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: 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: The Genesis of Misery

Title: The Genesis of Misery

Series: The Nullvoid Chronicles

Author: Neon Yang

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: War, death, violence, unreality (severe), injury, sexual content (consensual, minimal descriptions), terminal illness, parent death, religious trauma, religious bigotry (mild), mental illness (delusions/hallucinations), confinement, involuntary sedation with drugs, medical content (mentions)

Back Cover:

An immersive, electrifying space-fantasy, Neon Yang’s debut novel The Genesis of Misery is full of high-tech space battles and political machinations, starring a queer and diverse array of pilots, princesses, and prophetic heirs.

It’s a story you think you know: a young person hears the voice of an angel saying they have been chosen as a warrior to lead their people to victory in a holy war.

But Misery Nomaki (she/they) knows they are a fraud.

Raised on a remote moon colony, they don’t believe in any kind of god. Their angel is a delusion, brought on by hereditary space exposure. Yet their survival banks on mastering the holy mech they are supposedly destined for, and convincing the Emperor of the Faithful that they are the real deal.

The deeper they get into their charade, however, the more they start to doubt their convictions. What if this, all of it, is real?

A reimagining of Joan of Arc’s story given a space opera, giant robot twist, the Nullvoid Chronicles is a story about the nature of truth, the power of belief, and the interplay of both in the stories we tell ourselves.

Review:

I picked this up for two reasons: a nonbinary protagonist and the idea of Joan of Arc but in space. And you know, this book definitely has both of those things. Misery is most definitely nonbinary. And there definitely are Joan of Arc-type elements to the overarching plot (although you probably have to know that’s what it’s supposed to be to spot them – it’s definitely more “Joan of Arc-inspired” than “space opera retelling of Joan of Arc”).

But if you go in expecting just that, you are not at all going to be prepared for what The Genesis of Misery is going to throw at you. Because like I said, those elements are there, but they are definitely not the main thrust of the story.

Before I go too far, I do want to talk about Misery for a moment. (I’m going to be using she/her pronouns here, because while Misery uses both they/them and she/her, the narrative primarily uses she/her.) She’s an interesting character by herself. She’s a bit of a troublemaker – not for the sake of making trouble or being rebellious, but because she just has other priorities that rank higher than “obey the rules.” One of those priorities is self-preservation. Born with the disease that killed her mother, and experiencing the delusions and hallucinations that the disease causes, her driving motivation at the beginning of the book is survival. And the best way to do that seems to be to convince everyone that the symptoms of her terminal illness are actually symptoms of being god’s chosen messiah. All of that makes for a very interesting character. Her tenacity, resourcefulness, and general focus on prioritizing what matters to her over what people around her want her to do made her compelling and enjoyable to read about.

I haven’t read many unreliable narrator stories – not intentionally, that just hasn’t been a big aspect of my reading in general. Misery definitely qualifies as one, though, and in a really interesting way. She’s unreliable because she experiences hallucinations and delusions as a symptom of her illness, and she is very aware of that fact. So I may not be able to tell if the narrative is telling me the truth, but neither can she. In fact, she was so unreliable that I ended up believing the exact opposite of whatever she believed. At the beginning, she was 100% sure it was just hallucinations and she was faking the messiah thing as a survival strategy. At that point, I figured the twist would be that she was really divinely chosen after all. But as the story goes on, she began to slowly begin to think that maybe she was god’s chosen after all – and I began to doubt that she really was the messiah, or even that this deity existed in the first place. It wasn’t really an unpleasant experience, but it was weird to basically switch opinions with the protagonist throughout the course of the book.

This review is already pretty long, and I haven’t even gotten into the plot. But honestly, the plot is not really all that important here. In fact, you could argue that there really isn’t much of one. Misery’s people are at war with the Heretics, who have rejected their god and are trying to invade. Misery is playing messiah (or growing into the role of messiah, depending on who you believe) to cover for the fact that she has a fatal disease. A lot of people are doing politics and such around Misery and have big plans for this and that, but for the most part Misery is doing her best to 1. Stay alive, 2. Stay not imprisoned, and 3. Convince people that the weird stuff about her is from messiah-ness instead of mind-altering space disease, in that order. Sure, there’s some Pacific Rim-style mech battles in space, but those don’t come in until quite a ways through the book and they’re not what it’s about anyway.

