I’m still not loving this art style – the characters are so hyper-stylized that it feels like their features are constantly changing, and sometimes things are deliberately drawn with very little detail, which I just find annoying. The plot is fairly unremarkable, there’s too many characters going on to get too invested in any of them and the character dynamics they’re building are happening to fast for me to get invested, and the cool space nun thing that I was really excited about is basically backstory at this point. But for some reason I want to keep reading. I don’t know what it is about this book – maybe the vivid colors and cool space settings, maybe learning about the weirdness of alien biology, maybe I am somewhat getting invested in whatever’s going on between Grix and Vess. But either way, it was a fast and enjoyable read and I’m definitely going to read the third volume.
I have been in a reading slump for a while, but this book was so much that I devoured it in two days. I say “so much” because despite it not being unreasonably long, it is unreasonably packed with everything. The narrative slips easily between past and present, real and myth, winding together concrete reality, fantasy, and folklore in a way that somehow makes myths, ghosts, and generational curses feel exactly as real and plausible as the experimental physics the protagonist studies. It’s a narrator going mad and holding conversations with the hallucinations only she can see, and it’s a narrator weaving stories with reality to unravel her family’s past and present. It’s about the immigrant experience – leaving and loss and regretting, starting over, pain and isolation and hopes and dreams and racism and being visibly Other how each individual deals with it. It’s about complicated and painful family dynamics and confronting them as an adult when everyone who formed or was formed by those dynamics has changed or gone. It’s about the power of story and the power of language and what translation does and doesn’t do. It’s about identity and origin and family and past and the threads that can and can’t be cut between our present and our history. This book is so much, it feels expansive and raw and real and amazingly grounded and true, despite all the fantastical elements. It is definitely a unique reading experience but so, so worth it.
Tags: Korean American protagonist, Protagonist of Color, Korean American author, Author of Color, #ownvoices Korean American
My fundamental problem with this book is that I completely misunderstood what it was. From the title and the personal bent to the whole idea, I thought it was going to be a memoir, or mostly memoir combined with some self-help-style content. It is neither of those things. The conclusion section refers to it as a “thesis,” and that’s really what it reads like. Even the slightly odd formatting makes more sense in that context. It combines autoethnography (a variety of academic sociological study using the self as subject) with a historical analysis of Evangelical Christianity, trauma and PTSD, the development of Religious Trauma Syndrome as an idea, and pathways to healing. (I’m also slightly uncomfortable with her assertions that healing from religious trauma could heal chronic illness, cancer, infertility, and other physical ailments – I’ve read The Body Keeps the Score and don’t disbelieve in the premise, but it needs some disclaimers that she doesn’t provide.) It is a decent length for a thesis paper but very short for a book, especially a book with such a broad scope. It’s also written like a thesis paper – dense, packed with citations, emphasizing information and facts over storytelling or emotional engagement. It is a good, if academic, overview of the idea of religious trauma and how growing up in Evangelical Christianity can cause it. However, I’m not sure how or why this got published as a general readership book.
This book is very dense. It is incredibly interesting, as well – Ariel makes some intriguing points about the uses of pain in religious and ritual contexts, and his history of how conceptions of pain changed with the advancement of medical science from something inevitable, beneficial, and sometimes even desirable to something injurious, damaging, and to be removed at all costs was fascinating. However, I have two general criticisms. One is that it has a general air of being outdated, some of which probably has to do with the book being published in 2001, and some of it had to do with its weird overreliance on Jungian psychology in the early chapters. I studied psychology in college and I only heard Jung’s methods brought up in discussions of the history of the field, so reliance on it as an actual analytical and interpretave paradigm felt very outdated to me. Second, it was incredibly dense in places. This isn’t necessarily a problem with the book per se, as I’m pretty sure it was written by an academic for academics. However, in between intriguing ideas and vivid descriptions of historical uses and experiences of pain, there were long, dense sections about neurology, biology, and the neruobiological effects of pain and feelings about pain, and my eyes definitely glazed over several times. It does make some really interesting points and is solid overall, but be prepared going in for it to be pretty dense (and full of vivid and detailed descriptions of torture, medical content, injuries, and pain of all kinds).
Trigger Warnings: Blood (mentions), injury, medical content (severe), torture (severe), death, medical trauma, self-harm for religious/ritual purposes
This book has been on my TBR list for literally years. It came across my radar a long time ago and I heard it had polyamory in it, so I put it on my list. And it managed to stay through several years of sorting and culling the list because the back cover was so sparse on details that I didn’t feel like I could make a good decision. And the ideas here are really cool. There’s the city itself, slowly crumbling into the cavern beneath that used to be a river and is now an eternal fire, and the violent military/paramilitary group invested in keeping everybody there. There’s the people themselves, changed in strange ways by a “miracle drug” that gave fantastic powers, but often with horrible consequences. There’s our protagonists, a lizard-man with the power to turn invisible who had his memories stolen by a ghost and a singer with a super-powered voice, plus other characters like the ghost, a person who’s been Frankenstein’s monster-ed together out of other people, and the singer’s two wives, one of whom is mostly made of plants. People just are queer and are polyamorous and use they/them pronouns and nobody thinks anything of it. There’s perhaps an underground rebel organization, and there’s definitely weird stuff going on. There are so many good things in this book. But there’s also a mental illness/trauma angle that was so overwhelmingly heavy-handed. The characters are okay, but the only aspect of them that’s really developed is that they have anxiety and/or are traumatized in different ways. The singer and her family are the most “trauma informed” characters I’ve ever read, and somehow they became that way while still actively living through that trauma. Every few pages someone else has an anxiety attack and someone else has to talk them through it. I’m not saying that the stuff they’re going through isn’t traumatic, because it is. But the story keeps interrupting what could have been a truly interesting adventure to shoehorn in stuff about trauma and anxiety. It really feels like one of those thinley-veiled Morally Edifying Literature stories from like the Victorian era, except instead of promoting Modesty and Virginity it’s promoting Trauma Is Real and Be Compassionate With Anxiety Attacks. These are not bad things to promote, actually – I’m not arguing about that. But the way they’re done here is so overwhelming and heavy-handed. If you’re here for a good fantasy story, it’s going to yank you out of the adventure repeatedly to preach about anxiety and trauma. If you’re actually here for a Moral and Instructive Tale on Trauma and Mental Health, you’re probably going to find much of this very triggering. There were really good ideas here and I did want to read the story. I just got so, so fed up with the excessive mental illness and trauma preaching.
