lightreads

Truthwitch and Windwitch by Susan Dennard

2026-04-07T19:59:53Z

Truthwitch and Windwitch

3/5. First two books of five in this upper YA epic fantasy about two chosen sisters separated by circumstance trying to find their way back to each other as war brews and there’s an underlying magical plot happening, and obviously there’s a prophecy.

These are definitely a cut above the norm. They have that frenetic YA pacing and some POV bloat even by book two, neither of which are my favorite. But they also have a density to the worldbuilding and a thoughtfulness about character that you don’t usually get. As well as a commitment to super slow burning the romances. Also, there is a sort of chosen one character (though that gets complicated as we go) and she is refreshingly, wonderfully a hot mess. If there’s an arc towards heroism here, it’s a long, slow complicated one full of lots of impulsivity and bad decisions.

So yeah, I get why this one floats to the top of everyone’s lists of YA fantasy. It does really have something. Two books worth, which is saying a lot for me, since I’m lucky to make it a quarter into anything YA these days. So when I say I’m good after two books, that’s actually a compliment. If you want chewy plotty long YA that prioritizes platonic sister relationships and lets all the character arcs breathe, here you go.

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Testimony of Mute Things by Lois McMaster Bujold

2026-04-04T17:30:54Z

Testimony of Mute Things

3/5. I picked this up because A meal of Thorns had a great episode on Paladin of Souls, and I was like ‘oh yeah, damn, that book did slap.’ And then like a fool I picked up this recent novella instead of rereading PoS.

This is fine. It’s a capsule story set much earlier in the timeline, which means a much younger and less seasoned Pen is solving a murder. A perfectly serviceable hour of entertainment, well-observed and characterized, but not much more than that. Kind of made me sad, actually. You could get an interesting podcast episode out of the Penric stories as a whole. There is some theology stuff to chew on there, and some gender stuff and some parenting stuff. But most of the entries on their own? No.

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Exadelic by Jon Evans

2026-04-01T00:54:40Z

Exadelic

1/5. I am a more evolved human who DNF’s books now, so it has been a long time since I finished something and was this mad about it. See, what happened was I started this while sick and injured and under a lot of stress, and quickly realized it’s bad, but I thought it was boring protagonist bad. Dumb Silicon Valley dude wank fantasies bad. But entertaining enough to create mild noise in my brain, and it sounded like more effort to get a new book, you know?

And then I read the last quarter and now I’m mad and I’m crawling out of my hole to tell you about it.

Let’s back up. This is a scifi technothriller about a boring software middle manager dude who gets told he is of cosmic importance by a new AI, sending him off on a journey through the multiverse and time to try and save the world. One of those scifi books where the author had a huge pile of things (magic as software exploits, occult horror AI, multiverses, Dyson Spheres, the Black Dahlia, etc. etc.), refused to discard a single one of them, and stitched them all together with an afterthought of a narrator who somehow got less and less interesting the more time we spent with him. Also, the sex in this book is seriously cringe.

But then I got to the part where – I’m not going to spoiler cut this. I’ll keep it to general situational vibes, but if you really don’t want to know, stop here. There’s a point where our loser protagonist ends up in a future where humans are so scared of AI that they have outlawed all progress and live in a weird, stunted leisure society. Their fear of AI is pretty legit considering there is a history of Ais committing genocide. But the whole point of the book is to sneer at this society and for our protag to think snidely about how they have a slave class of sub-intelligent robots, and he’s got to fix everything by allowing free and rampant AI development.

Which, like. I’m not one of those people who froths at the mouth about how AI kills kittens or whatever. But my dude. My man. What. The fuck. It’s the smugness about the slave labor that gets me. Like, excuse me? Slave labor is not an exclusive feature of stagnant societies. Exploitation is often the engine of progress! Including in the AI boom right the fuck now!

And it’s not like he’s making a big intellectual stand here – the book isn’t even internally coherent enough for that. Our protagonist himself is literally exploited for labor at multiple points! By AIs!

Ugh. At least being this annoyed has cleared my sinuses.

Content notes: Torture, drugged sex, noncon

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Time of the Cat by Tansy Rayner Roberts

2026-03-06T00:52:52Z

Time of the Cat

3/5. Sci-fantasy time travel about the future scholars paired with talking cats to romp through history.