What really makes this story work is the religious aspect. This society has one god, the one true god, who agreed to help the humans who dispersed among the stars. This deity chooses saints, identifiable by their iridescent hair, who have powers to activate and control special types of stone that are used for all kinds of things through this society. This religion is integrated so deeply with the society that they never actually talk about a religion or name the faith – knowledge of this deity, following religious observances, the way the saints’ ability to control special stones make society function, it’s just part of how things are. At the beginning, despite being raised in the church, Misery doesn’t even believe in this deity. But ideas of heresy, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, paying lip service to religious rules while doing what you want anyway, the difference between ethics and religiosity, power structures, belief, and fanaticism are wound throughout the whole story. I don’t really know how to describe it. As someone raised in a religion that was big into fanaticism, private hypocrisy, and ignoring the spirit of the rules where possible, I found it both strange and sci-fi while simultaneously intimately and painfully familiar. Watching Misery start to believe that maybe she was the messiah had a similar ring – it was nearly the same process as my journey out of religion, but the opposite direction. It left me feeling a bit disoriented – which is, honestly, an appropriate feeling for this book.

I don’t think I have adequately expressed yet my overall opinion of this book. It’s good. It’s very, very good. But it’s an uncommon type of good. Some really good books hype you up. They get your adrenaline pumping, leave you emotionally exhausted at the end, and make you want to yell from the rooftops that everyone should read this book. (Honestly, as much as I liked it, if you’re not up for a book that’s heavily about weird space religions, you probably won’t enjoy it very much.) Instead, it’s a much quieter kind of good. It makes me want to slow down, savor the story, and appreciate the richness of the world and the journey. It makes me want to think and linger over all the religious elements, both thematic and emotional. There’s some bittersweet tones as I understand exactly why Misery is doing what she’s doing but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be painful for her. I can already tell I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.

The Nullvoid Chronicles:

1. The Genesis of Misery

Review: He Who Drowned the World

Title: He Who Drowned the World

Series: Radiant Emperor duology #2

Author: Shelley Parker-Chan

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Violence, blood, injury, death, bullying, self-harm (graphic), grief (severe), sexual content (explicit), misogyny, ableism, sexual assault, miscarriage, infidelity, murder, child death, parent death (mentions), suicidal ideation, body dysmorphia, homophobia, that complicated sexual trauma where you have sex when you don’t really want to as a means to get something else

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of the first book, She Who Became the Sun.

Back Cover:

How much would you give to win the world?

Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding high after her victory that tore southern China from its Mongol masters. Now she burns with a new desire: to seize the throne and crown herself emperor.

But Zhu isn’t the only one with imperial ambitions. Her neighbor in the south, the courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband—and she’s strong enough to wipe Zhu off the map. To stay in the game, Zhu will have to gamble everything on a risky alliance with an old enemy: the talented but unstable eunuch general Ouyang, who has already sacrificed everything for a chance at revenge on his father’s killer, the Great Khan.

Unbeknownst to the southerners, a new contender is even closer to the throne. The scorned scholar Wang Baoxiang has maneuvered his way into the capital, and his lethal court games threaten to bring the empire to its knees. For Baoxiang also desires revenge: to become the most degenerate Great Khan in history—and in so doing, make a mockery of every value his Mongol warrior family loved more than him.

All the contenders are determined to do whatever it takes to win. But when desire is the size of the world, the price could be too much for even the most ruthless heart to bear…

Review:

This is a hard book to review. Not because it was bad, or even because I’m ambivalent about it – on the contrary, it was spectacular and I loved it. Even having read the first book nearly two years ago, it didn’t take me long to get back into the story. It kept me engaged throughout and even got my heart speeding up in a few particularly tense scenes. It was, above all, astonishingly good.

And I think that’s a large part of what makes it hard to review. I can’t share all the emotions it made me feel by writing about it. To get the full experience, you have to read it yourself. It’s vivid and intense and full of twists I didn’t see coming but probably should have and the kind of book that leaves you completely exhausted at the end because you’ve been feeling so much along the way.

