Siavahda's Blog, page 3

Made Me Glitter: A King’s Trust by S.E. McPherson

A King's Trust (Heart-Mage Trilogy #1) by S.E. McPherson
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Autistic bi/pansexual MC with ADHD, MLM love interest, M/M/F polyamory
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
ISBN: 9798992254327
Goodreads

Fantasy | Romance | LGBTQ+

The spare becomes the heir and, on his path to the throne, discovers magical intrigue, a secret society pulling political strings, and not one, but two loves of his life.

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~wait how DID the crown prince die
~fuck paperwork
~do NOT fuck your bodyguard
~heart-magic ftw
~a Useful Thing is indeed useful

True story: a little bit ago, I politely messaged someone to let them know this is NOT a romantasy blog (which is how they’d described Every Book a Doorway). I don’t even read romantasy! I’m definitely not out here trying to BOOST it!

…I may have to eat my words a little bit. Because my newest fave is romantasy, and I am absolutely here to boost the hells out of it.

King’s Trust caught my eye when I saw it was promising me polyamory and an extremely neurodivergent main character – an AuADHD one, in fact. Like me! And that day, I was having major brain-fog, and was hoping something more romancey might reach me through the murk. (I have noticed that romance is much easier for me to read than Epic Fantasy when my brain’s misbehaving.)

Friends, not only did it go full-on LIGHTHOUSE on my brain-fog, I didn’t move from dawn to dusk until I’d finished it!

Beau is the second-born prince, but is now the heir, his elder brother having just died. Unfortunately, Beau couldn’t be worse for the job; he’s spent the last dozen years living incognito far from all things royal, he has zero understanding of or patience for politicking, has no idea how anything works or how it’s run, and is completely lacking the relationships with his country’s nobles that a crown heir should have developed years ago. (He also has the difficulties any unmedicated ADHDer has when it comes to reams of complicated, boring paperwork.) The country’s only chance, as his parents see it, is for him to marry someone brilliant enough that she can run the kingdom for him. (‘She’ because, though this is a queernorm setting, royal marriages need to make little baby royals, which means a partner you can reproduce with. Probably a trans or nonbinary person with the right equipment would be acceptable too, but there aren’t any of the right rank around so it’s a moot point.)

The one person Beau has in his corner is his bodyguard, cheerful, supportive Elias – who also happens to be the only person to believe Beau will make a good king. Beau has been crushing on Elias for years – Elias was his bodyguard long before he was called back to be king-in-waiting – but given how wildly inappropriate it would be to express sexual interest in an employee, Beau has kept that to himself.

They wanted just enough excitement in their small talk to flavor it, not enough realism to spoil the taste.

Beau’s autism is the kind that gets dubbed ‘high-functioning’, but if you know what you’re looking for, it’s not subtle. There’s his complete ineptitude at Doing Politics, as well as his contempt for it; and there’s the black-and-white thinking, the not just refusal to ignore injustice but the inability to do so. A small but important sub-plot is his discovery that many nobles, when visiting the palace, assault the servants sexually, which he refuses to let stand. Obviously that makes me like him, but what I most appreciated was that this characteristic is held in conflict with his contempt for politicking – and that contempt is critiqued. Charging in like a bull in a china shop will only make things worse, even dangerous, for the people he’s trying to help. It’s not enough to be well-intentioned; it’s not enough to call out injustice. You have to do so intelligently. Speaking from personal experience: yeah, this is something autists have to learn, just as we have to unlearn any disdain for politicking. Being able to ‘play the game’ is not a bad thing, something we also get to see via Penny, the ex-fiance of Beau’s brother, who stands as foil and contrast to Beau for a lot of the book.

The plots build up, and braid together, slowly but precisely, with a neatness I found really impressive. Mysteries and questions start in the background, then gradually come to the fore, growing bigger and more urgent with every page turned. Beau’s brother died in a hunting accident, that’s not one of the mysteries – but something appalling is going on with the kingdom’s store of magical artefacts; someone has been masquerading as Beau via letter for quite some time, taking and paying bribes; and tensions are rising between the kingdom and its neighbour regarding a band of destructive renegades/cultish fanatics. There’s also smaller-scale issues, like Beau’s aforementioned need to find a spouse, the trainwreck that is his relationship with his parents, and his discovery that many nobles have been assaulting palace staff without repercussions. It could have made for a messy, over-full book where not every plot point got enough page-time, but instead King’s Trust feels so wall-balanced! Yes, there’s a lot, but in a way that feels very believable and realistic: there are going to be a whole lot of things that need juggling if you abruptly become the crown heir! That makes perfect sense! And it helps convey how Much the whole situation is for Beau.

And–why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t decide if that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard or the most demented.”

I’ve seen a few critiques of the romance/s, but personally, I adored it/them. Beau’s relationship with Elias is wildly different from his relationship with Penny, aka Victoire Augusta Bridgette Penamour, aka the Duchess of Veritelutte. A minor spoiler re the polyamory aspect that might be a dealbreaker for some readers: [View post to see spoiler] This in no way impacted my enjoyment, though. Possibly my favourite aspect of the romance is how the progression of the romantic arcs parallels the reveal or discovery of El and Penny’s full characters. Elias is not who Beau (and the reader) first think he is, and neither is Penny; not just in a sense of, they have more depth than we were initially aware of, but their core personalities are not what they at first appeared to be. And that was a really fun, fascinating discovery – or journey of discovery, that might be a more accurate way to put it. I rarely get very invested in romantic plotlines, but I wasn’t just invested here, I was urging the romances on in a way I don’t remember ever doing before – because I wanted to learn more about El and Penny! Because they are very cool characters, way more so than I thought at first! They both have LAYERS and I wanted them uncovered!

And yes, I shipped them. VERY HARD.

Worldbuilding-wise, King’s Trust doesn’t have the level of detail I usually prefer, but I didn’t feel the lack because of how vividly alive the characters were, and how focused the book kept me on the different plotlines. It doesn’t hurt that the final beats of the ending make it clear we’ll be learning a lot more about magic in this setting in the rest of the series – as long as the author follows through on that, I’ll be perfectly happy. (And a fair bit of worldbuilding that looked simplistic turned out not to be.) The prose isn’t the ornate, semi-purple kind that is my favourite, but it’s bright and quick and polished – there’s an addictive popcorn-quality to it, and since it kept me hooked during some of the WORST brain-fog I’ve had this year, I can confirm that it’s wonderfully easy to read.

Look, I loved this book. LOVED IT. I’m almost done with my second read of it, and I predict I’ll have read it several more times before we get the sequel. It’s one of those books that just makes you HAPPY. That makes you glitter inside – not (just) because of the romance, but because of some indefinable squee-factor I’ve never been able to name. I flapped my arms and kicked my feet for this one, friends, and I will do it again!

Come December, you’ll find it on my best-of-year list!

The post Made Me Glitter: A King’s Trust by S.E. McPherson  appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

I Can’t Wait For…Beasts of the Four Nations by John O’Bryan, Bryan Konietzko, & Michael Dante DiMartino

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. 

You can find the releases I’m most anticipating this year over on my Unmissable list, but I use Can’t-Wait Wednesday to feature books I’m hopeful about but aren’t 100% sure will be five star reads.

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is Beasts of the Four Nations by John O’Bryan, Bryan Konietzko, & Michael Dante DiMartino! (And a whole bunch of wonderful illustrators!)

Beasts of the Four Nations: Creatures from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra by John O'Bryan, Bryan Konietzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Nickelodeon, Devin Elle Kurtz
Published on: 23rd September 2025
Goodreads

Discover the creatures of The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra with this in-depth exploration of the Four Nations’ animal inhabitants!
Part of what everyone loves about the Four Nations is all the strange and wonderful (and sometimes scary!) creatures that inhabit them! From the Air Nomads’ flying bison, to Kyoshi Island’s elephant koi, to the Earth Kingdom’s singing groundhogs and the little purple pentapus, look to this hardcover volume for images and information on Avatar and Korra’s creatures large and small.

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I’m ashamed to confess that I’ve never watched Avatar – I’m terrible at watching tv generally – but I’ve always meant to watch it eventually. I’ve loved everything I’ve seen and heard about it over the years.

And even if I hadn’t, as a worldbuilding-nut, I’m ALWAYS excited for ‘non-fiction’ about imaginary worlds. Especially beasties! Have you ever tried to invent a completely new animal?! It’s incredibly hard! So a book all about creatures invented for Avatar – which I’ve always heard has INCREDIBLE worldbuilding – sounds like it was written for me! (And maybe this will finally get me to sit down and watch the show???)

I first heard about Beasts of the Four Nations when one of the amazing artists I follow on insta revealed a print they’d illustrated for it. I’ve never seen the beasties in the picture in any Avatar screenshots or anything – but HI, I’M IN LOVE!

You can see some of the interior pages in this feature over on Nerdist, and they look fantastic. I’m basically one giant I HAVE A MIGHTY NEED gif!

*grabby hands*

The post I Can’t Wait For…Beasts of the Four Nations by John O’Bryan, Bryan Konietzko, & Michael Dante DiMartino appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Must-Have Monday #250

Must-Have Monday is a feature highlighting which of the coming week’s new releases I’m excited for. It is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all books being published that week; only those I’m interested in out of those I’m aware of! The focus is diverse SFF, but other stuff sneaks in occasionally too.

TEN books this week!

(Books are listed in order of pub date, then Adult SFF, Adult Other, YA SFF, YA Other, MG SFF.)

May Chaos Reign Over You by La Purvis
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MC, Black sapphic love interest, F/F
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

Hezi is the purveyor of wine and chaos at Wayward Sip, the safe haven she created to escape her abusive ex. As chaos incarnate, she bestows her golden apples at her discretion and it is there that she meets Edno. The young dragon carries a darkness that threatens unmeasurable destruction and Hezi can't help but offer him the thing he wants most -- power. But when he returns days later with Emry, the alpha of his coven, Hezi realizes she made a mistake.

Edno was consumed by chaos. But rather than feeling remorse, Hezi is amused and Emry is incensed. Emry decides that Hezi's life will be a suitable replacement for Edno's, but when their eyes lock, Emry's demands become far more personal than she'd anticipated. Bigger problems arise however as Emry is called back to her home to deal with the growing mistrust between her coven and The Regime, while Hezi's ex is trying to force his way back into her life.

Hezi knows that getting attached to anyone is a risk, but she doesn't know which is more terrifying -- pushing everyone away for fear of losing them, or succumbing to the love of a dragon hellbent on claiming Hezi as her own.

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Excuse me, our mc has four eyes??? I’m listening!

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Trans MC, nonbinary spouse, lesbian MC, lesbian spouse
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders's own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic.

