Like Peas and Carrots, Partly Cloudy is about what makes a family and how to be a good citizen of the world. Madalyn has been accustomed to a very traditional family, where she and her mom and dad all live in the same place all the time. But now change is afoot. First her dad gets a job that takes him out of town most of the time, and then her mom decides to send her to live with her great-uncle so she can attend a better school. That leaves her without either parent for much of the week, and she has to make all new friends at a school where she’s the only Black kid in her class. She immediately vibes with one of her classmates, but quickly finds that Natalie harbors ugly ideas about Black boys and adults.

Partly Cloudy has a real slice-of-life vibe, in ways that I tend to find frustrating in books for older readers and adults, but really enjoyed here. Papa Lobo, Madalyn’s great-uncle, is a gem of a human being, and though Madalyn doesn’t quite get the hang of him at first, she’s quickly able to settle into life with him (even though he doesn’t have wifi). At the same time, she has two parents who are very involved in her life and to whom she’s very close, but Davis doesn’t shy away from the fact that financial problems are dictating a lot of the choices the family has to make. It was great to see representation of how many, many parents struggle to balance issues of finance with parenting, without any suggestion that they’ve fucked up fiscally or parentally. Madalyn doesn’t love her new situation, but she’s able to find the good in it, forming a close bond with Papa Lobo and making new friends at her school.

As a separate thing, I was delighted with the presence of Black Louisiana Catholics in this book! Papa Lobo goes to Mass every week — on Saturday, so he can hang out with his friends on Sunday — and throws out Creole phrases as well. Yay Louisiana!! And yay for representations of religious people not being close-minded jerks. (Contrary to what white evangelicals are constantly striving to make us believe, it is actually possible to be a person of faith without trying to take away rights from your fellow humans.)

The climactic event of the book is a fire that comes near enough to Madalyn’s life that her family’s affected by it. A of all, I feel so sorry for the kids today. What a crap life for them to live on this burning planet! Secondly, though, I was very heartwarmed to see the community pulling together to take care of each other in a time of disaster. Papa Lobo rightly insists that children deserve to be and feel safe, even if their parents raised them racist, while Madalyn insists on taking care of one of Papa Lobo’s nemeses — so they each have something to teach each other about the right way to act in times of crisis. Despite the miserable, ongoing counterexample of COVID-19, we do still do this for each other. We pull together in disasters. That’s a value worth cultivating, and Partly Cloudy knows it.

As for the racism, Madalyn’s immediate friend at school is a white girl named Natalie, and Madalyn quickly gets a sinking feeling that Natalie is kinda racist. She’s scared of Papa Lobo’s godson, Jean, and their mutual friends are quick to explain it away as the result of a bullying incident Natalie endured the previous year at the hands of a Black boy. But Madalyn’s not sure she should give Natalie a pass. When she finally talks to her mother, her mom wisely tells her that you get to choose when it’s worth it to you to try to educate, versus when you want to walk away. Because there’s such an onus placed on Black folks in real life to forgive and educate, I might have liked to see a little more pushback in the text to the idea that Madalyn should continue her relationship with Natalie. But in the end, the girls reconcile, and you can see that Natalie has been struck by the conversation Madalyn bravely had with her about the impact her words and ideas have had on Madalyn.

Partly Cloudy reminds us of the value of care, and of taking the time to really see those around us. Madalyn doesn’t love being apart from her parents, but she’s ultimately able to see the joy, fun, and value of making herself part of Papa Lobo’s life. Natalie has allowed the weeds of white supremacy to take root in her mind, but her friendship with Madalyn and the care that Madalyn’s family shows her during the fire help her to learn better and act better. Tanita Davis is relentlessly uncynical, and Partly Cloudy felt like a tonic in these wretched and angry times.

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On This Unworthy Scaffold picks up right where A Kingdom for a Stage left off. Jetta has allied herself with the rebel king of Chakrana, Camreon, whose brother Raik is now under the necromantic control of the terrifying Le Trepas. The power she wields over dead souls is stronger than ever, but she is without the elixir that helps her to medicate her malheur, which means that she can never quite trust herself. Meanwhile, Raik has issued a decree that all Aquitan people are being deported from Chakrana — on a single ship that cannot possibly transport that number of people back to Aquitan. Camreon aims to save the Aquitans from likely death, in the hopes that they will throw their support behind him as kind (though also just cause, like, human rights). Meanwhile, they have to stop Le Trepas before he raises an army of the undead to fight them.