Another part of what makes this hard to review is how utterly dark it is. The first book was dark, too, don’t get me wrong. Zhu is not a good person. She is ruthless and ambitious and claims she is willing to sacrifice anything to reach her goal, and this book puts that to the test. This is also a book where Zhu starts to challenge the bounds of a likeable character. In the first book, she was ruthless and ambitious and violent and did a lot of really horrible things. But in the context of a world that would rather let her starve than inconvenience a man, it didn’t seem unreasonable. In this book, she had reached some measure of security – though still under threat, she was one of the four dominant military and political powers of the area. But her ambition to be the greatest kept her pushing onwards, even as she destroyed others in the process. She was still a dynamic, compelling character and I never really stopped rooting for her, but as the book progressed I found myself repeatedly confronting the reality of her actions and not really being sure how to feel about them. In some ways, it feels weird to even apply moral judgements here, though I can’t fully explain why. But eventually both I and Zhu were looking at the consequences of her ambitions and wondering if it was really worth all that.

(Yet another thing I appreciate about this series: None of the women in these books – whether or not you want to count Zhu and her ambiguous gender identity as a woman – are shamed for their ambition or treated any worse than the men for their crimes. The society is blatantly misogynistic, but the narrative refuses to be.)

General Ouyang was a major player in the last book, and he still is in this one, but to a lesser degree. Some of that is because of his arc. Following on the events from the climax of book one, his is an equal but opposite story to Zhu. While Zhu’s ambitions propelled her to further heights, Ouyang’s relentless pursuit of revenge drove him to further lows. Zhu’s resolve clarified as Ouyang’s mind descended into chaos. I found myself mainly feeling compassion as he destroyed himself on the teeth of his own self-loathing. I wish he could have had a better ending, but he was so far gone that I think he got the best he could.

This book, being the last in the series, was an ending for every character, though not all of them died. Writing-wise, their endings made sense, fit with their arcs, and felt narratively satisfying. On a personal level, so many of them deserved better. Xu Da deserved better. Ma deserved better. Ouyang deserved better. Even Baoxiang deserved better (he deserved better last book, and even before – he is yet another case of an antagonist who I really just feel bad for).

And this brings me to the final reason this book is so hard to review: There is just too much to say. I haven’t said anything about Baoxiang’s story, even though he was a point of view narrator. I haven’t talked about the gender politics involved in this story, or the absolutely spot-on depictions of that very specific and hard-to-define type of sexual trauma where you have sex when you really don’t want to or with someone you don’t want to have sex with as a means to get something else, or the theme of being seen in a gendered body (and, to a lesser extent, a visibly disabled body), or how it’s paced so well that it feels like so much is happening without ever feeling rushed or monotonous, or the really awesome historical setting, or the ghosts.

If I talked about every amazing thing in this book, I could go on forever. But I’ve focused this review mainly on the characters, because despite all the action and adventure and ghosts and politics and invasions, this is a story about these characters and how their actions, good, bad, or otherwise, shape (and often end) the lives of the people around them and, ultimately, the course of history. This feels like a book (and, honestly, a series) that you could keep re-reading and discover something new every time. (It helps that these books are long.) So few sequels live up to their predecessor, but this one does – but it’s also unique to the point where I can’t say whether She Who Became the Sun or He Who Drowned the World is better because they’re both so good for different reasons and in different ways.

I’m running out of eloquent ways to say “this is an amazing book, you should read the whole series,” so there you go. This is an amazing book. So was the first one. You should read both – especially if you like stories that show your emotions no mercy.

The Radiant Emperor duology:

1. She Who Became the Sun
2. He Who Drowned the World

Review: Dauntless

Title: Dauntless

Author: Elisa A. Bonnin

Genre: Fantasy (technically YA, but doesn’t feel specifically YA)

Trigger Warnings: Death (severe), violence (severe), blood, injury, gore, animal injury, animal death, mind control, betrayal, grief, parent death (mentions), emotional abuse (not of protagonist), murder (mentions), alcohol use (mentions), colonization, war, mental illness

Back Cover:

A teen girl must bring together two broken worlds in order to save her nation in this lush, Filipino-inspired young adult fantasy novel from debut author Elisa A. Bonnin.

“Be dauntless, for the hopes of the People rest in you.”

Seri’s world is defined by very clear rules: The beasts prowl the forest paths and hunt the People. The valiant explore the unknown world, kill the beasts, and gain strength from the armor they make from them. As an assistant to Eshai Unbroken, a young valor commander with a near-mythical reputation, Seri has seen first-hand the struggle to keep the beasts at bay and ensure the safety of the spreading trees where the People make their homes. That was how it always had been, and how it always would be. Until the day Seri encounters Tsana.

