Review: She Who Became the Sun

Title: She Who Became the Sun

Series: The Radiant Emperor Duology #1

Author: Shelley Parker-Chan

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: War, death, death of children, misogyny (severe), sexism, injury, blood, gore, vomit (mentions), animal death (mentions), fire (mentions), racism, body shaming, ableism (severe), death of parents, cannibalism (briefly implied), alcohol use, classism, dysphoria (minor), toxic relationship

Back Cover:

“I refuse to be nothing…”

In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness…

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother’s identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate.

After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu uses takes the chance to claim another future altogether: her brother’s abandoned greatness.

Review:

I put a hold on this audiobook at the library, and I’ll admit, when it came ready I wondered what I was thinking. I’ve read a lot of Chinese- and East Asian-inspired fantasy lately, including a completely different one that was also a fantasy version of a real ruler of China’s journey to power. But I’ve also DNF’d many, many other similar books recently. So I was a little skeptical going in.

Everything on the back cover is basically the setup for the story. The girl does not get a name, either because her father and brother don’t think her important enough to use it or her family never bothered to give her one in the first place. Surrounded by famine so terrible that people have resorted to truly terrible means, there was no reason to put effort into keeping a daughter alive when you could instead save a son.

But the girl lives. She takes her brother’s name and identity to enter a monastery where there would be food. There she discovers how far she will go to survive. She believes her true fate is nothingness and death, but if she has a strong enough will, she can convince Heaven itself that she should live.

That is the story. It is a monk who is not a woman* but who must hide her woman’s body, whose choices are nothingness or greatness and who will sacrifice anything, even breaking her own heart in the process, to seize her fate. As a girl child in a world that would rather let a girl die than let a boy be uncomfortable, she chose to live by any means necessary.

She is not a good person, but she is a strongly compelling character, a queer anti-hero who does many things that are morally dubious or outright wrong but who I still want to see succeed.

Her journey is set against a war – the Red Turban Rebellion – as the Chinese attempt to overthrow their Mongol rulers. And hers is not the only perspective in the story. There is also the eunuch general of the Mongol rulers, biding his time in dubious favor with various Mongol nobility until he can get revenge for his slaughtered family. There is also Ma, engaged to the son of a Red Turban leader as the rebellion’s leadership jockeys for power, who gets significantly less page time but no less importance than the other two. The threads of fate surround everyone and draw them ever closer to their glory or doom.

This review is poetic because that’s what this book evokes. The writing style isn’t poetic, and the book itself is full of violence and gore and hatred, but the story feels like an epic saga, the kind of thing that gets put to song and sung throughout the land. I occasionally had a difficult time keeping the names straight – though I’m pretty sure that’s a limitation of reading it as an audiobook – and the sheer excess of misogyny was hard to read at times. But I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. The sequel hasn’t even been announced yet, but there is going to be one and I can’t wait.

*About gender and pronouns in the book: Though raised as a girl until age 9-ish, Zhu declares herself not to be a girl. She presents as a man and uses he/him pronouns with others, but declares herself to be in a space between or outside the two genders, neither male nor female. The parts of the book that are from her perspective use she/her pronouns for her, so that’s what I use in this review.

The Radiant Emperor Duology:

1. She Who Became the Sun
2. He Who Drowned the World (August 2023)

Review: Where the Drowned Girls Go

Title: Where the Drowned Girls Go

Series: Wayward Children #7

Author: Seanan McGuire

Genre: Portal Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (mild), trauma, anxiety attacks, child abuse, injury details (brief), blood (brief), fatphobia, body shaming, bullying, suicide attempt, forced institutionalization, eating disorder (mentions)

Spoiler Warning: This book is seventh in a series, and both it and this review contain spoilers of previous books.

Back Cover:

“Welcome to the Whitethorn Institute. The first step is always admitting you need help, and you’ve already taken that step by requesting a transfer into our company.”

There is another school for children who fall through doors and fall back out again. It isn’t as friendly as Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.

And it isn’t as safe.

When Eleanor West decided to open her school, her sanctuary, her “Home for Wayward Children,” she knew from the beginning that there would be children she couldn’t save; when Cora decides she needs a different direction, a different fate, a different prophecy, Miss West reluctantly agrees to transfer her to the other school, where things are run very differently by Whitethorn, the Headmaster.

