Another reread. This is the one where Sophos turns out to be more awesome than anyone, including him, could possibly have imagined, and Eddis and AttoAnother reread. This is the one where Sophos turns out to be more awesome than anyone, including him, could possibly have imagined, and Eddis and Attolia spend a lot of time wanting to knock some sense into Gen, possibly via application of his head to the nearest hard surface.
I really love Sophos's pov way more than I expected to. I love his mixture of cleverness and naivety, and I really love the way he makes little personal connections with the people around him, without even realizing that's what he's doing.
Also, Eddis gets to be really great in this book, and I love it....more
Another reread. My absolute fave of the series, mostly because COSTIS. I kept having to stop while rereading just to flail about how much I love CostiAnother reread. My absolute fave of the series, mostly because COSTIS. I kept having to stop while rereading just to flail about how much I love Costis. I love seeing Gen from his complete outsider pov, and I love watching him slowly find that he actually kind of likes this maddening, frustrating usurper. And watching him untangle Gen and Irene's relationship.
Also, I love forever that Costis is so straightforward and honest in all things that it makes him one of the only people able to trick Gen. And it's BEAUTIFUL.
cw for this one: off-page torture condoned by our protagonists....more
Reread. This one is so hard at the start, but so rewarding once it gets going. I feel like this is the platonic ideal of an enemies-to-lovers story, aReread. This one is so hard at the start, but so rewarding once it gets going. I feel like this is the platonic ideal of an enemies-to-lovers story, and Turner really works to make the central relationship believable, despite its deeply traumatic beginnings.
I love how thoroughly realized this world is. All the characters are complicated and flawed and human and just a delight to spend time with.
Warning for torture early in the narrative, details behind a spoiler cut: (view spoiler)[The primary pov character gets his hand cut off, by order of his eventual love interest. (hide spoiler)]...more
I ADORED this book. OMG did I adore this book. It's a queer, poly, found-family story about two people who have absolutely nothing in common - except I ADORED this book. OMG did I adore this book. It's a queer, poly, found-family story about two people who have absolutely nothing in common - except for their complete chaos muppet of a boyfriend, who has gone missing.
Layla is a sensible, married pathologist with a wife, two small children, and a comfortable place within her local community. Nat is a blue-haired, genderqueer musician with a decidedly non-normative queer community, and no interest in marriage, children, or assimilation into mainstream society.
The only thing they have in common is Meraud. Brilliant, enigmatic, magical Meraud. A human who spent the first five years of his life in Fey, Meraud is beloved and exasperating to our two narrators in equal measure. I suspect anyone who's ever fallen in love with a natural chaos-agent will recognize themself in this book. I certainly did.
But as the only two people capable of rescuing Meraud from his own stupid mistake, Layla and Nat will have to work together, find common ground, spend some time pretending to be engaged to be married, and maybe, hesitantly, forge a simply lovely, complicated friendship that's not dependent on their mutual relationships with Meraud.
I loved the setting of this book, which is very much our present only with small, everyday magic. Our heroes are ear-wormed by catchy secular Christmas carols (a delightful running joke), contend with overly-friendly Anglican ministers and church busy-bodies, and search for magical information on Reddit. It feels just wonderfully lived in and alive. And part of that was the people, there is a real community of people in this story, and they are so richly and diversely characterized every one of them feels like they have their own richly complex story just waiting to be told. ...more
This is a sweet, fluffy read with rather more depth and rather more queerness than I expected.
A regency fantasy set in an alt-England where women leadThis is a sweet, fluffy read with rather more depth and rather more queerness than I expected.
A regency fantasy set in an alt-England where women lead the government, only men are magicians, and faerie is very close indeed. If you're really into worldbuilding this might not be the book for you, but if you're okay with just enough clever worldbuilding to hang the characters and their relationships on, then I highly recommend it.
It's a lot, but it's all balanced quite nicely, with all the plots integrated well and a great cast of characters.
What this book is really about Cassandra figuring out who she is and what her place in the world is, when the passion and vocation that has driven her for her whole life is suddenly closed to her. And starting to see all the things she missed, because she was so focused on her goals she put them ahead of everything and everyone else in her life.
Cassandra's relationship with her brother and sister-in-law is wonderful, and her rekindled relationship with her ex is handled quite well.
I really, really wanted to love this, and I did really love this for about the first 1/3, but I'm afraid this is one of those books where my love justI really, really wanted to love this, and I did really love this for about the first 1/3, but I'm afraid this is one of those books where my love just sort of fizzled out, the longer the book went on.