I do have a habit of reading through reference books like they’re narrative works, but even though this is technically a reference book, it’s the kind that is best read straight through first and then consulted as a reference. I watch Bernadette’s YouTube channel, and her personality shines through in the instructions themselves (already impressive) as well as the narrative bits that surround the instructions. There are also essays from other people who do historical sewing about what it means to them. Plus the instructions are just great. It’s targeted towards beginners so I didn’t expect to learn much (I bought it becuase I love Bernadette Banner, not because I expected it to be fantastically useful), but I actually learned several things, including the actual name of a stitch I use a lot, how to properly do gathers (I’ve apparently been doing it wrong), and how to put in a sleeve gusset. So not only is this a rare reference book that is fun to read straight through, the actual reference content is very helpful. It’s both accessible if you’re new to sewing and will probably teach you a thing or two even if you’ve been sewing for a while. I’m glad I own this one, because I fully expect to be referencing it later.
I very nearly DNF’d this one, because the main murder mystery plot just didn’t vibe with me. Ellie’s magic with ghosts means that her murdered cousin straight-up told her who killed him, and the mystery part was actually about finding why and how in a manner that law enforcement would accept. And I just didn’t find it that interesting. However, then I realized that I did find everything else in this story interesting. The world of monsters and magic – fae magic, Indigenous magic, vampires, all sorts of stuff – along with the modern world was well-crafted and fascinating. I loved how it was the modern world just a little askew because, you know, magic. I loved learning about the Ellie’s Lipan Apache traditions and magic, I loved having a protagonist who was explicitly aro/ace without it being a big deal, I even really enjoyed Ellie’s relationship with her best friend Jay. And the murder mystery part did end up having a solid climax (although I’ll be honest, I saw the big twist from a mile away). On the whole, I’m glad I finished reading it, because even though parts of it didn’t do it for me personally, there’s a lot to love in this book.
This is a weird DNF book to review, as there really isn’t anything particularly wrong with it. If you’d asked me while I was reading, I would have told you it was perfectly good. If I had read it in a different situation, i.e. if I still had the job where I could read audiobooks while I worked, I absolutely would have finished it and enjoyed it. And I did enjoy it while reading. The story was weird and interesting – a more realistic retelling of Arthurian myth, twisted with magic, steeped in a genuine pre-middle-ages historical feel, and told in a stark, almost minimalist style that throws out all the rules of “show don’t tell” but somehow works. There’s a lot to like here. But somehow I found myself always choosing to listen to something else. In the car, I turned on the radio. On Saturday mornings, when I usually put on an audiobook while I clean my apartment, I instead chose a podcast. I can’t even put my finger on why I really don’t want to go back to reading this book. By all rights, it’s pretty good, and I did enjoy it while reading. (I can’t emphasize that enough, despite how much I’ve avoided reading it after the fact, I genuinely really enjoyed the parts that I did read.) I don’t see much of a point of forcing myself to finish a book I’m avoiding picking up, so I’m not going to. I just still can’t explain why.
Tags: It’s Queer!
Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, injury, sexual content (off-page), animal death, murder, sexual assault (mentions)
I have a bad habit of picking up reference books and then trying to read them straight through like narrative books. This is very much a reference book, and it took me a while to read through. That said, it’s a fantastic reference book. It’s beautifully designed and full of gorgeous pictures of plants and garden tools, and it’s packed full of so much information. There’s the stuff I expected, like creating a good soil mix for pots and choosing the right containers and picking varieties of plants to grow in pots, but there’s also stuff I didn’t expect but found incredibly useful, like what pests to watch out for with each plant (and how to deal with them), how to best transplant plants, what kind of supports may or may not be needed, and even which plants grow well in the same pot. A spectacular reference book and one I will be consulting regularly when the weather gets warm enough to plant things.
This book is sad, dark, and incredibly intense. It goes hard on the mystery elements, and even though there’s some hints of the supernatural, most of it is entirely human. Everyone has secrets, the question is just how they fit together. I called several of the twists at 51% of the way through, but I didn’t spot all of them, which surprised me. There’s heavy questions about whether people can be truly inherently evil or if “good” and “evil” are defined by our actions and everyone has the capacity to choose. I didn’t expect to like this one very much, but it was surprisingly good. I didn’t adore it, but I did enjoy it.
I had not intended to review this one. But then I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I have absolutely no idea what to make of it. It’s a pandemic-driven apocalypse full of horrors you never imagined or predicted and ends up not being about the pandemic anyway. It’s packed with violence and gore and body horror and death and the only scene I’ve ever read that made me physically gag. It also has weird sex stuff that quickly tips into extraordinarily disturbing, an uncomfortable amount of vividly-described cannibalism, and the strange and unsettling feeling of grasping for normalcy while your body becomes strange and foreign around you. There’s an entire a pandemic-driven societal collapse as well as old gods from outer space, and both of those manage to somehow be background elements in this body horror fever nightmare of a book. It was dark and gory and horrible and also I just couldn’t stop reading. I feel like this isn’t the kind of book you should say you “love,” and yet I loved it. It may be a nightmare, but it’s a repulsively readable and enthralling nightmare.
