Siavahda's Blog, page 57

Must-Have Monday #103

There are ELEVEN new books I’m excited about this week, some of which I’ve been anticipating for a long time and some I only just discovered!

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

No Gods for Drowning by Hailey Piper
Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic MC
Published on: 20th September 2022
Goodreads

IN THE BEGINNING, MAN WAS PREY.
WITHOUT THE GODS, THEY'LL BE PREY AGAIN.

The old gods have fled, and the monsters they had kept at bay for centuries now threaten to drown the city of Valentine, hunting mankind as in ancient times. In the midst of the chaos, a serial killer has begun ritually sacrificing victims, their bodies strewn throughout the city.

Lilac Antonis wants to stop the impending destruction of her city by summoning her mother, a blood god—even if she has to slit a few throats to do it. But evading her lover Arcadia and her friends means sneaking, lying, and even spilling the blood of people she loves.

Alex and Cecil of Ace Investigations have been tasked with hunting down the killer, but as they close in—not knowing they're hunting their close friend Lilac—the detectives realize the gods may not have left willingly.

As flooding drags this city of cars and neon screaming into the jaws of sea demons and Arcadia struggles to save the people as captain of the evacuation team, Lilac’s ritual killings at last bear fruit, only to reveal her as a small piece in a larger plan. The gods’ protection costs far more than anyone has ever known, and Alex and Cecil are running out of time to discover the true culprit behind the gods’ disappearance before an ancient divine murder plot destroys them all.

Set in an alternate reality which updates mythology to near-modern day, NO GODS FOR DROWNING is part hunt for a serial killer, part noir detective story, and unlike anything you’ve ever read before.

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I’ve been waiting to read this ALL YEAR, and it seems so surreal that it’s finally out tomorrow! I may have to take a day off work to pounce on it, I am THAT EXCITED!

We Won't Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories by Margaret Killjoy
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: Queer MCs
Published on: 20th September 2022
Goodreads

Death cults, queer love, and the end of everything.

Spaceships, man-eating lesbian mermaids, swords, spears, demons, ghouls, thieves, hitchhikers, and life in the margins. Margaret Killjoy’s stories have appeared for years in the science fiction and fantasy magazines both major and indie. Here, we have collected the best previously published work along with brand new material. Ranging in theme and tone, these imaginative tales bring the reader on a wild and moving ride. They’ll encounter a hacker who programs drones to troll CEOs into quitting; a group of LARPers who decide to live as orcs in the burned forests of Oregon; queer, teen love in a death cult; the terraforming of a climate-changed Earth; polyamorous love on an anarchist tea farm during the apocalypse; and much more. Killjoy writes fearless, mind-expanding fiction that is redefining the genre.

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Killjoy is probably best known for the Danielle Cain series, but she’s written a fair bit more than that and is one of the few authors I’m delighted to read a full collection of! This is gonna be FUN!

The Queen of Summer's Twilight by Charles Vess
Genres: Fantasy
Representation: Biracial MC
Published on: 20th September 2022
Goodreads

When teenager Janet Ravenscroft is rescued from the night-time streets of downtown Inverness by a mysterious man on a black motorbike, little does she imagine what lies in store.

How could she know that this man holds the key to the mysteries that have plagued her life: her mixed heritage, her father’s casual cruelty, her mother’s absence, her sense that she’s never belonged? How could she know that her search for answers would lead her from the familiar environs of contemporary Scotland to the realm of faerie and that her life, her very soul, would be in jeopardy?

World renowned artist Charles Vess has worked with some of the greatest writers in fantastical fiction, including Neil Gaiman, Ursula Le Guin, and Charles de Lint, co-creating iconic works for which he has won numerous awards. He now unveils his remarkable debut novel. Born of a vision of two people racing across a field on a motorbike with a trail of burning grass in their wake, and inspired by the Ballad of Tam Lyn, Vess has produced a book of true wonder.

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I’ve known of Charles Vess as an artist for ages, but I had no idea he writes too! Very intrigued to see how his prose compares to his painting.

The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer and neurodivergent MCs
Published on: 20th September 2022
Goodreads

In this first full-length novel from the acclaimed Birdverse, new love blossoms between an impatient starkeeper and a reclusive poet as they try together to save their island home. Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte finalist R. B. Lemberg (The Four Profound Weaves) has crafted a gorgeous tale of the inevitable transformations of communities and their worlds. The Unbalancing is rooted in the mystical cosmology, neurodiversity, and queerness that infuses Lemberg’s lyrical prose, which has invited glowing comparisons to N. K. Jemisin, Patricia A. McKillip, and Ursula K. LeGuin.

Beneath the waters by the islands of Gelle-Geu, a star sleeps restlessly. The celebrated new starkeeper Ranra Kekeri, who is preoccupied by the increasing tremors, confronts the problems left behind by her predecessor.

Meanwhile, the poet Erígra Lilún, who merely wants to be left alone, is repeatedly asked by their ancestor Semberi to take over the starkeeping helm. Semberi insists upon telling Lilun mysterious tales of the deliverance of the stars by the goddess Bird.

When Ranra and Lilun meet, sparks begin to fly. An unforeseen configuration of their magical deepnames illuminates the trouble under the tides. For Ranra and Lilun, their story is just beginning; for the people of Gelle-Geu, it may well be too late to save their home

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I adore Lemberg’s Birdverse, and this is the first full novel in the setting! I admit it did not work out for me personally, but no way was I leaving it off this week’s releases!

Ship Without Sails by Sherwood Smith
Genres: Fantasy, Epic Fantasy
Published on: 20th September 2022

Nobody sane wants war.

But what happens when war comes to you?

In this first volume of The Norsunder War, the allies introduced in The Rise of the Alliance find their world invaded. For Atan, Queen of Sartor, preserving lives and knowledge come before fleeing to safety. Jilo of Chwahirsland risks his life to resist the return of an evil king. And for Senrid of Marloven Hess, it means facing a combined army whose might hasn’t been seen for eight hundred years, and losing everything he holds dear.

Heroism. Betrayal. Endurance. Resistance. Both sides encounter unexpected twists as some discover that even when existence is most dire, it can still surprise you . . .

REVIEWS FOR EARLIER BOOKS IN THE SARTORIAS-DELES SAGA:

OK, Bitches, anyone here like diversity? Kickass female characters? Rich, detailed worldbuilding? Of course you do! And I have got the series for you! —Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

“Smith deftly stage-manages the wide-ranging plots with brisk pacing, spare yet complex characterizations, and a narrative that balances sweeping action and uneasy intimacy.” —Publishers Weekly

CW: Part One is war; a child death

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HOLY FUCK, WE’VE ACTUALLY REACHED THE NORSUNDER WAR ARC OF THE SARTORIAS-DELES UNIVERSE!!! You don’t understand, Smith has been building to this for LITERAL DECADES and I cannot even right now!

I don’t think this is a good book to jump in on if you are new to the ‘verse – if I’ve understood Smith’s FAQ on the matter correctly, you should at least read the Rise of the Alliance arc before this one. But I highly encourage you to do so, because Sherwood Smith is a genius and Sartorias-deles is her masterpiece.

Bone Weaver by Aden Polydoros
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bisexual MC, gay MC
Published on: 20th September 2022
Goodreads

"A heart-pounding adventure. Magic and monsters lurk in every corner as a headstrong trio search for their place in Aden Polydoros's haunting world." ––Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights

From the author of The City Beautiful comes a haunting fantasy following Toma, adopted daughter of the benevolent undead, making her way across a civil war-torn continent to save her younger sister as she discovers she might possess magical powers herself.

The Kosa empire roils in tension, on the verge of being torn apart by a proletarian revolution between magic-endowed elites and the superstitious lower class, but seventeen-year-old Toma lives blissfully disconnected from the conflict in the empire with her adoptive family of benevolent undead.

When she meets Vanya, a charming commoner branded as a witch by his own neighbors, and the dethroned Tsar Mikhail himself, the unlikely trio bonds over trying to restore Mikhail’s magic and protect the empire from the revolutionary leader, Koschei, whose forces have stolen the castle. Vanya has his magic, and Mikhail has his title, but if Toma can’t dig deep and find her power in time, all of their lives will be at Koschei’s mercy.

Praise for The City Beautiful "An achingly rendered exploration of queer desire, grief, and the inexorable scars of the past."—Katy Rose Pool, author of There Will Come A Darkness

"Chillingly sinister, warmly familiar, and breathtakingly transportive, The City Beautiful is the haunting, queer Jewish historical thriller of my darkest dreams." —Dahlia Adler, creator of LGBTQreads and editor of That Way Madness Lies 

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Polydoros impressed me with his debut The City Beautiful, and I’ve heard good things about this, his sophomore novel!

Rust in the Root by Justina Ireland
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer Black MC
Published on: 20th September 2022
Goodreads

The author of the visionary New York Times bestseller Dread Nation returns with another spellbinding historical fantasy set at the crossroads of race and power in America.

