lightreads | Entries tagged with abandoned

Seven Devils by Elizabeth May and Laura Lam

Enemies to lovers sapphic (at least that’s where I assume it’s going, based on the setup) scifi about the heir to the evil galactic empire running away to join the rebellion, and the ship mechanic she is forced to work with despite bad history. Sounds potentially fun, right? It might be, but this was sold as adult and no. Incorrect. This reads so much like YA, I had formed this opinion before even finishing the first page. Not in the mood, particularly for this brand of YA where the main characters are supposed to be in their twenties but are in their feelings – and their feelings about their feelings – as if they are sixteen. Probably reads better if you know what it is going in. Why do publishers mismarket a book like this?

Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn

Woof. If I’d read this in the 90’s when it came out, I would have eaten it up with a spoon. It’s 90’s romantasy, using that definition of romantasy as ‘reads like YA but with more sex.’ I read 25% of this and came so close to liking it. Young prince who wants to do things smarter not harder, and what’s up with the dragons. But I just cannot with the gender and sexual politics here. There was a lot that was hard to swallow (the dying father advising his son to make sure his wife knows who is the “master” in bed, and the book is like way into that) but I noped out for good when our hero finds out our heroine isn’t a virgin (like he is) and throws a massive tantrum. I suspect he will improve but nope. Out.

The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong

Cozy fantasy about the travelling seer whose lonely existence is disrupted by accidentally acquiring a found family, also various plot things. Lots of people like this one. I have no soul, so was variously bored and annoyed by it, even though it is perfectly competent at what it is doing.

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

Trans scifi with a literary bent that is supposedly about the trans kid of trans parents discovering that they were revolutionaries after their deaths. I could not pay attention to this to save my life, and I don’t know why, since I gave up so early and have little sense of it. Worth trying again sometime?

All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry

Vivid and atmospheric YA about two deeply co-dependent teenaged girls who party hard and eventually encounter the supernatural by way of a boy musician. Good at what it’s doing, but I’m over YA in general, and also not in the mood for girls fighting over a dumb boy, and also this is doing that thing of ‘is it real or are they just stoned?’ which, meh. Should have read this ten years ago back when I first got it from Audible, oops.

Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson

Definitely a case of what is wrong with me? Contemporary british fantasy about five witches years after the war with the warlocks, and a prophecy and stuff. This is doing stuff about witchcraft as a feminine art in a way that is trans inclusive, if you’ll believe that. And it’s also doing stuff about intersectionality re race. And yet, my brain just constantly slid right off it, and after putting it down and forgetting about it multiple times, I have to admit defeat at 50%. I genuinely do not know why.

When the Moon Hatched by Sarah A. Parker

Fantasy romance with a stabby heroine who speaks only in quips, when she isn’t killing people. This was the it book in fanro circles for like .5 seconds earlier this year. I read 40% of this while sick, but once well, could not take just how bad this writing is. It’s very lots bad.

The Future by Naomi Alderman

Another case of it’s probably me. This is a sapphic near future scifi about billionaire apocalypse survival fantasies and what’s fucked up about the internet and what’s not, and other stuff. I tried to read this twice, and it is interesting and clearly going somewhere, and I just cannot make myself focus on it.

Where Love Grows by Jay Northcote

M/M contemporary about a former gardener recovering from serious illness and a software guy recovering from addiction and mental illness. This had a lot of surface things I ought to like, but fell into that horrible romance trap where the author just shoves the two protagonists together in a house for romance reasons and that’s it, that’s the book. They each have a token friend whose only function, at least by the point I stopped, was to comment on the protagonist’s life. I genuinely like slow, deeply internal books, but you’ve gotta be a lot better at writing interesting people for this to work.

Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter

Picked up because it’s about a space expedition to examine a mystery big dumb space object, bonus clones, and I was in the mood for scifi explorations with generations stuff after some Adrian Tchaikovsky. I could barely choke down 7% of this. It probably suffered mightily by coming right after Tchaikovsky, who is generally great. Maybe I would have stuck with this at a different time. But as it was I said “uh-oh” out loud when the prose n the first page thudded laboriously along. It’s just not a good sign when the professional audio book performer is killing themselves to sell the dialogue, and it’s still one of those humans don’t talk like that situations.

Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault

This has been on my TBR, in its various incarnations, for twenty years. It’s a shame that this really is not working for me now, because (1) this is an important artifact of queer culture, (2) it is actually pretty good, and (3) I surely would have been way into this at various points in the past. But now I’m not – my patience for historicals is at an incredible low for reasons I don’t fully understand, and I’m super not in the mood for tragic queers, and there are so so so many more options for queer books now that I know I would like a lot more.

The End of the Day by Claire North

The one about the guy recruited to be an angel of death, and something something the end of the world. I really like North’s stuff, but woof, this one really did not land. It’s an anti-capitalist screed which, yes, sing it, so when I say that it overplays its hand on this, I really mean it. I could not make my brain stick to this fragmentary, frustrating book with a damp dishrag main character.

Gateway by Sharon Shinn

One of her slight YA fantasy romances, this one about a Chinese-American girl who is nudged across a gateway to an alternate St. Louis populated largely by alternate Chinese people where she is supposed to remove a dangerous politician. Dropped partly because it was too simplistic for my mood, but mostly because it features a lot of exploitation that Shinn seems entirely unaware of. The protagonist's father is supposed to be a good guy, which we are to infer from the fact that he picks up homeless people off the side of the road, works them for a full day on his construction projects, then doesn't pay them for labor, oh no no no, he sends them off with a meal. What a prince, you guys. You see, when someone is starving, it's cool to extract $60+ worth of labor from them and then give them a $3 plate of spaghetti because hey, you helped, right. It's incredible the mental gymnastics people go through to justify this. Compounded in the text by our protagonist, who is supposed to take down a dangerous man that no one else can for mumble mumble reasons and then get her memory wiped because . . . IDK, when you have a dangerous job, you should definitely arrange to get a teenager from another dimension to do it for free?

There's an interesting point in here somewhere about fantasy narratives and chosen ones and doing the labor of saving everybody for free, but this book showed no signs of even noticing the issue, and I'm not interested enough to continue.

The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt

Scifi about archaeologists trying to fully record the remains of an extinct alien civilization before it is destroyed by terraforming. Interesting premise, but I quit at the 1/5 mark because the gender stuff was really getting out of hand. Just a tiny sampling: a statue of an alien about which they know absolutely nothing is "clearly" female (what? Why? You don't even know they have sexes!) and a later larger example is obviously male (because larger, apparently). A later alien writing sample is bold, and therefore declared "masculine." It really should not be a surprise that an author who would indulge in that sort of crap would also write a sentence like "people liked him, women loved him." Women, you understand, not being people. Yes, thank you for putting a bow on it, I got it.

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

YA about a freshman at UNC who gets mixed up in an Arthurian secret society in attempts to find out why she can see magic she shouldn't. This is doing interesting stuff with the black protagonist and her view of the overwhelmingly white arthurians and their creepy obsession with their ancestry. It's about who owns the legend and who really doesn't. But it's just so extremely YA – there's a romance that does everything you expect it to, down to the last beat, and the protagonist talks to herself in that particularly YA way – and I'm not in the mood.

Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson

Galileo hops back and forth between his own time and the moons of Jupiter 1400 years later. Galileo is a dick (purposely so) and this is too boring to keep me going through his nonsense.

Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip

Dreamy story of sisters and the wood and wildness and the mystery of the fae man who moves in to the ruin next door and an old curse, and roses and wells and freighted domestic conversation. It's very good at what it's doing, but I am only ever lukewarm on these kinds of books, and in a week where my baby was reacting to having childcare other than from his parents for the first time in his nearly a year of life by refusing to eat . . . No. My tolerance for this sort of thing was not available.

An Unconventional Courtship by Scotty Cade

M/M of the billionaire boss/assistant variety. Terrible business/corporate world building, but I really abandoned it because it's that sort of romance that spends 95% of its pagespace with the two leads alone together and the other 5% with the two leads thinking of each other while they are very briefly apart. It's claustrophobic and honestly unhealthy. Give these dudes some friends!