Alex Brown (one of my favorite reviewers! Hugo for Alex when?) noted that A Kingdom for a Stage showed many of its characters folding themselves smaller in the hopes of keeping themselves and others safe. In particular, Chakran characters use their invisibility to the Aquitan colonizers to erode the power those colonizers hold over them and their loved ones. In On This Unworthy Scaffold, the story is about reclaiming the space that has so long been denied to these characters and this country. No longer are the people of Chakrana required to hide their magic or their aims. Instead, they’re putting it all on full display, all the magic and power and resources they’ve had all along that the Aquitan occupation has demanded they suppress. It’s a gorgeous shift in theme that makes On This Unworthy Scaffold feel triumphant in an way that’s absolutely been earned by these characters over the course of their journey.

It’s also a book about the transformative power of art. Of course, the series always was about this, quite literally: Jetta can transform her fantouches (puppets) into living things with a soul and a drop of blood. Here, though, the theme is broadened to encompass not just the small stages of Jetta’s troupe of shadow players, but the world stage. Jetta, Camreon, and the others are performing for an audience of thousands in the hope of swaying hearts and minds. In the very first scene, we see Camreon cementing his claim as a leader by performing the traditional rice-planting ceremony that predates Aquitan colonization. Later, Theodora and Jetta face a battle of showmanship with the Mad King of Aquitan, in which each of them strives to tell a story that will resonate with the Aquitan people (and, in Jetta’s case, the Chakrans who have lived in Aquitan, overlooked for so many years).

But art does not happen in a vacuum, and On This Unworthy Scaffold knows it. Art requires a performer and an audience, and Heilig makes it clear that both are inextricably rooted in community. Just as Camreon’s fight for Chakran independence means nothing without the backing of the Chakran people, Jetta cannot channel her power productively without the support of those around her. Sometimes her community is the small one of friends and family (Leo, Akra, Camreon, Theodora), while other times she has to rally a broader group, like the Chakran expatriates in Aquitan, in order to stir the imaginations of the country at large.

By contrast, the deeds that are done alone and in the shadows avail the characters nothing. Driven by her malheur, Jetta tries several times to slip away from her friends to accomplish her goals. These efforts fail, and the only reason they don’t fall into complete catastrophe is that her people show up for her. While the book does end with Jetta getting her hands on a supply of the elixir she needs for her malheur, it’s clear that her health and prosperity depends not just on the elixir, but on the people who love her and whom she loves.

As in the past books, Heilig peppers On This Unworthy Scaffold with playful departures from a traditional format. Some portions are told as if they’re the scripts of plays; edicts and letters appear throughout the text; and as before, there are even some songs that add to the narrative story. This is extremely my shit, of course, but on a storytelling note, it adds to the feeling that we are in an expansive world that contains infinite stories beyond just the one we’re reading.

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Like most/all of Oyeyemi’s work, Peaces has the cadence and tenor of a fairytale. We are introduced to characters, certainly: Otto and Xavier Shin, who have received as a not-wedding gift this train journey; their mongoose, Arpad; the train’s proprietor, Ava, and her protectors, Laura and Allegra, and her mongoose, Chela. But the standard book questions like “why are these characters the way they are?” and “what motivates their choices?” are not questions that appear to interest Helen Oyeyemi. Instead, her stories ask fairy tale questions along the lines of “Can we ever awaken from the dream that is reality?” and “Do we even want to?”

Peaces begins with a matter-of-fact weirdness that put me in mind of Susanna Clarke, particularly her newest (!) novel, Piranesi. At first the weirdness is charming and sweet, along the lines of the fact that Otto Shin has a pet mongoose named Arpad, and Arpad is the latest descendant of a series of family mongooses, also named Arpad. Charming! Sweet! The book gives the impression that the world is just like this, and we won’t get anywhere by making a fuss about it, so we might as well get on with it. But of course, this isn’t our, the reader’s, world. But it’s all so matter-of-fact, the way Helen Oyeyemi writes it, that you start to wonder if maybe this is the world and we’ve just been mistaken about it all along.