Connie Willis, but make it way zanier. I picked this up the day our cat went into the kitty ER (he’s fine, he ate approximately four feet of ribbon but they got it back out without surgery). It was good for that day spent waiting, but after that exhausted/worried interval there was still more book, and it went weirder and more spaghetti splat than I wanted. Like there was so much happening in this book simultaneously, and all of it – the zany talking cat parts and the far future parts and the multiple factions parts and the romance parts and the trying-to-be-serious memory loss parts – were all treated with the same cheerful rush, which left me unsatisfied.

A good head empty no thoughts day book, but otherwise, kind of a frenetic mess. Also, I genuinely don't know why the protag was still into the love interest by the end, she did not sell me on that in the slightest.

Content notes: Memory manipulation.

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What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

2026-03-01T19:42:09Z

What Moves the Dead

3/5. Historical fantasy horror novella about a nonbinary former soldier going to the literally moldering home of old friends, and getting caught up in a whole fungus horror situation. (This is the Fall of the House of Usher one, if unclear).

We all know I am somewhat dead inside, so perhaps it is not surprising that I found this only mildly creepy, after having been told it is absolutely terrifying. Take that as you will. I enjoyed this, but it’s not really my sort of thing and I feel no need to carry on with the series. I do wonder whose decision it was to use “they” on the jacket copy re our protagonist rather than the textual neopronoun used in the book. I say ‘hmm’ about that. The background to the whole pronoun situation, and the historical context in this fictional tiny European country, is kind of great, though.

Content notes: Fungus horror, dead bodies moving horror, body horror, animals being creepy.

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Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes

2026-02-28T19:46:04Z

Chilling Effect

3/5. Adventure scifi featuring a Latina space captain trying to go straight with her ragtag crew, until the space mob kidnaps her sister.

I enjoyed the first half of this – repetitive but in a rompy way, messy family dynamics, great crew of women and aliens, unapologetic about the Spanish sprinkled in and not spoon-feeding translations of everything, did I mention Latina space captain. But it overstayed its welcome by a good 40,000 words and the last third is a hot mess. For real, if you find yourself as an author doing a “character is secretly a [redacted!]” okay, fine, but then if you do the exact same plot twist with literally the exact same redacted on a different character 30 pages later, you’ve just got to stop yourself and cool it, you know?

Points for cute interspecies romance (though I’m me, so I have questions about how the fade-to-black sex worked, exactly).

Content notes: Violence.

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Sunward by William Alexander

2026-02-25T01:03:38Z

Sunward

4/5. Slim scifi novel about a woman from the moon running currier jobs, while on the side she raises up baby Ais, who require care like extraordinarily precocious children.

I’m hard to charm so far this year, but this book managed it. It’s sweet in the right places, thorny in others, and does a fun/interesting tour of parts of this futuristic solar system. This pleased and distracted me during a difficult week with its space parrot and road trip.

I will say that it has odd pacing, which suddenly clicked into place for me when I looked up the author and discovered he’s previously written middle grade. Ding ding ding. This is a novel concerning mostly adult topics, but paced like middle grade. It may be less jarring if you go in knowing that.

Content notes: Violence, robots treated like property while obviously being people (not by the protagonist)

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DNFs

2026-02-16T19:21:19Z

Swordcrossed by Freya Marske

I’ve really liked some of her other books, but this one (secondary world M/M fantasy) just did not click. I got it from the library three times and appreciated Marske’s writing (always a highlight) but the trope set and the relationships just did not get me. Probably better if you like the inveterate liar falls in love thing.

Heavenly Bodies by Imani Erriu

Booktube strikes again. Enemies to lovers romantasy about the princess of the shadow kingdom kidnapped by the sunlight kingdom to train to kill a god. I was told this had good banter. The first 15% did not demonstrate that, just a lot of ham-handed writing and some cartoon sketchy worldbuilding. Meh.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

I think his Underground Railroad is genius. Which is saying something, since I generally do not like when a book has a speculative twist but gets shelved as literary. This falls in the same camp – it’s a literary take on the post zombie apocalypse thing. Meh. Genre has done it better, with more interesting people (our main character here is deliberately a boring sad sack, but still), and at least the genre book wasn’t like “but what if capitalism was the zombie all along, huh, huh, huh? How about that?” Well, okay, some genre books do that, but we don’t have critics shouting about how brilliant and innovative that is.