Thief's Magic by Trudi Canavan

Industrial fantasy about a college student stealing an artifact from an ancient grave only to discover it's a thousand-year-old woman whose consciousness was bound up in a book. He's like, "oh, right, she's a person," and then proceeds to treat her entirely like an object that he can do whatever he wants with. I don't know if the remainder of this book notices how fucked up all that is, but it was all so boring that I don't want to stick around to find out.

Updraft by Fran Wilde

Read the first couple chapters of this fantasy(?) about a teenaged girl making bad decisions in an authoritarian society that lives in these weird bone towers and flies on constructed wings. It's super duper into its esthetic and I don't DGAF about bone towers and wings. And I just wasn't in the mood for all the bog standard YA beats, up to and including the mean girl nonsense.

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong

Urban fantasy about the only female werewolf in the world. You know that feeling where you are reading a book featuring a toxic, rapey relationship (he makes a pass, she says no, so he does the obvious thing and ties her up and manipulates her into verbally consenting, it's super romantic, guys) and you just assume the arc of the books will be away from that relationship . . . and then you start getting a bad feeling and check bookjacket copy for a later book? And . . . no?

The ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons

And here I thought I was getting my epic fantasy mojo back. I gave this doorstop about a hundred thousand words, and it was all teenaged boy carrying a powerful magical artifact also he has mysterious (not really) parental origins, and also he's an accomplished thief, and also also he has a thing for a sex slave who gets fridged, and I was like nah bro. The "twist" in this one is that apparently the prophecy of which he is the subject (because obviously) is about how he's going to destroy everything, not unite the kingdoms, but eh, I'm not gonna read a couple million words just to say good riddance at the end. Book somewhat redeemed by the text being peppered with generally crabby footnotes disputing its accuracy and sense.

Damsel by Elana K. Arnold

One of those unusual books that I am abandoning for being too good at what it is doing. This is a dark fairy tale transformative work about the girl rescued from the dragon, which as everyone knows means she is to marry the prince, whether she wants to or not. The world she finds herself in is so stifling and quietly terrifying; I suspect there is a satisfying ending here, but it was just so stressful along the way. Quite a good twisted feminist story if you're in the mood for that sort of thing.

I'm really getting into this, it's so freeing.

Stranger by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith

Post apocalypse fantasy California. I remember that this was very concerned with transliterating stereotypical American high school drama onto post apocalypse survivors, down to the mean rich girl. Lost interest.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

I should have known better when everyone described this as "lush," which is the kiss of death for me, but yeah, no. Hated everyone. Boring. Writing prettily about boring things is still boring.

The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Admittedly I came into this with a bad attitude, having seen the author behaving horribly to someone online once, but I got a third into this is-it-mental-illness-or-is-it-real bit of nonlinear nonsense and meh. I tend not to like that premise anyway, and I've seen it done better.

I switched digital book players, which means I still have all my books but I lost my place in everything (seriously! WTF?) so I am admitting defeat on things I can't be bothered to remember where I even left off on. A few notes:

Jade City by Fonda Lee

Lots of people love this jadepunk gangster secondary world fantasy, and I tried, but I just hated all the men and their machismo problems and couldn't hack it beyond the 1/3 mark. I suspect there's some interesting stuff in there re the pointedly off-page woman-led rival gang, but eh.

Chime by Franny Billingsley

Lovely and atmospheric historical YA about a girl who can see ghosts and also there's industrialization and emotional abuse. Nothing wrong with it; just not in the mood and now it's been too long.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

*Stares dead-eyed into camera* I hate Kizzy. Hate. She and her manic pixie wokeness and really this entire book were trying so hard, my teeth hurt.

Walking Wounded by Lee Rowan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Abandoned for boredom. There’s nothing spectacularly wrong with this gay romance; there’s also just not much noticeably right. It’s one of those insulated ones where clearly the most important thing to the author is that these two men spend as much time physically together as possible, with the outside world/setting/sense of place barely intruding. Which would be fine if I’d found either of them particularly interesting, but there just wasn’t much there aside from paint-by-numbers military PTSD and some geeky pop culture references.

Nice enough for those times you want that sort of thing. Bland and uninteresting for those times you don’t.

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