A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic--with very unexpected results--in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.

Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training--she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she's also a powerful witch.

Serena, Jamie's mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.

Now it's up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.

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I’ve loved Anders’ previous standalones, but wasn’t sure if I’d vibe with this one? SHOULDN’T HAVE WORRIED, IT’S GOING ON MY BEST OF 2025 LIST!

You can read the first two chapters here!

My review!

Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of “Snow White” steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind.

Healer Anja regularly drinks poison.

Not to die, but to save—seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.
But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her.

Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat, and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow, but nothing seems to work. That is, until she finds a secret world, hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick.

Or it might be the thing that kills them all.

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Kingfisher is one of my favourite authors and I am HYPED for a character who is Very Intense about the scientific method!

You can read an excerpt here (where it says Read Excerpt beneath the book cover)!

The Possession of Alba Díaz by Isabel Cañas
Genres: Adult, Horror
Representation: Mexican setting and cast
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

When a demonic presence awakens deep in a Mexican silver mine, the young woman it seizes must turn to the one man she shouldn’t trust… from bestselling author Isabel Cañas.

In 1765, plague sweeps through Zacatecas. Alba flees with her wealthy merchant parents and fiancé, Carlos, to his family’s isolated mine for refuge. But safety proves fleeting as other dangers soon bare their teeth: Alba begins suffering from strange hallucinations, sleepwalking, and violent convulsions. She senses something cold lurking beneath her skin. Something angry. Something wrong.

Elías, haunted by a troubled past, came to the New World to make his fortune and escape his family’s legacy of greed. Alba, as his cousin’s betrothed, is none of his business. Which is of course why he can’t help but notice her every time she enters a room or the growing tension between them… and why he notices her deteriorate when the demon’s thirst for blood grows stronger.

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I’ve been seeing a lot of love for this, and for this author! Not my usual kind of read, but I may have to give it a try!

You can read an excerpt here!

The Last Soul Among Wolves (The Echo Archives #2) by Melissa Caruso
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: F/F
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

The Last Soul Among Wolves is the brilliant second installment in Melissa Caruso's Echo Archives series, a whip-smart adventure fantasy featuring cursed relics, sapphic romance, and a magical murder mystery.

All Kembral Thorne wants is to finish her maternity leave in peace. But when her best friend asks for help, she can’t say no, even if it means a visit to a run-down mansion on an isolated island for a will reading. She arrives to find an unexpected reunion of her childhood friends—plus her once-rival, now-girlfriend Rika Nonesuch, there on a mysterious job. Then the will is read, and everything goes sideways.

Eight potential heirs, half of them Kem’s oldest friends.
Three cursed relics.
The rules: one by one, the heirs will die.

The prize for the lone survivor: A wish. And wishes are always bad business.

To save their friends, Kem and Rika must race against the clock and descend into other realities once more. But the mansion is full of old secrets and new schemes, and soon the game becomes far more dangerous—and more personal—than they could have imagined.

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Working hard to not read the synopsis since I don’t want any spoilers, but – new Melissa Caruso!

You can listen to an excerpt of the audiobook here!

The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland by Rachael Herron
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MC
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

Most visitors to Skerry Island see only its lush greenery, picturesque cemetery, and quaint downtown. Yet generations of local women know that on Skerry, their benevolent witchcraft is at its most powerful.
  
Beatrice Barnard doesn't believe in magic. She definitely doesn't believe the predictions of the celebrity psychic who claims that she will experience seven miracles and soon after she will die. When she discovers her husband is cheating on her, Bea flees to Skerry Island, off the Pacific Northwest coast, in desperate need of solitude—taking her husband's birthday vacation by herself. Immediately upon arrival, she finds her life on the line as a rogue woodchopper blade almost kills her. Her survival feels like a miracle.

And then things get more miraculous when she discovers her twin sister, Cordelia, whom she never knew about, and her mother Astrid, who supposedly died when Beatrice was two years old. Astrid and Cordelia reveal that Beatrice (given name Beatrix) is an immensely powerful witch who can commune with the dead, like all the local Holland family witches. When their twin magic is joined, it shines like a beacon to the Velamen family, whose malevolent spirits are locked in an age-old struggle for magical dominance over the Hollands.

Beatrice doesn't know what to believe, but she begins to fear that the seven predicted miracles may occur, and that her imminent death will rip her away from her rediscovered family. Beatrice resolves to learn everything she can about her own power, in the hope of saving herself. But when her niece, Minna, goes missing, Bea's own life suddenly seems much less important. Beatrice must join her mother and her sister to save Minna even if she dies in the process.

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I doubt this one’s going to be for me, but I wanted to include it in case it catches someone else’s interest.

You can listen to an excerpt of the audiobook here!

Starship Librarians by Shannon Allen, JR Campbell
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

No starship crew is complete without a Librarian!

The glasses, the bun, the woolly sweater, the "shush" capable of reducing grown people to tears--we all know what the Librarians of the past looked like. But what about the Librarians of tomorrow? They're in spacesuits and uniforms because they're not getting left behind. Humanity needs them still. Always.

Whether essential crew in the grand exploration of the space, defenders of knowledge in bleak radioactive tomorrows, or idealists in the halls of Neo-Alexandria, the librarians of tomorrow are here to serve.

With stories Shannon Allen; Mackensie Baker; J R Campbell; C. B. Hingston; Robert Lauderdale; Trisha Jenn Loehr; Lesley Moody; Donna J. W. Munro; Nico Martinez Nocito; Aggie Novak; R. Overwater; Rhonda Parrish & E.C. Bell; Kara Race-Moore; Jennifer Rahn; J.W. Schnarr; Lisa Timpf; Liz Westbrook-Trenholm; C.N. Wheaton; and Kayla Whittle, with a special Librarian's Note from Sephora Henderson.

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Excuse me, I ADORE the idea of zooming in on the librarians of spaceships!!! Suspect I’m gonna devour this one!

Dot Slash Magic by Liz Shipton
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

A new, spicy urban fantasy from TikTokker Liz Shipton, perfect for fans of I am Number Fourand Zodiac Academy.

What if you wrote a magic computer program? What if that magic computer program started summoning monsters?

When twenty-something coder Seven Jones goes back to school at a community college in San Diego, the last thing she wants is to join some stupid club. And the last thing she expects is to walk into an underground magic club. Like, actual wizards and shit.

Seven reluctantly joins the motley crew of magic weirdos and discovers her own power. But she struggles to control it…until she figures out how to channel her magic through an artificially intelligent computer program.

Unfortunately, there is literally nothing Seven’s new friends hate more than AI, and when a student mysteriously turns up dead, blame falls on Seven. Is her “creepy artificial magic” summoning terrifying creatures to hunt students? Or is someone trying to frame her?

With only one person – cute ex-Navy seal Logan – on her side, Seven fights monsters (Dragon? Check. Kraken? Check) while struggling to convince everyone that her AI has nothing to do with them.

But how can she convince her peers when she isn’t totally convinced herself?

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I’ve heard good things about this, and I’m really hoping for a cool take on magic and tech playing together!

You can read an excerpt here!

Eternity's Blade by William Collis
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy
Representation: East Asian-inspired worldbuilding
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

With echoes of Mistborn and She Who Became the Sun, Eternity’s Blade is an action-packed fantasy debut chronicling an assassin’s rise to power in a world of immortals.

In the secluded paradise of the Valley, life is eternal. Guarded by unbreachable mists and ruled by a reclusive Emperor, this floating world of salt and lilies brims with beauty, ritual, and endless rebirth.

And then prince Soh’shoro discovers his power to kill.

Stolen from the courts, trained in martial and magical arts by enigmatic warrior monks, Soh’shoro is reborn as an assassin, ready to defend against the mythical Outside. But echoes of his lost mother and the ethereal allure of a doomed princess lead him on a path to discover the Valley’s dark secrets …

Now, as war dawns, Soh’shoro must Is paradise worth protecting? Or must Eternity itself be ended once and for all?

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I wasn’t sure what the mc’s ‘ability to kill’ meant, but apparently people don’t typically die in this setting! They’re transferred into infant bodies after exiting adult ones. So maybe the mc has the power to permanently kill people, which is not normal in his world? Interesting!

The Blade that Binds Us by Leah Thomas, Kali Wallace
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, YA
Representation: M/M
Published on: 19th August 2025
Goodreads

From beloved authors Leah Thomas and Kali Wallace comes a sweeping dark queer YA romantasy, inspired by Icelandic folklore, about a witch and shepherd boy who find love in the darkest of places.

Hrafn has seen too much.
He welcomes death as the flames lick at the staves carved into his skin.
Until a stranger pulls him out.

Siggi has never left his village.
He longs to go in search of his missing brother.
Perhaps that's why he pulls the witch boy from the fire.

Bound by a blade of bone and indebted to the village boy, Hrafn agrees to use his powerful magic to help the oaf who saved him from the pyre. Across (and sometimes under) a rugged and unforgiving landscape, the unlikely pair will travel in search of answers, crossing paths with druids, darkwolves, and the dreaded Huldu.

But when the deceptions of the past are peeled away, Siggi and Hrafn will come face to face with their true natures.

When the cost of magic is pain and family ties run bone deep, can an unlikely love blossom in a dark and dangerous world?

"...readers drawn to folklore-laced fantasy and hard-won romance with sharp banter will find much to savor here. A dark, haunting fantasy in which magic binds hearts as tightly as it binds fates."
- Kirkus Reviews

"A swoon-worthy romance-fueled by dangerous magic and set against an eerie and evocative landscape-makes this a wild and heart-pounding adventure you'll never forget."
- Caleb Roehrig, author of Teach the Torches to Burn

"A dark, bewitching tale of love, loss, and healing. Wallace and Thomas weave together rich folklore, skin-crawling horror, and tender moments in this beautiful tapestry of a book."
- Kelsea Yu, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of Bound Feet and Demon Song

“A perfect fantasy for the dark at heart and an achingly beautiful queer romance that cuts to the bone (quite literally). A must read!”
- Kit Vincent, author of Love Eternal and Us Et Cetera

"The Blade That Binds Us is a captivating and dark fantasy unlike anything I’ve ever read. Thomas and Wallace deftly wove a haunting story of blood and bone with a bittersweet romance that will linger in my memory for years to come."
- Audrey Coulthurst author of Of Fire and Stars

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Tiny Ghost Press publishes queer sff with outside-the-box premises, so of course I’m paying attention to their newest release! I know next to nothing about Icelandic mythologies, so it’ll all be new to me!

Will you be reading any of these? Did I miss any releases you think I should know about? Let me know!

