Review: The Blade Itself

Title: The Blade Itself

Series: The First Law Trilogy #1

Author: Joe Abercrombie

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death (severe), blood (severe), violence (severe), gore (severe), injury (severe), animal death, child death, animal injury, murder, war, body horror (mild), slavery (mentions), excrement (mentions), ableism, sexism, physical abuse (one scene, plus mentions of it happening in the past), torture, cannibalism (mentions), rape (mentions), unreality, colonization (mentions), xenophobia (mentions), vomit, classism, fire/fire injury, alcohol use

Back Cover:

The first novel in the First Law Trilogy and debut fantasy novel from New York Times bestseller, Joe Abercrombie.

Logen Ninefingers, infamous barbarian, has finally run out of luck. Caught in one feud too many, he’s on the verge of becoming a dead barbarian — leaving nothing behind him but bad songs, dead friends, and a lot of happy enemies.

Nobleman, dashing officer, and paragon of selfishness, Captain Jezal dan Luthar has nothing more dangerous in mind than fleecing his friends at cards and dreaming of glory in the fencing circle. But war is brewing, and on the battlefields of the frozen North they fight by altogether bloodier rules.

Inquisitor Glokta, cripple turned torturer, would like nothing better than to see Jezal come home in a box. But then Glokta hates everyone: cutting treason out of the Union one confession at a time leaves little room for friendship. His latest trail of corpses may lead him right to the rotten heart of government, if he can stay alive long enough to follow it.

Enter the wizard, Bayaz. A bald old man with a terrible temper and a pathetic assistant, he could be the First of the Magi, he could be a spectacular fraud, but whatever he is, he’s about to make the lives of Logen, Jezal, and Glokta a whole lot more difficult.

Murderous conspiracies rise to the surface, old scores are ready to be settled, and the line between hero and villain is sharp enough to draw blood.

Unpredictable, compelling, wickedly funny, and packed with unforgettable characters, The Blade Itself is noir fantasy with a real cutting edge.

Review:

I didn’t pick this book up entirely by choice. For Valentine’s Day, my local library did a “blind date with a book” promotion where they wrapped the books up in paper and just put a few facts about them on the front. I love the concept (I appreciate anything that gets me to try new things), so I knew I had to try one. Eventually I picked this one, and here’s all I knew about it until I got home from the library and opened the wrapping:

This is where the blind date with a book concept really comes in handy, because I had actually looked at this book on the shelf previously and decided it didn’t look interesting. The back cover introduced way too many characters and not enough plot, and it seemed like it was going to be very unclear what was actually going on and maybe a little dull. But since I had been convinced to check it out, I figured I might as well read it.

First of all, Joe Abercrombie is clearly a very good writer. This book was extremely well-written, and despite how many things are going on, it’s balanced well, and though the place is slow, it never gets dull. I did not find myself eager and enthusiastic about reading this story as fast as possible, but I also never considered putting it down. It seems strange to call a book full of as much death, violence, and bloodshed a pleasant reading experience, but it was – not slow or dense enough to lose interest, not enthralling enough to get me truly invested in anything that happened or anyone involved, no protagonists I disliked but also none I really loved. (Actually, while they were perfectly fine to read about, every protagonist was a terrible person in their own way.) I had quite a good time reading but didn’t get emotionally involved. It was the violent fantasy version of casual reading.

But then I finished it. And my husband asked if I liked it. And I realized how difficult of a question that actually was to answer. Because, as previously mentioned, I did have a good time reading it. And there were lots of really interesting aspects. Glokta’s experience of existing in a disabled person in a world that’s built for able-bodied people was intense and quite well-done. Bayaz’s wizardly shenanigans were entertaining and I liked that the history of the magic system was part of the story. And though it was violent, the violence never felt excessive or overdone, except in a way that made it clear that violence is always a tragedy, despite how the people who benefit from it may try to reframe it. So for that, it was good.

But then we come to the struggle that I really have no idea what was going on, plot-wise. There are a lot of point-of-view characters. There’s Logen, Jezal, and Glokta, as mentioned on the back cover. Despite being on the back cover, Bayaz isn’t a point of view character. There’s also the Dogman, a member of Logen’s old warrior band. And there’s Farro, who doesn’t get introduced until a third of the way throught the book, and who is 98% rage by volume, mostly feral, and whose primary goal in life is to commit as much murder as possible, with or without provocation. So there’s a lot of people running around doing things. But none of those things really coalesce into a plot. Glokta is doing his job; Jezal is shirking swordsmanship training and falling in love; Logen is tagging along after Bayaz, who definitely has plans but isn’t sharing them; the Dogman is traveling with the warrior band; and Farro is trying her best to commit a lot of murder, but is mostly being guided to somewhere by a magical old guy who also has plans but isn’t sharing them. There’s also two brewing wars, some internal politics driven by people who definitely have goals (but again, no indication as to what those are beyond “I want power”), a subplot with a swordsmanship contest that didn’t seem to have a point, and mostly just a lot of little things happening with no overarching plot or even protagonist goals. Farro’s story didn’t even meet up with any of the other characters until the last few chapters. And almost everybody felt like they were wandering through the story with no real goals or interest in doing much beyond live their lives. The only primary character who seems to have any sort of motivation or goal that could drive a plot is Bayaz – and as I said, he’s not telling.

This whole book really felt more like the setup than a story in and of itself – which is a very strange choice, considering that this book is over 500 pages long and there’s only two more books in the trilogy. (Although there are a bunch of standalone books, a second trilogy, and some short stories in the same world, so who knows what the thought process was here.) At the very end, something happened that felt like the inciting incident of an actual plot. So perhaps things will actually happen in the next book. I’m on the fence about reading it, though. On one hand, The Blade Itself was a perfectly fine read. On the other, it wasn’t any better than “perfectly fine”, and if the next book is anywhere close to this length, that’s an awful lot of pages to commit to when the story doesn’t even have an identifiable plot yet. I don’t regret the time reading this one, if for nothing else than exposure to something I wouldn’t have voluntarily picked up otherwise. But I don’t think I’ll be voluntarily seeking out book two, either.