There are so many thing here for me to love! A romance with a firm grounding in a historical period I'm personally quite interested in! Characters in open poly relationships who recognize that love is not a finite resource! Queerness! Class differences! People using their words and talking about their feelings!
Except that's it, that's the entire plot. It's just a whole lot of pages of characters doing nothing but talking about their feelings and worrying about being found out by society.
There's what looks like it's going to be an interesting plot about suffragettes and about being a woman in a male-dominated workplace, but it doesn't really go much of anywhere. And there's a frustrating plot about one character's brother potentially ruining things for everyone that hangs over everybody's heads mostly ignored for much too long. And there's talking. So. Much. Talking.
And guilt. Way too much queer guilt for my tastes. Probably quite realistic amounts of queer guilt really, but nevertheless way more than I'm interested in reading about.
Also, for a book that cares a lot about people recognizing the humanity of working-class people, most of the working-class characters are remarkably flat and lifeless. In fact, most of the characters outside the four at the centre of the novel feel lifeless and only half sketched in.
I may still pick up any sequels, just because this is a type of romance I crave and find so rarely, but I was definitely disappointed by this one....more
**spoiler alert** K.J. Charles goes full-on Heyer homage and it is delightful! And also queer, socially progressive and feminist in some really intere**spoiler alert** K.J. Charles goes full-on Heyer homage and it is delightful! And also queer, socially progressive and feminist in some really interesting ways.
Philip Rookwood and Guy and Amanda Frisby are all tainted by scandal, but circumstances and financial concerns have lead them to very different responses.
Guy and his sister Amanda live in forced rural seclusion, dependant entirely on a the charity of their prim and proper aunt who won’t tolerate even a hint of scandal.
Sir Philip Rookwood, by contrast, has money and land and friends. He revels in his reputation as a notoriously dissolute reprobate with shocking opinions, even more shocking friends and no interest in mixing with rural society. He only comes to his country home a few times a year to host “Murders� of his equally scandalous friends.
The two families are the firmest of enemies and have not associated in any way in years.
You see, a number of years ago Philip’s older brother and Guy and Amanda’s mother ran away to the continent together, leaving chaos and scandal in their wake. They died in an accident together several years later, never having returned to England.
Philip, a known bastard that nobody had gotten around to disowning yet, inherited the manor. Guy and Amanda inherited a terrible father who drank and gambled all the family money away before dying himself.
And then Amanda falls off a horse while trespassing on Rookwood’s land and the siblings are forced to stay in the Rookwood manor for several weeks while her leg heals enough for it to be safe to move her, and it turns out Rookwood and his friends are actually a collection of charming and kind scientifically-minded free thinkers and radicals with atheistic and democratic tendencies.
The irrepressible Amanda takes to them all like a duck to water. The anxiety-prone and scandal-shy Guy positively blooms, first within the wild, free-roaming intellectual conversations he’s never had before, and then in Philip’s arms.
I loved that Philip makes no secret of his desire to seduce the blushing, virginal Guy, but he has no interest in doing anything without Guy’s clear and explicit consent, but I also love that when Philip’s desire for explicit verbal requests runs up against Guy’s anxiety he listens.
I’ve read many good depictions of anxiety in fiction, but Guy is the character whose anxiety has really felt the most familiar to me. One symptom of anxiety I continually remind myself of is that anxiety makes me think people are secretly assholes. I find it incredibly useful to be able to stop my racing thoughts with, “so, has this person ever actually done anything to make this a reasonable assumption?�
Guy and Philip have that conversation on page. I’ve never seen that before! I’d give this book five stars on the basis of that conversation alone.
I really appreciated that Guy and Philip love each other, but they both have incredibly important pre-existing relationships in their lives and those relationships are given just as much weight as their romance. That’s not something I see enough in romances.
The other thing I want to mention is how incredibly compassionate the characters and the narrative are to all the women in the story. Philip’s mother and Guy and Amanda’s mother both made choices that harmed their children in very real ways, but it’s made very clear what part societal constraints and the inability to divorce awful husbands played in their decisions. Similarly, Guy and Amanda’s aunt was given much more sympathy and nuance than I expected.
This is really Charles at her finest a delightful, almost frothy romance that still has time for valuable conversations about gender and race and class and sexuality. Highly recommended....more
I can’t say how many times I’ve reread this book. It’s never enough; there’s always something more to find.
This reading I was struck again by the symI can’t say how many times I’ve reread this book. It’s never enough; there’s always something more to find.