She will soon discover that not all doors are welcoming…

Review:

This book is Cora’s book. Cora was in Beneath the Sugar Sky and Come Tumbling Down, but she hasn’t had her own story yet. This one is hers.

But it’s quite a bit different from the previous books. It’s not about her adventures on the other side of her door and how she was spit back out into our world against her wishes, or about her adventures at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, but rather her attempts to escape from the trauma that those things gave her. It also introduces the Whitethorn Institute, which is an alternate school to Eleanor West’s, and it’s not nearly as nice.

It turns out, though, than many of the worlds the door lead to are not as nice as the ones our previous protagonists have gone to (if places like the Moors can even be called “nice” – though some mentioned here are worse). The theme of trauma after the magical adventure runs throughout all the Wayward Children books, but it’s especially strong here. No doors are passed through in this book besides the ordinary type, and Cora has to reckon with what happened the last time she went through one.

I found Cora mildly dislikeable in Come Tumbling Down, but she was very relatable and lovable in this one. I absolutely relate to her frustrations with being fat and other people’s insistence that she chose to be that way and therefore she is lazy/disgusting/morally reprehensible, developing an eating disorder over it and still not losing enough weight to be considered “not fat,” and her attempting to hunch down and be smaller because she feels like she takes up too much space. It’s only mentioned as backstory in a couple spots, but it was so completely relatable. Her attempts to escape from the symptoms of her trauma even if people around her think her solution will also be bad for her was also relatable. Basically if you’re fat and/or traumatized, you’ll probably relate to her.

The Whitethorn Institute was also interesting, and the complete opposite of Eleanor West’s school. There were interesting characters there (including Regan from Across the Green Grass Fields), several twists about what’s actually going on here, trying to fix traumatized kids by traumatizing them in different ways, and a fascinating look at the more cruel, uncaring side of the doorways and the people that come back through them. It was very dark, it was full of trauma, but it was fascinating.

The Wayward Children books are always so good. I can’t say this one is perfect, mainly because I think Cora’s trauma was managed a little too fast to be believable, but it’s an enjoyable story in a fascinating world (or rather, a world populated with people who have been to and returned from fascinating worlds). Since this book just came out, I have no idea when they next one will be released or who it will be about (if you’re reading this, Seanan, Kade needs his own book!), but I absolutely want to read it when it is.

The Wayward Children series:

Wayward Children short stores

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: The Drowning Kind (DNF)

Title: The Drowning Kind

Author: Jennifer McMahon

Genre: Suspense/Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parent, death of child, drowning, psychological horror, death of animals (mention), pregnancy, childbirth, mental illness, forced institutionalization (mentions), alcoholism, unhealthy family dynamics, cancer (mentions), self-harm, infertility, drug use

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 59%

Back Cover:

Be careful what you wish for. When social worker Jax receives nine missed calls from her older sister, Lexie, she assumes that it’s just another one of her sister’s episodes. Manic and increasingly out of touch with reality, Lexie has pushed Jax away for over a year. But the next day, Lexie is dead: drowned in the pool at their grandmother’s estate. When Jax arrives at the house to go through her sister’s things, she learns that Lexie was researching the history of their family and the property. And as she dives deeper into the research herself, she discovers that the land holds a far darker past than she could have ever imagined.

In 1929, thirty-seven-year-old newlywed Ethel Monroe hopes desperately for a baby. In an effort to distract her, her husband whisks her away on a trip to Vermont, where a natural spring is showcased by the newest and most modern hotel in the Northeast. Once there, Ethel learns that the water is rumored to grant wishes, never suspecting that the spring takes in equal measure to what it gives.

A haunting, twisty, and compulsively readable thrill ride from the author who Chris Bohjalian has dubbed the “literary descendant of Shirley Jackson,” The Drowning Kind is a modern-day ghost story that illuminates how the past, though sometimes forgotten, is never really far behind us.

Review:

I can’t remember what exactly enticed me to pick this up. Maybe I found the idea of a wish-granting spring that takes in equal measure to what it gives intriguing. I think part of it is my library put it in a list of popular supernatural-based horror titles and I’m trying to expand my reading horizons. Regardless, I read it – or at least I tried to.

