Sally Bend's Blog, page 17

Red Sonja: Consumed by Gail Simone Hits the Sword & Sorcery Sweet Spot

Title: Red Sonja: Consumed
Author: Gail Simone
Publication Date: November 19, 2024 by Orbit
Genres: Fantasy
Protagonist Gender: Female

Back in high school, I devoured every sword & sorcery saga I could get my hands on, including Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Elric of Melniboné, Jirel of Joiry, Conan the Cimmerian, and (in comic book form), Red Sonja. I was a huge fan of her Marvel Comics run, and liked what I’d read of what I’d seen in Dynamite Comics, so I was excited to hear that Gail Simone would be the one to bring her to the page.

That said, I saw some rather negative (and surprising) reviews of Red Sonja: Consumed, so I entered into it with no little trepidation. Having devoured it over the course of a weekend, I can happily say this is the novel that the character has always deserved, as if Simone found some lost manuscript of the late Robert E. Howard and just finessed it for modern readers.

This is vintage sword & sorcery, complete with action, adventure, magic, and monsters. It’s violent and ugly at times, more concerned with survival than hope, and often disturbingly mad. It’s pulp fantasy with a bit more of a soul/conscience than we may have seen decades ago, but what makes it memorable is just how carefully Simone imbues the story with depth. She doesn’t shove contemporary morals or ideals in your face, doesn’t have her heroine make any grand statements about progress or equality, but instead sprinkles with book with subtle details, including the notes and articles from historians that open each chapter, that serve as a sort of internal commentary.

Some readers have described Red Sonja as one-dimensional and stereotypical, but nothing could be further from the truth. She’s a damaged woman, scarred by childhood trauma, who is wandering the world in search of meaning. She’s neither superhuman nor supernatural, and yet that vulnerability is something those same readers have chafed against. Others have complained she’s oversexualized, but this is an example of where Simone has so carefully shifted the telling. Yes, she’s scantily dressed, and some characters do objectify her, but you’re not going to find references to her breast size, heaving bosom, tight butt, or anything else that you may be imagining as you read.

Narratively, I’ve seen complaints about multiple POVs and shifts in narrative which, to be fair, are more hallmarks of epic fantasy than sword & sorcery, but I found they expanded the story and gave it depth – especially in the case of the villain and the monsters – and actually counter the complaints of readers who felt Red Sonja’s POV wasn’t engaging enough early on. Honestly, I feel as if some readers went into it with certain expectations, and abandoned it halfway through, because my experience was nothing but positive.

Red Sonja: Consumed felt familiar where I needed it to, new and fresh where I wanted it to, and surprising in so many exciting ways. A welcome addition to both the sword & sorcery and kick-ass heroine shelves.

Rating:

My sincere thanks to the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Weekend Freebies – Queer Fantasy & Romance,

Well, if it’s another weekend, then it must be time to bend our hearts and minds around preparing for the week ahead, and how better to do that than with some Weekend Freebies!

Every weekend I search through the free titles on Amazon, looking for those that might interest visitors to the ruins. Even if you don’t have a Kindle, you can still download the titles through one of Amazon’s free reading applications.

Please do be sure to check the price before downloading anything, as most freebies are limited time offers, and some are specific to certain regions.

Enjoy!

Can’t-Wait Wednesday: The Warbler by Sarah Beth Durst (urban fantasy)

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted here to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about that we have yet to read. Generally they’re books that have yet to be released. Find out more here.

My choice for this week is the story of a young woman who fears that if she puts down roots, a family curse will turn her into a tree!

The Warbler

by Sarah Beth Durst
Adult, Fantasy
335 pages, Paperback
March 1, 2025 by Lake Union Publishing

From the author of The Lies Among Us comes a magical tale about mothers and daughters, choices and consequences, and the real meaning of home when every place feels like a cage.

Ten months. That’s the longest Elisa has stayed anyplace, constantly propelled by her fear that if she puts down roots, a family curse will turn her into a tree.

