Lianyu Tan's Blog, page 2

Review – The Unbroken [Magic of the Lost #1]

Messy infuriating disaster sapphicsdestabilising colonialism in a North African-inspired setting

Review – Carmilla and Laura

5/5 would bang the creepy chick with the white nightdress and bloodied face.

Review – The Masquerade Series 1-3 [Baru Cormorant]

The Masquerade Series, Books 1-3

by Seth Dickinson

A rollercoaster of potentially deadly sapphic yearning

An epic fantasy, anti-imperialist, political, military, lesbian poc protagonist, gritty, thoughtful and thought-provoking unfinished 4 book series (book 3 was published 2020) by Seth Dickinson.

CW for this series: references to colonialism; racism; cruelty/death to queer, trans, non-binary, poly people; torture; death; animal death; sexual assault; swearing; abortion; non...

Review – The Monster Baru Cormorant

The Masquerade Series, Book 2

by Seth Dickinson

Read this book if you want to suffer

This book is like 170k words long, a bunch of stuff happens in it, there’s at least 3 povs that I can remember, but mostly it felt like a game of drawn-out grief where every new page might uncover and re-contextualise an old hurt.

There are moments of levity, including the occasional zinger of a one-liner (mostly due to Baru’s new gay colleague). Baru swears and drinks way more than she did in Bo...

Review – The Traitor Baru Cormorant

The Masquerade Series, Book 1

by Seth Dickinson

A truly grimdark political anti-imperialist epic fantasy
with a sapphic protagonist wielding fiscal policy as her superpower

The most brutally calculating sapphic heroine I’ve ever met. I LOVED her.

Also the closest I’ve seen to a MC personifying my day job. Personally I found her blunt use of monetary policy unfettered by having to go through a committee so fun (possibly the most fantastical part of the book, but joyous to watch). H...

Review – Gideon the Ninth

I experienced this book as a revelation.

Before you assume that’s hyperbole, the only other books I’ve ever read where I felt my life had changed in some subtle, indefinable way—that the me before reading was not the same person afterward–were the Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake, which I first read in my teens; a series that also happens to be a spiritual ancestor of Gideon the Ninth.

I’m thirty-five. When I was growing up, a queer Chinese kid in deeply white semi-rural Australia, th...