This reading I was struck again by the symmetry of Cordelia leaving Sergyar for the first time weeping silently for her enemies, and then leaving Beta for the last time weeping silently for herself. There’s a terrible truth there, the sort Bujold is particularly good at highlighting.
I think the quality of Bujold’s prose is sometimes undervalued. It’s never flashy, but it’s concise and precise, cutting to the heart of her characters and her themes with surgical precision, but also with a depth and warmth that belies that metaphor....more
I only read a few stories in this collection. I got it from the library entirely for “If Wishes Were�, the new-to-me Vicky Nelson story by Tanya Huff.I only read a few stories in this collection. I got it from the library entirely for “If Wishes Were�, the new-to-me Vicky Nelson story by Tanya Huff.
I was 13 or 14 when I first picked up Blood Ties, it was one of the first Urban Fantasy stories I ever read, back when UF was a small, niche genre. The series were hugely influential on my reading tastes and Vicky will forever be one of my touchstone fictional characters, so I couldn’t pass up the chance to revisit her life.
And I was not disappointed. This was a classic Vicky story, a little dark, a lot painful, but hopeful too in its own way.
Written almost twenty years after the last book in the series, “If Wishes Were� takes up Vicky’s story twenty years later as well. Mike Celluci is pushing 60, Vicky will never look older than 34. It’s heartbreaking, but also not? Because Mike is still Mike and Vicky is still Vicky and whatever time he has, they will have together.
While I had it, I read “Sleepover,� an InCryptid story by Seanan McGuire. It’s fun, but light and not terribly memorable.
I also read “Hunter, Healer� by Jim Hines, because I keep meaning to try his books. Thematically, I liked it, but it kind of felt like too much premise packed into not quite enough space....more
The perfect complement to Six of Crows, building on its themes, expanding its cast of characters and revealing new truths about the ones we already knThe perfect complement to Six of Crows, building on its themes, expanding its cast of characters and revealing new truths about the ones we already know.
If Six of Crows is about fighting for a life and a future, even if you have to lie and cheat and steal it, Crooked Kingdom is about how you can’t claim that future without reckoning with your past.
There are a lot of parents in this book, both real and metaphorical, and even the best of them have failed their charges in some fundamental way.
I continue to adore all these characters, even, or maybe especially, Kaz who is all the things I usually hate in a character somehow transformed into someone whose future happiness I’m incredibly invested in.
My current favourite is probably Wylan. It was a delight to finally see more of the inside of his head as he learns to recognize his own strength.
**spoiler alert** Not my favourite DWJ book, but it grew on me strongly as it went on. I think this is the first of her books I’ve read where the prot**spoiler alert** Not my favourite DWJ book, but it grew on me strongly as it went on. I think this is the first of her books I’ve read where the protagonist ages significantly during the course of one book and it was both interesting and painful to watch Polly grow up. Jones does not flinch away from the awkwardness and boundary-pushing behaviour of teenage girls.
I had less sympathy for Tom for much of the book, but that turned around when I caught on to the fact that he knew he was using Polly, and kept pushing her away and pulling her back again because he both hated himself for it and didn’t know any other way to escape Laurel. I appreciate that in the end he explicitly acknowledged and apologized for it.
Terrible parental figures are a staple of Jones’s books, but Polly’s are particularly nuanced pieces of work. Watching Polly come to understand them better was both one of the best parts of the book and the hardest to read. I wish I didn’t believe their behaviour and the behaviour of the other adults around Polly, I really do.
Not my favourite Tam Lin story, that will forever be Pamela Dean’s version, but a solid and quite well done version nonetheless....more
It took me a long time to read this, renewing my library hold several times, but it was definitely worth it.
It’s not a challenging or hard to understIt took me a long time to read this, renewing my library hold several times, but it was definitely worth it.
It’s not a challenging or hard to understand book, but I found it difficult to read because, especially at the beginning, the main character Meche is prickly and difficult and at times profoundly unlikeable. I love her rather a lot.
Signal To Noise is told as two parallel narratives about the same characters at different points in their lives,
In 2009, Meche, a computer programmer living in Oslo, returns to Mexico City for the first time in eighteen years for her estranged father’s funeral.
And in 1989, Meche is an awkward teenage outcast who, with her friends Sebastian and Daniella, discovers that they can use music to do magic.
We know from the beginning that something went terribly wrong in 1989. Meche and Sebastian once lived in each other’s pockets, now she considers him an enemy who betrayed her. But what exactly happened, how it relates to the magic the once did, and what it means for the present, takes a while to unfold. It’s worth the wait.