The First Law World:

The First Law Trilogy:

1. The Blade Itself
2. Before They Are Hanged
3. Last Argument of Kings

The First Law standalone books:

1. Best Served Cold
2. The Heroes
3. Red Country

The Age of Madness Trilogy:

1. A Little Hatred
2. The Trouble With Peace
3. The Wisdom of Crowds

The First Law short story collections:

1. Sharp Ends
2. The Great Change (And Other Lies)

Review: Hellbent

Title: Hellbent

Series: Cheshire Red Reports #2

Author: Cherie Priest

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, injury, murder, mental illness, confinement, ableism, blood drinking, parent death (mentions), severe weather, excrement (mentions)

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of the previous book, Bloodshot.

Back Cover:

Vampire thief Raylene Pendle doesn’t need more complications in her life. Her Seattle home is already overrun by a band of misfits, including Ian Stott, a blind vampire, and Adrian deJesus, an ex-Navy SEAL/drag queen. But Raylene still can’t resist an old pal’s request: seek out and steal a bizarre set of artifacts. Also on the hunt is a brilliant but certifiably crazy sorceress determined to stomp anyone who gets in her way. But Raylene’s biggest problem is that the death of Ian’s vaunted patriarch appears to have made him the next target of some blood-sucking sociopaths. Now Raylene must snatch up the potent relics, solve a murder, and keep Ian safe – all while fending off a psychotic sorceress. But at least she won’t be alone. A girl could do a lot worse for a partner than an ass-kicking drag queen – right?

Review:

For as lackluster as this back cover is, I enjoyed Bloodshot enough to be excited about reading this book. I’m not generally an urban fantasy fan, but I found Raylene a well-done snarky protagonist and surprisingly well-rounded for a badass vampire thief, and the whole book to be more action thriller than urban fantasy mystery. It’s like urban fantasy lite, and I enjoyed it.

This book, though, leans heavier into the urban fantasy elements of the series. Raylene interacts with multiple vampire Houses, she’s hunting down some magical artifacts, and of course there’s the whole sorceress thing. But despite that, it didn’t really have an urban fantasy feel to me. I think that’s because every other urban fantasy I’ve read has had some variety of romance (often a somewhat unhealthy romance), and even though the back cover tries to imply that Raylene and Adrian are going to get together, they are most definitely not. And I think having the first book be so light on the urban fantasy elements helped ease me in, as well.

It’s a general tendency of sequels to be just not quite as good as the first book. That’s not really the case here. Bloodshot and Hellbent are both well-written, well-plotted, interesting, and enjoyable to read. Raylene herself is still great. She is, as I’ve said, remarkably more full and well-written than I anticipated. Her snark works, she’s experiencing some growth, and I love her dynamic with the unique cast of characters she’s surrounded with. She’s dynamic and quite fun to read about, and she’s a large part of the reason why I’ve enjoyed this series.

Plot-wise, there’s a lot happening, but it’s balanced very well and all of it is enjoyable. In many ways, it exactly the same plot as last book – someone wants Raylene to obtain something, but someone else wants that to not happen. Last time, Ian wanted her to get some records and the government didn’t want her to do that. This time, she gets a job to steal some magical bones, and the sorceress who also wants them doesn’t want her to do that. But this one manages to make itself unique in a few ways: First, a single slightly-crazy sorceress uses much different Raylene prevention methods than the federal government. And second, this book leans harder into the urban fantasy aspects of the story. It becomes clear that there’s other supernatural creatures than vampires in this world (although none of them actually show up on-page, they’re mentioned). Raylene interacts with people from three different vampire Houses, and actually visits one House’s house. And there’s a sort-of subplot that’s a little bit trying to figure out who murdered a particular guy (although figuring out the answer requires less “figuring out who did it” and more “walking into the correct room while doing something else,” so it doesn’t really count as a mystery in my mind).

And now that I’ve finished expressing that I found this book quite good and an enjoyable read, I want to comment on the unusual aspect of it – which is that it doesn’t at all continue the plot from Bloodshot. At the end of that book, the main plot points were resolved, but there was still one antagonist on the loose who needed to be hunted down and dealt with. The implication was that this was the setup for the rest of the series, and Raylene and company would be working on tracking down and doing something (possibly murder) to the rest of the people involved in Project Bloodshot. But besides a mention at the beginning of this book that the events of the last book happened and there was at least one guy still out there, nothing in this book had anything to do with any of that.

This wouldn’t be a problem if there were more books. But there are only two Cheshire Red Reports books, and this one is over a decade old. Cherie Priest has said on her website that she may in the future write a third book in the series, but at this point there’s just the two. Which leaves the whole thing feeling incomplete. Sure, this book wrapped up really well, even resolved a few sub-plots from book one, and left the characters in an overall good place to end a series. But that one major thread left over from book one – that the guy behind Project Bloodshot is still on the loose and Raylene and company intend to hunt him down – is really bothering me. Even just one more book to resolve that would make this feel more complete as a series. Or it’s possible that I’m the only one bent out of shape by that one unresolved thing and everybody else is fine with the way it ended. Who knows.

This complaint really has nothing to do with this book, which I very much enjoyed. This series just feels incomplete with that one major thread left hanging, and I would love to see a third book come out at some point to resolve it. And if Cherie Priest ever decides to take up this series again and write more than one additional book, that works for me, too – I enjoy this series and would be happy to spend a few more books in it.

The Cheshire Red Reports:

1. Bloodshot
2. Hellbent

Review: Upgrade

Title: Upgrade

Author: Blake Crouch

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, violence, injury, gore, guns, parent death, suicide (mentions), pandemic, terminal illness, body horror, body modifications without consent

Back Cover:

Logan Ramsay can feel his brain…changing.

And his body too.

He’s becoming something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.

As he sets out to discover who did this to him, and why, his transformation threatens everything—his family, his job, even his freedom.

Because the truth of what’s happened to him is more disturbing than he could possibly imagine. His DNA has been rewritten with a genetic-engineering breakthrough beyond anything the world has seen—one that could change our very definitions of humanity.

