lightreads

Those Beyond the Wall

3/5. Sequel/companion to The Space Between Worlds. There’s a lot going on here – a sort of Mad Max thing where the city has locked a cohort of (mostly PoC) people out for generations in the climate apocalypse, also universe hopping and a lot of family drama.

I did not like this nearly as much as the first one. It’s a rage book – specifically a George Floyd book – so be prepared for a raw, reactive kind of violence that feels very 2020/2021 (I really wonder what delayed this book, and if it would have played better for me and a lot of people otherwise). Mostly, I just found this book messy and concerned with stuff that doesn’t compel me; see the dramatic first person passages about becoming a monster. Also, the fixation this book has with how amazing! Mysterious! Legendary! Hot! The protagonist of the first book is got, frankly, kind of embarrassing.

It's doing good and interesting things, and there is a truly absorbing quality to her writing. But this just didn’t land with me.

Content notes: Recollections of child abuse, institutionalized racism, sex work, a lot of violence and gore

Ashes of the Sun

3/5. First book in a science fantasy trilogy about siblings separated when one is taken away to serve the order of powerful protectors (yes, there’s Star Wars DNA here) and the other vows revenge.

This series is a booktube darling and I thought it would be a good kick off for a (loosely held intention) year of reading all those big doorstop series I put off. Not a great start.

So many buzz words for me – science fantasy, Star Wars inspiration, heist – and yet this alternated between boring and annoying. There’s something about his writing that makes this feel YA even though it isn’t. I think it’s partly the thing where you can tell he assigns each character some sort of distinctive gesture – touching a scar, fiddling with glasses, etc. – and then has them do it incessantly. Did he get this at some 'writing better characters' workshop? Please, mercy. And don’t get me started on how gratingly irritating some of the characters are. One in particular was shooting for interestingly flawed and landed instead in manic pixie dream sociopath. Ick.

Anyway, this was just intersting enough to get me to the end, but I’m out. Booktube, I do not get it.

Content notes: Child harm, violence, some body horror.

A Power Unbound

4/5. Conclusion to this trilogy of queer fantasy romance historicals. I was waiting for this one as the couple was signaled in a prior book and I was like yes, inject it into my veins.

And yes, the romance is great. They fight each other hard across a huge and painful class divide. But they’re also playful about it; they work out much of the messy tension of their relationship via blazing hot class-based sexy roleplay. Here for it.

The other plot stuff does, you know, plot things, which I didn’t care about as much and I also thought landed too thematically on the nose for a book about the power of class and the power of magic. But it’s still a great time, and I’ll still read probably anything she puts out.

Content notes: Passing mention of rape. Deeper discussions of grief and loss. Various forms of compulsion – magical and otherwise.

The Spear Cuts Through Water

4/5. One of those books where summarizing the plot seems rather beside the point. Somewhat experimental fantasy about a guard and a runaway prince doing the bidding of a dying goddess to try and topple a corrupt monarchy, except also this is taking place in the theater of dreams.

I read this a month ago and am still chewing on it. You know how I was just saying literary fantasy isn’t my thing? Exception to every rule, I guess. This is a dense, structurally challenging book that, to name only the most obvious thing, contains first, second, and third person sections, each POV fulfilling a different structural purpose. This book fucks with time, perspective, reality, and a bunch of other things. It is disorienting and yet absorbing, violent, intense, tricky, sad, queer, and kind.

Not everyone will like this. Some will like it more than I did. But if you want the best of the best who are pushing the boundaries of the genre, here you go. No one writes like him, I’ll tell you that.

Content notes: A lot of violence. Imprisonment, implied rape and forced childbearing. Cannibalism I guess?

Starling House

3/5. Opal, who clings to the precarious edge of survival in her tiny southern town, gets a job at the local haunted house to pay for her brother’s ticket out of town. Stuff happens involving evil capitalists and old children’s books and creepy mines.

I have realized that I like the stories that Alix Harrow tells, but that I decidedly do not like the way she tells them. This is a book about found family – about opening your eyes and seeing the family right there reaching for you – and making a home and all sorts of other stuff I’m into. Also sentient houses. But it’s told in such an overly precious way that I just can’t with it. Everything in this book means so much, guys. There’s an emotionally significant Toyota logo at some point, for real. And this is the sort of book that has a protagonist who is a nearly thirty year old man, and yet the narrative refers to him consisently – insistently, even – as a “boy” throughout. For the vibes, you know.

I had this same problem with one of her prior books, which had a terrible case of capitalizing random nouns, which I feel is a symptom of the same kind of preciousness. Shame, because I otherwise would have really liked this.

Content notes: Violence, hauntings, threatened sexual assault/incest referenced, parental loss

The Mask of Mirrors
The Liar's Knot
Labyrinth's Heart

4/5. Get ready to be surprised. I read a series of chonker fantasy novels, and I liked it.

This is a trilogy about a con-artist who impersonates an unknown relative to insinuate herself into a noble house in a Venice-inspired fantasy city, where things get quickly more complicated because there’s a masked vigilante who keeps flirting with her, and also she is mixed race and uneasy in both the culture she infiltrates and the oppressed culture of her birth, and there’s a rebellion brewing, and dangerous magical artifacts, oh and also, she’s accidentally acquiring a family in the people she set out to con, whoops.

