The Last Hour Between Worlds

4/5. A single mother, just two months post-partum, gets out for one night to attend a ball in her fantasy city. Which gets complicated when the whole ballroom keeps falling through levels of reality each time the clock strikes, and when her former crush turned professional enemy, the hot lady thief, is also on the case.

This is a lot of fun, and very stylish. Visually, I mean – there’s a lot going on here with what people are wearing and carrying, and with the shifting esthetics of each layer of reality. And you know I’m in favor of adventure books about mothers, particularly very new mothers like this one.

If you’re paying even moderate amounts of attention, none of these plot twists will rock you. But they are all pleasing to unwind, as is the whole book.

Content notes: Violence, temporary character death.

A Drop of Corruption

4/5. Sequel in this fantasy biopunk Holmes & Watson universe.

One of the more successful sequels I’ve read in a long time, in the sense that this accomplishes the task of really blowing up and blowing out the world. I continue to be only middling interested in these characters (and also continue to be puzzled about why this series is first person, aside from the obvious stylistic nod). But the construction of this empire, whose people’s bodies and minds are modified in ways beyond our understanding by methods beyond their understanding, all while the leviathans come ever closer to breaking down the sea walls, is incredibly interesting to me.

I think this book is not as successful in its project of talking about kings and power structures by blood in general. It does that, but our protagonist is not really clocking the implications for his own life as an imperial subject, so it doesn’t quite come together the way intended. The first person gets in the way there, specifically, given our protagonist is not, shall we say, a political or philosophical thinker.

Still, I am way more interested in this now than I was after the first book.

Content notes: Body modification and body horror, threats of infection/contamination.

Letters to Half Moon Street

3/5. Short epistolary queer norm historical romance with fantasy elements, about the shy (and possibly demi) younger son in London for the first time catching the eye of a society gentleman.

A charming frip of a book with good epistolary. This has all the trappings of an early nineteenth century historical romance, except it’s queer norm. The worldbuilding is paper thin – that’s not the point, I realize – but I’m the sort of person who asks too many questions of a book like this. Like okay, you’ve replaced heterosexism with a model that relies even more heavily on birth order, and yet that seems to have changed the way that class and inheritance and power work in this setting not at all or very little? How is that possible? Yes, I am interrogating the text from the wrong direction, I acknowledge I am the problem here. The author’s note is like “I wanted to write queer norm historical so I did and I stuck fantasy magic in it, so there,” and like, sure, I respect it. I’m just not the best at reading it.

A Gentleman's Gentleman

3/5. Historical trans m/m romance about the isolated earl who hires a valet for a trip to London to keep up appearances, because he has to find a wife for reasons, but oh yes, he’s trans.

Lovely slow burn historical that is very playful with several tropes – the dead twin, the tragic backstory, etc. -- all presented exactly as ordered, but in service to a trans narrative. I liked all of that a great deal, and Christopher himself is a charming mess.

I’m not rating this higher because the romance (with the valet, if that was unclear) did very little for me. This is single POV, which I think was done to preserve a late reveal in the book, but the net result is that the valet is something of a cipher and I just didn’t feel anything for these two as a pair (also, the reveal is not a surprise if you're paying attention at all, so not worth the trouble of concealing it, I think).

Still, I enjoyed this, and particularly recommend the audiobook for the delivery of Christopher’s dialogue. His fruity upper crust gentleman's accent is top tier.

Content notes: Loss of family, panic attacks, fear of outing, internalized transphobia.

Exordia

2/5. Huge chunky scifi about a transnational encounter with aliens in remote Kurdistan which sweeps earth into a galactic conflict with the evil overlords who want to metaphysically pin human souls to the proper narrative.

This started out great (funny surreal portrait of a young woman enduring the long-term effects of trauma, then she meets an alien in Central Park, it’s great) and went steadily downhill into not just weird, but long and turgid weird. I read the whole thing for the ideas and theming, which are doing a lot – the worst kind of iterative trolly problems and what they do to people, the monstrousness of making a thing only more like itself forever and ever, the work of breaking out of your own narrative. But boy, he did not want to make this book accessible. Or enjoyable. The thing is, he knows what he’s doing – two men spend the entire book in this gross psychosexual attraction/competition narrative over a woman, and in the very brief appearance she makes, she utterly and pointedly refuses to go along with that story. The book is about that kind of resistance. But I still had to read 250,000 words of their gross psychosexual posturing (and don’t get me started on the not real version of that woman they create).

I almost respect this for being one of the weirdest and most specific books I’ve ever read. It shares some meta concerns with Prophet, but bears little resemblance to basically anything. And his writing is, as always, strong. But choices were made here and I am not into them.

Also, there are lesbians here, and there is just something about the way he writes female desire that sets my teeth on edge. I thought so in his prior books, too. I can’t put words to it, but it just always makes me cock my head a little and go ew, please don’t.