And the battle to control this unfathomable power has already begun.

But what if humankind’s only hope for survival lies in embracing this change—whatever the cost?

Which side will Logan take? And by the time it’s over, will he—and the people he loves—even recognize him?

Upgrade is a stunningly inventive, ferociously plotted science-fiction thriller that explores the limits of our humanity—and asks what’s at risk when technology lets us reengineer not just the world around us, but ourselves.

Review:

This book was recommended to me, and I generally attempt to read books recommended to me. This wasn’t my first foray into this author’s work, either. I’d read his book Recursion a while back and found it a sci-fi kind of weird that isn’t necessarily my jam, but that was well-written and had some interesting ideas. So I figured this probably wouldn’t be bad.

And I was correct. Upgrade wasn’t bad. The protagonist may not have had very many interesting characteristics beyond being the protagonist, but the concept was interesting and Blake Crouch is a competent writer. The action moved along, the story was largely well-paced, and it kept me engaged the whole way through. Nothing spectacular, sure, but perfectly readable.

However. As you might have guessed by the tone here, I do have some criticisms. Again, Blake’s particular brand of sci-fi weird isn’t quite up my alley, so some of this could definitely be me. But some of it is I just take issue with some of the fundamental concepts of the book itself.

Upgrade is ambitious in scope and interesting in concept. In a world where genetic modification is very possible (but also very illegal), an anti-gene-modification enforcement agent finds his genes being modified against his will, making him almost superhuman. Now he has to tackle questions like “why did this happen?” and “would the world be better if it happened to everybody?” But as interesting and potentially thematic as this idea could be, the execution is a little wacky. Some parts are frighteningly realistic, others are laughably not, and the discordant combination made the whole thing feel a bit silly. It would have made a perfectly serviceable mindless action movie, but the attempt at thematic depth just emphasized how ridiculous some parts of it were.

I spent a lot of time trying to put my finger on my actual problem with this book. I had notes about how Logan Ramsey has big “r/iamverysmart” vibes, and whether or not killing the same character twice was too much, and how cruel Logan’s mother was and how I couldn’t believe that neither of her children realized how much they were like her. But then I was reminded of the word “eugenics” and realized my issue. Without giving away too many spoilers, the arguable antagonist of the first half of the book thinks climate change would be solved if people were only better in a specific way and wants to accomplish that with mass gene modification. It really feels like what a eugenics movement would look like in a world where you didn’t necessarily have to breed better traits into people because you could just modify people’s genes instead. But our protagonist seemed pretty against that whole idea, so I wasn’t too bothered. Up until the end, when (minor spoiler alert) he decided his problem wasn’t so much the eugenics-style idea, just which traits should be changed. It left a really bad taste in my mouth.

It’s very possible that at least some of my complaints are because while I find these kinds of stories fine, they’re not the type of thing I generally really love. And on the whole, Upgrade was fine. I didn’t love it, I think its themes were handled poorly, and I really didn’t love some of the vibes it gives off. But it was readable. I found it interesting enough to finish. If it were made into an action movie, I think it would work pretty well. I just don’t particularly recommend it as it is.

Review: Night Watch

Title: Night Watch

Series: Discworld #29 (City Watch #6)

Author: Sir Terry Pratchett

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, murder, injury, war, torture, fire, pregnancy (mentions), animal death (mentions), animal cruelty (brief), police brutality

Spoiler Warning: This book is 29th in the series, but reading beyond this point will expose you to only the mildest spoilers of the previous City Watch books.

Back Cover:

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is back in his own rough, tough past. He must track down a murderer, teach his young self how to be a good cop and change the outcome of a bloody rebellion. There’s a problem: if he wins, he’s got no wife, no child, no future.

Review:

I am not generally into books about time travel shenanigans. Not because I have anything against time travel in particular, but it just seems to be rare to have it done well, or at least in a way that I find enjoyable to read about. But, as usual, Sir Terry pulled it off.

I think a lot of that has to do with the character of Commander Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Due to some unfortunate wrong-place, wrong-time magical happenstance, Vimes ends up in his own past – the Ankh-Morpork of many decades ago, when he had just joined the Watch and things were, objectively, much worse than they are now. But one of the things that I appreciate most about Commander Vimes is that he is a relentlessly practical man. I recognize a kindred spirit in that, but it also means that the situation may be weird and fairly unpleasant, but he gets right on with dealing with it, with very little pining or philosophizing and absolutely no dithering or worrying about paradoxes.

That’s not to say that he’s emotionless, though. In fact, what makes Vimes so stellar as a character to me throughout this whole series is that he is competent, practical, and stays focused on the problem(s) in front of him instead of wasting time with excessive introspection or philosophizing, but he also has a strong set of personal values, cares deeply for the people around him, and feels his emotions intensely. He doesn’t do the introspection on the page because he doesn’t need to; he already knows himself thoroughly and is in control. To use the cliché, he is in touch with his feelings, but though they may tempt him to act against his values, they never control him. In so many ways, he is a paragon of positive masculinity – competent, principled, practical, honorable, caring, willing and able to experience great depth of feeling, never letting his feelings overrule him. He’s the rare character who is great to read about as a character, and also someone I think I would like, or at least respect, in real life.

Apparently this is the Sam Vimes Appreciation Review. That does make sense, because he really is the star of this book. Sure, there’s the whole time travel thing. There’s the murderer he’s tracking who also got zapped into the past and has the same future knowledge that Vimes does. There’s the fact that this point in the past is a particularly sticky one for Ankh-Morpork. There’s the sheer delight of a character being spectacularly good at what they do (some of it because Vimes has future knowledge, but much of it because he’s just a really, really good watchman). All of that is quite enjoyable to read. But this is a book that pushes Commander Vimes to his limits, and that means that he, as a character, is really what carries this story.