I talked about Meche being a sometimes unlikeable character, and that manifests in fascinating ways. At the beginning I found awkward, teenage Meche very sympathetic and uptight adult Meche very offputting, but that reversed over the course of the book. By the end it’s adult Meche I feel the most kinship towards, although I never lose that sympathy for teenage Meche. She’s awful and self-centred, but in a very specific and all-too-familiar way teenagers can be awful to the people around them, but also to themselves.
Also, she couldn’t have made that much of a hash of her relationship with Sebastian without his own awkward, self-centred teenage help. I love Sebastian too, but holy shit is he an idiotic, hormonal teenage boy.
In the end I loved the resolution of Meche and Sebastian’s relationship and the recognition that you can’t go back, but you can go on; you can’t rewind, but you can start again from where you left off.
cw: Daniella is fat and teenage Meche is sometimes awful in the ways she thinks about her friend. Attempted sexual assault by an authority figure (non-graphic.) References to domestic violence. Bullying and onscreen bullying-related violence. ...more
Wonderful m/f romance between two bi trans main characters.
Roy is a fantastic character, so full of compassion and love. He's gentle with Cecily, eveWonderful m/f romance between two bi trans main characters.
Roy is a fantastic character, so full of compassion and love. He's gentle with Cecily, even when she's harsh with him, and kind to his fellow workers, even though they don't really understand him. And his persistence in trying to get Cecily to open up to him creepy or obsessive.
Cecily was a harder character for me to come to love. Her grief makes her at times unnecessarily cruel and I fell for Roy so quickly it was hard to see past his hurt to her pain. But I love her selflessness with her magic, the eagerness with which she helps people, even those who fear her.
Three linked novellas set during or after the American revolution featuring three diverse relationships, one m/f, one m/m and one f/f, written by threThree linked novellas set during or after the American revolution featuring three diverse relationships, one m/f, one m/m and one f/f, written by three authors very much at the top of their game. This is the rare anthology where I adore all three stories, and it’s definitely going to lead me to seek out more by these authors.
“Promised Land� by Rose Lerner is a m/f romance between a Jewish woman who has disguised herself as a man to fight for independence and her estranged husband who she captures as a British spy. Her estranged husband who believes her to be dead.
There’s a lot here about Jewish religion and life in the 1780’s, which I found fascinating, and about the tension between someone who finds strength and purpose in the rules and traditions of their faith and someone who finds that structure suffocating and limiting.
At heart this is a story about two people who never really understood each other falling in love and figuring out how they might build a solid future together.
“The Pursuit Of...� by Courtney Milan is an m/m romance between a former slave fighting for the republic for personal and practical rather than idealistic reasons and a British deserter who has fallen in love with the ideas within the Declaration of Independence.
This is a story about the tension between idealism and reality, about finding inspiration and power in the words of America’s founding fathers, while recognizing all the ways they themselves failed to live up to those ideals.
There’s also a long walk together from Virginia to Rhode Island and a delightful extended metaphor about cheese.
“That Could Be Enough� by Alyssa Cole is an f/f romance between two African American women in New York City in 1820. Mercy is a maid helping Eliza Hamilton collect stories for a biography of her husband, and Andromeda is a successful tailor and business owner whose grandfather fought with Alexander Hamilton at Yorktown.
This is a story about the cost of love, and also the strength of love and about learning to live and take chances again when life has treated you poorly in the past. There’s a plot point here of a type that often annoys me, where one character makes an uncharitable assumption instead of just talking to the other, but it’s resolved in a way that I found satisfying rather than annoying....more
This wasn’t entirely what I expected, but I really loved it.
There’s a lot of big socio-political things going on, but at heart this is a book about rThis wasn’t entirely what I expected, but I really loved it.
There’s a lot of big socio-political things going on, but at heart this is a book about relationships.
Akeha’s relationship with his sister Mokoya. His relationship with his lover. His relationship with the rebellion he falls into. And most of all his relationship with his mother, the powerful authoritarian leader they’re rebelling against.
Even the victory that concludes the story is a more personal one.
The world-building here is fascinating and complex, and tied to real-world technical advances and accompanying political changes in really smart and unexpected ways.
Reread. I think I first read this sometime in 2010.
This is a secondary-world fantasy set in the approximate equivalent of 17th Century France only witReread. I think I first read this sometime in 2010.
This is a secondary-world fantasy set in the approximate equivalent of 17th Century France only with both sorcery and Fae creatures.