But she’s grown tired of flitting from town to town and in and out of relationships. When she discovers a small town in Massachusetts where mysterious forces make it impossible for the residents to leave, she hopes she can change her fate.

As Elisa learns about the town’s history, she understands more about the women in her family, who seem doomed to never get what they want. Now she believes she’s stuck, too—is that a patch of bark on her arm? But her neighbor’s collection of pet birds sings secrets that Elisa can almost understand—secrets she must unravel in order to be truly alive.

Goodreads

Curious about what you’ve been missing? Read my previous reviews of Sarah’s work HERE.

Book Review: The Bloodless Princes by Charlotte Bond (fantasy)

Title: The Bloodless Princes
Author: Charlotte Bond
Publication Date: October 29, 2024 by Tordotcom
Genres: Fantasy
Protagonist Gender: Female

Two books in, and I am absolutely in love with Charlotte Bond’s fantasy. She takes the familiar tropes of myth, legend, and fairy tale and spins new life from them, evoking the same sense of awe, admiration, and affection in her readers. On the surface, they seem to be simple stories of straightforward quests, but beneath that surface she deconstructs and reinterprets those familiar tropes, creating something subtly meaningful.

In The Fireborne Blade, she used flashbacks to tell her story, weaving together past and present, sprinkling it with archive reports of other knights and their dragon encounters. Here, in The Bloodless Princes, she forgoes flashbacks in favor of folklore, sharing stories that often contradict one another, leaving us entirely uncertain as to what really happened to shape the underworld and its princes.

While the first book was largely Maddileh’s, with Saralene only coming into it through the backdoor of flashbacks, here the women are friends, allies, and an almost couple, carrying the narrative and its quest together. In place of Maddileh’s squire we get a very different kind of sidekick, one with wings and horns and fur and murder paws, but you’ll have to meet her for yourself. The entire concept of the underworld here, especially with its conflicting origin stories, is wonderful, so well thought out and carefully detailed that it felt as much a country as an afterlife.

Like any good fairy tale or myth, there are sacrifices to be made, riddles to be puzzled, promises to be examined, and bargains to be made. The Bloodless Princes is a fantastic story on its own, and even better as a sequel, and I truly hope we’ll get to encounter these ladies again.

Rating:

My sincere thanks to the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

T-Girl Tales #8: A Kinky Treat from Crystal Veeyant

Title: T-Girl Tales #8
Author: Crystal Veeyant
Publication Date: September, 2024
Genres: Erotica
Protagonist Gender: Various

If you’re a regular reader of the Bookshelf or a fan of Crystal Veeyant, then you may be a bit confused seeing this review. Surely, you must be thinking, you remember T-Girl Tales #8 from a year ago, so why is Sally talking about it now? Well, the stories that were originally released as T-Girl Tales #8 were repurposed into the T-Girl Tales Family Values collection, so this new edition of T-Girl Tales #8 (be sure to update your download, if you’ve already purchased it) is actually all-new content.

These stories are super sweet stories of erotic discovery and kinky romance. There’s so much joy to them that, no matter how trashy or tawdry the sex may get, no matter how twists and turns may make you (temporarily) question that joy, the emotion is always there, inviting you to soar along with the characters. I found myself smiling so much in reading them, that I really do think they may be some of Crystal’s best relationships yet.

The story of Andi: Sissy Wife, Slave and Whore is, well, just that – and in that order. We start with a young man who takes a job cleaning houses to pay for his crossdressing habit, but who is also guilty of lifting silken treasures from dresser drawers and bedroom hampers. When he’s caught, the heady, romantic story of the Sissy Wife begins . . . and a pair of poker games later, with one very determined Mistress willing to be it all, we shift into the story of the Slave and the Whore, which has its edgy moments of darkness, but is no less a story of self-discovery because of it.