Luminous by Silvia Park

Literary scifi about three siblings (two human, one robot) in a future unified Korea. I developed a near instant dislike for this book. I am told it is interesting and goes deep on the relationships between humans and robots. Robots in this future being property and commodities as a formal matter, but as a functional matter serving as everything from members of the family to romantic partners to servants to victims of horrendous abuse, often more than one of those. There was something about the prose style that was like sandpaper to my ear, and I could tell in just the quarter I read that there was going to be a certain emotional grotesquery here that left me nauseous. It’s supposed to, but meh, no thanks, life’s too short.

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Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

2026-02-14T18:45:49Z

Of Monsters and Mainframes

3.5/5. The one about the ship AI and medical AI who are frenemies but stuck on the same ship together, and how they and a werewolf and a mummy and a vampire and a bunch of spider drones go on a revenge mission against Dracula.

If that sounds wacky zany and like a whole bunch of things got thrown in a blender, correct.

I enjoyed this, even including the sometimes odd mix of humor and horror. (This book doesn’t really have humans, except as occasional set dressing, generally as corpses). The AI POV here is particularly good. The ship AI has vastly more processing power than the medical AI but no “human interaction protocols,” so yeah, that’s how that goes. I actually laughed out loud, which is rare for me.

Marking down only for the structure, which is simultaneously messy and repetitive. Quite the trick. I was willing to roll along with it for a lot of this book, because I was enjoying myself, but at a certain point I could have used a tad less spaghetti on the wall, you know?

Content notes: Mass death by vampire, werewolf, etc. AI equivalent of mind control.

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JD Robb/Nora Roberts

2026-02-11T00:41:57Z

Stolen in Death

3/5. A nice entry that returns to the intimate murder mystery format, with a throwback (and hopefully a permanent conclusion) to an old storyline about Roarke’s past. There’s been something a bit tying-off-loose-ends feeling about the last few books. I mean . . . reasonable.

Mind Games

3/5. Standalone about the woman with largely undefined psychic powers who becomes mentally linked with the man who murdered her parents; also, a romance with a former rock star. This one is okay, by virtue of having only a soupcon of paranormal. She can’t handle any more than that. I will say, her general, IDK, emotional investment in prisons was on full display here. She’s just really, really interested in prison being absolutely and unlivably terrible, and wants you to know about that in the sort of sensual, loving detail she otherwise reserves for descriptions of home renovations. I have tried to unsee how deeply invested in this she is, but I can’t, and it honestly creeps/grosses me out in every book now.

Content notes: Murder, animal harm, the psychic equivalent of internet spamming someone and telling them to kill themselves.

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The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

2026-02-04T19:19:50Z

The Everlasting

3/5. Fantasy about the soldier turned scholar who ends up going back in time (and back . . . and back . . . and back) to meet the lady knight who is pivotal to the founding myth of his nation. Arthurian time travel about nation-building and myth creation and racism.

Man, I don’t know what it is, but I just do not like Alix Harrow books the way I should. Even this one, where the overwrought quality of her writing finally has a story to match its tone. The writing in some sections is notably strong, I should say. But there is something in every single one of her books that I cannot put my finger on, and it just annoys the crap out of me.

I will admit this is structurally clever. The narrative gets rewritten multiple times to create new founding national myths, and she manages that while not being too terribly repetitive, and also establishing a few important touchpoints that orient the reader to how the angle of history has changed in just a few sentences. That is well done.

I still don’t know. The one objection I can concretely point to here is that I don’t like the way this book centers nation-building around the ego and trauma and psychopathy of one single person. The metaphor of it all collapses there, because that’s not how this works. Systems of racial oppression and societal violence don’t form on the whim of a single person, and there is something trite in the way Harrow has her villain reconstructing this nation over and over again based on, like, ten minutes of history that get played out a thousand years before the modern day events. Which is a real objection – I think that is a weakness of the book. But it’s not the thing I found annoying and off-putting, and I still don’t know what that is.