It is 1937, and Laura Ann Langston lives in an America divided--between those who work the mystical arts and those who do not. Ever since the Great Rust, a catastrophic event that blighted the arcane force called the Dynamism and threw America into disarray, the country has been rebuilding for a better future. And everyone knows the future is industry and technology--otherwise known as Mechomancy--not the traditional mystical arts.

Laura disagrees. A talented young queer mage from Pennsylvania, Laura hopped a portal to New York City on her seventeenth birthday with hopes of earning her mage's license and becoming something more than a rootworker.

But four months later, she's got little to show for it other than an empty pocket and broken dreams. With nowhere else to turn, Laura applies for a job with the Bureau of the Arcane's Conservation Corps, a branch of the US government dedicated to repairing the Dynamism so that Mechomancy can thrive. There she meets the Skylark, a powerful mage with a mysterious past, who reluctantly takes Laura on as an apprentice.

As they're sent off on their first mission together into the heart of the country's oldest and most mysterious Blight, they discover the work of mages not encountered since the darkest period in America's past, when Black mages were killed for their power--work that could threaten Laura's and the Skylark's lives, and everything they've worked for.

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Listen, I don’t care what Justina Ireland writes, I will read anything she publishes!

Fraternity by Andy Mientus
Genres: Horror, Queer Protagonists, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy
Representation: Queer MCs, Black gay MC
Published on: 20th September 2022
Goodreads

A queer, dark academia YA about a mysterious boarding school, a brotherhood that must stay in the shadows, and an ancient evil that could tear it all apart.

In the fall of 1991, Zooey Orson transfers to the Blackfriars School for Boys hoping for a fresh start following a scandal at his last school. However, he quickly learns that he isn’t the only student keeping a secret. Before he knows it, he’s fallen in with a group of boys who all share the same secret, one which they can only express openly within the safety of the clandestine gatherings of the Vicious Circle––the covert club for gay students going back decades. But when the boys unwittingly happen upon the headmaster’s copy of an arcane occult text, they unleash an eldritch secret so terrible, it threatens to consume them all.

A queer paranormal story set during the still-raging AIDS crisis, Fraternity examines a time not so long ago when a secret brotherhood lurked in the shadows. What would Zooey and his friends do to protect their found family?

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Queer boys getting up to occult shenanigans? You have my attention, sir.

In the House of Transcendence by Amanda Ross
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Black queer MC
Published on: 22nd September 2022
Goodreads

Zora is a necromancer. Some say she’s gifted, others say she’s cursed, but her abilities always terrify her. Hoping to start a new life, she flees her childhood home and travels to Savannah, but she soon learns that some things can’t be changed.

There, she meets an alluring and powerful witch named Birdie. She offers Zora a proposition: she’ll give Zora a place to stay, a job dancing at a magical burlesque club called Nightingale’s, and help controlling her powers if Zora can solve her lover’s murder.

Zora accepts Birdie’s offer and is soon drawn into the magical community of Savannah, where rituals and magical fights are performed in grand old homes, potions can make people float on air, and three magical houses vie for dominance. As she tries to put the pieces together and solve the murder, Zora gets caught in the sight of the very forces responsible for the killing.

Can she rise up and learn to control her powers and solve the murder or will her fears cause her to lose it all?

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Definitely one of the books I’m most excited about this week! I only heard about it a few weeks ago, and I’ve been heart-eyes ever since. It sounds SO GOOD!

Deep Ocean by Stefani Freeman
Genres: Fantasy
Published on: 22nd September 2022

On the first day of her honeymoon a young woman inadvertently discovers that she's a descendant of a pod of mermaids once revered for their unrelenting disruption of the slave trade across the Atlantic. As the tensions rise between the remaining mermaids who face looming rediscovery, what role will she play in the future of her people? As technology continues to make the deep ocean more and more accessible by the decade, what will happen if myths from the past refuse to stay lost to the tides of time?

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I am 99.9% sure this is about Black mermaids – what excellent timing, if so! – but I haven’t been able to confirm it, and I haven’t seen any early reviews. But those mermaids on the cover – come on, look at their hair!

Regardless, I love the premise, and can’t wait to, ahem, dive in to this one!

Empire of the Feast by Bendi Barrett
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MC
Published on: 22nd September 2022
Goodreads

In Empire of the Feast, we awaken with Riverson, 32nd ruler of the Stag Empire, as he attempts to govern without the memories of his previous lives. To survive the ever-sharpening gears of war, he will need to mend the political schisms threatening to tear his empire apart while maintaining the erotic rituals holding off the eldritch horror known only as the Rapacious.

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I really wish Neon Hemlock (the publisher) would post the release dates of their books, but I think Empire of the Feast is out this week. I think. I really hope so, because it sounds amazing and early readers have hyped the hell out of it. I want to reeeeeeeeead it!

Will you be reading any of these? Let me know!

The post Must-Have Monday #103 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

A Book of Meh Revelations: The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang

Highlights

~angelic mecha suits
~magic gemstones
~what’s the difference between hallucinations and visions?

I feel like I should have enjoyed this much more than I did. Broken down to its constituent parts, I love everything that makes up Genesis: the religious themes and imagery; the jagged-edged nonbinary MC who is utterly convinced she’s not the Messiah; mysterious gemstones with all kinds of otherworldly properties.

And yet.

I think part of the problem is that, in this kind of set-up, we all know the Empire is – best-case scenario – mistaken in its take on Life, The Universe, And Everything; worst-case scenario, they’re deliberately lying about everything, and most especially The Enemy. We all know that The Enemy is either misunderstood or misrepresented; that they are far more likely to know The Truth than the protagonist’s side are. And while it’s a very cool change of pace to have our MC go from unbeliever to fanatic rather than the other way around, it still meant I was impatiently waiting for the Twist Reveal the whole time I was reading…which undercut basically all of the tension.

Also, while I can’t talk about it in any detail at all, the epilogue massively pissed me off. It rendered the entire rest of the book pointless. The whole thing from start to finish was a massive waste of everybody’s time. What on earth was {spoiler}’s goal then??? If {spoiler} wanted {spoiler} then there were much, MUCH simpler ways of making it happen than the entire plot of the book. What even.

Argh.

I found the worldbuilding really simplistic, I’ve gotta be honest – although in total fairness, the epilogue does make it clear that in fact the worldbuilding is much more complicated than we think it is. That doesn’t really change the fact that this aspect of Genesis was pretty disappointing and boring, though, since most of the book is not the epilogue. The most interesting thing was the holystones, the various materials that each have unique properties like emitting light or levitating, and how the Empire utilises them, but with basically no info on where they come from or how they work…

Basically, The Genesis of Mercy felt like it was only a sketch of the world, to be filled in later, in later books. There are brief mentions and glimpses of things that hint at interesting mysteries, but there’s no follow-through in this book, and that is both frustrating and leaves the actual story we have in front of us feeling very shallow.

(And what is up with referring to a military corps as a banquet? Which breaks down into courses, then dishes, then servings? That was incredibly bizarre and is never explained. Why would you name your military like you’re offering up your soldiers to be devoured by the enemy?)

Misery herself is easily the strongest part of the book: she comes across as narcissistic and manipulative, but only because she’s out to survive and has no one else to depend on, well aware that the systems of power she’s been caught up in could crush her at any moment. She’s spiky and smart and ruthless and irreverent, and her backwater upbringing gives Yang a way to introduce the reader to the main body of the Empire as Misery herself is introduced to it.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the gift of Misery’s insight – her ability to understand people and know exactly what they’re thinking and feeling – worked as well as a means to illuminate the rest of the cast. It becomes a whole lot of telling rather than showing – we’re effectively lectured on the inner workings of each secondary character, which backfires massively by making them read as extremely one- or two-dimensional. No one feels like a real person except Misery, and it’s possible, actually, that that was deliberate – the narrator isn’t interested in anyone but Misery, and Misery herself doesn’t seem to care much for other people either. But even if it was done intentionally, it really doesn’t read well. I was also confused that the narrative set up a literal team of characters around Misery, but then that team was pretty irrelevant; Misery doesn’t form much connection with them, and you could have replaced most of them with unnamed characters without affecting the plot.

Then Misery goes from atheist to fanatic after a Big Reveal, and while intellectually I appreciate this – usually we see characters lose faith, not gain it, over the course of their stories, so this is a nice change of pace – from a reading perspective it made her very boring and extremely unpleasant. I think the unpleasant part was deliberate – we’re not meant to like her anymore – but everything that made her an interesting character was just gone. Which left me with no drive at all to finish the book.

I did, though, but I’m not sure why I bothered. The plot is very…straightforward? Predictable? I saw another reviewer describe it as sequential, and maybe that’s the right word; things just seem to happen, with no…no driving force? No impetus? They happen because they happen. Misery goes from the capital to a military base to training to revelation to battle, and on paper that should all be very grand and dramatic, but somehow it never felt that way while I was reading. It’s just one damn thing after another, as they say.