The post Must-Have Monday #250 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Heart-Mending: Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

UK cover; US coverLessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Pansexual trans MC, nonbinary spouse, lesbian MC
PoV: Third-person present-tense; third-person past-tense; dual PoV
Published on: 19th August 2025
ISBN: 1250867347
Goodreads

In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders's own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic.

A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic--with very unexpected results--in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.

Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training--she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she's also a powerful witch.

Serena, Jamie's mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.

Now it's up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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~nerds (affectionate) nerding
~book hunting
~mysteries through time
~quiet but unmistakable magic
~I would die for these dorks

Initially I wasn’t sure this was going to be for me – I found the first chapter pretty dull – but I’m so glad I stuck with it, because Lessons in Magic and Disaster ended up being one of my favourite books of the year!

And it really shouldn’t have worked for me? Lessons is not a very typical Fantasy story: it almost might be Contemporary instead. The magic involves (almost) no special effects, no wands or glowing lights, and it’s more than a little vague (intentionally: a significant part of the book is the characters figuring out how magic works). Jamie is researching her dissertation and teaching a literature class at her university, beset by an absolute dickwad of a transphobic student; her researches into 17th century English lit written by women is a semi-constant thread woven throughout the rest of the story. All of this should have bored me to tears; would have, methinks, in the hands of a lesser author.

Instead, I was absolutely obsessed.

It’s hard to put my finger on why! A big part of it, I think, was how – how comforting the familiarity of it all was, and by that I don’t mean the travails of being a grad student or trying to lead your mom out of her grief or the intricacies of 17th century literature, none of which I’m familiar with at all. It’s – the flavour of it? The vibes? Anders has described Lessons as her queerest book yet, and that’s the magic x factor, that’s why it feels so familiar: this is such a queer book. These people are my people! We would click immediately despite our wildly different interests and lives! And that queer quality I can’t figure out how to define – it suffuses the whole book, every single page, and makes it feel homey. Comforting, even when Major Stresses are happening to the poor characters. Familiar, even though most of this is new territory for me. I mean, check this out;

Ro slaps a flogger made of recycled rubber against their left palm. “So. Which cardinal virtue are we to expound today?”

A shiver starts in Jamie’s scalp, she can enumerate every follicle on her head. They’re doing the cardinal virtue game! Corporal punishment for cardinal virtues–it’s the tits.

THESE NERDS (affectionate) BRING CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY INTO THEIR BDSM GAMES. Plato and St Ambrose and John Donne-level stuff. HI I LOVE THEM SO MUCH. Are Plato and St Ambrose my thing??? No, not really. (Donne totally is.) But that’s irrelevant, it’s not the subject matter that makes you click instantly with these other nerds (although it can), it’s the passion of the interested parties – and yes of course this is not exclusively a queer thing, at all, but this example in Lessons is just one scene among many that captures a particular shade (strain? genre? stripe?) of oddball, earnest, unconventional queerness that I don’t know how to define but surely you get what I mean!

(The scene quoted above is not very explicit at all, for the record, and I think is the closest thing to a sex scene in the book.)

It’s the way these characters talk, and think, and build relationships; the things that are important to them, the causes they care about, the way they care about each other. Obviously they mess up sometimes (who doesn’t?) but boundaries, consent, and autonomy are concepts they’re aware of and work hard to respect. As is the way they – feel their feelings? I don’t know how to put it better than that. But even if I can’t quite put my finger on it, even if I can’t put a name to this Special Queer Thing – it is going to be immediately recognisable to so many readers, and as appealing, as welcoming, to them as it was to me. Especially because – despite the travails the characters all go through over the course of the book – there’s a very strong element of queer joy to Lessons, too. You walk away from it happier than you were when you picked it up. Warmed. A little bit more able to face the rest of the world.

Since Jamie needs to prove that Emily is important and worth discussing, she scoops up these tiny shout-outs up like a basket of kittens and cradles them in her arms, cooing and covering them with little kisses. Who’s a good citation? It’s you, it’s you.

Other than queerness, what suffuses this book is the passion I mentioned before. There is nothing like listening to a person talk about their special interest when they really get going about it. Any topic becomes wildly interesting when someone who knows all about it and loves it is tripping over their own tongue to tell you why it’s cool. Lessons is, in some ways, one of those conversations – Jamie’s love for the books and authors she’s studying comes through loud and clear, to the point that it made me interested, not because this was the main character’s Thing and it’s therefore relevant to the story I’m reading, but because it became objectively interesting. And I think many if not all readers are going to find themselves caught up in it like I did, simply because it’s impossible not to be swept up in that passion. This is excellent for a number of reasons, but the one I want to highlight is the sheer craft and skill it takes to pull this off! Very few stories can make you care about a character’s special interest when it’s not already an of-interest-to-you-topic; the intense love of a thing is much less catching in text than it is in listening to someone in person happily expounding on it, for some reason. But Anders does it, captures that incredible, addictive energy, that love and delight in a subject, perfectly – AND makes it look easy!

(It definitely doesn’t hurt that the mystery and story of Emily – the novel Jamie’s obsessed with and is writing her dissertation on – is genuinely fascinating, especially in how Anders weaves it in parallel with Jamie’s life. The secrets hidden in this book-within-a-book DELIGHTED me utterly! And there was such a beautiful, wonderful theme of – of a hidden but powerful and unbroken line of women who reached for more; a line Jamie is a part of. It made my heart ache in the best way. Emily is Jamie’s inheritance, in a very real way that has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with spirit. I had to hug my ereader to my chest!)

(Why do we say, “benefit of the doubt”? Why not “benefit of the belief”?)

Plot-wise, Lessons is what would typically be considered low-stakes Fantasy – there are no Dark Lords or armies or saving-the-world quests. Jamie and her remaining mom are trying to rebuild (or recreate?) their relationship; this leads to them exploring and experimenting with magic, past the bounds Jamie’s already familiar with. The stressors are every-day stressors: the Humanities are in peril at Jamie’s university, putting her under even more pressure to get her dissertation done; she has to navigate a horrible student without telling him to crawl back into the sewer he came out of; there is much research to be done into Emily. But all of these things – I still seized up at the tension, I still freaked out when Things occurred, because even if they didn’t matter to the world they mattered to Jamie, and to me. Anders is most excellent at engaging us, making us care, and even though Jamie is imperfect (WHO ISN’T?) she is still this ridiculously cool, lovely person I wish I could befriend in real life. I did not want terrible things to happen to her! Even when those terrible things were ‘just’ screamingly awkward moments and the like!

“I wear my mistakes like my scars: proudly,” Delia says. “They’re credentials, because I learned better.

Some of the things that happen are much more serious than that, and there’s probably a lot of very clever things to be said about what Anders does – or rather, doesn’t? – do with the idea of A Villain, or possibly Villainy, in this book. It helps to have read her newsletter, particularly this issue here, where she says:

Case in point: Lessons in Magic and Disaster features a couple of characters who are bigoted assholes, and neither of them gets much “screen time.” They show up long enough to inflict some damage, and then they’re gone again. The book isn’t really about them, and the only reason they really matter is because my characters struggle with what to do about them. They could almost be natural disasters.

This is not a common approach to villains in Fantasy, at least not in the books I read – but I’m fascinated by it. The idea of…de-platforming the villain, almost? The idea of a villain who isn’t important, in and of themselves. It’s a surprisingly refreshing contrast to the approach I’ve seen in the last few years, where villains are humanised. And I like humanised villains! I do! But there’s something…kind of intoxicating, almost, in going nope. This isn’t your story. Stfu to the bad guy(s). You only matter because you affect the ones who matter. I’m sure I didn’t catch everything Anders was doing with this, but damn, I loved what I did catch!

“I can read the ransom notes left by my own heart.”

Lessons is such a gorgeous, poignant, heart-warming book – quietly but powerfully magical; hilarious; heart-breaking and heart-mending. It taught me things I didn’t know, and re-affirmed things I did; it’s a reminder of how wonderful and ridiculous and worth-living-in the world is. I adore it. It’s one of my favourite books of the year.

And if you read it, I think it’ll be one of yours too.

The post Heart-Mending: Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Heart-Mending: Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Andrews

UK cover; US coverLessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Pansexual trans MC, nonbinary spouse, lesbian MC
PoV: Third-person present-tense; third-person past-tense; dual PoV
Published on: 19th August 2025
ISBN: 1250867347
Goodreads

In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders's own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic.

A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic--with very unexpected results--in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.

Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training--she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she's also a powerful witch.

Serena, Jamie's mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.

Now it's up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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~nerds (affectionate) nerding
~book hunting
~mysteries through time
~quiet but unmistakable magic
~I would die for these dorks

Initially I wasn’t sure this was going to be for me – I found the first chapter pretty dull – but I’m so glad I stuck with it, because Lessons in Magic and Disaster ended up being one of my favourite books of the year!

And it really shouldn’t have worked for me? Lessons is not a very typical Fantasy story: it almost might be Contemporary instead. The magic involves (almost) no special effects, no wands or glowing lights, and it’s more than a little vague (intentionally: a significant part of the book is the characters figuring out how magic works). Jamie is researching her dissertation and teaching a literature class at her university, beset by an absolute dickwad of a transphobic student; her researches into 17th century English lit written by women is a semi-constant thread woven throughout the rest of the story. All of this should have bored me to tears; would have, methinks, in the hands of a lesser author.

Instead, I was absolutely obsessed.

It’s hard to put my finger on why! A big part of it, I think, was how – how comforting the familiarity of it all was, and by that I don’t mean the travails of being a grad student or trying to lead your mom out of her grief or the intricacies of 17th century literature, none of which I’m familiar with at all. It’s – the flavour of it? The vibes? Anders has described Lessons as her queerest book yet, and that’s the magic x factor, that’s why it feels so familiar: this is such a queer book. These people are my people! We would click immediately despite our wildly different interests and lives! And that queer quality I can’t figure out how to define – it suffuses the whole book, every single page, and makes it feel homey. Comforting, even when Major Stresses are happening to the poor characters. Familiar, even though most of this is new territory for me. I mean, check this out;

Ro slaps a flogger made of recycled rubber against their left palm. “So. Which cardinal virtue are we to expound today?”

A shiver starts in Jamie’s scalp, she can enumerate every follicle on her head. They’re doing the cardinal virtue game! Corporal punishment for cardinal virtues–it’s the tits.

THESE NERDS (affectionate) BRING CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY INTO THEIR BDSM GAMES. Plato and St Ambrose and John Donne-level stuff. HI I LOVE THEM SO MUCH. Are Plato and St Ambrose my thing??? No, not really. (Donne totally is.) But that’s irrelevant, it’s not the subject matter that makes you click instantly with these other nerds (although it can), it’s the passion of the interested parties – and yes of course this is not exclusively a queer thing, at all, but this example in Lessons is just one scene among many that captures a particular shade (strain? genre? stripe?) of oddball, earnest, unconventional queerness that I don’t know how to define but surely you get what I mean!