These books remind me of giant overstuffed armchairs. Too big? Yes. But that’s part of the fun. These books are full of things I like, including a whole lot of secret identities and living triple lives stuff. And, importantly, the sort of deliberate focus on made family – the kind that takes more effort than found family – that is my jam. All packaged up in an actual plot, yes, but it’s a meandering, sometimes puzzling one. Put it this way, I said “uh-huh, you sure did” when I discovered that the authors used their homebrew tarot system featured in the books to do a lot of plotting.

But yeah, I enjoyed myself. I just went on the ride with these books in a way I rarely manage to do. It can happen!

BTW, one half of the writing team here is Marie Brennan.

Content notes: Fantasy novel terrible childhoods, parental death, child death

He Who Drowned the World

4/5. Sequel to She Who Became the Sun, concluding this duology about the girl who dresses as a man – becomes a man, in most ways – to found the Ming dynasty.

Woof, this is a ride. I kept thinking, in mingled admiration and confusion, I don’t like this sort of thing, why do I like this so much? This is a violent, lurid, tragic seething psychosexual drama. Emphasis on the psychosexual. And the drama. And – well, really all of it. None of those are big draws for me.

But the thing is, there is a deftness, a depth to the way these books peer into unfittingness, and a complexity they afford themselves by way of having all of the central players be variously engaged in defying/escaping/suffering/manipulating/enduring/subverting/destroying their gender and sexuality. None of their modes of being would be particularly notable by themselves, but together they illuminate. Bloodily. Furiously.

Content notes: Um. A lot of death in horrible ways. Masochism. Homophobia and cisism. Domestic violence. Some complicated consent stuff.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

3/5. Lady pirate on the ancient Indian Ocean comes out of retirement for one last job, also her last husband may not be entirely human.

Lukewarm on this one. I know I’m in the minority here, but there is just something about Chakraborty’s writing that sucks the sparkly essence of interesting things away. Here, I wanted piracy, lady swashbuckling, lots of salty ocean love, and some chewy historical sailing stuff. Nope, none of that. I think maybe a swash was buckled once if I’m being generous, and if this allegedly great sea captain actually thought about the (all-consuming, to my knowledge) mechanics of sailing her ship even once, I missed it.

Also, Chakraborty had the poor judgment, in my view, to leave not only one note telling us how much research she did to make this historically accurate, but two! I mean okay, you do you, but I gotta say all the linguistic anachronisms and modern modes of thought in this book would not have bothered me if she didn’t make such a point of all the hundreds and hundreds of books she read for research. Do your research if it makes you happy, but you still have your historical pirate using very specific 2010’s internet speak and separately referring to a man as “so hot,” so maybe next time do the research and shut up about it so you don’t make people think your book is something it’s not?

There’s some nice made family stuff here, and complications with her daughter’s origins, and also an adventuring trans teenager. But this is setting up a series that I have little to no interest in following.

Content notes: Lots of violence, some body horror, threat of rape, some consent stuff as the result of magical influence

The Unbalancing

4/5. A complex little jewel of a fantasy about a nonbinary neurodivergent poet who sees ghosts and an intense, outspoken woman who leads their people by virtue of being magically connected to a star. This is a book about leadership and consent and empathy and failure and doing the work you are suited to and a lot of other things touched lightly but complexly. A little bit Patricia McKillip and a little bit Frances Hardinge for adults and a whole lot its own, very unique thing.

Content notes: Recollection of parental emotional abuse.

The Jasmine Throne

3/5. Sapphic feminist epic fantasy inspired by ancient India about the princess sent into exile to a colonized nation by her cruel brother, the maid tasked with keeping her compliant who has access to secret magic, and how they are drawn to each other as they use each other for their ambitions.

There are a lot of compelling key words up there, and yet it took me a full year to read this book. Is it lush and intricate? Yes. Magical and queer? Sure. Is it utterly and completely without a single moment of lightness, let alone even the faintest hint of humor? Oh god yes, and therein lies my problem. This book exists entirely, for nearly 200,000 words, at a minimum score of 8 on the dramatic!emotions! scale, with excursions upward. It’s about fate and what it is for a woman to be monstrous – to the world and to herself and how those are different – and yes, a whole lot of bad shit happens to everyone in this book. And not one person, for a single second, whistles in the dark. It’s just wall-to-wall dramatic speeches and hushed, meaningful conversation, and I’m sorry, but I just do not vibe with this sort of thing anymore.

This book particularly suffered in comparison to Tchaikovsky’s City of Last Chances, which I read concurrently with finishing this. City is grim as fuck, but also darkly funny. And I mean, look, you do not have to give me jokes. You do not have to make an execution scene so grimly strangely funny that I snorted, as Tchaikovsky did. But you do have to convince me that you understand that humans light candles in the dark, that we make fleeting joy for ourselves, that we just stop and take a breath once in a while. Suri gave me none of that.

Content notes: Forced drug use, a whole lot of burning women and children alive, other violence.