I didn’t skim, but I really had to force my way through the last 20% or so of Genesis. There was a lot of telling, a lot of reveals the groundwork was never laid for (no clues that the reader could put together to work out the conclusion, even in hindsight), a lot that was summarised instead of shown to us. And yet, quite a bit that I was able to predict from the get-go, simply because this is how this kind of story goes, not because Yang led me to the Le Gasp! moments step by step.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the actual prose, but reading this book made me so Tired. Despite the revelations in the epilogue, I don’t think I’ll be picking up the sequel. However, I seem to be very much in the minority on this one, so if the blurb sounds interesting to you, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it. But don’t bank on loving this just because you loved the Tensorate series; Tensorate and Genesis are very different books.

The post A Book of Meh Revelations: The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

I Can’t Wait For…The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao

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. 

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao!

The Surviving Sky (Rages, #1) by Kritika H. Rao
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Desi cast, bisexual MCs
Published on: 4th April 2023
Goodreads

This Hindu philosophy-inspired debut science fantasy follows a husband and wife racing to save their living city—and their troubled marriage—high above a jungle world besieged by cataclysmic storms

High above a jungle-planet float the last refuges of humanity—plant-made civilizations held together by tradition, technology, and arcane science. In these living cities, architects are revered above anyone else. If not for their ability to psychically manipulate the architecture, the cities would plunge into the devastating earthrage storms below.

Charismatic, powerful, mystical, Iravan is one such architect. In his city, his word is nearly law. His abilities are his identity, but to Ahilya, his wife, they are a way for survival to be reliant on the privileged few. Like most others, she cannot manipulate the plants. And she desperately seeks change.

Their marriage is already thorny—then Iravan is accused of pushing his abilities to forbidden limits. He needs Ahilya to help clear his name; she needs him to tip the balance of rule in their society. As their paths become increasingly intertwined, deadly truths emerge, challenging everything each of them believes. And as the earthrages become longer, and their floating city begins to plummet, Iravan and Ahilya's discoveries might destroy their marriage, their culture, and their entire civilization.

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I’ve been dying to read The Surviving Sky since I first heard about it last year – and we just got the amazing cover! Isn’t it ridiculously fabulous?!

‘Hindu-inspired flying plant cities’ is really all I need to hear – but I’m also really delighted that this trilogy is starting with a married couple, rather than closing with a wedding, which we see much more often. Marriage is not the end of the story, folx! Fuck that ‘your wedding is the most important day of your life’ nonsense – you can still have adventures after you’re married, and I’m extremely excited to get to read Iravan and Ahilya’s!

Rao has said that both MCs are bisexual, which is epic – more M/F bi rep, yesssss! – and I’m really looking forward to seeing her take on mixing tech and magic, which she’s also talked about The Surviving Sky featuring. I love Science Fantasy as a genre and am always looking for more stories that make technology and magic partners instead of enemies, and this promises just that.

Plus: solarpunk vibes much?!

There were literally months where I was checking every day to see if The Surviving Sky was up for preorder yet, and you’d better believe I slammed it when I found it! I very much encourage you to do the same.

Now to keep myself from bursting with anticipation until next April…!

The post I Can’t Wait For…The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Must-Have Monday #102

This week is PACKED with amazing new releases and especially beautiful covers!!!

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

Nona the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #3) by Tamsyn Muir
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Science Fantasy
Representation: Queer MC, queernorm world
Published on: 13th September 2022
Goodreads

Her city is under siege.

The zombies are coming back.

And all Nona wants is a birthday party.

In many ways, Nona is like other people. She lives with her family, has a job at her local school, and loves walks on the beach and meeting new dogs. But Nona's not like other people. Six months ago she woke up in a stranger's body, and she's afraid she might have to give it back.

The whole city is falling to pieces. A monstrous blue sphere hangs on the horizon, ready to tear the planet apart. Blood of Eden forces have surrounded the last Cohort facility and wait for the Emperor Undying to come calling. Their leaders want Nona to be the weapon that will save them from the Nine Houses. Nona would prefer to live an ordinary life with the people she loves, with Pyrrha and Camilla and Palamedes, but she also knows that nothing lasts forever.

And each night, Nona dreams of a woman with a skull-painted face...

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IT’S

NONA

THE

NINTH

!!!

I just finished my reread of the first two books at 5am Sunday morning (I regret NOTHING) and I mean, I was already hyped for Nona, but wow did I fall in love with this series all over again. It continues to be The Best, and I’m kind of in a daze that book three is actually! almost!! here!!!

Notorious Sorcerer (The Burnished City #1) by Davinia Evans
Genres: Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual MC, M/M, queernorm world
Published on: 13th September 2022
Goodreads

Since the city of Bezim was shaken half into the sea by a magical earthquake, the Inquisitors have policed alchemy with brutal efficiency. Nothing too powerful, too complicated, too much like real magic is allowed–and the careful science that’s left is kept too expensive for any but the rich and indolent to tinker with. Siyon Velo, a glorified errand boy scraping together lesson money from a little inter-planar fetch and carry, doesn’t qualify.

But when Siyon accidentally commits a public act of impossible magic, he’s catapulted into the limelight. Except the limelight is a bad place to be when the planes themselves start lurching out of alignment, threatening to send the rest of the city into the sea.

Now Siyon, a dockside brat who clawed his way up and proved himself on rooftops with saber in hand, might be Bezim’s only hope. Because if they don’t fix the cascading failures of magic in their plane, the Powers and their armies in the other three will do it for them.

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This was EVEN MORE EPIC than I was expecting it to be, and I was already expecting it to be amazing! Gorgeous prose, an amazing cast, worldbuilding I adored, and a plot that was so deliciously twisty! I haven’t seen NEARLY enough hype for Notorious Sorcerer and I need absolutely EVERYONE to read it!!!

You can read my review here!

Thief Mage Beggar Mage by Cat Hellisen
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: MC with chronic pain, amputee MC, M/M
Published on: 13th September 2022
Goodreads

Tet is no longer a priest-mage; thrown out from his temple and cursed by his gods to return a stolen relic. With every passing year, the curse works deeper into his flesh, breaking and twisting him until finally, driven by pain, Tet makes a drastic play to escape the gods.

His luck turns sour, and the escape costs him his soul, drawing his death even closer when he is captured by the despotic White Prince. In order to escape the prince, retrieve his soul and break the curse, Tet must form a fragile alliance with a man he cannot trust. An alliance made brittle by lies and deception; one that may take his heart as well as his soul.

Thief Mage, Beggar Mage is a lush, queer reimagining of Andersen’s The Tinderbox, embroidered with dreams, secret identities, stolen magic, giant spectral dogs, clockwork monsters, prophetic dragons, and the grand games of gods and humans.

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I love the Tinderbox fairytale, I love lush prose and queer stories, and I love Cat Hellisen. Thief Mage Beggar Mage is another that subverted my expectations at every turn, and altogether is just utterly *chef’s kiss*

You can read my review here!

Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: F/F, nonbinary secondary character
Published on: 13th September 2022
Goodreads

In the tradition of modern fairytales like American Gods and Spinning Silver comes a sweeping epic rich in Eastern European folklore--a debut novel about the ancestral hauntings that stalk us, and the uncanny power of story.

The Yaga siblings--Bellatine, a young woodworker, and Isaac, a wayfaring street performer and con artist--have been estranged since childhood, separated both by resentment and by wide miles of American highway. But when they learn that they are to receive a mysterious inheritance, the siblings are reunited--only to discover that their bequest isn't land or money, but something far stranger: a sentient house on chicken legs.

Thistlefoot, as the house is called, has arrived from the Yagas' ancestral home in Russia--but not alone. A sinister figure known only as the Longshadow Man has tracked it to American shores, bearing with him violent secrets from the past: fiery memories that have hidden in Isaac and Bellatine's blood for generations. As the Yaga siblings embark with Thistlefoot on a final cross-country tour of their family's traveling theater show, the Longshadow Man follows in relentless pursuit, seeding destruction in his wake. Ultimately, time, magic, and legacy must collide--erupting in a powerful conflagration to determine who gets to remember the past and craft a new future.

An enchanted adventure illuminated by Jewish myth and adorned with lyrical prose as tantalizing and sweet as briar berries, Thistlefoot is an immersive modern fantasy saga by a bold new talent.

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I love Baba Yaga – especially her amazing house!!! – so I’ve been looking forward to Thistlefoot for absolutely AGES. I only fell more in love after reading the first few pages via the Big River site, and the excerpt posted on Tor.com!

Bindle Punk Bruja by Desideria Mesa
Genres: Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
Representation: Latina MC
Published on: 13th September 2022
Goodreads

A part-time reporter and club owner takes on crooked city councilmen, mysterious and deadly mobsters, and society's deeply rooted sexism and racism, all while keeping her true identity and magical abilities hidden --inspired by an ancient Mexican folktale.

Yo soy quien soy.
I am who I am.

Luna--or depending on who's asking, Rose--is the white-passing daughter of an immigrant mother who has seen what happens to people from her culture. This world is prejudicial, and she must hide her identity in pursuit of owning an illegal jazz club. Using her cunning powers, Rose negotiates with dangerous criminals as she climbs up Kansas City's bootlegging ladder. Luna, however, runs the risk of losing everything if the crooked city councilmen and ruthless mobsters discover her ties to an immigrant boxcar community that secretly houses witches. Last thing she wants is to put her entire family in danger.