Content notes: Genocide, murder, a lot of body horror, military violence.

The Sky on Fire

3/5. Fantasy set in a world where dragons pair with riders, but the riders aren’t the ones in charge. A ragtag group of dragons and riders and thieves and dissidents get together to do a big heist on the evil head dragon for reasons, then stuff happens.

This is okay, but did not excite me. That is sad because it features the development of a polyamorous triad, which is my jam, but not this unsatisfying iteration. See also other things I like: heists, dragons, a queer-norm and kink-norm world, and yet, eh. It’s fine. I DNF’d her other fantasy series, so maybe I should just cut my losses here.

I would be curious to know if anyone else who read this found the back third kind of disorienting? Did I miss a step, or was the book casually connecting threads that just did not meet?

Content notes: Violence, graphic description of falling and fear of heights.

Long Live Evil

4/5. A young woman dying of cancer is given the chance to go into her (sort of) favorite dark fantasy series. She arrives in the body of the villainess the night before her execution. But changing that changes all sorts of other things.

This was, on the one hand, delightful and absorbing. It’s obviously very metatextual – our protagonist is forever commenting on genre convention, sexism in fantasy, the shape of stories, etc. And it’s also very funny. There’s an “as foretold” joke in here that made me straight up cackle. Also, I detect some Tamsyn Muir DNA in here, if that’s an inducement.

On the other hand, this did not reward any look beyond the surface. I think it meant to, but I didn’t find anything that stuck to me in all the talk of stories and conventions and villainy. I’m not mad about it, to be clear. I still had a pretty great time. But I did think there could have been more. Maybe the sequel will provide.

Content notes: Zombies, violence, threatened rape, recollections of terminal illness.

A Letter to the Luminous Deep

4/5. Epistolary novel set on a water world where two people begin writing to each other to process their grief about the mutual loss of their siblings, who it turns out had developed their own epistolary relationship, but investigating that raises more questions than it answers.

Lovely. It’s odd to call a book so concerned with grief "cozy," but I think it’s true. This is a book about a strange, dreamy world and some strange, dreamy happenings, and academic politics, and mental illness. But the heart of it is friendship and romance, held in equal importance here. There are two nested relationships – a slow, sweet romance between two very lonely people (at least one of whom is disabled and on the ase spectrum, btw) – and the other a deep and abiding friendship that draws two families together as they try to navigate loss. It’s the sort of book that will make you sigh quietly to yourself when you put it down.

I will say, since I always comment on epistolary, that this is done pretty well. There are a few contrivances, as there always are, but I forgave them easily. E.g., the book includes a written transcript of an important conversation upon first meeting your dear pen pal, because the two characters sat in silence next to each other and wrote notes. But the reason for that was so integral to them – their shyness, one’s mental illness, the circumstances – that it worked. I love epistolary so much, but man, it is not easy.

Content notes: Grief, mental illness – agoraphobia, anxiety, maybe OCD.

The Fireborne Blade

3/5. Novella about the lady knight (gasp) who sets out to retrieve a mythical sword to reclaim her honor and reputation, also dragons are more terrifying even in death than in life.

A mix of high fantasy and horror, with a bit of a queer love story. This will be totally awesome for certain other people. The horror vibes, in particular, are on point, and there’s all sorts of interesting dragon lore that I’ve never seen done like this. But it’s not to my tastes or interests.

Content notes: Violence, hauntings, horrible ways to die by dragon

The Blighted Stars

3/5. Start of a scifi trilogy set in a world where you can print yourself a new body, but there’s all sorts of fucky quantum entanglement stuff that happens with your memories/experiences across interstellar distances. Also, the somewhat estranged son of one of the powerful merchant families keeping humanity afloat ends up stranded on a planet infested with alien fungus with a terrorist posing as his body guard.

A lot of pieces here that I’m into, but it didn’t gel. There’s lots of chewy emotional implications of the worldbuilding here, but the whole story – corporate sabotage stuff and alien intelligence stuff and family drama stuff and all of it – stands or falls on how hard you buy into the central romance. I wanted to be into it – he’s a nerdy transboy who thinks he’s unpacked his privilege but he’s wrong, she’s a traumatized revolutionary driven to violence. But I missed some vital step and, also, the writing is pretty clumsy when it comes to their attraction. They end up mentally gushing over each other, and it’s one of those situations where I kind of suck my breath between my teeth, because infatuation is like that, yes, but come on, at a certain point, you’re just failing to see each other clearly at all for the complex, flawed people you are.

Anyway, read if you like creepy alien fungus stuff and family politics stuff and fucky multiple bodies stuff, but this just didn’t quite get over the hump for me.

Content notes: Violence, imprisonment, references to torture, lots of fungus and alien mind control stuff.