I’d bet on this to go on a bunch of award lists, though, just you wait.

Content notes: Racialized oppression, violence in war and otherwise, discussion of the killing of civilians, mention of stillbirth and sexual assault, something that is not the death of children but awfully close.

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Slow Gods by Claire North

2026-02-04T00:46:11Z

Slow Gods

3/5. Science fiction about a guy who grows up in and gets crushed by a kleptocratic fascist state, and how he is transformed, and what happens when an alien arrives to tell the scattered worlds of humanity that a supernova is about to wipe half of them out.

Interesting. Lots of things to say here. First, to be clear, you won’t ever catch me arguing that North isn’t a talented and unusual writer. She’s a good stylist, too. This book is science fiction in set dressing, but that’s wrapped around an eldritch and fantastical core that she is too smart to ruin by explaining or caging. I won’t spoil it more than to say that a lesser writer would have made this book about the protagonist’s attempts to understand the weird and creepy thing that happened to him. Instead, the reader understands that, mostly implicitly, and the book can go on about its business of being about immigration and politics and cultural preservation and assimilation.

Also, this is a book about autism. An autism metaphor, specifically. North has said this was a result of her own recent diagnosis, and I’m not in the business of critiquing how a person processes that in fiction. I will say that I would be critiquing the substance of it if this were not own voices, because I think parts of the portrayal (the equivalent to autism meltdowns, in particular) lean into a kind of scary stereotype of the violently uncontrolled autistic person. But because it is own voices, I’ll sit here and defend North’s right to process as she sees fit, even if that means grappling with some stereotypes in a messy way that didn’t land, at least for me.

All in all it’s an interesting book and I’m glad I read it.

Content notes: Fascist hellscapes – debt slavery, violence, imprisonment, medical experimentation, mass death and genocide through negligence.

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Teacup Magic by Tansy Rayner Roberts

2026-02-03T00:08:07Z

Teacup Magic

3/5. Collection of three gaslamp romantic fantasy novellas (link goes to the first, I couldn’t find the exact collection in print that I got on audio) about a clever young woman who is determined to marry for love and who ends up in various magical problem-solving adventures with a handsome and mysterious spellcracker.

Frothy and fun, and they take themselves exactly as seriously as they ought. These are set on an archipelago of islands one of which is named, wait for it, Town. So you would go to Town for the season. So I liked these, but as always I struggled a bit with this regency-but-also-queer-norm world. Misogyny definitely exists in these stories, but they otherwise skip merrily past all the messy questions of property and inheritance and patriarchy that a queer norm world presents. Not the point, yes, but I always ask the wrong questions of these kinds of settings.

I will keep reading these if I can (a lot of her work apparently doesn’t get audio rights in the U.S.).

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Kill the Beast by Serra Swift

2026-02-02T01:08:12Z

Kill the Beast

3/5. Standalone fantasy about a very angry young woman who gets hired to kill the dangerous beast that killed her brother.

This is just okay. Points for having the relationship that develops between protag and her employer be a friendship rather than a romance. Otherwise, this telegraphs its twists so hard that I spotted the one that drops around the 75% mark when I was only 15% in. Yikes. And it’s not just about wanting to be surprised, either – the emotional arc of this book probably only works decently well if you don’t see everything coming. Because the protag doesn’t, and she does need a few hard kicks to get her head on straight. But when you do see everything coming, it all just takes too long to play out.

Content notes: A lot of violence, references to parental death and abandonment, alcoholism.

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The Last Soul Among Wolves by Melissa Caruso

2026-02-01T01:03:09Z

The Last Soul Among Wolves

3/5. Sequel to The Last Hour Between Worlds, which I quite enjoyed. Secondary world adventure fantasy with F/F rivals to friends to enemies to lovers.

If you go by this blog, you’d think I read nothing in January. Which is not true, I did. I was also doing nanowrimo just because (I finished, obviously) and had few words left at the end of the day, so now we catch up.

