Ink (Skin Books #1) by Alice Broadway
Status: DNF at 39%
On the whole, Ink is unspectacular and uninspiring. It coasts by on the idea of a society where tattoos are a record of your life and your soul only exists as long as your tattooed skin remains to tell your story. Which is, admittedly, a really cool idea. However, there is zero worldbuilding that isn’t related to tattoos. You get all the details about how the tattoos happen, are chosen or mandated, and fit into life, death, and belief, but there’s nothing else that would let the world feel fully realized. What do they eat? What is the climate like? Traditional ceremonial dress gets described, but what do people wear every day? What time period is this even based on? It has a very “generic fantasy village” vibe, with a small-town feel, a village square where people gather when the mayor has something to say, and no hint of other modes of transportation besides walking, but then there’s also tattoo guns and some very modern-sounding school systems and house interiors. I couldn’t even get into the interesting parts of the world because I didn’t know about anything but the tattoos. On top of that, none of the characters have any personality. The protagonist is an incredibly generic YA protagonist – misses her recently-deceased dad, likes to draw, a loner at school, and nothing else. Nobody else has anything distinguishing. I kept waiting for the plot to start to see if that was interesting, but it just didn’t. It’s like the story wanted to spend a lot of time with the setup but it never actually set up anything. The whole story was as colorless, ill-defined, and two-dimensional as a poorly done tattoo.
Trigger Warnings: Parent death (severe), grief, needles, gore (mentions), corpse desecration, torture (mentions), injury, xenophobia
Invisible Kingdom, Vol. 1 by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward
Status: Completed
I really do not like the art style of this graphic novel very much. The scenery looks great, but the actual characters seem off. I know they’re supposed to be aliens and not humans, but with the style, it feels like their features have shifted slightly every time they’re shown at a different angle, which since I’m face-blind is absolute hell. I figured I wouldn’t continue the series just because of that. But I finished the first volume and for some reason, I found it gripping and want to keep reading. I have no idea why, either. Space nuns are cool, but the actual space monastery got very little page time and probably won’t get any in the rest of the series. The plot is fairly standard “protagonists discover people in high places are incredibly corrupt and have to do something with that information while said people are trying to kill them,” which can be good but isn’t necessarily unique. I can’t say I particularly liked either of the protagonists, and the story was just difficult enough to follow that I can’t even remember anything about the secondary characters. But whatever the reason, it was a quick read and I actually do want to read more.
See my review of Volume 2 here
See my review of Volume 3 here
Tags: Muslim author, Hijabi author
Trigger Warnings: Scifi racism (minor), prejudice against religious group, vomit (minor), threat of death
Immunity (Contagion #2) by Erin Bowman
Status: DNF at 24%
Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and this review may contain spoilers of book one. See my review of book one, Contagion, here.
I had a hard time getting into this one. Like all my reading in early January, I read it in fits and starts, which didn’t help. But I also found it just not as compelling. It has the exact same plot as the first book in the series: Find answers and escape. But instead of a terrifying uninhabitable planet stalked by an unknown danger that takes over the minds of your own crewmates, our protagonists are being held captive on a military spaceship and being studied. The answers searched for were less about what is happening and more about their captors’ plans so they can escape. The weird stuff happening to their bodies was just kind of accepted as cool new stuff they could do, with no concern or even curiosity about it. There was a political angle with a separatist faction seeming like it would become a driving force. And there was zero horror, space or otherwise. It was just overall unexciting and I didn’t feel like bothering to continue.
Trigger Warnings: Torture, body horror, medical content, excrement (mentions), kidnapping, confinement, death, injury, violence, blood, terminal illness (mentions)
Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way by Tanja Hester
Status: Completed
Being a practical person, I really appreciate that this book is 90% practical guidelines. It’s basically a step-by-step guide on retiring early from someone who actually did it. Not only is it full of information, it also contains quizzes (which I expected) and checklists (which are my one true love and were an unexpected delight to discover). It covers a lot of topics in a short time but still manages to be engaging and inspiring throughout. Of course, it is one person’s story, and while Tanja does her very best to make it generalizable, on the whole it doesn’t seem doable for me. Of course, most early retirement stuff seems to be meant for people who can afford to save 50+% of their income and not people like me working two jobs to pay rent, so I’m disappointed but not surprised. However, there is a lot of good reference material in here, so it’s still worth reading just for that.
Tags: Disabled Author
Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), chronic illness (mentions)
Not For Use in Navigation: Thirteen Stories by Iona Datt Sharma
Status: Completed
I enjoyed the science fantasy vibe of these stories, which ranged from solid scifi to scifi that felt like magic to magic and science combining to straight magic. Like most short story collections, I enjoyed some more than others. Unlike most short story collections, several of these were set in the same world. I really enjoyed the stories of a real Mughal Emperor of India set in a spacefaring alternate past. I didn’t particularly enjoy the stories of the people who call themselves Salt – the magic was interesting, but the postwar Britain setting was just not interesting to me. On the whole, though, none of them stood out as particularly bad (although none of them stood out as particularly spectacular, either) and it was a solid short story collection.
Tags: It’s Queer!, They/them author, Biracial author, Author of Color
Trigger Warnings: Death, violence, injury, mental illness, war, racism
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