First, there’s Jax. While I was initially put off by her being a social worker who by her own admission isn’t self-reflective, I could definitely relate to being the ordinary child overshadowed by a charismatic sibling. In my case said sibling was younger and wasn’t naturally good at everything like Lexie, but being the forgotten good child while a charismatic Problem Child got all the attention is a situation I know all too well and created an instant connection with Jax.

I didn’t have that same connection with Ethel, whose story alternated with Jax’s. She wasn’t bad, but I didn’t see how her story fit into Jax’s and found her sections much less interesting.

I think this story was supposed to be a slow burn, but it ended up just being slow. I read 59% of it, and in that time, Ethel had gone to the hotel and wished for a baby, and Jax had gone to her grandmother’s estate to deal with Lexie’s death, cleaned the house, went to the funeral, and realized that Lexie had been investigating the pool (which is fed with water from the spring). The suspense was driven by the hints that there was something in the pool, and by the time I stopped I had worked out what was in the pool but Jax had just started to get curious about what Lexie was working on.

I thought this was supposed to be some sort of suspense/thriller thing with supernatural horror and I wasn’t getting any of that. I knew enough about the spring to feel like I already knew what it would take from Ethel, but not enough about it to know if it would want something from Jax. Lexie was already dead, and since nobody else that I knew of had made a wish, it didn’t feel like there was any threat. The only suspense was coming from the question of what exactly was living in the spring (which I figured out fairly quickly) and why the spring granted wishes and took things in return (although I got the feeling that the only explanation I was going to get for that one was “it’s supernatural”).

Admittedly, suspense/thriller isn’t my genre, so this all may be me more than the book. But I wasn’t getting any suspense or thrills out of this, and the slow burn ended up just being slow to me. The Drowning Kind just isn’t my book.

Review: Finna

Title: Finna

Series: LitenVerse #1

Author: Nino Cipri

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, serious injury, transphobia (mentions), misgendering (mentions, not on page), toxic relationship

Back Cover:

When an elderly customer at a Swedish big box furniture store – but not that one – slips through a portal to another dimension, it’s up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company’s bottom line. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but our two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago.

Can friendship blossom from the ashes of a relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.

Review:

This is a weird little book. It’s very short – almost into novella range – very creative, and very bizarre.

Ava works at not-Ikea (it has a different name in the book but if you’ve ever been to Ikea you’ll know it’s Ikea) and it’s a sucky retail job. Then a customer falls through a portal to a parallel universe, and Ava and her recent ex Jules, due to budget cuts and being the lowest seniority, have to be the ones to get her back. Armed only with a piece of weird tech that is supposed to guide them through the multiverse, they have to travel through parallel universes’ not-Ikeas to try and find the missing customer.

Ava and Jules are both stunningly accurate representatives of the weird limbo generation between young Millennial and old GenZ. They know capitalism is the problem but still work crappy jobs to live. Ava is a highly relatable ball of anxiety. Jules lives in a personal chaos field but is more capable than anyone believes. Jules also uses they/them pronouns, which customers can’t seem to figure out and their manager refuses to use.

The breakup between Ava and Jules was rough, and the adventure through the multiverse seemed to be an opportunity for them to work out their issues and see if they could still be friends more than an opportunity for the reader to explore parallel universes. They spend a noteworthy amount of time in only three universes (I think they may have briefly passed through a couple more on the way but they were barely mentioned), and in all three the book is more about their reactions and interactions in the face of the weird and dangerous than the actual weird and dangerous stuff.

Finna could have easily been expanded to twice its length or more – they could have spent more time in other universes, or the ambiguous ending could have been a halfway point to launch them into new adventures in the multiverse. But it also worked the way it is. There is a second book, but it focuses on a different employee from the not-Ikea, and I don’t know that we’ll see Ava and Jules again. But that’s okay. This story is open-ended and leaves lots of opportunities, and I like to imagine Ava and Jules both end up happy.

The LitenVerse series:

1. Finna
2. Defekt

Review: The Unspoken Name

Title: The Unspoken Name

Series: The Serpent Gates #1

Author: A.K. Larkwood

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of children, torture, body horror, mental/emotional abuse

Back Cover:

What if you knew how and when you will die?