Anyway, this was not as fun and stylish as the first, but was a pleasant enough romp. I will say, as enticement or warning, that it has become clear to me that Caruso writes her heroines as demi or ase. She is two for two by my count. More power to her, but I will say that either the book was slow to spell it out or I was slow to pick up the clues, because I had already started to wonder why this relationship felt so . . . nonsexual, non-electric, etc., a few hundred pages before I realized that yes, that is by design. She is doing a lot here to create emotional tension, which I liked, but if I’m being honest, the lack of sizzle took some of the air out of the emotional side for me. So, take that as you will.

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At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald

2025-12-30T18:08:18Z

At the Back of the North Wind

1/5. 1870’s children’s christian fiction about the son of a coachman who makes friends with the north wind.

It would be reasonable to ask why I read 1870’s children’s christian fiction. The answer is that I read this as a child, but remembered nothing about it other than the title and the sound of the narrator’s voice saying it. I recently found the digitized version of that old cassette audiobook (thank you, National Library Service – in general, I mean, not for this in particular) and I got curious.

Woof, I am allergic to this book. Its preaching, its sanctimony, its moralism. On the one hand, it could be worse. The author was a christian-socialist who was definitely not wrong that, say, drinking and smacking your wife around is bad. His opinions were apparently very unpopular at the time. But it doesn’t ultimately matter what stripe of preaching this is when you are allergic to the whole project. Philosophically, I mean. The thematic statement of this book is, as one character says, “kindness is but justice,” and bleh, fuck right off with that. It’s a view of the world and who gets what and who deserves what that I violently disagree with.

Also, not for nothing, I said “are you fucking joking” out loud when I realized where this book was going. I’m pretty sure I don’t remember this book well because I didn’t understand or like it as a child. I do remember his Princess and the Goblin, which I think I reread quite a bit, but I think I’m good now. The offensive ending, by the way, is literally ( spoilers I guess? ).

I think I would be less annoyed by this if it didn’t have these flickers of good fantasy in it. Something wild and creative and extremely weird. But whenever he started down that road he would pull abruptly back and suddenly re-christian everything.

Content notes: *gestures upward*

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Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell

2025-12-22T01:09:28Z

Arboreality

4/5. A novella consisting of linked stories of the slow climate apocalypse in western Canada, focusing on the relationship between humans and trees.

Ah, lovely. I am often skeptical of these more literary speculative projects, but this one is a winner (literally, I picked it up because it won the Le Guin a few years ago and that award is reliably looking at interesting things). A sad elegy strung through with hope, a hard book about hard things, a beautiful book about beautiful things. It’s telling a multi-generational story of the warming world through ecology. The angles here are unexpected – an old man rewilding his abandoned neighborhood, a luthier making the last violin he can make, the surly keeper of a tree cathedral.

Recommended if you like that sort of thing, and can take this book’s occasionally too self-conscious of its symbology-ness.

Content notes: The slow dissolution of modern life and what that means for treating the sick and dying.

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This Brutal Moon by Bethany Jacobs

2025-12-19T19:24:34Z

This Brutal moon

3/5. Third book in this scifi trilogy, really do not start here.

Damn, it didn’t land it. It didn’t terribly fumble it either, but.

Let’s back up. I really liked the first book in this trilogy, which you should absolutely go into unspoiled because the ride is worth it. But she had to do different modes with the next books for plot and structure and not repeating herself reasons. Unfortunately, I was glad to see these people again, but I think this whole series lost momentum and vitality. And the deeper this series got into the story of a remnant population barely clinging on after a genocide several decades ago, well. She says they aren’t supposed to be space Jews, but, like, girl. These books are doing that thing where they valorize an oppressed population and an oppressed culture in a way that is both satisfying and also uncomfortable, if you get me. Satisfying in the way a reductive viewpoint is satisfying. Uncomfortable in the way a reductive viewpoint is uncomfortable.

Also, I am not at all qualified to opine on this, but I’ve caught the edges of conversations from people who think she has valorized her space Jews right over the border into weird antisemitic trope land, which did jump out at me when ( spoilers for the end of the first book ). Anyway, do with that what you will.

Look, I’m complaining about this a lot, but I genuinely think the first book is doing cool stuff, and I genuinely think the whole series is thinking about identity and refugees and cultural violence and retribution and repair. All chewy, important stuff. Also, the way women and nonbinary people are allowed to be intense and obsessed with each other and over-the-top in the first book is the good shit. I’m glad I read it, even though the last book had serious POV bloat (way too many) and didn’t land with the force I wanted it to.

