Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller

Blackfish City

2/5. Dystopic future scifi about a floating city in the arctic ruled by software and shareholders. A woman arrives with her nano-bonded killer whale and disrupts the power structure.

There are interesting ideas here, but many too many of them – psychic animals? Mystery STI? Crimelord war? Revenge plots? Asylum breakouts? Long lost family? Anti-capitalist uprisings? I could go on. It all becomes a mélange of short, jerky chapters and emotional beats that don't have time to breathe. And not even the presence of multiple queer characters, including a nonbinary person POV, could keep my interest.

Rafe: A Buff Male Nanny by Rebekah Weatherspoon

Rafe: A Buff Male Nanny

3/5. She's a brilliant young black surgeon with twins and a childcare emergency. He's a hot buff tattooed white guy who is a professional nanny to the rich and busy. They have a lot of chemistry.

Haha, okay. This is a lot of very frank horny porn packaged in a cute story about kids and blended families and good parenting. I'm glad she really went for it with the title – it tells you exactly what sandbox this book is playing in, and inverting. That inversion – she's the one with the money and a lot of the power, he's the one doing incredible amounts of hard domestic labor – rewrites some of the weird dynamics of these single-parent-hooks-up-with-the-nanny stories. You know, the ones where you have to wonder not-so-secretly if he decides to propose because hey, now he doesn't have to pay her for all that work she does. Swapping the usual gender roles here messes with that, and does a lot of other good stuff with masculinity and domestic skill and other things.

Note you can kinda tell she rushed to finish this, though. If she wasn't under deadline, I'd be shocked. Still, a fun, light, occasionally woke good time.