The heart of this story is the subtle balances and shifting alliances of court politics, in a country with a young, too-weak King and a ruthless, perhaps too-strong Dowager Queen. And it centres on the unlikely alliance that develops between Thomas Boniface, Captain of the Queen's Guard and Kade Carrion bastard, half-fay sister to the king, when the court comes under threat from forces both without and within.
The first third of the book is full of court intrigue and figuring out what angles the various characters are playing. That was fascinating to reread knowing where it was headed and picking up on clues and bits of foreshadowing I didn't necessarily catch on first read.
And then things take a turn for the worse and there's a lot of death and destruction and fighting the dark forces of the Fay and in general rather a large mess.
Wells doesn't flinch from showing the violence and chaos and death, but she doesn't dwell on it either. Horrific things happen, but they aren't the focus of the narrative and I appreciate that.
As is usual with Wells, where she soars is with her characters, all of whom are complicated and messily human, none spotless in virtue and none entirely, unreedemedly evil.
I especially love Thomas and Kade and the slow-burn distrust turned friendship turned romance between them. This is one of my favourite lines in the book that captures the development and appeal of their relationship:
"They could hardly object to each other's eavesdropping, Thomas supposed, having just come to the mutual conclusion that they were both too despicable to live in polite company anyway. �
Thomas and Kade are perfect foils for each other with contrasting experiences and abilities that allow them to shore up each other's weaknesses and support each other's strengths, and I love them together rather a lot....more
**spoiler alert** Ripper once again puts zir characters through the emotional ringer.
This time we get the aftermath of an offscreen sexual assault an**spoiler alert** Ripper once again puts zir characters through the emotional ringer.
This time we get the aftermath of an offscreen sexual assault and a breakup that's painful for everyone involved.
One of the things I love about this series is that the focus isn't on emotionally charged happenings, but on the aftermaths. The real story is in the emotional reactions and conversations and reevaluation of relationships that come next.
I expected this book to be mostly about Will and Molly, and the disintegration of their relationship, and it is. But there's also a lot in here about Hugh and Truman and Hugh's failure to deal with his own emotional reactions and entanglements.
I spend a lot of this series going, "damn it Hugh! You're so good at other people, why are you so shit at recognizing what's going on in YOUR head....more
I love Molly, and it was great to get her pov for a while and also to actually meet and get to know Becca, who in This series continues to be SO good.
I love Molly, and it was great to get her pov for a while and also to actually meet and get to know Becca, who in the first book was entirely an off-screen catalyst for the action rather than a character in her own right.
Also, I'm totally here for Will struggling with the importance of his own desires, but I'm even more here for Hugh and Truman struggling to convince him of his importance to them....more
The story of a Golem and a Jinn, two supernatural creatures living in two distinct immigrant communities in turn of the century New York City.
This staThe story of a Golem and a Jinn, two supernatural creatures living in two distinct immigrant communities in turn of the century New York City.
This started slow, and it took a while for the two main characters to even meet, but once I really got into it, I ended up staying up until 4am finishing it because I couldn’t put it down.
Mostly, this is a book about gender. It’s about roles and expectations and the consequences of not meeting those expectations, but also the consequences of embracing them uncritically.
As an immigrant woman who was literally built to be a wife, and who can hear the thoughts and desires of the people around her, the Golem Chava is constantly concerned with playing her assigned role, with being the perfect woman, with not revealing her nature, and with the impact her actions have on those around her.
By contrast, Ahmed the Jinn is insistent in his own freedom and often unconcerned by the consequences of his actions. Where Chava orders her entire life with rules and strictures, Ahmed resists conforming himself to any rules or expectations but his own.
They are, of course, both wrong. And it’s through their unusual and beautifully described friendship that they each finally start to understand the other.
I love the level of historical detail Wecker includes. It’s fascinatingly evocative of a specific time and place, without feeling overly anthropological or othering.
I adore the entire supporting cast here, and Wecker did a great job of pulling their seemingly-disparate experiences and storylines together in the last quarter of the book. And they are all, even the villain, written with a sympathetic eye to their flawed humanity.
I picked this up because it was free and I'd heard good things about the author, but honestly I was mostly expecting a smutty, poly diversion.
What I gI picked this up because it was free and I'd heard good things about the author, but honestly I was mostly expecting a smutty, poly diversion.
What I got was so much more.
This is a story about how propriety can be nothing but chains and the finding freedom and happiness by embracing ruin.
And family. This is very much a story about found family and the strength we find in the people we choose to love.
And, unusually and pleasingly, the relationships are not a triangle, but a vee. I'm always delighted to see a diversity of poly relationships represented in fiction, and characters choosing to be each other's family without being lovers.
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