(The scene quoted above is not very explicit at all, for the record, and I think is the closest thing to a sex scene in the book.)

It’s the way these characters talk, and think, and build relationships; the things that are important to them, the causes they care about, the way they care about each other. Obviously they mess up sometimes (who doesn’t?) but boundaries, consent, and autonomy are concepts they’re aware of and work hard to respect. As is the way they – feel their feelings? I don’t know how to put it better than that. But even if I can’t quite put my finger on it, even if I can’t put a name to this Special Queer Thing – it is going to be immediately recognisable to so many readers, and as appealing, as welcoming, to them as it was to me. Especially because – despite the travails the characters all go through over the course of the book – there’s a very strong element of queer joy to Lessons, too. You walk away from it happier than you were when you picked it up. Warmed. A little bit more able to face the rest of the world.

Since Jamie needs to prove that Emily is important and worth discussing, she scoops up these tiny shout-outs up like a basket of kittens and cradles them in her arms, cooing and covering them with little kisses. Who’s a good citation? It’s you, it’s you.

Other than queerness, what suffuses this book is the passion I mentioned before. There is nothing like listening to a person talk about their special interest when they really get going about it. Any topic becomes wildly interesting when someone who knows all about it and loves it is tripping over their own tongue to tell you why it’s cool. Lessons is, in some ways, one of those conversations – Jamie’s love for the books and authors she’s studying comes through loud and clear, to the point that it made me interested, not because this was the main character’s Thing and it’s therefore relevant to the story I’m reading, but because it became objectively interesting. And I think many if not all readers are going to find themselves caught up in it like I did, simply because it’s impossible not to be swept up in that passion. This is excellent for a number of reasons, but the one I want to highlight is the sheer craft and skill it takes to pull this off! Very few stories can make you care about a character’s special interest when it’s not already an of-interest-to-you-topic; the intense love of a thing is much less catching in text than it is in listening to someone in person happily expounding on it, for some reason. But Anders does it, captures that incredible, addictive energy, that love and delight in a subject, perfectly – AND makes it look easy!

(It definitely doesn’t hurt that the mystery and story of Emily – the novel Jamie’s obsessed with and is writing her dissertation on – is genuinely fascinating, especially in how Anders weaves it in parallel with Jamie’s life. The secrets hidden in this book-within-a-book DELIGHTED me utterly! And there was such a beautiful, wonderful theme of – of a hidden but powerful and unbroken line of women who reached for more; a line Jamie is a part of. It made my heart ache in the best way. Emily is Jamie’s inheritance, in a very real way that has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with spirit. I had to hug my ereader to my chest!)

(Why do we say, “benefit of the doubt”? Why not “benefit of the belief”?)

Plot-wise, Lessons is what would typically be considered low-stakes Fantasy – there are no Dark Lords or armies or saving-the-world quests. Jamie and her remaining mom are trying to rebuild (or recreate?) their relationship; this leads to them exploring and experimenting with magic, past the bounds Jamie’s already familiar with. The stressors are every-day stressors: the Humanities are in peril at Jamie’s university, putting her under even more pressure to get her dissertation done; she has to navigate a horrible student without telling him to crawl back into the sewer he came out of; there is much research to be done into Emily. But all of these things – I still seized up at the tension, I still freaked out when Things occurred, because even if they didn’t matter to the world they mattered to Jamie, and to me. Anders is most excellent at engaging us, making us care, and even though Jamie is imperfect (WHO ISN’T?) she is still this ridiculously cool, lovely person I wish I could befriend in real life. I did not want terrible things to happen to her! Even when those terrible things were ‘just’ screamingly awkward moments and the like!

“I wear my mistakes like my scars: proudly,” Delia says. “They’re credentials, because I learned better.

Some of the things that happen are much more serious than that, and there’s probably a lot of very clever things to be said about what Anders does – or rather, doesn’t? – do with the idea of A Villain, or possibly Villainy, in this book. It helps to have read her newsletter, particularly this issue here, where she says:

Case in point: Lessons in Magic and Disaster features a couple of characters who are bigoted assholes, and neither of them gets much “screen time.” They show up long enough to inflict some damage, and then they’re gone again. The book isn’t really about them, and the only reason they really matter is because my characters struggle with what to do about them. They could almost be natural disasters.

This is not a common approach to villains in Fantasy, at least not in the books I read – but I’m fascinated by it. The idea of…de-platforming the villain, almost? The idea of a villain who isn’t important, in and of themselves. It’s a surprisingly refreshing contrast to the approach I’ve seen in the last few years, where villains are humanised. And I like humanised villains! I do! But there’s something…kind of intoxicating, almost, in going nope. This isn’t your story. Stfu to the bad guy(s). You only matter because you affect the ones who matter. I’m sure I didn’t catch everything Anders was doing with this, but damn, I loved what I did catch!

“I can read the ransom notes left by my own heart.”

Lessons is such a gorgeous, poignant, heart-warming book – quietly but powerfully magical; hilarious; heart-breaking and heart-mending. It taught me things I didn’t know, and re-affirmed things I did; it’s a reminder of how wonderful and ridiculous and worth-living-in the world is. I adore it. It’s one of my favourite books of the year.

And if you read it, I think it’ll be one of yours too.

The post Heart-Mending: Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Andrews appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

I Can’t Wait For…Project Hanuman by Stewart Hotston

Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine. 

You can find the releases I’m most anticipating this year over on my Unmissable list, but I use Can’t-Wait Wednesday to feature books I’m hopeful about but aren’t 100% sure will be five star reads.

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is Project Hanuman by Stewart Hotston!

Project Hanuman by Stewart Hotston
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi
Representation: Desi cast (probably?)
Published on: 11th November 2025
Goodreads

Blending Indian mythology and classic space opera, Project Hanuman is a bold new science-fiction novel from Stewart Hotston, perfect for fans of Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The ship needed to hear voices, to know he was not alone. The pilot thought they were going to fight an enemy, to find someone responsible and mete out justice. The Interlocutor thought they were going to help. The ship only wanted to hear the chaos of life and know he wasn’t alone among the stars.

The Arcology is a pan galactic utopia whose people live entirely online. Tired of paradise, Praveenthi ‘Prab’ Saal had herself printed into the physical world of Sirajah’s Reach, working as an Interlocutor – a go between for the Arcology and the cultures it meets in flesh and blood.

One evening after a call with her family – who are pressuring her to abandon her body and rejoin the Arcology, the city stops. Stops completely – nothing electronic works anymore. Terrified that the Arcology has just up and disappeared, she receives a call for help from a ship in dock whose pilot, Kercher, is a prisoner printed into a body to serve out his sentence in the physical world. Between them they discover it’s not just her planet, but the entire Arcology that’s gone missing. If they don’t find out what’s going on it could be the end of everyone and everything that calls the Arcology home.

Their only resource is their living ship, into which all the knowledge and culture of the Arcology has been downloaded. Asked to be a life raft for the Arcology, the ship, a frigate without a name, is dying – slowly being swallowed whole by the literal universe of information it’s been asked to carry.

Featuring worlds made entirely from gold, an enemy who has no consciousness, allies made of lichen and the grand Ring World of Akhanda – the physical heart of the Arcology. Prab and Kercher will need to put aside their dislike of each other and the Arcology if they’re to help their ship and save anything at all. Can they restore the possibility of hope to their lives?

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If you don’t know, Hanuman is a Hindu deity – link to his wiki page – who I mostly know about through the kid’s version of the Mahabharata that I read when I was little. So I don’t know much! But it still interested me to see his name in a book title.

AND THEN, YOU KNOW. THAT SYNOPSIS!

Digital worlds are obviously hit or miss, but one that’s such a paradise that they send you out into the real world as a criminal sentence?! And are people born already inside it? Prab and Kercher both had to print bodies to have form in the ‘real’ world – does that mean they never had bodies of their own? Or is your body destroyed after you ‘upload’ to the digital world at some point? (When?)

But most of all I love the idea that a digital world WOULD ABSOLUTELY need flesh-and-blood people to be go-betweens between them and the rest of the universe! That sounds like a WILDLY interesting job! And even if you WEREN’T a go-between – imagine being on the outside when your entire world just disappears. Is the rest of the universe affected at all, given that the Arcology was never physically present to begin with???

Except Akhanda is the physical heart of it, so maybe it’s not quite correct to say the Arcology has no physical presence? I HAVE QUESTIONS.

Which won’t be answered until NOVEMBER, alas!

The post I Can’t Wait For…Project Hanuman by Stewart Hotston appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Fails to Take Flight: Blood As Bright As The Moon by Andrea Morstabilini

A Blood as Bright as the Moon by Andrea Morstabilini
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Gay MC
PoV: First-person, past-tense; second-person, present-tense; third-person, past-tense
Published on: 2nd September 2025
ISBN: 1803369760
Goodreads

A vampire, desperately torn between worlds, is hunted down by a secret society bent on his destruction, in this elegiac and unsettling queer gothic horror, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Frankenstein, Germany. Ambrose, a young vampire, lives a life secreted away from the modern world with the rest of his clan, all of them under the spell of the charismatic Regina, who spins stories of salvation for their kind. Their grand plan? To build makeshift wings and fly to the moon where a safe haven awaits for all vampires.

But Ambrose harbours a he is not ready to abandon the earth, and he is in contact with a human who believes he can be saved. As the rest of his kind prepare to flee their home, Ambrose is torn between loyalties.

However something else is on the horizon – the Royal Diurnal Society – a group with sinister plans for vampires, are closing in, and if Ambrose isn't careful, he could find himself right at the centre of a terrifying and mysterious experiment.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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~broken snowglobes as a threat
~the moon’s not an escape
~never trust a cult leader

:be warned of spoilers ahead! see the end for trigger warnings:

I have no idea what the point of that was.

This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, but it ended up being a disjointed snoozefest.

It really doesn’t help that the synopsis is wildly misleading: Ambrose isn’t ‘hunted’ in any way you’d expect from hearing that he is – isn’t aware he’s being hunted, so there’s no plotline where he knows he’s in danger, and who he’s in danger from. Which means that functionally, in term of it affecting the story the reader gets, he’s not being hunted. The secret society isn’t ‘bent on his destruction’; it’s being torn apart by its internal politics, only one faction of which wants vampires wiped out. And referring to Ambrose’s family as ‘the rest of his kind’ is just flat-out lying; Regina’s ‘clan’ is made up of FOUR vampires, including her and Ambrose. There is in fact a whole WORLD of other vampires out there, none of whom are involved in this nonsense at all.