But this bruja with ever-growing magical abilities can never resist a good fight. With her new identity, Rose, an unabashed flapper, defies societal expectations all the while struggling to keep her true self and witchcraft in check. However, the harder she tries to avoid scrutiny, the more her efforts eventually capture unwanted attention. Soon, she finds herself surrounded by greed and every brand of bigotry--from local gangsters who want a piece of the action and businessmen who hate her diverse staff to the Ku Klux Klan and Al Capone. Will her earth magic be enough to save her friends and family? As much as she hates to admit it, she may need to learn to have faith in others--and learning to trust may prove to be her biggest ambition yet.

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I’ll be honest, I fell in love with the cover first, but once I read the blurb I was completely hooked. Luna sounds like an amazing character, and I really want to know more about the folktale Bindle Punk Bruja is inspired by.

Glorious Fiends by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer cast
Published on: 13th September 2022
Goodreads

When infamous hot mess vampire Roxanne resurrects her deceased best friends, she’s confronted by a dream-dwelling Guardian of the Underworld, who demands that she replace them in his afterlife with three equally nefarious creatures—or he’ll drag her there instead.

Reunited with Medusa and Mx. Hyde, Roxanne and her macabre girl gang must become monster hunters themselves and fight for the future of their friendship.

Gory, sexy, silly, touching—Glorious Fiends asks who the real monsters are, and if the bonds that we think are solely human are really ours alone. This Hammer-inspired odyssey is a nostalgic trip through ‘80s horror tropes—with modern sensibilities.

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I have seen mixed reviews for this – it seems to be a love it or hate it kind of book – but I’m still excited to give it a go. Marvellous cover, either way!

[image error]Aces Wild: A Heist by Amanda DeWitt
Genres: Queer Protagonists
Representation: Asexual cast
Published on: 13th September 2022
Goodreads

What happens in Vegas when an all-asexual online friend group attempts to break into a high-stakes gambling club? Shenanigans ensue.

Some people join chess club, some people play football. Jack Shannon runs a secret blackjack ring in his private school’s basement. What else is the son of a Las Vegas casino mogul supposed to do?

Everything starts falling apart when Jack’s mom is arrested for their family’s ties to organized crime. His sister Beth thinks this is the Shannon family’s chance to finally go straight, but Jack knows that something’s not right. His mom was sold out, and he knows by who. Peter Carlevaro: rival casino owner and jilted lover. Gross.

Jack hatches a plan to find out what Carlevaro’s holding over his mom’s head, but he can’t do it alone. He recruits his closest friends—the asexual support group he met through fandom forums. Now all he has to do is infiltrate a high-stakes gambling club and dodge dark family secrets, while hopelessly navigating what it means to be in love while asexual. Easy, right?

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I’m far from the only one looking forward to Aces Wild – there was a big buzz when the publishing deal was announced, and again when the cover was revealed – but as an asexual person myself, I’m doubly excited for such a ridiculously cool premise. ‘Always have an ace up your sleeve’, indeed!

The Gingerbread Witch by Alexandra Overy
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic MC
Published on: 13th September 2022
Goodreads

Maud has grown up in a house made of gingerbread, wanting nothing more than to be a witch like Mother Agatha. But just like all of Agatha's creations—from the magical house made of sweets to the chocolate mousse squirrel, right down to the little sugar mice—Maud will turn back into gingerbread if anything ever happens to Agatha. After a terrible fight, Maud storms off only to return home to learn that Hansel and Gretel, a pair of witch hunters, have pushed Agatha into the cottage's oven.

To save herself and the other gingerbread creations, Maud will have to go into the dangerous forest of the Shadelands to find the First Witch's spellbook. But with witch hunters on her trail and other people interested in the book for their own means, it'll be far from easy. Can Maud claim the book and bring back the only mother she's ever known…or will witch hunters capture her before she can save her gingerbread family?

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This sounds very very sweet – and I did not mean for that to be a pun, I swear! – and gives all the vibes of being a perfect snuggle-book. I’m very much looking forward to curling up with it!

Lioness of Punjab by Anita Jari Kharbanda​
Representation: Punjabi Sikh cast
Published on: 17th September 2022
Goodreads

“We will fight here,” I commanded the warriors. “We are strong. We will have no fear. As Sikh warriors, we are ready to fight for justice. Vahiguru Ji Ka Khalsa! Vahiguru Ji Ki Fateh!”

It is the winter of 1705, and the tenth Guru of the Sikhs is under attack by the armies of the mighty Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb. Under siege and isolated, Guru Gobind Singh Ji’s men are exhausted beyond measure, and forty soldiers decide to head home. Back in the villages of Punjab, these forty men are met by a fiery Sikh woman—a warrior who has been preparing all her life for this very moment—who leads the deserters back to the Guru. This is the story of that warrior, the fierce Mai Bhago, who chose the sword to symbolize her unwavering loyalty and devotion to her people and her faith.

This energetic coming-of-age young adult novel brings us closer to Mai Bhago—a woman revered in the Sikh community and beyond—to imagine her growing to embrace her many roles in a way that was entirely her own and, in the process, becoming a shining inspiration for young women everywhere.

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I feel as if I have vaguely heard of Mai Bhago before, but I’d love to learn a lot more about her, and a novel that puts her front and centre seems like a good place to start!

Will you be reading any of these? Let me know!

The post Must-Have Monday #102 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

A Dazzling Dynamite Debut: Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans

Notorious Sorcerer (The Burnished City #1) by Davinia Evans
Genres: Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual MC, M/M, queernorm world
PoV: 3rd person, past-tense, multiple PoVs
Published on: 13th September 2022
ISBN: B09Q31T82G
Goodreads

Since the city of Bezim was shaken half into the sea by a magical earthquake, the Inquisitors have policed alchemy with brutal efficiency. Nothing too powerful, too complicated, too much like real magic is allowed–and the careful science that’s left is kept too expensive for any but the rich and indolent to tinker with. Siyon Velo, a glorified errand boy scraping together lesson money from a little inter-planar fetch and carry, doesn’t qualify.

But when Siyon accidentally commits a public act of impossible magic, he’s catapulted into the limelight. Except the limelight is a bad place to be when the planes themselves start lurching out of alignment, threatening to send the rest of the city into the sea.

Now Siyon, a dockside brat who clawed his way up and proved himself on rooftops with saber in hand, might be Bezim’s only hope. Because if they don’t fix the cascading failures of magic in their plane, the Powers and their armies in the other three will do it for them.

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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~phoenix-feathers and angel fire
~tribes of delightfully performative trouble-makers
~meet-cute? try meet-snark
~what’s the difference between alchemy and sorcery?
~time to hit the rooftops

Oh, Notorious Sorcerer, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways!

Picture a city by a sea. Now split it in half, just like the Sundering did. Make it rich and make it poor. Give it fisher-clans that work together or die alone; give it Flower Houses whose occupants laugh at little things like curfews while they play cards for fortunes. Give it a Harbormaster and a Prefect and inquisitors in grey, give it noble azatani with their calling cards and turbans, give it tribes of playful warrior bravi who rule the rooftops and go to war to entertain their city.

Now make it the only place in the world where alchemy works.

This is our setting, Bezim, and it’s wonderful and beautiful, but far from perfect. Especially when it comes to alchemy – what the rest of us would call magic – which is pretty much exclusively the domain of the wealthy and influential. Alchemy is complicated to learn, expensive to practice, and viewed with suspicion by the authorities – so if you don’t have access to a teacher and their library, all the necessary ingredients and tools, and the protection of an upper-class family?

Well, good luck with that.

Despite this, becoming an alchemist is exactly what our main character, Siyon, desperately wants. And to be honest, it’s quite a shock to learn that he isn’t one, because the incredible opening scene sees him entering another plane of existence to gather alchemical ingredients (which all come from one of the other planes, rather than the Mundane, aka the realm of humanity) in what is one of the most exciting, gorgeous, and illuminating story openers I have read in a long time.

And the Empyreal itself – the plane he visits? Is both beautifully described and brilliantly envisioned – a desert where the sand isn’t sand and angels do not look kindly on visitors. I loved every second we saw of it, and how Evans used metaphors and simile to get across the inherent nature of the plane!

Not actually sand, not here. Tiny grains of duty, or conscience, or something equally uncomfortable and insistent.

It’s thrilling and badass and honestly wondrous, so to discover after all that that Siyon isn’t an alchemist – is in fact held in contempt by ‘proper’ alchemists, considered a procurer of ingredients and nothing more – is pretty mind-boggling.

Which is to say, Evans wastes no time in establishing that a) Siyon is awesome, and b) the system is messed up.

The sound of an angel’s wings, scything through excuses.

Of course, things start changing pretty rapidly when Siyon sets off a domino chain of disasters and miracles by accomplishing the impossible – completely by accident.