Tags: It’s Queer!
Trigger Warnings: Gore (graphic), cannibalism (graphic), body horror (severe), cancer (mentions), murder, blood, violence, pandemic, unreality (mentions)
The back cover on this was mediocre, and I didn’t have high expectations. But it was surprisingly good. It takes the maxim “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and rolls with it. But the communication struggles between the augmented anthropologist of a technologically-advanced people and the princess of a generally-primitive people were the most fascinating part. For being as short as it is, the world and characters are remarkably complex and the emotions are surprisingly deep and rich. The plot is fairly simple – go to this place, deal with the demon there – but it ended in a pleasantly unexpected way. I just can’t get over how this book looked so unassuming on the outside and yet managed to be complex and interesting and have such solid characters and a well-developed world while still being so short. I almost wish it was longer just because I want more in this world with these characters.
Trigger Warnings: Death, injury, gore, body horror, mental illness, suicidal thoughts (mentions), animal death
I’m not much for comedy at the best of times – most of it just comes off as unfunny at best and cringeworthy at worst. And that’s exactly what happened with this book. I very nearly gave up on page 11 because the protagonist insisted on making a fool of herself while both literally and metaphorically shoving away another character trying to help her avoid doing so. But sometimes the inciting incident is a little rough and then it gets better, so I pushed on. And admittedly after that one scene, I no longer felt like cringing out of my skin. But it didn’t improve by much. The characters were caricatures with little depth whose main purpose seemed to be subverting tropes. The humor ranged from just not funny to awkward and forced. And the plot was far too straightforward and unexciting to hold my interest on its own. I appreciate that the book was trying to subvert all of the fantasy quest novel tropes – I am absolutely here for trope subversion. But Promises, Promises took the concept of subverting tropes and just kinda forgot to build an actually enjoyable story around it. I will admit, though, comedies aren’t my jam generally. The problem here may be me and not the book. But regardless of where the fault lies, I couldn’t find the desire to continue.
Tags: It’s Queer!, #ownvoices lesbian
Trigger Warnings: Threat of death, confinement, mental illness (mentions), character with delusions, violence (mentions)
I picked this up mainly because it was immediately available at the library, and I was in a nonfiction mood and didn’t have any nonfiction books checked out. I expected some rah-rah hype, inspiration, and pie-in-the-sky promises about making a ton of money doing only what you love and “living your dream life” and whatnot. But The $100 Startup is astonishingly practical. I took a ton of notes to use later. I’ve been working in marketing for a full decade and I still found some new concepts and ideas here. There’s also some extremely useful worksheets and checklists. It won’t give you the business idea, but once you have an idea this book gives you the step-by-step process to make it happen. It simplifies the whole process of building a business into its foundational aspects. And it does it all while being surprisingly engaging to read. I was pleasantly surprised to find it not only a good read, but relentlessly practical.
This book was surprisingly engaging. I loved the setting of historical Korea. It painted a vivid picture of life and society, culture and hierarchy, the palace and its relationship with the people outside, and even the details of which hairstyles are associated with which jobs. It felt rich and intricate and immersive. I was also unexpectedly interested in the murder investigation plot. The crown prince is implicated and he’s definitely committed murder before, but did he commit this murder? Unclear – and I wanted to know if he did, and if not who did, and overall why. The romance made me roll my eyes at first, but by the end it was the perfect combination of sweet and angsty and I enjoyed it. I didn’t expect to enjoy a historical mystery much at all, but The Red Palace was a surprisingly enjoyable read.
Tags: Nonwestern Setting, Protagonist of Color, #ownvoices Korean
This book was interesting overall, and covered a lot of very different and contradictory life philosophies. I liked that it was descriptive, not prescriptive – it didn’t even name most of the philosophies mentioned, but was written as commands for what to do if you want to live that way. But on the other hand, this book is incredibly short and still managed to feel a bit repetitive. The conclusion was also not really weird so much as exactly what I expected in a slightly different format than anticipated. It’s definitely not bad (though I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it “good,” either), but if all else fails, it’s short.
Trigger Warnings: Fatphobia (mentions)
Annihilation (Southern Reach #1) by Jeff VanderMeer
This book was a pretty solid horror story. It had a very strong SCP vibe to it, with a lot of aspects that reminded me of SCP-610. It was very eerie and had a lot of buildup in a very cool and incredibly creepy distorted natural world. However, I found the ending anticlimactic. There was a lot of potential in the mysterious creature and the body horror that never came to fruition. It had a lot of horror buildup, but missed that intense horror climax and release. It was perfectly fine on the whole, and very good in parts. I have no desire for a sequel – there are questions remaining, sure, but this is the kind of book where they don’t seem to require answers.
Trigger Warnings: Body horror (severe), death, guns, injury, blood (mentions), romantic partner death, violence, mind control, cancer (mentions)
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
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.
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
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
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
Books can be many things to many people, depending on what the book is and what you want from it. But one thing books can definitely be is a way of expanding yourself – expanding into new settings, feelings, genres, and experiences, and expanding ideas, perspectives, ideologies, and ways of looking at the world.
It’s been quite a year in general for me (and in many ways not a particularly good year), but it’s also been quite a year in reading. I have found books expansive in both senses this year. I have read about things I’d never thought about before, experienced new genres and concepts that I didn’t realize I would enjoy, and encountered books that turned everything I knew on its head.