Tsana is, impossibly, a stranger from the unknown world who can communicate with the beasts – a fact that makes Seri begin to doubt everything she’s ever been taught. As Seri and Tsana grow closer, their worlds begin to collide, with deadly consequences. Somehow, with the world on the brink of war, Seri will have to find a way to make peace.

Review:

In my last library trip, I picked up two books, and this is actually the one I was less excited about. Both the cover and description seemed weak and just a tiny bit corny. However, the concept of the beasts that may not be as antagonistic as previously thought and the Filipino inspiration were enough that I decided to give it a shot.

And oh boy. It sucked me in within just a few pages and I blazed right through almost four hundred intense and rich pages. I had to go back and read paragraphs again sometimes because I would inadvertently skip huge chunks of the text in my excitement to find out what happens.

We’ll start with the simple – the world. The rainforest where people live on platforms on huge trees is not a very complicated setting, but it’s unique and vivid and very cool. There are some very neat details about society, as well, such as “marks” (which I gather are something like tattoos) to commemorate important things in your life and the way every city, town, and settlement is just … a single tree. There may not be a ton of depth to explore, but the breadth is spectacular. The characters do a lot of traveling and there are always new interesting sights for the reader and the characters. There was almost no exposition, but I still understand and appreciate the beautiful, lush, dangerous rainforest and the society built in the trees.

And in this society we have Seri and the valiants. Seri’s growth is spectacular. She starts off relatable in a quiet way. She ends up as an aide to a legendary commander not intentionally, but because she took the first opportunity she could to run away from the memory of something painful. But as the story goes on, just by virtue of doing her best and dealing with what’s put in front of her, she becomes the stuff of heroic legend – braver, more confident, and powerful (with just a touch of the overpowered protagonist trope I love). She’s in her late teens during this story, and it really feels like she matures into an adult.

Other valiants thread through the story, but Eshai is the one consistent through the whole book, and she played a much bigger role than I anticipated from the back cover. And I loved the whole concept of her. She’s a huge legendary folk hero, but in real life she’s disorganized, has a temper, good at what she does but still feels like she’s a little over her head, and not really excited to be a folk hero but if that’s the role she has to play she’s gonna do it. I also adored the dynamic between Eshai and Seri. It’s hard to describe, but it was very good.

If you like action, this book has quite a bit of action. Almost all of it is large-scale battles, with our protagonists and a bunch of unnamed or briefly-mentioned side characters facing off against beasts. The battles themselves are great – it’s warriors with superhuman abilities against beasts with other weird abilities, so it’s bound to be great. But this book also does something impressive: It makes these large-scale battles actually have consequences. Seri herself is rarely at risk of actually dying. But someone dies in every fight. And when they die, there are rites for the dead. There is grief and guilt and hurt. Even though we really don’t have much doubt that the people we care about will survive, even the deaths of minor characters have profound effects on our protagonists, and that makes the danger feel real and ensures the fights never feel cheap.

But after all of these great things, my absolute favorite thing is all the moral complexity in this story. At the beginning, everything is straightforward – the beasts kill people, so people need to defend against the beasts. But the more Seri learns about the beasts and Tsana’s people, the more unclear everything becomes. Maybe the valiant aren’t actually the good guys. There is eventually a single antagonist, but even there the morality isn’t strictly black and white – he may be doing horrible things, but I can understand his reasoning. The main tension for Seri is trying to do the right thing when it’s not clear what the right thing is, because for most of the book it’s very unclear what is right. Neither “side” is truly good or evil. There’s also a settler-colonization element that was good, if a little muddled.

This review got long, but that’s because there’s so many great things to say about it. It was a thrilling, engrossing read with a vibrant world, good characters with great growth through the story, and some really awesome battles. And it has a happy ending – I love a dangerous, violent book with a happy ending for the primary characters. I’m very glad I gave it a chance, because it was completely worth it.

Review: Shatter the Sky

Title: Shatter the Sky

Series: Shatter the Sky #1

Author: Rebecca Kim Wells

Genre: Fantasy (YA)

Trigger Warnings: Kidnapping, confinement, torture (mentions), injury, animal cruelty (mild), violence, fire, colonization (mentions)

Back Cover:

Raised among the ruins of a conquered mountain nation, Maren dreams only of sharing a quiet life with her girlfriend Kaia—until the day Kaia is abducted by the Aurati, prophetic agents of the emperor, and forced to join their ranks. Desperate to save her, Maren hatches a plan to steal one of the emperor’s coveted dragons and storm the Aurati stronghold.