Notorious Sorcerer moves, for the most part, like a bravi running the rooftops; I wouldn’t call it frenetic, but the story never has a dull page – even if we do get breathing room for small but poignant human moments throughout. There’s a great deal going on, but it never feels like too much, or like Evans has lost control of all the balls she has in the air; instead the interlocking plotlines all feel very organic, like natural extensions of each other, which is especially wonderful because the various storylines cross and recross Bezim’s class lines – which helps us understand and perceive the city as a whole, single organism. The characters themselves see Bezim as divided – and it is – but by the very nature of the different plotlines and how they intersect, Evans shows us how divided doesn’t actually mean separate, much as some of the characters might wish it did!

They’re all in this together, whether they like it or not.

He was right. He was wrong. That was different.

So it’s lucky we have an incredible cast; Siyon, who is in love with magic and has a hunger for more; Zagiri, a noble-born young woman who is not, in fact, ‘playing’ at being bravi; Zagiri’s older sister Anahid, stuck in a frustrating marriage and struggling to define herself; and Izmirlian, who dreams.

Siyon grinned, or at least he bared his teeth. “Sure. I’m the best practitioner you’ve never heard of. I make angels dance and harpies weep. I make the others look staid, boring, uninspired.” He leaned forward; it was a feral relief to vent a little bile. “I could make all your wildest dreams come true.”

The azatan tilted his head in a careful and practised gesture, but there was a glint in his eye. Like the spark of light off a drawn sabre, like the thrill of leaping from one gutter to the next, like the flash of nothing between the planes. “You don’t know what I dream about.”

They’re each so perfectly distinct, and they play off and with each other so well. The relationships in this book – between the four PoV characters, and between them and the marvellous secondary cast – are fantastic, and best of all they evolve over the course of the book, even as they’re all built on different but solid foundations; the comradery of the bravi, blood-family and found-family, friendship and sisterhood, shared backgrounds, shared class, shared dreams.

“Boy, why jump through their hoops when you just leapt over the moon?”

And just as the interlacing of the different plotlines reinforces that everyone is part of the same story, mixing characters from different social classes does a really excellent job of critiquing the class system. We’re never lectured about it, but it’s impossible to miss who has privilege and who doesn’t, and how that affects the characters on a personal and plot level. Siyon, as the only non-noble in the main cast, is forever aware of the fact that the wealthy are playing by a different set of rules, and one of the things I loved about him was how he never forgets how freaking lucky he is when good things start happening, how he always remembers that the people he knows – other would-be alchemists, other non-nobles – aren’t getting the same chances he is. I was pleased that Zagiri woke up to her own privilege so quickly, and delighted when she started to use it to help those who needed help.

Izmirlian gets it too, but I already loved him for dreaming such strange, incredible dreams.

He didn’t spend much time berating himself for past mistakes. He’d made too many; no one had that much time.

There’s absolutely nothing I don’t adore about this book. The setting feels so real and so different from anything I’ve come across before; the worldbuilding delights me right down to the tiniest detail (colour-coded cafe umbrellas!); the magic system is exquisitely intricate and full of secrets and mysteries; the prose is so rich and lush and gorgeous that I want to eat it; and all of it together is so gloriously indulgent. It feels like the best kind of wish fulfilment even while it manages to twist and turn and surprise you, somehow managing to capture the warm glow of a much cosier, lower-stakes story despite being neither cosy nor low-stakes in the slightest; it fills you with glee and giggles one moment and then has you gasping the next. It’s absolutely flawless.

I need so much more of these characters and their world and their magic, okay. I’m so grateful this is just the start of a series!

Notorious Sorcerer is thrilling and exciting, unpredictable, and completely irresistible from the very first page to the very last. This isn’t a book you read; it’s a book you fall in love with, and undoubtedly one of the best of 2022.

Don’t miss it!

The post A Dazzling Dynamite Debut: Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

I Can’t Wait For…The Iron Princess by Barbara Hambly

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. 

This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is The Iron Princess by Barbara Hambly!

The Iron Princess by Barbara Hambly
Genres: Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy
Published on: 28th February 2023
Goodreads

A young woman rises from the streets to battle a sinister evil in this magical fantasy adventure by the bestselling author of the Darwath series.

Something is amiss with the world's magic. Spells don't work the way they used to--when they work at all. Only the powers of the Crystal Mages remain as they were, powers founded on the use of the mystical element adamis, the harvesting of which has enslaved the peoples of the Twilight Lands.

They need a hero.

At the same time, ravenous beasts have begun to appear, legendary creatures that seem to be proof against any magic. And Clea Stylachos, granddaughter of a great sage of the Twilight people, has reason to fear that the Crystal Mages, instead of seeking to defeat these insanely destructive monsters, are attempting to weaponize them in their quest for power.

Clea's only hope to save her people is a wizard who retains his power, one who will not betray her, either to the great merchant houses or to the all-entangling web of the Crystal Mages. But that wizard--Ithrazel the Cursed, destroyer of a city and magically imprisoned to suffer undying, unremitting torment--wants nothing to do with saving the world, helping a hero, or unraveling the terrible secret at the heart of the Crystal Mages' plans.

From the slums and tunnels of the slave-city of Morne, to the watery wilderness of the Twilight lands, to the halls of her father's palace and the spell-soaked mysteries of the Crystal Mages' House of Glass, Clea works to untwist the deadly riddles of magic and monsters--to free her mother's disenfranchised people from slavery under her father's conquering forces. To save her mageborn brother from the Crystal Mages' power; to control a sorcerer legendary for his deed of evil; to keep her own small band of friends one step ahead of her father's troops and the Crystal Order's spells.

She is the Iron Princess, and she knows she must prevail or die.

But at what cost to herself?

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Hambly has some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read – which is why she’s the only author I’ve ever followed from Fantasy to Historical Fiction. (If a fantasy author I love also writes scifi, I will definitely read it. If they write horror, I will probably read it. But following an author to a genre that isn’t SFF? ONLY THIS WOMAN!)

And don’t get me wrong: her historical fiction is excellent! But I am SO EXCITED that we’re getting a new fantasy from her!!! And it sounds especially excellent; the blurb feels very 80s Fantasy – but as anyone who has read her fantasy knows, Hambly is THE BEST at subverting the classic forms and tropes. I can’t wait to see what she’s going to do with this one!

DON’T THINK I MISSED THE DRAGONS IN THE BACKGROUND OF THE COVER, EITHER!

Definitely one of my most-anticipated books of 2023 – and since we’ll be waiting till February, there’s plenty of time to familiarise yourself with her work if you haven’t read any of it yet!

And if you have, you can do what I’ll be doing and settle in for rereading some seriously excellent favourites!

The post I Can’t Wait For…The Iron Princess by Barbara Hambly appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Love It or Hate It, You Won’t Forget It: Luda by Grant Morrison

Luda: A Novel by Grant Morrison
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy
Representation: Queer MCs
PoV: First-person, past-tense
Published on: 6th September 2022
ISBN: B09W8RLC8H
Goodreads

Luci LaBang is a star: for decades this flamboyant drag artist has cast a spell over screen and stage. Now she’s the leading lady in a smash hit musical. But as time takes its toll, Luci fears her star is beginning to dim.

When Luci’s co-star meets with a mysterious accident, a new ingenue shimmers onto the scene: Luda, whose fantastical beauty and sinister charm infatuate Luci immediately... and who bears a striking resemblance to herself at a much younger age.

Luda begs Luci to share the secrets of her stardom, and reveal the hidden tricks of her trade. For Luci LaBang is a mistress of the The Glamour, a mysterious discipline that draws on sex, drugs, and the occult for its trancelike transformative effects.

But as Luci tutors her young protegee in the art, their fellow actors and crew members begin meeting with untimely ends. Now Luci wonders if Luda has mastered The Glamour all too well... and exploited it to achieve her dark ambitions.

What follows is an intoxicating descent into the demimonde of Gasglow, a fantastical city of dreams, and into the nightmarish heart of Luda herself: a femme fatale, a phenomenon, a monster, and perhaps, the brightest star of them all.

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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~drag is magic
~beware ingénues
~all hail the manny-queen
~trust nothing
~enjoy everything

A Note

Here’s the thing: I fucking loved Luda…right up until the last few pages, where there suddenly is, for no fucking reason whatsoever, a flashback to a pretty graphic, very tragic animal death.

It hit me like a punch to the face, and retroactively ruined the book for me.

Until that, it was one of my favorites of the year. I was enjoying it so much, even if I wrinkled my nose occasionally at some of the cruder bits. So that one scene – gods. I wish Morrison just fucking hadn’t. It wasn’t even vaguely necessary. It came out of nowhere. And so unexpected like that, so close to the end? It felt weirdIy like some horrible betrayal.

Now: I’m going to do my best, from here on, to pretend that scene never fucking happened, and try to remember how I felt about the book before that scene, and review it thusly. But that scene is there, and if that’s something you need to know about, well, consider yourself warned.

A Review

In which we pretend That Scene never happened

Luda is a shameless, phantasmagorical, hallucinogenic whirlwind of glitter and sequins, sex and theatre, drugs and maybe-magic. It’s clever, twisty, fucked-up, and mercilessly human – even as it’s simultaneously over-the-top, beyond belief, and gloriously flamboyant. It serves up equal servings of LSD, kink, shade, and glamour-queen realness.