Quantity may eventually lead to quality
I am still at the job that lets me have earbuds in while I work, and we did a TON of overtime this year. (Our longest stretch of time without mandatory overtime was three weeks.) Therefore, I read a ton of books. And when you read that many books, eventually you’re going to have to start trying things you normally wouldn’t pick up because you’ve run out of books you actually want to read. I’ve DNF’d a metric ton of books that just didn’t end up being that enjoyable – both ones I expected to enjoy and ones I decided to give a chance even though I expected not to enjoy them. But I’ve also read plenty of books that turned out to be so much more enjoyable than I anticipated.
Last year was a year of reading surprises. Mainly, I was surprised to discover that things I had always hated previously could sometimes be good (namely sex scenes, graphic novels, and the entire romance genre). This year continued the theme with a few new and even more dramatic surprises.
I don’t hate literary fiction
Ever since high school (and an English Literature class specifically designed to suck the joy out of reading), I’ve considered “literary fiction” synonymous with “boring.” If it’s populated with dull, unlikeable characters, contains minimal plot, and is written to impress awards committees and/or academics with the blandest philosophical insights possible, why should I bother reading it? Literary fiction may not be the plot-driven action I’m used to, but when done right, it can be thematic, nuanced, and rich with meaning and feeling. It definitely has the ability to be dreadfully dull (especially the “man deals with his midlife crisis by having sex with barely-legal women” type), but also has the potential to be spectacular.
I don’t hate horror
Horror has been one of those genres that I’ve hesitated to even try because I’m just not a horror kind of person. Or so I thought. Remember that whole “trying new things because I’m running out of books I actually want to read” thing that I encountered this year? One of the new things I tried was horror. And it turns out I don’t hate horror. In fact, I have discovered I LOVE horror. Space horror and body horror are my favorites so far, but I’ve been trying out different horror genres and most of them are, surprisingly, pretty good. I’m not much for extreme gore, but if I have to mentally pull myself out of story immersion to keep from totally freaking out, it’s a good book.
Weird books are the best books
I first became really aware of the enthrallingly off-kilter genre of Magical Realism last year, when I read the absolutely stellar Vita Nostra. I read some more magical realism this year, both classic and new, and fell in love with its unexpected, nonsensical, and often unsettling weirdness. Even if it’s not specifically magical realism, I’ve discovered that I adore books that are weird, bizarre, and make just enough sense to be comprehensible but not necessarily enough to be coherent.
My Reading in 2022
I have a lot of stuff to stay about my reading and specific books from this year, so heads up for a very long post!
The StoryGraph also gave me my Reading Wrap-Up for 2022. The major stats (like how many books I read) are the same, but other ones are less accurate (like how long it took me to finish a book, as I update The StoryGraph when I write my review, not when I finish the book).
As always, none of these lists are in any particular order.
Overall Reading
My annual reading goal is always 48 books. If I remember right, I hit that in April. In total, I read 212 books this year, which is 442% of my goal and makes 2022 my biggest reading year EVER. I’ve been tracking my reading since 2010, and in the previous twelve years, my peak has been 2012 with 187 books. A decade later, not only did I read 50 more books than I read last year, I beat my previous record by 25 books. This is also the second year I’ve kept track of my DNF books, and I DNF’d 135 books. So in total I picked up 347 books and finished 61% of them.
In reviewing, I reviewed 149 books in total, 25 of which were DNF books. I also started doing Review Shorts this year, for books where I have a sentence or two of opinions, but not enough for a full review. I wrote 68 review shorts this year, so only 54% of my book reviews this year were full reviews.
The Details
Poetry is categorized as nonfiction, but it doesn’t matter because I only read one book of poetry this year.
The StoryGraph counts audiobooks by hours, not pages – which makes sense, but it does mess with my page count statistics.
My Goals for 2022
I set some reading goals for myself every year – some of them are always the same, and some of them change by the year. Let’s check in on the goals I set for my reading in 2022.
Finish 48 books between January 1 and December 31. Completed summa cum laude with honors, etc. I’m pretty sure I finished 48 books between January 1 and May 1.
Read at least 50% fiction. I read a ton of nonfiction this year, but I also read a ton of fiction, so it balances out. 68% of the books I finished were fiction.
Read only good books (by only reading books I’m interested in, not reading books just because I feel like I “should,” and not finishing books I’m not enjoying). I picked up a lot of crappy books this year, but I also DNF’d a lot of books, so I usually use my star ratings stats to give me an idea of this one. Ratings-wise, my numbers are a little different this year, for a couple reasons. One is that I started giving star ratings to every book I finished, not just the ones I reviewed. So the data is more complete but less positive than last year, when I only gave star ratings to books I reviewed. Also, I was more harsh in my star ratings this year and refused to give out five stars to anything I didn’t thoroughly, 100% enjoy. I finished 32 books that I rated three stars or lower. However, I also finished 103 books that I rated four stars or higher, including 25 that got a full five stars. With 60% of my finished books rated four stars or higher, I think I did pretty good this year.
Unread Shelf 2022: Read 12 books I own but haven’t read yet. I didn’t hit that one this year, as I only picked up 9 Unread Shelf books this year (and 2 of them were DNF).
A Year of Finishing Series
I am notorious (at least to myself) for reading the first book of a series, saying “that was fantastic, I desperately need book two!” and then never actually reading book two. This is especially a problem if it’s a newer book and book two isn’t out yet, but I am perfectly capable of doing it to a series whose last book came out a decade ago. This year, though, I finished a lot of series:
I also am reading several series that are still ongoing, so there are a few series I “completed” in the sense that I have read all the books currently published:
I also read 18 Discworld books this year, but I still haven’t finished that series …
Favorite Fictional Reads in 2022
I don’t pick overall favorite books in any category. Partly because it’s hard to compare two drastically different and very good books to pick a “favorite,” and partly because I’ve read a lot of good books and don’t want to have to pick just one or even rank them. So these are my top favorite fictional reads from 2022, in no particular order or rank.