But then! It gets so creepy! Peaces goes on a journey from “this is weird but fine” to “this is a bit creepy actually” to me curled up in my comfy armchair in my comfy library whisper-screaming AAAAAAAAAA. I admit that the closing creepiness is of a type that causes me a particular terror: When listening to The Magnus Archives, my true most terrifying of the fears was The Slaughter, but The Stranger was a close second. Peaces pings pretty close to several of the Fears/Entities, in case that is your jam.

Ever since Boy Snow Bird, I have been an anxious detective of whether Helen Oyeyemi hates trans people. (The ending of Boy Snow Bird, in case you have forgotten it, has a trans character who’s trans due to trauma, and the narrative suggests that he needs to be saved from his trans-ness.) Peaces contains a new clue!

The romantic failures are a sore spot. That’s a field in which I really ought not underwhelm. When Martha and Lieselotte had me, Martha’s legal name was still Mark, and Lieselotte was a high court judge in Bern. They’re two of the freest people I know, and somehow that seems like a by-product of the rambling conversation they’ve been in ever since they met, an exchange that draws them down by-lanes of trivia and scholarship, pettiness and poetry. When some new pact clicks into place, they meet at its corner to kiss. My professor mum made her Martha-ness official, and my Bern high court judge mum stepped down and stripped her view of justice all the way down to grass roots, serving her god (and I really do think justice is a god for Lieselotte) as a police inspector who does her paperwork whilst sipping coffee out of a mug emblazoned with a picture of her wife and son. I hate that mug. The picture on it makes us look like IKEA models who might just get thrown in as freebies if you buy enough furniture. But catalog elements aside, it’s a photo in which Martha is full-on sultry professor, and I look like a cute baby Viking. So even if her current mug gets broken, or hidden, Lieselotte just pulls out another, identical one.

Pros: Clear affirmation of the trans person’s identity. Cons: Unnecessary use of deadname. Conclusion: I don’t think she hates trans people, but this is still a clumsy and ignorant way to speak about a trans woman. So…. much better than Boy Snow Bird? But still not the best.

Note: I received this book from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted my review.

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Jebi is a specific type of protagonist that I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but is definitely my cup of tea. In many ways they’re very naive, despite having a sister who’s a freedom fighter. They don’t want to become involved in politics; they don’t feel qualified to be involved in politics; they aren’t any good at doing politics. What they want is to be left alone to do their art. Or as a next-best outcome, they don’t want to be actively contributing to the imprisonment of a sentient being and the destruction of their own culture. But as it turns out, there come times when you have to make a choice — and once Jebi has made theirs, they have to keep making it, or lose everything.

What’s particularly neat about this choice of protagonist is that all the other characters clearly have their own shit going on, and nobody’s clearly in the right. For instance, Jebi doesn’t want to kill people. A perfectly cromulent position! I too do not want to kill people. By contrast, their sister Bongsunga deeply wants the colonizers out, which is also a very cromulent position. Better yet, Yoon Ha Lee has a real gift for imbuing numerous different characters with protagonist energy. Vei, the shatteringly hot swordswoman who Jebi has a crush on, very clearly has her own shit going on, to the point that you could easily see a future book shifting into her POV. Same for Bongsunga. Same even for minor characters, like Vei’s parents — despite their relatively small amount of screen time, you’re so aware that these are not just satellites for the characters we actually care about. They’re all people who have their own stories and their own lives.

Speaking of characters with real protagonist energy, I absolutely loved the dragon automaton. Its name is Arazi and it acquires a telepathic connection with Jebi and I am here for it. I know that I have spent the years since the Heralds of Valdemar books trying to play like I’m too cool for telepathic connections with supernatural creatures, but the fact is that I am not now and never have been too cool for it. (See also: The Bone Shard’s Daughter.) And like, how refreshing that Yoon Ha Lee is not too cool for it either, despite being a very deeply cool writer. (See also: Nicefox Gambit et seq.) Arazi is a tremendously sweet and great character. It’s very very very smart (and in different ways than a human is smart!), but also in many ways a little innocent. I adored it.