I’d like to file a complaint with whoever wrote the synopsis and whoever approved it. Gah.

The first third or so of Blood as Bright is perfectly fine, sometimes rising to good: Ambrose and his bizarre little family live in a ruined castle until the day Regina leads them to the moon, where, she claims, Ludwig 2nd, himself a vampire, rules a beautiful realm that’s a paradise for vampires. It’s a cult, basically, with Regina as obsessed cult leader, telling them parables and holy stories of Ludwig’s vampiric life, with all sorts of rules that must be followed to prove themselves worthy of Ludwig. (Bits of vampire!Ludwig’s life are interspersed throughout the book, jarring and adding nothing at all to the book.) Ambrose feels oddly ambivalent about all of it, but he’s very close to another of the vampires, Agata, and their friendship seems to be the main tether keep Ambrose in place. When he can sneak out from under Regina’s eye, he goes into the nearby town to spy on the doctor Martin, who Ambrose is attracted to – but more importantly, he harbours a hope that Martin might be able to cure vampirism if Ambrose ever reveals himself to him.

The prose is lovely, but there’s a very Literary Fiction (derogatory) feel to it all – introspective in a way that feels pretentious and over-indulgent, kind of rambly, with zero impetus driving the story forward. The story drifts, barely disturbed by the strange broken snowglobes that appear around the vampires’ castle, and the murder of the sacred-to-Ludwig swans. So I was very surprised that near the 33% mark, Regina announced it was time to head to the moon, and everyone started strapping their wings on.

(They do not, alas, have their own biological wings like the figure on the cover. These are mechanical, vaguely steampunk-y wings.)

But! Catastrophe! Ambrose’s wings break. And when he crashes to earth, he is staked by a vampire hunter who comes out NOWHERE, narratively. It’s a painfully random, jerky series of events, but for a second I thought Morstabilini had gone where few authors dare to tread and killed off her main character!

She didn’t, though. Ambrose isn’t dead. Instead he’s paralysed, unable to move or react to stimuli, but still aware of what’s around him and, unfortunately, very able to feel pain.

Part two opens with Ambrose laid out on an operating table. He’s ‘examined’ (read: tortured) and then a bunch of men arrive – the Diurnal Society – and gather around him to debate what to do with him.

I’m not kidding: the whole second part (no longer in first-person, by the way, switching between second-person and formatted-like-a-script third-person) is these mostly awful men, who are all COMPLETE STRANGERS TO US, enumerating on how great they are (and how awful their political rivals within the same society are), how it’s high time they Do Something after only studying vampires from afar for centuries, and what the different factions within the society are. Oh, and how gross vampires are, and Ambrose in particular, since he’s also gay as well as being a vamp.

It is stunningly boring. Everyone is despicable (the one guy who calls the rest of them monsters leaves without trying to get Ambrose free, so yeah, I’m counting him as despicable too), everyone is long-winded and grandiose, most of them are clearly narcissists, and hi, I don’t care about the internal politics of bigots actually??? Or their history??? Never mind their completely ridiculous, zero-evidence-for opinions on vampires??? And you’ve given me NO REASON TO???

The ending of this part would be satisfying if, you know, I had any emotional connection to any of it. As it was I kept turning pages in a haze of outrage, waiting for the moment it would all click together and I’d understand what the fucking point was.

Alas, no point ever manifested.

Part three shifted gears: I went from bored to furious. Because finally, at last, Morstabilini starts giving us the most tantalising glimpses into the wider magical world: it’s revealed that vampires have their own culture (none of which we’ve seen before) and their own dialect/language; there are vampire-adjacent beings who can talk to the dead, and magical spiders who can recreate buildings that have been lost to fire. It’s extremely cool! But these are just glimpses: a sentence or two about each thing, and then it’s gone, never brought up again.

THE FUCK. Why weren’t we seeing all of this from the beginning?! You made me read through vague plotless rambling in the first part, boring and disgusting bigots pontificating in part two, and only at the END prove you had the good stuff all along, but I can’t have it???

Oh, and the moon was a total disappointment: Ambrose doesn’t get there, but we do see it, and it’s just like our moon – ie barren and white and dusty – except the vampires can somehow breathe there. And there are probably monsters. But I was hoping for some fantastical weird realm like the not-Earth planets in Radiance by Catherynne Valente, and nope! That did not happen! Because of course it didn’t.

The first two parts should have been cut, and part three should have been expanded into its own novel. Show me the rest of the vampire world! Why do some vampires set jewels in their teeth? Explain the taboos around speaking to the dead! I want more of the spiders! Plus, you know, the whole travelling quest-of-vengeance thing (even if I’m still mad about how that went down) and the love story that’s so fast it’s practically instantaneous. BUILD IT UP AND MAKE IT A FULL NOVEL. It could have been amazing!

So I’m enormously frustrated. There was so much potential here, but it was let down at every turn – so thoroughly that it almost feels purposeful. The synopsis is a lie, but in complete fairness I don’t know what else the publisher could have written, since there isn’t really anything coherent enough to be a story here. I cannot wrap my head around why the choices that were made were made; I don’t know what Morstabilini was trying to say, or do, but I’m pretty sure the intent wasn’t to entertain (if it was, it failed miserably). The torture and bigotry felt gratuitous at best; you wrote vampires that don’t need to drink blood; every time something cool was held out to us, it was snatched away. The whole book’s wishy-washy and vague, jumping from Thing to Thing at random, pulling 180s and flip-flopping all over the place. The tone is pretentious (see: the whole narrative thread of the freaking tarot cards)(and I say that as a tarot reader!) and there’s no meat to it.

Just. Wow. Absolutely not.

Don’t waste your time.

Trigger Warnings: [View post to see spoiler]

The post Fails to Take Flight: Blood As Bright As The Moon by Andrea Morstabilini appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

10 Books Sure to End Your Reading Slump

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Check out upcoming Top Ten themes on Jana’s blog!

The prompt for today was ‘books guaranteed to put an end to your book slump’, and since I just had such a slump last month, I feel very qualified to put a rec list together for you!

Darknesses (Darknesses, #1) by Lachelle Seville
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Black bisexual MC, Black pansexual love interest, F/F, Black secondary characters
Goodreads

It’s been a year since Oasis stumbled away from Blessed Falls with wings carved into her back and too many scars to count.

A year spent razing delusions of being an angel's vessel, proving to her brother that she doesn’t belong in a psych ward, and mourning the loss of her mother's vinyl pressed ashes.

A year spent struggling to feel human again.

Enter Laura, the mesmerizing stranger who claims to hear Oasis’ heartbeat, who reads her hand-written memoir like scripture, who makes her feel closer to found than lost.

Laura is the most recent face of the eternal Count Dracula, ruler of the shadows, chimera of the Devil, and embittered victim of libel.

The Van Helsing Institute have been waiting for a glimpse of the dragon’s underbelly, and eagerly approach Oasis for her help in a ploy to kill Dracula for good. But not every wound from Blessed Falls has cicatrized, and Oasis realizes she may be a danger to Laura—and to herself.

Yet no one is as dangerous as Laura—the first vampire, the Devil's plaything, and the person with whom Oasis finally feels human.

Oceans of time have passed since she last had a drink, and she will not let Oasis go easily.

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I can vouch for this one from experience, because Darknesses broke my most recent reading slump just a couple of weeks ago! This is over 500 pages on my ereader, but reading it is a BREEZE – it goes so quickly! Part of me wants to describe it as popcorn, but I think that gives the wrong impression: Darknesses isn’t shallow or fluffy, it’s meaty and has sharp teeth and there are so many delicious layers to it. But it’s as addictive as popcorn, or pringles, or whatever your I-can’t-stop-till-the-bag-is-empty snack of choice is. And it’s hysterically funny, and full of Feels of all kinds, and it’s WEIRD – do you want to be surprised? Do you want to encounter fantasy!concepts you never have before? Do you like having the rug pulled from under you re worldbuilding you never expected? THEN COME GET IT!

My review!

A Brother's Price by Wen Spencer
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi
Goodreads

In a world where males are rarely born, they've become a commodity-traded and sold like property. Jerin Whistler has come of age for marriage and his handsome features have come to the attention of the royal princesses. But such attentions can be dangerous--especially as Jerin uncovers the dark mysteries the royal family is hiding.

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Do you want to read a bodice-ripper where it’s the men who are supposed to be all sweet and demure? In an early Industrial Age setting where group marriage is the default? With plot-relevant cannons? Of course you do! Like all the best heroines in this kind of story, Jerin is clever and brave and packing unexpected skills that make him much more than a damsel in distress – but his princesses (yes, plural – I mentioned the group marriage thing!) still get plenty of chances to showcase how competent and badass they are! This one always makes me kick my feet, filled with the happy-glitter!feel unique to a certain kind of romance!

His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire, #1) by Naomi Novik
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
Goodreads

Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors ride mighty fighting dragons, bred for size or speed. When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes the precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Captain Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future – and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature.

Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle. For as France’s own dragon-borne forces rally to breach British soil in Bonaparte’s boldest gambit, Laurence and Temeraire must soar into their own baptism of fire.

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If you love dragons you’ve probably already come across this series, but even if you DON’T love dragons, you will love THESE ones! Because they aren’t just beasts of burden or war, they’re CHARACTERS – and Temeraire, Laurence’s dragon, is an inquisitive, hilarious sweetheart with a wonderfully autistic approach to human rules and conventions, who loves being read to and also is excellent at math (which is especially funny because his human REALLY isn’t). The Regency setting adds another layer of fun to the whole thing, but Novik’s deliciously readable prose, quiet but impeccable worldbuilding, and most of all FABULOUS CAST mean it’ll knock ANYBODY out of a slump!

A Song of Legends Lost (Invoker Trilogy #1) by M.H. Ayinde
Genres: Adult, Science Fantasy
Representation: Brown cast, queernorm world
Goodreads

'A relentlessly gripping, glorious epic fantasy - the exhilarating must-read fantasy debut of 2025' Tasha Suri, author of The Jasmine Throne

A SONG OF REBELLION. A SONG OF WAR. A SONG OF LEGENDS LOST.

In the kingdom of Nine Lands, only warriors of noble blood can summon their ancestors to fight with them in battle. But when Temi, a commoner from the slums, accidentally invokes a powerful spirit, she finds it could hold the key to ending a centuries-long war.

But as secrets long buried come to light, Temi will learn that not everything that can be invoked is an ancestor, and some of the spirits that can be drawn from the ancestral realm are more dangerous than anyone can imagine.