This is the first book in the Wells of Sorcery series, and like most trilogies, I enjoyed all three books but number one was the best. I loved the angry, violent protagonist and her anger as a super power, plus she had the Protagonist Does the Impossible variation of my favorite Absurdly Powerful Protagonist trope, which was delightful. And the massive ghost ship setting was weird, dark, terrifying, and generally amazing. A bunch of fantastic elements combined to make a fantastic story.
This is a pandemic-driven post-apocalyptic story featuring queerphobia, religious trauma, and so much body horror. But it’s also insanely cathartic. Let’s be real, which of us religiously-traumatized queers wouldn’t enjoy it at least a little if their religion twisted their body as well as their spirit and enabled them to rain down bloody retribution on the people who hurt them in the name of god? I know I would. It’s extremely dark and fairly gory, but also cathartic and remarkably uplifting.
This is the first book in the Spells, Swords, & Stealth series, and the cover and back cover copy really had a “D&D nerd decided to write and self-publish a crappy novel” vibe. I didn’t expect to finish it, let alone love it. But love it I did. Yeah, it’s a fantasy RPG-themed novel, but it also has surprisingly good characterization, remarkable emotional depth, humor that’s actually funny, and characters who know all the tropes and are just so tired of dealing with them. It’s not winning any awards, but it’s so much fun. (Plus the rest of the series is also fantastic.)
If Pacific Rim took place in ancient scifi China and the only way to power the mecha robots was to sacrifice the woman in a male-female pilot team, you’d get something like this book. If you’re here for action, adventure, and a protagonist who is too angry to deal with this bullshit, you’ve got it. If you want to watch an angry young woman realize how misogyny is systemic and change her target from killing an individual man to tearing down the entire system, you’ve got that. And if you want a love triangle that shakes out in the best way possible, you’ve got that too. Overall a stellar book, and I can’t wait for the sequel.
A smart and capable daughter is given a fate of nothingness, while her spoiled and bratty brother is given a fate of greatness. So when her brother and father die in a famine, the girl takes her brother’s identity and strives to take his fate as well. As a girl child in a world that would rather let a girl die than let a boy be uncomfortable, she chose to live by any means necessary. Featuring a morally complex queer anti-hero and set against the background of the Chinese rebellion against their Mongol rulers, this book is full of violence and yet is poetic and feels like an epic saga. I adored it.
Earth-Shattering Reads in 2022
Sometimes you read a book and feel like you just got bludgeoned across the head with a brand-new perspective. And occasionally, that new perspective is so monumental and earth-shattering that it makes you a completely different person than before you picked up the book. I haven’t called a book “life-changing” since I stopped pretending the Bible mattered to me. But if any book deserves the epithet “life-changing,” these psyche-altering volumes do.
A pandemic novel in that it’s a novel about a pandemic, it’s a horror story that emphasized the helpless despair in my own life. After I put the book down I felt off-kilter, like my life (or my psyche) was in a box that just got knocked off a table and nothing inside can ever be the same again. It sparked an intense reevaluation of my day-to-day life that’s still ongoing. Pretty much everything I’m currently doing just doesn’t matter.
A work of moral philosophy with an emphasis on American partisan politics, it’s not the kind of thing I expected to find earth-shattering, or even interesting enough to finish. But the idea of moral foundations and the author’s clear emphasis of the good parts of each political party (even the parties I vehemently disagree with) started another reevaluation. My political beliefs and even the values that underpin my own sense of morality are in question.
I thought this was going to be about climate change. Climate change doesn’t even get discussed until the last chapter. Regardless of climate change, society as we know it is going to collapse. In fact, the collapse has already begun. It’s going to be a long, slow apocalypse, but the apocalypse has already started. And I am reevaluating every plan I’ve ever made about my future.
The Hall of Honorable Mentions and the Otherwise Noteworthy
I Expected Self-Help But I Got a Memoir Instead
Tired as F*ck: Burnout at the Hands of Diet, Self-Help, and Hustle Culture by Caroline Dooner. My library categorized this as self-help, and combined with the back cover I thought it would tell me how to do a radical period of rest like the author talks about. Instead, it was mostly a memoir about the stresses that brought her to the point where she needed two years of rest in the first place. It wasn’t a bad read, actually, just not what I expected.
For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan. I was hoping for something more instructional about creating secular rituals and finding meaning in a meaningless universe – you know, like the title suggested. It does have a little bit of that, including some interesting notes about the kinds of rituals humans tend to create. However, a lot of it is memoir. It discusses the author’s experience with secular ritual as the daughter of Carl Sagan, and the rituals she does and plans to do with her own child. It was interesting and somewhat useful, just not as instructional as I’d hoped.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. This book was worthwhile for introducing the concept of “wintering” as an emotional season. The book provides some symptoms and an idea of what it feels like, but then goes off on a series of only vaguely related vignettes from the author’s life. It provides no real suggestions for what to actually do when you find yourself in an emotional winter. The concept is useful, but this book is mostly a rambling memoir.
I Didn’t Expect to Like It but Joke’s On Me
The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware. I’m not usually much for mystery or thriller-type books, and while I was a slightly interested in the idea of a fortune-teller using her cold-reading skills to grift her way into an inheritance, I didn’t expect to enjoy it. And while the beginning was difficult, it ended up being really good. The Westaway family is full of secrets, the protagonist may not be a long-lost granddaughter but she might have some connection with the family anyway, and the secrets could very likely become deadly. A twisty, thrilling story all the way around.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez. I picked this up during a very brief classics-reading kick, right before I figured out most classic books are pretty dull. This one, though, was very good. It’s magical realism, which I’ve discovered I really enjoy, and also a sweeping family saga about the rise and fall of one family across six generations. And it’s weird, and surprisingly relatable, and remarkably human. It’s not just a book about the human condition (which sounds pretentious, but is true), it’s also a good story.