The Discworld series doesn’t generally shy away from getting dark in places. But this book is probably the darkest that I’ve read so far, and since the City Watch sub-series tends to be less funny in general, it’s not tempered with humor into something darkly funny. It’s just dark. Not at all in a bad way, to be sure. As I said, these events push Vimes to his limit, and it’s hard to do that without delving into some darkness. But even in terms of sheer numbers of deaths and injuries, this has got to be one of the more violent Discworld books. It’s not unnecessary violence when it comes to the plot, but it definitely goes (and takes Commander Vimes to) some very dark places.

I can’t necessarily say that Night Watch has replaced Interesting Times as my favorite Discworld book. The two are so different in mood, tone, theme, and content that it’s hard to do a direct comparison. But I can definitely say that Night Watch is among my favorite Discword books. If you like Commander Vimes as a character, love stories where protagonists are pushed to their limits, or just enjoy the very specific trope where a character is sent back in time and has to relive a difficult part of their life from a new perspective, I think you’ll agree.

The Discworld Series:

1. The Colour of Magic
2. The Light Fantastic
3. Equal Rites
4. Mort
5. Sourcery
6. Wyrd Sisters
7. Pyramids
8. Guards! Guards!
9. Eric
10. Moving Pictures
11. Reaper Man
12. Witches Abroad
13. Small Gods
14. Lords and Ladies
15. Men at Arms
16. Soul Music
17. Interesting Times
18. Maskerade
19. Feet of Clay
20. Hogfather
21. Jingo
22. The Last Continent
23. Carpe Jugulum
24. The Fifth Elephant
25. The Truth
26. Thief of Time
27. The Last Hero
28. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
29. Night Watch
30. The Wee Free Men
31. Monstrous Regiment
32. A Hat Full of Sky
33. Going Postal
34. Thud!
35. Wintersmith
36. Making Money
37. Unseen Academicals
38. I Shall Wear Midnight
39. Snuff
40. Raising Steam
41. The Shepherd’s Crown

Review: Natural Beauty

Title: Natural Beauty

Author: Ling Ling Huang

Genre: Contemporary/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (major), sexism, misogyny (mentions, from antagonist), sexual content, death, medical content, medical trauma, sexual assault, pregnancy (mentions), death of parent (mentions), vomit, cannibalism (mentions), bullying (mentions), drug use (dubious consent), unreality

Back Cover:

Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.

Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.

A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.

Review:

I’m always down for media skewering the beauty industry. The damage the pursuit of beauty does to to the body and the psyche, consumerism masquerading as self-care, a mantra of “wellness” that only adds more work and stress to your life while claiming if you just did it right you’d never have a negative emotion again … these are all ideas that I find fascinating and compelling and I love to explore.

Unfortunately, that’s not really what I got with Natural Beauty.

Don’t get me wrong, it tries! It absolutely tries really hard to say a lot of things. But I think the problem was that it was try to cover way too many things in a book that isn’t nearly long enough. In addition to the commentary on the beauty industry, it also tries to talk about the value of music, beauty as social capital, the nature of beauty itself (through both physical beauty and music), complex relationships with parents, the inherent power dynamics of money, possibly sustainability – and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.

One of the primary drivers of the book is a fascinating form of body horror serving as a counterpoint to Holistik’s beauty mandate, which was a wonderful idea and a form of body horror that I don’t see a lot, so I appreciated it both as a body horror fan and a beauty culture skeptic. But for it to have been done well, it needed to be a slow burn. And Natural Beauty is emphatically not that. In fact, in the first two-thirds or so, the bit that should have been the tense, gradual build-up to the true horror at the end, the changes happen rapidly – and our unnamed protagonist barely seems to notice them anyway, simply commenting on how her body has changed and going on about her business. What seems to be the message of the book has to struggle for page time among flashbacks to the protagonist’s past, her thoughts about piano and music in general, and interactions with her coworkers.

Then about halfway through, the focus slowly begins to shift. In case you couldn’t figure it out from the back cover or the first few pages of the book, there’s something very weird and very suspicious going on at Holistik. The story shifts away from the protagonist’s body and the idea of beauty and towards finding out exactly what is happening at Holistik. But even that is unsatisfying because the answers we eventually get don’t actually tie up all the questions that I had. (What about the deer? What about the hand cream?) The book gets weird, and not in the unsetting way I enjoy, but in a way that feels overdone and unbelievable. I was halfway through reading a particular scene before I realized it was supposed to be the climax and not just another outlandish even in the series of outlandish events that was the last third of the book.

The narration is straightforward and passionless, which is not always a bad thing, but in this case served to keep at a distance any emotions that would have made it impactful. It also made it really difficult to judge which scenes were actually happening and which were some kind of drug-induced unreality sequence. And as I mentioned previously, the body horror aspect could have been fantastic if it was paced better. But what really made it so disappointing was the fact that it couldn’t keep a focus. It started off with the beauty industry and the costs and dangers of being beautiful. But it seems afraid to go too deep into it or lean too hard into the horrifying, revolting underbelly. Whenever it approached anything particularly grim, it would back off to talk about music or the protagonist’s parents or her past. Then it shifted to “let’s find out how fucked up this company really is!” with the bonus that the protagonist wasn’t even particularly interested in this line of investigating, but got dragged along as her friends started to pry. Then at the end it abruptly switches back to body horror and beauty culture, skipping over the actual change that would have made me actually feel something about it and relying on the protagonist’s passionless commentary and opinions about how just entirely not participating in beauty is good, actually.

I wanted this to be something more than it was. I wanted a literary horror commentary on the beauty industry, beauty culture, and how the modern mandate of “wellness” just sells women more work and more reasons to appeal to the male gaze while convincing them it’s actually “self-care” and “empowerment.” What I got was an admittedly well-written but poorly paced and unfocused story about a young woman who got caught up with a really fucked up beauty brand. The ideas were strong and the concepts had a lot of potential. But the execution, at least in my opinion, didn’t do them justice.

