WHO IS E WHO IS E OH WHAT THE FUCK WHO IS E Nothing gets me on my crazy Catholic bullshit like a new Tamsyn Muir book. When I finally (FINALLY) got my hands on Nona the Ninth, after ten thousand (fact check: two) years of pining for it, I curled up on my sofa with it and my Bible and unfortunately no wine because I was on a clean living kick, and read it and thought of tweets like “New Revised Standard Version in the streets, King James Version in the sheets”, a tweet you were only spared because…
Leave a CommentCategory: 4 Stars
HI FRIENDS, I rejoice to report that I’ve got a new column at Tor, entitled Ships in the Night, that looks at fantasy and SF romance. My first post is up now, exploring the figure of the misfit heroine and Olivia Atwater’s debut novel Half a Soul. Enjoy! Say hi in the comments! Let me know what other books you think I should be covering! https://www.tor.com/2022/07/26/how-to-not-fit-in-the-misfit-heroine-and-olivia-atwaters-half-a-soul/
Leave a CommentWhen I feel a bit sad about my reading/blogging focus having shifted to focus so heavily on recent releases, I comfort myself with a reminder that reading recent releases gets me in on the ground floor of new authors. This is fun because when they hit it big, I get to be a hipster about it (in a few years I’m going to be a nightmare about Micaiah Johnson and y’all will all be tired of me), but it’s also fun because I get to see their development as writers. Ideally, with supportive agents and editors, and the sales to…
Leave a CommentEver since she was a baby, Zuli has lived in the tree that holds the souls of dead birds. It’s an idyllic existence — surrounded by beauty and the love of her spirit parents (and the concern of a slightly fussy alive owl called Frowly), she spends her days clambering around the tree and chatting with the souls of dead birds before they head off to be born again the lives of new bodies. When the souls of birds stop coming home to the tree, Zuli is determined to set out into the world to find out why. If you’ve…
Leave a CommentLet me begin by saying that I highly recommend both of the books I’m going to talk about in this post, Olivia Dade’s contemporary romance novel All the Feels and Freya Marske’s fantasy romance A Marvellous Light with two Ls because she’s Australian. That’s a little tl;dr for anyone who might just want to know “but should I read these books” rather than receiving a disquisition on what I feel is good about fanfic. Can’t imagine anyone feels that way, but it takes all kinds to make a world. Both of these books are out now, and you should buy…
Leave a CommentAfter a fallow period of YA reading, I’ve been absolutely tearing through new YA books this October. Hot take, YA is really good right now! Sometimes when I think about my own youth and the, like, three bookshelves worth of YA books my library had back then, and half of them were Lurlene McDaniel, and that was a good library system, I just feel very very happy that the youth of today have such an amazing profusion of great books. At least something is going right for the youths! The rest of the world is chaos and disaster but they…
Leave a CommentNote: I write this review while listening to Béla Bartók’s “Sonata for Solo Violin.” No disrespect to the other orchestra sections but strings are the best ones. Light from Uncommon Stars has three protagonists: a teenage violinist, a grown adult violinist who can buy her soul back from Hell by giving it seven souls of younger violinists (her students), and a donut shop proprietor who is actually an alien on the run from galactic warfare. As that description indicates, this is a book that unapologetically blends genres, a fantasy novel that’s a sci-fi novel that’s actually really a novel about…
Leave a CommentThere’s this moment in Flamefall, the second book in Rosaria Munda’s Aurelian trilogy, where the protagonist asks one of the leaders of a scrappy band of rebel freedom fighters what they’re fighting for. She’s like “Equality!” and he’s like, “Neat, cool, great, but like what are your policy proposals?” How many dystopian YA novels have you read where the scrappy rebels our protagonist is allied with just have the basic policy “we won’t throw you in a fiery hellpit filled with ravenous snakes like these current bastards”? Like, that is a great start and I’m all for toppling your dystopian…
Leave a CommentAnyone who didn’t read A Song Below Water last year missed a trick, and I would also like to report that I, while reading it, missed a trick. The heroine of A Song Below Water is a siren, though she dedicates a lot of energy to hiding this fact about herself. While the world is friendly to some types of magic–particularly the charming and melodical eloko, of which Tavia’s school’s resident mean girl Naema is one–they’re acutely hostile to sirens. It is no coincidence that only Black girls and women can be sirens. A Chorus Rises is a companion novel…
Leave a Comment