The Everlasting by Katy Simpson Smith. I’m not usually much for literary fiction and I didn’t have high hopes for this one. But I was pleasantly surprised – or should I say emotionally surprised, because this book has big feelings. There’s not much of a plot, but it’s about bodies and their betrayals – being young, growing old, being female, getting sick, becoming pregnant. And yet it’s also about the joy of being embodied. It’s deep and rich and full of religious motifs and supremely relatable struggles. I’m not sure if I precisely liked it, but I most definitely felt it.
The Gallery of Gorgeous Books
I read some books with absolutely beautiful covers this year, so here is a small gallery of my favorites. (Whether or not I enjoyed or even finished the book has no bearing here – this section judges books by their covers and by their covers alone.)
Reading Goals for 2023
Like every year, I’m aiming for my annual reading goals:
Finish 48 books between January 1 and December 31
Read at least 50% fiction
Read good books, which involves…
Only reading books I’m truly interested in
Not attempting to read books because I feel like I “should”
Not finishing books I’m not legitimately excited to finish reading
I’m also brining back the Unread Shelf goal, because I still have a bunch of books I’ve owned but haven’t read. So again, I’m challenging myself to read 12 books that I own but haven’t read.
Final Thoughts
I’ve read a lot this year. Inevitably, that’s led me to read a wide variety of things I wouldn’t have normally read. And that’s introduced me to some things that it turns out I really enjoy. It’s also led to me picking up a ton of books that I ended up not finishing, and that’s okay too. I’m reading for fun, not to meet some arbitrary standard or goal. If I’m not having fun, what’s the point?
Here’s to a 2023 full of fun, entertaining, enjoyable, and even occasionally mind-blowing books.
I almost didn’t pick this up because of the author. At one point her book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was the ONLY thing available to do and I still couldn’t finish it. But Piranesi is only a quarter of the length of that book, and the concept was intriguing, so I gave it a shot. And I’m glad I did, because it’s the kind of bizarre almost-nonsensical story that I very much enjoy. I love the setting o the infinite house with weird statues and indoor oceans. I enjoyed the protagonist living there, examining the house with a semi-scientific mindset that often makes the leap into the nearly religious. I even enjoyed how the memory problems made the protagonist almost childlike in that he didn’t see how dark the story was even though it was obvious to me, the reader. It was very short, barely long enough to be coherent but not nearly long enough to make sense. I didn’t get the sense that there’s some kind of other meaning or metaphor, but I almost feel like there has to be one because otherwise it’s mostly pointless. But even if it is pointless, it’s the kind of off-kilter pointlessness that I enjoy.
This very short book brought up a lot of emotions, but I’m not really sure what emotions they are. Sadness, perhaps? Longing? A weird mix of hope and despair? It was a very philosophical story in a solarpunk-style world, with reflections on the idea of having a “life purpose” and the seemingly-universal human desire for something more. The protagonist’s longing for something else, something beyond what they have and do now, a longing so deep it seems to cross into depression at times, was the most relatable thing I’ve read in a long time. The book made me feel like crying and I have yet to determine if that’s a bad thing or not. It was, if nothing else, a deeply emotional read.
I was excited for this book because the concept is fantastic. I’m a sucker for cool gods, interesting mythologies, and pantheons I’m not familiar with – and Malaysian beliefs, East Asian spirits, and the Ten Chinese Hells definitely fit that bill. I thought the story was going to involve a lot of mythological bureaucracy and navigating both the real world and the world of gods and ghouls to solve a high-stakes murder. But Rupert fell into the category of urban fantasy protagonists who is trying to hard to have a voice and personality and ends up throwing themselves face-first into “most irritating person to ever irritate” territory. The mythology was sparse, the world was the barest sketch, and other characters move in and out of the story without introduction. What you do get a lot of is Rupert getting bitten by things so they can drink his blood and Rupert complaining about how this all sucks and he didn’t want to do any of it and isn’t his entire life just the worst. I really wanted to like the story, but Rupert just kept getting in the way.
A note on the series, because this frustrates me:
This book seems to be listed almost everywhere as the fourth book of the Gods & Monsters series. However, what exactly the rest of the series consists of is unclear.
Hoopla, where I checked it out from my library, lists Unclean Spirits by Chuck Wendig as the first book in the series but has no listing for books two or three.
The StoryGraph lists this book as book four and The Last Supper Before Ragnarok by Cassandra Khaw as book five, but no listing for books 1-3.
Goodreads lists it as a trilogy, the two individual novellas that make up this book as books one and two and The Last Supper Before Ragnarok as book 3.
FictionDB lists the series as two books long, one of the novellas making up this book as book one and Immortal Combat by Cassandra Khaw as book two. Immortal Combat doesn’t seem to exist anywhere outside of FictionDB.
Simon & Schuster lists the series with Unclean Spirits as book one, Myth Breaker by Stephen Blackmore as book two, Snake Eyes by Hillary Monahan as book three, and The Last Supper Before Ragnarok as book five – no book four listed, Food of the Gods isn’t even on the Simon & Schuster site, and Myth Breaker and Snake Eyes look like they don’t even belong in the series.
In short, I have no clue what’s going on with the alleged “Gods & Monsters” series, and I don’t think anyone else does either.
Tags: Nonwestern Setting, #ownvoices Malaysian, They/Them Author, Author of Color, Protagonist of Color
Trigger Warnings: Blood, gore, body horror, injury, death, murder, child death, self-injury for magic purposes, cannibalism, abandonment
The Murderbot Diaries is a series of scifi novellas. Since they’re so short, I don’t have enough opinions for a full review of each of them. But they’re good enough that I want them to have their own post. So I’m trying something new – a Review Shorts post not for a particular month, but for a series.