It is so much fun.

feather boas slung like trophies, pelts of feral plushies I’d hunted and skinned through neon-pink-and-blue jungles

I’ll admit, it took me a moment to adjust – the beginning, the opening chapter, was confusing at first, and then briefly a little boring, as Luci gives us a pretty quick rundown of wtf panto is – which is fair, because it’s a pretty uniquely British thing, so a lot of readers might need that explanation.

Regardless, stick with it, because after that first chapter, Luda is nothing short of stunning.

I took a step back, shot through the soul with a yearning arrow, curare-tipped and fletched with hummingbird feathers.

The set-up goes something like this: Luci LaBang was once very famous indeed, then dropped off the map, and now is satisfyingly well-known again as the star of a groundbreaking panto/musical. She’s telling her story to the reader – the fourth wall was knocked out to make room for Luci’s ego, and perhaps her dresses – and not in the most linear fashion. She rambles, she muses, she wanders down side-tracks, she slyly reminds the reader over and over not to trust her account of events too much. And I guess it could be annoying for some readers, but honestly, I loved it. I loved the messiness of it, the untidiness, because it felt like an organic messiness. This is how real people talk – not always in a straight line, occasionally forgetting details, becoming distracted by other things, their mind making leaps of connection that might not make much sense from the outside.

I think the majority of story-tellers – at least the ones telling stories in English, I can’t speak for other literary traditions – are taught that their stories must be…must be neat. The story must go from point A to point B to point C with no deviations. Think of Chekhov’s Gun: no detail must be present that is not directly relevant to the story. I mean, think of the first-person stories you’ve read, and compare those narrators to yourself. Are your thoughts ever that tidy? That focussed? That narratively-relevant? Because mine definitely aren’t.

In spooky stories, they never do the sensible thing. A glimpse of the Underworld’s too much of a temptation.

Luda tosses out those conventions and sprawls in glittery glory across every page. Don’t get me wrong: Luci loves the sound of her own voice, and between that and how purple and ornate her voice actually is, I strongly suspect this is going to be a love it or hate it book, with very few readers falling in the middle. But I do think everything about Luda is designed to incite a passionate response; either you’ll love it passionately, or hate it with the power of a thousand burning suns. I can’t see any room for a middle ground.

Anyway.

The actual story Luci is telling is how the eponymous Luda came into her life and what ensued therein, and that’s about all I can say without spoilers. It’s also hard to know how to refer to Luci or Luda; Luci is AMAB but goes by the name Luci full-time, and rejects any label but queer (which is something I massively appreciate); Luda, on the other hand, has such an (allegedly) fucked-up backstory and relationship to gender that it’s hard to know if she’d identify as trans or something else. It’s probably simplest to just call her queer as well. Again we have that sense of organic messiness, the reminder that real people often don’t fit neatly into one box.

I’m fine with making up my face; making my mind up is beyond my capabilities. … I was queer. I was a living mess of contradictions. I felt like an alien peeking through circular spaceship windows at the world and its folly. That was the best I could come up with.

Luci spins us a tale that is fantastical and sordid, outrageous and mundane, convoluted and very simple. It’s not easy to classify as a single thing – it’s not quite fantasy, not quite horror, but too much of both to be contemporary fiction. There’s spikes of sharp humour, moments of cringe or crudeness (or both), philosophical musings and occult ramblings. It’s plenty fucked-up; Luci and the reader gradually become more and more convinced that Luda is Up To No Good, taking down her competition one by one – and unfortunately, she might well see Luci as a competitor too.

But maybe this is excused – or at least explained? – by the screwed-up backstory I alluded to? I think this is the one weakness of the book, actually, because we’re effectively lectured about this backstory; we don’t see it, we’re told it, and hard as Morrison works to make us gag on the awfulness of it, it’s so over the top that it’s unbelievable.

Then again, it’s not at all clear that we’re meant to believe it, or even take it seriously. Not only is Luci herself an unreliable narrator, the circumstances in which Luda’s backstory is revealed are…not conducive to trustworthy testimony, let’s say.

I’m sorry I can’t be one more identical wedge in your clockwork chocolate orange!

The only other possible critique I might have is that I’m not sure how clear the workings of the Glamour are to anyone who doesn’t have some familiarity with modern witchcraft. I do, so I got it (and absolutely adored the delicious, ridiculous, completely believable mix of chaos magic and drag and ceremony that Luci/Morrison’s put together) but is a Christian reader, for example, going to recognise what Drawing Down [insert deity of your choice here] is? I feel like some readers might need a quick overview of practical Wicca or something first. Then again, maybe magic just reads as even more mysterious and occultic without that understanding.

It doesn’t really matter – none of the (imo, very minor) flaws matter, the story hardly matters, because what you’re really here for is Luci, whose telling of the story is even more interesting than the story itself (which is saying a lot, when we’re talking backstabbing, kink parties, magic both dark and glittery, kidnapping and psychological torture, and a very unique take on a pantomime production of Aladdin). It doesn’t matter how unreliable a narrator Luci is, whether or not literally anything went down the way she tells it, because the way she tells it is just so much fun. I would happily listen to Luci talk about just about anything, and the fact that she knows it bothers me not at all.

Luda releases in the US today. Don’t miss it!

The post Love It or Hate It, You Won’t Forget It: Luda by Grant Morrison appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Must-Have Monday #101

Not all the new releases that caught my eye are SFF this week, but there’s a lot of them and I’m going to be very busy reading them all!

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

The Blood Is the Life by David Carrico
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy
Representation: Orthodox Jewish MC
Published on: 6th September 2022
Goodreads

A COMING-OF-AGE STORY LIKE NO OTHER: CHAIM CAAN, AN OBSERVANT ORTHODOX JEW, FINDS HE MUST MAKE SENSE OF HIS PLACE IN THE WORLD WHEN HE DISCOVERS HE HAS BEEN TURNED INTO A VAMPIRE.

Chaim Caan was just out for a night of fun, blowing off some steam the way a young man will. After the better part of a year spent in COVID lockdowns, he was ready to let his hair down at a night club. But the young woman he encountered that night left him with something to remember her by: she turned Chaim into a vampire.

Soon, Chaim finds himself thrust into a weird underground world of mysticism and enchantment as he navigates life as the newly undead, trying to reconcile his beliefs as an Orthodox Jew with the new reality that has been thrust upon him.

He is forced to deal with a lot of change: to his body, to his mind, to his perceptions, to his relationships, and even to his world. He finds himself in parts of the world he had never dreamed of being in, and he finds himself doing things that he had never envisioned being a part of his life.

And if he can come to terms with these changes, this mild-mannered young man might just find himself a hero.

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An Orthodox Jewish vampire??? I’ve seen that premise before, but only in worldbuilding thought-experiments, so I’m intrigued to see how it plays out in a full novel!

Luda by Grant Morrison
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Queer MCs
Published on: 6th September 2022
Goodreads

Luci LaBang is a star: for decades this flamboyant drag artist has cast a spell over screen and stage. Now she’s the leading lady in a smash hit musical. But as time takes its toll, Luci fears her star is beginning to dim.

When Luci’s co-star meets with a mysterious accident, a new ingenue shimmers onto the scene: Luda, whose fantastical beauty and sinister charm infatuate Luci immediately... and who bears a striking resemblance to herself at a much younger age.
Luda begs Luci to share the secrets of her stardom, and reveal the hidden tricks of her trade. For Luci LaBang is a mistress of the The Glamour, a mysterious discipline that draws on sex, drugs, and the occult for its trancelike transformative effects.

But as Luci tutors her young protegee in the art, their fellow actors and crew members begin meeting with untimely ends. Now Luci wonders if Luda has mastered The Glamour all too well... and exploited it to achieve her dark ambitions.

What follows is an intoxicating descent into the demimonde of Gasglow, a fantastical city of dreams, and into the nightmarish heart of Luda herself: a femme fatale, a phenomenon, a monster, and perhaps, the brightest star of them all.

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I adored everything about Luda until one plot-irrelevant scene in the final pages ruined it for me, so my feelings on it are complicated and I’ve been struggling to review it. Hoping to get my review finished and live tomorrow.

Fairy Tale by Stephen King
Genres: Fantasy, Portal Fantasy
Published on: 6th September 2022
Goodreads

Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for that world or ours.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

King’s storytelling in Fairy Tale soars. This is a magnificent and terrifying tale in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy—and his dog—must lead the battle.

Early in the Pandemic, King asked himself: “What could you write that would make you happy?”

“As if my imagination had been waiting for the question to be asked, I saw a vast deserted city—deserted but alive. I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street. I saw smashed statues (of what I didn’t know, but I eventually found out). I saw a huge, sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds. Those images released the story I wanted to tell.”

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It’s been a long time since I was interested in a Stephen King novel, but okay, you have my attention. Nothing bad better happen to the dog, though!

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn
Published on: 6th September 2022
Goodreads

Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon.

They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.

When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they've been marked for death.

Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They're about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman--and a killer--of a certain age.

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This sounds like it has a lot of potential to be very funny, and I’ll never say no to little old ladies kicking some ass.