Review: Notorious Sorcerer

Title: Notorious Sorcerer

Series: The Burnished City #1

Author: Davinia Evans

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, injury, violence, police brutality, confinement (brief), unhealthy marriage, classism (a lot), alcohol use, body horror (mild), sexual content

Back Cover:

Since the city of Bezim was shaken half into the sea by a magical earthquake, the Inquisitors have policed alchemy with brutal efficiency. Nothing too powerful, too complicated, too much like real magic is allowed–and the careful science that’s left is kept too expensive for any but the rich and indolent to tinker with. Siyon Velo, a glorified errand boy scraping together lesson money from a little inter-planar fetch and carry, doesn’t qualify.

But when Siyon accidentally commits a public act of impossible magic, he’s catapulted into the limelight. Except the limelight is a bad place to be when the planes themselves start lurching out of alignment, threatening to send the rest of the city into the sea.

Now Siyon, a dockside brat who clawed his way up and proved himself on rooftops with saber in hand, might be Bezim’s only hope. Because if they don’t fix the cascading failures of magic in their plane, the Powers and their armies in the other three will do it for them.

Review:

This was one of my less-researched picks. It made it onto my reading list somehow, but by the time I grabbed it from the library I’d forgotten what it was really about or why. The only thing I knew about it was there was some kind of magic involved (obvious from the title) and the protagonist was queer in some capacity.

So I went in with very little context. But to be fair, I don’t think more context would have necessarily helped with my primary complaint – I had no idea what was going on with this world. The names were all long and hard to keep straight, especially since most characters had a first name, a last name, and a title, each of which could be used for the same character in different contexts. I got better at it as the story went on and I spent more time with the characters, but almost every name in the book at some point gave me a moment of “wait, do I know this person?” And the worldbuilding was clearly detailed and done with a lot of care and thought, but I also had a really hard time figuring things out. Part of the city fell into the sea, but I think it’s still around just a couple hundred feet lower than the rest of the city? I don’t really understand how the Bravi tribes work or what their role actually is in the city. There’s a huge class divide between the azatani and everyone else, but I’m not clear what defines an azatani or even whether it’s a racial category or a title. The magic system is fascinating and complicated but there’s a clear difference between alchemy, which is acceptable but regulated, and sorcery, which is very illegal (and I think “magic” is a separate third thing, maybe?).

So while the world was quite detailed and vibrant, I really didn’t have any idea of how it worked, or the rules of the magic system, or anything. (Although part of the plot of the book is figuring out that hte old rules of the magic system didn’t work anymore, so I’ll forgive that one.) But the weird part about the story, and I guess what best illustrates how enjoyable it really is, is that I didn’t mind all that. Sure, I wasn’t really sure how all the pieces of the world fit together, but even the confusing parts were just relentlessly cool. Daring street gangs getting up to hijinks, plucky underdogs who happen to be really good at what they do, and of course a whole lot of high-stakes magical shenanigans – it was a ton of fun. I enjoyed Siyon, I enjoyed the magical adventure, I enjoyed that it felt like a “protagonist has a big goal but accomplishing it is way more complicated than initially thought” plot and an “I only wanted to do this one small thing how did it get so out of hand” plot at the same time. I even in some ways enjoyed trying to fit new pieces of information into the story and the world.

This is a hard book to review because it absolutely has some pretty major flaws. Normally I wouldn’t even finish a book where I felt like I couldn’t get a handle on the world. But somehow this book managed to be so absolutely stellar in every single other aspect – plot, characters, romance, descriptions, the writing itself, coolness factor, being just plain fun and interesting to read – that it downgraded “I have no idea how this fantasy world works” from a dealbreaker to a minor annoyance. Which says a lot about the quality of the book itself, I think. This is also the author’s debut novel, so I have extremely high hopes for future books overcoming the worldbuildling issues. I fully intend to read book two.

The Burnished City Trilogy:

1. Notorious Sorcerer
2. Shadow Baron
3. Currently untitled

Review: Fleishman is in Trouble

Title: Fleishman is in Trouble

Author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Genre: Contemporary

Trigger Warnings: Sexual content (a lot), divorce (major), infidelity, abandonment, fatphobia/body shaming/disordered eating/moralizing about food (frequently mentioned), mental illness, terminal illness (mentions; not protagonist), medical content (mentions; because protagonist is a doctor)

Back Cover:

A finely observed, timely exploration of marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition from one of the most exciting writers working today.

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this.

As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place.

A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope.

Review:

I still occasionally talk about the AP English Literature class I took my freshman year of high school. As I wrote in 2022, “Every single novel I had to read for the class was about divorce, marital infidelity, or divorcing over marital infidelity. All of these novels were the ‘literary’ kind. And I hated every. single. book.”

Fleishman is in Trouble is a literary, largely plotless novel about a middle-aged man going through a divorce and having a lot of sex to try to deal with it. So I bring up this literature class yet again to emphasize how astonishing even I find it that not only did I pick up this book, and not only did I finish it, I actually enjoyed it. (Up until the end, which I’ll get to in a second.)

These characters and this world feel like the embodiment of a “live your best life,” “#girlboss,” “you can have it all” aesthetically-pleasing rich-girl Instagram account. You know the type. The primary characters in this book (a New York City doctor divorcing his millionaire publicist wife) are aggressively unrelatable to me (a secretary living on 75% of the national average salary in the Midwest). It has very little in terms of a plot. But the thing that this book does so well, and that made me eager to keep reading despite all these factors that should have made it feel exactly like the books I hated in AP Lit, is that it so perfectly captures the tensions of living your “best life” in the modern world. You’re already stretched to your breaking point but the mandate of self-actualization demands you do more. You hate these people and everything they stand for and yet you must also fit in and earn their respect, if not admiration. You’ve been dealing with burnout for so long that you can’t even recognize that’s what it is. You simultaneously feel that you’re doing the bare minimum and that you’re doing too much. You just want those closest to you to recognize – not even necessarily appreciate, just recognize – how much time and effort you’re putting into keeping so many different things running – for them! – but all they ever seem to notice is the things you don’t do.