If Maren is to have any hope of succeeding, she must become an apprentice to the Aromatory—the emperor’s mysterious dragon trainer. But Maren is unprepared for the dangerous secrets she uncovers: rumors of a lost prince, a brewing rebellion, and a prophecy that threatens to shatter the empire itself. Not to mention the strange dreams she’s been having about a beast deep underground…

With time running out, can Maren survive long enough to rescue Kaia from impending death? Or could it be that Maren is destined for something greater than she could have ever imagined?

Review:

Occasionally when I plan to come back to a book, I actually do. This is one of those books. Although to be fair, I gave up on it not because of the book itself, but because the audiobook was so quiet that even on max volume I couldn’t hear it over the background noise at my job. When I put it down, I knew I hadn’t given the book a fair chance, so I told myself I’d pick it up again in a different format.

And I’m glad I actually did. It didn’t grab me immediately, but I wanted to at least get past the setup that I attempted to listen to via audio. And by the time I got through that, the world grabbed me and the inciting incident had gotten the actual story started.

This story starts out really simple. Maren is perfectly happy to play second fiddle to her bold, brave, adventurous girlfriend, and would really rather stay in her mountain village instead of traveling the world. Kaia gets very little characterization besides being bold, brave, and adventurous (and Maren being deeply in love with her). I appreciated the rich descriptions of the village, but I really wasn’t connecting with any of the characters.

Then Kaia got taken and Maren decided she was going to steal a dragon, and the story really started to pick up. Maren’s straightforward plan goes sideways really quickly, as it turns out stealing an entire dragon is not as easy as it seems. Plus there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on, and the reader gains awareness of it as Maren does. What starts as mild racial tensions turns out to be a whole anti-imperialist rebellion. What starts as a simple steal-a-dragon quest turns into learning the truth about how the emperor deals treats his dragons and those who care for them. What starts as a simple goal to rescue a girl taken by the Aurati eventually reveals the significantly darker reality behind the Aurati as an institution.

I blazed through this book in two days because it’s very good. The world is well-drawn, I love dragons, I love the unique and creative way dragons are managed in this world. Maren herself is a great character who does some fantastic growth, and I love the way the slow revelations about what is actually going on are revealed in parallel with her growth – the more Maren comes out of her complacency and takes risks, the more both she and I learned the truth of this world. It was just very well done. Plus, you know, it’s hard to go wrong with dragons.

I didn’t realize going into this one that there’s a sequel, but I’m glad there is. There’s definitely more adventure to be had here, and I want to see where it goes. And of course no YA fantasy featuring a rebellion is going to be complete until the rebellion is done. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

The Shatter the Sky series:

1. Shatter the Sky
2. Storm the Earth

Review: A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

Title: A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe

Series: The Salvagers #1

Author: Alex White

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death (major), blood (major), gore, violence, injury, guns, grief, genocide, war (in the past), betrayal, sexual content (off-page), romantic partner death (in past), murder

Back Cover:

A crew of outcasts tries to find a legendary ship before it falls into the hands of those who would use it as a weapon in this science fiction adventure series for fans of The Expanse and Firefly.

A washed-up treasure hunter, a hotshot racer, and a deadly secret society.

They’re all on a race against time to hunt down the greatest warship ever built. Some think the ship is lost forever, some think it’s been destroyed, and some think it’s only a legend, but one thing’s for certain: whoever finds it will hold the fate of the universe in their hands. And treasure that valuable can never stay hidden for long …

Review:

This is the first novel I’ve read in print format in at least two years. I have read a few physical books and ebooks in that time, but they were all nonfiction or short story collections. Every novel has been an audiobook until this one. And as someone who used to keep a stack of books literally as talk as my waist next to my favorite childhood reading chair and spend hours reading up to seven physical books per week, it’s an absolutely bizarre experience to discover that hard copies in my hand just aren’t as immersive as audiobooks. So I’ll admit that I struggled a lot with this book, largely because of the format.

But that wasn’t the only reason A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe and I had a rough beginning. I’m a lover of speculative fiction, but I’ve always leaned more towards the fantasy side. I have found some really good scifi, especially recently, but cool scifi stuff isn’t enough to keep me interested – I need plot and characters and other stuff to get immersed in. And this book starts off really slow. The “finding a legendary ship” thing is a catalyst for part of the beginning, but it doesn’t really kick in until the middle. I was going to say that the beginning is setup, but it really isn’t. The beginning has stuff happening, just without much of a real focus.