Csorwe does — she will climb the mountain, enter the Shrine of the Unspoken, and gain the most honored title: sacrifice.

But on the day of her foretold death, a powerful mage offers her a new fate. Leave with him, and live. Turn away from her destiny and her god to become a thief, a spy, an assassin—the wizard’s loyal sword. Topple an empire, and help him reclaim his seat of power.

But Csorwe will soon learn – gods remember, and if you live long enough, all debts come due.

Review:

There seems to be a theme lately of me picking up long books with low expectations and actually enjoying them a lot (*cough*Spinning Silver*cough*). I was intrigued by the protagonist raised to be a human sacrifice and then deciding not to die, but that back cover didn’t seem like it would be worth a whole 18 hours of audiobook.

In a way, I was right. The entire plot on the back cover is done 65 minutes into the book – I actually looked at the timestamp because I couldn’t believe it was so fast. The beginning skims though Csorwe’s time at the temple of the Unspoken one, blazes though her choice, and covers two years in a matter of minutes (literally 2% of the book, I checked the timestamp). It was moving too fast for me to really care about much that was going on, interesting ideas be damned, and the only reason I didn’t stop there was because I didn’t want to get in trouble if I got caught having my phone out long enough to queue up another book.

But by the time I went on break and could have dropped this book and started a new one, I didn’t want to. Nearly an hour and a half in, the meat of the story finally started.

This is the book I switched out with The Body Keeps the Score (since I could only read that one two hours at a time and I needed something to fill the other six hours of a workday), and alternating the two makes for a heck of a reading experience. It’s never explicitly mentioned and I don’t even know if the author intended it, but Csorwe displays so many characteristics of an abused child. And none of the abuse is physical. Growing up as a destined sacrifice, it was lack of caring and connection and being told since she was old enough to understand that it was her duty to die and that’s what all the adults in her life wanted for her. After her escape, it was psychological and emotional (unless you count putting her in dangerous situations as physical abuse) from Belthandros Sethennai, the wizard who rescued her and who hits 8 of the 9 diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. And she genuinely loves him because she believes him convincing her not to become a human sacrifice means she owes him her life.

For something that seems like it should be a rollicking fantasy adventure and has so many wizard duels, creepy cultists, and fantasy settings, it is surprisingly character-driven. In fact, it is almost entirely character-driven. The only thing that could really be called a plot is that Belthandros wants a phylactery and uses Csorwe as one of his tools to get it. That doesn’t really sound like enough to fill 18 hours, but it’s also full of dead worlds, ancient crypts, snake goddesses, prison fortresses, reluctant allies, and a very sweet romance between Csorwe and an adorable research nerd in a similar situation to Csorwe before she met Belthandros. It was quite enough to keep me interested and engaged.

I have a ton of things I want to say, but considering that the entire back cover plot wraps up 5% of the way through the book, saying much more is probably a spoiler. The beginning was very rough, but after that I enjoyed it thoroughly. I didn’t know there was a sequel going in, and I don’t even know what it’s going to be about, but I love Csorwe, I enjoy her love interest, I thoroughly enjoy exploring all the weird and wonderful and eerie places that exist in this world, and I bet I will enjoy book two.

The Serpent Gates series:

1. The Unspoken Name
2. The Thousand Eyes (February 15, 2022)

Review: Once & Future

Title: Once & Future

Series: Once & Future #1

Authors: A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy
The names on the book cover are Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy, but these are the names on the authors’ website and seem to be what they prefer to go by as of this review.

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, death of animals, death of parent, murder, blood, gore, genocide, rape (mentions), violence, grief, body horror (mild-moderate), prison (brief), needles (mentions), being injected without consent, misgendering (once, accidental and immediately corrected)

Back Cover:

My name is Ari Helix. I have a magic sword, a cranky wizard, and a revolution to start.

I’ve been chased my whole life. As a fugitive refugee in the territory controlled by the tyrannical Mercer corporation, I’ve always had to hide who I am. Until I found Excalibur. Now I’m done hiding.