If I had to register a complaint about the book, I guess it’s reasonable to say that Jebi’s crush on Vei progressed a little fast once things got going. The transition from “chill boning” to “I would bathe in the blood of your enemies for you” happened kind of fast, but you know what? I don’t care! These are hard times, and I love an artist one / murder one romance, and Vei is very hot and Jebi has a dragon ally, so it is no surprise they were so into each other. So there! I loved it! I would read a whole other book that was just Jebi and Vei and Arazi flying around the world doing stuff. Maybe petty crimes / acts of sabotage against the Razanei regime? Petty crimes, but for justice? I’d read it.

Basically, I’m thrilled to have this new standalone fantasy novel from Yoon Ha Lee. The magic system is very cool but not nearly as difficult to grab onto as the one in Machineries of Empire series, so if you’ve been wanting to try this author but nervous that his books will be too hard to follow, give Phoenix Extravagant a try.

Note: I received a review copy of Phoenix Extravagant from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

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If you are not aware of the Queen’s Thief series, I do recommend popping out and purchasing The Thief for yourself. Though you will not be getting the full experience. I, myself, have not had the full experience, because I am a Jenny-come-lately who, despite the best recommending efforts of Legal Sister, didn’t read these books until 2010, which is when A Conspiracy of Kings came out. I did not wait; I did not suffer. Others among us (like Legal Sister) read The Thief when it came out in 1996 and commenced a waiting game for the subsequent five books that only bore full fruit in this, the year of our Lord 2020.

“Stop being weird, Jenny! Tell us what the books are about!” Yes, okay, so, these books are set in a society that’s inspired by classical antiquity, drawing specific inspiration from the Persian Wars and the small Greek states that held out against the Persian Empire despite odds that were, shall we say, daunting. At the center of the series is a boy named Eugenides, who is a thief. That is basically all I can say about the series without spoiling the entire thing. These books are a complicated machine, powered by intrigue and feelings. So many feelings. They also contain the angriest women and the softest men, including perhaps the purest cinnamon roll character in all of literature. Here is a further recap of the series, just so you know what to expect. (Book one: Road trip! Shenanigans! Book two: High-octane emotional devastation!)

Anyway, my non-spoilery review of Return of the Thief is that it was tremendous, there were elephants, it was everything I wanted it to be, and I feel joyful but also bereft to know this amazing series is at an end. What follows below the line is some disconnected and spoiler-filled fangirl screaming.

(I am not doing this to tease you! These books are so extremely serialized that even mentioning certain characters in affectionate terms is a spoiler. I’m so serious. It’s a spoiler to say with affection the full names of, I’m going to say, three? of the seven major characters.)

My opinions are as follows, and I have put them into bullet points:

• I would die for Pheris
• Megan Whalen Turner very clearly has spent the last twenty-four years thinking “What if Thermopylae, but haunted” and now we must all think about that too so thanks a lot, Megan Whalen Turner
• I can’t believe that after twenty-four years of dishing out the most devastating scraps of emotional availability, Megan Whalen Turner has produced a veritable feelings orgy
  • Irene buying Gen a horse like the troll she fundamentally is
  • Sophos picking out the horse for Gen like the cinnamon troll he fundamentally is
  • every single monarch of the Little Peninsula lowkey conspiring to protect Gen from going into battle
  • HIERO EARRINGS HELP ME WHYYYYY
  • Costis going absolutely feral over the prospect of Kamet being danger
  • Eugenides going somehow even more feral over the prospect of Kamet being in danger
  • “They do not smile at first, Your Majesty.”
  • “Why that orange tree? What that tamarisk bush?”
• It turns out we have been grievously underestimating the amount of murder of which Gen is capable
• Years and years and years and years and YEARS ago Megan Whalen Turner told us that Gen would see an elephant and be like “I want that elephant”
  • It happened.
  • Also, he fed them melons
  • Irene was like “where would you even keep an elephant anyway”
  • then, in the truest expression of love, she GETS HIM THE ELEPHANTS
  • I thought he was going to steal an elephant
  • This was better.
  • (because of my feelings)
• Of all the characters I would die for, I would die for Irene the most. Evidence:
  • Elephants; op cit.
  • “I did not become inappropriate all by myself!”
  • “I am not here to cut Sophos’s food him”
• THERMOPYLAE, BUT HAUNTED
• Disaster bisexual Relius (!) and disaster virgin Teleus (!!!!)
• the play to catch the conscience of the king
  • I was SO ANGRY at first
  • I was UNIMAGINABLY angry, like, I was ready to burn some shit down
  • not least because “swayed by a pretty face” like how actually dare you insult Irene Attolia in this manner
  • and then? Megan Whalen Turner?
  • just?
  • changed everything???
  • and Cenna said, “But it was funny, Gen, wasn’t it?”
  • and actually, it’s not Hamlet’s stupid fucking play plan; it’s someone who knows Gen well enough to call him by his nickname being an absolute dick to Gen
• I know I already did a whole bullet point about emotions but:
  • Pheris’s whole strategy of being underestimated
  • The King of the Strategy of Being Underestimated, Attolis Eugenides Eugenideides, doesn’t not fall for it
  • “To hell with Lader if he thinks I will not trust you”  H E L P  M E.
  • PHERIS
  • P H E R I S.
• the moment when Irene is like “you think Kamet is dead?” and Gen is like “yep” and Irene is like “without Costis burning down the entire Mede Empire about it?” and Gen is like “Ah.”
• The whole thing ends with a dance party! Just what you want!

