes, a story in which a trans boy gets to be the love interest. It is a sex-positive story, there’s a beautiful scene near the beginning about Miel and Sam having sex � and when I say beautiful I mean it, because Anna-Marie McLemore is the only author who is able to write a sex scene in a poetic way without making me cringe.
If you like magical realism, diverse love stories, or just want a really good book to read this fall, you shouldn’t miss out on When the Moon Was Ours....more
On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.
Years ago, there was a war between gods and men. It was a massacre. On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.
Years ago, there was a war between gods and men. It was a massacre. Men won. Strange the Dreamer is the aftermath.
I have read many fantasy books. After a while, some of them start to feel similar. The same stories, the same themes, the same tired fake-medieval world. Not here.
Strange the Dreamer is a story about the instability of peace, about forgiveness, about hope and dreams. I had never read a fantasy book with this premise*; books never tell you what happens after the war. Because, supposedly, that part is boring. It isn't.
I loved how this book never took the easy way out. It would have been so easy to show one side as good and the other as bad. But all the major characters have a motivation, and even the ones who do terrible things - you know why. Everyone has been hurt so much.
The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion—to close a door in one's own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering—and cause it—and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.
You could understand everyone, and... suffer.
Strange the Dreamer may not be a happy book, but is it beautiful. Not only the descriptions are beautiful and full of monsters (all the best things are) but Laini Taylor is the only author who can describe a girl's skin as "her smooth cerulean loveliness" and get away with it. Call it purple prose, but it works. Also, this book starts with the best prologue ever.
Few YA books can capture such a magical, dreamlike atmosphere, and very few have such an interesting worldbuilding. Angels and demons, gods and men, alchemy and moths. Strange the Dreamer is set in a monastery, then in a library, then in a lost city who lost its name.
(Now that we're talking about the worldbuilding: this book is totally set in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone universe. Just read the part where Lazlo is talking about "The Oldest Story in the World" and tell me that's not Dreams of Gods and Monsters).
And the characters. No book had ever shown me a bookish character whose love for books I actually felt. Lazlo grew up loving stories, and he is a dreamer. It's an important part of him. It's not just a relatable but irrelevant quirk. Dreamer. That's what Lazlo is.
And when Lazlo Strange the Dreamer met Sarai, the Muse of Nightmares, everything was perfect. I didn't even care that the romance developed quickly; I don't call it instalove if it feels real. I loved Sarai a lot. She hates herself for what she has done. She hates the world for what has been done to her. But she's also tired of hating.
The only problem I had with this book - the only reason this is 4.75 stars and not a full five - is the length, the pacing. 536 pages is a lot, and the first 150 after the prologue aren't that great. The rest? Perfect. The ending? Weep is actually an accurate name for that place.
And now I have a lot of questions. (view spoiler)[Is Korako alive? How many other Lazlos...? Will this book reconnect with DoSaB more clearly? (hide spoiler)]
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