When Ari crash-lands on Old Earth and pulls a magic sword from its ancient resting place, she is revealed to be the newest reincarnation of King Arthur. Then she meets Merlin, who has aged backward over the centuries into a teenager, and together they must break the curse that keeps Arthur coming back. Their quest? Defeat the cruel, oppressive government and bring peace and equality to all humankind. No pressure.

Review:

King Arthur in space. Cool idea, right? It gets better.

King Arthur and his knights are reincarnated every so often. The 42nd King Arthur is Ari Helix, an illegal immigrant from a blocked-off planet currently on the run with her adopted brother after their mothers were arrested and imprisoned for not turning Ari in. They’re on the run from the Mercer Corporation, the galaxy-wide monopoly on everything that blocked off Ari’s planet for saying that monopolies were bad, actually, and basically are the government because if the government does something they don’t like they can just stop delivering food and water until the government changes their mind.

Ari herself is hard-headed, stubborn, devoted to those close to her, and deeply passionate about truth. She is almost physically incapable of telling a lie, hates lies by omission just as much, and once ended a relationship because she felt like her girlfriend not telling her every single thing about herself immediately up front was tantamount to being lied to. Not only did that make her an interesting character, but it functioned as both a positive thing and a character flaw depending on the situation.

Merlin was a point-of-view character, cursed to age backwards so a couple millenia after helping the original King Arthur he’s somewhere around seventeen. It’s his job to mentor each reincarnation of Arthur, train him (or her, in the case of Ari), and accomplish a series of steps that the Lady of the Lake set out to end the cycle of reincarnation. Forty-one Arthurs before Ari have died without completing the steps, and Merlin carries the guilt of every single one. He is also incredibly gay, and completely adorable falling for one of Ari’s “knights.”

All of the characters in this book are stellar (pun intended). From Ari herself to her love interest Gwen (regal, pragmatic, and literally queen of a planet); Merlin (terrified of de-aging out of existence and not sure what to do about teenage hormones) and Morgana (not quite a physical being and fairly terrifying); Ari’s knights, including her relentlessly practical brother and a nonbinary friend who uses they/them pronouns; and the director of the Mercer Corporation who gives the faceless evil company a hateable and very punchable face.

I’ve seen criticisms of this book saying the pacing is all over the place, and I can absolutely understand not liking this. But personally, I found it a delightful sort of chaotic. This book gets really dark at times, from relationship betrayals to literal genocide, and fits a lot of really intense emotions into less than 400 pages, but it’s balanced somewhat by witty quips and bordering-on-absurd situations. It’s one of those books where looking back some of it was a little ridiculous, but in the moment it was a great read.

Considering the end of this book, I’m not sure I want to read book two – the ending wasn’t bad, but it was setting up what sounds like a vastly different type of adventure, and I don’t know if that’s really what I want out of these characters and this concept. But this book was absolutely worth the read.

The Once & Future series:

1. Once & Future
2. Sword in the Stars

Review: When I Grow Up I Want To Be a List of Further Possibilities

Title: When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

Author: Chen Chen

Genre: Poetry

Trigger Warnings: Cancer, serious illness, sexual content (mild), racism, homophobia

Back Cover:

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family—the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes—all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one’s own path in identity, life, and love.

Review:

In one of the poems in this collection, Chen Chen responds to a friend saying that all his poems are about being Asian and gay. The friend was correct – these poems are about being gay, Asian, or gay and Asian. But that is not a bad thing. Poems are about feelings, and these poems are full of feelings.

Chen writes about the racism he and his family encounter for being not white in America. He writes about being an immigrant whose parents long for another country that they left when he was too young to remember. He writes about crushes on white boys who don’t notice him and the rough joy of loving another man. He writes about the many ways he disappoints his mother and how his parents reacted when he told them he was gay.

These poems are sometimes crass and crude, but it adds a hollow realness to the feelings, like the world is determined to hollow him out but somehow he’s still here, still writing, still gay and Asian and putting pen to paper to give words to everything trying to scoop the life out of him. This collection of poetry is very different from poetry I’ve read before, more harsh and brutal than elegant and beautiful, but the emotions were vivid and clear, and that is what poetry should be.