This story has two protagonist: Boots (the washed-up treasure hunter) and Nylah (the hotshot racer). Boots is angry and rude and mean, but I didn’t mind her all that much. She’s not someone I would like to spend time with in real life, but she was fine as a character. Nylah, though, started the book as the kind of cocky, punchable asshole that I really, really hate in real life and in books. She got some character growth earlier on that helped, and she was incredibly powerful, so by the end I didn’t mind her, but the beginning was difficult. There’s also a host of other characters, including a spaceship crew who definitely get enough page time and development to be called secondary protagonists, but who I don’t really have much to say about. They’re all good, don’t get me wrong – I don’t think there’s a single weak or badly-done character in this book – but there’s nothing to say about them that could add to this review.

The world was an interesting fusion of scifi and magic. It’s your classic spacefaring, mutli-planet, fancy tech, faster-than-light spaceship travel kind of intergalactic science fiction world, but also a world where almost everyone has some type of magic and magic can be used to fuse with, alter, power, and enhance technology as well as just doing straight magic stuff. And the fusion was great. It was cool seeing cybersecurity as a psychic battle between people with tech magic and an evolving AI defense system. It made for some badass fight scenes. And really, it gave my fantasy-loving side something to really enjoy in this otherwise fairly ordinary scifi world and made the whole thing that much better.

Now, you might get this far and think, So this is a pretty solidly okay book, right? And you’d be wrong. This is a really, really good book. And the reason is because somewhere in the middle, the whole “hunting the legendary missing ship” thing finally kicks in. And I loved it. When it starts, the reasons for wanting to find the ship are small – Boots is trying to save her own skin, the rest of the crew wants a payday, and Nylah didn’t even want to be involved but got dragged along for the ride. But as they journey across the universe, exploring massive and unsettling abandoned places (my favorite) and getting chased by an unbelievably powerful assassin, they begin to put together a deadly conspiracy with its roots in a genocidal war decades earlier and its culmination fast approaching. It was thrilling, engaging, and brilliant, plenty of scenes with the absurdly powerful protagonist trope that I adore … I loved it deeply and read it in two sittings. Whatever else my criticisms of the book, once the plot got rolling it really got rolling.

Is A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe perfect? Definitely not. And there’s some things that I just didn’t like about it (e.g. Nylah at the beginning) that other readers may not find irritating or may even like. But the details are great, the world is pretty neat, and once the plot gets going it’s absolutely fantastic. On the whole it’s a very good book. But I don’t intend to read the rest of the series. Part of that is because everything seems to imply that the rest of the series is focused on dealing with the rest of the people involved in the big conspiracy, and that just sounds less interesting to me. And part of it is because this book wrapped up really well. There’s definitely room for a sequel, but it doesn’t feel like it requires one. It was a good, satisfying adventure, and I feel no need to read on.

The Salvagers series:

1. A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe
2. A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy
3. The Worst of All Possible Worlds

Review Shorts: Wayward Children Stories

I am a big fan of the Wayward Children series. My only problem is that the series is still ongoing, so I have to wait for the next book to be published before I can read more. So imagine my delight to discover that not only are there three Wayward Children short stories, they’re all available to read for free on Tor.com! Here’s some mini-reviews of the three of them – plus links to where you can read them for yourself.

In Mercy, Rain (Wayward Children #2.5) by Seanan McGuire

See it on The StoryGraph here

Read it on Tor.com here

Jack seems to get an inordinate amount of time in the Wayward Children series, but I really don’t mind because she and her world of the Moors are great. This story is very short and incredibly atmospheric, and really reminds me of the early books in the series (which, since it’s meant to be set just after book two, makes perfect sense). It feels like a single scene of how Jack met her girlfriend Alexis that Seanan just couldn’t make fit in Down Among the Sticks and Bones but that she liked and thought was important, so she added some context and rich descriptions to the beginning and called it a short story. And personally, I think it worked very well. The Moors are fascinating anyway, and this reveals some details (or just reminded me of details that I forgot) and provides some more characterization for Jack’s mad-scientist mentor. It’s a fast, dark, and wonderful read and I enjoyed it very much.