This is the end of my screaming thoughts. But maybe I will add more later. Who knows? I love this fucking series.

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Cas and her friends are dealing with the fallout from their takedown of Pithica in Zero Sum Game, and trying to cope with the uptick in crime that Los Angeles is seeing as a result. Rio is God knows where; Arthur and Checker and Cas are chasing down child trafficking rings, while Cas grows more and more frustrated with the small scale of the good work they’re able to do. They also have a new staff member called Pilar, who does admin and has demanded that Cas teach her how to shoot a gun. (Pilar is a treasure.)

In other bad news, Cas’s mind is starting to break down. Whatever Dawna did to her at the end of Zero Sum Game, it’s eating away at her memory, letting through flashes of the life she used to know. She’s become prone to hallucinations that she struggles more and more to ignore, control, or work around — even, at times, to the detriment of the jobs she’s working. Arthur and Checker, who love her, are worried. I am heartwarmed that she now has people to love her apart from just Rio, whose faithfulness to her is very sweet but it’s not like you can lean on the guy for emotional support. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure from her past, a psychic called Simon, is following her around and asking uncomfortable questions.

(PS I can’t see why nobody has asked Rio or Simon if Cas has been psychically told to trust Rio. But like — she has, right? I know he’s been unflinchingly loyal to her, etc., etc., but at some point she had to *start* trusting him in order to find *out* that he was going to be unflinchingly loyal, so — she’s been psychic-influenced, no?)

Two main questions occupy Our Heroes over the course of Null Set. One is whether Cas will allow another psychic to mess around with her brain, if their doing so means that she’ll survive the things that brain is currently doing to her. The second is how to stop the crime wave in Los Angeles, and our Cas unfortunately comes up with — okay, not the worst idea in the world, but an idea that is p R e T t Y bad, if you have ever read a book before, are Rio, or prefer not to mess around with the fragile and unpredictable human brain. Drawing on technology developed by the collapsed tech firm Arkacite, she creates a method of doing what she calls “brain entrainment” — basically, disrupting/shutting off the thing in the human brain that makes us form mobs and commit inhuman acts of violence. This is already pretty bad because don’t play God, brains are fragile, you never know what’ll happen, etc. etc., but then the actual worst idea in the world follows close on its heels, that being to implement the brain entrainment at scale and without testing.

Maybe superheroes should be required to undergo peer ethics supervision, like social workers. Wouldn’t that be good? Or like, bring their superplans before an Institutional Review Board and get some feedback. My instinct is that I would love to be on a superhero IRB. My thought-out response is that members of superhero IRBs would probably have really short life spans on account of all the superheroes who would turn evil and have a grudge against them. But what if it were like jury duty and everyone took a turn? But then you couldn’t have like a board full of experts on superheroics.

(This is the kind of internal conversation that ideally would take place in the tags of this post, but WordPress doesn’t let me post tags in the order EYE want to post them. They insist my tags be alphabetized. WordPress would probably try to brain entrain me given half a chance.)