Review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Title: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Series: Wayfarers #1

Author: Becky Chambers

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: Death, violence, grief, xenophobia, war, genocide, drug use (mild), terminal illness, sexual content (discussed/implied but no on-page sex), blood, abelism, imprisonment, injury, trauma/PTSD-like symptoms

Back Cover:

Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect much when she joins the crew of the aging Wayfarer. While the patched-up ship has seen better days, it offers her a bed, a chance to explore the far-off corners of the galaxy, and most importantly, some distance from her past. An introspective young woman who learned early to keep to herself, she’s never met anyone remotely like the ship’s diverse crew, including Sissix, the exotic reptilian pilot, chatty engineers Kizzy and Jenks who keep the ship running, and Ashby, their noble captain.

Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy—exactly what Rosemary wants. It’s also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her life wasn’t part of the plan. In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe.

Review:

This is a really hard book to review, because despite what the back cover makes it sound like, Rosemary isn’t the main character. The story starts with her, but each member of the Wayfarer crew is a protagonist. This isn’t so much a story about Rosemary as much as a story about the people of the Wayfarer as individuals and a group.

Third-person omniscient perspective is hard to do, and either it was done poorly (which again, it’s hard, and I don’t blame Becky Chambers if she just didn’t get it right) or it wasn’t going for third-person omniscient and I just got confused by perspective jumps. It also skips through time a fair bit, too, glossing over days and sometimes months with little to mark it, leaving me occasionally confused. But those are overall minor problems, and didn’t take too much away from my enjoyment of the book.

The story starts with Rosemary, a girl running from her past and looking to get as far away as possible from her old life on Mars, joining the crew on the Wayfarer. She joins a delightful crew already there – Ashby, Kizzy, Jenks, Sissix, Dr Chef, Corbin, Ohan, and Lovelace the AI. All of them are well-developed and interesting, with unique personalities and backstories, and for the most part are people I would love to spend time with myself.

This is not a plot-driven book. In fact, up until the end there isn’t a whole lot of a plot. The Wayfarer takes a long-haul job that requires them to spend nine months traveling to a place that was until very recently a war zone, and this book is almost entirely these characters on this nine-month trip – interacting with each other, stopping off at occasional planets to get more supplies, occasionally meeting interesting people but mostly just being together. It’s heavy on the world-building and more than anything is a wonderful, sweet story of found family.

If you go into this expecting a rip-roarin’ scifi adventure, you’re going to be disappointed. Because that’s not what this book is. The world is stunning, but it’s not even about the science fiction. It’s a sweet, simple story of love and found family and choosing the people you are close to, and it just happens to be set on a wormhole-making spaceship in a spacefaring world and some members of this found family just happen to be aliens. There’s plenty of scifi to satisfy a scifi fan, but at the core are emotions. If you go in expecting that, you won’t be disappointed.

My only real disappointment is that the Wayfarers series is a bunch of standalone novels in the same world, so this is the only book where I’ll get to enjoy these particular friends. I might try reading one of the other books (number three looks most interesting at the moment), but regardless if I pick up any of the rest of the series, I still consider this book to be absolutely stellar (pun intended).

The Wayfarers series:

1. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
2. A Closed and Common Orbit
3. Record of a Spaceborn Few
4. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within

Review: Not Your Sidekick

Title: Not Your Sidekick

Series: Sidekick Squad #1

Author: C.B. Lee

Genre: Superhero with Dystopian vibes

Trigger Warnings: Misgendering (one instance, accidental and immediately corrected), kidnapping, imprisonment/confinement, kidnapping of parents, injury, violence, racism/xenophobia (by an obviously evil character), needles, being injected with something without consent

Back Cover:

Welcome to Andover… where superpowers are common, but internships are complicated. Just ask high school nobody, Jessica Tran. Despite her heroic lineage, Jess is resigned to a life without superpowers and is merely looking to beef up her college applications when she stumbles upon the perfect (paid!) internship—only it turns out to be for the town’s most heinous supervillain. On the upside, she gets to work with her longtime secret crush, Abby, who Jess thinks may have a secret of her own. Then there’s the budding attraction to her fellow intern, the mysterious “M,” who never seems to be in the same place as Abby. But what starts as a fun way to spite her superhero parents takes a sudden and dangerous turn when she uncovers a plot larger than heroes and villains altogether.