'A Song of Legends Lost is stunning and vividly told . . . Ayinde is a master storyteller, and readers are in good hands from the very first pages to the very last'Andrea Stewart, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Bone Shard Daughter

'A whirlwind debut of ferocious talent and compulsive storytelling that lifts you up from the first page and never lets go. It's joyous from end to end - and highly recommended!'Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award-winning author

'An epic tale of conflict, betrayal, and intrigue . . . M. H. Ayinde weaves a rich and engrossing story through a unique and fascinating world'Anthony Ryan, author of Blood Song

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You’ll find this one on my Best of 2025 list in December, but the reason I included it here is because Song of Legends Lost engages your curiosity from the first page. Ayinde’s worldbuilding is so intricate, with layers and layers of misapprehension, outright lies, and custom obscuring the objective truth of what’s going on, this world’s history, how their magic works, and what the forbidden ‘techwork’ actually is – and all of it is plot-relevant! It’s all so tantilising – you’ll be WILD to find out the truth, and each delicious piece of the puzzle leads to the next like a trail of sweets, drawing you deeper and deeper in to the story and its mysteries. And that’s without even beginning to talk about the large cast and their very different plotlines, all of which give us very different perspectives on said mysteries and how they all fit together. I NEED THE SEQUEL YESTERDAY DAMN IT!

The Raven Scholar (Eternal Path Trilogy, #1) by Antonia Hodgson
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy
Representation: Brown MC, bi/pansexual love interest, queernorm world
Goodreads

From an electrifying new voice in epic fantasy comes The Raven Scholar, a masterfully woven and playfully inventive tale of imperial intrigue, cutthroat competition, and one scholar’s quest to uncover the truth.

Let us fly now to the empire of Orrun, where after twenty-four years of peace, Bersun the Brusque must end his reign. In the dizzying heat of mid-summer, seven contenders compete to replace him. They are exceptional warriors, thinkers, strategists—the best of the best.

Then one of them is murdered. We know who did it. We saw it happen. No one else did.

It falls to Neema Kraa, the emperor’s brilliant, idiosyncratic High Scholar, to find the killer before the trials end. To do so, she must untangle a web of deadly secrets that stretches back generations, all while competing against six warriors with their own dark histories and fierce ambitions. Neema believes she is alone. But we are here to help; all she has to do is let us in.

If she succeeds, she will win the throne. If she fails, death awaits her. But we won’t let that happen.

We are the Raven, and we are magnificent.

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Another one that’s already secured a spot on my Best of 2025, The Raven Scholar is an enormous trick – on the reader as much as on the characters. It sets itself up to look like a fairly conventional murder-mystery in a high fantasy setting, but from the end of the first chapter it’s clear that Hodgson is going to do everything but what you expect! It’s surprise after surprise; every time you think you know what’s going on – who the villain is – what level of threat we’re dealing with – what genre we’re in – even who’s telling the story! – TABLE-FLIP TIME! All of it grounded in really cool worldbuilding and bursting with emotion (brace for heart-ache, chills, and outrage alongside all the delight).

My review!

The Curse of Chalion (World of the Five Gods, #1) by Lois McMaster Bujold
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy
Goodreads

A man broken in body and spirit, Cazaril returns to the noble household he once served as page and is named secretary-tutor to the beautiful, strong-willed sister of the impetuous boy who is next in line to rule. It is an assignment Cazaril dreads, for it must ultimately lead him to the place he most fears: the royal court of Cardegoss, where the powerful enemies who once placed him in chains now occupy lofty positions.

But it is more than the traitorous intrigues of villains that threaten Cazaril and the Royesse Iselle here, for a sinister curse hangs like a sword over the entire blighted House of Chalion. And only by employing the darkest, most forbidden of magics can Cazaril hope to protect his royal charge -- an act that will mark him as a tool of the miraculous . . . and trap him in a lethal maze of demonic paradox.

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The Curse of Chalion is, impossibly, cosy – BUT with intense plot and the highest of stakes. I know, it makes no sense, I can’t explain it – Bujold is just magic like that. Curse fills you with warm Feels even as you’re on the edge of your seat, hoping this very-physically-wrecked man can race across the kingdom on horseback in time! Bujold has some of the most readable prose I’ve ever encountered (which is why she’s one of the only fantasy authors I followed into sci fi, and honestly, her entire Vorkosigan series is also an amazing reading-slump-breaker!) so good luck on not getting sucked in to this one! This setting also has some of my favourite theology ever, with simple but brilliant gods who have their hands in the plot up to Their elbows. You can read it as a standalone perfectly, but there’s a bunch of other books and novellas set in this world for you to pounce on after you fall in love with it!

Swordheart by T. Kingfisher
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Representation: Secondary nonbinary character
Goodreads

Halla is a housekeeper who has suddenly inherited her great-uncle's estate... and, unfortunately, his relatives. Sarkis is an immortal swordsman trapped in a prison of enchanted steel. When Halla draws the sword that imprisons him, Sarkis finds himself attempting to defend his new wielder against everything from bandits and roving inquisitors to her own in-laws... and the sword itself may prove to be the greatest threat of all.

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I mean, if you’re in a reading slump and it doesn’t occur to you to try T Kingfisher, I can only presume you have not yet encountered the awesomeness that is T Kingfisher! Swordheart is…a comedy-fantasy-romance? (NOT romantasy!) Because it’s Kingfisher, it’s neurodiverse as fuck and incredibly funny (I’ve read it four times now and it STILL makes me cry with laughter every time), but also really insightful in ways that will have you constantly going ‘wait you’re right, why DO humans do that???’ Both Hella and Stefan are in the 30-40 age-range, so they have life experience and have LEARNED THINGS and are a great deal less silly than your average 20yo. Both of them give wonderfully practical, hyper-competent vibes in their respective areas and they both recognise that about each other, and it’s epic.

Metal from Heaven by August Clarke
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic MC, multiple lesbian secondary characters
Goodreads

“WHEN MY VIOLENCE SUBSIDES, WE WILL HAVE NOTHING, AND BE CHAMPIONS.”

Ichorite is progress. More durable and malleable than steel, ichorite is the lifeblood of a dawning industrial revolution. Yann I. Chauncey owns the sole means of manufacturing this valuable metal, but his workers are on strike. They demand Chauncey research the hallucinatory illness befalling them. Marney Honeycutt, a lustertouched child worker, stands proud at the picket line with her best friend and family. That’s when Chauncey sends in the guns.

Only Marney survives the massacre.
She vows bloody vengeance.

A decade later, Marney is the nation’s most notorious highwayman, and Chauncey’s daughter seeks an opportune marriage. Marney’s rage and the ghosts of her past will drive her to masquerade as an aristocrat, outmaneuver powerful suitors, and win the heart of his daughter, so Marney can finally corner Chauncey and satisfy her need for revenge. But war ferments in the north, and deeper grudges are surfacing. . .

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This one’s a little hit or miss – you’ll either adore the writing or despite it – but you’ll know whether or not it’s for you by the end of the first page, and if it IS for you, then you are in for a wildly electric time and you will INHALE this book from cover to cover! Metal From Heaven is queer anarchy via a main character who is very traumatised and fully feral, and it’ll make you feral too. clarke pulls off so much that NO ONE should be able to pull off, you’ll want to lick the prose, and it’s nothing like Gideon the Ninth but it has the same kind of heart – I don’t know how to put it better than that. ALL THE YES!

My review!

The Mercy Makers (The Moon Heresies, #1) by Tessa Gratton
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual brown MC, secondary brown sapphic character, minor nonbinary character, minor trans character, queernorm world
Goodreads

A talented heretic must decide between the pursuit of forbidden magic, or the ecstasy of forbidden love—either way, her choice will upend the world, in the start of a sweeping, romantic epic fantasy trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Tessa Gratton.

Can an empire trip and fall on a mere strand of silk?

Iriset is a prodigy and an outlaw. The daughter of a powerful criminal, she dons her alter ego Silk to create magical disguises for those in her father’s organization, but she longs to do more with her talent: to enhance what it means to be human by giving people wings, night-sight, and other abilities; to unlock the possibilities of gender and parenthood; to cure disease and even to end mortality itself.

Everything changes when her father is captured and sentenced to death. To save him, Iriset must infiltrate the palace and the empire’s fanatical ruling family. There, she realizes she has a chance—and an obligation—to bring down the entire corrupt system. She'll have to entangle herself in the lives of the emperor and his sister, getting them to trust and even to love her. But love is a two-way street, and Iriset’s own heart holds the most mysterious and impenetrable magic of all.

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Maybe you’re in a reading slump because you feel like everything is so same-y and grey? In which case, The Mercy Makers is here to hit you like a baseball bat of jewel-tones and decadent weirdness! Gratton has gone all-out creating a world that FEELS like fantasy – with a moon hanging suspended over the city, and shapeshifting graffiti, and skull sirens! Everything down to the tiniest detail feels new and strange, and it’s so rich, it’s so hedonistic, it revels in itself in the best possible way. Iriset gives no fucks but loves fucking, is so defiant as a person and as a character, I would never dare speak to her in real life and I worship the ground she walks on. Gratton is a genius in all the ways but also right down to word choice and tense, if you read Mercy Makers you will see, GO READ IT.

My review!

A Letter to the Luminous Deep (The Sunken Archive, #1) by Sylvie Cathrall
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: MC with clinical anxiety, possibly ace-spectrum MC, sapphic MC, MLM MC, background F/F and M/M, queernorm world
Goodreads

'An underwater treasure-chest to be slowly unpacked, full of things Iike nosy and loving families, epistolary romance, gorgeous worldbuilding, and anxious scholars doing their best to meet the world with kindness and curiosity' -Freya Marske, author of A Marvellous Light

A charming fantasy set in an underwater world with magical academia and a heartwarming penpal romance, perfect for fans of A Marvellous Light and Emily Wilde's Encylopaedia of Faeries.

A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. The letters they share are filled with passion, at first for their mutual interests, and then, inevitably, for each other.

Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.'s home, and she and Henerey vanish.

A year later, E.'s sister Sophy, and Henerey's brother Vyerin, are left to solve the mystery of their siblings' disappearances with the letters, sketches and field notes left behind. As they uncover the wondrous love their siblings shared, Sophy and Vyerin learn the key to their disappearance - and what it could mean for life as they know it.

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Let’s wrap up with a book that feels like a warm hug. Letter to the Luminous Deep is so sweet, but also hard to put down; written in letter format, it’s both impossible not to fall in love with the cast, and to not need to know what happened to them. It reads like fantasy despite being (I’m pretty sure) sci fi, with one of our mcs living in an underwater house and another spending a lot of time in their world’s version of the Mariana Trench – because their planet has almost no land at all! People live on boats or boat-like-things or floating landscapes and universities, and it’s fascinating and charming. Luminous Deep will put a smile on your face for sure!

My review!

Tell me about the books that have ended YOUR reading slumps!