Mom’s Lesbian Sissy Toy is more about the hot MILFs next door than Lenny’s stepmom, but here the story starts with edgy kink, with themes of being caught and transformed, but as secret motives are revealed, we find our happily-ever-after.

Barracks Gangbang Sissy, meanwhile, is likely precisely what you expect in the middle, but getting there and moving on are delicious surprises. It’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell for the fetish generation, and just when you think Alex has been betrayed and pushed beyond his limits, we find out just how much he can take – and precisely what he wants to take.

Probably my favorite story in the collection, Sissy Therapy is that rare Crystal tale told not from the sissy’s POV, but from that of their Domme/Therapsit. What makes it so powerful for me is that it explores the very same guilt and shame so many people like Bethany are familiar with, working through those darker emotions to find a wonderful level of self-awareness and self-confidence, leading to a surprise HEA.

Now, if you’re starting to fear that Crystal has gone soft, she saves the darkest, sometimes cruelest, and sometimes most succulent surprises for last in Country Girls. I don’t want to say much about this, but what begins with an accident, an act of violence, and an abduction turns into a forced-feminization fantasy of erotic misuse at the hands of others. There’s still happiness to be found beneath the darkness, and some wonderful thrills that will have your heart racing to the conclusion, but how you feel about what’s in between . . . well, may just depend on whether you need that Sissy Therapist or have already found your self-awareness.

Rating:

My sincere thanks to the author for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Freebie Friday – Putting the TG in TGIF!

Well, if it’s Friday, then it must be time to bend our way into the weekend with Freebie Friday!

Every Friday I search through the free titles on Amazon, looking for those that might be of interest to similarly bent readers, fans, and lovers. Even if you don’t have a Kindle, you can still download the titles through one of Amazon’s free reading applications.

Please do be sure to check the price before downloading anything, as most freebies are limited time offers, and some are specific to certain regions.

Enjoy!

Can’t-Wait Wednesday: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted here to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about that we have yet to read. Generally they’re books that have yet to be released. Find out more here.

My choice for this week is 14 years and 6000 pages in the making, bringing the first story arc of the massive Stormlight Archive to a close!

Wind and Truth

by Brandon Sanderson
Adult, Epic Fantasy
Hardcover and eBook, 1248 pages
December 6, 2024 by Tor Books

The long-awaited explosive climax to the first arc of the #1 New York Times bestselling Stormlight Archive–the iconic epic fantasy masterpiece that has sold more than 10 million copies, from acclaimed bestselling author Brandon Sanderson.

Dalinar Kholin challenged the evil god Odium to a contest of champions with the future of Roshar on the line. The Knights Radiant have only ten days to prepare–and the sudden ascension of the crafty and ruthless Taravangian to take Odium’s place has thrown everything into disarray.

Desperate fighting continues simultaneously worldwide–Adolin in Azir, Sigzil and Venli at the Shattered Plains, and Jasnah in Thaylenah. The former assassin, Szeth, must cleanse his homeland of Shinovar from the dark influence of the Unmade. He is accompanied by Kaladin, who faces a new battle helping Szeth fight his own demons . . . and who must do the same for the insane Herald of the Almighty, Ishar.

At the same time, Shallan, Renarin, and Rlain work to unravel the mystery behind the Unmade Ba-Ado-Mishram and her involvement in the enslavement of the singer race and in the ancient Knights Radiant killing their spren. And Dalinar and Navani seek an edge against Odium’s champion that can be found only in the Spiritual Realm, where memory and possibility combine in chaos. The fate of the entire Cosmere hangs in the balance.

Goodreads

Curious about what you’ve been missing? Read my previous reviews of Brandon’s work HERE.

The Role of Human Editors in an AI World

I was chatting with an author friend today about automated tools for checking spelling and grammar, whether they’re good enough to polish a work of fiction, and if we really need human editors and proofreaders in an AI-powered world.

I edit/proofread a million words a year for clients, and I read every single one of them. Yes, I have some automated tools that I use for a first pass, but I use them cautiously and selectively. Why, you might ask? Well, there are a few reasons.