I’m fascinated by the conflict Huang ends up creating about Cas’s brain. Spoilers begin here, so I’ll put a gif to give you a chance to get away before the spoilers. And I’ll put another gif after the spoilers are over, so you’ll know where to start reading again.

We find out Cas’s original identity in the best way, when a friend of Arthur’s mentions it to her in the full assumption that Cas has already figured it out. I love this fucking shit. The idea that the answer to a central mystery can be an absolute nothing can be hard to pull off without the reader feeling cheated, but I thought Huang managed it. Anyway, her original self was a Bahraini girl named Valamarthi, a child prodigy in math, and that person’s brain was completely broken by what Pithica did to it. In an effort to save her, Vala’s then-boyfriend knocked out all her memories, creating essentially an entire new person: Cas.

I love this problem. I love it. Cas is clearly not Vala; wiping Vala’s memories eliminated that person. But she questions her own right to live, palimpsested on top of the forcibly blank slate of Vala’s memory and Vala’s life. The memories are still inside her, though, struggling their way to the surface — so what does that make her? A person or an occupying force? Or both?

(If you were anywhere near me in early to mid-2018, you’ll have heard me raving about a fic called A Change in Energy, by kvikindi. It shares many of these very concerns! I still rave about it! If what I’ve just said about Null Set sounds interesting to you, perhaps I can interest you in a 450,000-word fic, based on a by-all-reports-terrible SF show, but which nevertheless explores interesting questions about what it means to be a human and a body and a person.)

Though I wasn’t quite as enthralled by the mystery of Null Set as by Zero Sum Game, the counterbalance is that Cas has found a real community in this one. If you are a lover of found family vibes, as who would not be?, Null Set has them for you in spades. It’s lovely to see Cas in the bosom of people who care about her, particularly in contrast to the little we learn about her past life and self. Null Set finishes on — not a cliffhanger, but a resetting of the board (my favorite way for a middle book to end), where we know the immediate next thing that will happen to Cas, but just have no fucking idea about what might come after that. It’s a great entry in a great series, and I recommend it entirely.

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Playing House is about a woman finding her place in the world after a divorce (that’s Fay) and a man finding his place in the world after losing a job (that’s Oliver). In the relatively small world of urban planning, they’ve been casual friendquaintances for years. But when they run into each other at a home tour, and pretend to be dating to scare off a pushy guy harassing Fay, sparks fly.

In my master list of romance novel recs organized by trope (which I am keeping private until it reaches some not-yet-defined state of finished-ness), one of my favorite tropes is “Shared Project,” which is nearly, but not exactly, a subset of “Forced Proximity.” It’s a trope I love because it offers a tidy way for the characters to externalize their interest in each other and it humanizes them by showing us what they love (apart from, eventually, each other). It’s impossible not to love Fay and Oliver for loving what they do. Look at this adorability:

“What have you been up to today, then?”

“Helping my mom. Yard work. She lives in Forest Hills.”

“In Forest Hills Gardens–?”

They chorused, “One of the oldest planned communities in the United States.”

It was the first real laugh they’d had together that morning. Oliver had thrown back his head, and he was looking at her with something like affection. Blink and it was gone. “No, not the Gardens area. If she lived there, I’d lead with that. Hi, I’m Oliver Huang-my-mom-lives-in-Forest-Hills-Gardens-which-was-conceived-by-Omlsted-and-Atterbury.”

“They’re right when they say Asian names are difficult.”

I defy you not to feel love for these two charming nerds.

As they’re seeing each other, and looking at houses, they’re also both trying to figure out what they want their lives to look like. Oliver’s long-time firm recently shuttered, and he’s currently awaiting a call back from Fay’s quickly-expanding firm (which Fay doesn’t know). In the meantime, he’s living with his brother, working contract jobs, and struggling with the feeling that he’s disappointed everyone who knows him. Fay, for her part, is coming out of a marriage that made her feel isolated and unsupported, and she doesn’t feel much like taking a chance on anyone, let alone someone who’s friends with all her friends.