The post 10 Books Sure to End Your Reading Slump appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Must-Have Monday #248

Must-Have Monday is a feature highlighting which of the coming week’s new releases I’m excited for. It is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all books being published that week; only those I’m interested in out of those I’m aware of! The focus is diverse SFF, but other stuff sneaks in occasionally too.

THIRTEEN books this week!

(Books are listed in order of pub date, then Adult SFF, Adult Other, YA SFF, YA Other, MG SFF.)

Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Desi cast, F/F
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

Myung and Laleh are keepers of the whale of babel. They roam within its cosmic chambers, speak folktales of themselves, and pray to an enigmatic figure they know only as 'Great Wisa'. To Laleh, this is everything. For Myung, it is not enough.

When Myung flees the whale, she stumbles into a new universe where shapeshifting islands and ancient maps hold sway. There, she sets off on an adventure that is both tragic and transformative, for her and Laleh. For at the heart of her quest lies a mystery that has confounded scholars for generations: the truth about the mad sisters of Esi.

Fables, dreams and myths come together in this masterful work of fantasy by acclaimed author Tashan Mehta, sweeping across three landscapes, and featuring a museum of collective memory and a festival of madness. At its core, it asks: In the devastating chaos of this world, where all is in flux and the truth ever-changing, what will you choose to hold on to?

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This incredibly gorgeous, beautifully strange fantasy is such an ORIGINAL read, not like anything you’ve ever come across before. (Countless galaxies inside a whale! A shapeshifting island! A museum anyone can teleport to by touching their ear!) It feels soft even when it’s being sharp; it drips like honey. This was one of my Best of 2023 books when it was first released in India, and I’m so delighted it’s made its way to the UK and US!

You can read an excerpt here!

Teo's Durumi (The Alliance, #2) by Elaine U. Cho
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: Gay Desi MC, major Korean characters, secondary nonbinary character, M/M
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

The dazzling sequel to Ocean’s Godori dives back into Elaine U. Cho’s cinematic space opera series, taking Ocean and her crew deep into the cloisters of the Moon and the conflicts of the heart.

Teo Anand, former ne’er-do-well second son of the Anand Tech empire and current solar fugitive, has just crash-landed on the Moon after escaping the latest attempt on his life. But if anyone can help exonerate him, it’s his best friend, bold Korean space pilot Ocean Yoon.

Falsely accused of murdering his family, Teo is running out of both time and options. But loyalties are uncertain in their group of steadfast comrades and tentative new allies, and it’s difficult to know who to trust in the tangled web that awaits them in Artemis, a city on the Moon rich in Korean history and haunted by ghosts from Teo’s and Ocean’s pasts. Further complicating matters are Haven—the pensive medic whose beliefs challenge Ocean’s—and the dashing Phoenix—a space raider who’s come blazing into Teo’s life in more ways than one.

All the while Corvus, the real culprit behind the slaying of the Anands, is sowing a path of destruction that threatens to swallow the solar whole. The crew will wrestle with clashing ideals, flying bullets, and undeniable feelings, as they race toward a stunning final stand.

Teo’s Durumi brings Cho’s space opera duology to an exhilarating close, one that contends with questions of identity and acceptance; grief and redemption; and loyalty and sacrifice, as Teo, Ocean, and the people they love will decide once and for all how to forge their paths into the future.

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The first book in this duology, Ocean’s Gidori, enchanted me with its retro vibes, Korean snacks, found-family, and bright, electric prose – and left me WILD for the sequel!!! If you need any more convincing, check out this review of Ocean at reactormag – it’s what got me to pick it up! – or this excerpt (again, of Ocean’s Gidori, not Teo’s Durumi!)

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

From sci-fi visionary and acclaimed author Annalee Newitz comes Automatic Noodle, a cozy near-future novella about a crew of abandoned food service bots opening their very own restaurant.

While San Francisco rebuilds from the chaos of war, a group of food service bots in an abandoned ghost kitchen take over their own delivery app account. They rebrand as a neighborhood lunch spot and start producing some of the tastiest hand-pulled noodles in the city. But there’s just one problem. Someone―or something―is review bombing the restaurant’s feedback page with fake “bad service” reports. Can the bots find the culprit before their ratings plummet and destroy everything they created?

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Newitz has consistently given us fantastic, thought-provoking sci fi, and is now treating us to robot noodles! HERE FOR IT!

You can read an excerpt here!

Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Jewish lesbian MC
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin is back with Black Flame, a historical horror about one woman's deadly obsession with a haunted film, perfect for fans of Midsommar and Night Film.

Ellen, a deeply closeted lesbian spends all her time in solitude, restoring films at a failing archive in New York City.

When a group of German academics present her with a print of an infamous exploitation film believed to have been destroyed during the Holocaust, Ellen finds herself forced to confront her own repressed sexuality. And the more she works on the restoration, the more obsessed she becomes over its depictions of occult practices and queer debauchery.

She’s soon convinced that the acts portrayed in the film are not fiction, but reality. And they’re happening to her…

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Felker-Martin’s name is its own trigger warning at this point, and I mean that as the highest of compliments! I have no idea whether I’ll make it through Black Flame or wimp out partway through, but I’m looking forward to finding out!

This Is My Body by Lindsay King-Miller
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MC
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

A gripping, emotional, and darkly funny queer horror novel about family trauma and possession, for fans of Rachel Harrison and Catriona Ward.

Single gay mom Brigid always thought that cutting ties with her extremist Catholic family was the best thing she could have done for her daughter, Dylan—and for herself. But when Dylan starts having terrifying fits of unnatural violence, Brigid can’t shake her memories of a girl from her childhood who behaved the same way . . . until Brigid’s uncle, Father Angus, performed an exorcism.

Convinced that her daughter is suffering from demonic possession, Brigid does the thing she told herself she’d never she goes home. Father Angus is the worst person she knows, but he’s also the only person who can help her daughter.

But as Brigid starts to uncover secrets about Father Angus, that long-ago exorcism, and her family’s past, she realizes that she and Dylan have never been in more danger.

This Is My Body is a piercing journey into religious trauma and childhood shame, building towards a heart-pounding twisty climax that will spin your head all the way around.

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The conflict of turning your back on an abusive faith – but then it’s the only thing that could save your kid? DELICIOUS.

You can read an excerpt here!

The Faceless Thing We Adore by Hester Steel Steel
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic MC
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

Eat, Pray, Love goes full Lovecraft in this queer, feel-good cosmic horror that reflects on gaslighting and emotional abuse.

Lemon, poppy seed, sun-warmed sand. These visions convince Aoife to quit her job, leave her manipulative boyfriend, and escape to the isolated shores of the Farmstead commune. There, among its charismatic and hedonistic residents, Aoife finds everything she’s been a community that adores her, the freedom to indulge, and the promise to be a part of something miraculous.

But darkness underpins her airy new way of life. A disappearing cave looms above an ocean no one dares step foot in, mysterious crying fills the night hours, and a rot is spreading across the island. But perhaps most concerning is the commune’s reverence for their leader, Jonah—a love tinged with fear that Aoife knows all too well.

When Aoife’s boring old life comes crashing into her bold new one, loyalties are tested, unleashing a spiral of unspeakable violence that threatens to fracture reality itself. At the helm, Aoife finds herself desperately trying to protect everyone and everything she’s grown to love. Awkward, clumsy Aoife, who was always told she was weak, will soon realize the depths of her strength—and the pleasures of her rage.

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On the one hand, I love this premise; on the other hand, the main character earns herself a place on my straight-up-stupid shelf with her actions in the excerpt (which you can read on the book’s Big River page, with the read a sample function). I might wait to see what some of my favourite reviewers think of this before I try it for myself.

A Practical Guide to Evil I by David Verburg, ErraticErrata
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

The Empire stands triumphant.

For twenty years the Dread Empress has ruled over the lands that were once the Kingdom of Callow, but behind the scenes of this golden age threats to the empire are rising.

The nobles of the Wasteland weave their plots behind pleasant smiles while rebellion stirs beyond Peren Woods, for dreams of crowns were buried in shallow graves. The greatest danger of all lies to the west, where the First Prince of Procer restored order at last: her people sundered, she ponders if a crusade might not be the way to secure her reign.

Yet none of this matters, for in the heart of the conquered lands the most dangerous man alive sat across an orphan girl and offered her a knife.

Her name is Catherine Foundling, and she has a plan.

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If you’re as chronically online as I am, you’ve probably heard of A Practical Guide to Evil at some point; it’s a massively popular web-novel, which I guess is now getting an ebook edition! (I’m shocked at how badly my usual sources failed me; I only found out about this the week before release!) There’s also going to be an audiobook, released at the same time. No idea if the text went through any polishing prior to this release, but it might be time for me to FINALLY sit down and give it a go!

Crocosmia by Miranda Mellis
Genres: Adult, Sci Fi, Speculative Fiction
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

A revelatory novel (or parable) of art, adventure, and radical politics, set in a world on the precipice.

A philosophical fable, Crocosmia centers on Maya as she recollects the “great turning”—a moment of radical social and ecological change effected in part by the art of her mother, Jane. As Maya recalls her upbringing—from a commune run by anarchist nuns to a time of rural isolation before her mother’s disappearance—Mellis’s prose gorgeously conjures a life defined by revolutionary thought and action and the interplay and tension between family life and political commitment. At once a fantasy, a handbook to political thought, and a work of eco-fiction, this lush novel meditates on how, in a world on the precipice, dreams of communal care can bloom.

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I’ve not been able to get a clear idea of whether this is ‘just’ speculative, or whether there might actually be some sci fi elements, but I’m very curious. It might turn out be a bit too lit ficcy for me, but I’d like to try it!

A Dragon Rider's Guide to Retirement by Julia Huni, Lia Huni
Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

They survived the war. Now they just have to survive retirement.

When dragon rider William Ordell is grounded by a battlefield injury, he trades conflict for peace and purchases an abandoned lighthouse on the island of Safe Haven. But quiet doesn’t suit a man used to action. After a series of mysterious fires, William finds himself launching the island’s first fire brigade—with help from the local sea dragons.

Calantha Stormbringer has left war behind, along with the last sparks of her fading magic. She retreats to Safe Haven to rebuild her late aunt’s dusty bookshop—and maybe herself. Restoring the shop will require patience, intelligence, and gold. Calantha figures two out of three isn’t bad.

What neither of them wants? To run into each other. Again.

Old grudges, magical dragons, and one cozy, nosy village—what could possibly go right?

A Dragon Rider’s Guide to Retirement is a cozy, low-stakes fantasy filled with magic, mischief, and a slow-burn romance that won't steam your glasses. Perfect for fans of Legends & Lattes, Cursed Cocktails, and J. Penner’s Adenashire series.