Word Choice Matters

Number one, these tools are far from perfect. They’re evaluating your writing based on established patterns, common uses of language, and the context of neighboring words. Even the best AI-powered tools, fine-tuned for casual writing or works of fiction, can only make educated guesses. If you blindly accept every single recommendation, your writing is going to become an indecipherable mess. Think I’m exaggerating? Let me share a few real-life examples from stories I’ve run through spelling and grammar check software.

These first two are examples of tools suggesting word choices so wrong, they’re bizarre. We all know how erotic it is to have your criteria sucked, and I guess having someone breathed you instead of breed you is a novel form of birth control.

Perhaps you think those are anomalies, examples that I must have struggled to come up with. Nope. All the examples I’m sharing today came from quick checks of the first few pages of stories from 10 different authors. It’s nice to have someone who needs your breasts, but I’m sure we can all agree that kneading this is better, and given a choice of having someone cut down or cum down my throat, I’ll take the latter, please.

Surely you’re smart enough and careful enough not to let suggestions like that slip through, right? Perhaps, but by the time you’ve read your own work a dozen times or more, you tend to read what should be there rather than what is, and it’s easy to make the mistake of accepting the wrong changes – especially when it’s something that seems grammatically correct, but which changes the sense of your sentence entirely.

Yes, you can play alone or play along, but they mean very different things, and you can study with someone as well as you can study them, but participating and observing are not the same.

Tools can help, but they’ll never replace a human who reads every word, sentence, paragraph, and page, knowing how they connect and what they mean, not as isolated fragments of language, but as part of a story.

Dialogue and Slang: Grammar is Never Perfect

Formal language and grammar have their place, but so do informal grammar, casual language, and slang. We write one way for business, another for friends or family, and yet another for readers of stories. Similarly, we don’t speak the same way we write, and even if you’re neurodivergent like me, rehearsing and editing your words inside your head before you speak, you still don’t have the benefit of grammar-checking your conversations.

We say cause instead of because. We speak in fragments and run-on sentences. A pause for breath in narrative demands punctuation, but in dialogue we don’t have that luxury. We stumble over our words. We make tense mistakes, grammar errors, and more. A character in a horror story can speak in gibberish when being possessed, the protagonist in a thriller may be indecipherable after getting punched in the mouth, or a submissive in an erotic story may struggle to make themselves understood around a ball gag. “Ys ank ooo msrs” is entirely suitable for a gagged submissive saying, “Yes, thank you, Mistress,” but no tool is going to know that.

Some AI-powered tools can differentiate (to some extent) between casual and formal writing, and some try to acknowledge the freedom of dialogue, but only a human ear can ‘hear’ how your words sound.

Genre Has Its Own Complexities

Even if you could fine-tune a language tool to understand the complexities of casual writing and narrative writing, no two genres are entirely alike. Words that might be perfectly acceptable in one might read as out-of-place in another, and expressions that fit one genre do not always fit another.

Let’s take the example of come and cum in erotica. Generally, come is the act and cum is the fluid left over, but the words can be used interchangeably without readers batting an eye. In any other genre, cum is just plain wrong – unless you’re using it in the Latin sense. Or consider capitalization, where a BDSM story might refer to a master key or being the master of a skill, but also refer to being a Master. Any automated tool is going to flag the inconsistency, and no matter how you try to teach it what to ignore, it’ll never learn the difference.

For another example, consider interjections like ah, oh, hmm, or hmph. Those right there, the roots of the words, the shortest versions, are grammatically correct for just about any genre. Within fiction, however, especially romance, erotica, and horror, we regularly use onomatopoeia to capture sounds, turning ‘ah’ into ‘ahhhhh’ or ‘oh’ into ‘ohohohohohhhh,’ and readers are fine with that. Any tool out there is going to tell you that the extra letters are wrong – and sometimes they are just a typo – but it takes a human to read it in context and understand.