I have a lot of feelings about modern life, how doing it “perfectly” requires multiple conflicting things to be true at the same time, and how keeping on top of everything you’re “supposed” to do won’t result in a feeling of accomplishment or peace but in constantly feeling stressed and behind. And this book puts those feelings into words better than I ever could. In fact, I think making the story about rich people living dramatic lives in New York City is actually a better choice than something more easily relatable. Big lives enable the problems to become bigger, more obvious, almost caricatured to make the point. And it works.

Toby and Rachel are both not great people for different reasons. They’re both victims but they’re both victims of their own decisions. Their multiple penthouses and multi-million-dollar deals set them a world away from most things relatable to the average reader. But if the question is relatability, I will always choose Rachel. Toby has his own struggles and his story isn’t bad. Rachel throughout the book is portrayed as a monster. And though she’s definitely not as terrible as Toby thinks, she’s not a good person. But despite possessing wealth that I can only dream of, despite having the type of high-powered job that I neither want nor am likely to get, she was still relatable. She was relatable in being a person doing too much in a world that always demands more, and in being a woman and primary breadwinner in a heterosexual relationship that is unequal not due to any particular malice on the part of her male partner, but because the system of heterosexual relationships is inherently unequal and he has never bothered to consider how he might be passively benefitting at her expense.

The other thing that this book does wonderfully, but more subtly, was explore both sides of this kind of relational destruction. Even through the filter of Toby’s hurt and rage, I could still easily understand Rachel’s thought process and emotional state. But with Toby as the protagonist, I also saw his thought process. It was, above all, a failure to communicate on both sides. But it did do an interesting job of illustrating how even though it can feel like this person is just overtly refusing to meet your needs, chances are they also feel like you’re refusing to meet their needs. (Although the communication scholar in me wants to yell at them that if they were better about communicating what it actually was they needed they could avoid a lot of problems.)

The final thing I want to touch on as I start bringing what could be a really long review into some sort of ending is not so much something the book does or accomplishes, but a major theme that it touches on. And that is the theme of how relationships threaten female identity. A single woman, unattached, can be herself. A married woman must remove some of herself to make room for her new identity of wife. A mother must remove even more to take on the new identity of mother. Both of these other identities, taken on not because the woman chose to but because of her ties to someone else, have the potential to grow and push out even more of an individual identity – motherhood especially, until there is no more I, only Mother. I did not expect a book largely focusing on the man’s side to come out in such support of the woman, and women everywhere. It’s a deep, subtle exploration that may not even be recognized for people who don’t relate but will be blatant and resonant for anyone who is or has experienced similar feelings.

I went through most of this book ready and eager to write a glowing review (in case you can’t tell from the fact that my review so far has been so positive). There were a couple points where I actually had to stop myself from starting the review before I finished it because I was so eager to share how good this book was. And there’s a reason for that, and that reason played out especially true for this book. That reason is sometimes the ending doesn’t live up to the rest of the book. And when I say “ending” here, I’m mainly talking about the last few pages. The whole long, rambling story up to that point subtly and masterfully explored unique ideas and interesting themes – I hesitate to say “the human condition” because that’s very broad and also somewhat pretentious, but perhaps “the modern human condition” is fitting. And then in the last few pages, this previously rich and subtle book starts jumping up and down waving its arms in the air and shouting, “Hey! Here’s all the themes we’ve been talking about for the past 400 pages! Pretty neat, huh? Here’s an easy and quick answer to these big questions!” It felt jarring and discordant with the rest of the book, like the author didn’t quite know how to end it but wasn’t comfortable leaving the readers with no answers. It also felt cheap and almost dismissive, as if nothing it touches on actually matters because there’s a quick answer. Though it didn’t technically ruin my experience of reading the rest of the book, it thoroughly dampened my enthusiasm.

Sometimes books just come to you at the right time. I can guarantee that if I’d have picked this up even a few years ago, I probably would have found it dull and unlikeable. In fact, a few years ago I probably wouldn’t have picked it up at all. But I think I’m at the point in my life where I can appreciate the thematic resonance of a book about divorce featuring generally unlikeable characters. Despite my feelings about the ending, I still appreciate what the rest of the book had to say. It was definitely a different reading experience than my usual fare, but sometimes looking somewhere new leads to a surprise gem. And this is a book worth reading.

Review: Hild

Title: Hild

Series: Light of the World #1

Author: Nicola Griffith

Genre: Historical Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Death, injury (major), blood (major), sexual assault (mentions), violence, war, child death, pregnancy, childbirth, parent death (mentions), animal death (mentions), religious bigotry, incest (mentions), sexual content

Back Cover:

Award-winning author Nicola Griffith’s brilliant, lush, sweeping historical novel about the rise of the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages: Hild.

In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king’s youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby.

But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world—of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing her surroundings closely and predicting what will happen next—that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her.

Her uncle, Edwin of Northumbria, plots to become overking of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief. Hild establishes a place for herself at his side as the king’s seer. And she is indispensable—unless she should ever lead the king astray. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, for her family, for her loved ones, and for the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future.

Hild is a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early Middle Ages—all of it brilliantly and accurately evoked by Nicola Griffith’s luminous prose. Working from what little historical record is extant, Griffith has brought a beautiful, brutal world to vivid, absorbing life.

Review:

This book has been in the back of my head for a while. I saw it somewhere, possibly a bookstore when it first came out, and the idea stuck in my head. I’m not sure if it was the idea of a fictionalized story of a saint’s childhood, or the idea that it was set in a place and historical period that I know nothing about but is far enough back to be interesting to me, or the concept of a young girl in a very man-centric society gaining power and influence through her own cunning. Or possibly it was the cover, which is not all that spectacular but for some reason grabbed me. Whatever it was, Hild has been lodged in my thoughts for a long time, and when it finally resurfaced again I decided to give it a shot.

It took me a long time to get through this book. Not because it was slow or boring or anything, but because it’s long and dense with detail, and also because I read it as an ebook which is not the best format for me to actually get through books quickly. I didn’t realize before picking it up that it was written by the same person who wrote Spear which I DNF’ed last year. But I think my issue with Spear might have been format-related, because Hild is told in an almost identical style – straightforward and unadorned, heavy on telling over showing – and I enjoyed this book so much.