General spoiler warning: Though I try to avoid it, there is a high likelihood that each of these review shorts will contain spilers of the previous books.
Book #1: All Systems Red
Completed November 2022
This story was entertaining, irreverant, and a good time all around. I loved “Murderbot” and I really enjoyed the crew it was placed with and its dynamics. I especially enjoyed how Murderbot isn’t legally considered a person and doesn’t want to be considered one – it was an interesting idea. I also appreciated the way the crew insisted on treating it like a person even though that made it very uncomfortable. The plot itself was interesting, too – a capitalist hellscape universe, an interesting uninhabited planet setting, and a mystery to solve. It worked perfectly fine as a novella, but it could have easily been much longer, and I wish it was. I would have enjoyed spending a significantly longer time in this story with these characters unraveling this mystery. It’s kinda like how once you eat one potato chip you want to eat the whole bag – now that I’ve read this book, I want to devour the entire series.
Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, injury (severe), body horror, murder, mind control
Book #2: Artificial Condition
Completed November 2022
Like the first book in the series, this one was entertaining but way too short. Murderbot spent most of this one passing as human, which was fantastic. I found its attempts to figure out how to interact with people and act like a human amusing and remarkably relatable. (Also, watching Murderbot attempt to do an actual job interview was hilarious.) The human side characters were pretty good too. Murderbot’s goal this book is to get answers about its past – and it did, but the answers felt anticlimactic. Either there’s going to be more to it or the answers aren’t a huge part of whatever Murderbot is looking for. It’s on a journey looking for something, but it’s not really sure what yet (and honestly that’s pretty relatable too), and that made this whole book feel less like a self-contained story and more like one section of a larger book. It’s not like All Systems Red where it definitely could have been expanded – it was exactly as long as it needed to be, it just felt incomplete. Perhaps I should be reading this like a novel released in parts than as individual novellas? Regardless, I enjoyed it and I’m excited to keep reading this series.
Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, violence, injury, kidnapping (mentions), mind control, medical content, guns
Book #3: Rogue Protocol
Completed November 2022
I love Murderbot so much. It’s so done with all of this bullshit and just wants to consume media in peace, but it keeps having to go save idiot humans from their own bad decisions. Murderbot’s strong narrative voice made for a fascinating mood in this book. By all rights, the setting should be space horror – an abandoned space station where something is not quite dead and trying to kill you. But Murderbot’s trademark snark and irreverence makes it almost funny. And it worked – it’s definitely unique, and as much as I like space horror, I also enjoy Murderbot viewing a space horror setting as nothing more than highly inconvenient. This series so far is ostensibly about Murderbot investigating a conspiracy, but that just seems to be a reason for it to travel around and do other stuff along the way. It’s less about answers than about Murderbot’s growth. And it’s fascinating to see how it has grown even over three books as uncomfortable-pretending-to-be-human Murderbot now has to pretend to be a SecUnit again. This one didn’t need to be longer – it was a solid story that didn’t feel rushed – but I wish it was longer because I enjoy these books so much.
Trigger Warnings: Blood, death (mentions/threat of), violence, injury, kidnapping (brief), grief (mentions), body horror
Book #4: Exit Strategy
Completed December 2022
Considering that Murderbot isn’t human, it’s surprisingly relatable. It’s just a fun, entertaining, compelling character, and I love it. I’m also glad to see Mensa and the rest of the crew from book one back in this book. And that was a good way to emphasize the strong emotional journey and growth that Murderbot has been through over the course of this series so far. For all the violence that follows my favorite SecUnit around, this book is remarkably wholesome. It has a happy ending – not just “immediate problems are solved,” but an actual satisfying happy ending. Which Murderbot definitely deserves. I think this was originally supposed to be the last book in the series, which I would believe because this is a solid ending point. But I’m glad there’s more because I want to read more.
Trigger Warnings: Blood, injury, violence, kidnapping, guns (mentions), mind control (mentions)
Book #5: Network Effect
Completed December 2022
This book is exactly what I wanted from a full-length Murderbot novel – the classic Murderbot combination of entertainment, snark, action, and emotion in a cool scifi setting, but longer. Dr. Mensah and several of the crew from book one are back, along with ART and a selection of new characters, and there’s a new threat in a new section of the universe. But the extra length provided extra opportunity for growth. There was still plenty of action, but Murderbot got to develop some relationships and feel some emotions. The book even dove more into the trauma responses that can happen from all the stuff Murderbot and company have been through. There was a lot of Murderbot wrestling with feelings and interactions with people. I love seeing it grow and deal with feelings – and I know it’s technically because of the robot parts, but Murderbot is full of relatable autism feels. The climax of this book got a little confusing, as it (very briefly) went to three point-of-view characters and it was difficult to keep track of who was talking, but overall it was very good. There’s snark, scifi action, emotional growth, and relationship development all in one book! I know there’s more Murderbot novellas in the series, but I definitely think the series could handle some more full-length novels. At the very least, I want some.
Murderbot is always entertaining, no matter what it’s doing. In this case, it’s trying to solve a mystery on Preservation Station, and has to (horror of horrors) work with security humans. And it was a good time. It didn’t feel fully like a mystery because I don’t think there’s any way I could have figured out the culprit on my own, but that’s fine because the mystery is less about the mystery and more as a vehicle for Murderbot finding its place on Preservation. It got to interact with Preservation humans, work with security humans, and be snarky and good at its job. (Also of note, I’ve often noted that it’s part-bot mind is very relatable to my autism experience, but the beginning of this book had a bit where being a construct – part robot and part cloned human tissue – was very relatable to my nonbinary experience. So that was odd but cool.) This novella seemed lighter and quicker than previous ones in the series. Yeah, there was a murder, but it was overall satisfying and happy. I feel like I can tell Murderbot is adapting and becoming happier because it spends so much less time on-page watching media, and honestly that’s relatable too. I love Murderbot and I love this series, and I’m very happy that it seems to be finding a place in the world where it can live happily. I can’t wait until the next book comes out.