The Final Word

Tools are great for a first pass, for a sanity check, or just to clean up your manuscript for reading. They have value, and they have their place, but only when used correctly – and they’re no replacement for a human reader.

And that, of course, doesn’t even begin to get into the minefield that is AI and the training of large language models. Terms, conditions, and policies are often vague, with some tools allowing your content to be reused unless you opt out, some not giving you a choice, and others refusing to acknowledge whether they’re using your stories or not. There’s a reason companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are facing lawsuits. It’s one thing to risk exposing your own content, and another entirely to risk exposing your clients’ content.

On that note, I only use tools where I can confirm that content is not being reused under any conditions, and I pay close attention to any changes in terms and conditions – something not every writer using such tools casually has the time to do.

Book Review: Ritual of Proof by Dara Joy (SFF Romance)

Title: Ritual of Proof
Author: Dara Joy
Publication Date: April 2, 2002 by HarperTorch
Genres: SFF Romance

Ritual of Proof is a book I’ve had on my used bookstore wishlist for years, thanks in part to its place on several role-reversal and FLR book lists, and to the opening lines of its cover blurb:

In a world where women hold all the power, a titled man can do little but accept his fate — that his sole purpose is to secure a good match — and hope his “bed price” is high enough. 

I knew, given that Jorlan was described as impossibly willful and brash, that this was somehow going to subvert the relationship expectations, but I’d hoped for enough background and supporting characters for me to be able to enjoy the world around him. Sadly, that was not to be the case.

I made it a little more than a third into this, far enough to read about the titular Ritual of Proof (which involves a male hymen that is painfully dissolved by a woman’s sexual fluids), and randomly skimmed through the rest to see if it got better, but the whole book feels like an awkward satire at best, or a deliberate cheat at worst. We’re told that the whole world was deliberately set up like that of a gender-swapped Regency romance (yes, there’s a sci-fi colonization element to this), and we see a lot of the women in charge, but aside from references to the Marquelle’s pleasure boy, there’s not another male to be seen. We’re expected to just accept the gender dynamic because we’re told it exists, but the only one we get to experience is desperately straining to be that of a traditional romance.

Now, I get the satirical element of it, I really do. Making Jorlan a bluestocking who believes in equal rights for men seems silly because it’s so far from our own experience, but it also forces the reader to confront the fact that women having to fight for equality is just as silly. Similarly, genetically engineering a male hymen to prove virginity is just as silly, but it forces us to think about women being so casually violated to prove their virginity from a different perspective. Where the satire falls short is that, to my mind, the book does a good job of explaining why the society was established that way, and why gender roles were reversed, and nothing about the story seems to challenge that.

The problem – for me, at least – is that I wanted to immerse myself in that gender-flipped world and experience what it’s like to be a pampered, submissive male whose only job is to look good for his wife and take care of her estates. I knew we’d never get a sincere exploration of that in a twenty-year-old mass market paperback, but I hoped we at least see something of that world. I kept holding out hope for a character who would contrast Jorlan, maybe friends or even forced friends whose behavior would highlight what a rebellious bluestocking he is, but sadly none of that is to be found.

As a satire, Ritual of Proof is a bit too deliberate, with a singular focus that doesn’t allow for any nuances, lacking the context we need to appreciate it. As an FLR romance, it’s a complete failure, unless you like bratty subs, dubcon intimacy, and topping from the bottom. Maybe I just had my hopes up, but this was not for me.

Rating:

Freebie Friday – Putting the TG in TGIF!

Well, if it’s Friday, then it must be time to bend our way into the weekend with Freebie Friday!

Every Friday I search through the free titles on Amazon, looking for those that might be of interest to similarly bent readers, fans, and lovers. Even if you don’t have a Kindle, you can still download the titles through one of Amazon’s free reading applications.

Please do be sure to check the price before downloading anything, as most freebies are limited time offers, and some are specific to certain regions.

Enjoy!