Content notes: Torture, violence, discussions of genocide, child loss.

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There Is No Antimemetics Division by Qntm

2025-12-12T21:31:40Z

There Is No Antimemetics Division

4/5. A short novel about what it would be like to be an organization fighting anti-memes (powerful eldritch somethings that can effectively erase information from the universe, including from human memory). How do you fight a war for humanity when you keep forgetting a war is happening at all?

A very interesting mechanism of a book. I enjoyed watching its strangely-shaped gears catch one to the next, partly because this is the sort of story that my brain would not have come up with given several centuries of work. Not just the story itself, but the entire odd structure that makes it go. I do think I fundamentally disagree with one of this books premises about how human beings work, but sure, okay, I’m willing to go with the idea that the people who work at this particular organization are odd ducks who will, for example, have an entire decade of life scooped out of their head by a cosmic horror and who will just kinda shrug and go about calmly reconstructing their life from the evidence left behind.

I will say as a point of flavor more than a warning: this book has that particular approach to character where people are extremely unembodied. Indeed, you could be forgiven for picturing the entire cast as brains in a jar that go about acting on the world and on each other without much affect at all. People do have internal lives, but we glimpse them at odd angles and through narrow pinholes, like when we only get to know about a marriage when one of the spouses has forgotten the other and reads the surveillance reports on them. It’s all definitely a vibe, and not my style, but here it works.

Content notes: Cosmic horror, other kinds of creeping horror of knowing you’ve forgotten something terrifying, violence.

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Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

2025-12-08T21:31:03Z

Salvage Crew and Pilgrim Machines

4/5. A pair of related scifi novels largely narrated by sentient ships in a plausible corporatist space future. The first book is a sort of survival horror first contact situation, and the second is philosophical space exploration and consideration of mortality on the personal and galactic scale.

I like these. They manage that trick of feeling old-fashioned in the best way. Particularly the big ideas exploration book – it’s giving Niven or Vinge or Baxter or similar, except, you know, not variously phobic and -ist. Actually, several of the characters are Buddhist, which offers a really interesting lens on some more classic science fictional topics.

I’m a little suspicious about why these books didn’t take off, TBH. He got buzz early on, then seemed to fall off the map. I’m pretty plugged into new and interesting SFF, and I’ve only heard about him from one person. I have a suspicion this is because he openly talks about how he uses AI. E.g., in the first book here, he had AI generate hundreds of short poems on various themes, and he picked several for his AI ship to “write.” He is transparent about how he prompted and why he did it that way. I suspect this got some sort of AI stink on him, professionally, which is a real shame.

I will also add, they got Nathan Fillion to read the first audiobook. Normally I do not like these celebrity narrators, but actually, it’s kind of brilliant? He has this bro-y cynical depressive emotionalism that hit just right for the ship narrator of that book.

Content notes: Corporate hellscape stuff, body horror.

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The Montessori Child: A Parent's Guide to Raising Capable Children...

2025-12-07T22:02:44Z

The Montessori Child

4/5. What it sounds like, focusing mostly on the 6-12 age range, and a bit on the teenage years. A good survey book that passes lightly over a lot of things and gives good recommendations for where to look for deeper info. The sort of book that will say in passing that of course a child’s gender may not be as a parent wants or expects and a parent should follow the child’s lead. Good information delivered in a paragraph whereas the people who need it the most probably need a full book on it. Useful to me largely in that it made me realize that I already know most of this, at least in general. Good to know some things have stuck after all the parent ed Cb’s montessori school does.

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At Midnight Comes the Cry by Julia Spencer-Fleming

2025-12-06T19:55:17Z

At Midnight Comes the Cry

3/5. Tenth in this series of mysteries about the episcopal priest and the police chief (they are married with baby at this point).

I’m always happy to spend more time with these characters, but I’m gonna be honest here: I come to this series for small town stuff and mysteries and a light but intense approach to relationships. I do not come for white nationalist terrorism or action movie stuff. And yet, guess what I got here.