The Holiday Trap by Roan Parrish
Genres: Queer Protagonists
Representation: F/F, M/M
Published on: 6th September 2022
Goodreads

For fans of Alexandria Bellefleur and Alexis Hall comes a charming, hilarious, and heartwarming LGBTQIA+ romcom about two separate couples finding love over the holidays from acclaimed author Roan Parrish!

Greta Russakoff loves her tight-knit family and tiny Maine hometown, even if they don't always understand what it's like to be a lesbian living in such a small world. She desperately needs space to figure out who she is.

Truman Belvedere has just had his heart crushed into a million pieces when he learned that his boyfriend of almost a year has a secret life that includes a husband and a daughter. Reeling from this discovery, all he wants is a place to lick his wounds far, far away from New Orleans.

Enter Greta and Truman's mutual friend, Ramona, who facilitates a month-long house swap. Over the winter holidays, each of them will have a chance to try on a new life...and maybe fall in love with the perfect partner of their dreams. But all holidays must come to an end, and eventually Greta and Truman will have to decide whether the love they each found so far from home is worth fighting for.

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Whereas this sounds extremely sweet, and has many early reviews promising that it is sweet, so I will probably be giving it a go the next time I’m looking for fluffy escapism!

The Sunbearer Trials (The Sunbearer Duology, #1) by Aiden Thomas
Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Trans Latino MC
Published on: 6th September 2022
Goodreads

Welcome to The Sunbearer Trials, where teen semidioses compete in a series of challenges with the highest of stakes, in this electric new Mexican-inspired fantasy from Aiden Thomas, the New York Times bestselling author of Cemetery Boys.

“Only the most powerful and honorable semidioses get chosen. I’m just a Jade. I’m not a real hero.”

As each new decade begins, the Sun’s power must be replenished so that Sol can keep traveling along the sky and keep the evil Obsidian gods at bay. Ten semidioses between the ages of thirteen and eighteen are selected by Sol himself as the most worthy to compete in The Sunbearer Trials. The winner carries light and life to all the temples of Reino del Sol, but the loser has the greatest honor of all―they will be sacrificed to Sol, their body used to fuel the Sun Stones that will protect the people of Reino del Sol for the next ten years.

Teo, a 17-year-old Jade semidiós and the trans son of Quetzal, goddess of birds, has never worried about the Trials…or rather, he’s only worried for others. His best friend Niya―daughter of Tierra, the god of earth―is one of the strongest heroes of their generation and is much too likely to be chosen this year. He also can’t help but worry (reluctantly, and under protest) for Aurelio, a powerful Gold semidiós and Teo’s friend-turned-rival who is a shoo-in for the Trials. Teo wouldn’t mind taking Aurelio down a notch or two, but a one-in-ten chance of death is a bit too close for Teo’s taste.

But then, for the first time in over a century, Sol chooses a semidiós who isn’t a Gold. In fact, he chooses two: Xio, the 13-year-old child of Mala Suerte, god of bad luck, and…Teo. Now they must compete in five mysterious trials, against opponents who are both more powerful and better trained, for fame, glory, and their own survival.

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Everything about this premise delights me, and I’m even if it didn’t, I’d pounce on it for that cover alone!

Our Shadows Have Claws: 15 Latin American Monster Stories by Yamile Saied Méndez, Amparo Ortiz, Chantel Acevedo, Ricardo López Ortiz, Courtney Alameda, David Bowles, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Mia Garcia, Gabriela Martins, Racquel Marie, Tehlor Kay Mejia, Maika Moulite, Maritza Moulite, Claribel A. Ortega, Lilliam Rivera, Jenny Torres Sanchez, Alexandra Villasante, Ari Tison
Genres: Fantasy
Representation: Latine MCs
Published on: 6th September 2022
Goodreads

Fifteen original short stories from YA superstars, featuring Latine mythology’s most memorable monsters

From zombies to cannibals to death incarnate, this cross-genre anthology offers something for every monster lover. In Our Shadows Have Claws, bloodthirsty vampires are hunted by a quick-witted slayer; children are stolen from their beds by “el viejo de la bolsa” while a military dictatorship steals their parents; and anyone you love, absolutely anyone, might be a shapeshifter waiting to hunt.  

The worlds of these stories are dark but also magical ones, where a ghost-witch can make your cheating boyfriend pay, bullies are brought to their knees by vicious wolf-gods, a jar of fireflies can protect you from the reality-warping magic of a bruja—and maybe you’ll even live long enough to tell the tale. Set across Latin America and its diaspora, this collection offers bold, imaginative stories of oppression, grief, sisterhood, first love, and empowerment.  

Full contributor list: Chantel Acevedo, Courtney Alameda, Julia Alvarez, Ann Dávila Cardinal, M. García Peña, Racquel Marie, Gabriela Martins, Yamile Saied Méndez, Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite, Claribel A. Ortega, Amparo Ortiz, Lilliam Rivera, Jenny Torres Sanchez, Ari Tison, and Alexandra Villasante.

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Oh my gods, ALL THE YES! I’m a total myth-geek and I crave more books and stories about the folklore and mythology of Latin America. HIT ME!

Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix by Anna-Marie McLemore
Genres: Queer Protagonists
Representation: Trans Latino MC, trans love interest, M/M
Published on: 6th September 2022
Goodreads

Stonewall Honor recipient and two-time National Book Award Longlist selectee Anna-Marie McLemore weaves an intoxicating tale of glamor and heartbreak in Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, part of the Remixed Classics series.

New York City, 1922. Nicolás Caraveo, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Minnesota, has no interest in the city’s glamor. Going to New York is all about establishing himself as a young professional, which could set up his future—and his life as a man—and benefit his family.

Nick rents a small house in West Egg from his 18-year-old cousin, Daisy Fabrega, who lives in fashionable East Egg near her wealthy fiancé, Tom—and Nick is shocked to find that his cousin now goes by Daisy Fay, has erased all signs of her Latina heritage, and now passes seamlessly as white.

Nick’s neighbor in West Egg is a mysterious young man named Jay Gatsby, whose castle-like mansion is the stage for parties so extravagant that they both dazzle and terrify Nick. At one of these parties, Nick learns that the spectacle is all for the benefit of impressing a girl from Jay’s past—Daisy. And he learns something else: Jay is also transgender.

As Nick is pulled deeper into the glittery culture of decadence, he spends more time with Jay, aiming to help his new friend reconnect with his lost love. But Nick's feelings grow more complicated when he finds himself falling hard for Jay's openness, idealism, and unfounded faith in the American Dream.

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Listen, McLemore can write whatever they like and I will read it, end of discussion.

Moonflower by Kacen Callender
Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy
Representation: Black nonbinary MC
Published on: 6th September 2022
Goodreads

Moon has been plunged into a swill of uncertainty and confusion. They travel to the spirit realms every night, hoping never to return to the world of the living. But when the realm is threatened, it's up to Moon to save the spirit world, which sparks their own healing journey through the powerful, baffling, landscape that depression can cause.
Moon’s mom is trying her best, but is clueless about what to do to reach the ugly roiling of her child’s inner struggles. At the same time, though, there are those who see Moon for who they are – Blue, the Keeper, the Magician, Wolf. These creature-guides help Moon find a way out of darkness. The ethereal aspects of the story are brilliantly blended with real-world glimmers of light. Slowly, Moon grows toward hope and wholeness, showing all children that each and every one of us has a tree growing inside. That our souls emerge when we discover, and fully accept, ourselves.

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By all accounts this is an incredibly beautiful little book, and I’ve heard really good things about Callender. Very interested to see how this one goes.

Will you be reading any of these? Let me know!

The post Must-Have Monday #101 appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

Making Women Out of Men: Welcome to Dorley Hall by Alyson Greaves

Welcome to Dorley Hall by Alyson Greaves
Genres: Queer Protagonists, Speculative Fiction
Representation: Trans MC, F/F, minor nonbinary characters
PoV: 3rd-person, past-tense, dual PoVs
ISBN: B09ZNRWN1Q
Goodreads

Mark Vogel is like the older brother Stefan Riley never had, until one day he disappears, and Stefan has to adapt to life without him. But, one year later, when he runs into a girl who looks near-identical to Mark, Stefan becomes obsessed. He discovers that other boys have disappeared, too, dozens over the years, most of them students of the Royal College of Saint Almsworth, many of them troubled or unruly before their disappearance.

What is happening to these boys? Who are the handful of women on campus who bear a striking resemblance to some of those who went missing? And what is the connection to the mysterious Dorley Hall?
Stefan works hard to get into the Royal College for one reason and one reason only: to find out exactly what happened to the women who live at Dorley Hall, and to get it to happen to him, too.

A closeted trans girl attempts to infiltrate a secret underground forced feminisation programme.

Content note: this story engages with some reasonably dark topics, including but not limited to torture, manipulation, dysphoria, nonconsensual surgery, and kidnapping. While it isn't intended to be a dark or dystopian story, the perspective characters are carrying a lot of baggage, and the exploration of the premise might be triggering for trans readers.