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This sounds ADORABLE and I want it! It’s that simple.

The Outspoken and the Incendiary: Interviews With Radical Speculative Fiction Writers by Terry Bisson
Genres: Adult, Nonfiction
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

In-Depth, intense, insightful.

For more than a decade, radical science fiction author and activist journalist Terry Bisson interviewed some of the most provocative and outspoken authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anarchism, sexuality, creativity, and the future of humanity itself—no topic was taboo. Bisson's prankster spirit also shone through as he quizzed his subjects about what cars they drove, played free association games, and created an atmosphere of two old friends having intimate late-night chats. Collected from PM Press's award-winning Outspoken Authors Series for the first time, The Outspoken and the Incendiary showcases insightful and long-form explorations into the lives and minds of some of today’s most politically charged fiction writers.

“PM's Outspoken Authors Series looks almost like a science fiction Who’s Who or Hall of Fame, except that I included myself. Because I could.” —Terry Bisson

Words and Thoughts By: Eleanor Arnason, Terry Bisson, Michael Blumlein, John Crowley, Samuel R. Delany, Cory Doctorow, Meg Elison, Karen Joy Fowler, Eileen Gunn, Elizabeth Hand, Cara Hoffman, Nalo Hopkinson, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Paul Krassner, Joe R. Lansdale, Jonathan Lethem, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Macleod, Nick Mamatas, Michael Moorcock, Paul Park, Gary Phillips, Marge Piercy, Rachel Pollack, Rudy Rucker, Kim Stanley Robinson, Carter Scholz, Nisi Shawl, John Shirley, Vandana Singh, and Norman Spinrad, with additional new contributions by Nalo Hopkinson, Jonathan Lethem, Nisi Shawl, Peter Coyote, and Rudy Rucker.

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I imagine this will make for extremely interesting reading, and I’m looking forward to it!

Our Vicious Descent by Hayley Dennings
Genres: Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, YA
Representation: Black sapphic MCs
Published on: 21st October 2025
Goodreads

In this stunning conclusion to the bestselling Ravenous Fate duology, Elise Saint and Layla Quinn must discover the truths behind an alluring poison and the monstrous new presence ravaging New York City

In 1927, shocking upheavals have rocked Harlem's most powerful factions and left Elise Saint estranged from the reaper she loves, Layla Quinn. The Saint family empire is in decline, gangster-run blood houses peddle debauchery, and a dangerous reaper-venom drug has become all the rage with wealthy thrill-seekers. Elise is desperate to find her beloved little sister, Josi, who has gone missing in the chaos. Meanwhile, Layla contends with shifting alliances in the New York underworld, including Karine, an ancient reaper, and the gangster Nicoletta—both with scores to settle.

And then a terrifying new threat a beast making swift, murderous rampages through the city, keeping to darkness while hunting reapers and humans alike. Layla and Elise are joined in purpose when they suspect the monster's origins are related to a far deeper mystery that involves Josi, Karine, and a disquieting new future for reapers. Soon, they will risk everything to unearth these secrets, where the shadowy boundaries between the dead and the living are even more treacherous than they imagined.

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The sequel to This Ravenous Fate! Which I have heard great things (and seen beautiful fanart) of! I think this series is a duology, so Our Vicious Descent should be the final book.

Mistress of Bones by Maria Z. Medina
Genres: Fantasy, YA
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

An epic and romantic debut adventure fantasy, where a necromancer trying to resurrect her sister gets embroiled in bigger, world-ending plans instead

It's been thousands of years since the gods lifted the continents into the air so humanity could thrive, chaining the lands down with their bones and turning them into Anchor.

Azul del Arroyo doesn't care about gods or Anchor; she cares about being responsible for her sister's death and getting her bones from the capital so she can bring her back to life. Again. But in her way stands the Emissary of the Lord Death, who will do anything in his power to stop her, because a necromancer like her shouldn’t exist—no matter how alluring.

As Azul and the Emissary's cat-and-mouse game leads them to the dangerous Court of Cienpuentes, their fate becomes entwined with a count who begrudgingly works for a child king, a faceless witch who transforms Anchor into dreams she can peddle, and a long-lost half-brother with a secret of his own. It's a time of enlightenment, of rapiers and scientific prowess, in a country where Anchor ceased to be something worth revering a long time ago, and people have forgotten the gods' sacrifice.

But the gods haven’t. Because the gods want their bones back, and they're not opposed to becoming players in their own game.

Swashbuckling, grand, and tragically romantic, Mistress of Bones is a can't-miss debut about love, about loss, and, of course, about death.

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I’m a bit sceptical of this one – I don’t love the romance vibes – but the premise is FANTASTIC (flying continents chained with god-bones?! a necromancer scheming to bring back her sister?! AGAIN?! What do you mean, AGAIN?!) and I keep hearing great things from early readers (including that it’s multi-pov, which hopefully means the romance is a smaller part of the story than implied). So I’ll be giving it a try!

You can read an excerpt here!

The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera
Genres: Magical Realism, YA
Representation: Maori cast
Published on: 5th August 2025
Goodreads

Published for the first time on the Penguin Classics U.S. list, the bestselling modern classic Māori coming-of-age novel that inspired a multiple-award-winning film starring Academy Award–nominated actress Keisha Castle-Hughes

Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather’s love and attention. But he is focused on his duties as chief of a Māori tribe in Whangara, on the east coast of New Zealand—a tribe that claims descent from the legendary “whale rider.” In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir—there’s only Kahu. She should be the next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl. Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle, she has a unique the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. Once that sacred gift is revealed, Kahu may be able to reestablish her people’s ancestral connections, earn her great-grandfather’s attention, and lead her tribe to a bold new future.

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This is a new edition of a classic I remember hearing about when I was little, but never got to read. Looking forward to checking it out finally! (And is that not a STUNNING cover???)

Will you be reading any of these? Did I miss any releases you think I should know about? Let me know!

The post Must-Have Monday #248 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Impossible to Describe: Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks

Fire Logic (Elemental Logic, #1) by Laurie J. Marks
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic Indigenous-coded MC, biracial sapphic MC with a fantasy drug addiction, MLM MC with a limp, F/F, M/M, queernorm world, normalised group-marriage
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: B00E5LUOSI
Goodreads

Laurie Marks’ Elemental Logic series introduced readers to the realm of Shaftal, an intricately imagined land whose people operate within the boundaries of their basic natures—here defined as logics—which sometimes bequeath them with access to magical, elemental powers and sometimes embroil them in unsolvable internal conflicts. 

Fire Logic centers around the strong female character Zanja Na’Tarwein, a fighter and last survivor of her people in an occupied country. Alongside her is Karis, a powerful half-giant, who is a drug addict and lives in obscurity, hiding her considerable powers. Surrounded by incomprehensible loss, Zanja also forms a bond with Emil, an officer of the army she joins. 

Battling the complex forces of power, desire, and obligation, follow along as the trio work together to try and change the course of history. 

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~books are precious
~a most excellent raven
~plot-relevant fireworks
~careful who you cut with those
~the past is never coming back

Fire Logic is a book I’ve tried to read at least four times before this, and I’ve always bounced off the plain, dry prose – but for some reason, I had the impulse to pick it up again recently.

And this time, it swallowed me whole.

I was so wrong about the prose being plain and dry. What it is is simple – but it’s the elegant, perfect simplicity of clear water flowing over last year’s leaves, unadorned because it doesn’t need to be, hypnotic in its clarity. It tells little, and shows everything, full of natural imagery and similes that draw on comfortable household tasks – which reinforces the worldbuilding, or maybe is influenced by it, or both, because the culture of Shaftal seems imbued in every word choice. We don’t see this often – worldbuilding and writing style usually have nothing to do with each other – but it’s wonderful; it brings Shaftal, and the characters, alive in an incredibly vivid way. We learn about this place and these people as much from the words used to describe them as from the acts of the story itself, and it’s as impressive (and effective) as it is subtle.

the town’s largest tavern, into which the townspeople packed, elbow-to-elbow, like beans standing in the pickling jar.

Then the lake had glowed like a jewel; now it was gray, with the muted colors of tree and canyon bleeding across it like ink on a wet page.

the sun split the clouds open like a bright hammer upon gray stone.

The plot is relatively simple to explain, but that explanation doesn’t do Fire Logic justice at all: the country of Shaftal is overcome by brutal colonisers after its leader dies, and its warriors spend 15 years fighting a guerrilla war. Zanja, a foreigner, joins the guerrillas after the colonisers wipe out her people, eventually crosses paths with an enemy seer, and is directly entangled with the future of Shaftal and its leadership.

But that tells you nothing about how this is a book of grief and healing, of forging a new place and new purpose for yourself after you’ve lost everything. It’s a book about hate and rage and what to do with those things, those feelings. It’s about factions and responsibility and care, about ways to lead and ways to rule, ways to be. There are secrets within secrets here, layers upon layers; quiet, wry humour and earth-shaking emotion, vows and honour and very unexpected love, intuition versus insight.

It’s a familiar story told in a very unfamiliar way; there’s a war, but the enemies aren’t invaders, because they’ve lived in Shaftal for a generation at this point; there’s a war, and it’s an actual war, not a flashy cinematic battle that revolves everything in one go; there’s a war, and it’s been going on 15 years. As a genre, Fantasy isn’t great at realistic depictions of war, but Fire Logic is an excellent one – without being gory or grimdark. The exhaustion of it all comes through beautifully, and the schisms within the guerrilla forces are all too believable. Both sides are depicted as very, very human, making so many mistakes for such understandable reasons.

And none of what I’ve just typed out does the book justice, gives you any idea of what reading it is LIKE. It is so strangely, inexplicably soothing, far more readable than you would ever think a story with these themes could be. The characters are magnetic, and only grow more so as you get to know them better. Fire Logic ought to be a challenging read – not least because Marks does challenge the reader’s preconceptions about things like war and enemies and The Other – but somehow, it isn’t. It’s – easy, easy on your heart, even though it clearly shouldn’t be. If I laid the plot out for you, point by point, you’d never imagine that this book could feel straightforward, and gentle, and disarmingly serene. It makes no sense!

And yet.

Like a great wheel the year turned; and now the sower dropped to the horizon, and up rose the gatherer with her arms outstretched to capture the ripe stars and put them in her basket.

Can you just trust me? That this is a book you really, REALLY need to try? Even if it sounds like nothing you’d enjoy? Fire Logic is so much more than the sum of its parts; what Marks has done is transformational, alchemical, in a way I have been failing to describe for MONTHS.

I don’t think it can be explained. It needs to be experienced.

I really hope you’ll give it a try. As for me, I’m diving straight into the sequel!

You can read an excerpt of the book here!

The post Impossible to Describe: Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.