If unhelpful platitudes went to a Psychology 101 class, you’d get this book. They read about attachment theory in class and decided this explained everything – if you have a hard time making and keeping friendships as an adult, it’s just because you don’t have the right attachment style! It’s a very basic overview of the idea, too, not going much beyond what you’d get in psych 101, or even an internet article summarizing the idea. And what advice is included is of the trite platitude version. Stuff like “People are too busy thinking about themselves to notice your flaws” and “To make new friends, you have to talk to new people.” At least in the first 39%, none of it was all that interesting or useful – or even anything I didn’t already know.
An intriguing, twisty mystery of old family secrets that blurs the line between supernatural and psychological. I called most of the twists fairly early, but it was interesting to watch the characters put everything together and fill in all the details. The gothic setting of the house steeped in the dark secrets of an old and powerful family was fantastic, and definitely lent some weight to the supernatural explanation. (Of course, most of it can also be explained with rational psychological answers, so it’s up to you to decide which you want to believe.) I also expected the romance between the protagonist and the pastor to be more of a thing, so having it as a background was interesting. As personally irritating that it was that the entire story was predicated on the family just not communicating about anything (and most of it wouldn’t have happened if the Alban family was capable of having a conversation about negative things), this was a solid story.
I haven’t read much hard scifi at all, but from what I know, this book is the definition of it. It’s nominally about the threat of an alien invasion, but it’s mostly about astrophysics and particle physics. The whole story is told fairly passionlessly, which I gather is par for the course with Cixin Liu’s writing – or a lot is lost in translation, it’s hard to tell. It’s the first book in a trilogy, and while it introduces some characters and the overarching plot, it’s mostly about setup. It builds the cultural context (mainly how China’s Cultural Revolution led to the events of the story) and sets up a thorough and robust scientific foundation for why this is even plausible. And it was well-written enough that it was comprehensible to someone like me, who barely understood physics even back when I was taking a physics class in high school. It’s one of those books where either the author was a theoretical physicist who became an author or just adores physics, because why else would they do so much research? I don’t plan to continue the series. The story was okay, but hard scifi is just not my thing. When I’m reading science fiction, I prefer more fiction than science.
Tags: Nonwestern Setting, Nonwestern Work, Non-English Work, Chinese author, Chinese protagonist, #ownvoices Chinese
I asked my husband how many times it was appropriate to use the phrase “fucked up” in a review, and he said as many as I need – and this book needs a lot of them. This book is weird and very dark. It’s also legitimately good horror – so far in my horror-reading experience, it’s one of only two books (the other being Dead Silence) where I had to intentionally drag myself out of story immersion to keep from getting too scared. It is also an incredibly fucked-up story about a spectacularly fucked-up family. You can tell at the beginning that something really bad happened in the past, but the more you learn, the more fucked up it is. It’s told like a puzzle. Flashbacks give pieces of whatever happened, and though I guessed the rough shape of it fairly early, the details are essential, and you don’t get enough pieces to put together the whole picture until the very end. Whatever you suspect, you probably aren’t going to guess the sheer depths of fucked up that this story reaches. It also reaches some pretty deep depths of weird, too. The ending is strange, good, and horrible, and made me feel like maybe there was something else here that I didn’t quite understand. I’m still not entirely clear on how I feel about this book, but it is most definitely remarkable (in the sense that there’s a ton of weird and fucked up stuff to remark upon).
As I mentioned my reviews of Monstress Volumes 4-6, it’s getting very hard to review these. Each volume is less a complete story in and of itself and more a section of the middle of a single larger story. It’s like picking a random five chapters out of the middle of a novel and trying to review just those. This was especially difficult since this volume just came out and it’s been over a year since I was last immersed in the weird and wonderful world of the Monstress series. I still followed the main points of the story, but I know there are so many details I missed. (I still deeply appreciated the gorgeous artwork, though.) That was especially difficult in this one, as Maika herself took a back seat to other characters, several of whom I just did not recall. I think the best way to read this series is to wait for all of the books to come out, purchase them all, and then read them all back to back so you get the whole story all at once. Knowing that will not stop me from devouring each entry as it comes out, though.
At first, I found myself weirdly interested in the story. I’m not normally much for the contemporary genre and this book didn’t have nearly as much art world flavor as I was expecting, but the FBI interview transcript interspersed through the narrative had me hooked and the little bit of art world stuff there was I found interesting. In many places it seemed to be approaching philosophical thoughts on the nature of art and how the market affects the medium. However. I have a very low tolerance for secondhand embarrassment and a very low tolerance for characters being stupid. And protagonist Emma is full of both. She gets embarrassed over everything, including things that literally nobody but herself is judging her for (although, as someone who also has anxiety, I do kinda get that one). The part that really kills me is that Emma is supposedly 26 and has lived in NYC since she graduated college, but she acts like this is her time out of the family compound. At one point I texted my husband a scenario to see if I just had high standards or Emma was being naïve and oblivious to the point of stupidity. He agreed that she was either hopelessly naïve or willfully ignorant. I wanted to see how it ended, but that desire was eventually outweighed by Emma’s obliviousness and bad decisions. I can only tolerate a character making completely avoidable mistakes for so long.
Tags: Low Standards
Trigger Warnings: Parent death, cancer (mentions), drug use, alcohol use (a lot), infidelity (mentions), panic attacks (mention), anxiety, fire phobia, fire/fire injuries (mention)
Bluejay Reads 