I normally am not much for historical fiction because I usually find it boring. But a lot of that is because I just don’t find the time periods from the 1700s-ish on to be all that interesting – I much prefer ancient history. The British Isles in the 600s was far enough back to find interesting, and Nicola Griffith clearly did her research. I easily got wrapped up in the day-to-day of life in this world, which was richly detailed, fascinating, and not really what I would have expected. Though it wasn’t a central conflict of the book, there was always a simmering undercurrent of struggling against the land and weather for survival, which I suppose might have been an accurate feeling for the time period.

I know that this is a novel and therefore it’s hard to figure out the line between “accurate to research” and “made up for a better story” and therefore probably not accurate to say that I learned something. But in addition to being absorbed in a good story, I do feel like I learned something. Whether or not the wars and political machinations are true to history, and even if the details weren’t necessarily how things would have happened, I feel like I have a sense of what life, on the whole, might have been like in this time and place. And that was really cool.

I’ve been going on about the world for a while now, and that’s because everything that happens in this book is grounded in the reality of land and geography and the peoples who inhabit it. But what really made this book sing for me is Hild herself. She’s both an interesting, engaging character in her own right and a type of character that I really love to read about. It starts with her as a very small child, suddenly the only heir of a threat to the throne, being guided (or some might say manipulated) by her mother into a very specific role. But she is clever and observant and carves out a place for herself in the seer role. As the reader, I got to see inside her head and her thought processes and I know that everything she “sees” is just a prediction based on other patterns she’s observed. But even from her own point of view she comes across as a strange and uncanny child and young woman, and even though I know there’s no magic involved, I completely understand why others call her a witch. She inhabits the strange space of a child who had to grow up too fast, who is always in danger and must stay three steps ahead of everyone else to protect her life and the lives of those she loves, and who therefore acts and reacts in ways that someone on the outside might describe as strange and fey.

I think what I loved so much about this book, though, is that it covers so much. There’s not particularly a central plot. Hild’s driving goal is to keep herself and her loved ones safe from all the dangers the ever-shifting alliances and machinations of the power players of the day. She claws out as much agency as she can under the circumstances, but the context in which she acts is within the court of Edwin Overking, whose goal is to be king over all the kings of the land that will eventually be known as England. There are conflicts and challenges and small periods with defined goals, but overall it unfolds much as life does – piece by piece, event by event, with little in the way of a structured plot.

But the story opens with Hild as a young child, maybe five, and ends just as she blooms into an adult. And through it all, the world changes around her, and she grows and changes – from a child working hard to fit into the seer role and please the king to a young woman with her own agenda. I loved her grow into her role and then beyond it, pushing the boundaries. I loved her for her in-between-ness, a woman taller than most men, deft with healing herbs and spindle and equally deft with the war dagger she wears at her hip like the king’s fighting men. I loved her for the way she refused to take anything sitting down, determined to understand what had happened and what might happen, taking every opportunity she had to turn the situation her way.

This review is already absurdly long and I haven’t even touched on everything I could say about this book. It’s very long but it’s exactly as long as it needs to be. It is rich and atmospheric and so steeped in something undefinable and deeply engrossing that despite everything happening being completely earthly, there’s a mystic feeling that gives the whole story an air of being some kind of fantasy. I didn’t know going into this that there was a sequel, but there’s space for one and I want it. This book was so good and so much; I want to see where Hild directs the world next.

The Light of the World series:

1. Hild
2. Menewood

Review: Strike the Zither

Title: Strike the Zither

Series: Kingdom of Three #1

Author: Joan He

Genre: Fantasy (YA)

Trigger Warnings: Death, injury, blood, violence, war, parent death (mentions), terminal illness, alcohol use (mentions), child death (mentions), vomit (mentions), animal death (mentions)

Back Cover:

The Chinese classic Three Kingdoms reimagined with a lady Zhuge Liang.

The year is 414 of the Xin Dynasty, and chaos abounds. A puppet empress is on the throne, and three warlordesses each hope to claim the continent for themselves.

Only Zephyr knows it’s no contest.

Orphaned at a young age, Zephyr took control of her fate by becoming the best strategist of the land and serving under Xin Ren, a warlordess whose loyalty to the empress is double-edged—while Ren’s honor draws Zephyr to her cause, it also jeopardizes their survival in a war where one must betray or be betrayed. When Zephyr is forced to infiltrate an enemy camp to keep Ren’s followers from being slaughtered, she encounters the enigmatic Crow, an opposing strategist who is finally her match. But there are more enemies than one—and not all of them are human.

Review:

I didn’t realize when I picked this up that I’d already read one book by this author before – or at least attempted to read, as I DNF’ed Descendant of the Crane in 2021. But the back cover on this one sounded much more interesting, and I didn’t DNF the other book for being bad, just because I wasn’t able to get into it – which could very easily have been more about my mood than the book itself. So I gave this one a shot.

And at first, I was really glad I did. I didn’t love the world-building – I’ve read too many fantasies set in actual ancient China, so this Chinese-inspired world felt like a discordant mishmash of ideas instead of a cohesive world, but I could live with that. What I did like was Zephyr, who was clever, calculating, always three steps ahead of everyone else (a trait I love in a character), and some intriguing combination of dedicated to her warlordess and desperate to prove herself useful. And even though the plot involved a lot of politics, it wasn’t slow and managed to involve a fair bit of action and intrigue along the way.

The back cover really doesn’t tell you much about what’s in the book. The infiltration happens almost immediately, and while Crow is definitely an antagonist, he’s not really a major player in the story. Just about every bit of the story you think you’re going to read wraps up in part one. Then in part two things go way off the rails, and that’s where I started to really struggle.

My big criticism of the story itself is that it sacrifices background for speed, and that blunts any potential emotional impact. I don’t disagree with the choice – a long setup would have done the story a disservice. But often the reader finds out about crucial pieces of information the moment they’re supposed to be connected to an emotional moment, so the emotions have to share my attention with the process of mentally putting this new information into the overarching picture of the book. This also makes the big revelation at the start of part two feel unexpected, but in a jarring, random way. I may have had a different experience if I’d read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Chinese classic that this series is based on, but I haven’t. So maybe this is true to the original, but it was still difficult for me.