Trigger Warnings: Death, child death, mental illness, body horror, romantic partner death (mentions), emotional neglect

Juice Like Wounds (Wayward Children #4.5) by Seanan McGuire

See it on The StoryGraph here

Read it on Tor.com here

In my review of In an Absent Dream, I complained that the book was too short because one of Lundy’s friends straight-up died and you only find that out in dialogue after the fact. I guess Seanan McGuire heard my complaints, because this is the story of the great quest that lead to that death. As anticipated, it was wrenchingly sad, although I think it would have had even more impact if I’d read it directly after In an Absent Dream. It was also very lyrical and heavy on the feelings of being a child – specifically the invincibility and belief that nothing truly bad is going to happen to you – but significantly less atmospheric than I expected. Which is a disappointment, because I love the goblin market that Lundy goes to and I wanted to spend more time there. But this is a short story, not a full book, and for what it is it really works. Fantastical and heartwrenching, as every Wayward Children story tends to be.

Trigger Warnings: Injury, death, child death, blood, body horror (mild)

Skeleton Song (A Wayward Children Story) by Seanan McGuire

See it on The StoryGraph here

Read it on Tor.com here

Christopher has been in several of the Wayward Children books so far, mainly the ones set at Eleanor West’s actual school, but he’s never been a major character. I mentioned in my review of Come Tumbling Down that I wouldn’t mind if he got his own book. But he got his own short story and honestly that’s good enough. His adventure in Mariposa, the world of music and dancing skeletons, is very straightforward and follows the pattern of the other stories set in the magical worlds – though it was light on how and why he came through the door in the first place and focused more on what he found there and how he fell back out. Every wayward child’s world is a place that connects to their struggle in our world, but Christopher having an illness heavily implied to be terminal and walking through a door into a world where death is not only not to be feared, but is a beginning of something better beyond the bounds of flesh, is the most obvious one so far. This is like a shortened and condensed version of a full Wayward Children book and I think it could have easily been made longer, but it also works as a short story. And if you’re missing your Wayward Children fix, it’s definitely worth reading.

Trigger Warnings: Death, body horror (mild), terminal illness (mentions)

The Wayward Children series:

1. Every Heart a Doorway
2. Down Among the Sticks and Bones
3. Beneath the Sugar Sky
4. In an Absent Dream
5. Come Tumbling Down
6. Across the Green Grass Fields
7. Where the Drowned Girls Go
8. Lost in the Moment and Found

Review: Harrow the Ninth

Title: Harrow the Ninth

Series: The Locked Tomb #2

Author: Tamsyn Muir

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (extreme), injury (extreme), blood (severe), gore (severe), unreality (severe), grief, child death, murder, parent death, mental illness/psychosis, suicide (mentions)

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

Back Cover:

She answered the Emperor’s call.

She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only friend.

In victory, her world has turned to ash.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, last necromancer of the Ninth House, has been drafted by her Emperor to fight an unwinnable war. Side-by-side with a detested rival, Harrow must perfect her skills and become an angel of undeath ― but her health is failing, her sword makes her nauseous, and even her mind is threatening to betray her.

Sealed in the gothic gloom of the Emperor’s Mithraeum with three unfriendly teachers, hunted by the mad ghost of a murdered planet, Harrow must confront two unwelcome questions: is somebody trying to kill her? And if they succeeded, would the universe be better off?

Review:

It’s been three months since I read Gideon the Ninth, so I was prepared for it to take a little bit to get back into the story. I was also expecting it to be a little less enjoyable at the beginning because I wasn’t a huge fan of Harrow last book and I knew she would be the main character this time. So I was prepared to have a rough start.

What I was not prepared for was absolute incomprehensibility.

Some books feel like giant puzzles where the story keeps handing you pieces and it isn’t until the end where you figure out how they all fit together. This book does not feel like that. This book feels like it handed you a large box full of pulpy sludge, then at 74% of the way through the book it casts the spell to turn the sludge into puzzle pieces at which point they come together fairly easily.

If 74% feels like an oddly specific number, that’s because I checked. I looked at the time stamp for when the book started to make sense, because it took a very long time. The first three-quarters of the book are almost entirely incomprehensible. They go hard into the unreality and “unreliable narrator is unreliable because she can’t remember and isn’t sure what she’s seeing is real.” It goes back and forth between Harrow’s new life as a Lyctor and a retelling of book one where Gideon doesn’t exist. The timelines are all mixed up. It’s hard to tell when events are actually supposed to be taking place, and I’m pretty sure both timelines are told out of order anyway (but there’s no temporal markers so it’s hard to tell). It’s a crapshoot if you can figure out who’s speaking or even in the scene at the start. And the bulk of it is told in second person, which really threw me for the first few hours and never stopped feeling weird and jarring.