Playing House is the perfect book for a grim day when all you need is a cup of tea and a book that will make you feel cozy and safe and hopeful. There’s no operatic stakes here: Nobody’s threatening anyone’s livelihood, or getting murdered in an adjacent hotel room, or escaping a stabby step-parent. The biggest conflict Fay and Oliver face is he doesn’t tell her right away that he’s up for a job at her firm, and she’s mad about it. But that’s exactly what I love about Ruby Lang in general and Playing House in particular. The stakes are normal human stakes, because these are normal human people, albeit wittier and better at banter than normal human me. Even within the length constraints of a novella, Fay and Oliver feel like entire people with entire messy lives. Playing House isn’t pure fluff exactly because Fay and Oliver’s lives feel so real, from the things they love (penny? tile? I don’t understand house words) to the things they fear (inadequacy, parental disapproval). I was so happy for them to talk through their problems and get their relationship on track.

Ruby Lang continues to be one of my favorite romance novelists working. I have languished many years in the dark after her Practice Perfect series ended,¹ but now she is returned! Playing House is but the first in a new series about REAL ESTATE, a setting that now seems such an obvious one for romance novels that I am shocked I don’t have an entire raft of housing-related romances on my bookshelf. Please hit me with any real estate-focused romance novels you may know of. Like maybe one where the protagonists are bonding over home renovations?

Note: I got an e-ARC of this book from the publisher for review consideration, probably because of my noisy and boundless enthusiasm for the author’s previous books. This has in no way influenced the contents of my review.

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Daniel Cumberland joined the Loyal League to seek revenge: Born free, then sold into slavery by white men pretending to be abolitionists, Daniel has never recovered from the psychological scars his years in slavery inflicted. He has no interest in a new partner, let alone one as pretty and vivacious as Janeta Sanchez, a mixed-race Cuban woman. But Janeta holds secrets of her own: She is an unwilling double agent, sent to spy on the Union in order to secure the freedom of her slave-owning father.

In the hands of a less talented author than Alyssa Cole, this would have been a hard pairing to get me to root for. It was actually a hard pairing to get me to root for. Although Janeta’s position in her family has always been precarious, as the daughter of a former slave, she still plans to work against abolition. But Cole deftly shows us how Janeta’s strengths — which become clear to us and to Daniel over the course of the book — have arisen from that exact precarity. Daniel’s developing respect for Janeta’s ability to manipulate situations in her favor goes hand-in-hand with Janeta’s realization that her worldview has been deeply wrong — not just her ideas about slavery, but her ideas about herself. It’s just really, really nicely done.

The book handles Daniel’s trauma — and underlying goodness — with a similarly careful hand. Though Daniel believes himself to be weak for struggling to recover from his ordeal as a slave, the book is clear that isn’t the case. Instead, it makes the point that different people respond to trauma differently. Which is a simple point to make, but one that often goes ignored, and I appreciate Cole for bringing it to the forefront here. Daniel has begun to forgive himself by the end of this book, but it’s clear that recovery will be a long, slow process.

To the ongoing question of how one can set a romance in the midst of the Civil War, the answer continues to be “by engaging really carefully with the realities of the time period.” Our glimpses of Daniel’s past are horrifying. Cole has clearly done her research and shines a light into various aspects of slavery and the Civil War that make the book feel truly lived in. A good chunk of the plot deals with the issue of foreign intervention in the Civil War, a subject that occupied the two sides quite a lot at the time, but that I never learned about in history class. Daniel and Janeta are trying to disrupt the South’s efforts to gain European — and especially British — support, a support that much of the South believed, or hoped, they would be able to count on as the war went on.

Perhaps more important than the history — at least to me, in this political moment — are the things Cole has to say about America. Neither Daniel nor Janeta begins the book with much hope of improving the country. Daniel wants his revenge, and Janeta wants her life to go back to normal. They both discover that their previous normal was deeply corrosive to them, and that there’s more to strive for.

The past two years have shown more clearly than ever the corrosiveness of America’s status quo. Yet An Unconditional Freedom reminds the reader that America is also its people, that the most downtrodden people can still carry a spark of hope that brings light in the darkness and maybe, eventually, a brighter future.

Prepare, in short, to get emotional, not just about Daniel and Janeta, but about the country we live in and the one we hope to create.