The problem I had with part two, and the reason I won’t be continuing the series, is definitely a case of it’s not the book, it’s me. A major event at the end of part one and a character’s response to it at the beginning of part two resulted in one major character ending up in the body of another major character. I do not like body-swapping. I can’t even really explain why, it just makes me extremely uncomfortable. It’s worse if the body-swapped characters try to pretend that they are the person whose body they’re in, which also happens here. So I spent most of part two wanting to leave the situation but also hoping that the characters would get back to the right bodies, because I was sure I would start to like it again once the body-swapping thing was fixed. But based on the ending and reading the back cover for the sequel, I think the characters are likely to stay in the wrong bodies until near the end of book two. And I do not want to deal with that.

On the whole, this is not a bad book by any means. It had a lot of aspects that didn’t do it for me, personally, but that’s not a judgement on the book itself. I’m having a hard time expressing any sort of overall opinion about it because the biggest thing I didn’t like about it (and quite possibly the smaller thing I didn’t like as well) were all matters of personal opinion. I like the ideas, it’s well-written, and it kept my interest despite being fairly politics-heavy. It just has some elements that aren’t for me, personally – but might be for you.

The Kingdom of Three Duology:

1. Strike the Zither
2. Sound the Gong

Review: Bloodshot

Title: Bloodshot

Series: Cheshire Red Reports #1

Author: Cherie Priest

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death (severe), blood (severe), violence (severe), injury (major), murder, medical trauma (mentions, not protagonist), body horror (mild), grief (mild, not protagonist), homophobic slur (once, from bad guy), anxiety/panic attacks, transphobic language (mild, from ignorance not malice), fire (mentions), guns

Back Cover:

VAMPIRE FOR HIRE

Raylene Pendle (AKA Cheshire Red), a vampire and world-renowned thief, doesn’t usually hang with her own kind. She’s too busy stealing priceless art and rare jewels. But when the infuriatingly charming Ian Stott asks for help, Raylene finds him impossible to resist—even though Ian doesn’t want precious artifacts. He wants her to retrieve missing government files—documents that deal with the secret biological experiments that left Ian blind. What Raylene doesn’t bargain for is a case that takes her from the wilds of Minneapolis to the mean streets of Atlanta. And with a psychotic, power-hungry scientist on her trail, a kick-ass drag queen on her side, and Men in Black popping up at the most inconvenient moments, the case proves to be one hell of a ride.

Review:

My literary coming-of-age was in the mid-to-late aughts and early 2010s, beginning around the height of the vampire/paranormal romance era of YA literature and spanning its decline and the rise of dystopia as the hot new teen genre. But despite having a lot of available options for vampire books, I didn’t read many vampire books. Vampires just were not interesting to me.

This provides a little bit of context for part of why I didn’t expect to like this book. The other parts are that I generally don’t tend to enjoy books where solving a mystery/doing detective stuff is a major element, and urban fantasy is not my genre. I also picked up Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker many years ago, but never finished it as I found it lame and disappointing. But at a family gathering a few years ago, I somehow got to talking about books with one of my husband’s cousins, and she recommended this one. I had my doubts, but I do generally attempt to read books that are recommended to me. So while I fully expected to find it uninteresting, poorly written, and/or leaning towards the pulpy/trashy side, I gave it a shot. And, as you might expect from the fact that this isn’t a DNF review, I was pleasantly surprised.

While the standard urban fantasy elements are kept to a minimum (limited, in fact, to two characters being actually vampires and some references to the existence of vampire “Houses” and their politics), the thrust of the plot is a mystery. Raylene is trying to track down and steal some papers. However, it feels less like a detective story and more like an action movie because the government picks up pretty quick that someone is after information they’d rather not have anyone find. So yes, Raylene is trying to follow clues and find what she needs, but this also involves breaking into secure government bases, running across rooftops and rappelling down buildings to evade government agents, and generally feels more like Jason Bourne than Perry Mason. I may not be a fan of straight-up detective stories, but I can appreciate a good old-fashioned following the trail of clues when the antagonists are government agents who aren’t afraid to get into a firefight.

But what really carried the story was Raylene herself. I’ve read my fair share of snarky narrators with lots of commentary, and most of them quickly get annoying, frustrating, or boring. But Cherie Priest actually pulls it off. Raylene is snarky and sarcastic and intersperses the actual telling of the story with a ton of commentary, a “voicey” quality that puts her as a character, not the plot or action, at the heart of the story. And I think it works. “I’m a vampire, a famous thief, and you can hire me to steal things for you” leaves a lot of opportunity to create a more flat character, which can work in a plot-focused story. But Raylene is full of nuance and flaws. She may be really good at what she does, but she also has pretty bad anxiety which leads to overpreparedness, as well as a deep well of compassion that she tries to convince herself doesn’t exist and a reckless, almost self-destructive streak that she doesn’t yet recognize. Plus, her extreme confidence in her vampirism-enhanced physical abilities gives her a dash of that absurdly powerful protagonist trope that I love so much. I didn’t expect such a nuanced character with such an enjoyable voice, and I was surprised and delighed by how much I enjoyed following her through this story. There’s a lot of opportunity for growth in future books, and I think that could be really great to watch.

Speaking of future books, I didn’t know going into this that it had a sequel – although I probably could have suspected, because what urban fantasy book is a standalone these days? Regardless, this book stopped at a reasonable ending point, but the story itself is definitely not over. I’m not entirely sure if I so much care about how the story ends, but I do want to see what happens with Raylene personally. This is one of those books that nobody would call a masterpiece – it’s good and well-written, but it’s not deep or profound or thought-provoking. What it is, though, is enjoyable, engaging, and entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, and I will be reading book two, if for no other reason than I really like Raylene.

The Cheshire Red Reports series:

1. Bloodshot
2. Hellbent