Review:

I didn’t have a lot of expectations going into this book. I needed a book for work, this one was immediately available at the library. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

On the whole, this book was really just fun. There is some dark stuff that happens, high schoolers nearly dying, and some heavy themes, but despite all of that the prevailing mood reading this story is fun. There’s superhero stuff and a big conspiracy, sure, but there’s also friendship and crushes and romances and high school and in a way it portrays how complicated life is. Jess may have parents and an older sister who are literally superheroes, but she still has to deal with school and internships and a crush on a girl who probably isn’t even into girls.

I hope the world gets explored further in the rest of the series, because it was fascinating. It’s set in the future, where people watch TV on holoscreens and cars are so self-driving they don’t have steering wheels at all and roombas have AI and personalities. And, of course, superheroes exist and are big stars. At first there are only hints that all may not be as cool as it seems, but as Jess and friends start to uncover the big conspiracy, it begins to look like this is a dystopian world where the people in charge are so thorough that nobody even realizes their world is dystopian. I expect and hope there will be more on that in book two.

On one hand, I do have a tendency to guess plot surprises way ahead of time. On the other hand, I feel like all the superhero-related surprises were telegraphed from a mile away. Everything that was superpower- or secret identity-related and trying to be a plot twist I called almost immediately. However, I didn’t guess anything related to the big conspiracy. And even though I guessed all the superhero-related twists, I didn’t mind too much because I was just having fun with the story.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable book. Not perfect and leaning towards the “mindless entertainment” end of the scale, but I enjoyed it a lot and it was an absolutely fun read. And the biggest plot thread in the book didn’t get wrapped up hardly at all, so I totally intend to read the next book.

The Sidekick Squad series:

1. Not Your Sidekick
2. Not Your Villain
3. Not Your Backup

Review: Red, White and Royal Blue

Title: Red, White and Royal Blue

Author: Casey McQuiston

Genre: Romance

Trigger Warnings: Homophobia, homosexual sex (explicit), invasion of privacy, attempted rape (mention)

Back Cover:

What happens when America’s First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?

When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius–his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There’s only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.

Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations and begs the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through? Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue proves: true love isn’t always diplomatic.

Review:

Things I generally don’t like in books:

1. The romance genre
2. Politics

Things that are in this book:

1. It’s a romance
2. Politics

Things that I really, really enjoyed:

1. This book

This was another recommendation from my mother-in-law, and I’ll admit I was skeptical. I’m not a romance fan, I’m not into rom-coms at all, and it’s the rare book where I’m not bored by any politics involved. So I was gobsmacked by how much I loved this book.

It’s just absolutely adorable. In this fictional world, the next president after Barack Obama is Ellen Claremont, a Texas Democrat, and Prince Henry is the grandson of the current British queen, Queen Mary. I think I tolerated the politics in this book because it’s either a distraction so Alex doesn’t have to think about feelings or an impediment to him and Henry being together as opposed to actually being a big part of the plot.

The main plot is an enemies-to-lovers romance, except it isn’t really enemies-to-lovers because the only thing Alex really hated about Henry was that he wasn’t kissing him right that instant, even though he didn’t know it yet. I can see how someone might find Alex’s complete inability to figure out that he’s into Henry unrealistic, but as a Known Bisexual who took nearly a decade to realize thinking about scissoring with same-sex friends were not in fact Straight Thoughts, I found it incredibly realistic and absolutely hilarious. My Kindle copy of this book has no less than 10 notes to the effect of, “Alex, you are so obviously not straight.”

This is just a feel-good read all the way around. The stakes are higher than what I assume an average rom-com would have just because Alex and Henry both have such high profiles, but it has a happy ending and it’s cute and fluffy and full of mutual pining and nothing too dark. The main antagonist is politics for the most part – the pressure to keep up appearances so Alex doesn’t screw up his mom’s reelection campaign and Henry doesn’t “hurt the British royal image.” But they’re so in love (and so horny, there are a bunch of sex scenes and I actually enjoyed them) that they’re determined to make it work even if they have to give up everything in the process.

I did not expect to like this much at all, let alone like it as much as I did. It’s adorable and sweet and cute and overall a really good story. (Plus the author is nonbinary, and I love seeing other nonbinary people succeed!) I absolutely see why my mother-in-law liked it so much, and I absolutely agree.