(I received an e-copy of this book for review from the publisher. This has not impacted the contents of my review.)

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(Love to Everyone is called The Skylarks’ War in England, which I think is a much better title. Nobody ever consults me about these things.)

Clarry is accustomed to feeling invisible. Her mother died when she was a baby (because of her? Clarry thinks probably), and her father doesn’t care about her, and her brother Peter does not admit to liking her. But in the summers, she goes to Cornwall to stay with her grandparents, and she and Peter have summers with their older, dashing cousin Rupert. Love to Everyone is the story of them all growing up, Peter and Clarry and Rupert and all the people they acquire (and lose) along the way.

Of the many good things about Hilary McKay, my favorite is her ability to shift seamlessly between humor and joy and sadness. Her jokes are so exactly what I want jokes to be — wry and absurd and understated — but she has managed to reach adulthood without forgetting (which many people do forget) how sad and scary it can be to be a kid. Clarry and Peter spend a lot of their childhood being badly discontented, but they are clever and persistent enough to see opportunities to change their circumstances. They are also surrounded — this is another thing Hilary McKay does wonderfully — by people who mean different things to them at different stages of their lives. Someone who is a tedious nuisance at one stage of your life may turn out to be absolutely vital and heroic at another.

(All this I loved.)

What I did not love — and this will be a spoiler, but one that I am glad I knew going into the book, ta to Ana for warning me — is that in this World War I story, Hilary McKay chose the only queer character to die at the front. It is much much too many years in the future for people to be unaware of the Bury Your Gays trope. In Love to Everyone, the queer character is only in the war in the first place because he has a crush (obliquely suggested) on dashing cousin Rupert. Whatever Hilary McKay may have meant by it, it’s exhausting to read yet another story in which the senselessness of war ™ is made evident by disposing of a queer character–the only queer character, incidentally, in the book.

So take that as a caveat. If that hadn’t happened, I would have had only good things to say about Love to Everyone. It’s got a terrifically vibrant and complicated cast of characters, all of whom feel like real people with rich backstories of their own (whether we get to hear those stories or not). You can feel the world around the edges of the book in a way that’s quite remarkable. I just wish that Hilary McKay had been a little more aware of our own world and the tropes we should have put behind us by now.

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration.

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Revenant Gun picks up nine years after the end of Raven Stratagem, as the new government Cheris-and-Jedao founded tries to fight off efforts by the old hexarchate to regain their former power. Most notably, the ruthless and inventive Hexarch Kujen has resurfaced, and he has woken up a younger (less rebellious — he hopes) version of Jedao’s ghost to help him. Cheris-and-Jedao has disappeared. As it turns out, she/he/they are on a mission to assassinate Kujen (who we can all agree deserves it).

Phew. That was a lot of words to say. If you’re able, I would advise reading all three of these books one after another. They contain a lot of names and concepts and weirdness, and it took me a little while to get back in the swing of things. (Big surprise, I know.)

The verdict? Revenant Gun is an exciting, suspenseful conclusion to the series. Yoon Ha Lee introduces a potentially serious complication in the form of a second Jedao awakened and embodied by Kujen to win wars to sustain the existing calendar. (There’s a very funny — to me — running gag about a third Jedao, a kitten owned by a minor character.) This means, of course, two Jedao-ish characters working against each other, which could have been too much of a muchness but in fact works out to heighten the pitch of both the emotions and the suspense.

I mention the introduction of a second Jedao as a kind of synecdoche for Yoon Ha Lee’s relentless talent for inventive complication. It would have been easy (for me) for Revenant Gun to operate with the players already on the board, building to a climactic battle and a success for Cheris’s new calendar. Instead Lee continues to throw new ideas and complexities at the reader and the characters right up to the very end, requiring a constant re-sifting-through of loyalties and ideology. The result is a distinct lack of clear villainy or clear heroism. Everyone here is trying to correct wrongs they’ve perceived in the past, with the inevitable result of introducing shiny new wrongs that new people will have to launch assaults against.

Obviously, I love this series. It continues not to be for the faint of heart, and readers will probably benefit (I did) by not worrying too too much about sorting through and perfectly understanding each and every detail. But it’s superb and weird and strange and absolutely worth the effort you’ll invest.

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