And after all that, can you guess the moment that made me pause the book and stare into space asking myself if I really just heard what I thought I just heard? It wasn’t the unexpected betrayal, or the murder attempts, or the body under the bed or the weird blood river or the fact that God’s name is John. It was the moment where God was explaining a potential galaxy-ending apocalypse to Harrow and, right in the middle of a serious conversation, made an absolutely serious none pizza left beef reference. Out of all the incomprehensible nonsense that came before, that was the moment where I stopped the book, reconsidered my reading choices, and started wondering what kind of person Tamsyn Muir is to put a fucking meme reference in her elaborate and serious book.

Once I was paying attention, there was a surprising amount of memes and internet culture referenced in a gory and intense drama about necromancers in space. These included a “She wants the D” joke, a pun on the word “barista”, an honest-to-goodness “Hi, _, I’m dad” joke, and references to bone hurting juice and Miette. Am I supposed to be taking this seriously? Every single other thing in the book is very serious – and yet there are no less than five meme/joke references. What am I supposed to think?

I very nearly DNF’d this early on. Gideon was my favorite character and she wasn’t there. I didn’t really like Harrow that much in book one when she was badass, and I liked her even less when she was spending much of her time unconscious and not doing anything when she was awake. The other Lyctors were mean, standoffish, and incredibly unlikeable, and the Emperor was stiff and bland whenever he was on page. And even though I was spending a lot of brainpower trying to figure out what the hell was going on, there was zero plot whatsoever. Harrow wasn’t even doing anything – other people around her did stuff, but she did nothing except walk around, be confused about her own memories, and see things that weren’t there, interspersed with retold scenes from book one, except they were the scenes where very little happened and had no Gideon. There wasn’t even any interesting settings to explore, since instead of cool and creepy planets, this book takes place almost exclusively on a largely nondescript spaceship. Up until about halfway through, I really didn’t like this book.

But I stuck it out, mainly because I wanted to see if I was right in my suspicions (and hopes) that the end of book one would get undone in some way. And around the halfway point, I warmed up a bit to Harrow and the barest hint of a plot kicked in. So I felt mildly validated in pushing through the first half (which was about 10 hours, it’s an almost 20-hour audiobook) and kept reading.

Then the book hit the 74% mark and went from zero to sixty over the course of a few minutes. The book cast the spell that turned my box of fibrous sludge into puzzle pieces, I started slamming those pieces together as fast as my brain could whir, Harrow started to actually do things, a plot (of a sort) finally kicked into gear, and the last 26% of the book was absolutely fantastic. I loved it. I got some of the answers I wanted from book one, I got some answers to questions I didn’t even know I had that just added more twists, there was action, there was drama, there were surprises, some of my suspicions about book one’s ending were validated and some of them were not. It was great.

Was it worth the first half being unenjoyable and another quarter being mediocre? I don’t know. I really don’t know what to make of this book. The last 26% was amazing. The first half was terrible. The book seemed to skip engaging characters or intriguing plot and go straight for “if they don’t understand what’s happening, they’ll want to read on and find out,” but then overdid it so hard that it tipped over into obnoxious and frustrating. But also that ending answered a lot of my questions from book one, which is a large part of what I wanted out of this book, and came with some really stellar action sequences towards the end.

This review is very long because this is a very long book and I do not know what to make of it in the least. I think the first three-quarters could have been cut down to half its length, easily, without harming the story and probably making it better. I pushed through reading the whole thing and I don’t know if it was worth it. The confusing thing is that I definitely didn’t dislike this book. I don’t think I liked it, either. And I’m not even ambivalent about it. I’m having some kind of feeling about Harrow the Ninth, but I have no idea what. My opinions are about as incomprehensible as the majority of this book. I don’t know if I’ll read the next book. Maybe? I’m gonna need some time to untangle the disaster of whatever I feel about this one first.

The Locked Tomb series:

1. Gideon the Ninth
2. Harrow the Ninth
3. Nona the Ninth
4. Alecto the Ninth