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~screechingly hilarious coffee mugs
~terrifyingly convincing mindfuckery
~gender is complicated
~watch out for the tasers
~if you go into the basement, you’re not coming out as you

:I use male pronouns for Stefan throughout this review, because that is what the character insists upon in the book:

I have no idea what genre Welcome to Dorley Hall falls into – it’s definitely nothing like the SFF I usually read – but I devoured all 500+ pages in 24 hours, and despite it being a proper mindfuck, I bloody loved it.

A chance encounter in his childhood leads Stefan to the conclusion that an amazing, top-secret transition program for trans women is being run out of a nearby college. It’s pretty out-there, but he can’t figure out how else to reconcile the gorgeous women he’s glimpsed with the young men who keep going missing from the area – given that the women bear a striking resemblance to those same men.

They could be sisters, or cousins, or something. But as a closeted trans woman himself, Stefan can’t help hoping that his wild theory is correct.

Then he gets to find out for himself.

Under less-than-ideal circumstances.

See, the ‘forced feminization’ mentioned in the blurb? I wasn’t sure what it meant at first: turns out, it’s exactly what it sounds like – forcing (cis) men to be women. The program running in the basements of Dorley Hall? There’s an…organisation, let’s call it…that is pulling men off the streets and transforming them into women. With drugs and brainwashing and drastic, hardcore surgery. Extremely non-consensually.

UM?!

I was very glad this wasn’t an evil kink thing, but the goal is, to be honest, even harder to fathom – and since figuring out wtf is going on is such a driving force of the first part of the book, I’ve put it under a spoiler tag. [View post to see spoiler] The people who come out of the program don’t always consider themselves women – some identify as nonbinary or gender-nonconforming – but they are all very, very firm on their not being men any more.

It would be so easy for this premise to devolve into a confusing mess, but Anne wields her pen like a scalpel; every stroke is considered, deliberate, and masterfully controlled. It’s clear an enormous amount of thought has gone into this book, and it absolutely pays off, because, weird as the premise is? Welcome to Dorley Hall is simply incredible.

An enormous part of that is the characters; I feel like it’s been quite a while since I ran into characters who were so immediately and powerfully real, who I could absolutely believe were actual living, breathing people. Stefan comes across perfectly as a trans woman who has been isolated from the wider world and the queer community in particular; I thought his insistence on using male pronouns – and his reasoning behind that choice – did a brilliant job at driving that home, and an equally good job at demonstrating that being trans is messy and complicated and different for everyone. (I don’t care what they are or how you feel about them; if a trans/nonbinary person tells you their pronouns, you use those pronouns, not whatever you think they should be using.) More, Stefan acts as a much-needed contrast to our other PoV character, Christine, a near-graduate of the Dorley Hall program and a passionate believer in its worth and efficacy.

It’s probably alarming how many times I needed Stefan to point out that x, y or z was immensely fucked-up, honestly. Anne’s writing, the story, and most of all Christine and her sisters are terrifyingly convincing; I definitely found myself nodding along to their philosophy and justifications far too often.

Christine and the wide cast of secondary characters are all fascinating, because – they’re women. They’re very, very normal young women. They’re all different, with different interests, views, and fashion preferences – and if you didn’t know, you’d never know.

Except for all the talk about practicing womanhood, the fingerprint-locks on the doors, and the brainstorming sessions about how to mindfuck the boys in the basement. Except for those things – totally normal young women!

Christine is an immensely sympathetic character – they all are, she and her sisters, with their mundane and significantly-less-mundane daily issues, their debates over dresses, the make-up practice, the coffee dates with a friend’s girlfriend, attending protests against a gross professor on campus… Anne immerses you in their lives, and before you know what’s happened you’ve become fiercely attached to all of them; Christine in particular, of course, with all her frantic juggling of secrets and trying to help Stefan and a developing romance that I waved pom-poms for.

These are women who are unambiguously women, who the reader ‘should’ pity but who would spit that pity back in your face. They’re women who are united in their passion not just to become flawless women, but to become good people. And that part of it is…bizarrely wonderful?

I’m just – it would be so easy for this to be a terrible parody of itself. And it isn’t. It’s unbelievably immersive and compelling, but it’s also thoughtful, pointed, and exactingly self-aware. I’ve spent weeks dissecting its approach to gender, and I’m grateful that Anne doesn’t, anywhere, push one idea of ‘this is how gender works’ anywhere in the story. On the one hand, we have a trans MC; more, a trans person who is the kind of trans that cis people find the easiest to understand – someone who wants/needs to go from one end of the binary (AMAB) to the other (female), as opposed to the many other ways there are to be trans. And on the other hand, we have a whole cast of characters whose gender identity is way harder to neatly label. People who were forced to transition from one gender to another – but who genuinely identify as their new gender now. Some of these characters consider themselves trans, and some don’t; either way, they don’t fit neatly into any niche I know of. We don’t typically keep ‘forcibly transitioned’ around as a label!

The idea that gender can be forcibly changed is – well, not a widely accepted one. We’re against conversion therapy because it’s torture, but we also know that it doesn’t work. Gender and gender identity may change many times over a person’s lifetime, but most of us are pretty damn sure that those changes can’t be imposed.

But the central premise of Welcome to Dorley Hall is that, actually, they can. Albeit with torture, mutilation, and very hardcore brainwashing. Which, in fairness, is a set-up that I don’t think has been tested in the real world (I fucking hope it hasn’t)…so I guess we can’t swear that it wouldn’t work?

Um.

It might be better to say – as many of the graduates of Dorley Hall do – that a person can choose their gender. Because when push comes to shove, the women of Dorley Hall all reached a point where they had to choose to be women…or give up and ‘wash out’. It wasn’t a fair choice, at all – the narrative and characters are all very clear on that – but I suspect Anne’s point (if she is in fact making one, beyond ‘gender is complicated and there is no one-size-fits-all’) is that it’s the choice that’s the important part. It doesn’t work if you don’t make that choice and embrace your new gender.

But equally, it’s clearly not that simple, or trans people wouldn’t exist. And they very much do. Stefan’s existence contradicts the underlying premise of Dorley Hall in a way I think none of the characters (including Stefan) have realised yet (to be fair, they all have a lot going on, and even the people running the show haven’t revealed the gender theory model they’re working with, if indeed they have one) and is one of the many things I’m excited to see handled in the next book.

Which is all to say, there’s no one theory of gender underpinning the story. On that front, Anne clearly has her hands up, going ‘it’s complicated’. And you know, I appreciate that immensely. It’s the only take that I could ever be perfectly happy with.

Welcome to Dorley Hall is a wonderfully written, addictive, immensely compelling novel that at first glance shouldn’t work – but absolutely does. It superbly handles all the themes it tackles (and plays with), and I could not find one flaw in it. Even the parts that horrified me delighted me, if that makes sense, and I rabidly adore Stefan, Christine, and most of the other Sisters. I’ve already chalked up the sequel as one of my most anticipated reads of 2023!

I need so many more people to read this one. And then come shriek about it with me!

The post Making Women Out of Men: Welcome to Dorley Hall by Alyson Greaves appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.

In Short: August

August went up and down – I had two weeks of appalling fibro pain, but luckily I also had a lot of great books!

ARCs Received

Just two ARCs this month! I’m really excited for the allegedly intricate non-human worldbuilding of Empire of Exiles, and VenCo just sounds right up my alley in every possible way.

Read

20 books read this month – five more than July! I found some real under-the-radar treasures, like Everything For Everyone by M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi (which I’m currently working on a review for) and Welcome to Dorley Hall by Alyson Anne (review finished and scheduled for tomorrow!) Whereas I was fully expecting Oleander Sword, The Spear Cuts Through Water, and Moon Dark Smile to wow me – and they all very much did! (Click the titles to go to my reviews!)

I probably need a whole post to talk about the first three books of the Dante Valentine series (the short version is: it’s complicated) and Grant Morrison’s Luda gave me whiplash – I loved it unabashedly until the graphic, plot-irrelevant animal death in the last handful of pages, which retroactively ruined the book for me. (And left me sick and sobbing, so, you know, can we normalise fucking content warnings already, please.)

28.57% of this month’s authors were BIPOC (6 of 21 – I read 20 books, but one had two authors). Much better than last month’s 13%!

Reviewed

Six reviews is pretty excellent! And that’s without counting mini-reviews and DNF reviews. Pleased!Sia is pleased!

DNF-ed

I can barely believe it either, but I only had one DNF this month! Le gasp!

ARCs Outstanding

Bit by bit, I’m wrestling these down to reasonable numbers… I’ve just finished Luda, and I need to review it and Notorious Sorcerer, Genesis of Misery, Leech, and Hunt of Elk Mountain next month.

Misc

The Tarot Sequence hardbacks from Rainbow Crate went on sale, I was accepted as part of ST Gibson’s Street team, and my newest therapist is reading my word, so. Yay!

Looking Forward

September is usually a pretty epic month for SFF, and 2022 looks ready to keep that trend going. I must confess to being especially excited for Golden Enclaves (the ending of the previous book!!!) and My Name Is Magic (Finnish magic school!) And of course, NONA THE GODS DAMED NINTH!

Bring on September!

The post In Short: August appeared first on Every Book a Doorway.