This also feels like a final book, with a weirdly pasted on ‘five years later’ epilogue. Which is fine if that’s how it is, but I was disappointed in the treatment that a secondary couple got. She is so good at relationships that shouldn’t work but do. In this case, a divorced woman in her thirties with young kids and a history in the porn industry, and an early twenties rookie on the police force. She does messy but magnetic so well, and she let them develop over many books. So I found the conclusion(?) to their story here, and how little attention was paid to the thorny emotional stuff between them, to be uncharacteristic and disappointing. Same take on the resolution(?) of the addiction plotline.

Content notes: White nationalism of several flavors, violence (domestic and otherwise)

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Saint Death's Herald by C. S. E. Cooney

2025-12-03T17:30:30Z

Saint Death's Herald

3/5. Sequel, do not start here. Further wholesomely necromantic (it’s a vibe) adventures. Rough road trip when you have to chase down your great grandfather’s psychopathic ghost.

This book continues in the footsteps of the first by being cheerfully morbid, with great character work and complicated relationships. Weird thing though: I thought the first book was messy and oddly paced and overlong. This sequel is about 9 hours of audio shorter (so about 90,000 words, give or take) and so straightforward, I was baffled. Then the author said in the afterword that her editor made her cut 90,000 words, and ah. I see. I think I actually would like a little more mess in this book, believe it or not. Maybe the third book can get it just right.

Anyway, my point is: read if you would like a sort of T. Kingfisher plus Tamsyn Muir vibe plus normalized polyamory and queerness. And a reanimated tiger rug as the noble steed. And an undead wolf who is a very good boy.

Content notes: Death, violence, possession, mind control.

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All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

2025-12-01T15:34:06Z

All That We See or Seem

3/5. Marketed as scifi, but it’s actually a near future AI tech thriller about the loner hacker who gets tangled up in the search for a missing woman whose job is weaving AI-enhanced mass dream experiences.

Meh. A lot of the AI speculation here is really interesting. It’s all extremely plausible – the internet mostly just bots shouting at each other, everyone with means having a personal AI assistant who is trained to think specifically like them, what new kinds of art really draw people in as authentic, etc. – but speculates about these things while touching lightly on how they are bad and how they are good. Letting it be complicated with AI, can you imagine? Is that even allowed? In the era where I have been told that I’m a “traitor to humanity” for occasionally finding a particular AI powered accessibility tool to be extremely helpful in ways no prior tool has ever come remotely close to? Oh but surely we can’t have nuance in these conversations, oh no.

Unfortunately, everything else about this book is meh. The villain POV (please stop), the weirdly flat delivery of events that are supposed to be tense or upsetting, the main character and the shallow thriller treatment of her trauma, the “twist” in the epilogue.

This makes me not want to read his fantasy, actually. Does it have the same problems, or is he trying too hard to write like a thriller guy?

Content notes: Violence, slavery.

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Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

2025-11-27T00:15:15Z

Katabasis

3/5. The elevator pitch on this is two grad students go to hell to retrieve their dead advisor in order to get recommendation letters. As you might expect, there’s a bit more to it than that.

Congratulate me, I finally finished an RF Kuang book. This was my third attempt in five years.

Parts of this are great. Some really sharp and accurate observations of what you do inside your mind as a woman trying to succeed under the authority of an asshole man. My circumstances were different, but boy did she nail the compromises, the things you tell yourself, the ways you try to out-competent misogyny (it doesn’t work that way). This book is also constructed on paradoxes as a magic system, and it goes hard on the double-think you have to engage in to survive that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really like anything else: the characters, the whole hell set of nested metaphors, the romance (god help me, I really cannot with that). I’m being a bit unfair here because I think I’m irritated at this book in part because of how some people talk about it. For real though, some people think this book is like some super deep intellectual masterpiece. And my dudes. I am concerned for you. This is the wikipedia version of formal logic. I know extremely little about this field and I can still tell that. It is not deep. This is not an insult, it’s just, you gotta be able to recognize a spade when it’s in front of you.

This was not really for me, but maybe one of her other fantasies will be, someday.

Content notes: Misogyny, a lot of suicidal ideation, ableism, sexual coercion, murder, gore.

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